Nearly everything that underpins macro and micro economics (all versions) is rapidly being swept away by the onslaught of automation and the increasing velocity of information and its availability to everyone. This time things really are different, and the change is so great that we now should speak of quantum economics. We are witnessing the end of the Industrial Age and the ascendance of the Information Age; unfortunately, nothing can prepared us adequately for what will follow. Wealth, p...

The electronic markets for financial instruments is no different than any other industry where automation and competition ultimately match and overwhelm advantages from quality, features, longterm relationships, specialized knowledge, locality, or anything else and leaving price as the primary competition. Any advantages gained by redefining the product space through R&D to create a new class of product or to subsume an existing one is soon lost as remaining competitors follow suit. For a whil...

Most the the so-called public options will not be subject to existing state laws requiring coverage beyond the Federally mandated levels and with less consumer protection than these states currently require. Remember what happened when credit card reform made things much worse for consumers by barring states from regulation and oversight. The insurance companies lobbied hard to get Federal approval that would allow them to sell health insurance in multiple states without having to be licensed ...

NOTE: I posted this as a reply on another site and decided to add it to my DU journal. This mostly examines one of Zeke's recent articles in its context and my critique is so limited. I posted earlier that those for HC/HI reform could not allow its opponents to make Zeke the "face" to be feared by the general public. Until we get closer to a "real" bill, the debate will be vulnerable to misleading claims not supported by any likely variant of a bill but rather by various other statements. ...

The current disinformation campaigns revolving around the Cheney, CIA, Paneta, secret operation, etc. is following fairly predicatable patterns with "reporting" in the usual places based on anonymous sources gradually building up a web of contradictory "facts", misdirections, cover stories, co-mingling of facts involving unrelated operations. Lots of variant versions of an operation or operations at CIA or elsewhere, bungled operations (a la Peter Sellers), inconsistent timelines, and general c...

The recent threads at DU about John Edwards raised a couple of new items to research. There are three points that appear to be true, their connections not noted previously, and which raise some interesting issues for all of us. Here is the link to what I posted about this in that thread, in case you later want to read it: (Link) Let me now connect a few dots. 1. Rielle/Lisa Hunter was married to Kip Hunter, son of Boulder DA Alex Hunter in the JonBenet Ramsey murder story. 2. Af...

Source: This is London Texan broking firm Amherst Holdings is said by the Wall Street Journal to have forced big banks into losses of tens of millions of dollars when they believed they were on to sure-fire profits. The trade involved $29 million (£17.6 million) of securities that were backed by subprime mortgages. The big banks believed that these were almost worthless and so bought credit-default swaps based on them. These effectively act like an insurance policy paying out if the securities...

No, they are not "equivalent" operations; they are all part of the same monster, its current form rising from the ashes of WWII but its "family tree" goes back at least two centuries. When you know details about Operation Gladio in Italy, where many wild CT allegations have now been confirmed as true by government officials or proven in the courts. Everyone reading this thread needs to quickly refresh and review what is known about Operation Gladio and related groups before reading the rest of...

I now save a local archived/cached copy of nearly every page I link to because pages are routinely deleted, their content changed, missing the critical discussions posted by readers, or the host site no longer existing. Within a few days, nearly all traces of the old contentis replaced or removed from the caches at Google and other search engines. (I suspect that Google has everything archived for internal use, but that help me or someone reading my posts.) There are several sites which attem...

We are like the blind men describing the elephant. You need to go back probably a century before Watergate to really see the interplay among the major themes: "investment" banking, drug trade, arms dealing, intelligence service involvement in financial markets, money laundering, hidden relationships. Here are a couple of topics that help start ones voyage of discovery: 1. The opium trade and related wars over the last 200 years. 2. The Russian secret police under the Czar manipulating the G...

The Post has always been about the Establishment, NY banking and investment interests, and very close with Israel from the beginning with strong support in every way, visible or not. Go read about her father Eugene Meyer, appointed chair of the Fed Reserve by Hoover in 1930, first head of World Bank in 1946, started Allied Chemical, and lots more. He bought the Post at bankruptcy auction in 1933. Her grandfather was a partner at Lazard Freres. Her mother was an Ernst. Katherine Graham att...

While there are many valid issues with BofA, the OP and many of the linked articles are very misleading (accidental or deliberate?) and should not go unquestioned here at DU. "Facts" are cherry-picked, sometimes out of context, and strung together to build a case against BofA as the biggest villan on Wall Street. Some of the "points" being repeated here probably originated in the ongoing short selling attacking various financial institutions and many other publicly-traded firms. Consider wh...

I am a software executive with decades of experience, primarily developing products in-house and then marketing and supporting them world-wide. I have never used the H-1B system nor outsourced any functions; I have had a number of foreign-born employees who had "green cards", most had come to the US as graduate students and had stayed with plans to become citizens. With the exception that our small company has never out-sourced jobs/functions to anywhere, we have been involved through our cl...

This is just another example of Obama being flexible with timelines and other pesky things. I think he was unopposed for re-election in 2002 but I had trouble verifying that quickly. In 2002 he was starting to talk to his backers about possibly running for the Senate in 2004; in reality, he was "running" for federal office before he was even in the IL state senate. I have an article that discusses his early ambition from one of the Chicago papers, I think from 2004. I really fear that Obama...

Why do you consider my post to be repulsive and freepish? Michelle Obama regularly discusses the difficulties dealing with Barack's extended absences from the family. He talks about it in his books. In the recent Vanity Fair article I mentioned: That equanimity has been hard-won, however. Earlier in their 15-year marriage, she was often furious with her husband. “I have chosen a life with a ridiculous schedule, a life that requires me to be gone from Michelle and the girls for long stretch...

telling Boomers to get over themselves, to quit fighting those battles since the 60's replayed in the 90's, and to let a new generation take over with its new type of politics. Since those fights of the 60's and 70's were for the core issues of the Democratic Party (civil rights, women's rights, war, environment, poverty, hunger, and all the rest), we will continue to fight to keep them. Many of us at DU started to look more-closely at Obama during the run-up to Iowa, our BS detectors activa...

He followed in the tradition from the beginning of this country, to paint his political opponents as not being like the "majority". In his case, his opponents were the progressive Democrats now found at DU. Remember how wonderful it felt when we caused all those problems from the 60's on, when Reagan united the silent majority against us, when we were "they" : "They" want to destroy America, those long-haired dirty hippies, shiftless n***ers, uppity women, godless commie elites -- they hate ...

Let's stop all this niggardly behavior. Why must we niggle and nitpick? Disclaimer: No racist or sexist words or comparisons with animals were used in this post. Sometimes, life's a bitch.

He also uses the RW TPs about Social Security and a lot of other topics. While I might be able to forgive that, I am strongly offended when I see Obama and his supporters parroting the RW attacks on progressive Dems, attacks on positions that so many of us at DU have worked hard to defend. From the beginning of his campaign, Obama has presented himself as the alternative to the those who want to continue the fights of the 60's and says he will move beyond that contentious time and those iss...

Having a job other than posting at DU, it took a little while amid life for me to finish, but I believe Edwards wins and you/Clinton have lost the Iraq issue. You must be working on a well-documented rebuttal. I'll wait a bit longer for your answer before formally requesting a Summary Judgment favoring Edwards and that opposing (you) be sanctioned under Rule 11 of the Rules of Civil Procedure for making frivolous arguments, knowingly making false and misleading claims of fact, and failure to m...

Russerts question was: "Will you pledge that by January 2013, the end of your first term more than five years from now, there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq?" The spin machine was already primed for this question and within minutes began reporting that none of the leading Dem candidates would pledge to have all COMBAT troops out of Iraq by 2013 Edwards did not promise to remove ALL (that would be 100%) troops from Iraq, he did promise to remove ALL COMBAT troops (including counter-terroris...

After looking at what Michelle Obama said in the widely quoted paragraph, I was struck by her example of how the Obamas showed their commitment to family values and to the children. She only does day trips so that she can be at home in the mornings to get her girls off to school and be back at home in the evenings in time to tuck them into bed. No mention of infidelity, improper sexual behavior, multiple marriages, or any of the other things that would point at Clinton or at the various GOP c...

I also read the accompanying editorial. I now think that the study shows little more than the known genetic contributions to obesity, weight gain during middle age, and possibly weight loss late in life. First, there are a lot of problems with this study. Most are caused by the the limited pool of cohorts in the study. Here are obvious problems: 1. The "egos" are all children of the initial study subjects of 1948 who are at least 21 in 1971. The social network members are comprised on o...

I normally access DU and the rest of the net using either the lynx or w3m browsers which are essentially text only, incredibly fast, and almost free of problems. My company bans SWF/Flash from all of our computers, no matter what operating system and browser. We would ban all Adobe software if we could because of their enormous security risks, but we are forced to deal with some pdf files. We process them on Linux with open source programs which do not implement the embedding and scripting th...

Some of the ads being served are SWF format which can play sounds, etc. The first one I saw had mosquitos - heard it first. I block all of them now. BTW Flash can also access you microphone or camera and send the results elsewhere. You can set the Adobe security to disallow that, but its relatively easy for "bad actors" to reenable it without your knowing. SWF is a security nightmare.

There are a couple of keys to being able to efficiently and reliably hand count. The races must be organized on the ballots so that the national and statewide issues are printed separately from other races and issues. (For example, president and senator might be together, some statewide races and issues together, others grouped differently.) Use different colored paper to avoid confusion and maybe have different ballot boxes for each ballot type. Volunteers from all parties show up as the po...

It could be something as simple as lecture notes being compromised. If they can you get to view SWF or PDF files on most systems (XP, Linux, Mac), even fully patched ones, are no longer secure. While such an infected computer would not affect the most secure systems, it would cause havoc elsewhere among a lot of systems. But the compromises could be much greater. That compromised SWF/PDF file to enable the builtin microphone to eavesdrop on defense planning at the NWC or elsewhere. Even wo...

so why bother with even using the hardware for voting systems. I just posted in LBN more information about how the Naval War College has been compromised for several weeks and that they are probably replacing the hardware completely. Even that is not enough if you can't secure the hardware manufacturing and delivery because pre-infected hardware is really hard to detect (video card, disk controller, network controller). The DoD is aware that if you don't start by securing the chip foundrie...

This is hitting the mainstream now with AP reporting widely, so I think it qualifies for LBN. Hackers attacked the computer network at the Naval War College in Newport, taking down the school's network for more than two weeks, including some e-mail services and the college's website. The Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command in Norfolk, Va., detected the intrusion around Nov. 16 and took the system offline, spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Doug Gabos said. He said the unclassified network was used by st...

We have been seeing more and more really scary attacks out there lately. Most of the new stuff is deviously clever and is not detected by most of the antivirus, antispyware, antitrojan, ... programs we have typically used. We are experts in this field (I have over 40 years of all of it), and none of us can stop this new stuff. At best, we can slow it down. For example, the Naval War College was attacked and is completely compromised. They are apparently replacing all of their hardware and s...