July 2010
35 posts
Real/not real
“The dream of the internet, Bruce Sterling once said, had been that you would ‘upload yourself into a computer and have this rapture of the nerds. It was a powerful fantasy of escaping the unbearable pressures of being human. But you find that when you escape one of these things you generally bring all your baggage with you.’ It was worse than that, actually: The Internet...
Too big to fail.
“A previously unreleased memorandum by the Congressional Research Service outlined ways that a bankruptcy filing by BP could disrupt the cleanup and compensation.
The letter…stated that economic and environmental claims would fall into line behind the company’s secured creditors as ‘nonpriority, unsecured claims,’ leaving much of the continuing cost of cleanup,...
Houston > Cayman Islands > Switzerland
Transocean, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon well, has kept business ties with Myanmar, Iran, and Syria-based companies. It’s being investigated by several (less whack) countries for various criminal abuses, including (duh) tax fraud.
The New York Times
Busted.
“The [OECD] report says unemployment is particularly acute in economies where a boom-bust pattern in the housing market has had a role in the subsequent recession, most notably Spain, the US and to a lesser extent, Ireland.”
The Globe and Mail
June 2010
18 posts
“Criminal complaints filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday read like an old-fashioned cold war thriller: Spies swapping identical orange bags as they brushed past one another in a train station stairway. An identity borrowed from a dead Canadian, forged passports, messages sent by shortwave burst transmission or in invisible ink. A money cache buried for years in a field in...
“It is an erasure of history: The Enlightenment, we too often forget, took place simultaneously in the East and the West, and its values have been Eastern values for two centuries. Forgetting this, people in Beijing and Moscow try to claim that their state-capitalist economies are natural expressions of their traditional cultures, found in Confucius and Tolstoy and going back...
Opposite day every day
A U.S. judge has overturned Obama’s deepwater drilling ban, thanks to a lawsuit from Louisiana-based Hornbeck Offshore Services.
The Globe and Mail
Dig, baby, dig
“As China counts on more years of global leadership in economic growth, global warming remains a secondary concern. Secure sources of energy to fuel that growth are what matter most, whatever the implications for world energy markets and the global environment — not to mention foreign investors, who may or may not have a significant role to play in China’s energy industry under the...
What's bigger: the credit crisis, or the Foxconn...
Time will tell.
The New York Times
