October 12, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"But it comes at a price. When the entrepreneur returns to the VC, an epic battle ensues over valuations. In a climate of fear, the power pendulum swings back to the VCs. The VC knows that an entrepreneur won’t be as likely to get money elsewhere, so he plays hardball. The entrepreneur is more ready to cave in on the valuation. That means when a VC gives the entrepreneur money, the VC can claim more ownership of the company with a given amount of investment (because the company is worth less.) Tension rises, and boardroom fights begin. I saw it all unfold last time, when I started covering venture capital in 2001."
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October 11, 2008 at 2:00 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"Last year, more than 16,000 companies filed 10-Ks or 10KSBs with the SEC. Assuming they come in evenly (they don't, but we'll say this for simplicity's sake), that would be more than 4,000 annual reports a quarter, or roughly 44 a day, each and every day of the year. Forget holidays, vacations, or your kids' birthdays — you've got annual reports to read!"
October 10, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
October 8, 2008 at 3:44 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"The iPhone field mode shows a lot of information. In fact, it is more comprehensive than many other phone field modes, allowing you to see the details of the individual cell towers and a lot of detail about the cell phone network. To access it, dial *3001#12345#*. If you are already in a call, just hit "add call", enter the number above and hit call; the phone will go into test mode, but keep your call connected. "
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"In fact, if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, I would now describe much SF as fantasies of political agency. All three genres also may embody themes of personal psychological empowerment, of course, though often very different in the details, as contrasted by the way the heroines “win” in romances, the way detectives “win” in mysteries, and the way, say, young male characters “win” in adventure tales. But now that I’ve noticed the politics in SF, they seem to be everywhere, like packs of little yapping dogs trying to savage your ankles. Not universally, thank heavens—there are wonderful lyrical books such as The Last Unicorn or other idiosyncratic tales that escape the trend. But certainly in the majority of books, to give the characters significance in the readers’ eyes means to give them political actions, with “military” read here as a sub-set of political."
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"We've never actually seen a true global recession in a Web 2.0 world. What's it going to look like? How is it going to differ from a recession in a pre-internet world? Is it going to accelerate the hollowing-out of the retail high street as economy-conscious shoppers increasingly move to online shopping and comparison systems like Froogle? Are we going to see homeless folks not only living in their cars but telecommuting from them, using pay-as-you-go 3G cellular modems, cheap-ass Netbooks, and rented phone numbers to give the appearance of still having a meatspace office? Is the increasing performance curve of consumer electronics going to give way to a deflationary price war as embattled producers try to hold on to market share as Moore's Law cuts the ground away from beneath their feet?"
October 7, 2008 at 2:02 am · Filed under del.icio.us
October 5, 2008 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Uncategorized
What would happen if a government (not this one, surely, but some US government) declared all credit default swap contracts null and void?
Just killed them all. No more payments, no more indemnification.
What would happen?
October 5, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"… our heads full of language like buckets of minnows standing in the moonlight on a dock…"
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"… our heads full of language like buckets of minnows standing in the moonlight on a dock…"
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"It's been three weeks and it will certainly be many more before this is over. The Texas Guard is rolling out. Clean up crews and tow trucks rattle down the streets. Chainsaws replace generators. But still, the silence is deafening. Seriously deafening. As if no one is paying any attention at all."
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"The obscenity of John McCain is in his selfish willingness to reignite a culture war by attempting to provide someone like Sarah Palin entree to an office that she should only see from the other side of the velvet rope on the White House tour."
October 3, 2008 at 8:11 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"…The scientists explain these periods by an increase of the precipitation that resulted in a much larger vegetation cover resulting in less wind dust and stronger river activity in the Sahara region. The green Sahara episodes correspond with the changing direction of the earth's rotational axis that regulates the solar energy in the tropical Atlantic Ocean. Periods of maximum solar energy increased the moisture production while pushing the African monsoon further north and increasing precipitation in the Sahara."
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"My thoughts exactly, Don. Plus the durations target the drawdown precisely on the capital we need most. We're desperately short of 3 month working capital, and here comes Paulson to take $700 BB of what we've got left away and dump it in the mortgage industry. I don't think you could devise a worse plan. We might be better of if he *did* steal it."
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"Any college basketball fans who’ve been watching the bank failures and consolidations recently will understand and appreciate this September Madness chart. This was reportedly created by a general partner at Sansome Partners named Mark Slavonia."
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"For my part, I’m going to refuse to use Reuters’ software in future, strongly discourage graduate students from buying EndNote, and try to get this message out to my colleagues too (at least those of them who aren’t using Zotero or some BibTex client already). If I taught any classes where Thomson printed relevant textbooks, I would be strongly inclined not to use these texts either. I encourage you to do the same (and, if you’re so minded, to suggest other possible ways of making it clear to Reuters that this kind of behaviour is intolerable in the comments). People have argued that the music industry has screwed up badly by suing its customers – whether that’s true or not, makers of academic bibliography software should be told that suing universities for what appear to be entirely legitimate actions is not likely to do their reputations any good."
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October 2, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
October 1, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"TIGER MART HAS THE BEST COFFEE"
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"By not requiring a contract, Sprint is encouraging non-customers to test the service out to see for themselves. For a service that has thus far been difficult to establish, a strong public reaction is needed if it is to progress. Now it's just up to Sprint to provide the first devices so the public can use it. Stay tuned for BetaNews hands-on tests with Sprint's new Xohm WiMAX network."
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"When Allen Noren pointed to this visualization of U.S. government bailouts, I wanted to tweak it by showing the magnitudes on a timeline. I found this data set on Many Eyes, updated it with the number $700B, and made this bubble chart:…"
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"Credit-card issuers have been decreasing credit limits in the wake of the subprime meltdown. Folks with good credit scores and solid credit histories are now getting caught in the fray.
"Most banks are cutting their credit limits," says Carol Kaplan, spokeswoman for the American Bankers Association. "They're doing it to everyone.""
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"Various readers wrote us, and it was confirmed by a detailed report on the call at DealBreaker, that the Treasury Department held a conference call this evening for analysts on the bailout bill. A memo was evidently sent to SIFMA members; others may have been contacted by other means. But the report I got from one person who was on the call was the the questions came from financial services industry members. In other words, this was most assuredly not intended to be a call open to the public at large. If anyone from the media or other member of the great unwashed was listening in, it was by accident."
September 30, 2008 at 2:01 am · Filed under del.icio.us
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"They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.
Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.
Thus unfolded the Night of Terror on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right to vote.
For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their food–all of it colorless slop–was infested with worms."
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"Hedge funds are preparing to return between 10 per cent and 50 per cent of their assets under management to investors who want their money back at the end of yet another quarter of dire investment performance.
One prime broker said: “Many funds will have to close. There were a flood of redemption notices at the beginning of the quarter but many investors said they wouldn’t actually withdraw the money if performance improved. It hasn’t.”
One hedge fund said: “We’ve produced 15 per cent returns for 10 years. This year has been bad and our funds under management have been reduced from $2billion to just $300m. This is decimation.”"
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"Clearly, these are not your everyday sharks. Great Whites think alike and because of their size, they all think BIG. The Feds know this and are going to loan them (indefinitely) any amount of money they want - whenever they want it - at 2% or less so they can turn around and loan this money to you and I and every business in America at newly restrictive but higher "credit rates". How did the Feds solve the world's biggest credit crunch? They gave its perpetrators an offer they couldn't refuse. And this is euphemistically called re-liquefying.
Now, the crew who's angry about all this can ask themselves the alternative. What else could have been done? Wall Street could have sold the American financial industry to the Arabs for $1 trillion, a fee about equal to ARAMCO's 1H2008 oil profits. Or they could have sold it to Singapore, or China, or some of the fat cats in India or Japan. Instead, the U.S. Treasury bought it, rotten fish heads and all."
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"Do you see, Thomson Reuters? Do you see? If you don’t settle this nonsense in a fashion that leaves Zotero intact, the open-source software development world will fear to interoperate with you. If EndNote isn’t already dead, this will kill it, because our little project is hardly the only one of its type. We are legion, and you have shut yourself away from us. You have no one to blame for this suicidal course but your own legal and executive team.
And if you take away Zotero, trust me, Thomson Reuters: it won’t be EndNote that I switch to."
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