Monday Moanin'
A guy, even a wimp, could win the UFC championship with this strategy: Passengers said the man left the plane's bathroom covered in his own waste on the Dec. 26 flight and attacked the flight attendant.
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I do a fair amount of bankruptcy work, so I found this Economist piece about European bankruptcies interesting, especially this brewing jurisdictional mess:
Because of the stark differences in treatment of creditors in Europe–Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries are the friendliest, with Belgium, Germany, Portugal and Switzerland in the middle and France, Italy and Spain the worst, according to S&P–the next few years are likely to see jurisdictional battles. According to European Union law, a company can request to file for bankruptcy in the country where it has its “centre of main interest”, and creditors will fight to avoid the worst regimes.
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From the Notebooks
The basic assumption behind human activity is a one-on-one cause-and-effect: I hunger, so I eat. I thirst, so I drink. I want money, so I work.
But the vast bulk of everyday actions and decisions aren't that simple. As I've grown older, I increasingly distrust my motives. When I argue with another attorney, am I acting out of pride (to have the satisfaction of winning?), out of duty (to my client), out of a religious motive (does it touch on matters of morality?). Indeed, when I undertake any decision that requires reflective consideration, I am always amazed to see the number of threads that are used to form the final decision, so much so that I have a hard time sorting them out and determining which threads are dominant and which are secondary. All decisions (even the most simple ones, like "I hunger, so I eat") have these threads that come together in a split second and often effortlessly, so much so that we don't even recognize the dozen or so threads.
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Eighteen years behind the curve, but I still found this interesting: Godwin's Law: As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
The facts, corollaries, and emotions accompanying this irrefutable truth make me disdain online discussions. I few exchanges in the TDE combox are fine, but anything lengthier either becomes emotional or tiresome. I also find that many people who are willing to engage in lengthy online exchanges are high school or college students, or maybe childless young adults, without (i) many time commitments, or (ii) developed civility.
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The eighteenth century's Mississippi Scheme and South Sea Bubble, the seventeenth century's tulip mania, the 1920's stock market frenzy, the 1990's dot com explosion . . . the twentieth century modern art craze?
[T]he circuit from euphoria to catastrophe is not confined to the housing market and over-leveraged hedge funds. It applies, with ghastly pertinence, to that carnival of pretense and grotesquerie, the world of contemporary art. Stage One, the acceleration. It was an international inebriation: “The Chinese painter Zhang Xiaogang saw his work appreciate 6,000 times, from $1,000 to $6m (1999”“2008); work by the American artist Richard Prince went up 60 to 80 times (2003”“2008). The German painter Anselm Reyle was unknown in 2003; you could have picked up one of his stripe paintings for Ã14,000. Now he has a studio with 60 assistants turning them out for about Ã200,000 each.” . . . .
But this bubble is now deflating. Sotheby's share price has lost three quarters of its value over the past year, sinking from its peak of $57 in October 2007 to $9 in early November–close to its 1980s low of $8. The latest round of contemporary art auctions in London has gone badly. In October, the Phillips de Pury sale made only £5m–a quarter of the minimum estimate; at Christie's almost half the lots didn't sell; and an air of denial hung over the Frieze art fair like a fog.
The article, incidentally, has an ample passage from Charles MacKay's classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It's a pretty good book, but I can't get through the verbose nineteenth-century style. I just read bits and pieces as the mood strikes me. If you want a taste for the point made in the first third of the book (the part dealing with economic crazes), just check out the quoted passage in this article.
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Never tried it, but sounds pretty neat:
Here's a number worth putting in your cell phone, or your home phone speed dial: 1-800-goog411. This is an awesome service from Google, and it's free -- great when you are on the road. Don't waste your money on information calls and don't waste your time manually dialing the number. I am driving along in my car and I need to call the golf course and I don't know the number. I hit the speed dial for information that I have programmed. The voice at the other end says, "City & State." I say, "New Bern, North Carolina." He says, "Business Name or Type of Service." I say, "Taberna Golf Course." He says, "Connecting" and Taberna answers the phone. How great is that? This is nationwide and it is absolutely free! Click on the link below and watch the short clip for a quick demonstration.
Link.
