Category: Interesting

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Too big to fail, indeed.

What if they built a mall, at the time the world’s largest, and (almost) no one came?

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Fact checking… Investors’ Business Daily has heard of it.

In a spectacular outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease the right-wing newspaper Investors’ Business Daily avers that “People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.” Without realizing of course that Hawking IS in fact British and that the NHS didn’t just leave him on a mountaintop to be pecked clean by the crows, something which any American health insurance company would no doubt have done decades ago. This, I’m afraid, is typical of the level of debate in the United States about health care reform.

Note: I’m quite sure that the original article will be removed as soon as it starts getting a lot of traffic, so if you can’t find the quote I highlighted have a look at the article as it originally appeared (local cache).

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Same result, no reward.

When Microsoft offered nearly fifty billion dollars last year to acquire Yahoo I thought this was the stupidest thing Redmond had ever done, and in hindsight not accepting the offer was indeed the stupidest thing Yahoo had ever done. In a new development this week Yahoo has announced that it was ditching search and concentrating on its ad service in a 10-year agreement with Microsoft. Effectively Microsoft ended up getting almost as much control over Yahoo as they would have by owning it but for a fraction of the cost, while sidestepping antitrust regulations that would have resulted from an acquisition. In the end it goes to show that Yahoo really has been managed by the dumbest people in the IT business for the past couple of years…

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Now that’s some serious souvenir money.

The sports world is abuzz with Cristiano Ronaldo’s acquisition by Real Madrid for a record-setting 96 million Euro transfer fee, but I think the real important story of the day is the capture of two Japanese citizens in Italy who were bound for Switzerland with $134 billion in possibly-counterfeit US securities in $500M and $1B denominations.

Interesting how this story keeps getting blacked-out in the mainstream press, don’t you think? Methinks I detect Kim Jong-Il’s hand in this. North Korea has been turning out high-quality counterfeit US money for over a decade, and it was only a matter of time before they started working on the really valuable stuff. Still, it’s only speculation at this point. Still, is anyone in the market for shady $500M US bonds?..

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Documentaries to watch in 2009

I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries on YouTube recently, so I figured it might be a good idea to recommend a few. I think all of them are well worth seeing, if you haven’t viewed them already.

Continue reading “Documentaries to watch in 2009”

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Are we about to witness life as a disaster-porn TV special?

Not that people should panic or anything, but there has recently been a large cluster of seismic activity around Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. And Yellowstone is already known to be a supervolcano which is overdue for an eruption by about 40,000 years.

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Money for nothing…

Just how much are mobile phone companies ripping us off when they charge us fees to send (or even receive) text messages? Even more than you think. Mobile phone messages cost providers nothing. That’s right, absolutely nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Any amount they charge you is pure profiteering.

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And the Canadian consumer takes it in the shorts again.

We Canadians get the short shrift on just about everything, be it mobile phone services, or cars, but now someone’s come up with a comparison of broadband internet providers that shows just how much we’re getting screwed here north of the 49th parallel.

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Is the Fed speaking out of both sides of its mouth?

Ben Bernanke spent a lot of time in front of Congress on Tuesday arguing that there’s a credit crisis out there, so why did the Fed recently shrink the float by $125 billion and why is it still resisting a consensus-recommended half-percent rate cut? Is it, as some paranoid people could suggest, a way to generate a need for an all-encompassing mega-bailout plan?

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Livestation

I’ve had broadband internet access for over 10 years now, about as long as it’s been available, and many times I’ve seen claims of “TV over the internet” trumpeted but prove disappointing when put to a real-world test. That being said, Livestation delivers. If you’ve always wanted to see Al-Jazeera English, BBC World and news stations from France, Germany, the United States and around the world on your PC, give it a try. Why not, it’s free…