Once upon a time OpenOffice, or Ooo (OpenOffice.Org) as it became known was the leader in open source office productivity software. I loved it. It was loved. Then one day a cunning suitor, Oracle, offered to give gold to the very attractive, but not rich, Ooo. Ooo agreed to become part of Oracle. But Oracle …
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Category:3 The World of Money
Facebook has joined Microsoft and Google: ogres of the internet
A couple of months ago the Austrian law student Max Schrems asked Facebook to send him all their data stored about him. All Europeans have a right to do this because Facebook is based in the EU in Dublin, Ireland. It took a while and then Facebook sent Max a CD with 1222 PDF files. What …
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Who did Irish taxpayer’s bail out?
An unsurprising analysis of teh commitment teh Irish government took on in bailing out unguaranteed bondholders. Read Who are the bond holders we are bailing out? by David Malone author of Debt Generation. The list is good to have, though it is the story that makes you cringe with disgust at the greed and carelessness …
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Watch the dead cat bounce.
or here. The Western Economic System (capitalism?) is the cat. 🙁
Bankers and politicians couldn’t have done it better.
Reflect on what has happened over the past 10 to 15 years. In the late 1990s Western economies were really feeling the pressure from Asia, even though the Asian Financial Crisis had dealt a severe blow to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia etc. In the early 2000s the sub-prime bubble started to inflate. Bankers, politicians, regulators, rating …
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Ray Anderson
His passion could make you cry. He turned the dirtiest of industries in to the cleanest. He set the example. He died 8 August 2011. You can hear him talk about changing the world here. Wikipedia’s entry is here. Here is an obituary from The Economist. And here is a little poem he liked to …
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US downgrade – the world is beginning to wake up
So S&P, one of the rating agencies that fuelled the bubble and bust, has downgraded US credit rating. Its about time. Not that the US isn’t wonderful, but its economic profligacy expanded to new levels in the last decade and the culture is becoming one of gratuitous consumption at the cost of future earnings. The …
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Ireland’s future depends on breaking free from bailout
Ireland’s future depends on breaking free from bailoutIreland’s future depends on breaking free from bailout by Morgan Kelly in teh Irish Times: WITH THE Irish Government on track to owe a quarter of a trillion euro by 2014, a prolonged and chaotic national bankruptcy is becoming inevitable. By the time the dust settles, Ireland’s last …
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Has economics reached its sell-by date?
A note by Richard and Stella, voicing frustrations many of us feel in the imploding Irish economy. How far will things have to disintegrate before we cop on that we cannot continue to do things in the same way? At the moment, issues of the economy are determining political decisions, and consequently, are affecting decisions …
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Banking, Budgets, Inflation, Food prices
Four degrees of separation? I just browsed through three links that interested me and suddenly noticed that they drew the banking crisis and the food crisis (which is barely on many people’s radar) together. Here it is: US banking system ‘open to abuse’ One of the US’s top fraud investigators is warning that America’s policing …
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