Watched Margin Call last night on iTunes and woke up cranky. Here is a short list of things that it gets wrong about Wall Street.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has. - Margaret Mead

Steve Jobs was to tech like John Lennon was to music _ changed the game, launched a new era, had vision and integrity, was an inspiration to people.

Larry Summers: Daniel Ellsberg drew out the lesson regarding the Vietnam War…Policymakers acted without illusion. At every juncture they made the minimum commitments necessary to avoid imminent disaster — offering optimistic rhetoric but never taking steps that even they believed offered the prospect of decisive victory. They were tragically caught in a kind of no man’s land — unable to reverse a course to which they had committed so much but also unable to generate the political will to take forward steps that gave any realistic prospect of success.

It is a slow day in a small Irish town. The rain is misting and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and having a hard time making ends meet, let alone climbing out of debt.

A good analogy Of hurricanes and economic equilibrium.

Wild and woolly couple of weeks in tech world ‘out with the old, in with the new.’

With the S&P down 13% since July 7, and the 10-year rate down a point to barely over 2%, markets are discounting the double dip. They might be doing a great job of early warning, sensitive to faint aromas in complex crosscurrents of data. Or they might be wrong.

Tucked away in the neglected items in the ‘Tools’ menu above, you might have noticed the metaphorical ‘Cat Food Calculator’.

There’s a disingenuous meme being perpetuated by the grossly misinformed and cynical, that 50% of Americans get government benefits, but pay no taxes (the ‘lucky duckies‘, here and there and everywhere).

We have been going through the stages of coming to terms with GOP berzerkers. 1. Denial: “They’re just posturing.” 2. Astonishment: “Wow, some of them are dumb enough to believe their own BS.” 3. Facepalm: “I can’t believe they’re actually going to do this.”

Once again, people are debating here and here and here whether the GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious. - George Orwell

The greater the institution, the greater the chances of abuse. - Mohandas K. Gandhi

Bitcoin is a fascinating experiment: digital currency that doesn’t depend on a central authority.