Confused Capitalists

You gotta love this piece about Craigslist in the NYT, demonstrating a major culture clash between financial analysts and Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. You can almost see them leaving the conference scratching their heads. Hopefully they’ll scratch all the way through to their brains and kill themselves.

(Yes, I run a business myself; no, I’m not being ironic. Not everything has to be about money.)

LCD makers probed for price fixing

ars: Several LCD makers are facing new regulatory probes in the US, Japan, and Korea for anti-competitive practices. Samsung, Sharp, NEC, AU Optronics, LG Phillips, and Chi Mei Optoelectronics are all being examined for allegedly working together to fix prices on LCDs in order to combat falling prices.

Scandanavia…

Isn’t very cold at the moment, but it’s still picturesque. Wouldn’t live there though.

More later.

Medical Defence Union

(See here for an explanation.)

QUESTION: When is an insurer not an insurer?

ANSWER: When it is the Medical Defence Union (MDU) or a copycat version of it. (See Link) (more…)

ECB up 0.25%

That’s half of Cowen’s benefits to home buyers gone. Between that and the frankly idiotic cut in the top level of tax that we’ll probably desperately need next year, I reckon this particular Fianna Failure just flushed Ireland’s future down the toilet for a few years to come. And the opposition will have to clean up after them again.

CIA role claim in Kennedy killing

JFK next?

BBC NEWS: New video and photographic evidence that puts three senior CIA operatives at the scene of Robert Kennedy’s assassination has been brought to light.

The evidence was shown in a report by Shane O’Sullivan, broadcast on BBC Newsnight.

It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968.

The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles.

Security Of Electronic Voting Is Condemned

Like, duh.

Washington Post: Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country “cannot be made secure,” according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government’s premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.

In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine’s software. The recommendations endorse “optical-scan” systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.