He actually lost the money gambling while apparently partying. He is suing the casino about the partying.
From the WSJ:
During a year-long gambling binge at the Caesars Palace and Rio casinos in 2007, Terrance Watanabe managed to lose nearly $127 million. The run is believed to be one of the biggest losing streaks by an individual in Las Vegas history.So when you are feeling like a loser...
From the project's main wiki page:
Climate change poses a significant risk to the sustenance of future generations in many places and a challenge for sustainable development planning everywhere. Adaptation is a socio-institutional process, which when supported by data, tools and examples can provide a flexible avenue for exploring robust responses to these risks.Case Study page for California.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced the new application. Three years ago at the very same spot, Schwarzenegger signed California's landmark global warming law requiring the state to slash greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Treasure Island, along with SFO and Google's Mountain View headquarters, could all be fully underwater by 2100.Check out Google Earth to download.
Rather than becoming more crisis-prone, the financial system is likely to emerge from this episode healthier and more stable than before.Speech was presented on October 15,2007.
Back in October I mentioned Apple was looking into LaLa.com's app.
NYTimes.com announced Apple bought Lala apparently for the talent:
This person said Apple would primarily be buying Lala’s engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services.From Bloomberg:
Lala’s engineers have built a service that music enthusiasts say is very easy to use. Lala scans the hard drives of its users and creates an online music library that matches the user’s collection, making it painless (and free) for people to get their music in the cloud.
An acquisition of Lala may signal that Apple is more interested in creating a subscription service, Kenswil said.
They tested it. From kottke.org:
After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.
Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
The network news broadcasts have ignored a growing scandal over evidence of a potential climate cover-up — and now they've even been scooped by the fake news at Comedy Central.
Senator Bunting also placing a hold on Bernanke's confirmation in the Senate Banking Committee.Check out FireDogLake.com.
A Sprint spokesperson noted that law enforcement and other government agencies only request information such as in missing persons cases, genuine emergencies, criminal investigations, or instances when a customer consents to sharing information. Sprint spokesperson Matt Sullivan said, "In all cases we require a valid legal request appropriate for the circumstances, meaning the request must be accompanied by either a subpoena, court order or customer consent."Bold emphasis added.
Read payment cards from any device with an audio input jack, including your mobile phone. Accepting payments has never been faster or more convenient.From Fast Company's article:
By providing a basic, easy-to-use and secure system (no credit card data is stored on the iPhone in use) Square could turn almost anyone into a credit-card accepting merchant. It also costs way less than the typical wireless keypad/printer card machines you see in stores, even factoring in the price of the iPhone--partly due to its "no contracts...no hidden costs" promise.
When CEOs preside over disasters, they are fired. Captains go down with their ships.nakedcapitalism.com is one of the best and most well respected macro econ & finance blogs.
And Bernanke needs to be replaced.
He was a major architect of the policies that created the crisis.
He ignored signs of the severity of the developing crisis and failed to prepare for obvious dangers, like the collapse of an investment bank.
Received an email from an artist I follow who used FanBridge:
So Many Networks, So Little TimeLooks like a terrific integrated service. Have you tried this?
MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, oh my! Like you, your fans are spread out across many social networks, but that doesn't mean you need to maintain every social network separately. With FanBridge, you can communicate with fans from a single location. We then track the effectiveness of each network so you know where best to spend your time.
If you aren't pissed off about this, you aren't alive.
Go here to support Sanders and his blocking of Bernanke's renomination.
From the author of It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street, her recent article at The Daily Beast:
Again, it’s “just” a couple billion of discrepancies, but with books this massive at banks this big and risky, accuracy matters. Plus, such nuances make it extremely difficult to understand its books for regulators or the public.And:
With taxpayers now on the hook, we need an objective, consistent evaluation of bank balance sheets complete with probing questions about trading and speculative revenues, allowing for comparisons across the banking industry. This lack of transparency leaves room to misrepresent risk and trading revenue.The short version of her article:
She read over 1,000 pages of SEC filings of several large banks and found their publicly released balance sheets are incomprehensible and we as tax payers are now also liable since we continue to bail them out with any real accountability and the odds are, we are all screwed unless something big happens on the regulatory front.
An online tool to help save previous places:
LandScope America—a collaborative project of NatureServe and the National Geographic Society—is a new online resource for the land-protection community and the public. By bringing together maps, data, photos, and stories about America’s natural places and open spaces, our goal is to inform and inspire conservation of our lands and waters.Audubon provides some interesting info including it's Important Bird Areas series:
The Important Bird Areas (IBA) Program is the focal point for Audubon’s bird conservation work. As a global effort to identify the most important places for bird populations and to focus conservation efforts on those sites, IBAs represent Audubon’s lead conservation initiative because the most severe threats to bird populations are habitat-based.This should be identified as an Important Bird Area:
One of the most auspicious aspects of open space planning is that for the most part it happens locally.Communities with the will and the grassroots involvement to protect land and other resources can do tremendous things. As author Samuel Brody has noted, “Some of the most effective policy tools that can either threaten or protect ecosystems are in the hands of county officials, city councils, town boards, local planning staff, and general public rather than federal or regional agencies.”If local officials won't provide the leadership - the people need to step up, throw them out, and exercise their rights as citizens to protect their neighborhoods for future generations.
Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
German poet, playwright, novelist and statesman
On a related note, Vanity Fair's latest article on GS entitled The Bank Job.
SIFMA's website.
Check out her work. It's great.
Back to the Land from Maira Kalman at the NY Times.
Her site.
On the bottom-end of the market, there's the Espresso book printer, as currently in operation in the wonderful Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. This thing will print any public domain book that Google has scanned, in about 4 minutes, for $8.And:
...At the Harvard Bookstore, they have someone who spends the day mousing around on Google Book Search, looking for weird and cool titles in the public domain to print and shelve around the store, as suggestions for the sort of thing you might have printed for yourself.
At the other end of the scale, the high-end, there's the book-as-object phenomenon. Taschen and a few other art-book publishers have figured out how to make a market out of this[.]BTW, you can spend about 40 hours a day at bOingbOing.net.
The Fed has pumped well over $1T into the economy it eventually has to pull out in such a way inflation doesn't get too bad. Ha ha ha.
They've come up with a simple transaction they are going to test on a limited basis according to Bloomberg:
The transactions will be conducted at current market rates, and the aggregate amount outstanding “will be very small relative to the level of excess reserves,” today’s announcement said. The results will be posted on the New York Fed’s Web site and will be listed as liabilities on the Fed’s consolidated balance sheet statements.
The New York Fed said on Oct. 19 that it was working with market participants on how it would use reverse repurchase agreements to help drain cash. It also said the central bank was considering expanding the counterparties for reverse repo operations beyond the 18 primary dealers.
Sounds simple enough doesn't it? What's the worse that could happen? The economy is either the worst since 2008 or inflation explodes way more than it did in the 70s.
Even in Facebook.
From Wired's Wiki/article:
Different folks certainly have different tolerance levels for their online persona and how public they want it to be, but thankfully, there are tips to ensure that your boss, your ex, or your mildly interested former friends can keep tabs on you on your terms.
From their 911.wikileaks.org page:
The archive is a completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entrance into the historical record will lead to a nuanced understanding of how this event led to death, opportunism and war.What wikileaks.org is about:
We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly - in terms of human life and human rights.Hat tip to Virginia Coalition of Open Government for the link.
From Apple's Pro Profiles series:
“But with this book there are no copies in stores, no bookshelves, no review copies. Each copy is created as you order it, so it doesn’t exist until you bought it. Economically, environmentally, it’s just so much better.”They picked 200 photos for the book:
“But with Aperture, it was incredibly easy to sort, rate, and export 40 thousand images."At the book's website, The Obama Time Capsule:
STEP 1 Purchase THE OBAMA TIME CAPSULE on Amazon. One order per personalization. Within 3 hours of authorization an email will be sent to you so that you can begin personalizing your book.Instructions for how to make the book personalized.
“I don’t know the future of coffee table books,” he says. “Maybe they’re dinosaurs. But rather than killing them, technologies like just-in-time publishing might represent a coming of age for these books, and for books in general. I love the web — I live online all day — but there’s no ‘there’ there. So what I really like is that I can leave this book for my great grandchildren to pick up someday and see what my wife, my kids, and I were doing when President Obama was elected.”Cool!
From CreateFortMonroeNationalPark.org:
SOLUTION: We propose a national park that would flourish without overly burdening taxpayers and that would benefit the Hampton Roads economy in many ways. There’s a proven precedent and inspiration: San Francisco’s similar former Army post, the Presidio.Please! Donate to the Fort Monroe National Park Foundation:
The Fort Monroe National Park Foundation, Inc. was formed in June 2007 by leaders of Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park as a separate nonprofit, educational foundation dedicated to educating the public and promoting better understanding nationally, regionally and locally of the importance and potential of the 570 acres constituting Fort Monroe.
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