Diana Botutihe was born at sea. Now in her 50s, she has spent her entire life on boats that are typically just 5m long and 1.5m wide. She visits land only to trade fish for staples such as rice and water, and her boat is filled with the accoutrements of everyday living – jerry cans, blackened stockpots, plastic utensils, a kerosene lamp and a pair of pot plants.

The last of the sea nomads | Environment | The Guardian

I felt that watching this series helped put some of this stuff in perspective. A lot of it is review if you've been following, particularly episodes 2 and 3, but 1 and 4 included a lot of information that I wasn't aware of.

Money, Power and Wall Street | FRONTLINE | PBS

Republicans have sought to delay or dismantle key provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, calling it a prime example of this White House’s over-regulation of private markets. Romney has said he would repeal the law and replace the new regulations with a more streamlined approach.

House Republicans recently approved budget reductions that chisel away at certain elements of Dodd-Frank, and they have particularly targeted the funding needed to operate a new consumer protection bureau.

Obama is about as interested in regulating wall street as he is in defending civil liberties. But what choice does one have but to vote for him?

Romney is calling for Dodd-Frank to be rolled back - we go through the most dangerous financial crisis the world has ever seen, pass timid legislation that does the absolute minimum to prevent some of the regulatory arbitrage that led to that event, and two years later this guy is out there arguing that we gotta get rid of that legislation because its too much a burden?

If I thought he had a snowball's chance in hell of winning I would be very afraid. I don't.

President Obama uses JPMorgan loss to defend Wall Street regulations - BostonHerald.com

piggish

Graphic: Comparing FB with other Tech IPOS | The Big Picture

One thing that makes the JPMorgan trade look especially foolish is that it’s nearly the same sort of recklessness that AIG exhibited: selling derivatives against zero reserves. As Doug Kass, who heads the hedge fund Seabreeze Partners Management, explained: “Under the knowledge of Dimon, the JPM investment office sold massive amounts of CDS [credit-default swap] premium on large U.S. corporations in 2011. Like AIG, they accumulated a large amount of reported profits in the three-year period ending 2011. In an equally familiar manner, the principals of the London investment office were handsomely rewarded. And so was Dimon.”

JPMorgan’s debacle, and its parallels to AIG - The Washington Post

Five years ago, housing values in Atlanta were comparable to those in Charlotte, Dallas, Denver and Cleveland. In fact, Atlanta was a close second to Denver among those five. But as the chart below documents, that’s no longer the case.

I don’t think you can look at that data and shrug it off as a momentary blip. It’s also not the inevitable consequence of the larger national economic situation. This is a long-term problem, and it’s a metro Atlanta problem.

At least munich has a good beer festival.

Metro Atlanta housing prices plummet | Jay Bookman

Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs...

Anyone who’s ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalist’s course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it...

In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the middle class. And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich.

Let’s unleash the true power of the job creators! | Jay Bookman

In a series of blog posts our colleagues at Trend and AlienVault have detailed recent attacks on NGO’s, and how trojanized RTF files have been used as vehicles to plant various remote access trojans on unsuspecting users using the CVE-2012-0158 vulnerability.

In addition, they both mention that apparently stolen digital  certificates have been used to sign the trojan files...

The Shiqiang Gang | Norman Blog

Credit default swaps

Fill ‘er Up — with Unregulated! | The Big Picture

If you fail, all you know is that the particular path you took through that decision space didn’t work. But, it really doesn’t tell you much about which of the other paths might work.

But, if you succeed, you’ve created a pattern for success; a guide through that huge information space that can give you a sense of where to go next time.

The lies we tell ourselves. “I’ve learned more from my failures than my successes”