Your Stories

Cash is Not King

2010-12-10T18:00:00Z

"Cash is king" is a well-worn phrase that has been used quite a bit over the last few years. I hate to burst the bubble, but it is not true. Cash can be king for a day, a month or maybe even a year, but eventually it will be unseated by the real king: profit.

Don't get me wrong, cash is critical. Without cash, a company can become insolvent, unable to pay its people, its bills, its other obligations. The end result could be bankruptcy. But without profit, cash will eventually be revealed as a fraud. Think Bernie Madoff. He had plenty of cash, it just wasn't his. There are many ways to have cash without profit. It could be borrowed, or from investors, or from customer deposits, or from inventory that was sold but not replaced, or from the sale of an asset.

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Spy vs Spy

2010-12-08T18:00:00Z

Just as data security had been an afterthought for many businesses in their rush to get online in the 1990s, creating opportunities for the likes of Shadowcrew, many firms had taken no precautions as they eagerly adopted WiFi in the early 2000s. Gonzalez was especially intrigued by the possibilities of a technique known as "war driving": hackers would sit in cars or vans in the parking lots of big-box stores with laptops and high-power radio antennae and burrow through companies' vulnerable WiFi networks. Adepts could get into a billion-dollar multinational's servers in minutes.

..

Scott cracked the Marshalls WiFi network, and he and James started navigating the system: they co-opted log-ins and passwords and got Gonzalez into the network; they made their way into the corporate servers at the Framingham, Mass., headquarters of Marshalls' parent company, TJX; they located the servers that housed old card transactions from stores. Scott set up a VPN - the system Gonzalez and the Secret Service used to ensnare Shadowcrew - so they could move in and out of TJX and install software without detection. When Gonzalez found that so many of the card numbers they were getting were expired, he had Stephen Watt develop a "sniffer" program to seek out, capture and store recent transactions. Once the collection of data reached a certain size, the program was designed to automatically close, then encrypt, compress and forward the card data to Gonzalez's computer, just as you might send someone an e-mail with a zip file attached. Steadily, patiently, they siphoned the material from the TJX servers. "The experienced ones take their time and slowly bleed the data out," a Secret Service analyst says.

...

Using similar methods, they hacked into OfficeMax, Barnes & Noble, Target, Sports Authority and Boston Market, and probably many other companies that never detected a breach or notified the authorities. Scott bought a six-foot-tall radio antenna, and he and James rented hotel rooms near stores for the tougher jobs. In many cases, the data were simply there for the taking, unencrypted, unprotected.

...computer security was something that was just dollars and cents off the bottom line - it doesn't bring in money," Heymann told me when I asked why war-driving hackers were able to steal data so easily.

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Using Capitalism to Combat Poverty

2010-12-08T18:00:00Z

Mr. Khosla's advocacy of the bootstrap powers of capitalism is part of an increasingly popular school of thought: businesses, not governments or nonprofit groups, should lead the effort to eradicate global poverty.

Some nonprofit experts say commercial social enterprises have significant limitations and pose conflicts of interest. But proponents like Mr. Khosla draw inspiration from the astounding global growth of microfinance - the business of giving small loans to poor entrepreneurs, of which SKS Microfinance is a notable practitioner.

Advocates also find intellectual support for the idea from the work of business management professors like the late C. K. Prahalad, who have argued that large corporations can do well and do good by aiming at people at the so-called bottom of the pyramid.

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US Lawmakers Urge President to Remember God

2010-12-08T18:00:00Z

Since 1956, the official national motto of the United States has been "In God We Trust." The motto also appears in the national anthem, and on the nation's currency.

In a speech given Nov. 10 to students in Jakarta, Indonesia, Obama said that the United States and Indonesia share a similar history: "It is a story written into our national mottos. In the United States, our motto is 'E Pluribus Unum.'"

The members of the Congressional Prayer Caucaus said that it was "unacceptable" for the president to misrepresent the national motto: "The president is the primary representative of our nation to the world, and whether mistake or intention, his actions cast aside an integral part of American society."

"President [Ronald] Reagan once warned that 'If we ever forget that we're one nation under God, then we will be a nation gone under,'" the letter added.

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Too Big to Fail is Here to Stay

2010-12-06T20:00:00Z

it is one thing to empower the Treasury and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to fire senior bankers, wipe out stockholders, and impose losses on creditors. It is quite another thing for the authorities to exercise these powers. If Goldman, say, was to run into serious trouble shortly after giving up its banking license, it is hard to believe that the Treasury and Fed would shut it down and let the dominoes fall where they may. If markets were plummeting and creditors, depositors, and other counterparties were rushing to liquidate their positions, the authorities would come under enormous pressure to prop up the firm, or find a healthier rival to take it over. Then we would be back to September 2008.

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The Case Against Health

2010-12-03T20:00:00Z

We may be nearing a point where institutions of public health and the commercial interests that surround it, including the media, do more harm than good to the nation's health. The official version of health peddled by our current system is not only venal but potentially noxious. In some instances, public health has been transformed into a kind of iatric disease, a medically induced assault on the health of society. Our minders trumpet the obesity epidemic even as epidemiological evidence suggests that "yo-yo dieting" (repeatedly losing and regaining weight over a period of several years) actively damages the immune system. At any given time, it is estimated that 50 percent of all women are on diets, and 95 percent of all diets fail. The more we diet, the fatter we seem to become.

To be against health is to be critical of the myths and lies concerning our health that are circulated by the media and paid for by large industries. It is to demystify their hidden moralizing and their political agenda. It also means expanding the idea of iatric disease to include the moral and physical harm that is done to the public by particular nostrums of public health, especially those that impose constraints and privations "for your own good," as the saying goes.

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Negative Advertising

2010-12-03T17:00:00Z

Dozens of people over the last three years, she found, had nearly identical tales about DecorMyEyes: a purchase gone wrong, followed by phone calls, e-mails and threats, sometimes lasting for months or years.

It's all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: "I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven."

"I've exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?"

"Look," he says, grabbing an iPad off a small table. He types "Christian Audigier," the name of a French designer, and "glasses" into Google. DecorMyEyes pops up high on the first page.

"Why am I there?" he asks, sounding both peeved and amazed. "I don't belong there. I actually outrank the designer's own Web site."

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Recruiting Robots for Battle

2010-12-03T17:00:00Z

"One of the great arguments for armed robots is they can fire second," said Joseph W. Dyer, a former vice admiral and the chief operating officer of iRobot, which makes robots that clear explosives as well as the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. When a robot looks around a battlefield, he said, the remote technician who is seeing through its eyes can take time to assess a scene without firing in haste at an innocent person.

Yet the idea that robots on wheels or legs, with sensors and guns, might someday replace or supplement human soldiers is still a source of extreme controversy. Because robots can stage attacks with little immediate risk to the people who operate them, opponents say that robot warriors lower the barriers to warfare, potentially making nations more trigger-happy and leading to a new technological arms race.

"Wars will be started very easily and with minimal costs" as automation increases, predicted Wendell Wallach, a scholar at the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics and chairman of its technology and ethics study group.

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Twinkling Stars May Reveal Human-Size Wormholes

2010-12-02T17:00:00Z

"This is a neat calculation showing that, if wormholes are out there, this would give us a fighting chance to see them," said Matt Visser, a theoretical physicist at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand (also not involved in the study). "But wormholes are speculative stuff. A lot of work has been done with them, but primarily as a theoretical tool to stretch Einstein's ideas to their limits, to break them and see what drops out the other end."

Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen proposed the existence of wormholes in 1935, dubbing them Einstein-Rosen bridges. Decades later, the objects were mathematically shown to be unstable: Before even a piece of light could have a chance to fly through, the throat of the wormhole would close up for good.

More recent work by Michael Morris and Kip Thorne, however, suggests that highly exotic negative mass and energy - thought to behave counter to gravity - could prop open a wormhole's throat long enough for a courageous human to sneak through.

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Economists' Grail: A Post-Crash Model

2010-12-02T17:00:00Z

Mr. Farmer sees a perhaps greater flaw in the models' mathematical structure. A typical "dynamic stochastic general equilibrium" model-so called for its efforts to incorporate time and random change-consists of anywhere from a few to dozens of interlinked equations, which must agree before the model can spit out a solution. If the equations get too complex, or if there are too many elements, the models have a hard time finding the point at which all the players' preferences meet.

To keep things simple, economists leave out large chunks of reality. Before the crisis, most models didn't have banks, defaults or capital markets, a fact that proved problematic when the financial crisis hit. They tend to include only households, firms, central banks and the government. They also commonly use a single equation to represent each player, impairing the models' ability to explain the unexpected outcomes that can emerge when millions of different people interact.

"You are limited by what you can solve," says Mr. Farmer. "It puts the whole enterprise in a straitjacket."

His proposal: Create a richly complex, computer-based simulation of the economy like those scientists use to model weather patterns, epidemics and traffic. Given enough computing power, such "agent-based" models can include millions of individual players, who don't have to be rational or agree with one another. Instead of equations that must be solved, the players have open-ended rules of behavior, such as, "If I've just turned 55 and I'm feeling blue, I'll buy a sports car."

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Time to Topple Keynesian Economics

2010-12-02T17:00:00Z

Classical economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from Adam Smith to J.S. Mill (and neoclassical economists like Marshall and Pigou who followed them in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century prior to Keynes) conflated the big picture-the nation and trade-with the small picture-households, workers and firms. They had it right because the big and small pictures are inextricably linked. You can't look at one without considering the other.

Keynesianism produced a pedagogical schism in economics that has no relevance at all for the way economies work. Textbooks were divided into two parts: microeconomics and macroeconomics. Macroeconomics took on a life of its own. It was and still is a Keynesian world of aggregates, seemingly distinct from the economic forces at work among households, workers and firms. Keynes and his followers invented a new artificial world which, in fact, has no relationship to underlying economic forces. It has no underpinning. It has no legs. Trying to understand how the economy works, and how to put it right, through macroeconomics is like trying to understand how an engine works, and how to fix it, without regard at all to its constituent parts and how they work together.

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Four in 10 Say Marriage is Becoming Obsolete

2010-11-18T17:00:00Z

About 29 percent of children under 18 now live with a parent or parents who are unwed or no longer married, a fivefold increase from 1960, according to the Pew report being released Thursday. Broken down further, about 15 percent have parents who are divorced or separated and 14 percent who were never married. Within those two groups, a sizable chunk - 6 percent - have parents who are live-in couples who opted to raise kids together without getting married.

Indeed, about 39 percent of Americans said marriage was becoming obsolete. And that sentiment follows U.S. census data released in September that showed marriages hit an all-time low of 52 percent for adults 18 and over.

In 1978, just 28 percent believed marriage was becoming obsolete.

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Gloria Steinem insults "Right-Wing Women"

2010-11-18T17:00:00Z

Question: Why do some women vote for Republicans even though the party wants to take away their reproductive freedoms?

Gloria Steinem: It's very difficult. I mean, of course any group of people that has been subordinate absorbs the idea of our own subordination, and that it is natural, and comes to think that the only way to survive is to identify with the powerful. And I think that is not surprising, and it is what happens to a lot of right-wing women. I mean they think they better do what the powerful tell them do otherwise they'll be in even more trouble. So, I understand that, but anyone with any faith in the future, self respect, hope for themselves... you can't vote for people who don't vote for you and that is... There is a whole wonderful book called "The Republican War Against Women" that documents this from the '60s forward. It wasn't always true. The Republican Party was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment for instance, but it is true now.

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Why Spam Exists

2010-11-15T17:00:00Z

This guy paid his local computer repair guys $20,000,000 over 3 or 4 years to protect his computer from "a sinister virus emanating in a remote village of Honduras and created as part of a plot to infiltrate the United States government by Polish priests linked to Opus Dei." The New York Times article, linked below, doesn't say it but I'm pretty sure he's allowed to vote.

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The Dangers of Quantitative Easing

2010-11-11T17:00:00Z

Thank the Federal Reserve. The central bank has embarked on its program of "quantitative easing," a second round of experimental monetary policy in which the Fed buys up assets - like longer term government bonds - to bring down interest rates, which is supposed to spur lending and borrowing, thus reigniting the economy.

Nobody knows whether it will work to bring down the intractable rate of unemployment. But it has already worked in one significant way: the speculative juices of the markets are flowing.

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NASCAR Gasoline Going Green In 2011

2010-10-21T16:00:00Z

CONCORD, N.C. (AP) -- NASCAR will move from unleaded fuel to an ethanol blend in all three of its national series beginning next season.

The switch to Sunoco Green E15 was announced Saturday by NASCAR chairman Brian France, who touted the switch as yet another step by the auto racing series toward environment friendly practices.

"This is the most visible thing that we can do to let our partners and our fans know that NASCAR is taking a slow, steady march as an industry," France said at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

The E15 blend is a mixture of 15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline. It is a clean-burning, high-octane motor fuel, and the ethanol portion is produced from renewable resources that Sunoco will get from the Midwest.

"Domestic ethanol, for sure," France said.

The blend will replace Sunoco 260 GTX, a 98-octane fuel that is currently used at all three of NASCAR's national divisions. NASCAR made the move, with Sunoco, from leaded to unleaded gasoline at the start of the 2007 season. more

Robert Miller, MOH Recipient

2010-10-07T16:00:00Z

..."If I get killed on this mission," Miller said to his friend Staff Sgt. Nick McGarry a few hours before the patrol, "I don't want to be remembered for dying. I want to be remembered for who I was."

What Miller showed that morning about who he was will be recognized Wednesday at the White House...

...The second of eight kids, Miller, 24, was a driven staff sergeant who seemed destined for his fateful mission from the time he took his first steps at 7 months old. As a Boy Scout, he was thrilled to go camping and hiking. In eighth grade, he wrote a poem about the valor of the Army in World War II. In high school, he was a star gymnast, played sousaphone in the Wheaton North marching band, loved Hemingway and deep-dish pizza and was grateful for the D he got in Latin. The owner of the gym where Miller worked trusted him with keys to the place when Miller was 16. His homecoming date said she never felt more secure than when he was with her... more

WSJ: Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling. Too Bad it is not for U.S.

2010-10-07T16:00:00Z

Even though President Obama is against offshore drilling for our country, he signed an executive order to loan $2 Billion of our taxpayer dollars (which we can't afford to loan since we're broke) to a Brazilian Oil Exploration Company (the 8th largest company in the entire world), to drill for oil off the coast of Brazil.

The Chinese Communist military owns and controls all industry in China. So what? So here's the connection: the Chinese military is under contract to purchase all the oil that this field will produce, which is hundreds of millions of barrels; we Americans have absolutely no gain from this transaction. None.

Guess who is the largest individual stockholder of this Brazilian Oil Company and who would benefit most from this? It is American billionaire, George Soros, who was President Obama's most generous financial supporter during his campaign.

Not a word of this transaction was broadcast on any of the news networks!

Below is the Wall street Journal article confirming
this information.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574346610120524166.html

Vote Big Spenders Out

2010-10-06T16:00:00Z

The Spending voted for by each Member of Congress and the National Debt are being scrutinized by 2010 OR BU$T, a nonpartisan public information organization. Its website, www.votebigspendersout.com [VoteBigSpendersOut.com], keeps a running tab on the spending of Members of Congress starting January 2009.

North America about to be hit by tsunami of Far East goods

2010-10-06T16:00:00Z

The Chinese deep-water port at Yangshan, near Shanghai, provides ample evidence North America is about to be hit by a tsunami of containers from China. Yangshan is a reclaimed island the size of 470 soccer fields that lies in the East China Sea Port, offshore from Shanghai. According to Bloomberg News, the Chinese have invested $15 billion to develop Yangshan, currently the largest port in China. story

National Cryptologic Memorial

2010-10-06T16:00:00Z

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service Cryptologic Memorial honors and remembers those who gave their lives, "serving in silence," in the line of duty. It serves as an important reminder of the crucial role that cryptology plays in keeping the United States secure and of the courage of these individuals to carry out their mission at such a dear price. more

Thomas Jefferson Quotes

2010-10-05T16:00:00Z

When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as Europe.

The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.

It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one-half the wars of the world.

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.

Thomas Jefferson said in 1802:
'I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property - until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.'

Legislation Could Repeal Incandescent Ban

2010-10-04T16:00:00Z

Incandescents may be given a stay of execution. Last week, U.S. Reps. Joe Barton (R-Texas), Michael Burgess (R-Texas), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) introduced legislation designed to repeal the incandescent light bulb ban.

The "Better Use of Light Bulbs Act" (H.R. 6144) would repeal Subtitle B of Title III of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, the latter of which acts as a de facto ban on incandescent light bulbs. As it stands, 100 W incandescents will be phased out in 2012, and by 2014, the Edison light bulb will be contraband. In turn, this has raised concerns about forced obsolescence of legacy technologies. story

Scientific American: Coal Waste More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste

2010-10-04T16:00:00Z

The waste produced by coal plants is actually more radioactive than that generated by their nuclear counterparts. In fact, the fly ash emitted by a power plant-a by-product from burning coal for electricity-carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy.

...estimated radiation doses ingested by people living near the coal plants were equal to or higher than doses for people living around the nuclear facilities.story

Politically Correct Terrorism, and the Invincible Ignorance of the Left

2010-10-01T16:00:00Z

If you are politically incorrect, then you are not following the party line-your politics are somehow out of sync, and you must be brought back into alignment with the correct, approved way of thinking, speaking, and behaving-for the good of the collective. story

Kim Jung Un

2010-09-30T16:00:00Z

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea introduced its heir apparent to the world Thursday, a chubby-faced young man with a serious expression, combed back hair cut high and tight on the sides and wearing a communist-style black suit. story

The Lawyer Party

2010-09-30T16:00:00Z

The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers...

..The Republican Party is different. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not lawyers, but businessmen. The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer, not a lawyer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.

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