Re: With 20:20 hindsight ...
There is bound to be some Scheisse geht runter und schlägt den Propeller this Monday morning.
16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
On 9 March 2005, a 38-year-old Greek electrical engineer named Costas Tsalikidis was found hanged in his Athens loft apartment, an apparent suicide. It would prove to be merely the first public news of a scandal that would roil Greece for months. The next day, the prime minister of Greece was told that his cellphone was being bugged, as were those of the mayor of Athens and at least 100 other high-ranking dignitaries, including an employee of the U.S. embassy. Major network penetrations of any kind are exceedingly uncommon. They are hard to pull off, and equally hard to investigate. ... We still don't know who committed this crime. A big reason is that the UK-based Vodafone Group, one of the largest cellular providers in the world, bobbled its handling of some key log files. It also reflexively removed the rogue software, instead of letting it continue to run, tipping off the perpetrators that their intrusion had been detected and giving them a chance to run for cover. The company was fined 76 million this past December.
The next day Fred showed up in his scramble suit to hear about the bugging installation.....
To my own house, he thought. Arctor's house. Up the street at the house I am Bob Arctor, the heavy doper suspect being scanned without his knowledge, and then every couple of days I find a pretext to slip down the street and into the apartment where I am Fred replaying miles and miles of tape to see what I did, and this whole business, he thought, depresses me. Except for the protection -- and valuable personal information -- it will give me.
In other news:
Dot Com Bubble 2.0—–Lunacy By The Numbers
The financial data for the top name on the list, Twitter, is all that is required to remind us that once again markets are trading in the nosebleed section of history, rivaling even the madness of March 2000. Currently, Twitter (TWTR) is valued at $31 billion.That’s 18X revenue, but the catch is that the revenue in question is its lifetime bookings over the 18 quarters since Q1 2010.
When it comes to profits, the numbers are not nearly so promising! For the LTM (last 12 months) period ending in June, TWTR booked $974 million of revenue and $1.7 billion of operating expense. That why “NM” shows up in its LTM ratio of enterprise value to EBITDA. It turns out that its EBITDA was -$704 million. In fact, its R&D expense alone was 83% of revenues.
That’s not the real fantasy, however. The sell-side hockey sticks indicate that TWTR’s forward multiple is only 86.6X projected EBITDA. Let’s see. At its current total enterprise value, this implies it will generate $350 million of positive EBITDA in the next 12 months—or a $1 billion favorable swing from the LTM number.
Just say its going to take some doing—not to say a miracle. During Q2 EBITDA was -$104 million compared to -$13 million in the year ago June quarter. So TWTR’s cash profit numbers are marching to the rear at a furious pace, but never mind. It’s EBITDA will soar skyward any moment now, making it 86.6X forward multiple completely rational….. Right.
...
Any day now, this third and greatest bubble of the 21st century will reach a boiling point that even the mad money printers in the Eccles Building will not be able to sustain. Then there will be another thundering financial market crash—with collateral damage ricocheting willy-nilly in every direction along main street.
Google and Apple colluding on employee salaries
You should not be amazed at all. Once it comes down to disallowing people to talk to each other and agree on pricing you know the inner progressive logic overrides the libertarian.
Only people who somehow think that there is a god-giving right to get high salaries from Google/Apple for divine work rendered or that people are actually being forced to work there (they are monopsonists on the job market, right?) have any sort of problem with that.
Just a Hollywood movie plot which is probably being pitched to some director right now as the blockbuster for summer of 2015. Happens all the time.
President of the United World Government
Imagining that a "United World Government" could do anything except gaze at its own navel through the mirror maze of superbloated bureaucracy, free-fall-devalue the world currency and pass most of the time suppressing dissent in the most brutal manner imaginable -- as opposed to be able to set up Mars as a lifeboat -- is beyond ludicrous. UWG would be the Koch brotherscartel. And if anyone told me that he wanted ship me to Mars for survival, I would immediately conclude I was being cunningly Lincoln Train'd.
Wait! There are wars, poverty, pollution, envirocollapse and everything? This seems to be confirmation that "there is no daylight" between World Government and the Bad Guys. Maybe this is aaactually a sly psychological thriller which cunningly hides the key to a deeper layer of the story? Read it again, dear reviewer, and report back.
Back to reading the "Southern Reach Trilogy", which is now complete.
It was indeed a combination of the two. Which could also be simply referred to as "rotated".
More on this in Rotations, Quaternions, and Double Groups by Simon L. Altmann (1986)
1) Leo splurges cash that might have been better spent on serious investments yielding ROI and government chest-beating windfalls in the form of jobs and taxes
2) Shareholders complacent
3) ???
4) A HUGE YACHT FOR CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION APPEARS!
Well, these are the bubble times!
Keynesians will rejoice as they are incapable of distinguishing between consumption and investment but so be it.
Unless these soon-defleshed corpses died of natural causes or internecine struggles?
"Piecing together the tales which Norrys collected for me, and supplementing them with the accounts of several savants who had studied the ruins, I deduced that Exham Priory stood on the site of a prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must have been contemporary with Stonehenge. That indescribable rites had been celebrated there, few doubted; and there were unpleasant tales of the transference of these rites into the Cybele-worship which the Romans had introduced. Inscriptions still visible in the sub-cellar bore such unmistakable letters as “DIV . . . OPS . . . MAGNA. MAT . . . “ sign of the Magna Mater whose dark worship was once vainly forbidden to Roman citizens. Anchester had been the camp of the third Augustan legion, as many remains attest, and it was said that the temple of Cybele was splendid and thronged with worshippers who performed nameless ceremonies at the bidding of a Phrygian priest...."
I hope these researchers very carefully check the walls of their sleeping quarters.
Seriously, shut the fuck up, Prof.
Rehashing old physics ego-vertisements, Might/Could/Bes and pulling random energy levels out of the hat just doesn't cut it.
Peter Woit, February 21, 2013:
At the AAAS 2013 meeting in Boston this past week [Feb. 2013], a press conference was held to update the media on the Higgs. What the media got from the press conference was the news that the Higgs may spell doom, unless supersymmetry saves us. This isn’t just doom for HEP physics research, it’s doom for the entire universe:
“At some point, billions of years from now, it’s all going to be wiped out…. The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realise that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us,” Lykken said at AAAS.
This is based on a renormalization group calculation extrapolating the Higgs effective potential to its value at energies many many orders of magnitude above LHC energies. To believe the result you have to believe that there is no new physics and we completely understand everything exactly up to scales like the GUT or Planck scale. Fan of the SM that I am, that’s too much for even me to swallow as plausible.
If you are being kept awake by the Higgs metastability issue, you’ll want to know the Higgs mass as accurately as possible. The rumor from ATLAS is that the difference in best fit masses between the gamma-gamma and ZZ channels has narrowed, with gamma-gamma moving up slightly to 126.8 GeV, ZZ quite a bit, to 124.3 GeV.
Also:
The statement says there is no evidence that debit card PINs were compromised and that the investigation was "focused on April forward".
Details of the purloined cards have since appeared on public carder site Rescator.cc, conveniently split into geographic regions to help crims slip under bank fraud radars.
So they don't read Krebs or El Reg or what do they mean?