Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Nothing new from the rented horses on the hill

Meanwhile, a disquieting message on your cereal box:

Real Median household income peaked way back in 1999 at $56,000 and by 2012 it was down 9%—an unprecedented decline. It goes without saying that Washington’s Keynesian ministrations on the money printing and national debt front didn’t much help.

The provinces have thus not kept pace with the imperial capital. Not by a long shot.

Hmmmm...... housing!

"But, as he said, this is a well-targeted scheme and it has helped tens of thousands of people get on the housing ladder and to have mortgages.

The shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, said the Help to Buy scheme was simply too high: "We've said it should come down much closer to average house prices. A number below £400,000 would make much more sense than £600,000 which is far too big a house price for the taxpayer to be guaranteeing mortgages. "

Let unmarked helos...

...power up

Regulation is what will keep Wall Street down. Oh wait...

the increasing regulatory attention the crypto-currency is receiving

Indeed, once "regulators" show up, you know the pigs are there, fearing to be be possibly kept away from a good feast.

SEEMS THAT THE MUSIC HAS ACTUALLY STOPPED!

Momo Meltdown Singes San Francisco Housing Bubble

San Francisco’s favorite baby, Twitter – so favorite that the city’s taxpayers were shanghaied into granting it tens of millions of dollars’ worth of payroll tax exemptions so that it would move from one building to another a few blocks away, rather than move to another city whose taxpayers might have been shanghaied into an even worse deal. Well, Twitter is the locally best known among these momentum fiascos, down 56% from its high in less than five months. Hope has wheezed out of it.

That this drop came in March and April is particularly nasty. This is the time when home prices rise. Even during the down-years of 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 when the housing bubble in San Francisco was imploding, home prices religiously rose in March and April! So this downdraft is very special; and an early indication that this fabulous boom is once again turning, as it always and inevitably does, into a bust.

Well, if we finagle World War III for August, in time for the WWI centenary, all of that could be reinflated, right? KEYNESIANS ALWAYS WIN!

You mean they did this on purpose?

IPsec: It can’t have got that bad by accident

IPsec was a great disappointment to us [...] virtually nobody is satisfied with the process or the result [...] the documentation is very hard to understand [...] the ISAKMP specifications [the NSA’s main overt contribution to IPsec] contain numerous errors, essential explanations are missing, and the document contradicts itself in various places [...] none of the IPsec documentation provides any rationale for any of the choices that were made [...] the reviewer is left to guess [...]

“A Cryptographic Evaluation of IPsec”, Niels Ferguson and Bruce Schneier, from the first 5 pages of 28

And also: How to fuck things up while no-one notices