The World Bank says it’s going to cost $45 billion over the next 10 years to rebuild Afghanistan. That’s chump change (the Afghan government says it will cost $45 billion, which still isn’t that much). Consider that we funnelled $7 billion in military aid to the Afghan resistance in the eighties, or that we spent $20 billion in one fell swoop to “bail out” the airlines. We can get a country of over 20 million people back on its feet for less than $1,000 per person. The disparity in wealth between the developed world and the “developing” world is insane.

In a belated effort to save its miserable skin, Arthur Andersen has fired the partner in charge of the Enron audit.

Paul Krugman on crony capitalism.

Here’s an interesting conversation between Alan Cooper and Kent Beck about how to integrate interaction design and Extreme Programming. I really enjoyed the back and forth, but confess to still not understanding exactly what interaction design is, as Cooper defines it.

How out of touch with regular people is super-rich Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill? According to O’Neill, Enron’s collapse is “part of the genius of capitalism.” Some companies succeed, some companies fail, some companies defraud their employees and shareholders and leave them in financial ruin. Some companies dole out the dollars to everyone who’s willing to take a buck in order to create a favorable regulatory environment so that they can inflate their stock prices. Some public accounting firms fight tooth and nail to fight regulations that would eliminate giant conflicts of interests like taking massive consulting fees from the same companies that you audit. For rich guys like him who can retire on their cash hoard regardless of what happens, it’s all in good fun.

The Economist has an overview of the Enron situation.

Bill Clinton’s old lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, disclosed that last year Ken Lay used Enron stock to repay a loan extended to him by the company. He hasn’t come clean about when the loan was repaid, so we don’t know how much the stock was worth when he repaid the loan or whether he repaid it after the date he claimed he stopped selling Enron stock. The implications here are that Lay liquidated more stock than he previously disclosed — he just liquidated it in a different way. Depending on any number of factors, there may be nothing to this at all, or it may be a big deal.

As the open source operating system turns: way back in March, 2000, BSDI bought Walnut Creek CDROM, and thus took over the stewardship of FreeBSD development (to go with their BSD/OS operating system, which is proprietary). In April of last year, Wind River bought out BSDI, getting both BSD/OS and FreeBSD. Now, Wind River is selling the FreeBSD stuff to FreeBSD Mall, which is owned by Bob Bruce, the original founder of Walnut Creek CDROM.

It now emerges that an as yet unnamed Enron employee warned CEO Ken Lay that they were going to go down in flames due to “accounting scandals” back in August, 2001. Of course, I’m sure Lay already knew that they were screwed, and by August, 2001, it was too late for Enron to change course anyway. At that time, Lay was still busy telling everybody that Enron was doing great, and that things were only going to get better. Now everybody knows for sure that he was lying.

I think that we need to start lobbying the FCC to pass a rule for television that states that no commercial is permitted to be shown more than once during the same show. I don’t think it’s too much to ask.