Posts

Michael Lewis: The Irresponsible Investor. The crux of the matter: Of the roughly $19 trillion in American investment capital, in other words, $17 trillion or so is invested with the implicit instruction: ''Just give me back as much money as possible. Gouge consumers, cheat employees, poison the environment, lie to the public markets -- just do it all sufficiently artfully that it doesn't dent my portfolio.'' Then, when the market falls and one of the people on the receiving end of their beastly demands is caught behaving badly, investors collapse to the floor in disbelief and bay for their money back. It is at that moment -- and not a minute before -- that they discover the novel idea that businessmen in possession of other people's capital should be held to the highest ethical standards. But of course, now the idea pays. For a long time I told people that in my dream world I would abolish the stock market because its main purpose was to eliminate the concept of personal responsibility for people who run businesses. Investors in mutual funds don’t even know which companies they invest in, so the only criteria for success in publicly owned companies is whether your stock helps investors make more money. I later decided that my solution wouldn’t really solve anything, but it is a mark of my frustration with corporate behavior. ...

Gentoo is Rice compares users of Gentoo Linux users to ricers (those kids who bolt all kinds of weird aftermarket mods and bogus stickers onto their Toyota Tercels). My own history of statements regarding Gentoo Linux can be found via this search. As I’ve said before, I use Gentoo because it’s the only Linux distro that I’ve managed to keep up and running for an extended period of time without blowing up. I fear though that my server at home is on the precipice of a major collapse due to some problems with KDE and Gnome. ...

You can always count on people to ruin everything.

The other day I mentioned weblog hosting service PowerBlogs. Today I’m wondering why this company can’t provide their customers with RSS feeds that work? I only know of two PowerBlogs sites, but neither of them have properly working RSS feeds. That’s pathetic.

Christopher Allbritton has published his latest dispatch from Iraq. I only get to see my neices and nephews a couple of times a year. If you asked their parents how much they’ve changed over the past six months, I don’t think they could give you as good a description as I can after I’ve just seen them for the first time in half a year. Similarly, Allbritton is immersing himself in Iraq after being away for a year or so, and his impression of how things have changed is sobering. ...

A Washington Post reporter describes troubles encountered on the way to his recent visit to Fallujah: Fallujah byways are a hell of roadside bombs and ambushes. On Friday, an armored sport-utility vehicle carrying this Washington Post reporter and his driver was attacked close to Fallujah on the main highway to Baghdad. Four men in an orange-and-white taxi pumped dozens of bullets from AK-47 assault rifles into the vehicle for more than two minutes, each round causing a loud thump on the vehicle's metal plating and reinforced windows. They shot from behind, from in front and from the sides, where their determined frowns and mustached faces were clearly visible, as they and we weaved down the highway at 90 mph. The fusillade stopped when the SUV, its back tires missing and its rear windows shattered, spun out of control. The gunmen sped down the road, evidently thinking their mission was accomplished. Neither the driver nor the reporter was injured. Read the whole story, if only to read about their harrowing escape from town and second encounter with the taxi of death. ...

TheyWorkForYou.com blows me away. It’s a Web site that keeps track of the UK Parliament, and I mean really keeps track of it. Full transcripts of many Parliamentary debates are posted, and users of the site can comment just about anywhere. The individual pages for members of Parliament are incredibly useful. The site also has an extensive help system that explains what’s going on if you don’t know the ins and outs of Parliament. I don’t know if weblogs are going to change the world of politics, but sites like this one probably will. TheyWorkForYou.com is an amazing effort in the tradition of Fundrace and opensecrets.org. We desperately need an American version. ...

Nigritude Ultramarine. I’m doing this only because Anil Dash dissed the iPod in his gadget bag feature at Gizmodo, and I think the iPod is the best thing since sliced bread. If he wins the iPod, he’ll come to agree with me. The only thing that runs on electricity that I love more than my iPod is my Tivo.

Scott Rosenberg gets it.

Sometimes you just have to look at the way things shake out and think, “I win.” This happens to me so very rarely that this feling is utterly alien to me, but I can now tell you that it feels pretty good. After years of writing my own code to copy values in Java objects to relational databases, I realized that I needed to take a good hard look at what was out on the market and see if I couldn’t simplify my life. There were a lot of object-relational tools out there, everything from TopLink to Castor to EJB’s entity beans, to the standards-driven JDO. After a very unscientific survey of the market, I chose Hibernate. It seemed like a good choice to me because I could understand how it worked without reading a whole lot about it, because it didn’t require anything but including a few libraries with your application, and because it had good XDoclet support. As it turns out, the people deciding how EJB 3.0 should work agreed with me. I read an EJB book last year and found persistence as defined in EJB 2.0 to be horrifyingly complex. Apparently, the EJB 3.0 expert group agrees with me, as they’ve chosen Hibernate 3.0 as the persistence implementation for EJB 3.0. For me, that’s great news. I already know Hibernate really well, and am quite fond of it, so this puts me ahead of the curve for once. Supporters of other options are not so pleased. The author of the column, a JDO proponent (I wanted to like JDO, I really did, but the timing wasn’t right or something), is quite bitter about the whole situation. Unfortunately, he’s ignorant when it comes to Hibernate: ...