Delicious LiveJournal Links for 10-8-2008

[andrewducker]

• Kim Komando's Video of the Day » Water Painting
  This fountain can actually make pictures and words with falling water. It's been described as working like an inkjet printer. Hundreds of nozzles create precise streams of water. Timed just right, images are created.
  (tags: water video art)
• Threading in C#
  A free E-book. Will probably come in handy at some point.
  (tags: threads threading software c# tutorial)
• Javascript Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition Character Generator
  I'll be needing this next week, I suspect, once our 3.5 campaign ends
  (tags: javascript dnd tools gaming)
• TinEye
  Very impressive image search engine. Finds the image you give it, plus variants and cropped versions.
  (tags: image search internet)
• Applying the eBay Model to Music Licensing
  Fascinating concept. I wonder if it will catch on. It's not, by the way, even slightly the eBay model, unless they're thinking of eBay Express.
  (tags: music business licensing)
• UK death rates are plummeting
  Figures published yesterday show deaths from cancer fell by 18.2 per cent in the decade to 2007 and are on course to hit the target reduction set by the Government four years ago of a 20 per cent fall by 2009-11.
  
  Deaths from heart disease and stroke are down 44 per cent over the same period and have already exceeded the 40 per cent target set for 2009-11.
  (tags: health uk nhs)
• NPR Transcript on the credit crisis
  Which takes you through it, top to bottom and back again, showing how everyone in the chain was, frankly, an idiot, who thought they could get away with it. If you've ever wondered how the credit crunch happened, this will explain it.
  (tags: mortgages finance economics npr)

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Another Frightening Show about the Economy is even more impressive (and scarier--the mortgage mess is only a medium-sized part of what went wrong), but there doesn't seem to be a transcript yet.

[andrewducker]

Cheers - if you notice a transcript appear then do let me know!

What do you see as the bigger part of what went wrong? To me it's about there being more investment money to invest than there is to invest it in, which pushes up prices and causes the money to be invested in places it really shouldn't be. And the mortgage market was one place it was invested where it shouldn't be.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

There's a reason I want a transcript for that second show-- I didn't assimilate all of it on the first bounce.

However, part of the problem isn't just that there are bad mortgages. Apparently, there was some HUGE amount of money (or possibly fairy gold) bet on which way investments would go. Generally, it was bet on investments people didn't have by people who couldn't cover the bets. This, plus the mortgages, meant that so much confusion has been injected into the financial system that the companies which make the short term loans that business is highly dependent on have panicked (they're a risk-averse bunch) and aren't doing that lending.

My impression is that the fairy gold betting involved more money than the mortgages.


"You can print money, but you can't print trust". (Sorry, no source.)

[andrewducker]

Aaah, yes - the various bits of hedging and spread betting that were going on leveraged things to a vast extent. And nobody currently knows who owes what to who, which is going to take a fair while to unwind. And until you know whether the bank you're lending money to is actually horribly insolvent, you aren't going to lend them money...

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I still don't get why reliable commercial borrowers who aren't in the financial industry are having so much trouble getting money, though.

[andrewducker]

Like who?

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Having just read the article, I'd put it down to the total swing in approach. "Safe - how safe? We don't want normal safe. We want really really really safe." That sort of attitude.

[darkoshi]

There's a problem with the water-painting link.

[andrewducker]

Fixed!
http://videos.komando.com/2008/08/19/water-painting/

[0olong.livejournal.com]

TinEye should be really cool once it's done some more indexing, but I'm disappointed that it's so far unable to find any of my images that I know have been reproduced on other web sites...

[andrewducker]

Agreed. It's great for images it has, but they really need to build up their database.

[pennski.livejournal.com]

Thank-you for that last link. I now understand how and why the situation built up in more detail than the vague "greed and stupidity" understanding I had before.