Let me break it to you that the word "communist" actually has a real meaning and isn't a generic term for bad.

How you can consider the pro-war, pro-big-business, anti-union Obama a "communist" is beyond rational understanding. Nixon (Medicare, Medicaid, welfare) was a lot more of a communist than Obama is.

We're all embarrassed for you in the same way that we would be for a 2-year old yelling "Poo poo!" in a church service - and in the same way, we understand that you're simply completely and utterly ignorant.

"And the idea that Fama and Lucas are wholesale wrong is ridiculous. Their ideas really do offer a ton of insight into functioning markets for 99% of the time we have them. And we've had massive financial disasters so infrequently (i.e. 1929 and 2008) that literally no one knows what to do when they happen."

Imagine your doctor had a theory of medicine that said, "You can't get sick." The doctor would also be right 99% of the time and also not know what to do when you got sick.

It's worse than that, actually, because the "markets are God" philosophies might even be the cause of these crashes.

It's clear to anyone who's ever worked in or studied the financial markets that they are prone to massive manipulation by a small number of organizations for their own benefit, at the expense of almost everyone else, efficient market hypothesis be damned...

Occam's razor, you know: you'd expect that after a decade of fighting the Americans, they'd get better at it, right? What need is there to postulate an Iran connection (absent concrete information)?

The Afghanis have been reputed to be fearsome fighters for centuries. Afghanistan isn't called The Graveyard of Empires for nothing...

Too young to die.

I'm not that familiar with his work but he had a lot of troubles not all of his own making (third-degree burns! That's something that requires months of excruciating therapy).

He was a clever DJ and apparently a nice guy. RIP.

(And for the anti-social personalities who have nothing better to do than snark on someone's death - don't worry, it'll be your turn soon enough!)

...and get good at catching up on other work, surreptitiously, when other people are blah-blahing.

People want a chance to speak, even if they have nothing to say, so that they feel they contributed. Don't stand in their way, bring a laptop so you don't get bored.

If you allow the motormouths all to speak and exhaust themselves, you can come in fresh at the end, "sum it all up" and tell people what to do.

If you can actually change the meetings, there's lots you can do.

1. Get everyone to stand up during the meeting. People don't blah blah when they're standing up.

2. Try to get people used to ending meetings early. In the group I was most recently in, I was shocked that we had weekly hourly meetings for a team of about 40 - more than half of which ended in less than 30 minutes. There was a general feeling of "get it out of the way, back to work" so no one blah blahed.

Remember that we have to "move forward" - which means that criminals, if they're powerful, should not be inconvenienced by things like "police", "investigations" or even "trials".

Where's my change?!

Perhaps the bailout was better than nothing-at-all - but was nothing-at-all ever even a possibility? I don't think so.

The fact is that huge risk-taking went on on the taxpayer's dime, for which all the perpetrators were richly rewarded; that a large number of literal felonies were committed ("due diligence" isn't just a good idea, it's the law); that huge sums of money were extracted right from the Treasury into the pockets of the ultra-rich; and worst, that the risk-taking behaviour continues to happen.

People weren't forced to mark to market. There are still huge piles of junk securities underlying many firms. Even by the rosiest estimates, most of the foreclosures and layoffs have yet to happen. Retail stores are teetering - there are still far too many of them - if Christmas 2009 isn't a roaring success, this Spring's retail bloodbath will be like a walk in the park compared to February 2010. Commercial real estate is collapsing...

All of you have bought into the story that the recession is over. It's as if you never read a history book.

...(his own words) so this has to be good news for both remaining Obama supporters.

It's not the act of writing the software per se - it's that it allows you to do illegal things, like front-running.

Much like guns, where owning them is legal but discharging them at others is not in many cases.

Extending the analogy, there's the legal concept of an "infernal device" - something like a bomb or similar device which is so hazardous to life that simply making one of these things is a crime.

This software might even fit into that category...