A certain economic issue, eResearch Conference, Many other activities.

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I have written a short piece on the proposed bail-out of the American banking, deriving from the words of actual economic critics of the plan, which are indeed many: Socialise the land and banks, don't bail-out the monopolists. Interestingly, at least some of this is likely to be put into effect. The British bank Bradford & Bingley has been bought out by their governments and even in the United States, where socialisation of banking is just a little too red for the poor dears to handle, and we may see some of the more sensible (albeit symptomatic) solutions by Nouriel Roubini and Paul Krugman introduced. From crankynick a lolz version of recent events (pictures with humour, articles with insight). Just as well the bailout bill was passed as martial law was threatened if it was not.

Spent most of this week at the eResearch2008 conference which had quite a substantial agenda. Gave a presentation on Thursday morning on the use of collaborative tools within Drupal. The conference itself was very well attended, although the venue was one of those souless functional modern buildings that had piped sacchrin jazz everywhere you went (even in the toilet), and had a loud jazz band playing during the conference dinner. You really want to know what I think of jazz?

Registration to the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Post/Human Condition completed; off to New Zealand in December! The ABC is screening on Catalyst a study of poker machines, gambling and social environments of which I did some of the audio-visual work.

My review of D&D 4th edition (from RPG Review) has been republished on rpg.net (which one person has described as "the best review they've read all year"). On a related note, have been taking my pbem HeroQuest group through an abbreviated version of the Orlanth is Dead scenario, which is thematically strong, but rather rough in its structure and content. Sunday was spent playing RuneQuest, specifically scenario 2 of Shadows on the Borderlands. It plays a lot better than it reads, mainly because the cavern complex actually is designed and feels like such.

Caught up with recumbenteer and L., picnicing in Edinburgh Gardens on Saturday with their young Mormon friend; was a little surprised (and amused) to discover they did not know of the somewhat notorious the Fundamentalist Church of LDS. In rodent news, Scoundrel has a very bad cold; he's old, doesn't eat much and has always been prone to illness. So he's being looked after a great deal.

seanr give me a brain-breaker of the week, which is really quite special: The case against Obama.

Comments

Re: Still had this on my clipboard from other postings...

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I've found Buffett invariably quite sound on economic matters. He understands the importance of productivity and utility of goods and thus is not distracted by damaging speculation.

I also get a little annoyed when people keep bringing up the Community Reinvestment Act as if that was the cause of the current crisis. Yes, it did mean that banks were forced to give loans to low-income people (although with strict criteria).

But I'm waiting to see a single figure on how significant this quantity of loans actually was - I mean surely if it was that damaging the damage would have been obvious and evident a few years after the Carter period, rather than thirty years after?

I see too much "poor-bashing" on the right - of Australian and American politics. It's sickening that some individuals are now trying to put the blame of the liquidity crisis on the least fortunate.