Dragon's at the water cooler

The most popular show at our office right now has got to be CBC's Dragon's Den. People pitch their business ideas to a panel of potential investors. By far most ideas rightly fail to get funding and usually O'Leary has something mean to add. Both good things, entertainment-wise.

Naked short selling

The Darkside of the Looking Glass: The Corruption of Our Capital Markets. It's an 80 minute in-depth presentation that explains the tactic of "strategic failure to deliver" stock. In other words, how Wall Street insiders use naked short selling and other deviance to steal money from investors and destroy companies for profit and how the system lies to protect them. He ends with a lengthly look at Refco and poor Sedona. This tale of stock market intrigue has Austrian banks, Swiss financiers, an arrested CEO, half a billion of "lost" money (naked shorts?), sealed records, and the potential to collapse the market if the truth is made public.

I've good a pretty good idea now of what may have happened to my Thorium stock earlier this month.

New laptop

I helped Juliane pick out (then setup) a new laptop today. No surprise, it's an HP. 2GHz Turion, 15.4" widescreen, 1GB RAM, 80GB hard drive, 8x dual layer DVD burner, 802.11b/g. In typical HP fashion it feels solid, has all the nice switches and indicators, and the best touchpad in the industry. And new it was just $799. Just another reason why they've passed Dell to become the number 1 computer seller?

Just ask Paul.

It's more or less the newer version of mine. Yes, jealous I am.

Oh, and as if I needed another reason to love Picasa: Moving her photo library to the new laptop was smooth thanks to the slick Picasa backup and restore functionality.

Olbermann on Military Commissions Act

Olbermann says it better than I can. More about the Bush signs Military Commissions Act:

Panda sneeze

After that downer I need a pick-me-up funny animal video:

Bush signs Military Commissions Act

The New York Times:

...a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy.

The U.S. Military Commissions Act of 2006 was signed into law today by President Bush. Here's the best part:

e)(1) No court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the United States who has been determined by the United States to have been properly detained as an enemy combatant or is awaiting such determination.

The U.S. can now continue to detain and torture without those pesky lawyers getting in the way. U.S. Senator Russell Feingold sums it up:

Under this legislation, some individuals, at the designation of the executive branch alone, could be picked up, even in the United States, and held indefinitely without trial and without any access whatsoever to the courts. They would not be able to call upon the laws of our great nation to challenge their detention because they would have been put outside the reach of the law. That is unacceptable, and it almost surely violates our Constitution.

More US housing market

A great post today from M. Morgan on the blog: Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis. It has some specific examples from each of the "tidal waves" that are coming.

They have a 600 unit project that is 100% up for resale. This means no one is going to close when the building is completed in January. Every single buyer will walk from their 20% deposits. The developer will simply going to turn the keys over to the bank.

Then later in the post Mish adds some commentary on report by Meredith Whitney, Executive Director, CIBC World Markets for the FDIC: Scenarios for the Next U.S. Recession.

The conclusion to the article is that we will have a "segmented consumer recession that will impact 10% of U.S. consumers". I dismiss such a limited impact because it does not address a rolling cascade of layoffs that I believe are coming as a result of the housing slowdown. Nonetheless the case is presented extremely well along with charts and data that everyone can use to draw their own conclusions.

A real eye-opener for me was chart 41:

We estimate that 26 percent of the U.S. population lives at, near, or below the poverty level

Encana tower renderings

Some computer renderings of the proposed Encana tower, "The Bow". It will be the tallest Canadian building west of Toronto.

I like

I've switched to Google Reader

I had been using Bloglines as my RSS reader for a long time, but today I switched to Google Reader. Google recently upgraded their reader and became the first company to offer me something better than Bloglines. And the switch only took about 20 seconds thanks to OPML and my existing Google account. I exported my Bloglines list, including folders, to a single file and uploaded it to Google.

Thanks Bloglines, we had some good times.

Google really has a hold on me now as I regularly use Search, Gmail, Blogger, Spreadsheets, Calendar, I manage my photos with Picasa, I recently started using their browser sync to keep my home and work computers updated, and now my feed reader (probably the single web site I visit the most).

WTF Primus?

Primus Canada has managed to recently surpass even their previous levels of idiocy. This company is so incompetent it's surprising even for one as jaded as me. Please, please never use their services and maybe they'll go bankrupt and the world will be a better place.

I'm a Croc convert

After finally giving in and trying a pair in Mexico I have to agree - Crocs are awesome. It's all about that foam material they're made of. For some reason it's not sweaty and (especially on my feet) it should be. And it's comfortable. And endorsed by the American Podiatric Medical Association.

And they're dorky and trendy, both reasons I don't want to like them. But, I can't lie to myself. So go ahead and make fun, I can't hear you over hear in comfort county. At least they sponsor a BMW Grand Am team.