A new use for the Zimbabwe dollar

This image has been doing the rounds of the economics and investment blogs lately, and so of course I can't pass by without adding my six penny [or 144 Zimbabwe Dollars—ed.] worth.

It's rather spoiled by the fact that, apparently, Zimbabwe is now experiencing deflation, after switching its economy to using a basket of world currencies rather than the old Zimbabwe dollar, but let's cast our minds back a year, or preferably two.

The first observation is that, like any commodity, toilet paper has a price. In finis, even a single sheet of toilet paper has a price. Let's say that this price was at one time one Zim$. Now let time pass (and not necessarily very much time) and we see that the price of a single sheet of toilet paper is 10 Zim$. Now, remembering your Structuralism, what little squiggles on the dollars do is establish a relationship between two of these pieces of paper such that one of them is worth ten times as much as the other. The obvious conclusion, assuming for a moment that Zim dollars and pieces of toilet paper are perfectly fungible, is that by applying ink to a piece of paper, the Zimbabwe government has actually destroyed 90% of its value.

Sentence of the day

"Deflation in a fractional reserve banking system means policymakers have, for all intents and purposes, lost control of the economy."

Difficult to argue with that one, whatever you may think of the rest of the author's argument.

Gaddafi preaches to Rome beauties

Another airy, breezy little piece from the BBC. Apparently Col. Gaddafi rounded up 200 young Italian women, in Rome, home of the Catholic church and one of Christianity's holy cities, and harangued them for two hours on the wonders of Islam, urging them to convert.

Of course, the BBC does its best to tell the story in a laugh-a-minute style (that Gaddafi, what a card!) But I wonder what headlines we'd be looking at now if a Western leader had seen fit to go to Mecca and round up 200 women and urge them to convert to Christianity? Flag burning? Riots? The looting of Christian quarters in certain middle-eastern cities? Ancient Catholic nuns in faraway places having their heads chopped off by enraged crowds? All of that, I fear. And the BBC's tone — well it would be rather different.

Best sentence read today

"The good news out of the bad news is that because money [currently] has no velocity, we have no inflation."

(Brackets mine.) From CNBC's A Conversation with Art Cashin, UBS.

Governments have turned the printing presses on but the banks are not lending for economic activity. Instead, all that money is propping up real estate prices and powering another bubble on the stock markets.

Word of the day: Externalities

OK this isn't exactly a new word, I've come across it many times without ever being sufficiently bothered to look up its exact meaning. That's often an acceptable modus operandi when you can make a believable (if only to you) guess at a word's meaning, but that's something I never really managed to do with "externalities" — the best I managed was that it referred to something nasty.

So here's a definition from Paul Krugman, no less, in a recent article in the New York Times: "externalities — costs that people impose on others without paying the price, like traffic congestion or pollution." So now I know.

Ultimi Barbarorum

I've discovered Ultimi Barbarorum, and immediately added it to the subscriptions list of my now-groaning Google Reader.

Immediately, that is, after reading this excellent posting which opened my eyes to what exactly senior management (especially in the States) is doing with all those share buybacks. To some extent he's only pointing out the obvious, but it's depressing just how often I don't see the obvious (or maybe it's only obvious now I've read the article).

It seems that Mark Cuban has a similar understanding of what's going on, as expressed here ("Most CEOs ... are so focused on marking to market their own personal stock portfolios, they emphasize stock performance over doing the right thing for the company").

Algal fuels: is hydrocarbon extraction always necessary?

This is the second posting prompted by something I read today at FuturePundit.

Commenting on news that a new proprietary strain of algae has been bred to increase its uptake of CO₂ (and hence its production of fuel hydrocarbon) in high-light conditions, Randall says that "The rate of growth of algae is just one of several factors that affect biodiesel algae costs. Another big factor is extraction cost. What does it cost to get the oil separated from the rest of the algae mass?"

That might be so for use in the field of transport, which is after all a big consideration, but in the field of power generation I seem to remember power stations being built in the UK that took coal, crushed it (into either small crumbs or a fine powder, I can't remember which) and then burned it. The crushing meant that the coal burned more efficiently: increased oxygen flow meant that more of it burned and that it burned at higher temperatures. Would it be too fanciful to imagine hydrocarbon-rich algae being skimmed from the pools in which they grow, dried into an oily cake and the cake then transported to similar power stations where it could be crushed and burned, without any necessity for extracting the oil from the algal mass?

If that did work then it would be possible to extend the idea to heating factories, offices and even individual homes. After all, it's not so long ago that a man knocked at my parents' front door every week and sold us a few sacks of coal for the fire.

Ocean plastics break down faster than expected

First of a couple of posts stimulated by reading FuturePundit.

One Katsuhiko Saido of Nihon University seems to have said, in a presentation to the American Chemical Society: “We found that plastic in the ocean actually decomposes as it is exposed to the rain and sun and other environmental conditions, giving rise to yet another source of global contamination that will continue into the future.”

Apologies to Saido-san if he's been misrepresented somewhere along the way, but that's so typical of the mind-set of the present day clod-botherers^TM: damned if you do, and damned if you don't. First the plastic refuse collecting in the ocean is bad because it would never degrade; then it's bad because it does degrade. I seem to remember that once upon a time, oxygen was the nasty new chemical that was destroying 99% of all life in the ocean. Turned out well eventually though, didn't it?

There seems to be a strain in modern-day environmentalism that just wants to bring about a stasis that is the antithesis of the real world (I was going to say "wants to wrap the world in clingfilm", but there's a limit to the amount of irony that I can take).

Today's unfinished business

Not exactly unfinished, since I've already started using it! But I want to record the original url somewhere. I'm talking about Bill Katz' very nice full text indexing for App Engine.

Kaupthing made ISK billions in insider loans, now seeks to gag reporting

This and this and particularly this may go some way to explain why the UK government used anti-terrorism laws to freeze the British assets of the Icelandic banks when they went bust, a move that was widely decried at the time.

Iceland was always a beautiful country with good, hard-working people, but now there's something rotten in the state of Iceland and it's not just a load of old cod. The Icelandic people seem extremely angry with their financial and political elites, and frankly I don't blame them.

Czech Property

www.czechpropertysearch.co.uk.

A nice little site, they sound enthusiastic and they don't look like ripoff merchants. I imagine Czech property prices may have become even more affordable in the past several months.

The Czech Republic looks like a delightful place to visit, perhaps to live. Here's an interesting blog written by a British woman who took the plunge into Czech property. If you go to her profile you'll see links to her other blogs, which are also interesting in this context, and from there there are also links to other Czech property blogs and ones on Cesky Krumlov in particular.

Turkey attacks China 'genocide'

So Turkey's Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has described the ethnic violence in China's Xinjiang region as "a kind of genocide".

Now at last we know then, what the Turkish authorities consider to be "genocide": it's the death of 47 people and the injury of few hundred others.

Well, not just any old people exactly. Just some people, apparently.

Because the Turkish authorities do not consider the deaths of between one and one-and-a-half million Armenians due to forced marches, ethnic cleansing and good old-fashioned massacres, to have been "a kind of genocide" at all.

What a strange, what an obscene, double standard!

To the BBC's eternal shame, the article linked at the top of this post, reporting Mr Erdogan's words, does not contain any reference to Turkey's Armenian Genocide. Which might have put things into a bit of context.

Chrome OS

I must admit, a new netbook OS from Google, and one that's not based on Android, did rather surprise me. Though there had been mutterings that Android's single-window approach, which just right for phones and (perhaps) internet tablets, was not rich enough for netbooks and (certainly) laptops and desktops, where a multiple simultaneous windows are required.

So the base is Linux, but the windowing system will be new. There might be some overlap with Android at the base, Linux level then. It looks like X gets the thumbs down from yet another vendor as a modern windowing system though.

And on top of their so-far unnamed windowing system, the GUI itself will basically be the browser: Chrome. It's not as far fetched as it sounds. While the idea itself is older, Firefox brought home to me the possibility of writing an application in a browser window. With Firefox, it's not just the inner pane, the one that displays the web page, that's a browser window: the outer pane is a browser window too, and all the menus and toolbars and whatnot that make up the browser itself are built up in the same way as web pages are.

Looking back a few years to Internet Explorers 4 to 6, Microsoft themselves reinvented the desktop as a browser pane with Active Desktop. The desktop could now include HTML fragments that contained anything from a simple specification of the background wallpaper to a desktop widget.

And now Palm's Pré mobile phone shows just how good a GUI you can build using web technologies. WebOS is the Pré's GUI and is written — you guessed it — using this now-standard approach of a browser pane as the basic window type, good for the "desktop" (phonetop?) as well as for application windows.

If Chrome OS can run Flash Player (and therefore also Air) and, dare I say it, Java as well (and there's no reason why it shouldn't, as Chrome-the-browser can certainly do all that) then I'd say it's got most bases covered, even games (to a certain degree).

Word of the day: Grassoline

"Grassoline": second-generation bio fuels made from the inedible parts of plants. Hat tip to Scientific American.

The sea "angel" — OF DEATH!

Hat tip: otoshimono the blog.

The most unnerving thing, to my mind, is not the sea angel itself, but the continued laughter of the watchers.

Things you can do in your Calvin's

I know this is hardly the time, but if Calvin Klein don't negotiate with TehranLive.org to run an advert with this image then they are losers.

That Iranian election

It now seems clear that Ahmadi-Nejad, so far from having been weakened by the transparent illegitimacy of his reelection, has won some kind of power struggle in the only arena that counts, which is to say the upper layers of the Iranian elites. He is effectively daring the clerics to question the validity of the election, and it does not look like they are going to; indeed, they have already acquiesced.

The problem is that Ahmadi-Nejad is what we in the west would call a raving lunatic. From his previous utterances, he seems to think that he is the Hidden Imam of Shia belief, or possibly the Imam's herald. It looks to me like he has now decided that his mission is so important that he cannot allow it to be derailed by anything so irrelevant as the will of the people he ostensibly leads. This makes me wonder if perhaps the nuclear program is further advanced than we thought.

Iran's current religious leaders have previously been documented as saying that they care not if their country is reduced to a nuclear wasteland, so long as it hastens the eventual triumph of Islam over the rest of the world. That Ahmadi-Nejad makes such people look like moderates is clearly a cause for extreme alarm. In this context I quote a Slashdot posting where one worried Iranian says "People, we need your urgent help in Iran. We are under attack by the government. They stole the election. And now are arresting everybody... Please tell us what to do or we are going to die in a nuclear war between Iran and US".

If it does come down to Iran lobbing nuclear weapons around, then they will surely be spoilt for choice. Heretical Sunnis next door in Pakistan? Americans in Iraq? Israel? (In which case, look for an immediate flowering of mushroom clouds over capitals throughout the Middle East.) I wonder at what point those European elites who have done their best to sabotage sanctions over the years will realise that Europe is a lot closer to Iranian launch pads than America is?

Still, before that can happen, we can expect to see a rapid and brutal putting down of all opposition. I don't think this regime will be gentle, I think there will be a lot of blood.

Today's unfinished business

• Adobe Flash Builder 4 Beta at Adobe Labs Downloads.
• Overview of Flex 4 (Gumbo) at O'Reilly InsideRIA.
• Examples of magazine article proposals that did the business!

Today's unfinished business

It often happens that I have to reboot the PC (usually because of an over-insistent "important" upgrade, thank you Microsoft) while several tabs in the browser are still not fully explored, digested and/or commented upon. I've decided in cases like these that I'll return to the now seemingly prehistoric formula of a blog post full of links :))), just so that I can review them again if need be. Without further ado, here are today's candidates.

• Processing: seemingly a language for doing visual work, graphics and so on. It seems to be very popular and has a large user community, many of them non-technical. This is the second time I've been led to this site; why don't I know anything about it?
• Adobe Flash Player Support Center: the place to download a debug version of the Flash Player, for if I ever get serious about learning something about game development. Also the place to go for the lates released version of Flash.
• SpriteLib GPL: a collection of graphics that can be used in games for free.

Microsoft Money

I am just taking a moment to mark the passing of Microsoft Money. It's not the first big name product that Microsoft has discontinued recently, but this was the product that, for me, really opened my eyes to the vicious and arrogant company that Microsoft had become.

I remember Microsoft working together with Intuit. I remember thinking that the embrace seemed rather too close for comfort, like those female spiders that eat their mates. I was not surprised then when Microsoft attempted to buy Intuit; after all, it was common practice at the time for Microsoft to work closely with a company for long enough to learn its business, learn its business model, and most importantly understand its software inside out. One always had the feeling that the relationship was not complete until Microsoft had a copy of the unfortunate "partner's" source code locked away in its vaults. Then Microsoft would either acquire the company — at a price of its own choosing — or it would bring out competitive software, usually much better integrated with Windows and often much better targetted at the mass market and much cheaper.

Such was to be the fate of Intuit. I can't remember now whether Intuit may have even agreed to be acquired, but at any rate the US Department of Justice stopped the acquisition in its tracks. Microsoft's anger was truly amazing to behold, and it brought out Microsoft Money suspiciously quickly, with the stated ambition of crushing Intuit completely and in double-quick time.

But left with no choice but to fight, the plucky little personal finance company did just that, improving its own product and bringing out new ones and always just staying that little bit ahead. And so, unlike countless other small firms who had partnered with the Redmond giant only to be betrayed, gutted and discarded, Intuit actually survived and prospered. And in this way Money was a kind of high water mark for Microsoft's ambitions.

And now it's gone, replaced by a link to one of Microsoft's many web sites: a faceless me-too in an ocean of competitive sites. The same thing has already happened to Encarts, Microsoft's encyclopedia me-too, but it's Money that really wakes me up to the slow strangulation of this corporate behemoth. I wonder how many more of its products will go the same way?

Fascist

It often seems to me that the Left has taken the word "fascist" and made of it a club with which to beat their enemies over the head.

Smart meters

If we are to all have smart electricity meters in our homes, with the supplier varying the price of their electricity in real time, then they need to figure out some way of letting us know what the current price is without us having to walk into the garage to look at the meter in order to find out.

A nice Yahoo! widget on the TV would be the preferred solution for 90% of homes I don't doubt. Followed by mobile phone apps (a lot of effort for several relatively small markets) and a plain old PC website for Neanderthals like me.

Apple and chips. Apple, Intel, ARM, Imagination, ... Oracle and ... Sun

I keep coming back to it. The question keeps nagging away at me. What is Apple doing building up a chip division? Why has it spent money on ex P.A. Semi engineers? Why is it still advertising for chip engineers? What on earth is it up to?

The consensus amongst Apple-watchers seems to be that this has to do with the mobile side: the iPhone, iPods and whatever sundry network appliances make it out of the gates in the years to come. The desktop and server markets are just too firmly owned by Intel. Apple, having not so long ago come in from the IBM Power PC sphere where it had been getting dangerously far behind in terms of performance, would never be foolish enough to walk out of it and risk that happening again. Plus, Apple had to make a significant and presumably costly effort to port its software from Power to Intel, and would not soon countenance another such expense.

So on the mobile side, the iPhone has an ARM cpu (much criticised by Intel as being slow and lacking horsepower) and a couple of Imagination Technologies' PowerVR graphics processors (a geometry engine and a 3D accelerator). iPods also have an ARM based cpu; I'm not sure what gpu they have, if any.

Most commentators seem to think that this is all about adding unique features to Apple products, and reducing the amount that external chip suppliers know about Apple's technology. I think maybe it's also about taking out stuff that Apple don't need: currently they are buying in complete, general-purpose, mass-market, chips. For example the iPhone cpu, a Samsung device based on ARM IP, contains a "Jazelle" subsystem meant to accelerate Java performance on mobiles: since Java performance on iPhone has zero value for Apple, that's just so much wasted silicon, wasted money and wasted power.

It's possible then that Apple want to design their own chips. Now ARM technology can be licensed as IP, not just bought in as prebuilt chips. Apple could bypass Samsung and license ARM core IP directly. Exactly the same approach is followed by Imagination, so Apple could license the necessary PowerVR IP from them, and go on to design a single chip that incorporated not only ARM and Imagination cores but also their own, unique goodies. Even if all they end up doing is integrating into one or two chips stuff that they could have got elsewhere in several, the resulting savings in manufacturing costs (and more importantly, power consumption) would be well worth having.

This has to be far and away the most likely scenario, so it looks good for ARM and Imagination, less good for companies currently supplying the actual chips. Though Apple would undoubtedly farm out its chip making to a foundry, so perhaps one of its chip suppliers would benefit there.

Of course, a speculative post like this one wouldn't be complete without an absolutely outrageous coda. So, I'll go there. Pretty soon, Steve's very good friend Larry is going to have a RISC chip making business that I suspect he's not likely to really want. Apparently, Sparc chips can be implemented with an extremely low logic gate count — the same order of magnitude as ARM designs. A couple of weeks ago I wondered why SUN had never scaled Sparc down as well as up (the name stands for "Scalable Processor Architecture" after all). Perhaps Apple might be prepared to do that? Maybe not for the iPhone/iPod, but possibly for the tablet/netbook markets, the sort of space that Intel is aiming for with Atom, or even for the home server market?

Most unexpected thing so far today

Following a link from Silicon Alley Insider, I end up at Microsoft's Wonderwall site. I'd seen it before and thought it was rather slick. "Damn fine advert for Silverlight," I muttered, and right-clicked on the scrolling video-wall to examine its properties.

Oops! — "About Adobe Flash Player 10...". How very embarrassing for Microsoft!

Sun / IBM deal to collapse?

The hot news of the hour seems to be that IBM's bid for SUN is off — they couldn't agree on price. This possibility has been discussed at length in the tech press in the last few days, and the consensus is that this is going to be a disaster for SUN: Schwartz has supposedly hawked it around the whole world looking for a buyer, and (supposedly again) no one expressed interest apart from IBM.

The fear is that, now they know that SUN's top managment has effectively admitted it's unable to return the company to profitability, both customers and employees may haemorrhage away. Some have even hinted that this was IBM's game plan all along — which is not an impossibility, since that used to be Microsoft's favourite trick.

There is perhaps, however, one last, desperate hope: Cisco. The investment boards are humming with the idea that SUN is a perfect buy for Cisco: it would give them an 'in' to the server market, which they have so very recently decided to enter. Hmm, Cisco's new boxes are all Intel I think, and while SUN has a substantial Intel business, its main line is of course Sparc. That said, Cisco is nothing if not an adventurous and technically competent company, and if they decided to run with the Sparc heritage, you might end up seeing a version of the chip ending up in their routers :)))

Sparc has long been almost a millstone round SUN's neck. I'm not quite sure why. ARM has made a major success of a non-Intel chip, with an enormous number of licencees busily fabbing away and integrating it into their custom designs, and I know that SUN has been willing to make the IP available to fabricators in what seems to me a similar way (the devil's in the details though) but so far, only Fujitsu has taken it up. Maybe they were myopic about targetting the architecture at the server market: maybe they should have focused more on scaling Sparc down as well as up. They did that a little bit, aiming it at multi-chip webservers, but perhaps they could have gone a bit further than that.

Whatever. It's now looking, with the benefit of hindsight, as though Java has been an enormously costly mistake for SUN. Not that it hasn't been a very successful platform — it has. But because they've never managed to make more than small change from it, while it's sucked up an enormous amount of management (and, in the early days, legal) time and effort that would perhaps have been better spent on SUN's core competencies.

I say that with a good deal of regret, and as a fan of Java. And of course, it didn't look like that in the early days. Java, originally developed for set top boxes, came out at a time when Microsoft ruled the desktop even more than now, when Microsoft had all the mind share, and when it had started to stop making versions of Windows for desktop and server class processors other than Intel's. The worry was that a Microsoft future would be an Intel future, and that Sparc would go the way of MIPS. Java then, with its virtual machine and processor-agnosticity, was a way of keeping Sparc in the game. But somewhere along the line it got too important, and SUN ended up chasing a mirage.

The brave investor then, might wait for SUN to fall below $4, even as far as $3, and then buy in the hope of a Cisco offer. Or even the hope of the board kicking Schwartz out the door, which would be bound to have a salutary effect on the share price, even if only temporarily.

Let 10,000 Wolfenstein projects bloom!

Just reading a post by John Carmack where he talks about porting his old Castle Wolfenstein code to the iPhone. Since he open-sourced the code several years ago there's been a fair bit of development, with several open source projects adopting, adapting, and going off merrily on their own sweet ways.

He reveals that he finally settled on Wolf3D Redux, and then drops the fabulous line, "I sent an email to the Wolf 3D Redux project maintainer to see if he might be interested in working on an iPhone project with us, but it had been over a year since the last update, and he must have moved on to other things". Sheesh! If that developer ever reads his email, he'll be kicking himself to the moon and back while weeping tears of blood! I'd sacrifice whatever parts of my anatomy are not strictly necessary for coding to get that kind of offer, and I think 99% of programmers out there would do the same.

So I foresee an immediate uptick of sourceforge projects dedicated to porting, cleaning, remodularising, abstracting, translating and just plain messing around with that old Wolfenstein code. Just on the offchance you understand...

Cherie Blair hired to sue RBS and Sir Fred Goodwin

This looks, on the face of it, highly suspicious. North Yorkshire Council and Merseyside Council, hmm... They wouldn't be Labour councils by any chance? And Cherie Blair???? There's more than a whiff of a stitch up here, this is presumably Harriet Harman's doing. I'm only surprised that Cherie Blair is lending her name and her skills to such an enterprise.

Britain poised to tumble

I am deeply dubious that the answer to our economic problems lies in encouraging banks to lend. Rather, since the reason they won't lend is that households are overburdened with debt, to such an extent that a large proportion of existing loans may never be paid back, the answer to me seems to be to play things quietly: to let people reduce their debts — over years if necessary — until financial health is restored. Only then can growth resume.

To put it in more familiar terms: if you've binged so much that you're lying puking in the gutter, with a cirrhotic liver and clogged kidneys, then a hair of the dog is probably not the right answer.

I also doubt recent claims in the media that the government will stand ready to claw back any excess liquidity should inflation reassert itself. I think they've calculated that a decade of inflation at 10% or so will nicely reduce all those personal loans to manageable proportions, and at far less political cost than a decade of real financial prudence.

That's not a popular analysis. Indeed I expect most commentators would scoff at its naivety. Certainly, insofar as the original personal debt problem has led to other problems such as a dearth of commercial lending, I suppose it may be reasonable to try to resolve those separately. But I don't think that trying to give the old wheel one more turn is going to get us anywhere, other than the poor house.

So it's nice to see that at least some financial professionals agree with me: house prices 'could fall by further 55 per cent' say Numis Securities, a leading City investment bank whom I've regrettably never heard of till now. They put it rather better than I've been able to:

"The Prime Minister and Chancellor have publicly stated that they want banks this year to lend at 2007 levels... We think this is a crazy policy, given that too much debt was one of the prime reasons why the economy has its current problems."

"The bankruptcy of the UK is a very real probability as the UK Government is trying to stimulate a greater debt burden in a grossly indebted economy."

Intel prepping for mass roll-out of Android netbooks

This post, from January 2008, is looking a little bit prescient now. I do so love being right. [OK, I said set top boxes and it's actually netbooks, I'm still claiming half a point.]

Of course, this is just the tip of … well, something a lot more pointy than an iceberg … a giant harpoon perhaps, aimed fair and square at Microsoft's heart. Manufacturers are already putting versions of Linux on full-size desktop PCs whose primary operating system is Windows, so that you can use them — for email, browsing, and playing tunes — without having to "boot" them [i.e., not into Windows]. Look for Android to be made more suitable for this purpose.

In true Google style, nothing will be said. Officially, it won't be happening. In practice, some manufacturer's light-boot linux will turn out to be Android when disassembled by an intrepid hacker. If it catches on, good; if it doesn't, "we were never really interested in doing that anyway".…

"Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method."

Downloaded the latest VirtualBox, version 2.1.2, for my now-ancient Windows XP main PC, and wondered if I could finally get Ubuntu server to boot on it. Having tried previously with the old 1.6 version and failed. Got the same problem, couldn't boot, but fixing it was as simple as enabling PAE (processor architecture extensions) in the settings for the VM. I don't know whether that option wasn't there in 1.6 or whether I was just being exceptionally dense that day, but anyway it's solved now.

During the Ubuntu boot process there was another odd message though, even when it was successfully booting: "Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method." Sounded like the hardware was being hidden a little too successfully. Sounded like something that a lot of people would come across, but the only solution I found was on a German website.

In brief, there are two files in /etc/init.d :

hwclockfirst.sh

and

hwlock.sh

You need to edit both of them. There's a line that defines an (empty) environment variable, HWCLOCKPARS; it looks like this:

HWCLOCKPARS=

Edited that line to look like this:

HWCLOCKPARS="--directisa"

And Ubuntu server now boots in the VM without any problem.

Markets in used lightbulbs

Hat tip to the ever-readable Marginal Revolution blog ("interesting throughout"):

For most of us, it is hard to fathom the rationale for a market in burnt-out light bulbs. But in the scarcity-driven Soviet economy, the market was entirely reasonable. Light bulbs were rarely available to individual consumers, but were obtainable for state-sponsored activities. Thus, it would be difficult to purchase a light bulb for a new lamp in one's home, while burnt-out bulbs in state-run offices or factories were routinely replaced. So if someone purchased a new lamp and needed a bulb, he would buy a used light bulb for a small fee and replace a functioning bulb at work with the dud. He would then take the functioning bulb home for the new lamp, while the burnt-out bulb at the office/factory would be replaced with a new functioning bulb. Meanwhile, the maintenance person at the office/factory would take the used bulb and sell it on the used light bulb market.

What's particularly interesting here is the use of something (the broken bulb) — other than money itself — acting as a catalyst in an economic transaction.

I think I finally understand

I think I finally understand why the pound is falling so badly and, even when the whole world is in recession, people are particularly "shorting" Britain. As I read more and more American articles on the current financial collapse they all seem to be saying the same thing: the old financial system was a house of cards, and it's not going to come back. What will rise in its place is something very much smaller and less ambitious - and far less profitable.

Britain, of course, allowed its manufacturing sector to run down while it concentrated on growing its financial sector. Britain is fucked.