Edible cars

If you have a dog with teething problems, why not give
the poor quadruped a car to chew on?

Either that, or the dog will do it of its own volition.

How was the Doggie daddy to know that his car
was edible? He paid £80 K for an Aston Martin
to show how cool he is, and now he's got even
more cooling, from nature.
His car's missing a front bumper.

How is it the rich guys are always ahead of the
curve with new car ideas? While we shiver,
upright, jammed up against the steering wheel,
pumping our feet to change gears, they
sit back and use paddles.

Their cars can park for them, or show them
the way with cameras so they don't have to
turn their lordly heads. We gotta risk pinched
nerves on a daily basis.

Aston La Vista , baby [yahoo news]

 The dog's name is Chew-baka. [yahoo news]

computers were invented for currency traders

I need to acknowledge the obvious or else I go crazy.

When people are trading currencies, it means that
they see some value in those currencies and those
values shift. Actually, that would be nice.

The truth is, bankers send orders whizzing around
the planet, making trades simply to get the fees.

I had this figured out as a kid. There's no rhyme
or season to this crap.

So, the world needs bankers to trade 5 trillion
dollars worth of currencies every day.
I repeat. this is bullsh*t!

checkit: theguardian.com

The rise of money trading has made our economy all mud and no brick

Trillions of dollars change hands every day in the foreign exchange markets. Yet this vast industry profits from peaks and troughs – it has no interest in a stable economy

        Alex Andreou  

        Wednesday 20 November 2013 16.55 GMT 

By far the most destructive sentence, in terms of political engagement, is "this is too complex for you to understand". Occasionally, I stand in front of what I've learned on a subject, like an ant looking up at the Great Wall of China, thinking "how do I begin to explain this to another ant?" But it is just stone on top of stone, brick on top of brick, with a bit of mud in between to hold them together; it is like any other wall, just a lot bigger.

We all understand currency exchange – one national currency can be exchanged for another based on an agreed rate. Most of us have seen it in action at one time or another, before a holiday or when paying for a DVD on eBay from a seller based in another country. The global foreign exchange market consists of two elements. The first is business conducted in the real economy – buying that DVD, providing a service to a foreign company, importing oil. The second is speculation; the buying and selling of currency purely in order to make a profit from its changing value.

According to the economist Bernard Lietaer, author of The Future of Money, as recently as 1975 roughly 80% of foreign exchange transactions involved the real trading of a product or a service. The remaining 20% were speculative; bets made on the value of currencies going up or down – buy it before it rises, dump it before it drops. By the late 90s that ratio had changed dramatically. In 1997 the percentage of foreign exchange which involved transactions in the real economy was only 2.5%.

Today, the picture is even starker. According to the Global Policy Forum, in 2011 only 0.6% of foreign exchange could be traced to genuine international trade in goods and services. Of the rest, a minimum of 80% was directly attributable to exchange rate speculation. The ratio of mud to brick has reversed entirely.

Let me now give you an idea of the size of the wall. An estimated $5.3tn changes hands every day in the foreign exchange markets. That is an entire year's worth of the European Union's GDP, gambled every three days. More than 40% of these trades happen in the UK. On a daily basis, the financial institutions of the City of London make speculative currency trades worth nearly as much as the entire nation's GDP for a whole year.

Some of the foreign exchange sub-markets (like the $2tn spot market) are controlled by fewer than 100 individuals, working for a dozen large banks. Add into this mix the fact that regulatory authorities last week launched investigations into at least 15 global banks for alleged manipulation of these vast markets and the need to reconsider and redesign this warped system becomes even more urgent.

Five thousand years ago, a shekel was a unit of weight – usually barley. I want some eggs; I will give you these two standard bags of barley for them. Then someone thought "wouldn't it be better to have something small and easy to carry that just represented bags of barley?" And so, around 650BC, the Lydians created the first few coins. Money developed explicitly as a tool to make our lives easier, our trades less onerous.

"Money," wrote Ayn Rand, "is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them." This is no longer true. Money itself has become the thing most traded. It is critical to understand the size and nature of this behemoth industry in order to dispel the myth that as a country (and globally) we are united in a process of restoring economic stability. We are not. The money is made in predicting the peaks and troughs. No peaks and troughs, no profit.