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.

I'll slip out & get some fruit from Chile

This is one of my favourite themes.

Oil on your plate

What do you have on your plate that is heavily

reliant on oil? It's incredible, but now normal, how

the world can literally be found in your supermarket.

Although I've shown others arguments that deny this,

I think it's ridiculously dangerous letting oil sort out

our diets because whenever the bankers want to play

the oil market, people's diet will suffer. If you can't

raise enough food locally it's because you've chosen

to play real estate baron and built suburbs where 

there should be farms.

As happened with Rome, that ruined most of its

topsoil meaning it had to get its food from too far away, 

we are vulnerable to disaster, and we're 

wasting oil.

this fellow is a Canadian prof, interviewed by 

treehugger, and he's got the same angle:

the Avenging Engineers

a TWA plane popped after leaving NY in '96.

Planes just don't do that, these days. There was

some proof at the time, from eye-witnesses,

that I saw on tv, that there was a missile shot

at the plane.

I wonder if it was domestic services?

checkit: FoxNews.com

Investigators want missile theory probed in '96 TWA Flight 800 crash

Published June 19, 2013

        Reaction to new claims about TWA Flight 800 crash

        Was TWA Flight 800 crash actually caused by missile...

        Documentary challenges cause of TWA Flight 800 crash

A handful of aviation experts, including a number of investigators who were part of the original probe of TWA Flight 800, have come forward in a new documentary to say evidence points to a missile as the cause of the crash off the coast of Long Island 17 years ago.

The New York-to-Paris flight crashed July 17, 1996, just minutes after takeoff from JFK Airport, killing all 230 people aboard. In the weeks that followed, the plane was reassembled in a hangar from parts retrieved from the sea. But the cause of the crash was not identified immediately, and after authorities said the crash was caused by static electricity ignited fuel fumes, many skeptics cast doubt on the theory. Adding to the controversy were multiple eyewitness accounts of a fireball going up from the ground and hitting the plane before it went down, accounts which the FBI dismissed at the time.

    “It’s obvious that the truth was not allowed to be pursued."

- Jim Speer, accident investigator for the Airline Pilots Association

The half-dozen investigators whose charges will be fleshed out in a documentary set to air July 17 - the anniversary of the crash - say they were never allowed to get at the truth. But they are confident a missile brought down the plane.

"We don't know who fired the missile," said Jim Speer, an accident investigator for the Airline Pilots Association, one of a half-dozen experts seeking a new review of the probe. "But we have a lot more confidence that it was a missile."

The group is comprised of people who worked for the National Transportation Safety Board, TWA and the Airline Pilots Association, all of whom have since retired. All six say that the evidence shows the plane was brought down by a projectile traveling at a high speed.

“It all fits like a glove,” said Tom Stalcup, a physicist who is considered one of the foremost independent researchers and participated in the documentary, said during a press conference on Wednesday. “It is what it is and all the evidence is there.”

Hank Hughes, a retired senior accident investigator for NTSB, said probers were not allowed to seek answers once the FBI took over the crime scene. "We just want to see the truth come out," Hughes said. "We don't have hidden agendas. The only thing we are looking for is the truth."

Speer, who says he found explosive residue on a part from the right wing which also had three holes, agreed.

“It’s obvious that the truth was not allowed to be pursued," said Speer. “A majority of people working in that hangar did not feel as if the evidence was properly being handled.”

Bollygram. stop

a spice of life in India will soon end.

the telegram

I was most impressed with the story below and

how it looked at the historical, personal, legal and 

technological aspects of the telegram. 

I'm always fascinated by the changes in 

technology, as I've seen or used most of 

them:

typewriter

8-track

cassette

dial phone

VCR

telegram

This also fits into the general mechanisation of the
world that is saving money, but costing jobs.
People in the telegram business have to find something
to do.

more comments later

checkit: Csmonitor

India to send world's last telegram. Stop.

Once a staple of authoritative communication across the Indian subcontinent, the telegram has lost too much ground to smartphones. One devotee is threatening a Gandhi-style fast.

By Shivam Vij, Correspondent / June 14, 2013

An Indian staff member, foreground, of central telegraph office dispatches telegrams in Mumbai, India, Friday, June 14. The state-run telecom firm Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) has decided to discontinue the 160-year-old telegram service from July 15, in India once a source of quick and urgent communication.

At the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), India's state-owned telecom company, a message emerges from a dot matrix printer addressing a soldier's Army unit in Delhi. "GRANDMOTHER SERIOUS. 15 DAYS LEAVE EXTENSION," it reads. It's one of about 5,000 such missives still being sent every day by telegram – a format favored for its "sense of urgency and authenticity," explains a BSNL official.

But the days of such communication are numbered: The world's last telegram message will be sent somewhere in India on July 14.

That missive will come 144 years after Samuel Morse sent the first telegram in Washington, and seven years after Western Union shuttered its services in the United States. In India, telegraph services were introduced by a British doctor and inventor who used a different code for the first time in 1850 to send a message.

The BSNL board, after dilly-dallying for two years, decided to shut down the service as it was no longer commercially viable.

"We were incurring losses of over $23 million a year because SMS and smartphones have rendered this service redundant," Shamim Akhtar, general manager of BSNL's telegraph services, told the Monitor.

An important tool of British colonial administration and control in India, the telegram is connected with some key moments in Indian history, such as helping the British put down a popular revolt in 1857 and being the mode of communication with which Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru informed London of Pakistan's invasion of Kashmir.

Colloquially known as "taar" or wire in India, the telegram has been a part of Indian life, a metaphor for an urgent message, bypassing the delays of the postal system. Responsible for a twist in the plot of many a Bollywood film, telegrams were often the harbinger of the news of the death of a family member. Today, death telegrams, still priced at a fifth of the regular fee, account for less than 1 percent of telegram traffic.

At their peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices. Today, only 75 offices exist, though they are located in each of India's 671 districts through franchises. And an industry that once employed 12,500 people, today has only 998 workers.

One of them is R.D. Ram, who has been working in the Delhi office for 38 years. "They will now move me to another department where I will feel like a fresher [beginner]," he complains.

Mr. Ram once learned the Morse code technology for telegraphy, but today oversees staff who type out and send telegrams over a Web software. He tries to put up a spirited defense of the obsolete technology in the age of the smartphone, arguing that mobile penetration is much lower than it is hyped to be. Mobile penetration is indeed a dismal 26 percent, but even in the remotest village, at least someone has a phone.

Ram notes that the telegram has legal benefits as well. "It is still accepted by the courts as a valid form of evidence. And is taken seriously by a judge when a government official sends a telegram to say he is unwell and cannot be present in court today," he says.

Sixty-five percent of daily telegrams are sent by the government. But it is the remaining 35 percent that Ram worries about. A number of telegrams are from runaway couples who marry secretly because their parents wouldn't let them marry in the wrong caste, class, or religion.  "They inform their parents that they are married, and fearing violence from the family, inform the police and the National Human Rights Commission," he said.