hey kiryan

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Turxx
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Joined: Sat Jun 30, 2001 5:01 am

hey kiryan

Postby Turxx » Thu Mar 12, 2009 3:35 pm

hey man, give me a holler
Corth
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Re: hey kiryan

Postby Corth » Thu Mar 12, 2009 7:37 pm

I don't feel like starting a new thread so I'll just use this one..

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feat ... rentPage=1

Maybe my favorite article of the year. Probably because I have been to Iceland and get a kick out of the way the country is depicted.
Having said all that, the situation has been handled, so this thread is pretty much at an end. -Kossuth

Goddamned slippery mage.
kiryan
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Re: hey kiryan

Postby kiryan » Sun Mar 15, 2009 3:13 am

Sup Turxx... firstname_lastname at yahoo dot com or find my wife on facebook

Its interesting. I've followed a few things on Iceland over the years. I'm very interested in the scandanavian countries despite socialism! I dig their communities, their openness and welcoming change. That really is somethign interesting about how quickly Europe adopts some types of change... One example is Ireland, they kinda decided almost overnight that paper/plastic bags were bad and that everyone should switch to reusable cloth bags... So agile, yet they can't work out the whole Catholic / Protestant thing...

Getting to the other part of the article, the financial collapse... I'm having a hard time understanding that what they did was wrong. They saw an opportunity, went gang busters, everyone was getting paid, but ultiamtely failed and they find themselves in a terrible sitaution... (or do they... what exactly is the recourse if they declare bankruptcy... loss of reputation?). In retrospect, its easy to say it was dumb to commit so deeply to one sector... yet they didn't have many alternatives... fishing? Would you chastise India for committing so heavily to technology? If you took tech away from india, they too would essentially collapse (except 90% of their population lives in abject poverty as it is).

What I wonder is.. is it wrong? Obviously wrong, they failed? Because they misjudged risk... or because they misjudged the timing? because they were greedy? What exactly was wrong. How much did they really "invest" in these endeavors... Someone lost money, but they really didn't have money to begin with. Is it wrong to accept "risky" investments? If a startup wants to find the cure for cancer for profit is it wrong for them to accept tons of money from willing investors and get rich searching for the cure? I don't know.

I'm starting to struggle with whether any individuals did anything wrong in Iceland, on Wall Street, on main street (other than not saving and diversifying their riches). I'd almost consider putting the blame squarely on policy makers who manipulate the economy and the investors who blindly dump their money into investments they don't understand based only on recommendations and past records. I could see myself blaming the companies who were in the business soley to make money now vs money long term...

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