Chaos In Greece, Fear On Earth, Holes In Facebook
Greece, which would just be some lazy Balkan/Island place nobody worried much about if it still had drachmas instead of Euros, erupted in terrible violence after grim new "austerity measures" were announced. People are going insane, basically -- how else do you explain throwing gasoline bombs at a bank building,with your fellow humans inside, and killing three of them? Meanwhile, the entire global financial system is either overreacting to this Greek Tragedy or preparing for a lot more "Sovereign Debt Crisis" fun from Portugal, Spain, the UK, etc. So, congratulations to everyone for "surviving" the housing collapse and the credit crisis and the Global Recession, and do please enjoy theSovereign Debt Crisis. [ Economist / Reuters ]If you were very tricky with theFacebook, yesterday you might have been able to manipulate your Privacy Settings to let yourself watch the live chats of your friends on Facebook. Luckily, nobody has any idea how Facebook's privacy settings work, including Facebook engineers. [ TechCrunch / New York Times ]
TheSenatebecame bipartisan, hooray! In a 93-5 vote, America's most annoying deliberative body approved some shell-game amendment to thefinancial reform bill. Instead of a $50-billion "industry funded" stockpile for shutting down Too Big To Fail firms that are actually failing, the money will just be taken from the U.S. Treasury, but only if the Too Big To Fail firm is considered (by someone) to be solvent. And in a purely ceremonial vote, 96 senators voted to ban the use of "taxpayer funds" for bailouts, because the government can ultimately call its money whatever it wants, and also print more of it whenever it runs out. [ BusinessWeek / Washington Post ]