Roger Gregory tells a good story of making the first private (non-government entity) order from Sun as COO of Project Xanadu (XOC).

In Palo Alto, Roger hears of the Sun 1 via word-of-mouth and trade journals, raises the cash, fills out the form and sends in his order. And invoice comes back, with instructions to pay via bank (wire) transfer and an estimated delivery date.

About a month after the date, Roger and others are eagerly awaiting the machine, which has not arrived.

Roger gets on the phone and calls the number for Sun in Berkeley. Bill Joy answers the phone and, after some back-and-forth, says he will need to transfer Roger to the “accounting department.”

Bill sets down the phone and it becomes clear to Roger, who can hear the background noise, that Sun likely only has *one* phone line at this point. Shortly, Vinod Khosla picks up the phone with a "Hey, Roger!"

After about three minutes of chat, Vinod explains “Oh! We were wondering where that $40,000 in our account came from!” and promises to get the machine to XOC ASAP.

The Sun 1 shows up at XOC’s offices about two weeks later, as I remember. The machine is still in Roger’s basement last I knew.

We attached it to the Internet and ran a simple webserver for a short period in mid-’99 or so. Around that time, Bill stopped by for breakfast and offered a six-figure sum to buy the machine back, which Roger declined.

http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/...

"Images are truly ephemeral: They disappear after being viewed, from a user’s inbox as well as the Glimpse servers. Photos are shown for eight seconds, while video is just four seconds or shorter..."

Flying mammals' population growth is, presumably, exponential under nominal circumstances. Stop the oppression of the bumblebee bat, and the motorcycle will be done for! :)

http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/ILP/r...

http://www.phy.ilstu.edu/ILP/r...

Etc...

the netherworld swallows up seven symbols of hypermasculinity. // just sayin'... seriously, build your museum *on top of* a known cave system...

This is just great! Pour a few bags of fertilizer down the drain by his house... next stop, my local IT competitor's shop...

Price competition?

My most expensive calls are Mexico. Since most of it is termination, especially to cell phones, no one offers a signricant difference.

Germany? Singapore? Korea? Geez, it's all a few cents per minute. Even if we assume 10 hours/week, 600 minutes, saving 3 cents/minute... that's less than half my hourly per month.

Who cares? The question is, service. (Admittedly, Skype isn't so good there, either, but neither are the alternatives).

You cease to amuse. Suggestion: pick up a copy of the Financial Times. Google "Bernanke peg China".

>>the US will fulfill its obligations to allies and creditors who've played the game in good faith.

>Nope, not even close. The USA will default on those debts by inflation.

Inflation is not default. Plus, it may very well be in the US interest, to selectively pay down debts.

I think your analysis is faulty in many aspects.

China does not own *all* dollars; by far, not. For instance, Switzerland, Austria and many other countries, owe debts to China in USD.

So what's one consequence if China tried to dump its dollars? Well, on the most basic level, it would *also* devalue the debts owed to it. Hard to get around that, though, of course, "it's complex."

They're also owed RMB. If they keep RMB tagged to USD, they loose capital value, but lower cost of goods/labour-- you have to run some complex analysis to understand that. If they decouple the RMB from the USD, then... well, the US probably wants that, doesn't it? COGS has to go up, which puts a big break on China's economy, presumably...

I assume nothing. Your understanding is evidently severely lacking. For one, if China starts dumping dollars, they have to unpeg the RMB from the dollar, don't they?

What happens when they do that? Hmmm?

There's a lot China can do, but in the end, they have to accept devaluation, and that they can be the primary dumpee of devaluation.

And of course they know. Of course the Central Banks have thought about this. And Sherlock-- I don't need to assume a singular US. I have the fact, of a singular Fed.

The bottom line here is, the US owes-- as my economics professors (Reagan advisers) pointed out 25 years ago-- the one thing it can produce infinitely and with no cost: US dollars.

What happens in a meltdown? Well, if I ran the Fed along the principles my advisers taught me-- I'd pour payments to my allies (Europe, etc.); then I'd devalue the currency-- meaning, the creditors I didn't pay, now are owed much less. That's China, primarily, which, after all, has played quite a currency game with the US, and who's debt is quite arguably overvalued due to cheating on exchange rates.

Would China like the world to adopt the RMB as a default currency? Sure. Obvious. It's in their self-interest, at least. If everyone owes RMB, then they have to accept the global exchange rates.... they can't print or otherwise acquire USD, and pay off debts to China with the new currency.

Guess what? In short: no one's going to trust China as the global standard, as much as they aspire to it. If you're Switzerland, you know, that in a pinch, the US is going to pay off its debts to you-- not to China-- and give you a lot of notice, that it's going to devalue the dollar, so you can take advantage of the opportunity to erase 15% or 20% of your net debt to China, as well.

What's this called? Global political economics. China knows the game; it knows that it played the game to dump cheap labour and goods on the US, and accumulate capital debts (loans); and it knows, if the US reaches debt ceiling, it's China's debts that are going to get radically devalued to balance the sheets.

And good that. Unless, of course, you'd prefer that the Central Party, and not the US Treasury, is the final guarantor of the money you've loaned. A risk, I doubt, many of you (and many Central Banks) wish to take.

Or in short: the US will fulfill its obligations to allies and creditors who've played the game in good faith. To China and others who've gamed the system-- well, that's another story, and in the next days and weeks, we may very well see, what action the US can use, to re-balance the sheets.

Cute. Did I say my life was shitty? I get to be in eight major cities around the world this month, all of which I have friends in. I said the time counted and provided examples. You're projecting ASSumptions.

OK, point looks to already have been made (-1, redundant?)

They weren't careful. A careful strategy, would not raise alarms by taking extraordinarily high wins, and would accept reasonable losses, ie, not fold with a great hand *even if* you know you'll loose.

What you'd want, is to scrape in marginally better positive wins, not great hits, -- and then move on. Heck, just in case, take some more-than-usual losses at some casinos. Build a data model; speadsheet it; look for a reasonably higher ROI, say 50%/annum on the operation, not spectacular wins.