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.

Because the NSA is still going to p0wn your routers. And find a way to get the data home. Done.

Yeah yeah yeah. Guess you don't fly much.

Oh the 32-34 minute flight from BNA-ATL, ATL having really poor WiFi and equally bad 3G/4G/LTE, even in the lounges-- that time below 10K can really matter. It can mean a few minutes of catching up with family, before a long-haul to Amman with no connectivity out of ATL (last month). It can mean, catching and responding to a client email that's *critical* ($10K, $100K on the line...), even deciding to skip the next flight and reschedule to make sure the client is OK. And so on.

May not be your life, but it is some peoples'. And heck, it may seem glamourous to you, but it can be darn stressful. Especially for the people, headed in harm's way, who may not make it back to see their families, or who may not have a chance to communicate for days or weeks.

Nice joke. But you're the horse's petunia, for making it at the expense of people who are doing far more important things than tending your virtual farm, buddy.

Oh c'mon. Your TSA groping is the most fun you have all week. Admit it.

The OP has been reported to the NSA... oh, nevermind, they're already monitoring. See the van nextdoor? :P

>Now, you have regulatory agencies that don't make laws at all but are given jurisdiction to make what is held as equivalent to law in that if you disobey their rules, you can be charged with a crime. This is not appropriate at all and everybody should be outraged that this is happening.

We learned this in Sociology 25 years ago. It happened in the 1930s. There's a great scene in The Great Gatsby, when Rockefeller-equivalent calls up "his" Senator and tries to get something done, still thinking personal influence matters... and some bureaucrat at the Federal Housing Authority of the time, given the power by Congress, blocks him just to spite the big guy.

Think of that, next time you watch the murder / suicide in the movie... trope, for the US.

Ah crap. 15 mod points to burn, and I just commented.

RTFA. Just *READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE.* This goes for you who are reading this, too.

(Mod parent down, as parent ignores something well-explained in the article, among other problems that make this a run-of-the-mill ignorant comment, not "insightful," not to mention a 1M+ UID claiming unique years deep experience out of their rear orifice.... all I can say, is that if Qualcomm paid this guy anything, they paid ...)