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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LTK007 who wrote (99800)	11/21/2008 4:16:41 PM
From: benwood	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110194

Max, I think it is the Peter Principal at work -- people have risen to a level in which they are incompetent. The software issue you describe is a great example, but it's not mathematical. Studies by IBM have shown that there is a correlation between bugs found in piece of software, and bugs NOT found. That is, the more bugs found, the more bugs that remain to be found (if ever...). And to elaborate further, David Cutler used to work at Digital Equipment Corp, if I remember correctly, and was (I think) the lead engineer on a project to create a new OS to replace VMS. They kept a daily count of known bugs. Each day the count would diminish; however, the count was large (maybe 5000+), and at some point, the number stopped shrinking and started growing. Eventually, the project was canceled. I read about this when and his WindowsNT team were trying to complete that new OS, and he mentioned this possibility, because of the overall complexity, that a similar situation could occur with WinNT. With interventions, there is always a cost. Bail out the auto companies now to save a quarter million jobs, and it could potentially cost us 1 million new jobs between 2010 and 2015 and be a further drag on our economy for years. Eventually if the natural free market mechanism of "the good thrive and the bad fail" is warped so that the bad are kept afloat, the good die and thus the ability to prop up the bad also fails and the end result is "Mr. Gorbachev: Tear down that wall!!"

To: LTK007 who wrote (99800)	11/21/2008 5:51:53 PM
From: bart13	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Being in too much of a hurry got me again, I should have said w/o lies corrections from Williams. I think Murphy & Parkinson were related. <g> And as far as problems multiplying, I think these apply as well as the law of unintended consequences. “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” -- Albert Einstein "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." -- Napoleon Bonaparte And the (being as kind as possible) ones who just must have fast answers probably are the reason behind this one: "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else." -- Winston Churchill And as far as how bad it will get, who knows... and I hope its not as bad as some of my really dark moments, although in a weird way I hope its gets a bit darker than it takes to cure most of the financial idiots once & for all - not like 2000-2002.