If you have 20 seconds and want to utterly waste them. Click the link.
They must have because I most definitely sent them. Lame. PM me your address again. Sorry pal, it happens. I normally don't put a return address on them but with you.. I think I can risk it.
Here's what an idiot I am, I just looked at our referring sites for the day and thought to myself, "how are we getting hits from Occupy Wall Street?"
spectacular. I used to do work for the University of Washington. They had, amongst their requirements for AV gear, a gadget I'd never heard of. And they needed it for this one particular application. Demanded it, in fact. Something I'd never heard of, mind you. So I called a rep and asked him. He pointed me at a company I'd never heard of. They referred me to a local provider that might have one. Talked to the local provider who said they didn't have one (never had) but they had some information on one. They could fax it over to me. So after six hours of searching I ended up getting faxed a copy of the exact same customer spec I held in my hand. I'm still not sure the gadget ever existed.
Somewhere in your description is an analogy for 90% of our economy.
If any of you happen to have an Economist subscription, that's part of what their special report was about this week. -- And if you don't, here's a good bit: Money markets in the rich world seized up during the crisis and have not yet fully recovered, but in China and other emerging markets they are growing rapidly. A money-market fund launched last June by Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant, attracted 500 billion yuan ($81 billion) in its first nine months. Peer-to-peer (P2P) lenders—websites that match savers with borrowers—are also growing like topsy, albeit from a tiny base. The value of loans chaperoned by Lending Club, the biggest such website, has doubled every year since its launch in 2007 and now totals over $4 billion. New firms are springing up the world over to cater to all manner of niches, from short-term loans for property developers to advances against unpaid corporate invoices. The Financial Stability Board (FSB), a global financial watchdog, reckons that shadow lending in all its forms accounts for roughly a quarter of all financial assets, compared with about half in the banking system. But it excludes insurance and pension funds from its calculations; add those in, and shadow banking is almost on a par with the better-lit sort. My money mustache blogger hero has been pushing p2p lending a bit, I think. I'm behind on that.And private debt is only one form of lending that takes place outside banks. Bond markets—by far the biggest source of non-bank financing—continue to grow even as bank lending shrinks. In 2007 the value of all outstanding corporate bonds issued by American firms was just under 29% of GDP; by last year it had risen to over 42%, according to McKinsey. In South Korea the figure rose even more dramatically, from 23% of GDP to 48%. Globally, corporate bond-issuance doubled between 2007 and 2012, to $1.7 trillion, as firms everywhere took advantage of extraordinarily low interest rates.