CrisisOfCredit.com

CrisisOfCredit.com explains it perfectly - with a very simple animated story:


(via @vineeth)

The creators of this video did not close the loop completely. The investors at the end who have lost the money - where does their money come from? The creators of wealth in any economy are the workers, at the bottom of the chain in our case. These workers - you and I - want to give our monies to these investors in the hope of getting back "more" "later". And we keep asking for more - from our pension funds, from our 401Ks, from our insurance plans. This money comes back to us when we take a loan or a mortgage, leveraged many times over. We validate the business model of these investors.

Essentially, everyone is borrowing money from the future because we are too greedy to sustain ourselves on what we have today.

mac & pc, pc & mac

It's interesting how the two brands have evolved.

PC stands for Personal Computer - a very generic term. Yet it has come to mean a computer running Windows. And Windows has captured the mindshare associated with personal computers. Mac, not meaning anything, has evolved from the opposite direction and has come to mean everything the PC is not. In doing so, it has captured the same mindshare associated with personal computers.

books

I went and got myself a bookcase yesterday, and took my books from Bangalore out of their carton. I should have done this ages ago. There is something about having books around that makes the place feel more like home. Something old and familiar.

When I found only a handful of books in the carton, I realized just how many I have left behind. There was a brief moment of regret, but then, it's good to have space for newer books. I used to read a book a week; sometimes, more. This has steadily been decreasing over the years. I have just finished The Watchmen and as I try to think back to what I had last read, I see Atonement in my reading list on this blog on the left. That was 9 or 10 months ago! I have read Neil Gaiman's Sandman series since, but that's hardly a consolation.

Just got Friedrich Dürrenmatt's The Visit and The Execution of Justice. Wikipedia describes his works as "macabre satire"! I'm looking forward to reading these.