1 I find most of the "Madoff is Evil Incarnate" hype to miss the point: the scary thing is that I suspect he simply fell into an easy trap of his own making, and that most people, after the first few steps, would have made just the same decisions he did. The thing about pyramid schemes is that they are easy to start, and *very* hard to stop. You get deeper and deeper so fast that all you can do is keep feeding the monster until it eats you. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if it started the same way as the Satyam mess: cooking the books just a little to smooth out a glitch, and then covering over each successive layer until all you have left is the fraud...
Sesame Street explains the Madoff Scandal
1 I find most of the "Madoff is Evil Incarnate" hype to miss the point: the scary thing is that I suspect he simply fell into an easy trap of his own making, and that most people, after the first few steps, would have made just the same decisions he did. The thing about pyramid schemes is that they are easy to start, and *very* hard to stop. You get deeper and deeper so fast that all you can do is keep feeding the monster until it eats you. Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if it started the same way as the Satyam mess: cooking the books just a little to smooth out a glitch, and then covering over each successive layer until all you have left is the fraud...
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Hard lessons learned about being *too* completist
There -- I've just finished a major milestone in the monumental "sort the comics and figure out which ones to get rid of" project. I've finished with…
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TRoOB: The Sculptor
[There's a lot of good stuff coming out, so it's time to get back into the habit of The Review of Obscure Books.] Downstairs in our basement, there…
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The easiest first-pass metric
As a lot of you know, I am the possessor of a lot of Stuff. Among that Stuff is the most idiotically large comic-book collection of anybody I know,…
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Hard lessons learned about being *too* completist
There -- I've just finished a major milestone in the monumental "sort the comics and figure out which ones to get rid of" project. I've finished with…
-
TRoOB: The Sculptor
[There's a lot of good stuff coming out, so it's time to get back into the habit of The Review of Obscure Books.] Downstairs in our basement, there…
-
The easiest first-pass metric
As a lot of you know, I am the possessor of a lot of Stuff. Among that Stuff is the most idiotically large comic-book collection of anybody I know,…
