Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

GREEK CRISIS: A serious debt crisis in Greece has rattled global financial markets and raised worries about whether other countries will be able to repay their debts. LEHMAN REPLAY: Economists are worried that the Greek crisis, if not contained, could turn into a repeat of the cascading financial panic that occurred in the fall of 2008 after Lehman Brothers collapsed. DEBT RESCUE: European countries and the International Monetary Fund are racing to assemble a package of loans for Greece that will be sufficient to convince markets that the country will not default on its debt obligations. Concerns have already surfaced in Congress that the broad demands of the sovereign debt crisis will quickly exhaust the I.M.F.’s reserves and leave the United States, the fund’s largest shareholder, with the bill. Professor Nouriel Roubini, the New York-based academic who was one of the few to anticipate the scale of the US financial crisis, told a panel in California that the buildup of debt i...

Recently I tweeted a quote from John Stossel (who was quoting Michael Medved): "If you believe that when the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, then you believe that creating wealth causes poverty, and you're an idiot" This is the old zero-sum fallacy, which ignores that when two people engage in free exchange, both gain -- or they wouldn't have traded. That’s the way business works. I received a number of responses to that tweet, mostly espousing the leftist concept that Capitalism is bad and somehow that the concept of getting wealthy is “obscene” and it seems to occur “at the expense of others”. When does wealth (or the creation of wealth) become "obscene"? Is there some measuring stick we can hold against it with a red line on it that says "Obscenity Level"? Or is it just somebody's subjective, biased jugement? Other responses seemed to focus on the "deductive argument" logic of the statement, completely ignoring the point (and...

A couple of days ago I started having an issue where if I’d go to Youtube.com to look at a Flash movie, I’d get to see only a black screen in the movie area. A right – click on the movie and I’d see “Movie not loaded”. In addition, the browser status bar reports “1 item remaining” – basically meaning, “I’m waiting for this movie to load”. Of course, this never goes away. You might be tempted to uninstall the Flash plugin or try any number of fixes including changing your Internet Explorer security settings, among other "tricks". Don't do it. Try this first. Here’s how I fixed it: In Internet Explorer, choose “Tools / Internet Options”. In the Browsing History section, click the “Delete” button and you should see a dialog like the above. Note that I have checked the History and Temporary Internet files checkboxes. Click Delete at the bottom and that should fix it. If that doesn’t work, do it again but this time uncheck the “Preserve Favorite website data” Item and click D...

Have you ever installed a BETA or CTP or an RC build of some Microsoft product such as Visual Studio, and then been faced with the unhappy situation that it could not find the installation sources when you attempted to uninstall the product, or it just didn’t uninstall “cleanly” – leaving traces of Registry entries that prevented you from installing a later version? It’s certainly happened to me several times. But today I ran into a program called Perfect Uninstaller that, for $35, turned out to be one heck of a bargain. Perfect Uninstaller has three modes to completely and totally uninstall any program. It starts out using the regular Windows Installer, but it doesn’t stop there – even if the installer says “I can’t find the MSI source for this”, it doesn't give up like the Windows MSIEXEC installer would do -- it picks up all the Registry Entries by scanning the Registry, and then it picks up all file traces by scanning the filesystem. The result is a 100% complete and total un...