Michael Gracie 

A fly fisherman’s perspective.

Forbes’s Janet Novack says “Forget the promises. The government will grab lots more of your money.” One of the suggested solutions…a value-added tax. Hard to say whether or not a VAT would cripple an economy driven primarily by consumer spending, but that is certainly what folks start screaming whenever a VAT is mentioned. And, you [...]

RFO (Request for Opinions) on PGP Whole Disk Encryption: Interestingly, it is hard to find any negative articles on PGP, probably because most of them are written by IT pros who are only focused on the security, and not usability. I therefore ask the Slashdot community, what are the disadvantages of PGP in terms of [...]

From “The Curve” Dude: These issues aren’t Republican or Democrat, left or right, liberal or conservative. They are simply economics, and wish as you might, bad economics will sink any economy no matter how much they believe this time things are different. They aren’t. By the way, Mr. Laffer also points out the hilarity of [...]

According to Bloomberg, it’s globalization itself.

Yesterday the catch was a grand total seven fish between three people – to add insult to injury the largest was a foul hooked tandem streamer victim that couldn’t be included in the count. Thankfully, however, we follow tip #1682 around here – included are: Got up too early Truck stop didn’t have enough Krispy [...]

A lucid analysis of the predicament facing VCs and their investments as a result of the liquidity crisis, from Techdirt/Mike Masnick. Included within is this: Usually startups go through multiple rounds of funding, which the VC firm bakes into its calculations when doing the initial funding. That initial firm may not lead later rounds (in [...]

Via Bloomberg: “We’ve reached a situation of sheer panic,” Roubini, who predicted the financial crisis in 2006, told a conference of hedge-fund managers in London today. “There will be massive dumping of assets” and “hundreds of hedge funds are going to go bust,” he said. Of course, hundreds of hedge funds are already going bust, [...]

Most email clients, including Blackberry devices, offer you the ability to turn off delivery confirmations and read receipts.  This is supposed to be a good thing – spammers often send emails to arbitrary addresses with receipt requests, hoping to find valid, active addresses they can pummel with Viagra offers. Unfortunately, Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) also [...]

Global finance sans a single unemployed investment banker Auctions are hot – when the chips are down, the wealthy stock up on jewelry and clothes! We’re in fly reel acquisition mode over here, but only because some manufacturers have turned over their lines – the old but still good gear goes to eBay. I guess [...]