Quickie

Hey, just a little cross-promotion, my dad’s new site for his consulting firm is up at Lean Pursuit - they specialize in implementation of Lean principles for process improvement in a variety of companies, such as the manufacturing industry. If you haven’t heard of Lean techniques, you might know of Six Sigma - similar concept, all about reducing defects and smoothing the process of production. Anyway, I’m helping out with the site, so fingers crossed it gets up and running soon enough. ...

Fantastic obituary to make anyone think their life is pretty boring - Count Robert de La Rochefocauld, former Resistance fighter in WWII: Cycling to Bordeaux to meet a contact who was to arrange his return to England, however, he ran into a roadblock, taken prisoner, and imprisoned at the 16th-century Fort du Hâ. His explanations that he had been out after dark on a romantic assignation were not believed and, in his cell, La Rochefoucauld considered swallowing the cyanide pill concealed in the heel of his shoe. ...

These days, when you lose someone you care for, the digital world keeps their footprints: My Gmail is a priceless hoard of us making plans, telling inside jokes, calling each other “snoodle” and “bubbies.” I type his name into the search field and enter a world of the unscripted dialogue that filled our 9-to-5 existence. I become immersed in the coziness of our union. In hundreds of chats automatically saved to my account, we express our love for each other readily and naturally in our own private speech. This is a history of our relationship that we didn’t intend to write, one that runs parallel to the one authored by his uncontainable illness. ...

Matt Taibbi, who once called Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity”, writing in Rolling Stone about the Levin report on the causes of the GFC: Thus, while much of the Levin report describes past history, the Goldman section describes an ongoing? crime — a powerful, well-connected firm, with the ear of the president and the Treasury, that appears to have conquered the entire regulatory structure and stands now on the precipice of officially getting away with one of the biggest financial crimes in history. ...

Alan Kohler: …in Australia, the budget is in a wonderful position – heading back into surplus in a couple of years despite one of the world’s biggest and most successful stimulus programmes during the global recession. But you wouldn’t know it. Five billion dollars needed in flood recovery spending and … oh dear, we need a levy. Can’t possibly wait a year or two to go back into surplus. What would Tony Abbott say? ...