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Homebrew coder Actarus has recently released a new version of iDeaS, the ever-popular Nintendo DS emulator for Windows and Linux. The latest beta update of the homebrew includes is mostly a bug fix release to further improve

“The poor little girl saw her mother in the house, naked, with a man…”

The adobe houses that people live in up in the mountains are not very big. Usually just one or two rooms. There are not many secrets in family life.

“At least they could go outside, behind some bushes or something… You’d think this place is a paradise…”

In many ways it is paradise. The valleys are green. The sky is blue. The sun is hot. There are no traffic jams. No drug dealers. No TV. No stone-hearted tax collectors. No stone head politicians. No crackpot economists.

“But these children are not innocent…they’ve seen everything… Well, not the same things that kids in the city have seen…but they are not innocent. The problem here is that they don’t have families… Not all of them, of course. But a lot of the girls just have babies. First with one man…then with another… And sometimes they start as young as 12 years old. They see their mothers…and then they do the same thing.”

We had invited the entire local school over for an outing. Two teachers – Olivia and Lilliane – along with their 23 students. Lilliane, a slim, attractive woman in her 40s, with black hair pulled back in a bun and bright red lips, was telling us about the problems they face:

“I’ve been here for 26 years. We used to have twice as many students as we do now. But now the girls don’t have as many children. They know how to avoid getting pregnant. But they still carry on…

“And they’re bolder and naughtier than they used to be. I woke up one night and found one older boy had snuck into the school and was in bed with one of the girls. We had to make a rule…no one gets to stay in the school after they are older than 12. But even that doesn’t seem like enough. One night we found a boy of ten in bed with a girl of 11. They’re just too young for that kind of thing.

“Many of the children stay with us because they live too far up in the hills to go home at night. And some of them live so far away that they have to stay with us on the weekends too. We have 9 who stay with us on the weekends now.

“But it’s exhausting for us, because we have to keep an eye on them at night…we can’t trust the children to behave themselves.”

When the children arrived, they filed into the house quietly, timidly. Many of them had never been in a real house before.

“Have a seat…sit down,” we told them.

They sat down without a word. The house was silent. Our Spanish is not good enough to entertain a group of 23 children. In a flash of inspiration, we picked up the guitar and started singing the first song that occurred to us:

“Your cheatin’ heart…will tell on you….”

The kids giggled.

By the time we were finished the final verse, Elizabeth had brought in the pan casero (homemade, unleavened bread) with marmalade on it. They had brought their own cups, into which we poured mate cocido – a type of herb tea.

The kids seemed satisfied. When they were finished, they went out into the courtyard.

“Gimme five,” said Calvert loudly, to a group of boys. “Up high…down low…uh oh…too slow.”

The boys laughed. One by one, they tried to slap Calvert’s hand before he jerked it away. Then, Edward got out his soccer ball and the boys all played.

As for the girls, we don’t know what they were doing. But our Argentine friend, Maria, had gotten back to the house by then. She had been on a long ride on a short, uncomfortable mule. Maria plays the guitar and sings too, only people don’t laugh at her. She must have entertained the girls somehow.

Maria was the last to come back from our outing. We had left the house early in the morning to ride up to see Dona Ileena – an old woman who lives high in the mountains. Her husband, Felix, fell down a few weeks ago and hit his head. He was taken down from their lodge and driven to a hospital a couple of hours away. That left Ileena alone. No one had seen her in several days; we thought we should pay her a visit.

We don’t know how Maria ended up on the mule. But she was a good sport about it. On the way back, she switched mounts with someone else, but then went back to the mule.

The horses took up a steady trot for a couple of miles across the plain…up the valley…until they arrived at the pass. Then, they slowed to a walk to pick their way down the rocky road that led to the smaller valley below. It took 2 hours to reach the alfalfa fields. We dismounted for a few minutes, drank some water, tightened our saddle girth straps, and headed upstream. The river was dry at first. Then, a trickle of water appeared. We continued up the valley, making our way between thorn bushes, alamos trees, pampas grasses and the rock cliff wall on the side of the river. On the right, we passed two abandoned adobe houses. On the left, there were Indian ruins…the stone walls that once held small terraced fields.

After another hour and a half, Gustavo, who was leading this expedition, pointed up to the right.

“We have to go up there. That’s where Ileena lives.”

It was not obvious how we were going to get up there.

Gustavo didn’t hesitate. He found a path through the thorn bushes…that turned into a path through the rocks. The horses strained to get up the hillside. It’s amazing where they can go. Soon, they were on a green mesa, their riders still on their backs.

The pasture looked over-grazed, but we saw only one horse, tied up near the house, and two cows lying under a tree. Our horses stepped over a low stone wall, another relic of the Indian days. The place was naturally fortified. Steep cliffs guarded the access on three sides. On the other, the mountain went up rather than down. Over on the edge of the cliff was an enclosure of sticks and logs, where a herd of goats was kept; the enclosure was not meant to keep them from getting out, but to keep the puma from getting in. It must have been moved there from in front of the house, where there was about three feet of goat manure, forming a large circle.

The house was made of adobe, with a low, mud roof and a few openings to let out the smoke. Off to the side was another low building, also of adobe, probably used for tools and storage.

No one came out.

“Ileena…” Gustavo yelled, urging his horse closer to the house. Still, no sound came from the house.

Then, a moment later, Ileena came out, dressed in a dirty, dusty, torn dress…a sweater, and a pair of cloth shoes, torn open at the toes. Her grey hair was pinned behind her head and her face was crossed by hundreds of wrinkles. She might have been 60…or 90…we couldn’t tell.

She smiled. We got down off our horses, and greeted her warmly with kisses and hugs. But we couldn’t understand what she said. Gustavo had to translate.

Then, when we were satisfied that all was well, we mounted up again for the long ride back.

“The Indians never left here,” Maria explained. “This place has probably been inhabited for 1,000 years. Nothing much has changed.”

This is not the first time we’ve met Ileena. She and Felix were often down in the valley when we visited. They always seemed to be in a good humor. Thin and spry, it looked like they would live forever. But now Felix is in a hospital with a head injury and no one is sure he’ll ever be completely right again.

Life goes on.

The following day, life went on some more. We rode up to the old reservoir. Uphill and down. Over rocks and streams. Among ancient Indian ruins…and saddle sores. The old reservoir is still there. Perhaps it too dates from the time of the Inca or even before the Inca – the Diaguitas – or even some more ancient group. A long time ago, after the hunter gatherers began settling down to plant corn and potatoes, people figured out that if they were going to live in this valley they had to find a way to store and direct the little water they had. Life needs water.

And there was not enough water falling from the sky to support much of anything.

We examined the old reservoir and then gave up. There is no way to get machinery to it. And it is too big to dig out by hand.

Riding back, we passed one of the adobe houses where “la gente” live. An old woman, short and fat, came running out. She had a handkerchief to her face, as though he had been crying.

“Jorge… Jorge…”

Jorge turned his horse around. He rode over to the old woman and spoke to her for a few minutes. Then, he rejoined our group…

“She told me my father died… She heard it on the radio. He lives in Salta. But they make announcements on the radio for the people in the mountains to inform them of important events.

“He was 85 years old…and sick… I’ll confirm it when we get back to the house. (We have a satellite phone for emergencies). If it is true, I’ll have to leave to go get the body…”

Life goes on…

Regards,

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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Poor Ol’ Goldman…

Just trying to do ‘God’s work’…

And everybody treats it like the devil.

The Washington Post yesterday carried a front-page headline, portraying the firm as though it was Satan himself:

“Cheers at Goldman as housing market fell.”

Goldman executives were in a good mood for a good reason: they had bet against the mortgage market.

Of course, that was the only reasonable thing to do. Anyone could see that the housing market was in a bubble. And everyone knew that the bubble would blow up sooner or later. Nobody knew better than Goldman because the firm helped create the bubble…selling those delicious, but teeth-rotting, mortgage-backed securities all over town.

Goldman did the right thing. It bet against the mortgage market.

Naturally, Goldman execs were happy when their bets began to pay off.

But to hear the press tell the story, Goldman executives were like a devilish cabal…cackling about the fall of the mortgage market as if they were celebrating the sacking of Rome.

“Sounds like we will make some serious money,” said one exec in an email.

Serious investors should pay no mind to the Goldman story. The Wall Street firm did the right thing – it helped separate the numbskulls from their money. And now, the numbskulls are moaning and the SEC is trying to salvage its reputation by prosecuting Goldman for betting the right way.

As usual, the pundits are on the story too – kicking the poor Goldman crew when they’re down. And as usual, they are drawing all the wrong conclusions.

Roger Lowenstein, in the New York Times:

WHILE the Securities and Exchange Commission’s allegations that Goldman Sachs defrauded clients is certainly big news, the case also raises a far broader issue that goes to the heart of how Wall Street has strayed from its intended mission.

Wall Street’s purpose, you will recall, is to raise money for industry: to finance steel mills and technology companies and, yes, even mortgages. But the collateralized debt obligations involved in the Goldman trades, like billions of dollars of similar trades sponsored by most every Wall Street firm, raised nothing for nobody. In essence, they were simply a side bet – like those in a casino – that allowed speculators to increase society’s mortgage wager without financing a single house.

The mortgage investment that is the focus of the S.E.C.’s civil lawsuit against Goldman, Abacus 2007-AC1, didn’t contain any actual mortgage bonds. Rather, it was made up of credit default swaps that “referenced” such bonds. Thus the investors weren’t truly “investing” – they were gambling on the success or failure of the bonds that actually did own mortgages. Some parties bet that the mortgage bonds would pay off; others (notably the hedge fund manager John Paulson) bet that they would fail. But no actual bonds – and no actual mortgages – were created or owned by the parties involved.

Lowenstein’s point is that Wall Street has lost its way. It is no longer providing a useful service. Instead, it has turned itself into a casino.

So far, so good.

But his solution? More regulation!

Of course, the regulators were on the case the whole time. But, according to the news reports last week, while the biggest scams of all time were going on the SEC team was busy watching porn on its office computers! It missed Madoff. It missed Sanford. It missed the greatest bubble in financial history.

More regulation? Forget it!

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The Wall Street Journal says its time to load up on commodities. The price charts seem to agree.

“Portfolios that add commodities after the Federal Reserve tightens the discount rate, perform better than portfolios that don’t,” observes Journal writer, Carolyn Cui.

The Fed raised the discount rate in February and seems likely to continue raising rates. Therefore, says Cui, investors should be increasing their commodity exposure. She bases her observation on a new study to be published in the Journal of Investing. The authors of the study researched data from December 1970 through August 2007.

Cui explains the process: “The researchers added a basket of commodity futures tracking the S&P GSCI Commodity Index to five types of stock portfolios: value, small-cap, momentum, growth and large-cap. The commodities added to the returns of all five equity styles during periods when the Fed tightens the discount rate.”

Interestingly, most commodity prices bottomed out in mid-February, which is exactly when the Federal Reserve hiked the discount rate to 0.75% – the first increase in the discount rate in more than three and a half years. From its February lows to the present, the CRB Index of commodity prices is up 8%. The CRB’s advance is not just an “oil thing.” Most commodities are advancing, including the long-slumbering agriculture complex.

Several price indices are validating these recent inflationary signals coming from the commodity markets. The Producer Price Index is up 6% year over year; import prices are up 11.4%, and the ISM’s Prices Paid Index has more than doubled during the last 12 months.

Perhaps these price trends are inspiring the Fed to begin “tightening” – i.e. raising interest rates. Whatever the Fed’s exact motive, it has begun to raise rates…and that’s enough of a reason to begin buying commodities, according to the study Cui cites.

“The strategy is pretty simple to follow and doesn’t require much trading,” says Cui. “During the 37 years the study covered, the Fed changed the discount rate 113 times, but only 18 of those moves represented directional changes – meaning investors would need to get in and out of commodities only 18 times.

“So how can investors take advantage of the latest Fed rate-tightening cycle?” Cui asks. “First, they must decide how much money they want to devote to commodities. The study modeled allocations of 5%, 10% and 15%, and found that the 15% dose produced the best results.

“Next,” she says, “investors need to decide what to buy… There are commodity mutual funds and exchange-traded funds like the iShares S&P GSCI Commodity Indexed Trust. Investors also can make more-targeted bets with single-commodity funds: The SPDR Gold Shares tracks gold prices by holding physical bullion; US Commodity Funds LLC runs a suite of ETFs tracking prices of crude oil, natural gas and gasoline.”

A basket of commodities is probably the best approach for the long-term investor.

Eric Fry
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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William Rastetter wrote:

1. Build clusters of excellence. Single companies have a tough time in isolation!

2. Provide meaningful ownership incentives to all employees. Share the big picture with every employee, often. Establish, communicate frequently and live a concise, coherent set of Corporate Values—”walk the talk.”

3. Embrace change as a constant. Know how to evolve your company and its strategy in response to outside competitive forces. Stagnation around outdated concepts and “staying the course” can be your enemies.

4. Build your companies on “three-legged stools:” First is innovative technology with strong intellectual property. Second, you need a strategy that gives you competitive advantage despite your small size and high cost of capital. Third, new companies need excellent people.

5. Don’t even start if your “stool” has only two legs!

[Editor’s note: To help launch Xconomy Detroit, we’ve queried our network of Xconomists and other innovation leaders around the country for their list of the most important things that entrepreneurs and innovators in Michigan can do to reinvigorate their regional economy.]

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UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

And once again the world is humming. World steel production hit a new all-time record in March, according to the World Steel Organisation. Global steel mills cranked out 120.3 million tonnes of steel, an increase of 30.6% from the same time last year. The WSO adds that capacity at mills in the 66 countries surveyed for its latest report is at 80.2%. That is well up from the low 58.1% in December of 2008 at the height of the credit crisis.

The task of today’s Daily Reckoning, then, is to ask if the rebound in global industrial production means the Global Financial Crisis is well and truly over. If that were the case, you’d want to be long commodities. As Eric Fry mentions in a note below, new financial research shows that commodity markets tend to bottom as the Federal Reserve begins tightening the discount rate.

And it’s not just rising U.S. rates that might do it. For example, later today the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports the March producer price figures. If those figures show rising producer prices, it gives the Reserve Bank of Australia more ammunition to raise Australian rates. But according to the study to be published in the Journal of Finance, that means now might be the best time to add commodities to your portfolio.

According to the Journal article, the study compared five types of portfolios: value, small-cap, momentum, growth and large-cap. It then determined how each portfolio would perform if it added commodity investments. “A 10% dose of commodities would have boosted a small-cap portfolio by the most: 1.67% per year during the restrictive period. That helping of commodities would have added 1% to the momentum portfolio, the least among the five.”

But which commodities and how much? “The study modeled allocations of 5%, 10% and 15%, and found that the 15% dose produced the best results, while 5% didn’t change the results significantly.” And the investment vehicles ranged from managed futures with an adviser to mutual funds, exchange traded funds, or index tracking funds.

All of this would seem to be very bullish. And we know that Kris, Alex, and Murray will be glad to hear this. In one form or another, all of them have recommended investments related to rising commodity prices or impending bottlenecks. Like late 2008, it seems like there’s never been a better time to be an Australian resource investor (or speculator).

Howard Simons at Bianco Research in Chicago says you should narrow your commodity search to those sectors where capital spending shortages have placed a limit on how fast output can grow. He likes the base metals. Alex likes coking coal and the platinum group metals.

Exercising some discretion about which commodities to invest in, and how, seems like a good idea. But in the big picture, the story is simple: China and India. The International Monetary Fund’s latest World Economic Outlook says that between the two of them, China and India will account for 40% of world GDP growth. China will grow faster than the rest of the G-7 combined, according to the IMF. And India will outperform the European Union.

This then, is the basic “stronger for longer” thesis in commodities that reigned in June of 2007, when Bear Stearns began quietly imploding. The “stronger for longer” theme is back. Even the Chairman of the Reserve Bank, Glenn Stevens, has caught a whiff of the optimism in the air. At a speech in Toowoomba last week Stevens said that, “Demand for natural resources has returned and prices for those products are rising. We have all read of the recent developments in contract prices for iron ore. As a result of those and other developments, Australia’s terms of trade will, it now appears; probably return during 2010 to something pretty close to the 50-year peak seen in 2008.”

Would a technician or a chartist call that a double top?

Any time you make a 50-year peak in anything, you have to ask yourself what is going. Stevens says that, “As usual with these things, we cannot know to what extent this change is permanent, as opposed to being a temporary cyclical event. However, the fact that we will have reached that level twice in the space of three years suggests there is something more than just a temporary blip at work.”

What is that “something?” Is it the industrialisation of three billion people in two of the world’s most ancient civilisations? Or has the super cycle in paper money created the mother of all commodity booms?

Either way, our deep and abiding suspicion is that the global financial system – which aids and abets leverage in the commodity markets – is as unstable as ever. The first phase of the GFC came about with a collapse in U.S. residential housing. A second stage of collapse in that sector is still possible. And there are many other risks (residential real estate and sovereign debt) to bank collateral.

But for now, none of that seems to matter. While our other colleagues have the one side of commodities trade covered – how to profit from it – we’ll take the other: how to profit from it if and when it blows up. This week we’ll be working out what the other side of the trade is. Until then…

Dan Denning
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

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We’re all waiting for the Planck map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which should become the definitive map of the early Universe for the foreseeable future. While we’re on tenterhooks, the Planck team has been feeding us tidbits to keep us occupied. The first was a gorgeous map of the dust. Now they’ve released some images of a stellar daycare. Planck’s key science goals have to do with mapping the CMB, which is an image from the far edge of the Universe. All the foreground stuff in between (like our galaxy, and all its dust and stars) is a nuisance, and need to be removed. Most of the Planck team would be just as happy if no stars existed at all. In that case the images of the CMB would be pristine and spectacular, and the whole mission would be a lot easier. Of course, it’d be pretty cold and lonely Universe, since there’d be no Sun, and no Earth, and no Planck team, and (shudder to think) no blogs.

For better or worse, there are dusty regions in our galaxy, filled with newly-born stars. Planck has been specifically designed to map out these annoying foregrounds, so as to be able to remove them from its images. The trick is that stars generally form in these regions, because it is precisely this dust which collapses to form stars. But this same dust obscures our view of what’s happening, at least at optical wavelengths. At microwave wavelengths, one can image the dust directly, and Planck observes at multiple frequencies precisely to do this. It makes detailed maps of stars and dust, just to subtract them off. But in the process, we get these lovely pictures.

The image is of Orion. The right panel is a composite image, while the left shows the three individual color bands: red corresponds to synchrotron emission from hot electrons in our galaxy’s magnetic field, green corresponds to hot gas (presumably heated by the stars), and blue corresponds to cold gas (this is the stuff that collapses into stars). The giant red circle in the image is from a star which exploded roughly 2 million years ago, and blew out its surrounding dust (inhibiting further star formation in that region). We’re seeing the aftermath of the birth (and death) of a star! The details of how stars are born, live, and die are pressing astrophysical questions, and these images show us the process as it unfolds. Whatever. Enough with the distractions. Planck has now imaged the entire sky in at least three frequency bands, and it looks like the data is good. Hopefully the full-sky CMB maps aren’t too far behind!

The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has put up a pretty interesting chronology of data breaches (via Guardianista) detailing leaks in the US since 2005 that resulted in the loss of people’s personal info. They’ve totaled up the figure over the past five and a bit years, and it’s a staggering 358.4 million records lost. Keep in mind that 358.4 million is just a minimum, since there are plenty of leaks that have lost an unknown number of records (like the one from a closed-down Hollywood Video store in Nevada, where customer records were thrown in a dumpster then scattered by the wind). Still, you may be thinking that you don’t hear about record-breaking data breaches much these days, but that’s not because they’ve stopped — it’s just that they happen so often, they’re really not all that newsworthy any more. A lot of lip service gets paid to clamping down on fraud, but it really doesn’t seem like much goes on to stop data leaks, since the penalties for the leaks are toothless and are cheaper than any real prevention.

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by Julian Ku

What should South Korea do if it confirms the responsibility of North Korea for the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel?  This article quotes a Korean law professor offering three options:

Writing in JoongAng Daily, Kim Hyun-soo, professor of international law at Inha University, said Lee has three options if he wishes to avoid risking all-out war on the peninsula. He could demand concerted action by the UN security council; he could take his case to the international court of justice; or, failing that, he could impose a maritime blockade, as the US did against Cuba in 1962.

The first option seems no problem, except that it is hard to get the Security Council to do anything.  The second option is a problem since, well, North Korea has not accepted the compulsory jurisdiction of the ICJ.  The third option seems the most interesting, but it is also the most complicated one legally.  The Koreas are in a state of cease-fire.  But blockades, at least in theory, are not permitted under the U.N. Charter except when authorized by the Security Council (see U.N. Charter Art. 42). The 1962 U.S. “quarantine” of Cuba was carefully not called a blockade to avoid this legal problem.  I suppose South Korea could end the cease-fire, initiate hostilities, and institute the blockade as part of its right of self-defense.  Now that would be legally defensible, although it would probably start an all out (maybe even nuclear) war. So let’s hope they go with option 1.

The classic Nintendo 64 console can now really get along with the times, thanks to this handheld mod by Bacteria. It’s practically the whole thing crammed into one delectable piece of portable N64 heaven, complete with speakers

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I take a look at a new way of finding disease-related genes: search their ancient evolutionary history. Scientists can find genes involved in blood vessel growth in yeast–which have no blood. They can find genes that help build human embryos in plants, where they sense gravity. It’s a twist on a twist on Darwin’s great insights descent with modification. And I’m pleased to see that University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne, a tough audience if ever there was one, is swayed by the piece. So check it out!

My friend and colleague Jim Vreeland writes over at The Vreelander about the tragedy of the Greek bail out:

So here it is: the long-awaited, much anticipated bail out of Greece. Was there really ever any doubt? I guess there was a little – that’s why Greek bond yields went up. But the break-up of the Eurozone? Com’on – wasn’t gonna happen.

So why has this been such a tragedy? Why the bickering back and forth about whether Greece will get a bail-out and who will do the bailing?

The answer has to do with “moral hazard” and “conditionality.”

Moral hazard rears its ugly head any time actors are insured against a risk.

Imagine how people would drive if they were completely insured against any damage to their cars – answer: a little more recklessly.

The auto-insurance industry deals with potential moral hazard with lots of institutions: deductibles, higher premiums for folks with poor driving records, different rates for different types of cars and drivers.

Imagine the kinds of risks that banks might take if they were completely insured against risk by the government… hmmm… Imagine – it isn’t hard to do.

Why, they’d take risky bets, lending to people who had little chance of repaying – and then when the loan repayments didn’t come, well, they’d just get bailed out by the government.

So, how do we address this kind of moral hazard? This one is tougher. See, if the big banks fail, we all suffer. That’s what “too big to fail” is all about – we don’t have a credible commitment to let them fail… unless we are willing to allow the whole financial system to fail – that is, none of us eat. Since we don’t want to go hungry, and the banks know this, they understand that they are just too big to fail.

Congress is trying to figure out away to deal with this moral hazard. Their solutions have to do with passing preemptive laws. One law could be to require banks to lend less and keep more money in their vaults (this is what “deleveraging” and “capitalizing” are about). Another law being considered is to keep banks small. The financial system can survive if small banks collapse. so we’ve got a credible commitment to let them fail. Knowing this, the small banks will not take undue risks.

Now, imagine how governments would act if they were completely insured against the risk of defaulting on loans. Why, they’d borrow and borrow and borrow… and they’d never worry about paying anything back… Yeah – imagine that. Well, this is what Germany has been imagining lately… it’s been a nightmare thinking about the signal it sends when Greece is bailed out. Portugal, Spain, Italy – they’ll all realize that they can borrow and spend without limit, and in the end someone will bail them out. How, then, can Germany deal with this kind of moral hazard?

The answer: Conditionality. Conditionality is just a quid pro quo. You want loans? You’ve got to change your ways. We’ll give you a li’l slice of the loan upfront. But before giving you the next slice in a few months, we’re going to check your policies. If you’re still misbehaving – eating more than your earning – we’ll hold up the next installment of the loan. And that will be ugly. You won’t be able to pay government workers or deliver public services. Investors will run scared from your country, and no one else will be willing to lend to you. You won’t eat.

Note that conditionality attacks a country’s very sovereignty. The “conditions” of the loan have to do with government taxes and spending – the very essence of politics. It is as though the lender has suddenly entered into a country’s political arena. And when taxes go up while spending goes down, there are lots of people who lose – people who won’t be very happy about conditionality.

So who’s going to impose conditionality?

Germany & the Eurozone have the money to lend to Greece. And they likely have the credibility to crack the conditionality whip. But this is dirty work. Germany would be seen as the bad guy in Greece – indeed throughout Europe – if it were dictating to the Greek government how to run Greece. If only there were some kind of smokescreen that Germany could use… where they call the shots, but make it appear that someone else is cracking the whip.

That’s where the International Monetary Fund (IMF) comes in. See, the IMF has been doing conditionality for years and years. And while the United States is the largest single vote-holder at the IMF, the combined power of the Eurozone easily surpasses American might. So, the Eurozone will be calling the shots. Bickering amongst Eurozone members like France and Germany can take place behind the secret doors of the IMF Executive Boardroom. And whatever emerges will be IMF policy.

So, be on the look out for protest signs in Athens bashing the IMF in coming months. Some will surely see through the IMF facade, realizing that Germany is really calling the shots. Others will see that Greece really sacrificed its sovereignty the day they gave up the drachma in favor of the euro. But the real devil here is moral hazard. And the solution conditionality.

Wade Roush wrote:

If there were a heat map showing how high-tech entrepreneurs are distributed around Boston, there would be a new red spot at 614 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge’s Central Square.

From the outside, the four-story office building is distinguished mainly by its white-tiled facade and its large plate-glass windows. Deep inside is the office of Carl Barron, the building’s 93-year-old owner and landlord, long adored by neighbors as the unofficial “Mayor of Central Square.”

And now the building is also home to a gaggle of venture-backed Web and mobile startups, including Conduit Labs on the fourth floor and Oneforty on the second. Conduit is best known as the creator of the online music game Loudcrowd, and Oneforty has built a groundbreaking “Twitter app store” guiding Twitter fans to tools that make the microblogging service more useful.

Dozens of familiar faces from the Boston startup and investing scene were on hand for a joint Conduit/Oneforty housewarming party last Friday night, which was also the occasion for the unveiling of the Awesome Foundation’s March 2010 grant (it went to a London biology undergraduate, Charles Fracchia, who’s creating bio-engineered inks). At the party, I learned from Conduit CEO Nabeel Hyatt and Oneforty CEO Laura Fitton that both companies will be sharing their spaces with smaller startups.

Already subletting space from Conduit, according to Hyatt, are Shareaholic, maker of a social sharing plugin for Web browsers, and AccelGolf, which is developing GPS-driven golf apps for smartphones.

Jay Meattle, founder and CEO of Shareaholic, says his company moved into the Conduit space in mid-February. “We have a private room that can easily fit in 3-4 people, which is perfect for our size,” Meattle says. “It’s like an office within an office, with all the amenities of a big space like a kitchen, conference rooms, et cetera.”

William Sulinski, CEO and co-founder of Portland, ME-based AccelGolf, says the Cambridge outpost will become the startup’s sales hub.

Fitton says she’s not sure yet who will move into Oneforty’s space, but that they’ll likely be other entrepreneurs funded by Oneforty’s investors, who include Boston-based Flybridge Venture Capital, San Francisco-based Javelin Venture Partners, and a bevy of angel investors such as Dave McClure, Roger Ehrenberg, Lee Hower, and Andy Sack.

There’s “a two-fold benefit” from having other companies supported by Oneforty’s investors in the same space, says Fitton. “It keeps the energy up, and it also means our investors and advisors are coming by the office all the time, so we can grab them for extra questions.”

The new cluster of startups in the Barron Building is another example of the informal incubator phenomenon that Erin spotlighted back in February. In these work/hangout spaces, sheer proximity tends to …Next Page »

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FatWire recently announced two new products — Gadget Server and Community Server — both aimed at website visitors

Binary over on XDA got a hold of the system dump from the upcoming myTouch 3G Slide and Domenuk was able to port it to his Mytouch 3G/G1.

I am SO surprised that even in its early state you can see how well this runs on my very limited G1. This may very well be the first SNAPPY 2.1 ROM for the G1.

The myTouch 3G Slide will be T-Mobile’s FIRST phone with Android 2.1 and HTC’s updated Espresso Sense UI and should be released sometime in June.

T-Mobile went to great lengths to make Android a little more user friendly to mainstream customers and not just power users like myself. It’s also more appealing to currently displaced Sidekick users and I feel like this is who T-Mobile is trying to target with this new phone in their myTouch 3G series.

After playing with a leaked ROM, it is easy to see that T-Mobile had a LOT more influence with this Android phone than any others before it. You can see their apps strewn about this phone and although most are pretty useless, I can see how some Android virgins may find them useful.

One I particularly liked was the myTouch Music app which is essentially a streaming radio station with the top 100 hits and you can even skip ahead to tracks. Nice! Most of the others were apps that overlapped with a lot of other fuctions already found on Android (like Settings). Some even seemed like T-Mobile trying to cash in on some of the more unsuspecting Android newcomers.

I did like how Swype came preloaded as well as HTC IME.

Overall, this ROM on the G1 is faster than ANY other 2.1 Sense UI ROMs I have tried. It’s crazy. Especially given the fact the myTouch Slide is much more powerful than the G1. This Sense UI is a little different than tradition Sense in that it’s technically a new version called Espresso. You can see some of the graphical changes such as the bubbles around the apps. Again, I can see what HTC was going for with this and trying to get a more uniform look to the app icons.

Either you love it, or hate it. I personally don’t mind it at all.

As of now, the only things not working in this ROM are WiFi, Bluetooth, Browser and Gmail. Although, I’m sure all of these will be fixed before I even finish this sentence. The Android community has been really great in pulling together and getting everything up and running. So much progress in so little time!

Here’s the link for the the version I’m using at the moment. Look for the Beta2 link.

Related Posts

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• More myTouch Slide pics and details leak

When it comes to red-blooded boys toys, Husqvarna’s latest demolition robot takes the cake. Husqvarna is in the process of releasing a series of new remote-control demolition robots, beginning with the introduction of the 22 kW DXR310 weighing 1900 kg in late 2009, followed by the smaller 1620 kg DXR 250 in January. The 250 comes standard with 18.5 kilowatts, but there is also a 22 kW option. Now comes the diminutive 960 kg DXR 140 which can be optioned up to 15 kW, yet is only 77 cm wide, meaning it can pass through most doorways, fits in a lift or on a standard trailer or on the back of a utility… and the easy-to-use Bluetooth remote control makes it an absolute breeze to smash just about anything you can think of. ..
Continue Reading Husqvarna’s Bluetooth-controlled DXR 140 demolition robot

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Engadget is reporting that the handset pictured to the left is yet another leaked piece of upcoming hardware, this time from Motorola. Called the Moto MT820, this handsets appears to be a potentially exciting piece of equipment for the China telecom market.  head to Engadget for a full gallery of images but long story short, here’s what you’ll find – This unit has a forward facing camera, physical home, power, camera and volume buttons as well as a microSD slot hidden under the cover of the phone.

While all of that seems a bit ho-hum, you may be asking yourself what is so exciting about this handset?  That’s when I call your attention to the odd flip cover you can see in the pic.  It is rumored that this flip cover is the first implementation of the 3D screen patent that Motorola applied for a while back. 

The premise is simple – When the cover is open, the screen shows normal 2D images and operates like a normal touch screen.  When you close said flip cover, the images from the screen take on a “3D-like appearance” which you can interact with.  The flip cover also operates as a touch sensor for the handset.

I have to admit that I am sucker for new tech, and the idea of a 3d mobile handset intrigues me.  I know that it is gimmicky to say the least, but man I want to see it.  This handset as mentioned above is for the China Mobile network.  It will be interesting to see if indeed it is going to have the 3d capability built in, and what it will operate like.

Might We Suggest…

• BGR: Calgary to be First Android Handset from Motorola
  The Boy Genius Report is, well… reporting that the first Android handset from Motorola will be the Calgary.  Shown below in mockups, the device has that some of that same old MOTO feeling to it mix…

Sony has released the latest PlayStation Move video diary to showcase the upcoming motion controlled bowling game, Brunswick Pro Bowling. Check it out after the jump.