Out Of Control

Conditions: Cool, Calm

Who Really Is In Control?

Late last week the Dow Jones stock market plunged something like 1,000 points in a single day. The terrifying point is that no one really seems to know why.

The initial focus of the investigations appeared to center on the way a growing number of high-speed trading networks interact with one another and with venerable exchanges like the New York Stock Exchange. Most investors are unaware that these competing systems have fractured the traditional marketplace and have displaced exchanges like the Big Board as the dominant force in stock trading.

The silence from Washington cast a pall over Wall Street, where shaken traders returned to their desks Friday morning hoping for quick answers. The markets remained on edge, as the uncertainty over what caused Thursday’s wild swings added to the worries over the running debt crisis in Greece.
[...]

Over the last five years, the stock market has split into a plethora of new competing hubs and trading outlets, a legacy of deregulation earlier this decade and fast-paced technological change. On Friday, the rivalry between the two main exchanges erupted into view as each publicly pointed the finger at the other for being a main cause of the collapse on Thursday, which sent shockwaves around the globe.

- nytimes.com/

So here we are, in a society that hangs on a massively-compilicated financial system that's become so ridden with tricks and traps that we can start to see this kind of activity where no one knows what happened or why? Exactly how bad do things have to get before we start wising up and taking back control of critical systems?



Film Review: Iron Man 2

The first Iron Man was a surprise hit. A pretty great cast hooked into a pretty deep story about a son of a weapons industrialist who is humbled, and is forced to reinvent and redeem himself. And, also, robot fighting. The second film is also interested in exploring a bit more of Tony Stark's background, but this time the focus isn't on righting wrongs but on Tony having to fix his arc reactor design because it's poisoning his blood.

The story line is basically that America is uncomfortable with having it's defense maintained by this wealthy playboy who's more interested in having fun and showing off. And what's really odd is how much sense that actually makes. Sam Rockwell is supposed to be the bad guy who's trying to build his own weaponised Iron Man design for the military, but fundamentally I think the point he's making is logical. Tony Stark is just one alcoholic in a suit. In reality, one superman isn't enough to keep a nation safe or calm, especially a superman as imbalanced as Stark is.

Despite the imbalance of the underlying plot, and the lack of a focused story, the second Iron Man film is still pretty good. Mickey Rourke is playing essentially a Russian Stark, whose father was part of the original design work, and now wants revenge. He's in great form, but eventually you realize it's a role that just doesn't have enough meat on it. We needed more of a confrontation between these two men, instead of just Iron Men battling each other, which surprisingly gets old pretty fast. Robert Downey's Stark is a hard character to like, who's really fighting to fix problems that he's responsible for in the first place. I get the feeling this film is filling in for a bigger third film, that will have likely have more involvement from Samuel Jackson and Scarlet Johansson, who both are really just slumming it in this film. Two and a half punches out of Five.


- Peace out