Is it a depression or bad recession? Or is it something rather usual, a normal recession like it is supposed to happen like here and then according to the Kenseyan Business Cycle? And is it the fault of capitalism? Can one blame the capitalist for what happened?

First of all, I think it is quite clear, it is a recession a big one. I guess it is even the biggest one since the Great Depression in 1929. This recession will probably last longer than usual ones, at least these are the stands which most economist predict these days. However, in order to determine the fact if it is a failure of capitalism one has to look into the reasons for this recession.

The probable start of this recession was when the housing bubble burst in 2007, at that time housing prices had been increasing steadily over the last decade. At the same time the building rate for new houses had been increasing. Everybody was profiting, which lead to more money being in the market, too much money and banks started lending money to people who couldn’t even afford buying houses. This lead to more houses being build on huge loans. This market was doomed to crash and the burst of the bubble had been expected for years.

So one might ask why did people continue to invest in this market, even though they new it is going to burst. There are several reasons for that, the first reason is that it was difficult to tell when this bubble would burst and there where still a lot of profits made, which you could have missed out. The second reason is that if you have money, it is totally natural that you try to make more out of it. This is human, some like to call it greed, but I don’t think it is greed if you try to get more money if you have the opportunity.

However, the burst of this market did not lead to the recession we are in now. The sad thing was that this market was based on cheap money, too cheap money. Banks started giving out money to people who could never afford buying a house. So suddenly hundreds of thousands could not repay there debts, as the burst of the bubble had lead to an increase in interests and a fall in the worthiness of the houses. Therefore people where sitting in homes which were less worth than they had been, but still had to pay back to the banks. These banks now faced the dilema of trying to get back there money which resulted in many houseforeclosers and mistrusts in banks.

The banks when lending the money for homes, had sold their risks to investors. I think here lies the key. These investors had then sold the risks in different packages to other investors and soon an uncromprehensive industry was created which just lost control about the risks they were selling.

Today the governments try to increase spending of consumers by lowering interrest rates. However banks are still afraid of lending out money and the governments are not able to really get their money to the people, therefore the spending power has not been incresing and brought down the situation.

Now is this a failure of capitalism? I would say NO. The whole economy has been brought into this recession by the wrong doing of the finance sector, the rest of the economy was still well functioning. The finance sector, sold risks, and banks sold these risks again and other people sold them again. These risks were always mixed up in different packages, and so most of the people, including the government, lost control and oversight of these papers. They had no idea of what they were actually dealing with and the real risks they possesed. When the housingmarket then crashed it came to light what they actually posessed, but it was too late. The stone got roling.

Now, this is a human error, which has nothing to do with capitalism, the banks and investers symplie did not understand what they were actually possessing and investing in. They did not understand one can not illiminate risks by selling them again and again.

The trade itself, the trade with risks, is not wrong at all. The insurance industry has been doing that for over 100 years and it proved to a functioning industry. However, they always now what they are possesing and are able to understand their risks. Unlike the investors in this crisis, who lost their money on these packages.

Therefore, I would say this recession is no failure of capitalism.

The Big looser of the day was the “Curious Case of Benjamin Button” with Brad Pitt after beeing nominated for 13 Awards and only managing to secure 3 of them,  including Make-up, art-direction and visual affects.

The Award for best actress in leading role went to Kate Winslet for her acting in The Reader, while best actor in leading role went to Sean Penn for his role in Milk.

Here are all the winners:

I want to show you some nice tricks with Google! Are you ready? Here we go:

If you enter in the Google search box “Google 133t” and click on I’m feeling lucky, you will get a nice example of a different Google starting page. You will get a page in Letters and Numbers, which you can’t read, but it is from Google.com. It is really interesting, the language is called 133t or Leet and is used in the internet for some reasons, which I don’t know. (If you click on the image, you will get there)

Another nice trick is entering “Google bsd” and then click on I’m feeling lucky. You will end up on a Google page with a devil…

The third trick I want to show you is if you enter “Google Easter Egg” and then click on I’m feeling lucky. You will have to help a small easter bunny catch his easter eggs

If you are a fan of Gothic, you will like this site… Enter “Google Gothic” and you will end up on a nice black site for Gothic fans. I like the button “I’m feeling depressed” instead of “I’m feeling lucky”.

Last but not least, I have another nice trick for you. This one won’t give you any different themes or so but a quite strange result. By the way did you know the answer to life, the universe and everything? It is 42, you won’t believe me? Then enter: “answer to life, the universe and everything else” into Google and press enter.

That’s it for today. If you want more themes, enter things like:

• Google Pig Latin and you will get Google in Pig Latin
• Google Linux and you will get the Google logo with the Linux logo
• Go to Google loco
• And if you want to be environmental friendly and save energy use Blackle which is the environmental friendly version of Google. Why? It is explained on the website, but mainly because it is in black.

However, where ever it came it face protests, hatred and a huge press coverage. Why that? That is because of Tibet. In the middle of march, hundreds of protesters protested against the control of Tibet by China. China has entered Tibet in the 1950′s and since then the Chinese government is ruling there. During the protests in Tibet, some protesters were killed, which started everything.

So since the protests, thousands of protesters around the world protested against China, for whom that is the worst moment as it wants to present itself at it’s best during the games. Whenever the Olympic torch arrived in another city thousands of protesters tried to stop it and attacked the sport stars carrying the torch.

These protests are mostly organized and attended by exile Tibetans.

They sometimes jumped at it, tried to grab it or other things and the torch had to be secured by several rings of police and Chinese security staff.

So why am I writing all that? Because I want to get my opinion out there. I thing that these protests are as cruel as what China is doing.

How can you get peace by attacking other people who have nothing to do with what China is doing? How can you get peace by misusing the Olympic Games, which have nothing to do with what China is doing? How can you get peace by ignoring the whole purpose of the Olympic Games, a time of peace? How can you get peace by hurting fans of the Olympic Games, who want to watch the torch but can’t because some extremists have to attack it?

At the moment theses protests are hurting only one type of people and that are the fans of the Olympic Games around the world. The Olympic Games have nothing to do with Tibet or so and these protest can’t change anything at the moment.

China is a communist dictated country, the government has the power over it’s people and there is nothing like freedom of speech in China. China is an uprising power, with an extremely fast rising economy. So the people in China have no idea about the protest that are going on in China, because freedom of press doesn’t exist there. So these protests can’t help the Chinese people who want to get ride of their government.

What are the protest then for? International pressure….

However, I think that is totally useless, China has never really cared about how other countries think about it. So China is one of the least countries where international pressure can help, similar to the US. Now, if some countries try to put pressure on China all it will do is cool down their relationship and it is extremely
important to make sure it doesn’t cool down to much as China isn’t a country you can ignore, the Western economy is depending on China and it’s economy.

So I hope you see what I mean, these protest are useless and misusing the Games and hurting it’s fans.

However, don’t think I agree with what China is doing! The total opposite, I am against the Chinese control of Tibet and I think it is good that the world is reacting to that. It would be shocking if not. However, I am against how the world is reacting to that, by misusing the Olympic Games.

Today the Olympic torch will be in Tanzania, Africa. Let’s hope this will face less protests.

here are interesting things to see. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t. I bet you always thought that the United States of America are trying everything to hide what they are doing and let the least possible amount of people see Guantanamo Bay. You thought that, didn’t you? I tell you, you were wrong.

Ok, it is true you can’t go there as a person and have a chat with the imprisoned “threats” to America and the world. However, you can go there from the air. You don’t need a plane or so, all you

need is Google Earth

Google Earth allows you to see quite a lot of details of Guantanamo Bay. The qual

ity of the image isn’t as good as the one of Miami or so, but as good or better then Havana (the capital of Cuba). You have a better image of the Airport of Guantanamo Bay, then of the camps. I don’t know if this is by purpose, I think so but I am not quite sure. And who can say: “I was in Guant

anamo Bay, for free!” so what do you want more. By the way, you are not the only one who was there, a lot of people left some interesting information about the different buildings you can see there.

So it is always worth a travel

Here in Google Maps. However, I would recommend to look at it in Google Earth, as you can see more information about it.

It is expected that Mr Zardari will lead the PPP for the next time while Bilawal is finishing up his studies at Oxford.

Also announced today by the leading party PML-Q, the party of president Musharraf, that the date for the elections may be delayed up to 4 month.

More at BBC and at Spiegel

MS Bhutto was two times the first woman in the Islamic country, in 1988-90 and 1993-96, both times she was accused of being corrupt sacked both times. However she remained the most popular person in Pakistan. She went to exile in the UK from which she returned after making an agreement with PM Mr. Musharraf. She returned on Oct.13 the same day a suicide bomber attacked her bus, which was followed by thousands of fans, and killed over a hundred people.

Soon after she returned her relationships with PM Musharraf broke and she had to suffer under the state of emergency Musharraf had declared to “save the country”. Ms Bhutto was killed in Rawalpindi in Pakistan during an election rally.

Ms Bhutto educated at Harvard and Oxford, her father was former PM of Pakistan until he got executed.

More at BBC  and at Spiegel

“Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly. XML error message: The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup.”

Since now it always worked, I have installed the code so often also on blogger blogs. I looked a little bit around and noticed the Analytics has released a new code. There should come “Exciting new features” The install instructions were the same, it still didn’t work so I had to use the old code.

You might ask why I am telling all this so detailed. I am doing so because I find it quite embarrassing when Google releases a new feature which doesn’t even work with their own products. (Blogger is owned by Google)

However Larry Page, one of the two Google founders, is marrying his girl friend Lucy Southworth in the Caribbean on the private island of Virgin boss Richard Branson. You will ask yourself, and? The problem with all this is that everything happening there isn’t enviromental friendly at all. First of all, all guest are brought there with private chartered jets from around the world which of course creats a lot of CO2. That isn’t everything, to get enough room a big sand bank had to be created to put all the beer tents on, which are cooled by air condition. It takes a lot of energy to cool open tents. To create a nice atmosphere hundreds of plasticpalms had been planted. I mean if you plant palms and have so much money and say you are environmental friendly, why can’t you plant at least real palms?

You can say that everybody can decide how he wants to celebrate his wedding, but in my opinion if you want to get an environmental friendly repetition and you do so much advertising to get one, you should at least do environmental friendly things. Also it really doesn’t match up when today Google.de is doing a protest action against Global Warming and their founders are doing everything to support Global Warming.

Vote here

Thanks

Did you know that …. ?

• Each persons throws away 4 pounds of trash each day
• The energy we save by recycling one glass bottle is enough to let one light bulb burn for 4 hours
• It takes 90% less energy to recycle aluminium cans than creating new ones
• 84% of all Household trash can be recycled
• Recycling paper needs 64% less energy then creating new one
• Every ton of paper recycled saves 17 trees
• Every ton of paper recycled saves 7,000 gallons from chemicals
• Every ton of paper recycled saves 4,100 kilowatt hours of electricity
• One gallon of motor oil can contaminate 2 million gallons of water
• About 5 million tons of oil ends up in the ocean each year
• Every week it takes 500,000 trees to produce the paper for the ‘Sunday’ Newspapers, only in the US
• It takes 15,000 tones of trash that are buried in the earth to create one job, while recycling this trash creates 9 jobs.

Read more about it here and here

A short time before the ‘Tour de France’ formal T-Mobile driver said that they have been taking illegal substances, including formal Bjarne Riis. Before this some ex-worker accused the T-Mobile team of high use of illegal drugs and other illegal substances to stimulate the body.

T-Mobile warned the team already to take more care about the doping in the team, today they announced to stop sponsoring because the team chief wanted to recruit George Hincapi, formal team member of US Postal and Discovery Channel, two teams that have been accused of doping.

T-Mobile was sponsoring the team since 1991, new sponsor might be the American company ‘High Roads’.

Read more on Spiegel and on BBC

I thought of an explanation and came to two possible conclusions, either BBC is looking for British ex-colonies, but they include countries like Brazil and other South American countries, where England never had their colonies. Another explanation could be that in countries like Japan or Germany are to many local news stations already, so it is useless for BBC to try to enter those territories. This could also be the reason why there is French listed in the section Africa.

It works like this, You log in with your normal Google Account, choose a username/nickname, then you will be connected with somebody else playing the game. You will have 2 minutes time, in this time Google will show you pictures, you have to enter words matching with the picture. As soon as you and your partner enter the same name you will get points for it, you will get more points for words that are more exclusive.

So for example you will get just 50 points if both of you entered man, but you will get 150 points if both entered Spiderman.

Offcourse Google hasn’t created the game just for fun, they want to use the words entered to improve their image-search.

You can play it here

More on Mashable.com

Even worse there are still a lot of racist comments, just looked at it and the second comment is already a racist.

Techcrunch.com

A popular case in the blog scene was a person called charlie, who worked for the investment bank Goldman Sachs, he spend an 500 hours in the last six month on Facebook. This is about 4 hours a day!!! What I can’t understand is, what do you want to do 4 hours a day on Facebook? It is getting worse, Charlie got a warning from his employer to stop going on Facebook during work-time. He ignored the warning and posted it on Facebook, mentioning that he is more afraid of losing Facebook than his job. This is crazy, isn’t it? More about his case on Techcrunch.com

More about Facebook at work and the consequences here on Spiegel International.

 A person called Noah took 6 years every day a picture of himself and made a video about it. It is interresting to see the changes over the time. I have the link to it below, but be carefull after I watched the video I couldn’t get his face out of my head.

Watch his Video

Here is another video of somebody who did the same process for 8 years!

More videos on Youtube.com

Find more at Nicomarket.com