discombobulated parts

Who had Tony Parker/Longoria and Brandon Roy as the first two 50 point games of the year?

I've been following at some distance the scandal with the hedge fund fellow. I'm not that surprised to see a system used to scam billionaires, I'm just surprised it took the total economic meltdown of the stock market for people to figure out they were being scammed. I may look into it further, but it sounds more or less like any confidence scam, just conducted on a very large scale and with a supposed official status as a "hedge fund".

These sorts of things come up more and more often with a society that continues to extend the limits of the mobility of the concept of 'identity'. It was one thing when there are dozens of "John Smiths". It's another when there are dozens of the same "John Smith". It's not like that cloning technology is coming around the bend just yet. The fungible nature of who we are and who we can trust is becoming a marketable commodity. In some ways it may be good to have a market on trust. But like many other brand competitions, it relies on having someone else independently valuable worth trusting also. And the whole thing then relies on a sort of chicken/egg scam. "You can trust us" Why? "Because they said so". Why should I trust them? "Because we said so".

In the particular case, it works basically like that. "You can trust me because I work on Wall St and nobody seems to think I'm capable of doing anything wrong (even the people whose job it is to see if I was doing anything wrong)". Yes...quite a load of crap. Bullshit is rampant in reality and it seems better not to bother trusting people with such things (asking questions is really an annoying hobby to have if you want people to get along with you, I'm willing to hazard it at least). I guess it's good to see it get caught once in a while. But it doesn't mean we should let the burden for our inability to ask questions be shouldered only by a federal regulatory body (which also dropped the ball).