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These resources are called tax lawyers, and they are very expensive. The knowledge required to do this is very specialized and guarded with extreme zeal by its possessors. As is usual in any situation involving government regulation, the biggest winners are the lawyers. If you want to get an idea of how complex and draconian these things really are, try looking up PFIC and "controlled foreign corporation".

Regardless of whether politicians "support" it, I expect that most of them know that it's really good for the country in the long term. That's why I said that I hope Obama, who's been all about change, will have the brains (and the balls) to actually do the right thing.

Maybe Obama will be smart enough to start handing out green cards to anybody with an H1B who can hold a permanent position for two years. I'd much rather employ somebody who's motivated enough to leave their home country in search of opportunity.

It seems likely that there are multiple effects here. Perhaps work has become skilled enough to produce large enough differences in productivity that it necessitates an adjustment to the model. This might help explain why the recent recessions were considered fairly jobless relative to those that came before. It might also help in explaining the increasing compensation gap that we see.

It may also be the case that businesses are delevering in the same way that households must. This would be a rational reaction to the dangers of debt financing that have been placed in stark relief by the crisis. Businesses that are reducing their dependency on debt by switching to internal financing will have less capital available for expansion.

The rising cost of benefits may have also started to effect the demand for full time workers and pushed businesses over into hiring temps and part timers.

There may be some wisdom, but not a whole lot. Hiring on referrals is based on the idea that people will not refer idiots to you for fear of depleting their social capital, providing you with a fairly strong selection mechanism for talented candidates. Being forced to hire the relatives of your mate regardless of their skills does not strike me as very beneficial.

I almost had to laugh, this sounds like a plot from an Ayn Rand novel.

And the implication here is that the other industrialized nations are free-riders on development costs paid by the Americans and would probably need to pay more in their markets.

Has anybody seen any research on how much of the difference between health care costs in the US and Canada/Europe are accounted for by the difference in drug prices?

I also expect that international cooperation on the approval process for new drugs might reduce development costs. Perhaps the UN might actually make itself useful and form something like an international version of the FDA and have member nations agree to abide by its decisions.

I am a US citizen as well and I agree that the thought of ditching my identity for tax purposes is very painful, but the American political system seems to become ever more broken. I've been living in Hong Kong for the past few months after nearly 10 years in New York City and my experience has been a real eye opener. I can't see any real difference in the quality of life here (this is an expat's experience, so take that with a grain of salt), but it is achieved at a significantly lower tax burden, like less than half. I have health insurance that doesn't break the bank, the mass transit system is clean and efficient, they have well-maintained public parks, etc. As someone who works hard and earns well, my freedom to criticize the government hasn't stopped me from being viewed as a piggy bank by elected officials who haven't learned the real lesson of the financial crisis, which is to live within your means. They're taking on yet another helping of the "borrow and spend" habit that the homeowners had to give up, and it seems to me that it's all going to end in tears at some point. Frankly I don't really want to be among the ones who has to pay for it down the road. The final freedom is the freedom to vote with your feet, which is what made the iron curtain such a horrible crime against human rights, and while I still have that freedom, they want me to leave my wallet at the door, unlike almost every other developed country.

One thing that you must keep in mind is that if you get sick of high US taxes (and they only seem to be going higher) and you want to move someplace like Hong Kong, you will still need to pay US taxes, and you will even be forced to continue to pay them for 10 years if you decide to give up your citizenship.

Both have had moments of awesome brilliance. Both have been slowly ground into the dirt by writers with no exciting new ideas who have gone to the well too many times and finally sucked it dry.

Why are we still talking about proliferation? Proliferation has already happened: Pakistan has the bomb, North Korea has the bomb, Iran is probably building one. We were only ever going to delay the inevitable, once you prove that it can be done, it's only a matter of time before technology brings the price of doing it down to a level that less wealthy nations can afford. There may be other reasons why we shouldn't reprocess fuel, but proliferation isn't one of them.

No, the point is that unhedged systemic risk is only one component of the crisis, despite what the rest of the media is blaring. The other, and perhaps more important, component was zero down mortgages and cash-out refinancings that left borrowers with no equity in their houses. Borrowers were just as irresponsible as bankers and haven't gotten the bad press they deserve. "It's the leverage, stupid" should be the mantra of this crisis.

Most of the media don't have enough knowledge to get the story straight (remember that Lewis was once a bond trader), they just find the angle with the most emotional impact and drive it into the ground with very little regard for the actual facts. The politicians either don't realize how incorrect the reporting is, or can't be bothered to try to correct the oversimplifications and explain the real truth to voters, who are most likely to undereducated to understand it anyway. It's much easier for them to ride the wave of outrage in the direction of the nearest camera and then pound the table about how angry they are and how someone needs to do something about it and how they are people that will do it, even though some of them (such as Barney Frank) bear a share of the responsibility because they pushed the idea of better access to credit for "under served" (i.e. high risk) potential home buyers and because they blocked improved regulations at the GSEs that might have shut down some of the irresponsible lending.

Has anyone seen any good articles with an overview on what went wrong at Fannie and Freddie? I've seen bits and pieces but for the most part the silence is deafening.

He doesn't appear to be a quant, based on his linkedin profile. Looks like he had a telecom background, so he was probably working on the architecture of their co-located trading platform. In the automated trading world, co-location means putting your machines at the exchange to reduce the latency of receiving market data and entering orders. For a high frequency strategy (i.e. tens or hundreds of thousands of trades per day), these improvements can really increase profits, and there is a huge arms race under way in industry to get the lowest latency.

I believe that the author is ignoring the importance of libraries for commercial work when bemoaning the slow uptake of lessons learned in language research. Learning a new language does not take a long time in comparison to the amount of time required to learn the APIs necessary to be really productive.

I have an idea for reducing congestion in Manhattan: ban on-street parking. Only vehicles making deliveries with a valid permit should be permitted to park on the street, everybody else would have to use a garage. This should clear a few extra lanes for traffic in many places, as well as forcing more people to give up their cars.

Does anybody else find this embedded document format as annoying as I do? This makes navigating with the mouse wheel extremely difficult.

I've been kind of worried about this for a while. Week economic conditions place selection pressure on companies to learn to do more with less, and technology steadily improves the tools that are available to reach that goal. When the economy starts to turn around these companies may not need to hire more workers to meet rising demand. The recovery from the recession was called "jobless" and I suspect that this one will be even worse.

Fairly informative for someone like me who is interested in building their own hardware but doesn't have much experience. Power supplies are the scariest part due to the possibility of screaming electrical death (or at least a good strong jolt).

Does anybody have recommendations for sites that provide more such instructional videos?

There is now a comment on this blog entry purporting to be from someone on the Google web search team claiming that the site was removed because it had been hacked and that Google had attempted to contact the author.

I disagree. There is a huge difference between insider trading and buying a company to sell off pieces of it and make the remainder more efficient through reorganization, even if the reorganization includes layoffs. In the former case, you are abusing your access to information that others do not have in order to make a profit at their expense, and this is why it is illegal. In the latter case, you are making a positive contribution to the wealth of the stockholders of a company, even though this might cause hardship to some of the employees who will have salary/benefits cut or even lose their jobs. Gekko embodies both of these behaviors (as did some of the participants in 80s takeovers), but I don't believe that insider trading properly represents capitalism.

And remember that Gordon Gekko was Oliver Stone's foil for Carl Fox (the father of the main character) who was meant to embody the evil of the 80s takeover era. This speech was based on a University of California speech given by Ivan Boesky, in which he said: "Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself."

"How'd Krugman ever get accepted as an economist? He seems to be a massive doomcrier who is consistently wrong, and uses a lot of anecdotes and very few hard numbers."

You need to separate Krugman's work as an academic economist from his work as a "popular economist" and political commentator. I'm not an economist, but my understanding is that his academic work is outstanding and has contributed significantly to improving the models for understanding international trade. He also correctly predicted that fixed exchange rate regimes would be dangerously unstable (a lesson that not everybody has learned yet).

As you point out however, he was incorrect in his prescription for how to deal with the currency crisis. I'm going to postulate here that economists don't have really good models for studying how to recover from crisis events because they are relatively rare in comparison to their complexity, so the mathematical tools of economics are unable to explain them well. When you're placed in a situation in which you do not have enough information to make a good recommendation, the correct action is to admit that fact. That goes for the current crisis as well. Krugman seems to have very strong idealogical tendencies, given that he wrote a book called "The Conscience of a Liberal," and thus expresses his opinion about how to handle these matters much more forcefully than is warranted by the information that is provided by economics. In my opinion, this is an abuse of the natural authority provided by his economic credentials, and he should probably stick to writing articles for the academic community and not the popular press.

The issues greatly depend on which country you are from. Your best bet is to speak to a lawyer because the issues are very complex, at least for US citizens.

I think California succeeds in spike of its political system, not because of it. The bay area has fantastic weather, a cultured urban center, plenty of nearby outdoor activities, and a climate of technological innovation that predates many of the problems with the political system. I have never personally visited L.A. but it is also reported to have excellent weather, and is clearly a center of the entertainment industry (this development once again occurring before their problems got really bad). I've lived a semi-nomadic lifestyle for most of my life, and have wanted to move to California, but have not done so precisely because of the high taxes and the dysfunctional politics, which make some sort of disaster seem almost inevitable. The question is not how it survives, but how much better it could be if the system worked properly given the number of advantages that the state enjoys.

The quality of the argument against mutlithreading is undermined quite a bit by choosing one of the most poorly written networking library functions around. If you want to do this right, use libevent or Boost.Asio asynchronous resolvers.

I do have to admit that I didn't bother to dig through the final example looking for the errors, so perhaps the author did have a better argument in there but didn't bother to pursue it more aggressively.

Mostly looking to protect personal assets.

How about asset protection strategies?

"In government, for example, a 'should-have-known-it' blame game is played after every tragedy."

This statement, and the later explanation of "misleading or insignificant" information that can't be sorted from actual signal is one of the best explanations of government failure in recent calamitous US events (i.e. Sept. 11 and the financial collapse). No matter what happens or which side is in power, there's always a politician on the other side who stands up to cast blame. The public never seems to see through this charade.

I think the Europeans have problems just as bad as the Americans, but it looks different because of national organization. Most of the problems in America are in California, Florida, and Nevada. If these were separate countries rather than separate states, then the situations would look more similar with some having crushing problems (like Iceland and Britain) and others seeming relatively unscathed locally but affected by the global nature of the downturn. European banks have taken a huge beating, and there have been multiple bailouts. I also consider it likely that there are still unacknowledged problems in other banks that seem healthy so far. The pain filters down more readily to average Americans and Brits because they were the ones borrowing money for houses they couldn't afford and because continental political systems have stronger social support systems. I expect that it will likely take the European economies longer to recover than the Americans unless the US government borrows so much money that it starts to affect its de-facto credit rating.