Ouroborus

Trade depends on money that depends on trade that depends on money...
It is an infinite loop on that nothing is certain and there are no fixed values.
Neither the value of money nor the stocks are measured on a fixed scale but relative to artificial metrics. Therefore is easy to manipulate the metrics and this is why the actual crash happened.

I really think that the first step towards a serious economy would be the stabilization of money. I mean that the Bretton Woods treaty should be revised in the actual context of the economy. If the money is stable over long periods of time then the fluctuations of stock exchange indexes would be based on a more realistic metrics.

I do not know how to revise the treaty - but at least it should be somehow modified in order to add some referential for money exchange - that would reduce the panic on markets during recession periods. It would also help various economies to keep their position in situations of crisis, and give to the government a clear picture about national reserves and the real depreciation of money.

The end of bandwidth

I have seen an announcement from Joost that made me think.
Joost is a P2P television system (as Azureus Vuze and others) created by the same guys that built Skype and Kazaa.
The newst trick is that they dropped(?) their desktop client and created an online one (probably an ActionScript BitTorrent client) that can be used on virtually any PC with 0 installation effort.
In this case many more computers will use Joost overloading any kind of available bandwidth.
After the financial crisis there will be a bandwidth one :)

Images of Romania

Romania is seen abroad as a paradox country.
There are no gray shades but black and white (with larger black stripes).

We are known for our appetite for theft and sometime murder (see the cases in Italy and other countries in EU), for all the corruption on the country, for being dirty and lazy, for the high number of gypsies, bad roads, fierce maladies (Depardieu case), prostitutes.

Still there are some Places and people that might wash away partially the bad image we have.
As Anthony Bourdain noticed in his show "No Reservation" there are some unpolluted areas where people still live by the ancient traditions.

Why this big difference? One explanation was given by Dan Puric - a very gifted actor and lately one of the voices that are alerting us about our decline as a people - he explained that the communism in Romania produced an artificial selection in the fifties. The communists have eradicated most of the intellectuals of the epoch either by imprisoning them or sending them directly to death. They killed priests, officers, doctors, teachers... and replaced them with mediocrities that were governed only by fear, treason and servility. This new "elite" generated the actual monstrous society, the remains of this would be carried on for at list a half of century.

The simple men - the uncorrupted ones that somehow survived - are hardly visible. For them living in Romania is still a continuous struggle. After the losses they had during the communist era when they were expropriated and humiliated for their dignity, in those days they have been again transformed in victims as there is no clear action plan from the government to propose a long term development plan - therefore they have no certitude that their work would ever matter.
Having no certitudes they started to loose their motivation, sell the land and then leave or die... An along with them die the traditions and the rest of our individuality as a people.

Another one who pointed out the slow death of the Romanian culture is Grigore Lese. He has recently gave an interview for Radio Romania Cultural in that he described the alienation of our cultural heritage, the death of traditional music and the contamination of Romanian folklore.
He pointed out that the avalanche of "manele" music that were replacing the traditional songs is due also to the fact that the Romanians were alienated during the last 50 years.

Those two men - Grigore Lese and Dan Puric - although different in their speech are fighting for a common cause - the national cause of Romania. They are trying to create a dissociated image of what real Romanians are and how they live from the amorphous crowd of burglars and crooks that are making the nation ashamed.

GWT in enterprise

I have been working lately into integrating GWT in our products.
The rationale behind this is that GWT is offering me the same work style on web applications as Swing for rich clients and it cleanly separates the views from the actual processing tasks using JSON RPC. I have considered also Tapestry, Wicket and JSF for the same task - but all those frameworks - although sound and very mature were forcing me to use a Java server side framework.
In my case this was sometimes a little bit of overhead. GWT on the other hand is very server agnostic and I have successfuly integrated it both with Java servers side as well as with Python/modPython. I know that JSF has more features when it comes to be compared side by side with GWT, but the latter one scores better in terms of application responsiveness and it is starting toa have a complete ecosystem around it (gwt-ext for example).

Linked into http: http://maramureseni.ro/

I found that somebody in Maramures - Cristian China-Birta - is reading my worthless blog and linked it into a group.

Thank you, distant friend!

Is there any realation between LHC and the finaces crash?

Probably not...

Mirror

http://www.nickturpin.com/08site/overview/11.jpg

Interesting suprise

http://www.cwu.edu/~andonie/

When I have been in highschool I have received his book from my former Romanian teacher - Maria Muresan - who still believes that I would have been a better teacher than an enginer and si might be probably right.

It was an wonderful book as it presented a new approach on the aklgorithms and data structures. The book was the first one that presented STL. I In that era it was trendy for us the teenagers to implement our own data structures and to be proud that they work flawlessly. It was the trend imposed by the so called "Olyimpiads". This book was a radical shift for me. All the data structures were already implemented. No need to reinvent the wheel again - but the only thing a programmer should do was to concentrate on the real problems.



I stumbled upon this page today while browsing the internet searching for "Dynamic Programming" resources. I recommend it to all Romanian readers. It is a shame that this book was never reprinted and that is not really known to many readers. The content is available online at author's page. Happy reading.

Is Romania going down?

My personal opinion is yes.
I have reached those arguments after some long deliberation

1. The country seems not able to absorb structural founds from UE. Therefore no major investments can be done there.
Causes: Extreme fiscality, bureaucracy and CORRUPTION.
Consequences: No room for growth - therefore no real life standard increase.

2. No viable internal economy. Most of the goods are imported.
Causes: Ill fated privatizations and headless
Consequences: Unstable national money and growing inflation.

3. No longer viable education system.
Causes: Lack of money in education made the young capable people to avoid education.
Consequences: Mediocre generations to come

4. Massive emigration
Causes: Low life standard
Consequences: No more internal workforce for undertaking businesses

5. 4 milions active people vs. 6 milions retired. Apart from the army, justice, health, education and other kind of clerks.
Causes: all above are viable
Consequences: The state has to direct the funds that could support economic growth into social security.

All this sumber facts were triggered by the fact that the actual government decided to increase the teachers' wages with 50%. From where do this money come? I am not against it - it is mandatory to have good education in a country in order to be competitive, but Romania has really no financial resources to do it? I really guess that this is a pure electoral maneuver. The result of this BAD decision is a depreciation of RON with a couple of percent.
On long term it will generate inflation. I do not really believe that this depreciation will increase the exports because basically Romania sells nothing but workforce abroad. Romania is a country for lohn and outsourcing, there are almost no national brands and the existing are not well perceived.

The National Bank is already incapable to stop the inflation - thy have imposed stricter credit policies - but they are not synergistic with the demagogic governments.

I might be wrong, please contradict me, but I thing thar Romania will be in a crisis in no more than two years from now on. This is my most optimistic estimation. All those can happen sooner because of the global economic instability.