Matt Taibbi of the Rolling Stone Magazine recently wrote an excellent long detailed article about the history of Goldman Sachs. The article is one of the best I’ve read in recent memory and it details how the brokerage has been scamming people since the early 1900’s and still does the same today, such as oil trading during the recent oil spike. Goldman was the #1 trader of oil barrels during the oil spike we saw last summer. A barrel of oil gets traded 27 times before it hits our streets. He even goes ahead and details how much of the treasury and federal reserve key political figures were at one point either working or worked with Goldman Sachs in the past. As well as predicting Goldman’s next scam; buying little oil factories and refineries, and other polluters who will soon all get ‘carbon credits’ from the government. To tell you what a ‘carbon credit’ is in a nutshell, it’s for companies whom, if the bill passes, there will be limits for coal plants, utilities, natural-gas distributors and numerous other industries on the amount of carbon emissions it can produce each year. Once a company runs out they have to purchase carbon credits from other companies who were smart enough to save theirs. As the years pass the cap on carbon emissions will get lower and lower, making carbon credits (and sales of them) a trillion dollar plus industry.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine
Or get the slightly different version (maybe all of it’s the same, i’m not reading 14+ pages of internet text twice and comparing) with video commentary from Matt Taibbi and others themselves here: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/28816321/inside_the_great_american_bubble_machine

I won’t have to work till 4am for an 18 hour work day. Until then I have been working on some real good projects lately. Lot of heavy developing and some designing involved. Going to be a long week.

Edit: Make that 5am for 19 hrs

Finally catching back up on school – and understanding the material. Good thing. But now I’m so behind on client work it’s ridicilous and that’s going to occupy the rest of my week. However business is flowing great and I got a e-mail box of 100 leads to go through thus I can’t complain

I originally was writing this as an e-mail, then thought that if I sent this to my same point of contacts at my school, nothing would be done – like before…

There’s a magical disconnect between the management, staff and instructors at the International Academy of Design and Technology (IADT) that should be brought up with the Federal Department of Education.

Since it has a business mind, it is what’s making students fail. Especially since chopping the extra whole week of time out (this was a huge deal for me since I was already on thin margins)- without surveying any students. The way the schedule used it be was 5 1/2 weeks for one class, then 5 1/2 weeks for two other classes, than two weeks off, year around. Now there’s only 5 weeks for one class, then 5 weeks for the other two, then only one week off. Year around. IADT figures less time to graduate=more federal aid money quicker=who cares about anything else (students come first in this situation? – a ripoff of their slogan). This should be sent to presidents of IADT as well, oddly all IADT management contact information is MISSING from the academy website. The contact page doesn’t list them, just everyone else.

I tried dropping out of this class (would of been my first one my entire degree program) so I could retake it next term (more time, more understanding), as always I was advised not to. I’ve been saying it for months between other classes, not understanding the first Flash class or JavaScript fully. Please notice less than half the students passed in the Unit 1 IP for my current class – Multimedia Design II (advanced Flash + ActionScript 3).

I’m not getting a quarter as much as I should out of these good classes and it’s due to an 80 hour work week (running a startup company). The advisor said to do an hour a day, thats not enough. I worked on the unit 1 IP for 4 hours, to find out you have another IP posted somewhere else. Trash. I start on the one you have posted on your site, and somehow my Flash tracing of a picture of mine got deleted from within the file working on it till 5am last night. Thus I’m just taking a screenshot of me viewing the swf file (I didn’t publish it again before it was too late) and pasting it into my Flash file. This will have to do.

I’ve done about 12 hours of homework so far (in 3 days) and have not a damn thing to show for it. This is just Unit 1, LOL (we’re almost on unit 3).

Us students really need to stop being “pushed” through classes just to pass (Chivonne, this message is for you, my student advisor, great advice!), because it’s now just biting us . We MUST understand what we are doing. People don’t understand the material. The work is very unprofessional. I’m sure Professor Leach can vouch for me on this knowing the quality work he creates and other entry level people in the workforce should be.

This week I finally get to work for money instead of my own Web sites. Also have Actionscript 3 Flash/Multimedia Design II class with a great teacher – Matthew Leach. Lots to learn. In a transition to get back to sales leads, e-mails, and social media. Over years I’ve shunned going crazy about social media, but now it’s almost inevitable (! my favorite word) with programs like Twitter and Facebook dominating the Web.

My Pain = Updating all the status updates

My Solution = Ping.fm
Can set what networks you want it to update, including ones like AIM status. I already have Facebook pull my Twitter feeds thus I set it up for everything else. Also cool is that I can update my status from Skype or AIM message.

The Web now has to deal with this problem of short paragraphs of duplicated text of the same status dozens of times. Sort of spammy if you ask me. Search engines won’t usually detect such short duplicate content thus it all looks unique and thus these social media sites are almost uncontrolable with unique fresh content.