The Banks Were Profitable In January And February Thanks To... AIG

Yay, now I can sleep better knowing that we are in good hands.

The Quiet Coup

Even more push for nationalization... now!

Toyota: Moving Forward

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7932316.stm

The new marketing paradigm: product placement in war. To me this is a hilarious idea. But that's probably just me.

Heres a link to the Vanity Fair article:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904

Oh theres more...

There are, of course, a few jobs in Iceland that any refined, educated person might like to do. Certifying the nonexistence of elves, for instance. (“This will take at least six months—it can be very tricky.”)

Where do I sign up!

Notice that no one asked, What might Icelanders want to do? Or even: What might Icelanders be especially suited to do? No one thought that Icelanders might have some natural gift for smelting aluminum, and, if anything, the opposite proved true. Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered two problems peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”

I blame Iceland's financial crisis on the elves!