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Rescuing Scrum teams keeps me in business,” joked one colleague. It’s funny because it’s true.

True for any buzzword you follow just because it’s the latest and greatest…

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Employing unusually vivid religious imagery for the secular United Nations, President Bush on Thursday praised the “transformative and uplifting power of faith” and said religious belief “leads us to common values.”

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Addressing a two-day interfaith conference that has prompted mixed reactions from other leaders, Bush said religious belief “changed my life” and “sustained me through the challenges and joys of my presidency.” He also suggested faith can transform relations between nations and cultures.

So that would be “common values” like illegal war, murder of civilians, torture, and indefinite imprisonment without evidence.

Isn’t religion great?

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Barack Obama in a collage of over 600 headlines from around the world on November 5th, 2008 after wining the US presidential election.

The full size picture is available, and 78 Mb big..

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Hold on to your hat: the Baltic Dry Index was down at 826 points yesterday, a shattering drop from its high of 11,793 in May.

The index, which tracks the price of shipping bulk cargo, might not sound like a reason to choke on your cornflakes. But it is an unparalleled, ifsubtle, barometer of the global trade in economic building blocks like iron ore, coal and grain – and it is telling a worrying tale.

Put simply, the cost of shipping has dropped through the floor. Sending a tonne of iron ore from Brazil to China in early June would have set you back more than $100 (£62) per tonne, or around $15m per voyage. But freight rates have now dropped to only slightly over $10 per tonne, or just $1.5m for the 70-90 day journey.

As if that wasn’t dramatic enough, the drop in daily charter rates is even sharper. At the peak of the market, a 170,000-tonne Capesize bulk carrier was hired out at the eye-watering daily rate of $234,000. At the beginning of this week, it was $5,611 – a fall of nearly 98 per cent.

Peter Kerr-Dineen, chairman of Howe Robinson shipbrokers, said: “The scale of change in rate is utterly staggering – the market has come down from super-boom territory to pretty close to bust, effectively in two months.”

If you look at a 15 year view of the index, it’s much more interesting:

But still, the speed at which the bubble deflated is amazing…

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This column is dedicated to the top managers of American business whose policies and practices helped ensure Barack Obama’s victory. The mandate for change that sounded across this country is not limited to our new President and Congress. That bell also tolls for you. Obama’s triumph was ignited in part by your failure to understand and respect your own consumers, customers, employees, and end users. The despair that fueled America’s yearning for change and hope grew to maturity in your garden.

Millions of Americans heard President-elect Obama painfully recall his sense of frustration, powerlessness, and outrage when his mother’s health insurer refused to cover her cancer treatments. Worse still, every one of them knew exactly how he felt. That long-simmering indignation is by now the defining experience of every consumer of health care, mortgages, insurance, travel, and financial services—the list goes on.

Obama was elected not only because many Americans feel betrayed and abandoned by their government but because those feelings finally converged with their sense of betrayal at the hands of Corporate America. Their experiences as consumers and as citizens joined to create a wave of revolt against the status quo—as occurred in the American Revolution. Be wary of those who counsel business as usual. This post-election period is a turning point for the business community. It demands an attitude of sober reappraisal and a disposition toward fundamental reinvention. If you don’t do it, someone else will.

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yes, that’s the approximate piracy rate for the pc version of world of goo. we casually mentioned that number recently and the news seemed to propagate far and wide, so we’d like to follow up with some more details, for those interested.

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this is in line with a previous estimate by russell carroll (director of marketing at reflexive) for the game ricochet infinity.  russell estimated a 92% piracy rate and i found his analysis quite interesting (check it out here if you’re curious).  one thing that really jumped out at me was his estimate that preventing 1000 piracy attempts results in only a single additional sale.  this supports our intuitive assessment that people who pirate our game aren’t people who would have purchased it had they not been able to get it without paying.

in our case, we might have even converted more than 1 in a 1000 pirates into legit purchases.  either way, ricochet shipped with DRM, world of goo shipped without it, and there seems to be no difference in the outcomes.

Well, there is a difference in outcome. One company treated their real customers as if they were thieves and spent a lot of money on ineffective DRM software. The other did not.

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“Do you have an opinion on the direction of the market? Maybe you are interested in overweighting or under-weighting a certain sector. Direxion Shares powerful 3x leverage (the highest in the ETF and mutual fund industry) seeks to amplify the performance (positively or negatively) of your investment capital by 300%,” said the company in recent marketing material made available to investors.

For example, if the Russell 1000 Index gains 1% in a trading session, the Direxion Large Cap Bull 3x ETF is designed to gain 3%. On the other hand, the Direxion Large Cap Bear 3x ETF would move in just the opposite direction. If the same Russell index fell 1%, the ETF’s goal would be to gain about 3%.

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If you like to go skydiving, keep a pet alligator in the bathtub, and dream of a winter king crab fishing in the Bering Strait, then you will be right at home with the Direxion ETFs.

Redefining volatility. Wow.

Perhaps daytrading should simply be outlawed. Let’s have a law that says if you buy stock, you are by law required to hold on to them for at least four weeks. Of course, you’d have to outlaw options to make this stick, but still… just when you thought derivatives couldn’t get more insane, along comes Direxion…

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The Republican Governors Association announced its new leadership lineup today after their annual meeting concluded Thursday in Miami.

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford was voted RGA chairman, taking over the top job from Texas Gov. Rick Perry who will now serve as finance chairman. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour is vice-chairman, while Florida Gov. Charlie Crist will serve as chair for the annual RGA gala, and Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue will head up the recruitment effort.

Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle, Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty will also sit on the RGA’s executive committee.

“Republican Governors are natural leaders who will find solutions to our nation’s challenges and bring back the Party,” Sanford said in a statement.

Not on the list? Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who also attended the Miami meeting.

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With Russian tanks only 30 miles from Tbilisi on August 12, Mr Sarkozy told Mr Putin that the world would not accept the overthrow of Georgia’s Government. According to Mr Levitte, the Russian seemed unconcerned by international reaction. “I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls,” Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. “Hang him?” — he asked. “Why not?” Mr Putin replied. “The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein.”

Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: “Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?” Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: “Ah — you have scored a point there.”

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The top map is voting patterns in this 2008 election– the bottom map is cotton production in 1860…