中學時有兩個學弟學妹拍拖, 後來分手鬧翻以後就好像世仇一樣。

今天看到學弟的Facbook,在他的朋友堆裡面, 有學妹的名字。

這個世界,沒有永遠的朋友,更加沒有永遠的敵人。

Be really careful what you say here.  There are more people reading what you wrote then you think there are.   

I just answered this Featured Question; you can answer it too!

I have a complain to make.  That certain amount of money I put in my 401(k), I really lost it.

All that money you've lost — where did it go?

NEW YORK – Trillions in stock market value — gone. Trillions in retirement savings — gone. A huge chunk of the money you paid for your house, the money you're saving for college, the money your boss needs to make payroll — gone, gone, gone.

Whether you're a stock broker or Joe Six-pack, if you have a 401(k), a mutual fund or a college savings plan, tumbling stock markets and sagging home prices mean you've lost a whole lot of the money that was right there on your account statements just a few months ago.

But if you no longer have that money, who does? The fat cats on Wall Street? Some oil baron in Saudi Arabia? The government of China?

Or is it just — gone?

If you're looking to track down your missing money — figure out who has it now, maybe ask to have it back — you might be disappointed to learn that is was never really money in the first place.

Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale, puts it bluntly: The notion that you lose a pile of money whenever the stock market tanks is a "fallacy." He says the price of a stock has never been the same thing as money — it's simply the "best guess" of what the stock is worth.

"It's in people's minds," Shiller explains. "We're just recording a measure of what people think the stock market is worth. What the people who are willing to trade today — who are very, very few people — are actually trading at. So we're just extrapolating that and thinking, well, maybe that's what everyone thinks it's worth."

Shiller uses the example of an appraiser who values a house at $350,000, a week after saying it was worth $400,000.

"In a sense, $50,000 just disappeared when he said that," he said. "But it's all in the mind."

Though something, of course, is disappearing as markets and real estate values tumble. Even if a share of stock you own isn't a wad of bills in your wallet, even if the value of your home isn't something you can redeem at will, surely you can lose potential money — that is, the money that would be yours to spend if you sold your house or emptied out your mutual funds right now.

And if you're a few months away from retirement, or hoping to sell your house and buy a smaller one to help pay for your kid's college tuition, this "potential money" is something you're counting on to get by. For people who need cash and need it now, this is as real as money gets, whether or not it meets the technical definition of the word.

Still, you run into trouble when you think of that potential money as being the same thing as the cash in your purse or your checking account.

"That's a big mistake," says Dale Jorgenson, an economics professor at Harvard.

There's a key distinction here: While the money in your pocket is unlikely to just vanish into thin air, the money you could have had, if only you'd sold your house or drained your stock-heavy mutual funds a year ago, most certainly can.

"You can't enjoy the benefits of your 401(k) if it's disappeared," Jorgenson explains. "If you had it all in financial stocks and they've all gone down by 80 percent — sorry! That is a permanent loss because those folks aren't coming back. We're gonna have a huge shrinkage in the financial sector."

There was a time when nobody had to wonder what happened to the money they used to have. Until paper money was developed in China around the ninth century, money was something solid that had actual value — like a gold coin that was worth whatever that amount of gold was worth, according to Douglas Mudd, curator of the American Numismatic Association's Money Museum in Denver.

Back then, if the money you once had was suddenly gone, there was a simple reason — you spent it, someone stole it, you dropped it in a field somewhere, or maybe a tornado or some other disaster struck wherever you last put it down.

But these days, a lot of things that have monetary value can't be held in your hand.

If you choose, you can pour most of your money into stocks and track their value in real time on a computer screen, confident that you'll get good money for them when you decide to sell. And you won't be alone — staring at millions of computer screens are other investors who share your confidence that the value of their portfolios will hold up.

But that collective confidence, Jorgenson says, is gone. And when confidence is drained out of a financial system, a lot of investors will decide to sell at any price, and a big chunk of that money you thought your investments were worth simply goes away.

If you once thought your investment portfolio was as good as a suitcase full of twenties, you might suddenly suspect that it's not.

In the process, of course, you're losing wealth. But does that mean someone else must be gaining it? Does the world have some fixed amount of wealth that shifts between people, nations and institutions with the ebb and flow of the economy?

Jorgenson says no — the amount of wealth in the world "simply decreases in a situation like this." And he cautions against assuming that your investment losses mean a gain for someone else — like wealthy stock speculators who try to make money by betting that the market will drop.

"Those folks in general have been losing their shirts at a prodigious rate," he said. "They took a big risk and now they're suffering from the consequences."

"Of course, they had a great life, as long as it lasted."

我這個工作的地方很好很好。

不過我們整個部門的人全都是工作狂。

我親愛的上級啊,為甚麼你如此不聽話? 手術做好了應該休息足一個星期,為甚麼你才休息了四天就要回來趕工呢? 我們沒有說過不等你耶!

工夫, 多少天都是一樣的工夫。

計劃上的東西都是很快就可以做好,只要你休息足夠以後第一天開工就可以解決了。

你如此工作狂,叫我如何是好?

I admit it, I'm lazy these days.

On the other hand, Tina Fey doesn't really have editing to do on the script.  I don't blame her for not wanting to play a non-challenging character.

I thought having Queen Latifah playing Gwen Ifill is nice touch.

Though taking my friend's advice, let's hope we don't need to see this for the next four years.

"The world had changed," said the Morgan
Stanley spokesperson yesterday, and you can mark that down as the
understatement of the year.

She was explaining the company's decision late Sunday night to
convert back into a bank holding company some 75 years after the
Glass-Steagall act sundered the House of Morgan into J.P. Morgan, the
bank, and Morgan Stanley, the investment firm. Under pressure from the
Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs made the same choice this weekend.

And so, in a single week, the era
of the independent investment bank has ended. Wall Street as we've
known it for decades has ceased to exist. Six months ago there were
five major investment banks. Two -- Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns --
have failed, Merrill Lynch is selling itself to Bank of America, and
now the last two are becoming commercial banks. Adam Smith, that great
market disciplinarian, is punishing excesses and remaking American
finance long before Congress can get into the act.

Both Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will have two years in which
to arrange their affairs to conform to the capital requirements and
other rules that govern such commercial banks as Wells Fargo, BofA and
Citigroup. That will mean less leverage -- assets that are perhaps 10
times their capital bases instead of the 20 or 30 to 1 they have
sported as investment banks. That in turn means less risk and almost
certainly less profit and lower compensation.

In exchange, they will be able to accept consumer savings deposits
as a ready source of funds. They also get the promise of greater
stability and continued access to Federal Reserve lending facilities
such as the discount window. To be more pointed, they'll have a better
chance at survival, not least because they also will be able to avoid
certain "mark-to-market" accounting rules that have forced writedowns
on troubled securities.

This year's market turmoil had called into question the viability of
the investment-banking business model as far back as March, with Bear
Stearns's collapse. The Fed gave the remaining banks access to
emergency lending, but it was clear from the start that this taxpayer
lifeline wasn't sustainable without a greater degree of federal
oversight. What Morgan Stanley and Goldman did Sunday night was to
choose their poison -- submitting themselves to commercial banking
regulation rather than have it imposed on them either through
legislation or merger, as Merrill recently did in selling itself to
BofA.

The result will be a sturdier but also less-innovative financial
system than we have had in recent decades. That has its benefits; we're
paying the price for some of the more dubious innovations right now.
The new system will have more capital and less direct lending through
such vehicles as asset-backed securities. Direct lending is highly
efficient and has provided funds for many useful ends. But it is also
riskier in a panic because it lacks a capital cushion to absorb the
losses when asset values decline. In another sign of this new world,
Morgan Stanley followed the weekend's news by announcing that it had
sold a 20% stake to Japan's Mitsubishi.

Wall Street's transformation also means that private equity
companies and hedge funds will be the new financial innovators and move
further onto investment banking's traditional turf. But both hedge
funds and private equity have intrinsic limitations on their ability to
raise money and fund their activities, so neither is a perfect
substitute for the former role of the investment banks.

In some sense, the pure-play investment bank was itself a regulatory
artifact. In the depths of the Depression, separating the investment
functions from the banks was considered necessary for the stability of
the commercial banks. Thus Glass-Steagall was born, and this week that
separation can finally be said to be undone.

As for the long-term effects, expect them to be as hard to predict
as the full effects of Glass-Steagall were in 1933. Adaptation and
innovation have been hallmarks of our financial system since before
there was a Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. If Congress is wise next
year as it attempts to reorganize our financial system, it will
recognize the benefits of a sturdier system without crushing its
ability to innovate.

If anyone has told you programming gets easier as years gone by, I can tell you this right now: LIES!

Computer programming is not unlike writing.  As years gone by and you know what doesn't work, you aim for perfection.  You aim for that one plan that works, and works perfectly.  But after you go back and read it one more time, you cannot stop at correcting it only one more time because you know for a fact that it's not perfect, something's missing, why did I write that, that sucks!

Ugh...