Oh What a Fight!

 Hi All,

A parody song of the famous Kirk-Gorn fight of Star Trek the Original Series. Whilst the Gorn only appeared in this episode and one other, in the 'extended universe' they are recurring villains and allies in Star Trek. 

Lighting the Hanukkah Candles

 Hi All, 

Informative video : 

Note : It is Sephardic custom not to light the shammash first and use it to light the rest. Instead, the shammash candle is the last to be lit, and a different candle or a match is used to light all the candles. Also in Sephardic tradition we will sing Psalms 20,67 and 91.

Ashkenazi vs Sephardic Food

 Hi All,

LOL, LOL, LOL!!

HAPPY HANUKAH!

 Hi All, 

Happy Hanukkah!

Judean Dates and brining them back after 2.000 years

 Hi All,

A couple of  videos about the Judean Date Palm Tree. Basically the current date palm trees we see in the land of Israel are not actually Israeli, but Moroccan. In Biblical times and right to the times of Jesus, the Judean date was renowned for its size, healing properties and aphrodisiac effects ,  one of those fruits certainly for the rich and powerful,  including the Emperors of Rome. They became extinct after the Jewish Wars, as Rome burned the trees to the ground. Then 2,000 years later, Archaeologists began to excavate the infamous mountain fortress of Masada: incredibly the Zealots had kept a storehouse of food, including seeds of the Judean Date Palm Tree. Eventually thanks to two scientists they were able to grow a new set of Judean Date Palm Trees. 

Cool eh? 

Shabbat Shalom!

 Hi All, 

Open thread as usual! 

Have a great one!

What is the 'higher understanding?'

 Hi All,

Does anyone know? 😃

Caption competition

 Hi All, 

LOL! 

Is Boris 'loosing it'? 

The Trading Floor

 Hi All,

The office windows were blacked out in an effort to recreate a Las Vegas circa 1920s style casino atmosphere, with people solely focused on their tripod screens and the space telephones that were standard issue. The office space was noisy and chaotic, however, with overflowing ashtrays, cups of tepid coffee and physical paper files piled on tops of the terminals and under the space telephones : men and women yelled and worked with an intensity. The noise. The swearing . Surviving by your wits alone. Trusting only your gut. Dog eat dog.  Space phones were thrown: wastebaskets  were kicked, files thrown everywhere,  curses shouted. And  a miasma of cigarette and cigar smoke  hung everywhere. It was a million miles away from the gentlemanly world of the Bankers, but this place was an important to the financial services eco system as any banker: the Trading Floor.

Time line

 Hi All, 

Brief time-line  to 2115

66 Million years ago: The S’sszorg, a race of intelligent dromaeosauridae  & the dominant civilisation on Earth become entangled in the great universe war, the last battle of which is fought from Earth to Mars. They are on the winning side, but like the Martians are forced to retreat underground after Asteroid bombardment.

1956 : Suez Crisis, Britain and France are forced to pull out of Egypt and the Suez Canal Zone, under American and Russian pressure. Britain withdraws from NATO in protest.

1957-1960 : Russia is the first nation to land on the Moon, begins to colonisation programme. In the following years the great powers of the security council- France, Britain, America and China follow suit.

1960: Dr David Ben Elharar, a gifted  young Physicists, releases his Quantum Portal Theory. Dismissed as a crank and lunatic, he is nonetheless recruited by the IDF to develop his research. In 1961 a quantum portal between the Negev and Tel Aviv is established, but only lasts for a minute, due to the power requirements. In any event this crucial technology enables Israel to defend herself in the last, decisive middle east conflict, which was a greater part of world war three.

1962: During World War Three Russia, China, France, Britain  and the USA launch rocket ships in the hope that should the war turn to nuclear warfare some part of their civilisations survive. A private rocket ship ‘Derek’s Ark’ is also launched at the same time, from Alice Springs in Australia.

1963, February : The end of World War Three; 560 million casualties and the formation of a Federal world government to prevent chaos and anarchy. British Prime Minister Lord Alec Douglas Home becomes the First President of this ‘Earth Allianz’.

1963, March: Elharar and his business partner, Major Jacob Horowitz, form the Elharar-Horowitz Company Ltd. By this time Elharar has successfully developed a MHD generator and an ‘energy scoop mark I’ : Opening up a portal to the sun they send the energy scoop through. It in turn uses the sun’s plasma as fuel to open a return portal to Earth, directly into the MHD generator. This is the beginning of cheap energy on earth and the end to fossil fuels as well as a transportation revolution as people can now go from New York to London in under a minute. It does also make Elharar and Horowitz the world’s richest men. Whilst their company becomes a massive conglomeration which is later broken up, they maintain control via a ‘mishpahhah’ (lit family) system of trusts and interlocking businesses that own stocks in each other (like Japanese keiretsu).

1963, August : Because of the huge amount of energy and radiation The S’sszorg are reawakened. Humans and S’sszorg, after various incidents,  meet at the convention of Birmingham, which results in the Act of Union and the creation of the United Earth Union Allianz, a Federal Democracy based on the American and British models. By 1970, all Earth states with the exception of Switzerland and the Vatican are members (Russia overthrew the Communists and reverted back to an Empire, but this time a constitutional one: in this timeline Princess Margaret converts to Orthodox Christianity and is installed as  Tsarina).

1963-2076: With both Quantum Portal technology and Warp Drive (given by the S’sszorg), Earth goes through a  ‘golden age’ of exploration and colonisation, meeting thousands of species and colonising millions of planets. Venus is terraformed and the Jovian gas giants mined for helium 3, the key ingredient in nuclear fission necessary to power warp drives. First contact occurred in 1966 and on Mars, which was generally a peaceful affair.

2040: In the Tau Ceti system, a ‘gateway’ of wormholes is discovered, each leading to another galaxy. There are potentially hundreds of these wormholes, each opens up new trading and first contact situations. It will take decades to explore each one, there are estimated to be at least 200 of them.

2066: Wormhole 19 leads to the ‘seven heavens’ galaxy, so called because it is made of 7 rings of stars, each as ring as big as the milky way. Here a ‘lost tribe’ of humanity is found, one of those who fled world war 3, now called the Albion Kingdom and whose religion is based upon the teaching of the founder and prophet ‘Derek of Luton’, but surprisingly there are still minority religions within the Kingdom and plant/wildlife that is extinct on Earth. The Albion people are dismissed by Earthers as ‘rustic cousins’, due to their relatively speaking, social conservative and homespun ways.

2076 : Another shock for Earthers is wormhole 20. This leads to Andromeda, whose major polity is the Andromeda Freedom Confederacy, which despite its name is built upon slavery. In this case human slavery and these humans are the descendants of those who fled in the rocket ships in world war 3. Unlike Albion they were enslaved and bred, so there are quadrillions of humans. To make matters worse, these slaves are forcibly injected with an addictive drug, which needs to be given on a daily basis. The dominant species in the Confederacy are the Minotauri or Minotaurs, so called because of their half-man-half bull appearance of human legends.

2076-2079 : repeated skirmishes between Earth forces and the Confederacy. An underground railroad and resistance is formed, resulting in various ‘terrorist’ incidents. The countdown to war gets nearer and nearer.

2079- 2081: Earth blockades the entrance to the Andromeda wormhole in an attempt to keep peace.

2081: A conservative administration comes to power on Earth and in the Confederancy extremists have taken power. This leads to all out war when Confederate forces storm the wormhole and end the blockade. 200 Earth ships are obliterated within minutes, thus demonstrating technological advantage the Confederacy have, their warships not only fan out into the milky way, but all the other galaxies as well.

2081-2083: Earth is isolated and no-one else wants to enter the war : even the Albions say they will stick to ‘splendid isolation’. The war is a ferocious total one and the Confederate high command did not anticipate that the S’sszorg would stand by their human brothers during the conflict, also the Gorf, a rich merchant class species who were brutally expelled from their Andromeda ghettos have been funding the war to enable Earth to stay in the fight,  but nonetheless it is a war which Earth is loosing.

 2082:  two Albion Chemists , Deborah and Jonathan Mocotta, discover a counter medication for the drug used to keep the human slaves in order, but even to produce at cost price will be a fortune. The Emperor of the Byzantines agrees to pay for this and at the signing ceremony on Albion Prime, the Confederacy launch an invasion of the system, during which Earth President Nigella Farage is killed, with Vice -President Antonio Garibaldi  being sworn in as President . This brings Albion and more importantly the oldest, most powerful civilisation -The Byzantine Empire- into the war: within 24 hours Mars, Nachash, Svinge , Koobe, Sh'aboo and the K’hari  declare war upon Andromeda . From then onwards the outcome of the war is inevitable.

2083-2089 : With the war now expanded to almost every species, this is truly an intergalactic war, which finally ends in 2089, after 8 bloody years of conflict.

2090 :Peace Treaty signed and pillars of the new interstellar system created- such as a security council and Galactic Development Banks-  in an effort to never have such a massive war again, with the Andromeda Confederacy broke up into five thousand states.

2090-present : Relocation of over 4 Septillion former slaves amongst Earth, Albion and Byzantine (who create a ‘Raj’ for this purpose).  Under the ‘every sperm is sacred’ act, the allied powers also agree not to destroy the millions of sperm and egg factories used to ‘breed’ humans, but to increase production to maximum, until there are no sperm and eggs left. With the return of millions of soldiers from the war, these three decisions create a massive baby, property, economic and social boom, which everyone in the galaxies enjoy. However after twenty years the boom is quickly turning to a bubble and now a mania: it is a question of when and where, not whether it will happen.

 2092: the GECO (Galactic Economic Community) is formed by former states of the Andromeda Confederacy and middle ranking galactic powers, as a free trading bloc, although in recent years it has attempted to have the trappings of a super state, such as an anthem, flag, parliament and single currency.

2112: First contact with the Methi civilisation from wormhole 22. 

BISTRO

 Hi All, 

People often talk about 'toxic assets' and in popular thought it makes you think that these assets are some kind of radioactive jelly than one shouldn't touch for fear of being killed in a painful way. To some in the press a toxic asset is something that no-one can put a value on and is therefore worthless, but in fact this is only partly true, A more accurate definition of a toxic asset is an asset in which the seller cannot agree the price that a buyer is willing to purchase that asset. An asset might have a face value of 100 units of currency, but in the market place where things are bought and sold, the price could go up or down, but if this asset was suddenly being  offered  for half or a quarter of a unit (thus there is still some 'value' being attached to it) what seller would be willing to let that asset go at such a loss? This is exactly what happens to toxic assets: those wanting to sell the assets don't want to do so at the price a buyer is offering, thus the market place breaks down and it really becomes impossible to put a fair value onto the asset. 

This was the case in 2115 with  derivatives- an asset backed by an underlying asset-  traditionally used in day to day and short term trading, either as hedges or as nothing other than bets, one or two whizz kids at investment banks decided that derivatives could be deployed and sold long term. Thus the BISTRO ( Bankers Indexed Security Treasuries Offering) was born. Simply put BISTROS were bonds, with the underlying value being a jumble of different assets: everything from mortgages, stocks, shares, government bonds, local government securities, personal, commercial, corporate loans etc etc, the fee/interest/coupon being the interest rate charged on this mixed bag of assets, some of which were purely synthetic.  There was one BISTRO offered at $30 billion  (the latest price of a Picasso), with the interest being 1.4% plus the percentage increase for whatever the next Picasso sold for, if the price didn't go up, neither did the interest rate.  The Falklands has a population of 13,000, yet there were a dozen BISTROs which were based upon 10 million Falkland Mortgages, the cost of the BISTRO based upon the average house price and the interest being determined by the average local rate and the average annual increase in local house prices plus 1%: but the BISTRO would also automatically follow the average rate of default, repossession and falls in prices.  The BISTROs also evolved into ever bigger products, first the BISTRO book, then the BISTRO bible (in the sense of a collection of books) , followed by the BISTRO Library (containing millions of BISTROs, thousands of books and hundreds of bibles). 

The BISTRO was meant to reduce risk, by spreading out and balancing it around the galactic system. What they did do was the opposite, because traditionally banks- who take money and lend it out -  were the deciders of who got credit and because this would actually effect a bank's profit and loss, were actually cautious about who got this credit and would be hands on for those who did get credit. With BISTRO, all a bank had to do was make a loan and convert it into a BISTRO and then it didn't matter to the bank as they were now off the hook for things like defaults and non-payments, so anyone could get credit, even up to the so-called 'NINJAS' (no income, job, assets or securities ). 

This worked all right, up to the time when it didn't. As these loans became bad and houses were  foreclosed, it did of course have an impact on the real economy and therefore these BISTROs which had become so complex and large, that to value them properly would take more time than anyone thought they had. Even the best BISTROs would have losses attached to them and because they'd been spread all over the interstellar financial system and because they were 'over the counter', rather than traded on a public exchange, no-one really knew who held what and how good or bad these BISTROs were. The result was a 'credit crunch' were banks and other financial institutions refused to lend to each other: if left unchecked this would lead to banks not only refusing to lend to good companies and borrowers, but for them to call in existing loans, thus forcing businesses and people to cut their own lines of credit and spending, resulting in a depression. 

At this point the central or reserve bank of Earth, The Bank of Earth, took on its role as lender of last resort, pumping in trillions of Earth Dollars into the financial system, in an attempt to kick start interbank lending. Chairman Jerome Sven, a mild mannered Swede, was on the space phones, trying to cajole his counterparts in the 4 other institutions that mattered to help out and within 24 hours the National Bank of Albion, The GECO Central Bank and Her Imperial Majesty's Treasury of the Byzantine Empire had flooded the system with trillions of bricks of Gold encased Liquidium and collectively issued a statement to their own banks to 'continue to lend'. 

This brief rally was halted by the actions of a different Earth body - inter agency turf wars being part of Earth politics -the Earth Insurance Reserve Fund, whose job was to place insolvent banks into administration and to pay out deposit insurance. This works well with local banks who had  a minimal interstellar presence, the Fund takes over 3,000 banks a year in good times, thanks to the fragmented Earth banking system, where there are millions of banks. However the EIRF unilaterally took over Bank Alba, a massive Interstellar Scottish Bank....