Availability cascade — a self-reinforcing process in which a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse (or “repeat something long enough and it will become true”).
Since the early 90s I have been warning that all this nonsense would all end in tears – I am called “the Angell of Doom” because of my predictions about the control freaks who think they are immune to the uncertainty implicit in the real world. Number mysticism, aided and abetted by computer technology, has turned the world’s financial markets into a huge global casino. First we had ‘the chartists’, who claimed to predict stock movements by pattern matching, as if the market was some recurring dendrochronology. Then came the ‘Masters of the Universe’ and their mathematical models. Developed by the likes of Nobel Laureates Robert Merton and Myron Scholes, these methods are designed to beat the system. Accordingly, hedge funds leverage already huge amounts of money into astronomical sums that are then placed as bets. These ‘big swinging dicks’ of Wall Street and the City of London believe in the mathematical guarantee of ‘riskless risk’, that they can beat the system.
Apparently, Apple has now started labeling their rejection letters with Non-Disclosure (NDA) warnings:
THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS MESSAGE IS UNDER NON-DISCLOSURE
Now that is BS. Balmer might be a monkey boy with “Developers, Developers, Developers” but I think Jobs is in the corner sneaking in “Bend over, bend over, bend over” in the middle.
Silicon Valley’s corps of engineers have little tolerance for dishonesty. The implicit bargain they strike with the MBAs who turn their work into money: Keep the lies over on your side. Lie to investors, partners, reporters; just don’t lie to us. There’s no room for lies in the world of code; software works, or it doesn’t. That may be a Pollyannaish belief, but it’s a common one in the idealism-choked cubicle farms which sprawl along 101.
Sheryl Sandberg: Liar, liar. So true. Engineers (and I) hate the lying biz types.
We’re not quite sure why Apple took down the application yet, we’ve received no communication from Apple thus far. NetShare did not violate any of the Developer or AppStore agreements. We’re hoping we’ll get some feedback from Apple tomorrow. Sorry to all the folks that couldn’t get it in time. We’ll do our best to try to get the application back onto the AppStore if at all possible. At the very least, I would hope Apple will allow it in countries where the provider does permit tethering.
Nullriver Introduces 3G/EDGE Tethering App for iPhone [Updatedx3] - Mac Rumors