I read a study/survey a few years ago that showed the average lawyer made about $60,000 per year, while the same year the average sysadmin made about $62,000. Prices for both are up now, but I wouldn't be surprised if the ratios are about the same.
Also IIRC during the Microsoft antitrust case the MS attorney David Boies' standard billing rate was cited as $600 per hour, for one of the top litigation lawyers in the US. That was a while back, of course, and I could be completely wrong. According to an article I was just looking at, partner billing rates at many firms are set artificially high to prevent anyone from hiring them on an hourly basis. Quote:
Noted litigator David Boies (formerly partner at Cravath and now principal at his own firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner) criticized the rates in a quote in the article:
Frankly, it's a little hard to think about anyone who doesn't save lives being worth this much money," says David Boies, one of the nation's best-known trial lawyers, at the Armonk, N.Y., office of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP.
Another lawyer, Steve Sussman (who often handles high-stakes contingency matters), explains that the hourly fee of $1,100 is intended in part to discourage anyone from hiring him on an hourly basis.
... pet peeve - Internet articles that are not dated. I finally found a posted-by date at the bottom, of 2007.
Unfortunately, banning the munition as you describe would have the opposite effect that you desire. It would allow anybody anywhere to outprice, outmarket you before you have a chance to develop the new tech sufficiently. Patents were created for good reasons, despite the fact that they (like much of the legal system) have been messed up. I don't know if change for the better will occur, and I'm not even sure what the better would be in detail, but banning patents would not be better.
So, you're hypothesizing a kind of quantum tunneling by neutrinos? Interesting. Probably wrong, but better than anything I've come up with. It raises interesting speculations about virtual particles (to some extent a real proton is still virtual), frames of reference and causality. Is space warped inside a nuclear particle or by one of the nuclear forces? If nothing else, there might be a good science fiction bit to be made out of this.
I suspect the '732 km' is just the round number provided to the media. It's probably more like '732.1523568134 km', which would alter your computation. Of course I'm too lazy to RTFM.:)
Just curious - can you have an environment shared on two monitors? I presently run a highly tuned Desktop Cube in Compiz, on a dual-monitor Ubuntu setup. I've read about a way to run Compiz in E17 but haven't tried it. IIRC some of the Compiz functionality was already in E17? I loved E16 back in the day, despite various issues.
It may be that other vendors appear to be able to do the project for less money per TFLOP. If (example with made up numbers) an SC based on the POWER7 cores has 100,000 cores and they cost $1000 per core, but another Intel-based SC with 200,000 cores can do the same work and costs $400 per core with the same operating cost, then the latter machine is cheaper for the performance required - which is the figure of merit.
. That really was true back in the day when IBM owned the mainframe business. Numerous anecdotes exist about their business practices back then. Of course those business practices pissed much of their customer base off, made a significant fraction of all sysadmins virulently anti-IBM and eventually got them into antitrust trouble and arguably nearly destroyed the company. (Hmm. Sounds familiar - what other company went the same path? Hmmm) When I was in school literally nobody in the CS department was planning to work in the IBM environment, much like more recent times when folks in CS were against working for Microsoft. I suppose it's due to that pesky libertarian streak that runs through the computin community.
One widely discussed anecdote (I have no idea if it's true or not) went as follows: A sysadmin decided to buy a third-party plug-compatible printer and plugged it into the mainframe (which was leased from IBM with a full service contract). The IBM salesman came by on his periodic visit, and noticed the printer. Soon a phalanx of IBM VPs visited - not the sysadmin, not his manager, but the CEO of the company in another city. And they would tell the CEO that, while they believed in the free market, they felt it was important to let the CEO know that, if any problems occurred, since there was non-IBM hardware plugged in, they would not be able to tell if it was an IBM problem and could not initiate a service call until it was proved (by the sysadmin and the third party vendor) that the third party printer was not the problem This might take, oh, a month or two, and in the meantime the mainframe would be out of service. The CEO would call the sysadmin's manager, the sysadmin would be fired, and the third party printer would be tossed out the back door.
I don't know if IBM actually did that (they later learned their lesson by all accounts and as we all know have been promoting open source and other 'good things' - and I think have earned a place as a major player in a very competitive field), but if you read "Father, Son and Company" by Tom Watson Jr., there are anecdotes from the early days that were much worse. And a friend of mine who used to work for General Foods told me about things he did regarding Jell-O and competitors on store shelves that were very similar, where local food store managers did get fired for promotions that GF didn't like, so it does happen.
Wasn't it last year when a router 'configuration error' resulted in something like 20% of all DNS requests being routed through a Chinese DNS server? Any upstream DNS server has a de facto capability to reroute any domain to any place desired. No, it's not legal, and not according to the RFCs but hey. Your cable provider could do it, and so could the root servers. Do they? I don't know.
I remember when the cost of memory dropped below 1c per bit - $10,000 per megabyte. (IIRC it was about 1972, close to the time when RAM began to take over from core.)
What about LTE 4G phones? They won't be able to do LTE-advanced will they? Assuming not, when is all that LTE-advanced goodness likely to happen - both in network and in the phones? Not that it matters much to me - I'm about 50 miles from the nearest 4G-capable towers. They say next year for sure...:P
According to the local VZW rep, as long as you get another smartphone (or keep the one you've got) your unlimited plan will be grandfathered in. Of course they could change their mind, but hey.
Actually IMHO it would be easiest and most sensible for them to just have reasonable ramp-up from the static limit, so if you go over you just get charged extra at the same equivalent per-MB rate. Say you're paying a hypothetical $40 per month for the data portion of the contract, for 4GB (easy math...) That's 10c per MB, so just charge 10c per MB over the 4GB until the end of the month. If (due to network issues) it's necessary to discourage serious overuse, then increase the rate on a sliding scale - 15c/MB for 5-6GB, 20c/MB for 6-8GB, or whatever. If peak traffic times are an issue, then only charge for overuse during peak times to encourage folks to do their serious downloading in the middle of the night - enterprising app builders will then build deferred download tools, and life will be great for both providers and customers.
These companies should be able to do that - this is very much like the old long distance rate structure, at least after the MCI vs. AT&T suit forced AT&T to open their lines to competition! I suppose that the fact that such competitive rate schedules are not available is a clue that the cellphone business is essentially a kind of segmented monopoly - call it a triopoly - in the US.
They say no - I was in looking at the Bionic last week, and have a grandfathered plan as well. According to them, as long as I stay with a smartphone my unlimited plan is grandfathered. But if I drop to a cheap phone then I'll lose it. How do you like the Bionic? I tried several of the 4G phones and it seemed the best of the ones they had in the store, but I've been hanging on to my Treo for four years now so I'm not up on the latest.
You're ignoring the fact that as a result of those high rates there was huge pressure for creating a jungle of loopholes and exceptions that reduced the effective rates quite a bit, and folks in the higher brackets moved their money elsewhere where it couldn't be taxed, thereby taking it out of the system and reducing economic growth. Interesting that it was Kennedy who ran on lowering both taxes and expenditures, and balancing the budget. Reducing rates from 91% resulted in a huge increase in government revenues, as folks didn't work so hard to hide their income.
The original platform of the proponents of the 16th amendment was that only the top 2% would be taxed, and the maximum rate would never exceed (IIRC) 5%. The opponents argued that the income tax would allow the federal government to grow out of bounds, and centralize all political power to the federal government away from the states. We can see how that turned out.
There is a misconception that the rich are job creators.
- it's no myth. Read the literature. I haven't kept up with the specific figures recently but the great majority (>70%?) of all new jobs are created by small business. Fortune 500 companies grow by buying smaller companies and cutting costs. As a result the big companies are responsible for a net loss of jobs in most years.
Or, as a friend told me on Friday night, "I've never had a job that wasn't provided by a rich guy. Poor guys don't start companies, and they don't hire people."
The vast, vast majority of folks taking trips overseas are solidly middle class - that's why cruise ships and tours nearly all cater to the two-week-vacation crowd. There's a reason why the cruise ships are getting bigger - more clients per trip with only slightly larger operating costs adds up to lower cost per passenger and much larger market base.
Or, think of it this way - if you had $1 million, would you blow it on trips and cars, or would you try to make something interesting? Most people who get that money by effort (i.e. not the lottery) are already motivated to make interesting things, and so they try it again. The start-up thing is challenging and actually kind of addictive.
Take my own case in point - the numbers are slightly different because it was a while back, but in early 1992 I sold $200,000 worth of stock in a company I helped start but had since left. (IMHO $200,000 back then was pretty equivalent to $1,000,000 today with inflation.) This was enough to pay the taxes and use the remaining money to hire two people in the new consulting company I was putting together. I had hired one person, and things were going OK. Then Clinton pushed through a retroactive tax increase and several changes in tax law, which ended up costing a lot more taxes - including everything my total tax bill was over $120,000. (My case was a bit unusual due to the circumstances - most people weren't hit that hard.) As a result we had to borrow money on the house to pay the tax bill, I had to lay off the one worker and could not hire the other. I was then unable to continue with the business as originally planned - it sputtered along as a one-man company for a couple of years but I was never able to get enough cash to really do what was necessary to start growing.
So Clinton's 'soak the rich' scheme cost the nation at least two, and arguably three jobs in that year and some unknowable number after that. Adding up, if I had succeeded for just two years, I and my employees would have paid more taxes than Clinton's plan collected. Everything after that would have been gravy for the government. That's the real point.
At present the top 5% of income earners pay just about 1/2 of all the income taxes, while the bottom 45% pay zero or actually negative taxes (they receive money from the government instead of paying taxes.)
Funny thing, I said nothing about race. I spoke of a voluntary behavior (listening to rap music) that is not at all restricted to any race. I could have used baseball playing, beer drinking, catfish noodling or any of a thousand other activities, many of which are commonly subject to generalizations and stereotyping. I used rap by chance, and it happened to trigger in you the kind of assumptions that I was pointing to. So, thanks!:) I suggest that you try to get to know some people who actually run companies (small or large), and find out what they are really like, what are their needs, hopes and fears. You might be surprised.
I wish I was. I thought my present job was going to involve some interesting machine learning but it's much more mundane. I'm starting to feel stale. I _really_ want to be stretching my brain around neural networks and such. I was teaching myself Erlang for a while (it has a really nice approach to dynamic clustering, although it ain't the fastest out there) but I've kinda slacked off on that. I haven't decided what to do about it.
Oddly enough, these days I"m a computer geek writing web-based data mining systems.
In the past I've been VP of R&D for a bleeding edge startup, project scientist in the Robotics Institute at CMU. After CMU, I was control systems manager for a nuclear maintenance robotics company, and product manager for a pretty cool document management software product for the NeXT computer. I once spent the entire afternoon watching Steve Jobs tear apart our user interface and tell us how it ought to be done - and rightly so.:) The head of our company and inventor of the product wasn't very happy, even though Steve told us that if it wasn't good, he wouldn't have spent the time.
A number of years later I was a senior sysadmin building the first serious web server farm for a competitor to Halliburton. this would eventually replace over 100 separate web server projects around the company, running on every imaginable architecture. To get approval I had to get the C-level execs for several divisions AND the very serious global networks division to agree on the system proposal and get it built.
Funny - looking back on all that, I've done some interesting stuff. At the time it was just what I did.
I've long had some pretty strong interest in the implications of considering economics as a 'complex adaptive system' (look it up, it's an interesting area of study). Systems Science FTW!
When handled correctly, "mortgage-backed security derivatives" are economically equivalent to the title insurance required when you buy a house.
Your statement about C-level executives is exactly equivalent to someone saying "Those kids who listen to rap are all a bunch of murderers, cop-killers and junkie-thieves. We should put them all in prison." It's a facile, self-serving, 'classist' and ignorant statement.
Just as almost any demographic group, the vast, vast majority of C-levels are good hard-working folks who are really trying to do the best for their company, their investors, their customers and the public. You hear about the bad'uns, but they are a tiny minority - from my own experience I would argue a smaller percentage than in most other demographics. Folks who can't be trusted tend not to get promoted.
I've worked with a number of such folks at all levels from startups with five people to Fortune 500 companies. Most of them got where they because they worked well with others, maybe had some charisma, tended to make the best decisions given insufficient information (often it's not make the right decision, it's making a decision and making it become the right one by making a success of it), and the ability to instill confidence and optimism in the work force.
But just like auto drivers - the ones who drove home today without incident don't make the news - CEOs that just run good companies well are rarely in the news. The 1% or less who make the news are not typical.
It was not good for UBS, but IMHO it was good for the system. This is an example of moral hazard in action - that principle that was violated by at least some of the US bank bailouts.
As for the size of the loss, forex trading tends to be very highly leveraged, so it's possible to have a hypothetical risk of 100 or more times the amount of a transaction - but with a very low probability of that risk occurring. The risk is not a single number but a probability density function (like a gaussian) with a very long tail (where the 'black swans' live). I presume that the bank's risk analysis system was not correctly recognizing the potential risk and requiring the appropriate hedge .
I certainly don't know the specifics of this incident, but black swan events are very difficult to quantify and it's a delicate balance between being overprotective (leaving money on the table) and being underprotective (leaving the bank vulnerable). A very small difference in the 'number' chosen can make a huge difference in the result. And to make things worse, that assumes that one has thought of and correctly judged the impact fanout of all the possible relevant risk factors - should an asteroid impact, or a large earthquake under London be included in the computation?
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Ironically, IIRC the Girl Scouts have been the subject of copyright enforcement for singing 'Kumbaya' around the campfire. :P
I read a study/survey a few years ago that showed the average lawyer made about $60,000 per year, while the same year the average sysadmin made about $62,000. Prices for both are up now, but I wouldn't be surprised if the ratios are about the same.
Also IIRC during the Microsoft antitrust case the MS attorney David Boies' standard billing rate was cited as $600 per hour, for one of the top litigation lawyers in the US. That was a while back, of course, and I could be completely wrong. According to an article I was just looking at, partner billing rates at many firms are set artificially high to prevent anyone from hiring them on an hourly basis. Quote:
Noted litigator David Boies (formerly partner at Cravath and now principal at his own firm, Boies, Schiller & Flexner) criticized the rates in a quote in the article:
Frankly, it's a little hard to think about anyone who doesn't save lives being worth this much money," says David Boies, one of the nation's best-known trial lawyers, at the Armonk, N.Y., office of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP.
Another lawyer, Steve Sussman (who often handles high-stakes contingency matters), explains that the hourly fee of $1,100 is intended in part to discourage anyone from hiring him on an hourly basis.
... pet peeve - Internet articles that are not dated. I finally found a posted-by date at the bottom, of 2007.
Unfortunately, banning the munition as you describe would have the opposite effect that you desire. It would allow anybody anywhere to outprice, outmarket you before you have a chance to develop the new tech sufficiently. Patents were created for good reasons, despite the fact that they (like much of the legal system) have been messed up. I don't know if change for the better will occur, and I'm not even sure what the better would be in detail, but banning patents would not be better.
So, you're hypothesizing a kind of quantum tunneling by neutrinos? Interesting. Probably wrong, but better than anything I've come up with. It raises interesting speculations about virtual particles (to some extent a real proton is still virtual), frames of reference and causality. Is space warped inside a nuclear particle or by one of the nuclear forces? If nothing else, there might be a good science fiction bit to be made out of this.
I suspect the '732 km' is just the round number provided to the media. It's probably more like '732.1523568134 km', which would alter your computation. Of course I'm too lazy to RTFM. :)
Just curious - can you have an environment shared on two monitors? I presently run a highly tuned Desktop Cube in Compiz, on a dual-monitor Ubuntu setup. I've read about a way to run Compiz in E17 but haven't tried it. IIRC some of the Compiz functionality was already in E17? I loved E16 back in the day, despite various issues.
It may be that other vendors appear to be able to do the project for less money per TFLOP. If (example with made up numbers) an SC based on the POWER7 cores has 100,000 cores and they cost $1000 per core, but another Intel-based SC with 200,000 cores can do the same work and costs $400 per core with the same operating cost, then the latter machine is cheaper for the performance required - which is the figure of merit.
"nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"
. That really was true back in the day when IBM owned the mainframe business. Numerous anecdotes exist about their business practices back then. Of course those business practices pissed much of their customer base off, made a significant fraction of all sysadmins virulently anti-IBM and eventually got them into antitrust trouble and arguably nearly destroyed the company. (Hmm. Sounds familiar - what other company went the same path? Hmmm) When I was in school literally nobody in the CS department was planning to work in the IBM environment, much like more recent times when folks in CS were against working for Microsoft. I suppose it's due to that pesky libertarian streak that runs through the computin community.
One widely discussed anecdote (I have no idea if it's true or not) went as follows: A sysadmin decided to buy a third-party plug-compatible printer and plugged it into the mainframe (which was leased from IBM with a full service contract). The IBM salesman came by on his periodic visit, and noticed the printer. Soon a phalanx of IBM VPs visited - not the sysadmin, not his manager, but the CEO of the company in another city. And they would tell the CEO that, while they believed in the free market, they felt it was important to let the CEO know that, if any problems occurred, since there was non-IBM hardware plugged in, they would not be able to tell if it was an IBM problem and could not initiate a service call until it was proved (by the sysadmin and the third party vendor) that the third party printer was not the problem This might take, oh, a month or two, and in the meantime the mainframe would be out of service. The CEO would call the sysadmin's manager, the sysadmin would be fired, and the third party printer would be tossed out the back door.
I don't know if IBM actually did that (they later learned their lesson by all accounts and as we all know have been promoting open source and other 'good things' - and I think have earned a place as a major player in a very competitive field), but if you read "Father, Son and Company" by Tom Watson Jr., there are anecdotes from the early days that were much worse. And a friend of mine who used to work for General Foods told me about things he did regarding Jell-O and competitors on store shelves that were very similar, where local food store managers did get fired for promotions that GF didn't like, so it does happen.
Funny thing, at my school it was just the opposite.
Wasn't it last year when a router 'configuration error' resulted in something like 20% of all DNS requests being routed through a Chinese DNS server? Any upstream DNS server has a de facto capability to reroute any domain to any place desired. No, it's not legal, and not according to the RFCs but hey. Your cable provider could do it, and so could the root servers. Do they? I don't know.
Nicely done! :)
I remember when the cost of memory dropped below 1c per bit - $10,000 per megabyte. (IIRC it was about 1972, close to the time when RAM began to take over from core.)
Now get off my lawn! :D
What about LTE 4G phones? They won't be able to do LTE-advanced will they? Assuming not, when is all that LTE-advanced goodness likely to happen - both in network and in the phones? Not that it matters much to me - I'm about 50 miles from the nearest 4G-capable towers. They say next year for sure... :P
According to the local VZW rep, as long as you get another smartphone (or keep the one you've got) your unlimited plan will be grandfathered in. Of course they could change their mind, but hey.
[pedant-says] I think the 4G phones are more for grown-ups[/pedant-says] :)
Actually IMHO it would be easiest and most sensible for them to just have reasonable ramp-up from the static limit, so if you go over you just get charged extra at the same equivalent per-MB rate. Say you're paying a hypothetical $40 per month for the data portion of the contract, for 4GB (easy math...) That's 10c per MB, so just charge 10c per MB over the 4GB until the end of the month. If (due to network issues) it's necessary to discourage serious overuse, then increase the rate on a sliding scale - 15c /MB for 5-6GB, 20c/MB for 6-8GB, or whatever. If peak traffic times are an issue, then only charge for overuse during peak times to encourage folks to do their serious downloading in the middle of the night - enterprising app builders will then build deferred download tools, and life will be great for both providers and customers.
These companies should be able to do that - this is very much like the old long distance rate structure, at least after the MCI vs. AT&T suit forced AT&T to open their lines to competition! I suppose that the fact that such competitive rate schedules are not available is a clue that the cellphone business is essentially a kind of segmented monopoly - call it a triopoly - in the US.
They say no - I was in looking at the Bionic last week, and have a grandfathered plan as well. According to them, as long as I stay with a smartphone my unlimited plan is grandfathered. But if I drop to a cheap phone then I'll lose it. How do you like the Bionic? I tried several of the 4G phones and it seemed the best of the ones they had in the store, but I've been hanging on to my Treo for four years now so I'm not up on the latest.
You're ignoring the fact that as a result of those high rates there was huge pressure for creating a jungle of loopholes and exceptions that reduced the effective rates quite a bit, and folks in the higher brackets moved their money elsewhere where it couldn't be taxed, thereby taking it out of the system and reducing economic growth. Interesting that it was Kennedy who ran on lowering both taxes and expenditures, and balancing the budget. Reducing rates from 91% resulted in a huge increase in government revenues, as folks didn't work so hard to hide their income.
The original platform of the proponents of the 16th amendment was that only the top 2% would be taxed, and the maximum rate would never exceed (IIRC) 5%. The opponents argued that the income tax would allow the federal government to grow out of bounds, and centralize all political power to the federal government away from the states. We can see how that turned out.
There is a misconception that the rich are job creators.
- it's no myth. Read the literature. I haven't kept up with the specific figures recently but the great majority (>70%?) of all new jobs are created by small business. Fortune 500 companies grow by buying smaller companies and cutting costs. As a result the big companies are responsible for a net loss of jobs in most years.
Or, as a friend told me on Friday night, "I've never had a job that wasn't provided by a rich guy. Poor guys don't start companies, and they don't hire people."
The vast, vast majority of folks taking trips overseas are solidly middle class - that's why cruise ships and tours nearly all cater to the two-week-vacation crowd. There's a reason why the cruise ships are getting bigger - more clients per trip with only slightly larger operating costs adds up to lower cost per passenger and much larger market base.
Or, think of it this way - if you had $1 million, would you blow it on trips and cars, or would you try to make something interesting? Most people who get that money by effort (i.e. not the lottery) are already motivated to make interesting things, and so they try it again. The start-up thing is challenging and actually kind of addictive.
Take my own case in point - the numbers are slightly different because it was a while back, but in early 1992 I sold $200,000 worth of stock in a company I helped start but had since left. (IMHO $200,000 back then was pretty equivalent to $1,000,000 today with inflation.) This was enough to pay the taxes and use the remaining money to hire two people in the new consulting company I was putting together. I had hired one person, and things were going OK. Then Clinton pushed through a retroactive tax increase and several changes in tax law, which ended up costing a lot more taxes - including everything my total tax bill was over $120,000. (My case was a bit unusual due to the circumstances - most people weren't hit that hard.) As a result we had to borrow money on the house to pay the tax bill, I had to lay off the one worker and could not hire the other. I was then unable to continue with the business as originally planned - it sputtered along as a one-man company for a couple of years but I was never able to get enough cash to really do what was necessary to start growing.
So Clinton's 'soak the rich' scheme cost the nation at least two, and arguably three jobs in that year and some unknowable number after that. Adding up, if I had succeeded for just two years, I and my employees would have paid more taxes than Clinton's plan collected. Everything after that would have been gravy for the government. That's the real point.
At present the top 5% of income earners pay just about 1/2 of all the income taxes, while the bottom 45% pay zero or actually negative taxes (they receive money from the government instead of paying taxes.)
haha- cool! :D
Funny thing, I said nothing about race. I spoke of a voluntary behavior (listening to rap music) that is not at all restricted to any race. I could have used baseball playing, beer drinking, catfish noodling or any of a thousand other activities, many of which are commonly subject to generalizations and stereotyping. I used rap by chance, and it happened to trigger in you the kind of assumptions that I was pointing to. So, thanks! :) I suggest that you try to get to know some people who actually run companies (small or large), and find out what they are really like, what are their needs, hopes and fears. You might be surprised.
I wish I was. I thought my present job was going to involve some interesting machine learning but it's much more mundane. I'm starting to feel stale. I _really_ want to be stretching my brain around neural networks and such. I was teaching myself Erlang for a while (it has a really nice approach to dynamic clustering, although it ain't the fastest out there) but I've kinda slacked off on that. I haven't decided what to do about it.
Oddly enough, these days I"m a computer geek writing web-based data mining systems.
In the past I've been VP of R&D for a bleeding edge startup, project scientist in the Robotics Institute at CMU. After CMU, I was control systems manager for a nuclear maintenance robotics company, and product manager for a pretty cool document management software product for the NeXT computer. I once spent the entire afternoon watching Steve Jobs tear apart our user interface and tell us how it ought to be done - and rightly so. :) The head of our company and inventor of the product wasn't very happy, even though Steve told us that if it wasn't good, he wouldn't have spent the time.
A number of years later I was a senior sysadmin building the first serious web server farm for a competitor to Halliburton. this would eventually replace over 100 separate web server projects around the company, running on every imaginable architecture. To get approval I had to get the C-level execs for several divisions AND the very serious global networks division to agree on the system proposal and get it built.
Funny - looking back on all that, I've done some interesting stuff. At the time it was just what I did.
I've long had some pretty strong interest in the implications of considering economics as a 'complex adaptive system' (look it up, it's an interesting area of study). Systems Science FTW!
When handled correctly, "mortgage-backed security derivatives" are economically equivalent to the title insurance required when you buy a house.
Your statement about C-level executives is exactly equivalent to someone saying "Those kids who listen to rap are all a bunch of murderers, cop-killers and junkie-thieves. We should put them all in prison." It's a facile, self-serving, 'classist' and ignorant statement.
Just as almost any demographic group, the vast, vast majority of C-levels are good hard-working folks who are really trying to do the best for their company, their investors, their customers and the public. You hear about the bad'uns, but they are a tiny minority - from my own experience I would argue a smaller percentage than in most other demographics. Folks who can't be trusted tend not to get promoted.
I've worked with a number of such folks at all levels from startups with five people to Fortune 500 companies. Most of them got where they because they worked well with others, maybe had some charisma, tended to make the best decisions given insufficient information (often it's not make the right decision, it's making a decision and making it become the right one by making a success of it), and the ability to instill confidence and optimism in the work force.
But just like auto drivers - the ones who drove home today without incident don't make the news - CEOs that just run good companies well are rarely in the news. The 1% or less who make the news are not typical.
It was not good for UBS, but IMHO it was good for the system. This is an example of moral hazard in action - that principle that was violated by at least some of the US bank bailouts.
As for the size of the loss, forex trading tends to be very highly leveraged, so it's possible to have a hypothetical risk of 100 or more times the amount of a transaction - but with a very low probability of that risk occurring. The risk is not a single number but a probability density function (like a gaussian) with a very long tail (where the 'black swans' live). I presume that the bank's risk analysis system was not correctly recognizing the potential risk and requiring the appropriate hedge .
I certainly don't know the specifics of this incident, but black swan events are very difficult to quantify and it's a delicate balance between being overprotective (leaving money on the table) and being underprotective (leaving the bank vulnerable). A very small difference in the 'number' chosen can make a huge difference in the result. And to make things worse, that assumes that one has thought of and correctly judged the impact fanout of all the possible relevant risk factors - should an asteroid impact, or a large earthquake under London be included in the computation?