4 ms·
This is one of the funniest and more informative articles I have read in a long time.
by coconutrandom 18y ago
This is one of the funniest and more informative articles I have read in a long time.
- michael_dorfman 18y agoAbsolutely! I was pretty skeptical going in (and the headline here didn't help), but it was a great read.
- dpapathanasiou 18y ago"Wall Street on the Tundra" by Michael Lewis would have attracted more upvotes, immediately.
- toffer 18y agoYou would think so, but apparently not... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502769 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=502769
- fortes 18y agoI loved this bit: "Alcoa, the biggest aluminum company in the country, encountered [problems] peculiar to Iceland when, in 2004, it set about erecting its giant smelting plant. The first was the so-called “hidden people”—or, to put it more plainly, elves—in whom some large number of Icelanders, steeped long and thoroughly in their rich folkloric culture, sincerely believe. Before Alcoa could build its smelter it had to defer to a government expert to scour the enclosed plant site and certify that no elves were on or under it. It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”"
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- sethg 18y agoCompared with some of the things American financiers were believing during the height of the bubble, elves and trolls seem downright rational.
- aneesh 18y agoI've come to expect no less from Michael Lewis.