Re: Economic meltdowns in SF

"Sean O'Hara" <seanohara@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:64fr62F2bha9jU1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In the Year of the Earth Rat, the Great and Powerful Taki Kogoma
declared:
>> On 2008-03-20, Alexey Romanov <alexey_r@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>> allegedly proclaimed to rec.arts.sf.written:
>>> On Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:45:32 -0400, pullo wrote:
>>>> "William December Starr" <wdstarr@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
>>>> news:frppvh$9i0$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>>>>> In article <Xns9A64E2CE22D79genewardsmithsbcglob@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
>>>>> Gene Ward Smith <gene@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> said:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I don't know if people want to count it as sf, but Clancy's
>>>>>> Ryanverse, in Debt of Honor, has economic warfare by Japan against
>>>>>> the US. A veritable economic Pearl Harbor, in fact.
>>>>> Which was circumvented by a method so simple that only a team of
>>>>> Clancy geniuses could have taken hundreds of pages to think of it.
>>>> AOL. I recall when I read it thinking: 'Ofercripessakes just
*spoiler* 
>>>> and problem solved.'
>>> I can has spoilers, pls?
>>
>> Well, if you insist...
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>> Last Warning...
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>> The crisis was precipitated by having the Wall St. computer systems all
>> crash about halfway through the trading day; all records of that day's
>> transactions were corrupted beyond anyone's ability to recover them.
>>
>> The solution was to debug the computers, then resume trading based on
>> the data backed up the evening before.
>>
>
> Well it was a bit more complicated than that -- the Japanese arranged a 
> two prong attack, of which that was the second part. The first was to
use 
> stock manipulation to cause a market crash. So they weren't just saying 
> that an ordinary trading day didn't happen, but one where the Dow
dropped 
> several hundred points. The solution still should've been obvious, but
the 
> latter case would require more deliberation before deciding to implement

> it.

Actually I thought that made it _easier_ to do the reset. Assume two 
possible forms of attack:

[1] They do as they did in the book and destroy the trading records.

[2] They do the attack that causes the stock market crash but don't
destroy 
the records.

Option [2] makes it easier to go back to the closing market postions
before 
the attack. In desttoying the records the bad guys gift wrapped what was 
already an obvious solution to make it glaringly obvious.

 The only people who would argue against the reset would be the bad guys -

who naturally would not carry any eight - and those who simply lucked into

shorting the market/stocks during the attack. but given the blatant 
manipulation I doubt there objections would carry much more weight. They'd

be told to suck it up.

 Having the trading records corrupted simply tied a huge bow around the
good 
guys' solution.