Real Linux and a BSG reference!

I've seen references to the observation that Asia lacks a dominant financial hub in two places now:

1) McKinsey Global Institute: Mapping Global Capital Markets - Fourth Annual Report executive summary page 13:

Notably, Asia lacks a single dominant financial hub and has relatively weak cross-border financial ties in the region.

2) Newsweek: What Power Looks Like page 1:

Recalling an earlier crisis in global securities markets that he helped to manage, Geithner said the Fed brought together the leaders of the world's 14 major financial firms, from five countries, representing 95 percent of all the activity in global markets. The Swiss were there, the Germans were there, the British were there. Interestingly, no Asians were there, not even the Japanese.

The BTO team was in town on Wednesday, and I got treated to a nice dinner along with the other acceptees. Of the many interesting topics covered during dinner, a former Goldman analyst made the comment that while he was at Goldman, investors did not want stock recommendations from him - what they wanted was an "understanding" of the industry.

This observation led me to think about the web2.0 world as it is today - I think one of the missing features is that people do not feel like they control the aggregation process. When you are talking about large impersonal sites like digg and reddit, the quality of your experience is largely dependent on your ability to conform to the tastes of the community. On sites like netflix, on the other hand, your experience depends on the expertise of some unnamed team of programmers. What is missing in both is the feeling that you are consciously controlling and refining the aggregation process yourself.

I think the development of taste is a very personal experience, and there exists real demand for the feeling that one's taste is not an objective unchanging thing waiting to be discovered, but rather something that is actively and consciously being developed and improved.