The Bloomberg terminal is the perfect example of a lock-in effect reinforced by the powerful conservative tendancies of the financial ecosystem and its permanent need to fake complexity.I've noticed relentless attacks on wall street portraying them as dumb people who do simple work but are just ruthless and greedy as hell. Of course they're greedy risk takers, and sometimes that causes problems. However, financial models can get fairly complex and require intelligence to navigate and utilize.
I was listening to NPR post-Haiti earthquake, and they were interviewing this woman who was basically borrowing money, going to the Dominican Republic to buy goods, giving them to stores in Port Au Prince, and then collecting the money two weeks later. She also charged the shopkeepers interest. When the earthquake hit, all of her goods were destroyed in the shops, so there was no way she could repay her debts.
Anyway, the radio hosts kept harping on the fact that she had only a middle school education, and was doing "extremely sophisticated math, the type that people on wall street get paid millions for". Now, I very much respect what that woman (and she was working off her debt post earthquake), but I thought it was incorrect and misleading to bring in wall street.
There are a lot of other examples, these are just two.