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Do you really want to live in a place where there's such a thing as "a perfectly legal stop to verify documentation"? That's not the America I grew up in.

Currently in New York City it is law that cops can stop you and search "backpacks or other large containers". The Second Amendment for years http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_3_52/ai_59243533>has only been The First Amendment can be restricted at the pleasure of politicians to avoid uncomfortable press in cities across America since the invention of the "First Amendment Zone"

Maybe that's what Governor Palin means when she says small towns are more pro-America, she means they are still protected by the Constitution.

If we hadn't had things like CRA and community activist groups painting banks that didn't paint lots of bad loans into 'underserved' areas as racists, then we might not have had quite so many bad loans.

The myth that the CRA and other goverment housing initiatives were largely responsible for the current economic debacle has been so thoroughly discredited it's tiresome to see it trotted out again.

This article makes the case that Fannie Mae started accepting risky mortgages in response to market and investor pressures. The originators of mortgages were making it clear they had alternatives to Fannie, and large investors in Fannie were pressuring it to take greater risks in order to earn a higher return. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were owned by private shareholders who invested in those corporations to make money.

The study discussed in this article makes the case that it's not the type of borrower that determines the default rate, but the type of loan. As one of the authors of the study says "These results show clearly that mortgages made using traditional affordable housing guidelines are holding up much better than subprime mortgages." A significant portion of subprime borrowers could have qualified for much lower cost traditional mortgages. Lewis Ranieri, considered by some to be the founder of mortgage backed securities, is quoted in this transcript as estimating that 50% of subprime borrowers could have qualified for Alt-A or prime mortgages. Government housing initiatives like the CRA did not push these people into subprime mortgages.

Um, no. The Fed artificially lowered interest rates, and the Clinton Administration pressured the Fannie Mae to buy mortgage blocks with loans that shouldn't have been issued. The result is that far too many people got loans they couldn't afford, and now the bill is due. It's time to learn from history: people who can't get loans shouldn't have them. Yes, it's coldhearted, but federal compassion doesn't work.

Another huge problem is the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Yes, it's nice to have you money protected by Uncle Sam, but it has a terrible side effect of removing responsibility. Why should Joe Average bother to make sure he uses sound banks if his Uncle Sam will replace his money if the bank tanks? Why should Joe Banker make sure his bank doesn't go under? After all, if he can make a heap of cash before it does, he'll get rich and Uncle Sam will kindly pay off his customers. Federal compassion doesn't work.

In other news, Hudson City Savings bank, which has consistently refused to issue shaky loans, reported record earnings of $110.7m for the third quarter and increased its quarterly dividends to $0.12 a share. Hooray for old-fashioned integrity.

It's not as if the SEC wasn't warned about the possible catastrophic failure that could result from using computer modeling to rationalize the virtual elimination of the big banks' capital-on-hand requirements. This article http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/business/03sec.html?hp=&pagewanted=print tells of Leonard Bole, a software consultant and risk management expert who adivses the SEC. In early 2004, when the heads of teh 5 big investment banks demanded that the SEC ease the capital requirements, Bole wrote a letter to the SEC commissioners saying that "the computer models run by the firms -- which the regulators would be relying on -- could not anticipate moments of severe market turbulence" -- not even tubulence on the order of the 1987 market crash (which now seems laughable, given current circumstances). Of course, Bole was ignored by the SEC commissioners. I know this is /. , but go ahead, rtfa. Btw, the big bank CEO leading the charge for easing captital requirements: Goldman-Sachs CEO henry paulson. Yeah, that henry paulson. Happy $700B + trillions to you, too. --MK

Greenspan just confessed before Congress to being shocked to discover that after 40 years of blind devotion, he's lost his faith in free markets here

When all of your thinking and all of your models are based on false assumptions, ALL your data is going to be spurious.

"and we _have_ demonstrated the ability to create artificial ecologies that are sustainable in the long-term"

The rest of your post is spot on but AFAIK current "biodome" technology can only sustain a habitat suitable for humans for ~2yrs maximum. I wholeheartedly agree with the GP's research priorities and suggest the next POTUS should put the phrase "To understand and protect our home planet" back into NASA's mission statement to undo the attempted strangulation of NASA's Earth facing budget.

Don't get me wrong I'm all for sending men to Mars and the stars but to do that we need to know how the biosphere on Earth ticks and how to replicate it well enough to support a given number of people indefinitely. Even if you get past the incredible gaul and short-sightedness of the neocons "Trash the planet and go to Mars" project AND work out how to keep a small tribe of humans alive for a couple of generations, you still have the phycolocical aspect.

Will the great-great-grandchildren of the original crew still know what the hell was going on when they got to their destination? - One closet scientologist in the original crew, even a "difficult child" who dominates his peers... Just the fact that the crew are human is what will doom galactic voyages, including the one we hijacked a mere 40k years ago and are still trying to figure out how it works.

So before we put a handfull of teenagers and their hormones in a tin can and launch them toward the nearest star we should at least survey what needs repairing on the mothership we are currently living on...

Let's see, somebody already got the "tiring" quip and the "40,000 curies is a lot" nonsense, so I'll take a few of the points the other responders left.

The hydrogen explosion was only a small one - well before the large amount of hydrogen accumulated from the reaction between the hot zirconium fuel rod cladding and the cooling water. The thing that kept it from being devastating was that conditions changed where it didn't ignite.

The "conditions that changed" were that all the O2 was used up in the explosion. So there was no more to react with the remaining H2, and so it couldn't possibly explode. H2 in such an environment is essentially an inert gas.

Also, airliners are no threat to containment buildings.

I'll leave your claim that, as radioactive materials decay, "you get more radioactivity growing into your sample making it more radioactive than it originally was" alone in case someone else wants to play. (Hint: if that were true, and given that the Earth's crust was rather radioactive 4 billion years or so ago, what should we expect to see today?)

--MarkusQ

One thing about the potassium in our bodies - unless you get the levels seriously out of whack, it won't kill you.

And neither will external materials that have low-level radioactivity for 10,000 years.

Polonium 210 is an alpha emitter (you know - the kind you toss about as not being able to penetrate the dead skin on our bodies). Unfortunately 89 nanograms, ingested, is the median lethal dose.

Let's be clear for a moment: Litvinenko was poisoned. He didn't accidentally ingest 10 micrograms of Polonium 210 any more than you or I have accidentally ingested 5 mg of Pu-238. With a half-life of about 1/3yr, a temperature that easily exceeds 500C, and a heavy weight that prevents it from becoming airborne, Polonium poses little risk outside the laboratory or industrial environments where it is used. In addition, Polonium is a highly stable heavy metal that is unlikely to chemically bond to common materials and/or make it into the water or food supply like the more concerning Su-90 or I-131.

The greatest concern with Polonium-210 is that tobacco fertilizers contain the material, probably from natural Uranium decay in the soil. The tobacco plant absorbs the chemical and thus it gets into cigarettes. The quantities are miniscule, even by Polonium-210 standards (partially owing to the short half-life), but enough to eventually lead to lung cancer.

And while it is obvious to anyone versed on the subject that a coal plant belches out far more radioactive material than a properly operating coal plant, when a nuclear plant goes south, it can do it in a big way. TMI let some 40,000 curies of radioactive Krypton out. Chernobyl was far worse and directly killed a lot of people, contaminated a huge area of the Ukrane, and spewed contamination across Europe.

Let's count up the deaths, shall we?

Three Mile Island: 0 deaths
Chernobyl: 47 deaths (there were also 4,000 cases of Thyroid cancer that were successfully treated)
London Great Smog: 12,000 deaths

That last one was caused by burning coal. 12,000 deaths from a disaster caused by burning coal. Versus a maximum impact from nuclear power of ~4,050 people. (Only a small handful of who directly lost their lives.) And that's DESPITE the USSR building a sub-standard facility, DESPITE the USSR requiring untrained personal to safety test the facility, DESPITE the lousy and late evacuation job, and DESPITE the massive release of radioactive materials.

If that's not sinking in, read it again. Coal is MASSIVELY more dangerous than nuclear power plants. Period, end of story. If you have your brain even half-way engaged, you should be demanding that every one of our coal plants be ripped out.

(The 125,000 death figure, BTW, is a myth.)

I think it's pretty convenient and disingenuous that you and your other proponents of nuclear power continue to blame every accident on "bad designs".

TMI was not a "bad" design for its time. By modern standards it is, but then it was acceptable. And guess what? NOBODY DIED. Chernobyl on the other hand lacked BASIC safety measures. Like concrete for example. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that putting a solid concrete bunker around a super-heated boiler is a good idea in case it should explode. (Boiler explosions are a VERY common industrial accident, regardless of nuclear materials.) For some stupid reason, the bunker wasn't there. Furthermore, the untrained techs who performed the tests actually DISABLED the shutdown systems by cutting wires so that the reactor could not auto-sc

you must be a communist muslim supported by jewish money

like mccain

(i'm being funny, but yes, there are people who actually think like this)

"What i REALLY want is an ATX power supply for my PC that has a 12-volt POWER IN line on it so I can have a stack of sealed-lead-acid batteries behind it wired to a solar panel on the roof, and so it would switch back to mains on-the-fly when the battery power got too low.. preferably without crashing the O/S"

What you REALLY want is a PC that runs off of 12V directly, with as little voltage conversion as practical.

Google is pushing hard for that. PSUs are one of the bigger areas of a PC for power waste, and also generate a lot of heat (that needs to be removed with A/C). Google runs huge datacenters and stands to gain a lot from reduced waste in the PSU and reduced A/C usage.

Google has a lot to gain from this, and the side benefits of being able to run PCs off of stored solar, wind, etc. are big for the rest of us.

Here is an article on this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/26/technology/26google.html

For users of IE, Mr. Pepperman successfully showed that integration does provide some technical benefits. The sharing of code between IE and Windows 98 will result the saving of memory for those who wish to use IE. Furthermore, over 100 ISVs depend on IE-related code to function. (Even a competing browser requires IE DLLs to operate.)

The appeals court said:

Microsoft proffers no justification for two of the three challenged actions that it took in integrating IE into Windows -- excluding IE from the Add/Remove Programs utility and commingling browser and operating system code. Although Microsoft does make some general claims regarding the benefits of integrating the browser and the operating system, it neither specifies nor substantiates those claims.

Small towns with their own runway so you can land and taxi directly to your own garage? Apparently there's about 300 of them in the USA now.

eg. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE6DF123AF933A2575AC0A96F948260

The market for flying cars is vanishingly small. It makes a lot more sense to make special towns than to try and build a limited-production car which car which converts into a 'plane, along with all the compromises and complications that entails. It'll be a horrible 'plane and an even worse car.

The Earth has been cooling for the last several years as solar activity has been lessening.

Not trolling, just pointing out scientific data that disputes that temperatures on earth are cooling. I will put the links here and everyone can form their own opinion. I personally had not seen this before so chances many others have not either.

(Note the chart was posted in 2006 yet does not show temperatures from 2000 - 2008. Some might find this disturbing, however I would suggest that the trend in the graph would suggest that the temperature is probably even warmer, not cooler.)

Here is the link to Global Temperature Anomalies.

This quote from the above link makes me believe these numbers are in reality more realistic as they increase the area of the earth covered over time. Mental note to self, if other posts about temperature are made, are they reducing sampling area or increasing sampling area by their choice of areas to cover.

After testing several cut offs, it was decided to exclude regions with a normalized sampling error of 0.5. The amount of global area excluded is greatest in the 19th century, when it is 20%-30%. For the 20th century the area excluded is 20% or less, and after 1950 it is less than 15%.

Even more on topic...

P.S. I came across the Temperature Anomaly chart from 1860 through 2000 in this document on Solar Current Feedback by M.A. Vukcevic MSc. I found his article on Evidences of a multi resonant system within solar periodic activity very interesting. Check out his conclusion where he states that while it cannot be conclusively proven, it should be a matter of further scientific consideration.

This reminded me of Albert Einstein's, spooky action at a distance which he studied and postulated on from 1935 - 1955 and Bell's theorem which he published in 1964, yet it was not until June 1997 when Dr. Nicolas Gisin and colleagues of the University of Geneva was able to show that a connection did exist between two photons over 6 miles apart.

I think it is amazing what Einstein (and many others even today) can prove with just mathematics. So often these great individuals come up with theories that are so out there, that they are derided by other jealous scientists. How many theories are here today that many are making fun of that will prove to be correct 10, 20, 30 or even 40 years from today?

Unlike scientists today, Einstein did not have access to the computers that we have today...imagine if he had, had access to computers.

Some believe that Bell's Theorem proves something, others believe it does not. One of the reasons cited is the inability of current science to monitor all the photons in the 1997 experiment, thus extra assumptions were required. I prefer not to look at it all as black or white, rather accept the results as phenomenal as they are with the caveat that more is left for science to explain. Who knows, perhaps it will tie in to String theory, Quantum theory of Gravity or some other theory related to either time, speed or mass.

All in all, its pretty interesting stuff IMO so I decided to share the links, enjoy.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is that you?

Christians have learned all about timers:

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2719258620070428

They're also quite fond of guns:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E7DC1630F934A15757C0A962958260

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-16035695.html

tesla-lotus connection:
http://autoreview.belproject.com/item/186

nyt summary on toyota-lotus connection:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9900EEDC163BF931A35751C0A965948260

To people reading this discussion, google works for you guys too.

He is going to be busy for a while, what with his licensing problems.

You'd be better off calling Bob the plumber, from down the street.

"Goatse? That might as well be a default Windows wallpaper once you've seen Mr. Hands."

Turn up the audio too. Trust me.

The man (and horse) who made Enumclaw famous:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9500E2DD1330F932A35757C0A9619C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

"''Zoo'' obliquely recreates the events of the fateful night that caused a media frenzy in the Seattle area two summers ago. Shortly after being dropped off at an emergency room in Enumclaw, Wash., a 45-year-old Boeing engineer named Kenneth Pinyan -- known in the film only by his Internet handle, Mr. Hands -- died of internal injuries resulting from a perforated colon. The police investigation led to a farm and turned up videotapes and DVDs that showed several men engaging in sexual acts with the resident Arabian stallions. Bestiality was not illegal in Washington at the time, but in response to the Pinyan incident the State Senate voted last year to criminalize it."

Who was in charge of Congress when Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush 1 were in office? Democrats.

Er, no they weren't.

Who was in charge of Congress when Clinton was in office? Republicans for 6 out 8 years (the 6 best).

Get your facts straight.

Yes, the Republicans have totally melted down in the past 8 years and are now as bad as the Democrats.

Yeah, it's easy to say stuff like that when you aren't burdened by facts. However, a simple look at the numbers - and that includes in your falsely shifted consequential view to fantasies of who's in control - disproves you.

Please don't waste my time with another unsourced rebuttal. If you're going to speak up again, have citation and fact on your side. This sort of unquestioned, blind, faith-driven guesswork is a dangerous waste of time. I will not play party to your fictional political beliefs.

It happened in Houston in 1994:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E5D81631F93BA35752C0A962958260

You mean like the test the french developed for HIV in blood? Listed here?

which has penetrated "98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops,"

Nice to know that in addition to cats, I'm a trendsetter in not having Flash installed.

So this is what the linux crowd feels like on a daily basis.

"Really? Preach it brother - Name Names of those conservative economists that were screaming about the problems, yet being ignored by the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress!"

It didn't even take a degree in economics to see this coming, my mental giant of a friend. Bush tried to implement reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to get a grip on the subprime mess in 2003. These reforms (including new regulations, for you lovers of beauracracy out there) were shot down when, surprise surprise, Democrats stonewalled them. In hearing, Barney Frank in particular said he saw no subprime problem at all, that it was alllll a racist attempt to keep poor people from the American Dream of home ownership. And this is according to a bastion of Republican advocacy.

"Because I never heard anything from any of them - possibly they were too busy talking about how lowering taxes on the wealthy was going to generate an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen."

Or, maybe because you had your head so far up your ass (or in Indymedia... same thing) that you never noticed anyone else yelling about the problem lo these many years.

That's incorrect. The act in the Senate was passed on a basically straight party line vote. See 106th Congress, Senate Roll Call Vote 105 54-44. 53 Republicans voted for the bill, 1 Deomcrat. 44 Democrats voted against the bill.

You're looking at the Senate accepting the conference report, which was the 90-8 vote. (106th Congress, Senate Roll Call Vote 354).

My search-fu is sort of weak, but the last time I could find that the Senate outright rejected a Conference Report (filibusters excluded) was in 1918.

Well, there was that famous quote by the then head of Diebold to the effect of "promising to deliver Ohio's votes for the Republican party" in 2004. See here http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/09/business/yourmoney/09vote.html for example.

That's what's really at the core of the worldwide economic meltdown: the fraud is unravelling.

Yes, that would explain why the standard-of-living of someone in Sweden has been so much better than the United States in recent years: For richer.

Do you think you "objectivist" types could actually try dealing with reality once in awhile? Theory is nice, freedom is cool, but at some point you've got to come to grips with the real problems... e.g. there's always an asymmetry of power between the democratic citizen and the corporation interested in rigging the system, so the system is always going to be rigged, ergo we can't get an actual "free market", so the theory is pretty close to useless.

This is one of the things that makes Krugman in particular so insufferable about his profession. He places far too much importance on it in relation to it's actual value. Like all social sciences... sociology, psychology, political science... economics is not a hard science.

Question: do you know anything at all about Paul Krugman's research? Have you read anything at all of his popular writings?

Here, let me help you out a little:

• columns
• blog

And just for the hell of it, you might peek at the answer key, an article Krugman wrote about his own approach: How I Work

Most young economists today enter the field from the technical end. Originally intending a career in hard science or engineering, they slip down the scale into the most rigorous of the social sciences. The advantages of entering economics from that direction are obvious: one arrives already well trained in mathematics, one finds the concept of formal modeling natural. It is not, however, where I come from. My first love was history; I studied little math, picking up what I needed as I went along.

[...]

I was, of course, only saying something that critics of conventional theory had been saying for decades. Yet my point was not part of the mainstream of international economics. Why? Because it had never been expressed in nice models. The new monopolistic competition models gave me a tool to open cleanly what had previously been regarded as a can of worms. More important, however, I suddenly realized the remarkable extent to which the methodology of economics creates blind spots. We just don't see what we can't formalize. And the biggest blind spot of all has involved increasing returns. So there, right at hand, was my mission: to look at things from a slightly different angle, and in so doing to reveal the obvious, things that had been right under our noses all the time.

This is one of the things that makes Krugman in particular so insufferable about his profession. He places far too much importance on it in relation to it's actual value. Like all social sciences... sociology, psychology, political science... economics is not a hard science.

Question: do you know anything at all about Paul Krugman's research? Have you read anything at all of his popular writings?

Here, let me help you out a little:

• columns
• blog

And just for the hell of it, you might peek at the answer key, an article Krugman wrote about his own approach: How I Work

Most young economists today enter the field from the technical end. Originally intending a career in hard science or engineering, they slip down the scale into the most rigorous of the social sciences. The advantages of entering economics from that direction are obvious: one arrives already well trained in mathematics, one finds the concept of formal modeling natural. It is not, however, where I come from. My first love was history; I studied little math, picking up what I needed as I went along.

[...]

I was, of course, only saying something that critics of conventional theory had been saying for decades. Yet my point was not part of the mainstream of international economics. Why? Because it had never been expressed in nice models. The new monopolistic competition models gave me a tool to open cleanly what had previously been regarded as a can of worms. More important, however, I suddenly realized the remarkable extent to which the methodology of economics creates blind spots. We just don't see what we can't formalize. And the biggest blind spot of all has involved increasing returns. So there, right at hand, was my mission: to look at things from a slightly different angle, and in so doing to reveal the obvious, things that had been right under our noses all the time.

Well, I just read the article, and what I see is a couple of lines devoid of context that are being used to support a sweeping statement, and there you have the conservative-hit-piece MO in a nutshell.

Dismiss the remark "if the rich get more, that leaves less for everyone else" as over-simplified, if you like, but try reading the entire article and tell me that Krugman isn't talking about a real problem: For richer

You might consider this point (which addresses your implicit "but the pie gets bigger!" argument): "We pride ourselves, with considerable justification, on our record of economic growth. But over the last few decades it's remarkable how little of that growth has trickled down to ordinary families." Or how about this point: "The reason conservatives engage in bouts of Sweden-bashing is that they want to convince us that there is no tradeoff between economic efficiency and equity -- that if you try to take from the rich and give to the poor, you actually make everyone worse off. But the comparison between the U.S. and other advanced countries doesn't support this conclusion at all."

But on the other hand, I have no doubt that you're correct that the award is "politically motivated", at least in part: it's much like the Dixie Chicks getting a Grammie... there are so many people so disgusted with the Bush regime at this point that the awards committees can't resist tweaking some Republican noses.

(And if anyone cares, this is my take on Krugman: KRUGMAN_FUNNIES.)

Some supporting evidence making it hard to fit this prize into an ideological box...

• Here is a very good essay by Edward Glaeser on the work that got Krugman the prize.
• Here is an essay where Krugman takes a liberal reporter to task for misunderstanding and opposing globalization.
• And here is a somewhat more technical essay on why free trade is better than the alternatives even if your trading partners have horrible records on the environment and labor rights.

In his popular writing, including his NY Times column, Krugman is a pretty outspoken liberal on most issues. But within his academic expertise -- which is what he won the prize for -- he is very willing to depart from liberal orthodoxy if that's where logic and evidence lead him.

How many more politicians and faux-news talking heads will continue to push the pseudo-scientific religion that is reaganomics?

Humans are capable of believing untrue things for a very long time, even after reality begins to seriously challenge those beliefs. The Left has long-cherished beliefs (Example: Unions are good for workers, My Counter-Example: The number of Unions up until the 60s that prohibited blacks from working at a union shop). The Right has its long-cherished beliefs.

There are a lot of possible explanations why people are like that, but the more important thing is to engage those people by asking questions about the basis of their belief and learning yourself. If someone says something, and you don't know if it's true or not, take some effort to find out if it is. Most of the time, you can Google the issue and find a lot of people have done the hard work for you. You just have to verify if their logic is sound and inferences are valid.

Krugman, via his blog and columns, does try his best to do this. In fact, he often posts links to early versions of his papers and mathematics on his NY Times blog and lets his readers pick it apart. He and Tyler Cowan (a libertarian leaning economist) have very civil debates via their blogs.

Most *-wing sites simply tune out contrary voices with more chanting and weak arguments that bolster that community's feelings on right and wrong. In short: people judge arguments by its truthiness, not its validity.

And for the record, we cannot judge if Reagnomics worked because Reagonomics is:

1. reduce the growth of government spending,
2. reduce marginal tax rates on income from labor and capital,
3. reduce government regulation of the economy,
4. control the money supply to reduce inflation.

To be honest, I don't believe he achieved those four goals during his presidency, so I'm not sure one can say Reagonomics worked or not:

1. Government spending as a percentage of GDP
2. Tax receipts as percentage of GDP
3. Quantifying regulation: Notice the Clinton years come out looking pretty good too (i.e., congress is as much to blame/credit as the President)
4. Inflation from 1913 to present

Safe as Houses

A snippet (only 3 paragraphs to fall within fair use):

I used to live next door to a Russian emigre. One day he asked me to explain something that puzzled him about his new country. "This place seems very rich," he said, "but I never see anyone making anything. How does the country earn its money?"

...

In other words, a fuller answer to my former neighbor would be that these days, Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn't seem like a sustainable lifestyle.

How solid, then, is America's economic recovery? The British have a phrase that applies: "safe as houses." Our economy is as safe as houses. Unfortunately, given current prices and our dependence on foreign lenders, houses aren't safe at all.

Whine all you want about the Nobel Committee having a political agenda. Right is right. And Krugman was right.

Free software for free votes, what a great match-up. Plus, it beats the Diebold machines running on Windows CE that kept crashing.

Incidentally, I just voted in our Canadian federal election and we're still using the pencil-and-paper and human-counted voting method. Slower, but still the most reliable and secure method IMO.

Perhaps though that's why i like Palin's bio as a cleaner of Alaska's Republican Augean stables and am frustrated by the one-sided coverage of her.

That's your problem. You have this image of her as a corruption fighter, which couldn't be farther from the truth. Like I said, she's just like Gingrich - she didn't take on corrupt figures because she wanted to clean out the system, but because she's a ladder climber who was looking to make a name for herself:

• She takes Bush's peonage appointments and turns it up to 11.
• She tried to ban books and tried to fire the Wasilla librarian when she rebuffed Palin's request for the third time.
• She fires officials that don't support her during elections.
• She requested earmarks that McCain specifically complained about as being wasteful spending.
• She fully supported the bridge to nowhere until Congress said it would have to be paid for with state money, yet took the federal funds anyway. Now she's lying by saying "I told Congress, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' on that bridge to nowhere."
• She illegally uses personal email accounts for state business.
• Abused her position by trying to have her ex-brother in law fired, and when the state commissioner refused, she fired him instead.
• And most dispicably, signed off on charging rape victims for examination kits.

I am SAYING that these are facts, and that reporting them is (of course) fair. My complaint is the failure to report other pertinent facts.

Like those Fox News talking heads that wished that the rest of the media would stop talking about all the bad things happening in Iraq - like bombings that would kill a hundred people at a time, roadside bombs killing our troops, and ethnic cleansing between Shiites and Sunnis - and focus on the positive things like construction of a new clinic inside the Green Zone. I'm sure the women of Iraq who would wear mourning robes for years at a time - another family member would be killed before it was time to take them off - would concur.

With all due respect there's a pretty big difference between being endorsed by a pastor and having someone BE your pastor for over 20 years.

With all due respect you're rationalizing a racist smear. If you watch more than "Goddamn America" soundbyte played on the media, he's speaking about how the United States kept slaves "in perpetuity", the "separate but equal" Dred Scott decision, Jim Crow, forced American Indians onto reservations, interned Japanese Americans during WWII, and the Tuskegee experiments on black men with syphilis. Funny how the media never mentioned that this Angry Black Man hated the United States sooo much he voluntarily gave up his student deferment and served two terms of duty as a Marine in Vietnam, and then re-enlisted as a medical corpsman and was so good he was the valedictorian of his class and was on LBJ's surgical team in 1966.

It is at least conceivable that McCain wasn't fully aware of

Two words which American politicians should be particularly worried about; "Chinese consumer". When you hear those two words on American news, you know that China is going to be asking itself what America is good for. At the moment, tens of trillions in IOUs.

e.g.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DA133CF937A25751C1A9659C8B63

Or the Gov't and certain social engineering groups forcing the banks to make loans to people who wouldnt normally qualify under any circumstances...

NY Times praising the new program in 1999

Bill Clinton admitted the democrats stopped any oversight of Fannie and Freddie:
"CHRIS CUOMO, ABC NEWS: A little surprising for you to hear the Democrats saying, "This came out of nowhere, this is all about the Republicans. We had nothing to do with this." Nancy Pelosi saying it. She signed the '99 Gramm Bill. She knew what was going on with the SEC. They're all sophisticated people. Is that playing politics in this situation?

BILL CLINTON: Well, maybe everybody does that a little bit. I think the responsibility the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

Im not completely blaming the democrats, but they certainly set up the framework for the housing bubble and the subprime mess we are in now

If it makes you feel any better, the attitude you're describing isn't limited to math or science. I already posted most of this comment here, but thought it worth repeating.

I'm in the Ph.D. in English program at the University of Arizona, and as a result I teach 50 freshmen divided into two classes in English 101 each semester. They're great for learning about society's views and prejudices, since they come pre-equipped with so many and so few tools for self-analysis. This time, I created a unit on science and assigned an Asimov story and various other things, including Peter Wood's How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science, which the author of the New York Times article should have referenced, as well as Neal Stephenson's Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out. Students' responses to and associations with science in particular have been fascinating for how negative they are.

Many draw a distinction between "us" ("normal people") and "them" ("scientists and mathematicians," as well as others who focus on intellectual achievement), defining the two as utterly opposed to one another. Few if any perceived science or learning as a process, rather than a thing. Just like much of the fiction and many of the essays we read, many saw science as being not applicable to their lives. Actually, it's hard for me to discern what they do find applicable to their lives.

Anyhow, you're right -- they "just don't see the connection," and I'm not sure if my efforts, like pointing out the us vs. them tendencies, actually helped. I drew explicit comparisons between work and tenacity needed for significant achievement in virtually any field, including scholastic ones like English, but I'm not sure whether some of these subtler points were actually understood. For most of them, I'm guessing the answer was no, but maybe a few were genuinely affected.

Funny you say this: I'm in the Ph.D. in English program at the University of Arizona, and as a result I teach 50 freshmen divided into two classes in English 101/102 each semester. They're great for learning about society's views and prejudices, since they come pre-equipped with so many of them and so few tools for self-analysis. This time, I created a unit on technology, form, and myth, assigning an Asimov story and various other things, including Peter Wood's How Our Culture Keeps Students Out of Science, which the author of the New York Times article should have referenced, as well as Neal Stephenson's Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out. Students' responses to and associations with science in particular have been fascinating for how negative they are.

Many draw a distinction between "us" ("normal people") and "them" ("scientists and mathematicians," as well as others who focus on intellectual achievement), defining the two as utterly opposed to one another. Few if any perceived science or learning as a process, rather than a thing. Just like much of the fiction and many of the essays we read, many saw science as being not applicable to their lives. Actually, it's hard for me to discern what they do find applicable to their lives.

Anyhow, you're right -- they "just don't see the connection," and I'm not sure if my efforts, like pointing out the us vs. them tendencies, actually helped. I drew explicit comparisons between work and tenacity needed for significant achievement in virtually any field, including scholastic ones like English, but I'm not sure whether some of these subtler points were actually understood. For most of them, I'm guessing the answer was no, but maybe a few were genuinely affected.

In case you missed it, George Bush isn't a right-winger. Most conservative right-wingers want to get rid of the Department of Education and government out of education all together.

If you want to blame someone, blame everyone. Just read this article about how brainwashed kids are becoming. They are making kids religious zealots, although its not Christianity.

Maybe you should read this book, The deliberate dumbing down of america. The author of this book was one of the top people inReagan's Department of Education.

You should also check out the Reece Commission, which investigated the tax-exempt foundations in the 1950's. Then you'll find out that this was completely deliberate. You'll also find out it has nothing to do with political parties or the false left-right paradigm we're fed on the TV all day long.

Of course you'll probably just call me crazy without looking at the documents. All I ask is you look at it yourself, then call me crazy ;)

While this may seem very partisan I think it's timely and as such I'm going to risk getting modded down by right wing zealots.

The GOP has increasingly become a huge fan of this 'dumb is good' type of culture. For a number of reasons. It's not that they don't want any smart people. Rather they just don't want everyone to be smart. If your smart you can see though a lot of things that they would rather you not. Now the same is true to an extent of people on the left. And even some in the center. However no party has embraced this idea of keeping the populace as a whole dumbed down as the right wing/GOP.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/opinion/10brooks.html?hp

David Brooks does a great idea in showing how this mindset has been honed over the years.

Wait, except that the part with the actual competition is shrinking.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/economy-hits-us-pc-sales-but-notebook-growth-remains-strong/

Desktops are being outsold by laptops, at least in the US, and that trend will continue worldwide. The reason iMac killers don't sell is that until 2008, most iMac killers were suicidal; ugly, bulky, expensive, and hard to use.

Why would Apple want to compete in a shrinking market? They just need the Mac mini to last another three years and that market will essentially be dead.

It's not so much that the CRA had no effect, but that its affect on Fannie and Freddie was not nearly as great as some are claiming. The CRA certainly had some role in all of this, but with the advent of mortgage backed securities, and Wall Street's enthusiasm for these securities, Fannie and Freddie were in a position of becoming irrelevant if they didn't start accepting more high risk mortgages from companies such as Countrywide. Have a look at the NY Times article that describes how market and investor pressures helped to push Fannie into accepting risky mortgages.

There's an article at in the NY Times that describes why Fannie got so deep into subprimes. Among the biggest reasons were market and shareholder pressures. Fannie was seeing a larger and larger portion of its business being picked off by non-GSE competitors. Companies that originated mortgages, such as Countrywide, were making it clear that unless Fannie bought more of the riskiest loans from them they would start selling to Wall Street. In the new world of mortgage-backed securities Fannie was no longer essential to banks, savings and loans, and other originators of mortgages. Additionally, large investors in Fannie, such as hedge funds, were pressuring it to take greater risks in return for greater profits. It would appear that far from Fannie driving the market to accept bad mortgages, the inverse was actually true.

to be fair a micro sd card is easier to hide then let's say, heroin or explosives...

I think it's easier to swallow heroin and explosives than it is to swallow a micro sd card. Now I don't know if anyone's swallowed explosives but drug carriers do swallow drugs.

Falcon

Kids young and old aren't going to care that your 401k lost 25% this year and that your new house is now worth less than what you owe on it... they just want their damn iPod's and MacBooks for Christmas!

If they whine loudly enough, I think that most of them will get what they want.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/business/06econ.html?pagewanted=all
Long story short: Consumer spending is expected to shrink for the first time in almost twenty years
Which ultimately suggests that your whining theory of economics is unlikely to be viable.

A smart company would start mass advertising for their cheaper media player as an iPod alternative...
Not because kids will want it, but because parents might buy it for their whiner.

This is bad, but not much compared with the number of names being taken off the voter rolls in preparation for the upcoming presidential election. See "How to Swing an Election."

They're seeing competition from Microsoft according to MS's fans in the press. The market considers the Zune material for comedy. I was joking when I mentioned the possibility of a Zune phone ...

Microsoft's problem is that Apple is clearly much better at evil these days than they are. Microsoft used to have the best and most popular evil; these days they can't even successfully pay people to use their evil. And they've been trying for a while.

To keep on-topic, Android's main function will be to lift the iPhone's game. Existing and not sucking will be a win for Android and Google. Then, as others have noted, someone will come up with a killer Android app that leaves Apple playing catchup as they've pissed off too many developers. Interesting times and a win for credible competition. Which Microsoft just isn't in this space.

I'm saying that most likely no one saw the issue at all

Are you sure? I don't like Bush, but you're just wrong. His administration brought up the issue numerous times, and it was killed numerous times because "fixing" the problem would cut off loans to the "economically disadvantaged" (read "people who can't pay back their loans").

From the NY Times article:

"These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis," said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."

Nope. Nothing wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Just as long as they keep on pumping out loans for "affordable housing."

Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.

"I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing," Mr. Watt said.

God forbid they stop giving out loans to people who aren't qualified. That would just be terrible.

[...] on top of yesterday's news that datamining for terrorists is not feasible due to false positives) of just how badly the use of these lists can be abused.

Uhm, that study may be pointing out at potential misuse of the lists &mdash treating the entries as actual terrorists, rather than mere suspects — but not at abuse. Software is not going to care. It takes an actual overzealous cop to abuse the list by placing a person on it, against whom no reasonable suspicions exist.

That said, considering the present-day prominence (and a comfortable life of a tenured professor) of an anti-war protester turned terrorist (to this day unrepentant), the Maryland cops' action is not that unconscious...

It is not that all such protesters are necessarily going to become terrorists, it is that there is a prominent example of how doing that can not only go unpunished by the Law, but, actually, glorified by Public Opinion — or, at least, significant segments thereof...

With Ayers on everybody's mind because his protege is within grasp of becoming the next President, I would not blame those cops for suspecting, that some of the present-day anti-war activists may be up to blowing up a thing or two...

Whoever tagged this donttasemebro, stop. I go to UF, that kid was a jackass. All his friends said he was a jackass. He did jackassary to get attention and was tased because he was being very disruptive, to the point where the cops were afraid of it getting out of hand.

Look, I'm all about stopping abuse of power. I'm against laptop seizures at the border, I know that cops in some states don't get to be a cop unless their IQ is low enough (source). But this kid was just being a really big dick for attention and took it way to far. End of story.