Bullshit. The reason those bacterial infections can grow without being disturbed is precisely because your immune system is inactive during stressed periods. See Sapolsky's work, e.g., Why Zebra's don't get Ulcers., or his recent splendid TTC series Stress and your body.
After the University Of Hawaii began getting Google Over IPv6 in March of 2010, we began noticing problems with user devices on our wireless sending router advertisements and “black-holing” traffic. This problem is, of course made more apparent by initiating Google Over IPv6, which causes significantly more content to be requested by clients over IPv6. Despite first appearances, this is a good thing, since it is a problem that must be faced and dealt with in order to operate a IPv6 network for the near term.
In a nutshell, a “rogue RA” scenario occurs when some device besides an “official” router identifies itself as a router using “router advertisement” ICMP6 messages. Once client hosts see the “rogue” as a router, they may prefer it as their next hop to send traffic out to the Internet.
This can result in one of two problems:
the rogue router can use its position as a router to intercept and eavesdrop upon or otherwise mess with traffic
the rogue router can neglect to forward traffic such that the client cannot reach things by IPv6
These issues are not IPv6 specific problems. There are numerous similar problems that occur in IPv4 networks, on 802.11 “WiFi” networks, and on Layer 2 switched wired networks.
The best-known cause of rogue RAs on an IPv6 network comes from Windows Vista hosts with Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) enabled. Other causes are probably common, since the “personalities” of rogue RAs seem to differ widely.
And there also appears to be a problem with enabled 6to4 tunnels advertising to the network that they are willing to act as virtual gateways.. Not exactly my idea of 'extremely good'
*shrug*. Tell that to everyone living off the income that up until now was provided by the Gulf of Mexico, and everyone who is (was) directly or indirectly dependent on the wages the people who made their living off the Gulf earned. Words might look "offensive", but BPs actions are 1000x that, and they have assured the suicide of more parents and partners on that coast than I will ever be able to effect through writing here, and they don't give a flying fuck. (Specifically, look at suicide incidence rates in Alaska since the Exxon Valdez disaster there, especially among fishermen, but also among service providers.)
are you going to provide oil to run the fishermen's boats for the next 40 years?
are you going to provide oil to run the hotels for the next 20 years?
does the free market guarantee continued employment, or is the very basis of capitalism the inherent necessity of the value of ADAPTING.
Tell me where you live, and I will shoot your family. You must adapt to any change I think is right for you (read: me). But wait, you might ask, where is my right to freedom from interference? You, however, have less money, and therefore your suffering is irrelevant. Congratulations, you live in the State of Nature, also called the USA.
I know you won't admit to it, but I, at least, find this line of reasoning troubling, and just a little bit undemocratic. Why do you pride yourself on living under a rule of law, when you have The Market?
Yes, that's what's called the "anglo-saxon business model". Something similar happens when hedge funds buy up companies, use that company as collateral to borrow huge amounts of money with, and then dump the company again.
The Economist has a pathetic leader this week criticizing Obama for hammering BP and raising the ridiculous idea that his corporate-friendly administration is anti-business.
It actually (really!) calls the president “Vladimir Obama” and writes:
The collapse in BP’s share price suggests that he has convinced the markets that he is an American version of Vladimir Putin, willing to harry firms into doing his bidding.
The normally sober Economist has gone off the wagon here.
First, it knows better than to “suggest” what “the markets” think. Second, that blew up in its face rather quickly. Instaputz points out that BP shares soared 10 percent on news of the $20 billion fund the Economist’s spin here is obnoxious. If anything ends up ruining BP, it will have been its own actions. Go read this The Wall Street Journal piece for a look at the company’s negligence.
And BP should have to pay for all the associated costs of its actions, not just the actual bill for cleaning up the oil.they will be very, very costly.
Moreover, a company’s market capitalization is based on expectations for future earnings. This disaster will surely make it harder for BP to get drilling rights that investors expected it to have just two months ago. The political climate for offshore drilling has just undergone a seismic change.
Another big factor in BP’s share decline is pure uncertainty. Investors don’t like it. Right now, the only thing certain is that BP’s hole is going to be spewing toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico for at least another two months
Bobby Jindal doesn't know what he's doing here, guys. He's fighting an oil spill like a war or a flood. You block this pass off with these dirtbags and mounds of dirt, you're gonna kill this marsh. The life here evolved with the current that moves through this pass. Nutrients, oxygen... you're creating a slackwater zone in a marsh that is used to tides and current. There's little critters that keep the algae off the grass stems and reeds. They need oxygen and a specific salt-freshwater mix. They eat the algae and keep the grass healthy. You kill them and the marsh becomes a big flat of rotting vegitation. But... where did you get that dirt? 300 yards inland? That dirt's poison for this marsh. Couldn't be worse than if you brought it from Nebraska. It's alien fucking dirt in this environment. It's worse than the fucking oil. And Jindal will leave it here forever if we let him. Lets get that shit out of here and we'll all get together and lay some fucking proper fucking boom.
you get the idea. It's fucking obvious. Boom is not meant to contain or catch oil. Boom is meant to divert oil. Boom must always be at an angle to the prevailing wind-wave action or surface current. Boom, at this angle, must always be layered in a fucking overlapped sort-of way with another string of boom. Boom must always divert oil to a catch basin or other container, from where it can be REMOVED FROM THE FUCKING AREA. Looks kinda involved, doesn't it? It is. But if fucking proper fucking booming is done properly, you can remove most, by far most of the oil from a shoreline and you can do it day after day, week after week, month after month. You can prevent most, by far most of the shoreline from ever being touched by more than a few transient molecules of oil. Done fucking properly, a week after the oil stops coming ashore, no one, man nor beast, can ever tell there has been oil anywhere near that shoreline.
Wow, we are sinking to new levels of idiocy now.
The MSM would have you believe that the tremendous sell-off in the markets was just a trading error. If it was a trading error, then these markets SUCK! Are you telling me we put TRILLIONS of dollars, including our retirement savings, into a system that can be completely thrown into chaos because a single guy hits the wrong button on a single transaction? It’s a good thing Faisal Shahzad isn’t still working on Wall Street anymore, or he could have just pushed a button and caused a lot more damage that way than he did with a faulty car bomb
This is financial terrorism, folks, retail traders were stopped out and margined out while the pros made Billions picking up the pieces. Don’t worry though, if you are rich enough and connected enough, the Nasdaq will reverse your losses but if they really wanted to make amends, they would cancel the day’s trading for ALL traders.
This market didn’t just sell off because of a trading mistake. Whatever really happened, it happened because there were no real buyers when the selling came - something I have been warning would happen during the last 3 months of low-volume run-ups. I keep using the house of cards/Jenga metaphor and that’s exactly what we have so be very careful when the same idiots who have been telling you BUYBUYBUY are now telling you to "come back in - the water’s fine."
Having seen the capitulation unfold second by second and then listen to CNBC come up with every excuse under the sun just got under my skin. I've decided to chart some of our one second analytics charts of the capitulation unfolding on our screens. The chart below (more to follow) captures the moment of the final capitulation, before the reversal today. The idea that it was a 'fat finger' error is ludicrous; unless the fat finger hit every market in the world virtually simultaneously. Liquidity simply left the world financial markets for about four minutes this afternoon. The bids just vanished. And what else vanished? Remember the vaunted supplemental liquidity providers, led by Goldman Sachs. Remember that they are paid to "provide liquidity" through their predatory high-frequency algos, they are not required to do so. So when the S@#$T hit the fan they just disappeared. In one second more or less someone (and yes, under these circumstances, human beings take control of the machines) made the decision to pull the bids on every equity in the S&P, every financial futures contract, every FX contract in every market in the world. This kind of thing just doesn't happen in a pure auction environment; there just isn't a tight enough communication link between the parties to allow the decisions to propagate within the same second -- even with HFT algorithms. No. Some human made the decision to pull the bids; all of them, all at once. If that is not a condemnation of the concentration of financial power and the systematic risk it engenders I don't know what is.
So, when you say "society has changed", what you actually mean is that "cops are now far more paranoid, trigger-happy fuckers than before"?
The point that multiple people have made here, and which you so strongly seem to be ignoring/denying, is that society has hardly become more violent than it was 40 years ago. The only difference is that we have more news sources today who cover similar shit.
But by all means, be accepting about the fact that LEOs perceive so many threats that they will likely soon start hitting children who "escape" vehicles during the "search process".
What were you using it for? All the DX can do is display PDFs. It can't search, bookmark, annotate, and probably not zoom.
The iliad can do all of these things, and has a folder structure view in the filelist as well. For any kind of reading other than passive reading, the DX (with its larger screen) is about as useful as a Dinky Toy.
The reason is simple: We need to stop letting the government make life difficult for American business.
I love simple reasons. Really. They're almost always accurate.
Because fuck knows it wasn't the companies who asked for money to prop up their failing business models with, it was the government's fault for being captured and giving in.
All that's happened in the past 20 years is people lobbying to get more freedoms for a select few companies, the government granting that because of no adequate oversight and a severe lack of foresight in legislators (perhaps partly due to regulatory capture, but that's pretty hard to reconstruct), and businesses capitalizing on that to fleece everyone they could out of their money.
And yet, somehow, this is all the fault of government rather than of the egotistical fuckers who feel it is their "duty" to maximize corporate profit (and get "healthy" bonuses out of it in the process). The credit market was destroyed because the banks can currently borrow from the government at no cost, and use that money any way they like, which is far less risky than loaning to businesses. Which is why they don't feel the need to try to restart small loans etc. anymore. And there were no strings attached to those loans because of filthy little fuckers like Geithner and Summers who conveniently forgot, or claimed that "regulation at this point would keep the banks from using and applying their expertise".
No aspect of this "crash" has anything to do with the crippling effects of regulation, if anything, regulations prevented it, until they were abolished (Glass-Steagal, leverage rules for the big 5 being suspended in a backroom without oversight, you name it they've done it) through lobbying by rich people who wanted to become richer and didn't care what the effects would be for everyone else. And all of this largely made possible because senators are so dependent on campaign contributions (much more so now in the age of TV than ever before) that they will suck anyone's cock just so they can stay in power a bit longer. Why US citizens accept this to be the case I haven't the faintest, but it's probably because nobody in the MSM is really pointing people towards the fact that only on token issues (abortion) where the public "speaks up" they have any input in the process any more.
"We do the opposite of what would help" because the things that are done then do help a group of perhaps 10.000-100.000 people who have the most say. Only their interests don't really always mesh very well with the interests of the other 300 million. bureaucratic rules that small companies have to adhere to explain perhaps 0.001% of the variance, but considering how much money they make compared to the big ones, your problems really don't matter.
More people have died from deciding to take a car more often (instead of an airplane) than there died in 9/11. And most of those deaths weren't even on the planes, but in the buildings. (Never even mind the economic damage caused by the car crashes, insurance payouts, and travel time lost that could've been spent on business matters directly; and, more indirectly, the 3-trillion dollar Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the iraqi lives lost due to Blackwater having fun, etc.)
Terrorist attacks in Europe or Israel have taken far many more lives than they have in the US.. The planes flying into buildings happened, sure.. but "9/11" was created in the mind of the world by the US response to it.
Awesome. And I bet all these claims can be made by different people with you still feeling "they" are "all" making exaggerated claims, too.
All the experts don't agree. (Nor did they in the Iraq war. the difference there was that Cheney et al had executive power, whereas scientists don't. Scientists also have to compete in the media with hacks and politicians. See this yt video)
Do you believe/care about everything you're being told in the media? Who cares what those partisan quacks call you.
Al Gore != climate scientist. Al Gore is a politician/media figure making money.
You feel it is an argument against "climate science" that every (shit) disaster movie after 2000 has been using that as a theme? Astonishing.
As said before, the experts don't agree on everything. Also, "citizen-researchers" (blame WSJ for thinking up this imbecilic word/notion.) are being denied access to data != breakdown of the peer review process.
"I could smell the BS a mile a way" does not actually prove you're intelligent or insightful. It might just as well prove that you distrust people who tell you you're doing something that is causing something bad. Or something else entirely. But feel free to interpret the CRU "Scandal" as you like to reinforce your own opinions.. just remember it doesn't really prove anything.
Boo fucking hoo. So he was in a position of power and got away with it at first, and then felt strengthened by that knowledge enough to continue until he was caught.
Advertisers also tell you that you should own a bigger house than your neighbor, but "keeping up with the joneses" has never yet been an excuse for murder or fraud (though it may or may not be a motive). If you get caught, however, it's your own responsibility. So many things on TV are unrealistic.. why is this suddenly an excuse? Next you'll be arguing that kids watching violent movies and videogames are more prone to violent acts...
Contemporary society doesn't accept some things that were fine before. Murder, too, was quite acceptable once, if only as a way to cull the group of young males. Today, however, it isn't anymore. Too bad; if you can't live with that fact, you have no place in modern society, and you might as well be put down.
Are you seriously trying to peddle the thought that rape is "just something that happens to you. don't worry about it, you'll get over it"? Ugh. Sure, you can talk people into a PTSD, or whatever, but the problem with rape really isn't that it's happened; the trouble is with trying to cope with the fact that you (as a woman) apparently do not have full autonomy over your body, over the fact that sensations were produced in it against your will by your assailant, etc., and then trying to talk yourself into the fact that that doesn't mean that you wanted it (as you'll be told by those self-righteous conservative christians that call themselves human). The effects that has on a person, especially a (pre-)teen, who is still forming his/her personality, are enormous. How is that not a permanent effect of your "temporarily nullifying someone's right to autonomy"?
Better? Ugh. Where do you get your omega-3 from then? egg white has almost no nutritional content, and contains almost none of the vitamins and minerals. (compare white and yolk, both dried. I can't find a source on cooked/raw eggs on the site, though. Odd, that.) Yes, there are correlations between cholesterol intake and increased Diabetes-2 risk, (and a few other things) but there is a lot of criticism being levelled at the "lipid hypothesis", and it is hardlyuncontroversial that increased cholesterol intake "causes" (or even statistically increases the chance for getting) metabolic diseases. Also,
A large yolk contains more than two-thirds of the recommended daily intake of 300 mg of cholesterol (although one study indicates that the human body may not absorb much cholesterol from eggs[18])
Exciting stuff. A felony even. Where did you get your disinformation about how you can only find "hacked up games with viruses" online, though?
Anyway, I'm glad you care so much about your line of work, but I have bought EU3 and a few other Paradox games, as well as Civ4.
But I don't really think a game with 0 replay factor is worth €60/50+$. And while I'm sure game development takes more time nowadays than 5-8 years ago, the current prices are just ridiculous. And yes, I might then "conscientiously" decide not to play the game, but OTOH, why would I? Especially when you're all being bought up by sequel factories like Activision "let's take the fun out of game development and instil a culture of fear".
He later added, "We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."
If that sounds like it would create a corporate culture that isn't all sunshine and hugs, then it's mission accomplished for Kotick. The executive said that he has tried to instill into the company culture "skepticism, pessimism, and fear" of the global economic downturn, adding, "We are very good at keeping people focused on the deep depression."
Luckily with games, there are free demos available on every major torrent site.
Having said that, I do realise that this applies less to console owners, who are in a more difficult position because they generally can't test games before purchasing it, meaning they will have to live with a lower signal-to-noise ratio. (But then, they were the ones who chose to invest in a closed platform.)
Anyway, I'm fairly happy that most games are available for free testing (I'm usually not really in a rush to get any particular game), because - looking back - I can't really say that I found very many games that would've been worth my money if I had bought them (not even when they were sold at half 'list' price).. For the last couple of years the list would pretty much be limited to Portal, EU3, World in Conflict, Vampire: Bloodlines and Civ4 (and Arkham Asylum was OK too, just not at the current prices). Not a very long list, I might note.
In all, I would suggest people don't get consoles, as too much bargaining power is taken away from you in getting one, and too many games just aren't worth wasting money on.
Quite so. "Man refused to use pen(cil) to vote; wanted to vote using (quill, or clay tablet with name etched into it)"
Yes, computerized voting is somewhat problematic when you don't require the computers to be OSS and/or verifiably untampered-with by the incumbent (or whoever), but trying to protest this at the time of voting seems rather late. And anyway, if you're the only one who votes on paper, do you really think your "certain" vote is going to make the difference? If you hate voting computers, create awareness some other way than this, as this is just going to make you seem whiny.
The more that power and national wealth are centralized in the hands of the national government the greater the incentive and opportunity for corruption, patronage, and undue insider influence to occur.
[citation needed]
In fact, many of the wealthy families of Europe have maintained their fortunes, at least in part by, successfully manipulating these national governments through patronage and corrupt bargains with government officials and elected representatives.
And If you start a sentence with "in fact", [citationS needed]. Do you really mean to say that you believe your Bush family today isn't at least as nepotist as "our (hidden, because I can't say I can think of too many offhand) old elites? I'm curious, what do you call buying a representative's allegiance through "campaign contributions"? Because I suspect that if you were to correlate donations with voting behavior, you'd be pretty shocked and appalled. And yet, the fact that that happens has nothing to do with "big government", just with people creating rules that are to their own advantage rather than to another's, and nobody caring enough to protest as long as they keep it hidden from view. In any case, "The libertarians amongst us" are a bunch of twits who use banal stereotypes in order to support their own beliefs, fearing to actually look for sources for their idiotic claims about "Europe" or "communism" because all they're interested in is pushing their own agenda, and for that you need fear of government. You rail against this "socialism" shit, yet you're afraid to look for confirmation from sources other than Glenn Beck's writing (because fuck knows he's the poster child of academic rigour in his research). If you want to see what deregulation did for the American consumer, go read Elizabeth Warren's "The Two-Income Trap". If you deregulate banks, they're not suddenly going to be nice to you, as though the 2500 year old usury laws/taboo was utter nonsense. They're going to try to suck you dry for all you're worth, and even if they don't succeed with you, they will succeed with your friends and neighbors. Only they won't talk about it because they feel it is their personal failing that they couldn't get better rates from the bank. Yet "libertarians" suck it all up and say "this is a risk of the free market. What the fuck is free about it? The relative bargaining power of the bank vis-a-vis the lone consumer is enormous. Of course there's going to be abuse of power there, resulting in terrible deals for the consumer. Remember that slogan "everyone is equal under the law"? You need regulation to enforce that. The open market won't create it. Why would they? There is no incentive whatever to do so, as there is nobody who can check their power except the government.
Those who believe that they will "punish the wealthy" need only look to Europe to see that the wealthy will largely keep their wealth while the middle class chafes under high unemployment, high prices for consumer goods and high taxes.
Have you not been watching the news in your country? How, pray tell, do you maintain this idiotic notion that the USA doesn't suffer from high prices? Try talking to anyone who's needed to go in for some sort of medical treatment, and see if they didn't go bankrupt afterwards because of lost income, or somesuch. as for high unemployment, again, [citation needed]. You kept the entire automobile industry alive through huge tariffs and subsidies, not least of which through actually subsidizing gas prices so that manufacturers didn't feel the need to try for better mileage. That industry's dead now, and you've got at least 10-15% unemployed atm. Think they'll be going away soon?
Remember what happened when people decided to vote for a third candidate in Fla 2000? Right, the votes were lost. A two party system is a direct consequence of winner takes all voting. And the ruling parties have a huge incentive to gerrymander districts in such a way that any third party is neutralized; or they can just raise the voting bar to, say, 5% of national votes, to ensure no "fringe" parties are elected into parliament. (see Russia, Germany for examples.) There are so many ways to keep out newcomers. Lastly (and I'm not trying to be insulting here), but local interests are generally pretty stupid, and only encourage porkbarrel spending and logrolling practices to buy voters with. Practices like that are what kept the rust belt in business and innovation-free.
Anyway, you probably didn't want to hear that. The point, however, is that "your being heard" is a joke and a fiction. Sure, you'll be heard, if "you" consist of 30-50% of the voters in your district. But that'll never happen on every piece of legislation that impacts "you", most of which you don't even hear about. And in those cases your shiny toy representative just votes for the guys who paid for his TV indoctrination campaign.
So be against Majoritarianism/Winner Takes All voting. The problem would be that the district system would have to go, because officials couldn't/wouldn't be elected locally any more (unless you, say, quadruple the number of representatives). But that would probably also cut down on those ridiculous amounts of money needed for elections, and, furthermore, decrease the possibility that votes are bought through "campaign contributions," or legalized bribery, because individual representatives would be less directly connected to special interests. In all, I would call it an enormous win, but YMMV.
I wholeheartedly agree. The problem your suggestion would run into, though, is that very few people (especially from the social sciences/lit) will be unwilling to have to devote time to becoming mathematically literate unless they consider it a useful part of their choice of major. There are few things that annoy me more today than the stuff public spokespeople get away with when they start spouting "data", but until you somehow make all students realise that a. it's in their best interest, and b. it's still in their best interest if they "don't care" about being lied to by everyone from the salesmen through to your pet senator. People think they can get by without understanding and being comfortable around any maths at all (it's only for nerds, or really clever people) even though it's a skill that will help you with anything from picking out a mortgage that you can afford to cringing whenever someone only mentions a percentage increase without giving context.
and somewhat more interestingly and controversially: The article that denounced (mostly Goldman Sachs's) doing this:
It is called high-frequency trading — and it is suddenly one of the most talked-about and mysterious forces in the markets. Powerful computers, some housed right next to the machines that drive marketplaces like the New York Stock Exchange, enable high-frequency traders to transmit millions of orders at lightning speed and, their detractors contend, reap billions at everyone else’s expense. (The slower traders began issuing buy orders. But rather than being shown to all potential sellers at the same time, some of those orders were most likely routed to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds — 0.03 seconds — in what are known as flash orders. While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.) These systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike. And after growing in the shadows for years, they are generating lots of talk. Nearly everyone on Wall Street is wondering how hedge funds and large banks like Goldman Sachs are making so much money so soon after the financial system nearly collapsed. High-frequency trading is one answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. The reason those bacterial infections can grow without being disturbed is precisely because your immune system is inactive during stressed periods. See Sapolsky's work, e.g., Why Zebra's don't get Ulcers., or his recent splendid TTC series Stress and your body.
After the University Of Hawaii began getting Google Over IPv6 in March of 2010, we began noticing problems with user devices on our wireless sending router advertisements and “black-holing” traffic. This problem is, of course made more apparent by initiating Google Over IPv6, which causes significantly more content to be requested by clients over IPv6. Despite first appearances, this is a good thing, since it is a problem that must be faced and dealt with in order to operate a IPv6 network for the near term.
In a nutshell, a “rogue RA” scenario occurs when some device besides an “official” router identifies itself as a router using “router advertisement” ICMP6 messages. Once client hosts see the “rogue” as a router, they may prefer it as their next hop to send traffic out to the Internet.
This can result in one of two problems:
These issues are not IPv6 specific problems. There are numerous similar problems that occur in IPv4 networks, on 802.11 “WiFi” networks, and on Layer 2 switched wired networks.
The best-known cause of rogue RAs on an IPv6 network comes from Windows Vista hosts with Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) enabled. Other causes are probably common, since the “personalities” of rogue RAs seem to differ widely.
And there also appears to be a problem with enabled 6to4 tunnels advertising to the network that they are willing to act as virtual gateways.. Not exactly my idea of 'extremely good'
*shrug*. Tell that to everyone living off the income that up until now was provided by the Gulf of Mexico, and everyone who is (was) directly or indirectly dependent on the wages the people who made their living off the Gulf earned. Words might look "offensive", but BPs actions are 1000x that, and they have assured the suicide of more parents and partners on that coast than I will ever be able to effect through writing here, and they don't give a flying fuck. (Specifically, look at suicide incidence rates in Alaska since the Exxon Valdez disaster there, especially among fishermen, but also among service providers.)
are you going to provide oil to run the fishermen's boats for the next 40 years?
are you going to provide oil to run the hotels for the next 20 years?
does the free market guarantee continued employment, or is the very basis of capitalism the inherent necessity of the value of ADAPTING.
Tell me where you live, and I will shoot your family. You must adapt to any change I think is right for you (read: me).
But wait, you might ask, where is my right to freedom from interference?
You, however, have less money, and therefore your suffering is irrelevant. Congratulations, you live in the State of Nature, also called the USA.
I know you won't admit to it, but I, at least, find this line of reasoning troubling, and just a little bit undemocratic. Why do you pride yourself on living under a rule of law, when you have The Market?
Yes, that's what's called the "anglo-saxon business model". Something similar happens when hedge funds buy up companies, use that company as collateral to borrow huge amounts of money with, and then dump the company again.
The Economist has a pathetic leader this week criticizing Obama for hammering BP and raising the ridiculous idea that his corporate-friendly administration is anti-business.
It actually (really!) calls the president “Vladimir Obama” and writes:
The collapse in BP’s share price suggests that he has convinced the markets that he is an American version of Vladimir Putin, willing to harry firms into doing his bidding.
The normally sober Economist has gone off the wagon here.
First, it knows better than to “suggest” what “the markets” think. Second, that blew up in its face rather quickly. Instaputz points out that BP shares soared 10 percent on news of the $20 billion fund the Economist’s spin here is obnoxious. If anything ends up ruining BP, it will have been its own actions. Go read this The Wall Street Journal piece for a look at the company’s negligence.
And BP should have to pay for all the associated costs of its actions, not just the actual bill for cleaning up the oil.they will be very, very costly.
Moreover, a company’s market capitalization is based on expectations for future earnings. This disaster will surely make it harder for BP to get drilling rights that investors expected it to have just two months ago. The political climate for offshore drilling has just undergone a seismic change.
Another big factor in BP’s share decline is pure uncertainty. Investors don’t like it. Right now, the only thing certain is that BP’s hole is going to be spewing toxic oil into the Gulf of Mexico for at least another two months
Bobby Jindal doesn't know what he's doing here, guys. He's fighting an oil spill like a war or a flood. You block this pass off with these dirtbags and mounds of dirt, you're gonna kill this marsh. The life here evolved with the current that moves through this pass. Nutrients, oxygen... you're creating a slackwater zone in a marsh that is used to tides and current. There's little critters that keep the algae off the grass stems and reeds. They need oxygen and a specific salt-freshwater mix. They eat the algae and keep the grass healthy. You kill them and the marsh becomes a big flat of rotting vegitation. But... where did you get that dirt? 300 yards inland? That dirt's poison for this marsh. Couldn't be worse than if you brought it from Nebraska. It's alien fucking dirt in this environment. It's worse than the fucking oil. And Jindal will leave it here forever if we let him. Lets get that shit out of here and we'll all get together and lay some fucking proper fucking boom.
. See here for relevant background:
you get the idea. It's fucking obvious. Boom is not meant to contain or catch oil. Boom is meant to divert oil. Boom must always be at an angle to the prevailing wind-wave action or surface current. Boom, at this angle, must always be layered in a fucking overlapped sort-of way with another string of boom. Boom must always divert oil to a catch basin or other container, from where it can be REMOVED FROM THE FUCKING AREA. Looks kinda involved, doesn't it? It is. But if fucking proper fucking booming is done properly, you can remove most, by far most of the oil from a shoreline and you can do it day after day, week after week, month after month. You can prevent most, by far most of the shoreline from ever being touched by more than a few transient molecules of oil. Done fucking properly, a week after the oil stops coming ashore, no one, man nor beast, can ever tell there has been oil anywhere near that shoreline.
Wow, we are sinking to new levels of idiocy now.
The MSM would have you believe that the tremendous sell-off in the markets was just a trading error. If it was a trading error, then these markets SUCK! Are you telling me we put TRILLIONS of dollars, including our retirement savings, into a system that can be completely thrown into chaos because a single guy hits the wrong button on a single transaction? It’s a good thing Faisal Shahzad isn’t still working on Wall Street anymore, or he could have just pushed a button and caused a lot more damage that way than he did with a faulty car bomb
This is financial terrorism, folks, retail traders were stopped out and margined out while the pros made Billions picking up the pieces. Don’t worry though, if you are rich enough and connected enough, the Nasdaq will reverse your losses but if they really wanted to make amends, they would cancel the day’s trading for ALL traders.
This market didn’t just sell off because of a trading mistake. Whatever really happened, it happened because there were no real buyers when the selling came - something I have been warning would happen during the last 3 months of low-volume run-ups. I keep using the house of cards/Jenga metaphor and that’s exactly what we have so be very careful when the same idiots who have been telling you BUYBUYBUY are now telling you to "come back in - the water’s fine."
and here:
Having seen the capitulation unfold second by second and then listen to CNBC come up with every excuse under the sun just got under my skin. I've decided to chart some of our one second analytics charts of the capitulation unfolding on our screens. The chart below (more to follow) captures the moment of the final capitulation, before the reversal today. The idea that it was a 'fat finger' error is ludicrous; unless the fat finger hit every market in the world virtually simultaneously. Liquidity simply left the world financial markets for about four minutes this afternoon. The bids just vanished. And what else vanished? Remember the vaunted supplemental liquidity providers, led by Goldman Sachs. Remember that they are paid to "provide liquidity" through their predatory high-frequency algos, they are not required to do so. So when the S@#$T hit the fan they just disappeared. In one second more or less someone (and yes, under these circumstances, human beings take control of the machines) made the decision to pull the bids on every equity in the S&P, every financial futures contract, every FX contract in every market in the world. This kind of thing just doesn't happen in a pure auction environment; there just isn't a tight enough communication link between the parties to allow the decisions to propagate within the same second -- even with HFT algorithms. No. Some human made the decision to pull the bids; all of them, all at once. If that is not a condemnation of the concentration of financial power and the systematic risk it engenders I don't know what is.
So, when you say "society has changed", what you actually mean is that "cops are now far more paranoid, trigger-happy fuckers than before"?
The point that multiple people have made here, and which you so strongly seem to be ignoring/denying, is that society has hardly become more violent than it was 40 years ago. The only difference is that we have more news sources today who cover similar shit.
But by all means, be accepting about the fact that LEOs perceive so many threats that they will likely soon start hitting children who "escape" vehicles during the "search process".
And the US government condoned not giving blacks treatment for syphilis even though it was readily available and known to work, as well as testing vaccines and seeing how Hepatitis-C infections progressed in on mentally retarded children, sterilized them, locked up its Japanese citizens in concentration camps during and after WWII, allowed state-sponsored racism at least until 1964, and is currently feeding Illinois state prisoners a diet that is known to cause organ failure
Isn't this a href= thing fun? I can go on all day. I am, however, saddened, that you call this "some mistakes".
What were you using it for? All the DX can do is display PDFs. It can't search, bookmark, annotate, and probably not zoom.
The iliad can do all of these things, and has a folder structure view in the filelist as well. For any kind of reading other than passive reading, the DX (with its larger screen) is about as useful as a Dinky Toy.
I love simple reasons. Really. They're almost always accurate.
Because fuck knows it wasn't the companies who asked for money to prop up their failing business models with, it was the government's fault for being captured and giving in.
All that's happened in the past 20 years is people lobbying to get more freedoms for a select few companies, the government granting that because of no adequate oversight and a severe lack of foresight in legislators (perhaps partly due to regulatory capture, but that's pretty hard to reconstruct), and businesses capitalizing on that to fleece everyone they could out of their money.
And yet, somehow, this is all the fault of government rather than of the egotistical fuckers who feel it is their "duty" to maximize corporate profit (and get "healthy" bonuses out of it in the process). The credit market was destroyed because the banks can currently borrow from the government at no cost, and use that money any way they like, which is far less risky than loaning to businesses. Which is why they don't feel the need to try to restart small loans etc. anymore. And there were no strings attached to those loans because of filthy little fuckers like Geithner and Summers who conveniently forgot, or claimed that "regulation at this point would keep the banks from using and applying their expertise".
No aspect of this "crash" has anything to do with the crippling effects of regulation, if anything, regulations prevented it, until they were abolished (Glass-Steagal, leverage rules for the big 5 being suspended in a backroom without oversight, you name it they've done it) through lobbying by rich people who wanted to become richer and didn't care what the effects would be for everyone else. And all of this largely made possible because senators are so dependent on campaign contributions (much more so now in the age of TV than ever before) that they will suck anyone's cock just so they can stay in power a bit longer. Why US citizens accept this to be the case I haven't the faintest, but it's probably because nobody in the MSM is really pointing people towards the fact that only on token issues (abortion) where the public "speaks up" they have any input in the process any more.
"We do the opposite of what would help" because the things that are done then do help a group of perhaps 10.000-100.000 people who have the most say. Only their interests don't really always mesh very well with the interests of the other 300 million.
bureaucratic rules that small companies have to adhere to explain perhaps 0.001% of the variance, but considering how much money they make compared to the big ones, your problems really don't matter.
More people have died from deciding to take a car more often (instead of an airplane) than there died in 9/11. And most of those deaths weren't even on the planes, but in the buildings. (Never even mind the economic damage caused by the car crashes, insurance payouts, and travel time lost that could've been spent on business matters directly; and, more indirectly, the 3-trillion dollar Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the iraqi lives lost due to Blackwater having fun, etc.)
Terrorist attacks in Europe or Israel have taken far many more lives than they have in the US.. The planes flying into buildings happened, sure.. but "9/11" was created in the mind of the world by the US response to it.
"I could smell the BS a mile a way" does not actually prove you're intelligent or insightful. It might just as well prove that you distrust people who tell you you're doing something that is causing something bad. Or something else entirely. But feel free to interpret the CRU "Scandal" as you like to reinforce your own opinions.. just remember it doesn't really prove anything.
Boo fucking hoo. So he was in a position of power and got away with it at first, and then felt strengthened by that knowledge enough to continue until he was caught.
Advertisers also tell you that you should own a bigger house than your neighbor, but "keeping up with the joneses" has never yet been an excuse for murder or fraud (though it may or may not be a motive). If you get caught, however, it's your own responsibility. So many things on TV are unrealistic.. why is this suddenly an excuse? Next you'll be arguing that kids watching violent movies and videogames are more prone to violent acts...
Contemporary society doesn't accept some things that were fine before. Murder, too, was quite acceptable once, if only as a way to cull the group of young males. Today, however, it isn't anymore. Too bad; if you can't live with that fact, you have no place in modern society, and you might as well be put down.
Are you seriously trying to peddle the thought that rape is "just something that happens to you. don't worry about it, you'll get over it"? Ugh. Sure, you can talk people into a PTSD, or whatever, but the problem with rape really isn't that it's happened; the trouble is with trying to cope with the fact that you (as a woman) apparently do not have full autonomy over your body, over the fact that sensations were produced in it against your will by your assailant, etc., and then trying to talk yourself into the fact that that doesn't mean that you wanted it (as you'll be told by those self-righteous conservative christians that call themselves human). The effects that has on a person, especially a (pre-)teen, who is still forming his/her personality, are enormous. How is that not a permanent effect of your "temporarily nullifying someone's right to autonomy"?
Yes, there are correlations between cholesterol intake and increased Diabetes-2 risk, (and a few other things) but there is a lot of criticism being levelled at the "lipid hypothesis", and it is hardly uncontroversial that increased cholesterol intake "causes" (or even statistically increases the chance for getting) metabolic diseases. Also,
Anyway, I'm glad you care so much about your line of work, but I have bought EU3 and a few other Paradox games, as well as Civ4.
But I don't really think a game with 0 replay factor is worth €60/50+$. And while I'm sure game development takes more time nowadays than 5-8 years ago, the current prices are just ridiculous. And yes, I might then "conscientiously" decide not to play the game, but OTOH, why would I? Especially when you're all being bought up by sequel factories like Activision "let's take the fun out of game development and instil a culture of fear".
Anyway, enjoy your anger.
Luckily with games, there are free demos available on every major torrent site.
Having said that, I do realise that this applies less to console owners, who are in a more difficult position because they generally can't test games before purchasing it, meaning they will have to live with a lower signal-to-noise ratio. (But then, they were the ones who chose to invest in a closed platform.)
Anyway, I'm fairly happy that most games are available for free testing (I'm usually not really in a rush to get any particular game), because - looking back - I can't really say that I found very many games that would've been worth my money if I had bought them (not even when they were sold at half 'list' price).. For the last couple of years the list would pretty much be limited to Portal, EU3, World in Conflict, Vampire: Bloodlines and Civ4 (and Arkham Asylum was OK too, just not at the current prices). Not a very long list, I might note.
In all, I would suggest people don't get consoles, as too much bargaining power is taken away from you in getting one, and too many games just aren't worth wasting money on.
Quite so. "Man refused to use pen(cil) to vote; wanted to vote using (quill, or clay tablet with name etched into it)"
Yes, computerized voting is somewhat problematic when you don't require the computers to be OSS and/or verifiably untampered-with by the incumbent (or whoever), but trying to protest this at the time of voting seems rather late. And anyway, if you're the only one who votes on paper, do you really think your "certain" vote is going to make the difference? If you hate voting computers, create awareness some other way than this, as this is just going to make you seem whiny.
[citation needed]
And If you start a sentence with "in fact", [citationS needed]. Do you really mean to say that you believe your Bush family today isn't at least as nepotist as "our (hidden, because I can't say I can think of too many offhand) old elites? I'm curious, what do you call buying a representative's allegiance through "campaign contributions"? Because I suspect that if you were to correlate donations with voting behavior, you'd be pretty shocked and appalled. And yet, the fact that that happens has nothing to do with "big government", just with people creating rules that are to their own advantage rather than to another's, and nobody caring enough to protest as long as they keep it hidden from view.
In any case, "The libertarians amongst us" are a bunch of twits who use banal stereotypes in order to support their own beliefs, fearing to actually look for sources for their idiotic claims about "Europe" or "communism" because all they're interested in is pushing their own agenda, and for that you need fear of government. You rail against this "socialism" shit, yet you're afraid to look for confirmation from sources other than Glenn Beck's writing (because fuck knows he's the poster child of academic rigour in his research). If you want to see what deregulation did for the American consumer, go read Elizabeth Warren's "The Two-Income Trap". If you deregulate banks, they're not suddenly going to be nice to you, as though the 2500 year old usury laws/taboo was utter nonsense. They're going to try to suck you dry for all you're worth, and even if they don't succeed with you, they will succeed with your friends and neighbors. Only they won't talk about it because they feel it is their personal failing that they couldn't get better rates from the bank. Yet "libertarians" suck it all up and say "this is a risk of the free market. What the fuck is free about it? The relative bargaining power of the bank vis-a-vis the lone consumer is enormous. Of course there's going to be abuse of power there, resulting in terrible deals for the consumer. Remember that slogan "everyone is equal under the law"? You need regulation to enforce that. The open market won't create it. Why would they? There is no incentive whatever to do so, as there is nobody who can check their power except the government.
Have you not been watching the news in your country? How, pray tell, do you maintain this idiotic notion that the USA doesn't suffer from high prices? Try talking to anyone who's needed to go in for some sort of medical treatment, and see if they didn't go bankrupt afterwards because of lost income, or somesuch. as for high unemployment, again, [citation needed]. You kept the entire automobile industry alive through huge tariffs and subsidies, not least of which through actually subsidizing gas prices so that manufacturers didn't feel the need to try for better mileage. That industry's dead now, and you've got at least 10-15% unemployed atm. Think they'll be going away soon?
Remember what happened when people decided to vote for a third candidate in Fla 2000? Right, the votes were lost. A two party system is a direct consequence of winner takes all voting. And the ruling parties have a huge incentive to gerrymander districts in such a way that any third party is neutralized; or they can just raise the voting bar to, say, 5% of national votes, to ensure no "fringe" parties are elected into parliament. (see Russia, Germany for examples.) There are so many ways to keep out newcomers. Lastly (and I'm not trying to be insulting here), but local interests are generally pretty stupid, and only encourage porkbarrel spending and logrolling practices to buy voters with. Practices like that are what kept the rust belt in business and innovation-free.
Anyway, you probably didn't want to hear that. The point, however, is that "your being heard" is a joke and a fiction. Sure, you'll be heard, if "you" consist of 30-50% of the voters in your district. But that'll never happen on every piece of legislation that impacts "you", most of which you don't even hear about. And in those cases your shiny toy representative just votes for the guys who paid for his TV indoctrination campaign.
So be against Majoritarianism/Winner Takes All voting. The problem would be that the district system would have to go, because officials couldn't/wouldn't be elected locally any more (unless you, say, quadruple the number of representatives). But that would probably also cut down on those ridiculous amounts of money needed for elections, and, furthermore, decrease the possibility that votes are bought through "campaign contributions," or legalized bribery, because individual representatives would be less directly connected to special interests. In all, I would call it an enormous win, but YMMV.
I wholeheartedly agree. The problem your suggestion would run into, though, is that very few people (especially from the social sciences/lit) will be unwilling to have to devote time to becoming mathematically literate unless they consider it a useful part of their choice of major. There are few things that annoy me more today than the stuff public spokespeople get away with when they start spouting "data", but until you somehow make all students realise that a. it's in their best interest, and b. it's still in their best interest if they "don't care" about being lied to by everyone from the salesmen through to your pet senator. People think they can get by without understanding and being comfortable around any maths at all (it's only for nerds, or really clever people) even though it's a skill that will help you with anything from picking out a mortgage that you can afford to cringing whenever someone only mentions a percentage increase without giving context.
Again, a blogger;