No, they did not. The same risk taking investors who placed their money into the dot-com bubble, invested their money into housing after the bubble burt. After the housing market cooled down, they invested in commodities, creating a boom there. Institutional investors who previously invested very conservatively, continued to.
And people who needed to purchase houses had to purchase marked up ones, and bought even bigger than they needed as 'investments'.
I don't give a fuck about people who invest professionally. They can take care of themselves. It's people who see the bank giving an interest rate of 3% and property values raising 15% a year who got hit, and were repeatedly told 'home values never go down' and 'homes are an investment' that went out and bought a home that was already overpriced by 50%.
Why were the banks giving such low interest rates? Because of the government's monetary policy. Why were property values rising so quickly? Because of the government's complete non-interference.
And even people who didn't fall for the idiocy were still effected, because they have to have a place to live. It's all well and good to say people can opt out of the stock market, even though that's not true because of pension plans and whatnot. No one can opt out of the housing market. (And, yes, the increase in home prices also raised rents and leases. Although renters, at least, won't be hurt by the drop.)
Your article did not mention them, so please elaborate on these other "tiny" things. And also, elaborate how you would have stopped the housing boom.
I would stopped promoting home ownership, for the most obvious one!
Other than that, let's see: Tightened controls on the mortgage industry so there wasn't so much money being thrown around. Changed tax code to penalize flipping.
And I'd have encouraged local government to de-emphasize more residential zoning, and have impact fees for new hours, and to increase property taxes for higher-priced houses.
The tiny things? Well, Bush did almost exactly the opposite of all those. (Although he didn't really have to work locally, he knew local Republicans would automatically fight impact fees and increased property taxes and zoning.)
No, housing prices really couldn't have gotten higher than they did. Investors realized that it was a bubble, and pulled out.
Sure they could have gotten higher...if oil prices had been lower. That's what made the wheels fall off this little ride...people couldn't pay for their gas and their mortgage. (And their food, but food prices follow right behind gas prices.)
Don't you think that it's a little absurd that one of the most incompetent presidencies in history successfuly orchestrated the movement of trillions of dollars by ingenious and unnoticeable micro-prods, and yet fail to realize that invading a oil rich country will increase the price of oil?
The theory is that by now, in fact, by 2004, we'd have control of their oil wells. No, not that we'd take over and run them ourselves, but that they'd be selling cheap to us. Remember how the oil was supposed to pay for the war?
If the Iraq war had worked, we'd be rolling in 75c gas right now, and people would be driving 60 miles a day in their Hummer earning $40,000 a year to pay off their $260,000 house, and that would actually work. At least for another 18 months.
And even if you think it wouldn't work another 18 months even with cheap oil, that was still the plan. It's possible that even without oil going up, the plan would have failed, but arguing that a Bush plan would have failed for multiple reasons or was insanely optimistic about the behavior of others is not a very useful objection to the idea that such a plan exists.
The illusion in question is an illusion because it causes your brain to assume lighting conditions that aren't the case, which cause you to interpret color incorrectly.
That makes no sense. There are no actual lighting conditions, so how do you know which ones are real?
That's just a show-measure, designed to make people feel good. Besides, the definition of "heavy-gas-using cars" is very sketchy, expect it to be distorted beyond belief in a congressional hearing.
Um, no, it's already been distorted. What needs to be done is to undistort it.
Batteries require a tremendous amount of energy to create, unless the car is driven very often, this is often more energy than is saved.
Jesus Christ. Here's me: 'And, yes, we'd have idiots argue it wouldn't save money, when the point isn't to save money, or even energy. It's to help cover research and production-startup costs.'
I can't argue with this sort of bone-deep stupidity. Granted, I was talking about solar panels, but anyone could figure out the same applies to hybrid cars. We can wait 20 years for this industry to grow enough to be economically feasible, relying on early adopters to pay the cost, or we, in the form of the government, can pay the early-adopter cost and get it reasonable now. (Which also would cause a economic boom, and make a lot more sense than damn overbuilt houses, or a stupid-ass war.)
Whether or not we should do it to reduce energy consumption is a valid question, but I wasn't postulating it for that. I was saying that if we're going to have a government sponsored bubble, we should do it in something that's actually useful in the long run, even after the bubble goes away.
Gasoline is highly price-inelastic. Prices would have to be raised to tremendous levels in order to signifigantly effect consumption(far more than the $2-$3 per gallon you are talking about). Not only that, but it would harm poor people rather severely, along with increasing inflation.
I was talking about raising them to 2-3 a gallon, which, obviously, makes no sense anymore, but doesn't appear to hurt poor people that much. But that's exactly why I proposed a tax on new cars instead of on gas.
Europe is every bit as Dependant on the rest of the world for oil and natural gas as we are. In fact, because of their particular infrastructure, they are more so. So if energy security is your concern, don't look to them as a shining beacon.
I'm pretty certain I didn't mention Europe at all, and actually, you're wrong. Europe uses a lot less gas per-person. They have tiny little cars exactly because gas costs so much, and they use mass transit a lot more because they actually build mass transit and thus can get everywhere using it.
But, hey, there's yet another thing we could have done. Instead of building houses, we could have build mass transit.
Any step forward in solar cell technology is going to be done by grad students working for a VC. How exactly are the profits of giant corporations funneled to them? I'm concerned that such subsidies distort funding away from original technologies that have not been considered.
As opposed to now, where big oil is in charge of funneling research?
Before we decide what are our goals. Is your goal achieving energy independence, or mitigating global warming? I am personally unsympathetic to the first goal, and very enthusiastic about the second. But they have nothing to do with each other, and I would like you to clarify your goals before I move on.
Ah, I see. You like big oil.
Well, no point in trying to convince you of anything.
Yes, it was a rather disgusting corporate welfare program. Regardless, senior citizens received drugs they would have had to pay for, so I count it as an entitlement. Semantics aside, the deficit is due mostly to growth in these programs.
Medicare drugs now cost more. If you want to include that as an entitlement increase, go ahead and live in your own crazy universe.
Those are just the ones with Wikipedia articles. In each of those countries, median home prices have doubled in the last 8 years, in most of them, the increase was far larger. Real estate prices have spiked by enormous amounts in nearly every country in the world (Japan is a notable exception; prices are still level from their boom in the 90's).
First off, there is no Russian or Romania or Indian or China housing bubble, despite the fact there's a Wikipedia article with that name. Russia might have a Moscow bubble, but, OTOH, their property is way out of sync of the reast of Europe. Romania just invented home loans, before that, no one could actually afford to own a house.
India and China, OTOH, are in the middle of a huge income increase, prices are not increasing alone, income is increasing. The fact that people can now afford to live in real houses instead of hovels is not a 'bubble'.
Europe, OTOH, actually is in a bubble. Why? Because our investment greatly influences theirs, and our government influence theirs.
More to the point, you'll notice that most of their bubbles and slowed in 2006 or 2005, and started a year or so after ours. (Ours actually started in 2000 or even 1999, although no one really noticed.) Why? Because those countries figured out how dangerous it was and stopped it!
You vastly over-estimate the effect of the removal of the 30-year note. As I said earlier, the 30-year note had many close substitutes with essentially identical risk and return (FDIC insured CD's and state bonds for example).
Even without substitutes, the 30-year note was for very conservative investors. The idea that by removing one ultra-safe investment option, investors will suddenly pour funds into risky real estate is absurd.
Except they did.
And you're overempashising the example I gave. There were a lot of tiny things that the government did to encourage it, and there were quite a lot of things the government could have done to stop it. (I, unlike you , don't think the government should let the free market drive itself off the cliff, even if it chooses to do so of its own free will. And it certainly shouldn't do anything to encourage it.)
The "Ownership Society" was a political buzzword used by George Bush to capitalize on a trend. You have failed to provide convincing evidence that this was anything more than an empty slogan. Anyone with enough cash or credit to buy a home should know better than taking financial advice from a politician.
And, once again, the right is forced to fall back on 'It's not malice, it's incompetence'.
Bzzzt, wrong. If oil prices had remained steady, the housing boom would still be happening, and it would happen all the way to the next president, who would get hit with the collapse, which at that point would be even worse. That was what was supposed to happen.
It's incompetence it's happing now, but it was with malice Bush encouraged it. Did you know that, of the jobs created under Bush, about a third of them are related to the real estate market, mostly as a realtor or construction worker? It sure looked nice as a statistic in job creation, and hey, the next guy was going to have to deal with all those unemployed workers when the bubble crashed.
Yes, everyone knows that. We would have had a recession in 2002-2003 without something to stop.
Bush decided to fix it with a goddamn housing bubble. This was less than useful, as it is leading the way to a full-scale economic collapse.
The point isn't to 'save' the economy, the economy could have got through the tech crash eventually, the point would have been to cushion it while it happened. Look at the 80s crash.
Encouraging people to purchase overpriced houses they can't afford is pretty much the opposite of 'cushioning'. In fact, it's a good way for a lot of people to end up homeless, and cause another actual depression.
Actually, Bush has raised entitlement spending more than any president since Johnson. The biggest offender is the prescription drug plan, but that is just one part of his "Compassionate Conservatism".
The prescription drug program didn't give anyone entitlements except the drug companies.
If you meant he raised spending, yes, I know. Pretending it's caused by 'entitlements' when it's actually an expansion of the military and corporate welfare is just deceitful.
Which explains why real estate prices spiked in a bunch of other countries too?
Yes, they spiked and went down in some places, and went up in some places, went down in some places. Pretending the housing bubble is a global problem is idiotic. Nowhere else on the planet saw home prices double in the last eight years.
All the article says the treasury department did was eliminate the 30-year treasury note, claiming that this made long-term investment impossible without real-estate. This is absurd, anyone investing in real-estate is expecting far larger returns than a 30 year would give. Not only that, but CD's and Municipality bonds are close substitutes for the 30 year note.
*sigh* The government influences the market in many ways. One of those ways was to remove certain bonds for investment purposes.
And I notice you didn't respond to my 'Ownership Society' mention. Bush went up there in 2004, boasting how home ownership was high and talking about the 'ownership society', etc, etc, at a time that anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge could see we were in a bubble and encouraging people to buy a house at that moment was stupid. He did that because his economy was based on housing prices.
It might be possible that the government helping the bubble was an accident only if we didn't have them standing up in front of everyone and promoting 'investing' in that bubble.
The best solution is to move to a consumption tax. Instead of taxing income that people make, you tax what people spend. The effects are a bit regressive, but you can overcome that with a tax rebate.
The best solution for what? What fictional problem are you looking at? How on earth could taking consumption help the housing market? (Unless you're including taxing houses, which are not normally included in 'sales tax' proposals.)
So far, government attempts to do all of that have been subverted into bipartisan pork competitions. I don't really believe that our government is capable of doing such a complicated and nuanced thing, at least not with our current constitutional system.
Our government, OTOH, is perfectly capable of slowly raising the taxes on heavy-gas-using cars, and providing rebates to help defray the cost of hybrid cars, for example. I'd suggest higher gas taxes, putting gas in the range somewhere of 2-3 dollars a gallon, except the current government has managed to do that fairly accidentally. Higher taxes on high MPG cars is fairer to consumers, anyway...they'll know what they're getting into when they buy it.
Or putting solar on top of their buildings. And, yes, we'd have idiots argue it wouldn't save money, when the point isn't to save money, or even energy. It's to help cover research and production-startup costs. We spend 80 dollars a panel so they can build big factories and then sell them to people at 25 dollars a customer, because people won't buy them at 80 and the first million are going to cost that much.
The government shouldn't run around funding research. The government should set up taxes and rebates to encourage companies to do research themselves, because it's less expensive than not doing it. It should be buying the results, even if it costs more than it saves right now, to encourage development.
Hell, while you're at it, run water pipes through the algae, and you've got solar-heated water. I don't know why that wouldn't work.
The problem with hydrogen collection is that it tends to escape because it's so small. So, logically, the closer you move it to where you use it, the better. You can collect it on your roof and operate a power generator that burns it into water in your attic, if you're powering your house off it. (A bit more work to get it to your car, though.) As an added bonus, now you're got freshwater being created, which you can use as drinking water...and you don't even have to pump it anywhere, it's in your attic and will pour thanks to gravity.
But I'm still not entirely convinced that hydrogen will play an important part of anything in the future. The second we invent a battery that's better, hydrogen is going away...it's too much work to contain it.
If we power cars with hydrogen, the equation here is:
if photocell-electrical conversion to hydrogen<algae
Whereas if we power them using something else, the equation is:
if photocell<algae-energy loss in burning
Which doesn't mean we can't use it if we aren't powering cars with hydrogen, just that it might be better to use photocells at that point.
Of course, as scientists have been trying to figure out how to do for decades, the thing to actually do is figure out how to take solar light and use it to turn carbon dioxide into carbon, like plants do. And then burn the carbon back into CO2.
That's what they've got working with hydrogen, but if we could get it working with carbon, we'd not only find it easier to burn, we'd stop global warming dead. The CO2 we'd get by burning is 'free' cause we just pulled it out of the air in the first place, and we could set up a bunch of those things and not burn the resulting carbon to decrease CO2.
What exactly did the Bush administration do wrong, as far as economic management goes? No matter who was in power, after 9/11 any politician would have drastically increased homeland security and military spending. The Bush Tax cuts were very popular, and would have been implemented anyway, whether or not Bush was in power. Not only that, but while corruption is very photogenic, it's effects have been economically negligible. Our deficit is mostly the result of highly enlarged entitlement spending, which I just can't see tied to George Bush.
Then you're a moron. Clinton left Bush with a balanced budget. Bush has not increased entitlements. Ergo, our deficit cannot be caused by entitlements.
However, that's completely irrelevant to what I was talking about. No one here is talking about the financial shape of the government. We're talking about the financial shape of the country.
And we didn't need to vastly increase military spending after 9/11. We could have beaten Afghanistan with one hand tied behind our back.
You seem to think that presidents are relevant to macroeconomic trends. This is a common political delusion, but in the absence of massively stupid legislation(On the level of what has been seen in Latin America), the Federal Reserve bank is the only office with any real power.
Did you read the article I linked to? The Treasury Department, which I assure you the president does control, almost single-handed caused the housing boom because of how they structured their bonds, causing anyone who wanted to invest long term have to do so in real estate. (And, of course, Republicans automatically structure things where investments get less taxes than income.)
And does the phrase 'Ownership Society' not ring a bell anymore? Maybe you should check out who coined that expression and used it repeatedly. The Treasury Department's behavior was not an accident.
Of course, all that we are left with are millions of homes. What use could they serve?
Are you being sarcastic? We've got more homes than people, we've got more going up all the time because of the lag in the market, and quite a bit of them are much too large to operate at a reasonable cost and shoddily enough constructed that the upkeep will be a bitch. Because people stopped judging houses as 'Is this a good fit for me?' and instead asked 'What's the most expensive house I can afford right now as an 'investment'?'.
Yes, in the long run, the houses aren't going to vanish and will eventually get used. OTOH, the excess houses are going to depression the construction market for some time, so look for higher prices there.
Random fads are not a useful way to build material wealth in this country. People suspend their judgment, companies slap together shoddy products that people would not normally want, and then it crashes down and products sit on shelves and houses stand abandoned for years. If people want X amount of something a year, and then suddenly want X3 for a year and then 1/2X for two years, the industry is in a lot worse shape than if they had just kept wanting X a year...half the companies have probably gone bankrupt and a lot of waste occured.
Random fads, OTOH, are a good way to get a lot of research done. Or, for example, convert a lot of homes to be more energy efficent. Or, as the last fad demonstrated, get everyone on the internet.
Really? How exactly could we have done that?
Erm...tax breaks? Research grants? Higher taxes on non-alternative energy?
It's not really the poor economy, it's the fact Bush has used a bubble instead of actual growth.
We should have had a minor recession in 2001 or 2002, but then it would have been really hard to convince people they needed to funnel huge amounts of money into defense contractors pockets.
Money quote:
The liberal solution would have been to try and find a new tech boom, which in the case of the Gore administration would almost certainly have either been a micro and alternative energy boom or a telecom boom.
The Bush solution was different. The decision was made to base the economy on the real estate market. Record low interest rates flooded money into the mortgage market and the housing market boomed.
A boom sucks, at the end, No matter what you do, people will come in and lose their shirts. But some booms, in the long run, have much better results. The internet boom of the 90s changed the face of the planet. And even if some people lost their shirts in the stock market, well, no one made them invest.
This housing boom, OTOH, everyone did have to play. Even renters pay more when houses prices are up, although at least they won't have to watch the value of their house plummet. And it's left us with no tangible benefits at all except millions of shoddy McMansions.
We could have put that same amount of effort and money in alternate energy, and be in the middle of a nice stock correction now, where alternate energy company stocks are dropping through the floor and being picked up by a few big players which are merging with the big energy suppliers who are just now realizing they need to change their business plan. Which wouldn't hurt John Q. Public at all. John Q. Public, in fact, came out ahead because he got 'sponsored' for solar panels and that company, with a crappy business plan, went out of business, like during the tech crash.
Of hardware, there was the infamous Therac 25, an x-ray machine. They saved money by removing some failsafe hardware intended to limit the device to safe levels, and let the software handle that. But the software sometimes got it wrong, commanding the device to emit far too much radiation, and some patients died as a result.
Actually, that was two errors. The first is that the software allowed inputs that were obviously wrong, and the second was that the UI allowed people to, basically, arrow around and think they changed things.
It's exactly that sort of quasi-official familiarity that social engineers exploit. You see, they'll know the name of the guy that usually calls, they'll know where they're based, they'll know about their kid, they'll be intimately familiar with the operating procedures, they'll know all the right terms and the system setup, and have a great explanation as to who they are and why they're the ones calling.
Con artists don't just walk around guessing how things work. They probably won't know how to actually run the generators, but they'll certainly sound as if they do.
You're absolutely wrong here. If it's untrue, there is a 0.00000001% (or however minimal we're setting it) chance that you stay alive. That is if it is untrue. If it is true, there's a 100% chance you stay alive. Either way, it is possible to arrive at the same result. There is no way to tell how you arrived at that result.
Man, you've suddenly got an amazingly strict standard for scientific results.
All experiments have a margin where they might succeed or fail simply by chance, so I don't know why this one is any different. If you really don't trust it, you can always repeat it a few times.
As far as "doing the entire planet," I doubt that would make much of a difference. There's no saying that anyone else will live through it; it still only guarantees that you see it, because it's possible that everybody except you dies.
Only if you design the experiment stupidly. I specifically said 'the planet' instead of 'every person'. It's very hard to imagine a way you survive without a planet. And, if you do, that's also incredibly improbably and hence proof.
Do you have some sort of reading comprehension problem?
"However, as I pointed out, the AG didn't sign that piece of paper authorizing whatever the NSA is doing now, which would say something like 'Under penalty of perjury I certify that this is tap is on non-citizens to the best of my knowledge'."
"He's not asserting that. We already figured that out. He's not stupid enough to risk perjury charges, and, more to the point, that wouldn't allow the administration to install spy equipment inside the telecoms."
Yes, and those two sentences say the same thing, so I have no idea what your point is. Your oh-so-clever attempt to prove something I said didn't make sense failed because you forgot to point out how it didn't make sense.
I repeat, yet a third time: The AG didn't sign the legal authorization allowing him to tap non-citizens. He didn't do it because he knew it was a lie, and such a lie would open him up to perjury charges.
It also wouldn't have let him install huge amounts of monitoring equipment and clone their entire data trunks, at least not practically. For that he'd need a special agreement with each telecom, as they were unlikely to believe that everyone using their equipment were non-citizens, even if he had asserted that.
If you don't understand what I just said, you're too stupid be in this discussion. You can disagree with it all you want, although I'm fairly sure the facts are on my side, but if you simply don't understand it please go away. If you want to just repeat want I said making vague claims about how it doesn't make sense, please go away too.
"This lawbreaking didn't have anything to do with the non-citizen authorization the AG can make, that's a stupid red herring."
No, the administration brought it up, by first asserting that any AG authorization makes wiretapping legal, but was forced to admit that is not supported in law...only specific AG authorizations are allowed under the law. I mentioned it here so that morons wouldn't bring it up.
And I also mentioned it because it is vaguely possible that any AG authorization would make the telecoms not legally liable for their behavior. (Although this wouldn't make it legal.) The way the law is written, it's possible they could assert that they are not competent to decide if an authorization is legal. However, as I pointed out, they're got a gap where they let Bush operate the program without AG authorization, so they're screwed anyway.
What I'm saying is that if it weren't true, it is still possible that you can perform these experiments and arrive at the same experimental results as if it were true.
No you can't. If it's untrue you will arrive nowhere because you're dead.
If it's true, OTOH, you will arrive in a universe where it's easy to demonstrate because you are somehow alive. (A bunch of the dead yous will arrive in other universes, but I'm not certain why you should care about those guys.)
It's hard for other people to extrapolate the truth or untruth, because most of them will be in a universe with a dead you, and won't be able to tell which kind. But for you, it's easy. You, of course, will only be in the amazingly improbably universe where you lived.
This is why I recommend doing the entire planet at once. Then everyone can see.
Anyhow, I don't know where I'm really going with this, but a situation where the odds are firmly stacked against my continuing existence doesn't seem like any kind of proof at all.
What do you mean? The odds are 100% you will live, somewhere.
I assert that the phone we are tapping will never be used either by a US citizen or used to call a US citizen. See, you can't guarantee that either. No one can. Maybe he is asserting it. If he is, he probably shouldn't be the AG.
He's not asserting that. We already figured that out. He's not stupid enough to risk perjury charges, and, more to the point, that wouldn't allow the administration to install spy equipment inside the telecoms.
If you have no idea what's going on, you really should just shut up and let people who've actually followed this discuss it. The telecoms broke the law, both at the AGs 'authorization' and at the Administrations 'authorization', opening them up to millions and perhaps billions of dollars of liability. This lawbreaking didn't have anything to do with the non-citizen authorization the AG can make, that's a stupid red herring.
And if Democrats are so fucking stupid as to pass a law immunizing that behavior, we will vote them out and put someone in that will repeal that immunization. It's not ex post facto to change punishments back to what they were at the time of the original offense, the courts already decided on that.
It's not a real theory, it doesn't need to be. It's just a corollary to Many Worlds.
Basically, the idea is that, at any moment, in at least some universe, your consciousness will not end. At any branching, at least one of them includes a universe where 'you' continue to exist for another moment. If you think about it a little bit, you'll get it.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I don't like Many Worlds: It makes a hash out of physical laws.
In some universe, somewhere, there are human beings that think they can fly unaided. Not because the laws are different, or the humans are different, or they're just delusional, but every single time in history they have thought 'I would like to lift up into the air', some crazy quantum miracle has happened that has allowed it.
And a world where people can 'travel in time' with a thought, although what is really happening is that the entire universe just randomly rearranges itself to look like the past and this happens to coincide with these apparent temporal jaunts, and then it just happens to rearrange itself to look like the present again when they 'get back'.
Yes, those universes are extraordinally unlikely, but they still must exist under Many Worlds.
No. The entire trigger mechanism could fail through many quantum means, such as a cross-section of the protons decaying and it breaking in half.
Trust me, it will happen if Many Worlds is right.
Granted, it will only happen in one out of every septillion universes, so sucks for all the other yous. (Of course, they're dead, so what do they care?)
Also, talking about 'here' is wrong. The universes you live would be just as much 'here' as the universe you died in, because they haven't split yet.
I'm not sure other people would believe it, though. We need to do is a massive scale.
What we really need is some process that will destroy the entire earth with 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999% certainty. Then, when it doesn't, we can look around and conclude that, yup, obviously there are parallel universes splitting off and we're in one, because, frankly, that outcome was insanely improbable.
Obviously, the other universes couldn't conclude that, of course, but, then again, they wouldn't be doing any concluding at all, so it hardly matters what their view of the universe is.
To sue the telecoms or the NSA or anyone for that matter, someone has to have standing. That means they have to know in advance that they were tapped, it's not enough to suspect you were wronged. The only way anyone will ever know if they were tapped is if the NSA either lets them know or the tapped information is used to prosecute them. It doesn't sound like anyone in this case has standing at this point.
In what case? We're talking about them seeking immunity in advance, not a court case.
And there is plenty of possibilities that someone will have standing. The phone company could be forced to testify in front of Congress, Congress just could explicitly pass a law giving everyone standing, a court could require that the phone company turn over records to determine standing, there could be a leak at the NSA, etc. Or, as in one case, the FBI could accidentally hand wiretap records to the person who sued them.
If there wasn't a chance, there'd hardly be a reason for them to point out their misbehavior by seeking immunity in advance, now would there?
This is just stupid and almost as stupid as asking foreigners to state on their visa that they are not terrorists. He can't pre-certify the citizenship of someone making a phone call. Neither can the NSA. Even if the tap is in the Chinese embassy. Because of this very simple fact, your interpretation means that no call can ever be tapped. Obviously, the NSA doesn't agree with you.
You're the only person who thinks that. We have plenty of laws in this country where people sign, under penalty of perjury, that they believe something to work, and those laws work all the time.
Especially law enforcement! They do it literally any time they arrest someone, they sign that, to the best of their knowledge, they have cause to detain that person, they do it whenever they write up a search warrant for a judge to sign, they probably sign a dozen documents a day that says 'Under penalty of perjury, what I attest here is true as far as I know: '.
I don't know in what delusional universe you live in, but the only thing the AG having to sign such a document for wiretaps means is that he can't delegate it, not that it's magically impossible.
All wiretaps in the US have, at some point, people asserting things under penalty of perjury behind them. Every Single One of them has, somewhere, someone that laid out the reasons for the tap, under penalty of perjury. Often more than one person.
FISA just makes the AG sign it himself if he wants to tap foreign nationals in the US.
Following your interpretation, no phone calls could ever be legally tapped by the NSA, anywhere in the world. After all, it could be an American in the Chinese embassy making the call. Or it could be an American receiving the call. This way lies madness.
Um, no, you dumbass. I'm pretty sure I actually explained it, but I will again:
First of all, any phone can be tapped without a warrant outside the US. The laws say that, and the constitution implies it, and outside the US isn't under US law anyway. If they get a US citizen by accident, they can't use it in court and are actually seriously restricted in what they can do with it at all.
Inside the US, the AG can sign off on an affidavit, under oath, that, to the best of his knowledge that the tap is not on an American citizen. This has to be renewed every 45 days.
Phones do not have citizenship, people do. The NSA should be allowed to tap any damn call any damn time, because even in this country there are non-Americans making damn phone calls to other non-Americans.
The NSA is allowed to do that. All they have to do is get the AG to agree that the people they are tapping are not citizens, and sign a piece of paper. That's it. A single 'This is not a citizen' form letter. The AG has to reauthorize that every 45 days. This is clearly laid out in FISA.
However, as I pointed out, the AG didn't sign that piece of paper authorizing whatever the NSA is doing now, which would say something like 'Under penalty of perjury I certify that this is tap is on non-citizens to the best of my knowledge'.
He instead signed some other piece of paper that said something like 'Telecoms, give the NSA access to all your stuff, this is legal, I promise.'. (We don't actually know what it said, but we know it wasn't the real 'they're a non-citizen' letter. Not only has the Administration confirmed it, but it wasn't a letter for a tap, it was a letter getting them to route all their communications though a secret NSA-run room.)
Which, of course, is not actually legal. You can't just assert something is legal and then do it. Under FISA and US law, you either need a warrant or you need a real letter signed by the AG. (Outside of US law, of course, you can do whatever the hell you want as long as the other country doesn't catch you.)
Of course, as I pointed out, even the 'fake letter' craptacular legal justification doesn't work, because for at least 24 hours the telecoms didn't even have that, which makes them royally fucked in court. They're liable for at least $1,000 or $100 per day, whatever is higher. (I.e, five days is $1,000, eleven days is $1,100.) Per tap.
If the NSA, as is suspected, was running some sort of keyword intercept and ran hundreds of thousands of phones through their filtering on that day, that could run into hundreds of millions in suits for the single day.
Or, if the entire multi-year tap, (From whenever they started in 2001 to sometime in mid-2004 when they apparently 'made it more legal' after Comey and half the Justice Department almost resigned.) is found to be violation of the law, (And it is.) and this resulted in, say, half the people in the US having their phone calls looked at, they could be looking at anywhere from ten billions to trillions of dollars in liability.
Oh, and that's just how much they can be sued for. The actual fines are up to $10,000 or five years in jail.
Per incident.
Somewhere in the bowels of AT&T there's someone looking at millions of years of jail time, literally. Possibly billions. It's hard to even comprehend the level of illegality.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they did not. The same risk taking investors who placed their money into the dot-com bubble, invested their money into housing after the bubble burt. After the housing market cooled down, they invested in commodities, creating a boom there. Institutional investors who previously invested very conservatively, continued to.
And people who needed to purchase houses had to purchase marked up ones, and bought even bigger than they needed as 'investments'.
I don't give a fuck about people who invest professionally. They can take care of themselves. It's people who see the bank giving an interest rate of 3% and property values raising 15% a year who got hit, and were repeatedly told 'home values never go down' and 'homes are an investment' that went out and bought a home that was already overpriced by 50%.
Why were the banks giving such low interest rates? Because of the government's monetary policy. Why were property values rising so quickly? Because of the government's complete non-interference.
And even people who didn't fall for the idiocy were still effected, because they have to have a place to live. It's all well and good to say people can opt out of the stock market, even though that's not true because of pension plans and whatnot. No one can opt out of the housing market. (And, yes, the increase in home prices also raised rents and leases. Although renters, at least, won't be hurt by the drop.)
Your article did not mention them, so please elaborate on these other "tiny" things. And also, elaborate how you would have stopped the housing boom.
I would stopped promoting home ownership, for the most obvious one!
Other than that, let's see: Tightened controls on the mortgage industry so there wasn't so much money being thrown around. Changed tax code to penalize flipping.
And I'd have encouraged local government to de-emphasize more residential zoning, and have impact fees for new hours, and to increase property taxes for higher-priced houses.
The tiny things? Well, Bush did almost exactly the opposite of all those. (Although he didn't really have to work locally, he knew local Republicans would automatically fight impact fees and increased property taxes and zoning.)
No, housing prices really couldn't have gotten higher than they did. Investors realized that it was a bubble, and pulled out.
Sure they could have gotten higher...if oil prices had been lower. That's what made the wheels fall off this little ride...people couldn't pay for their gas and their mortgage. (And their food, but food prices follow right behind gas prices.)
Don't you think that it's a little absurd that one of the most incompetent presidencies in history successfuly orchestrated the movement of trillions of dollars by ingenious and unnoticeable micro-prods, and yet fail to realize that invading a oil rich country will increase the price of oil?
The theory is that by now, in fact, by 2004, we'd have control of their oil wells. No, not that we'd take over and run them ourselves, but that they'd be selling cheap to us. Remember how the oil was supposed to pay for the war?
If the Iraq war had worked, we'd be rolling in 75c gas right now, and people would be driving 60 miles a day in their Hummer earning $40,000 a year to pay off their $260,000 house, and that would actually work. At least for another 18 months.
And even if you think it wouldn't work another 18 months even with cheap oil, that was still the plan. It's possible that even without oil going up, the plan would have failed, but arguing that a Bush plan would have failed for multiple reasons or was insanely optimistic about the behavior of others is not a very useful objection to the idea that such a plan exists.
There's no actual anything. By that logic, all pictures are optical illusions, which may be true in some abstract sense, but is rather meaningless.
The illusion in question is an illusion because it causes your brain to assume lighting conditions that aren't the case, which cause you to interpret color incorrectly.
That makes no sense. There are no actual lighting conditions, so how do you know which ones are real?
That's just a show-measure, designed to make people feel good. Besides, the definition of "heavy-gas-using cars" is very sketchy, expect it to be distorted beyond belief in a congressional hearing.
Um, no, it's already been distorted. What needs to be done is to undistort it.
Batteries require a tremendous amount of energy to create, unless the car is driven very often, this is often more energy than is saved.
Jesus Christ. Here's me: 'And, yes, we'd have idiots argue it wouldn't save money, when the point isn't to save money, or even energy. It's to help cover research and production-startup costs.'
I can't argue with this sort of bone-deep stupidity. Granted, I was talking about solar panels, but anyone could figure out the same applies to hybrid cars. We can wait 20 years for this industry to grow enough to be economically feasible, relying on early adopters to pay the cost, or we, in the form of the government, can pay the early-adopter cost and get it reasonable now. (Which also would cause a economic boom, and make a lot more sense than damn overbuilt houses, or a stupid-ass war.)
Whether or not we should do it to reduce energy consumption is a valid question, but I wasn't postulating it for that. I was saying that if we're going to have a government sponsored bubble, we should do it in something that's actually useful in the long run, even after the bubble goes away.
Gasoline is highly price-inelastic. Prices would have to be raised to tremendous levels in order to signifigantly effect consumption(far more than the $2-$3 per gallon you are talking about). Not only that, but it would harm poor people rather severely, along with increasing inflation.
I was talking about raising them to 2-3 a gallon, which, obviously, makes no sense anymore, but doesn't appear to hurt poor people that much. But that's exactly why I proposed a tax on new cars instead of on gas.
Europe is every bit as Dependant on the rest of the world for oil and natural gas as we are. In fact, because of their particular infrastructure, they are more so. So if energy security is your concern, don't look to them as a shining beacon.
I'm pretty certain I didn't mention Europe at all, and actually, you're wrong. Europe uses a lot less gas per-person. They have tiny little cars exactly because gas costs so much, and they use mass transit a lot more because they actually build mass transit and thus can get everywhere using it.
But, hey, there's yet another thing we could have done. Instead of building houses, we could have build mass transit.
Any step forward in solar cell technology is going to be done by grad students working for a VC. How exactly are the profits of giant corporations funneled to them? I'm concerned that such subsidies distort funding away from original technologies that have not been considered.
As opposed to now, where big oil is in charge of funneling research?
Before we decide what are our goals. Is your goal achieving energy independence, or mitigating global warming? I am personally unsympathetic to the first goal, and very enthusiastic about the second. But they have nothing to do with each other, and I would like you to clarify your goals before I move on.
Ah, I see. You like big oil.
Well, no point in trying to convince you of anything.
Yes, it was a rather disgusting corporate welfare program. Regardless, senior citizens received drugs they would have had to pay for, so I count it as an entitlement. Semantics aside, the deficit is due mostly to growth in these programs.
Medicare drugs now cost more. If you want to include that as an entitlement increase, go ahead and live in your own crazy universe.
Those are just the ones with Wikipedia articles. In each of those countries, median home prices have doubled in the last 8 years, in most of them, the increase was far larger. Real estate prices have spiked by enormous amounts in nearly every country in the world (Japan is a notable exception; prices are still level from their boom in the 90's).
First off, there is no Russian or Romania or Indian or China housing bubble, despite the fact there's a Wikipedia article with that name. Russia might have a Moscow bubble, but, OTOH, their property is way out of sync of the reast of Europe. Romania just invented home loans, before that, no one could actually afford to own a house.
India and China, OTOH, are in the middle of a huge income increase, prices are not increasing alone, income is increasing. The fact that people can now afford to live in real houses instead of hovels is not a 'bubble'.
Europe, OTOH, actually is in a bubble. Why? Because our investment greatly influences theirs, and our government influence theirs.
More to the point, you'll notice that most of their bubbles and slowed in 2006 or 2005, and started a year or so after ours. (Ours actually started in 2000 or even 1999, although no one really noticed.) Why? Because those countries figured out how dangerous it was and stopped it!
You vastly over-estimate the effect of the removal of the 30-year note. As I said earlier, the 30-year note had many close substitutes with essentially identical risk and return (FDIC insured CD's and state bonds for example).
Even without substitutes, the 30-year note was for very conservative investors. The idea that by removing one ultra-safe investment option, investors will suddenly pour funds into risky real estate is absurd.
Except they did.
And you're overempashising the example I gave. There were a lot of tiny things that the government did to encourage it, and there were quite a lot of things the government could have done to stop it. (I, unlike you , don't think the government should let the free market drive itself off the cliff, even if it chooses to do so of its own free will. And it certainly shouldn't do anything to encourage it.)
The "Ownership Society" was a political buzzword used by George Bush to capitalize on a trend. You have failed to provide convincing evidence that this was anything more than an empty slogan. Anyone with enough cash or credit to buy a home should know better than taking financial advice from a politician.
And, once again, the right is forced to fall back on 'It's not malice, it's incompetence'.
Bzzzt, wrong. If oil prices had remained steady, the housing boom would still be happening, and it would happen all the way to the next president, who would get hit with the collapse, which at that point would be even worse. That was what was supposed to happen.
It's incompetence it's happing now, but it was with malice Bush encouraged it. Did you know that, of the jobs created under Bush, about a third of them are related to the real estate market, mostly as a realtor or construction worker? It sure looked nice as a statistic in job creation, and hey, the next guy was going to have to deal with all those unemployed workers when the bubble crashed.
Yes, everyone knows that. We would have had a recession in 2002-2003 without something to stop.
Bush decided to fix it with a goddamn housing bubble. This was less than useful, as it is leading the way to a full-scale economic collapse.
The point isn't to 'save' the economy, the economy could have got through the tech crash eventually, the point would have been to cushion it while it happened. Look at the 80s crash.
Encouraging people to purchase overpriced houses they can't afford is pretty much the opposite of 'cushioning'. In fact, it's a good way for a lot of people to end up homeless, and cause another actual depression.
Actually, Bush has raised entitlement spending more than any president since Johnson. The biggest offender is the prescription drug plan, but that is just one part of his "Compassionate Conservatism".
The prescription drug program didn't give anyone entitlements except the drug companies.
If you meant he raised spending, yes, I know. Pretending it's caused by 'entitlements' when it's actually an expansion of the military and corporate welfare is just deceitful.
Which explains why real estate prices spiked in a bunch of other countries too?
Yes, they spiked and went down in some places, and went up in some places, went down in some places. Pretending the housing bubble is a global problem is idiotic. Nowhere else on the planet saw home prices double in the last eight years.
All the article says the treasury department did was eliminate the 30-year treasury note, claiming that this made long-term investment impossible without real-estate. This is absurd, anyone investing in real-estate is expecting far larger returns than a 30 year would give. Not only that, but CD's and Municipality bonds are close substitutes for the 30 year note. *sigh* The government influences the market in many ways. One of those ways was to remove certain bonds for investment purposes.
And I notice you didn't respond to my 'Ownership Society' mention. Bush went up there in 2004, boasting how home ownership was high and talking about the 'ownership society', etc, etc, at a time that anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge could see we were in a bubble and encouraging people to buy a house at that moment was stupid. He did that because his economy was based on housing prices.
It might be possible that the government helping the bubble was an accident only if we didn't have them standing up in front of everyone and promoting 'investing' in that bubble.
The best solution is to move to a consumption tax. Instead of taxing income that people make, you tax what people spend. The effects are a bit regressive, but you can overcome that with a tax rebate.
The best solution for what? What fictional problem are you looking at? How on earth could taking consumption help the housing market? (Unless you're including taxing houses, which are not normally included in 'sales tax' proposals.)
So far, government attempts to do all of that have been subverted into bipartisan pork competitions. I don't really believe that our government is capable of doing such a complicated and nuanced thing, at least not with our current constitutional system.
Our government, OTOH, is perfectly capable of slowly raising the taxes on heavy-gas-using cars, and providing rebates to help defray the cost of hybrid cars, for example. I'd suggest higher gas taxes, putting gas in the range somewhere of 2-3 dollars a gallon, except the current government has managed to do that fairly accidentally. Higher taxes on high MPG cars is fairer to consumers, anyway...they'll know what they're getting into when they buy it.
Or putting solar on top of their buildings. And, yes, we'd have idiots argue it wouldn't save money, when the point isn't to save money, or even energy. It's to help cover research and production-startup costs. We spend 80 dollars a panel so they can build big factories and then sell them to people at 25 dollars a customer, because people won't buy them at 80 and the first million are going to cost that much.
The government shouldn't run around funding research. The government should set up taxes and rebates to encourage companies to do research themselves, because it's less expensive than not doing it. It should be buying the results, even if it costs more than it saves right now, to encourage development.
Hell, while you're at it, run water pipes through the algae, and you've got solar-heated water. I don't know why that wouldn't work.
The problem with hydrogen collection is that it tends to escape because it's so small. So, logically, the closer you move it to where you use it, the better. You can collect it on your roof and operate a power generator that burns it into water in your attic, if you're powering your house off it. (A bit more work to get it to your car, though.) As an added bonus, now you're got freshwater being created, which you can use as drinking water...and you don't even have to pump it anywhere, it's in your attic and will pour thanks to gravity.
But I'm still not entirely convinced that hydrogen will play an important part of anything in the future. The second we invent a battery that's better, hydrogen is going away...it's too much work to contain it.
If we power cars with hydrogen, the equation here is:
if photocell-electrical conversion to hydrogen<algae
Whereas if we power them using something else, the equation is:
if photocell<algae-energy loss in burning
Which doesn't mean we can't use it if we aren't powering cars with hydrogen, just that it might be better to use photocells at that point.
Of course, as scientists have been trying to figure out how to do for decades, the thing to actually do is figure out how to take solar light and use it to turn carbon dioxide into carbon, like plants do. And then burn the carbon back into CO2.
That's what they've got working with hydrogen, but if we could get it working with carbon, we'd not only find it easier to burn, we'd stop global warming dead. The CO2 we'd get by burning is 'free' cause we just pulled it out of the air in the first place, and we could set up a bunch of those things and not burn the resulting carbon to decrease CO2.
Then you're a moron. Clinton left Bush with a balanced budget. Bush has not increased entitlements. Ergo, our deficit cannot be caused by entitlements.
However, that's completely irrelevant to what I was talking about. No one here is talking about the financial shape of the government. We're talking about the financial shape of the country.
And we didn't need to vastly increase military spending after 9/11. We could have beaten Afghanistan with one hand tied behind our back.
You seem to think that presidents are relevant to macroeconomic trends. This is a common political delusion, but in the absence of massively stupid legislation(On the level of what has been seen in Latin America), the Federal Reserve bank is the only office with any real power.
Did you read the article I linked to? The Treasury Department, which I assure you the president does control, almost single-handed caused the housing boom because of how they structured their bonds, causing anyone who wanted to invest long term have to do so in real estate. (And, of course, Republicans automatically structure things where investments get less taxes than income.)
And does the phrase 'Ownership Society' not ring a bell anymore? Maybe you should check out who coined that expression and used it repeatedly. The Treasury Department's behavior was not an accident.
Of course, all that we are left with are millions of homes. What use could they serve?
Are you being sarcastic? We've got more homes than people, we've got more going up all the time because of the lag in the market, and quite a bit of them are much too large to operate at a reasonable cost and shoddily enough constructed that the upkeep will be a bitch. Because people stopped judging houses as 'Is this a good fit for me?' and instead asked 'What's the most expensive house I can afford right now as an 'investment'?'.
Yes, in the long run, the houses aren't going to vanish and will eventually get used. OTOH, the excess houses are going to depression the construction market for some time, so look for higher prices there.
Random fads are not a useful way to build material wealth in this country. People suspend their judgment, companies slap together shoddy products that people would not normally want, and then it crashes down and products sit on shelves and houses stand abandoned for years. If people want X amount of something a year, and then suddenly want X3 for a year and then 1/2X for two years, the industry is in a lot worse shape than if they had just kept wanting X a year...half the companies have probably gone bankrupt and a lot of waste occured.
Random fads, OTOH, are a good way to get a lot of research done. Or, for example, convert a lot of homes to be more energy efficent. Or, as the last fad demonstrated, get everyone on the internet.
Really? How exactly could we have done that? Erm...tax breaks? Research grants? Higher taxes on non-alternative energy?
There's a dozen way to do it.
Now I'm imagining KITT pretending to be a GPS whenever someone else is in the car.
KITT: Turn left in 200 feet, Michael.
Other person in car: Did your GPS just call you by name?
Even if they weren't moving them, saving and checking accounts are insured up to $100,000 in the US.
Although treat that as per-bank, not per-account.
It's not really the poor economy, it's the fact Bush has used a bubble instead of actual growth.
We should have had a minor recession in 2001 or 2002, but then it would have been really hard to convince people they needed to funnel huge amounts of money into defense contractors pockets.
Money quote:
The liberal solution would have been to try and find a new tech boom, which in the case of the Gore administration would almost certainly have either been a micro and alternative energy boom or a telecom boom.
The Bush solution was different. The decision was made to base the economy on the real estate market. Record low interest rates flooded money into the mortgage market and the housing market boomed.
A boom sucks, at the end, No matter what you do, people will come in and lose their shirts. But some booms, in the long run, have much better results. The internet boom of the 90s changed the face of the planet. And even if some people lost their shirts in the stock market, well, no one made them invest.
This housing boom, OTOH, everyone did have to play. Even renters pay more when houses prices are up, although at least they won't have to watch the value of their house plummet. And it's left us with no tangible benefits at all except millions of shoddy McMansions.
We could have put that same amount of effort and money in alternate energy, and be in the middle of a nice stock correction now, where alternate energy company stocks are dropping through the floor and being picked up by a few big players which are merging with the big energy suppliers who are just now realizing they need to change their business plan. Which wouldn't hurt John Q. Public at all. John Q. Public, in fact, came out ahead because he got 'sponsored' for solar panels and that company, with a crappy business plan, went out of business, like during the tech crash.
Of hardware, there was the infamous Therac 25, an x-ray machine. They saved money by removing some failsafe hardware intended to limit the device to safe levels, and let the software handle that. But the software sometimes got it wrong, commanding the device to emit far too much radiation, and some patients died as a result.
Actually, that was two errors. The first is that the software allowed inputs that were obviously wrong, and the second was that the UI allowed people to, basically, arrow around and think they changed things.
Bzzzt.
It's exactly that sort of quasi-official familiarity that social engineers exploit. You see, they'll know the name of the guy that usually calls, they'll know where they're based, they'll know about their kid, they'll be intimately familiar with the operating procedures, they'll know all the right terms and the system setup, and have a great explanation as to who they are and why they're the ones calling.
Con artists don't just walk around guessing how things work. They probably won't know how to actually run the generators, but they'll certainly sound as if they do.
You're absolutely wrong here. If it's untrue, there is a 0.00000001% (or however minimal we're setting it) chance that you stay alive. That is if it is untrue. If it is true, there's a 100% chance you stay alive. Either way, it is possible to arrive at the same result. There is no way to tell how you arrived at that result.
Man, you've suddenly got an amazingly strict standard for scientific results.
All experiments have a margin where they might succeed or fail simply by chance, so I don't know why this one is any different. If you really don't trust it, you can always repeat it a few times.
As far as "doing the entire planet," I doubt that would make much of a difference. There's no saying that anyone else will live through it; it still only guarantees that you see it, because it's possible that everybody except you dies.
Only if you design the experiment stupidly. I specifically said 'the planet' instead of 'every person'. It's very hard to imagine a way you survive without a planet. And, if you do, that's also incredibly improbably and hence proof.
Do you have some sort of reading comprehension problem?
"However, as I pointed out, the AG didn't sign that piece of paper authorizing whatever the NSA is doing now, which would say something like 'Under penalty of perjury I certify that this is tap is on non-citizens to the best of my knowledge'."
"He's not asserting that. We already figured that out. He's not stupid enough to risk perjury charges, and, more to the point, that wouldn't allow the administration to install spy equipment inside the telecoms."
Yes, and those two sentences say the same thing, so I have no idea what your point is. Your oh-so-clever attempt to prove something I said didn't make sense failed because you forgot to point out how it didn't make sense.
I repeat, yet a third time: The AG didn't sign the legal authorization allowing him to tap non-citizens. He didn't do it because he knew it was a lie, and such a lie would open him up to perjury charges.
It also wouldn't have let him install huge amounts of monitoring equipment and clone their entire data trunks, at least not practically. For that he'd need a special agreement with each telecom, as they were unlikely to believe that everyone using their equipment were non-citizens, even if he had asserted that.
If you don't understand what I just said, you're too stupid be in this discussion. You can disagree with it all you want, although I'm fairly sure the facts are on my side, but if you simply don't understand it please go away. If you want to just repeat want I said making vague claims about how it doesn't make sense, please go away too.
"This lawbreaking didn't have anything to do with the non-citizen authorization the AG can make, that's a stupid red herring."
No, the administration brought it up, by first asserting that any AG authorization makes wiretapping legal, but was forced to admit that is not supported in law...only specific AG authorizations are allowed under the law. I mentioned it here so that morons wouldn't bring it up.
And I also mentioned it because it is vaguely possible that any AG authorization would make the telecoms not legally liable for their behavior. (Although this wouldn't make it legal.) The way the law is written, it's possible they could assert that they are not competent to decide if an authorization is legal. However, as I pointed out, they're got a gap where they let Bush operate the program without AG authorization, so they're screwed anyway.
And now they want amnesty for their lawbreaking.
What I'm saying is that if it weren't true, it is still possible that you can perform these experiments and arrive at the same experimental results as if it were true.
No you can't. If it's untrue you will arrive nowhere because you're dead.
If it's true, OTOH, you will arrive in a universe where it's easy to demonstrate because you are somehow alive. (A bunch of the dead yous will arrive in other universes, but I'm not certain why you should care about those guys.)
It's hard for other people to extrapolate the truth or untruth, because most of them will be in a universe with a dead you, and won't be able to tell which kind. But for you, it's easy. You, of course, will only be in the amazingly improbably universe where you lived.
This is why I recommend doing the entire planet at once. Then everyone can see.
Anyhow, I don't know where I'm really going with this, but a situation where the odds are firmly stacked against my continuing existence doesn't seem like any kind of proof at all.
What do you mean? The odds are 100% you will live, somewhere.
I assert that the phone we are tapping will never be used either by a US citizen or used to call a US citizen. See, you can't guarantee that either. No one can. Maybe he is asserting it. If he is, he probably shouldn't be the AG.
He's not asserting that. We already figured that out. He's not stupid enough to risk perjury charges, and, more to the point, that wouldn't allow the administration to install spy equipment inside the telecoms.
If you have no idea what's going on, you really should just shut up and let people who've actually followed this discuss it. The telecoms broke the law, both at the AGs 'authorization' and at the Administrations 'authorization', opening them up to millions and perhaps billions of dollars of liability. This lawbreaking didn't have anything to do with the non-citizen authorization the AG can make, that's a stupid red herring.
And if Democrats are so fucking stupid as to pass a law immunizing that behavior, we will vote them out and put someone in that will repeal that immunization. It's not ex post facto to change punishments back to what they were at the time of the original offense, the courts already decided on that.
It's not a real theory, it doesn't need to be. It's just a corollary to Many Worlds.
Basically, the idea is that, at any moment, in at least some universe, your consciousness will not end. At any branching, at least one of them includes a universe where 'you' continue to exist for another moment. If you think about it a little bit, you'll get it.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I don't like Many Worlds: It makes a hash out of physical laws.
In some universe, somewhere, there are human beings that think they can fly unaided. Not because the laws are different, or the humans are different, or they're just delusional, but every single time in history they have thought 'I would like to lift up into the air', some crazy quantum miracle has happened that has allowed it.
And a world where people can 'travel in time' with a thought, although what is really happening is that the entire universe just randomly rearranges itself to look like the past and this happens to coincide with these apparent temporal jaunts, and then it just happens to rearrange itself to look like the present again when they 'get back'.
Yes, those universes are extraordinally unlikely, but they still must exist under Many Worlds.
No. The entire trigger mechanism could fail through many quantum means, such as a cross-section of the protons decaying and it breaking in half.
Trust me, it will happen if Many Worlds is right.
Granted, it will only happen in one out of every septillion universes, so sucks for all the other yous. (Of course, they're dead, so what do they care?)
Also, talking about 'here' is wrong. The universes you live would be just as much 'here' as the universe you died in, because they haven't split yet.
I'm not sure other people would believe it, though. We need to do is a massive scale.
What we really need is some process that will destroy the entire earth with 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999% certainty. Then, when it doesn't, we can look around and conclude that, yup, obviously there are parallel universes splitting off and we're in one, because, frankly, that outcome was insanely improbable.
Obviously, the other universes couldn't conclude that, of course, but, then again, they wouldn't be doing any concluding at all, so it hardly matters what their view of the universe is.
How the heck is that not being pedantic?
To sue the telecoms or the NSA or anyone for that matter, someone has to have standing. That means they have to know in advance that they were tapped, it's not enough to suspect you were wronged. The only way anyone will ever know if they were tapped is if the NSA either lets them know or the tapped information is used to prosecute them. It doesn't sound like anyone in this case has standing at this point.
In what case? We're talking about them seeking immunity in advance, not a court case.
And there is plenty of possibilities that someone will have standing. The phone company could be forced to testify in front of Congress, Congress just could explicitly pass a law giving everyone standing, a court could require that the phone company turn over records to determine standing, there could be a leak at the NSA, etc. Or, as in one case, the FBI could accidentally hand wiretap records to the person who sued them.
If there wasn't a chance, there'd hardly be a reason for them to point out their misbehavior by seeking immunity in advance, now would there?
This is just stupid and almost as stupid as asking foreigners to state on their visa that they are not terrorists. He can't pre-certify the citizenship of someone making a phone call. Neither can the NSA. Even if the tap is in the Chinese embassy. Because of this very simple fact, your interpretation means that no call can ever be tapped. Obviously, the NSA doesn't agree with you.
You're the only person who thinks that. We have plenty of laws in this country where people sign, under penalty of perjury, that they believe something to work, and those laws work all the time.
Especially law enforcement! They do it literally any time they arrest someone, they sign that, to the best of their knowledge, they have cause to detain that person, they do it whenever they write up a search warrant for a judge to sign, they probably sign a dozen documents a day that says 'Under penalty of perjury, what I attest here is true as far as I know: '.
I don't know in what delusional universe you live in, but the only thing the AG having to sign such a document for wiretaps means is that he can't delegate it, not that it's magically impossible.
All wiretaps in the US have, at some point, people asserting things under penalty of perjury behind them. Every Single One of them has, somewhere, someone that laid out the reasons for the tap, under penalty of perjury. Often more than one person.
FISA just makes the AG sign it himself if he wants to tap foreign nationals in the US.
Following your interpretation, no phone calls could ever be legally tapped by the NSA, anywhere in the world. After all, it could be an American in the Chinese embassy making the call. Or it could be an American receiving the call. This way lies madness.
Um, no, you dumbass. I'm pretty sure I actually explained it, but I will again:
First of all, any phone can be tapped without a warrant outside the US. The laws say that, and the constitution implies it, and outside the US isn't under US law anyway. If they get a US citizen by accident, they can't use it in court and are actually seriously restricted in what they can do with it at all.
Inside the US, the AG can sign off on an affidavit, under oath, that, to the best of his knowledge that the tap is not on an American citizen. This has to be renewed every 45 days.
Phones do not have citizenship, people do. The NSA should be allowed to tap any damn call any damn time, because even in this country there are non-Americans making damn phone calls to other non-Americans.
The NSA is allowed to do that. All they have to do is get the AG to agree that the people they are tapping are not citizens, and sign a piece of paper. That's it. A single 'This is not a citizen' form letter. The AG has to reauthorize that every 45 days. This is clearly laid out in FISA.
However, as I pointed out, the AG didn't sign that piece of paper authorizing whatever the NSA is doing now, which would say something like 'Under penalty of perjury I certify that this is tap is on non-citizens to the best of my knowledge'.
He instead signed some other piece of paper that said something like 'Telecoms, give the NSA access to all your stuff, this is legal, I promise.'. (We don't actually know what it said, but we know it wasn't the real 'they're a non-citizen' letter. Not only has the Administration confirmed it, but it wasn't a letter for a tap, it was a letter getting them to route all their communications though a secret NSA-run room.)
Which, of course, is not actually legal. You can't just assert something is legal and then do it. Under FISA and US law, you either need a warrant or you need a real letter signed by the AG. (Outside of US law, of course, you can do whatever the hell you want as long as the other country doesn't catch you.)
Of course, as I pointed out, even the 'fake letter' craptacular legal justification doesn't work, because for at least 24 hours the telecoms didn't even have that, which makes them royally fucked in court. They're liable for at least $1,000 or $100 per day, whatever is higher. (I.e, five days is $1,000, eleven days is $1,100.) Per tap.
If the NSA, as is suspected, was running some sort of keyword intercept and ran hundreds of thousands of phones through their filtering on that day, that could run into hundreds of millions in suits for the single day.
Or, if the entire multi-year tap, (From whenever they started in 2001 to sometime in mid-2004 when they apparently 'made it more legal' after Comey and half the Justice Department almost resigned.) is found to be violation of the law, (And it is.) and this resulted in, say, half the people in the US having their phone calls looked at, they could be looking at anywhere from ten billions to trillions of dollars in liability.
Oh, and that's just how much they can be sued for. The actual fines are up to $10,000 or five years in jail.
Per incident.
Somewhere in the bowels of AT&T there's someone looking at millions of years of jail time, literally. Possibly billions. It's hard to even comprehend the level of illegality.
Doh, you're right.