Wait, you mean that Presidents have prepared remarks and speechwriters? I'm shocked, completely shocked. Alert the Internet!
That meme is one of the dumber ones I've heard lately, and is a bit of a head scratcher. I mean, if you had taken any effort to inform yourself you would know that Obama's speechwriter is Jon Favreau. But it's just so...expected...for a President to have speechwriters that makes this pique so senseless. You may have heard of Ben Stein, who was a speechwriter for Nixon and Ford.
This country needs healthy dissent to thrive, but the right wing seems to be overflowing with dissent that is downright deranged. Hold Obama's feet to the fire when he fouls up on things like warrantless wiretapping or bank bailouts, stay away from this stupid bullshit.
Well, one alternative is to take an axe to these derivative contracts, and make it so they are redeemable for their original purchase price (or with a bit of a premium for time cost and whatnot). I thought about this possibility a while back, but it seems to be picking up some steam in more mainstream financial circles (I read an article about it recently in Barron's), and supposedly similar contract alteration was done in response to the Dutch Tulip bubble in the 1600s.
It might not be a better choice than propping up the banks and waiting it out, but eventually they are going to need to put an end to these things. The deregulated shadow market for them was and is complete madness. It's not all that much dumber than making Ponzi schemes, naked short selling, or insurance fraud legal.
In any case, if there is a situation where anything approaching the quadrillion or a slightly lesser number of trillions of dollars of the derivatives need to be exercised they will be completely worthless. Worthless either because the system will completely collapse and no one will honor them, or worthless because they will be devalued by hyperinflation. There's not enough money currently in existence to cover those positions, so those are pretty much the options.
Looking at the article, it looks like it is even less news because the ruling is based entirely on an obscure Massachusetts state law, which would only apply to those in Massachusetts even if it was not overturned. And that law has the requirement of demonstrating "actual malice", which probably will fall flat rather quick.
This might be a bad ruling, but it seems like it is rather limited in scope and likely to be overturned regardless.
Huh? That's a whole lot of nonsense right there. I'm not a communist nor to I ascribe to a notion that the economy should be fully centrally planned, and I'm perplexed as to how you would get that from what I wrote. It's just for some things the government is more efficient at handling them than the private sector, or the private sector simply wouldn't be able to handle them at all or operate in anything approaching the ideal free market case without government protections. A college level economics course should teach you about externalities, which are by definition side effects in the markets where individuals will not bear all the costs or benefits of their economic decisions, affecting others. You'd have to be seriously misinformed or delusional to think that externalities are a nonissue, and that a market would be able to handle them in isolation from some manner of coercion in the form of a government. Especially given that the subject of air pollution and reducing it through wind power generation is one such externality
To me the anarchistic libertarianism is just about as daft as other brands of anarchism, which is rather daft. It is an ideology that does not stand the test of reality.
Sigh, the common libertarian approach to economics is akin to saying that the understanding the simple Newtonian mechanics of objects moving in a vacuum and without friction is all you need to adequately predict all physical phenomena. It is an unfounded assumption that government is automatically inefficient for the wide variety of potential ways to spend on economic activity, and in many cases government is more efficient for handing certain things and some important matters wouldn't be properly handled at all with the absence of government. In particular government is best there for resolving "Collective Action Problems", of which there are many, where the optimum economic behavior for an individual clashes with the optimum economic behavior for a group as a whole. A good example is crime, like say theft, where you would have most benefit from stealing from someone else society will fall apart if everyone, or even simply enough people, take from each other without any respect for the rules.
The environment is a giant collective action problem which necessitates government, because while individuals may benefit more for polluting a bit more with small marginal effects, when you take that behavior across the whole population you wreck the environment and have disastrous effects on everyone such as through health problems or poor climate or weather.
There's basically been tacit allowance of widespread copyright infringement for unlicensed anime because there is little incentive for the Japanese companies to try to stop it. That's because the English market for an unlicensed anime isn't open yet; they need someone to translate and distribute it. There's no money to be lost yet, so they can mostly benefit from the infringement to market the shows and get data on what's popular in the western markets. The only downside is the risk of not being able to stop infringement once they license, but many fansubbers will stop translating willingly when it is licensed. And people will still pirate anyways...
Comcast however, has a direct interest in stopping this: it eats up bandwidth. So I would guess they are either mostly or completely behind this rather than the copyright holders. I wonder if they even have permission from the copyright holders to send these out.
Add into that the fact that the internet is the only avenue for getting these shows in a translated format without having to wait for X years if licensed, or forever if not licensed. Standard domestic shows you can just watch it on regular TV or set up a DVR.
Don't feel too discouraged. I was a badass at abstract algebra I in college and I still have only a little idea of what is going on in that wikipedia page.
Er, I've seen this issue pop up somewhere else before, but the percentage of food consumed in the US that is imported is a small minority. According to Reuter's, only about 15% of the food supply was imported a year ago. This is up from bit less than 10% a decade ago, but not overwhelmingly so. Do remember there is quite a bit of protectionism over US agriculture.
Yeah, the dollar is going in the toilet, but we don't import everything.
Greenpeace is one of those "environmental" organizations that uses the issue of the environment as a trojan horse for other social or political causes. The positions of the political environmentalists is often regardless of or sometimes even contrary to real environmental problems or their solutions.
I'm not excluding rational environmentalism from the discourse, I'm just of the opinion that Greenpeace has very little of it.
...here is a snippet one of the really damning hand histories (the cheat is POTRIPPER):
POKERME420 - Posts small blind $150 JINXY_MONKEY - Posts big blind $300 *** POCKET CARDS *** Dealt to AUTOSMOKE [7c 4h] Dealt to OBV_DONK [Js 5h] Dealt to POTR0AST [6h 4c] Dealt to POTRIPPER [Ks Qd] Dealt to POKERME420 [10d Qs] Dealt to JINXY_MONKEY [Ah As] Dealt to CLOVER777 [Kh Jd] Dealt to SCARFACE_79 [7s 3h] SCARFACE_79 - Folds CLOVER777 - Calls $300 OBV_DONK - Folds AUTOSMOKE - Folds POTR0AST - Folds POTRIPPER - Folds POKERME420 - Raises $450 to $600 JINXY_MONKEY - Raises $1500 to $1800 CLOVER777 - Folds POKERME420 - Calls $1200 *** FLOP *** [10h 10c 9s] POKERME420 - Checks JINXY_MONKEY - Bets $1800 POKERME420 - Calls $1800 *** TURN *** [10h 10c 9s] [5c]...
He folds KQo unraised preflop ahead of AA when there was a grand total of ONE HAND in the whole collection he folded preflop where an opponent didn't have JJ or better. A few hands prior he raised 62o under the gun.
I guess if you are going to cheat, you are going to need to not be so obvious as to never fold _except_ when your opponents have something.
Didn't Charles Manson get convicted for murder by use of a proxy? He used his underlings to commit murders, but got convicted for the crime as well as them.
I'm sorry, but giving her advice not to appeal shows that you are ignorant of many of the important aspects of the law surrounding this case that have been covered here. The most important point can be found in BMW OF NORTH AMERICA, INC., PETITIONER v. IRA GORE, Jr..
For those who don't want to read that case, it says that punitive damages grossly excess of the actual damage caused and lacking in reprehensibility are unconstitutional. SCOTUS calls a ratio of fine to actual damages of 500 to 1 "breathtaking" in that case. This case is more than an order of magnitude higher than that!
Appealing is about her only option of getting this absolutely bullshit reward thrown out, and hopefully the statutory minimum damages with it.
That's wrong, we have a trigger too: the printing press. (Or the federal reserve if you want to get technical)
With all the bonds they hold, them pegging their currency to ours, and the amount they sell to the US a dose of hyperinflation could easily sink both of us. That would probably cause or follow a global financial crisis though.
About the chaos theory, it's also the case that no perturbations can lead to big results if there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions. In a chaotic system, after a long enough timeframe imperceptible differences will cause divergence, making it impossible to fully predict the outcome of small changes down the line.
Weather is pretty random and hard to predict, but there's a bit more to it than that and GW is a slightly different matter. The GW models don't try to predict exactly what the temperatures will be, because that's impossible, but rather try to get the probability distribution of the weather or derived statistics such as averages. So if the GW models are sufficiently accurate, it won't guarantee that years will all be hotter, but rather it is more likely to be hotter or it will be hotter on average. Or more chaotic, or whatever the hell they now are predicting.
How does a (yet another) Republican getting caught show "both sides" are corrupt? Unless of course you're a Republican, in which case everything bad about Republicans is true of everyone, and nothing good is true of anyone else. Because there are plenty of cases of corruption in the Democratic party? Hopefully you are familiar with the political machines of the past centuries, such as Tammany Hall. Then there is the more current case of William Jefferson.
Politicians can be corrupted by power, and there are sources of power from both sides of the aisle. This should be relatively unsurprising. However, given your response it seems likely that you are just a partisan troll.
"You can observe a lot just by watching." - Yogi Berra
Unfortunately, political corruption has a pretty long and well established history in the US and abroad. Having oil companies be a vehicle for corruption is rather unsurprising, as they have a lot of money, power, and interest in the activities of the political realm.
But suggesting or implying that corruption is limited or mostly limited to oil or the Republicans would be silly, and I hope that isn't what the GP is trying to do.
I'm concerned with what is their justification for doubling prison terms in terms of proportionality of punishment. Let punishment fit the crime, etc.
Are pirates that big of a threat to society that they merit a doubling of imprisonment? I can see how commercial pirates represent much more tangible harm than personal copyright infringement does, as sales take place, though at potentially at a much higher quantity than at the legitimate price. But this just going through the database and multiplying everything by two, which suggests considering these matters was at best done in a haphazard or arbitrary manner.
Is this just a matter of our good friend and his 'constituents' thinking that eye-for-an-eye is not enough and upgrading it to head-for-an-eye, because I can think of a better use of prisons and related resources than for this.
I am not an expert on federal law, but I thought Bush was allowing adult stem cell research. Yeah, what Bush did was refuse to provide federal funding on new lines of embryonic stem cells from after the time of the decision, but he wasn't opposing adult stem cells at all, much less banning research on them or use in treatment.
I don't know what the GP is all about, maybe just an advertisement?
Why would they do that? The only motivation for concern they would have is that he might be trying to mess with the machine's electronics or coin mechanisms, but just writing stuff down wouldn't be cause for that.
There's a reason why they display past results for Roulette tables: they let people form false patterns on random data. If they see him recording the machine, then he is likely trying to come up with a "system", which doesn't work, or is trying to figure out the payout and probability structure of the machine, which is harmless since it is well known that the machine is skewed against him either way.
As long as he is not interfering with the other gamblers I see little incentive for the casino to stop him.
Blizzard distributes World of Warcraft patches using P2P, specifically with a modified bittorrent client. Although the system does allow for distribution by non-P2P methods, it is at much lower speed.
Blocking off all unencrypted P2P would require them to switch to encrypted, reduce the quality of service to their customers, and/or cost them more to improve other ways to distribute patches. This is a very legitimate use of the technology and I doubt they would be pleased to be blocked off like this.
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Wait, you mean that Presidents have prepared remarks and speechwriters? I'm shocked, completely shocked. Alert the Internet!
That meme is one of the dumber ones I've heard lately, and is a bit of a head scratcher. I mean, if you had taken any effort to inform yourself you would know that Obama's speechwriter is Jon Favreau. But it's just so...expected...for a President to have speechwriters that makes this pique so senseless. You may have heard of Ben Stein, who was a speechwriter for Nixon and Ford.
This country needs healthy dissent to thrive, but the right wing seems to be overflowing with dissent that is downright deranged. Hold Obama's feet to the fire when he fouls up on things like warrantless wiretapping or bank bailouts, stay away from this stupid bullshit.
Well, one alternative is to take an axe to these derivative contracts, and make it so they are redeemable for their original purchase price (or with a bit of a premium for time cost and whatnot). I thought about this possibility a while back, but it seems to be picking up some steam in more mainstream financial circles (I read an article about it recently in Barron's), and supposedly similar contract alteration was done in response to the Dutch Tulip bubble in the 1600s.
It might not be a better choice than propping up the banks and waiting it out, but eventually they are going to need to put an end to these things. The deregulated shadow market for them was and is complete madness. It's not all that much dumber than making Ponzi schemes, naked short selling, or insurance fraud legal.
In any case, if there is a situation where anything approaching the quadrillion or a slightly lesser number of trillions of dollars of the derivatives need to be exercised they will be completely worthless. Worthless either because the system will completely collapse and no one will honor them, or worthless because they will be devalued by hyperinflation. There's not enough money currently in existence to cover those positions, so those are pretty much the options.
Looking at the article, it looks like it is even less news because the ruling is based entirely on an obscure Massachusetts state law, which would only apply to those in Massachusetts even if it was not overturned. And that law has the requirement of demonstrating "actual malice", which probably will fall flat rather quick.
This might be a bad ruling, but it seems like it is rather limited in scope and likely to be overturned regardless.
Huh? That's a whole lot of nonsense right there. I'm not a communist nor to I ascribe to a notion that the economy should be fully centrally planned, and I'm perplexed as to how you would get that from what I wrote. It's just for some things the government is more efficient at handling them than the private sector, or the private sector simply wouldn't be able to handle them at all or operate in anything approaching the ideal free market case without government protections. A college level economics course should teach you about externalities, which are by definition side effects in the markets where individuals will not bear all the costs or benefits of their economic decisions, affecting others. You'd have to be seriously misinformed or delusional to think that externalities are a nonissue, and that a market would be able to handle them in isolation from some manner of coercion in the form of a government. Especially given that the subject of air pollution and reducing it through wind power generation is one such externality
To me the anarchistic libertarianism is just about as daft as other brands of anarchism, which is rather daft. It is an ideology that does not stand the test of reality.
Sigh, the common libertarian approach to economics is akin to saying that the understanding the simple Newtonian mechanics of objects moving in a vacuum and without friction is all you need to adequately predict all physical phenomena. It is an unfounded assumption that government is automatically inefficient for the wide variety of potential ways to spend on economic activity, and in many cases government is more efficient for handing certain things and some important matters wouldn't be properly handled at all with the absence of government. In particular government is best there for resolving "Collective Action Problems", of which there are many, where the optimum economic behavior for an individual clashes with the optimum economic behavior for a group as a whole. A good example is crime, like say theft, where you would have most benefit from stealing from someone else society will fall apart if everyone, or even simply enough people, take from each other without any respect for the rules.
The environment is a giant collective action problem which necessitates government, because while individuals may benefit more for polluting a bit more with small marginal effects, when you take that behavior across the whole population you wreck the environment and have disastrous effects on everyone such as through health problems or poor climate or weather.
There's basically been tacit allowance of widespread copyright infringement for unlicensed anime because there is little incentive for the Japanese companies to try to stop it. That's because the English market for an unlicensed anime isn't open yet; they need someone to translate and distribute it. There's no money to be lost yet, so they can mostly benefit from the infringement to market the shows and get data on what's popular in the western markets. The only downside is the risk of not being able to stop infringement once they license, but many fansubbers will stop translating willingly when it is licensed. And people will still pirate anyways...
Comcast however, has a direct interest in stopping this: it eats up bandwidth. So I would guess they are either mostly or completely behind this rather than the copyright holders. I wonder if they even have permission from the copyright holders to send these out.
Add into that the fact that the internet is the only avenue for getting these shows in a translated format without having to wait for X years if licensed, or forever if not licensed. Standard domestic shows you can just watch it on regular TV or set up a DVR.
Don't feel too discouraged. I was a badass at abstract algebra I in college and I still have only a little idea of what is going on in that wikipedia page.
Er, I've seen this issue pop up somewhere else before, but the percentage of food consumed in the US that is imported is a small minority. According to Reuter's, only about 15% of the food supply was imported a year ago. This is up from bit less than 10% a decade ago, but not overwhelmingly so. Do remember there is quite a bit of protectionism over US agriculture.
Yeah, the dollar is going in the toilet, but we don't import everything.
A leading cause of death, as my late grandfather put it: too many birthdays.
Doesn't surprise me in the least.
Greenpeace is one of those "environmental" organizations that uses the issue of the environment as a trojan horse for other social or political causes. The positions of the political environmentalists is often regardless of or sometimes even contrary to real environmental problems or their solutions.
I'm not excluding rational environmentalism from the discourse, I'm just of the opinion that Greenpeace has very little of it.
...here is a snippet one of the really damning hand histories (the cheat is POTRIPPER):
...
POKERME420 - Posts small blind $150
JINXY_MONKEY - Posts big blind $300
*** POCKET CARDS ***
Dealt to AUTOSMOKE [7c 4h]
Dealt to OBV_DONK [Js 5h]
Dealt to POTR0AST [6h 4c]
Dealt to POTRIPPER [Ks Qd]
Dealt to POKERME420 [10d Qs]
Dealt to JINXY_MONKEY [Ah As]
Dealt to CLOVER777 [Kh Jd]
Dealt to SCARFACE_79 [7s 3h]
SCARFACE_79 - Folds
CLOVER777 - Calls $300
OBV_DONK - Folds
AUTOSMOKE - Folds
POTR0AST - Folds
POTRIPPER - Folds
POKERME420 - Raises $450 to $600
JINXY_MONKEY - Raises $1500 to $1800
CLOVER777 - Folds
POKERME420 - Calls $1200
*** FLOP *** [10h 10c 9s]
POKERME420 - Checks
JINXY_MONKEY - Bets $1800
POKERME420 - Calls $1800
*** TURN *** [10h 10c 9s] [5c]
He folds KQo unraised preflop ahead of AA when there was a grand total of ONE HAND in the whole collection he folded preflop where an opponent didn't have JJ or better. A few hands prior he raised 62o under the gun.
I guess if you are going to cheat, you are going to need to not be so obvious as to never fold _except_ when your opponents have something.
Didn't Charles Manson get convicted for murder by use of a proxy? He used his underlings to commit murders, but got convicted for the crime as well as them.
I'm sorry, but giving her advice not to appeal shows that you are ignorant of many of the important aspects of the law surrounding this case that have been covered here. The most important point can be found in BMW OF NORTH AMERICA, INC., PETITIONER v. IRA GORE, Jr..
For those who don't want to read that case, it says that punitive damages grossly excess of the actual damage caused and lacking in reprehensibility are unconstitutional. SCOTUS calls a ratio of fine to actual damages of 500 to 1 "breathtaking" in that case. This case is more than an order of magnitude higher than that!
Appealing is about her only option of getting this absolutely bullshit reward thrown out, and hopefully the statutory minimum damages with it.
That's wrong, we have a trigger too: the printing press. (Or the federal reserve if you want to get technical)
With all the bonds they hold, them pegging their currency to ours, and the amount they sell to the US a dose of hyperinflation could easily sink both of us. That would probably cause or follow a global financial crisis though.
About the chaos theory, it's also the case that no perturbations can lead to big results if there is sensitive dependence on initial conditions. In a chaotic system, after a long enough timeframe imperceptible differences will cause divergence, making it impossible to fully predict the outcome of small changes down the line.
Weather is pretty random and hard to predict, but there's a bit more to it than that and GW is a slightly different matter. The GW models don't try to predict exactly what the temperatures will be, because that's impossible, but rather try to get the probability distribution of the weather or derived statistics such as averages. So if the GW models are sufficiently accurate, it won't guarantee that years will all be hotter, but rather it is more likely to be hotter or it will be hotter on average. Or more chaotic, or whatever the hell they now are predicting.
I'm afraid of what happens if he decides to kick it up a notch.
BAM!
Politicians can be corrupted by power, and there are sources of power from both sides of the aisle. This should be relatively unsurprising. However, given your response it seems likely that you are just a partisan troll.
"You can observe a lot just by watching." - Yogi Berra
Unfortunately, political corruption has a pretty long and well established history in the US and abroad. Having oil companies be a vehicle for corruption is rather unsurprising, as they have a lot of money, power, and interest in the activities of the political realm.
But suggesting or implying that corruption is limited or mostly limited to oil or the Republicans would be silly, and I hope that isn't what the GP is trying to do.
I'm concerned with what is their justification for doubling prison terms in terms of proportionality of punishment. Let punishment fit the crime, etc.
Are pirates that big of a threat to society that they merit a doubling of imprisonment? I can see how commercial pirates represent much more tangible harm than personal copyright infringement does, as sales take place, though at potentially at a much higher quantity than at the legitimate price. But this just going through the database and multiplying everything by two, which suggests considering these matters was at best done in a haphazard or arbitrary manner.
Is this just a matter of our good friend and his 'constituents' thinking that eye-for-an-eye is not enough and upgrading it to head-for-an-eye, because I can think of a better use of prisons and related resources than for this.
The only things scarier than zombies are litigious zombies.
I don't know what the GP is all about, maybe just an advertisement?
Why would they do that? The only motivation for concern they would have is that he might be trying to mess with the machine's electronics or coin mechanisms, but just writing stuff down wouldn't be cause for that.
There's a reason why they display past results for Roulette tables: they let people form false patterns on random data. If they see him recording the machine, then he is likely trying to come up with a "system", which doesn't work, or is trying to figure out the payout and probability structure of the machine, which is harmless since it is well known that the machine is skewed against him either way.
As long as he is not interfering with the other gamblers I see little incentive for the casino to stop him.
Eh, but we can always build more kill...errr, stunbots.
Blizzard distributes World of Warcraft patches using P2P, specifically with a modified bittorrent client. Although the system does allow for distribution by non-P2P methods, it is at much lower speed.
Blocking off all unencrypted P2P would require them to switch to encrypted, reduce the quality of service to their customers, and/or cost them more to improve other ways to distribute patches. This is a very legitimate use of the technology and I doubt they would be pleased to be blocked off like this.