so cut the bullshit about 'its within the rules', and get used to living in a society.
It's not a "society", it's a game.
In real society, people do things you won't like all the time, and they are still "within the rules". Get used to it. YOu don't get to threaten their life.
Loans to people/companies who can actually pay them back yield a lot of money. Average return on a 15 year mortgage, for example, is about double. It's also frontloaded, so they make most of the profit by year 10 and all that is left is the principal that needs to be paid back.
Corporate loans work similarly, so if Company X pays back a 1 billion dollar loan in 10 years, the loaner has made a profit of probably around 50-75%.
Depends on what kind of a "loan" it is.
Corporations typically raise this kind of capital with a bond issue, which, unlike a loan (or mortgage), does not pay compound interest, it just has a fixed interest schedule. At the end of the period (bond maturity) the principle is returned.
First, as has been repeatedly noted on this page, the 'wise Latina woman' comment was in relation to a bad decision made by one of the white old men who had been on the Supreme Court during earlier ages making clearly racist rulings; in context, the statement is perfectly sensible.
And the best counter to a racist white old man is a "wise Latina woman"? That's perfectly sensible to you? Surely, she could have picked much better words. On the Supreme Court, words you use matter.
Context matters, and if you pay attention to everything she said, it's not really racist at all.
Sadly, complex thoughts and context don't seem to fare well in the minds of many people these days - maybe it's because they don't make for quick, easy to digest sound bites.
She's saying that a specific race and gender is superior (or rather she hopes it is) in interpreting law and rendering judgment.
How do her comments, regardless of context, qualify her from the position? How is holding an opinion that it takes a particular race and gender to interpret law "correctly" an attribute we want to see in a supreme court justice?
So if there was a racial or sexual discrimination case in front of the court, she would be able to interpret and apply the law better than a male or white judge?
She'd may be able to empathize better with a victim of such discrimination, but that does not qualify her for the position.
And even fewer people understand a "mixed" market model, because it has vastly more moving parts, and actually relies on someone understanding what is going on and directing (government, tax) resources appropriately. This is not possible. I would go with a simpler model that does not require all-knowing experts making far-reaching decisions whose effects they cannot even begin to model.
Yeah, when this first happened I think I recall some future shops getting rebranded, but that mysteriously stopped, and now you can find both future shops and best buys. This mystified me, until some time later I realized almost no one knew they're the same company. People don't get deals at one place or get bad service, they go next door to the other one to make their purchase on basically the same terms.
Online reviews are nice, but they often fall short, and so much of what we see as product quality is subjective (ie, aesthetic). For a simple example, I would never buy a mouse that I could not try beforehand. The size, shape and weight must feel "right" and be comfortable TO ME, there must be the "right" amount of buttons in the "right" locations and requiring the "right" amount of pressure, the scroll wheel must not be mooshy and must have clearly defined stops and must feel "right". No review will tell me this.
Anything you interact with is subjective, and different people have different preferences, place different emphasis on certain aspects, and are often willing to overlook what to you may be glaring and fatal flaws.
You're assuming most players pick up WoW with a bunch of their friends at the same time. That they bounce from MMO to MMO until they agree on something, that you call the "lowest common denominator".
That just isn't so, and you're not giving WoW enough credit by being condescending like that.
For the life of me, I don't know where all my bookmarks are, or why they are so hard to get at.
I'm a little privacy obsessed, and I don't know what is going on with my cookies. On the one hand you have no visibility into what cookies a site is setting, on the other you have the "incognito" mode, which takes things too far in the wrong direction (ie, zero control over cookies).
Not having even simple addons like text2link and flashblock and basically dealbreakers for me just for regular daily use.
I'm sure some of this will get sorted out sooner or later, not quite ready for prime-time yet.
Giving a loan to someone who cannot afford it, or is a high default risk, is not illegal. It is bad business, but not illegal. It may be actionable by shareholders and you may be found personally liable (unlikely), but it is not illegal.
Housing, historically, ideally, rises about equally to rate of income growth. "Affordable" housing is usually 2-3 times the median annual income. Incomes have not been keeping pace with the official inflation figures, never mind actual inflation figures (CPI excludes housing and energy costs... why? who knows, it just does).
But if you assume incomes keep pace with inflation, and so does housing, you're paying a rate your mortgage dictates (definitely higher than rate of inflation) to maintain the value of your money (the house). You could have just bought T-bills instead, and made a better return, then, after 20-30 years, bought yourself the same house with only a portion of the profits.
Rents never exceed the cost of a mortgage payment. They do sometimes, in some markets, for a period of time, but it always settles down.
You can pretend to do all kinds of math, but renting is almost always the better choice. It is strictly better in a housing bubble market. Once you factor in mortgage closing costs and property fees, interest, property tax, maintenance, repairs, upgrades, and broker (realtor) fees and taxes when you sell, you are losing a lot of money. That's assuming you buy during a sane market, and housing, at best, maintains its value vs median income.
That's not even counting the opportunity cost of forgone income due to mortgage interest, significant personal time investment into maintaining and upgrading the property, and greatly reduced mobility (also, if you want to move you may have to make overlapping payments on two mortgages, especially in a buyer's market).
Renting, and pocketing the difference (to, say, invest in something that pays more than rate of inflation) will make you better off than the person who's just done paying off their mortgage. UNLESS, you guess right and buy in a low market, or in an area that experiences significant rise in values.
That said, I have a mortgage, because I like the peace of mind (I HATE moving) and being able to take the hammer and rearrange things, but I also recognize that I am paying way more than I could rent the place for.
No, the problem was not that "those people" got loans, that's just a side effect of artificially ultra-low interest rates, and offloading of all risk to misinformed investors.
The problem was the rapid inflation of the monetary base (ie inflation) and gross misallocation of investments and assets, which leads us into the current "correction".
The right keeps using the words "Socialist", "Marxist", and "Fascist" to describe Obama. Those words do not mean what they mean think they mean. I mean, really, Obama is a _______ (fill in the blank)? Obviously the right has ZERO idea of how center-right Obama really is. Heck, in any "Socialist" country, Obama would be seen as a right-winger. Fascist? Yeah, right, let me know what the previous President's wonderful record on the Bill of Rights was, in particular the 4th amendment.
I do in fact know what "Fascist" means. The 4th Amendment has nothing to do with Fascism, although there certainly are effects, but they're just symptoms that follow.
Fascism is just another word for Corporatism. The US is now well into the realm of Fascism now.
Similarly, I need to repeat again and again that not all government employees have their salaries funded by income taxes. The postal service is mostly self-sufficient.
The postal service, and all quasi-government "corporation" (or crown corporations in Canada) are money sucking black holes. Only profit they make is the same kind of "profit" posted last quarter by Bank of America after they sucked down hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts and FED credits.
Salaries at public universities are increasingly paid out of tuition and grants.
Now I know you're just trolling. Public universities are, gasp, publicly funded. Perhaps that is why they are called "public universities".
Plus, I'm generally not a fan of the kind of balkinization that I feel this will produce -- people that view only the things they already know they like are unlikely to branch out and view something different. There's quite a bit of interesting wheat (in there with the chaff, of course) flipping through that large middle block of digital channels.
Producers and distributors will have an incentive to get their channels subscribed to by as many people as they can. They will offer free samples every 6 or whatever months, where people get channels they don't subscribe to for some period of time to "try out".
These things have a way of working themselves out, even if you don't immediately see how. Either that, or they go out of business.
That was at best an extremely poor choice of words on the parent's part.
The FED rate is the rate the FED will lend to large banks at. The parent IS correct in that, effectively, the FED has nothing in reserve, and any money it lends is basically created out of thin air. The way it influences (and benefits) these banks is that the lower the rate, the more will be lent and borrowed, and anything they get from the FED they will multiply 10x through the magic of fractional reserve banking.
This is bad because it distorts the economy. By artificially lowering rates and encouraging capital borrowing, businesses misallocate their assets and efforts, anticipating economic conditions that are ultimately fake (because real capital is only created through savings, not the printing press), and that will lead to losses when the real condition is revealed (the classic boom/bust cycle).
If they do battle and win, the guys life is basically ruined and bankrupt. If he throws in the towel early, they win too. If they lose, it's just status quo.
Everyone knows how expensive a legal defense can be, and how expensive a settlement can be when punitive damages are considered. By keeping these cases public and visible, it acts as a deterrent. Many people, when faced with a legal challenge and potential costs will just shut up and move on with their life.
It puts a number of things together that make it more usable than, say, blogs. For shooting off quick updates to your friends on where you are or what you are doing, it's great. Just text your message, or log in somewhere for 2 minutes, and you're done. It also offers a great deal of control over who has access to your messages. Sure, you can do some or all of these things by throwing a bunch of customized stuff at Facebook or a blog, but Twitter does it for you, and "everyone is using it", so it has good exposure.
And unlike blogging, it's not "airing things out". Make your page private, and only people you allow in will see it, so that removes the whole banal aspect of it. You still CAN be, but it does move things in the right direction.
I've had the flat speakers on my desktop a few years ago, and it really does not matter which way you point them, as long as the surface is 'roughly' facing you. In that sense, they don't really have a 'sweet spot'.
The shortcoming is that to reproduce a full spectrum of sound, or close to it, they have to be paired with a subwoofer, because the surface can't displace enough air to generate low frequencies. This is not an issue with a PA-type system; voice and dings and bleeps come through just fine, and would be good enough for AM talk radio.
Microsoft has been breaking their own UI guidelines (that everyone else has to follow to be "Certified for Windows") ever since they first created them. Primarily with Office.
Slashdot Mirror
so cut the bullshit about 'its within the rules', and get used to living in a society.
It's not a "society", it's a game.
In real society, people do things you won't like all the time, and they are still "within the rules". Get used to it. YOu don't get to threaten their life.
Loans to people/companies who can actually pay them back yield a lot of money. Average return on a 15 year mortgage, for example, is about double. It's also frontloaded, so they make most of the profit by year 10 and all that is left is the principal that needs to be paid back.
Corporate loans work similarly, so if Company X pays back a 1 billion dollar loan in 10 years, the loaner has made a profit of probably around 50-75%.
Depends on what kind of a "loan" it is.
Corporations typically raise this kind of capital with a bond issue, which, unlike a loan (or mortgage), does not pay compound interest, it just has a fixed interest schedule. At the end of the period (bond maturity) the principle is returned.
First, as has been repeatedly noted on this page, the 'wise Latina woman' comment was in relation to a bad decision made by one of the white old men who had been on the Supreme Court during earlier ages making clearly racist rulings; in context, the statement is perfectly sensible.
And the best counter to a racist white old man is a "wise Latina woman"? That's perfectly sensible to you? Surely, she could have picked much better words. On the Supreme Court, words you use matter.
Context matters, and if you pay attention to everything she said, it's not really racist at all.
Sadly, complex thoughts and context don't seem to fare well in the minds of many people these days - maybe it's because they don't make for quick, easy to digest sound bites.
She's saying that a specific race and gender is superior (or rather she hopes it is) in interpreting law and rendering judgment.
How do her comments, regardless of context, qualify her from the position? How is holding an opinion that it takes a particular race and gender to interpret law "correctly" an attribute we want to see in a supreme court justice?
So if there was a racial or sexual discrimination case in front of the court, she would be able to interpret and apply the law better than a male or white judge?
She'd may be able to empathize better with a victim of such discrimination, but that does not qualify her for the position.
How do we treak "regular" foreign criminals? If returning them to their country of origin is a danger to their lives, don't they get asylum in US?
And even fewer people understand a "mixed" market model, because it has vastly more moving parts, and actually relies on someone understanding what is going on and directing (government, tax) resources appropriately. This is not possible. I would go with a simpler model that does not require all-knowing experts making far-reaching decisions whose effects they cannot even begin to model.
Yeah, when this first happened I think I recall some future shops getting rebranded, but that mysteriously stopped, and now you can find both future shops and best buys. This mystified me, until some time later I realized almost no one knew they're the same company. People don't get deals at one place or get bad service, they go next door to the other one to make their purchase on basically the same terms.
Online reviews are nice, but they often fall short, and so much of what we see as product quality is subjective (ie, aesthetic). For a simple example, I would never buy a mouse that I could not try beforehand. The size, shape and weight must feel "right" and be comfortable TO ME, there must be the "right" amount of buttons in the "right" locations and requiring the "right" amount of pressure, the scroll wheel must not be mooshy and must have clearly defined stops and must feel "right". No review will tell me this.
Anything you interact with is subjective, and different people have different preferences, place different emphasis on certain aspects, and are often willing to overlook what to you may be glaring and fatal flaws.
You're assuming most players pick up WoW with a bunch of their friends at the same time. That they bounce from MMO to MMO until they agree on something, that you call the "lowest common denominator".
That just isn't so, and you're not giving WoW enough credit by being condescending like that.
I too am missing a great many things from Chrome.
The UI IS different, for no reason.
For the life of me, I don't know where all my bookmarks are, or why they are so hard to get at.
I'm a little privacy obsessed, and I don't know what is going on with my cookies. On the one hand you have no visibility into what cookies a site is setting, on the other you have the "incognito" mode, which takes things too far in the wrong direction (ie, zero control over cookies).
Not having even simple addons like text2link and flashblock and basically dealbreakers for me just for regular daily use.
I'm sure some of this will get sorted out sooner or later, not quite ready for prime-time yet.
Giving a loan to someone who cannot afford it, or is a high default risk, is not illegal. It is bad business, but not illegal. It may be actionable by shareholders and you may be found personally liable (unlikely), but it is not illegal.
To follow up, basically look at it this way.
Housing, historically, ideally, rises about equally to rate of income growth. "Affordable" housing is usually 2-3 times the median annual income. Incomes have not been keeping pace with the official inflation figures, never mind actual inflation figures (CPI excludes housing and energy costs... why? who knows, it just does).
But if you assume incomes keep pace with inflation, and so does housing, you're paying a rate your mortgage dictates (definitely higher than rate of inflation) to maintain the value of your money (the house). You could have just bought T-bills instead, and made a better return, then, after 20-30 years, bought yourself the same house with only a portion of the profits.
Rents never exceed the cost of a mortgage payment. They do sometimes, in some markets, for a period of time, but it always settles down.
You can pretend to do all kinds of math, but renting is almost always the better choice. It is strictly better in a housing bubble market. Once you factor in mortgage closing costs and property fees, interest, property tax, maintenance, repairs, upgrades, and broker (realtor) fees and taxes when you sell, you are losing a lot of money. That's assuming you buy during a sane market, and housing, at best, maintains its value vs median income.
That's not even counting the opportunity cost of forgone income due to mortgage interest, significant personal time investment into maintaining and upgrading the property, and greatly reduced mobility (also, if you want to move you may have to make overlapping payments on two mortgages, especially in a buyer's market).
Renting, and pocketing the difference (to, say, invest in something that pays more than rate of inflation) will make you better off than the person who's just done paying off their mortgage. UNLESS, you guess right and buy in a low market, or in an area that experiences significant rise in values.
That said, I have a mortgage, because I like the peace of mind (I HATE moving) and being able to take the hammer and rearrange things, but I also recognize that I am paying way more than I could rent the place for.
No, the problem was not that "those people" got loans, that's just a side effect of artificially ultra-low interest rates, and offloading of all risk to misinformed investors.
The problem was the rapid inflation of the monetary base (ie inflation) and gross misallocation of investments and assets, which leads us into the current "correction".
The right keeps using the words "Socialist", "Marxist", and "Fascist" to describe Obama. Those words do not mean what they mean think they mean. I mean, really, Obama is a _______ (fill in the blank)? Obviously the right has ZERO idea of how center-right Obama really is. Heck, in any "Socialist" country, Obama would be seen as a right-winger. Fascist? Yeah, right, let me know what the previous President's wonderful record on the Bill of Rights was, in particular the 4th amendment.
I do in fact know what "Fascist" means. The 4th Amendment has nothing to do with Fascism, although there certainly are effects, but they're just symptoms that follow.
Fascism is just another word for Corporatism. The US is now well into the realm of Fascism now.
Similarly, I need to repeat again and again that not all government employees have their salaries funded by income taxes. The postal service is mostly self-sufficient.
The postal service, and all quasi-government "corporation" (or crown corporations in Canada) are money sucking black holes. Only profit they make is the same kind of "profit" posted last quarter by Bank of America after they sucked down hundreds of billions of dollars in bailouts and FED credits.
Salaries at public universities are increasingly paid out of tuition and grants.
Now I know you're just trolling. Public universities are, gasp, publicly funded. Perhaps that is why they are called "public universities".
Plus, I'm generally not a fan of the kind of balkinization that I feel this will produce -- people that view only the things they already know they like are unlikely to branch out and view something different. There's quite a bit of interesting wheat (in there with the chaff, of course) flipping through that large middle block of digital channels.
Producers and distributors will have an incentive to get their channels subscribed to by as many people as they can. They will offer free samples every 6 or whatever months, where people get channels they don't subscribe to for some period of time to "try out".
These things have a way of working themselves out, even if you don't immediately see how. Either that, or they go out of business.
That was at best an extremely poor choice of words on the parent's part.
The FED rate is the rate the FED will lend to large banks at. The parent IS correct in that, effectively, the FED has nothing in reserve, and any money it lends is basically created out of thin air. The way it influences (and benefits) these banks is that the lower the rate, the more will be lent and borrowed, and anything they get from the FED they will multiply 10x through the magic of fractional reserve banking.
This is bad because it distorts the economy. By artificially lowering rates and encouraging capital borrowing, businesses misallocate their assets and efforts, anticipating economic conditions that are ultimately fake (because real capital is only created through savings, not the printing press), and that will lead to losses when the real condition is revealed (the classic boom/bust cycle).
Oh I don't know, I think it works just fine.
If they do battle and win, the guys life is basically ruined and bankrupt. If he throws in the towel early, they win too. If they lose, it's just status quo.
Everyone knows how expensive a legal defense can be, and how expensive a settlement can be when punitive damages are considered. By keeping these cases public and visible, it acts as a deterrent. Many people, when faced with a legal challenge and potential costs will just shut up and move on with their life.
It puts a number of things together that make it more usable than, say, blogs. For shooting off quick updates to your friends on where you are or what you are doing, it's great. Just text your message, or log in somewhere for 2 minutes, and you're done. It also offers a great deal of control over who has access to your messages. Sure, you can do some or all of these things by throwing a bunch of customized stuff at Facebook or a blog, but Twitter does it for you, and "everyone is using it", so it has good exposure.
And unlike blogging, it's not "airing things out". Make your page private, and only people you allow in will see it, so that removes the whole banal aspect of it. You still CAN be, but it does move things in the right direction.
Virtually all plots of 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s movies could be easily shortened to 5 minutes if you assume existence of cell phones and internet.
Actually, they are definitely NOT directional.
I've had the flat speakers on my desktop a few years ago, and it really does not matter which way you point them, as long as the surface is 'roughly' facing you. In that sense, they don't really have a 'sweet spot'.
The shortcoming is that to reproduce a full spectrum of sound, or close to it, they have to be paired with a subwoofer, because the surface can't displace enough air to generate low frequencies. This is not an issue with a PA-type system; voice and dings and bleeps come through just fine, and would be good enough for AM talk radio.
So is Windows with the POSIX subsystem installed, no?
Microsoft has been breaking their own UI guidelines (that everyone else has to follow to be "Certified for Windows") ever since they first created them. Primarily with Office.