But if you want to change a rightie's day, just wrap a quarter in six miles of duct tape and leave the ball between their church and the local house of ill repute....they'll give themselves a Brazilian getting to that quarter.
But the videos are too useful to the insurance companies, who will use them to diagnose conditions like MS, Parkinson's, diseases whose symptoms include jaundice, and other signs of serious illness or injury that are visually detectable so that they can deny you coverage under the new, improved "A public health option is off the table!" system.
Certain advantages to that...say, in case your government passes a "Patriot Act" that lets them put a "black box" - no questions asked - in any phone switching center or ISP head end or...anywhere. "Black boxes" can have so...many...capabilities.
People sure weren't complaining when these guys were giving them cheap capital to buy speculative housing and gigantic SUVs. We're all in this together.
I would disagree about "we're all in this together".
I am of the opinion that the easy credit was a response to the loss of jobs caused by inequitable and unbalanced free trade and the diversion of income out of the American economy from the middle class and working poor into stasis in the holdings of the top 1% or, worse, into building new factories to take yet more American jobs.
In short, the housing (and SUV buying) bubble occurred because of a decision by the Fed and their cohorts in banking, Wall Street, and the Republican Party to use easy credit to replace income from jobs that were being lost in the manufacturing and service sectors. The American people's addiction to Madison Avenue's guidance was used to conceal what was actually being done to them.
I suspect that the primary regret that the Goldman Sachs alumni in that last Administration as well as the membership of the Fed have is that they could not sustain the illusion of a functional economy until after a Democratic Administration had taken office - which was inevitable given the Iraq revelations, DOJ corruption, et al.
But that failure, too, was a function of the fact that we are not "all in this together"; that last Administration flat out refused to regulate the hedge funds and rein in the speculation - to include the creation of artificial scarcity - in hydrocarbons which was hammering the American people; indeed, the Administration added to the upward consumer price pressure by increasing food prices through the diversion of corn products into an inefficient ethanol production system.
The resultant surge in prices - particularly energy, but pretty much all consumer prices - tipped enough mortgage holders over the edge to reveal the underlying corruption and lack of value in the highly leveraged mortgage financial instruments.
The point at which the conscious decision to drive our economy with easy credit and flaky mortgages - and profit from the leveraging of those bad mortgages - can be discerned by reading this Bush speech http://www.hud.gov/news/speeches/presremarks.cfm given in June of 2002. In it, Bush brags of having put the arm - the Presidential arm - on Fannie Mae with the result that "about $440 billion" in "capital" was "created".
From a pragmatic perspective, the last Administration and their Republican cohorts in Congress were all about economically raping the American economy and our Treasury. They did a good job, too. Goldman Sachs should be proud; but then again, they have some experience at it; John Galbraith observes their contribution to the crash of 1929 in his book The Great Crash, 1929.
So while there is no doubt that the administration brings a certain bias to the table, it's also hard to overlook the fact that any crack team of financial wizards is likely to include a Goldman alum.
Wizards? Under their guidance, we got where we are today.
Given that the nation did not benefit but they are still paying massive bonuses at Goldman Sachs, one can only wonder who the intended beneficiary of their "crack team of financial wizards" http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0820-06.htm was.
Goldman is being rewarded by the market for making the right moves a year and a half ago in the mortgage market.
Or, perhaps, they are being rewarded for having had so many of their alumni in the Administration that oversaw the creation of a need to distribute billions and billions in taxpayer dollars.
Nah, they haven't. It is the corporate bean counters, CEOs, and boards of directors who have no loyalty to Abrash's Zen of Assembly Language; coding for cycles and bytes takes time.
The whole point of making code modular and dependent upon pre-existing "frameworks" - plug'n'play, if you will - was to dispose of those expensive programmers who could craft code in favor of those who could generate code.
Don't need good, tight code, when you can generate bloatware offshore, release it, and then throw hundreds of programmers at bugs post-release and still turn a helluva profit.
And the bean counters and the folks who get paid in stock options and so forth don't give a damn what box the public is running; witness Vista, the computer retailer's friend.
Capitalism is the separation of other people from their wealth with the goal of increasing your own wealth.
Anything that interferes with that goal is socialism.
Therefore of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Conquest, War, and Famine are clearly capitalists, because you can use them to leverage wealth from others.
Death, however, is clearly a socialist - and perhaps even a communist, as he permanently halts the transfer of wealth from or to whoever he has an appointment with.
...to me that the marriage counseling hasn't worked.
Oh, well...one thing is still true: If you need someone to vent to, you can be sure that the NSA still listens.
You do realize that the amount of money spent in the past few months on the so-called "stimulus" has already dwarfed the total amount spent over several years on the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, right?
I would add that Iraq provided the distraction needed to conceal the shenanigans on Wall Street and in banking - to use only examples that are public knowledge - that necessitated the later expenditures on the stimulus.
An appropriate response would be to issue letters of marque and treat them like the pirates of old but I suspect that if we actually did this it wouldn't go over very well.
Now if people start talking bounties in hard dollar figures, red passports, expense accounts, and access to the identification production facilities of certain U.S. agencies along with letters of marque...
It is hilarious to me that we have this big DoD initiative to protect "defense" secrets, but in the name of profit we ship silicon wafer manufacturing technology and all kinds of advanced robotics anywhere labor rates are lower than America's.
Just how stupid do you have to be to believe that nobody can translate the guts - the design - of a pick-and-place robot that operates in four dimensions while putting circuit boards and PCs together into a missile guidance system? Or to assume that you cannot use a super-computer sold to predict weather for an Olympics to model thermonuclear design and detonation?
Maybe they believe the Itanium architecture has a role to play as various factions try to implement the "glass house" paradigm again (except this time with a softer, gentler name: "cloud computing").
Does the Itanium architecture come complete with back doors for the Feds, the RIAA, the BSA, etc.? And a circular queue (FINO: First In, Never Out) where change and improvement requests can go to rot forever in quantum hell?
Concur - "shielded from complexity" comes to mind. Back when I did that sort of thing, I might get detailed complaints from PC users - but all I ever heard from Apple users was "It is slow." or "It won't work.".
Not to mention, I didn't see my first virus on Windows...it was nVir, on the Mac - which is one of the reasons I always laugh when anybody says things like "inherently more secure".
The odds are pretty good that Pluto will outlive the human race.
The odds are equally good, I'd say, that both will cease to exist at the same time - likely because somebody found out that Pluto was a clump of some mineral massively valuable on Earth, and decided to drive it back to Earth to harvest...and for the last time, somebody used English units of measure when everybody else was using metric.
Like our tax code, our laws are entirely too complex; complexity in turns yields many interpretations - so many, in fact, that in many ways our system of law is beginning to resemble a religion.
I suspect that we are coming full circle; the only conclusive proof that I lack may yet be found in a lost scroll somewhere in the Middle East: A notation that King Solomon awarded the plaintiff's and defendant's lawyers 1/3rd of the baby apiece as fees.
in case of Halliburton : their only thing that define them are their shareholders pocket
No longer true; the tendency to pay in stocks and options has created a new kind of CEO that will maximize profits and thus share price in the short term through actions that they know will destroy the corporation and all shareholder value - but not until the day after their golden parachute is funded.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm, I wonder if this would work for liberals?
Liberals? Dunno.
But if you want to change a rightie's day, just wrap a quarter in six miles of duct tape and leave the ball between their church and the local house of ill repute....they'll give themselves a Brazilian getting to that quarter.
But the videos are too useful to the insurance companies, who will use them to diagnose conditions like MS, Parkinson's, diseases whose symptoms include jaundice, and other signs of serious illness or injury that are visually detectable so that they can deny you coverage under the new, improved "A public health option is off the table!" system.
Why not nuke Kansas or Ohio? THat'll improve the IQ and educational system while only killing 2 men and a donkey.
One man and a donkey. I moved.
Certain advantages to that...say, in case your government passes a "Patriot Act" that lets them put a "black box" - no questions asked - in any phone switching center or ISP head end or...anywhere. "Black boxes" can have so...many...capabilities.
People sure weren't complaining when these guys were giving them cheap capital to buy speculative housing and gigantic SUVs. We're all in this together.
I would disagree about "we're all in this together".
I am of the opinion that the easy credit was a response to the loss of jobs caused by inequitable and unbalanced free trade and the diversion of income out of the American economy from the middle class and working poor into stasis in the holdings of the top 1% or, worse, into building new factories to take yet more American jobs.
In short, the housing (and SUV buying) bubble occurred because of a decision by the Fed and their cohorts in banking, Wall Street, and the Republican Party to use easy credit to replace income from jobs that were being lost in the manufacturing and service sectors. The American people's addiction to Madison Avenue's guidance was used to conceal what was actually being done to them.
I suspect that the primary regret that the Goldman Sachs alumni in that last Administration as well as the membership of the Fed have is that they could not sustain the illusion of a functional economy until after a Democratic Administration had taken office - which was inevitable given the Iraq revelations, DOJ corruption, et al.
But that failure, too, was a function of the fact that we are not "all in this together"; that last Administration flat out refused to regulate the hedge funds and rein in the speculation - to include the creation of artificial scarcity - in hydrocarbons which was hammering the American people; indeed, the Administration added to the upward consumer price pressure by increasing food prices through the diversion of corn products into an inefficient ethanol production system.
The resultant surge in prices - particularly energy, but pretty much all consumer prices - tipped enough mortgage holders over the edge to reveal the underlying corruption and lack of value in the highly leveraged mortgage financial instruments.
The point at which the conscious decision to drive our economy with easy credit and flaky mortgages - and profit from the leveraging of those bad mortgages - can be discerned by reading this Bush speech http://www.hud.gov/news/speeches/presremarks.cfm given in June of 2002. In it, Bush brags of having put the arm - the Presidential arm - on Fannie Mae with the result that "about $440 billion" in "capital" was "created".
From a pragmatic perspective, the last Administration and their Republican cohorts in Congress were all about economically raping the American economy and our Treasury. They did a good job, too. Goldman Sachs should be proud; but then again, they have some experience at it; John Galbraith observes their contribution to the crash of 1929 in his book The Great Crash, 1929.
So while there is no doubt that the administration brings a certain bias to the table, it's also hard to overlook the fact that any crack team of financial wizards is likely to include a Goldman alum.
Wizards? Under their guidance, we got where we are today.
Given that the nation did not benefit but they are still paying massive bonuses at Goldman Sachs, one can only wonder who the intended beneficiary of their "crack team of financial wizards" http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0820-06.htm was.
It does not appear to have been the taxpayer.
Goldman is being rewarded by the market for making the right moves a year and a half ago in the mortgage market.
Or, perhaps, they are being rewarded for having had so many of their alumni in the Administration that oversaw the creation of a need to distribute billions and billions in taxpayer dollars.
Nah, they haven't. It is the corporate bean counters, CEOs, and boards of directors who have no loyalty to Abrash's Zen of Assembly Language; coding for cycles and bytes takes time.
The whole point of making code modular and dependent upon pre-existing "frameworks" - plug'n'play, if you will - was to dispose of those expensive programmers who could craft code in favor of those who could generate code.
Don't need good, tight code, when you can generate bloatware offshore, release it, and then throw hundreds of programmers at bugs post-release and still turn a helluva profit.
And the bean counters and the folks who get paid in stock options and so forth don't give a damn what box the public is running; witness Vista, the computer retailer's friend.
Capitalism is the separation of other people from their wealth with the goal of increasing your own wealth.
Anything that interferes with that goal is socialism.
Therefore of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Conquest, War, and Famine are clearly capitalists, because you can use them to leverage wealth from others.
Death, however, is clearly a socialist - and perhaps even a communist, as he permanently halts the transfer of wealth from or to whoever he has an appointment with.
I had one for a minute, and I couldn't hear shit!
...to me that the marriage counseling hasn't worked. Oh, well...one thing is still true: If you need someone to vent to, you can be sure that the NSA still listens.
...is an oxymoron.
You do realize that the amount of money spent in the past few months on the so-called "stimulus" has already dwarfed the total amount spent over several years on the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, right?
I would add that Iraq provided the distraction needed to conceal the shenanigans on Wall Street and in banking - to use only examples that are public knowledge - that necessitated the later expenditures on the stimulus.
that he who litters first, litters last.
I'm glad there is a scientific basis for me not having to inflict my root on everybody.
A seemingly intelligent fellow, explaining how it should work - while it never actually did work. Just like listening to Paulson, or Geitner, or...
"[...] and an unanticipated increase in staffing to manage procurement"
Now there is a good example of the self-serving nature of bureaucracy: Overspending on managers to manage spending.
An appropriate response would be to issue letters of marque and treat them like the pirates of old but I suspect that if we actually did this it wouldn't go over very well.
Now if people start talking bounties in hard dollar figures, red passports, expense accounts, and access to the identification production facilities of certain U.S. agencies along with letters of marque...
It is hilarious to me that we have this big DoD initiative to protect "defense" secrets, but in the name of profit we ship silicon wafer manufacturing technology and all kinds of advanced robotics anywhere labor rates are lower than America's.
Just how stupid do you have to be to believe that nobody can translate the guts - the design - of a pick-and-place robot that operates in four dimensions while putting circuit boards and PCs together into a missile guidance system? Or to assume that you cannot use a super-computer sold to predict weather for an Olympics to model thermonuclear design and detonation?
We make me laugh.
Maybe they believe the Itanium architecture has a role to play as various factions try to implement the "glass house" paradigm again (except this time with a softer, gentler name: "cloud computing").
Does the Itanium architecture come complete with back doors for the Feds, the RIAA, the BSA, etc.? And a circular queue (FINO: First In, Never Out) where change and improvement requests can go to rot forever in quantum hell?
Concur - "shielded from complexity" comes to mind. Back when I did that sort of thing, I might get detailed complaints from PC users - but all I ever heard from Apple users was "It is slow." or "It won't work.".
Not to mention, I didn't see my first virus on Windows...it was nVir, on the Mac - which is one of the reasons I always laugh when anybody says things like "inherently more secure".
The odds are pretty good that Pluto will outlive the human race.
The odds are equally good, I'd say, that both will cease to exist at the same time - likely because somebody found out that Pluto was a clump of some mineral massively valuable on Earth, and decided to drive it back to Earth to harvest...and for the last time, somebody used English units of measure when everybody else was using metric.
Then Britain would really have the last laugh.
Like our tax code, our laws are entirely too complex; complexity in turns yields many interpretations - so many, in fact, that in many ways our system of law is beginning to resemble a religion.
I suspect that we are coming full circle; the only conclusive proof that I lack may yet be found in a lost scroll somewhere in the Middle East: A notation that King Solomon awarded the plaintiff's and defendant's lawyers 1/3rd of the baby apiece as fees.
in case of Halliburton : their only thing that define them are their shareholders pocket
No longer true; the tendency to pay in stocks and options has created a new kind of CEO that will maximize profits and thus share price in the short term through actions that they know will destroy the corporation and all shareholder value - but not until the day after their golden parachute is funded.
...for government intrusion, censorship, and propaganda, they rip down the house. Not to worry, though: PNAC loves you.