Sorry, no. The whole point of skepticism is to assign a negative (false) value to anything but proven assertions. You may still be in the realm of empiricism, but you are not being skeptical.
When I write software for other people, I explicitly retain the rights to anything I write, unless the client pays extra.
As a contractor there's no reason to do work-for-hire. Legally it will not be considered such unless it [a] falls into a protected category, and [b] an agreement is signed saying that the work is "for hire".
And yes, the reason that I retain rights is so that I can open-source anything I please. We can have a separate discussion about the copyrights, but your words had better be writ large on a stack of banknotes.
Between open source products, SaaS, and the Internet in general, the idea of selling copies of software seems to be dying an unlamented death.
Actually in the context of epistemology, it means exactly what I said it means. The wikipedia article you refer to conflates rationalism and empiricism, I refer you to my previous post for an explanation of the differences.
You're also ignoring centuries of christian apologists and philosophers, scores of whom were better logicians than either of us: I may single out Descartes and Kant. Faith is an axiom, not necessarily an irrationality. The axioms of Christianity and those of mathematics may differ, but their applicability to the real world is problematic for the exact same reason.
It's about epistemologies: How you arrive at those facts. Most scientists follow an empirical empistemology. The rest of the world usually follows a more rational one, or historical (i.e. something is true because a book says so).
A rational epistemology holds that anything that can be proved logically is true. An empiricist holds that anything that can be demonstrated experimentally is true. Some statements can be true in either paradigm, but it can make a big difference as to how you arrive at these conclusions.
And it's not that either is necessarily invalid, or even that they're entirely separable. You have tradeoffs: with rationality, you can prove things that aren't necessarily 'true' in the real world. With empiricism, your truths are only valid to the limits of measurement: there's very little in the way of absolute truth to be had.
The clashes between science and the church were epistemological. Only one of these things can be the ultimate test of knowledge. So far the empiricists are winning if you count the fruits of their works, and the rationalists are winning by sheer numbers.
Adam, that really doesn't cut it as an excuse. Yes, it's a new installer, and this fact is well advertised. But if you have so little faith in the installer that you're cautioning people not to upgrade to F18, why the hell would you even release it?
This is becoming too common in the Linux world, with distros being released with half-implemented pet projects of its developers (Unity, PulseAudio, Fedora's new installer) under the guise of a final release. Rough rough rough, and not something people coming from say OS X or even Windows 7 would expect. Yes it's free, but it's also very off-putting and tends to reinforce the idea that you get what you pay for.
First, you're four years late on the PulseAudio rant, Unity works pretty well even if you don't like it, and you definitely didn't let the existence of Windows 8 get in the way of a good rant.
Nevertheless, this isn't exactly a new thing in the software world. It would be easier to find a project that avoided the practice, and in regards to shipping an operating system? Well, you just let me know when you manage to ship a bug free OS.
Red Hat isn't even the worst offender here. I've singled out Win8 already, but (and I apologize for mentioning it to a non-technical audience) Ruby has managed to release a new version of the language with "experimental features". The justification I got was something along the lines of "It's okay because none of the major libraries will rely on them."
However, I would urge everyone to be charitable. Change is good, even if it's rarely a smooth process. To the programmers reading this: let he who has never shipped a bug (or broken an API) throw the first stone. To the non-programmers: "We apologize for the inconvenience."
The State of Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend, to which you are no doubt referring, pays between $1000 and $2000 dollars per annum to all natural persons who have [a] resided in the state for at least one year, and [b] applied for it. It is *not* meant to be an income guarantee. The point of the Permanent Fund was that future generations will be deprived of the value of that oil, so it would be nice if someone besides the ludicrously rich oil companies had something to show for it afterwards.
I have no idea whether you're arguing for or against a minimum income, but regardless, the Alaska PFD does not in any meaningful sense qualify.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
It is not enough to have the ability to change the world. It is a rare combination of chance and circumstance, far more than any particular genius. Archimedes could not have formulated the questions that led to quantum electrodynamics. Nor is it fair to select a particular point of inflection out of a continuum of progress -- which discovery since the invention of the transistor is responsible for the processor in your computer?
You judge beyond your ken, and far above your station. I hope that you are ashamed of your comment, but console myself that it will likely receive all the attention that it deserves.
There are a couple fundamental issues with capitalism that are failing to be addressed here: monopolies, and natural monopolies.
Capitalism really is less about competition and more about accumulation of capital. The competitive behavior is the goal, but it comes with the built-in problem of monopolies. You can't allow people to 'win' this particular game. Taken to an extreme, you might end up with one company that simply owned everything.
Capitalism in this sense is kind of a bait-and-switch. We're sold on the idea of an efficient competitive marketplace, but end up with monopolies and rent-seeking.
The problem of natural monopolies is even worse. Your ability to start a competing business is almost entirely a function of how much initial capital it takes to enter said market. It's far easier to start a restaurant or web company than to start a company that lays undersea fiber optic cable. This is why people talk about 'barriers to entry' as a bad thing: they reduce the efficiency of the market. Further, there are some services where competition would have negative utility -- no one really needs multiple companies laying water, power, or sewage lines to their home.
The answer to both of these problems is government. The government's purpose is to prevent or eliminate these market failures.
With natural monopolies, there is no real purpose behind allowing them to make a profit. It's a form of taxation, and can justly be called a theft from the public. These markets are the natural purview of government.
We have a slightly larger toolbox for dealing with large companies. We can break them up entirely, levy progressive business taxes, or subsidize potential competitors.
We need to start divorcing the idea of competition from the idea of capitalism: they're not synonymous. Yes, I am anti-capitalist -- but very pro-competition. Which side are you on?
'Nice' compared to Amarok, Banshee, etc? Or just nice in that there aren't better alternatives?
Last I checked, iTunes was a contender for the best media library available for Windows. Personally I have always found it to be rather lacking, with a small feature list and limited configuration options. I understand that might actually be a feature in itself for a majority of users. In any case, it's been some time since I've used it.
PHP's original problem was that generating HTML is actually not all that hard. You didn't need all of those fancy real-language features; that would just create a barrier to entry!
"Well, apparently it's a little harder than we thought, so we'll add some things to the language and then it will be okay!"
The recent phenomenon of using Javascript on the server is the exact same pattern.
Re:You mean like your bullshit test on hosts files
on
Perl Turns 25
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· Score: 1
Hi, APK. How's the life?
I have been working pretty hard on other projects; I haven't had time to set up my new computer let alone the tests we discussed. Really, it's quite depressing.
Your insistence that "the IP stack had to do some work first" is a complete departure from reality. A browser request starts in the browser, and may not even reach the DNS layer -- for instance, if you're requesting a local file (file://), your browser is not going to do a DNS request.
If you're the kind of guy who is going to completely ignore the factual when it suits him, then I'm probably not going to make these benchmark numbers a real priority.
And honestly, if you keep trolling my posts on here, writing a plugin to automatically hide your posts would be at least as much fun to write as doing these benchmarks would be. The next step would be to run a script to automatically post links to said plugin after every post of yours. So let's keep the drama to a minimum, shall we?
The problem with your idea is that you are assuming that Linux as it exists today is a bad consumer desktop OS. From a certain perspective this is true.
Linux is not really anything in and of itself. It is a platform for constructing other things. You can use a Linux system to serve web pages, crunch numbers, or throw some eye candy on the screen, but the project itself will always be focused around the ease of use for people who are building such things, and not the end users.
In fact, the versatility of Linux is precisely what conflicts with its ease of use. Leaving aside UI concerns regarding the paradox of choice, it is impossible to optimize of all tasks simultaneously. In a more specific context, much of the graphical stuff that makes your desktop use easier are anti-features in other domains.
I am completely fine with Linux not ever being more than a niche desktop contender. I am even fine with people occasionally turning it into a locked-down playskool user toy every now and then. For people to hold up the toy and say "All Linux should be like this!" is to completely misunderstand the point of both Linux and the toy, and the processes that produced them both.
The only time that being able to understand other languages has come in handy is when the programmer I'm talking to forgets the English word for something.
Learning languages is wonderful in general, but not always useful in practice. English is overwhelmingly the world's most popular second language, the ipso facto lingua franca mundi. If you want to use your second language, go to someplace where there are many native speakers. In places where people from disparate lands mingle, you will invariable converse in English; it's really quite boring.
So this question is, on the surface, pretty retarded. It's obvious that the terms 'phase transition' and 'symmetry' are being used as scientific jargon; your question is based on a completely different set of semantic meanings and so ultimately attempts to answer it will boil down to telling you the definition of the term and how none of your examples have anything to do with the actual subject matter.
On the other hand, you just got a bunch of physics geeks to explain the concepts as applied to a variety of contexts.
Our current generation of batteries has a tendency to explode in the right conditions. What happens when you pack five times the energy density of a lithium cell into your new device, and then something goes wrong?
Wikipedia gives the energy density (Megajoules/kg) of lithium batteries as 1.8, and that of dynamite as 4.6. (Gasoline is ~46) At that point I'd be happy if an electrical discharge were the worst of my concerns.
No. The word you are looking for is "epistemology."
A method for determining truth is not itself a truth. Facts, or beliefs, are the result of this process.
Further, science is an empirical epistemology, as opposed to (e.g.) a rational one. So your appeal to logical principles is actually unfounded.
The above statements should not be construed to imply that rational epistemologies are "wrong." More to point out that the truths produced by each process are not equal. You may have a rational truth that "the sky is blue," and a thought experiment which proves this. You may also have an empirical truth that "the sky is blue", and empirical measurements that suggest that the light emitted is such-and-such a wavelength on average.
Both systems have problems. Rational systems can prove anything, depending on the axioms chosen. This can include things that are not empirically true: the sky is green, the Earth is flat, etc. Empirical systems cannot deliver exact results; nothing is ever entirely "true." Both systems cannot fully describe the universe -- in point of fact, nothing can, since that book would have to contain all information about every part of the universe.
The relative value of each system is mostly not measurable. Most systems make both rational and empirical claims. However, taking empiricism to extremes means not believing in anything but data. The opposite course involves believing anything that you can construct a rational explanation for. Philosophically, these things are equal. I don't presume to inform the reader which may be preferred.
I'd just like to take a minute to point out that you are both arrogant and clueless. You seem to believe that your generation has some sort of richer or better culture, or perhaps a deeper wisdom. Youth is often arrogant and derisive of what they have not experienced. What's your excuse?
You have constructed a bias in thought without input from reality. Your generation was decried by the previous one just the same -- the tradition is at least as old as Socrates. Aside from the general principle that ninety percent of everything is 'crud', your complaint is mostly one of ignorance. You don't seek out counterexamples, or involve yourself with the creative minds of the younger generations. For my part I am rather pleasantly astounded at the number of young people that I meet who have actually read The Brothers Karamazov, although meeting an equal number who have read Finnegan's Wake fails to elicit the same emotions.
Overall, this may be a generation that is unused to theatre -- but expects at least 20 hours of plot from video games. They may have a preference for netspeak -- but they interact with each other on a global scale. They may not write sonnets -- but only because you can't use a 3D printer to make them. They may not share your musical tastes -- and for that they should truly be damned, because everyone knows that good music hasn't been made since whichever formative decade you experienced.
I would label this as a case of projection: you are a small-minded person with limited knowledge outside your own domain, and assume that this is true of everyone else.
And mostly this part. Moody's didn't know what they were rating. Literally had no information about the component parts of the derivative. Are 20% of these loans bad? 80%? Don't know, but someone will buy them if they're rated right, so we'd better rate them just to stay relevant.
It really had nothing to do with homeowners and everything to do with Wall Street. Banks don't just give out cash they're never going to get back, just for the hell of it. It's not like all the homeowners woke up one day and decided to lie about their credit ratings, or that the bank managers' union(??) collectively decided to try for higher sales targets. This was a top-down crisis, a crime of ineptitude and fraud. Wall Street decided it could turn shit into gold, and then did this as much as possible until the first wave of defaults broke.
The triple-A rating was all Wall Street needed in order to not do any research into what they were buying. The rating agencies didn't create the crisis, but they certainly enabled it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, no. The whole point of skepticism is to assign a negative (false) value to anything but proven assertions. You may still be in the realm of empiricism, but you are not being skeptical.
When I write software for other people, I explicitly retain the rights to anything I write, unless the client pays extra.
As a contractor there's no reason to do work-for-hire. Legally it will not be considered such unless it [a] falls into a protected category, and [b] an agreement is signed saying that the work is "for hire".
And yes, the reason that I retain rights is so that I can open-source anything I please. We can have a separate discussion about the copyrights, but your words had better be writ large on a stack of banknotes.
Between open source products, SaaS, and the Internet in general, the idea of selling copies of software seems to be dying an unlamented death.
Actually in the context of epistemology, it means exactly what I said it means. The wikipedia article you refer to conflates rationalism and empiricism, I refer you to my previous post for an explanation of the differences.
You're also ignoring centuries of christian apologists and philosophers, scores of whom were better logicians than either of us: I may single out Descartes and Kant. Faith is an axiom, not necessarily an irrationality. The axioms of Christianity and those of mathematics may differ, but their applicability to the real world is problematic for the exact same reason.
No, it's not about facts.
It's about epistemologies: How you arrive at those facts. Most scientists follow an empirical empistemology. The rest of the world usually follows a more rational one, or historical (i.e. something is true because a book says so).
A rational epistemology holds that anything that can be proved logically is true. An empiricist holds that anything that can be demonstrated experimentally is true. Some statements can be true in either paradigm, but it can make a big difference as to how you arrive at these conclusions.
And it's not that either is necessarily invalid, or even that they're entirely separable. You have tradeoffs: with rationality, you can prove things that aren't necessarily 'true' in the real world. With empiricism, your truths are only valid to the limits of measurement: there's very little in the way of absolute truth to be had.
The clashes between science and the church were epistemological. Only one of these things can be the ultimate test of knowledge. So far the empiricists are winning if you count the fruits of their works, and the rationalists are winning by sheer numbers.
Adam, that really doesn't cut it as an excuse. Yes, it's a new installer, and this fact is well advertised. But if you have so little faith in the installer that you're cautioning people not to upgrade to F18, why the hell would you even release it?
This is becoming too common in the Linux world, with distros being released with half-implemented pet projects of its developers (Unity, PulseAudio, Fedora's new installer) under the guise of a final release. Rough rough rough, and not something people coming from say OS X or even Windows 7 would expect. Yes it's free, but it's also very off-putting and tends to reinforce the idea that you get what you pay for.
First, you're four years late on the PulseAudio rant, Unity works pretty well even if you don't like it, and you definitely didn't let the existence of Windows 8 get in the way of a good rant.
Nevertheless, this isn't exactly a new thing in the software world. It would be easier to find a project that avoided the practice, and in regards to shipping an operating system? Well, you just let me know when you manage to ship a bug free OS.
Red Hat isn't even the worst offender here. I've singled out Win8 already, but (and I apologize for mentioning it to a non-technical audience) Ruby has managed to release a new version of the language with "experimental features". The justification I got was something along the lines of "It's okay because none of the major libraries will rely on them."
However, I would urge everyone to be charitable. Change is good, even if it's rarely a smooth process. To the programmers reading this: let he who has never shipped a bug (or broken an API) throw the first stone. To the non-programmers: "We apologize for the inconvenience."
The State of Alaska's Permanent Fund Dividend, to which you are no doubt referring, pays between $1000 and $2000 dollars per annum to all natural persons who have [a] resided in the state for at least one year, and [b] applied for it. It is *not* meant to be an income guarantee. The point of the Permanent Fund was that future generations will be deprived of the value of that oil, so it would be nice if someone besides the ludicrously rich oil companies had something to show for it afterwards.
I have no idea whether you're arguing for or against a minimum income, but regardless, the Alaska PFD does not in any meaningful sense qualify.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
It is not enough to have the ability to change the world. It is a rare combination of chance and circumstance, far more than any particular genius. Archimedes could not have formulated the questions that led to quantum electrodynamics. Nor is it fair to select a particular point of inflection out of a continuum of progress -- which discovery since the invention of the transistor is responsible for the processor in your computer?
You judge beyond your ken, and far above your station. I hope that you are ashamed of your comment, but console myself that it will likely receive all the attention that it deserves.
Why are you surprised?
There are a couple fundamental issues with capitalism that are failing to be addressed here: monopolies, and natural monopolies.
Capitalism really is less about competition and more about accumulation of capital. The competitive behavior is the goal, but it comes with the built-in problem of monopolies. You can't allow people to 'win' this particular game. Taken to an extreme, you might end up with one company that simply owned everything.
Capitalism in this sense is kind of a bait-and-switch. We're sold on the idea of an efficient competitive marketplace, but end up with monopolies and rent-seeking.
The problem of natural monopolies is even worse. Your ability to start a competing business is almost entirely a function of how much initial capital it takes to enter said market. It's far easier to start a restaurant or web company than to start a company that lays undersea fiber optic cable. This is why people talk about 'barriers to entry' as a bad thing: they reduce the efficiency of the market. Further, there are some services where competition would have negative utility -- no one really needs multiple companies laying water, power, or sewage lines to their home.
The answer to both of these problems is government. The government's purpose is to prevent or eliminate these market failures.
With natural monopolies, there is no real purpose behind allowing them to make a profit. It's a form of taxation, and can justly be called a theft from the public. These markets are the natural purview of government.
We have a slightly larger toolbox for dealing with large companies. We can break them up entirely, levy progressive business taxes, or subsidize potential competitors.
We need to start divorcing the idea of competition from the idea of capitalism: they're not synonymous. Yes, I am anti-capitalist -- but very pro-competition. Which side are you on?
Your analogy is simple and expressive. Unfortunately it expresses an unfathomable morass of ignorance.
It seems "tyranny" has joined "big government" as being synonymous for "any government I don't like."
Happens often enough in those banana republics where it's hot as blood outside and you're not drinking the beer for its taste anyway.
You keep repeating this same point about "the new IE6".
I think that the proofs for that have not been established.
However, if you are not being paid to repeat that statement, then I would suggest that you should consider your point made.
'Nice' compared to Amarok, Banshee, etc? Or just nice in that there aren't better alternatives?
Last I checked, iTunes was a contender for the best media library available for Windows. Personally I have always found it to be rather lacking, with a small feature list and limited configuration options. I understand that might actually be a feature in itself for a majority of users. In any case, it's been some time since I've used it.
I'm beginning to think that the causative factor behind this misquotation is a rather peculiar mental illness.
It's not, "Do no evil."
It's "Don't be evil."
The implications of this distinction are left as an exercise to the reader.
You're on my foe list for good reason. You're basically a dick as far as I can tell, and wrong more often than you are right.
But here you are so entirely right that I am compelled to post a "me, too!" comment.
This guy should have known better. Nuff said.
PHP's original problem was that generating HTML is actually not all that hard. You didn't need all of those fancy real-language features; that would just create a barrier to entry!
"Well, apparently it's a little harder than we thought, so we'll add some things to the language and then it will be okay!"
The recent phenomenon of using Javascript on the server is the exact same pattern.
Hi, APK. How's the life?
I have been working pretty hard on other projects; I haven't had time to set up my new computer let alone the tests we discussed. Really, it's quite depressing.
Your insistence that "the IP stack had to do some work first" is a complete departure from reality. A browser request starts in the browser, and may not even reach the DNS layer -- for instance, if you're requesting a local file (file://), your browser is not going to do a DNS request.
If you're the kind of guy who is going to completely ignore the factual when it suits him, then I'm probably not going to make these benchmark numbers a real priority.
And honestly, if you keep trolling my posts on here, writing a plugin to automatically hide your posts would be at least as much fun to write as doing these benchmarks would be. The next step would be to run a script to automatically post links to said plugin after every post of yours. So let's keep the drama to a minimum, shall we?
The problem with your idea is that you are assuming that Linux as it exists today is a bad consumer desktop OS. From a certain perspective this is true.
Linux is not really anything in and of itself. It is a platform for constructing other things. You can use a Linux system to serve web pages, crunch numbers, or throw some eye candy on the screen, but the project itself will always be focused around the ease of use for people who are building such things, and not the end users.
In fact, the versatility of Linux is precisely what conflicts with its ease of use. Leaving aside UI concerns regarding the paradox of choice, it is impossible to optimize of all tasks simultaneously. In a more specific context, much of the graphical stuff that makes your desktop use easier are anti-features in other domains.
I am completely fine with Linux not ever being more than a niche desktop contender. I am even fine with people occasionally turning it into a locked-down playskool user toy every now and then. For people to hold up the toy and say "All Linux should be like this!" is to completely misunderstand the point of both Linux and the toy, and the processes that produced them both.
Yo soy el mismo.
The only time that being able to understand other languages has come in handy is when the programmer I'm talking to forgets the English word for something.
English is built into programming languages, with a few exceptions.
Learning languages is wonderful in general, but not always useful in practice. English is overwhelmingly the world's most popular second language, the ipso facto lingua franca mundi. If you want to use your second language, go to someplace where there are many native speakers. In places where people from disparate lands mingle, you will invariable converse in English; it's really quite boring.
I ask this question in ignorance: what does the much-vaunted CPAN contain within it that has unit tests?
It is my current belief that any code lacking some sort of proof of correctness is valueless. In many cases it is worse than having no code at all.
I have strong feelings concerning the promotion of untested or untestable code, but will reserve them until I know whether they're warranted.
So this question is, on the surface, pretty retarded. It's obvious that the terms 'phase transition' and 'symmetry' are being used as scientific jargon; your question is based on a completely different set of semantic meanings and so ultimately attempts to answer it will boil down to telling you the definition of the term and how none of your examples have anything to do with the actual subject matter.
On the other hand, you just got a bunch of physics geeks to explain the concepts as applied to a variety of contexts.
Mod parent +5 Troll.
Our current generation of batteries has a tendency to explode in the right conditions. What happens when you pack five times the energy density of a lithium cell into your new device, and then something goes wrong?
Wikipedia gives the energy density (Megajoules/kg) of lithium batteries as 1.8, and that of dynamite as 4.6. (Gasoline is ~46) At that point I'd be happy if an electrical discharge were the worst of my concerns.
No. The word you are looking for is "epistemology."
A method for determining truth is not itself a truth. Facts, or beliefs, are the result of this process.
Further, science is an empirical epistemology, as opposed to (e.g.) a rational one. So your appeal to logical principles is actually unfounded.
The above statements should not be construed to imply that rational epistemologies are "wrong." More to point out that the truths produced by each process are not equal. You may have a rational truth that "the sky is blue," and a thought experiment which proves this. You may also have an empirical truth that "the sky is blue", and empirical measurements that suggest that the light emitted is such-and-such a wavelength on average.
Both systems have problems. Rational systems can prove anything, depending on the axioms chosen. This can include things that are not empirically true: the sky is green, the Earth is flat, etc. Empirical systems cannot deliver exact results; nothing is ever entirely "true." Both systems cannot fully describe the universe -- in point of fact, nothing can, since that book would have to contain all information about every part of the universe.
The relative value of each system is mostly not measurable. Most systems make both rational and empirical claims. However, taking empiricism to extremes means not believing in anything but data. The opposite course involves believing anything that you can construct a rational explanation for. Philosophically, these things are equal. I don't presume to inform the reader which may be preferred.
O hai!
I'd just like to take a minute to point out that you are both arrogant and clueless. You seem to believe that your generation has some sort of richer or better culture, or perhaps a deeper wisdom. Youth is often arrogant and derisive of what they have not experienced. What's your excuse?
You have constructed a bias in thought without input from reality. Your generation was decried by the previous one just the same -- the tradition is at least as old as Socrates. Aside from the general principle that ninety percent of everything is 'crud', your complaint is mostly one of ignorance. You don't seek out counterexamples, or involve yourself with the creative minds of the younger generations. For my part I am rather pleasantly astounded at the number of young people that I meet who have actually read The Brothers Karamazov, although meeting an equal number who have read Finnegan's Wake fails to elicit the same emotions.
Overall, this may be a generation that is unused to theatre -- but expects at least 20 hours of plot from video games. They may have a preference for netspeak -- but they interact with each other on a global scale. They may not write sonnets -- but only because you can't use a 3D printer to make them. They may not share your musical tastes -- and for that they should truly be damned, because everyone knows that good music hasn't been made since whichever formative decade you experienced.
I would label this as a case of projection: you are a small-minded person with limited knowledge outside your own domain, and assume that this is true of everyone else.
And mostly this part. Moody's didn't know what they were rating. Literally had no information about the component parts of the derivative. Are 20% of these loans bad? 80%? Don't know, but someone will buy them if they're rated right, so we'd better rate them just to stay relevant.
It really had nothing to do with homeowners and everything to do with Wall Street. Banks don't just give out cash they're never going to get back, just for the hell of it. It's not like all the homeowners woke up one day and decided to lie about their credit ratings, or that the bank managers' union(??) collectively decided to try for higher sales targets. This was a top-down crisis, a crime of ineptitude and fraud. Wall Street decided it could turn shit into gold, and then did this as much as possible until the first wave of defaults broke.
The triple-A rating was all Wall Street needed in order to not do any research into what they were buying. The rating agencies didn't create the crisis, but they certainly enabled it.
Markets are not a solution to everything. Read about natural monopolies. Like, before you read the rest of this post, even.
Rephrased, you're saying that the government can delegate authority to charge a tax for something to a private profit-driven entity.
Capitalism is what we call it when many entities compete to provide services. The competition part is what is good about that; it forces efficiency.
You're advocating Fascism.