white applicants with similar financial characteristics and credit histories
So they said, "If you're going to make shitty loans to white people, you have to make shitty loans to black people, too." It sounds like they were making shitty loans already.
I know a lot of the more conservative folks around here don't believe racism is real, but here's my opinion: Making bad loans to poor people is stupid, but making bad loans to poor white people and not to poor black people is stupid and racist.
In any case, you're just proving my point even more. Do you really think that ACORN suing banks to force them to be equal-opportunity idiots is the sole cause of the crisis? According to this, this, and this, less than a quarter of the subprime loans were made by institutions that were covered by the CRA. Also, there's no data to suggest that CRA subprime loans have a higher default rate than the other 80% of subprime loans. And if ACORN sued Wells Fargo and CitiBank, how come Wells Fargo didn't go under because of all the bad loans it was forced to make in the last few years?
There's two sides to every story, and usually both sides are wrong. Certainly the government was stupid to encourage banks to make bad loans and are not without culpability here, but the banks were doing it anyway.
The bubble was created by people who forced lenders to lend to people that were previously thought of as bad investments
Maybe I'm inferring something you're not trying to say here, and I'm sorry if I am, but blaming Fannie Mae "forcing" lenders to make bad loans is about as accurate as blaming the Republicans and deregulation. As always, the truth is in between and shares elements of both sides.
The way I understand it, Clinton's changes to the CRA didn't force banks to make bad loans, but allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy mortgages from banks that were previously considered bad. Now, naturally this encouraged banks to make bad loans, which maybe in capitalistic terms is the same as saying they forced them. However, other, private investment banks were buying bad mortgages, too.
I'm sick of this whole attitude of Democrats saying, "All you have to do is look at a selective subset of the facts and its obvious it's the Republicans' fault," and the Republicans saying "Well, the liberal media only shows you one selective subset of the facts. Our selective subset of the facts makes it REALLY obvious that it was the Democrats' fault."
There's plenty of blame to go around: the people who tried to buy houses they couldn't afford, the banks who lent them money, the investors that bought mortgage-based securities, the executives that encouraged buying them, and politicians on both sides who passed laws that encouraged bad lending and deregulation that made it easier to make bad loans.
In retrospect, I think I'm misinterpreting what the parent was saying, so sorry about that, but I'm sick of people trying to say that one group's mistakes can be blamed for this whole thing.
On the other hand, my grandfather died when my mom was 11. I'm sorry my grandmother couldn't get a college education when she was the right age for that (due to depression and war) so that she could get one of those great high-paying jobs available to women in the early 60s. She did the best she could get to raise her two kids (she worked, so did my mom and my aunt), but they still needed welfare to get by.
Geez, Grandma, you mean when you were 20 you didn't prepare for the possibility that your husband would die tragically in a construction accident? Well maybe you should've paid more attention in school when your family could barely eat during the depression, and gone to college during the war, then ended sexism in the 50s so you could get a higher paying job when Grandpa bit it. It's called personal responsibility.
On the other hand, my mom tells people this story all the time as a defense of welfare, but when she lost her job she only applied to jobs she knew she couldn't get so she could keep her unemployment benefits as long as possible.
My point is that it goes both ways. You can't get rid of welfare just because some people abuse it. You'll punish the honest while the dishonest will find another way to game the system. It's just like DRM, I guess:-).
I had a professor assign his Cartoon Guide to Genetics as a required textbook for a biology class for CS majors.
Also, the Cartoon History of the Universe actually taught my wife some history, and she punches me if I leave the TV on the History Channel for more than 2 seconds.
I agree with most of what you're saying, particularly that it's a myth that world leaders are so short-sighted that they would knowingly do things to completely destroy civilization.
What I don't get is how this is a "liberal" idea.
In the wake of 9/11 (and still today), neither liberals nor conservatives publicly considered the true motives of terrorists. It's just, "they hate freedom and they hate us for our wonderful freedom".
In the run-up to the Iraq war, no one (again, at least in the news I saw) pointed out that it would make no sense for Saddam to use WMDs against the US because it would be a sure-fire for him to lose power, which was the one thing he would never want to do.
Both sides are equally guilty of scaring people into thinking that the enemy will happily destroy all civilization.
Circuit City could probably be called a "has-been", but certainly no knockoff. They pioneered the big-box electronics store. Circuit City has been around for a few decades now. Best Buy is rather new;
Granted, I'm merely quoting the Best Buy and Circuit City wikipedia pages, but it sounds like they're about even.
The first Best Buy opened in Minnesota in 1983. Circuit City apparently used to be a series of smaller specialty chains that started getting combined into superstores in the early 1980s. Both grew out of companies that were quite a bit older than that.
It probably depends on where you're from. I'm from Minnesota, the home of Best Buy, and I remember having BBs before CCs.
In any case, I have a preference for Best Buy because they're prices on DVDs were slightly better back when I was purchasing a lot of DVDs. Now I just order online and only go to the store if there's a specific bargain.
Maybe the legalese is throwing me off, but what's the big problem with this? I didn't see anything that says (or implies), "The President can choose to call off elections or defer leaving office in the case of an emergency". It seems like it's asking various government agencies to come up with a plan to continue working smoothly in the case of an emergency.
The examples you quote are good ones (and I won't try to defend Obama's comments), but there are just as many cases where this idea of "anti-elitism" is misused.
It's come to a point where simply being elite is considered elitism. John Kerry was considered out of touch with the common man because he liked wind surfing and went to Yale.
How many times during the last few years have you heard people say something along the lines of "Just because you're a respected (climatologist | biologist | economist | theologian | lawyer | diplomat) doesn't mean you know more than me (global warming | evolution | economics | religion | law | foreign affairs) than I do"?
I don't approve of intellectuals being condescending, but it's just as bad when people dismiss an idea as "elitism" simply because they disagree with it and it came from someone with a PhD.
The whole point is that people try to define the words liberal and conservative to mean friend or enemy (order depending on who you are). The process is pretty simple.
1. I define myself as a liberal because I believe in using tax money to fund social programs, I'm against the war, for gay rights, etc. All positions which you can probably respect, regardless of whether you agree.
2. Change the definition of the word "liberal" in people's minds minds to mean Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.
3. Since I gave myself that label, I can no longer argue that I am not a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking,..., Freak show, because I admitted it myself, right?
In my own mind I do the same with Republicans. I hear "conservative" and I think, "Gun-toting, Bible-thumping, fact-ignoring, etc", when really they probably just believe in lower taxes, a free market and strong national defense, which are things I don't agree with but don't hate you for believing.
Does supplying more bandwidth to the Caribbean mean that the MPAA will have to start trying to prevent Pirates of the Caribbean from being downloaded illegally by pirates in the Caribbean?
Although I agree with the fact that we are getting a lot more noise than 10 years ago, it is not getting any harder to separate out the crap from the good. 10 years ago, there was very little home-produced internet video. The only low-budget movies to make it to the mainstream were the ones good enough to get into theaters. Now, the same is true, except anyone can get their video on the internet. The problem then is easy. If I want good movies, I look to the same places I looked before: independent theaters, reviews, asking my friends what they saw, etc.
The idea that we're being "inundated with crappy movies that guys with no experience or budget made in their mom's basements" is not true, if you ask me, unless you go to youtube or moviesimadeinmymomsbasement.com. And please don't start with the argument that movies are worse today than they were in yesteryear. Styles are different, yes, but fewer movies are getting made with much higher relative production values. For every classic movie you use as an example there are probably a few dozen movies made in that same time period that are so bad nobody remembers them or even bothers to preserve.
If the internet truly heralds a new age of independent filmmaking (and I'm with you that it probably won't) there will be a filter for people like you who don't want to waste their time on crap. There will be plenty of people who sit and watch these things all day and spread the word to the rest of us how good they are.
What I'm saying is, just because almost everything is crap doesn't mean good stuff isn't out there or that it's going away. It's not even really getting hard to find. In fact, it's in the same place it always was.
Also, I believe that due to some crazy German tax laws, Germans who make movies with German money can actually get a huge tax writeoff if the movie loses money. Hence, his movies can hugely bomb and people will still invest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwe_boll#Financing
Simple induction would lead us to conclude this. Now wait, certainly proving it's true for n=1 is trivial, but I don't how we can say that if there are n intelligent species in the galaxy then there must be n+1 for all n>1.
Disclaimer: This is a lame math joke, not a critique of your argument.
Well, obviously not. My point was that the idea of getting permission to do something that was previously illegal in the interest of enforcement exists. The irony is that MediaSentry (presumably) doesn't have that. It appears that, once again, what I thought was a slyly worded joke turned out to make me look stupid instead.
A little configuration work, and boom! Not only do I get a simple, easy to install package managed for me, I automatically get updates! Try THAT with most Windows apps!
It's. Just. Not. A. Problem. What you call "a little configuration work", most people call "hours and hours of reading message boards, trying and failing to edit the config file in just the right way", I call it "wasting a Saturday".
I understand that most people on Slashdot are both knowledgeable and patient when it comes to Linux, and I also understand that the OP doesn't fully understand a lot of these distinctions, but the spirit of what he's saying is still true. Here's my typically linux experience:
apt-get install package
Could not find package
What's the command to see the available packages?
10 minutes later:
apt-get install package-0.23.819.01
package-0.23.819.01 depends on pacakgeAv2 and packageBv2.
OK, install those.
sorry, packageAv2 does not run unless you have packageBv1.
Now I'm stuck, now back to the message boards. Someone says, "Here's the fix, it's easy". Four hours later I've got my program installed and working, but two other things that worked before are now broken.
I try to go to Linux every couple years, but always with the same result: I spend hours and hours making configuration tweaks so I get it doing 85% of the things I could do on Windows in five minutes.
Admittedly, things have gotten better. Synaptic makes it much easier to install one package at a time. The last time I used it to update my Mythbuntu box, I only needed to spend about an hour fixing all the things that broke.
Maybe the answer to this is that Windows is the OS for me, but my understanding is that most of us would like it if Linux became popular. However, I am fairly intelligent (note I didn't say knowledgeable) and I can't figure Linux out. If the OP is trying to say that Linux needs to be a lot easier before the masses can use it, then he's absolutely right.
Really, I have yet to see any evolution be observed in my can of peanut butter.
I'm not sure whether this is a troll, but I'll reply anyway. Evolution can be observed, and not just indirectly. If you grow E. Coli or other bacteria in a petri dish you can watch it change over many generations as you expose it to various stresses (drug resistance, excessive heat, oxygen deprivation, what have you).
Even in nature you see this happening. Why do you think Tuberculosis is making such a big comeback? It's because it has changed in recent years to be more drug resistent. This is the core idea of evolution.
Another thing I'm not sure that people understand (on both sides of the debate) is that evolution is not simply a bunch of random mutations. There are many mechanisms that go into it besides just single nucleotide mutations (such as huge insertions/deletions of sequences, invasive chunks of DNA from viruses or other unknown sources, inversions of sequence on the strand). "Random" is a very loaded word here, and it doesn't tell the whole picture, even if it is technically correct (I don't whether it is).
Slashdot Mirror
white applicants with similar financial characteristics and credit histories
So they said, "If you're going to make shitty loans to white people, you have to make shitty loans to black people, too." It sounds like they were making shitty loans already.
I know a lot of the more conservative folks around here don't believe racism is real, but here's my opinion: Making bad loans to poor people is stupid, but making bad loans to poor white people and not to poor black people is stupid and racist.
In any case, you're just proving my point even more. Do you really think that ACORN suing banks to force them to be equal-opportunity idiots is the sole cause of the crisis? According to this, this, and this, less than a quarter of the subprime loans were made by institutions that were covered by the CRA. Also, there's no data to suggest that CRA subprime loans have a higher default rate than the other 80% of subprime loans. And if ACORN sued Wells Fargo and CitiBank, how come Wells Fargo didn't go under because of all the bad loans it was forced to make in the last few years?
There's two sides to every story, and usually both sides are wrong. Certainly the government was stupid to encourage banks to make bad loans and are not without culpability here, but the banks were doing it anyway.
The bubble was created by people who forced lenders to lend to people that were previously thought of as bad investments
Maybe I'm inferring something you're not trying to say here, and I'm sorry if I am, but blaming Fannie Mae "forcing" lenders to make bad loans is about as accurate as blaming the Republicans and deregulation. As always, the truth is in between and shares elements of both sides.
The way I understand it, Clinton's changes to the CRA didn't force banks to make bad loans, but allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy mortgages from banks that were previously considered bad. Now, naturally this encouraged banks to make bad loans, which maybe in capitalistic terms is the same as saying they forced them. However, other, private investment banks were buying bad mortgages, too.
I'm sick of this whole attitude of Democrats saying, "All you have to do is look at a selective subset of the facts and its obvious it's the Republicans' fault," and the Republicans saying "Well, the liberal media only shows you one selective subset of the facts. Our selective subset of the facts makes it REALLY obvious that it was the Democrats' fault."
There's plenty of blame to go around: the people who tried to buy houses they couldn't afford, the banks who lent them money, the investors that bought mortgage-based securities, the executives that encouraged buying them, and politicians on both sides who passed laws that encouraged bad lending and deregulation that made it easier to make bad loans.
In retrospect, I think I'm misinterpreting what the parent was saying, so sorry about that, but I'm sick of people trying to say that one group's mistakes can be blamed for this whole thing.
On the other hand, my grandfather died when my mom was 11. I'm sorry my grandmother couldn't get a college education when she was the right age for that (due to depression and war) so that she could get one of those great high-paying jobs available to women in the early 60s. She did the best she could get to raise her two kids (she worked, so did my mom and my aunt), but they still needed welfare to get by.
Geez, Grandma, you mean when you were 20 you didn't prepare for the possibility that your husband would die tragically in a construction accident? Well maybe you should've paid more attention in school when your family could barely eat during the depression, and gone to college during the war, then ended sexism in the 50s so you could get a higher paying job when Grandpa bit it. It's called personal responsibility.
On the other hand, my mom tells people this story all the time as a defense of welfare, but when she lost her job she only applied to jobs she knew she couldn't get so she could keep her unemployment benefits as long as possible.
My point is that it goes both ways. You can't get rid of welfare just because some people abuse it. You'll punish the honest while the dishonest will find another way to game the system. It's just like DRM, I guess :-).
Also, the Cartoon History of the Universe actually taught my wife some history, and she punches me if I leave the TV on the History Channel for more than 2 seconds.
Ghost World
No. It's supposed to make you feel watched.
Combining those thoughts, it's supposed to make us feel like they're being watched as well, which in theory should make us feel safer.
It's OK if they watch us as long as it helps catch them, right? Who are they again?
What I don't get is how this is a "liberal" idea.
In the wake of 9/11 (and still today), neither liberals nor conservatives publicly considered the true motives of terrorists. It's just, "they hate freedom and they hate us for our wonderful freedom".
In the run-up to the Iraq war, no one (again, at least in the news I saw) pointed out that it would make no sense for Saddam to use WMDs against the US because it would be a sure-fire for him to lose power, which was the one thing he would never want to do.
Both sides are equally guilty of scaring people into thinking that the enemy will happily destroy all civilization.
This little gizmo saved Earth's economy and prevented us from becoming a 3rd-galaxy world.
Yet another example of sci-fi authors being ahead of actual scientists, which is always amusing.
Knockoff? You're kidding, right?
Circuit City could probably be called a "has-been", but certainly no knockoff. They pioneered the big-box electronics store. Circuit City has been around for a few decades now. Best Buy is rather new;
Granted, I'm merely quoting the Best Buy and Circuit City wikipedia pages, but it sounds like they're about even. The first Best Buy opened in Minnesota in 1983. Circuit City apparently used to be a series of smaller specialty chains that started getting combined into superstores in the early 1980s. Both grew out of companies that were quite a bit older than that.
It probably depends on where you're from. I'm from Minnesota, the home of Best Buy, and I remember having BBs before CCs.
In any case, I have a preference for Best Buy because they're prices on DVDs were slightly better back when I was purchasing a lot of DVDs. Now I just order online and only go to the store if there's a specific bargain.
Mr. Obama, how do you feel about the current economic crisis?
Let me be clear, our current crisis is a result of the failed policies of the Bush administration.
Mr. McCain, what is your take on the energy crisis?
My friends, we need to drill more and use nuclear energy. Easy.
Maybe the legalese is throwing me off, but what's the big problem with this? I didn't see anything that says (or implies), "The President can choose to call off elections or defer leaving office in the case of an emergency". It seems like it's asking various government agencies to come up with a plan to continue working smoothly in the case of an emergency.
I know! I just want to Give her a hug!.
It's come to a point where simply being elite is considered elitism. John Kerry was considered out of touch with the common man because he liked wind surfing and went to Yale.
How many times during the last few years have you heard people say something along the lines of "Just because you're a respected (climatologist | biologist | economist | theologian | lawyer | diplomat) doesn't mean you know more than me (global warming | evolution | economics | religion | law | foreign affairs) than I do"?
I don't approve of intellectuals being condescending, but it's just as bad when people dismiss an idea as "elitism" simply because they disagree with it and it came from someone with a PhD.
1. I define myself as a liberal because I believe in using tax money to fund social programs, I'm against the war, for gay rights, etc. All positions which you can probably respect, regardless of whether you agree. ..., Freak show, because I admitted it myself, right?
2. Change the definition of the word "liberal" in people's minds minds to mean Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.
3. Since I gave myself that label, I can no longer argue that I am not a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking,
In my own mind I do the same with Republicans. I hear "conservative" and I think, "Gun-toting, Bible-thumping, fact-ignoring, etc", when really they probably just believe in lower taxes, a free market and strong national defense, which are things I don't agree with but don't hate you for believing.
Does supplying more bandwidth to the Caribbean mean that the MPAA will have to start trying to prevent Pirates of the Caribbean from being downloaded illegally by pirates in the Caribbean?
Press: What's your plan to make health care affordable for all Americans?
Candidate Puppy (chews on tennis ball, chases tail): Woof!
Voters: Awwwwww!
The idea that we're being "inundated with crappy movies that guys with no experience or budget made in their mom's basements" is not true, if you ask me, unless you go to youtube or moviesimadeinmymomsbasement.com. And please don't start with the argument that movies are worse today than they were in yesteryear. Styles are different, yes, but fewer movies are getting made with much higher relative production values. For every classic movie you use as an example there are probably a few dozen movies made in that same time period that are so bad nobody remembers them or even bothers to preserve.
If the internet truly heralds a new age of independent filmmaking (and I'm with you that it probably won't) there will be a filter for people like you who don't want to waste their time on crap. There will be plenty of people who sit and watch these things all day and spread the word to the rest of us how good they are.
What I'm saying is, just because almost everything is crap doesn't mean good stuff isn't out there or that it's going away. It's not even really getting hard to find. In fact, it's in the same place it always was.
Also, I believe that due to some crazy German tax laws, Germans who make movies with German money can actually get a huge tax writeoff if the movie loses money. Hence, his movies can hugely bomb and people will still invest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwe_boll#Financing
Disclaimer: This is a lame math joke, not a critique of your argument.
Well, obviously not. My point was that the idea of getting permission to do something that was previously illegal in the interest of enforcement exists. The irony is that MediaSentry (presumably) doesn't have that. It appears that, once again, what I thought was a slyly worded joke turned out to make me look stupid instead.
I just assume that there is a paralell universe out there somewhere where I have all the same data but my hard drive didn't crash.
I understand that most people on Slashdot are both knowledgeable and patient when it comes to Linux, and I also understand that the OP doesn't fully understand a lot of these distinctions, but the spirit of what he's saying is still true. Here's my typically linux experience:
apt-get install package
Could not find package
What's the command to see the available packages?
10 minutes later:
apt-get install package-0.23.819.01
package-0.23.819.01 depends on pacakgeAv2 and packageBv2.
OK, install those.
sorry, packageAv2 does not run unless you have packageBv1.
Now I'm stuck, now back to the message boards. Someone says, "Here's the fix, it's easy". Four hours later I've got my program installed and working, but two other things that worked before are now broken.
I try to go to Linux every couple years, but always with the same result: I spend hours and hours making configuration tweaks so I get it doing 85% of the things I could do on Windows in five minutes.
Admittedly, things have gotten better. Synaptic makes it much easier to install one package at a time. The last time I used it to update my Mythbuntu box, I only needed to spend about an hour fixing all the things that broke.
Maybe the answer to this is that Windows is the OS for me, but my understanding is that most of us would like it if Linux became popular. However, I am fairly intelligent (note I didn't say knowledgeable) and I can't figure Linux out. If the OP is trying to say that Linux needs to be a lot easier before the masses can use it, then he's absolutely right.
I'm not sure whether this is a troll, but I'll reply anyway. Evolution can be observed, and not just indirectly. If you grow E. Coli or other bacteria in a petri dish you can watch it change over many generations as you expose it to various stresses (drug resistance, excessive heat, oxygen deprivation, what have you).
Even in nature you see this happening. Why do you think Tuberculosis is making such a big comeback? It's because it has changed in recent years to be more drug resistent. This is the core idea of evolution.
Another thing I'm not sure that people understand (on both sides of the debate) is that evolution is not simply a bunch of random mutations. There are many mechanisms that go into it besides just single nucleotide mutations (such as huge insertions/deletions of sequences, invasive chunks of DNA from viruses or other unknown sources, inversions of sequence on the strand). "Random" is a very loaded word here, and it doesn't tell the whole picture, even if it is technically correct (I don't whether it is).