The emergence of the laser is certainly going to make the long standing Democratic argument against missile defense suddenly seem pretty silly. Missile defense any more has gone from intercepting everything from ballistic missiles to shells in flight. Question to either candidate is, whose going to fund and field laser research at the current breakneck Bush pace? Will McCain have the patience for this technology or will he call it a taxpayer boondoggle and cut it? Will Obama remain starry eyed about diplomacy or will he retain a pragmatic strategic edge? Which candidate, too, will have the honesty to admit that the USA's own strategic nuclear delivery systems will need to be upgraded when its own defenses make it obsolete?
You got fighter aircraft that can cruise at Mach 2 and still are stealthy, a new kind of submarine, a new kind of aircraft carrier, rail gun battleships are suddenly on the table and lasers blasting all over the place. If the USA can recover from some of its fiscal problems and keep up the pace of military research, it should be well in charge of its destiny for the next 50-100 years.
. Official numbers understate unemployment and inflation. [mindfully.org]
Inner city people genuinely don't want to to work. That's the deal. They just don't. They are lazy and they'd rather sit around and get stoned or drunk and watch TV and do nothing.
As far as business friendly goes, I think we need to deregulate lending even more, not less.
Ironically, no one on the left will say a word. The ACLU will be silent. The media will not cover it. For once, Bush will not be to blame
Of course they will say a word. It's what they want. They view all of that as progress. The left wing, at its core, despite all of its rhetoric about classware, is really more about social stability than it is about social wealth. They ultimately don't care if society actually gets wealthier, so long as it is more orderly.
I'm a right wing Republican whose endorsing John McCain but I am appalled at the way you liberals are once destroying yourselves and your candidate with your withering self doubt. We have on the right have a joke, that is, only Democrats could be so smart as to figure out a way to blow election after election and here you go again.
Can you please have some hope?
What Obama did with his web site was to basically rewrite it from the mishmash that it was into something more coherent. There is nothing substantively different about this restructuring. Obama has always been in favor of strong IP legislation, but, so what of it?
Do you really think that a man who spent his formative years arguing in favor of some form of socialism will suddenly turn his back on that?
Do you really believe that a man who has worked his entire life organizing his own liberal constituency into an election machine is suddenly going to come out looking like Reagan?
I mean, seriously, don't you think Michelle would kick his rear if he even thought of selling out?
I mean come on liberals. You are getting a guy whose is your best standard bearer for your commy liberalism in easily 40 years, if not since Roosevelt, and arguably all time. Obama knows well that which he argues and that's why on the right hate the son of a gun so much. If you are liberally inclined, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Obama is a committed idealist with the trappings of greatness about him and in spades. A minor shift in a political position or a rephrasing of a web site is not going to alter the overall thrust of this man's policy or his life.
So, don't lose faith because some staff member re-edited the web site. Obama is going to deliver for you liberals nearly everything that you believe in if he is elected. Obama is the real deal of liberalism. This is your chance. Don't f--- it up.
Now, quit whining, liberals, as you so often do, and get off your asses and vote for this guy. He's the best you'll have in your lifetime and now is the time to go for it.
As a non-American it sounds like an improvement over touching of a ME war and draging the world into the smoking crater that used to be called the US economy. --
The US economy will always be lagging somewhat until we have a final solution to the liberal problem.
It makes a lot of sense to have energy as the universal currency
It is. The dollar plummets as US oil consumption increases and US's share of world oil production falters. Americans drive less and Bush makes noises about opening up for drilling, puts corn on the market as ethanol, and what happens, but, the dollar slightly recovers and oil prices fall. Energy IS wealth, and conservation is really at best a mechanism to save your wealth for export... but it certainly doesn't create it. To do that, you need to have more energy, not less. If you want the USA to get really rich again, build a load of nuclear power plants and then use the electricity to drive the creation of alternative fuels. Anything else is just making the country poorer.
Except for the fact that you are totally butchering his ACTUAL trade policy,
Do you seriously think that any action restricting imports to the USA from any country will occur without retaliation? That's like saying that you can have a limited nuclear exchange. Obama will go in thinking he can sweet talk the EU or Canada into accepting some sort of a cap on their exports to the USA, and what's going to do is see how little those throngs in Berlin love him once they find out its their jobs on the line.
Obama condemned NAFTA in Ohio, complains about foreign companies taking American jobs, his regrets globalization... I mean, this is a classic dyed in the wool socialist who condemns global capitalism because his constituents are simply ill prepared to cope with it, and he wants to drag the rest of the country down to their level. In doing so, he'll touch off a trade war and drag down the world. Everything he says is a complete and utter contempt for individual freedom and risk taking, and this financial crisis and his response to it proves it.
And the biggest joke is that he says he's going to unite the country? Cut me a break. Let's see how many farmers fall behind him when he tries to bully the midwest into cranking out corn for slave wages, just like Democrats always do. Red states are red because of economics and the blue states can't take it because they paved over their food with walmarts, won't allow any manufacturing because they want to "save the planet", and thus, have to pay more of their money to get stuff because ultimately everyone knows that their currency is worthless. What exactly does Chicago make these days anyway? Cities used to be information hubs and manufacturing hubs... but they got rid of the manufacturing, and the information hub of people is obsolete due to the internet, and so that really doesn't leave much utility for the powerbase of the Democrats to exist anyway. It's not even that they are evil, it is that they are useless. Cities need to -make things-. No smokestacks, no money. It's pretty simple.
Many german cars for example are made right here in the US and shipped back out all over the world.
Most of the foreign car factories in the USA are essentially assembly. It's not like the engines and transmissions are actually built in the USA. Just look at the parts origin list of these supposedly "American made" foreign cars. They only do the final assembly here to save on freight. It's like IKEA, but for cars.
I knew we got off the gold standard but I hadn't realized we switched to coal.
You know, I haven't thought about it that way, but we really have. From my days at the utility I know that all the energies commodities prices track each other pretty closely as people tend to shop by BTU at least in that space. If I have a diverse portfolio of plants, I just pick the best commodity and that tends to drive all the prices up until they reach a sort of a market equilibrium that considers the BTU and the handling involved and the overall people that want it.
Seriously... just ask yourself, if oil goes up, why does coal go up? The answer is, is that there's some sort of "peak" behavior taking place in ALL of the commodities, not just oil.
Your best grades of coal are rarer... like, the most telling thing the German "clean coal plant" is not that its clean coal, but that its burning lignite, rather than anthracite or some other better grade of coal. In Germany, lignite seems to be about all that is left, and its pretty crappy stuff, indeed.
Actually, wages are not crap. We're just frigging greedy. WE're in a field that expects to pay us the same coming out of "Chumb MCSE school" the same rate that a frigging doctor makes coming out of medical school. I guarantee you that, on average, IT workers make more money on average than just about every other position, every field, in every other country on the planet earth. If you want more money, you need to own a business, rather than be an indentured servant for someone elses.
It's where this 'free money' is coming from - guess what, it's coming out of his ass in the form of an extra $5,000 worth of income taxes next April 15th. Mine too. Yours too.
The fact of the matter is that this big bailout is really going to be a tax on the rich to let them sell mortgages to the poor for pennies on a dollar. Ultimately, a lot of these people that are overstretched are going to be able to renegotiate their loans and the banks won't care if they do, because they can always foist a screwed loan onto the feds now.
Guess how many companies offshore to unisys? Tons.
Not that many... the IT sector is hundreds of billions a year and Unisys is barely eking by with a few billion a year in revenues. IT's a tiny, dying company that gets by on government contracts.
But, here's the flipside. If you think George Bush pissed off the world, how do you think Obama will do if he throws 5,000,000 Indian IT workers out of work when he cuts off trade. Do you think they will like him then? Will 2 million Europeans tossed out of work because the USA cuts off imports of German cars like Obama then? What about the record amount of Canadians exporting everything from wood and fuel and water and software to the USA? When Obama cuts off trade, do you think they will like the world again?
Free trade may suck sometimes, if you are a loser, but when protectionism comes along, the entire world loses, and if you think Bush has started some wars, wait till you see the wars that follow when Obama starts a trade war and world wide unemployment hits 20 percent on average and 50 percent in places.
John McCain has been nothing but a cheerleader for the Reaganomics that has caused this debacle. He's been for privatization, deregulation and tax cuts. In fact, there's a video going around on YouTube the last few days where John McCain is giving very energetic (as much as he can be energetic) support for the privatization of Social Security.
Yeah, a bunch of banks have failed and some people are losing their homes that they couldn't afford, but:
a) The commodities sectors are doing well. If you work in farming, oil, coal, iron, copper or gold, then, those sectors are all doing very well. Even the moribund alternate fuels sector is shaping up in spots. Biodiesel maker Nova Biosource Fuels is actually running its Seneca refinery profitably and if it gets some financing, this penny stock is going to absolutely kick ass. b) Now we find out that IT workers are doing well. In fact, it looks that like that Lehman's data center is going to be purchased by Barclay's more or less intact. Not only that, but Intel and Microsoft, both industry leaders, are not only making record revenues, but Intel is actually paying dividends. c) If we turn to the housing situation, we find, shockingly, that more people in the USA actually own their own homes than ever before. In short, despite the banking losses and the bankruptcies, at the end of the day, a bipartisan policy designed to encourage lending to put as many people into homes as possible actually WORKED.
The tell tale sign of a real recession or economic downturn is high unemployment and falling commodities prices. Neither has taken place. Instead, what we have is moderate unemployment and high commodities prices and this suggests that demand is high, rather than low.
Now, I don't doubt that some people are hurting in this economy but those people tend to be concentrated in blue states that have been stupidly run for way too long. Michigan's government has basically made it all but impossible to do business in that state and Ohio is as nearly as incompetent and corrupt, particularly in the manufacturing centers and Democratic bastions of Cleveland, Toledo, Akron and Youngstown. Red states, on the other hand, big producers of food and fuel, are doing rather well.
Bottom line is, this economy isn't falling apart, and never has been. Instead, wealth is shifting from those who make raw materials and products from those who make up financial services around them. WE have lived a lie that said that a bunch of paper is more important than the coal that it represents and it simply isn't true. Bush's economic policies have worked, free trade has worked, and if the market has decided that a program that does something with a car is not as valuable as the steel that makes it well, you are just on the wrong side of reality.
The irony is that Obama's policies are actually going to shift this economic advantage to red states any more. Bush's economic policies, at the essence, have allowed the market to refocus on the basics of materials and manufacturing as the value drivers of the economy. When Obama goes and enacts all sorts of environmental legislation, he's only going create even more scarcity. Suddenly, that old copper mine in Arizona or dying oil well the gulf are going to be even more valuable than it is today, when you can't get permits any more for a new one, and yes, those states that push back more against the Obama administration are those states that are going to have the biggest advantage, economically. They will make more, while the blue states make less, and as a consequence, they will wind up with more money. The future is passing from Chicago where the corn is traded, to the belts where the corn is made, from New York where the cars are traded, to the south where the cars are made.
While the production of naphthalene is rare, I doubt it is unique. They are only looking 700 light years out.
You figure that there's some set mixing, temperature and pressure that coupled with the right raw materials, kicks out different kinds of organic chemicals. Park the right cloud of raw good next to the right kind of star and in the right kind of gravity area, and, it seems reasonable that all sorts of organics might be found eventually all over the universe.
For all we know, our solar system just whipped right through a cloud of stellar cooked organics, and we practically just have life rained down on our little world.
Yeah, because communication is just a distraction in warfare. You think this is about creating a Soviet model army, where the officers basically move mindless units around like chess pieces? Please. We simply don't work that way, and haven't since before WW1.
I worry about it as there's no guarantees that a good tradition now is something that we will always retain. Throughout history, people have had an annoying tendency to throw out something that works in favor of a fruitless fad. So yeah, if the helmet could be used to do something like dial up an airstrike or, get reinforcements, without making any sound, then that's very useful. , but, it could also be like when the USAF decided that guns on fighter jets were obsolete just prior to Viet Nam. I have this vision of Donald Rumsfeld or Lyndon Johnson trying to call up a specific platoon in the field and talk in their helmets on a conference call with the JCS.
I was a sergeant in the army 5 years ago, and when my obligation ran out, nothing they could have offered me was enough to make me stay
Did you feel like offered you everything that they could have before you walked away? Not just money, but different assignments... like, do you felt like they felt your experience was valuable?
Money doesn't wish away the frustration inherent in not being able to pursue an enemy across an arbitrary political boundary that's ignored by every man and beast in the area but the ones wearing US flags and Union Jacks.
Sargeants made Japan surrender in WWII? It wasn't two huge bombs? Did anything have a significant effect on that other than the bombs? I don't think so.
Uh, check your history. Without sergeants, there is no successful invasion of the places close to enough to Japan to fly the bombers from.
Training matters most. Japan actually had managed to muster up a pretty good aircraft force during the battle of the Marianas, but, their pilots were completely untrained, having lost all the vets already, and, so, America's more trained and experienced pilots simply shot them all down... it was called the Great Marianas Turkey shoot... and even at that time the Zero was still in many ways a better airplane.
If we go farther back in time, during the napoleonic era, the British didn't really have a huge advantage over the French and Spanish in technology, but, they just practiced their gunnery over and over and over again so that they were effectively throwing more than twice the rounds in the air than their counterparts.
How about the Iraq war? Do you think that our use of tanks there was not important? Tanks are really expensive, and if we didn't have to use them, it'd sure help.
Our tanks were good, for sure, but the real problem for Iraq was really their lack of training. Americans got to be better soldiers because there is a lot of money invested in training them, and you know who does that, quite, often, sergeants.
There were a lot of ways that the USA could have lost both invasions of Iraq, if training weren't in place. The big advantage of our tanks was that they could engage at longer ranges... a poorly trained unit might have just charged in and get cut to pieces. In this and another a thousand ways training matters...
No matter how many sergeants we have, we will not have enough. The US goes everywhere and potentially fights everyone. The US army will lose if we rely on numbers.
Very true, but training, local initiative and weapons are the biggest force multipliers. Communications is just not as important as more powerful weapons and the force to use them effectively. I would much rather have the platoon with some new sort of rifle that can level a building than I would have them sitting around waiting for an email to come into their helmet to approve taking out a sniper.
Historically (through *all* of human history), technology is the single most effective force multiplier that there is. Sure, there are some battles that have been won by superiour planning and execution, but that usually only happens when one side or the other is really stupid in their tactics. You can't count on that.
Training, training, training matters. Dude, you gotta read your history. The Romans put together a pretty good army that created and held together an empire that in the west lasted for almost 1000 years. They rarely really had the leg up in technology over anyone except for maybe the barbarians to the north. Where the Romans really shined was in training, discipline and organization. They based their army on the centurion, who they made a professional out of, gave land to, and trained him and he was essentially, well, the equivalent of a sergeant.
Actually, it works out. In terms of the federal budget, like, over 80% of the revenue comes from people making over 250k a year. So, to be apolitical, all Obama is really doing tax wise is shifting a bit more onto the rich and a bit less onto the middle class. The downside of this, which, of course neither party will really say, is that the federal government will effectively derive its take revenue from investment income, as you noted, and that's going to have us swinging wildly from surplus to deficit as the stock market girates. The problem, here, again, is in fact that Democrats won't admit that taxes on the rich are too high, whereas Republicans won't admit that taxes on the middle class should not be cut and might actually be too low. Of course, the government should spend less, and balance the budget.. but to do what is needed, cut military spending and cap entitlements won't satisfy any constituency. We can't afford to be buying grandma 1.2M worth of medical care when she is 87, but we really can't afford crap like Future Combat System either. The thing is, once we balance the budget, we can work on that line item of interest on the debt, and pay that down. We're spending the equivalent of the Clinton defense budget on interest. IT's crazy.
Unless there's one time pad data in the helmet, the war might come to a tragic halt for the USA when the enemy fills up our heads with porn.
This wired up army is a dumb idea. It's better to give troops the flexibility to matters into their own hands on the battlefield. If you want to have a better US Army, maybe instead of blowing billions on trying to turn platoons into borg, maybe pay sergeants more and jack up their retention rate. Sergeants are the backbone of any army and always will be more, more so than any communications gizmo.
SGI is a company much weaker than it was when it first released OpenGL and drove it. Microsoft has no use for OpenGL, and so now, we have OpenGL being offered up as free software? This can be spun as having an "open license" as much as we want, but to me it looks more like OpenGL is really without any serious corporate sponsorship.
If they really wanted to bail out the mortgage market, let the borrowers buy back their OWN DEBT FOR PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR!!!! I know I would, in a heart-beat.
Ah, but you can. That's what "making debt liquid means".
I mean, check this out. If you absolutely don't pay your credit cards, some will sue you, they call you a lot, send you off to collections, and just torment you, but... they have no real collateral so they can't do jack.
Eventually after, you sit on it for like a year, they will come around and give you an offer to close the account and it's gonna be cheap.
In the case of mortgages, if you wanted to be a bit crazy, once this bill passes, you could just blow off your payments for two months and demand a lower rate. You should actually be able to get it because this bailout package assumes that houses are basically worthless but in any case if you are flipped on your mortgage, you are now holding ALL of the cards and the bank has very few. What are they going to do, take a worthless house? Reposess a TV? Of course not.
After this legislation passes, anyone who owes a debt of any kind, who tries to pay all of it, is just a fool. The taxpayer is on the hook for all of it anyway, and the banks can then just unload anyone that doesn't pay it back.
I'm telling you, it's the biggest transferrance of wealth from rich to poor - EVER. Now, I'm not one that wants to punish the rich with higher tax rates.. I like the rich. I want to be one myself. But, by the same token, I see no reason to have the federal government trying to stop the rich from being stupid with their money. If they want to do something stupid with their money, its their right... we should want to be ahead in line when they do it, and there's nothing wrong with it. That's all fair and good.
You missed the point. You can never have anything to invest if you don't subscribe to deferred gratification
I think we are talking about the same thing, but down on different paths. I said that investment is work, and you say that you can't invest if you don't have deferred gratification, and I believe both can be simultaneously true.
I would say, thought, that the ultimate success in Warren's case too, was that he was able to get a good spot to put the machine to begin with. Having the broken machine and fixing it were means to an end... what he saws and continues to see is where the investment matters, and that requires a certain amount of insight. As applied to stocks, it requires both insight and work to do the research. This is always my achilles heel of investing as I tend to put my time into making things nobody wants!
I successful CEO used to tell me over and over again, that the difference between being rich and being poor is that poor people try and measure the value of something by how much it costs, rather than how much it is worth. Basically you set your prices as high as its value can go, and work backwards on your costs.
We have the extremely wealthy being bailed out by the government while the rank and file get laid off and foreclosed on.
That's actually not true. What's going to happen is that extremely wealthy will get, at most, pennies on the dollar for all of these bad mortgages and they won't get much at all for stocks in financial institutions. On the other hand, the poor people suddenly have access to a housing market that is now suddenly affordable, and those who are in houses can now make deals but are otherwise strapped can now negotiate a much lower loan with their lender because the feds can now buy it if it fails. Essentially, rich people are taxing themselves to buy poor people houses, and, from a liberal perspective, how is that really a bad thing?
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The emergence of the laser is certainly going to make the long standing Democratic argument against missile defense suddenly seem pretty silly. Missile defense any more has gone from intercepting everything from ballistic missiles to shells in flight. Question to either candidate is, whose going to fund and field laser research at the current breakneck Bush pace? Will McCain have the patience for this technology or will he call it a taxpayer boondoggle and cut it? Will Obama remain starry eyed about diplomacy or will he retain a pragmatic strategic edge? Which candidate, too, will have the honesty to admit that the USA's own strategic nuclear delivery systems will need to be upgraded when its own defenses make it obsolete?
You got fighter aircraft that can cruise at Mach 2 and still are stealthy, a new kind of submarine, a new kind of aircraft carrier, rail gun battleships are suddenly on the table and lasers blasting all over the place. If the USA can recover from some of its fiscal problems and keep up the pace of military research, it should be well in charge of its destiny for the next 50-100 years.
. Official numbers understate unemployment and inflation. [mindfully.org]
Inner city people genuinely don't want to to work. That's the deal. They just don't. They are lazy and they'd rather sit around and get stoned or drunk and watch TV and do nothing.
As far as business friendly goes, I think we need to deregulate lending even more, not less.
Ironically, no one on the left will say a word. The ACLU will be silent. The media will not cover it. For once, Bush will not be to blame
Of course they will say a word. It's what they want. They view all of that as progress. The left wing, at its core, despite all of its rhetoric about classware, is really more about social stability than it is about social wealth. They ultimately don't care if society actually gets wealthier, so long as it is more orderly.
Making the Internet safe for Democracy. What a great thing Bush has done. I haven't seen Obama call for securing .gov. Bush is so great.
I'm a right wing Republican whose endorsing John McCain but I am appalled at the way you liberals are once destroying yourselves and your candidate with your withering self doubt. We have on the right have a joke, that is, only Democrats could be so smart as to figure out a way to blow election after election and here you go again.
Can you please have some hope?
What Obama did with his web site was to basically rewrite it from the mishmash that it was into something more coherent. There is nothing substantively different about this restructuring. Obama has always been in favor of strong IP legislation, but, so what of it?
Do you really think that a man who spent his formative years arguing in favor of some form of socialism will suddenly turn his back on that?
Do you really believe that a man who has worked his entire life organizing his own liberal constituency into an election machine is suddenly going to come out looking like Reagan?
I mean, seriously, don't you think Michelle would kick his rear if he even thought of selling out?
I mean come on liberals. You are getting a guy whose is your best standard bearer for your commy liberalism in easily 40 years, if not since Roosevelt, and arguably all time. Obama knows well that which he argues and that's why on the right hate the son of a gun so much. If you are liberally inclined, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Obama is a committed idealist with the trappings of greatness about him and in spades. A minor shift in a political position or a rephrasing of a web site is not going to alter the overall thrust of this man's policy or his life.
So, don't lose faith because some staff member re-edited the web site. Obama is going to deliver for you liberals nearly everything that you believe in if he is elected. Obama is the real deal of liberalism. This is your chance. Don't f--- it up.
Now, quit whining, liberals, as you so often do, and get off your asses and vote for this guy. He's the best you'll have in your lifetime and now is the time to go for it.
As a non-American it sounds like an improvement over touching of a ME war and draging the world into the smoking crater that used to be called the US economy.
--
The US economy will always be lagging somewhat until we have a final solution to the liberal problem.
It makes a lot of sense to have energy as the universal currency
It is. The dollar plummets as US oil consumption increases and US's share of world oil production falters. Americans drive less and Bush makes noises about opening up for drilling, puts corn on the market as ethanol, and what happens, but, the dollar slightly recovers and oil prices fall. Energy IS wealth, and conservation is really at best a mechanism to save your wealth for export... but it certainly doesn't create it. To do that, you need to have more energy, not less. If you want the USA to get really rich again, build a load of nuclear power plants and then use the electricity to drive the creation of alternative fuels. Anything else is just making the country poorer.
Except for the fact that you are totally butchering his ACTUAL trade policy,
Do you seriously think that any action restricting imports to the USA from any country will occur without retaliation? That's like saying that you can have a limited nuclear exchange. Obama will go in thinking he can sweet talk the EU or Canada into accepting some sort of a cap on their exports to the USA, and what's going to do is see how little those throngs in Berlin love him once they find out its their jobs on the line.
Obama condemned NAFTA in Ohio, complains about foreign companies taking American jobs, his regrets globalization... I mean, this is a classic dyed in the wool socialist who condemns global capitalism because his constituents are simply ill prepared to cope with it, and he wants to drag the rest of the country down to their level. In doing so, he'll touch off a trade war and drag down the world. Everything he says is a complete and utter contempt for individual freedom and risk taking, and this financial crisis and his response to it proves it.
And the biggest joke is that he says he's going to unite the country? Cut me a break. Let's see how many farmers fall behind him when he tries to bully the midwest into cranking out corn for slave wages, just like Democrats always do. Red states are red because of economics and the blue states can't take it because they paved over their food with walmarts, won't allow any manufacturing because they want to "save the planet", and thus, have to pay more of their money to get stuff because ultimately everyone knows that their currency is worthless. What exactly does Chicago make these days anyway? Cities used to be information hubs and manufacturing hubs... but they got rid of the manufacturing, and the information hub of people is obsolete due to the internet, and so that really doesn't leave much utility for the powerbase of the Democrats to exist anyway. It's not even that they are evil, it is that they are useless. Cities need to -make things-. No smokestacks, no money. It's pretty simple.
Many german cars for example are made right here in the US and shipped back out all over the world.
Most of the foreign car factories in the USA are essentially assembly. It's not like the engines and transmissions are actually built in the USA. Just look at the parts origin list of these supposedly "American made" foreign cars. They only do the final assembly here to save on freight. It's like IKEA, but for cars.
I knew we got off the gold standard but I hadn't realized we switched to coal.
You know, I haven't thought about it that way, but we really have. From my days at the utility I know that all the energies commodities prices track each other pretty closely as people tend to shop by BTU at least in that space. If I have a diverse portfolio of plants, I just pick the best commodity and that tends to drive all the prices up until they reach a sort of a market equilibrium that considers the BTU and the handling involved and the overall people that want it.
Seriously... just ask yourself, if oil goes up, why does coal go up? The answer is, is that there's some sort of "peak" behavior taking place in ALL of the commodities, not just oil.
Your best grades of coal are rarer... like, the most telling thing the German "clean coal plant" is not that its clean coal, but that its burning lignite, rather than anthracite or some other better grade of coal. In Germany, lignite seems to be about all that is left, and its pretty crappy stuff, indeed.
. Wages are crap,
Actually, wages are not crap. We're just frigging greedy. WE're in a field that expects to pay us the same coming out of "Chumb MCSE school" the same rate that a frigging doctor makes coming out of medical school. I guarantee you that, on average, IT workers make more money on average than just about every other position, every field, in every other country on the planet earth. If you want more money, you need to own a business, rather than be an indentured servant for someone elses.
It's where this 'free money' is coming from - guess what, it's coming out of his ass in the form of an extra $5,000 worth of income taxes next April 15th. Mine too. Yours too.
The fact of the matter is that this big bailout is really going to be a tax on the rich to let them sell mortgages to the poor for pennies on a dollar. Ultimately, a lot of these people that are overstretched are going to be able to renegotiate their loans and the banks won't care if they do, because they can always foist a screwed loan onto the feds now.
Guess how many companies offshore to unisys? Tons.
Not that many... the IT sector is hundreds of billions a year and Unisys is barely eking by with a few billion a year in revenues. IT's a tiny, dying company that gets by on government contracts.
But, here's the flipside. If you think George Bush pissed off the world, how do you think Obama will do if he throws 5,000,000 Indian IT workers out of work when he cuts off trade. Do you think they will like him then? Will 2 million Europeans tossed out of work because the USA cuts off imports of German cars like Obama then? What about the record amount of Canadians exporting everything from wood and fuel and water and software to the USA? When Obama cuts off trade, do you think they will like the world again?
Free trade may suck sometimes, if you are a loser, but when protectionism comes along, the entire world loses, and if you think Bush has started some wars, wait till you see the wars that follow when Obama starts a trade war and world wide unemployment hits 20 percent on average and 50 percent in places.
John McCain has been nothing but a cheerleader for the Reaganomics that has caused this debacle. He's been for privatization, deregulation and tax cuts. In fact, there's a video going around on YouTube the last few days where John McCain is giving very energetic (as much as he can be energetic) support for the privatization of Social Security.
Yeah, a bunch of banks have failed and some people are losing their homes that they couldn't afford, but:
a) The commodities sectors are doing well. If you work in farming, oil, coal, iron, copper or gold, then, those sectors are all doing very well. Even the moribund alternate fuels sector is shaping up in spots. Biodiesel maker Nova Biosource Fuels is actually running its Seneca refinery profitably and if it gets some financing, this penny stock is going to absolutely kick ass.
b) Now we find out that IT workers are doing well. In fact, it looks that like that Lehman's data center is going to be purchased by Barclay's more or less intact. Not only that, but Intel and Microsoft, both industry leaders, are not only making record revenues, but Intel is actually paying dividends.
c) If we turn to the housing situation, we find, shockingly, that more people in the USA actually own their own homes than ever before. In short, despite the banking losses and the bankruptcies, at the end of the day, a bipartisan policy designed to encourage lending to put as many people into homes as possible actually WORKED.
The tell tale sign of a real recession or economic downturn is high unemployment and falling commodities prices. Neither has taken place. Instead, what we have is moderate unemployment and high commodities prices and this suggests that demand is high, rather than low.
Now, I don't doubt that some people are hurting in this economy but those people tend to be concentrated in blue states that have been stupidly run for way too long. Michigan's government has basically made it all but impossible to do business in that state and Ohio is as nearly as incompetent and corrupt, particularly in the manufacturing centers and Democratic bastions of Cleveland, Toledo, Akron and Youngstown. Red states, on the other hand, big producers of food and fuel, are doing rather well.
Bottom line is, this economy isn't falling apart, and never has been. Instead, wealth is shifting from those who make raw materials and products from those who make up financial services around them. WE have lived a lie that said that a bunch of paper is more important than the coal that it represents and it simply isn't true. Bush's economic policies have worked, free trade has worked, and if the market has decided that a program that does something with a car is not as valuable as the steel that makes it well, you are just on the wrong side of reality.
The irony is that Obama's policies are actually going to shift this economic advantage to red states any more. Bush's economic policies, at the essence, have allowed the market to refocus on the basics of materials and manufacturing as the value drivers of the economy. When Obama goes and enacts all sorts of environmental legislation, he's only going create even more scarcity. Suddenly, that old copper mine in Arizona or dying oil well the gulf are going to be even more valuable than it is today, when you can't get permits any more for a new one, and yes, those states that push back more against the Obama administration are those states that are going to have the biggest advantage, economically. They will make more, while the blue states make less, and as a consequence, they will wind up with more money. The future is passing from Chicago where the corn is traded, to the belts where the corn is made, from New York where the cars are traded, to the south where the cars are made.
While the production of naphthalene is rare, I doubt it is unique. They are only looking 700 light years out.
You figure that there's some set mixing, temperature and pressure that coupled with the right raw materials, kicks out different kinds of organic chemicals. Park the right cloud of raw good next to the right kind of star and in the right kind of gravity area, and, it seems reasonable that all sorts of organics might be found eventually all over the universe.
For all we know, our solar system just whipped right through a cloud of stellar cooked organics, and we practically just have life rained down on our little world.
Yeah, because communication is just a distraction in warfare. You think this is about creating a Soviet model army, where the officers basically move mindless units around like chess pieces? Please. We simply don't work that way, and haven't since before WW1.
I worry about it as there's no guarantees that a good tradition now is something that we will always retain. Throughout history, people have had an annoying tendency to throw out something that works in favor of a fruitless fad. So yeah, if the helmet could be used to do something like dial up an airstrike or, get reinforcements, without making any sound, then that's very useful. , but, it could also be like when the USAF decided that guns on fighter jets were obsolete just prior to Viet Nam. I have this vision of Donald Rumsfeld or Lyndon Johnson trying to call up a specific platoon in the field and talk in their helmets on a conference call with the JCS.
I was a sergeant in the army 5 years ago, and when my obligation ran out, nothing they could have offered me was enough to make me stay
Did you feel like offered you everything that they could have before you walked away? Not just money, but different assignments... like, do you felt like they felt your experience was valuable?
Money doesn't wish away the frustration inherent in not being able to pursue an enemy across an arbitrary political boundary that's ignored by every man and beast in the area but the ones wearing US flags and Union Jacks.
Can I ask, is that Pakistan?
Sargeants made Japan surrender in WWII? It wasn't two huge bombs? Did anything have a significant effect on that other than the bombs? I don't think so.
Uh, check your history. Without sergeants, there is no successful invasion of the places close to enough to Japan to fly the bombers from.
Training matters most. Japan actually had managed to muster up a pretty good aircraft force during the battle of the Marianas, but, their pilots were completely untrained, having lost all the vets already, and, so, America's more trained and experienced pilots simply shot them all down... it was called the Great Marianas Turkey shoot... and even at that time the Zero was still in many ways a better airplane.
If we go farther back in time, during the napoleonic era, the British didn't really have a huge advantage over the French and Spanish in technology, but, they just practiced their gunnery over and over and over again so that they were effectively throwing more than twice the rounds in the air than their counterparts.
How about the Iraq war? Do you think that our use of tanks there was not important? Tanks are really expensive, and if we didn't have to use them, it'd sure help.
Our tanks were good, for sure, but the real problem for Iraq was really their lack of training. Americans got to be better soldiers because there is a lot of money invested in training them, and you know who does that, quite, often, sergeants.
There were a lot of ways that the USA could have lost both invasions of Iraq, if training weren't in place. The big advantage of our tanks was that they could engage at longer ranges... a poorly trained unit might have just charged in and get cut to pieces. In this and another a thousand ways training matters...
No matter how many sergeants we have, we will not have enough. The US goes everywhere and potentially fights everyone. The US army will lose if we rely on numbers.
Very true, but training, local initiative and weapons are the biggest force multipliers. Communications is just not as important as more powerful weapons and the force to use them effectively. I would much rather have the platoon with some new sort of rifle that can level a building than I would have them sitting around waiting for an email to come into their helmet to approve taking out a sniper.
Historically (through *all* of human history), technology is the single most effective force multiplier that there is. Sure, there are some battles that have been won by superiour planning and execution, but that usually only happens when one side or the other is really stupid in their tactics. You can't count on that.
Training, training, training matters. Dude, you gotta read your history. The Romans put together a pretty good army that created and held together an empire that in the west lasted for almost 1000 years. They rarely really had the leg up in technology over anyone except for maybe the barbarians to the north. Where the Romans really shined was in training, discipline and organization. They based their army on the centurion, who they made a professional out of, gave land to, and trained him and he was essentially, well, the equivalent of a sergeant.
Actually, it works out. In terms of the federal budget, like, over 80% of the revenue comes from people making over 250k a year. So, to be apolitical, all Obama is really doing tax wise is shifting a bit more onto the rich and a bit less onto the middle class. The downside of this, which, of course neither party will really say, is that the federal government will effectively derive its take revenue from investment income, as you noted, and that's going to have us swinging wildly from surplus to deficit as the stock market girates. The problem, here, again, is in fact that Democrats won't admit that taxes on the rich are too high, whereas Republicans won't admit that taxes on the middle class should not be cut and might actually be too low. Of course, the government should spend less, and balance the budget.. but to do what is needed, cut military spending and cap entitlements won't satisfy any constituency. We can't afford to be buying grandma 1.2M worth of medical care when she is 87, but we really can't afford crap like Future Combat System either. The thing is, once we balance the budget, we can work on that line item of interest on the debt, and pay that down. We're spending the equivalent of the Clinton defense budget on interest. IT's crazy.
Unless there's one time pad data in the helmet, the war might come to a tragic halt for the USA when the enemy fills up our heads with porn.
This wired up army is a dumb idea. It's better to give troops the flexibility to matters into their own hands on the battlefield. If you want to have a better US Army, maybe instead of blowing billions on trying to turn platoons into borg, maybe pay sergeants more and jack up their retention rate. Sergeants are the backbone of any army and always will be more, more so than any communications gizmo.
SGI is a company much weaker than it was when it first released OpenGL and drove it. Microsoft has no use for OpenGL, and so now, we have OpenGL being offered up as free software? This can be spun as having an "open license" as much as we want, but to me it looks more like OpenGL is really without any serious corporate sponsorship.
It is either paid by taxes or by inflation not by the ric.
In this case, you err, because it is the rich that pay the majority of the taxes.
If they really wanted to bail out the mortgage market, let the borrowers buy back their OWN DEBT FOR PENNIES ON THE DOLLAR!!!! I know I would, in a heart-beat.
Ah, but you can. That's what "making debt liquid means".
I mean, check this out. If you absolutely don't pay your credit cards, some will sue you, they call you a lot, send you off to collections, and just torment you, but... they have no real collateral so they can't do jack.
Eventually after, you sit on it for like a year, they will come around and give you an offer to close the account and it's gonna be cheap.
In the case of mortgages, if you wanted to be a bit crazy, once this bill passes, you could just blow off your payments for two months and demand a lower rate. You should actually be able to get it because this bailout package assumes that houses are basically worthless but in any case if you are flipped on your mortgage, you are now holding ALL of the cards and the bank has very few. What are they going to do, take a worthless house? Reposess a TV? Of course not.
After this legislation passes, anyone who owes a debt of any kind, who tries to pay all of it, is just a fool. The taxpayer is on the hook for all of it anyway, and the banks can then just unload anyone that doesn't pay it back.
I'm telling you, it's the biggest transferrance of wealth from rich to poor - EVER. Now, I'm not one that wants to punish the rich with higher tax rates.. I like the rich. I want to be one myself. But, by the same token, I see no reason to have the federal government trying to stop the rich from being stupid with their money. If they want to do something stupid with their money, its their right... we should want to be ahead in line when they do it, and there's nothing wrong with it. That's all fair and good.
You missed the point. You can never have anything to invest if you don't subscribe to deferred gratification
I think we are talking about the same thing, but down on different paths. I said that investment is work, and you say that you can't invest if you don't have deferred gratification, and I believe both can be simultaneously true.
I would say, thought, that the ultimate success in Warren's case too, was that he was able to get a good spot to put the machine to begin with. Having the broken machine and fixing it were means to an end... what he saws and continues to see is where the investment matters, and that requires a certain amount of insight. As applied to stocks, it requires both insight and work to do the research. This is always my achilles heel of investing as I tend to put my time into making things nobody wants!
I successful CEO used to tell me over and over again, that the difference between being rich and being poor is that poor people try and measure the value of something by how much it costs, rather than how much it is worth. Basically you set your prices as high as its value can go, and work backwards on your costs.
We have the extremely wealthy being bailed out by the government while the rank and file get laid off and foreclosed on.
That's actually not true. What's going to happen is that extremely wealthy will get, at most, pennies on the dollar for all of these bad mortgages and they won't get much at all for stocks in financial institutions. On the other hand, the poor people suddenly have access to a housing market that is now suddenly affordable, and those who are in houses can now make deals but are otherwise strapped can now negotiate a much lower loan with their lender because the feds can now buy it if it fails. Essentially, rich people are taxing themselves to buy poor people houses, and, from a liberal perspective, how is that really a bad thing?