The nation as a whole is now the proud owner of billions of dollars worth of debt previously owed by the super-rich.
No, it wasn't owned by the "super-rich." It was owned by us, everyone that owned stock in these banks.
Should human activity benefit humanity? People who say "no" scare the shit out of me
What gives you or any man the right to judge what is best for humanity? That's the point.. its just a vast amount of religious intolerance in that one for a species that can't even agree on what is human and what is not.
Do you know why companies exist? To make profit for the owner(s)
The owners are the public. That's what you don't get. Put down your Karl Marx, go to e-trade.com, and if you want to own a piece of any company, it won't cost you all that much, especially these days.
Conservatives do not oppose Barrack Obama's 800 billion welfare bill because they are afraid it might work. Rather, it is because we know it won't.
Regardless of the merits of the traditional Republican free market system - that incidentally, was an invention of the Democrats, the fact of the matter is, we absolutely know that doling out government cheese to everyone isn't going to work. Liberal socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and never even had the upsides that came with a free trade environment.
If we were really going to reach back in history and do something that did work, then historically the greatest period of economic expansion for the USA is the mercantile era from the post civil war up until around the 1920s. US manufacturers were protected, unemployment was generally low and the lot of the middle class improved dramatically. Then, you could have some liberal stuff of putting unions together because a company could just pass the costs of higher wages to the consumer without getting undercut by slave labor from overseas.
Contract this to Obama's book. His economic vision is the worst of all possible worlds, and, its a vision that matches that of Krugman and company. What they advocate is having a big socialist nanny state to protect people from the effects of global trade, and I would argue, if you didn't have global trade, you wouldn't need to protect them at all.
So yeah, Obama's plan of ultimately raising taxes - via carbon or whatever else, to pay for global trade, is really just a bandaid over something that we already know has failed.
The unintended consequence of this is that every user on a system is going to get a fixed ipv6 ip and ipv4 traffic would be gradually phased out. Why bother with the administrative burden of issuing an IP address via dhcp and tracking it, when, you could have an ipv6 theoretically assigned to a customer for the life of a device.
a. regulate in the public interest b. if a company is profitable than it is criminal, go to step a. c. if a company is unprofitable, nationalize it, and stuff it with your buddies, return to step a.
Basically, you have some gung-ho lefty making a bunch of proclamations, admitting a bias against another company, and she's going to be in a position of power in government? Oh wait, I forgot, this is change we can believe in, just another form of chicago cronyism... or really, detroit, judging by the way this administration is driving the country into the ground.
However, it seems that I have been part of a very small minority of people who have cared to make them that way in the past decade
So now we really know what happened to all that Webvan money!
Sorry, but I'm just like one of those people that worked to be compatible with the most popular browsers. I know that in some abstract sense it might be good, but I see no reason to alienate the best part of an audience.
Places on the planet that allow for malicious attacks on the internet to take place should be excluded from it. There is no legitimate reason we should be lowering the shields of the West to appease a few Chalabis in otherwise lawless countries.
The science of climate change, by contrast, is on very solid theoretical footing; but sometimes every science has to deal with bad data, as in this case
The problem with climate science is ironically the same as the problem with economics. Chaos theory says pretty plainly that you will never have enough data to make an accurate prediction and for that reason, you have lost the ability to have a control.
I mean, the whole idea is that you can take a sort of an average of events and call that climate - like, sorta look at lorenz attractor and say "well, the average is this". But the thing is, that average is still pretty unstable and you can jigger it pretty easily, which is really where all the global warming alarm comes from.
In fact, the thing is, that economics cannot make accurate predictions should be the canary in the coal mine for climate science. Economic modelling is based on trying to understand coupled dynamic systems in the same kind of math that climate science is. Economics is just about people, and its continually wrong, so, how could climate ever really be right, when it considers not only the effect of people, but of the planet as a whole, and all the organisms responding to, and influencing climate, plus any number of celestial and geological unknowns.
Without measurements, I can say with certainty that our climate is changing.
Like, having winters in the northeastern USA? Yeah, for the last decade there was no snow. This year is the first year in a while where it has been consistently cold in the northeastern USA. A few years ago, I remember sitting out on my deck in shorts in November, thinking "this is screwed up". This year though, its all about blankets and and a cord of firewood.
s were the only point against carbon dating and other radio-dating methods I'd have kept my trap shut.
The implicit assumption behind radio and carbon dating is that the mixture of the things being sampled is constant and that time itself moves in some continuous fashion. That's not to say that I think the earth is 6000 years old, I don't. But it is to say that when someone carbon or radio dates something to a specific time enough that it might be used as a cause of something else carbon dating later, then we need to look at that gap between the two events and also understand the story of the things being dated so we can assess, well, if this thing is really as old we thought. There's just a lot of processes out there that we don't know, and if there is one thing science teaches, it is that the people who think they have finally got it wind up finding that they know less than they think.
Fearing the end of the world or a great disaster is not a religious belief as nearly as much as it is an externalization of the fear or death and a mental mechanism for realizing how little control you have over the world. It is like, the mind plays out, what is the worst that will happen, as if to remind you that your time is finite and you are not as powerful as you think.
If there was no belief in God, people would still have some show on about the end of the world. Indeed, some of the more popular documentaries now are about comets slamming into the earth, supervolcanos sending us into a snowball earth, giant tsumanis from islands falling into the ocean, mega earthquakes, the reactivation of the siberians traps, a supernova of a nearby star baking the earth with gamma radiataion, or a change in the density of intersteller dust that somehow screws up the solar system as the sun orbits the black hole in the center of the milky way. There's enough genuine geological catastrophe completely outside of our power to control that makes a fear of total disaster a reasonable thing, even if the daily risk is rather low. And against all that, what harm does it really do if some people say: "dear God, please don't slam a comet into the earth today, I have a little boy and love him." It can't hurt anything, if there is no God, and even if it isn't your bag, having someone else hedge humanity's bets on the divine for you isn't too bad of a gambling strategy either.
That's only useful if you want to tell him what he should say the passwords are
The thing is, in that specific case, it would work, because you can verify the truth of the password immediately. The benefit is that the guy gets to walk right afterwards, on the theory that, no real harm, no real foul. I mean, if the guy grabs the passwords, you waterboard him, he gives them up... what disruption to the business was there? There wasn't really a crime and you could obviously make the argument that waterboarding was punishment enough. This is vastly different from torturing someone for operational war plans, which cannot be verifies, and you are right, people in that situation will make up anything to evade torture.
As people romance the scale and stability of the mainframe and move towards centralized, mainframe approaches, they forget the reasons that gave birth to the PC revolution to begin with.
Having your stuff on your computer is an immensely liberating act. No matter what the terms of service, your data is in someone else's charge when its on yonder mainframe, and you are at the mercy of their data center when it comes to performance, user interface, virtually all aspects of the system.
On the other hand, with a PC, particularly as applications move towards more open file designs, you get much more control, more choice, and as much power as you would like to invest in.
McDonald's got rid of their dollar menu in Boston? You guys should have a McDonald's "Tea Party" in protest. Down around Philly, the dollar menu is well and strong.
Everyone throws around $78/hour for the price of union labor but that number is wrong. Entry level autoworkers make $14/hour, and the most an autoworker makes is about $30/hour. Costs beyond that are due to health care and that differential is because in most foreign countries the taxpayer pays the health care, but in the USA, companies like GM subsidize everyone else's health care. Had Bush resolved health care expense issues as President, GM would most assuredly not be at the begging table. But the government screwed this up, and the government should fix it.
I find it highly amusing that so many conservatives had no problem dropping two trillion dollars and five thousand dead to bring democracy to the Iraqi people, but balk at spending a few bucks to accept responsibility for their national responsibility to create level playing field with our international competitors.
I just wonder what sort of a society we have where a disgruntled work hides a few passwords to stuff he evidentally brought in, for a few hours at most, but at the same time a bunch of dudes mismanaged their banks to the detriment of the entire world economy, in cooperation by senior members of both political parties, and that's just a mistake.
You know I was arguing all about either torture the guy and let him walk to get the passwords, thinking that 10 minutes of waterboarding is less damaging than 7 years in prison.
Now, his side says that he's getting tossed into jail for sneaking a few modems onto his desk and not giving out the passwords to the modems he set up? come on now, that's not the story we heard coming from s.f. before and I have to wonder just what passwords s.f. was asking for.
I don't know that I would hire the guy, but, somehow, when all the banks in the fine city of san francisco are sitting there having blown through trillions of dollars, I think maybe s.f. pd needs to be putting some other people in prison besides this guy.
How convenient, after years of economic prosperity on the back of trade with China (which both benefited from) now that there's a crisis they're against free trade and everyone should isolate themselves.
China and the USA have a complicated relationship that goes through weird phases. By and large most Americans like Chinese people... Chinese food is great, the history and artwork are just amazing. There's always going to be an American soft spot for China because the two countries are opposites in some ways - China is very old, and America is very young.
Like it or not it was the greed of certain Americans that caused this crash, the reason it spread all across the world is because the whole world has been investing in the US sub-prime sector
Well, I'm not buying the sub-prime thing. The total value of all mortgages in the USA is only about 10 trillion dollars, and so I would think that if the subprime mess were the problem, that's only about two trillion worth, and the USA has already pumped that much money into the banking system to cover those losses, either via TARP, or via games played with the Federal Reserve.
Finally if you want to "Kick them the fuck out" try not buying their products.. Good luck, their products are what make the Western lifestyle affordable.
Um, the western lifestyle was more affordable before those products happened. It used to be, before free trade, that a single man could work 9-5 at a steel mill, support a stay at home, a bunch of kids, pay for medical expenses out of his pocket, own his house and have two new cars and a TV, and he could send his kids to college. When he retired, he got a company pension that lasted not only until he died, but until his wife died. Since the emergence of free trade, bit by bit, that standard of living has been eroded and that's what the Democrats are just screaming about while, foolishly, Republicans keep pushing the free trade button despite all the ruin that it caused. Yes, its good on paper, free trade is, but it just doesn't work.
Maybe if overpaid workers and grossly overpaid management aren't raising the prices of products, they'd sell better overseas. Granted the auto-industry is too easy a dead horse to kick at the moment.
Maybe if you actually paid your workers something, you would have a domestic economy, rather than having to unload all your junk on countries that actually do pay their workers. That's really the essence of mercantilism is that, these mercantile countries get screwed. All that money that is being hoarded as currency reserves could and should be spent to benefit the people.. but it doesn't. How stupid is that? What good does it do the Japanese people to know that Japan has a trillion USD sitting in a computer somewhere, or China? Where's all that Chinese money going... to those slave ladies making keyboards for 42 cents an hour? Is that overpaid? Is that how everyone should be paid? Yep, China didn't pick Capitalism to emulate, it actually picked the very sort of economic mercantilism that lead to the birth of communism in the first place. Shitty conditions for workers, an export driven economy, a few connected people get mega rich and the government doesn't change.
The USA is not going to collapse any time soon. Even now, this crisis of cash has not and most likely will not trigger a rush to go after the numerous physical assets this nation has. There is enough shale oil in Colorado to burn for a 100 years, if we bothered to get it. There's a trillion dollars of oil sitting in Alaska that we're not going to get, because it bothers us that a few polar bears might get hurt. There's also about 500 billion barrels of oil sitting in North Dakota... and on top of that, the entire country is is just a food producing machine. We have wheat fields and corn fields that are larger than some other nations. We have so much goddamn food that we are burning it to power our giant cars, the rest of you fools can starve.
Even the French actually have said that when the dust all settles from this financial "crisis", the USA will come out on top. Communism is crap. Even in Star Trek, there is only one Captain of the Enterprise, not a central planning committee.
Neither Hong Kong or Singapore are countries in the country sense of the world. Singapore is just a city and Hong Kong is just a tiny, tiny island. They HAVE to have some measure of free trade because they have essentially no natural resources, no room for manufacturing... putting them in the same category as the rest of Asia is like saying all of Europe is like the Channel Islands.
You know, that's a good point and we can apply that to free trade. What has free trade with asia done for the USA lately? Gee, I'm drawing a blank. Good reason to pull the plug on it.
Slashdot Mirror
The nation as a whole is now the proud owner of billions of dollars worth of debt previously owed by the super-rich.
No, it wasn't owned by the "super-rich." It was owned by us, everyone that owned stock in these banks.
Should human activity benefit humanity? People who say "no" scare the shit out of me
What gives you or any man the right to judge what is best for humanity? That's the point.. its just a vast amount of religious intolerance in that one for a species that can't even agree on what is human and what is not.
Do you know why companies exist? To make profit for the owner(s)
The owners are the public. That's what you don't get. Put down your Karl Marx, go to e-trade.com, and if you want to own a piece of any company, it won't cost you all that much, especially these days.
Conservatives do not oppose Barrack Obama's 800 billion welfare bill because they are afraid it might work. Rather, it is because we know it won't.
Regardless of the merits of the traditional Republican free market system - that incidentally, was an invention of the Democrats, the fact of the matter is, we absolutely know that doling out government cheese to everyone isn't going to work. Liberal socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and never even had the upsides that came with a free trade environment.
If we were really going to reach back in history and do something that did work, then historically the greatest period of economic expansion for the USA is the mercantile era from the post civil war up until around the 1920s. US manufacturers were protected, unemployment was generally low and the lot of the middle class improved dramatically. Then, you could have some liberal stuff of putting unions together because a company could just pass the costs of higher wages to the consumer without getting undercut by slave labor from overseas.
Contract this to Obama's book. His economic vision is the worst of all possible worlds, and, its a vision that matches that of Krugman and company. What they advocate is having a big socialist nanny state to protect people from the effects of global trade, and I would argue, if you didn't have global trade, you wouldn't need to protect them at all.
So yeah, Obama's plan of ultimately raising taxes - via carbon or whatever else, to pay for global trade, is really just a bandaid over something that we already know has failed.
The unintended consequence of this is that every user on a system is going to get a fixed ipv6 ip and ipv4 traffic would be gradually phased out. Why bother with the administrative burden of issuing an IP address via dhcp and tracking it, when, you could have an ipv6 theoretically assigned to a customer for the life of a device.
No, not, seriously...
This is democratic politics in a nutshell
a. regulate in the public interest
b. if a company is profitable than it is criminal, go to step a.
c. if a company is unprofitable, nationalize it, and stuff it with your buddies, return to step a.
Basically, you have some gung-ho lefty making a bunch of proclamations, admitting a bias against another company, and she's going to be in a position of power in government? Oh wait, I forgot, this is change we can believe in, just another form of chicago cronyism... or really, detroit, judging by the way this administration is driving the country into the ground.
However, it seems that I have been part of a very small minority of people who have cared to make them that way in the past decade
So now we really know what happened to all that Webvan money!
Sorry, but I'm just like one of those people that worked to be compatible with the most popular browsers. I know that in some abstract sense it might be good, but I see no reason to alienate the best part of an audience.
Places on the planet that allow for malicious attacks on the internet to take place should be excluded from it. There is no legitimate reason we should be lowering the shields of the West to appease a few Chalabis in otherwise lawless countries.
I mean, come on.... this is just pure fraud.
The science of climate change, by contrast, is on very solid theoretical footing; but sometimes every science has to deal with bad data, as in this case
The problem with climate science is ironically the same as the problem with economics. Chaos theory says pretty plainly that you will never have enough data to make an accurate prediction and for that reason, you have lost the ability to have a control.
I mean, the whole idea is that you can take a sort of an average of events and call that climate - like, sorta look at lorenz attractor and say "well, the average is this". But the thing is, that average is still pretty unstable and you can jigger it pretty easily, which is really where all the global warming alarm comes from.
In fact, the thing is, that economics cannot make accurate predictions should be the canary in the coal mine for climate science. Economic modelling is based on trying to understand coupled dynamic systems in the same kind of math that climate science is. Economics is just about people, and its continually wrong, so, how could climate ever really be right, when it considers not only the effect of people, but of the planet as a whole, and all the organisms responding to, and influencing climate, plus any number of celestial and geological unknowns.
Without measurements, I can say with certainty that our climate is changing.
Like, having winters in the northeastern USA? Yeah, for the last decade there was no snow. This year is the first year in a while where it has been consistently cold in the northeastern USA. A few years ago, I remember sitting out on my deck in shorts in November, thinking "this is screwed up". This year though, its all about blankets and and a cord of firewood.
s were the only point against carbon dating and other radio-dating methods I'd have kept my trap shut.
The implicit assumption behind radio and carbon dating is that the mixture of the things being sampled is constant and that time itself moves in some continuous fashion. That's not to say that I think the earth is 6000 years old, I don't. But it is to say that when someone carbon or radio dates something to a specific time enough that it might be used as a cause of something else carbon dating later, then we need to look at that gap between the two events and also understand the story of the things being dated so we can assess, well, if this thing is really as old we thought. There's just a lot of processes out there that we don't know, and if there is one thing science teaches, it is that the people who think they have finally got it wind up finding that they know less than they think.
Fearing the end of the world or a great disaster is not a religious belief as nearly as much as it is an externalization of the fear or death and a mental mechanism for realizing how little control you have over the world. It is like, the mind plays out, what is the worst that will happen, as if to remind you that your time is finite and you are not as powerful as you think.
If there was no belief in God, people would still have some show on about the end of the world. Indeed, some of the more popular documentaries now are about comets slamming into the earth, supervolcanos sending us into a snowball earth, giant tsumanis from islands falling into the ocean, mega earthquakes, the reactivation of the siberians traps, a supernova of a nearby star baking the earth with gamma radiataion, or a change in the density of intersteller dust that somehow screws up the solar system as the sun orbits the black hole in the center of the milky way. There's enough genuine geological catastrophe completely outside of our power to control that makes a fear of total disaster a reasonable thing, even if the daily risk is rather low. And against all that, what harm does it really do if some people say: "dear God, please don't slam a comet into the earth today, I have a little boy and love him." It can't hurt anything, if there is no God, and even if it isn't your bag, having someone else hedge humanity's bets on the divine for you isn't too bad of a gambling strategy either.
That's only useful if you want to tell him what he should say the passwords are
The thing is, in that specific case, it would work, because you can verify the truth of the password immediately. The benefit is that the guy gets to walk right afterwards, on the theory that, no real harm, no real foul. I mean, if the guy grabs the passwords, you waterboard him, he gives them up... what disruption to the business was there? There wasn't really a crime and you could obviously make the argument that waterboarding was punishment enough. This is vastly different from torturing someone for operational war plans, which cannot be verifies, and you are right, people in that situation will make up anything to evade torture.
As people romance the scale and stability of the mainframe and move towards centralized, mainframe approaches, they forget the reasons that gave birth to the PC revolution to begin with.
Having your stuff on your computer is an immensely liberating act. No matter what the terms of service, your data is in someone else's charge when its on yonder mainframe, and you are at the mercy of their data center when it comes to performance, user interface, virtually all aspects of the system.
On the other hand, with a PC, particularly as applications move towards more open file designs, you get much more control, more choice, and as much power as you would like to invest in.
McDonald's got rid of their dollar menu in Boston? You guys should have a McDonald's "Tea Party" in protest. Down around Philly, the dollar menu is well and strong.
Everyone throws around $78/hour for the price of union labor but that number is wrong. Entry level autoworkers make $14/hour, and the most an autoworker makes is about $30/hour. Costs beyond that are due to health care and that differential is because in most foreign countries the taxpayer pays the health care, but in the USA, companies like GM subsidize everyone else's health care. Had Bush resolved health care expense issues as President, GM would most assuredly not be at the begging table. But the government screwed this up, and the government should fix it.
I find it highly amusing that so many conservatives had no problem dropping two trillion dollars and five thousand dead to bring democracy to the Iraqi people, but balk at spending a few bucks to accept responsibility for their national responsibility to create level playing field with our international competitors.
I just wonder what sort of a society we have where a disgruntled work hides a few passwords to stuff he evidentally brought in, for a few hours at most, but at the same time a bunch of dudes mismanaged their banks to the detriment of the entire world economy, in cooperation by senior members of both political parties, and that's just a mistake.
who just don't happen to live in the US?
And, good, they can have free trade with themselves, but, right now, free trade is NOT benefiting the US. We don't owe these people anything.
You know I was arguing all about either torture the guy and let him walk to get the passwords, thinking that 10 minutes of waterboarding is less damaging than 7 years in prison.
Now, his side says that he's getting tossed into jail for sneaking a few modems onto his desk and not giving out the passwords to the modems he set up? come on now, that's not the story we heard coming from s.f. before and I have to wonder just what passwords s.f. was asking for.
I don't know that I would hire the guy, but, somehow, when all the banks in the fine city of san francisco are sitting there having blown through trillions of dollars, I think maybe s.f. pd needs to be putting some other people in prison besides this guy.
How convenient, after years of economic prosperity on the back of trade with China (which both benefited from) now that there's a crisis they're against free trade and everyone should isolate themselves.
China and the USA have a complicated relationship that goes through weird phases. By and large most Americans like Chinese people... Chinese food is great, the history and artwork are just amazing. There's always going to be an American soft spot for China because the two countries are opposites in some ways - China is very old, and America is very young.
Like it or not it was the greed of certain Americans that caused this crash, the reason it spread all across the world is because the whole world has been investing in the US sub-prime sector
Well, I'm not buying the sub-prime thing. The total value of all mortgages in the USA is only about 10 trillion dollars, and so I would think that if the subprime mess were the problem, that's only about two trillion worth, and the USA has already pumped that much money into the banking system to cover those losses, either via TARP, or via games played with the Federal Reserve.
Finally if you want to "Kick them the fuck out" try not buying their products.. Good luck, their products are what make the Western lifestyle affordable.
Um, the western lifestyle was more affordable before those products happened. It used to be, before free trade, that a single man could work 9-5 at a steel mill, support a stay at home, a bunch of kids, pay for medical expenses out of his pocket, own his house and have two new cars and a TV, and he could send his kids to college. When he retired, he got a company pension that lasted not only until he died, but until his wife died. Since the emergence of free trade, bit by bit, that standard of living has been eroded and that's what the Democrats are just screaming about while, foolishly, Republicans keep pushing the free trade button despite all the ruin that it caused. Yes, its good on paper, free trade is, but it just doesn't work.
Maybe if overpaid workers and grossly overpaid management aren't raising the prices of products, they'd sell better overseas. Granted the auto-industry is too easy a dead horse to kick at the moment.
Maybe if you actually paid your workers something, you would have a domestic economy, rather than having to unload all your junk on countries that actually do pay their workers. That's really the essence of mercantilism is that, these mercantile countries get screwed. All that money that is being hoarded as currency reserves could and should be spent to benefit the people.. but it doesn't. How stupid is that? What good does it do the Japanese people to know that Japan has a trillion USD sitting in a computer somewhere, or China? Where's all that Chinese money going... to those slave ladies making keyboards for 42 cents an hour? Is that overpaid? Is that how everyone should be paid? Yep, China didn't pick Capitalism to emulate, it actually picked the very sort of economic mercantilism that lead to the birth of communism in the first place. Shitty conditions for workers, an export driven economy, a few connected people get mega rich and the government doesn't change.
The USA is not going to collapse any time soon. Even now, this crisis of cash has not and most likely will not trigger a rush to go after the numerous physical assets this nation has. There is enough shale oil in Colorado to burn for a 100 years, if we bothered to get it. There's a trillion dollars of oil sitting in Alaska that we're not going to get, because it bothers us that a few polar bears might get hurt. There's also about 500 billion barrels of oil sitting in North Dakota... and on top of that, the entire country is is just a food producing machine. We have wheat fields and corn fields that are larger than some other nations. We have so much goddamn food that we are burning it to power our giant cars, the rest of you fools can starve.
Even the French actually have said that when the dust all settles from this financial "crisis", the USA will come out on top. Communism is crap. Even in Star Trek, there is only one Captain of the Enterprise, not a central planning committee.
Once they have your password, you choose another one and that's it. I'd like to see you do that with your face
Hell, I would too, just for the heck of it...
Neither Hong Kong or Singapore are countries in the country sense of the world. Singapore is just a city and Hong Kong is just a tiny, tiny island. They HAVE to have some measure of free trade because they have essentially no natural resources, no room for manufacturing... putting them in the same category as the rest of Asia is like saying all of Europe is like the Channel Islands.
You know, that's a good point and we can apply that to free trade. What has free trade with asia done for the USA lately? Gee, I'm drawing a blank. Good reason to pull the plug on it.