Actually, you forgot the event of 1908 in Siberia, which, if it had landed 4 hours later would have taken out St. Petersburg, and the fall of 3000 meteorites in Normandy in 1803, both of which were only a small part of a sequence of cometary near misses that goes back at least to the dendrochronological minimum of 4375 BC. It's really quite amazing we're still here at all: http://neros.lordbalto.com/ChapterEight.htm
That would be the Washington Post Exclusion Law that only allows you to be ethical if a story in the newspaper says you should be? I'm surprised Bernie M hasn't taken advantage of that law.
"But Your Honor, the Washington Post never told me I shouldn't be engaged in a Ponzi scheme!"
Hey, Carlos Norris wants to be the president of Texas. I say, let him have it. And then watch the Mexican drug lords eat his lunch for him without federal troops from Washington.
Some of us don't look at the party affiliation before determining whether the position is stupid or not. Unlike the Neonuts who will complain about something when a Democrat does it and then laud it as just beneath the second coming of Christ when a Republican does it.
There have always been bubbles. Check out "tulipomania" on the web if you doubt this. The difference here is that the extent of the damage is much wider and that wider extent is a direct result of who knows how many hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial derivatives being traded off of any regulated exchange. Though you may be right in general about more unenforced regulations, in this particular case this global financial meltdown is a direct result of lack of regulation. Whether those regulations would have been properly enforced is anyone's guess. Looking at the Madoff case, I have to suspect they wouldn't have. Unfortunately, we will never know, because no one even tried, except for a few voices in the wilderness.
Actually, I'm 98% in cash (including gold) and have been since your hero Idiot II lowered the tax rate on capital gains. No, I am not an idiot (except for the time I bet on the Bank of England against George Soros).
No, I don't want the "markets to be fair with the rest of the world." I want the criminal types who cost the American people billions of dollars to be locked up in prison along with the guys who stole $200 from a bleeping liquor store. Life may not be fair, but the G-D D-NED legal system that regulates wall street needs to be, or you will be spouting your tripe from the side of the barrel you are selling apples from on the street corner. Why do you not get this? Did someone drop you on your head when you were a little kid?
And really, like Mike Malloy says, after you syntax-challenged characters have managed to destroy the financial system of the world, you might just want to sit in the corner and BE QUIET.
As for trading--I'd rather see all those itsy bitsy western states with one or two representatives and two d--ned senators merged into one big state of El Diablo with two senators and as many representatives as they can actually justify by their real population. They could even paint it permanently blue if they wanted. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.
No, I think it's something specifically about the state of Utah. I mean, this is the only state in the Union that has a virtual state religion. A religion with such power over civil society that you can literally be arrested for smoking on the sidewalk outside of the Mormon Temple. That they would try to protect their own homegrown businesses from competition from the outside world is not surprising.
Basically these characters want "free markets" when they are doing well and taxpayer-funded socialism when they are not. Whereas what we had in the U.S. until the '30s was the "boom and bust" cycle, fueling ever greater bubbles and collapses until it finally became apparent that the nation couldn't take much more of this nonsense. And then along came the Neonuts and it was back on the ferris wheel again.
But yes, everything you say is spot on and cogent.
"if Bush-era deregulation is the cause of the U.S. market woes, then why is the European Union, the world's most stringently-regulated capitalist "country", in recession too?"
What you are missing through your fog of suspect thought patterns is that European financial problems, as well as those of Asia and most of the rest of the world, were the direct result of American (US) lack of regulation and the interconnected nature of the current global economic system. To put it country simple, it only takes ONE APPLE to spoil the barrel, and that rotten apple was destined for an American apple pie.
From what I can extract from the less than informative articles referenced, these bills attempt to protect Utah (read Mormon) companies from having to compete with out-of-state companies that provide the same goods and services. Something tells me this would eventually be shot down on constitutional grounds. I mean, imagine the state legislature of Maine trying to ban advertising for Coke because there's a Maine registered brand called Maine's Best Maple Cola (I'm just making this up).
But yes, they get elected and they think they have to DO SOMETHING. Lulz.
"However, suppose the cop stopped you because your brake light was broken, and you had cocaine in the trunk. If you keep quiet, he cannot look into the trunk to see if you are carrying something illegal there."
The cop stopped you because he wanted to search for cocaine. The brake light was just an excuse to look in your trunk. Hence the old saw, "If you want to break the big laws, you have to obey the little ones."
The "constitution" was relegated to the status of "just a piece of paper" during the Bush II administration. If you want it back, you're going to have to hold another convention.
"Fuck trolling. Every time I start getting into a good thread about the relative merits of the GPL vis a vis the BSD license, or a deep legal examination of the ramifications of massive copyright theft, or the advantages of using strongly statically typed languages like Perl over Python for implementing LAMP servers... whammo, there's something gaping, oozing, or epitheting the middle of a decent conversation."
You obviously have Slashdot confused with something else.
Now if you had said, "Every time I start getting into a good thread about the relative merits of taco salad and corn chowder..." I might agree. Deep? Here? Nah...
Note to moderators: Don't bother. I'm titanium plated.
Well I don't know for sure, but it looks like a cousin of what we're talking about here, that is, a program that lets you substitute the name of a person or organization into a "complaint letter" that's so general in its content that it could apply to anything or anybody. Its advantage is that it lets you send a negative letter to someone--a congressman, for example--that doesn't really have anything to do with reality and doesn't require any real work on the part of the sender. You may want to Google: "Complaint-letter generator" for more details.
Is this the same Isaac Asimov who thought that the Exodus occurred outside of history? And that civilization began in Sumer because a spaceship crashed in the Persian Gulf?
As someone who has done a bit of original historical research, however, I will say that a lot of these characters do suffer from what you might call "footnote-osis." They really do spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about what everybody else has already said.
As has become painfully obvious in the political sphere over the past eight years, lying is not done for the sake of lying, nor is it done for the thrill of fooling one's fellow citizens. It is done to promote an agenda that would otherwise be difficult to advance without widespread belief in the false statements of the liars. In the case of the euphemistic "recording industry assoc" the lies are aimed at mitigating the negative publicity that is cutting into the very profits they are trying to protect. In short, this is one of those lose/lose situations to which unrestrained greed invariably leads.
"the United States is deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems that were instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq"
Don't see much in the way of SISEes on the internet. Actually, they could have called it SISEL, which does mean something, though not related to their business, unless you picture them tying up the manufacturers and beating them with rubber hoses.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you forgot the event of 1908 in Siberia, which, if it had landed 4 hours later would have taken out St. Petersburg, and the fall of 3000 meteorites in Normandy in 1803, both of which were only a small part of a sequence of cometary near misses that goes back at least to the dendrochronological minimum of 4375 BC. It's really quite amazing we're still here at all:
http://neros.lordbalto.com/ChapterEight.htm
That would be the Washington Post Exclusion Law that only allows you to be ethical if a story in the newspaper says you should be? I'm surprised Bernie M hasn't taken advantage of that law.
"But Your Honor, the Washington Post never told me I shouldn't be engaged in a Ponzi scheme!"
As long as you don't tromp on my strawberries.
Assuming you are not making this all up, I have to applaud your vast knowledge of the trivial.
Hey, Carlos Norris wants to be the president of Texas. I say, let him have it. And then watch the Mexican drug lords eat his lunch for him without federal troops from Washington.
Some of us don't look at the party affiliation before determining whether the position is stupid or not. Unlike the Neonuts who will complain about something when a Democrat does it and then laud it as just beneath the second coming of Christ when a Republican does it.
[Nice mod of Marvin Kitman's old motto]
There have always been bubbles. Check out "tulipomania" on the web if you doubt this. The difference here is that the extent of the damage is much wider and that wider extent is a direct result of who knows how many hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial derivatives being traded off of any regulated exchange. Though you may be right in general about more unenforced regulations, in this particular case this global financial meltdown is a direct result of lack of regulation. Whether those regulations would have been properly enforced is anyone's guess. Looking at the Madoff case, I have to suspect they wouldn't have. Unfortunately, we will never know, because no one even tried, except for a few voices in the wilderness.
Actually, I'm 98% in cash (including gold) and have been since your hero Idiot II lowered the tax rate on capital gains. No, I am not an idiot (except for the time I bet on the Bank of England against George Soros).
No, I don't want the "markets to be fair with the rest of the world." I want the criminal types who cost the American people billions of dollars to be locked up in prison along with the guys who stole $200 from a bleeping liquor store. Life may not be fair, but the G-D D-NED legal system that regulates wall street needs to be, or you will be spouting your tripe from the side of the barrel you are selling apples from on the street corner. Why do you not get this? Did someone drop you on your head when you were a little kid?
And really, like Mike Malloy says, after you syntax-challenged characters have managed to destroy the financial system of the world, you might just want to sit in the corner and BE QUIET.
You forgot Mittens Helmet-hair.
As for trading--I'd rather see all those itsy bitsy western states with one or two representatives and two d--ned senators merged into one big state of El Diablo with two senators and as many representatives as they can actually justify by their real population. They could even paint it permanently blue if they wanted. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.
No, I think it's something specifically about the state of Utah. I mean, this is the only state in the Union that has a virtual state religion. A religion with such power over civil society that you can literally be arrested for smoking on the sidewalk outside of the Mormon Temple. That they would try to protect their own homegrown businesses from competition from the outside world is not surprising.
Basically these characters want "free markets" when they are doing well and taxpayer-funded socialism when they are not. Whereas what we had in the U.S. until the '30s was the "boom and bust" cycle, fueling ever greater bubbles and collapses until it finally became apparent that the nation couldn't take much more of this nonsense. And then along came the Neonuts and it was back on the ferris wheel again.
But yes, everything you say is spot on and cogent.
"if Bush-era deregulation is the cause of the U.S. market woes, then why is the European Union, the world's most stringently-regulated capitalist "country", in recession too?"
What you are missing through your fog of suspect thought patterns is that European financial problems, as well as those of Asia and most of the rest of the world, were the direct result of American (US) lack of regulation and the interconnected nature of the current global economic system. To put it country simple, it only takes ONE APPLE to spoil the barrel, and that rotten apple was destined for an American apple pie.
From what I can extract from the less than informative articles referenced, these bills attempt to protect Utah (read Mormon) companies from having to compete with out-of-state companies that provide the same goods and services. Something tells me this would eventually be shot down on constitutional grounds. I mean, imagine the state legislature of Maine trying to ban advertising for Coke because there's a Maine registered brand called Maine's Best Maple Cola (I'm just making this up).
But yes, they get elected and they think they have to DO SOMETHING. Lulz.
"However, suppose the cop stopped you because your brake light was broken, and you had cocaine in the trunk. If you keep quiet, he cannot look into the trunk to see if you are carrying something illegal there."
The cop stopped you because he wanted to search for cocaine. The brake light was just an excuse to look in your trunk. Hence the old saw, "If you want to break the big laws, you have to obey the little ones."
The "constitution" was relegated to the status of "just a piece of paper" during the Bush II administration. If you want it back, you're going to have to hold another convention.
"Fuck trolling. Every time I start getting into a good thread about the relative merits of the GPL vis a vis the BSD license, or a deep legal examination of the ramifications of massive copyright theft, or the advantages of using strongly statically typed languages like Perl over Python for implementing LAMP servers... whammo, there's something gaping, oozing, or epitheting the middle of a decent conversation."
You obviously have Slashdot confused with something else.
Now if you had said, "Every time I start getting into a good thread about the relative merits of taco salad and corn chowder..." I might agree. Deep? Here? Nah...
Note to moderators: Don't bother. I'm titanium plated.
Well I don't know for sure, but it looks like a cousin of what we're talking about here, that is, a program that lets you substitute the name of a person or organization into a "complaint letter" that's so general in its content that it could apply to anything or anybody. Its advantage is that it lets you send a negative letter to someone--a congressman, for example--that doesn't really have anything to do with reality and doesn't require any real work on the part of the sender. You may want to Google: "Complaint-letter generator" for more details.
Is this the same Isaac Asimov who thought that the Exodus occurred outside of history? And that civilization began in Sumer because a spaceship crashed in the Persian Gulf?
As someone who has done a bit of original historical research, however, I will say that a lot of these characters do suffer from what you might call "footnote-osis." They really do spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about what everybody else has already said.
Kirk Stephenson, Olivant Advisers.
Edward Mattar, BestBank.
Alex Widmer, Bank Julius Baer.
It's called G-O-O-G-L-E. Try it some time.
As has become painfully obvious in the political sphere over the past eight years, lying is not done for the sake of lying, nor is it done for the thrill of fooling one's fellow citizens. It is done to promote an agenda that would otherwise be difficult to advance without widespread belief in the false statements of the liars. In the case of the euphemistic "recording industry assoc" the lies are aimed at mitigating the negative publicity that is cutting into the very profits they are trying to protect. In short, this is one of those lose/lose situations to which unrestrained greed invariably leads.
Expert sex change dot com has a paywall?
Let me guess--you're an engineer for a multi-national arms contractor?
The part I liked was how they are degrading customer service to prevent degradation of customer service. Orwell would have loved these guys.
Remember, Big Chimpy is watching you.
"the United States is deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems that were instrumental in crippling the insurgency in Iraq"
My built in shit detector just went off.
Don't see much in the way of SISEes on the internet. Actually, they could have called it SISEL, which does mean something, though not related to their business, unless you picture them tying up the manufacturers and beating them with rubber hoses.
The only way I would serve is if I had my own private intelligence service I could field against the established agencies.