If you're computing from a fixed seating position you're probably sitting at a desk.
If you're sitting at a desk, it might be your desk, at which you could do all of those things, but it might not. It might be at the office you're visiting.
It might not be a desk. It might be a seat on a plane or train, sunlight coming in from a nearby window you don't control (and boy, if there's any setting in which you have almost no room to maneuver, it's on a plane in coach. And yet the Mac Book Air? Glossy only from day one.)
It might be the one of a small set of seats available to you at a conference room, or a lecture hall.
It might be a park bench, it might be on the couch in the living room facing the TV where you're sitting to be with your SO or family while they're watching it, and you're trying to work, but the sunset through the window behind the couch is causing a problem.
If you bought a laptop, the whole point is that you'd like to be able to move it around and use it anywhere. The constraints arbitrarily added by the glare off a glossy screen make it more difficult.
And having used one for the past year, the glare issue is really a red herring. I don't notice it.
That's great that it doesn't bother you, and I think it's fine that people who for whatever reason don't seem to mind glare can buy glossy screens, but the tone of your post is so dismissive of the genuine problems people have with glossy screens that it's bordering on insulting.
It's really hard to fathom that anyone who has actually used a glossy display for any serious amount of time wouldn't prefer it to a matte display.
For a bit over two months this year I was borrowing laptops while mine broke, including a MacBook. They had glossy screens. I absolutely hate them. I suppose you can argue that 2 months for 8-14 hours per day of use isn't a "serious amount of time", but you'd be wrong.
Phil: You offset the reflection by the brightness, and consumers love it.
That's great, but people who actually have to *work* for a while on their machines will probably hate it.
I thoroughly hate it, so thoroughly that it was a complete dealbreaker for me on the MacBook and MacBook Air, so thoroughly that I very nearly hate Phil personally for that statement, so thoroughly that despite everything else I love about Apple products, if I can only get them with a glossy screen, I might not bother.
One of the great things about a notebook is you can turn it however you want!
That's true if the environment you're working in doesn't have any constraints on which way you're sitting, which is often not the case. And I don't want to spend time futzing around with avoiding glare. I have other things to do with this machine I've bought.
They do not exist to help children learn. That is simply not the reason the union exists.
This is true, but it's beside the point. The idea that unions exist to serve the interests of teachers isn't particularly problematic, because teacher satisfaction hardly precludes student success, in fact, it's rather dependent on it.
Not to mention that it's completely orthogonal to unions -- if teacher's interests were inherently at odds with genuine education, the problem really wouldn't be unions, it'd be teachers, and the remaining option would be non-professional educators...
Not named as OS X, but there's enough in common with NeXTStep that you can argue it's been out for 19 years... longer if you count the 1986 previews.
There's also a number of things that carried over from OS 9 that might still be important to workflow under OS X, mostly AppleScript, but there might be a few other things.
How? They held minorities in both the house, the senate, and every committee. Bush held the Presidency.
defeated the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, cosponsored by John McCain
McCain was a late cosponsor, 2006, and the author of the S.190 was Chuck Hagel. I've written elsewhere that at least in theory, McCain deserves from credit for this, but since the bill never materialized, it's not clear what form the actual policy would have taken, nor, for that matter, how the Democrats were the major obstruction in adopting S.190, since they didn't control the Senate.
It's also worth noting that Hagel has been a fairly vocal Obama supporter.
That said, the quotes from those Democrats are interesting and indicate they didn't have a particularly strong grasp of the situation. The question is if the Republicans involved did and what exactly they were proposing to do -- remember, this is in the wake of the accounting problems *not* hearings on the housing bubble, CDOs, or most of the other issues relevant to today's financial turmoil, in which the GSEs really only play part that's really quite replaceable by a host of entities from the private sector.
In particular, I don't think Mr. Manzullo's displaying a particularly great grasp of the private sector here:
Mr. Raines, 1.1 million bonus and a $526,000 salary. Jamie Gorelick, $779,000 bonus on a salary of 567,000. This is -- what you state on page 11 is nothing less than -- than staggering
Not particularly high compensation for C-list private sector positions, actually. Unfortunate, but if there's any scandal to this, then the center of it is not here.
People think that conservatives are anti-intellectual, which isn't necessarily the case. It's that they're anti-elitism.
That's fine as far as it goes, but the question is -- where does a lack of respect for real elite achievements begin?
When you're going in for surgery, are you going to be anti-elite?
The school district where I grew up put in a math program that was utterly and completely worthless. Math scores tanked, parents complained, and it was hard to believe that even 30% of the parents supported the new math program. However, the district stuck to their guns because some college professors thought it was the best thing in the world.
Anybody who understand that practical results matter more than expert advice is exhibiting common sense. I don't think most people are going to argue otherwise. I get really, really nervous, however, when people start to question whether expertise is important at all -- or the idea that looking towards expertise is "elitism."
Fortunately, there's signs that this isn't actually so much a conservative philosophy as it is a convenient tool for discarding expert advice that you don't want to believe, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. And there's plenty of evidence that the accomplished and wealthy are happy to support conservative politics as well as liberal.
While we're at it, McCain authored a similar regulation in the Senate in 2005, yet he's somehow being blamed for the lack of regulations that caused the mortgage failures.
Chuck Hagel's the original sponsor of the bill, McCain wasn't on the list of 2005 cosponsors, so I don't think he can have a reasonable claim to authorship. He did become a cosponsor sometime after the bill got stuck in committee, for which he probably deserves some credit.
He's probably getting hammered for his support of Gramm-sponsored deregulation legislation. Not that he's by any means alone in this, so it's somewhat unfair, though he is more than casually connected with Gramm, so it's hard to say.
In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
There's a distinction here that's important to understand. FM/FM played a role in the problems, but most of that appears to have been overleveraging based on implied guarantees from the government and investment in overrated CDOs like every other private institution that's in trouble -- *not* their involvement in CRA loans, which were fully-underwritten and whose recipients definitely had to show ability to repay. As far as I've seen, CRA loans actually have a higher repayment rate and lower default rate than general commercial lending over the last 10 years.
It's OK for simple stuff, but trying to do something like implementing a loop in a spreadsheet.
This is one reason the VB scripting turns out to be highly useful. But that said... for half the things loops might be useful for in a normal context, they're wrong in a spreadsheet. Iterating over a set of data isn't done with loops, it's done with applying formulas over a range of cells. And if you turn on iteration for the spreadsheet, it *is* possible to build flow-controlling state machines without using the scripting engine. Not particularly natural for most imperative programmers, but definitely possible.
So I don't think loops are the issue. My understanding is that the biggest problem with using Excel for detailed number crunching is in how they handle some precision/float issues.
Good grief, you are using those as examples of socialism working? Lots of people have problems with police departments all over the place,
Especially after a number of odd personal encounters with the police over the last year, I certainly wouldn't argue that there are no problems. However, there's some significant problems with all kinds of commercial activity, and I'm not out arguing that it should be abolished, just perhaps the rules of the game should be a bit different...
and listing schools there is just short of insanity.
Why? I mean, I understand there are problems with public schools as well as anybody, probably better than most since I briefly ventured into the system as a teacher before deciding industry might well be a better place for me. There are a number of things they do well, though, and after examining a number of private schools and home schooling, I'm not convinced either effort would work better on a society-wide level.
Roads are almost never in good repair, and when is the last you you saw a road crew where you thought "hey, that's just about the right number of people and they are all working diligently".
Construction is frequent where I've lived, which is in itself annoying (and in particular, if there's any inefficiency that leaps out at me and gets on my nerves, it's that crews seem to block out much, much more or the road than necessary, sometimes more than 10x what they're actually working on), but the roads generally are in good repair. Last year I also had the opportunity to take a four-month road trip across 25 states and my experience was that we've got a pretty vast and remarkable highway system.
Public libraries and fire departments are probably at the top of that list as to things that generally work OK - but that's mostly because so few people pay attention to what they spend, you can't say for sure how truly inefficient they may be (especially libraries).
Operationally, they're obviously cost centers, but it's also hard to measure what the precise gains they produce in terms of community and individual capital, so efficiency is sortof an odd point. Perhaps there's some research that examines this, but I suspect that you either believe it's an investment in the community or you don't. Most people do.
You do realize that in a lot of smaller communities the fire department is local volunteers right? That's not socialism.
It's true, it's more or less communitarianism. You can also argue that creating a city-run professional fire department is pretty much the same thing -- simply that people are specializing, quite possibly reaping some gains in the process, and supporting the community with their money rather than their time...
Do you realize you just asked that question when faced with (a) a list of people actively and currently in McCain's inside circle that's 3-6 times as long and (b) the explanation that of the *2* people connected with the Obama campaign, 1's "involvement" was ridiculously peripheral and the other was fired?
Sincerely holding an opinion -- shaped by whatever factors -- is worlds away from insincerely expressing the same opinion for money. Obama was the second largest among Senators paid by the Fannie and Freddie
The amount of money that he's received from FM/FM is so completely dwarfed by *individual contributions* of (average of $96 each as of Apr 2008) that even *assuming* that he decides he owes fealty to donors in proportion to the amount they gave, their contribution is significant.
But there's significant evidence that campaign donations aren't at all payments to hold a given opinion. The only connections that have been shown to have a basis in reality are (a) a sign of ideological alignment (the NRA doesn't sway people by campaign contributions, it contributes to campaigns of people it believes it will help) and (b) contributions tend to precede lobbyist access, which has an imperfect rate of success, because it never grants you exclusive access.
But, OK, assume lobbyist access will influence -- perhaps even compromise -- Obama. Consider that the McCain campaign already has these lobbyists on the inside.
If a damaging allegation surfaces against your side, be quick to come up with a similar sounding one against the opponent. It does not matter, if your counter-allegation is weakly substantiated,
That's an astute observation, but it doesn't apply here. The scope of FM/FM's lobbying efforts is documented, the scale of funds they've poured into it is several orders of magnitude to what they've given to Obama. This isn't weakly substantiated at all, and it's independently substantiatable from a number of sources by a bit of Googling or some of the links I've offered in the discussion.
but the label is reused, "the questions linger", and it has already been said, that Sarah has "her own troopergate".
Yeah, I think that's a bit of laziness in applying the label -- each of the situations you've described is pretty different -- but I can't agree that means there aren't legitimate questions about Palin's behavior.
- In this hypothetical debate, I obviously did not change this democratic-socialist's mind. Due to cognitive dissonance he simply chose to not hear what I was saying to him.
Or, perhaps confronted with a person who wasn't distinguishing taxation from theft, or private vehicles from public goods, he simply backed away slowly and left.
Or, perhaps noticing he seemed to be constructed from straw (free car for everybody?), he realized he was a foil in a hypothetical argument and also decided to exit.
You're kidding, right? Of course, that's the problem with journalism, is the deception that the human mind can be unbiased. Most journalists lean heavily left-of-center,
We don't really have a heavy left-of-center in the United States. "Socialism" here is public education and *maybe*, at the far left end of the scale, nationalization of health insurance. I don't think there's a viable candidate or officeholder on the federal landscape who'd nationalize any other sector.
(By the same token, we don't really have genuine economic liberals highly visible on the landscape, as is evidenced by the fact that we're perfectly happy to socialize a financial/prop/casualty insurer in a pinch and that we haven't either.)
One thing I find rarely done is the realization that maybe they can never be truly objective...
Probably true. Some bias is inevitable. However, there's mitigating it, and there's embracing it. It's pretty obvious that Fox does *neither* -- they don't stop with embracing it, they move into full-fledged agenda, where you don't just subconsciously or unintentionally see things as your background and situation lead you to, you consciously select facts and arguments in service of a predetermined goal.
In the meanwhile, I'm unable to find a 2005 Vote on S.190... and that's in line with the Bloomberg editorial you linked which states that the measure was opposed in committee, which means it's hard to infer a position for any Democrat (or Republican) who wasn't on the banking/finance committee at the time.
A side note on that -- it's actually pretty hard to imagine exactly how this could have been killed in committee by Democrats alone. Republicans were in control of the 109th Congress/Senate 55-45, and it looks as if fhey were in control of the Finance/Banking committee 11-10. There may be procedural tactics I'm not familiar with that would enable them to kill something, or there might have been a few Republicans in opposition, but without knowing this, something doesn't add up about the takeaway story that the lack of FM/FM regulation is all the Democrat's fault.
An adviser on the hypothetical and future transition... Most insignificant...
If the polls are to be believed, there are roughly even odds on this "hypothetical" transition at the moment. And I can't agree planning the organization and staffing of a Presidential adminstration is insignificant. If you have an alternative explanation of his job description, though, I'm open.
There's also the matter of the other people I mentioned.
Here you are equating "directing" with "receiving".
I'm not sure why this is a problem. Taking on the role of a straight-up advocate, as lobbyists do, seems at least as likely to shape one's opinions as giving access to lobbyists (generally the only demonstrable custom connected with campaign donations), and it appears these people are a significant part of the McCain campaign.
Now, I certainly think it's certainly possible their views may be larger than that of your standard shill, but I think that if you allow that possibility to people who were actively lobbying for and dispersing funds from FM/FM, you have to allow the same possibility to those who've accepted funds and offered an audience to those lobbyists.
And Obama has none, right?
I think I did state in my earlier posts that I certainly don't think that influence from FM/FM is contained to Republicans, and that I'm aware it does touch Obama's campaign.
I'm not, however, aware of specific connections other than Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson. But it turns out Raines' role in Obama's campaign appears to be limited to speaking to some members of the campaign staff: he states he's never advised Obama directly on anything and that contact with the campaign has been a few phone calls. Jim Johnson was definitely more of an insider but was more or less fired from the VP search committee when a few people kicked up dirt about his personal mortgage terms, and it's not clear he was ever a policy adviser.
Maybe there's more though. I'll say again that it wouldn't surprise me. *Everybody* in Washington was connected to FM/FM.
But the Democrats opposed it on a party line -- according to the article. Perhaps, you can discuss it with your acquaintances among Congressional leaders, and post the results?
Congressional scholars (political scientists who study how congress works) were the people who I mentioned earlier, but perhaps I can ask some acquaintances who've been staffers.
In the meanwhile, I'm unable to find a 2005 Vote on S.190... and that's in line with the Bloomberg editorial you linked which states that the measure was opposed in committee, which means it's hard to infer a position for any Democrat (or Republican) who wasn't on the banking/finance committee at the time.
Yeah, she wanted a man, who threatened to kill his ex father-in-law and tasered his own 10 year-old son, to not be a police officer in her State. An outrageous violation of the due process on rule-of-law.
I don't think anybody's argued that the police officer's alleged actions were defensible, but that this wouldn't justify a violation of the law on Palin's part. However, it's not clear she's actually in any particular trouble. I'll be interested in the conclusions of the investigation and court case, if any. Until there are some, I think this is a fairly minor point, especially in comparison to other things, say, her consistent disembling about earmarks.
Yep... Can be compared with Clinton using Arkansas troopers to deliver women to him.
I'm not sure why Clinton is important to the discussion either. I certainly wouldn't suggest the stories of his history are the bar against which Palin's behavior should be compared.
Are you seriously equating an ex-lobbyist working for McCain (on McCain's presidential transition -- a rather remote future possibility), with Obama and Dodd receiving actual cash?..
Actually, if you want to look at the situation closely, there are a number of factors that would make McCain's connections at least as significant direct cash to the campaign. For one thing, most congressional scholars I've talked to suggest that the effects of donations on votes and legislation is overrated -- it's the secondary direct lobbying that comes with the access cash tends to help shape policy. And there's a number of businesses, industries, and other groups that simply spread their collections around. Pre 2006 election, FM/FM were giving the slight balance (about 53%) of their contributions to Republicans. Post 2006, it's about 56% to Democrats (and in general, they've increased lobbying dollars over time).
John McCain's received about $20k of that. Assuming a linear relationship between cash received and compromise on the topic and considering no other factors, I suppose you could argue that McCain's 1/6th as compromised as Obama.
As it is, though, I can't agree that an adviser on Presidential transition is some kind of insignificant connection. That sounds to me like that means he'll be helping plan the organization and staffing of a McCain Whitehouse. And if touching the money produces compromise, Timmons must be about twice as compromised as Obama. But if you wanted to be generous and assume he plays a smaller role in the McCain campaign, we could discount that, so McCain might still be less compromised under our theoretical linear relationship to money touched.
However, that's not the only McCain campaign connection. We've also got Aquiles Suarez, an economic adviser to the McCain campaign, at least according to some 2007 McCain press releases. Former director of government and industry relations for Fannie Mae. Directed about $47 million in lobbying from 2003 to 2006.
Again, assuming a linear relation, this person is about 400 times more compromised than Obama. However, if you want to be generous and assume he plays a smaller role in the campaign, we really only have to discount the influence by a factor of 100.
It doesn't stop there, though. Charlie Black. Rick Davis. Wayne Berman... I think there's at least a few more on the campaign, plus a dozen or so fundraisers for McCain.
So, no, I don't think Obama's campaign donation numbers say it all.
But what I'm really trying to do here is not so much convince anybody that McCain's uniquely attached to them (you can come up with a number of Obama connections as well) so much as to illustrate how pervasive FM/FM's presence has been in Washington for a long time, and how little of the story the actual campaign donations tell.
Wow... No wonder, Sarah Palin's "troopergate" is seriously compared with Bill Clinton's.
Troopergate is interesting as a test of how important process and rule-of-law are to Palin, but I agree that it's not all that significant. There's far better reasons to worry about Palin as an officeholder. That's a bit offtopic for this post, though, and I suspect you were simply mocking the idea that the McCain campaign might have connections with FM/FM. Hopefully I've addressed this adequately enough.
I don't mean to be a troll, just curious. In what way is Google Street View useful?
I've used it a few times to get a visual of a destination before traveling there. Street numbers are great, but it's nice to be able to recognize a place by sight as you're looking for it.
Could this possibly lead to my dream mobile phone? Could it? With the Android platform being open-source, I think it is just possible.
Dude, Android has nothing to do with your dream phone. The Nokia 5190 was pretty much doing what you wanted it to 10 years ago. Pick one up off of eBay for less than $30 and be happy, unless you're worried that the extra features like SMS and Snake will interfere with your experience. Tell all your Slashdot friends who also just want a phone, too.
I don't know, who the "repubs" want to pay, but the Democrats' intentions are certainly "less than honorable". Christopher Dodd and Barack Obama are the two-highest beneficiaries of the Fannie and Freddie lobbying efforts -- despite the vast accounting irregularities of both monsters.
IIRC, the total lobbying effort of Fannie and Freddie has been in the hundreds of millions, and the Obama campaign's share is about $112,000. I'm not sure he's received more than 1-2% of their attention. The lobbying effort has been so huge that I doubt there are very many federal offices that haven't been touched by it.
Not that this is a partisan issue. It's pretty clear Fannie and Freddie really worked hard to have as much influence as possible, and I think that's one of the reasons why the recent bailout had a provision that they had to curtail lobbying activity.
You know, when a bank gets robbed, and the police department watches as the robbers get away, it's certainly a failure on the police side of things, but the primary responsibility still lies on the robbers themselves.
Not that you shouldn't try to address both problems, but ultimate responsibility for the crime is still pretty clear.
(Now, if the police provide the guns and the getaway car...)
If his idea works as well stated in the article, the guy deserves more than "a $25,000 scholarship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development."
Oh yeah. And if he doesn't get a real return on this while patent trolls are sucking blood out of industry, there's something very wrong.
If it's his invention and it does what it says he does, this is exactly the kind of thing the enterprise system should reward generously.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, step back, I voted republican. We cool now?
Sure. As long as that's past tense, previous to 2000, or doesn't apply to the office of the Presidency.
Otherwise... no.
At least one imperative programming language (Prolog/etc)
Pretty sure you meant to say "declarative" or "logic" rather than imperative. :)
If you're computing from a fixed seating position you're probably sitting at a desk.
If you're sitting at a desk, it might be your desk, at which you could do all of those things, but it might not. It might be at the office you're visiting.
It might not be a desk. It might be a seat on a plane or train, sunlight coming in from a nearby window you don't control (and boy, if there's any setting in which you have almost no room to maneuver, it's on a plane in coach. And yet the Mac Book Air? Glossy only from day one.)
It might be the one of a small set of seats available to you at a conference room, or a lecture hall.
It might be a park bench, it might be on the couch in the living room facing the TV where you're sitting to be with your SO or family while they're watching it, and you're trying to work, but the sunset through the window behind the couch is causing a problem.
If you bought a laptop, the whole point is that you'd like to be able to move it around and use it anywhere. The constraints arbitrarily added by the glare off a glossy screen make it more difficult.
And having used one for the past year, the glare issue is really a red herring. I don't notice it.
That's great that it doesn't bother you, and I think it's fine that people who for whatever reason don't seem to mind glare can buy glossy screens, but the tone of your post is so dismissive of the genuine problems people have with glossy screens that it's bordering on insulting.
It's really hard to fathom that anyone who has actually used a glossy display for any serious amount of time wouldn't prefer it to a matte display.
For a bit over two months this year I was borrowing laptops while mine broke, including a MacBook. They had glossy screens. I absolutely hate them. I suppose you can argue that 2 months for 8-14 hours per day of use isn't a "serious amount of time", but you'd be wrong.
Phil: You offset the reflection by the brightness, and consumers love it.
That's great, but people who actually have to *work* for a while on their machines will probably hate it.
I thoroughly hate it, so thoroughly that it was a complete dealbreaker for me on the MacBook and MacBook Air, so thoroughly that I very nearly hate Phil personally for that statement, so thoroughly that despite everything else I love about Apple products, if I can only get them with a glossy screen, I might not bother.
One of the great things about a notebook is you can turn it however you want!
That's true if the environment you're working in doesn't have any constraints on which way you're sitting, which is often not the case. And I don't want to spend time futzing around with avoiding glare. I have other things to do with this machine I've bought.
They do not exist to help children learn. That is simply not the reason the union exists.
This is true, but it's beside the point. The idea that unions exist to serve the interests of teachers isn't particularly problematic, because teacher satisfaction hardly precludes student success, in fact, it's rather dependent on it.
Not to mention that it's completely orthogonal to unions -- if teacher's interests were inherently at odds with genuine education, the problem really wouldn't be unions, it'd be teachers, and the remaining option would be non-professional educators...
Second, OS X hasn't been out 15 years.
Not named as OS X, but there's enough in common with NeXTStep that you can argue it's been out for 19 years... longer if you count the 1986 previews.
There's also a number of things that carried over from OS 9 that might still be important to workflow under OS X, mostly AppleScript, but there might be a few other things.
Democrats blocked regulation in 2004
How? They held minorities in both the house, the senate, and every committee. Bush held the Presidency.
defeated the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, cosponsored by John McCain
McCain was a late cosponsor, 2006, and the author of the S.190 was Chuck Hagel. I've written elsewhere that at least in theory, McCain deserves from credit for this, but since the bill never materialized, it's not clear what form the actual policy would have taken, nor, for that matter, how the Democrats were the major obstruction in adopting S.190, since they didn't control the Senate.
It's also worth noting that Hagel has been a fairly vocal Obama supporter.
That said, the quotes from those Democrats are interesting and indicate they didn't have a particularly strong grasp of the situation. The question is if the Republicans involved did and what exactly they were proposing to do -- remember, this is in the wake of the accounting problems *not* hearings on the housing bubble, CDOs, or most of the other issues relevant to today's financial turmoil, in which the GSEs really only play part that's really quite replaceable by a host of entities from the private sector.
In particular, I don't think Mr. Manzullo's displaying a particularly great grasp of the private sector here:
Mr. Raines, 1.1 million bonus and a $526,000 salary. Jamie Gorelick, $779,000 bonus on a salary of 567,000. This is -- what you state on page 11 is nothing less than -- than staggering
Not particularly high compensation for C-list private sector positions, actually. Unfortunate, but if there's any scandal to this, then the center of it is not here.
People think that conservatives are anti-intellectual, which isn't necessarily the case. It's that they're anti-elitism.
That's fine as far as it goes, but the question is -- where does a lack of respect for real elite achievements begin?
When you're going in for surgery, are you going to be anti-elite?
The school district where I grew up put in a math program that was utterly and completely worthless. Math scores tanked, parents complained, and it was hard to believe that even 30% of the parents supported the new math program. However, the district stuck to their guns because some college professors thought it was the best thing in the world.
Anybody who understand that practical results matter more than expert advice is exhibiting common sense. I don't think most people are going to argue otherwise. I get really, really nervous, however, when people start to question whether expertise is important at all -- or the idea that looking towards expertise is "elitism."
Fortunately, there's signs that this isn't actually so much a conservative philosophy as it is a convenient tool for discarding expert advice that you don't want to believe, regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. And there's plenty of evidence that the accomplished and wealthy are happy to support conservative politics as well as liberal.
While we're at it, McCain authored a similar regulation in the Senate in 2005, yet he's somehow being blamed for the lack of regulations that caused the mortgage failures.
Chuck Hagel's the original sponsor of the bill, McCain wasn't on the list of 2005 cosponsors, so I don't think he can have a reasonable claim to authorship. He did become a cosponsor sometime after the bill got stuck in committee, for which he probably deserves some credit.
He's probably getting hammered for his support of Gramm-sponsored deregulation legislation. Not that he's by any means alone in this, so it's somewhat unfair, though he is more than casually connected with Gramm, so it's hard to say.
In a move that could help increase home ownership rates among minorities and low-income consumers, the Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders.
There's a distinction here that's important to understand. FM/FM played a role in the problems, but most of that appears to have been overleveraging based on implied guarantees from the government and investment in overrated CDOs like every other private institution that's in trouble -- *not* their involvement in CRA loans, which were fully-underwritten and whose recipients definitely had to show ability to repay. As far as I've seen, CRA loans actually have a higher repayment rate and lower default rate than general commercial lending over the last 10 years.
It's OK for simple stuff, but trying to do something like implementing a loop in a spreadsheet.
This is one reason the VB scripting turns out to be highly useful. But that said... for half the things loops might be useful for in a normal context, they're wrong in a spreadsheet. Iterating over a set of data isn't done with loops, it's done with applying formulas over a range of cells. And if you turn on iteration for the spreadsheet, it *is* possible to build flow-controlling state machines without using the scripting engine. Not particularly natural for most imperative programmers, but definitely possible.
So I don't think loops are the issue. My understanding is that the biggest problem with using Excel for detailed number crunching is in how they handle some precision/float issues.
... laughs at your difficulties.
(but is afraid of zombie Kurt Gödel.)
Good grief, you are using those as examples of socialism working? Lots of people have problems with police departments all over the place,
Especially after a number of odd personal encounters with the police over the last year, I certainly wouldn't argue that there are no problems. However, there's some significant problems with all kinds of commercial activity, and I'm not out arguing that it should be abolished, just perhaps the rules of the game should be a bit different...
and listing schools there is just short of insanity.
Why? I mean, I understand there are problems with public schools as well as anybody, probably better than most since I briefly ventured into the system as a teacher before deciding industry might well be a better place for me. There are a number of things they do well, though, and after examining a number of private schools and home schooling, I'm not convinced either effort would work better on a society-wide level.
Roads are almost never in good repair, and when is the last you you saw a road crew where you thought "hey, that's just about the right number of people and they are all working diligently".
Construction is frequent where I've lived, which is in itself annoying (and in particular, if there's any inefficiency that leaps out at me and gets on my nerves, it's that crews seem to block out much, much more or the road than necessary, sometimes more than 10x what they're actually working on), but the roads generally are in good repair. Last year I also had the opportunity to take a four-month road trip across 25 states and my experience was that we've got a pretty vast and remarkable highway system.
Public libraries and fire departments are probably at the top of that list as to things that generally work OK - but that's mostly because so few people pay attention to what they spend, you can't say for sure how truly inefficient they may be (especially libraries).
Operationally, they're obviously cost centers, but it's also hard to measure what the precise gains they produce in terms of community and individual capital, so efficiency is sortof an odd point. Perhaps there's some research that examines this, but I suspect that you either believe it's an investment in the community or you don't. Most people do.
You do realize that in a lot of smaller communities the fire department is local volunteers right? That's not socialism.
It's true, it's more or less communitarianism. You can also argue that creating a city-run professional fire department is pretty much the same thing -- simply that people are specializing, quite possibly reaping some gains in the process, and supporting the community with their money rather than their time...
How many does one need?
Do you realize you just asked that question when faced with (a) a list of people actively and currently in McCain's inside circle that's 3-6 times as long and (b) the explanation that of the *2* people connected with the Obama campaign, 1's "involvement" was ridiculously peripheral and the other was fired?
Sincerely holding an opinion -- shaped by whatever factors -- is worlds away from insincerely expressing the same opinion for money. Obama was the second largest among Senators paid by the Fannie and Freddie
The amount of money that he's received from FM/FM is so completely dwarfed by *individual contributions* of (average of $96 each as of Apr 2008) that even *assuming* that he decides he owes fealty to donors in proportion to the amount they gave, their contribution is significant.
But there's significant evidence that campaign donations aren't at all payments to hold a given opinion. The only connections that have been shown to have a basis in reality are (a) a sign of ideological alignment (the NRA doesn't sway people by campaign contributions, it contributes to campaigns of people it believes it will help) and (b) contributions tend to precede lobbyist access, which has an imperfect rate of success, because it never grants you exclusive access.
But, OK, assume lobbyist access will influence -- perhaps even compromise -- Obama. Consider that the McCain campaign already has these lobbyists on the inside.
If a damaging allegation surfaces against your side, be quick to come up with a similar sounding one against the opponent. It does not matter, if your counter-allegation is weakly substantiated,
That's an astute observation, but it doesn't apply here. The scope of FM/FM's lobbying efforts is documented, the scale of funds they've poured into it is several orders of magnitude to what they've given to Obama. This isn't weakly substantiated at all, and it's independently substantiatable from a number of sources by a bit of Googling or some of the links I've offered in the discussion.
but the label is reused, "the questions linger", and it has already been said, that Sarah has "her own troopergate".
Yeah, I think that's a bit of laziness in applying the label -- each of the situations you've described is pretty different -- but I can't agree that means there aren't legitimate questions about Palin's behavior.
- In this hypothetical debate, I obviously did not change this democratic-socialist's mind. Due to cognitive dissonance he simply chose to not hear what I was saying to him.
Or, perhaps confronted with a person who wasn't distinguishing taxation from theft, or private vehicles from public goods, he simply backed away slowly and left.
Or, perhaps noticing he seemed to be constructed from straw (free car for everybody?), he realized he was a foil in a hypothetical argument and also decided to exit.
You're kidding, right? Of course, that's the problem with journalism, is the deception that the human mind can be unbiased. Most journalists lean heavily left-of-center,
We don't really have a heavy left-of-center in the United States. "Socialism" here is public education and *maybe*, at the far left end of the scale, nationalization of health insurance. I don't think there's a viable candidate or officeholder on the federal landscape who'd nationalize any other sector.
(By the same token, we don't really have genuine economic liberals highly visible on the landscape, as is evidenced by the fact that we're perfectly happy to socialize a financial/prop/casualty insurer in a pinch and that we haven't either.)
One thing I find rarely done is the realization that maybe they can never be truly objective...
Probably true. Some bias is inevitable. However, there's mitigating it, and there's embracing it. It's pretty obvious that Fox does *neither* -- they don't stop with embracing it, they move into full-fledged agenda, where you don't just subconsciously or unintentionally see things as your background and situation lead you to, you consciously select facts and arguments in service of a predetermined goal.
In the meanwhile, I'm unable to find a 2005 Vote on S.190 ... and that's in line with the Bloomberg editorial you linked which states that the measure was opposed in committee, which means it's hard to infer a position for any Democrat (or Republican) who wasn't on the banking/finance committee at the time.
A side note on that -- it's actually pretty hard to imagine exactly how this could have been killed in committee by Democrats alone. Republicans were in control of the 109th Congress/Senate 55-45, and it looks as if fhey were in control of the Finance/Banking committee 11-10. There may be procedural tactics I'm not familiar with that would enable them to kill something, or there might have been a few Republicans in opposition, but without knowing this, something doesn't add up about the takeaway story that the lack of FM/FM regulation is all the Democrat's fault.
An adviser on the hypothetical and future transition... Most insignificant...
If the polls are to be believed, there are roughly even odds on this "hypothetical" transition at the moment. And I can't agree planning the organization and staffing of a Presidential adminstration is insignificant. If you have an alternative explanation of his job description, though, I'm open.
There's also the matter of the other people I mentioned.
Here you are equating "directing" with "receiving".
I'm not sure why this is a problem. Taking on the role of a straight-up advocate, as lobbyists do, seems at least as likely to shape one's opinions as giving access to lobbyists (generally the only demonstrable custom connected with campaign donations), and it appears these people are a significant part of the McCain campaign.
Now, I certainly think it's certainly possible their views may be larger than that of your standard shill, but I think that if you allow that possibility to people who were actively lobbying for and dispersing funds from FM/FM, you have to allow the same possibility to those who've accepted funds and offered an audience to those lobbyists.
And Obama has none, right?
I think I did state in my earlier posts that I certainly don't think that influence from FM/FM is contained to Republicans, and that I'm aware it does touch Obama's campaign.
I'm not, however, aware of specific connections other than Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson. But it turns out Raines' role in Obama's campaign appears to be limited to speaking to some members of the campaign staff: he states he's never advised Obama directly on anything and that contact with the campaign has been a few phone calls. Jim Johnson was definitely more of an insider but was more or less fired from the VP search committee when a few people kicked up dirt about his personal mortgage terms, and it's not clear he was ever a policy adviser.
Maybe there's more though. I'll say again that it wouldn't surprise me. *Everybody* in Washington was connected to FM/FM.
But the Democrats opposed it on a party line -- according to the article. Perhaps, you can discuss it with your acquaintances among Congressional leaders, and post the results?
Congressional scholars (political scientists who study how congress works) were the people who I mentioned earlier, but perhaps I can ask some acquaintances who've been staffers.
In the meanwhile, I'm unable to find a 2005 Vote on S.190 ... and that's in line with the Bloomberg editorial you linked which states that the measure was opposed in committee, which means it's hard to infer a position for any Democrat (or Republican) who wasn't on the banking/finance committee at the time.
Yeah, she wanted a man, who threatened to kill his ex father-in-law and tasered his own 10 year-old son, to not be a police officer in her State. An outrageous violation of the due process on rule-of-law.
I don't think anybody's argued that the police officer's alleged actions were defensible, but that this wouldn't justify a violation of the law on Palin's part. However, it's not clear she's actually in any particular trouble. I'll be interested in the conclusions of the investigation and court case, if any. Until there are some, I think this is a fairly minor point, especially in comparison to other things, say, her consistent disembling about earmarks.
Yep... Can be compared with Clinton using Arkansas troopers to deliver women to him.
I'm not sure why Clinton is important to the discussion either. I certainly wouldn't suggest the stories of his history are the bar against which Palin's behavior should be compared.
Are you seriously equating an ex-lobbyist working for McCain (on McCain's presidential transition -- a rather remote future possibility), with Obama and Dodd receiving actual cash?..
Actually, if you want to look at the situation closely, there are a number of factors that would make McCain's connections at least as significant direct cash to the campaign. For one thing, most congressional scholars I've talked to suggest that the effects of donations on votes and legislation is overrated -- it's the secondary direct lobbying that comes with the access cash tends to help shape policy. And there's a number of businesses, industries, and other groups that simply spread their collections around. Pre 2006 election, FM/FM were giving the slight balance (about 53%) of their contributions to Republicans. Post 2006, it's about 56% to Democrats (and in general, they've increased lobbying dollars over time).
John McCain's received about $20k of that. Assuming a linear relationship between cash received and compromise on the topic and considering no other factors, I suppose you could argue that McCain's 1/6th as compromised as Obama.
As it is, though, I can't agree that an adviser on Presidential transition is some kind of insignificant connection. That sounds to me like that means he'll be helping plan the organization and staffing of a McCain Whitehouse. And if touching the money produces compromise, Timmons must be about twice as compromised as Obama. But if you wanted to be generous and assume he plays a smaller role in the McCain campaign, we could discount that, so McCain might still be less compromised under our theoretical linear relationship to money touched.
However, that's not the only McCain campaign connection. We've also got Aquiles Suarez, an economic adviser to the McCain campaign, at least according to some 2007 McCain press releases. Former director of government and industry relations for Fannie Mae. Directed about $47 million in lobbying from 2003 to 2006.
Again, assuming a linear relation, this person is about 400 times more compromised than Obama. However, if you want to be generous and assume he plays a smaller role in the campaign, we really only have to discount the influence by a factor of 100.
It doesn't stop there, though. Charlie Black. Rick Davis. Wayne Berman... I think there's at least a few more on the campaign, plus a dozen or so fundraisers for McCain.
So, no, I don't think Obama's campaign donation numbers say it all.
But what I'm really trying to do here is not so much convince anybody that McCain's uniquely attached to them (you can come up with a number of Obama connections as well) so much as to illustrate how pervasive FM/FM's presence has been in Washington for a long time, and how little of the story the actual campaign donations tell.
Wow... No wonder, Sarah Palin's "troopergate" is seriously compared with Bill Clinton's.
Troopergate is interesting as a test of how important process and rule-of-law are to Palin, but I agree that it's not all that significant. There's far better reasons to worry about Palin as an officeholder. That's a bit offtopic for this post, though, and I suspect you were simply mocking the idea that the McCain campaign might have connections with FM/FM. Hopefully I've addressed this adequately enough.
I don't mean to be a troll, just curious. In what way is Google Street View useful?
I've used it a few times to get a visual of a destination before traveling there. Street numbers are great, but it's nice to be able to recognize a place by sight as you're looking for it.
Could this possibly lead to my dream mobile phone? Could it? With the Android platform being open-source, I think it is just possible.
Dude, Android has nothing to do with your dream phone. The Nokia 5190 was pretty much doing what you wanted it to 10 years ago. Pick one up off of eBay for less than $30 and be happy, unless you're worried that the extra features like SMS and Snake will interfere with your experience. Tell all your Slashdot friends who also just want a phone, too.
I don't know, who the "repubs" want to pay, but the Democrats' intentions are certainly "less than honorable". Christopher Dodd and Barack Obama are the two-highest beneficiaries of the Fannie and Freddie lobbying efforts -- despite the vast accounting irregularities of both monsters.
IIRC, the total lobbying effort of Fannie and Freddie has been in the hundreds of millions, and the Obama campaign's share is about $112,000. I'm not sure he's received more than 1-2% of their attention. The lobbying effort has been so huge that I doubt there are very many federal offices that haven't been touched by it.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0912/p03s01-usec.html
There are certainly connections with the McCain campaign:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=aQIOOr9klOnE&refer=home
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/us/politics/22mccain.html
Not that this is a partisan issue. It's pretty clear Fannie and Freddie really worked hard to have as much influence as possible, and I think that's one of the reasons why the recent bailout had a provision that they had to curtail lobbying activity.
Blame Congress for where we are now.
You know, when a bank gets robbed, and the police department watches as the robbers get away, it's certainly a failure on the police side of things, but the primary responsibility still lies on the robbers themselves.
Not that you shouldn't try to address both problems, but ultimate responsibility for the crime is still pretty clear.
(Now, if the police provide the guns and the getaway car...)
The key is large rocks and properly accelerating the cats.
If you pick a big enough rock, the problem of accelerating the cat takes care of itself. :)
If his idea works as well stated in the article, the guy deserves more than "a $25,000 scholarship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development."
Oh yeah. And if he doesn't get a real return on this while patent trolls are sucking blood out of industry, there's something very wrong.
If it's his invention and it does what it says he does, this is exactly the kind of thing the enterprise system should reward generously.