167 individual people control 37+ Trillion dollars of actual monetary wealth in the world. I am not the reductionist.
If you think that this concentration of wealth does not produce the outcome desired by those individuals? Then you don't see that this is how they got to that position, over the last 30 years, when thety were less than 1/3 as wealthy, and how they used this influence to drive them to the current concentration.
There is NO "tea party" - tho' the passions do actually run that high, 'mong the recruited rabble. There's just the Koch's. They are the "regressive, brute" funding team, of the monied elite.
No, what YOU don't understand it that the Kochs have taken a hit in the past two weeks' free fall on Wall Street. They therefore have sent forth the word that the Tea Party needs to cut it the fuck out.
And the Tea Party is ignoring them.
Thus my "Victor Frankenstein" comment.
I'm telling you that YOUR picture of the current state of Washington and the Repugnican Party is oversimplified. YOU live in California. *I* live in rural Ohio, in the heart of Tea Party country. I'm personally acquainted with far too many of these nit-wits. And they are NOT part of the "everybody in Washington works for the plutocrats" equation.
In the end? The powerful will be more so - you will pay more, and get less.
Mission accomplished, and your expectations diminished, as planned.
Oh, horseshit.
The "drama and theatrics" of which you so dismissively speak is ALL on the Tea Party side. The House clowns behind this public tantrum ARE the agents of plutocrats - but they are unwitting ones, blinded to the control of their puppetmasters by their ideology and prideful ignorance. That's an argyle horse, because all their non-TP peers understand EXACTLY who has purchased them.
The Tea Party currently controls the Republican Party - and, because of gerrymandering and the fact that most Democrats only vote once every four years, that is unlikely to change any time soon. It is unlikely to change, because mainstream Republican voters don't turn out in significant numbers for primary elections. Instead, they're happy to cast their vote for a Republican slate in the general election, and go away satisfied that they've done their duty to party and (only incidentally) country. So it's the "base" - the evangelicals that Ronald Reagan's campaign strategy so empowered - the NRA lifers, and the slack-jawed Fox News addicts that turn out for the primaries. Those are the identical constituencies of the Tea Party, and they'll uncritically accept and vote in accordance with any propaganda effort that gets them sufficiently riled up over abortion, gun rights, taxes, and "socialism" (all while happily depositing their Social Security checks, and leaning as heavily on their Medicare coverage as they do on their walkers and canes).
Cue the Koch brothers - the oil billionaires who have (thanks to the Roberts Court's decisions that money and speech are somehow equivalent, that "corporations are people" for purposes of political speech, and that unlimited secret spending on political campaigns - as long as it pretends to be "educational" and "issue-based" - is a bastion of fr-r-ee-dom!) essentially bankrolled the entire Tea Party monster from its inception, as a proxy for their personal business interests.
Only now the monster has escaped their control - as Victor Frankenstein could have told them it inevitably would. And it's far too late to chain it back up in the basement, because the Tea Party is now a self-sustaining reaction.
THAT's the difference. Washington's establishment pols are self-aware. The Tea Party is not. It's all id - and the Republican superego has left the building, so its ego, the career Republican establishment, has been left to fend for itself. The result is that the career Republican pols are falling all over themselves to embrace all things Tea, in perfectly-justified panic over being "primaried" (a nonce verb that owes its very existence to the Tea Party) out of their comfy jobs as shills for whoever pays them to be.
It's the triumph of arrogant ignorance over calculated self-interest - and that is Not A Good Thing for the country. Or you and me, for that matter, because the Tea Party is the very definition of a faith-based movement. And I'm not talking about their Christian evangelism, here. I'm talking about their blind hatred of "socialism" - despite their personal dependence on it - of taxes - even though our tax rates are still near historic lows (and FAR lower than during the Eisenhower administration, which is a Golden Era in the Tea Party credo) - and of all things Obama - regardless of the fact that our 44th president is an enthusiastic centrist, and ardent supporter of the status quo.
Your sneering dismissal of all pols as corrupt representatives of corporate plutocracy represents a faux-sophisticate's rhetorical overreach: they're NOT all the same. The Tea Partiers are DANGEROUS, precisely because they're NOT subject to the "business-as-usual" corruption of Washington politics. They're True Believers - and not in the good, Marvel-comics way, but in the terrible Spanish-Inquisition-and-Crusades way.
Please explain how this "study" corrected for the difference in traffic conditions between rush hour/daytime driving and driving on weekends and after 9:00pm.
On second thought, don't bother. This "study" isn't worthy of the effort.
Now a real interesting development happened a little while back, John Fogerty was sued by the current owner of CCR IP, for plagiarizing himself with his newer music (in the early 90s his career took off again when the 20 years of bondage ended and he could make and sell new music that didn't automagically belong to someone else.) In court the greedy bastard that sued him made it perfectly clear owning CCR wasn't enough, that even though he was no longer under contract, he had every intention of keeping John under his thumb for the rest of his natural life and take everything he made for his own benefit. The Judge informed said scumbag that a songwriter sounds like that songwriter because HE IS THAT SONGWRITER... that CCR songs sound like CCR songs and one would only expect that future songs by that artist might have a similar style. The case was crushed.
But here where it get's interesting. Part of the reason nuisance suits have been so effective is that defending them, leave you with a terrible court expense whether you win or lose. John asked the court, can I sue this ass-hat to recover my court costs? The judge said go for it, and John got most of 2 million dollars in court costs back.
The scumbag in question was Saul Zaentz, owner for many decades of Fantasy Records, in Berkeley, CA. (CCR started as a high-school band called the Golliwogs in El Cerrito,-about a ten-minute drive from Fantasy's studio). FWIW - he spent a large amount of the songwriting royalties he screwed Fogarty out of making the movie Amadeus.
He sued Fogerty over the song, "The Old Man Is Down The Road" - but what pissed him off enough to doggedly pursue the case was "Zaentz Can't Dance" (later changed to "Vantz Can't Dance", after Zaentz filed a defamation action).
Hey, my wife and I both contracted Valley Fever when we moved to Las Vegas, in 2004.
I've never been that sick before. Throwing up once an hour for close to a week. Drained of energy for a couple of months afterward.
God-fucking-AWFUL disease.
Take the recent Microsoft Xbox One fiasco. I find it hard to believe that a company like Microsoft would not have known this reaction was coming. Any trivial study of online sentiment data would have shown this in advance.
If you find that hard to believe, then you know very little about Microsoft's management.
Did you not notice the Vista fiasco of a few years back (not to mention the Windows 8 disaster, now playing at a computer store near you)?
Things were better (believe it or not) when billg was in charge. At least back then, the geeks actually had some voice in product decisions. Ever since that nincompoop Ballmer took over, it's been MBAs, all the way down.
MBAs don't listen to ANYONE - except other MBAs. Even then, they only pay attention if those MBAs outrank them. MBAs are specifically conditioned to focus exclusively on improving margins, cutting costs, and pumping up the stock price. Quality is not an issue that even registers with them. Customers are wallets with legs. Customer input is to be solicited only when unavoidable, and only on non-business-related issues: How do you feel about THIS commercial? Do you like the purple-on-green packaging, or the green-on-purple packaging better? Do you prefer the logo HERE, or over there?
Ballmer is a fool, who has surrounded himself with fools - all of whom have MBAs. But I repeat myself.
All of which is to say that the XBox One policies that caused such immense, and immediate backlash were ENTIRELY believable products of the Microsoft management environment. "MBAs are people who know the price of everything - and the value of NOTHING," (with apologies to Oscar Wilde).
But to use financial success as the measure, when it is pre-installed is like saying that unleaded gas is more successful than leaded gas. If there is not alternative, then what is actually being measured?
I don't disagree. However, in the case of Windows 95, people upgraded to new computers specifically so that they COULD run 95 - because it was so obviously and incontrovertibly superior to Win 3.x in so many ways. You may not recall, but 95 had the largest open beta test of any software product EVER to that time. Microsoft very wisely encouraged everyone who wanted to try it ahead of its release to download and install it - and people did, in droves.
When 95 was finally released, it set records for copies sold, not only pre-installed, but new orders and upgrades from 3.x. It was wildly popular, and it deserved to be wildly popular, because Microsoft did an excellent job of making it both fully-featured and highly-debugged upon release.
That, of course, was back when billg was running the company. After he left, and that MBA schmuck Ballmer took over, we got Vista and Windows 8, two pieces of OS shit so loose and stinky that they barely qualify as diarrhea.
The people hid from one militant guy. Compare this to 1776 when British militants walked on a town. Citizens decided to gather together to oppose them despite the risk to their lives (, and many did die ). Boy how this country has changed.
You'e conflating the term "militant" with "military". The Boston Massacre (which turns out to have been no such thing - in actuality, the British soldiers were fired on from the crowd, which means they returned fire in self-defense - but the winners get to write the histories), known to the British as the Incident on King Street, occurred on March 5, 1770, when a detachment of eight British soldiers was sent to defend a sentry, Private Hugh White, who was surrounded by a mob of several hundred Bostonians, and was being subjected to insults and threats from its members. The soldiers formed a protective shield around White, and, on orders from their commander, Captain Thomas Preston, loaded their muskets. The mob's actions escalated to throwing objects, and daring the soldiers to fire. Richard Palmes, a local innkeeper, physically threatened Captain Preston with a club. One thrown object hit Private Hugh Montgomery hard enough to knock him off his feet. When Montgomery got back to his feet, he fired his musket into the crowd. No one was hit. However, Palmes further aggravated the situation by clubbing both Montgomery and Preston with his cudgel. Without orders or authorization, the other soldiers then fired into the mob, which promptly retreated.
After an overnight investigation, Preston and his detachment were all arrested - by the British military governor - the following morning. On the 17th, Preston, the eight men under his command, and four members of the mob who were alleged to have fired on the troops were all indicted for murder. Preston, defended by John Adams, with the assistance of Paul Revere (who drew a defense map of the scene, showing the position of the five fatalities in relation to that of the troops, a la CSI), was tried in late October, 1770 and acquitted on grounds that he had not ordered his men to fire. The eight soldiers under his command were tried separately in late November. Two of them were found guilty of manslaughter, because Adams convinced the jury that they had had good reason to feel their lives were in danger. The other six were found not guilty.
The four civilians were tried in December. One of the witnesses for the defense - a defendant's manservant - was found guilty of perjury. The four main defendants were acquitted.
The events of March 5, 1770 were skillfully exploited by Samuel Adams and his fellow separatists to help turn the tide of public opinion against British rule. Eventually, more than seven years after the so-called Boston Massacre (a phrase coined by Sam Adams), the colonies declared their independance, and the United States eventually won their independence from Britain.
John Adams, who successfully defended all the British soldiers involved in the incident against charges of murder, went on to write the U.S. Constitution, and become the second President of the United States.
Along the way, there were numerous failings - Windows 3.0, Windows 95 (while successful, was buggy) Windows ME, Windows Vista.
Windows 3.0 was not a failure. In terms of both enthusiastic adoption by consumers, and financially for Microsoft, it was a major success. Yes, it was buggy. That didn't matter to the marketplace.
Likewise, Windows 95 was a major success for Microsoft, by the same metrics. It was, to borrow a term from a certain self-aggrandizing billionaire, HUGE, both in the corporate and consumer marketplaces.
But you're dead right about ME and Vista. People reacted to both as if they were dead rats - and rightly so. Dell even forced Microsoft to offer its corporate customers a downgrade path - buy a PC with Vista, get a license to replace the OS with XP for free.
I'm in favor of partial legalization and regulation. Smoking kills 300k a year. Something like widespread meth use could come in 10x, 20x that. The reason drugs can get banned is because they are so incredibly devastating to individuals to families and to communities when their use becomes common. Pretending they are harmless undermines other points.
The question is whether the benefits of criminalization, the avoidance of widespread use, can be achieved without criminalization.
That Kool-Aid must be MIGHTY tasty. It sounds like you drained the whole pitcher.
Smoking marijuana is "incredibly devastating" ONLY to those who have been convicted for possessing it. (It's still a felony in a number of our more backward states, and in many countries - Singapore, I'm looking at YOU - elsewhere around the globe). Holland has demonstrated that, once it's decriminalized, even mainlining heroin is not especially devastating to anyone other than the user - and not necessarily even to him/her, if he/she doesn't share needles.
Crack and meth are another story, mostly because of the paranoiac effects of both the drugs themselves and of the prolonged sleep deprivation which accompanies their extreme abuse - but those effects, too, are enormously magnified SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY'RE ILLEGAL.
The point is: the single greatest harm ANY illegal drug creates is the consequences of the user falling afoul of the criminal "justice" system. Make them all legal, cheap, and easily available to adults (so that nobody has to steal to afford them, and the excessive profits that are built into their price to compensate dealers for the risks involved in supplying them disappear), and any harm they may do declines to mere nuisance value.
Don't be a tool. And, for pity's sake, put down that pitcher.
My story wasn't making a point of "I'm so smart, I saw it!". The point of the story is that anyone who claims that "nobody could have seen it before the crash" is lying, possibly to themselves.
Anyone who wanted to buy a house could have seen it. Anyone who had handled any piece of mortgage transactions could see it. Heck, anyone who had seen TV ads for the mortgage companies that were begging people to buy houses they couldn't really afford could have seen it. A number of economists from a wide variety of political backgrounds and theoretical schools warned about it. And that tells me that those who were trained to see it and had the job of looking for it and preventing it were either hopelessly incompetent or willfully blind.
I could not agree more.
And I didn't mean to imply any criticism of you or your post. It was more of a "me, too" kinda thing, only from the perspective of a mortgage industry outsider.
If spectators where driving the market nobody would have cared when the bubble popped.
The volume of social spending back of this bubble pop more or less proves you false. It was on 'the poor'* driving demand.
*Even with liar loans 'the poor' could not qualify if they told the truth.
You are absolutely wrong.
Everybody cared when the bubble popped for several reasons:
The sudden disappearance of the market for real estate, and the revelation of the VAST oversupply in housing led to a host of foreclosures around the world. They, in turn, immediately reduced the value of all the homes in their neighborhoods, as did the general dilapidation of those neighborhoods, as banks were overwhelmed with foreclosed properties, and neglected maintenance on the homes they'd repossessed.
The VAST majority of subprime mortgages wound up packaged as derivatives, which Wall Street (and its foreign equivalents) sold as gilt-edged securities. The revelation that they were, in fact, toxic "assets", nearly toppled the economy (and did, in fact, destroy Lehman Brothers). Apparently you weren't paying attention when the US Congress approved a $700 billion bailout for mortgage bankers UNDER GEORGE BUSH, with no disclosure requirement, and no conditions attached.
The abrupt economic collapse led to banks simply sitting on another $700 billion in Congressionally-approved bailout funds UNDER BARACK OBAMA, rather than loaning that money to individuals and small business holders (i.e. - "Main Street"), which considerably worsened the economic crisis, as businesses, in particular, found themselves in a sudden cash crisis FOR WHICH THERE WAS NO BASIS - except the bankers' greed and stupidity.
And it was, indeed, speculators who were responsible for the VAST majority of subprime loans. If the mortgage industry is so determined to give you free money that they offer you 0% interest for the first six months of the loan, AND they're willing to roll all their fees into the mortgage, AND you're planning on unloading the house you buy in THREE months, AND the market demand is so high that, essentially, your investment sells the day you list it, why wouldn't you take their money? That is EXACTLY what happened, over and over again. To make matters worse, many speculators were able to leverage their ownership of houses (and, worse yet, condos) they had no intention of ever occupying by pledging their titles as collateral for additional loans - which permitted them to build little empires of subprime-mortgaged properties.
Granted, many of the houses these speculators bought were in poor neighborhoods. That doesn't mean it was poor people who bought them.
There are now DOZENS of high-rise condominium developments in various stages of completion in and around Las Vegas. Their occupancy rate runs around 10%, on average. There are still lots of new houses in the area that never saw an occupant. And there are LOTS of houses in poorer areas that turned over multiple times - and were never occupied.
You have NO idea what you are talking about.
And listening to Fox News is not improving your education, either.
I saw the housing bubble. In 2006, specifically, when working as a programmer for a mortgage titling company. I just saw the numbers going into the database and realized that there's no possible way this could work in the long term - there were tons of refinanced loans for lower monthly payments that did nothing to pay back the principal, which more-or-less guaranteed that eventually the borrower couldn't pay.
I could see it, and I wasn't trained to see it or supposed to be looking for it. But it was there plain as day.
I saw the bubble in 2004.
My wife and I had just moved to Las Vegas - one of the housing bubble's domestic epicenters - and went looking for a house to buy. Nearly every property we saw had already been sold by the time the "for sale" sign went up on its lawn. Houses were selling for 20-40% over asking price within 45 minutes of appearing on the realty industry's MLS. Often, the same houses - having never been occupied by anyone other than a painting crew - would be back on the market three months later, for 50% more money. And would sell, again, in 45 minutes, for substantially more than their asking price.
We decided to bid on an FHA foreclosure property. The FHA brochure estimated its market value at $121K, so we put in a bid of $135K, just to be safe. It sold to a Mexican family that bid $179K.
That's when I told my wife, "This shows all the signs of a classic bubble market."
I was pretty sure it was a Vegas-only phenomenon, until I happened to talk to a friend of mine whose wife was trying to break into the travel-writing market. They'd recently returned from traveling the Mediterranean, and, when I told him about the crazy housing market in Las Vegas, he said, "It's not just Vegas. We were just in Bulgaria, and the Aegean coast there is completely lined with high-rise condo developments, in all stages of construction. And - we asked out of curiosity - they're all asking half a million dollars for a 1,200-square-foot condo on the 'Bulgarian Riviera'."
That's when I realized that the housing bubble was a global phenomenon - and that its collapse would be a world-wide catastrophe.
What I could not imagine at the time was that the epic level of irresponsibility I saw on the part of everyone from speculators (who, contrary to the blame-the-poor crowd, were the ones who were driving the demand), to mortgage bankers, to Wall Street derivatives brokers, to (especially!) regulators would continue unabated for FOUR MORE YEARS.
Actually, "within 0.25 AU" puts them too close to their star to be habitable... i.e. not in the goldilocks zone:(PS 1 A.U. is the distance of the Earth to the Sun, just in case you didn't/don't know.
Yep. Important datum, that.
However... since this announcement ONLY applies to 1-3 Earth-mass planets within.25 AU of G-type stars (because it's the result of occulation observations, and that's the limit of resolution for any current telescope), it says nothing whatsoever about Earth-ish planets that obit in the "Golidlocks zone". OTOH, I think it's not unreasonable to extrapolate that, if there're appropriately-sized worlds in too-close orbits around that high a proportion of G-type stars, there's a pretty good likelihood that there're just as many (or more) in the zone where life could evolve.
Perhaps we'll find out when/if the James Webb telescope is launched.
ShanghaiBill persisted in missing the point, thusly:
You have a right to question their integrity. You do not have a right to silence them. Integrity is not, and should not be, a pre-condition for Constitutional rights to apply. Scumbags have rights too.
Again: exactly which part of NOBODY IS ATTEMPTING TO SILENCE THE DENIERS was unclear to you?
The issue is whether THEIR SOURCES OF FUNDING SHOULD BE REVEALED.
Exactly how is requiring groups who engage in lobbying and who presume to weigh in on scientific debate to reveal their actual sources of funding censoring speech in any meaningful sense of the phrase?
Many people believe that the right to speak anonymously is fundamentally important. This right has been defended by the EFF and ACLU. You might also want to read the American Civil Liberties Union's viewpoint on Citizen's United. It is tempting to reach for a censor's pen, rather than rebutting an argument. But remember, once our rights are gone, they are gone for all of us.
Again, in what way does requiring those who claim to be scientists disputing scientific consensus on a scientific basis to reveal the sources of their funding represents ANY infringement on their free speech?
The short answer is: it doesn't. The long answer is: the fact that the sources of funding for climate scientists who argue for anthropogenic global warming have ALL, ALWAYS been public knowledge, but the sources of funding for the scientists in denial have, in general, been kept purposefully opaque tends, quite rightly, to call into question the motive for their opposition to the consensus - while in no way denying them the right to hold, argue, and publish those opinions. Sure, they're free (under current law) to keep those sources secret - but, since the scientist-deniers' own identities are (necessarily) public knowledge, the presumption HAS to be that they're keeping the sources of their funding secret in order to conceal that their opinions are paid for by the very parties who stand most to benefit from their arguments contra the overwhelming scientific consensus.
In other words: they're trying to hide the fact that they're paid whores of the fossil fuel industry.
The overwhelming majority...
The right to express an opinion should not be based on the popularity of that opinion. It is all the more important to defend the expression of dissenting opinions when they are unpopular or go against the consensus.
Again, no one's questioning their right to express their opinion. Not me, not anyone.
What's being questioned is their integrity - and it is completely legitimate to do so, so long as they refuse to reveal who's paying them to disagree.
ShanghaiBill somehow got modded to +4 Insightful for blathering:
we as a society can demand accountability
Please don't use weasel words. You shouldn't say "we as a society" when you really mean "the government", and you shouldn't say "demand accountability" when you really mean "censor speech".
Exactly how is requiring groups who engage in lobbying and who presume to weigh in on scientific debate to reveal their actual sources of funding censoring speech in any meaningful sense of the phrase? The overwhelming majority of climate scientists who publish papers that conclude our climate is, in fact, changing (and that the change is largely or exclusively due to human-generated greenhouse gases) and the institutions for which they work make their sources of funding public. Why shouldn't the government require deniers - especially those specifically engaged in high-pressure lobbying of elected officials on the subject - to reveal where their financing comes from? Because they have some supposed divine right to anonymity?
Somehow the phrase "fair and balanced" springs instantly to mind... and not in a good way.
Slashdot Mirror
"Think about this: think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
Jeremiah Cornelius explained:
167 individual people control 37+ Trillion dollars of actual monetary wealth in the world. I am not the reductionist.
If you think that this concentration of wealth does not produce the outcome desired by those individuals? Then you don't see that this is how they got to that position, over the last 30 years, when thety were less than 1/3 as wealthy, and how they used this influence to drive them to the current concentration.
There is NO "tea party" - tho' the passions do actually run that high, 'mong the recruited rabble. There's just the Koch's. They are the "regressive, brute" funding team, of the monied elite.
No, what YOU don't understand it that the Kochs have taken a hit in the past two weeks' free fall on Wall Street. They therefore have sent forth the word that the Tea Party needs to cut it the fuck out.
And the Tea Party is ignoring them.
Thus my "Victor Frankenstein" comment.
I'm telling you that YOUR picture of the current state of Washington and the Repugnican Party is oversimplified. YOU live in California. *I* live in rural Ohio, in the heart of Tea Party country. I'm personally acquainted with far too many of these nit-wits. And they are NOT part of the "everybody in Washington works for the plutocrats" equation.
Jeremiah Cornelius sneered:
You took the bait.
There is only one game in town.
Reductionist running dog.
Jeremiah Cornelius snorted:
Stage management. Drama. Theatrics.
In the end? The powerful will be more so - you will pay more, and get less.
Mission accomplished, and your expectations diminished, as planned.
Oh, horseshit.
The "drama and theatrics" of which you so dismissively speak is ALL on the Tea Party side. The House clowns behind this public tantrum ARE the agents of plutocrats - but they are unwitting ones, blinded to the control of their puppetmasters by their ideology and prideful ignorance. That's an argyle horse, because all their non-TP peers understand EXACTLY who has purchased them.
The Tea Party currently controls the Republican Party - and, because of gerrymandering and the fact that most Democrats only vote once every four years, that is unlikely to change any time soon. It is unlikely to change, because mainstream Republican voters don't turn out in significant numbers for primary elections. Instead, they're happy to cast their vote for a Republican slate in the general election, and go away satisfied that they've done their duty to party and (only incidentally) country. So it's the "base" - the evangelicals that Ronald Reagan's campaign strategy so empowered - the NRA lifers, and the slack-jawed Fox News addicts that turn out for the primaries. Those are the identical constituencies of the Tea Party, and they'll uncritically accept and vote in accordance with any propaganda effort that gets them sufficiently riled up over abortion, gun rights, taxes, and "socialism" (all while happily depositing their Social Security checks, and leaning as heavily on their Medicare coverage as they do on their walkers and canes).
Cue the Koch brothers - the oil billionaires who have (thanks to the Roberts Court's decisions that money and speech are somehow equivalent, that "corporations are people" for purposes of political speech, and that unlimited secret spending on political campaigns - as long as it pretends to be "educational" and "issue-based" - is a bastion of fr-r-ee-dom!) essentially bankrolled the entire Tea Party monster from its inception, as a proxy for their personal business interests.
Only now the monster has escaped their control - as Victor Frankenstein could have told them it inevitably would. And it's far too late to chain it back up in the basement, because the Tea Party is now a self-sustaining reaction.
THAT's the difference. Washington's establishment pols are self-aware. The Tea Party is not. It's all id - and the Republican superego has left the building, so its ego, the career Republican establishment, has been left to fend for itself. The result is that the career Republican pols are falling all over themselves to embrace all things Tea, in perfectly-justified panic over being "primaried" (a nonce verb that owes its very existence to the Tea Party) out of their comfy jobs as shills for whoever pays them to be.
It's the triumph of arrogant ignorance over calculated self-interest - and that is Not A Good Thing for the country. Or you and me, for that matter, because the Tea Party is the very definition of a faith-based movement. And I'm not talking about their Christian evangelism, here. I'm talking about their blind hatred of "socialism" - despite their personal dependence on it - of taxes - even though our tax rates are still near historic lows (and FAR lower than during the Eisenhower administration, which is a Golden Era in the Tea Party credo) - and of all things Obama - regardless of the fact that our 44th president is an enthusiastic centrist, and ardent supporter of the status quo.
Your sneering dismissal of all pols as corrupt representatives of corporate plutocracy represents a faux-sophisticate's rhetorical overreach: they're NOT all the same. The Tea Partiers are DANGEROUS, precisely because they're NOT subject to the "business-as-usual" corruption of Washington politics. They're True Believers - and not in the good, Marvel-comics way, but in the terrible Spanish-Inquisition-and-Crusades way.
jtownatpun.net snarled:
The only reason you could want to ban cameras is to hide your mistakes.
Yep. And that that's the reason behind the imbecile SF Fire Chief's ban is so obvious that she's already walking it back.
Can you say "Streisand Effect", anybody?"
Please explain how this "study" corrected for the difference in traffic conditions between rush hour/daytime driving and driving on weekends and after 9:00pm.
On second thought, don't bother. This "study" isn't worthy of the effort.
Genda observed:
Now a real interesting development happened a little while back, John Fogerty was sued by the current owner of CCR IP, for plagiarizing himself with his newer music (in the early 90s his career took off again when the 20 years of bondage ended and he could make and sell new music that didn't automagically belong to someone else.) In court the greedy bastard that sued him made it perfectly clear owning CCR wasn't enough, that even though he was no longer under contract, he had every intention of keeping John under his thumb for the rest of his natural life and take everything he made for his own benefit. The Judge informed said scumbag that a songwriter sounds like that songwriter because HE IS THAT SONGWRITER... that CCR songs sound like CCR songs and one would only expect that future songs by that artist might have a similar style. The case was crushed.
But here where it get's interesting. Part of the reason nuisance suits have been so effective is that defending them, leave you with a terrible court expense whether you win or lose. John asked the court, can I sue this ass-hat to recover my court costs? The judge said go for it, and John got most of 2 million dollars in court costs back.
The scumbag in question was Saul Zaentz, owner for many decades of Fantasy Records, in Berkeley, CA. (CCR started as a high-school band called the Golliwogs in El Cerrito,-about a ten-minute drive from Fantasy's studio). FWIW - he spent a large amount of the songwriting royalties he screwed Fogarty out of making the movie Amadeus.
He sued Fogerty over the song, "The Old Man Is Down The Road" - but what pissed him off enough to doggedly pursue the case was "Zaentz Can't Dance" (later changed to "Vantz Can't Dance", after Zaentz filed a defamation action).
It's a VERY personal conflict.
Hey, my wife and I both contracted Valley Fever when we moved to Las Vegas, in 2004. I've never been that sick before. Throwing up once an hour for close to a week. Drained of energy for a couple of months afterward. God-fucking-AWFUL disease.
brunes69 opined:
Take the recent Microsoft Xbox One fiasco. I find it hard to believe that a company like Microsoft would not have known this reaction was coming. Any trivial study of online sentiment data would have shown this in advance.
If you find that hard to believe, then you know very little about Microsoft's management.
Did you not notice the Vista fiasco of a few years back (not to mention the Windows 8 disaster, now playing at a computer store near you)?
Things were better (believe it or not) when billg was in charge. At least back then, the geeks actually had some voice in product decisions. Ever since that nincompoop Ballmer took over, it's been MBAs, all the way down.
MBAs don't listen to ANYONE - except other MBAs. Even then, they only pay attention if those MBAs outrank them. MBAs are specifically conditioned to focus exclusively on improving margins, cutting costs, and pumping up the stock price. Quality is not an issue that even registers with them. Customers are wallets with legs. Customer input is to be solicited only when unavoidable, and only on non-business-related issues: How do you feel about THIS commercial? Do you like the purple-on-green packaging, or the green-on-purple packaging better? Do you prefer the logo HERE, or over there?
Ballmer is a fool, who has surrounded himself with fools - all of whom have MBAs. But I repeat myself.
All of which is to say that the XBox One policies that caused such immense, and immediate backlash were ENTIRELY believable products of the Microsoft management environment. "MBAs are people who know the price of everything - and the value of NOTHING," (with apologies to Oscar Wilde).
Badgers?
We don't need no stinkin' badgers!
Jeremiah Cornelius posited:
Microsoft is misspelling things again.
It's spelled "Windows Blue", but pronounced "Windows Blew".
No, no, no.
There's nothing past tense about it.
CrimsonAvenger admitted:
(note that I have an unusual surname, and yet I've managed to run into several people who knew someone with my FULL NAME)...
Wait ... you've run into SEVERAL people who knew someone named CrimsonAvenger?
eric conspiracy pointed out:
Maybe on some other planet, but on Earth John Adams did not write the US Constitution.
You are, of course, correct. I was thinking of James Madison. My error.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_wrote_the_US_Constitution
Piss-poor authority, especially given the page's unreadability without Javascript.
Try this one, instead:
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_history.html
Dcnjoe60 argued:
But to use financial success as the measure, when it is pre-installed is like saying that unleaded gas is more successful than leaded gas. If there is not alternative, then what is actually being measured?
I don't disagree. However, in the case of Windows 95, people upgraded to new computers specifically so that they COULD run 95 - because it was so obviously and incontrovertibly superior to Win 3.x in so many ways. You may not recall, but 95 had the largest open beta test of any software product EVER to that time. Microsoft very wisely encouraged everyone who wanted to try it ahead of its release to download and install it - and people did, in droves.
When 95 was finally released, it set records for copies sold, not only pre-installed, but new orders and upgrades from 3.x. It was wildly popular, and it deserved to be wildly popular, because Microsoft did an excellent job of making it both fully-featured and highly-debugged upon release.
That, of course, was back when billg was running the company. After he left, and that MBA schmuck Ballmer took over, we got Vista and Windows 8, two pieces of OS shit so loose and stinky that they barely qualify as diarrhea.
MouseTheLuckyDog blathered:
The people hid from one militant guy. Compare this to 1776 when British militants walked on a town. Citizens decided to gather together to oppose them despite the risk to their lives (, and many did die ). Boy how this country has changed.
You'e conflating the term "militant" with "military". The Boston Massacre (which turns out to have been no such thing - in actuality, the British soldiers were fired on from the crowd, which means they returned fire in self-defense - but the winners get to write the histories), known to the British as the Incident on King Street, occurred on March 5, 1770, when a detachment of eight British soldiers was sent to defend a sentry, Private Hugh White, who was surrounded by a mob of several hundred Bostonians, and was being subjected to insults and threats from its members. The soldiers formed a protective shield around White, and, on orders from their commander, Captain Thomas Preston, loaded their muskets. The mob's actions escalated to throwing objects, and daring the soldiers to fire. Richard Palmes, a local innkeeper, physically threatened Captain Preston with a club. One thrown object hit Private Hugh Montgomery hard enough to knock him off his feet. When Montgomery got back to his feet, he fired his musket into the crowd. No one was hit. However, Palmes further aggravated the situation by clubbing both Montgomery and Preston with his cudgel. Without orders or authorization, the other soldiers then fired into the mob, which promptly retreated.
After an overnight investigation, Preston and his detachment were all arrested - by the British military governor - the following morning. On the 17th, Preston, the eight men under his command, and four members of the mob who were alleged to have fired on the troops were all indicted for murder. Preston, defended by John Adams, with the assistance of Paul Revere (who drew a defense map of the scene, showing the position of the five fatalities in relation to that of the troops, a la CSI), was tried in late October, 1770 and acquitted on grounds that he had not ordered his men to fire. The eight soldiers under his command were tried separately in late November. Two of them were found guilty of manslaughter, because Adams convinced the jury that they had had good reason to feel their lives were in danger. The other six were found not guilty.
The four civilians were tried in December. One of the witnesses for the defense - a defendant's manservant - was found guilty of perjury. The four main defendants were acquitted.
The events of March 5, 1770 were skillfully exploited by Samuel Adams and his fellow separatists to help turn the tide of public opinion against British rule. Eventually, more than seven years after the so-called Boston Massacre (a phrase coined by Sam Adams), the colonies declared their independance, and the United States eventually won their independence from Britain.
John Adams, who successfully defended all the British soldiers involved in the incident against charges of murder, went on to write the U.S. Constitution, and become the second President of the United States.
dcnjoe60 averred:
Along the way, there were numerous failings - Windows 3.0, Windows 95 (while successful, was buggy) Windows ME, Windows Vista.
Windows 3.0 was not a failure. In terms of both enthusiastic adoption by consumers, and financially for Microsoft, it was a major success. Yes, it was buggy. That didn't matter to the marketplace.
Likewise, Windows 95 was a major success for Microsoft, by the same metrics. It was, to borrow a term from a certain self-aggrandizing billionaire, HUGE, both in the corporate and consumer marketplaces.
But you're dead right about ME and Vista. People reacted to both as if they were dead rats - and rightly so. Dell even forced Microsoft to offer its corporate customers a downgrade path - buy a PC with Vista, get a license to replace the OS with XP for free.
jbolden blathered:
I'm in favor of partial legalization and regulation. Smoking kills 300k a year. Something like widespread meth use could come in 10x, 20x that. The reason drugs can get banned is because they are so incredibly devastating to individuals to families and to communities when their use becomes common. Pretending they are harmless undermines other points.
The question is whether the benefits of criminalization, the avoidance of widespread use, can be achieved without criminalization.
That Kool-Aid must be MIGHTY tasty. It sounds like you drained the whole pitcher.
Smoking marijuana is "incredibly devastating" ONLY to those who have been convicted for possessing it. (It's still a felony in a number of our more backward states, and in many countries - Singapore, I'm looking at YOU - elsewhere around the globe). Holland has demonstrated that, once it's decriminalized, even mainlining heroin is not especially devastating to anyone other than the user - and not necessarily even to him/her, if he/she doesn't share needles.
Crack and meth are another story, mostly because of the paranoiac effects of both the drugs themselves and of the prolonged sleep deprivation which accompanies their extreme abuse - but those effects, too, are enormously magnified SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY'RE ILLEGAL.
The point is: the single greatest harm ANY illegal drug creates is the consequences of the user falling afoul of the criminal "justice" system. Make them all legal, cheap, and easily available to adults (so that nobody has to steal to afford them, and the excessive profits that are built into their price to compensate dealers for the risks involved in supplying them disappear), and any harm they may do declines to mere nuisance value.
Don't be a tool. And, for pity's sake, put down that pitcher.
dkleinsc protested:
My story wasn't making a point of "I'm so smart, I saw it!". The point of the story is that anyone who claims that "nobody could have seen it before the crash" is lying, possibly to themselves.
Anyone who wanted to buy a house could have seen it. Anyone who had handled any piece of mortgage transactions could see it. Heck, anyone who had seen TV ads for the mortgage companies that were begging people to buy houses they couldn't really afford could have seen it. A number of economists from a wide variety of political backgrounds and theoretical schools warned about it. And that tells me that those who were trained to see it and had the job of looking for it and preventing it were either hopelessly incompetent or willfully blind.
I could not agree more.
And I didn't mean to imply any criticism of you or your post. It was more of a "me, too" kinda thing, only from the perspective of a mortgage industry outsider.
HornWumpus blathered:
If spectators where driving the market nobody would have cared when the bubble popped.
The volume of social spending back of this bubble pop more or less proves you false. It was on 'the poor'* driving demand.
*Even with liar loans 'the poor' could not qualify if they told the truth.
You are absolutely wrong.
Everybody cared when the bubble popped for several reasons:
And it was, indeed, speculators who were responsible for the VAST majority of subprime loans. If the mortgage industry is so determined to give you free money that they offer you 0% interest for the first six months of the loan, AND they're willing to roll all their fees into the mortgage, AND you're planning on unloading the house you buy in THREE months, AND the market demand is so high that, essentially, your investment sells the day you list it, why wouldn't you take their money? That is EXACTLY what happened, over and over again. To make matters worse, many speculators were able to leverage their ownership of houses (and, worse yet, condos) they had no intention of ever occupying by pledging their titles as collateral for additional loans - which permitted them to build little empires of subprime-mortgaged properties.
Granted, many of the houses these speculators bought were in poor neighborhoods. That doesn't mean it was poor people who bought them.
There are now DOZENS of high-rise condominium developments in various stages of completion in and around Las Vegas. Their occupancy rate runs around 10%, on average. There are still lots of new houses in the area that never saw an occupant. And there are LOTS of houses in poorer areas that turned over multiple times - and were never occupied.
You have NO idea what you are talking about.
And listening to Fox News is not improving your education, either.
dkleinsc claimed:
I saw the housing bubble. In 2006, specifically, when working as a programmer for a mortgage titling company. I just saw the numbers going into the database and realized that there's no possible way this could work in the long term - there were tons of refinanced loans for lower monthly payments that did nothing to pay back the principal, which more-or-less guaranteed that eventually the borrower couldn't pay.
I could see it, and I wasn't trained to see it or supposed to be looking for it. But it was there plain as day.
I saw the bubble in 2004.
My wife and I had just moved to Las Vegas - one of the housing bubble's domestic epicenters - and went looking for a house to buy. Nearly every property we saw had already been sold by the time the "for sale" sign went up on its lawn. Houses were selling for 20-40% over asking price within 45 minutes of appearing on the realty industry's MLS. Often, the same houses - having never been occupied by anyone other than a painting crew - would be back on the market three months later, for 50% more money. And would sell, again, in 45 minutes, for substantially more than their asking price.
We decided to bid on an FHA foreclosure property. The FHA brochure estimated its market value at $121K, so we put in a bid of $135K, just to be safe. It sold to a Mexican family that bid $179K.
That's when I told my wife, "This shows all the signs of a classic bubble market."
I was pretty sure it was a Vegas-only phenomenon, until I happened to talk to a friend of mine whose wife was trying to break into the travel-writing market. They'd recently returned from traveling the Mediterranean, and, when I told him about the crazy housing market in Las Vegas, he said, "It's not just Vegas. We were just in Bulgaria, and the Aegean coast there is completely lined with high-rise condo developments, in all stages of construction. And - we asked out of curiosity - they're all asking half a million dollars for a 1,200-square-foot condo on the 'Bulgarian Riviera'."
That's when I realized that the housing bubble was a global phenomenon - and that its collapse would be a world-wide catastrophe.
What I could not imagine at the time was that the epic level of irresponsibility I saw on the part of everyone from speculators (who, contrary to the blame-the-poor crowd, were the ones who were driving the demand), to mortgage bankers, to Wall Street derivatives brokers, to (especially!) regulators would continue unabated for FOUR MORE YEARS.
Needless to say, we did not buy a house in Vegas.
Greg01851 noted:
Actually, "within 0.25 AU" puts them too close to their star to be habitable... i.e. not in the goldilocks zone :(PS 1 A.U. is the distance of the Earth to the Sun, just in case you didn't/don't know.
Yep. Important datum, that.
However ... since this announcement ONLY applies to 1-3 Earth-mass planets within .25 AU of G-type stars (because it's the result of occulation observations, and that's the limit of resolution for any current telescope), it says nothing whatsoever about Earth-ish planets that obit in the "Golidlocks zone". OTOH, I think it's not unreasonable to extrapolate that, if there're appropriately-sized worlds in too-close orbits around that high a proportion of G-type stars, there's a pretty good likelihood that there're just as many (or more) in the zone where life could evolve.
Perhaps we'll find out when/if the James Webb telescope is launched.
Exciting stuff, regardless.
ShanghaiBill persisted in missing the point, thusly:
You have a right to question their integrity. You do not have a right to silence them. Integrity is not, and should not be, a pre-condition for Constitutional rights to apply. Scumbags have rights too.
Again: exactly which part of NOBODY IS ATTEMPTING TO SILENCE THE DENIERS was unclear to you?
The issue is whether THEIR SOURCES OF FUNDING SHOULD BE REVEALED.
My own, personal opinion is that they should.
Shanghai Bill insisted:
Exactly how is requiring groups who engage in lobbying and who presume to weigh in on scientific debate to reveal their actual sources of funding censoring speech in any meaningful sense of the phrase?
Many people believe that the right to speak anonymously is fundamentally important. This right has been defended by the EFF and ACLU. You might also want to read the American Civil Liberties Union's viewpoint on Citizen's United. It is tempting to reach for a censor's pen, rather than rebutting an argument. But remember, once our rights are gone, they are gone for all of us.
Again, in what way does requiring those who claim to be scientists disputing scientific consensus on a scientific basis to reveal the sources of their funding represents ANY infringement on their free speech?
The short answer is: it doesn't. The long answer is: the fact that the sources of funding for climate scientists who argue for anthropogenic global warming have ALL, ALWAYS been public knowledge, but the sources of funding for the scientists in denial have, in general, been kept purposefully opaque tends, quite rightly, to call into question the motive for their opposition to the consensus - while in no way denying them the right to hold, argue, and publish those opinions. Sure, they're free (under current law) to keep those sources secret - but, since the scientist-deniers' own identities are (necessarily) public knowledge, the presumption HAS to be that they're keeping the sources of their funding secret in order to conceal that their opinions are paid for by the very parties who stand most to benefit from their arguments contra the overwhelming scientific consensus.
In other words: they're trying to hide the fact that they're paid whores of the fossil fuel industry.
The overwhelming majority ...
The right to express an opinion should not be based on the popularity of that opinion. It is all the more important to defend the expression of dissenting opinions when they are unpopular or go against the consensus.
Again, no one's questioning their right to express their opinion. Not me, not anyone.
What's being questioned is their integrity - and it is completely legitimate to do so, so long as they refuse to reveal who's paying them to disagree.
ShanghaiBill somehow got modded to +4 Insightful for blathering:
we as a society can demand accountability
Please don't use weasel words. You shouldn't say "we as a society" when you really mean "the government", and you shouldn't say "demand accountability" when you really mean "censor speech".
Exactly how is requiring groups who engage in lobbying and who presume to weigh in on scientific debate to reveal their actual sources of funding censoring speech in any meaningful sense of the phrase? The overwhelming majority of climate scientists who publish papers that conclude our climate is, in fact, changing (and that the change is largely or exclusively due to human-generated greenhouse gases) and the institutions for which they work make their sources of funding public. Why shouldn't the government require deniers - especially those specifically engaged in high-pressure lobbying of elected officials on the subject - to reveal where their financing comes from? Because they have some supposed divine right to anonymity?
Somehow the phrase "fair and balanced" springs instantly to mind ... and not in a good way.
Swampash blathered:
Compare the revenues received by the estate of Elvis Presley in 2012 with those of any year while he was alive.
In other words, STFU.
Compare the revenues Apple received on the Mac II with the revenues it's receiving ON THE MAC II now, Mr. Pathetic.