I have a tool that I'm not using right now, I will lend it to you under the condition that you bring it back to me tomorrow when I'll need it... Investments and lending work exactly like that
Except that they don't, at least not any more.
With the repeal of Glass-Steagal (Gramm et al 1999), and especially reserve requirements (Paulson 2004), banks were now free both to lend out money they did not have (they only have your promise to work up the money and pay later, and the (tee-hee!) "collateral" of the property), and to speculate in hedges and derivatives to pretend that the risk had been negated rather than just moved out of sight.
Huge chunks of credit (NOT money) were inflated into existence in this way, with everyone believing in the existence of this new "wealth" that would surely come in as loans were paid off by the newly "wealthy". Result:a runaway bubble in RE prices (NOT values).
If things worked as you say, the current Depression (NOT recession, NOT recovery) could not have happened. Instead we have the.gov and Fed pumping up 12% p.a. of GDP with *more* credit, worsening the result when the inevitable reversion to the mean happens, the creditors discover they've been sold an empty promise (a slowing in credit expansion now causes GDP contraction and unemployment, and unemployed people do not pay back loans OR pay taxes).
Banks (creditors) have been scrambling to put off that day by counting HELOCs on defaulted houses at par (Kanjorski 2009), dawdling for *years* on foreclosures, and borrowing from the FED at 0% interest then sitting on the money (remember all those "waah, banks aren't lending the stimulus money" stories?).
I'd love to live in an economy that works as you describe, but its capital has been hollowed out and replaced with credit, with real wealth replaced by claims on an uncertain future, claims which have ballooned to many times what even sovereign nations can pay (Iceland, Ireland, Greece, with Italy,Spain, France, England, Germany, and the USA on deck).
The banks aren't just knocking houses down to create scarcity - they're knocking them down (after letting them go moldy) to be able to account for them differently so they avoid eating the loss, and *still* avoid local taxes.
I had a little portable TV with integrated VCR. We used it for a year or so, took it to a ski cabin one weekend.
A tape got tangled in the works of the VCR. By the time we got it out (including taking off the housing and poking in with sticks), lithium grease had gotten onto the video head from somewhere nearby.
I couldn't clean it well enough out there in the boonies, and it wasn't worth the trouble and uncertainty of finding the solvents and cleaning up ship-in-a-bottle style at home (and certainly too cheap to bother w/a repair shop), so the VCR's I bought from then on were separate units.
H2O has a half-life of about three weeks in the atmosphere. Let me know when you can change that in a way that establishes a new equilibrium between the oceans and the atmosphere. The climatologists are very interested in modeling the effects of changes in gas concentrations on the climate.
Otherwise, the only way I can think of to affect that equilibrium is to change the temperature of the atmosphere or oceans.
Wonder if anyone's working on a way to do that?...
Bah! They're taking jobs away from inner city kids who could benefit from a little real work experience.
Note to Newt:
Order a few crates of those collars for your youth janitorial program. You'll teach them about obedience to authority, and keep property secure from the shiftless, thieving little urchins. Win - Win -Win!
Indeed. When we turned off cable in the nineties, an eager young fellow came to the door with a proposition. He was from Nielsen, and was delighted to find a family with a TV and no cable! We signed up for a year or so, and they came in with some incredibly frowzy phone lines and dongles to automate sending data summaries at 3AM.
We drove them bonkers with long periods of watching Channel 68, which was static/snow in our area without a registered channel. They kept calling to ask to check on the health of the system, and we had to keep telling them the data was accurate - we had it on for white noise so the baby could sleep while we did housework.
Finally we bailed just to get them to shut up, since dealing with this special case seemed to be beyond their comprehension, let alone their data gathering protocol.
"Try and understand the words, they will be English: 'We don't watch TV.' "
Told them that up front, yet they still wanted our info. Except not really. Sayonara, suckers.
By definition, because they've written a law against it. That's as far as the label 'criminal' goes, notwithstanding its incorrect and loose uses in the media and other propaganda.
Many criminals have done nothing immoral or harmful, including you. (Do you know for a fact that you've never broken some Victorian-era Taliban-style law which still has force today?)
So St. Jerome, after spending 20 years in a cave scribbling away at his translation, came to this part, then chucked the whole thing into the fire, right?
Or was that the scribes of James I? If you read the toadying into to the KJV, you come away pretty unsure these guys could manage any objective scholarship.
Or is it that "Everybody in history, including the Pink and Pleasant Plastic Icon Company of Del Rio, Texas, has leave to change/interpret the Bible, except you, son"?
Your comment has broad application around here. At the same time, one does expect a certain level of competence across the board in basic life issues - which these days includes at least an acquaintance with the nature and operation of computers.
Cue car analogy in 3...2...1... Not everyone needs to spend their weekends modifying stock engine blocks, but we do expect normal adults not to cringe timidly when faced with a steering wheel and PRNDL lever.
It's not that difficult to understand how an OS matters to a computer system. People do equivalently difficult things regularly, yet somehow the sight of a kbd and monitor conjures Jacob's ladders and mad cackling.
The entities delivering those services usually make horribly inefficient and crony-based choices in doing so.
It seems to me that the GP attempted (inarticulately, perhaps) to note the lack of consequences for those entities when they screw up. Your point indirectly addresses this - we who allegedly vote for such things (really just for the representatives who then make the inefficient decisions) should hold them to account. We hold no fine-grained way to do this (can't withhold taxes for what we don't like), and we allow them to trick us into wasting the blunt-instrument 'vote' that we can use.
Wachovia trafficked in $387 billion of money laundering for drug cartels, kept a nice chunk of it, and was fined a small fraction when caught. Nice net benefit - can you and I get in on the action? Hell no, we'd be strung up by the family jewels.
Will any of us visit similar chastening on any politician for that? Or do we accept (with lots of political encouragement) that we have a de facto two-tiered legal structure where the elite go unpunished as a matter of course? Seems an unoriginal endpoint for a country that started with a rather different idea.
The damage that MS has done by barging, elbowing, and carpet-bagging their way into business and slowing the development of computing to a crawl is exceeded only by the damage done by the original Unix vendors and their standards-hegemony wars.
One needs no college education to imagine the explosion in innovation and entrepreneurship that could happen without software patents and copyright bullying - just learn to code, then try to do something useful. Those lawyers (another college over-product) will come quite quickly to school you.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to sore anything on my computes, for Bob's sake bring some alcohol wipes.
Except that they don't, at least not any more.
With the repeal of Glass-Steagal (Gramm et al 1999), and especially reserve requirements (Paulson 2004), banks were now free both to lend out money they did not have (they only have your promise to work up the money and pay later, and the (tee-hee!) "collateral" of the property), and to speculate in hedges and derivatives to pretend that the risk had been negated rather than just moved out of sight.
Huge chunks of credit (NOT money) were inflated into existence in this way, with everyone believing in the existence of this new "wealth" that would surely come in as loans were paid off by the newly "wealthy". Result:a runaway bubble in RE prices (NOT values).
If things worked as you say, the current Depression (NOT recession, NOT recovery) could not have happened. Instead we have the .gov and Fed pumping up 12% p.a. of GDP with *more* credit, worsening the result when the inevitable reversion to the mean happens, the creditors discover they've been sold an empty promise (a slowing in credit expansion now causes GDP contraction and unemployment, and unemployed people do not pay back loans OR pay taxes).
Banks (creditors) have been scrambling to put off that day by counting HELOCs on defaulted houses at par (Kanjorski 2009), dawdling for *years* on foreclosures, and borrowing from the FED at 0% interest then sitting on the money (remember all those "waah, banks aren't lending the stimulus money" stories?).
I'd love to live in an economy that works as you describe, but its capital has been hollowed out and replaced with credit, with real wealth replaced by claims on an uncertain future, claims which have ballooned to many times what even sovereign nations can pay (Iceland, Ireland, Greece, with Italy,Spain, France, England, Germany, and the USA on deck).
The banks aren't just knocking houses down to create scarcity - they're knocking them down (after letting them go moldy) to be able to account for them differently so they avoid eating the loss, and *still* avoid local taxes.
I had a little portable TV with integrated VCR. We used it for a year or so, took it to a ski cabin one weekend.
A tape got tangled in the works of the VCR. By the time we got it out (including taking off the housing and poking in with sticks), lithium grease had gotten onto the video head from somewhere nearby.
I couldn't clean it well enough out there in the boonies, and it wasn't worth the trouble and uncertainty of finding the solvents and cleaning up ship-in-a-bottle style at home (and certainly too cheap to bother w/a repair shop), so the VCR's I bought from then on were separate units.
KISS Lesson Learned Agin.
... from wetter places on the planet.
H2O has a half-life of about three weeks in the atmosphere. Let me know when you can change that in a way that establishes a new equilibrium between the oceans and the atmosphere. The climatologists are very interested in modeling the effects of changes in gas concentrations on the climate.
Otherwise, the only way I can think of to affect that equilibrium is to change the temperature of the atmosphere or oceans.
Wonder if anyone's working on a way to do that?...
Bah! They're taking jobs away from inner city kids who could benefit from a little real work experience.
Note to Newt:
Order a few crates of those collars for your youth janitorial program. You'll teach them about obedience to authority, and keep property secure from the shiftless, thieving little urchins. Win - Win -Win!
So you can cheer when they die?
You should change your nick to 'ouroboros'.
Indeed. When we turned off cable in the nineties, an eager young fellow came to the door with a proposition. He was from Nielsen, and was delighted to find a family with a TV and no cable! We signed up for a year or so, and they came in with some incredibly frowzy phone lines and dongles to automate sending data summaries at 3AM.
We drove them bonkers with long periods of watching Channel 68, which was static/snow in our area without a registered channel. They kept calling to ask to check on the health of the system, and we had to keep telling them the data was accurate - we had it on for white noise so the baby could sleep while we did housework.
Finally we bailed just to get them to shut up, since dealing with this special case seemed to be beyond their comprehension, let alone their data gathering protocol.
"Try and understand the words, they will be English: 'We don't watch TV.' "
Told them that up front, yet they still wanted our info. Except not really. Sayonara, suckers.
By definition, because they've written a law against it. That's as far as the label 'criminal' goes, notwithstanding its incorrect and loose uses in the media and other propaganda.
Many criminals have done nothing immoral or harmful, including you. (Do you know for a fact that you've never broken some Victorian-era Taliban-style law which still has force today?)
Unfixed it for you.
Those materials were available in the 19th century. I wonder if anyone previously discovered this?
That was Paul Graham, working on the Yahoo Store.
So St. Jerome, after spending 20 years in a cave scribbling away at his translation, came to this part, then chucked the whole thing into the fire, right?
Or was that the scribes of James I? If you read the toadying into to the KJV, you come away pretty unsure these guys could manage any objective scholarship.
Or is it that "Everybody in history, including the Pink and Pleasant Plastic Icon Company of Del Rio, Texas, has leave to change/interpret the Bible, except you, son"?
One for his homies...
Well, fluc you Amelicans too!
Emacs does a lot, but it isn't the most user-friendly of OS's.
Your comment has broad application around here. At the same time, one does expect a certain level of competence across the board in basic life issues - which these days includes at least an acquaintance with the nature and operation of computers.
Cue car analogy in 3...2...1...
Not everyone needs to spend their weekends modifying stock engine blocks, but we do expect normal adults not to cringe timidly when faced with a steering wheel and PRNDL lever.
It's not that difficult to understand how an OS matters to a computer system. People do equivalently difficult things regularly, yet somehow the sight of a kbd and monitor conjures Jacob's ladders and mad cackling.
Techie: "No, *you* think I'm smarter than you."
And do you know why I want a cup of tea?
I see the banks have people reading Slashdot.
Nah, it was just a memory leek.
Wrestling with this problem makes my blood Boyle.
Turn about is fair play.
The entities delivering those services usually make horribly inefficient and crony-based choices in doing so.
It seems to me that the GP attempted (inarticulately, perhaps) to note the lack of consequences for those entities when they screw up. Your point indirectly addresses this - we who allegedly vote for such things (really just for the representatives who then make the inefficient decisions) should hold them to account. We hold no fine-grained way to do this (can't withhold taxes for what we don't like), and we allow them to trick us into wasting the blunt-instrument 'vote' that we can use.
Wachovia trafficked in $387 billion of money laundering for drug cartels, kept a nice chunk of it, and was fined a small fraction when caught. Nice net benefit - can you and I get in on the action? Hell no, we'd be strung up by the family jewels.
Will any of us visit similar chastening on any politician for that? Or do we accept (with lots of political encouragement) that we have a de facto two-tiered legal structure where the elite go unpunished as a matter of course? Seems an unoriginal endpoint for a country that started with a rather different idea.
And that's a good thing?
The damage that MS has done by barging, elbowing, and carpet-bagging their way into business and slowing the development of computing to a crawl is exceeded only by the damage done by the original Unix vendors and their standards-hegemony wars.
One needs no college education to imagine the explosion in innovation and entrepreneurship that could happen without software patents and copyright bullying - just learn to code, then try to do something useful. Those lawyers (another college over-product) will come quite quickly to school you.
If you push a love button gently a few times, it gets a little bigger.