this is one of the few posts to get it right. it was a fucking ponzi scheme, not some 'oh woops sorry' miscalculation by math guys.
as for the Fed bailout, it wasnt just a bunch of loans. there are an alphabet soup of programs the Fed set up to 'shore up' the banking system in 2008. there are literally at least a dozen programs they set up, each working in a different fashion and targeted at a different piece of the industry that was failing.
but the other side of this argument is its just more BS to lie to people about. they can claim that they 'payed the TARP money back', but that doesnt mention ANY of the other programs and the massive, huge losses the taxpayers took in bailing out these banks.
the AIG Credit Default swap deal being a prime example - you, the taxpayer, payed Goldman Sachs 100% of the 'face value' of the CDS that AIG wrote against a bunch of crappy CDOs. Those CDS were not woth but maybe a few pennies, like 1-10% of their face value. but we taxpayers were forced to pay 100%. Thats a 90% rip off. And the guys who did this running Treasury and the Fed were former Goldman people, like Hank Paulson. if its not conflict of interest i dont know what is. And, by the way, it has come out recently that he TOLD his hedge fund buddies what was going on, 'outside of the loop' of his normal job as Tres Sec. He put his banker friends before the American people.
the thing about the LTCM is that the guys that ran it got jobs in the industry, again, and they proceeded to destroy even more money, and then they did it again and again and again.
people say that capitalism 'weeds out the non performers' but when you look at the history of places like LTCM, its bullshit. its a big old boy network where people like Dick Fuld do not get busted down to street sweeper - they get to sit on millions of dollars of other peoples money, forever, with no prosecution of any kind. guys fail and fail and fail, over and over, and they keep getting jobs in the industry.
there are people who commit blatant frauds who keep getting spots in the industry too, over and over and over. The SEC and the other federal agencies then are supposed to regulate, but their top officers routinely get hired away by these companies they are supposed to be regulating at huge salaries as 'consultants' and lobbyists.
but there were a huge number of people who understood it perfectly well.
they get fat bonuses quarter after quarter for delivering 'results' that they knew were BS. they dont care. they keep on doing it.
the ratings agencies purposely colluded with the investment banks to lie about the ratings of CDOs. it wasnt 'they didnt understand', it was that they understood and were making too much money to care. their profit margins in these years came from CDO ratings. they actively stopped people inside their organizations who were pointing out the obvious flaws in the models.
AIG itself stopped the game a year before the thing began to crash. And yet, the Monoline insurance companies picked up where AIG left off. the idea that everyone 'didnt understand' does not make sense. Plenty of people understood. They just didnt care. its called fraud.
investment bank after investment bank, hedge fund after hedge fund, saw that this whole thing was a risky load of shit, and they actively moved to profit from the collapse, even at the expense of their own institutions. CEOs like Dick Fuld actively demoted and ignored internal critics, and walked away with millions after their companies disappeared into a puff of smoke.
The guys on the CDO desks at these places, not one or two, not a handful, not a dozen. Dozens. Dozens of them, made billions of dollars. Why should they care if it blew up? They were making bonuses based on 'future profits' calculated back to the present based on these shitty loans. They colluded with the ratings agencies to lie about the quality of the loans.
Then they made the taxpayers fix it all.
Where is the 'black swan'? Fraud is not a black swan, fraud is endemic to human nature and to financial bubbles.
Taleb is fine but here are some other books about the actual mechanics of the fraud
Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Lawrence McDonald
Sellout, Charles Gasparino
Trillion Dollar Meltdown, Charles R Morris
Fool's Gold, Gillian Tett
All the Devils are Here, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera
myron scholes or any of the other tools that enabled the 2008 crash, including CDOs, securitization, etc.
Edwrd Chancellor has a much, much more accurate , and scientific approach to crises - and that is to catalog and record them and their details, going back to Tulipmania and before. His book "Devil take the hindmost" came out before the 2008 crash, but basically what he is doing is proving that History is much more of a 'science' than economics --- at least in History, they try to gather actual data before making theories, and throw out the theories when the facts dont match.
the various attempts to 'blame math' for the crash of 2008 are little more than attempts to cover up the massive fraud that was perpetrated on the taxpayers of the planet. you make a huge amount of horrible loans to people you know cannot pay them back, resell the loans to people and lie about it, then get the government to bail you out when the whole system is about to collapse. you dont need a formula to do that, it is the basic feature of every economic bubble and its bursting. Fraud.
the difference here is that the fraudsters have completely made an end run around all the rules implemented after the 1929 crash to prevent this sort of thing, they practically own the politicians that are supposed to regulate them, and they insinuate themselves into positions of power in the political class. thats the difference - that we are actually regressing backwards in our civilization, and having the free market run less well than it did previously, and watching entrepenurial capitalism die a nasty death by its own supposed proponents.
bombings like the Cole, Khobar Towers, Pan Am over Lockerbee, etc etc etc.
promoting a good police force is sort of part of the human rights agenda. rights activists are usually not asking for the end of the state, they are asking for the rule of law, and equal protection under the law.
which means for example that if a government murders a bunch of people with a research weapon, it should be held responsible. and maybe some of the Unit 731 people should not have their graves in honored places in Japanese cemeteries where the president goes and pays respects.
Adele Goldberg -- "actually, i did think of that, and told you guys, but you ignored me"
Consumer - "and that democratization of information between Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft brought technology to the masses and created the computer revolution of the 80s and 90s"
Apple CEO - "and we cant have that again, because the 80s and 90s were brutal for the entrenched interests. like Xerox"
Google - "no shit. thats why you shouldnt base your fucking business model on making information secret, when your entire history has been based on borrowing ideas from other people"
of cost reduction are what are required to meet a population growing at a geometric rate, in theory.
if you want to argue that somehow the 'resources required' to grow organics wont meet population growth, you have to prove that somehow conventional produce can meet the geometric rate increase while organics cant.
but if you go into the store, organics are not 'orders of magnitude' more expensive than conventional produce. they are usually 1 to 3 times more in cost. thats not an order of magnitude. its a pretty simple scalar multiple.
and alot of the difference in cost is because of subsidies for various industries, like the oil industry where the petroleum precursor of most fertilizers and insecticides comes from.
now, go into any supermarket, and look on the shelves. you see a huge amount of processed food, repackaged, precooked, pre-stuffed, etc etc etc. all of that 'added value' is, well, basically its waste. nobody "needs" frozen apple turnovers with chocolate icing in the pattern of a heart shape, but you can go buy it if you want. the idea that somehow organic food would be 'wasted productivity' in the food system is absolutely ridiculous when you look at all the crap in the various 'value added' isles of the supermarket. all of those are, essentially, lowering the efficiency of transporting the calories from the farm to the belly. you could simply sell 5 pound bags of flour for 2 dollars each, and get rid of the entire cereal and cracker aisle, and the people would get the same nutritional value approximately, but they would save a huge amount of money. money = resources. those resources saved could then be put back into growing 'extra food' and meeting the 'growing population'.
but that argument is fucking stupid because the 2-3 times price markup for a bag of crackers vs a bag of raw flour (which you could use to make your own goddamn crackers) is not going to cause mass starvation simply because its less efficient. all it does is make people smile because crackers taste good, and make food companies and retailers money because they can 'value add' to the raw flour and build a profit into the increased price.
now if you see organics, instead of some hippy 'impediment to growth and optimization of food supply', and, instead simply view it as another way to deliver calories or raw food products, then the arguments against them from an efficiency standpoint are just as stupid.
you cant say that organic flour is going to cause mass starvation because it costs 5 bucks a pound instead of 3 bucks a pound, when you have just repackaged that conventional flour into cheerios on the next aisle and are selling it for 6 bucks a pound.
these people are fucking idiots and should be embarassed to call themselves thinkers.
support human rights in and of themselves, and take charge of the state actors that tend to use these things horribly.
einstein and his friends were simply discussing the universe, and what would happen if you shined a light while riding on a superfast train. they had no 'intention' of investigating nuclear weapons, but that is where E=mc^2 eventually led.
lets look at the computerized lists used to help perform the holocaust. they began as census taking machines.
the attempt to cure disease was later used in Unit 731 to cause disease in Chinese civilian populations.
etc etc etc.
Similar things could be said about many other scientists, which is why so many of the big pacifists and anti-nuclear activists in the cold war were scientists... even people like Andrei Sahkarov who had specifically built their careers around weapons tech felt a responsibility to push against governments who were misusing it.
and i know everyones worried about 'lone wolf terrorists'. but alot of those guys, if you look at their history, were only enabled by state powers. without the CIA, ISI, and Soviet Red Army, there is no al Qaeda. it simply would not exist. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar would be selling fruitcakes on the side of the road not running a huge paramilitary organization from inside of a mansion. Pick a terrorist bombing over the last 50 years, the chances that is directly linked, or 'one-degree-of-separation' from a state run intelligence agency are very high.
i dont think so. i rather think freedom of speech is not just a recreational activity, it is vital to the ongoing survival of the human species. same for the other rights that suffer when all of space is controlled by a military dictatorship, aka, 'the federation'
he was a pessimist because he was a realist, and quite a lot of the stuff he wrote about came true.
if we had more pessimists in the 1930s, the world would be in a lot better place.
who were the optimists? they were the 'futurists', and they were allied with this new thing in italy called 'fascism' - the glorification of the machine of state, and the state of the machine.
what is optimism in this age? "Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela. "My Country and the World" by Andrei Sakharov. "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan et al.
look in the govt, 'maintenance man' is the lowest you can go on the totem pole/cast system.
you will be a fucking GS3 making 20k/year or some horrible shit while congressman doing coke off hookers in the lincoln bedroom get perks out the ass, etc etc etc.
of course, their toilets wont work because maintenance men won't be allowed overtime, won't be encouraged to get more education, won't ever get promoted, etc etc etc... but hey, whatever. they didn't go to MI fucking T right? am i right?
this is a symptom of what is wrong with this country. building spy planes that can blow up people in their houses in the middle of the night from 100 miles away, but you cannot fix the fucking bridges and keep the goddamn hospitals clean, because the only thing 'cool' about janitorial/maintenance/cleaning is how low you can push the costs by outsourcing and re-out-out sourcing, privatizing everything from the toilet seat installation to the toilet paper delivery, so some hedge fund finance fucktard can say 'oh i saved 2 percent this year, i deserve a 50,000$ bonus for projected savings over the next 30 years'
We think the soviet union collapsed on itself? we are collapsing on ourselves right now. bridges are falling apart. roads are falling apart. schools are falling apart. they are firing cops, they are firing fucking firefighters. they are trying to destroy the goddamn firefighters union for chrissakes because it 'costs too much'.
you know what costs too much? the fucking system costs too much, and eventually it will self topple just like the soviets did. nice fucking country while it lasted, good ideals, in practice they did not get implemented. oh fucking well. start over and build again.
good post... and on top that, even if he was driving a tesla or something that can do 15-0-15 instantly, its still not safe.
the whole point of stop signs and anti-running laws in the first place is to promote the safety of pedestrians, children, motorcycles, bicycles, and other automobiles.
assholes like this brag about how they 'beat the system' but when they kill somebody they dont feel so haughty.
the inability to comprehend the situation and the lack of enthusiasm in dealing with it in a forthright and efficient manner speaks volumes about kickstarters management culture. they sound like a bunch of incompetent buffoons.
and one year after the war in iraq had started, but before it had gone completely to hell in a handbasket.
2004 was in the middle of the housing boom, when every fucking idiot thought they had $500,000 in equity in some piece of shit mcmansion that was in reality just a game piece so that some hedge funder could pump and dump another Mortgage Backed CDO on the widows and orphan investors of the planet.
"ask yourself, are you better off now than you were 4 years ago, using the fake paper accounting that is full of shit and will probably collapse before the next olympics"
now, there is no chance that we will be able to pass a constitutional amendment banning masturbation. with santorum gone, the only bulwark against the slaughter of the billions of semen is a man from whom I would not buy a used car - Mitt Romney.
Slashdot Mirror
this is one of the few posts to get it right. it was a fucking ponzi scheme, not some 'oh woops sorry' miscalculation by math guys.
as for the Fed bailout, it wasnt just a bunch of loans. there are an alphabet soup of programs the Fed set up to 'shore up' the banking system in 2008. there are literally at least a dozen programs they set up, each working in a different fashion and targeted at a different piece of the industry that was failing.
but the other side of this argument is its just more BS to lie to people about. they can claim that they 'payed the TARP money back', but that doesnt mention ANY of the other programs and the massive, huge losses the taxpayers took in bailing out these banks.
the AIG Credit Default swap deal being a prime example - you, the taxpayer, payed Goldman Sachs 100% of the 'face value' of the CDS that AIG wrote against a bunch of crappy CDOs. Those CDS were not woth but maybe a few pennies, like 1-10% of their face value. but we taxpayers were forced to pay 100%. Thats a 90% rip off. And the guys who did this running Treasury and the Fed were former Goldman people, like Hank Paulson. if its not conflict of interest i dont know what is. And, by the way, it has come out recently that he TOLD his hedge fund buddies what was going on, 'outside of the loop' of his normal job as Tres Sec. He put his banker friends before the American people.
the thing about the LTCM is that the guys that ran it got jobs in the industry, again, and they proceeded to destroy even more money, and then they did it again and again and again.
people say that capitalism 'weeds out the non performers' but when you look at the history of places like LTCM, its bullshit. its a big old boy network where people like Dick Fuld do not get busted down to street sweeper - they get to sit on millions of dollars of other peoples money, forever, with no prosecution of any kind. guys fail and fail and fail, over and over, and they keep getting jobs in the industry.
there are people who commit blatant frauds who keep getting spots in the industry too, over and over and over. The SEC and the other federal agencies then are supposed to regulate, but their top officers routinely get hired away by these companies they are supposed to be regulating at huge salaries as 'consultants' and lobbyists.
to use the word "Fraud", "Theft", "Corruption", or any of the other nasty things that 'greed' is a euphemism for.
your list is full of 'didnt understands'.
but there were a huge number of people who understood it perfectly well.
they get fat bonuses quarter after quarter for delivering 'results' that they knew were BS. they dont care. they keep on doing it.
the ratings agencies purposely colluded with the investment banks to lie about the ratings of CDOs. it wasnt 'they didnt understand', it was that they understood and were making too much money to care. their profit margins in these years came from CDO ratings. they actively stopped people inside their organizations who were pointing out the obvious flaws in the models.
AIG itself stopped the game a year before the thing began to crash. And yet, the Monoline insurance companies picked up where AIG left off. the idea that everyone 'didnt understand' does not make sense. Plenty of people understood. They just didnt care. its called fraud.
investment bank after investment bank, hedge fund after hedge fund, saw that this whole thing was a risky load of shit, and they actively moved to profit from the collapse, even at the expense of their own institutions. CEOs like Dick Fuld actively demoted and ignored internal critics, and walked away with millions after their companies disappeared into a puff of smoke.
The guys on the CDO desks at these places, not one or two, not a handful, not a dozen. Dozens. Dozens of them, made billions of dollars. Why should they care if it blew up? They were making bonuses based on 'future profits' calculated back to the present based on these shitty loans. They colluded with the ratings agencies to lie about the quality of the loans.
Then they made the taxpayers fix it all.
Where is the 'black swan'? Fraud is not a black swan, fraud is endemic to human nature and to financial bubbles.
Taleb is fine but here are some other books about the actual mechanics of the fraud
Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Lawrence McDonald
Sellout, Charles Gasparino
Trillion Dollar Meltdown, Charles R Morris
Fool's Gold, Gillian Tett
All the Devils are Here, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera
Structure Finance and CDOs, Janet Tavakoli
House of Cards, William Cohan
Greatest Trade Ever, Zuckerman
The Big Short, Michael Lewis.
EConned, Yves Smith
myron scholes or any of the other tools that enabled the 2008 crash, including CDOs, securitization, etc.
Edwrd Chancellor has a much, much more accurate , and scientific approach to crises - and that is to catalog and record them and their details, going back to Tulipmania and before. His book "Devil take the hindmost" came out before the 2008 crash, but basically what he is doing is proving that History is much more of a 'science' than economics --- at least in History, they try to gather actual data before making theories, and throw out the theories when the facts dont match.
the various attempts to 'blame math' for the crash of 2008 are little more than attempts to cover up the massive fraud that was perpetrated on the taxpayers of the planet. you make a huge amount of horrible loans to people you know cannot pay them back, resell the loans to people and lie about it, then get the government to bail you out when the whole system is about to collapse. you dont need a formula to do that, it is the basic feature of every economic bubble and its bursting. Fraud.
the difference here is that the fraudsters have completely made an end run around all the rules implemented after the 1929 crash to prevent this sort of thing, they practically own the politicians that are supposed to regulate them, and they insinuate themselves into positions of power in the political class. thats the difference - that we are actually regressing backwards in our civilization, and having the free market run less well than it did previously, and watching entrepenurial capitalism die a nasty death by its own supposed proponents.
but i think im mostly kind of right.
bombings like the Cole, Khobar Towers, Pan Am over Lockerbee, etc etc etc.
promoting a good police force is sort of part of the human rights agenda. rights activists are usually not asking for the end of the state, they are asking for the rule of law, and equal protection under the law.
which means for example that if a government murders a bunch of people with a research weapon, it should be held responsible. and maybe some of the Unit 731 people should not have their graves in honored places in Japanese cemeteries where the president goes and pays respects.
Adele Goldberg -- "actually, i did think of that, and told you guys, but you ignored me"
Consumer - "and that democratization of information between Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft brought technology to the masses and created the computer revolution of the 80s and 90s"
Apple CEO - "and we cant have that again, because the 80s and 90s were brutal for the entrenched interests. like Xerox"
Google - "no shit. thats why you shouldnt base your fucking business model on making information secret, when your entire history has been based on borrowing ideas from other people"
of cost reduction are what are required to meet a population growing at a geometric rate, in theory.
if you want to argue that somehow the 'resources required' to grow organics wont meet population growth, you have to prove that somehow conventional produce can meet the geometric rate increase while organics cant.
but if you go into the store, organics are not 'orders of magnitude' more expensive than conventional produce. they are usually 1 to 3 times more in cost. thats not an order of magnitude. its a pretty simple scalar multiple.
and alot of the difference in cost is because of subsidies for various industries, like the oil industry where the petroleum precursor of most fertilizers and insecticides comes from.
now, go into any supermarket, and look on the shelves. you see a huge amount of processed food, repackaged, precooked, pre-stuffed, etc etc etc. all of that 'added value' is, well, basically its waste. nobody "needs" frozen apple turnovers with chocolate icing in the pattern of a heart shape, but you can go buy it if you want. the idea that somehow organic food would be 'wasted productivity' in the food system is absolutely ridiculous when you look at all the crap in the various 'value added' isles of the supermarket. all of those are, essentially, lowering the efficiency of transporting the calories from the farm to the belly. you could simply sell 5 pound bags of flour for 2 dollars each, and get rid of the entire cereal and cracker aisle, and the people would get the same nutritional value approximately, but they would save a huge amount of money. money = resources. those resources saved could then be put back into growing 'extra food' and meeting the 'growing population'.
but that argument is fucking stupid because the 2-3 times price markup for a bag of crackers vs a bag of raw flour (which you could use to make your own goddamn crackers) is not going to cause mass starvation simply because its less efficient. all it does is make people smile because crackers taste good, and make food companies and retailers money because they can 'value add' to the raw flour and build a profit into the increased price.
now if you see organics, instead of some hippy 'impediment to growth and optimization of food supply', and, instead simply view it as another way to deliver calories or raw food products, then the arguments against them from an efficiency standpoint are just as stupid.
you cant say that organic flour is going to cause mass starvation because it costs 5 bucks a pound instead of 3 bucks a pound, when you have just repackaged that conventional flour into cheerios on the next aisle and are selling it for 6 bucks a pound.
these people are fucking idiots and should be embarassed to call themselves thinkers.
support human rights in and of themselves, and take charge of the state actors that tend to use these things horribly.
einstein and his friends were simply discussing the universe, and what would happen if you shined a light while riding on a superfast train. they had no 'intention' of investigating nuclear weapons, but that is where E=mc^2 eventually led.
lets look at the computerized lists used to help perform the holocaust. they began as census taking machines.
the attempt to cure disease was later used in Unit 731 to cause disease in Chinese civilian populations.
etc etc etc.
Similar things could be said about many other scientists, which is why so many of the big pacifists and anti-nuclear activists in the cold war were scientists... even people like Andrei Sahkarov who had specifically built their careers around weapons tech felt a responsibility to push against governments who were misusing it.
and i know everyones worried about 'lone wolf terrorists'. but alot of those guys, if you look at their history, were only enabled by state powers. without the CIA, ISI, and Soviet Red Army, there is no al Qaeda. it simply would not exist. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar would be selling fruitcakes on the side of the road not running a huge paramilitary organization from inside of a mansion. Pick a terrorist bombing over the last 50 years, the chances that is directly linked, or 'one-degree-of-separation' from a state run intelligence agency are very high.
i mean, thats kind of the point of a 'free market' - it shouldnt matter what country you come from as long as you do the job well.
i dont think so. i rather think freedom of speech is not just a recreational activity, it is vital to the ongoing survival of the human species. same for the other rights that suffer when all of space is controlled by a military dictatorship, aka, 'the federation'
he was a pessimist because he was a realist, and quite a lot of the stuff he wrote about came true.
if we had more pessimists in the 1930s, the world would be in a lot better place.
who were the optimists? they were the 'futurists', and they were allied with this new thing in italy called 'fascism' - the glorification of the machine of state, and the state of the machine.
what is optimism in this age? "Long Walk to Freedom" by Nelson Mandela. "My Country and the World" by Andrei Sakharov. "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan et al.
look in the govt, 'maintenance man' is the lowest you can go on the totem pole/cast system.
you will be a fucking GS3 making 20k/year or some horrible shit while congressman doing coke off hookers in the lincoln bedroom get perks out the ass, etc etc etc.
of course, their toilets wont work because maintenance men won't be allowed overtime, won't be encouraged to get more education, won't ever get promoted, etc etc etc... but hey, whatever. they didn't go to MI fucking T right? am i right?
this is a symptom of what is wrong with this country. building spy planes that can blow up people in their houses in the middle of the night from 100 miles away, but you cannot fix the fucking bridges and keep the goddamn hospitals clean, because the only thing 'cool' about janitorial/maintenance/cleaning is how low you can push the costs by outsourcing and re-out-out sourcing, privatizing everything from the toilet seat installation to the toilet paper delivery, so some hedge fund finance fucktard can say 'oh i saved 2 percent this year, i deserve a 50,000$ bonus for projected savings over the next 30 years'
We think the soviet union collapsed on itself? we are collapsing on ourselves right now. bridges are falling apart. roads are falling apart. schools are falling apart. they are firing cops, they are firing fucking firefighters. they are trying to destroy the goddamn firefighters union for chrissakes because it 'costs too much'.
you know what costs too much? the fucking system costs too much, and eventually it will self topple just like the soviets did. nice fucking country while it lasted, good ideals, in practice they did not get implemented. oh fucking well. start over and build again.
as muslims. you can read any history book of the soviet afghan war and figure this out.
and russia? does that sound oppressive? i mean it kind of sounds oppressive to me.
especially not if they have lasers.
good post... and on top that, even if he was driving a tesla or something that can do 15-0-15 instantly, its still not safe.
the whole point of stop signs and anti-running laws in the first place is to promote the safety of pedestrians, children, motorcycles, bicycles, and other automobiles.
assholes like this brag about how they 'beat the system' but when they kill somebody they dont feel so haughty.
the inability to comprehend the situation and the lack of enthusiasm in dealing with it in a forthright and efficient manner speaks volumes about kickstarters management culture. they sound like a bunch of incompetent buffoons.
then its kind of pointless.
and one year after the war in iraq had started, but before it had gone completely to hell in a handbasket.
2004 was in the middle of the housing boom, when every fucking idiot thought they had $500,000 in equity in some piece of shit mcmansion that was in reality just a game piece so that some hedge funder could pump and dump another Mortgage Backed CDO on the widows and orphan investors of the planet.
"ask yourself, are you better off now than you were 4 years ago, using the fake paper accounting that is full of shit and will probably collapse before the next olympics"
now, there is no chance that we will be able to pass a constitutional amendment banning masturbation. with santorum gone, the only bulwark against the slaughter of the billions of semen is a man from whom I would not buy a used car - Mitt Romney.
"I am not deceiving myself about anything"
i can tell by some of the voxels and from having seen a lot of shops in my time (playing Commanche helicopter simulator in 1993)