the fact is that you can build a nuclear bomb with 1940s technology. know what else was state of the art in the 1940s? nylon. tube amplifiers. black and white television. color movies.
the 'gun type weapon' is so simple a child could build it. half the shit on mythbusters is more complicated than a gun-type uranium weapon. refining the uranium is a pain in the ass, but again, it just takes a lot of fucking money, there isn't any secret formula. there is no mystery. its not going back in the bottle. its like saying that we can stop people from building guns or airplanes with missiles on them. it doesnt work that way.
the reason it got shut down is because you can't outcompete a country where environmental activists are put into labor camps.
pretty simple, and yet, almost every media story on this thing hides the truth in vague generalizations like "cost competition". its not cost competition, its fucking slavery.
pension funds, city governments, people running 401 k plans, etc etc etc.
all you have to do is read some SEC reports really close to find out who has invested in student loan debt. its the same morons who invested in subprime mortgage debt. they are the people who run the pension systems, the 401k funds, the union funds, the funds of funds, etc etc etc. there are also a lot of stupid individual investors, corporate investors, and government investors, people who dont want to do due diligence and prefer to rely on the ratings agencies, even after the greatest financial crash in the history of the planet was directly caused by the ratings agencies (which, for some reason, have escaped any and all punishment, whatsoever, let alone meaningful scrutiny by the government).
and the same people are shorting it (Steve Eisman, of Michael Lewis' Big Short, is now shorting 'subprime education', he made millions shorting the housing bubble at Morgan Stanley).
it is really hilarious to watch people bitching about everything from dorms that are too nice to too many mac's in the computer labs, but nobody wants to follow the money.
student loan debt is securitized and resold to various investors, just like housing debt was in the housing bubble. its the securitization chain, and the big banks are behind it, along with the corrupt government agencies that look the other way instead of doing their job (preventing fraud, preventing false advertising, preventing misdeeds by the credit ratings agencies, etc)
it is like this never ending pattern when people talk about financial matters. everyone goes off their own personal experience instead of approaching it like a hacker: : : how does the system work? what are it's major pieces? how do they fit together? what is the flow in between those pieces? if people would just ask those basic fucking questions we wouldnt be in this fucking recession.
instead its 'oh no, i graduated and i payed my debt off, these freeloaders / communists / blah blah blah'.. complete and utter red herring bullshit that is in no way helpful to solving the problems of the planet.
the government back stops large investment banks to securitize a shitty loan, pay ratings agencies to over-rate the quality of the loan, and then resell the loan to investors.
the feeder system, i.e. the subprime colleges (ITT tech, Univ of Phoenix, etc) are completely unregulated, and basically control their own accreditation system. this is thanks to extensive lobbying, and brainwashing of "no regulation" twats who think the government is the root of all evil.
congrats, no regulation directly enables scam artists to fuck the government of its necessary functions. there is no decent, modern country on the planet (or in the history of the planet) that does not have government funded education.
talking about the student loan bubble without talking about the securitization chain is like talking about the housing bubble without talking about the securitization chain
student loans are sliced and diced and sold on to third parties who sell them on to other parties.
banks dont care. the colleges dont care. the only people who care are the investors who buy this debt... but it could be in a mystery-meat structured product that they dont even understand. it is also probably highly rated by the ratings agencies, who get payed by the banks to rate this trash highly. just like the housing market.
goldman sachs, jp morgan, etc, are very happy about the student loan bubble, it gives them more suckers to scam and another bubble to short. and if you are screaming about 'lib arts majors' and 'useless bureaucracy' at schools, you are missing the point. its like yelling at the migrant farm worker who was loaned 200 grand to buy a house.... a sharp looking guy in a nice suit from a big bank told him it was a good idea, because he can re-sell it for 250 grand in two years. why shouldnt he listen? he probably didnt even graduate from high school.
take for example the French check-processing scandal that happened a few years ago.
the banks said "oh, we are transitioning from paper checks to electronic payments. we will need to hike fees a little bit to pay for this transition, it will be expensive, but eventually we will stop"
guess what. they never stopped. years after they had completed the transition. years after they had payed back their costs. they kept charging people fees for 'electronic conversion'.
sure, you can argue that everyone agreed to that. but that would be a lie. everyone did not agree to it. and everyone knows it was wrong. except, somehow, certain sociopathic types who do not have a conscience, or undersatnd the difference between right and wrong.
by CEOs and executives... which is every bit, exactly, as much stealing as swiping someones credit card. and it has gone unpunished... there is a book that came out recently about this.
then there were the Auction Rate Securities scams...
then there were the CLO based mergers and acquisitions, created only for profit of traders...
and on and on. the garden of fraud that blossomed from 1995-2008 is unprecedented in human history, and yet law enforcement wasnt able to "come across it".
the only people in jail are Bernie Madoff and that one hedge fund dude. Everyone else got away.
the subprime RMBS, the Credit Default Swap market.... those were trillions of dollars... a single CDO deal could be worth a billion dollars... and law enforcement some how did not "come across" it.
if you want to know why, three of the best books are Confidence Game by Christine S Richard and The Asylum by Leah McGrath Goodman and EConned by Yves Smith. Another good resource is the film Inside Job by Charles Ferguson.
white-collar law enforcement is flat out corrupted, with guys who head regulatory agencies going soft on big financial institutions, and then getting hired by those institutions a year or two later.
the Synthetic CDO market has been called the biggest ponzi scheme in history, by Janet Tavakoli (who wrote three textbooks on structured finance). and insiders in the industry, like Gregg Lippman of Deutschebank, called it similar names, as revealed by the Levin Coburn senate committee hearings. You can find books like Colossal Failure of Common Sense, by Lehman bond trader Lawrence McDonald (and Patrick Robinson) who flat out call CDS "gambling". and then there is Lang Gibson , high up in Merrill Lynch's CDO business, who wrote an entire book called 'Lost Trust' about it. Then there is Tetsua Ishikawa, who wrote a novel called "How I caused the Credit Crunch" - he was an ex-Goldman Sachs guy .
Now lets not even discuss the Commodity Index Funds, or how "someone in Washington" prevented Goodman's article in a trade journal that blamed the GSCIF for manipulating market prices of commodities, or the article in Harpers that said similar things. Also lets not even go into how JP Morgan and other bailed-out banks have bought entire warehouses to hoard metals (Copper being the one JPM was caught doing), or that the head of JP Morgan's commodities business is none other than Blythe Masters - who was on the original JPM team that invented Credit Default Swaps in the 1990s.
No. Let's go after the half-starving clerks and retail workers, many of whom cannot even afford to go to a doctor, in the richest country on the history of the planet. Yeah. those are the real 'thieves'. arent they?
As Goodman quotes a Trader in her book, about why the cops never go busting the massive cocaine deals going on in places like the New York Mercantile exchange... "[why would they want to get caught up in a shit show like that? Theyd rather be busting Pablo in Harlem]". the same principle applies to other financial crimes, like theft and fraud. Why would a regulator or cop want to get caught up in a shit show like that?
these people are the problem in the world. These people are what is wrong with america. these people are pure, unadulterated, incarnate evil. they represent everything backward, barbaric, evil, stupid, crude, vulgar, barbarian, and moronic in our culture and in our society. they represent the death of the human spirit, the backward turning of the clock, the destruction of technology, not simply the machines, but the idea itself, the evolutionary pinnacle of the human brain is viewed as an impediment, as a problem to be solved, rather than as a fundamental miracle of the universes forward march toward destiny. these are the people who sacked rome, who raped nanjing, who seiged st petersburg. these are the foul and rotting corpse zombies of the apocalypse, the pestulant horsemen come to slaughter mankind with the weapons of dullness and a purposeful, proud ignorance. when they learned that someone threw witches into water to test whether they were guilty by flotation, they cheered that such a marvelous form of justice had been created. when they heard the inquisitor torture galileo to say the earth moved not, they were happy that right had been done. when they saw einstein chased out of germany for his heresy, they cheered because right had been protected from wrong. these are the banes of history, the anti-people who wish themselves to be lizards, so that they could crown themselves lizard kings, and rule over us in our senseless joy and invention. they pity us for our freedom and for our imagination, they view us as deformed, for having ideas, and view us as trouble, for speaking them freely.
if there is anything that will drive the exploration of the exoplanets, it is the people like those who inhabit the management offices of Astrolab, Incorporated.
Slashdot Mirror
the fact is that you can build a nuclear bomb with 1940s technology. know what else was state of the art in the 1940s? nylon. tube amplifiers. black and white television. color movies.
the 'gun type weapon' is so simple a child could build it. half the shit on mythbusters is more complicated than a gun-type uranium weapon. refining the uranium is a pain in the ass, but again, it just takes a lot of fucking money, there isn't any secret formula. there is no mystery. its not going back in the bottle. its like saying that we can stop people from building guns or airplanes with missiles on them. it doesnt work that way.
full of people that you chopped the limbs off of and ate, like in The Road, well, i guess we should put you in prison too.
But hey, whats this 'if' stuff. Here's what we know about cannibals in modern society.
1. most of them are white
2. most of them are male
3. alot of them visit sites similar to slashdot
4. you have a basement
5. you are not a vegetarian
holy shit ! call the fucking FBI
you stupid, ignorant fuckwad
i wish Bre would figure this out so Makerbot could start opening retail stores and getting insipid journalists to drool over his genius
wow. what progress we have made since the 1800s.
we have gone from 'a chicken in every pot' to 'a chicken in every cubicle'
this stuff happening. you guys who have worked in corps know how it works.
geek: "hey boss this shit is broken"
boss: "how much will it cost to fix it"
geek: "more than 0 dollars"
boss: "fuck it. oh, and i didnt say that"
google it.
and we pretend we have a 'green economy' with our space-ship apple headquarters that run off of sunshine and unicorn farts.
fucking US hypocrisy is astounding.
see also: Kerr-Mcgee and Tronox
the reason it got shut down is because you can't outcompete a country where environmental activists are put into labor camps.
pretty simple, and yet, almost every media story on this thing hides the truth in vague generalizations like "cost competition".
its not cost competition, its fucking slavery.
pension funds, city governments, people running 401 k plans, etc etc etc.
all you have to do is read some SEC reports really close to find out who has invested in student loan debt. its the same morons who invested in subprime mortgage debt. they are the people who run the pension systems, the 401k funds, the union funds, the funds of funds, etc etc etc. there are also a lot of stupid individual investors, corporate investors, and government investors, people who dont want to do due diligence and prefer to rely on the ratings agencies, even after the greatest financial crash in the history of the planet was directly caused by the ratings agencies (which, for some reason, have escaped any and all punishment, whatsoever, let alone meaningful scrutiny by the government).
and the same people are shorting it (Steve Eisman, of Michael Lewis' Big Short, is now shorting 'subprime education', he made millions shorting the housing bubble at Morgan Stanley).
it is really hilarious to watch people bitching about everything from dorms that are too nice to too many mac's in the computer labs, but nobody wants to follow the money.
student loan debt is securitized and resold to various investors, just like housing debt was in the housing bubble. its the securitization chain, and the big banks are behind it, along with the corrupt government agencies that look the other way instead of doing their job (preventing fraud, preventing false advertising, preventing misdeeds by the credit ratings agencies, etc)
it is like this never ending pattern when people talk about financial matters. everyone goes off their own personal experience instead of approaching it like a hacker: : : how does the system work? what are it's major pieces? how do they fit together? what is the flow in between those pieces? if people would just ask those basic fucking questions we wouldnt be in this fucking recession.
instead its 'oh no, i graduated and i payed my debt off, these freeloaders / communists / blah blah blah' .. complete and utter red herring bullshit that is in no way helpful to solving the problems of the planet.
the government back stops large investment banks to securitize a shitty loan, pay ratings agencies to over-rate the quality of the loan, and then resell the loan to investors.
the feeder system, i.e. the subprime colleges (ITT tech, Univ of Phoenix, etc) are completely unregulated, and basically control their own accreditation system. this is thanks to extensive lobbying, and brainwashing of "no regulation" twats who think the government is the root of all evil.
congrats, no regulation directly enables scam artists to fuck the government of its necessary functions. there is no decent, modern country on the planet (or in the history of the planet) that does not have government funded education.
shrug shrug! !
talking about the student loan bubble without talking about the securitization chain is like talking about the housing bubble without talking about the securitization chain
student loans are sliced and diced and sold on to third parties who sell them on to other parties.
banks dont care. the colleges dont care. the only people who care are the investors who buy this debt... but it could be in a mystery-meat structured product that they dont even understand. it is also probably highly rated by the ratings agencies, who get payed by the banks to rate this trash highly. just like the housing market.
goldman sachs, jp morgan, etc, are very happy about the student loan bubble, it gives them more suckers to scam and another bubble to short. and if you are screaming about 'lib arts majors' and 'useless bureaucracy' at schools, you are missing the point. its like yelling at the migrant farm worker who was loaned 200 grand to buy a house.... a sharp looking guy in a nice suit from a big bank told him it was a good idea, because he can re-sell it for 250 grand in two years. why shouldnt he listen? he probably didnt even graduate from high school.
the company pay to train people
it doesn't matter what language you write it in.
because of all the shitty languages used to develop it.
it's going the way of Sun . . . just losing tons of users every day.
take for example the French check-processing scandal that happened a few years ago.
the banks said "oh, we are transitioning from paper checks to electronic payments. we will need to hike fees a little bit to pay for this transition, it will be expensive, but eventually we will stop"
guess what. they never stopped. years after they had completed the transition. years after they had payed back their costs. they kept charging people fees for 'electronic conversion'.
sure, you can argue that everyone agreed to that. but that would be a lie. everyone did not agree to it. and everyone knows it was wrong. except, somehow, certain sociopathic types who do not have a conscience, or undersatnd the difference between right and wrong.
by CEOs and executives... which is every bit, exactly, as much stealing as swiping someones credit card. and it has gone unpunished... there is a book that came out recently about this.
then there were the Auction Rate Securities scams...
then there were the CLO based mergers and acquisitions, created only for profit of traders...
and on and on. the garden of fraud that blossomed from 1995-2008 is unprecedented in human history, and yet law enforcement wasnt able to "come across it".
the only people in jail are Bernie Madoff and that one hedge fund dude. Everyone else got away.
figure that one out.
the subprime RMBS, the Credit Default Swap market.... those were trillions of dollars... a single CDO deal could be worth a billion dollars... and law enforcement some how did not "come across" it.
if you want to know why, three of the best books are Confidence Game by Christine S Richard and The Asylum by Leah McGrath Goodman and EConned by Yves Smith. Another good resource is the film Inside Job by Charles Ferguson.
white-collar law enforcement is flat out corrupted, with guys who head regulatory agencies going soft on big financial institutions, and then getting hired by those institutions a year or two later.
the Synthetic CDO market has been called the biggest ponzi scheme in history, by Janet Tavakoli (who wrote three textbooks on structured finance). and insiders in the industry, like Gregg Lippman of Deutschebank, called it similar names, as revealed by the Levin Coburn senate committee hearings. You can find books like Colossal Failure of Common Sense, by Lehman bond trader Lawrence McDonald (and Patrick Robinson) who flat out call CDS "gambling". and then there is Lang Gibson , high up in Merrill Lynch's CDO business, who wrote an entire book called 'Lost Trust' about it. Then there is Tetsua Ishikawa, who wrote a novel called "How I caused the Credit Crunch" - he was an ex-Goldman Sachs guy .
Now lets not even discuss the Commodity Index Funds, or how "someone in Washington" prevented Goodman's article in a trade journal that blamed the GSCIF for manipulating market prices of commodities, or the article in Harpers that said similar things. Also lets not even go into how JP Morgan and other bailed-out banks have bought entire warehouses to hoard metals (Copper being the one JPM was caught doing), or that the head of JP Morgan's commodities business is none other than Blythe Masters - who was on the original JPM team that invented Credit Default Swaps in the 1990s.
No. Let's go after the half-starving clerks and retail workers, many of whom cannot even afford to go to a doctor, in the richest country on the history of the planet. Yeah. those are the real 'thieves'. arent they?
As Goodman quotes a Trader in her book, about why the cops never go busting the massive cocaine deals going on in places like the New York Mercantile exchange... "[why would they want to get caught up in a shit show like that? Theyd rather be busting Pablo in Harlem]". the same principle applies to other financial crimes, like theft and fraud. Why would a regulator or cop want to get caught up in a shit show like that?
i actually understood most of that.
why can't people like you write the wikipedia math articles?
and i have no idea what the hell they are saying. wicked smash innit? thems Cockney barrow boy spivs theyis!
but i can understand almost any Indian i hear speaking English.
these people are the problem in the world. These people are what is wrong with america. these people are pure, unadulterated, incarnate evil. they represent everything backward, barbaric, evil, stupid, crude, vulgar, barbarian, and moronic in our culture and in our society. they represent the death of the human spirit, the backward turning of the clock, the destruction of technology, not simply the machines, but the idea itself, the evolutionary pinnacle of the human brain is viewed as an impediment, as a problem to be solved, rather than as a fundamental miracle of the universes forward march toward destiny. these are the people who sacked rome, who raped nanjing, who seiged st petersburg. these are the foul and rotting corpse zombies of the apocalypse, the pestulant horsemen come to slaughter mankind with the weapons of dullness and a purposeful, proud ignorance. when they learned that someone threw witches into water to test whether they were guilty by flotation, they cheered that such a marvelous form of justice had been created. when they heard the inquisitor torture galileo to say the earth moved not, they were happy that right had been done. when they saw einstein chased out of germany for his heresy, they cheered because right had been protected from wrong. these are the banes of history, the anti-people who wish themselves to be lizards, so that they could crown themselves lizard kings, and rule over us in our senseless joy and invention. they pity us for our freedom and for our imagination, they view us as deformed, for having ideas, and view us as trouble, for speaking them freely.
if there is anything that will drive the exploration of the exoplanets, it is the people like those who inhabit the management offices of Astrolab, Incorporated.
its a figure of speech.