they use some fuzzy accounting to redefine what 'bailout' means. they have 'loans' and 'loan guarantees' and 'asset purchase programs' and a whole other bunch of stuff to make it hard to calculate a straight ahead cost.
imco (in my conspiratorial opinion), they did this on purpose because otherwise they wouldnt have been able to inject enough capital into the banking system and wed be even more @#$@#$ than we are. (congress would never allocate 2 trillion directly).
one million american dollars, yeah it is kind of cheap.
There is a great book about the Soviet side of the early space days. One of their test V7 rockets blew up, the chief designer and his friend were almost crying about the massive amount of money they had just wasted, enough to support whole villages several times over.
When Sputnik launched, it captured the human imagination so powerfully that even the communist apparatchiks of Kruschev's regime had to pay respect to Korolev, and even the children of the imperialists were out in their backyards tuning their radios to the transmissions of the godless communist enemy. The man Korolev, though they would not know the man's name for another couple dozens years, as he was kept a secret so the CIA would not assassinate him, and his team, inspired the whole world.
And now, this feat costs $250,000... less than the price of a fighter jet, or a hollywood movie, or a TV show episode, and it can be done by civilians. It is truly remarkable, and a great story for slashdot.
it's like the difference between having unbuffered video stream and a buffered video stream on your youtube video.
if its unbuffered, you might get interruptions and hiccups in delivery, which destroy the experience.
if you have buffering, it costs more resources, more memory, more code, etc, but you are guaranteed less interruption.
now we are talking about big industries instead of a video on youtube, so people feel the impact harder, and if it is the food pipleine, people will start rioting in the street.
many oil producers keep strategic reserves on hand, am i right? its like inventory, its wasteful but they do it to smooth out the bumps in the road.
the entire business system of the world has been moving to 'just in time' / outsourcing, from airplanes to electronics to finance itself (mortgages).
the claim is 'higher efficiences' and 'lower costs' (arbitrage im guessing is in there somewhere).
when people talk about risks, they dont get listened to becasue they are basically saying 'we need to cut fewer costs' i.e. 'we need to make less short term profit'.
in some industries, failure to be number 1 or 2 = complete and total failure, at least amongst certain types of people who see things that way.
if you dont believe me just google up the NPR stories about the drug war in mexico.
journalists have stopped reporting. politicians have stopped talking. the drug gangs control everything, including, now, your children's biometric data.
i hate to be sour grapes, but all these 'boycott BOA' calls are just about like boycotting Shell stations and thinking that it matters. the Oil all gets mixed together at the refinery, and money all gets mixed together in the back office of financial institutions. it doesnt matter if it is a small Gasoline shop in downtown, springfield, america, or a small bank across the street from it. the same principle applies.
i have had a website up about the 'toxic debt' for 6+ months. it gives details of CDOs.
it has almost no visitors. 100 hits a day, mostly big banks and lawyers and the government trolling google looking for specific doodas for some reason they are stuck with researching.
now, is that the users fault? or is it my fault, for not making my site good enough? i dont mean good like huffington post, i mean good like digging enough dirt out before i find something.
(actually i did find some things but i couldnt post them, because.. its a long story. . . )
anyways, if my site had been successfull i could have quit my job and done more of it. instead i am pretty much about to shut the site down.
should i blame the public? i dont think so, i used to be a 'stupid public' before i heard a radio show that approached the story from an angle i could understand.
i am thinking about every unforseen situation that car drivers encounter, that could never possibly be predicted. then i am trying to imagine a robot taking over those decisions. it doesn't work.
deer and pedestrians jumping out in front of a car are one thing.
i mentioned several other things that the robot has no clue how to deal with. pulling over for a fire truck that is trying to get down the road? not going to work. there are a ton of other things that can happen that there is no way you can ever predict.
what if the car is going up an icy road, and then it starts sliding backwards because it couldnt make it? how is the robot going to slide back down the hill? it doesnt even know where the road is, the road is covered in ice.
how about your wheel falls off? it happens. what does the robot do?
what if the robots sensors go out? get jammed by some unforseen event?
most of all what it lacks is judgement. the robot can hit the brakes, but maybe it should have been going slower in the first place. drivers know in certain neighborhoods you slow down, they know when its dark to slow down, when its wet you slow down, they know where blind corners are, they know about the semi trucks that cut too close on the sharp turn on the way to work every day (and how you might have to back up) , people understand how to deal with a 4 way stop if the lights go out, they know the highway has a bad bump here and you might lose traction for a half of a second, they know there are drug dealers on this block so dont go this way,
they know that if you have two choices, one goes by an accident up ahead and the other goes through the parking lot of the church, you go through the church parking lot so as to not be a rubbernecker. but you slow down because its sunday and old people are walking through on walkers and, they are driving and their reaction times are bad.
Slashdot Mirror
discusses how he got anti-intellectual Reagan to fund the thing in the first place (we are cowboys, exploring the frontiers of physics)
they use some fuzzy accounting to redefine what 'bailout' means. they have 'loans' and 'loan guarantees' and 'asset purchase programs' and a whole other bunch of stuff to make it hard to calculate a straight ahead cost.
imco (in my conspiratorial opinion), they did this on purpose because otherwise they wouldnt have been able to inject enough capital into the banking system and wed be even more @#$@#$ than we are. (congress would never allocate 2 trillion directly).
in one Synthetic CDO trade. read 'the big short' if you dont believe me.
to pore over high res photographs of the desert.
anyone who finds a meterotie gets a $500 bonus.
i thought they had a rocket for $250k. lols.
all i know is what i read in the books
my bad
one million american dollars, yeah it is kind of cheap.
There is a great book about the Soviet side of the early space days. One of their test V7 rockets blew up, the chief designer and his friend were almost crying about the massive amount of money they had just wasted, enough to support whole villages several times over.
When Sputnik launched, it captured the human imagination so powerfully that even the communist apparatchiks of Kruschev's regime had to pay respect to Korolev, and even the children of the imperialists were out in their backyards tuning their radios to the transmissions of the godless communist enemy. The man Korolev, though they would not know the man's name for another couple dozens years, as he was kept a secret so the CIA would not assassinate him, and his team, inspired the whole world.
And now, this feat costs $250,000... less than the price of a fighter jet, or a hollywood movie, or a TV show episode, and it can be done by civilians. It is truly remarkable, and a great story for slashdot.
IMHO
by releasing the keys which are 'national defense information'?
it's like the difference between having unbuffered video stream and a buffered video stream on your youtube video.
if its unbuffered, you might get interruptions and hiccups in delivery, which destroy the experience.
if you have buffering, it costs more resources, more memory, more code, etc, but you are guaranteed less interruption.
now we are talking about big industries instead of a video on youtube, so people feel the impact harder, and if it is the food pipleine, people will start rioting in the street.
many oil producers keep strategic reserves on hand, am i right? its like inventory, its wasteful but they do it to smooth out the bumps in the road.
the entire business system of the world has been moving to 'just in time' / outsourcing, from airplanes to electronics to finance itself (mortgages).
the claim is 'higher efficiences' and 'lower costs' (arbitrage im guessing is in there somewhere).
when people talk about risks, they dont get listened to becasue they are basically saying 'we need to cut fewer costs' i.e. 'we need to make less short term profit'.
in some industries, failure to be number 1 or 2 = complete and total failure, at least amongst certain types of people who see things that way.
michael lewis just got sued by Wing Chau for 'the big short'.
his publisher is helping him out with this.
most of this discussion on /. seems to be about non-fiction, vampires, zombies, whatever.
the world of non-fiction journalism is a world apart.
editors, working for publishers, are behind a lot of the great literary works of the united states.
philip k dick's "a scanner darkly" comes to mind. there are many others.
publishers also deal with libel and defamation lawsuits for you.
they also set up junkets so you can market your book.
im not saying theres no point to self publish, but there are many differences between music industry and book industry.
also known as "Mr X", an author for part of the book Marihuana Reconsidered?
Richard Feynman, almost became a full blown alcoholic?
i could go on.
that was also my personal view, before i saw the video of pool of garbage, on fire, devouring the countryside, wiping away houses like they were toys.
so when their heads turn up in a ditch, and their body turns up in a dumpster, you will be able to match the parts together.
this post is not a joke. just google what is going on down there.
will now have everyones iris scan. wonderful!
if you dont believe me just google up the NPR stories about the drug war in mexico.
journalists have stopped reporting. politicians have stopped talking. the drug gangs control everything, including, now, your children's biometric data.
the actual 'owners' of your mortgage might be thousands of people all over the planet.
the BoA might just be the 'servicers'.
i hate to be sour grapes, but all these 'boycott BOA' calls are just about like boycotting Shell stations and thinking that it matters. the Oil all gets mixed together at the refinery, and money all gets mixed together in the back office of financial institutions. it doesnt matter if it is a small Gasoline shop in downtown, springfield, america, or a small bank across the street from it. the same principle applies.
i have had a website up about the 'toxic debt' for 6+ months. it gives details of CDOs.
it has almost no visitors. 100 hits a day, mostly big banks and lawyers and the government trolling google looking for specific doodas for some reason they are stuck with researching.
now, is that the users fault? or is it my fault, for not making my site good enough? i dont mean good like huffington post, i mean good like digging enough dirt out before i find something.
(actually i did find some things but i couldnt post them, because.. its a long story. . . )
anyways, if my site had been successfull i could have quit my job and done more of it. instead i am pretty much about to shut the site down.
should i blame the public? i dont think so, i used to be a 'stupid public' before i heard a radio show that approached the story from an angle i could understand.
0 peers.
nothing happens.
i have no idea. the guy who made pkzip died waist deep in a pile of hoarder trash or something.
had something to do with shareware.
or so im told.
Why did Solidarity succeed while other revoultions just made things worse?
i am thinking about every unforseen situation that car drivers encounter, that could never possibly be predicted. then i am trying to imagine a robot taking over those decisions. it doesn't work.
deer and pedestrians jumping out in front of a car are one thing.
i mentioned several other things that the robot has no clue how to deal with. pulling over for a fire truck that is trying to get down the road? not going to work. there are a ton of other things that can happen that there is no way you can ever predict.
what if the car is going up an icy road, and then it starts sliding backwards because it couldnt make it? how is the robot going to slide back down the hill? it doesnt even know where the road is, the road is covered in ice.
how about your wheel falls off? it happens. what does the robot do?
what if the robots sensors go out? get jammed by some unforseen event?
most of all what it lacks is judgement. the robot can hit the brakes, but maybe it should have been going slower in the first place. drivers know in certain neighborhoods you slow down, they know when its dark to slow down, when its wet you slow down, they know where blind corners are, they know about the semi trucks that cut too close on the sharp turn on the way to work every day (and how you might have to back up) , people understand how to deal with a 4 way stop if the lights go out, they know the highway has a bad bump here and you might lose traction for a half of a second, they know there are drug dealers on this block so dont go this way,
they know that if you have two choices, one goes by an accident up ahead and the other goes through the parking lot of the church, you go through the church parking lot so as to not be a rubbernecker. but you slow down because its sunday and old people are walking through on walkers and, they are driving and their reaction times are bad.
etc etc etc.