Are you proud of what the corps you own have done to the world you're going to retire in? How much is the blood on your hands worth? Is it worth trashing your children's and grandchildrens's world?
And if you're going to say that's all made up, is it worth living in denial that it's true?
I do blame the people who lied to get loans, as I said. I just don't not blame the banks that didn't check to see if they're lying, because those loans were profitable anyway (just not as much as if they weren't lying), as I also said. Thinking that this mortgage bubble somehow neutralizes because both banks and borrowers worked together to defraud the Fed of the loan money, so the Fed should bail out either of them, is what the banks are counting on to get bailed out.
How could banks have risked 4x the money? Who borrowed it? And since the banks marked up all the loans they made on money loaned from the Fed, it's clear that banks risked less than the people who borrowed it, because the Fed risked some of what the banks just passed through. Since the banks marked up the Fed wholesale to their retail by less than doubling it, the banks risked less than even the Fed. Since the banks made plenty of completely profitable loans (at even 5.26% - lower than it's been in years - compound over 30 years, banks make as much in interest as in principal, not even including points and fees), the system risked even less money than that. If you look at all those big factors, not even considering all the little complexities in refinance, reinvestment of the interest payments, etc, it's perfectly clear that the borrowers as a whole risked more than the banks did, and far from the 4:1 bank risk you're claiming.
You're still saying that loaning lots of money to people who probably wouldn't pay it back is a huge risk, but of course that's why banks get to make at least as much in interest as the principal paid to the home seller. And of course if banks which take those risks get bailed out, then they're not taking those risks. Which is exactly why they should either not get bailed out, or not get those profits for taking the risk. Getting both bailouts and profits means they're not taking the risk.
So you're now independently wealthy. Explain to me how my doing the same is not "doing something to better myself". If you're going to use the same kind of "logic" you've used so far, don't bother.
Is there a Firefox plugin that runs an actual torrent client, actually downloading the chunks in the background and not just browsing the tracker?
If BitTorrent were just another protocol Firefox handled, along with HTTP, FTP, etc, and people didn't even need to know they're downloading "a torrent" any more than we need to know we're downloading a GIF, or JPG, or MOV, or WMV, BitTorrent use would skyrocket, the way that HTTP skyrocketed on the popularity of integrating it with a browser for the more popular (at the initial release time) protocols like FTP, and even disappeared ones like gopher and WAIS.
In fact, the increased download performance would probably make Firefox even more popular, as people switched to it because it could handle the torrents that other browsers (IE) don't.
If someone could write a complete torrent client that's entirely embeddable in an HTML page (and doesn't require the browser to have any special torrent support), that could grow even faster. Though that kind of packaging isn't as easy to use (and not accidentally abort) as one that downloads in the background, and doesn't quit when clicking away from its page.
and why is this? millions of people took on a loan they couldn't handle. It has to do with the fact that many banks were forced to give out loans (by the government) to people that they knew were not making enough to pay it back.
No, that's not why.
Yes, millions took on loans they couldn't handle. Banks weren't "forced to give out loans". Unless you mean that they were forced by their shareholders natural profit motive to take near-0% wholesale loans from the government, which government eliminated requirements that the retail borrowers be able to pay it back, then mark it up to several percent, and jack that up to a dozen percent or more after the borrowers were committed to the loan (because they'd lose their house, and whatever they'd already repaid).
Yes, there were millions of people who took out loans they couldn't afford. I never said they shouldn't lose their houses, or otherwise take the hit. There were many people who got loans on fraud, too, though most of those frauds were encouraged by banks that didn't ask even for documentation - just asserting on a single form that you made $X a year was enough.
Hell, we just lived through the age of "NINJA" loans: No Income, No Job or Assets. Given happily by banks, hand over fist.
Why? Not because "the government forced them to". But because the government made them a delightful offer they couldn't refuse: make $BILLIONS on these stupid loans, marking up loans from the government, and then when lots go bad, the government will bail you out. The problem is that "the government" meant "politicians bribed by the banks" when it came to deciding to hand out the money, but "the government" means "taxpayers" when it comes to actually paying for it. Taxpayers who were themselves bribed by those politicians with "tax cuts" and even tax rebates, all so the entire cost could be put onto the public debt, which means it cost even more interest atop what the mortgage interest cost.
If you'd asked about what to do about the people who took loans they can't repay, you'd have found that of course they should bear the damage from failing under their risks. People who were sold loans by fraudulent banks should still have to repay the principal to those banks, and pay an interest rate set to the median fixed rate their neighbors paid in the financial quarter they all were issued their loans, but to a government liquidity fund rather than to the defrauding bank, from which fund new loans can be made if necessary and creditworthy. If they still can't pay, they foreclose like anyone else. People taking loans on true terms they signed should also have to pay, unless they go bankrupt like anyone else - at which point the judge can redesign their mortgage debt, along with all their obligations to creditors, just like anyone else. And everyone in the country should be allowed to tap their IRAs and other separate funds ordinarily unavailable to keep their homes from foreclosing. But since you were too busy inventing what I think about risk and consequences, you didn't bother to find out.
Blah blah blah about "rich vs poor is a lie". The fact is that the rich have every privilege. I didn't say that no poor people can get rich: some can, especially if they can help the rich get richer (helping the poor get richer makes practically no one rich in this country). I personally came from a middle class family, worked regular jobs starting at age 13, and made myself rich by working like a slave starting up my own company on my own savings and brains. I even helped some kids who'd grown up poor by training and employing them, and they're at least upper middle class, and some are rich. I don't say anyone should get extra privileges and opportunities because they're not rich, just that the rich have enough extra opportunities and privileges they can legitimately buy, without being subsidized in risk and profits by the taxpayers when they go wrong, more than everyone else gets protected. Being rich ha
Bear Stearns is getting bailed out by the government (taxpayers). JP Morgan is getting the money to by BS from the government (taxpayers).
Sure, the stock is going to be worth less net now than it was last year. But that high was built on a bubble inflated by money lent from the Fed (taxpayers).
And even more to the point, Bear Stearns (and its shareholders, brokers and execs) raked in so many $BILLIONS over the past 10-20 years (much of which ultimately came from the Fed - taxpayers) running the way that eventually ran out, that it was totally worth the price of doing business when its shares collapsed. They made way more cash money operating that way than they lost on paper.
So I call you math illiterate, and a liar.
Meanwhile, the Republicans controlling the economy(ies) that pumped all that money through BS will do anything they can to avoid protecting the millions of people in the same economic straits who are going to lose their homes.
So I call you a thief, since your lies are protecting the Republican wealth redistribution from most Americans to banks like Bear Stearns, and the even risk-freer ones like JP Morgan.
Your free market economy at work. Free of honesty, that is.
A recession and a bubble at the same time? Of course. When oil and bank corps, and the people who own & run them are bathing in record profits (above the records set every year for the past decade and a half, above the records set every year except maybe one or two of every twenty for the past few centuries), but literally millions of people are getting their homes foreclosed, millions more are always 6 weeks paychecks from losing their homes, income has shrunk over the past 25 years while prices have doubled, tripled or more (especially oil/gas prices and bank fees)...
Of course there's a recession and a bubble possible. Where do you think that bubble money comes from? And do you think that when it pops, everyone loses their shirt? Or maybe the rich people who run the country (*cough* Bear Stearns *cough*) will never see any real risk, while the poor are as free as the rich to sleep under a bridge.
The biggest lie about "the economy" is that it's "the" economy. There are separate economies for the rich and everyone else, shunted and fed back into each other separately. Except the rich economy has a siphon into the other economy.
Nah, you're just a Republican looking for excuses to keep voting for these terrible presidents who do us so wrong.
I mean, all you've got on Gore is that he says "Global Warming" sometimes, even though he of course says "Climate Change" all the time, too? Lots of people know the problem as "Global Warming", and rather than confuse them or waste time splitting hairs, Gore is actually getting them to do something. You voted for the guy who's wasted 7 years while the climate is changing, making it worse and denying it.
Kerry "can't make up his mind"?
Reverend Mike "Young Earth Creationist" Huckabee was your last, best hope? The crooked Arkansas governor who forced the gift laws there to change so he could keep his haul when he left office (to name just one un-Christian corruption)?
And now you're voting for McCain, when you could be voting for Obama.
Riiight. You have a lot of blood on your hands. Maybe what you told me you need to fool yourself. But you don't fool me, or anyone else who looks closely. You and 60M+ other Republicans like you are interested only in excuses to vote for the people who have done in this country. It's your fault even more than it is Bush's, because there are more of you, and Bush has no choice but to be Bush. You had a choice, and you blew it on the worst president in history. Twice.
Also, I think a lot of "IT" people in America are the kind of "IT" who couldn't replace a toner cartridge (or maybe that's all they do), think HTML is "programming", fill out TPS reports, that kind of corporate filler that isn't very smart. Like waitresses are "beverage technologists". Who don't even really understand what real IT people, who tell the machines what to do and not the other way around, actually do.
It's also one reason why this study thinks there are twice as many "IT" people as the official count. Because they're not really IT people, any more than concert security guards are police.
Those kinds of corporate droids are usually authoritarians (unlike real IT people who are usually anti-authoritarians). They're stupid and sheep enough to vote McCain.
Please say "deborking the system" whenever you want: I was just using your "system is borked" idiom, anyway.
I'm down with your Surprise Party programme. I'd like to see Americans organize ourselves a lot more into a lot more small political parties that don't claim exclusive monopolies on its members or its candidates. Each with an explictly specified platform, which then endorse any candidate their membership agrees also represents its platform. Cross-endorsements.
There's a huge vacuum of political organization and membership that the two high-handed parties now leave, because neither can bother to do much at the level of the individual, from the top down. When they actually do go from bottom up, it's a revolution in power, because that redefines the party all the way up to the top. So they don't do it often, because which powerful incumbent wants to be redefined all the time? However, there is a big demand in America for affiliation at that level, especially if it isn't very demanding. Which is nearly the entire appeal of the current vogue of political blogs. So once there's common software that's not just a blog, but a community system that's an actual political party with casual membership but aggregation into actual political activity, there will be a surge of power from the bottom. It happens every time: in the early 1800s it was town newspapers, in the early 1900s it was unions, and now the early 2000s can see blogs become actual formal political power centers. And the major parties will live and die by that power dynamic, once established.
I think the American system is borked mainly by creating artificial citizens as corporations, then elevating them to first class status above second class humans. It was fairly recent, a scam in 1886 that a railroad monopoly's monopoly newspaper fraudulently reported creating those "persons" despite the underlying court decision doing no such thing. Fixing that basic injustice would go a long way towards deborking the system.
Political parties are too institutionalized with privileges and immunities. If they, like their patron corporations, were reduced to second class status behind humans, the deborking processes would be a lot less obstructed all the time.
Some other backwards institutions like respecting religion establishments ("churches") more than nonreligion establishments (and nonestablishments), rather than the prescribed "no respect" would also go a long way towards deborking our system. Reversing those perverse doctrines would probably follow as their institutions were no longer propped up with artificial privileges and immunities as corporations and patrons of corporate political parties.
Americans have shown that we (most of us, anyway) kneel before the "shock doctrine". We gave up our military integrity, and so much connected to it, under the shock of the 9/11/2001 attacks. If we have an economic shock like what mismanaging our current descent into recession and unsupportable debt will produce, we will give up everything else.
But if we make it through the next year without losing much more of our ability to govern and manage our country, we might emerge stronger. We could eliminate a lot of the debts and disabilities we now face with just some radical legal revisions throwing out the rot we grew the past 7-13 years. We'd be able to cope that way: Americans work hard, stick together and produce a lot, more than anyone else on Earth. But if we fail, and aren't on the mend by this time next year, I expect we will stay economically shocked indefinitely, and produce the greatest shock of all, global environmental collapse, within 10-20 years.
Then it's permanent Mad Max time, and we should just rename the planet to "Planet Bork".
And now we see exactly how the US telecom market is designed to push operating costs above a high threshold that only giant corps can afford, to keep anyone but the limited number of incumbent competitors out of the market. Even a rich newcomer like Google finds its only option is to wiggle within the rules to try to force some of those "usual suspects" into throwing some openness crumbs back a the market.
And so the Federal government will spend $millions, probably $billions, on no-bid contracts for all kinds of fancy gear, but still won't fix the levees protecting New Orleans.
I'm not going to thank them for borking the system. It was obviously borked before they signed that Contract On America with our blood, or cheered in Bush for "changing the tone" (to fingernails across a blackboard). If you couldn't tell it was borked after Nixon's Watergate/Vietnam, or after Reagan/Bush's Iran/Contra, you were an essential part of the borking.
I'm grateful to the people who created, accepted and perpetuated the Constitution for a couple hundred years or so. Because at least from them we've got the directions of what we should be doing to run a borkfree system. All ironically at odds with what Robert Bork himself has been doing to bork the system through that entire duration.
You just don't seem to understand that if the person to whom I were replying weren't poor, and therefore I might make some money off of them, then I might consider continuing to reply to them, even though there were no other reasons to talk with them - as I detailed. Which illustrates why I might, or anyone might, have been willing to play on the MIT blackjack team, even if we didn't respect the other players for their politics.
But hey, if all you can see is that I'm richer than them, even though you "really don't care", then there's no way you're going to understand something like that. And that limitation has nothing to do with how much money you've got.
Well, I have indeed looked at the Sun, and I'm not even blind because I've been careful to look away in time.
But if you've looked at the Sun, you know that it doesn't look like the "tsunami" video we're discussing, either. And though the Sun is lots brighter than the other stars it hangs in front of, the instruments we're using don't have to constrain their images to the "windowing" effect our eyes give us. We can take pictures of other stars in a daylight sky with our instruments without the Sun blotting them out. And our sensitive instruments can detect stars through the gas of the Sun when it's not too dense to actually block (or gravitationally bend away) the distant stars' light.
That's the nice thing about actual physical instruments: they're not limited to the illusions our natural senses confine us to. That's why we use them.
Since Apple is the #1 music retailer, and the music biz is always the most copycat, fad-driven biz, they've got to start suing more of their customers.
They don't want the cool kids at the RIAA to think they're lame.
What will be the first Apple lawsuit crusade? DRM violation? iPod hacking? Or something really creative?
No, you can't even keep it together enough to make sense from one post to another. You claimed I couldn't know the team because one person on it you claim you know is a corporate fascist. So I explained that someone I know on the team was a college anarchist. The point is that your possibly imaginary friend's fascism doesn't mean that my real friend's anarchism didn't exclude them from being on the team. They both wanted to make money counting cards, which is why they were happy to be on the team. Their politics didn't have anything to do with it.
Meanwhile, my politics (even though you've got them wrong) were even less relevant, because I didn't even join the team, though for completely nonpolitical reasons (I was busy making money another way). And let me tell you, as a capitalist (who amasses capital by trading in capital, often in the purest abstract terms like trading derivatives), I know that wearing a suit and taking money from the government are in fact some of the clearest marks of any capitalist. Socialism is when the government owns my capital, which isn't at all what I said.
So you have now executed a perfect demonstration of your own confusion, ignorance, and worthlessness in every possible subject you could mention. And I'm still rich, with some friends who ran a very lucrative and now famous blackjack team - and you're not.
While you're right about the Sun's surface being a largely statistical boundary, and not at some specific radius like on a solid planet (which is also an approximately fractal distance, as your coastline example suggests), and not at all like the oversimplifications often pictured and vaguely described, there is such a thing. It's a chaotic surface, like a stormy sea, but there is a boundary where the Sun's plasma meets the vacuum of space, into which the Sun blasts solar wind (including protons, electron/beta and helium/alpha particles), and launches jets that collapse back into the Sun at its "surface". It's a blurry boundary, unlike the simple image most often implied, but it's real.
For one, I didn't say that I did, and then I said that I didn't, but you haven't caught on to that simple fact yet. For another, 21% is a big fraction, and I said "plenty". 1 out of five people is "plenty". Yet another, as another response to your post mentioned, growing up with some money can help you get into MIT because you have more resources with which to develop your mind. That development is the basis for getting into MIT for most of its students, however they come by the development. It's not supposed to reflect America in microcosm (look it up), it's supposed to reflect America's smartest. It's unfair that having money offers benefits, including learning advantages, that not everyone can get, but that's why people want to be rich. Why people like me work hard and use our smarts to get rich.
So I didn't really deny "the problem" exists, I just denied that everyone at MIT is rich, as you insisted, but which you certainly can't prove by offering evidence that over a fifth of them come from families that make less than what 75% of Americans make.
But really, you're far from MIT material because you can't even understand when I tell you that you've got no business talking to me because you've got major problems. The fact that you don't understand that you're not being rich offers no alternative reason for you to have business to talk with me, further confirms that you're not so bright.
Kinda dumb, pretty obnoxious, relatively uneducated, intensely jealous, no money to offer, unable to pick up even free clues - you're getting nothing more from me.
If you're good at what you do, you have time to do it, and to post about it on Slashdot, too. Especially if you're good enough to get rich and semi-retire right around the time Slashdot gets started.
Slashdot Mirror
You should click a little deeper into at least one of the roles that the Federal Reserve is responsible for, when it lends money to bail out banks.
Are you proud of what the corps you own have done to the world you're going to retire in? How much is the blood on your hands worth? Is it worth trashing your children's and grandchildrens's world?
And if you're going to say that's all made up, is it worth living in denial that it's true?
I do blame the people who lied to get loans, as I said. I just don't not blame the banks that didn't check to see if they're lying, because those loans were profitable anyway (just not as much as if they weren't lying), as I also said. Thinking that this mortgage bubble somehow neutralizes because both banks and borrowers worked together to defraud the Fed of the loan money, so the Fed should bail out either of them, is what the banks are counting on to get bailed out.
How could banks have risked 4x the money? Who borrowed it? And since the banks marked up all the loans they made on money loaned from the Fed, it's clear that banks risked less than the people who borrowed it, because the Fed risked some of what the banks just passed through. Since the banks marked up the Fed wholesale to their retail by less than doubling it, the banks risked less than even the Fed. Since the banks made plenty of completely profitable loans (at even 5.26% - lower than it's been in years - compound over 30 years, banks make as much in interest as in principal, not even including points and fees), the system risked even less money than that. If you look at all those big factors, not even considering all the little complexities in refinance, reinvestment of the interest payments, etc, it's perfectly clear that the borrowers as a whole risked more than the banks did, and far from the 4:1 bank risk you're claiming.
You're still saying that loaning lots of money to people who probably wouldn't pay it back is a huge risk, but of course that's why banks get to make at least as much in interest as the principal paid to the home seller. And of course if banks which take those risks get bailed out, then they're not taking those risks. Which is exactly why they should either not get bailed out, or not get those profits for taking the risk. Getting both bailouts and profits means they're not taking the risk.
So you're now independently wealthy. Explain to me how my doing the same is not "doing something to better myself". If you're going to use the same kind of "logic" you've used so far, don't bother.
Is there a Firefox plugin that runs an actual torrent client, actually downloading the chunks in the background and not just browsing the tracker?
If BitTorrent were just another protocol Firefox handled, along with HTTP, FTP, etc, and people didn't even need to know they're downloading "a torrent" any more than we need to know we're downloading a GIF, or JPG, or MOV, or WMV, BitTorrent use would skyrocket, the way that HTTP skyrocketed on the popularity of integrating it with a browser for the more popular (at the initial release time) protocols like FTP, and even disappeared ones like gopher and WAIS.
In fact, the increased download performance would probably make Firefox even more popular, as people switched to it because it could handle the torrents that other browsers (IE) don't.
If someone could write a complete torrent client that's entirely embeddable in an HTML page (and doesn't require the browser to have any special torrent support), that could grow even faster. Though that kind of packaging isn't as easy to use (and not accidentally abort) as one that downloads in the background, and doesn't quit when clicking away from its page.
No, that's not why.
Yes, millions took on loans they couldn't handle. Banks weren't "forced to give out loans". Unless you mean that they were forced by their shareholders natural profit motive to take near-0% wholesale loans from the government, which government eliminated requirements that the retail borrowers be able to pay it back, then mark it up to several percent, and jack that up to a dozen percent or more after the borrowers were committed to the loan (because they'd lose their house, and whatever they'd already repaid).
Yes, there were millions of people who took out loans they couldn't afford. I never said they shouldn't lose their houses, or otherwise take the hit. There were many people who got loans on fraud, too, though most of those frauds were encouraged by banks that didn't ask even for documentation - just asserting on a single form that you made $X a year was enough.
Hell, we just lived through the age of "NINJA" loans: No Income, No Job or Assets. Given happily by banks, hand over fist.
Why? Not because "the government forced them to". But because the government made them a delightful offer they couldn't refuse: make $BILLIONS on these stupid loans, marking up loans from the government, and then when lots go bad, the government will bail you out. The problem is that "the government" meant "politicians bribed by the banks" when it came to deciding to hand out the money, but "the government" means "taxpayers" when it comes to actually paying for it. Taxpayers who were themselves bribed by those politicians with "tax cuts" and even tax rebates, all so the entire cost could be put onto the public debt, which means it cost even more interest atop what the mortgage interest cost.
If you'd asked about what to do about the people who took loans they can't repay, you'd have found that of course they should bear the damage from failing under their risks. People who were sold loans by fraudulent banks should still have to repay the principal to those banks, and pay an interest rate set to the median fixed rate their neighbors paid in the financial quarter they all were issued their loans, but to a government liquidity fund rather than to the defrauding bank, from which fund new loans can be made if necessary and creditworthy. If they still can't pay, they foreclose like anyone else. People taking loans on true terms they signed should also have to pay, unless they go bankrupt like anyone else - at which point the judge can redesign their mortgage debt, along with all their obligations to creditors, just like anyone else. And everyone in the country should be allowed to tap their IRAs and other separate funds ordinarily unavailable to keep their homes from foreclosing. But since you were too busy inventing what I think about risk and consequences, you didn't bother to find out.
Blah blah blah about "rich vs poor is a lie". The fact is that the rich have every privilege. I didn't say that no poor people can get rich: some can, especially if they can help the rich get richer (helping the poor get richer makes practically no one rich in this country). I personally came from a middle class family, worked regular jobs starting at age 13, and made myself rich by working like a slave starting up my own company on my own savings and brains. I even helped some kids who'd grown up poor by training and employing them, and they're at least upper middle class, and some are rich. I don't say anyone should get extra privileges and opportunities because they're not rich, just that the rich have enough extra opportunities and privileges they can legitimately buy, without being subsidized in risk and profits by the taxpayers when they go wrong, more than everyone else gets protected. Being rich ha
Bear Stearns is getting bailed out by the government (taxpayers). JP Morgan is getting the money to by BS from the government (taxpayers).
Sure, the stock is going to be worth less net now than it was last year. But that high was built on a bubble inflated by money lent from the Fed (taxpayers).
And even more to the point, Bear Stearns (and its shareholders, brokers and execs) raked in so many $BILLIONS over the past 10-20 years (much of which ultimately came from the Fed - taxpayers) running the way that eventually ran out, that it was totally worth the price of doing business when its shares collapsed. They made way more cash money operating that way than they lost on paper.
So I call you math illiterate, and a liar.
Meanwhile, the Republicans controlling the economy(ies) that pumped all that money through BS will do anything they can to avoid protecting the millions of people in the same economic straits who are going to lose their homes.
So I call you a thief, since your lies are protecting the Republican wealth redistribution from most Americans to banks like Bear Stearns, and the even risk-freer ones like JP Morgan.
Your free market economy at work. Free of honesty, that is.
A recession and a bubble at the same time? Of course. When oil and bank corps, and the people who own & run them are bathing in record profits (above the records set every year for the past decade and a half, above the records set every year except maybe one or two of every twenty for the past few centuries), but literally millions of people are getting their homes foreclosed, millions more are always 6 weeks paychecks from losing their homes, income has shrunk over the past 25 years while prices have doubled, tripled or more (especially oil/gas prices and bank fees)...
Of course there's a recession and a bubble possible. Where do you think that bubble money comes from? And do you think that when it pops, everyone loses their shirt? Or maybe the rich people who run the country (*cough* Bear Stearns *cough*) will never see any real risk, while the poor are as free as the rich to sleep under a bridge.
The biggest lie about "the economy" is that it's "the" economy. There are separate economies for the rich and everyone else, shunted and fed back into each other separately. Except the rich economy has a siphon into the other economy.
Nah, you're just a Republican looking for excuses to keep voting for these terrible presidents who do us so wrong.
I mean, all you've got on Gore is that he says "Global Warming" sometimes, even though he of course says "Climate Change" all the time, too? Lots of people know the problem as "Global Warming", and rather than confuse them or waste time splitting hairs, Gore is actually getting them to do something. You voted for the guy who's wasted 7 years while the climate is changing, making it worse and denying it.
Kerry "can't make up his mind"?
Reverend Mike "Young Earth Creationist" Huckabee was your last, best hope? The crooked Arkansas governor who forced the gift laws there to change so he could keep his haul when he left office (to name just one un-Christian corruption)?
And now you're voting for McCain, when you could be voting for Obama.
Riiight. You have a lot of blood on your hands. Maybe what you told me you need to fool yourself. But you don't fool me, or anyone else who looks closely. You and 60M+ other Republicans like you are interested only in excuses to vote for the people who have done in this country. It's your fault even more than it is Bush's, because there are more of you, and Bush has no choice but to be Bush. You had a choice, and you blew it on the worst president in history. Twice.
You are totally right.
Also, I think a lot of "IT" people in America are the kind of "IT" who couldn't replace a toner cartridge (or maybe that's all they do), think HTML is "programming", fill out TPS reports, that kind of corporate filler that isn't very smart. Like waitresses are "beverage technologists". Who don't even really understand what real IT people, who tell the machines what to do and not the other way around, actually do.
It's also one reason why this study thinks there are twice as many "IT" people as the official count. Because they're not really IT people, any more than concert security guards are police.
Those kinds of corporate droids are usually authoritarians (unlike real IT people who are usually anti-authoritarians). They're stupid and sheep enough to vote McCain.
Please say "deborking the system" whenever you want: I was just using your "system is borked" idiom, anyway.
I'm down with your Surprise Party programme. I'd like to see Americans organize ourselves a lot more into a lot more small political parties that don't claim exclusive monopolies on its members or its candidates. Each with an explictly specified platform, which then endorse any candidate their membership agrees also represents its platform. Cross-endorsements.
There's a huge vacuum of political organization and membership that the two high-handed parties now leave, because neither can bother to do much at the level of the individual, from the top down. When they actually do go from bottom up, it's a revolution in power, because that redefines the party all the way up to the top. So they don't do it often, because which powerful incumbent wants to be redefined all the time? However, there is a big demand in America for affiliation at that level, especially if it isn't very demanding. Which is nearly the entire appeal of the current vogue of political blogs. So once there's common software that's not just a blog, but a community system that's an actual political party with casual membership but aggregation into actual political activity, there will be a surge of power from the bottom. It happens every time: in the early 1800s it was town newspapers, in the early 1900s it was unions, and now the early 2000s can see blogs become actual formal political power centers. And the major parties will live and die by that power dynamic, once established.
Surprise!
I think the American system is borked mainly by creating artificial citizens as corporations, then elevating them to first class status above second class humans. It was fairly recent, a scam in 1886 that a railroad monopoly's monopoly newspaper fraudulently reported creating those "persons" despite the underlying court decision doing no such thing. Fixing that basic injustice would go a long way towards deborking the system.
Political parties are too institutionalized with privileges and immunities. If they, like their patron corporations, were reduced to second class status behind humans, the deborking processes would be a lot less obstructed all the time.
Some other backwards institutions like respecting religion establishments ("churches") more than nonreligion establishments (and nonestablishments), rather than the prescribed "no respect" would also go a long way towards deborking our system. Reversing those perverse doctrines would probably follow as their institutions were no longer propped up with artificial privileges and immunities as corporations and patrons of corporate political parties.
Americans have shown that we (most of us, anyway) kneel before the "shock doctrine". We gave up our military integrity, and so much connected to it, under the shock of the 9/11/2001 attacks. If we have an economic shock like what mismanaging our current descent into recession and unsupportable debt will produce, we will give up everything else.
But if we make it through the next year without losing much more of our ability to govern and manage our country, we might emerge stronger. We could eliminate a lot of the debts and disabilities we now face with just some radical legal revisions throwing out the rot we grew the past 7-13 years. We'd be able to cope that way: Americans work hard, stick together and produce a lot, more than anyone else on Earth. But if we fail, and aren't on the mend by this time next year, I expect we will stay economically shocked indefinitely, and produce the greatest shock of all, global environmental collapse, within 10-20 years.
Then it's permanent Mad Max time, and we should just rename the planet to "Planet Bork".
And now we see exactly how the US telecom market is designed to push operating costs above a high threshold that only giant corps can afford, to keep anyone but the limited number of incumbent competitors out of the market. Even a rich newcomer like Google finds its only option is to wiggle within the rules to try to force some of those "usual suspects" into throwing some openness crumbs back a the market.
And so the Federal government will spend $millions, probably $billions, on no-bid contracts for all kinds of fancy gear, but still won't fix the levees protecting New Orleans.
I'm not going to thank them for borking the system. It was obviously borked before they signed that Contract On America with our blood, or cheered in Bush for "changing the tone" (to fingernails across a blackboard). If you couldn't tell it was borked after Nixon's Watergate/Vietnam, or after Reagan/Bush's Iran/Contra, you were an essential part of the borking.
I'm grateful to the people who created, accepted and perpetuated the Constitution for a couple hundred years or so. Because at least from them we've got the directions of what we should be doing to run a borkfree system. All ironically at odds with what Robert Bork himself has been doing to bork the system through that entire duration.
You just don't seem to understand that if the person to whom I were replying weren't poor, and therefore I might make some money off of them, then I might consider continuing to reply to them, even though there were no other reasons to talk with them - as I detailed. Which illustrates why I might, or anyone might, have been willing to play on the MIT blackjack team, even if we didn't respect the other players for their politics.
But hey, if all you can see is that I'm richer than them, even though you "really don't care", then there's no way you're going to understand something like that. And that limitation has nothing to do with how much money you've got.
How can you be sure?
Well, I have indeed looked at the Sun, and I'm not even blind because I've been careful to look away in time.
But if you've looked at the Sun, you know that it doesn't look like the "tsunami" video we're discussing, either. And though the Sun is lots brighter than the other stars it hangs in front of, the instruments we're using don't have to constrain their images to the "windowing" effect our eyes give us. We can take pictures of other stars in a daylight sky with our instruments without the Sun blotting them out. And our sensitive instruments can detect stars through the gas of the Sun when it's not too dense to actually block (or gravitationally bend away) the distant stars' light.
That's the nice thing about actual physical instruments: they're not limited to the illusions our natural senses confine us to. That's why we use them.
I've even driven to other states to register voters, driven them to the polls, and driven Republicans away from the polls to the wrong side of town.
Hey, I did what I could, but 60M+ Republicans can't be wrong, right?
So, what have you done to be so smug?
Since Apple is the #1 music retailer, and the music biz is always the most copycat, fad-driven biz, they've got to start suing more of their customers.
They don't want the cool kids at the RIAA to think they're lame.
What will be the first Apple lawsuit crusade? DRM violation? iPod hacking? Or something really creative?
No, you can't even keep it together enough to make sense from one post to another. You claimed I couldn't know the team because one person on it you claim you know is a corporate fascist. So I explained that someone I know on the team was a college anarchist. The point is that your possibly imaginary friend's fascism doesn't mean that my real friend's anarchism didn't exclude them from being on the team. They both wanted to make money counting cards, which is why they were happy to be on the team. Their politics didn't have anything to do with it.
Meanwhile, my politics (even though you've got them wrong) were even less relevant, because I didn't even join the team, though for completely nonpolitical reasons (I was busy making money another way). And let me tell you, as a capitalist (who amasses capital by trading in capital, often in the purest abstract terms like trading derivatives), I know that wearing a suit and taking money from the government are in fact some of the clearest marks of any capitalist. Socialism is when the government owns my capital, which isn't at all what I said.
So you have now executed a perfect demonstration of your own confusion, ignorance, and worthlessness in every possible subject you could mention. And I'm still rich, with some friends who ran a very lucrative and now famous blackjack team - and you're not.
Goodbye.
I guess I have to dis you in return for being stupid enough to thing the entire Sun is solid. Congratulations - you can't handle fuzziness.
I'm thinking of, for example, this NASA image of the Sun (blasting a jet right through the Earth back in 2003).
While you're right about the Sun's surface being a largely statistical boundary, and not at some specific radius like on a solid planet (which is also an approximately fractal distance, as your coastline example suggests), and not at all like the oversimplifications often pictured and vaguely described, there is such a thing. It's a chaotic surface, like a stormy sea, but there is a boundary where the Sun's plasma meets the vacuum of space, into which the Sun blasts solar wind (including protons, electron/beta and helium/alpha particles), and launches jets that collapse back into the Sun at its "surface". It's a blurry boundary, unlike the simple image most often implied, but it's real.
:).
It would make a great movie
It's pretty obvious why you didn't go to MIT.
For one, I didn't say that I did, and then I said that I didn't, but you haven't caught on to that simple fact yet. For another, 21% is a big fraction, and I said "plenty". 1 out of five people is "plenty". Yet another, as another response to your post mentioned, growing up with some money can help you get into MIT because you have more resources with which to develop your mind. That development is the basis for getting into MIT for most of its students, however they come by the development. It's not supposed to reflect America in microcosm (look it up), it's supposed to reflect America's smartest. It's unfair that having money offers benefits, including learning advantages, that not everyone can get, but that's why people want to be rich. Why people like me work hard and use our smarts to get rich.
So I didn't really deny "the problem" exists, I just denied that everyone at MIT is rich, as you insisted, but which you certainly can't prove by offering evidence that over a fifth of them come from families that make less than what 75% of Americans make.
But really, you're far from MIT material because you can't even understand when I tell you that you've got no business talking to me because you've got major problems. The fact that you don't understand that you're not being rich offers no alternative reason for you to have business to talk with me, further confirms that you're not so bright.
Kinda dumb, pretty obnoxious, relatively uneducated, intensely jealous, no money to offer, unable to pick up even free clues - you're getting nothing more from me.
Goodbye, and better luck next time.
So you say in a Slashdot post.
If you're good at what you do, you have time to do it, and to post about it on Slashdot, too. Especially if you're good enough to get rich and semi-retire right around the time Slashdot gets started.