You're not being anti-pedantic. You're being counterfactual. Even when someone points out the central point of your error, politely and gently. I can see now that our argument isn't going to teach you anything, and probably teach me little, too, while trying to educate you. I'll humor the argument as long as it's not insulting, and I don't get bored.
A "bank run" isn't when some other bank buys a bank or its assets for less than the bought bank paid for them before. It's when a bank's depositors withdraw their money. A "bank run on bonds" would be, if anything, if the borrowers rushed to pay off their debts early. There is no such thing as that, and it is certainly not happening now. And if the lender is bought by another party, it makes no difference whatsoever to the borrower - unless the new party offers terms the borrower prefers to the old ones, at the borrower's discretion.
Just because banks have vastly oversaturated the debt markets with nonperforming debt doesn't make a "bank run on bonds". It's a "bond market crash", and it's been fully underway for over 3 years. Indeed, the crash has largely recovered, though another one is gathering potential as banks restart a bubble cycle with their bailout money.
I have owned several large debts in the form of mortgages, including a current one. I have owned corporate bonds, secured personal debts, securitized debt instruments, and many other forms of debt. I have of course read every word of the "fine print", and spent quite adequate time and money on lawyers when closing each debt deal. I also have the usual credit card debts, whose fine print I'm also familiar with. None of those loans can be "called in at any time". Likewise public debts, like the Treasury bonds sold to China and other foreigners, cannot be just "called in" like some hysterical people like to say.
Bonds are contracts to pay. Only a fool signs contracts that the other party can control at their whim later, changing the value balance unilaterally. Though plenty of fools did sign debt contracts that could change the value balance over time, like adjustable rate mortgages, those terms aren't reset by the lender, but by some outside fact the lender doesn't (at all directly, anyway) control: the Fed's prime rate, etc. Even the dumbest loan contracts didn't include a clause allowing the lender to call them in whenever they wanted ahead of maturity. Though there quite possibly were some like that, in the huge, unregulated, and eventually totally insane debt markets, they are the minority, and nearly no private individual is obligated under any like that.
The forest fires of Arizona just deleted wealth. Credit crashes that bottleneck cash flow forcing foreiture of accumulated assets delete wealth.
If the money in existence is cut in half, equally across everyone with money (as in currency crashes), the net worth is not cut in half. It stays exactly the same. Money is finance, not wealth.
The stock markets are finance, not wealth. But plenty of property is bought with either loans against stocks, which is increased wealth even though it comes with (greater) increased cost. Or bought with cash proceeds from selling stocks for more than they were bought. All of that increased property ownership is wealth. BTW, the stock market has grown in value even as Baby Boomers have retired. Wealth has grown even more steadily than the stock market, or the money in circulation, each of which are financial descriptions of the wealth that have (largely) inflated and (somewhat) deflated over the bubble/crash cycles of the past decade and a half since Boomers started retiring en masse.
Bernanke's economics is as voodoo as was Greenspan's. But all finance is voodoo: it depends on the instilled faith that accepting a note in exchange for labor or property will be reciprocated later when exchanging the note for others' labor or property. Like voodoo, it usually works. Even when it's dressed up in the most ridiculous props, often fails catastrophically when most needed and relied upon, and promoted by the most obvious charlatans. The placebo effect is real, even if its mechanics are in our minds. But just as the placebo's chemistry is real while its believed mechanism is not, so too are the mechanical economics I described real even as the political economics practiced by Bernanke not. The economics you described aren't real, th
1. We are mostly not retailers, so we don't care about the recall, despite its being "News for Nerds". 2. We do care about the possibility that some lawyers will control how we use, or even whether we can continue to use, physical objects we have bought, the way they've screwed up so much of the software that we've bought.
Your entire post is accurate only when talking about itself, and about you. Obnoxious Anonymous clueless Coward.
Tell that to the majority of Qaeda members who've been making a mockery of the CIA for decades.
More likely is that if any of these crackers are even caught, the CIA will make a deal to coopt them instead of destroy them. The CIA likes nothing better than skilled makers of mayhem - except perhaps mayhem itself.
That's right - the certainty of vast damage, perhaps triggering armageddon, is worth the annoyances, risks, and comparatively tiny damages of fixing security bugs.
On the one hand, the military and its contractors are assholes for exposing tens of thousands (and surely more) of military people's accounts to cracking and outing.
On the other hand, Anonymous is assholes cracking and outing tens of thousands (and surely more) of military people's accounts.
That's both hands assholes. Have you noticed that everyone in public life these days is an asshole?
Well, I'm a little less paranoid than you and a little less impressed with the organization skills of America's militias. But it's true that Teabaggers don't care about getting reelected. Their whole point is corporate anarchy, privatization. They will get fat private jobs, mainly the payouts of bribes by the Citizens United corps that paid for them to get there and wrench the government from protecting the people at all, not just the inadequate job Republicans have given us since Reagan.
It doesn't have to get as bad as a civil war won by militias. It's bad enough already. And it will get worse the more Americans are stupid enough to vote with these Teabaggers, or as usual just not vote at all. The more they deny they're just corporate prey, the more they fail to elect representatives of what they actually need, rather than what they want to say in a soundbite that they want, like some deranged TV gameshow.
Most of the "entitlement programs" are Social Security and Medicare. That money doesn't pay "government employees", it pays our huge (and overpriced, and inefficient) private medical industry and the entire network of many private industries that old people spend their money on (beyond healthcare).
Also, banks can't just "call in their loans" ahead of schedule, or raise the interest on existing loans retroactively. There's no such thing as a "bank-run on bonds" because bonds aren't liquid until their maturity date.
I agree that the US defaulting on debt, or even just cutting the current stimulative spending (other than the military/intel $TRILLIONS, which are far more stimulative spent nearly any other way), would wreak havoc in the bond markets, and in the stock markets that can delete existing wealth. But let's be correct about how the economics actually work, and what actually works. That makes it easier to see what doesn't.
Defaulting on the debt won't fix anything. It will only break a lot more things. Many of which we can't afford to break.
It won't even stop the US from borrowing. It will merely continue to borrow to the maximum $15T limit. But every dollar it borrows will cost it a lot more. And what will be left to work with won't work as well to stimulate more revenue and regain the "nearly zero risk" rate the US borrowed against for centuries.
But we could just reduce the Pentagon + intel budget to $700B, $500B, then $400B, then $300B over the next 4 years. Which would save a load of money, and stop a load of problems that cost us a load more money.
And we could return to Clinton's tax rates, which were as obviously consistent with a growing economy as Bush's (ie. current) tax rates have been consistent with a collapsing economy.
Either of them, we're OK. Both of them, we thrive.
Or we can do the kind of thing that only a bankster could love: throw the US into a worse deal of borrowing the same vast amount but getting vastly less out of it.
No, I've invented plenty of stuff, some of it significantly innovative and successful, and patents don't deter me. I'm in software and networking. There's so much patent-unencumbered, license-unencumbered stuff to configure (perhaps in complex combinations) or program primitively to interoperate that the patents are effectively fairy tales.
It's the questioning of our "superiors" that dragged us out of the Stone Age. The Stone Age was characterized by prohibition of such questioning, even more than wiping our asses with a stick.
So far, so good. Drugs are more decriminalized now than ever before in my life. Mainly because so many people like me ignored the legal war on them. IP is even more likely to stay safe and available. Growing your own is even easier than growing drugs.
Yet I actually don't. Despite a mountain of EULAs that I've clicked through that might claim otherwise. Not even US courts recognize that a shrinkwrap EULA, let alone a clickwrap EULA, is a binding agreement when I don't agree to the term that says I can't click through it.
Nobody does. Fearing that kind of license is more irrational than fearing a foreign terrorist is going to blow up your smalltown church.
Sure they do. That business model doesn't scale as well as the ones that just work for the money. And that put the deprecation value in the hands of the buyer, which is the risk * resale value. As long as they're not going to buy me out of that, they're not going to get my money. Or my agreement to those terms. Such a synthetic deal isn't worth the paper that it's clicked on - absurd mixed metaphor intended.
Besides, I don't need to waste my time with such a deal. There's far more stuff that's simply natural property, even free software, to run on boringly commodity hardware. Sure, I'll rent time running processes in a virtual server farm. And my business will license stuff without regard to its HW/SW/net-access in/tangibility - when it comes with the people attached to it that gives such free stuff such superior value over dead, proprietary stuff. But for entertainment like Nintendo, and even education - the same stuff, but far more valuable - I'll take the free sharing of info. If I have to pay I have plenty of stuff I need to pay others to create for and with me. I don't have time to waste bogged down in licenses - I'm far too busy, productive and profitable without them.
You just described a scene that is better written "you might be asked to sign" than "may". They may not ask me to sign that. Or at least I will not if they ask. Unless it contains no other encumbrances I might ever violate before reselling it at some unknowable future time.
I don't even sign the licenses on SW and most described IP I've seen for the past decade or two, and I never signed it in the couple of decades before that. I did get a lot of IP my way over those years, though. And I've given a lot more back on the unlicensed stuff, exponentially more, than on the licensed stuff. And the licensed stuff almost always cost more in my time to use to the claims of the licensor than the free stuff ever did, and the free stuff lived up to a higher degree of its claims.
Why would I care that a cable I have that works safely has been recalled due to some conflict between some corporations to whom I owe nothing, now that I bought mine for myself? I'm certainly not going to stop using it, and absolutely not going to go to any trouble to send it back. Indeed, now that it can't be gotten anymore, it's even more valuable to me, given its scarcity. I'd probably sell it to someone else who values it even more than I do, for more than I paid for it new.
If these lawyers start telling me that I don't own even the physical goods I buy, because of some licensing agreement upstream between parties with whom I never agreed to any ongoing terms, then those lawyers are simply thieves.
Slashdot Mirror
Please give me an example of a loan a bank can call in ahead of time. And some idea of how common that kind of loan is in circulation.
Mortgages are bonds owed to a bank.
You're not being anti-pedantic. You're being counterfactual. Even when someone points out the central point of your error, politely and gently. I can see now that our argument isn't going to teach you anything, and probably teach me little, too, while trying to educate you. I'll humor the argument as long as it's not insulting, and I don't get bored.
A "bank run" isn't when some other bank buys a bank or its assets for less than the bought bank paid for them before. It's when a bank's depositors withdraw their money. A "bank run on bonds" would be, if anything, if the borrowers rushed to pay off their debts early. There is no such thing as that, and it is certainly not happening now. And if the lender is bought by another party, it makes no difference whatsoever to the borrower - unless the new party offers terms the borrower prefers to the old ones, at the borrower's discretion.
Just because banks have vastly oversaturated the debt markets with nonperforming debt doesn't make a "bank run on bonds". It's a "bond market crash", and it's been fully underway for over 3 years. Indeed, the crash has largely recovered, though another one is gathering potential as banks restart a bubble cycle with their bailout money.
I have owned several large debts in the form of mortgages, including a current one. I have owned corporate bonds, secured personal debts, securitized debt instruments, and many other forms of debt. I have of course read every word of the "fine print", and spent quite adequate time and money on lawyers when closing each debt deal. I also have the usual credit card debts, whose fine print I'm also familiar with. None of those loans can be "called in at any time". Likewise public debts, like the Treasury bonds sold to China and other foreigners, cannot be just "called in" like some hysterical people like to say.
Bonds are contracts to pay. Only a fool signs contracts that the other party can control at their whim later, changing the value balance unilaterally. Though plenty of fools did sign debt contracts that could change the value balance over time, like adjustable rate mortgages, those terms aren't reset by the lender, but by some outside fact the lender doesn't (at all directly, anyway) control: the Fed's prime rate, etc. Even the dumbest loan contracts didn't include a clause allowing the lender to call them in whenever they wanted ahead of maturity. Though there quite possibly were some like that, in the huge, unregulated, and eventually totally insane debt markets, they are the minority, and nearly no private individual is obligated under any like that.
The forest fires of Arizona just deleted wealth. Credit crashes that bottleneck cash flow forcing foreiture of accumulated assets delete wealth.
If the money in existence is cut in half, equally across everyone with money (as in currency crashes), the net worth is not cut in half. It stays exactly the same. Money is finance, not wealth.
The stock markets are finance, not wealth. But plenty of property is bought with either loans against stocks, which is increased wealth even though it comes with (greater) increased cost. Or bought with cash proceeds from selling stocks for more than they were bought. All of that increased property ownership is wealth. BTW, the stock market has grown in value even as Baby Boomers have retired. Wealth has grown even more steadily than the stock market, or the money in circulation, each of which are financial descriptions of the wealth that have (largely) inflated and (somewhat) deflated over the bubble/crash cycles of the past decade and a half since Boomers started retiring en masse.
Bernanke's economics is as voodoo as was Greenspan's. But all finance is voodoo: it depends on the instilled faith that accepting a note in exchange for labor or property will be reciprocated later when exchanging the note for others' labor or property. Like voodoo, it usually works. Even when it's dressed up in the most ridiculous props, often fails catastrophically when most needed and relied upon, and promoted by the most obvious charlatans. The placebo effect is real, even if its mechanics are in our minds. But just as the placebo's chemistry is real while its believed mechanism is not, so too are the mechanical economics I described real even as the political economics practiced by Bernanke not. The economics you described aren't real, th
I posted what I did on Slashdot because:
1. We are mostly not retailers, so we don't care about the recall, despite its being "News for Nerds".
2. We do care about the possibility that some lawyers will control how we use, or even whether we can continue to use, physical objects we have bought, the way they've screwed up so much of the software that we've bought.
Your entire post is accurate only when talking about itself, and about you. Obnoxious Anonymous clueless Coward.
How do either of us know whether questioning "superiors" was more or less prohibited in the Stone Age?
But I do know that prohibiting that questioning is more likely to drive us back into it than is encouraging it. And that soldiers are murderers.
How is aiding the rebels, even bombing Kadaffy's forces, messing up Libya?
The rebels are no filthier than Kadaffy's loyalists. Only a minority of Americans ever vote in our elections. Who are these religious fanatics?
Aren't you just a Kadaffy loyalist?
How is the US messing up Libya?
Tell that to the majority of Qaeda members who've been making a mockery of the CIA for decades.
More likely is that if any of these crackers are even caught, the CIA will make a deal to coopt them instead of destroy them. The CIA likes nothing better than skilled makers of mayhem - except perhaps mayhem itself.
That's right - the certainty of vast damage, perhaps triggering armageddon, is worth the annoyances, risks, and comparatively tiny damages of fixing security bugs.
You're an idiot.
On the one hand, the military and its contractors are assholes for exposing tens of thousands (and surely more) of military people's accounts to cracking and outing.
On the other hand, Anonymous is assholes cracking and outing tens of thousands (and surely more) of military people's accounts.
That's both hands assholes. Have you noticed that everyone in public life these days is an asshole?
Well, I'm a little less paranoid than you and a little less impressed with the organization skills of America's militias. But it's true that Teabaggers don't care about getting reelected. Their whole point is corporate anarchy, privatization. They will get fat private jobs, mainly the payouts of bribes by the Citizens United corps that paid for them to get there and wrench the government from protecting the people at all, not just the inadequate job Republicans have given us since Reagan.
It doesn't have to get as bad as a civil war won by militias. It's bad enough already. And it will get worse the more Americans are stupid enough to vote with these Teabaggers, or as usual just not vote at all. The more they deny they're just corporate prey, the more they fail to elect representatives of what they actually need, rather than what they want to say in a soundbite that they want, like some deranged TV gameshow.
Most of the "entitlement programs" are Social Security and Medicare. That money doesn't pay "government employees", it pays our huge (and overpriced, and inefficient) private medical industry and the entire network of many private industries that old people spend their money on (beyond healthcare).
Also, banks can't just "call in their loans" ahead of schedule, or raise the interest on existing loans retroactively. There's no such thing as a "bank-run on bonds" because bonds aren't liquid until their maturity date.
I agree that the US defaulting on debt, or even just cutting the current stimulative spending (other than the military/intel $TRILLIONS, which are far more stimulative spent nearly any other way), would wreak havoc in the bond markets, and in the stock markets that can delete existing wealth. But let's be correct about how the economics actually work, and what actually works. That makes it easier to see what doesn't.
Defaulting on the debt won't fix anything. It will only break a lot more things. Many of which we can't afford to break.
It won't even stop the US from borrowing. It will merely continue to borrow to the maximum $15T limit. But every dollar it borrows will cost it a lot more. And what will be left to work with won't work as well to stimulate more revenue and regain the "nearly zero risk" rate the US borrowed against for centuries.
But we could just reduce the Pentagon + intel budget to $700B, $500B, then $400B, then $300B over the next 4 years. Which would save a load of money, and stop a load of problems that cost us a load more money.
And we could return to Clinton's tax rates, which were as obviously consistent with a growing economy as Bush's (ie. current) tax rates have been consistent with a collapsing economy.
Either of them, we're OK. Both of them, we thrive.
Or we can do the kind of thing that only a bankster could love: throw the US into a worse deal of borrowing the same vast amount but getting vastly less out of it.
No, I've invented plenty of stuff, some of it significantly innovative and successful, and patents don't deter me. I'm in software and networking. There's so much patent-unencumbered, license-unencumbered stuff to configure (perhaps in complex combinations) or program primitively to interoperate that the patents are effectively fairy tales.
Soldiers are murderers.
It's the questioning of our "superiors" that dragged us out of the Stone Age. The Stone Age was characterized by prohibition of such questioning, even more than wiping our asses with a stick.
The tallest blade of grass gets cut at exactly the same rate as any other grass that's taller than the lawnmower blade.
The nails that stick out and get beaten down still stick out.
Anyone who doesn't grease all their wheels when the first one squeaks runs slower than those who do.
That has nothing to do with Facebook.
So far, so good. Drugs are more decriminalized now than ever before in my life. Mainly because so many people like me ignored the legal war on them. IP is even more likely to stay safe and available. Growing your own is even easier than growing drugs.
Yet I actually don't. Despite a mountain of EULAs that I've clicked through that might claim otherwise. Not even US courts recognize that a shrinkwrap EULA, let alone a clickwrap EULA, is a binding agreement when I don't agree to the term that says I can't click through it.
Nobody does. Fearing that kind of license is more irrational than fearing a foreign terrorist is going to blow up your smalltown church.
Sure they do. That business model doesn't scale as well as the ones that just work for the money. And that put the deprecation value in the hands of the buyer, which is the risk * resale value. As long as they're not going to buy me out of that, they're not going to get my money. Or my agreement to those terms. Such a synthetic deal isn't worth the paper that it's clicked on - absurd mixed metaphor intended.
Besides, I don't need to waste my time with such a deal. There's far more stuff that's simply natural property, even free software, to run on boringly commodity hardware. Sure, I'll rent time running processes in a virtual server farm. And my business will license stuff without regard to its HW/SW/net-access in/tangibility - when it comes with the people attached to it that gives such free stuff such superior value over dead, proprietary stuff. But for entertainment like Nintendo, and even education - the same stuff, but far more valuable - I'll take the free sharing of info. If I have to pay I have plenty of stuff I need to pay others to create for and with me. I don't have time to waste bogged down in licenses - I'm far too busy, productive and profitable without them.
Simple means "not complex" (however many quotes enclose "not complex"). Nuclear war is complex any way you slice it.
You just described a scene that is better written "you might be asked to sign" than "may". They may not ask me to sign that. Or at least I will not if they ask. Unless it contains no other encumbrances I might ever violate before reselling it at some unknowable future time.
I don't even sign the licenses on SW and most described IP I've seen for the past decade or two, and I never signed it in the couple of decades before that. I did get a lot of IP my way over those years, though. And I've given a lot more back on the unlicensed stuff, exponentially more, than on the licensed stuff. And the licensed stuff almost always cost more in my time to use to the claims of the licensor than the free stuff ever did, and the free stuff lived up to a higher degree of its claims.
Are RPMs available for CentOS v6.0 now that it's out?
Why would I care that a cable I have that works safely has been recalled due to some conflict between some corporations to whom I owe nothing, now that I bought mine for myself? I'm certainly not going to stop using it, and absolutely not going to go to any trouble to send it back. Indeed, now that it can't be gotten anymore, it's even more valuable to me, given its scarcity. I'd probably sell it to someone else who values it even more than I do, for more than I paid for it new.
If these lawyers start telling me that I don't own even the physical goods I buy, because of some licensing agreement upstream between parties with whom I never agreed to any ongoing terms, then those lawyers are simply thieves.
Hmm, an Anonymous Coward condescendingly bragging about the size of their database, with no facts or any other content.
Get a grip on something other than your penis.
Yes, nothing is as simple as a nuclear war. Stupid.