because changing some regulations didn't create one.
No, but it brought a previously heavily regulated market closer to a pure free market by removing existing regulation. Basically, the banks were given far more freedom to do as they wished (such as creating complex mortgage-backed derivatives), and the result is a financial meltdown. What that tells me is that giving them even *more* freedom is most definitely *not* the answer.
'course, a crazy libertarian might say that you should just unshackled the free market and the invisible hand will fix everything. Problem is, they're living in a fantasy world (kinda like the favorite whipping boy of the right, Karl Marx).
I made too much money at 15 hrs a week at $7/hr. to qualify for the local "free clinic" but they sure do love to ask me for donations.
Well if the US had proper socialized healthcare that wouldn't have been a problem.
I don't get a bunch of cash from the government to survive, WHY SHOULD ANYONE ELSE?
Because there are many people who use the welfare system for reasons *besides* laziness. Yes, the free rider problem exists. So you have a choice: eliminate the system to punish the free riders while screwing those who legitimately need the system, or keep the system functioning and live with the moochers. I believe it's more ethical (and practical) to leave the system in place. Obviously a good chunk of the US population (yourself included) disagrees.
Which is why socialism and communism always eventually fails.
Socialism failed? Really?? Better tell that to basically all of Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan, among many others.
Honestly, only in the US can someone be so ignorant as to believe that socialism failed... across a whole wealth of quality of life factors, it's clear that socialism beats out US-style laissez faire economics any day of the week.
But when the average welfare mamma lives better than I do
So I assume you surveyed at least 1000 welfare mamma's (the statistical sample necessary to extrapolate to the national population) before forming this opinion?
It will backfire I do believe, since the same hacked email account doesn't appear to actually have any real business work.
Huh, so I guess that email labeled "CONFIDENTIAL: Ethics Matter" from her chief of staff was just a communique about her kid's behaviour in school or something? And the one labeled "Draft letter to Governor Schwarzenegger." from her deputy chief of staff was just, what, a little fan letter to say how much she loved him in Terminator? How about the one labeled "Court of Appeals Nominations"? Got any ideas there?
But yeah, I'm sure you're right, the account probably doesn't have any work-related emails in it.:rollseyes:
Seriously, do you Republicans take a course in self-delusion before getting your party membership card?
I'm not sure why this is insightful. Who cares what party the person is from? Illegal is illegal. All the parent is is partisan fingerpointing. It's no different than Bush-defenders pointing out that Clinton was worse, or Obama-defenders pointing out that Bush was worse. It's completely pointless and only serves to muddy the waters.
I simply cannot find a more definitive point at which 'life' begins than at conception.
Sure you can. When there's brain activity. We use that very measure to determine when life ends, so unless you don't believe in pulling the plug on people in vegetative states, you must concede that that's a valid metric for determining when life begins.
Ooooh, I see, you're changing the definition of "deregulated" to mean something other than what everyone else in the world means, gotcha.
Sorry, talk to any economist and they'll tell you that the last 8 years have seen the financial markets deregulated. There were regulations in place, and those regulations were removed. That is the very definition of deregulation. That act gave the market more freedom to "innovate", and thus we are in the situation we're in today. That's the reality. The government chose to "allow the market to continue" (instead of imposing new regulations to curb bad practices) because the idiots in power were unwilling to believe that the markets were running off the edge of a cliff. They saw only growth, all the while blinding themselves to the enormous house of cards that was building up (must've been too busy prostrating themselves at the altar of Alan Greenspan).
No it's not. It's not even close to important information. The important information with regards to science is whether or not she lets that belief move her to disrupt good science.
Absolutely! Fortunately, we already know that she doesn't consider book-banning a bad thing (to be generous), and combined with her beliefs regarding creationism, I'd say the trend is more than a little alarming.
No, nationalization looks like a government taking over the day-to-day operations of a company. AIG isn't being run by the government. It was given an emergency injection of funds so that they could effect a controlled dismantling, rather than a chaotic collapse. Is the government now the majority shareholder in AIG? Yes. But it isn't being run by the government, and so the corporation is not nationalized, as the term is traditionally used.
In short, if this is what you call "nationalization", then you're using the term far more broadly than most people in the western world (and I would know, I come from one of those "evil" socialist countries that actually has nationalized institutions).
I think the problem is that perverse incentives created by law
Ummm, what the hell incentives are you talking about?
How does "unfettered free market economics" describe things at all?
Simple. These problems were enabled by a *de*regulation of the mortgage market, allowing companies to "innovate" and create complex derivative securities based on mortgages. The result was an obfuscation and misjudgment of risk, so investors looked at these MBSs as low-risk, high-return AAA-rated securities and pumped massive amounts of credit into the market. The banks then took this glut of cheap credit and issued shitty mortgages, again building them up into complex investment vehicles, and so the cycle continued.
Had the government a) disallowed these complex financial constructs, or b) forced better loan standards on banks, or c) scrutinized the investment ratings agencies, odds are, we wouldn't be where we are now. But the US government, under Greenspan, backed away from the market and let it run away on it's own, and voila, we find ourselves where we are today.
The Fed has literally run out of money with the AIG nationalization and has asked the treasury to print more dollars NOW.
Just as a correction, AIG was *not* nationalized. It was provided a bridge loan while it's slowly dismantled. The US will then, in theory, be paid back through funds generated by the selloff of assets and subsidiaries. It's effectively a controlled liquidation of the company.
As for the Treasury programme, I have no idea what you're talking about vis a vis "[printing] money". They're providing a supplementary fund to the Fed, and they're getting the money by, among other things, auctioning T-bills just like they normally do. So what are you going on about, again?
You say that people will take loans they can't afford, "if you let them."
Damn right they will, if they believe they can flip their house before their ARM kicks in. Or if the bank obfuscates the terms so that people don't know what they're getting in to. Or if they're just plain stupid. Or if they believe that they can just stay afloat for a while and then resell their home for massive profits.
It's called a bubble. They encourage bad behaviour. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to pop.
They need someone else to give it to them, and a loan that's bad for the borrower is also bad for the lender. The proper way to ensure that the "right" amount of loans are taken is to let the person who is getting all the reward (interest) bear all the risk (default).
Absolutely correct, which is why an unregulated secondary mortgage market was disastrous for the US economy. It disconnected the credit suppliers from the debt holders, obfuscating the risk in the process. Welcome to unbridled capitalism.
Past government bailouts, and the expectation that they would continue in the future, caused exactly this imbalance.
Bullshit. Poor risk assessment by investment firms caused this imbalance, period. They evaluated MBSs *far* too highly, and as a result, vast quantities of cheap credit were pumped into the housing market, which only encouraged further bad loans to be given out. It was self-delusion, but because everyone was getting filthy, stinking rich, no one wanted to admit it.
The fact that the government played little or no role in the process is precisely why the economy is now in the state it's in today.
The real bug is that the financial industry knows that if everyone does the same thing, and it blows up, the government will step in and give them money.
And this is exactly what the government *hasn't* been doing. Aside from Freddie and Fannie, which were clearly allowed to get *far* too big for the US economy's own good (yet another regulatory failure), the US government has not bailed out a *single* company. Not one. Lehman was allowed to go bankrupt. AIG is being liquidated, and it's bridge loan is just to facilitate the process. WaMu will probably go the way of the dodo unless they get very lucky and avoid a run on the bank.
Make no mistake, the Fed and Treasury are very cognizant of the moral hazards involved in bailing out *any* large financial institution. F&F were very special cases, and had they properly regulated those giants, the bailout would never had been necessary. But I'll bet they will be *very* reticent to bail out any large, private financial institutions.
Oh, and did you know that the government FORCED banks to make CRA loans?
I'm sorry, but what? The government *forced* banks to give out interest-only, negative amortization, ARM, and liar loans to people who couldn't afford them? Or similarly structured HELOCs? Really! Care to provide a citation for your unsupported assertion?
And before you begin, I would point out that encouraging banks to provide cheap loans in order to ensure that people have access to credit *they can afford* is *very* different from forcing the banks to give out bad loans to people who wouldn't be able to repay them.
random rearrangements, insertions of 'new' but irrelevant stuff all over the place, and deletions of essentials elsewhere
ROFL, while I have my own critiques of the movie, this is probably the *last* reason to dislike the script. If you read the books and listened to the radio plays (or played the Infocom game), you'd know that DNA was quite happy to alter the HHGTTG storyline in order to fit the medium. The fact that the movie diverges from the books should be *expected*, not derided, given DNA's approach to the material.
If you want to host a server, call a hosting company. Your home internet connection is not sold for hosting servers.
That's a BS argument. What if I want to stream my music collection, that's stored on my media server, to work? Or access MythWeb so I can alter my recording schedule during the day? Or simply SSH to my home machine so I can retrieve something I was working on? None of these cases are served by using a hosting company, yet all qualify as "[hosting] a server".
however we will be much closer to socialism and our economy will have a harder time climbing out of the hole.
Uhh... what hole? Most of the western world runs under some brand of socialist regime, including the entire G8 save for the US. And the US is having the lion's share of economic problems. Now, that's not proof that socialism is better, but it seems like clear evidence that the US model certainly isn't.
Oh, I understand *why* it's more efficient. I'm saying that the difference will be so small as to be negligable in most cases, and so it comes down to picking nits (unless the practice is explicitly outlines in a style guideline).
Not necessarily. See my other post. It depends on when you think the assignment operation is completed. If the i++ is performed by copying a value into a temporary and then immediately incrementing, followed by assignment from the temporary (which, as it happens, it how gcc sometimes behaves, depending on the compiler version and optimization level), then i will contain 0. If the assignment is completed first, and then the increment occurs, then i will equal 1.
Now, the C standard could've picked one approach and been done with it. But they opted to leave it undefined for whatever reason.
And I'll bet you the amount of savings you get by switching to prefix instead of postfix increment is so miniscule as to render the entire discussion academic in most circumstances.
While this doesn't qualify as a premature optimization to me (which, in my mind, implies added complexity or cleverness for dubious or unnecessary benefit), it does seem like picking nits. Should a programmer try to conform with a pre-existing codebase? Absolutely. But I never would've considered prefix/postfix increment style to fall into the category, unless it's specifically mentioned in a set of written coding guidelines.
And thinking on it further, the exception is only weird depending on how one imagines the operation works. If you see the increment as happening after the assignment is done, then i should equal 1. If you imagine the assignment as happening after the increment was performed, using a temporary to store the intermediate value of i, then i should equal 0.
Basically, there's no good reason to assume one mode of computation of the other. The standard then took the position of assuming neither, leaving the whole thing undefined.
Slashdot Mirror
because changing some regulations didn't create one.
No, but it brought a previously heavily regulated market closer to a pure free market by removing existing regulation. Basically, the banks were given far more freedom to do as they wished (such as creating complex mortgage-backed derivatives), and the result is a financial meltdown. What that tells me is that giving them even *more* freedom is most definitely *not* the answer.
'course, a crazy libertarian might say that you should just unshackled the free market and the invisible hand will fix everything. Problem is, they're living in a fantasy world (kinda like the favorite whipping boy of the right, Karl Marx).
I made too much money at 15 hrs a week at $7/hr. to qualify for the local "free clinic" but they sure do love to ask me for donations.
Well if the US had proper socialized healthcare that wouldn't have been a problem.
I don't get a bunch of cash from the government to survive, WHY SHOULD ANYONE ELSE?
Because there are many people who use the welfare system for reasons *besides* laziness. Yes, the free rider problem exists. So you have a choice: eliminate the system to punish the free riders while screwing those who legitimately need the system, or keep the system functioning and live with the moochers. I believe it's more ethical (and practical) to leave the system in place. Obviously a good chunk of the US population (yourself included) disagrees.
Which is why socialism and communism always eventually fails.
Socialism failed? Really?? Better tell that to basically all of Europe, Canada, Australia, and Japan, among many others.
Honestly, only in the US can someone be so ignorant as to believe that socialism failed... across a whole wealth of quality of life factors, it's clear that socialism beats out US-style laissez faire economics any day of the week.
But when the average welfare mamma lives better than I do
So I assume you surveyed at least 1000 welfare mamma's (the statistical sample necessary to extrapolate to the national population) before forming this opinion?
It will backfire I do believe, since the same hacked email account doesn't appear to actually have any real business work.
Huh, so I guess that email labeled "CONFIDENTIAL: Ethics Matter" from her chief of staff was just a communique about her kid's behaviour in school or something? And the one labeled "Draft letter to Governor Schwarzenegger." from her deputy chief of staff was just, what, a little fan letter to say how much she loved him in Terminator? How about the one labeled "Court of Appeals Nominations"? Got any ideas there?
But yeah, I'm sure you're right, the account probably doesn't have any work-related emails in it. :rollseyes:
Seriously, do you Republicans take a course in self-delusion before getting your party membership card?
I'm not sure why this is insightful. Who cares what party the person is from? Illegal is illegal. All the parent is is partisan fingerpointing. It's no different than Bush-defenders pointing out that Clinton was worse, or Obama-defenders pointing out that Bush was worse. It's completely pointless and only serves to muddy the waters.
Insightful. Honestly, wtf?
I simply cannot find a more definitive point at which 'life' begins than at conception.
Sure you can. When there's brain activity. We use that very measure to determine when life ends, so unless you don't believe in pulling the plug on people in vegetative states, you must concede that that's a valid metric for determining when life begins.
willing to overlook overwhelming evidence in order to believe something
Yup, that's definitely the kind of thinking that's needed in the Whitehouse...
Ooooh, I see, you're changing the definition of "deregulated" to mean something other than what everyone else in the world means, gotcha.
Sorry, talk to any economist and they'll tell you that the last 8 years have seen the financial markets deregulated. There were regulations in place, and those regulations were removed. That is the very definition of deregulation. That act gave the market more freedom to "innovate", and thus we are in the situation we're in today. That's the reality. The government chose to "allow the market to continue" (instead of imposing new regulations to curb bad practices) because the idiots in power were unwilling to believe that the markets were running off the edge of a cliff. They saw only growth, all the while blinding themselves to the enormous house of cards that was building up (must've been too busy prostrating themselves at the altar of Alan Greenspan).
No it's not. It's not even close to important information. The important information with regards to science is whether or not she lets that belief move her to disrupt good science.
Absolutely! Fortunately, we already know that she doesn't consider book-banning a bad thing (to be generous), and combined with her beliefs regarding creationism, I'd say the trend is more than a little alarming.
No, nationalization looks like a government taking over the day-to-day operations of a company. AIG isn't being run by the government. It was given an emergency injection of funds so that they could effect a controlled dismantling, rather than a chaotic collapse. Is the government now the majority shareholder in AIG? Yes. But it isn't being run by the government, and so the corporation is not nationalized, as the term is traditionally used.
In short, if this is what you call "nationalization", then you're using the term far more broadly than most people in the western world (and I would know, I come from one of those "evil" socialist countries that actually has nationalized institutions).
I think the problem is that perverse incentives created by law
Ummm, what the hell incentives are you talking about?
How does "unfettered free market economics" describe things at all?
Simple. These problems were enabled by a *de*regulation of the mortgage market, allowing companies to "innovate" and create complex derivative securities based on mortgages. The result was an obfuscation and misjudgment of risk, so investors looked at these MBSs as low-risk, high-return AAA-rated securities and pumped massive amounts of credit into the market. The banks then took this glut of cheap credit and issued shitty mortgages, again building them up into complex investment vehicles, and so the cycle continued.
Had the government a) disallowed these complex financial constructs, or b) forced better loan standards on banks, or c) scrutinized the investment ratings agencies, odds are, we wouldn't be where we are now. But the US government, under Greenspan, backed away from the market and let it run away on it's own, and voila, we find ourselves where we are today.
You can be a capitalist without being a prick.
I never said you couldn't be. It just isn't as profitable (as Barclay's is now illustrating).
In an unfettered free market, failing businesses are not bailed out by the government.
No, instead the entire economy is allowed to collapse. Oh yeah, that's way better.
Unfettered free market economics created this problem. Government intervention is the only thing stopping it from spiraling out of control.
What a bunch of dicks.
I think you mean, what a bunch of capitalists. Yay unfettered free market! Right?
The Fed has literally run out of money with the AIG nationalization and has asked the treasury to print more dollars NOW.
Just as a correction, AIG was *not* nationalized. It was provided a bridge loan while it's slowly dismantled. The US will then, in theory, be paid back through funds generated by the selloff of assets and subsidiaries. It's effectively a controlled liquidation of the company.
As for the Treasury programme, I have no idea what you're talking about vis a vis "[printing] money". They're providing a supplementary fund to the Fed, and they're getting the money by, among other things, auctioning T-bills just like they normally do. So what are you going on about, again?
You say that people will take loans they can't afford, "if you let them."
Damn right they will, if they believe they can flip their house before their ARM kicks in. Or if the bank obfuscates the terms so that people don't know what they're getting in to. Or if they're just plain stupid. Or if they believe that they can just stay afloat for a while and then resell their home for massive profits.
It's called a bubble. They encourage bad behaviour. Unfortunately, they have a tendency to pop.
They need someone else to give it to them, and a loan that's bad for the borrower is also bad for the lender. The proper way to ensure that the "right" amount of loans are taken is to let the person who is getting all the reward (interest) bear all the risk (default).
Absolutely correct, which is why an unregulated secondary mortgage market was disastrous for the US economy. It disconnected the credit suppliers from the debt holders, obfuscating the risk in the process. Welcome to unbridled capitalism.
Past government bailouts, and the expectation that they would continue in the future, caused exactly this imbalance.
Bullshit. Poor risk assessment by investment firms caused this imbalance, period. They evaluated MBSs *far* too highly, and as a result, vast quantities of cheap credit were pumped into the housing market, which only encouraged further bad loans to be given out. It was self-delusion, but because everyone was getting filthy, stinking rich, no one wanted to admit it.
The fact that the government played little or no role in the process is precisely why the economy is now in the state it's in today.
The real bug is that the financial industry knows that if everyone does the same thing, and it blows up, the government will step in and give them money.
And this is exactly what the government *hasn't* been doing. Aside from Freddie and Fannie, which were clearly allowed to get *far* too big for the US economy's own good (yet another regulatory failure), the US government has not bailed out a *single* company. Not one. Lehman was allowed to go bankrupt. AIG is being liquidated, and it's bridge loan is just to facilitate the process. WaMu will probably go the way of the dodo unless they get very lucky and avoid a run on the bank.
Make no mistake, the Fed and Treasury are very cognizant of the moral hazards involved in bailing out *any* large financial institution. F&F were very special cases, and had they properly regulated those giants, the bailout would never had been necessary. But I'll bet they will be *very* reticent to bail out any large, private financial institutions.
Oh, and did you know that the government FORCED banks to make CRA loans?
I'm sorry, but what? The government *forced* banks to give out interest-only, negative amortization, ARM, and liar loans to people who couldn't afford them? Or similarly structured HELOCs? Really! Care to provide a citation for your unsupported assertion?
And before you begin, I would point out that encouraging banks to provide cheap loans in order to ensure that people have access to credit *they can afford* is *very* different from forcing the banks to give out bad loans to people who wouldn't be able to repay them.
random rearrangements, insertions of 'new' but irrelevant stuff all over the place, and deletions of essentials elsewhere
ROFL, while I have my own critiques of the movie, this is probably the *last* reason to dislike the script. If you read the books and listened to the radio plays (or played the Infocom game), you'd know that DNA was quite happy to alter the HHGTTG storyline in order to fit the medium. The fact that the movie diverges from the books should be *expected*, not derided, given DNA's approach to the material.
If you want to host a server, call a hosting company. Your home internet connection is not sold for hosting servers.
That's a BS argument. What if I want to stream my music collection, that's stored on my media server, to work? Or access MythWeb so I can alter my recording schedule during the day? Or simply SSH to my home machine so I can retrieve something I was working on? None of these cases are served by using a hosting company, yet all qualify as "[hosting] a server".
But... but... socialist! Socialist! Socialist! Socialist! Communism! Pinko! EVIL!
however we will be much closer to socialism and our economy will have a harder time climbing out of the hole.
Uhh... what hole? Most of the western world runs under some brand of socialist regime, including the entire G8 save for the US. And the US is having the lion's share of economic problems. Now, that's not proof that socialism is better, but it seems like clear evidence that the US model certainly isn't.
Or, it takes the value of i (0), copies it into a temporary, increments i (1), and then assigns the value of the temporary to i (0).
Seems pretty undefined to me. :)
Oh, I understand *why* it's more efficient. I'm saying that the difference will be so small as to be negligable in most cases, and so it comes down to picking nits (unless the practice is explicitly outlines in a style guideline).
Not necessarily. See my other post. It depends on when you think the assignment operation is completed. If the i++ is performed by copying a value into a temporary and then immediately incrementing, followed by assignment from the temporary (which, as it happens, it how gcc sometimes behaves, depending on the compiler version and optimization level), then i will contain 0. If the assignment is completed first, and then the increment occurs, then i will equal 1.
Now, the C standard could've picked one approach and been done with it. But they opted to leave it undefined for whatever reason.
And I'll bet you the amount of savings you get by switching to prefix instead of postfix increment is so miniscule as to render the entire discussion academic in most circumstances.
While this doesn't qualify as a premature optimization to me (which, in my mind, implies added complexity or cleverness for dubious or unnecessary benefit), it does seem like picking nits. Should a programmer try to conform with a pre-existing codebase? Absolutely. But I never would've considered prefix/postfix increment style to fall into the category, unless it's specifically mentioned in a set of written coding guidelines.
And thinking on it further, the exception is only weird depending on how one imagines the operation works. If you see the increment as happening after the assignment is done, then i should equal 1. If you imagine the assignment as happening after the increment was performed, using a temporary to store the intermediate value of i, then i should equal 0.
Basically, there's no good reason to assume one mode of computation of the other. The standard then took the position of assuming neither, leaving the whole thing undefined.