No, instead MS adopted their normal "fuck you all" attitude and forced a new, ill conceived driver model onto the IHVs.
So, if they support backward compatibility, it's cruft and bloat and the reason Windows sucks. If they break compatibility in order to provide a more modern driver interface, all the while warning driver providers of the change well ahead of time, they've got a "fuck you all" attitude.
So... which is it?
Disclaimer: I'm definitely *not* a fan of MS or Windows. But come on, hypocritical much?
All those questions can be handled scientificially. With an omnipotent being, none of those questions makes any sense.
Nor can they even be answered. With an omnipotent being, if you find no evidence of their existence, a believer can simply say "well, they don't want to be found".
An alien, however, must obey the laws of the universe, and therefore is a legitimate subject of inquiry.
It's more when they're championing wealth redistribution, and how everybody else needs to do it, but then they're living in mansions. THAT is elitist, if you ask me.
Why? Most of the rich, liberal or otherwise, could give up a bit of their income and *still* live in their mansions. Liberals aren't about eliminating the rich as a class. They just believe that it's not unreasonable to tax the wealthy more heavily in order to give the poor a leg up.
But no Republican will admit that... it's far easier to paint the democrats as drooling, wealth-hating communists.
Answer: Probably neither better nor, due to likely unforeseen needs for additional modifications as problems crop up, cheaper.
It seems you prefer to ignore the sheer amount of manpower and expense that goes into designing and implementing a completely new booster package. With the SRBs, NASA has, what, 20, 30 years of experience launching and refurbishing them? Not to mention the 20 or 30 years of experience ATK has in building and testing them? Oh, and the entire manufacturing and testing infrastructure that already exists?
Designing and deploying an entirely new booster package is *hugely* non-trivial. Making use of existing components and experience, where possible, is one of the key ways NASA is saving money (and time) in the Ares program. Heck, even if they have to make some modifications (like vibration dampening systems) to make the system work, it'll almost certainly still be cheaper than rebuilding from the ground up.
They should have known from general solid rocket experience what the well known disadvantages of solid boosters are (i.e. vibrations due to imperfectly molded grains of fuel, high acceleration and force but little control over either...once you light it then it goes all out, etc) before going down that road with Ares.
Oh, I see. You're "not a shuttle engineer", but you know what the NASA engineers should and shouldn't have known about the SRBs.
Presumptuous much?
In short, the shuttle engineers almost certainly knew that flying the SRB as the first stage in a vehicle besides the shuttle probably wouldn't work
So now you're telling me that, rather than not learning from the shuttle program, NASA has actually gotten dumber and forgotten the things they already knew? Really?
I strongly suspect that the answer to that question may be "yes"
So you're not a shuttle engineer... you've only read the press releases and so forth... but you suspect the answer is 'yes'.
Well, at least that answers my question. You don't actually have evidence that NASA hasn't learned from the shuttle program, you simply believe it must be true.
I believe that it would be better to make a clean break with the Shuttle
Funny, I've heard people say the same thing when working on a large software project. Usually they're junior programmers who haven't really seen how a real-world project works. "This thing has gotten big and crufty," they say. "Let's start from scratch!" Then, years later, after millions of dollars have been spent, they have nothing to show for it. Why? Because redesigning from the ground up rarely works as well as you'd think.
Natural Selection is science, as is mutation. No contest there. Viruses "evolve" in the sense of generational change, but I am unaware of any innovations
You mean like bacteria evolving the ability to digest citrate?
It might seem that way at first glance, but remember that the parts of the shuttle were designed to work together when put together as the shuttle. For example, excess vibrations from the solid rocket boosters were negligible when attached to the large mass of the main fuel tank and the orbiter, but they become a problem when one attempts to perch a lighter vehicle in a top-heavy configuration on top of a single SRB.
Yeah, but that's a newly discovered fact. The shuttle program couldn't have taught them that. So your complaint that they haven't "learned their lessons" isn't supported by this particular issue. Had they known, a prior, that this was going to be a problem thanks to experience with the shuttle, then yes, absolutely I would agree with you, but since they didn't know that in advance, making use of the SRBs made perfect sense at the time the decision was made.
So, do you have any other evidence that they haven't learned their lessons from the shuttle program?
The SRBs were appropriate on the Shuttle because of the huge liftoff masses and the need for extra power to get the whole thing moving from a stationary start (the proverbial kick in the pants) but they seem to be less so on the Ares-1.
On the Ares-1, perhaps. But the final goal, for which Ares-1 is only the first step, is a much larger launch vehicle with a much greater mass, in which case the SRBs may very well be a logical choice.
While it just my opinion, a proposal to re-use substantial parts from the Shuttle program exactly or almost exactly the same as their current configuration does not strike me as "learning the lessons"
Umm, why? Are you saying there's something wrong with the shuttle booster system? I mean, yes, there are problems with the shuttle itself. It's wickedly expensive to maintain, it's tiles are a problem, the insulation on the external tanks is a problem, etc, etc. But since when has the booster system been an issue?
Do you have specific complaints about the shuttle booster system? If so, what are they? Because, in the absence of such complaints, reusing the shuttle booster system is incredibly *smart*. Why waste time designing a whole new system when the existing one will suffice?
Re:Ignorance vs. the Unknown
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
2 points - cosmic rays move fast and don't hang around the earth.
And occasionally they slam into the atmosphere, with far more energy than any collision generated in the LHC. Hell, we've detected tiny gamma ray bursts from high-altitude balloon-mounted observatories that have demonstrated this.
And that's the point. What the LHC can do is nothing like what happens in earth's upper atmosphere on a fairly regular basis.
Cosmic rays of the kind that could cause problems are infinitesimal in their interactions with the earth.
"The frequency of air showers ranges from about 100 per m^2 per year for energies >10^15 eV"
To put that in perspective, the LHC will be generating collisions with energies of roughly 1.4*10^13 eV (14 TeV).
So, every year, there are 100 cosmic ray interactions per *square meter* of atmosphere. Every single year. That's a truly enormous number. And each interaction involves ten times the amount of energy the LHC can produce, or more. So if we haven't been gobbled up yet, we won't.
We should learn the lessons, what to do and what NOT to do, that the Shuttle program has to teach instead of repeating the same steps and expecting different results.
So, I can only assume you have evidence or references to suggest that this isn't precisely what NASA has done?
That was more than enough to get them to indulge in the 'liquor' you blame for this hangover
But they didn't! Why do you keep insisting they did? Look it up. Until late 2007, neither Fannie nor Freddie were in the subprime mortgage market. But at that point, they had no choice but to get involved; had they not started buying up those mortgages, MBSs would've started failing, and the investors would've run for the hills, taking the housing market it along with it, resulting in an even more dramatic collapse.
The fact is, it was the regular banking institutions that were so deeply embedded in the subprime market. No, really, look it up, it's true. The market failed, and it was the pure private institutions that really screwed it up (have you already forgotten about IndyMac and Bear Stearns??), because the US government let them by not regulating the market appropriately. It was a classic market failure. Which is what happens when you let the free market charge ahead unimpeded.
Now, that's not to say Fannie and Freddie don't have their problems. But being involved in the subprime market was *not* one of them.
the guarantee that bad decisions bring failure, and they will bear the consequences.
That requires these organizations to successfully gauge risk. The problem is that the nature of the secondary mortgage market was such that investors believed they were insulated from that risk, either through poor statistical thinking (the idea that a bunch of high-risk mortgages collected together makes for a low-risk investment... a correct idea, if the risks are independant... a terrible, terrible idea if they're not), or through genuine misinformation or misdirection because of the level of abstraction in some of those derivative instruments.
This blind ideology is actually called economics.
No, you're describing laissez faire capitalism, which is one economic theory (preferred by my favorite whipping boy, libertarianism), but it most certainly does *not* embody the entirety of "economics". Meanwhile, the pragmatic folks out there realize that, yup, some people screwed up, but it's better to prevent the failure of Fannie and Freddie than to trigger a depression, partly due to domestic wealth destruction, but worse yet, because of international wealth destruction causing the withdrawl of investment funds, resulting in a massive credit crunch and an economic meltdown.
Now, you may be coldhearted enough not to care, but trust me, most people probably don't agree with you. I'm sure, given the choice, people would've rather avoided the depression of the 30s, too, even if it meant government bailouts.
The thing is, not you or anyone can predict the other certain unwanted consequences of these proposed simple rules.
Well, people could easily predict what would happen in the absence of said rules (many were predicting this bubble collapse), and there really was *no good reason* to allow the market to issue such bad loans. I mean, ffs, the entire reason the fed exists is to manage the money supply... and given that mortgages are one of the primary ways through which wealth is created, it's clearly in their interest to ensure that said money is backed by legitimate assets (in this case, correctly valued property and debtors who were able to repay their mortgages).
And no, don't start again with the gold standard BS, I don't wanna hear it.:)
If it means to have people who made bad decisions take responsibility for them, I say let the economy implode. Which it wouldn't by the way.
ROFL, there's a phrase for that. It's called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
And trust me, it would. Really. The sheer amount of money tied up in mortgage backed securities is enormous. Allowing that amount of wealth to simply evaporate would cause incalculable damage to the US economy, in all probability thrusting it into a new depression. Thanks, but no thanks.
On the bright side, I can at least be happy that the US isn't so ideologically blinded to be willing to sacrifice the US (and probably world) economies because of blind adherence to an ideology.
Oh, what's not to like in a good spirited and polite argument.:)
Heh, well, if they'll go someplace, sure. But we both know what'll really happy. I'll call you crazy, you'll call me ignorant, and we'll go 'round and 'round. Fun for some, maybe, but I'll pass.:)
If the government knew a bad loan from a good one, Fannie and Freddie wouldn't have failed.
Umm... what? The whole point is that the government played *no* role in the mortgage industry... Fannie and Freddie are private institutions (sort of), and it was up to them to make that judgement when they bought the loans from the banks. And interestingly, they generally did a decent good job of that, staying away from the subprime market. It was the rest of the mortgage industry that gave out truly questionable loans... Fannie and Freddie were just dragged down with the rest of them when the bubble burst.
And why did those banks give out questionable loans? As I already said, blind greed. It's really that simple. The nature of the secondary mortgage market meant that investors were, supposedly, insulated from risk, while it encouraged banks to issue loans as fast as they could to satiate the demand, making billions upon billions of dollars in the process. Of course, it was all a house of cards, and many predicted it well in advance of the collapse (and many banks explicitly stayed out of the game because they knew it was a bad idea... Fannie and Freddie included, along with others, such as J.P. Morgan), but that didn't stop many more from being sucked in.
NOBODY is smart enough to determine the outcomes of such regulations or write some theoretical 'good' ones.
Oh bullshit. You may not be able to predict, a priori, which loans will fail, but it's trivial to set some basic guidelines. Hell, I can do it!
1) Outlaw liar loans, requiring real documentation of income before issuing a mortgage. 2) Outlaw negative amortization and interest-only loans. If you don't plan to pay back the mortgage, you shouldn't own the property. 3) Outlaw "creative" incentives to encourage purchases, such as the seller paying the down payment for the purchaser. This just encourages people getting into loans they can't afford.
See, basic, common-sense rules that would've gone a *long* way to curtailing the clusterfuck that we're seeing today.
Actually no. Everybody deserves a home, being homeless must suck.
Of course. That's why there's this alternative to home ownership: renting.
This doesn't quite fall under the way of thinking I described, since there are many companies that contribute to Linux, not to mention the countless developers.
What does that have to do with anything? Either free software is dumping, because people are underpricing their product in order to drive out competition, or it's not. The same is true of Google's services.
Although one could argue that releasing products for free was akin to underselling the competition, driving other companies out of business by funding these products with alternate revenue streams.
So much for Linux, then, which is funded by, among other companies, Redhat, Oracle, etc. Oh well, it was a fun ride...
Out of necessity but not of desire? They were forced to make bad investments?
Or let the economy implode. You pick.
Again, I'll happily ignore the rest, I've heard the same or similar from the likes of you before, so I'm not sure why you're even trying.
Summarizing, if you want to blame easy credit, don't be vague and call it 'market alcoholism' but point the finger at the source of it.
I did. Bad regulation. If the government had instituted rules which disallowed banks from issuing bad loans, none of this would've happened.
Alternatively, they could've outlawed the secondary mortgage market, but I'm not educated enough to determine if that's a good idea or not (my gut says it isn't, since that would cause large amounts of mortgage funding to essentially evaporate, but there's something to be said for the idea that not everyone deserves to own a home).
Absolutely they were. It was only at the tail-end of 2k7 that the GSEs really started getting involved in the subprime market, and that was out of necessity, not desire. But when you hold nearly 80% of all mortgages (after the various banks and investors started pulling out), and the GSEs can no longer raise funds to support their guarantees because the market has turned, increasing defaults while drying up the availability of funds, it's hardly surprisingly that Fannie and Freddie went under.
The rest of your post is the usual "gold standard" BS. And if you believe in that crap, there's little left to discuss.:)
And the calling the homeowners stupid is disingenuous.
I never did. Not all of them, anyway. Some were dumb. Some were filthy speculators. Others were honestly taken in by banks that basically suckered them into loans they couldn't afford.
You can't put the responsibility on them
Well, you can, at least to some degree. Millions upon millions of Americans bought interest-only, or worse, negative-amortization mortgages, or ARMs which, after adjustment, they could no longer afford. This is a basic issue of consumer education.
That said, the banks went out of their way to keep consumers in the dark, because it was in their interest to issue as many loans as they could, so that they could resell them for big dollars. It was a systemic problem, there's absolutely no question of that, but there's blame to be handed out all along the chain, from the government all the way down to individual home "owners".
Inland ice is increasing due to increased precipitation, and that's thanks to global warming increasing the amount of H2O in the atmosphere... this happens to match modeled predictions quite well. However, meanwhile, the ice shelves on the edges of the continent continue to degrade. Is the news all bad? No. But it ain't all rosy, either, despite what you might have us believe.
Maybe because your comments are, frankly, rooted in ignorance?
both Freddie and Fannie had special ties and treatment by the government that led them to purchase very risky subprime loans that regular market-bound enterprises wouldn't touch with a 20-foot pole.
Umm... what? It was the big private investors that bought the lion's share of the truly high risk subprime loans. Why do you think Bear Stearns collapsed? Or IndyBank?
In fact, my understanding is that Fanny and Freddie were far better than the private investment firms and banks, as far as loan quality goes, but unfortunately even quality mortgages are now starting to default as a consequence of general declines in the real estate market.
The simple fact is this: ignoring the "stupid homeowners" side of the equation, it was the *lack* of regulation that caused this problem (not your supposed "distorting intervention"), as the availability of large amounts of free capital looking for investment opportunities encouraged banks to issue bad loans, and encouraged middlemen to repackage those loans into AAA-rated investment vehicles. Basically, the entire market was drunk on cheap capital, and had this insane notion that a) real estate never declines, b) real estate never collapses on a large scale, and as a corollary to b, c) a bunch of high-risk mortgages, packaged together, equals a low-risk investment vehicle. It's completely insane, but when you couple large amounts of free capital with insatiable greed and a lack of market regulation, this is exactly the kind of crap that happens.
But, as any truly funny joke, it has a kernel of truth to it: Perl 6 has been in development since forever, and in fact I can't remember any project of similar magnitude and visibility that has been delayed for so long (feel free to educate me, tho).
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Excellent, time to visit facebook... :)
Except when your friends with unlocked profiles post pictures with you tagged in them.
No, instead MS adopted their normal "fuck you all" attitude and forced a new, ill conceived driver model onto the IHVs.
So, if they support backward compatibility, it's cruft and bloat and the reason Windows sucks. If they break compatibility in order to provide a more modern driver interface, all the while warning driver providers of the change well ahead of time, they've got a "fuck you all" attitude.
So... which is it?
Disclaimer: I'm definitely *not* a fan of MS or Windows. But come on, hypocritical much?
Obviously you missed the part of John where Jesus says that he who is sinless should throw the first stone.
Silly, he never said he threw the stone. He wielded it as a bludgeoning weapon. Which, read literally, isn't outlawed by Jesus' statement.
All those questions can be handled scientificially. With an omnipotent being, none of those questions makes any sense.
Nor can they even be answered. With an omnipotent being, if you find no evidence of their existence, a believer can simply say "well, they don't want to be found".
An alien, however, must obey the laws of the universe, and therefore is a legitimate subject of inquiry.
Just OOC, what infrastructure do those small providers use? Are they putting up their own cells?
It's more when they're championing wealth redistribution, and how everybody else needs to do it, but then they're living in mansions. THAT is elitist, if you ask me.
Why? Most of the rich, liberal or otherwise, could give up a bit of their income and *still* live in their mansions. Liberals aren't about eliminating the rich as a class. They just believe that it's not unreasonable to tax the wealthy more heavily in order to give the poor a leg up.
But no Republican will admit that... it's far easier to paint the democrats as drooling, wealth-hating communists.
Answer: Probably neither better nor, due to likely unforeseen needs for additional modifications as problems crop up, cheaper.
It seems you prefer to ignore the sheer amount of manpower and expense that goes into designing and implementing a completely new booster package. With the SRBs, NASA has, what, 20, 30 years of experience launching and refurbishing them? Not to mention the 20 or 30 years of experience ATK has in building and testing them? Oh, and the entire manufacturing and testing infrastructure that already exists?
Designing and deploying an entirely new booster package is *hugely* non-trivial. Making use of existing components and experience, where possible, is one of the key ways NASA is saving money (and time) in the Ares program. Heck, even if they have to make some modifications (like vibration dampening systems) to make the system work, it'll almost certainly still be cheaper than rebuilding from the ground up.
They should have known from general solid rocket experience what the well known disadvantages of solid boosters are (i.e. vibrations due to imperfectly molded grains of fuel, high acceleration and force but little control over either...once you light it then it goes all out, etc) before going down that road with Ares.
Oh, I see. You're "not a shuttle engineer", but you know what the NASA engineers should and shouldn't have known about the SRBs.
Presumptuous much?
In short, the shuttle engineers almost certainly knew that flying the SRB as the first stage in a vehicle besides the shuttle probably wouldn't work
So now you're telling me that, rather than not learning from the shuttle program, NASA has actually gotten dumber and forgotten the things they already knew? Really?
I strongly suspect that the answer to that question may be "yes"
So you're not a shuttle engineer... you've only read the press releases and so forth... but you suspect the answer is 'yes'.
Well, at least that answers my question. You don't actually have evidence that NASA hasn't learned from the shuttle program, you simply believe it must be true.
I believe that it would be better to make a clean break with the Shuttle
Funny, I've heard people say the same thing when working on a large software project. Usually they're junior programmers who haven't really seen how a real-world project works. "This thing has gotten big and crufty," they say. "Let's start from scratch!" Then, years later, after millions of dollars have been spent, they have nothing to show for it. Why? Because redesigning from the ground up rarely works as well as you'd think.
There are a lot of ways that a system that's cheap in principle can become expensive in practice
Now *that* is a lesson I suspect NASA learned from the Shuttle program. :)
Natural Selection is science, as is mutation. No contest there. Viruses "evolve" in the sense of generational change, but I am unaware of any innovations
You mean like bacteria evolving the ability to digest citrate?
It might seem that way at first glance, but remember that the parts of the shuttle were designed to work together when put together as the shuttle. For example, excess vibrations from the solid rocket boosters were negligible when attached to the large mass of the main fuel tank and the orbiter, but they become a problem when one attempts to perch a lighter vehicle in a top-heavy configuration on top of a single SRB.
Yeah, but that's a newly discovered fact. The shuttle program couldn't have taught them that. So your complaint that they haven't "learned their lessons" isn't supported by this particular issue. Had they known, a prior, that this was going to be a problem thanks to experience with the shuttle, then yes, absolutely I would agree with you, but since they didn't know that in advance, making use of the SRBs made perfect sense at the time the decision was made.
So, do you have any other evidence that they haven't learned their lessons from the shuttle program?
The SRBs were appropriate on the Shuttle because of the huge liftoff masses and the need for extra power to get the whole thing moving from a stationary start (the proverbial kick in the pants) but they seem to be less so on the Ares-1.
On the Ares-1, perhaps. But the final goal, for which Ares-1 is only the first step, is a much larger launch vehicle with a much greater mass, in which case the SRBs may very well be a logical choice.
While it just my opinion, a proposal to re-use substantial parts from the Shuttle program exactly or almost exactly the same as their current configuration does not strike me as "learning the lessons"
Umm, why? Are you saying there's something wrong with the shuttle booster system? I mean, yes, there are problems with the shuttle itself. It's wickedly expensive to maintain, it's tiles are a problem, the insulation on the external tanks is a problem, etc, etc. But since when has the booster system been an issue?
Do you have specific complaints about the shuttle booster system? If so, what are they? Because, in the absence of such complaints, reusing the shuttle booster system is incredibly *smart*. Why waste time designing a whole new system when the existing one will suffice?
2 points - cosmic rays move fast and don't hang around the earth.
And occasionally they slam into the atmosphere, with far more energy than any collision generated in the LHC. Hell, we've detected tiny gamma ray bursts from high-altitude balloon-mounted observatories that have demonstrated this.
And that's the point. What the LHC can do is nothing like what happens in earth's upper atmosphere on a fairly regular basis.
Cosmic rays of the kind that could cause problems are infinitesimal in their interactions with the earth.
Uhh, not hardly. See here:
http://www.srl.caltech.edu/personnel/dick/cos_encyc.html
To quote:
"The frequency of air showers ranges from about 100 per m^2 per year for energies >10^15 eV"
To put that in perspective, the LHC will be generating collisions with energies of roughly 1.4*10^13 eV (14 TeV).
So, every year, there are 100 cosmic ray interactions per *square meter* of atmosphere. Every single year. That's a truly enormous number. And each interaction involves ten times the amount of energy the LHC can produce, or more. So if we haven't been gobbled up yet, we won't.
Yes, because Orion and Falcon 9 have the exact same requirements and specifications...
We should learn the lessons, what to do and what NOT to do, that the Shuttle program has to teach instead of repeating the same steps and expecting different results.
So, I can only assume you have evidence or references to suggest that this isn't precisely what NASA has done?
That was more than enough to get them to indulge in the 'liquor' you blame for this hangover
But they didn't! Why do you keep insisting they did? Look it up. Until late 2007, neither Fannie nor Freddie were in the subprime mortgage market. But at that point, they had no choice but to get involved; had they not started buying up those mortgages, MBSs would've started failing, and the investors would've run for the hills, taking the housing market it along with it, resulting in an even more dramatic collapse.
The fact is, it was the regular banking institutions that were so deeply embedded in the subprime market. No, really, look it up, it's true. The market failed, and it was the pure private institutions that really screwed it up (have you already forgotten about IndyMac and Bear Stearns??), because the US government let them by not regulating the market appropriately. It was a classic market failure. Which is what happens when you let the free market charge ahead unimpeded.
Now, that's not to say Fannie and Freddie don't have their problems. But being involved in the subprime market was *not* one of them.
the guarantee that bad decisions bring failure, and they will bear the consequences.
That requires these organizations to successfully gauge risk. The problem is that the nature of the secondary mortgage market was such that investors believed they were insulated from that risk, either through poor statistical thinking (the idea that a bunch of high-risk mortgages collected together makes for a low-risk investment... a correct idea, if the risks are independant... a terrible, terrible idea if they're not), or through genuine misinformation or misdirection because of the level of abstraction in some of those derivative instruments.
This blind ideology is actually called economics.
No, you're describing laissez faire capitalism, which is one economic theory (preferred by my favorite whipping boy, libertarianism), but it most certainly does *not* embody the entirety of "economics". Meanwhile, the pragmatic folks out there realize that, yup, some people screwed up, but it's better to prevent the failure of Fannie and Freddie than to trigger a depression, partly due to domestic wealth destruction, but worse yet, because of international wealth destruction causing the withdrawl of investment funds, resulting in a massive credit crunch and an economic meltdown.
Now, you may be coldhearted enough not to care, but trust me, most people probably don't agree with you. I'm sure, given the choice, people would've rather avoided the depression of the 30s, too, even if it meant government bailouts.
The thing is, not you or anyone can predict the other certain unwanted consequences of these proposed simple rules.
Well, people could easily predict what would happen in the absence of said rules (many were predicting this bubble collapse), and there really was *no good reason* to allow the market to issue such bad loans. I mean, ffs, the entire reason the fed exists is to manage the money supply... and given that mortgages are one of the primary ways through which wealth is created, it's clearly in their interest to ensure that said money is backed by legitimate assets (in this case, correctly valued property and debtors who were able to repay their mortgages).
And no, don't start again with the gold standard BS, I don't wanna hear it. :)
If it means to have people who made bad decisions take responsibility for them, I say let the economy implode. Which it wouldn't by the way.
ROFL, there's a phrase for that. It's called cutting off your nose to spite your face.
And trust me, it would. Really. The sheer amount of money tied up in mortgage backed securities is enormous. Allowing that amount of wealth to simply evaporate would cause incalculable damage to the US economy, in all probability thrusting it into a new depression. Thanks, but no thanks.
On the bright side, I can at least be happy that the US isn't so ideologically blinded to be willing to sacrifice the US (and probably world) economies because of blind adherence to an ideology.
Oh, what's not to like in a good spirited and polite argument. :)
Heh, well, if they'll go someplace, sure. But we both know what'll really happy. I'll call you crazy, you'll call me ignorant, and we'll go 'round and 'round. Fun for some, maybe, but I'll pass. :)
If the government knew a bad loan from a good one, Fannie and Freddie wouldn't have failed.
Umm... what? The whole point is that the government played *no* role in the mortgage industry... Fannie and Freddie are private institutions (sort of), and it was up to them to make that judgement when they bought the loans from the banks. And interestingly, they generally did a decent good job of that, staying away from the subprime market. It was the rest of the mortgage industry that gave out truly questionable loans... Fannie and Freddie were just dragged down with the rest of them when the bubble burst.
And why did those banks give out questionable loans? As I already said, blind greed. It's really that simple. The nature of the secondary mortgage market meant that investors were, supposedly, insulated from risk, while it encouraged banks to issue loans as fast as they could to satiate the demand, making billions upon billions of dollars in the process. Of course, it was all a house of cards, and many predicted it well in advance of the collapse (and many banks explicitly stayed out of the game because they knew it was a bad idea... Fannie and Freddie included, along with others, such as J.P. Morgan), but that didn't stop many more from being sucked in.
NOBODY is smart enough to determine the outcomes of such regulations or write some theoretical 'good' ones.
Oh bullshit. You may not be able to predict, a priori, which loans will fail, but it's trivial to set some basic guidelines. Hell, I can do it!
1) Outlaw liar loans, requiring real documentation of income before issuing a mortgage.
2) Outlaw negative amortization and interest-only loans. If you don't plan to pay back the mortgage, you shouldn't own the property.
3) Outlaw "creative" incentives to encourage purchases, such as the seller paying the down payment for the purchaser. This just encourages people getting into loans they can't afford.
See, basic, common-sense rules that would've gone a *long* way to curtailing the clusterfuck that we're seeing today.
Actually no. Everybody deserves a home, being homeless must suck.
Of course. That's why there's this alternative to home ownership: renting.
This doesn't quite fall under the way of thinking I described, since there are many companies that contribute to Linux, not to mention the countless developers.
What does that have to do with anything? Either free software is dumping, because people are underpricing their product in order to drive out competition, or it's not. The same is true of Google's services.
Although one could argue that releasing products for free was akin to underselling the competition, driving other companies out of business by funding these products with alternate revenue streams.
So much for Linux, then, which is funded by, among other companies, Redhat, Oracle, etc. Oh well, it was a fun ride...
It does not require active malice to do harm
Unfortunately, an anti-trust suit does. A monopoly is only illegal if you leverage it. Simply having one isn't sufficient to run afoul of the law.
Out of necessity but not of desire? They were forced to make bad investments?
Or let the economy implode. You pick.
Again, I'll happily ignore the rest, I've heard the same or similar from the likes of you before, so I'm not sure why you're even trying.
Summarizing, if you want to blame easy credit, don't be vague and call it 'market alcoholism' but point the finger at the source of it.
I did. Bad regulation. If the government had instituted rules which disallowed banks from issuing bad loans, none of this would've happened.
Alternatively, they could've outlawed the secondary mortgage market, but I'm not educated enough to determine if that's a good idea or not (my gut says it isn't, since that would cause large amounts of mortgage funding to essentially evaporate, but there's something to be said for the idea that not everyone deserves to own a home).
Were they?
Absolutely they were. It was only at the tail-end of 2k7 that the GSEs really started getting involved in the subprime market, and that was out of necessity, not desire. But when you hold nearly 80% of all mortgages (after the various banks and investors started pulling out), and the GSEs can no longer raise funds to support their guarantees because the market has turned, increasing defaults while drying up the availability of funds, it's hardly surprisingly that Fannie and Freddie went under.
The rest of your post is the usual "gold standard" BS. And if you believe in that crap, there's little left to discuss. :)
And the calling the homeowners stupid is disingenuous.
I never did. Not all of them, anyway. Some were dumb. Some were filthy speculators. Others were honestly taken in by banks that basically suckered them into loans they couldn't afford.
You can't put the responsibility on them
Well, you can, at least to some degree. Millions upon millions of Americans bought interest-only, or worse, negative-amortization mortgages, or ARMs which, after adjustment, they could no longer afford. This is a basic issue of consumer education.
That said, the banks went out of their way to keep consumers in the dark, because it was in their interest to issue as many loans as they could, so that they could resell them for big dollars. It was a systemic problem, there's absolutely no question of that, but there's blame to be handed out all along the chain, from the government all the way down to individual home "owners".
Inland ice is increasing due to increased precipitation, and that's thanks to global warming increasing the amount of H2O in the atmosphere... this happens to match modeled predictions quite well. However, meanwhile, the ice shelves on the edges of the continent continue to degrade. Is the news all bad? No. But it ain't all rosy, either, despite what you might have us believe.
Mods on /. have been unforgiving lately.
Maybe because your comments are, frankly, rooted in ignorance?
both Freddie and Fannie had special ties and treatment by the government that led them to purchase very risky subprime loans that regular market-bound enterprises wouldn't touch with a 20-foot pole.
Umm... what? It was the big private investors that bought the lion's share of the truly high risk subprime loans. Why do you think Bear Stearns collapsed? Or IndyBank?
In fact, my understanding is that Fanny and Freddie were far better than the private investment firms and banks, as far as loan quality goes, but unfortunately even quality mortgages are now starting to default as a consequence of general declines in the real estate market.
The simple fact is this: ignoring the "stupid homeowners" side of the equation, it was the *lack* of regulation that caused this problem (not your supposed "distorting intervention"), as the availability of large amounts of free capital looking for investment opportunities encouraged banks to issue bad loans, and encouraged middlemen to repackage those loans into AAA-rated investment vehicles. Basically, the entire market was drunk on cheap capital, and had this insane notion that a) real estate never declines, b) real estate never collapses on a large scale, and as a corollary to b, c) a bunch of high-risk mortgages, packaged together, equals a low-risk investment vehicle. It's completely insane, but when you couple large amounts of free capital with insatiable greed and a lack of market regulation, this is exactly the kind of crap that happens.
But, as any truly funny joke, it has a kernel of truth to it: Perl 6 has been in development since forever, and in fact I can't remember any project of similar magnitude and visibility that has been delayed for so long (feel free to educate me, tho).
Well that's an easy one: Mozilla.