Yes, he would be breaking the law. And you, probably, would be breaking it too.
A lot of things become flat-out illegal — or subject to heavy regulations — when somebody is getting paid. It is a rather unfortunate state of affairs...
It is almost as if our rulers would rather we sat idle depending on their benevolence to provide us with the necessities we need — in their omniscient opinion. Oh, wait...
It is already illegal to drive your friend to the airport without a permit. You need a driver's license to operate a motor vehicle.
I don't know, if you meant it, but this is a very good point. At some point decades ago, the government declared driving on public roads to be a privilege to be granted to the good by the Executive, rather than a right to be withdrawn from naughty by the Judiciary (as walking is). We, the populace, accepted it and it has been downhill from there...
Now, try getting a new credit card (again) and not have it hit your credit score while you try to transfer balances, etc. It's a gigantic PITA.
You misread... My proposition was not meant for people like yourself, who are dissatisfied with a particular bank's practices, but for those, who, like the Anonymous Coward above would like to abolish all banks.
In a typical Illiberal fashion, they are unsatisfied with simply not patronizing businesses they don't like themselves — they wish to ban them for the rest of humanity as well...
The global recession puts the lie to your notion that not doing business with banks means I'm free of their ill effects.
Nope. You are only affected as much as you were involved with the banks — being there customer or an employee, or dealing with other people, who were. But the recession was not the bank's fault — rather it is that of the politicians, who forced banks (with the threat of "discrimination" lawsuits) to give money to unqualified borrowers.
1. Forging a higher stated income onto loan documents so they could lend more money
Nope. It was not the banks doing the forging — it was the applicants. Bank-employees may have looked the other way, but the actual forgery was done by the customers.
2. Giving loans to people that they knew would not be able to afford it
Refusing to issue such a loan was to expose the firm to a discrimination lawsuit. But, once again, you are ignoring the role of the actual applicants, who lied on their applications — putting the blame solely on those, who were supposed to catch the lies.
3. Offering minorities ARM loans or loans with much higher interest rates than they would offer to white borrowers with the same credit score.
Citation needed.
Issuing repayable loans is the banks' bread-and-butter. That's, what they do. They normally have every incentive to issue as many loans to qualified borrowers as they can, while keeping the unqualified out. The bubble started, when the government messed up those incentives by, on the one hand, suspecting every rejection of being racially-motivated and, on the other, lowering the standards, under which banks could unload (sell) their loans to the government. It was this combination, that created the mortgage bubble — not some inherent evil of the "banksters".
Blaming the borrower ignores the mountains of evidence showing wildly illegal, fraudulent, and outright deceptive behavior by the loan industry
Nope. The borrower signing a fraudulent loan application is the main guilty party. Those failing — willfully or otherwise — to catch his lies may be somewhat responsible too, but the primary responsibility is with the applicant.
If you don't know this stuff, you must be willfully ignoring the facts
Yes, "just" stop using them [banks]. Like we can "just" stop voting in all these rubbish politicians.
Unlike politicians, who impose themselves even upon those, who voted against them, banks have no power over you if you don't use them. You don't have to convince other people to stop using banks — just stop doing it yourself and you'll be free from them...
Most people can't stop doing business with them because they are already in debt
Nobody forces people into the debt. They take it voluntarily and are genuinely happy, when their applications are approved. Without banks, you'd have to save money for 10 years before buying a house. With banks, you can move-in right away and pay off in 15 years. Loans are a service, that banks provide to willing customers.
Banks, on top of providing essentially services, have built a money sucking machine
I'm not aware of this "money sucking machine". Could you, please, elaborate?
The only way to address this, without plunging the economy into chaos, is for the government to step in and untangle it
Just what is it, that you'd like to see "untangled"?
Then the industry rips off society I'd rather question whether they should be allowed to continue operating AT ALL.
The only industry, that lives off of society is the industry of government — they are paid by the taxpayers. And, armed with the IRS' ability to collect taxes at gunpoint, they are very hard to limit.
The banks, on the other hand, are very easy to "kill" — just stop using them. Unlike the government, they have no way to compel you.
More regulation, until they cannot operate any longer, makes much more sense.
Thank you for admitting, what the true intent of the regulations is. But would not it make even more sense to simply outlaw banks, huh? If only you could formulate such a law without shredding that pesky Constitution...
But I did not mean that. The difficulties, to which I was originally referring, were caused by the Sarbanes Oxley Act, which made it painfully difficult to change even the slightest aspect of a production computer system in a financial institution.
The precedent was set with the banks and auto industry.
Not sure about the auto industry, but banks and other financial institutions did spend untold billions on revamping their systems to comply with the new regulations. Working for them became horribly difficult — at least one client of mine had to hire a consultant, whose sole job was translating change-requests (such as: "We need to increase the JVM's memory limit of the risk-computing application") from engineer's English into regulation-compliant legalese...
Oh, and then an actual user had to sign-off on it — try to explain the intricacies of Java garbage-collection to an equity-options trader...
Nazi Germany and militarist Japan were capitalists.
In Nazi Germany it was the government, that created a number of firms (including Volkswagen). This disqualifies it from being Capitalist on technicality. (And it also, unfortunately, disqualifies modern-day America, but that's another story). No head of a major firm in Germany could possibly survive Hitler's displeasure (fortunately, Koch brothers are a living proof, that the US has not fallen that low, even if the case of the producer of an anti-Islam YouTube video is discouraging.)
But, more importantly, we were talking here not merely about economic systems, but entire schools of thought and political systems. You are attempting to switch the semantics down to pure economics — today's China, in such understanding, would be Capitalist. Hitler's party was called "National Socialists" for a reason. Here is the man's Programme — it is all about government providing (what it deems best) and the citizen serving dutifully. Collective trumps the Individual all over it — much like in the USSR. It is such Collectivism, that easily leads into mass-murder at home and abroad. It also cripples the development of free markets (where they are attempted at all), condemning the survivors to lower standards of living.
Read back to the beginning of this thread — were I denounced Che Guevara and (other Communists), and was told, "Capitalists are just as bad". You take this (or pretend to) as a comparison of economic systems: Free Markets vs. Central Planning. That's wrong — the "battle" is between Collectivism (such as represented by Guevara) and Individualism.
And, yes, the Soviet Union killed more Soviet citizens than Nazi Germany. That's because it operated for longer.
No. Even in the short period between 1933 and 1941, USSR murdered far more of its citizens, than Hitler murdered of his. Holodomor alone took several millions of lives.
And do not forget the sordid detail of Stalin encouraging Hitler (such as by making a Pact with him) and is thus responsible for some of the Hitler's murders.
Both Nazi Germany and militarist Japan were so incredibly murderous and aggressive that we had to take them down hard and fast.
That they were. My point is, USSR was even worse. And then there is Pol-Pot's Cambodia...
What a lovely Orwellian speak! This "right to be forgotten" is about forcing one entity to forget about another. This may sound find for the subject of the record, but it is, in fact, rather draconian, towards the record-keeper.
Whatever law applies to corporations (crosses himself, go away evil, evil!), would — or should — apply to individuals too. Would you like your ex-girlfriend to demand, you destroy the pictures the two of you took in happier times?
And why stop there — at the destruction of material mementos — huh? "Forgotten" means "forgotten" in any language, does not it?.. We are on the verge of being able to selectively erase certain memories — would you approve of a law requiring people to subject themselves to the procedure, whenever someone they once met demands, they forget him? Heck, there may not even be a need for a new law for this — it might follow directly from this much-heralded European initiative.
really dude, you have no freaking clue. pick up a history book. or just freaking google.
Nope. You make a statement, you offer supporting evidence. I'm not doing the googling for you.
chile's success is in spite of us, not because
Nope, it is because we persuaded him to adopt Capitalism and free markets.
Various reports and investigations claim that between 1,200 and 3,200 people were killed, up to 80,000 people were interned and as many as 30,000 were tortured during the time Pinochet was in government
Compared to millions exterminated by Stalin, for example, those numbers don't even qualify as the proverbial peanuts. And Pinochet stepped down on his own — whereas Castro enjoys such overwhelming love and adoration, they just keep electing the man...
But even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that none of those 3200 dead deserved it... That just about matches the number of dead in Soviet invasion of Hungary. But Hungary was just one... Do you know, how many Afghans died, when USSR invaded them? A nice and round million... And not the million of the imaginary people as in that infamous Lancet study, which counted the unborn, but of actual people killed in fighting or "restoring order" or whatever Soviets called it back then.
not that chile is special in that regard
Once again, Chile is special — the top economy of Latin America. Thanks to Capitalism and freedom.
is a craphole because what would otherwise be it's main (only) trading partner has isolated it for 50+ years.
Wrong... In our stead, USSR was buying Cuban sugar and whatever else they could produce to support them (such as cigars). For 3 years I was going to high-school in Kyiv walking by a "Havana" shop. And just plain giving them money. And yet, they are still a craphole. Because they are Communist.
My point, though, was not that the US is truly innocent, but that whatever dirt you can throw at us, the USSR, China, or North Korea have done far worse.
US involvement in south america. cuba. guatemala. peru. chile. nicaragua. all in the name of "stopping the spread of communism".
Nothing evil about that. Chile, where we succeeded, is Latin America's top economy today. Where we failed (Cuba), the place is a craphole.
Meanwhile, USSR openly invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Afghanistan to enforce Communism — the most murderous school of thought known to humanity (even Hitler's brand of Fascism is a distant second).
Yeah, cherry-pick the nicer capitalist regimes and the worst Communist excesses look horrible. I'd suggest looking at Nazi Germany and militarist Japan to start with.
Neither Nazi Germany nor militarist Japan were truly Capitalist.
As far as I can tell, their murder rate exceeded the Soviets and Chinese
Stalin's USSR killed more of its own citizens, than Nazi Germany did...
Letting you know. Name a few evil things done by America, UK, or even France in the last 100 years, that was not matched — with gusto — by USSR, China, or North Korea.
I currently disallow usage of my software by people owning Che Guevara T-shirts and other items bearing the scumbag's liking. Perhaps, it is time to make the license more encompassing by prohibiting all Communist-sympathizers...
A fair number of Russians believe, the "asteroid" was, actually, an American weapon...
You can laugh at fellow American kooks, who suspect American government at everything, but the paranoia — against the same American government — is even wider spread over there.
Even earthquakes and tornadoes are firmly believed by some (or many?) to be triggered by the evil Pentagon or Gosdep (which is what "Department of State" translates as in Russian). I'd offer links, but they are all in Russian...
Thousands of apologies. I had that page book-marked, but — employing the best web-masters there are to be found, no doubt, the Department of Education has rearranged their pages. The information is now here, or, if you (like myself) are having trouble accessing the Windows-powered site, here the Google-cache of it.
On the page, there is a table. In 1962 the "total expenditure" per pupil per year was (in 2011 dollars) $3,915. In 2010 it was $13,692...
Slashdot "ate" the first post — it was not showing up on the page, and in my history of posts, it was showing up blank — no title, and no contents. Of course, by the time I finished redoing it, the first copy appeared properly.
With that behind us, do you have anything to say on topic?
With per-pupil costs of public schools quadrupling since 1962 (inflation-adjusted), and results remaining as mediocre as described in TFA — and getting worse — the only conclusion is, we must spend more money.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, he would be breaking the law. And you, probably, would be breaking it too.
A lot of things become flat-out illegal — or subject to heavy regulations — when somebody is getting paid. It is a rather unfortunate state of affairs...
It is almost as if our rulers would rather we sat idle depending on their benevolence to provide us with the necessities we need — in their omniscient opinion. Oh, wait...
I don't know, if you meant it, but this is a very good point. At some point decades ago, the government declared driving on public roads to be a privilege to be granted to the good by the Executive, rather than a right to be withdrawn from naughty by the Judiciary (as walking is). We, the populace, accepted it and it has been downhill from there...
Or even your wife .
You misread... My proposition was not meant for people like yourself, who are dissatisfied with a particular bank's practices, but for those, who, like the Anonymous Coward above would like to abolish all banks.
In a typical Illiberal fashion, they are unsatisfied with simply not patronizing businesses they don't like themselves — they wish to ban them for the rest of humanity as well...
Nope. You are only affected as much as you were involved with the banks — being there customer or an employee, or dealing with other people, who were. But the recession was not the bank's fault — rather it is that of the politicians, who forced banks (with the threat of "discrimination" lawsuits) to give money to unqualified borrowers.
Nope. It was not the banks doing the forging — it was the applicants. Bank-employees may have looked the other way, but the actual forgery was done by the customers.
Refusing to issue such a loan was to expose the firm to a discrimination lawsuit. But, once again, you are ignoring the role of the actual applicants, who lied on their applications — putting the blame solely on those, who were supposed to catch the lies.
Citation needed.
Issuing repayable loans is the banks' bread-and-butter. That's, what they do. They normally have every incentive to issue as many loans to qualified borrowers as they can, while keeping the unqualified out. The bubble started, when the government messed up those incentives by, on the one hand, suspecting every rejection of being racially-motivated and, on the other, lowering the standards, under which banks could unload (sell) their loans to the government. It was this combination, that created the mortgage bubble — not some inherent evil of the "banksters".
Nope. The borrower signing a fraudulent loan application is the main guilty party. Those failing — willfully or otherwise — to catch his lies may be somewhat responsible too, but the primary responsibility is with the applicant.
Yeah, yeah. And if I don't agree with you, I must be stupid and incompetent.
Unlike politicians, who impose themselves even upon those, who voted against them, banks have no power over you if you don't use them. You don't have to convince other people to stop using banks — just stop doing it yourself and you'll be free from them...
Nobody forces people into the debt. They take it voluntarily and are genuinely happy, when their applications are approved. Without banks, you'd have to save money for 10 years before buying a house. With banks, you can move-in right away and pay off in 15 years. Loans are a service, that banks provide to willing customers.
I'm not aware of this "money sucking machine". Could you, please, elaborate?
Just what is it, that you'd like to see "untangled"?
The only industry, that lives off of society is the industry of government — they are paid by the taxpayers. And, armed with the IRS' ability to collect taxes at gunpoint, they are very hard to limit.
The banks, on the other hand, are very easy to "kill" — just stop using them. Unlike the government, they have no way to compel you.
Thank you for admitting, what the true intent of the regulations is. But would not it make even more sense to simply outlaw banks, huh? If only you could formulate such a law without shredding that pesky Constitution...
Yeah, right. It just became illegal for banks to have proprietary traders (derivatives and others) in-house — resulting in massive lay-offs of traders and their supporting personnel (IT, programmers, quants)...
But I did not mean that. The difficulties, to which I was originally referring, were caused by the Sarbanes Oxley Act, which made it painfully difficult to change even the slightest aspect of a production computer system in a financial institution.
Not sure about the auto industry, but banks and other financial institutions did spend untold billions on revamping their systems to comply with the new regulations. Working for them became horribly difficult — at least one client of mine had to hire a consultant, whose sole job was translating change-requests (such as: "We need to increase the JVM's memory limit of the risk-computing application") from engineer's English into regulation-compliant legalese...
Oh, and then an actual user had to sign-off on it — try to explain the intricacies of Java garbage-collection to an equity-options trader...
Do you need a reminder, what that "freedom-granting" nation does to its own defectors? It involves polonium poisoning. Rings a bell?
In Nazi Germany it was the government, that created a number of firms (including Volkswagen). This disqualifies it from being Capitalist on technicality. (And it also, unfortunately, disqualifies modern-day America, but that's another story). No head of a major firm in Germany could possibly survive Hitler's displeasure (fortunately, Koch brothers are a living proof, that the US has not fallen that low, even if the case of the producer of an anti-Islam YouTube video is discouraging.)
But, more importantly, we were talking here not merely about economic systems, but entire schools of thought and political systems. You are attempting to switch the semantics down to pure economics — today's China, in such understanding, would be Capitalist. Hitler's party was called "National Socialists" for a reason. Here is the man's Programme — it is all about government providing (what it deems best) and the citizen serving dutifully. Collective trumps the Individual all over it — much like in the USSR. It is such Collectivism, that easily leads into mass-murder at home and abroad. It also cripples the development of free markets (where they are attempted at all), condemning the survivors to lower standards of living.
Read back to the beginning of this thread — were I denounced Che Guevara and (other Communists), and was told, "Capitalists are just as bad". You take this (or pretend to) as a comparison of economic systems: Free Markets vs. Central Planning. That's wrong — the "battle" is between Collectivism (such as represented by Guevara) and Individualism.
No. Even in the short period between 1933 and 1941, USSR murdered far more of its citizens, than Hitler murdered of his. Holodomor alone took several millions of lives.
And do not forget the sordid detail of Stalin encouraging Hitler (such as by making a Pact with him) and is thus responsible for some of the Hitler's murders.
That they were. My point is, USSR was even worse. And then there is Pol-Pot's Cambodia...
What a lovely Orwellian speak! This "right to be forgotten" is about forcing one entity to forget about another. This may sound find for the subject of the record, but it is, in fact, rather draconian, towards the record-keeper.
Whatever law applies to corporations (crosses himself, go away evil, evil!), would — or should — apply to individuals too. Would you like your ex-girlfriend to demand, you destroy the pictures the two of you took in happier times?
And why stop there — at the destruction of material mementos — huh? "Forgotten" means "forgotten" in any language, does not it?.. We are on the verge of being able to selectively erase certain memories — would you approve of a law requiring people to subject themselves to the procedure, whenever someone they once met demands, they forget him? Heck, there may not even be a need for a new law for this — it might follow directly from this much-heralded European initiative.
And there I thought, the "only a fool would" kind of argument was soundly destroyed by Hans Christian Andersen centuries ago...
Nope. You make a statement, you offer supporting evidence. I'm not doing the googling for you.
Nope, it is because we persuaded him to adopt Capitalism and free markets.
Compared to millions exterminated by Stalin, for example, those numbers don't even qualify as the proverbial peanuts. And Pinochet stepped down on his own — whereas Castro enjoys such overwhelming love and adoration, they just keep electing the man...
But even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that none of those 3200 dead deserved it... That just about matches the number of dead in Soviet invasion of Hungary. But Hungary was just one... Do you know, how many Afghans died, when USSR invaded them? A nice and round million... And not the million of the imaginary people as in that infamous Lancet study, which counted the unborn, but of actual people killed in fighting or "restoring order" or whatever Soviets called it back then.
Once again, Chile is special — the top economy of Latin America. Thanks to Capitalism and freedom.
Wrong... In our stead, USSR was buying Cuban sugar and whatever else they could produce to support them (such as cigars). For 3 years I was going to high-school in Kyiv walking by a "Havana" shop. And just plain giving them money. And yet, they are still a craphole. Because they are Communist.
My point, though, was not that the US is truly innocent, but that whatever dirt you can throw at us, the USSR, China, or North Korea have done far worse.
Nothing evil about that. Chile, where we succeeded, is Latin America's top economy today. Where we failed (Cuba), the place is a craphole.
Meanwhile, USSR openly invaded Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Afghanistan to enforce Communism — the most murderous school of thought known to humanity (even Hitler's brand of Fascism is a distant second).
Bam, indeed.
Neither Nazi Germany nor militarist Japan were truly Capitalist.
Stalin's USSR killed more of its own citizens, than Nazi Germany did...
Communism. The most murderous school of thought known to humanity. Even Hitler's peculiar brand of Fascism is but a distant second.
Wherever Communism was attempted in earnest, the results included mass murder and economic misery for survivors...
Letting you know. Name a few evil things done by America, UK, or even France in the last 100 years, that was not matched — with gusto — by USSR, China, or North Korea.
Communism is just as evil in 2014 as it was in 1934 or, indeed, in 1980. Thank you.
It is only meant to raise awareness and let the healing begin. Please, don't hate.
I currently disallow usage of my software by people owning Che Guevara T-shirts and other items bearing the scumbag's liking. Perhaps, it is time to make the license more encompassing by prohibiting all Communist-sympathizers...
A fair number of Russians believe, the "asteroid" was, actually, an American weapon...
You can laugh at fellow American kooks, who suspect American government at everything, but the paranoia — against the same American government — is even wider spread over there.
Even earthquakes and tornadoes are firmly believed by some (or many?) to be triggered by the evil Pentagon or Gosdep (which is what "Department of State" translates as in Russian). I'd offer links, but they are all in Russian...
Contrary to some misconceptions, being a monopoly is not illegal.
What is illegal is using one's monopoly position in one market, to expand into another.
Congratulations, Google. You are following Microsoft's steps.
Thousands of apologies. I had that page book-marked, but — employing the best web-masters there are to be found, no doubt, the Department of Education has rearranged their pages. The information is now here, or, if you (like myself) are having trouble accessing the Windows-powered site, here the Google-cache of it.
On the page, there is a table. In 1962 the "total expenditure" per pupil per year was (in 2011 dollars) $3,915. In 2010 it was $13,692...
Slashdot "ate" the first post — it was not showing up on the page, and in my history of posts, it was showing up blank — no title, and no contents. Of course, by the time I finished redoing it, the first copy appeared properly.
With that behind us, do you have anything to say on topic?
With per-pupil costs of public schools quadrupling since 1962 (inflation-adjusted), and results remaining as mediocre as described in TFA — and getting worse — the only conclusion is, we must spend more money.
Not just Math — only 30% of 8th-graders nation-wide can be considered "proficient" in reading. And some particularly well-managed locales spend much more pupil, while producing and even higher share of illiterates.