"No, it's a military base. It is still under U.S. Jurisdiction (for all practical purposes)."
However for legal purposes it isn't under U.S. judicial jurisdiction. This isn't some new GWB twist. In all the countries we have occupied- Germany, Japan, Korea, Iraq, no one has ever asserted that foreign citizens on a U.S. base suddenly get the rights afforded by the U.S. Constitution. Generally speaking its the local laws, abridged or modified by us for the purposes of occupation. Gitmo is no different."
"I think it is being suggested that the Constititution (including the bill of rights) applies to all actions of the U.S. Government regardless of where those actions take place or who the target of those actions are."
Again read the above, clearly this has never been the legal interpretation. The Bill of Rights doesn't restrict U.S. Government behavior, it asserts the rights of people subject to it's jurisdiction. Outside of that jurisdiction it has no bearing even on people employed by the U.S..
Under your argument the Nuremburg Trials, War Crime Trials in the Pacific, the detention of individuals by the U.S. in occupied Germany and Japan, all of this would have been illegal.
"religious-nutball-inspired-violence behind hundreds of years ago" Nonsense. Absolute nonsense.
-Europe had a nice bout of Christians on Muslim Genocide in the 90s. 250,000 murdered in the name of Christ. -Then there was that Holocaust thing. Lets not forget how many "Christians" in France and Italy were gleeful participants. -Wiping out Native Americans throughout the 1800s most certainly had a religious component. Civilizing the saveges, etc. -A MAJOR component of American fear and hatred for Communism stemmed from a Christian hatred for aethiesm. -The Iraq war. How many Americans justified this or were motivated by Christianity? GWB certainly did to an extent. As did Pat Robertson and his moronic followers.
And in the U.S. how often are Christians beating and murdering gays, doctors at abortion clinics, etc?
Sorry religious violence is rampant in the West to this day. That is because religion is by necessity, violent.
As a philosophical statement one may consider it universal. As a law it is constrained by the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system. The U.S. legal system only extends beyond the U.S. borders when dealing with U.S. nationals. Gitmo is not an embassy. Its technically Cuban soil that happens to be leased by the U.S. Are you suggesting that the bill of rights is legally binding on foreign nationals in other countries?
Gitmo doesn't violate the bill of rights unless the prisoner is a U.S. National. Gitmo is technically located in Cuba and the bill of rights only governs U.S. Government behavior within the U.S. or with regards to U.S. Nationals abroad.
Other issues aside, no one would argue that the U.S. Army be obligated to follow the bill of rights when governing Iraqis in Iraq. Why should it be any different in Cuba?
There are plenty of good arguments against Gitmo but the Bill of Rights isn't one of them.
We let the people who screwed up fail. The question now is if we let everyone else fail. If you let these banks fail, then the dominoes will eventually hit you and you too will fail. Sorry but if these banks go under, you and I will go with them.
Warren Buffet didn't screw up. Investors in BS, LEH and AIG have seen those holdings wiped out. Most of the employees of these companies (LEH especially) had much if not all of their wealth tied up in the stock. Yes, people who sold prior to the collapse are ok, but most didn't. Most of them have seen their life savings destroyed.
The "bailout" does nothing to change that. The idea that investors aren't being punished for poor choices is just ludicrous. The bailout is assisting companies that are several degrees of separation away from the root cause. However, lets posit for a second that they aren't. What do people suggest, we let the foundations of the financial system collapse? Unless you are living on the fringe of the sanity bell curve, you probably would be very unhappy with the consequences we will all suffer if this thing goes down.
"Zero yelds makes now a very nice time to sell US treasures:),"
This is only true when there is some place else you feel safe putting it. Right now such a place just does not seem to exist.
"Nobody seems to be buying"
Thats why yields are nearly negative and prices are sky rocketing right? On the contrary, EVERYONE is buying, it is one of a very few places left to stash money. Everyone pulled there money out of the Markets last night in Europe and China. Much of that went into treasuries.
"Now, about your "stocks at all time lows", I bet you didn't do much hystoric researching, did you?"
The market is not at an all time low, but many value stocks certainly are or are close.
Well what you describe is only part of the problem though. The 700billion is supposed to offset the damange of mark to market, but banks still aren't lending. They have the money, but they are charging a premium for it to other banks. This lockup is totally fear oriented, no one wants to be the first to lend overnight.
I abhor the idea of the treasury buying a bank to get around this, but as a threat it is a good play. Banks can start lending again or play Russian roulette and risk being nationalized. This is such a cock-up, its unreal.
Well on the subject of Social Security, thats one place where I give a degree of respect to the "Starve the beast" argument. The baby boomers got us into this, if SS goes tits up then I am ok with that- we can just cut benefits. Its not that I want seniors to starve, I just don't think that they are entitled to more then cat food given the mess they have given us. It won't even require legislation to do, we will just re-rig the CPI and let inflation over a few years take care of the rest.
"But that's a fickle crowd and they are mostly buying short term treasuries"
The treasury bubble dooms day scenario requires the collapse of government, at which point we are all dead anyway. \\
"Land and guns are always good to own."
Tell that to the people that bought land anytime in the last 7 years.
While things are certainly going to be bad you have badly misread what is happening.
(1) The liquidity crisis is actually preventing inflation and there is a good chance that we could even witness some deflation if things don't change. Economic downturns are not necessarily couple with inflation, in fact we could even see deflation during this recession.
(2) Treasuries (U.S. Debt) have become even more valuable. Yields are almost effectively zero while prices are sky high. This is because everyone is so afraid of the markets that they are running to pick up the safest instrument available: U.S. debt. You really think China or anyone else will dump treasuries? Where would they put the money? Europe? China? Russia? Europe is as screwed as we are while Russia and China are even worse.
(3) The U.S. Dollar has actually been gaining value lately, likely due to point #2.
(4) "Buy land, seeds, guns and ammo cause Darwin is going to come knocking for the slow and trusting. Real assets are the only hard currency left." This is a nonsensical point. In order for "Real Assets" to trump cash it is likely that we would need a total failure in the rule of law, at which point having bought land or seeds would be meaningless as anyone with a gun would simply take them. Logic points to a couple years of slow or negative growth, not the collapse of society. I bet you spent Y2K in a basement.
You can have your land and seeds, I am going to start accumulating value stocks at all time lows.
The bailout isn't a bailout. The bankers who screwed up are for the most part being wiped out, along with the investors. Please see AIG, LEH and BS stock prices and you will see that the company owners and the company employees are being entirely wiped out. The "bailout" is preventing the guys who screwed up and are wiped out from wiping out everyone else. Its about liquidity and fear. Good companies are being destroyed due to too much fear and too little liquidity. It isn't a lie when the Fed says that most of what will be bought with the $700 million will be good or profitable. So the feds loose a couple hundred mil on this. Several trillions are being wiped out every week in the stock market.
I really doubt that this is a case where extend and extinguish is really viable or intended. Its not like jquery is some fundamental piece of open source that it's destruction would advance ms in any way, as you note there are tons of other similar active great projects.
If they wanted to extinguish it then I doubt they would make it such a core piece of Visual Studio. It sounds to me like they finally realized how retarded visual studio was compared to what was freely available and decided to just integrate with a good existing project. If anything I think that in this specific area they plan on working with the community in a positive way.
so at worse I think we will see some unpleasant branching or the addition of some lame IE specific code. Its a rare case where one can say kudos MS! They integrated with a good project for the right reasons.
Liking one of the oldest and most complex beverages man has crafted is pretentious? I don't get it. There is great cheap wine. There is great expensive wine. Crafting wine that ages well is a bit hard and more expensive to do, but you can still get bottles that will age ok for $20 or so. Its only in the U.S. that wine has this absurd association with pretentiousness.
It may not be inevitable, but it sure as hell is useful. I have saved literally thousand of dollars and tons of man hours using EC2 and S3. The ease by which one can have a reasonably powerful server with one's application up is fantastic. EC2+S3+CentOS is a life saver.
How is this any different then the world of symbian apps or the other cell OSs. The mistake is that analysts keep referring to Android as a consumer product, when in reality its just a very open google friendly platform that different cell companies will use to implement their own products. Comparing it to the iPhone is like comparing apples to an erector set.
And if I understand the news about AIG correctly, the stock is only taken temporarily as a security. So if AIG recovers and can pay back the money, these investors get off way too lightly as well.
The feds took stock warrants totaling nearly 80% of the company as collateral. The warrants are basically options, at anytime they can be turned into stock that the feds will permanently own. There is good reason not to make it 100%, no one wants the fed to actually have to own or oversee the dissolution of this company. It would be far better if they paid back the loan and went on to be a successfully company.
So if AIG recovers and can pay back the money, these investors get off way too lightly as well.
I don't agree with this. This is not entirely AIGs fault. AIG insured a lot of bad debt its true, however their current liquidity problems are also the product of fear (due to LEH, BS) driven increases to what amounts to interest rates on loans that they (like all banks/insurers) need. When these rates went up then AIG's costs shot up causing the recent problem. Nothing changed at AIG, its just that because of LEH/BS/etc the market fearfully drove AIG's debt costs up, prior to that they were fine.
Also keep in mind that the the Feds didn't write AIG a check for $85billion, they gave them a line of credit. The presence of this line of credit could make AIGs debt costs go down (remember they are artificially high due to fear) without ever actually using it fully.
Anyway I think seeing one's investment go from $70/share to $2 is probably PLENTY of punishment.
What about Morgan Stanley? The exact same thing could happen to them and they are currently turning a profit! Right now the market is so fearful that profit/loss doesn't matter. Should investors loose all of their money because a panic induced mob crashed prices? I certainly don't want to see profitable companies like Morgan Stanley go out of business and fire all of their workers because of a panicked crazed mob.
There is between people who can't get a mortgage though. Please, the lack of understanding of economics your comment revealed is staggering. If you aren't a troll then your are probably too foolish to participate in the economy (ie pay taxes) in a meaningful way.
Did you see what happened to the stock prices of Sallie, Fannie and AIG?
Yes the government is making sure that these companies remain able full-fill their insurance and debt obligations, but the investors have been wiped out. This isn't a bail out where the owners get rich and everyone else pays. Share holders have lost all (or nearly all in the case of AIG) of their investments.
The bailout does very little for the owners of these companies. It is punishing in fact. The bailout prevents the rest of the world from feeling the massive and devastating consequences of one of these giants falling. It would destroy economies around the world, not just the U.S.
By destroy I don't mean that people who can afford to invest suffer. I mean most of us loose our jobs, then our houses. No student loans. No mortgages. No insurance payouts for houses flattened by hurricanes. End of times depression everybody suffers consequences.
I don't see why this is marked as a troll. This is a perfectly reasonable argument given the discrepancies between Bush in the campaign and Bush in the whitehouse.
Is the observation that politicians are duplicitous and insincere really a troll?
He violated another person's/companies private property. I don't care if its my computer network, my home, or my car. If you attempt to gain entry to it you are violating my property rights. Assuming one believes in private property, this isn't just illegal, it is clearly wrong.
Get an Amex. I have never ever had them do anything other then remove a charge once disputed. It doesn't even require a phone call, you do it online. They are worth every cent of their annual fee.
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"No, it's a military base. It is still under U.S. Jurisdiction (for all practical purposes)."
However for legal purposes it isn't under U.S. judicial jurisdiction. This isn't some new GWB twist. In all the countries we have occupied- Germany, Japan, Korea, Iraq, no one has ever asserted that foreign citizens on a U.S. base suddenly get the rights afforded by the U.S. Constitution. Generally speaking its the local laws, abridged or modified by us for the purposes of occupation. Gitmo is no different."
"I think it is being suggested that the Constititution (including the bill of rights) applies to all actions of the U.S. Government regardless of where those actions take place or who the target of those actions are."
Again read the above, clearly this has never been the legal interpretation. The Bill of Rights doesn't restrict U.S. Government behavior, it asserts the rights of people subject to it's jurisdiction. Outside of that jurisdiction it has no bearing even on people employed by the U.S..
Under your argument the Nuremburg Trials, War Crime Trials in the Pacific, the detention of individuals by the U.S. in occupied Germany and Japan, all of this would have been illegal.
"religious-nutball-inspired-violence behind hundreds of years ago"
Nonsense. Absolute nonsense.
-Europe had a nice bout of Christians on Muslim Genocide in the 90s. 250,000 murdered in the name of Christ.
-Then there was that Holocaust thing. Lets not forget how many "Christians" in France and Italy were gleeful participants.
-Wiping out Native Americans throughout the 1800s most certainly had a religious component. Civilizing the saveges, etc.
-A MAJOR component of American fear and hatred for Communism stemmed from a Christian hatred for aethiesm.
-The Iraq war. How many Americans justified this or were motivated by Christianity? GWB certainly did to an extent. As did Pat Robertson and his moronic followers.
And in the U.S. how often are Christians beating and murdering gays, doctors at abortion clinics, etc?
Sorry religious violence is rampant in the West to this day. That is because religion is by necessity, violent.
As a philosophical statement one may consider it universal. As a law it is constrained by the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system. The U.S. legal system only extends beyond the U.S. borders when dealing with U.S. nationals. Gitmo is not an embassy. Its technically Cuban soil that happens to be leased by the U.S. Are you suggesting that the bill of rights is legally binding on foreign nationals in other countries?
Gitmo doesn't violate the bill of rights unless the prisoner is a U.S. National. Gitmo is technically located in Cuba and the bill of rights only governs U.S. Government behavior within the U.S. or with regards to U.S. Nationals abroad.
Other issues aside, no one would argue that the U.S. Army be obligated to follow the bill of rights when governing Iraqis in Iraq. Why should it be any different in Cuba?
There are plenty of good arguments against Gitmo but the Bill of Rights isn't one of them.
We let the people who screwed up fail. The question now is if we let everyone else fail. If you let these banks fail, then the dominoes will eventually hit you and you too will fail. Sorry but if these banks go under, you and I will go with them.
Warren Buffet didn't screw up. Investors in BS, LEH and AIG have seen those holdings wiped out. Most of the employees of these companies (LEH especially) had much if not all of their wealth tied up in the stock. Yes, people who sold prior to the collapse are ok, but most didn't. Most of them have seen their life savings destroyed.
The "bailout" does nothing to change that. The idea that investors aren't being punished for poor choices is just ludicrous. The bailout is assisting companies that are several degrees of separation away from the root cause. However, lets posit for a second that they aren't. What do people suggest, we let the foundations of the financial system collapse? Unless you are living on the fringe of the sanity bell curve, you probably would be very unhappy with the consequences we will all suffer if this thing goes down.
"Zero yelds makes now a very nice time to sell US treasures :),"
This is only true when there is some place else you feel safe putting it. Right now such a place just does not seem to exist.
"Nobody seems to be buying"
Thats why yields are nearly negative and prices are sky rocketing right? On the contrary, EVERYONE is buying, it is one of a very few places left to stash money. Everyone pulled there money out of the Markets last night in Europe and China. Much of that went into treasuries.
"Now, about your "stocks at all time lows", I bet you didn't do much hystoric researching, did you?"
The market is not at an all time low, but many value stocks certainly are or are close.
Well what you describe is only part of the problem though. The 700billion is supposed to offset the damange of mark to market, but banks still aren't lending. They have the money, but they are charging a premium for it to other banks. This lockup is totally fear oriented, no one wants to be the first to lend overnight.
I abhor the idea of the treasury buying a bank to get around this, but as a threat it is a good play. Banks can start lending again or play Russian roulette and risk being nationalized. This is such a cock-up, its unreal.
Well on the subject of Social Security, thats one place where I give a degree of respect to the "Starve the beast" argument. The baby boomers got us into this, if SS goes tits up then I am ok with that- we can just cut benefits. Its not that I want seniors to starve, I just don't think that they are entitled to more then cat food given the mess they have given us. It won't even require legislation to do, we will just re-rig the CPI and let inflation over a few years take care of the rest.
"But that's a fickle crowd and they are mostly buying short term treasuries"
The treasury bubble dooms day scenario requires the collapse of government, at which point we are all dead anyway. \\
"Land and guns are always good to own."
Tell that to the people that bought land anytime in the last 7 years.
While things are certainly going to be bad you have badly misread what is happening.
(1) The liquidity crisis is actually preventing inflation and there is a good chance that we could even witness some deflation if things don't change. Economic downturns are not necessarily couple with inflation, in fact we could even see deflation during this recession.
(2) Treasuries (U.S. Debt) have become even more valuable. Yields are almost effectively zero while prices are sky high. This is because everyone is so afraid of the markets that they are running to pick up the safest instrument available: U.S. debt. You really think China or anyone else will dump treasuries? Where would they put the money? Europe? China? Russia? Europe is as screwed as we are while Russia and China are even worse.
(3) The U.S. Dollar has actually been gaining value lately, likely due to point #2.
(4) "Buy land, seeds, guns and ammo cause Darwin is going to come knocking for the slow and trusting. Real assets are the only hard currency left." This is a nonsensical point. In order for "Real Assets" to trump cash it is likely that we would need a total failure in the rule of law, at which point having bought land or seeds would be meaningless as anyone with a gun would simply take them. Logic points to a couple years of slow or negative growth, not the collapse of society. I bet you spent Y2K in a basement.
You can have your land and seeds, I am going to start accumulating value stocks at all time lows.
The bailout isn't a bailout. The bankers who screwed up are for the most part being wiped out, along with the investors. Please see AIG, LEH and BS stock prices and you will see that the company owners and the company employees are being entirely wiped out. The "bailout" is preventing the guys who screwed up and are wiped out from wiping out everyone else. Its about liquidity and fear. Good companies are being destroyed due to too much fear and too little liquidity. It isn't a lie when the Fed says that most of what will be bought with the $700 million will be good or profitable. So the feds loose a couple hundred mil on this. Several trillions are being wiped out every week in the stock market.
I really doubt that this is a case where extend and extinguish is really viable or intended. Its not like jquery is some fundamental piece of open source that it's destruction would advance ms in any way, as you note there are tons of other similar active great projects.
If they wanted to extinguish it then I doubt they would make it such a core piece of Visual Studio. It sounds to me like they finally realized how retarded visual studio was compared to what was freely available and decided to just integrate with a good existing project. If anything I think that in this specific area they plan on working with the community in a positive way.
so at worse I think we will see some unpleasant branching or the addition of some lame IE specific code. Its a rare case where one can say kudos MS! They integrated with a good project for the right reasons.
Liking one of the oldest and most complex beverages man has crafted is pretentious? I don't get it. There is great cheap wine. There is great expensive wine. Crafting wine that ages well is a bit hard and more expensive to do, but you can still get bottles that will age ok for $20 or so. Its only in the U.S. that wine has this absurd association with pretentiousness.
We aren't called "Vinophiles", its Oenophile. Furthermore very few of us would ever give a rats ass about tasting to determine what is more expensive.
We taste to see which we like better. Sometimes those are cheap, sometimes not.
The only people who compare wines based on expense are posers and fools.
It may not be inevitable, but it sure as hell is useful. I have saved literally thousand of dollars and tons of man hours using EC2 and S3. The ease by which one can have a reasonably powerful server with one's application up is fantastic. EC2+S3+CentOS is a life saver.
How is this any different then the world of symbian apps or the other cell OSs. The mistake is that analysts keep referring to Android as a consumer product, when in reality its just a very open google friendly platform that different cell companies will use to implement their own products. Comparing it to the iPhone is like comparing apples to an erector set.
Why do people referring to the G1 as if it is the end all be all of Android? It is a single implementation, and the first one at that.
Just because Apple wshouldn't fear the G1, doesn't mean they shouldn't fear the Android OS.
And if I understand the news about AIG correctly, the stock is only taken temporarily as a security. So if AIG recovers and can pay back the money, these investors get off way too lightly as well.
The feds took stock warrants totaling nearly 80% of the company as collateral. The warrants are basically options, at anytime they can be turned into stock that the feds will permanently own. There is good reason not to make it 100%, no one wants the fed to actually have to own or oversee the dissolution of this company. It would be far better if they paid back the loan and went on to be a successfully company.
So if AIG recovers and can pay back the money, these investors get off way too lightly as well.
I don't agree with this. This is not entirely AIGs fault. AIG insured a lot of bad debt its true, however their current liquidity problems are also the product of fear (due to LEH, BS) driven increases to what amounts to interest rates on loans that they (like all banks/insurers) need. When these rates went up then AIG's costs shot up causing the recent problem. Nothing changed at AIG, its just that because of LEH/BS/etc the market fearfully drove AIG's debt costs up, prior to that they were fine.
Also keep in mind that the the Feds didn't write AIG a check for $85billion, they gave them a line of credit. The presence of this line of credit could make AIGs debt costs go down (remember they are artificially high due to fear) without ever actually using it fully.
Anyway I think seeing one's investment go from $70/share to $2 is probably PLENTY of punishment.
What about Morgan Stanley? The exact same thing could happen to them and they are currently turning a profit! Right now the market is so fearful that profit/loss doesn't matter. Should investors loose all of their money because a panic induced mob crashed prices? I certainly don't want to see profitable companies like Morgan Stanley go out of business and fire all of their workers because of a panicked crazed mob.
There is between people who can't get a mortgage though. Please, the lack of understanding of economics your comment revealed is staggering. If you aren't a troll then your are probably too foolish to participate in the economy (ie pay taxes) in a meaningful way.
Did you see what happened to the stock prices of Sallie, Fannie and AIG?
Yes the government is making sure that these companies remain able full-fill their insurance and debt obligations, but the investors have been wiped out. This isn't a bail out where the owners get rich and everyone else pays. Share holders have lost all (or nearly all in the case of AIG) of their investments.
The bailout does very little for the owners of these companies. It is punishing in fact. The bailout prevents the rest of the world from feeling the massive and devastating consequences of one of these giants falling. It would destroy economies around the world, not just the U.S.
By destroy I don't mean that people who can afford to invest suffer. I mean most of us loose our jobs, then our houses. No student loans. No mortgages. No insurance payouts for houses flattened by hurricanes. End of times depression everybody suffers consequences.
"Maybe it is time for the entire world's financial industry to take a massive hit.
I'll continue to grow my own vegetables, thanks."
I am guessing you also don't pay much in the way of taxes, so by your own logic why should we care what you think?
I don't see why this is marked as a troll. This is a perfectly reasonable argument given the discrepancies between Bush in the campaign and Bush in the whitehouse.
Is the observation that politicians are duplicitous and insincere really a troll?
He violated another person's/companies private property. I don't care if its my computer network, my home, or my car. If you attempt to gain entry to it you are violating my property rights. Assuming one believes in private property, this isn't just illegal, it is clearly wrong.
Damn traiters.
Get an Amex. I have never ever had them do anything other then remove a charge once disputed. It doesn't even require a phone call, you do it online. They are worth every cent of their annual fee.