Yes, it's getting warmer. But there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that we are going to do anything about it through emissions limits.
What we should do is to avoid interfering with rapid economic development because developed nations can actually easily deal with climate change and rising sea levels (just look at the Dutch, a large part of their country is below sea level).
We should also stop subsidizing (implicitly and explicitly) fossil fuel extraction. Right now, many nations are adopting policies that, on the one hand use tax dollars to subsidize fossil fuels, then on the other hand use more tax dollars to support alternative energies; the entire scheme is a gigantic give-away to industry.
In addition, we should give up our silly opposition to nuclear. The best way of reducing carbon emissions is to make it easy to deploy efficient, modern nuclear plants, the kind that actually burns almost all the fuel.
Wow, you're really grasping at straws here, trying to exculpate the administration. The adminstration is responbile for supervising the fed. It should be preventing such leaks, and when they occur, it should be investigating aggressively. Of course, it isn't going to do that.
And my point is not that the Democrats are doing something that the Republicans didn't do, my oint is that their holier-than-thou attitude is bogus. Democrats are in bed with big business and the financial industry just as much as Republicans were. That's important to remember when they propose legislation, because whether it's financial regulation supposedly protecting the little guy or health care laws supposedly insuring everybody, in the end, the people get screwed and administratiion friendly corporations win.
They do control the situation, more than any other actor involved.
No, they don't. Banks can't force you to take a mortgage against your will. You are the only person to decide whether you want to take out a mortgage and whether you like the conditions offered you. Nobody actually needs a mortgage; you can rent or save. When it comes to mortgages, the borrower is in complete control.
But the home owners ( with less data ) cant make a bad estimate of the risk?
Home owners have perfect information, control, and complete data about their financial situation.
Part of the problem with the crisis was that lenders didn't get that information or weren't even supposed to use it as a matter of public policy.
It is very easy to say all that, but life is a bit more nuanced than that. You expect to have some raises and better opportunities before the rates reset on adjustable mortgages.
In your financial planning, you also need to expect that you lose your job, that you won't get a raise, and that you get sick, and plan accordingly. Well, you used to have to do that. Now, of course, increasingly, you just take whatever risks you like and can expect to get bailed out.
And if all the above is true ( and it basically is, except for human want/greed ), then how much more true is it for the lender? They didn't have to loan the money. So, still, the first and foremost finger gets pointed at the lender.
There are different people who claimed to have been aggrieved.
Home "owners" claimed to have been talked into mortgages they couldn't afford, and they complained about "losing their homes". But home owners weren't harmed by foreclosures: they were simply kicked out of homes they never really owned in the first place. Yet, the administration tried to make it possible for them to stay in "their" homes, at the cost of everybody else. That's wrong.
Lenders made a lot of bad loans, loans they shouldn't have made. They were blackmailing the administration by saying that it would be really bad if they failed. But fail is what they should have done because they made wrong choices. Instead, the administration bailed them out.
Bear in mind, I am not arguing that homeowners deserve no blame. But that the lenders should get a large share of that blame.
I think we sort of agree, I'm just making a finer distinction. Homeowners are to blame for "losing their homes". Lenders are to blame for making bad loans. And with just and rational economic policy, they should have faced the consequences of their bad choices.
Instead, the administration took money from companies and individuals who made prudent decision and handed it to these losers. So I blame the administration for penalizing me for prudent financial choices, wasting my money and keeping housing prices artificially high.
And the rational choice for me is to take bigger risks in the future too and rely on the government to bail me out. I should buy that $2M mansion in a flood plain; if it floods, FEMA will bail me out, if can't make the mortgage, the administration will help me or I can walk away. And if it appreciates, I take all the profit. That's the kind of behavior that's currently being rewarded by politicians.
You talk about the news media as if they were some independent, unaccountable body. But where does the new media get this information from and why? Who, in fact, is "the news media", other than a select group of journalists that the fed wants to influence?
No matter how you look at it, the fed screwed up. They made the decision, and it is their job to make sure that everybody gets the information at the same time and there is no insider trading.
Of course, this is really just a symptom of a deeper problem.
But not first and foremost at the lending organizations that had the analytic data to show that these prospective home owners
If you need "analytic data" to figure out whether you can afford a mortgage payment, you should lose your right to engage in any kind of financial transactions. A fixed 30 year mortgage isn't hard to figure out, and if you can't afford it, you don't take it. And if someone tries to sell you anything else and you don't understand what they are selling you, you don't buy it either. I mean, have we become a country where the default assumption is that everybody is an idiot?
Furthermore, the lenders would have paid the price for their errors: they would have lost money on the bad loans. Instead, the administration first shoved billions in the hands of lenders who made poor decisions, and then shoved billions more in the hands of home owners who made poor decisions.
IBM Keyboards have tons of useless keys. If he had wanted a single key alternative for Ctrl-Alt-Del, SysReq, Break, or Pause would have been the obvious choices. In this instance, sanity seems to have prevailed, and the reboot key combination was something hard and obscure to type.
If you're going to rewrite history, try to pick a better lie. Ballmer gave it a good try with "we forgot about mobile and are late to the party" (reality: "we almost had mobile in the bag and then lost it through my incompetence").
You are forgetting the "or". A mortgage is a contract - you agree to pay the principal + interest OR you forfeit the house and are liable for the difference between it's sale value and what you owe. Breaking a contract is a business decision. When you break it, you eat the consequences.
No, that's not what mortgages are. When you buy a house on a mortgage, you own the house and you owe on the mortgage. Stopping payment isn't just a business choice between two contractual options. The lender has the option of using your house as collateral, but that's at their discretion, not yours. In some states, they can go after you and your money to recover losses after foreclosure, and your credit will certainly get damaged. Lenders will usually let you get away with defaulting and foreclosure (and hurting your credit record) because it's not worth their time to do anything more, but that doesn't mean it's just an either/or for you.
A home buyer who enters a mortgage, and defaults and suffers a foreclosure is an expected, normal, and routine part of the real-estate market. There is nothing unsavory about it.
Yes, I agree: foreclosures are a normal part of the real-estate market. They are what's supposed to keep lenders from making bad loan decisions, how the market is supposed to police itself.
What's "unsavory" is that the administration has been using tax dollars for preventing foreclosures. That is, people like me who made prudent mortgage decisions and paid off their mortgages are forced to pay increased taxes so that lenders who took unreasonable risks don't have to pay for their mistakes and that buyers who bought too much house now get their homes heavily subsidized with my money.
The other group of people who are being hurt are new home buyers, because by keeping foreclosures from happening and subsidizing home owners, the administration is keeping prices unreasonably high.
"Most" is his strawman claim and response. My statement was that the administration is responsible for a massive handout of taxpayer dollars, and I'd call $273bn a pretty massive waste of money.
In addition, the term "most" is ambiguous, meaning either "the majority" or "almost all". His strawman played on that ambiguity by falsely giving the impression that very little was not repaid, when in fact a lot was not repaid.
In different words, he and you are not even wrong; you're using strawmen and propaganda tools to mislead and manipulate.
Other countries may do some or all of these things but they are belittled, sanctioned, or bombed (usually in that order). The US does this "to protect its interests" and the rest of the Western world says "ok".
Other countries have done lots of these things in the past themselves. They stopped doing it because they couldn't afford it anymore; some time in the 1950's and 1960's, countries like France and Britain increasingly just picked up the phone and asked the US to clean up their messes; it was cheaper, simpler, and less risky. And why did the US do it? Because it was pretty easy for it to do so, and because it gives it great power. So, the rest of the Western world doesn't just say "OK", it says "yes, please".
I have. The EU laws on privacy laws have huge holes and exemptions in them for national security and other shenanigans. And even if they weren't, there is no guarantee that they are enforced either.
I would call 375 of $465 B TARP money [propublica.org] most or maybe you just believe the voices on the radio
You apparently can't read and understand the articles you cite yourself. What's actually been repaid is $371bn of $608bn, leaving us $237bn short, and that's assuming even that that government accounting is correct. You cannot count the "revenues" as a refund, since we would have gotten those if we had used the money differently. But that's not even the whole story, since we paid interest and opportunity costs on that money. As a result, the whole bailout cost us dearly.
If this had been a Republican president, the press would be up in arms about his crony capitalism. Apparently, when a "progressive Democrat" spends hundreds of billions in crony capitalism (in addition to all the other evil things Obama has done), it becomes OK, for purely partisan reasons.
but when they don't do their due dilligence and lend money to somebody who obviously won't pay it back is the buyer's fault?
Yes, it is the buyer's fault if he doesn't pay back his debts, nobody else's. Without government interference, the lender would simply have repossessed the home and eaten the losses. Instead, the government gave huge amounts of money to both home owners and lenders, and people like me who have paid off their mortgages have to pay for it through their taxes.
This a shared responsability scenario but the one with the biggest responsability is the one that controls the situation, and that one is the one with the money, not the one asking for it.
Bullshit.
The borrowers are adults; if they want a house and they borrow money for it, it's their responsibility to pay it back. The people lending the money don't "control" the situation, they are simply offering a deal in hopes of making a profit, and sometimes they make a bad estimate of the risk.
Bullshit reasoning like yours not only means that people are absolved from responsibility for their own actions, it means that gradually, we all lose our ability to make decisions on our own because the presumption is increasingly that nobody can be trusted to make financial decisions for themselves.
You do know that most of the bailout money to Wall St and Detroit has been returned don't you?
No, I don't know that because it's false. You need to check your facts better.
It's the money to back the mortgages that is gone (FNMA and FHLMC). So you should be pointing the finger at Congress who created the mortgage crisis, not the executive branch who cleaned up the mess.
I point the finger first and foremost at the home owners who bought homes they couldn't afford. But the administration certainly pushed for bailouts; instead of fixing the mess, it made it worse by creating a moral hazard.
Great! Now all we have to do is find out who committed this egregious crime, and the head of the Justice Department will prosecute, right?
I expect not. They don't seem to ever seriously prosecute any other malfeasance in the executive branch. Instead, the executive branch seems to be getting bolder and bolder in terms of transferring money to their buddies in industry, with "stimulus packages", "bailouts", and various fed manipulations.
All we really have to do is stop electing people that give our money away on such fraudulent schemes. By the time anybody investigates, the money is long gone and they'll just put on a show trial for a fall guy.
My point is that blaming "big bad corporations" and "Goldman Sachs" is pointing the finger at the wrong people. Those people may be taking money that they know isn't theirs (but they are little different from unions or middle class families in that regard who are being paid off for their votes), but the real culprits are the people that are giving our money away in the first place.
The executive branch nominates the Fed president but that person doesn't report to the POTUS.
The executive branch is ultimately responsible for what the Fed does, including investigating and stopping fraud at the fed.
Instead of the paltry fines that the SEC levies on the cheaters, they ought to take the entire transaction away from the guilty party.
You don't get it: the guilty part sits where the information was leaked. Punishing the people who acted on that information may also be useful, but it isn't going to solve the problem.
This isn't high frequency trading, this is either a violation of physics or insider information.
This shouldn't come as a surprise that companies in the business of making money will do everything that they can to (drum roll...) make money
No. And it shouldn't even come as a surprise that corrupt government officials provide insider information to greedy businesses.
But while it may not be a surprise, it is still an outrage.
Of course, the deeper problem is that the fed attempts these kinds of manipulations of the economy to begin with; if the fed couldn't do that, there wouldn't be insider trading on this kind of information in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's getting warmer. But there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that we are going to do anything about it through emissions limits.
What we should do is to avoid interfering with rapid economic development because developed nations can actually easily deal with climate change and rising sea levels (just look at the Dutch, a large part of their country is below sea level).
We should also stop subsidizing (implicitly and explicitly) fossil fuel extraction. Right now, many nations are adopting policies that, on the one hand use tax dollars to subsidize fossil fuels, then on the other hand use more tax dollars to support alternative energies; the entire scheme is a gigantic give-away to industry.
In addition, we should give up our silly opposition to nuclear. The best way of reducing carbon emissions is to make it easy to deploy efficient, modern nuclear plants, the kind that actually burns almost all the fuel.
Wow, you're really grasping at straws here, trying to exculpate the administration. The adminstration is responbile for supervising the fed. It should be preventing such leaks, and when they occur, it should be investigating aggressively. Of course, it isn't going to do that.
And my point is not that the Democrats are doing something that the Republicans didn't do, my oint is that their holier-than-thou attitude is bogus. Democrats are in bed with big business and the financial industry just as much as Republicans were. That's important to remember when they propose legislation, because whether it's financial regulation supposedly protecting the little guy or health care laws supposedly insuring everybody, in the end, the people get screwed and administratiion friendly corporations win.
So that pretty much means that they are admitting that they never managed to get sandboxing to work properly for Java.
No, they don't. Banks can't force you to take a mortgage against your will. You are the only person to decide whether you want to take out a mortgage and whether you like the conditions offered you. Nobody actually needs a mortgage; you can rent or save. When it comes to mortgages, the borrower is in complete control.
Home owners have perfect information, control, and complete data about their financial situation.
Part of the problem with the crisis was that lenders didn't get that information or weren't even supposed to use it as a matter of public policy.
In your financial planning, you also need to expect that you lose your job, that you won't get a raise, and that you get sick, and plan accordingly. Well, you used to have to do that. Now, of course, increasingly, you just take whatever risks you like and can expect to get bailed out.
There are different people who claimed to have been aggrieved.
Home "owners" claimed to have been talked into mortgages they couldn't afford, and they complained about "losing their homes". But home owners weren't harmed by foreclosures: they were simply kicked out of homes they never really owned in the first place. Yet, the administration tried to make it possible for them to stay in "their" homes, at the cost of everybody else. That's wrong.
Lenders made a lot of bad loans, loans they shouldn't have made. They were blackmailing the administration by saying that it would be really bad if they failed. But fail is what they should have done because they made wrong choices. Instead, the administration bailed them out.
I think we sort of agree, I'm just making a finer distinction. Homeowners are to blame for "losing their homes". Lenders are to blame for making bad loans. And with just and rational economic policy, they should have faced the consequences of their bad choices.
Instead, the administration took money from companies and individuals who made prudent decision and handed it to these losers. So I blame the administration for penalizing me for prudent financial choices, wasting my money and keeping housing prices artificially high.
And the rational choice for me is to take bigger risks in the future too and rely on the government to bail me out. I should buy that $2M mansion in a flood plain; if it floods, FEMA will bail me out, if can't make the mortgage, the administration will help me or I can walk away. And if it appreciates, I take all the profit. That's the kind of behavior that's currently being rewarded by politicians.
TARP was authorized by Congress under Bush, but it was the Obama administration that decided if and how to spend the money.
You talk about the news media as if they were some independent, unaccountable body. But where does the new media get this information from and why? Who, in fact, is "the news media", other than a select group of journalists that the fed wants to influence?
No matter how you look at it, the fed screwed up. They made the decision, and it is their job to make sure that everybody gets the information at the same time and there is no insider trading.
Of course, this is really just a symptom of a deeper problem.
If you need "analytic data" to figure out whether you can afford a mortgage payment, you should lose your right to engage in any kind of financial transactions. A fixed 30 year mortgage isn't hard to figure out, and if you can't afford it, you don't take it. And if someone tries to sell you anything else and you don't understand what they are selling you, you don't buy it either. I mean, have we become a country where the default assumption is that everybody is an idiot?
Furthermore, the lenders would have paid the price for their errors: they would have lost money on the bad loans. Instead, the administration first shoved billions in the hands of lenders who made poor decisions, and then shoved billions more in the hands of home owners who made poor decisions.
Sometimes the slope really is slippery.
IBM Keyboards have tons of useless keys. If he had wanted a single key alternative for Ctrl-Alt-Del, SysReq, Break, or Pause would have been the obvious choices. In this instance, sanity seems to have prevailed, and the reboot key combination was something hard and obscure to type.
If you're going to rewrite history, try to pick a better lie. Ballmer gave it a good try with "we forgot about mobile and are late to the party" (reality: "we almost had mobile in the bag and then lost it through my incompetence").
Finland is part of the EU; they can move anywhere freely.
No, that's not what mortgages are. When you buy a house on a mortgage, you own the house and you owe on the mortgage. Stopping payment isn't just a business choice between two contractual options. The lender has the option of using your house as collateral, but that's at their discretion, not yours. In some states, they can go after you and your money to recover losses after foreclosure, and your credit will certainly get damaged. Lenders will usually let you get away with defaulting and foreclosure (and hurting your credit record) because it's not worth their time to do anything more, but that doesn't mean it's just an either/or for you.
Yes, I agree: foreclosures are a normal part of the real-estate market. They are what's supposed to keep lenders from making bad loan decisions, how the market is supposed to police itself.
What's "unsavory" is that the administration has been using tax dollars for preventing foreclosures. That is, people like me who made prudent mortgage decisions and paid off their mortgages are forced to pay increased taxes so that lenders who took unreasonable risks don't have to pay for their mistakes and that buyers who bought too much house now get their homes heavily subsidized with my money.
The other group of people who are being hurt are new home buyers, because by keeping foreclosures from happening and subsidizing home owners, the administration is keeping prices unreasonably high.
"Most" is his strawman claim and response. My statement was that the administration is responsible for a massive handout of taxpayer dollars, and I'd call $273bn a pretty massive waste of money.
In addition, the term "most" is ambiguous, meaning either "the majority" or "almost all". His strawman played on that ambiguity by falsely giving the impression that very little was not repaid, when in fact a lot was not repaid.
In different words, he and you are not even wrong; you're using strawmen and propaganda tools to mislead and manipulate.
Well, you have just proven how dumb you are.
Other countries have done lots of these things in the past themselves. They stopped doing it because they couldn't afford it anymore; some time in the 1950's and 1960's, countries like France and Britain increasingly just picked up the phone and asked the US to clean up their messes; it was cheaper, simpler, and less risky. And why did the US do it? Because it was pretty easy for it to do so, and because it gives it great power. So, the rest of the Western world doesn't just say "OK", it says "yes, please".
I have. The EU laws on privacy laws have huge holes and exemptions in them for national security and other shenanigans. And even if they weren't, there is no guarantee that they are enforced either.
You apparently can't read and understand the articles you cite yourself. What's actually been repaid is $371bn of $608bn, leaving us $237bn short, and that's assuming even that that government accounting is correct. You cannot count the "revenues" as a refund, since we would have gotten those if we had used the money differently. But that's not even the whole story, since we paid interest and opportunity costs on that money. As a result, the whole bailout cost us dearly.
If this had been a Republican president, the press would be up in arms about his crony capitalism. Apparently, when a "progressive Democrat" spends hundreds of billions in crony capitalism (in addition to all the other evil things Obama has done), it becomes OK, for purely partisan reasons.
Yes, it is the buyer's fault if he doesn't pay back his debts, nobody else's. Without government interference, the lender would simply have repossessed the home and eaten the losses. Instead, the government gave huge amounts of money to both home owners and lenders, and people like me who have paid off their mortgages have to pay for it through their taxes.
Bullshit.
The borrowers are adults; if they want a house and they borrow money for it, it's their responsibility to pay it back. The people lending the money don't "control" the situation, they are simply offering a deal in hopes of making a profit, and sometimes they make a bad estimate of the risk.
Bullshit reasoning like yours not only means that people are absolved from responsibility for their own actions, it means that gradually, we all lose our ability to make decisions on our own because the presumption is increasingly that nobody can be trusted to make financial decisions for themselves.
No, I don't know that because it's false. You need to check your facts better.
I point the finger first and foremost at the home owners who bought homes they couldn't afford. But the administration certainly pushed for bailouts; instead of fixing the mess, it made it worse by creating a moral hazard.
I expect not. They don't seem to ever seriously prosecute any other malfeasance in the executive branch. Instead, the executive branch seems to be getting bolder and bolder in terms of transferring money to their buddies in industry, with "stimulus packages", "bailouts", and various fed manipulations.
All we really have to do is stop electing people that give our money away on such fraudulent schemes. By the time anybody investigates, the money is long gone and they'll just put on a show trial for a fall guy.
My point is that blaming "big bad corporations" and "Goldman Sachs" is pointing the finger at the wrong people. Those people may be taking money that they know isn't theirs (but they are little different from unions or middle class families in that regard who are being paid off for their votes), but the real culprits are the people that are giving our money away in the first place.
How appropriate:
SCCM = Society of Critical Care Medicine
https://www.google.com/search?q=SCCM
I think most people just use Evernote.
They used to be "in the game" of providing the primary software platform for homes and businesses.
That's the game they are at risk of losing.
And to get back into that game, they are trying this tablet/hardware/software combo.
The executive branch is ultimately responsible for what the Fed does, including investigating and stopping fraud at the fed.
You don't get it: the guilty part sits where the information was leaked. Punishing the people who acted on that information may also be useful, but it isn't going to solve the problem.
This isn't high frequency trading, this is either a violation of physics or insider information.
No. And it shouldn't even come as a surprise that corrupt government officials provide insider information to greedy businesses.
But while it may not be a surprise, it is still an outrage.
Of course, the deeper problem is that the fed attempts these kinds of manipulations of the economy to begin with; if the fed couldn't do that, there wouldn't be insider trading on this kind of information in the first place.