Maybe that's why Americans support Israel. The thought that Native Americans could have a legitimate case that the US is an invalid state and they should be recognized as the true state in this geographic region is completely retarded. And that's what the Palestinians are trying to do.
Consequently the U.S will have no vote, and no influence as it's no longer providing any funding.
And what of value will have been lost?
Do you think the US wouldn't be allowed to talk to other countries or make deals?
You'd have the UN passing a bunch of BS that the US typically vetoes at the last moment, like the Muslim countries' "human rights" initiatives that include stuff like "the right to have your religion protected from insult on penalty of death."
Honestly the idea of all the countries in the world being under one organization was rather boneheaded to begin with. Some countries are just too different.
We're removing ourselves from a cultural organization that promotes a culture we disagree with. Sounds like we're smartly saving a couple bucks that were otherwise being thrown down the drain. How is that like cutting our own throats, which implies we're going to be harmed by this?
Clarity, if not an answer, may have come inadvertently from National Community. The coalition argues that Capital One’s application to acquire ING Direct is suspect because Capital One refuses to lower its credit standards to extend Federal Housing Administration-insured loans to people with credit scores of 580. This is the lowest credit score allowed by the F.H.A. National Community contends that this is discriminatory against members of minority groups because they tend to have lower credit scores and have been hit harder by the financial crisis.
Capital One has responded by agreeing to lower its credit score requirements by 2012. For National Community, this is not enough, because Capital One’s F.H.A. loan volume is relatively flat in growth. Capital One is now a bit player with less than 1 percent of the F.H.A. loan market. National Community wants the combined entity to make more of these loans, since they help people who could not otherwise afford a mortgage.
Who is National Community? (http://www.ncrc.org/)
In recent years, NCRC has led efforts to reform the financial system, respond to the foreclosure crisis, and expand the Community Reinvestment Act. We are experts on banking, business development, community reinvestment, community development, civil rights, housing, and workforce issues.
I love the idea of "inadvertent clarity" here -- it's funny but absolutely true. This organization is working with the government to make banks, today, right now, take on more risk and make more loans to poor people, and fight legitimate business deals that reduce risk. They don't go out of their way to advertise the role they play in adding risk to the financial system, of course, but the fact that it was slipped into this rather dry article is awesome. You really don't see that happen in the NY Times too much.
You're claiming "Those loans were extremely profitable to the banks" -- I'm curious if the excerpt I posted makes you change your mind on that.
And you also claim "and in any case, it has nothing to do with the housing bubble in Spain, Ireland, China, etc" but surely you see how the largest market in the world (the US) has an affect on international banks (e.g. ING Direct is owned by a Dutch conglomerate).
I also find your linked article highly dubious calling running multiple gas and water lines from different providers an inconvenience. Not only can it be dangerous but it's also really really really expensive to do.
It's not all or nothing. You can have legislation that makes it safe, and if it's not safe the company has to fix it.
Also if it's really expensive and dangerous, it probably wouldn't happen. Surely it's not expensive and dangerous everywhere though. Why does everybody have to be hamstrung by the lowest common denominator?
You are also confused as to what the parent was suggesting, when government owns the wires they can subcontract out to multiple providers in each pop leveling the playing field for competition
Yeah sure, and then you can argue that when the government owns the service they can subcontract out to different content providers. And then when the government owns the providers they can subcontract out to different content producers. And when they own the producers they'll still subcontract out to individual employees. It must be more efficient because there are fewer middle men.
I hear you on the Linux client, it's a pain. But, with the various systems that play Netflix (TVs, DVD players, game systems) and Windows machines/laptops, I don't see how they can justify doing a Linux client. Their problem was locking in with Silverlight.
The client isn't much more than a wrapper around an h264 video player. It's the kind of thing one developer could take care of in a few days.
The rationale given is usually something about needing DRM. It doesn't make much sense though, considering all the movies Netflix streams are already available to rip from DVD or Bluray at higher quality.
Might be a good idea to decompose that along a few different dimensions. Dominance/control, pain, nudity/exposure, number of participants, etc. High dominance/control (burka) may be more offensive than soft nudity for instance.
Look how angry people got when Bank of America started charging for debit cards. What was the rational? Most people said "It shouldn't cost me money to use my money."
I think these protesters are disconnected from the real working and middle class.
You know what problem I have with an unfettered free market? Human nature. The problem with the ideal free market is that it depends on the ideal human. And if communism and its success story should have told us anything, then that the ideal human is a mythological thing. And just like communism failed because humans prefer raking in money and being lazy to working, I doubt a fully free market can work.
There's never going to be an unfettered free market. It's not possible if only because in an unfettered free market you are free to fetter the market. Nobody wants that kind of instability.
The question is what compromise can we achieve? What is the smallest set of restrictions we can have that provides for the greatest good? You want to put aside stupid examples but really they're all we have, the only relevant things. I've stopped believing in idealistic solutions. There's no simple maxim that will result in world peace and everybody being rich. We also have to accept that the present is our starting point. We can't propose a system where everything changes overnight or we pretend some things just don't exist. What we have now isn't even that bad -- to either side, I believe.
When I first upgraded and Unity was enabled, this was my experience.
There was a auto-hiding taskbar-like-thing on the left side of the screen. It had some predefined buttons of things I had never used like Libreoffice. I couldn't right-click on it to add new launchers or customize what menus from my old desktop would show up.
There was a single applications menu/icon thing that had a few programs in it, but you could click "more" or something (I forget the wording) and it would open a full screen blank command line (complete with gimmicky partial transparency) that let you type stuff in. It would display matches as you typed... very slowly. But when I was looking specifically for Brasero, and I didn't remember the name, I had no idea how to find it. It didn't occur to me to type in "I want to burn a dvd" or some google-like search, I was trying to think of the command name. Eventually I opened the browser, googled "ubuntu dvd burning" and got the name and tried it back in the full screen command line. It worked but it was, obviously, slow and painful and not what you want in a desktop.
This lets you quickly launch programs without touching the mouse if you're familiar or you can mouse through for learners and use key words to get what you want.
That's true in theory but the Unity command line was very slow. I wanted to launch a terminal (there was no preconfigured menu item for that, shockingly) so that I could launch eclipse (which I had installed in my home directory manually, not via apt). So I open the command line and start typing g.. pause as the screen fills up with 500 possible commands, n.. o.. m.. e.. -.. t finally the list narrows enough that gnome-terminal is there. Probably took 5 or more seconds for me to type the full gnome-terminal command because it kept freezing as it repopulated the list of options. What a joke.
Anyway in the meantime I branched out and tried some other distros. Now I've got Fedora and I'm using XFCE and it's awesome.
A free market is devoid of any kind of regulation.
What makes you think Somalia is devoid of regulation? What does regulation mean to you? If the local warlord decides that businesses selling to Christians are illegal, is that regulation? How about if the local warlord decides you have to devote 50% of your land to opium, or that your eldest son is required to do a 2 year term as a pirate? I mean it seems like you think regulation by definition only comes from officially sanctioned governments or something, which doesn't exist in all areas of Somalia and Pakistan, therefore it's (vacuously) a free market paradise. But the original idea of government in general and economic regulation or interference specifically has nothing to do with legality or whether it's recognized by various third parties.
Cherry picking does not even begin to describe the ridiculousness of the Somalia/Pakistan/desert island "free market paradise" meme, it's just plain incorrect. Go to Mogadishu and try to start a business in music, alcohol, bibles, church construction, prostitution of Muslim girls to rich Westerners, pig farming, secular education, etc and see how quickly you run into some guys coming around ready to share the local regulations.
and as we can see, don't want to take responsibility for it when your gambling fails and your company crashes and burns
Look I know the kind of people you're talking about and I agree with you, they are annoying. Of course I want companies to fail when they take a risk that doesn't pay off. I understand that may be even more annoying to you.
To me, the whole "free market" proponents sound like teenagers complaining about their parents putting up some "stupid rules"
I'm not against all rules, but there are stupid rules that should be eliminated on a case by case basis. A great example is a lot of the current environmental regulation. We're like, oh, we care about global warming so let's export industries A, B... Z to China so that the global climate is not harmed. Because of course China is not part of Earth. Win win!
But yeah, transitioning to a more free market system can't be done overnight or things would collapse as you said. I think it could be done over time.
It's a winnowing process -- people are trying to apply greater restriction to it because the name raises a red flag. That's good. The mistake in judgment would be trying to apply fewer restrictions because of the name.
There is no "true free market". Except in terrible places like Mogadishu and Peshawar, and various other slave trading centers, now and through history.
Can you explain how Mogadishu is more of a free market than the US? I mean if you want to be a criminal in the US there's a free market as well.
And Peshawar? It seems to be a meme that Pakistan has a "free market" economy because it's such a shambles (like Somalia). But that's said by people who don't know anything about Pakistan, or are trying to pull a fast one. It's a very centralized economy. Hell the biggest companies are owned by the Pakistan Army. Every major contract has an Army owned corporation as a middle man. Saying it's a free market is just stupid to anyone who knows more than surface data about Pakistan.
The distorted set of laws you're at least admitting are the deregulation laws forced on America by the wildest promoters of "free markets". Everything you're invoking is directly from the playbook written by these banks, their law and PR firms, for their bought reps in Congress and corrupted regulators like the SEC.
You're taking a set of crappy laws, calling it deregulation, and then saying deregulation is bad. It's the opposite of the No True Scotsman fallacy you alluded to, but it's still wrong.
Deregulating would be either removing the government from it, or giving equal access to all citizens and business. When you have laws that limit who can participate it's not deregulated. Try getting a 0% short term loan from the "fed window" or whatever they call it, as a free citizen, then tell me it's been deregulated.
BTW, $90B is a lot of money, but not compared to the $2-10 TRILLION the banks threw at each other at the end of 2008 as their mutual scams crumbled and George Bush, Dick Cheney and Henry Paulson yanked it from the public to fund their free fall.
There's a big difference in meaning between a $90B loss and $2-10T in trading activity so I don't know what you're trying to compare. As for the bailout, at least it was profitable. Getting back the money we gave to Fannie Mae just isn't going to happen.
The default choice is where most of the testing, integrating, and polishing goes. If you like one distro's default choices more than another's, it would make absolutely no sense to stay with the inferior one.
What I ran into was that I didn't know the names of many programs. I don't know if it's Ubuntu's fault but a lot of projects have decided to have cutesy catchy unique names instead of descriptive names, relying on menu categorization and icons to convey meaning. Brasero, under a Tools menu, with a burning DVD icon, ok yeah that looks like I could use it to burn a DVD. Just randomly typing in Brasero in a blank command line? Not going to happen. So they're forcing you to take the more conventional Windows approach to apps. You don't care which app it is or how it's launched or anything, you go to the ISO file, right click, and choose "open" with whatever the OS thinks you should use. That paradigm doesn't always fit though.
Deregulation has not protected pre-appointed 'winners', otherwise the dot com bubble would never have happened.
The weird thing is you're saying that like it's bad. There shouldn't be pre-appointed winners, and they shouldn't be protected. So deregulation is actually good.
So it sounds like deregulation has been good.
Government has been rapidly getting out of the way for 3 decades plus
What do you even mean by that? So many government regulatory programs have been strengthened since then. Just look at how environmental regulations have pushed business out of this country and to growing economies like China and India.
Libertarians have their ideal, utopian state - its called Somalia. Kindly go live there.
If you don't realize that Somalia has intrusive government, you should read the news... in fact Somalia's biggest problem is TOO MUCH government, as in more than one group trying to run the country.
Keep in mind the top 1% is over 3 million people in America alone. You honestly think many of those 3 million people invented "absurd financial ponzi schemes with other peoples money" ??
More realistic reasons: - their families sacrificed a lot to send them to medical school or law school - they sacrificed a lot to start a new business that became successful - they got lucky
I read the wikipedia page about her, but there weren't many specifics.
The problem I'm pointing out is that the type of fraud people are talking about in the current financial crisis is often subjective. To angry investors, saying that "these mortgage backed bonds are safe" is fraud in hindsight so they call it fraud. Even the most bold financial proclamations ("I'm 100% sure these will go up in value") aren't fraud, to me, because the nature of these investments is highly chaotic and the person could legitimately believe what they're saying. Many people might legitimately believe it. In fact everybody could believe it. But it could still go wrong.
It's not the same as, say, selling "mortgage backed" securities when you know the mortgages don't even exist. That's real fraud.
I'm in complete agreement with lawmakers in part where "exclusion from group is a form of bullying".
There have to be some qualifications put on that statement though. A boy being excluded from a group of girls going to the bathroom together is obviously not a form of bullying.
Slashdot Mirror
You know the issue is about principle, not the amount of money right?
For every Palestinian atrocity you can name, I can name an Israeli one. That game will lead you nowhere.
That's the past, how about the future?
Which side do you think is more willing to resort to violence first?
I mean if today the slate is wiped clean, who will be the first to say "screw the status quo I'm launching a rocket/airstrike/kidnapping/invasion?"
Just like the "Indian wars" in the USA
Maybe that's why Americans support Israel. The thought that Native Americans could have a legitimate case that the US is an invalid state and they should be recognized as the true state in this geographic region is completely retarded. And that's what the Palestinians are trying to do.
Consequently the U.S will have no vote, and no influence as it's no longer providing any funding.
And what of value will have been lost?
Do you think the US wouldn't be allowed to talk to other countries or make deals?
You'd have the UN passing a bunch of BS that the US typically vetoes at the last moment, like the Muslim countries' "human rights" initiatives that include stuff like "the right to have your religion protected from insult on penalty of death."
Honestly the idea of all the countries in the world being under one organization was rather boneheaded to begin with. Some countries are just too different.
We're removing ourselves from a cultural organization that promotes a culture we disagree with. Sounds like we're smartly saving a couple bucks that were otherwise being thrown down the drain. How is that like cutting our own throats, which implies we're going to be harmed by this?
This has next to nothing to do with the financial crisis, as many financial insiders (like the old Lehman Brother's CEO and others) have discussed.
How do they know? Because they're insiders? There's so much misinformation and genuine complexity that it's almost impossible to say. However, look at this little tidbit in an article about Capital One's plans to buy ING Direct: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/in-feds-move-on-capital-one-deal-a-test-of-dodd-frank/
Clarity, if not an answer, may have come inadvertently from National Community. The coalition argues that Capital One’s application to acquire ING Direct is suspect because Capital One refuses to lower its credit standards to extend Federal Housing Administration-insured loans to people with credit scores of 580. This is the lowest credit score allowed by the F.H.A. National Community contends that this is discriminatory against members of minority groups because they tend to have lower credit scores and have been hit harder by the financial crisis.
Capital One has responded by agreeing to lower its credit score requirements by 2012. For National Community, this is not enough, because Capital One’s F.H.A. loan volume is relatively flat in growth. Capital One is now a bit player with less than 1 percent of the F.H.A. loan market. National Community wants the combined entity to make more of these loans, since they help people who could not otherwise afford a mortgage.
Who is National Community? (http://www.ncrc.org/)
In recent years, NCRC has led efforts to reform the financial system, respond to the foreclosure crisis, and expand the Community Reinvestment Act. We are experts on banking, business development, community reinvestment, community development, civil rights, housing, and workforce issues.
I love the idea of "inadvertent clarity" here -- it's funny but absolutely true. This organization is working with the government to make banks, today, right now, take on more risk and make more loans to poor people, and fight legitimate business deals that reduce risk. They don't go out of their way to advertise the role they play in adding risk to the financial system, of course, but the fact that it was slipped into this rather dry article is awesome. You really don't see that happen in the NY Times too much.
You're claiming "Those loans were extremely profitable to the banks" -- I'm curious if the excerpt I posted makes you change your mind on that.
And you also claim "and in any case, it has nothing to do with the housing bubble in Spain, Ireland, China, etc" but surely you see how the largest market in the world (the US) has an affect on international banks (e.g. ING Direct is owned by a Dutch conglomerate).
If you only pay $1/night for a girl you're going to be hitting the bottom of the barrel.
I also find your linked article highly dubious calling running multiple gas and water lines from different providers an inconvenience. Not only can it be dangerous but it's also really really really expensive to do.
It's not all or nothing. You can have legislation that makes it safe, and if it's not safe the company has to fix it.
Also if it's really expensive and dangerous, it probably wouldn't happen. Surely it's not expensive and dangerous everywhere though. Why does everybody have to be hamstrung by the lowest common denominator?
You are also confused as to what the parent was suggesting, when government owns the wires they can subcontract out to multiple providers in each pop leveling the playing field for competition
Yeah sure, and then you can argue that when the government owns the service they can subcontract out to different content providers. And then when the government owns the providers they can subcontract out to different content producers. And when they own the producers they'll still subcontract out to individual employees. It must be more efficient because there are fewer middle men.
I hear you on the Linux client, it's a pain. But, with the various systems that play Netflix (TVs, DVD players, game systems) and Windows machines/laptops, I don't see how they can justify doing a Linux client. Their problem was locking in with Silverlight.
The client isn't much more than a wrapper around an h264 video player. It's the kind of thing one developer could take care of in a few days.
The rationale given is usually something about needing DRM. It doesn't make much sense though, considering all the movies Netflix streams are already available to rip from DVD or Bluray at higher quality.
Might be a good idea to decompose that along a few different dimensions. Dominance/control, pain, nudity/exposure, number of participants, etc. High dominance/control (burka) may be more offensive than soft nudity for instance.
I know it's not the main point of your post but,
Financial transaction tax
Look how angry people got when Bank of America started charging for debit cards. What was the rational? Most people said "It shouldn't cost me money to use my money."
I think these protesters are disconnected from the real working and middle class.
You know what problem I have with an unfettered free market? Human nature. The problem with the ideal free market is that it depends on the ideal human. And if communism and its success story should have told us anything, then that the ideal human is a mythological thing. And just like communism failed because humans prefer raking in money and being lazy to working, I doubt a fully free market can work.
There's never going to be an unfettered free market. It's not possible if only because in an unfettered free market you are free to fetter the market. Nobody wants that kind of instability.
The question is what compromise can we achieve? What is the smallest set of restrictions we can have that provides for the greatest good? You want to put aside stupid examples but really they're all we have, the only relevant things. I've stopped believing in idealistic solutions. There's no simple maxim that will result in world peace and everybody being rich. We also have to accept that the present is our starting point. We can't propose a system where everything changes overnight or we pretend some things just don't exist. What we have now isn't even that bad -- to either side, I believe.
When I first upgraded and Unity was enabled, this was my experience.
There was a auto-hiding taskbar-like-thing on the left side of the screen. It had some predefined buttons of things I had never used like Libreoffice. I couldn't right-click on it to add new launchers or customize what menus from my old desktop would show up.
There was a single applications menu/icon thing that had a few programs in it, but you could click "more" or something (I forget the wording) and it would open a full screen blank command line (complete with gimmicky partial transparency) that let you type stuff in. It would display matches as you typed... very slowly. But when I was looking specifically for Brasero, and I didn't remember the name, I had no idea how to find it. It didn't occur to me to type in "I want to burn a dvd" or some google-like search, I was trying to think of the command name. Eventually I opened the browser, googled "ubuntu dvd burning" and got the name and tried it back in the full screen command line. It worked but it was, obviously, slow and painful and not what you want in a desktop.
This lets you quickly launch programs without touching the mouse if you're familiar or you can mouse through for learners and use key words to get what you want.
That's true in theory but the Unity command line was very slow. I wanted to launch a terminal (there was no preconfigured menu item for that, shockingly) so that I could launch eclipse (which I had installed in my home directory manually, not via apt). So I open the command line and start typing g.. pause as the screen fills up with 500 possible commands, n.. o.. m.. e.. -.. t finally the list narrows enough that gnome-terminal is there. Probably took 5 or more seconds for me to type the full gnome-terminal command because it kept freezing as it repopulated the list of options. What a joke.
Anyway in the meantime I branched out and tried some other distros. Now I've got Fedora and I'm using XFCE and it's awesome.
A free market is devoid of any kind of regulation.
What makes you think Somalia is devoid of regulation? What does regulation mean to you? If the local warlord decides that businesses selling to Christians are illegal, is that regulation? How about if the local warlord decides you have to devote 50% of your land to opium, or that your eldest son is required to do a 2 year term as a pirate? I mean it seems like you think regulation by definition only comes from officially sanctioned governments or something, which doesn't exist in all areas of Somalia and Pakistan, therefore it's (vacuously) a free market paradise. But the original idea of government in general and economic regulation or interference specifically has nothing to do with legality or whether it's recognized by various third parties.
Cherry picking does not even begin to describe the ridiculousness of the Somalia/Pakistan/desert island "free market paradise" meme, it's just plain incorrect. Go to Mogadishu and try to start a business in music, alcohol, bibles, church construction, prostitution of Muslim girls to rich Westerners, pig farming, secular education, etc and see how quickly you run into some guys coming around ready to share the local regulations.
and as we can see, don't want to take responsibility for it when your gambling fails and your company crashes and burns
Look I know the kind of people you're talking about and I agree with you, they are annoying. Of course I want companies to fail when they take a risk that doesn't pay off. I understand that may be even more annoying to you.
To me, the whole "free market" proponents sound like teenagers complaining about their parents putting up some "stupid rules"
I'm not against all rules, but there are stupid rules that should be eliminated on a case by case basis. A great example is a lot of the current environmental regulation. We're like, oh, we care about global warming so let's export industries A, B... Z to China so that the global climate is not harmed. Because of course China is not part of Earth. Win win!
But yeah, transitioning to a more free market system can't be done overnight or things would collapse as you said. I think it could be done over time.
It's a winnowing process -- people are trying to apply greater restriction to it because the name raises a red flag. That's good. The mistake in judgment would be trying to apply fewer restrictions because of the name.
There is no "true free market". Except in terrible places like Mogadishu and Peshawar, and various other slave trading centers, now and through history.
Can you explain how Mogadishu is more of a free market than the US? I mean if you want to be a criminal in the US there's a free market as well.
And Peshawar? It seems to be a meme that Pakistan has a "free market" economy because it's such a shambles (like Somalia). But that's said by people who don't know anything about Pakistan, or are trying to pull a fast one. It's a very centralized economy. Hell the biggest companies are owned by the Pakistan Army. Every major contract has an Army owned corporation as a middle man. Saying it's a free market is just stupid to anyone who knows more than surface data about Pakistan.
The distorted set of laws you're at least admitting are the deregulation laws forced on America by the wildest promoters of "free markets". Everything you're invoking is directly from the playbook written by these banks, their law and PR firms, for their bought reps in Congress and corrupted regulators like the SEC.
You're taking a set of crappy laws, calling it deregulation, and then saying deregulation is bad. It's the opposite of the No True Scotsman fallacy you alluded to, but it's still wrong.
Deregulating would be either removing the government from it, or giving equal access to all citizens and business. When you have laws that limit who can participate it's not deregulated. Try getting a 0% short term loan from the "fed window" or whatever they call it, as a free citizen, then tell me it's been deregulated.
BTW, $90B is a lot of money, but not compared to the $2-10 TRILLION the banks threw at each other at the end of 2008 as their mutual scams crumbled and George Bush, Dick Cheney and Henry Paulson yanked it from the public to fund their free fall.
There's a big difference in meaning between a $90B loss and $2-10T in trading activity so I don't know what you're trying to compare. As for the bailout, at least it was profitable. Getting back the money we gave to Fannie Mae just isn't going to happen.
The default choice is where most of the testing, integrating, and polishing goes. If you like one distro's default choices more than another's, it would make absolutely no sense to stay with the inferior one.
What I ran into was that I didn't know the names of many programs. I don't know if it's Ubuntu's fault but a lot of projects have decided to have cutesy catchy unique names instead of descriptive names, relying on menu categorization and icons to convey meaning. Brasero, under a Tools menu, with a burning DVD icon, ok yeah that looks like I could use it to burn a DVD. Just randomly typing in Brasero in a blank command line? Not going to happen. So they're forcing you to take the more conventional Windows approach to apps. You don't care which app it is or how it's launched or anything, you go to the ISO file, right click, and choose "open" with whatever the OS thinks you should use. That paradigm doesn't always fit though.
Sounds like the punchline of a constipation joke.
Wow, I guess let's not pretend to be civil either. Turns out you don't need an MD to be an abrasive asshole.
Deregulation has not protected pre-appointed 'winners', otherwise the dot com bubble would never have happened.
The weird thing is you're saying that like it's bad. There shouldn't be pre-appointed winners, and they shouldn't be protected. So deregulation is actually good.
So it sounds like deregulation has been good.
Government has been rapidly getting out of the way for 3 decades plus
What do you even mean by that? So many government regulatory programs have been strengthened since then. Just look at how environmental regulations have pushed business out of this country and to growing economies like China and India.
Libertarians have their ideal, utopian state - its called Somalia. Kindly go live there.
If you don't realize that Somalia has intrusive government, you should read the news... in fact Somalia's biggest problem is TOO MUCH government, as in more than one group trying to run the country.
Keep in mind the top 1% is over 3 million people in America alone. You honestly think many of those 3 million people invented "absurd financial ponzi schemes with other peoples money" ??
More realistic reasons:
- their families sacrificed a lot to send them to medical school or law school
- they sacrificed a lot to start a new business that became successful
- they got lucky
I read the wikipedia page about her, but there weren't many specifics.
The problem I'm pointing out is that the type of fraud people are talking about in the current financial crisis is often subjective. To angry investors, saying that "these mortgage backed bonds are safe" is fraud in hindsight so they call it fraud. Even the most bold financial proclamations ("I'm 100% sure these will go up in value") aren't fraud, to me, because the nature of these investments is highly chaotic and the person could legitimately believe what they're saying. Many people might legitimately believe it. In fact everybody could believe it. But it could still go wrong.
It's not the same as, say, selling "mortgage backed" securities when you know the mortgages don't even exist. That's real fraud.
I'm in complete agreement with lawmakers in part where "exclusion from group is a form of bullying".
There have to be some qualifications put on that statement though. A boy being excluded from a group of girls going to the bathroom together is obviously not a form of bullying.
But the paper is supporting one side, not both equally (clue: subjective use of refined)