But then again the borrower is walking away from a mortgage just because the house is worth less on the market than the amount of money borrowed. The fact that a mortgage is "underwater" does not trigger foreclosure if he keeps paying his bills. But the borrower is a greedy so-and-so who had no intention of actually living in the house long term, and merely bought the property to "flip it" short term and make a quick profit. I have no sympathy for people who expect prices to go up forever and who expect to get rich quick. No one is forcing them to walk away, but they stop paying their mortgage because now it makes no "business sense". If there were harsh consequences, it would make people think harder before borrowing.
Since neither you nor I are familiar with the orbits in question, I'd say there's a roughly 25% chance of that. There's a 25% chance that it's headed to a point ahead of the Earth, and the Earth will be there AFTER it passes. And there's a 50% chance it's headed to a point above or below the Earth's orbit, and the Earth will never occupy that space at all.
What you have actually created is a system that rewards people who took unreasonable risks and now suffer no consequences for those risks, and penalizes people who avoided taking risks.
Everything I've read indicates that pure oxygen begins to cause brain damage within a few minutes.
Just because I have nothing to do today:
"CNS oxygen toxicity does not occur when the partial pressure of inspired oxygen is less than 2 atmospheres (203 kPa); its occurrence is thus limited to a small number of hyperbaric applications" Goodman and Gilman's "The Pharmacological basis of Therapeutics", 9th edition, page 353. Yeah my edition is a little old, but I've been a doctor for a while. Although everyone makes mistakes, usually when I wear my "doctor hat" I make sure what I say is accurate if it involves medicine. I certainly trust my medical texts more than any website, especially on something absolutely not cutting edge at all like this. The patient will die from pulmonary edema long before you see CNS toxicity. Except of course if you're cheating in a lab and doing things to tissue in a petri dish.
soaring at over 11 miles a second straight towards Earth
A bit sensationalist no? More accurate would be "not quite straight toward Earth" or "not toward Earth at all but at some point that passes close to Earth".
Eh? I never expected support for that statement - it seems to make everyone my instant enemy. Thanks. Government interference in marketplaces rarely works as intended. Another great example is when they try to ban short selling, and the market drops anyway. It happened in 2008 when the US banned short sales on financials (and they tanked anyway). It happened recently in Europe when Germany banned short sales (and the market tanked anyway). That's because government has no idea how a market works - the entire concept of a free market is completely alien to them. The less regulations, fees and taxes there are, the more level a playing field it is for everyone.
Yeah the guy with lots of money is going to screw over everyone with less money. That's just life. And if you play soccer with David Beckham you are not going to win, either. But when you put artificial rules and regulations then the rich guy who can afford the lawyers, overseas shell corporations or many other ways around the law will still win, and the little guy will always lose.
And the people who applied for mortgages on houses they couldn't afford should also be guilty of fraud. It works both ways. If you're going to forgive the guy who lied to buy a house and punish the bank for not checking things out more, you should also forgive the bank who lied to sell the loan and punish the guy who bought it for not checking things out more.
It's all imaginary money. Everything is imaginary - even my property - because there is nothing stopping a government from coming one day and telling me that my land has been nationalized, collectivized, or seized for whatever reason. It would not be the first time that this happens in recent human history. Of course what you do is own property in several countries and hope they don't all try to grab your stuff.
Not too smart, though.
We'll see about that. It's not over till its over. What's the price of gold? Oh, $1795/oz right now, gee, it's going up again. Wonder why. Thought that bubble had burst already. Protip: bubbles don't reinflate right after popping - unless they weren't bubbles in the first place of course. See the price of houses going up in Fla yet?
Your buying power was destroyed in 1971. This is nothing new. I've been trying to double my money every 7 years and even I am having trouble. I have a farm up for sale for $25 million US, and I'm not sure I want to sell it because I don't know anywhere safe to park the money. My girlfriend doesn't understand when I tell her that she is not rich at all even if she earns $120k a year plus stock options, and that there is no way she can retire early. But this isn't due to the recent credit crisis - this has been happening for a while.
And there's no end in sight - every time there's a hint of economic recovery, crude oil goes up and whacks everyone in the head. $96.56 for WTI and $116.11 for Brent right now. Why? We're at peak oil and running into serious price elasticity problems. It's going to get even more fun in a few years when we can no longer produce enough oil to meet demand no matter how we try. Because oil plugs into absolutely everything it's putting tremendous upward pressure on prices. Reckless money-printing by the world's governments is only encouraging inflation too. So if you think you don't have buying power now, wait a few years.
They don't need to make payments to the children - all the children have to do is administer the fund. The fund needs a jet. The fund needs a house in this country, and a house in that country. It all belongs to the fund. Of course the administrator of the fund is allowed to tour the investments and make sure they are sound. And the administrator is also allowed to draw a modest salary. And instead of paying tax, the fund has to do some actual "charity work" to prove to everyone that it is, after all, a legitimate fund. But said "charity work" will always be much, much less than paying actual taxes. Jeez do you really think it's something else? I'm amazed at how blind people are. I bet you think Paris Hilton was "dis-inherited" too, right?
I am not an expert, and no I can not explain exactly how it will happen.
I believe you mean to say "I have no idea what I'm talking about but I am going to say it anyway". Yeah buddy I actually make money by trading stocks so I know how it works. You, and everyone else that argues against HFT, have no fucking clue how the market works. HFT cannot alter the price. Because if Goldman Sachs is on one side of the trade with HFT, then JP Morgan is on the other side doing just the opposite. Otherwise you would be seeing prices all over the map, all the time. HFT is not a price maker, it's a price taker. When real money comes into the market - like on the day of the "flash crash" (a day that cost me, personally, $20,000), that is when the price moves. And curiously when the "flash crash" happened all the computers were instantly taken offline because the price moved so quickly it tripped the fail-safes. So what happened? For 5 minutes NO ONE WAS BUYING, which is why the market plummeted. If someone had left their computer on they would have bought the entire market. But since buying the whole market is not something a brokerage wants to do - even if it had money for it - the algorithms stopped the programs.
If you are desperate to sell and no one is around to buy, you will lower your price until someone buys. If you are desperate to sell and someone (a HFT program) is around to buy, you sell right away and usually close to the price you wanted. But you people who are completely clueless as to how a market works fail to understand this simple concept. In your theoretical world you think that just because you want to sell something, someone is going to buy it. Or just because you want to buy something, someone is going to sell it to you. That's not how the market works at all.
This would be the ideal scenario. I don't see how a tax would suddenly make people ethical though.
Plus, in case you haven't been reading the news for the last 3 years, the financial sector owes us some money.
No - credit was created and credit disappeared. No one owes anyone anything. Of course the poor bastard who thought he could afford a house when really he couldn't ends up feeling cheated. And the poor bastard who bought mortgage backed securities on a promise from a salesman without realizing what he was buying or doing due diligence feels cheated. And the government that prints money to give to banks to lend to corporations to try to stimulate "growth" and then doesn't get the growth it wanted feels cheated when it finds out that after all, ink and paper is just ink and paper and doesn't actually create wealth. But at the end of the day people who don't take care of their money don't deserve money anyway.
I personally haven't been affected by the problems in the past 3 years (apart from my gold quadrupling in price - but I ain't selling). Neither has my wife. The ones that have lost out are the ones living on credit, the ones living beyond their means, and the ones who thought that (insert fancy job title here) actually meant something. But all that has happened is the veil has been lifted. The ones who thought they were rich found out they aren't rich after all, and the ones who thought they weren't poor found out that they are still poor after all.
You are far closer to the truth than you think. Cash transactions over 5000 Euros are now illegal in Italy. Greece also wants to make cash illegal for some transactions. Oh it's all being done in the name of preventing crime and money laundering, but it's fairly obvious that since electronic transactions are much easier to monitor, governments are salivating at the thought of forcing us all under their microscope.
First they make a law but only apply it to large transactions that people don't normally pay cash for anyway - buying a house, or a car. Then two things happen. First, they can move the goalpost closer to zero over time. Secondly (and this is the magic part), inflation will move everyone over the barrier over time anyway. In 40 years or so when a grocery bill is 5000 euros, or 100 years when a pack of chewing gum is 5000 euros, then effectively all cash transactions will be illegal without actually having to do anything at all. Governments are dangerous - the only thing they can ever do is take from you. They can never give you something you didn't already have. But people just don't care.
Americans try to solve all the world's problems with a tax. It makes no sense.
No, they are just trying to solve one problem with tax - the fact that they are bankrupt. They are bankrupt, however, because they try to solve all the world's problems by spending money.
This would be much better for establishing stability in the markets.
High frequency trading results in very stable markets. To wit, I present the case that the market is at the same place it was since 1998. If jogging in place for 13 years isn't "stability" I don't know what is.
Yes, and with high frequency trading - and trading in general - being less profitable you can expect less liquidity, larger spreads between the bid and ask price, and much greater volatility in the markets. Well done.
Isn't it nice when fabulously wealthy people who have ALREADY MADE THEIR FORTUNE advocate making it harder for the rest of us to make a buck? I'm sure Mr. Buffet will never worry about money for the years he has left; and Mr. Gates who has already moved most of his assets into a loophole (sorry, "Foundation") to protect his progeny's inheritance from taxes, certainly shouldn't worry about the future.
Meanwhile for the rest of the people who are having their homes foreclosed for being late on a mortgage payment even when the bank can't prove who actually holds the mortgage (if anyone) because they botched the paperwork, well, life still sucks.
The Japanese earthquake and tsunami has nothing to do with the flood in Thailand, however it is a natural disaster that presumably is unrelated to climate change. I see that a tsunami involves water, so you probably believe that I was comparing water in Japan with water in Bangkok, but I was not. I could just as easily have mentioned an avalanche in the Swiss Alps or a hurricane in the Caribbean, but those are probably more weather driven. Jesus please try to understand the stuff you read.
I still refuse to enter panic mode, CO2 has been higher before. At some point soon we will run out of fossil fuel and an equilibrium will be reached. Of course it sucks to be a coral reef or any number of other species, but running out of fossil fuel will be much more efficient than any "carbon tax" we could dream up because then we just won't have a choice.
I guess the ostrich feels nice and comfortable with its head in the sand. Maybe I should just leave it there. Or you could look at the world's oil reserves of 1.2 trillion barrels, and divide that number by the nearly 90 million barrels of oil per DAY the world is using, and do the math yourself. Using these figures there's less than 40 years out there. Oh and we haven't talked about economic growth, with countries like China adding the demand of equivalent of Australia every single year. Not to mention that the last drops of oil are going to be a lot harder to get at than today. It's going to be fun going down the curve when every few years there is half as much oil supply available as there is today. But hey if long division makes your head hurt, keep it in the nice warm sand.
No, I just bought a 3TB one. Tell me are you going to blame the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on climate change too? It's easy to point at a natural disaster to prove a point - they happen regularly. But flooding is not a new phenomenon at all. In fact I predict that "because of Dr. Murray's conviction" there will be a catastrophic flood somewhere in the world within the next 10 months. Mark my words!
Well considering that some biologists argue that the pH of the oceans was around 7.4 when life began (which is why pretty much every living organism struggles to maintain this pH at least on an intracellular level), we still have a ways to go I'd say.
And these models are taking into account the solubility of bicarbonate in a slightly warmer ocean and its equilibrium with atmospheric CO2, right? The hotter the water, the less soluble the bicarb. I wonder what happens to it. Oh wait...
In order to increase to 300PPM from the baseline we have had to burn approximately half of all the fossil fuel in the world. How much more fuel do you think there is left? So what if we get to 600PPM (I'll be generous), at one point there will be no more fuel left to burn and we will be cycling CO2 into fuel crops to burn back into CO2. The question is, rather, what will the world look like with 600PPM CO2. As you said, it certainly won't be lethal for us humans.
And like I said elsewhere - the supply of fossil fuel is very limited and at our current rate we will run out soon. Very soon in fact. My kids will live to see the end of oil. Coal won't be too far behind once the oil is gone.
Slashdot Mirror
But then again the borrower is walking away from a mortgage just because the house is worth less on the market than the amount of money borrowed. The fact that a mortgage is "underwater" does not trigger foreclosure if he keeps paying his bills. But the borrower is a greedy so-and-so who had no intention of actually living in the house long term, and merely bought the property to "flip it" short term and make a quick profit. I have no sympathy for people who expect prices to go up forever and who expect to get rich quick. No one is forcing them to walk away, but they stop paying their mortgage because now it makes no "business sense". If there were harsh consequences, it would make people think harder before borrowing.
Since neither you nor I are familiar with the orbits in question, I'd say there's a roughly 25% chance of that. There's a 25% chance that it's headed to a point ahead of the Earth, and the Earth will be there AFTER it passes. And there's a 50% chance it's headed to a point above or below the Earth's orbit, and the Earth will never occupy that space at all.
Imagine the earth is your face, and the asteroid is a bullet coming within arms length of you.
You can't hit me, I'm hiding behind the Library of Congress!
What you have actually created is a system that rewards people who took unreasonable risks and now suffer no consequences for those risks, and penalizes people who avoided taking risks.
Everything I've read indicates that pure oxygen begins to cause brain damage within a few minutes.
Just because I have nothing to do today:
"CNS oxygen toxicity does not occur when the partial pressure of inspired oxygen is less than 2 atmospheres (203 kPa); its occurrence is thus limited to a small number of hyperbaric applications" Goodman and Gilman's "The Pharmacological basis of Therapeutics", 9th edition, page 353. Yeah my edition is a little old, but I've been a doctor for a while. Although everyone makes mistakes, usually when I wear my "doctor hat" I make sure what I say is accurate if it involves medicine. I certainly trust my medical texts more than any website, especially on something absolutely not cutting edge at all like this. The patient will die from pulmonary edema long before you see CNS toxicity. Except of course if you're cheating in a lab and doing things to tissue in a petri dish.
soaring at over 11 miles a second straight towards Earth
A bit sensationalist no? More accurate would be "not quite straight toward Earth" or "not toward Earth at all but at some point that passes close to Earth".
Eh? I never expected support for that statement - it seems to make everyone my instant enemy. Thanks. Government interference in marketplaces rarely works as intended. Another great example is when they try to ban short selling, and the market drops anyway. It happened in 2008 when the US banned short sales on financials (and they tanked anyway). It happened recently in Europe when Germany banned short sales (and the market tanked anyway). That's because government has no idea how a market works - the entire concept of a free market is completely alien to them. The less regulations, fees and taxes there are, the more level a playing field it is for everyone.
Yeah the guy with lots of money is going to screw over everyone with less money. That's just life. And if you play soccer with David Beckham you are not going to win, either. But when you put artificial rules and regulations then the rich guy who can afford the lawyers, overseas shell corporations or many other ways around the law will still win, and the little guy will always lose.
And the people who applied for mortgages on houses they couldn't afford should also be guilty of fraud. It works both ways. If you're going to forgive the guy who lied to buy a house and punish the bank for not checking things out more, you should also forgive the bank who lied to sell the loan and punish the guy who bought it for not checking things out more.
Not too smart, though.
We'll see about that. It's not over till its over. What's the price of gold? Oh, $1795/oz right now, gee, it's going up again. Wonder why. Thought that bubble had burst already. Protip: bubbles don't reinflate right after popping - unless they weren't bubbles in the first place of course. See the price of houses going up in Fla yet?
it turns out you're just a smug twat.
And you're just an envious git.
Can I have my buying power back please
Your buying power was destroyed in 1971. This is nothing new. I've been trying to double my money every 7 years and even I am having trouble. I have a farm up for sale for $25 million US, and I'm not sure I want to sell it because I don't know anywhere safe to park the money. My girlfriend doesn't understand when I tell her that she is not rich at all even if she earns $120k a year plus stock options, and that there is no way she can retire early. But this isn't due to the recent credit crisis - this has been happening for a while.
And there's no end in sight - every time there's a hint of economic recovery, crude oil goes up and whacks everyone in the head. $96.56 for WTI and $116.11 for Brent right now. Why? We're at peak oil and running into serious price elasticity problems. It's going to get even more fun in a few years when we can no longer produce enough oil to meet demand no matter how we try. Because oil plugs into absolutely everything it's putting tremendous upward pressure on prices. Reckless money-printing by the world's governments is only encouraging inflation too. So if you think you don't have buying power now, wait a few years.
They don't need to make payments to the children - all the children have to do is administer the fund. The fund needs a jet. The fund needs a house in this country, and a house in that country. It all belongs to the fund. Of course the administrator of the fund is allowed to tour the investments and make sure they are sound. And the administrator is also allowed to draw a modest salary. And instead of paying tax, the fund has to do some actual "charity work" to prove to everyone that it is, after all, a legitimate fund. But said "charity work" will always be much, much less than paying actual taxes. Jeez do you really think it's something else? I'm amazed at how blind people are. I bet you think Paris Hilton was "dis-inherited" too, right?
I am not an expert, and no I can not explain exactly how it will happen.
I believe you mean to say "I have no idea what I'm talking about but I am going to say it anyway". Yeah buddy I actually make money by trading stocks so I know how it works. You, and everyone else that argues against HFT, have no fucking clue how the market works. HFT cannot alter the price. Because if Goldman Sachs is on one side of the trade with HFT, then JP Morgan is on the other side doing just the opposite. Otherwise you would be seeing prices all over the map, all the time. HFT is not a price maker, it's a price taker. When real money comes into the market - like on the day of the "flash crash" (a day that cost me, personally, $20,000), that is when the price moves. And curiously when the "flash crash" happened all the computers were instantly taken offline because the price moved so quickly it tripped the fail-safes. So what happened? For 5 minutes NO ONE WAS BUYING, which is why the market plummeted. If someone had left their computer on they would have bought the entire market. But since buying the whole market is not something a brokerage wants to do - even if it had money for it - the algorithms stopped the programs.
If you are desperate to sell and no one is around to buy, you will lower your price until someone buys. If you are desperate to sell and someone (a HFT program) is around to buy, you sell right away and usually close to the price you wanted. But you people who are completely clueless as to how a market works fail to understand this simple concept. In your theoretical world you think that just because you want to sell something, someone is going to buy it. Or just because you want to buy something, someone is going to sell it to you. That's not how the market works at all.
Plus, in case you haven't been reading the news for the last 3 years, the financial sector owes us some money.
No - credit was created and credit disappeared. No one owes anyone anything. Of course the poor bastard who thought he could afford a house when really he couldn't ends up feeling cheated. And the poor bastard who bought mortgage backed securities on a promise from a salesman without realizing what he was buying or doing due diligence feels cheated. And the government that prints money to give to banks to lend to corporations to try to stimulate "growth" and then doesn't get the growth it wanted feels cheated when it finds out that after all, ink and paper is just ink and paper and doesn't actually create wealth. But at the end of the day people who don't take care of their money don't deserve money anyway.
I personally haven't been affected by the problems in the past 3 years (apart from my gold quadrupling in price - but I ain't selling). Neither has my wife. The ones that have lost out are the ones living on credit, the ones living beyond their means, and the ones who thought that (insert fancy job title here) actually meant something. But all that has happened is the veil has been lifted. The ones who thought they were rich found out they aren't rich after all, and the ones who thought they weren't poor found out that they are still poor after all.
You are far closer to the truth than you think. Cash transactions over 5000 Euros are now illegal in Italy. Greece also wants to make cash illegal for some transactions. Oh it's all being done in the name of preventing crime and money laundering, but it's fairly obvious that since electronic transactions are much easier to monitor, governments are salivating at the thought of forcing us all under their microscope.
First they make a law but only apply it to large transactions that people don't normally pay cash for anyway - buying a house, or a car. Then two things happen. First, they can move the goalpost closer to zero over time. Secondly (and this is the magic part), inflation will move everyone over the barrier over time anyway. In 40 years or so when a grocery bill is 5000 euros, or 100 years when a pack of chewing gum is 5000 euros, then effectively all cash transactions will be illegal without actually having to do anything at all. Governments are dangerous - the only thing they can ever do is take from you. They can never give you something you didn't already have. But people just don't care.
Americans try to solve all the world's problems with a tax. It makes no sense.
No, they are just trying to solve one problem with tax - the fact that they are bankrupt. They are bankrupt, however, because they try to solve all the world's problems by spending money.
This would be much better for establishing stability in the markets.
High frequency trading results in very stable markets. To wit, I present the case that the market is at the same place it was since 1998. If jogging in place for 13 years isn't "stability" I don't know what is.
Yes, and with high frequency trading - and trading in general - being less profitable you can expect less liquidity, larger spreads between the bid and ask price, and much greater volatility in the markets. Well done.
Isn't it nice when fabulously wealthy people who have ALREADY MADE THEIR FORTUNE advocate making it harder for the rest of us to make a buck? I'm sure Mr. Buffet will never worry about money for the years he has left; and Mr. Gates who has already moved most of his assets into a loophole (sorry, "Foundation") to protect his progeny's inheritance from taxes, certainly shouldn't worry about the future.
Meanwhile for the rest of the people who are having their homes foreclosed for being late on a mortgage payment even when the bank can't prove who actually holds the mortgage (if anyone) because they botched the paperwork, well, life still sucks.
The Japanese earthquake and tsunami has nothing to do with the flood in Thailand, however it is a natural disaster that presumably is unrelated to climate change. I see that a tsunami involves water, so you probably believe that I was comparing water in Japan with water in Bangkok, but I was not. I could just as easily have mentioned an avalanche in the Swiss Alps or a hurricane in the Caribbean, but those are probably more weather driven. Jesus please try to understand the stuff you read.
I still refuse to enter panic mode, CO2 has been higher before. At some point soon we will run out of fossil fuel and an equilibrium will be reached. Of course it sucks to be a coral reef or any number of other species, but running out of fossil fuel will be much more efficient than any "carbon tax" we could dream up because then we just won't have a choice.
I guess the ostrich feels nice and comfortable with its head in the sand. Maybe I should just leave it there. Or you could look at the world's oil reserves of 1.2 trillion barrels, and divide that number by the nearly 90 million barrels of oil per DAY the world is using, and do the math yourself. Using these figures there's less than 40 years out there. Oh and we haven't talked about economic growth, with countries like China adding the demand of equivalent of Australia every single year. Not to mention that the last drops of oil are going to be a lot harder to get at than today. It's going to be fun going down the curve when every few years there is half as much oil supply available as there is today. But hey if long division makes your head hurt, keep it in the nice warm sand.
No, I just bought a 3TB one. Tell me are you going to blame the Japanese earthquake and tsunami on climate change too? It's easy to point at a natural disaster to prove a point - they happen regularly. But flooding is not a new phenomenon at all. In fact I predict that "because of Dr. Murray's conviction" there will be a catastrophic flood somewhere in the world within the next 10 months. Mark my words!
Well considering that some biologists argue that the pH of the oceans was around 7.4 when life began (which is why pretty much every living organism struggles to maintain this pH at least on an intracellular level), we still have a ways to go I'd say.
And these models are taking into account the solubility of bicarbonate in a slightly warmer ocean and its equilibrium with atmospheric CO2, right? The hotter the water, the less soluble the bicarb. I wonder what happens to it. Oh wait...
In order to increase to 300PPM from the baseline we have had to burn approximately half of all the fossil fuel in the world. How much more fuel do you think there is left? So what if we get to 600PPM (I'll be generous), at one point there will be no more fuel left to burn and we will be cycling CO2 into fuel crops to burn back into CO2. The question is, rather, what will the world look like with 600PPM CO2. As you said, it certainly won't be lethal for us humans.
And like I said elsewhere - the supply of fossil fuel is very limited and at our current rate we will run out soon. Very soon in fact. My kids will live to see the end of oil. Coal won't be too far behind once the oil is gone.