I'm not sure I care. This looks like a cool game. I'm probably going to pick it up because of this news story, and unlike games from EA, I'll have no worries about DRM making my day bad.
Because in this case, it's "Nobody" within their little reality. The banks pretend not to know, the sellers pretend not to know, the buyers pretend not to know, but if any of the people in this loop dropped the charade, the market would crash.
Unfortunately, the word "conservative" is almost completely meaningless.
I mean, who increased spending the most and the second most in the history of the United States?
Bush II, followed by Reagan.
Who signed the bank bailout bill?
Bush II.
So apparently it means "liberal, but we don't like certain minorities".
People who are constitutional conservatives are few and far between. Incidentally, they usually aren't seen as evil, because they don't want to control your every waking moment.
Keep on refusing to sell to me, and I'll keep on pirating the content. I have no moral obligation to buy what you don't want to sell.
Incidentally, I've never paid for an episode of The Daily Show, even though I was sitting with a credit card in my hand ready to buy a subscription on iTunes a few years ago.
In the same way that "no one could have seen" the 9/11 attacks or the impact that hurricane Katrina would have on the Gulf coast. In other words: plenty of people predicted it, they were just ignored.
Obviously. Witness my own prediction, years before the "oh my god, nobody could have predicted this" collapse of the housing and credit markets.
The copyright industry is trying to have it both ways.
Copyright is supposed to be a partnership between the public and creators. It's supposed to be a 2-way thing.
As much as the copyright holders love to bitch about how piracy is theft, so is what they're doing. They've stolen 50 years of our culture and locked it away in a vault so they can eke out a few dollars by opening the vault every few years. They're literally stealing money from us every time we buy a CD or hard disk, but they don't want to deal with the fact that we get to have music for that tax. Now, they want to have more control over expression than copyright ever intended, and they want to have it longer than ever before.
If these companies want all these things, if they want to be able to shut down free speech or control all speech, fine. Let's make the copyright term 5 years. If they want legislation to mandate that they get to have a chip in my computer telling me what I can and cannot watch, then the trade-off should be that the stuff they have power over should be incredibly fleeting. The idea of giving them absolute control over every computer in the country, then giving them that control for 100 or 150 years is utterly against the idea of copyright.
I agree with you, but hate the irony of using the first amendment to protect his attempts to push unconstitutional laws that will limit speech he doesn't like.
If Jack Thompson started e-mailing me, I'd be intimidated as hell, knowing he's got a long history of harassment, libel, slander, and generally making life a living hell for people he doesn't agree with.
As I mentioned earlier, Thompson's career for a decade has revolved around chasing the ambulances after school shootings. He's been paid repeatedly to show up for interviews on television on this subject. This is his commercial business at this point, which I'd argue makes these commercial e-mails. Sacha Baron Cohen sending hundreds of e-mails saying "PLEASE PASS THE BILL GIVING ME A SUBSIDY FOR GYPSY TEARS TO PROTECT ME FROM THE AIDS" should be considered commerical e-mail as well, since they're made in pursuit of commercial interests.
I knew Vista Post-SP2 would be the safest, most reliable OS on the planet -- every single Windows installation since Windows 95 has told me that they've all been the safest and most reliable ever!
Why, I was installing Windows XP without any service packs, and the installer told me windows has never been safer or more reliable!
Computer technology is progressing FAR more slowly than it used to.
In 1991, you'd be using a 386 or 486 with 2-4MB of RAM. By 1999, you'd be using an Athlon with at least 512MB of RAM. That's a MASSIVE difference.
By contrast, in 2001, you'd be using a Pentium 4 at around 2GHz with about a gig of RAM. Today, you could be using the same machine. Sure, there are some cool technologies that have come out since then -- 64 bit processors are ubiquitous, and multi-core technology is insane, but we're not looking at anything like the difference between 1991 and 1999.
I was referring to a lot of things. ARMs weren't even legal until the 80s, and securities banks weren't allowed to touch mortgages until the late 90s.
Nobody KNEW the assets were overvalued, and in some cases, they still don't. In countries with better banking regulations, prices are still increasing in many markets, because the banking system hasn't yet collapsed.
Income multiples are a good way to look at house prices. In the market I'm in, 2-3x income(In my case, 120-180k) will get you a VERY nice house. In big cities in Ontario or Alberta, however, that'll get you nice down payment on a house priced at 6-10x income (400-600k). Considering the average income in Canada is much less than I make, these prices aren't rational, unless lending standards are far too low. Until we see average house prices drop to more sane levels (or just stop increasing), we're due for a large correction in these markets, because people can't afford these houses.
The central bank was lending at such a low rate that it was only rational, until proven otherwise, to keep on taking as much debt as possible at massive profits. Thanks to the housing market, which was artifically propped up by the government enacting legislation which greatly reduced lending standards and increased the number of people who would qualify for the debt for a house, even a foreclosure for a long time meant massive profits -- The bank could sell the foreclosed house and make much more than they lent out.
If you ask me, the government should make lending more money than you actually have illegal -- It should be, since it's fraud. Then you could eliminate the federal reserve and give the power to print money to the congress. I used to be a gold standard advocate, until I realised that many bubbles are caused by the government artificially setting the value of gold and silver in maintaining such a standard. A fiat currency maintained responsibly would be as good as a gold standard, because hopefully supply would remain flat.
This is nowhere NEAR the first time the government has created policies which created a property boom supported by easy credit.
The government spent too much money in 1812, expanding the money supply and artificially making credit easy to get. European governments artificially induced a state where US food producers were doing very good by fighting the Napoleonic wars and destroying a lot of food production capacity, which created a speculative bubble in US farming. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back, causing a defaults, bank closures, and a recession.
In 1837, the government began forcing people to pay for government land with gold or silver. Andrew Jackson had eliminated the central bank during his presidency, with the intent of removing cheap debt from the economy. The banks responded by printing paper currency, which meant debt was artificially easy to get(Why was this legal?). The restriction on buying government land drove up land prices, which led to a speculative bubble in which people took out paper debt to buy gold or silver. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back, causing a defaults, bank closures, and a recession.
In 1857, the California gold rush caused a huge influx of gold into the economy. This had two effects: First, a speculative bubble in railroads, and second, easy access to credit. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back, causing a defaults, bank closures, and a recession.
In 1873, following the end of the civil war, a huge number of people were released from military service, and the money supply was massively increased by federal spending. This created a speculative bubble in railway industries, and provided easy access to credit. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back, causing a defaults, bank closures, and a recession.
In 1893, the Sherman Silver Purchase act remonetized silver, causing inflation which led to an easy supply of credit. Unlike other recessions, this one was caused by massive protective tarrifs of the McKinley tarrif act, which instead of causing an artificial bubble, instead collapsed the value of healthy markets by forcing a heavy tax burden on manufacturers and farms who relied on imported parts.
In 1907, J. P. Morgan stopped a recession from happening by providing capital during a period that saw many central banks around the world, which led to the creation of the New York federal reserve bank.
European governments once again destroyed their agricultural output with the onset of World War I. Further, the creation of the New York federal reserve bank made credit easily available by eliminating the risk of bank runs. The Homesteader's act was altered to allow land that couldn't be irrigated to be sold. The combination of Europe's war and America's deregulation created a massive speculative bubble, which was supported by a few unusually wet seasons. The unusually wet seasons ended causing a collapse of the speculative market, one of the worst environmental catastrophes of American history. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back AND suddenly had farms they couldn't even farm on, causing a defaults, bank closures, and a recession.
The Y2k bubble was one of the few bubbles fueled by non-government interference. A simple mathematics issue caused every industry on the planet to spend money ensuring their businesses would continue functioning during the year 2000, causing the incredible speculative bubble in tech. This speculative bubble was fueled by record low interest rates, leading to easy credit. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back, but a new speculative bubble in housing was brewed and interest rates were brought even lower.
That brings us to today. Housing prices were artificially driven up by reducing legislation regulating lending standards
The problem is, the congress tends to do a poor job of managing the pursestrings, so the president has a bigger role than ever before in setting the policy of the nation. A divided government under Reagan spent more than any government in history until Bush.
Sanity is rare. Props for having it and not believing the tripe that the bi-polar idiots out change their views on whenever it becomes politically convenient to do so try to feed you..
There's no logical fallacy. I argued with jackasses for years over these things. I was the lone voice attacking these things, while Republicans CONTINUED to bitch about their taxes being too high while the debt ran out of control.
Suddenly today? Oh look, all the people who voted for the deficits are voting against them. Little late?
I agree completely. As much as the Democrats represent an ideology I disagree with, I would have voted for Obama because democrats have historically grown government at a lower rate than Republicans, and thus are the lesser of two evils.
My numbers show that from 2007 to 2008, the federal debt grew from 8,726.36 trillion 2007 dollars to 10,408.37 trillion 2007 dollars, an increase of about 1,680 trillion 2007 dollars.
Bush signed into law bailouts equalling 1.8 trillion dollars, all tolled, so the massive increase in debt burden makes sense.
I think Obama is doing the exact wrong thing. He should pull the 3 million troops we've got stationed around the world back home and fire the majority of them, then eliminate the income tax and fire the IRS. If you managed to cut spending back to 1998 levels (which you could do by eliminating the world empire and eliminating a few of the useless "department of"s), you could do it. Imagine the incredible stimulus of every person in America suddenly having all their income available? On the other hand, I'm not the one pretending he's doing something different than Bush. Also, I knew back in 2005 that the irresponsible monetary policy was going to lead to a collapse, and I said so. I think we're headed for yet another short-term bubble, leading to an even worse recession. The same old thing is going to lead us further and further down a spiral.
They claim to hate him NOW because they don't want to appear utterly partisan, even though they are. Even the Republican candidate for president ran on a platform that would continue the Bush policies which led to the deficit. How is that HATING the deficit?
I can only think of ONE republican who has consistently attacked deficit spending. Guess what? Republicans hate him.
Obama's administration is already facing heavy criticism for every move they make or don't make. You've got an army of partisan hacks who loved torture when it was their guys doing it who will cut off Obama's balls if they hear about him doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Would the thieves have bought it otherwise?
I'm not sure I care. This looks like a cool game. I'm probably going to pick it up because of this news story, and unlike games from EA, I'll have no worries about DRM making my day bad.
Because in this case, it's "Nobody" within their little reality. The banks pretend not to know, the sellers pretend not to know, the buyers pretend not to know, but if any of the people in this loop dropped the charade, the market would crash.
Unfortunately, the word "conservative" is almost completely meaningless.
I mean, who increased spending the most and the second most in the history of the United States?
Bush II, followed by Reagan.
Who signed the bank bailout bill?
Bush II.
So apparently it means "liberal, but we don't like certain minorities".
People who are constitutional conservatives are few and far between. Incidentally, they usually aren't seen as evil, because they don't want to control your every waking moment.
Keep on refusing to sell to me, and I'll keep on pirating the content. I have no moral obligation to buy what you don't want to sell.
Incidentally, I've never paid for an episode of The Daily Show, even though I was sitting with a credit card in my hand ready to buy a subscription on iTunes a few years ago.
In the same way that "no one could have seen" the 9/11 attacks or the impact that hurricane Katrina would have on the Gulf coast. In other words: plenty of people predicted it, they were just ignored.
Obviously. Witness my own prediction, years before the "oh my god, nobody could have predicted this" collapse of the housing and credit markets.
You know what pisses me off?
The copyright industry is trying to have it both ways.
Copyright is supposed to be a partnership between the public and creators. It's supposed to be a 2-way thing.
As much as the copyright holders love to bitch about how piracy is theft, so is what they're doing. They've stolen 50 years of our culture and locked it away in a vault so they can eke out a few dollars by opening the vault every few years. They're literally stealing money from us every time we buy a CD or hard disk, but they don't want to deal with the fact that we get to have music for that tax. Now, they want to have more control over expression than copyright ever intended, and they want to have it longer than ever before.
If these companies want all these things, if they want to be able to shut down free speech or control all speech, fine. Let's make the copyright term 5 years. If they want legislation to mandate that they get to have a chip in my computer telling me what I can and cannot watch, then the trade-off should be that the stuff they have power over should be incredibly fleeting. The idea of giving them absolute control over every computer in the country, then giving them that control for 100 or 150 years is utterly against the idea of copyright.
I agree with you, but hate the irony of using the first amendment to protect his attempts to push unconstitutional laws that will limit speech he doesn't like.
If Jack Thompson started e-mailing me, I'd be intimidated as hell, knowing he's got a long history of harassment, libel, slander, and generally making life a living hell for people he doesn't agree with.
As I mentioned earlier, Thompson's career for a decade has revolved around chasing the ambulances after school shootings. He's been paid repeatedly to show up for interviews on television on this subject. This is his commercial business at this point, which I'd argue makes these commercial e-mails. Sacha Baron Cohen sending hundreds of e-mails saying "PLEASE PASS THE BILL GIVING ME A SUBSIDY FOR GYPSY TEARS TO PROTECT ME FROM THE AIDS" should be considered commerical e-mail as well, since they're made in pursuit of commercial interests.
Jack Thompson is an ambulance chaser who has been paid to be on TV.
This theatre is his business. Any e-mails he sends regarding it are commercial in nature.
I knew Vista Post-SP2 would be the safest, most reliable OS on the planet -- every single Windows installation since Windows 95 has told me that they've all been the safest and most reliable ever!
Why, I was installing Windows XP without any service packs, and the installer told me windows has never been safer or more reliable!
I'm not even sure why this is news! Go Microsoft!
Computer technology is progressing FAR more slowly than it used to.
In 1991, you'd be using a 386 or 486 with 2-4MB of RAM. By 1999, you'd be using an Athlon with at least 512MB of RAM. That's a MASSIVE difference.
By contrast, in 2001, you'd be using a Pentium 4 at around 2GHz with about a gig of RAM. Today, you could be using the same machine. Sure, there are some cool technologies that have come out since then -- 64 bit processors are ubiquitous, and multi-core technology is insane, but we're not looking at anything like the difference between 1991 and 1999.
I was referring to a lot of things. ARMs weren't even legal until the 80s, and securities banks weren't allowed to touch mortgages until the late 90s.
Nobody KNEW the assets were overvalued, and in some cases, they still don't. In countries with better banking regulations, prices are still increasing in many markets, because the banking system hasn't yet collapsed.
Income multiples are a good way to look at house prices. In the market I'm in, 2-3x income(In my case, 120-180k) will get you a VERY nice house. In big cities in Ontario or Alberta, however, that'll get you nice down payment on a house priced at 6-10x income (400-600k). Considering the average income in Canada is much less than I make, these prices aren't rational, unless lending standards are far too low. Until we see average house prices drop to more sane levels (or just stop increasing), we're due for a large correction in these markets, because people can't afford these houses.
The central bank was lending at such a low rate that it was only rational, until proven otherwise, to keep on taking as much debt as possible at massive profits. Thanks to the housing market, which was artifically propped up by the government enacting legislation which greatly reduced lending standards and increased the number of people who would qualify for the debt for a house, even a foreclosure for a long time meant massive profits -- The bank could sell the foreclosed house and make much more than they lent out.
If you ask me, the government should make lending more money than you actually have illegal -- It should be, since it's fraud. Then you could eliminate the federal reserve and give the power to print money to the congress. I used to be a gold standard advocate, until I realised that many bubbles are caused by the government artificially setting the value of gold and silver in maintaining such a standard. A fiat currency maintained responsibly would be as good as a gold standard, because hopefully supply would remain flat.
20 years? How quaint.
This is nowhere NEAR the first time the government has created policies which created a property boom supported by easy credit.
The government spent too much money in 1812, expanding the money supply and artificially making credit easy to get. European governments artificially induced a state where US food producers were doing very good by fighting the Napoleonic wars and destroying a lot of food production capacity, which created a speculative bubble in US farming. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back, causing a defaults, bank closures, and a recession.
In 1837, the government began forcing people to pay for government land with gold or silver. Andrew Jackson had eliminated the central bank during his presidency, with the intent of removing cheap debt from the economy. The banks responded by printing paper currency, which meant debt was artificially easy to get(Why was this legal?). The restriction on buying government land drove up land prices, which led to a speculative bubble in which people took out paper debt to buy gold or silver. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back, causing a defaults, bank closures, and a recession.
In 1857, the California gold rush caused a huge influx of gold into the economy. This had two effects: First, a speculative bubble in railroads, and second, easy access to credit. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back, causing a defaults, bank closures, and a recession.
In 1873, following the end of the civil war, a huge number of people were released from military service, and the money supply was massively increased by federal spending. This created a speculative bubble in railway industries, and provided easy access to credit. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back, causing a defaults, bank closures, and a recession.
In 1893, the Sherman Silver Purchase act remonetized silver, causing inflation which led to an easy supply of credit. Unlike other recessions, this one was caused by massive protective tarrifs of the McKinley tarrif act, which instead of causing an artificial bubble, instead collapsed the value of healthy markets by forcing a heavy tax burden on manufacturers and farms who relied on imported parts.
In 1907, J. P. Morgan stopped a recession from happening by providing capital during a period that saw many central banks around the world, which led to the creation of the New York federal reserve bank.
European governments once again destroyed their agricultural output with the onset of World War I. Further, the creation of the New York federal reserve bank made credit easily available by eliminating the risk of bank runs. The Homesteader's act was altered to allow land that couldn't be irrigated to be sold. The combination of Europe's war and America's deregulation created a massive speculative bubble, which was supported by a few unusually wet seasons. The unusually wet seasons ended causing a collapse of the speculative market, one of the worst environmental catastrophes of American history. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back AND suddenly had farms they couldn't even farm on, causing a defaults, bank closures, and a recession.
The Y2k bubble was one of the few bubbles fueled by non-government interference. A simple mathematics issue caused every industry on the planet to spend money ensuring their businesses would continue functioning during the year 2000, causing the incredible speculative bubble in tech. This speculative bubble was fueled by record low interest rates, leading to easy credit. When the bubble collapsed, a huge number of people couldn't pay their debts back, but a new speculative bubble in housing was brewed and interest rates were brought even lower.
That brings us to today. Housing prices were artificially driven up by reducing legislation regulating lending standards
It seems you didn't notice that half the OSes I looked at weren't linux.
My number says 2,903,053 personnel. How many of them do we actually need to protect the country?
The problem is, the congress tends to do a poor job of managing the pursestrings, so the president has a bigger role than ever before in setting the policy of the nation. A divided government under Reagan spent more than any government in history until Bush.
I knew it was going to be important. :D
Sanity is rare. Props for having it and not believing the tripe that the bi-polar idiots out change their views on whenever it becomes politically convenient to do so try to feed you..
But Ron Paul is a congressman, not a senator. :P
I switch OSes like some people change their underwear.
I started with PCLinuxOS, then moved to Ubuntu, then back to XP, now I'm running Windows 7 on it.
There's no logical fallacy. I argued with jackasses for years over these things. I was the lone voice attacking these things, while Republicans CONTINUED to bitch about their taxes being too high while the debt ran out of control.
Suddenly today? Oh look, all the people who voted for the deficits are voting against them. Little late?
I agree completely. As much as the Democrats represent an ideology I disagree with, I would have voted for Obama because democrats have historically grown government at a lower rate than Republicans, and thus are the lesser of two evils.
My numbers show that from 2007 to 2008, the federal debt grew from 8,726.36 trillion 2007 dollars to 10,408.37 trillion 2007 dollars, an increase of about 1,680 trillion 2007 dollars.
Bush signed into law bailouts equalling 1.8 trillion dollars, all tolled, so the massive increase in debt burden makes sense.
I think Obama is doing the exact wrong thing. He should pull the 3 million troops we've got stationed around the world back home and fire the majority of them, then eliminate the income tax and fire the IRS. If you managed to cut spending back to 1998 levels (which you could do by eliminating the world empire and eliminating a few of the useless "department of"s), you could do it. Imagine the incredible stimulus of every person in America suddenly having all their income available? On the other hand, I'm not the one pretending he's doing something different than Bush. Also, I knew back in 2005 that the irresponsible monetary policy was going to lead to a collapse, and I said so. I think we're headed for yet another short-term bubble, leading to an even worse recession. The same old thing is going to lead us further and further down a spiral.
Bullshit.
They claim to hate him NOW because they don't want to appear utterly partisan, even though they are. Even the Republican candidate for president ran on a platform that would continue the Bush policies which led to the deficit. How is that HATING the deficit?
I can only think of ONE republican who has consistently attacked deficit spending. Guess what? Republicans hate him.
Bullshit.
Obama's administration is already facing heavy criticism for every move they make or don't make. You've got an army of partisan hacks who loved torture when it was their guys doing it who will cut off Obama's balls if they hear about him doing it.