That's what I suspected since it was lacking a meta generator tag but seemed to have all the other details in place (robots.txt file, a favicon.ico, and detailed description and keywords tags).
I'm curious how you know this for a fact though, not that I doubt that you are correct.
I disagree because ultimately only the phone is tracked, not the person. The only foolproof way for them to rob is to scope out the location and have somebody outside to watch out for anybody approaching the property. They would never know when somebody else might show up after all.
Also, the whole point of E911 is so that rescue people can track you down even if you don't know where you are or are incapacitated. How the heck are they going to do that if they don't know where you are or do you think the risks that they might come right back to rob you (ha!) aren't worth it?
I don't mind criticism and expect it for Obama the same as any other president. However, there is a difference between constructive and nonconstructive criticism. There is no way that hoping somebody fails can be construed as constructive criticism. It's egotistical and selfish to his own detriment no less.
Also, the whole intent of having the government more open is to make it more accountable and open to debate. Hillary Clinton on her first day of her new job was saying:
"Think outside the proverbial box," Clinton urged the employees. "There is nothing I welcome more than a good debate and the kind of dialogue that will make us better.... We need a sense of openness and candor in the building."
In the previous administration usually there was very little desire for public debate or even time allocated for a debate. I think that will not happen again under this administration.
Well, Bush tried hard for 8 years to set the best environment for business in order for them to expand. The argument for cutting taxes was exactly for that purpose. It's difficult for me to believe that given the current economic conditions his tax policy made hardly any difference in the long run other than to increase our national debt. Ireland had even lower tax rates (the world's lowest corporate tax rates) but are now in even bigger economic trouble than we are.
However, there are many pressing issues involving entitlements, infrastructure (bridges should not be collapsing...), energy (regardless of global warming, we do not want to import oil from the Middle East for security reasons), etc. I think we will need to invest in our infrastructure at levels probably not seen since the Eisenhower administration in order to solve just one of those issues and then there's still the problems of energy and entitlements to contend with. I don't see any way of these problems solving themselves with just market forces alone, especially given the incredibly tight credit market right now. Heck, just recall Bush's proposed solution for entitlements (investing them into 401k's in the stock market). Can you imagine what would have happened at this point if he had succeeded? It would have been an even bigger disaster than what we currently have.
Also, remember that the federal government expanded more under Bush than any other president in recent history. I think it's possible to increase spending for infrastructure and entitlements (which really is just paying off enormous IOU's created by past administrations) without necessarily increasing the powers of the federal government.
In fact, I think some of these first acts by the Obama administration are already effectively reducing the power of the executive branch (by closing Gitmo for instance and limiting the CIA's ability to use secret foreign prisons for long-term detentions).
I think Obama is correct in stating that we need to focus on which programs work and which do not. Simply reducing funding everywhere is often not the best policy. For example, very little was spent in Iraq on auditors and additional review to track the enormous spending going on. As a result, billions of taxpayer dollars have literally disappeared with nobody to hold accountable for it. Spending more on auditing may have increased the initial cost but would have surely reduced the amount of corruption and waste that occurred.
I also am encouraged by the policy stated on the new whitehouse.gov to put every bill about to be signed by Obama on public review there 5 days ahead of time. That should be enough time for an organization like grocklaw to review important legislation (at least if they have enough lawyer volunteers). Hopefully this will help reduce the amount of pork and dangerous elements within a bill before they are passed into law and will at the very least make the process more open and accessible to the public.
In context I think Rush is still (as he often is) wrong. Back in 2000 when Bush was running for president many people on the left thought that his tax plan would lead to huge deficits and that his economic forecast was not realistic (he was betting on a continuation of the already unprecedented economic growth under the Clinton administration). We thought this was very unlikely given the probability that the stock market was already experiencing a bubble and the fact that our economy has never expanded that strongly for that length of time (among other reasons).
Nevertheless, we didn't hope he would fail. We didn't go and say, "Well, I sure hope his tax cut policy fails. That'll show him and those crazy conservatives that cutting taxes by itself doesn't solve life's problems." It would be foolish to make such a statement since we would get burned in the process if it did, indeed fail. And, in fact, he met little resistance in getting his tax policy passed.
Hoping for Obama to fail, especially at a time like this, is unbelievably foolish. Even if you disagree with him and disagree with liberalism you had better hope and pray that it works this time. If McCain had been elected I certainly would have hoped his policies would work too since at that point there is little alternative and failure would be disastrous.
I would like to point out that the US probably became closer to pure socialism than at any other point in its history during WWII when the government controlled nearly all of our industrial output and had an enormous amount of influence on salaries and spending during that time, including enormous deficit spending. That also was the time when the Great Depression finally ended unequivocally.
One thing to keep in mind though is that this information is private (unless you intentionally broadcast it to the world using a website like instamapper.com). It can be accessed by law enforcement or rescue people. I'm not sure what protocol is used in the US in order for them to access it. I would imagine that it must be very quick in the case of emergency workers since they can't wait in order to find out where the person they want to rescue is.
The main page is also perfect XHTML code according to w3.org's validator. I don't know whether this was true for the previous administration's website or not. The code's also very readable, not sure what tool they used to create it though.
Good luck! I live near a town where Seagate is the largest local employer and already had to fire a portion of their staff this past week. I really hope you guys are able to solve this quickly both for your customers and yourselves of course.
That's tradition. They always call the person being inaugurated by their previous title and then president afterwards. Originally this was actually the case and after passing the twentieth amendment there really wasn't sufficient reason to change that tradition.
Well other than not being able to run the Windows CD this has nothing to do with Ubuntu and everything to do with the router. Any off the shelf router has a default local network address a user can navigate to using Firefox. So long as she told the guy on the phone what she was using he could quickly look up the information and tell her what this address is (it's probably in the documentation that came with it, but she can hardly be expected to read documentation right?).
In my experience 192.168.0.1 is often the default address for Netgear routers. Not sure what the default is for others but I'm sure I could find it quickly either in documentation that comes with the product or on the net.
Remember, she did call Dell back when she found out she had Ubuntu installed instead of Windows and they somehow convinced her that it would work for her.
How did they convince her? She must have told them that she needed Office for her courses. The only way I can imagine them convincing her that Ubuntu would work is by telling her about Open Office.
They probably also gave her a primer on using Ubuntu including telling her about Firefox and I wouldn't be surprised if they told her to go to 192.168.0.1 on Firefox in order to get her internet connection configured.
My guess is most of this information went through one ear and out the other so she was left with the feeling of being OK without actually knowing anything more than before she made the call.
In addition if he does need to run those computers all the time he could try using some higher efficiency servers that are now available. He could also try using laptops for personal use which should substantially reduce the amount of power consumed.
Unfortunately, at the office I work at we have a number of rack-mount servers and none of them are the least bit 'green'. This is because my employer has absolutely no incentive to pay a little more for the green servers that are ever so slightly slower than what we have because we don't pay the electric bill (rent covers that expense indirectly).
One interesting piece of trivia is all binary attachments to e-mails are already base-64 encoded. So this guy is trying to effectively take out the little bit of data between the body of the message and the attachment.
My guess is that the number of characters of each e-mail is limited too so this method probably won't work. Worth a shot I suppose.
Of course you can simulate gravity, that's easy. Just look at the space station used in Babylon 5 or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Simply make the thing spin and voila, gravity that you cannot distinguish from the real thing. The main trick is finding materials that can withstand the high tensile strength required in order to have a full 1 g of acceleration.
The reason they don't do that on the ISS is because the whole point of that station is to experience micro gravity and presumably also due to costs and the complexity it would involve.
Android is cool but does anyone know why they took out some of the beta functionality (like being able to get driving directions which are now expressly forbidden by the terms of service for the Android google maps API key)?
It seems like it would be fairly trivial to write a turn-by-turn voice app for Android if they still had the API to request driving directions. By knowing the location of the phone the program could easily find what segment of a route it's on (if any at all), see how far it is until the next instruction and then read the instruction using the text2speech library someone has already made.
As it stands, the only way I see of implementing such an app would be to have a webserver somewhere that would forward direction requests from the phone to google using the standard google maps javascript API and then return the directions back to the app. Very much a PITA if you ask me and might violate the terms of use of developing software on Android for all I know.
"and the entire reason we have teachers is to make up for the fact that people in general don't have a whole lot of it."
I disagree. If you look at countries like Japan the students are much more studious generally speaking (at least until college). There is a lot of societal pressure there that keeps students motivated. I certainly don't think the Japanese students perform better because they have better teachers, they simply work much harder.
If there's no pressure on the students to perform at home there's really not much the teachers can do to make them do their homework and excel in class.
Depends on your profession. I was fortunate to attend a school that had a computer lab that allowed me to learn how to program on my own time (my family couldn't afford a computer at home at the time).
If you come from a poor family having computers at school is a real boon. I don't think studious kids should be punished by not being allowed access to computers due to the majority not using them for educational purposes.
I also don't think the school system is broken. There's nothing stopping kids from going to school and being productive except their own lack of discipline and work ethic.
It isn't a false dichotomy (and of course I know what a false dichotomy is, I even posted on it on a true false dichotomy elsewhere on this story).
Imagine you're a senator and you have to vote on the bailout bill. You've already been through a series of negotiations (which you may not have even been a part of if you weren't on the relevant committee) and now the bill comes up for a vote. You only have four alternatives:
1) Vote yes 2) Vote no 3) Abstain 4) Try to continue debate (filibuster) -- if that doesn't work, you have to choose between the first three options
However, your constituents would only view you as either voting for it (option 1) or against it (the other three options) and your constituents would either be calling in to tell you to vote for it or against it (with the great majority telling you to vote against it).
So I ask you, were these multitude of people telling the senator to vote against the bill actually opposed to the bill or not? Sure, they may want SOMETHING but I think we all know what we are talking about (I hope). We're talking about the bailout bill as passed by Congress, not some other bill that doesn't exist. The congressmen only had two realistic options, to vote for it or against it and hope that a better bill could be prepared over the following days. I think the version they first voted on was far superior to the second version that had an added $150 billion in pork to be honest.
As for explaining how it works or doesn't, I'll leave that to the experts that have already performed an excellent job of explaining it on the Economist, various op-ed pieces and articles on the NY Times and Washington Post, and the numerous interviews with experts on Charlie Rose and a number of other programs.
This is the age of the Internet where information is relatively easy to find. Even if you cannot find it online, you may find someone like me who knows where to find hard copies of what you are seeking.
The original blueprints used for the rocket were lost. Does that mean the rocket didn't exist, despite all of the thousands of people that built it and watched it launch?
However, I do know where you can find thousands and thousands of bureaucratic pages of the Apollo project. They are stored at the Norlin Library at the University of Colorado at the Boulder campus. Back when I was an undergrad we had to do a little project of reviewing the design of the Apollo lander's landing strut and we were sent to that library to find some of the original design specifications. There was an unbelievable amount of information in the hundreds of journals stored there.
Also, Myth Busters did a recent episode of debunking many of the theories of moon landing deniers.
Personally I agree with what Biden said a couple of years ago. Your own religion is a private belief and not something you need to wear on your sleeve. While being a strong Catholic believer he never talked about it much in public until he was essentially forced to due to changing political times.
While your own personal beliefs are important, I don't agree that you necessarily need to give yourself an acceptable label in order to please the populous. In fact, I'd prefer if they did not publicly state their religion--instead, if people really want to know the candidates' convictions, they would have to tune in to the debates and look closely at their history rather than giving them a satisfactory or unsatisfactory label as a starting point.
That's debatable. Nobody claims that derivatives were the root of the current financial disaster. It's simply the gasoline that was poured on the spark.
Greenspan strongly advocated for derivatives to not be regulated and he got his wish (believing that the markets would self-regulate). Naysayers claimed that the derivatives would be too opaque and could lead to a domino effect. Warren Buffett referred to them a few years ago as financial weapons of mass destruction. Just read this very informative article in the NY Times for details about how the libertarian ideal was absolutely wrong in this case.
It isn't a scholarly work. The only thing I could find for free would be transcripts of presentations made on the floor when Bernanke and Paulson were trying to convince Congress to pass the bill. Do you REALLY want me to find the links to those transcripts?
Other countries that have tried hard to stamp out illegal migrant labor have had their own issues (see Spain).
This is one of the very few topics I agree with Bush Jr on, we need to make migrant labor feasible like it was in the past. There simply aren't enough Americans that are willing to do the work, just ask almost any labor-intensive crop producer. It's long hours of hard, mind-numbing and body-breaking low-skill work. The great majority of Americans simply won't do that kind of work unless the salary was so high that we would have to pay double to quadruple the price on produce.
That's a good devil's/idiot's argument. The only thing I can think of to compare to is people that switch religions. Tony Blair recently switch to Catholicism I believe, but it was after he left office and he implied on a recent interview (I think on the Daily Show) that it would have been a risky thing to politically while in office.
So hypothetically it should be OK to switch religions I suppose. I know it's weak, but it's all I have for this hypothetical argument.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I suspected since it was lacking a meta generator tag but seemed to have all the other details in place (robots.txt file, a favicon.ico, and detailed description and keywords tags).
I'm curious how you know this for a fact though, not that I doubt that you are correct.
I disagree because ultimately only the phone is tracked, not the person. The only foolproof way for them to rob is to scope out the location and have somebody outside to watch out for anybody approaching the property. They would never know when somebody else might show up after all.
Also, the whole point of E911 is so that rescue people can track you down even if you don't know where you are or are incapacitated. How the heck are they going to do that if they don't know where you are or do you think the risks that they might come right back to rob you (ha!) aren't worth it?
I don't mind criticism and expect it for Obama the same as any other president. However, there is a difference between constructive and nonconstructive criticism. There is no way that hoping somebody fails can be construed as constructive criticism. It's egotistical and selfish to his own detriment no less.
Also, the whole intent of having the government more open is to make it more accountable and open to debate. Hillary Clinton on her first day of her new job was saying:
"Think outside the proverbial box," Clinton urged the employees. "There is nothing I welcome more than a good debate and the kind of dialogue that will make us better. ... We need a sense of openness and candor in the building."
In the previous administration usually there was very little desire for public debate or even time allocated for a debate. I think that will not happen again under this administration.
Well, Bush tried hard for 8 years to set the best environment for business in order for them to expand. The argument for cutting taxes was exactly for that purpose. It's difficult for me to believe that given the current economic conditions his tax policy made hardly any difference in the long run other than to increase our national debt. Ireland had even lower tax rates (the world's lowest corporate tax rates) but are now in even bigger economic trouble than we are.
However, there are many pressing issues involving entitlements, infrastructure (bridges should not be collapsing...), energy (regardless of global warming, we do not want to import oil from the Middle East for security reasons), etc. I think we will need to invest in our infrastructure at levels probably not seen since the Eisenhower administration in order to solve just one of those issues and then there's still the problems of energy and entitlements to contend with. I don't see any way of these problems solving themselves with just market forces alone, especially given the incredibly tight credit market right now. Heck, just recall Bush's proposed solution for entitlements (investing them into 401k's in the stock market). Can you imagine what would have happened at this point if he had succeeded? It would have been an even bigger disaster than what we currently have.
Also, remember that the federal government expanded more under Bush than any other president in recent history. I think it's possible to increase spending for infrastructure and entitlements (which really is just paying off enormous IOU's created by past administrations) without necessarily increasing the powers of the federal government.
In fact, I think some of these first acts by the Obama administration are already effectively reducing the power of the executive branch (by closing Gitmo for instance and limiting the CIA's ability to use secret foreign prisons for long-term detentions).
I think Obama is correct in stating that we need to focus on which programs work and which do not. Simply reducing funding everywhere is often not the best policy. For example, very little was spent in Iraq on auditors and additional review to track the enormous spending going on. As a result, billions of taxpayer dollars have literally disappeared with nobody to hold accountable for it. Spending more on auditing may have increased the initial cost but would have surely reduced the amount of corruption and waste that occurred.
I also am encouraged by the policy stated on the new whitehouse.gov to put every bill about to be signed by Obama on public review there 5 days ahead of time. That should be enough time for an organization like grocklaw to review important legislation (at least if they have enough lawyer volunteers). Hopefully this will help reduce the amount of pork and dangerous elements within a bill before they are passed into law and will at the very least make the process more open and accessible to the public.
In context I think Rush is still (as he often is) wrong. Back in 2000 when Bush was running for president many people on the left thought that his tax plan would lead to huge deficits and that his economic forecast was not realistic (he was betting on a continuation of the already unprecedented economic growth under the Clinton administration). We thought this was very unlikely given the probability that the stock market was already experiencing a bubble and the fact that our economy has never expanded that strongly for that length of time (among other reasons).
Nevertheless, we didn't hope he would fail. We didn't go and say, "Well, I sure hope his tax cut policy fails. That'll show him and those crazy conservatives that cutting taxes by itself doesn't solve life's problems." It would be foolish to make such a statement since we would get burned in the process if it did, indeed fail. And, in fact, he met little resistance in getting his tax policy passed.
Hoping for Obama to fail, especially at a time like this, is unbelievably foolish. Even if you disagree with him and disagree with liberalism you had better hope and pray that it works this time. If McCain had been elected I certainly would have hoped his policies would work too since at that point there is little alternative and failure would be disastrous.
I would like to point out that the US probably became closer to pure socialism than at any other point in its history during WWII when the government controlled nearly all of our industrial output and had an enormous amount of influence on salaries and spending during that time, including enormous deficit spending. That also was the time when the Great Depression finally ended unequivocally.
One thing to keep in mind though is that this information is private (unless you intentionally broadcast it to the world using a website like instamapper.com). It can be accessed by law enforcement or rescue people. I'm not sure what protocol is used in the US in order for them to access it. I would imagine that it must be very quick in the case of emergency workers since they can't wait in order to find out where the person they want to rescue is.
The main page is also perfect XHTML code according to w3.org's validator. I don't know whether this was true for the previous administration's website or not. The code's also very readable, not sure what tool they used to create it though.
Good luck! I live near a town where Seagate is the largest local employer and already had to fire a portion of their staff this past week. I really hope you guys are able to solve this quickly both for your customers and yourselves of course.
That's tradition. They always call the person being inaugurated by their previous title and then president afterwards. Originally this was actually the case and after passing the twentieth amendment there really wasn't sufficient reason to change that tradition.
Yea, GPS currently uses 2 frequencies (eventually a third will be used too).
The frequencies used are:
F1: 1575.42 MHz
F2: 1227.6 MHz
(new frequency, not transmitted yet)
F3: 1176.45 MHz
So theoretically this new cloak would be invisible to these frequencies.
Well other than not being able to run the Windows CD this has nothing to do with Ubuntu and everything to do with the router. Any off the shelf router has a default local network address a user can navigate to using Firefox. So long as she told the guy on the phone what she was using he could quickly look up the information and tell her what this address is (it's probably in the documentation that came with it, but she can hardly be expected to read documentation right?).
In my experience 192.168.0.1 is often the default address for Netgear routers. Not sure what the default is for others but I'm sure I could find it quickly either in documentation that comes with the product or on the net.
Remember, she did call Dell back when she found out she had Ubuntu installed instead of Windows and they somehow convinced her that it would work for her.
How did they convince her? She must have told them that she needed Office for her courses. The only way I can imagine them convincing her that Ubuntu would work is by telling her about Open Office.
They probably also gave her a primer on using Ubuntu including telling her about Firefox and I wouldn't be surprised if they told her to go to 192.168.0.1 on Firefox in order to get her internet connection configured.
My guess is most of this information went through one ear and out the other so she was left with the feeling of being OK without actually knowing anything more than before she made the call.
In addition if he does need to run those computers all the time he could try using some higher efficiency servers that are now available. He could also try using laptops for personal use which should substantially reduce the amount of power consumed.
Unfortunately, at the office I work at we have a number of rack-mount servers and none of them are the least bit 'green'. This is because my employer has absolutely no incentive to pay a little more for the green servers that are ever so slightly slower than what we have because we don't pay the electric bill (rent covers that expense indirectly).
One interesting piece of trivia is all binary attachments to e-mails are already base-64 encoded. So this guy is trying to effectively take out the little bit of data between the body of the message and the attachment.
My guess is that the number of characters of each e-mail is limited too so this method probably won't work. Worth a shot I suppose.
Of course you can simulate gravity, that's easy. Just look at the space station used in Babylon 5 or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Simply make the thing spin and voila, gravity that you cannot distinguish from the real thing. The main trick is finding materials that can withstand the high tensile strength required in order to have a full 1 g of acceleration.
The reason they don't do that on the ISS is because the whole point of that station is to experience micro gravity and presumably also due to costs and the complexity it would involve.
Android is cool but does anyone know why they took out some of the beta functionality (like being able to get driving directions which are now expressly forbidden by the terms of service for the Android google maps API key)?
It seems like it would be fairly trivial to write a turn-by-turn voice app for Android if they still had the API to request driving directions. By knowing the location of the phone the program could easily find what segment of a route it's on (if any at all), see how far it is until the next instruction and then read the instruction using the text2speech library someone has already made.
As it stands, the only way I see of implementing such an app would be to have a webserver somewhere that would forward direction requests from the phone to google using the standard google maps javascript API and then return the directions back to the app. Very much a PITA if you ask me and might violate the terms of use of developing software on Android for all I know.
"and the entire reason we have teachers is to make up for the fact that people in general don't have a whole lot of it."
I disagree. If you look at countries like Japan the students are much more studious generally speaking (at least until college). There is a lot of societal pressure there that keeps students motivated. I certainly don't think the Japanese students perform better because they have better teachers, they simply work much harder.
If there's no pressure on the students to perform at home there's really not much the teachers can do to make them do their homework and excel in class.
Depends on your profession. I was fortunate to attend a school that had a computer lab that allowed me to learn how to program on my own time (my family couldn't afford a computer at home at the time).
If you come from a poor family having computers at school is a real boon. I don't think studious kids should be punished by not being allowed access to computers due to the majority not using them for educational purposes.
I also don't think the school system is broken. There's nothing stopping kids from going to school and being productive except their own lack of discipline and work ethic.
It isn't a false dichotomy (and of course I know what a false dichotomy is, I even posted on it on a true false dichotomy elsewhere on this story).
Imagine you're a senator and you have to vote on the bailout bill. You've already been through a series of negotiations (which you may not have even been a part of if you weren't on the relevant committee) and now the bill comes up for a vote. You only have four alternatives:
1) Vote yes
2) Vote no
3) Abstain
4) Try to continue debate (filibuster) -- if that doesn't work, you have to choose between the first three options
However, your constituents would only view you as either voting for it (option 1) or against it (the other three options) and your constituents would either be calling in to tell you to vote for it or against it (with the great majority telling you to vote against it).
So I ask you, were these multitude of people telling the senator to vote against the bill actually opposed to the bill or not? Sure, they may want SOMETHING but I think we all know what we are talking about (I hope). We're talking about the bailout bill as passed by Congress, not some other bill that doesn't exist. The congressmen only had two realistic options, to vote for it or against it and hope that a better bill could be prepared over the following days. I think the version they first voted on was far superior to the second version that had an added $150 billion in pork to be honest.
As for explaining how it works or doesn't, I'll leave that to the experts that have already performed an excellent job of explaining it on the Economist, various op-ed pieces and articles on the NY Times and Washington Post, and the numerous interviews with experts on Charlie Rose and a number of other programs.
This is the age of the Internet where information is relatively easy to find. Even if you cannot find it online, you may find someone like me who knows where to find hard copies of what you are seeking.
The original blueprints used for the rocket were lost. Does that mean the rocket didn't exist, despite all of the thousands of people that built it and watched it launch?
However, I do know where you can find thousands and thousands of bureaucratic pages of the Apollo project. They are stored at the Norlin Library at the University of Colorado at the Boulder campus. Back when I was an undergrad we had to do a little project of reviewing the design of the Apollo lander's landing strut and we were sent to that library to find some of the original design specifications. There was an unbelievable amount of information in the hundreds of journals stored there.
Also, Myth Busters did a recent episode of debunking many of the theories of moon landing deniers.
Personally I agree with what Biden said a couple of years ago. Your own religion is a private belief and not something you need to wear on your sleeve. While being a strong Catholic believer he never talked about it much in public until he was essentially forced to due to changing political times.
While your own personal beliefs are important, I don't agree that you necessarily need to give yourself an acceptable label in order to please the populous. In fact, I'd prefer if they did not publicly state their religion--instead, if people really want to know the candidates' convictions, they would have to tune in to the debates and look closely at their history rather than giving them a satisfactory or unsatisfactory label as a starting point.
That's debatable. Nobody claims that derivatives were the root of the current financial disaster. It's simply the gasoline that was poured on the spark.
Greenspan strongly advocated for derivatives to not be regulated and he got his wish (believing that the markets would self-regulate). Naysayers claimed that the derivatives would be too opaque and could lead to a domino effect. Warren Buffett referred to them a few years ago as financial weapons of mass destruction. Just read this very informative article in the NY Times for details about how the libertarian ideal was absolutely wrong in this case.
Before diving into the numbers, here is a detailed article about how derivatives had been predicted to fail extraordinarily in difficult times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/business/economy/09greenspan.html?bl
Here is the Economist's take on the bailout bill: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=12305249
And finally here is the Economist's explanation of why the bill could work (yes, with numbers): http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12305746
It isn't a scholarly work. The only thing I could find for free would be transcripts of presentations made on the floor when Bernanke and Paulson were trying to convince Congress to pass the bill. Do you REALLY want me to find the links to those transcripts?
Yea, like in Japan where produce costs a fortune.
Other countries that have tried hard to stamp out illegal migrant labor have had their own issues (see Spain).
This is one of the very few topics I agree with Bush Jr on, we need to make migrant labor feasible like it was in the past. There simply aren't enough Americans that are willing to do the work, just ask almost any labor-intensive crop producer. It's long hours of hard, mind-numbing and body-breaking low-skill work. The great majority of Americans simply won't do that kind of work unless the salary was so high that we would have to pay double to quadruple the price on produce.
That's a good devil's/idiot's argument. The only thing I can think of to compare to is people that switch religions. Tony Blair recently switch to Catholicism I believe, but it was after he left office and he implied on a recent interview (I think on the Daily Show) that it would have been a risky thing to politically while in office.
So hypothetically it should be OK to switch religions I suppose. I know it's weak, but it's all I have for this hypothetical argument.