What does "get the money out of politics" mean? [...] Seriously, with all the abuses of other moneyed interests,(mine, of course never abuse the system) no one has ever even tried to explain something better to me.
It means a lot of things. Just because you are ignorant doesn't meant there are no good answers.
Stop politicians from taking bribes Prohibit members of Congress from soliciting and receiving contributions from any industry or entity they regulate, including those industries' lobbyists. Prohibit all fundraising during Congressional working hours.
Limit super PAC contributions and "coordination" Require SuperPACs to abide by the same contribution limits as other political committees. Toughen rules regarding SuperPACs' and other groups' coordination with political campaigns and political parties.
Prevent job offers as bribes Close the "revolving door" where elected representatives and senior staff sell off their legislative power for high-paying jobs. Stop them from negotiating jobs while in office and, once they leave, bar them from all lobbying activity for 5 years.
Call all people who lobby, lobbyists Significantly expand the definition of and register all lobbyists to prevent influencers from skirting the rules.
Limit lobbyist donations Limit the amount that lobbyists and their clients can contribute to federal candidates, political parties, and political committees to $500 per year and limit lobbyist fundraising for political campaigns. Federal contractors are already banned from contributing to campaigns: extend that ban to lobbyists, high-level executives, government relations employees, and PACs of federal government contractors.
End secret money Mandate full transparency of all political money. Require any organization that spends $10,000 or more on advertisements to elect or defeat federal candidates to file a disclosure report online with the Federal Election Commission within 24 hours. List each of the donors who gave $10,000 or more to the organization to run such ads. This includes all PACs, 501c nonprofits, or other groups that engage in electioneering.
Empower all voters with a tax rebate Build up the influence of voters by creating a biennial $100 Tax Rebate that they can use to make qualified contributions to federal candidates, political parties, and political committees. Flood elections with small-donor contributions that will offset the huge spenders. Candidates and political groups will only be eligible for these funds if they agree to a set of contribution limits: they will only accept money from small donors (giving $500 or less a year), other groups abiding by the limits, and the Tax Rebates themselves.
Disclose "bundling" Require federal candidates to disclose the names of individuals who "bundle" contributions for the member of Congress or candidate, regardless of whether such individuals are registered lobbyists.
Enforce the rules Strengthen the Federal Election Commission's independence and strengthen the House and Senate ethics enforcement processes. Provide federal prosecutors the additional tools necessary to combat corruption, and prohibit lobbyists who fail to properly register and disclose their activities from engaging in federal lobbying activities for a period of two years.
The first reason for them to gear up this way is that DHS is selling us back equipment that the military purchased for Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a boost to the MIC, and a nice way to double tax us for the same equipment. Yes, DHS sells them for less money but still are selling them to local police.
I must have missed that the first time I read your comment.
How is that possibly a "double tax us for the same equipment"?
Every war that the USA has been in, we've tried to destroy, give away, or sell as much as possible instead of shipping it home. I'm honestly surprised that the military is bringing anything that big home and selling it to state/local authorities for pennies on the dollar.
Well, I certainly agree with most of your points (I normally do) but have to debate one particular omission from yours and GPs comments. Violence by Police departments has escalated drastically in the same time as criminal violence has gone down. Police brutality is close to a daily occurrence today, and not just the cops manhandling a suspected felon but outright killing people.
I would question this conclusion. I'm inclined to think that the police have always been brutal, the only difference now is increased reporting (and video recording). As a point in case, the proliferation of cell phone video has led to a proliferation of lawsuits against police who have confiscated phones or arrested the videographer.
It's something of a society wide problem, where in the past we didn't have a grasp on the extent of many problems, either from willful blindness or unintentional ignorance.
since a false positive is likely to be close enough to a true positive that it will be incorrectly affirmed by eyewitnesses, even if the authorities don't bias them by telling them that the guy was a match.
That's exactly what I thought when I read in TFA that "he ranked No. 1 among possible matches."
It's a matter of when, not if, the #1 match is innocent, but was in the same place at the same time as the actual perpetrator.
What makes you think that banks or credit cards have any stake in fraud protection? Everything they do is insured or charged back to the vendor.
As long as the issuing credit card company stays under some maximum % of fraud, they won't get bounced from the Mastercard/Visa/Amex/Discover transaction network.
Non-Annex I countries (as listed in the Kyoto Protocol) are becoming the main contributors to cumulative emissions just as climate change has turned dangerous, that makes their emissions the cause of dangerous climate change.
Maybe it's just late, but can you to link directly to your source (pdf?) and maybe throw in a page reference for good measure
The larger tariffs could be used to assist with adaptation costs in countries with low per capita emissions where vulnerability to dangerous climate change is high.
China's per capita emissions are lower than Europe (as a whole and many individual countries) and much lower than the USA. I don't think per capita is the measure you want to be using.
Krugan certainly knows more about global economics than I do, but he's not shy about the fact that his writings are as much about promoting a liberal agenda as they are about understanding how global markets actually work.
Not understanding global markets indeed. Neither Krugman nor mdsolar seem to mention that China has the world's 2nd largest (by trading volume) carbon market. And that's just their pilot program.
The southwestern city of Chongqing will be the seventh region in China to launch carbon trading when its market opens on June 13, the local carbon exchange said Thursday, in a move designed to curb the city's greenhouse gas emissions.
The market is the last of China's planned pilot CO2 markets ahead of the launch of a nationwide scheme later this decade as the world's biggest-emitting nation steps up efforts to slow down rapid emissions growth.
China is already moving in the right direction and a hard cap is definitely in their future.... If for no other reason than China is planning to increase its nuclear power production by more than an order of magnitude over the next 10~15 years. If everything goes to plan, China will be producing more nuclear power than #1 and #2 (USA & France) combined.
Proposing a carbon tariff seems like a big middle finger to a government that is pouring tens of billions into solar, wind, and nuclear power. (Did I mention that China is #1 in wind power?)
There are too many holes in the manufacturing capability now while in China the place to make that other thing is just down the road - like it used to be in the USA.
Manufacturing is coming back to the Americas (North/Central/South) specifically because of problems mentioned in TFA
But Sparseâ(TM)s manufacturing partners there initially had trouble making the die-cast metal parts to the right tolerances, and there was a high rejection rate for units with the silver finish.
âoeI really care about making things perfect, and it takes a certain amount of time to solve things when the problems crop up and the information has to filter up the supply chain,â Owen says. âoeIt can take you a week to see if they are shipping the same part you presented to them.â
Problems like those can still happen with local manufacturing, but they get noticed and resolved in days, not weeks.
Maybe we shouldn't put our greatest dreams in the hands of government.
6:30 a.m. You are awakened by your clock radio. You know it is actually 6:30 because the National Institute of Standards and Technology keeps the official time. And you can listen to your favorite radio station only because the Federal Communications Commission brings organization and coherence to our vast telecommunications system. It ensures, for example, that radio stations do not overlap and that stations signals are not interfered with by the numerous other devices â" cell phones, satellite television, wireless computers, etc. â" whose signals crowd our nationâ(TM)s airwaves.
6:35 a.m. Like 17 million other Americans, you have asthma. But as you get out of bed you notice that you are breathing freely this morning. This is thanks in part to government clean air laws that reduce the air pollution that would otherwise greatly worsen your condition.
6:38 a.m. You go into the kitchen for breakfast. You pour some water into your coffeemaker. You simply take for granted that this water is safe to drink. But in fact you count on your city water department to constantly monitor the quality of your water and to immediately take measures to correct any potential problems with this vital resource.
6:39 a.m. You flip the switch on the coffee maker. There is no short in the outlet or in the electrical line and there is no resulting fire in your house. Why? Because when your house was being built, the electrical system had to be inspected to make sure it was properly installed â" a service provided by your local government. And it was installed by an electrician who was licensed by your state government to ensure his competence and your safety.
Your greatest dreams are in the hands of the government everyday. And those are just the ones from the first 10 minutes after you wake up.
From here, the sequence of events is relatively undisputed. With Hammond equipped and as FBI agents reportedly watched on, AntiSec began plundering Stratforâ(TM)s financial information and personal records. Monsegur convinced Hammond and others to unknowingly transfer âoemultiple gigabytes of confidential dataâ to one of the FBIâ(TM)s servers. That included the roughly 60,000 credit card numbers and records for Stratfor customers that Hammond was ultimately charged with stealing.
This is going to piss off a lot of very powerful people who were on that customer & credit card list.
2. CEOs are focused on next quarter profits and, aside from a few corporate founder CEOs, are not able to have their company innovate. [...] The second problem is caused by SEC, SOX and CEO compensation structure, not by HFT.
I'm very interested in hearing about how the SEC and SOX are at all to blame for CEOs pursuing short term goals.
It will take an act of congress to fix this and they're bought and paid for by the HFT's.
The exchanges set their own rules and they could collectively or individually halt HFTers in their tracks. The book mentioned, Flash Boys, talks about their own exchange IEX and how they go out of their way to prevent HFTers from having any advantage.
Norway's $880 billion sovereign wealth fund, the worldâ(TM)s largest, is throwing its support behind Brad Katsuyamaâ(TM)s new exchange.
[...]
"IEX is a trading venue where all players participate on the same terms," oil fund spokesman Thomas Sevang said in an e-mailed response to questions. "We support this."
IEX, [...], doesn't pay firms to buy or sell shares, shunning a practice that many markets use to lure business from high-speed traders. It mandates a 350-microsecond delay between requests to trade and executions to prevent traders from pre-empting their moves through high-frequency maneuvers.
Any exchange could cut off the HFTers in a heartbeat, if they wanted to.
The problem with this is that what is that even going to accomplish?
For years the courts have been throwing out cases because "you can't prove anything" meant that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue. If the court stipulates that the plaintiffs were spied on, then they have standing to sue, and the case can move forward.
they will act like any other local utility and tell you to wait 5 years until they gather enough data that there is a demand for it, then take another few years to study the problem, then spend another 5 years begging for money in the budget and finally upgrading the network
Utilities don't get funded through the general budget. They petition the PUC/PSC/etc with a plan, it gets approved (or not), then the utility either raises prices the approved amount to cover the direct cost or the utility issues bonds... and then raises prices the approved amount to cover the bonds.
And AFAIK there's no such thing as a government utility, only government chartered corporations. They are self funding and mostly independent of government, except where they have to interact with the Public Utilities Commission, like any other utility.
It must be nice for your stock to be so excessively overvalued to have so much money to throw around on all these ancillary projects.
Google has money to throw around because they're excessively profitable. They aren't issuing shares to fund this stuff. As for ancillary... well, here's two quotes from their IPO prospectus
And now, we are in the process of establishing the Google Foundation. We intend to contribute significant resources to the foundation, including employee time and approximately 1% of Googleâ(TM)s equity and profits in some form. We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the worldâ(TM)s problems.
We will optimize for the long term rather than trying to produce smooth earnings for each quarter. We will support selected high-risk, high-reward projects and manage our portfolio of projects.
They have always aimed to do things outside search/advertising.
Of course we need extraordinary proof. That's why Snowden's documents are so explosive. Finally! Proof!
It's the basic bones of the NSA's charter.
Then provide a link to the NSA's charter and quote the portion you think is relevant. Argument by Assertion is not an argument, which is exactly what I called out the GGP for.
Of course our intelligence operations will continue to try to learn what other governments are up to, just like they do to us and everyone else.
I'm talking specifically about spying on Heads of State, so if you're saying that other governments are tapping Obama's cellphone, don't even bother to hit reply, call your local FBI field office and give them your proof.
Spying on people like Angie Merkel is the entire reason we instructed our Congress to spend $30-$40 per person on an NSA. Period. End of story. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Same goes for most of the other NSA revelations (spying on Brazil's government, helping the Aussies spy on Indonesia, etc.).
Merkel complained to President Barack Obama on Wednesday after learning that U.S. intelligence may have targeted her mobile phone, saying that would be "a serious breach of trust" if confirmed. The two leaders spoke by phone, Carney said.
"The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor," said Carney. "The United States greatly values our close cooperation with Germany on a broad range of shared security challenges."
Why did Obama promise not to spy on Merkel if that's what "we instructed our Congress to" do? (Who's "we" by the way? I sure as hell didn't instruct anyone do to that.)
Ms. Merkel, who last fall declared that âoespying between friends is simply unacceptableâ and that the United States had opened a breach of trust that would have to be repaired, said at the news conference that âoewe have a few difficulties yet to overcome.â One remaining issue, she said, was the âoeproportionalityâ of the surveillance.
Whether or not you can lock up Snowden, the NSA needs its plug pulled for utter incompetence.
Snowden intentionally got himself posted to a NSA facility that had not received the security software upgrades which were rolling out across all DoD facilities. The next Manning or Snowden is going to have to work a lot harder to vacuum up large quantities of classified data without getting caught.
Apart from social media (largely), none of those things are "the web."
If you read further, there's a lot of other sources the NSA is (not denying that they are) pulling from.
declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants. also declined to say whether the N.S.A. collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media gathers airline passenger data collects photographs from national identity card databases created by foreign countries asked whether the agency is now [gathering iris scans], officials declined to comment The documents also indicate that the N.S.A. collects iris scans of foreigners through other means. a program called Pisces, collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range of countries
Am I doing it wrong, or do (un)ordered lists not work on/. anymore?
The details of what gets recorded in the lien are a matter of state law, but certainly there will be some description that the lien is in fact a mortgage.
Every few years there's a mini-scandal as [State] realizes that the Social Security numbers weren't (properly) redacted from the public loan documents.
The increasing trend towards putting public records online has accelerated the pace of these "scandals."
You would think the banks would have an obligation to protect investors' money.
Banks were securitizing the bad loans and selling them off immediately. They protected their investors money, it's the poor assholes who bought those fraudulently rated AAA bundled loans that weren't protected.
The people who want to blame this on government housing policy or sub-prime borrowers are the financial equivalent of climate change deniers (yes, I'm talking about the GP). All of the official reports blame widespread fraud on the part of lenders. Anyone who disagrees with this is in an alternate universe.
This is the Congressional Report from 2011: The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf (663 pages PDF)
They lay out in extensively footnoted detail who was responsible and who wasn't, but I'll save you the trouble of reading them: The collapse was caused by weak regulatory controls, conflicts of interest in the banking sector, lending fraud, credit ratings agencies' fraud, massive failures in risk management by the financial sector, and insufficient capital reserves.
These financial deniers need to cite legitimate research that supports their position. At the bare minimum, supporting documents would need to lay out (with numbers) what deserves the blame. Because the official reports say things like
Research indicates only 6% of high-cost loansâ"a proxy for subprime loansâ"had any connection to the [1977 CRA] law. Loans made by CRA-regulated lenders in the neighborhoods in which they were required to lend were half as likely to default as similar loans made in the same neighborhoods by independent mortgage originators not subject to the law.
The facts are out there, if only you'd look past the media noise machines.
Slashdot Mirror
What does "get the money out of politics" mean?
[...]
Seriously, with all the abuses of other moneyed interests,(mine, of course never abuse the system) no one has ever even tried to explain something better to me.
It means a lot of things.
Just because you are ignorant doesn't meant there are no good answers.
Here's a few of them:
http://anticorruptionact.org/#act
Stop politicians from taking bribes
Prohibit members of Congress from soliciting and receiving contributions from any industry or entity they regulate, including those industries' lobbyists. Prohibit all fundraising during Congressional working hours.
Limit super PAC contributions and "coordination"
Require SuperPACs to abide by the same contribution limits as other political committees. Toughen rules regarding SuperPACs' and other groups' coordination with political campaigns and political parties.
Prevent job offers as bribes
Close the "revolving door" where elected representatives and senior staff sell off their legislative power for high-paying jobs. Stop them from negotiating jobs while in office and, once they leave, bar them from all lobbying activity for 5 years.
Call all people who lobby, lobbyists
Significantly expand the definition of and register all lobbyists to prevent influencers from skirting the rules.
Limit lobbyist donations
Limit the amount that lobbyists and their clients can contribute to federal candidates, political parties, and political committees to $500 per year and limit lobbyist fundraising for political campaigns. Federal contractors are already banned from contributing to campaigns: extend that ban to lobbyists, high-level executives, government relations employees, and PACs of federal government contractors.
End secret money
Mandate full transparency of all political money. Require any organization that spends $10,000 or more on advertisements to elect or defeat federal candidates to file a disclosure report online with the Federal Election Commission within 24 hours. List each of the donors who gave $10,000 or more to the organization to run such ads. This includes all PACs, 501c nonprofits, or other groups that engage in electioneering.
Empower all voters with a tax rebate
Build up the influence of voters by creating a biennial $100 Tax Rebate that they can use to make qualified contributions to federal candidates, political parties, and political committees. Flood elections with small-donor contributions that will offset the huge spenders. Candidates and political groups will only be eligible for these funds if they agree to a set of contribution limits: they will only accept money from small donors (giving $500 or less a year), other groups abiding by the limits, and the Tax Rebates themselves.
Disclose "bundling"
Require federal candidates to disclose the names of individuals who "bundle" contributions for the member of Congress or candidate, regardless of whether such individuals are registered lobbyists.
Enforce the rules
Strengthen the Federal Election Commission's independence and strengthen the House and Senate ethics enforcement processes. Provide federal prosecutors the additional tools necessary to combat corruption, and prohibit lobbyists who fail to properly register and disclose their activities from engaging in federal lobbying activities for a period of two years.
The first reason for them to gear up this way is that DHS is selling us back equipment that the military purchased for Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a boost to the MIC, and a nice way to double tax us for the same equipment. Yes, DHS sells them for less money but still are selling them to local police.
I must have missed that the first time I read your comment.
The original cost was $700,000.
The cost to ship back to the USA and refurb is $250,000 to $300,000 per vehicle
The cost to local police is $5,000.
How is that possibly a "double tax us for the same equipment"?
Every war that the USA has been in, we've tried to destroy, give away, or sell as much as possible instead of shipping it home.
I'm honestly surprised that the military is bringing anything that big home and selling it to state/local authorities for pennies on the dollar.
Well, I certainly agree with most of your points (I normally do) but have to debate one particular omission from yours and GPs comments. Violence by Police departments has escalated drastically in the same time as criminal violence has gone down. Police brutality is close to a daily occurrence today, and not just the cops manhandling a suspected felon but outright killing people.
I would question this conclusion.
I'm inclined to think that the police have always been brutal, the only difference now is increased reporting (and video recording).
As a point in case, the proliferation of cell phone video has led to a proliferation of lawsuits against police who have confiscated phones or arrested the videographer.
It's something of a society wide problem, where in the past we didn't have a grasp on the extent of many problems, either from willful blindness or unintentional ignorance.
since a false positive is likely to be close enough to a true positive that it will be incorrectly affirmed by eyewitnesses, even if the authorities don't bias them by telling them that the guy was a match.
That's exactly what I thought when I read in TFA that "he ranked No. 1 among possible matches."
It's a matter of when, not if, the #1 match is innocent, but was in the same place at the same time as the actual perpetrator.
These aren't hard coded admin passwords, just default passwords that were never changed.
and actually have some stake in fraud prevention.
What makes you think that banks or credit cards have any stake in fraud protection?
Everything they do is insured or charged back to the vendor.
As long as the issuing credit card company stays under some maximum % of fraud, they won't get bounced from the Mastercard/Visa/Amex/Discover transaction network.
Non-Annex I countries (as listed in the Kyoto Protocol) are becoming the main contributors to cumulative emissions just as climate change has turned dangerous, that makes their emissions the cause of dangerous climate change.
Maybe it's just late, but can you to link directly to your source (pdf?) and maybe throw in a page reference for good measure
The larger tariffs could be used to assist with adaptation costs in countries with low per capita emissions where vulnerability to dangerous climate change is high.
China's per capita emissions are lower than Europe (as a whole and many individual countries) and much lower than the USA.
I don't think per capita is the measure you want to be using.
Krugan certainly knows more about global economics than I do, but he's not shy about the fact that his writings are as much about promoting a liberal agenda as they are about understanding how global markets actually work.
Not understanding global markets indeed.
Neither Krugman nor mdsolar seem to mention that China has the world's 2nd largest (by trading volume) carbon market.
And that's just their pilot program.
You'd think that since these two care so much about the issue, they'd follow the news:
China's Chongqing to launch carbon market trading on June 13
Thursday Jun 5, 2014
The southwestern city of Chongqing will be the seventh region in China to launch carbon trading when its market opens on June 13, the local carbon exchange said Thursday, in a move designed to curb the city's greenhouse gas emissions.
The market is the last of China's planned pilot CO2 markets ahead of the launch of a nationwide scheme later this decade as the world's biggest-emitting nation steps up efforts to slow down rapid emissions growth.
China is already moving in the right direction and a hard cap is definitely in their future....
If for no other reason than China is planning to increase its nuclear power production by more than an order of magnitude over the next 10~15 years.
If everything goes to plan, China will be producing more nuclear power than #1 and #2 (USA & France) combined.
Proposing a carbon tariff seems like a big middle finger to a government that is pouring tens of billions into solar, wind, and nuclear power.
(Did I mention that China is #1 in wind power?)
There are too many holes in the manufacturing capability now while in China the place to make that other thing is just down the road - like it used to be in the USA.
Manufacturing is coming back to the Americas (North/Central/South) specifically because of problems mentioned in TFA
But Sparseâ(TM)s manufacturing partners there initially had trouble making the die-cast metal parts to the right tolerances, and there was a high rejection rate for units with the silver finish.
âoeI really care about making things perfect, and it takes a certain amount of time to solve things when the problems crop up and the information has to filter up the supply chain,â Owen says. âoeIt can take you a week to see if they are shipping the same part you presented to them.â
Problems like those can still happen with local manufacturing, but they get noticed and resolved in days, not weeks.
Maybe we shouldn't put our greatest dreams in the hands of government.
6:30 a.m. You are awakened by your clock radio. You know it is actually 6:30 because the National Institute of Standards and Technology keeps the official time. And you can listen to your favorite radio station only because the Federal Communications Commission brings organization and coherence to our vast telecommunications system. It ensures, for example, that radio stations do not overlap and that stations signals are not interfered with by the numerous other devices â" cell phones, satellite television, wireless computers, etc. â" whose signals crowd our nationâ(TM)s airwaves.
6:35 a.m. Like 17 million other Americans, you have asthma. But as you get out of bed you notice that you are breathing freely this morning. This is thanks in part to government clean air laws that reduce the air pollution that would otherwise greatly worsen your condition.
6:38 a.m. You go into the kitchen for breakfast. You pour some water into your coffeemaker. You simply take for granted that this water is safe to drink. But in fact you count on your city water department to constantly monitor the quality of your water and to immediately take measures to correct any potential problems with this vital resource.
6:39 a.m. You flip the switch on the coffee maker. There is no short in the outlet or in the electrical line and there is no resulting fire in your house. Why? Because when your house was being built, the electrical system had to be inspected to make sure it was properly installed â" a service provided by your local government. And it was installed by an electrician who was licensed by your state government to ensure his competence and your safety.
Your greatest dreams are in the hands of the government everyday.
And those are just the ones from the first 10 minutes after you wake up.
From here, the sequence of events is relatively undisputed. With Hammond equipped and as FBI agents reportedly watched on, AntiSec began plundering Stratforâ(TM)s financial information and personal records. Monsegur convinced Hammond and others to unknowingly transfer âoemultiple gigabytes of confidential dataâ to one of the FBIâ(TM)s servers. That included the roughly 60,000 credit card numbers and records for Stratfor customers that Hammond was ultimately charged with stealing.
This is going to piss off a lot of very powerful people who were on that customer & credit card list.
2. CEOs are focused on next quarter profits and, aside from a few corporate founder CEOs, are not able to have their company innovate.
[...]
The second problem is caused by SEC, SOX and CEO compensation structure, not by HFT.
I'm very interested in hearing about how the SEC and SOX are at all to blame for CEOs pursuing short term goals.
It will take an act of congress to fix this and they're bought and paid for by the HFT's.
The exchanges set their own rules and they could collectively or individually halt HFTers in their tracks.
The book mentioned, Flash Boys, talks about their own exchange IEX and how they go out of their way to prevent HFTers from having any advantage.
World's Biggest Wealth Fund Escapes Flash Boys in IEX Dark Pool
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-03/world-s-biggest-wealth-fund-escapes-flash-boys-in-iex-dark-pool.html
Norway's $880 billion sovereign wealth fund, the worldâ(TM)s largest, is throwing its support behind Brad Katsuyamaâ(TM)s new exchange.
[...]
"IEX is a trading venue where all players participate on the same terms," oil fund spokesman Thomas Sevang said in an e-mailed response to questions. "We support this."
IEX, [...], doesn't pay firms to buy or sell shares, shunning a practice that many markets use to lure business from high-speed traders. It mandates a 350-microsecond delay between requests to trade and executions to prevent traders from pre-empting their moves through high-frequency maneuvers.
Any exchange could cut off the HFTers in a heartbeat, if they wanted to.
Open source is a win here because I can fix it without waiting for a vendor patch. Not that I would, but I can.
And why wouldn't you?
Probably because you're waiting for some other guy (the vendor) to do compatibility and regression testing.
The problem with this is that what is that even going to accomplish?
For years the courts have been throwing out cases because "you can't prove anything" meant that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue.
If the court stipulates that the plaintiffs were spied on, then they have standing to sue, and the case can move forward.
they will act like any other local utility and tell you to wait 5 years until they gather enough data that there is a demand for it, then take another few years to study the problem, then spend another 5 years begging for money in the budget and finally upgrading the network
Utilities don't get funded through the general budget.
They petition the PUC/PSC/etc with a plan, it gets approved (or not),
then the utility either raises prices the approved amount to cover the direct cost
or the utility issues bonds... and then raises prices the approved amount to cover the bonds.
And AFAIK there's no such thing as a government utility, only government chartered corporations.
They are self funding and mostly independent of government, except where they have to interact with the Public Utilities Commission, like any other utility.
Can't we also be leaders in industry with public-private partnerships?
It must be nice for your stock to be so excessively overvalued to have so much money to throw around on all these ancillary projects.
Google has money to throw around because they're excessively profitable.
They aren't issuing shares to fund this stuff.
As for ancillary... well, here's two quotes from their IPO prospectus
And now, we are in the process of establishing the Google Foundation. We intend to contribute significant resources to the foundation, including employee time and approximately 1% of Googleâ(TM)s equity and profits in some form. We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the worldâ(TM)s problems.
We will optimize for the long term rather than trying to produce smooth earnings for each quarter. We will support selected high-risk, high-reward projects and manage our portfolio of projects.
They have always aimed to do things outside search/advertising.
You don't need extraordinary proof.
Of course we need extraordinary proof.
That's why Snowden's documents are so explosive. Finally! Proof!
It's the basic bones of the NSA's charter.
Then provide a link to the NSA's charter and quote the portion you think is relevant.
Argument by Assertion is not an argument, which is exactly what I called out the GGP for.
Of course our intelligence operations will continue to try to learn what other governments are up to, just like they do to us and everyone else.
I'm talking specifically about spying on Heads of State,
so if you're saying that other governments are tapping Obama's cellphone,
don't even bother to hit reply, call your local FBI field office and give them your proof.
Spying on people like Angie Merkel is the entire reason we instructed our Congress to spend $30-$40 per person on an NSA. Period. End of story. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Same goes for most of the other NSA revelations (spying on Brazil's government, helping the Aussies spy on Indonesia, etc.).
[Citation Needed]
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wh-us-not-monitoring-german-chancellor-angela-merkels-phone/
Merkel complained to President Barack Obama on Wednesday after learning that U.S. intelligence may have targeted her mobile phone, saying that would be "a serious breach of trust" if confirmed. The two leaders spoke by phone, Carney said.
"The president assured the chancellor that the United States is not monitoring and will not monitor the communications of the chancellor," said Carney. "The United States greatly values our close cooperation with Germany on a broad range of shared security challenges."
Why did Obama promise not to spy on Merkel if that's what "we instructed our Congress to" do?
(Who's "we" by the way? I sure as hell didn't instruct anyone do to that.)
7 months later and Merkel is still pissed off about it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/03/world/europe/merkel-says-gaps-with-us-over-surveillance-remain.html
Ms. Merkel, who last fall declared that âoespying between friends is simply unacceptableâ and that the United States had opened a breach of trust that would have to be repaired, said at the news conference that âoewe have a few difficulties yet to overcome.â One remaining issue, she said, was the âoeproportionalityâ of the surveillance.
Whether or not you can lock up Snowden, the NSA needs its plug pulled for utter incompetence.
Snowden intentionally got himself posted to a NSA facility that had not received the security software upgrades which were rolling out across all DoD facilities.
The next Manning or Snowden is going to have to work a lot harder to vacuum up large quantities of classified data without getting caught.
And most of the people answering yes can be easily identified as flat out liars.
Or just ignorant.
Never underestimate the power of the media to misinform people already predisposed to a point of view.
Apart from social media (largely), none of those things are "the web."
If you read further, there's a lot of other sources the NSA is (not denying that they are) pulling from.
declining to say whether the agency had access to the State Department database of photos of foreign visa applicants.
also declined to say whether the N.S.A. collected facial imagery of Americans from Facebook and other social media
gathers airline passenger data
collects photographs from national identity card databases created by foreign countries
asked whether the agency is now [gathering iris scans], officials declined to comment
The documents also indicate that the N.S.A. collects iris scans of foreigners through other means.
a program called Pisces, collecting biometric data on border crossings from a wide range of countries
Am I doing it wrong, or do (un)ordered lists not work on /. anymore?
The details of what gets recorded in the lien are a matter of state law, but certainly there will be some description that the lien is in fact a mortgage.
Every few years there's a mini-scandal as [State] realizes that the Social Security numbers weren't (properly) redacted from the public loan documents.
The increasing trend towards putting public records online has accelerated the pace of these "scandals."
You would think the banks would have an obligation to protect investors' money.
Banks were securitizing the bad loans and selling them off immediately.
They protected their investors money, it's the poor assholes who bought those fraudulently rated AAA bundled loans that weren't protected.
The people who want to blame this on government housing policy or sub-prime borrowers are the financial equivalent of climate change deniers (yes, I'm talking about the GP).
All of the official reports blame widespread fraud on the part of lenders.
Anyone who disagrees with this is in an alternate universe.
This was written in 2009 by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland:
Ten Myths about Subprime Mortgages
http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/commentary/2009/0509.cfm
This is the Senate Oversigh Report from 2011:
Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse (646 pages PDF)
http://www.hsgac.senate.gov//imo/media/doc/Financial_Crisis/FinancialCrisisReport.pdf
This is the Congressional Report from 2011:
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf (663 pages PDF)
They lay out in extensively footnoted detail who was responsible and who wasn't, but I'll save you the trouble of reading them:
The collapse was caused by weak regulatory controls, conflicts of interest in the banking sector, lending fraud, credit ratings agencies' fraud, massive failures in risk management by the financial sector, and insufficient capital reserves.
These financial deniers need to cite legitimate research that supports their position.
At the bare minimum, supporting documents would need to lay out (with numbers) what deserves the blame.
Because the official reports say things like
Research indicates only 6% of high-cost loansâ"a proxy for subprime loansâ"had any connection to the [1977 CRA] law. Loans made by CRA-regulated lenders in the neighborhoods in which they were required to lend were half as likely to default as similar loans made in the same neighborhoods by independent mortgage originators not subject to the law.
The facts are out there, if only you'd look past the media noise machines.