I'll tell you WTF. The primary party injured by the trades and the coverup? The owners of the company stock, investors, retirement funds, etc - people who are being misled by company executives. The people who end up paying this fine? The same people, the owners of the stock. That doesn't sound a little "we had to destroy the village in order to save it" of a premise to you at all?
Besides which, I'm calling for being dubious of the regulators in addition to banks, not instead of the banks.:P
JP Morgan Chase lost about $7.2 billion dollars trading bonds (with its own private money, mind you, not depositors' money or anything). Then the feds decided this was bad and that they should fine them an extra $800 million. Even the Brits are dubious, suspecting that it's really because Chase has been publicly complaining about the feds and wondering when exactly it became a crime to lose money...
So if you want a laugh, sure, you can choose the popular-screed opinion du jour where banks are the bad guys. But I'd say, why limit your targets like that? We can be cynical about banks and regulators!!:P
I saw the Lady Gaga quip and Scott's fondness for effective ancient map-reducey techniques on unusual hardware platforms. It reminded me about things like discovering America. Did the Vikings discover it years before any other Europeans? Certainly. Did the Chinese discover it as well? There's some scholarly thought that maybe they did. But you know whose discovery actually effected change in the world? Lame old Christopher Columbus.
Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned here from people who want to actually change the world with software and if we spent less time ranting about mmap-vs-scanf-in-Hive we could learn it.
Ha! As if. I suppose you're blaming house Republicans, but if those guys were making budgetary threats, they'd be pretty hollow. Or have you been asleep for the past year and a half of gridlock?:P
And you're not doing much yourself to provide a counterexample to the notion that climate-change is a left-wing conspiracy. So I have an idea for you. How about we talk science for a bit instead of political smears?
For the manufacturer, it's also a political maneuver. They can say "we made smart guns!" and maybe get some politicians off their back for a little while.
And it's obvious why people don't actually buy them. Pay $$$ extra for finicky biometrics which are at least as likely to impede you as they are to assist you? I'll get right on that.
This solves the problem of getting to LEO cheaply enough by using a miniature, lightweight tank. That's why it's a big deal. (Or at least a medium deal.)
And forget the interstellar-space angle for a moment, too: anyone for a decent picture of Pluto?
The main thing that the USA today piece gets at is this:
But his crime devastated the Vatican, shattering the confidentiality that typically governs correspondence with the pope.
Let's consider a similar privilege in the US: attorney-client privilege. It's really important that people can trust their communications with their lawyers are confidential, at least if there is any hope to maintain a semblance of justice in the justice system instead of federal prosecutors running roughshod over everyone. Likewise, it's really important for the Vatican that people trust their priests enough to actually go to confession for forgiveness of sins (important to Catholics, you may have heard) and to receive moral guidance - at least so long as people remain imperfect, which means more or less 'forever'.
There have been some big scandals recently which have compromised that sort of trust.
"I think the GPs point was that it does not have to be a all or none - that you can have SSL of a self signed cert without the error message and without giving any "expectation of [high] security" (to quote GP "no full secure icon")"
Can you, really? I mean, we have a big enough problem with training users to type credentials in a login box served by http://www.myfavoritebank.com/ all insecure-like. This area where security intersects user interaction design is a tricksy one.
Upper management allowed equity investors it jack up the debt load.
Yeah... part of the plan to to return money to the shareholders. That's why companies do things: to make money for the shareholders. (The debtors, rather than getting totally screwed, are first in line for the bankruptcy proceeds.) Not necessarily a nice thing but, when the financial incentive put the two sides in conflict over millions (nearly billions!) of dollars, guess what happens?
Based on the debt load, the bakers union did not think a percentage of the company had enough value.
Yeah, because the company's worthless when they've got work rules saying that you can't put Twinkies and Wonder-bread on the same truck. Word on the street has it that normal distribution channels would have easily freed up $80-$120 million a year to go straight to the bottom line; maybe the bakers' percentage would have been worth something under those circumstances.
And now that they're out of union-contract-land, they're actually thinking about making new snacky-things. Because they might actually be able to make money off of them. Perish the thought.
The Teamsters union always had a variety of rules, e.g. "the guy who unloads the truck has to drive in a separate car from the guy who drives the truck" and other stuff like that. Hostess, realizing the costs that this imposed on them, didn't really invest in the brand very much over the next several decades, because they realized that they couldn't turn the investment into a big profit and they're not in the business of giving away money if they can help it - instead, they returned such money as there was to shareholders. (And to themselves as management. The shareholders and bankruptcy courts are free to look into that, certainly.) Hostess slowly declined into marginal profitability, then unprofitability, and limped around in bankruptcy for 11 years, until at a critical juncture the baker's union went on strike because they felt that they could do better for their members in any takeover than if Hostess were otherwise restructured with a Teamsters contract.
No, because there were (possibly-surprisingly) very few actual crimes associated with the financial crisis. Even civil suits with lower burdens of proof than criminal cases, such as the ones filed by the SEC versus the likes of Edward Steffelin (JPMorgan Chase, with regards to Squared CDO 2007-1) and Brian Stoker (Citigroup, similar). There just haven't been any substantial number of laws broken. We'll see how the suits against Fabrice Tourre (Goldman Sachs) and Credit Suisse (as an abstract entity) go.
You want to know why the meltdown happened? Your first thought will be "greed". I'd be more abstract and call it "pursuit of money", but tomato/tomahto. Anyway. GREED! Right, but! It's not enough. Greed happens all the time in the corporate world without causing meltdowns. All businesses are out to pursue money all the time, doubly so in the financial sector, and it doesn't cause meltdowns all the time. The difference here? The reason that the meltdown happened? The system was giving them money for doing the wrong thing. And it started when the Washington, DC establishment combined negative real interest rates (subsidizing the housing bubble) with federal homeownership programs that paid the banks top dollar to make shaky mortgages -- and when federal rules gave ratings from a few firms with clear conflict-of-interest problems special preference in the regulatory system, and thus encouraged all banks to buy AAA-rated mortgage junk to maintain their regulatory capital requirements.
Of course banks caused the crisis. They were paid to do so, and paid handsomely, and chased into doing so by regulators when they weren't overtly paid. But don't worry!!! We've solved the failures with Dodd-Frank and it'll never happen again!!!11 *coughcoughcough asif cough*
Of course, if you ran it into town express on the Fourth Avenue line, you'd have to kick off the existing express trains (D and N) and make them run local or something. Then once the new express got to downtown Brooklyn, you'd need to decide which line has to run local through Brooklyn and on to lower Manhattan through the Montague Tube (as opposed to the more northerly route via the Manhattan Bridge) and where it would go from there (the Nassau Street line has capacity as far north as Chambers/City Hall, easily)
That's a very good point. There are more IT workers than just me. There is, in fact, a great level of diversity in tech workers, tech companies, and their goals in life and business. It's great for city-oriented tech workers that NYC is becoming a place that lots of tech workers like to live and work, and that doesn't need to undercut anyone else's tech work (except insofar as it's a better deal for the employee, which is just fair competition).
While some of these points are not without merits: (0) what exactly are you proposing to carry that public transit would interfere with? big fat server racks? (1) "constrained by the hours the metro runs" it runs ALL NIGHT - thank you - they're quite proud of it, though it makes maintenance obnoxious - and moreover for historical reasons there are like 3 ALMOST COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT subway SYSTEMS (not just lines, systems, IRT BMT IND) so if one is down there's probably a backup(2) office outing: just tell everyone to hop on the subway, 80%+ of them will have an unlimited pass anyway, and the rest you can let expense it if you really want (3) I'm not sure that the hiring pool dynamics work exactly like you imagine; the big tech hubs support businesses of the sort where you say "I am in a high-margin business and I can make a lot of money per employee; I can afford to pay them lots and I am constrained by my ability to find and attract large numbers of skilled people and to grow the business much bigger". If your business isn't like that it's another matter and sure, go for cheap programmers, have fun, I won't be working there:D
Well... Really good technology workers tend to be well-paid, for starters. But beyond just being paid well, such people also like to have enjoyable life experiences. In fact, I saw some fascinating coverage (which I was trying to look up to link you to but failed, thanks google) about the divergence in the fortunes of various cities, suggesting that places such as New York and San Francisco in fact can offer higher real wages for high-income people like software engineers when you use a high-income person's market-basket of goods and services, because they have a variety of goods and services (and opportunities for life experiences) which would be more expensive to get out in the middle-of-nowhere suburbs.
in summary... because that's where the cool kids want to hang out. and you want to hire the cool kids.
That would be actually reasonably smooth move by Obama if he wishes to temper the wrath of his own party. But it's completely absurd to imagine that it's the petition that would make him change his mind. Still, if you're into such things...
Since you ask? Media Matters for America, which isn't just a 501(c)(4) but a 501(c)(3) and routinely engages in blasting the American right wing.
501(c)(4) organizations are for promoting social causes; donations are nondeductible but operations tax-exempt, aka "if we performed these activities as individuals we wouldn't get taxed again so why should we be taxed as a group?" -- they can engage in cause-oriented political spending. 501(c)(3) are charitable organizations and the donations are tax-deductible and the organization isn't supposed to do partisan political spending at all. Then of course there are 501(c)(5)'s, aka labor unions, a left-wing favorite who are given very broad discretion to engage in very overt political spending to the tune of billions of dollars... but that's its own rabbit hole, and I digress.
Anyway. Media Matters would make an okay 501(c)(4), as they clearly have some idea of a social cause, but they go above and beyond that to get outright all-contributions-deductible 501(c)(3) status while their political enemies were denied any tax exemptions at all.
But don't worry! The US left has already proposed a way to resolve these abuses targeting right-wing political activity! Nancy Pelosi would have us take action to ban these vehicles for right-wing political activity altogether. We can also pretend Citizens United never happened.:P (Whatever else, that lady's got some chutzpah.)
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Besides which, I'm calling for being dubious of the regulators in addition to banks, not instead of the banks. :P
JP Morgan Chase lost about $7.2 billion dollars trading bonds (with its own private money, mind you, not depositors' money or anything). Then the feds decided this was bad and that they should fine them an extra $800 million. Even the Brits are dubious, suspecting that it's really because Chase has been publicly complaining about the feds and wondering when exactly it became a crime to lose money...
So if you want a laugh, sure, you can choose the popular-screed opinion du jour where banks are the bad guys. But I'd say, why limit your targets like that? We can be cynical about banks and regulators!! :P
I'm holding out for the app to help me avoid huge ships.
They'd need to be careful. A female playing the Doctor would risk being objectified. Then it would be Doctor Whom.
I saw the Lady Gaga quip and Scott's fondness for effective ancient map-reducey techniques on unusual hardware platforms. It reminded me about things like discovering America. Did the Vikings discover it years before any other Europeans? Certainly. Did the Chinese discover it as well? There's some scholarly thought that maybe they did. But you know whose discovery actually effected change in the world? Lame old Christopher Columbus.
Perhaps there's a lesson to be learned here from people who want to actually change the world with software and if we spent less time ranting about mmap-vs-scanf-in-Hive we could learn it.
Ha! As if. I suppose you're blaming house Republicans, but if those guys were making budgetary threats, they'd be pretty hollow. Or have you been asleep for the past year and a half of gridlock? :P
And you're not doing much yourself to provide a counterexample to the notion that climate-change is a left-wing conspiracy. So I have an idea for you. How about we talk science for a bit instead of political smears?
For the manufacturer, it's also a political maneuver. They can say "we made smart guns!" and maybe get some politicians off their back for a little while.
And it's obvious why people don't actually buy them. Pay $$$ extra for finicky biometrics which are at least as likely to impede you as they are to assist you? I'll get right on that.
And forget the interstellar-space angle for a moment, too: anyone for a decent picture of Pluto?
The main thing that the USA today piece gets at is this:
Let's consider a similar privilege in the US: attorney-client privilege. It's really important that people can trust their communications with their lawyers are confidential, at least if there is any hope to maintain a semblance of justice in the justice system instead of federal prosecutors running roughshod over everyone. Likewise, it's really important for the Vatican that people trust their priests enough to actually go to confession for forgiveness of sins (important to Catholics, you may have heard) and to receive moral guidance - at least so long as people remain imperfect, which means more or less 'forever'.
There have been some big scandals recently which have compromised that sort of trust.
Can you, really? I mean, we have a big enough problem with training users to type credentials in a login box served by http://www.myfavoritebank.com/ all insecure-like. This area where security intersects user interaction design is a tricksy one.
More regulatory uncertainty! Yay!
You must be taking the slow bus. Metro North can do ~23 miles in ~25 minutes (White Plains to Grand Central).
Yeah... part of the plan to to return money to the shareholders. That's why companies do things: to make money for the shareholders. (The debtors, rather than getting totally screwed, are first in line for the bankruptcy proceeds.) Not necessarily a nice thing but, when the financial incentive put the two sides in conflict over millions (nearly billions!) of dollars, guess what happens?
Yeah, because the company's worthless when they've got work rules saying that you can't put Twinkies and Wonder-bread on the same truck. Word on the street has it that normal distribution channels would have easily freed up $80-$120 million a year to go straight to the bottom line; maybe the bakers' percentage would have been worth something under those circumstances.
And now that they're out of union-contract-land, they're actually thinking about making new snacky-things. Because they might actually be able to make money off of them. Perish the thought.
Not quite.
The Teamsters union always had a variety of rules, e.g. "the guy who unloads the truck has to drive in a separate car from the guy who drives the truck" and other stuff like that. Hostess, realizing the costs that this imposed on them, didn't really invest in the brand very much over the next several decades, because they realized that they couldn't turn the investment into a big profit and they're not in the business of giving away money if they can help it - instead, they returned such money as there was to shareholders. (And to themselves as management. The shareholders and bankruptcy courts are free to look into that, certainly.) Hostess slowly declined into marginal profitability, then unprofitability, and limped around in bankruptcy for 11 years, until at a critical juncture the baker's union went on strike because they felt that they could do better for their members in any takeover than if Hostess were otherwise restructured with a Teamsters contract.
You want to know why the meltdown happened? Your first thought will be "greed". I'd be more abstract and call it "pursuit of money", but tomato/tomahto. Anyway. GREED! Right, but! It's not enough. Greed happens all the time in the corporate world without causing meltdowns. All businesses are out to pursue money all the time, doubly so in the financial sector, and it doesn't cause meltdowns all the time. The difference here? The reason that the meltdown happened? The system was giving them money for doing the wrong thing. And it started when the Washington, DC establishment combined negative real interest rates (subsidizing the housing bubble) with federal homeownership programs that paid the banks top dollar to make shaky mortgages -- and when federal rules gave ratings from a few firms with clear conflict-of-interest problems special preference in the regulatory system, and thus encouraged all banks to buy AAA-rated mortgage junk to maintain their regulatory capital requirements.
Of course banks caused the crisis. They were paid to do so, and paid handsomely, and chased into doing so by regulators when they weren't overtly paid. But don't worry!!! We've solved the failures with Dodd-Frank and it'll never happen again!!!11 *coughcoughcough asif cough*
Of course, if you ran it into town express on the Fourth Avenue line, you'd have to kick off the existing express trains (D and N) and make them run local or something. Then once the new express got to downtown Brooklyn, you'd need to decide which line has to run local through Brooklyn and on to lower Manhattan through the Montague Tube (as opposed to the more northerly route via the Manhattan Bridge) and where it would go from there (the Nassau Street line has capacity as far north as Chambers/City Hall, easily)
That's a very good point. There are more IT workers than just me. There is, in fact, a great level of diversity in tech workers, tech companies, and their goals in life and business. It's great for city-oriented tech workers that NYC is becoming a place that lots of tech workers like to live and work, and that doesn't need to undercut anyone else's tech work (except insofar as it's a better deal for the employee, which is just fair competition).
What about that crowd over at Etsy? I mean, I their tech leadership isn't Google-level, but statsd and loupe ain't nothing.
While some of these points are not without merits: (0) what exactly are you proposing to carry that public transit would interfere with? big fat server racks? (1) "constrained by the hours the metro runs" it runs ALL NIGHT - thank you - they're quite proud of it, though it makes maintenance obnoxious - and moreover for historical reasons there are like 3 ALMOST COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT subway SYSTEMS (not just lines, systems, IRT BMT IND) so if one is down there's probably a backup(2) office outing: just tell everyone to hop on the subway, 80%+ of them will have an unlimited pass anyway, and the rest you can let expense it if you really want (3) I'm not sure that the hiring pool dynamics work exactly like you imagine; the big tech hubs support businesses of the sort where you say "I am in a high-margin business and I can make a lot of money per employee; I can afford to pay them lots and I am constrained by my ability to find and attract large numbers of skilled people and to grow the business much bigger". If your business isn't like that it's another matter and sure, go for cheap programmers, have fun, I won't be working there :D
Excuse me. I'm working here at a just-went-public stock photography marketplace a block south of the NYSE. Don't knock the WHOLE sector. :P
Well... Really good technology workers tend to be well-paid, for starters. But beyond just being paid well, such people also like to have enjoyable life experiences. In fact, I saw some fascinating coverage (which I was trying to look up to link you to but failed, thanks google) about the divergence in the fortunes of various cities, suggesting that places such as New York and San Francisco in fact can offer higher real wages for high-income people like software engineers when you use a high-income person's market-basket of goods and services, because they have a variety of goods and services (and opportunities for life experiences) which would be more expensive to get out in the middle-of-nowhere suburbs.
in summary... because that's where the cool kids want to hang out. and you want to hire the cool kids.
What's worse than ending any particular product is mangling the Internet, like they did with the shutdown of Google Reader and with newsgroups.
That would be actually reasonably smooth move by Obama if he wishes to temper the wrath of his own party. But it's completely absurd to imagine that it's the petition that would make him change his mind. Still, if you're into such things...
501(c)(4) organizations are for promoting social causes; donations are nondeductible but operations tax-exempt, aka "if we performed these activities as individuals we wouldn't get taxed again so why should we be taxed as a group?" -- they can engage in cause-oriented political spending. 501(c)(3) are charitable organizations and the donations are tax-deductible and the organization isn't supposed to do partisan political spending at all. Then of course there are 501(c)(5)'s, aka labor unions, a left-wing favorite who are given very broad discretion to engage in very overt political spending to the tune of billions of dollars... but that's its own rabbit hole, and I digress.
Anyway. Media Matters would make an okay 501(c)(4), as they clearly have some idea of a social cause, but they go above and beyond that to get outright all-contributions-deductible 501(c)(3) status while their political enemies were denied any tax exemptions at all.
But don't worry! The US left has already proposed a way to resolve these abuses targeting right-wing political activity! Nancy Pelosi would have us take action to ban these vehicles for right-wing political activity altogether. We can also pretend Citizens United never happened. :P (Whatever else, that lady's got some chutzpah.)