You are leaving out the activists and politicians who lobbied for greater credit access for the poor and for college students -- regardless of their ability to re-pay -- and they are equally to blame. "Every working family should be able to buy a home. Every kid should be able to go to college." Those soundbites sounds great, but without discipline and financial constraints, they are a recipe for disaster. You are also completely absolving the borrowers of any personal responsibility at all. No one put a gun to their heads to take that money -- they weren't not "financially clued in," they were either too lazy or too stupid to take their time and figure out whether or not what they were offered was in fact a good deal for them, and most importantly, WHETHER THEY COULD PAY IT BACK. My wife and I were offered mortgages for way more than we wanted to borrow in the run-up to the housing crisis, but we actually did our due diligence and decided on our own that we would (at best) end up severely cramped financially with one of those bigger notes. Sure the banks acted greedily and were predatory -- the way all banks have during the entirety of human civilization -- but so did the politicians and lobbyists (do you really think they had no idea what would happen when the banks are allowed to write half-million dollar mortgages to grocery clerks, or $200k loans to art students?), and so did the borrowers who got in over their heads. I think we are on the same page though that this type of lending to high-risk borrowers shouldn't be allowed, but I have no faith that Congress will ban it. Obama with House and Senate majorities let things stand as-is in the aftermath of the housing meltdown, as did Trump with his own Congressional majorities.
Credit scores are nothing more than applied actuarial science. Like most science, it "doesn't give a shit about you." You may hate the way companies use it, but it's a number backed by real science which simply indicates the likelihood of a borrower to pay back what they borrow. That's it. Perhaps the more important question for society is why are these big corps and even parts of the gov't still allowed to trap people in debt by lending out money they know can't be paid back?
Your credit score (vaguely) indicates whether you earn a paycheck, are self sufficient and pay your bills.
Not exactly. Your credit score indicates how likely you are to pay back what you borrow -- that's it. It's perfectly possible (and sadly common) for people that make a lot of money to be terrible borrowers and default on loans, or declare bankruptcy, etc. Conversely, it's also possible to make a rather modest paycheck but have a high credit score -- those are usually the people who never forget to pay a monthly bill, don't run a credit card balance, etc. Finally, you have to actually borrow money every once in awhile and pay it back to really build your credit score. That's how you "prove" that you'll actually pay back what you want to borrow, and why banks look very carefully at your credit card payment histories, etc. They literally have this stuff (managing financial risk) down to a science.
Nonsense. Credit scores are used to assign a risk to a borrower. The higher a person's credit score, the more likely it is that they will pay back what they borrow. Unlike China's "social credit," credit scoring is is rooted in real actuarial science. We've already seen what happens when credit scores and the like are ignored and money is just lent out to anyone regardless of their ability to ever pay it back (the mid-2000s housing crisis, and today's student loan crisis) just because "it's the right thing to do." It is a bad thing financially for the country (any country, not just the US) to import a bunch of dependents who are statistically highly unlikely to be able to provide any value to society beyond "diversity." Unlike previous generations of immigrants, there are very few opportunities for unskilled laborers in the United States. If you are hellbent on bringing them here, you better have a real plan for paying for them.
Most of the Uber / Lyft drivers I've ridden with over the years do it part-time when they feel like it to make some extra money. These people are absolutely not in bad financial straits -- there's even a large number of older, mostly-retired folks in there who drive to (in part) have something to do. Now, you might be able to make an argument that this negatively affects the traditional taxi industry (to which I say, it's about goddamn time), but the majority of drivers themselves are doing just fine.
That's not because right wing folks are dumber, it's because left wing folks have generally had more education and education teaches critical thinking.
And even with all that education, the left wing folks still haven't figured out that being smug pricks with a superiority complex doesn't get people to vote for their team.
Huh? Who are these "beltway bandits squeezing the government" with magical open-ended contracts for "services rendered"? Names please. And please post links to any non-competitive contracts being awarded to these companies, preferably to the actual awards as shown on fbo.gov. The press would absolutely have a field day with that stuff, and signing the gov't onto a bad (meaning illegal) contract is one of the few things a Federal employee can actually get outright fired for these days. As long as you have at least two vendors bidding on an opportunity, you'll have competition, which naturally drives down the price (unless they collude, which is highly illegal).
Here's a hint: what you're describing might have existed long ago but unless you're a) someone with the clout of Amazon or b) a defense contractor offering truly one-of-a-kind capabilities, EVERYTHING in DC is competitive, and has been for the last several decades at least. I routinely see larger DC-area companies get lazy and not put forth their best effort and pricing on an RFP response and get booted, even though they were the incumbent in an agency for decades. If anything, Federal procurement is more competitive than the way private sector firms purchase, because of the transparency and because the Fed purchasing folks typically have a legal obligation to save the taxpayers money whenever possible. Now, we can talk about whether or not the gov't goes too far the other way treats certain specialized services as pure commodities when they're really not, but that's another conversation.
The senior people who actually run the gov't on a day-to-day basis live in the metro DC area and that's not changing.
Tribal knowledge is key. Two years ago I saw a senior purchasing contract officer try to retire and a large part of an entire agency was unable to buy anything for over six months. Out of desperation, they talked her into coming back part-time for awhile, but she eventually retired for good and shut the thing down for another year, forcing them to send out a ton of RFPs at the very end of fiscal just so they didn't lose funding. Many other parts still require submission of paper invoices and other documentation. Sure they've made progress, but the US Gov't is the world's biggest employer, and customer, and they're based in Washington DC. The investment in infrastructure alone to support even one decent sized Federal agency is staggering. You're living in a fantasy world if you think that's ever changing. On the contrary, as shown by Amazon and others, DC just continues to become more important.
The "best" CPU is always the best one for *your* workload. If that's max single-threaded performance and money doesn't matter, then that means Intel, and it likely will for awhile. If we're talking about a workload that can be processed massively in parallel, then AMD has earned a seat at the table. I like the "High End CPUs - Intel vs AMD" benchmarks at PassMark -- should enable plenty of dick-waving no matter who you are. Take the time to understand your workload in detail, set your budget, and choose. Whatever you buy will be obsolete in a few years anyway.;-)
Same here . . . my wife and I are both registered unaffiliated voters but our phones got lit up by Democrat groups urging us to attend rallies and go vote, especially MoveOn -- even after we told them to remove us from their lists. Unwanted spamming is definitely is not a good way to sway people to your cause.
Whether you love or hate Intel or AMD (or, like me, are neutral and use the right tool for the job), you gotta love that we've finally got some CPU competition again. This will only accelerate the development of better tech and drive prices down.
Dude, quit talking out of your ass. Some of us actually spend significant time in the areas we talk about instead of just re-posting random articles from the Net. And yeah, MD Republican Governor Larry Hogan is gonna double-digits mop the floor on Tuesday with progressive lackey Ben Jealous in a very DEEP blue state because he's the most popular governor there EVER (with good reason). Imagine that, real working people (even Democrats!) actually like moderates that won't tax them into poverty and who aren't leftist fringe crazies.
Newark?!? Yeah right. That stretch of I-95 is literally like the tanker truck chase at the end of The Road Warrior. What was in their package, that NOS-powered forklift the Humungus was driving? Bezos would officially be titled the "Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla?"
If they were looking at it purely from a space / infrastructure standpoint, PG County across the river from Alexandria would be the best place. But MD isn't the best economic package and Crystal City is right across from downtown, so that's where they're going.
The people of DC won't be directly paying for this, so they will derive benefit from it just like the people of MD. It's Virginia taxpayers who will get stuck with the bill.
To continue to be as disruptive as they are, Amazon must wield significant political influence for the foreeable future. This requires close proximity to DC and its lobbyists and owned Congress critters. MD offers a high-tax, anti-business environment (despite the best efforts of its moderate governor over the past four years), and DC itself is a slowly-gentrifying pit with high crime rates and little room for expansion or infrastructure. That leaves Northern Virginia, and Crystal City / Arlington is indeed perfect: it's an under-utilized area immediately across the river from downtown DC, it's directly served by the Metro (yes, I know the DC Metro has its flaws), it has its own major airport (Reagan), and taxes are lower than Maryland or DC proper (for now). The "competitive process" was likely just to gain leverage to see what concessions VA was ultimately willing to throw into the pot. I feel a bit bad for the VA taxpayers who are going to directly pay for a big part of this with higher taxes at least initially, and in perpetuity with even more insane traffic than they have now, but who knows? Maybe they'll actually see some of that massive economic impact of so many additional high-skilled jobs that Amazon has been preaching.
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You are leaving out the activists and politicians who lobbied for greater credit access for the poor and for college students -- regardless of their ability to re-pay -- and they are equally to blame. "Every working family should be able to buy a home. Every kid should be able to go to college." Those soundbites sounds great, but without discipline and financial constraints, they are a recipe for disaster. You are also completely absolving the borrowers of any personal responsibility at all. No one put a gun to their heads to take that money -- they weren't not "financially clued in," they were either too lazy or too stupid to take their time and figure out whether or not what they were offered was in fact a good deal for them, and most importantly, WHETHER THEY COULD PAY IT BACK. My wife and I were offered mortgages for way more than we wanted to borrow in the run-up to the housing crisis, but we actually did our due diligence and decided on our own that we would (at best) end up severely cramped financially with one of those bigger notes. Sure the banks acted greedily and were predatory -- the way all banks have during the entirety of human civilization -- but so did the politicians and lobbyists (do you really think they had no idea what would happen when the banks are allowed to write half-million dollar mortgages to grocery clerks, or $200k loans to art students?), and so did the borrowers who got in over their heads. I think we are on the same page though that this type of lending to high-risk borrowers shouldn't be allowed, but I have no faith that Congress will ban it. Obama with House and Senate majorities let things stand as-is in the aftermath of the housing meltdown, as did Trump with his own Congressional majorities.
Yep, that's exactly how it works. The banks need "proof" that someone will pay back a loan, and the only real proof is a past borrowing history.
Credit scores are nothing more than applied actuarial science. Like most science, it "doesn't give a shit about you." You may hate the way companies use it, but it's a number backed by real science which simply indicates the likelihood of a borrower to pay back what they borrow. That's it. Perhaps the more important question for society is why are these big corps and even parts of the gov't still allowed to trap people in debt by lending out money they know can't be paid back?
Your credit score (vaguely) indicates whether you earn a paycheck, are self sufficient and pay your bills.
Not exactly. Your credit score indicates how likely you are to pay back what you borrow -- that's it. It's perfectly possible (and sadly common) for people that make a lot of money to be terrible borrowers and default on loans, or declare bankruptcy, etc. Conversely, it's also possible to make a rather modest paycheck but have a high credit score -- those are usually the people who never forget to pay a monthly bill, don't run a credit card balance, etc. Finally, you have to actually borrow money every once in awhile and pay it back to really build your credit score. That's how you "prove" that you'll actually pay back what you want to borrow, and why banks look very carefully at your credit card payment histories, etc. They literally have this stuff (managing financial risk) down to a science.
Nonsense. Credit scores are used to assign a risk to a borrower. The higher a person's credit score, the more likely it is that they will pay back what they borrow. Unlike China's "social credit," credit scoring is is rooted in real actuarial science. We've already seen what happens when credit scores and the like are ignored and money is just lent out to anyone regardless of their ability to ever pay it back (the mid-2000s housing crisis, and today's student loan crisis) just because "it's the right thing to do." It is a bad thing financially for the country (any country, not just the US) to import a bunch of dependents who are statistically highly unlikely to be able to provide any value to society beyond "diversity." Unlike previous generations of immigrants, there are very few opportunities for unskilled laborers in the United States. If you are hellbent on bringing them here, you better have a real plan for paying for them.
Most of the Uber / Lyft drivers I've ridden with over the years do it part-time when they feel like it to make some extra money. These people are absolutely not in bad financial straits -- there's even a large number of older, mostly-retired folks in there who drive to (in part) have something to do. Now, you might be able to make an argument that this negatively affects the traditional taxi industry (to which I say, it's about goddamn time), but the majority of drivers themselves are doing just fine.
That's not because right wing folks are dumber, it's because left wing folks have generally had more education and education teaches critical thinking.
And even with all that education, the left wing folks still haven't figured out that being smug pricks with a superiority complex doesn't get people to vote for their team.
Same thing with dinosaur-related discoveries. New tools mean access to data (and thereby new discoveries) never before available.
Maybe he penned it during last week's walk-out?
Huh? Who are these "beltway bandits squeezing the government" with magical open-ended contracts for "services rendered"? Names please. And please post links to any non-competitive contracts being awarded to these companies, preferably to the actual awards as shown on fbo.gov. The press would absolutely have a field day with that stuff, and signing the gov't onto a bad (meaning illegal) contract is one of the few things a Federal employee can actually get outright fired for these days. As long as you have at least two vendors bidding on an opportunity, you'll have competition, which naturally drives down the price (unless they collude, which is highly illegal). Here's a hint: what you're describing might have existed long ago but unless you're a) someone with the clout of Amazon or b) a defense contractor offering truly one-of-a-kind capabilities, EVERYTHING in DC is competitive, and has been for the last several decades at least. I routinely see larger DC-area companies get lazy and not put forth their best effort and pricing on an RFP response and get booted, even though they were the incumbent in an agency for decades. If anything, Federal procurement is more competitive than the way private sector firms purchase, because of the transparency and because the Fed purchasing folks typically have a legal obligation to save the taxpayers money whenever possible. Now, we can talk about whether or not the gov't goes too far the other way treats certain specialized services as pure commodities when they're really not, but that's another conversation.
The senior people who actually run the gov't on a day-to-day basis live in the metro DC area and that's not changing. Tribal knowledge is key. Two years ago I saw a senior purchasing contract officer try to retire and a large part of an entire agency was unable to buy anything for over six months. Out of desperation, they talked her into coming back part-time for awhile, but she eventually retired for good and shut the thing down for another year, forcing them to send out a ton of RFPs at the very end of fiscal just so they didn't lose funding. Many other parts still require submission of paper invoices and other documentation. Sure they've made progress, but the US Gov't is the world's biggest employer, and customer, and they're based in Washington DC. The investment in infrastructure alone to support even one decent sized Federal agency is staggering. You're living in a fantasy world if you think that's ever changing. On the contrary, as shown by Amazon and others, DC just continues to become more important.
If you wanted a heater, the 2nd gen Threadripper 2950X uses more power (TDP) for a lot less money . . .
The "best" CPU is always the best one for *your* workload. If that's max single-threaded performance and money doesn't matter, then that means Intel, and it likely will for awhile. If we're talking about a workload that can be processed massively in parallel, then AMD has earned a seat at the table. I like the "High End CPUs - Intel vs AMD" benchmarks at PassMark -- should enable plenty of dick-waving no matter who you are. Take the time to understand your workload in detail, set your budget, and choose. Whatever you buy will be obsolete in a few years anyway. ;-)
Same here . . . my wife and I are both registered unaffiliated voters but our phones got lit up by Democrat groups urging us to attend rallies and go vote, especially MoveOn -- even after we told them to remove us from their lists. Unwanted spamming is definitely is not a good way to sway people to your cause.
Whether you love or hate Intel or AMD (or, like me, are neutral and use the right tool for the job), you gotta love that we've finally got some CPU competition again. This will only accelerate the development of better tech and drive prices down.
. . . they're probably not the kind of person that should be voting anyway.
Sure you can. You can buy the stocks of (precious metal) mining companies. That uses even less energy.
As someone who spends a lot of time in Florida -- no way. Sure Florida is growing but the real power base is in the DC to NY corridor.
Dude, quit talking out of your ass. Some of us actually spend significant time in the areas we talk about instead of just re-posting random articles from the Net. And yeah, MD Republican Governor Larry Hogan is gonna double-digits mop the floor on Tuesday with progressive lackey Ben Jealous in a very DEEP blue state because he's the most popular governor there EVER (with good reason). Imagine that, real working people (even Democrats!) actually like moderates that won't tax them into poverty and who aren't leftist fringe crazies.
Huh? Crystal City is on the Blue / Yellow lines. It can get crowded but it's nowhere near like, for example, the Red line at peak hours.
Newark?!? Yeah right. That stretch of I-95 is literally like the tanker truck chase at the end of The Road Warrior. What was in their package, that NOS-powered forklift the Humungus was driving? Bezos would officially be titled the "Ayatollah of Rock and Rolla?"
If they were looking at it purely from a space / infrastructure standpoint, PG County across the river from Alexandria would be the best place. But MD isn't the best economic package and Crystal City is right across from downtown, so that's where they're going.
The people of DC won't be directly paying for this, so they will derive benefit from it just like the people of MD. It's Virginia taxpayers who will get stuck with the bill.
To continue to be as disruptive as they are, Amazon must wield significant political influence for the foreeable future. This requires close proximity to DC and its lobbyists and owned Congress critters. MD offers a high-tax, anti-business environment (despite the best efforts of its moderate governor over the past four years), and DC itself is a slowly-gentrifying pit with high crime rates and little room for expansion or infrastructure. That leaves Northern Virginia, and Crystal City / Arlington is indeed perfect: it's an under-utilized area immediately across the river from downtown DC, it's directly served by the Metro (yes, I know the DC Metro has its flaws), it has its own major airport (Reagan), and taxes are lower than Maryland or DC proper (for now). The "competitive process" was likely just to gain leverage to see what concessions VA was ultimately willing to throw into the pot. I feel a bit bad for the VA taxpayers who are going to directly pay for a big part of this with higher taxes at least initially, and in perpetuity with even more insane traffic than they have now, but who knows? Maybe they'll actually see some of that massive economic impact of so many additional high-skilled jobs that Amazon has been preaching.
Dark humor is a coping mechanism. Get off your high horse.