"I hope this provides an impetus for India to adopt something like Sarbanes-Oxley."
A lot of good Sarbanes Oxley did. It didn't even put a dent in all the creative off balance sheet vehicles that have destroyed AIG, all but two of the major investment banks and may still take down Citi, BofA and JP Morgan. It didn't do a thing to stop John Thain from hoodwinking BofA in to buying Merrill Lynch and then forgetting to tell them about the extra $15 billion in losses. Not sure if its true but I recently read Merrill was still buying toxic mortgage backed securities in 2008, even though they had destroyed the company. They thought they had bottomed so they started buying them again.
Holding up Sarbanes Oxley and the U.S. as a model India should emulate is pretty comical on your part. A 10 page quarterly report is just as good as a 1000 page one if the 1000 page report still doesn't tell the truth.
A more interesting recent event on H1B Visas are the layoffs announced at Microsoft. I think Congressmen Waxman used those layoffs to call in to question Microsoft's constant demands for more H1B visas. Like why do you need more H1B visas now that you are laying off your U.S. staff. I think he is also interested to know what the ratio of American citizens to H1B visa holders will be in the layoffs.
"What about those that do have a family and/or mortgage?"
Then you pretty much bought in to a ball and chain and your options are extremely limited. You made your choices, you pay the price. Believe it or not the "system" wants everyone to be married, have some kids and a mortgage, which is why both of these things are heavily promoted by society. They make for a docile, controllable work force that does what its told, doesn't talk back, and can only bail on a job when they can line up another one first which is somewhat challenging to do. Its good for business and businessmen. The one down side to family people is they tend to be reluctant to working staggeringly long hours unless they are made to feel insecure and are worrying about the house and family.
The other part of the one, two punch here is the relative ease with which your spouse can divorce you, take the house, stick you with alimony and child support while they shack up with someone else. Yes you may will have the opportunity to support your spouse while they live in your house, and are screwing someone else. Such an awesome system.... and people wonder why smart affluent people are increasingly reluctant to marry and have kids. Marriage and kids worked back in a simpler time when you needed kids to work the fields and support you in old age, and when divorce was rare and difficult. In modern society its not a particularly smart move. Buying a house, at least, is in theory a good investment at least up until the bubble bursts, as long as its in your name and only your name.
If the judicial branch is allowing warrantless wiretapping of overseas calls how is the judicial system supposed to do ANYTHING about eavesdropping on journalists without probably cause. The warrant IS the process by which the judicial system decides what is constitutional eavesdropping and what isn't. As soon as the judicial system abandons the warrant its abandoned all enforcement of the constitution in this area. The U.S. government can apparently listen to anything it likes, any time it likes as long as the communication is crossing the U.S. border, and it can most definitely use it to undermine freedom of the press, right to privacy and the need for probable cause for eavesdropping on an American citizen's communications with others.
You leave out the interesting case where the person abroad is a foreign correspondent for an American news agency. Its been established by whistle blowers that journalists have been a particular target of this eavesdropping, along with aid workers. You are in fact trampling freedom of the press if you let the government read and listen to all the emails and phone calls of a journalists without a warrant. It allows the government to immediately identify all of the journalists sources unless the contact is only made face to face which is pretty constraining. It places an immediate chilling effect on an independent press and on anyone telling a journalist anything. This is a big plus for the government and military which would prefer the public not know about all their dirty laundry.
"which convinced most of the group that they were expert economists, bankers, politicians"
Based on what I've seen of our "expert" economists, bankers and politicians I am convinced that almost anyone with a functioning brain and some minimal ethics could surpass them in every way so this tendency on the part of this group is understandable. In particular there seems to be a litany of Harvard and Yale grads, who went on to get Harvard MBA's who appear to be running the U.S. economy and political system who seem to be completely incompetent. One wonders if either those Ivy league institutions are completely bankrupt as educators, or more likely they have turned in to diploma mills for the spawn of the "establishment" or if anyone whose parents have big enough check book. Or maybe Ivy league universities just can't teach ethics or Business 101. They seem to be giving MBA's that open the doors to power and wealth to complete idiots. George W. Bush being the supreme example of someone who has a Harvard MBA and nearly single handedly destroyed the U.S. through sheer incompetence and ignorance.
Reference the parting shot from Andrew Lehde a state university educated hedge fund manager who clean up betting against the Ivy leaguers on mortgage backed securities.
"Today, there are plenty of banks, and way too many bankers."
So you are suggesting we need some form of natural selection to winnow our crop of bankers, some sort of Malthusian correction for over population of bankers, with wrist slashing being a form of self selection versus natural selection? Seems a little harsh but greedy and incompetent bankers do seem to be threatening the survival of our species so it might be an appropriate response.
If you read Galbraith's "The Great Crash" it does discount the urban legend that there were rampant suicides in 1929. There were a couple high profile suicides directly related to the crash, that drew a lot of press, but there weren't really a lot of people jumping out of windows on Wall Street.
Thomas Friedman, who I usually find kind of overblown and breathless, has a pretty good opinion piece on the New York Times today. He cites a potentially fatal flaw in America's economy, the best and brightest are being drawn to financial engineering instead of real engineering. The end result is we specialized in manufacturing money instead of manufacturing products to sell. Making money the new fashioned way instead of the old fashioned way which seems to be the root cause of our collapsing economy.
News networks seem to be extremely fond of running stock footage showing money being printed lately. I think it indicates the dominate manufacturing industry in America now will have left is printing money. Welcome to the United States of Zimbabwe.
As best I recall FDR took us off the gold standard during the last depression, since it freed him to print money to get the U.S. out of the depression. Having taken the first step on that slippery slope, I think we will soon be seeing the consequence of an unbrindled fiat currency with irresponsible politicians and Fed bankers manufacturing staggering sums of monopoly money, and throwing it out of helicopters over Wall Street.
As a person who avoids debt, and avoided the stock market bubble and crash, I fear my wealth will soon be destroyed by hyperinflation, by a scheme to bail out incompetent bankers who gamed the system, and got rich pocketing their ill gotten gains. While I behaved responsibly I fear my wealth will be destroyed as New York and Washington bail out bankers and borrowers who behaved irresponsibly using a fiat currency as the new financial weapon of mass destruction. I'm desperately trying to figure out where I can put my money where it will be safe and not wiped out by hyperinflation. Gold would be the traditional place but that doesn't seem safe either these days. Everyone is rushing to U.S. Treasuries as a safe half haven but how can they be safe when the U.S. dollar is turning in to Monopoly money.
There is a reason the programmer stereotype is the geek with poor social skills, because most bright people with strong social skills are going to quickly jump to the business side of the company where they can make more money and climb faster. Its a form of natural selection.
Developing software is really not that great a career, when compared to the other modern careers in business(though its obviously better than factory worker and ditch digger). It does draw some good people who enjoy developing software or maybe don't have the temperament for other professions(translation: geeks who would suck at business, marketing, law and medicine). There are some geeks that score big in software which are the exception to the rule but that happens at about the same frequency as people scoring big in professional sports or acting at least since the dot com bubble burst.
Problem #1, software development isn't a career path that will last you until retirement or if it does the entire second half of your career will suck. In most companies programming is a career for 20 somethings, maybe 30 somethings, 40 somethings if you stretch it. You better hope you land hit on a lucrative startup in your prime so you can get your FU money and retire young. Once you hit your 40's and 50's you are either going to be forced to switch to self employment or to management otherwise your career advancement is going level off and you hope it doesn't start going down. Fifty and sixty year old programmers are something of an oddity and usually discriminated against because the stereotype is you need to be young to be a programmer. The exception is maybe if you have a PhD and can jump to research. Jumping to management or self employment mid career is fine for some people but it requires a radically different skill set and temperament to manage people, business, customers, budgets and schedules and not code. A lot of coders wont succeed in the transition.
Problem #2, most programming jobs don't really pay that well though again its better than factory work:) You will need to be a superstar and create products that you own and control or you aren't going to make big money. If you are a programmer stuck in a large organization the executives, marketing people and salesmen are going to be the ones getting rich and climbing fast. There is a reason so many climbers seek MBA's, even if its dubious MBA's have real value in the world (especially after witnessing the recent meltdown induced largely by MBA's, George W. Bush included in that number).
As a programmer will probably do OK money wise, but you will probable have an opportunity to work long hours on tough projects, and do some painful death marches to get products out the door. If the product fails then you hope you survive the layoffs that ensue. If it succeeds you discover the people above you in the food chain have taken most of the profits, and throw crumbs to the programmers unless they are superstars. If you are lucky you get a small raise or a few options(since options are accounted now they aren't as widely available as they used to be especially on the lower rungs of the food chain). You then just get to start over on the next product and repeat. It can easily be a treadmill to nowhere unless you get in to a high risk startup that succeeds. If you do you still have to work hard or get lucky to get a big piece of the action which requires some pretty serious social and business skills and a strong ability to watch your back, because everyone else in the startup is trying to get a bigger piece of the action too... probably at your expense.
Its just a guess but most really bright people, especially ones with good social skills, are going to be smart enough to angle for the business side of the company because they know thats generally where the money is, especially these days, because CxO's and directors almost always rake in millions a year whether they succeeded or not. Most programmers will never see that kind of money.
They aren't really zero emission. They are just moving the emissions down the line, which is good in that it gives you more flexibility in how you generate the electricity, but could be extremely bad if you pick the wrong method.
If its coming from hydroelectric, solar, wind or nuclear you might say they are zero emission, though nukes are emitting some fairly nasty radioactive waste out the back end and some pretty nasty waste at the front end to produce the fuel if its coming from enriched uranium.
If the electricity is coming from natural gas is is still most definitely emitting CO2 so its not really the answer to global warming if that's what you are trying to accomplish. Natural gas is a pretty clean fuel so maybe its a net win, but it is releasing a greenhouse gas and its still burning fossil fuel which is eventually going to run out. It would probably be better to use the natural gas we have to make fertilizer and plastics.
If the electricity is coming from coal fired power plants migrating to electric cars is a environmental screwup of epic proportions. So unless you are also ruthlessly preventing building new coal fired power plants and replacing the ones we have with something cleaner, electric cars aren't solving the problem.
The other down side to electric cars is that, unless you are charging them from solar or wind in your back yard, they will require a major expansion in the grid if everyone starts driving them, and that means a lot more really ugly high voltage power line strung across the country.
Urbanites probably don't care because most of the power plants and power lines get inflicted on the people outside the cities.
Since the crash, companies who have cheap stock but still pay their pre-crash dividends are an extremely good investment at the moment, at least as long as they keep paying their dividends. Its really one of the few good ways to invest in equities at the moment.
The idea of the Multiverse is the central theme of Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Its not my favorite work from Stephenson but it is an interesting read and does have some interesting dialogs on the idea of the Multiverse, science.vs. religion and consciousness.
I wager the people who work at the CIA probably have 401K's or are invested in the stock market one way or antoher. If they are looking to whack anyone right now its probably the asshats on Wall Street and not Obama.
Deriding Wall Street is shooting fish a barrel a this point. They, like George Bush and the Republican party, are getting what they deserve. Well they don't deserve the $700 billion handout, their obscene bonuses while their firms are cratering and the golden parachutes when they all do us a favor and quit.
Nope, credit default swaps weren't regulated at all, there was no open markets to establish their value, there were no reserve requirements on them, there weren't even good accounting rules for them, and there was no transparency so you could look at a company's books and figure out the risks they had associated with them. That was all OK as long as there were no big defaults. When Lehman failed there was, and it took down AIG almost over night. Accountants couldn't figure out what they were worth or what the risks and liabilities were. AIG definitely didn't have the reserves set aside to actually paying any of them off. At AIG their outside accountant, Price Waterhouse as I recall, tried to flag the problem but AIG execs just pushed back, said there was no problem and brushed the problem under the rug. Then Lehman collapsed, AIG's counterparties started demanding more collateral and AIG suddenly had a hundred billion dollar hole in its balance sheet only the government could fill. If they'd let AIG fail it could have resulted in systemic collapse. It could well be AIG's liabilities will end up in the hundreds of billions in the near future if they have to actually pay all of them off.
An assortment of powerful people fought over the years to keep them unregulated so they were. As I recall Rubin, Greenspan and Gramm all fought to keep them unregulated. There were GAO reports back in the early 90's red flagging their danger to the economy, where they might cause a systemic collapse if a large company in the middle of them were to default. In 2008 that nearly happened, still might.
", resulting in the deaths of 19 US Soldiers on 3 Oct 93 because"
Kind of small potatoes against the nearly 5,000 dead soldiers and tens of thousands with serious wounds in Iraq, in particular because Bush and Rumsfeld didn't think the Army needed armor on their humvees to ride around streets filled with IED's.
"-Murder of 86 American citizens at Waco, and two more at Ruby Ridge"
Yes that was messed up though its still open to debate who started the fire that killed them all. Its 50/50 change it was suicide by fire and Koresh was the murderer. Pretty small potatoes against lying us in to the war in Iraq which has killed hundreds of thousands, Gitmo, Abu Graib, massive spying on Americans without warrants, rendition, water boarding, denying American citizens their basic right to due process etc.
"-The fiasco that was HillaryCare."
Excepting of course it never passed and it never was anything other than a legislative and PR fiasco. If it had been actually implemented you might have had something to complain about. Open to debate if it would have been worse than our current system where costs are spiraling out of control mostly to line the pockets of health care and insurance corporations, and the ranks of he uninsured are spiraling out of control because only the affluent can afford insurance now. I wouldn't have voted for Hillary this year because I don't want nationalized health care either. I hope Obama sticks to his word and increases insurance access, and driving down costs, without taxing us all in to the ground to pay for it, but who knows......
"-Claimed authority to conduct warrantless searches and wiretaps."
Again totally dwarfed by the two Patriot acts and the Bush administration spying. How can Clinton's be worse other than in precedent, when Bush totally wins on scope.
You forgot when Clinton left office the budget was in surplus and he was paying off the national debt. Bush doubled it in eight years and will leave us with the largest deficit in history by far next year, especially after a couple trillion in Wall Street bailouts and a severe recession are factored in.
I kind of feel bad for Obama taking power with this mess because he is going to get a LOT of blame for the disastrous consequences of the Bush administration's incompetence.
You have a few weak points but your attempt to portray Clinton as worse than Bush failed miserably. Almost no one agrees with you.
OK here is another one. He managed to change a nation that was largely apathetic about politics in 2000 and where less than half of those eligible voted, young people in particular, in to one which is completely focused on politics and voting in record numbers in 2008.
He did this by showing us the consequences of not participating in our political system and letting a vocal minority, particularly the evangelical right and the wealthy, elect an incompetent, incurious, ideologue who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, as President of the United State. He then proceeded tpvividly illustrate what happens when you don't care about your government, by being a miserable failure for eight years and nearly destroying America.
Historical trivia, Barbara Bush is descended from Franklin Pierce. He too is considered one of America's worst presidents though not in the same league as George W. I propose there is something in those genes which suggests we should never elect another from that bloodline President of the United States.
"Name one stump speech in which Obama blamed his fellow Dems"
Not sure you understand this politics thing. You say what you have to say to get elected, attacking your base usually doesn't work. You could uphold your principals, and always say what you think, but that will also mean you probably wont get elected. If you don't get elected then you wont have a chance to actually do any of the things you really want to do, and which hopefully you think will benefit society, or at least part of it.
It takes someone with immense wisdom, judgment and temperament to do what you have to do to get elected, without completely selling out, and then still act on your principals to do what you think is right when you get there. When you get there you have to make a whole bunch more compromises to get the political support to pass your legislation. Obama has done about as well as can be expected at this balancing act. McCain has been a disaster at it. To win over party to get the nomination he sold out most of this principals, and he completely alienated all the independents and moderates he needed to actually win the general election. Obama is playing the politics game a lot smarter and better than McCain, cut him some slack.
They only political leaders who can say what they think are dictators. They in practice don't do it either because they just lie and tell their subjects what they want to hear and then do whatever they want anyway. They are also pretty heavily compromised by the fact they have to constantly and ruthlessly crush all opposition and that exacts a pretty heavy political toll too.
If Bush isn't who is? Probably no one with any actual political and financial power then? Some people on Slashdot espousing free markets but with no actual ability to advance them doesn't seem particularly useful.
"I'd like to point out that the lack of prevention and preparation for that disaster falls as much, or more, on the state and local government than on the federal government."
Certainly true but there is is this thing called the Federal Emergency Management Agency(FEMA) and that is ALL they are supposed to do, especially in a case where an entire state is devastated by a disaster, and the resources for relief need to come from outside the state.
You can play the blame game all you want, and the state and city deserve their share. The Louisiana governor was kicked out over it, along with the fact Louisiana turned in to a Republican state because all the black Democrats in New Orleans were scattered to other states never to return. I wouldn't put it past Karl Rove to have been weighing the advantages of sending New Orleans black Democrats to be swallowed in Republican Texas just so he could turn Louisiana in to a red state.
At the end of the day though, when it was obvious that New Orleans was devastated it was the job of FEMA and the Bush administration to use the vast resources of the government and nation to provide relief. Instead they mostly sat on their hands for a week (outside of Coast Guard search and rescue) and it wasn't until they had been pummeled in the press that they sent in Army convoys with relief. The fatal failure of the Bush administration here? They appointed an incompetent political crony to head a vital agency. He was previously to incompetent to run an Arabian Horse association, what do you think his chances were going to be against Katrina. Story of the entire Bush administrationm, one incompetent and unqualified political crony after another, placed in positions of great importance, screwing up one place after another. Iraq was exactly the same story in 2003-2006. Department of Justice, same, same.
"The adults among us do much better when the government does nothing."
I would be OK with the government doing next to nothing, they do a few good things like build roads and provide for national defense, defense not offense, preferably.
The only problem I have is that they still seem to spend trillions of dollars while they are doing nothing........
"No one forced the government to do it -- certainly no pro-free market person."
Other than Bush and Paulson......
At least Bush has been saying he is a "pro-free market person" all these years, though based on his track record for truthfulness and integrity it is certainly possible he was lying when he said it.
You do realize that the Annenberg foundation which sponsors this challenge was created by Walter Annenberg who was appointed ambassador to the court of St. James by another notorious radical, Richard Nixon. Nixon did go to China and China was Communist then. Therefor Obama's association with the Annenberg foundation must prove he is a Communist, as was Henry Kissenger. Annenberg was also close friends with another cabal of radicals, Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Prince Charles.
Say what you want about Ayers early life but the Annenberg foundation isn't part of a Communist conspiracy. Its just trying to improve education in America..... DAMN YOU ANNENBERG FOUNDATION....... you commie bastards. Annenberg is Jewish so......
Do you want to keep playing guilt by association? OK, lets try Charles Keating? No, G. Gorgon Liddy? No, an actual listed terrorist organization McCain backed, the Kosovo Liberation Army. What about Ronald Reagan's associations, he poured billions of dollars in to a rag tag band of Muslim terrorists in the 1980's, which funded the beginnings of Al Qaida, Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban. How about Donald Rumsfeld who met with and... gasp... shook Saddam Hussein's hand once.... probably to discuss transferring chemical weapons to Iraq to gas Iranians.
""The Republicans" shouldn't have sucked so bad? If by "The Republicans" you mean George Bush and co., then you need to re-evaluate your terminology here."
The "Republican's" nominated and elected the man TWICE. I'd give them a pass on 2000 but by 2004 it becoming pretty obvious what he was. The Republican party overwhelmingly supported him when he was popular, and didn't stop supporting him until his popularity plummeted among independents, moderates and the mdia.... which is extremely convenient. They really didn't turn on him until everyone else did, mostly in the wake of his incompetent handling of Katrina and Iraq around 2005.
I will grant you there are a lot of good people in the Republican party, and they used to have some good ideas about small government. The fact is those people are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, and the Republican party was taken over by a bunch of extremists. Bad for them there aren't enough of them left to win a national election any more. Bad for them they've turned themselves in to a far right, fringe party with Sarah Palin as their future standard bearer.
This is bad because American's want a fiscally conservative, socially tolerant, small government party to vote for and there isn't one. We have a socially fanatic party that spends like a drunken sailor, and another party that also spends like a drunken sailor.
Slashdot Mirror
"I hope this provides an impetus for India to adopt something like Sarbanes-Oxley."
A lot of good Sarbanes Oxley did. It didn't even put a dent in all the creative off balance sheet vehicles that have destroyed AIG, all but two of the major investment banks and may still take down Citi, BofA and JP Morgan. It didn't do a thing to stop John Thain from hoodwinking BofA in to buying Merrill Lynch and then forgetting to tell them about the extra $15 billion in losses. Not sure if its true but I recently read Merrill was still buying toxic mortgage backed securities in 2008, even though they had destroyed the company. They thought they had bottomed so they started buying them again.
Holding up Sarbanes Oxley and the U.S. as a model India should emulate is pretty comical on your part. A 10 page quarterly report is just as good as a 1000 page one if the 1000 page report still doesn't tell the truth.
A more interesting recent event on H1B Visas are the layoffs announced at Microsoft. I think Congressmen Waxman used those layoffs to call in to question Microsoft's constant demands for more H1B visas. Like why do you need more H1B visas now that you are laying off your U.S. staff. I think he is also interested to know what the ratio of American citizens to H1B visa holders will be in the layoffs.
"What about those that do have a family and/or mortgage?"
Then you pretty much bought in to a ball and chain and your options are extremely limited. You made your choices, you pay the price. Believe it or not the "system" wants everyone to be married, have some kids and a mortgage, which is why both of these things are heavily promoted by society. They make for a docile, controllable work force that does what its told, doesn't talk back, and can only bail on a job when they can line up another one first which is somewhat challenging to do. Its good for business and businessmen. The one down side to family people is they tend to be reluctant to working staggeringly long hours unless they are made to feel insecure and are worrying about the house and family.
The other part of the one, two punch here is the relative ease with which your spouse can divorce you, take the house, stick you with alimony and child support while they shack up with someone else. Yes you may will have the opportunity to support your spouse while they live in your house, and are screwing someone else. Such an awesome system. ... and people wonder why smart affluent people are increasingly reluctant to marry and have kids. Marriage and kids worked back in a simpler time when you needed kids to work the fields and support you in old age, and when divorce was rare and difficult. In modern society its not a particularly smart move. Buying a house, at least, is in theory a good investment at least up until the bubble bursts, as long as its in your name and only your name.
If the judicial branch is allowing warrantless wiretapping of overseas calls how is the judicial system supposed to do ANYTHING about eavesdropping on journalists without probably cause. The warrant IS the process by which the judicial system decides what is constitutional eavesdropping and what isn't. As soon as the judicial system abandons the warrant its abandoned all enforcement of the constitution in this area. The U.S. government can apparently listen to anything it likes, any time it likes as long as the communication is crossing the U.S. border, and it can most definitely use it to undermine freedom of the press, right to privacy and the need for probable cause for eavesdropping on an American citizen's communications with others.
You leave out the interesting case where the person abroad is a foreign correspondent for an American news agency. Its been established by whistle blowers that journalists have been a particular target of this eavesdropping, along with aid workers. You are in fact trampling freedom of the press if you let the government read and listen to all the emails and phone calls of a journalists without a warrant. It allows the government to immediately identify all of the journalists sources unless the contact is only made face to face which is pretty constraining. It places an immediate chilling effect on an independent press and on anyone telling a journalist anything. This is a big plus for the government and military which would prefer the public not know about all their dirty laundry.
Since they can read your email and listen to your phone calls they also know what is IN your mind.
"which convinced most of the group that they were expert economists, bankers, politicians"
Based on what I've seen of our "expert" economists, bankers and politicians I am convinced that almost anyone with a functioning brain and some minimal ethics could surpass them in every way so this tendency on the part of this group is understandable. In particular there seems to be a litany of Harvard and Yale grads, who went on to get Harvard MBA's who appear to be running the U.S. economy and political system who seem to be completely incompetent. One wonders if either those Ivy league institutions are completely bankrupt as educators, or more likely they have turned in to diploma mills for the spawn of the "establishment" or if anyone whose parents have big enough check book. Or maybe Ivy league universities just can't teach ethics or Business 101. They seem to be giving MBA's that open the doors to power and wealth to complete idiots. George W. Bush being the supreme example of someone who has a Harvard MBA and nearly single handedly destroyed the U.S. through sheer incompetence and ignorance.
Reference the parting shot from Andrew Lehde a state university educated hedge fund manager who clean up betting against the Ivy leaguers on mortgage backed securities.
"Today, there are plenty of banks, and way too many bankers."
So you are suggesting we need some form of natural selection to winnow our crop of bankers, some sort of Malthusian correction for over population of bankers, with wrist slashing being a form of self selection versus natural selection? Seems a little harsh but greedy and incompetent bankers do seem to be threatening the survival of our species so it might be an appropriate response.
If you read Galbraith's "The Great Crash" it does discount the urban legend that there were rampant suicides in 1929. There were a couple high profile suicides directly related to the crash, that drew a lot of press, but there weren't really a lot of people jumping out of windows on Wall Street.
Thomas Friedman, who I usually find kind of overblown and breathless, has a pretty good opinion piece on the New York Times today. He cites a potentially fatal flaw in America's economy, the best and brightest are being drawn to financial engineering instead of real engineering. The end result is we specialized in manufacturing money instead of manufacturing products to sell. Making money the new fashioned way instead of the old fashioned way which seems to be the root cause of our collapsing economy.
News networks seem to be extremely fond of running stock footage showing money being printed lately. I think it indicates the dominate manufacturing industry in America now will have left is printing money. Welcome to the United States of Zimbabwe.
As best I recall FDR took us off the gold standard during the last depression, since it freed him to print money to get the U.S. out of the depression. Having taken the first step on that slippery slope, I think we will soon be seeing the consequence of an unbrindled fiat currency with irresponsible politicians and Fed bankers manufacturing staggering sums of monopoly money, and throwing it out of helicopters over Wall Street.
As a person who avoids debt, and avoided the stock market bubble and crash, I fear my wealth will soon be destroyed by hyperinflation, by a scheme to bail out incompetent bankers who gamed the system, and got rich pocketing their ill gotten gains. While I behaved responsibly I fear my wealth will be destroyed as New York and Washington bail out bankers and borrowers who behaved irresponsibly using a fiat currency as the new financial weapon of mass destruction. I'm desperately trying to figure out where I can put my money where it will be safe and not wiped out by hyperinflation. Gold would be the traditional place but that doesn't seem safe either these days. Everyone is rushing to U.S. Treasuries as a safe half haven but how can they be safe when the U.S. dollar is turning in to Monopoly money.
There is a reason the programmer stereotype is the geek with poor social skills, because most bright people with strong social skills are going to quickly jump to the business side of the company where they can make more money and climb faster. Its a form of natural selection.
Developing software is really not that great a career, when compared to the other modern careers in business(though its obviously better than factory worker and ditch digger). It does draw some good people who enjoy developing software or maybe don't have the temperament for other professions(translation: geeks who would suck at business, marketing, law and medicine). There are some geeks that score big in software which are the exception to the rule but that happens at about the same frequency as people scoring big in professional sports or acting at least since the dot com bubble burst.
Problem #1, software development isn't a career path that will last you until retirement or if it does the entire second half of your career will suck. In most companies programming is a career for 20 somethings, maybe 30 somethings, 40 somethings if you stretch it. You better hope you land hit on a lucrative startup in your prime so you can get your FU money and retire young. Once you hit your 40's and 50's you are either going to be forced to switch to self employment or to management otherwise your career advancement is going level off and you hope it doesn't start going down. Fifty and sixty year old programmers are something of an oddity and usually discriminated against because the stereotype is you need to be young to be a programmer. The exception is maybe if you have a PhD and can jump to research. Jumping to management or self employment mid career is fine for some people but it requires a radically different skill set and temperament to manage people, business, customers, budgets and schedules and not code. A lot of coders wont succeed in the transition.
Problem #2, most programming jobs don't really pay that well though again its better than factory work :) You will need to be a superstar and create products that you own and control or you aren't going to make big money. If you are a programmer stuck in a large organization the executives, marketing people and salesmen are going to be the ones getting rich and climbing fast. There is a reason so many climbers seek MBA's, even if its dubious MBA's have real value in the world (especially after witnessing the recent meltdown induced largely by MBA's, George W. Bush included in that number).
As a programmer will probably do OK money wise, but you will probable have an opportunity to work long hours on tough projects, and do some painful death marches to get products out the door. If the product fails then you hope you survive the layoffs that ensue. If it succeeds you discover the people above you in the food chain have taken most of the profits, and throw crumbs to the programmers unless they are superstars. If you are lucky you get a small raise or a few options(since options are accounted now they aren't as widely available as they used to be especially on the lower rungs of the food chain). You then just get to start over on the next product and repeat. It can easily be a treadmill to nowhere unless you get in to a high risk startup that succeeds. If you do you still have to work hard or get lucky to get a big piece of the action which requires some pretty serious social and business skills and a strong ability to watch your back, because everyone else in the startup is trying to get a bigger piece of the action too... probably at your expense.
Its just a guess but most really bright people, especially ones with good social skills, are going to be smart enough to angle for the business side of the company because they know thats generally where the money is, especially these days, because CxO's and directors almost always rake in millions a year whether they succeeded or not. Most programmers will never see that kind of money.
They aren't really zero emission. They are just moving the emissions down the line, which is good in that it gives you more flexibility in how you generate the electricity, but could be extremely bad if you pick the wrong method.
If its coming from hydroelectric, solar, wind or nuclear you might say they are zero emission, though nukes are emitting some fairly nasty radioactive waste out the back end and some pretty nasty waste at the front end to produce the fuel if its coming from enriched uranium.
If the electricity is coming from natural gas is is still most definitely emitting CO2 so its not really the answer to global warming if that's what you are trying to accomplish. Natural gas is a pretty clean fuel so maybe its a net win, but it is releasing a greenhouse gas and its still burning fossil fuel which is eventually going to run out. It would probably be better to use the natural gas we have to make fertilizer and plastics.
If the electricity is coming from coal fired power plants migrating to electric cars is a environmental screwup of epic proportions. So unless you are also ruthlessly preventing building new coal fired power plants and replacing the ones we have with something cleaner, electric cars aren't solving the problem.
The other down side to electric cars is that, unless you are charging them from solar or wind in your back yard, they will require a major expansion in the grid if everyone starts driving them, and that means a lot more really ugly high voltage power line strung across the country.
Urbanites probably don't care because most of the power plants and power lines get inflicted on the people outside the cities.
Since the crash, companies who have cheap stock but still pay their pre-crash dividends are an extremely good investment at the moment, at least as long as they keep paying their dividends. Its really one of the few good ways to invest in equities at the moment.
The idea of the Multiverse is the central theme of Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Its not my favorite work from Stephenson but it is an interesting read and does have some interesting dialogs on the idea of the Multiverse, science .vs. religion and consciousness.
Dude, my post was a joke......... get it?
I wager the people who work at the CIA probably have 401K's or are invested in the stock market one way or antoher. If they are looking to whack anyone right now its probably the asshats on Wall Street and not Obama.
Deriding Wall Street is shooting fish a barrel a this point. They, like George Bush and the Republican party, are getting what they deserve. Well they don't deserve the $700 billion handout, their obscene bonuses while their firms are cratering and the golden parachutes when they all do us a favor and quit.
"Quite the opposite, they were regulated badly."
Nope, credit default swaps weren't regulated at all, there was no open markets to establish their value, there were no reserve requirements on them, there weren't even good accounting rules for them, and there was no transparency so you could look at a company's books and figure out the risks they had associated with them. That was all OK as long as there were no big defaults. When Lehman failed there was, and it took down AIG almost over night. Accountants couldn't figure out what they were worth or what the risks and liabilities were. AIG definitely didn't have the reserves set aside to actually paying any of them off. At AIG their outside accountant, Price Waterhouse as I recall, tried to flag the problem but AIG execs just pushed back, said there was no problem and brushed the problem under the rug. Then Lehman collapsed, AIG's counterparties started demanding more collateral and AIG suddenly had a hundred billion dollar hole in its balance sheet only the government could fill. If they'd let AIG fail it could have resulted in systemic collapse. It could well be AIG's liabilities will end up in the hundreds of billions in the near future if they have to actually pay all of them off.
An assortment of powerful people fought over the years to keep them unregulated so they were. As I recall Rubin, Greenspan and Gramm all fought to keep them unregulated. There were GAO reports back in the early 90's red flagging their danger to the economy, where they might cause a systemic collapse if a large company in the middle of them were to default. In 2008 that nearly happened, still might.
Let's work through this little list:
", resulting in the deaths of 19 US Soldiers on 3 Oct 93 because"
Kind of small potatoes against the nearly 5,000 dead soldiers and tens of thousands with serious wounds in Iraq, in particular because Bush and Rumsfeld didn't think the Army needed armor on their humvees to ride around streets filled with IED's.
"-Murder of 86 American citizens at Waco, and two more at Ruby Ridge"
Yes that was messed up though its still open to debate who started the fire that killed them all. Its 50/50 change it was suicide by fire and Koresh was the murderer. Pretty small potatoes against lying us in to the war in Iraq which has killed hundreds of thousands, Gitmo, Abu Graib, massive spying on Americans without warrants, rendition, water boarding, denying American citizens their basic right to due process etc.
"-The fiasco that was HillaryCare."
Excepting of course it never passed and it never was anything other than a legislative and PR fiasco. If it had been actually implemented you might have had something to complain about. Open to debate if it would have been worse than our current system where costs are spiraling out of control mostly to line the pockets of health care and insurance corporations, and the ranks of he uninsured are spiraling out of control because only the affluent can afford insurance now. I wouldn't have voted for Hillary this year because I don't want nationalized health care either. I hope Obama sticks to his word and increases insurance access, and driving down costs, without taxing us all in to the ground to pay for it, but who knows......
"-Claimed authority to conduct warrantless searches and wiretaps."
Again totally dwarfed by the two Patriot acts and the Bush administration spying. How can Clinton's be worse other than in precedent, when Bush totally wins on scope.
You forgot when Clinton left office the budget was in surplus and he was paying off the national debt. Bush doubled it in eight years and will leave us with the largest deficit in history by far next year, especially after a couple trillion in Wall Street bailouts and a severe recession are factored in.
I kind of feel bad for Obama taking power with this mess because he is going to get a LOT of blame for the disastrous consequences of the Bush administration's incompetence.
You have a few weak points but your attempt to portray Clinton as worse than Bush failed miserably. Almost no one agrees with you.
"what Bush's one great accomplishment was."
OK here is another one. He managed to change a nation that was largely apathetic about politics in 2000 and where less than half of those eligible voted, young people in particular, in to one which is completely focused on politics and voting in record numbers in 2008.
He did this by showing us the consequences of not participating in our political system and letting a vocal minority, particularly the evangelical right and the wealthy, elect an incompetent, incurious, ideologue who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, as President of the United State. He then proceeded tpvividly illustrate what happens when you don't care about your government, by being a miserable failure for eight years and nearly destroying America.
Historical trivia, Barbara Bush is descended from Franklin Pierce. He too is considered one of America's worst presidents though not in the same league as George W. I propose there is something in those genes which suggests we should never elect another from that bloodline President of the United States.
"Name one stump speech in which Obama blamed his fellow Dems"
Not sure you understand this politics thing. You say what you have to say to get elected, attacking your base usually doesn't work. You could uphold your principals, and always say what you think, but that will also mean you probably wont get elected. If you don't get elected then you wont have a chance to actually do any of the things you really want to do, and which hopefully you think will benefit society, or at least part of it.
It takes someone with immense wisdom, judgment and temperament to do what you have to do to get elected, without completely selling out, and then still act on your principals to do what you think is right when you get there. When you get there you have to make a whole bunch more compromises to get the political support to pass your legislation. Obama has done about as well as can be expected at this balancing act. McCain has been a disaster at it. To win over party to get the nomination he sold out most of this principals, and he completely alienated all the independents and moderates he needed to actually win the general election. Obama is playing the politics game a lot smarter and better than McCain, cut him some slack.
They only political leaders who can say what they think are dictators. They in practice don't do it either because they just lie and tell their subjects what they want to hear and then do whatever they want anyway. They are also pretty heavily compromised by the fact they have to constantly and ruthlessly crush all opposition and that exacts a pretty heavy political toll too.
If Bush isn't who is? Probably no one with any actual political and financial power then? Some people on Slashdot espousing free markets but with no actual ability to advance them doesn't seem particularly useful.
"I'd like to point out that the lack of prevention and preparation for that disaster falls as much, or more, on the state and local government than on the federal government."
Certainly true but there is is this thing called the Federal Emergency Management Agency(FEMA) and that is ALL they are supposed to do, especially in a case where an entire state is devastated by a disaster, and the resources for relief need to come from outside the state.
You can play the blame game all you want, and the state and city deserve their share. The Louisiana governor was kicked out over it, along with the fact Louisiana turned in to a Republican state because all the black Democrats in New Orleans were scattered to other states never to return. I wouldn't put it past Karl Rove to have been weighing the advantages of sending New Orleans black Democrats to be swallowed in Republican Texas just so he could turn Louisiana in to a red state.
At the end of the day though, when it was obvious that New Orleans was devastated it was the job of FEMA and the Bush administration to use the vast resources of the government and nation to provide relief. Instead they mostly sat on their hands for a week (outside of Coast Guard search and rescue) and it wasn't until they had been pummeled in the press that they sent in Army convoys with relief. The fatal failure of the Bush administration here? They appointed an incompetent political crony to head a vital agency. He was previously to incompetent to run an Arabian Horse association, what do you think his chances were going to be against Katrina. Story of the entire Bush administrationm, one incompetent and unqualified political crony after another, placed in positions of great importance, screwing up one place after another. Iraq was exactly the same story in 2003-2006. Department of Justice, same, same.
"The adults among us do much better when the government does nothing."
I would be OK with the government doing next to nothing, they do a few good things like build roads and provide for national defense, defense not offense, preferably.
The only problem I have is that they still seem to spend trillions of dollars while they are doing nothing........
"No one forced the government to do it -- certainly no pro-free market person."
Other than Bush and Paulson......
At least Bush has been saying he is a "pro-free market person" all these years, though based on his track record for truthfulness and integrity it is certainly possible he was lying when he said it.
You do realize that the Annenberg foundation which sponsors this challenge was created by Walter Annenberg who was appointed ambassador to the court of St. James by another notorious radical, Richard Nixon. Nixon did go to China and China was Communist then. Therefor Obama's association with the Annenberg foundation must prove he is a Communist, as was Henry Kissenger. Annenberg was also close friends with another cabal of radicals, Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Prince Charles.
Say what you want about Ayers early life but the Annenberg foundation isn't part of a Communist conspiracy. Its just trying to improve education in America..... DAMN YOU ANNENBERG FOUNDATION ....... you commie bastards. Annenberg is Jewish so......
Do you want to keep playing guilt by association? OK, lets try Charles Keating? No, G. Gorgon Liddy? No, an actual listed terrorist organization McCain backed, the Kosovo Liberation Army. What about Ronald Reagan's associations, he poured billions of dollars in to a rag tag band of Muslim terrorists in the 1980's, which funded the beginnings of Al Qaida, Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban. How about Donald Rumsfeld who met with and ... gasp ... shook Saddam Hussein's hand once.... probably to discuss transferring chemical weapons to Iraq to gas Iranians.
That isn't even funny or witty. Can't you do better than that?
ACORN was legally required to submit all the voter registrations they collected, they flagged all the ones they could tell were bogus.....
Try again, your smoking gun isn't smoking or a gun.
""The Republicans" shouldn't have sucked so bad? If by "The Republicans" you mean George Bush and co., then you need to re-evaluate your terminology here."
The "Republican's" nominated and elected the man TWICE. I'd give them a pass on 2000 but by 2004 it becoming pretty obvious what he was. The Republican party overwhelmingly supported him when he was popular, and didn't stop supporting him until his popularity plummeted among independents, moderates and the mdia.... which is extremely convenient. They really didn't turn on him until everyone else did, mostly in the wake of his incompetent handling of Katrina and Iraq around 2005.
I will grant you there are a lot of good people in the Republican party, and they used to have some good ideas about small government. The fact is those people are fleeing like rats from a sinking ship, and the Republican party was taken over by a bunch of extremists. Bad for them there aren't enough of them left to win a national election any more. Bad for them they've turned themselves in to a far right, fringe party with Sarah Palin as their future standard bearer.
This is bad because American's want a fiscally conservative, socially tolerant, small government party to vote for and there isn't one. We have a socially fanatic party that spends like a drunken sailor, and another party that also spends like a drunken sailor.