Perhaps regulation would have helped. But the "financial instruments" are the market adapting to a changing playing field. A playing field the US government changed when they decided to artificially adjust markets by guaranteeing almost every mortgage in the country on the foolish idea that everyone deserves a house. Remove Fannie and Freddie from the mix and suddenly banks have to be much more cautious about the loans they hand out because they are on the line for it.
The free market didn't fail this time, the free market wasn't given a chance to work.
In most places in the states, there is a duopoly as well, it just depends on where you are. You can choose between the cable company, or the phone company. If you are outside of the metro-areas, your choice for broadband may drop to just one company or none. There are often a handful of homegrown options, but they generally fall well behind the services of the big players. I've seen satellite service, and local wireless service.
It will be interesting to see if content providers start to push on the other end when they see revenue streams in moving content via the internet, and see that threatened by caps. As others have mentioned, increased prices will also bring new players to the market, like more robust wireless and internet over phone lines, and possibly feasible mesh type networks.
5GB is hardly enough for my regular use. I added a PAM plan for a month that I was going to be working remote, and I'm already finding that I'm going to brush right up against the edge of that with fairly standard work use (VNC, email, transferring some logs to look over, etc). I can't even think about youtube, etc at night, as I'll definitely bound easily over that. And this is all reasonably simple stuff. I can't imagine how fast I'd chew this up if I had to move considerable amounts of content, or anything else.
Their stock certainly isn't doing well. But, you are correct. There are market forces that should be allowed to play out here. Some poorly run companies need to be allowed to fail, and the market will adjust to move around these securities.
The question is how much damage it'll do to the market in the interim. That said, it'll do far less damage if the government makes their position clear and allows the market to do it's thing, rather than the limbo we're in now.
Agreed. I'm nervous about what the ramifications are of letting these companies fail. If we can let them fail, let the stock market adjust reasonably, and not dry up the credit markets, then I fully support this.
Unfortunately, most of the "experts", most of whom support this bill, also have significant stakes in getting the government to pump 700 bil into the market.
It very much depends on how the government chooses to manage the mortgages it's about to buy. They may be able to bail out the banks by buying this bad paper at a steeply discounted rate, and then renegotiate the terms themselves (they hold the paper...). And, at the same time, by doing so, will greatly reduce the number of foreclosures and increase their own profit from the deal.
Unfortunately, many home owners have purchased so much house that they could only afford at the 4% ARM rate, that even if you negotiated the rate down to a normal rate (7%) that they would still be stretched. And, further, many of these people still don't have the credit to justify a rate even that low.
Quite frankly, everyone is fixated on the bank right now, and someone needs to stand up and point to the elephant and say, "Not everyone can handle a house."
Yes, free market is nice, and it would be nice to make sure these guys know the loss of running a company poorly. Unfortunately, the repercussions of allowing these companies to fail would affect significantly more than just these companies.
I'm pretty sure the fed isn't doing this, "cuz gosh, them directors are just nice guys and they tried awful hard.". They're trying to keep the economy from collapsing on itself entirely. And as bad a shape as we are in right now, if we lost Fannie, Freddie, AIG, Lehman, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch all inside of a year, we'd be tumbling down to depression era status.
If capital punishment were the deterrent it is claimed to be by its proponents, then why does it still exist?
Let's turn this around, if we took murderers and and took them aside and said, "Johnny, we don't do that, please don't do that any more." Do you think we would have more or less murders?
Letting this kid off is actually positive reinforcement for the action. For him, and for others. It isn't about others saying, "Gee, look at that guy, he went to jail, so I won't do this." It's about not having people say, "Gee, look at that guy, he did this and got off free.". Further, I DO think that universities might respond with programs to encourage this behavior in a controlled environment.
How does this follow? I think it would be more likely to encourage more students to do similar things. And this isn't a good thing. Perhaps this kid got lucky and didn't screw anything up, but 20 years olds screwing around in university systems isn't a good thing. Maybe, just maybe, this will encourage the students who might think of doing such a thing to actually go through the right channels and present this as a project with proper controls and safeguards. Maybe, universities might coordinate this behavior and make a class or research project out of it.
But for people to express in any legally rigorous way that they DO want it, they have to know in advance about its existence
That doesn't mean that they have a RIGHT to get it to me, once or one hundred times. Just because it's awfully inconvenient for them to get their message out if restricted to channels where people are complicit in receiving those messages, doesn't mean they should be granted some right to hoist their message on people who haven't asked for it.
Your freedom ends when you impose on me without my permission. I don't think "harm" needs to be reached for your freedom to end.
People who send me spam, have done so without my consent, and they are causing me undo effort as a result.
I think a better analogy would be someone trespassing on your lawn and running around your house insisting you (sign petition/hear about candidate X/order viagra).
So you're going to vote for the guy who you think can convince people to go for policies that you disagree with rather than vote for the guy who you think won't be able to get anything done on the policies you do agree with.
Godwin's law be damned (I'm certainly not trying to compare the policies of Barack Obama, or any candidate, for that matter, to Hitler), why don't we vote for Hitler. Sure, he's a facist and we don't like the things he stands for, but gosh he just speaks to people so well.
Again, I'm not implying there are any Hitlers in this election, but I am saying that a vote for the guy who makes you feel good inside is shallow and silly.
In another line of reasoning, if there weren't subsidies on oil and oil companies then oil would have reflected the cost earlier and investors would have seen the market for solar cells, electric cars, etc.
Government subsidization is indeed good for initiating interest in otherwise daunting industries, but continued subsidies discourage other similar industries from starting because government involvement creates uncertain and less predictable markets.
Solar is a perfect example, with the government backing energy companies (oil and coal), it was a significantly higher risk to invest in alternative energy because the government was providing preference for a competing sector of the industry.
In my community in the US, they started cutting these programs because the number of students in the classes weren't high enough to justify the cost (~12-15 students per advanced class). The choices were limited as courses were cut to meet staffing levels.
You're exactly right, and that is why shareholders probably wouldn't win a lawsuit for negligent management. But, the direction of the company is dictated by the shareholders. We're about to find out whether the shareholders agree with the rejection of Microsoft's offer or not. There are significant benefits to going public, capital being one of them, but that those benefits aren't free.
Agreed. Their defense doesn't support their assertion. That said, I've read lots of mentions of corruption, but does anyone have some links to stories with specific cases of corruption, etc.
Oh, and for the love of all things, please stop confusing standard with free to implement. There are plenty of standards that aren't freely available for anyoen to implement. I understand that Microsoft intentionally confused the issue by calling it 'open'. But standards don't obligate anyone to allow others free access to implement the idea.
Thank you for that, I absolutely deserved it. My brain was completely melted. I must add the disclaimer that I do know the difference between pseudo and sudo, and completely botched it here.
Because Universities aren't exclusively places of higher education anymore. They are businesses, or sudo-businesses. Their sole interest is to grow. It's why they bow to bad PR and why the average American bachelors degree has been so completely watered down.
Which actually gives some additional hope that those who are transitioning from mainframe Unix to Linux will have a much better idea of what they are doing than a transition from Windows to Linux.
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Perhaps regulation would have helped. But the "financial instruments" are the market adapting to a changing playing field. A playing field the US government changed when they decided to artificially adjust markets by guaranteeing almost every mortgage in the country on the foolish idea that everyone deserves a house. Remove Fannie and Freddie from the mix and suddenly banks have to be much more cautious about the loans they hand out because they are on the line for it.
The free market didn't fail this time, the free market wasn't given a chance to work.
In most places in the states, there is a duopoly as well, it just depends on where you are. You can choose between the cable company, or the phone company. If you are outside of the metro-areas, your choice for broadband may drop to just one company or none. There are often a handful of homegrown options, but they generally fall well behind the services of the big players. I've seen satellite service, and local wireless service.
It will be interesting to see if content providers start to push on the other end when they see revenue streams in moving content via the internet, and see that threatened by caps. As others have mentioned, increased prices will also bring new players to the market, like more robust wireless and internet over phone lines, and possibly feasible mesh type networks.
5GB is hardly enough for my regular use. I added a PAM plan for a month that I was going to be working remote, and I'm already finding that I'm going to brush right up against the edge of that with fairly standard work use (VNC, email, transferring some logs to look over, etc). I can't even think about youtube, etc at night, as I'll definitely bound easily over that. And this is all reasonably simple stuff. I can't imagine how fast I'd chew this up if I had to move considerable amounts of content, or anything else.
Their stock certainly isn't doing well. But, you are correct. There are market forces that should be allowed to play out here. Some poorly run companies need to be allowed to fail, and the market will adjust to move around these securities.
The question is how much damage it'll do to the market in the interim. That said, it'll do far less damage if the government makes their position clear and allows the market to do it's thing, rather than the limbo we're in now.
Agreed. I'm nervous about what the ramifications are of letting these companies fail. If we can let them fail, let the stock market adjust reasonably, and not dry up the credit markets, then I fully support this.
Unfortunately, most of the "experts", most of whom support this bill, also have significant stakes in getting the government to pump 700 bil into the market.
I hadn't caught up with the headlines, perhaps with the defeat of the bail out bill, my previous post will be moot.
Unfortunately, Congress dropping 700 Billion on Wall Street might end up cutting into NASA's budget, along with several other programs.
It very much depends on how the government chooses to manage the mortgages it's about to buy. They may be able to bail out the banks by buying this bad paper at a steeply discounted rate, and then renegotiate the terms themselves (they hold the paper...). And, at the same time, by doing so, will greatly reduce the number of foreclosures and increase their own profit from the deal.
Unfortunately, many home owners have purchased so much house that they could only afford at the 4% ARM rate, that even if you negotiated the rate down to a normal rate (7%) that they would still be stretched. And, further, many of these people still don't have the credit to justify a rate even that low.
Quite frankly, everyone is fixated on the bank right now, and someone needs to stand up and point to the elephant and say, "Not everyone can handle a house."
Yes, free market is nice, and it would be nice to make sure these guys know the loss of running a company poorly. Unfortunately, the repercussions of allowing these companies to fail would affect significantly more than just these companies.
I'm pretty sure the fed isn't doing this, "cuz gosh, them directors are just nice guys and they tried awful hard.". They're trying to keep the economy from collapsing on itself entirely. And as bad a shape as we are in right now, if we lost Fannie, Freddie, AIG, Lehman, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch all inside of a year, we'd be tumbling down to depression era status.
Apparently you missed the part where Obama voted to approve the FISA bill which included telco immunity...
Note, I support neither major candidate in this election. I tend to lean libertarian.
If capital punishment were the deterrent it is claimed to be by its proponents, then why does it still exist?
Let's turn this around, if we took murderers and and took them aside and said, "Johnny, we don't do that, please don't do that any more." Do you think we would have more or less murders?
Letting this kid off is actually positive reinforcement for the action. For him, and for others. It isn't about others saying, "Gee, look at that guy, he went to jail, so I won't do this." It's about not having people say, "Gee, look at that guy, he did this and got off free.". Further, I DO think that universities might respond with programs to encourage this behavior in a controlled environment.
How does this follow? I think it would be more likely to encourage more students to do similar things. And this isn't a good thing. Perhaps this kid got lucky and didn't screw anything up, but 20 years olds screwing around in university systems isn't a good thing. Maybe, just maybe, this will encourage the students who might think of doing such a thing to actually go through the right channels and present this as a project with proper controls and safeguards. Maybe, universities might coordinate this behavior and make a class or research project out of it.
Note the words "would like to". This is what security companies do all the time.
Stay on the internet all you like, stay the hell out of my inbox.
But for people to express in any legally rigorous way that they DO want it, they have to know in advance about its existence
That doesn't mean that they have a RIGHT to get it to me, once or one hundred times. Just because it's awfully inconvenient for them to get their message out if restricted to channels where people are complicit in receiving those messages, doesn't mean they should be granted some right to hoist their message on people who haven't asked for it.
Your freedom ends when you impose on me without my permission. I don't think "harm" needs to be reached for your freedom to end.
People who send me spam, have done so without my consent, and they are causing me undo effort as a result.
I think a better analogy would be someone trespassing on your lawn and running around your house insisting you (sign petition/hear about candidate X/order viagra).
So you're going to vote for the guy who you think can convince people to go for policies that you disagree with rather than vote for the guy who you think won't be able to get anything done on the policies you do agree with.
Godwin's law be damned (I'm certainly not trying to compare the policies of Barack Obama, or any candidate, for that matter, to Hitler), why don't we vote for Hitler. Sure, he's a facist and we don't like the things he stands for, but gosh he just speaks to people so well.
Again, I'm not implying there are any Hitlers in this election, but I am saying that a vote for the guy who makes you feel good inside is shallow and silly.
In another line of reasoning, if there weren't subsidies on oil and oil companies then oil would have reflected the cost earlier and investors would have seen the market for solar cells, electric cars, etc.
Government subsidization is indeed good for initiating interest in otherwise daunting industries, but continued subsidies discourage other similar industries from starting because government involvement creates uncertain and less predictable markets.
Solar is a perfect example, with the government backing energy companies (oil and coal), it was a significantly higher risk to invest in alternative energy because the government was providing preference for a competing sector of the industry.
In my community in the US, they started cutting these programs because the number of students in the classes weren't high enough to justify the cost (~12-15 students per advanced class). The choices were limited as courses were cut to meet staffing levels.
More importantly, they wanted autonomy. They didn't want their churches regulated, and they didn't want their religious positions legislated.
You're exactly right, and that is why shareholders probably wouldn't win a lawsuit for negligent management. But, the direction of the company is dictated by the shareholders. We're about to find out whether the shareholders agree with the rejection of Microsoft's offer or not. There are significant benefits to going public, capital being one of them, but that those benefits aren't free.
Agreed. Their defense doesn't support their assertion. That said, I've read lots of mentions of corruption, but does anyone have some links to stories with specific cases of corruption, etc.
Oh, and for the love of all things, please stop confusing standard with free to implement. There are plenty of standards that aren't freely available for anyoen to implement. I understand that Microsoft intentionally confused the issue by calling it 'open'. But standards don't obligate anyone to allow others free access to implement the idea.
Thank you for that, I absolutely deserved it. My brain was completely melted. I must add the disclaimer that I do know the difference between pseudo and sudo, and completely botched it here.
Because Universities aren't exclusively places of higher education anymore. They are businesses, or sudo-businesses. Their sole interest is to grow. It's why they bow to bad PR and why the average American bachelors degree has been so completely watered down.
Which actually gives some additional hope that those who are transitioning from mainframe Unix to Linux will have a much better idea of what they are doing than a transition from Windows to Linux.