Everyone. Everyone from 401Ks to mutual funds, to hedge funds, cities, states, CALPERS - i.e., Wall Street and eventually you through your ownership of a CD or something.
They were all bundled up with AAA class loans and called "mortgaged backed securities." AAA on the top, junk on the bottom. And then labelled "AAA" quality - same as cash. Which they obviously were not to anyone paying attention.
Magnetar saw what was going on and bet against all that.
"A hedge fund named Magnetar comes up with an elaborate plan to make money. It sponsors the creation of complicated and ultimately toxic financial securities...while at the same time betting against the very securities it helped create. Planet Money's Alex Blumberg teams up with two investigative reporters from ProPublica, Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, to tell the story. Jake and Jesse pored through thousands of pages of documents and interviewed dozens of Wall Street Insiders. We bring you the result: A tale of intrigue and questionable behavior, which parallels quite closely the plot of a Mel Brooks musical. (40 minutes)"
I had a mortgage broker (at a fly-by-night) tell me before the crash that the only thing I needed to qualify for a loan was to breathe. This was in spite of all banking regulations about credit scores, income, etc. The broker simply fobbed the loan off to BoA or some such. It was then/their/ problem.
It horrified me, considering what I saw was happening with the price of real-estate.
It literally was criminal levels of fraud. The prisons should be filled with these people.
Yet we need less regulation, if you talk to Libertarians and Republicans.
Copypasta from FARK. Slightly cleaned up for formatting.
Rik01 4 hours ago Folks have heard me biatch about changes in my own city in the State of Florida -- and changes in the State itself. Basically the response has been (1) progress old man, (2) change the onion on your belt, (3) yelling at clouds, (4) who cares -- it's Floraduh!
However, these changes have been going on in other states.
I've watched politicians promise Eco-improvements with one hand and sell the voters down the river with the other. [For example] We had a massive oyster bed in the Indian River placed off limits to the public for preservation and ecological reasons for close to 20 years. That thing had huge oysters in it and the water in its cove was nearly crystal clear. The local police arrested scores of people sneaking down there to poach oysters and the shores were dotted with piles of empty shells. The cove was absolutely packed with the things, no river bottom exposed. Then, during the Housing Boom, an upscale development went it around it. Since the cove was too shallow for wealthy owners to park their boats at the planned docks behind the cove-side homes, it was dredged. No warning to anyone who wanted to get these delicious oysters. Dredges came in, ripped thousands of them out and disposed of them. The cove is now full of dark water and few oysters, making a lot of folks like myself wonder why we preserved them.
Water use in the state has quadrupled. Florida used to be very swampy, but the water table was shallow. Now, after sucking so much out and changing the lay of the land, plus paving over every square inch they could, we're the capitol of the US when it comes to sink holes. Water shortages began to pop up years ago, where before, we never had any.
Millions of acres of wild woods have been developed, endangering a host of native species of animals we used to have and the amount of fish in the rivers has diminished to the point that you need a license and a fishing season for Mullet -- once so plentiful that it was considered 'garbage fish' and caught mainly for bait. Within the last 40 years, the Indian River has to be closed to shellfish harvesting and fishing periodically during the summer because of massive human fecal bacteria contamination.
The previously crystal clear air of my seaside town now shows signs of grey pollution. They stopped dump burning ages ago, along with burning huge piles of used tires. Land clearing agencies have to use these massive air blowers that surround burn pits to burn stumps and brush with, creating a hotter, less smoke making fires. However, the local traffic, even with more eco-friendly cars, has quadrupled and quadrupled again. Their lesser pollution has, by the sheer weight of volume, has surpassed that which was present in times of less pollution control, when you used to have 'smokers' rolling down the roads.
Major advertising campaigns have convinced the public that instead of one or two cars per family, everyone except the dog needs one, plus a couple of ATVs, a boat and a couple of those fast, small watercraft good for nothing except going fast on the water and making a lot of noise. Prior to that, dirt bikes were the thing, tearing up thousands of acres of wild woods and chasing out local animals for fun. To round things out for the macho man, we have air boats, running on aircraft engines, no mufflers, tearing up the diminishing acres of wild swamps and annoying the crap out of neighbors when the owners 'test' them in their yards.
We have fewer forest fires than when I was a kid, thanks to sophisticated fire equipment -- but then again, the acres of undeveloped woods has fallen by 3/4, so there's less to burn. Where lightening would hit decades old pine trees and forest floors thick with dry pine needles, it hits houses, paved streets, power poles and grassy lawns.
My yard has an 'old growth' pine in it. Around 60 feet tall and nearly three feet around. It was 6 feet tall when we moved in around 1958. Across the street used to be a
Unfortunately, their incentives are diametrically opposed to common sense. There is literally no downside for a USPTO examiner to rubber-stamp everything on his or her desk. They get to go home early to beat the traffic, while productive society is left to deal with the legal fallout. The net effect is to devalue legitimate IP while rewarding the trolls.
THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS
It's because of this and copyright abuse that I think, sometimes, that we should just chuck it all and rely on trade secrets and a free-for-all on copyright. These jerks are not just poisoning the well, they're throwing dead goats in it.
>stealing technology >china is "guilty" of this "crime"
The entire Industrial Revolution in the States was because people stole "intellectual property" from England. Samuel Slater, and the rest of the gang up and down the Blackstone River got all their tech from England.
And it's hailed as an achievement here in the US.
Somehow it's bad when someone else does it.
>Calling the F35 good technology
No, no it is not. It is a boat anchor. A very very expensive boat anchor. It's the exact same thing that happened with the F111 at the demands of Robert McNamara but/worse/. A jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none-but-with-vtol and maintenance nightmares.
I love how you have to go back 1600 years to find an example of Christians being assholes
No, all I have to do to find examples of Christians being assholes is to open the fucking newspaper and read current events.
The Christian Taliban, aka the Dominionists, Reconstructionists, "Christian Warriors", "Joel's Army" et alia, surely do exist. And they are frightening.
The greatest weapon against religious fanaticism is education
Fixed, but only to a point. Many of the most loudest "kill all the fags" and "America is a Christian Nation" dolts that have a following have college educations. Fred Phelps was a lawyer and so is the rest of his family.
They replace the ad space with a message like this: "You're running Adblock. Please consider whitelisting us so we can pay for this website. Thank you."
Fark does this. I wish more sites did. Fark also has subscriptions for the private side (TotalFark 5 bux/mo). Value added selling works when there is actual value added.
I suspect the vendor response will be more along the lines of, "We've detected Ad Block on your computer. You will be unable to view content on this site while this is active."
Some already do this.
My response is always "fuck you, I'll go elsewhere then."
And the "elsewhere" where they don't do that is typically better.
If something is conductive, it can be wire-EDM drilled no matter how hard it is. If not, it can be lasered or waterjet cut. There is more to drilling than the twist drill in your Makita cordless drill.
YOU can't be taken seriously because most of us out here know what $1TRILLION could have done for infrastructure and education. But no, we've got flag-waving racist imbeciles like you who want to piss it all away on odious shit, like killing brown people, and politicians who will pander to them and suck the cocks of the military industrial complex.
What you don't get is that you've been pick-pocketed to kill people.
Title II is in effect because the ISPs decided to not play nice with their customers. If everyone liked Comcast, for example, instead of calling it the absolute worst company in customer service, we would never be here.
The days of the mom-and-pop ISP with direct personal service and "organic growth" of the Internet has been over for more than a decade. And what has taken their places are large customer-fucking entities with abysmal customer service and that absolutely refuse to upgrade infrastructure but instead put caps on use to deal with the demand. And for that they demand ever higher payment. This is after we threw billions at them to install last-mile fiber that they never installed, but instead handed out to the shareholders.
In the People's Libertarian Paradise of Concord, NH, we have exactly *two* "broadband" providers, both of which suck massively, one of which doesn't even offer broadband as currently defined (=>25Mbps). Comcast and Fairpoint (unfairpoint, fairly bad point, etc)
That's why we are here. This is "why we can't have nice things."
Screw both of these guys and Reason magazine too. If not outright corporate shills, they are at least useful idiots.
The struggle now is how to keep people from destroying things. FireFox is a disaster. Gnome is useless. Seems like people take over these projects and tear them to pieces.
I don't think the Open Source community is entirely free of the Peter Principle and politics for all the talk of meritocracy and organic growth. Especially when we have companies that subvert those goals for their own agenda despite their original lofty goals at founding.
Contracts are only valid when both parties negotiate on good faith and without undue pressure.
Contracts are also only valid when they're enforceable.
Without any power behind a contract (i.e., some sort of laws and force of government, e.g., regulations), contracts are nothing more than "damn pieces of paper" and your "word," whatever that is at the time.
This is where the libertarian fantasy drives off a cliff - that we can have contracts without The Man.
That only worked when your tribe was > 300 people and you could do ad-hoc "trial by combat."
Woosh... xOra's point was, government's intervention causes harm.
And what you don't get is not whether government regulation is a bad or good thing, but what kind of effort do we put into *good* governance. You know, like what everyone else on the planet does, from countries to corporations. Ever hear about "corporate governance"? Ever think of countries as just large corporations? It's an over-simplification (by far) but I think it's the only way to illustrate the "all regulation is bad" idea as lunacy.
The way broadband is sold in this country, the legality of what ISPs do in their contracts are just shy of outright fraud.
But hey, all regulation is bad.
You people want to toss out everything and leave anarchy behind. Forget about good governance, let's just have more burning rivers, consumer fraud, and land-grabs using private armies.
>uttering C++ and C# in the same sentence as if they are equivalent
Just... no.
>no need for other languages
Uh huh.
It seriously sounds like you've got only two tools in your toolbox and are looking at the guy with the loaded Gerstner box and telling him all those things are useless, which as a machinist and toolmaker, I have to say that you're delusional.
There is room in the world for C, Lisp, Go, Rust, COBOL, C#, and literal jokes like Brainfuck. Because no one language is perfect for all use cases.
An Easter Egg, in the construction sense that you describe, would be more like the time a construction crew opened up the wall in my apartment to fix a leak in a pipe and found a lunchbox that someone left behind when the building was built in 1928 with a note inside reading "Hello."
Sometimes it's a singing frog.
Don't bother trying to put the frog on Broadway, though.
Slashdot Mirror
>who was buying the loans
Everyone. Everyone from 401Ks to mutual funds, to hedge funds, cities, states, CALPERS - i.e., Wall Street and eventually you through your ownership of a CD or something.
They were all bundled up with AAA class loans and called "mortgaged backed securities." AAA on the top, junk on the bottom. And then labelled "AAA" quality - same as cash. Which they obviously were not to anyone paying attention.
Magnetar saw what was going on and bet against all that.
"A hedge fund named Magnetar comes up with an elaborate plan to make money. It sponsors the creation of complicated and ultimately toxic financial securities...while at the same time betting against the very securities it helped create. Planet Money's Alex Blumberg teams up with two investigative reporters from ProPublica, Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, to tell the story. Jake and Jesse pored through thousands of pages of documents and interviewed dozens of Wall Street Insiders. We bring you the result: A tale of intrigue and questionable behavior, which parallels quite closely the plot of a Mel Brooks musical. (40 minutes)"
http://www.thisamericanlife.or...
I had a mortgage broker (at a fly-by-night) tell me before the crash that the only thing I needed to qualify for a loan was to breathe. This was in spite of all banking regulations about credit scores, income, etc. The broker simply fobbed the loan off to BoA or some such. It was then /their/ problem.
It horrified me, considering what I saw was happening with the price of real-estate.
It literally was criminal levels of fraud. The prisons should be filled with these people.
Yet we need less regulation, if you talk to Libertarians and Republicans.
Idiots.
--
BMO
Copypasta from FARK. Slightly cleaned up for formatting.
Rik01 4 hours ago
Folks have heard me biatch about changes in my own city in the State of Florida -- and changes in the State itself. Basically the response has been (1) progress old man, (2) change the onion on your belt, (3) yelling at clouds, (4) who cares -- it's Floraduh!
However, these changes have been going on in other states.
I've watched politicians promise Eco-improvements with one hand and sell the voters down the river with the other. [For example] We had a massive oyster bed in the Indian River placed off limits to the public for preservation and ecological reasons for close to 20 years. That thing had huge oysters in it and the water in its cove was nearly crystal clear. The local police arrested scores of people sneaking down there to poach oysters and the shores were dotted with piles of empty shells. The cove was absolutely packed with the things, no river bottom exposed. Then, during the Housing Boom, an upscale development went it around it. Since the cove was too shallow for wealthy owners to park their boats at the planned docks behind the cove-side homes, it was dredged. No warning to anyone who wanted to get these delicious oysters. Dredges came in, ripped thousands of them out and disposed of them. The cove is now full of dark water and few oysters, making a lot of folks like myself wonder why we preserved them.
Water use in the state has quadrupled. Florida used to be very swampy, but the water table was shallow. Now, after sucking so much out and changing the lay of the land, plus paving over every square inch they could, we're the capitol of the US when it comes to sink holes. Water shortages began to pop up years ago, where before, we never had any.
Millions of acres of wild woods have been developed, endangering a host of native species of animals we used to have and the amount of fish in the rivers has diminished to the point that you need a license and a fishing season for Mullet -- once so plentiful that it was considered 'garbage fish' and caught mainly for bait. Within the last 40 years, the Indian River has to be closed to shellfish harvesting and fishing periodically during the summer because of massive human fecal bacteria contamination.
The previously crystal clear air of my seaside town now shows signs of grey pollution. They stopped dump burning ages ago, along with burning huge piles of used tires. Land clearing agencies have to use these massive air blowers that surround burn pits to burn stumps and brush with, creating a hotter, less smoke making fires. However, the local traffic, even with more eco-friendly cars, has quadrupled and quadrupled again. Their lesser pollution has, by the sheer weight of volume, has surpassed that which was present in times of less pollution control, when you used to have 'smokers' rolling down the roads.
Major advertising campaigns have convinced the public that instead of one or two cars per family, everyone except the dog needs one, plus a couple of ATVs, a boat and a couple of those fast, small watercraft good for nothing except going fast on the water and making a lot of noise. Prior to that, dirt bikes were the thing, tearing up thousands of acres of wild woods and chasing out local animals for fun. To round things out for the macho man, we have air boats, running on aircraft engines, no mufflers, tearing up the diminishing acres of wild swamps and annoying the crap out of neighbors when the owners 'test' them in their yards.
We have fewer forest fires than when I was a kid, thanks to sophisticated fire equipment -- but then again, the acres of undeveloped woods has fallen by 3/4, so there's less to burn. Where lightening would hit decades old pine trees and forest floors thick with dry pine needles, it hits houses, paved streets, power poles and grassy lawns.
My yard has an 'old growth' pine in it. Around 60 feet tall and nearly three feet around. It was 6 feet tall when we moved in around 1958. Across the street used to be a
Unfortunately, their incentives are diametrically opposed to common sense. There is literally no downside for a USPTO examiner to rubber-stamp everything on his or her desk. They get to go home early to beat the traffic, while productive society is left to deal with the legal fallout. The net effect is to devalue legitimate IP while rewarding the trolls.
THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS
It's because of this and copyright abuse that I think, sometimes, that we should just chuck it all and rely on trade secrets and a free-for-all on copyright. These jerks are not just poisoning the well, they're throwing dead goats in it.
--
BMO
The difference is that creationists deny science because of their faith. These guys deny science because of greed.
There really isn't any difference when your faith consists of greed.
"Mammon, n. The god of the world's leading religion. His chief temple is in the city of New York"
-- Ambrose Bierce "The Devil's Dictionary"
--
BMO
>stealing technology
>china is "guilty" of this "crime"
The entire Industrial Revolution in the States was because people stole "intellectual property" from England. Samuel Slater, and the rest of the gang up and down the Blackstone River got all their tech from England.
And it's hailed as an achievement here in the US.
Somehow it's bad when someone else does it.
>Calling the F35 good technology
No, no it is not. It is a boat anchor. A very very expensive boat anchor. It's the exact same thing that happened with the F111 at the demands of Robert McNamara but /worse/. A jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none-but-with-vtol and maintenance nightmares.
--
BMO
Probably very good.
We don't make anything here anymore. And we have forgotten how.
--
BMO
Go ahead and find a news article of radical Christians killing thousands of innocent people every month in Africa with gasoline, matches, and machetes
They do.
Or have you completely fucking ignored what's been going on in Uganda?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Engineered by guess who? "Christians" in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
People like you disgust me.
--
BMO
I love how you have to go back 1600 years to find an example of Christians being assholes
No, all I have to do to find examples of Christians being assholes is to open the fucking newspaper and read current events.
The Christian Taliban, aka the Dominionists, Reconstructionists, "Christian Warriors", "Joel's Army" et alia, surely do exist. And they are frightening.
Read this take-down of Joel's Army: http://www.discernment-ministr...
The greatest weapon against religious fanaticism is education
Fixed, but only to a point. Many of the most loudest "kill all the fags" and "America is a Christian Nation" dolts that have a following have college educations. Fred Phelps was a lawyer and so is the rest of his family.
--
BMO
They replace the ad space with a message like this: "You're running Adblock. Please consider whitelisting us so we can pay for this website. Thank you."
Fark does this. I wish more sites did. Fark also has subscriptions for the private side (TotalFark 5 bux/mo). Value added selling works when there is actual value added.
--
BMO
I suspect the vendor response will be more along the lines of, "We've detected Ad Block on your computer. You will be unable to view content on this site while this is active."
Some already do this.
My response is always "fuck you, I'll go elsewhere then."
And the "elsewhere" where they don't do that is typically better.
I also run the EFF's Privacy Badger.
--
BMO
I just stood up on my chair.
*golf clap*
Well done, Sir.
--
BMO
Even diamond.
Maybe not conventionally with a high-speed-steel drill bit, but yes, holes are drilled even in diamonds every day.
http://www.gemgate.com/origina...
If something is conductive, it can be wire-EDM drilled no matter how hard it is. If not, it can be lasered or waterjet cut. There is more to drilling than the twist drill in your Makita cordless drill.
--
BMO
I vote for steady state
It doesn't matter what you vote for or what you believe. The data says you're wrong.
To head off this inevitable statement: "But this debate proves that we don't really know anything!"
No, no it doesn't. Read this before you go any further:
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...
--
BMO
YOU can't be taken seriously because most of us out here know what $1TRILLION could have done for infrastructure and education. But no, we've got flag-waving racist imbeciles like you who want to piss it all away on odious shit, like killing brown people, and politicians who will pander to them and suck the cocks of the military industrial complex.
What you don't get is that you've been pick-pocketed to kill people.
Just shut the fuck up.
--
BMO
>Reason
You need to dump the salt so you can make room in the truck to haul away the horse shit.
--
BMO
I went to Sperry's twitter page.
The amount of Libertarian derp is stunning.
Didn't bother with the other author.
Title II is in effect because the ISPs decided to not play nice with their customers. If everyone liked Comcast, for example, instead of calling it the absolute worst company in customer service, we would never be here.
The days of the mom-and-pop ISP with direct personal service and "organic growth" of the Internet has been over for more than a decade. And what has taken their places are large customer-fucking entities with abysmal customer service and that absolutely refuse to upgrade infrastructure but instead put caps on use to deal with the demand. And for that they demand ever higher payment. This is after we threw billions at them to install last-mile fiber that they never installed, but instead handed out to the shareholders.
In the People's Libertarian Paradise of Concord, NH, we have exactly *two* "broadband" providers, both of which suck massively, one of which doesn't even offer broadband as currently defined (=>25Mbps). Comcast and Fairpoint (unfairpoint, fairly bad point, etc)
That's why we are here. This is "why we can't have nice things."
Screw both of these guys and Reason magazine too. If not outright corporate shills, they are at least useful idiots.
Quislings come in all forms.
--
BMO
Follow-up...
My exit is in ten miles... I'll just close my eyes for a bit... And then 200 miles later...
IKR!?
>going to new job
>see road sign "welcome to new hampshire"
I was supposed to be in Uxbridge MA.
From Rhode Island.
--
BMO
How will the car know when to wake the driver up
You mean as opposed to now?
I used to fall asleep every morning on the way to work because I had two jobs and school. Without rumble strips I'd be dead.
Semi-autonomous driving would have been safer.
--
BMO
The struggle now is how to keep people from destroying things. FireFox is a disaster. Gnome is useless. Seems like people take over these projects and tear them to pieces.
I don't think the Open Source community is entirely free of the Peter Principle and politics for all the talk of meritocracy and organic growth. Especially when we have companies that subvert those goals for their own agenda despite their original lofty goals at founding.
--
BMO
You can't have enforcement of contracts without laws and the power of government behind them.
Remind me to never sign a contract with you.
Because seriously, you and people like you are what is wrong with libertarianism.
--
BMO
Contracts are only valid when both parties negotiate on good faith and without undue pressure.
Contracts are also only valid when they're enforceable.
Without any power behind a contract (i.e., some sort of laws and force of government, e.g., regulations), contracts are nothing more than "damn pieces of paper" and your "word," whatever that is at the time.
This is where the libertarian fantasy drives off a cliff - that we can have contracts without The Man.
That only worked when your tribe was > 300 people and you could do ad-hoc "trial by combat."
--
BMO
Woosh... xOra's point was, government's intervention causes harm.
And what you don't get is not whether government regulation is a bad or good thing, but what kind of effort do we put into *good* governance. You know, like what everyone else on the planet does, from countries to corporations. Ever hear about "corporate governance"? Ever think of countries as just large corporations? It's an over-simplification (by far) but I think it's the only way to illustrate the "all regulation is bad" idea as lunacy.
The way broadband is sold in this country, the legality of what ISPs do in their contracts are just shy of outright fraud.
But hey, all regulation is bad.
You people want to toss out everything and leave anarchy behind. Forget about good governance, let's just have more burning rivers, consumer fraud, and land-grabs using private armies.
--
BMO
So much shilling in one post.
>uttering C++ and C# in the same sentence as if they are equivalent
Just... no.
>no need for other languages
Uh huh.
It seriously sounds like you've got only two tools in your toolbox and are looking at the guy with the loaded Gerstner box and telling him all those things are useless, which as a machinist and toolmaker, I have to say that you're delusional.
There is room in the world for C, Lisp, Go, Rust, COBOL, C#, and literal jokes like Brainfuck. Because no one language is perfect for all use cases.
--
BMO
An Easter Egg, in the construction sense that you describe, would be more like the time a construction crew opened up the wall in my apartment to fix a leak in a pipe and found a lunchbox that someone left behind when the building was built in 1928 with a note inside reading "Hello."
Sometimes it's a singing frog.
Don't bother trying to put the frog on Broadway, though.
http://static.comicvine.com/up...
--
BMO
That's what the Reply To: is for.
It can be different from the From: header.
Most people never check it.
--
BMO