they've bailed out some companies while letting others fail with no clear motive
Actually, the motive is very clear, at least in the case of General Motors. It's spelled "Labor Unions".
Pretty simplistic view of a complex situation. It might also be spelled "saving one of the last major US owned industrial companies". Or maybe it's spelled "preventing the uncontrolled and disastrous collapse of economies of Michigan and Ohio." What's it spelled when both the UAW and bond holders of GM are told by the Obama administration they both need to make major concessions or GM will go bankrupt? Or what's the spelling of the cost of sorting out the pension mess would exceed the amount we've loaned to GM? The spelling of not wanting hundreds of thousands of additional long term unemployed during the worst recession in 75 years would be interesting, too.
Yeah, Obama has a political debt to the UAW, but the reason the administration is going to such extraordinary lengths for GM extend beyond just that debt. That you see the entire situation as boiling down to supporting unions says more about your ideology than what's actually at stake.
Ummm... isn't that exactly the sort of treatment the unions had to face in the U.S. when they first started?
What's different now?
Now all unions want to fight for is a fifteen minute break every ten minutes. What happened to the spirit of "we shall overcome?"
If they actually cared about American jobs, they would be going to China and doing what needs to be done. Period.
Actually it's not the sort of conditions unions faced when they started organizing in the US. A far cry from it. The Chinese government is far more repressive than the US government ever was. The US had a long tradition of free speech by the time labor organizations started organizing. While government and business interests were hostile, sometimes violently so, it was possible to at least publish articles advocating the use of strikes as a means of gaining better working conditions. Try getting away with that in China today. Additionally, the most significant increase of unions' power came in the 1930's, when legislators friendly to organized labor were elected on a broad scale. Not sure you can even run for office in China in the same way you can in the US. Seems like anyone of any significance has to rise up through the communist party. Who don't seem very communist these days. There are labor organizations in China, but for the most part they're pretty pliable and don't push things too far.
Prosecutors always have some leeway in what charges they'll bring. If they charged everyone for every conceivable violation we'd all have criminal records. Just as no sane prosecutor would go after parents for sending pictures of their naked infants to relatives, no prosecutor who's not a publicity seeking, grade A ass hole would charge a teenager with distributing child porn in these circumstances.
The school district does not contest that Ms. Redding had no disciplinary record, but says that is irrelevant.
"Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules," the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, "only that she was never caught."
I would never want anyone from a school with this attitude to be involved in the education of my children.
It appears these were sweetheart contracts far more generous than the industry standard retention contracts. An interesting article on this is available here.
The way it works now is that large states that are heavily democratic or republican don't get much attention outside of the primaries. Why in the world would a presidential candidate campaign in New York, Texas, or California if only the electoral vote counts. Even with the electoral college, small states that tend to lean one way or the other get no attention. Why should a campaign care about Vermont or Wyoming if their electoral votes are all but decided before the election? The only states that matter are those that are undecided, no matter what how many electoral votes they have. Ohio and Florida assume a significance vastly disproportionate to the size of their electorate. Because of the electoral college, presidential campaigns don't have an incentive to woo undecided voters in heavily partisan states, large or small, they'd rather focus resources on Ohio and Florida. The electoral college distorts things, but not necessarily in favor of small states.
Some of these new machines can cost several million dollars and offer amazing franchise opportunities... providing enough procedures can be scheduled on the machines during their operating lifetimes to amortise the cost and produce a profit.
Several million would be cheap compared to some devices. According to this article, accelerators can exceed $100 million per machine.
I'm not sure if medicine is always rationed, but I suspect that in the US it's rationed to a varying degree for the great majority of people, even when you have private health insurance. I've known of plenty of cases where insurance companies will not pay for more expensive treatment options until you first try a more conservative and inexpensive approach. Even when the more advanced treatment is clearly indicated. You can find plenty of cases of US insurance carriers who won't cover cyberknife treatments, as they judge the cyberknife to be experimental. Experimental doesn't necessarily mean it's not effective, but that they have not determined that it's more effective than existing treatments that cost less. Not an unreasonable position, if they're making an honest effort to evaluate the available data. It's difficult to determine how often these sorts of determinations are made with the best interest of the patient as opposed to financial interest of company executives and owners. Also, sometimes advanced treatments have a better short term outcome for many patients, but long term studies don't show a significant increase in longevity. Long term studies may have clearly indicated cyberknife is the most effective treatment for some conditions, but if that's not the case, should an insurance company burden all it's participants with higher premiums for marginally better outcomes? This article, for instance, discusses the issues related to treating prostrate cancer with the cyberknife. How much more per month are most people willing to pay for health insurance so that some people can live two or three months longer or have fewer side effects? $50? $100?
Aren't LEDs less efficient for white light, compared to current streetlights with HPS? Wikipedia says 150 lumens/watt for HPS and only 10-90 for white LEDs.
Might want to check my math, but based on the spec sheet this LED looks like it gets up to 330 lumens/watt .
You do know that it is impossible to get third degree burns from boiling coffee.
I'm not an expert on conditions that can cause burns, however it seems that in the Macdonalds' case a factor was how long the hot liquid was held against the skin. According to this article, the plaintiff in this case, and others, did suffer third degree burns from the McDonalds' coffee. From the article:
The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin. A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and genital and groin areas. She was hospitalized for eight days, during which time she underwent skin grafting. Liebeck, who also underwent debridement
treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds refused.
During discovery, McDonalds produced documents showing more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebecks. This history documented McDonalds' knowledge about the extent and nature of this hazard.
And,
Further, McDonalds' quality assurance manager testified that the company actively enforces a requirement that coffee be held in the pot at 185 degrees, plus or minus five degrees. He also testified that a burn hazard exists with any food substance served at 140 degrees or above,
and that McDonalds coffee, at the temperature at which it was poured into styrofoam cups, was not fit for consumption because it would burn
the mouth and throat. The quality assurance manager admitted that burns would occur, but testified that McDonalds had no intention of reducing the "holding temperature" of its coffee.
Plaintiffs' expert, a scholar in thermodynamics applied to human skin burns, testified that liquids, at 180 degrees, will cause a full
thickness burn to human skin in two to seven seconds. Other testimony showed that as the temperature decreases toward 155 degrees, the extent
of the burn relative to that temperature decreases exponentially. Thus, if Liebeck's spill had involved coffee at 155 degrees, the liquid would have cooled and given her time to avoid a serious burn.
Nope. One says "we'll just give people money, that'll fix it!" and the other says "we'll just cut taxes on businesses, that'll fix it!"
If you go to their websites you can download more detailed policy proposals.
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/economy/
http://www.johnmccain.com/Issues/jobsforamerica/
For an independent comparison of their plans for the economy in general, and more specifically taxes and spending, you might want to try this article and this article.
If we hadn't had things like CRA and community activist groups painting banks that didn't paint lots of bad loans into 'underserved' areas as racists, then we might not have had quite so many bad loans.
The myth that the CRA and other goverment housing initiatives were largely responsible for the current economic debacle has been so thoroughly discredited it's tiresome to see it trotted out again.
This article makes the case that Fannie Mae started accepting risky mortgages in response to market and investor pressures. The originators of mortgages were making it clear they had alternatives to Fannie, and large investors in Fannie were pressuring it to take greater risks in order to earn a higher return. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were owned by private shareholders who invested in those corporations to make money.
The study discussed in
this article makes the case that it's not the type of borrower that determines the default rate, but the type of loan. As one of the authors of the study says "These results show clearly that mortgages made using traditional affordable housing guidelines are holding up much better than subprime mortgages." A significant portion of subprime borrowers could have qualified for much lower cost traditional mortgages. Lewis Ranieri, considered by some to be the founder of mortgage backed securities, is quoted in this transcript as estimating that 50% of subprime borrowers could have qualified for Alt-A or prime mortgages. Government housing initiatives like the CRA did not push these people into subprime mortgages.
Obama has been under intense media scrutiny for the last year. All of what you're bringing up was reported at various times. Do a search of the NY Times, I think you'll find that they reported on all of this previous to Obama being nominated.
Sarah Palin shows up out of the blue, with a little over two months until the election, and you're surprised the press is all over her, her family, and anyone that knew her since childhood? If that level of scrutiny is too much for her then she should not have agreed to be on the Republican ticket. As Gail Collins said in an opinion piece, "Palin has been pressing the line that people don't really know 'the real Barack Obama,' and who could make the argument better than a woman who we've already known for almost six weeks? Really, she's like one of the family."
Kids in the U.S. aren't doing as well in school anymore as a whole because a lot more of them don't speak a word of English when they start going to school.
That doesn't explain why even the ones who are raised speaking English, and have virtually no immigrants in their classroom, are not doing well either. That's the case in my local school district. Through some volunteer work that I do I get the opportunity to talk to local high school students, and there seems to be a pervasive anti-intellectual streak, especially among the young men.
It's not so much that the CRA had no effect, but that its affect on Fannie and Freddie was not nearly as great as some are claiming. The CRA certainly had some role in all of this, but with the advent of mortgage backed securities, and Wall Street's enthusiasm for these securities, Fannie and Freddie were in a position of becoming irrelevant if they didn't start accepting more high risk mortgages from companies such as Countrywide. Have a look at the NY Times article that describes how market and investor pressures helped to push Fannie into accepting risky mortgages.
There's an article at in the NY Times that describes why Fannie got so deep into subprimes. Among the biggest reasons were market and shareholder pressures. Fannie was seeing a larger and larger portion of its business being picked off by non-GSE competitors. Companies that originated mortgages, such as Countrywide, were making it clear that unless Fannie bought more of the riskiest loans from them they would start selling to Wall Street. In the new world of mortgage-backed securities Fannie was no longer essential to banks, savings and loans, and other originators of mortgages. Additionally, large investors in Fannie, such as hedge funds, were pressuring it to take greater risks in return for greater profits. It would appear that far from Fannie driving the market to accept bad mortgages, the inverse was actually true.
The end of that article offers evidence that the CRA had a minimal impact on the problem with subprime mortgages.
"Some commentators note that CRA regulated loans tended to be safe and profitable, and that subprime excesses came mainly from institutions not regulated by the CRA. In the February 2008 House hearing, law professor Michael S. Barr, a Treasury Department official under President Clinton,[63][26] stated that a Federal Reserve survey showed that affected institutions considered CRA loans profitable and not overly risky. He noted that approximately 50% of the subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA. Another 25% to 30% came from only partially CRA regulated bank subsidiaries and affiliates. He stated that institutions fully regulated by CRA made "perhaps" one in four sub-prime loans. Referring to CRA and abuses in the subprime market, Michael Barr stated that in his judgment "the worst and most widespread abuses occurred in the institutions with the least federal oversight". [64] According to Janet L. Yellen, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, independent mortgage companies made "high-priced loans" at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts; most CRA loans were responsibly made, and were not the higher-priced loans that have contributed to the current crisis.[65] A 2008 study by Traiger & Hinckley LLP, a law firm that counsels financial institutions on CRA compliance, found that CRA regulated institutions were less likely to make subprime loans, and when they did the interest rates were lower. CRA banks were also half as likely to resell the loans.[66]"
"Assistant Professor of Law Alan M. White[67] notes that some abuses blamed on CRA actually occurred under the George W. Bush administration, because the Housing and Urban Development and Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to fulfill their affordable housing goals â" which are not technically part of the CRA â" by buying subprime mortgage-backed securities.[68]"
International roaming is a feature you have to call and add to the account, they make you aware of the fees, and try to sell you a package that will reduce themm and when you do not buy it, they note it.
That wasn't my experience with AT&T. I used them from 2001 to 2004. I live in the US, and I was able to freely use my cell phone in Canada, and accrue roaming charges, without having to call and authorize anything. I had one of their national plans, so I was never charged roaming charges in the US, Canada was a different story.
I was only replying to a specific statement, nothing more. I quoted that statement. But you didn't want to address that, so you put words in my mouth. You launched into a rant implying I didn't want to hold anyone responsible. My point was that requirements and needs outpaced capability, and that this happens in organizations of all types. You seem to want to ascribe an intent to my statements that isn't there. I'm not aware that anything I said related to the type of harm bad software design can cause.
So you're saying we should forgive the government because they rushed the job? Or should we hold them accountable for botching up a system that now impacts innocent lives?
That's not what I said, so don't put words in my mouth. I was replying to your statement that professionals weren't involved in the design of the database. You were the one who seemed to think that neither professionals nor private companies were involved. You said "and rather than bring in some professionals to design it, they slapped it together on their own." The report contradicts what you said, and clearly states that Boeing was the contractor. It's difficult to believe that you read the report before hand and made such a statement. I said nothing about accountability or impact, so I don't know why you're trying to pin those on me. Face it, you made unsubstantiated claims, someone called you on it, and now you're trying to cover your ass by putting words in their mouth. Take some responsibility for what you said. How can you go from my statement that these sorts of screw ups happen in all sorts of enterprises to absolving the government of any responsibility?
I'm sure somebody at the Justice Department decided that this database should be easy to build ("It's just a list!"), and rather than bring in some professionals to design it, they slapped it together on their own.
If you'd bother reading the report, available at http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/File/Commdocs/Staff_Memo_toBM_terror_watch_8.21.08.pdf, you'd see that Boeing is responsible for the current system. So, yes, a private professional company, employing experienced DBAs is responsible for the current system. If you'd spent much time consulting for private industry you'd know that this sort of thing isn't unique to the government. It's just that it's much more likely to come to light if it's a government project. I've seen many examples in private industry where companies, large and small, end up in the same same bind. This is what happens when rapidly evolving requirements are shoehorned into databases whose original designs could never have anticipated those requirements. Projects like this don't have scope creep so much as scope leap. Software messes that are difficult to migrate almost invariably occur.
Forrer is a consultant, not one of the maintenance coders for the system in question. He just threw out the phrase tens of thousands to give the reporter something to grab on to. It sounds impressive to laymen. To extrapolate from his statement that maximum loc is 90k seems a bit of a leap to me. The real number of loc could just as well be 900,000 as 90,000. I think a more revealing figure for the complexity involved is the $117 million price tag for a replacement system. Even if that includes hardware, to me that implies a significant amount of code needs to be written.
No, more like Dennis Kucinich getting the Democratic nomination. Both are fringe candidates within their parties that have a snowball's chance in Brazil of getting their parties' nominations.
Slashdot Mirror
they've bailed out some companies while letting others fail with no clear motive
Actually, the motive is very clear, at least in the case of General Motors. It's spelled "Labor Unions".
Pretty simplistic view of a complex situation. It might also be spelled "saving one of the last major US owned industrial companies". Or maybe it's spelled "preventing the uncontrolled and disastrous collapse of economies of Michigan and Ohio." What's it spelled when both the UAW and bond holders of GM are told by the Obama administration they both need to make major concessions or GM will go bankrupt? Or what's the spelling of the cost of sorting out the pension mess would exceed the amount we've loaned to GM? The spelling of not wanting hundreds of thousands of additional long term unemployed during the worst recession in 75 years would be interesting, too.
Yeah, Obama has a political debt to the UAW, but the reason the administration is going to such extraordinary lengths for GM extend beyond just that debt. That you see the entire situation as boiling down to supporting unions says more about your ideology than what's actually at stake.
Ummm... isn't that exactly the sort of treatment the unions had to face in the U.S. when they first started?
What's different now?
Now all unions want to fight for is a fifteen minute break every ten minutes. What happened to the spirit of "we shall overcome?"
If they actually cared about American jobs, they would be going to China and doing what needs to be done. Period.
Actually it's not the sort of conditions unions faced when they started organizing in the US. A far cry from it. The Chinese government is far more repressive than the US government ever was. The US had a long tradition of free speech by the time labor organizations started organizing. While government and business interests were hostile, sometimes violently so, it was possible to at least publish articles advocating the use of strikes as a means of gaining better working conditions. Try getting away with that in China today. Additionally, the most significant increase of unions' power came in the 1930's, when legislators friendly to organized labor were elected on a broad scale. Not sure you can even run for office in China in the same way you can in the US. Seems like anyone of any significance has to rise up through the communist party. Who don't seem very communist these days. There are labor organizations in China, but for the most part they're pretty pliable and don't push things too far.
Prosecutors always have some leeway in what charges they'll bring. If they charged everyone for every conceivable violation we'd all have criminal records. Just as no sane prosecutor would go after parents for sending pictures of their naked infants to relatives, no prosecutor who's not a publicity seeking, grade A ass hole would charge a teenager with distributing child porn in these circumstances.
VM/CMS isn't dead. IBM is still selling it and making money from it. And MVS is still around, buried deep down in zOS.
The school district does not contest that Ms. Redding had no disciplinary record, but says that is irrelevant. "Her assertion should not be misread to infer that she never broke school rules," the district said of Ms. Redding in a brief, "only that she was never caught."
I would never want anyone from a school with this attitude to be involved in the education of my children.
It appears these were sweetheart contracts far more generous than the industry standard retention contracts. An interesting article on this is available here.
This summary left out a key element whenever solar power is mentioned. How much power in standard popular press houses is this array rated for?
The way it works now is that large states that are heavily democratic or republican don't get much attention outside of the primaries. Why in the world would a presidential candidate campaign in New York, Texas, or California if only the electoral vote counts. Even with the electoral college, small states that tend to lean one way or the other get no attention. Why should a campaign care about Vermont or Wyoming if their electoral votes are all but decided before the election? The only states that matter are those that are undecided, no matter what how many electoral votes they have. Ohio and Florida assume a significance vastly disproportionate to the size of their electorate. Because of the electoral college, presidential campaigns don't have an incentive to woo undecided voters in heavily partisan states, large or small, they'd rather focus resources on Ohio and Florida. The electoral college distorts things, but not necessarily in favor of small states.
Some of these new machines can cost several million dollars and offer amazing franchise opportunities... providing enough procedures can be scheduled on the machines during their operating lifetimes to amortise the cost and produce a profit.
Several million would be cheap compared to some devices. According to this article, accelerators can exceed $100 million per machine.
I'm not sure if medicine is always rationed, but I suspect that in the US it's rationed to a varying degree for the great majority of people, even when you have private health insurance. I've known of plenty of cases where insurance companies will not pay for more expensive treatment options until you first try a more conservative and inexpensive approach. Even when the more advanced treatment is clearly indicated. You can find plenty of cases of US insurance carriers who won't cover cyberknife treatments, as they judge the cyberknife to be experimental. Experimental doesn't necessarily mean it's not effective, but that they have not determined that it's more effective than existing treatments that cost less. Not an unreasonable position, if they're making an honest effort to evaluate the available data. It's difficult to determine how often these sorts of determinations are made with the best interest of the patient as opposed to financial interest of company executives and owners. Also, sometimes advanced treatments have a better short term outcome for many patients, but long term studies don't show a significant increase in longevity. Long term studies may have clearly indicated cyberknife is the most effective treatment for some conditions, but if that's not the case, should an insurance company burden all it's participants with higher premiums for marginally better outcomes? This article, for instance, discusses the issues related to treating prostrate cancer with the cyberknife. How much more per month are most people willing to pay for health insurance so that some people can live two or three months longer or have fewer side effects? $50? $100?
Aren't LEDs less efficient for white light, compared to current streetlights with HPS? Wikipedia says 150 lumens/watt for HPS and only 10-90 for white LEDs.
Might want to check my math, but based on the spec sheet this LED looks like it gets up to 330 lumens/watt .
You do know that it is impossible to get third degree burns from boiling coffee.
I'm not an expert on conditions that can cause burns, however it seems that in the Macdonalds' case a factor was how long the hot liquid was held against the skin. According to this article, the plaintiff in this case, and others, did suffer third degree burns from the McDonalds' coffee. From the article:
The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin. A vascular surgeon determined that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6 percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and genital and groin areas. She was hospitalized for eight days, during which time she underwent skin grafting. Liebeck, who also underwent debridement treatments, sought to settle her claim for $20,000, but McDonalds refused.
During discovery, McDonalds produced documents showing more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some claims involved third-degree burns substantially similar to Liebecks. This history documented McDonalds' knowledge about the extent and nature of this hazard.
And,
Further, McDonalds' quality assurance manager testified that the company actively enforces a requirement that coffee be held in the pot at 185 degrees, plus or minus five degrees. He also testified that a burn hazard exists with any food substance served at 140 degrees or above, and that McDonalds coffee, at the temperature at which it was poured into styrofoam cups, was not fit for consumption because it would burn the mouth and throat. The quality assurance manager admitted that burns would occur, but testified that McDonalds had no intention of reducing the "holding temperature" of its coffee.
Plaintiffs' expert, a scholar in thermodynamics applied to human skin burns, testified that liquids, at 180 degrees, will cause a full thickness burn to human skin in two to seven seconds. Other testimony showed that as the temperature decreases toward 155 degrees, the extent of the burn relative to that temperature decreases exponentially. Thus, if Liebeck's spill had involved coffee at 155 degrees, the liquid would have cooled and given her time to avoid a serious burn.
Nope. One says "we'll just give people money, that'll fix it!" and the other says "we'll just cut taxes on businesses, that'll fix it!"
If you go to their websites you can download more detailed policy proposals.
For an independent comparison of their plans for the economy in general, and more specifically taxes and spending, you might want to try this article and this article.
If we hadn't had things like CRA and community activist groups painting banks that didn't paint lots of bad loans into 'underserved' areas as racists, then we might not have had quite so many bad loans.
The myth that the CRA and other goverment housing initiatives were largely responsible for the current economic debacle has been so thoroughly discredited it's tiresome to see it trotted out again.
This article makes the case that Fannie Mae started accepting risky mortgages in response to market and investor pressures. The originators of mortgages were making it clear they had alternatives to Fannie, and large investors in Fannie were pressuring it to take greater risks in order to earn a higher return. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were owned by private shareholders who invested in those corporations to make money.
The study discussed in this article makes the case that it's not the type of borrower that determines the default rate, but the type of loan. As one of the authors of the study says "These results show clearly that mortgages made using traditional affordable housing guidelines are holding up much better than subprime mortgages." A significant portion of subprime borrowers could have qualified for much lower cost traditional mortgages. Lewis Ranieri, considered by some to be the founder of mortgage backed securities, is quoted in this transcript as estimating that 50% of subprime borrowers could have qualified for Alt-A or prime mortgages. Government housing initiatives like the CRA did not push these people into subprime mortgages.
Obama has been under intense media scrutiny for the last year. All of what you're bringing up was reported at various times. Do a search of the NY Times, I think you'll find that they reported on all of this previous to Obama being nominated.
Sarah Palin shows up out of the blue, with a little over two months until the election, and you're surprised the press is all over her, her family, and anyone that knew her since childhood? If that level of scrutiny is too much for her then she should not have agreed to be on the Republican ticket. As Gail Collins said in an opinion piece, "Palin has been pressing the line that people don't really know 'the real Barack Obama,' and who could make the argument better than a woman who we've already known for almost six weeks? Really, she's like one of the family."
Kids in the U.S. aren't doing as well in school anymore as a whole because a lot more of them don't speak a word of English when they start going to school.
That doesn't explain why even the ones who are raised speaking English, and have virtually no immigrants in their classroom, are not doing well either. That's the case in my local school district. Through some volunteer work that I do I get the opportunity to talk to local high school students, and there seems to be a pervasive anti-intellectual streak, especially among the young men.
It's not so much that the CRA had no effect, but that its affect on Fannie and Freddie was not nearly as great as some are claiming. The CRA certainly had some role in all of this, but with the advent of mortgage backed securities, and Wall Street's enthusiasm for these securities, Fannie and Freddie were in a position of becoming irrelevant if they didn't start accepting more high risk mortgages from companies such as Countrywide. Have a look at the NY Times article that describes how market and investor pressures helped to push Fannie into accepting risky mortgages.
There's an article at in the NY Times that describes why Fannie got so deep into subprimes. Among the biggest reasons were market and shareholder pressures. Fannie was seeing a larger and larger portion of its business being picked off by non-GSE competitors. Companies that originated mortgages, such as Countrywide, were making it clear that unless Fannie bought more of the riskiest loans from them they would start selling to Wall Street. In the new world of mortgage-backed securities Fannie was no longer essential to banks, savings and loans, and other originators of mortgages. Additionally, large investors in Fannie, such as hedge funds, were pressuring it to take greater risks in return for greater profits. It would appear that far from Fannie driving the market to accept bad mortgages, the inverse was actually true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act
The end of that article offers evidence that the CRA had a minimal impact on the problem with subprime mortgages.
"Some commentators note that CRA regulated loans tended to be safe and profitable, and that subprime excesses came mainly from institutions not regulated by the CRA. In the February 2008 House hearing, law professor Michael S. Barr, a Treasury Department official under President Clinton,[63][26] stated that a Federal Reserve survey showed that affected institutions considered CRA loans profitable and not overly risky. He noted that approximately 50% of the subprime loans were made by independent mortgage companies that were not regulated by the CRA. Another 25% to 30% came from only partially CRA regulated bank subsidiaries and affiliates. He stated that institutions fully regulated by CRA made "perhaps" one in four sub-prime loans. Referring to CRA and abuses in the subprime market, Michael Barr stated that in his judgment "the worst and most widespread abuses occurred in the institutions with the least federal oversight". [64] According to Janet L. Yellen, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, independent mortgage companies made "high-priced loans" at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts; most CRA loans were responsibly made, and were not the higher-priced loans that have contributed to the current crisis.[65] A 2008 study by Traiger & Hinckley LLP, a law firm that counsels financial institutions on CRA compliance, found that CRA regulated institutions were less likely to make subprime loans, and when they did the interest rates were lower. CRA banks were also half as likely to resell the loans.[66]"
"Assistant Professor of Law Alan M. White[67] notes that some abuses blamed on CRA actually occurred under the George W. Bush administration, because the Housing and Urban Development and Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to fulfill their affordable housing goals â" which are not technically part of the CRA â" by buying subprime mortgage-backed securities.[68]"
International roaming is a feature you have to call and add to the account, they make you aware of the fees, and try to sell you a package that will reduce themm and when you do not buy it, they note it.
That wasn't my experience with AT&T. I used them from 2001 to 2004. I live in the US, and I was able to freely use my cell phone in Canada, and accrue roaming charges, without having to call and authorize anything. I had one of their national plans, so I was never charged roaming charges in the US, Canada was a different story.
I was only replying to a specific statement, nothing more. I quoted that statement. But you didn't want to address that, so you put words in my mouth. You launched into a rant implying I didn't want to hold anyone responsible. My point was that requirements and needs outpaced capability, and that this happens in organizations of all types. You seem to want to ascribe an intent to my statements that isn't there. I'm not aware that anything I said related to the type of harm bad software design can cause.
So you're saying we should forgive the government because they rushed the job? Or should we hold them accountable for botching up a system that now impacts innocent lives?
That's not what I said, so don't put words in my mouth. I was replying to your statement that professionals weren't involved in the design of the database. You were the one who seemed to think that neither professionals nor private companies were involved. You said "and rather than bring in some professionals to design it, they slapped it together on their own." The report contradicts what you said, and clearly states that Boeing was the contractor. It's difficult to believe that you read the report before hand and made such a statement. I said nothing about accountability or impact, so I don't know why you're trying to pin those on me. Face it, you made unsubstantiated claims, someone called you on it, and now you're trying to cover your ass by putting words in their mouth. Take some responsibility for what you said. How can you go from my statement that these sorts of screw ups happen in all sorts of enterprises to absolving the government of any responsibility?
I'm sure somebody at the Justice Department decided that this database should be easy to build ("It's just a list!"), and rather than bring in some professionals to design it, they slapped it together on their own.
If you'd bother reading the report, available at http://democrats.science.house.gov/Media/File/Commdocs/Staff_Memo_toBM_terror_watch_8.21.08.pdf, you'd see that Boeing is responsible for the current system. So, yes, a private professional company, employing experienced DBAs is responsible for the current system. If you'd spent much time consulting for private industry you'd know that this sort of thing isn't unique to the government. It's just that it's much more likely to come to light if it's a government project. I've seen many examples in private industry where companies, large and small, end up in the same same bind. This is what happens when rapidly evolving requirements are shoehorned into databases whose original designs could never have anticipated those requirements. Projects like this don't have scope creep so much as scope leap. Software messes that are difficult to migrate almost invariably occur.
Forrer is a consultant, not one of the maintenance coders for the system in question. He just threw out the phrase tens of thousands to give the reporter something to grab on to. It sounds impressive to laymen. To extrapolate from his statement that maximum loc is 90k seems a bit of a leap to me. The real number of loc could just as well be 900,000 as 90,000. I think a more revealing figure for the complexity involved is the $117 million price tag for a replacement system. Even if that includes hardware, to me that implies a significant amount of code needs to be written.
No, more like Dennis Kucinich getting the Democratic nomination. Both are fringe candidates within their parties that have a snowball's chance in Brazil of getting their parties' nominations.