Every year I dread the twenty-four hour period that makes most of the web useless. This year, I find, much to my surprise, that SlashDot has actually done something that I not only don't despise, but actually think is a moderately good idea.
One of the 7-11's I used to frequent here in Colorado Springs had a former CIO of an intenet bubble company as it's assistant manager. So yes, they're all run by nerds out here. The dot-com bubble broke big here.
Their whole study is voodoo. This isn't physics, it's just math. Simple math doesn't have grey areas.
The maximum output for the LHC is in the 10^15eV range. That's the same as many cosmic rays. In fact, the rate of cosmic ray impact at about 10^15eV is about one impact, per square meter of the Earth's surface, per year.
The Earth's surface area is 5.10227658 × 10^14 meters. We can assume cosmic rays have been pouring in at roughly the same rate for about 4.6 billion years, or the age of the Earth.
That means, we have not seen a "Earth Ending Event" in 2.34704723 × 10^24 chances. And that ignores that there's a large portion of cosmic rays that come in with an energy GREATER THAN 10^15eV.
There's no gray area here. Even assuming that we've gotten incredibly lucky and the very next cosmic ray impact on the Earth will cause a black hole,... oops, not that one, no the next one, oh wait (never mind)... The odds of any single collision causing a black hole event would be at best in the range of 1:1x10^24. That's not one in a hundred billion, that's:
1 : 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That's one in a septillion. That's close to the number of stars in the visible universe. This whole thing is nothing but a ridiculous anti-science rant.
You sound like you have made up your mind on politics and look for facts to support your position.
Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle. I can see that all the facts and information I've thrown out are pointless. Your whole "Obama brings hope" mantra is proof of that. Last I checked, Hope is not a political position, nor can you legislate it. It has no meaning, no use in and of itself, and no purpose without action. Clearly you have been hypnotized by the "Lord Messiah On High, Barack Obama" and there's no point in talking to you further.
The facts, the direction of the conversation, etc, from my side have always been consistent. On yours, you have picked your own interpretation of what I've said, ignoring clear statements and claiming I meant the opposite, and then tried to lambaste me for it. You have never learned the "rules" of a good discussion, and have continuously used anecdotal evidence, straw men, and poorly researched and incomplete history to hold up your end. To continue this is pointless. Vote Obama and his "change and hope", but realize that he has Franklin Raines (former chairman of Fannie Mae, indicted for $10.8 BILLION of fraud) and James Johnson (former Chairman of Fannie Mae, and the originator of buying sub-prime at Fannie Mae) as his Economic Advisor and Campaign Advisor respectively. Then tell me I have the wrong party.
That would be true if and only if FM/FM were the only two organizations with financial trouble linked to lending. They are not, so you are wrong...
You missed the point. Prior to about 2000, Fannie Mae was tasked, as part of their mission statement, to do due diligence on the loans they were buying. They would go through and look at all of the fundamentals of the loan, and if they found that the broker had over-stated earnings, or that the property backing the loan wasn't of value to cover, then they *WOULD NOT BUY THE LOAN*. Prior to 2000, Fannie Mae DID NOT BUY BUNDLED PAPER. Then, in 2000, under new chairman Franklin Raines, he rescinded that due diligence and began buying loans based solely on the rating given by the broker. By 2004, they were also buying bundled paper that they did not research at all. As early as 2003, the Bush Administration was calling for massive investigation and regulation of Fannie Mae. This was blocked almost entirely by "big name" democrats like Dodd and Rangel. In fact, Fannie Mae spent about $300 million to $400 million a year on lobbying the democrats to get exactly that result. The current, now "transitional, chairman of Fannie Mae wrote a memo that's been leaked that said "[in politics] we take no prisoners." When a financial institution of 70 years, with the clout of Fannie Mae starts buying bad paper, then why *wouldn't* everyone else. Especially since, once Fannie buys and sells it, they see it as "backed by the government" with no risk if it all goes south. That's what's happening now.
Affirmative action is in place now, and it's for the white males.
I'm going to assume from this statement, and I may be wrong, that you are involved in race issues, or perhaps a member of the minority. For the record, yes, I am a white male. Before you get into any of the standard race baiting, my family moved from Germany in the 1930's, we never owned slaves or were a part of the slave trade. I've never had a prejudiced bone in my body. I went to a college of 60,000 students, and some of my best friends were black. I work in a group that's about as racially and ethnically, and gender diverse as you can get. (In fact, in a team of fifteen, I'm one of three white males.) And for your information, I just had to sit here and actively *think* about what gender/race/etc. my teammates are, because I really could care less.
Now, that said, I want you to look at that statement you wrote and realize A) how totally bigoted it is, since you have just lumped all of white male-dom into a single category and then thrown your prejudice at it, and B) just how much resentment you cause by saying crap like that.
Was affirmative action needed in the 1960's (after the *REPUBLICANS* voted the 1964 civil rights act through -- check your history, Al Gore's dad filibustered *against* the civil rights act) when prejudices still ran strong? Probably they were. We had people in power who were not going to hand over the reigns to people they saw as "inferior". But that was almost 50 years ago. Most of that generation are dead. Soon the baby boomers, the last real generation to live with legal prejudices, will be out the door and into retirement. When I was a kid (in the 70's), racism was prevalent. Today, the biggest racists I've seen lately are the ones on the other side saying, "You've had fifty years to give me something, and it hasn't been enough, whitey is a racist." I point at your statement above.
Which leads to this beauty: It takes laws in order to beat the inherent biases out of people. What in the name of any number of deities makes you think you can legislate prejudice away? If I passed a law tomorrow that said, "you can no longer bash white people," how long before the NAACP will have it in court? Could you really stop feeling resentment because I passed a law that said you shouldn't? Or would you be pissed as hell that I am, in fact, implicitly calling you a racist and a bigot simply by passing the law. "I don't believe you can change you
By the way, I found out today that Franklin Raines, the disgraced, indited, civilly sued for $54 million, under SEC investigation, under OFHEO investigation, former chairman of Fannie Mae...
You seem a bit angry. I didn't do anything to you, and I have a real issue with the charge of bigotry on my part. I'm probably the most un-prejudiced person you'll ever meet. (Or not meet, this being the Internet and all.)
The 2005 bill was passed with affirmative action requirements in it. Then the representatives and senators who created/sponsored the bill went to HUD and the press, and made it clear that their intention was to push racial quotas for loans. Feel free to read any of the originally linked articles or to do any kind of search on the bill and what was said when it was passed. At the time it was hailed by many groups as "a great leveling of the playfield." Even one of the responses to my original message talks about how "it was needed".
Also be aware, I never claimed that the whole subprime mess is a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac issue. What I answered was the original post's question (now modded down to obscurity) that asked "Who is responsible for the Fannie Mae mess?" You've taken my answer to that question and tried to extend it to a more general "Who's responsible for the sub-prime mess?" It was never my intention to answer that question.
As far as it goes, I know exactly what you mean by all the crap paper that was pushed early in the decade, and I agree completely with your assessment. I started out on an ARM back in 1997, and I swapped out for a fixed rate back in 2000. I have walked out on three refinance deals in mid-process when they tried to force me back into an ARM. I won't touch those with a fifty foot radiation proofed pole. But that's me (and you, apparently.) A lot of people aren't that smart. They go into a mortgage wide-eyed and trusting, and that's definitely been part of the problem. When the mortgage company is paid on commission (and what do people think closing costs are?) then we breed a system that encourages giving big loans to people who can't afford them. The rule used to be you could get a mortgage for three times your gross annual income. So how were fast food workers in California buying houses for $700,000? When you amp up the buying power of a worker to that level, of course it drives the price of housing through the roof, which gives you additional equity, which raises your buying power, which is amplified by these loans, which, etc. etc.
My wife used to love watching those "house flipping" shows and I would just goggle as a 900 square foot home would sell for over half a million dollars. The real estate prices were absolutely insane, and there was no basis. When the materials going into the house only cost 1/10th the selling price, then there's an artificial boom going on. It was insane, the prices were sheer fantasy, and now we're paying the price.
So, in most respects, we agree on what caused/is causing the overall market collapse.
And as far as your comment about "unfettered capitalism", you damage your own argument. In truly unfettered capitalism, those mortgage brokers would now be the ones curled in the fetal position on the floor because the crap paper they wrote all went bad, and when they foreclosed, they'd be left holding property that couldn't pay off their debt because of the drop in the value of the home. The problem is, the government is now stepping in and bailing out the brokers who caused the problem in the first place, leaving them with no consequences. As usual, the only person being screwed in this whole process is the little guy stuck with a foreclosure notice.
In true "unfettered capitalism", the real check on mortgages is that, as an investor, you don't buy a mortgage paper from a broker if you don't think that either the buyer can pay the loan, or the real-estate that it's financing can cover the cost. When HUD forced Fannie Mae to increase its high-risk portfolio, they forced it to do exactly the opposite, and buy bad paper. In an unfettered capitalist system, the government wouldn't have stuck its fingers into the mortgage industry, and definitely wouldn't have *forced* Fannie to buy bad p
Using teaser lines and forcing the reader to do the bulk of the research is the hallmark of...
My point was to the original poster, who wanted someone (like Scott Adams) to provide him information on who caused the Fannie Mae scandal. My initial reply was an attempt to prod him/her on to do some research on his own. As for my "confidence that a search will turn up what I want" -- yes, I'm confident that there are facts out there. That if someone really wants to know the truth they will research it on their own. I have since been soundly chastised for daring to suggest that you might do some research on your own. You claim that I was pushing an agenda, but it was my intent to not push an agenda so that you could find the answers on your own. It's much more satisfying, really.
The problem is, Democrats are pretty diverse, and some are even-- gasp-- conservative!
Yes, there are some "Blue Dog" democrats, like Joe Lieberman. Unfortunately, these aren't any of them. These are all former members of campaign staffs, or appointees of the President. I don't see any blue dog's in this bunch.
The Fannie Mae board between 1991 and 2003 reads like a who's-who of "in" Democrat operatives. James Johnson, who earned $21 million in just his last year (1998); Franklin Raines who earned $90 million in five years while leading Fannie Mae to a $10.6 billion accounting scandal (Ken Lay went to jail, Raines is still in his mansion) and overstating profits by $6 billion as justification for his lavish salary; Jamie Gorelick (former attorney-general and author of the infamous "wall" memo of 9/11 fame) who earned $26 million at Fannie Mae during her three years. Oh, and the current law firm of Fannie Mae? That would be WilmerHale -- where Gorelick is a senior partner. So after Raines resigned and Gorelick was kicked out in 2004, she still found a way to suck money out of Fannie Mae.
Face it, the positions at Fannie and Freddie are political "goodies" handed out by politicians.
IIRC, this was personal donations by employees...
That's correct, because a corporation giving directly to a candidate is against federal finance law. However, Fannie Mae is the single largest spending lobbyist in Washington, spending over $300,000,000 a year. As part of Obama's team, several of Fannie Mae's lobbyists have joined a "special action force" to try to raise $40 million for Obama. And, as I point out in another message, James Johnson, former Fannie Mae CEO, is now Obama's Campaign Advisor.
Sorry, your reasoning is on par with 9/11 Truth Movement conspiracy theorists...
I'd like to point out that you first chastise me for not doing the research for you, and then chastise me for handing out conclusions based on sparse facts. I've gone back and read my original. I didn't post a conclusion. I posted a few factoids that might lead someone interested in the issue to dig a little deeper. I did not say something along the lines of, "It's all the Democrats! They're EVVVIIILLL!" I pointed out that I find it amusing that today, the ones who are screaming the loudest about regulatory issues, are the same ones that voted for the changes that made it possible. And in this case, that largely includes the whole of Congress.
When I did my research I found that you can trace the problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back to Fannie's creation in the 1930's. Why, I ask you, in a free market, must the government rob from its people (see taxation) and hand it out as loans for people to buy a house? Which amendment in the bill of Rights says, "The right of every person to own their own house shall not be infringed"? It's social engineering and, for all intents, socialism. The U.S. Government, in assuming the reigns of Fannie and Freddie, now hold the mortgage deed to over 50% of the homes in the United States. In one swoop, they now own half the property in the U.S. Is that really what the Founding Father's in
The Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005 (H.R. 1461/S. 190). Google is your friend. Use your friend. This gave the power to HUD to include "fair affirmative action", HUD then ordered Fannie Mae to increase it's percentage of high-risk mortgages. The Globe and Mail
...should make one *highly* skeptical about the assertion that congress twisted lender's arms...
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not just any lender. They are government backed "corporations" that operate under restrictions passed by law. They are holding The People's money, taken by force at the end of a gun barrel (see definition of taxation.) As such, they must be much more risk averse than a private mortgage firm with investors who willingly take risks. The change to the law opened the floodgates for making bad loans on a "corporation" that just got investigated for making years of bad decisions and poor financial choices. Which brings us to...
The connection of Fannie Mae to Walter Mondale's campaign manager...
James Johnson was Walter Mondale's campaign manager. He is also Barack Obama's Campaign Advisor. Relevance is up to you...
That "last week" has got to be pre-2004, then...
Wow, if only I'd set off that part as being a quote from a news article, perhaps by putting it all in italics. Shame on me. Maybe this style will help.
ARTICLE QUOTATION FOLLOWS Fanie's lobbying efforts paid off as liberal politicians such as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.T.) and Rep. William Clay (D-Mo.) worked to kill any real reform of Freddie and Fannie. The Washington Post reports: "In an internal memo in 2004, Fannie Mae executive Daniel H. Mudd affirmed what the company's critics had long contended: In the political arena, 'we always won' and 'we took no prisoners.'" END OF ARTICLE QUOTATION
Oh, and Daniel Mudd was just the (is currently the transitional) CEO of Fannie Mae for the last six months. He'll be receiving a $5.64 million "retirement package" thanks to his friends in Washington. And Daniel Mudd has admitted that after 2005, they "stopped internally scrutinizing" their purchases of Alt-A loans and packages. That's a heck of an admission for a CEO of a "corporation" that's supposed to be about scrutinizing and packaging mortgage loans.
Raines also made no mention of...
Again, I must apologize for not setting off the article in italics or something. That was the reporter's comment. Please note that I just might have included this as a means of demonstrating the racial component of the push at Fannie Mae towards high risk loans. Raines being a major player in the Democratic party top brass might have had something to do with it as well. You might even want to use Google or another search engine to actually research the issue as I urged you to do in my initial message. Everything you complained about fell under the "if you're too lazy" block, which says more about you than about me.
Take some time and learn about Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and who ran the "corporation" since 2000. Add to that, researching the 2005 bill that forced FM/FM to give out loans based on racial profiles instead of financial stability, and you'll have a good idea who to blame.
Who was in charge of Fannie Mae when they "misreported" $10.8 billion in 2006? Washington Times
For those too lazy to find out, consider that Obama, despite being in the Senate for only 2 years, is the #1 recipient of donations from FM/FM at $112,000. (McCain has also taken $16,000, Joe Biden also got $500.)
"Fannie Mae Chairman Franklin Raines last week called for continued efforts by Fannie Mae and mortgage lenders to reach out to those 'at the margins' of home ownership. Blacks, Hispanics and immigrants trying to buy homes would be a major focus of outreach, Raines said." Raines made no mention of assistance for the millions of white families who have difficulty purchasing homes.
And who is Franklin Raines? Why, Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under Bill Clinton. (He was the chairman of the same department under Jimmy Carter.) He's currently under investigation by several different groups, including the SEC, the OFHEO, and others.
Even if you try to copyright a compilation of facts, what you are really doing is copyrighting the layout, order, and typesetting/commentary. The actual facts cannot be copyrighted, and if I put together the same collection of facts, in a different style, with different typeface or order, and my own commentary, you could not sue me for copyright infringement.
When the state files the court charges charging him with copyright violation, they must cite the law that is being violated. Since court proceedings are public, that would be the equivalent of distributing a free printed copy of said law -- thus violating their own copyright. My statement was meant to be in jest, however, it is correct in most details.
If your fictional author were to publish his work in a form that is printed for free, distributed for free, and whose owner is the government, which in the United States is synonymous with putting the item into the public domain, then you're damn right he would lose any hope of ever enforcing his copyright.
On top of that, laws are statements of fact. You can't copyright yesterday's weather report, so the idea that you could copyright a law is insanity to begin with. I think you missed the intent to provide humor in the situation.
If I prosecute a person for distributing a free, printed copy of the law, and in so doing, must, myself, distribute a free, printed copy of the law, then the idea of prosecuting said person in a serious (so maybe the 9th "Circus" Court is out) courtroom becomes ludicrous.
Because if they tell him he's broken the copyright law, then they are, ipso facto, revealing the copyright law, which invalidates their copyright since they are distributing the copyrighted material.
If charged, he can immediately get the entire idea of the law being copyrighted thrown out on that basis.
Sheesh, what a bunch of whack-jobs they've got running the Kal-ee-forn-ee-uh government. I think Ah-nuld got hit in the head a few too many times while making those movies.
I call BS on this one. You can still go to upper Michigan (Houghton and Hancock region) and pull raw copper nuggets off the ground. And they stopped mining back in the 1930's because of the depression. There's still a huge amount of copper (and silver, gold, zinc, and half a dozen other metals) up in the basaltic flows of Upper Michigan. The copper there is in nearly pure veins.
In fact when I got a tour of Quincy Shaft #2 (the deepest hole in the U.S. at 9672 feet) the guide told us about a single, solid column of copper that's still in the mine, 50 feet across and over 20 feet high. That's about 21 million pounds of copper in a single formation on a single level of the mine. (The mine had nearly 100 levels and stretched for several miles.) That block of copper alone is about 1% of the copper usage in the U.S. annually. They never removed it, because in 1930, they didn't have the tools to tear it apart.
Maybe zinc is running short, but there's still gobs of copper around.
...they discovered in a matter of hours that the Milky Way is 12,000 light years thick, vs. the 6,000 that had been the consensus number for some time.
Look, I don't know why we have to constantly defend the well established consensus of Galactic Thinning from these deniers. The science is done, we have a scientific consensus that the galaxy is 6,000 light years thick, now we have these two amateurs coming in and using, of all things, an Excel Spreadsheet to try and prove us wrong.
Clearly, these denialists should just be ignored.
But, if I had my way, we'd have a Nuremberg trial for these denialists.
I had the same problem, and ran a "test". Basically, after you go to any page with a form field on it, Firefox goes out and tries to update the "Phishing" list. About 2.5 hours later (52 minutes of CPU on a 2.4GHz machine) and a peak of 450MB of memory for Firefox, it finishes. After that, this problem doesn't occur.
It's already been reported. It's caused by the anti-phishing stuff built into Firefox. Apparently, despite the fact they could simply copy the 16MB Sqlite file down and use it, they choose to send down the data and then reload it into the local database. That's what burns the time, CPU, Disk, etc. for nearly 2 and a half hours.
Really? Because I can do it in one page. I tried out FF3 yesterday. Opened our local search page (about a 4K page with very little other than text) and let it sit for 2-3 minutes while I worked on something else. Suddenly the machine slowed to a crawl, the drive went to 100% on, and by the time I could finally get Task Manager open a minute or two later, Firefox.exe was at 635MB and climbing.
Everything after that is "uncommon", because iron is the low point on the fission/fusion energy curve...
For completeness, the rest of the named elements are (Man-made are marked with a * -- Okay, for truth's sake, any element up to 94 [Plutonium] may be found as a decay product, but they are rarely found in nature and were found first when man-made.):
And for really, really completeness sake, in the as-yet unnamed man-made elements, there's
ununbium(112), ununtrium(113), ununquadium(114), ununpentium(115), ununsexium(116), ununseptium(117), ununoctium(118) -- if I still remember my standard nomenclature for un-named trans-uranic elements.
Slashdot Mirror
Every year I dread the twenty-four hour period that makes most of the web useless. This year, I find, much to my surprise, that SlashDot has actually done something that I not only don't despise, but actually think is a moderately good idea.
Hooray SlashDot.
One of the 7-11's I used to frequent here in Colorado Springs had a former CIO of an intenet bubble company as it's assistant manager. So yes, they're all run by nerds out here. The dot-com bubble broke big here.
Their whole study is voodoo. This isn't physics, it's just math. Simple math doesn't have grey areas.
The maximum output for the LHC is in the 10^15eV range. That's the same as many cosmic rays. In fact, the rate of cosmic ray impact at about 10^15eV is about one impact, per square meter of the Earth's surface, per year.
The Earth's surface area is 5.10227658 × 10^14 meters. We can assume cosmic rays have been pouring in at roughly the same rate for about 4.6 billion years, or the age of the Earth.
That means, we have not seen a "Earth Ending Event" in 2.34704723 × 10^24 chances. And that ignores that there's a large portion of cosmic rays that come in with an energy GREATER THAN 10^15eV.
There's no gray area here. Even assuming that we've gotten incredibly lucky and the very next cosmic ray impact on the Earth will cause a black hole, ... oops, not that one, no the next one, oh wait (never mind)... The odds of any single collision causing a black hole event would be at best in the range of 1:1x10^24. That's not one in a hundred billion, that's:
1 : 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That's one in a septillion. That's close to the number of stars in the visible universe. This whole thing is nothing but a ridiculous anti-science rant.
You sound like you have made up your mind on politics and look for facts to support your position.
Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle. I can see that all the facts and information I've thrown out are pointless. Your whole "Obama brings hope" mantra is proof of that. Last I checked, Hope is not a political position, nor can you legislate it. It has no meaning, no use in and of itself, and no purpose without action. Clearly you have been hypnotized by the "Lord Messiah On High, Barack Obama" and there's no point in talking to you further.
The facts, the direction of the conversation, etc, from my side have always been consistent. On yours, you have picked your own interpretation of what I've said, ignoring clear statements and claiming I meant the opposite, and then tried to lambaste me for it. You have never learned the "rules" of a good discussion, and have continuously used anecdotal evidence, straw men, and poorly researched and incomplete history to hold up your end. To continue this is pointless. Vote Obama and his "change and hope", but realize that he has Franklin Raines (former chairman of Fannie Mae, indicted for $10.8 BILLION of fraud) and James Johnson (former Chairman of Fannie Mae, and the originator of buying sub-prime at Fannie Mae) as his Economic Advisor and Campaign Advisor respectively. Then tell me I have the wrong party.
I'm done.
That would be true if and only if FM/FM were the only two organizations with financial trouble linked to lending. They are not, so you are wrong...
You missed the point. Prior to about 2000, Fannie Mae was tasked, as part of their mission statement, to do due diligence on the loans they were buying. They would go through and look at all of the fundamentals of the loan, and if they found that the broker had over-stated earnings, or that the property backing the loan wasn't of value to cover, then they *WOULD NOT BUY THE LOAN*. Prior to 2000, Fannie Mae DID NOT BUY BUNDLED PAPER. Then, in 2000, under new chairman Franklin Raines, he rescinded that due diligence and began buying loans based solely on the rating given by the broker. By 2004, they were also buying bundled paper that they did not research at all. As early as 2003, the Bush Administration was calling for massive investigation and regulation of Fannie Mae. This was blocked almost entirely by "big name" democrats like Dodd and Rangel. In fact, Fannie Mae spent about $300 million to $400 million a year on lobbying the democrats to get exactly that result. The current, now "transitional, chairman of Fannie Mae wrote a memo that's been leaked that said "[in politics] we take no prisoners." When a financial institution of 70 years, with the clout of Fannie Mae starts buying bad paper, then why *wouldn't* everyone else. Especially since, once Fannie buys and sells it, they see it as "backed by the government" with no risk if it all goes south. That's what's happening now.
Affirmative action is in place now, and it's for the white males.
I'm going to assume from this statement, and I may be wrong, that you are involved in race issues, or perhaps a member of the minority. For the record, yes, I am a white male. Before you get into any of the standard race baiting, my family moved from Germany in the 1930's, we never owned slaves or were a part of the slave trade. I've never had a prejudiced bone in my body. I went to a college of 60,000 students, and some of my best friends were black. I work in a group that's about as racially and ethnically, and gender diverse as you can get. (In fact, in a team of fifteen, I'm one of three white males.) And for your information, I just had to sit here and actively *think* about what gender/race/etc. my teammates are, because I really could care less.
Now, that said, I want you to look at that statement you wrote and realize A) how totally bigoted it is, since you have just lumped all of white male-dom into a single category and then thrown your prejudice at it, and B) just how much resentment you cause by saying crap like that.
Was affirmative action needed in the 1960's (after the *REPUBLICANS* voted the 1964 civil rights act through -- check your history, Al Gore's dad filibustered *against* the civil rights act) when prejudices still ran strong? Probably they were. We had people in power who were not going to hand over the reigns to people they saw as "inferior". But that was almost 50 years ago. Most of that generation are dead. Soon the baby boomers, the last real generation to live with legal prejudices, will be out the door and into retirement. When I was a kid (in the 70's), racism was prevalent. Today, the biggest racists I've seen lately are the ones on the other side saying, "You've had fifty years to give me something, and it hasn't been enough, whitey is a racist." I point at your statement above.
Which leads to this beauty: It takes laws in order to beat the inherent biases out of people. What in the name of any number of deities makes you think you can legislate prejudice away? If I passed a law tomorrow that said, "you can no longer bash white people," how long before the NAACP will have it in court? Could you really stop feeling resentment because I passed a law that said you shouldn't? Or would you be pissed as hell that I am, in fact, implicitly calling you a racist and a bigot simply by passing the law. "I don't believe you can change you
By the way, I found out today that Franklin Raines, the disgraced, indited, civilly sued for $54 million, under SEC investigation, under OFHEO investigation, former chairman of Fannie Mae...
...is Barack Obama's Financial Advisor.
Is THAT relevant enough for you?
You seem a bit angry. I didn't do anything to you, and I have a real issue with the charge of bigotry on my part. I'm probably the most un-prejudiced person you'll ever meet. (Or not meet, this being the Internet and all.)
The 2005 bill was passed with affirmative action requirements in it. Then the representatives and senators who created/sponsored the bill went to HUD and the press, and made it clear that their intention was to push racial quotas for loans. Feel free to read any of the originally linked articles or to do any kind of search on the bill and what was said when it was passed. At the time it was hailed by many groups as "a great leveling of the playfield." Even one of the responses to my original message talks about how "it was needed".
Also be aware, I never claimed that the whole subprime mess is a Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac issue. What I answered was the original post's question (now modded down to obscurity) that asked "Who is responsible for the Fannie Mae mess?" You've taken my answer to that question and tried to extend it to a more general "Who's responsible for the sub-prime mess?" It was never my intention to answer that question.
As far as it goes, I know exactly what you mean by all the crap paper that was pushed early in the decade, and I agree completely with your assessment. I started out on an ARM back in 1997, and I swapped out for a fixed rate back in 2000. I have walked out on three refinance deals in mid-process when they tried to force me back into an ARM. I won't touch those with a fifty foot radiation proofed pole. But that's me (and you, apparently.) A lot of people aren't that smart. They go into a mortgage wide-eyed and trusting, and that's definitely been part of the problem. When the mortgage company is paid on commission (and what do people think closing costs are?) then we breed a system that encourages giving big loans to people who can't afford them. The rule used to be you could get a mortgage for three times your gross annual income. So how were fast food workers in California buying houses for $700,000? When you amp up the buying power of a worker to that level, of course it drives the price of housing through the roof, which gives you additional equity, which raises your buying power, which is amplified by these loans, which, etc. etc.
My wife used to love watching those "house flipping" shows and I would just goggle as a 900 square foot home would sell for over half a million dollars. The real estate prices were absolutely insane, and there was no basis. When the materials going into the house only cost 1/10th the selling price, then there's an artificial boom going on. It was insane, the prices were sheer fantasy, and now we're paying the price.
So, in most respects, we agree on what caused/is causing the overall market collapse.
And as far as your comment about "unfettered capitalism", you damage your own argument. In truly unfettered capitalism, those mortgage brokers would now be the ones curled in the fetal position on the floor because the crap paper they wrote all went bad, and when they foreclosed, they'd be left holding property that couldn't pay off their debt because of the drop in the value of the home. The problem is, the government is now stepping in and bailing out the brokers who caused the problem in the first place, leaving them with no consequences. As usual, the only person being screwed in this whole process is the little guy stuck with a foreclosure notice.
In true "unfettered capitalism", the real check on mortgages is that, as an investor, you don't buy a mortgage paper from a broker if you don't think that either the buyer can pay the loan, or the real-estate that it's financing can cover the cost. When HUD forced Fannie Mae to increase its high-risk portfolio, they forced it to do exactly the opposite, and buy bad paper. In an unfettered capitalist system, the government wouldn't have stuck its fingers into the mortgage industry, and definitely wouldn't have *forced* Fannie to buy bad p
It came up first on Google, and provided a somewhat biased, but mainly factual overview of what happened. Would you prefer...
...or just Google him for crying out loud.
Wikipedia
Slate's Leftward view where they paint him as a hero. (I wonder how they treated Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay?)
The New York Times
The Seattle Times
Using teaser lines and forcing the reader to do the bulk of the research is the hallmark of...
My point was to the original poster, who wanted someone (like Scott Adams) to provide him information on who caused the Fannie Mae scandal. My initial reply was an attempt to prod him/her on to do some research on his own. As for my "confidence that a search will turn up what I want" -- yes, I'm confident that there are facts out there. That if someone really wants to know the truth they will research it on their own. I have since been soundly chastised for daring to suggest that you might do some research on your own. You claim that I was pushing an agenda, but it was my intent to not push an agenda so that you could find the answers on your own. It's much more satisfying, really.
The problem is, Democrats are pretty diverse, and some are even-- gasp-- conservative!
Yes, there are some "Blue Dog" democrats, like Joe Lieberman. Unfortunately, these aren't any of them. These are all former members of campaign staffs, or appointees of the President. I don't see any blue dog's in this bunch.
The Fannie Mae board between 1991 and 2003 reads like a who's-who of "in" Democrat operatives. James Johnson, who earned $21 million in just his last year (1998); Franklin Raines who earned $90 million in five years while leading Fannie Mae to a $10.6 billion accounting scandal (Ken Lay went to jail, Raines is still in his mansion) and overstating profits by $6 billion as justification for his lavish salary; Jamie Gorelick (former attorney-general and author of the infamous "wall" memo of 9/11 fame) who earned $26 million at Fannie Mae during her three years. Oh, and the current law firm of Fannie Mae? That would be WilmerHale -- where Gorelick is a senior partner. So after Raines resigned and Gorelick was kicked out in 2004, she still found a way to suck money out of Fannie Mae.
Face it, the positions at Fannie and Freddie are political "goodies" handed out by politicians.
IIRC, this was personal donations by employees...
That's correct, because a corporation giving directly to a candidate is against federal finance law. However, Fannie Mae is the single largest spending lobbyist in Washington, spending over $300,000,000 a year. As part of Obama's team, several of Fannie Mae's lobbyists have joined a "special action force" to try to raise $40 million for Obama. And, as I point out in another message, James Johnson, former Fannie Mae CEO, is now Obama's Campaign Advisor.
Sorry, your reasoning is on par with 9/11 Truth Movement conspiracy theorists...
I'd like to point out that you first chastise me for not doing the research for you, and then chastise me for handing out conclusions based on sparse facts. I've gone back and read my original. I didn't post a conclusion. I posted a few factoids that might lead someone interested in the issue to dig a little deeper. I did not say something along the lines of, "It's all the Democrats! They're EVVVIIILLL!" I pointed out that I find it amusing that today, the ones who are screaming the loudest about regulatory issues, are the same ones that voted for the changes that made it possible. And in this case, that largely includes the whole of Congress.
When I did my research I found that you can trace the problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac back to Fannie's creation in the 1930's. Why, I ask you, in a free market, must the government rob from its people (see taxation) and hand it out as loans for people to buy a house? Which amendment in the bill of Rights says, "The right of every person to own their own house shall not be infringed"? It's social engineering and, for all intents, socialism. The U.S. Government, in assuming the reigns of Fannie and Freddie, now hold the mortgage deed to over 50% of the homes in the United States. In one swoop, they now own half the property in the U.S. Is that really what the Founding Father's in
I'm gonna call bullshit...
...should make one *highly* skeptical about the assertion that congress twisted lender's arms...
The Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005 (H.R. 1461/S. 190). Google is your friend. Use your friend. This gave the power to HUD to include "fair affirmative action", HUD then ordered Fannie Mae to increase it's percentage of high-risk mortgages. The Globe and Mail
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not just any lender. They are government backed "corporations" that operate under restrictions passed by law. They are holding The People's money, taken by force at the end of a gun barrel (see definition of taxation.) As such, they must be much more risk averse than a private mortgage firm with investors who willingly take risks. The change to the law opened the floodgates for making bad loans on a "corporation" that just got investigated for making years of bad decisions and poor financial choices. Which brings us to...
The connection of Fannie Mae to Walter Mondale's campaign manager...
James Johnson was Walter Mondale's campaign manager. He is also Barack Obama's Campaign Advisor. Relevance is up to you...
That "last week" has got to be pre-2004, then...
Wow, if only I'd set off that part as being a quote from a news article, perhaps by putting it all in italics. Shame on me. Maybe this style will help.
ARTICLE QUOTATION FOLLOWS
Fanie's lobbying efforts paid off as liberal politicians such as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.T.) and Rep. William Clay (D-Mo.) worked to kill any real reform of Freddie and Fannie. The Washington Post reports: "In an internal memo in 2004, Fannie Mae executive Daniel H. Mudd affirmed what the company's critics had long contended: In the political arena, 'we always won' and 'we took no prisoners.'"
END OF ARTICLE QUOTATION
Oh, and Daniel Mudd was just the (is currently the transitional) CEO of Fannie Mae for the last six months. He'll be receiving a $5.64 million "retirement package" thanks to his friends in Washington. And Daniel Mudd has admitted that after 2005, they "stopped internally scrutinizing" their purchases of Alt-A loans and packages. That's a heck of an admission for a CEO of a "corporation" that's supposed to be about scrutinizing and packaging mortgage loans.
Raines also made no mention of...
Again, I must apologize for not setting off the article in italics or something. That was the reporter's comment. Please note that I just might have included this as a means of demonstrating the racial component of the push at Fannie Mae towards high risk loans. Raines being a major player in the Democratic party top brass might have had something to do with it as well. You might even want to use Google or another search engine to actually research the issue as I urged you to do in my initial message. Everything you complained about fell under the "if you're too lazy" block, which says more about you than about me.
Take some time and learn about Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and who ran the "corporation" since 2000. Add to that, researching the 2005 bill that forced FM/FM to give out loans based on racial profiles instead of financial stability, and you'll have a good idea who to blame.
Who was in charge of Fannie Mae when they "misreported" $10.8 billion in 2006? Washington Times
For those too lazy to find out, consider that Obama, despite being in the Senate for only 2 years, is the #1 recipient of donations from FM/FM at $112,000. (McCain has also taken $16,000, Joe Biden also got $500.)
"Fannie Mae Chairman Franklin Raines last week called for continued efforts by Fannie Mae and mortgage lenders to reach out to those 'at the margins' of home ownership. Blacks, Hispanics and immigrants trying to buy homes would be a major focus of outreach, Raines said." Raines made no mention of assistance for the millions of white families who have difficulty purchasing homes.
And who is Franklin Raines? Why, Director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget under Bill Clinton. (He was the chairman of the same department under Jimmy Carter.) He's currently under investigation by several different groups, including the SEC, the OFHEO, and others.
Even if you try to copyright a compilation of facts, what you are really doing is copyrighting the layout, order, and typesetting/commentary. The actual facts cannot be copyrighted, and if I put together the same collection of facts, in a different style, with different typeface or order, and my own commentary, you could not sue me for copyright infringement.
When the state files the court charges charging him with copyright violation, they must cite the law that is being violated. Since court proceedings are public, that would be the equivalent of distributing a free printed copy of said law -- thus violating their own copyright. My statement was meant to be in jest, however, it is correct in most details.
If your fictional author were to publish his work in a form that is printed for free, distributed for free, and whose owner is the government, which in the United States is synonymous with putting the item into the public domain, then you're damn right he would lose any hope of ever enforcing his copyright.
On top of that, laws are statements of fact. You can't copyright yesterday's weather report, so the idea that you could copyright a law is insanity to begin with. I think you missed the intent to provide humor in the situation.
If I prosecute a person for distributing a free, printed copy of the law, and in so doing, must, myself, distribute a free, printed copy of the law, then the idea of prosecuting said person in a serious (so maybe the 9th "Circus" Court is out) courtroom becomes ludicrous.
Because if they tell him he's broken the copyright law, then they are, ipso facto, revealing the copyright law, which invalidates their copyright since they are distributing the copyrighted material.
If charged, he can immediately get the entire idea of the law being copyrighted thrown out on that basis.
Sheesh, what a bunch of whack-jobs they've got running the Kal-ee-forn-ee-uh government. I think Ah-nuld got hit in the head a few too many times while making those movies.
Last I checked, we're close to $0.10 per gigabyte. Since the terabyte drives are just over $100 for 1000GB.
Adding ten million square kilometers of lime from Australia's outback to sea water...
...yeah, no chance for any unintended consequences here.
I call BS on this one. You can still go to upper Michigan (Houghton and Hancock region) and pull raw copper nuggets off the ground. And they stopped mining back in the 1930's because of the depression. There's still a huge amount of copper (and silver, gold, zinc, and half a dozen other metals) up in the basaltic flows of Upper Michigan. The copper there is in nearly pure veins.
In fact when I got a tour of Quincy Shaft #2 (the deepest hole in the U.S. at 9672 feet) the guide told us about a single, solid column of copper that's still in the mine, 50 feet across and over 20 feet high. That's about 21 million pounds of copper in a single formation on a single level of the mine. (The mine had nearly 100 levels and stretched for several miles.) That block of copper alone is about 1% of the copper usage in the U.S. annually. They never removed it, because in 1930, they didn't have the tools to tear it apart.
Maybe zinc is running short, but there's still gobs of copper around.
Great, I had my friend who speaks German come over and look at this and now he's dead...
At least he went with a smile....
...they discovered in a matter of hours that the Milky Way is 12,000 light years thick, vs. the 6,000 that had been the consensus number for some time.
Look, I don't know why we have to constantly defend the well established consensus of Galactic Thinning from these deniers. The science is done, we have a scientific consensus that the galaxy is 6,000 light years thick, now we have these two amateurs coming in and using, of all things, an Excel Spreadsheet to try and prove us wrong.
Clearly, these denialists should just be ignored.
But, if I had my way, we'd have a Nuremberg trial for these denialists.
What's that? Global Warming?
Sorry, wrong consensus.
I had the same problem, and ran a "test". Basically, after you go to any page with a form field on it, Firefox goes out and tries to update the "Phishing" list. About 2.5 hours later (52 minutes of CPU on a 2.4GHz machine) and a peak of 450MB of memory for Firefox, it finishes. After that, this problem doesn't occur.
It's already been multiply posted to bugzilla.
It's already been reported. It's caused by the anti-phishing stuff built into Firefox. Apparently, despite the fact they could simply copy the 16MB Sqlite file down and use it, they choose to send down the data and then reload it into the local database. That's what burns the time, CPU, Disk, etc. for nearly 2 and a half hours.
Really? Because I can do it in one page. I tried out FF3 yesterday. Opened our local search page (about a 4K page with very little other than text) and let it sit for 2-3 minutes while I worked on something else. Suddenly the machine slowed to a crawl, the drive went to 100% on, and by the time I could finally get Task Manager open a minute or two later, Firefox.exe was at 635MB and climbing.
I can reproduce it every single time.
Maybe it's because all the more recent clients are supporting encryption by default?
"I couldn't name all the natural elements these days but I could probably name a 100 of them or close to."
Hmmm. In my reality, there's only 91 natural elements (1-92 minus technitium). I'd be impressed if you could name 100 and still miss a few...
Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, phosphorous, sulfur, chlorine, argon, potassium, calcium, scandium, titanium, vanadium, chromium, manganese and iron.
Everything after that is "uncommon", because iron is the low point on the fission/fusion energy curve...
For completeness, the rest of the named elements are (Man-made are marked with a * -- Okay, for truth's sake, any element up to 94 [Plutonium] may be found as a decay product, but they are rarely found in nature and were found first when man-made.):
Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, Zinc, Gallium, Germanium, Arsenic, Selenium, Bromine, Krypton, Rubidium, Strontium, Yttrium, Zirconium, Niobium, Molybdenum, Technetium*, Ruthenium, Rhodium, Palladium, Silver, Cadmium, Indium, Tin, Antimony, Tellurium, Iodine, Xenon, Cesium, Barium, Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Promethium, Samarium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Holmium, Erbium, Thulium, Ytterbium, Lutetium, Hafnium, Tantalum, Tungsten, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Gold, Mercury, Thallium, Lead, Bismuth, Polonium, Astatine, Radon, Francium, Radium, Actinium, Thorium, Protactinium, Uranium, Neptunium*, Plutonium*, Americium*, Curium*, Berkelium*, Californium*, Einsteinium*, Fermium*, Mendelevium*, Nobelium*, Lawrencium*, Rutherfordium*, Dubnium*, Seaborgium*, Bohrium*, Hassium*, Meitnarium*, Darmstadtium*, Roentgenium*. (Please forgive any spelling mistakes, these aren't names I use every day.)
And for really, really completeness sake, in the as-yet unnamed man-made elements, there's
ununbium(112), ununtrium(113), ununquadium(114), ununpentium(115), ununsexium(116), ununseptium(117), ununoctium(118) -- if I still remember my standard nomenclature for un-named trans-uranic elements.
Now, where do I sign up to run for President?
Don't be ridiculous. Kucinich will never win...