"It didn't lower standards and it didn't say that banks were required to lend to high-risk borrowers--all it said was if they're doing business in a neighborhood, they must provide loans to people in that neighborhood."
Let me get this straight. You believe that the CRA did not lower underwriting standards? You appear to be a minority of one.
I can tell you, from personal knowledge, that you are simply wrong. I worked at Fannie in Chicago as an IT guy for a while in the late '90's. I cannot tell you how much advertising material I saw assuring higher risk people in marginal neighborhoods they could get a loan. The CRA was invoked. The standards were lowered. In fact, one man in particular, who worked in the financial area, was concerned that Fannie was buying these lower quality mortgages. He was in no position to do anything about it, but he did not think it was smart.
Independent mortgage companies made crap loans because banks, Fannie, Freddie, etc. were willing to buy them. Why would they NOT make the loans, when there were buyers eager to pay for them?
The point is not that the CRA directly caused all the bad things. It lowered standards for poorer borrowers. That lowered underwriting standards for everyone else. And contributed substantially to our present mess.
"Why were so many of these bad loans made by banks that weren't being told to make them by the government?"
Which banks were those, exactly?
"Why were so many of these loans made that had zero connection to either Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae?" Because the CRA doesn't require sale to Freddie/Fannie. It does require sub-prime lending.
Yes, there was plenty of greed involved. But that, by itself, would not have caused the current train wreck. It's not as if bankers and investors suddenly got greedy in the last 10 years. It's just that in the past, their GREED required sound loan underwriting. Then the feds decided they were being mean to poor people, hence the CRA.
The CRA led to lowered lending standards for every borrower -- if a 600 FICO is good enough for the poor, it's good enough for middle class people living way above their means also, and its illegal discrimination to have one standard for the one group and another for everyone else.
Do you understand yet? The free market HAD good lending practices precisely BECAUSE the bankers were greedy. The government decided to tell them to "loosen up." What the gov't demands, it generally gets.
Those statistics are skewed. Doctors in the U.S. intervene on very very premature babies and other "lost cause" situations more often than doctors in Europe. So a stillbirth or "spontaneous abortion" elsewhere -- not included in infant mortality statistics -- can end up as an "infant mortality" statistic in the U.S.
As a courtesy to customers in need of technical assistance, we ask callers not to call Microsoft Customer Support Services to request an extension for Windows XP,' a company representative said. Microsoft declined to comment on whether its support lines had experienced a call-volume spike starting last Friday, when the Neowin notice first appeared.
Umm, if you ask people not to call, doesn't that strongly imply that people are calling?
It's not nearly as biased or misleading as many of the Slashdot crowd want to say it is.
With the filing of court documents, a philosophical debate about the proper place for software in society has become a business dispute with the risk of substantial consequences. He's right about this. If I use ExtJS, am I required to either buy a license or open source my entire website? Yes or no? If I modify but do not distribute GPL3 software, must I release my modifications? Yes or no?
And the real kicker: If I have software patents, and want to be able to enforce them, can I legally use any GPL3 software at all? Yes or no?
These are all risks one must consider before using GPL3 software. Which source code must I release? FSF isn't sure the ExtJS people are wrong that using their stuff touches ALL the code that has ANYTHING to do with my website. So if I use GPL3 stuff on my web server, I could get sued for not releasing proprietary stuff I've developed to make that website work. Guess what -- getting sued is a risk, no matter which way the verdict goes.
GPL3 ain't all that simple, and it ain't all that clear, at the edges. Which source code must I redistribute, and what can I keep to myself? If the FSF can't say, then it's not clear. If I own software patents, can I enforce any of them against a potential Open Source violation of those patents after using any GPL3 software in my business? Probably not. Both of those are pretty big risks to a fair number of businesses.
You just don't get it. Let me spell it out for ya:
1) This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby.
2) This system board is really, really small. It would make a simply superb POS system, home fileserver/email server/router/allaround network appliance, a great low-power system the size of a trade paperback... a lot of things like that.
Yeah, the 10/100 ain't so great, but you can always put a GigE NIC in one of the PCI slots.
Let's review: Really small, really low power, really really powerful for its size and power footprint. Lots of neat things one can do with this.
Re: geology degrees, the point is that if the sciences won't grant degrees to creationists, it's rather odd to turn around and talk about creationists' lack of scientific achievement in the field -- including things like finding big oil fields.
The Poincare quote simply asserts what you set out to prove. It's a bare assertion that, applied to the distant past, begs the very question I wrote my post to ask. I assert that there are no "facts" about the origin or age of the universe, because you must choose your epistemological presuppositions first. How do you know that currently observed scientific laws have always been true? Documents thousands of years old, in language appropriate to the time, assert that when the universe began, very basic assumptions we make about nature and ourselves simply were not true, and also describes the events that changed that world into this one. It's not a question some obtuse religious guy dreamed up last week to frustrate scientists.
Why does geology predict rather well where to find oil? Because it begins with observed facts. "We find lots of oil in formations like this, and we don't find it in those." My only argument with the geology is the "how fast," and the age of the rocks.
I've taken a stab at your epistemological question. Would you care to address mine? Or is this little corner of this topic going to be so similar to the rest... science with admirable intellectual rigor -- except when discussing its own first principles?
The "omphalos" -- you didn't address my question. How old would you think the earth was if you had a flux capacitor and went to day 7 of Genesis? I'll be happy to discuss your assertion if you'd first address mine. Or are first principles scary?
Maybe that's why guys like me took 60 credit hours of Greek, 30 of Hebrew, with a bunch of Latin thrown in just for grins. And why guys like me think it's cool when little scraps of 1st century papyrus with Biblical text on them turn up.
1) Because if you seek an advanced degree in geology, and you learn the material, get solid grades, but don't believe it took X million years for these formations to be made, you will not receive your degree. My high school science teacher was just such a man.
2) No one challenges the observable fact that oil is found in certain kinds of geological formations far more often and reliably than in others.
3) I have an earned Master of Divinity, and I believe in a young earth. The conflict between evolutionary thought and creationist thought really comes down to a question of epistemology -- how do you know what you know? At the root of all scientific inquiry is the idea that everything in the natural world can be understood on the basis of currently available/observable/discoverable data.
The Biblical creation account specifically says that this assumption won't work going back to the beginning of time, because there three unobservable and unrepeatable events shaped our universe:
1) The initial creation itself was mature. If you invented the flux capacitor and went back to day 7 of Genesis, how old would you think the universe was? You'd see a complete ecosystem, geological features like rivers and riverbeds, light from stars in the night sky, and so on.
2) The fall into sin not only changed people, it wrecked a previously perfect universe. Laws of biology changed -- death entered the world, many of the animals became predators, a perfect and perfectly harmonious world became a "survival of the fittest" jungle instead. It could very well be that laws of physics changed as well. Try to imagine a universe warping and shrivelling like a dying leaf.
3) A worldwide flood -- for which, by the way, most of the water came up from underground. Geological change on an epic scale.
If one assumes the scientific worldview, evolution is the best available explanation for what we see. If one assumes the Biblical worldview, there's no problem whatsoever learning and observing the nature of things as they currently are. There's a really big problem working backwards and applying our understanding of the nature of things to the question of origins.
Epistemology -- how do you know what you know? It's not a "scientific" question, but is that a comment on the quality of the question, or on the limitations of science?
I agree that we need to be pushing biodiesel. But I think the article you link paints far too rosy a picture, because:
1) It only deals with oil used for transportation. 1/3 of US oil consumption is for other purposes. If we stopped using oil for transportation tomorrow, the U.S. would still be a net oil importer.
2) The doc you reference discusses algae in open ponds. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to work well at all. Foreign algae invades, and it's difficult to put the algae under the biological stress needed to get the oil yield up. Current work on the stuff is using ziploc bags or other containers to make these problems manageable, and hooking the mess up to stack gasses from power plants to boost growth. Short version: the actual production cost will be quite a bit higher than the UNH study discusses.
3) As much promise as it shows, there is still no successful, production scale pilot one can point to.
Another that could start making a real dent, if the cards fall right, is algae-produced diesel fuel, easily mixable with existing refinery and delivery infrastructure and plug-in compatible with petro-diesel. Last I knew, the biology works, the algae simply loves the high CO2 levels in the stack gasses from power plants, but the nitty-gritty details of harvesting the algae in a cost-effective way was "back to the drawing board" after a trial at a coal-fired power plant in Arizona. If $60 is the floor price for a barrel of oil, and if they can figure out a sensible way to harvest the algae, and assuming the biology of stressing the algae to make it produce oil scales OK, the economics will work without tax subsidies -- especially if production will also spin off EU-salable carbon credits.
1) World oil consumption is surging, mostly because China, India, etc. are rapidly industrializing. This has caused oil/natural gas prices to triple in the last 5 years, and there is no reason at all to expect them to come back down any time soon.
2) There is no substitute for oil and natural gas, NONE, that will even put a moderate dent in the problem in the next 10-15 years.*
3) Therefore, spending money to extract oil in the Dakotas and Montana is a bad idea.
What did I miss?
The key fallacy: While we are spending our time and money pulling oil out of the ground we are not going to be making any effort to develop alternatives. Spending money currently going overseas to produce more oil locally doesn't mean no research. It means a healthier and larger domestic economy that can afford more research.
doc
* Ethanol? Don't get me started. Electric cars? Show me where enough new nuclear plants will be in production 15 years from now just to meet increased demand for electricity, let alone charge up your car batteries.
1) Distance. TFA indicates Gen 1 gear can push 100 mbits to 300 meters with green light. Cat6 GigE is 100 meters. The difference matters in a fiber to the prem kind of infrastructure.
2) If the stuff in the house does plastic fiber, then telco can put you directly into an ethernet switch port with no media conversion needed.
3) Fiber is easier to handle than UTP.
4) Fiber doesn't care about flaky fluorescent tubes and other sources of RFI you may have in your house.
5) Fiber buried in a trench to your house doesn't care as much if it gets wet.
Ummmm, no. IPv6 does not "kill NAT." NAT devices and web proxies won't be disappearing anytime soon. IPv6 potentially eliminates the need to use NAT, because adequate address space will finally be available.
Since NAT is often a very big pain in the a$$ in actual, real-world corporate networking, this is a very good thing.
You thought Linux was an Operating System, which simply enables your computer to run applications? And that these applications are what make your computer useful?
Forbes, of course, is a business magazine. In serious businesses, the leadership does not build a business plan on a fairy tale. From a corporate-business perspective, with no other knowledge of the issue, whom would you believe:
a) A CEO who is an officer of the corporation, and may be personally, even criminally liable for patently false statements in things like SEC filings, or b) The people that CEO says stole some of his company's code/IP/whatever.
I mean, how often does a publicly traded company sue someone 100x their size based on nothing but hot air? Lying is one thing. Lying when, sooner or later, you will be required to show evidence in a court of law, is something else again. Let's face it, SCO was breathtakingly brazen. I can certainly understand how someone might conclude what he did... there's got to be SOMETHING there.
Why it took him so long to wise up (or whether he did) would be another discussion.
There is another side to this. Breaking TCP is, indeed, evil. But consider this:
1) Comcast's TOS forbids operating a server of any kind on the network. 2) A bittorrent client is acting as a server when it's uploading data. 3) They have not used technical means to enforce this ban. 4) They are fully within their contractual rights if they simply filter all inbound SYN's to their customers.
Is it good for them to spoof RST's? No. Does it have less impact on their users than simply firewalling all inbound SYN packets? Probably. Are the users running P2P on Comcast breaking their TOS? Yes, they are. Does someone breaking the TOS have legal standing to file a lawsuit? IANAL.
Your copy of Windows will stop working with very little notice (three days) and your PC will go into "reduced functionality" mode, where you can't do anything but use the web browser for half an hour.
My (preinstalled) copy of Vista never gave me three days' notice before reducing my laptop's functionality (losing the USB mouse). Was that three days thing an added feature of the retail copy?
Yes, I had planned to flee to LinuxMint anyway, but still...
In a financial trading arbitrage environment, that millisecond would literally be worth millions of dollars. Yes, it matters that much. Some of the best and most expensive brains in the software and systems engineering world are paid a whole lot of money to try to gain that millisecond. At least one "dorm room to gazillionaire" story was built on just such an edge in the early 1990's. The resulting trading firm has $10 billion in net profits since 1998. Warning, there be flash here! http://www.citadelgroup.com/
Do not assume that the people interested in this level of performance are idiots. There's always the possibility they know more about what they're doing than you do.
I won't be a grammar Nazi, because (sigh) this is increasingly common usage. "Because there are really two sentences there" would be correct. English is increasingly lazy on subject-verb agreement if the subject isn't first in the sentence; this is an example.
Slashdot Mirror
"It didn't lower standards and it didn't say that banks were required to lend to high-risk borrowers--all it said was if they're doing business in a neighborhood, they must provide loans to people in that neighborhood."
Let me get this straight. You believe that the CRA did not lower underwriting standards? You appear to be a minority of one.
I can tell you, from personal knowledge, that you are simply wrong. I worked at Fannie in Chicago as an IT guy for a while in the late '90's. I cannot tell you how much advertising material I saw assuring higher risk people in marginal neighborhoods they could get a loan. The CRA was invoked. The standards were lowered. In fact, one man in particular, who worked in the financial area, was concerned that Fannie was buying these lower quality mortgages. He was in no position to do anything about it, but he did not think it was smart.
Independent mortgage companies made crap loans because banks, Fannie, Freddie, etc. were willing to buy them. Why would they NOT make the loans, when there were buyers eager to pay for them?
The point is not that the CRA directly caused all the bad things. It lowered standards for poorer borrowers. That lowered underwriting standards for everyone else. And contributed substantially to our present mess.
"Why were so many of these bad loans made by banks that weren't being told to make them by the government?"
Which banks were those, exactly?
"Why were so many of these loans made that had zero connection to either Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae?" Because the CRA doesn't require sale to Freddie/Fannie. It does require sub-prime lending.
Yes, there was plenty of greed involved. But that, by itself, would not have caused the current train wreck. It's not as if bankers and investors suddenly got greedy in the last 10 years. It's just that in the past, their GREED required sound loan underwriting. Then the feds decided they were being mean to poor people, hence the CRA.
The CRA led to lowered lending standards for every borrower -- if a 600 FICO is good enough for the poor, it's good enough for middle class people living way above their means also, and its illegal discrimination to have one standard for the one group and another for everyone else.
Do you understand yet? The free market HAD good lending practices precisely BECAUSE the bankers were greedy. The government decided to tell them to "loosen up." What the gov't demands, it generally gets.
doc
Linux + Wine + ies4Linux + OWA.
Forgot the link.
Those statistics are skewed. Doctors in the U.S. intervene on very very premature babies and other "lost cause" situations more often than doctors in Europe. So a stillbirth or "spontaneous abortion" elsewhere -- not included in infant mortality statistics -- can end up as an "infant mortality" statistic in the U.S.
doc
For Gutsy, you get Beta 4, not the final release.
doc
They are rotten SOBs that should be put up against that wall.
There's some fine, dispassionate inquiry for ya!
As a courtesy to customers in need of technical assistance, we ask callers not to call Microsoft Customer Support Services to request an extension for Windows XP,' a company representative said. Microsoft declined to comment on whether its support lines had experienced a call-volume spike starting last Friday, when the Neowin notice first appeared.
Umm, if you ask people not to call, doesn't that strongly imply that people are calling?
doc
It's not nearly as biased or misleading as many of the Slashdot crowd want to say it is.
With the filing of court documents, a philosophical debate about the proper place for software in society has become a business dispute with the risk of substantial consequences. He's right about this. If I use ExtJS, am I required to either buy a license or open source my entire website? Yes or no? If I modify but do not distribute GPL3 software, must I release my modifications? Yes or no?
And the real kicker: If I have software patents, and want to be able to enforce them, can I legally use any GPL3 software at all? Yes or no?
These are all risks one must consider before using GPL3 software. Which source code must I release? FSF isn't sure the ExtJS people are wrong that using their stuff touches ALL the code that has ANYTHING to do with my website. So if I use GPL3 stuff on my web server, I could get sued for not releasing proprietary stuff I've developed to make that website work. Guess what -- getting sued is a risk, no matter which way the verdict goes.
GPL3 ain't all that simple, and it ain't all that clear, at the edges. Which source code must I redistribute, and what can I keep to myself? If the FSF can't say, then it's not clear. If I own software patents, can I enforce any of them against a potential Open Source violation of those patents after using any GPL3 software in my business? Probably not. Both of those are pretty big risks to a fair number of businesses.
doc
You just don't get it. Let me spell it out for ya:
... a lot of things like that.
1) This CPU runs on **4 watts!** I'm not sure my cell phone can run on 4 watts in standby.
2) This system board is really, really small. It would make a simply superb POS system, home fileserver/email server/router/allaround network appliance, a great low-power system the size of a trade paperback
Yeah, the 10/100 ain't so great, but you can always put a GigE NIC in one of the PCI slots.
Let's review: Really small, really low power, really really powerful for its size and power footprint. Lots of neat things one can do with this.
doc
Re: geology degrees, the point is that if the sciences won't grant degrees to creationists, it's rather odd to turn around and talk about creationists' lack of scientific achievement in the field -- including things like finding big oil fields.
... science with admirable intellectual rigor -- except when discussing its own first principles?
The Poincare quote simply asserts what you set out to prove. It's a bare assertion that, applied to the distant past, begs the very question I wrote my post to ask. I assert that there are no "facts" about the origin or age of the universe, because you must choose your epistemological presuppositions first. How do you know that currently observed scientific laws have always been true? Documents thousands of years old, in language appropriate to the time, assert that when the universe began, very basic assumptions we make about nature and ourselves simply were not true, and also describes the events that changed that world into this one. It's not a question some obtuse religious guy dreamed up last week to frustrate scientists.
Why does geology predict rather well where to find oil? Because it begins with observed facts. "We find lots of oil in formations like this, and we don't find it in those." My only argument with the geology is the "how fast," and the age of the rocks.
I've taken a stab at your epistemological question. Would you care to address mine? Or is this little corner of this topic going to be so similar to the rest
The "omphalos" -- you didn't address my question. How old would you think the earth was if you had a flux capacitor and went to day 7 of Genesis? I'll be happy to discuss your assertion if you'd first address mine. Or are first principles scary?
doc
Maybe that's why guys like me took 60 credit hours of Greek, 30 of Hebrew, with a bunch of Latin thrown in just for grins. And why guys like me think it's cool when little scraps of 1st century papyrus with Biblical text on them turn up.
And please, quit with the straw men.
doc
1) Because if you seek an advanced degree in geology, and you learn the material, get solid grades, but don't believe it took X million years for these formations to be made, you will not receive your degree. My high school science teacher was just such a man.
2) No one challenges the observable fact that oil is found in certain kinds of geological formations far more often and reliably than in others.
3) I have an earned Master of Divinity, and I believe in a young earth. The conflict between evolutionary thought and creationist thought really comes down to a question of epistemology -- how do you know what you know? At the root of all scientific inquiry is the idea that everything in the natural world can be understood on the basis of currently available/observable/discoverable data.
The Biblical creation account specifically says that this assumption won't work going back to the beginning of time, because there three unobservable and unrepeatable events shaped our universe:
1) The initial creation itself was mature. If you invented the flux capacitor and went back to day 7 of Genesis, how old would you think the universe was? You'd see a complete ecosystem, geological features like rivers and riverbeds, light from stars in the night sky, and so on.
2) The fall into sin not only changed people, it wrecked a previously perfect universe. Laws of biology changed -- death entered the world, many of the animals became predators, a perfect and perfectly harmonious world became a "survival of the fittest" jungle instead. It could very well be that laws of physics changed as well. Try to imagine a universe warping and shrivelling like a dying leaf.
3) A worldwide flood -- for which, by the way, most of the water came up from underground. Geological change on an epic scale.
If one assumes the scientific worldview, evolution is the best available explanation for what we see. If one assumes the Biblical worldview, there's no problem whatsoever learning and observing the nature of things as they currently are. There's a really big problem working backwards and applying our understanding of the nature of things to the question of origins.
Epistemology -- how do you know what you know? It's not a "scientific" question, but is that a comment on the quality of the question, or on the limitations of science?
doc
I agree that we need to be pushing biodiesel. But I think the article you link paints far too rosy a picture, because:
1) It only deals with oil used for transportation. 1/3 of US oil consumption is for other purposes. If we stopped using oil for transportation tomorrow, the U.S. would still be a net oil importer.
2) The doc you reference discusses algae in open ponds. Unfortunately, that doesn't appear to work well at all. Foreign algae invades, and it's difficult to put the algae under the biological stress needed to get the oil yield up. Current work on the stuff is using ziploc bags or other containers to make these problems manageable, and hooking the mess up to stack gasses from power plants to boost growth. Short version: the actual production cost will be quite a bit higher than the UNH study discusses.
3) As much promise as it shows, there is still no successful, production scale pilot one can point to.
doc
Another that could start making a real dent, if the cards fall right, is algae-produced diesel fuel, easily mixable with existing refinery and delivery infrastructure and plug-in compatible with petro-diesel. Last I knew, the biology works, the algae simply loves the high CO2 levels in the stack gasses from power plants, but the nitty-gritty details of harvesting the algae in a cost-effective way was "back to the drawing board" after a trial at a coal-fired power plant in Arizona. If $60 is the floor price for a barrel of oil, and if they can figure out a sensible way to harvest the algae, and assuming the biology of stressing the algae to make it produce oil scales OK, the economics will work without tax subsidies -- especially if production will also spin off EU-salable carbon credits.
doc
Let me see if I have this straight.
1) World oil consumption is surging, mostly because China, India, etc. are rapidly industrializing. This has caused oil/natural gas prices to triple in the last 5 years, and there is no reason at all to expect them to come back down any time soon.
2) There is no substitute for oil and natural gas, NONE, that will even put a moderate dent in the problem in the next 10-15 years.*
3) Therefore, spending money to extract oil in the Dakotas and Montana is a bad idea.
What did I miss?
The key fallacy: While we are spending our time and money pulling oil out of the ground we are not going to be making any effort to develop alternatives. Spending money currently going overseas to produce more oil locally doesn't mean no research. It means a healthier and larger domestic economy that can afford more research.
doc
* Ethanol? Don't get me started. Electric cars? Show me where enough new nuclear plants will be in production 15 years from now just to meet increased demand for electricity, let alone charge up your car batteries.
1) Distance. TFA indicates Gen 1 gear can push 100 mbits to 300 meters with green light. Cat6 GigE is 100 meters. The difference matters in a fiber to the prem kind of infrastructure.
2) If the stuff in the house does plastic fiber, then telco can put you directly into an ethernet switch port with no media conversion needed.
3) Fiber is easier to handle than UTP.
4) Fiber doesn't care about flaky fluorescent tubes and other sources of RFI you may have in your house.
5) Fiber buried in a trench to your house doesn't care as much if it gets wet.
doctorcisco
Since NAT is often a very big pain in the a$$ in actual, real-world corporate networking, this is a very good thing.
doc
Fusion has been 40 years away for ... right around 40 years now.
doc
You must be new here.
doc
I'll offer an alternative understanding.
... there's got to be SOMETHING there.
Forbes, of course, is a business magazine. In serious businesses, the leadership does not build a business plan on a fairy tale. From a corporate-business perspective, with no other knowledge of the issue, whom would you believe:
a) A CEO who is an officer of the corporation, and may be personally, even criminally liable for patently false statements in things like SEC filings, or
b) The people that CEO says stole some of his company's code/IP/whatever.
I mean, how often does a publicly traded company sue someone 100x their size based on nothing but hot air? Lying is one thing. Lying when, sooner or later, you will be required to show evidence in a court of law, is something else again. Let's face it, SCO was breathtakingly brazen. I can certainly understand how someone might conclude what he did
Why it took him so long to wise up (or whether he did) would be another discussion.
doc
There is another side to this. Breaking TCP is, indeed, evil. But consider this:
1) Comcast's TOS forbids operating a server of any kind on the network.
2) A bittorrent client is acting as a server when it's uploading data.
3) They have not used technical means to enforce this ban.
4) They are fully within their contractual rights if they simply filter all inbound SYN's to their customers.
Is it good for them to spoof RST's? No. Does it have less impact on their users than simply firewalling all inbound SYN packets? Probably. Are the users running P2P on Comcast breaking their TOS? Yes, they are. Does someone breaking the TOS have legal standing to file a lawsuit? IANAL.
doc
My (preinstalled) copy of Vista never gave me three days' notice before reducing my laptop's functionality (losing the USB mouse). Was that three days thing an added feature of the retail copy?
Yes, I had planned to flee to LinuxMint anyway, but still ...
doc
Do not assume that the people interested in this level of performance are idiots. There's always the possibility they know more about what they're doing than you do.
doc
I won't be a grammar Nazi, because (sigh) this is increasingly common usage. "Because there are really two sentences there" would be correct. English is increasingly lazy on subject-verb agreement if the subject isn't first in the sentence; this is an example.
doc