God, why won't this stupid meme die? "Inserting a mandatory delay" does NOTHING to solve the problem you're asserting it will. All it does is mean that it'll take $delay seconds after market open for high-speed / automated trading to begin hitting the exchange, and it will continue ALL DAY LONG until market close.
This assertion that a delay would somehow make the market "manageable" for individual humans is like saying that making everybody wait in their driveway for 2 minutes before they begin their commute to work will somehow alleviate traffic jams.
That's great, but this discussion wasn't about your inability to *sell* your condo when you decided to move.
Several alternatives suggest themselves: 1) Rent your place out until it can sell; 2) Put it on the market cheap and take the loss (and tax deduction) if you really need to unload it; 3) Find a job within commuting distance of the home you already own, and move away only once your home sells; 4) Tap into your 6-12 months of savings (you had that much savings put aside... didn't you?) to keep making mortgage payments until it sells, and live frugally in your new city until you can get rid of the old home. Since you're drawing a regular paycheck as well, your savings should have lasted you for much longer than they were intended to - 6 months of living expenses probably equals 9-10 months of "just mortgage payments."
You specifically asserted that "many" people are spending upwards of 50% of their gross income on housing. This is demonstrably false, or most people you know are fucking idiots who enjoy spending beyond their means on their home. With an unemployment rate of ~10%, your scenario is the VAST MINORITY of cases - very few people who are laid off are finding themselves: 1) owning a condo they can't sell; 2) having to move away to find work somewhere else. Most people who are having mortgage difficulties simply bought too much house, assuming they could refinance into a lower rate down the line before their ARM adjusted, or assuming their income would "catch up". This is their fault. Not "the billionaires'". Not mine. Not yours. It is theirs. And while I don't wish ill on anybody else, I also don't feel it's anybody else's obligation to enable their foolish spending patterns.
This is what most people in large cities have, after taxes.
Somebody doesn't understand the concept of "gross income." Go read what I've written before you continue making an ass of yourself pushing your stupid lies and conspiracy theories. (Pro tip: Gross income is what you make before taxes and other deductions.)
If you take home $3000 a month (this is also known as you "net income"), you should be able to fairly easily afford a home that costs the median home price in the US in December of 2010, even with not-so-great credit & only 10% down payment.
And anyway - if you live in a city and can't afford your home... whose fault is that? There are TONS of places within easy public transit of most cities that are significantly cheaper than penthouse apartments on Boston Common or the San Francisco waterfront. Those awful nasty billionaires aren't forcing you to overextend yourself, and you are not entitled to live wherever you want without needing to budget or make tradeoffs.
In closing - you're simply making yourself look like an idiot by continuing to argue this point.
I suspect most droid users would say "fuck it... I can get the same info for free if I just spend 10 seconds and Google it".
Right, because Google's not a marketing company at all. And Android isn't a marketing tool at all.
Like you, I'm glad Google has given us this online wonderland of free shit with absolutely no marketing involved whatsoever. I'm probably gonna name my firstborn Sergey in gratitude, but I'll let you have dibs on Eric for yours.
Mmm. But now we're down to Android being more popular than iOS, at least by some measures of units shipped. FINALLY, the technology produced by a non-marketing company wins out!
OH WAIT, who makes Android, and what do they do again?
Apple is a *hardware* company who happens to have solid product design coupled with excellent marketing. ("Excellent marketing" doesn't keep their customers coming back, nor does it keep them at the top of nearly any "customer satisfaction" ratings you can find, nor does it allow them to keep winning new customers in a fairly saturated market. There's more to their success than simply "spending lots on marketing." Their marketing certainly *helps*, but it is not the sole reason for their success.)
You're an idiot if you really mean to suggest that average rent takes 50% of someone's gross income. Do some figuring with me, will you?
-- Median US Home price, December, 2010: $241,500. (source) -- Assuming "Fair" credit, a 20% down payment, and a 30 year loan, you could expect a monthly mortgage rate of ~$1050 on a median-priced home. -- Assuming a 10% down payment, the expected price would rise to about $1300/month.
I'm at a loss to understand why you seem to think this is somehow inordinately out of the reach of normal people. Rule of thumb says someone making $36k/year can afford payments of ~900/month. Not too far off affording the median price, on what is BELOW the median per capita income.
If you are spending $1500 a month on rent and making $3000 a month, you are being ripped off, you are stupid, or (most likely) you, Alex Belits, are a liar.
And that probably explains why I stick with vim for text editing, and have never understood the appeal of emacs - I don't want my text editor to also do a million other things, I'm happy with pretty simple text-editing.
I'd make three comments in response: 1) MSIE 1 was started, by the accounts I can find, in mid-to-late 1994, and released in August 1995. So a year+ of development. 2) MSIE 1 was significantly simpler than a high-volume, high-availability critical trade processing system which handles hundreds of thousands of trades each day; 3) IE largely succeeded over time on the back of Microsoft's anticompetitive practices, and THEN would have laid in a corner neglected if Firefox hadn't come along to shock them out of their complacency and force them to begin supporting newer web standards.
IE is not a good example for showing that you can write highly complex, high scalable, fault tolerant/highly available trading systems with "half a dozen coders and 6 months." In fact, its development history shows that it will generally require a significantly longer timeframe to accomplish anything of note.
I'll assume you're aware that dollar cost averaging and diversifying a portfolio for long term gains are accepted (and proven) methods for investing that greatly eliminate the volatility of your portfolio in what is, essentially, a cyclical market. Investments over the last decade have absolutely made money if you spent a few days learning how to invest, and then a few hours each quarter balancing your portfolio to match your plan.
The stock market is not a "this week, this month, this quarter" endeavor. If you want to make money, worrying about a downturn this year is stupid. If you're so close to retirement that you can't afford to ride out a downturn, then your money should be in safer investments - bonds, money market mutuals, or hell, even CDs and savings accounts if you're truly paranoid. If you're not that close to needing the money to fund retirement, then you keep investing in well-run low-cost mutual funds and make sure that your portfolio is well-diversified, EVEN during the passing downturns, because the overall trend of the market is up - it always has been, and always will be, barring some sort of extinction-style event which leaves entire swaths of the planet uninhabitable and barren.
So, since I've generously assumed you're aware of these basic facts of investing and financial markets, care to explain the joke?
Pound cost averaging? Unit cost averaging? Cost average effect? Any of those ring a bell? They all (along with Dollar cost averaging) describe the same thing.
And "things taking a dive" is exactly *why* you diversify - across sectors, across regions, and across instruments, and across company sizes. In laymen's terms, this avoids "putting all your eggs in one basket." Some sectors of the economy hold up better in downturns than others; Some instruments hold up better than others; some regions hold up better or recover faster; some types of companies are better poised to take advantage of downturns and the inevitable recoveries that follow them. Spreading your money out helps dampen the impact of big dives on your portfolio.
Investing "wisely" doesn't take lots of specialized knowledge or time. Given that this money is supposed to support you for 20+ years in your retirement, spending a few weeks in your 20's and 30's understanding how to diversify, and then spending a few hours each quarter reviewing your current allocations and shifting money to keep things balanced is *not* a lot of time required. You can even hire a fee-based financial planner to do it for you.
If you're properly diversified, and sticking with an investment plan, then even when the market turns down, you will generally: a) Not suffer as badly as the idiots who sink all their money into their company's stock purchase plan; b) Not suffer as badly as the fools who see the numbers drop and panic, selling everything and locking in their losses.
If you consider investment to be nothing more than gambling, you will never succeed at it. If you understand a few basic principles and stick to a plan, you can do quite well, even in the inevitable down cycles.
Sites already licensed to encode and serve AVC will continue to use AVC, even if they adopt WebM alongside it. New sites not needing to target iDevices or devices with old versions of Android OS may use WebM exclusively.
They won't adopt WebM along side it. They can serve Flash-wrapped AVC, after all that's one of the big selling points of Android - "It runs flash!"
New sites that don't take iDevices into account? Only if they don't want to make money. Why, when a single alternative format exists, would you encode in such a way that deliberately cuts out 10's of millions of people who have enough money to buy an iOS device, and who are, in all likelihood, more willing to spend to purchase online than other mobile device users? (See: success of Itunes store, paid-app sales, and iOS in-app purchases). You could, instead, encode to H.264 / AVC, and serve that up natively to the devices that support it, and then wrap that same H.264 content in Flash for devices that need Flash to play H.264.
Otherwise, you're encoding in AVC for iDevices, WebM for others, and perhaps Flash-wrapped AVC or WebM for a third (and perhaps fourth!) category of devices. It just makes no sense, when there is no compelling benefit to switch to WebM for any online/streaming use - it's already royalty free for them, and consumers pay a few pennies per unit for the built-in H.264 hardware support, and that situation will remain constant until 2016.
The final patent on H.264 expires in 2028; in the 11-year window between 2017 (when the current royalty terms are up for review) and 2028, which means that there are 2.2 license review periods between now and the expiration. MPEG-LA has specifically built into their agreement that the royalty cost will not increase more than 10% in a given renewal period. So you're looking at a possible ~20% increase in the fees until the patents expire on the current set of technologies.
This makes licensing fees very simple, and pretty easy to forecast and budget for, versus the unknowns of WebM/VP8. Until WebM has stood up to a patent challenge or two or three, I wouldn't expect anybody beyond Google to seriously consider adopting it - Google's assurances that there aren't any infringing parts won't do anything to help a small company avoid getting slapped with "pay royalties or desist" court orders, for that you need a court ruling. As you noted yourself, "VP8 is so similar to AVC that any programmable DSP capable of AVC can likely be reprogrammed for VP8." Which very possibly means that, despite google's best intentions, there ARE parts of VP8 that may infringe.
Ah, I see, so the browser couldn't use some scheme whereby it would support whatever video codecs are supported natively by your OS, allowing you to simply update a playback library when/if a codec changes, or install a new library to support a new codec?
What is it with people having some sort of fetish for putting EVERYTHING into the frigging browser?
What royalty-bearing technology is included in HTML5 and WebM?
Nice straw man, I never mentioned WebM, champ. But, since you brought it up:
With the exception of Youtube, which will convert because Google owns them, no content producer of any size will re-encode their entire library and double their disk space allocation simply to support WebM, *especially* because they will not freeze out the entire existing ecosystem of H.264-in-hardware-capable devices - there's no appreciable benefit to shifting formats - aside from some vague fuzzy feeling for "supporting openness," whatever that means - and there are significant costs to shifting away from H.264 and moving to WebM as well.
So, people who have browsers and devices that don't support native H.264 video via HTML video tags will simply receive the H.264 video wrapped in a Flash player. WebM support will be "that thing Youtube uses," and if it's not done well, it'll be "that thing Youtube used to use before we all started using other sites like Vimeo."
You know this, I know this, let's stop pretending that WebM is somehow going to change a fucking thing until and unless Flash is dead. And since Google - who is also pushing WebM - is the one propping Flash up in the interests of "openness," WebM is effectively dead on arrival.
If you're a market maker - who may have a legal & contractual obligation to keep offering trades - yes, you do stay in the market until the trading curbs halt a complete meltdown if things are headed south.
Yeah, and then another 3 years hiring somebody new and letting them rewrite it because your homebrew hobbyists who you thought would save you money low-balled the project because "LOL HOW HRD CUD IT B RLY?"
Nothing happens in the financial services industry in "about 6 months." Your project estimate reads like a PHB asserting, "I don't understand this, so I'll assume it's trivial, and can be done by half a dozen guys in half a dozen months."
No no no. Doesn't matter. Flash is open. H.264 and HTML5 are closed, and require onerous patent licensing terms of pennies per unit, with a hard cap.
It's much better to trust a single company, Adobe, to play nicely, rather than publish a standard and allow all manufacturers to implement it if they wish.
In other news, up is also down, and black is also white.
Standard rule of thumb, easily calculated, is that your monthly mortgage payment shouldn't exceed 28% of your gross pay, and your total monthly debt obligations (that mortgage, plus car loan, credit cards, etc.) shouldn't exceed 35-40% of your monthly gross. Furthermore, you should have a minimum of 6 months of living expenses put aside against a rainy day - i.e., get laid off, you know you've got 6 months of expenses covered no matter what happens. Ideally, you should have a full year.
Are you so bad at math that you need an "army of accountants" to calculate 28% of your gross pay, or what constitutes 6 months of living expenses?
If you gross $3000 a month, taking a $1600/month mortgage is living beyond your means. If you're taking a zero-down mortgage that's 30% of your monthly gross with no money in the bank, you're living beyond your means.
I don't think it's asking for too much "personal responsibility" for people to spend 5 minutes calculating a budget before they go house shopping. And if you don't know what your gross pay is to calculate a budget, then you have zero business looking for a home loan.
You said it was to benefit "the states" and not "the people" - I clarified your statement that it's "the entirety of the states," and can't be used, as I said, to "benefit California at the expense of Ohio."
The problem with your entire point is that, as I've pointed out, the Supreme Court has ruled against your (and Madison's, as I pointed out) opinion. As much as you or I may wish that the interpretation was more narrow, it is not.
The savings rate fell off a cliff around 1982, which is just about the time that the bull market leading up to the 2000 meltdown, then slid back downwards, then jumped back up again at the end of 2008. That nearly 20 year bull market was a time of general prosperity, when people COULD have been saving up money for the inevitable downturn that cyclical markets will bring. They didn't. The data clearly shows that people SAVE MORE when times are hard.
The problem is our culture puts more emphasis on buying a new Toyota, or a new flatscreen tv, rather than making sure that you save for the inevitable downturns, and the inevitable point where you're going to want to retire. Part of this is consumerism, and part of this is simply peoples' attitude that the government will somehow make it all better, and they don't need to worry - see the ridiculously low amount of retirement savings most people have, compared to the cost of the car they're driving. They think nothing of spending $300-500 a month on a car loan for 5-6 years, but ask them to put aside the same amount in their 401(k) and they'll scream bloody murder about how they don't have the money to afford that.
Yeah... "I'm so enraged by this development that I... need to take half a day off. But I'll totally make up for it by working a few extra hours next week, per the standard Flex Time arrangement."
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God, why won't this stupid meme die? "Inserting a mandatory delay" does NOTHING to solve the problem you're asserting it will. All it does is mean that it'll take $delay seconds after market open for high-speed / automated trading to begin hitting the exchange, and it will continue ALL DAY LONG until market close.
This assertion that a delay would somehow make the market "manageable" for individual humans is like saying that making everybody wait in their driveway for 2 minutes before they begin their commute to work will somehow alleviate traffic jams.
That's great, but this discussion wasn't about your inability to *sell* your condo when you decided to move.
Several alternatives suggest themselves:
1) Rent your place out until it can sell;
2) Put it on the market cheap and take the loss (and tax deduction) if you really need to unload it;
3) Find a job within commuting distance of the home you already own, and move away only once your home sells;
4) Tap into your 6-12 months of savings (you had that much savings put aside... didn't you?) to keep making mortgage payments until it sells, and live frugally in your new city until you can get rid of the old home. Since you're drawing a regular paycheck as well, your savings should have lasted you for much longer than they were intended to - 6 months of living expenses probably equals 9-10 months of "just mortgage payments."
You specifically asserted that "many" people are spending upwards of 50% of their gross income on housing. This is demonstrably false, or most people you know are fucking idiots who enjoy spending beyond their means on their home. With an unemployment rate of ~10%, your scenario is the VAST MINORITY of cases - very few people who are laid off are finding themselves: 1) owning a condo they can't sell; 2) having to move away to find work somewhere else. Most people who are having mortgage difficulties simply bought too much house, assuming they could refinance into a lower rate down the line before their ARM adjusted, or assuming their income would "catch up". This is their fault. Not "the billionaires'". Not mine. Not yours. It is theirs. And while I don't wish ill on anybody else, I also don't feel it's anybody else's obligation to enable their foolish spending patterns.
Somebody doesn't understand the concept of "gross income." Go read what I've written before you continue making an ass of yourself pushing your stupid lies and conspiracy theories. (Pro tip: Gross income is what you make before taxes and other deductions.)
If you take home $3000 a month (this is also known as you "net income"), you should be able to fairly easily afford a home that costs the median home price in the US in December of 2010, even with not-so-great credit & only 10% down payment.
And anyway - if you live in a city and can't afford your home... whose fault is that? There are TONS of places within easy public transit of most cities that are significantly cheaper than penthouse apartments on Boston Common or the San Francisco waterfront. Those awful nasty billionaires aren't forcing you to overextend yourself, and you are not entitled to live wherever you want without needing to budget or make tradeoffs.
In closing - you're simply making yourself look like an idiot by continuing to argue this point.
Right, because Google's not a marketing company at all. And Android isn't a marketing tool at all.
Like you, I'm glad Google has given us this online wonderland of free shit with absolutely no marketing involved whatsoever. I'm probably gonna name my firstborn Sergey in gratitude, but I'll let you have dibs on Eric for yours.
Mmm. But now we're down to Android being more popular than iOS, at least by some measures of units shipped. FINALLY, the technology produced by a non-marketing company wins out!
OH WAIT, who makes Android, and what do they do again?
Apple is a *hardware* company who happens to have solid product design coupled with excellent marketing. ("Excellent marketing" doesn't keep their customers coming back, nor does it keep them at the top of nearly any "customer satisfaction" ratings you can find, nor does it allow them to keep winning new customers in a fairly saturated market. There's more to their success than simply "spending lots on marketing." Their marketing certainly *helps*, but it is not the sole reason for their success.)
You're an idiot if you really mean to suggest that average rent takes 50% of someone's gross income. Do some figuring with me, will you?
-- Median US Home price, December, 2010: $241,500. (source)
-- Assuming "Fair" credit, a 20% down payment, and a 30 year loan, you could expect a monthly mortgage rate of ~$1050 on a median-priced home.
-- Assuming a 10% down payment, the expected price would rise to about $1300/month.
I'm at a loss to understand why you seem to think this is somehow inordinately out of the reach of normal people. Rule of thumb says someone making $36k/year can afford payments of ~900/month. Not too far off affording the median price, on what is BELOW the median per capita income.
If you are spending $1500 a month on rent and making $3000 a month, you are being ripped off, you are stupid, or (most likely) you, Alex Belits, are a liar.
"I can't hear you, you're trailing off. And did I hear a 'niner' in there? Were you calling from a walkie-talkie?"
And that probably explains why I stick with vim for text editing, and have never understood the appeal of emacs - I don't want my text editor to also do a million other things, I'm happy with pretty simple text-editing.
I'd make three comments in response:
1) MSIE 1 was started, by the accounts I can find, in mid-to-late 1994, and released in August 1995. So a year+ of development.
2) MSIE 1 was significantly simpler than a high-volume, high-availability critical trade processing system which handles hundreds of thousands of trades each day;
3) IE largely succeeded over time on the back of Microsoft's anticompetitive practices, and THEN would have laid in a corner neglected if Firefox hadn't come along to shock them out of their complacency and force them to begin supporting newer web standards.
IE is not a good example for showing that you can write highly complex, high scalable, fault tolerant/highly available trading systems with "half a dozen coders and 6 months." In fact, its development history shows that it will generally require a significantly longer timeframe to accomplish anything of note.
I'll assume you're aware that dollar cost averaging and diversifying a portfolio for long term gains are accepted (and proven) methods for investing that greatly eliminate the volatility of your portfolio in what is, essentially, a cyclical market. Investments over the last decade have absolutely made money if you spent a few days learning how to invest, and then a few hours each quarter balancing your portfolio to match your plan.
The stock market is not a "this week, this month, this quarter" endeavor. If you want to make money, worrying about a downturn this year is stupid. If you're so close to retirement that you can't afford to ride out a downturn, then your money should be in safer investments - bonds, money market mutuals, or hell, even CDs and savings accounts if you're truly paranoid. If you're not that close to needing the money to fund retirement, then you keep investing in well-run low-cost mutual funds and make sure that your portfolio is well-diversified, EVEN during the passing downturns, because the overall trend of the market is up - it always has been, and always will be, barring some sort of extinction-style event which leaves entire swaths of the planet uninhabitable and barren.
So, since I've generously assumed you're aware of these basic facts of investing and financial markets, care to explain the joke?
Pound cost averaging? Unit cost averaging? Cost average effect? Any of those ring a bell? They all (along with Dollar cost averaging) describe the same thing.
And "things taking a dive" is exactly *why* you diversify - across sectors, across regions, and across instruments, and across company sizes. In laymen's terms, this avoids "putting all your eggs in one basket." Some sectors of the economy hold up better in downturns than others; Some instruments hold up better than others; some regions hold up better or recover faster; some types of companies are better poised to take advantage of downturns and the inevitable recoveries that follow them. Spreading your money out helps dampen the impact of big dives on your portfolio.
Investing "wisely" doesn't take lots of specialized knowledge or time. Given that this money is supposed to support you for 20+ years in your retirement, spending a few weeks in your 20's and 30's understanding how to diversify, and then spending a few hours each quarter reviewing your current allocations and shifting money to keep things balanced is *not* a lot of time required. You can even hire a fee-based financial planner to do it for you.
If you're properly diversified, and sticking with an investment plan, then even when the market turns down, you will generally:
a) Not suffer as badly as the idiots who sink all their money into their company's stock purchase plan;
b) Not suffer as badly as the fools who see the numbers drop and panic, selling everything and locking in their losses.
If you consider investment to be nothing more than gambling, you will never succeed at it. If you understand a few basic principles and stick to a plan, you can do quite well, even in the inevitable down cycles.
They won't adopt WebM along side it. They can serve Flash-wrapped AVC, after all that's one of the big selling points of Android - "It runs flash!"
New sites that don't take iDevices into account? Only if they don't want to make money. Why, when a single alternative format exists, would you encode in such a way that deliberately cuts out 10's of millions of people who have enough money to buy an iOS device, and who are, in all likelihood, more willing to spend to purchase online than other mobile device users? (See: success of Itunes store, paid-app sales, and iOS in-app purchases). You could, instead, encode to H.264 / AVC, and serve that up natively to the devices that support it, and then wrap that same H.264 content in Flash for devices that need Flash to play H.264.
Otherwise, you're encoding in AVC for iDevices, WebM for others, and perhaps Flash-wrapped AVC or WebM for a third (and perhaps fourth!) category of devices. It just makes no sense, when there is no compelling benefit to switch to WebM for any online/streaming use - it's already royalty free for them, and consumers pay a few pennies per unit for the built-in H.264 hardware support, and that situation will remain constant until 2016.
The final patent on H.264 expires in 2028; in the 11-year window between 2017 (when the current royalty terms are up for review) and 2028, which means that there are 2.2 license review periods between now and the expiration. MPEG-LA has specifically built into their agreement that the royalty cost will not increase more than 10% in a given renewal period. So you're looking at a possible ~20% increase in the fees until the patents expire on the current set of technologies.
This makes licensing fees very simple, and pretty easy to forecast and budget for, versus the unknowns of WebM/VP8. Until WebM has stood up to a patent challenge or two or three, I wouldn't expect anybody beyond Google to seriously consider adopting it - Google's assurances that there aren't any infringing parts won't do anything to help a small company avoid getting slapped with "pay royalties or desist" court orders, for that you need a court ruling. As you noted yourself, "VP8 is so similar to AVC that any programmable DSP capable of AVC can likely be reprogrammed for VP8." Which very possibly means that, despite google's best intentions, there ARE parts of VP8 that may infringe.
Ah, I see, so the browser couldn't use some scheme whereby it would support whatever video codecs are supported natively by your OS, allowing you to simply update a playback library when/if a codec changes, or install a new library to support a new codec?
What is it with people having some sort of fetish for putting EVERYTHING into the frigging browser?
Nice straw man, I never mentioned WebM, champ. But, since you brought it up:
With the exception of Youtube, which will convert because Google owns them, no content producer of any size will re-encode their entire library and double their disk space allocation simply to support WebM, *especially* because they will not freeze out the entire existing ecosystem of H.264-in-hardware-capable devices - there's no appreciable benefit to shifting formats - aside from some vague fuzzy feeling for "supporting openness," whatever that means - and there are significant costs to shifting away from H.264 and moving to WebM as well.
So, people who have browsers and devices that don't support native H.264 video via HTML video tags will simply receive the H.264 video wrapped in a Flash player. WebM support will be "that thing Youtube uses," and if it's not done well, it'll be "that thing Youtube used to use before we all started using other sites like Vimeo."
You know this, I know this, let's stop pretending that WebM is somehow going to change a fucking thing until and unless Flash is dead. And since Google - who is also pushing WebM - is the one propping Flash up in the interests of "openness," WebM is effectively dead on arrival.
Looks like somebody doesn't know about dollar cost averaging and long term investment in a diversified portfolio.
If you're a market maker - who may have a legal & contractual obligation to keep offering trades - yes, you do stay in the market until the trading curbs halt a complete meltdown if things are headed south.
Yeah, and then another 3 years hiring somebody new and letting them rewrite it because your homebrew hobbyists who you thought would save you money low-balled the project because "LOL HOW HRD CUD IT B RLY?"
Nothing happens in the financial services industry in "about 6 months." Your project estimate reads like a PHB asserting, "I don't understand this, so I'll assume it's trivial, and can be done by half a dozen guys in half a dozen months."
No no no. Doesn't matter. Flash is open. H.264 and HTML5 are closed, and require onerous patent licensing terms of pennies per unit, with a hard cap.
It's much better to trust a single company, Adobe, to play nicely, rather than publish a standard and allow all manufacturers to implement it if they wish.
In other news, up is also down, and black is also white.
Even better, how about a lightweight browser that doesn't require plugins to view videos?
Standard rule of thumb, easily calculated, is that your monthly mortgage payment shouldn't exceed 28% of your gross pay, and your total monthly debt obligations (that mortgage, plus car loan, credit cards, etc.) shouldn't exceed 35-40% of your monthly gross. Furthermore, you should have a minimum of 6 months of living expenses put aside against a rainy day - i.e., get laid off, you know you've got 6 months of expenses covered no matter what happens. Ideally, you should have a full year.
Are you so bad at math that you need an "army of accountants" to calculate 28% of your gross pay, or what constitutes 6 months of living expenses?
If you gross $3000 a month, taking a $1600/month mortgage is living beyond your means. If you're taking a zero-down mortgage that's 30% of your monthly gross with no money in the bank, you're living beyond your means.
I don't think it's asking for too much "personal responsibility" for people to spend 5 minutes calculating a budget before they go house shopping. And if you don't know what your gross pay is to calculate a budget, then you have zero business looking for a home loan.
You said it was to benefit "the states" and not "the people" - I clarified your statement that it's "the entirety of the states," and can't be used, as I said, to "benefit California at the expense of Ohio."
The problem with your entire point is that, as I've pointed out, the Supreme Court has ruled against your (and Madison's, as I pointed out) opinion. As much as you or I may wish that the interpretation was more narrow, it is not.
Funny, the data seems to disagree with you. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/PSAVERT.txt
The savings rate fell off a cliff around 1982, which is just about the time that the bull market leading up to the 2000 meltdown, then slid back downwards, then jumped back up again at the end of 2008. That nearly 20 year bull market was a time of general prosperity, when people COULD have been saving up money for the inevitable downturn that cyclical markets will bring. They didn't. The data clearly shows that people SAVE MORE when times are hard.
The problem is our culture puts more emphasis on buying a new Toyota, or a new flatscreen tv, rather than making sure that you save for the inevitable downturns, and the inevitable point where you're going to want to retire. Part of this is consumerism, and part of this is simply peoples' attitude that the government will somehow make it all better, and they don't need to worry - see the ridiculously low amount of retirement savings most people have, compared to the cost of the car they're driving. They think nothing of spending $300-500 a month on a car loan for 5-6 years, but ask them to put aside the same amount in their 401(k) and they'll scream bloody murder about how they don't have the money to afford that.
I think that's what people rely on the government to do for them with entitlement programs, isn't it?
Yeah... "I'm so enraged by this development that I... need to take half a day off. But I'll totally make up for it by working a few extra hours next week, per the standard Flex Time arrangement."
That's balls for sure.