we wouldn't even know about the ~$14 trillion the Fed loaned to the banks at ~0%
The Fed never loaned $14 trillion to the banks. What they did is make guarantees that the money would be there if the banks needed it. The Fed actually only loaned about $2 trillion to banks at the peak of the crisis.
I imagine you're also lumping Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) loans into the culpability for the crisis. This is a thirty-year old law. You may want to look into that; CRA-approved mortgages were less likely to be subprime and less likely to be resold.
Also, Fannie and Freddie have rules that stipulate they would cover only 80% of a mortgage. Where did the other 20% come from? Ask Angelo Mozilo; Countrywide would just give you a second mortgage to cover the other 20%. Ta-da, 0% down payment home mortgages.
Fannie and Freddie also would not take Jumbo loans. So those McMansions could not be financed that by them.
As far as "liar loans"(or NINJA loans), the fault lies 100% with the broker. While consumers are morally obligated to be honest, it's supposed to be the broker's responsibility to keep liars from getting money they can't pay back. Instead we had brokers facilitating fraud.
The biggest cause of the problem was the large secondary market for mortgages. It's all basic Supply and Demand. If there had been no market for selling shitty mortgages, the brokerage firms would never have been able to get rid of the bad mortgages and they would have crushed under the weight of their own defaulted loans (as they did when the big banks finally stopped buying their trash). But back then Wall Street was more than willing to buy up this crap, so the fly-by-nights had a willing buyer for their doomed-to-fail mortgages.
And make no mistake; Fannie and Freddie were not big players in subprime loans until Countrywide said what amounted to "if you don't buy these loans, Wall Street will, and you will lose all your market share". Fannie and Freddie didn't really get into subprime loans until about 2005. And in 2010, their loans had a foreclosure rate 30% lower than the national average.
Oh, and let's not forget the SEC decision in 2004 that exempted the banks from the capital reserve requirements. Without this ruling, they wouldn't have been able to lever up their balance sheet as highly as they did.
And all the deregulation and mega-mergers that made banks too big to fail, and allowed a shadow banking system to grow in the derivatives market which then began to exceed the size of the real banking system. And the Credit Ratings Agencies which were complicit in labeling toxic CDOs which were designed to fail as AAA-worthy.
Yes, please do explain how England caused our panics by manipulating gold. How 1893 wasn't the result of railroads and a pegged currency. Or 1837 wasn't speculation and Specie Circular. Or how 1907 wasn't a run on banks after a failed attempt to take over United Copper Company. I did some quick reading but couldn't find anything to support England manipulating gold prices, other than a simultaneous panic in the UK in 1893 which only exacerbated the existing panic in the US.
As far as the economy being weak...let's be honest here. We're talking two to four years after the recession officially ended. Two years after the recession ends, you shouldn't be cutting taxes. Four years after the recession ends, you shouldn't be lowering interest rates. You're talking about recoveries being 3-6 times longer than the recession itself. It doesn't have to be a vigorous recovery; indeed, perhaps it should NOT be a vigorous recovery, lest the economy overheat (which it did thanks to subprime lending and mortgage backed securities and insufficient capital reserves)
I did not imply Bush or his administration were Keynesian. Quite the contrary, as detailed above, they are anti-Keynesian, cutting taxes and lowering interest rates when the economy is doing well. And the GOP has plenty to be ashamed of regarding Big Government; DHS and Medicare Part D are their creation.
Finally...I think my plan is far more tenable than yours. Yours requires the government to keep their hands out of the cookie jar. That is impossible, given how many lobbyists love them some cookies. Meanwhile, the government right now *is* competent enough, there's just insufficient oversight to keep pressure on them to be honest. You can't tell me that the wealth of data that we can collect and process now could never result in competent decisions. The problem is the regulators have been captured by industry. That's why e.g. in 2004, the SEC decided to loosen reserve restrictions on banks so they could load up with more debt (directly leading to the implosion of Bear Stearns). In my opinion, if we can prevent regulatory capture and enforce common-sense laws, the problem of incompetence will be negligible.
If the government stops disrupting the economy possibly corrective measures simply won't be required? It's never been tested.
I disagree with this premise. Google "panic of" and you get plethora of results on the first page. Note how the last panic was 1907 - over 100 years ago. Note how many panics happened between 1800 and 1907.
Anyway, the dot-com bust happened in 2000. That recession officially lasted only 8 months, ending Nov 2001. The Fed lowered interest rates right around when the recession ended.
By 2003 (when the second round of "Bush tax cuts" passed Congress), the recession had been over for almost 2 years. While the first round could be considered marginally Keynesian, this second round was definitely not.
By 2005 (when the Fed finally began raising interest rates) the recession had been over for almost 4 years.
It's not that the government isn't competent enough to pull this off. They don't *want* to pull this off. When the dot-com bubble was growing, they should have raised rates instead of holding them steady. They should have raised taxes then, too. But it was unpalatable at the time, for whatever reason. Just like when the housing bubble was growing.
The highest income bracket when the Federal Income Tax was enacted was $500,000 (NOT adjusting for inflation! with inflation it's like $11 million)
Our current highest tax bracket is roughly $379,000.
The highest income in the US last year was in excess of $1 billion. That means there's about four orders of magnitude between the top tax bracket and the top income.
IMO, we need to keep existing tax brackets and add new ones at $1 million, $10 million, $100 million, and $1 billion. For rates, let's go with Clinton's (39%), Reagan's (50%), Nixon's (70%), and Eisenhower's (90%).
Note that those last three were Republican presidents.
The one thing I hate about any discussion re: Keynes is that everyone focuses on the "stimulus during recession" part.
More generally, Keynes' theory suggests counter-cyclical pressure applied by the government. This not only means "stimulus during recession", but it also means raising taxes and interest rates when the economy is booming to prevent it from "overheating".
Unfortunately, our government decided to CUT taxes and LOWER interest rates when the economy was good. And then the economy over-heated, aka the Subprime Mortgage Crisis.
And let's say, oh, that you're standing on the highway and watching these hunters. What sort of circumstances does that make? Do you think it's right to shoot someone who is watching you from public space?
Internet license servers also fail if your device isn't supposed to be connected to the Internet.
For instance, computers in medical facilities are often air-gapped. Many of them still run Windows XP because Vista was never approved and W7 is currently being audited for approval.
This isn't as simple as adding "return true;" to "isDongleConnected()". Clearly you've never tried to add copy protection to anything.
First there's the challenge/response model. Imagine this as "sometimes you should return false instead of true".
Second there's the dongle processor. Imagine "int DoDongleCalculation(int x, int y)". The dongle then calculates x and y and returns a value. What do you propose to return in those cases?
Oh, what's that, you want to peek inside the CPLD and extract the code and reverse engineer it so you know what DoDongleCalculation is doing? lol, good luck buddy.
In Dimock, horses and other pets are losing their hair. This only started once the fracking began. Go tell the Sautners that Gasland is BS.
"Drilling operations near their property commenced in August 2008. Trees were cleared and the ground leveled to make room for a four-acre drilling site less than 1,000 feet away from their land. The Sautners could feel the earth beneath their home shake whenever the well was fracked.
Within a month, their water had turned brown. It was so corrosive that it scarred dishes in their dishwasher and stained their laundry. They complained to Cabot, which eventually installed a water-filtration system in the basement of their home. It seemed to solve the problem, but when the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection came to do further tests, it found that the Sautners’ water still contained high levels of methane. More ad hoc pumps and filtration systems were installed. While the Sautners did not drink the water at this point, they continued to use it for other purposes for a full year.
“It was so bad sometimes that my daughter would be in the shower in the morning, and she’d have to get out of the shower and lay on the floor” because of the dizzying effect the chemicals in the water had on her, recalls Craig Sautner, who has worked as a cable splicer for Frontier Communications his whole life. She didn’t speak up about it for a while, because she wondered whether she was imagining the problem. But she wasn’t the only one in the family suffering. “My son had sores up and down his legs from the water,” Craig says. Craig and Julie also experienced frequent headaches and dizziness."
I appreciate your honest approach to the issue. And you're probably right, done with proper regulations and safety precautions fracking can be safe...in theory. You only saw one piece of the puzzle, so here are some more pieces.
In practice, one thing you need to consider is what happens to the chemicals *after* they're pulled out of the ground. Sometimes they just dump it, like the case of Josh Foster.
Fracking can be done right. But it's expensive and requires the cooperation of many disparate companies and enforcement of regulations (or any regulations at all; I'm looking at you, Halliburton Loophole). And expensive is not profitable.
I know I can point at some that were missing which could have reduced the impact of the crash. Glass-Steagall, for instance. Or the SEC decision in 2004 that exempted the banks from regulations regarding reserves so that they could stack up even more debt (without which Bear Stearns wouldn't have been able to implode)
they feel well and can't see the need to swallow any more of the evil pills that have given them diarrhoea and other stomach problems (the main side effect of broad spectrum antibiotics....).
This is something I find interesting. When I broke my finger (compound fracture from falling ~20 feet off a rather large rock in the forest - surprised that's all I broke), I was given antibiotics to prevent any infection.
I must say, while on antibiotics, those were the best, most consistent shits I ever took in my life. No dingleberries, no diarrhea, no constipation at all. It didn't even smear very much, which is quite atypical for me, my stool is almost always smear-y. From what I've read it means excess fat in the stool, but I don't think I have a particularly high-fat diet. Maybe I'm wrong, but I didn't change eating habits while I was on antibiotics.
Barnie from How I Met Your Mother called it the Crazy Hot Line. In was in the episode where Ted got a girlfriend off an Internet dating site, and everyone was taunting him about how she's going to be crazy.
I disagree, though. My girlfriend is good looking and not crazy. Well, she's crazy in good ways, but not crazy in bad ways.
Sure she ain't no super model (I'd rate her 7/10, excluding the good feelings I get from looking at her as a result of our relationship). But truth be told, I did a lot of stupid shit to get female attention before I met her, and I don't do that stupid shit anymore.
For one thing, you mean MHz. With a capital M. A lower case m would be milli. FM stations are not separated by millihertz.
For two, it is NOTHING like that. It's more like designing an FM radio receiver, and then someone comes in and starts blasting AM all over your frequency band.
Remember that when the GPS devices were designed and manufactured, signals of the power that LightSquared wants to use were ILLEGAL. As in, violators go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Do you really want to punish engineers for doing their homework and creating cost-effective designs intended for practical applications in the real world according to existing laws and regulations?
Some engineer did their homework. They decided to create a filter with the necessary -dB/octave roll-off needed to deal with the signals that could be expected in the real world.
In the real world, signals of the power that LightSquared wants to use were illegal at the time the GPS device was manufactured. As in, violators go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
So how, exactly, are their filters "lax", if they were designed to deal with the maximum power signals that were legal at the time of design?
You're a hardware engineer. You've been tasked with building a GPS front end in a cost-effective manner.
You decide to do your homework. You look up the FCC regulations for adjacent frequency bands. Since very high power terrestrial transmissions were prohibited by federal law (i.e. punishable by pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison time for violations), you run the calculations and decide how many -dB/octave your front-end filter needs to exclude signals that you could expect in real world applications.
Sure, you could have gone with a filter that had 2x or 3x steeper roll-off. But why? Your manager asked you to do this in a cost-effective manner, and it's patently illegal for such strong signals to exist.
So you're telling me that a hardware engineer who does his homework and designs a filter that can remove signals which are the maximum legal power is "shoddy"?
It's probably still that way. In the late 90s, I had a bully punch me in the face on my way to first period - twice. After the second punch, I shoved him away from me so he couldn't land three or four.
I ended up getting three days of out-of-school suspension for "fighting back".
Thankfully, the magistrate knew this was a bunch of BS and made the bully pay my fine as well as his own.
What the hell is wrong in the US that an obvious wingnut like Santorum can gain so much support?
Old people. Mostly in the mid-west and south, although you can find them in any place in the US.
Grab anyone off the street under the age of 30. Ask them if gay people should be allowed to get married. Typical responses will include "yes", "of course", and "duh". Santorum's views on these issues are a total non-starter with younger Americans.
Look at the polls for support of gay marriage. It's slowly going up. Know why? All the old bigots are slowly dying off, and the new generation of Americans view this culture war as done and over with.
Slashdot Mirror
we wouldn't even know about the ~$14 trillion the Fed loaned to the banks at ~0%
The Fed never loaned $14 trillion to the banks. What they did is make guarantees that the money would be there if the banks needed it. The Fed actually only loaned about $2 trillion to banks at the peak of the crisis.
http://timiacono.com/index.php/2011/12/07/when-guarantees-are-not-loans/
I imagine you're also lumping Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) loans into the culpability for the crisis. This is a thirty-year old law. You may want to look into that; CRA-approved mortgages were less likely to be subprime and less likely to be resold.
Also, Fannie and Freddie have rules that stipulate they would cover only 80% of a mortgage. Where did the other 20% come from? Ask Angelo Mozilo; Countrywide would just give you a second mortgage to cover the other 20%. Ta-da, 0% down payment home mortgages.
Fannie and Freddie also would not take Jumbo loans. So those McMansions could not be financed that by them.
As far as "liar loans"(or NINJA loans), the fault lies 100% with the broker. While consumers are morally obligated to be honest, it's supposed to be the broker's responsibility to keep liars from getting money they can't pay back. Instead we had brokers facilitating fraud.
The biggest cause of the problem was the large secondary market for mortgages. It's all basic Supply and Demand. If there had been no market for selling shitty mortgages, the brokerage firms would never have been able to get rid of the bad mortgages and they would have crushed under the weight of their own defaulted loans (as they did when the big banks finally stopped buying their trash). But back then Wall Street was more than willing to buy up this crap, so the fly-by-nights had a willing buyer for their doomed-to-fail mortgages.
And make no mistake; Fannie and Freddie were not big players in subprime loans until Countrywide said what amounted to "if you don't buy these loans, Wall Street will, and you will lose all your market share". Fannie and Freddie didn't really get into subprime loans until about 2005. And in 2010, their loans had a foreclosure rate 30% lower than the national average.
Oh, and let's not forget the SEC decision in 2004 that exempted the banks from the capital reserve requirements. Without this ruling, they wouldn't have been able to lever up their balance sheet as highly as they did.
And all the deregulation and mega-mergers that made banks too big to fail, and allowed a shadow banking system to grow in the derivatives market which then began to exceed the size of the real banking system. And the Credit Ratings Agencies which were complicit in labeling toxic CDOs which were designed to fail as AAA-worthy.
Now, if you want to talk about not paying taxes (which the oil companies did)
Really? So how much federal income tax did Exxon pay in 2009?
(hint: the same amount as GE in 2010)
Seeing as how both Bush and Obama administrations have launched pre-emptive wars, I don't see how he is irrelevant. Nice try though.
Yes, please do explain how England caused our panics by manipulating gold. How 1893 wasn't the result of railroads and a pegged currency. Or 1837 wasn't speculation and Specie Circular. Or how 1907 wasn't a run on banks after a failed attempt to take over United Copper Company. I did some quick reading but couldn't find anything to support England manipulating gold prices, other than a simultaneous panic in the UK in 1893 which only exacerbated the existing panic in the US.
As far as the economy being weak...let's be honest here. We're talking two to four years after the recession officially ended. Two years after the recession ends, you shouldn't be cutting taxes. Four years after the recession ends, you shouldn't be lowering interest rates. You're talking about recoveries being 3-6 times longer than the recession itself. It doesn't have to be a vigorous recovery; indeed, perhaps it should NOT be a vigorous recovery, lest the economy overheat (which it did thanks to subprime lending and mortgage backed securities and insufficient capital reserves)
I did not imply Bush or his administration were Keynesian. Quite the contrary, as detailed above, they are anti-Keynesian, cutting taxes and lowering interest rates when the economy is doing well. And the GOP has plenty to be ashamed of regarding Big Government; DHS and Medicare Part D are their creation.
Finally...I think my plan is far more tenable than yours. Yours requires the government to keep their hands out of the cookie jar. That is impossible, given how many lobbyists love them some cookies. Meanwhile, the government right now *is* competent enough, there's just insufficient oversight to keep pressure on them to be honest. You can't tell me that the wealth of data that we can collect and process now could never result in competent decisions. The problem is the regulators have been captured by industry. That's why e.g. in 2004, the SEC decided to loosen reserve restrictions on banks so they could load up with more debt (directly leading to the implosion of Bear Stearns). In my opinion, if we can prevent regulatory capture and enforce common-sense laws, the problem of incompetence will be negligible.
If the government stops disrupting the economy possibly corrective measures simply won't be required? It's never been tested.
I disagree with this premise. Google "panic of" and you get plethora of results on the first page. Note how the last panic was 1907 - over 100 years ago. Note how many panics happened between 1800 and 1907.
Anyway, the dot-com bust happened in 2000. That recession officially lasted only 8 months, ending Nov 2001. The Fed lowered interest rates right around when the recession ended.
By 2003 (when the second round of "Bush tax cuts" passed Congress), the recession had been over for almost 2 years. While the first round could be considered marginally Keynesian, this second round was definitely not.
By 2005 (when the Fed finally began raising interest rates) the recession had been over for almost 4 years.
It's not that the government isn't competent enough to pull this off. They don't *want* to pull this off. When the dot-com bubble was growing, they should have raised rates instead of holding them steady. They should have raised taxes then, too. But it was unpalatable at the time, for whatever reason. Just like when the housing bubble was growing.
This ought to tickle your fancy.
The highest income bracket when the Federal Income Tax was enacted was $500,000 (NOT adjusting for inflation! with inflation it's like $11 million)
Our current highest tax bracket is roughly $379,000.
The highest income in the US last year was in excess of $1 billion. That means there's about four orders of magnitude between the top tax bracket and the top income.
IMO, we need to keep existing tax brackets and add new ones at $1 million, $10 million, $100 million, and $1 billion. For rates, let's go with Clinton's (39%), Reagan's (50%), Nixon's (70%), and Eisenhower's (90%).
Note that those last three were Republican presidents.
The one thing I hate about any discussion re: Keynes is that everyone focuses on the "stimulus during recession" part.
More generally, Keynes' theory suggests counter-cyclical pressure applied by the government. This not only means "stimulus during recession", but it also means raising taxes and interest rates when the economy is booming to prevent it from "overheating".
Unfortunately, our government decided to CUT taxes and LOWER interest rates when the economy was good. And then the economy over-heated, aka the Subprime Mortgage Crisis.
Obama and Bush say I must pay for pre-emptive war through my taxes. Ron Paul says that is wrong, and I agree with him.
Kind of hard to scare the prey away from the hunters...when the hunters are the ones releasing the prey.
Since when does shooting the perp count as "citizen's arrest"?
And let's say, oh, that you're standing on the highway and watching these hunters. What sort of circumstances does that make? Do you think it's right to shoot someone who is watching you from public space?
Because that's what happened here.
Internet license servers also fail if your device isn't supposed to be connected to the Internet.
For instance, computers in medical facilities are often air-gapped. Many of them still run Windows XP because Vista was never approved and W7 is currently being audited for approval.
Utility stations also keep their PCs air-gapped.
This isn't as simple as adding "return true;" to "isDongleConnected()". Clearly you've never tried to add copy protection to anything.
First there's the challenge/response model. Imagine this as "sometimes you should return false instead of true".
Second there's the dongle processor. Imagine "int DoDongleCalculation(int x, int y)". The dongle then calculates x and y and returns a value. What do you propose to return in those cases?
Oh, what's that, you want to peek inside the CPLD and extract the code and reverse engineer it so you know what DoDongleCalculation is doing? lol, good luck buddy.
I'd like to point you to Dimock, PA.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/06/fracking-in-pennsylvania-201006
In Dimock, horses and other pets are losing their hair. This only started once the fracking began. Go tell the Sautners that Gasland is BS.
"Drilling operations near their property commenced in August 2008. Trees were cleared and the ground leveled to make room for a four-acre drilling site less than 1,000 feet away from their land. The Sautners could feel the earth beneath their home shake whenever the well was fracked.
Within a month, their water had turned brown. It was so corrosive that it scarred dishes in their dishwasher and stained their laundry. They complained to Cabot, which eventually installed a water-filtration system in the basement of their home. It seemed to solve the problem, but when the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection came to do further tests, it found that the Sautners’ water still contained high levels of methane. More ad hoc pumps and filtration systems were installed. While the Sautners did not drink the water at this point, they continued to use it for other purposes for a full year.
“It was so bad sometimes that my daughter would be in the shower in the morning, and she’d have to get out of the shower and lay on the floor” because of the dizzying effect the chemicals in the water had on her, recalls Craig Sautner, who has worked as a cable splicer for Frontier Communications his whole life. She didn’t speak up about it for a while, because she wondered whether she was imagining the problem. But she wasn’t the only one in the family suffering. “My son had sores up and down his legs from the water,” Craig says. Craig and Julie also experienced frequent headaches and dizziness."
I appreciate your honest approach to the issue. And you're probably right, done with proper regulations and safety precautions fracking can be safe...in theory. You only saw one piece of the puzzle, so here are some more pieces.
In practice, one thing you need to consider is what happens to the chemicals *after* they're pulled out of the ground. Sometimes they just dump it, like the case of Josh Foster.
If it can't possibly affect the water table, why do drilling companies end up shipping water to people such as Mr. Ira Haire, who live near their fracking sites?
Why are the horses and pets in Dimock, PA, losing their hair?
Why is the EPA detecting fracking chemicals in the aquifers Pavillion, Wyoming?
How about this Oklahoma Geological Survey report that suggests the recent uptick in earthquakes were caused by fracking?
What about waste treatment plants that fail to successfully reduce the levels of contaminants before discharging the water into a river?
How about the President of the Marcellus Shale Coalition admitting that fracking has contaminated the drinking water in PA?
Fracking can be done right. But it's expensive and requires the cooperation of many disparate companies and enforcement of regulations (or any regulations at all; I'm looking at you, Halliburton Loophole). And expensive is not profitable.
Point me to regulations for derivatives like Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) that existed between 2000 and 2008.
Point me to regulations for Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) that existed between 2000 and 2008.
Hell, point me at any regulation that led to the crash. Any regulation at all. And by the way, I'm going to pre-empt your "Community Reinvestment Act" bullshit because the 30 year old law had nothing to do with the subprime mortgage crisis.
I know I can point at some that were missing which could have reduced the impact of the crash. Glass-Steagall, for instance. Or the SEC decision in 2004 that exempted the banks from regulations regarding reserves so that they could stack up even more debt (without which Bear Stearns wouldn't have been able to implode)
they feel well and can't see the need to swallow any more of the evil pills that have given them diarrhoea and other stomach problems (the main side effect of broad spectrum antibiotics....).
This is something I find interesting. When I broke my finger (compound fracture from falling ~20 feet off a rather large rock in the forest - surprised that's all I broke), I was given antibiotics to prevent any infection.
I must say, while on antibiotics, those were the best, most consistent shits I ever took in my life. No dingleberries, no diarrhea, no constipation at all. It didn't even smear very much, which is quite atypical for me, my stool is almost always smear-y. From what I've read it means excess fat in the stool, but I don't think I have a particularly high-fat diet. Maybe I'm wrong, but I didn't change eating habits while I was on antibiotics.
Barnie from How I Met Your Mother called it the Crazy Hot Line. In was in the episode where Ted got a girlfriend off an Internet dating site, and everyone was taunting him about how she's going to be crazy.
I disagree, though. My girlfriend is good looking and not crazy. Well, she's crazy in good ways, but not crazy in bad ways.
Sure she ain't no super model (I'd rate her 7/10, excluding the good feelings I get from looking at her as a result of our relationship). But truth be told, I did a lot of stupid shit to get female attention before I met her, and I don't do that stupid shit anymore.
This bar/"telescope sucks" analogy is perhaps one of the best ones I've heard yet. Too bad I already made replies and I can't mod you up myself.
Argh! Where do I start?
For one thing, you mean MHz. With a capital M. A lower case m would be milli. FM stations are not separated by millihertz.
For two, it is NOTHING like that. It's more like designing an FM radio receiver, and then someone comes in and starts blasting AM all over your frequency band.
Remember that when the GPS devices were designed and manufactured, signals of the power that LightSquared wants to use were ILLEGAL. As in, violators go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Do you really want to punish engineers for doing their homework and creating cost-effective designs intended for practical applications in the real world according to existing laws and regulations?
Some engineer did their homework. They decided to create a filter with the necessary -dB/octave roll-off needed to deal with the signals that could be expected in the real world.
In the real world, signals of the power that LightSquared wants to use were illegal at the time the GPS device was manufactured. As in, violators go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
So how, exactly, are their filters "lax", if they were designed to deal with the maximum power signals that were legal at the time of design?
Let's rewind back to the year 2000.
You're a hardware engineer. You've been tasked with building a GPS front end in a cost-effective manner.
You decide to do your homework. You look up the FCC regulations for adjacent frequency bands. Since very high power terrestrial transmissions were prohibited by federal law (i.e. punishable by pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison time for violations), you run the calculations and decide how many -dB/octave your front-end filter needs to exclude signals that you could expect in real world applications.
Sure, you could have gone with a filter that had 2x or 3x steeper roll-off. But why? Your manager asked you to do this in a cost-effective manner, and it's patently illegal for such strong signals to exist.
So you're telling me that a hardware engineer who does his homework and designs a filter that can remove signals which are the maximum legal power is "shoddy"?
It's probably still that way. In the late 90s, I had a bully punch me in the face on my way to first period - twice. After the second punch, I shoved him away from me so he couldn't land three or four.
I ended up getting three days of out-of-school suspension for "fighting back".
Thankfully, the magistrate knew this was a bunch of BS and made the bully pay my fine as well as his own.
What the hell is wrong in the US that an obvious wingnut like Santorum can gain so much support?
Old people. Mostly in the mid-west and south, although you can find them in any place in the US.
Grab anyone off the street under the age of 30. Ask them if gay people should be allowed to get married. Typical responses will include "yes", "of course", and "duh". Santorum's views on these issues are a total non-starter with younger Americans.
Look at the polls for support of gay marriage. It's slowly going up. Know why? All the old bigots are slowly dying off, and the new generation of Americans view this culture war as done and over with.