Balta1701

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Dec 22, 2008 -> 12:38 PM) I really wish that the TARP funding would have required that this money be specifically tracked for its use, to see how it made them any different than they were pre-funding. There's a number of things we all wish would have been done with the TARP program. Virtually all of which would have made it work better. The thing that it all boils down to, IMO, is that the TARP program is right now doing exactly what it was designed to do; dump money in to banks with no accountability and no changes. It wasn't designed to unfreeze the credit markets, improve the economy, or stave off a depression. It was designed to do exactly what it is doing.

You knew this wouldn't take long to turn in to a flash game. http://www.sockandawe.com/

The remarkable thing about these things is not that people get things wrong. It's that the people who keep consistently getting things wrong also keep getting promoted.

QUOTE (dasox24 @ Dec 22, 2008 -> 02:11 PM) I know... I would have thought it snows there, but one of the guys I live with is from Seattle (he's there right now), and he was crazy excited about the snow. Said it never snows. The Pacific ocean along the western U.S. tends to act as something of a buffer. It brings a lot of moisture with it, but the current that flows down from Alaska keeps many of the cities between the ocean and the mountain ranges perched a little too warm for snow.

QUOTE (kyyle23 @ Dec 22, 2008 -> 08:00 AM) Im wondering who is going to rise up to challenge Best Buy in the next year or so. Fry's? Radioshack? Nobody? I wasted about 2 hours in Fry's trying to buy a digital camera when they couldn't figure out how to use their computer system. I was there because I was on vacation and they were the closest stop. The next day I drove a half hour to the nearest bestbuy.

QUOTE (Flash Tizzle @ Dec 22, 2008 -> 01:23 PM) Which concept car is this, the Camaro? The Volt.

So would McCarthy be projected as one of those 4?

That lineup is still more likely than Ozzie treating Anderson as a starter.

QUOTE (philadelphia sox fan @ Dec 22, 2008 -> 12:43 PM) I didn't skip over you're entire post, but you have to watch with looking at too many numbers. If numbers is the only thing that matters, then Bobby Abreu should be getting 25 mil for 7 years. Just sayin... Age 34 That's a number too.

For a team in Texas that's just silly.

The AP has spent some time doing some digging in to where the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on bailouts so far has gone. Their answer? Aside from some chunk going in to $1.6 billion in executive bonuses, no one seems to have a clue or is willing to say.

In some detail, the NYT spells out the Bush administration's key role in pushing the inflation of the housing market and their failure to respond or restrain it. Just an example of their details:

Henry Waxman just rules.

QUOTE (southsideirish71 @ Dec 21, 2008 -> 12:16 PM) So what makes him an asshole, because he opposes gay marriage. Maybe he hates the sin, yet loves the sinner. Which is of course why his church doesn't allow "unrepentant" gay people as members. To love them so much that they don't have to smell them.

Gigantic surge in demand for this brand of shoes. I wonder sometimes if Mr. Bush truly understands how unpopular he is.

QUOTE (kapkomet @ Dec 20, 2008 -> 05:55 PM) Let's all just stop breathing, ok? That would solve the problem once and for all. Honestly, gas that comes out of your mouth isn't as much of a contributor as gas coming out of other locations on the human body.

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Dec 20, 2008 -> 02:19 PM) Well, I could care less if Al Gore is involved or not. What I am saying is, if done right, a carbon trading system would definitely help reduce pollution and encourage further spending on technologies that pollute less. And you don't have to force buy-in - you tie it to the laws regarding pollution output. The laws should be made more stringent, such that the limits on output for carbon oxides or other pollutants should be just a little above the typical use level. If companies meet the number, they meet the law - just like now. If they WANT to go significantly below the number, and sell their credits, then great - go ahead. If other companies go over, they have to buy the credits, or face massive fines and regulatory investigation (again, like now). The system can be implemented such that it would work. And this is not meant to be some complete solution, BTW. I'm just pointing out one way it could be done. Amazingly, I think I'm going to disagree with you here. Based on the European experience, I'm more and more convinced that a European/McCain style "cap and trade" system just will not work. Especially here. When Europe tried it, their hearts were in the right place, but their heads weren't. They took far too many steps to avoid hurting industry in how they designed their system, where their permits were given out to companies and those companies were then only required to pay money if they needed to buy more. The European system may work better in a few years as they turn down the emissions dial, but in terms of applying that model to the U.S., given that Europe doesn't have to deal with an entire political party that is in the hands of the oil industry like we do, I think that a cap and trade system would just be designed to fail. There is, however, a better and vastly simpler way to do it; a carbon tax. Rather than handing out or auctioning off credits, the government already has the data it needs to implement an appropriate system. A certain mass of coal, gasoline, oil, or natural gas that is burnt will release a certain amount of CO2 to the atmosphere. The U.S. keeps solid data on how much of these fuels are produced and burnt within the country, since it's not that easy to sneak in an oil tanker or a train full of coal (i.e. the creation of a black market is virtually impossible because of the volumes involved). If you create a tax on the amount of carbon burnt, there's no trading of credits to worry about; the more you use the more you pay. There's no place for lobbyists other than preventing the tax from existing in the first place, where in any sort of cap and trade system, the price of credits or the amount of credits going to each place can be up for complex and annoying lobbying schemes. The problem so far is that virtually every system in place has been designed to fail. That doesn't mean it's impossible to design one to succeed, it just means that if you let the people who want it to fail design the system, it's going to fail.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Dec 20, 2008 -> 03:40 PM) Get out of here with your precious science and facts! What about the sunspot contention (more sunspots lately = rise in temperatures on Earth, Mars, etc.)? Well, the sunspot thing is a little less blatant than that one, typically, because there are some acutal folks out there doing careful work on the interactions between those cycles and the climate. But, to steal a phrase from realclimate, that science tends to wind up in 3 categories; the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good stuff actually focuses on what the data is showing. The bad stuff is bad science, the stuff that sometimes just happens if you misinterpret a signal or do something wrong in a measurement. The ugly is the stuff that is deliberately done wrong because it produces the outcome that the people with the money in the energy industry want to see. First correction; we're actually at a sunspot minimum right now, the minimum was supposed to be hit in 2006 and it's been a slow recovery for the sun. This image though I think is the simplest way to look at it. Shown here are 3 indexes for solar activity (one measured in the earth's atmosphere, one measured by SOHO I think, etc.) plotted against the global mean temperature graph. The temperature is in red. Simple observation; the global mean temperature has increased in the last 20 years. It has been mediated by other factors (El Nino southern Oscilliation, the Pinatubo eruption in 91, etc.) But its trend is obvious. The sun has shown no index that gives a similar trend. Its activity has gone up and down, and the correlation between its behavior and the earth's climate is poor. From the impression I've gotten, most of the people who come out and claim a strong, first order correlation between temperature and the suns activity over the last 100 years fall in to the "ugly" category. They take unrepresentative data sets, maneuver things around, and make their correlations look a lot better than they actually are.

QUOTE (santo=dorf @ Dec 20, 2008 -> 02:36 PM) What about the argument that 97% of all CO2 emitted each year is by natural causes? Volcanos are a much large source of emitting CO2. How do we collect money from those environmental hating volcanos? We stop lying to ourselves and actually pay attention to the measurements that show the exact opposite.

QUOTE (SouthsideDon48 @ Dec 19, 2008 -> 10:50 AM) Mariano surpassed Hoffman? I wasn't aware of that. No, but by th etime his currrent contract is up, he will.

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Dec 19, 2008 -> 11:54 AM) why you gotta be such a Blagojevich? I'm taking bribes for postings?

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Dec 19, 2008 -> 10:35 AM) These two things aren't even in the same universe. Without the banks, the auto industry would have failed anyway. Heck it was the problems in the banking industry that really were the last straw for the US auto companies. I know that three million employee figure keeps getting thrown about, but if the banking industry collapsed, the three million autoworker related jobs would have been a very small part of the people thrown into unemployment. My issue with this statement is that the longer we go on after having passed TARP, the more the data comes out showing that not only was the "crisis" dramatically overstated (the consumer lending markets were no where near "frozen" as we were told), but on top of it, the TARP funds have been so badly wasted by the Treasury Dept. that it's hard to believe that if there had been a real crisis they would have made a difference.

More official sources saying that the guy's been beaten in custody. Isn't that precious? Iraq's justice system is growing up so fast, it's acting just like ours!

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Dec 19, 2008 -> 09:42 AM) As I understand it, from a technical/chartist standpoint, it is oversold. From an economist standpoint, this might be the beginning. So what you're saying is, it's time to add energy companies to the TARP fund list?

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Dec 19, 2008 -> 09:50 AM) And sure enough... $17.4B from the TARP fund will go to GM and Chrysler in the form of loans. They need to show viability by March 31, or will be forced to repay immediately, which is of course a joke because then they couldn't pay for it anyway. Ford gets nothing. Like it or not this was the right thing to do. This one is arguably significantly more important of a step than the bailout of the banks.