Balta1701

QUOTE (DukeNukeEm @ Sep 23, 2008 -> 12:30 PM) If there is a 269-269 tie the winning ticket in the popular vote will get elected. Congressmen aren't just going to piss off their constituents and lose their jobs over something like this. Yes, they would.

QUOTE (vandy125 @ Sep 23, 2008 -> 11:07 AM) Yes, because obviously the voice of people growing the food of the nation does not need to be heard... The city people definitely know what is needed to grow our crops and protect the environment outside of their city... And clearly the farmers know what is needed...more of the crops that they grow! So, to satisfy that need, we dump major subsidies on to growing a couple of specific crops, notably corn. This pushes down the price of corn so far that it becomes an ingredient in everything we eat it seems, from soft drinks to meat to the gas you put in your car...and that only happens because of the major government subsidy for growing corn. Meanwhile the environment is ravaged by all the corn growing, the rest of the world is pushed out because the U.S. market is flooded with corn, the U.S. consumer's diet becomes more and more unhealthy because of all the processed versions of corn they're consuming, and the U.S. taxpayer wastes an enormous amount of money on finding things that can be done with corn, like turning it in to ethanol.

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Sep 23, 2008 -> 10:42 AM) no i'm saying if a corporation makes bad decisions and goes bust they don't get to dip into taxpayers funds to get a bailout. if they want to take a risk and fail they aren't getting a massive tax payer bailout. big tax increases aren't the solution to this mess There's a big flaw in your argument, and it's the flaw that has caused this bailout...that we let these banks get so leveraged and so interconnected and so big that if any of them truly go down then basically it winds up being a gigantic disaster. Thanks to the bank deregulations of the late 90's, these banks were able to borrow enormous sums of money from each other, vastly more than they had assets they were able to cover in the event that their debts were called in. By doing so they were able to push up their profits enormously in the short term, but that left them over-leveraged in the event that the housing market turned, and now they simply don't have the money to cover the debts they wrote...and if they go down, they take every other one with them because they all owe a piece of themselves to each other. That's why Lehman went down right after the FNMA nationalization, that's why AIG was bought by the government right after Lehman went down. There are really only 2 options here. Either we be prepared to bail out these "Too big to fail companies" if we don't regulate them well enough, or we expand antitrust activities so that these banks and investment firms never get too big to fail, which would mean breaking up a hell of a lot of companies right now.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 23, 2008 -> 10:55 AM) Panamanian El Caballo McCain!

QUOTE (mr_genius @ Sep 23, 2008 -> 10:38 AM) Definitely, these government bailouts certaily modify the risk reward scale. Just tossing 700 billion back to a bunch of failures is only going to encourage thes types of reckless buisness models. Go for the big windfall profit, as if you fail, you will get a big bailout and start over. So what you're saying is that the solution is in fact to start enacting windfall taxes on every industry we can think of?

QUOTE (Texsox @ Sep 23, 2008 -> 10:33 AM) Are you saying that if there was no government regulation it would be harder or easier to get a mortgage? Sorry, I'm not understanding. He's saying that the fact that FNMA existed with an implicit government guarantee made companies vastly more willing to take on bad loans because they felt they could just pass them on to the government and take the profit for themselves, which is exactly how the system started working over the past decade or so. His contention is that the government being involved in the first place was why this happened, mine is that the banks would have done exactly this whether the GSE's existed or not as soon as you removed the regulations in 1999.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 23, 2008 -> 10:32 AM) The same reasons that all of the other things the forefathers had the foresight to want to protect against. They expressly wanted protections against the majority for the minority. This nation has never been about 50%+1. No, but it also wasn't constructed on the idea that tiny minorities (i.e. corn farmers in Iowa, a few thousand ultra rich bankers in NYC) should be able to dominate our political discussion with their issues while the issues that actually would affect the lives of so many other people (urban schools, adequate public transportation, pollution controls, etc.) are neglected because of them.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Sep 23, 2008 -> 10:13 AM) That's the argument the other way against the electoral college. Candidates would spend most of their time in places like Chicago, New York, and LA. Why would they ever bother with rural Nevada or Iowa? And please...tell me exactly what is wrong with that? According to the 2000 census data, nearly 80% of the U.S. population lives within what they consider to be urban areas, a number that has probably only grown since then. 58% of the U.S. population lives in cities with a population greater than 200,000, and I'm sure a large chunk of the remainder is in the suburbs. Yes, that 20% of the population shouldn't be neglected, but as the system is constructed right now, that slice is often treated as the most important part. It's venerated as somehow the "Real america" when the real america for 80% of the population is some version of city life.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 23, 2008 -> 09:16 AM) In theory I agree with you 100%. I don't want to do it, espically because it was the government's own damned fault this happened. If they had stayed out of the mortgage business all together, this would have enver happened. If by that you mean the 1999 deregulation act that allowed all these cryptic financial instruments to appear, I agree. If by that you mean the GSE's, then I disagree.

QUOTE (jackie hayes @ Sep 23, 2008 -> 07:33 AM) Balta's point is that dear Joe will be paying for something he shouldn't be paying for, one way or another. Someone's getting an undeserved handout. Thank you for getting my point. And I'm happy to see a few people took the bait I laid. You don't want to pay off the mortgages of the people who screwed up and took bigger mortgages than they deserve? Fine, I totally understand that. So why should we bail out the bankers who screwed up just as bad but who did so with an awful lot more money? It's equally unfair.

QUOTE (Felix @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 07:44 PM) I remember seeing Boone do it effectively against Morneau last year (year before?). Of course, there's no way I'd put him in there now. Just did some checking. Morneau is 6/11 career against Boone with a 1.492 OPS. And presumably that includes a few at bats from the months when Boone was actually effective.

QUOTE (Felix @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 06:59 PM) pfft Just put a lefty in there and throw three straight breaking balls out of the zone. Easy way to beat him. Do we have a lefty who can actually throw a breaking ball? At least out of the bullpen?

I think there's something like 5 different things I laughed at in this article.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 05:02 PM) The irony is that many of these changes were sold as Democrats as ways of increasing poor and minority home ownership rates. It was supposed to be another way of bringing people into the middle class and freeing them from the vicious circles of things like rent and poverty in general. The two lowest quinttiles, by and large, have been the biggest victims and losers in all of this, because they were the ones getting the mortgages they couldn't afford, as much as anyone else was. Guess what, there are some people that just can't afford a mortgage, no matter how you dress it up. So then here's an alternative. We're dumping $1 trillion or $2 trillion or something like that in to the economy. The U.S. has a $12 trillion mortgage market, IIRC. If the problem is bad mortgage debt, why not take the $1 or $2 trillion and instead of handing it over to banks, use it to pay off a chunk of the mortgages for the people who are falling behind? IF the loans are paid off, if the loans don't go bad, then the people on wall street don't win because the profit from those loans was processed a long time ago, but they also don't lose because the loans are paid off.

QUOTE (chw42 @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 01:21 PM) If Anderson learns to hit an off-speed pitch, he will be a very good player in this league. However, he's just a fastball hitter with a good glove right now. I guess you can live with that, but if that's going to be the way it goes, he's gonna get traded sooner or later. The guy is slugging at a .450 clip right now. 21 of his 41 hits are extra base hits. He's a breakthrough waiting to happen, but he's lacking a crucial skill to succeed in the Majors. Part of the issue with that is going to be playing time for a guy like him though. He's a part time player who has a totally rebuilt swing this year and was surviving on the minors by just being a better athlete than everyone else. He's managed to learn how to hit lefties a lot better this year, and against anyone that throws him a fastball his power numbers have been solid as you point out. But if you want him to learn how to take the soft tossing righty that spots the change up on the outside corner the other way, and how to stay back on an offspeed pitch or outthink a pitcher for once...he's going to need at bats.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 12:01 PM) I understand the need for a bail-out. As much as I'd like to tell every bank out there to F off, the reality is if we do that we'd really be asking for a complete financial meltdown. However, I think things need to be done to ensure that this is a one time thing and that banks can't just expect the gov to jump in anytime they do something completely stupid. That said I'm not a proponent of leaving this up to the White House or anyone like that. This should be dealt with by the Fed Bank and those with key banking knowledge. Here's my biggest problem with that. The fed and key banking institutions were just as instrumental in bringing about this mess as the Congress was. You can divide the blame 50/50 between Greenspan and Gramm, or 75/25, 90/10, whatever...the fed was just as complicit. Greenspan praised the new financial institutions and encouraged people to try these new mortgages that were so helpful in increasing homeownership around the country. What a great thing, higher homeownership stimulating the economy, all built by these new financial instruments. You say you're a fan of leaving this with the people with key banking knowledge. Those same people were denying there was a housing bubble in 2006. Those same people were saying that we should be open to these new ARM's, and that these new financial instruments in the $70 trillion credit swap market were nothing at all to worry about because the people running them understood what they were doing. Now that it's blown up...they've been fairly effective in dealing with the problem, but that's in no small part because they've been willing to dump trillions of dollars in public money in at a whim. Why should I trust people who were as instrumental as anyone in bringing the debacle about?

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 12:50 PM) Didn't they do some sort of coin flip thing for ties? How did that turn out and what did it mean? The toin coss was done a couple weeks ago and yours truly posted the thread. The Sox won over the Twins. If the Sox play the game in Detroit and the season comes out tied between the Sox and Twins, there will be a 1 game playoff for the Central, probably next Tuesday, at the Cell. The coin toss was for home field and we won.

QUOTE (shipps @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 12:47 PM) Wouldnt we then have to play that Detroit game?So than we wouldnt clinch there. EDIT:G kid you beat me to it. Well, our magic number would then be 1, which would mean that we'd have "Clinched at least a tie".

QUOTE (greg775 @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 12:18 PM) C'mon Sox, play loose, but aggressive. If you win game one you'll be up 4 in loss column and it shouldn't be too difficult to split the next two. Lose game one and they'll be waving the hankies and we'll probably get swept. So my prediction is if we win game one, we take 2 of 3. If we lose game one, put it on the board, a Twins sweep. I'd just like to say...regardless of how we got it this way...I'm fairly happy we have Gavin set up to go on normal rest in game 3 of this series...after the work he did in key games in Yankee Stadium and in the Metrodome in the past month or so.

QUOTE (Buehrle>Wood @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 01:23 PM) What is the contract status of D-Weezy looking like? We signed him to a minor league deal, so I assume there is some sort of ML team option. I would love for outfield next year to look like it is now minus Griffey. Wise started this season with only 2 years of MLB service time recorded. Not sure exactly how they count the time he was up and down this year, but at worst he'd be arbitration eligible.

QUOTE (Chisoxfn @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 11:59 AM) I hope this doesn't push energy back up and if it is going to, can anyone please look into the future and let me know cause I will throw some money into the energy sector. At this point, both in the short and long term, I frankly have no idea where the oil market is going to go. The fundamentals of that market are frankly still strong...the more oil the world can produce, the more it's going to consume. But right now there are so many different factors that are going to play in to where the price goes: 1. The gigantic wall street bailout and what it will do to the dollar to sell another trillion dollars worth of bonds 2. The Presidential election and the radically different lines of thinking of the 2 sides 3. The world economic slow down and what that does for growth of demand 4. The increasing realization of the damage atmospheric CO2 is causing and the gradual clampdown on emissions from parts of the non-U.S. developed world (EU, Australia). 5. The approaching production peak 6. The development of higher mileage cars Numbers 1 and 5 seem likely to push the prices up, Numbers 3 , 4, and 6 would actually be likely to push them down (for 4, the U.S. doesn't have a carbon trading system yet and the more other countries force their demand downwards through government action the more oil is available for the rest of the world), and no one really knows what #2 will do but the impact could well be very large if either of them rapidly get an energy policy enacted.

QUOTE (The Critic @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 09:14 AM) They didn't get a chance to celebrate with the fans last year. And even if they did, what's the harm in enjoying an achievement, no matter how insignificant some other team's fanbase deems it to be? Didn't watch so I can't honestly comment...the only question worth asking is whether or not you go a bit too far. You got to this level last year...your work isn't done yet.

Chris Dodd's office has put out the outline of some changes he'd like to push on to the bill. I think they'd be an improvement, although I still don't like the bailout concept here.

QUOTE (The Ginger Kid @ Sep 22, 2008 -> 09:55 AM) he'll be in CF again next year, starting. Quite frankly, it'll take about a full season of him being treated as the starter before I actually believe that will happen.

Oz, this better work. Ozzie got himself front page @ ESPN.com with this one. Come on Javy, your manager just called you out publicly to try to motivate you.