NorthSideSox72

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 11, 2010 -> 01:39 PM) Well yeah...which is why you don't worry about the volume of money kicked out until the recovery has taken hold and unemployment has significantly gone down (to the point that the stuff written about by today's Nobel Prize winner, job-lock and structural unemployment, become important). Until you get to the point that you run into the structural damage done by leaving people unemployed for >2 years, inflation shouldn't be a concern at all. And if it does become a concern...the amount of steps the fed has taken to fight deflation give it enormous amounts of room to fight inflation. You just agreed with me.

QUOTE (G&T @ Oct 11, 2010 -> 09:37 AM) This is a good question, and knowing nothing in particular about the laws in that state, I can't give a certian answer, but my logic says yes, they would be liable. The question here is one of duty. Assuming the policy is entirely legal, they only owe a duty to extinguish or prevent fires to those who paid the fee. If the fire had burned down a payor's house while the firefighters were present and able to prevent it from happening, they would have breached that duty. And there would be causation because they literally did nothing. This is similar to a wild fire. Firefighters try to extinguish a fire before it can burn down homes of the people they owe a duty to. They then sue the person responsible for the wild fire if the cause is unnatural for the cost of putting that fire out (which they probably never receive but the person ends up in prison). Here, they were (arguably) within their right to permit this house to burn, but they had to prevent it from spreading. If the fire spreads to a payor's house, then they breach the duty. In fact, they should be sued for any damage done as a result of their failure to make an effort to put the fire out. In short, they should have put the fire out and made the homeowner pay. There is also a potential Duty to Act problem here. In many states, people like firefighters, paramedics, etc., are REQUIRED to act in aid, regardless of jurisdiction.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 11, 2010 -> 08:30 AM) Wha? If interest rates stay this low and inflation doesn't kick in at some point, then there is no recovery.

QUOTE (soxfan-kwman @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 03:36 PM) We will not get Carl Crawford, track record people. Kenny will make a trade: quentin, Floyd, (Teahen packaged w/ someone else). Lineup will be: J.Pierre LF G. Beckham 2b A. Rios CF C. Quentin DH A. Ramirez SS A.J.P. C D. Viciedo 1b J. Danks RF B. Morel * if Quentin is still here* Otherwise- andruw jones/ Mark Teahen With this team, we need to pull the fences back to the Orginal distance, & raise the height to 12 feet high from the leftfield line to rightcenter, where we should jack the fence up to about 25 feet high. Two purpose: detour Minnesota & The Yankees. So... who is Kenny getting for TCQ/Floyd then? And how is Quentin in the lineup if you have traded him?

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 05:46 PM) Let me be a little more vague...I think it'll be a lot closer to 2016 than to 2012. Probably a bit too specific there. I think we have that far to go...and I think that right now, worrying about interest rates going up due to government spending is tantamount to saying that we are not losing government jobs fast enough...and we're losing government jobs right now faster than the private sector can create them. Who's worrying? Ultimately, it will be a healthy thing.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 02:26 PM) Well, considering we're going to try your method and actually worry about inflation rather than mine, do you want to put a number on how long you think unemployment will remain above 8%? I'm going to say 2016. Similarly, when will the Federal Reserve have raised rates above 4%? I don't know when its a specific number, its not even a prediction I'd try to make. 2016? That's an awfully long way out.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 01:20 PM) Simple math here. You're a bank, holding the mortgage on a house that is going into foreclosure. That loan has paid 10-15% on it. Bare minimum, basically anything other than an interest-only mortgage. The house has lost 20% of it's value. You have 2 options...you can either have the inhabitants stop paying entirely, or you keep them on the hook with a "modification" where they keep paying for another 12-16 months. You have no intention of actually redoing the loan, but you extract another 12-16 months of payments from that family, foreclose on them anyway, and now you own the house and you have every dollar that they've paid into that mortgage. It's not always a win, but compared to the write-offs they were taking on those, a 2-3% loss thanks to the government telling the family to keep paying is a pretty big win. Your scenario is absurd. First, most of the people being foreclosed upon are not a little underwater, they are WAY underwater. Second, they are selling these homes for way, way down from what they were valued when the mortgages were done. Third, very few people are even getting these modifications - most of them are just not paying at all. Fourth, you are completely ignoring the fact that it costs a whole bunch of money and time just to even perform a foreclosure: legal costs, personnel time costs, fees and costs to the auction, realtor, etc., commission to realtor, and so on. You are creating a fictional boogeyman. Banks are not making money off foreclosures, at all. QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 10, 2010 -> 01:23 PM) And they're the ones who have been saying that worrying about inflation when you're in a huge hole is the recipe for a Japan-style lost decade. No, they're really not.

QUOTE (fathom @ Oct 8, 2010 -> 08:11 PM) Their is some glimmer of hope for some offensive players in our system, but if you don't consider Sale a prospect, the pitching in our system is easily the worst in the majors. Even a team like the Astros has Lyles blow up this season. Only possibly true for STARTING pitching. Which of course is the more important part, but still, needed to make that distinction. There are actually a number if intriguing relievers down there.

I know this seems hard to believe for people here, but... 1. This guy is an idiot AND (not OR) 2. This policy is all kinds of stupid, costly, and likely illegal Why anyone is trying to characterize it as one or the other is beyond me.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 8, 2010 -> 09:30 PM) They're not being forced to keep bad debt on their books right now...they've figured out how to make so much money off of that bad debt that they couldn't care less about getting it off the books. They get a family that misses a couple payments, they start the foreclosure process but don't tell the family so that the family keeps paying on the mortgage, they foreclose on the family anyway, and show up 1 day and evict them with no warning. They sell the house at near full value because it never sat empty, and they get the additional funds the first family paid on the mortgage. That's the new game. They do things as rapidly as possible between eviction and sale because they make the most money that way from both sides. The problem is they keep going overboard with the eviction process, to the point that they've literally broken into some people's homes. That got the government's attention, so now they "halt" all foreclosures and just let the people they're foreclosing on pay longer. The bolded is patently untrue - what they are doing is losing money, lots of it. Further, your scenario of a shadow foreclosure is falacy. That is not what happens, it can't because its all kind of illegal, so they'd never be able to complete the proceedings in the courts even if they tried it. I really don't get where you think your scenario is some sort of new "method". QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 8, 2010 -> 09:33 PM) And NSS...these same people are the same ones who told us that housing prices could never go down, and ARM mortgages were a wonderful investment. These experts are the same people who bet after the stimulus package that they were shoveling out so much money that they could make a fortune betting on inflation. JPMorgan, for example, lost billions on that bet. No, they're not. That is not who I am talking about. I'm talking about the people who've been right, not the ones who've been wrong.

He's borderline at best with the numbers, and the steroids push him off the fence into the "No" category.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 8, 2010 -> 01:51 PM) That is the story of this recession. We are trying to forestall all of the bad things from happening that need to happen so that we can start to recover. Well, let's divide that up. There is a difference between softening the extremes, and just postponing the inevitable. Putting false stops on foreclosures is the latter - its not helping anyone, those people aren't going to suddenly find big money, so all you are doing is making things worse. The banks have f***ed a lot of things up, but the speed of foreclosures was actually being handled pretty well. Messing with it is stupid. Stimulus type actions, on the other hand, aren't really forestalling anything. They are softening the dip, but also blunting the rate of recovery a bit. So its changing the curve, but can still have an overall positive effect, all the way out to the next run up. My problem has never been with the idea of the stimulus in general - and its plain to see that it has indeed helped avoid a depression. Problem is, they spent the money in the wrong places, so the long term (and I mean past the recession entirely) hasn't been helped.

B of A now halting foreclosure proceedings in all 50 states, until they feel they have a better handle on procedures and documentation. This is an interesting set of developments, starting with what Balta posted earlier. One of the positives of the foreclosure situation seemed to be that the banks were processing, but also sort bottlenecking them to an even pace, which was doing a decent job of putting them on the market at a fast enough pace to work down the pile but slow enough not to cause a massive downturn and following spike in prices. Now, we have this stalling - which if it goes on for any significant lenght of time, will cause a backlog, and further push out the healing process for the housing market. Hopefully this turns out to be a blip. But I have a feeling you will see Congress grab onto this as a way to look good, going after the banks, but ultimately the stalling would end up making things worse.

QUOTE (bigruss22 @ Oct 8, 2010 -> 01:10 PM) I'm sure it's a thought that crosses their mind. I doubt Kenny would have someone throw a rumor like that around, I don't see him wasting his time with stuff like that but I'm sure that if they did miss out on someone they would want people to know that they tried to save grace a bit, just look at the Torri Hunter situation. Well sure, if they do fall short, they want to spin it that way. That's after the fact. But the idea that it is the prime motivation just seems ridiculous to me.

Has it occured to anyone, through all the anger, that PART of the reason we fall short on free agents is that the team is willing to pay what they see as the value of the player, and not overpay? That its an organizational philosophy? Because I find that much more likely than the idea that they do it for publicity. This team has been upper echelon in payroll for 5 seasons in a row now, its not like they don't spend money, so it seems silly to try to "fake" interest in signing people. People here seem to be letting their frustrations with the results of 2010 color their judgment. The whole publicity stunt thing just doesn't make sense.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Oct 8, 2010 -> 08:26 AM) http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/wor...hina/budget.htm China, $77.9 billion (USD) divided by 1.6 billion people=$50 USD per person US, $664 billion (USD) divided by 300,000,000 people=$2,213 USD per person Something like 19-20-21% of our annual Federal budget. The US alone spends 46.5% of the global defense budget of the entire world. China is a distant second at 6.6%. In other words, the US is still 7X higher in spending even though our population is 1/5th the size of China's. So really, to put it another way, we're spending 35X per person what they are. Or if you calculate it from the other statistic I used above, it's actually 44X the spending per person of China. France, UK and Russia make up 11.5%. The next ten countries combined are at 20.7%, and the rest of the world (roughly countries #16-200) at only 14.7%. http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/wor...litary-spending China's total revenues inbound are $157B, $77B or more (they say it may be more) are spent on the military. That means China is spending HALF its budget on its military. This is from your own article.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Oct 8, 2010 -> 08:11 AM) Just give me one good reason to believe that anything will change for the better in the US in the next two years besides luck, chance or "it simply has to." Once again, the 75% would slide down to 50% in the first 9 months, hardly an incredible barrier. And I don't remember a zillion solar panels anywhere in what I wrote. I do think if we challenged our carmakers to build 200 million battery-operated cars for under $20,000 (with the supporting infrastructure of recharging stations that would be critically important...as nobody wants to be an initial adopter until they see that a new technology will be sustained and adopted) by the year 2020 that it clearly could be done. Is there ANY hope at all that Congress will do this on their own? No, I'd say those odds are less than ZERO. What is your plan to keep our country from becoming the next Russia? Prayer? I see zero chance that thsi country becomes the next Russia. The dynamics are simply not at all the same. They are in fact entirely different, in almost every way.

QUOTE (caulfield12 @ Oct 8, 2010 -> 08:04 AM) I think it's pretty clear that at least 75% of the people in America would agree with you and feel unsafe without some form of military. I live in China...they don't have a military empire all over the globe, yet you would be hard-pressed to find a single Chinese person afraid of attack at this point in time. Instead of military imperialism, they're practicing economic imperialism while watching the US bankrupt itself like Russia did trying to be the policeman for the entire globe. The t.v. idea obviously needs to be fine-tuned. One thing is for sure, whether it's 24 hours of debate or 240 hours or even 2,400, with the new Congress in January of 2011, nothing will be passed over the next two years and our country will sink further into irrelevancy. And you're making a big assumption that every person who came to Washington would be an "idiot." OTOH, I think we'd all be presently surprised to hear some of the thoughts and ideas of the "common people" because we already know what we're going to get from multi-millionaire lawyers. At the time of George Washington, people came to serve the country in a time of need with the idea they would go home as soon as possible. The last thing any Congressman today would ever want to institute is term limits upon themselves. Remember the Contract with American in 1994? Remember how quickly that idea died for the majority of those newly-elected into power that year? You do realize that China has the largest standing military on earth, right? More men, more guns, more armor than any other country. And 98% of it is within the country's borders, so obviously it would be pretty insane to attack them. They spend immense amounts of money on their military, make no mistake.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 8, 2010 -> 07:43 AM) Really, no, you're wrong. It doesn't matter how much total money is shoved out there, it matters the demand for it. Right now, there is huge demand for additional safe assets and the bond market is going in exactly the opposite direction of what you'd predict if anyone worried about inflation at all. Take a look at the graph I posted a couple days ago. Until we're out of the gigantic hole in production, inflation isn't going to happen, and unless we can get >3% growth per year, there's no way to get out of that hole. We're at nearly 10% unemployment. There's so much excess capacity right now that there is absolutely nothing that will push inflation in the next decade unless we do another stimulus at the federal level to get that output gap filled. The reason i think stocks are overvalued is that I don't see any real prospects for a sustained recovery. They've been boosted by a combination of the feds shoving out money and improving corporate profits...but those profits have come entirely from cutting back on employees and their spending. That's not a sustainable path towards improvement. Balta, look. I'm not sure how to put this. There are things I can't even say here, for various reasons. But suffice to say that people who know the markets in a way neither you or I could dream of, feel that what I stated is true. And I don't understand how someone who knows at least basic economics can honestly say it doesn't matter how much money goes out the door, or what interest rates do, or inflation does. They are all key factors, they are all intertwined, and they all effect the markets in a big, big way.

The Meandering Manifesto strikes again. You want only essential services and a 75% rule to pass anything, but you want to see a zillion solar panels and bullet trains? I'm at a loss for words.

Stocks are not overvalued - stocks are priced as they are only partially because of expectations of general recovery. The other big thing looming that the markets know, is that as the economy does grow a bit more, interest rates and inflation HAVE to rise. There is no way around it, with the amount of money having been shoved out there. And that means, even in a neutral economy, money will flow into the equity markets, and stocks will rise. They know that's coming, but no one knows for sure when.

QUOTE (BigSqwert @ Oct 7, 2010 -> 02:59 PM) Do not question someone who after 881 posts has yet to backup any of their opinions with any facts. QUOTE (kitekrazy @ Oct 7, 2010 -> 03:03 PM) Some things don't need any facts, like this post of yours is nothing but taunting and ignorant at best. Let's just stop this right here, OK?

Don't know where to put this, since its both parties f***ing up, but I LOL'd... Congress passes bill, doesn't know how, or why, or how it got through so fast

QUOTE (kitekrazy @ Oct 7, 2010 -> 02:45 PM) That's as simple as it gets. The Twins are very good this year. They won 94 games and might have won more if they wanted too. What does the bolded mean? You think they didn't feel like winning? They were in the chase for home field advantage all the way to the end, so it would make no sense that they weren't trying to win.

QUOTE (joeynach @ Oct 7, 2010 -> 02:14 PM) What about just letting Viciedo or some other low level play 1st base in 2011 and then sign Puljos when hes a free agent for 2012. I can't tell if you are joking or not. If you are not, then... just keep in mind that Pujols will probably command the largest FA deal ever at that point. How likely is it that the Sox will win a bidding war, at that level, for him?