StrangeSox

some other higher-order animals seem to display concepts of right and wrong and fairness http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/animal...ence-in-animals

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Apr 11, 2013 -> 12:02 PM) SEXIST! Well yeah the tradition pretty much is, an adult woman's father isn't her primary caretaker and permission isn't the father's to give. Edit sexist isn't the right word, patriarchal would be accurate.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Apr 11, 2013 -> 08:17 AM) Tried making the same point about the guy who stabbed all those kids in China on the same day of the Sandy Hook tragedy. None of those kids died and all of them made full recovery. They'll hear what they want to hear though. If I never hear another stupid gun rant on Facebook it'll be too soon. You can't talk to these people - "I know banning guns is unconstitutional, but we need to expand background checks and look into straw purchase reform because the laws aren't working and easy to circumvent" reads to them as "I want Obama to confiscate everyone's guns, and use those guns to force people to allow atheists to teach kids how to have gay sex in public schools, and teach girls how to perform do-it-yourself abortions at home." I advocate the latter policy though

BENGHAZI A WORSE COVER UP THAN WATERGATE? NAVY SEALS LEFT TO DIE?! DID OBAMA ABANDON AMERICANS IN BENGHAZI? lol at these ads

This was my fil's full-time job, so a loss would have put him in a difficult place. Probably have to un-retire from the trades and go back to some tough physical labor for several more years.

QUOTE (bmags @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 10:05 PM) You are related to mongo mc michael? No, but i did meet him at a fundraiser and my parents almost won a signed Jersey and dinner with him. I think i have video of his incoherent speech i could post later. My father-in-law was up for election. Looks like he is going to win comfortably.

election nights are a lot more stressful when you are related to the candidate.

there's a difference between gloating over someone's death and the idea that there should be no criticism and that the hagiography should be allowed to paint the highly controversial person as a saint.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:52 PM) This is an article of faith that's kind of cemented in the public consciousness thanks to that disastrous 2010 wave election even though it's completely false... federal deficit size = high unemployment Also that federal budgets of monetary sovereigns who print the world's reserve currency are analogous to "household" budgets. I'd place plenty of blame on many Democrats and the media as well. Despite most Americans caring about things other than "Deficits!," it's all they talk about, all the focus on. So that means people come to think it's a legitimate problem that actually needs to be addressed right now, and it sucks all the oxygen out of the room for anything else. How long has Obama been on his inexplicably stupid "Grand Bargain" kick now? Since the 'summer of recovery'? Well, several years back it was "Confidence!" and "Uncertainty!" so now those same people are insisting that we govern through a never-ending series of crises.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:49 PM) There's literally no better time to take on a project like that. While people are more or less paying you to hold their money. QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:50 PM) Which is why we're doing the exact opposite (Sequester yeah!) The world is run by some incredibly dumb people.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:39 PM) He ended up raising them far beyond that shortly after to "control" the .com boom, though. So, if the interest rates are the answer to both problems, you are going to have to blame him for keeping them that low in 1996, when in 1998 the .coms sprang up from his economy. By then, it was too late to control the growth. So, by one token, keeping the rates low in 1996 was a good thing, but by 1998, they were too low, and then it was too late to do anything about the pending bubble. I've heard it argued before that these low interest rates somewhat fueled the subprime/MBS bubble in that investors internationally went looking elsewhere for "safe" investments (AAA!) since treasuries were paying so low.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:39 PM) Versus now which is just being fueling by a "free money" bubble. Great deal for the banks, though. Borrow money for free and then charge to loan it back out. Too bad we couldn't use some of that free money for nice things like infrastructure and public works.

RE: the CRA and its influence on the sub-prime market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Rei...inancial_crisis

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:36 PM) Nothing. It was going to pop one way or another, and all they did to "control it" did absolutely nothing, if not make things even worse. The .com bubble lasted all of 2 years. People make it sound like something that spanned decades. Control was an illusion, and all they did with the interest rates made it even worse on the fall as when the bubble popped we were stuck with massively inflated interest rates for quarters to come. The only thing that stops any kind of bubble is conservative investing, something most people don't do, because fad investing is the cool thing to do. If you take a look at the whole period from 1999 until now, there's a good argument to be made that we never really recovered from the .com bubble. Sure, there was 'growth' under Bush, but it was fueled entirely by the illusionary housing bubble. eta: fad investing is also the profitable thing for Wall Street to do, and if your bank is playing it 'conservative' and getting hammered by the competition, you'll be out on your ass in a hurry.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:24 PM) Matt Taibbi does a fantastic job of explaining this in layman's terms that everyone can understand (plus he's just a great writer and really funny). He doesn't let the losers who bought houses with no intention of ever making any payments off the hook either, but they are not the ones who engineered this whole disaster. And these are pretty far and between cases. Plenty of people bought houses to live in fully intending to pay for them. Sometimes they were pushed into higher-cost subprimes even if they qualified for normal FHA-backed loans, especially if they were minorities. Other times they were convinced or pressured to spend more money. Other times maybe they just didn't have the financial literacy to really analyze what was within their reach and the 'experts' that are supposed to screen and advise people were only looking to churn as many mortgages as possible. Bankers/originators were under no obligation or legal requirement to loan $500k to someone making $30k or, hell, by the end, not even verifying their incomes or assets at all, but they did. Because it was immensely profitable for many of them for a long time.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:23 PM) We've heard this sort of reaction before...but really there's one statement missing from this which is totally implied throughout it: everyone in the entire financial industry is an idiot. And you know what, I'm not sure its wrong. For this logic to follow, it implies that the entire financial industry has absolutely no idea how to assess risk. They see that 1 loan in 1 place makes money and therefore assume that all loans must make money and dump tens of trillions of dollars into it with no assessment of the actual risks or reasons why that one particular loan made money. Basically it paints the entire financial industry as a bunch of lemmings jumping over a cliff faster than the one before. It paints them as a bunch of people who made boatloads of money off of these shenanigans and haven't really suffered at all thanks to the crash they brought about. In fact, they're doing better than ever. If you're a greed-obsessed asshole with Rand as your guiding philosophy, then they were acting like geniuses.

QUOTE (lostfan @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:21 PM) I'm really kind of in awe at the s*** they were able to pull. The regulators are at a disadvantage, they are looking at, say, a monthly flow of events but the cheaters are working on a day to day flow. They are understaffed, underfunded and as I'm sure ss2k5 would add, overlapping in some areas with huge gaps in others. Plus it's mostly a revolving door like most other regulatory bodies these days. Yup, this is what happens when you take some rip-off Nietzsche mixed with a heavy dose of sociopathy in the form of a novel as some sort of gospel truth. Bernanke's not doing much better. Despite studying the Great Depression academically, he's not actually doing nearly as much as he could or as he'd argued in the past that somebody should in that position.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:17 PM) It's the fault of a LOT of people, from the borrowers to the lenders, to the lawmakers, to the auditors that combined, allowed this to happen, and watched WHILE it was happening. It was then the fault of the insurance underwriters claiming the mortgages were safe, and when they could no longer do that, accepting 'bundles of mortgages', and instead calling those safe when they could no longer be called that on their own. It was then the fault of the likes of AIG and other insurance carriers ACCEPTING and backing those loans. Deregulation of the mortgage industry led to this, because the things they did were simply never before thought of...and when you deregulate an industry thinking they do things XYZ, but suddenly they begin doing them ABCXYZ under the new regulations, which didn't account for the ABC, this is what you get. Yeah, I'm not letting the government(s) off the hook here. They clearly failed to protect American citizens and to foster a strong, robust economy with solid foundations.

My avatar is a policy suggestion, time to bring back the Committee of Public Safety for the bankers

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 01:02 PM) Or a bailout, which is the complete opposite of a "free market." No downside, no risk. I can lend/do business however the hell I want. That was the culture and has been for decades. The bailouts were necessitated because we allowed banks to merge investment and commercial, putting the entire economy at risk and leaving us with only a handful of mega-banks. But the bailout (which has now morphed from "too big to fail" to "too big to prosecute") is separate from the compensation package structures for management that reward and encourage excessive risk-taking. The bailout just means that the last guy there doesn't lose the game of hot potato.

Mortgage lending of the type that caused the collapse was the most unregulated segment of mortgage lending. I don't think the lenders gave one s*** about who would back a mortgage--they weren't holding on to them for any length of time. They were re-selling them to people who would then chop them up and securitize them after paying S&P to give them a AAA ratings while others were selling Credit Default Swaps based on those s***ty mortgage-backed securities and everyone leveraged themselves to insane levels because there was little or no regulations on them doing that. Oh, and we got the mixing of commercial and investment banking thanks to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which again only made matters worse. Every step towards deregulation was a step that fueled the crisis. And, again, Freddie and Fannie were way late to the whole sub-prime game and started getting into it because they were losing market share and getting hammered by investors for it. Accepting only 5% down wasn't the problem. The problem was giving out mortgages to anybody and everybody without verifying income or assets in any way, even going so far as to lie on application forms so that people would get approved. Originators made money this way, the banks that securitized it made money, the ratings agencies made money, the insurance companies made money. Lots and lots of people made huge fortunes exploiting the system in every way possible. Nowhere does "forced by government to make bad loans" enter into this. There's no such thing as a completely free market in reality because there are always governments and always laws. It's just a No True Scotsman to try to downplay the role that deregulation and lack-of-regulation played in this.

Oh god, not that crap again. It was the private market that led the way on the s***ty mortgages, completely unforced by any sort of CRA or other requirements. Freddie and Fannie were late getting into the sub-prime game as well. And of course government regulations had nothing to do with all of the exotic gambling/financial products and banks leveraging themselves 40-1. The worst parts of the financial crisis were the unregulated parts--the NINA loans, the CDS's and MBS's, the leverage ratios, the mixing of investment and commercial banking. CRA loans performed better than private mortgage loans. This has been well-documented for years now. Why on earth do you think banks wouldn't be risky with their money? They over-leverage themselves and use bank funds like a casino all the time. If management takes big risks and produces huge (short-term) profits, they'll make themselves a small fortune every year. And, if they f*** it up, they'll ride to safety on their golden parachute.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 12:34 PM) I don't know why I ever buy movies...I can probably count on 1 hand the number of movies I have ever watched more than once or twice. One of my friends has a huge "DVD Collection." Whoops.

BOOM http://yoisthisracist.com/post/47461263287...ure-dead-if-not

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Apr 8, 2013 -> 11:48 AM) Not just refused to serve them, but had them throw perfectly good food into the trash because of account balances that are entirely outside of their control. How could this ever cross an adult's mind as a reasonable thing to do? Related: “American Dream”: Food loaded into Dumpsters while Hundreds of Hungry Americans Restrained by Police