Why I love Apple! Cuz they're great, great, great...

Microwave your laptop & sell it on eBay for charity

Bids start at $26,001.



Proceeds donated to one laptop per child.

Mission Statement: To create educational opportunities for the world's poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning.

At eBay.
Originally saw post at engadget.

Bank of American won't repay $4B to us taxpayers since it was an "oral agreement"

From Forbes, not from The Onion:

...has argued that it doesn't need to pay the Treasury back because it was simply an oral agreement.

Things looked differently nine months ago.

During the company's fourth-quarter conference call, which was held on Jan. 16, Chief Executive Ken Lewis announced BofA received a federal guarantee for $118 billion of toxic assets, most of which were accrued in its acquisition of Merrill Lynch, in addition to the $20 billion it received to complete the deal. (See "Ken Lewis Is Getting Lonely.") Lewis said the guarantee was worth $4 billion and that it was essentially insurance protection.

Gimmie a B. Gimmie a O. Gimmie a Y. Gimmie a C...

New ad from Change-Congress.org against Democrat Rep. Mike Ross

Join Change-Congress.org and drive special interests out:

Here at Change Congress, we believe that politicians should work for the people, not special interests. But it’s not enough to push politicians to stay out of the system of corruption—we have to reform the system itself. That’s why we support a hybrid of small-dollar donations and public financing, to keep big money out of politics.

There is a bill in congress being pushed by Change-Congress.org that has 85 sponsors to give the country back to the people by changing campaign finance law.





There is a case pending in the Supreme Court that could allow corporations to spend unlimited money in campaigns. Unlimited.

From NPR.org:

NINA TOTENBERG: At issue in the case is whether the century-old ban on corporate spending in candidate election violates the constitution and whether the court should reverse decades of its own decisions that explicitly or implicitly have upheld the ban on corporate and union spending.

Yesterday, there appeared to be five conservative justices on the verge of saying the ban is unconstitutional. If so, that would dramatically change campaign finance law as practiced since 1907 when Congress, for all practical purposes, first outlawed corporate spending in candidate elections.

This can be traced back to a case in 1886 about "corporate personhood".
More at Wikipedia. How many "rights" should a corporation have vs. a person.

There isn't much of a leap to make to have the scenario of an illegal immigrant, "an enemy of the state", etc, forms a corporation, is allowed to exercise their "rights" as a "person" under the 1st Amendment, with a ruling from the Supreme Court allowing...that corporation can spend unlimited money "campaigning" undoubtedly affecting the outcome of an election. We, the people, would clearly loss more of our voice and our vote.

CEO of International Swaps & Derivatives Association says trust us

From the Bond Buyer:

But Robert Pickel, the ISDA’s CEO, told members of the House Agriculture Committee yesterday, “Not all standardized contracts can be cleared.” Pickel said that derivatives contracts that are infrequently traded, even if they have standardized economic terms, “are difficult if not impossible to clear” because a central counterparty clearing facility’s ability to clear a contract depend on such factors as liquidity, trading volume and daily pricing. This “makes it difficult for a clearinghouse to calculate collateral requirements consistent with prudent risk management,” Pickel said.

“End-users are not systemically significant and ­regulations intended to improve stability and decrease systemic risk should not ­apply to them.” Jonathan Short, senior vice president and general counsel of the ­IntercontinentalExchange Inc., also said Congress should focus regulation on the segments of the market where risk is greatest. “Mandating that interdealer and major swap participant trades be cleared would eliminate the bilateral counterparty risk that was central to the liquidity crisis that occurred last year,” he said. Pickel also argued against mandatory exchange trading of OTC derivatives, warning it “would undercut their very purpose: the ability to tailor custom risk-management solutions to meet the needs of end-users.” Dan Budofsky, a partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, who testified on behalf of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, agreed that “it may be more appropriate for products that trade less frequently to trade over-the-counter.”

Witnesses also challenged the Treasury’s plan to impose capital requirements on cleared swap transactions. This would require the end-user businesses to post collateral for the swaps, Budofsky said. Collateral requirements for corporate end-users “would create a significant ­disincentive to use swaps to manage risk,” he said.

I have a business proposition for you.

Send me money to insure your house. As long as nothing goes wrong we'll be fine. If something does go wrong, that's ok, I'll be fine cuz I've collected the premiums from you. You'll be screwed if you have any losses since I never set aside enough collateral to cover anything . [Think: AIG.]

What's in your wallet ?

Apparently only ious.

From CalculatedRisk.com:

According to the Fed, household net worth is now off $12.2 Trillion from the peak in 2007.

That's not even the "downside". The "downside" is:

After a bubble, the value of assets decline, but most of the debt remains.

As a percentage, from NYTimes.com:

...household net worth remains about 19 percent below its peak in the third quarter of 2007, before the recession began.

I'll be there in 15 minutes, I mean 6 days, no 30 seconds

From xkcd.com:



I love his cartoons.

In terms of income growth and poverty reduction, Bush performed worse than any two-term president of the modern era

According to David Frum.
David Frum was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush and is a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. More about him at Wikipedia.

From Marketplace where you can also hear his commentary:

In terms of income growth and poverty reduction, Bush performed worse than any two-term president of the modern era. Even in the best year of his presidency, 2007, the typical American household still earned less after inflation than in the year 2000. The next year, 2008, American households suffered the worst income drop since record-keeping began six decades ago.

In my Republican party, there is worryingly little discussion of this damning trend. We do criticize ourselves for over-spending in office. But economic management gets much less, almost zero, internal discussion.

And:

The more plausible culprit is the surge in health care costs. Over the years from 2000 to 2007, the price employers paid for labor rose handsomely: on average, 25 percent. Yet for the typical worker, none of that extra cost translated into higher wages.

In other words, we've wasted far too much time in fixing health care in America. It needs fixed now and it's dangerously foolish to waste time making up crap about why we shouldn't fix it, vs. having intelligent discussions on how to fix it.

62% of doctors support PUBLIC & private options for health insurance

According to a survey published at The New England Journal of Medicine:

Overall, a majority of physicians (62.9%) supported public and private options (see Panel A of graph). Only 27.3% supported offering private options only. Respondents — across all demographic subgroups, specialties, practice locations, and practice types — showed majority support (>57.4%) for the inclusion of a public option (see Table 1). Primary care providers were the most likely to support a public option (65.2%); among the other specialty groups, the “other” physicians — those in fields that generally have less regular direct contact with patients, such as radiology, anesthesiology, and nuclear medicine — were the least likely to support a public option, though 57.4% did so. Physicians in every census region showed majority support for a public option, with percentages in favor ranging from 58.9% in the South to 69.7% in the Northeast.

Saw it first at NPR.org.

Trouser wearing woman fined not flogged

From NPR.org, an update to this story:

A Sudanese judge convicted a woman journalist on Monday for violating the public indecency law by wearing trousers outdoors and fined her $200, but did not impose a feared flogging penalty.

And:

"I will not pay a penny," she told the Associated Press while still in court custody, wearing the same trousers that had sparked her arrest.

Hussein said Friday she would rather go to jail than pay any fine, out of protest of the nation's strict laws on women's dress.

"I won't pay, as a matter of principle," she said. "I would spend a month in jail. It is a chance to explore the conditions in jail."

Celebrate Park(ing) Day this Friday

Make a public park:

PARK(ing) Day is an annual, one-day, global event where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spots into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public parks.

Google's new FastFlip

Nice. Check it out:

...is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to "flip" through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.

Facebook screws up once & Google could keep info permanently online

At reddit.com:

Facebook FAIL: A misconfigured webserver has leaked notes for 16,000 accounts with privacy settings turned on. (Mine was one of them)

One would certainly hope Google would delete this info permanently.

An example of how privacy laws have not kept up with technology

Did you know:

Gender, ZIP code, and birth date feel anonymous, but Prof. Sweeney was able to identify Governor Weld through them for two reasons. First, each of these facts about an individual (or other kinds of facts we might not usually think of as identifying) independently narrows down the population, so much so that the combination of (gender, ZIP code, birthdate) was unique for about 87% of the U.S. population. If you live in the United States, there's an 87% chance that you don't share all three of these attributes with any other U.S. resident.

And:

But research by Prof. Sweeney and other experts has demonstrated that surprisingly many facts, including those that seem quite innocuous, neutral, or "common", could potentially identify an individual. Privacy law, mainly clinging to a traditional intuitive notion of identifiability, has largely not kept up with the technical reality.

Read entire Technical Analysis at EFF.org.
Be sure to join to.

Life settlements being securitized

This should work out well.

From Wikipedia:

A life settlement generally refers to the sale of a life insurance policy by a policyowner for less than the face value of the policy to third party investors.[1] The third party investor(s) plans to profit at death of the insured by collecting more in death benefits that were paid out (e.g., the purchase price, the transactions costs, and premiums). This translates into higher profits the sooner the policy holder dies.

From WSJ:

The product, known as a life-insurance settlement, has come under greater scrutiny following the financial crisis. In recent months, Wall Street firms have begun securitizing the products by slicing them up and selling bundled pieces to investors.

Regulators are concerned about the securitization of these products and whether those who are selling their life-insurance policies and those buying them know exactly what they are getting, according to people familiar with the matter.

Some see echoes of the residential-mortgage market, in which pieces of mortgage-backed assets became widely distributed among financial firms and few people had a good grasp of the value of the underlying mortgages.

This is kinda funny.

When checking LISA, The Life Insurance Settlement Association website to learn more about the industry, they have a page that beckons "LIFE SETTLEMENTS SIMPLIFIED Understand the process." Check out the link so you can learn more. This is what comes up for me:

Depending on internet speed, this page may take a few minutes to load

Simplified eh? And that's before securitization.

I got an idea.

We should let Wall Street do this without any regulations and keep the rule of contractual law fuzzy, re: securitization, to make settlement as complicated as possible in case something goes wrong. Then in a few years we can check back to see how it's worked out.

Juliette Binoche, Charlie Rose & a conversation about love

Thank you U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff

From WSJ:

A federal judge threw out the Securities and Exchange Commission's proposed settlement with Bank of America over its disclosure of controversial bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch employees, in an unusual ruling that casts doubts about how the agency handles probes of major U.S. companies.

From Huffingtonpost.com:

Rakoff, in his ruling, found that the settlement "suggests a rather cynical relationship between the parties: the SEC gets to claim that it is exposing wrongdoing on the part of the Bank of America in a high-profile merger, the bank's management gets to claim that they have been coerced into an onerous settlement by overzealous regulators. And all this is done at the expense, not only of the shareholders, but also of the truth."

Last year Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch & others were on their way to insolvency, some getting bailed out by us tax payers, others being taken over and yet others being allowed to crash and burn.

BoA bailed out Merrill Lynch by "buying" them last year. There is apparently enough evidence to hold a trial to determine the truth that hopefully, will ultimately hold people accountable.

Thanks to Judge Rakoff's ruling, the real truth behind what was later revealed that Merrill, with the knowledge of Bank of America executives, paid Merrill employees $3.6 billion in bonuses just before the deal closed on Jan. 1.

That's $3.6B in bonuses paid to executives of a firm that lost over $27B and was basically insolvent just before getting "bought". The SEC's fine of $33M, as in million, is what the Judge threw out. Thank you!

Hear the health care bill

Hear The Bill, We Read...You Listen...We ALL Decide

Many voters have been questioning whether their Congressional representatives have read the entire health care reform bill, HR3200. Now, they don't have to - they can listen to it.

Pretty darn cool. You can download the audio and listen to it on your MP3 player like your iPod so you stay informed and have an intelligent debate about the health care bill.

Secret government plan to take over health care

There is a government take over of health care going on. It's called sticking with the status quo. The VA. Join the Military to defend your country, and work for an organization that has a proud history. One of the benefits you get is health care. Depending on time served, even for life.

Everyone knows one of the great benefits of working for a government, whether it's a local city or town government, the Post Office, Civil Service, etc, knows it's health care. Even elected officials in a government large enough to provide health care has it.

You have a job that provides health care, great! As long as you keep the job, and as long as the business is large enough to negotiate to keep the same benefits you had years ago the same today and in the future for the same cost you're ok. If. One example of what's probably happening for most employer based plans, again, is our health care went up 30% vs. last year. It's with a Fortune 500 Company and we have no "conditions".

Lost your job and/or your health care? Good luck affording COBRA. Have a pre-exisiting condition? You'll probably be dropped if you haven't been yet thanks to existing law and reality.

Conclusion?

Unless you are very wealthy to afford your own health care, sticking with the status quo you will likely lose your job sponsored plan, or significant benefits from it in "x" number of years. If you're fortunate enough to work for a government that provides you affordable health care you are part of the secret government plan to take over health care by having everyone work for government to get health care.