Public property = trees most likely live.
Birds that live on PHP*, like the Belted Kingfisher, appreciate trees too.
PHP = Pleasure House Point.
Want to help protect it for future generations? Start here.
Thanks to Jon Stewart who had William Kamkwamba on tonight.
Mr. Kamkwamba's website.
A post on his site for viewers from The Daily Show that includes a couple dozen links of how you can learn more and help.
His book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope, is also available from links on his site. If you purchase thru his website, the affiliate fees also go to him & his 501(c)3.
By donating [Emphasis mine.]:
Payments appear as Moving Windmills Project, a US 501(c)3. Contributions are tax deductible in U.S. Click "Support My Work" tab for more info. Amounts over $250 will be doubled by a challenge grant.Some info about the Documentary, YouTube version above:
“Moving Windmills” was submitted to the Pangea Day Film Festival, where it received the “Best North American Filmmaker” award from Participant Media. It placed third in the Cinema Properite Film Festival.Watch & learn about the movie at the Director's site, m ss n g p eces.
Since the film’s release, “Moving Windmills” has been screened at the World Economic Forum, the Consumer Electronics Show, and Columbia University’s African Economic Forum. It has also been accepted to the Ashland Independent Film Festival, The Without Borders Film Festival in Rome, and the Darfur Film Festival. It won 3rd place at the Seven Fund
In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it's easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that — to help people see themselves in others — through the power of film.Follow Kamkwamba on Twitter.
Stephen Colbert's "news" on Conservapedia apparently crashed their site.
From a cached version at Google:
As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible[.]Other benefits also include, according to Conservapedia, getting close minded liberals to read the Bible:Benefits include:
- Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
- mastery of the Bible, which is priceless
liberals will oppose this effort, but they will have to read the Bible to criticize this, and that will open their minds
Read entire article & comments at his blog.
Read entire article & comments at nakedcapitalism.com.
It's interesting comparing the comments due to somewhat different readership of each blog.
I totally agree with his take on the real problem. Think, houses being used as ATM's with home equity loans. Then value of homes collapse, re: collateral, with the same loans outstanding. The ones that aren't in default that is.:
But, make no mistake, the housing and writedown problems are only symptoms. The real problem is the debt – specifically an overly indebted private sector (note the phrase ‘private sector’ as I will return to this topic).On why we're heading into a depression vs. a recession:
Depressions [are] marked by balance sheet compression[.]He goes into what the public sector, ie: federal government:
Recessions are typically characterized by inventory cycles – 80% of the decline in GDP is typically due to the de-stocking in the manufacturing sector. Traditional policy stimulus almost always works to absorb the excess by stimulating domestic demand. Depressions often are marked by balance sheet compression and deleveraging: debt elimination, asset liquidation and rising savings rates. When the credit expansion reaches bubble proportions, the distance to the mean is longer and deeper. Unfortunately, as our former investment strategist Bob Farrell’s Rule #3 points out, excesses in one direction lead to excesses in the opposite direction.
If the private sector is a net saver, the public sector must, I repeat must, run a deficit. That’s the law of double entry book-keeping.About the author.
I have a buddy who has their Gorillapod & it's addictively fun & easy to use. Now they have one for mobile devices. Super cool.
Hat tip Daring Fireball.
But U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled there was no justification to withhold the entire 67 pages of FBI records documenting Fitzgerald's interview since the Plame leak investigation has concluded. He said that limited parts could be withheld to protect national security and private communications between the president and vice president.
Securities firms may be forced to report trading data for asset-backed securities after the opaqueness of that market helped create the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the U.S. brokerage industry’s main regulator said.And from the article, an interesting objection:
Brokers represented by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association and Regional Bond Dealers Association objected to that expansion in comment letters, saying it would impair market liquidity.You know, impair market liquidity that could create enough chaos in a "market" that could cause it to crash. In other words, this market crashed in 2007-2008 being opaque and they want to keep it opaque so it doesn't crash again.
CIT Group, you never heard of them, provide financing to roughly 70% of small businesses. They've been on the verge of bankruptcy for over a year. Won't bore you with all the details, but under TARP we loaned them $2B to keep them afloat.
They now need more money or they're history. Which would be incredibly complicated for the small businesses that depend on them for financing. More economic chaos would result and one can only guess how these businesses could get alternative financing to help them weather the worst economy in decades.
They have a plan to restructure their debt outside of bankruptcy, but CDS holders have an incentive to have them file bankruptcy.
Complicating negotiations trying to keep them out of filing is the amount of outstanding Credit Default Swaps[CDS].
From FT.com:
From NYTimes.They suspect that some of the largest holders still have significant enough holdings of the credit default swaps that they would gain more on the value of their credit protection than they would lose with the loss on the debt if the company filed for bankruptcy protection.
But one of the frustrating things for advisers to companies trying to stay out of the bankruptcy court is that it is virtually impossible to have an exact understanding of the dynamics of the creditors.
If you "invest" and don't read enough to understand what happened & what's going on now - you are crazy.VF Daily: In your own words, what do you think is the significance of the new revelations and the excerpts in your book?
Andrew Ross Sorkin: Well, I think this is the first time the public is going to get a true, inside-the-room account of what happened where you actually get to see all of the machinations, all of the interlinking relationships—the sort of inter-web—and even some of the duplicity among the various actors in this drama. It hopefully brings all of it to life for the first time and also helps solve the larger mystery, which is, How did this happen? We have all read the headlines during those harrowing days, but as I got further and further into my research, I realized that news reports at the time only scratched the surface of what really happened.
That obviously makes more sense than the crazy idea of the FDIC borrowing needed reserves from the banks floated a couple weeks ago. Previously posted here.If adopted, the proposal, the agency’s third restoration plan for the fund in a year, would raise $45 billion from the banks to replenish the fund.
That would almost certainly wipe out the industry’s earnings for this year — in the first half of the year the banking industry reported $1.8 billion in income.
Regulators have told the banks that they will not have to record the prepayments as an expense until the fees would ordinarily have been due, postponing the hit to balance sheets until a time when officials believe the industry will be better able to weather the costs.
Senior officials emphasized that the plight of the fund would have no impact on insurance for bank deposits.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation posted Part 2 that shows how social networking sites help create data bases of your online activity.
This example is about job searches:
Let's start with an example of 3rd party tracking: when we went to CareerBuilder.com, which is the largest online jobs site in the United States, and searched for a job, CareerBuilder included JavaScript code from 10 (!) different tracking domains: Rubicon Project, AdSonar, Advertising.com, Tacoda.net (all three are divisions of AOL advertising), Quantcast, Pulse 360, Undertone, AdBureau (part of Microsoft Advertising), Traffic Marketplace, and DoubleClick (which is owned by Google). On other visits we've also seen CareerBuilder include tracking scripts and non-JavaScript web bugs from several other domains. There are pretty sound reasons to hope that when you search for a job online, that fact isn't broadcast to dozens of companies you've never heard of — but that's precisely what's happening here.Be sure to check out Part 1 about Cookies and how hard they are to remove and how advance they've become.
A judge ordered the government Thursday to release more records about the lobbying campaign to provide immunity to the telecommunications giants that participated in the NSA's warrantless surveillance program. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White ordered the records be provided to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) by October 9, 2009.Related news from EFF, a new bill was introduced to push this further:
Yesterday, four US Senators, led by Senator Chris Dodd, announced plans to introduce "The Retroactive Immunity Repeal Act." That bill, endorsed by EFF, would repeal the retroactive immunity granted by Congress as part of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) to phone companies that illegally assisted in domestic spying by US intelligence agencies and would revive EFF's recently dismissed lawsuit against AT&T for its collaboration in the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.
Seriously. A $95 homeless doll.
From Consumerist.com:
Gwen is a limited edition toy, so non-homeless girls with the $95 to spare only have a few more months to buy one. Real homeless children aren't a limited edition, and will still be in shelters and on the streets, long after Gwen disappears from shelves.Go buy Gwen at AmericanGirl.com. I wonder if 100% of the proceeds go to helping eradicate homeless children.
Track the money.
Here's a look at Virginia's info.
Hot link to Report Fraud, Waste & Abuse:
One of the core missions of the Recovery Board is to prevent fraud, waste, and mismanagement of Recovery funds. Recovery.gov gives you the ability to find Recovery projects in your own neighborhood and if you suspect fraudulent actions related to the project you can report those concerns in several ways[.]
Fannie Mae reported that the serious delinquency rate for conventional loans in its single-family guarantee business increased to 4.17 percent in July... and up from 1.45% in July 2008.That is not subprime! Those are conventional plain vanilla loans.
Go see it. The End.
Virginia Stage Company:
ALIVE AND WELLSome reasons to see it. You:
Kenny Finkle
September 15-October 4, 2009
In this funny new play by VSC favorite Kenny Finkle, our country's continuing struggle between the North and South is on full display as a heartbroken Civil War re-enactor and an emotionally desperate New York journalist search for the oldest living Civil War veteran. Trekking through the heart of Virginia, they find more than they bargained for in this irreverent take on modern America. This is the second play in VSC's American Soil series, a new play project exploring the cultural and historical foundations of Hampton Roads.
And... for us semi-anti-tv-non-tivo-owners, PBS is putting them all online!
At PBS.org Ken Burns' National Parks America's Best Idea.
At the site, they have sections entitled Full Episodes, Video Clips, Deleted Scenes, & Untold Stories. You can also send ePostCards, purchase the book, DVD, or CD, download from iTunes & of course donate.
PBS also has this groovy Scrapbook widget that:
Create your own personalized scrapbook page! As you view the website, save photos, video, and text passages that you like to your scrapbook for future easy referenceCheck out their sample Scrapbook page.
Patagonia pushing the envelop beyond sustainability.
Learn more at Patagonia's "the footprint chronicles".
Reread it. Any one who "invests" or thinks they want a lot of it. Money that is, needs to read this and understand the incredible risks in blindly trusting "professionals" and history. History, as in "the market always comes back".
Two great quotes.
One in relation to behavioral finance:
Probably the most influential paper in this vein was a 1997 publication by Andrei Shleifer of Harvard and Robert Vishny of Chicago, which amounted to a formalization of the old line that “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”Second one:
...good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.”[Emphasis mine]
Hat tip to Virginia Coalition for Open Government.
From Law.com:
The FCC lost their argument. AT&T was considered a "person" for the sake of this FOIA exemption apparently intended to protect a person's privacy.In an appeal before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the FCC argued that when Congress crafted the exemptions clauses of the Freedom of Information Act, it intended the phrase "personal privacy" to extend only to human beings.
But AT&T begged to differ, arguing that the FOIA specifically defines the term "person" to include corporations, and therefore that "Congress's choice of the adjectival form of that word -- 'personal' -- should be understood to refer to that definition."
Could this added transparency with your personal information be abused? Will there be laws in place to make possible abuse illegal?
American Securitization Forum, ASF, created the:
...new global ASF Loan Identification Number Code (ASF LINC™) is a sixteen digit identification code that captures underlying loan type, origination date and country of origin, in addition to randomized alphanumeric data, to create a unique ID for a wide range of loans that may be pooled and sold into the capital markets.It's intent is to track individual loans to provide transparency to everyone who is a stakeholder in the loan once it's securitized. It's intent sounds noble, & beneficial. One of the critical supremely complicated problems of the housing market, is the lack of motivation of holders of securitized mortgages to negotiate in good faith to help responsible people stay in their homes.
The global ASF LINC is linked to the CUSIP and/or ISIN number of the securitized product, allowing investors to track the loan throughout its lifespan and provide a chain of accountability between loan originators and investors. The ASF LINC creates standardization and consistency in connecting and reporting monthly performance data of a loan. In addition, it provides a means to connect added value data and information from third party providers like credit bureaus. Assigned at no cost to issuers, the ASF LINC is stored in a central loan data repository administered by S&P FIRMS. The ASF LINC is not designed or intended to replace the primary servicer's loan number, but rather to provide users with a means to track and monitor a loan throughout its life after the loan has been securitized.
How can we join in to make it a class action!?!
Sounds far doesn't it?
More at Reuters:
Dalton Chiscolm is unhappy about Bank of America's customer service -- really, really unhappy.Remember how BoA doesn't think it owes us, $4B as it "was an oral agreement".
Chiscolm in August sued the largest U.S. bank and its board, demanding that "1,784 billion, trillion dollars" be deposited into his account the next day. He also demanded an additional $200,164,000, court papers show.
So one time, there was this really groovy financial instrument that was illegal to regulate, that grew to well over 10 times the US debt, according to the comment at the article in the link below. Anyway, remember AIG ?? The company us tax payers threw a couple hundred billion dollars into since they were insolvent and we came within hours of a planetary financial meltdown if they were allowed to go under since there is no rule of law in place to deal with a catastrophe like that.
This is funny, from Bloomberg.:
“The only market that I know of that seems to have worked virtually every day has been the CDS market,” Eraj Shirvani, chairman of ISDA and Credit Suisse Group AG’s head of fixed income for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told reporters yesterday at the industry group’s regional meeting in New York.Funny in that Shirvani's comment is close to the dumbest fucking rewriting of history comment one could make.
Of the $189 billion securitized Option ARM loans outstanding, 88% have yet to experience a recast event ... Of these loans that have not yet recast, 94% have utilized the minimum monthly payment to allow their loans to negatively amortize.And:
Resets are not a problem with low interest rates. The potential problems are from loan recasts.
This seems to make sense & simplify the accounting as the "product" that is a bundle of software & hardware obviously has to work together or either part is essentially worthless.
From WSJ:
Currently when a company sells devices like these, it gets the cash up front, but can only book the revenue and profits from the sale over time, typically over the length of a product's life.And:
Under the new rules, companies will be able to book much more of the revenue when the product is sold. A company that has strong sales in a quarter would likely record higher profits under the new rules than the old. The old standard helped smooth out the differences between good and bad quarters.
A person familiar with the thinking of a FASB task force that approved the accounting switch earlier this month said it was "trying to align the accounting better with what the economics of the transaction were.The new rule is expected to pass Wednesday. I'm calling this now - watch as people see a spike in sales/earnings, once the accounting has been implemented, & they don't do the appropriate due diligence on the value of the underlying stock & the stock will explode up for a period of time.
This should simplify things.
Highlights from NYTimes article:
Senior regulators say they are seriously considering a plan to have the nation’s healthy banks lend billions of dollars to rescue the insurance fund that protects bank depositors.And if anything goes wrong, what's the worst that could happen?
-
The plan, strongly supported by bankers and their lobbyists, would be a major reversal of fortune.
-
Bankers worry that a special assessment of $5 billion to $10 billion over the next six months would crimp their profits and could push a handful of banks into deeper financial trouble or even receivership. And any new borrowing from the Treasury would be construed as a taxpayer bailout that could open the industry to a political reaction, resulting in a wave of restrictions like fresh limits on executive pay. Any populist furor could be avoided, the thinking goes, if the government borrows instead from the banks.
A Wyoming bank sent an e-mail containing sensitive customer data to the wrong Gmail account, and now wants Google to reveal the identity of the account holder who received the data.Google declined.
YEAH!
At OpenInternet.gov:
[If you do anything right now - hit their site, join it, become a Fan in Facebook, etc!]
It's a great sport that builds athleticism, team building, etc but the NFL sure seems to have not been that great in the last "x" number of years for me.
Finally, as football was intended. I'm starting a fantasy football league too.
What a timely idea.
Heard her again on Fresh Air.
At Wikipedia:
Karen Armstrong MRSL (born 14 November 1944 in Wildmoor, Worcestershire) is a British author of numerous works on comparative religion, who first rose to prominence with her highly successful A History of God. A former Catholic nun, she asserts that "All the great traditions are saying the same thing in much the same way, despite their surface differences." They each have in common, she says, an emphasis upon the overriding importance of compassion, as expressed by way of the Golden Rule: Do not do to others what you would not have done to you.
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.
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.Gimmie a B. Gimmie a O. Gimmie a Y. Gimmie a C...
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.
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.
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.
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.I have a business proposition for you.
“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.
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.
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:
And: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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.This is kinda funny.
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.
Depending on internet speed, this page may take a few minutes to loadSimplified eh? And that's before securitization.
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.
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.
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.
It's true. A manager at Blue Ridge Mountain Sports recommended Dave Page, Cobbler to repair an old pair of Alp styled Teva's that had both blown out. They were super comfortable sandals and I missed them. Tossed in the back of the closet I stumbled on them one day hoping to revive them. Dave answered questions in email quickly & let me know when he received them & when the work was done without asking. I'm glad they're back. They're super comfortable. Thanks Dave.
That sounds like it's going in the right direction.
What's the Repo market? It's where:
An investor places its money with the custodian bank, which in turn lends it to another institution, and then assets are pledged as collateral for the loan.Repos are used to increase leverage. They also usually have incredibly short terms, like one day, or even hours. As such, they are typically viewed as "cash".
The consequences for the repo market are best highlighted by the plunge in dealers financing corporate securities. A common transaction during the boom involved investors lending out Treasuries and then using the pledged cash to borrow corporate securities. They made money on the difference between the higher rate for corporates than Treasuries. This daisy chain collapsed when investors lost faith in using corporates as collateral and the relationship between Treasuries and corporate securities changed sharply.
Standards for collateral used in repo remain much higher and traders say reforms for the repo market, which are still being discussed by dealers and the Fed, should focus on making sure that continues.The reasons you should care are you want tighter regulations on the repo market and the more intelligent use of risk so the 2008 blowup has less chance of occurring again, and to understand to some extent, how much you risk you take in thinking the stock market will "come back" like it always has. "Come back" to "where & when"?
During President Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress tonight regarding health care reform, Republican Congressman Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) yelled out "lie" when the President said his health care bill would not mandate coverage for illegal immigrants.
Saw Julie & Julia yesterday. Really good flick! I'd highly recommend taking someone you know who is an amazing cook, then buying whatever ingredients they want to cook after the flick.
Meryl Streep was perfect. The rest of the cast were just really, really good.
The flick at IMDB.com.
Watch Julia Child at PBS.org.
The blog that was made into the movie.
And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you – don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.The story of America isn’t about people who quit when things got tough. It’s about people who kept going, who tried harder, who loved their country too much to do anything less than their best.It’s the story of students who sat where you sit 250 years ago, and went on to wage a revolution and found this nation. Students who sat where you sit 75 years ago who overcame a Depression and won a world war; who fought for civil rights and put a man on the moon. Students who sat where you sit 20 years ago who founded Google, Twitter and Facebook and changed the way we communicate with each other.
A cool groove I made using the iPhone app GrooveMaker is, well, groovy. It's so groovy, you export your track or complete song from your iPhone/iPod, type in the http link you're given and wala, it's on the interwebs . I think. your machine.Not sure if the link for my groove works for you. Just started messing with exporting late last night. Enjoy. I think.
Lengthy, readable, excellent article by Krugman:
Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.Short version:
I. MISTAKING BEAUTY FOR TRUTH
II. FROM SMITH TO KEYNES AND BACK
III. PANGLOSSIAN FINANCE
IV. THE TROUBLE WITH MACRO
V. NOBODY COULD HAVE PREDICTED . . .
VI. THE STIMULUS SQUABBLE
VII. FLAWS AND FRICTIONS
VIII. RE-EMBRACING KEYNES
This seems, however, like a good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.”A translation?
I'd like to think it was all of us "workers" doing what we need to do to resolve our minor, petty differences and to protect our government. That also means our government needs us to stick together, to protect the larger colony so we can continue on another day.
Hattip for the vid to kottke.org.
First, the CFPA will regulate consumer financial products across the board-using the same rules for all mortgages or for all small dollar loans, regardless of whether the mortgage or the loan is issued by a national bank, a state bank or a non-bank.A research paper is available at CreditSlips.org if you want to learn much more.
But industry executives vowed on Tuesday to fight Mr. Obama’s plan with everything they have, even though banks are still heavily dependent on many taxpayer-supported loans and loan guarantees to get through the crisis.To me, another reason banks who have been bailed out should not be allowed to lobby for anything until they pay us back. Period. If they didn't want the money with strings attached in Fall 2008, they should have been allowed to fail and sold off. If they wanted the money, there should have been plenty of strings attached to protect us, the tax payers. The previous administration blew it.
Great news on one of the causes of the financial meltdown, the rating agencies can not use the First Amendment as a defense for their, what many term, fraudulent actions.
From the Wall Street Journal:
The ruling is expected to spur more lawsuits and could apply to structured investment vehicles once valued at as much as $400 billion.Why should you care?
The most significant development, however, is the commitment by the Obama administration to affirmatively post visitor records online on an ongoing basis, bringing a historic level of transparency to the White House. CREW Executive Director Melanie Sloan praised the White House, stating, “The Obama administration has proven its pledge to usher in a new era of government transparency was more than just a campaign promise.Transparency good.
Check out some pics from the Cardboard Knight Director's blog.
I got to help with the costumes, I mean armor, for the White Knight on the left, and the Ninja on the right this past Saturday. About 50 people were on the set that day. Actors, cameramen, gaffers, grips, ADs, catering, tents, port-a-lets, costume designers, etc. Huge crazy fun.
I was helping my buddy, Chris Groffman. Contact him any time you're working on a movie project. You'll be happy you did.
Check out the site for the flick, Carboard Knights.
From DOJ.gov:
As a part of today’s resolution, six whistleblowers will receive payments totaling more than $102 million from the federal share of the civil recovery.It's the first-Ever Qui Tam Whistleblower Settlement of its type. In common law, a writ of qui tam is a writ whereby a private individual who assists a prosecution can receive all or part of any penalty imposed. From Wikipedia.
The government also discovered that Pfizer offered and paid illegal compensation to health care professionals to induce them to promote and prescribe Zyvox in violation of federal kickback laws.It was the largest health care fraud settlement and the largest criminal fine of any kind ever.
Why would you see a movie with a cast like that?
It'd probably be better than staring at goats though.
Read the entire article at Wired.com:
Previously here.So why write the bill if it doesn’t give the president any more authority? I’ve heard two reasonable theories. Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic suggests that the goal may be to give power to the president on these issues at the expense of the less-open NSA and DOD. Under that theory, the bill is actually designed to keep potential channels of dissent in a crisis more open to the public, rather than less.
The second theory is that it’s just a senate jurisdictional battle.
From their website:
Chrysler Museum of Art announces free general admission to all visitors all the time starting Sept. 2.And:
The launch of the new “Free to All” policy is made possible by special gifts from a number of generous donors and foundations. Membership retention and recruitment are vital to ensure the program is sustainable.Wow! This is a terrific museum with great programs we don't spend enough time going to. Membership info.
Wall Street is suiting up for a battle to protect one of its richest fiefdoms, the $592 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market that is facing the biggest overhaul since its creation 30 years ago.And...
The five biggest derivatives dealers in the U.S. -- JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup Inc. -- held 95 percent of the $291 trillion in notional derivatives value of the country’s 25 largest bank holding companies at the end of the first quarter, according to a report by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. More than 90 percent of those derivatives were traded over the counter, the OCC data show.Have you attended a town hall meeting about regulating derivatives? Get your legislator to have one! Don't want to deal with this, then you shouldn't be able to sleep at night if you're still contributing to your IRA/401(k).
...instead of 4 minutes texting while driving.
Watch it over at ShareShoreDriveDay.net.
On a related note, from a Republican National Committee mailer entitled "Future of American Health Care Survey", this question:
"It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person's political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you?"Read entire "push poll" mailer at The Washington Independent.
Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to "direct the national response to the cyber threat" if necessary for "the national defense and security." The White House is supposed to engage in "periodic mapping" of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies "shall share" requested information with the federal government. ("Cyber" is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)
"The language has changed but it doesn't contain any real additional limits," EFF's Tien says. "It simply switches the more direct and obvious language they had originally to the more ambiguous (version)...The designation of what is a critical infrastructure system or network as far as I can tell has no specific process. There's no provision for any administrative process or review. That's where the problems seem to start. And then you have the amorphous powers that go along with it."
Translation: If your company is deemed "critical," a new set of regulations kick in involving who you can hire, what information you must disclose, and when the government would exercise control over your computers or network.
FINALLY!
Beginning September 1, 2009, prerecorded commercial telemarketing calls to consumers – commonly known as robocalls – will be prohibited, unless the telemarketer has obtained permission in writing from consumers who want to receive such calls, the Federal Trade Commission announced today.Read the press release at FTC.gov.
Tarantino was on Fresh Air yesterday. The interview was so interesting we went to see it last night. Wanna go? I'll see it again & again... Audio is available around 3pm est at NPR.org. Here's the transcript:
I just love movies. And I loved seeing, you know, I guess around the age of like 13 and 14 is when I started venturing out from just like, you know, the standard Hollywood movie to see a lot of these different exploitation movies or art films. You know, I guess like, say, like around my '76, where, you know, I guess the standard Hollywood movie would be "A Star Is Born," with Barbra Streisand, okay, that would be that movie.Official site for Inglorious Basterds.
First noted screenplay was titled "Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit," which was written in 1985.
Has stated that he would like to direct a James Bond movie at some point in his career.
When people ask me if I went to film school I tell them, 'no, I went to films.'
From Wired.com article about craigslist:
Only programmers, customer service reps, and accounting staff work at craigslist. There is no business development, no human resources, no sales. As a result, there are no meetings.Hatip to kottke.org.
Financial institutions diversify into their level of incompetence.Then they blow up?
...It is therefore particularly easy for those who work in financial institutions to make the mistake of believing that their success is the result of exceptional skill rather than good fortune. What more natural to believe than that extraordinary talent will find pots of gold under other rainbows?When you're considering diversifying your portfolio into stocks keep in mind on Tuesday, trading in 4 stocks represented 37% of the trading volume. Two of them are essentially insolvent companies too. Here's the scoop at Seeking Alpha.
From an interview at Fox w/Greta on August 25th:
Excerpts posted if you don't have time to read entire transcript.
VS: But can you sort of, you know -- you know, bring me in on the secret why the Republicans didn't do health care reform when they owned the House, the Senate and the White House? Do you have any idea?From Washington Post opinion piece from August 24th:
S: No, I don't have an idea, and I think, you know, again, it's one of those -- those flaws of the past that, you know, we tripped ourselves up on. We had a perfect opportunity even when we didn't have control of the House and Senate during the early days of the Bush -- of Bush first term to at least put in place some of the -- some of the efforts to put, you know, our imprimatur, if you will, on the health care debate.
...What I do not applaud is the way they want to go about reforming our health care system when, in fact, the parts that they want to reform and don't need it, and the parts like Medicare that do need to be addressed, they're kind of slipping off to the side because everyone knows there's no money here, Greta, in about six or seven years. And so with all this spending now, where will the money come from to deal for our seniors in about six years when there is no money for Medicare?
Furthermore, under the Democrats' plan, senior citizens will pay a steeper price and will have their treatment options reduced or rationed.So part of the goal is to drive the conversation for health care reform to:
...Many of the most significant costs of care come in the last six months of a patient's life, and every American household must consider how to treat their loved ones.
The parts like Medicare that do need to be addressed do not touch?
Continue to spend the most significant costs of care...in the last six months of a patient's life?
Wednesday Morning Launch Attempt Called OffPreviously.
Mission managers have decided to scrub Wednesday morning’s launch attempt due to a stuck valve associated with the fill and drain plumbing of the main propulsion system within the orbiter aft compartment.
At Major League Baseball dot com.
Did ya hear the one about the Mets losing from being on the wrong end of the first unassisted quadruple play?
Check out the idea at the GOP's official page.The country's largest lobbying group for seniors, AARP, said it welcomed the RNC's commitment to protect Medicare. But the group, which supports efforts to overhaul the health-care system, also dismissed the RNC statement as misleading and alarmist.
"Change by itself is anxiety producing, but as we have analyzed the various bills [before Congress], the proposed Medicare savings do not limit benefits, they do not impose rationing and they do not put the government between patients and their doctors," said John Rother, AARP's executive vice president.
From Bloomberg:
The Federal Reserve must make records about emergency lending to financial institutions public within five days because it failed to convince a judge the documents should be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.And:
Bloomberg said in the suit U.S. taxpayers need to know the risks behind the central bank’s $2 trillion in lending because the public is an “involuntary investor” in the nation’s banks.Previously at Bloomberg:
The Fed began expanding its lending programs in August 2007 with the Term Discount Window program. The central bank’s loans don’t have oversight requirements or compensation limits that Congress imposed upon the TARP.This is going to make some incredibly fascinating, & hopefully, "indictful" reading.
At the NFOIC conference in June, Bloomberg's inhouse lawyer, Charles Glasser, was a great panelist on the topic.More from Huffington Post, the docs from the lawsuit Bloomberg v. Fed.
Here's a link to the blog coverage on his panel on fiscal transparency.
Video link to fiscal transparency panel.
Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill or COLBERT is launching in a few hours! Woo Hoo! [In your best Stephen voice.]
More about C.O.L.B.E.R.T. at NASA.
Space Shuttle Missions at NASA.
Check out the Official Patch:
Seriously, it's the official patch. Check out the link about COLBERT at NASA.
Occidental College Course Catalog 2008-2009:
Seriously. Don't be stupid. Follow the above link too.
Note: It's only a 100 Level course so you probably just touch on the subject.180. STUPIDITY.
Stupidity is neither ignorance nor organicity, but rather, a corollary of knowing and an element of normalcy, the double of intelligence rather than its opposite. It is an artifact of our nature as finite beings and one of the most powerful determinants of human destiny.
I wonder if you have to get an "F" to pass this course?That could be true, but it might not be good enough in Canada:
B.C. university adds grade worse than FArticle at the Calgary Herald.
I suggested you check out Change Congress here to learn what we can do to take big lobbying out of our government. Today, in an article by Larry Flynt, he has another idea:
As Thomas Jefferson famously quipped in regard to the insurrection: "A little rebellion now and then is a good thing. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."Read his whole article. I hadn't planned on linking to it, but several financial blogs I read pointed it out. They are livid, as you should be too, about the Wall Street bail out with seemingly little accountability plus a lot of the jerks who helped get us in this mess are still getting their obnoxious multi-million dollar salaries to "clean it up".Perhaps it's time to consider that option once again.
I'm calling for a national strike, one designed to close the country down for a day. The intent? Real campaign-finance reform and strong restrictions on lobbying. Because nothing will change until we take corporate money out of politics. Nothing will improve until our politicians are once again answerable to their constituents, not the rich and powerful.
Let's set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn't effective -- if the politicians ignore us -- we do it again. And again. And again.
The real war is not between the left and the right. It is between the average American and the ruling class. If we come together on this single issue, everything else will resolve itself. It's time we took back our government from those who would make us their slaves.
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