Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[jay-ell]

My kids love eating seaweed sheets.

Jehosephat.  I can't even get my kid to eat cheese.  It is awesome that your kids will try eating "unusual" (to Americans) food like that.  Tick that off on the list of Ways in which Your Children Rock. 

And yes, I did just use the word "jehosephat" without irony.  I do this often in speech, because apparently I'm Elijah Bailey?  But I think this is the first time I've actually typed it out.  It's kind of a weird feeling, wondering how to spell this word I use daily.  [/navel-gazing]

[wombat]

As far as sushi goes: It's awesome. I am looking for a job in the DC/Maryland area right now and as soon as I get one I am going to make sure that Wombat and the Technical Staff have a big sushi dinner with me and the wife because Wombat gets it.

Yes! Keeping my fingers crossed!

[Arachno-capitalist]

Ive had a few drinks with a group of guys who are into economics (professors, students) and we're all pretty worried about the current state of the US economy.
Pete Boettke, The Moses of my economic religion believes that we are basically standing on a cliff of an economic crisis and have been for years. Capitalism can only do so much when its bridled by government, and as a result, whenever government regulation outpaces capitalist advances, we move closer to that precipice of depression. Ben Bernanke has been fuck*ng us for months and I think americans should take notice of the government stimulus that will ultimately push us over the cliff. Look at it like this - If you had cancer and all the doctors [high educated, well meaning people] did was treat the symptoms, the cancer would grow and become more lethal. That is what has happened for the past decades. We are going to experience some huge hits. This is my prediction and the prediction of some very well educated people. However, this is the healthiest way to go. Just like the cancer patient, sometimes its easier to endure the effects of chemo to come out healthier.
I predict a US recession.
I predict that ethanol will be the wave of the next decades, but Geothermal energy energy will be the wave of the next millennium.
The problems occur when government thinks it knows whats best. Well, the Soviet Union though it knew what was best too.

[littlefallsmets]

I dunno there, pard, all this mortgage fiasco seems the product of Reagan-Bush deregulation, not over-regulation to me.

Oversight that used to prevent this kind of massive-scale predatory lending got slowly taken away and... surprise surprise... the bottom dropped out.

The analogy seems to be a lot closer to... a bunch of doctors ignored everything kinda obvious about smoking so that they could take tons of money to tell people about pleasing feelings in their T-Zones and now they're acting all surprised when we're coughing up chunks of blood.

The doctors didn't care about the consequences, they were rakin' in the money in the short term, damn the long-term consequences.

Regulation and economic protectionism, please, a lot of it and make it snappy. We've let ourselves become a colony state of our own upper class, our very own Banana Republic.

But we're too busy just trying to survive than to wake up and fight back, culturally and economically.

Which was the plan, of course. Of course.

[AugustWest]

1.  I am suspicious anytime someone suggests a blanket solution is a panacea.  "Deregulation will solve all our problems" or "More regulation will protect people's rights" seems a little facile to me.  Having worked as a regulator for many years, and having spent lots of time thinking about and drafting regulations, I've seen cases where both are true.  Some activities need regulating, others don't.  Neither AC nor LFM cites specific examples to support their position.  I believe both could, which supports my position that regulation is best addressed on a case-by-case basis.

2.  One flaw with AC's position is that it's based on the assumption that what's good for business/the economy is good for society as a whole.  It's hard to argue against the idea that if we completely deregulated the business world and allowed them to do whatever they wanted, however they wanted then businesses would be more profitable.  However, would this make our lives better?  Would it make for a better, more civilized, humane, just society?  I don't know.

[Pedro Picasso]

Nuts to ethanol.  Safe, reliable, beautiful nuclear power.  Semi-plentiful plutonium powering breeder reactors that generate power and golden U-235 for future generations.  Nuts to Yucca mountain.  We weren't using that mountain anyway.  Nuts to corn growers.  Nuclear power.  It feeds the electrolysis that feeds the hydrogen economy of the future.  Nuclear power.  Greenpeace loves it, and now your family can too.  Nuclear power.  Now that's good eatin'!

Why stop there?

I support removing regulations from the airline industry while also removing bailouts and bankruptcy protection from the airline industry.

No health care plan is good enough that doesn't provide incentives for doctors to become primary care providers and not specialists.

Nuts to emergency rooms.  If a health care system only treats emergencies, every problem will eventually be an emergency.

The annual farm bill must die.

NASA is a hole, and if you say that $18 billion annually is not a very big hole, you are no judge of holes.

We do not need this many nukes, and it is both dangerous and expensive to put off dismantling them.

The armed forces do not need attack jets, they need vests, boots, helmets, and better food.

You won't get armed forces recruitment numbers up until you can tell young Americans what they'll be dying for in 25 words or less without obvious lies.

The auto and oil industries will make out like bandits when oil actually starts running out.  Only after they have ridden people as hard as they can will they have an incentive to do the actual research for alternative energy, and when they introduce fully realized solutions, they will once again make out like bandits.  It is in the public interest for the US Government to pour money into this research and get working solutions in advance of a crisis, but the world will not collapse either way.

As long as U.S. Representatives are paid so little and provided so little money for staff, they will be at the mercy of lobbyists who are much better paid and better funded.

Help!  I can't stop.

The only thing we have to fear is the Depression itself.  ...and Hitler.

If terror makes you remove your own liberty, terrorists win.  If terrorists are too afraid to terrorize, terror wins, but the good kind of terror this time.

NAFTA did not prepare the workers of tomorrow for the challenges of today.

[Doc]

1.  I am suspicious anytime someone suggests a blanket solution is a panacea.  "Deregulation will solve all our problems" or "More regulation will protect people's rights" seems a little facile to me. 

Thankyou AW for saying very precisely what I would have said very rudely.

I am not entirely sure if Pedro is joking about nuclear power but I think it is the fuck*ng Bomb (*rimshot*). The out of sight, out of mind worldview that holds it is better to pump radioactive particles into our atmosphere and then forget about them rather than bury (a much smaller but more radioactive) quantity of material in a lead lined bunker reveals a truly pitiful aspect of the human condition.

[Pedro Picasso]

The out of sight, out of mind worldview that holds it is better to pump radioactive particles into our atmosphere and then forget about them rather than bury (a much smaller but more radioactive) quantity of material in a lead lined bunker reveals a truly pitiful aspect of the human condition.

I had never heard of people wanting to vent the stuff into the atmosphere.  Except possibly for terrorist people.  That's crazy-go-nuts.

But yeah, I totally think we should be using nuclear power a lot and hiding our shame in Yucca Mountain.

[Doc]

I had never heard of people wanting to vent the stuff into the atmosphere.  Except possibly for terrorist people.  That's crazy-go-nuts.

Nah, I mean coal plants and similar that just pump junk into the atmos. When I said what they pump out is radioactive I guess that's an exageration. I mean, it's true but not in the long term way most people would think of.

[jaydub]

Thankyou AW for saying very precisely what I would have said very rudely.

I am not entirely sure if Pedro is joking about nuclear power but I think it is the fuck*ng Bomb (*rimshot*). The out of sight, out of mind worldview that holds it is better to pump radioactive particles into our atmosphere and then forget about them rather than bury (a much smaller but more radioactive) quantity of material in a lead lined bunker reveals a truly pitiful aspect of the human condition.

Also, Oz is the Saudi Arabia of uranium mining

[Doc]

I KNOW! So perfect! Unfortunately we just voted in a government that has basically promised not to set up any more nuclear power stations. I voted for the bastards on the basis of foreign policy but I just kick myself everytime I think of that. I have to figure we'll get it eventually though, if only for purely economic reasons.

[Pedro Picasso]

I KNOW! So perfect! Unfortunately we just voted in a government that has basically promised not to set up any more nuclear power stations. I voted for the bastards on the basis of foreign policy but I just kick myself everytime I think of that. I have to figure we'll get it eventually though, if only for purely economic reasons.

"Come for the good foreign policy.  Stay for the terrible domestic policy."

That's pretty much the exact opposite of how we elect presidents in the US.

[Carlos del Vaca]

So, this is the stock market topic...

I really, really, REALLY want to short Chipotle (symbol: CMG).  Over the past five years or so, I've had a pretty good gut feeling when a stock is overvalued, but I rarely take advantage of it.  There's a lot of due diligence to be done before I pull the trigger on something like this.  But still, even though I love burritos, a $3.8 BILLION dollar market cap for a fuckin' chain of burrito stands?  Seriously?

[theinevitable]

as long as the topic is about having the understanding level of a third grader...

how can it ever be a good way to make money to sell your stock for less than what people are normally paying for it?

[Golfhaus]

Short selling is something that almost feels like it should be illegal, like if it didn't have a term and a button on Ameritrade that let you do it, it was something that could get you arrested for fraud. Its similarity to the Don't Pass line in craps just reemphasizes the observation I initially made about the stock market in the fifth grade, which is that it was just another kind of gambling.