Recent comments by aleister perdurabo
Deuteronomy 13-15
New International Version (NIV)
Worshiping Other Gods
13 [a]If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, 2 and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them,” 3 you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The LORD your God is testingyou to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul. 4 It is the LORD your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him. 5 That prophet or dreamer must be put to death for inciting rebellion against the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery. That prophet or dreamer tried to turn you from the way the LORD your God commanded you to follow. You must purge the evil from among you.
6 If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods that neither you nor your ancestors have known, 7 gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other), 8 do not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity. Do not spare them or shield them. 9 You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people. 10 Stone them to death, because they tried to turn you away from the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 11 Then all Israel will hear and be afraid, and no one among you will do such an evil thing again.
12 If you hear it said about one of the towns the LORD your God is giving you to live in 13 that troublemakers have arisen among you and have led the people of their town astray, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods” (gods you have not known), 14 then you must inquire, probe and investigate it thoroughly. And if it is true and it has been proved that this detestable thing has been done among you, 15 you must certainly put to the sword all who live in that town. You must destroy it completely,[b] both its people and its livestock.
16 You are to gather all the plunder of the town into the middle of the public square and completely burn the town and all its plunder as a whole burnt offering to theLORD your God. That town is to remain a ruin forever, never to be rebuilt, 17 and none of the condemned things[c] are to be found in your hands. Then the LORD will turn from his fierce anger, will show you mercy, and will have compassion on you. He will increase your numbers, as he promised on oath to your ancestors— 18 because you obey the LORD your God by keeping all his commands that I am giving you today and doing what is right in his eyes.
Isaiah 13
And it shall be as the chased roe, and as a sheep that no man taketh up: they shall every man turn to his own people, and flee every one into his own land.
15Every one that is found shall be thrust through; and every one that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword.
16Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.
17Behold, I will stir up the Medes against them, which shall not regard silver; and as for gold, they shall not delight in it.
18Their bows also shall dash the young men to pieces; and they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb; their eye shall not spare children.
19And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.
20It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.
sportsfan wrote:
ut we can't start from the premise that we are all George Bush.
We killed a couple of million in Vietnam. Chump change. They seemed to have turned the other cheek. Whether or not we agreed with GWB's policy or not, there is a perception that the USA supports the continued killing in the Mideast. After all, in a democracy it is the will of the majority that determines our policy.
I fully realize this is a simplistic and wrong headed notion. But our government is killing and maiming people daily in our name. Can you blame some double digit IQs for feeling vengeful?
sportsfan wrote:
You think I'm a fool for saying that attack was motivated by Muslim hatred of the West. The Attacker was quoted on video saying that.
David Bromwich: America's Words of Peace and Acts of War
The United States in the past decade has now killed, at a low estimate, 225,000 people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. How, in the face of those figures, could one argue against a Muslim who once admired the United States but has been convinced, by the actions of the country under Bush and Obama, that we are bent on his destruction? One would be driven to request an act of faith: "We are good. Please believe that we are good." That is what Bush said, and it is what Obama says. But it will take more than occasional words to shift the direction of the policy of perpetual war; and words that are given the lie by actions are worse than no words.
"You ought not, in reason," said Edmund Burke in 1775, "to trifle with so large a mass of the interests and feelings of the human race. You could at no time do it without guilt; and be assured that you will not be able to do it long with impunity." He was speaking of the attitude of Britain toward the American colonists. He thought the continued prosecution of a policy bent on war would alienate America from Britain and cause the closest of ties to be severed. He was not wrong, and the laws of human nature have not changed in the intervening years.
some investor guy wrote:
Second homes, improvement, moveup homes.
1%
sportsfan wrote:
Are you also troubled when somebody's god tells them to chop up an infidel stranger on a sidewalk?
Birmingham murder may have been racially motivated, say police | UK news | The Guardian
A 75-year-old man stabbed to death yards from his home may have been targeted in a racially motivated attack, according to police.
Mohammed Saleem, who used a walking stick, was stabbed three times in the back as he returned home from prayers at his local mosque in Small Heath, Birmingham, on Monday night.
The blows were struck with such violence they penetrated to the front of his body.
The father of seven also had no defensive wounds in what has been described as a swift, vicious and cowardly attack by the man leading the murder investigation, Detective Superintendent Mark Payne of West Midlands police.
Officers want to trace a white man, aged 25-32, of medium height and build, spotted on CCTV footage running near the scene of the attack around the time it happened, just before 10.30pm.
Yoringe wrote:
I think the 3 D food printing is interesting... Nutrition wise may good.. Just dont ask for taste Wink
Building a $325,000 Burger - NY Times
MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — As a gastronomic delicacy, the five-ounce hamburger that Mark Post has painstakingly created here surely will not turn any heads. But Dr. Post is hoping that it will change some minds.
The hamburger, assembled from tiny bits of beef muscle tissue grown in a laboratory and to be cooked and eaten at an event in London, perhaps in a few weeks, is meant to show the world — including potential sources of research funds — that so-called in vitro meat, or cultured meat, is a reality.
Gabor Forgacs, a researcher at the University of Missouri and a founder of Modern Meadow, a start-up company that wants to develop and market cultured meat, is aware of the hurdles as well. “Getting cultured meat to the supermarket is going to be difficult, and controversial,” said Dr. Forgacs, whose approach to cultured meat has some similarities to Dr. Post’s, although he has also developed 3-D bioprinting technologies that might someday be used to create thicker tissues.
April Existing-Home Sales Up but Constrained | realtor.org
Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist, said the market is solidly recovering. “The robust housing market recovery is occurring in spite of tight access to credit and limited inventory. Without these frictions, existing-home sales easily would be well above the 5-million unit pace,” he said. “Buyer traffic is 31 percent stronger than a year ago, but sales are running only about 10 percent higher. It’s become quite clear that the only way to tame price growth to a manageable, healthy pace is higher levels of new home construction.”
Must be a lot of cash buyers.
Mortgage Applications Fall Sharply as Rates Rise
Applications for purchase mortgages also declined and the seasonally adjusted Purchase Index was 3 percent lower than a week earlier. The unadjusted index was down 4 percent from the previous week but was still 10 percent higher than during the same period in 2012.
"Mortgage rates increased to their highest level since March last week, leading to the largest single week drop in refinance applications this year," said Mike Fratantoni, MBA's Vice President of Research and Economics. "The refinance index has fallen almost 19 percent over the past two weeks and is back to its lowest level since late March. Purchase activity declined over the week but is still running about 10 percent above last year's pace at this time."
EngineerJim wrote:
think they know something that other people don't know.
They don't know something that other people do know. It's classified.
Apple CEO makes no apology for company's tax strategy
| Reuters
Cook said Apple agreed with those in Congress who want to reform corporate taxes and called for changes that include lower corporate income tax rates and a reasonable tax on foreign earnings.
"Apple recognizes these and other improvements in the U.S. corporate tax system may increase the company's taxes," he said in prepared testimony.
Many U.S. multinational take advantage of a tax law that allows profits earned abroad to be tax-free as long as they are not brought into the United States, or "repatriated." Total U.S. corporate profits parked offshore rose 15 percent to $1.9 trillion last year, according to research firm Audit Analytics.
Accounting rules also let the companies avoid recognizing a tax expense if management intends to keep the earnings indefinitely reinvested overseas. Taking advantage of these laws, the offshore earnings of U.S. companies has risen 70 percent in the past five years, Audit Analytics said two weeks ago.
"The baldness of the Apple strategy surprises me more than anything else," said University of Southern California Law Professor Edward Kleinbard. "European member states are going to be very angry with Apple and very angry with Ireland."
Indian guest workers sue company in Miss., Texas - Yahoo! Finance
GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) -- Dozens of Indian guest workers are suing an Alabama-based marine and fabrication company, claiming it financially exploited them and forced them to live in squalid conditions after bringing them to work at Gulf Coast shipyards after Hurricane Katrina.
Three federal lawsuits backed by the Southern Poverty Law Center were filed Tuesday in Mississippi and Texas on behalf of 83 people who worked for Signal International LLC after the 2005 storm slammed into the coast.
The plaintiffs claim Signal used the federal government's H-2B guest worker program to recruit them to work as welders and pipefitters at its facilities in Pascagoula, Miss., and Orange, Texas.
"The cornerstone of the defendants' scheme was the tantalizing prospect that Signal would be able to hire a skilled workforce at effectively no cost by forcing the plaintiffs and their coworkers to foot the bill for their own recruitment, immigration processing, and travel," says the suit filed Tuesday in Gulfport, Miss.
Signal falsely promised to help the workers apply for and receive greens cards, the suit alleges.
"Put simply, plaintiffs had been deceived into taking on life-altering debt for something that was never going to happen," says the suit, which also claims workers were required to live in camps that exposed them to "barbaric and prison-like conditions."
Ray Manzarek, who as the keyboardist and a songwriter for the Doors helped shape one of the indelible bands of the psychedelic era, died on Monday at a clinic in Rosenheim, Germany. He was 74.
dryfly wrote:
you either own the means of production or you are the means of production.
dryfly wrote:
Kruggles talking generational 'immobility'... wealth wise...
Give Them Our Huddled Masses - By Aaditya Mattoo and Arvind Subramanian | Foreign Policy
To start, consider retirees. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the unfunded pension liability of the state and local governments in the United States ranges between $0.7 trillion and $3 trillion (depending on how assets and liabilities are valued.) Since the net worth of the median household has also declined by 35 percent over the last decade, the prospects of current and future retirees who stay in the United States are dim: They have fewer savings, and their pension incomes will become less reliable.
One dollar will buy twice as much in Costa Rica, and three times as much in Thailand as it does in the United States, as well as the opportunity to hike in Monteverde and sunbathe in Phuket. According to the Social Security Administration, about 350,000 U.S. retirees (about 1 percent of the total) already live abroad, a quarter in developing countries.
Between 2008 and 2010, 35 percent of U.S. retirees who moved abroad headed for the developing world, double the rate of the preceding seven years. If the fraction of those choosing to live overseas were to increase to 2 percent by 2020, and 3 percent by 2030, nearly 3 million U.S. retirees could be living abroad within two decades. Retirees relocating to developing countries would not only continue to draw Social Security benefits, but they would maintain their current standard of living.
Rajesh wrote:
Apple CEO begs for a bailout from Congress.
Report: Apple used subsidiaries to avoid $44 billion in U.S. taxes - latimes.com
WASHINGTON -- Apple Inc. has used an elaborate web of offshore subsidiaries to avoid paying at least $44 billion in U.S. taxes over the past four years, a Senate investigation has found.
Many of the tactics, such as cost-sharing arrangements, are common among large multinational corporations seeking to shift profits to countries with lower tax rates. The investigation did not find Apple violated any laws.
But three of its subsidiaries in Ireland claim to have no responsibility to pay income taxes to any country, according to a 40-page, bipartisan report released Monday by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
One of those subsidiaries, Apple Operations International, which has no employees but reported $30 billion in income from 2009-2012, has not filed an income tax return in any country for the past five years, the investigation found.
Give Them Our Huddled Masses - By Aaditya Mattoo and Arvind Subramanian | Foreign Policy
To start, consider retirees. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the unfunded pension liability of the state and local governments in the United States ranges between $0.7 trillion and $3 trillion (depending on how assets and liabilities are valued.) Since the net worth of the median household has also declined by 35 percent over the last decade, the prospects of current and future retirees who stay in the United States are dim: They have fewer savings, and their pension incomes will become less reliable.
One dollar will buy twice as much in Costa Rica, and three times as much in Thailand as it does in the United States, as well as the opportunity to hike in Monteverde and sunbathe in Phuket. According to the Social Security Administration, about 350,000 U.S. retirees (about 1 percent of the total) already live abroad, a quarter in developing countries.
Between 2008 and 2010, 35 percent of U.S. retirees who moved abroad headed for the developing world, double the rate of the preceding seven years. If the fraction of those choosing to live overseas were to increase to 2 percent by 2020, and 3 percent by 2030, nearly 3 million U.S. retirees could be living abroad within two decades. Retirees relocating to developing countries would not only continue to draw Social Security benefits, but they would maintain their current standard of living.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has reportedly taken action against the Japanese Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, shutting down a major source of liquidity for the Internet’s unregulated shadow currency. Timothy Lee writes that the federal action against Bitcoin is unsurprising:
In the wake of the Gawker story two years ago, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) described Bitcoin as an “online form of money laundering” and called for the authorities to shutter the Bitcoin-based drug market Silk Road. Yet until recently, the feds have taken a relatively hands-off posture. Agencies have issued guidelines and signaled that they are monitoring the situation, but none have taken active steps to force Bitcoin intermediaries to comply with federal regulations.
Kevin Drum on why the robots will rise up and take all our jobs
It seems like if you have a huge section of people who are unemployed, who don’t really have resources but have a lot of spare time, then there’s a possibility of really huge political mobilizations on the part of those people, like you see in countries nowadays with mass unemployment.
I think that’s likely to be one of the things that happens along the way. Societies that suffer from mass unemployment, the history of what happens to those societies is not a bright one. At some point you have to respond, and there’s going to be a lot of resistance to responding because of ideology, because of politics, because of pure greed, but eventually we are going to respond to this. It’s going to be obvious what’s happening, that people are unemployed due to no fault of their own, and that we have to respond.
In the meantime, we’re going to resist responding, and we’re probably going to resist responding very very strongly, because rich people don’t like giving up their money. We’re in for a few decades of a really grim fight between the poor, who are losing jobs, and the rich, who don’t want to give up their riches.
**It does speak a bit to a split you see on the left between, on the one hand, people who want work to pay more, and be safer, and have dignity, and on the other hand people who think that modern work is wage slavery and needs to be abolished. The world you describe is more hospitable to the latter camp.
**
I’m not sure there are that many people taking the latter position today, but you’re right, in the future we’ll hear this more and more. If I’m right about what happens with artificial intelligence, there won’t be any work, period, so there won’t be dignity in work. We’ll have to find dignity in doing other things. It’s in the medium run, getting there, that I think we’ll have problems.
Freddie Mac Gives Immediate Green Light to Streamlined Modifications
Freddie Mac has opened applications for its new Streamlined Modification program, making it available to all eligible borrowers immediately, six weeks earlier than originally planned. The company said the early implementation was made to expedite financial relief for potentially thousands of distressed families.
Under the program, originally set to begin on July 1, servicers are required to send modification offers to borrowers who are at least 90 days, but no more than 720 days, delinquent on mortgages that are at least 12 months old and meet other eligibility criteria. Eligible borrowers are not required to submit documentation and the modification becomes permanent if the borrower makes on-time payments during the three month trial period.
If Poverty Ends, Then What? - By Daniel Altman | Foreign Policy
Moreover, the most recent research on income and happiness suggests that fighting non-extreme poverty may be just as important to the world's wellbeing as fighting extreme poverty. The link between income and happiness is strong in countries around the globe, and it persists through fairly high levels of income -- above $100,000 a year in the highest-earning countries measured. Perhaps most importantly, the link follows a logarithmic-linear function that is remarkably consistent across countries: the amount of happiness added by increasing incomes by a fixed percentage stays constant as incomes rise.
So, even if the lives of poor farmers and sweatshop workers are improved beyond the level of mere subsistence, further boosts in their material living standards would continue to make them feel better off. Put another way, absolute increases in income will always make people happier, even if their incomes still compare unfavorably to those of their fellow citizens.
The slogan of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is that every human life has equal value. This suggests a simple utilitarian, rather than Rawlsian, view of the world. In other words, every human life is worth the same, and so is its happiness. Making rich people happier by increasing their incomes by 10 percent is therefore just as valuable as making poor people happier by doing the same for them.
In the last year, there has settled, even among the Democrats, a kind of reserved defeat that shows a stunning lack of urgency toward the crisis of long-term joblessness. From abandoning the payroll tax cut in late 2012, to quietly acceding to sequester, to going silent on unemployment, nearly all of Washington -- not just the right -- has essentially stopped talking about the most important economic issue of our time.
High-ranking Treasury officials officials I've spoken with on background couldn't name any specific proposals they have to help the long-term unemployed. Instead, they've argued that general economic growth stuff, such as infrastructure spending, should be enough to put these 4 million people back to work. But the economic literature objects: Fighting vast long-term unemployment with general economic growth policies is like fighting pneumonia with Vitamin C.
Mary wrote:
I'm thinking, the question is, how will governments and industry put youth and adults back to work.
Germany, France to Unveil ‘New Deal’ for EU’s Jobless Youth - Bloomberg
Germany and France will announce joint proposals this month to address Europe’s soaring youth unemployment, the Labor Ministry in Berlin said, confirming a newspaper report of a planned “New Deal for Europe.”
The blueprint will be unveiled in Paris on May 28 and will enroll the European Investment Bank to unlock billions of euros in loans to companies that create jobs for young people, the Rheinische Post reported today. The proposals are part of a joint initiative termed a “New Deal for Europe” that echoes former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s drive to cut U.S. unemployment in the 1930s, the newspaper said.
The economy of the 17-nation euro area will probably shrink for a second year while unemployment will rise to a record 12.2 percent, the EU Commission said May 3 as it presented new forecasts. Youth unemployment -- defined as people aged below 25 without work -- rose to 24 percent in the single currency area in March, according to Eurostat.
The average masked rates of 56 percent in Spain and 38 percent in Portugal and Italy. Youth unemployment in the EU will remain above 17 percent until 2015, the International Labor Organization said May 8 in a report called “Generation at Risk.” The rate in Germany in March was 7 percent.
Rob Dawg wrote:
If mortgage apps and re-fis crater it will see 1.6x again and fast.
Housing Headlines Mask Unsettling Trends
In its April Housing Data Wrap-Up Wells Fargo's economists summarize the nation's housing picture: "While most of the housing-related headline numbers continue to improve, the underlying details give us some pause."
One headline, the surprising spurt in housing starts in March. A 1.04 million unit annualized rate marked the highest pace since June 2008. Rising above one-million units was a significant milestone, however the increase was totally in the multi-family sector, and single-family starts fell 4.8 percent.
The Bank says another disconcerting signal comes from the growing divergence between the homeownership rate and the recent spike in prices. Rising home prices usually coincide with rising demand as more households form or people's preferences swing toward homeownership.
The Banks says neither trend appears to be present today. Household formation rose 980,000 in 2012, compared to the long term annual average of 1.28 million between 1965 and 2001. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of new households are choosing to rent rather than own their home. The homeownership rate fell 0.4 percentage points during the first quarter to 65.0 percent and is now at levels last seen in the mid-1990s.
Outsider wrote:
Monsanto wins against a 75 y.o. farmer? Gee, what a surprise.
Monsanto Wins Seed Case as High Court Backs Patent Rights - Bloomberg
Biotechnology companies, software makers and research universities backed Monsanto in the case. Makers of replacement auto parts and the American Antitrust Institute supported Bowman.
Bowman sought to get around Monsanto’s rules from 1999 to 2007 by buying less expensive soybeans from a grain elevator. Because the elevator accepted harvests from farmers using Monsanto seeds, the second-generation beans proved to be herbicide-resistant. The farmer says he saved $30,000 for his farm.
When Monsanto found out about the practice, the company sued Bowman. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the award against Bowman in 2011. The appeals court said Bowman “created a newly infringing article” by growing a new generation of soybeans with the seed.
The Supreme Court today rejected Bowman’s contention that Monsanto had “exhausted” its patent rights by the time he bought the seed.
http://rt.com/news/bloomberg-spying-scandal-bernanke-geithner-180/
In a new twist of the Bloomberg spying scandal a former company employee has revealed journalists allegedly spied on the Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and former Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner through the news terminals.
Bloomberg journalists had access to what both Bernanke and Geithner were using the private company’s business terminals for: information regarding news, equity markets and bonds.
Though, the former Bloomberg employee told CNBC the information was general rather than specific, although knowing how often a user logged on and what information they were searching for could provide valuable insight into their concerns.
The former Bloomberg employee, who used to work for the editorial section, didn't say specifically what he was looking at, but added that he and some of his colleagues also used to call up information on the officials “just for fun”, showing newcomers “how powerful” their terminals were.
Does anyone think that Bloomberg might have had a trapdoor which allowed them to front run the market?
Mary wrote:
Why did you abandon Ayn Rand "truth"?
???
Mary wrote:
Suck on that a bit ...
Upanishads and Gilgamesh. So what?
Mary wrote:
BUT the text.
On the way, of course, we have two wonderful examples of the sheer brilliance of the texts of our own legacy bringing us to our own self-founding as inheritors of a history and its institutions that we did not found (and sometimes did not even find). Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle reads like a montage of early twentieth century discourses—its literary, speculative and scientific resources somehow usurp their own authority by their being mixed. But perhaps the peculiarity of this text lies in its main topic: repetition. Repetition simultaneously makes its mastery possible while eluding mastery. Derrida’s text is mostly concerned with revealing, exploiting, and performing the effects of repetition on mastery. And his affirmation, as always, would be towards a responsibility that is not, nor ever could be, a form of mastery, but in its coming-up-against authorities is ideally placed to expose the violence of their mystical foundation.
Mary wrote:
all Freud literature. Insidious, no?
The Feminine Mystique Betty Friedan (1963)
The concept ‘penis envy’, which Freud coined to describe a phenomenon he observed in women – that is, in the middle-class women who were his patients in Vienna in the Victorian era – was seized in this country in the 1940s as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women. Many who preached the doctrine of endangered femininity reversing the movement of American women towards independence and identity, never knew its Freudian origin. Many who seized on it – not the few psychoanalysts, but the many popularisers, sociologists, educators, ad-agency manipulators, magazine writers, child experts, marriage counsellors, ministers, cocktail-party authorities – could not have known what Freud himself mean by penis envy. One needs only to know what Freud was describing, in those Victorian women, to see the fallacy in literally applying his theory of femininity to women today. And one needs only to know why he described it in that way to understand that much of it is obsolescent contradicted by knowledge that is part of every social scientist’s thinking today, but was not yet known in Freud’s time.
skk wrote:
for me it was something different.
Catharsis.
lawyerliz wrote:
I broke my piece of chalk.
One day when the teacher walked into the classroom, she noticed that someone had written the word 'PENIS' (in tiny letters) on the blackboard. She scanned the class looking for a guilty face. Finding none, she rubbed the word off and began class. The next day, the word 'PENIS' was written on the board again; this time it was written about halfway across the board. Again she looked around in vain for the culprit, so she proceeded with the day's lesson. Every morning for about a week, she went into the classroom and found the same disgusting word written on the board, each day's being larger than the previous one, and each being rubbed off vigorously. At the end of the second week, she walked in expecting to be greeted by the same word on the board but instead found the words: "The more you rub it, the bigger it gets."
HomeGnome wrote:
Is there a doctor in the house? almost I know nussing! NUSSING!
HomeGnome wrote:
got the pasta carbonara with an actual raw egg on top because we asked the chef for it
If you can't remember the pasta, you're doomed to reheat it.
Page not found | New Economic Perspectives
Brown and Vitter do not understand the import of the facts of Lehman’s failure. “Capital” is merely an accounting residual: assets – liabilities = capital. Accounting control frauds like Lehman (see my House testimony for details) massively overstate asset values. Frauds also use many scams to dramatically understate liabilities. (Lehman used an accounting scam to substantially understate its debt levels.) There are also scams that directly create fictional capital. See my description in earlier articles of the Icelandic banks’ scams in which they lent money to their shareholders to buy their shares.
Brown and Vitter do not understand the ephemeral nature of capital. “Capital requirements will focus on common equity and other pure, loss-absorbing forms of capital.” Brown and Vitter’s conception that capital can be something that is “pure” and can be counted on to be there when the bank fails to “absorb” “loss” is a dangerous delusion that demonstrates that Brown and Vitter do not understand the most basic and critical concepts of finance, accounting, and regulation. They seem to believe that there is some vault in a bank that holds “capital” and that there is “pure” capital that will remain in the “pure” “capital” vault even after the bank is looted. It is dangerous to believe in such absurd myths.
Brown and Vitter have forgotten recent history, when Congress successfully extorted the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), demanding that they change generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) so that the largest banks would not have to recognize their massive losses on their loans and toxic derivatives. That accounting travesty remains the rule today, which means that we have systematically overstated bank asset values – which means that we systematically overstate bank capital. Brown and Vitter propose no change to end this travesty. Instead they spread fantasies about “pure” capital.
There was blood in the water Wednesday at Yonkers City Hall where 28 bidders gathered to buy a piece of the city’s $5.3 million in unpaid taxes.
While on the books, that debt grew at 12 percent a year, and was worth $636,000 a year to the city and its taxpayers. But that money would only materialize when the city was able to collect it, or convert it into cash through the sale of property taken by foreclosure.
The 2013 tax lien sale played out over four hours in the fourth-floor council chambers at City Hall. Twenty-eight bidders were scattered around the room, with four professional investors camped out with laptop computers at a table inside the railings. Each bidder had a number that they raised to bid in the auction on the interest rate they’d get on the tax-lien. The bidding started at 12 percent, and went down from there.
Several of the investors purchased scores of tax liens. One particularly aggressive bidder, who declined to give his name, told Tax Watch he was buying the liens for a Wall Street investment house, which would bundle the debt, and securitize it in a bond to be sold to an investor, much like mortgages are sold.
Homebuilders can't find enough qualified workers - Yahoo! Finance
U.S. builders and the subcontractors they depend on are struggling to hire fast enough to meet rising demand for new homes.
Builders would be starting work on more homes — and contributing more to the economy — if they could fill more job openings.
In the meantime, workers in the right locations with the right skills are commanding higher pay.
Consider Richard Vap, who owns a drywall installation company. The resurgent housing market has sent builders calling again. Vap would love to help — if he could hire enough qualified people.
"There is a shortage of manpower," says Vap, owner of South Valley Drywall in Littleton, Colo. "We're probably only hiring about 75 or 80 percent of what we actually need."
Antipodes wrote:
Maybe I better make another batch. Laughing out loud
robj wrote:
(A young Sam Bush on mandolin.)
Old Sam Bush:
robj wrote:
Also,
Had the hots for her when she worked at Max's Kansas City in Manhattan. Long story. One of the best looking and most intelligent woman that I ever met. Still can't understand what she saw in Graham.
josap wrote:
One day you can retire, the next day you have to work until you are 70.
Big opportunity coming up in Syria. Don't miss out!
skk wrote:
We are not Judeo Christians. We are Greco Romans.
Architecture, aesthetics, athletics, philosophy, law, democracy, gymnasium, public works, roads, university, mathematics, theater, citizen, senator, secularism and other minor stuff.
YouTube - What have the Romans ever done for us