patrick.net

I think many on this site would argue that that’s not government’s role at all.

of course they would. they frequently do. the view in australia, as a fairly recently settled ex-colony in a hostile environment, was that govt should be present to correct deficiencies and lend a hand when times are hard. hence, people traditionally turn to govt for solutions here more so than in the US, for instance. (and think about what a 'governor' does on a steam engine.) however, public opinion and the US national trait is one of individualism and fatalism, for better or worse. (i would argue it is often for the worse, and at best fatalism is just a coping or ego defence mechanism.)

i would hate to think that the american view of the role of govt is limited to making war, spending inordinate amounts of taxpayers' money on armaments, harassing other countries for advantage, and so on. traditionally, americans somehow see politics and their govt as being there to facilitate business.

Governments have by and large abandoned their traditional role of taking responsibility for the equitable redistribution of wealth and privilege in a democratic society, and have increasingly left that job up to the markets, a policy which has been complicit with the sort of inequity the politics of division are designed to cover.

Because someone did tear down that wall?

Oops, it shouldn't have had the #comments thing at the end. Here's a tinyurl:

http://tinyurl.com/2v9cpt

Because someone did tear down that wall?

what's THAT got to do with anything?

That role of the government was proven to be inappropriate.

Peter P Says:
That role of the government was proven to be inappropriate.

if you say so... they're your ghettos, after all...

@SP,

My pleasure.

they’re your ghettos

Fair description of the Bay Area.

[quote]I keep getting (ir?)rational urges to short WaMu, even with their 5% dividend yield. [/quote]

I have a large cash position right now, and I'm not keeping it in banks like WaMu for similar irrational urges.

SP

You just invoked a lot of memories. Man.

See if you can find me in this old archive from the day (when SLIP PPP was a big deal).

http://scout.wisc.edu/Projects/PastProjects/NH/95-02/95-02-16/0023.html

uucp in the house

Stop it, before this gets out of hand and all the youngsters head back to MySpace and YouTube.

Nah, Randy, we're all hanging out at woot.com right now.

It looks as if the housing equity sector in Spain is tanking. Can you spell
G-L-O-B-A-L housing problems?
Hope the link works
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/060c6658-f287-11db-a454-000b5df10621.html

We are presently renting while we try to hunker down from the housing bubble issues. At first I felt guilty watching my 75 year old landlord mow the lawn, however his control freak wife keeps refusing my offers to help with the gardening. One day, he came over with his arm in a sling and all his wife would do was bitch at him as he is trying to mow the lawn with one arm.

I'm keeping up my CPR skills in case he drops dead in front of me.

Has anybody noticed the US market indices spurting new highs almost daily ?
And the US dollar falling in value against most of the world?
Is it that private equity has taken around 5% of stocks to buy off the public market leaving the foreigners' insatiable appetite to fund our folly chasing the crumbs left behind ?
Or is this the time of the year to sell into this nonsense and buy into the "sell in May and go away" theory which worked like a charm last year ?
The 30 dow components are thrashing predicted earnings helping lure more $$ into their stock prices as the rally is picking up more steam. Charts are strong . Momentum is strong . Earnings ditto . Outlooks super . More company buy backs helping EPS . TECH FINANCIALS OIL RETAIL all are on FIRE
China growth is shazam
Russia Kaboom
Germany bo yah
England -sterling over 2
Arabs windfalling at over $60 a barrel every minute of every day going going going up up up where will it stop ?
That late Feb swoon in hindsight was a major buy signal .
OK it is easy doing monday morning quarterbacking.
Isn't anybody bearish ? All bulls ? What happened to that 4 year business cycle ?
Heck I don't know and been bearish for last 2 months and have lost way too much money being the pessimist I am .
Will I be broke before the market turns south ??
Like casey serin ?
Should I start a stock losers' blog to bum money or google adsense ?
Gas going to $4 doesn't hurt consumer spending but increases it ?
I thought I knew my chit but the market is telling me not to fight it and join the party which is very hard for me to do.
If we don't tank in May then I will be even poorer .
Should I invest in real estate to cushion my stock losses ?
he he
HELP !

Quote (while working a college student-programmer-consultant job):

"If you learn Banyan Vines, you'll be set for life. Trust me."

This guy was an Amdahl expert. I was working on a Prolog and SAS project at the time.

appletalk

localtalk in the house!

INT 13 0

danville_woman said:
One day, he came over with his arm in a sling and all his wife would do was bitch at him as he is trying to mow the lawn with one arm.

I’m keeping up my CPR skills in case he drops dead in front of me.

Based on the description you gave of his charming wife, I would guess the poor guy would NOT be too grateful at being revived!

SP

HelloKitty Says:
Now you are OUTED as the pre-internet BBSing geezers that u r , grok them apples!!!!

Huh? This is hardly the first time I have mentioned usenet in nostalgic terms - in fact I (being elitist, after all) think the internet used to be better when most of the folks on it were from .edu and .net domains. Less noise back then, even with the tradeoff that one had to uudecode the files from alt.s.p. :-)

SP

justme Says:
ROT13, anyone?

Ah, yes - many a time on rec.humor. (Whatever happened to Henry Cate III?)

In fact, IIRC, I think the first shell-script I wrote back in school was:
tr 'A-M N-Z a-m n-z' 'N-Z A-M n-z a-m'

SP

I bet the kids today think "Archie, Veronica & Gopher" are just comic book characters. Wait... do they even know what a "comic book" is?

Shit, I feel really old now. Maybe I should start hanging out at MySpace & Woot.

HARM Says:
I bet the kids today think “Archie, Veronica & Gopher” are just comic book characters.

I actually have a 11 year old niece who thinks these are comics for 'old people' at the supermarket. She reads some other (post Ranma) japanese comics that I cannot grok - most of which seem heavy on fantasy and girl-power themes, and very low on original plot.

SP

"US Out of the Middle East AND San Francisco"

http://www.brumm.com/antiwar/jan18/07.html

When you consider that roughly 50% of SF residents are renters (and thereby unAmerican), and combine that with non-US citizens who own property/mortgages there, then the U.S. is sort of out of SF already. Or vice-versa.

In many ways, the charge of "un-American" levied these past several years against anyone who isn't completely behind the war in Iraq, is very similar to attitudes towards those of us who did not take the creative loans, did not participate in the bidding wars, and stubbornly continue to rent. I realize the post is tongue-in-cheek, but I do see a corollary. The sentiment of "if you're not with us, you're against us" is quite evident in the reaction to HARMs posts to the SDCIA Jeff thread.

Hey, if logic, reason and making informed decisions are unAmerican, then I wear the scarlet "R" proudly.

Thanks Peter P for another thought provoking contribution.

If you look through the 'GO-Zone' thread at the SDCIA message board, you can find a post from the FB-du-jour indicating he got most (9, including the 3 FL turkeys) of his properties via an organisation fronted by a Marshall Reddick.

Does this name ring bells with any of you guys/gals? As an Australian I have a vague recollection of seeing the name in relation to some RE Investment Seminars, but nothing past that.

Randy H,

My bad. I had no inkling SL was making those types of claims. A 12,000 % return is realistic though, right? Gotta go, see you "loosers" later!

Jon,

I've been following the "7-11 of financial services" for some time. They get slammed over at www.rrmag.com in the broker forms w/ regularity. Perhaps Amway would be more appropriate?

DinOR

It's just a bit obfuscated, that's how they get away with it. It's not the SL makers who promise these things directly. They just use the hype they've fanned to promote themselves (increasing demand for their fake-money printed and sold with a click of the mouse). And they enforce a system of rules that perpetuates an internal pyramid economy. But they claim it's not their doing, it's what all the players have determined to do themselves.

Not unlike if the NYSE were to allow companies to self report, do anything they want, so long as they agreed to only trade in NYSE printed money. There'd be a small group of companies that would quickly end up controlling everything, and the NYSE would profit wildly so long as they could convince newcomers to list, for the hope of also being one of those select rich winning companies. But of course, the game is rigged from the outset by the rules (only big companies can exchange NYSE bux for USD bux at a fair rate, for exmaple; everyone else only gets to take out amounts smaller than they put in, after which their exchange rates spike to "tax" away all their winnings and redistribute them back to the big boys).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_inflation

Food and Energy are demand inelastic. In other words, people cannot substitute and will buy the same amount (in aggregate) regardless of price in the short term. (They will adjust over the longer term by finding near-substitutes. But near term, people just pay more).

This means Food and Energy are highly volatile and suffer lots of short-term price shocks. Since inflation measures are intended to measure long-term future inflation trends, short-term noise must be eliminated. Otherwise you'd have the Fed changing rates every 22 days.

Since people do adjust over time, if price shocks aren't shocks, but permanent, the inflation gets captured by downstream price inflation in other items that are measured.

> WHY is food and energy excluded from inflation calculations?

Food and energy prices are more volatile, i.e. they change often and faster up and down, depending on harvest, world crisis etc. It would be unwise to try tuning a policy so that complete inflation is in a certain interval, like 1 to 3%, because events outside the policy influence the outcome so much. Instead an index is chosen for the tuning, from which food and energy are excluded. Not excluded are the consequences of higher food and energy price: When trucking becomes more expensive, for examples, retailers would like to give their increased costs to the consumer. If they have that pricing power, it's a sign for inflation, too.

Randy H,

I stand corrected. Perhaps the "disconnect" (for me) was that HYIP's were SO deceptive that an initial purchase was all that was required of the "investor". No further manipulation needed. Just sit back and watch those bucks roll in!

SL OTOH, further deludes participants into believing their "market activity" will somehow change their end result.

Jon,

This is simply a way for citigroup to go after the low end of the market without bigger investors knowing they'll take anyone's money! Just as a number of "those sleazy subprime lenders" are actually subsidiaries of large publicly traded banks.

There was a huge test case brought against another "main street" firm (no not Edward Jones) where the firm insisted that their agents were totally independent, yet remarkably all of these "independent agents" had placed their clients in oddly the EXACT same mutual funds/investments. Funny, huh? So it was clear that these guys/gals were taking their "marching orders" from corporate! The bottom line is that everyone in mgmt. in retail securities views the broker's client's (and their money) as "their" money. Gets old don't it?

DinOR

Maybe it's more of a case of Linden Lab running a pool hall, where the back room is used for poker. They don't specifically say it's for poker. But everyone goes in there to play poker. And, you have to pay the pool hall to go in that room. And, the fat cats who are there every night get special seating by the little windows that reflect the other player's cards.

Person Said:

Re: core inflation, I understand the point about food and energy being more volatile, but you don’t need to remove them to eliminate noise. You can use another trick called a “running average”.

My post got cut off for some reason, here's the rest:

EXACTLY (to "Person's" post). Why is it that anything that might RAISE inflation measurements automatically disqualified, while anything that LOWERS inflation is A-ok? The boyz at the Fed/BLS don't know how to do moving averages/data smoothing? Please...

I stand by Barry Ritholtz's definition of the CPI: "inflation ex-inflation".

@Randy H,

Yeah, and "looser" racks!

HARM

They don't put food and energy back in when they go down in price either. Energy went down quite a bit in price recently, yet they still excluded it from the core metric. In fact, that demonstrates the reasoning.

I will agree that they'd be better to leave it in and instead apply a smoothing function. But then we'd all be fighting about the smoothing function, wouldn't we?

I'm reporting this fellow to the Housing UnAmerican Activities Community. He is trying to ruin housing values with his small homes.
Point your Mosaic browser at the link below and check it out (my first tiny url, I am going to like internets 2.0)
http://tinyurl.com/349mlh

I’m reporting this fellow to the Housing UnAmerican Activities Community.

Your co-operation is most appreciated. We will take action to ensure that our traditional values are preserved and American Dreams are fulfilled.