Not an expert, but it could be a domino effect of a loose screw scenario, causing all the screws to be snapped off. Here in Toronto (Canada), we've seen significance increases of fatal accidents of these type because of (mostly truck's) poor maintenance causing wheels flying off & killed people. It's the driver's (or trucking companies') fault. The interviewed Police usually warn viewers that because we here often need (and should!) change between summer/winter tires, we need to make sure the tires are balanced and the screws are properly tightened. The garages usually wash their hands off from accident liabilities and insurance companies rarely go after the garages as well.

I'm thinking one or two firecrackers could trigger the domino effect

One precaution if I may. Do not use this tactic on commercial aircraft. It could cause a domino effect. Ok to do in the First Class section as there would be a barrier to protect Economy section.

Your video, The Brick Double-Domino Effect Explained, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

You are right. They have taken it to a very extreme level. However, I can see their rationale to it. It's essentially a domino effect in that if the first person hadn't leaked it, then the 100k others wouldn't have gotten ahold of it. Does that make each one worth $450k . . . no.

I wouldn't mind seeing massive piraters sued for the monetary value of everything in their playlist (i.e., if it's a buck off iTunes, and they have 100k sounds, then they stole 100k.)

To say that every pirated piece is a lost sale, you are correct to say no. However, it still makes it a theft. While I technically didn't lose money . . . you still stole it. That's why I believe in ad revenue such as iTunes Radio, Pandora, I heart Radio etc. So I get doubly pissed when content providers make a song free via advertising, and then people bitch about that. lol Like, Hulu.

People normally pay $100/mo to watch 14 minutes of commercials per hour, but complain when they pay nothing to watch only 3 minutes worth.

I was all for ad revenue, except, my brother and I sold graphics. Not exactly something we could put ads on. We actually had people who'd buy it from us, and then throw it up on their site for a fraction of the price….

In that regard, if someone is profiting off my work, then the fabled revenue lost is 100% tangible. So for Megaupload et al who made real money (not just legit P2P sharing) I'm all for sticking them with the maximum fine possible. If I make a piece of digital goods and you make $1,000 off it, then that's my grand, not yours.

Which is why there are big stock photo/video sites who basically screw over the little person but are at least legit. They pay their up loaders, albeit small amounts, to generate profit off having tons of content. Way more content than any one individual can create. So the same as Megaupload, only, they're not stealing or encouraging people indirectly to use their service to host any and all files you'd like to share while we knowingly look the other way towards our profit margins.

Anyway, that's mostly a rant at this point. :-p

4 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

>> ^mgittle:

If the bank in your latest example can't satisfy withdrawal demands, it probably borrows money from a commercial bank, which can request money from the Fed to cover the difference.

Change the word "request" to the word "borrow" and that's correct.

>> ^mgittle:
So, yes, the bank is not literally creating the money on its own, but it seems to me that banks granting loans for more money than they possess at any given time is the most significant reason for the Fed to have the ability to increase the money supply.

Again, banks aren't granting loans for more money than they posses. In the example above, they have $1,000, they can loan out $900, because they're legally required to hold 10% reserves.

Now, their balance sheet shows the following:

+$100 cash on hand as reserves
-$1000 owed to depositor
+$900 in debt owed to them by borrower
+$X in interest on debt owed to them by borrower

Which nets out to +$X interest in net worth.

There are two big risks with this arrangement:

#1: The depositor wants to close his account before the loan matures. The bank doesn't have the money to cover the withdrawl, and will need to borrow funds from another bank. If the borrowing costs are higher than the expected return from its loan, the bank is insolvent, and is gonna die. On conventional banks, the government will step in and cover the depositor's accounts up to some arbitrary dollar amount (I think it's still $250k), but the bank owners will be fired, and they'll seek out someone else to buy the bank and take over future operations.

#2: The borrower defaults on his loan. Since we're talking about only 1 depositor and 1 borrower, this single failure is the equivalent of 100% of the bank's borrowers defaulting at once. This too will result in the government stepping in, covering depositor's accounts, and restructuring the bank and selling them off.

What happened with the US financial crash was that a big, non-insured bank (Lehman Brothers) got hit by scenario #2, and since it was not a traditional, FDIC-insured bank, they just let it go bankrupt, and let the investor accounts get wiped out.

That started a panic, and led to lots of people pulling money out of other similar banks, leading to widespread cases of #1 happening, which had the effect of making banks default on loans they'd taken out with other banks, starting a new wave of #2...

That's why this system is fragile, and none of this has anything to do with monetary policy yet. This is all fiscal and regulatory policy.

What happened was that even after TARP stopped that domino effect of #2 leading to #1 leading to #2 again, banks were worried that all debt was much risker than they'd formerly believed, and so they raised the costs of borrowing (the interest rate) to sky-high levels, which severely curtailed the amount of people borrowing money to invest in real-world business activity.

That drop in investment led to a drop in production, which led to a drop in employment, which led to a drop in consumer demand, which led to a drop in production...

So now, the Fed is stepping in with monetary policy, and trying every trick in the book to stuff the banks with reserves, so they'll lower interest rates. They've had some success, but it isn't really doing the whole job, because unemployment is already so high, and consumer spending is so low, nobody wants to invest in expanding their business, no matter how cheap borrowing costs are...

That's what monetary policy is really about, stabilizing the interest rates and the overall flow of goods and services in the economy. When the economy slows, the Fed pumps money into the economy to try to make it go again. When it starts overheating (and leading to inflation), it siphons money out of the system to slow it down a bit.

Fiat currency doesn't really depend on growth -- if anything, growth depends on fiat currency, and the application of good monetary policy.

My hope is that this passes and it has a domino effect in other states. I'm in Canada where the majority of the public would support legislation like this but our political leaders are threatened by the US ambassador every time the issue comes up. If it becomes normalized in th US it will then be politically feasible to legalize or decriminalize it here in Canada. So thank you California.

Right at 1:03 you can see the 5th guy in the domino effect cop a feel on the busty lady in front of him, I wonder if she was "Feeling His Presence".

I don’t know where conservatives get their crystal ball, but I hope they kept the receipt. Lets take a look at their track record:

*Prediction: The Iraq war will be over in six months
*Prediction: Our troops will be welcomed as heros, candy and flowers will rain down on them
*Prediction: The oil revenues will pay for the Iraq war.
*Prediction: Overthrowing Sadam will cause a domino effect of stability breaking out in the Mid East
*Prediction: WMD will be found in Iraq
*Prediction: A connection between Sadam and 9-11 will be proven.
*Prediction: The autopsy will prove Terry Schivio had a fully functioning brain
*Prediction: It will be proven that Mark Foley/Larry Craig were set up by dastardly liberal operatives.

Basically, these tools couldn’t predict six o’clock at five-thirty. Additionally, this Gerald Celente has been making the same predictions for the last 20 years. It’s almost as if he wants these things to happen.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I understand that if AIG is allowed to fail, it could be a domino effect and completely destroy our financial system. So nationalise these fuckers completely and fire the management team. We'd need to disband Moodys too because AIG relied on their crappy, incestuous rating system to calculate their insurance risk.

It was the "implied" government backing of companies like AIG, Freddy and Fannie that contributed to this mess. Might as well go the whole hog now.

NIST has a comprehensive report detailing how this particular structure collapsed, and how come others that have either been engulfed in flames for DAYS, OR also hit by a plane, did not collapse in the same manner.

It has to do with the way the floors were constructed around a central pillar.

Trusses linked to the outer frame, and the inner core with a few simple angle clips to hold and share the load, with no free-standing pillars like conventional towers. This gave the floors much much more open floor space than any other tower out there...with obvious advantages.

Take some of the clips out of one floor thats hooked into the outer shell, and you have to share the load of the floor on the rest of the clips.

Shock load the clips and you stress them to a point where they cant hold as much weight prior to a collapse as they used to.

Strip the fire-proofing material off the steel that was rated to handle fires much much hotter than jet fuel could possibly provide, expose said steel to a mix of noxious gasses (created by burning old office equipment) that destroyed basic bonds holding the alloys in the steel together and you turn said steel into iron...drastically lowering its strength potential.

Heat the iron up, she melts...more clips fail, floor pancakes onto one below it. The one below is shock loaded and snaps instantly.....domino effect ensues, tower collapses into its own footprint at close to free-fall.

And yes, concrete can vaporise if you provide enough force.

Other towers either hit by a plane, or had been exposed to much hotter fires for far longer, had drastically different internal designs. They had a series of cubes connecting to one another, essentially an intricate pattern of concrete covered steel beams criss-crossing their way through the entire structure.

Take one beam out (either by fire or collision)...big whoop, theres 300 others to do its job. Not so with twin towers, the clips holding the trusses were limited, and a significant portion of them on the central impact floor were taken out in the collision.

This is more of a 'Rube Goldberg machine' (instead of a 'Domino effect').

(This also may be a dupe - I'd be surprised otherwise).
I suggest you edit the title and description accordingly. I will edit this comment.

I'll reluctantly rain on the parade here -
she definitely and sadly has a mental disorder that puts herself and the public at risk. It's sad, and there's definitely a lesson that should be had about how to deal with the situation, identify the people and provide them with the help they need.

Sometimes it could just be getting the right prescription drugs - and unfortunately there's a domino effect with this dilemma - don't take the prescription drugs and you're in no shape to be getting the prescription drugs you need to get back on track.

Unless some samaritan of the public would ensure they get the help they need. But first they may need to put the camera down.

>> ^J-Rova:
> Cartel? Like drugs? Oil? :-P And of course it's a bunch of banks! They have all the information! Would you rather it be a collection of... say, hospitals, making all the same decisions? I can picture that - "Well, Mr. Bernanke, there were an unusually high number of influenza cases this year, sooo ahh, let's see.... ahh, fuck it - we recommend contracting the money supply to prevent inflation." ???? HAH!

It's a bunch of private banks. This is akin to having wolves guarding a hen house.

>> Since mid-2007, Bernanke has been hiking rates for people who were solvent, and lowering for the ones who were not.
> Hiking and lowering rates at the same time, for specific people? I'm not sure where you got that.

You don't understand what I'm saying because you're in over your head. Starting in December 2007 the Fed started auctioning huge short-term loans at the 3% rate, available only to the big banks. This brand new loan mechanism is called the TAF: (Temporary) Term Auction Facility. It has allowed institutions like Citibank and Bank of America to stay afloat despite having no reserves of their own. They will carry on renewing these loans indefinitely as long as they can provide the collateral.

It just so happens that for everyone else, interest rates are determined by the market and not by the Fed, and are a function of risk. No one but the big banks get loans at 3%. Last week, municipalities were forced to raise rates from 4% to 20%, and even at this rate they can't get buyers for their bonds. These finance basic services such as hospitals. Now there are about $265 billion in outstanding municipal bonds (i.e., bonds that haven't found buyers). Mortgage rates have skyrocketed, meaning people can't refinance their houses at acceptable rates. Even prime mortgages are at risk now, and the crisis will spread.

The Fed has provided extremely low rate loans only to big banks -- precisely the ones who caused this crisis and shouldn't be artificially kept afloat. Meanwhile, the market has screwed over the parties who were still solvent by giving them huge rates due to the perceived high risks. By not forcing the exposure and liquidation of bad debt tied to banks, the Fed is creating the conditions for a domino effect. If conditions continue to deteriorate, Americans will have a deflationary credit crisis similar to the one seen in the 1930's.

People borrowed money they couldn't afford to borrow, and lenders allowed them to do it. They all miscalculated some of the risks involved, and it finally started biting some people in the ass. This is NOT the Fed's fault!

The Fed is partly responsible by keeping artificially low interest rates, which gave rise to the credit bubble. Today the Fed is accountable for providing liquidity to float junk assets owned by big depositary institutions, temporarily favoring them and creating the conditions for a widespread credit collapse.

>> Everything connected to the Fed is secretive, and not even members of Congress with the highest clearance can find out what's going on.
> Is this bad?

It's bad because it lets bankers manipulate the market. The President's Working Group on Financial Markets (a.k.a. Plunge Protection Team) is the prime example.

I'm all for having educated discussions about the economy. but I sense that you're the kind of person who first makes his mind and then tries to find arguments to back up your claims. Quoting a few paragraphs from Wikipedia doesn't show the Fed's integrity. If you want to find the truth, look at the market. It can be temporarily manipulated, but in the end it never lies.