So what the comments so far here resemble may be perhaps an example of a sense of doubt based-upon a lifetime of a steady diet of a formulaic and programmed expectation of how reporting should be rendered in order to feed a denial of common-sense equity, and civil liberties being shat upon, then digested, and fed back disguised as a healthy sustenance?

Perhaps if Brian Williams raps it out you can all continue to swallow cheeseburgers after voting in the next major election of cunts who'll straighten-out the foul injustice of unprofessional journalism...

Thanks mate, very nice comment of you.

Always like to hear different viewpoints, makes me consider ideas I hadn't and also bulk up my own point of view, so all good

I suppose they're all specific specialities of the broader business field, I would also add accounting but they are very broadly interrelated. For example in bank lending decisions, discounted cash flow estimations (finance) which are reliant on income statement and balance sheet information are just as important as IS/BS audit expertise (accounting) which assesses the credibility of their reporting. This is especially true for smaller, privately owned entities (who obviously can't rely on public equity, so are generally bank reliant). Large publicly listed companies have much more stringent auditing requirements already, and public disclosure means that they are highly open to scrutiny.

Economics beyond 101 basics is generally is more of an academic niche. The macroeconomic side looking at large scale GDP, inflation, employment etc., is relied upon in government, treasuries and policy think tanks. Large listed companies would certainly have a dedicated in-house team for consultations. Medium sized companies might contract dedicated industry research consultant firms, but outside of that their use is quite limited.

The microeconomic side is industry specific looking at competitive behaviour inter-firm, with suppliers and customers. It's generally a more wishy washy field which introduces some amateur psychology via behavioural economics and game theory. It's more of an academic field really. I can imagine large multinationals with few competitors employing them or hiring consultants. We have a near duopoly here in supermarkets and I can see them using microeconomic theory in pricing decisions for example.

Delaware is considered a northern state. Maybe not by you but by others.
And when I lived in Maryland, everyone there seemed to consider it a northern state too. But ok, you don't consider it a northern state. Cool.
(Ask anyone in Boston if he is a "Yankee" and see how that goes!)

But what's your point now? You agree that the Civil War was a "War to preserve the Union, not a Lincoln crusade to end slavery". That's why he did not invade or interfere with the border states. They did not secede. So how is this relevant to the original point about Jon Stewart thinking otherwise and going off on Andrew Napolitano about it? And are you now trying to claim that the north was acting in "self-defense" because of southern attacks on federal forts?


"In 1862, the General Assembly replied to Lincoln's compensated emancipation offer with a resolution stating that, "when the people of Delaware desire to abolish slavery within her borders, they will do so in their own way, having due regard to strict equity." And they furthermore notified the administration that they regarded "any interference from without" as "improper," and a thing to be "harshly repelled.""

The proposal was never put to a vote. It was not tried in other states. And it was not addressed directly to the slave owners but to politicians in the Assembly. No effort was put into it.

Among the tactics employed by the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danes, and others were slave rebellions, abolitionist campaigns to gain public support for emancipation, election of anti-slavery politicians, encouragement and assistance of runaway slaves, raising private funds to purchase the freedom of slaves, and the use of tax dollars to buy the freedom of slaves.

The most charitable thing I could say is that Lincoln tried but failed to come up with and implement any other way to end slavery but to engage in 'bloodshed and violence' (putting aside that he claimed to not care to end slavery except as a way to get one over on the South).

Still, that only says something about his competency, his "political genius" as some say (or lack of it), but not about whether there were other options available that could have worked without the 620,000 dead and 800,000+ more maimed-or-disfigured-for-life.

Of course, there is no empirical way to 'prove' or 'disprove' that any more than there is any empirical way to 'prove' or 'disprove' that, without two nukes, Japan would have lost the war, or that without the Korean war, the Communists would have taken over the world, or that without the Iraq invasion, Saddam would not have built "weapons of mass destruction" to unleash on the world.

What if 'peaceful secession' would have neutered the federal enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act (which Lincoln strongly supported), creating a flood of runaway slaves that could not have been stopped and would have broken the back of the slave system'?

The Soviet Union collapsed on its own without the US and its allies going into a bloody war against it. Maybe if the US had started a third world war with the USSR, it would have collapsed sooner. But it certainly would not have been worth the 'blood and violence'. And it is far from certain that the 5 years of Civil War accelerated the end of slavery, while it has certainly served to bolster and continue the decades of segregation, discrimination, and abuse that followed.

The first Republican president seems to have set a precedent for later Republican neocons. When faced with a problem ---> go to war.

Not a big fan of this show but I do like how well he played them. You could tell Cuban was going to go in big the whole time.

As the for the app itself, king of pointless as it only works with one phone and you're not likely to get any good pictures having to find a very flat surface from which to shoot. The underlying technology however seems pretty novel and I could see it being somewhat successful in other ways.

Overall, I think this guy got a great deal. Great start up money with enough equity to make some serious bank when his company is bought.

All those people lost their homes.

How much of "their" home did they own? Oh maybe 5 percent equity...if that.

I've been a renter for 9 years. I have a large savings account that I add to each month so when I buy a house I will actually OWN part of it.

@Jaer not sure why you think morality is not involved in the law. The laws, the courts and the police agents are there to serve justice (IIRC).

via Wikipedia:
'Justice is a concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, natural law, religion, equity or fairness'

Also, you make the argument from a point of convenience but several of these people are willing to bear the inconvenience to make their point. Non-compliance is a form of activism and the fact that they are all let go without answering the questions or submitting to searches shows that the DHS agents understand that what they are requesting is actually outside the bounds of our rights as they are generally interpreted. They are simply seeking compliance.

Which brings me to my final point. My German girlfriend overheard the video and then came to sit by me and watch it. She was fascinated with the video and at the end, she commented on the several references to Nazi Germany.

'Americans don't really know anything. That's not like Nazi Germany, it's like East Germany. The only difference is the Stazi got results and nobody dared to resist their constant intrusions so directly.'

She should know, since she lived there until the wall came down. Non-compliance against an unjust act/request is a moral duty. Damn your convenience.

I would argue that one of the most powerful evolutionary advantages we have as a human species is human potential. By human potential, I mean traits like creativity, motivation, artistic talent, critical thinking, communicative ability, etc. It is a weird and nebulous thing, but we do know that it is not unique to any particular group of humans. It is not unique to men, nor is it unique to aryans, and it is not even unique to particular families.

I think that a decent argument can be made that creating a hospitable and reasonably equitable environment for all of these groups will maximize the percentage of humans who excel at these useful traits, creating a better world for everyone to live in.

So if your system oppresses any significant segment of the population, then there is a good chance that you will be less successful. I think that the Jewish brain drain from Nazi Germany is actually a very good example of this principle in action.

I should note that this is an evolutionary principle that is well established within certain groups. It is a massive evolutionary advantage to look out for people within your own group (tribe), which incidentally is why we have a long history of it being totally ok to kill other people's toddlers but not your own (see the Old Testament for examples). I think that now in these modern times we are realizing the benefits of extending that same principle of tribalism equity to the whole human community.

But yea, it's ultimately just a survival strategy. I have never claimed that my view of human morality has any absolute standard or guarantee of success. I can only be thankful that the society I live in has won out over the other ones.

Mind you, I still think it needs improvement - and leaving my little stamp on it is going to be a hell of a journey by the time it's over.

So why did God seem to think it was OK to murder toddlers and enslave people under certain circumstances? I thought that his absolute gold standard of morality was the only thing that was keeping us from devolving into such chaos.

Hey detheter.." when an American tried to use an isolated case in Canada to justify opposition to gun regulations in the US"

Not true. Regulation of the insanity is all. See, here in America the current atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust of government was created not by and for any people but the ones running the entire planet into the shitter.
The worst city in the country(the one the President called home) from the worst state for crime (including police, whose collusion with criminals' in tomes) has the most restrictive gun laws. Television, the vilest of offenders offers-up pharmaceuticals, bobble-heads re-writing the English language and grooms fleshapoids for agendas whose brains are putty after years of programming.

Bottom-line for me nutters-all, would be this simple fact:
The police, military, active reserves, prison guards, private security forces, Nato troops, Swat teams, etc., all have weapons more capable of wreaking havoc on civilians than what civilians may already own or purchase therefore, Shouldn't civilians be so armed, under mandate of the natural order of life and freewill should they chose to do so, for what ever the reason as long as they are responsible for the same and ALSO responsible for taking part in the process that determines the equity of the laws governing their ownership and usage?

For the U.S., it will come eventually, as it will to the entire planet. Police, security, controlled, ordered, and sanctioned by mandate not vote.
Fascism plain and simple.
Radical Democracy, corporate police state, I don't care for either option thank you, and our shit would work just fine if the cunts were toppled and the script adjusted in favor of sanity over developmental disability and cushy slavery. Fuck That.

The argument is exactly that. Rich folk tend to invest. You put money in their pocket, and they'll typically invest it in equity or bonds. Both of these things bring down the cost of corporate borrowing either directly (through bond buying) or indirectly (through supporting the share price, and thus the equity available to borrow against). The hypothesis is that this will lead to more hiring, job retention, or capital investment.

My main issue with it is that in a global economy it doesn't provide any guarantees those jobs happen here. Further, if you don't support demand, there is no real incentive to grow the firm. That's why I think considering the supply side is backwards.

>> ^TheFreak:

Give me $2500 over a year and it will all be spent on household expenses in the bat of an eye, directly into the economy. Give $250,000 to a millionaire and what exactly is it going to do? How is that money going to stimulate the economy better than the millions they're already hoarding?
Someone give me a coherent argument for how an extra fraction of wealth is going to encourage these people to invest and grow anything. Show me the flaw in my logic.

@bmacs27

No doubt, the best deals get done. The two I have in mind as examples are either under construction or fully built. When you have firm tenant commitments with specific requirements there is money out there that will back the project. In one case an institutional investor partnered with the developer to fund the project. In the other the developers got cash from just about everywhere and anywhere they could to meet the equity requirement.

What happened in my market is a "flight to quality" or "flight to safety". Basically tenants and developers stopped looking at the green belt (developing outer edges) and started looking at the strongest parts of the local market. That means the CBD and established communities. These deals are harder, but they are safer. Thus the "easy" deals in the developing (speculative) communities ended.

The idea that there are a bunch of empty shopping malls isn't really true. Vacancy rates spiked several years ago yes, but since then the amount of new space to market (supply) has dropped.


When I recently surveyed four communities in Central, IL (Bloomington/Normal, Springfield, Decatur, & Champaign/Urbana) I found that there is very little available retail space. Same goes for the Chicago Loop.

I agree we need infrastructure investment but we also need let the market dictate where new construction is going to take place because each market is different. Location location location. If the fundamentals make sense we need to build.

@bmacs27

I am all for good lending practices, but what is happening now goes beyond that. I know of several instances of developers having signed leases from investment grade tenants (large pharmaceutical companies , retailers etc.)who have had significant challenges obtaining financing, even with putting up 40% equity.

At the end of the day the fewer 'good' projects that get done means fewer jobs that are created, both on a temporary (construction) and permanent basis.

I am not on the development side so I don't have first hand experience with the above.

I don't disagree that speculative real estate developments should have trouble getting financing, but that isn't the only kind of product being effected by the new standards.

My take on Jamie Dimon is he isn't Bill Gates. He is a banker and he wants to make money for his company and his shareholders. So did Steve Jobs. I don't fault him for looking out for his interests and I don't fault those who seek to restrain them reasonably. I don't view him as a hero or a demon. He is just a banker - and he seems to be a very 'good' one.

As well as some additional facts about Barak Obama's "Public Equity" layoff record where he has personally destroyed thousands of jobs...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/forget-bain-obamas-public-equity-record-is-the-real-scandal/2012/05/24/gJQAXnXCnU_story.html

Temporarily waving the requirement to have 20% equity to refinance at a lower rate will only put us back into the position we used to be in. If people can't pay a mortgage, it's still no use. It's likely better for the individual family to leave instead of paying for a property that had its value slashed.

That, and the loss will be put on the back of the taxpayer. The bank won't take it.

>> ^EvilDeathBee:

>> ^JiggaJonson:
My wife drives a hybrid and pays $60 a month filling up her tank twice a month.
My advice to you sirs, is to get a hybrid and LEASE it for 3 years. If you lease it, then, yes, you're not building equity with the car, but it alleviates the biggest complaint about hybrid cars: replacing the battery means you'll negate any savings on gas.
When her lease is up, we simply roll it over into another lease, with another 3 year warranty (which covers the battery during those three years as well).
WIN!

I'd prefer a diesel over a hybrid.


Bingo! I've been driving a VW Golf TDI for over 9 years now. I pay fuel costs comparable to a hybrid without all the extra costs of owning a hybrid.

Even in the dead of a NY winter, I don't have any problems. You pour a splash of fuel additive in when it gets down in the single digits and that's that. No block heater, no garage. Just wait 30s for the glow plugs and then turn the key and go.