Wow, what a hurricane of snark.

You know, it really strikes me that if she likes living that way, cool. Good for her. We have room for both housewives AND career women in the world. And house husbands, too.

It's not like she's a threat to you; you don't have to emulate her. You don't have to be happy about just doing housework and taking care of kids, and few men expect that anymore. I think that's very unlikely to change if a few women... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:17 PM on December 18, 2009

Boy, that doesn't work well on Win7-style desktop -- the snap-to-edges screws it right up.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:56 PM on December 18, 2009

Single-link post for what should be fairly obvious reasons.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:54 AM on December 18, 2009

Hmm, kirkaracha, maybe I should have tracked down more about Singer. It seemed like it was really about Robinson, and clearly there weren't going to be much Web information on him.

Thanks for doing that!
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:48 AM on December 18, 2009

This obviously isn't intended to be actual investment advice, it's trying to show you what a crime these 0% interest rates are.

But, that said: this is terrible advice for someone who actually still wants to be in business in ten years. You're borrowing short and lending long, which is just about the stupidest thing you can do. This is a good chunk of what wrecked Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But there's big bonuses in it, which you can bet... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:40 AM on December 18, 2009

All banks by definition borrow short and lend long,

And bank runs do indeed destroy banks. This is why the FDIC was invented.

Banks!=bad in every situation.

Of course not. But that doesn't change the fact that borrowing short and lending long is inherently risky.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:02 AM on December 18, 2009

Does it confirm my suspicions that the financial system is constantly being tweaked to favor massive wealth

Well, consider this: who got bailed out of the jam? The wealthy experts that were supposed to know this stuff, or the ordinary homeowners, or most of the small-scale lenders?

Given the bailouts, the property bubble amounts to one of the largest thefts in hstory; the people who made it all happen skated with their wealth... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:46 AM on December 18, 2009

What an awesome post, Potomac. I wish I could favorite it twice.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:06 AM on December 18, 2009

Florida last year passed a law that automatically grants former inmates found innocent $50,000 for each year they spent in prison. No legislative approval is needed. That means Bain is entitled to $1.75 million.

Wow, in Florida? That's remarkably human for Florida.

It should also include an investment adviser; 1.75 million can go away really fast.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:15 PM on December 17, 2009

Well, the Time award is for the person who affected the world the most in a given year, and Bernanke's the obvious choice.

But he didn't do us any favors. All he did was put off the inevitable debt crisis, and made it worse. He avoided nothing; in essence, we promised the world a leg tomorrow if they please won't take our foot today.

We spent more money than on every war we've ever fought, combined, with the sole purpose of not... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:57 AM on December 16, 2009

anastasia: the real damage is allowing the banks to continue business models that assume unlimited liquidity, creating financial instruments that look like money and trade like money, and end up FUNCTIONING like money, causing the huge runups and then collapses in first the stock and then the real estate markets. The Fed was forced to MAKE many of those instruments real, by injecting absolutely unprecedented amounts of money into the system. They lent it to pretty much anyone who asked, in... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:18 AM on December 16, 2009

they didn't have the face the consequences; they got to keep their yachts and their mansions, while we cleaned up the mess.

In other words... you know how so many people are badly underwater on their mortgages? A lot of the "money" that was used to bid those houses up so high simply evaporated, but a lot of it is in those mansions and yachts. We're suffering today on the ground because of these financial instruments; they created fake... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:34 AM on December 16, 2009

Oh, I should also answer this little bit:

We've forsaken the most important part of our democracy: not the power to choose who to put into political office, but the power to direct our own individual decisions that affect not only our own individual outcomes, but our collective outcome as well.

But you really can't, at least financially. Say you want to save money. Thanks to the Fed, you can't get any return on savings. The... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:46 AM on December 16, 2009

codacorolla: How realistic do you think the assertations are that if Bernanke hadn't propped up the banks that we would've had a far worse version of the great depression?

Well, absent other intervention, that's probably correct. I was talking about the Second Great Depression here on Metafilter years before you read about it in the mainstream press. Don't think this makes me a magical oracle or anything: I was just reading the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:19 AM on December 16, 2009

Oh, also note that I'm entirely skipping the very central role that the GSEs played in the bubble, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They were an absolutely critical component to the mess. Economics is kind of like fractals... the closer you look the more complex it gets, seemingly without limit.

But the whole banking system is under the Fed's remit, and the bubble could have been stopped overnight by simply constraining money supply and raising interest rates. Ultimately,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:26 AM on December 16, 2009

I absolutely love Bill Fleckenstein over at Fleckenstein Capital (pay service), and this is what he had to say about Bernanke's win.

TIME Looks for Greatness in All the Wrong Places
As this will be the next-to-last column I write before the decade ends, and given the fact that Time Magazine chose to anoint Ben Bernanke Man of the Year, I thought I would share my opinion on the subject.

First of all, Bernanke's being made Man of the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:37 AM on December 17, 2009

He broke his back in that crash -- for the eighth time.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 1:15 PM on December 16, 2009

Yeah, that's how vegetation works in the South... all that sunlight and water means it grows very quickly. There's a lot of available energy, and both the plants and the insects thrive like nowhere else. It takes constant maintenance to keep things intact. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised it's in that good a shape after eight years of neglect.

I still don't know why sensible people would want to LIVE in that area. Yuck!

It's sad to see a Disney... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:35 PM on December 16, 2009

All your base are belong to 10?
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:05 AM on December 16, 2009

I would strongly suggest not using the site. It is free, and at least semi-professionally done, meaning that someone with actual skill worked on it. It has no visible advertising, meaning they have to pay for the bandwidth in some other way.

Combined with the pure fraudulence of the underlying idea, this ahs to be marketing-related somehow. It strikes me as quite likely that you're giving your friends' addresses to spammers.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:41 AM on December 15, 2009

s/ahs/has/
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:41 AM on December 15, 2009

I'm shocked, shocked, that the live webcast seems not to be working.

I swear, anything that modern Boeing touches sucks. I think I will actively avoid their Dreamliners for a number of years.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:12 AM on December 15, 2009

Everyone involved seems to have a different, conflicting story. There are few points of agreement, even on the simplest things.

One thought that comes to mind is that perhaps she agreed to work for the CIA and was released, and then the relationship went sour.

That is one intensely strange story, whatever the hell is going on. I hope we can get to the bottom of it, but I have barely more faith in the Obama administration than I did in Bush's.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:17 AM on December 14, 2009

As a related aside, Obama apparently continues to operate secret prisons in Afghanistan, and is covering up for Bush-era war crimes.

From that link:
The Obama administration "has gutted the hard-fought victories in Nuremberg where lawyers and judges were often guilty of war crimes in their legal advice and opinions," Turley said. "Quite a legacy for the world’s newest Nobel Peace Prize winner."I doubt very much if any... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:24 AM on December 14, 2009

Okay, so first, let's get one fact straight: The administration did shut down all the CIA's black prisons. This is not a CIA site. It's a military facility.

We don't know any of that. We don't how many prisons they had, and we don't know whether they were closed. All we have is him saying, "trust us, they're gone". The prisons we DO know about, however, are all still open.

Remember, the CIA does one thing... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:39 AM on December 14, 2009

In other words... all the positive things you just said about the Obama administration were based almost entirely on their verbal testimony, plus your imagination of what that testimony means.

The fact that they claimed to have closed down all secret CIA prisons in no way proves, or really even implies, that we no longer have secret prisons; even if they're telling the literal truth, we may have just outsourced the prisoners to new entities,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:54 AM on December 14, 2009

funny how this works both ways. it's like a little rhetorical pocket mirror.

No, saulgoodman. I'm basing my opinion on evidence, not testimony. What I can actually see of our intelligence and military operations is business as usual. I see few real changes. There's a couple of little bright spots, like trying a few terrorists in a real court, but nothing truly substantial. Virtually all of the claimed improvements are hidden,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:51 AM on December 14, 2009

Huh, my father tried to teach that to me, but either explained it wrong or I misunderstood it.... he taught it to me as 'droplets dance across the pan', which according to this video, is too early.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:24 PM on December 13, 2009

Of all the people I know who download music via torrents, none of them actually pay for any music.

As a contrary anecdote, in years when I've done the most music downloading, I've also bought the most music. I just don't hear new music unless it's recommended to me and I download it. What the RIAA sees is that I downloaded, say, fifty albums over a year's period, and they call that 'theft of fifty albums'. What they don't see is that I bought five... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:58 AM on December 13, 2009

fourcheesemac: if I do what you say, and never download any music ever again, I will also never buy any. None. Zero. There have been years in the last decade where I didn't download any music at all, and in those years, I bought nothing. And this wasn't from financial hardship, it was simple lack of interest; what I had was good enough. In years when I download, those downloads directly trigger some sales; in years when I don't, my wallet remains closed.

In the real... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:42 AM on December 13, 2009

I actually tried this with an RPG called Aeternal Legends. I gave away a digital copy which included a link to the print version at a significant discount. After an initial spike it didn't make much of a difference. I could have crippled the PDF somehow, but that just generates resentment.

Maybe it just wasn't a very good RPG? Baen seems to do pretty well with their Free Library.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:05 PM on December 13, 2009

Detailed accurate bug reports are for internal QA, which, apparently, Adobe doesn't believe in.

Typically, companies shipping products like this have large QA departments. They "believe" in QA, as in having some, they just don't listen to them.

All the crashes you guys are experiencing were probably well-known to QA since before the product shipped. I'll bet nickels to dollars the the department... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:54 PM on December 12, 2009

Dammit, I hit post too soon. Continuing...

In my experience, the best software companies don't ship until QA says they can ship... the head of QA has absolute block power on whether a program goes out the door. This clearly doesn't make perfect software, as that's still dependent on the fundamental code quality and development process, but a strong QA department will wring the best possible results out of whatever programming team you've put together. If they're rock... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:00 PM on December 12, 2009

(* it still amuses me every time someone emails me a bug report that describes in detail exactly which model of Macintosh they have)

Hmm, when I'm bug reporting, I always include at least my processor and total memory. If it's on Windows, and uses more than basic Windows graphics, I tell them my specific video card and driver revision. If it uses more than basic sound, I tell them my soundcard and driver revision. I do this under the assumption... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:53 PM on December 13, 2009

Well, I watched it, read the comments, and clicked away from the thread. Then I realized I was grinning; I enjoyed it more than I consciously realized. A bit of surreality that did, in fact, brighten my day. :)

I love the YT comment that one poster is going to remotely upload that to his parents' digital photo frame remotely. What a thing to come home to!
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:57 AM on December 13, 2009

Summation: we did a little handwringing after we and the British overthrew Mossadeq for daring to steal our oil. Why, we even talked sternly to that murderous bastard.

That makes everything "nuanced", and therefore okay if we start trying to interfere there now.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:12 AM on December 12, 2009

Yeah, like I said, we talked sternly to the dictator we helped install, and somehow that makes it okay.

He also seems to argue that we didn't do it all by ourselves, so it's not our fault, that "forces in Iran" caused the takeover. Well, of course they bloody did, you can't foment a coup unless there's an opposition to fund and support. It's entirely disingenuous, but it's couched in Scholarly Language, trying to make what's actually not a... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:30 PM on December 12, 2009

not a complex thing at all

(I meant morally/ethically, and wasn't terribly clear about that, sorry.)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:31 PM on December 12, 2009

Holy cow. Sir, though you are long dead, I doff my virtual hat at your craftsmanship. That tool was completely unsuited to the task at hand, and not only did you make it work, you made it work well. I wonder how many people at the time noticed what an extraordinary job you did?

What a neat find, Dusty Diary and jjray.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:10 PM on December 9, 2009

The good bit? Huh? Typical smarmy promotional video is the good bit?
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:46 PM on December 9, 2009

They have some damn fine artists working there. Those things are PERFECT.

Boy, they aren't afraid to charge for them, either. Ouch.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:41 AM on December 9, 2009

What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth

I love how he completely ignores the fact that he couldn't do his watercolors if someone out there wasn't working like a dog to dig the ores or gather the herbs required to get the dyes. That "superabundant loot" also means paper, brushes, and paints.

Somehow, I think his opinion of the "senseless sweat and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:20 PM on December 8, 2009

Nobody ever derived pigments from berries or canvases from natural fibers prior to that.

There wasn't a whole lot of watercoloring going on before paper.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:41 AM on December 9, 2009

Wow, I thought I'd seen all the Rankin/Bass stuff. I guess not. Cool!
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:52 PM on December 7, 2009

delmoi said: The idea that Apple is more secure or has fewer flaws is just delusional fanboi speak. The only difference is that isn't targeted by spyware authors the same way (but it isn't completely untargeted)

This, by the way, is completely correct. Apple has not implemented many, many defensive strategies that Microsoft has in their software stack. Were the relative market positions reversed overnight, it would be a bonanza strike for the botnet... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:54 PM on December 4, 2009

mkb: thanks for the pointer on tmux. I'll definitely check that out!
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:39 PM on December 4, 2009

Yeah, imagine, having a conversation that spans multiple days. What a weird thing to do, eh?

I may not be posting much more in the thread, not really having anything to contribute, but I'm enjoying watching it.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:48 PM on December 6, 2009

Wow, it was damn near as big as it is now!
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:52 PM on December 4, 2009

It's an interesting idea, but if you lose the fight with the nightmare guy, you lose almost everything you've gained.

Fuck that.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:37 PM on December 4, 2009

Artw: that's not the finale, that's a season break, a new thing that seems to have arisen in the last few years. They'll have the second half of the season early next year, and then (if renewed) will also have the first half of Season 2 starting in September.

I've liked parts of SGU really well, but I'm not yet enthusiastic about it. Galactica totally had me within the first hour, and then lost me when they turned into a soap in space in Season 2.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:09 PM on December 4, 2009