This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas."
YouTube - The Great Pacific Garbage Patch - Good Morning America
Topic: Miscellaneous
10:12 am EDT, Aug 5, 2009
Good Morning America is a bit flashy but this news report contains actual footage which a lot of reports about this thing don't have. I hate encountering garbage while swimming in the ocean - the idea that there is a garbage patch that spans the pacific is nearly the most disgusting thing I can imagine.
House bill would restrict laptop searches -- Federal Computer Week
Topic: Miscellaneous
11:02 am EDT, Aug 4, 2009
The use of the word "restrict" in the title is incorrect.
Under the bill (H.R. 1726) sponsored by Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), DHS officials would be required to perform an open rule-making process with public comment.
It moved to the full committee on the 22nd.
“This bill preserves the Department of Homeland Security’s broad authority to search individuals and their belongings at our borders, while setting standards to protect travelers’ privacy,” Sanchez said. “In short, the bill strikes the right balance between security and civil liberties by requiring DHS to engage the American public and undertake an open rule-making process.”
While I support the passage of this bill, I don't agree that it "strikes the right balance" or any balance for that matter. This bill continues to allow the status quo while requiring that additional information be collected and presented to the public. That information, when it becomes available a year after this bill is passed, may be helpful in understanding the impact of these searches, but I don't see why Congress cannot act now to restrict these searches in a meaningful way.
Many civil liberties issues are complicated and require careful deliberation. This one doesn't.
Suspicionless search and seizure of laptop harddrives at border crossings violates fundamental American values. It has violated those values for the many years that these searches have been going on, it violated those values a year ago when this issue was first noticed by Congress, it violates those values right now, while Congress dithers on this, and it will continue to violate those values a year from now, when the data this legislation collects becomes available. Our history, our Constitution, and frankly an objective sense of right and wrong require that customs agents have some reason to suspect travellers of a crime before rifling through their personal data and correspondence!
CBP has even claimed that they establish reasonable suspicion before engaging in these kinds of searches. This is a simple matter of requiring by law a practice CBP claims that they already engage in. The fact that in six months the President has failed to take action on such a simple, straight forward issue is ample evidence that all of the rhetoric from the Democratic party about civil liberties was just that, rhetoric.
She was ordered to stand in the middle of the living room as the agents, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, began searching the house for a Hispanic woman. They had no court warrant.
I've been under the impression that long term interest rates during the past few years were extremely low by historical standards and were being held that way to engineer unsustainable credit driven growth. I presumed that in the future interest rates will go up substantially. That perspective is wrong, depending on your perspective about what "substantially" means. Although certainly interest rates are low right now in order to encourage borrowing, if you look at schiller's data you can see that historically they have always been low. The extremely high (>8%) interest rates of my childhood were the historical oddity.
If the economy does recover there is a chance that unwanted inflation might need to be worked out by setting prohibitively high interest rates again, so they might be going up in the future, but over the long term we should expect them to be less than 6%.
That means that adjustable rate mortgages aren't really as risky as I thought so long as you can accept the range of potential rates and are not putting yourself in a position where you can only afford the loan in the best case scenario (which many, many people did).
Things like Option ARMs are getting a bad rap in this crisis because they have been abused by so many people. There is a reasonable application for them - but you have to be responsible enough to usually make principal payments and only exercise your **Option** to pay "interest only" in the case of a financial emergency. The problem is not the loans. The problem is misunderstanding and misuse of the loans.
Chart of the Day - S&P 500 earnings down 98% from peak
Topic: Miscellaneous
9:39 pm EDT, Jul 30, 2009
Today's chart provides some perspective on the current earnings environment by focusing on 12-month, as reported S&P 500 earnings. Today's chart illustrates how earnings are expected (38% of S&P 500 companies have reported for Q2 2009) to have declined over 98% since peaking in Q3 2007, making this by far the largest decline on record (the data goes back to 1936)
Its hard to comprehend this. This doesn't add up. People are still doing the same stuff they did a year ago for the most part. You can only cut back on spending to a certain extent.
Two DeKalb County Officers are being investigated for allegedly performing a background check on President Barack Obama.
Reading between the lines here, these guys can run background checks on whoever they want and there are absolutely no institutional safeguards whatsoever. The Secret Service found out about this one because they monitor NCIC transactions related to the President and his family. The county is "shocked, shocked" to learn that the systems are being used for entertainment purposes.
There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals.
When you use time that way, it's merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you're done.
But there's another way of using time that's common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon...
The Way We Live Now - The New Joblessness - NYTimes.com
Topic: Miscellaneous
7:37 am EDT, Jul 27, 2009
Among the reasons are a decline in innovation in the aftermath of the tech boom, leading to fewer new businesses, and the aging of the population.
Are we not being creative enough?
The percentage of adults who are working has fallen from 64 at the end of the Clinton era to only 59.5 now. Some of those dropouts are retirees, but some may be responding to the economy’s declining dynamism.
Along with double-digit unemployment, the country is facing a second potential scare headline: falling wages. In June, overall wage growth was zero. Zandi thinks the United States could see negative wage growth.
