flynn23 wrote:
It was already impossible to retire for most Americans before this all happened. Good luck now, even if you have a decent standard of living.

Thanks for the frontline link - they are always worth the time.

RE: Back to Business - Investment Funds Profit Again, This Time By Paring Mortgages - NYTimes.com

23% of all mortgage borrowers in the US are underwater.

Imagine if they all walked.

CoreLogic: 1 in 4 Borrowers Are Underwater | The Big Picture

The U.S. government on Tuesday imposed its first-ever punishment against airlines for stranding passengers aboard aircraft, fining three carriers $175,000 for a six-hour ordeal in Minnesota.

Good!

U.S. airlines fined for stranding travelers on plane | U.S. | Reuters

Investment funds are buying billions of dollars’ worth of home loans, discounted from the loans’ original value. Then, in what might seem an act of charity, the funds are helping homeowners by reducing the size of the loans.

Thats an extremely responsible thing to do and very good development in my view.

Sometimes, people foreclose because they can't make their payments, but this current crisis evokes the specter of debt slaves who can make the mortgage payments but can never sell the house, because the sale price won't clear the mortgage and they can't save the difference. Its called "jingle mail." When you mail the mortgage lender your keys because 7 years with a foreclosure on your record is a better fate than having to come up with hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Given that home prices are not going back up, banks may be in a position where the losses they would take on principal by adjusting these mortgages are better than the losses they would take from going out of business if too many of these mortgages foreclose. However, so far it sounds like this is only happening in cases where the bank has already gone belly up, the mortgages have been bought up at pennies on the dollar, and investors looking to buy the mortgages are unwilling to do so if they think that future "jingle mail" is in the offing.

Arguably, if not for the massive taxpayer largess that has bailed out a lot of these banks and artificially propped up the housing market, more banks might be forced to make these kinds of principal adjustments. Consumers might be better off in that case, as the public debt would be lower and many of them would owe less on their mortgages.

I see this, in some respects, as a path to sanity, instead of the given situation where everything is going down and the question for homeowners is how badly are you going to get fucked before you get out - with the weakest going earliest but with no end in sight for those with the means to hold on... millions of people paying underwater mortgages for years, praying for inflation... The impact this has on the mobility of our society and people's ability to save for retirement may contribute as much to our economic malaise as the direct costs.

Back to Business - Investment Funds Profit Again, This Time By Paring Mortgages - NYTimes.com

Unemployed people don’t have any money, so they don’t pay mortgages. It’s as simple as that.

Ivy Zelman: “Home prices are going back down” « naked capitalism

In 1990, MTV aired a groundbreaking TV documentary series called Buzz. Created and directed by Mark Pellington (Mothman Prophecies, Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" video) in partnership with MTV Europe, Buzz was a fantastic experiment in non-linearity and cut-up that drew heavily from -- and presented -- avant-garde art, underground cinema, early cyberpunk, industrial culture, appropriation/sampling, and postmodern literature. Experientially, it feels like what Mondo 2000 would have looked like as a television show, and in fact Mondo founder RU Sirius was interviewed on the first episode. Other notable contributors/subjects included William S. Burroughs, Jenny Holzer, Genesis P-Orridge, Syd Mead, and many other happy mutants.

MTV's Buzz: fantastically forward-thinking TV from 1990 - Boing Boing

What do ya'll think?

Frankly, this feels about right, even through I haven't looked at this carefully:

Instead Android will be the Linux of the phone market. Very slick tool, open, full of technical goodness, philosophically correct, the geek choice. And since it’s the geeks who write about technology, you’ll see as many Android-is-taking-over articles as we see Linux-is-taking-over articles. But it will never actually happen because most of the marketplace is not made up of geeks.

The droid is huge - clunky. Feature rich but not sexy. Its a Lynx, not a Gameboy.

Apple: Can it stop the Android menace? « naked capitalism

In a report entitled "Worst-case debt scenario", the bank's asset team said state rescue packages over the last year have merely transferred private liabilities onto sagging sovereign shoulders, creating a fresh set of problems.

Overall debt is still far too high... it must be reduced by the hard slog of "deleveraging", for years.

"As yet, nobody can say with any certainty whether we have in fact escaped the prospect of a global economic collapse," said the 68-page report, headed by asset chief Daniel Fermon.

It is an exploration of the dangers, not a forecast.

Really? I think its a forecast. Here is why.

Under the French bank's "Bear Case" scenario (the gloomiest of three possible outcomes), the dollar would slide further and global equities would retest the March lows. Property prices would tumble again. Oil would fall back to $50 in 2010.

I view retesting march lows as a near certainty.

Société Générale tells clients how to prepare for 'global collapse' - Telegraph

Gillo Pontecorvo's 1965 film The Battle of Algiers portrays the urban warfare between Algerians and the French troops occupying their country.

The film's raw presentation of a ruthless conflict just years after it occurred left audiences enthralled.

The film is now being re-released -- and to some, it conveys a new meaning in light of the US involvement in Iraq.

Its been years since jlm first posted about this film on MemeStreams. I finally got around to watching it. The film provides a provocative and balanced look at an early conflict of a sort which has become commonplace today. The powerful use of local music and impressive bombing and riot scenes provide a level of realism I didn't expect from 1960's cinema.

'Battle of Algiers' Makes a Comeback

"Bad guys are encrypting their stuff now, so we need a methodology of hacking on that to try to break passwords," said Claude E. Davenport, a senior special agent at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center, known as C3. "The Playstation 3 - its processing component - is perfect for large-scale library attacks."

This story is very light on technical details but I don't think I have ever heard the news media describe a federal government encryption cracking technology before, so its interesting in that respect. The story emphasizes the fourth amendment and the use of warrants to seize computer systems, but of course its quite likely that this same infrastructure is used in some cases where computer systems are seized at border crossings without a warrant or any reasonable suspicion. Understanding what sort of forensic analysis is used when computers are seized without suspicion helps us ascertain the privacy impact of those seizures. This is a relevant datapoint.

Federal officers use video game console to catch child pornographers