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Post re. Pharma CI conference from Scientific Misconduct blog.
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Video of Wake’s Randolph Childress breaking UNC’s Jeff McIness’s ankles.
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Video of Wake’s Randolph Childress playing overseas.
links for 2008-03-11
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Da Banking Bidness
Fec linked to several stories related to potential bank failures in the US. This bit from the US News & World Report really caught my attention:
“It’s our view that regulators are expecting 100 to 200 banks to fail”
over the next 12 to 24 months, says Jaret Seiberg, a research analyst
for the Stanford Group. Seiberg expects those failures to occur
predominantly in states like Ohio, Michigan, California, and
Georgia—where the construction lending market, which includes
residential real estate, is expected to weaken dramatically…Washington Mutual lost $1.87 billion in the fourth quarter, hit by
mortgage defaults, write-downs and a substantial increase in the amount
it set aside for bad loans.
That got me to thinking about the FDIC. My understanding is that it insures checking and savings accounts up to $100,000 per depositor and up to $250,000 per IRA account, so if these banks fail won’t it be on the hook to insure all those accounts? How much moolah are we talking here?
When I set my fingers to typing this post I was going to ask "How much of the taxpayers money is at risk here?" but upon doing a little reading I discovered that the FDIC is funded by insurance payments from the banking institutions themselves. So unless something catastrophic happens then taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be at risk right? Something about this sounds spookily familiar.
Oh, yeah. Right when I was getting out of college and beginning my life in the working world (that would be 1989) there was this little thing called the savings and loan crisis that I didn’t really understand, but seemed to have all the real adults spooked. It happened to coincide with a real estate bust and a fairly decent recession, and it resulted in the birth of this new institution called Resolution Trust CorporationFrom the Wikipedia entry on RTC comes this: that ended up employing lots of people in DC to do something really important: bailing out the S&Ls and the morons who broke them on the shoals of a booming-busting real estate market.
According to Joseph E. Stiglitz in his book, Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics, page 243, the real reason behind the need of this company was to allow the United States government to subsidize the banking
sector in a way that wasn’t very transparent and therefore avoid the
possible resistance. This is supported by the fact that the banks had
better information related to the loans than the RTC.
So pardon me if I don’t swallow whole the idea that taxpayer dollars may not come to the rescue of the current crop of morons who are breaking their banks on the shoals of the latest booming-busting real estate market. Somehow the pinstripes always find a way to dump their problems on the denim crowd.
Update: Ed Cone links to an article about the feds getting ready to help out. From the article: The Federal Reserve, struggling to
contain a crisis of confidence in credit markets, plans to lend
up to $200 billion in exchange for mortgage-backed securities…it will hold
auctions of Treasuries in exchange for debt including AAA rated
mortgage securities sold by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and by
banks. Ed then says, "I’ve made some rotten investments in my lifetime, it
would be nice if someone would swap me some Treasuries for them. "
That didn’t take long.
links for 2008-03-10
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California appelate court upholds CA law saying that anyone who home schools has to be a certified teacher. Teachers union happy, parents not.
The Worst Has Not Been Visited Upon Us Yet
Below is a video clip of an interview by Foreign Policy with former FBI interrogator Jack Cloonan on the use of torture in the "war on terror." Basically he says that it is counterproductive in that it mythologizes terrorists and in turn helps the terrorists recruit a whole new generation of jihadists. The most chilling lines come at the end when he says that we (the U.S.) believes that our programs work because we haven’t been attacked since 9/11, but the jihadists say that they’ll get us even if it takes a generation. He ends with the line "The worst has not been visited upon us yet."
Now I’ll sit back and wait for the "we’re American, Christian and righteous and we’re fighting for freedom in the face of invading Islamo-fascist hordes" crowd to come and say this expert has no idea what he’s talking about. They know torture works and is necessary because they listen to Rush every day and he tells them it’s true. And they’ve watched every episode of 24 at least seven times and if it works for Jack Bauer then surely it works for our boys too.
Of course they wouldn’t agree with Cloonan when he points out that even the Israelis think that torture doesn’t work. I mean, what do they know? They just live on a piece of land the size of a US state and are bordered by whole groups of people who’ve stated for the record that they want Israel annihilated. It’s not like they have a lot of experience dealing with this kind of thing, right? Yep, Jack Bauer is a much better source of information.
links for 2008-03-09
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Forbes’ article on Martin Eakes, leader of Center for Responsible Lending.
links for 2008-03-07
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Funny tech support transcripts.
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Roast your own coffee beans with a hot-air popcorn popper.
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If someone showed up to play me with an Armani tennis racquet I’d be doubly inspired to beat him like a drum.
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Expensive placebos are more effective than cheap placebos. In other words the placebo effect can be influenced by the perceived value of the placebo.
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Study shows small companies create more jobs than larger businesses.
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Kids given detention because they paid for their lunches with pennies.
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Good recommendations for soccer players dealing with shin guard rash.
Sweet Sixteen
Sixteen years ago today Celeste took pity on me and let me marry her. A lot, and I mean a LOT, has happened since then, but I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else, with anyone else, or being any happier. I was going to try and wax poetic, but I don’t think there’s any greater testament to a marriage than being able to say "Life is great." It truly is.
BTW, the cake was great!
Legal Tender Not Accepted
More fun on the education front. In a school district in New Jersey 29 students have been given two days of detention for paying for their $2 lunches in pennies. Apparently it started out as a prank, but then turned into a protest over shortened lunch periods. The school superintendent says that the students were disciplined "for holding up their peers and disrespecting lunch aides."
What I love is that the "educators", who must see every problem as a nail that must be hammered, couldn’t come up with a solution that would counteract the protest. The evidence that the "educators" were outsmarted by the eighth graders is the fact that the local media picked up the story.
What could the "educators" have done to avoid this little PR fiasco? Maybe take the pennies, put them in a cup labeled with that students name and then count them after the lunch period is over. If the student’s payment is short then he or she can be billed for it later. That way the students’ peers aren’t held up and their protest will peter out fairly quickly once they realize how hard it is to gather 200 pennies on a daily basis and then tote them to school.
Hey I’ll be the first to say that eight graders can be a royal pain in the a– to deal with, and sometimes I think that middle school teachers should get combat pay, but to be so stupid as this I think the "educators" involved here are getting what’s coming to them.
Hemingway Would Have Shot Someone
How would you like your business to be threatened by the actions of a foreign government even though you don’t do business there? That’s what has happened to an English travel agent named Steve Marshall living in Spain. The story’s a little complex so let’s see if we can break it down:
- Marshall sells trips to sunny places including Cuba, mostly to Europeans, via lots of different websites that he owns and has run since the late 90s.
- In October about 80 of his websites stopped working.
- Some of his websites had been put on a blacklist by the Treasury Department because of the tours he booked to Cuba, including literary themed "Hemingway Tours".
- His domain registrar, eNom, which is based in the U.S., disabled his sites after being informed that they were on the Treasury blacklist. They didn’t give him a heads up they were doing it either.
- eNom has refused to release the domains to the travel agent because they were legally obligated to also freeze his assets.
- All of Marshall’s sites were hosted on servers in the Bahamas.
- He still doesn’t have his .com domain names back, but he’s slowly been rebuilding his web business using .net domains registered through European based registrars.
- Weird exception to the domains on the blacklist is the www.cuba-guantanamo.com site that is still up and running.
- eNom only acted after discovering Marshall’s blacklisting from a blog. In other words it sounds like no one from Treasury bothered to contact eNom to disable the sites.
Here’s the quote from the Treasury Department rep about their action:
A Treasury spokesman, John Rankin, referred a caller to a press release
issued in December 2004, almost three years before eNom acted. It said
Mr. Marshall’s company had helped Americans evade restrictions on
travel to Cuba and was “a generator of resources that the Cuban regime
uses to oppress its people.” It added that American companies must not
only stop doing business with the company but also freeze its assets,
meaning that eNom did exactly what it was legally required to do.
Here’s Marshall’s reply:
Mr. Marshall said he was uninterested in American tourists. “They can’t go anyway,” he said.
All sounds kind of absurd doesn’t it? Read the NYT article and you’ll find that there’s a few lawyers who think that the government has overstepped its bounds. Huh, go figure.
We’ve Come So Far in 40 Years
When you think of the ’60s what do you picture? Flower Power? Vietnam? Peace Symbols? Free Love? Marijuana and LSD? Forty years from now what do you think people will picture when they think of the ’00s? Probably Iraq, terrorism, Freedom Fries, ribbon stickers on SUVs, Oxycontin and Chrystal Meth. Heck, you might even think of anti-love. Check out this story from Arizona about a middle school that is punishing students for hugs that last more than two seconds. Maybe I mis-typed since really this story isn’t about anti-love, but conditional love. So there we have it: the 00s are the decade of Iraq, terrorism, Freedom fries, ribbon stickers on SUVs, Oxycontin, Chrystal Meth and conditional love. That’s what I call progress.
Befuddled 