SAR #8175

Continuous consumption of a finite supply is unlikely.

Collector's classic: Go down to the Ford place and put in an order for a 2009 F-150 pickup. It'll probably be the last of its kind. Put it in a barn with a tarp over it.

Self Incrimination : Curiously, Senator Dodd's housing bill requires the reporting of nearly all electronic transactions to Homeland Security. Not just Master card and Visa, but also PayPal and most other electronic sales. Why? And why is this hidden in a housing bill?

Extra (Non) Credit: Losses on Credit card debt, now around 5.7 percent, could go as high as 10 percent in the next 18 months

Sausage The Dodd-Shelby housing bill is an interesting document. First it limits banks losses to 10% - which certainly takes the risk out of investing; the $300 billion lost in subprime will become $30 billion for the banks and $270 billion for you. The rest - home equity loans, credit card debt, Alt-A and Option Pay ARMS - will drive losses over a trillion dollars. But don't worry about the banks, they'll accept their 10% losses. Oh, Bank of America wrote the bill for Senator Dodd, too. Full service banking

The Joke's On Us : Median US house price is about $200,000, headed South. So Congress, in all its wisdom, wants the FHA to insure houses costing over $700,000. Either they're trying to help people making $42,000 a year to get in over their heads, or there's some sort of payback going on here.

Yesterday, Upon the Stair: Trevor Paglen has taken pictures of 189 spy satellites that don't officially exist. Hope the enemy - whomever that may turn out to be - doesn't find out too.

Enlightenment: Basic capitalist economic theory is based on the assumption that each will try to maximize his or her advantage over others. Like much economic theory, this is not always true. Experiments show that people often act against their personal self-interest. How else to explain voting for Bush?

Squaring the Circle: Congressional leaders have come up with compromise wording in the wiretap legislation that will not just give retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies, but will retroactively make the crimes of Bush & Co. legal. Works both ways; now there's a precedent for making something retroactively illegal, too

Lost and Found: Terrorist may have gotten parts of nuclear weapons systems that the Pentagon has mislaid. Perhaps the Boy Scouts have found them; missing means they have no idea where they are.

Peer Review: Plagiarism, faked results, and outright fabrications make it into peer-reviewed scientific journals at the rate of about 1,000 a year, according to a research report in Nature, a peer-reviewed journal. This apparently is in addition to pharmaceutical company sponsored research.

False Dawn: Those who think new, more fuel efficient cars are going to solve the oil problem should bear in mind that about 12.5 million new vehicles will be sold this year. It will take 20 years to replace all the cars on the road today. We don't have 20 years.