Wednesday, January 6, 2016

SAR #16006


Perhaps intelligence is not going to turn out to be a successful evolutionary adaptation.
White Guys With Guns: That's our land those nuts want to take. It is sedition . This was planned well in advance. Where was NSA, where was Homeland Security, the FBI; someone in our gigantic police state should have known what these people were planning. Big fail. Now the thing to do is simply walk away, let them have the damned building and a few hundred acres and just ignore them. And ask the media to go home, too.
Safety First: Volkswagen, having admitted to deceiving its customers and various governments hasn't got much defense against the lawsuit being brought by the Justice Department, which could cost them as little as $18 billion or as much as $90 billion. But if Congress has its way, VW ill not have to face any class actions lawsuits over its commercial fraud. There's a bill, the Fairness in Class Action Litigation Act [but really known for what it is, The VW Bailout Bill] which will stop nearly all attempts at class action lawsuits in the future. It requires that every member of a class have the same type and scope of injury with identical products and in identical conditions. Few individual customers will have the resources to sue VW, which is the point.
Another Candyman: GOP wannabe Ben Carson's tax plan would repeal the entire US income tax code and level a flat 14.9% income tax on everyone except the working poor. But only on wages. It would not tax capital gains, dividend income or interest income – which to republicans is not actually income, but their due rewards for being rich enough to hold stocks and bonds and real estate to make these windfalls possible. As an added attraction for the super rich, their estates would no longer be taxed when they pass it on to the kids.
Big Wheel Keep On Turning: Big miners have been borrowing big money to build big mines and even with falling prices caused jointly by the global economic slowdown and the big production from these big mines, they have to keep adding to the global oversupply because they need the cash flow to pay the interest on the big money they borrowed to build the big mines. They're losing money but they can't afford to shut down, so more is less. Big trouble.
Noted: “By many, many historically predictive valuation measures, stocks are overvalued to the tune of 75%-100%. … A stock-market crash of ~50% from the peak would not be a surprise. It would also not be the “worst-case scenario,” by any means”.
Blue Ribbon: Last year Costa Rica's entire supply of electricity came from renewable sources.
Win Some, Lose Some: While The Caliphate has lost abut 40% of the territory it once held in Iraq and about 20% of the part of Syria it had occupied, The Taliban is now in control of more territory than at any time since the US invaded fourteen years ago.
The Parting Shot:



6 comments:

McMike said...

re some seditions are more equal than others. You gotta go see Gawker's invisibility tarp post.

It occurs to me that the best move right now, for everyone else, is for (unarmed) groups of blacks, Muslims, and OWS-types to go occupy a federal building near them. Right now. Mirror the wingnuts, except without weapons, and peaceful but firm, and without secession threats but rather calls for justice and sanity.

Anonymous said...

Lack of Class: If Congress passes the anti-tort legislation, Obama will happily sign it. He may be a lawyer by training, but his heart belongs to corporatism.

Anonymous said...

Even though Waco and Ruby Ridge happened decades ago, the Feds still fear backlash if they move. Unfortunately this will probably encourage seditious knuckle draggers to bigger, bolder acts against government, until something really MUST be done.

McMike said...

re class: DC is full to the brim with lawyers - corporate lawyers - and almost all of them (including Dems) hate plaintiffs lawyers.

With legislative and regulatory Democracy sold out, unions gone, fixed arbitration enshrined, and the courts overtaken by corporatist tools, class action/tort law is the sole remaining peaceful mechanism for redress. So it is of course being destroyed.

Besides, they are being replaced by TPP-style state/corporate tribunals.

A few plaintiff attorneys will be preserved in glass cases, to be pulled out when needed during approved end games, as with tobacco.

Gegner said...

How sad is it that intelligence has never been 'widespread' and the self-serving among us are actively working to wipe it from the genome.

A huge mistake is being made when we trust the education of our children to those who would exploit them. Why else doe the US continue to slide in academic standing?

More disturbing is number of adults that have no clue WHY we have government (worse is being absolutly clueless about money but the phenomena are related.)

It is unthinkable to many that criminals run the government but yet we have criminal acts committed in the people's name all the time...just like back in the days of royalty (and that's no accident either.) Perhaps more disturbing is how criminal acts go unpunished...but if YOU did anything not half as condemnable, you'd go to jail! (on the cop's say so, evidence or lack thereof be damned.)

It is even more disturbing to consider that we live in a mess overseen by the college graduates of our time. How convenient for the inept that they have a media that routinely blames the victim?



Anonymous said...

Big Wheels... The idea of mining itself could only work in a capitalist system, where tomorrow is only a day away. Mining, Petrolium, etc; it's all part of why animals will have to evolve to breathe methane/carbon dioxide oxygen mixes instead of carbon dioxide/oxygen. We're not only burning the candle at both ends, Wall Street sold the idea of cutting the candle into ever thinner slices to get ever brighter light.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-01-06/indexes-accounting-and-atm-fees

The stock market was never good a predicting the future, but it's gotten ever worse at this job as the machine developed.

" The Bloomberg headline is "Nevsky's Taylor Blames Algos in Closing $1.5 Billion Hedge Fund," but Nevsky's actual letter is much more nuanced and worth reading in full. My favorite sentence is:

In such a world dominated by index and algorithmic funds historically logical correlations between different asset classes can remain in place long after they have ceased to be logical.

A main purpose of stock markets is to make sure that stock prices correctly reflect the underlying value of the companies. One way to do this is to conduct fundamental research on the underlying companies, and then buy stocks that are undervalued and sell stocks that are overvalued. That was Nevsky's approach, and it used to be the only approach. But modern markets have replaced a lot of that fundamental research with automated statistical approaches: If you know that Company X and Company Y usually move together, and you get good fundamental news on Company X, you can go push up the price of Company Y too. This is good! On average it does make prices more efficient (more accurate), and it is cheaper and faster than doing ground-up fundamental research on every company every day. But it is obviously imperfect, relying as it does on historical correlations, and if you are not doing the ground-up fundamental research each day you might miss the point where those correlations ought to break down.