Meshugger

So basically they are just showing that no police force can be everywhere at all times. They are apparently coordinating the attacks in a similar fashion as the Arab revolts did last spring, only this time is more Blackberry chat and less FB. I'm not sure if this is good or bad brand publicity. "Blackberry, the tool of the 21st century professional hooligan" It's kinda weird the complete ineffectiveness the police have demonstrated so far because Brits have a lot of experience fighting urban guerrillas and rioters in Northern Ireland. I wonder once police and/or military response gears up to actually put the riots down, will Sarko move to initiate humanitarian airstrikes on the evil repressors too? Will he ask for RAF support? I think the reason is that the police have experience from anti-terrorism, football hooligans and alike. Immigrants and some chavs going on a masslooting-spree is probably not filed under standard protocol Anyhoo, the two "worst" scenarios are: 1) Military moves into cities. Little casualties, but a big blow to british society as a "civilized" and "western" society since it is not a demonstration against the government, but rather random looting and pillaging. 2) The rest of britain give up on the police being able to keep order and form local neighbourhood watches, paramilitary groups and a such. Much more casualties, since it would pretty easily escalate to target all blacks.

Jesus, riots popping up like zombies in immigrant-heavy buroughs. Even in Birmingham as well. Monte, care to report in? Linky.

Sounds like the same thing that happened in France last year. A local thug dies in a shootout and the police is to blame. Those "protesters" are scum and should all be deported to their own island where they could kill and loot each other off....ooh.

I am out of the loop here. Why are there riots in Tottenham, Enfield and apparantly Brixton?

Um, ratings downgrades mean higher borrowing costs - which is something that will have a tangible impact on all Americans. This isn't some non-issue the media is hyping up (OK, so they probably ARE hyping it up). Those are only effective if the markets pay heed to the rating itself. Which they shouldn't do, since the decision to cut the rating was solely a political one. S&P said so themselves.

It is still sad to see how the media treats these rating agencies as serious entities when they have proven that they can't rate for **** to begin with. Manipulating financial bubbles are more their kind of territory. I am not saying that the US government should treat their budget problems any less lightly, but they should not be treated as the only source for financial stability.

Oh, what did S&P think about the sub-prime mortage CDCs? "AAA" perhaps?

Hasn't the US had a AAA rating since 1917? It means that it has endured the great depression, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and 9/11. Simply put, the US should do what a nation being number 1 does. Blow up or burn the S&P HQ to the ground this sunday and raise a statue of hulk hogan holding the flag upon the rubble. "That our rating of YOU, suckers"

Care to elaborate? As everyone is aware, the US is almost entirely comprised of immigrants. Im not aware of any group specifically singled out as not being alowed entry. Certainly, Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965 which abolished the previous, National_Origins_Formula There were also 19th-century policies aimed to actively exclude immigrants from China and Japan. There's a long history of nativist politics in America, in spite of its immigrant roots. Early on, nativist groups were primarily anti-Catholic. By the late 19th century, they took on more racial tones (recall that thinkers like Herbert Spencer were still quite well thought of at that time), particularly with regard to Asians and folks from central America and the further Southern and Eastern portions of Europe. However, prior to the 1920s, business interests (who wanted a continued source of cheap immigrant labor) were successful in keeping the nativists from implementing any seriously restrictive policies. I hear ya. I didn't know about the anti-catholic movement though. I just wanted to point that the US immigrant policy wasn't a free-for-all, as some might think it was.

Care to elaborate? As everyone is aware, the US is almost entirely comprised of immigrants. Im not aware of any group specifically singled out as not being alowed entry. Certainly, Immigration_and_Nationality_Act_of_1965 which abolished the previous, National_Origins_Formula

USA had it as well, until about the time of the civil rights movement of the 1960's.

After the 9/11 attacks, support for president Bush and his policies had an approval rating of 90%. Point being is that doing political polls when a nation suffers from an enormous emotional stress isn't the best idea.

True story: The mongolian sense of tribal hierarchy can be seen in russian culture to this very day. A great example would be the poster above me: obyknven

Judging from the rhetoric, it seems like multiculturalism = love, solidarity & tolerance. However, life itself is a lot more complex than that.

That was my point all along. no it wasn't, but am not gonna rehash the obvious that you is intrigued by brev's message. your basic premise is that we should not ignore the message just 'cause the messenger is a pathetic, cowardly, and monstrous killer o' children. you find some value in the message. Gromnir, on the other hand, is quite comfortable dismissing the messenger. there is a very long list o' anti-islamic commentators who gots very impressive resumes... scientists, diplomats, philosophers, doctors, etc. many such commentators has not felt the need to plagiarize, and virtually none worth mentioning has gone on killing sprees. the last thing we is gonna do is give some delinquent with daddy issues an opportunity to set the agenda on multiculturalism in europe. is precisely 'cause he resorted to such a cowardly act that his message is deserving less/no consideration... but you don't get that 'cause you agree with him... and you continue to defend his intellect and courage. we walked out the fed court house a couple a days ago and were accosted by a dirty and bearded fellow who assured us that fbi were involved in human trafficking with mexican drug cartels. he sounded at least as coherent as boo or vol. am guessing he had not bathed in at least a week, though we did not recognize him from the local soup kitchen and homeless shelter where we volunteer. we didn't pay much attention to the fellow. would you? *snort* even so, as far as we know, grimy conspiracy theorist never killed dozens o' kids in an attempt to get us to listen to his message. neither grimy guy nor brev has any academic, professional or personal life experience that we is aware o' to be making their relative messages worthy o' consideration, so as between dirty and bearded and mass-murdering prepster, am gonna actual be more likely to listen to the guy who looks like a walking lice and tick farm. heck, the dirty fellow could turn out to be a former fed himself, which would at least give him some expertise. there is at least a possible (if improbable) reason to consider dirty-guy. brev gots nothing... dead bodies and a plagiarized manifesto. fascination with brev as a kinda unique monster? sure, that is understandable... but to actually consider the merits o' his message when his only notable accomplishment in life is mass murder? at least ted were actual smart. brev is simply the 2011 version with more idiot appeal. given his educational and personal accomplishments, is unlikely that we would take breivik's narcissistic and rambling manifesto serious if we had read it on july 21, 2011. the guy were a nobody and 1,500 pages o' doggerel and stolen material woulda' been evoking maybe a smidgen o' scorn and a dollop o' amusement. read today? why? his message is less relevant today, not more. HA! Good Fun! I find him interesting from psychological point of view. People like Dahmer and Bundy are easy to "understand" since they killed because of a sexual desire to do so. But people like Breivik, McVeigh and the unabomber, they did incomprehensive acts of violence without any basic desire, but rather out of a weird sense of desperation and hate. For me, that makes them "interesting" because i cannot phantom on what exactly makes them tick. It is pretty much the fear of the everyday man to snap and kill everyone that they might wish that keeps me compelled.

Compared to other killers, this guy is interesting since: 1) He wasn't suicidal, yet he wanted to get caught (lite martyr-complex?) 2) You have to have a tremendous rage to go on a rampage and kill 80 people, but he still had enough self-control to spare an 11 year old when the kid pleaded for mercy 3) Allegedly socially conservative, but still not against homosexuality and other generally "conservative" issues 4) Finally, his target was strangely refined. It wasn't the muslims in general, or even imams and similar people in power. It was instead the youth section of a party that he blamed for destroying the norwegian culture. /me scratches head...

It solves the initial allocation question-- i.e., how do you decide to whom to issue that money? The role of a financial or banking sector in an economy is pretty simple: It is the job of the financial sector to decide where a society's aggregated assets should be invested. In order to maximize the long-term competitiveness of a society, the banking sector should be making those decisions based on what endeavors offer the highest likely real rate of return. And if you allow the mechanisms of the money supply to flow through private businesses competing for market share and returns to capital, you tend to get decision-makers who have the correct incentives governing that decision. One of the key lessons of the 20th Century is that, when prudently regulated, a capitalist banking sector tends to make more efficient decisions than does a system run with more political control (which, from a technical political-theory point of view, would probably be called fascist, but is more closely associated in the modern mindset with the communist regimes that previously lurked on the unfashionable side of the Iron Curtain). That said, the "prudently regulated" bit is quite important. Because a banking sector has an enormous power over the overall functioning of an economy, there have to be some checks to ensure that it is in fact worthy of the trust that the rest of the society gives it. The incentives that private parties have in free market democracies all create tendencies towards monopoly, oligopoly, and the exercise of political influence for private gain, so the state must police its industries (particularly finance) to minimize the efficiency-sapping impact of those kinds of exercise of market power. And that's largely at the root of what has happened. Under this view, the portion of GDP generated by the financial sector can be seen as something of a tax-- the part of our overall productivity that is rendered to the people who are making our investment allocation decisions for us. For most of the post-WW2 period in the U.S., this portion held pretty steady around 4%. It started rising above that level in the 1980s, as the de-regulation cogs started to turn and as the workplace culture changed inside the big Wall Street investment banks. (Most importantly, they started transitioning from small private partnerships to publicly traded corporations, and there's a big difference between what kind of risks a person is willing to take with their bosses' money and what kind of risks they are willing to take with money provided by millions of anonymous shareholders.) In short, when deciding which endeavors to fund with the assets of the society, the answer "Other Bankers like Me" started turning up more and more often. (Sidenote: also a factor was the frequency with which the question was answered with "Southeast Asia" or some other foreign nation instead of somewhere closer to home.) By the time the wave crested, the financial sector in the U.S. was around 8% of GDP. Essentially, with the "hands off" regulatory attitude, there just got to be too much lending. Which means too much debt and too much risk. Leverage is a magical thing. Say that you find an investment opportunity that you're pretty sure will return 10% in a year. If you fund the whole thing out of pocket, you make a 10% return. But if you get get 10-1 leverage, borrowing $9 for every $1 you put up, your return on the initial investment is 100% (minus your borrowing costs). The problem, of course, is that if you're wrong, it only takes a 10% decline in the investment to wipe out 100% of your investment. By late 2008, some of the huge investment banks were at 30-1 overall leverage, and their regulators were fine with this because it was assumed that these companies were being run by the most sophisticated managers that money could buy and that no regulator could protect their investors better than those managers could. In that environment, any kind of shock could be enough to precipitate a catastrophe. It turned out to be the overvaluing of sub-prime real estate that provided the match, but had that not happened, it would've been something else instead. Too many piles of oil-soaked rags lying around for it not to catch fire sooner or later. And Wals is incorrect in saying that only rich people suffered. The global recession is mostly a de-leveraging event. Companies, governments, and individuals have responded to this crisis largely by attempting to reduce their debt levels. Lots of big businesses are still getting over the shell-shock that happened when the commercial paper market essentially shut down in late 2008, so they're keeping oodles of cash on hand instead of investing it in hiring, expansion, or other things that keep the economy moving. In the aggregate, we've basically got lots of people either defaulting on debt or putting more of today's earnings into paying for yesterday's expenditures. That means less present consumption and fewer present jobs. Thank you I knew the rest, but i wanted an argument on why fractional reserve banking is the langua franca among economists.

A dumb question: Why is fractional reserve banking better than the government issuing money itself entirely? Why do we need a bank to print money(=our currency)?

Must be horrible. Getting gently talked to by beautiful female psychiatrists the whole day "But you're special! You can change if you just want! Do you want a massage to feel better?". Most likely not. I have friends who works as nurses (male) at a closed psychiatric ward and by their telling it is more like a blend of the ward where Hannibal Lecter was in silence of the lambs and like in one flew out of the cuckoo's nest, except there aren't any women. Just brick walls, silence and lots of prescription drugs.

Oww... you missed out on the greatest of the 'A's, Australia! Just kidding, those who knows me knows my contempt for nationalism/patriotism as an archaic, mind limiting concept that should have been wiped out post 1918. Just out of interest, do you even believe in the concept of nation-states? If not, then what do you suggest instead as a social contract between the individual, groups and the state?

I guess. Where are the Coen Bros, Scorsese, Welles, Mann, Coppola, hell, even the Nolans of the game industry? Considering the profiling that Bioware seems to put themselves to (or any other big developer), you would expect them to try have some sort of elevated standards. In before "Bioware does not owe anything to anybody!" but please refrain from that since that was not the point. It all boils down the old "auteurism" thread we had, as we can see from your comparison. I couldn't care less what the names on the game say (as long as they don't do unlawful imprisonment and fraud). Some people have high (I'd say unrealistic) expectations from Bioware, yet often seem happy with products that are IMO clearly inferior. And some people are, of course, just happy to hate. Never understood both camps myself, Bio's games aren't as good as they could be, but are still, unfortunately, the best made in the current industry climate; as for the people who want to spend their money so that they can bitch about Bioware - you are lucky, I don't have enough time to indulge the things I like, never mind the ones I hate. I have never percieved Bioware as a company fallen from grace, rather a company that has the resources to do something really great, but never bothering to (i am talking about monetary resources, not human). To debate about someone having the interest or time not to bitch about a company to produce something they want is inconsequental or maybe even pointless. What is more important though is that cash is a fact. If there's a market for more adult-themed movies and novels out there, then there's also a market for games for the very same segment of consumers. One way is actually talk about it at online forums, since developers tend to read or even participate in them. Just planting some seeds here.

I guess. Where are the Coen Bros, Scorsese, Welles, Mann, Coppola, hell, even the Nolans of the game industry? Considering the profiling that Bioware seems to put themselves to (or any other big developer), you would expect them to try have some sort of elevated standards. In before "Bioware does not owe anything to anybody!" but please refrain from that since that was not the point.

To throw in a tangent here, i just finished ME2. It was like a solid Firefly-episode. I would rate it 7/10 since it had nothing really that stood out, but on the other hand it had great production values and nothing was really bad either. What i am not getting is the ridicoulus high praise that it gets. What was so special there that elevated it into gaming history? Is it in the DLCs? By using ME2 as a template for the third (and final?) act in the series, i expect nothing much. A solid blockbuster like "Independence Day" would be a good analogy.

Graveyard - The Siren Probably the best band in the last 20 years. These guys will be big. Really, really big. Truly Satan's finest.

His "Codex stories" with garry's mod are hilarious. Hats off to him