Bartender Geek

I really don't get what's so hard to understand about this plan. (Though not including mortgage relief is just dumb, especially this close to an election.) This isn't me trying to be stubborn, I really don't get it.

And I'm not sure "this is unpopular and an election is coming up" really counts as backbone.

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ron_newman

If it's massively unpopular with constituents, then it shouldn't be done; democracy is important.

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I don't 100% agree. I feel that an elected official should always do what he or she believes is best for the country, accepting that, if their ideas are different than their constituency, they will not be re-elected.

It's important to take the People's voice into account, but a representative should never follow a course of action that he or she thinks is immoral because it is popular.

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ron_newman

OK, I'll grant you that, but causing this bill to fail is hardly "immoral". Maybe imprudent; we'll see.

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If we had the time, education would be the obvious solution.

And, well, letting the economy collapse would be educational.

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I don't even understand, precisely, what the problem is, so I have no idea if the proposed solution matches it.

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I have to go teach a class, and this wouldn't be a short post, so I'll see if I can write more this evening.

L'shana tova!

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I hear you. The money people are freaking out, something appears to be wrong, but, I still make good money, there's plenty of stuff on the shelf at the store, what's the problem?

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amberdine.livejournal.com

Because there are billions of dollars of liquidity that need to stay in available circulation for ordinary day-to-day business to operate, from people using credit cards to stores being able to buy inventory.

If the banks and major financial institutions cannot supply that liquid capital, credit is no longer available, and a large, very important section of the world economy ceases to function. It hasn't happened yet, so the stores and your employer are still functioning. However, people who know what is coming are pulling out of the stock market, because so many businesses will be unable to run that those stocks will be valueless. (Keep in mind the people still holding those dwindling-value stocks are mutual funds -- owned mostly by ordinary people and pensions.)

How much do individuals and businesses buy on credit? (Even short-term, net 30 stuff, not even counting mortgages and business loans.) That is how big the worst-scenario impact may be.

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So we couldn't afford our lifestyle before, and the bill is finally coming due?

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amberdine.livejournal.com

Well, kind of, yes.

Many people, in a particular sector (housing) bought things they couldn't afford, on credit, with loans from big financial institutions. Those financial institutions are involved in many different aspects of the economy. So many people are forfeiting their debts simultaneously, that it affects the income stream of the big financial institutions, such that they can't function, and that has a huge ripple effect.

What irks me most is that the proverbial bill is not coming due for the people who couldn't afford their lifestyle -- though they are the primary cause of the problem. Mostly they've just had to move into an apartment, or a smaller house, abandoning the house they never put any real money into anyway.

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Yes, but it's misleading to try to make it about the individual mortgages. The entire industry was engaged in very highly leveraged speculative investing. While individual people did buy more than they could afford, there was a lot of predatory lending and lying about the terms of loans. But meanwhile, the mortgages themselves, and what was effectively the insurance on the mortgages was being bought and sold in a ridiculously leveraged fashion, often by entities who were leveraging assets they no longer had (or that were no longer worth what they had previously been assessed by) with very little regulation.

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I meant "we" in a very broad sense. If it was just mortgages, it wouldn't be a general crisis.

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Um, 10% of my retirement savings gone in the last year? And that's with a fairly conservative investment strategy.

However, I tend to be a "bite the bullet" kind of person. Sooner or later we're going to have to deal with our national credit addiction, and it's not going to be pretty no matter when we do it.

I guess it comes down to whether you prefer boom today or boom tomorrow. Because, sooner or later, boom.[1]

[1] For values of "boom" approximating the Great Depression.

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Gone? Or gone on paper? I don't retire for 20 years or more. I stuck 75% of my retirement money in low risk stuff a while ago to minize the bust. It'll even out in the recovery. Before the crash, I didn't have the money for 20 years, I still don't have the money for 20 years. If I were retiring soon, I'd be a lot more worried.

Is the scale of "boom" a constant? In my experience, it's not. When boom becomes inevitable, it gets bigger over time. Does putting it off make it go away, or does it just make it happen later and worse?

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Gone as in gone. Can I make enough profit on my remaining investments to end up as well off at retirement as I would have been without the loss? Unlikely at best.

I tend to agree with you re the scale of boom.

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If this means that they can get a more populist bill through (I'm thinking mortgage relief) then good. If they can do it quickly. The current bill has been appalling badly communicated.

But if this means that people are just grandstanding so that they can make it through the elections (which I think is a lot of it) and they're going to continue to let the market collapse... then we're all screwed. I'm kind of amazed how many people don't seem to see the connection between widespread bank collapse, credit collapse, and everyone but particularly people who need paychecks being utterly screwed. Or maybe it's just a few too many loud people screaming "Let them fail! It'll serve them right!" It seems like a lot of them. (Do people not study economic history in school? I mean, yeah, background in poli-econ and all, but I'm pretty sure I learned this at my Marxist highschool, and I was only there for one year.)

I'm not looking to stock up on canned goods. On general principle. (Okay, I do keep a well stocked pantry.) But I'm pretty fruck, really.

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We need, umm, 700 billion dollars, to pick a number at random, and we need absoloutely no oversight on how it is used, and we can't tell you how we will use it, and we need it RIGHT NOW!

The .22 will be more fun to shoot at the range, but less useful when society collapses. And it won't stop a zombie.

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"Fun to shoot at the range" was my criterion.

And, according to Max Brooks, it is the best weapon to stop a zombie.

When society collapses, if I'm trying to shoot small game, it'll be VERY useful. If I'm trying to shoot people, I've pretty much already screwed up.

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I don't know Max Brooks. And I agree about small game, but if you need to shoot people, it may not be you that screwed up. Defense is always optional, but the alternative sucks. The .22 will feed you, within reason (can't take a deer), you can have 2000 rounds of ammo in the space it takes to store one MRE, and if you are clever, you can use a little gun to get a bigger gun, see "liberator pistol".

Two of the guns I don't have but want are .22s. I want a .22 pump action rifle, and a .22 revolver. The pump would be fun to shoot if I lived in a place where I could just toss some reactive targets downrange and shoot a while, and the revolver is a great teaching gun. As it is, when I teach shooting, I have to use a 9mm or rent a .22 semi-auto.

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Max Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks, and has written two books: The Zombie Survival Guide, and World War Z.

The zombies in his world are the result of a virus which is only transmissible by bites (or by getting a transplanted organ from a zombie, but that's statistically negligible). They have no reasoning capacity, very limited dexterity, don't move faster than 1 step every 1.5 seconds or so.

Bits chopped off of them do not remain animate. The only way to destroy them is to destroy the brain.

If a zombie is decapitated, the body is dead, but the head can still bite, and can still transmit the virus. The virus is 100% fatal, and 100% of the time, will raise the corpse as a zombie about 12 hours later.

Zombies freeze solid in extreme cold -- however, when they thaw out, they are just as dangerous as they originally were. All animals instinctively avoid them -- and this includes scavenger insects, and decomposition bacteria. They decompose very slowly, basically from fungal decompostion, and therefore can remain active for years.

Individually, zombies are not much of a threat, if you know what you're dealing with, but, in World War Z, most of the world didn't know -- and so millions, perhaps billions, of humans ended up as zombies. While ONE zombie is not a threat, a hundred thousand of them ARE.

After much of the world was zombified, humanity eventually went on a resurgence, and the newly-formed militaries discovered that the best weapon against zombies was a line of trained riflemen with scoped .22 rifles who would choose ground where the zombies had only one avenue of approach, and take careful aimed headshots.

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Ah, I've seen the books, but not read them. The gun geek in me wants to pick holes in that tactic. There's a bunch of more accurate, more powerful, longer range rounds that would work better on targets that require headshots. But then, I watch too much Futureweapons on TV. Maybe the vast wealth of .22 ammo would be a factor, we have tons of ammo in that caliber. But if a partial kill just leaves you with a biohazzard, .223 is still a lot better, and we have a lot of that too.

Mel and Max, it's interesting when talent runs in families. Mel was solidly an entertainment genius, and I know a lot of people think well of those two books.

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Sure, there's plenty of .223 around.

But it's not in every single Wal-Mart in the remnants of the United States. Okay, you have to be careful entering the Wal-Marts, because there are probably a bunch of zombies still in them (if bitten people died in there, and then, in the twelve hours before they arose as zombies, the power went out, they're not going to be able to figure out how to open the powerless electric doors), but, once you draw them to the door and whack them over the head with a crowbar or hatchet, then you can resupply your entire team.

The advantage of the .22 is not only how much of it there is -- it's its ubiquity.

And there's no such thing as a partial kill with a zombie. If it's still moving, just line up a second shot.

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redknight.livejournal.com

In World War Z, when the US military went on the offensive against the zombies their rifles used a derivative of the 5.56mm NATO round ("Our staple ammo was the NATO 5.56 'Cherry PIE'."). Although very similar to the .223 round

voltbang referenced, there are a few small differences between .223 and 5.56 cartridges (the two are frequently used interchangeably, but they're not).

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Oh, right. Now I remember. Wasn't it designed to fragment within the skull or some such?

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redknight.livejournal.com

Right. "PIE stands for pyrotechnically initiated explosive. Outstanding design. It would shatter on entry into Zack's skull and fragments would fry the brain."

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If you're going for birds, you might want to add a 410 over and under shotgun to the mix.

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I've never fired a shotgun -- can you load birdshot into a shotgun chambered for 12-gauge? 'Cause that might make the most sense, and allow hunting of deer and so forth as well.

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Sorry, this is beyond my ken. You could always ask the local NRA. Seriously; they probably have all kinds of information freely available.

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unquietsoul5.livejournal.com

Well it means no vote on a new plan until after Columbus Day, I suspect. We're waiting to see our quarterly 401k report to see if any of this is really directly affecting us.

I don't think the original Paulson plan was a good idea. I do think they need to put back in all the breakers and failsafes and oversight that used to be in place from the New Deal. I also believe that if the economy is at such a high risk, we'd be better off taking half that 700B and putting it into a national Infrastructure and public works project.

700 Billion is a lot of money. A better investment would be to give every single taxpayer a million dollar check with the strings attached that they must pay off outstanding debt from it, period. It would cost less, clear the books for the majority of American debt and end the 'worthless state' of all that corporate paper (except that which was purely built by corporate games and not actual people getting mortgages).

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Actually, $5000 per taxpayer.

Sadly, for a lot of people, that wouldn't clear their debt, especially if you include car payments and mortgages.

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brooksmoses

Because this idea seems to inexplicably be getting actual traction: Yes, 700 billion is a lot of money, but it only amounts to maybe $6000 per household (and less per taxpayer), not a million dollars apiece. The reason that giving every single taxpayer a million dollar check would do a lot more to fix things is that it would cost vastly more than any proposed bailout, and about a dozen times the existing national debt.

So, no, it would not "cost less", by any stretch of the imagination.

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kightp.livejournal.com

All I know yet is that the "no" votes came overwhelmingly from people in swing district races, on both sides of the aisle.

The next one of them who makes noises about "playing politics" deserves *such* a slap.

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ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com

One very reliable rule in finance is: If someone is using high- pressure tactics to urge you to give them money right now or else, walk away. It is a scam.

No situation is so bad that panic can't make it a whole lot worse. People in Washington need to calm down and do some research to find a real solution.

Or they're likely to find themselves out of a job next month, and in this economy, that would suck. For them.

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You forget the golden rule. "It can't happen to me."

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ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com

A whole lot of rich jerks in the Depression found out that, yes indeedy, it CAN happen to you.

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