Letters to the Editor
A Billion Angry Bees
Published Letters: 476 Editor's Choice: 13
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A lot of people think AIDS and crack were invented by the CIA to kill the black man
[Read the article: The difference between Jeremiah Wright and radical, white evangelical ministers]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A lot of people think they were personally abducted by flying saucers too. Just because some irrational twit has a pulpit and people cheer doesn't make him right, it just makes him popular. Or Elmer Gantry. Hell we've got people here who believe the global Jewish conspiracy of everything. And anyone who disagrees with them are quietly tut-tutted. Doesn't make them an oracle of truth it just means that some people agree with their crackpot opinions. That's why I like Rev Wright. I like all crackpots. It's entertaining to watch their apologists. We've got an incumbent who believes the earth is 6000 years old and we've got a candidate who's main mentor in life is a raving race baiter, demagogue and loon. Good for them. That's what I love about America. Take stupidity and rage, mix in ignorance, racial politics and dash of hate. Stand back and watch the 'media' fumble over themselves trying to come up with a rational explanation. You can't make this stuff up.
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I never seen this email
[Read the article: Poetry, psychology, and the Barack Obama Muslim e-mail]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]could someone post it? I toss most email unopened since 90% is junk anyway. So I may have rec'd it, just never saw it.
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SalilM
[Read the article: George Bush's reality distortion field]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So this is just grousing? Ok. carry on.
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Alkaline
[Read the article: Nightmare on Wall Street]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Well the same things that been applied or should have been applied since around 1999 or so. It's not as if the laws and regulations that gate credit, debt and particularly derivatives are opaque. It's that no one paid them any mind at all. For example, Carlyle fund was leveraged at least 15:1 perhaps 20:1, which if they were an investment bank would not quite be criminal but it would certainly alert auditors to a substantial risk. But for some odd reason Hedge funds aren't held to the same audit let alone reserve standards that investment banks are. And investments are very loose in relation to 'real' banks.
Moreover, if investors don't understand the inherent risks in derivatives then the seller of the instrument should have a better explanation for how it works. If they can't do that then the derivative doesn't make any sense to own and shouldn't be sold. But millions of people flocked to them on the promise that it would work somewhat like magic. But magic isn't a legal term or an equation. And its unlikely that ANYONE ON EARTH understands how second order derivatives actually work let alone some of the more esoteric tertiary or quaternary ones. Perhaps they should be outlawed. Perhaps the reserve brakes for CDO/CMOs should be set more in line with a 'real' bank e.g. 30% since it's at its base no more complicated than a straight loan, and that when the default rate exceeds 5% a trigger flips and the loans are called in series so that the reserve pool isn't depleted at once. Attention actuaries; maybe you could look at it like a mortality table cubic function over time. That would seem to make basic rational sense that there is an initial slope to the risk that's quite low, it accelerates and then there is a terminal phase where the rate of change of the risk flattens out until everyone has been accounted for.
There are a hundred different financial things one could do. They're not black magic. Talk to a banker, they'll tell you.
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What a silly note
[Read the article: Poetry, psychology, and the Barack Obama Muslim e-mail]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It sounds like trash. It sounds no more credible than a Nigerian email scam.
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But you start from a position of ignorance in your own argument, don't you?
[Read the article: Why Apple fans hate tech reporters]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]....People who "think" they know about global warming or Apple computers or the mideast......
Well I own an Apple and I've been to the mideast and lived there. What does that mean? I'm still beholden to the ignorance of 'experts'? No the problem with 'True Enough' is that people like you assume everyone else is clueless BECAUSE they're online.
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So is the point that eventually the Brits learn to at least respect if not like their Nazi guards?
[Read the article: Guerrillas rise up in Nazi-occupied Britain]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Or is the point that they should all run out and righteously build IED's and slaughter their occupiers? I'm always confused by the fervor with which we're all supposed to agree with anti-occupation-ism here at salon.com.
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If you think the sole answer is politics and policy then you are a fool, Andrew
[Read the article: The crash in Republican economics ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Big picture people always fail at this because this is not a macro big picture problem. And politics and policy not only have been logjammed and frozen for nearly two decades but it's entirely suspect, politics and policy have anything remotely useful to offer. Especially since "Your shit's fucked up" is hardly a useful description of the problem in the first place. And what makes you think that the President can even do anything enforceable in a global electronic financial economy where 100 Trillion with a T dollars flows through it every day? Go ahead, invoke a law, see where all that activity lands. It won't be on Wall St.
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By the by
[Read the article: Guerrillas rise up in Nazi-occupied Britain]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I never thought The Man in the High Tower was about an occupied country. It's about a post war country that lost and the rules, the borders and the organization of it has changed, as Germany's did. In many ways, apart from Dick's paranoia, it's about a new country that's forced to adjust to a new set of ruling classes where those rulers have imposed a kind of odd postwar prosperity on the country. Economically things are kind of ratty, in a civil service mass transit kind of way in Dick's California but they're light years ahead of where they were in the 1940's even where they were in contemporary times when Dick wrote the book. So part of the story implies a trade-off, a quiet complicity that comes with occupation vs. class aspirations.
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Then you don't ever read ESPN magazine
[Read the article: News roundup: Girly drinks and peeping toms]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The sexist nature of their Skyy Vodka ads would fry your sex toys. A typical Skyy ad is a man seated being handed a Martini from a woman who's mostly naked, or straddling him, or both.
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Salon readers are ashamed to admit it
[Read the article: Why Apple fans hate tech reporters]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But they're just as likely to advocate the killing and eating of those who disagree with them, as anyone else.