11foot8
Sites like this are why the internet is awesome.
Making Sausage
…with our livelihoods.
This is where the trickery comes in. To explain it, let’s go back to the sausage analogy.
Say I’m a sausage grinder. My sausage is selling great. Until one day, my customers say they don’t want the ends, the ones with those nasty knots. Pretty soon, I’ve got all these end bits piling up on my counter. I’m worried it’s going to turn off customers. So I shove the end bits back in the grinder and make new sausages. Brilliant. Of course, customers don’t want those end bits either. So, I throw them back in the grinder. This works for a while. But eventually, I’m making sausages that are made up entirely of nasty end bits.
“So, this is exactly what happens with subprime CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) ,” Bernstein says. “The investment banks take the worst parts of the CDO and they put it into new CDOs, recycling it again and again, until pretty soon, the CDOs that you’re left with are made up of the worst parts of the stuff.”
With Wall Street, when they recycle a CDO and shove a nasty bit back in the blender, they mark it as a sale. As if they found a real customer.
“In fact, a lot of the business is an illusion,” Eisinger says. “The CDO guys are orchestrating the demand.”
From a fine collaboration with NPR and ProPublica, with AutoTune the news thrown in for good measure.
40 Days
When Greg Abbott actually sues a company in Texas, you know it’s got to be pretty bad.
In Texas City, an estimated 538,000 pounds of pollutants like benzene, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide leaked into the air during that period, though Carman believes the release may be “more than 10 times higher” than the number that BP reported to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. That’s because, he says, BP assumes that its flare met the 2 percent standard but has no record proving that it does. “BP has no real monitoring technology up on the flare,” he says. “They have no way to measure the actual emissions that did not get burned over the 40 days.” (more…)
While we ponder more stringent immigration controls in the state, hows about we deport BP?
Regent Donors
For only $200K, you too can have seat on the Texas A&M board of regents.
Terlingua
24 hours in Terlingua, a documentary – complete with old dude living in a bus he calls ice station zebra, wearing a Whole Earth t-shirt.
Tea Party & Vergoogle
Following the release of Google and Verizon’s controversial proposal on managing Internet traffic, which comes less than a week after the FCC abandoned efforts at a hammering out a compromise, Tea Party groups have taken a strong stance on the issue of net neutrality.
Specifically, they’re against it. (more…)
I just…I can’t…words….rage….what the hell? Instead of the Government mandating an open web that is free of tiered-content restrictions based on provider, you’re going to let the ‘free’ market decide what content you should be allowed to access, based on a payment level? Or worse yet be served specific content at a different priority level, thus severely diminishing the open access to multiple sources/viewpoints? So, freedom of speach is cool, but if I’m poor and can’t afford access I only get served a specific…. oh wait, you guys hate poor people anyhow, so this actually works in your favor. I see what you did there.
This was my favorite bit.
The Internet has never been a regulated utility and we urge you to keep it that way by rejecting so-called “Net Neutrality” regulations on the Internet and the proposed Title II reclassification.
Right, cause all those root DNS servers, backbone connections, URL naming conventions -they all magically run themselves with no government intervention or regulation.
FM
Coming soon to your cell phone – an FM receiver. No really. Also in negotiations – mandatory telegraph capability for laptops and semaphore flags with every WiMAX contract. This is just dumb.
Time Travel
Some days I wish I could travel back 20 years ago to working on various home-improvement projects in the garage with my dad, and hear Zeppelin or Cream again for the first time, completely with the insightful observation of, “Whoa, cool.”
Birthright Citizenship
“The debate is always about the theoretical. … Whenever you talk about the practical aspects of it, there’s silence,” says Margaret Stock, an Anchorage, Alaska-based immigration attorney who’s written extensively and testified before Congress on the subject. “Because anybody who understands how citizenship is determined in the absence of the 14th Amendment quickly realizes that we have a huge mess on our hands. And it will cost billions of dollars if we change the amendment’s current interpretation.” (more…)
Anti-immigrant sentiment and the absurdity of the anchor babies argument aside, get rid of your birth certificate as proof of citizenship and your talking about a huge inflation of bureaucracy to keep track of citizens, somewhere on the scale of a national ID plan meets the Census Bureau with some elements of the IRS thrown in for fun (all this being the supposed anathema to your conservative base (except of course with defense)) . Someone needs to help the Republicans and the Teapers eat their young on this bullshit.
8:The Mormon Proposition
From the good folks at the Alamo, the documentary 8:The Mormon Proposition exposes the inappropriate and hateful role the Mormon Church had on California’s Proposition 8. Further, the film examines how the church’s project of suppressing homosexuals has led to great turmoil, prompting, among other things, Utah to have the highest suicide rate in the country.