costard
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Posts posted by costard
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C) - both. The derivatives market was essentially corrupt - bad loans knowingly made and sold off as low risk, earn your four percent here. Unfortunately, as with a lot of these fashions in business, those companies that didn't invest in the derivatives were only making something like the real rate of growth as return; it turns out that when you strip out the derivatives and their -ahem- earnings, the world economy was only growing at about 1 to 2 percent per annum over the last decade. These companies came under pressure from the market, which would sell the shares and devalue the company. The directors would be fired by angry (and not terribly bright) shareholders, and the company would start to invest in the derivatives - where else was it possible to get a four percent return for doing nothing? At the end of the cycle - everyone is left holding trash and the corporations are managed by the intellectually incapable: those that believed the fairy tale would last forever. This mechanism for sinking an entire economy is a fairly important one to understand - the same sort of process takes place when legislation is passed that allows for the deterioration of working conditions: a company that doesn't pass on the cost savings is necessarily at a disadvantage when competing against a company that does. The market drives the behaviour: short term profit is the only recognisable measure of a corporation's success, it says. Too bad that this is fundamentally in opposition to the philosophy behind the creation of corporations in the first place, and it's just tough that there is no such thing as a nation that can afford to plan only in the short term.
It is my belief that the sophist interpretations of the law that allowed this to take place started at the top, with the leadership - with intellectually dishonest arguments concerning torture, motivations and justifications for waging war, etc. It is hardly surprising, really, as the same people making the money out of those interpretations were making money out of going to war. Len Deighton does a nice little story of the importance of a corrupt legal system for the furthering of Nazi Germany in "Winter". And if you think we weren't headed the same way, I'd invite you to go and do some reading and remembering. We dodged it by about eighteen months, I reckon. Thank god for the American artist: writers mostly.
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He(?) probably pinched the wheelie bin to make the costume - that's a hanging offense over here. I wonder what they'll recycle him as - fertilizer?
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The human inhabitants provide sustenance for hungry bears.
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At it core, what is the difference between a squad of soldiers and military security contractors beside the uniform and who the boss is?
A soldier fights for a flag, a mercenary fights for money.
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You wouldn't understand.
Something for which I'm grateful. I figure you're probably grinding yourself.
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Rich,
Is the shimmering happening when you move the mouse or when you use the arrow buttons to move around? If it is the former, it sounds like you may have some sort of weird interference/feedback problem with the mouse. Maybe try a different mouse?
We had a discussion in the GF about some interference causing noise a while back - and I forget what the solution was, sorry,.
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Height of terrain? maybe?
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Nice one BD6 - so the US would only knowingly enter into this arrangement if they thought they could blame their failure in Afghanistan on the uncooperative Russians?
It's worth noting that Russia did build a logistics route into Afghanistan. Whether it has survived the intervening decades in good condition is another question, though my suspicion is that the Soviet military built stuff to last.
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Looks like the Finns know what fun is - and it looks like I'm gonna have to find my way from the arse end of the planet to the bald head.
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I'd buy that for a dollar.
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I should have looked at a map. But Chechnya still simmers, doesn't it? And the costs of an extended supply route - from a port or airfield in Russia to Afghanistan - are going to be astronomical. Do you have any detailed maps on road/rail routes Sergei?
Heh, China and Russia putting in competitive bids for US military co-operation - NATO might be able to make a profit on the deal.
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Actually, that would make sense. His whole administration could be viewed as payback for the US "winning" the Cold War.
Michael
Nah - just the forseeable outcome of an unworkable economic philosophy let loose. Somebody forgot to turn off the propaganda machine in 1990 and people no longer had a competing viewpoint to look to for balance. The rest is the inevitability of incompetence and stupidity: the human condition, if you will.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090123/ap_on_re_as/eu_russia_us_afghanistan
What the article conspicuously leaves out, of course, is what price Russia exacted for its "cooperation".
Any guesses?
I'd guess at not all that much - the US has to protect its supply into Afghanistan, which means they'll have to provide some sort of active security presence through Russia's troubled south. Russia gets the US to fight it's homegrown insurgency problem, first dibs on easily obtainable intelligence on US kit and method, and a forced co-operation between the respective militaries. The US, of course, understands all of this, but now has no option. Putin has kept this possibility open since the beginning of the Afghanistan campaign: he's a realist enough to appreciate the advantages accruing to both nations. He had the misfortune to run into an unimaginative and backward thinking US military command (at the very top, anyway).
It remains to be seen whether the funny buggers on both sides can be kept out of the mix - there's a fair swag of mistrust to overcome before the operation can begin to run smoothly and a sizable risk of a deterioration in the relationship being the only measurable outcome.
The upside - the Afghanistan campaign goes forward with the establishment of secure trade routes through southern Russia and the opportunity for the Afghan (and other) peoples to benefit from these. The downside - total failure in Afghanistan coupled with a further entrenchment of alienation between the world's two most powerful militaries.
My guess, for what its worth.
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Becuase it's an accelerant. Helps get your pitch burning.
ah so - you dip your (unlit) torch into a bucket of pitch, then into a bucket of sulphur and she lights first time, right?
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I can see how pitch might be handy to have in a mining operation, but sulphur? What for you need sulphur?
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I'm fairly sure I've noticed a difference in vehicles' movement rates with different terrain - in Objective Pooh with vehicles scurrying to get behind the hill, there's a LOS for an AT4 (I think) in one of the trenches. A poor choice of path will leave a vehicle in that LOS for too long and it will be snotted. It may be that with the relatively small distances to cover (due to relatively small maps) that the vehicles don't reach top speed too often.
Come to think of it, I found the salt pan terrain in the next scenario is even more detrimental to a vehicle's top speed.
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Fantastic work - thanks for the heads-up.
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You're very welcome.
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I'm thinking of catapults. Worked with plague ridden bodies, so why not chemical canisters.
I'm thinking of the natural draft through the tunnel - though it looks like the gas would be H2S. Inject some water and takes it to H2SO3, sulfurous acid.
The discrepancy in height between the top of the shaft and the bottom would want to be quite large - or you could be pumping air through from the bottom with a big pair of bellows / set of sails.
An acid fog - and the need to block the tunnel - hence the rockfall.
Cheers for the article.
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Isn't this just the ballistic path of the different projectile? If the 50 cal is shooting at long range, it's shells will arc too. At long range for 7.62mm, .50 is just getting warmed up.
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Didn't Israel knock out a UN observation post in the last spat (Lebanon)? They used HE then, IIRC. There's a pattern here...
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Could be a Vista / accounts thing - there's a similar problem discussed in the CMSF forums. Try a search for "SAVED1" - I've forgotten the extension - on your hard disc.
Hope this helps.
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I remember hearing about a report of treatment of captured Allies in GW1 - the officers and privates were left alone, the NCOs, and in particular the British NCOs were interrogated fairly thoroughly. Not tortured, mind, interrogated for some clue as to why the British Army functioned as it does.
The mythos of the organisation - the culture of the army - is propagated and maintained by its senior NCOs. When you have a unit that has been successfully (more or less) campaigned for 400 years, the culture of that unit, evident more in its traditions than its laws, is an extremely important part of the organisational makeup. It defines the cohesiveness of the unit, the efficiencies gained in communication between the sub-units and their ability to function with uniform purpose. This is especially important when the **** has well and truly hit the fan, the officer corps has ceased to exist and inter-unit communication has practically ceased. Everyone is fighting blind - but every sub-unit has a pretty good idea of what is required of it nonetheless. It is the reason the German Army in WW2 was able to function down to the level of the remnant of the unit, whereas the non-professional armies with no history or long standing traditions ceased to function once its officers had been killed.
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Well sure, but in the short term you managed to feel good about beating up on some towel-heads, and the plutocracy made a bomb.
Mission Accomplished.
Still no movement on the systemic changes that need to take place to fix the problems - and the clock has been ticking for 18 months now. I'd say it's positive indication of brain-sucking aliens. Where's John Kettler when you need him?
When you default on your house mortgage...
in General Discussion Forum
Posted
REVS - the law was only changed quite recently here in Australia: in the late nineties I think. It was a deliberate sell-off of the populace into debt slavery that went mostly un-noticed by the press.
I seem to remember a similar set of legal changes mooted in the US, but I'm not sure if it got up. It could be that the legislators there recognised that it removed the onus on the lender to quantify the risk before lending, instead placing the responsibility on the borrower. The lenders in the States decided to get around this by deliberately understating the risk - "as safe as houses." while making quarter million dollar NINJA loans- No Income, No Job (or) Assets. To some extent they were aided and abetted by the legislation introduced by the Democrats which had as its raison d'etre the provision of housing to low income citizens; for the most part it was because everyone in the lending industry was being paid by commission and no-one was prepared to point out that the outcome was likely to be exactly what came to pass (not while they were raking in the dough. Hell, they were printing it - watering the currency by way of lending against hugely overpriced assets.).
Anyone with brains enough not to **** in their boot before putting it on had got out of the market before July 2007 and converted what they had to cash, but as the guy in Davos said, the cashed-up aren't buying cheap assets, they're running for the hills and keeping their cash.