The Off Topic Topic

[Octavian]

God bless us all!

[Ideologue]

I approve of those small butts.

[Eddie Teach]

It's Ante, not Anti. Antidiluvian would be someone against floods.

They all got wiped out, and Noah's pro-flood faction won out.

[Jaron]

It's Ante, not Anti. Antidiluvian would be someone against floods.

They all got wiped out, and Noah's pro-flood faction won out.

[Josquius]

http://www.wikihow.com/Ride-a-Dog

[Lettow77]

 When I was very little, I had a Siberian Husky, who was quite big enough to ride around on, and good-natured enough to allow me to do so. At the time my father's office was a three-story former bank downtown, the basement and upper two floors of which were our home.

Black folks are invariably scared of dogs, and were the majority of my father's clientele. He'd get both angry and amused when i'd come out into the office area terrifying self-styled thugs and hard criminals guilty of violent robbery  half to death.

After all the improvements downtown Memphis has received, the property would be worth enormous amounts now. As it is, it was quite a vanity of my father's, a large financial sink even for a successful lawyer, and its clear in retrospect he had no experience being wealthy or managing assets. Still, it was the zenith of his economic triumph and I think our happiest days as a family.

I miss all of that, but it's a happy memory.

Edit: In a bout of nostalgia, I went and found it using Google Earth. It doesn't look so great anymore, does it? The place that isn't a liquor store had a bunch of folks living in it, and they were musicians. They were friends of the family, but eventually one named Mike overdosed in our basement, and that was the end of that. The other side was a liquor store back then, too. The third floor had a massive glass jar stuffed with pennies beyond measure, every penny my father ever found himself with, and I amused myself by throwing pennies at the winos who would congregate outside the liquor store. They didn't mind much, being shameless winos- they collected the pennies.


I also really liked to climb on the ledge you can see on the second story, but that ended when I got a severe whupping after my mother returned from a store to find me dangling out like that.

[Sheilbh]

Just read an article in The Atlantic about the well-known decision of the SEC to increase the leverage ratios of investment banks from 12-1 to 33-1 in 2004, which everyone agrees is one of the root causes of the meltdown.

Turns out it's not true.

I'd never heard of that before.

How is it not true?

[Josephus]

I approve of those small butts.

The only good thing to watch during the Olympics.
They should have a butt cam option.

[Admiral Yi]

I'd never heard of that before.

How is it not true?

Wierd, isn't it?  A former SEC division chief made the claim in an article, the claim was picked up by several prominent economics columnists, never fact checked.  Became conventional wisdom.

The author of the article gives several examples of i-banks with higher leverage in the 80s and 90s than right before the crash.

[Neil]

Neil should wake up in about two hours or so.

Even I won't go to bat over Hellsing.  Yuck.

[Admiral Yi]

Read in The Economist that US Debt/GDP now is 100%.

Is it just me, or has the media decided the US debt is not very newsworthy starting in, oh, roughly, give or take, 2008?

[Ideologue]

Neil should wake up in about two hours or so.

Even I won't go to bat over Hellsing.  Yuck.

It's the sort of nonsense I wanted to like, because Alucard's kind of like the Spectre, right?  Well, wrong.

[CountDeMoney]

Somebody ask Yi where he was last summer, when the government virtually shut down over the debt.

And oh yeah, I seem to recall other issues in 2008 that overshadowed the debt, like, oh I don't know, the narrowly-missed destruction of the global economy.

[Sheilbh]

Read in The Economist that US Debt/GDP now is 100%.

Is it just me, or has the media decided the US debt is not very newsworthy starting in, oh, roughly, give or take, 2008?

I think there's been more conversation about debt and deficit in the last four years than any time I can remember.

[Admiral Yi]

Somebody ask Yi where he was last summer, when the government virtually shut down over the debt.

Exactly.  To the extent that debt has been mentioned, it has been purely a political issue.

Interestingly enough there has been a lot more coverage of state deficits.