http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/923/1?rss=1

The world is currently in shock over the rejection of the bail-out plan by Congress. Most people were confident of the passage of the bill and indeed, the world markets were poised on Monday in the anticipation that the bill would be passed. Yet, when the news broke on Monday, the result was heavily disappointing. Congress had elected to reject the $700 bn bail out plan for the financial sector. Almost immediately, the Dow tanked a record 7% or more than 770 points. When compared to the Great Depression, this is nothing. On Black Tuesday, stocks took a dive of more than 89%. However, the question that angers and bewilders almost all economists...is why?

The authors of Freakonomics, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, have a blog that is highly interesting. In it they suggest that the reason, might actually be self-serving politicians (shock to me as well). The vote was close ending in a 228-205 defeat. Nate Silver's analysis on 38 candidates with tight re-election races shows that out of the 38, 30 voted against the bill. Odd that those without highly politicized races would be split almost 50-50 197(for)-198(against). Out of the 26 congressmen who are not running for re-election, 22 voted for the bill.

Explanation of the Bill

Why would the congressmen vote this way? Because the general populace of America are short-sighted. They see their tax-dollars going to finance this financial bail-out, have never heard of such a big amount of money before and only see that this money is being shipped out of sight. Since "out of sight" means the "financial sector" and not into their pockets, they cry "Thief". Now, this is completely understandable for those who have the same reaction. When you're wondering why the government was worried about the collapse of premiere chocolate maker, Fannie Mae, economists won't fault you for your opinion.

What they don't understand is without the bailout plan, what you have is the meltdown of the financial markets and that this means a choke for the national economy. This means no capital for investments, loans that are nearly impossible to get and high interest rates. It also means, as was shown in the market, that stocks in directly related sectors will take an immediate plunge followed most likely by a ripple effect in nearby sectors. So, in short, now with the rejection of the bail-out plan, sure you keep tax-payer dollars intact, but tax-payers lose a lot more in the long run as economic growth halts and recovery is hard because of the lack of money for investments.

A look into what may have been's Obama's best moment in yesterday's debate, brought to you by dailykos.com

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/9/27/03557/0386/140/612112

Cheers,

zexi

The company that you love so much is a malice-filled corporate jerk.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=536

This article takes an interesting angle on how our society and culture is developing.

Virtual is No Refuge From the Real
For children, no escape from America's car-dependent, cheap-oil fiesta

By James Howard Kunstler
Elm Street Writers Group

One of the extremely painful lessons of our time, I'm convinced, will be that the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the real. It will be painful because the notion of virtuality has become a psychological crutch for a culture that is recklessly destructive of real places, real experiences, real relationships with real people, and real notions of purposeful, decent behavior.
One of the most popular beliefs of the computer era has been that virtual places are every bit as okay as real places. This idea gained popularity in direct proportion to the spread of immersively ugly, monotonous, dysfunctional suburban environments through the 1980s and 90s. The more our nation came to be composed of crappy housing subdivisions, highway strips, Big Box fiefdoms, and parking wastelands, the more appealing the idea of virtual reality became.
For one thing, it was a way of turning the lack of something into an opportunity to sell more products. The lack of town centers in suburbia led to malls. The lack of access to either complex integral townscapes or real rural landscapes led to theme parks or, in the case of Las Vegas, fragmentary ersatz urbanism. The general impoverishment of the public realm - or the relegation of it to mere decorative berms between zoning categories - was compensated for by the exorbitant internal luxury of new private houses, with their home theaters, "great rooms," and three-car garages.
For adults the result has been an amazing amount of pervasive situational loneliness. Despite the fact that so many Americans own a car there is no place to go, at least no places of casual socializing unrelated to chain store commerce. So the chat rooms and listserves of the Internet are supposed to take the place of actually being somewhere.
For children, this trend has been catastrophic because they lack the mobility to use environments designed solely for motoring. This consigns kids either to nebulous low-grade hangouts in the left over scrap places of suburbia - the 7-Eleven parking lot, the storm sump, the wooded "buffer" between the housing tract and the strip mall - or to virtual and heavily commercialized public realms of television and the computer, which include rentable movies, the Internet, and computer games.
The most remarkable aspect of these movies and games is their violence, grandiosity, antisocial behavior, and exaltation of technology. A lone Bruce Willis potently and adroitly kills dozens of enemies and saves the world. A gamer manipulates a joystick to waste legions of invaders with virtual gunfire or death rays to save the world. The wish to save the world is obviously not inadvertent since it is based on the perhaps subconscious recognition that our immediate "world" of American culture and American place badly needs to be saved.
It's not a coincidence that the degree of grandiose fantasized empowerment provided by these "entertainments" exists in inverse relation to the loss of power that suburban children suffer in controlling their own lives. Stuck in a disaggregated habitat and totally dependent on chauffeuring to get from one part of their world to another, suburban children are deprived of the most fundamental process of growing up: developing a sense of personal sovereignty, the confidence of being able to make decisions about using one's environment, and then acting on those decisions.
The fact that so many suburban children are obese should tell us that they have also lost control even of their own bodies, a final, tragic insult on top of the developmental injuries they endure.
It has been an over-investment in technology that got us into this predicament - the wish to build a drive-in utopia. And it will be the failure of this entropic project that may rescue us, if it doesn't put the human race out of business altogether.
Specifically, the world is now facing the end of a century-long cheap oil fiesta with no real prospect of replacing fossil fuels with other things. There is not going to be any"hydrogen economy." It's a fantasy promoted by politicians and business leaders who see what is coming, are scared out of their wits, and have nothing offer besides wishful thinking. The bottom line is this: No combination of alternative fuels or procedures will allow us to run what we are currently running in the United States, or even a substantial fraction of it.
If we want American civilization to continue we will have to rescale and reorganize everything we do, from farming, to schooling, to retail commerce, to the places we live in. We will have to rebuild local networks of economic interdependence and we will have to reconstruct real communities as the context for it to happen in. There will be a lot less motoring. Circumstances will compel us to do this or the future will belong to other people in other places. It will be a difficult transition in any case. But a half century from now we may look back and marvel that we had ever become so collectively psychotic to pretend that the virtual was the same as the real.

Hello, hello, and welcome to me nerd-ing off. If techy stuff turns you on, get ready to be seriously aroused.

There's a ton of really useful stuff out there. I'm writing this post very selfishly because some of the coolest programs aren't useful unless your friends also use them. There's some others I want to touch briefly on too, but let's start with things I want YOU to start using.

ChaCha actually isn't a website (*gasp) or software (double *gasp!). Actually, it's a question answering service. Try it: text any question from your cellphone to 242242 (chacha) or call 1-800-2-chacha and ask your question. Usually, answers come back within 2 or 3 minutes! Ask anything: restaurant suggestion, directions, movies, ANYTHING. Do you know why? Because there's a REAL HUMAN BEING answering the questions! Click here to read more!

McCain?

Just wondering what the political attitudes are in this little blog group. I'll let you know my pick later.

A challenge! I was fooling around, and I came up with this relatively simple cipher. It may or may not be frustrating to decipher. There are two parts that when used together, form the answer.

Part 1:

K5P66 X5EDF &H5JY 85C7E N4079
E5P8E 6N0MN 064Q7 XMIC7 Y0^9&
51JQ7 MJ61E =518? &,514 4Q=HH
NQ0MN S0DV5 7XE7P 6A7Q8 ^7E7&
6^164 06^3U &0M88 165NV 9B7DP
D4^&0 YACXN 0M=E7 7NJD6 7P1M8
68^L7

This ciphertext is to be read from right to left, and then down. The plaintext is a Bible verse.

Part 2:
BWKNCXLZZJZMDFUSPVZYJ

Part 2 will not make any sense without Part 1 being solved. If you solve Part 1, it should be relatively easy to decode Part 2.

I don't know if anyone will take me up on my challenge. To make it more enticing: if you win you get a prize! (To be decided)

If you want clues, you can get them.

a post by me about my favorite software that I'm guessing you don't know about?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rg3uNrI8tE

An interview with a famous physicist.

Hey everyone, since there are a lot of smart, intellectuals =P from all over the world on here, why don't we introduce ourselves?