nathaniel

Nobody, including the West, understood banking very well until the Ottomans were already well into decline. FWIW the Ottomans did quite a bit for their vintage, but things went haywire as the Ottoman Empire went out of style. The problem IMO is that many of the pieces of Ottoman cruft lying around weren't competent enough to recognize the good in modern banking, and turned out to be a lot of fundies. It's not that Islam prohibits banking, or that Islam has changed all that much in the last 30 years, but that a set of incompetent leaderships decided to interpret banking as bad. They kept this backward mentality until a set of enterprising western corporations recently intervened out of self interest. Besides, it is not one Islam but dozens of related beliefs and practices that are commonly rolled up under the name. This way of looking at it, it is ineffective Islamic leadership and the absence of pan-Islamic alignment that is the root cause of both failure to embrace banking and failure to keep up with the West since the 18th C. Rather than too much Islam. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I'd point to the decline of and uneven dissolution of the Ottoman Empire before I'd point to Islam as a root cause. Islam is scattered right now, there are more divisions within than without. In the waxing periods the area has done much better than its surrounds, to the benefit of both the locals and to the rest of the world in hindsight. In particular between around 800CE and around 1200CE (when the Mongols invaded, murdering most of Baghdad in 1258) Islamic nation states were the most advanced in the world. It was up and down after that, the Ottomans were the last really strong Islamic nation empire builders. edit: I should say empire builders rather than nation builders...the modern idea of nations is a bit too recent... I think it's about as fair to blame Islam for the state of the ME today as it would be to blame Christianity for the state of Europe in 1200 or again in 1900. IOW not very. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Short term yes, long term no. Extremism has been an on-again off-again thing in Islam, historically. The Kharijites for instance make the Wahabis look like kindergarteners. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I guess all that stuff about Protestants vs Catholics was made up. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

IMO the economics issue is more macro than micro. For hundreds of years the parts of the koran that prohibited usury were interpreted to mean basically no interest at all. Which puts quite a damper on banking. If I understand it correctly, it's only in the past 30 years or so that western banking companies have found ways to concoct instruments acceptable to hard-line Islamic governments. It's not a problem for moderates and "westernized" individuals of course. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Snow in Chicago... I took this picture at noon, according to my camera. From the lake. * noon on Jan 22, 2005 My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Wait is he a democrat or a republican? My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I think one of the keys is to be aware of any lateral yaw and correct it ASAP. Before it even feels like a spin, when you start turning about your vertical axis without intentional input is when you should be correcting it. Correcting it, in turn, doesn't necessarily mean stopping the turn immediately but acting gradually and keeping the spin from developing until your control increases. On one of the exits from the otter at Zflock 2.5 someone ended up pinned to my leg by inertia on his part and relative wind on my part--fully vertical into the relative wind. He finally separated by pushing off my left leg, causing me to stall and to start a flat rotation. I was able to hold it to a constant rate of rotation through about 270 degrees until my pitch came back to level and the suit began flying again, at which point the spin stopped on its own with no further input. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Funny you should mention the yen, btw. Total aside, but while we're on an economics roll, there's an article in the Economist last week that purports the yen to be even more undervalued than the yuan. Due to subtler market manipulations or conditions (depending on who you ask, according to the article) than a fixed exchange rate. edit: garr, fudged the url My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Frenchy got it wrong too, the Yuan is not directly floated. The nominal value of the yuan is determined by a loose formula administered by China. Since all the prices are visible, it just takes a little math to figure out what the formula is, plus or minus a little wiggle room that's built in: http://www.rieti.go.jp/jp/publications/dp/06e019.pdf#search=%22yuan%20basket%20formula%22 I remembered wrong, btw, it was in 2005 that the formula was introduced, not earlier this year. Anyway, since the yuan is set to almost a fixed number of dollars, whichever way the dollar fluctuates (in real terms) is transmuted onto the yuan. The exchange rate stays put but the amount of homogeneous goo that each will buy travels together. That's exactly what it means to say that the two are pegged, or nearly pegged. The dollar is floated, but it is not totally free since our central bank workalike, the Fed, actively manipulates it (to good ends). Since the dollar is floated, the yuan is thus indirectly floated. The issue with China's currency is not whether the yuan is floated or not, but how the yuan is manipulated. Right now the yuan can't be manipulated independently from the dollar, it can only be manipulated simultaneously with the dollar (by the Fed) because they are pegged. Economic pressures are pushing the yuan and the dollar differently, and the result is economic inefficiency and effectively various subsidies and penalties throughout both markets, and indirectly thus to their respective trading partners. What it would mean for a currency to not be floated at all would be Soviet style price controls: X kopeks buys a loaf of bread, Y rubles buys a quart of oil, Z rubles buys a car. That's not China. North Korea and Cuba are the only parts of the world that do that. IIRC some Arab states and Venezuela get into the act a bit with local fuel prices, and of course the US and the EU with farm subsidies, but certainly no other whole economies. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

The word nominal is what you don't understand. The nominal value of the yuan is pegged at the dollar. The nominal value has no other meaning. The dollar is not a fixed quantity. It goes up and down, mainly down, in real value (aka inflation). The value of one dollar floats on a market that the Fed interferes with on a regular basis. 7.9 yuan == 1 dollar Remember algebraic substitution? The value of 7.9 yuan floats on a market that the Fed interferes with on a regular basis. You've also failed to grasp that the strict peg has been removed in favor of a formula, which is not too far off from a strict peg. Their "deliberate action" is failure to exert any control over their currency, and instead to hand over control of their currency to other central banks who do not want the burden. Nobody is demanding China abandon their currency to the free market, only that they take control of the yuan back from foreign central banks and exert a suitable set of deliberate actions in accordance with the empirical behavior of the Chinese economy and established policies of fair trade. Fair trade is contingent on all participating central banks to use their monetary policies actively and in cooperation. It is simply wrong My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

nominally in real value based on foreign currency. China cannot stop the world market. They cannot prevent you from buying yuan from me. All they can do is buy or sell yuan themselves. Yep. Manipulates by failing to establish proper controls tho, not manipulates by actually manipulating the market. Versus a formula that is not too far off from the dollar. Modern central banks use monetary (ie currency) policy to shape market forces, not vice versa. All that stuff you tune out about the Federal Reserve changing interest rates is express market manipulation (if indirect), and it's done for the common good of each country's (or administrative domain's, since some currencies like the Euro span countries) interest subject to fair trade agreements. The issue with China is that by failing to control their currency they are essentially trading unfairly. The fair, or neutral position for currency is actually active manipulation by a central bank. You wrote it yourself, it's pegged to the dollar. Rather, a formula that's close to the dollar. The problem is when Bernanke and the Fed control the dollar they simultaneously control the yuan, and vice versa. China has no control, and Bernanke has all the control, just he doesn't want to exert it because it would tank both economies. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Go ahead and read what you wrote. It means that when the dollar goes up in real value, so does the yuan. (It so happens they changed this year from pegging to the dollar to a formula that's not much different but allows a little play) The only "control" China exerts is to let fluctuations in other currencies determine theirs. In effect, China's currency is floating on a formula determined by foreign currency policies. The problem is that China's economy is growing very rapidly and their currency needs to adjust to reflect this. IOW China's currency is not "tightly controlled" except in nominal terms. In real terms it's uncontrolled and loosely manipulated by pegging to foreign currency due to the fact that China's economy is growing (which, in turn, was caused by increasing deregulation since the 70s). Nominal terms being useless. edited for grammar My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Hah, that's backwards. If you mean China's currency is controlled by foreign states then OK. China basically links its currency to foreign currency. Fluctuations in value are thus driven by foreign currency policy. Which due to various economic factors results in friction that, due to the way that China's economy has been performing, has acted as a subsidy to local Chinese businesses recently. But the effect in the long run will be costlier to maintain than to abandon. To say that the Chinese gov't "controls" the currency is inaccurate. China has an on/off switch for their present currency snafu, and the off switch would be to actually start to exert traditional monetarist controls on their currency. Which the Communist party is gradually starting to do, but just gradually for now. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Unskilled and Unaware is about a incompetence being a self-reinforcing trait. Foley was an accomplished politician, until recently anyway. He had decades of experience in the FL state senate and the US House. I don't think he could be fairly marked as incompetent at politics. Flawed very definitely, but not incompetent in the sense of Unskilled and Unaware. He certainly had the presence of mind to resign immediately when the scandal broke. Instead of incompetent I've got a hunch that he rationalized his behavior. Not so much that he thought he could be a better pederast than average, but that he found beliefs and reinforcement for his conduct and sought to continue it for his perversion. Anyway I thought there was some room for spin on the internet / belief systems angle. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I know this is SC, but it's not a you-me thing. It's that they would be better informed if they ate their vegetables and considered a wider set of sources than the ones that please them most. It's the spotlight phenomenon, and the self-selection bias. What got me thinking about this is Darius' post on one of the Mark Foley threads asking how someone could delude himself into sleeping soundly at night and abusing children by day, and doing so blatantly and not being paranoid about getting caught. They 'lure' themselves into believing things by shutting out opposing thoughts. Since 1995 the internet has gotten big enough not just that no one person can keep track of it all, but that one person can get mired in a single mindset and occupy himself entirely within it due to the sheer volume of content. For better or worse. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

QFT. My cat was a stray, picked up by a friend, then another friend and then I adopted her. My favorite is sneak attacks from underneath a blanket. If she can't see a hand or foot connected to my face, it's not part of me and instead it's a bizarre monster. She totally freaks out and gets ticklish if you poke at her from the far side of a pillow or blanket. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

http://www.philosophyofinformation.net/disinfor.htm Would you believe that somebody had already figured this out back in 1995? My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I think someone on the SC knows more about the Dems than they are willing to say, but they are saving it for a politically opportune moment. Which will only encourage them to worsen their behavior until ultimately confronted, hopefully right here in the SC. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

It takes deep cynicism to fault the Dems for what Foley did against the parents' wishes. A good Republican would have taken one for the team, eh? Sickening. That's why people are saying Hastert should resign too. / no friend of the Dems myself, but your post is way out of line. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

It is pure anti-gay malice to confuse pedophilia with homosexuality. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I don't use av / anti-spyware personally. I wouldn't blink at the thought of rebuilding any of my systems from scratch. Most people aren't in the same situation, certainly not most businesses. AV / antispyware reduces the lowest common denominator effect of having less computer-savvy people on staff. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

On the radio this evening I heard them read off a couple names saying they'd been arrested. Haven't seen it posted online tho. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Nah it's not made up, there's been a bit of research on the subject, at least I've seen several abstracts. Not so much in terms of parachute landings specifically but overall slightly more likely to injure themselves at all, and much more likely to suffer ill consequences and complications of injuries after they are injured. And ISTR it goes backwards for skinny folk too, people with low BMI are less accident injury prone, statistically speaking. There's been recent research that suggests waist-hip ratio is better at predicting ill-health due to obesity, but I don't know that waist-hip ratio has been studied in the context of overall injury rates. links I found in a cursory search: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=16997162 http://www.usnews.com/usnews/health/briefs/obesity/hb041105c.htm http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/obeshurt.htm Think about it...your feet don't get any bigger and you don't get any more bones as you gain weight. Your stance doesn't get wider, yet your inertia increases. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?