Mr. Paulson, is that you?

Seriously, "20 cents on the dollar" is a major understatement. Due to arbitrage, those assets are never going to go lower than any reasonable estimate of what their real maturity value is. They will only get bid lower if there are real expectations that there will be more delinquencies.

The other reason they MUST make banks recognize assets at market value is because of leverage and deposits. Leverage, because their creditors need to have the right to force a margin call as per the contract terms that guarantee a certain profit (the large banks who pushed for the rule change had no problems issuing margin calls on smaller lenders and mortgage companies!). Deposits, because those banks have deposits guaranteed by the U.S. taxpayer that are backed by these securities. Why do you think the loss ratios have been so insanely high on many of the banks that have been seized by the FDIC this year? In other words, how is the FDIC supposed to know when a bank is insolvent if its assets aren't marked to market? In some cases, insolvent banks had overvalued their assets by as much as 30%. This has completely depleted the DIF, and our country is almost bankrupt now (it would have already defaulted if it hadn't raised the debt limit two weeks ago!), making it more difficult to guarantee deposits.

No, this nonsense about the credit markets is just what the banks sold you. Some of those banks were leveraged so far that a 5-10% decline in asset value would (and did) make them insolvent. And considering delinquency rates are far above 10% in some cases, it's not surprising that fair value on those assets would ruin them.

This is actually quite simple. The trick is to recognize gains as soon as possible, while waiting as long as possible to write off losses. This is the motivation behind FASB's rule change at the beginning of April 2009 (at the kind...er, suggestion...of the large banks) that allowed any asset marked as "held to maturity" to be valued at whatever they want (so long as it doesn't exceed the maturity value). That means that if 50% of your loan portfolio is delinquent and has no chance of ever accruing, you can put a label on it that says you'll hold it to maturity, and you don't have to recognize a 50% loss in your loan portfolio until 30 years down the road (so long as you don't foreclose on the debtors, of course). By simply waiting on the foreclosures, you can make billions off of free money from the Fed discount window (heck, you can even borrow that money from the Fed at 0%, and loan it right back to the federal government at 3%!), and rake in billions in "profits" (and bonus payouts). And then when your bills come rolling in, it doesn't matter that you have no income and all your assets are worth less than a Pontiac Silverdome... you've already cashed in your stock options. As they say, patience is a virtue!

Even if you do work in finance IT, what are the chances that you get to actually develop new financial formulas on your own?

At least they weren't using "Police Squad!"

Well, there was the joke part of it, but aside from that, it was just middling. No, I didn't hate watching it; I simply see no reason to ever watch it again. I'm just expressing disagreement with the OP (and others) that this movie merits repeat viewings.

That's funny, I never want to see it again. In fact, my roommate invited me to go along and watch Avatar with his group. I decided that staying home and watching Drag Me To Hell for free would be a better use of my time and money. And it was.

Yeah, I have no problem with a Chekhov's Gun every now and then, but they beat it into the ground. Another one I can think of is when they introduced the mobile facility in the floating mountains.

Ideally, it shouldn't be completely obvious to the audience that the plot element is there for no other reason than to facilitate a future plot element. Given that there are several of these, it seems the writers were a little too lazy.

"they spent almost 47 dollars on the script"

They might consider asking for a refund.

During the part where Neytiri starts training John...er...Jake to appreciate nature, I actually thought they were going to break into singing "Colors of the Wind."

That's fine; this topic is not about the book, nor what Hawks' rant. They're both about the idea of a Boskop race. I think Hawks took care to point out that, like you said, he didn't read the book, but also that he was referring to the book because it is cited by the Discovery article. It seems that Hawks, Lynch, and Granger are all in agreement about the idea of the Boskop race; it's only the Discovery article that is supporting it.

Some points from that article:

First, if you do a simple Google Scholar search for "Boskop", you will discover that this has not been a going topic in human evolution for nearly fifty years. Most intellectual effort on the topic of "Boskopoids" happened between 1915 and 1930. I want to emphasize how easy it is to discover these things by a simple Google search. This is obscure knowledge, but for a good reason -- it's obsolete and has been for fifty years!

This selection was initially done almost without any regard for archaeological or cultural associations -- any old, large skull was a "Boskop". Later, when a more systematic inventory of archaeological associations was entered into evidence, it became clear that the "Boskop race" was entirely a figment of anthropologists' imaginations. Instead, the MSA-to-LSA population of South Africa had a varied array of features, within the last 20,000 years trending toward those present in historic southern African peoples. Singer ends his paper thusly:

It is now obvious that what was justifiable speculation (because of paucity of data) in 1923, and was apparent as speculation in 1947, is inexcusable to maintain in 1958.

That is pretty much where matters have stood ever since. "Boskopoid" is used only in this historical sense; it is has not been an active unit of analysis since the 1950's. By 1963, Brothwell could claim that Boskop itself was nothing more than a large skull of Khoisan type, leaving the concept of a "Boskop race" far behind.

Today, skeletal remains from South African LSA are generally believed to be ancestral to historic peoples in the region, including the Khoikhoi and San. The ancient people did not mysteriously disappear: they are still with us! The artistic legacy of the ancient peoples, clearly evidenced in rock art, is impressive but no more so than that of the European Upper Paleolithic or that of indigenous Australians.

I hate to think that the theme of a 2008 book was pulled straight from a 1958 essay, but I don't know where else they would have gotten the idea. No anthropologists have written much about the so-called "Boskopoids" since 1958. There is no such thing as an "IQ estimate" for a fossil human; that's entirely nonsensical.

Perhaps most important:

Both Lynch and Granger are experts in neuroscience, with a long list of publications on memory, cortical organization, and chemical regulation of brain activity. Neither of them is an anthropologist or archaeologist.

It would seem John Hawks has thoroughly debunked the idea.

A simpler answer might be to train people that they actually need to slow down if a traffic signal is not fully visible.

Having worked, in computer software, with a group of people called "users," I submit that training is almost never the answer. Many people are simply untrainable. Remember, these are people who often can't even remember what a turn signal is for, or how to correctly interpret a speed limit sign.

The USA tried something close to a laissez faire marketplace and it failed miserably. Starting in 1898, there was an explosion of regulation and the breaking up of monopolies. Free markets did not self-regulate. They polluted, colluded, abused the workforce, sold unhealthy foods, caused stock/bank crashes and a 101 other things. The EPA, SEC, FTC, FDA, OSHA, etc are all the direct result of that failed philosophy.

The "Gilded Age" featured heavy government subsidies for railroads and the opening up of formerly Indian lands on the cheap. This distortion allowed corporations to grow more than they would have in an actual free market. As far as those problems you've mentioned, some have gotten worse, some have improved, and some haven't changed at all due to the new regulations that have been introduced. The choice is one between corporate corruption and government corruption, and I'm not sure government corruption is any safer, considering the government can legally hold a gun to your head.

The problem with advocating a "free" market is that it is simply bad public policy to let a corporation kill 100 people and then settle the matter afterwards through the court. Ideology rarely succeeds in the real world.

The alternative being, of course, to stop people from committing a crime before they've committed it? Maybe we should have a legal system more akin to that in The Minority Report.

I guess I just don't see why you need more regulation to prevent corporations from killing people, when killing is already illegal.

I was just trying to be funny.

Shouldn't he be the guy who provided the most opportunities for investors to make money? If so, I'd argue that their favorite person should be Alan Greenspan, because, for better or worse (almost certainly worse), he flooded the market with credit, which inflated stock prices across the board (including AAPL), and opened the door for an excellent shorting opportunity in 2007-08. His student, Bernanke, then created another way for investors to double their money by exchanging future stability for short term gain. I'm sure Greenspan made investors far more money than Steve Jobs did; it just came at the expense of pretty much anybody who is not a smart investor/trader.