IMHO, you should go for distilling alcohol instead. It's either legal or closer to legal.

The concept of CDS starts out as insurance, sure. But since third parties that have nonthing to lose if the default should occur can also take out "policies" and since there is no regulation requiring that the agency selling the CDS "insurance" actually have the assets on hand to pay-up should the potential defaulter default... well, actually it turns out that CDSes are *a lot* different than insurance. In fact, CDSes are pretty damn stupid (read: financially risky and dangerous). I'm sure it all seemed like a good idea at the time though.

Stupid, stupid news. Wish people (as a collective whole) would think for themselves a bit.

They do. It's called "the News". I mean, you're asking people to think for themselves "collectively" and "as a whole". You're acting as if "the news" as-a-whole is something separate and apart from the people. It isn't. "the news" is merely the voice through which "the people" talk to themselves.

Now, at a time like this, it might actually be a good thing for the news not to be the true voice of the people. It might actually be a good thing if the very few elite that have more influence over the news than they rightly ought to, to put that influence to good use by slowly, slowly steering the news coverage away from the dire economic predictions into the it-might-not-suck-so-bad economic predictions.

Well... at least she's better than Katz...

I don't think you fixed it, but you did manage to bundle all the complaints into a *family* that succinctly describes *all* those complaints. It's like grouping y=3x + 12, y=(5/11)x - 1 y=(1/4)x + 9, and y=x into the general family y=(m)x + b.

Thanks for that.

I have been out of the loop for some time now. What tune should this be sung to?