you're only looking at reputable players here. sure, BofA won't touch GS's code, for a host of very good reasons like those you describe. but for someone looking to game GS's system, being able to run the code is totally unimportant: just reading it could likely be enough to extract exploitable characteristics.

i have a somewhat-better-than-passing knowledge of how these systems work. i'm very unconvinced by your explanation.

you seem to be assuming the intent would be to out-compete Goldman by re-implementing this system, perhaps with some changes/optimizations. for that, sure, you'd need the rest of the environment. but a good understanding of the algorithm and implementation could be obtained without the rest of the environment (like i can read C# code and extract the algorithms without having the rest of the environment). that seems like it would be enough to game Goldman's system (which is a sizable part of the system overall).

note that i am not asserting that this is a catastrophe for Goldman, just that your explanation isn't convincing. i will, however, agree with a previous poster that Goldman's sudden absence from NYSE's 15 most active members, rather than being #1 as they had for a good while, is very suspicious.

amazing. you give the answer and still totally miss it.

Mortgages were ALWAYS secularized... well, at LEAST since the 80s.

right, the early '80s, when we began a concerted effort to dismantle financial regulation that provided a very stable economy since the end of the Great Depression based on the ascendency of people with a religious devotion to simplistic Free Market ideas. the dismantling has been incremental, but began then and has continued (regardless of which party is in which seats) since.

greed doesn't drive progress, certainly not inherently and certainly not sustainably. i feel like i'm hearing '80s era "greed is good" rallying cries all over again. didn't we learn anything? greed drives short-term paper gains, but is not about production, and therefore not about sustainability or real growth. the dramatic unraveling we've seen over the last year of the greed-based paper gains over the preceding two decades or so has been amazingly illustrative.

more confusion. mortgages are not financed by mortgage-backed securities, at least not until pretty late on. instead, those provided the drive (in the form of appeal to greed) to write more and more mortgages, regardless of risk.

also, who the customers are doesn't really matter. the fact is that deregulation allowed financial houses to do this more and more. everyone involved was participating in open market operations. the fact that enough of the mortgage-backed securities were not in the hands of central banks can be trivially observed by the scope of the fallout we've seen since late 2008.

the logic of your argument (aside from factual errors) is predicated on the idea that "free market" is an absolute: you either have a perfectly free market, or there's no blame to be aimed at free market principles. that's a cop-out, and, more importantly, is entirely useless in policy discussions for dealing with the current issues.

you're very confused. lunch is almost over, so just a few things.

the fed explicitly, intentionally creates an "inflationary condition", and always has. they're very clear on this point, and it's not an inherently bad thing. nobody disputes this. the question is over rates of inflation.

banks were not required to participate in CRA-fueled loans. plenty didn't, and still did quite well. further, CRA was explicitly designed to not require "new types of mortgages" - those grew up quite independent of CRA. you've demonstrated no link.

selling turd bricks doesn't make you "evil and greedy" - but selling turd bricks painted in gold while claiming that they're 24k solid might.

we did, in fact, have a substantial recession after the tech bubble. on paper, it lasted (i think) three quarters, but in the industries where the boom happened it was much longer (we don't have reliable numbers on industry-by-industry recessions).

your conclusion seems very much predicated on CRA being the cause of the housing bubble, or maybe setting interest rates wrong. there is no credible basis for either belief. i'd love to see a citation.

you're right that we're not in a "normal" situation. but everything else you say is pretty much dead wrong. again.
the situation we're in right now is primarily a liquidity trap. Keynes' theories work perfectly well in this situation. read Paul Krugman for the best applicaiton of Keynes' theories to our current situation (and generally, some of the best econ writing around).

what does "destruction of currency based on overspending" mean? our currency remains (to my surprise, actually, although i guess everyone's largely in the same boat) strong and stable. maybe you meant destruction of capital, an argument i hear more often. it'd still be wrong, though: the problem is the "capital" being "destroyed" never really existed in the first place. it was largely the paper product of "borrowing without having any collateral", or at least ridiculously small capital reserves, aka leveraging. the culprit there, though, is not the US government, but our (global, but largely US-lead) banking system. we've also not lost our manufacturing capacity (although there's real risk of doing so in the next ~2-5 years if we don't gear up), it's just sitting idle. you're positing a supply-driven failure, which is very much not what we've got; it's a demand-driven failure. personally, i don't believe having an economy as demand-driven as our is can be healthy in the long term, but the fact is that's what we've got, and the amazing contraction in demand over 2008 is what's currently got us most screwed. you're probably correct that we have become (or are becoming) uncompetitive in the global market, but it's not clear why you think that has anything to do with spending. rather, it's more likely because when we structured the global market in the first place (shortly after WWII, mostly driven by the US and GB) we did so focusing on free trade without any thought for externalities, thus giving a huge advantage in global markets to (less developed, but that's semi-incidental) countries willing to ignore more of the externalities than we are (once they got industrialized, anyway, which was largely funded by western corporate interests who wanted to take advantage of that fact).

feeding trolls is a fun lunchtime break.

um, what? i never suggested that complexity is incomprehensible; i merely meant that reducing the behavior of a complex thing to a single cause isn't really illustrative. i'm not sure what "people like me" you're talking about, but what i'm after is a regulatory system much like what served the US very well for about 50 years, a time during which we became the world economic powerhouse. personally, i'd also throw in some pre-civil war-era regulations on corporate scope and governance, but i'm not aware of very many "people like me" in that regard. and i'm not aware of having used any slogans in my post.

also, it's admirable the phenomenal progress you're already making on your stated goal. keep at it!

The US is in economic meltdown and the only thing that it can do to save itself is to stop spending.

i really appreciate the fact that you demonstrate your total lack of understanding for modern (where "modern" means "well understood in quantitative detail for at least 70 years") economic theory right up front like that. read Keynes, then provide a refutation.

countries and economies are complex things, but if you really want to point to a single thing that caused the collapse of the USSR, the fact that their military spending overshadowed all the rest of their spending is a good bet. the parallels to modern America should not be missed.

you make a good point about Toyota jobs in the US. your conclusion as to the reason (unionization) is totally unsupported, but at least the question is interesting, and is something not talked enough about.

on the financial situation, though, you're way, way off. the "Fannie Mae regulation" you're thinking of wasn't a Fannie Mae regulation - otherwise it wouldn't have applied to other banks. you're presumably thinking of the CRA, which did apply to other banks, but wasn't designed either to put banks at the crazy risk they put themselves in (it contained explicit language against such behavior) or to support securitization of the loans (enabled by a later amendment). the numbers on CRA default rates, compared to the "general population" also doesn't support putting much blame there.

the notion that there is some idealized money supply inherently consistent with a given level of economic activity is laughably naive. you set monetary policy as a tool to achieve a given end; the current economic level is context for that activity. i've not seen (but would be quite interested in seeing) any serious, quantitive analysis of the Fed's handling of money supply that makes a strong case that they could have avoided the housing bubble without serious consequences (like astronomical inflation).

and no, of course greed is not new. but we've spent 20+ years disassembling the regulatory structure designed to keep our greed in check, which had worked very well for about 50 years before that. greed drove the disassembly, of course, coupled with a religious devotion to a particularly warped conception of the free market and crypto corporatism.

you are insane. and also very incorrect.

let's start with something really easy: job creation by presidential party. the numbers don't lend themselves to a nice pithy "party A good; party B bad" conclusion, but certainly the average shows that, on average, we as a country do better on jobs with Democrats in the head office than Republicans.
okay, maybe you don't like "job creation" as the employment metric (there are decent reasons not to). unemployment is more straight-forward to measure and the data comes in regularly and frequently; what's it tell us? try this analysis. i'll save you some reading, since i imagine that's a problem for you; the conclusion, on page 2, includes the punchline: "Over the past 34 years, Democratic Presidents have overseen periods when the unemployed became employed, and Republican administrations were characterized by an increase in unemployment."
alright, alright, it's not fair to focus only on "employment". there are other ways of generating wealth (although where that gets focused is an interesting question), and the employment numbers don't tell us as much about turnover as we'd like. how about some other metrics? well, this analysis is old enough that we don't get to poke at Bush II much, but the numbers are pretty conclusive over modern US history. "...since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3 percent annual total return on the S&P 500, but Republicans only an 8 percent return." c'mon, tell me there's a liberal bias in S&P. you'd have to also lump in the Dow (nearly the same numbers). focusing on congress is also pretty damning; the spread is less dramatic, but still statistically relevant.
perhaps the most important macro metric of all - real GDP - follows the same trend as the stock market, at least since 1930.
how 'bout regionally? well, at least up until the current collapse, New England has been growing substantially faster than the rest of the country (left two columns in this chart; right two aren't really relevant). note the increasing spread between New England and the national average, either by percent or absolute dollars, as it coincides with the blue shift in the region over the same time period.
the Republicans got a lot of traction in the last election cycle out of the "redistribution of wealth" phrase, which they're still pimping. but the reality is that modern Republicans are far more guilty of it. take a look at GDP vs. median wageduring the Bush II years. the nominal increase in the economy after the Bush II crash was all focused on the top slice of the economy - doing very little to stimulate overall economic growth and stability.

you make some pretty weird claims about migration. can you show any evidence for a mass migration from blue to red states? i can't find it. instead, the conventional cause for census shifts are taken to be birth rates differing by states (for a good time, compare to teen birth rates when Republican hacks keep talking about the moral center of Real America) and immigration rates differing by states in roughly the same areas. the net domestic migration numbers, which i think are what you want to look at, don't seem to indicate what you want them to, although i could only find back to 1990. since then, there's been a departure from the northeast, midwest, and pacific coast for the western mountains and the south, but that doesn't seem to orient well along political lines, is substantially slowed this decade compared to last, and likely has more to do with people having more cash to move, period. i can't conclusively prove you're wrong here (as opposed to all the previous points), but you've certainly got quite the case to make.

as to your riddle: you'd have to ask them. were i to guess, i'd say the lower land costs, reduced competition for similarly semi-skilled labor, and presence of significant shipping infrastructure are the biggest factors determining placement.

and finally, your "[1]" is a total non-sequitur. where they file has absolutely nothing to do with where their "ownership trees" find their roots. you could argue it was or wasn't a good/fair/whatever thing to do, but it has no correlation to "location of ownership", whatever that would even mean.

it's also worth noting that (again, at least on the XO) the screen very often looks better in b&w mode; i run it that way even in daylight often. it's just a software setting that sets it to b&w when backlight goes to zero; you can toggle each manually.

the part that helps resolution is that, at least in b&w mode, you can address each of what would otherwise be a sub-pixel individually. the composition of a "pixel" is different in these displays: rather than three bars of three different colors forming one addressable pixel, in this display each pixel is much smaller, but only one color. in color mode, color anti-aliasing gives you more or less the same effect (but typically with fuzzier edges), while in b&w mode you get substantially better addressable resolution.

see this image for the comparison. in traditional displays (the right), three bars is one pixel; in the XO display (left), each dot is a pixel.

note: this is all from the XO. i'm assuming this thingie is the same deal.

teletype? you had teletypes? we had to use remote card punchers. which we had to punch with our teeth, because the puncher was only on the remote end. and we liked it!

the usage is correct; the thing currently called SGI used to be called Rackable. the fact that Rackable included, however briefly, a sub-part called SGI, which had its own prior existence, is irrelevant.

sorry, let me clarify: the usage is correct, but pretentious. i'd be more forgiving if the accent was correct.