Yes, because independent auditors hired by the city, county, and/or state governments perhaps even by a Citizen Police Review Board are SOOOO impractical.

[...]

Duty calls.

Of all the misinformation you have in your post (ACORN? Really? Get thee to Glen Beck!) , these are the two most egregious, since they come from a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between government and investment banks.

First. The government does not create investment vehicles beyond government bonds. I 'm sorry, but it just doesn't. HUD did not create collateralized-debt-obligations / credit-default-swaps. That was the brain trusts on Wall Street. They were able to securitize and resecuritize these risky loans, due to deregulation of the banking industry. Actually, when it comes to the derivatives market, there aren't any regulations.

Second. No one forced anyone to buy the CDOs. While the first generation of CDOs probably was a good investments, the later generations weren't. They were so bad, that investment banks and hedge funds such as Magnatar Capital were knowingly creating CDOs that would fail, and were shorting them, all the while selling them to their clients as rock solid investments. That is fraud.

That is why people are pissed off. They're pissed off at Wall Street for crashing the economy while making billions on our troubles. They're pissed of at the government for putting policies in place since the 1980s and policies advocated by The Most Blessed, Saint Ronald of Hollywood, Peace Be Upon Him. Polices such as cutting the capital gains taxes. Removing regulations that stabilized the economy and set us on the path to become the preeminent economic power of the 20th century. Essentially, polices that punished work, and rewarded wealth. These are policies backed by Wall Street, and pushed by their lackys in Washington. These are the policies of the GOP. Just look at the charts. And while we're at it, I suggest you look at the national debt chart, and tell me who really cuts government spending.

And you know what I'm pissed off about? No one on Wall Street, is being prosecuted for fraud.

The French knew how to deal with our Wall Street problem.

Take the new job.

Management would beat with a pool cue until you had dettached retinas for less money than that. Do you really think that management wouldn't sell out their employees for a buck? They already outsourced a big chunk of the code you said. One way loyalty is simply holding the hand that holds you down.

Nice try. Both he and I own stock. We don't pay corporate taxes. The company does. It's not our accounts, nor are they our not assets.

Well then, they should simply incorporate.

Besides a few hardcore geeks, no one bothers to even look at the code.

And seriously. Like @#$%t78rRuby or $!^&$Perl is better.

No. That's up to all of us.

Great camp. Such a horrible t-shirts.

Not as mind blowing as searching for www.google.com on Google.

There was an outcry. Complete with allegations of wiretap violations.

I am becoming convinced that this talk about "privacy" completely misses the mark about what's really going on. Someone wants privacy they want secrecy. He or she is afraid that exposing a secret will injure him or her in someway. The injury is greatest if it's exposed someone the person knows, or to someone that has power over them. In social network mining (email being the oldest online social network) no one actually reads the messages. A machine does. The secrets are never actually exposed to anyone.

So what is happening? Your social actions, you, your friends, and that very low fidelity copy of what makes you "you," (your soul if you want to get a bit melodramatic) is commodified and sold. You provide the value, and yet you receive nothing in return.. I believe it's this idea: that humans are simply goods to exploited and sold is what really underpins this talk about "privacy."