I know why the banks lied – they had an incentive to make themselves look better by low balling their LIBOR numbers

That's a very small reason they lied, IMO. Above that reason, I'd put direct profits to their friends/associates/contacts. Currency traders made fortunes by using their influence to manipulate the LIBOR rate.

I also recall reading, although I'm too lazy to find it right now, that there was pressure from bigwigs to manipulate LIBOR to alter public perception of the health of the banking industry as a whole. I don't know if this is true, I just recall reading it from a source I have no reason to distrust.

Reinstate most of Glass-Steagal and force investment banks apart from retail banks.

Investment banks do serve a useful purpose.. but if they stand alone from retail banking, they wouldn't be "too big to fail", and they would in fact self-regulate to a certain degree if ownership was at risk.

still keep almost everything they have in bonds, equities, and real-estate.

Bonds are a *horrible* hedge against inflation. Investing in bonds is equivalent to betting on low inflation.

So the only thing I think is telling is that those people value having diversified investment portfolios.

Just remember said leader doesn't play nicely with the US, we're just going to take our shiny things and go home.

No, that's not right at all.

We're going to take their shiny things and go home.

Taxing a corporation results in those taxes (if paid) being classified as expenses. Added to costs. Added to prices.

That is not how pricing works.

I know of nobody that voted for National Health Care Law, it was decided after an election, which it wasn't a campaign platform for anyone.

Bullshit. Here is the section of the 2008 Democratic Party Platform relevant to Obamacare (source: NYT):

Health Care

All Americans should have coverage they can afford. Families and individuals should have the option of keeping the coverage they have or choosing from a wide array of health insurance plans, including many private health insurance options and a public plan. Coverage should be made affordable for all Americans with subsidies provided through tax credits and other means. Insurance should be portable from job to job.

Medicare and Medicaid

Strengthen Medicare by cutting costs and protecting seniors from fraud. Fix Medicare’s prescription drug program: "Repeal the prohibition on negotiating prescription drug prices, ban drug companies from paying generic producers to refrain from entering drug markets, and eliminate drug company interference with generic competition." Phase-out the cap on Medicaid funding and phase-in equal participation in other federal health care assistance programs. Provide Medicaid to more low-income HIV-positive Americans.

Specifics of the health care plan were discussed at length during the 2008 election campaign, it was one of the cornerstones of Obama's campaign. Stop revising history to support your arguments.

All taxes are regressive, because the "rich" can avoid them where the poor and middle class cannot.

That's not true. Poorly enforced and designed taxes can be regressive for this reason. The capital gains tax, for example, allows tax avoidance by the wealthy... but this does not make all income tax regressive. Just the current implementation of them.

But making taxes "voluntary" (taxing items, services not needed to survive) we could change our government funding process while decreasing activites and products we don't like (as a society), reducing the need for certain government programs.

So you're suggesting government should meddle strongly in the marketplace by using taxes punitively on undesired behavior? Who gets to decide what the undesired behavior is?

This is very much against the conservative principles you've previously espoused here. Has something changed in your outlook?

Taxing companies SOUNDS like a tax on the rich, but it's really a tax on everyone: people that pay for the tax via sals, and then people who pay for higher income taxes due to the need to fund various benefits that tie in to unemployment

That sounds like it makes sense, but it's not true. It'd only be true when there is perfect or near-perfect competition (i.e., nowhere); in that case, any increase in cost of goods sold is passed on to the buyer. However, in the real world, there is not perfect competition (this is why there are profits!), and corporate income taxes are a tax borne by business owners.

In essence, corporate taxes are a tax on taking advantage of inefficiencies in the market. Whether this is good or not is a topic for a different discussion, but it is incorrect to assume that profits are inelastic to income tax, and that therefore corporate taxes are borne by employees.

Which of your friends do you tell to swim the moat, the African-American or the Caucasian-American?

Whichever one knows how to swim... I'd ask. If they can both swim, ask which one is the better thrower, and have the other one swim. If they're both mute... throw them both in, and see which one sinks. He's the thrower.

I understand your argument... I don't agree with it for various reasons, which I'm not going to go into here. But your use of Title 9 as an example is a poor choice.

More or less, Title 9 mandates that opportunities for women in athletics are equal to those of boys. For example, a public school offering 11 boys' sports programs but only 4 girls' programs would need to find a way to make those numbers equal. A public university offering 150 sports scholarships for men must also offer 150 sports scholarships for women. Furthermore, schools must strive to have participation similar for girls as for boys... since there was/is a cultural norm of women not playing sports, schools promoted girls sports to overcome the cultural gap.

I don't think this really supports your thesis at all...

I don't know. The way I read it, he was first an anti-GMO crusader, and now he has become a pro-GMO crusader. Neither one I'm too fond of.

Did you read his speech? Because I did, and I don't agree with you at all.

Lynas was a knee-jerk environmentalist who was an anti-GMO crusader. Then he got into climate change... and became wise in the ways of science (though, mercifully, he has not yet shared his theory on the prevention of earthquakes using sheep bladders).

In his speech, he dug into some of the specifics you bring up... and emphasized the importance of the science.

If you don't see a lot of discussion about the specifics, you're probably not looking very hard.

In baseball, you don't measure how well a player bunts or takes a few pitches or leads off base for a steal ... how does not matter - it is only the outcome.

That's not true at all. Have you seen the type of stats kept by sabermetricians? I think you're mistaking casual fan stats with the stats pros use to evalute and manage players.

There are about 130 plays per game, and 256 games per year. That is 33,280 plays to analyze each year. That would increase to about 135k if you include Division 1-A college games. If you had two guys spend 15 minutes analyzing each play (2 guys to reduce errors) then it would take 20 full time employees to do this each year. More if you want to get more immediate results after each week. There are plenty of ex-athletes that couldn't make the pros and are intelligent enough for the work. Probably somewhere around $2 million per year in salary ($500k if you only look at professional games).

And for each play, you have 44 athletes whose performance needs to be evaluated according to specific metrics for multiple categories.

Let's look a one typical, very simple play: a running back dive through the strong-side B-gap with the fullback lead blocking out of a standard I formation. I'm not going to do this by each position, too much space, but here's a quick overview of the stats that would need to be collected:

Offensive line: Snap, blocking efficiency. This is complicated by blocking schemes (chip blocks, zone-blocking schemes, etc).
Fullback: Lead blocking -- did he clear the hole? Did he make a block at the second level but miss a free LB? Should he have blocked that LB at all, or was it someone else's missed block?
WR group: did they sell the decoy route, or make the block on the CB?
QB: Pre-snap activity, receiving the snap, handoff.
RB: Receiving the handoff, yards gained, yards after contact, depth of contact (none of which are the direct result of only his actions).
Defensive Line: block-eating, gap-filling, penetrate, containment: what's his responsibility? How do we know? If the weakside DE didn't fill his gap, but it didn't matter to the result of the play... is that scored at all? How can you determine if he filled the gap when he never had to get off the block?
LBs: Reads, shucking blocks, tackling, containment.
Safeties: positioning, reads, shucking, tackling.
Cornerbacks: reads, shucking, closing, tackling.

A football play is just far too complex to boil down to numbers for each position, since there are so many possibilities for what a player is supposed to do and how they fulfill their responsibilities.

So say you just look at the handful of players directly involved in a play... say, ten of them. Do you just look at the yards gained? How do you account for things like down and distance factoring into the style of play? A 2-yard run on 3rd-and-1 is much more valuable than a 4-yard run on 2nd-and-10... so how do your statistics weight that?

Long story short: unless the GMs office understands that statistics are a source of information, and not the be-all and end-all of player value, I can't see this being successful... scheme, coaching, other players are far too impactful on measurable results to make the stats definitive.

, just like pitchers gain poor ERAs due to bad defense that allows easily defended ground balls to become runs scored

Just an FYI... ERA is Earned Run Average. It does not include runs arising from errors made by fielders (those are unearned runs).

Of course, there is still a very human factor in determining what defensive mishap is scored an error instead of a hit... not to mention great defenders who turn what would be a hit into an out because of their athletic range.

I say it is nearly impossible to do for football what Moneyball did for baseball. It's not just the scope of the stats that are important... it's also the team nature of football and the difference between systems.

In baseball, the average ball hit into play involves 5-6 people (catcher, pitcher, batter, fielder, baseman, sometimes an additional baseman). In football, the average play involves 22 people. The interdependencies are huge.

Plus you have the issue of players in different systems not playing to the same set of standards... how do you come up with equivalent metrics for players in positions whose role is different depending on the offensive scheme? Resort to video-game player stats for catching, awareness, blocking, etc? A wide receiver for the New York Jets is going to have a very different set of responsibilities than a WR for the Indianapolis Colts, and thus should be judged differently.

Plenty of people have been doing advanced statistical analysis of football players for a very long time. It's a muddle at worst, and can inform scouts and GMs at best... but I believe the Bills will have very limited success if they plan on going "pure Moneyball" style.

I think what this is really all about is normalizing the market for players. Costs are not even close to being in line with the value of a player or position, and by sticking to their "Moneyball" rules, the Bills gain some negotiating leverage... and some of the costly mistakes they (and other teams) have made wrt free agent signings.

I don't know how such a blatant ad hominem argument can be modded informative.