lostfan

Romney put himself in a position where he either has to: a) admit that what if you use slightly different words, he was advocating doing very close to the same as what Obama ended up doing b) admit that if you take what he was saying at face value, he was cool with letting Detroit crash and burn He's trying to claim that Obama's decision is disastrous to the market/economy and trying to take credit for what happened at the same time. He said, point blank, that if Obama got his way, you could kiss the American auto industry goodbye. The complete and total opposite of that actually happened. Then again, Romney's never had any personal difficulty pretending in the past he believed the opposite of what he currently pretends to believe. He's disowned every significant legislative accomplishment he had as governor of Massachusetts.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 16, 2012 -> 11:06 AM) There would have been a source of funding. The idea there wouldn't have is just propaganda. Who? Where? How? Even banks couldn't borrow money from other banks in 2008 let alone extremely risky bankruptcy financing on a company with a solid reputation of failure that was built over the past decade or so. Where was the credit?

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Feb 8, 2012 -> 05:00 PM) Report: Assad's Office Hacked, Password Was '12345' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6iW-8xPw3k

QUOTE (GoodAsGould @ Feb 9, 2012 -> 01:05 PM) Someone that got over 700 yards and 900 yards the last 2 seasons is far from worthless..... Knox has many flaws but he would be fine as a 3rd WR, Bennett would be in the slot when they'd have 3 receivers on the field. Knox averaged 18.8 and 19.6 yards per reception under Martz... which looks great but it's because he really is incapable of running routes shorter than about 12 yards. He runs the vertical routes and that's about it. If he has to break then he'll either round it off or he'll slip and fall (Cutler blamed of course for being interception-prone) I wouldn't say he's worthless but he's not that big of a loss if he can't play next year either.

Louisiana Congressman John Fleming thinks The Onion's Abortionplex Article is real.

Totally missed this thread. Thanks guys! And happy bday nitetrain!

I've previously donated to SGK but my money will be better spent in the future supporting causes that prioritize fighting breast cancer over marketing and politics.

QUOTE (Tex @ Feb 2, 2012 -> 03:12 PM) I do have to give Trump credit for one thing, he has worked the American system better than anyone. From real estate to entertainment. Divorce, bankruptcy, and still living the dream. Born on 3rd base, thinks he hit a triple

Ah damn Butler, playing good defense but still looks like a rookie on offense. A quick bounce pass to Boozer in the paint was 2 easy points, no white jerseys even knew he was there yet.

We'd all be b****ing about Lee's defense too though.

QUOTE (MexSoxFan#1 @ Feb 1, 2012 -> 06:57 PM) I agree with J4L, our biggest FA signing has been Boozer and no blockbuster trades to speak of... Even IF Howard is there for the taking, Gar-Pax won't pull the trigger but I wouldn't mind eating crow if they do snag Howard but it ain't happening. The Bulls signed Boozer because he was all that was left for exactly the reasons I said. Has nothing to do with them being too conservative. Bulls fans like to act like there was someone other than Boozer available in 2010, there just wasn't.

There's pretty logical reasons why campaigns are always negative. I tried to explain this before but it works better in a graph. So you have 2 candidates. Candidate A has true facts about him that are positive and true facts that are negative. Candidate B does too. Candidate A is going to say positive things about himself that are true, but in most cases he's not going to say anything negative. He's going to say negative things about Candidate B, who is doing the same thing, to undermine the positive things Candidate B is saying about himself. Candidate B is doing a mirror of everything Candidate A is doing. No matter how long they try to stay away from negatives they always end up defaulting to it, and when one does it the other has to follow or he'll lose. This starts to get REALLY messy when you have False Positive and False Negative factored in.

QUOTE (LittleHurt05 @ Feb 1, 2012 -> 05:01 PM) Thanks. I figured it was a bit taboo to go against the sitting President from your party, but it does happen to congressman and governors all the time like you said, so I wasn't sure about the rules. I guess the fact that the law prevents Obama from running in 2016 makes a difference too, any candidate knows they can run 4 years from now. It's too late in the game to do that too

The front office isn't THAT conservative. Remember we are only a year and a half from the team selling off pieces so they could make a run at 2 max players (LeBron plus one) and after extending Rose and possibly Noah would've pushed them way into luxury tax territory. They failed, but they gave it the best effort they could've been reasonably expected to, and IIRC Forman has already looked into the possibility of getting Howard at least.

The headline is terribly misleading, but the quote is total bulls*** anyway. Whats Romney going to do for the middle 90% income levels? Nothing, but maybe shift the tax burden onto them as much as possible

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 1, 2012 -> 11:33 AM) If the CFTC were failing at their job, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. In my experiences they are the absolute worst at their mission out of all of the regulatory bodies I have dealt with. I think the futures exchanges do a better job of policing than does the CFTC. I would have to read the reports, but it is worth noting that because of the nature of commodities, hedging is a founding function of those markets. I have no idea how legitimate those hedges were or not. Thats what it comes down to. The head of the CFTC didn't even know about the exemptions. Which may or may not explain why it wasn't all over the media.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Feb 1, 2012 -> 11:11 AM) It depends on what you are talking about. Thanks to our awesome FINREG program, there are different rules and requirements for everything. For futures there are disclosure laws that have to be met if you control a certain percentage of a market, or have specific levels or ownership for different commodities. Basically the Hunt Brothers rules. If someone out there really did control a significant portion of the marketplace, the CFTC would know about it, plus it would have been splattered all over the news. The CFTC did, and didn't know about it. (this part becomes harder to explain) the basic rules you're talking about still exist but what I'm talking about happened because of a loophole that allowed exemptions to certain investment firms that defined their speculating as hedging, which in effect loosened the marketplace. The technical details of all this is still kind of over ,y head nut I've been doing a lot of reading, it's kind of jarring to read all the ways there are to get around various regulations.

QUOTE (iamshack @ Feb 1, 2012 -> 10:55 AM) I am a total Pretentious Douche then. I am assuming you have the iPad2, right? I think it is imperative you get a case, yes...unlike w/ the phones... Lol. You don't really act like it. In this thread you just sound like a guy who likes cool toys. Edit: yes it's an iPad 2

But the idea of futures/speculators is to have a middleman market so that producers can sell when there's otherwise nobody available to buy at the moment, and buyers can buy when nobody is otherwise available to produce? Correct? I thought there were regulations on how much volume there could be in speculation at any given time, compared to physical buying and selling, since it gets too volatile when the ratio is out of whack (thinking of 2008 here... There wasn't a drop/spike in supply and demand which should be the only thing affecting prices even with speculators, since you have enough activity on both sides to give you the right price).

QUOTE (NorthSideSox72 @ Feb 1, 2012 -> 10:52 AM) I am not southsider2k5, but I play on on TV... First, I doubt he said that commodity trading doesn't affect the price of oil. In fact it sets the general value of a certain variety of commonly purchased oil, which leads the market and gives price indicators. What he probably said is the SPECULATION doesn't MANIPULATE the price of oil beyond fundamentally dictated levels, except on rare occasion and for short periods of time. Also, I think you have a slight misunderstanding of how futures (oil or otherwise) work. They are not month-long instruments. At this moment in time, if I am a trader, I can buy contracts for oil that expire in a month or less (this would be called the Front Month), but I can also buy contracts for, say... June, or December, or December of 2013... and in some cases many years out. And in fact those index funds do not always just roll over front month to next, they sometimes balance via calendar spreads or just outright time spreads over multiple contract periods. I would say you are correct about one thing though - the existence of DBO and other similar commodity-long funds does, in fact, probably inflate prices more than just via trading fluctuations. For most commodities, those that are not nationally controlled, this isn't a problem because the spot, unregulated and smaller markets will work against the artificial rise. With oil, the delivery points are too few and too institutional, so even beyond just OPEC, the other actors can be a de facto cartel. There is a danger there. The way the market MIGHT react to that in the long run is, as oil becomes more expensive (it would anyway, but made worse in this instance), usage drops as people conserve, find alternatives, nations increase production, etc. So the overall effect is probably not as dramatic as you may fear. Oh no I understand futures I'm just not typing on a keyboard which makes me lazy. Shorten that post to say sudden influx of new funds = imbalance of speculators to physical goods = extreme risk of artificial price inflation

I've always used the phrase "pretentious douche" to refer to appleheads. Hey shack someone said it was imperative I should get a case... Agree or no?

Hey southsider2k5 let's go back a couple of years when you and I were talking about commodities trading and you were telling me it doesn't affect the price of oil because whenever a speculator buys a futures contract, they have to also sell the contract to someone too. I figured something out though and you can tell me if I'm right or wrong. The way you described it, that's how it's supposed to work in theory and that's how the commodities market worked for several decades because it's a short term market. What's different is investment banks encouraging index funds and other large sources of money to invest in the commodities market like it was the stock market (there were rules against this from the start for very specific reasons but as usual there were loopholes found/created), the idea being to add "liquidity" which is redundant anyway because that's the entire reason speculators exist in the first place. Because this money is all for long term investing their only motivation is having the price go up over time (also not the point of futures which are only for a month, not 10 years) and it blows the whole market, not like the stock market where people buy and hold, or short sell and whatnot, and aren't dealing with physical goods that people use in real life. So, people are still buying and selling, but pushing dozens of times the amount of money into speculation means you're buying and selling at much higher prices that don't reflect the actual value of what's being traded, in this case oil.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 08:25 PM) Morphing? Touché QUOTE (iamshack @ Jan 31, 2012 -> 08:42 PM) I'm insulted!! only if you resemble the remark

So I've had this iPad for a few days now and I'm showing absolutely no signs of morphing into a pretentious douche. So it is possible after all.