lostfan

QUOTE (GoSox05 @ Apr 10, 2013 -> 12:30 PM) People won't get over 85 until the Bears win another championship. It could be 20 years from now and if they still haven't won, people will still be talking about 85. It's mostly Bears fans who are 40 and older (especially the older ones) who always do that. In the past few years every time one of these Bears teams would have an elite defense, inevitably some old guy would call the Score or get on Sun-Times or Tribune articles and start rambling about how this team doesn't hold a candle to the '85 team, blah blah blah. STFU Grandpa

QUOTE (bmags @ Apr 8, 2013 -> 12:54 PM) Please explain to me what you interpret Obamanomics to be. Trying to outmaneuver hostage-takers every 3-6 months over a fake crisis while the hostage-takers tell everyone it's you who escalated the situation by getting captured

One of the hardest things for me to do is convince people who look only at errors and FPCT that Alexei is an elite defender. Yes, you make like 20 errors but your range gets you to 200 more attempts, which obviously have a much higher degree of difficulty to make a putout. People don't really listen though. "But so and so had less errors, what are you talking about" You'd think you wouldn't have to explain this to someone who actually gets advanced stats though.

Robin let Peavy stand there and take it up the ass.

Peavy is getting assaulted, he's done

Brain fart by De Aza

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 06:52 PM) Its no different than the people who look down on people who like Hawk. It's someone's own personal opinion, it's already boiled down to the lowest common denominator. It's not like arguing over stats or something. I like green and some other dude likes blue. "I don't understand, why do you like green? Green sucks."

QUOTE (Iwritecode @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 03:43 PM) When I was in HS I found out how much Blockbuster paid for VHS tapes when I accidentally mixed 2 up from 2 different stores. Put the wrong tape in the wrong case. BB caught the mistake. The other store not only missed that it was the wrong tape, they actually rented it out to another person! They finally figured it out when the other person brougth it back. This was after the dumbass store manager vehemently denied that it could have gotten rented out and insisted that they didn't have the BB movie. In the meantime I'm freaking out wondering how I'm going to come up with $100 for a VHS tape. Yeah, it wasn't like this was common knowledge. I'm not sure what Blockbuster paid for them, but that was the replacement cost for the customer and if you really wanted, I suppose you could've paid that but I'm not sure why anyone would. I only knew that because I'd see it on the computer screen. When tapes were done with the renting cycle (after a while, you don't need 218 copies of Gladiator or X-Men) those would either get converted to used copies and sold at a discount or they'd get sent "back to distribution" which was some mythical place in the sky and we have no idea what they did with them there.

Rubio's situation is different because he came back at more like 80% and used the playing as rehab to get to 100%. Which is what you see players do, most of the time.

QUOTE (Realfan @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 02:11 PM) I lucked out and had to be in DC today for business. The weather here today is phenomenal. Game time temps should be in the 70s. I'll be in a corporate box behind home plate wearing my Sox gear. Those seats are incredible in that stadium

I imagined Iverson's practice rant and the parts I have memorized, pictured him talking about Rose instead when he was speaking in the first person. "We sittin' here, he supposed to be the franchise player, we in here talkin' bout practice. Not a game. Not a game, not a game. Practice. How the hell he supposed to make his teammates better by practice?"

And it's not like we have recent, updated real-world examples to show that either doesn't work or will lead to another recession. Oh wait. But yeah, more comparisons to Greece plz kthx

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 02:50 PM) Which is why we're doing the exact opposite (Sequester yeah!) This is an article of faith that's kind of cemented in the public consciousness thanks to that disastrous 2010 wave election even though it's completely false... federal deficit size = high unemployment ...therefore we fight unemployment by taking away hundreds of thousands of jobs at a time. Nobody can explain how, or why, this works though, because they haven't thought it through. We wonder what went wrong with GDP growth 2 quarters ago. Um, pretty self-evident.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 02:49 PM) Yea, but that's the point, it wasn't until around 97 that things were no longer looking like a standard cycle, and they absolutely skyrocketed on speculation. The market, throughout time, usually hovers around 10-25 in P/E, some short term spikes here and there, but nothing like what occurred between 98 and 2000. Then again, we have a mini .com bubble happening right now, with the likes of Facebook (1,785) Amazon (was about 2000 until they went negative in the recent quarter) and LinkedIn (900) P/E ratios. Waiting for Amazon to correct so I can hold some of those shares. No way do I buy at those prices they have right now. But Amazon the company clearly isn't going anywhere. They have debt but it's not toxic debt, it's from investments and whatnot.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 02:42 PM) Great deal for the banks, though. Borrow money for free and then charge to loan it back out. Too bad we couldn't use some of that free money for nice things like infrastructure and public works. There's literally no better time to take on a project like that. While people are more or less paying you to hold their money.

This is the size of our fanbase, for the past 10 years. It really is what it is. We draw at a ~60% capacity rate, on average. Except for the couple of years with stronger-than-normal attendance. I mean, bandwagons or not, the people who come to games and the people who don't come to games show and don't show about the same rate as they always do. We are just another baseball team's fanbase, and our team is in a large market but isn't really all that popular.

This reminds me of the time when "they" were telling everybody the budget surplus was bad and we had to get rid of it.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 02:31 PM) You know, there was one thing Greenspan did that actually helped a whole lot of people. There was enormous pressure on him around 1996 to start raising interest rates because there was a generally believed rule that anything under 5% unemployment rates would rapidly lead to inflation surges. Greenspan didn't listen to those folks, and as a consequence we wound up with unemployment rates closing in on 3% and the only period in the last 35 years where there has been actual wage growth for anyone but the investor class. I'm sure this was simply incidental.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 02:30 PM) And these are pretty far and between cases. Plenty of people bought houses to live in fully intending to pay for them. Sometimes they were pushed into higher-cost subprimes even if they qualified for normal FHA-backed loans, especially if they were minorities. Other times they were convinced or pressured to spend more money. Other times maybe they just didn't have the financial literacy to really analyze what was within their reach and the 'experts' that are supposed to screen and advise people were only looking to churn as many mortgages as possible. Bankers/originators were under no obligation or legal requirement to loan $500k to someone making $30k or, hell, by the end, not even verifying their incomes or assets at all, but they did. Because it was immensely profitable for many of them for a long time. It had gotten to a point where they knew this was going to come crumbling down, it was just a matter of when, but they didn't give a s*** because they knew they'd be ok.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 02:27 PM) Serious Q in reply: what should have been done in 2000 then? There was an enormous, unsupported, multi-trillion dollar asset bubble sitting there (with a few hundred billion in fraud thrown in for good measure). Should they have continued to let it grow? Somehow attempt to pop it more slowly? The right answer ought to be to have regulations and actions that prevent the development of such an asset bubble, but by 2000 that ship had sailed, so what do you do? Go back in time. Advise Greenspan's father to take a cold shower, give him condoms. Give Greenspan's mother birth control pills.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 02:25 PM) Yea, can't say I'm a fan of his either. I remember that douche trying to "control the .com economy" by inflating interest rates on what seemed like a weekly basis back then. He was one of those that were arrogant enough to actually believe he [they] had control of it in the first place. When he did this, it was actually just a way of siphoning money from ordinary people. He had many different ways of doing that. He was creative, I'll give him that much.

Matt Taibbi does a fantastic job of explaining this in layman's terms that everyone can understand (plus he's just a great writer and really funny). He doesn't let the losers who bought houses with no intention of ever making any payments off the hook either, but they are not the ones who engineered this whole disaster.

I said s*** 4 times in one post. I really, really hate Alan Greenspan. I wish he played around fast-moving buses more often.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 02:17 PM) It's the fault of a LOT of people, from the borrowers to the lenders, to the lawmakers, to the auditors that combined, allowed this to happen, and watched WHILE it was happening. It was then the fault of the insurance underwriters claiming the mortgages were safe, and when they could no longer do that, accepting 'bundles of mortgages', and instead calling those safe when they could no longer be called that on their own. It was then the fault of the likes of AIG and other insurance carriers ACCEPTING and backing those loans. Deregulation of the mortgage industry led to this, because the things they did were simply never before thought of...and when you deregulate an industry thinking they do things XYZ, but suddenly they begin doing them ABCXYZ under the new regulations, which didn't account for the ABC, this is what you get. I'm really kind of in awe at the s*** they were able to pull. The regulators are at a disadvantage, they are looking at, say, a monthly flow of events but the cheaters are working on a day to day flow. Greenspan is a douchebag, he took away what little oversight actually existed, then when s*** blew up, he said "I can't do anything about it, this is what the market wants." No you f***ing asshole, this was not an issue before you made it one. The karma fairy needs to do some really awful s*** to Greenspan. He's the source of a lot of this s***.

QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Apr 9, 2013 -> 02:09 PM) Mortgage lending of the type that caused the collapse was the most unregulated segment of mortgage lending. I don't think the lenders gave one s*** about who would back a mortgage--they weren't holding on to them for any length of time. They were re-selling them to people who would then chop them up and securitize them after paying S&P to give them a AAA ratings while others were selling Credit Default Swaps based on those s***ty mortgage-backed securities and everyone leveraged themselves to insane levels because there was little or no regulations on them doing that. Oh, and we got the mixing of commercial and investment banking thanks to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, which again only made matters worse. Every step towards deregulation was a step that fueled the crisis. And, again, Freddie and Fannie were way late to the whole sub-prime game and started getting into it because they were losing market share and getting hammered by investors for it. Accepting only 5% down wasn't the problem. The problem was giving out mortgages to anybody and everybody without verifying income or assets in any way, even going so far as to lie on application forms so that people would get approved. Originators made money this way, the banks that securitized it made money, the ratings agencies made money, the insurance companies made money. Lots and lots of people made huge fortunes exploiting the system in every way possible. Nowhere does "forced by government to make bad loans" enter into this. There's no such thing as a completely free market in reality because there are always governments and always laws. It's just a No True Scotsman to try to downplay the role that deregulation and lack-of-regulation played in this. The industry players, the regulators, the government, they become one messy confluence where one is indistinguishable from the next because we aren't paying attention.