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Ron Paul Supports Constitution Party

This is great news!  Ron Paul has officially endorsed Chuck Baldwin and the Constitution Party.  I like the approach to this "New Alliance" that Ron Paul is talking about:


This does not mean that I expect to get Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney to become libertarians, nor do they expect me to change my mind on the issues on which we disagree. In the meantime, why can’t we be friends, respectful of each other, and fight the corrupt process from which we suffer, and at the same time champion the four issues that we all agree upon which the two major candidates won’t address?

... Those who don’t want to collaborate are insecure with their own beliefs ...

Principled people are not shy in participating with others and will defend their beliefs on their merits. Liberals and progressives are willing to align themselves with us on the key issues of peace, civil liberties, debt and the Federal Reserve. That’s exciting and very encouraging, and it means we are making progress. The big challenge, however, is taking on the establishment, and the process that is so well entrenched. But we can’t beat the entrenched elite without the alliance of all those who have been disenfranchised.

... True revolutions are not won in a week, a month, or even a year. They take time. But we are making progress, and the momentum remains and is picking up.

And at the end:

I’ve thought about the unsolicited advice from the Libertarian Party candidate, and he has convinced me to reject my neutral stance in the November election. I’m supporting Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party candidate.

Hooray for Liberty!

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Gold Soars

Gold hasn't been doing very well this year... until today.  It looks like it's up $83 / oz as of right now.  Some insights into the surge at Bloomberg.

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AIG Goes "Kinda" Bankrupt

There isn't really a precedent for this strange tale... but tonight, apparently, the Federal Reserve has taken ownership of 80% of AIG (the 3rd largest institution in America) in exchange for an $80 billion bridge loan.  The reason, according to various sources, is that AIG is "too big to fail" and would cause systemic failure to the international banking system if it were allowed to fail (it has more than $1 trillion in assets, worldwide).


Some interesting or funny comments over at calculatedrisk:

I know Bush promised us an 'ownership society' but this wasn't exactly what we had in mind...
neil | 09.16.08 - 9:49 pm | # 

Long live the United Socialist States of America !
sk | 09.16.08 - 10:01 pm | #

It's not a bridge financing, it's a pier financing. It doesn't get AIG to the other side -- more like walk the plank boys.
Hackman | 09.16.08 - 10:02 pm | # 

tj & the bear writes:
> Someone on the last thread asked what would be bigger than this.
> Easy -- next up WAMU.

What? I just saw one of their commercials last night. They didn't say anything about problems. I'm sure they wouldn't be advertising for new accounts if they had problems.

P.S. They even have free checking!
Ken | 09.16.08 - 10:08 pm | # 

The US is just a taxpayer funded PUBLIC EQUITY GROUP.

We just put the America into American International Group.
Gold Medal CMBX diver | 09.16.08 - 10:17 pm | # 

A great article and commentary on this unfolding situation is here at the CalculatedRisk blog.

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Spore - DRM = Awesome

For the record, I absolutely LOVE the ideas of Will Wright embodied by the video game "Spore"... however, as much as I like it, and even though it's available for the Mac, I won't be buying it because of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) that Electronic Arts has decided to embed in the software.  For those who buy the software, there is an arbitrary "3 installation" limit, so if you bought the game and pass that limit, you're out of luck.  Or you can try your dice with EA's security team (aka "customer service").


The problem with EA's tactic is that it tries to solve a moral issue with a technological solution, and the result is a poorer product for the "good guys".  The "bad guys", on the other hand, will figure out a way to copy the game *anyway*, and will end up with a superior product (i.e. they will not need to worry about how many times they installed and uninstalled their software).

Thumbs down to EA's distrust of its customers.

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Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?

Click Here to Find Out.  Refresh as necessary.


:)

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Daniel Attends "Rally for the Republic"

My friend, Daniel Harmon, attended the Rally for the Republic in Minneapolis.  Noting the very diverse crowd of 10,000 there, he says:


Of course, everyone subscribes to Paul’s strict constitutional philosophy in varying degrees. But he doesn’t care that you don’t believe 100% in some 30-point program. He just says it as he sees it and lets you buy into whatever you want. And precisely because of that, these people see him as a principled political leader, a maverick fighting for the freedom that America now largely takes for granted.

I'm also excited to find out what Ron Paul's announcement will be today.  Thanks for the in-person reporting, Daniel!

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Ubiquity Makes Browsing Faster

I've been enjoying the new Firefox plugin, Ubiquity, very much of late.  If you've ever been frustrated that you can't get stuff on one web page into another web page, or if you wish you could more easily search for things on the web, Ubiquity is your friend.  It adds "verbs" to your browser so that you can tell it what to do, and if you're a programmer, well, the sky's the limit.  You can add new verbs and instruct Firefox on what to do and how to behave.


My first "verb" helps me in a BYU class this semester, specifically in searching the Doctrine and Covenants (it's a church book).  The church has published it online, so I made a "d&c" search command for Ubiquity.  Basically, to use it, you would type "option-spacebar" (or ctrl-spacebar on a PC) to get to the Ubiquity command, and then type "d&c 1:5", for example, to go to Doctrine and Covenants section 1, verse 5.

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Even FASTER Javascript

I've been very impressed with the speed improvements for Javascript in Firefox 3.0.  Well, the Mozilla foundation is at it again, improving the backbone of web applications by speeding up Javascript by 2-4 times with a new engine called TraceMonkey.  The claim is that this brings Javascript on par with the speed of C, which is in my mind, a really good reason to begin taking the language seriously for anything from image manipulation and computer vision to networking and desktop applications.


Once again, I'm excited to be a programmer :)

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Your BYU Schedule

In case there are any other Rubyists out there going to BYU, here's a little script I wrote to turn BYU's circa 1995 website into a circa 2008 iCal-jamming datasource. Copy-paste your schedule to the DATA section (after the __END__ marker) of the ruby script and it will turn your semester's classes into a file ready to be added to your calendar.

Usage:
$ sudo gem install icalendar
$ # Copy paste your schedule to the DATA section
$ ruby byucal.rb

Enjoy the School.ics file that is produced!

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Are we becoming a cash economy again?


Slate's "The Death of the Credit Card Economy" is an interesting read.  It suggests that the credit crunch has resulted in a shift in economic trust: we're moving from "borrow and buy" to "cash and carry".  This could have an amplifying effect on a recession:

This shock to the system may further damage the already-fragile psychology of the consumer. Writing a check or deducting the price of a pair of shoes directly from your bank account packs a much more potent emotional punch than charging the pair of Allen Edmonds loafers on your American Express platinum card. Chalk it up to a concept called "the pain of paying," said Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational. (It's a concept the parents of his students at Duke University feel every semester.) Imagine that a restaurant, rather than charging $30 per meal, charged 50 cents per bite, with a waiter standing tableside collecting after each chomp. That would be an extremely unpleasant meal. But credit puts a safe distance between the ecstasy of consumption and the agony of payment, and thus makes us feel better. Said Ariely: "If it's more difficult to get credit, it might make people feel more pain of paying and therefore spend less."

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