This is what I like to see

Fair and balanced reporting with no value laden terms. Sadly, there's really no other source for such information from these remote regions. And it takes days after the fact for these people to post it!

in reference to:

"a fierce fire fighting between the Kadyrov's apostates supported by Russian infidels on the one side and the Mujahideen on the other"
- A gun battle took place in district of village Aktash-Aul of Dagestan - Kavkazcenter.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Blago

I live on the Indiana-Illinois border. Last year I was going to steal one of those "Welcome to Illinois" signs with Blago's name on it. I knew they were destined to become collectors' items.

in reference to: Rod Blagojevich: A strange trip for Illinois -- chicagotribune.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Flaming

Good Lord. I didn't know people needed an instruction manual to do this effectively.

in reference to: Guide to Flaming - flayme.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

Long live the Cyborgs

This is a wonderfully pithy comment about what's going on these days:

The market is currently driven on a daily basis by algos that are doing essentially that; notice a tick, drive into it, stir up the other algos and draw in a few retail traders, calculate the asymptotic peak, sell early into the peak, dump on the down side as any humans jump in with late bids. Then tie up the lose ends, update a database table with another row of winnings, reset, resume search.

The entire process probably typically takes about 180 seconds, and with multiple threads running across the cloud then you could have -- Hell I don't know -- say a hundred of these events running concurrently, each generating -- let's see -- say $100-1000 profit on exchanges per event depending on who jumps on and how dumb they are. Representing maybe $10K cleared profit every 3 minutes across the whole cloud.

And on a good day with plenty of random volatility you could double that.

It's just like printing money. But it is a type of theft born of our lust for speculation over real investment.

And while the same technology could be used as you suggest, to notice unfair ramps, why would anyone use it that way when instead they could clear $10K a minute?

Hey, kids. It's Friday and you know what that means, IT'S BANK FAILURE FRIDAY

Only six today. According to people who pore over the numbers, at least one of them had a really nasty diff.

in reference to: FDIC: Failed Bank List (view on Google Sidewiki)

My 2 cents'

I love heroic couplets. If I remember right, one of the things that Pope was complaining about in The Dunciade was the admixture between the high and the low, the merging of the sacred and the profane. We have quite a bit of that today. Indeed, a synthesis between the two is considered healthy.

One of the things that leaves people screaming, I think, is that we have become so successful in mastering our environment, so successful in abstracting out the minutiaea of our physical world and manipulating them, but our bodies and consciousness haven't evolved as fast as our problem solving skills. We're still apes, but we now possess thermonuclear weapons. This leaves anyone with a lick of sense crawling out his skin.

in reference to: Harry Magnet's Blog: The Triumph of Dullness (view on Google Sidewiki)

<a href="http://ditech.com">ditech.com</a>

In my days of title searching, I found this lender was fond of giving a second mortgage for 80% of the home's value. The first mortgage, which was generally for 125% to 150% of the appraised value, seemed to be irrelevant.

in reference to:

"But often all it takes is a decline of 20% in a home's value to wipe out a second mortgage, which is typically piled on top of an 80% first mortgage."
- The deal: Junk mortgage story just gets worse - Dec. 1, 2009 (view on Google Sidewiki)