What If The U.S. Paid Off Its Debt?
NPR’s Planet Money got its hands on a government report entitled “Life After Debt“, which concluded the action would actually harm the global economy.
If the U.S. paid off its debt there would be no more U.S. Treasury bonds in the world. “It was a huge issue … for not just the U.S. economy, but the global economy,” says Diane Lim Rogers, an economist in the Clinton administration.
The U.S. borrows money by selling bonds. So the end of debt would mean the end of Treasury bonds.
But the U.S. has been issuing bonds for so long, and the bonds are seen as so safe, that much of the world has come to depend on them. The U.S. Treasury bond is a pillar of the global economy.
Banks buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth, because they’re a safe place to park money. Mortgage rates are tied to the interest rate on U.S. treasury bonds. The Federal Reserve — our central bank — buys and sells Treasury bonds all the time, in an effort to keep the economy on track.
Puts new light on the GOP obsession under Obama with debt reduction.
Source: liberalsarecool
Fox News UK’s Don Ronson reporting from the front line at the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest and meeting the ‘proto-fascist hippy-sludge’ head on.
An intense moment of truth with mainstream media.. Love this ’I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it’ moment from Dylan Ratigan.
In a conversation with a show panel about the country’s debt and credit downgrade, MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan passionately calls both the Democratic and Republican economic plans, “reckless, irresponsible and stupid.”
Video of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first getting word, via Blackberry, of Gaddafi’s
deathedit: captured (sorry). “Wow.”“Unconfirmed. We’ve had a bunch of these.”
Fascinating raw video. Thanks ABC for releasing this.
Source: joshsternberg
Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the former Libyan strongman who fled into hiding after rebels toppled his regime two months ago in the Arab Spring’s most tumultuous uprising, was killed Thursday as fighters battling the vestiges of his loyalist forces wrested control of his hometown of Surt, the interim government announced. Read more.
#Wikileaks founder arrived at the protest wearing an#anonymous mask which police insisted he remove.#OccupyLSX#Assange
(via proletarianinstinct)
Source: anoncentral
Occupy Wall Street has reached Times Square.
Doctor Who is now immortal, reveals the BBC
Selection from a 2010 Guardian article regarding the Doctor’s regenerations:
Edict that Time Lords can regenerate only 12 times before they die has been quietly ditched.
The moment comes in the CBBC spin-off show, The Sarah Jane Adventures, which stars former companion Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. Matt Smith, who plays the current Doctor Who, guest stars in a two-part episode called The Death of the Doctor, to be screened on October 25 and 26. While the Doctor and Clyde Langer, played by Daniel Anthony, are in the process of outwitting spooky vulture undertakers the Shansheeth, Clyde asks how many times he can regenerate. The Doctor indicates that there is no limit. The action continues.
read the entire article here. Thanks for the tip, nothinggoodontheradio & others.
Guess the Doctor will not be dying in this Saturday’s finale …or ever! I wonder what’s going to happen!
(via silas216)
Source: fuckyeahdoctorwho
NYPD cops talk on thread #occupywallst
(From Twitter) So, officer.com deleted the disgusting thread: http://bit.ly/q4dZjk But of course Anonymous has it archived: http://imagebin.org/176772
Read the thread. Disgusting.
Cloud-Powered Facial Recognition Is Terrifying
With Carnegie Mellon’s cloud-centric new mobile app, the process of matching a casual snapshot with a person’s online identity takes less than a minute. Tools like PittPatt and other cloud-based facial recognition services rely on finding publicly available pictures of you online, whether it’s a profile image for social networks like Facebook and Google Plus or from something more official from a company website or a college athletic portrait. In their most recent round of facial recognition studies, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to not only match unidentified profile photos from a dating website (where the vast majority of users operate pseudonymously) with positively identified Facebook photos, but also match pedestrians on a North American college campus with their online identities.
The repercussions of these studies go far beyond putting a name with a face; researchers Alessandro Acquisti, Ralph Gross, and Fred Stutzman anticipate that such technology represents a leap forward in the convergence of offline and online data and an advancement of the “augmented reality” of complementary lives. With the use of publicly available Web 2.0 data, the researchers can potentially go from a snapshot to a Social Security number in a matter of minutesThe Internet never forgets a face. Read more at The Atlantic
(via thedailyfeed)
Source: theatlantic
Financial Forecast, Black Monday
More from Malicious Dick’s Jesus in the Wal-Mart receipt series. I like The Dude, personally.
Original:
His explanation of why he decided to play around with this is quite enlightening. Don’t let the radio handle fool you - he’s a vegetarian, very progressive, and a Buddhist. He’ll be moving to Seattle shortly, and I’ll miss him here in Wyoming.
Thanks for the giggles, my friend!
gq:
Lithuanian Mayor Drives Tank Over $200,000 Mercedes Illegally Parked in a Bike Lane
We don’t care if this is a publicity stunt. It’s fucking awesome. Hat tip, Mayor Arturas Zuokas.
(via GOOD)
