Ye’, Angelo “The Tanned One” Mozilo’s other project IndyMac bank has been seized by the FDIC. It is the second largest bank failure ever.
Note that IndyMac was not subprime lender, they did “Alt-A” loans which are the bottom end of the prime market.
We will be seeing more of this.
Bill Sweetman has in interesting insight into the corporate culture of Sukhoi.
The founder of the design bureau was not a member of the Communist party, and the deisgn bureau seemed to be routinely outmaneuvered in the Soviet era by the MiG deisgn bureau, Artem Mikgoyan was brother of senior politician Anastas Mikoyan, and Tupolev design bureau, which was always very tied in politically.
As a result, the Sukhoi design bureau is unlikely to be amenable to partnerships with its rivals, and tends to look outside the country for such deals, as evidenced with its recent work with India on the PAK-FA.
The CDI has a good review of the process, which gained much of its currency in missile defense, and has spread like Athlete’s Foot to infect the US defense procurement process.
Basically, the project is never done, and never needs to meet requirements, because there is always a “spiral” upgrade that takes care of some short coming.
The full report is a PDF, though the summary linked to is not.
I encountered this worthless bullsh%$ while working FCS.
The Soyuz has had some issues with separation of the crew and re-entry modules, and so the has pulled the explosive bolt which is believed to have been responsible for the past two “anomalies”.
The failure of the joint to decouple smoothly led to two ballistic re-entries with much higher G-forces on re-entry and an off target landing.
Needless to say bringing an explosive device in for inspection, it has about the same boom as an M-80, is a non-trivial operation, and they have an explosion resistant container to transport it in once removed.
Still, I have to figure that the “pucker factor” is pretty high.
The idea of using balloons to make a helicopter arrangement lift more, because the rotors carry only the load, the airframe is neutrally buoyant, was tried before in the late 1986s, with the Piasecki PA-97, but it was a shoestring job with a seat of the pants attitude towards engineering, and on its maiden flight, a helo broke lose, and destroyed the aircraft, killing one of the 4 pilots.
This Boeing /Skyhook joint venture appears to be more thought out, and it offers good performance, with an estimated 200 mile range with a 40t payload.
That being said, I have always said that the first problem with lighter than air craft is that landing, even in a mild wind, becomes problematic.
When you consider that this is designed for operations in the, “niche market of commercial oil and mining companies operating in Canada’s far north,” I would also add the problem of operations in inclement weather.
I would also note that the cost of helium is going through the roof (been to a party supply store lately?), which will further crimp the project.
The ROK (South Korea) is looking at fielding its own advanced combat aircraft (Paid Subscription Required), EADS is pushing a Typhoon pushed somewhere past tranche 3, and SAAB is pushing a new stealth supercruiser, Boeing is pitching a significantly updated F-15, while Lockheed-Martin is pitching the F-35.
This is in parallel to the (IMHO overambitious) indiginous KFX stealth fighter program.
SAAB is proposing both a one and a two engine variant.
Honestly, the only two I see likely are the F-35 and Boeing’s proposal. The former because it is the 800 lb gorilla in the room, and the latter because they are currently taking shipments of the F-15K.
Note that in the competition that selected the F-15K, the Rafale was widely rumored to have won, but the fact that it was not a US product led to the selection of the Eagle.
Neave.com …the interactive playground of Paul Neave
Use the arrow keys to move
Fire missile – space key
Hyperspace – ctrl or shift key
Pause game – P
Quit game – Q
Mute sound – M
When Obama goes to Iraq, Chuck Hagel will accompany him.
I really hope not.
Their throttling of BitTorrent clients violated FCC regulations.
It appears that a fine is unlikely.
Of course, if I were FCC chair, penalties would involve a cricket bat, a taser, veal gravy, and hungry ferrets to the senior management and IT staff…which is why I am not FCC chair.
First and foremost, understand that Fanie Mae and Freddie Mac are responsible in some manner or another for about $5 trillion in debt, or a bit more than 1/3 of the gross domestic product of the USA, and they account for about 55% of all mortgages in the US.
Right now, we appear to be in the midst of a market panic, with their shares, and hence their ability to raise capital to cover bad debt, dropping.
As a result, the Treasury Department is drawing up plans for a government takeover if they prove insolvent, though they are denying any plans for an iminent takeover, though the lesson of Bear Stearns is that going concerns to flat broke can take less than 24 hours.
One of the less inspiring parts of John McCain’s life story was when, after coming back from Vietnam, he dumped his first wife Carole to marry rich beer heiress Cindy.
Now it appears that he has been lying about some of the specifics:
Hmmmmm…….I’m sure that the press will find some way of making it “inspiring”.
Well, it appears that it’s been an unsettled day, likely because of concerns about the GSE(s), which will get its own post, and as a result, oil hit a new intra day high, $47.50/bbl, before settling to $143.84/bbl.
Note that in addition to uncertainty in Iran and Nigeria, there is now a possibility of a strike in Brazil.
Gasoline prices fell though, finishing below $4.10/gal for the first time in a week.
In currency, uncertainty has driven the dollar down, but there is a bit of a bright side to all of this, because the falling dollar is pushing the trade deficit down.
The problem is that once the dollar settles down to a more sustainable level, there will be a high inflation interregnum where imports prices will go up, but there will be no domestic businesses to pick up the slack.
Nothing on US real estate today, but in the UK, their housing crash is the worst since the Great Depression.
Additionally, we have a monetary picture that appears to point toward a vicious deflationary recession spiral.
Chart pr0n:
Well, it turns out that the ICRC specifically warned members of the military and the Bush administration that they were engaging in war crimes:
Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.
The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.
….Citing unnamed “sources familiar with the report,” Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.” Red Cross representatives were not permitted access to the secret prisons where the C.I.A. conducted interrogations, but were permitted to interview Abu Zubaydah and other high-level detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The book says the C.I.A. shared the report, which Ms. Mayer first described last year in less detail in The New Yorker, with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
I really hope that there is a prosecutor in The Hague getting his ducks in a row over this case now.
Toady, he’s writing about the Medicare vote, and he writes about the underlying issues, not the drama of Kennedy showing up to break a filibuster.
Specifically, he notes that in 2003, Bush and His Evil Minions™ got the so called Medicare Modernization Act though congress, and a big part of it was a very poison pill, large subsidies for the private insurer run Medicare Advantage.
Because these plans are heavily subsidized, they suck money out of the program, making a fiscal crisis even worse.
Because these plans require larger premiums, they also exclude the poor.
So you create a two tiered system, where the rich tier sucks the marrow out of the poor tier.
Basic Republican social programs: Reverse Robin Hood.
Krugman is also far more sanguine about the possibility of real reform next year, because the Dems held together, and the Republicans caved when hit with the full force of the AMA over the July 4th weekend.
Me, I’m more of a pessimist. My goals are less extreme. Just remove the preemption clause from ERISA, and let the states compete, and businesses will migrate to places where they aren’t shafted by the healthcare system.
The International Criminal Courte at The Hague takes it time, but eventually it dots its “i”s and crosses its “t”s, and it gets the job done.
We should see a genocide indictment against Omar Hassan al-Bashir shortly.
Hopefully the ICC will be more prompt in cases closer to home.
Rex Nutting, the Market Watch Washington Bureau Chief says that the implosion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a certainty.
Why does he see it as a certainty? Because Bush and His Evil Minions™ don’t see it happening.
Other Things that Bush and His Evil Minions™ never expected:
To quote Bender the robot, “We’re boned”.
His response to questions about whether Lieberman would be chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is now, “Let’s talk about this year.“
Not surprising. In addition to lying about the Democratic nominee, and endorsing the Republican, he’s also been a craptacular committee chairman. No hearings on anything that might embarrass Bush and His Evil Minions™, like the failures of Katrina.
I don’t care about the iPhone. I don’t want a smart phone. I just want to make phone calls.
That being said, this take down of the iPhone is a thing of beauty, if you are into such stuff, which I am.
Well, once again the forces of ignorance and hate, specifically those people who allow their own Satan to dominate their lives, have decided that what ever perverse god that they worship gives them the right to be and do evil.
As frequently happens, this story started with a, one Webster Cook, who decided that he would go to mass, and not eat the Eucharist, the cracker that is supposed to be the body of Christ, but instead, he would remove it from church.
It appears that he wanted to show it to a friend sitting in the back to help explain rituals of the church. A member of the church then assaulted him in an attempt to recover said cracker, or human flesh, or spiritual flesh, or whatever it is under Catholic theology, so Mr. Cook left.
What followed was a series of death threats from around the world, and Mr. Cook, fearing for his life, returned the cracker.
From what I understand of Catholic Dogma, and to be honest, this incident is making me far less interested in knowing or understanding, or respecting these beliefs, because those people who assaulted him and threatened his life are no different from the 19 men who flew planes into buildings on Septermber 11.
I understand that Mr. Cook did something that many Catholics find offensive. He shouldn’t have done it. In fact, he could have gotten one of the crackers before it was blessed, when it was still “just” a cracker, as opposed to some sort of mystical human flesh according to Catholic dogma, and showed it to his friend that way.
People had a right to be offended. They had no right to invoke behavior that reeks of the inquisition, and the behavior of the President of the School, the state school the University of Central Florida, who tacitly endorsed harassing the young man, should never be allowed to work in education again.
In any case, noted science blogger PZ Myers, of Pharyngula, came across this, and understood, as I do, that this behavior is not that of a fully developed human being, and noted that, “IT’S A FRACKIN’ CRACKER!“, and rightly condemned the behavior of the Taliban-Catholics.
Of course, now he’s being subjected to moronic harassment and likely threats of violence, in addition to demands to his employer that he be fired.
And, of course, racist and anti-Semitic bigot Bill Donohue, of the “Catholic League” (his own private rent-a-crowd) has had to weigh in on a witch hunt for Prof Myers too..
Satan does not exist in Jewish theology. Rather the Satan exists, where Satan is a title, meaning “adversary” or “prosecutor”. The Satan is our own evil inclination, and the people who are harassing Cook and Myers are doing their Satan’s work, not God’s work, because at their core, all they need is someone to hate.
I disagree with Mr. Meyers in only one area. It isn’t a cracker, it’s ritualized cannibalism.
There is actually a long history of cannibalism, both real and ritualized simulations, in religious observance, from Catholicism to the tribes of Papua New Guinea , and while I find it odd it’s not my business…Until you decide that your desire to eat human flesh, real, imagined, or spiritual allows you to justify violence against another.
If God is kind and just, and I believe he is, though it is impossible for a human to percieve the totality of God (Ein Sof in Kabbalistic Judaism), the God hates Bill Donohue and his ilk, because there is no greater sin than profaning his name (chillul Hashem).
Well, it appears that Barack Obama will be in Europe, and he wants to give a speech at the Brandenberg gate in Berlin, but members of the Bush delegation at the G-8 summit twisted arms to prevent this.
It appears that Merkel is interested in taking over Blair’s role as Bush’s poodle, though members of her CDU party are generally supportive of Obama speaking there because they want to hear what he wants to say.
Merkel has also gotten herself in an eye poking contest with the Mayor of Berlin, and member of the opposition (sort of, German party coalitions are complex) SDU Klaus Wowereit, who has made a point of calling Merkel out on her own overseas electioneering.