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[Neonivek]

The REAL qualification is likely the ability to act as Trump's puppet or at least to advance his personal interests.

Remember Trump has no qualms about personal interest and considers it to be a fringe benefit.

[Sprin]

I had the disscussion with Fish in PMs, I just dont think hed be bad. Sorry for not panicing over it sheesh.

[smjjames]

Oh and Carson for Urban development since he's lived in the inner cities, Trump really wants to do something about that. Which is nice.

"Lived on the inner city" is not a job qualification. Put somebody there who actually has experience with housing policy.

Yeeeah.

"Minister for Agricultural development" => qualification => "I eat food". (See I am human like you, fellow human).

At least Carson will certainly bring a different perspective than his predecessors had. Though not the only one who grew up poor.

He did talk about health stuff in relation to housing (the environment primarily) during the confirmation hearing, so, there's his healthcare professional prospective.

[Sprin]

Im not expecting like miricals with Carson, I just think hed be alright.

[Reelya]

He did talk about health stuff in relation to housing (the environment primarily) during the confirmation hearing, so, there's his healthcare professional prospective.

It's good that Carson is directly citing lead poisoning as a big issue.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-lead-poisoning-science-met-20150605-story.html

For those who had been exposed to lead as toddlers, even in small amounts, the scans revealed changes that were subtle, permanent and devastating. The toxic metal had robbed them of gray matter in the parts of the brain that enable people to pay attention, regulate emotions and control impulses. Lead also had scrambled the production of white matter that transmits signals between different parts of the brain, largely by mimicking calcium, an element that plays a critical role in brain development. Scars left by lead have had significant consequences for the study participants and their communities. As children, they struggled in school more than those who had not been exposed. As teens, they committed crimes more frequently, University of Cincinnati researchers reported.

Part of our limited reasoning is that we think about the individual effects of e.g. lead exposure, but we don't scale that up to think about what happens when you do an "experiment" where you exposed entire cities to the stuff. e.g. if an individual commits more criminal behavior due to brain damage from lead exposure, then logically if everyone has a high level of lead exposure, you'd think that we could put 2 and 2 together and realize that the total crime rate will rise if we do that. Except we've known about the effects of lead exposure on the brain for longer than any bay12er has been alive, and yet people only started talking about a connection to mass public behavior less than  1 decade ago. It's like humans have a blind spot in realizing that individual effects scale up when there are more people.

“HUD has several different ways it helps people, through [ensuring] financing for that first home to helping those in poverty, which has been an intractable problem for decades.”

But you know who also used government money to create incentivized loans for poor people because having a home was supposed to pull you out of poverty? GW Bush's policies related to HUD / FNMA, and his "American Dream Downpayment Act" which was supposed to fix poverty by giving all the poor people a housing asset and a mortgage. We saw what that lead to already. Have they got a better policy? One that doesn't involve giving massively risky expendable minimum-wage workers a huge loan?

[Sprin]

Ok I take it back, dont have the gov back loans.

[Reelya]

The big problem with what Bush did was that he loosened the regulations on who could get a home loan, while at the same time providing big cash incentives to the banks for handing out the loans, but only if they were handed out to people who were sufficiently risky:
https://www.thebalance.com/facts-about-the-american-dream-downpayment-act-1797732

So basically, this was money artificially pumped into the mortgage sector, but you had to earn < 80% of median income to get it. so banks could pad their portfolios in the short term (maximizing money coming in) by seducing low-income earners  to take out a home loan, getting the grant money, then bundling the shitty loan up into a bundle and selling it to someone else. This skewed things because banks were determined to get their "share" of the grant money before the other banks, so they aggressively sought out these ultra-low-earning people to pitch homeloans to, rather than to people who would have a better chance of paying it back.

Sure, you can incentivize economic behavior, but you need to do it in a way that doesn't distort behavior away from something that's more sustainable. e.g. by incentivizing loans to riskier clients, the Bush Administration dis-incentivized loans to safer clients (there are finite amounts of money and a finite amounts of sales employees who sell loans). This increased the percentage of risky vs safe home loans quite a bit.

[wierd]

Not fair to demonize the shrub, and not also Bill Clinton.

Clinton's repeal of Glass-Stegal is just as contributory to the 2008 collapse as the bad housing loans of the shrub era.

[Reelya]

The whole bill was written by Republicans in Congress, and passed by Republican majorities in the Congress and Senate.

But the real problem with blaming the Glass Steagal repeal for the banking crisis is that the bill didn't work. Mergers between banks and investment firms, which the bill was supposed to allow, actually slumped after the bill passed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall:_aftermath_of_repeal

Despite these increases in securities activities by bank holding companies that qualified as financial holding companies, the Joint Report found that concentration levels among securities underwriting and dealing firms had not changed significantly since 1999.[16] Ranked by capital levels, none of the four largest securities dealing and underwriting firms was affiliated with a financial holding company.[17] Although the market share of financial holding companies among the 25 largest securities firms had increased by 5.7 percentage points from that held in 1999 before the GLBA became effective, all of the increase came from foreign banks increasing their U.S. securities operations.[17] The combined market share of the five largest U.S. based financial holding companies declined by 1 percentage point from 1999–2003, with the largest, Citigroup, experiencing a 2.4 percentage point reduction from 1999–2003.[17] Of the 45 bank holding companies that had operated Section 20 affiliates before the GLBA, 40 had qualified as financial holding companies, 2 conducted securities underwriting and dealing through direct bank subsidiaries (i.e., “financial subsidiaries”), and 3 continued to operate Section 20 affiliates subject to pre-GLBA rules.
...
In a speech delivered shortly before the Joint Report was released, Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson stated that the Federal Reserve had “not been able to uncover any evidence that the overall market structure of the [banking, insurance, and securities] segments of the financial services industry has substantially changed” since the GLBA.
...
Within the banking industry, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan testified to Congress in 2004 that commercial bank consolidation had “slowed sharply in the past five years.”

So yeah, the problem is that the repeal of Glass Steagal wasn't actually followed by any rapid sort of transition in how banking operates. The big mergers between investment firms and savings banks that the repeal allowed (and are Glass Steagal's purported role of the crash) didn't actually occur, so can't have been the reason for the crash.

What actually cause the housing market crash to crash everything was financial companies trading a commodity called mortgage-backed securities. And Glass Steagal had nothing to do with regulating those in the first place
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage-backed_security
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateralized_debt_obligation
you'll not that "Glass Steagal" isn't mentioned anywhere in either article

[Sergarr]

I'm not sure where Mexican news should go, but I'll leave them here: Apparently someone has started a petition for Vladimir Putin to invade "liberate" Mexico from drug lords.

[wierd]

That will go over about as well as a lead balloon...

[Sergarr]

That will go over about as well as a lead balloon...

It seems to be topping the charts of at least two Russians news aggregators that I know of, despite its ridiculous objective insignificance (5 thousand signatures is like chump's change on the Internet). And, since all media sites in Russia are, obviously, controlled by the government...

[Neonivek]

That will go over about as well as a lead balloon...

To my knowledge Mexico already works with the United States, well as much as can be expected, to get rid of drug smugglers and cartels.

The issue is that, if I remember correctly, Mexico isn't completely industrialized and thus there is a lot of ground to cover. Not as bad as say... China or India.. But still.

Well that and there is a huge race divide in Mexico... probably doesn't help.

[Sprin]

Well we could hurt the cartels by ending the drug war

[Sheb]

Couldn't the Wall actually help Mexico if it slows the passage of drugs northward and guns southwards?