iPad Apps for me

My iPad should be here on Monday so I’m spending the weekend getting together a list of the first apps I want to load. I’ll put on the iWork apps, even if they are not quite up to my expectations. I figure they will get there. And iBooks.

Starwalk will be one. As will Smule – Magic Piano, Glee, The Elements will also be something. And probably the ABC app.Netnewswire, too. (I’d love some mashups between an RSS news reader and a blog editor, as I have on my laptop but maybe this will have to wait for iPhone 4.0.

More news/photos from the Guardian Eyewitness.

And some games. Perhaps NOVA. Or Real Racing HD.

So many fun choices. Any suggestions?

Where are the lunches with real scientists?

by malias

Cooler Heads Coalition serves up tired denialist fare at Hill “Climategate” lunch briefing
[Via ClimateScienceWatch]

Climate Science Watch attended a Capitol Hill briefing April 16 on the “Climategate” e-mails, a denialist-friendly event intended for media and Congressional staffers. The briefing was hosted by the Heritage Foundation and the Cooler Heads Coalition, an anti-regulatory-minded group formed to “dispel the myths of global warming by exposing flawed economic, scientific and risk analysis.” Speakers Pat Michaels and Joseph D’Aleo found it easy to spoon-feed misinformation to this audience without being held accountable.

[More]

As I mentioned in an earlier post Why science communication often fails, it is hard for researchers to speak effectively at these sorts of functions. They are not well skilled in the lawyerly tricks used in these sorts of discussions.

Organizations should be helping scientists here. In fact, why not fight fire with fire? It is well known that young researchers will attend almost any event if it has free food, as it seems dowillthe young Congressional staffers. Instead of having stand-up presentations by ‘old farts’ why not have get-togethers with the peer groups from each sector? Bring the young scientists together with the young staffers in order to have conversations rather than simply lectures?

Simply talking shop between them may accomplish more than any other method. Especially since the younger scientists also seem to have more drive to evangelize their thought than many older researchers.

Time to open a can of whoop-ass

by Yodel Anecdotal

Since we may not be able to put people away for some of the shenanigans they pulled, we should be identifying them and working to shun them or at least make sure they lose their jobs. Here are some from the Republican side:

And some from the Democratic side:

The legislative language was complex, but the vote was understood as a simple question: Should big banks be broken up so that they no longer pose a risk to the financial system?

Eight Democrats and one Republican joined Sanders, but the measure failed by a 12-10 vote. Four Democrats opposed the amendment, standing with the big banks: Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (N.D.), Bill Nelson (D-N.D.), Mark Begich (Alaska) and Mark Warner (Va.). [My bold]

Here is the purpose of the amendment:

Purpose: The amendment would create a deficit-neutral reserve fund for legislation that would break-up too-big-to-fail financial institutions that pose a catastrophic risk to the economy.   

The combination of those 4 Democrats with the 8 Republican votes on the committee made sure that an amendment – one that would prevent banks from becoming so large that their failure threatened the entire health of the US economy – failed.

Interestingly, John Comyn is on the committee, voting against the amendment with the other 8 Republicans and he is also in the video.

I wonder how much the financial lobbyists are helping him raise?

Apparently he believes banks should be allowed to swindle money from people by lying to them about risk, while making back room deals with cronies to reserve huge piles of money for themselves, and then extort money from the American taxpayer for help because they are too big to fail.

I guess he feels sympathy towards business models that are based on bilking people.

My List: John Comyn (Tx), Richard Burr (NC) Kent Conrad (ND), Bill Nelson (ND), Mark Begich (Alaska), Mark Warner (Va).

As an aside on the previous post

The really awful thing about the immoral use of credit default swaps I discussed below is that there is actually a good chance that the bankers and everyone involved will get off. There may not have been anything really illegal inlying to one group of investors while helping another make a ton of money. These guys were very careful to game the system and to make sure that no regulatory action would ever be taken.

So we might need to just close the barn door after the horses have run out and make it illegal now. As well as make it impossible to do something similar. And include tough oversight to make sure that when they want to do something ‘innovative’ again, it is vetted to make sure that people are not fraudulently sold a pig in a poke.

Somehow, ever bad player here needs to be shunned in some fashion. And we need to identify the good players, the ones who refused to do this and, while probably hurting their company’s bottom line, displayed a moral sense that should be rewarded.

Best single description of the Big Sh$#pile and how Goldman benefited

by matthewnstoller

Shocking Fraud from Financial Scum
[Via Good Math, Bad Math]

Against my better judgement, I’ve ended up writing a lot about the financial mess that we’re currently going through. If you’ve read that, you know that my opinion is that the mess amounts to a giant pile of fraud.

But even having spent so much time reading and studying what was going on, the latest news from the financial mess shocks me. Even knowing how utterly sleazy and dishonest many people in the financial world have been, even knowing about the stuff they’ve been doing, the kinds of out and out fraud that they’ve perpetrated, the latest news makes them look even more evil than I could have imagined.

More]

Mark not only provides a nice background of how derivatives and credit default swaps created the huge financial mess, he also illustrates the type of fraudulent behavior Goldman Sachs, and probably others, exercised.

It may very well be that Goldman Sachs purposefully created financial instruments that it sold to people, knowing that the value would decrease, all so that other clients of its could make a bunch of money on the failure. From Mark:

What the hedge funds were really doing is making it possible for the investment banks to create CDOs that were likely to fail, and then buying credit default swaps against the top tranches of those CDOs, betting that they were going to fail.

The strategy here is simple. I spend $5 million buy the bottom 5% of $100 million worth of loans that I think are going bad. I’m expecting to lose that: I’m going to be out $5 million. But, I also use another $5 million to buy credit default swaps on $60 million worth of the higher tranches of that pool of loans. Now, if the pool goes bad, I’m out $10 million – $5 million for the crap that I bought that’s now worthless, and $5 million to buy the credit default swaps. But because the whole thing went bad, I get to collect $60 million.

They wanted to crappy loans that were sure to default. Because they could clean them up and sell them to regular institutions as though they were fine. But they could then sell CDS, which are essentially insurance for failure, to hedge funds. By purposefully creating things that would fail, Goldman Sachs got money from the original sale and money from the sale of the CDS. The hedge funds made tons of money on the failure and the losers, who thought they were buying regular safe investments, were left holding the bag.

No wealth was really created. It was transferred (I call it stolen) from the groups that invested in the original loans, not knowing that the financial institutions. were selling them a load of crap.

Let me restate – it appears that institutions such as Goldman Sachs knowingly sold derivatives, that were doomed to fail, to groups who were assured that these were safe investments, all so it and its hedge fund partners could make even more money by betting on the failure.

And they did all this on purpose, knowing it would fail and making money on the failure:

Anyone who honestly looked at the whole CDO thing a few years ago knew perfectly well that the thing was going to collapse sooner or later. The hedge funds knew, perfectly well, that the people that they wanted to buy credit default swaps from were likely to go belly up eventually. So they wanted to be in the situation of being the first ones to collect, before the big insurers backing the CDSs ran out of money.

So they didn’t just find crappy CDOs to bet against. They went to the investment banks, and asked them create CDOs consisting of piles of specific, high-risk loans. They provided specific requirements – complaining when firms tried to put together better packages. They’d only back the true crap. They wanted shit that would go bad, and go bad fast. And most of the big investment banks went along with it. (To their credit, a few refused.)

Both the banks and the hedge funds knew what was going on here: they were creating and then selling CDOs where they knew that the things were designed to lose all of the money invested in them. And the investment banks went to their other customers, and lied! They sold these things to their customers, telling them that it was a safe, profitable investment, even though they knew that they were designed to lose all of the money invested in them!.

It is like betting against the come in craps, only with loaded dice and with the stickman in on the deal.

Then when all this blew up in their face, they went to the taxpayer to get made whole.

If this is true, then all those guys should be in prison along with every other person involved with this fraudulent behavior. It was bad enough that they were using monstrosities such as CDS but to knowingly game the system in order to make money off of the failure,. To think that this was a failure that resulted in the loss of trillions of dollars in value for the people who thought they were buying regular safe investments, is simply jaw-dropping.