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POPSWhere is my money?
"It's in people's minds," Shiller explains. "We're just recording a measure of what people think the stock market is worth. What the people who are willing to trade today — who are very, very few people — are actually trading at. So we're just extrapolating that and thinking, well, maybe that's what everyone thinks it's worth." Shiller uses the example of an appraiser who values a house at $350,000, a week after saying it was worth $400,000. "In a sense, $50,000 just disappeared when he said that," he said. "But it's all in the mind." While the money in your pocket is unlikely to just vanish into thin air, the money you could have had, if only you'd sold your house or drained your stock-heavy mutual funds a year ago, most certainly can. "You can't enjoy the benefits of your 401(k) if it's disappeared," Jorgenson explains. "If you had it all in financial stocks and they've all gone down by 80 percent — sorry! That is a permanent loss because those folks aren't coming back.
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POPSWhat Palin Did I don't get why news agencies are confused. She violated the ethics laws by trying to get the trooper fired. She didn't violate anything by firing the Commissioner of Public Safety. How hard is that? She legally violated Alaska's Executive Branch Ethics Act.
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POPSSchoolhouse Rock - lyrics & links to videos on YouTube I got an urge to hear the Preamble again: In 1787 I'm told Our founding fathers did agree To write a list of principles For keepin' people free. The U.S.A. was just startin' out. A whole brand-new country. And so our people spelled it out The things that we should be. And they put those principles down on paper and called it the Constitution, and it's been helping us run our country ever since then. The first part of the Constitution is called the preamble and tells what those founding fathers set out to do. We the people, In order to form a more perfect union, Establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, Provide for the common defense, Promote the general welfare and Secure the blessings of liberty To ourselves and our posterity Do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
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POPSWhen The Messiah Speaks, The Youth Will Hear “Not sure the Obama team will be thrilled about yet another crazy association,” added another commenter on the NewsBusters forums page. Previous reports have documented Obama’s links to Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga, onetime Weatherman bombing suspect Bill Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who proclaimed a black liberation theology for 20 years while Obama was a member of his church, demanding that God “d***” America. “How much more have to come out on Obama before the O-Bots put down the kool-aid and say ENOUGH!” added a third. “Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus,” Cohen said during a one-minute speech on the floor of the U.S. House yesterday. “Pontius Pilate was a governor.” Democrats, including party strategist Donna Brazile and Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., made nearly identical biblical comparisons of the characters in this presidential election Is Barack Obama the Messiah? http://obamamessiah.blogspot.com/
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POPS$10.2 Trillion: National Debt Clock Goes Bust George Bush's legacy and the cost of war. How appropriate for the Debt Clock to run out of numbers. It's so symbolic, like the clock itself staggered at the number. The figure is absolutely outrageous and completely unjustifiable. And republicans used to be the party of limited instead of Big Government. The consequences are now all coming back. But Democrats should not gloat too much, they had plenty of support for the same spending packages and gave Bush whatever he wanted (fools). The ignorant flag-waving American public now realizes they were pushed into war under false pretenses and lies.
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POPSPalin revives McCarthyism "Today, with Fox News, talk radio and a right-wing blogsphere, there is an atmosphere and core of support for this type of thing. Sarah Palin seems like the missing link"
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POPSData Breaches Expose 30M Records in '08 Some states require entities to alert consumers of a data breach: I have been notified on three occasions (by my credit card company and a hospital and the VA) of my data being ‘lost’ and each time the date of the letter was 6-8 months after the fact. How does notification help in these cases? If only these companies protected my information as if it were their own. Most of us secure our data while on our own computer, but when our personal information is given to others we become vulnerable and subject to whatever level of seriousness corporations (and the government) extend to preventing a data breach. As long as himans are involved we will always be at risk.
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POPS Oil Outlook Clouds Russia’s Economic Future That could trigger a vicious circle of falling income and investment, as production gets more expensive in Russia's aging fields. The era of record profits from oil and gas is over - that's according to Russia's Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin. 2008 is likely to be the year of peak oil and gas production in the country. The big oil companies are cutting investment in new projects. Russia has received up to $1 Billion a day in oil revenues in recent years, and the country's budget and economy remain highly dependent on hydrocarbon earnings. The world financial crisis and recession has triggered big falls in the world's oil price. That will significantly affect the Russian budget, according to Mikhail Kroutikhin, partner at Rusenergy.
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POPSWhat Makes Your Blood Type Different? The presence or lack of additional monosaccharides in the oligosaccharide chain determines your blood type... I would guess you could say this is rather important. Make sure you are getting enough glyconutrients which are a combination of these plant saccharides or your health may suffer inexplicably.
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POPSWhy Do People Smoke After Having Sex? "On their first date, a man asked his companion if she'd like a drink. "Oh, no, what would I tell my Sunday school class?" she said. Later he offered her a cigarette. "Oh, no, what would I tell my Sunday school class?" she said again. On the drive home, he saw a motel. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he asked if she wanted to stop in there. "Okay," she replied. "What will you tell your Sunday school class?" he asked, shocked. "The same thing I always tell them: 'You do not have to drink or smoke to have a good time.'" That's my motto :)
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POPSPalin is a Hypocrite - Shock, Dismay Part II Wait just a minute here. Iran. Did you say the party she shouted out to was sponsored by Iran? This just has to be some bizarre joke, right? Not exactly. Her husband belonged to the party for seven years.
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POPSA Better Strategy on Opium in Afghanistan The statistics are bleak and we are pursuing typically myopic policies in Afghanistan. Hitchens (whose writing I think is superb) makes a great case for a different approach. "in the short term, hard-pressed Afghan farmers should be allowed to sell their opium to the government rather than only to the many criminal elements that continue to infest it or to the Taliban. We don't have to smoke the stuff once we have purchased it: It can be burned or thrown away or perhaps more profitably used to manufacture the painkillers of which the United States currently suffers a shortage. (As it is, we allow Turkey to cultivate opium poppy fields for precisely this purpose.)"
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POPSToy Robot Intended to Save Humans This narrative, crafted by Hugo award winner Tony Daniel and University of Texas performance professor Thomas Riccio, is intended to make Zeno into a character that people identify with and want to to see develop — something with the depth of a movie character or a figure from a Homerian epic. That makes Zeno into as much of a sociological experiment as it is a technical marvel or fun toy. "The idea is to create a cultural phenomenon and accelerate the use and humanization of the technology," Where story, game, reality, toys are not differentiable anymore.
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POPSBluehost How-To : Thunderbird Email Config?? I can’t seem to get my email with BlueHost working with TB. I have used it for a long time and can usually figure it out by looking at the other accounts but hmm, this one no go. Here is what I have so far.