[Quote:]

The European Commission analysis of ACTA’s Internet chapter has leaked, indicating that the U.S. is seeking to push laws that extend beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and beyond current European Union law (the EC posted the existence of the document last week but refused to make it publicly available). The document contains detailed comments on the U.S. proposal, confirming the U.S. desire to promote a three-strikes and you’re out policy, a Global DMCA, harmonized contributory copyright infringement rules, and the establishment of an international notice-and-takedown policy.

Shit like this make me eager for as fast a collapse of the entire USA as possible. Could China please collect their debts right away and sell the remains of the country in the smallest possible pieces?

[Quote:]

The EU justice and home affairs minister are about to agree on a large-scale banking data sharing plan with the United States. The agreement will have a massive impact on the privacy of banking data of European businesses and citizens.

[..]

The move of SWIFT the data server to Switzerland would be an excellent opportunity to stop the nearly unlimited access of US authorities on EU bank transactions. But EU justice and interior minister are apparently keen agree a deal as soon as possible, on 30 November. Why 30 November? Because one day later, on 1 December 2009, the EU’s Lisbon Treaty will be in force and would allow the European Parliament to play a major role in the negotiations of the deal with the USA. A deal one day before will be a slap in the face of democracy in the EU.

SWIFT handles 15 mio bank transactions daily for more than 9000 banks worldwide. Nearly every transnational bank transaction within the EU is recorded in the SWIFT data centers, including amount, sender, recipient, and transaction comments. The agreement will even allow to transmit “other personal data”.

[..]

The most suprising fact related to the EU negotiations with the US is the missing demand of reciprocity. In other words: while the US will be able to access EU banking data no access to US banking data by EU auhtoirties is being foreseen.

[Quote:]

In the early hours this morning, boffins at the controls of the Large Hadron Collider brought the colossal particle-punisher up to beam energies of 1.18 tera-electron-volts (TeV), breaking the world atomsmasher record of 0.98 TeV held by the US Tevatron. The LHC is now officially the most powerful matter-rending machine in operation.

[Quote:]

To celebrate the start of its 350th year, the Royal Society has put online 60 of its most memorable scientific papers.

The Royal Society’s head of archives, Keith Moore, talks about some of them in an audio slideshow.

The papers (warning – they’re all PDFs) include:

Isaac Newton’s New Theory on Light And Colors. (1672)

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek‘s observations of Little Animals in Rainwater. (1677)

The Electrical Kite of Benjamin Franklin. (1752)

Thomas Young‘s Wave theory of light. (1802)

Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden’s gold foil experiment which led to the nuclear model of the atom. (1909)

[Quote:]

If you ask most people why the day after Thanksgiving is called Black Friday, they’ll explain that the name stems from retailers using the day’s huge receipts as their opportunity to “get in the black” and become profitable for the year. The first recorded uses of the term “Black Friday” are a bit less rosy, though.

According to researchers, the name “Black Friday” dates back to Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. The Friday in question is nestled snugly between Thanksgiving and the traditional Army-Navy football game that’s played in Philadelphia on the following Saturday, so the City of Brotherly Love was always bustling with activity on that day. All of the people were great for retailers, but they were a huge pain for police officers, cab drivers, and anyone who had to negotiate the city’s streets. They started referring to the annual day of commercial bedlam as “Black Friday” to reflect how irritating it was.

So where did the whole “get in the black” story originate?

Apparently storeowners didn’t love having their biggest shopping day saddled with such a negative moniker, so in the early 1980s someone began floating the accounting angle to put a more positive spin on the big day.

In other words: marketing propaganda.

[Quote:]

According to the Times, this federal bailout was intended to save 4 million homes from foreclosure, yet there are only approximately 650,000 homes in the program to date. A previous report showed that ONLY 2,000 of the then 500,000 in process had their loan modifications made permanent.

[..]
The government incentive for this was $1,000 at the time the terms were renegotiated, plus another $1,000 per year for up to 3 years. I’m guessing they believed that after 3 years home prices would go back up and homeowners would then be able to sell or refinance. Of course, $1,000 payment from the government is hardly a meaningful incentive to forgo many thousands of dollars of interest. These renegotiations often took the form of deferred interest payments. That is, adding the interest onto the principle amount cause the base amount of the mortgage to continue to grow and grow.

This was a dumb idea on several fronts:

1) The loan servicers don’t give a damn if the loan defaults. In fact, perversely, it is to the servicer’s short term benefit if the loan does go into default because the servicer is then entitled to all kinds of additional fees.

2) The reason the servicers don’t care if the loan goes into default, is that the servicers don’t own the mortgage; so if the mortgage is suddenly worthless, the servicer is not the one taking the loss, the owner of the mortgage is.

3) The owners of these mortgages that have been pooled together and sold off as securities are pension funds and municipalities and college endowments. They don’t own a specific mortgage, just a percentage of a pool of thousands of mortgages held in trust for their benefit. They will take the loss if the mortgage defaults. Or will they?

4) Don’t forget all those “credit default swaps” that we had to bail out AIG for. Many Mortgage Backed Securities have insurance policies on them that are supposed to pay some or all of the loss if the security fails. The insurer has no power to recast the mortgage to mitigate that loss, though. However, the insurers have, or expect, government bailouts and back up guarantees to prevent an insurance industry collapse.

5) What about the Trustee who holds all these mortgages for the benefit of the pension plans, etc., who bought the mortgage backed securities? You would think as a fiduciary for the security holders that the Trustee would have some incentive to mitigate the losses by getting a reduced, but flowing, income stream rather than no income stream at all. But often the trust agreement does not give the Trustee the power to recast these loans.

So, who suffers? The homeowner who does not have a person to negotiate with, the pension funds and school districts who may face a total loss if their securities don’t have insurance or if the government does not bail out the specific insurance company that wrote the credit default policy on their particular security; and of course, the taxpayers because Treasury keeps just giving away and giving away more and more money with no actual performance standards or benchmarks.