“Does anyone know if you have a foreign bank account in euros, do you have to pay US taxes when the exchange rate changes (assuming you are a US citizen)?”
Interesting question, would like to hear the answer also - Bjorn Tipling
See "section 988" (http://www4.law.cornell.edu/us...) and its many interpreters. I *think* this means you owe tax whenever there's a transaction in foreign currency, and the gains or losses count as ordinary income. I don't think you owe tax if the rate changes and you don't buy or sell. - ⓞnor
"Finally, buried deep within the bill, and not mentioned in any MSM source that I am aware of, is the provision that every credit card transaction will now be reported to the IRS. How this fits in to the housing crisis is anyone’s guess." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
"Sales of previously owned homes, which make up most of the housing market, tumbled 2.6 percent in June, nearly double the decline that economists had expected, according to a report Thursday by a private trade group.
The report from the group, the National Association of Realtors, reinforced fears that the weak job market and scarcity of credit was discouraging Americans from purchasing homes. Those who may be in the market for a house may find it more difficult to take out a mortgage." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
"Drivers would pay to travel on San Francisco's most traffic-choked corridors - roadways such as the Embarcadero, Van Ness Avenue, Broadway and Harrison Street - under a plan getting serious consideration from city transportation officials in their continuing quest to get more people out of their cars." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
I think if they do this, they should be required to build a subway system equal to London, Paris, Tokyo, or NYC. - Chris White
Comment: "the city wants me out of my car; i want me out of my car. so we're on the same page there. over the past two years, i spent about about 1&1/2 in london. london's tube and bus system got me everywhere i wanted to go, or within a very short walk, in a very time-efficient manner. too bad you can't say the same for muni. it seems that muni isn't interested in making it easy to ride muni. just the other day i went to the powell street station and only had a five dollar bill. the get-change-from-the-bart-ticket-machines only give change for a dollar. the only other change machine in the station gives change for a ten or twenty. the surly muni attendant told me i had to go buy something to get the correct change (and she said she had no complaint forms). i went home and got my car. want me out of my car? provide me with a transit system that is focused on customer and public service rather than a transit agency that's really a city welfare program." - Chris White
posted a message
“Is 2008 social networking all that different from 1995 Usenet and bulletin boards?”
Because the dialog seems very similar, although there weren't companies built around these discussions then, and now the valuations of companies fostering these conversations are astronomical. - Chris White
All of Usenet in 1995 was estimated to have 18 million users (http://www.tlsoft.com/arbitron...). Facebook alone now claims 80 million active users (http://www.facebook.com/press/...), and there are an estimated 1.4 *billion* Internet users in the world (http://www.internetworldstats....). This numerical growth alone would justify increased commercial attention, especially combined with the vastly greater monetization tools now available. - ⓞnor
But @nor, we could be arguing in the same way on Usenet. Is scale the only difference? - Chris White
Deja News was founded in 1995 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...), so you're actually wrong that there weren't companies build around these discussions at the time. Before then, the numbers were even smaller, and it wasn't much earlier that there were pretty strict restrictions on commercial activity on major Internet backbones (NSFnet, etc). - ⓞnor
Also, don't forget the commercial online services -- CompuServe, the original AOL, Prodigy and so on. A large part of what they sold was access to "bulletin boards". So I think online conversation has been a center of commercial activity for as long as there have been online conversation. - ⓞnor
Okay, I was wrong regarding the actual date of commercialization. I think my point is still interesting regarding the sameness of the experience. BTW, I felt the same about the commercialization of chat by AOL. I was surprised that people were so excited about something we had all been using for years. If FF allowed me to edit, I would change 1995 to 1983, which is when I started using the Internet. - Chris White
I think most of the evolution of online social networking is a response to these very important scale changes. Usenet is a ghost town because a global topic hierarchy doesn't scale to a billion users. Instead, people flock to friend-link communities - Groups, Facebook, Friendfeed, and everything in between. The experience of two people arguing on the net hasn't changed much and may never change, but the way you find people and topics and an audience has changed quite a bit. - ⓞnor
CompuServe was founded in 1969, and marketed directly to consumers as early as 1979. But yes, the date of commercialization is not so important. An interesting question is whether you think there are important changes that could be made. You seem to be saying that we're basically in a rut; do you have any suggestions for what would lie outside the rut? (Not "virtual reality", surely.) - ⓞnor
Louis: Arguments the same, but finding people to argue with has improved. :) - Chris White
"Debts are retired by paying them off, " restructuring" or default. In the first case, no value is lost; in the second, some value; in the third, all value. In desperately trying to raise cash to pay off loans, borrowers bring all kinds of assets to market, including stocks, bonds, commodities and real estate, causing their prices to plummet. The process ends only after the supply of credit falls to a level at which it is collateralized acceptably to the surviving creditors." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
"The U.S. has experienced two major deflationary depressions, which lasted from 1835 to 1842 and from 1929 to 1932 respectively. Each one followed a period of substantial credit expansion. Credit expansion schemes have always ended in bust. The credit expansion scheme fostered by worldwide central banking is the greatest ever. The bust, however long it takes, will be commensurate. If my outlook is correct, the deflationary crash that lies ahead will be even bigger than the two largest such episodes of the past 200 years." - Chris White
"Facebook is pursuiting social networks it believes have copied their design or features by suing German social network StudiVZ. The Financial Times has reported that Facebook have filed a suit in the Californian Supreme Court against the German company for what it claims is an infringement of Facebooks “look, feel, features and services”." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
It will be interesting to hear what the specific violations are. Is the css protected, and what are these features that others aren't allowed to duplicate? - Chris White
"FEARS of a "no fun Olympics" are growing as security restrictions increase and become more bizarre with less than 20 days to go until the opening ceremony.
Beijing police have been visiting bar owners in the popular Sanlitun area and asking them to sign pledges agreeing to not serve black people or Mongolians and ban activities including dancing." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
"Most of us would never know that the 1957 launch of Sputnik would lead us to the Internet. Most of those reading, are probably already thinking. INCORRECT! However, it was the fear of the Soviets that led Dwight D. Eisenhower to develop ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) which would assemble of some of the greatest minds in the United States and eventually create the first internet." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
"Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman have broken up, their publicists said Monday. "Jimmy and Sarah have no further comment," Kimmel's spokesman Lewis Kay told The Associated Press, confirming the split that was first reported on Vanity Fair magazine's Web site.
Silverman's publicist, Amy Zvi, confirmed the breakup in an e-mail message to the AP. Zvi didn't immediately respond when asked for further details.
The pair dated for five years, and were one of Hollywood's funniest — and seemingly solid — couples." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
I wonder if it was because of Matt Damon or Ben Affleck. - Chris White
I thought it was a joke that they were dating... darn funny people! - Clare Dibble
"An insider let slip that two new Amazon Kindle models will hit stores this holiday season, with the first coming as early as October." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
hmm, was hoping for a more radical redesign - Adam Kazwell
Adam, I think that's just the CrunchGear rendering. I've heard the design is much better than that, although I don't have the details. - Chris White
Yeah, according to the piece they "skipped several generations" of typical evolution. We'll see, but I'm pretty interested to see how things turn out. - felix
well that's good to hear....I don't think it will take much to convince to get one, but I'd rather amazon get more sales from a device that's better designed. - Adam Kazwell
"Senator John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, has admitted that he never uses email and that his staff has to show him websites because he is only just "learning to get online myself"" - Chris White via Bookmarklet
He's really not old enough for that to be an excuse for his technological ignoance... my grandparents are in their 80s and have been using the internet for years! Maybe they should offer him lessons. - Shannon Jiménez
""The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said.
"But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree," he said in a statement." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
"I don't know where these guys get the audacity to take our money, taxpayer money, and buy stock in Fannie Mae,'' Rogers, 65, said in an interview from Singapore. ``So we're going to bail out everybody else in the world. And it ruins the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and it makes the dollar more vulnerable and it increases inflation." - Chris White
"They're ruining what has been one of the greatest economies in the world,'' Rogers said. Bernanke and Paulson ``are bailing out their friends on Wall Street but there are 300 million Americans that are going to have to pay for this." - Chris White
The economy is in such a bad shape that the government's only resort at this stage is to bend the law as much as they can get away with, hence the misallocation of taxpayer money (not to mention the non-existent imaginary paper used for such overnight bailouts) in hopes of preventing the inevitable massive bank run. IMVHO, of course. :) - Aviv
"President George Bush signed off with a defiant farewell over his refusal to accept global climate change targets at his last G8 summit.
As he prepared to fly out from Japan, he told his fellow leaders: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."" - Chris White via Bookmarklet
"Still, isn’t it shocking that taxpayers may end up having to rescue these institutions? Not really. We’re going through a major financial crisis — and such crises almost always end with some kind of taxpayer bailout for the banking system" - Chris White via Bookmarklet
Increasingly, I find myself in conflict with Paul Krugman's positions. - Chris White
What in particular do you disagree with? That Fannie/Freddie can't be allowed to fail? - Jim Norris
In this case, I disagree that Fannie/Freddie aren't partially responsible for this mess, as well as how the inevitable answer for problems in the economy is taxpayers bailing out governmental and institutional mistakes. Clearly a bunch of people made money off the whole real estate bubble since 1998, including people associated with Fannie/Freddie. Why don't they pay for this? - Chris White
Well, you'd have to decide how that was gonna work, exactly. - j1m
Maybe it's better to let them fail. Mortgages will be harder to get, so houses will be harder to sell. In order to sell the houses, prices will have to be lowered. That's the natural way to get housing prices back to what they should be. Right now it makes more sense to rent than to own in many markets. Low interest rates and poor lending practices caused housing prices to drastically inflate like a dotcom stock. How will prices get back to what they should be under the bailout plan? - Chris White
Going forward, there should be no more interest-only loans, and 20% down should be required, along with verified earnings and/or proof of collateral. Second homes should probably require even more down, without the ability to walk away freely from a foreclosure without owing anything. - Chris White
"Every time you buy products such as food or gas, you are impacted by unregulated, secretive and often foreign commodities futures markets. Speculators in these markets are increasingly buying and selling commodities such as oil to sell again, rather than to use. As largely unregulated speculators pocket billions of dollars at your expense, the price of commodities has increased out of proportion to marketplace demands." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
Oh noes, *furriners* are buying *our* oil?! - ⓞnor
Hahaha. I'm one of those unregulated speculators --- I loaded up on energy stocks 4 years ago. - Piaw Na
""Oil has become the new gold," said Jim May, CEO of the Air Transport Association, at a Washington news conference Friday.
He said airlines face a crisis that results largely from the role of speculators in the oil market, with investor trades accounting for 20 times the number of physical trades by producers and users. That pushes prices up far above the actual cost of production, which is $65 to $75 a barrel." - Chris White via Bookmarklet
"The immediate cause of the closing was a deposit run that began and continued after the public release of a June 26 letter to the OTS and the FDIC from Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, according to the OTS. The letter expressed concerns about IndyMac's viability. In the following 11 business days, depositors withdrew more than $1.3 billion from their accounts.
"This institution failed today due to a liquidity crisis," said OTS Director John Reich. "Although this institution was already in distress, I am troubled by any interference in the regulatory process."" - Chris White via Bookmarklet
