While O’Donnell laudably tried to concentrate the audience’s awareness onand hopefully last, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen below for decent, I used to be overtaken, not from the pulling around the thread, and the voracious audience he serves. It did not make me sad, it crafted me angry.
With regards to celebrities, we can be considered a heartless region, basking in their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Seashore. The impulse is understandable, to some degree. It might be grating to pay attention to complaints from many people who delight in privileges that many of us can’t even think of. Should you can’t muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who tends to make additional income for any day’s do the trick than the majority of us will make in a very decade’s time, I guess I cannot blame you.
Together with the fast tempo of activities on the web as well as information revolution sparked from the World-wide-web, it’s particularly quick for that know-how industry to think it is distinctive: continuously breaking new ground and accomplishing factors that no person has actually performed previous to.
But you will discover other kinds of business enterprise that have previously undergone some of the similar radical shifts, and also have just as good a stake in the long run.
Consider healthcare, for example.
We generally imagine of it as being a vast, lumbering beast, but in truth, medication has undergone a series of revolutions within the past 200 years which have been not less than equal to these we see in engineering and advice.
Much less understandable, but however inside the norms of human nature, may be the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and look at the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but from the blithe interviewer Sheen’s daily life as we pass it inside proper lane of our daily lives. To become straightforward, it could possibly be tough for folks to discern the variation concerning a run-of-the-mill attention whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its own merits, a quote like “I Am On the Drug. It is Described as Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we can’t all be anticipated to get the full measure of someone’s everyday living each and every time we listen to something funny.
Swift forward to 2011 and I am attempting to check out will mean of becoming a little more business-like about my hobbies (for the most part new music). From the conclude of January I had manned up and started off to advertise my blogs. I had produced numerous unique weblogs, which had been contributed to by acquaintances and colleagues. I promoted these activities as a result of Facebook and Twitter.
Second: the very little abomination the Gang of Five on the Supream Court gave us a yr or so ago (Citizens Inebriated) truly comprises somewhat bouncing betty of its individual that may really effectively go off during the faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. As this ruling prolonged the idea of “personhood” to both equally businesses and unions, to test to deny them any appropriate to run in the legal framework that they had been organized beneath deprives these “persons” with the freedoms of speech, association and movement. Which means (when once again, quoting law college skilled friends and family) that both the courts should uphold these rights for that unions (as individual “persons” as guaranteed through the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they have to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights really need to apply to important corporations, also.
This was supposed to be an article about monetizing your life as an amateur musician. It’s become an opinion piece on my experience of Google AdSense.
Google Adsense allows you receive revenue through placing content-specific adverts on your website. The system makes Google around $8 Billion a year.
I signed up for Adsense several years ago. I had a travel blog which was general only for family and friends. If I remember correctly, my travel blog made me about £0.05 across 2 years or so.
Fast forward to 2011 and I am trying to investigate means of being a little more business-like about my hobbies (mostly music). By the end of January I had manned up and started to promote my blogs. I had created several different blogs, which were contributed to by friends and colleagues. I promoted these activities through Facebook and Twitter.
After a few weeks, I was looking at around 2,000 hits a month across all my content sources. I was feeling pretty proud of myself. My Google Adsense balance was approaching £10, and I hoped I could make around £50-100 a year. Google then disabled my account.
When your Adsense account is disabled you receive a standard email which tells you there has been "invalid activity". It directs you to a help URL. The only response you can take is to make an appeal.
Taking the matter particularly seriously, I spent some time writing the appeal which outlined my thoughts on the invalid activity. My guess is that I have violated their "don’t click on your own ads" policy when I’ve been proudly showing off my sites to friends and family. Since my IP address is logged on Blogger etc. and my clicks are less than 1% of the total hits received from countries far and wide, I assumed that they would realise my site was genuine.
Continued on the next pageBy Richard Smith, a recovering capital markets IT specialist
Housing Wire’s Paul Jackson has another post up continuing his row with Yves over securitization chain of title issues. It presents itself as a rebuttal of her previous post, about an Alabama trial court decision that Jackson deems to be a significant defeat, but which Yves and more recently Adam Levitin have argued is both insignificant and not very relevant.
Normally I’d leave the two of them to slug it out. However, Jackson’s weekend submission, in which he says he is “going to address her latest talking points” piqued my interest. Rather than addressing any of the substance of the post itself, he mounts a bizarre attack on the motives of the attorneys behind the Alabama case, based on a pretty peculiar interpretation of one of Yves’ comments to the post. The comment:
Are you kidding? Each side spent over $250K on this case. Trials where you are making real legal arguments, as opposed to presenting papers for a judge to approve, are costly. And Alabama billing rates are a lot lower than in other states. For borrower’s counsel, since the borrower has no money, the “spent” is what their time was worth plus hard dollar expenses (experts witnesses and so on). They are out the real out of pocket real costs.
The banks’ lawyer gets paid, so yes, this is an epic fail for the bank. I’ve mentioned this in other posts. The more borrowers fight cases, the more loss severities are gonna rise. Investors already are losing 70% on the average foreclosure and housing prices are projected to fall further in most states this year. If on top of that they start having more cases with 300% losses on foreclosure, investors might wake up and finally do something a lot more serious to pressure servicers.
Sooo…bank attorneys run up a tab fighting a foreclosure in a pretty obscure courthouse, that results in a 300% loss to investors, when all the borrower’s attorney wanted was the house back and a loan modification. The big numbers are the result of the bank attorney’s posture, and of eleventh hour moves that many judges would have rejected: introducing an allonge on the eve of the trial. This was clearly a bad economic result for the borrowers’ attorney! It was not hard to see that the trial had become a war of escalation, with the bank’s attorney in an ideal position to up the ante. The post makes clear that unlike the bank’s lawyers, borrower’s counsel was “out”, in hard dollar terms, vastly less than the total, which would have to include the opportunity cost of unpaid for billing time.
For Jackson this somehow becomes the basis for a statement of his worldview: that everyone is greedy, ergo these attorneys must be too! In his own words:
Morality and the accompanying emotions to that noble love of justice are simply a varnish for the fires of greed. In other words, everything is about the money, and if you can find a viable angle to make more of it than someone else. And I mean everything.
Taking guidance from this exceedingly dubious, indeed self-refuting claim (if it’s all about the money, we can’t trust Jackson either, can we?) is quite foolish. In fact Jackson doesn’t really believe it either: elsewhere in his oeuvre, we find a bizarre exception to his rule:
Believe it or not, mortgage servicing is a noble industry. Or, at least, it’s supposed to be. Even in managing borrower defaults and repossessing property, there is something noble to the work, underneath it all — and it comes from following the law, enforcing contracts, ensuring that our nation’s system of property rights maintains its integrity for all Americans.
Though it could be that he’s just slapping a spot of varnish, on some fires of greed, for the money; I do hope that varnish isn’t flammable, Mr Jackson, or you may decide you are underpaid.
At any rate, armed only with his distractingly inept imagery and his defective moral compass, Jackson sets out on a fishing trip, in his latest, and gets hopelessly lost almost immediately:
Yves tries to suggest that in writing about the Congress case I was claiming “Mission Accomplished,” attempting to associate me with an infamous Dubya moment during the far-from-over war in Iraq. Nothing could be further from the truth.
If you have the attention span of a gnat, you might take this at face value. On the other hand, the very next sentence says this:
Yves spends a fair amount of time suggesting that the effect of the Congress case elsewhere will be muted, if it has any effect all. In attempting to minimize the relevance of this case, however, what she misses is an important reality: that the defense here saw fit to mount one in the first place.
So make your mind up, Mr Jackson: is the case widely relevant or not?
Or was the choice of court and case, perchance, simply something of a goof by some attorneys looking to develop a theory that might have more lucrative applications? That’s one sensible conclusion you could draw, and a basic step in puzzling that out, that does not even occur to Jackson, is doing some minimal research and actually looking up the plaintiff’s lawyers. And the idea that deep pockets types would go to of all places Alabama, not exactly known for cutting edge jurisprudence or friendliness to consumers, and hire two no-name attorneys to represent a black borrower, is beyond belief. If you are Jackson, though, you skip the homework, or the sanity check, and go for the ASF paranoia:
In many ways, the plight of the distressed borrower is a convenient lever to pull if — for example— you’re a buyside Wall Street firm that decided to load up with cheap nonagency mortgage-backed securities in the wake of the market’s collapse, betting on a mechanism that could open the door to damage claims and settlements worth more than the securities themselves. Or maybe a mortgage insurer looking for novel ways to repudiate claims en masse.
I’m not at all suggesting that’s what went on here…
I have a suggestion straight back at Mr Jackson: if you want to not suggest something, the best way is simply not to make the suggestion. Otherwise, it looks as if you’re trying to have it both ways. Keeping the accusation vague is a smart move, admittedly, if you happen to be a bit clueless and not very brave. Bill Gross for one has made the trade that Jackson mentions, but does Jackson actually mean Bill Gross? He doesn’t say. Perhaps he doesn’t want Bill Gross on his case.
Yves by contrast doesn’t care a bit, roundly dissing Mr Gross’s self interested utterances. Ultimately, Jackson is too vague to be interesting here: it’s just a smear. As for the mortgage insurer theory: there’s no evidence for that either; just Tom Adam’s prior employment history and his occasional contributions at this blog. Mortgage insurers can make claims directly, on the very same theory that Naked Capitalism and the Congressional Oversight Panel have discussed. They have no reason to test a theory on a case in a largely irrelevant jurisdiction. And there are business reasons that the monolines are going the putback case route rather than this one. Remember that most of the MBS exposure (excluding CDOs) that monolines have is via HELOCs or second liens. That may put them in a position similar to that of the big banks: unwilling to take action on the first lien mortgages for fear of write downs on the second liens.
Yes, Bill Gross and MBIA and others are out there. And if they want to work the legals to make some money, or claw some back, they, or others like them, will. It’s really hard to see why the output of “Naked Capitalism” would so heavily in their ruminations as to be worth paying for (if that is what Jackson’s insinuating: he doesn’t seem to be able to bring himself to spell it out).
All of this stuff of Jackson’s is irrelevant and pretty much content-free; but still, it’s an interesting glimpse of sell-side anxieties.
So what really matters about this case? Three things: the unfortunate Erica Congress, who has had her hopes dashed twice over now, once when she couldn’t pay her mortgage and a second time when she was turfed out of her house; and two blithe but pernicious affirmations by the judge: first, that an allonge doesn’t have to be affixed to the note, which just opens up the floodgates for document fabrication, and second that “digital signatures” are valid endorsements to the note.
Unfortunately, neither Jackson nor the judge seem to grasp the difference between a digital signature, “a mathematical scheme for demonstrating the authenticity of a digital message or document”, as Wikipedia has it, and a digitally reproduced signature, a simulacrum that can be knocked up in minutes by any sad sack in a servicer that can use Photoshop, Word, and a laser printer, and doesn’t authenticate anything at all, least of all a transfer of title. Using 21st century technology to recreate a state of screwed-up title that hasn’t existed in anglophone countries since the mid-17th century is nothing to crow about, Mr Jackson. As a citizen of the US, it ought to make your blood run cold. It’s not just about the money.
At any rate, the more this stuff is talked about, the more lawyers (in less frivolous jurisdictions) will furrow their brows about the damage being done to the integrity of basic property transfers. So we will keep the pot boiling.
Source: http://removeripoffreports.net/ online reputation management
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