Everyone wants to live a long time, preferably forever. Much of human art and most all of religion is based on that anxiety. So Google is on the case! [Read more…]
The Zingularity
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Everyone wants to live a long time, preferably forever. Much of human art and most all of religion is based on that anxiety. So Google is on the case! [Read more…]
When you hear about interests rates, it’s usually an announcement that they’ve been raised, lowered, or left unchanged. What many laypeople fully understand is it’s not the interest rate on a T-note that changes, it’s the price of the bond itself. The interest rate, what stock-jocks call the coupon, is fixed. What determines the interest rate is what people are willing to pay for that bond. A bond is simply a loan, and the big factors on a loan is how safe is it, when do you get the principal back, and what rate does it pay? The less safe the lower the price people are willing to pay and, since the coupon/interest rate is fixed, the more interest it yields. Obviously, if the loan is going to miss an interest rate or if the agency issuing it is about to default, it’s less safe.
US bonds are considered among the safest investments in the world, people are willing to pay top dollar for a safe investment, but if that changes significantly it crashes the bond market. A crashing bond market crashes pretty much everything else, even currency stashed in a matress might cease to have value. Which is why the Wall Street Journal is telling Teaparty Republicans to STFU about defunding the government: [Read more…]
An atheist org has bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ads in papers across the nation celebrating the secular nature of the US Constitution. The ads, sponsored by the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), pointed out our founding document is free of references to a deity despite what many political leaders like to say: [Read more…]
Not long ago Sean Gastonguay almost killed his entire family by “fleeing the US’ by sea and getting lost in the middle of the Pacific.
Gastonguay claimed to be escaping an abortion friendly US government and ended up adrift for weeks. He ended up costing the taxpayers of several nations untold thousands of dollars and manhours to save his sorry ass and get home. I guess that was just a dry run, because he’s gonna do it again: [Read more…]
Pew and USA Today have a nice poll out with great cross tabs and more detailed follow-up questions on the Affordable Care Act or ACA, also know as Obamacare. The results are mixed but one thing is a little encouraging: if you combine those who outright approve of the ACA, and those who disapprove but say elected officials should seek to make the ACA work as well as possible, we have a solid majority who want this to work: [Read more…]
Seems like just a few centuries ago when I was blissfully happy in my generic middle class existence, but it’s only been five years. Little did I know the initial crash of Lehman followed by the banking crisis would spell the end of that and almost mark the end of my life: [Read more…]
Somehow this has to be bad and Obama’s fault. But in the rest of the world, this is a Big Fucking Deal: [Read more…]
There is much joy in Teaparty-ville that Arctic ice loss may fall short of a new minimum this year. Back in the reality-based world, there’s not much in the way of good news to celebrate:
Prof Andy Shepherd, from Leeds University, said: “Now that we have three years of data, we can see that some parts of the ice pack have thinned more rapidly than others. At the end of winter, the ice was thinner than usual. Although this summer’s extent will not get near its all-time satellite-era minimum set last year, the very thin winter floes going into the melt season could mean that the summer volume still gets very close to its record low,” he told BBC News.