Miscellaneous And Off Topic Subjects

[hack]

If you consider some of the variables you'll probably get some of an answer. The Financially Unaccountables aren't holding guns to loan officers' heads and forcing them to approve loans. Banks, too, have obviously changed since a generation or two ago. And that might be a contributing factor to the increased reliance on credit.

Few banks anymore consider their raison d'etre as lending against the spread to credit-worthy people. Those banks are now quaint little oddities with CEOs under pressure to improve return on equity. Until there's a crisis and everybody writes feature stories about those banks because they have no exposure to the crisis, a la Hudson City Bank in 2008 and suddenly the CEO is a genius. You wanna blame this too on consumers being financially irresponsible?

Why not consider the cost of the basic-banking model? You need to train and retain loan officers them and pay them to work with their heads. They have to make site visits to small businesses and spend hours sorting out the idiosyncratic accounting in the books of thousands of mom-and-pop businesses. As an alternative you could just build a loan-decision algorithm, hike transaction fees, move your risk off your own books through securitization, and know you'll get a bailout in the next crisis if it doesn't work.

So there's that. Or there's your unsupported blanket assertion that people used to be responsible adults but now are not because ``redistributive fairness'' denied them the opportunity to pay back their loans.

[Hannibal]

The Financially Unaccountables aren't holding guns to loan officers' heads and forcing them to approve loans.

You're right. It's the politicians that did that.

[Tony G]

Wrong, the loan officers and banks got bonuses for loans generated. As soon as the paradigm shifted to this instead of sound economics the game was lost to greed. This is not a criticism of the US but a statement of fact. When you incentivised a single step of the process it went out of balance. That it continued and then metastasized into the obscene abuse of proper credit rankings of loans and a three card monte game at the corporate level that became a firestorm of corporate entitlement shows how far gone our system is.

[hack]

You're right. It's the politicians that did that.

Seriously. Look at it again without your prejudices. Go back to the simple concepts in the textbooks.

[Tony G]

Veering back to the medical side, here's a Hail to the victors moment.

3-D printer helps save dying baby

By Stephanie Smith, CNN
updated 5:03 PM EDT, Wed May 22, 2013

.
Kaiba Gionfriddo as a newborn, before he experienced breathing problems.

University of Michigan researchers Scott Hollister, left, and Dr. Glenn Green developed Kaiba's splint.

A model of Kaiba's airway, with the biological stent in place.

Kaiba and his mother, April, in June 2012, four months after his stent was implanted.

A recent photo of Kaiba, who is now able to breathe on his own.

Editor's note: "Life's Work" features innovators and pioneers who are making a difference in the world of medicine.
(CNN) -- When he was 6 weeks old, Kaiba Gionfriddo lay flat on a restaurant table, his skin turning blue. He had stopped breathing.
His father, Bryan, was furiously pumping his chest, trying to get air into his son's lungs.
Within 30 minutes, Kaiba was admitted to a local hospital. Doctors concluded that he had probably breathed food or liquid into his lungs and eventually released him.
But two days later, it happened again. It was the beginning of an ordeal for the Youngstown, Ohio, family that continued day after agonizing day.
"They had to do CPR on him every day," said April Gionfriddo, Kaiba's mother, who later found out her son had a rare obstruction in his lungs called bronchial malacia. "I didn't think he was going to leave the hospital alive."
With hopes dimming that Kaiba would survive, doctors tried the medical equivalent of a "Hail Mary" pass. Using an experimental technique never before tried on a human, they created a splint made out of biological material that effectively carved a path through Kaiba's blocked airway.
What makes this a medical feat straight out of science fiction: The splint was created on a three-dimensional printer.
"It's magical to me," said Dr. Glenn Green, an associate professor of pediatric otolaryngology at the University of Michigan who implanted the splint in Kaiba. "We're talking about taking dust and using it to build body parts."
Kaiba's procedure was described in a letter published in the most recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
"It was pretty nifty that (doctors) were able to make something for Kaiba on a printer like that," April Gionfriddo said. "But we really weren't so worried about that. We were more worried about our son."
Green, who has been practicing for two decades, and a UM colleague, biomedical engineer Scott Hollister, had been working for years toward a clinical trial to test the splint in children with pulmonary issues when they got a phone call from a physician in Ohio who was aware of their research.
"He said, 'I've got a child who needs (a splint) now,' " referring to Kaiba, said Green. "He said that this child is not going to live unless something is done."
Green and Hollister got emergency clearance from their hospital and the Food and Drug Administration to try the experimental treatment -- which had been used only on animals -- on Kaiba. The child was airlifted from Akron Children's Hospital to C.S. Mott Children's Hospital at UM.
"It was a mixture of elation and, for lack of a better word, terror," said Hollister, a professor of biomedical and mechanical engineering who has been studying tissue regeneration for more than 15 years. "When someone drops something like this in your lap and says, 'Look, this might be this kid's only chance' ... it's a big step."
The next big step was getting a CT scan of Kaiba's lungs so that the splint could be fitted to his organs' exact dimensions. Hollister used the results of the scan to generate a computer model of the splint.
The model was fed into a 3-D printer that can engineer structures using a powder called polycaprolactone, or PCL.
PCL is malleable; it can be fashioned into all kinds of intricate structures. When a splint is created using PCL, it becomes a sort of biological placeholder, propping up structures while the body heals around it.
PCL has been used for years to fill holes left behind in the skull after brain surgery, according to Hollister. As time passes, PCL degrades and is excreted out of the body, hopefully leaving behind a healed organ.
What followed in Kaiba's case was a painstaking process of creating the splint on the printer in layers. Information about each layer is transmitted from the computer to a laser beam, which melts the PCL into a 3-D structure.
"We can put together a complete copy of a body part on the 3-D printer within a day," Green said. "So we can make something very specific for a patient very quickly."
Green then took the splint, measuring just a few centimeters long and 8 millimeters wide, and surgically attached it to Kaiba's collapsed bronchus. It was only moments before he saw the results.
"When the stitches were put in, we started seeing the lung inflate and deflate," Green said. "It was so fabulous. There were people in the operating room cheering."
"This case is a wonderful example that regenerative technologies are no longer science fiction," said Dr. Andre Terzic, director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Regenerative Medicine, who was not involved in Kaiba's case. "We are increasingly ... finding new solutions that we didn't have before."
The technique used by Green and Hollister is part of a burgeoning field called regenerative medicine, which involves engineering therapies -- using things like stem cells, or "body parts" constructed out of biological material -- to harness the body's ability to heal itself.
Creating a part that is specific to a patient's organ takes on even more importance with diseases like bronchial malacia, in which conventional intervention is risky and often the alternative is life on a ventilator.
But while cases like Kaiba's are a medical boon, both Terzic and the UM researchers stress that this and other regenerative procedures must be replicated in a wider patient population.
"This gives us the opportunity to really do patient-specific and individualized medicine," Hollister said. "So we don't have to do one-size-fits-all. But there is still a lot of work to be done."
While that work is being done, Kaiba's family remains grateful that, 15 months post-surgery and at age 18 months, he is still able to breathe on his own.
"I'm just so happy he's still here, that he was able to make it through," April Gionfriddo said. "Hopefully (soon) he'll be able to run around and be an even happier child."
The splint will take three years to degrade, and in the meantime, Kaiba's lung should continue to develop normally, said Green.
Green and Hollister hope to begin clinical trials in a larger patient population this year or next.

[Hannibal]

Seriously. Look at it again without your prejudices. Go back to the simple concepts in the textbooks.

Yes. Simple concepts. That's exactly what I'm doing. Supply, demand, and deadweight loss. Chapter 1 of Microeconomics.

[whodean]

Simple means different things to different people.

[entropy]

amazing..

[Hannibal]

OT:

Anyone looking forward to the PS4 or the XBox One? PS4 looks a lot more promising so far. XBox One reveal was about as enticing as a RichRod recruiting class.

[Optimus Prime]

ExtremeTech has a writeup about XB ONE.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/15...and-kinect-2-0

[Hannibal]

Sounds like a Microsoft PR writeup.

Fees for used games has been confirmed, and so has "phone home" DRM. Despite the claim that it will be an "all-in-one" device, it won't replace your cable box or satellite. At best, it will have pass through functionality for cable and satellite providers that support it. There's a good chance that most of the cable and satellite boxes on the market right now aren't capable of supporting the functionality shown off in that press conference.

But at least you can do Skype and Netflix with it LOL

Technology sounds about exactly the same as the PS4, but with one big difference -- The XBox One will be running Windows 8. I don't know how that affects performance, but historically, consoles have benefitted tremendously from not having to run an OS. This is why consoles can exceed the performance of a PC with similar hardware by a significant margin.

Here's a perfect summary of the XBox One reveal press conference.

:D

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbWgUO-Rqcw"]Xbox One Reveal 2013 Highlights - YouTube[/ame]

[hack]

Yes. Simple concepts. That's exactly what I'm doing. Supply, demand, and deadweight loss. Chapter 1 of Microeconomics.

Nope. Unless ``It's the politicians that did that'' was a joke, in which case I apologize. With all due respect, I didn't think it was a joke.

[Hannibal]

Nope. Not a joke.

Apparently, you have never heard of the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 or the numerous activist groups (like ACORN) that have taken legal action against banks over the years for not making enough loans to the "less fortunate".

[Hannibal]

http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-perspective/122012-637924-faults-community-reinvestment-act-cra-mortgage-defaults.htm?p=full

While the 1977 law was passed 30 years before the crisis, it underwent a major overhaul just 10 years earlier. Starting in 1995, banks were measured on their use of innovative and flexible" lending standards, which included reduced down payments and credit requirements.

Banks that didn't meet Clinton's tough new numerical lending targets were denied merger plans, among other penalties. CRA shakedown groups like Acorn held hostage the merger plans of banks like Citibank and Washington Mutual until they pledged more loans to credit-poor minorities (see chart).

WaMu CEO Kerry Killinger has blamed the CRA for his bank's overexposure to risky loans. He said he wanted to tighten lending requirements, but "such measures would have presented other issues such as the company's CRA rating and its commitment to serving its (low-income and minority) customers and communities."

Other large banks have reported serious delinquency rates on CRA home loans. Bank of America's 2009 10-K states: "Our CRA portfolio comprised 6% of the total residential mortgage balances, but 17% of nonperforming residential mortgage loans." Under Clinton's revised CRA, moreover, banks for the first time earned CRA credit for purchasing subprime securities. A wave of these securitizations began in 1997, which also happens to mark the start of the housing bubble.

[hack]

With all due respect -- and I mean that, cause I've seen you in this form share some very impressive thought processes -- that is partisan bullshit. Economists on either side will disagree in all the usual partisan ways about the impact of CRA on the crisis, but to pretend that these were the only subprime loans out there is ludicrous. According to this 11% of mortgages from 04-06 counted as CRA. The act applies only to deposit-taking institutions, and not the non-bank financials like Countrywide that played such a big role in the crisis.

In general I agree with you that political pressure on lending distorts the practice in negative ways. But in this case I don't see the data to suggest that this was a major cause of the crisis. Perhaps a minor one, but even that is stretching it when you're talking about a tenth of the market and the non-performing loans were overwhelmingly and demonstrably shown to be elsewhere. The text you bolded from BoA proves it. 17% of its defaults in the mortgage sector. So that leaves 83% coming from elsewhere. You simply cannot use this to imply that banks would have been accountable actors in this economy were it not for ``politicians forcing them not to''. Mountain out of a molehill.

As far as that specific IBD story, Citi and Travellers completed the largest merger in the history of financial-sector mergers just after the timeline suggested, and that chart doesn't prove Citi had to do any lending to unqualified borrowers in order to accomplish it. It cites the general trend in support of something specific, and piles on with words like ``shakedown'' and ``hostage''. They are preaching bullshit to a gullible choir in the same way that this happens on the left. Show me a spike in CRA lending ahead of the Citi/Travelers merger to support that article's claim. (And then we can move on to how this is typical horsetrading, because the number will quite clearly be small enough for Citi to shake off and much smaller than their exposures outside their CRA-mandated loanbaook.) Furthermore that graph is very possible entirely made-up bullshit. If in the years that CRA lending rose the fastest according to those graphs the actual share of mortgage lending is 11%, then you have to wonder. That's implying that CRA lending was at the time worth, I'm guessing, 15-20% of GDP. That does not pass the sniff test.

My suggestion is that everybody would like to escape accountability in this system, and those that can do. It's a profitable way to go most of the time and therefore a potential goal of any rational actor. Some of them get away with it and some don't. I don't like to see it when it happens, but I'm not gonna blame the little guy and refuse to talk about the culpability of others when too-big-to-fail banks are doing it too and making a real impact on the economy, as well as any other economic actor that can get away with it.