Delicious LiveJournal Links for 4-28-2010

[andrewducker]

• 93% of AAA rated CDOs turn out to have been junk.
  (tags: politics banks economics finance fraud)
• Life under Labour: better or worse?
  As I've said repeatedly - a major failing of Labour is in not changing the dialogue about poverty and redistribution.
  (tags: poverty politics uk)
• The Torrent Of Legend - I have one of these!
  (tags: bittorrent funny comic)
• Leopard and cubs on webcam
  All together now, "Awwwwwww"
  (tags: webcam leopard cute)
• Why You Should Never Pay For Online Dating
  (tags: dating economics statistics love onlinedating)
• Dating by blood type in Japan
  (tags: dating blood EpicFail)
• The kind of beserk paternalism that deserves a protest
  (tags: usa feminism abortion rights)
• The Garden of Cosmic Speculation
  (tags: nature plants water architecture gardens)
• Pencil vs. Camera
  (tags: art photography)
• 30 Awesome Minimalist Superhero Posters
  (tags: superheroes art)
• David Cameron undermines his own marriage tax
  (tags: tax marriage conservatives uk politics)

Comments

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

The online dating article is interesting (as are all the posts on OkCupid's blog - I love the way they have a tame stats geek writing it) but it is more a critique of a particular model of pay-dating site. I've just had a spectacular success with paid membership of Guardian Soulmates - let's just say neither I nor my new girlfriend are paid members any more - but its operating model does seem rather different to the sites that article is criticising.

[GSM allows very basic messaging without paying, and has a quite sophisticated compatibility searching model. As such you can trawl and make initial contact without having to pay if you want, although you get rather better and more tunable search options if you do. Of course I am now showing the bias of someone who succeeded, but I think my four months' subs may prove to be the best £80 I spent in a long time.]

[broin.livejournal.com]

The Guardian have a dating site?

Whose joke was it about 'The Nazis might have been bad, but no-one has ever fantasised about being tied to a chair by a liberal'? :D

[andrewducker]

Yup, Ravs got married to the person he met on The Guardian dating site...

[broin.livejournal.com]

It's a pretty good site. And everyone appears to be spelling.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - I'd have gone for the Guardian or Independent dating sites if I was looking now.

I didn't actually realise you had a new girlfriend. I must not be on that filter :->

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Not all of us blog all the time to everyone about everything that happens to us ;-)

[andrewducker]

Apparently so :->

I don't blog about _everything_.

I didn't talk about the adventures of our squad of Inquisition members on board a Space Hulk last night at all!

And I mostly don't talk about work.

In fact, it largely seems to be amusing pictures of cute animals and lolcanos.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I was teasing!

(And I'd quite enjoy #1, in a sort of vicarious-gaming way seeing as how I rarely have the time or opportunity at the moment).

[andrewducker]

I assumed the teasing. There really ought to be an emoticon for "I know you're not being malicious, and am thus playing along in order to be on the right side of the joke."

I get about 2 and a half hours of gaming per week at the moment. Which is not enough in some ways, but actually perfect in others, considering how busy I seem to be.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I've been to the Garden of Cosmic Speculation. It's down just outside Dumfries and just as spectacular as the photographs suggest. The one thing you don't appreciate from photographs though is the scale. It is huge. I would recommend anyone pay it a visit, although I think it is only occasionally open to the public.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

It's open on the 2nd May (12-5) this year.

Unfortunately, there's no way that I'm going to be able to get all the way up from Southampton to see it this year.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

Oh maybe I can actually go this year! (I live about 14 miles from it and have managed to either not be around or be busy every time it's been open in the last twelve years).

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

You are perhaps doing a bit of a 'scary newspaper headline' on the AAA CDOs one.

"AAA-rated subprime-mortgage-backed securities issued in 2006, 93 percent — 93 percent! — have now been downgraded to junk status."

(from article, my emphasis)

bit different to what your headline says....

[andrewducker]

It was mostly the subprime stuff that they turned into CDOs wasn't it? The prime stuff didn't need to be batched up.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

but (do anyone correct me if I am wrong) not ALL CDOs are subprime-mortgage-backed debt.

Though 'CDO' may not be quite as general a blanket term for packaged debt that I think it is, in which case maybe it's not such a major point, but see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateralized_debt_obligation

Of course, other products that are described as CDOs may well be individually dodgy in their very own special ways... but that's not what the article you linked to was specifically pointing to.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

I wish I saw the point about children of married couples not better because their parents are married but because their parents are richer made more often. I rarely see the Tories called on this point - it gets repeated more or less unchallenged.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

To call them on it would lead to newspaper headlines suggesting that Labour/Libs (or whoever) were suggesting that working class children were not as good as rich ones.

[girl-onthego.livejournal.com]

I need to figure out how to get your delicious feed to just go straight into my Instapaper feed.

[andrewducker]

Does it do RSS?

[broin.livejournal.com]

I have a Torrent of Legend too! Mine is a collection of a Vertigo comic that no-one has ever heard of. Probably because it wasn't good. I don't think you had it, either. Called 'Sadhu'? 97.3% for going on a year now.

[andrewducker]

Not ever heard of it!

[khbrown.livejournal.com]

Blood type is a bit like star signs in Japanese culture; Japanese games often give the blood type for their characters (e.g. Street Fighter II)

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

93% of AAA rated CDOs issued in 2006 turn out to have been junk.

Fixed that for ya. It's significant.