Shit dude, was anyone shot? It doesn't seem like the shooter got anybody.

Lucky man you got no classes for the day ;)

But the real question is: DID YOU OR HAVE YOU EVER POSSESSED AN AK-47? lol McCarthy trials

You've gotta be careful of us mathematicians.

Now, give me your centres or else!

"shooter"

Pretty cruel joke, Ghost. The guy turned the AK on himself.

Well, there's not much one can say... this guy was clearly screwed up in the head in some way, did something incomprehensible and then killed himself.

it was pretty incomprehensible i'll say that... was dressed in a tuxedo, apparently didnt try to kill anyone... just shot around

now there's a bullet hole in my government building...

colton tooley is his name, just release a few hours ago.

and no one got hurt thank god... and panic didn't break out either thanks to i must say some top notch preparedness

And he already has a Facebook fan page. One wonders what the world has come to, and perhaps even sympathizes a teeny tiny little bit with madcaps like Tooley.

Wow... I guess he took that ass-whooping that my Bruins gave the Longhorns really hard. And is it just me or is this the second time that's happened at UT Austin?

you mean the '66 tower shooting? yeah that was a lot worse, 14 dead


or did you mean losing a football game?

cause we've only lost like 2 of those ;)

Only 2 previous losses to UCLA you mean, with the first loss being the worst loss in Longhorn history, going down 3-66. 66? Hrmm, the Universe is messing with numbers again.

Seriously though, I'm very glad this man decided to not make things worse than he already did.

Wow that is so scary. I'm glad that you're safe. The "Manchester Massacre" (not sure how many of you heard about it) was actually in my town and it's pretty freaky knowing that a shooting happened so close to where you live.

http://www.wtnh.com/dpp/news/hartford_cty/manchester-shooting- there's a link if you haven't heard of it.

@ Thucy - Second shooting I meant.

And we kicked your asses all day on Saturday.

Ah hell...I used to have to drive to Detroit on a regular basis. Go down all-but-deserted streets to get to some business. Occassionally I've heard gun shots...passed plenty of burned out buildings...obvious drug houses...

Not to diminish the horror one must feel in a campus shooting, but understand that there are places right in our own country - such as Detroit - where murder is so common is doesn't even make the news any more...

Souhside of Chicago representing. I had a gun pointed at me at a bus stop last year.

Must have been a disgruntled Obama voter who never got a piece of his stash....lol

Must you politicize everything? Lol

HEY!!! I've not commented - political or otherwise - in AGES!!!!! Give a brother a break, Ava! But...yes! Yes, I absolutely *MUST* politicize *everything*! :P

Luckily, ava is an economist, so when the mugger said, "Give me all your money," ava started rambling on about how all his money is tied into the yen and, blah, blah, blah and bored the mugger to death.

I wouldn't call myself an economist...merely a student of economics beleaguered with such banal things as net present value and internal revenue rules.

Aah, economists, people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. It's actually a moderately successful social science, so long as ignores the blatant teleology at the center of the discipline.

I won't defend that, as I am not an economist :P

See, krellin, I'd guess it would be one of the many, many thousands of batshit crazy rightists who just want to turn the clock back to a fictional representation of, say, 1830, and who know the economic troubles of today are caused by lazy minorities buying too large a house, not by gigantic equity trading firms using a several trillion dollar ponzi scheme to loot the world's economy for the benefit of about a thousand people worldwide.

@Thucy Glad you're ok. You live on campus, or off? Heard about it on my way to work this morning. Had planned to eat down on the drag for lunch, but decided against fighting the probable traffic.

Bob, at risk of starting a political discussion, this banking system is completely government structured, so putting blame on the banks is kinda unfair.

hahahahaha oh TGM come on.

subprime is the government's fault?

anyway... i know what you mean krellin and it was one of my first thoughts, how really, nothing happened. but when you begin to think of your campus as a your home, the whole expanse of it becomes like your back yard in a way... it would be more like if there was a guy with an AK in times square than it would be like if there was a guy with a handgun in an alley.

the spot where this happened at UT is the central hub where EVERYone goes and knows and it happened at a busy time of the morning.

so basically... i will forever freaked out by that library. which is the main library.

There really is much more to it than you allow room for, you need to assess how the government changes behaviour, and there are several points here.

Firstly, fannie and freddy shaped the subprime markets enormously, and they were both heavily regulated and essentially backed by the US government.

Secondly, the Fed set interest rates too low for two long, deliberately causing inflation in the dollar, and promoting profligacy. Without government involvement there would be several competing currencies, and if any was unsafe, there would be a run before it became too big to fail. The tax and credit law gives the dollar total control so no competition in money exists.

Thirdly, acts such as the communities reinvestment act encouage and require poor lending practise.

Fourthly, leverage law encourages the trading that makes markets more complex and convoluted than can be understood.

Fifthly, the crisis was not limited to subprime.

Finally, it has been noticed that bubbles were much smaller in areas with looser planning laws

"hahahahaha oh TGM come on.

subprime is the government's fault?"

It's interesting that crises have to be "somebody"'s fault. I guess it depends whether you look at more proximal causes or more underlying causes. It's sort of like asking whether a murder was the fault of the bullet, the gun, the shooter, the guy who hired the shooter, the local gun control legislation, the discoverer of gunpowder, or those first cheeky amphibian-fish things that dared to crawl up out of the water. That the government had an instrumental role in the subprime mortgage crisis should hardly be doubted, let alone derided. =P

When it comes down to it the bad decisions were made by some people who took some risks (like on subprime) and dumped all their risk on AIG (a mistake on their part) etc. etc.

Instead of paying for those risks like they claim you should do in their ideal laissez faire world, they temporarily revoked their mantras and took the assistance offered and survived where they would have failed. Only to turn around and cry foul and the government for raising hell about their bonuses.

It's not exactly.... reasonable of them. Whatever the preconditions were, that's what the *decided to do*... and it's like.... why did you do it? Or at least why didn't they live up to the consequences?

W/e. I think economic debates never ever lead anywhere whatsoever at all. So I'll jump off this train here.

and chris i was more getting at the ridiculous claim that the "banking system is completely government structured."

even after the wall street reform bill... that's not true at all. it is structured by the govt to a large degree but there is a very very large amount of leeway and free-agency, was and is.

@ghost: The whole "government involvement" argument is just ridiculous. There's a classic rule about political/government collusion: follow the money. The people who got rich, and who made people in government rich, were the large banks, not the community banks who were targeted by the Community Reinvestment Act.

"Instead of paying for those risks like they claim you should do in their ideal laissez faire world, they temporarily revoked their mantras and took the assistance offered and survived where they would have failed. Only to turn around and cry foul and the government for raising hell about their bonuses."

And the problem in all of that was government. The government shouldn't have had anything to do with it; they should have been laughed all the way back from Washington for having the cheek to ask.

"even after the wall street reform bill... that's not true at all. it is structured by the govt to a large degree but there is a very very large amount of leeway and free-agency, was and is."

The commodity of banking is money, and money is controlled by a government enforced monopoly. It is the most regulated sector of the economy, and is built on the foundation of a weak dollar.

"@ghost: The whole "government involvement" argument is just ridiculous. There's a classic rule about political/government collusion: follow the money. The people who got rich, and who made people in government rich, were the large banks, not the community banks who were targeted by the Community Reinvestment Act."

But just because they issued the mortgages... the larger banks bought and sold them.

Wait, in America, is the interest rate set by the government? I thought it was an independent body.

Well, glad you're OK...doesn't sound like anyone else was injured...huh, so why would he go on campus to shoot himself (with multiple shots, it sounds like...unless the weapon was just automatic, I'm no gun expert, but aren't they, AKs?)

And it's the Lit. and Philosophy majors you have to watch for, Ghost...one whiff of nihilism or ten minutes having to listen to someone go on about how "The Great Gatsby" is The Great American Novel (it's NOT, dialogue so stilted it's ridiculous and the points raised just aren't as effectual as in other works, and I find most of the characters really just one-dimensional mouthpieces for a stereotype rather than an actual character...but I digress, point is, no one was hurt except the shooter, which is sad but really if you're going to shoot yourself on campus with an AK you'll find less sympathy and more wondering what on earth went wrong and just sheer relief you didn't kill anyon e else, and "Of Mice and Men" and "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" are ten times the Great American Novel "Gatsby" is, and for better American stories that are set i9n the urban centers of America rather than the rural "Death of a Salesman" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" are both at least semi-involved with an urban setting, more than the previous two, and are both far better than "The Not-So-Great Gatsby.")

I like how everyone and their mom has an opinion on economics that they read on some blog or heard on some news broadcast. I try not to sound particularly authoritative about things outside my field, because, frankly, I'm not.

I could read Hawking's articles and lecture everyone on abstract Physics, but I'd have no authority to, since I wouldn't understand it like Hawking does.

lol i have to agree ava

An economist who i thought had a few good things to say

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/9/22/chilean_economist_manfred_max_neef_us

Stiglitz "Making Globalization Work"

notably written before the recession