If you want to donate to the victims of the landslide: http://snohomishcountywa.gov/2362/How-to…

Which I probably got from SLOG an hour ago. I've been posting the link a couple places.

Storming the supermarket I'm sure seemed like a good idea, until of course the company decides there's no point in sending more food to restock if it's just going to get stolen.

Bank of America is more than welcome to use the $3.00 check image processing fee I pay (I write 1-2 checks a month) towards that fine.

The recent n+1 city by city essay on Boise is another quality elegy on place that details what happens when your podunk NW-ish hometown is suddenly kind of cool. Also, it's by Cienna Madrid's teen years best friend, which is crazy!

One of the victims of the slide was also a nurse who had just bought a home in the slide area. She had moved in a week before, and had three contractors working on the home when the slide hit. Talk about horrible luck.

Bank of America forced to pay $7.3 billion, buy $2 billion worth of bonds, for wrecking the global economy over the course of two years. "This'll definitely cut into the obscene profits that we made off of those deals," a spokesman claims, "but, all things said, no regrets. We still came out ahead, and just wait until you see what we've got planned for next quarter!"

@4: Wouldn't it be better if they a) returned to the banking rules of 75 years ago, b) returned your actual canceled checks to you at no additional charge (if desired), c) paid more than a fraction of a percent interest on savings accounts under $100k, and d) didn't repeatedly do things that incurred multi-billion-dollar fines?

@8 - mostly but..
a - unsure
b - I don't want the checks back where they would reside in shoe boxes in the basement - but the imaging should be a courtesy - for sure!
c - I suppose so. But far better to have savings in a money market account anyway. Just have to meet a $1K minimum balance.
d - Yes, but government polices were also to blame for the sub-prime mortgage bubble burst.

@9 BoA money market accounts currently yield 0.08% APR.

If you don't like evil bank, stop using them. Complaining on here just earns you more well-deserved derision.

@10: That's why I use a different institutions for my money market, and other investment vehicles. I just use BoA for checking. Also, it was more of a "joke" than a complaint. Please take a sedative.

I would dispute the notion that celebrities do much besides murder that's "news". And I wish the story was that those two had murdered each other.

Glad people are ignoring Brendan's stupid coverage of the events in Crimea. I know, I know. Putin is Hitler -- Hillary told you so.

There's a movement to secede from Snohomish County? For Heaven's sake, why?

@9, regarding your point d: bullshit.

The subprime mortgage crisis was the result of a concerted policy by lenders -- NOT the government, NOT the borrowers. In fact, a substantial majority of subprime borrowers qualified for prime loans, but were lied to about that fact (this is still largely true today, to a lesser extent).

Every major lender in the runup to the crisis had an ENTIRE DEPARTMENT devoted to forging signatures and other details on loan forms. Many borrowers didn't even know what they were borrowing.

The banks didn't give a shit, either, because their mandate from above was to produce as many subprime loans as humanly possible, because the product they were trying to generate was not housing loans at all; it was derivatives based on bundled loans -- even if a large portion of those loans were fake. Good producers of bad loans -- loans that everybody in the building knew were bad -- up to SEVENTY A DAY for the very best -- were rewarded with cash and other perks, including free rides on prostitutes.

Millions of people have lost not just their homes but their life savings because of the actions of these banks. Those people are overwhelmingly black and brown. None of the banks have been punished, beyond a few trivial "cost of doing business" penalties.

Read this and understand why the bullshit lie being peddled by people like you is false: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/11691…

@ 13. I follow Brendan's coverage of the events in the Crimea and especially Chris Collison's reporting. I think it was very powerful when Chris' colleague told the woman who had pointed them out to the Russian police and was mocking them later: “What happened back there is just like what people were doing to the Jews in the 1940s”. Unfortunately, the behavior of the Russians in 2014 is very similar of that of the Nazis in 1938.