What Went Right, and What Hasn't

Take a good look at this picture from 1974; close to 40 years ago.

Back when most of us were kids. Or young teens.

Two things that stand out to me. One is how tall this thing is.

The other is that the playground surface is blacktop.

Remember those days? Running, Playing, Climbing Swinging, FALLING on the blacktop playground?

We did it everyday. For hours. I'm sure kids got hurt. Skinned knees and elbows; maybe even a broken arm once in a while. It was how we learned our capabilities, and our limitations.

Can you imagine erecting a public playground like today? First it would cost an arm and a leg to manufacture and install. If you could get zoning approval. And I don't even want to think about the legal fees.

But by God it was fun and exciting. Part of the fun was the risk. Part of the learning was the pain. Play was always about learning about how to deal with situations that came up in daily life. Working through differences of opinion, gracious winning and how it felt to lose.

You learned these things when you were 5 and 6. You learned about yourself; where your talents were. And where they weren't. You learned who could be trusted to keep a bargain, and who couldn't. In those days you expected to stay within a few miles of where you grew up, and expected to be dealing with these same folks for the rest of your life. Everything I know about life I learned in kindergarten, right?

What are playgrounds like today? Everything is padded. Including the ground. Slides are enclosed, so you can't fall off and absolutely nothing to climb on that would put you more than a few feet off the ground.

And the helicopter parents; standing by to dust off butts and kiss any 'boo-boos' that the little darlin's might feel they got by falling 6 inches onto a rubber pad. And those are the 10 year-olds.

What kind of adults does this produce?

Three words:

'Occupy Wall Street'.

All I can hear when I hear an interview with one of those...... individuals is this:

"WAHHH! Mommy, life's not being FAIR!!!"

Sorry 'bout your luck kid. I found out life wasn't fair when I was 6, not 26.

By falling on a blacktop playground.

Pssst; Wanna Buy a Cheap House?

The housing market is the last economic driver in this country.

Why? Because it is the only one they cannot ship offshore (although I am sure plans are in the works for Mexican house builders to ship completed sections north).

And why is that a problem?

Housing has not hit bottom yet, and may not for 3-5 more years.

Housing will soon only have the value that cash money can buy, as lenders will not lend long term on a depreciating asset, will they?

And housing is still depreciating; a fall that will only accelerate when the Federal money from Freddie and Fannie dries up completely.

And the bank owned homes will be the first to fall. A house to the owner is not an asset to be liquidated; it has a value as shelter that creates it's primary value. When the cost of that shelter becomes more than its worth, it becomes a drag on the budget, but never should it be considered an asset.

But the bank has to liquify the asset; they deal in liquidity, not in real estate.

And when the banks own a sizable percentage of the real estate, that liquidation will be costly to home values.

It was the idea of the last ten years to make your home an asset to be liquidated.

Re-fi and take the cash, right? Home Equity lines to pay for the trip to Disney World or pay off the credit cards that were run up at The Gap and Target; turn your Home into CASH.

And then interest rates rise a little, and housing values fall a little, and now your cash cow has dried up. Instead of being able to take another 10k out of your home to pay off the Visa, the bank is calling in your credit limit.

And so the bust began. To many leaks in the credit dike, and not enough fingers. Everybody who was strung out at the end of their credit line went bust.

Which was apparently quite a sizable percentage of the country.

If you have ever seen video of a sinkhole beginning and developing, that is the exact way the housing values are progressing. The houses that seemed safe at first are now starring down the abyss, and the guy next door is planning on taking a hit as well.

Home value is about two things; what someone will pay, and what someone will lend. A bank doesn't care what you are paying for the place; they will tell you what they will lend. if you can make up the difference, then everybody goes home happy. When you can't...

And values fall again.

You want to know when housing has hit bottom?

When the banks stop sitting on piles of liquidity, and start investing in mortgages.

Without Fannie and Freddie (READ: US Taxpayer) to bail them out.

Yeah; What He Said

This is the post I tried to write the other day.

I didn't write it today either, but this is exactly what I wanted to say.

And written better too.

The best phrase:

So, person to person, I don't know about you, but I'm weary of being ruled -- not governed, mind you; governed is in the rear-view mirror, and fading -- ruled by a gaggle of metrosexual car salesmen, slovenly ward heelers, and soi-disant intellectuals that can't operate an apostrophe, never mind something substantial and commendable like a dry cleaners or a brothel.

What Does The FUTURE Hold?

Saying we are screwed doesn't cover the half of it.

This crash should have happened in the 1960's, but was avoided by the Federal Government borrowing money and giving it away, as well as military and space race spending. That money went not just to Federal spending, but state, county and municipal grants to allow those entities, which, in most cases by law must have balanced budgets, to spend with a reckless abandon as well.

When it comes to employment in this country have you ever wonder where all of the jobs are? Right now we are looking at between 9% and 20% unemployment, based on whose figures you quote.

But between 1975 and 2005 how many women entered the workforce? The creation of the two income family also meant the creation of 25% more jobs than were available in the 1960's.

Where were almost all of these jobs created? Government. In 1975 1 person in 10 worked for a government at some level. Today it is closer to 1 in 4.

And government is paying for these jobs with taxes and borrowed money.

In one way I feel sorry for Obama. This crisis has been in the making for 70 years. The standard of living we have enjoyed has, for at least the last 50 years, been a product of government borrowing. And the hot potato that has been passed from administration to administration has now burned Obama's hands.

Well, I'd like to say tough S*%#.

But Obama isn't going to suffer; we are. Until this country can bring the cost of its labor into line with its worth, comparative to the rest of the world, we are not going to come out of this hole.

Wages are already stagnating and dropping. New hires are earning less than what similar positions were paid a year ago, and folks are happy to accept these lower amounts.

Housing prices are still dropping. Talk about a vicious cycle; Lenders aren't lending money on homes because the value of those homes still has not bottomed out, and housing prices are still falling because of the tight lending market. And lenders are slowing foreclosures because they already have massive portfolios of homes, some of which have not been marketed yet because to do so will only depress the market further.

The Feds have to stop borrowing.

But once they do, where will the money come from to pay for local civic improvements, wages for the multiple useless federal entities, or even pay the Social Security benefits seniors have earned?

And once those jobs dry up, what happens to the economy? As a libertarian I am waiting for the day I can celebrate the end of the EPA, the Department of Energy or the Department of Education. Right now would be a good time for ending the EPA; we need the freedom to create jobs that would allow and it would be a way to cut the federal budget.

Except we now have 18,000 more people out of work, defaulting on credit cards and mortgages and collecting unemployment and probably food stamps.

And that is just one example. What about the Department of Education (5,000 employees), or the Department of Energy (110,000 employees); want to see those folks added to the unemployment rolls?

YES!

And no.

We didn't get into this hole overnight. It took 70 years of incremental expansion of government to get where we are. And God help us it will take at least 30 years to resolve the mess.

And it ain't gonna be pretty.

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae need to be severely restricted. They can become a lender of last resort, limited to maybe a guarantor of loans similar to what a VA loan is for veterans, and only if there is a surplus in the federal budget.

That will probably collapse the housing market further. But until housing finds it's bottom, the economy is not going to recover. And adding to the federal debt is just artificially creating a bottom. Government money distorts any market it is in.

The minimum wage needs to rescinded. Even if housing finds a bottom, unless wages are similarly returned to market rates without an artificial floor, jobs cannot return to this country.

Life is going to suck for quite a while.

I'm not looking forward to it.

but I am preparing for it just the same.

Saturday Morning; Eight A.M.

And where am I?

Sitting in a large, gradually filling auditorium.

Blogging from my iPhone.

What could have drug me from the comforts of home?

Hold on to your hats:

A dance recital.

Yeah, I have trouble believing it too.

But, it is for the Young'un.

So, here I am.

This is just the dress rehearsal; the show is tonight. And I don't even know what time this hint kicks off this morning. I might be here for hours. This would have been unthinkable for any of my boys. But for the Young'un, here I am.

To be fair, when her Dad an Uncles were her age I was working most Saturday mornings, and glad of it. Money was tight in those days. It's still tight, but loose enough to allow a Saturday dance recital.

I'll catch up on my sleep later.

Butt Ugly... And Pretentious to Boot

Remember that post I did about our new butt ugly courthouse a while back? I finally had a chance to get a picture of the side you can see with out breaking your neck.

You see, the street this mess faces is one way; going away from the front of the courthouse. Not that side is much better looking; basically it's a wall of glass and a flag pole.



Now here is the part that makes me wonder if this building wasn't put backwards on the site on purpose. Its the pretentious part.

Look at the first picture again. You see how it looks like there are two buildings here? one that is straight to the corner and another one that is a little cockeyed and a little shorter?

See, if this building had faced the one way street, nobody would have ever seen the back, and this useless bit of drivel.

Here is another shot, showing the building site:

The building is on the south end of the lot with parking to the north. you can also see the little building the big building ate in this shot if you look close.

So to sum up: we have an ugly building that should face south, but faces north on a one way street that heads north, that has a pretentious bit of tomfoolery that probably added a couple of million to the cost of this cow pie.

And here is the part that takes all the fun out of this joke; they paid for this pile of dung with my money.

And they will probably have to tear it down and replace it about the time its paid for.

Ain't an unresponsive government a wonderful thing?

Boehner Had One Chance

And he blew it.

I just sent this email to Speaker Boehner:


I just wanted to thank you Speaker Boehner for selling us out during the recent budget battle.

Promise 100 billion in cuts, deliver 38. Don't forget, the initial 100 billion was less than 7% of the yearly deficit.

So now, instead of spending $1,500,000,000,000 more each year than we have, we will only spend $1,462,000,000,000 more each year than the government has as income.

Congratulations on your success?

And you managed to sell out the pro-life movement in the bargain.

Again, well done.

Provided you support Nancy Pelosi.

Kiss it all good bye friends.

And then there is this.

it might change, so here is the part I find Interesting:


NJ: A blow to Boehner, Obama and the nation

How did it—this incompetence—get this bad? After all, the fight over about $7 billion in differences in this year's budget is about 0.2 percent of the $3.5 trillion federal budget. It's like a family making $100,000 falling apart over $200.

I would think a more pertinent comparison would be one of a family making $100,000 a year and spending $142,000.

they don't seem to think that borrowing is a big deal. I guess they're right. Borrowing is easy.

Paying back on the other hand...

Yeah, It's Been One Of Those #@*&^% Months

Ever heard the old saying When everything you touch turns to #@*&, stop touching #@*&?

Absolutely NOTHING went right for the last two weeks. Everything I touched fell, apart, failed to work or blew up in my face.

The big project I am working on in the workshop? I almost had to scrap a big piece of it because I failed to make a crucial tool adjustment.

And there is my car. My '92 BMW has need some front end work, and I have been kind of putting it off, waiting for spring and the end of heating bills. I had another car to drive, so I just left it in the driveway. Well, then the motor went bad in my son's car and we needed the Bimmer back in the fleet. I priced parts and figured I could get it done for about $250, so I bought the parts.

Then came the day to install the new parts. Remember the title of this post?

Instead of buying a whole McPherson strut, i bought shocks that will rebuild the strut; cheaper that way, don't ya know?

Except my struts weren't rebuildable. Ste-riiike One! I had to buy the whole strut.

At twice the cost. and since the car is already in pieces, my options are limited. Then I got home with the parts and found out the struts are for a standard 325i; i have the Sport suspension; these struts won't work. Ste-riiike Two!

And guess what? The struts I need are twice as much as the ones I have, AND a special order; be here is 3-4 days.

Well, they finally came in. Driver's side was perfect. The Passenger side... was not. Struts like this are for one side of the car only; left or right, because of the way they are designed, a right won't fit on the left and vice-versa.

Apparently the strut I have for the passenger side was welded up wrong. The top was welded up for the left side, and the bottom was welded up for the right side. The spring fit on beautifully, and it bolted up to the spindle assembly fine, but when I went to bolt up the stabiliser links, the mounting bracket was toward the front of the car, instead of the back.

Ste-riike $(*&@%#$ing Three!

The replacement part will be here in a couple of days.

Until then, I ain't touching #@*&.

I will have a few beers though. Or at least try to.

Hopefully I can drink a beer or two without spilling most of it.

But at this point I have my doubts.

If You Remember the '70s

You probably didn't enjoy them. Ain't that the old joke?

The trouble is, we are almost repeating the '70s; especially the late '70s.

Look at Mid-Eastern unrest. To be honest, I think we are screwed in that area of the world for a generation or more. And not just us; Europe and Asia too.Anybody who doesn't see Islamic theocracy in Egypt's future is whistling past the graveyard. Yemen and Libya too.

And then the wars start; just like he '70s. First they will go after Israel, get their collective asses handed to them again, and then the Shiites and the Sunnis will go after each other, again.

The bad news is we will not be burning Middle Eastern oil until maybe 2040. The good news is, neither will Western Europe, China, India or Russia.

The bad news is we won't be burning our own until 2015. Maybe. If we can get government permission to drill for it.

And I don't see that happening until Obama has to get out and help push Limo 1.

Face it; the only reason we give a rat's hindquarters about what happens in the Middle East at all is because of the oil. That's why we fought over it in WWII; to keep the oil out of Hitler's hands. That's why we have a presence there now, to keep the old USSR from taking the oil over. Because we- and every other industrialized nation on the face of the Earth- use oil to travel, produce goods, services and food, heat our homes and a thousand other things. Including power our National Defense.

We saw that in WWII also. The side that ran out of oil first lost. Oil is not "A" strategic resource, it is "THE" strategic resource.

Our entire economy is dependent on oil; cheap oil. Try to think of the last time you went a day without being dependent on oil for something. It could even be stretched to the idea that the coal that fired the boilers that made your electricity was delivered with oil fired towboats. So even that day you stayed home in the air conditioning and watched old movies was brought to you by oil.

Remember that post I did about your rights stopping at the end of my nose? How long until the unrest in the Middle East starts to effect the end of your nose with $5.00 a gallon gas? How long until we are nostalgic for $5.00 gas?

There is a reason that the United States sticks in nose in all over the world; what happens all over the world affects the way we live our lives; even more so than in teh 70's.

Holy WOW!

All I can say is:

Holy Wow!

I was checking out Jay Leno's Garage this morning and caught this video.

Holy Wow!

If only they can somehow match this up with Google Street view, not only could you drive your car on the street at 140, you could drive your car, on your street at 140!

How cool would that be?

Yeah, But Back in My Day...

Sometimes it's the strangest things that start my mind to working down odd paths.

This morning I was reading Car Lust, one of my favorites, and found this post. Truly the end of an era.

But it got me to thinking about how car sound used to be a 'gateway drug' to customization of what used to be Mom & Dad's car.

Back in my day, when dinosaurs like Pontiac and Oldsmobile ruled the land, and you would rather be caught naked in the gym on Prom night than drive a 'furrin' car, usually the very first thing that happen to your first car was the tune box. Usually before you even washed it, or put gas in it for the first time.

The FM converter. Plugged into the antenna wire between the antenna and the radio, and suddenly you could avoid the stigma of AM only. You still had just one speaker, and it always sounded high pitched and tinny, but, man, you had FM. For $9.95 at Kmart.

It usually took a couple of paychecks, but eventually you became enamored of a little higher quality sound in the ride, and sprung for the AM/FM in dash stereo unit that came with the wires and TWO speakers! $29.95 for the Kraco brand at Kmart. Since installation usually required dismantling the dash, most of the interior and sometimes cutting holes into part of the car, installation usually took place at a friend's house, where you assured his Dad you had permission to do this work.

White lies like that are just a few weeks in Purgatory; well worth the benefit of the NEW AND IMPROVED sounds your car made. It was also almost worth the Hell you went through when Dad found out what you had done to HIS car.

But the new wore off of that system pretty quickly too. Everybody else was listening to Tape Decks in their cars, and you were stuck with only FM. In 1978 you could still buy an aftermarket 8-track unit, and you did have a collection of 8-track tapes. Cassettes were an unproven technology- and cost money. It was either buy a fresh new cassette deck, and not have anything to listen to in it, or get an 8-track deck.

You could by a new stereo 8-track, but hey; that was 75 bucks. Down at the junk yard (they're called Auto recycling centers now) you could get a used factory unit for half that, some times less, if you bought one of the less popular side-by-side knob units like Chrysler and Ford used in their high-end stuff.

So you had to cut up the dash a little more. and there were no factory trim pieces to hide the mess you made of the cut job, No dremel tools in them days. When you cut a hole in a metal dash it was with a hammer and cold chisel, tin snips and, if you were lucky, a rotary file chucked up in a corded drill. Precise cuts were as common as Cadillacs in the high school parking lot.

But it was worth it. Now you could listen to your music on your schedule at a volume that almost overrode the muffler and the wind noise at highway speeds. You were Stylin'!

Then came that first job after graduation and the first car you could by with your own money. It came down to two; Grandma's 15 year old, low mileage Buick that you could get a couple of hundred, or that 10 year old Mustang that has been hot-rodded and modified to the point where even Lee Iaccoca wouldn't recognize it; for a grand- cash.

Grandma's Buick had an AM Radio.

The Mustang had a cassette deck.

Yeah; it was no contest. Your cousin who got the Buick drove it for two years and it didn't cost any more than gas and oil.

And an FM converter that you sold him for 5 bucks.

The Mustang ate parts like you did popcorn at the drive-in. When you could afford the drive-in. You spent more on parts that first year than the car cost you, and twice that the second year.

But you didn't care. You had a stereo cassette deck.

Even if you did have to play it in the driveway, waiting on parts.

While you rode with your cousin in Grandma's old Buick.

Egypt: Now What?

As I mentioned in this post, we have an interest in what goes in the rest of the world. I may not be my brother's keeper, but I sure should be his helper.

The problem in Egypt is the disconnect between the people and their government. On the radio today there was a report from Cairo where the reporter repeated what he had heard from some of the protesters in the square. Apparently there was at least one protester who felt the American government should have done more for the people of Egypt, and less for the government in the form of Mubarak.

Great Idea!

Now, how do we implement it?

Governments have to deal with governments. The folks in charge may not have a legitimate claim to being in charge, but they are the legally constituted folks what be in charge. And damn the bad luck we can't do anything about that.

Take North Korea. Other that the Chinese and Iran (talk about your strange bedfellows), there probably isn't a country on the face of this Earth that wouldn't love to see a regime change in North Korea. How do we go about it?

Declare war on North Koreans? Have our army fight their army? Would China join in? On who's side? And the end game would be what?

Thousands or more dead on both sides, wanton destruction of the Korean peninsula and eventually freedom and reunification.

Would that be best for the North Koreans? Set them free, but destroy the population and the landscape?

And who knows the cost for the South Koreans? Remember, North Korea has at least one nuclear weapon, and probably wouldn't hesitate to use it on Seoul, if it could, or Pyongyang if it couldn't.

Would that be better or worse for the North Koreans than living under the current regime?

Tough call, ain't it?

And Pyongyang is on our ENEMIES list. Egypt isn't.

Maybe the best way we can help the Egyptian people is by trying to modify their government, by bribing them to cooperate, a process sometimes called foreign aid.

The trouble is, to those on the bottom, it doesn't look like we're helping them, it looks like we're supporting the crooked regime.

And we are. Change is glacially slow, and the more we spend to try and get some reform, the tighter the nets are drawn, the more the people suffer and the more power the top man consolidates to himself.

And the US Dollars keep flowing in.

Rand Paul has a plan that drastically cuts this bribery. And we should. But maybe we should make sure we are completely self sustaining and isolated first, like we were in Washington's day.

I found this chart that in some ways asks more questions than it answers. Did you know ONE THIRD of all foreign aid goes to Egypt and Israel?

And we have no real idea how much we are spending in total.

Damn.

So back to the original question: What do we now do in Egypt?

The military is now in charge; we'll have to see if that is temporary, until the next election, or if this is just step one in a military coup. Elections in September. Free and Fair? Who wins?

And then what? What if the Free and Fair election votes in another Muslim theocracy? Then how do support the Egyptian people? Like we did the Iraqis under Saddam Hussein? Like the Iranians under the Ayatollah? Like the North Koreans?

It all looks so easy, doesn't it?

Until you start looking at the possible options, and the most likely results.

And no matter what happens, we're affected. The region is oil rich- damn the bad luck- Egypt is next to (and has a peace treaty with) our strongest ally in the area, Israel. What happens if the new, freely and fairly elected Egyptian government reneges on the treaty?

We are already fighting wars on two fronts in the area; are we ready for a third?

More importantly; are we ready for the consequences of our actions/inactions?

I wish I had more faith in the Democrats to handle this crisis. As is, I think were doomed.