Foreclosure next to me has been empty for couple years now. Noticed avocado tree had a few at the top (all I can see is the very top of the tree, blocked by other trees) so I head over to “investigate” and see the tree overflowing with them. Then I turn my gaze to the rest of the yard - a line of papaya trees, with some - I kid you not - bigger than footballs!
A revisit to (and an excellent opportunity to beat to death) the theme that “Cash is king” brought me to this tidbit from Investopedia:
“Difference Between Earnings and Cash”
“In an August 1995 article in Individual Investor, Jonathan Moreland provides a very succinct assessment of the difference between earnings and cash. He says “at least as important as a company’s profitability is its liquidity – whether or not it’s taking in enough money to meet its obligations. Companies, after all, go bankrupt because they cannot pay their bills, not because they are unprofitable. Now, that’s an obvious point. Even so, many investors routinely ignore it. How? By looking only at a firm’s income statement and not the cash flow statement.”
This is the part I meant to home in on: “Companies, after all, go bankrupt because they cannot pay their bills, not because they are unprofitable.”
Most commonly used auto parts, whiskey, ammo, firearms - those are all king. In a few years none of those blue dyed fiat notes we have today might be accepted as trade.
“Not worth a continental” could return as “Not worth a dollar”
Looks like the petrodollar’s days as the world reserve currency may be numbered - doomed by the same hubris that caused other reserve currencies to fail, with disastrous effects for their citizens.
Lotsa ways to address cash flow, factoring, lines of credit. At the end of the day, businesses need to be profitable once you adjust for non-cash deductions like depreciation and amortization.
Big deals are back. To fund them, buyers are using a little creative thinking and a lot of common stock to fuel the best quarter for global takeovers since 2007.
As they agreed to more than $900 billion of purchases in the second quarter, acquirers turned to their rising stock prices to finance deals. For buyers with public listings, all-cash offers made up about one-third of the takeovers announced in the second quarter, data compiled by Bloomberg show. A year earlier, all-cash bids accounted for two-thirds of deals, and in the five years through 2013 they averaged 50 percent, the data show.
…
Stock prices are driven by opinions and when opinions about stocks are high then so are the prices.
And if these high-priced stocks that are backed by high opinions can be used in place of hard to get cash to buy stuff with then it would make sense to buy using these high-priced stocks instead of using cash - which is essentially what you see going on as described in the article.
One could say that cash is no longer king but if this were the case then it would be cash that would be gotten rid of - cash would have been spent in order to do the buying - and shares of stock are what would have been kept. But instead it is the other way around.
During the Seventies ‘Adam Smith’ (a pen name for George Goodwin) wrote the book “Supermoney” and his book’s main theme was how, during bull markets, shares of stock could be effectively used to buy things (such as other companies) instead of going the old fashioned way of using cash, and he termed this sort of buying as using supermoney.
With supermoney the effective money supply of the company employing supermoney could be expanded well beyond any other means that might be at hand. The only thing that is needed in order for supermoney to work is an acceptance from sellers to accept supermoney (shares of the purchasing company’s stock) instead of hard cash in return for the selling company’s assets - and during bull markets convincing sellers to accept supermoney is something that is easy to do.
And during bear markets? Well, not so much.
(What a surprise, eh?)
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Comment by aNYCdj
2014-07-06 10:32:40
Combo
It really surprises me how few companies will buy back stock when its low….not many bought back shares during 09…..even buffett didn’t buy back stock,
Comment by Combotechie
2014-07-06 10:56:31
The incentives are all wrong, IMO.
If the incentive is to do what is best for the company (and thus for the stockholders in general) then the company should buy shares in itself when prices are low and it should use free cash flow to do this.
But if the incentive is to make the price of the stock go up so that those executives who can make some big bucks by exercising stock options and then selling their newly-acquired stock into a pumped-up market then this what the executives will do - and they will most likely will do this buying with borrowed money if interest rates are low enough.
This borrowing to buy at high prices is nuts to do for the company as a whole but it can be very lucrative for the executives - and it’s the executives who make such decisions whether to do this or to not do this.
“Stock prices are driven by opinions and when opinions about stocks are high then so are the prices.”
Also driven by money flows and interest rates: With QE3 holding the interest rate pedal to the metal, stock prices are high, right along side of housing and long-term bond prices.
Obviously this does not mean that when and if interest rates ever revert back up to historic norms, the high valuations of stocks, bonds and houses will necessarily reverse — DOES IT?
This is how the US will lose its reserve currency status. There will be no announcement no sudden loss, however Obama’s policies i.e. surge in national debt and surge in money supply will cost us the status. While in the long run, it might even be good for the country the immediate impact will be much lower standard of living since we will only be able to import the amount of goods we match in exports:
What does that stand for? Is this considered to be an unbiased (aka “fair and balanced”) news source regarding the future reserve currency status of the dollar?
If it is the process you are talking about, then I don’t think one can properly date the onset to Obama’s presidency. For instance, what about the collapse of the Bretton Woods accord in the early 1970s; didn’t this have something to do with the subsequent erosion of the dollar as a reliable store of value?
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Comment by Albuquerquedan
2014-07-06 11:24:45
What Obama has done is accelerate the pace to warp speed. In the long run, it would happen anyway but in the long run we would have all been dead.
It’s not a question of if, but when a new reserve currency is born.
When this happens the USD is toast. Burnt toast.
when the US dollar became the world reserve currency, did the other currencies become ‘toast’?
it isn’t losing reserve status that will destroy the dollar.
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Comment by Housing Analyst
2014-07-06 17:55:43
It is at the end of a gun that the dollar is the reserve currency.
Comment by Prime_Is_Contained
2014-07-06 18:36:29
when the US dollar became the world reserve currency, did the other currencies become ‘toast’?
+1. I’m not convinced that it makes any difference, really.
Just as now, the dollar will still be exchangeable for whatever the next “reserve” currency is—as well as all of the other currencies, gold, other PMs, etc. It’s much ado about nothing, imo.
Comment by Whac-A-Bubble™
2014-07-06 18:51:09
“It’s much ado about nothing, imo.”
The important issue seems to be whether one can use the electronic printing press on a discretionary basis to get out of trouble when needed. For instance, Greek and Argentina apparently don’t have this option, whereas China and the US do. I’m not clear on the dividing line between those in or out of the club.
Comment by Prime_Is_Contained
2014-07-06 23:35:43
I’m not clear on the dividing line between those in or out of the club.
The dividing line is whether you are able to borrow in your own currency, or whether the market requires that your notes be denominated in some other currency that you can’t print.
In the long term, in the short term it is very painful. It is like kicking heroin cold turkey, you can die trying to withdraw. When the free sh#t does not go out because the government cannot print money with abandon riots may destroy the country.
It’s the topic everybody loves to talk about – property.
While some people love to trade their way up in the hope of becoming a property millionaire, some lucky owners are experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime windfall simply by sitting pretty in their homes for more than a decade and watching the value rocket.
A new house price boom, particularly in London and the South East, means that many people are taking advantage to cash in and use the profits to fund a career change, help out family or friends, take a luxury trip, or bank the cash to provide a comfortable retirement.
Rupert Collingwood, of the London Management Company, said. ‘The past two years have been extraordinary. In some areas of the capital there has been a 150 or 160 per cent increase. If you invest in London the general rule is you will double your money in ten years.’
But many families have done far more than double their money. While the average price of a detached house in the capital was £257,144 in January 1995, by April this year it had risen to £1,320,936 – an increase of 414 per cent.
Figures from the Nationwide show that the average home in London now sells for more than £400,000, with prices in the three months to June up by 25.8 per cent compared with a year earlier.
The national average house price rose 11.8 per cent to £188,903, the biggest rise since January 2005. Additional reporting by Barnaby Harrison.
“While the average price of a detached house in the capital was £257,144 in January 1995, by April this year it had risen to £1,320,936 – an increase of 414 per cent.”
Bahahahahahahaha … and this price increase was due to the actions of strangers - strangers who may or may not be of sound minds and bodies - and people who should know better (but for some reason they don’t) will rush to a lender in order to cash out this rise in price by (and this is the fun part) by BORROWING AGAINST the rise in equity caused by the rise in price - a rise in price (as stated earlier) by the actions of strangers who may or may not be of sound mind and bodies.
Bahahahahahahaha … and if these strangers who set the price ever decide to set the price a bit lower rather than a bit higher then the borrower may discover that he is UNDERWATER on his loan which is another way of saying that he is TRAPPED.
At 55 I no longer feel uncomfortable in pointing out the classical personal finance rules always keep winning in the end. The tech bubble of the 90s was not the new paradigm. Houses as investments is not the new paradigm.
We’ve said it here. Household formation is cratering, boomers are downsizing/dying, and gen X leading edge is nearing AARP age. It’s going to be a fine renters market for a generation, so if I, say, buy in a nice area in Phoenix in a few years, there will sure be a much more nicer, more exclusive, more quiet and private setting where my rent payments will be cheap and I’ll be able to enjoy gains on my investments in stocks and bonds.
I just need space to store auto parts, whiskey, wines, ammo, firearms, and precious metals, but such space can be rented.
Your demographic assessments are incorrect. The 18_25 segment is now the largest group. The following segments care poised to grow, adding to the housing demand in the next two decades. Renting may work for you, but not for the reasons you state here.
The 18-25 age cohort is a mere third of the size of the boomer generation that is now just starting to shed 35 MILLION excess empty houses.
Remember…. Housing demand is at 19 year lows and falling and rental rates are half the cost of buying at current grossly inflated asking prices of resale housing.
The sad fact is that by dollar cost averaging into any asset over a period of 15 or more years you end up with an insanely low cost basis. It is far more ridiculously low the longer you dollar cost average.
But you cannot do that in a house. Your house goes ghetto well nothing you can do about it but maybe walk away, like a former colleague of mine did.
I can take my Vanguard account with me where ever I go.
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Comment by Whac-A-Bubble™
2014-07-06 11:22:31
“The sad fact is that by dollar cost averaging into any asset over a period of 15 or more years you end up with an insanely low cost basis. It is far more ridiculously low the longer you dollar cost average.
But you cannot do that in a house.”
That is the fundamental insight to why one should never buy a home at inflated prices. Once bought, you are priced in forever.
Comment by Bill, just South of Irvine, CA
2014-07-06 11:54:40
1997 prices are still my guide. I will buy when my dream home gets to the 1997 level. Demographics (despite Mr. Jingles statement) are in favor of major SFH price drops. Mickey D jobs for the younger set and not high paying jobs - which have been outsourced. Boomers downsizing. Interest rates rock bottom and will have to go up. Taxes might go up higher to pay for all the big spending of the Messiah. Mix it all up and it spells doom for real estate shills.
Comment by Whac-A-Bubble™
2014-07-06 13:07:52
1997 seems like a reasonable benchmark; some areas are already there and then some (e.g. Detroit). The questions seems to be how long it will take homes in relatively desirable areas (e.g. Coastal Cali) to get back to the reasonable price levels of the mid-1990s.
I’m guessing this will happen fairly quickly once interest rates start definitively rising — not just the mini bump of 2013, but on a permanent upward trajectory.
Comment by Bill, just South of Irvine, CA
2014-07-06 15:25:12
How many years did we have interest rates below 4% Five years? Six years? You and I both know that interest rates are cyclic.
If that is not a sign of a severe systemic problem I don’t know what to tell you. Rates cannot get any lower of course.
Comment by Prime_Is_Contained
2014-07-06 18:38:38
Notice how the low has been lower with each cycle… Hmmm.
Comment by Whac-A-Bubble™
2014-07-06 18:56:25
“You and I both know that interest rates are cyclic.”
Right.
However, I also know that this is not a normal cycle. The last time US interest rates stayed this low for a comparable period, it lasted fifteen years (1933-1948). The same duration period of ultra-low rates beginning in January 2009 would continue through 2023.
Comment by Bill, just South of Irvine, CA
2014-07-06 20:13:01
I think the mid 2000s were a hiccup. The 2000 crash was the game changer. Rates went down to 1%.
2003 to 2017. Then high rates.
Comment by Whac-A-Bubble™
2014-07-06 21:02:42
“2003 to 2017. Then high rates.”
Rates did not collapse to comparable levels to 1933 and stay there until the aftermath of the Fall 2008 global financial Armageddon event. And the Fed has already more-or-less indicated its intention to raise interest rates after 2017.
My guess is that the period of low rates will last ‘longer than expected’ for a duration that ‘nobody could have seen coming’ that extends well past 2017. The Fed will pretend to be in full control of when rates will go back up, but they won’t be.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s most accurate, up-to-date temperature data confirm the United States has been cooling for at least the past decade. The NOAA temperature data are driving a stake through the heart of alarmists claiming accelerating global warming.
You do realize that Forbes’ climate “expert” James Taylor is an infamous lobbyist for the oil/coal industry and has a history of distorting facts every which way. He laughably claims to be a climate scientist, which actually amounts to a couple undergraduate classes 25 years ago. Nothing he writes is ever peer reviewed, it’s pure propaganda.
Global warming computer models confounded as Antarctic sea ice hits new record high with 2.1million square miles more than is usual for time of year
•UN computer models say Antarctic ice should be in decline, not increasing
By David Rose
Published: 16:01 EST, 5 July 2014
The levels of Antarctic sea-ice last week hit an all-time high – confounding climate change computer models which say it should be in decline.
America’s National Snow And Ice Data Center, which is funded by Nasa, revealed that ice around the southern continent covers about 16million sq km, more than 2.1 million more than is usual for the time of year.
It is by far the highest level since satellite observations on which the figures depend began in 1979.
In statistical terms, the extent of the ice cover is hugely significant.
In its authoritative Fifth Assessment Report released last year, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted that the computer models on which scientists base their projections say Antarctic ice should be in decline, not increasing.
The report said: ‘There is low confidence in the scientific understanding of the observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent since 1979, due to… incomplete and competing scientific explanations for the causes of change.’
Some scientists have suggested the Antarctic ice increase may itself be caused by global warming. But Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said the arguments were not convincing.
She added: ‘We do not have a quantitative, predictive understanding of the rise in Antarctic sea ice extent.’
She said it was becoming increasingly apparent that long-term cycles in ocean temperatures were responsible for a significant proportion of the ice decline in the Arctic – a process that may be starting to reverse.
Prof Curry also revealed that because of the ‘pause’, in which world average temperatures have not risen for more than 16 years, the Arctic ice decline has been ‘touted’ by many as the most important evidence for continued global warming.
But in her view, climate scientists have to consider evidence from both Poles.
She added: ‘Convincing arguments regarding the causes of sea-ice variations require understanding and ability to model both the Arctic and Antarctic.’
—————————————–
IT’S POLITICS, NOT SCIENCE, DRIVING CLIMATE CHANGE MANIA
For years, computer simulations have predicted that sea ice should be disappearing from the Poles.
Now, with the news that Antarctic sea-ice levels have hit new highs, comes yet another mishap to tarnish the credibility of climate science.
But the relentless focus by activist scientists on the Arctic decline does suggest a political imperative rather than a scientific one – and when put together with the story of the US temperature records, it’s hard to avoid the impression that what the public is being told is less than the unvarnished truth.
As their credulity is stretched more and more, the public will – quite rightly – treat demands for action with increasing caution…
A repost, from below. This is becoming like whack-a-mole:
There’s a significant difference between sea ice and land ice. The Daily Mail is the UKs version of the New York Post, so they will publish anything. From a primer about the difference between the Arctic and Antarctica: “When people talk about an increase in ice they are actually talking about sea ice, which is completely different from continental ice. Warmer oceans help melt the ice and make it thinner, which has been observed in the Arctic. In Antarctica it’s more complicated. It is losing continental ice while sea ice has been increasing by about 1% a decade.”
Global warming advocates routinely toss out the statistic that 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is real and man-made. Where did that figure come from? Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, and Roy Spencer, principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, explain the history behind the misleading number.
In short, there is no basis for the claim that 97 percent of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem.
In 2004, Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard science historian, examined 928 abstracts of scientific journal articles, finding that three-quarters of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the observed warming of the last half-century.
•However, Oreskes did not analyze articles by prominent scientists — such as Richard Lindzen and John Christy — who question the “consensus” view.
•Additionally, a recent study in Nature magazine confirms that academic abstracts often contain claims that are not proven in the studies themselves.
A 2009 article by University of Illinois student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman and her master’s thesis adviser Peter Doran also made the 97 percent claim.
•The authors made this conclusion after conducting a two-question online survey of 3,146 scientists, only 79 of which were experts in climate science and had published half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change.
•It did not include the scientists most likely to understand the natural causes of climate change: solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists or astronomers.
•Moreover, the survey did not specify whether the human impact on global warming was large enough to constitute a problem.
In 2013, Australian blogger John Cook reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011, concluding that 97 percent of the authors who stated their position on the subject believed that human activity was responsible for some warming.
•However, when University of Delaware geography professor David Legates reviewed Cook’s papers, he found that only 41 of them (0.3 percent of all of the abstracts, and just 1 percent of those that expressed an opinion) believed human activity was causing most current warming.
On the other hand, write Bast and Spencer, the Petition Project — a group of physicists and physical chemists in California — has collected more than 31,000 signatures from scientists agreeing that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of…carbon dioxide…or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
Source: Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer, “The Myth of the Climate Change ‘97%’” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2014.
“In short, there is no basis for the claim that 97 percent of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem.”
One should also consider whether 97 percent (or whatever share) of scientists agree that global warming is ‘real’ out of fear for loss of standing or position in case they don’t jump on the global warming political bandwagon.
When the facts don’t agree with your position, killing the messenger is a natural strategy to employ.
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Comment by Albuquerquedan
2014-07-06 11:30:30
true dat
Comment by phony scandals
2014-07-06 11:56:48
“When the facts don’t agree with your position, killing the messenger is a natural strategy to employ.”
US college professor demands imprisonment for climate-change deniers
3/17/2014
An assistant philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology wants to send people who disagree with him about global warming to jail.
The professor is Lawrence Torcello. Last week, he published a 900-word-plus essay at an academic website called The Conversation.
His main complaint is his belief that certain nefarious, unidentified individuals have organized a “campaign funding misinformation.” Such a campaign, he argues, “ought to be considered criminally negligent.”
Torcello, who has a Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, explains that there are times when criminal negligence and “science misinformation” must be linked. The threat of climate change, he says, is one of those times.
Y’all can keep your politics and science and Drudge links.
Just consider what an ecological utopia this planet will be when there are 12, 15, 20 billion humanoids. The 7 billion now are doing such a stellar job as stewards of their planet, it can only get better with more of them, right?
Comment by Whac-A-Bubble™
2014-07-06 13:10:39
“…assistant philosophy professor…”
Does this credential qualify the guy as an expert on global warming with the right to imprison anyone who disagrees with his political position?
If so, our country is in big trouble.
Comment by MightyMike
2014-07-06 13:29:38
Does this credential qualify the guy as an expert on global warming with the right to imprison anyone who disagrees with his political position?
I can’t think of any credential that would give anyone such a right. Another question might be whether it’s worth even paying attention to this character.
Comment by phony scandals
2014-07-06 13:38:03
“The 7 billion now are doing such a stellar job as stewards of their planet, it can only get better with more of them, right?”
You had better get a seat at the next Bilderberg meeting and talk to TPTB.
They just imported another 300,000 from donkey riding countries and dispersed them via jet and bus throughout a gas guzzling country.
Comment by goon squad
2014-07-06 14:58:48
I read some of the Daily Sheeple links about how this “humanitarian crisis” will be used to implement the UN elimination of national sovereignty.
An unlikely scenario, IMO.
Got 7.62×39?
Comment by phony scandals
2014-07-06 16:59:44
The Cloward-Piven Strategy
By Richard Poe
DiscoverTheNetworks.org
2005
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the Cloward-Piven Strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue an African American man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.
The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare — about 8 million, at the time — probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.” Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be “a profound financial and political crisis” that would unleash “powerful forces for major economic reform at the national level.”
I went on NOAA’s website, nothing supports the claims made by Forbes or Daily Mail. the links in the forbes article take you to blogger websites where they interpret data from NOAA.
Ive been working with/for a 27 year old house flipper for the last 60 days. He demonstrated EVERY negative flipper stereotype in the known universe, including many things that are probably illegal.
It was an amazing experience to witness.
I did much of the work so if you have any questions please ask. The house is:
5884 14th st Arlington Va, 22205
The staging people came thursday and I think the open house is next weekend.
Comment by Bill, just South of Irvine, CA
2014-07-06 06:24:37
Looks like it has convenient access to rte 66
——————————————————————–
Dude,
rt 66 is 20 FEET behind the back yard fence. Not only does it sound like a race track all day, but the subway train is rolling past every 30 minutes or so.
I play guitar so it works for me.
But its loud. You should have heard it the day of Rolling Thunder.
BTW, his dad is old school cool (had to come down and pull sons nuts out the fire) but the son is a POS; no values, no ethics, no morals.
He would sell his own mother if the price was right, ISYN!
Bill, my suspicion is the house price reflects the neighborhood; not the actual structure.
The Westover area of Arlington occupies a sought after niche; its white and middle class, with good schools, but not so white and middle class that it draws TOO much attention to itself, if you know what I mean?
“Now why did you pay a massively inflated price for a house…. and then double down on the losses and finance it for decades?”
Good question.
Which begets the question;
Do you really believe wages are going to triple to meet massively inflated housing prices? Especially with the millions of excess empty houses lenders are holding and hoping won’t impact prices? Of course not. Housing prices will continue to fall by two-thirds to meet wages that are still in the 1990’s range.
In the wake of revelations about the extent of mass surveillance by the NSA and other agencies, people are trying to protect themselves by adopting encryption and other privacy tools.
The Guardian reported in January:
The gathering crisis of trust around consumer web services and the fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations is fuelling a significant uptake in anonymity tools, new research shows, as internet users battle censorship and assert their right to privacy online.
Globally, 56% of those surveyed by GlobalWebIndex reported that they felt the internet is eroding their personal privacy, with an estimated 415 million people or 28% of the online population using tools to disguise their identity or location.
Aggregating market research data from 170,000 internet users worldwide, GWI found that 11% of all users claim to use Tor, the most high profile for anonymising internet access.
Tor was created – largely with funding from the U.S. government – in order to allow people who live in repressive authoritarian regimes to communicate anonymously on the Internet.
So it is ironic that the NSA targets as “extremists” (the word the U.S. government uses for “probable terrorists”) anyone who uses Tor or any other privacy tool … or even searches for information on privacy tools on the Internet.
Jacob Appelbaum and other privacy experts explain at Das Erste:
- Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA.
- Among the NSA’s targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states.
Of course, NSA apologists will pretend that targeting privacy tool users is necessary to stop the bad guys. This argument is demolished by the fact that for 5,000 years straight, mass surveillance hasalways been used by tyrants to crush dissent.
Bill, I have similar gains during the same time frame, plus a lot of nice cash flow and tax benefits… …..85% of it from real estate investments. There are many ways to invest.
969,000 - that is how much my net worth increased since October 2009 ??
Hmmm….A million bucks in 4-5 years in the middle of a recession Eh ??
Gee’s Bill, why work down their in the hell hole of Southern California…With that kind of ability to earn profits, why not just move to Arizona, rent a shack and day trade ??
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Comment by Prime_Is_Contained
2014-07-06 10:15:15
With that kind of ability to earn profits, why not just move to Arizona, rent a shack and day trade ??
He never said those were trading profits; he said “that is how much my net worth increased”.
Net worth increases with savings too. I’m guessing that a reasonable fraction of Bill’s increased net worth comes from new savings.
Comment by Bill, just South of Irvine, CA
2014-07-06 10:32:00
True. I added excess money I saved by renting into cash, precious metals, municipal bonds, stocks (15% discount company stock, which I have sold 60% of at this point), and stock index funds. A lot of principle in that. But my 401k grew by 140% since January 1 2009 - and that did not count my principle.
Stocks did FAR BETTER than real estate.
And SCDave I am not opposed to working in a blue state where incomes are far higher. Even though cost of living in Arizona is significantly less, it is slightly more advantageous for me to work in California and rent both in California and Arizona.
But I keep checking every now and then on jobs in the Phoenix area that fit my Linux / C / C++ skills. Phoenix is a Java programmers paradise, but I have very little experience with Java, particularly SQL (database gobbledygook) so my pay for a job in that language would be too low to make it worthwhile to move back.
Bill, I’m a little ahead of you in the profits department and I rent a 3 bedroom home near the beach. but during this time the rents have skyrocketed in Carlsbad. When I move again it will be a 1k or 2k increase. Is it really better to throw money away on rent?
At current grossly inflated median price of $819k, your mortgage payment is $6500. And you haven’t even turned the lights on or paid your taxes. Add in depreciation and you’re in excess of $7500/month.
Now considering prices are falling in Carlsbad and the rampant realtor and mortgage fraud there, is it such a good idea?
The point is I am highly diversified, Anne. You are probably losing sleep being mostly in SFH real estate. Stocks are a far less risky investment and with an average annual gain far higher than real estate.
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Comment by Housing Analyst
2014-07-06 11:59:05
Keep in mind the SFH’s don’t appreciate. They depreciate with nothing to offset those losses.
Comment by ann gogh
2014-07-06 11:59:45
I rent and save. 1900.00 a month. I was thinking about upgrading my living situation and noticed many homes now rent for 4000 to 5000. I realize the median is 2500.00 but I do not want a sideways move. I plan on spending 3K to have a mini upgrade without buying a house trap!
Bill we have similar portfolios except I am a shopaholic and need more space, not less!
let rap!
Comment by Bill, just South of Irvine, CA
2014-07-06 12:27:11
“I am a shopaholic”
There is therapy for that.
I too, pay $1000 extra per month so that I can have “scary looking firearms” and high capacity magazines - in Arizona. Each of us has our own indulgences.
Despite what some poster’s wrote about strange people in Laguna Beach, I still would like to rent a small beach house that is going for $2500, just blocks from the beach. Was hoping with the new company that just bought us a month ago the “compensation that would make it worthwhile” would allow me to do it. But many of us did not get any extra compensation. At least not until January 1 2015.
Comment by Whac-A-Bubble™
2014-07-06 13:12:59
So far as I have personally witnessed, there are strange people in every corner of California. But you can easily learn to overlook strangeness and enjoy the diversity!
Comment by Whac-A-Bubble™
2014-07-06 13:22:47
Ann Gogh — we are in a similar mode of renting and saving. I just checked the amount; I’m basically socking away a year’s worth of rent payments in tax-deferred savings every year. It’s great to be diversified instead of throwing away good money on an overvalued, depreciating debt-funded crap shack investment.
Comment by Prime_Is_Contained
2014-07-06 14:22:38
I’m basically socking away a year’s worth of rent payments in tax-deferred savings every year.
Me too!
Comment by Ann Gogh
2014-07-06 17:44:51
Miss seeing you guys in person. I am the grasshopper and you are the wise ones!
We have been “pressing the case for sound money” for a very long time. Many others, particularly those economists considered part of the Austrian School have been doing so for decades. It was the Austrian School economists who saw 2008 coming. It was the Austrians who warned the world. But the Austrians are a truly and deeply free market bunch, and politicians don’t like free markets. So the warnings went unheeded.
Now we are looking at a massive worldwide bubble inflating which makes the prior bubble(s) look small. The pop may very well have profound impact on the lives of everyday people in negative way. It would be wise to pay close attention as the S&P climbs ever higher while the real economy continues to struggle. This disconnect cannot continue forever.
Better to be the ant than the grasshopper.
…
Comment by Bill, just South of Irvine, CA
2014-07-06 20:08:59
Ant.
Next time you are near an ant hole think about that column. Then think about what you see when the ants are moving from and to the anthole. From: empty. To: Full. Always working. Saving up. Accumulating.
No debt. Always accumulating.
The grasshopper. Well, you know. $30k millionaire, drives a Boxster on even days of the month, drives a Cayman on the odd days. Owes money on those beasts. Votes for the same big spenders and high debtors. Republican and Democrat.
Ants? Silly you. Ants do not vote. Nor do the drive.
A person with a lot of cash under the mattress and a lot of precious metals outside of a safe deposit box and no credit card debt is Mr. Banker’s nemesis
Spain Issues Retroactive 0.03% Tax on Bank Deposits to “Boost Economic Growth and Job Creation”
by Mish - Global Economic Analysis
Published : July 06th, 2014
Via translation from Libre Mercado, Spain will retroactively tax bank deposits to January 1, 2014 stating the move will boost growth and job creation.
Guru Huky correctly labeled the tax for what it is “More than a tax, this looks like a mini seizure of deposits. Someone likely needs a few million and to balance the books.”
The notion that a tax increase will boost the economy is of course absurd. But don’t worry, it’s only 0.03%, nudge nudge, wink wink … for now.
Washington Post - In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are
“Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.
The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.”
You need to check your facts. There’s a significant difference between sea ice and land ice. The Daily Mail is the UKs version of the New York Post, so they will publish anything. From a primer about the difference between the Arctic and Antarctica: “When people talk about an increase in ice they are actually talking about sea ice, which is completely different from continental ice. Warmer oceans help melt the ice and make it thinner, which has been observed in the Arctic. In Antarctica it’s more complicated. It is losing continental ice while sea ice has been increasing by about 1% a decade.”
In the end you contradict your own point, sea ice is increasing and btw the melting of the continental ice is due to volcanic activity and has nothing to do with global warming.
Exactly, a carbon tax needs to be justified to create a funding source for world government and to increase the taxes on the middle class so the .01% will not have to face higher taxes.
Comment by phony scandals
2014-07-06 11:21:28
Global Warming Causes Global Spending: Follow the Money [video]
Added by Ben Gaul on January 17, 2014.
Global warming causes, when you follow the money, are shown to be nothing but political excuses to waste trillions in unnecessary global spending. Billions of those tax dollars are taken from an unsuspecting public, then given – tax-free – to the global warming gurus who keep the lie going; so it really should come as no surprise that those very gurus do all they can to keep their cash-cow alive and kicking. Some estimates put the spending on global warming causes at one billion dollars a day.
Governments around the world, at the behest of the U.N., spend vast amounts of money on a problem which only exists in computer models. Climate change research has become big business; driven by political ideology and greed, instead of a quest for truth. There are reams of real-world data available which effortlessly debunk the myth of climate change. However; if it is ever mentioned publicly, the data is laughed off as conspiracy theory “denial,” obviously being spread by agents of Big Energy.
If any individual or organization – with more than two dimes to rub together – should decide to fund climate research not predicated on anthropogenic global warming causes, they will be accused of employing “dark money.” – particularly if the donors have opted to keep their identities to themselves. Since the global warming cause faithful will picket, protest, threaten, intimidate and lie about any person involved in “heresy” against their religion, who can blame people for wanting to remain anonymous?
Here in America, DOE stimulus loans – the entire Energy Department loan portfolio, in fact – have gone to people and companies with significant connections to Democratic politicians. Those recipients all seem to have been top donors, fundraisers and bundlers for Obama and other Democrats in high office. Following the global warming money shows that it causes American spending almost equal to the amount of global spending. The U.N. has very little on the U.S., when it comes to funding global warming causes.
Starting in 2009, the Energy Department has employed three funding and loan programs – along with pressure from President Obama and Vice President Biden – to monetize 33 projects. Section 1705 of the 2009 Recovery Act; Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) and the 1603 Treasury Program. 1705 and the ATVM have guaranteed $34.5 billion in taxpayer money, which has given America such notable losers as Solyndra, Fisker Automotive, Beacon Power, the Vehicle Production Group, Abound Solar and SoloPower. There are more “green” sinkholes out there still, waiting to implode.
Treasury Program 1603 alone awarded free taxpayer cash to campaign donors cum green energy execs to the tune of $19,349,675,402.00 How is private money supposed to compete with those kinds of numbers?
In Nevada, Senator Harry Reid has been using Green stimulus money to buy his reelections. Nevada Geothermal won a $98.5 million loan in September 2010. Ormat Nevada won $350 million and SolarReserve won $737 million in September 2011. All three companies got their money from the SWIP-E project, which Reid championed and campaigned on. Those three companies – through their executives – have donated more than $58,000 to Reid and other Democrats, since 2008.
BrightSource Energy won of $1.6 billion in April 2011for a solar project. BrightSource Energy also held a fundraiser for Senator Reid in their Oakland offices, hosted by none other than then-CEO, John Woolard and then-chairman of PG&E, along with Peter Darbee of BrightSource Energy, in August 2010.
A survey of 3247 US research scientists who address global warming causes – all publicly funded through the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services – published in the science journal Nature, showed that 503 of them admitted to altered the design, methodology or results of their studies, due to pressure from funding sources. Those were just the scientists willing to be honest; it is safe to assume a much larger number.
Evidently, the key to obtaining grant money resides in what your study says it means to discover. Should a scientist want to study the migratory patterns of a particular butterfly, they might title their grant proposal like this: “A study of the migratory patterns of the Blue Mountain Swallowtail Butterfly.” A perfectly reasonable title for a proposal which will certainly yield greater knowledge of the natural world.
However, that scientist is competing against another researcher, whose title is “A study of the effects of Global Warming and Climate Change on the migratory patterns of the Blue Mountain Swallowtail Butterfly.” Both people would be gathering the exact same data, but only one of them purports to forward the global warming cause. There is no doubt as to which scientist will be funded.
Of course, the “global warming cause” industry, which collects all those billions in tax-free grants, is not above fudging numbers, data manipulation or lying with a straight face. When they get caught, they say they are only exaggerating to emphasize how important the global warming cause is. It cannot be about the money, since they claim to have absolutely the best of intentions. Therefore, they can only be judged on their ideals; condemning them for the lies they tell, the financial crimes they perpetrate and waste they incur, might jeopardize the “scientific process.” Follow the money and it is easy to see where global warming causes global spending.
Back atchoo, jeff. I very much appreciate the bigger picture that your postings provide. For example, I’ve been pretty much in orbit over the whole Central American “kiddie” crusade, however, once I saw the video you posted today, I actually calmed down, because at least now I have a thorough understanding of why this is happening. And WHO is behind it. That in itself brings considerable relief, identification of the enemy.
So thank you. If we’re ever up north in Greenwich at the same time for a visit, I’ll treat you and the family to dinner somewhere nice on one of the Avenues.
Your very welcome. Losing any family member is tough. As I get older I am able to look back on the good times involving the recently departed, instead of only focusing on the pain.
Obama must help Middle-class families with an 18.4-cent-per-gallon gas tax?
Obama Urges Congress to Fund Infrastructure Projects
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVISJULY 1, 2014
WASHINGTON — President Obama called on congressional Republicans on Tuesday to take quick action to fund infrastructure projects throughout the country, arguing that failing to do so could mean huge layoffs for Americans this year.
The president said that if Congress did not act in the next couple of months, states would have to decide which projects to continue and which to halt, ultimately placing as many as 700,000 jobs at risk.
“That would be like Congress threatening to lay off the entire population of Denver, or Seattle, or Boston,” Mr. Obama told about 550 supporters and employees of the federal and Washington Transportation Departments. “That’s a lot of people. It would be a bad idea.”
“Middle-class families can’t wait for Republicans in Congress to do stuff. So sue me,” Mr. Obama said. “As long as they’re doing nothing, I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something.”
Before a cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning, Mr. Obama said he was directing his team to look for creative ways to accomplish what Congress had refused to do.
“If Congress can’t act on core issues that would actually make a difference in helping middle-class families get ahead, then we’re going to have to be creative about how we can make real progress,” Mr. Obama said.
The transportation measure would fund projects in virtually every lawmaker’s state or district and enjoys broad support, but it has been mired in a political fight over how to pay for it. Some Democrats favor increasing the 18.4-cent-per-gallon gas tax to bring in more revenue for highway programs, whose expenditures have outpaced the amount brought in by the tax. Republicans have resisted that approach, arguing that the measure should be paid for by cutting federal spending elsewhere.
Alveda King: While We Marched in the Sixties, Planned Parenthood Was Preparing Us a Place
by Sarah Zagorski | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 7/4/14 4:34 PM
Alveda King, the niece of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., spoke at National Right to Life’s Prayer breakfast on June 27th. King is the Director of the African American Outreach for Priests for Life, and their mission is to activate pro-life leaders who will expose the disproportionate amount of black babies killed by the abortion industry.
Abortion ends the life of more African Americans than all other causes of death combined, including accidents, cancer, AIDS and violent crimes. In 2008 alone, abortion killed 363,705 African American babies. Although Black Americans only represent 12.6% of the U.S. population, they account for over 30% of all abortions.
During the breakfast, King praised African American Representative, Katrina Jackson (D-Monroe) who authored the Unsafe Abortion Protection Act (HB 388) in Louisiana. The Act will ensure that women who do choose abortion and experience complications, such as hemorrhage, uterine perforation, or infection from an incomplete abortion, receive the highest standard of care possible at a local hospital without any delays.
When Louisiana GovernorBobby Jindal signed the bill into law, pro-abortion activists said Louisiana was initiating a “war on women.” However, King said Rep. Jackson didn’t buy into the pro-abortion rhetoric. Instead, she proved to be a leader who stands up for African American women and unborn children.
Additionally, King shared about Priests for Life work to defund Planned Parenthood. In the abortion giants 2012-2013 annual report, they brag of their so-called “outreach ” to African American youth. However, their semantic gymnastics cleverly hide their true agenda.
King said, “Right now in America almost half of our babies are being killed in the womb, and in certain parts of America more of our babies are being aborted than being born. While we were marching in the sixties, a place was being prepared for us at Planned Parenthood. We were trying to get off the back of the bus, and they were going to have a space for us in the front of the abortion mill.”
Several ways to increase your freedom from governments, corporations, and bankers:
1) Don’t vote
2) Don’t allow government your third partner in a romantic relationship (no marriage license)
3) Stay out of debt. Bankers hate you for this. And if you want to strike back against bankers this is what you have to do.
4) Aside from California avocados - don’t consume any “food” advertised on TV. Shop the perimeters of grocery stores - whole grains, steel cut oats and nuts are an exception.
5) Work out at least six hours per week.
6) If you are past 40 restrict sodium to 1500 mg or less per day. This sadly eliminates a lot of fun restaurants, but you also eliminate added sugar too.
7) Put off buying a house. It’s a trap set by banksters, government, and corporations. They want you in a house because people tend to be docile and not anti government if they buy a SFH. Besides, the government will turn your neighborhood into a ghetto eventually. Never invest politically. If you hate the current president (no matter if D or R) and you avoid investing in stocks when everyone is having a honeymoon with someone they voted in, you are hurting yourself. If you do not invest in treasuries because it’s helping the government, you are also being political. You need to diversify your risk.
9) Don’t pass up high paying opportunities just because they are in a state full of liberals or “tea baggers.” Again you are only hurting yourself more than hurting those you cannot stand. Remember, the key is to build up your net worth quickly to get you to financial freedom far quicker than the average person.
#1 - it’s psychological. Once you stop voting you start to think of yourself as a visitor, not a subject. I reside in Arizona and work in California. In California during election seasons I see signs all over the place. I cannot remember the time I checked to see if they were Republican or Democrat signs. It did not matter. It does not matter. What George Carlin said is that if you don’t vote you do have a right to complain but the morons who voted for the same ol $hite and complain have no right to complain. They are the ones responsible for the Demopublican statism that made this country a KGB-style nation. You realize after awhile you freed yourself from politics. You still regard them as the enemy but you are immune to their memes, their lies, and their propoganda to get you into the voting booth.
2) Hardening of the arteries is common in people who have no sign of heart disease. “Chronic high intake of sodium can cause high blood pressure, or hypertension, which can damage arteries and affect the heart muscle tissue, raising your risk for heart attack and stroke. Because your risk for heart disease climbs as you age, making dietary changes to curb your sodium intake at age 40 can prevent a premature death from cardiac events.” http://www.livestrong.com/article/479151-what-is-the-normal-sodium-intake-for-a-40-year-old-female/
Personally I had chronic high intake of sodium for most of my life. And now I have to take high blood pressure medicine. I exercised in intense cardio and weight lifting for decades but that did not stop the damage from a high sodium diet.
Lost ten pounds training for the Pikes Peak Ascent half marathon, may lose another 10 in the next six weeks before the race.
People at work make fun of me because of how many vegetables I eat, and how I refuse to eat any of the garbage doughnuts and store-bakery birthday cakes that people bring in.
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Comment by Bill, just South of Irvine, CA
2014-07-06 17:58:22
My 59 year old sister lost 13 lbs over the last year. I got her into the MyFitnessPal craze. She was thin up to about ten years ago then started putting on weight. Commutes and all that take time away from workouts - and her hypothyroidism.
I think I got her on the whole foods diet as well. Every now and then send her pics of my dinner plate mostly green all stacked with fresh vegetables, some steamed, some raw, some cooked, and a baked salmon fillet or the whole grain pasta. Sister knows also about recording exercise into the Myfitnesspal app. The key thing is to get them hooked on the nutritional balance feature. To make sure you get to the red line on the iron, calcium, vitamins, and protein. The sodium line is geared for the younger set 2300mg so my line is 1500. Somtimes I go to 2000 and other times 1200. Then the sugar line - I don’t care much about it because it’s mostly natural sugars. One Ghiradelli dark chocolate square has 1gm of added sugar. I can accept that as if it’s zero.
Comment by Bill, just South of Irvine, CA
2014-07-06 19:12:51
“People at work make fun of me because of how many vegetables I eat, and how I refuse to eat any of the garbage doughnuts and store-bakery birthday cakes that people bring in”
Keep at this plan for at least 20 years and keep tabs on your colleagues - never lose contact with the ones who make fun of you. Then you can start sending them pictures in 20 years of you hiking, mountain biking, skiing, and younger looking than them.
You nailed it.
Those same people are telling you life is short, so enjoy it because you may be hit by a truck tomorrow. I’ve been told that for more than 20 years. In the late 80s a father of 7 kids told me, “you know Bill, married men live longer than single men.” At that time he was 35, thinning very short short gray hair, and had a pot belly, though he was not a drinker. I have mostly dark brown hair at 55 with white hair at my ears, no pot belly, and I can grow my hair long. The dude would be 65 this year.
Comment by Whac-A-Bubble™
2014-07-06 21:05:38
“People at work make fun of me because of how many vegetables I eat, and how I refuse to eat any of the garbage doughnuts and store-bakery birthday cakes that people bring in.”
I guess it depends on the sort of people you work with, as my primarily veggie choices generally are met with compliments.
“This is what greets you when you log into Wells Fargo:”
Well, at least it doesn’t say “Turn your equity into cash!!!”. One of our local credit unions has a little branch inside the Raley’s grocery store, and believe it or not, that’s what the big sign says, with pictures and everything.
My salary is $130k (plus bennies). This family of one (with a few lizards as outdoor pets to keep me company) gets by in Orange County on that, rents two apartments, and if not for my Roth 401k I could come out even.
This family of one is hanging on to develop commercial software stuff for the resume in order to keep working in high techifornia, for the eventual contracting in commercial software from Seattle to San Diego along the rim of fire coast.
The pluses: The produce out here at the Whole Foods stores is awesome. The weather is always awesome. The income is higher than if I were to stay home working in Arizona.
I’m too greedy to decide on the drop of a dime to work home in Arizona. Arizona needs to drop its state income tax completely instead of have the ridiculous 3.4% of your income taxed. Robbery!
Name:Ben Jones Location:Northern Arizona, United States To donate by mail, or to otherwise contact this blogger, please send emails to: thehousingbubble@gmail.com
PayPal is a secure online payment method which accepts ALL major credit cards.
Foreclosure next to me has been empty for couple years now. Noticed avocado tree had a few at the top (all I can see is the very top of the tree, blocked by other trees) so I head over to “investigate” and see the tree overflowing with them. Then I turn my gaze to the rest of the yard - a line of papaya trees, with some - I kid you not - bigger than footballs!
Shadow inventory never tasted soooo good!
Hope you sent a payment to the bank for the fruit you acquired; they’ve got to make money somehow.
One has to ponder these two facts;
-Housing Demand At 19 Year Lows
-Excess empty and defaulted housing inventory of 25 Million
hmmmm…..
A revisit to (and an excellent opportunity to beat to death) the theme that “Cash is king” brought me to this tidbit from Investopedia:
“Difference Between Earnings and Cash”
“In an August 1995 article in Individual Investor, Jonathan Moreland provides a very succinct assessment of the difference between earnings and cash. He says “at least as important as a company’s profitability is its liquidity – whether or not it’s taking in enough money to meet its obligations. Companies, after all, go bankrupt because they cannot pay their bills, not because they are unprofitable. Now, that’s an obvious point. Even so, many investors routinely ignore it. How? By looking only at a firm’s income statement and not the cash flow statement.”
This is the part I meant to home in on: “Companies, after all, go bankrupt because they cannot pay their bills, not because they are unprofitable.”
Same goes for people.
Stay out of debt. It is a risky bet on fragile earnings and relentless pounding payment obligations.
That’s right….
Save you cash and stay out of debt. You’re going to need every penny of it.
Most commonly used auto parts, whiskey, ammo, firearms - those are all king. In a few years none of those blue dyed fiat notes we have today might be accepted as trade.
“Not worth a continental” could return as “Not worth a dollar”
Perhaps, but right now people are willing to kill in order to get hold of the stuff.
Looks like the petrodollar’s days as the world reserve currency may be numbered - doomed by the same hubris that caused other reserve currencies to fail, with disastrous effects for their citizens.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-06/france-assures-push-against-petrodollar-not-fight-against-dollar-imperialism
I’ve been hearing that for years now…
Lotsa ways to address cash flow, factoring, lines of credit. At the end of the day, businesses need to be profitable once you adjust for non-cash deductions like depreciation and amortization.
Cash No Longer King as Stock, Asset Swaps Drive Takeovers
By Manuel Baigorri and David Welch Jul 1, 2014 1:27 AM PT
Big deals are back. To fund them, buyers are using a little creative thinking and a lot of common stock to fuel the best quarter for global takeovers since 2007.
As they agreed to more than $900 billion of purchases in the second quarter, acquirers turned to their rising stock prices to finance deals. For buyers with public listings, all-cash offers made up about one-third of the takeovers announced in the second quarter, data compiled by Bloomberg show. A year earlier, all-cash bids accounted for two-thirds of deals, and in the five years through 2013 they averaged 50 percent, the data show.
…
Stock prices are driven by opinions and when opinions about stocks are high then so are the prices.
And if these high-priced stocks that are backed by high opinions can be used in place of hard to get cash to buy stuff with then it would make sense to buy using these high-priced stocks instead of using cash - which is essentially what you see going on as described in the article.
One could say that cash is no longer king but if this were the case then it would be cash that would be gotten rid of - cash would have been spent in order to do the buying - and shares of stock are what would have been kept. But instead it is the other way around.
During the Seventies ‘Adam Smith’ (a pen name for George Goodwin) wrote the book “Supermoney” and his book’s main theme was how, during bull markets, shares of stock could be effectively used to buy things (such as other companies) instead of going the old fashioned way of using cash, and he termed this sort of buying as using supermoney.
With supermoney the effective money supply of the company employing supermoney could be expanded well beyond any other means that might be at hand. The only thing that is needed in order for supermoney to work is an acceptance from sellers to accept supermoney (shares of the purchasing company’s stock) instead of hard cash in return for the selling company’s assets - and during bull markets convincing sellers to accept supermoney is something that is easy to do.
And during bear markets? Well, not so much.
(What a surprise, eh?)
Combo
It really surprises me how few companies will buy back stock when its low….not many bought back shares during 09…..even buffett didn’t buy back stock,
The incentives are all wrong, IMO.
If the incentive is to do what is best for the company (and thus for the stockholders in general) then the company should buy shares in itself when prices are low and it should use free cash flow to do this.
But if the incentive is to make the price of the stock go up so that those executives who can make some big bucks by exercising stock options and then selling their newly-acquired stock into a pumped-up market then this what the executives will do - and they will most likely will do this buying with borrowed money if interest rates are low enough.
This borrowing to buy at high prices is nuts to do for the company as a whole but it can be very lucrative for the executives - and it’s the executives who make such decisions whether to do this or to not do this.
“Stock prices are driven by opinions and when opinions about stocks are high then so are the prices.”
Also driven by money flows and interest rates: With QE3 holding the interest rate pedal to the metal, stock prices are high, right along side of housing and long-term bond prices.
Obviously this does not mean that when and if interest rates ever revert back up to historic norms, the high valuations of stocks, bonds and houses will necessarily reverse — DOES IT?
This is how the US will lose its reserve currency status. There will be no announcement no sudden loss, however Obama’s policies i.e. surge in national debt and surge in money supply will cost us the status. While in the long run, it might even be good for the country the immediate impact will be much lower standard of living since we will only be able to import the amount of goods we match in exports:
http://voiceofrussia.com/news/2014_07_04/Beijing-Seoul-agree-to-direct-trade-in-national-currencies-4477/
Obama will be out of office before the dollar loses its reserve currency status.
Whac it is already happening. It is a process not an event and he has put the process in motion.
http://rt.com/usa/dollar-danger-as-world-currency-977/
“RT”
What does that stand for? Is this considered to be an unbiased (aka “fair and balanced”) news source regarding the future reserve currency status of the dollar?
If it is the process you are talking about, then I don’t think one can properly date the onset to Obama’s presidency. For instance, what about the collapse of the Bretton Woods accord in the early 1970s; didn’t this have something to do with the subsequent erosion of the dollar as a reliable store of value?
What Obama has done is accelerate the pace to warp speed. In the long run, it would happen anyway but in the long run we would have all been dead.
Comment by SV guy
2010-06-19 11:26:46
“Medvedev Pushes Ruble Reserve Currency to Cut Dollar Dominance.”
It’s not a question of if, but when a new reserve currency is born.
When this happens the USD is toast. Burnt toast.
It’s not a question of if, but when a new reserve currency is born.
When this happens the USD is toast. Burnt toast.
when the US dollar became the world reserve currency, did the other currencies become ‘toast’?
it isn’t losing reserve status that will destroy the dollar.
It is at the end of a gun that the dollar is the reserve currency.
when the US dollar became the world reserve currency, did the other currencies become ‘toast’?
+1. I’m not convinced that it makes any difference, really.
Just as now, the dollar will still be exchangeable for whatever the next “reserve” currency is—as well as all of the other currencies, gold, other PMs, etc. It’s much ado about nothing, imo.
“It’s much ado about nothing, imo.”
The important issue seems to be whether one can use the electronic printing press on a discretionary basis to get out of trouble when needed. For instance, Greek and Argentina apparently don’t have this option, whereas China and the US do. I’m not clear on the dividing line between those in or out of the club.
I’m not clear on the dividing line between those in or out of the club.
The dividing line is whether you are able to borrow in your own currency, or whether the market requires that your notes be denominated in some other currency that you can’t print.
Like trust, it is there right up until it isn’t.
since we will only be able to import the amount of goods we match in exports:
Wouldn’t that type of forced financial discipline actually be a good thing for this country??
In the long term, in the short term it is very painful. It is like kicking heroin cold turkey, you can die trying to withdraw. When the free sh#t does not go out because the government cannot print money with abandon riots may destroy the country.
This could not happen if we could not just print money:
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
In the Dailymail article about people bragging about how much they have made on their homes:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/index.html
Excerpt from the Dailymail home as piggy bank :
It’s the topic everybody loves to talk about – property.
While some people love to trade their way up in the hope of becoming a property millionaire, some lucky owners are experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime windfall simply by sitting pretty in their homes for more than a decade and watching the value rocket.
A new house price boom, particularly in London and the South East, means that many people are taking advantage to cash in and use the profits to fund a career change, help out family or friends, take a luxury trip, or bank the cash to provide a comfortable retirement.
Rupert Collingwood, of the London Management Company, said. ‘The past two years have been extraordinary. In some areas of the capital there has been a 150 or 160 per cent increase. If you invest in London the general rule is you will double your money in ten years.’
But many families have done far more than double their money. While the average price of a detached house in the capital was £257,144 in January 1995, by April this year it had risen to £1,320,936 – an increase of 414 per cent.
Figures from the Nationwide show that the average home in London now sells for more than £400,000, with prices in the three months to June up by 25.8 per cent compared with a year earlier.
The national average house price rose 11.8 per cent to £188,903, the biggest rise since January 2005. Additional reporting by Barnaby Harrison.
“While the average price of a detached house in the capital was £257,144 in January 1995, by April this year it had risen to £1,320,936 – an increase of 414 per cent.”
Bahahahahahahaha … and this price increase was due to the actions of strangers - strangers who may or may not be of sound minds and bodies - and people who should know better (but for some reason they don’t) will rush to a lender in order to cash out this rise in price by (and this is the fun part) by BORROWING AGAINST the rise in equity caused by the rise in price - a rise in price (as stated earlier) by the actions of strangers who may or may not be of sound mind and bodies.
Bahahahahahahaha … and if these strangers who set the price ever decide to set the price a bit lower rather than a bit higher then the borrower may discover that he is UNDERWATER on his loan which is another way of saying that he is TRAPPED.
Bahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha
The notion of houses as investments. Good grief.
At 55 I no longer feel uncomfortable in pointing out the classical personal finance rules always keep winning in the end. The tech bubble of the 90s was not the new paradigm. Houses as investments is not the new paradigm.
We’ve said it here. Household formation is cratering, boomers are downsizing/dying, and gen X leading edge is nearing AARP age. It’s going to be a fine renters market for a generation, so if I, say, buy in a nice area in Phoenix in a few years, there will sure be a much more nicer, more exclusive, more quiet and private setting where my rent payments will be cheap and I’ll be able to enjoy gains on my investments in stocks and bonds.
I just need space to store auto parts, whiskey, wines, ammo, firearms, and precious metals, but such space can be rented.
Your demographic assessments are incorrect. The 18_25 segment is now the largest group. The following segments care poised to grow, adding to the housing demand in the next two decades. Renting may work for you, but not for the reasons you state here.
False J._Fraud.
The 18-25 age cohort is a mere third of the size of the boomer generation that is now just starting to shed 35 MILLION excess empty houses.
Remember…. Housing demand is at 19 year lows and falling and rental rates are half the cost of buying at current grossly inflated asking prices of resale housing.
“The 18_25 segment is now the largest group.”
But the Mickey D jobs don’t pay for houses.
nonsense. what those kidz need are $500,000 starter homes!
“…the classical personal finance rules always keep winning in the end.”
Rule Number 1: Buy low, sell high.
If you buy a house at current grossly inflated prices, you are breaking this rule.
True Dat!
The sad fact is that by dollar cost averaging into any asset over a period of 15 or more years you end up with an insanely low cost basis. It is far more ridiculously low the longer you dollar cost average.
But you cannot do that in a house. Your house goes ghetto well nothing you can do about it but maybe walk away, like a former colleague of mine did.
I can take my Vanguard account with me where ever I go.
“The sad fact is that by dollar cost averaging into any asset over a period of 15 or more years you end up with an insanely low cost basis. It is far more ridiculously low the longer you dollar cost average.
But you cannot do that in a house.”
That is the fundamental insight to why one should never buy a home at inflated prices. Once bought, you are priced in forever.
1997 prices are still my guide. I will buy when my dream home gets to the 1997 level. Demographics (despite Mr. Jingles statement) are in favor of major SFH price drops. Mickey D jobs for the younger set and not high paying jobs - which have been outsourced. Boomers downsizing. Interest rates rock bottom and will have to go up. Taxes might go up higher to pay for all the big spending of the Messiah. Mix it all up and it spells doom for real estate shills.
1997 seems like a reasonable benchmark; some areas are already there and then some (e.g. Detroit). The questions seems to be how long it will take homes in relatively desirable areas (e.g. Coastal Cali) to get back to the reasonable price levels of the mid-1990s.
I’m guessing this will happen fairly quickly once interest rates start definitively rising — not just the mini bump of 2013, but on a permanent upward trajectory.
How many years did we have interest rates below 4% Five years? Six years? You and I both know that interest rates are cyclic.
Wow! Check this out:
http://www.fedprimerate.com/fedfundsrate/fed-funds-target-rate-chart-graph-graphic.gif
It stops in 2008 but I think it’s been FLAT since.
http://www.fedprimerate.com/fedfundsrate/federal-funds-target-rate_chart-graph-graphic.htm
If that is not a sign of a severe systemic problem I don’t know what to tell you. Rates cannot get any lower of course.
Notice how the low has been lower with each cycle… Hmmm.
“You and I both know that interest rates are cyclic.”
Right.
However, I also know that this is not a normal cycle. The last time US interest rates stayed this low for a comparable period, it lasted fifteen years (1933-1948). The same duration period of ultra-low rates beginning in January 2009 would continue through 2023.
I think the mid 2000s were a hiccup. The 2000 crash was the game changer. Rates went down to 1%.
2003 to 2017. Then high rates.
“2003 to 2017. Then high rates.”
Rates did not collapse to comparable levels to 1933 and stay there until the aftermath of the Fall 2008 global financial Armageddon event. And the Fed has already more-or-less indicated its intention to raise interest rates after 2017.
My guess is that the period of low rates will last ‘longer than expected’ for a duration that ‘nobody could have seen coming’ that extends well past 2017. The Fed will pretend to be in full control of when rates will go back up, but they won’t be.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/06/25/government-data-show-u-s-in-decade-long-cooling/
Damn facts!
You do realize that Forbes’ climate “expert” James Taylor is an infamous lobbyist for the oil/coal industry and has a history of distorting facts every which way. He laughably claims to be a climate scientist, which actually amounts to a couple undergraduate classes 25 years ago. Nothing he writes is ever peer reviewed, it’s pure propaganda.
Global warming computer models confounded as Antarctic sea ice hits new record high with 2.1million square miles more than is usual for time of year
•UN computer models say Antarctic ice should be in decline, not increasing
By David Rose
Published: 16:01 EST, 5 July 2014
The levels of Antarctic sea-ice last week hit an all-time high – confounding climate change computer models which say it should be in decline.
America’s National Snow And Ice Data Center, which is funded by Nasa, revealed that ice around the southern continent covers about 16million sq km, more than 2.1 million more than is usual for the time of year.
It is by far the highest level since satellite observations on which the figures depend began in 1979.
In statistical terms, the extent of the ice cover is hugely significant.
In its authoritative Fifth Assessment Report released last year, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admitted that the computer models on which scientists base their projections say Antarctic ice should be in decline, not increasing.
The report said: ‘There is low confidence in the scientific understanding of the observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent since 1979, due to… incomplete and competing scientific explanations for the causes of change.’
Some scientists have suggested the Antarctic ice increase may itself be caused by global warming. But Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said the arguments were not convincing.
She added: ‘We do not have a quantitative, predictive understanding of the rise in Antarctic sea ice extent.’
She said it was becoming increasingly apparent that long-term cycles in ocean temperatures were responsible for a significant proportion of the ice decline in the Arctic – a process that may be starting to reverse.
Prof Curry also revealed that because of the ‘pause’, in which world average temperatures have not risen for more than 16 years, the Arctic ice decline has been ‘touted’ by many as the most important evidence for continued global warming.
But in her view, climate scientists have to consider evidence from both Poles.
She added: ‘Convincing arguments regarding the causes of sea-ice variations require understanding and ability to model both the Arctic and Antarctic.’
—————————————–
IT’S POLITICS, NOT SCIENCE, DRIVING CLIMATE CHANGE MANIA
For years, computer simulations have predicted that sea ice should be disappearing from the Poles.
Now, with the news that Antarctic sea-ice levels have hit new highs, comes yet another mishap to tarnish the credibility of climate science.
But the relentless focus by activist scientists on the Arctic decline does suggest a political imperative rather than a scientific one – and when put together with the story of the US temperature records, it’s hard to avoid the impression that what the public is being told is less than the unvarnished truth.
As their credulity is stretched more and more, the public will – quite rightly – treat demands for action with increasing caution…
Andrew Mountford
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/…ing-latest-Amount-Antarctic-sea-ice-hits-new-record-high.html -
A repost, from below. This is becoming like whack-a-mole:
There’s a significant difference between sea ice and land ice. The Daily Mail is the UKs version of the New York Post, so they will publish anything. From a primer about the difference between the Arctic and Antarctica: “When people talk about an increase in ice they are actually talking about sea ice, which is completely different from continental ice. Warmer oceans help melt the ice and make it thinner, which has been observed in the Arctic. In Antarctica it’s more complicated. It is losing continental ice while sea ice has been increasing by about 1% a decade.”
Attack the author not NOAAs own data, that is pretty desperate.
+1 Dan,
Ad Hominem is a LIEberal’s favorite tool.
The 97 Percent Myth
June 3, 2014
Global warming advocates routinely toss out the statistic that 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is real and man-made. Where did that figure come from? Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, and Roy Spencer, principal research scientist for the University of Alabama in Huntsville, explain the history behind the misleading number.
In short, there is no basis for the claim that 97 percent of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem.
In 2004, Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard science historian, examined 928 abstracts of scientific journal articles, finding that three-quarters of them believed that humans were responsible for most of the observed warming of the last half-century.
•However, Oreskes did not analyze articles by prominent scientists — such as Richard Lindzen and John Christy — who question the “consensus” view.
•Additionally, a recent study in Nature magazine confirms that academic abstracts often contain claims that are not proven in the studies themselves.
A 2009 article by University of Illinois student Maggie Kendall Zimmerman and her master’s thesis adviser Peter Doran also made the 97 percent claim.
•The authors made this conclusion after conducting a two-question online survey of 3,146 scientists, only 79 of which were experts in climate science and had published half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change.
•It did not include the scientists most likely to understand the natural causes of climate change: solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists or astronomers.
•Moreover, the survey did not specify whether the human impact on global warming was large enough to constitute a problem.
In 2013, Australian blogger John Cook reviewed abstracts of peer-reviewed papers published from 1991 to 2011, concluding that 97 percent of the authors who stated their position on the subject believed that human activity was responsible for some warming.
•However, when University of Delaware geography professor David Legates reviewed Cook’s papers, he found that only 41 of them (0.3 percent of all of the abstracts, and just 1 percent of those that expressed an opinion) believed human activity was causing most current warming.
On the other hand, write Bast and Spencer, the Petition Project — a group of physicists and physical chemists in California — has collected more than 31,000 signatures from scientists agreeing that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of…carbon dioxide…or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
Source: Joseph Bast and Roy Spencer, “The Myth of the Climate Change ‘97%’” Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2014.
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=24484 - 30k -
“In short, there is no basis for the claim that 97 percent of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem.”
One should also consider whether 97 percent (or whatever share) of scientists agree that global warming is ‘real’ out of fear for loss of standing or position in case they don’t jump on the global warming political bandwagon.
When the facts don’t agree with your position, killing the messenger is a natural strategy to employ.
true dat
“When the facts don’t agree with your position, killing the messenger is a natural strategy to employ.”
US college professor demands imprisonment for climate-change deniers
3/17/2014
An assistant philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology wants to send people who disagree with him about global warming to jail.
The professor is Lawrence Torcello. Last week, he published a 900-word-plus essay at an academic website called The Conversation.
His main complaint is his belief that certain nefarious, unidentified individuals have organized a “campaign funding misinformation.” Such a campaign, he argues, “ought to be considered criminally negligent.”
Torcello, who has a Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, explains that there are times when criminal negligence and “science misinformation” must be linked. The threat of climate change, he says, is one of those times.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/03/17/u-s-college-professor-demands-imprisonment-for-climate-change-deniers/#ixzz36iQbYzZE
Y’all can keep your politics and science and Drudge links.
Just consider what an ecological utopia this planet will be when there are 12, 15, 20 billion humanoids. The 7 billion now are doing such a stellar job as stewards of their planet, it can only get better with more of them, right?
“…assistant philosophy professor…”
Does this credential qualify the guy as an expert on global warming with the right to imprison anyone who disagrees with his political position?
If so, our country is in big trouble.
Does this credential qualify the guy as an expert on global warming with the right to imprison anyone who disagrees with his political position?
I can’t think of any credential that would give anyone such a right. Another question might be whether it’s worth even paying attention to this character.
“The 7 billion now are doing such a stellar job as stewards of their planet, it can only get better with more of them, right?”
You had better get a seat at the next Bilderberg meeting and talk to TPTB.
They just imported another 300,000 from donkey riding countries and dispersed them via jet and bus throughout a gas guzzling country.
I read some of the Daily Sheeple links about how this “humanitarian crisis” will be used to implement the UN elimination of national sovereignty.
An unlikely scenario, IMO.
Got 7.62×39?
The Cloward-Piven Strategy
By Richard Poe
DiscoverTheNetworks.org
2005
First proposed in 1966 and named after Columbia University sociologists Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, the Cloward-Piven Strategy seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Inspired by the August 1965 riots in the black district of Watts in Los Angeles (which erupted after police had used batons to subdue an African American man suspected of drunk driving), Cloward and Piven published an article titled “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” in the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation. Following its publication, The Nation sold an unprecedented 30,000 reprints. Activists were abuzz over the so-called “crisis strategy” or “Cloward-Piven Strategy,” as it came to be called. Many were eager to put it into effect.
In their 1966 article, Cloward and Piven charged that the ruling classes used welfare to weaken the poor; that by providing a social safety net, the rich doused the fires of rebellion. Poor people can advance only when “the rest of society is afraid of them,” Cloward told The New York Times on September 27, 1970. Rather than placating the poor with government hand-outs, wrote Cloward and Piven, activists should work to sabotage and destroy the welfare system; the collapse of the welfare state would ignite a political and financial crisis that would rock the nation; poor people would rise in revolt; only then would “the rest of society” accept their demands.
The key to sparking this rebellion would be to expose the inadequacy of the welfare state. Cloward-Piven’s early promoters cited radical organizer Saul Alinsky as their inspiration. “Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules,” Alinsky wrote in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system’s failure to “live up” to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist “rule book” with a socialist one.
The authors noted that the number of Americans subsisting on welfare — about 8 million, at the time — probably represented less than half the number who were technically eligible for full benefits. They proposed a “massive drive to recruit the poor onto the welfare rolls.” Cloward and Piven calculated that persuading even a fraction of potential welfare recipients to demand their entitlements would bankrupt the system. The result, they predicted, would be “a profound financial and political crisis” that would unleash “powerful forces for major economic reform at the national level.”
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/theclowardpivenstrategypoe.html - 19k -
From another angle, since money talks: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-the-insurance-industry-is-dealing-with-climate-change-52218/
I went on NOAA’s website, nothing supports the claims made by Forbes or Daily Mail. the links in the forbes article take you to blogger websites where they interpret data from NOAA.
The United States covers less than 3% of the earth’s surface.
Hey folks;
Ive been working with/for a 27 year old house flipper for the last 60 days. He demonstrated EVERY negative flipper stereotype in the known universe, including many things that are probably illegal.
It was an amazing experience to witness.
I did much of the work so if you have any questions please ask. The house is:
5884 14th st Arlington Va, 22205
The staging people came thursday and I think the open house is next weekend.
Im done with it and I REALLY need a shower!
Nice to see you back, Spook. I missed your posts.
Imagine being on the hook for those losses. WOW.
Looks like it has convenient access to rte 66 - zillow has it pegged at $575,000 and it was sold in February for $552,000
Comment by Bill, just South of Irvine, CA
2014-07-06 06:24:37
Looks like it has convenient access to rte 66
——————————————————————–
Dude,
rt 66 is 20 FEET behind the back yard fence. Not only does it sound like a race track all day, but the subway train is rolling past every 30 minutes or so.
I play guitar so it works for me.
But its loud. You should have heard it the day of Rolling Thunder.
BTW, his dad is old school cool (had to come down and pull sons nuts out the fire) but the son is a POS; no values, no ethics, no morals.
He would sell his own mother if the price was right, ISYN!
“rt 66 is 20 FEET behind the back yard fence”
Put the proper spin on this fact and maybe you can turn it into a selling point.
Here’s an example:
“Some owners even say the hum of the traffic sounds a bit like ocean surf.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/10/AR2009121004795.html
They use Triple pane windows in NYC for this sound blocking purpose.
Good for you for getting out and doing something interesting with your life! (Now off to the shower…)
“5884 14th st Arlington Va, 22205″
That’s inside the 495 Beltway, so it’ll be interesting.
Oh BTW,
It is being listed under continental realty and he said he is asking $815K
(he put a 2nd story master bedroom on it in the rear)
With housing demand cratering by every measure, there isn’t a buyer at any price.
Arlington, VA Housing Demand Collapses 25% YoY
http://www.zillow.com/local-info/VA-Arlington-home-value/r_30258/#metric=mt%3D30%26dt%3D1%26tp%3D6%26rt%3D8%26r%3D30258%26el%3D0
wow. Maybe he’ll get that. The zillow value of the house next door is in the $900s
Bill, my suspicion is the house price reflects the neighborhood; not the actual structure.
The Westover area of Arlington occupies a sought after niche; its white and middle class, with good schools, but not so white and middle class that it draws TOO much attention to itself, if you know what I mean?
And now we’re getting to the crux of the biscuit; The “location” lie.
Remember…. “Location” is an marketing technique to get your target to pay far more than the property is worth.
“Buying a house at these massively inflated prices and doubling your losses by financing it results in a lifetime of peonage.”
You better believe it mister.
“Now why did you pay a massively inflated price for a house…. and then double down on the losses and finance it for decades?”
Good question.
Which begets the question;
Do you really believe wages are going to triple to meet massively inflated housing prices? Especially with the millions of excess empty houses lenders are holding and hoping won’t impact prices? Of course not. Housing prices will continue to fall by two-thirds to meet wages that are still in the 1990’s range.
Remember…. housing depreciates rapidly and results in financial losses. Those losses are magnified tremendously if you finance it.
Comment by reedalberger
2014-07-05 07:04:51
http://daserste.ndr.de/panorama/aktuell/NSA-targets-the-privacy-conscious%2cnsa230.html
——————————————————————————-
NSA Targets As “Extremists” Americans Who Simply Wish to Protect Themselves from Oppression
by Washington’s Blog | July 6, 2014
In the wake of revelations about the extent of mass surveillance by the NSA and other agencies, people are trying to protect themselves by adopting encryption and other privacy tools.
The Guardian reported in January:
The gathering crisis of trust around consumer web services and the fallout from Edward Snowden’s revelations is fuelling a significant uptake in anonymity tools, new research shows, as internet users battle censorship and assert their right to privacy online.
Globally, 56% of those surveyed by GlobalWebIndex reported that they felt the internet is eroding their personal privacy, with an estimated 415 million people or 28% of the online population using tools to disguise their identity or location.
Aggregating market research data from 170,000 internet users worldwide, GWI found that 11% of all users claim to use Tor, the most high profile for anonymising internet access.
Tor was created – largely with funding from the U.S. government – in order to allow people who live in repressive authoritarian regimes to communicate anonymously on the Internet.
So it is ironic that the NSA targets as “extremists” (the word the U.S. government uses for “probable terrorists”) anyone who uses Tor or any other privacy tool … or even searches for information on privacy tools on the Internet.
Jacob Appelbaum and other privacy experts explain at Das Erste:
- Merely searching the web for the privacy-enhancing software tools outlined in the XKeyscore rules causes the NSA to mark and track the IP address of the person doing the search. Not only are German privacy software users tracked, but the source code shows that privacy software users worldwide are tracked by the NSA.
- Among the NSA’s targets is the Tor network funded primarily by the US government to aid democracy advocates in authoritarian states.
Of course, NSA apologists will pretend that targeting privacy tool users is necessary to stop the bad guys. This argument is demolished by the fact that for 5,000 years straight, mass surveillance hasalways been used by tyrants to crush dissent.
housing has made a lot of people wealthy and a lot of people poor. Be on the right side of the trade!!!
$969,000 - that is how much my net worth increased since October 2009. And zero of that in housing.
Bill, I have similar gains during the same time frame, plus a lot of nice cash flow and tax benefits… …..85% of it from real estate investments. There are many ways to invest.
969,000 - that is how much my net worth increased since October 2009 ??
Hmmm….A million bucks in 4-5 years in the middle of a recession Eh ??
Gee’s Bill, why work down their in the hell hole of Southern California…With that kind of ability to earn profits, why not just move to Arizona, rent a shack and day trade ??
With that kind of ability to earn profits, why not just move to Arizona, rent a shack and day trade ??
He never said those were trading profits; he said “that is how much my net worth increased”.
Net worth increases with savings too. I’m guessing that a reasonable fraction of Bill’s increased net worth comes from new savings.
True. I added excess money I saved by renting into cash, precious metals, municipal bonds, stocks (15% discount company stock, which I have sold 60% of at this point), and stock index funds. A lot of principle in that. But my 401k grew by 140% since January 1 2009 - and that did not count my principle.
Stocks did FAR BETTER than real estate.
And SCDave I am not opposed to working in a blue state where incomes are far higher. Even though cost of living in Arizona is significantly less, it is slightly more advantageous for me to work in California and rent both in California and Arizona.
But I keep checking every now and then on jobs in the Phoenix area that fit my Linux / C / C++ skills. Phoenix is a Java programmers paradise, but I have very little experience with Java, particularly SQL (database gobbledygook) so my pay for a job in that language would be too low to make it worthwhile to move back.
You’ve got nothing but fantasy J._Fraud.
Bill, I’m a little ahead of you in the profits department and I rent a 3 bedroom home near the beach. but during this time the rents have skyrocketed in Carlsbad. When I move again it will be a 1k or 2k increase. Is it really better to throw money away on rent?
A little honest math helps.
http://www.movoto.com/carlsbad-ca/market-trends/
At current grossly inflated median price of $819k, your mortgage payment is $6500. And you haven’t even turned the lights on or paid your taxes. Add in depreciation and you’re in excess of $7500/month.
Now considering prices are falling in Carlsbad and the rampant realtor and mortgage fraud there, is it such a good idea?
On the other hand;
http://www.zillow.com/local-info/CA-Carlsbad-home-value/r_3975/#metric=mt%3D46%26dt%3D1%26tp%3D5%26rt%3D8%26r%3D3975%26el%3D0
Carlsbad rental rates are right around $2500/month.
A little honesty and integrity goes a long way here.
The point is I am highly diversified, Anne. You are probably losing sleep being mostly in SFH real estate. Stocks are a far less risky investment and with an average annual gain far higher than real estate.
Keep in mind the SFH’s don’t appreciate. They depreciate with nothing to offset those losses.
I rent and save. 1900.00 a month. I was thinking about upgrading my living situation and noticed many homes now rent for 4000 to 5000. I realize the median is 2500.00 but I do not want a sideways move. I plan on spending 3K to have a mini upgrade without buying a house trap!
Bill we have similar portfolios except I am a shopaholic and need more space, not less!
let rap!
“I am a shopaholic”
There is therapy for that.
I too, pay $1000 extra per month so that I can have “scary looking firearms” and high capacity magazines - in Arizona. Each of us has our own indulgences.
Despite what some poster’s wrote about strange people in Laguna Beach, I still would like to rent a small beach house that is going for $2500, just blocks from the beach. Was hoping with the new company that just bought us a month ago the “compensation that would make it worthwhile” would allow me to do it. But many of us did not get any extra compensation. At least not until January 1 2015.
So far as I have personally witnessed, there are strange people in every corner of California. But you can easily learn to overlook strangeness and enjoy the diversity!
Ann Gogh — we are in a similar mode of renting and saving. I just checked the amount; I’m basically socking away a year’s worth of rent payments in tax-deferred savings every year. It’s great to be diversified instead of throwing away good money on an overvalued, depreciating debt-funded crap shack investment.
I’m basically socking away a year’s worth of rent payments in tax-deferred savings every year.
Me too!
Miss seeing you guys in person. I am the grasshopper and you are the wise ones!
The Hill: Another financial meltdown on the horizon?
By Nick Sorrentino on July 2, 2014
We have been “pressing the case for sound money” for a very long time. Many others, particularly those economists considered part of the Austrian School have been doing so for decades. It was the Austrian School economists who saw 2008 coming. It was the Austrians who warned the world. But the Austrians are a truly and deeply free market bunch, and politicians don’t like free markets. So the warnings went unheeded.
Now we are looking at a massive worldwide bubble inflating which makes the prior bubble(s) look small. The pop may very well have profound impact on the lives of everyday people in negative way. It would be wise to pay close attention as the S&P climbs ever higher while the real economy continues to struggle. This disconnect cannot continue forever.
Better to be the ant than the grasshopper.
…
Ant.
Next time you are near an ant hole think about that column. Then think about what you see when the ants are moving from and to the anthole. From: empty. To: Full. Always working. Saving up. Accumulating.
No debt. Always accumulating.
The grasshopper. Well, you know. $30k millionaire, drives a Boxster on even days of the month, drives a Cayman on the odd days. Owes money on those beasts. Votes for the same big spenders and high debtors. Republican and Democrat.
Ants? Silly you. Ants do not vote. Nor do the drive.
“Be on the right side of the trade!!!”
And on the right side of the debt.
A person with a lot of cash under the mattress and a lot of precious metals outside of a safe deposit box and no credit card debt is Mr. Banker’s nemesis
You are correct but fortunately you are outnumbered.
Seems like the Echo Bubble has pretty much finished its run…what next?
another manufactured crisis to flush the weak hands?
housing has made a lot of people wealthy and a lot of people poor.
Often the same people when they mistake a bubble for intelligence.
Worthless housing…. worthless worthless housing….. It’s worth less and less with each passing day.
“With 25 million excess, empty and defaulted houses in the US, 4 million of which are in California, there is plenty of “housing supply”.”
Ask yourself this question and be prepared to respond as you will be asked by us;
Are you an agent of price fixing and housing crime or are you an agent of truth?
“If you have to borrow for 15 or 30 years, it’s not affordable nor can you afford it.”
Especially when the borrowed money is used to buy a depreciating asset like a house.
Spain Issues Retroactive 0.03% Tax on Bank Deposits to “Boost Economic Growth and Job Creation”
by Mish - Global Economic Analysis
Published : July 06th, 2014
Via translation from Libre Mercado, Spain will retroactively tax bank deposits to January 1, 2014 stating the move will boost growth and job creation.
Guru Huky correctly labeled the tax for what it is “More than a tax, this looks like a mini seizure of deposits. Someone likely needs a few million and to balance the books.”
The notion that a tax increase will boost the economy is of course absurd. But don’t worry, it’s only 0.03%, nudge nudge, wink wink … for now.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
http://www.24hgold.com/…on-.aspx?contributor=Mish&article=5620915608H11690&redirect=False - 249k -
To keep afloat the zombie banks & zombie governments, they will do anything.
It could never happen here, right???
It could never happen here, right ??
Already effectively has…. .005% on savings in the face of 3% + inflation…
That’s not inflation my friend. Learn the difference.
please give your definition of inflation for all to see.
please give your definition of inflation for all to see.
HA will never say what inflation _IS_—merely what it is not.
Really? Explanation after explanation and you still don’t like it.
Get over it and get on with your life.
The most transparent administration in history
Washington Post - In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are
“Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.
The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.”
20 minutes into this 28 minute video, Wow.
The Agenda Behind the ‘Refugee’ Crisis on the Border | The Daily …
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/…the-agenda-behind-the-refugee-crisis-on-the-border_072014 - 63k - Cached - Similar pages
1 day ago …
Nice link.
Yesterday’s bits on this and related topics was a nice read last night.
Home Depot Lumber Yard, lol.
Learned a new name, Peter Sutherland. Why do these guys always look like Jabba the Hutt?
REAL SCIENCE
Global warming latest: Amount of Antarctic sea ice hits new record high
By David Rose 22:01 05 Jul 2014,
“The levels of Antarctic sea-ice last week hit an all-time high – confounding climate change computer models which say it should be in decline.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-2681829%2FGlobal-warming-latest-Amount-Antarctic-sea-ice-hits-new-record-high.html&tabId=4
If computer models are so wrong this year - - - why would you think that they can predict further into the future?
You need to check your facts. There’s a significant difference between sea ice and land ice. The Daily Mail is the UKs version of the New York Post, so they will publish anything. From a primer about the difference between the Arctic and Antarctica: “When people talk about an increase in ice they are actually talking about sea ice, which is completely different from continental ice. Warmer oceans help melt the ice and make it thinner, which has been observed in the Arctic. In Antarctica it’s more complicated. It is losing continental ice while sea ice has been increasing by about 1% a decade.”
the white mans ice is colder.
It’s a Drudge Report link, that explains everything.
In the end you contradict your own point, sea ice is increasing and btw the melting of the continental ice is due to volcanic activity and has nothing to do with global warming.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2681812/Its-politics-not-science-driving-climate-change-mania-UN-predictions-subject-ridicule-stunning-failure.html
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/06/lying-with-statistics-the-national-climate-assessment-falsely-hypes-ice-loss-in-greenland-and-antarctica/#more-112590
Follow the money
Exactly, a carbon tax needs to be justified to create a funding source for world government and to increase the taxes on the middle class so the .01% will not have to face higher taxes.
Global Warming Causes Global Spending: Follow the Money [video]
Added by Ben Gaul on January 17, 2014.
Global warming causes, when you follow the money, are shown to be nothing but political excuses to waste trillions in unnecessary global spending. Billions of those tax dollars are taken from an unsuspecting public, then given – tax-free – to the global warming gurus who keep the lie going; so it really should come as no surprise that those very gurus do all they can to keep their cash-cow alive and kicking. Some estimates put the spending on global warming causes at one billion dollars a day.
Governments around the world, at the behest of the U.N., spend vast amounts of money on a problem which only exists in computer models. Climate change research has become big business; driven by political ideology and greed, instead of a quest for truth. There are reams of real-world data available which effortlessly debunk the myth of climate change. However; if it is ever mentioned publicly, the data is laughed off as conspiracy theory “denial,” obviously being spread by agents of Big Energy.
If any individual or organization – with more than two dimes to rub together – should decide to fund climate research not predicated on anthropogenic global warming causes, they will be accused of employing “dark money.” – particularly if the donors have opted to keep their identities to themselves. Since the global warming cause faithful will picket, protest, threaten, intimidate and lie about any person involved in “heresy” against their religion, who can blame people for wanting to remain anonymous?
Here in America, DOE stimulus loans – the entire Energy Department loan portfolio, in fact – have gone to people and companies with significant connections to Democratic politicians. Those recipients all seem to have been top donors, fundraisers and bundlers for Obama and other Democrats in high office. Following the global warming money shows that it causes American spending almost equal to the amount of global spending. The U.N. has very little on the U.S., when it comes to funding global warming causes.
Starting in 2009, the Energy Department has employed three funding and loan programs – along with pressure from President Obama and Vice President Biden – to monetize 33 projects. Section 1705 of the 2009 Recovery Act; Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) and the 1603 Treasury Program. 1705 and the ATVM have guaranteed $34.5 billion in taxpayer money, which has given America such notable losers as Solyndra, Fisker Automotive, Beacon Power, the Vehicle Production Group, Abound Solar and SoloPower. There are more “green” sinkholes out there still, waiting to implode.
Treasury Program 1603 alone awarded free taxpayer cash to campaign donors cum green energy execs to the tune of $19,349,675,402.00 How is private money supposed to compete with those kinds of numbers?
In Nevada, Senator Harry Reid has been using Green stimulus money to buy his reelections. Nevada Geothermal won a $98.5 million loan in September 2010. Ormat Nevada won $350 million and SolarReserve won $737 million in September 2011. All three companies got their money from the SWIP-E project, which Reid championed and campaigned on. Those three companies – through their executives – have donated more than $58,000 to Reid and other Democrats, since 2008.
BrightSource Energy won of $1.6 billion in April 2011for a solar project. BrightSource Energy also held a fundraiser for Senator Reid in their Oakland offices, hosted by none other than then-CEO, John Woolard and then-chairman of PG&E, along with Peter Darbee of BrightSource Energy, in August 2010.
A survey of 3247 US research scientists who address global warming causes – all publicly funded through the National Institutes of Health, an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services – published in the science journal Nature, showed that 503 of them admitted to altered the design, methodology or results of their studies, due to pressure from funding sources. Those were just the scientists willing to be honest; it is safe to assume a much larger number.
Evidently, the key to obtaining grant money resides in what your study says it means to discover. Should a scientist want to study the migratory patterns of a particular butterfly, they might title their grant proposal like this: “A study of the migratory patterns of the Blue Mountain Swallowtail Butterfly.” A perfectly reasonable title for a proposal which will certainly yield greater knowledge of the natural world.
However, that scientist is competing against another researcher, whose title is “A study of the effects of Global Warming and Climate Change on the migratory patterns of the Blue Mountain Swallowtail Butterfly.” Both people would be gathering the exact same data, but only one of them purports to forward the global warming cause. There is no doubt as to which scientist will be funded.
Of course, the “global warming cause” industry, which collects all those billions in tax-free grants, is not above fudging numbers, data manipulation or lying with a straight face. When they get caught, they say they are only exaggerating to emphasize how important the global warming cause is. It cannot be about the money, since they claim to have absolutely the best of intentions. Therefore, they can only be judged on their ideals; condemning them for the lies they tell, the financial crimes they perpetrate and waste they incur, might jeopardize the “scientific process.” Follow the money and it is easy to see where global warming causes global spending.
Editorial by Ben Gaul
Read more at http://guardianlv.com/2014/01/global-warming-causes-global-spending-follow-the-money-video/#xkPGXi0dY6IarDW5.99
“Follow the money”
Post Of The Day.
follow the money: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-the-insurance-industry-is-dealing-with-climate-change-52218/
Bet interest rates will go up soon after I start buying into some bond funds and bond ETFs this summer.
http://www2.homeowneraction.org/site/PageServer?pagename=moadv_petitionpage&autologin=true&s_subsrc=HID_fbnf2
don’t swipe my real estate deductions, dude!
realtors are liars
js and family would like to send a special thank you to…
Prime_Is_Contained
CA renter
Whac-A-Bubble™
Neuromance
SV guy
sleepless_near_seattle
RioAmericanInBrasil
Tarara Boomdea
jose canusi
For all your kind words.
“If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.” ~Will Rogers
Back atchoo, jeff. I very much appreciate the bigger picture that your postings provide. For example, I’ve been pretty much in orbit over the whole Central American “kiddie” crusade, however, once I saw the video you posted today, I actually calmed down, because at least now I have a thorough understanding of why this is happening. And WHO is behind it. That in itself brings considerable relief, identification of the enemy.
So thank you. If we’re ever up north in Greenwich at the same time for a visit, I’ll treat you and the family to dinner somewhere nice on one of the Avenues.
Jeff,
Your very welcome. Losing any family member is tough. As I get older I am able to look back on the good times involving the recently departed, instead of only focusing on the pain.
We all ‘get it’.
Boulder, CO Housing Demand Collapses 12% YoY
http://www.zillow.com/local-info/CO-Boulder-home-value/r_30543/#metric=mt%3D30%26dt%3D1%26tp%3D4%26rt%3D8%26r%3D30543%26el%3D0
Fairfax, VA Housing Prices Crater 11% YoY At Peak Of Selling Season
http://www.movoto.com/fairfax-va/market-trends/
Obama must help Middle-class families with an 18.4-cent-per-gallon gas tax?
Obama Urges Congress to Fund Infrastructure Projects
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVISJULY 1, 2014
WASHINGTON — President Obama called on congressional Republicans on Tuesday to take quick action to fund infrastructure projects throughout the country, arguing that failing to do so could mean huge layoffs for Americans this year.
The president said that if Congress did not act in the next couple of months, states would have to decide which projects to continue and which to halt, ultimately placing as many as 700,000 jobs at risk.
“That would be like Congress threatening to lay off the entire population of Denver, or Seattle, or Boston,” Mr. Obama told about 550 supporters and employees of the federal and Washington Transportation Departments. “That’s a lot of people. It would be a bad idea.”
“Middle-class families can’t wait for Republicans in Congress to do stuff. So sue me,” Mr. Obama said. “As long as they’re doing nothing, I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something.”
Before a cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning, Mr. Obama said he was directing his team to look for creative ways to accomplish what Congress had refused to do.
“If Congress can’t act on core issues that would actually make a difference in helping middle-class families get ahead, then we’re going to have to be creative about how we can make real progress,” Mr. Obama said.
The transportation measure would fund projects in virtually every lawmaker’s state or district and enjoys broad support, but it has been mired in a political fight over how to pay for it. Some Democrats favor increasing the 18.4-cent-per-gallon gas tax to bring in more revenue for highway programs, whose expenditures have outpaced the amount brought in by the tax. Republicans have resisted that approach, arguing that the measure should be paid for by cutting federal spending elsewhere.
http://www.nytimes.com/…/07/02/us/obama-urges-funding-for-infrastructure-projects.html -
Alveda King: While We Marched in the Sixties, Planned Parenthood Was Preparing Us a Place
by Sarah Zagorski | Washington, DC | LifeNews.com | 7/4/14 4:34 PM
Alveda King, the niece of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., spoke at National Right to Life’s Prayer breakfast on June 27th. King is the Director of the African American Outreach for Priests for Life, and their mission is to activate pro-life leaders who will expose the disproportionate amount of black babies killed by the abortion industry.
Abortion ends the life of more African Americans than all other causes of death combined, including accidents, cancer, AIDS and violent crimes. In 2008 alone, abortion killed 363,705 African American babies. Although Black Americans only represent 12.6% of the U.S. population, they account for over 30% of all abortions.
During the breakfast, King praised African American Representative, Katrina Jackson (D-Monroe) who authored the Unsafe Abortion Protection Act (HB 388) in Louisiana. The Act will ensure that women who do choose abortion and experience complications, such as hemorrhage, uterine perforation, or infection from an incomplete abortion, receive the highest standard of care possible at a local hospital without any delays.
When Louisiana GovernorBobby Jindal signed the bill into law, pro-abortion activists said Louisiana was initiating a “war on women.” However, King said Rep. Jackson didn’t buy into the pro-abortion rhetoric. Instead, she proved to be a leader who stands up for African American women and unborn children.
Additionally, King shared about Priests for Life work to defund Planned Parenthood. In the abortion giants 2012-2013 annual report, they brag of their so-called “outreach ” to African American youth. However, their semantic gymnastics cleverly hide their true agenda.
King said, “Right now in America almost half of our babies are being killed in the womb, and in certain parts of America more of our babies are being aborted than being born. While we were marching in the sixties, a place was being prepared for us at Planned Parenthood. We were trying to get off the back of the bus, and they were going to have a space for us in the front of the abortion mill.”
http://www.lifenews.com/…/ - 42k -
Several ways to increase your freedom from governments, corporations, and bankers:
1) Don’t vote
Never invest politically. If you hate the current president (no matter if D or R) and you avoid investing in stocks when everyone is having a honeymoon with someone they voted in, you are hurting yourself. If you do not invest in treasuries because it’s helping the government, you are also being political. You need to diversify your risk.
2) Don’t allow government your third partner in a romantic relationship (no marriage license)
3) Stay out of debt. Bankers hate you for this. And if you want to strike back against bankers this is what you have to do.
4) Aside from California avocados - don’t consume any “food” advertised on TV. Shop the perimeters of grocery stores - whole grains, steel cut oats and nuts are an exception.
5) Work out at least six hours per week.
6) If you are past 40 restrict sodium to 1500 mg or less per day. This sadly eliminates a lot of fun restaurants, but you also eliminate added sugar too.
7) Put off buying a house. It’s a trap set by banksters, government, and corporations. They want you in a house because people tend to be docile and not anti government if they buy a SFH. Besides, the government will turn your neighborhood into a ghetto eventually.
9) Don’t pass up high paying opportunities just because they are in a state full of liberals or “tea baggers.” Again you are only hurting yourself more than hurting those you cannot stand. Remember, the key is to build up your net worth quickly to get you to financial freedom far quicker than the average person.
1) Don’t vote
How does this increase your freedom in any way?
6) If you are past 40 restrict sodium to 1500 mg or less per day.
This one is unsupported by any scientific evidence, unless you already have high blood-pressure or are prone to retaining water.
#1 - it’s psychological. Once you stop voting you start to think of yourself as a visitor, not a subject. I reside in Arizona and work in California. In California during election seasons I see signs all over the place. I cannot remember the time I checked to see if they were Republican or Democrat signs. It did not matter. It does not matter. What George Carlin said is that if you don’t vote you do have a right to complain but the morons who voted for the same ol $hite and complain have no right to complain. They are the ones responsible for the Demopublican statism that made this country a KGB-style nation. You realize after awhile you freed yourself from politics. You still regard them as the enemy but you are immune to their memes, their lies, and their propoganda to get you into the voting booth.
2) Hardening of the arteries is common in people who have no sign of heart disease. “Chronic high intake of sodium can cause high blood pressure, or hypertension, which can damage arteries and affect the heart muscle tissue, raising your risk for heart attack and stroke. Because your risk for heart disease climbs as you age, making dietary changes to curb your sodium intake at age 40 can prevent a premature death from cardiac events.” http://www.livestrong.com/article/479151-what-is-the-normal-sodium-intake-for-a-40-year-old-female/
Personally I had chronic high intake of sodium for most of my life. And now I have to take high blood pressure medicine. I exercised in intense cardio and weight lifting for decades but that did not stop the damage from a high sodium diet.
“A lower sodium level — 1,500 mg a day or less — is appropriate for people 51 years of age or older, and individuals of any age who are African-American or who have high blood pressure, diabetes or chronic kidney disease.” http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pressure/in-depth/high-blood-pressure/art-20046974
Argh! Forgot closing italic symbol
+1
Lost ten pounds training for the Pikes Peak Ascent half marathon, may lose another 10 in the next six weeks before the race.
People at work make fun of me because of how many vegetables I eat, and how I refuse to eat any of the garbage doughnuts and store-bakery birthday cakes that people bring in.
My 59 year old sister lost 13 lbs over the last year. I got her into the MyFitnessPal craze. She was thin up to about ten years ago then started putting on weight. Commutes and all that take time away from workouts - and her hypothyroidism.
I think I got her on the whole foods diet as well. Every now and then send her pics of my dinner plate mostly green all stacked with fresh vegetables, some steamed, some raw, some cooked, and a baked salmon fillet or the whole grain pasta. Sister knows also about recording exercise into the Myfitnesspal app. The key thing is to get them hooked on the nutritional balance feature. To make sure you get to the red line on the iron, calcium, vitamins, and protein. The sodium line is geared for the younger set 2300mg so my line is 1500. Somtimes I go to 2000 and other times 1200. Then the sugar line - I don’t care much about it because it’s mostly natural sugars. One Ghiradelli dark chocolate square has 1gm of added sugar. I can accept that as if it’s zero.
“People at work make fun of me because of how many vegetables I eat, and how I refuse to eat any of the garbage doughnuts and store-bakery birthday cakes that people bring in”
Keep at this plan for at least 20 years and keep tabs on your colleagues - never lose contact with the ones who make fun of you. Then you can start sending them pictures in 20 years of you hiking, mountain biking, skiing, and younger looking than them.
You nailed it.
Those same people are telling you life is short, so enjoy it because you may be hit by a truck tomorrow. I’ve been told that for more than 20 years. In the late 80s a father of 7 kids told me, “you know Bill, married men live longer than single men.” At that time he was 35, thinning very short short gray hair, and had a pot belly, though he was not a drinker. I have mostly dark brown hair at 55 with white hair at my ears, no pot belly, and I can grow my hair long. The dude would be 65 this year.
“People at work make fun of me because of how many vegetables I eat, and how I refuse to eat any of the garbage doughnuts and store-bakery birthday cakes that people bring in.”
I guess it depends on the sort of people you work with, as my primarily veggie choices generally are met with compliments.
No views.
Crater Street, LV, NV
Ms. Craterton enjoying her long July 4th holiday weekend in Las Vegas
^lolz.
las vegas home prices appear to be inline with banker bonuses in that region.
Hee Haw!
especially since I forgot to make it public. My dear old dog pics, too.
LOL
imgur is simple yet I managed to screw up. Got it now.
jeff, pic of my dear old dog. Hope you’re feeling a little better.
DearOldDog
I had to get my wife.
Your pup looks like Dozzer’s brother.
Thanks for posting.
This is what greets you when you log into Wells Fargo:
http://www.picpaste.com/wells-fargo-NPDnWAd3.JPG
“This is what greets you when you log into Wells Fargo:”
Well, at least it doesn’t say “Turn your equity into cash!!!”. One of our local credit unions has a little branch inside the Raley’s grocery store, and believe it or not, that’s what the big sign says, with pictures and everything.
Wu-Tang Clan - Can It Be All So Simple?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saa0mMwe91o
Cypress Hill:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4fU8ltc8lA
When the musical history of the 1990’s and 2000’s is written, I will be writing it.
How ’bout a ham sandwich?
she was only 20 when she wrote this song and played guitar left handed……
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoaLCc2jR_g
http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2014/07/for-a-family-of-4-it-takes-roughly-this-much-money-per-year-in-income/#.U7nt12PIB78.
“Answer: $130,000/year.
In places like Washington DC, New York, and San Francisco it costs a heck of a lot more than that.”
It costs more than that for a family of six to live the American Dream in San Diego.
Yup. Price shock.
My salary is $130k (plus bennies). This family of one (with a few lizards as outdoor pets to keep me company) gets by in Orange County on that, rents two apartments, and if not for my Roth 401k I could come out even.
This family of one is hanging on to develop commercial software stuff for the resume in order to keep working in high techifornia, for the eventual contracting in commercial software from Seattle to San Diego along the rim of fire coast.
The pluses: The produce out here at the Whole Foods stores is awesome. The weather is always awesome. The income is higher than if I were to stay home working in Arizona.
I’m too greedy to decide on the drop of a dime to work home in Arizona. Arizona needs to drop its state income tax completely instead of have the ridiculous 3.4% of your income taxed. Robbery!
Family of One sounds glamourous when you say it! I am a one too!
last sentence in the article:
I am about done with the word “fair.”
Use of the word about that way is incorrect and annoying. Also, why doesn’t this guy like the word “fair?”
This is Parliament and the P-Funk All-Stars:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNXkw96HC7k