Bits Bucket for March 26, 2015
Post off-topic ideas, links, and Craigslist finds here.
The Housing Bubble
Examining the home price boom and its effect on owners, lenders, regulators, realtors and the economy as a whole.
About Me
Name:Ben Jones
Location:Northern Arizona, United States
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Newport Beach, CA Prices Dive 12%; Inventory Billows 61% As Foreclosures Ramp Up
http://www.movoto.com/newport-beach-ca/market-trends/
CRATER
http://www.thedenverchannel.com/thenow/soaring-cost-of-living-in-denver-pushing-renters-into-the-home-buying-market
If you can’t afford to rent a home in some city odds are you’ll never be able to buy one there. Where do realtors find these foolish people?
Look out below!!!
The debate on whether the financial world will end in deflation or hyperinflation is a lot like the debate on whether the world will end in fire or ice. Even the old Twilight Zone had a show covering that theme. However, I think it will end in hyperinflation because governments have fiat money to print. Someone asked what is the next move for the banksters, they have tried everything. In one word, I say India. Think what India needs in infrastructure and the people want in terms of goods. Now, because most of us on this board are practical people, we say India cannot afford what is needs let alone what it wants. But when in the last few decades have banks worried about whether someone can repay the loans years down the road? The banksters and government entities such as the IMF could loan trillions to India to build infrastructure and the demand for equipment and resources by India would help many of the indebted countries and companies stay current on their present loans.
As long as the money was pouring into India it would have enough money to stay current on the new loans and certainly there would be some real economic growth spun off from this essentially Ponzi scheme, there always is real growth in these bubbles. The problem would be a few decades away when the capital was no longer flowing into the country and the loans would have to be paid by the real economy of India which would certainly be bigger but probably not big enough to fully service the loans but hey YOLO, the people that would have created the bubble will have their pile for doing God’s work.
“The debate on whether the financial world will end in deflation or hyperinflation is a lot like the debate on whether the world will end in fire or ice.”
I see you are recycling my old posts now. I suppose I should be flattered.
The whole fiat system works until the currency is so diluted that alternative ways to exchange goods and services becomes more attractive. Fiat works because it enables people to exchange goods and services more efficiently.
It seems that homes became the preferred storage of value for the typical american. Their cash in the bank was losing money but if it was tied up in a house they got a return due to leverage.
People want hard assets that hold value in a fiat world.
#3) Sociopaths are incapable of feeling shame, guilt or remorse. Their brains simply lack the circuitry to process such emotions #4) Sociopaths invent outrageous lies #9) Sociopaths never apologize
Albuquerquedan yesterday:
“I tried to find the post where Rio stated that I was upset because he was a successful black man that I remember…”
Shillow/Richard Warm Onger yesterday:
“I remember that post also.”
It’s just like a sociopath that you’re posting early the day after you were proved to be a manipulating liar Albuquerquedan-you are incapable of feeling shame. You don’t “remember” any posts saying I was a black man. Neither do you Shillow/Warmonger. You just said it to try to manipulate the HBB - trick them. Lying and manipulation are classic traits of sociopaths. (and warmongers) Is this the post you remember Adan and Shillow from 2012?
Comment by RioAmericanInBrasil
2012-10-04 19:17:41
Carlson scolded black Americans for being proud of their community for surviving slavery.
Well F#$K Tucker Carlson and the slave-groomed horse he rode in on. That guy is a disgrace to our American ideals.
I’m a white American who is proud to grow up much of my life in KANSAS. And Kansas stood up and was the first state to really be counted in blood to have fought against slavery. See: “Bleeding Kansas”, the “Missouri Compromise”, “Kansas: Free State” and “The Kansas/Nebraska Act”. Kansas now is a bit f*&*^d up. But in the past, Kansas stood tall when no other state had.
Stayed up all night on a binge? I do remember a post somewhere along the way and thinking you had indicated you were black in it. So what, good for you. Is all this effort indicating you have some problem with someone being black?
Also I’m not Shillow.
I do remember a post somewhere along the way and thinking you had indicated you were black in it
No you don’t. You are a liar.
Is all this effort indicating you have some problem with someone being black?
Black, Red, Yellow or Blue doesn’t matter. This “effort” indicated I have a problem with lies and calculated manipulation. I caught you both in a lie. It doesn’t matter how I did it.
Also I’m not Shillow.
Who knows WarMonger/StrawberryPicker/Shillow? Who can believe anything a liar says?
You’re an angry Lola.
No, I’m not lying. I do remember something like that. Dan’s post reminded me. Why would I lie about a recollection?
I just wouldn’t waste the effort to go find it.
‘You just said it to try to manipulate the HBB’
To what end? So we’ll vote a certain way? If all this path-stuff bothers you, how about this; who said he was ‘good at killing people’? Even if one believed a person should be killed, I can’t imagine talking about it this way.
This anniversary just recurred. It might make you think.
The Scene of the Crime
A reporter’s journey to My Lai and the secrets of the past.
By Seymour M. Hersh
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/30/the-scene-of-the-crime
‘You just said it to try to manipulate the HBB’To what end?
Well, you’d have to think like Adan for one of the ends. A racist thinks Blacks are inferior - his constant rant that they are not as smart. By painting me as Black, Adan thinks he’s actually insulting me while playing to others of his ilk - and there are some here. Also, by painting me as Black, thinks he can add credibility to his loony “theory” of something along the lines that I’m a Black guy hired by a White Politician to try to make the mixed-race Brazil look good because we have a Black President. It’s hard to keep up with his paranoid delusions but it’s something like that. (See two days ago and yesterday)
Deflection is another possible reason. He was losing our Thomas Jefferson debate so maybe he just wanted to throw out a curve ball to change the subject.
Adan is a conniver. He didn’t “forget”. Adan knew I wasn’t black, I’m on record telling him that directly in one of his threads. (See yesterday.)
The bottom line is Adan is a liar and a sociopath imo.
WarMonger’s motivation is related. He just wanted to make me look like a liar and buddy up with his war mongering friend because I drive them nuts. But by saying “He remembered” a post I never made, I also proved WarMonger the liar he is.
Don’t be such an obsessive $h1T disturber. Getting a wrong impression about you doesn’t make anyone a sociopath. Dan doesn’t care if you are pink or blue, neither do the rest of us. We didn’t care enough to watch your dance(s) in front of the street cam, and we never will.
Print your last few posts out and discuss them with your therapist.
Getting a wrong impression about you doesn’t make anyone a sociopath.
Adan has many traits of a rac!st sociopath. Deal with it.
Print your last few posts out and discuss them with your therapist.
Tell that to Adan with his “theory” of me.
I’ll tell Dan to get a reality check about other things, but clearly he does not have a theory about you. He misunderstood you. We all misunderstand you.
Do you feel “more alive” during these rages?
Rio Street Cam time Amigos!
Do you feel “more alive” during these rages?
You misunderstand me for sure. I mostly find it amusing “matching wits” with most of you.
We didn’t care enough to watch your dance(s) in front of the street cam, and we never will.
“We”? Are you French? Actually someone said they’d give $$ to Bens blog if I went on Rio cam and they said they paid Ben. But here, I’ll do it for Free. I’ll be in front of this cam between 1:15 and 1:30 Rio time. I’ll wave to you Blue! Plaid Shorts, White t-shirt and a baseball cap. (My office wear)
http://vejoaovivo.com.br/rj/rio-de-janeiro/rua-bolivar-42-copacabana.html
Lola,
Do falling prices send you into CraterRage?
Do falling prices send you into CraterRage?
No. I don’t root for them to fall here but It goes with the territory. And I’ll be the first to send you any articles I find about prices dropping. I actually think they will even in the local currency. But not for the easy mortgage credit reason.
“I’ll do it for Free”
Well, that settles it. Now we know what you are, and what your price is!
Now we know what you are, and what your price is!
I actually expected a higher level from you Blue. Jr. High jokes?
It’s not my turn to seriously piss you off…
I have a suggestion though; Your link to your video cam coincides with fund raising week here at HBB. How about you make a nice donation coincident with your selfie? I am sure it will make us all feel better.
Well that’s good news Lola. Here’s something for you to be happy about for once.
Southlake, TX Sale Prices NoseDive 25%; Inventory Balloons As Crude Craters
http://www.zillow.com/southlake-tx/home-values/
AB Dan, Rio, I hate to see this fratricidal conflict going on between two HBB stalwarts. I follow both of your (non-flame war) posts quite avidly and think you both add a lot to this board when you aren’t engaged in scorched-earth flame wars with each other, which is distracting and annoying especially for newbies who might be turned off by that kind of bickering.
I would appeal to both of you to cease & desist with the gratuitous personal insults, for starters. Focus on what this blog is supposed to be about: the housing bubble and how it affects us. You both bring valuable insights and perspectives to the forum. Focus on that instead of one-upping each other.
“Even if one believed a person should be killed, I can’t imagine talking about it this way.”
Hillary on Gaddafi - “we came, we saw, he died.” laughing? - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtH7iv4ip1U - 396k -
In one word, I say India.”
Can our system even work without growth ?
Interesting article which among other things really shows just how dependent alternative energy sources are on government subsidies, in Texas about half the cost of production and still not competitive in a low NG environment, I on the road again today but will try to post:
http://eaglefordtexas.com/news/id/149042/another-victim-of-the-price-drop-texas-renewable-energy/
According to Lola the Statist, everything good is subsidized by the government.
According to Lola the Statist, everything good is subsidized by the government.
And you’re a proven liar still lying. “Everything good”? Liar.
And sociopathism and lying are traits of warmongers.
If your prediction that oil prices will go back up is correct, then alternative energies will become more economical, just as fracking will.
One good thing about alternative energy, we don’t subsidize it by getting in the middle religious wars on the other side of the planet. Oh yeah, and it uses way less water to produce, which is starting to become quite a scarce resource in many parts of the country.
I think higher oil price makes “alternatives” more expensive, not less, since it takes a tankerload of oil to produce them. Negative return on energy invested… Building “alternatives” pushes the cost of oil up and pulls decades of consumption forward, like drinking more to help you get sober. All you’re doing is getting wasted.
If we put some of this still cheap energy into designing communities that don’t need so much energy to function we’d be a lot better off in the long run.
“Milton Copulus, the head of the National Defense Council Foundation, … a Reagan White House alum, and an advisor to half a dozen U.S. Energy Secretaries, various Secretaries of Defense, and two directors of the CIA… After taking into account the direct and indirect costs of oil, the economic costs of oil supply disruption, and military expenditures, he estimates the true cost of oil at a stunning $480 a barrel.”
Guess that makes oil more taker than maker, eh Dan? ; - )
Interesting article which among other things really shows just how dependent alternative energy sources are on government subsidies…
That’s also true of more conventional energy sources.
Tax breaks, U.S. research play big part in success of fracking
PITTSBURGH (AP) — It sounds like a free-market success story: a natural gas boom created by drilling company innovation, delivering a vast new source of cheap energy without the government subsidies that solar and wind power demand.
“The free market has worked its magic,” the Barnett Shale Energy Education Council, an industry group, claimed over the summer.
The boom happened “away from the greedy grasp of Washington,” the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank, wrote in an essay this year.
If bureaucrats “had known this was going on,” the essay went on, “surely Washington would have done something to slow it down, tax it more, or stop it altogether.”
But those who helped pioneer the technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, recall a different path. Over three decades, from the shale fields of Texas and Wyoming to the Marcellus in the Northeast, the federal government contributed more than $100 million in research to develop fracking, and billions more in tax breaks.
Now, those industry pioneers say their own effort shows that the government should back research into future sources of energy — for decades, if need be — to promote breakthroughs. For all its success now, many people in the oil and gas industry itself once thought shale gas was a waste of time.
“There’s no point in mincing words. Some people thought it was stupid,” said Dan Steward, a geologist who began working with the Texas natural gas firm Mitchell Energy in 1981. Steward estimated that in the early years, “probably 90 percent of the people” in the firm didn’t believe shale gas would be profitable.
“Did I know it was going to work? Hell no,” Steward added.
Shale is a rock formation thousands of feet underground. Among its largest U.S. deposits are the Marcellus Shale, under parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia, and the Barnett Shale is in north Texas. Geologists knew shale contained gas, but for more than 100 years the industry focused on shallower reserves. With fracking, large volumes of water, along with sand and hazardous chemicals, are injected underground to break rock apart and free the gas.
In 1975, the Department of Energy began funding research into fracking and horizontal drilling, where wells go down and then sideways for thousands of feet. But it took more than 20 years to perfect the process.
http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2012/09/tax_breaks_us_research_play_bi.html
BTFD!
#WWCMD
Buy The F’ing Diary???
Is China’s economy off to a slow start due to the Lunar New Year holiday?
It looks like the Global Economic Cooling has passed a tripping point.
“Is Trade Dying? Plunging Baltic Dry Index And Keep [sic] Commodity Prices Collapsing (Global Slowdown Continues)
https://confoundedinterest.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/is-trade-dying-plunging-baltic-dry-index-and-keep-commodity-prices-collapsing-global-slowdown-continues/
Heard on the Street
China’s Stumble Is More Than Seasonal
Workers in a shipyard in Yichang, in central China’s Hubei province, on March 1.
Photo: Getty Images
By Alex Frangos
Updated March 24, 2015 2:23 a.m. ET
Play it again, Sam, could be the unofficial motto of the Chinese economy this time of year.
For the fourth year in a row, China has stumbled out of the gate. The latest sign was HSBC’s preliminary purchasing managers index for March, which dipped below 50, indicating a contraction in activity.
A separate proxy measure of growth by Capital Economics—mixing electricity production, transport usage, and the like—is at its lowest since the 2003 SARS crisis. The proxy indicates growth on a year-over-year basis in the first quarter will dip below the government’s full-year target of 7%.
China naturally starts the year slowly because of the Lunar New Year holiday, during which factories shut down and workers go home. But that happens every year, so year-over-year growth indicators should take that into account.
The ever-slower starts could be because companies have less cushion and confidence than they used to, suggests Andrew Batson of GaveKal Dragonomics. Corporate decision makers become scared that the slow start to the year wasn’t just a bump in the road, but the start of a prolonged downturn.
A property market that has failed to respond to the removal of lending curbs could be intensifying fears that this year is different. Most entrepreneurs in China are property investors in some form, through their companies’ use of real estate as collateral and investment, or because they own property in their personal accounts. A 5% drop in prices nationwide is understandably undermining confidence.
…
Comments.
Ruediger Sahm 16 hours ago
>> Corporate decision makers become scared that the slow start to the year wasn’t just a bump in the road, but the start of a prolonged downturn. <<
I am surprised that those “corporate decision makers” did not see this coming sooner. As best I know, the global economy has been kinda sluggish for a few years.
Oh, yeah! China’s official growth rate: what was it again? Wait:
7.5% for as long as I can think back.
7.4% after that.
Supposedly 7.0% now.
If they don’t “cook the books” that would surprise me.
Robert Carter 18 hours ago
@Chris Holten
Our economy cannot grow that much higher than it currently is as a developed country.. and despite your rhetoric this should not be tied to Obama. I will never understand how someone intelligent enough to read and post on WSJ insists on tying the rate of GDP growth to just the president… He has very little power to affect GDP - it is so much more dispersed in our economy Congress is much more the culprit. High school government class should have taught all of us that.
Robert Carter 18 hours ago
@Chris Holten That’s only if you believe this GNP growth rate is real… Many, many economists think this number is extremely suspect, and that the Chinese economy is already down in 3-5% range. Still not horrible.. but much lower than you are thinking. Basically, if this true, the Chinese economy has a false $ 1-2 trillion valuation tied to its total GNP of 11 trillion. Compared to other countries how they calculate this number is extremely hidden and hard to understand… There have been several prominent analysts who have compared this growth rate to true hard data (electricity use, energy, retail, etc, etc).. and they just do not believe that the growth rate has been anywhere near this high the past few years.
Would lies about growth rate really surprise anyone from a country that tries to block any message it does not agree with from being read by its citizens through the great firewall? Heck .. they have been blocking WSJ for years.
After six years of credit expansion and Trillions in stimulis, employment in the miracle country is stuck at 2008 levels.
“China now sees exactly where the last trillion dollar QE went… a de minimus and unsustained blip in the economy and liquidity-fueled rampage in stocks (which is not what a corruption-crackdown politburo wants to encourage”
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-23/china-lands-hard-rail-volume-plunges-pmi-tumbles-contraction-employment-worst-lehman
Beijing to Shut All Major Coal Power Plants to Cut Pollution
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-24/beijing-to-close-all-major-coal-power-plants-to-curb-pollution
“The city also aims to take other measures such as closing polluted companies and cutting cement production capacity to clear the air this year, according to the Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau.”
Less smog should make the residents of Beijing happier. Less cement, that sounds like putting a happy face on less construction.
Oh well, I guess we won’t be needing these coal trains through WA to the export terminals then . . .
Are you invested in any zombie REITs?
Real Estate
Property Investors’ Latest Horror: Zombie REITs
Formerly popular nontraded REITs fall on hard times
By Robbie Whelan
March 24, 2015 2:18 p.m. ET
Inland American Real Estate Trust Inc. is the kind of property company that gives some investors bad dreams. It raised $7.9 billion to buy assets it now can’t or won’t sell. The value of its holdings has plunged 60%. It has cut its dividend by three-quarters.
“It’s a zombie,” says Allan Roth, one of 170,000 shareholders of the nontraded real-estate investment trust. Instead of returning money to shareholders, the REIT is plowing proceeds from the few properties it has sold into new purchases or reducing debt, complains the financial adviser from Colorado Springs, Colo.
Nontraded REITs became popular among individual investors over the past five years with a simple proposition: buy portfolios of properties, pay annual dividends of 6% or more, then liquidate the assets and return investors’ original capital and then some. Instead of being traded on stock exchanges like traditional REITs, the funds are sold by brokers directly to investors.
Annual fundraising by nontraded REITs more than tripled between 2009 and 2013 to a record $20 billion. At the same time, funds began to return capital to investors on a faster timetable, often two to four years instead of six or eight that had been typical in the industry.
But some nontraded REITs grew so fast that they became difficult to unwind. Others overpaid for their properties and since the crash of the commercial property market have had trouble selling assets at a price that would make investors happy. Such funds became zombies.
…
Inland’s experience has been particularly rough. It raised a record $7.9 billion between 2005 and 2009, selling shares at $10 apiece, and did the bulk of its buying before the commercial real estate market turned south. The real-estate bust battered the value of its holdings, forcing the REIT in 2011 to cut the price of its shares to $7.22 apiece. In May 2012, it announced the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating its management fees and other issues.The investigation is ongoing, an Inland American spokesman said.
Inland isn’t planning to liquidate anytime soon. Mr. McGuinness said its strategy is to expand its portfolio of student housing through development and acquisition, and to refine its shopping-center holdings to focus on its most profitable markets. He said the company has expanded its credit line and is using the proceeds from some recent asset sales to pay down debt and fund the expansion rather than return money to shareholders.
“We have a lot of shareholders, Mr. McGuinness said. ”We’re trying to balance the desire to have a current yield and still have a base in student-housing and retail assets.”
…
Is bilking students and their families out of a considerable fortune in rent for the pleasure of living near campus some kind of perennial real estate investing cash cow?
It’s a little sweeter to snake a drain or replace a garbage disposer when it’s a sorority house. And make sure you switch off a breaker before you leave so you can come back the next day.
well if you dont have a car or at least 18 hours of a bus/subway line at campus, how do you get home at 10-11pm after the night school and a trip to the library or a night time event?
My neighbor a while back asked about investing in non-traded REITs.
He is a math guy, so I told him that he will have limited liquidity, and so he should be paid well for the privilege of investing in such a thing. I told him to look at 2 things:
1. The fees that come out right off the top. When you pay the broker dealer, etc., often times you pay 15% of your $1 invested. So, only 85% of your money goes toward buying the REIT.
2. The cash flow generated by the real estate as compared to the dividends paid. Often times the REITs promise a certain yield that is not actually achievable in the market, and so they use sale proceeds, or new capital raises to generate the cash for the promised yield. A fully disclosed ponzi.
I guided him toward public REITs if he wanted real estate exposure. The yields are lower, but at least (for the most part), they are legit–most REITs pay out only 65-70% of the cash flow generated by the real estate. And, the investment is liquid through public markets.
Racist senior editor Jamilah Lemieux of Ebony.com makes quite a statement much to the delight and giggles of the “better” next to her.
MSNBC guest: ‘Nothing says “Let’s go kill some Muslims” like country music.’
By Erik Wemple March 25 at 7:32 PM
Freshly announced presidential candidate Ted Cruz has made news with his claim that he became a fan of country music after rock-and-roll music disappointed him with its response to the Sept. 11 attacks. The MSNBC afternoon program “Now with Alex Wagner” used Cruz’s music comments as the jumping-off point for a discussion among guest host Ari Melber, Joan Walsh, Michael Steele and Jamilah Lemieux.
“Nothing says ‘Let’s go kill some Muslims’ like country music,” said Lemieux in kicking off the festivities. The comment came off as something packaged, premeditated. While Walsh and Steele giggled, Melber remained stone-faced, vouching for the pluralism of the genre. “Well, but I mean, there’s plenty of country music that doesn’t have that message,” he said.
Moments later, Melber returned to the matter, telling viewers: “We have a programming note. A few minutes ago on this program, a guest made a comment about country music that was not appropriate, and we want to be clear this network does not condone it. ”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/…/ -
just like occupy wall street where were any recent rock bands? i think occupy would have lasted a lot longer but a freak Halloween snowstorm gave bloomberg the opportunity to move in and end it…..people were starting to get sick because of the cold rain snow
Racis cops in Fort Lauderdale exchanged text messages showing Obama with gold teeth:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/26/politics/doj-police-racially-offensive-text-messages
“Racis cops in Fort Lauderdale exchanged text messages showing Obama with gold teeth:”
That’s not going to get any laughs on MSNBC
“Nothing says ‘Let’s go kill some Muslims’ like country music,” said Lemieux
“Southern Voice” by Tim McGraw - YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv5FJb0rHuQ - 352k -
Sheer ignorance and pandering to the basest instincts of the population. Every human being has a divine spark. Some suppress it more than others.
Houston area and Dallas-Fort Worth top nation’s fastest-growth list.
Dallas-Fort Worth added more new residents than almost anywhere else in the U.S. in the latest population estimates.
The area trailed only Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, the Census Bureau reported Thursday.
Four Texas counties — Harris, Bexar, Dallas and Tarrant — were among the Top 10 nationally in numeric growth. Three others — Hays, Fort Bend and Comal — were among the 10 fastest-growing counties of 10,000 or more residents by percentage increase.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/metro/20150326-houston-area-and-dallas-fort-worth-top-nations-fastest-growth-list.ece
Amazon’s one-hour delivery now available in Dallas.
Amazon says the list is in the tens of thousands and includes things like Tide, Bounty paper towels and Cheerios.
http://bizbeatblog.dallasnews.com/2015/03/amazon-coms-one-hour-deliver-now-available-in-dallas-find-you-zip-code.html/
Cheerios at your door in an hour for $7.95…no wonder the terrorists hate us so much.
The problem is, you are still stuck in Dallas.
The problem with Texas is that it’s chock full of Texans.
A Saudi sheik had a son whose birthday was coming up. So he asked the son what he wanted for his birthday
The boy says: “A Mickey Mouse outfit”
A few days later, the sheik returns, to give his son the bad news…..
“Sorry, my son, but your father cannot get you a Mickey Mouse outfit. Rick Perry says Texas isn’t for sale to no A-Rabs”.
My favorite - ‘You can tell a Texan, but you can’t tell him much’
This is crazy misallocation of resources, malinvestment and overcapacity. We need Cheerios or Tide delivered in less than an hour? I can also get either in less than 15 minutes driving to the store.
Right, but why have multiple competing grocery stores with their large parking lots? It’s probably more efficient to have delivery of the goods. One vehicle doing rounds versus tons of cars driving to and from.
Ask all of those old coal miners how dealing with one “company store” worked out for them.
I can get Cheetos in less than 15 minutes by foot, plus a cold draft to power me home.
Up on Rice lake in Ontario, you can beep your horn and a few cheerful youngsters on a pontoon boat will come over instantly and serve you a cold ice-cream cone. That is a service!
I have young kids.
My wife is traveling next week.
If there was 1-hour delivery available for $8, and I find out that I’m short on essentials that I need for the next day (or that night), I have a choice to make:
1. Pile the kids in the car, get the essentials, and then cook them a simple and quick meal at home (or get something out) before bath/bed; or
2. Order something for 1-hour delivery for $8, and cook them a real meal before bath/bed.
I’d go with #2.
Of course, it would need to be an essential–cereal doesn’t qualify.
And this is not something I would do habitually, but only in certain circumstances.
An old farmer (John Seymore maybe) once said that the daily running to town for necessities was insanity. I raised some kids too and there was always a spare everything and a backup everything and things in the pantry and freezer well in advance. Also, there is always pancake mix.
The biggest crisis we ever had was when one of the girls washed her favorite white top to wear the next day in with her brother’s shirt, and he had left a ball point pen in the pocket. That was an emergency!
The service could also be useful for elderly and disabled people who can’t get around easily.
As the great Jello Biafra once said ‘give me convenience, or give me death!’
I had this discussion with my partners yesterday. They are members of Amazon Prime. I am not. I rarely need anything so quickly that slow-poke, 5 day shipping doesn’t work.
And the grocery store is smack between my office and home. I can park, run in, get an item, and back in my car–only delays my trip home by 5-10 minutes.
That said, there have been a couple of times that I used Google Shopping Express for items. Once, I needed to pick up some noise-limiting headphones for my kids before we went on a long-ish road trip–more for parental sanity than anything else. I needed to go to two stores (each store only had 1 pair in stock).
It wasn’t an emergency–we certainly could have lived without them. However, rather than spend 1-2 hours driving to the stores myself, Google Express got them for me and delivered to my doorstep that day for a minimal cost. It was brilliant.
We have a friend who’s husband is out of town during the weekdays for 6 months each year (and is then stay-at-home dad for 6 months). She has a demanding career, and has daycare during the day, but little time to go shopping for necessities, etc. She uses Google Shopping Express for Costco runs, etc.
If the cost is low enough, people will use the service. $5 for the occasional delivery for convenience? Absolutely. Everyday? Absolutely not.
The drive-in-and-wander-around model is - IMHO - well grounded in profit maximization. I don’t think anybody will dispute that going in and wandering the aisles results in higher checkout bills! Prolly results in enough additional spending to pay for the parking lot and taxes many times over.
If I were to depend on delivery for groceries, I’d fill out my list ahead of time. The things that I forgot I needed might go unbought for months - until the Eureka! moment. It is only then that I break stride, find a notebook, and actually write something down.
I’m thinking the wandering-around model contributes more to GDP.
The ‘unique’ reason your home’s still on the market
Kelli B. Grant
20 Hours Ago
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102531467 - 216k -
All you higher-income $50k a year fat cats are just SOL
Low-income people loved Obamacare, but the rest of us…
Dan Mangan
18 Hours Ago
The carrots worked pretty well for Obamacare this year. The stick? Not so much.
People with higher incomes in 2015 were much less likely to enroll in Obamacare plans than lower-income earners—even when they were offered financial assistance to help pay for their health plans, according to an analysis released Wednesday.
And the differences in uptake of Obamacare were dramatic between income groups, with a sharp falloff as people’s annual earnings increased and the amount of subsidies available decreased, the analysis by the Avalere Health consultancy found.
Those pronounced drops were particularly striking because they occurred even between groups who are eligible for the most generous kind of Obamacare private plan assistance.
A whopping 76 percent of Obamacare-eligible individuals who earned between $11,770 and $17,655 annually actually signed up for a plan this year on the federally run insurance exchange HealthCare.gov, which serves 37 states, Avalere found. That income group represents the low end for qualifying for Obamacare subsidies, and as a rule those people would receive the largest amount of financial aid.
But there were steep declines in the next two income groups, even though those people receive not only help paying their monthly premiums, but as with the lower earners remain eligible for financial assistance to cover out-of-pocket medical expenses.
Just 41 percent of eligible people earning between 151 and 200 percent of the federal poverty level bought HealthCare.gov plans. And just 30 percent of eligible people in the next income group, earning up to 250 percent of the poverty level, bought such a plan.
Only 16 percent of eligible people who earned between $35,427 and $47,080—the high-end Obamacare subsidy recipients—bought a HealthCare.gov plan.
And when the subsidies weren’t available, because a person earned more than $47,080, the participation was far lower.
Just 2 percent of eligible people above that income enrolled in a HealthCare.gov plan, the Avalere analysis found.
“Virtually all of the people signing up for this are people who receive subsidies from the federal government,” said Avalere Health CEO Dan Mendelson.
“A lot of the higher-income people are not participating in this,” he said. “The exchanges are primarily a low-income benefit. … The people signing up for these benefits are the ones that are heavily subsidized.”
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102534125
Uh … wouldn’t people with higher incomes be far more likely to get insurance at work than low paid workers, who probably don’t even have a single, full time job?
Individual Health Insurance Plans: Upending Coverage for Millions
Because individuals who buy their own health insurance receive no employer subsidy for their health coverage, and often receive no taxpayer subsidy, they frequently shop for the most economical plan available. However, most individual plans do not comply with Obamacare’s new mandated benefits.
Obamacare includes a list of 10 “essential benefits” that health plans must cover—including coverage of maternity services, habilitative services, and pediatric vision care.
The law also requires that most health plans cover at least 60 percent of expected medical expenses. A study last year suggested that more than half of individual market insurance policies do not meet these so-called actuarial value requirements.
Because they do not comply with the law’s new required benefits, one expert has concluded that as many as 85 percent of individual health insurance policies—affecting up to 16 million individuals—will be cancelled due to Obamacare.
http://www.heritage.org/…/factsheets/2013/11/losing-health-insurance-due-to-obamacare - 62k -
Comment by phony scandals
2015-03-26 07:38:45
Individual Health Insurance Plans: Upending Coverage for Millions
heritage.org/research/factsheets/2013/11/losing-health-insurance-due-to-obamacare
So this article is saying that the insurance provided by Obamacare to help poorer people get insurance is mainly being used by poorer people. What a shocker.
It’s helping middle class people lose their insurance.
What a shocker.
“Because they do not comply with the law’s new required benefits, one expert has concluded that as many as 85 percent of individual health insurance policies—affecting up to 16 million individuals—will be cancelled due to Obamacare.”
Wow. An article from the right wing Heritage Foundation quotes “one expert” on how gosh darn awful Obamacare is. This is about as lame a post as any you’ve ever made, buy they’re all pretty lame to begin with, so it’s really just par for the course.
But it’s true. Many, many people got their hours knocked back to part-time so the company would not have to provide health benefits for them. Ask anybody in retail about this.
My own plan got cancelled due to O-care. The one I have now is worse and with a higher deductible.
And besides the misleading statistics on how many people are now covered, let’s look at what the deductibles are for those people - so high, in fact, that essentially all of their care is now out-of-pocket. WIN for O-care supporters and health insurers, but everybody else is screwed.
But it’s true. Many, many people got their hours knocked back to part-time so the company would not have to provide health benefits for them. Ask anybody in retail about this.
If they were working full time (say for a national retail chain) then they were already getting insurance because if you offer insurance to people at HQ, then you have to offer it to all full time employees. Ditto with paid time off and other bennies. And you can bet that all national retailers provide their professional staff at HQ (procurement, finance, accounting, IT, etc) with insurance, or they wouldn’t be able to attract them.
This predates Obamacare by decades. It’s why there haven’t been full time menial jobs for a very long time in Corporate America. It’s why the mail room, the janitors, security and the people in the cafeteria were all outsourced decades ago.
No one had their hours reduced because those people were already part time and have been for decades.
Obamacare had two parts:
1. Give subsidies so people with less income can buy insurance on the private market;
2. Create a penalty system to cause people to buy insurance who have higher incomes (and don’t get the subsidies).
One Republican criticism of the plan was that if the goal was to get healthy people who have good incomes to buy insurance, the penalties were too low.
The carrot is working. The stick is not.
I would be very interested if they overlaid data on “pre-existing conditions” to see how that plays into it. I would be willing to bet that if you only look at people with pre-existing conditions, the effect described is less extreme.
In other words, I’ll bet that a disproportionate number of people who bought insurance without subsidies did so because they have a pre-existing condition.
“A lot of the higher-income people are not participating in this,” he said. “The exchanges are primarily a low-income benefit. … The people signing up for these benefits are the ones that are heavily subsidized.”
well you had to pass it to find out how it would work since law makers are too stupid to figure this out ahead of time .
Covert warfare coming to Texas sparks some fears of federal takeover
Dylan Baddour, Houston Chronicle | March 25, 2015 |
Is Texas ‘hostile’ territory?
This map, from an Army slideshow explaining Operation Jade Helm, frightened some with its designation of Texas as a “hostile” territory.
Operation Jade Helm will bring a coalition of forces, including the Green Berets, SEALS, and special operations commands from the Air Force and Marines to Texas for two months of “realistic military training” in a simulated “hostile” territory between July and September this summer.
Army Special Operation Command spokesman Mark Lastoria said soldiers would practice “emerging concepts in special operations warfare” in Texas.
“Training exercise Jade Helm is going to assist our Special Operations Soldiers in refining the skills needed against an ever changing foreign threat,” he said.
Among the planned exercises, soldiers will try to operate undetected amongst civilian populations in some towns and cities where residents will be advised to report any suspicious activity they notice as a means of testing the military’s effectiveness, said county law enforcement officials who had been briefed by the Army.
“They’re going to set up cells of people and test how well they’re able to move around without getting too noticed in the community,” said Roy Boyd, chief deputy with the Victoria County Sheriff’s Office. “They’re testing their abilities to basically blend in with the local environment and not stand out and blow their cover.”
http://www.chron.com/news/article/Covert-warfare-comming-to-Texas-6157685.php - 362k -
So they will be looking to have a bunch of guys with a sh##load of guns try to blend in…..
Theyve just describes 95% of the rural and suburban population between Pittsburg and the Continental Divide.
I guess they outgrew their $96 million fake city.
Although that mosque sure looks like a church to me.
US army builds fake city to shoot at during training
The American army has built an entire fake city including a school, a mosque and a football stadium
By Lucy Kinder
11:54AM GMT 13 Feb 2014
The US army has built a fake city designed to be used during combat training exercises.
The 300 acre ‘town’ includes a five story embassy, a bank, a school, an underground subway and train station, a mosque, a football stadium, and a helicopter landing zone.
Located in Virginia, the realistic subway station comes complete with subway carriages and the train station has real train carriages.
The subway carriages even carry the same logo as the carriages in Washington DC
There are also bridges and several other structures which can be transformed into different scenarios.
The $96 million is designed to meticulously “replicate complex operational environments and develop solutions”.
Colonel John P. Petkosek, the commander of the group said of the new training city :
“This is the place where we can be creative, where we can come up with solutions for problems that we don’t even know we have yet,”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/…/US-army-builds-fake-city-to-shoot-at-during-training.html -
Well, Rick Perry did say he thought Texas should secede…
I’d love to see Special Forces guys try to “blend in” with communities that look like The People of Wal-Mart.
FYI Ben Jones I have a new IP address because I got a new one of these:
http://www.cnet.com/products/zte-grand-x-max-plus
Mucked-up housing market: wages vs. price boom (yeah…this looks sustainable.)
http://wolfstreet.com/2015/03/26/wage-growth-vs-home-price-appreciation/
I thought the two interesting markets there were Detroit and Atlanta.
So the 28 year old copilot with “hundreds of hours” of flight experience decided to off himself, and take the airplane and passengers with him.
Probably did the math, and discovered his flight training loans will be impossible to pay off making $25k/year.
Kinda what I figured when the news guyz started talking about the aircraft taking 8 minutes to descent. About 3-4 thousand feet a minute. A fairly steep descent rate, but definitely under control.
Some of the passengers might not even have noticed. At least before the PIC started beating on the door.
Apparently screams from the passenger compartment are audible on the flight recorder.
I sure hope my daughter, who is afraid to fly, somehow misses the news on this incident.
Apparently screams from the passenger compartment are audible on the flight recorder.
I can’t believe there was not a key (secret system) that anyone authorized in the cockpit could open that door from the outside. It seems damn obvious. No?
The trouble will be that the “terrorists” will know about it before long. And someone will always spill the beans on the “secret”.
This has been my point for a while. The pool of qualified, level headed, experienced pilots and mechanics who will work for table scraps is getting depleted rapidly, if not actually empty.
It’s a multi-level problem, with solutions that should have been implemented 5-10 years ago. But it would have required the airlines to start spending some money, which none of them reportedly had.
So, as I have personally observed, the positions are being filled by the best qualified person who will work for what they are willing to pay. And this occurs only after they find out that they can’t stack this job onto another guy, who is already on the payroll
(Hence, the proliferation in corporate aviation of the full time pilot/part time Director of Maintenance”)
This has been my point for a while. The pool of qualified, level headed, experienced pilots and mechanics who will work for table scraps is getting depleted rapidly, if not actually empty.”
H1b ? can’t let labor push equity around you know
The US is the only country that treats aircraft mechanics as “semi-skilled labor”
First World licensed aircraft mechanics don’t immigrate here, because they make more money at home. I’m called a “Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineer” anywhere else but the USA.
Here’s the dirty little secret airlines don’t want you to know………..although they do have licensed mechanics, any numbnutz can work on airliners, as long as he works at a licensed “Repair Station”, or has his work “observed and supervised” by an A&P. (the way my uncle got his license…..came out of the USAF, worked for AA under an airline/FAA issued “Repairman’s Certificate” while he went to night school for his A&P)
The theory being, Joe Blow does the work, while having his work supervised and inspected by a Quality Control Department, or an A&P. It used to be a pretty good way to get your foot in the door. Of course, management, being the loophole sniffing/cheap azz/cost cutting morons they are, decided to drive a 747 thru this loophole.
What constitutes “supervision”? And how many people can one QC Inspector/A&P “supervise?
(Answer: 10? 100? 200?….as many as the guy’s conscience will allow him to. At least until the maintenance-induced accident)
It’s all about “shareholder” value in the oligarcy’s casino economy. If the 95% of idiots who voted for crony capitalism and corporate statism in 2008 and 2012 (the Obama Zombies, McCain Mutants, and Romney Retards) really knew what they were voting for, would the outcome have been any different?
Probably not. You can’t fix stupid.
A false economy, paying busboy wages to pilots.
http://www.businessinsider.com/r-pilots-actions-may-add-to-germanwings-liability-in-mountain-crash-lawyers-2015-3
I can’t believe there was not a key (secret system) that anyone authorized in the cockpit could open that door from the outside. It seems damn obvious. No?
“The A320 is designed with safeguards to allow emergency entry if a pilot inside is unresponsive, but the override code known to the crew does not go into effect — and indeed goes into a lockdown — if the person inside the cockpit specifically denies entry, according to an Airbus training video and a pilot who has six years of experience with the jets.”
Let the Robot fly the plane. As long as the robot isn’t hacked, I am sure we will be fine.
If he wanted to off himself, he could have done in private. Why take 150 innocents with you? This guy wanted to get even with the world or something.
But yeah, paying some guy a menial wage to help fly a $100 million dollar airliner with 150 passengers on board seems a tad stranger. A shift manager at a McDonalds is bette rpaid.
Got to love it though. The terrorist proof door does no good if a nutjob is at the helm. From what I read somewhere, because of the vault like nature of the modern flight deck, that there is never supposed to be only one person in there and apparently that protocol was not followed.
+1. And now they’re saying he was “depressed.” No, he was homicidal and deranged.
Fed Should Push Unemployment Well Below 5%, Paper Says
By Pedro Nicolaci da Costa
The Federal Reserve should hold short-term interest rates near zero long enough to drive unemployment well below 5%, even if it means letting inflation exceed the central bank’s 2% target.
That’s according to Laurence Ball, economics professor and monetary policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, in a paper to be published next week by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and made available to The Wall Street Journal.
Fed officials have made clear they expect to start raising their benchmark short-term interest rate, the federal funds rate, from near zero sometime this year as long as the economy continues to improve.
Fed officials last week released updated economic forecasts showing they generally expect unemployment to fall from 5.5% in February to between 5.0% and 5.2% by the end of this year, and they expect the jobless rate to settle into that range in the long run. They do forecast the rate could go as low as 4.9% by the end of 2016 and 4.8% by the end of 2017.
Mr. Ball says the Fed could create more jobs by letting the unemployment rate fall lower. It should seek to push the rate “well below 5%, at least temporarily,” he writes. That could help bring some discouraged workers to reenter the labor market, as well as help the long-term unemployed find work and involuntary part-time workers find full-time jobs, he said.
“A likely side effect would be a temporary rise in inflation above the Fed’s target, but that outcome is acceptable,” writes Mr. Ball, who has been a visiting scholar at various central banks, including the Fed and often testifies on Capitol Hill about Fed policy. “To push unemployment down, the Fed should keep interest rates near zero for longer than is currently expected, certainly past the end of 2015.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/03/25/fed-should-push-unemployment-well-below-5-paper-says/
If we had honest unemployment stats, we’d be well above 20% hardcore unemployment.
As an aside, this is where some of our “free market” types get it all wrong.
When there is a shortage of qualified individuals, businesses NEVER try to outbid each other for labor
They lower the requirements. If the requirements are a government reg, they lobby to get the reg changed to reduce the requirements.
Its SOP in the so-called “safety sensitive” aviation business. It can only be worse in unregulated businesses.
All you guys out there who work in the real world…….tell me I dont know what Im talking about.
I concur. As soon as labor gets tight, tech companies run to Wash DC and beg for increases in the H1B visa quotas. How can we expect American kids to pay off student loans when Congress undercuts them with cheaper foreign labor?
My apartment complex is about 1/4 Indian techies. You can see them leaving by carpool every morning, with their business casual techie uniforms, and the lanyards around their necks with their security badges and Flash Drives. Or taking walks with grandmama in the evening.
Amount of interaction with their neighbors? Zero.
So much for the “melting pot”.
Indians are some of the smuggest, smarmiest people on this planet. I quit riding the bus to work because of them. Why we let so many into this country to take jobs away from Americans, I don’t know. Their country is a giant septic tank, and they act like they’re too good for the rest of the world. Kill whatever program lets them come here. Now.
Update: Copilot’s total flight hours……630 hours total time.
That is effing insane, if true. The Germans can’t be that stupid.
The industry’s answer is: “In WWII, we turned over B-17s and B-24s to kids with only 2-300 hours”
Yeah, but the screening programs for pilot applicants were tighter back then (in today’s market, all you have to do is pass a physical, and scratch out a check) You were more likely to be kicked out of pilot training if you failed to meet standards.
And don’t ask any embarrassing questions about the safety record of those 300 hour pilots, especially in aircraft requiring a higher degree of skill (B-24s, B-26s). Or how they actually performed when they left the sunny plains and desert southwest, and started flying in places with REAL weather (Alaska, Northeast Europe).
This is the precise reason why the FAA mandated that all airline pilots have ATPs (1500 hours minimum, before you can even take the test). (Of course, the industry bitched about “overregulation”)
As it so happens, we hired a pilot last week. Our (and our insurance carrier’s) requirements:
ATP
Minimum 1000 hours of “jet time”
Dassault Falcon Type rating, and experience in type.
A friend of mine is a pilot, and for a while, he was training some folks from China. He said to never fly on a Chinese airline–if you needed to fly from one Chinese city to another, try to do so on an American airline.
His comment was related to many of his students having never driven a car before, but being trained to jump right into flying a 737.
Heard from flight instructor, under contract to train pilots in the Far East: “Not enough generations between the water buffalo and the airplane”
The problem is, we are developing the same issues. The millenials and newer all think that this electronic stuff is infallible, and a bunch of them have never laid a wrench on anything before they started working on airplanes.
Flight training is designed to “pass the test”. Fail a sim session, and you get to do it again until you get it right. What about issues that nobody simulates? Put a newly minted ATP, and a 600 hour co-pilot on the airplane instead of Sullenberger and crew, and the “Miracle on the Hudson” probably turns into “Fatal Crash on the Hudson”.
The millenials and newer all think that this electronic stuff is infallible
It’s impossible to prove that all the code running in an airliner’s computers is bug free. That alone gives me pause whenever I board a fly by wire jet. Now we can add overworked/underpaid and psychotic flight crew to the mix.
I wonder what the co-pilot’s family is going through. They probably had no clue that he had gone over the edge. Imagine knowing that your son murdered 150 people because he was nuts.
If you voted for Obama, McCain, or Romney, you voted for off-shoring American jobs and importing cheap labor. Don’t go bitching to me if you got what you voted for. The consequences of stupidity WILL manifest themselves.
Some oil guys I have heard been making pretty good bank following the boom. It’s still a boom by the way.
What time today will Lola have another meltdown?
Brazil time or DC time?
Powerful ideas piss-off weak and biased minds.
Adan, WarMonger and HA.
The top three on his “haters list” anyone with good ideas would like to have.
And all three are liars.
Lola,
Add me as one of your tenants in that big space in your empty skull.
Ok Shillow/Strawberry
BTW Peeps. I’m seeing a more for sale signs but no rentals really. And I’m going past the Olympic golf course today. As of last week almost nothing has been done except a little earth moving. Can a good golf course be built in 500 days?
Falling prices is always positively bullish and good for the economy Lola.
White Salmon, WA List Prices Plunge 19%; Inventory Balloons As Sellers Slash
http://www.zillow.com/white-salmon-wa/home-values/
I’m not LolaLOL or Shillow either.
I’m Liberace.
“Powerful ideas piss-off weak…”
You could be right, but you haven’t tested your theory.
You could be right, but you haven’t tested your theory.
LOL. Fair enough! Have a good day and weekend.
I’m sending you a donation Ben. Thanks!
There you go!
If the minds in question are very weak, the ideas don’t have to be very powerful.
Communists got to communist.
#FundamentalTransformationOfAmerica
What time today will Lola have another meltdown?
I really wish you’d knock that sh!t off. Baiting another HBB member just to be obnoxious is bad form.
If it succeeds in having him and his silly cut and pasted propaganda banned then it is good form. If you think he adds anything but rage and lies you are wrong.
Is there any chance the Fed will engage in a few rounds of stock market bloodletting before they finally get around to raising interest rates? It would seem politically unattractive to them for the market to crash in the immediate aftermath of rate increases; why not let rational expectations do the work of letting the air out of the market in advance of tightening?
Is now a good time for dips to buy?
Futures lower, world stock markets down
By: Jane Onyanga-Omara
March 26, 2015 2:57 am
U.S. stock futures were lower Thursday, along with world stock markets and the dollar, battered by weak economic data and tensions in the Middle East.
Here is where major market index futures stood ahead of the start of regular trading:
Dow: -1%
S&P 500: -1%
Nasdaq: -1%
In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 index plunged 1.4% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index dropped 0.1%. The Shanghai Composite gained 0.6%.
European shares were lower Thursday, with France’s CAC 40 sliding 1.3%, Germany’s DAX dropping 1.6% and Britain’s FTSE 100 shedding 1.1%.
The U.S. Commerce Department reported Wednesday that orders to U.S. factories for long-lasting manufactured goods fell in February for the third time in four months. That data came after a survey showed Chinese manufacturing at its weakest in nearly a year.
…
Wall Street needs someone to buy their overpriced paper at some point, otherwise they’ll be stuck with it as it crashes through the floor. Any volunteers?
Try to avoid flights with suicidal copilots on board.
I’m still formulating the ideal question to ask the pilots as I board the plane - then I can claim I left my phone back in the terminal and get off if they give the wrong answer.
Any ideas?
Want to make a lot of friends (not)?
If it’s a full flight, while taxiing out, tell the flight attendant that your seat belt is broken.
Not sure why but I woke up this morning singin Country Joe and the Fish…..I FEEL LIKE I’M FIXIN’ TO DIE RAG LYRICS..
Off to DC for the weekend - gonna do something alot more important - visit my daughter and catch up with her for a couple of days.
“Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He’s got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun.
And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.
Well, come on generals, let’s move fast;
Your big chance has come at last.
Gotta go out and get those reds
The only good commie is the one who’s dead
And you know that peace can only be won
When we’ve blown ‘em all to kingdom come.
And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.
Huh!
Well, come on Wall Street, don’t move slow,
Why man, this is war au-go-go.
There’s plenty good money to be made
By supplying the Army with the tools of the trade,
Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb,
They drop it on the Viet Cong.
And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.
Well, come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Come on fathers, don’t hesitate,
Send ‘em off before it’s too late.
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.
And it’s one, two, three
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam.
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.”
Drudge Report is now pimping the reefer madness meme (remember that Sheldon Adelson spent $5 million to defeat a Florida medical marijuana ballot initiative in 2014)
denver.cbslocal.com/2015/03/25/marijuana-edibles-blamed-for-keystone-death
Maybe this 23 year old dumb@ss should have read the label before consuming the whole package
Darwinian self-selection.
So…on the tail of the article noting the Walmart is the largest employer in several states we have this:
Attention Wally Mart employees and shoppers…..
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2015/03/26/mystery-odor-at-muncie-walmart-sends-8-to-ball-memorial-hospital/70475498/
What a long strange trip it’s been.
That was the fun part. Getting home, that’s a bitch.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFsbAuX9P4w - 335k -
Much appreciated. I remain for a while far from home.
take risks or else ? This could end badly.
John Sweeney, executive vice president for retirement planning and strategy at Fidelity Investments, advises those in their 50s and 60s to take more risks than they might if interest rates were higher. “We’re asking folks to make sure they aren’t too conservative at a time when interest rates are so low,” he says. “They need some portion of their savings growing, because they don’t know if they’re going to be running a sprint or a marathon as they age—and have to plan for the marathon.”
I bet most of the investment advice this guy hands out involves paying him fees, or investing in financial “products” that pay him a commission.
“plan for the marathon…”
I’d rather travel light and relax.
“We’re asking folks to make sure they aren’t too conservative at a time when interest rates are so low,”
Sheep need to be readied for sheering.
lather, rinse , repeat !
Dont you love a centrally planned economy where bankers pick the winners? They must make some nice cash off their bets. Knowing the outcome is critical to the game.
95% of the electorate sanctioned crony capitalism with their votes in 2008 and 2012. They’ll do so again in 2016. You can’t fix stupid.
Alburqueson
“The Canadian oil industry will shed nearly 8,000 jobs this year as revenues fall by $43 billion (Can.) in response to the plunge in oil prices, predicts the Conference Board of Canada.
A report by the group predicts a pretax loss of more than $3 billion for the industry.
At current prices, the report says, new projects in the Canadian oil sands and tight-oil plays are seen as uneconomic.
According to the report, break-even costs in the oil sands are $60-80/bbl (US) for a steam-assisted gravity drainage project and $90-100/bbl for a mine.
The report projects oil investments will fall to $40 billion this year from $56 billion last year.
Still, total crude oil production in Canada will rise to 3.8 million b/d this year from 3.6 million b/d in 2014 as projects based on past investments come on stream.
The report projects an average oil price of $55/bbl in 2015. Reduced investment will ease production growth as low oil prices spur demand.”
“However, the days of triple-digit oil prices have passed for the immediate future,” the report says. “With the rise of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, the US industry will be able to quickly respond and increase production if prices reach $80/bbl, putting a hard cap on prices.”
Any comments ? I believe this came from O & G today.
Comment by Albuquerquedan
Sorry for the misspelling.
Netanyahu’s Spying Denials Contradicted by Secret NSA Documents
Israel’s claim is not only incredible on its face. It is also squarely contradicted by top-secret NSA documents, which state that Israel targets the U.S. government for invasive electronic surveillance, and does so more aggressively and threateningly than almost any other country in the world. Indeed, so concerted and aggressive are Israeli efforts against the U.S. that some key U.S. government documents — including the top secret 2013 intelligence budget — list Israel among the U.S.’s most threatening cyber-adversaries and as a “hostile” foreign intelligence service.
One top-secret 2008 document features an interview with the NSA’s Global Capabilities Manager for Countering Foreign Intelligence, entitled “Which Foreign Intelligence Service Is the Biggest Threat to the US?” He repeatedly names Israel as one of the key threats.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/25/netanyahus-spying-denial-directly-contradicted-secret-nsa-documents/
Everything about this is just sad sad sad. The horrors of the Holocaust do not grant a green light to the human rights abuses toward the Palestinians. If Roosevelt and Truman hadn’t rejected the refugee boats, and instead initiated a campaign of evacuation from Europe, maybe all these problems could have been prevented…
buy stocks and homes and your problems will go away!
The Fed’s ZIRP has cost savers $470 billion - at least.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/financial-repression-has-cost-savers-470-billion-swiss-re-argues-2015-03-26?link=MW_home_latest_news
But just think of how much money it has made homeowners!
If you like your rigged stock market, you can keep your rigged stock market.
http://nypost.com/2015/03/25/us-stock-market-is-just-way-too-riggin-easy/
I like my rigged stock market. Thanks for allowing me to keep it.
Region IV