Housing Bubble 2.0 - (Part 2) - Voila, an American Dream
Posted On: Saturday - July 8th 2017 8:04PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Music University China Economics
In yesterday's post on Housing Bubble 2.0, graphs of median prices for cities in 5 regions of the country were presented. The conclusion was that the US West Coast is experiencing this much more than elsewhere due to the influx of foreign money, from China in particular.
Other evidence for this is the University towns/cities. This writer has been traveling quite a bit recently, and it is quite noticeable now how many Chinese travelers there are, on the airlines. When you notice where they are going to or coming from, it is almost always some city or town with a big university. They are everywhere education is, mostly in graduate schools (engineering/computers/stats are majority Chinese ALL AROUND THE COUNTRY.), but also many at the undergraduate level. What this has to do with housing is coming in a bit.
This is the time to mention the city of Boston though, alluded to as a special case in Part 1. Most big cities are bound to have a number of colleges of some sort, but they are not usually a big part of the economy. Boston is a big exception. Besides the goodly number of famous ones, MIT, Harvard, Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis, Cambridge, and Northeastern, there are hundreds of colleges there. There are in the neighborhood of 150,000 college students just at the big name schools. The college scene, cntrl-left and wacky as it may be these days, is still a great counterbalance to the rest of the population of that city, known as the Massholes, and that appellation was not lightly earned by the residents of that city. How they could be descendants of the early founders of our country is a mystery to the Peak Stupidity staff.
Anyway, the point of this post in relation to housing is that many of these Chinese people with their hard-earned, or (usually) hard-extorted, US dollars want to stay in the country. Even if they don't want to stay, there are many Chinese young people who are sent here for college based on the reputation of US Universities as being the best institutions of learning - this is the subject of a post coming Monday (we don't agree with this.) Others are sent by their rich corrupt gov't-official parents as a foothold to get their money out of China and at the same time to buy citizenship or gain it via their kid (usually just one.) It is not just the big West Coast cities seeing this foreign influence on the housing market. The Case/Shiller data shown in Part 1 was only computed for those 20 big cities. I have only anecdotes, but am sure that smaller University towns are experiencing some bidding-up of housing prices - maybe only in certain neighborhoods - due to the influence of Chinese money.
Hey, I get along pretty well with Chinese people, but people should just realize that this effect is far and wide. It may not be too long before things are changed as to be unrecognizable as traditional America for someone raised in the 1980's even. Many formerly middle-class people may be priced out of anywhere nice in the cities. Americans do like living out in the country, so there is that, in BIG CONTRAST to the Chinese who reckon that anyone not living in the big city is an illiterate piece of trash (which is their definition back home, in the
Is it still America in Augusta, Georgia, at least? "Voila, An American Dream ...
... where we can travel, girl, without any means"
That's the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and it's Linda Rondstadt singing harmony there! It was written by Rodney Crowell and released in 1979.
* What will that even mean anymore?
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Aja by Steely Dan
Posted On: Friday - July 7th 2017 5:50PM MST
In Topics: Music Political Correctness
I've been reading a couple of interesting posts by Steve Sailer, on the unz.com site today, and in this post, in which Mr. Sailer invokes his clever "First Law of Female Journalism", in this case the article is somwhat about a mixed relationship between a "South Asian" girl and white guy. You've got your "South Asian" and "East Asians". The South Asians are Indians (Dot, of course), and the East Asians are Orientals. I am sick of political correctness even from unz commenters! It's not worth telling them again that the term "Oriental" is much more descriptive, and, in fact, is NO kind of slur - the word means "Eastern" - as back when things were Euro-centered, these people lived FAR to the EAST.
Well, we already beat this horse in this post way back, saying:
After reading and discussing China today, the older, English names for countries and for the cities in China came up. PeakStupidity believes the English names were so much nicer and evoked images of the mysterious Orient. For example, would you rather date a girl if she were billed as “a beautiful Oriental lass from Canton, in Cathay in the Far East” or if she were “a good worker loyal party-following comrade from Guangzhou's Tein-hou district of the People’s Republic”?OK, enough, I guess. I only wanted to post some music tonight anyway. That old post featured Rod Stewart's "Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?".
Just thinking about Asia then, here is the great band Steely Dan with their song "Aja", title song of that album. It is more jazzy than what Peak Stupidity normally posts, but it has a great jam for 1/2 of the song. Steely Dan is mostly known as just 2 guys, Walter Becker and Donald Fagan, but they had lots of professional, session musicians play with them. We hope you enjoy this one. Good night.
"
Oh, Sailer's 1st Law of Female Journalism is: The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.
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Housing Bubble 2.0 - West coast, university towns, minorities, to be hardest hit!
Posted On: Friday - July 7th 2017 10:15AM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Websites University California Global Financial Stupidity Economics
(By "minorities", in this case we mean non-rich regular Americans, who will indeed soon be minorities in the parts of these areas that people want to live in.)
This is more information that could be gleaned from regular readings of Zerohedge and sites like that over the last few years. Peak Stupidity would like to give a shout-out, if you will ("shout-out", only phrase heard from Øb☭ma that I liked) to a site called Seattle Bubble that this writer first perused way back in 2005. By the name, this guy, called "The Tim", writes specifically about Seattle, Washington, but he covers the overall scene with housing prices in his graphs - more about them shortly.
I will say that The Tim did call out the ridiculous bid-up of housing in Seattle and the west coast before things went down the first time. His site clued me into the real state of financial things by leading me to the Calculated Risk blog (OK, I recall, but most of the commenters were flat-out Communists, Commo-commenters, if you will!), which led me later on to Zerohedge, one of our favorites, of course. I will first write a few things about the Seattle Bubble site, then a few things about the data to be displayed on changes in median housing prices.
SeattleBubble was interesting early on, but the posts were geared toward people living in Seattle, or King County, or surrounding counties of course. Besides discussing the ridiculousness of the prices (till 2007), the state of housing in the area during the big decline (2008 - 2013), and then the reasons for the new sharp rise again (2014-Present), the site is geared toward people into real estate as a business. Most of the commenters, in fact, would only be interesting to readers in Real Estate, one of the unproductive large areas of the American economy, as part of the FIRE sectors (see 5th paragraph and down). In addition, a majority of the commenters are fairly leftwing and clueless, which shows when any kind of politics come into discussion - that'd be expected, I guess. Nowaday, I look forward only to reading the monthly post with graphs from Case-Shiller data on housing prices for 20 metropolitan areas of the US. Granted, this data can be read elsewhere - from the 2 guys Case and Shiller, if nothing else. The Tim has some really well-presented graphs in his posts each month, that haven't changed format (which I like) and use software called Tableau that enables user control of the graph on-line - oh, that doesn't work on slightly older browsers, like a lot of stuff!
Now, about the data: There are a few things one must understand or his impression of the housing numbers from the Case/Shiller monthly numbers will be wrong. Here ya go:
1) All of the cities' housing prices are given as the median value, as opposed to the average, or mean. This really makes sense with this kind of data. Most buyers are buying ONE house out of thousands, and a few very high-dollar mansions being sold can skew an average. The median, for the statistically-declined, means the value at which 1/2 of the other numbers would be higher than it and 1/2 lower.
2) All of the city's median housing prices have been normalized to a value of 100 at the beginning of 2000, at a time when these guys considered housing bubble 1.0 to have started. This means that, though the median LA price and the median Charlotte, NC price were way different at that time, they both show 100 on the graph. The idea is to enable people to compare not actual prices between cities, but relative rises and falls based on that "initial" value, before any bubbling.
3) This last point is not particular to Case/Shiller data, but the housing market in general, for most parts of the country, gets better (more sales and higher prices) in Spring and Summer than in Fall/Winter. It may be a matter of more people getting out and around or something about jobs/schooling and moving. Who cares, but the yearly waves in most of the graphs are not noise, but real. It's the long-term trends that are more important.
With that being said, the point of this post is to point out the areas that are particularly seeing this 2nd housing bubble. The following graphs are just screenshots from the SeattleBubble site, so not interactive. In addition, they are more than 1 month old now. The new graphs, showing data through end-of-April, was presented in late June, and can be viewed and played with there. Remember, the indexes shown are not relative to other cities, just to the median price in that city back in 2000.
(Phoenix should not appear here also - I cannot correct this right now, sorry.)
None of these cities had a real, serious out-of-control bubble back the first time, circa 2007. Though Denver has gone quite a bit up lately, note that it's index of 190 means prices are up 90% since the year 2000. That would be an increase of just over 4% yearly compounded, which is not at all out of line with real (not US Government published) inflation numbers.
These two cities, in what Steve Sailer (of unz/Vdare) calls the "sand states", had a huge bubble last go around. It had to mostly just pure get-rich-quick speculation, and I personally know someone involved who lost mucho monero getting in the scheme at the wrong time - or, really, getting out at the wrong time. Though prices came out of their steep dive and trough in 2013, the increase in the last 3 years are not ridiculous. Have people learned not to speculate? I mean, you can get to the real casino pretty quickly from both these locales.
These 2 Southern big cities never had anything really unreasonable going on. The dip in Atlanta toward 2012 bring prices down to 80% of a dozen years earlier was the worst of it.
(Trust me, I didn't pick the colors - Washington, FS is the light blue-gray one with the higher-up indexes throughout the x-axis.)
NYC and Washington, FS are the big money cities. NYC as King of the Finance "industry, first of the FIRE methods of
AHA! WTF? These West Coast cities saw huge peaks in housing prices in 2007, as there was much speculation, but the down slides never got as low as Vegas and Phoenix, or even the Midwest/Mountain West, which got down to 2000 levels. The big thing to notice is that these cities are really undergoing bubble 2.0 with a vengeance. In fact prices in Seattle, Portland, and San Fran have all gone higher than the peaks of bubble 1.0. OK, it's nice out there, when the sun ever shines, but it's been that way. What's new and special about the West Coast? I'll tell you - it's closer and more familiar to the folks with the big bucks over in China. There is a whole lof of foreign-collected US Dollars being spent, as Peak stupidity has already discussed here.
Word on the
There are plenty of people in Real Estate who may love this sort of thing. People who are ready to get the hell out of these cities, for whatever reasons, may also be grateful for this influx of foreign cash. It is not good for an average American who just wants to stay and live a decent life. California has gone through this years ago, but know that, even though you're "locked in" with the price you paid, and can get nice big home equity loans or lines-of-credit for vacations and SUVs , your property tax will go up accordingly. This rent-from-the-State deal will not end. Can't come up with the money? See you, get the hell out of this city.
What about Boston, and what about the University towns per the post title? That'll be the the material in the next post on this, hopefully tomorrow.
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Apprehending Jason Bourne (Part 3) - All-powerful Feral Gov't - NOT!
Posted On: Wednesday - July 5th 2017 9:35AM MST
In Topics: TV, aka Gov't Media US Police State Movies US Feral Government Deep State
It's been a month and a half since I wrote this post and continuation post to compare the Gov't Media's (LP's), aka, Hollywood/TV portrayal of the efficient, omniscient, all-powerful US Feral government to the real thing, as a morning spent at the Social Security office will illustrate. This is the 3rd part, just written today due to a Peak Stupidity writer's experience with a government-mandated training office recently, and some of these people are supposed to be involved in "security". Yes, there were multiple cameras on everyone involved for "our personal safety"?, per the signs?
This was something that had to be done per the job description, so at least this time at this office was paid for. It's just that from the fairly high level of stupidity of the personnel at the office, I don't think they would have any clue how to deal with, much less capture the following gentleman:
What happens if a guy like this gets sick of the US Feral government and has had enough? It may not be that he was in a clandestine CIA experiment or anything like that. Maybe he just lost his house due to tax assessments, got screwed over in divorce court (as, for men, seems to be the point of it), and got forced out of his regular full-time/exempt-employee assassin job due to affirmative action? The Los Angeles police had much of the force out looking for many days four years back in the search for just one ex-cop (link is to a long full-story from LA Times). He was no Jason Bourne, and who knows how many 10's of thousands of man-hours were spent in finding the guy holed up in the next county (San Bernadino)?
Just imagine it was a few white guys working together who had the ability to make plans and shoot better than some ex-cop. The kind of people I ran into today may be good enough to do their day-in-day-out bureaucratic procedures, but thinking very much is out of the question. In fact, the way you get shuffled around to the right line, watch intently for your number to get called and go up to the proper counter obsequiously for your "processing", it is very good training for those Americans headed for prison, is about all. With the types of employees seen, I imagine that a big portion of resources of the current Feral Government may be required just to bring THIS GUY to justice:
"This aggression will not stand, man."
Keep trying that propaganda, Lyin' Press and Hollywood. People with their eyes open can see how things really work. The globalist elites want to get this US Police State up and running before a large enough chunk of the American populace gets too wise to it. When things get real, I don't think it will look like "The Bourne Indentity". It'll take quite the manpower just to take care of slightly temperamental Walter Sobchak here:
"You mark that frame an 8 and you're entering a world of pain..
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Them US Blues
Posted On: Tuesday - July 4th 2017 7:24PM MST
In Topics: Music The Dead Americans Holiday from Stupidity
wave it wide and high.
Summertime done come and gone,
my oh my."
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I, for one, welcome our Venusian
Posted On: Monday - July 3rd 2017 9:00PM MST
In Topics: Global Climate Stupidity
The stupidity does not always emanate from the stupid, we must remind ourselves, this post notwithstanding. In this case, we have the renowned physicist, Mr. Steven Hawking, who most people would consider far from stupid*, who has, however, said that he is worried that the Earth may become like Venus fairly soon, in some type of runaway climate totally-unmodelled process.
I will bend over in genuflection to you, our new Venusian Queen. You first though, my mistress, and wear that teal-green mini-skirt that I like.
Listen, physicists have got to have some tremendous spatial visualization skills, a great handle on the higher math, and a persistent liking of ramen noodles and mac&cheese to get them through graduate school in a field that may not have instant decent jobs awaiting. The field of physics involves theoretical and experimental investigations into the laws of nature. Nobody would say it is easy. However, this does not necessarily provide physicists with commonsense smarts or the ability to make practical improvements to the world. It is not engineering, in which off-the-cuff statements of theory applied to the real world with no serious attempt at modelling would be dismissed. Engineers are involved in real world stuff that must really work and make money.
As discussed in many of the 25 posts (already) with the Global Climate Stupidity topic key, mathematical modelling of something as complex as the earth's climate is not something that has been accomplished as of yet. Modelling of any system requires knowledge of ALL physical processes involved, not just one topic du jour, in this case the "greenhouse" effect. As Peak Stupidity has noted here before:
That is one thing [understanding ALL of the physical processes involved]. Now, try putting a few different processes together in these type of models. Firstly, if there are slight uncertainties in the outputs of the math representing each of the processes, then things will get much more uncertain when it is put together. Secondly, even if the individual parts are very solid and confirmed via experimentation,a when put together the answers to the big problem can still be garbage due to the fact that there are unknown processes existing, that would have had to have been modeled for the overall thing to be close to working. It's not easy.
Per Mr. Hawking in this article:
Venus, the second closest planet to the sun, was once Earth-like.But, geologists say the Earth has had loads more Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere than it does now, and widely varying amounts of water vapor, but we are not now Venusians.
But a build-up of greenhouse gasses in its atmosphere turned the planet into a boiling celestial body with temperatures of 250 degrees celsius and wind speeds of up to 100 metres per second.
Oh, I see, it's political again. Does the renowned physicist Mr. Hawking really think that the bailing out of, on the part of the US, a silly bureaucratic non-enforceable "accord", made admittedly to enable government control of more of the economy will be the last straw that will tip this climate over on it's ass?
President Trump recently took the controversial steps of withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement – a move which Professor Hawking says could destroy Earth.
In an interview to mark his 75th birthday, the world famous physicist told the BBC: "We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible.Can physicists get senile? It starts with the simple things, like forgetting to spend years perfecting a working mathematical model. Next thing you know, you've forgotten that you already ate your creamed corn for lunch only an hour later.
"By denying the evidence for climate change, and pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement, Donald Trump will cause avoidable environmental damage to our beautiful planet, endangering the natural world, for us and our children.”Well, George Carlin said it best: here (at the bottom) "Hey, the planet is fine. It's the people that are fucked!"
Professor Hawking then reiterated his claims if the human race is to survive we will need to leave Earth and colonise another planet – most likely Mars.That's the first part we agree with here at Peak Stupidity. Mars is the sweet spot - far enough away from Earth to be away from the most lethal emanations of stupidity, yet close enough to Venus for frequent inter-species conjugal visits.
* If stupid is over in, say, Central Park East, Manhattan, NYC, NY, Mr. Hawking would be well past the orbit of your anus, were we to make one diameter of his wheelchair wheels equal to 1.0 megaduhs of garden-variety stupid. Of course, that doesn't take into account the gravitational follicle waviness, the curlyness of particles, and other esoteric concepts that we in the cosmetology world have a hard time explaining to non-cosmetologists.
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3 minor doses of stoopiditee. It all adds up, though.
Posted On: Monday - July 3rd 2017 3:53PM MST
In Topics: General Stupidity Curmudgeonry Economics Taxes
It's just part of being a curmudgeon, I suppose, but the day-to-day stupidity seems to add up sometimes to cause a decent amount of annoyance. I noticed one thing in each of three errands that needed to be done today.
The biggest by far was the noticing of the temporary closing of a branch of the library. The annoyance is not that it's closed for renovation for an unspecified amount of time, but it's the fact that the outside of the building is no more than 25 years old (looks in great shape), and the inside of the place is very nice. I talked for a minute with a lady who also went to this library and saw the closed sign. I first mentioned the library bond issue that I voted against 2 years back due to all the libraries being fairly new with plenty of employees in there. It passed. The lady and I agreed that this branch was closed purely so they could get some of that bond money spent. That's, of course, how governments work. It's pretty natural that people don't spend money as it were their own. This is how cities, counties, and states, go broke, one stupid thing at a time, or, I should write, one stupid thing specified by the voters, at a time.
At the big box electronics store, I got some good help and 3 items, just what I needed, in 10 minutes or less. That was nice. Now, I just needed to pay and get the hell out of there, before I spent more money. It wasn't so easy, though there were 2 check-out counters open and only one person per line. As I straddled the middle to get to whichever opened first, things started to drag on, on both sides. The guy on the right was getting his address changed for his special discount card, and it was a transaction, let me tell you. The lady on the left side was signing up for some other thing, and neither was leaving the store. Each of the
Not all things I was looking for were at the big box store, and more power to the little guys. However, this was really just a big business chain of small shoppes anyway. Yeah, shoppes. It's not just Joe's Vitamin Shop. It's The Vitamin Shoppe, and you're gonna need the vitamins if you normally eat at, not Joe's Bar and Grill, but Ye Olde Barre and Grille What the extended Olde English spelling does for the business is makes it sound high end, good enough for the ladies that compete for yard-of-the-month to shop at. What these extra letters mean for the customer is higher prices, linear with the lettering. I.E. the grille will charge 20% more than the grill, as it has 6 versus 5 letters, and the shoppe can charge 50% more than the shop, as it has 6 instead of 4.
Well,this all is enough stupidity to cause me to imbibe one extra draught beere.
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They called it Paradise
Posted On: Saturday - July 1st 2017 9:08PM MST
In Topics: Immigration Stupidity Music The Dead California
(The golden hills of California look better green, in the spring time, after the rains. They look golden when dry in the summer.)
"... I don't know why, you call some place Paradise, then kiss it goodbye..." sang Don Henley of The Eagles, the quintessential California band on "The Last Resort". Peak Stupidity could post hundreds of songs about California here, but one could not go wrong with The Eagles' "Take it Easy" or "Peaceful Easy Feeling" "I wanna sleep with you in the desert tonight with a billion stars all around..." These songs and many others evoke images of an amazing place and time that may never be seen again in this world. That's what makes this a sad post.
One doesn't have to be very old to remember a time when he had a friend that "made up my mind, I'm gonna make a new start, going to California with an aching in my heart." "Someone told me there's a girl out there with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair." Whether it was work, the wife, the climate, or the whole rat race that wasn't working out, things were going to be different and better out there, where one could leave the old ways behind and start a new life in an environment that couldn't be more beautiful. It usually did work out better. I doubt many people regretted it and wanted to move "back East". This was a place where people a little bit different would not be bothered about it. There was not the family and friends around with the discouraging words about one's new weird habits or lifestyle. There was so much freedom, but no, you wouldn't get tired of it!
Maybe your sister ended up running an incense shop or massage therapy office in Mendocino County, or your friend ended up living on his sailboat in the LA marina running his software company, or this scientist type has a lab in an old railroad caboose deep in the canyon (yes, true). Even if one didn't even visit the state, if was still nice knowing "hey, if this doesn't work out, I'm gonna just drop it all and head out West - my friend can put me up in his place in San-Something-Or-Other." People now may sometimes play the game of what would be the best time and place in all history to have lived - a very good answer, as a friend came up with, was 1950's in Southern California.
The thing is, whatever wacky lifestyles people wanted to lead in the golden state, the economy was so strong that many who were "doing their own thing" in a not super-productive manner, could still be easily supported by the large middle-class living good lives themselves. The aerospace industry in Los Angeles (what is it now, just down to one big company?), with Lockheed, North American, Douglas (before McDonnell, making commercial airliners), Rockwell, Northrup, Hughes, and all of them, the Movie Industry there too (before it was just a big propaganda mill), and the huge San Joaquin/Sacramento river valley with the best farmland, growing vegetables for the nation (thanks to visionaries that engineered the irrigation system), all contributed greatly.
Even those living a normal lifestyle, not so different from those "back East" still had this 150,000 mi2 playground of a state with an ecosystem for everyone. Beaches, mountains, low desert, coast ranges with rocky cliffs by the sea, redwood forests - snow skiing, rock climbing, surfing.... one could camp out in a different environment every weekend for life.
That was then.
"What have you done to our fair sister?!." said Jim Morrison, a Californian from way back. When did this all get destroyed, and who caused the destruction of this great land? "When" is easy - arguably from the late 1970's to the mid 1990's is when one could say about the magic of California - "It's all over ..." (same guy).
The ideas put out there over the years by the new culture in "the land of fruits and nuts" weren't all bad. The care for the environment, though nothing new (see John Muir), was good for this most beautiful of lands, but most of the wacky left-wing ideas just couldn't work out well in the long run. It's easy to spend taxpayers' money for all the crazy pet projects to experiment with the new ways, when the middle class is most of the population, and is working good, productive jobs. However, the environmentalism became stifling, hurting this goose that kept laying the golden eggs, and sending her flying off to Washington, Arizona, or Idaho. Even more crazy was the idea that an unlimited amount of unskilled people could come in with no controls to double the population over a few decades. (It is, in fact, quite the contradiction with the ideas of environmentalism even, but let's not talk about that!)
The people that built up the great land in California are being both augmented and replaced by people from Latin America and elsewhere around the world to where this is California:
"This is the End..." (same guy)
Even if you are OK with replacing the people who are part of what made California California, what about the beautiful land? You've got twice as many people, trying to live on the limited water that prevents much the place from being desert. For any environmental problem, 2 x the people = 2 x the problem with other variables held equal. However, do you think that the people that were imported have the same ideas about the environment as Joni Mitchell or any of the white free-thinkers that loved the place? Will it be taken care of the same way? Not a-gonna happen. Even without this change in the population, though, the socialist left has ruined the economy so much that there are so many more poor people, and when things get bad, the environment is the first thing to go.
It's just a faded dream now, this promised land of California. Way back though, I was up in the golden hills in the warm dry summer air, right by a big "C" fixed to the hillside, for the University of California, looking at the cumulus clouds float in from the San Francisco bay, with the Golden Gate looking just like a Grateful Dead album cover ...
... I was only alone because the tie-died Dead Heads had been moved off the hillside by the law - worried about an accidental brush fire. They didn't see me. I laid back in the tall dry grass, and I heard The Dead start the show from down below on the campus. It's all just no more. Listen to how it was:
"California, preaching on the burning shore
California, I'll be knocking on the golden door
Like an angel, standing in a shaft of light
Rising up to paradise, I know I'm gonna shine."
(Jerry starts in with 2 minutes of wah-wah guitar at 3:40)
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The pension time bomb
Posted On: Saturday - July 1st 2017 6:35PM MST
In Topics: Global Financial Stupidity
Zerohedge has an article, Pensions Timebomb In America – "Global Crisis” Cometh, giving some facts and some opinion about the scary state of pension funds. Don't think this doesn't matter much because you, and most people in fact nowadays, don't have any kind of pension
a) The people who do expect to get money to live a good life during retirement from these plans are many, and they are not going to be happy at all,
but, more importantly,
b) As noted specifically here and in general in some posts under the "Global Financial Stupidity" topic key, investments are kind of fungible and are intertwined. That means that some other "safe" investment of yours may have a stake in some pension plans or others. It will all go down together, when it goes down.
The Zerohedge article is not original zerohedge by the Tyler Durdens, but by one Bryan Maher of "The Daily Reckoning", that discusses:
After having read the lined material, I agree with Mr. Maher's opinions on this big problem, but he has his own big problem of not understanding the idea of writing in paragraph form, so it's hard to put a big quote in here. Just a few lines:
America’s underfunded pension system is “not a distant concern but a system already in crisis”...
Tax may explode as governments seek to bail out insolvent pension plans
Illinois, California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Kentucky and eight other states vulnerable
The simple mathematical mismatch at the heart of the pension crisis...
Why the pension crisis really is “America’s silent crisis”...
Pensions timebomb confronts Ireland, UK and most EU countries.
But consider…His conclusion is that, for public pensions that is, states will have to go nuts with new taxes to prop up the plans:
The average public pension plan returned just 1.5% last year.
Last year marked the second consecutive year that plans undershot the 7.5% return rate, according to Governing magazine.
The same plans worked an average gain of 2–4% in 2015.
A highly technical term describes the foregoing if it goes on long enough... and we apologize if it sends you to the dictionary:
Insolvency.
Briefly turn your attention to the Golden State, for example. California.
State pensions are only in funds to meet 65% of their promised benefits.
And California pins its hopes on that golden annual 7.5% return to make the shortage good.
But it’s in a devil of a fine fix if the average public pension plan only returns 1.5%.
The math is the math.
California essentially depends on returns 400% above the norm, according to financial analyst Larry Edelson.
But California is by no means alone.
We won’t run the entire roll call of shame.
But the great state of Illinois, for one, risks sinking into a $130 billion "death spiral" from its unfunded pension liabilities, as Ted Dabrowski of the Illinois Policy Institute described it.
S&P Global Ratings has even threatened to downgrade the state's credit score to "junk" status.
New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Kentucky are also among the worst deadbeats.
But the problems run from ocean to ocean and south to north.
Your tax bill could explode as governments around the country seek to bail out insolvent pension plans. And you know how much politicians like to use your tax money to bail out some constituent. They like to prove their “compassion” with your money!
“Expect to pay higher state and local taxes for fewer services in the years to come,” adds Larry Edelson, before mentioned.
And:
“Don’t be surprised if authorities of all shapes and sizes — from local governments to national agencies — up the ante to get ahold of your assets any way they can.”
Though the previous article concerns the problem in the US, a month back on Zerohedge some guy John Mauldin of "Mauldin Economics", "Warns The Next Recession May Be A Complete Reset Of All Asset Valuations" in an article about pension plans throughout the world:
Sometime this year, world public and private plus unfunded pensions will surpass $300 trillion. That is not even counting the $100 trillion in US government unfunded liabilities. Oops.Hey, in the rest of the article the guy's got a colorful graph, so you know, case closed and all....
These obligations cannot be paid. A time is coming when the market and voters will realize this.
Will voters decide to tax “the rich” more? Will they increase their VAT rates and further slow growth? Will they reduce benefits? No matter what they decide, hard choices will bring political turmoil.
And that, of course, will mean market turmoil.
Peak Stupidity had this article previously on the topic, and we emphasized there would be many more stories. Right now Illinois is the biggest one in the news.
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Freedom is beyond imagination to many Americans now
Posted On: Thursday - June 29th 2017 5:00PM MST
In Topics: Commies Music Liberty/Libertarianism US Feral Government ctrl-left
As a follow-up to the prevous post on the hard shift to the left (Big Gov't socialism) on the issue of health care, I looked at the comments under the Unz.com Ron Paul post mentioned. There is a particular commenter that I had had a long discussion with previously, no more than a week back. In our "discussion" (to put it in a good light) I brought up every real world example I could to try to convince this guy that the system of health care in this country has been interfered with by the US Government for over 5 decades, and that's the basic problem. I may put the series of comments up here another time, but it's a lot of writing to try to get the muck out of this guy's head.
It's a shame that the comments under Doctor Paul's post include some from the same guy, and he hasn't learned a damn thing! I guess I can't say I completely wasted my time, as anytime one comments, there are possibly many readers who may get your point, even if the recipient has learned nothing. This particular discussion was just pretty frustrating, and goes along with what I wrote in my previous post: "I just don't think there is a large percentage of Americans who would even understand Mr. Paul's, or Miss Coulter's writing on this. The limited amount of people who have memories of what a free market in health care and actual insurance is like is dwindling.". That's what it's come down to, and not just in this particular area of public (and private) debate. There are people today in America who have not seen examples of any freedom in many areas of life. They just can't imagine every different.
I happened upon a 1 1/2 hour long video called "American Standoff" about the patriot activity out in eastern Oregon 1 1/2 years back (the Bundy deal) from a link from a Zerohedge commenter (of course!). Though not at all on this same issue, it was just about another area of encroachment of Federal power into Americans' affairs. As I posted way back, regarding the Waco, Texas massacre even the terminology of freedom is scary to many Americans, egged on by the Lyin' Press. "These guys are SURVIVALISTS! OMG!". Yes, they want to be left alone, what a freakin' concept?!
The song included below is by John Lennon, but it is not the one most appropriate to this post. That would be "Imagine, of course. Can you even imagine freedom? The commenter, and a hundred million like him, in America cannot even imaging people doing business together without intervention from Big Gov.; just "Here's what I can do for you - here's what it costs?". "OK, deal.". This is beyond people's imaginations!
Now, silly John Lennon, though I'll give him a pass in that he was still a foolish young man then, wanted people to imagine Communism. We didn't have to imagine it, once we learned what people went through and how many 100's of millions of lives were lost, and more ruined. It is right there in the books and people's memories. We need another song like this, urging people to "Imagine Freedom. "It's easy if you try. No Governments behind us, above us only sky ...."
Well, John Lennon's "Imagine" won't be played here, as a) it's been overplayed, b) the lyrics suck (though the tune is fine, so that's not the real reason, and. c) this other one is less popular but a much brighter song, in spirit and guitar sound:
"Nobody told me there'd be days like these. Strange days indeed. Most peculiar, Mama .... roll! .... " ... with the guitar triplets)
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Overton Window slammed to the left on healthcare
Posted On: Tuesday - June 27th 2017 6:50PM MST
In Topics: Liberty/Libertarianism US Feral Government ctrl-left
Though the recently-figuratively-lobotomized Glenn Beck brought this up to the public (before his foray into deep stupidity), Peak Stupidity has posted on the "Overton Window" concept previously, and will do so again in this post. One can think of the public political debate as having a window for each issue within which it is acceptable to discuss the topic, while outside of it is "radical".
That is the concept, and it seems to have been slammed very far toward the socialist stops (being US Feral Government control of the health of all American, also known as "single-payer", a bit wonky to provide the realization of what it is - that is a feature of the term.). Peak Stupidity posted 2 months back the following Conservatives" punting on health care? (That's the left's evil plan in action). That post discussed specifically the otherwise very-conservative alt-right's dismissal of healthcare as an important issue. To excerpt just a paragraph:
I understand the point that the fix to this healthcare mess is not as urgent as other things President Trump was voted in to accomplish, the primary of which is the southern border and US sovereignty. I agree, first things first. Also, there is no doubt that fixing the mess caused by 60-odd years of Feral Governement interference in the health care market cannot occur easily, i.e., with a lot of financial pain and unfairness in the interim. However, to just throw up ones hands, saying, let's give up on this - seems like we'll just be like England and Canada with the government in control is entirely un-American.Now, we just happen to be pretty timely in this post, as there is big debate in so many place on how to get rid of the Obamacare gov't planned fiasco. Here's a guy who as a Libertarian's LIbertarian, and a Doctor ought to have his word in, Mr. Ron Paul (article on unz.com). This is a good honest article, as always by Mr. Paul, but here's on quick summary paragraph:
Congress should be working to repeal all federal interference in healthcare, including by shutting down the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA raises the cost of medicine, denies Americans access to effective treatments, and prevents individuals from learning about cost-effective ways to improve their health.
Now, I don't want to repeat our 2-month-ago article here, so just suffice it to say that Peak Stupidity is probably in between Ron Paul and Ann Coulter on personal and theoretical knowledge of the current dismal gov't-munged state of the huge health-care industry in America. This is not to disrespect Ann Coulter, however, as we concur completely with these 2 liberty-minded posts on this issue as of late (This one discussed by PS here, and this one, discussed by PS here.
OK, the Overton Window take on this is that these cntrl-left socialists that have been pushing this back to the days of the non-cookie-baking 1st-lady version of the Hildabeast have drastically moved the window on this issue that affects so many Americans. Again, we don't believe in clever long-term conspiracies very much, especially keeping in mind the somewhat-limited brainpower of the socialist crowd. This is just another issue that has been pushed and pushed into Feral Gov't control relentlessly since the days of doctors giving house calls. It is not even just "acceptable debate" on which the window has moved far toward the left; it seems that American thinking can't stretch even close to the idea of a free market anymore. I just don't think there is a large percentage of Americans who would even understand Mr. Paul's, or Miss Coulter's writing on this. The limited amount of people who have memories of what a free market in health care and actual insurance is like is dwindling.
Sigh, it's ALWAYS been like this - I don't see how there'd be any other way."
Lastly, as mentioned in the previous PS post on this, it is a build in
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Unz/Zerohedge convergence in thought
Posted On: Tuesday - June 27th 2017 3:25AM MST
In Topics: Websites University Global Financial Stupidity Globalists Economics
Due to a lack of full 1-2 hours blocks of time to get a good post on here without interruption, we are down to 1-2 per day. I'd rather have 1 good original one than 3 that are just "fiskings" (as the old bloggers back in the 'oughts used to say), with mostly just excerpts. However, I think it's fair to post stuff on Peak Stupidity that I originated as comments on other blogs.
This is from a reply to this article, by Steve Sailer on unz.com. The article, "Without Immigration, Tokyo More Than Doubles Housing Space Per Person", goes along with Sailer's out-of-control (in the sense that I can't keep up!) lately posting on population issues around the world, mostly with respect to out-of-control (in the sense that we may ALL be screwed) Africa.
My reply started with the first paragraph about zerohedge, as discussion of Japanese society, including all the "worries" about their decreasing population, happens a lot within the comments there, and mostly with the same conclusion of my 2nd paragraph following.
[Peak Stupidity comment from unz]:
***********************************************
This to me, is really a convergence with the thinking on Zerohedge*. That’s what those guys have been saying a long time. To remain on topic with your comment, specifically, Piltdown, I don’t think any of these economists are particularly bright people, though I’ll make an exception for your Adam Smiths, Rothbards, and Freedmans.
However, because the American economy has been gutted, as far as manufacturing jobs go, the FIRE economy, Finance, Insurance, Real Estate (in my opinion, should be: Finance, Insurance, Real estate, Education) is the vehicle of “expansion”. By expansion, that DOES NOT MEAN increase in quality of life for Americans. It just means increase in GDP, which is really just a concern to the economists (BTW, one of multiple reasons inflation numbers are way understated by the Feral Gov’t is that GDP increases would probably all be wiped out, possible long in the red, were the actual numbers included in GDP calculations).
Back to the FIRE economy, all that stuff is not wealth creating. It is just shifting money around, and the “capitalist” elites in those industries make money from transactions, the churning around of money. White Flight is BAD, you say (cause you took losses on your houses, had to move the family twice, drive for 2 hours/day)? NO, it’s GOOD for real estate agents and lawyers, and mortgage bankers, and increase in GDP! A decade interest rates forced to within ε of 0 is BAD, you say (cause your 78 y/0 Mom can’t make it off SS and interest off of $300,000 grand they had saved)? NO, it’s GOOD, cause that forces individuals and pension funds into the stock market where the finance guys can get their cut of every transaction, and it’s the only way to make decent returns, forget the risk! Huge school loans are BAD, you say (cause your kid is still working the same job at Starbucks, but now with a mortgage-sized $80,000 loan due from his 4 years of good times, studying Art History)? NO, it’s GOOD, cause the University has a brand new gym, has expanded the campus are by 2 x in 2 decades and increases the number of “seats” by 1000 people each year – the Admins. especially are livin’ large, and hiring new people every week to make new university policies!
Anyway, I think this is where we unz people have quite a bit in common with the zerohedge types. This crap can’t go on, and won’t go on. The Globalists think it will, or at least until they are dead and gone or in their bug-out locales, so they want to keep the GDPs officially increasing, sales of toilet paper and other goods must keep increasing with more real estate deals and company mergers. People just slowly increasing their wealth at the family level, living a productive and quiet life, and having 2 kids in a stable non-diverse population is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!
As to whether the economists can or do understand this, that is not their world. They aspire to the big money finance or corporate world, and the quality of life of the populations of the world does not enter into their mathematical models, such as they are.
* Full disclosure: I am not associated with the site, but I used to read it (esp. the comments) a whole lot, to the point of seriously affecting my work.
*****************************************************
BTW my "capitalists" was put in quotes, because these are NOT AT ALL Capitalists (with a Capital!). The people running things are "crony-capitalists", and also the real, actual definition of "fascists", as they only are able to stifle all competition via government regulation and control.
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Seattle Gun/Ammo tax results in better
Posted On: Saturday - June 24th 2017 6:40PM MST
In Topics: Lefty MegaStupidity Liberty/Libertarianism
We have only featured this one post here on Peak Stupidity, even though this writer is one of the minority of Americans who, apparently, can read this simple 5-10 page document. It's just that there are plenty of good sites with loads of info (here's one out of thousands) , and the stupidity of the gun control nuts has kind of plateaued, hanging quite a bit behind other stupidity flavors at this juncture. We're all over "Van Control" like white on rice, if that helps ya any.
Zerohedge features writings from Mac Slavo, operator of the SHTF-Plan prepper site. Here's Since Seattle Placed A Tax On Guns And Ammunition, The City's Violent Crime Rate Has Increased from Mr. Slavo, and here is the story on Zerohedge with it's great commenters.
This legislation for a tax on both guns and ammo. by the City of Seattle was passed about 2 years back, and I remember it from reading gun news. 5 cents per round of ammo doesn't sound like much unless your shooting .22's, in which case it's a HUGE increase, say 80% or so. The $25 per gun can be a 20% increase on a cheap carry pistol (Check out Jimenez arms, made in Henderson, NV). These lefties just end up pushing business out of town, for a pittance of revenue:
But Mike Coombs, owner of Outdoor Emporium, the last large gun dealer left in Seattle, said the actual tax revenue is almost certainly just over $100,000, a figure based on information he says the city shared with his lawyers.
Coombs said storewide, sales are down 20 percent while gun sales have plummeted 60 percent.
“I’ve had to lay off employees because of this,” Coombs said. “It’s hurting us, it’s hurting our employees.
Well,you know the people pushing the law at the high end are not all stupid. They want the gun stores gone, cause it makes them feel better, but safer, well, only the useful idiot voters believed that part, but they didn't get that result:
Comparing the first five months of 2017 with the same period before the gun tax went into effect, reports of shots fired are up 13 percent, the number of people injured in shootings climbed 37 percent and gun deaths doubled, according to crime statistics from the Seattle Police Department.It's true, as Mac Slavo also says, that doesn't prove much, but still, it's not like things are better with the violence by the street hoods/gangs.
All we can say here is that, maybe those street thugs are more cost-concious than you'd think. Is it possible they are gaining better shooting skills (oh, like not holding their guns sideways, for example) in an effort to cut costs? I'm sure thugs and gangs have got fixed costs to cover; by cutting their variable costs - injuring 37% more people with only 13% more shots - they can keep the books balanced.
C'mon Homies! Whadya need a refresher course? It's all economics these days!
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Car Wheels on a Gravel Road - Lucinda Williams
Posted On: Friday - June 23rd 2017 9:28PM MST
In Topics: Music
This lady must have been heeded the usual advice to "write about what you know.", as this whole album's lyrics (this song is the title cut) are about life in Louisiana and Mississippi. She has got a good band and a real good gravelly (get it?) Southern voice. The whole album is worth listening to.
What's funny is that I have another album from Lucinda Williams, called "This Old World", and I didn't like much on it - I may have to find it (or youtube it) and try it out again, as that was long ago.
From 1998, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" by Lucinda Williams:
The song wouldn't be nearly as good without the great bass line.
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New drugstore blood-pressure
Posted On: Friday - June 23rd 2017 7:27PM MST
In Topics: Curmudgeonry Artificial Stupidity Orwellian Stupidity Healthcare Stupidity iEspionage
Yeah, welcome to the Orwellian world of
Was anything really wrong with the old machine, on the left that didn't say a damn thing when you sat down on it? There are 3 LED readouts, Systolic BP, Diastolic BP, and pulse rate, and a GREEN button (START, yes), and a RED button (STOP, hey this is easy.) Sit down, do it - don't like the high reading? do it again, relax try it until the wife is done shopping. Finished? Leave. Nice and relaxing, remember the average or best reading. Next time, we'll see if it's stable, or a good bit better, or a good bit worse.
Then, the monstrosity on the right moved in and displaced the simple machine to blood-pressure-monitor heaven. OK, 2 screens here, and the bottom, touch screen needs some information. The top's for advertising. This device has got a scale too, so whatdya want done, sir? "Blood pressure, ya POS, I've got a scale at home." "Are you a guy or a gal?" Choose by picture. Whoaaah, are they gonna have to update this software before a lawsuit comes - no 32 flavors of gender - couldn't you do that by picture? (I've got that part, no none of those, but I identify with that weirdo picture there ... I digress.) Birthdate, now**. OK, it's gonna do the job now. "Are you really ready?" "Just DO IT!" - man, now how am I going to get a good reading. BP is shooting through the roof ... then the woman's voice comes out of the speaker "relax, put your mind at ease ... kinda like a massage therapist, in a way ..." "Hey, wait", I thought, "what else does this machine do?" I looked for round openings in the control panel ... Nada.
It gets done, and you get nice graphics of three meters with the needles rotating around to your values. OK, that's kind of cool, but Precision ain't Accuracy. It's probably just as accurate as the old machine, but anyway, now you can do a "Redo" (pick that!) or "Continue" will make you enter stuff over again. Your readings can be saved (well they probably are already at higi-headquarters, for some 100-year old gal that I'm supposed to be**) on a jump-drive or emailed to your inbox. Woohoo! How 'bout I just remember the readings for next time, and you let me leave outta here?
OK, this is the curmudgeon part. People that don't mind at all any big company or government, pretty much the same thing, know anything they want about them probably think this is great. "I get charts emailed to me showing my progress. It tells me what to do each step, like my phone. Cool!" Drugstore News says it's helping people LOWER their blood pressure via lots of data for guidance). Fine. It's just a different world, and that's the world they are used to. Me, I'm not about to give you all this info, just on principle, and I always liked the KISS idea in design - Keep It Simple, Stupid. As mentioned in other posts under the Curmudgeonry topic key, just because something CAN be done, doesn't mean I want it.
After multiple "sessions" with this machine, I have at least gotten more relaxed during the actual blood-pressure measurement (the whole point of it), possibly due to the computer-generated woman's soothing voice. I wish I could put a face and a nice body to it though, but I looked up on the big top display screen and it had an ad for Aspirin. I guess she's not in the mood for anything special.
* Yes, there is a camera near eye level. What for?
** No, of course I don't give any real information. In fact I enter in different stuff every time. The data crunchers out in higi-headquarters are probably pleased that a lot of 100 year old men and "gals" have been able to use their machines, with still just enough time left over, after entering all the data, to make it to the early-bird special at the cafeteria.
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UK Police Chief dick calls for VAN! CONTROL! NOW!
Posted On: Thursday - June 22nd 2017 6:27PM MST
In Topics: Humor Liberty/Libertarianism Orwellian Stupidity World Political Stupidity Peak Stupidity Roadshow
OK, yes, this is the UK, but Peak Stupidity doesn't need a separate topic key for "UK Police State", as a lot of what happens over there in Oceana becomes a bug up some police state tyrant's rectum here in the Colonies later on.
And no, the UK Police Chief is not, and does not even have, a dick, as it is a she, Miss Cressida Dick. Yes, SERIOUSLY! This is not fake news here; why do you people doubt me?
This has to do with terrorists running people down - they may use vans. The fact that they may also use a lot of other weapons is what makes this one up there on the steep trail to Peak Stupidity. Anyway, I guess we can pull out an old tried-and-true chant for any folks out to protest against the killer vans:
"What do we want?
Van Control!
When do we want it?
We want it
I can't believe Peak Stupidity would link to msn here, but I guess it's fitting:
Stricter rules on van hire may be needed in light of recent terrorist attacks, London’s police chief has said.OK, well here's more ...
Rental companies have been told to be more aware of who is getting keys to large vehicles after hired vans were used twice by terrorists in the capital.
According to The Times, Metropolitan police commissioner Cressida Dick told the London Assembly: “Should [van hire] be regulated in any way? There’s a whole big review to be done. I don’t know. It might require some tweaking of legislation.”
Ms. Dick acknowledged that regulating van hire would be “very hard” but...I just had to include this ... make of it what you will.
The formerly-U, formerly-K has gone way down the road of Orwellian stupidity already. The guns are only in the hands of authorities, criminals, and terrorists (often with some overlap) so people must fear for their lives, when it comes to it, with no recourse. It turns out that stabbings are done with knives, so they're under scrutiny. Now it's these damn evil vans!
Why don't we ever learn from history, per Hans Moleman, or something like that:
Listen, first they came for the Minivans, and I didn’t speak out, because I don’t have the hots for soccer Moms.
Then, they came for the Econolines, and I said nothing, as I can fit all my tools in the back of my ’80′s Camaro.
Then, they came for the VW Microbuses, and I was silent, as I have gotten sick of the smell of incense and patchoulie, and dirty stinkn' hippies.
Then, they came for the Conversion vans, and there was nobody down by the river to speak up for me.
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Bad Blood - Neil Sedaka w/ Elton John backing vocals
Posted On: Wednesday - June 21st 2017 8:38PM MST
In Topics: Music
Neil Sedaka made some soft, "middle-of-the-road", the broadcasting guys called it, music back in the 1970's. A favorite, at least a fairly big hit, was "Laughter in the Rain". The one featured tonight, though, has the Bo Diddly beat, but more importantly, the backing vocals of Elton John in his prime.
It's a great song. Bad Blood:
Don't the pictures remind you of good times, even if you weren't a pop star with 1000's of pairs of sunglasses?
More Elton John here and here.
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Forget the Russians for a minute - Repeal Amendment XVII
Posted On: Wednesday - June 21st 2017 8:15PM MST
In Topics: The Russians Liberty/Libertarianism US Feral Government
That is a 17 for those of us on the new system of numbers - man that Roman system was pretty stupid, you gotta admit. Anyway, from this document (originally not in html format, believe it or not, but on parchment paper), we present to the reader:
Amendment 17 - Senators Elected by Popular Vote. Ratified 4/8/1913.Here is the language in Article 1 (Legislative Branch), Section 3 (The Senate):
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.
When vacancies happen in the representation of any State in the Senate, the executive authority of such State shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies: Provided, That the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.
This amendment shall not be so construed as to affect the election or term of any Senator chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, (chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.The "chosen by ..." clause was superseded by Amendment 17.
That was a big fuck-up, or possibly part of a plan a century back to help ruin the greatest (meaning smallest and least centralized) central government seen in history. As Peak Stupidity stated (previous link): "Though the latter SEEMS like just an administrative "housekeeping" change, it is most definitely not, and it was as if the people had said "America's Federal government is not broke, but let's fix it!"" See, the results of that change can be seen very easily in most national-seat legislative elections were one to "follow the money", the campaign contributions, that is. This latest Georgia special election was a Congressional one, not Senatorial, but read how much money was involved in the campaign, most of it from out of state.
Zerohedge (not an exclusive - one can read about this anywhere) makes fun of the whole "Russians did it!" angle with: The Russians Do It Again: Democrats Get Crushed In Georgia Election Despite 7x Spending Advantage, but the article is really about who spent money to support the candidates:
Meanwhile, as The Mercury News pointed out earlier this morning, this race has been by far the costliest in the history of Congressional races with Ossoff raising over $23 million. Ironically, he received nearly 9x more donations from California than from Georgia, a testament to how this special election has morphed into a national contest for Democrats.Though this congresscreature is supposed to represent the 6th district of Georgia, 1/2 of Atlanta and 'burbs, who will she really be working for? And yes, this was just a congressional race - there are 4.35 of these creatures for each Senator (in lobbyist terminology, that means each Senator's price is 4.35 x higher than a congresscreature - good old supply and demand). In the Senate races, the money spent is much higher. Wait, what does this have to do with the change to the US Constitution 104 years back? I'll tell you what - though each congresscreature nowadays represents 3/4 of a million people on average (without a lot of variance district-to-district), though it was originally specified that "The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand" (also overwritten, by Amendment 14), at least the Senators used to be very responsive to their states.
[SJ Mercury News:] Between March 29 and May 31, Ossoff reported receiving 7,218 donations from California, dwarfing the 808 donations he received from Georgia. In the nine Bay Area counties alone, he received 3,063 donations in the same time period.
Why, because, the legislatures chose them. The old way gave the states more power, as the state legislators, who are even now still within easy reach of citizens, had more power before the change of Amendment 17. These senators could be recalled much more easily by people in legislatures that had political and legal knowledge vs. referendums/petitions/etc. that most people don't even know about. In addition, the state legislators also would know more about what the state needed from Washington, FS, versus a popular election, what with money from all over the place pushing this national issue or that one. That's what it's come to over the last 30 years or so - the Hildabeast for example, as each Senator can be supported by big money from anywhere in the country, with the state being represented meaning almost nothing anymore.
Each congresscreature represents about 20X as many Americans as originally specified in the US Constitution. That makes the stakes bigger and the money for influence larger. Then, Amendment 17 paved the way for larger more influential money from outside the state to be represented. No, the Russian are the least of our worries in this election business. It's the big money that flows like a river of menstrual blood throughout the country periodically.
One more thing to keep in mind though. Assuming fair elections (not worried about Russian, more like Black Panther intimidation, illegal alien voters, dead voter, dead illegal alien voters, etc.), whatever money put into campaigning can't directly BUY enough votes. It only effects those who can't do the thinking required of a responsible voter. That's the real basic problem; Peak Stupidity rears it's ugly head here too.
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More on the Non-Science of Economics - George Thorogood
Posted On: Tuesday - June 20th 2017 6:27PM MST
In Topics: Music Economics
OK, I called out hypocritical commenters on economics in the previous post. To pile on here, if you're gonna complain about the financial world being unfair, and America's economy being a train wreck in slow motion, then don't take part in the most crooked or rigged part of it, the investments, the banking, and the investment banking. It's really the US Feral Government and the whole F.I.R.E. chunk of the economy that is sucking up the workingman's money.
So, get off your computer doing your day trading, don't try to get rich quick in a housing bubble, just GET A HAIRCUT AND GET A REAL JOB!.
George Thorogood and the Delaware Destroyers:
Get a haircut and get a real job.
Clean your act up and don't be a slob.
Get it together like your big brother Bob.
Why don't you get a haircut and get a real job?
...............
I met this chick she was my number one fan.
She took me home to meet her mommy and dad.
They took one look at me and said "Oh my God!"
Get a haircut and get a real job.
................
I hit the big time with my rock 'n' roll band.
The future's brighter now than I'd ever planned.
I'm ten times richer than my big brother Bob.
but he, he's got a haircut he's got a real job.
Great slide guitar there!
George Thorogood – guitar, vocals
Billy Blough – bass
Hank Carter – keyboards, saxophone, background vocals
Jeff Simon – drums
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The Non-Science of Economics
Posted On: Tuesday - June 20th 2017 6:03PM MST
In Topics: Websites Global Financial Stupidity Economics
Commenter "Heidelberg", under the post Mark Steyn 3-hour interview on CSPAN-2 BookTV, left an unrelated comment with this link on economics. This site, "failed evolution", has the banner "the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens". It looks like a decent site, at first glance and the blogroll seems "fair and balanced", though some of the stuff is greek to me - no, I mean some of it is written in Greek, so not particularly readable for most of us.
Anyway, the short article is on economics, and the author, Mr. system failure due to insufficient evolution (what was his mother thinking?! Probably this is a Greek thing, but still better than LaTundra - More on kid's names here) theorizes that the non-science of economics cannot predict economic events well due to a parallel to Physics' Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It's a pretty good parallel, as Heisenberg proved in theory that at this very small quantum-level of matter, the act of observing matter would change it's state or condition. In economics, because there are government people, big-businessmen, pundits and the like always predicting what will happen, their influence on the system via psychology of buyers and sellers changes the outcome.
That one thing does not stop economics from being a science, but there is another major problem that does. Only the very simple supply/demand and elasticity concepts can be seen to work in only a very small market, to the point where some good predictive numbers can actually be obtained. A small sailing club where dues come in and expenses are known may be an example. The elasticity of demand when prices are changed, all that stuff could be measured pretty well. A small isolated island economy that trades in seashells could be an example. This stuff doesn't scale up, though, and things get hard to predict quickly, even without heavy-handed government fuckage with the markets. Markets like the stock market are even worse in terms of conforming to any decent economic theory, because, though loads of information is out there, many in the market are not privy to, or don't even care about the information on real value of companies or assets. People are making money off of other people's decisions, so it becomes very psychological very quickly. Those of us who have been around our share of nutcases or stay home during the wrong few certain days of the month know that predicting of behaviors is not science at all, but a worthless waste of time.
Between the Greek guy's point and the point of the last paragraph, prediction of market prices is like prediction of any weather out past 4 days - complete bullshit, basically. This brings us to one of our favorite websites:
(What's that small column of junk through the "d"? - that's a comment - Zerohedge comments are useless on some browsers!)
Now, I've read that site for a long while, as the Peak Stupidity review states. I've had lots of praise for the commenters (when I can read them) on the site. I will say something about the people, a bit more so a few years back, who read the site for market advice, not the big picture of the problem, as I read it for. These, now, seem to be less than 10% of the commenters, as the types of people has definitely changed. First, of course, I think it's a waste of time to read this site for direction on how to invest, per what was just written 2 paragraphs up-post.
However, the 2nd issue is the hypocrisy of some of the comments on the stock market. Rightfully, many of these people call out the government distortion of the markets via the Federal (private) Reserve Bank, the bailouts to the big banks, and crony capitalism in general. "The whole system, it's all rigged in favor of the big guys!" "The market is working completely backwards due to the idiot business version of the Lyin' Press." "I want to short this stuff because it's all way overvalued, but they keep propping it up!", etc. OK, point taken, that this is no free market. Then, why are you still participating?
The 2nd part of this hypocrisy is the, also rightful, condemning of the American economy's reliance on FIRE, Financial, Insurance, Real Estate*. These are big money industries that produce nothing of worth - they DO! NOT! CREATE! WEALTH!, but just move money around. OK, point taken that this is not a productive healthy economy. Then why are you still participating in the Investment business?
Well, there are some people who really practice what they preach on there, and talk gardening, off-the-grid money managing, and off-the-grid all sorts of things, up to complete prepper stuff. These comments are what make the site well worth reading. Don't read ZeroHedge for market advice. Don't read anything for market advice - it's all rigged for the big guys that run the computer trading-programs. Don't forget, if you shop around you can get up to 0.25% annual compounded (haha) interest on a Certificate of Deposit. Thanks, Federal Reserve!
* I would substitute Education for the 2nd part of Real Estate, as it is also a big non-productive sector nowadays.
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