As to the real estate market drop, one of the problems is that it's not happening consistently. Lower-value properties and properties last sold before the spike have dropped by 50%-80%, but higher-value properties (at least as defined by their price during the spike) have not dropped nearly as much. This may help some buyers but is also hurting those saddled with pre-spike property taxes on older properties now worth essentially the price of the dirt under them.
[goes off, reads] Hmmm... it sounds like in the end, the taxpayers are still the losers.
I have wondered what would happen if the U.S. simply defaulted on all its foreign debt, including trade deficits. Seems to me that if the external money dried up, government would be forced to reduce its impact and we'd be forced back on our own resources -- and that, more than anything, would revive industry and jobs in this country. So long as we bleed manufacturing to the rest of the world, we're going to bleed money too, as credit that increasingly we've no means to repay other than from taxpayer wallets. Better to pay more for domestically-made goods (at least that is money that stays home) than to pay higher taxes in the name of paying off foreign-owned debt (a sort of broken-window economy).
Yep, and that's pretty much Larry Elder's point -- that inner-city-gangsta culture (which I've not seen anywhere else, and isn't entirely exclusive to blacks) is stupid and wasteful and needs to die, and if you choose to be part of it you better not complain about "da MAN keepin' you down" because your failure-to-succeed was your own damn fault. Yeah, you might not get "a ton of money" from getting as educated as you can manage, but at least then you'd be smart enough to SEE your opportunities when they knock.
And it wasn't that long ago (just a generation or two) that our kids did all the same work that illegals do today. Every kid had a summer job, on the farm or in some related capacity.
I've sometimes thought that a required period of such labour (perhaps earning college money in escrow) would put a different perspective into the heads of today's youth.
Larry Elder makes the same point in one of his books -- an observation of the kids using a library in a poor inner-city neighbourhood that's about equal parts Asian and black. The library is wall-to-wall with Asian kids, studying fervently... but the black kids are all outside riding skateboards, hanging out and being "cool". Same opportunity, but one culture says "Study and Succeed" and the other says "Be Cool".
I had a similar thought... they have essentially stated what the value of that catalog IS... far below what they'd have us believe is the value of what gets pirated. Make up our minds, is it worth a lot (pirated) or a little (if *they* have to buy it)??
Same principle, tho -- "can't afford a stove" so they don't think any further, and just go to McD's. I totally agree it makes more financial sense to find an alternative (like a cheap hotplate, a used microwave, or even a $2 can of sterno), but the *poor mentality* doesn't do that.
BTW I grew up with no money, but we were NEVER "poor".
Trouble is, under that scheme, if your gov't decides to spend a whole lot of money, they can then charge you a whole lot of tax. Gov't should not be fed ad libitum, but rather should be on the edge of starvation and forced to be thrifty. If they know they can raise your taxes any time they want, they have NO incentive not to spend freely.
That's actually part of CA's problem -- the state can raise the sales tax any time they want, so they spend madly and assume they can make it up out of our pockets.
A couple years ago I watched our CA state legislature (strongly liberal-controlled) at work for 3 weeks of the session.... not ONCE did they vote down any proposal for spending money, no matter how trivial or needless.
One of the side effects is that biodiesel seems to be getting into the livestock feed fats pipeline (shared processing facilities, I'd guess; dog food that uses animal fat now smells like diesel fuel) and the result is toxic to canine fetuses and neonates.
That's the difference between a poor person, and a person with no money.
Give ten bucks to a poor person, and they'll use all of it it to buy one good meal at Denny's or McDonald's.
Give ten bucks to a person with no money, and they'll go to the grocery and buy the fixins for 5 or 6 meals, if not more, and have a dollar left over to put in savings.
From what I've seen, sales tax gets collected at the state's basic rate, not at the locality's rate (which is often higher). At least so it's been with stuff I've bought from CA online retailers here in CA.
Someone recently ran the numbers on that, and... Prop 13 isn't the problem, it's massive spending increases EVERY FUCKING YEAR that are the problem. If California would just back off state spending to the same level it was just two years ago, that would be sufficent to balance the state budget.
As to whether Californians could survive without Prop 13... My property tax, based on what I paid for my place, is about $2200/year. During the real estate spike, my property's nominal value went up tenfold. If property tax had been allowed to rise at the same rate, my property tax would have shot up to $22,000/year (more than I make, and more than twice as much as my annual mortgage payments!) Me and most everyone else not in the high-income brackets would have lost our homes due to being unable to pay the property tax, just as was happening before Prop 13 (and is happening right now in parts of Montana where out-of-state money caused a price spike 10-20x the actual worth of older homes, causing property taxes, being linked to that fantasy value, to go through the roof.)
Incidentally, Prop 13 has not protected us as well as it was intended to -- local gov't simply slap "special assessments" onto the prop.tax. Half of what I pay is "special assessments".
Virgin now has some deal with Sprint for a prepaid phone with limited phone minutes but 1Mbit unlimited (data) internet access, tetherable at no extra charge, for $25/mo. prepaid and no contract. Friend just got this. Maybe it's a sign that the US's ridiculous rates might be coming down.
I know a bunch of ADD people. Their single overriding trait is not inability to focus; it's inability to *switch* focus. So if they get interrupted, they get totally untracked and can neither recover their focus nor switch focus to the new task. Whereas if they're not interrupted, they may concentrate on one thing for hours.
Thanks for reminding me, I keep meaning to try PCBSD and just hadn't gotten to it. Been frustrated with linux for years... first tried it in 1998, still haven't found one I can love.:(
Tho the some-other-BSD disk someone handed me at the last LUG threw up all over my test box (a lowly P4-2GHz) and wouldn't install. ???
Somewhat amusing that it takes scientific research to work out what every kid knows from observation, at least if they've ever used a double-length or very soft rope. Foot-timing can get downright tricky due to the slight lag in the middle.
We had air-raid sirens in Fargo ND/Moorhead MN in the 1960s, and they were tested every Sunday at noon. One long continuous blast. My grok was that if it was instead short blats, that was the real thing.
Air-raid sirens were the legacy of generations that had lived through World War II and had grown up into the Cold War. We've had nothing of that scale since.
Well, from what I've read, drug shortages are just as bad elsewhere, tho maybe not the same ones. Or at least, people in public healthcare can't get them in a timely manner.
Methinks a lot of the U.S. problem is that the industry has become overregulated in the wrong ways, such as the push for NDAs on old proven medications, which aren't sufficiently profitable to spend millions re-proving, and are subsequently taken off the market. Then some company willing to do the partial NDA gets monopoly control over the market and we're back where we were when the drug was newfangled and still under patent.
And it's not just human meds, it's happened with a lot of animal products as well.
Same reason I dislike cruise control and don't use it (when I had a car with CC). It's a nuisance to have to constantly compare road conditions, when anything other than mostly-empty, to "should I turn off CC now?" It's easier to just let my foot automanage it as a throttle setting rather than a speed setting. Also, that's how my truck prefers to be driven, and at its advanced age (almost 34 years), it gets whatever it wants.
Always makes me cringe when the smog test guy revs it harder to get up to the desired RPMs than I ever do in Real Life.
I read somewhere that British pharma are guaranteed a flat-rate of profit by law, to both ensure that it's worth their while and to prevent gouging. Anyone know how this works, or how well?
Slashdot Mirror
Roald Amundsen's polar expeditions were planned with the sled dogs as part of their food supply. That was only about 100 years ago.
[reads groupon's tale of woe]
Sounds like legalized money-laundering to me :(
As to the real estate market drop, one of the problems is that it's not happening consistently. Lower-value properties and properties last sold before the spike have dropped by 50%-80%, but higher-value properties (at least as defined by their price during the spike) have not dropped nearly as much. This may help some buyers but is also hurting those saddled with pre-spike property taxes on older properties now worth essentially the price of the dirt under them.
[I know, I own one of 'em. :( ]
[goes off, reads] Hmmm... it sounds like in the end, the taxpayers are still the losers.
I have wondered what would happen if the U.S. simply defaulted on all its foreign debt, including trade deficits. Seems to me that if the external money dried up, government would be forced to reduce its impact and we'd be forced back on our own resources -- and that, more than anything, would revive industry and jobs in this country. So long as we bleed manufacturing to the rest of the world, we're going to bleed money too, as credit that increasingly we've no means to repay other than from taxpayer wallets. Better to pay more for domestically-made goods (at least that is money that stays home) than to pay higher taxes in the name of paying off foreign-owned debt (a sort of broken-window economy).
Maybe if a few creditors have to eat the losses, they won't be so willing to extend basically unlimited credit to governments in the future, eh??
Yep, and that's pretty much Larry Elder's point -- that inner-city-gangsta culture (which I've not seen anywhere else, and isn't entirely exclusive to blacks) is stupid and wasteful and needs to die, and if you choose to be part of it you better not complain about "da MAN keepin' you down" because your failure-to-succeed was your own damn fault. Yeah, you might not get "a ton of money" from getting as educated as you can manage, but at least then you'd be smart enough to SEE your opportunities when they knock.
That too :/
Doesn't Israel still have a requirement for national service?
And it wasn't that long ago (just a generation or two) that our kids did all the same work that illegals do today. Every kid had a summer job, on the farm or in some related capacity.
I've sometimes thought that a required period of such labour (perhaps earning college money in escrow) would put a different perspective into the heads of today's youth.
Larry Elder makes the same point in one of his books -- an observation of the kids using a library in a poor inner-city neighbourhood that's about equal parts Asian and black. The library is wall-to-wall with Asian kids, studying fervently... but the black kids are all outside riding skateboards, hanging out and being "cool". Same opportunity, but one culture says "Study and Succeed" and the other says "Be Cool".
I had a similar thought... they have essentially stated what the value of that catalog IS... far below what they'd have us believe is the value of what gets pirated. Make up our minds, is it worth a lot (pirated) or a little (if *they* have to buy it)??
Same principle, tho -- "can't afford a stove" so they don't think any further, and just go to McD's. I totally agree it makes more financial sense to find an alternative (like a cheap hotplate, a used microwave, or even a $2 can of sterno), but the *poor mentality* doesn't do that.
BTW I grew up with no money, but we were NEVER "poor".
Trouble is, under that scheme, if your gov't decides to spend a whole lot of money, they can then charge you a whole lot of tax. Gov't should not be fed ad libitum, but rather should be on the edge of starvation and forced to be thrifty. If they know they can raise your taxes any time they want, they have NO incentive not to spend freely.
That's actually part of CA's problem -- the state can raise the sales tax any time they want, so they spend madly and assume they can make it up out of our pockets.
A couple years ago I watched our CA state legislature (strongly liberal-controlled) at work for 3 weeks of the session .... not ONCE did they vote down any proposal for spending money, no matter how trivial or needless.
One of the side effects is that biodiesel seems to be getting into the livestock feed fats pipeline (shared processing facilities, I'd guess; dog food that uses animal fat now smells like diesel fuel) and the result is toxic to canine fetuses and neonates.
That's the difference between a poor person, and a person with no money.
Give ten bucks to a poor person, and they'll use all of it it to buy one good meal at Denny's or McDonald's.
Give ten bucks to a person with no money, and they'll go to the grocery and buy the fixins for 5 or 6 meals, if not more, and have a dollar left over to put in savings.
From what I've seen, sales tax gets collected at the state's basic rate, not at the locality's rate (which is often higher). At least so it's been with stuff I've bought from CA online retailers here in CA.
Someone recently ran the numbers on that, and... Prop 13 isn't the problem, it's massive spending increases EVERY FUCKING YEAR that are the problem. If California would just back off state spending to the same level it was just two years ago, that would be sufficent to balance the state budget.
As to whether Californians could survive without Prop 13... My property tax, based on what I paid for my place, is about $2200/year. During the real estate spike, my property's nominal value went up tenfold. If property tax had been allowed to rise at the same rate, my property tax would have shot up to $22,000/year (more than I make, and more than twice as much as my annual mortgage payments!) Me and most everyone else not in the high-income brackets would have lost our homes due to being unable to pay the property tax, just as was happening before Prop 13 (and is happening right now in parts of Montana where out-of-state money caused a price spike 10-20x the actual worth of older homes, causing property taxes, being linked to that fantasy value, to go through the roof.)
Incidentally, Prop 13 has not protected us as well as it was intended to -- local gov't simply slap "special assessments" onto the prop.tax. Half of what I pay is "special assessments".
Virgin now has some deal with Sprint for a prepaid phone with limited phone minutes but 1Mbit unlimited (data) internet access, tetherable at no extra charge, for $25/mo. prepaid and no contract. Friend just got this. Maybe it's a sign that the US's ridiculous rates might be coming down.
I know a bunch of ADD people. Their single overriding trait is not inability to focus; it's inability to *switch* focus. So if they get interrupted, they get totally untracked and can neither recover their focus nor switch focus to the new task. Whereas if they're not interrupted, they may concentrate on one thing for hours.
OT, but has there ever been an experiment with doing something like dropping an airburst bomb into a tornado to attempt to disrupt it??
Thanks for reminding me, I keep meaning to try PCBSD and just hadn't gotten to it. Been frustrated with linux for years... first tried it in 1998, still haven't found one I can love. :(
Tho the some-other-BSD disk someone handed me at the last LUG threw up all over my test box (a lowly P4-2GHz) and wouldn't install. ???
Somewhat amusing that it takes scientific research to work out what every kid knows from observation, at least if they've ever used a double-length or very soft rope. Foot-timing can get downright tricky due to the slight lag in the middle.
We had air-raid sirens in Fargo ND/Moorhead MN in the 1960s, and they were tested every Sunday at noon. One long continuous blast. My grok was that if it was instead short blats, that was the real thing.
Air-raid sirens were the legacy of generations that had lived through World War II and had grown up into the Cold War. We've had nothing of that scale since.
Well, from what I've read, drug shortages are just as bad elsewhere, tho maybe not the same ones. Or at least, people in public healthcare can't get them in a timely manner.
Methinks a lot of the U.S. problem is that the industry has become overregulated in the wrong ways, such as the push for NDAs on old proven medications, which aren't sufficiently profitable to spend millions re-proving, and are subsequently taken off the market. Then some company willing to do the partial NDA gets monopoly control over the market and we're back where we were when the drug was newfangled and still under patent.
And it's not just human meds, it's happened with a lot of animal products as well.
Same reason I dislike cruise control and don't use it (when I had a car with CC). It's a nuisance to have to constantly compare road conditions, when anything other than mostly-empty, to "should I turn off CC now?" It's easier to just let my foot automanage it as a throttle setting rather than a speed setting. Also, that's how my truck prefers to be driven, and at its advanced age (almost 34 years), it gets whatever it wants.
Always makes me cringe when the smog test guy revs it harder to get up to the desired RPMs than I ever do in Real Life.
I read somewhere that British pharma are guaranteed a flat-rate of profit by law, to both ensure that it's worth their while and to prevent gouging. Anyone know how this works, or how well?
But should still be of value to persons who have not been sexually active, yes? regardless of age.
And I'd been wondering why they didn't vaccinate males; after all, carriers are half the equation.