invite response« First « Previous Comments 94 - 133 of 181 Next » Last » Search these comments
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 2:51pm
I love the ones that say little or no money down starts your bankruptcy case.
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 2:52pm
Hey guys, you know you are offering credit terms to people who have demonstrated that they don't pay their bills.
Peter P
2007 Apr 8, 2:52pm
I love the ones that say little or no money down starts your bankruptcy case.
Ha! Bad credit OK, I presume?
bankruptcy lawyers will be big soon, already getting there
How will they get their fees? :o Maybe it's more profitable to be the anti-bankruptcy lawyers who stick it to people under the new laws.
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 2:54pm
Can’t argue. Any high-income professional can be culpable of this
You are very enlightened. A memorable MBA session was when we had a guy come in and talked about 'shaking down some doctors' when he needed angel funding. Professionals are great targets because they have no idea what to ask. They totally get turned on by a flowery story.
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 2:56pm
Small businesses are funded in this order, the three Fs.
Family
Friends
Fools (the professionals)
Peter P
2007 Apr 8, 2:57pm
BK lawyers get first dibs on the bankruptcy estate
Ooh, all $23.47 in the account. :)
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 2:58pm
OMG, I've got a story one of those BK lawyers told me. You know what some of those scumbags do? They get the client to pay them with a credit card and then add that credit card to the creditor list. I just remembered that story.
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 3:01pm
Yup, times change. Camaros were the greatest status symbol when I was in high school. Now I'm like, what the f@ck were we thinking? Man NM is like a time capsule, people here love those 80s American POSs. The emissions in this state are about the same as in the 80s. I'm getting headaches everytime we follow too closely, and they still smoke in restaurants.
Anyone who is familiar with the recent H1B crisis? It seems like the 2007 (or 2008) quota is already completely used up so lots of foreigners with job offers will need to leave.
The Congress seems to be reviewing a new proposal of lifting the cap of H1B by another 50,000 a year. How likely will such a bill go through?
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 3:04pm
Peter you might get your way. Looks like they are going to settle on a fee for work visa solution. $3500 per pop.
Malcom, I know you aren't ripping on Camaros. :o
Although 80's camaros (3rd gen) completely sucked from a body style standpoint. 1st generation rocked the hardest. A classic 60's RS or SS is a beautiful vehicle.
Peter P
2007 Apr 8, 3:06pm
The Congress seems to be reviewing a new proposal of lifting the cap of H1B by another 50,000 a year. How likely will such a bill go through?
I am against all kinds of numerical quota. The market will let us know how many is enough.
However, the crisis means that many potential home-buyers will not be buying anymore. Oops. Spring bounce indeed. :twisted:
Peter P
2007 Apr 8, 3:08pm
Peter you might get your way. Looks like they are going to settle on a fee for work visa solution. $3500 per pop.
Perhaps they should auction off the quota. The proceeds will go into the education system. :)
Malcolm Says:
> The other flaws that I see in boomers all the way
> down to the Ys is the failure to form lasting
> relationships.
The reason we have more Y’s with screwed up relationships is that we have more Boomers with screwed up relationships.
People tend to do what they saw growing up so if a kid grows up in Africa and watches Mom & Dad gather nuts and bugs to eat in the mud hut odds are that the kid will grow up and gather nuts and bugs and live in a mud hut…
If a kid grows up in Presidio Heights and watches Dad play dominos at the PU Club and watches Mom work on JLSF fundraisers he will probably grow up and play dominos at the PU Club while his wife works on JL fundraisers…
Most (but not all) the people I know who grew up in a screwed up divorced home have been divorced at least once while most (but not all) the people I know that grew up in a (at least appearing to the outside) normal home with parents still married are still married…
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 3:12pm
BAP, that is true although the Gila forest was gorgeous. Lots of tall healthy trees. The Indian cliff ruins were amazing.
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 3:15pm
The reason we have more Y’s with screwed up relationships is that we have more Boomers with screwed up relationships.
Right on, and I've thought that too. Why though are the boomers so screwed up when they had nice Leave it to Beaver families? I know that is a myth, and they had molesting priests and overbearing fathers but really, they had a better head start than the generations before them and the blew it. They just figured their parents were evil and tried to not be like them at all.
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 3:40pm
I had an 80 Capri in high school, and a 78 Camaro just after. I thought I was cool, I was wrong. To add to that in the early 90s we bought one of those Firebirds. It was that nice red color with T tops. It actually was a pretty cool car, but once you go from that to a well made foreign car you just can't go back. Once you go Jap you don't go back.
Baby Boomers- that is all true, and they were so promising with new ideas. I guess that's what I mean when I call them hypocrites. When they had to bear the costs they didn't promote blacks, oh they made a show of affirmative action and tried to make everyone else do it but they just became incredibly selfish and materialistic. They are the first generation to literally make sure that their heirs don't have an inheritance to build on. Only a baby boomer would come up with the concept of a reverse mortgage.
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 3:42pm
I think the Clintons are the poster children of baby boomers. Do onto others the way I say you should, never mind what I'm doing.
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 3:50pm
WWII generation raised the baby boomers, then often raised their children, and even their children in many cases only to be discarded when they were no longer useful. And all I hear from bably boomers is, what's going to happen to me when I get old? Who is going to support me? Only 1 in 10 has enough to retire on. They really are screw ups, and in typical fashion didn't care about anyone else but constantly whine about their own bleak future.
Malcolm
2007 Apr 8, 3:57pm
All the baby boomers could think about was how many people would be impressed with those hideous Cadillacs. OMG those are nausiating.
Brand,
Hmmm, that wasn't my impression but I'm not an engineer. My sense is that an engineer would not make as much as a marketing person of equal general ability, etc. I certainly felt my boyfriend was underpaid for his level of responsibility at his previous job.
I don't think the inequality between lawyer pay and engineer pay became evident until pretty recently. Didn't new associates get paid similar level as teachers in the 1960s? Now big NYC firms are paying first year associates $145-160K a year, equal to very senior engineers. That's a hell of a lot of money (even when divided by 2,500 billable hours a year) for people who are basically doing paralegal type work to start.
Jimbo,
I *may* have overstated how unfocused my boyfriend actually is -- he's very bright and pretty well adjusted, so things have always come easy to him. Now he's a bit burnt out and he's dragging his feet on what he wants to do next. I *may* be projecting some of my fears about him wasting his potential.
The Boomers had a rather self indulgent revolution against their parents' world, and boy did they let everyone know about it!
Now the Snowflakes think mommy and daddy made everything just perfect and they can be perfect and special as they are.
(Randy, I know I am a severe pessimist. You say America still has the entrepenerial spirit, but I see that becoming more and more crass; more about making money than building something lasting and long term. It feels like America has skid off the rails of Henry Ford and became a massive Enron funny money game.)
Malcolm Says:
> I have a 99 Boxster which is the same. Nothing
> handles like it, and it has that classic rounded
> sleek sportscar look which looks just like what
> James Dean wrapped around a tree.
Dean actually wrapped his 550 Spyder around a 1950 Ford…
Some PCA guys still drive out to the accident spot East of Paso Robles when they come up to events at Laguna Seca…
? Now big NYC firms are paying first year associates $145-160K a year, equal to very senior engineers.
The difference is that those first year associates will be working 209138720 hours a day, whereas the senior engineers will be working a mere 60 hours a week.
Also, those first year associates will have massive dry cleaning bills. :)
chem e and he doesn't want to go to med school (that, he is certain about)
So my question is, short of terrible catastrophe or nuclear war (which somehow manages to not irradiate me),
That's one of the reasons why I want to move to NY/Boston/DC - in the event everything goes to hell, I won't have anything to worry about.
[Goes back to laughing about how in 24, all the terrorism happens in LA, and how Jack Bauer is able to cover so much ground every hour driving]
But senior engineers actually have skills beyond shuffling paper and getting into a top 20 law school law review!
PS - my guess is that Jack Bauer actually graduated from Hogwarts Academy and stole a time turner from the Ministry of Magic.
LunerPark,
that Marc article has got to be the most idiotic articles I seen.
Anyone really pluged into real wall street business news already
knows that business-capital tech spending is down. Fact is we
are already seeing spending for semi, computers, storage, and
software down.
What a stupid writer....
Monday, April 02, 2007
BusinessWeek: Weak Capital Spending
For equipment and software, investment declined in two of the last three quarters. With a lag of 3 quarters, the YoY change would turn negative in Q1 2007. Of course the lag might be longer, or YoY investment might not turn negative this time. But it would be reasonable to expect the YoY change to turn negative soon.
/calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2007/04/businessweek-weak-capital-spending.html
A reprint from my maiden thread, for the boomer critics. I probably take this all much too personally.
mrsburnside says:
October 8, 2006 at 5:57pm
@HidingintheBronx
My point, which seems to have become lost, is that it is extraordinarily easy to make a sharp critique of a given generation, and that your turn will arrive eventually - though I hope your eventual critics will deploy their arguments more honestly than you have done.
What you choose to call the 'silent generation' includes my parents. I don't, incidentally, hate them, and I never did. Wjile it is true we did not share their views on race, it was members of their own generation who did the hard, serious work which actually addressed the problem - attorneys, religious leaders and, eventually, legislators. Media of the day - and histories as they are presented now - imply that demonstrations got the job done. While not wholly false, these accounts overlook too much. You know this. But so do I.
As to languages and logic, I have some of each. But I'm not able to read Tacitus in the original, and am hazy on field and ring theory. College administrations, i.e., my parents' contemporaries, made those changes to curricula under pressure from linguistically and logically challenged boomers who I presume would not otherwise have been graduated. So you are right. I believe such courses remain availble, but the unwilling are not required to improve themselves. A kind of perverse freedom.
As to your economic model, I would observe that the generosity you attribute to the silent generation accrued to them - and almost entirely to the adult world at the time - from their successful effort to repopulate the country. That surge of infants drove before it construction, education, healthcare and retail. For my parents there were jobs available in an expanding economy. There were not nearly enough jobs or available slots at college for boomers. That socially upward mobility you are pleased to note was built on a population surge. The fact that you admire it must be one of the finer ironies, since it is the same demographic aberration which drives all that rightly annoys you today. The country may have benefitted in some ways from the intensity of competition, but many in my generation were underemplyed for years. A lot of us became entrepreneurs. I don't say that you are wrong - only that you give too little perspective, or that you select to feed your resentment which is, after all, your option.
As to the Great Depression, the silent generation were adolescents 1929-1939 and had nothing whatever to do with the recovery of those years. I have no wish to denigrate that generation, but by assigning them achievements not their own, you pay them a poor compliment. World War II was thrust upon them and they did the necessary, the decent thing, and at a cost. They were in college, mostly, at the time or just starting family life. The material demands of that war are generally accorded to have ended the economic depression.
Your take on inheritance is puzzling. Perhaps you know someone who has been foolish with theirs? Unless you know a great deal more than you are likely to about the personal finances of multitudes of strangers, you may not presume to know what assets they hold in reserve - not visible to an outside observer like yourself. Nor would you ordinarily be made aware of what arrangements they've made for gifts to nonprofits, or the precautions they've taken for looking after their own children and grandchildren. Do you suppose they make their plans to suit your ideas? Do you imagine they are not as bright or as principled as yourself? They may not only be better informed than you think, they may be better informed than you.
That is the crux of the matter, of course. Whether or not your post reflects your actual nature - that I can't know - it breathes insularity.
/rant
(we had fun watching a trust fund Gen Y kid try and find the spare on his M Roadster at an autocross at the Marina Airport a couple years back)
I changed a tyre on an M coupé a while ago, and it wasn't easy. There's about 10 gadgets just to get the tyre to drop out from under the boot -- it's external and underneath. And the supplied spare is about the dimensions of a bicycle wheel...
P.S. we had a grumpy old guy work for us for while who was a gadget freak -- spent every cent on laptops, orienteering toys, yachting and m/bikes, didn't own a house, and was one of about 8 kids, so wasn't going to inherit much... however, he really didn't know a whole lot about technology, and was pretty similar to the UPS kid... nor did he work very hard... so boomers and Gen Y can reverse, and clearly people vary within generations, not just across them...
Malcolm Says:
Post 1
Baby Boomers - I guess that’s what I mean when I call them hypocrites. [...]they just became incredibly selfish and materialistic. They are the first generation to literally make sure that their heirs don’t have an inheritance to build on. Only a baby boomer would come up with the concept of a reverse mortgage.
Post 2
I have a 99 Boxster
Most (but not all) the people I know who grew up in a screwed up divorced home have been divorced at least once while most (but not all) the people I know that grew up in a (at least appearing to the outside) normal home with parents still married are still married…
nature or nurture, the perennial question...
Randy H Says:
Part 1
This is an incredible strength which gives me great confidence in the next Century of “American Dominanceâ€. I almost hesitate to use that term because it’s become so maligned.
Part 2
I’m no jingoistic patriot.
jokes ;)
thenuttyneutron
2007 Apr 8, 9:15pm
PS:
Thanks for the f&*^ed up world/mess you baby boomers gave to the gen y kids. I now have to spend my lifetime trying to clean it up salvaging civilization. You baby boomers did a very bad job, now give us a chance and pass your verdict after we have had the 30 years you used to screw all of us.
« First « Previous Comments 94 - 133 of 181 Next » Last » Search these comments
I do not feel the need to enumerate their lameness.
Nevertheless, lame or not, they represent a huge market. How can businesses capitalize on this generation? Will this cohort make Web 2.0 a blockbuster success?
How will the future housing market react? Will there be another bubble when these young folks decide to become productive?
By the way, I am not saying that Generation X is not lame.
Are we lame or not?
Is "lame" a lame word?
Peter P
#housing