patrick.net

One more thing...

Globalization is inevitable.

Yet the combination of welfare state and globalization is deadly.

I doubt Europe can survive in its present form for more than a decade or so.

northernvirginiarenter Says:

> Conventional wisdom on this board sometimes
> seems very heavily slanted towards some strange
> fantasy, a pure capitalist state with low taxes, small
> government, eliminated wasteful sloth encouraging
> social programs, and no government interference.

Only an insane person or someone unwilling to work would want high taxes, big government tons of sloth encouraging social programs and government interference…

> IMHO this viewpoint is a bit naive in that it does not
> recognize the massive ills that go along with a state
> whose values are completely corrupted by unseen
> corporate players.

We currently have high taxes, big government tons of sloth encouraging social programs and government interference and a state whose values are completely corrupted by (unseen most) corporate players. Explain how higher taxes, bigger government tons more sloth encouraging social programs and more government interference will reduce the influence of corporate players?

> I have a fairly good understanding of unintended economic
> consequence, and believe we would be a better country if
> we spent 4 to 5 times as much on social programs. The
> problem is how we spend it, mostly.

There is no accountability in government spending so 90% of the money is just wasted. Have we won the “War on Poverty” “War on Crime” or “War on Drugs” yet?

> Its remarkable how you don’t hear too much about it, but
> spend some time in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, or France
> and compare the quality of life to our own.

If the US was full of white people of Swedish, Finnish, Dutch and French decent we would be a lot like more Sweden, Finland, Denmark, or France. There is not a single place in the US with a lot of white people of Swedish, Finnish, Dutch and French decent with high crime or high poverty, but there are plenty of places in the US with a lot of black and Hispanic people with high crime and poverty just like every black country and many Hispanic countries in the world…

Sedona is very nice though, but it is more expensive than many places in California.

Oak Creek and Big Park are 10-15 minutes from Sedona proper, and they have nice red rocks views as well. Here's a nearly new house with nice views for $400K.

http://www.realtor.com/realestate/sedona-az-86351-1094911399/

And here's a decent remodeled older house for $300K.

http://www.realtor.com/realestate/sedona-az-86351-1090867886/

Can you suggest some places in CA to look for someone who enjoys an "outdoor" lifestyle, no more than 2 hours from SF? This is a serious question.

STCM

Prop 13 makes me so mad I want to start punching every old person I see at Safeway. But your solution is worse. You only have to pay taxes if you don't have money. If you have money, you avoid paying the taxes.

Screw you, poor people!

Everybody pays the same taxes for property. If you're too much of a pansy to tell old people sell and move to cheaper properties when they're retired (or tell them to save for their goddamn retirement like I have to because you KNOW SS isn't going to be there when I'M 65), well, you can let anybody retired and over 65 and making less than half of the median income put their property taxes as a lien against the house, to be repaid when the house is sold/inherited/no longer a primary residence for Oldy McGee. Oh, and banks are allowed to make mortgages contingent on taxes being paid. You stop paying your taxes, and they can foreclose before the tax lien exceeds the equity. Don't like it? Pay off your damn mortgage.

Can you suggest some places in CA to look for someone who enjoys an “outdoor” lifestyle, no more than 2 hours from SF? This is a serious question.

Marin county is just across the GG Bridge. Parts of Monterrey county should also fit your description.

This thread is hillarious - thanks all!

I've voting prop GREED and I don't even live in CA.

@ Malcolm:

Here's my personal SWOT

Strengths:

Most assets held outside USA in non USD assets
Currently renting
Strong FICO score
Clean background
Real experience
Long time resident - IL
Good skillset
Thanks to buying right and selling in 2005 I can undercut if needed.

Weaknesses:

MBA (Things got much better once I took it off my resume) I started getting interviews and offers!
Out of work for a few years in the early 00's
Last job (as of 2003) was only for 2 months, prior to that longer periods of stable employment
Currently working (but I don't take it for granted)

Opportunities:

"Don’t seem to quite line up with my goals" (I hear you loud and clear!)

Threats:
"Biggest threat to me is that I feel like I am a perishable commodity.
Being idle careerwise has definitely hurt me."

AMEN - I feel for you in this situation. HANG TOUGH! I know you are getting all kinds of suggestions from people on what to do, and it SUCKS because none of that works. I will not tell you what to do - I hated that.

Oak Creek and Big Park are 10-15 minutes from Sedona proper, and they have nice red rocks views as well. Here’s a nearly new house with nice views for $400K.

I like the Village of Oak Creek. My wife actually likes it more than Sedona proper.

Thanks.

Paul, no kidding. I'm sitting here with a friend I went to grad school with and we both said the same thing. Maybe the MBA hurts the resume more than it helps. Maybe I'll move mine to the weakness category as well.

Peter P Says:
February 26th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
"Never invest in something simply because it is cheap. It is “cheap” for a reason.
Not investment advice."

That's really good noninvestment advice.

Folks,

If really wanna stir Prop-13 sh*t up you CAN see what your neighbors' assessment is.

Just go the Larry Stone's web site and type in the address you are interested in, and it will show the name of the owner and the assessment.

http://eservices.sccgov.org/ari/search.do

FAB:

I dunno. Even though I'm white I feel a lot more uncomfortable around white trash including some I'm related to, than nonwhites.

It is never a race issue. It is a culture and social-economy issue.

The best way to lift everyone out of poverty is to promote a free economy with big market and small government.

Me too. White trash is the lowest form of human life. The funny thing is that they are normally the ones who think being white makes them automatically above everyone. These are the idiots who get a credit card, go overseas on some boomer cruise, make an ass out of themselves, and then I go to the same place and wonder why the locals don't like white people.

Peter P:

I don't think that the choices are between what we have now, and Euro-Scleroic socialism and taxes.

t's been said that the US military spending is more than all the military spending of all other nations in the world combined. Maybe if resources were diverted we could have it both ways.

Malcolm,

There are a couple of people at work who had similar experiences (we are at an online broker). They agreed taking the MBA off the resume helped get calls, interviews and job offers. Again, I'm not going to tell you what to do, but what I did for a period of time was to have multiple resumes. One with it and one without depending on the audience. I got to point where I just wanted a "job" so the ones where I knew I was overqualified I took it off and the ones that were what I should be doing, I left it on. Ironically, I spent most of the '90's trying to be a generalist so I could target the mid to "c" level management jobs. Most of the feedback during the job search was that I had good knowledge of many different functional areas but since "I did not stay focused" nobody "knew what to do with me". My school (Loyola) was worthless in terms of career services. None of the above is intended to bring you down but to help with ideas.

Best Wishes!

Paul

DinOR Says:
February 26th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Malcom,
"most working adults shun anything resembling a (God forbid) “career coach”

I had a few inquiries about that and I am very clear that I am only interested in consulting small real businesses. What I do is basically set up accounting systems, and the lady I was talking about needed help interfacing her E-store with Quickbooks, and linking the new Quickbooks merchant account. There are some lessons an MBA like me can help with so at no charge I'm a sounding board for her ideas.

Reflecting now on that careers services situation really burns me up. Here you buy a product (an education) with the idea that it will help get a job. Then when you ask them for help at career services they want to charge you for the service. It is like buying a car and taking it back to the dealer and saying it doesn't start. The response from the dealer is that they want a consulting fee to see why it isn't starting!

Paul, thanks, that sort of describes me or at least I can relate to it. Maybe I should have gone for engineering or a technical skill for the undergrad stuff but those guys are hurting now as well, and many complain that they should have studied business. I was smart in following my undergraduate operations management degree with a professional certification from APICS as a production manager. General logistics theories are what they teach. Then, mainly for the satisfaction of it I went for the MBA in entrepreneurship.
I thought it would be a nice topping. I still find that I only am taken seriously in my original fields of accounting and procurement though. I guess I'm just one of those people who does better pursing my own ventures than operating in someone else's organization. I end up feeling very limited and I get frustrated easily. That's why I started in real estate, and why I thought maybe if I help launch someone's small startup I can get in on something from the ground floor and utilize some of the graduate skills. I know we can kid around, but that knowledge is very useful.

For the undergrad, career services was useless, we used to have some pretty good opportunities to work with companies, and even lots of internship opportunities presented to us right through the program that no one even explored the official career services.

correction:

For the undergrad, career services was useless. In grad school however, we used to have some pretty good opportunities to work with companies, and even lots of internship opportunities presented to us right through the program that no one even explored the official career services.

Even the King of Pop is having a tough go of it lately -

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23359218

btw - that was graduate school career services

I guess I'm not very familiar with "white Trash". Living in the bay area, I think they've all moved away. I think white trash people would have it tougher than their equally poor ethnic counterpart. They dont have a system that shows any sympathy towards them. They dont have a culture to fall back on or a country to go back to. They are just living in poverty, for whatever reason, and nobody cares. I bet they get treated especially bad being forced to live as a minority amongst aggressive ethnic tribes.

sybrib Says:

> FAB: I dunno. Even though I’m white I feel a lot more
> uncomfortable around white trash including some I’m
> related to, than nonwhites.

I’m no fan of white trash and nothing scares me more
Than people on crystal meth (who are almost all white).

Remember it was northernvirginiarenter who first mentioned
Sweden, Finland, Denmark, or France and I just pointed out
that the those countries are able to avoid many of the problems
of the US since the are mostly white.

While we do have some scary white people (including almost
every serial killer) white people around the world just tend to
kill each other less than black and brown people.

When was the last time there was a riot in a white
European Neighborhood where 8,000 cars were burned?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_France

sfbubblebuyer Says:

> Prop 13 makes me so mad I want to start
> punching every old person I see at Safeway.

It is not just old people you have to punch since kids can take over the prop 13 tax basis of their parents. I have a friend that lives in the home he grew up in near my apartment in Presidio Heights paying a little over $5K a year in property tax while others on the block who bought in the past few years are paying over $100K a year. When his parents (who are living in the Pacific Heights co-op his grandparents bought in the 70’s and paying just a few $ a year in property tax) die he will not only lock in the low tax basis on not only the Presidio Heights home he lives in, but the Pacific Heights co-op and the vacation homes in Seadrift and the West Shore…

OK, this quote takes the cake. I don't even need to comment on it.

“This is not a bailout,” Joseph Smith, the commissioner of banks in North Carolina, said this month in announcing a program to direct $300,000 in taxpayer money to mortgage counselors who could help homeowners refinance. “We’re not paying off anybody’s mortgage.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/us/26backlash.html?_r=1&ref=patrick.net&oref=slogin

Same article: Does this confirm my fear that we are in a depression? The logic follows that the practice was used during The Depression and is being justified as being used during The Depression. It must stand to reason we are in a depression.

Government has a history of getting involved in foreclosure crises. During the Great Depression, the federal government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, which helped refinance about a million loans — and made a profit in the process. In December, Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, suggested that government provide assistance to homeowners facing foreclosure.

sfbubblebuyer Says:
> Prop 13 makes me so mad I want to start
> punching every old person I see at Safeway

When I was a Republican I used to think it would have been funny to grab their walker and pretend to run away with it. Then I would have teased them from a safe distance and watch them stumble towards me and then pull it away at the last second.

To add to the visual, I'm dressed as Uncle Sam in the joke :)

prop 13 is part of the 'perfect storm' killing CA house prices.

the only missing is an earthquake and race riots. shocks from credit crunch is so powerful it might cause both of these.

The credit crunch is probably triggered by Pluto's ingression into Capricorn.

I had to take a day of from blogging, but here are some "late hits"

Peter P,

>>Optimal rate of production.

Again, not all will agree upon what is the optimal rate of production. This could easily end up as a circular argument.

NVR,

Right on. I have some personal experience with some of these countries, and I can only agree with you. There is indeed a lot of capitalist fantasy in the US. People think that they are rich purely because of their own ability and effort, rather than the fact that they had a lot of people doing the work for them. I'm not going to knock ability or effort, but it only goes so far if you are alone. The premium that rich people want to attribute to their own talent and effort, and the pay premium they assign themselves is way out of whack with reality. You just need to look at CEO salary and compensation to realize that. The pay premium comes from power, not from their actual worth to the company.

Malcolm, Paul, others: Interesting to hear your take on employment, skills etc. Food for thought.

Peter P,

Yeah, I think it may be too late to short google. It is always risky to short these high-flying stocks anyway. It is impossible to predict how the average investor will value them, and that is what counts. Now I wish I had the guts to short them at 700, but it could just as easily have gone to a 1000 as to 400.

Patrick,

A list of property taxes would be great. I used the assessors site that Sybrib mentioned, but it has the "inverse turing test" thing that impedes collecting all the data.

Here's a possible new topic:

Is the proposed VISA IPO the mother of all contrarian indicators?

VISA International has filed for IPO, with an expected completion date of March 19. They are offering 406Mshares + 10% over-alottment at an expected pricing range of $37-43, for a midpoint of $16B raised. If you fine-read the S-1 filing, you can see that the total number of shares after the offering can be as high as 966M. The implied market cap at $40/share is about $38B,

Now, VISA International is only an umbrella organization for credit card issuers, The real money is made by the banks that collect interest on negative card balances. And it is rumored that the banks (who are also owners of VISA International) are using the IPO to get cash to shore up their own balance sheets that are rife with subprime and other questionable loans.

Is the VISA IPO the mother of all contrarian indicators? With the decline in the credit markets, people have been walking away from their houses rather than their credit cards, but what will happen when things get really bad?

NOT investment advice!

This is why I proposed Prop 1313 last year:

http://www.burbed.com/2007/05/26/college-grads-fleeing-california-how-can-we-tax-them/

Summary: We must directly tax children to save granny's house.

RE: MBA

I'm perplexed... why would having an MBA hurt your chances of getting a job. Or, what jobs were looking for that having an MBA hurt?

I guess I’m not very familiar with “white Trash”. Living in the bay area, I think they’ve all moved away.

Trust me, they're not.

I ran into some the other night at a late night entertainment venue in The Real Bay Area. I also ran into some when going to open houses in The Real Bay Area, and in parts of Campbell, East San Jose, and... well... San Jose.

What's really frustrating is that I cannot for the life of me remember how I personally voted on Prop 13 back in 1978. I was age 25 at the time. I clearly remember almost all people I have voted for but somehow for many ballot propositions I don't remember whether I supported or opposed them at the time.

prop 1313 is a great start to maintain state population levels - but it doesnt go far enough

I propose proposition 1212 - which will lure newcomers to the state by:

giving them freebies like public education
free breakfast and lunch for school children
education in thier non english native tongue
subsidized rent if they are poor
free cash and food stamps if they need it
for medical they can just cram the ER and not pay the bill and we totally wont care.

think about it, this needs to happen!

HelloKitty Says:

> I propose proposition 1212 - which will lure
> newcomers to the state by:
> giving them freebies like public education
> free breakfast and lunch for school children
> education in their non English native tongue
> subsidized rent if they are poor
> free cash and food stamps if they need it
> for medical they can just cram the ER and not pay
> the bill and we totally wont care.
> think about it, this needs to happen!

We already have all the items above to lure poor newcomers to the state and to lure hard working tax payers who will start businesses and grow the economy our leaders in have the following items:

Free public education in old crappy dilapidated schools where the kids learn things like “self esteem” “gay rights” and “cultural sensitivity” (but learn very little reading, writing, math or history).

Crappy overpriced unhealthy food for sale in public schools.

The ability to sit through hours of education you can’t understand when kids that speak Chinese or Spanish are “mainstreamed” (along with the disabled and seriously mental disabled kids that are also put in to regular classes).

High rent and high home prices with very high taxes for all newcomers.

High health care costs.

There is no surprise to me that throughout my life I have seen lots of poor people move in to the state and lots of hard working tax payers move out of the state….

eburbed Says:
February 27th, 2008 at 1:01 am
RE: MBA
"I’m perplexed… why would having an MBA hurt your chances of getting a job. Or, what jobs were looking for that having an MBA hurt?"

It seems counterintuitive and I don't have anything other than my own observations to substantiate the claim. Here are a few reasons that I've noticed:

1. Like many things in our economy, an MBA creates a value that exceeds the cost an employer is willing to pay. In an HR pay matrix an MBA puts someone in a pay category that will lead an employer to choose someone without one if they can get someone with minimal qualifications for less money. Two candidates apply for the same job, one with one without, the employer may choose the one without if they can do the job for less. Maybe they will actually divide the job and use a consultant or outside firm for the MBA functions.
2. It is our own fault but MBAs have a view that they are professionals in their field and not a servant type employee. It is easy to find some sort of work, employers don't tend to want people who have other options, they want people who look at their employer as a provider/master, not a client.
3. Some people don't want to put people in their organizations who can potentially upstage them. Believe it or not, the inferiority complex towards someone perceived as elite (they replace the 'in crowd' clique from high school) carries over from people's past. Many entrepreneurs and business managers are actually misfits who successfully pursued their own vision to build a successful company. Many MBAs are snobs and create that stigma that we then all have to bear.
4. As I hinted at earlier, many MBAs like me devoted their whole study to business without learning a marketable technical skill. The ideal MBA is an engineer or scientist who then becomes more rounded with the financial knowledge that comes with earning an MBA degree. Looking at it objectively, these people actually have a fairly aquired competivie advantage and are the biggest competition.
5. MBA degrees have become much easier to earn and so there is much more competition. This is most obvious geographically. If I go just a few miles south, the demographic changes to where less than 15% of the working population even have a bachelor's degree. If you go to areas like SF, or you the higher priced coastal cities, everyone has at least a bachelor's degree, and probably 10% have MBAs. Therefore there is a distribution mismatch between the markets. I get calls all the time from flyover states and they actually seem surprised that I have no interest in moving. "But why? This is a very good paying job!" Yeah, but you're in Phoenix, paleeze!