My wife were at the Padres-Cubs game last night and I could not avoid hearing the conversation going on in the box seats behind me. The guy gave a non-stop monologue about his real estate investments and tax issues. The other people sitting with him nodded and occasionally got in a few words. You get used to this conversation in the high roller section. As the game wore on, the topic behind me switched to the soon to be expired Bush tax cuts. He said, and I quote directly, “….I don’t the Muslim is going to keep them…”. My wife turned and looked me and the box got very quiet, especially his friends, the silence in that place with interesting.
Politics aside, what strikes me about this is that this person felt at liberty to speak that way in a public environment. If I was saying something colossally stupid and wrong at the same time, I would keep it to my other fellow morons.
I heard an interesting rant on the BBC yesterday and the author of the piece offered two interesting infobits: First, 8% of the British workforce is on disability of some sort. The person went on to opine that “there must be some plague in the UK that has not been reported…”. Second, one-third of all UK households have more than fifty percent of their income provided by the central or local governments.
If you think President Obama is recklessly steering this country down the socialist highway, take a look at our comrades across the pond.
The various GOP primaries and off-year elections held in 2010 thus far are probably making H. L. Mencken smile. For those not acquainted with the Bard of Baltimore, his newspaper reporting in the earlier part of the last century was ruthless in savaging low-brow politics and society. He wielded the English language on par with the other Bard in my view.
I would love to transport Mr. Mencken to today and read what he would write about the Tea Party bunch. He took no prisoners and frankly we have no print or Internet journalist today that could carry his jockstrap. I am sure he would do to Mr. Beck and his ilk what he did to William Jennings Bryan.
I know he would be amused and revolted by some of the antics that passes for modern day electioneering. I am also going to take great glee in the upcoming circus. The GOP is buried in the middle of a sinkhole with few good options. Yes, as any party has always done in the past, they will make their standard and allotted mid-term gains in Congress. That tradition dies hard. The fun part is going to be a revival of the Rockefeller-Goldwater interparty schism of the 1960s’, only this time around it will be better and certainly more funny. Sarah Palin is way more amusing than Mr. Goldwater or Mr. Rockefeller for that matter. Stay tuned on this one.
One of the ways to keep tabs on your college kid is to read the school newspaper online. What a great trove of information. It gives me the opportunity to see what I am paying for, or put another way, what great events he may be missing because I doubt he is reading the paper.
I am surprised, or I guess I should not be surprised, at some of the opinion pieces by two seniors. One column, “The Preacher’s Daughter”, is surely close to X-rated as is “Ball You Discretely”, a bi-weekly piece on, well I am sure you get it.
Not that I disapprove, the paper has way more real content than my college paper even had. In any event, it makes for good reading and keeps me connected. On the downside, I find out their is a budget problem at this wealthy school. The article on this issue read like an article on the UC system!
This is quite a transition time for our family. Taking your oldest to college throws your whole world into disarray. All of the old familial relationships, forged over so many years, are being redone and rethought. As a parent you are moving on tricky and uncertain ground.
Not that thousands of others have not gone before you. But each family is so unique and the individual relationships within those families are also one-of-a kind. I learned this time around the vast differences in the way I relate to each of my two boys; in the past I assumed I treated them both the same, always trying to hold the even hand.
Another surprise was the mental and emotional anguish(mostly self-imposed) over this departure, occurred before he left. Now that he is gone, I view this more as an ordinary life transistion. As long as he keeps returning those text messages.
I heard a rumor floating around that I was about to retire. With two kids in private school and poor golf skills, the notion is pure fantasy. I am not sure what I would do with my time in any instance, my garage is really organized and clean.
I heard a rumor floating around that I was about to retire. With two kids in private school and poor golf skills, the notion is pure fantasy. I am not sure what I would do with my time in any instance, my garage is really organized and clean.
There is a good article in the business section of the Union Tribune today. It is a primer on how the various residential real estate indexes work. You can read at Sign On San Diego. The reporter did a first-class job.
Even though this was a good article, I think the recent redesign of the paper was generally positive. Before the paper was looking like a concentration camp victim; the paper just seemed to get smaller and smaller. Now there appears to be more content, albeit wire service for the most part, but more content nonetheless. Given the problems in the print media, I suspect they have done the best with what they have to work with. At least it appears to have gained some weight.
Real estate investment trusts have had a banner year. For those not familiar with RE’ITs, consider them a mutual fund for particular types of commercial real estate; apartments, shopping centers and so on. So the question is this: are investors betting that commercial real estate has bottomed out? I would have to say yes even though there are so many structural problems with that market.
A good example is the huge number of mortgages coming due over the next 24 months. Unlike residential real estate loans, most commerical debt has short maturity dates. In ordinary times, this would not present a problem as banks were actually in the business of loaning money to entrepreneurs. To compound the problem, values of commercial holdings are down about thirty to forty percent since 2006. Often to get a loan rolled-over, owner must pay down their existing financing. Of course, this is not always possible.
But somehow investors are looking past this issue and are betting the economy will not double-dip. I hope they are right.
Residential real estate sales, and you know this if you get a morning paper, were sluggish over the summer. I sell real estate and when the market slows, it is often hard to keep running at the old pace. Some industries still operate on the school calendar. Those of us in San Diego with kids are not needing them at home to get in the corn but things still slow down.
Hard labor begins after Labor Day. I hope this fall is better than the last. Most of the economic news is worrisome and I am more of a pessimist than optimist when it comes to this market but the work remains. Even having said that, I think most consumer are still going to be sitting on their wallets until election day. There is a sense that the election will benefit the GOP. How that translates into jobs in another issue.
