The maker of Girl Scout uniforms has been doing so since 1968 in a small factory in New Jersey. Today the Girl Scouts find it economically prudent to solicit bids for the required gear, and likely, the cheapest bids will come from Guatemala or China. Just my guess.
Granted, I know nothing about this organization, but in my mind's eye I see it as an all American affair; I don't mentally envision the Moroccan Girl Scouts or Burmese troops selling cookies outside their bazaars or shopping malls, or whatever they call their own versions of their consumption centers. But there might be some foreign presence for all I know.
I think it interesting that an 11-year old Elk Grovian girl might someday soon climb into her mom's chariot, their Nissan Murano, get shuttled to her girl scout rally across town to meet up with a dozen others, all wearing apparel manufactured by nameless, faceless 11-year old Chinese girls 8,342 miles distant. The $29,454 cost of the Murano? Just another necessary accessory that comes with suburban living; clearly, a non-discretionary expense these days. The cost of a $6.50 sash for her little scout? Whoa, way too fucking much. What are they trying to do, bankrupt working families? Outsource that labor! Drop the price to a more reasonable $3.97.
And so we will. And we'll lose another small piece of American manufacturing, and the textile mills will produce a few bolts fewer than before, and the carton company will produce a few fewer shipping boxes than before, and on it goes. But while the parents lose their jobs and will find other, lower paying jobs in and around New Jersey, at least they'll be able to send their own little girls to scout meetings, because now they can afford the sashes and the vests...and the buttons and the pins and the badges for that matter.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Socialize The Losses
At every opportunity I listen to Tom Sullivan on KFBK in the afternoons. I listen to his ideas on fiscal conservatism. That's a good label for my own personal financial approach to things. Nonetheless I'm quite left-wing as it applies to social issues and this usually trumps voting for fiscally conservative candidates. The God, Guns, NASCAR and CORPS attachment to fiscal conservatism makes me want to puke in my soup.
I enjoy the hypocrisy of a well-known wealthy fiscal conservative enjoying the fringe benefits of a public bank bailout. Had the government not blown a trillion to prop up housal unit values he'd be short-selling it at an even lower price than the artificial prices that units are commanding.
I personally believe that prices should drop even more to return to historical norms...but think of the damage another 15% would cause the banks...would cause the homeowers...would cause to the ancillary services of refinancing, HELOCing, and carpet installers...would cause to Fannie and Freddie where 96% of all new mortgages end up. Perhaps with another 15% drop would come 15 years of stagnant Elk Grovian low-density sprawl. Maybe by then the city council members would come to realize that this type of growth is destructive. Maybe not. But for the next 15 years, the rest of us can live without the threat of groan! more development! More traffic!
Things are looking up.
I enjoy the hypocrisy of a well-known wealthy fiscal conservative enjoying the fringe benefits of a public bank bailout. Had the government not blown a trillion to prop up housal unit values he'd be short-selling it at an even lower price than the artificial prices that units are commanding.
I personally believe that prices should drop even more to return to historical norms...but think of the damage another 15% would cause the banks...would cause the homeowers...would cause to the ancillary services of refinancing, HELOCing, and carpet installers...would cause to Fannie and Freddie where 96% of all new mortgages end up. Perhaps with another 15% drop would come 15 years of stagnant Elk Grovian low-density sprawl. Maybe by then the city council members would come to realize that this type of growth is destructive. Maybe not. But for the next 15 years, the rest of us can live without the threat of groan! more development! More traffic!
Things are looking up.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The Curse Of Woe
I wanted to clarify my understanding of why a Chinese manufactured product is cheaper than American made, but I couldn't make sense of it. Seems to me that the evisceration of U.S. manufacturing is more of an excuse (a choice) rather than anything else.
Say you have a $500 item produced in China where the labor to build it represents 5% of the total cost. Really, most of the expense in such a big item is not in labor at all...it's in the supply chains, the parts, the pieces. If they get paid $500 a month to build stuff while their American counterparts would have been paid $2500 a month, the 5% cost of labor would be $25 in China and 5x that in the U.S., or $125. The wage differential is a hundred bucks.
But the story doesn't end here. Think of these factors:
Your 401(k) is doing as well as it has because corporate profits surged over the past twenty years by sending jobs overseas. Fiorina's Hewlett Packard saw immense gains. So, let's take twenty bucks off that wage differential for not having moved offshore.
A $500 item made in China is likely a big, hulking thing. Not likely a small, intricate electronic device. So take twenty bucks off that wage differential for not having to ship it 8,000 miles on a container ship.
China uses predominantly coal fired electricity to power their manufacturing sectors. There is a social cost that will arise from this use, along with the expectation that they will eventually spend trillions to develop the same levels of OSHA-like regulations, HAZMAT controls, and other regulations worthy of an advanced manufacturing sector. Take off another 20 bucks for the current and future costs of pollution and worker safety.
Lastly, they are very likely vastly less efficient in that energy use than the U.S. Take off another $5 bucks.
Now the real difference is $35...on a $500 item that's less than 10%. Really, if we were to consider the American retail markup of these things (to account for the cost of the escalators and air conditioning at the Gallerias where we drive to purchase these things) we could narrow that difference even further. There's a lot involved in the selling of shit to Americans; a lot of retail fat that can be lopped off.
This is an amateurish estimate of things, I fully admit. But really, would you expect that American labor lower wages to Chinese levels, or work in cost-effective stripped conditions like Mexican factories?
Well, the former is where we are headed. We won't get lower wages in American manufacturing, we will instead off those manufacturing jobs and replace them with lower paying strip retail associates and other service jobs. We'll do so, because in my America the notion of manufacturing work is not a part of our identity anymore.
Not when there is better money to be made in the FIRE (finance, insurance and real-estate) sectors of our economy, where the idea that CEOs are worth millions instead of hundreds of thousands, where anyone can flip real-estate and never get their fingernails dirty. Our culture has shifted, unlike in other advanced manufacturing nations like Japan or Germany where factory labor is an important part of their national identity.
Our culture has shifted towards the FIRE. These jobs don't produce a fucking thing yet somehow out comes a pile of money -- JP Morgan builds a collateralized debt obligation, AIG insures it, the government develops policy to facilitate it, fund managers hedge it, yet nothing has increased in value. All those mortgage holders in that CDO didn't get any improvement on their housal units, didn't get shit for all this financial speculation except for a much deeper recession than what would have otherwise occurred.
I forecast the continuation of woe. Not just because I want it to happen (I do), but because I don't think this nation can move away from its culture of consumption to that of production...something that would reverse this decades long slide of shuttered rust belt jobs. Instead I see a culture, as I've mentioned dozens of times on my blog, bent on entitlement -- on getting something for nothing. Flipping a housal unit was the epitome of this culture and once these values are established it's very likely impossible to reverse.
I paint a bleak future for this nation, but truthfully I want to see it happen so that we may emerge from the other side a better people that what we've become. I want to see a nation that respects its bicyclists, that builds beautiful places to live, that values their crafts, that respects their environments.
Say you have a $500 item produced in China where the labor to build it represents 5% of the total cost. Really, most of the expense in such a big item is not in labor at all...it's in the supply chains, the parts, the pieces. If they get paid $500 a month to build stuff while their American counterparts would have been paid $2500 a month, the 5% cost of labor would be $25 in China and 5x that in the U.S., or $125. The wage differential is a hundred bucks.
But the story doesn't end here. Think of these factors:
Your 401(k) is doing as well as it has because corporate profits surged over the past twenty years by sending jobs overseas. Fiorina's Hewlett Packard saw immense gains. So, let's take twenty bucks off that wage differential for not having moved offshore.
A $500 item made in China is likely a big, hulking thing. Not likely a small, intricate electronic device. So take twenty bucks off that wage differential for not having to ship it 8,000 miles on a container ship.
China uses predominantly coal fired electricity to power their manufacturing sectors. There is a social cost that will arise from this use, along with the expectation that they will eventually spend trillions to develop the same levels of OSHA-like regulations, HAZMAT controls, and other regulations worthy of an advanced manufacturing sector. Take off another 20 bucks for the current and future costs of pollution and worker safety.
Lastly, they are very likely vastly less efficient in that energy use than the U.S. Take off another $5 bucks.
Now the real difference is $35...on a $500 item that's less than 10%. Really, if we were to consider the American retail markup of these things (to account for the cost of the escalators and air conditioning at the Gallerias where we drive to purchase these things) we could narrow that difference even further. There's a lot involved in the selling of shit to Americans; a lot of retail fat that can be lopped off.
This is an amateurish estimate of things, I fully admit. But really, would you expect that American labor lower wages to Chinese levels, or work in cost-effective stripped conditions like Mexican factories?
Well, the former is where we are headed. We won't get lower wages in American manufacturing, we will instead off those manufacturing jobs and replace them with lower paying strip retail associates and other service jobs. We'll do so, because in my America the notion of manufacturing work is not a part of our identity anymore.
Not when there is better money to be made in the FIRE (finance, insurance and real-estate) sectors of our economy, where the idea that CEOs are worth millions instead of hundreds of thousands, where anyone can flip real-estate and never get their fingernails dirty. Our culture has shifted, unlike in other advanced manufacturing nations like Japan or Germany where factory labor is an important part of their national identity.
Our culture has shifted towards the FIRE. These jobs don't produce a fucking thing yet somehow out comes a pile of money -- JP Morgan builds a collateralized debt obligation, AIG insures it, the government develops policy to facilitate it, fund managers hedge it, yet nothing has increased in value. All those mortgage holders in that CDO didn't get any improvement on their housal units, didn't get shit for all this financial speculation except for a much deeper recession than what would have otherwise occurred.
I forecast the continuation of woe. Not just because I want it to happen (I do), but because I don't think this nation can move away from its culture of consumption to that of production...something that would reverse this decades long slide of shuttered rust belt jobs. Instead I see a culture, as I've mentioned dozens of times on my blog, bent on entitlement -- on getting something for nothing. Flipping a housal unit was the epitome of this culture and once these values are established it's very likely impossible to reverse.
I paint a bleak future for this nation, but truthfully I want to see it happen so that we may emerge from the other side a better people that what we've become. I want to see a nation that respects its bicyclists, that builds beautiful places to live, that values their crafts, that respects their environments.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Horrors!
Couldn't let the burning of one the largest suburban consumption depots in our region go unreported here on the Franklin Monologues, now could I?
Horrors!
"We'll get through this difficult time" was overheard during local news reports this evening, like we just lost a grandchild or something. The twin blows of a crippling, disfiguring economy and a big fire in a mall; is there no God?
Horrors!
"We'll get through this difficult time" was overheard during local news reports this evening, like we just lost a grandchild or something. The twin blows of a crippling, disfiguring economy and a big fire in a mall; is there no God?
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
A Foreign Affair
I wonder what it would have been like to be an engineer in Westinghouse's Power Equipment Division, circa 1963, in Pittsburgh, designing transformers.
So I'm a middle-aged engineer in 1963. I'd think that as an electrical engineer I'd most certainly be the only wage-earner in the family. Westinghouse hadn't yet begun its drawdown into industrial financial services...no, its revenue still came from the manufacturing of stuff...actually building things instead of financing them. I've got a wife and kids and a dog and most importantly, a reliable car to commute to my new surburban housal unit in Wilkinsburg. I help design a 200MVA transformer bank for shipment to Sacramento. It's installed the following year. My life is good, yes. Sure, I spend most of my weekends boiling glass syringes to sterilize them for re-use the next week as an insulin dependent diabetic, but overall, life is good, yes.
Cut to today, where I'm a middle-aged engineer in 2010. Today while I'd like to wonder about what engineering must have been like in 1963, instead I sit in my cube and receive reports how a 69kV feeder crossarm broke, causing a fault, and when our dispatchers attempt to reclose a few moments later to restore the 8,000-odd customers that were momentarily outaged, the Westinghouse transformer installed in 1964, some 46 years earlier, decides its days are over. Major internal core damage occurs as the sudden pressure and differential relays operate; an internal B-phase fault ends its half-century run.
Today I sit in my cube and think of its replacement. We have an opportunity to get a new laminated core built for this bank...but it will have to be sent overseas to get that done. We have an opportunity to buy a new replacement bank...but it will most certainly come from South Korea or China. Transformer bank engineering and construction is now, nearly universally, a foreign affair.
A foreign affair, because our "new economy" allowed GM to become a financial services company that happens to make cars...as they discovered that the real money wasn't in making shit -- it was providing financial services to others who make it and to the buyers of it. Someone built my housal unit, I'm paying a mortgage to GMAC for it, and GM earns a small sum for handing the transaction. Sit in the middle and collect a percentage managing the financial affairs of other producers and consumers. Increasingly, however, those producers were foreign.
If you followed the demise of Westinghouse you'll know how the transmission services division of this company also delved into "industrial services financing" before closing the East Pittsburgh plant and being swallowed up by ABB in 1989. A financing company that also happened to build power transformers. Interesting parallel. Also interesting is how now they do neither.
I suppose Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea will follow the same path. Today they are one of the few producers of bulk power transformers, but if things play out there as they've done here, they'll soon tire of just making stuff and will really tire of watching those Melican financial services companies skim all those profits and soon they'll say "fuck it" and get into that action for themselves. Hyundai Heavy Credit Corporation will become one of the "heavy hitters" in the global industrial financial marketplace...pun intended. Won't take them very long to realize how much money is to be made providing both the manufacturing and the financial servicing of their products...cutting out all those American middlemen.
And what will happen to all those American financiers of 2010, whose fathers were building transformers in Pittsburgh in 1963? What will they do? What will their children do, twenty seven years from now, when manufacturing isn't a viable career and when financing is no longer a viable career?
So I'm a middle-aged engineer in 1963. I'd think that as an electrical engineer I'd most certainly be the only wage-earner in the family. Westinghouse hadn't yet begun its drawdown into industrial financial services...no, its revenue still came from the manufacturing of stuff...actually building things instead of financing them. I've got a wife and kids and a dog and most importantly, a reliable car to commute to my new surburban housal unit in Wilkinsburg. I help design a 200MVA transformer bank for shipment to Sacramento. It's installed the following year. My life is good, yes. Sure, I spend most of my weekends boiling glass syringes to sterilize them for re-use the next week as an insulin dependent diabetic, but overall, life is good, yes.
Cut to today, where I'm a middle-aged engineer in 2010. Today while I'd like to wonder about what engineering must have been like in 1963, instead I sit in my cube and receive reports how a 69kV feeder crossarm broke, causing a fault, and when our dispatchers attempt to reclose a few moments later to restore the 8,000-odd customers that were momentarily outaged, the Westinghouse transformer installed in 1964, some 46 years earlier, decides its days are over. Major internal core damage occurs as the sudden pressure and differential relays operate; an internal B-phase fault ends its half-century run.
Today I sit in my cube and think of its replacement. We have an opportunity to get a new laminated core built for this bank...but it will have to be sent overseas to get that done. We have an opportunity to buy a new replacement bank...but it will most certainly come from South Korea or China. Transformer bank engineering and construction is now, nearly universally, a foreign affair.
A foreign affair, because our "new economy" allowed GM to become a financial services company that happens to make cars...as they discovered that the real money wasn't in making shit -- it was providing financial services to others who make it and to the buyers of it. Someone built my housal unit, I'm paying a mortgage to GMAC for it, and GM earns a small sum for handing the transaction. Sit in the middle and collect a percentage managing the financial affairs of other producers and consumers. Increasingly, however, those producers were foreign.
If you followed the demise of Westinghouse you'll know how the transmission services division of this company also delved into "industrial services financing" before closing the East Pittsburgh plant and being swallowed up by ABB in 1989. A financing company that also happened to build power transformers. Interesting parallel. Also interesting is how now they do neither.
I suppose Hyundai Heavy Industries in South Korea will follow the same path. Today they are one of the few producers of bulk power transformers, but if things play out there as they've done here, they'll soon tire of just making stuff and will really tire of watching those Melican financial services companies skim all those profits and soon they'll say "fuck it" and get into that action for themselves. Hyundai Heavy Credit Corporation will become one of the "heavy hitters" in the global industrial financial marketplace...pun intended. Won't take them very long to realize how much money is to be made providing both the manufacturing and the financial servicing of their products...cutting out all those American middlemen.
And what will happen to all those American financiers of 2010, whose fathers were building transformers in Pittsburgh in 1963? What will they do? What will their children do, twenty seven years from now, when manufacturing isn't a viable career and when financing is no longer a viable career?
Monday, October 18, 2010
Crystal Castles
For someone all power, all perfect, all wise and all knowing, you'd perhaps think God could balance a checkbook, too. Apparently he can't, or at least many of his followers can't, not with the bankruptcy of the Crystal Cathedral announced today, some $55,262,308 in debt.
How is it that this organization can be protected by bankruptcy law yet their 40-acre campus is [presumably] exempt from property taxation, huh?
And you thought bankers were bad? Here we have a ring that has an immediate ~xx% advantage against tax-paying enterprises and still it can't manage itself financially. One more? OK, how about all that right-wing fiscal-responsibility banter -- you think that mantra can be heard echoing off those crystal ceilings?
You talk about a racket...holy shit.
How is it that this organization can be protected by bankruptcy law yet their 40-acre campus is [presumably] exempt from property taxation, huh?
And you thought bankers were bad? Here we have a ring that has an immediate ~xx% advantage against tax-paying enterprises and still it can't manage itself financially. One more? OK, how about all that right-wing fiscal-responsibility banter -- you think that mantra can be heard echoing off those crystal ceilings?
You talk about a racket...holy shit.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Phone Home
I am excited each Halloween, as more and more young adults come by with their nephews and nieces and tell me how I scared the hell out of them when they were kids. We've been a pretty active Halloween family for all my thirteen years here:
This is my usual spiderweb. I dispatched the spider yesterday. Today I'll get the toe-pincher coffin out with the pneumatic vampire. I wanted my crucified nun on an inverted cross receiving a hot-lead-douche for Halloween 2010, but the wife didn't approve. She muttered something about not wanting to look so evil to others. What a downer.
However -- what I remember most about Halloween as a kid wasn't my own experience, but rather, the Halloween scene in the 1982 movie ET. If you're my age, you were a kid the same age as the kid actors, and you got your first glimpse of a sanitized, wholesome California-style suburban "community." I wondered for many years why my own suburban neighborhood didn't look like that.
Fast forward fifteen years, I buy my Elk Grovian unit, and my own "community" looks much like that scene. Clean houses, kempt (sic) landscaping, good exterior paint, two new cars in every driveway. Halloween '97 comes, and it looks a lot like what I remember in that movie...only one thing is drastically different. There are no people.
We load up on the decorations, we offer a massive bowl of candy, yet people only trickle by. I take my own son out trick-or-treating and am amazed at how every other house is dark, every third house has a light on but no answer -- it has absolutely no resemblance to my own childhood experiences in Carmichael which was highly active, or to ET, where Hollywood inserts a community into that sterilized suburban housal unit pod.
Elk Grovian Halloweens suck. I blame it on a few factors:
With a fair degree of sarcasm I still make my point because within each one of these bullets lies a kernel of truth.
The 4th of July, Halloween, Memorial Day parades -- these are things that define us as a culture, yet I am seeing that they are increasingly being trumped by private celebrations, by private ceremonies. Fewer and fewer of us engage in the few public events we have. Halloween in Elk Grove in 1976 was probably fantastic. Halloween in Elk Grove in 2009 is just a casualty of the dead, lifeless autoclaves we call subdivisonal living.
ET had to phone home. He boarded his spaceship presumably to return to a culture that probably respects the dignity of place, the value of community and shared experiences.
This is my usual spiderweb. I dispatched the spider yesterday. Today I'll get the toe-pincher coffin out with the pneumatic vampire. I wanted my crucified nun on an inverted cross receiving a hot-lead-douche for Halloween 2010, but the wife didn't approve. She muttered something about not wanting to look so evil to others. What a downer.
However -- what I remember most about Halloween as a kid wasn't my own experience, but rather, the Halloween scene in the 1982 movie ET. If you're my age, you were a kid the same age as the kid actors, and you got your first glimpse of a sanitized, wholesome California-style suburban "community." I wondered for many years why my own suburban neighborhood didn't look like that.
Fast forward fifteen years, I buy my Elk Grovian unit, and my own "community" looks much like that scene. Clean houses, kempt (sic) landscaping, good exterior paint, two new cars in every driveway. Halloween '97 comes, and it looks a lot like what I remember in that movie...only one thing is drastically different. There are no people.
We load up on the decorations, we offer a massive bowl of candy, yet people only trickle by. I take my own son out trick-or-treating and am amazed at how every other house is dark, every third house has a light on but no answer -- it has absolutely no resemblance to my own childhood experiences in Carmichael which was highly active, or to ET, where Hollywood inserts a community into that sterilized suburban housal unit pod.
Elk Grovian Halloweens suck. I blame it on a few factors:
- A much higher Asian American population than my Carmichael of the '70s and '80s. My observations are that they don't engage in this tradition;
- Within every third housal unit lurks a registered sex offender. We obviously didn't have that back then. Times have changed. It's much more dangerous out there these days;
- The neighborhood is bifurcated into multiple dead zones created by Frye Creek
BoulevardFreeway. No parent in their right mind would allow their children to roam at night around all that brutally fast traffic...although they have no fucking concern when they themselves are behind the wheel; - Neighbors don't depend on each other for anything anymore. Better to drive to the supermarket on November 1st, stock up on discounted candy, and have no fear that the neighbors spiked Billy's peanut butter cups with razor blades or dropped used syringes into Betti's bucket;
- The distances between housal units has grown to the point that little children have be dragged down the last street.
With a fair degree of sarcasm I still make my point because within each one of these bullets lies a kernel of truth.
The 4th of July, Halloween, Memorial Day parades -- these are things that define us as a culture, yet I am seeing that they are increasingly being trumped by private celebrations, by private ceremonies. Fewer and fewer of us engage in the few public events we have. Halloween in Elk Grove in 1976 was probably fantastic. Halloween in Elk Grove in 2009 is just a casualty of the dead, lifeless autoclaves we call subdivisonal living.
ET had to phone home. He boarded his spaceship presumably to return to a culture that probably respects the dignity of place, the value of community and shared experiences.
Nothing For Something
Every 26 seconds in this grand nation of ours another mortgage foreclosure occurs. Another investor hoping to earn 20% by flipping a unit...another South Sacramento family who thought that if they didn't get in, they'd never be able to get in.
All victims of the American culture of getting something for nothing.
And this culture is growing. Note that there are 21% more applications for social security disability these days than two years ago. Tell me...did something change here? Did we somehow return to icky, icky manufacturing jobs where people are becoming maimed in sheet metal presses? Are there still a few thousand people falling off roofs of those millions of new housal units being built? Did I misunderstand something here?
I didn't get a fax. Didn't get an e-mail. Didn't get a page. Didn't get tweeted or twatted or a facebook update. Didn't get a phone call. Didn't get a telegram. Didn't get a wire. Didn't get a voicemail. Didn't get a text. I didn't get the memo that somehow there are more people becoming disabled and becoming unable to work when there are 7 million fewer of us working.
Understand that once a person gets on social security disability, their odds of returning to the workforce is 1%. As soon as they are approved, they effectively retire.
Look. There are cases where, say, a 56 year old unemployed janitor simply cannot find work...where existing disabilities that he was able to work through keeps him marginalized while competing against 5 other janitors applying for that one job opening, and perhaps it's time to leave work behind. What can I say about his plight?
I don't quite know what to say. I blog from my little ivory tower here, well employed with little debt and a lot of savings. It would be rather shameless of me to assume that I wouldn't also apply under the same circumstances. I've been a juvenile diabetic for sixteen years now! Don't you think I could ride this fucking disease all the way to an early retirement? As Sarah would say, "You betcha!"
I do things somewhat different than you, I believe. I leave 20% tips instead of donating a whole lot to charity. I don't go to the doctor for every sniffle. I try to tread lighter. I don't think I would sue for a bona fide car-bicycle accident. I highly enjoy my craft. These are actions that determine my character, whatever that may be...and I think that I provide a positive net value to our culture as a consequence. I am not a believer in getting something for nothing.
This ethos is why casinos and gambling are now considered normal features of our American culture, why they are sprouting up on every supposed reservation and tribal unit. Sure, they've taken a hit during this slowdown like any other business modeled around wanton consumption, but stroll into the Tropicana at 2:45AM on any Thursday night and witness the volume of people 'at leisure,' gaming for 'fun.' There are still quite a few.
This ethos is why we had programming such as "Flip This House," where the supposed addition of a few gallons of paint and new toiletries were considered the equivalent of the craft of home building, where the return on the investment was measured in triple digit percentages, where any schmuck with a two-dollar paint brush can do the same level of work as any skilled craftsman.
This ethos is why "free" and "all you can eat" are the two most profitable phrases in American advertising.
This ethos is why we were willing to lend to anyone with a pulse, including some without a pulse, to keep our hallucinated FIRE economy running at any cost, while everyone knew that if they were the last holding the bag they were going to get really fucked.
This ethos is why it is political suicide to raise the use tax on car dependency, i.e., the gas tax, and why we mask it through the spending of trillions of general taxes to achieve the same result. If we don't pay for it at the pump we think we are getting it for nothing and we treat it as a free good. We use more of it as a consequence.
This ethos is why I've been told, to my face, that I'm an idiot for paying down my mortgage instead of investing it elsewhere, why I was an idiot for paying the capital gains on my rental sale instead of like-exchanging it for another 20% flipper.
This ethos is why, today, several million of us have received nothing for something, why several million of us have spent a fair portion of our one-time allotment of life energy and received nothing...why several million of us will spend a fair portion of tomorrow's life energy (something) and will still receive...nothing.
All victims of the American culture of getting something for nothing.
And this culture is growing. Note that there are 21% more applications for social security disability these days than two years ago. Tell me...did something change here? Did we somehow return to icky, icky manufacturing jobs where people are becoming maimed in sheet metal presses? Are there still a few thousand people falling off roofs of those millions of new housal units being built? Did I misunderstand something here?
I didn't get a fax. Didn't get an e-mail. Didn't get a page. Didn't get tweeted or twatted or a facebook update. Didn't get a phone call. Didn't get a telegram. Didn't get a wire. Didn't get a voicemail. Didn't get a text. I didn't get the memo that somehow there are more people becoming disabled and becoming unable to work when there are 7 million fewer of us working.
Understand that once a person gets on social security disability, their odds of returning to the workforce is 1%. As soon as they are approved, they effectively retire.
Look. There are cases where, say, a 56 year old unemployed janitor simply cannot find work...where existing disabilities that he was able to work through keeps him marginalized while competing against 5 other janitors applying for that one job opening, and perhaps it's time to leave work behind. What can I say about his plight?
I don't quite know what to say. I blog from my little ivory tower here, well employed with little debt and a lot of savings. It would be rather shameless of me to assume that I wouldn't also apply under the same circumstances. I've been a juvenile diabetic for sixteen years now! Don't you think I could ride this fucking disease all the way to an early retirement? As Sarah would say, "You betcha!"
I do things somewhat different than you, I believe. I leave 20% tips instead of donating a whole lot to charity. I don't go to the doctor for every sniffle. I try to tread lighter. I don't think I would sue for a bona fide car-bicycle accident. I highly enjoy my craft. These are actions that determine my character, whatever that may be...and I think that I provide a positive net value to our culture as a consequence. I am not a believer in getting something for nothing.
This ethos is why casinos and gambling are now considered normal features of our American culture, why they are sprouting up on every supposed reservation and tribal unit. Sure, they've taken a hit during this slowdown like any other business modeled around wanton consumption, but stroll into the Tropicana at 2:45AM on any Thursday night and witness the volume of people 'at leisure,' gaming for 'fun.' There are still quite a few.
This ethos is why we had programming such as "Flip This House," where the supposed addition of a few gallons of paint and new toiletries were considered the equivalent of the craft of home building, where the return on the investment was measured in triple digit percentages, where any schmuck with a two-dollar paint brush can do the same level of work as any skilled craftsman.
This ethos is why "free" and "all you can eat" are the two most profitable phrases in American advertising.
This ethos is why we were willing to lend to anyone with a pulse, including some without a pulse, to keep our hallucinated FIRE economy running at any cost, while everyone knew that if they were the last holding the bag they were going to get really fucked.
This ethos is why it is political suicide to raise the use tax on car dependency, i.e., the gas tax, and why we mask it through the spending of trillions of general taxes to achieve the same result. If we don't pay for it at the pump we think we are getting it for nothing and we treat it as a free good. We use more of it as a consequence.
This ethos is why I've been told, to my face, that I'm an idiot for paying down my mortgage instead of investing it elsewhere, why I was an idiot for paying the capital gains on my rental sale instead of like-exchanging it for another 20% flipper.
This ethos is why, today, several million of us have received nothing for something, why several million of us have spent a fair portion of our one-time allotment of life energy and received nothing...why several million of us will spend a fair portion of tomorrow's life energy (something) and will still receive...nothing.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
The Software Of Architecture
I posted last year a picture of the beautiful blank brick wall that adorns my building where I work. Built in, perhaps, 1983, it represented the pinnacle of modernist architecture, where form follows function, where the rejection of ornamentation is embraced. It has all the charm of the Soviet Ministry of Geology. I have a nice photo shopped photo of it where I've hung 45' tapestries of Mao, Lenin and Marx. It would have fit very well in 1964 USSR.
I admit that I like Arts and Crafts furniture, popularized in the first decade of the last century against the superfluous ornamentation of Victorian furniture. Here, as in modern architecture, was an emphasis on vertical and horizontal lines and the creation of ornament by using the structure itself. It is beautiful in and for itself. And practical. It uses the wood itself as it's ornamentation, and is highly regarded.
But damn, there is a vast difference between wood and modern building materials like concrete, glass, and steel, and when presented in a modernist fashion this is what we get:
If you were in eight grade today I'd bet you'd regard this building as a hostile, sterile, lifeless place, making the already difficult years of grade school even more depressing. You wouldn't, however, ever put two and two together -- you wouldn't make the connection between a building not worth a shit and an education not worth a shit.
But they do go hand in hand. It just is never discussed. There is nothing human about this place. By 2065, if it survives that long, as the middle school migrates out to the next suburban tier this building could easily be converted into a Witness Hall for followers of Jehovah. No windows. No appearance of any human activity. No landscaping other than an over-fertilized lawn, limiting maintenance.
Granted, there also aren't any places for 14 year old's to duck under, to smoke dad's weed, to share his beer with friends on a Saturday night. It's sterile.
As we continue to build shit like this, as we allow every "new" subdivision to look like every other subdivision with curbside parking and acres of asphalt, as we allow our consumption depots to occupy multi million square feet instead of a single million square feet, offset from the street 600 feet to accommodate all that required parking, all that high-pressure sodium illumination, as we continue this, we are everyday losing more of our software, the people and the human interactions and the human scaled geometries necessary for vibrant, healthy places to live. We only focus on the hardware of our four-lane expressways, our mega-consumption depots, the blank three-car garage doors of our housal units.
What happened to the art of architecture? How is it that architects today are employed to build shit like this Middle School? Do you think they enjoy this? Models of these buildings could be assembled in an afternoon by three-year olds using colored plastic blocks.
Then, to the opposite side of the architectural spectrum we have our famous modern architects designing stand-alone monstrosities showcasing their "talents," while totally fucking up the integration of their "works" with the rest of the environment:
Places that showcase themselves, and themselves only. Never any concern for the software of an integrated city, only the hardware of galactically stupid buildings build solely as stand alone testaments to their bloated egos.
I admit that I like Arts and Crafts furniture, popularized in the first decade of the last century against the superfluous ornamentation of Victorian furniture. Here, as in modern architecture, was an emphasis on vertical and horizontal lines and the creation of ornament by using the structure itself. It is beautiful in and for itself. And practical. It uses the wood itself as it's ornamentation, and is highly regarded.
But damn, there is a vast difference between wood and modern building materials like concrete, glass, and steel, and when presented in a modernist fashion this is what we get:
If you were in eight grade today I'd bet you'd regard this building as a hostile, sterile, lifeless place, making the already difficult years of grade school even more depressing. You wouldn't, however, ever put two and two together -- you wouldn't make the connection between a building not worth a shit and an education not worth a shit.
But they do go hand in hand. It just is never discussed. There is nothing human about this place. By 2065, if it survives that long, as the middle school migrates out to the next suburban tier this building could easily be converted into a Witness Hall for followers of Jehovah. No windows. No appearance of any human activity. No landscaping other than an over-fertilized lawn, limiting maintenance.
Granted, there also aren't any places for 14 year old's to duck under, to smoke dad's weed, to share his beer with friends on a Saturday night. It's sterile.
As we continue to build shit like this, as we allow every "new" subdivision to look like every other subdivision with curbside parking and acres of asphalt, as we allow our consumption depots to occupy multi million square feet instead of a single million square feet, offset from the street 600 feet to accommodate all that required parking, all that high-pressure sodium illumination, as we continue this, we are everyday losing more of our software, the people and the human interactions and the human scaled geometries necessary for vibrant, healthy places to live. We only focus on the hardware of our four-lane expressways, our mega-consumption depots, the blank three-car garage doors of our housal units.
What happened to the art of architecture? How is it that architects today are employed to build shit like this Middle School? Do you think they enjoy this? Models of these buildings could be assembled in an afternoon by three-year olds using colored plastic blocks.
Then, to the opposite side of the architectural spectrum we have our famous modern architects designing stand-alone monstrosities showcasing their "talents," while totally fucking up the integration of their "works" with the rest of the environment:
Places that showcase themselves, and themselves only. Never any concern for the software of an integrated city, only the hardware of galactically stupid buildings build solely as stand alone testaments to their bloated egos.
Our Acts of Consumption
I sat in my co-worker's new 2011 F250 Super Duty Power Stroke Turbo Diesel XLT the other day. I like Joe, we goose hunt every season, but man, I question his economic decisions.
He told me a few weeks ago he bought this new truck and I immediately asked why. He replied, "Why not?" Really, there's not much else to blog about when you get an answer like that, as it tells you everything you need to know about why consumers engage they way they do in their acts of consumption. But I will blog on.
His old truck was fine. With this new truck, he says, you can't even feel the trailer behind you. I thought to myself, so fucking what if you can feel the trailer behind you?
His old truck was fine. With this new truck, he tried to show me how his iPhone, that wirelessly docks to the in-dash radio, is able to stream an Internet based music subscription service to the speakers. He asked me to give him a song. I told him Dimension Zero's Silent Night Fever. He spent seven minutes trying to find it on-line via the iPhone and it didn't work. Came back with some jazz. We gave up.
This truck is over $40,000. Yeah, he traded in his fine old truck to offset some of the cost, but really, he's at least another $20 grand in debt...just so he doesn't have to feel a trailer and can steam down some music. OK, maybe there's more to this story. Maybe a big diesel truck is a babe magnet. In any event, I just can't see how I'd ever, ever, spend that kind of money on a truck. Granted, I'm four standard deviations from the top of the consumer bell curve, but damn. If our economy is based on this kind of spending, well, I guess I should just be glad there are tens of millions of other Joe's out there doing the same thing.
He told me a few weeks ago he bought this new truck and I immediately asked why. He replied, "Why not?" Really, there's not much else to blog about when you get an answer like that, as it tells you everything you need to know about why consumers engage they way they do in their acts of consumption. But I will blog on.
His old truck was fine. With this new truck, he says, you can't even feel the trailer behind you. I thought to myself, so fucking what if you can feel the trailer behind you?
His old truck was fine. With this new truck, he tried to show me how his iPhone, that wirelessly docks to the in-dash radio, is able to stream an Internet based music subscription service to the speakers. He asked me to give him a song. I told him Dimension Zero's Silent Night Fever. He spent seven minutes trying to find it on-line via the iPhone and it didn't work. Came back with some jazz. We gave up.
This truck is over $40,000. Yeah, he traded in his fine old truck to offset some of the cost, but really, he's at least another $20 grand in debt...just so he doesn't have to feel a trailer and can steam down some music. OK, maybe there's more to this story. Maybe a big diesel truck is a babe magnet. In any event, I just can't see how I'd ever, ever, spend that kind of money on a truck. Granted, I'm four standard deviations from the top of the consumer bell curve, but damn. If our economy is based on this kind of spending, well, I guess I should just be glad there are tens of millions of other Joe's out there doing the same thing.
New Economy
Our economy lost 95,000 jobs last month. Many were government jobs, offsetting a 64,000 increase in private sector jobs.
What kind of private sector jobs make up the majority of this 64,000 increase? Ambulatory health care services and leisure and hospitality -- "food services and drinking places" accounted for 34,000 of those jobs...nearly 50% the total.
These are fake jobs. They are fake jobs for cities, municipalities, and taxing authorities. The are very nearly fake jobs for many of those 34,000 people who are taking them on, as they really want other work. They are fake because they don't pay well, and therefore, they don't support a level of taxation necessary to support that person's use of government services, like freeways to get them to their fake jobs 22 miles distant, or maintenance of the freeway sound walls, or the launching of the next generation of spacecraft, or the twin wars abroad to provide for their "security," or what have you. These jobs are not net-gainers to society. They are needed, yes, but only in tandem with higher paying jobs and their higher marginal tax rates...like those in manufacturing and industry...or in electrical engineering, like what I do.
Our supposed new economy of the last twenty years was the creation of jobs in financial services, in innovation, in high-tech services. Yet we jettisoned an awful lot of those recently with the latest meltdown. Software engineering -- dispatched abroad. Bulk power transformer manufacturing -- dispatched abroad.
We may want to blame the housal unit bubble and the derivative and securitized debt obligation meltdown as to why we have 6,100,000 people currently long-term unemployed. Nope. I argue that this is just a symptom of what happens when professional services and manufacturing is sent to cheaper labor markets. Now that "they" are engaged in the icky, icky work of welding steel laminate transformer cores, these decreased labor costs have enriched only a certain segment -- shareholders and Wall Street, of which many of us are also engaged, yes, but at the expense of our middle class incomes.
And! We masked that loss beautifully during the last fifteen years, didn't we? Although wages didn't appreciably rise, boy our standard of living sure did! iPhones, docking stations, a new SUVs every three years and bigger than the last, 3,235 sq ft housal units, GPS navigation devices, 21" computer monitors, on and on and on.
We got all this because we borrowed from today. We borrowed from now. The loss of our middle class incomes was masked by rising housal unit equity re-fi's and the extension of cheap-ass credit to everyone with a pulse and we spent and we spent and we spent and we spent and we spent. Now, whoa! consumer debt expansion has run its course. We even tried to revive it somewhat, through Cash For Clunkers and $18,000 tax credits for taking on a new 30-year mortgage. We borrowed from tomorrow, too.
The compression of consumer income does not bode well for an economy seventy percent dependent on its spending. Consumer demand has been removed as a driving force in our economy....so all this $700,000,000,000 stimulus spent from tomorrow's earnings is having little effect against such a dropoff in spending.
And never forget that there's no reason to believe the shipping of even more tradable professional services and manufacturing won't continue. Why wouldn't we see further job losses in these areas?
There you have it. Our new economy. Workers in drinking places.
What kind of private sector jobs make up the majority of this 64,000 increase? Ambulatory health care services and leisure and hospitality -- "food services and drinking places" accounted for 34,000 of those jobs...nearly 50% the total.
These are fake jobs. They are fake jobs for cities, municipalities, and taxing authorities. The are very nearly fake jobs for many of those 34,000 people who are taking them on, as they really want other work. They are fake because they don't pay well, and therefore, they don't support a level of taxation necessary to support that person's use of government services, like freeways to get them to their fake jobs 22 miles distant, or maintenance of the freeway sound walls, or the launching of the next generation of spacecraft, or the twin wars abroad to provide for their "security," or what have you. These jobs are not net-gainers to society. They are needed, yes, but only in tandem with higher paying jobs and their higher marginal tax rates...like those in manufacturing and industry...or in electrical engineering, like what I do.
Our supposed new economy of the last twenty years was the creation of jobs in financial services, in innovation, in high-tech services. Yet we jettisoned an awful lot of those recently with the latest meltdown. Software engineering -- dispatched abroad. Bulk power transformer manufacturing -- dispatched abroad.
We may want to blame the housal unit bubble and the derivative and securitized debt obligation meltdown as to why we have 6,100,000 people currently long-term unemployed. Nope. I argue that this is just a symptom of what happens when professional services and manufacturing is sent to cheaper labor markets. Now that "they" are engaged in the icky, icky work of welding steel laminate transformer cores, these decreased labor costs have enriched only a certain segment -- shareholders and Wall Street, of which many of us are also engaged, yes, but at the expense of our middle class incomes.
And! We masked that loss beautifully during the last fifteen years, didn't we? Although wages didn't appreciably rise, boy our standard of living sure did! iPhones, docking stations, a new SUVs every three years and bigger than the last, 3,235 sq ft housal units, GPS navigation devices, 21" computer monitors, on and on and on.
We got all this because we borrowed from today. We borrowed from now. The loss of our middle class incomes was masked by rising housal unit equity re-fi's and the extension of cheap-ass credit to everyone with a pulse and we spent and we spent and we spent and we spent and we spent. Now, whoa! consumer debt expansion has run its course. We even tried to revive it somewhat, through Cash For Clunkers and $18,000 tax credits for taking on a new 30-year mortgage. We borrowed from tomorrow, too.
The compression of consumer income does not bode well for an economy seventy percent dependent on its spending. Consumer demand has been removed as a driving force in our economy....so all this $700,000,000,000 stimulus spent from tomorrow's earnings is having little effect against such a dropoff in spending.
And never forget that there's no reason to believe the shipping of even more tradable professional services and manufacturing won't continue. Why wouldn't we see further job losses in these areas?
There you have it. Our new economy. Workers in drinking places.
Friday, October 15, 2010
Fourteen Years
I am indeed intrigued by that graphic from two posts back showing the number of bank-owned units in South Sacramento. What really intrigues me, however, is not that there are so many...but rather, why aren't there more? Why are so many homeowers (sic) still paying on these underwater mortgages?
Mortgages aren't blood oaths. Just a contract -- a collateralized loan. Indeed, for all the times I've refinanced my own housal unit, and while I don't remember any language saying I am making a "promise" to pay, even if it did, it's a promise to do so or to surrender the collateral -- the unit.
In Elk Grove these underwater mortgages are [mostly] covered under non-recourse laws that prevent lenders from going after the other assets of defaulting borrowers. Do you really think your unit will recover its $125,000 loss anytime soon? How long, exactly, do you think it would take you to save that much money?
I can tell you how long. Fourteen years.
My original mortgage was $165,400. Today I owe $9,300. Had I never made a single additional payment, my balance today would be $128,700. That is...I've committed an additional ~$125,000 against my debt over fourteen years. It's about the only "savings" I have; truthfully, I'm broke otherwise.
Yet -- it shows that with extreme diligence and a modest degree of personal austerity, I've saved $125,000 over fourteen years. Didn't spend it on cars, on hookers, on blow, on vacations. Just paid down the mortgage.
This metric might offer a reason why someone might want to say fuck it and drive away from their Elk Grove housal unit. If you're upside down $125k, you can expect to lose at least the next 14 years of all your savings paying on an upside down asset.
Sure, prices might rise back up to that original value again...but you will be paying on that for that entire time, and value has nothing to do with what you owe. You still have the underlying mortgage to contend with.
Value has nothing to do with what you owe. Had anyone understood this, they would have never engaged into these mortgages to begin with. Yes, the two are [supposedly] related at the moment you buy, but after that, regardless of where the value goes, you still have that mortgage...that doesn't change. People who bought a mortgage at 5x their annual income, even if prices today were to rise 40%, they'd still have to deal with that mortgage at 5x their annual income.
And you heard everyone who did this say "In a few years, I'm gonna refinance."
Refinance into what? You still have that 5x mortgage! What, interest rates were going to drop another 2%? You were going to cash-out some equity? And do what with that, exactly -- pay off some of your mortgage? You'd be right back to where you were! Minus, of course, fees and points due the refi company for arranging such a deal.
Unless and until median housal unit prices drop to 2x, perhaps 2.5x median annual salary with some down payment, does it make any sense in my opinion to take on such debt. It would make sense to wait for prices to drop, therefore, because they are not there yet, to the consternation of another few million more existing homeowers who would become underwater. More foreclosures, and the further inventory, and the further prices will drop.
I dunno. You really want to buy your next housal unit, say in 2018, at 3.4 times your annual income?
Mortgages aren't blood oaths. Just a contract -- a collateralized loan. Indeed, for all the times I've refinanced my own housal unit, and while I don't remember any language saying I am making a "promise" to pay, even if it did, it's a promise to do so or to surrender the collateral -- the unit.
In Elk Grove these underwater mortgages are [mostly] covered under non-recourse laws that prevent lenders from going after the other assets of defaulting borrowers. Do you really think your unit will recover its $125,000 loss anytime soon? How long, exactly, do you think it would take you to save that much money?
I can tell you how long. Fourteen years.
My original mortgage was $165,400. Today I owe $9,300. Had I never made a single additional payment, my balance today would be $128,700. That is...I've committed an additional ~$125,000 against my debt over fourteen years. It's about the only "savings" I have; truthfully, I'm broke otherwise.
Yet -- it shows that with extreme diligence and a modest degree of personal austerity, I've saved $125,000 over fourteen years. Didn't spend it on cars, on hookers, on blow, on vacations. Just paid down the mortgage.
This metric might offer a reason why someone might want to say fuck it and drive away from their Elk Grove housal unit. If you're upside down $125k, you can expect to lose at least the next 14 years of all your savings paying on an upside down asset.
Sure, prices might rise back up to that original value again...but you will be paying on that for that entire time, and value has nothing to do with what you owe. You still have the underlying mortgage to contend with.
Value has nothing to do with what you owe. Had anyone understood this, they would have never engaged into these mortgages to begin with. Yes, the two are [supposedly] related at the moment you buy, but after that, regardless of where the value goes, you still have that mortgage...that doesn't change. People who bought a mortgage at 5x their annual income, even if prices today were to rise 40%, they'd still have to deal with that mortgage at 5x their annual income.
And you heard everyone who did this say "In a few years, I'm gonna refinance."
Refinance into what? You still have that 5x mortgage! What, interest rates were going to drop another 2%? You were going to cash-out some equity? And do what with that, exactly -- pay off some of your mortgage? You'd be right back to where you were! Minus, of course, fees and points due the refi company for arranging such a deal.
Unless and until median housal unit prices drop to 2x, perhaps 2.5x median annual salary with some down payment, does it make any sense in my opinion to take on such debt. It would make sense to wait for prices to drop, therefore, because they are not there yet, to the consternation of another few million more existing homeowers who would become underwater. More foreclosures, and the further inventory, and the further prices will drop.
I dunno. You really want to buy your next housal unit, say in 2018, at 3.4 times your annual income?
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Dead Is Dead
As a bicycle commuter I long for 2008; I wish those days would return.
2008 represented the "height" of our recession...and the repossession of thousands of rides. My commute by bicycle was never so nice. I didn't have to concern myself with four black guys in a $62,000 Escalade with $6,000 aftermarket rims feigning running me down on my Franklin Blvd. I didn't have to concern myself with three shirtless black guys in a Dodge Neon hurling insults (or whatever they were saying) at me while trying to get home.
No one had any money. No one was driving on Franklin Blvd. in the evenings. It was quiet. It was dead. And for a bicycle commuter, it was a little slice of heaven.
Today, a hot day by October standards, meant that a few thousand South Sacramento cars had their windows down because their AC hasn't worked since '07. Combine that with passengers and it's ripe to get either insulted riding a bike or to get shit throw at me by the passengers. Invariably, they are either 24-year old white assholes or 22-year-old black assholes. Haven't had anything thrown at me by any Mexicans or Asians. Must be a cultural thing.
And that's why I blog. It is most decidedly a cultural phenomenon. Why is it that Asian American guy's don't screw around with a white guy on a bicycle, while black guys do?
I'll be forever trying to answer that question on my blog. But, suffice to say, nowadays there are many more black meatheads out there than in 2008, out there giving me grief on my little bicycle. There are many more white meatheads out there than in 2008, out there giving me grief on my little bicycle. That much is true.
I don't enjoy having to "compete" with these people every day for my share of the road...but I do it, because I have a right to it, and most certainly, I've paid for it. And truthfully, I'm exposing myself to these people everyday by bicycling while I don't have to. I'm an affluent white guy. I could just as well say fuck it and commute by motorized vehicle like every other affluent white neighbor of mine. But I don't, and I don't for my own reasons.
I would rather not enjoy getting plowed down by one of these guys...but truthfully, it's not going to be one of them. Statistically, it'll be an Asian female mini-van driver that'll get me. Statistically, because they are the only ones to have hit me before. Twice. Some black guy feigning running me over -- he's just showing off as they are wont to do. An Asian female minivan driver...she's really a bad driver, and while there's no intention, it doesn't matter to a bicyclist...dead is dead.
2008 represented the "height" of our recession...and the repossession of thousands of rides. My commute by bicycle was never so nice. I didn't have to concern myself with four black guys in a $62,000 Escalade with $6,000 aftermarket rims feigning running me down on my Franklin Blvd. I didn't have to concern myself with three shirtless black guys in a Dodge Neon hurling insults (or whatever they were saying) at me while trying to get home.
No one had any money. No one was driving on Franklin Blvd. in the evenings. It was quiet. It was dead. And for a bicycle commuter, it was a little slice of heaven.
Today, a hot day by October standards, meant that a few thousand South Sacramento cars had their windows down because their AC hasn't worked since '07. Combine that with passengers and it's ripe to get either insulted riding a bike or to get shit throw at me by the passengers. Invariably, they are either 24-year old white assholes or 22-year-old black assholes. Haven't had anything thrown at me by any Mexicans or Asians. Must be a cultural thing.
And that's why I blog. It is most decidedly a cultural phenomenon. Why is it that Asian American guy's don't screw around with a white guy on a bicycle, while black guys do?
I'll be forever trying to answer that question on my blog. But, suffice to say, nowadays there are many more black meatheads out there than in 2008, out there giving me grief on my little bicycle. There are many more white meatheads out there than in 2008, out there giving me grief on my little bicycle. That much is true.
I don't enjoy having to "compete" with these people every day for my share of the road...but I do it, because I have a right to it, and most certainly, I've paid for it. And truthfully, I'm exposing myself to these people everyday by bicycling while I don't have to. I'm an affluent white guy. I could just as well say fuck it and commute by motorized vehicle like every other affluent white neighbor of mine. But I don't, and I don't for my own reasons.
I would rather not enjoy getting plowed down by one of these guys...but truthfully, it's not going to be one of them. Statistically, it'll be an Asian female mini-van driver that'll get me. Statistically, because they are the only ones to have hit me before. Twice. Some black guy feigning running me over -- he's just showing off as they are wont to do. An Asian female minivan driver...she's really a bad driver, and while there's no intention, it doesn't matter to a bicyclist...dead is dead.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Cranial Rectosis
This graphic shows the foreclosures along a short section of my Franklin Blvd. (my blogs namesake):
Housal unit foreclosures are still coming in for South Sacramento at the rate of 145 per month. You can fill in a coupla more white squares with red on this two-mile wide swath over the next several years, methinks.
Note the large, empty chunk of land at the extreme bottom left corner. Two years ago our county supervisors were wet-dreaming about Delta Shores, another massive 5,200 suburban-housal-pod shithole with 1.3 million feet of strip retail...a "plan" to convert all that wasted space into asphalt, consumption depots, and low density suburban living. An extension of South Sacramento, who in their right mind could believe this "development" won't also turn to liquid shit by 2040? At the corner of Franklin and Consumnes River Blvd., not two miles from my own housal unit should be Light Rail's Franklin Station. It's been planned, designed, vetted through environmental and neighborhood review...but now stalled for some five plus years...to be forgotten about, to suffer the same fate as the second New Jersey tunnel project. It's projected cost in 2007 to deliver a light rail station from the Meadowview station was $1,000 per inch. If/when we apply the necessary ointment to cure our chronic case of cranial rectosis for having squandered such a grand opportunity to build public transit to an existing population willing to ride it, it's gonna cost us $1,750 an inch if/when we ever get around to it. 2025 is my guess. Right as I retire.
If South Sacramento, home of many of the poorest of our residents in the county, suffered the most foreclosures because people can't make their mortgage payments, perhaps many of them might have been able to afford housal unit expenses by eliminating their goddamn car if there existed a viable public transit option.
But perhaps not. Many in this region, clearly, owned some smashing bling before the crash. You never seen so much chrome, the lowest, lowest! profile tires and thumpin' sounds. Nowadays they are riding around in their parent's '93 POS Ford Falcon, living in one of those white boxes.
Not one of the red ones.
Housal unit foreclosures are still coming in for South Sacramento at the rate of 145 per month. You can fill in a coupla more white squares with red on this two-mile wide swath over the next several years, methinks.
Note the large, empty chunk of land at the extreme bottom left corner. Two years ago our county supervisors were wet-dreaming about Delta Shores, another massive 5,200 suburban-housal-pod shithole with 1.3 million feet of strip retail...a "plan" to convert all that wasted space into asphalt, consumption depots, and low density suburban living. An extension of South Sacramento, who in their right mind could believe this "development" won't also turn to liquid shit by 2040? At the corner of Franklin and Consumnes River Blvd., not two miles from my own housal unit should be Light Rail's Franklin Station. It's been planned, designed, vetted through environmental and neighborhood review...but now stalled for some five plus years...to be forgotten about, to suffer the same fate as the second New Jersey tunnel project. It's projected cost in 2007 to deliver a light rail station from the Meadowview station was $1,000 per inch. If/when we apply the necessary ointment to cure our chronic case of cranial rectosis for having squandered such a grand opportunity to build public transit to an existing population willing to ride it, it's gonna cost us $1,750 an inch if/when we ever get around to it. 2025 is my guess. Right as I retire.
If South Sacramento, home of many of the poorest of our residents in the county, suffered the most foreclosures because people can't make their mortgage payments, perhaps many of them might have been able to afford housal unit expenses by eliminating their goddamn car if there existed a viable public transit option.
But perhaps not. Many in this region, clearly, owned some smashing bling before the crash. You never seen so much chrome, the lowest, lowest! profile tires and thumpin' sounds. Nowadays they are riding around in their parent's '93 POS Ford Falcon, living in one of those white boxes.
Not one of the red ones.
A Trillion Less
To protect high voltage transmission lines from lightning strikes, flying squirrels, or errant balloons, I am employed to identify faulted conditions (usually a combination of high current and low voltage) and to trip circuit breakers to isolate the faulted equipment.
Failure to do so leads to blackouts like what occurred in Florida in 2008, where a fault wasn't detected and was allowed to drag down a half million customers.
Today I employ microprocessor controlled relays that measure such things as voltage and current 4 times a cycle, and with 60Hz power that's 240 times a second. I've been doing it for almost five years now.
If I count all the processing intervals that all the digital relays I have in my utility have processed since I started work here:
Failure to do so leads to blackouts like what occurred in Florida in 2008, where a fault wasn't detected and was allowed to drag down a half million customers.
Today I employ microprocessor controlled relays that measure such things as voltage and current 4 times a cycle, and with 60Hz power that's 240 times a second. I've been doing it for almost five years now.
If I count all the processing intervals that all the digital relays I have in my utility have processed since I started work here:
- # of intervals per minute 240
- # of intervals per hour 14,400
- # of intervals per day 864,000
- # of intervals per year 20,736,000
- # of intervals over the 5 years I've worked for SMUD 7,568,640,000
- # of digital relays at SMUD 324
- Total number of processes by all microprocessors 12,261,196,800,000
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Food Units
As I predicted here seven months ago, the awards for the providing of overpriced airport food were contracted to two of the largest global food companies -- HMS Host and SSP America. Dollars spent here will flow out of here, which is par for the economic course we've designed. We're just playing bogey ball.
A few local owners will be granted the privilege of aligning with these two corporations owing up to a 10% stake in the venture.
Others, who paid several thousand dollars and applied as independents (read: totally locally owned) so as to not be subjected to the dim 4%-6% share of revenues they would have gotten while under the umbrella of either of these corporations, were denied. "Lack of experience," claimed the panel of evaluators for Greg Brida, the owner of Luigi's Slice in Midtown. His family's 50 years of experience in Sacramento was no match against the experience of HMS Host offering globally sourced products to other airports concessions stands. Gone is his $7,000...pissed away to pay for evaluation efforts that clearly were going to lean towards national businesses operating under the contraction of a global food service provider. Famous Famiglia Pizza won the "Italian Foods Concessions Bid." The official pizza of the Palms Hotel. The official pizza of Madison Square Garden.
And soon to be the official Italian-food-unit for Terminal B at Sacramento International Airport. I suppose having authentic pre-formed frozen pizza dough from a factory in Minnesota shipped here and cooked at the push of a single button on a heating unit by a lowly-paid concessionaire and touted as "NY's finest pizza" is exactly what Sacramento needs.
I would have to think that frequent airline travelers enjoy a degree of familiarity when they arrive at a new destination. That they can find a slice of pepperoni pizza that tastes just like the pizza they had at Cleveland International is an important point. That is...they will spend more money there as opposed to an unknown, cast-under-suspicion local outfit like Luigi's Slice.
A few local owners will be granted the privilege of aligning with these two corporations owing up to a 10% stake in the venture.
Others, who paid several thousand dollars and applied as independents (read: totally locally owned) so as to not be subjected to the dim 4%-6% share of revenues they would have gotten while under the umbrella of either of these corporations, were denied. "Lack of experience," claimed the panel of evaluators for Greg Brida, the owner of Luigi's Slice in Midtown. His family's 50 years of experience in Sacramento was no match against the experience of HMS Host offering globally sourced products to other airports concessions stands. Gone is his $7,000...pissed away to pay for evaluation efforts that clearly were going to lean towards national businesses operating under the contraction of a global food service provider. Famous Famiglia Pizza won the "Italian Foods Concessions Bid." The official pizza of the Palms Hotel. The official pizza of Madison Square Garden.
And soon to be the official Italian-food-unit for Terminal B at Sacramento International Airport. I suppose having authentic pre-formed frozen pizza dough from a factory in Minnesota shipped here and cooked at the push of a single button on a heating unit by a lowly-paid concessionaire and touted as "NY's finest pizza" is exactly what Sacramento needs.
I would have to think that frequent airline travelers enjoy a degree of familiarity when they arrive at a new destination. That they can find a slice of pepperoni pizza that tastes just like the pizza they had at Cleveland International is an important point. That is...they will spend more money there as opposed to an unknown, cast-under-suspicion local outfit like Luigi's Slice.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
One Hundred And One
Today there were more notices of default in my local Elk Grove Citizen newspaper than I've ever seen before; more today than at any time over the past three years of recession.
In 2008 I posted the names of those who were then defaulting, and it was clear that they were predominantly non-white. Today in the Elk Grove Citizen there were one hundred and one notices of default. The latest the deed of trust was executed was 2009. The earliest was July 27th, 1999. In this one instance, a couple, Emil and Raquel Canlas paid on their mortgage for twelve years and two months and are now defaulting, presumably meaning that all those payments were nothing more than rent, while the government was able to account Emil and Raquel Canlas as "homeowners" for all those years, inflating their numbers touting the success of the middle class, how middle Americans are doing just fine...prospering during our booming 2002-2006 economy. If it's anything like my brother-in-law, the housal unit will be "stolen" by an investor, a bank, or someone else who picks it up for a song.
Why do you suppose Emil and Raquel defaulted, now some twelve years into their [presumably] thirty year mortgage? Loss of income? Medical bankruptcy? Over-extension due to cash-out re-fi's buying 1080i TVs for each room? Housal unit valuation less than the $160,789.86 owed, and they simply said "fuck it," and drove away?
Why?
I will never know.
Those defaulting today are not the same as those defaulting two years ago. It's clear that those defaulting two years ago were very clearly non-white. Look at the names of some of these 101 defaulters of today:
Jin Wu
Lien Nguyen
Kc Hasse
Lorenzo Durrana
Michael Wells
Trung Tran
Elsa Montenegro
Phuc Gi
James McGown
Gerald Haynes
Murad Ali Kabani
Penny Sulivan
Nancy Boykin
Samantha Stonework
Dennis Martel
Jose Martinez
Amber Peck
Tyler Weisz
Romeo Gatchalian
May Thanh Le
Robert Archie
Jeffery Mcalpin
Natasha Clarke
Joselito Laygo
Robert Jones
Danielle Sada
Deborah Henry
Balwinder Dulku
Umaru Fofana
Rose Valencia
Megan Williams
Brian Rowland
Stephan Leesha
Cindy Titus
Ophelia Delapaz
Duong Chu
Quang Dich
Laura Gardner
Joseph Maggiora
Nichelle Williams
William Hannell
James Dapelo
Jennifer Larsen
Angelito Rubio
Tanya Duplantier
Raymond Hayashi
Kulbir Thind
Randy Stiles (the largest defaulter)
William Page
Lanier Williams
Susan Clanton
Lydda Macellana
Sonia Gutterez
Stephen Burrell
Emil Canlas
Geogina Castro
Masoud Janatpour
Andre Wilder
Tracye Bishop
Angelita Francisco
Stephen Locke
Elias Fares
Whew!
Why am I wasting precious hours of my life posting this shit? To document that every class, every race, every creed, and not just foreign born Americans have lost much of their life's work, but now, white America, too. It seems that white people held out hope a lot longer than when I first posted the names of defaulters two years ago, and now they represent 50% of all defaulters. I say this using the stereotype of using names to presuppose race...Samantha Stonework is decidedly a white woman's name, wouldn't you agree? Two years ago, white names represented 15% of the total.
Coupla ideas why. Perhaps whites were the last fired. Perhaps they cling more strongly to the core value of not defaulting on obligations. Perhaps they are simply economic dolts, having failed to see the value in driving away early. I tend to believe more in #3, because look around -- there are a lot of people out there without a basic understanding of saving, of value, of buy-later-when-there-ain't-no-money...
In 2008 I posted the names of those who were then defaulting, and it was clear that they were predominantly non-white. Today in the Elk Grove Citizen there were one hundred and one notices of default. The latest the deed of trust was executed was 2009. The earliest was July 27th, 1999. In this one instance, a couple, Emil and Raquel Canlas paid on their mortgage for twelve years and two months and are now defaulting, presumably meaning that all those payments were nothing more than rent, while the government was able to account Emil and Raquel Canlas as "homeowners" for all those years, inflating their numbers touting the success of the middle class, how middle Americans are doing just fine...prospering during our booming 2002-2006 economy. If it's anything like my brother-in-law, the housal unit will be "stolen" by an investor, a bank, or someone else who picks it up for a song.
Why do you suppose Emil and Raquel defaulted, now some twelve years into their [presumably] thirty year mortgage? Loss of income? Medical bankruptcy? Over-extension due to cash-out re-fi's buying 1080i TVs for each room? Housal unit valuation less than the $160,789.86 owed, and they simply said "fuck it," and drove away?
Why?
I will never know.
Those defaulting today are not the same as those defaulting two years ago. It's clear that those defaulting two years ago were very clearly non-white. Look at the names of some of these 101 defaulters of today:
Jin Wu
Lien Nguyen
Kc Hasse
Lorenzo Durrana
Michael Wells
Trung Tran
Elsa Montenegro
Phuc Gi
James McGown
Gerald Haynes
Murad Ali Kabani
Penny Sulivan
Nancy Boykin
Samantha Stonework
Dennis Martel
Jose Martinez
Amber Peck
Tyler Weisz
Romeo Gatchalian
May Thanh Le
Robert Archie
Jeffery Mcalpin
Natasha Clarke
Joselito Laygo
Robert Jones
Danielle Sada
Deborah Henry
Balwinder Dulku
Umaru Fofana
Rose Valencia
Megan Williams
Brian Rowland
Stephan Leesha
Cindy Titus
Ophelia Delapaz
Duong Chu
Quang Dich
Laura Gardner
Joseph Maggiora
Nichelle Williams
William Hannell
James Dapelo
Jennifer Larsen
Angelito Rubio
Tanya Duplantier
Raymond Hayashi
Kulbir Thind
Randy Stiles (the largest defaulter)
William Page
Lanier Williams
Susan Clanton
Lydda Macellana
Sonia Gutterez
Stephen Burrell
Emil Canlas
Geogina Castro
Masoud Janatpour
Andre Wilder
Tracye Bishop
Angelita Francisco
Stephen Locke
Elias Fares
Whew!
Why am I wasting precious hours of my life posting this shit? To document that every class, every race, every creed, and not just foreign born Americans have lost much of their life's work, but now, white America, too. It seems that white people held out hope a lot longer than when I first posted the names of defaulters two years ago, and now they represent 50% of all defaulters. I say this using the stereotype of using names to presuppose race...Samantha Stonework is decidedly a white woman's name, wouldn't you agree? Two years ago, white names represented 15% of the total.
Coupla ideas why. Perhaps whites were the last fired. Perhaps they cling more strongly to the core value of not defaulting on obligations. Perhaps they are simply economic dolts, having failed to see the value in driving away early. I tend to believe more in #3, because look around -- there are a lot of people out there without a basic understanding of saving, of value, of buy-later-when-there-ain't-no-money...
Monday, October 4, 2010
They're Alive
When Mr. Obama was first elected, 91% of U.S. blacks supported his presidency while 63% of whites did.
Now some twenty months later, after enduring twenty months of the worst, most catastrophic recession in the recorded history of the world, 90% of blacks still support Obama's presidency while only 36% of whites do.
So tell me...who are the racists here? Support for a president based on the color of his skin is the definition of racism, just as much as it would be to oppose that same president due to his race. It's either the blacks who are racist for maintaining the same level of support or the 27% of the whites who've withdrawn their support...in the face of $1.4 trillion annual deficits, the continuation of two wars, the continuation of double digit unemployment and projected massive run-ups in health care costs.
Please. I cannot think of any clearer example of racism in America. It is alive and well; it has never gone away.
Now some twenty months later, after enduring twenty months of the worst, most catastrophic recession in the recorded history of the world, 90% of blacks still support Obama's presidency while only 36% of whites do.
So tell me...who are the racists here? Support for a president based on the color of his skin is the definition of racism, just as much as it would be to oppose that same president due to his race. It's either the blacks who are racist for maintaining the same level of support or the 27% of the whites who've withdrawn their support...in the face of $1.4 trillion annual deficits, the continuation of two wars, the continuation of double digit unemployment and projected massive run-ups in health care costs.
Please. I cannot think of any clearer example of racism in America. It is alive and well; it has never gone away.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Everywhere And Nowhere
How is it that the last human walked on the moon in December of 1973...almost 40 years ago, yet we haven't returned? I mentioned some time back about how I enjoy paying taxes so long as a [large] percentage is allocated towards NASA. There is no better use of my efforts on this rock than to be taxed to explore realms outside this rock. I do not mind being taxed for this.
However, as I rode my bicycle down Thurman Way in South Sacramento to my cousin's house, I got to see where most of my tax dollars are going instead. Instead of NASA, my labors are used to support the chronic bums of South Sacramento. There are thousands upon thousands. They are everywhere. And nowhere.
I must say that Sacramento is, for the most part, a complete shithole. I get the privilege of riding my bicycle from a "decent" suburban environment to work everyday through former decent suburban environments, those that have already turned to liquid shit, while it's only a matter of time until my little "neighborhood" does the same. This is the untold reality of suburbia -- the older, earlier rings around the central city core always erode, as those with means escape to the next tier, to the next ring, and the blight repeats, with newer construction ever farther out, enticing those with means to move there, creating suburban wastelands in-between the city with the jobs and the hinterlands with the housal units. South Sacramento falls into the earlier "ring category," hence its fate is to become and stay a shithole. It just happened to do so first. North Elk Grove will become second, while those with the money and the means will simply pick up and move to the next tier, abandoning their earlier "community" while believing they are establishing a new, better "community" even more removed from everything.
And when this happens, my Elk Grove will become home to tens of thousands of chronic bums much like South Sacramento, where rents will become cheap, roads will be just good enough to drive to the consumption depots, to the EDD offices, to the county medical centers. And the bums will be enabled by programs to help them, to help them stay bums.
I say all this from personal, one-on-one observations with a dozen South Sacramentans living on Thurman Way -- my cousin among them. He is fully capable of working yet somehow can't find employment, somehow gets fired/released/let go/terminated/laid off from every job he's ever had. He's got his EBT card yet there isn't a day that goes by where he doesn't knock back a half dozen 211's or Earthquakes. He is among an entire neighborhood of others just like him, an entire neighborhood. You can be assured that this is repeated four thousand times here in Sacramento and four million times across this great land of ours.
Aside from EBT services, he's received free care for having plowed his face into the asphalt while drunk on a bicycle:
free care for his staph infection living amongst the flies and filth, free hospitalization from chronic alcohol abuse...on and on. This is where my tax dollars go, not to NASA, and he'll continue this gravy train for as long as he can, because he can. During his few lucid moments he admits this. There is no reason to try looking for a job, he admits.
There is no reason for the wife of my co-worker to look for a job either, who has no intention of returning to the workforce following a recent childbirth, but who has been receiving unemployment for the past nineteen months. And why wouldn't she? It's free money. Fuck yea, I'd do the same thing. Drive it until the wheels fall off. 99 months, 199 months, 1999 months...when will it end?
Well, it may never end, because in my mind we've created an economy based on services, where only a small percentage of us hold real employment while a larger percentage of us shuffle in and out of these service-based jobs, taking unemployment in between.
There is no reason to believe we will change this, because there is nothing to make me think that we will manufacture anything again. In my mind, manufacturing is key. Without this, we become a nation of lawyers, financiers, bankers, real estate agents, insurance saleswomen, musical theater performers, Target clerks, Asian foot masage "therapists," casino cleaners, Red Lobster waiters and garbage collectors -- jobs in the tertiary sector...requiring the efforts of other nation's manufacturing and production. We have fewer and fewer jobs in energy production, mining, and manufacturing, and as such, I see us becoming a nation of a handful of billionaires and a half billion lower class service providers.
This might be OK if we created better-wage service jobs compared to our manufacturing bretheren -- but we haven't. On the whole, we are trading our manufacturing and production jobs for lower valued service jobs.
However, as I rode my bicycle down Thurman Way in South Sacramento to my cousin's house, I got to see where most of my tax dollars are going instead. Instead of NASA, my labors are used to support the chronic bums of South Sacramento. There are thousands upon thousands. They are everywhere. And nowhere.
I must say that Sacramento is, for the most part, a complete shithole. I get the privilege of riding my bicycle from a "decent" suburban environment to work everyday through former decent suburban environments, those that have already turned to liquid shit, while it's only a matter of time until my little "neighborhood" does the same. This is the untold reality of suburbia -- the older, earlier rings around the central city core always erode, as those with means escape to the next tier, to the next ring, and the blight repeats, with newer construction ever farther out, enticing those with means to move there, creating suburban wastelands in-between the city with the jobs and the hinterlands with the housal units. South Sacramento falls into the earlier "ring category," hence its fate is to become and stay a shithole. It just happened to do so first. North Elk Grove will become second, while those with the money and the means will simply pick up and move to the next tier, abandoning their earlier "community" while believing they are establishing a new, better "community" even more removed from everything.
And when this happens, my Elk Grove will become home to tens of thousands of chronic bums much like South Sacramento, where rents will become cheap, roads will be just good enough to drive to the consumption depots, to the EDD offices, to the county medical centers. And the bums will be enabled by programs to help them, to help them stay bums.
I say all this from personal, one-on-one observations with a dozen South Sacramentans living on Thurman Way -- my cousin among them. He is fully capable of working yet somehow can't find employment, somehow gets fired/released/let go/terminated/laid off from every job he's ever had. He's got his EBT card yet there isn't a day that goes by where he doesn't knock back a half dozen 211's or Earthquakes. He is among an entire neighborhood of others just like him, an entire neighborhood. You can be assured that this is repeated four thousand times here in Sacramento and four million times across this great land of ours.
Aside from EBT services, he's received free care for having plowed his face into the asphalt while drunk on a bicycle:
free care for his staph infection living amongst the flies and filth, free hospitalization from chronic alcohol abuse...on and on. This is where my tax dollars go, not to NASA, and he'll continue this gravy train for as long as he can, because he can. During his few lucid moments he admits this. There is no reason to try looking for a job, he admits.
There is no reason for the wife of my co-worker to look for a job either, who has no intention of returning to the workforce following a recent childbirth, but who has been receiving unemployment for the past nineteen months. And why wouldn't she? It's free money. Fuck yea, I'd do the same thing. Drive it until the wheels fall off. 99 months, 199 months, 1999 months...when will it end?
Well, it may never end, because in my mind we've created an economy based on services, where only a small percentage of us hold real employment while a larger percentage of us shuffle in and out of these service-based jobs, taking unemployment in between.
There is no reason to believe we will change this, because there is nothing to make me think that we will manufacture anything again. In my mind, manufacturing is key. Without this, we become a nation of lawyers, financiers, bankers, real estate agents, insurance saleswomen, musical theater performers, Target clerks, Asian foot masage "therapists," casino cleaners, Red Lobster waiters and garbage collectors -- jobs in the tertiary sector...requiring the efforts of other nation's manufacturing and production. We have fewer and fewer jobs in energy production, mining, and manufacturing, and as such, I see us becoming a nation of a handful of billionaires and a half billion lower class service providers.
This might be OK if we created better-wage service jobs compared to our manufacturing bretheren -- but we haven't. On the whole, we are trading our manufacturing and production jobs for lower valued service jobs.
Bertha's Big Boned Bargain Bin
I wandered around the Roseville auction today as I've been doing since I was a kid. First, I hit the Jimboy's taco stand then headed straight towards the real "flea" market -- the junk everyday-people are selling at the back. I normally avoid the "new" stands, the permanent sellers who import Chinese luggage, cheap tools, poorly built housal unit items, that sorta stuff.
I had a U.S. manufactured tri-fold wallet that held up for nearly 12 years, but it gave up the ghost and I had to replace it a few months ago. I bought a cheap Chinese made wallet at the Folsom auction five months ago but it is now falling apart. It survived 1/30th the time my U.S. made wallet did, and cost a whole lot more than 1/30th of the U.S equivalent. But, the only wallets available at the Folsom auction were Chinese. What choice did I have?
Therefore, today I bought another wallet at the auction, and I took great pains to not buy Chinese. I gave up looking for a U.S. made wallet a long time ago because they simply don't exist at flea markets. I am willing to buy good stuff, but the rest of our nation's residents aren't, so good quality U.S. made goods are simply not available at these venues. Shopping at the flea market these days is nothing more that a direct line between cheap Asian importers and you. Flea markets are like shopping at Bertha's Big Boned Bargain Bin, where every item is marked down cheaper than the last, where only bargains are offered, and where only cheap imported shit is sold, barely able to endure the tortuous outfitting of a plus-sized American woman beyond one fitting. They rarely survive two.
However! I found an Indian made tri-fold wallet today! I am excited at the prospects for this wallet because I am a great fan of Indian manufacturing. They build good stuff; everything I've every owned from India has turned out as good or better than American manufactured goods, and I am hopeful this wallet is the same. It cost me no more than the Chinese version, and would probably cost less than the U.S. version but remember, U.S. citizens are no longer willing to buy U.S. made products with their ridiculous pricing. I didn't have the choice at Roseville to buy American...so I bought Indian.
I long ago blogged about my good experiences with Indian manufactured goods and I fully expect my tri-fold to hold to that good standard. I would have bought American under every possible scenario while at the auction, yet truthfully I'm not willing to pay the added "service industry" markup at Nordstrom's for a U.S. wallet. $18 at the auction? Yes. I'd do that, for 12 years of walleting. $44.99 at Nordstroms? Hell no. Instead I blew $5 for my Indian wallet.
I expect it to last five years...not five months like that Chinese made piece of shit...
I had a U.S. manufactured tri-fold wallet that held up for nearly 12 years, but it gave up the ghost and I had to replace it a few months ago. I bought a cheap Chinese made wallet at the Folsom auction five months ago but it is now falling apart. It survived 1/30th the time my U.S. made wallet did, and cost a whole lot more than 1/30th of the U.S equivalent. But, the only wallets available at the Folsom auction were Chinese. What choice did I have?
Therefore, today I bought another wallet at the auction, and I took great pains to not buy Chinese. I gave up looking for a U.S. made wallet a long time ago because they simply don't exist at flea markets. I am willing to buy good stuff, but the rest of our nation's residents aren't, so good quality U.S. made goods are simply not available at these venues. Shopping at the flea market these days is nothing more that a direct line between cheap Asian importers and you. Flea markets are like shopping at Bertha's Big Boned Bargain Bin, where every item is marked down cheaper than the last, where only bargains are offered, and where only cheap imported shit is sold, barely able to endure the tortuous outfitting of a plus-sized American woman beyond one fitting. They rarely survive two.
However! I found an Indian made tri-fold wallet today! I am excited at the prospects for this wallet because I am a great fan of Indian manufacturing. They build good stuff; everything I've every owned from India has turned out as good or better than American manufactured goods, and I am hopeful this wallet is the same. It cost me no more than the Chinese version, and would probably cost less than the U.S. version but remember, U.S. citizens are no longer willing to buy U.S. made products with their ridiculous pricing. I didn't have the choice at Roseville to buy American...so I bought Indian.
I long ago blogged about my good experiences with Indian manufactured goods and I fully expect my tri-fold to hold to that good standard. I would have bought American under every possible scenario while at the auction, yet truthfully I'm not willing to pay the added "service industry" markup at Nordstrom's for a U.S. wallet. $18 at the auction? Yes. I'd do that, for 12 years of walleting. $44.99 at Nordstroms? Hell no. Instead I blew $5 for my Indian wallet.
I expect it to last five years...not five months like that Chinese made piece of shit...
Proposition None
I was asked my positions on the California propositions. These are how I'll vote:
19 -- yes
20 -- won't vote
21 -- won't vote
22 -- won't vote
23 -- no
24 -- won't vote
25 -- won't vote
26 -- won't vote
27 -- won't vote
The way I see it as a bicycle commuter, stoned drivers are not going the be the ones mowing me down on Franklin Blvd. It's going to be a sober, irascible, bitter, overweight 48-year old pajama clad white woman in flip-flops driving a POS 1984 Buick Riveria returning from the Florin Rd. WalMart, fumbling about with her Chinese made "hands-free" device because the law told her she can't drive with a "visible" cellphone on her ear. Or perhaps it's going to be a yammering 33-year old Asian female in an imported Kia Sedona minivan, yammering in a language I don't understand although I will understand that she thinks I was the one at fault. Maybe it'll be a 26-year old Mexican immigrant, "documented," driving his white 2007 Ford F150 who just happened to have fifteen Tecates before returning home.
But it won't be the 51-year old social worker driving a Ford Mondeo who lights up a seeds-and-stems joint after work, navigating Tamoshanter Way at rush hour. It won't be the 39-year old pipe-fitter driving a Toyota Tacoma who just scored some frosty Purple Kush bud. Sorry, but these aren't the people who are gonna run me down. Yes on 19.
Prop 23 is a bad idea in my mind. Pinning environmental legislation to an arbitrarily and capriciously set unemployment target is woefully nearsighted, and I've already blogged extensively on the fact that while I don't give a fuck about climate change I do care about viable communities and good places to live, unlike the low-density automobile-dominated shithole my Elk Grove has become. I see climate legislation as a fantastic catalyst for implementing changes to the way we lay out our cities and our "neighborhoods," and being the pessimist I am I see unemployment lingering at high levels for a lot longer than any of you realize, meaning that prop 23 would suspend this legislation for a lot longer than you'd probably think. Perhaps that's what you want, but if so, why didn't you sign the proposition to eliminate AB32 in the first place? Why didn't you sign that petition outside your WINCO, huh?
You didn't because you didn't have that option. Your options for this year were spelled out for you based on your propensity to vote, your demographic, the election cycle (mid-term vs. presidential), and how much money the people who want this legislation are willing to spend. This is what we get for signing these petitions -- a whole lot of future litigation for every proposition and the potential for a single judge to throw out any given approved proposition. What you are doing by signing these things outside your consumption depots is guaranteeing a few hundred million dollars blown in litigation for every one that's passed. If you enjoy the continuation of our litigious culture, then please, sign on.
However, I simply forgo voting for these fucking things...mostly. You can be assured that the only one I will vote for, every time, is proposition none.
19 -- yes
20 -- won't vote
21 -- won't vote
22 -- won't vote
23 -- no
24 -- won't vote
25 -- won't vote
26 -- won't vote
27 -- won't vote
The way I see it as a bicycle commuter, stoned drivers are not going the be the ones mowing me down on Franklin Blvd. It's going to be a sober, irascible, bitter, overweight 48-year old pajama clad white woman in flip-flops driving a POS 1984 Buick Riveria returning from the Florin Rd. WalMart, fumbling about with her Chinese made "hands-free" device because the law told her she can't drive with a "visible" cellphone on her ear. Or perhaps it's going to be a yammering 33-year old Asian female in an imported Kia Sedona minivan, yammering in a language I don't understand although I will understand that she thinks I was the one at fault. Maybe it'll be a 26-year old Mexican immigrant, "documented," driving his white 2007 Ford F150 who just happened to have fifteen Tecates before returning home.
But it won't be the 51-year old social worker driving a Ford Mondeo who lights up a seeds-and-stems joint after work, navigating Tamoshanter Way at rush hour. It won't be the 39-year old pipe-fitter driving a Toyota Tacoma who just scored some frosty Purple Kush bud. Sorry, but these aren't the people who are gonna run me down. Yes on 19.
Prop 23 is a bad idea in my mind. Pinning environmental legislation to an arbitrarily and capriciously set unemployment target is woefully nearsighted, and I've already blogged extensively on the fact that while I don't give a fuck about climate change I do care about viable communities and good places to live, unlike the low-density automobile-dominated shithole my Elk Grove has become. I see climate legislation as a fantastic catalyst for implementing changes to the way we lay out our cities and our "neighborhoods," and being the pessimist I am I see unemployment lingering at high levels for a lot longer than any of you realize, meaning that prop 23 would suspend this legislation for a lot longer than you'd probably think. Perhaps that's what you want, but if so, why didn't you sign the proposition to eliminate AB32 in the first place? Why didn't you sign that petition outside your WINCO, huh?
You didn't because you didn't have that option. Your options for this year were spelled out for you based on your propensity to vote, your demographic, the election cycle (mid-term vs. presidential), and how much money the people who want this legislation are willing to spend. This is what we get for signing these petitions -- a whole lot of future litigation for every proposition and the potential for a single judge to throw out any given approved proposition. What you are doing by signing these things outside your consumption depots is guaranteeing a few hundred million dollars blown in litigation for every one that's passed. If you enjoy the continuation of our litigious culture, then please, sign on.
However, I simply forgo voting for these fucking things...mostly. You can be assured that the only one I will vote for, every time, is proposition none.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Save The Children
I finished reading the arguments against California proposition 19, the Tax Cannabis Act, in the California General Election guide published by the Secretary of State. As I fully expected, the argument against the legalization of marijuana comes down to the safety of our children. Horrors if a school bus driver can arrive for work with marijuana in his or her system! School districts would have their hands tied tied! because they couldn't require bus drivers to be drug-free -- until after tragedy strikes.
This is more societal yammering about "saving the children." "Protect" the children! "Help" the children! "Save" the children!
Know what I say? Fuck the children.
There's too much emphasis placed on children's safety these days and it goes to extreme, schizo-paranoidal lengths. We're not just talking about laws requiring helmets during batting practice; no, it goes all the way to a parent who accompanies their child during the first day of school to "direct" them to the best seat in the class where their odds of being gunned down by a shooter are minimized.
So much emphasis on safety. We operate under the assumption that every third housal unit in Elk Grove harbors a sex offender, where any hope of allowing your kids to play outside with chalk on the driveway has long since vanished, because they might vanish. Kids can't ride bikes to school, not just because of those sex offenders but because of the danger we've created by such brutal traffic having to shuttle these kids everywhere from structured play dates to tuba practice. No one is allowed to walk anymore. I expect in the future, say by 2023, walking outside your housal unit if you're under the age of 16 will be a goddamn crime in Elk Grove...passed by a right leaning city council under the guise of "Protecting Our Children." Of course, there will be notable exceptions, such as allowing our children to walk between the doors of our consumption depots and their parent's motorized vehicles. This would have to be exempted, to ensure adequate retail sales tax revenue for the city.
"...until after tragedy strikes."
Is this for real?
Yes, it is. Pull out the old "save the children" card, hold it high overhead, tug on our parental heartstrings, and think that we're saving our children when all we're doing is turning them into young adults who will have no autonomy, no independence, no way to navigate themselves through early adult life. And you know how they're gonna cope in a world that's not geared towards "protecting" them like you do? They're gonna get loaded! They're going to do the same thing we all do -- drink, smoke, load up on prescription meds, roll a joint and shelter ourselves in the carapice of an automobile 'till the end of time. If you were a kid these days I think you'd have to get stoned...to cope with all you neurotic, over-protective parents.
This is how we argue against proposition 19, even though I know a half dozen people who can't climb into a vehicle without getting loaded first...and so do you. It is a false argument in my mind, yet "children's safety" might just push this proposition towards failure. Fair enough. It makes perfect sense for us to use those who we deem the most vulnerable, tender and precious as peons for influencing the legislative process. Yep, that's what we do. Our children are but tools, used to advance our social agendas.
If you want to protect your children from abductors, rapists, and sexual assaulters, then keep them away from their family members, including you...because far and away, the most likely sources of abuse comes from people they know. If you want to "save" your children...leave them the fuck alone!
This is more societal yammering about "saving the children." "Protect" the children! "Help" the children! "Save" the children!
Know what I say? Fuck the children.
There's too much emphasis placed on children's safety these days and it goes to extreme, schizo-paranoidal lengths. We're not just talking about laws requiring helmets during batting practice; no, it goes all the way to a parent who accompanies their child during the first day of school to "direct" them to the best seat in the class where their odds of being gunned down by a shooter are minimized.
So much emphasis on safety. We operate under the assumption that every third housal unit in Elk Grove harbors a sex offender, where any hope of allowing your kids to play outside with chalk on the driveway has long since vanished, because they might vanish. Kids can't ride bikes to school, not just because of those sex offenders but because of the danger we've created by such brutal traffic having to shuttle these kids everywhere from structured play dates to tuba practice. No one is allowed to walk anymore. I expect in the future, say by 2023, walking outside your housal unit if you're under the age of 16 will be a goddamn crime in Elk Grove...passed by a right leaning city council under the guise of "Protecting Our Children." Of course, there will be notable exceptions, such as allowing our children to walk between the doors of our consumption depots and their parent's motorized vehicles. This would have to be exempted, to ensure adequate retail sales tax revenue for the city.
"...until after tragedy strikes."
Is this for real?
Yes, it is. Pull out the old "save the children" card, hold it high overhead, tug on our parental heartstrings, and think that we're saving our children when all we're doing is turning them into young adults who will have no autonomy, no independence, no way to navigate themselves through early adult life. And you know how they're gonna cope in a world that's not geared towards "protecting" them like you do? They're gonna get loaded! They're going to do the same thing we all do -- drink, smoke, load up on prescription meds, roll a joint and shelter ourselves in the carapice of an automobile 'till the end of time. If you were a kid these days I think you'd have to get stoned...to cope with all you neurotic, over-protective parents.
This is how we argue against proposition 19, even though I know a half dozen people who can't climb into a vehicle without getting loaded first...and so do you. It is a false argument in my mind, yet "children's safety" might just push this proposition towards failure. Fair enough. It makes perfect sense for us to use those who we deem the most vulnerable, tender and precious as peons for influencing the legislative process. Yep, that's what we do. Our children are but tools, used to advance our social agendas.
If you want to protect your children from abductors, rapists, and sexual assaulters, then keep them away from their family members, including you...because far and away, the most likely sources of abuse comes from people they know. If you want to "save" your children...leave them the fuck alone!
Friday, October 1, 2010
$22.99 / Hour
All of my co-workers are documented immigrants...one from Vietnam, one from Bangladesh, two from India, one from Germany, one from the Philippines...and the other two from Texas and Missouri. Myself? The only home-grown Sacramentan from the entire pool.
Today, one of my Indian co-workers wondered aloud regarding Meg Whitman's housekeeper -- if Meg was banned by law to ask about her housekeeper's status, how exactly will she crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants when she herself couldn't do it? How exactly can she be "tough as nails" on illegal immigration when she herself couldn't?
She won't. She can't.
This is why I love politics, especially now that we're so damn polarized. This polarization will lead to further inaction and will hopefully lead to our state and our nation falling into total chaos. This is exactly what I want. I want it...because we will come out the other side a better people...even if it means dealing with a whole lot of shit in the middle. At the moment, our governments are ineffective. Ineffective because exactly fifty percent of us think one way while the other fifty think the opposite. It so happens that we require super majorities in the most important things, and with our inability to compromise we end up doing nothing.
Which is fine with me; the less we do, the sooner we'll end up in the abyss and the sooner we might get meaningful representation, where we don't drive ourselves into debt to service the pandering of every possible constituent.
Meg knows, based upon the results of the several hundred thousand dollars she spent in pre-election surveys to find out, that she cannot win the state without approximately 27-31% of the Latino vote. I heard the other day a perspective from a Latino man who argued that her hiring of an illegal wasn't the problem -- it was that she fired her housekeeper upon learning that she was illegal. Regardless of politics, this is a fascinating viewpoint, because who of you would fire someone who had been working for you for the past decade simply because you discovered they were "undocumented?"
Would you stop going to your favorite store because the butcher in the back has been identified as illegal? Are you going to fire your pool boy or your landscaper who provided good service for the past nine years because you discovered they over-extended their original 2001 visa? The janitor at your kid's school -- would you hold a rally outside the gates demanding his/her deportation? Would you hold a press conference outside Kelly Moore Paints and demand that every undocumented house painter be jailed?
Sure, you might. But the majority of us wouldn't. We'd prolly just continue to work with them, they would work with us, and we'd go about our lives. We might even try to help them obtain legal status, depending on the circumstances. But this is where Meg differs. Just fire her and hope "it" never comes back to haunt her during the election season. Paying $23 an hour means nothing; it's insignificant to someone worth billions, and has no bearing on this issue. Thousands of us would gladly do that work for $22.99/hour.
This is the real story in all this. She has "invested" $120,000,000 for this position. Do not think that this money isn't well spent. People spend huge amounts to see favorable legislation passed their way and the purchase of the governorship is no different. There are reasons for billionaires to enter politics, reasons that go well beyond the millions to be represented.
Personally, I'll vote for Laura Wells, and see that Meg Whitman's $4 she spent to get my vote goes nowhere.
Today, one of my Indian co-workers wondered aloud regarding Meg Whitman's housekeeper -- if Meg was banned by law to ask about her housekeeper's status, how exactly will she crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants when she herself couldn't do it? How exactly can she be "tough as nails" on illegal immigration when she herself couldn't?
She won't. She can't.
This is why I love politics, especially now that we're so damn polarized. This polarization will lead to further inaction and will hopefully lead to our state and our nation falling into total chaos. This is exactly what I want. I want it...because we will come out the other side a better people...even if it means dealing with a whole lot of shit in the middle. At the moment, our governments are ineffective. Ineffective because exactly fifty percent of us think one way while the other fifty think the opposite. It so happens that we require super majorities in the most important things, and with our inability to compromise we end up doing nothing.
Which is fine with me; the less we do, the sooner we'll end up in the abyss and the sooner we might get meaningful representation, where we don't drive ourselves into debt to service the pandering of every possible constituent.
Meg knows, based upon the results of the several hundred thousand dollars she spent in pre-election surveys to find out, that she cannot win the state without approximately 27-31% of the Latino vote. I heard the other day a perspective from a Latino man who argued that her hiring of an illegal wasn't the problem -- it was that she fired her housekeeper upon learning that she was illegal. Regardless of politics, this is a fascinating viewpoint, because who of you would fire someone who had been working for you for the past decade simply because you discovered they were "undocumented?"
Would you stop going to your favorite store because the butcher in the back has been identified as illegal? Are you going to fire your pool boy or your landscaper who provided good service for the past nine years because you discovered they over-extended their original 2001 visa? The janitor at your kid's school -- would you hold a rally outside the gates demanding his/her deportation? Would you hold a press conference outside Kelly Moore Paints and demand that every undocumented house painter be jailed?
Sure, you might. But the majority of us wouldn't. We'd prolly just continue to work with them, they would work with us, and we'd go about our lives. We might even try to help them obtain legal status, depending on the circumstances. But this is where Meg differs. Just fire her and hope "it" never comes back to haunt her during the election season. Paying $23 an hour means nothing; it's insignificant to someone worth billions, and has no bearing on this issue. Thousands of us would gladly do that work for $22.99/hour.
This is the real story in all this. She has "invested" $120,000,000 for this position. Do not think that this money isn't well spent. People spend huge amounts to see favorable legislation passed their way and the purchase of the governorship is no different. There are reasons for billionaires to enter politics, reasons that go well beyond the millions to be represented.
Personally, I'll vote for Laura Wells, and see that Meg Whitman's $4 she spent to get my vote goes nowhere.
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