Starter Vineyards

My company used to host an internal chat room. The topics were moderated but any employee could post on them. As is typical of the web at large, my SMUD utility also has its share of ingrate idiots, those few individuals who cannot or will not keep their homophobic, racist, sexist, slurish comments to themselves, and consequently the forum was permanently shut down a few years back.

It was fantastic! We used to host topics regarding energy efficiency, the coming smart grid, SMUD retirement issues, etc., and man, they were a source of excellent discussion. But alas, this couldn't last, as a few fuck-offs decided that calling Obama a nigger was more important than lively discussion, particularly when the discussion revolved around energy subsidies, or other such "leftist" policies that my company embraces.

I find it fascinating how talk radio uses the term "N-word head" when talking about a rock painted "niggerhead" on some Texan ranch somewhere that some people allegedly saw back in 1996. As if there's some moratorium on using the word nigger on the radio when every black rap artist uses it as every other word in a sentence. But there are apparently limits...and the moderator having to pull posts by public service employees using nigger on an internal forum is obviously over that limit -- because of the context in which it was used.

I, however, am not over any line here on this blog. My use of the word is apt, descriptive, and relevant to my argument -- it doesn't take long for any web forum, of any sort, to fall into a "nigga-this" and a "fuck-you-that" back and forth that destroys the value of what could be such wonderful forums for good information.

It's no different to fucker away such a resource than it is to have set it afire and destroyed it by arson, or to have smashed in the windows of a web-kiosk with a brick. It's equivalent...and it's too bad we can't find good discussion on non-moderated forums...anywhere...on anything. I can't go to a Ford truck restoration forum without some poster arguing that Fords suck and Dodges are superior. I can't go to a thrash-metal forum without scads of posts between two dolts bickering and leading to personal insults.

I should not be surprised. Indeed, it only validates my own long-held position that Americans are, by-and-large, culturally bankrupt. The web only reinforces such idiotic behavior that would occur in some other capacity elsewhere if it didn't exist there.

These days, my company's webmaster posts a weekly "poll," where employee's can vote on some random poll topic such as "what does the end of the NFL football lockout mean to you," or "how many employees will SMUD have in 10 years' time: much more, slightly more, the same, less, or substantially less than today." It's been reduced to a worthless, useless, meaningless statistic that cannot generate any discussion because there's no forum in which to discuss it. This is nothing different than our culture at large, whole segments of our "consumers" enraptured by "voting off" contestants on some reality TV-show that has no hint of "reality" about it and no form of discussion as to why actions played out the way they did.

Yet! Last week's poll question was unexpected (at least by your Monologueonian): "Is your mortgage underwater?" with the following limited, canned options for response along with the final percentages"

Yes. (34%)
No, I owe less than what it's worth. (33%)
No, I own my house outright. (6%)
No, I rent. (15%)
Other. (12%)

The percentages didn't appreciably change over the course of the weekly poll, which is indicative that the poll is accurate, indicative that there weren't outliers that drastically changed the results, while over a quarter of my utility's employees responded. The same percentages on this poll are in rough agreement with my own little work group. That is -- a third of my fellow workers owe more on their mortgage than what their housal unit is worth...if you extrapolate these 25% responses to the company at large. This is an amazing statistic.

SMUD employees likely average $85,000 per year (the best data Ihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif could find), which is almost 70% more than the median salary in SMUDs service territory ($47,107) -- yet, a third of us are underwater. I will yet again argue that the more money one makes, the more one is likely to be up to their eyeballs in debt.

All that money made, yet all that money flowing directly to Wall Street bankers, those who hold the paper on some collateralized debt obligation of which some single, insignificant mortgage holder in Sacramento county keeps on paying to help keep it rated "AAA," the same rating as government issued Treasury's. One third (about 700 employees) who are staring down another one or two decades of payments just to break even.

A third. That's the same percentage of people as males who have erectile dysfunction. However, I wasn't surprised by this statistic. I look in our parking lot and see dozens and dozens of $40,000 rigs -- I know that many live in the beautiful gated communities of Serrano, or the majestic highlands of Folsom, or on 25-acre "starter vineyards" out towards Rancho Murieta. On an $85,000 salary? Come on, such lifestyles have been fueled by growing debt burdens over the last thirty years -- upper middle class wage earners are no different than those in the upper poverty class. The more people make, the more debt they carry, and I'd bet that the percentages are roughly the same between classes.

I do not consider myself "lucky" to fall in that 6% "loan is paid off" tranche. Luck had nothing to do with it. I neither inherited a housal unit nor an inheritance. I paid my down payment with US savings bonds I accumulated earlier, and I made massive personal sacrifices for 15 years to put every dime I had left over into principal. You cannot do this if you're buying new his and her Acuras every five years.

The past twenty weekends were spent on ladders replacing fascia and painting the trim. Today I'll be outside in about an hour finalizing the paint on the garage doors. I replaced my car's brake pads last Saturday. I smash my own aluminum cans. I mow my own lawn. These things in the aggregate are what allowed me to have the discretionary income to blow on my mortgage, not to blow on hookers and blow.

I hold no magic key here. Frugality and thriftiness are the sounds of my perseverance. I also know that I could lose it all in an instant, too; there are many unknowns that are coming, as there was and always will be.