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How much do jobs really stimulate the economy

We've seen over the last year a huge push to create jobs, but does this benefit the economy as much as one might think? Busy workers are busy doing just that - working, not spending. From my perspective, I spend very little nowadays just because of work. When I'm not working, it doesn't take much to satisfy me. Sure I might have some money from working, but why spend it? I'm perfectly content sitting at home and reading a book from library, playing a video game or watching a movie. Why am I content? Because I'm not working. If I had more time to pursue other interests, no doubt my spending would increase. As employees our time is being stretched thin and technology is helping us get more entertainment out of less money. I'd love to take up sailing or mountain climbing, maybe even scuba diving. Honestly I just don't have the time. So I'll continue saving my money and putting it towards my house.

Beyond correction (Our housing catch 22)

My wife and I are currently renting but have plans to buy a house, unfortunately the housing market in our  area is overinflated. When I first heard about the mortgage problem I was optimistic buying a house would soon be affordable.  It was plain and simple people bought houses they couldn't afford. When they missed their payments on the houses, banks would take over these homes and resell them for a more realistic price. The more homes where the borrower defaults on payments the more homes on the market the more the price was pushed down.  My wife and I buy a house at a realistic price.

So what went wrong? Everything. The mortgage securities that were poisonous that should have been written down will now be bought by the government. Other government plans are also being introduced to help homeowners who can't pay their mortgages. McCain is now offering a plan where the government will pay the mortgages for troubled borrowers. Other people are taking more drastic measures to keep their house (like shooting themselves) and lenders are taking pity.

So thats where we're at. New home buyers lose. Our only regret not buying what we couldn't afford. Purchasing what you can afford went out of style like ripped jeans in the eighties. So the economy will not be benefiting from our spending, but the this is the situation we're dealt.

Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending

Read this article from 1999

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9c0DE7DB153EF933A0575AC0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Gov't Regulators: 0
Free Marketers:  1

Maybe why you should panic....

Let me start by saying I know nothing about Economics. I barely passed the intro course in college so read this for whats its worth.


The FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) currently insures up to 100,000 on checking and savings accounts. This is the government safety net that was put in place after the Great Depression. The idea is when the financial system looks gloomy, no one will rush to the bank to withdrawal there money because they'll know it's insured. So you might ask, where does this reserve come from? Well the DIF (Depositor's Insurance Fund) is derived from premiums lenders pay based on the risk level of their assets. What surprising is the current DIF is only (don't rush to your bank yet..) around 1 percent of the total exposure to insured funds. Currently the reserve is around 40 billion and the total of insured deposits is around 4.29 trillion. Now it gets worse, Bailout Part Deux is pushing to have the insurance per account raised to 250,000 (recommend by Obama and McCain). This only makes the ratio worse, now granted mostly insured accounts mostly likely are not over 100,000, but every account this is over is increasing that exposure. So now how does the DIF increase to maintain that already small ratio of 1%. Well it has to be increased Bank Insurance premiums, right? Which I thought the bailout was supposed to help the Banks... but now its looking like there going to have to pay more. How does this free up credit?  This bailout never made much sense to me and now it makes less sense. The unfortunate part is it now stands a better chance of being passed.


All the numbers here are from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FDIC

Comments?

The inquisitive Smaller reader may ask... "Ben, why are there no comments on your blog?". Let me explain...

Due to the popularity of this blog since inception, it has been necessary to turn off comments. I have several hundred emails a day to read that alone is enough to manage. Please note however I reserve the right to reenable comments ... randomly... without prior notice.....

Museum of Terrible Snacks

Our office rents space on the second and third floor of a three story office plaza. We have one vending machine for the entire building - and it is the worst. Out of the approximate 50 items I'm interested in zero. Certain popular items when arriving are usually sold out in a few days. Contrary to what one might think, popular items aren't restocked but replace with less popular items.  By now our vending machine is nothing more than a museum of the worst candy and snacks one could imagine.

Make any sense? No... Well thats what I thought, until I though about it from the perspective of the vending machine service agent. He / She must visit several building on a regular schedule to examine what needs refilled. Now what advantage does the service operator have for putting in popular items?? Probably zero. Putting in popular items requires MORE restocking. The owner definitely makes more money, not the service man. The owner is probably too busy with his head up his arse in other businesses to do any type of inventory tracking, so we bear the blow.

Swedish fish anyone?

blog

blog (BLAHG) n.

A website where you can write ad nauseum about your daily life without fear of boring others. Also a place to talk about yourself without sounding overtly self-centered.

Nerd Geek Test

I'm not really sure what defines a dork/geek, but I'd be willing to bet the control of electrons has something to do with it. Millions of people go home every night and stare at fancy boxes with various patterns of electrons. Apparently staring at patterns of electrons has become so normal that these people are fine and this is acceptable in society. 

Even small user changes to electron patterns are normal and the acceptable way of doing this is with a small rectangular box that is held in one hand. The small rectangular box is used to switch to different patterns until one finds a pattern of their liking and sticks with it.

If a user wants more control and wants to switch from controlling which patterns he sees to controlling the patterns themselves, he changes to a better input device. This input device is usually held with two hands as opposed to the small rectangular box that is held with one. Holding the two handed device the user is given greater control over the electron patterns. This level of control allows more precise movement of shapes within the patterns. This level of control seems to fall beyond what is acceptable by society.

Test this out next time your at home controlling your electron box. How much control do you have? Does this relate to your own view of how geeky / nerdy you envision yourself? Let me know.

No sleep till.... LICH KING

Here's my overly cautious leveling plan to reach 70 on my priest before WoLK..

50 April 20
60  June 1
63 July 1
66 August 1
70 September 1

Thanks goodness its the weekend

OR...

 

TGI (fri|s[au][tn][u]?[r]?)day

New Content for WoW...great :P

While Eliah from WoW Insider can't wait for the next patch, there is no sense of urgency here. I'm in the middle of leveling my second character which I started in November. While I do take pleasure in leveling, I have more fun in endgame. My first main dinged 60 pre Burning Crusade and had a good six months of end game raiding. After that Burning Crusade debuted and I lost interest while running the leveling treadmill back to 70. Last November I returned to WoW when a friend started playing and rerolled Horde on a new server. Thank goodness 20-60 has been greatly speed up, but there is still the obvious 60-70 grind ahead of me. Now I'm coming to the realization that when I finally do reach 70 (sometime this summer) Lich King will nearly be upon us. That means 10 more levels... Woo Hoo. So at the time being-  I'm 44 which would mean I have 26 levels to endgame, but its starting to look more like 36. Now Sunwell Plateau I'd love to see, but I'm not high level enough to appreciate the new content yet. All I know is the sooner the 2.4 is released the closer they are to releasing Lich King. So the dangling carrot game goes on as I push forward. When will I reach engame?  Who knows.

 

Retro Servers anyone?

Today is brought to you by the number 6

6 is how many of my butts it would take up to fill the whole cushion of my office chair.

 

Pictoral representation:

 

 

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more RSS wikipedia

As a follow up to my old post, I recently noticed you'll only see comments of the changes, not the full description of comments in the rss feed. This means if whoever made the change doesn't explicitly state what he changed in the comments your left guessing of the edit. I'll look more into this when I get more time.

If the shirt fits buy it

For years I've dreaded clothes shopping. One reason is nothing ever fits my jokey-esqe statue. Picking up shirts and pants excitedly and then trying them on only to be disappointed was the norm. Now the things are different. Now I shop in ...

 

(drumroll)

 

The Boys Section. There are two big advanatages here. First I find clothes that actually fit and secondly I can pay a fraction of the price for them. However there are downsides. The only people in the boys section are usually 10 year old boys and their moms.The other big problem is the boy's section of a deparment store is usually on a whole other floor then the men's section. This presents a difficulty when finding a fitting room. You either have to haul your clothes downstairs on the escalator or enter a fitting room decorated with clown and sailboat paintings. After surviving the fitting session your faced with the cashier. I feel awkward buying kids clothes, so its nice to have another person with you when you approach the register. I usually say something like "How long till Brian will outgrow these pants?". Anything that hints that the clothes aren't for you. What I don't recommend is bribing kids to come to the register with you. Especially children you run into the kids dressing room. If the parents catch view your intentions may appear less than innocent.

 

Overall the experience is not easy, but you'll be celebrating as you leave the store with clothes that fit at bargain prices.

RSS + Wikipedia Change History = :)

I'm sure most people by now are familiar with Wikipedia. If you don't then your probably over 40 or live in a third world country. What you might NOT know is about the Change History (tab in top right corner). When you click this you'll see a list of recent changes. Highlight two adjacent versions and click 'Compare' and you see the differences. Why is this so great? Well its a good way to keep track of items your interested in. Now I knew about Wikipedia and Change History for some time, but I didn't know is... its syndicated. WooHoo! Sooo just subscribe with you favorite news reader to the the Change History (RSS link is in the bottom left hand corner) and voila you have your own custom news generated from Wikipedia changes.

Here's an example.  I have an interest in knowing when Xbox Live releases new arcade games. Because Microsoft does not syndicate this info.. at least as far as I'm aware. I found a wiki entry for a list of released arcade titles. Now after subscribing to the change history feed. I'm notifed every time there is a change to the article. This keeps me up to date of new releases and I don't have to check the page every day. Its Magic. Web 2.0 FTW.

 

lame winter

I'm BACK. I finally pulled my head out of my Azeroth and tried to blog again. So far the winter has been very disappointing as my area has received no snow at all. I LOVE cross country skiing and look forward to snow all year so this has been very painful . To make matters worse sites like weather.com TEASE us and tell us snow is on the way for the10 day forecast, however it nevers comes. I"m certain its all part of a consipiracy to hide the fact of global warming. They think.. "as long as they think there's a chance of snow, they'll assume its a ordinary winter". Well no its not. This is a weak winter. So weak a winter I challenge  it to a fight. So bring it "WINTER"*! The battle is on.

 

 

(*keep in mind im talking about the lame central NJ winter, not the crazy martial arts winter that kicked the crap out of China)

finger slams mouse button
mouse signals computer
computer signals automatic pistol firing mechanism
firing mechanism pulls gun trigger
trigger releases bullet
bullet passes through forehead...

The decline of good conversation

Is it possible that American values such as free choice maybe hurting us? I would argue yes. Think about the last ten years. How many new cable channels do you now have? How many new video game systems have been invented? How many extreme sports have been invented? This appears to be positive, because we all know that diversity is good right? Now think of how many friends you have now compared to how many friends you had ten years ago.  Most likely the number of friends you have will not have varied, unless your a politician or won the lottery (in both cases they're probably not "real" friends).  So with the number of friends staying constant but the number of hobbies and interests increasing rapidly we are as a society becoming more individualistic. The problem lies in the inherent need for us to be understood by our peers. As we become more individualistic the chances we share the same interests as our close friends decreases. Consequently we feel isolated and depressed or we turn to new mediums such as the internet for our basic needs. Here's an example of a not so uncommon lunch conversation...

Dave: Didn't anyone see the new episode of Gray's Anatomy last night?
Daryl: No I was watching Major League Soccer.
Dave: Well you missed a good one. Sophia contracted Cancer. It was heartwrenching.
Frank: Sounds.... interesting! *stifling yawn*
Dave: Next week she is starting chemo and we find out if Brad is going to leave her.
Frank: I see.
Frank: Hey did anyone play new Grand Theft Auto game yet? I spent all last night playing.
Bill: Sorry I was at karate practice.
Ted: No I'm busy watching the Battlestar Galatica season three on DVD.

Unfortuntately it doesn't appear that we'll be having less choices anytime soon. So it might be best to take a rain check next time your invited to a group lunch. The new book by Steven Pinker may prove a more stimulating alternative.

Colorado Day Two and Three - Hiking, Hiking and more Hiking

Sunday, our first full day in Colorado, we left early in the morning for Rocky Mountain State Park. We decided to do some light hiking (no mountains) so we did a 6 -7 mile loop from the Bear Lake Trail head. The trail head starts around 9000 feet and the highest part is a little over 10,000. This might not be that bad if you weren't staying at sea level the day before. With in the first five minute my chest was tightening up and I felt a shortness of breath. Luckily after a few minutes later the altitude sickness symptoms disappeared and I felt pretty good. Here's a picture of me in front of Emerald Lake with the Rockies in the background.



Monday morning we left at dawn to climb Flattop Mtn. The trail starts at the Bear Lake trail head and climbs 2,800 feet in about 4.5 miles. My biggest fear going into the hike was that we still hadn't fully acclimatized. The first 3 miles went fairly well, then came the big surprise. At around 11,000 feet we left the treeline and the winds picked up. With temperature in the 30's and very high winds made the uphill climb even more difficult. The top of the mountains were covered in snow and ice which was intimidating because Carol and I don't usually climb mountains. Nevertheless we made it in around four hours. Here's a pic from the summit.