Recent comments by Bob Dobbs
some investor guy wrote:
Like administering a bar exam without requiring law school?
Why not? You know what you're supposed to know, and you bring it or you don't.
It's not all books. A student would have to connect with educational bodies that had the labs, the tools, and some kind of structured program. You've got to have access to people who can teach what you need to know. But it could be anybody, any provider of any type. Even apprenticeship.
some investor guy wrote:
What if a bunch of wealthy parents tried to devise an alternative to current universities? Would they come up with something very different?
A private college that served only the young, strong, well-educated and well-funded would be very efficient. No snark. Narrow mission, less overhead.
Another option: consider what universities do. They teach -- and certify. It's a nice racket, if I say so myself. So, separate the two functions: teaching bodies, certification bodies. The certification body doesn't care where you learned, just that you can pass the (rather rigorous) projects that it requires to certify you in a field of study. It doesn't teach; it just confirms.
Market forces everywhere; teaching bodies whose grads don't certify, don't last. And anyone anywhere can teach because it's just a service. Only the certification board holds legitimacy. And overly-easy certification boards -- the word would get around. The certs would be downgraded by opinion, and there'd be ratings services soon enough.
Pearl wrote:
You can't see me in the video--but the reporter mentions me.
"Rogue bidder."
A name to be proud of! I suggest having a button made.
Mook wrote:
I think the ultimate macroeconomic takeaway of the past 20 years is that the "greater fool theory" becomes somewhat less operative once a society reaches a certain population of fools.
Fools with money are a vital part of the financial ecosystem (fecosystem), but they are a fragile subspecies and their numbers diminish easily. The National Greater Fool Conservancy attempted to strengthen the population with an artificial credit insemination program, but the resulting progeny were even less viable than their predecessors and are vanishing quickly. The Fecosystem is once again in danger.
GDD9000 wrote:
Anticipating this, the Chinese buyers, and every other reason I'd never afford the home I wanted in San Francisco, left town early Jan 2011.
California Housing Market Braces for Facebook Millionaires - NY Times
Good for SF, Palo Alto, Los Altos, Menlo Park, Los Gatos, Woodside, Belmont, even Santa Cruz and South Marin.
Elsewhere, maybe not so much.
traderwalt wrote:
ut "simple, brutal and, frankly. honest"? I wouldn'ty characterize it in those terms
Honest in that it would be completely clear that the nomination is being bought and paid for by the very wealthiest -- as we've long suspected.
convexity wrote:
On some previous thread, pavel said Catholics were mad at Obama.
Pavel's Catholics. There are other kinds.
traderwalt wrote:
The New York Times is reporting that Santorum won Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota.
I don't see either as electable, nor Gingrich. So I have to wonder if
- The passel of GOP billionaires given their freedom by Citizens United is actually going to try to slide either one of them to the presidency on an avalanche of money.
- Or if said billionaires will simply show up at the convention, make it clear that they're not going to fund any of the current candidates, and name their own dark horse in a brokered convention? Simple, brutal and, frankly, honest.
JimPortlandOR wrote:
Now that we can breathe again (lol):
United States Planning to Slash Iraq Embassy Staff by Up to Half - NY Times
massive FU. 16,000 people, 2000 of which are diplomats and the rest security people.
"Within days, the salad bar at the embassy dining hall ran low. Sometimes there was no sugar or Splenda for coffee. On chicken-wing night, wings were rationed at six per person."
Oh, the humanity!
How good of us to spending $750 mill building the future home of the Iraqi-Iranian Joint SecurityAdministration
dryfly wrote:
That one is going to be a handful when she grows up.
Sounds like your typical EE major to me.
purple wrote:
yeah we're talking a permanent decline in our standard of living, and probably another recession before 2020. Way to much debt out there still.
It's already declined in terms of security, access to affordable medical care, income security, education for those who can use it. If we get all those things and become a nation of families of four living in 900-sq-foot flats or small homes with three-quarters-car per household, I call it a net win.
So much of what we spend money on is crap. I saw a fine selection of $25 dog dishes at the pet store the other day. Settled on one that cost $1.50, though probably cost of mfr in China was maybe a dime.
TJ and The Bear wrote:
Canada Scowls, Indiana Cheers Over Caterpillar Moves - Forbes
Oh yeh... 23 states with right-to-work laws...and counting.
some investor guy wrote:
If properly managed, it could be a big plus for the US. Two big pieces. 1. Make it easy for Euro companies to relocate to the US. 2. Make it easy for people with money and/or special skills to relocate.
I'd expect the Canadians to try to skim their share, and more than their share. Much more attractive to many Euros as in, not completely insane. And not paying much of the military budget to protect the continent, just like back home in Europe. And access to the NAFTA zone, so why go USA at all? If you've got money and some business skills and promise to employ someone, even down to the small business level, Canada welcomes you.
mp wrote:
I should have said "the next leg down" in the on-going US downturn.
Sometimes the sky really is falling.
robj wrote:
When I was a young lad in Oklahoma, I saw Reagan work the rubber chicken circuit and it was a marvel how he had them eating out his hand. I thought it was one cliche after another, after another, but he was extremely likeable.
When I was 16 I attended the American Legion Boys State summer camp in Sacramento. Reagan was still governor and he spoke to us. About abstinence, to 1000 horny 16 and 17-year-olds. "The best birth control is just that one little word -- no." He got a standing ovation for the cyclopean magnitude of his bullshit. We knew it was.
I guess the rest of the nation weren't as perceptive as a bunch of 17-year-olds. As for likeable, sure: but I've known honestly likeable people who'd put their hand in your pocket and smile when you caught them. Likeable means nothing. Someone else Americans still don't know.
azurite wrote:
The article you link too mentions areas w/short sales or foreclosure in the tens (60 in one area), but doesn't indicate what % of the homes in that area it represents, would you have any idea of what % of total "high end" homes are in foreclosure/short sale prospects in that general high end area?
Sorry, I don't.
As for cash money buyers being available, it is Silicon Valley or nearby. There are losers there, but always new winners with stock option cash. I suspect that a Facebook IPO might goose the market for awhile.
"Of course these are national price indexes and there will be significant variability across the country. "
Most definitely. I posted this last night:
Foreclosures at the high end increase - San Jose Mercury News
Some of the better-off unfortunates have now run through their savings. We are all subprime.
Edit: could decreasing prices at the high end put pressure on the middle? And thus, indirectly on the low end?
Bad Dawg Bobby wrote:
I have never seen anything like that, it looks air brushed.
Amazing (!)
They can be pretty dramatic. Here's a Google image search string
TJ and The Bear wrote:
Fairly common phenomenon. It's not 12/21/12 yet.
If you ever see a sky full of these, you may be forgiven for believing that God is tweaking the universe's parameters.
tobycettera: My new favourite cloud formation
I've seen them twice. Never had a camera, dammit. But they do make you question what planet you're on.
TJ and The Bear wrote:
I would assume the standard models, not the Abarths. Most college kids can't afford premium.
As far as I can tell, just regular 500s. Didn't realize the Abarths were different.
An Italian car made in Mexico by Chrysler. What could go wrong? 
Yeah, yeah, unfair but I do remember the ahem issues some people had back in the 60s and 70s. As my wife said about the Fiat her father bought for her, she had a bad feeling about a car that comes with a toolkit as standard equipment.
scone wrote:
2012 Fiat 500 Abarth First Test - Motor Trend
People are buying them as go-to-college cars for their kiddies, at least the female kiddies. Sightings have become moderately common in this college town, though the nearest dealer is 50 miles away.
Mike in Long Island wrote:
Guys on my high school team used steroids - this was 20 something years ago. Heck - there's guys in my gym now who use it - why I dunno - not like they are playing an pro sports.
Some guys just juice because they juice; they want muscular size, they want to impress, they want confidence. Roids and HGH make you feel like a god, too -- for awhile. No, I've not done it myself. Awfully easy to mess yourself up, and then there's the roid rage. Saw an extremely muscular young man threaten to run down two bicyclists in traffic last week because they wouldn't get out of his way fast enough.
Not quite so different in the affluent Bay Area neighborhoos as it used to be...
Foreclosures at the high end increase - San Jose Mercury News
In general, the wave of foreclosures is going more toward the higher-end properties," said short-sale specialist Joe Reichert, of Keller Williams in Danville, who was showing a home Thursday in Alamo that is listed for $999,000 -- which is less than is owed on it.
"It hit all the lower-end properties fastest," Reichert said. "The people in the lower-end homes were a month or two away from not being able to make payments. The people in the higher end had more staying power and more to lose by defaulting. They're starting to go now. We're definitely starting to see more."
12th Percentile wrote:
You know what you see when you go to my local highschool at end of day. A bunch of kids walking in the street, disregarding cars, acting like they own the world.
I see that at my uni. The wife and I (we both commute there togethe) call them the "two-legged deer." (There are four-legged deer, but they clear the roadway faster.) Mom and Dad poured $500K raising the little darlings and they still step off the curb without looking left or right. With their earbuds blasting the latest tunes.
Cobradriver wrote:
Most fucked up kids are a direct reflection of how the parents raised them. After having 60+ foster kids cycle through our house you'll never convince me differently...
I have to honor you for that.
I worked at a school for homeless kids for awhile (also kids in difficult situations). One of them, a fifth-grader, was sharp as a tack, advanced in every way. But his druggie mom had let her druggie boyfriend beat the shit out of him all the way through his early years, and the kid had so much anger and so little control that he was an outcast. I had to pull him off smaller kids because he'd start "playing" with them and then end up choking them -- not hard, but enough to see the fear. With this sick grin on his face.
Smart as hell, ahead on academics, though. I hope he got help.
12th Percentile wrote:
Yes. I worked a basketball league for kids from the worst neighborhoods. It was very depressing. There were two kids there who stood out. Smart and funny. The next year one was on probation and the other one was in prison. If those kids had the opportunity and family I had growing up, I'm sure they'd be very successful by traditional standards.
Communities of knowledge; if your family and its friends can't tell you about preparing for life, you'll never know. Grow up in a colleged educated family and they'll be after you to get lined up for pre-reqs for a college degree, admissions, scholarships, and so on. If your family is poor and disconnected, you'll learn none of that. Might even get discouraged from getting ahead at all, because 'that never works out." Same for people with advanced vocational skills; they know how to get their kids squared away.
But if your not hooked in, it's hard to get there.
dryfly wrote:
Plus a lot of them would not only graduate HS but also go on to two or four year programs if they say a payback. real tangible people they know type payback. And the trades are sufficiently complex nowadays to need that training. Think of all those refineries along the canal down by 'Pasadena'. The instruments on those columns don't calibrate themselves and there are a s-load of them.
Locally, our town opened a charter high school based at the local community college for kids in risk of failing to graduate high school not so much for lack of skills as for lack of motivation. They offer small class sizes, sure, but also prep for and immediate access to vocational programs at the CC -- and they get them work in their field of interest during high school, both as experience and as a sweetener to keep them interested. Local business community advises the curriculum. It really works. As you say in your first line.
dryfly wrote:
And seriously - I don't have any idea how to change it. I have two sons who need better jobs and even I can't get them to look into machining.
What are their reasons? Are they thinking it's a dead end? Do they think the jobs wlll be shipped overseas? Is it beneath them?
One of my cousins started as a machinist and went far.
Recovery? I prefer to think of it as an upward-sloping ledge halfway down a cliff. It may peter out before it goes anywhere. And it is easy to slip.
Skittles the Unicorn wrote:
I note that almost 5 million of you mainlanders came over to Hawaii this year and recorded pretty near the highest spending ever. Just wanted to say thanks.
Are you sure it wasn't the Canadians?
JimPortlandOR wrote:
My guess is that the Navy thinks chinese and moooslims are not advanced enough (like the US pre-WWII thinking about japanese human ability to attack THE US NAVY! )
I'm more cynical. I think they believe it might be a threat. But they don't want to know. Because hundreds of billions of dollars in politically-important weapons contracts will be in jeopardy. Somebody might decide that carrier groups are, y'know, obsolete and a massive waste of money. And then what would happen to poor Lockheed and the rest?
You'd think people would be open to replacing a seventy-year-old weapons system concept like the carrier group. But I guess, not when there's more money to be made.
yuan wrote:
Navy Lacks Plan to Defend Against `Sizzler' Missile (Update1) - Bloomberg
"The missile, known in the West as the ``Sizzler,'' has been deployed by China and may be purchased by Iran. "
May? MAY? A supersonic carrier destroying cruise missile that the US has no plans for countering? While the MIC keeps selling the old AEGIS systems and pocketing the cash?
Looks like the Russians decided to sell arms from their private stock, this time. Why not? THEY don't dare use them. So...sell them to someone who will.
Comrade Kristina wrote:
I think Homs might have been the unknown variable that pushed that big red button.
Maybe, but it looks like its the old Shia vs. Sunni dynamic in Syria, with this time the Shias backing the authoritarian gov't and the Sunni in opposition. Probably why the Arab League gives a damn at all, Persian Gulf nations are Sunni-dominated except for Iran and now Iraq. People's Revolution easily can turn into old-school score-settling.
Outsider wrote:
Lunar colonies may not be needed. We're heading towards oceanic colonies.
Wacko libertarian oceanic colonies that want to off-shore even more work from the US -- but move the "shore" just out beyond the twelve-mile limit. Parasites.
adornosghost wrote:
Thacher was saved by the Falklands War--- Her administration was heading down the rat whole until then.
Yes. Galtieri's junta, which started the thing -- they didn't do so well. They didn't think the Brits would actually fight. Ooops.
ac wrote:
The horror... the horror.
MIC is a giant self-perpetuating make-work/welfare system. What Lockheed-Martin has to say first and foremost about the F-35 Flying Faceripper -- I mean, Lightning 2 -- is how many jobs it creates. Check it out:
Lockheed Martin · F-35 Lightning II
It won't end, and the wars won't end, until the money goes away.
Citizen AllenM wrote:
Nothing like a big war to distract them all from their local problems.
The common wisdom of tyrants. Doesn't always work. See Falklands War.
josap wrote:
I can almost agree. While it is a great way to stick it to the bankers, it also BKs pension funds, probably some 401Ks etc.
That's the bankster's great blackmail angle: if we go down, we take the old folks' retirement with us.
Of course much of it will vanish anyway as hordes of seniors try to cash in their "investments" simultaneously.
azurite wrote:
Better (more annoying) tactic for the Iranis would be for the Iranis to bomb some oil tankers.
Better yet, bomb Ras Tanura, the Saudi Aramco oil terminal port on the Persian Gulf -- or threaten to. Ten percent of the world's daily oil supply comes from that one port. If it goes down, all the tankers in the world won't help.
Yah, I understand why everybody's so touchy about the Gulf. I understand why Iran scares them. But if you look at the history of western involvement in Iran over the last 60 years, you can see a lot of the problem is coming home to roost. We made most of this problem, and in "fixing" it, we'll make it worse.
Edit for purposes of our cybermasters: I do not advocate bombing Ras Tanura. But if you don't think our Iranian friends haven't thought of it, you haven't scoped the problem out very well.
ac wrote:
OBAMA IS AN ATHEIST
And an Arab. Don't forget:
josap wrote:
The London cops use round Roman shields.
Ave Londinium!
TJ and The Bear wrote:
I'm still fascinated by one of the greatest displays of natural forces in recent history -- Japan's tsunami. How about Tsuna?
That's good. I'm obviously having fun with Google Translate tonight. Lavina (with an accent on the I) means avalanche in Slovak, or you can go with Valanga (Italian) or Avalancha (Spanish). Possibly a good choice if it's an enthusiastic delivery
some investor guy wrote:
reply
We have also considered natural forces like gravity, wind, and foreign terms for those.
There's Kaosa. Means "chaos" in Basque.
some investor guy wrote:
Don't blame me. We are having a baby in two months.
Sincere congratulations.
As for middle name, Time's not a bad one. Alma is good, too (comes from Latin, meaning approximately feed the soul, lift the spirit).
Then there's always Maya (illusion) which would have fit several ex-girlfriends of mine.
km4 wrote:
US Workers Are Toiling Harder And Getting Paid Less Than Ever
And there are more jobs, though at less pay. Dryfly, this was your prediction. Of course Europe could through a big stinkbomb into the (rather sparsely catered) party.
12th Percentile wrote:
Did they have travel hockey teams for 10 years olds during the last depression?
From what I understand, some people didn't really notice GD1. If you were young, lived in an urban area and your family was in the right business it was all good. And most of your friends had the same deal. And you didn't know that many people who didn't have that deal.
$20K would buy you a base-model Duesenberg, nicely equipped, in 1933.
greenchutes wrote:
Rude, but they have a point. I hate how prop 13 keeps oldsters in 2500 sq ft places they don't need.
If you start talking about "need" you might as well break out the Marxist playbook. Since nobody's willing to do that, that argument's off the table. Unless Oklahoma wants to modify the prop tax to charge X amount per bedroom in excess of number of occupants. Don't wait for it.
Finance_Fan wrote:
yep. Oklahoma is trying like crazy to attract educated young people. But it's too churchy for many. The only thing to do in many areas in the weekend is literally going to church!
I know a couple out here who lived in Oklahoma for awhile, dual income no kids and never going to. They bought a nice house. The neighbors kept asking when they were going to have children. When it became clear that they weren't going to have kids, some of the neighbors started telling them they shouldn't be in that nice big house, it should go to someone who'll fill it with kiddies.
Edit: They don't recommend Oklahoma.
ac wrote:
I remember Austin from the early 80s.
It really has become a completely different city.
There's a bumper sticker in Austin that some of the locals like to put on their car: reads Help Keep Austin Weird. I've never been to Austin, but I know this is true because somebody copied the idea here in Santa Cruz and now Porshe Cayennes and Range Rovers alike can be seen around town sporting Help Keep Santa Cruz Weird bumper stickers.
The irony escapes them. Having lived here in the '80s myself, it does not.
JP wrote:
Sure -- just find someone who's willing to give you the "practice." Since we will have revoked no legal liabilities whatsoever, that won't be so free-form.