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livinincali
ParticipantThis tragic event in itself isn’t a reason to do anything, but it might be blamed for a market dislocation that’s probably going to happen sooner than later. There’s been growing evidence world’s economy is slowing down and certainly many stock markets around the world aren’t pricing that slow down in. At some point a country in the Euro is going to leave it and when that happens I think the Euro will fail. Of course the timing is hard. The euro and/or stock markets could be higher from here in the short or medium term. If you short the Euro now you’ll probably be right at some point a few years from now but you might not be right a month from now or even a year from now.
ParticipantAt this point technology should make the actual education part of college virtually free. Maybe each student pays $50 a class for content production, grading and profits to an online provider. What’s not free is boat loads of administrators, counselors, brand new buildings, safe spaces, and a plethora of other hand holding services/parenting for the youth today which isn’t free. Then you have the government adding layers financial aid and accreditation in an attempt to keep higher education a monopoly enterprise that artificially reduces supply and has no limitations on cost.
The private sector jobs sector could end us of this cycle if they stopped being lazy and evaluated candidates based on their ability to do the job. If they used testing and interviews or even internships rather than relying on a crutch of must have college degree would improve things greatly. But that doesn’t CYA or help with short term make a quick buck thinking.
November 5, 2015 at 7:46 AM in reply to: Need help…lease-back or extend escrow? Pros & cons? Other options? #791034ParticipantI guess the questions to ask yourself is how much would it cost to finance the property as an investment and then refi it in a year as a primary and can you qualify for the property as an investment. If you really like the house and those additional costs don’t add up to too much money maybe it’s worth it to just buy it as an investment property.
Participant[quote=deadzone]I don’t know what pedantic means but fact is there is a bubble in craft beers, it is obvious and it will always be a niche market. If the big brewers thought Ballast Pt had major national sales potential they would have bought them out by now and there would be no talk of going public. Will Ballast Pt. somehow remain the big fish in the niche market, and outlast the weaker competition when the inevitable craft beer bubble bursts, perhaps.[/quote]
Heinken entered into global partnership with Lagunitas.
https://lagunitas.com/heineken-and-lagunitas-brewing-company-partner-to-take-craft-beer-globalGolden Road, LAs biggest craft brewery got bought by Bud.
http://la.eater.com/2015/9/23/9384413/golden-road-brewing-anheuser-busch-acquistion-los-angeles-craft-beerFrankly it’s pretty hard to go public. It would have been much easier for Ballast to sell themselves out to major but I guess they want to maintain some control over the brand and based on way I’ve seen the deal they will. Doesn’t mean there won’t be investor pressures but the voting majority will still be held by the Ballast Point founders. Maybe they have bigger plans to not just be another niche player.
Participant[quote=deadzone]
You are the one that sounds like a jackass, you can’t even make a logical response to my point. I said nothing about IPA (although I do think it sucks), the point is there are dozens if not hundreds of brewers brewing the same beer. What makes Ballast Point stand out from all the others? You can’t answer that and I’ll be you couldn’t tell in a blind taste test.Let me repeat, this is a niche market, not going to sustain hundreds of brewers. And very expensive. Not a winning recipe for mass sales.[/quote]
From the article
[quote]
Those India pale ales have propelled the brewery’s growth. In 2014, Ballast Point sold 122,890 barrels of beer, up from 37,161 in 2012, according to the SEC filing. Annual revenue totaled $48.9 million last year, compared with $14 million in 2012. Those numbers make Ballast Point one of the fastest growing breweries in California and possibly the nation, said Tom McCormick, executive director of the California Craft Brewers Assn.[/quote]300+% growth over the previous 2 years says that they’re doing something right. There’s 1.63 billion barrels of beer produced each year worldwide. Even if Ballast could only get to 0.1% of the worldwide beer market that’s more than 10x from where they currently are.
I do agree with the what makes them so special but the same could be said for most product lines and companies. I don’t understand why people spend so much more on Apple products because there’s hundreds of phones or computers that can do the same things for less but people do. Marketing hype is real.
That said I expect the IPO ramp to make the company tremendously overvalued. Basically it will be priced like they already achieved the 10x growth from where they are, which I think might be possible over the next 5-10 years.
I do agree that there’s probably a craft beer bubble in San Diego right now and some of them are going to die out but I think craft beer is here to stay.
As for a German style beer these craft breweries make them. A fresh Liter of Hofbreau or Spaten in Muchen I’ll take that all day but a Hofbrau in a bottle that was in storage for 3 months and shipped 5000+ miles, I’ll take a Fresh Ballast Point Pescadero please
Participant[quote=Hatfield]
As opposed to having to come up with $1,455,000 if you don’t have insurance?The way I look at it: if the big one comes and the house comes crashing down, there will probably be state and federal loan assistance and other ways to scratch together the deductible. In our case, we have plenty of equity in the property so I think we’d be able to come up with the deducible one way or another. Beats walking away from the home and the equity.[/quote]
Problem with a huge earthquake that devastates everything means the insurance companies won’t have the money to pay. If a huge earthquake comes to SoCal and causes 1+ trillion in insurable damage that money isn’t coming from anywhere. If you’re on a cliff in Del mar and you house slides down the cliff and the houses inland are fine then you’ll get paid to have earthquake insurance.
Participant[quote=no_such_reality]If you actually look at the Dow 30 from 1965, you might be shocked. The effective companies and their products are quite alive and dominating. Post, no longer Post, was Phillip Morris, then Altria, now Kraft and another company. Don’t Kraft and Post products pretty much own one of the aisles in most supermarkets. Little known firms like united Aircraft, still around, you may recognize their new name United Tech. UTX. $64B in revenue, total slouches. AT&T recently booted from the Dow, still around. In 1965, they were huge, $3.1B in revenue, those losers barely rake in $132B today.
[/quote]I have looked and while their are wildly successful stories there are also complete failures. In addition these are supposedly some of the biggest most influential companies around when they are in the DOW. If it were true that capitalism ends up with the rich always getting richer and concentrating wealth then GM would have never gone bankrupt, Woolworth and Bethlehem Steel would still be around, AA’s market cap would be vastly greater than it was 20 years ago.
GDP in 1965 was ~ 750 million now it’s 16.7 trillion (you’d have to grow revenue 22x just to keep up with the general growth of the economy) . I would hope there’s some success stories in the DOW from 1965 like AT&T, PG, GE, and Post. Go back even further and there are even more failures. My point is that all the rich companies don’t just keep getting richer they surprisingly end up replaced by some new innovation more often than you would think.
Participant[quote=scaredyclassic]im less concerned with inequality. in equality by itself seems neither bad nor good, since it doesn’t in itself describe the conditions of the lower end.
I am more concerned with the endgame. capitalism, does it necessarily end in the desctruction of our souls, our planet, our society?[/quote]
It doesn’t seem too. How many companies that were in the DOW 30 50 years ago still around today or as big as they are today. Kodak was a huge company that dominated photography now it’s gone. Walmart and McDonald’s have both been struggling recently. Apple would never be here today if Steve Jobs didn’t come back in the late 1990’s. The visionary leader that built these companies eventually leaves and dies and the next round of Wharton business grads eventually grinds the company into the ground because they don’t know how to innovate. All the wealth doesn’t eventually end up in the hands of the few because they die and their heirs eventually squander it.
Participant[quote=ltsdd]
You are contradicting yourself here. If socialism is one system that can reasonably contain corruption, as you claimed, then please explain why it hasn’t been able to do so in the aforementioned “socialist” countries? And why is corruption appears to be worse in those “socialist” countries than it is in the non-socialist countries?[/quote]The problem with a socialist utopia is it is still governed by people. Most extended families (20 or so people) couldn’t even pool their resources together and allocate them fairly in the eyes of everybody in that family. How is a group of people going to do that for 300 million people? It just never is going to work and it never has.
Even for something small and simple like all the piggs putting their resources together and letting CAR allocate them would be an impossible task for CAR to handle. And yet somehow there’s some smart guy/girl, some think tank, some computer algorithm that can properly and fairy allocate resources for a nation of 300 million. What is fair is always in the eyes of a person, it’s hard to measure.
October 8, 2015 at 11:44 AM in reply to: How accurate are the fico scores that are free from your credit card company. #790080ParticipantCitibank might be using a different scoring system. There are quite of few of them out there.
For example a google search yielded this
[quote]
The Credit Score Range Using Various Scoring Models:
FICO Score range: 300-850.
VantageScore 3.0 range: 300–850.
VantageScore scale (versions 1.0 and 2.0): 501–990.
PLUS Score: 330-830.
TransRisk Score: 100-900.
Equifax Credit Score: 280–850
[/quote]Participant[quote=SK in CV]
The economist that was the source of that $18 trillion number said it was horribly misleading. It effectively left off the part that it would otherwise cost $15 trillion anyway, and that’s before the savings. Net would probably be no additional net spending.[/quote]The problem with most government spending is the spending part is usually underestimated and the revenue part is over estimated. Even if it’s not, the popular thing to do later on is the cut the funding sources. Look at Obamacare. Two of the highest priorities that have a chance to be passed are cutting the medical device tax and cutting the Cadillac tax. So we are going to cut the 2 biggest funding sources for the law but keep the spending.
Participant[quote=FlyerInHi]
There’s a shortage of housing in Portland and prices are moving higher. I know someone who had to move to Vancouver, WA.[/quote]It can be rather advantageous to live/work in Vancouver, WA. No income tax in Washington, no sales tax in Oregon. If you can figure out a work from home situation for a Portland based company that can work too.
You might not be as hispster though and for many sheep that’s really all that matters.
ParticipantThe bottom line is you can only have open borders if you’re willing to dismantle the welfare system. You can choose to have open borders with mexico but you can’t give a dime in any sort of benefits to those mexicans citizens that want to come here. That’s the only workable solution unless you’re going to run the race to the bottom where you equalize everybody in the middle and the bottom. Unfortunately the equilibrium of such a scenario means a significant quality of life degradation for the vast majority of the middle class here in America.
Why are there millions of “Refugees” entering Europe and attempting to get to Germany rather than stopping at the first point of entry (aka Greece or Hungary). The obvious answer is there’s a lot more free shit to be had if you wind up in Germany with nothing.
Participant[quote=bearishgurl]
Why should we pay higher rates so those “super-users” in buried-cable lizardland can be “comfortable” under their central A/C? What exactly is it that I’ll be getting for my money if my utility bill happens to double under a two-tiered rate system (to make it more “fair” for super-users, lol)?[/quote]Their bills will continue to be much higher than yours. A lot of people will see their bill go up somewhat a few people will see their bill go down significantly. If your neighbor uses twice as much power as you does he deserved to be billed 4 times as much when he’s in your same shoes when it comes to infrastructure. Go look at this document where you can see that rates for tier 3 and 4 are more than double 1 and 2. The future proposal shrinks that down to about 25% and there still is a heavy penalty for super users.
Let’s just be honest with ourselves that low energy users were getting a pretty good deal. I haven’t really seen my bill go up much at all in the past 7 years using tier 2 or below power 99% of the time.
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