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[quote=flu]
The deal of the lifetime, me thinks, have loan passed. My half empty glass continues…[/quote]

This is California, pass that glass to a homeless guy, he’ll fill it up for you.

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[quote=The-Shoveler]It’s not about housing or stocks, it’s about local municipalities Tax base and retirement pension funds that are reliant on stocks and housing.

If either go bust anytime in the next few years,

local municipalities will be dropping like flies.[/quote]

That boogeyman has one driver. Interest rates. But that really only affects the for sale market.

As interest rates go up, like we’ve seen over the last several months, counter-intuitively, housing prices will actually rise. For the same reason that they rose in the last year. Lack of inventory.

The bubble-bust had the effect of largely pricing people in. As in, stuck in their house. So sans banks finally actually starting to foreclose again, there will be no collapse of housing prices.

While the masses could find someone to buy their house and move up to a more affordable better house, the vast majority won’t because they won’t be able to stomach ‘giving it away’.

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[quote=spdrun]Looks like a whole lot of cookie-cutter McHouses on that broker’s site. 🙂

But I have a question: the video (best played at 50% speed!!!) showed a lot of deciduous greenery, including “wild” areas along hiking trails. The mountains behind Boise look like desert, something you’d find in AZ or NV. Is Boise in a valley with a micro-climate, or is this all due to irrigation?

BTW – if you search for “idaho corruption”, you can see that Idaho isn’t immune. And also has a large problem with fruits and nuts of the wannabe Nazi persuasion.[/quote]

Large scale farm irrigation. Boise is on Great Basin Plateau. Think San Bernandino or maybe Fallbrook.

There is a natural forest on the ridge above so for the trees in city, those may be natural with run off from the snow pack. Boise itself gets only 11 inches of rain a year. Fallbrook averages 16.

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[quote=CDMA ENG][quote=no_such_reality]It actually goes further than that. He deployed in riot gear, when directed not to.

He deployed with an unauthorized and unapproved for department use canister of pepper spray that is more powerful and dangerous than the pepper spray authorized for campus police.[/quote]

Ok… that info I did not have and it does make a huge difference in the story…

That being said though the students did disobey orders and should have been spray though by an approved product…

Another two wrongs story…

CE[/quote]

I disagree, they should have been arrested as other cops were doing. Tazing, pepper spray, rubber bullets, bean bag rounds are LESS LETHAL not NON-LETHAL. IMHO, the police are way to cavalier about their use.

The protesters were protesting, not resisting arrest. There was no reason to resort to assaulting them and peppering spraying is an assault, really no different than whacking them with a nightstick.

Would you be saying, disobeyed a lawful order and wound up and started smacking them with a baton?(note, for now let’s ignore that ironically, the protesters were actually legally assembled there and UC and Campus Police didn’t have legal ground to disperse them),

If you disobey a lawful order, you should get arrested or detained, not beaten and pepper sprayed.

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[quote=CDMA ENG][quote=Dougie944]Let me be contrarian here. I’m just as appalled by the 30k that each of the protesters received. They completely blocked all paths the police officers could take to leave the area and were each individually warned, in advance, that they were going to be pepper sprayed if they did not allow them to pass. Then they got sprayed just as they were warned and still won $30k each.

You can’t impede the cop’s ability to leave an area. The alternative was to physically break the human chain they had created. That would have resulted in injuries.
[/quote]
I actaully agree with you on this point.

CE[/quote]

Only minor nit on that is his own stepping over the ‘impeding’ line and the other officers escorting handcuffed people out of the circle through the openings on the ends.

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It actually goes further than that. He deployed in riot gear, when directed not to.

He deployed with an unauthorized and unapproved for department use canister of pepper spray that is more powerful and dangerous than the pepper spray authorized for campus police.

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80 programs and an average of $740 Billion a year not including the States portion of Medicaid at $200 Billion or including Medicare and Social Security.

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[quote=SK in CV][quote=SD Realtor]you forgot the ending nsr… which is generally, a successful private entity cuts losses, cancels the project and moves on.[/quote]

Rarely happens with projects like this. The website is a pretty small but essential piece of the puzzle.[/quote]

Since I primarily work in large public companies, I’ve seen the ERP projects go around in circles for years. Cutting losses, rarely. Fire a CIO or two, yes, but go in circles and switch vendors, lots of that.

But own up to the real root of the problem? Business line leaders that refuse to align processes, insist theirs is the best process and circle around fascinated by trivial details? Never, although I’ve heard it’s been done.

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The death of any project is pretty straight forward, scope creep.

Hence, the perennial problems with Government implementations, whether CalPERs or LAUSD, you have a byzantine set of contractual obligations resulting in a myriad range of pay categories that simply, cannot be changed.

Any good private sector project when implementing an ERP solutions standardizes and aligns processes first, the Government can’t. Those esoteric pay rules in LAUSD codified via the contract. The pensions rules are to and hence, you have a bazillion rules because there is one set of rules for employees starting this year, different rule for the employees before last year but not yet retired, a different set of rules based on which role they’re in etc.

Any private entity dealing with the same sprawl of requirements and same restrictions on streamlining those requirements, really ends up with the same results, ERP projects running over budget, over time and racking up hundreds of millions in fees.

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iPads for L.A. Unified could now cost $770 each, a 14% increase
[quote]The L.A. Unified School District will have to purchase nearly 520,000 iPads in order to avoid spending nearly $100 more apiece for the tablets, a new school district budget shows.

The newly disclosed price of $770, a 14% increase per iPad, appeared in a revised budget released in advance of a public meeting Tuesday on the $1-billion project. The potential sticker shock can be avoided, but only after the district has spent at least $400 million for the devices.

Officials did not answer questions Monday about how much the district would then spend on the remaining tablets.

The earlier cost estimate for each iPad “preceded the actual procurement process,” the district said Monday in response to questions from The Times. “The negotiated discount [to $678] does not go into effect until the district has reached the $400-million spending threshold.”[/quote]

Just another tiny detail.

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[quote=zk][quote=EconProf]A couple of factors limit how much water savings this could really achieve:
1. San Diego can go six months without a drop of rain (as your comment suggests), so this would be of no help during those months–the very months in summer when your lawn needs the most water.
2. During our rainy winter months, some people can get away with turning off their lawn sprinklers entirely, so your plan would yeild no savings for those periods.
Finally, leveling a lawn is a HUGE amount of work. And do you have a place for the extra soil?[/quote]

In the summer (and fall and spring) is when I would get the benefit. Because there would be no runoff from the sprinklers. Normally, a lot of the sprinkler water runs off the grade and down the drain. With my plan, it would all soak directly into the grass, and there would be no water wasted to runoff.

The extra soil is not a problem.[/quote]

I have artificial turf in the play area for my son under his sandbox. I wouldn’t install it again. If it gets direct sun, it gets hot. Almost as hot as a concrete driveway in the sun. Liquids run through it, but anything else (sand, dirt, dog doo, etc.) just mats into the under fabric. You get very little water savings from artificial turf, you use almost as much cleaning and cooling it.

If you’re getting run-off with your sprinklers, they’re on too long. In most of SoCal with our clay type soil, in the height of summer, a lawn will be fine with the sprinklers set to cycle 3 times for 3 minutes 3 times a week. If you still have run-off after that, adjust the flows on your sprinklers.

Finally, if it’s not an area used for socializing and playing such that you need an open lawn area, xeriscape and install California fountain grasses, pencil plants, etc. Plus many water districts will pay you to remove your lawn.

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There’s several reasons.

First thing we need to address is that per capita, the USA across it’s levels of Government is currently and has for the last five years been spending on par with GReat Britain, France and Germany. We haven’t taxed to that level, but per person, we’re spending the same level of Government.

Except we don’t have universal health care, SS is kind of like their pensions, but overall, we’ve been funneling our money into the Military.

When you look at Norway, firstly, their top tax rate is 48%, their GDP per capita is twice ours, with a GDP at basically $100K/person.

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[quote=CDMA ENG]
A lot. No one assumes a “George Jetson” future where a machine does one hundered percent of the work. It has been explained, multiple times, why there is will a huge reduction in need for physical, and some intellectual, labor.[/quote]

I think a lot of intellectual jobs, such as Software Developers, are beginning the winter of their discontent and looking at a future that manufacturing was looking at starting in the late 1970s.

One last attempt at prospective. We’ve talked oil, there’s a boatload of good paying jobs in the Dakota oil fields.

Since 2007, the Bakken Oil Formation counties have experienced explosive growth and current have 3% unemployment. Impressive, be flexible. Go where the jobs are.

Now reality. From 2007-2011, all industries in those counties added 27,954 jobs. Twenty seven thousand jobs. Overall North Dakota employment grew about 30,000 jobs since 2007. A part of the Bakken Formation is in Montana but Montana has actually lost employment since 2007 in spite of oil field work.

Why is that important? Perspective. San Diego City has 56,160 people currently unemployed looking for work. A little over twice ALL the jobs created with the oil boom in the Bakken Field.

San Diego county, has 125,860 people unemployed and looking for work. That 4.5X all the jobs, across industries created in the Bakken field boom.

Finally, in that same time period, San Diego City grew a net 40,000 people.

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Your too busy pontificating from the chip on your shoulder to realize you’re not even part of the same discussion the rest of us are having.

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This is from Mother Jones

The good job they’re referencing here is equivalent to about $37K with benefits.

You may notice down trends that started in 2000 for College educated. I suspect those lines will begin to look like high school lines over the next thirty years unless we make fundamental changes or advances. That percentage is the percentage of that group of workers. i.e. ~20% of the some college work force have good jobs.

In aggregate, the rate is about 25%.

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