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June 5, 2012 at 9:43 PM in reply to: My next door neighbor was a cop, still under 60, been retired for more than 5 yrs #745109June 4, 2012 at 9:58 PM in reply to: OT: Post your favorite pic of your town/neighborhood that you took. #745044
paramount
ParticipantHale Telescope taken from where? (hint: a really famous celebrity owns this ranch)
[img_assist|nid=16280|title=Hale Observatory|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=799|height=600]
June 4, 2012 at 9:36 PM in reply to: OT: Post your favorite pic of your town/neighborhood that you took. #745043ParticipantI like this pic.
[img_assist|nid=16279|title=Living Water in the Desert|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=466|height=621]
June 4, 2012 at 9:16 PM in reply to: My next door neighbor was a cop, still under 60, been retired for more than 5 yrs #745041ParticipantEx Vernon City Manager
A Convicted Felon
$540,000/year from CalPERS
Basically convicted of stealing tax payer money.
Wow. You can say that again.
June 3, 2012 at 2:40 PM in reply to: OT: Is it really that bad out there for fresh grad attorneys? #744885ParticipantI can see this college lending bubble is going to end badly, very badly.
ParticipantThe latest (June 1) in Peter Schiff commentary:
Participant[quote=ltsdd][quote=The-Shoveler]Hope you got good sleeping pills, Just kidding sort of,
Yea I was tempted to hold to see if a bounce happen on Monday.
BTW, ever hear the saying,
Stocks never hit a low on a Friday ….
Also bad sign this occurring at the first 3 trading days of the month IMO.Anyway good luck..[/quote]
The market has been choppy and I have been doing quite well with some “hit-and-run” trades. The market run-up from late last year up until April or so made it pretty easy to decide to be defensive and respect the “sell in May and go away” adage. I have to say this though, once you’re out of the market it’s hard to get back in unless you see days like today.[/quote]
You bulls couldn’t be more wrong.
Listen to Peter Schiff – Peter Schiff was right.
May 30, 2012 at 10:10 PM in reply to: My next door neighbor was a cop, still under 60, been retired for more than 5 yrs #744576ParticipantThese outlandish retirements happen for quite a few reasons (none of them good), but at the end of the day it’s nothing more than greed and thievery.
What really sickens me is when those would defend these outlandish retirements/benefits say something like:
The answer I have seen is quit whining. If you don’t like it, you apply for one of those jobs to get those pensions and those benefits.
What these people don’t get is that some people – like myself – don’t want a job that steals from tax payers. I’d rather stand on my own two feet than feed at the gov’t trough.
ParticipantI’m calling for a HP boycott.
Oh I forgot, I don’t buy their junk anyway.
HP-UX is a dead OS.
ParticipantHP Layoff’s – and why IT sucks in the long run as a career choice
(and why it may have been good that this idiot Whitman did not become governor)
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/25/opinion/matloff-hp-layoffs/index.html?hpt=hp_bn7
(CNN) — Are technology companies ailing?
Hewlett-Packard certainly is. The venerable behemoth announced it will implement a restructuring that includes eliminating 27,000 jobs. HP tried to bring itself around by replacing its CEO last year. That didn’t quite do the trick, so now it’s resorting to the good old-fashioned mass layoff.
One suspects that HP is a little too venerable. It was the first “Stanford spinoff,” fittingly reflected in the presence of Hewlett Hall and Packard Hall in the engineering corner of the Stanford campus. Yet HP hasn’t stayed ahead of the innovation curve, failing for instance to adapt well to the tablet craze.
This could be the end of an era.
Consider two Stanford neighbors of Hewlett and Packard Halls — Gates Hall and the Huang Center. Bill Gates’ company may be losing the innovation war, too. It’s getting pummeled by the tablets as well, and just this week Google’s Chrome Web browser overtook Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in popularity. By contrast, the Huang Center was funded by Jen-Hsun Huang, whose firm NVIDIA has been revolutionizing the supercomputer field.
But won’t those laid-off HP engineers be snapped up by the booming tech sector? Many will not.
The tech job market is excellent for younger workers, but many of those who are laid off and over 35 will find the market less welcoming. They’re perceived as too expensive. The HP layoff will consist disproportionately of older workers. Indeed, jettisoning the veterans is often the hidden agenda in mass layoffs. It’s no coincidence that many of the U.S. core engineering openings at HP have titles like Recent Graduate, Intern and Post Doc, all aimed at the younger crowd.
The difficulties of older techies have been investigated statistically in studies at American University and the National Research Council, but a very public human face was placed on this recently in an online town hall meeting with President Obama.The wife of electrical engineer Darin Wedel explained to the president that her husband has never found a permanent job after being laid off by the electronics giant Texas Instruments. Granted, family issues restricted him to the Dallas area, but if the hype regarding a seller’s market for engineers were true, Wedel should have been able to find something in that region, which sadly has not been the case.
A former student of mine was a star at HP for 10 years or so, acquiring patents and promotions. Yet he, too, got caught up in a huge layoff, and could find engineering work only sporadically afterward. Ultimately he left the field.
Those who survive this round of HP layoffs will likely find themselves being asked to not only do their own jobs, but also those of the departed. Engineers are exempt employees, hence no overtime pay, and HP will accrue a net reduction in labor costs.Another tried and true fix for a sick firm (and for the well ones) is to ship work abroad. A few years ago, HP executive Ann Livermore made it plain: “A basic business tenet is that things go to the areas where there is the best cost of production.” HP’s jobs Web page shows that 48 of the 113 open core engineering positions are outside the United States.
Unlike Livermore’s explicit position on cheap labor, former HP CEO Carly Fiorina said that HP offshores work because the American educational system doesn’t develop good math skills in its students. That claim is a red herring. HP workers, including those being discarded, are among the best in the business, and were whizzes in math when they were in school. Many of our technology leaders, from Hewlett to Huang, are products of the American school system.
The offshored operations often require U.S.-based workers to make periodic site visits. Survivors of the HP layoffs who always wanted to visit Singapore may now get their chance — monthly.To her credit, HP’s current CEO, Meg Whitman, conceded that layoffs “adversely impact people’s lives.” But she insisted that the action is necessary. Probably so, but the message here is that engineers, like many others, will have to get used to a life of layoffs in a globalized economy.
ParticipantI think one of the strongest of all human desires is to feel superior to others.
And certainly ‘snobbery’ can be an outgrowth of that desire.
Marketers understand this concept very well.
ParticipantThe Real Crash – Peter Schiff
I first came to national attention back in 2008 and 2009 when the housing and credit markets imploded. I became known as the guy that other market “experts” laughed at when I warned of trouble brewing in the seemingly indestructible American economy. After the wheels ground to a halt in mid-2008, people noticed that my book Crash Proof, originally released in early 2007, read like a detailed preview of many of the events that eventually unfolded.
Three years later I am now catching heat from many who assume that my predictions actually fell short. They argue that I was able to anticipate the crash but that I severely underestimated the resiliency of the American economy. They admit that we took an “unexpected” blow to the chin, and that it left a lingering bruise, but they argue that we never hit the canvas like I predicted we would.
However, they mistakenly assumed that the crash I was warning about was solely a housing led credit bubble. While that was part of it, I never saw it ending there. The crash that most concerned me was the one that would result from the government’s response to the initial crisis. My concern was not that our economy would succumb to the disease that I had diagnosed, but instead would be taken down by the “cure” that the government unleashed to combat it.
When the government’s delaying tactic, which involves continuous borrowing and money printing is no longer tenable, the dollar could collapse, interest rates and consumer prices could soar and the U.S. economy could implode. That’s the real crash that I was warning about, and the one we all need to be worried about now.
This is the subject of my new book “The Real Crash: America’s Coming Bankruptcy, How to Save Yourself and Your Country.” For now it is just a prophecy but as with my first book, it soon may be regarded as history. Unfortunately, the policies of both the Bush and Obama administrations, and the Ben Bernanke led Federal Reserve, have vastly raised the chances that my catastrophic view will come to pass. However, it’s not all gloom and doom — I devote a large majority of the book to solutions. The real crash may be inevitable, but what we do in response is not. We can follow on the path that I recommend back to prosperity, or we can continue on our current course which I believe will lead to economic ruin.
When looking back from a point in the future, I believe that the years immediately after the credit collapse of 2008 will stand out as a period of dangerous economic negligence. We have bought ourselves some time by sweeping enormous problems under the rug. Through a combination of political cowardice, economic ignorance, and false confidence, we are digging ourselves into a hole so deep that it may take generations to crawl out.
Most people assume that half way through 2012 we have made some important positive strides since flirting with the brink of economic catastrophe in the dark days of 2008. Although no one is wildly celebrating the below trend 2 to 3 percent GDP growth, we are continuously reminded that we have turned the corner and that our situation is better than many other regions around the world. But what has really changed?
A D V E R T I S E M E N TImmediately prior to the crash, the United States economy was experiencing unprecedented consumer debt levels, persistently high trade deficits, historically large government budget deficits, high-energy prices, and a moribund manufacturing sector. Four years later, all of these problems have gotten worse. And unlike four years ago, we are now saddled with the highest unemployment rate in generations and levels of public debt that would have been unimaginable then. Yes we are no longer technically in recession. But I believe that is just an illusion created by perhaps the cheapest, and most obvious, trick ever devised.
I had argued that our economic growth prior to the crisis was largely a function of the real estate bubble. When that bubble popped, I knew that the economy would have to shrink. And that’s just what happened. From 2008 to 2009 our national GDP (of around $14 trillion) contracted by $212 billion. To prevent any further dips, the government aggressively spent, borrowing heavily to do so. To the relief of just about everyone, these moves did stop the nominal contraction. From 2010 to 2011 the U.S. GDP expanded by $502 billion, and from 2011 to 2012 it added an additional $508 billion. All told, from the end of 2008 the U.S. economy added a cumulative $798 billion in GDP. But those gains came at a very high price.
The combined federal deficits for the same time frame come in at a staggering $4.2 trillion! In 2009 alone the feds chalked up a chart breaking $1.4 trillion in debt (the deficit was a mere $161 billion in 2007). In other words, we borrowed five times more than we grew. This “strategy” for growth is no different from an individual who loses half his income, but continues to spend by running up credit card debt. Could this be described as economic growth? But that’s just how we are describing our current economy, and for the large part, expert economists, politicians, investors, and academics all agree.
I felt certain before writing Crash Proof that the government would never let the economy contract far enough to restore balance and sustainability. I knew the spending and deficits would head off the charts. I thought those realities would push down the dollar and cause foreign creditors to shun American government debt. However, I did not factor in the reprieve we have gotten from the false perception that Europe is in even worse shape than we.
As the curtain eventually falls on the drama unfolding in Europe, the world will refocus its attention on the more spectacular events in the U.S. The sovereign debt crisis that is now playing out in Europe will cross the Atlantic, and when it opens here The Real Crash may indeed finally begin. The average American will have a front row seat but will hardly enjoy the show.ParticipantIf your not an insider, your just making the FB capitalists richer.
Spend the money on silver.
ParticipantMove to Temecula.
Participant[quote=flu]Please dont nina… I mean, really there are better ways to gamble on the stock market than this….
Because in short… Most companies end up being more like Groupon/Zygna versus Google. Google was really the exception…
[/quote]
Something happened yesterday, I just don’t know what (yet).
Can’t thank you enough flu for this excellent advice…
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