Man Wants Ex-Wife's Breast Implants Declared "Assets"

Justices of the North Dakota Supreme Court appear to see family law going down a slippery slope if they accept a man's novel theory that his former wife's breast implants should be counted against her in their divorce.

Courts may consider anything classified as a “marital asset” in dividing property between a divorcing couple. Erik Isaacson of Mandan, N.D., has ventured into uncharted waters by requesting that his ex-wife Traci's breast implants be declared a marital asset.

A Morton County District Court judge vehemently rejected the request, saying he couldn't “imagine people would actually waste time thinking that breast implants are marital assets. It just defies common sense.”

For whole story, click link

http://www.onpointnews.com/NEWS/Man-Wants-Ex-Wife-s-Breast-Implants-Listed-As-Assets.html

12 Places To Go If The World Goes To Hell

No nuclear fallout in Tierra Del Fuego.

To see all 12 places, click link:

http://www.businessinsider.com/ten-places-to-go-if-world-goes-to-crap-2009-10

When in doubt, bury someone alive.

From http://www.writingclasses.com/

Poe did not set down the following advice for bettering a story:

1. Employ an unreliable narrator, preferably one who doesn’t know he is insane and has no recollection of such events as digging into a grave to rip out the teeth of his recently departed lover.
   
   
2. Include a beautiful woman with raven locks and porcelain skin, preferably quite young, and let her die tragically of some unknown ailment.
   
   
3. Use grandiloquent words, such as heretofore, forthwith, and nevermore. A little Latin will also enhance the text.
   
   
   
4. Do not shy away from such grotesqueries as inebriation, imprisonment, insanity, and men costumed as orangutans being burned to death.
   
   
5. When in doubt, bury someone alive.
   

Lake Louise

Complete National Geographic- every issue since 1888 - $59.95

The Complete National Geographic on 6 DVD-ROMs

Price:$59.95

Item#:1076013





Explore 120 years of amazing discoveries, fascinating maps, and the world's best photography with The Complete National Geographic. This definitive collection of every issue of National Geographic magazine, digitally reproduced in stunning high resolution, brings you the world and all that is in it. Use the advanced interface to explore a topic, search for photographs, browse the globe, or wander on your own expedition.

To see offer for National Geographic, click link:
http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/browse/productDetail.jsp?productId=1076013&categoryId=

Are we comfy?

To see all lazy cities, click link:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-laziest-cities-in-america-2009-11

Walker Evans

WWII

Evans

Vonnegut tips

From http://www.writingclasses.com/ :

Vonnegut put forth 8 basics of what he calls Creative Writing 101: *

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them—in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Wilder's screenwriting tips

From http://www.writingclasses.com/ :

Wilder's screenwriting tips:

1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then—that’s it. Don’t hang around.

Work Clock

.

Diehard

True North

Overconfidence

From
http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2009/12/think-outside-the-box-ten-outrageous-predictions-for-2010.html

My professor asked us some off the wall question like how much does the earth weigh. After we wrestled with the question and wrote down our answers, he then asked us to put a 95% confidence interval around the answer. He said give me a range of numbers that you believe the earth’s weight is 95% certain to be in. We mulled this over and answered. Result? Our 95% confidence interval was wrong something like 40% of the time within the class. Why?

Basically, by asking us the first question: how much does the earth weigh and giving us a chance to think about it, our professor was secretly giving our little pea brains a chance to become overconfident. By the time he asked us the second question, we had become anchored to the first answer. Essentially, he asked us to think outside the box and the mix of our overconfidence and anchoring caused us to make catastrophically wrong answers.

That’s how humans work. And this was a 10-minute exercise. Just think if you spend your life looking at economic events and making predictions. The likelihood of your being anchored to a specific prediction is that much greater. Eventually, you become so overconfident about this prediction that you are willing to bet the farm on the outcome.

Aurora

http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/places/photos/photo_northwestterritories_northwestterritories.html

Panorama from the science book store

http://www.thesciencebookstore.com/

Anodised table

Anodised table by Max Lamb for Deadgood
by Harry / September 15, 2009
The nature of this process means that each product is slightly different, with varying streaks, marks, or patches of tonal difference incorporated in a blend of colour that runs across the surfaces of the product.

+ deadgoodltd.co.uk

"My parents named Zbigniew because they were drunk."

How about never?

Son, you're all grown up now. You owe me two hundred and fourteen thousand dollars.

Why don't we make it simple this year and just give everyone the finger?

The entire axis of boring is in there.

Pie Charts

knave or a fool

The abolitionists had a stock phrase that a man was either a knave or a fool who did not act as they (abolitionists) knew to be right.  So Calvin thought of the Catholics and the Catholics of Calvin.  ........When you know that you know persecution comes easy.

O.W. Holmes

Smart Greek Dude

"A nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its
warriors will have its laws made by cowards and its wars fought by
fools."
—

Thucydides


"Some legislators only wish to vengeance against a particular enemy.
Others only look out for themselves. They devote very little time on
the consideration of any public issue. They think that no harm will
come from their neglect. They act as if it is always the business of
somebody else to look after this or that. When this selfish notion is
entertained by all, the commonwealth slowly begins to decay. "
—

Thucydides

"In general, the men of lower intelligence won out. Afraid of their own
shortcomings and of the intelligence of their opponents, so that they
would not lose out in reasoned argument or be taken by surprise by
their quick-witted opponents, they boldly moved into action. Their
enemies,on the contrary, contemptuous and confident in their ability to
anticipate, thought there was no need to take by action what they could
win by their brains."
—

Thucydides

extreme events

Mandelbrot (1983) -
“Even though economics is a very old subject, it has not
truly come to grips with the main difficulty, which is the
inordinate practical importance of a few extreme events.”

Hmmmm

"Social science is a compendium of flawed thinking disguised as scientific understanding."

The wild world of sports

"Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with
hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic
pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words: it is war minus the
shooting. "  -The Sporting Spirit - Orwell

Wilde

"By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."

"If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism."

"If there was less sympathy in the world, there would be less trouble in the world."

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

In India, a Factory Model for Hospitals Is Cutting Costs and Yielding Profits

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125875892887958111.html


By GEETA ANAND

BANGALORE
-- Hair tucked into a surgical cap, eyes hidden behind thick-framed
magnifying glasses, Devi Shetty leans over the sawed open chest of an
11-year-old boy, using bright blue thread to sew an artificial aorta
onto his stopped heart.


As Dr. Shetty pulls the thread tight with scissors, an assistant
reads aloud a proposed agreement for him to build a new hospital in the
Cayman Islands that would primarily serve Americans in search of
lower-cost medical care. The agreement is inked a few days later,
pending approval of the Cayman parliament.


Dr. Shetty, who entered the limelight in the early 1990s as Mother Teresa's
cardiac surgeon, offers cutting-edge medical care in India at a
fraction of what it costs elsewhere in the world. His flagship heart
hospital charges $2,000, on average, for open-heart surgery, compared
with hospitals in the U.S. that are paid between $20,000 and $100,000,
depending on the complexity of the surgery.

Albert

"Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new."
Albert Einstein

Kill All the Bankers? There’s an App for That…

Among the 100,000-plus applications for the iPhone is one that allows users to “kill” bankers.

The TARP-inspired Bailout Wars
app lets iPhone users “take revenge on bankers” by “throwing them into
the air, blowing them up, shooting them down and shaking them so hard
their clothes fall off, writes American Banker. The point of the game,
made by Gameloft and selling for $.99 on iTunes, is to destroy bankers
in order to save both the White House (and US taxpayers’ money) from
greedy day traders, high risk investors, and finance CEOs.

The game’s description on iTunes reads:

Defend the White House and save the US taxpayers’ money before it
gets stolen! It’s time for you to give them what they deserve! [...]
It’s your only chance to really take revenge on bankers for the
recession they caused [...] Explore many different ways to beat
bankers: tap, grab, or shake them in the air. Bailout Wars current has
a three-and-a-half star rating on iTunes, with 219 users out of 492
giving the app a five-star rating.

Would You Buy 7-Eleven’s House Wine?

Published November 6, 2009

7-Eleven is making and selling its own wine. The convenience-store mega chain is putting out a Chardonnay and a Cabernet Sauvignon under the label Yosemite Road that will retail at most stores for $3.99.

The move comes after corporate realized that wines priced $5 and under are enjoying double-digit sales. We’re guessing that 7-Eleven is trying to capitalize on Trader Joe’s popular Two-Buck Chuck wine.

http://globestcounterculture.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/would-you-buy-7-elevens-house-wine/

E-Mails Fuel Skeptics

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

......................

At first, said Dr. Michaels, the climatologist who has faulted some
of the science undergirding the global warming consensus, his instinct
was to ignore the correspondence as “just the way scientists talk.”

But
on Friday, he said, after reading more deeply, he felt that some
exchanges reflected a concerted effort to block the release of data for
independent review.

He said that some e-mails mused about a way to discredit him by challenging the veracity of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin by claiming he knew his research was wrong.

“This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people’s reputations in very serious ways,” he said.

Dunkin’ Donuts Getting Bank Branches?

Published October 22, 2009

Pretty soon you might be able to apply for a loan before buying a coffee and doughnuts — under the same roof. Citizens Bank just opened a pretty-full-service branch in a Dunkin’ Donuts store in Bellingham, MA.

The unit has three teller windows, an ATM and is open seven days a week. According to a Dunkin’ spokesperson, this store is only a test and no more are planned in the near future.



http://globestcounterculture.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/dunkin-donuts-gets-bank-branches/

Jobs 'Saved or Created' in Congressional Districts That Don't Exist

Human Error Blamed for Crediting New Stimulus Jobs to Nonexistent Places
By JONATHAN KARL
Nov. 16, 2009

Here's a stimulus success story: In Arizona's 15th congressional district, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the Web site set up by the Obama administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There's one problem, though: There is no 15th congressional district in Arizona; the state has only eight districts.


http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jobs-saved-created-congressional-districts-exist/story?id=9097853

Medic Esthetic

Behold the beauty of imperfection! These white or skin-coloured shoes made of synthetic plaster, bandages, stainless steel, and other medical materials, aim to expose the taboo on physical deformities.

Florida has a public option for *********** insurance - How is it working?

Florida has a public option for property insurance.  Here is Randy Holcombe writing at The Beacon:

After Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in 1992 some
Floridians were having difficulty purchasing homeowners’ insurance.
(The reason: rates are regulated, and at the regulated rates some
properties are too great a risk.) So, the state government formed
Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, which is owned and operated by
the State of Florida.

As originally envisioned, Citizens would charge rates
above those charged by private insurers, to make Citizens the insurer
of last resort. Nevertheless, Citizens found plenty of customers.

After two bad hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005 property
insurance rates in Florida rose, and in his campaign for the office,
current Governor Charlie Crist promised voters that if elected he would
see that their property insurance bills “dropped like a rock.”

One tactic he used was to change Citizens’ rate structure
so it was competitive with private insurers. His idea, like President
Obama’s idea with health insurance, is that with a public option,
private insurers would have to keep their rates in line or risk losing
customers to the government insurer.

...Today about 30% of homeowners’ policies are written by
Citizens, which is the largest property insurer in the state. It’s
about to get bigger too. The largest private insurer, State Farm, had a
rate request rejected last year, and now is pulling out of the state
altogether (for property insurance; they’ll still insure your car)....

Everybody in Florida knows Citizens is a fiscal time bomb.
Already, every Florida insurance policy (on homes, boats, cars, etc.)
pays a surcharge that goes to Citizens, but Citizens still doesn’t have
sufficient reserves to weather a major hurricane. When one comes,
Florida taxpayers will be on the hook for the bill.

The legislature knows this, and actually passed a bill
last year that would have done a great deal to solve the problem by
partially deregulating rates private insurers could charge. State Farm
would have stayed in Florida had that bill taken effect, but it was
vetoed by the Governor. The public option is displacing private
insurance.

In Florida, the public option has meant a substantial
socialization of insurance, subsidization of the public option by those
who take a private option, and the creation of a fiscally-unsound
public insurance company despite the subsidy.

Some people regard private enterprise as a predatory tiger to be shot.
Others look on it as a cow they can milk. Not enough people see it as a
healthy horse, pulling a sturdy wagon. —Winston Churchill

Free Photoshop Clone - reorganized GIMP’s tools, options, windows, and menus to closely resemble Adobe Photoshop

From Plastic Bugs:

If you’ve never used Photoshop before, you may not appreciate my GIMPshop hack. What I’ve done is renamed and reorganized GIMP’s tools, options, windows, and menus to closely resemble Adobe Photoshop’s menu structure and naming conventions. Many of the menu options and even whole menus were recreated to faithfully reproduce a Photoshop-like experience. After running my GIMPshop hack,you’ll find that Photoshop and the GIMP are strikingly similar.


GIMPshop is by no means a 1-to-1 copy of Photoshop and you may find some menu items that are not in perfect order. But GIMPshop’s pretty close, and I think it does the job. I’m getting lots of use out of it and I hope you do too.


http://plasticbugs.com/?page_id=294

Experts - Chimps Throwing Darts

Oct 28, 2009 |

Larry Swedroe: |

"I recently read Philip Tetlock’s book Expert Political Judgment, which presents his 20-year study about experts’ ability to predict the future. The insights he gleaned about the so-called experts who make prediction their business are certainly worth sharing, especially as he found they’re no better than the proverbial chimps throwing darts."

Expert-Political-Judgment

Ditch the Dollar

http://seekingalpha.com/article/168911-here-s-why-asia-must-eventually-ditch-the-dollar

"Nonetheless, if America continues to monetize debt at a trillion-dollar annual rate, and the United States continues to withdraw from international leadership, Asia will have no choice but to make its own arrangements. The Obama administration, in my view, will fail to reflate the burst consumer bubble. Attempting to do so by gunning the federal deficit up to 12% of GDP and ballooning the Fed balance sheet is one of the stupidest things the United States ever has done."

Why Is Capitalism So Unpopular Among Intellectuals ?

From  http://mises.org/story/3529

To a "man of system," to borrow Adam Smith's terminology, capitalism just isn't that exciting. Participants in the market economy are wholly beholden to consumer wants. The academics envision a grand world, where Great Men fight Great Wars, periodically inventing Great Things or developing Great Ideas. Instead, the market provides us with incremental processes, which expend enormous piles of resources, in a quest to make better Triscuits. It is hardly the stuff of high drama, to say nothing of Great History.

Under capitalism, the common man does not need an intellectual vanguard or a group of virtuous surrogates to make his decisions for him or to defend him against the rapacity of his fellows. He can do just fine without our help, thank you very much, and would be much obliged if we would go back to our ivory towers and leave him alone

10 economic lessons Rap

Verse I
Tradin’ this for that, call it tit for tat
We all face tradeoffs and that’s a fact because
Everything is in finite supply
That’s the reason why we all sell and buy

Next up is rule deuce, the next best use
Of money or time defines its true value
It’s more convoluted than just the simple cost
What else could you do? What opportunities are lost?

Decisions at the margin, yeah that’s the key
To understanding principle #3
Take your present situation and assume that it’s the best
If a change is worth more than it costs, then that’s your test

Lesson #4: it’s like the carrot and the stick
We break it down so you can see what makes the world tick
So why do we do the things that we do?
It’s a system of incentives that we all respond to

Chorus
Demand, supply
Listen up, learn this, and you’ll know why
We work, we buy
The price is right when the competition’s alive
(x2)

Verse II
Everyone in society can benefit from trade
#5 is a reminder that we shouldn’t let hope fade
Just use what you’ve got to produce your best
The money that you make will buy the rest

Lesson 6 is a trick, the invisible hand
Buyers and sellers clear markets without the man
The market system almost always prevails
But recognize, too, that markets can fail

Because of monopolies and the troubles they create
Uncle Sam comes along and he’s gotta regulate
That’s lesson #7: when government’s there
They oversee to guarantee that competition is fair

#8 says the future of a national State
Relies on services and products people create
If we sell and excel and we keep doing well
Then the money keeps going ’round just like a carousel

Chorus

Verse III
#9: keep an eye on that money supply
Printing too much paper sends prices sky high
A dollar means nothing, it’s just a nice name
If what it represents doesn’t stay the same

Number 10: there’s a tradeoff in the short run
Between unemployment and inflation
I really can’t explain the whole situation
You want the full story? Step up your education!

His answer was greeted with laughter

http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNewsAndPR/idUSPEK14475620090601

June 1, 2009
Tom Bawden

Timothy Geithner moved today to reassure the Chinese Government that its huge holdings of dollar assets were safe as he reaffirmed his faith in a strong US currency.

Mr Geithner, in China on his first visit as US Treasury Secretary, sought to allay concerns that Washington’s growing budget deficit would fan inflation which, in turn, would undermine the dollar and US bonds.

“Chinese assets are very safe,” Mr Geithner said, answering a question after his opening address at Peking University this morning.

His answer was greeted with laughter by the students, who question the wisdom of China spending huge amounts of money on US bonds instead of improving domestic living standards.

Why dogs have floppy ears.

Dmitri Belyaev

From Wikipedia

Dmitri Konstantinovich Belyaev  was a Russian scientist, and academician. In the 1950s Dmitri Belyaev and his team spent many years breeding the silver fox and selecting only those individuals that showed the least fear of humans. Eventually, Belyaev's team selected only those that showed the most positive response to humans. He ended up with a population of foxes whose behavior and appearance was significantly changed. After about ten generations of controlled breeding, these foxes no longer showed any fear of humans and often wagged their tails and licked their human caretakers to show affection. They also started to have spotted coats, floppy ears, and curled tails.
At the time, biologists were puzzled as to how dogs evolved to have different coats than wolves. They couldn't figure how dogs got those genes from wolves. Belyaev saw his foxes as a perfect opportunity to find out how this happened. He and his colleagues began performing tests on the animals. When they checked the adrenaline levels of the domesticated foxes, they found that they were significantly lower than normal. This is feasible, because foxes that are not afraid of humans are going to produce less adrenaline around them. This explains the foxes' tameness, but it doesn't really explain their multicolor coats. The scientists theorized that adrenaline shares a biochemical pathway with melanin, which controls pigment production.
Quote from NOVA's 'Dogs and More Dogs' program

NARRATOR: Suddenly, it all started to make sense. As Belyaev bred his foxes for tameness, over the generations their bodies began producing different levels of a whole range of hormones. These hormones, in turn, set off a cascade of changes that somehow triggered a surprising degree of genetic variation.
JAMES SERPELL: Just the simple act of selecting for tameness destabilized the genetic make up of these animals in such a way that all sorts of stuff that you would never normally see in a wild population suddenly appeared.

Dmitri Belyaev was director of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics (IC&G) of the present-day Russian Academy of Sciences from 1959-1985. He made significant contributions to the establishment of the IC&G and made efforts in the restoration and advancement of genetics in the USSR.

Let the good times roll.

"The good times too of high price almost always engender much fraud.
All people are most credulous when they are most happy; and when much
money has just been made, when some people are really making it, there
is a happy opportunity for ingenious mendacity."

Walter Bagehot
Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market.
1873

Bob Farrell's 10 Rules for Investing

1. Markets tend to return to the mean over time.

When stocks go too far in one direction, they come back. Euphoria and pessimism can cloud people's heads. It's easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment and lose perspective.

2. Excesses in one direction will lead to an opposite excess in the other direction.

Think of the market baseline as attached to a rubber string. Any action to far in one direction not only brings you back to the baseline, but leads to an overshoot in the opposite direction.

3. There are no new eras -- excesses are never permanent.

Whatever the latest hot sector is, it eventually overheats, mean reverts, and then overshoots. Look at how far the emerging markets and BRIC nations ran over the past 6 years, only to get cut in half.

As the fever builds, a chorus of "this time it's different" will be heard, even if those exact words are never used. And of course, it -- Human Nature -- never is different.

4. Exponential rapidly rising or falling markets usually go further than you think, but they do not correct by going sideways.

Regardless of how hot a sector is, don't expect a plateau to work off the excesses. Profits are locked in by selling, and that invariably leads to a significant correction -- eventually. comes.

5. The public buys the most at the top and the least at the bottom.

That's why contrarian-minded investors can make good money if they follow the sentiment indicators and have good timing.

Watch Investors Intelligence (measuring the mood of more than 100 investment newsletter writers) and the American Association of Individual Investors survey.

6. Fear and greed are stronger than long-term resolve.

Investors can be their own worst enemy, particularly when emotions take hold. Gains "make us exuberant; they enhance well-being and promote optimism," says Santa Clara University finance professor Meir Statman. His studies of investor behavior show that "Losses bring sadness, disgust, fear, regret. Fear increases the sense of risk and some react by shunning stocks."

7. Markets are strongest when they are broad and weakest when they narrow to a handful of blue-chip names.

Hence, why breadth and volume are so important. Think of it as strength in numbers. Broad momentum is hard to stop, Farrell observes. Watch for when momentum channels into a small number of stocks ("Nifty 50" stocks).

8. Bear markets have three stages -- sharp down, reflexive rebound and a drawn-out fundamental downtrend.

I would suggest that as of August 2008, we are on our third reflexive rebound -- the Januuary rate cuts, the Bear Stearns low in March, and now the Fannie/Freddie rescue lows of July.

Even with these sporadic rallies end, we have yet to see the long drawn out fundamental portion of the Bear Market.

9. When all the experts and forecasts agree -- something else is going to happen.

As Stovall, the S&P investment strategist, puts it: "If everybody's optimistic, who is left to buy? If everybody's pessimistic, who's left to sell?"
Going against the herd as Farrell repeatedly suggests can be very profitable, especially for patient buyers who raise cash from frothy markets and reinvest it when sentiment is darkest.

10. Bull markets are more fun than bear markets.

Especially if you are long only or mandated to be full invested. Those with more flexible charters might squeek out a smile or two here and there.

Thomas Sowell - 3 Quotes

"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats, procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing."

"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong."

"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."

Taking a break until November

picking up the tab

 From http://www.askmen.com/dating/curtsmith_150/190_dating_advice.html

"I don't mind picking up the tab tonight; you always pay anyway."

Not true. Although this lie doesn't apply to all women, most still do expect men to pay for things, especially if the man asked them out in the first place. They will secretly think that the guy is cheap if he wriggles out of the bill on a regular basis. Men should always at least offer to pay for dinner if they have asked the woman out. If she protests vigorously , then go Dutch; if she just protests casually, she's only doing it out of politeness -- so pay for it.

Lie radar: If she says: "Oh, I'll cover this," but doesn't even make the motion of rooting around in her purse for her wallet, it means that she has no real intention of paying.

What you should do: Dude, just go to the date fully prepared to pay for the whole shebang. In later stages of the relationship, you can work out a fair way to determine who treats who when, but in the early, critical dating stages, don't risk looking cheap.

June 6, 2003 - Fannie Mae Chief Executive - No Housing Bubble

Fannie Mae's Raines Sees No Housing Bubble, Low Interest Rates

June 6 (Bloomberg) -- Fannie Mae Chief Executive Franklin Raines, who runs the biggest mortgage portfolio in the world, said the continuing rise in housing prices won't end in a bust like the stock market of three years ago.
``We do not see any sign of housing price decline nationwide, let alone the bursting of a bubble,'' Raines said in an interview with Bloomberg News in New York.

http://tinyurl.com/ltysuw

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There is no housing bubble in the USA - April, 2005

There is no housing bubble in the USA: housing activity will remain at high levels in 2005 and beyond

Business Economics, April, 2005 by James F. Smith

There is no evidence of a housing "bubble" in the United States and housing demand should stay strong for years to come. Three major factors lead to this conclusion. First, the 77 million baby boomers are approaching the peak home ownership ages of 65-75 (over 83.0 percent versus a national average in 2004 of 69.0 percent). Second, immigrants, a growing share of the U.S. population, tend to buy houses ten years later than people born in the United States of the same income group and family size. Third, mortgage rates are not likely to go high enough (8.0 percent or more for 30-year fixed rate mortgages) to put a crimp in demand. Despite some areas of concern, overall homeowners' equity is at record levels above $9 trillion. Delinquencies are still less than one percent of mortgages outstanding.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1094/is_2_40/ai_n13798086/

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April 2006 There is no housing bubble. Right.

April 2006
Bubble, Bubble, Where's the Housing Bubble?
Professors of economics, Gary Smith and Margaret H. Smith, say:

They found bubble conditions in only one of the 10 metropolitan U.S. housing markets evaluated.The professors dismiss talk of a housing bubble questioning the assumption that home prices have exceeded their fundamental value. "Perhaps housing prices were too low in the past and recent prices have brought market prices more in line with fundamental". They claim that existing methods, using indirect measures or values predicted by regression models, cannot show if housing prices are justified by the anticipated cash flow. They feel their model, using unique rent and price data for matched single-family homes, is a more accurate measure of fundamental home values.


... homes in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties were still somewhat undervalued by11 percent and 20 percent, respectively. Outside California, homes also were undervalued in Boston (12 percent under) and Chicago(17 percent under). Under valuation was dramatic in Dallas (40 percent), Atlanta(53 percent), Indianapolis (65 percent) and pre-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans(46 percent).

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October 27, 2005 Bernanke: There's No Housing Bubble to Go Bust

By Nell Henderson

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 27, 2005

Ben S. Bernanke does not think the national housing boom is a bubble that is about to burst, he indicated to Congress last week, just a few days before President Bush nominated him to become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve.

U.S. house prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years, noted Bernanke, currently chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, in testimony to Congress's Joint Economic Committee. But these increases, he said, "largely reflect strong economic fundamentals," such as strong growth in jobs, incomes and the number of new households.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/26/AR2005102602255.html

From The Children of the Zodiac By Kipling

THOUSANDS of years ago, when men were greater than they are to-day, the Children of the Zodiac lived in the world. There were six Children of the Zodiac—the Ram, the Bull, Leo, the Twins, and the Girl; and they were afraid of the Six Houses which belonged to the Scorpion, the Balance, the Crab, the Fishes, the Archer, and the Waterman. Even when they first stepped down upon the earth and knew that they were immortal Gods, they carried this fear with them; and the fear grew as they became better acquainted with mankind and heard stories of the Six Houses. Men treated the Children as Gods and came to them with prayers and long stories of wrong, while the Children of the Zodiac listened and could not understand. A mother would fling herself before the feet of the Twins, or the Bull, crying: ‘My husband was at work in the fields and the Archer shot him and he died; and my son will also be killed by the Archer. Help me!’ The Bull would lower his huge head and answer: ‘What is that to me?’ Or the Twins would smile and continue their play, for they could not understand why the water ran out of people’s eyes. At other times a man and a woman would come to Leo or the Girl crying: ‘We two are newly married and we are very happy. Take these flowers.’ As they threw the flowers they would make mysterious sounds to show that they were happy, and Leo and the Girl wondered even more than the Twins why people shouted ‘Ha! ha! ha!’ for no cause.

Unintended Consequences - Cash for Clunkers

Summarized from article

First "a likely bubble in used-car values, which
could deflate as the Cash for Clunkers program comes to a close." This
means that with the overall reduction in used car availability, up to
750,000 when all is said and done, Kelley Blue Book expects the price
of used cars to go up once C.A.R.S. ends later this fall. Ironically, this will then lead to deep discounts, says KBB's senior analyst of vehicle valuation Alec Gutierrez:

If this bubble comes to pass, dealerships will end up with
excess inventory of both new and used vehicles and be forced to offer
deep discounts to remove surplus inventory, driving values down.
Ultimately, there will be the possibility of a severe contraction in
auto sales as soon as the Cash for Clunkers program runs out of
funding.

Another negative, money used to fund C4C is coming from a program in the stimulus bill that was used to guarantee the Department of Energy's loans. Sam Jaffe writes over at Green Tech Media this is exactly "the wrong place to pinch from."
Instead of spending $2 billion on C.A.R.S. to get $2 billion of
stimulus, leaving the money in the loan guarantee program would result
in "at least $20 billion worth of economic activity, all of which will
have to take place on U.S. soil," he says.

Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA) which has been fighting Cash For Clunkers for months. The AAIA recently released a statement saying that simple vehicle
maintenance "would save consumers $30 billion in gasoline a year vs.
spending $3 billion in taxpayer dollars to buy new cars."

There is no housing bubble April 2006

April 2006
Bubble, Bubble, Where's the Housing Bubble?
Professors of economics, Gary Smith and Margaret H. Smith, say ....  They found bubble conditions in only one of the 10 metropolitan U.S.
housing markets evaluated.
The professors dismiss talk of a housing bubble questioning the assumption
that home prices have exceeded their fundamental value. "Perhaps housing
prices were too low in the past and recent prices have brought market prices
more in line with fundamental". They claim that existing methods, using
indirect measures or values predicted by regression models, cannot show if
housing prices are justified by the anticipated cash flow. They feel their
model, using unique rent and price data for matched single-family homes, is
a more accurate measure of fundamental home values.

Aug 2008 - Housing Collapse Ahead? Not According to the Professor

We conclude that declines in house prices are highly likely to remain small. Our analysis reveals, unsurprisingly, that foreclosures and home prices have negative effects on each other over time, but this does not imply a vicious cycle of collapsing prices. Our models predict that as foreclosures continue to climb in many states, house prices will remain flat or decline in those states -- but will not collapse.
-----------------------
But fears of a huge loss in home values for most homeowners -- and especially for middle-income homeowners -- across the United States, and fears of the devastating losses by financial institutions that would accompany them, are greatly overblown.
Charles W. Calomiris is Henry Kaufman professor of financial institutions at Columbia University and a visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Stanley D. Longhofer directs the Center for Real Estate at Wichita State University's business school. William Miles is an associate professor of economics and Barton fellow at Wichita State.

June 6, 2003 - Fannie Mae Chief Executive - No Housing Bubble

Fannie Mae's Raines Sees No Housing Bubble, Low Interest Rates
June 6 (Bloomberg) -- Fannie Mae Chief Executive Franklin Raines, who runs the biggest mortgage portfolio in the world, said the continuing rise in housing prices won't end in a bust like the stock market of three years ago.
"We do not see any sign of housing price decline nationwide, let alone the bursting of a bubble," Raines said in an interview with Bloomberg News in New York.

"Stimulate"? "Jump-start"? Why not just call it "dump" or "liquidate"?

Calculated Risk Blog -NY Times:

In Jersey City Saffron, a nearly complete 76-unit condominium complex in the thick of this city’s downtown, the Fields Development Group is trying something new ... The first units — a minimum of 9, a maximum of 15 — will be auctioned off before the grand opening and the start of conventional marketing.
...
Ending sales with an auction — after fair-market values for a building have already been well established — is a tried-and true-technique, of course. But the auctioneers for the Saffron, at Sheldon Good & Company, say they have never conducted a “jump-start” auction before.
"Stimulate"? "Jump-start"? Why not just call it "dump" or "liquidate"?

But this is a reminder that new high rise condos are not included in the new home inventory report from the Census Bureau, and are also not included in the existing home sales report from the NAR (unless they are listed). These uncounted units are concentrated in Miami, Las Vegas, San Diego and other large cities - but as these articles show, there are new condos almost everywhere.

tulip

Willful Omissions From Paul Krugman

From politicalmath

You may have seen the Paul Krugman post “How Big is $9 Trillion” in which he attempts to defend the Obama administration’s recent announcement that they expect that their policies will increase the national debt by $9 trillion. His tack is to “explain” that $9 trillion isn’t really all that much when you understand it in context.
------------------
(Krugman's explanation)

Right now, federal debt is about 50% of GDP. So even if we do run these deficits, federal debt as a share of GDP will be substantially less than it was at the end of World War II.

--------------------

First of all, the national debt in WWII was initiated by an existential threat to the very continuation of our country. Mr. Krugman does not make even attempt to make the case that we have a similar crisis that justifies this kind of debt.

Second, implicit in his observation is the concept that since we did fine after WWII, we’ll do fine now. But the years after WWII saw drastic reductions in the inflation-adjusted debt driven by drastic reductions in spending. Mr. Krugman points to no similar possibility in the post-Obama world.

Third, we have something now that we didn’t have in the 1940’s. Back in the 1945, at the height of the spending that saw our national debt rise so dramatically, entitlement spending and interest on the national debt made up a meager 5% of our total budget.

WTF 5

Clay and Kathie Kime- now.:)

http://www.plantomove.com/

           

"If you or someone you know is experiencing difficulty
making the mortgage payment, please let us know. 

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Clay & Kathie Kime - February 05, 2007

http://seekingalpha.com/article/25947-why-there-s-no-such-thing-as-a-housing-bubble

The concept that there is or was a “housing bubble” is simply the nonsensical and fancifully imaginative story of Wall Street Stock Analysts, who have been chanting this exact same “mantra” since the late 1990’s in an effort to divert investment activity back into the stock market.

the “normal” annual rates of appreciation will slowly return, although in the 7% to 10% range

Clay & Kathie Kime

RE/MAX Preferred Properties

Brisbane

I am satisfied with my auto insurance.

How about assigned risk for heath care?

What is assigned risk?

If your state requires you to have auto insurance in order to drive, you may be faced with a dilemma if insurance companies won’t accept you. Most states, therefore, have some sort of assigned risk plan to assure that you can get coverage. The cost of insurance under the assigned risk plan may be high, but the plan must accept you.

I'm in the mood for a car wreck.

WTF 4

Five Bad Questions

Things that women should never, ever ask a guy:

1 - 'What are you thinking?'
2 - 'Do you love me?'
3 - 'Do I look fat?'
4 - 'Do you think she is prettier than me?'
5 - 'What would you do if I died?'"

Ball versus Car