Far from being dragged into poor neighborhoods and forced to give out home loans to jobless black folk, companies like Countrywide and New Century charged into suburbs and exurbs from coast to coast with the enthusiasm of Rwandan machete mobs, looking to create as many loans as they could. - Matt Taibbi
"Rwandan machete mobs"....
only Taibbi
....
He goes on to explain how the American "housing bubble" happened. I remember those days.. when you just needed to fog a mirror to get a very large mortgage... the so-called "stated income" loan where you didn't actually have to support your ability to pay the mortgage with any documentation of income or assets. John called them "liar liar loans".
Funny shit...
....
More Taibbi on what the OWS shit is all about.
It's an amazing scam, the likes of which has never before been seen in the world.. with nobody going to jail and the tax payers of America guaranteed to pay for it all.
And a nice chart from Krugman;
What I find funny as fuck is that millions of middle class "conservatives" applaud this.. even as they drive their dirt hauling trucks around southern California. The only reason why the entire United States population hasn't descended into Rwandan machete mobs is because being poor in the US is actually a better standard of living than most other people in the world have.
It's become okay to slave your life away for 40+ hours a week for 50+ years before you can rest and do something for you. At least.. that's how it is for most Americans.
My advice.. figure a way out of it. John works crazy hours, but he owns the company and his income is directly related to his effort. The point of that is that he is determining his own future and not beholden to the benevolence of somebody else.
I haven't followed my own advice.. I'm just a code monkey for a big corporation but I've got the easiest gig in the world and get paid well for it. John wants me to quit my job and go work with him in his business, but we're getting my income basically for free.
Some of the anxiety and depression symptoms I've been experiencing are somehow related to this though. It's great to have an easy job that pays well.. "working" from home and all that. It's just not very satisfying personally.
My personal chemistry is better, but it's still not right. I think I must have picked up some kind of weird viral infection that completely whacked me. It's not the flu, because I haven't had sinus drainage or anything like that. It's just weird.
2 comments:
"The point of that is that he is determining his own future and not beholden to the benevolence of somebody else".
I'm desperate to get my business going. It's the only freedom these days.
You're an attorney.. right? I'd imagine it's difficult to start your own law firm, but hopefully you can get it working out.
I was thinking about the whole "working for somebody else for 50 years" thing.. and again, I miss the broader point. For most people in the world, that would be paradise.. at least the American version of it where you can actually earn a living wage if you put some effort into it.
I spent the entire day Thursday, maybe 6 or 7 hours I guess, working on one very specific piece of logic to fix a problem with a data import. Used to be when I came up with really clever solutions to things like that, I'd be impressed with myself and felt like I'd actually done something kind of cool. This time, I was annoyed with how long it took to test the solution, and the very lengthy email I had to write documenting the problem and solution.
It's got to be a mid life crises. I'm guessing that a lot of people flip out when they figure out that they're 45 and what they're doing is all they're going to do.
I need to figure out something else I can do on the side. I think I can write.. so maybe try writing a novel.. even if it's a bad one, that might be something worth while.
Post a Comment