what helps alleviate this kind of "bad parenting" is the full gamut of policies that bob has almost certainly been voting against: healthcare, worker's rights, taxes, welfare systems, housing, racial equity, environmental protections, even bike lanes, etc.

after taking away access to any real possibility to a dignified life or upward mobility, bob points and says, "look at how horrible these people are" as he pretends the guilt sits on no one's shoulders but the victims.

1 no joke just some satire
2 off topic
3 off topic
4 Good deal and a kind landlord. That being said the landlord is under no obligation to rent to anyone under current market value.

5 Siblings all agree to let it go to the renters and the 50 to 60% discount . All I need is a email/ letter stating their agreement.


6 I think they might be able to do this at 5% down ( or zero). The bank will see a 50K equity in the new owners the moment they sign the papers.

For 30 years / fixed / 3500 property tax/year
At 120K @6% about 1200/month
At 60K @6% about 800/month
At 50K @6% about 730/month

Current rent 695/month
IF they / their kids can put down 10% ( 5K) payments drop about 100bucks

This is simple. Buy the house for 1/2 off and put 50K in you pocket at the closing.

IMO they will raise rates. the economy will stall. they will be forced to increase purchases of equities and reduce rates (again). the fed will not let another 2008 happen however they will make the crash that much harder. the house of cards has been built for a long time over many administrations and its waay past the point of any attempt at recovery. delaying the pain will make the pain even worse but when it comes crashing down USD will be gone forever and alternatives (like metals and yes BTC) will reign. you will have time though as petrodollar is king at this point other nations will fall before us. make your time.

Fake.
It's not official Goodyear policy, not created by Goodyear, and is actually dead wrong in what it claimed.
That makes it a fake in multiple ways. It's maybe a real picture (maybe not) of a fake policy/slide. A picture of a fake purported to be real is a fake, even though it's a real picture. Duh. If I edit Melania's porn photos to have Don Jr draped over her in the nude and fondling her nude breasts, take a picture of that fake and release it as proof they're having an incestuous affair, is that not fake? It's a real picture. Jesusissodisappointedinyou


First, it gained national attention because Trump claimed they singled out his campaign attire, a total lie, and called for a boycott because he's a petulant infant that can't handle any perceived slight without throwing a tantrum. The claims are absolute pure bullshit. It wasn't until that was absolutely undeniable that you glommed onto the "no blue lives matter" part that's also a lie but less obvious.
Second, it's not corporate policy as it claims, it's one person making up their own policy, a person I'm sure is fired or demoted after the damage their unapproved actions caused.

Bullshit. Managers do not make policy. Stop lying. This is at worst a rogue employee, not a policy, liar. Try making new corporate policy down there at TGIFridays as the manager, see how that works out for you.

Goodyear did address it, instantly releasing a statement denouncing it as never their policy and never approved as soon as they heard. Duh. You right wingers are just incapable of learning anything, aren't you.
If the employee who leaked it had sent it to corporate, they would likely have done the same thing but more internally, which is told their employees this isn't the policy and never was, but without the boycotts and death threats from the insane right that will hurt the business if not destroy it over a lie. Now they have to worry about having a job next year and losing their pensions, and America has to worry about losing another international manufacturer, losing more jobs, and losing more GDP.

When one of Trump's underlings commits a felony for him, do you say he is guilty because his manager did it and should go to prison with them? Like decimating the post office, that's Trump, right? Separating families and caging children, all on Trump's shoulders, no response to Covid for months killing tens of thousands, all Trump, talking to the Russians for help in the election, also Trump. Talking to Ukraine for help with the election, Trump. Asking China for help with the election....that's actually directly Trump.
No, you excuse him as the leader with rogue subordinates that committed crimes....subordinates that deserve pardons for their treasonous felonies.

🤦‍♂️

If Corporate hadn't found out, yes, perhaps it would have been policy for that shift at that section of that factory and until they did find out those few employees might believe that Blue Lives Matter attire wouldn't be allowed.
Blue Lives Matter isn't a racial justice or equality movement, they're an anti racial justice and equity movement, so shouldn't be allowed but are because Goodyear does so much business with police they made an exception to allow it, not an exception to exclude them as you claimed in your parroting of the ignoramus in chief.

Oh, so now you like cancel culture, more so when based on complete and willful misunderstanding the facts? So you're not just a liar, you're a proud hypocrite.
Open season on right wing businesses now I guess, make up any lie about them then boycott or burn them out of business. Sounds like a great way t o make America great, doesn't it?

You think the president calling for a national boycott of an American institution is the best way to handle an internal company policy issue where one employee tried to implement their own policy?!? Of course the same goes for right wing rogues, right?

My Pillow is run by a pedophile crackhead who runs a secret restaurant in the factory that serves baby to Satanists, a crackhead that allows only Maga attire and no social or political statements that don't support Trump in his factories. Go.

Of course, no lies needed for Trump companies. They clearly have the policy being complained about but reversed....no Biden attire, no BLM, but Maga and blue lives matter is ok. Certainly you're calling for them to be cancelled too, right?

Troll.

Nice lie. Jesuswouldbeproudofyou.

Ok, I slightly miswrote, it's not a pure "no political statements" policy, it's a long term "no political campaigning" policy, so no political CAMPAIGN statements or slogans or advocacy of one candidate over another. I'll fix it since it confused you so, it was not meant to deceive so wasn't a lie....can't say the same for therightscoop.com, they're clearly trying g to deceive if they claim it was unfair or uneven enforcement of long term company rules.

The point is it's not being unfairly applied like the petulant child claims and you dishonestly stand behind, it's totally even handed. No ByeDon 2020, no maga, not even JoJo2020. Yes BLM, whether that's a black or blue "B". Maybe you don't understand that BLM isn't running for office, isn't a candidate, and isn't a political party....yet.

Social issues, even those that have been politicized, are allowed..
like blm or support for police garb. You can wear a shirt that says "VOTE", you can't wear one that says "VOTE BYE-DON".

• Trump tweeted in response to a photo of a slide leaked by a Goodyear employee that purportedly shows that “Black Lives Matter”-branded clothes are acceptable to wear at work but “MAGA attire” is not.

• In a public statement, Goodyear said that it asks its employees to refrain from political campaigning for any political party but allows advocacy for racial justice and equity issues.

Trump claims the first stimulus package was for up to $6 trillion, not just two....and expects two more will be needed, making the bill for his inaction near $18-19 trillion by his estimates. That means all the outrage over Sanders plans to spend trillions on healthcare and education was utter bullshit (which we knew) or that the problem was we would get something for our money. Trump's just handing it out, largely without strings attached or getting any equity or concessions for it like Obama's bailouts did. Now THAT'S some serious socialism, meaning in just over 3 years his mismanagement would have more than doubled the national debt during an economic expansion (he added >$5 trillion without the pandemic, well over $1 trillion per year deficit before the economic collapse)....Conman Don, Don the Con, that's what they call him, I'm hearing people call him that, Don the Con.

It's all but guaranteed that he's going to just grab the Covid19 funds to build his wall, which is quickly becoming the wall America paid for FOR MEXICO who handled the pandemic infinitely better with only .3% of the cases America has and is stopping Americans from going to Mexico now.
(Side note, with immigrant harvesters staying home and crops rotting in the fields, expect food prices to skyrocket while unemployment also continues to skyrocket.)
@bobknight33 , comments?

15:05-15:30: you tell Mr and Mrs Front-Porch that your loonie of 1871 cannot be compared to your loonie of 2013 (year of this interview). You went off the gold standard in '33, you abandoned the peg in '70, and your currency has been free-floating ever since. Yes, the ratio of debt to GDP has some importance, but so does the nature of your currency. Just look at Greece and Japan, where the former uses a foreign currency and the latter uses its own, sovereign, free-floating currency.

Pay back the national debt -- have you thought that through?

First, the Bank of Canada is the monopolist currency issuer for the loonie, so explain to me in detail just how the issuer of the currency is supposed to borrow the currency from someone else? If you're the issuer of the currency, you spend it into existence, and use taxation as a means to create demand for your currency, and to free resources for the government to acquire, because you can only ever buy what is for sale.

Second, every government bond is someone else's asset. An interest-bearing asset. A very safe asset, in the case of Canada, the US, the UK, Japan, etc. "Paying back the debt" means putting a bullet into just about every pension fund in the world that doesn't rely exlusively on private equity or other sorts of volatile toilet paper.

There's a distributional issue with these bonds (they are concentrated in the hands of the non-working class, aka the rich), no doubt about it. But most of the other issues are strictly political, not economical.

What if the interest rate rises 1%? The central bank can lower the interest rate to whatever it damn well pleases, because nobody can ever outbid the currency issuer in its own currency. Remember, the central banks were the banks of the treasuries. The whole notion of an independent central bank was introduced to stop these pesky leftists from spending resources on plebs. That's why central banks were often removed from democratic control and handed over to conservative bankers. If the Treasury wants an interest rate of 2% on its bonds, it tells its central bank to buy any excess that haven't been auctioned off at this rate. End of story.

What if the market stops buying government bonds? Then the central bank buys the whole lot. However, government bonds are safe assets, and regulations demand a certain percentage of safe assets in certain portfolios, so there is always demand for the bonds. Just look at the German Bundesanleihen. You get negative real rates on 10 year bonds, and they are still in very high demand. It's a safe asset in a world of shitty private equity vaporware.

But, but.... inflation! Right, the hyperinflation of 2006 is still right around the corner. Just like Japan hasn't been stuck near deflation for two decades, and all the QE by the BoE and the ECB has thrown both the UK and the Eurozone into double-digit inflation territory. Not! None of these economies are running near maximum capacity/full employment, and very little actual spending (the scary, scary "fiscal policy") has been done.

But I'm going off track here, so.... yeah, you can pay back your public debt. Just be very aware of what exactly that entails.

As for the poster-child Latvia: >10% of the population left the country.

Here's a different poster-child instead, with the hindsight of another 4 years of austerity in Europe after this interview: Portugal. The Portuguese government told Master of Coin Schäube to take a hike, and they are now in better shape than the countries who just keep on slashing.

On a different note: Marx was wrong about the proletariat. Treating them like shit doesn't make them rebellious, it makes them lethargic. Otherwise goons like Mario Rajoy would have had their comeuppance by now.

PS: Blyth's book on Austerity is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in its history or its current effects in particularly the Eurozone.

I understand and appreciate what you're saying. I enjoy hearing the reasoning of others and think that truth is found through dialogue. I agree that we should each try to produce less pollution. I defaulted to a criticism of China's role, as a nation, in reducing global Co2 emissions because...well, that's how the Paris Accord differentiated between the signatories, as well as that being a fairly logical division, i.e. the largest defacto groupings able to decide environmental policy. What a nightmare it would be to have 7.5 billion individuals each come up with their own plan to lessen their own carbon footprint, and then get everyone to sign on.

I know that opinions will differ between what's ideal and what's realistic. Some will say that realistically we'll need to let the undeveloped and "developing" nations catch up by allowing them to increase and continue emitting Co2. Some will say that it's idealistic to assume that our planet's climate will be that forgiving re. the additional damage and time taken to attempt international equity. Others might transpose those two opinions, or come up with yet another view. I'm more than happy to listen carefully and respond thoughtfully.

My own take on all of this isn't fully formulated. But I do wish my home country, the USA, would do more. I wish we didn't have The Donald. And I wish China's rising nationalism would morph into a detente so that every nation could better allocate the necessary resources to mitigating this climate crisis.

Adam really does ruin everything - in this case, it's his credibility.

There are many reasons home ownership is better than renting - not the least being that you have far more flexibility in your lifestyle than a renter would. And while you are paying off a mortgage (which, in part, is subsidized by the mortgage deduction on your income tax) you are building equity and paying off the bank with progressively "inflated" dollars over the life of the mortgage (that's why they charge "interest"). The rents go up with the inflation, the mortgage payment doesn't (unless you are fool enough to buy into an adjustable rate mortgage). In the end, if you are careful and smart about when and where you buy, the home is nominally worth more than you paid (in inflated dollars - and possibly in constant dollars) and that value can be recovered if and when necessary. Renting, you walk away with a bunch of receipts...

Of course, if you are lazy and irresponsible in when and where you buy and how you maintain the home, then you could again walk away with nothing...

eh, kinda, sorta, maybe, could be true depending on your circumstances...

It's a pretty short treatment of a very complex topic.

Buying a home has a lot of positives.
Financially, while you might not be building equity in the first few years, eventually, you ARE building equity. Don't buy a home unless you can afford to pay the damn thing off.

There's also a big difference between rents and mortgages. Rents go up over time and mortgages (depending on the structure) generally go down (either on a reducing mortgage or as a function of your income).

Also, mortgages stop when you've paid them off. Rent doesn't. If you're renting when you retire, well, have fun paying the same rent (or more!) until you die.

Also, if you get that dream job in Hawaii... you can actually SELL your house. Or even better, rent it out.

That doesn't even cover the intangibles like the fact that you can do whatever you want to the house. Don't like that wall? Knock it down. No asking a landlord! *

Also, no property inspections and while the bank can kick you out if you don't pay... that's the ONLY reason they can kick you out, unlike renting where you can be evicted for "damaging the property", "being a disturbance" or "because the landlord doesn't like you".

All that said, there are plenty of reasons not to buy, and they are highly dependent on your income, ambitions and the local property market.

Just don't ever buy anything where your mortgage is more than 30% of your take home pay.


* you should really ask an engineer and your local government in case your house falls over and/or you need building consent.

I know it's Colbert's shtick and I never really got into it, but still...

"I have friends who live and work in London. They said "don't worry,we're very sensible people."

What's sensible for people in London might not be sensible for people in Salford. Or Boston. Or Wolverhampton. London, or the South-East in general, is as representative of the UK as the East/West Coast is of the US.

The hinterland has been drained at the expense of the center, on both a global and a national scale. If you live and work in the City of London, things might look quite ok, and whatever issues there are only need some reforms to no longer be an issue. But if your factory, the factory that provided jobs for the people in your home town, closed down ten, twenty years ago and now the best you can get is zero-hour contracts, then no, things are not ok.

People up top keep telling you that the economy is growing, that everyone's gonna be better off, that it's ok for multinational corporations and rich individuals to optimise their taxes, while they cut your welfare. Banks get a bailout, you get to pay the bedroom tax.

So no, your sensible friends, if they exist, live in a different universe than many of their countrymen. That's the disconnect we've been talking about.

-----
"The British economy is tanking. The pound has plunged to its lowest level since 1985... The Dow lost 611 points."

Again, so what? If the economy is growing and it has no effect on you, why should you give a jar of cold piss about the value of the pound or the stock exchange? Arguably, a drop in the exchange rate of the pound makes it easier for you to export your goods and raises the prices for imports, thereby encouraging you to produce the shit yourself. The UK does have a sovereign currency, unlike the Spanish, the Greeks, the Portuguese or the Italians who have to suffer internal devaluations, because Wolfgang Schäuble says so.

"Equity losses over $2 trillion"

Why should that matter? QE has pushed up stock prices beyond any resonable level, so what meaning do these book values hold? Not to mention that a lot of people made a shitload of money by shorting these stocks, including George Soros against Deutsche.

"There'll be no more money"

QE never trickled down anyway, makes no difference. Corbyn's people call their version "QE for the People" and "Green QE" for a reason: the previous version was only meant to prop up banks and stock values.

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

On a more general note, the hatred, the racism, the xenophobia... in most cases, it's a pressure valve. You leash out against someone else, you need someone to blame. The narrative is that we're living in a meritocracy, which makes it your fault that you didn't inherit an investment portfolio. So you start blaming yourself. You're a fuck-up. You worked hard and not only didn't climb the ladder, you actually went down. There's depression for ya. Guess what happens if someone, a person of perceived authority, then comes along and tells you it's not your fault, it's the fault of the immigrants. That narrative is very appealing if history is any indication. Even the supposedly most prosperous country in the EU, Germany, has the very same issue in the eastern parts, where there is no hope for a meaningful job.

People need work, meaningful work. Wanna guess how many of those "xenophobes" would be out in the street protesting against immigrants if they had a meaningful job with decent pay? Not to many would be my guess.

So the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are providing the narrative. But the lack of social cohesion is a result of market fundamentalism, of Thatcherism, of Third Way social-democrats leaving the lower half of the income distribution to the wolves. You can't exclude large swaths of the population from the benefits of increased productivity, etc. Social dividend, they called it. It's what keeps the torches and pitchforks locked away in the barn.

QE certainly isn't perfect. Giving liquidity to banks in theory should give them an incentive to loan it out (they earn more by doing that rather than sitting on it or putting it in super safe assets like Treasuries). However, they have generally erred on the conservative tack, partly also because their capital requirements (how much cash/equity they have to sit on) was raised. Companies that have done well and not received bailouts have also hoarded cash rather than invest because of uncertainty around the economy.

Meanwhile stock market valuations have soared because of a lack of other assets to put it in. Many of these cash holdings from corporations and banks have been dumped in Treasuries. This has reduced the return from Treasuries to a miserable amount. Meanwhile commodity prices have also tanked. That pretty much left stocks, which are arguably now inflated in price (and historically overvalued) largely as a result of the QE money handed out to banks.

What oritteropo says is very correct, if any poor or middle class person had opened a brokerage account and dumped their money in an S&P or Nasdaq tracking fund at or near the bottom of the 2009 market, they would have tripled their money or more. The option was certainly available and affordable to anyone.

The problem was that there were arguably limited alternatives. What the Australian government here did, which was far more effective (and completely avoided any recession) is simply gave out cash to everyone. Unlike QE money which just sat around in safe assets this got spent (largely to pay off debts, but this would have to happen anyway and sped up a recovery).

The issue was, this was fiscal policy, and we could easily afford it because we had (and still have) very low debt levels. A country like the UK could not so easily do this, certainly not many of the troubled European countries. The US arguably could have because with the USD being such a crux global currency, there is virtually no chance it would have led to a currency crash or brought about serious worries about being able to service their debt levels (even if they are high).

There is a demonstrated bias towards equity investment domestically which is probably what Adam Smith was talking about, which is rather different to tax havens and global supply chains which would not have been as feasible back in the 18th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_bias_puzzle

Chomsky is also not really correct as Adam Smith does use it in the more general sense that it is referred to today in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. That it took me a couple of minutes to contradict this video with wikipedia does not bode well for the fact checking of TYT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand#Other_uses_of_the_phrase_by_Smith

I think it's also worth pointing out that Smith's position wasn't that of unrestrained market activity. The general principle of the invisible hand is sound if you accept that point. As far as his actual position on the role of government, it's open to interpretation. It's also worth pointing out that you can't expect a concept to not need some adjustment after 250 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith#As_a_symbol_of_free_market_economics

This is not as relevant as the rest of the discussion here, but an interesting addendum to the clip: the President doesn't set the salaries of White House staffers - they're set according to a schedule established by an administrative affairs body. The President has some say, though, in who gets hired to senior positions, and whether it's mostly men or women in the high-paying positions. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/14/obama-is-nudging-the-white-house-toward-gender-pay-equity.html

Some of the more disturbing aspects to divorce court:

1)No right to trial by jury and no right to representation by a court appointed lawyer if you cannot afford a private attorney. Your fate is solely in the hands of one judge.

2)Lawyers are essentially completely immune from prosecution for fraud, libel, defamation, excessive litigation and more.

3)Family courts are not courts of law but rather courts of equity. This amplifies the risk and damage that a corrupt judge can do to you exponentially by giving that judge virtually unlimited power to interpret the law according to his or her opinion as to what is 'right' as opposed to what might be actually written in the law.

Kafka's The Trial pales in comparison to the reality of modern day family court.