Panem
et
cirsenses
Superbowl 2009
Keeping the masses happy.
Sunday, February 1, 2009
I like this "mad" senator of Missouri
"A Bunch Of Idiots Up On Wall Street! Kicking Sand In The Faces Of Americans!"
That 700 billion gift to the banks was the worst political/economical decision EVER.
Everyone knew the corrupt bankers in Wallstreet would use it for their own benefit, only the idiots in Washington that have lost all touch with reality thought that money was going to be used to help the bank institutions.
Amazing
I don't like to say it, but TOLD YOU SO!
HERE
HERE
HERE
HERE
HERE
Friday, January 30, 2009
If the governments around the world don't stop intervening in the "free" market there
will only be government jobs left.
Date Company Total Laid Off Industry
1/30/2009 Caterpillar 2,110 Capital Goods
1/29/2009 Textron 2,000 Conglomerates
1/29/2009 Ford 1,200 Durables
1/29/2009 Eastman Kodak 4,500 Household
1/29/2009 Black and Decker 1,200 Household
1/29/2009 Walt Disney 400 Media
1/28/2009 Walt Disney 200 Media
1/28/2009 Starbucks 6,700 Restaurants
1/28/2009 Boeing 10,000 Aerospace
1/28/2009 Time Warner 1,500 Media
1/27/2009 Target 1,000 Retailing
1/27/2009 Masco 600 Construction
1/26/2009 IBM 2,800 Software
1/26/2009 Texas Instruments 3,400 Semiconductors
1/26/2009 Lincoln National 540 Insurance
1/26/2009 Caterpillar 20,814 Capital Goods
1/26/2009 General Motors 9,758 Durables
1/26/2009 Home Depot 7,000 Retailing
1/26/2009 Pfizer 19,800 Pharmaceuticals
1/26/2009 Sprint Nextel 8,000 Telecommunications
1/23/2009 Abercrombie & Fitch 50 Retailing
1/23/2009 Deere & Company 662 Capital Goods
1/23/2009 Harley-Davidson 1,100 Consumer Durables
1/22/2009 Microsoft 5,000 Software
1/22/2009 Huntsman 1,665 Chemicals
1/21/2009 Burlington Santa Fe 2,500 Transportation
1/21/2009 UAL 1,000 Transportation
1/21/2009 SPX 400 Conglomerates
1/21/2009 Intel 5,000 Semiconductors
1/21/2009 Walt Disney 600 Media
1/21/2009 Wynn Resorts 53 Leisure
1/21/2009 Eaton 5,609 Capital Goods
1/20/2009 Clear Channel 1,850 Media
1/20/2009 Deere & Co. 160 Capital Goods
1/16/2009 ConocoPhillips 1,300 Oil & Gas
1/16/2009 Hertz Global Holdings 4,000 Business Services
1/16/2009 WellPoint 600 Health Care
1/16/2009 Advanced Micro Devices 1,700 Semiconductors
1/15/2009 Xerox 275 Business Services
1/15/2009 MeadWestvaco 2,000 Materials
1/15/2009 Autodesk 750 Software
1/15/2009 Marshall & Ilsley 830 Banking
1/15/2009 General Electric 1,000 Conglomerates
1/14/2009 Ecolab 1,000 Chemicals
1/14/2009 Delta Air Lines 2,000 Transportation
1/14/2009 Motorola 4,000 Technology
1/14/2009 Google 100 Software
1/13/2009 KeyCorp 200 Banking
1/13/2009 Newell Rubbermaid 75 Household
1/13/2009 Cummins 1,300 Capital Goods
1/12/2009 Textron 2,665 Conglomerates
1/12/2009 Mosaic 1,000 Chemicals
1/12/2009 Best Buy 500 Retailing
1/12/2009 Precision Castparts 40 Defense
1/9/2009 Oracle 500 Software
1/9/2009 Smithfield Foods 75 Food
1/9/2009 Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold 2,750 Materials
1/8/2009 Union Pacific 230 Transportation
1/8/2009 General Dynamics 179 Defense
1/7/2009 Walgreen 1,000 Retailing
1/7/2009 EMC 2,400 Technology
1/6/2009 Alcoa 13,500 Materials
1/5/2009 Cigna 1,100 Health Care
1/5/2009 United States Steel 4,225 Materials
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Passed real estate exam
Now that I don't have to attend a class everyday, I will have more time available to post.
I will post the Disneyland pics this weekend.
Riots in France
1 million people
LINK
Who would have thought that common people were smart enough to realize that bailouts are bad morality and bad economics.
Riots in the USA: 0 people
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Everything what Ron Paul says here is 100% correct economics
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
"When governments spend money, they spend it in a non-productive manner. And every penny the government spends, they have to take it out of a productive source of money. The money has to come from somewhere."
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Mastercard
She doesn't have the intention to pay it all back, that's why she doesn't and won't feel.... soooo bad.
No bailout for him
BAY CITY, Mich. - A 93-year-old man froze to death inside his home just days after the municipal power company restricted his use of electricity because of unpaid bills, officials said.
Marvin E. Schur died "a slow, painful death," said Kanu Virani, Oakland County's deputy chief medical examiner, who performed the autopsy.
Neighbors discovered Schur's body on Jan. 17. They said the indoor temperature was below 32 degrees at the time.
Schur owed Bay City Electric Light & Power more than $1,000 in unpaid electric bills, Bay City Manager Robert Belleman told The Associated Press on Monday.
A city utility worker had installed a "limiter" device to restrict the use of electricity at Schur's home on Jan. 13, said Belleman. The device limits power reaching a home and blows out like a fuse if consumption rises past a set level. Power is not restored until the device is reset.
The limiter was tripped sometime between the time of installation and the discovery of Schur's body, Belleman said. He didn't know if anyone had made personal contact with Schur to explain how the device works.
The body was discovered by neighbor George Pauwels Jr.
"His furnace was not running, the insides of his windows were full of ice the morning we found him," Pauwels told the Bay City News.
Quote of the day
"Who needs the government to create a new “bad bank” when it has Bank of America?"
-New York Times Breaking Views column, mocking BofA's incompetent CEO Ken Lewis and calling for his ouster, January 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Is it me or is this thing really getting out of control
MASS Layoffs
Microsoft: 5000
Intel: 6000
Home Depot: 7000
Caterpillar 20000
General Motors: 2000
Sprint Nextel: 8000
Texas Instruments: 3500
Halliburton: 5000
United Airlines: 1000
At this rate, we will have riots in the US like the ones in Iceland within 6 months.
Our car buying strategy
1. Never give them a number/price. We would never give the car salesperson a number. He then would say "But I need a number to work with, what is your price range". We would tell them "It is lower than that number. YOU are the carsalesman, you want to sell us this car, you have to come up with numbers and we will tell you when it is a good number. Give us your best deal on this car and we will tell you if we will take it."
2. We would act like we didn't care. They asked us, what color do you like best, we would answer them "We don't care, about the color, we want to best deal". Emotionally attached to a car = sucker!
3. We would give our salesperson exactly 30 minutes to give us his best deal. The first weekend we spend 2 hours per cardealer. This 30 minute rule solved that problem. After 30 minutes we would say, we have to go, time is up. They would come up with a better deal, the closer we got to the exit. The even stopped us when we were in our car.
4. Tell them you want to buy a car today or tomorrow and that you are visiting them first. But that you want to compare their offer with the future offers from other dealerships.
5. We would never discuss/negotiate the monthly car payment. First question when you want to buy a car " what carpayment would you like per month". Our answer would be something like this: "we won't negotiate on the monthly carpayment, we negotiate on the total price".
Most important thing to remember when buying a car:
Car dealers (can) make a profit on 3 things:
1. selling you the car
2. financing of the car
3. trade-in of your old car
Most of the money is made on item number 2 and 3. If you know this in advance, it can help you negotiate a better deal.
We were happy to get a car loan, this will boost our credit score. We are paying 6.7% without any extra costs for taking the loan.
We drove a lot of cars and negotiated a lot of prices (lol), we paid about 3k less than the 2nd best deal we got on the same vehicle.
Car buying process
We "shopped" for cars about 4 weekends and a full week during our holiday.
The car buying experience in the USA is totally different than in Europe.( I generalize for better understanding)
Car buying in Europe
You have read some reviews so you go to the dealership of that car, take it for a test drive. You don't take any salesperson with you. After a while (minutes/hours) you come back. You pick your options, add them all up, and you deduct the 8%-10% (unwritten discount)from the dealer's price and sign the contract. 3 months later you pick up the car that was custom made for you.
Car buying in the US
In the US you pick a certain car from the lot, that you like. You take it for a 15 minute test drive with an annoying salesperson next to you who wants to distract you from paying attention to the car/engine/transmission. When you arrive at the dealership, negotiations start. This process can take hours because the salespeople want to wear you out. Once in a while you hear a bell ... someone has bought a car. You can feel the selling pressure in your little toe.
At first this was very weird for us but we adopted very fast...
I went on the internet to look for salestechniques they used so we were aware of them (and were able to counter them). I found this incredible article from an undercover journalist who became a car sales person. It took me 2 hours to read the whole thing but oh my, that saved us thousands.
some shocking excerpts:
The process begins by asking the customer how much they want for a monthly payment. Usually, they say, about $300. "Then, you just say, '$300... up to?' And they'll say, 'Well, $350.' Now they've just bumped themselves $50 a month. That's huge." You then fill in $350 under the monthly payment box.
I later found out this little phrase "Up to?" was a joke around the dealership. When salesmen or women passed each other in the hallways, they would say, "Up to?" and break out laughing.
The final box on the 4-square was for the trade-in. This was where the most profit could be made. Buyers are so eager to get out of their old car and into a new one, they overlook the true value of the trade-in. The dealership is well aware of this weakness and exploits it.
I later found out that the first pencil is arrived at by the dealership in a very unscientific way. For every $10,000 that is financed, the down payment they try to get is $3,000 and the monthly payment they try for is $250. In this way, a $20,000 family sedan would require about $6,000 down and a $500 a month payment. (These payments are based on very high interest rates calculated on five-year loans. These numbers are so inflated that a manager I later worked with laughingly called them, "stupid high numbers.")
"But here's the beauty of this system," Michael said, "these numbers aren't coming from you — you're still the good guy. They're coming from someone on the other end of the phone. The enemy."
This reminded Michael of something and he laughed. "Here's another thing. Never give the customer even numbers. Then it looks like you just made them up. So don't say their monthly payment is going to be $400. Say it will be $427. Or, if you want to have some fun, say it will be $427.33."
In another post I will explain our strategy when visiting car dealers.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
You know the depression is for real when
Microsoft lays off 5000 people for the first time in their history. They didn't have mass lay-offs during the dot.com crash (2000-2001), but now they are reducing their staff by 10%.
There is nothing the government can do to stop this mess. The more they intervene the worse it will get. The DOW was 10800 before the 700 billion gift to the banks... everybody, except the morons in Washington, knows that intervening in the free market by the government always has horrendous consequences. It's called negative externalities. The market works best without government intervention.
Worst thing they can do now: throw some more money in the bottomless moneyhole of the banks. If they do, there will only be government (created) jobs left in 5 years.
Meanwhile 9 ounces of gold are enough to buy one share of the DOW, the countdown has begun.
Extremely funny, must see(BBC)
part 1
part 2
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