From the Daily Record:
N.J. homes among priciest, but S.J. offers some bargains
Coldwell Banker Residential Brokerage has released its 2014 Home Listing Report, which found New Jersey to have the fourth highest average listing price in the nation, at $440,354 for a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home.
However, half of the state’s 10 most affordable real-estate markets are in South Jersey, according to the Coldwell Banker Home Listing Report.
The report, which additionally ranked 128 real estate markets within New Jersey, named Chatham Township as having the highest average listing price, at $892,489 for a four-bedroom, two-bathroom home, while East Orange ranked as the most affordable market in the state, with an average listing price of $120,000.
…
The top 10 most expensive New Jersey real estate markets, based on average listing price, are: Chatham Township, $892,489; Bernards Township, $832,878; Madison Borough, $777,490; Mountain Lakes Borough, $724,490; Princeton Junction/West Windsor Township, $722,912; Livingston Township, $720,787; Westfield Town, $720,221; Warren Township, $718,909; Alexandria Township, $712,433 and Woodcliff Lake Borough, $678,623.The top 10 most affordable New Jersey real estate markets, based on average listing price, are: East Orange, $120,000; Newark, $147,981; Roselle, $173,419; Paterson, $178,156; Deptford, W. Deptford, Woodbury, $181,6396; Atco, $186,380; Glassboro, $206,900; Elizabeth, $210,000; Sicklerville, $217,479; Millville, $219,052.
Good Morning New Jersey
Mercedes Moving 1000 Jobs To Atlanta
Link http://www.nj.com/bergen/index.ssf/2015/01/mercedes-benz_usa_announces_move_from_montvale_to_atlanta.html
Sorry already posted after catching up on yesterday
Mercedes CEO statements about running a business in NJ are damning. I hope this is a wake up call.
Maybe we can get a regional office of the Dallas Cowboys to set up here?….oh, maybe we already have that…..
[5] grim,
I doubt it. The entrenched interests in NJ are simply that–entrenched.
Gonna have to bend the ear of one of my friends and former colleagues who was just appointed to a high level position in Trenton. Everything on paper would suggest he falls into the twitless/footrest/fabian camp but he is actually quite receptive to opposition ideas.
[6] condo
Good one! Clearly a 2016 move; the Fat Man will get more votes yelling “how ’bout dem cowboys?” than supporting the feckless NJ teams. South of the Mason-Dixon line, you lose three votes for every one you gain with an “NY” on your sports gear.
Who remembers these bandwagon jumpers?
http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/ads04/clarkad122003.html
https://gitell.wordpress.com/2007/10/24/giuliani-a-red-sox-fan/
12 killed in terror attack in Paris office of a Daily Kos wannabe. Details still emerging but it looks to be islamoterror
anon searching desperately for a tweet blaming the NRA. WH blames it on GOP obstructionism.
Terrorists used AK-47s and RPGs in attack on satire office in Paris. Suggests real overkill and islamoterror, not just a random workplace shooting.
This is the kind of thing that gets Clot sick and excited at the same time.
I’m sure some company will move into the vacated Mercedes HQ that is more sympatico with the changing lifestyle in Northern NJ. Perhaps this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zastava_Koral
#WhiteBrunchSTL
If a bunch of white people started showing up at St. Louis area fried chicken joints reading off the names of cops who were killed in the line of duty how long do you think it would take before a patron pulled out an illegal handgun and killed one of them?
Tesla would be right at home in NJ… err.. maybe not.
Is it true that Mayor de Blasio is trying to secure federal funds to renovate the statue of liberty so that both arms are in the air?
[13] LOL
I’m on the train but I believe we’re in the early stages of upper bergen county’s version of white flight. Those 4/2.5 CHCs are going to start housing multiple families all based on these companies moving out. Listen to what Clot says, there’s truth in his sarcasm.
too many in here are obsessed with Clot’s coc k
Comrade Nom Deplume, who needs to stop screwing around and get back to work says:
January 7, 2015 at 7:46 am
….. gets Clot sick and excited at the same time.
Clot is wise.
Keep dreaming. Bergen County is right outside NYC, not a chance.
Fast Eddie says:
January 7, 2015 at 8:03 am
I’m on the train but I believe we’re in the early stages of upper bergen county’s version of white flight. Those 4/2.5 CHCs are going to start housing multiple families all based on these companies moving out. Listen to what Clot says, there’s truth in his sarcasm.
19- Where are they fleeing to? Atl….lmao
Pumpkin,
Yes, they are fleeing to Atlanta.
@fhollande:
Aucun acte barbare ne saura jamais éteindre la liberté de la presse. Nous sommes un pays unis qui saura réagir et faire bloc.
This just in….new video of Pumpkin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDAmPIq29ro
“Mr. Market is kind of a drunken psycho. Some days he gets very enthused, some days he gets very depressed. And when he get really enthused… you sell to him, and if he gets depressed, you buy from him. There’s no moral taint attached to that.” — Warren Buffett,
Buffet said Taint….hehe hehe
[25] sonofabitch Essex, you beat me to it!
I just realized the other day that nobody here will live long enough to see another bond bull market, not US anyway.
Keep dreaming. Bergen County is right outside NYC, not a chance.
It’s a great time to buy; they’re not making anymore land; interest rates are at record lows…. what could go wrong? Buy as much house as you can. Besides, your salary will always go up, right?
Ahhh, the good old days:
A History of Interest Rates: 2000 B.C. to the Present. This four-millennium perspective extended our knowledge of credit back to a time before industry, banking or coinage existed. Homer showed that the regulation of credit marked the beginning of the legal history of several great civilizations. As he told an interviewer in connection with the publication of his book’s second edition:
Under the Code [of Hammurabi], you could hypothecate your wife. But a creditor could seize her for only three years. And he would have to return her in as good condition as she came. That’s all in the code. It’s very serious.
http://www.fiasi.org/1997-hall-of-fame/66-sidney-homer
@white privilege:
clot has the coc k of a black man
Growing up privileged is so hard to deal with. I was talking to a parent the other day that got upset with the butler dropped off their 13 year old son to see an R rated movie. #privilegedproblems
Son allegedly killed Manhattan hedge fund founder over $200 allowance cut, police say
A law enforcement source told the New York Post that Thomas Gilbert Jr. had just been told by his father that he would only receive $400 for spending money per month from that point on in addition to $2,400 per month for rent. The younger Gilbert had previously received $600 per month.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/01/06/hedge-fund-founder-reportedly-killed-by-son-in-manhattan-apartment/
How many billions left PIMCO after he left?
Bill Gross, bond king, ousted executive, self-styled poet of the markets, has a bold, depressing prediction for 2015, and he’s not couching it in any of his usual metaphor: “The good times are over,” he wrote in his January investment outlook note. By the end of 2015, he goes on, “there will be minus signs in front of returns for many asset classes.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2015-01-06/bill-gross-calls-it-2015-is-going-to-be-terrible.html
@white privilege:
http://nypost.com/2015/01/07/a-974-million-settlement-wasnt-enough-for-this-divorcee/
What are the rules around property taxes when an office building goes vacant? Someone (ie MB or a Mack-Cali) still owns it, but how successful are they at getting reduced tax rates since the office is unoccupied. Pearson Education is leaving it’s USR headquarters and Mack-Cali is saying the taxes they will need to pay will be reduced. How accurate is that and how long is the appeal to get that approved?
[31] Once they’re on the teat, they latch on for good. Raise your kids with cheapness and they turn out a lot better. I gave one of my daughters a gmail account for her birthday several years ago and she was thrilled. Both daughters are looking forward to having jobs so they can afford to own a cell phone some day.
[34] I imagine the town would tell you to go pound sand for a while, the same as if your tenant moved out of any other property.
For the same job, I’d move to Atlanta over NJ happily. Keep in mind that “Atlanta” doesn’t actually mean the official city of Atlanta, but rather the broader area & suburbs. Better food, nicer people, in general I’d say. Plenty of “diversity” for those craving that sort of thing. Some very upscale neighborhoods for those with money, yet 4000sf houses in nice neighborhoods are easily in reach for under 500k. Hardly anyone reads the NY Times there. They have bad traffic in some places however, so a key would be the location of the office relative to one’s house.
I wonder if NJ puts in place some laws that are more punitive to leaving an office building where taxes don’t get reduced because the building is now vacant. Someone gets left holding the bag, it’s either MB, Mack-Cali or the rest of the taxpayers.
CoreLogic: The 2015 Housing Outlook
While there has been much discussion about opening the credit box, it’s been just that – all talk. Analyzing the most recent data on the three main drivers of underwriting (debt-to-income ratio, loan-to-value ratio and credit scores) reveals that purchase underwriting remains modestly tight and is not loosening yet. While there has been clarification on GSE loan put-backs and new low down payment products, the impact of both will be fairly modest because the weak originations market reflects not just a modestly tight supply of credit, but very weak demand.
http://www.corelogic.com/blog/authors/sam-khater/2014/12/the-2015-housing-outlook.aspx
As Roche leaves a large void in taxes to Nutley, the State is kicking in:
http://www.northjersey.com/news/business/2-75-million-to-aid-nutley-in-roche-transition-1.842045
31,
Ha, that 30 year old kid who killed his dad over the $200 allowance cut had an economics degree from Princeton. Story suggested no recent history of employment. Probably studied under Krugman and was seething with rage at the thought of the economic damage created by this $200 drop in “aggregate demand” given his high marginal propensity to consume relative to his father.
More on tax impact:
“Multiple Clifton City Hall sources, however, told the Journal that the Clifton City Council is dismayed that Nutley agreed to lower Roche’s property taxes by 33 percent, without first informing Clifton officials.
Roche pays approximately $14 million in property taxes each year, with about $9 million going to Nutley and Clifton receiving just below $5 million.
As a result of Nutley’s agreement, which Clifton officials believe will remain in effect until 2015, Nutley is slated to lose about $3 million in taxes per year. If Clifton were to accept the same reduction, the municipality would lose about $1.6 million in property taxes annually.
Clifton officials said that the main reason Nutley accepted the offer relates to that municipality’s exposure likely standing closer to 50 percent should the tax appeal go to an arbitration hearing. Consequently, Nutley could lose nearly $4.5 million in annual property taxes as opposed to the agreed-to figure of $3 million. ”
http://www.northjersey.com/news/business/nutley-roche-tax-reduction-reflects-demolition-1.753391
And here I was thinking of paying down my 30 year 3.5% mortgage. If large companies continue to move out of NY Metro it won’t be good for housing. Heck even our governor seems to have relocated down south, he has been spednign allot of time Texas as now Florida.
“As chairman of the Republican Governors Association, Christie made seven trips to Florida this year to support Scott.
The New Jersey governor has been traveling out of state this week.”
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/christie_chronicles/Christie-to-attend-Florida-governors-inauguration.html#WQhe8m8MHaPEX2Xe.99
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/christie_chronicles/Christie-to-attend-Florida-governors-inauguration.html
Yes, just like north jersey really is nyc. So if north jersey is dying, so is nyc. Not happening, imo.
Also, being an executive in nyc and having to go to atl sucks. Better food? I wouldn’t say Atl has better food than nyc, but everyone has their own opinion.
Ragnar says:
January 7, 2015 at 9:53 am
For the same job, I’d move to Atlanta over NJ happily. Keep in mind that “Atlanta” doesn’t actually mean the official city of Atlanta, but rather the broader area & suburbs. Better food, nicer people, in general I’d say. Plenty of “diversity” for those craving that sort of thing. Some very upscale neighborhoods for those with money, yet 4000sf houses in nice neighborhoods are easily in reach for under 500k. Hardly anyone reads the NY Times there. They have bad traffic in some places however, so a key would be the location of the office relative to one’s house.
Gunmen in Paris Kill 12 at Offices of Satirical Newspaper Charlie Hebdo
PARIS — Masked gunmen with automatic weapons opened fire in the offices of a French satirical newspaper on Wednesday in Paris, the police said, killing 12 people and then escaping in a car.
President François Hollande said the attack on the weekly, Charlie Hebdo, was “without a doubt” an act of terrorism and raised the nationwide terror alert to its highest status. He said that several terrorist attacks had been thwarted in recent weeks.
The gunmen were still at large hours after the shooting. The French authorities added additional security at houses of worship, news media offices and transportation centers.
A senior French prosecutor said the victims included two police officers.
The news channel France Info quoted a witness as saying that he saw the episode from a nearby building in the heart of the French capital, not far from the Place des Vosges.
“About a half an hour ago, two black-hooded men entered the building with Kalashnikovs,” the witness, Benoît Bringer, told the station.
Continue reading the main story
Latest Updates on the Paris Attack
9:43 AM ET
Official Identifies Two Victims, A.P. Reports
9:24 AM ET
Official Says 3 Gunmen Carried Out Attack, A.P. Reports
9:23 AM ET
Images of the Attackers Battling the Police in Paris
More Updates »
“A few minutes later, we heard lots of shots,” he said, adding that the men were then seen fleeing the building.
Xavier Castaing, a police spokesman, said that three armed men, wearing masks, had forced their way into the offices and fired indiscriminately at people in the lobby, hitting many. He said that they were carrying AK-47 weapons, and that the attack had lasted several minutes before the attackers fled by car.
News reports said the attackers shot at the police outside the building before escaping. During the attack, several journalists sought cover on the roof.
In 2011, the office of the weekly was badly damaged by a firebomb after it published a spoof issue “guest edited” by the Prophet Muhammad to salute the victory of an Islamist party in Tunisian elections. It had announced plans to publish a special issue renamed “Charia Hebdo,” a play on the word in French for Shariah law.
A lawyer for the newspaper said that a number of prominent editors and cartoonists had been killed on Wednesday, including the cartoonists Stéphane Charbonnier, known as “Charb,” and Jean Cabut, who signs his work “Cabu.” He said that the cartoonists Georges Wolinski and Bernard Verlhac were also among the victims.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-paris-shooting.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=span-ab-top-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
41 – Post of the day
So Nutley negotiated the decrease and then gets aid to fill the void. Put a bandaid on the situation and kick the can down the road. Looks like the other key is the building being demolished. I agree there, if it’s just land now, a reassessment makes more sense. Another opportunity for a law to be put in place that puts land value higher as well as towns having less control over tax assessments. If the town acts like a fiefdom and it only affects those in the town, so be it, but in this case the town made a decision and it affected Clifton and then everyone in NJ as every taxpayer is now kicking in a little more to pay for the aid.
from article…During a March 12 public meeting about Roche property redevelopment, Evans said Roche’s assessment dropped from $305 million to $220 million as of Jan. 1, reflecting the demolition of Roche’s Building 85 in Nutley. The decreased value resulted in a 28 percent tax reduction for Roche.
#41..now we all can see the true impact of “income inequality”….
I was under the impression that large commercial/industrial property owners frequently renegotiated property taxes on large properties that go vacant. That they were not held to a similar standard as a homeowner with a rental property. Some of this having to do with the fact that typically these large commercial/industrial buildings are mixed use and were heavily customized for the previous tenant. Generally when these places are vacated, large swaths of them are gutted, leaving only shells while new tenants are found. This obviously doesn’t apply to small blocks of office space in a multi-tenant arrangement.
re # 33 – Some “economist” she is . She wants CLR stock over the cash I guess. She should take that Billion dollar check and short CLR instead.
The stock in now worth less than 1/2 what is was a year ago and if oil continues to drop they won’t be drilling any new wells in North Dakota. They have only drilled 7,000 wells there. To get to the predicted 100,000 wells they need to get to 2 million barrels a day of oil, is going to cost allot of money. Is Wall Street going to lend these companies $6 to $9 million per well when the price of oil is what it is under $50 a barrell?
Not in our life time.
Pink slips for new years in North Dakota and Texas.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/cheap-oil-killing-job-103000020.html;_ylt=A0LEVjnLU61U8oEATKgPxQt.
Grim it makes sense, it’s all about value. A tenanted building is worth far more as an asset than an empty office park or industrial building. It’s only fair that if a tenanted working factory is worth 40 million and a vacant factory is only worth 20 million the taxes should be halved when the factory closes. It also should push the municipality to get business back into their town so they can refill their coffers.
[151 from yesterday]
Pumpkin — Is your point simply that inflation is coming? If so, why do you refer over and over again to “wage inflation”?
As Inigo would say: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
so can I appeal to lower my assessment when my kids go off to college…
I guess I’d get increased once they moved back in after college while they are finding themselves and I’m paying them only $400 a month in allowance and watching my back.
[29] expat
“And he would have to return her in as good condition as she came.”
No exception for normal wear and tear?
What if you hypothecated her to JJ? Shouldn’t there be a vas clause at least?
[35] expat
“Raise your kids with cheapness and they turn out a lot better. I gave one of my daughters a gmail account for her birthday several years ago and she was thrilled. Both daughters are looking forward to having jobs so they can afford to own a cell phone some day.”
Can I hypothecate Mrs. Deplume to you for awhile? She is spoiling my girls rotten and making it impossible for me to raise them properly. At the rate they are going, they will become hipsters or, worse, have to resort to hanging out with JJ types.
The homeowners in the vacated towns will get hosed, make no mistake about it. Christie threw his buddy Joe a bone apparently or the tax increases would have begun already.
BASF’s departure cost everyone homeowner in Mount Olive $3-400 according to this. http://php.dailyrecord.com/taxcrush/view_article_details.php?id=42 The town now has the second highest rate in Morris County.
An interesting juxtaposition of news stories from the Continent in recent days.
The libtard media has been beating the drum about the PEGIDA protests in Germany, basically calling them a bunch of right-wing extremists because they are protesting against their nation’s immigration policies and the Islamization of Europe, carrying signs that read “Against religious fanaticism and any kind of radicalism — Together without violence”
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/01/06/375385153/germany-turns-off-the-lights-to-protest-growing-anti-islam-movement
Then this morning’s news from France.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-paris-shooting.html?_r=0
I wonder how many Europeans are today looking past the libtard media slander and considering the validity of many of the issues raised by the PEGIDA protests.
I also somehow doubt that the idiots in charge of the Cologne Cathedral will be turning off the lights in protest of the latest round of Islamic hate killings.
53 that doesn’t lower the value of your property. If they build a power plant next door then you probably could get a reduction, as your property is worth less, not that it makes any sense but that is how your taxes are set.
There’s an old saying that it’s “better to be lucky than good,” but what if you are unlucky and bad?
That would describe Mayor Bill de Blasio, who in the span of a few hours went from defiant to deflated. He started out crowing and ended up eating crow.
The mayor emerged from hiding Monday to use the release of 2014 crime stats to heap more abuse on cops, saying a decline of 4.6 percent in major felonies meant he was right to demand both a “safe city” and a “fairer city.” He also blasted officers for turning their backs on him at Sunday’s funeral for Officer Wenjian Liu, calling them “disrespectful” and saying “it defies a lot of what we all feel is the right and decent thing to do.”
Hours later, he was at a Bronx hospital visiting two undercover cops wounded in a late-night shootout with armed robbers.
The roller-coaster day revealed the incoherence of de Blasio’s mayoralty. He claims lower crime justifies his anti-police agenda, but can’t resist throwing an elbow at the people who actually do the dangerous job. And when two officers are wounded, he praises their courage without any recognition of why so many of the Finest believe he has made the job even more dangerous.
The toxic tangle is growing worse, with data suggesting a widespread slowdown. Arrests and summonses are falling so steeply that there is no other reasonable explanation. Meanwhile, murders and other serious crimes jumped in the last two weeks of December, erasing some of the gains made throughout the year.
The mayor knew all of this when he spoke Monday, which makes his boasting and criticism especially unwise. He could have used the 2014 stats as a moment to turn the page and make a fresh start.
Instead, he threw gasoline on the fire — and has the nerve to accuse cops of disrespect. Then he has to go visit the wounded and comfort their families in an emergency.
The upshot is that de Blasio still doesn’t understand what it means to be mayor and how to use his power for the good of all New Yorkers. He’s stuck in a combative, campaign mindset, trying to win an argument rather than govern effectively.
It’s a fool’s errand because he can’t win the argument. If he did, it would destroy the city.
To break the spirit of the NYPD and make it complicit in his radical agenda, he’d have to purge the department of proven leaders and younger officers who participated in the successful two-decade war against crime. He’d have to erase the institutional memory of preventive policing and wipe the history books clean of the heroes who gave their all, and sometimes their lives, to make New York safe.
Meanwhile, the pols and left-wing pundits who echo the mayor in pouring abuse on the cops are lost in the fog de Blasio created. The mayor holds all the cards and the bully pulpit, while it’s the cops who put their lives on the line.
They and their families have bet the biggest stakes, and deserve an extra measure of understanding. The fact that they expressed their anger at funerals for two assassinated fellow officers shows how deeply their estrangement runs.
Remember, too, the slowdown began after de Blasio refused opportunities to cool a simmering battle that goes back to scurrilous charges he made in the 2013 campaign. Even at the meeting he called to try to heal the breach, he dug in his heels, defended the protesters despite the widespread abuse of and threats against cops, and offered nothing that could remotely be described as conciliatory. An olive branch might have been the first step to a solution.
At this point, it is hard to be optimistic. Fundamentally, de Blasio makes it clear on many issues that he views his election as a blank check, and feels no need to represent the 7.7 million people who did not vote for him or those who don’t agree with him.
That’s the nut of the problem. The real disrespect is that the mayor is failing to do his duty to end the war on cops. After all, he started it.
In driving around a little bit I found that I still like being in Essex Co. (i know…right?!) So what is everyone’s opinion on the Caldwells?
ChiFi:
DeBlasio has his issues, but that Faux Thruthiness article you posted from Murdoch’s machines has issues.
Murdoch/Ailes don’t like DeBlasio because he does not vow down to them. Add that the NYPD has been without a contract since 2010, a gift from Bloomberg. DeBlasio signed with the Teachers a few months back, and the cops are looking for a “BIG” payout, they want to go to the scale that was in place and then taken apart by Giuliani.
If the cops get that you a $150,000 NYPD patrolman will be routine with $200,000 likely with O/T , NYPD Union wants ballpark of same Porth Authority gets now.
DeBlasio made a mistake by bringing back 75+/- years old Bratton. LAPD has many of the problem NYPD has now with Bratton and NYPD had under Bratton/Giuliani. The problem stems from a mismatch of large minority city/large white police administration/ evolving beat cop demographics from large white to large minority.
So ChiFi, once you get reality based and not Faux Thruthiness based then explain away.
59 – if this keeps up, happy go lucky oblivious hipsters in NY on their playcations are going to find that a reversal in gentrification of NY over the next few years a bit scary.
Funny thing though, if cops…intentionally aren’t making any arrests….could that have the effect of actually lowering the crime rate initially? How are crime rates calculated?
Finally, a big one that bugs me is the fake hero/uniform hero worship going on since 9/11.
You wear a uniform, that is a job with bennies and paycheck attached to it.
You do something heroic, that is a hero and should be proud.
You do something shameful, that is a douchebag and should be shameful.
And yes, before I forget to say, what no ome heres like to mentions.
A lot of the personal barter of top leaderships in the NYPD sound like that Howard stern /Marge Schott 1990’s bit from youtube.
#60..I think Caldwells are fine….Caldwell and West share James Caldwell high, and North is part of West Essex. Equivalent tax rates are good for Essex county, of course Morris is better but depends on commute, etc.
Did you live in NYC in the 70’s and 80’s?
Not ChiFi says:
January 7, 2015 at 11:43 am
Finally, a big one that bugs me is the fake hero/uniform hero worship going on since 9/11.
You wear a uniform, that is a job with bennies and paycheck attached to it.
You do something heroic, that is a hero and should be proud.
You do something shameful, that is a douchebag and should be shameful.
And yes, before I forget to say, what no ome heres like to mentions.
A lot of the personal barter of top leaderships in the NYPD sound like that Howard stern /Marge Schott 1990′s bit from youtube.
New York City Used To Be A Terrifying Place [PHOTOS]
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-city-used-to-be-a-terrifying-place-photos-2013-7
Valuation of large commercial properties is very complex, there are rarely even remotely comparable properties to compare against. It’s easy to value a house, there are lots of them in the township. How do you value a property like Roche? There is nothing like it, and you could argue that even if there was a comparable, it’s unlikely a similar tenant would be found, so the comp is worthless. A property that scale, that would need to undergo vast redevelopment, would need to be taxed at the land value alone once the business is gone.
It’s nothing like a residential property at all.
Wow, NYPD is really slowing down.
The number of arrests citywide plummeted by 56% for the week ending Sunday, from 5,448 during the same time period a year ago to 2,401.
The number of people slapped with criminal summonses for offenses like drinking in public fell 92% for the same week, from 4,077 to just 347.
Just 749 motorists were hit with moving violations, compared with 9,349 a year ago — a 92% drop.
And the number of parking summonses issued fell by a whopping 90%, from 16,008 to just 1,191.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/tickets-drop-92-week-apparent-nypd-slowdwon-article-1.2066763
Valuation is almost completely arbitrary.
Can’t value it based on comps, because there are no comps.
Can’t value it based on the cost of the property and structures, since the structures are worthless to a new tenant and will likely all be torn down.
Can’t value it based on the income generated, because it’s zero.
Why exactly should they continue to pay the same taxes they did previous? Unfortunately the value of a commercial property is somewhat determined by the tenant and what they do with it.
Did in 80’s. Wore uniform. Was on duty 2/26/93. No longer there by 9/11.
Being there, done that, went around and came back twice.
Remember NYPD starting pay before Giuliani @55,000 yr. /Post Giuliani @35,000 yr (not adjusted to today). This is what the fight is about, $$$$$.
PS. One of the way NYC got safer, is because the “harrassment” ensured the criminal element goes away to “other” areas that have less resources like Paterson, JC, Newark.
So just like the top story of Mercedes Benz leaving NJ for greener pastures, many elements left NYC for greener pastures in NJ.
Princeton students have a website where they can report “microaggression” like hurtful critiques about pronunciation.
http://m.nationalreview.com/article/395715/princeton-student-joking-about-how-i-pronounce-cool-whip-microaggression-katherine
Yes, I know what inflation and wage inflation are. Inflation has been happening in certain parts of the economy as has deflation, but not across all boards of the economy, hence why some will say that there is no inflation. We need wage inflation to raise the r.e. asset prices and in general, all prices of goods. This would be beneficial right now because wage inflation helps lower debt and increase demand in the economy. Obviously, you can’t just have wage inflation without the economy getting stronger. By stating wage inflation is coming, I’m stating that the economy will be getting strong enough to sustain wage inflation. Most people don’t think this is possible, but they will be wrong. They are way too pessimistic.
Happy Renter – militant but not violent, now with 25% more privilege! says:
January 7, 2015 at 10:49 am
[151 from yesterday]
Pumpkin — Is your point simply that inflation is coming? If so, why do you refer over and over again to “wage inflation”?
As Inigo would say: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
PAPD? So what is with the grief?
I still remember having to go to a client meeting with a fat lip and half-shiner when I was 23 embarrassed because some prick felt comfortable enough to sucker-punch me with no fear of retribution.
Not ChiFi says:
January 7, 2015 at 12:20 pm
Did in 80′s. Wore uniform. Was on duty 2/26/93. No longer there by 9/11.
Being there, done that, went around and came back twice.
Remember NYPD starting pay before Giuliani @55,000 yr. /Post Giuliani @35,000 yr (not adjusted to today). This is what the fight is about, $$$$$.
PS. One of the way NYC got safer, is because the “harrassment” ensured the criminal element goes away to “other” areas that have less resources like Paterson, JC, Newark.
So just like the top story of Mercedes Benz leaving NJ for greener pastures, many elements left NYC for greener pastures in NJ.
“Much like an echo of the politically driven instinct to play down acts of terrorism as the product of mental illness, family dysfunction and life’s disappointments, regular media portraits of the murderer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, ascribed his act to a turbulent personal life and mental illness.
The idea that deranged individuals with, say, a history of disturbed relationships and a tendency to violence shouldn’t be seen as genuine representatives of a cause, an ideology, is decidedly odd if not itself a kind of deranged thinking. When the cause itself is a grab bag of pathologies, it isn’t surprising that it attracts the disturbed.”
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
As demonstrations over the grand-jury decisions in Ferguson, Mo., and New York’s Staten Island gathered momentum, Smith College President Kathleen McCartney felt herself obliged on Dec. 9 to issue a campus-wide apology. Her offense? Having said, in a message of support for the protests, that “all lives matter”—for which she became a target of enraged rebukes charging her with insensitivity and with minimizing the concerns of blacks.
What President McCartney’s instant apology said about the moral spine and leadership on the nation’s campuses today needs no spelling out. It wouldn’t be long, however, before the impact of two nonblack lives snuffed out with murderous deliberation would come blasting into the continuing carnival of staged “die-ins,” blocked highways and chanting marchers, including the contingent shouting “What do we want? Dead cops.”
Nothing more instantly transformed the atmosphere in New York than the Dec. 20 killing of police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, shot as they sat in their police car. It broke the hearts of New Yorkers, it demolished whatever shard of public sympathy was left for the marches and denunciations of the police. The murders had, in addition, caused a glaring light to be cast on the mayor of New York, whose central campaign theme when running for the office had been devoted almost exclusively to the evils, the racial bias, in the stop-and-frisk tactic practiced by the police.
Once in office, Bill de Blasio made clear his view of the police as a power that required watching and re-education. To which end he summoned Al Sharpton , the longtime race hustler whose lifetime career pressing fraudulent bias claims, inciting racial conflagrations, was apparently no deterrent to Mayor de Blasio, who described Mr. Sharpton as the nation’s foremost civil-rights leader. The general attitudes emanating from the de Blasio administration were, the police concluded, distinctly unsupportive.
The most important cause of all for that glaring light, of course, was the fact that the two police officers had been killed by an assassin inspired by the antipolice fervor of the demonstrators and by the image of police as a major danger to young black men.
The killer had attended one of the rallies. He had also made certain that there would be no mystery about his motive. He had posted online an explicit declaration of his aim to kill the police, and of the reason: “They Take 1 Of Ours…… Let’s Take 2 of Theirs #ShootThePolice.”
This didn’t prevent immediate efforts on the part of the press sympathetic to the protests, and to the mayor, to dismiss the murders of the police officers as one more case of mental disturbance. The murders had nothing to do, really, with any response to the cases of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York—or, more to the point, with any incitement by the nonstop flow of accusations by demonstrators casting the police as racists and killers.
Much like an echo of the politically driven instinct to play down acts of terrorism as the product of mental illness, family dysfunction and life’s disappointments, regular media portraits of the murderer, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, ascribed his act to a turbulent personal life and mental illness.
The idea that deranged individuals with, say, a history of disturbed relationships and a tendency to violence shouldn’t be seen as genuine representatives of a cause, an ideology, is decidedly odd if not itself a kind of deranged thinking. When the cause itself is a grab bag of pathologies, it isn’t surprising that it attracts the disturbed.
More remarkable than anything, perhaps, in the aftermath of the murder of the two police officers, has been the effort to portray Mayor de Blasio as a martyr of sorts—the victim of New York City police officers, who had unfairly decided that Mr. de Blasio thought they were prone to mistreating black citizens and were in need of fundamental reform. Still, nobody paying attention to Mayor de Blasio’s pronouncements would have failed to come away with precisely that perception of his attitudes—not least his very public announcement last month that he had to “train” his biracial teenage son about the “dangers” posed to him by police officers.
The mayor had, in addition, staunchly defended his hiring of Mr. Sharpton’s longtime aide, Rachel Noerdlinger, to serve as chief of staff to his wife, Chirlane McCray, despite the fact that Ms. Noerdlinger had concealed her relationship with a live-in boyfriend—a convicted killer with a habit of posting his police-bashing tirades online. In November, the mayor, furious at eventually having to let this chosen hire go—she had other problems—accused her critics of McCarthyism.
Numbers of police officers have, as a result, chosen to turn their backs to this mayor at public events, including the ones where he was shown on an outdoor video screen, speaking at the funerals of their fellow officers. The amount of righteous hand-wringing inspired by this silent, civilized protest has been remarkable. Noteworthy too, for having been churned out by the same progressive-liberal quarters of the media that were enraptured by the demonstrators—hordes that swarmed the streets of New York, determined that there should be no lighting of the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree, no Christmas shopping (they invaded five department stores), no traveling on the city’s highways.
It took scarcely more than two days of Police Commissioner William Bratton’s managed permissiveness for the protesters—intoxicated by their media-accorded status on television and in opinion pieces lauding their peacefulness—to become violent. On Dec. 13, as thousands of protesters blocked the Brooklyn Bridge, two police officers were beaten and hospitalized as they tried to stop protesters from heaving a garbage can on police officers below the roadway.
But with a police demonstration involving a silent turning of backs, the media cheering section that had embraced demonstrators bent on shutting down the city became impassioned defenders of propriety. New Yorker magazine editor David Remnick solemnly accused the police who turned their backs on the mayor at the Dec. 27 funeral of Officer Ramos of hijacking an occasion for mourning.
Officer Liu’s funeral on Sunday was, like the Ramos funeral, very nearly unbearable both for the depth of grief on display and for its eloquence. No one who heard her will soon forget the words of tribute spoken by Pei Xia Chen, Officer Liu’s widow, in honor of her husband, or the anguish in them.
The days pass, the memories of these events will grow dim, but certain things endure, among them the realization that tens of thousands came to New York to march for justice, to charge the police, the system, with crimes against minorities.
When it was all over, there were two dead police officers and a grieving city.
On Monday at a news conference, a seething Mayor de Blasio rebuked police officers for turning their backs to him, calling it a “political action”—the implication being, as his allies in the media have been suggesting, that the officers were just using the occasions to express resentment over union contract negotiations. The remarks, made as he begins his second year in office, say everything about how little Mr. de Blasio knows about the city of which he is the mayor.
[72] “We need wage inflation to raise the r.e. asset prices and in general, all prices of goods.”
I can’t say it better than Inigo.
#54 Eddie Ray
If he hypothecated her to JJ, then JJ can’t touch it. If on the other hand he rehypothecated her to JJ, it is just a matter of defining the compensation for use.
[74] chicagofinance
All lives matter, meaning Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Officer Ramos, and Officer Liu. We as a nation have a propensity to choose sides on everything when there isn’t a need for it and like to take a soundbite from the most ignorant and think everyone in the group feels that way.
—————
Kareem Abdul-Jabar says it better than I did above…In his eyes, the protests are not anti-cop, but anti-racism. It’s a negative influence that has seeped into parts of the justice system, but it’s no more indicative of all police than a child-abusing priest is to an entire religion, he says.
“Police are not under attack, institutionalized racism is,” he writes. “Trying to remove sexually abusive priests is not an attack on Catholicism, nor is removing ineffective teachers an attack on education. Bad apples, bad training and bad officials who blindly protect them, are the enemy.”
[76] Stock Loan 101
“Wow, NYPD is really slowing down.”
The last time I walked through Penn Station, it looked a lot more like the Port Authority of the 70’s/80’s. I swear, I am driving in now on. I will miss the recorder player at the entrance to the 1/9 who loves to play Popeye the Sailor man.
[77] “Kareem Abdul-Jabar says it better than I did above…In his eyes, the protests are not anti-cop, but anti-racism.”
Except for that pesky fact that there is no evidence that the media-crucified Officer Wilson shot thug Mike Brown because of anything having to do with racism.
Stick to bouncing a ball and running around entertaining the masses, Kareem.
I think that staff are waking up to the fact that relocation is not a good thing. There are a few things. First is I have a load of friends that were moved to Charlotte from NYC. It took about a year for the novelty big house to wear off and now they are stuck with NASCAR, bad food and no realistic way move back.
Next is my friend that got offered a relo to Texas. He refused and they held on to him up here. The ones that got relocated got sh1tcanned a year after the move. As the company had paid them to relocate, they didn’t get a second package. So they are stuck in Texas with a mortgage in a very iffy job market.
My advice to anyone is take the layoff package and find another job. The companies will then have to factor in personal replacement costs. If its just manufacturing jobs, that is not usually a problem. But if it is senior management in niche fields, you have a problem. Merc may go, but you will have BMW, Volvo and Jaguar sifting through the resumes.
It has been a good long while since I have lost my composure at work…..possibly the story of the year…..on January 7th…
Gaby Hoffmann has a secret ingredient in her smoothies: placenta.
“I made smoothies out of it for three weeks,” the new mom told People.
“I had a home birth, so my midwife and my doula took it and cut it up into 20 pieces and froze it, and every day, I put it in a blender with strawberries and blueberries and guava juice and a banana, and I drank that s–t up,” she continued.
The “Girls” actress, who welcomed first child Rosemary in November with cinematographer boyfriend Chris Dapkins, said eating the placenta boosted her energy levels and milk supply after giving birth.
“Placenta, placenta, placenta. Just eat that s–t up, and it does a girl good,” hailed the actress, 32.
Other stars including January Jones have touted the benefits of eating their own placentas after giving birth.
Even better? “You don’t taste it,” claimed Hoffman.
[79] “I will miss the recorder player at the entrance to the 1/9 who loves to play Popeye the Sailor man.”
Did the Penn Station commute for years, but had forgotten about that dude. I can’t go as far as saying that I actually miss him (or the spit-dodging one had to do when passing in front of him) but it does bring back memories.
re # 73 – Ah the late 1980s and early 1990s in NYC. Most of the people living in NYC NOW weren’t around and can only read about it. The hipsters etc won’t know what hit them if the NYPD keeps up this slowdown and they will if they don’t get a contract soon. Over 50% of the force are minorities, so de DeBasio can go cry in his pillow for all they care about him and his bull crap comment about his son.
Speaking of the back in the day, I got car jacked at gun point in Hells Kitchen after leaving a club late at night. It was raining and the ladies did not bring coats. Nobody brought a coat back then because chances are you would not get it back if it was nice enough and the coat check was expensive like $5 a coat. So me being a gentleman I went out in the rain to get the car. I had parked on the street near on 50th st subway station. The 2 perps from the South Bronx rode the 1 train down to midtown to perform stickups and saw an opportunity as I was getting the car, once I opened the door I turned to see a black revolver pointed at my face as I was getting in. I turned over my wallet and thought that was it. Well I had an empty wallet so they took the car, and old 1979 chevy beater. Car was found in the South Bronx later practically untouched, wasn’t even worth stripping. Me after looking through a few dozen mug books of mostly black and hispanic perps, I realized next time I would at least park in a garage and stop being a cheapo by parking in the street.Did not slow me down for one bit, we still partied nearly every night at a different club in the city.
Save the Robots!
I tell folks I went to college in NYC and they go wow! I say it was not so great…1979-1983!!!
Or the fact that Officer Wilson’s prior job was with the Jennings police force which was disbanded for corruption and excessive force. I’m sure he took refresher classes when he joined the Ferguson force. When unsavory priest move to different parish do they stop messing with kids?
Next is my friend that got offered a relo to Texas. He refused and they held on to him up here. The ones that got relocated got sh1tcanned a year after the move. As the company had paid them to relocate, they didn’t get a second package. So they are stuck in Texas with a mortgage in a very iffy job market.
I’ve heard this story a dozen times. Easy way to deal with this is to ask for a contract. You’ll know right away what the long term is.
[86] “Or the fact that Officer Wilson’s prior job was with the Jennings police force which was disbanded for corruption and excessive force.”
Really scraping the bottom of the barrel, aren’t you?
ZERO evidence that Officer Wilson engaged in corruption or excessive force, either in his job in Ferguson or at any time beforehand.
ZERO evidence that Officer Wilson engaged in any racism in the shooting incident with thug Brown.
You’re clinging to some convoluted guilt-by-association-with-a-former-employer theory for Wilson, while apparently ignoring thug Brown’s assault and strong-arm robbery minutes before his attack of Officer Wilson.
Desperate race-baiter. Your ilk has been thoroughly shown for what it is.
I had to lay off a very good worker today as his job was eliminated in our transition from a cold set web print facility to a hybrid digital and traditional print plant. This employee had the kind of work ethic you don’t see anymore. He worked here for over 15 years. Dude was 1st generation Philipino and commuted out to Union by bus every day, often seven days per week. As I helped him pack his stuff which we will ship to his apartment in the city, besides the umbrella, poncho, toilet paper (that’s a whole other story) there were two dictionaries. A hard cover old school Miriam Webster and a pocket sized dictionary. ‘Nuff said.
I have a much tougher termination to perform this evening. This employee is a real nice guy, but he has a mean streal and is the polar opposite of the first one I just described. Though a very accurate worker, he is inflexible and stodgy. He should have applied for one of the roles in the digital print room, but the entitlement attitude is strong with this one. He is much younger too than the other guy. Wish me luck.
[40] Wow, I didn’t know Roche was closing up the entire shebang! What’s going to happen to that property, more retail space on route 3, I guess? We used to rent about 7 houses away from the main gate, right across the street from 3rd base on the baseball field in that park. I once interviewed for a consulting gig there that I didn’t get. If I did my plan was to roller-blade to work; I figured I could be at my office in about 4 minutes.
The hell I don’t! LISTEN, KID! I’ve been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I’m out there busting my buns every night. Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes.
Happy Renter – militant but not violent, now with 25% more privilege! says:
January 7, 2015 at 12:58 pm
Stick to bouncing a ball and running around entertaining the masses, Kareem.
[84] Juicebox
Maybe all the hipsters, OWS, and privileged trust fund babies will have their rose-colored glasses knocked off and finally stop blaming the man.
[89] I used to hate those firing gigs. The first time I did it I cried in my bosses office after we each let 5 good people go. He pulled out a bottle of whisky and we drank.
Happy Renter…thanks for pointing out the obvious.
I used to work in a toy store in East Brunswick where some of the employees were terminated for stealing video games and using them as barter with other mall employees to obtain various krap.
When I got into college, I transferred to the same toy store in the Willowbrook and about six months in, found out the same thing was happening there. They tried to terminate me for it and I told them they better have some proof or I would own the store. I got to keep my job.
And no, I was quite an entrepreneurial kid, but kept it much more legal.
Expat,
I’ve been through so many of these that I just don’t let my emotions surface. During the last decade, I was forced to let go of 12 from another department of 20 which I manage when we opened up my sister department in Chennai. In three years, the company went from 5,500 down to almost 3,000. Yet the amount of pages we produce are down less than 10% since then.
[88] Unhappy Renter
Just as you presented an equally factual statement that Brown committed a crime. I presented a fact about his job history. If you don’t see how a person’s work history could be a factor in a person’s performance, then ok.
“Desperate race-baiter” by you is what I call scraping the bottom.
[96] Don’t you have a brunch to occupy somewhere, Kareem?
“Brunch is symbolic for people of leisure and White Privilege”
Because it’s just too good not to repeat.
Was the reduction based on the print technology used?
I remember when I ran the technology behind a big print shop in Clifton. Running a room full of old OCE cold fusion lasers. We moved to half the number of new Siemens printers that had more then 3x the throughput, and as a result eliminated second shift and weekends. I’m sure the printers paid for themselves in a year. I think we went from printing a one up page at 90 pages a minute to a 2-up form that got cut and collated at more than 480 pages a minute.
We printed tons of collections letters and junk mail. Literally, tons. We easily generated more than a quarter of a million mail pieces a week. Before we closed up shop and moved it out to Ohio, we were going to convert the stacks of fan-fold to a huge roll to roll setup.
Even with that volume it was stark how few people it required. Everything was automated, operators just watched machinery. Cutting, folding, collating, multiple inserts, inserting, inking postage. We even automated postal sort so trays could be loaded up and shipped straight to the presort house with little effort.
And this was more than 15 years ago, I’d love to see what it would look like today.
Jeez I remember when we installed our first big duplexers. Which essentially meant daisy chaining two huge printers together, where the pin feed paper came out of one, flipped over, and got fed into the second.
Do you guys even touch paper anymore?
Unhappy Renter
You should try some Anger Management classes, start exercising or take up drinking
It’s pretty awesome now. The ROI for our four million dollar transition involves the removal of two cold set webs. We purchased two roll to roll devices, one color, one monotone and two full featured binding lines. We also purchased a small stand-alone perfect binder. Rolls move at 600 feet per minute and we can print 3 stacked books across. Two people can man the digital print room per shift and potentially one, if they are really good. Each traditional press required a crew of 4 with a real artisan type of skill set. We plan to use these new digital devices to handle the shorter runs we were formerly printing on our cold set webs. Anything over around a print quantity of 10,000 and/or 80 pages still makes more sense on the old presses. Of course, larger page counts with smaller quantities might still make sense to print digitally. Plus, having a digital setup allows us to handle variable data work, which is big. The biggest expense in digital printing is the ink and the ink heads. In traditional, it’s the paper and labor. Funny how that works. When we are up and running, I’d be glad to give you the tour. We still have three large webs that can do 20,000 64-page signatures an hour. Those are pretty cool.
And maybe when you take your bourbon public, we can print your prospectus and handle the filing with the SEC. :P
Oh yeah….and the market rallies on.
A point I was trying to make, and seems to be totally missed is that Giuliani broke the back of NYPD’s union. The Union was weak as well with Bloomberg, bu now is now getting it’s spine toughen because DeBlasio is not playing rough ball.
All of you are interpreting my comments in political right/left issues.
My point is (hypothetical numbers here)
Available for NYPD Staff Salary – $1,000,000
Divided by staff -100,000
Everyone gets $10
New contract – Everyone gets $20
Multiply by staff 100,000
new Cost $2,000,000
How to meet new cost? Either raise taxes or cut staff.
Either way, the “old” good times, as perceived by some are over.
Giuliani/Bloomberg did not have to deal with because they played hard ball politics and made deals with Murdoch/Ailes.
Giuliani/Bloomberg are admired for essentially Wal-Marting NYPD. Because that is what happened under them. Cut cost per man. Which allowed them to get plenty of “cheap hands” to flood the street.
WalMarting the Cops is something a Newark, Jersey City or Paterson can not yet do. However, the Camden County Police model seems to be promising. I predict it will be used again in NJ. Camden Police was very expensive, corrupt, and one step better than useless; it was disbanded replaced by the Camden County Police which hire no more than 49.9% of the old department cleanest, most efficient officers at a lower pay scale and benefits package to patrol the city of Camden. Christie, Norcross and DiVicenzo signed off on it.
DeBlasio is behaving like an old fashioned neighborhood politician who wants to be liked so he’s pussy footing around. Giuliani never wanted to be liked even by his kids. Bloomberg only cared about the Billionaire class. So is not about left/right is about money, where is it going to go and who is going to pay for it.
One last thing. The gas station in Union IS a Citgo, and it’s down to $1.97 credit. Hail Chavez after all.
Costco in Wayne, $1.87
Why did I buy an electric car!
[105] Not CHI FI
Camden Police was very expensive, corrupt, and one step better than useless; it was disbanded replaced by the Camden County Police which hire no more than 49.9% of the old department cleanest, most efficient officers at a lower pay scale and benefits package to patrol the city of Camden.
From your experience, how does one determine who was clean in a corrupt force? And the ones determined to be dirty for lack of a better word, join another police?
I fired a Jamaica guy once. He was disappearing constantly during the day, usually around lunch time and just wasn’t getting job done. Several of the women in the office cried that day. Turns out he was two timing or is it three timing them in the same cheap motel down the highway.
“Why did I buy an electric car?”
And now you know why Saudi Arabia/OPEC is not reducing supply.
re # 108 – “Why did I buy an electric car?”
It’s hip to be square?
Lib – The Fit Guess-O-Meter is reading 35 miles max range today.
Electric car will allow you to move about freely and without detection in Doucheland.
114 – I can drive straight through Montclair now, without a single bottle or molotov cocktail thrown at me. Is my privilege checked? Or is this taking me completely in the wrong direction?
FKA 2010 Buyer says:
January 7, 2015 at 2:33 pm
[105] Not CHI FI
Camden Police was very expensive, corrupt, and one step better than useless; it was disbanded replaced by the Camden County Police which hire no more than 49.9% of the old department cleanest, most efficient officers at a lower pay scale and benefits package to patrol the city of Camden.
From your experience, how does one determine who was clean in a corrupt force? And the ones determined to be dirty for lack of a better word, join another police?
This guy is a dirty cop……
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWx6IsqPUKk
#114…well..you could have bought diesel…
“Lib – The Fit Guess-O-Meter is reading 35 miles max range today.”
Let me know what it reads tomorrow :P
Maybe the technology is not quite there yet? Which is why the Volt might end up being the best solution.
Personally, I think they should replace all of the roads with rails and just have a very fancy junction switching mechanism so each (rail)car will be routed automatically to where it needs to go. Couple this with the google platooning technology and wallah. Or is that Wall-E?
[116] chicagofinance
Cops have a stressful job and do the best they can to enforce the law and keep everyone safe. If you are a good cop, you would have to be ignorant to not understand the social dynamics that a bad cop plays in the distrust in the community which adds to stress of the job. They know amongst themselves the ones that shouldn’t be on the force but the blue wall would never let them publicly acknowledge that.
And cops lives matter just like everyone’s.
[55] Nom – I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that your problem is easily reversible, the bad news is that you have to convince Mrs. Deplume to stop being such a good earner to make it work. Happy Mom at home with no personal income is easy to impress with the premise of quantity time with kids instead of quantity purchases for kids as recompense for time not spent with them. You can defer the years when you make income, you can’t defer years spent with your kids while they are kids.
Can I hypothecate Mrs. Deplume to you for awhile? She is spoiling my girls rotten and making it impossible for me to raise them properly. At the rate they are going, they will become hipsters or, worse, have to resort to hanging out with JJ types.
Tesla 3 looks like a winner with a 200 mile range. I’d like to stay electric, and if I do I’ll put my money there (assuming they can deliver it for 35-40k).
If the current crop of batteries could deliver a 100 mile winter range, they would be perfect. But they don’t they do 100 summer, and 50 winter (on a good day). Thus, the Tesla will deliver 100 winter miles.
3 seasons out of the year I generally have no range problems. I can easily do 200+ miles on a given day with a charging stop.
But if I needed to drive to Newark Airport tomorrow morning, and park overnight? I’d be dead, no way. You’d think even the expensive parking deck would have charging stations – it doesn’t. Even if I could make it there and back straight, the overnight in the cold, unplugged, would kill the battery.
EV in this area only works if you have a second car.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2863411/heres-everything-toyota-will-give-you-if-you-buy-the-hydrogen-powered-mirai.html
Price tag is high, but in this climate it beats electric I guess.
Was planning on it being my third car.
And this morning, due to the cold, the interior recirculate/exterior air switch on my climate control on my 4 month old Mazda 6 essentially froze. After 20 minutes of the heat running full blast, I was able to switch to recirculate interior air. Man I loved my old Civic. I’m also having issues with my TPMS now that I have the winter wheels on.
The concept of a hydrogen powered car is full of hot air.
Lesson here, being a good worker gets you nowhere today.
“I had to lay off a very good worker today as his job was eliminated in our transition from a cold set web print facility to a hybrid digital and traditional print plant. This employee had the kind of work ethic you don’t see anymore. He worked here for over 15 years. Dude was 1st generation Philipino and commuted out to Union by bus every day, often seven days per week. As I helped him pack his stuff which we will ship to his apartment in the city, besides the umbrella, poncho, toilet paper (that’s a whole other story) there were two dictionaries. A hard cover old school Miriam Webster and a pocket sized dictionary. ‘Nuff said.”
#125….macro factors trump micro factors….
Efficiency…baa. So now 2000 workers lose their jobs so the boss can profit more. That’s 2000 people that have gone from tax payers to tax takers. Then you get to listen to the boss b!tch about why he has to pay more taxes. Damn, efficiency rules!! The only part of the equation that the pro-efficiency people are missing is what do we do with the worker who just lost his job so that the boss and shareholders could make more money. So what’s the answer? Living wage? No matter what idea you come up with, the result will be the same. You will either be providing welfare so that the individual can survive or providing this individual with a meaningless job so that they can survive.
Libturd in Union says:
January 7, 2015 at 1:29 pm
Expat,
I’ve been through so many of these that I just don’t let my emotions surface. During the last decade, I was forced to let go of 12 from another department of 20 which I manage when we opened up my sister department in Chennai. In three years, the company went from 5,500 down to almost 3,000. Yet the amount of pages we produce are down less than 10% since then.
Tip of iceberg?
U.S. Steel announced on Tuesday that it will be laying off 614 workers at its Lorain Ohio plant that makes steel piping.
Lower oil and natural gas prices were among the reasons cited for the upcominmg layoffs, likely to begin in March.
I’m on my 4th Winter with my Tire Rack purchased Winter Wheels with TPMS. I’ve had no problems to the point that I wonder if my TPMS system does anything at all. I’ve never seen a light and don’t have to do anything at all when I change the wheels over. I have a 2011 Mazda6. I think I read a while back that the new 6’s use a different TPMS technology? Not the valve stem deals, but something else, IIRC? I can’t remember what the change was, maybe that the computer can divine inflation pressure by differences in rotational speed which implies a different circumference indicating a pressure differential?
I’m also having issues with my TPMS now that I have the winter wheels on.
It’s one thing to be a good worker. It’s another to not continually retrain ones self when facing the obstacle of a dying industry. It would be nice if we could continue to pay this guy for a skill that is no longer needed, but it would not help to strengthen our team or to be able to compete successfully in the marketplace. He received decent service pay and I’m certain he will end up doing just fine. Time will tell.
When I first got word of the transition here, the first thing I did was figure out how to lock myself in to the new workflow. I weaseled my way on to the planning team and now will be the sole person with the knowledge to automate the flow of our files from our MIS to the digital print devices. I’m always looking for ways to both increase the performance of the company as well as protect my back side. As hard of a worker this employee was, he should have seen the writing on the wall when we first announced the transition, removal of two of our five presses and even announced there would be a workforce reduction. Sorry, but no sympathy from me in this regards.
[73] chifi
You are assuming he was a cop at all. Nowhere does he actually say he was a cop. Rather, it’s merely implied. The uniform could be military, security guard, or doorman.
Punkin’ – here’s your wage inflation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8OPxZvCAuw
This is what TR told me when I shared with them what the dealer told me. Quite frankly, I’m fine with turning the whole system off. I’ve driven for 30 years without it, so why all of a sudden do I need to be told I have a flat tire. It’s so easy to feel anyway, plus I’m the kind of person who inspects the tires regularly anyway and always have a gauge in the trunk. And yes, I already did the relearn procedure, though I plan to try it again after work today. Will be a long day as my second termination doesn’t arrive into work until 7pm.
This vehicle does not have TPMS sensors in the wheels. It’s an ABS based system. If it was working fine for a month, there’s something going on with the onboard system on the car. Make sure you have done the relearn procedure in the owner’s manual if you have not done so yet.
#114 Clotr
That’s so 2008.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-M11pdp9Ks
Grim didn’t we warn you about the range and the cold? I think I summed EV’s up as
“So how many days are you going to drive over 82 miles? Need a quick trip to the Poconos? Got home and forgot to plug in? Closing in Glen Ridge and the paperwork is in Ridgewood? This is aimed at the 5000 mile set that have a 20 minute commute and never socialize outside a two town radius.”
127- If wage inflation will never come and the growth will remain flat, when do we start reforming the economic system to reflect that. Current economic model is based on absolute growth from the bottom up. If there is no growth, it will eliminate the chance for most people to move ahead, which is what makes this economic system work. If people start to realize that it’s almost impossible to improve their lot due to stagnant growth, how long before they give up and stop participating? Ghetto’s already reflect that. Most turn to the black market to survive and get ahead. Very few have a tax paying job. Will ghettos expand and become the norm if the economy can’t produce enough growth for wage inflation?
TPMS is a big pain. It came in on the back of the Firestone SUV tire recall. a lot of people are hitting the point where the batteries are starting to run out in the sensors. It’s $200 a wheel for a new sensor. I wonder if this is the next big class action suit.
135 – It’s not as bad as that, we generally have few problems. It’s the primary car most every day, even today.
How’s the heat work on a day like today?
We frequently drive more than the “82” mile range on any given day. If there was wider distribution of charging stations, range would be a complete non-issue.
A pretty regular weekend is head out in the morning on a full charge to do errands, shopping, come home to unload groceries, etc – car is plugged in. An hour later, head out again with a full charge, burn off 40-50 miles, come home in the afternoon, plug in, head out again in the evening with a full charge, etc.
Like I said, we’ve had plenty of 200+ mile days. Plugging the car in is second nature. I’ll say it’s nice to be able to pre-condition the car before you head out to the garage. Press a button on the key fob and it will heat or cool the car to the set temp before you even unplug, which is nice.
The lack of charging stations is what makes the shorter winter ranges difficult, when the only charging base is home, that really does limit range.
Not bad, I believe it’s a heat pump system, my wife regularly cranks it up to max and turns it into a hot box, never complained about range.
I’m guessing the pre-conditioning off the charge cord saves a bit of power as well, since you are using the grid power to get the car to the temp, and then just using the battery to maintain it.
The AC is kind of weak though, if you park in the shade you wouldn’t notice.
Heck, the AC in my Civic HB was weak too like that.
[136] Slowly, ever so slowly, tiny, tiny, green shoots of wisdom starts to ooze into the punkin’ mind.
If there is no growth, it will eliminate the chance for most people to move ahead, which is what makes this economic system work. If people start to realize that it’s almost impossible to improve their lot due to stagnant growth, how long before they give up and stop participating?
^^^Civilizations have never lasted forever. They rise. Then they fall. If you have any questions, save them for your recitation instructor, Mr. Clot.
There are hydrogen powered cars. They just aren’t affordable or appealing.
I just saw some analyst cut his volume forecast for the Tesla 3 by 50% out in 2020 or some such. The whole thing is a confidence game – guessing the success of a whole new car model is a suckers game. The Tata Nano was a fiasco. BYD’s “revolutionary” electric car cohyped by Buffet’s crew has turned out to be years of vaporware and is still MIA.
Meanwhile, Tesla’s current ASP per car is greater than $100k, and the auto mags give that company a free pass on all kinds of stuff that they’d crucify other brands for, especially in cars selling for 100k. Like not working sometimes. Saw one auto magazine put the latest even higher priced sport edition Tesla on the Laguna Seca track head to head against the i8. The Tesla went into shutdown mode before completing one single lap, so the magazine decided not to incorporate that in their decision making criteria. What a great concept – super sports car jazzed up $140k price and cannot do one lap around a track. Car of the Year! Helping multimillionaires signal their earth-love via large amounts of rare earth metals and other assorted mined and processed odds and ends.
grim – Windows up or down in the garage during the summer to better “pre-condition”? My current car is the first one I’ve had with remote start which is a real luxury when I walk out of our home (no garage) at 6:25 each morning. Same thing in the afternoon starting the car before I leave work. In the summer I never do it because it seems like a total waste. How much cooling can I get from the AC at idle with the car being a hermetically sealed oven at 120 degrees with the windows closed? I just walk out to the car, start it up and crank down all the windows for about a 1/4 mile while blasting the AC in circulate mode, roll up the windows and then hit recirculate probably when I’m a half mile from work. If I had a garage at home and had an EV I might be inclined to leave the windows open and start the AC remotely and then put them up after I got into the car. Then again, maybe standard garage smells would outweigh the thermal benefit.
I’ll say it’s nice to be able to pre-condition the car before you head out to the garage. Press a button on the key fob and it will heat or cool the car to the set temp before you even unplug, which is nice.
I believe TPMS is federally mandated, to let you know when you drop below a certain pressure (30 psi on my car) for gas mileage reasons. It must be mandated, as it’s on my bottom of the line Cruze. It’s a royal pain in the ass, as if you choose to run the tires lower for a softer ride, the “low pressure” warning takes over the display and you have to clear it every time you turn the car on in order to see the odometer. I have the shop manual and was looking for an easy way to get rid of it but haven’t found it.
It is federally mandated, but like everything federally mandated, it is just a money grab for certain constituencies. Imagine if we had 1800 lb cars like we did in the late 70’s and early 80’s with today’s engine technologies. They would be getting 85 miles per gallon on gas. But no, no, no. You need air bags, crumple zones, TPMS, yada, yada, yada for your now protection because it wouldn’t be safe for you to drive an 1800 lb car anymore. But you can still buy a motorcycle. How much sense does that make?
I believe TPMS is federally mandated
[147] BTW – If you want a softer ride, lower tire pressures are not a great or very smart way to get it. You should always inflate to the door jamb indicated pressure or higher. Lower pressures build up way more heat, increase the chance of a tire failure, and reduce the life of your tires for more than a few reasons (don’t get me going on heat cycles). If you want a softer ride you can change the tires or change the car. Since gas mpg isn’t what you’re interested in just ditch the Cruze in favor of a 5 year old Camry. You’ll save tons of money and have the slushy ride you’re looking for. The only exception I can think of for lower than recommended tire pressures are extremely bad Winter weather when you have not set your car up with the proper tires for the job. Drop your pressure to 22-24 psi (assuming you’re not driving a severely overloaded vehicle to begin with) and you’ll have much better traction, safety and drivability to get you where you need to go. Inflate back up to recommended pressures when the roads are no longer snow covered.
Lib – Since this has become tire talk – here’s a tip for you since you have two sets of wheels for your Mazda and you OEM wheels are now very low miles and off the car. When I received my winter wheels from TR I thought about steelies but I they couldn’t be fitted with the god-awful expensive TPMS sensors and I didn’t want to spend all Winter look at the TPMS light on the dash. So I bit the bullet and bought light, aluminum wheels with the correct offset and TPMS sensors along with the mounted and balanced Michelin X-Ice tires (dropped down to a 16″ package, btw). When the wheels arrived all bright and shiny mid-week I knew they wouldn’t be going on the car until the weekend. I got the idea to go out and buy some wax and wax them before the went on the car. I went to Target and it was just a couple dollars difference between the cheapest wax and the most expensive (Maguire’s something or other), so I bought the expensive $12 stuff. I waxed the hell out of those wheels before I mounted them and they stayed brand new looking all freaking Winter. Impressed, I did the same to the OEM wheels in the Spring. I did nothing to either set for 3 years and they never accumulated any brake dust and came out of every car wash looking new. After 3 years I did both sets a second time just out of gratitude for how well the system worked out. They hold no dust inside or our and still look great.
I really hope this is not the path taken.
The Original NJ ExPat says:
January 7, 2015 at 5:35 pm
[136] Slowly, ever so slowly, tiny, tiny, green shoots of wisdom starts to ooze into the punkin’ mind.
If there is no growth, it will eliminate the chance for most people to move ahead, which is what makes this economic system work. If people start to realize that it’s almost impossible to improve their lot due to stagnant growth, how long before they give up and stop participating?
#150 Click and Clack
Good advice. I think Tire Rack stopped selling TPMS sensors in their tires. People expected them to work out of the box and didn’t realize there was programming involved.
XIce are fantastic tires. I have XIce 2s on the minivan and XIce 3’s on my Prius. The 3’s you have to be careful with as they are a directional tire. You get better grip, but you can only rotate them front to back. Also be careful where you store your tires. I lay down two fence posts and stack on top. That way the tires are off the ground.
Quote from Asymptosis: “IOW it’s not just taking money from the rich and giving money to the poor (though that’s both economically and morally necessary, to some extent, IMO); it’s taking money from the rich and investing it in common public goods.”
My problem is that you still putting things into monetarist terms i.e. take the rich people’s money and then use that for public benefit.
But you’ve already lost the battle when you concede the idea that the propertied classes have anything that society at large needs or wants.
Money derives its value from national productivity and it is the rich who have created a redistributionist system for wealth via contracts and business law.
The question is how one creates a system where a “harmony of interest” is realized in the widest possible distribution of capital ownership which would thus tend to equalize all men. Now this not Utopian because it understood as a process of forever becoming but I mention the idea of “harmony” as direction rather than a state which we to achieve.
In short, we face a cultural challenge where the social classes are constantly pitied against each other in social Darwinian warfare but act according to the Westphalian principle of each acting toward the benefit of the other because it is in your benefit to do so. In short, the ruling (bullying) class needs to learn that fairness and sharing makes everyone happier and better off.
P.S. Asymptosis I consider myself a Conservative and I’m quite socially conservative but I’ve turned against what today’s reactionary right calls “Conservative” because 19th century liberal economic radicalism isn’t “Conservative” and in today’s context it’s destructive so it’s better to keep the New Deal than become neo-fascists or neo-feudalist.
Call me a Prog-Con.
– See more at: http://www.asymptosis.com/are-machines-replacing-humans-or-am-i-a-luddite.html#sthash.vWMbDqs0.dpuf
[152] FabMax – Check your minivan X-Ice Xi2’s are directional, that’s what I have. Living in Boston I wish I could put them on the other side so I could evenly distribute the curb rash my wife occasionally imparts on our pretty alloys. When viewed from the driver’s side our Winter wheels look perfect;-)
153 – stop spending my money
Storing my winter tires: I have a completely restored 1972 El Camino that I haven’t driven in about 10 years. Anyway, the EC has a custom-cut rubber bed-liner and the car/truck I spent way, way, way too much money to restore to stock (numbers matching, btw) is now used to store whichever set of wheels is not on my Mazda6. I have a ’94 Miata right next to the EC that I’ve never driven on the road as I had a ’99 at the time that I bought it. Old guys are idiots when it comes to cars and I was in my 30’s when I bought both of those garage-stayers. Interestingly I ran into my garage landlord when I was putting the Winter Wheels on the Mazda6. I hadn’t seen him since 1998 when I rented the garage from him ( and he never raised my rent, 2 car garage with electricity, in Boston, $150/month). Turns out we’re birds of a feather. He has a ’55 Chevy in his garage that he’s owned for nearly 50 years that he hasn’t driven in over 20 years.
Moral of the story, trust no one.
Bought a 27″ iMac from a guy on Amazon Marketplace – Good price, thought I’d take a shot on it. It was easily a $2800-$3000 computer when new a few years ago.
Received it the other day, noticeable damage to the exterior of the box, alerted UPS immediately (driver left before I could stop them).
Opened the box, computer completely destroyed, not just a smashed screen by the aluminum case was literally tacoed. It was packaged beyond poorly, it was stuffed diagonally in a box and filled with peanuts, that’s it. No bubble wrap, no original box, no double box, nothing. I couldn’t believe it.
Update UPS with some additional information, and it appears it was shipped with no declared value, which means $100 (UPS doesn’t offer insurance) – as if matters couldn’t be made worse.
File a claim with Amazon marketplace, contact the seller. Turns out he paid his local UPS Store franchise to package and ship the computer. They did a really piss poor job. They also didn’t tell him anything about why it was important to enter the correct declared value, he sounded young, doesn’t sound like he’s shipped a lot of stuff before.
So there you have it, kid is going to be out the money, out a computer, and if he’s lucky will get $100 from UPS for his trouble.
I’m out the shipping cost back to him, kid sounded pretty heartbroken, I didn’t want to push it.
Don’t trust idiots with your money.
grim – tough luck. Was this your first mac purchase since hating windows 8 so bad that you bought an older iMac on Craig’s List for the kitchen?
Not for me, for him, I’m positive Amazon will see in my favor and refund. I’ll just grab one from someone else. I’m just ticked because it was a great price.
Yes, looking to replace the 24″ iMac in the kitchen, need something faster, and I really like the larger high-res screen, no way I’m paying two grand for one though.
BTW, this is the effect of unions(bus drivers and support people would just call in sick):
No school in Boston tomorrow. It’s too cold:
http://www.bostonpublicschools.org/site/default.aspx
#154 ExPat
Apologies on the typing, I meant that all the Xi’s are directional and as you point out you get hit with Driver side wear.
The GOP hasn’t done something this depressing since they went after PBS and Big Bird. Any of the Wing Nuts here going to stand up and say this is wrong?
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/congresss-first-act-was-to-declare-war-on-math.html
BS9Ycb ttoppmkhnrmy, [url=http://vwmjyihccgfe.com/]vwmjyihccgfe[/url], [link=http://pfalijiyxqgb.com/]pfalijiyxqgb[/link], http://ohnmqaxjjmha.com/
Good read…check out the whole thing.
“The Labor Market As Ultimatum Game
Introduction: Labor Market as Ultimatum Game
In the standard neo-classical economics that I was taught in college, labor contracts are assumed to be negotiated between parties who have an equal ability to refuse the terms of any proposed contract and walk away from the agreement. Each party to the contract is also assumed to have the same amount of information available to them; for instance, the working conditions and the amount of surplus created by the production process. It follows from these assumptions that each party to the labor contract (i.e. the worker and the employer) will only agree to contracts which provide each with the value of their contribution to the production process. So long as there is competition among both employers and employees, capitalists will not be able to exploit workers (by paying them less than they are worth) and workers will not be able to exploit capitalists (by demanding more than they contribute).
Of course, this description of the labor market sounds patently absurd to anyone who has spent time toiling in the low-wage sectors of our economy. The statement that both parties to a labor contract have an equal ability to walk away from the agreement recently elicited a well deserved guffaw from one of my friends.
An alternative model of the labor market is offered by scholars such as Prof. Ellen Dannin1, who describe at-will employment as a “dictator game2” in which the employer tells the worker the terms of the agreement and the worker has no choice but to accept3. While Dannin’s description is closer to lived reality for most of us, it too, like the neo-classical description above, fails to capture the nuanced real-life interaction of employers and their employees (at least, to this humble observer).
A better description can be had, I think, by conceptualizing the labor market as a variety of ultimatum game4. In a standard ultimatum game, two players are given the task of dividing a sum of money between them. The first player (the ‘proposer’) makes an offer to the second player (50/50, 60/40, 99/1, etc) and the second player decides whether to accept or reject that offer. If the second player accepts the offer both keep the amounts agreed upon, but if the second player rejects the offer neither receives anything. Usually, the game is only played once by any test subject or pair of subjects and both players know what the stakes are (that is, they know what the total amount being divided is). The ultimatum game bears many resemblances to my experience working in low-wage sectors (janitorial, retail sales, food service); however, there are a number of tweaks that could be made to the standard ultimatum game that would make it much more closely resemble what people like myself face when we go out to look for a job.
First, and most obviously, the ultimatum game is only played one time by any given individual in an experiment, while employment negotiations are (for most of us) a ‘repeated game.’ Not only do workers seek employment at multiple establishments and employers interview multiple job candidates, but the ‘ultimatum game’ continues even after employment as workers and employers negotiate for adjustments of wages, benefits and working conditions/requirements. Besides being a repeated game, labor contract negotiations also have distinct ‘informational asymmetries.’ Workers and employers do not have the same amount of information regarding what the actual value of the product or service that the worker will be making or providing is; nor do they have equal information regarding the relative share of revenue that labor is responsible for creating. Workers and employers bargain for shares of revenue created by the productive process, but only the employer knows what that revenue actually is. Contrariwise, employers have no way of knowing for sure ex ante what the individual characteristics of an employee are, and therefore what their productivity will actually turn out to be.
Another difference between the actual labor market and the standard ultimatum game experiment is that players in the ultimatum game do not suffer any personal economic consequences if the game ends in refusal, both players simply walk away in the same economic position that they were before. No one had gained, but neither has anyone lost. In the real world, on the other hand, people seeking employment are often in no position to refuse any offer, however small. This is why my friend laughed at the notion that workers and employers are on equal footing in negotiating labor agreements and why Prof. Dannin has characterized the at-will labor market as a dictator game. Different individual workers will have differing degrees of ability to refuse low proposals, based on things like their accumulated savings, strength of social and familial ‘safety nets,’ relative slack or tightness in the labor market, and their individual psychologies. Because these factors (and many others) are unique to each individual ‘player’ in the labor market ultimatum game, generalizations about workers abilities to refuse proposals must be made with a great deal of caution. My preference is to assume some sort of distribution of player’s ability to reject low offers, random or otherwise. I have tried to encapsulate these realities into two concepts which I will explain in more detail later: ability to refuse (ATR) and economic effects of refusal (EER).
So, we might conceptualize the labor market (or at least large portions of it) as a modified ultimatum game; one in which players repeat the game indefinitely with multiple other players in an environment of informational asymmetry, and in which players experience differing consequences as a result of games that end in refusal. It is on this basic conceptual framework that I will build in what is to follow.”
“Conclusion
The labor market can be conceived of as a modified, repeated ultimatum game between employers and employees. Most the of the divergences between the real-life labor market and the idealized experiment, serve to advantage employers and disadvantage employees. As a result, in the labor market ultimatum game it’s easier to get away with under-paying than it is to get away with under-working.
1Professor of Law, Wayne State University Law School
2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator_game
3https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=524382
4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game
5Some of these asymmetries, of course, can be addressed through union tactics in workplaces where workers are organized. Trade union representation, however, seems to be decidedly on the decline and, at any rate, cannot ameliorate all of the asymmetries and disadvantages that workers face under the current, capitalist arrangement.”
http://threadingthepearls.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-labor-market-as-ultimatum-game.html
“Some readers are very enthusiastic about the idea of a basic income guarantee.
Be careful what you wish for.
An important article in Vice discuses why Silicon Valley’s elite, which is dominated by libertarian thinking, has become keen about providing a minimum level of income to everyone.
The purported reason is to allow their favored class, “creatives,” have a greater ability to support themselves while they are coming up with the Next Big Thing. From the article:
One might not expect such enthusiasm for no-strings-attached money in a room full of libertarian-leaning investors. But for entrepreneurial sorts like these, welfare doesn’t necessarily require a welfare state. One of the attendees at the Singularity meeting was HowStuffWorks.com founder Marshall Brain, who had outlined his vision for basic income in a novella published on his website called Manna. The book tells the story of a man who loses his fast-food job to software, only to find salvation in a basic-income utopia carved out of the Australian Outback by a visionary startup CEO. There, basic income means people have the free time to tinker with the kinds of projects that might be worthy of venture capital, creating the society of rogue entrepreneurs that tech culture has in mind. Waldman refers to basic income as “VC for the people.”
In other words, the idea is to have the government act as a first-line incubator. Notice that the government does a lot of that already by funding health care and military research, as well as the national labs like Sandia. And as readers pointed out yesterday, private companies also used to fund a tremendous amount of basic research, with Bell Labs and Xerox Parc once the pride of their corporate parents, and later shuttered or considerably cut back when they came to be perceived as corporate luxuries.
And another big contributor to the risk of going out on your own is the weak labor market. It used to be that if you were a college graduate and took a year off to develop an idea, you could get a job again. You’d probably pay a cost for the career interruption but you wouldn’t be at risk of survival.
But who wants to be an entrepreneur? Seriously. If you can hold a job with any stability and you don’t mind the work and get on with your boss and co-workers, it’s a vastly better deal than running your own show. Now admittedly, situations like that are increasingly scarce. But being in business for yourself is almost a roll-back for the whole rationale of advanced economies: that of specialization. In a larger organization, the really good sales guy can mainly do sales, plus the unavoidable internal politics and bureaucratic tasks. The accountant can mainly do accounting, and so on.
By contrast, starting a business requires lots of skills, including selling, negotiating, having common sense about priorities, being able to size up potential backers and employees, being able to budget and manage funds. It’s a drag if you are really good at one particular thing to have to do all that other stuff, even if you are capable of it. Partnering up is one way of addressing that issue, but my observation across a very large sample of friends and colleagues is that it is remarkably hard to make partnerships work.
The payoff curve for entrepreneurship looks a lot like that of lines of employment that most parents would tell their kids to avoid: acting, playing sports, writing novels. Remember, 90% of all new businesses fail within three years. And like J.K. Rowling, A-list Hollywood stars, and football pros, the lure of the huge payoffs at the top end masks the steep falloff after that.
Admittedly, Silicon Valley has spawned a lot more fabulously and moderately wealthy than the entertainment industry, but the idea that a certain class of people might have more success in creating ventures with income guarantees is a stretch. The world has been awash in angels chasing people with promising tech ideas; they are even being courted at colleges. So this looks like a means to get the government to subsidize private sector activity that is not in any apparent need of subsidies.
And here is the real objective, to shrink government. Again from Vice:
Chris Hawkins, a 30-year-old investor who made his money building software that automates office work, credits Manna as an influence. On his company’s website he has taken to blogging about basic income, which he looks to as a bureaucracy killer. “Shut down government programs as you fund redistribution,” he told me. Mothball public housing, food assistance, Medicaid, and the rest, and replace them with a single check. It turns out that the tech investors promoting basic income, by and large, aren’t proposing to fund the payouts themselves; they’d prefer that the needy foot the bill for everyone else.
“The cost has to come from somewhere,” Hawkins explained, “and I think the most logical place to take it from is government-provided services.”
This kind of reasoning has started to find a constituency in Washington. The Cato Institute, Charles Koch’s think tank for corporate-friendly libertarianism, published a series of essays last August debating the pros and cons of basic income. That same week, an article appeared in the Atlantic making a “conservative case for a guaranteed basic income.” It suggested that basic income is actually a logical extension of Paul Ryan’s scheme to replace federal welfare programs with cash grants to states—the Republican Party’s latest bid to crown itself “the party of ideas.” Basic income is still not quite yet speakable in the halls of power, but Republicans may be bringing it closer than they realize…
If we were to fund basic income only by gutting existing welfare, and not by taxing the rich, it would do the opposite of fixing inequality; money once reserved for the poor would end up going to those who need it less. Instead of being a formidable bulwark against poverty, a poorly funded basic-income program could produce a vast underclass more dependent on whoever cuts the checks
I promised readers a write-up of a historical example of a nation-wide, two generation long basic income guarantee program this week, but you might not get the long-form treatment till next week. Without giving too much of the story away, its main results were to drive wages lower, since employers treated the income guarantee as a reason to pay workers less. Instead of having just WalMart and other employers who rely on government programs to bring inadequate wage rates up to a survival level, that type of corporate welfare would be extended and institutionalized. And another result was a widening of the gulf between the rich and poor, with the lower orders pauperized and deskilled and the rich and merchant classes regarding them with contempt. When this system was dismantled, the new laws put in place were draconian and turned large swathes of the public that had depended on support into beggars.
As Lambert points out, a basic income guarantee simply subsidizes consumption. It does not allow for democratic influence over the labor market. If you think any income guarantee level, even if it starts out as adequate, will remain so for any length of time, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. Just look at how Social Security, which can easily have any long-term funding issues fixed with relatively minor tweaks like raising the cap on income subject to tax, is instead being stealthily gutted with ruses like chained CPI.
Ironically, the feature we often decry about indirect subsidies or housing programs, like food stamps or Medicare or subsidies for housing for the poor, that they too often do more for the corporate beneficiaries than their intended recipients, provides them with political support outside the sections of society that believe in social safety nets. Straight up transfers are much more vulnerable to being slashed quickly, as opposed to being reformulated over time to increase the looting-to-service-content ratio.
What the remnants of the American middle class fail to realize is how rapidly the gears of unfettered capitalism can grind down entire sections of society. As Karl Polanyi wrote in his The Great Transformation of early industrial England:
It was deemed an established fact that the masses were being sweated and starved by the callous exploiters of their helplessness; that enclosures had deprived country folk of their homes and plots, and thrown them into labor markets created by Poor Law reform and that the authenticated tragedies of the small children who were sometimes worked to death in mines and factories offered ghastly proof of the destitution of the masses….
Actually, a social calamity is primarily a cultural phenomenon not an economic phenomenon that can be measured by income figures and population statistics. Cultural catastrophes involving broad strata of the common people cannot be frequent; but neither are cataclysmic events like the Industrial Revolution – an economic earthquake which transformed within less than half a century vast masses of the inhabitants of the English countryside from settled folk into shiftless migrants. But if such destructive landslides are exceptional in the history of classes, they are a common occurrence in the sphere of cultural contact between different races. Intrinsically, the conditions are the same. The difference is mainly that a social class forms part of a society inhabiting the same geographical area, while cultural contact occurs usually between societies settled in different geographic regions. In both cases the contact may have a devastating effect on the weaker part. Not economic exploitation, which is often assumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is then the cause of the degradation. The economic process may, naturally, supply the vehicle of the destruction, and almost invariably economic inferiority will make the weaker yield, but the immediate cause of his undoing is not for that reason economic’ it lies in the lethal injury to the institutions in which his social existence is embedded. The result is a loss of self-respect and standards, whether the unit is a people or a class, whether the process springs from a so-called culture conflict or from a change in the position of a class within the confines of society….
The condition of some native tribes in modern Africa carries an unmistakable resemblance to that of the English laboring classes in the early nineteenth century…The description recalls the portrait Robert Owen drew of his own working people….telling them to their faces, cooly and objectively as a social researcher might record the facts, why they had become the degraded rabble that they were, and the true cause of their degradation could not be more aptly described than by their existing in a “cultural vacuum” – the term used by anthropologists to describe the cause of cultural debasement of some of the various black tribes in Africa under the influence of contact with white civilization.
Think of the core assumptions of what it means to be middle class in America, or the variants in other advanced economies. Among the beliefs were that education and hard work would be rewarded, that you had defensible property rights and could deal safely with merchants if you took reasonable precautions. If you attained a modest level of success, which included ownership of a home (except in Germany where by policy rentals have been kept affordable), you could also carve out a measure of security and form lasting social bonds in your community, and that local government was generally responsive to the needs of the community (yes, some corruption was inevitable, but it would not rise to the level of doing meaningful damage).
Readers can no doubt improve on this list, but you can see where I am going. When you hear Elizabeth Warren say how she is fighting for middle class families, some of her patter sounds anachronistic. That’s a sign that some of what she is trying to restore is irretrievably gone. For instance, she may succeed in stopping specific tricks and traps, but she can’t stand in the way of one-sided contracts that put consumers (notice, not “citizens”) in “heads you lose, tails I win” deals. And we can already see signs of deep dislocation in the widespread use of prescription medication, both anti-depressants, as well as performance-enhancing drugs like Adderall.
And the erosion of trust, in having good odds of getting a payoff from self-development and hard work, of being treated fairly at the workplace and in commercial dealings, is far more corrosive than you imagine. As Cathy O’Neil pointed out:
I’ve long thought that the “marshmallow” experiment is nearly universally misunderstood: kids wait for the marshmallow for exactly as long as it makes sense to them to wait. If they’ve been brought up in an environment where delayed gratification pays off, and where the rules don’t change in the meantime, and where they trust a complete stranger to tell them the truth, they wait, and otherwise they don’t – why would they? But since the researchers grew up in places where it made sense to go to grad school, and where they respect authority and authority is watching out for them, and where the rules once explained didn’t change, they never think about those assumptions. They just conclude that these kids have no will power.
With the gap between the super rich and everyone else only getting larger and larger, it’s a safe bet that corruption will be an even bigger growth industry than it has been in the last ten years and that the victimization of the lower orders will rise in lockstep. And the loss of trust and the loss of community have stripped many people of the faith and networks that would enable them to fight back, or at least considerably delay the march of what some choose to call progress.”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/01/tech-titans-promoting-basic-income-guarantee-way-shrink-government-kill-social-programs.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/01/tech-titans-promoting-basic-income-guarantee-way-shrink-government-kill-social-programs.html
#155 Grim
“153 – stop spending my money”
I pointed out at a GTG years ago that its it is not your money on the line. I explained it back in the day as:
“If we go to a GTG and I redistribute the contents of Eddie Rays wallet to pay the bill, what has it cost the rest of you?”
Bring on the 1%!
This is damn good. See what happens when you cut everything. Europe is your case study.
“As a virulent strain of austerity capitalism takes over Europe, leaving shattered lives in its shadow, researchers Servaas Storm and C.W.M. Naastepad, Senior Lecturers in Economics at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, consider how things got so bad, what role economists and misguided policy-makers have played, and which models and ideas are needed to change course. In the following interview, they discuss how most are getting the story about Europe wrong. They explain how their research shows that when countries try to compete with each other by lowering wages and slashing the social safety net, the costs are high both economically and socially, and why co-operative and regulated capitalism is a far better path. (For more, see “Europe’s Hunger Games: Income Distribution, Cost Competitiveness and Crisis,” published in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, and “Crisis and Recovery in the German Economy: The Real Lessons,” part of the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s project on the “Political Economy of Distribution”).
Lynn Parramore: What do we need to know about economists and their relationship to power?
Servaas Storm: In a brief moment after financial crisis, mainstream economists did some soul-searching and rethinking. But once the economy stabilized (somewhat) thanks to large-scale government support, most went back to “normal,” rebuilding their professional status as neutral technocratic advisors and portraying macroeconomists as mere engineers solving practical problems. This is a chutzpah. Macroeconomics starts off from vision, moral values, perspectives and ideology, which color any analysis and need to be disclosed and debated. This was clear in the old days to economists as diverse as Joseph Schumpeter and Gunnar Myrdal, but not now anymore.
One example of “vision” is the unshaken belief of mainstream economics in the self-regulating and self-stabilizing powers of (financial) markets, which even Alan Greenspan admitted to be flawed.
It is exactly this “vision,” or ideology as Greenspan called it, which allowed the financial system to derail and blow-up our economies. But most economists refuse to debate their vision. They want to look scientific and neutral. Their refusal may also be directly linked to the fact that quite a few have undisclosed ties with financial-sector firms. But there is a far bigger reason, as explained by John Kenneth Galbraith long ago. By claiming that their economics has no content of power and politics but is neutral, mainstream economists have become “useful” as the influential and invaluable allies of the powers that be, who help to convince the public that the status quo, in Panglossian fashion, is the best of all possible worlds. They help de-democratize economic policy, which is quintessentially political and should be the subject of intense and informed democratic debate.
LP: This de-democratizing of economic policy has been playing out in the European economy, which you’ve compared to The Hunger Games. You note that we’re watching capitalism turn into something where a parasitic few prosper at the expense of the rest, who must increasingly fight to get their most basic needs met. How did things get this bad?
SS: Crisis-struck Eurozone countries are told that they got into trouble because of wastefulness and a lack of price or cost competitiveness. The powers that be preach austerity: Cut your government expenditures (however essential these are). Deregulate — especially the labor markets in order to reduce wages and labor costs. Go sell more exports to recover, since your debt-strapped citizens at home don’t have enough money to spend to keep the economy going. Do all this even if it means that wages (and living standards) get slashed by around 25-30 percent or more.
As a result of this “one-size-fits-all” policy prescription, all Eurozone member states (especially in Southern Europe) have been busy cutting down government spending, reducing wages, and breaking down social security and labor protection provisions. The predictable, dramatic, outcome has been that the crisis deepened to a near-collapse.
This frenzied race to see who can reduce labor costs the most looks like the contest forced upon twelve young people in The Hunger Games, a dystopian novel (and a movie) about how a fictional dictatorship is using “Bread and Circuses” to distract and appease its oppressed and disenfranchised population. The analogy between Europe’s crisis and The Hunger Games is that it’s competitive in the extreme. The contestants are the Eurozone members—each one trying to bootstrap its economy out of the throes of the most severe crisis in living memory. The audience judging each country’s performance is not made up of reality TV watchers but of financial (bond) markets and credit rating agencies, whose supposedly rational views can make or break any economy.
The name of the game is boosting cost-competitiveness and exports—and its rules are carved into stone in March 2011 in a ‘Euro Plus Competitiveness Pact,’ a plan imposed by Germany and the ECB that forced the other countries to play.”
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/01/welcome-hunger-games-brought-mainstream-economics.html
Grim- can you unmod 168. Great discussion should come from it.
Good comment from that article I posted that is under moderation.
“Very good – it brings all the pieces of the jigsaw together, except maybe the fact that certain people in high place such as George Osborne are quite happy with the results of the current class warfare. I am certainly no economist but I perhaps erroneously believed that this psuedo science was based on supply & demand & the fact that a race to the bottom is in nobodies interests except perhaps rentiers & those who live by speculation, but surely even this – I imagine in the long term, needs to be based on a sustainable sturdy foundation.
There was plenty of talk during the early part of the crisis of the amount of mercedes benz in Greece, which along with other quality products must have benefitted the German economy, but in this beggar thy neighbour brave new world – what is the point of producing quality products to export, if there is no-one out there who can afford to pay for them ?
At the end of the day it all just seems to me that a privileged group cannot keep their snouts out of the trough & basically they gladly only listen to advisers who benefit very well, from telling them that it is OK to continue with the feast, while the rest of us are only deserving of, & will do just fine with the crumbs that fall from the high table.”
Another good comment from that article. I try to explain this to the rags and fast eddie types, but they are so close minded that it is impossible for them to understand how bad cutting things are for our economy. It’s a system that is based on growth, not cuts. Cutting things has the same effect as overspending on things. It destroys the equilibrium or balance in our economy.
“Wages, in this view, are just a cost item, and lowering them will lower prices and/or raise profit margins, and raise employment as well as net exports.
This lies at the heart of a lot of what is wrong with Macro. Wages are, of course, not just a cost item for business–they also create the pool of income out of which new spending must take place. By cutting wages (“good for business”), you also undermine demand (bad for business). The idgits in the mainstream say, “No problem, just make up for lower domestic demand by selling more exports.” But while it is literally impossible for every country to become a net-exporter, I’ve yet to see the IMF or anybody else suggest that a country become a net-importer, which someone is going to have to do if everyone else is looking to increase their exports. Astounding that anyone takes them seriously anymore.”
I do not know if it’s just me or if everybody else encountering issues with your website.
It appears like some of the text in your posts are running off the screen. Can someone else please
provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to them
too? This may be a issue with my browser because I’ve had this happen previously.
Kudos