From the WSJ:
U.S. Existing Home Sales Surge in September
Sales of previously owned homes swung to a big increase in September, putting the market back on track for its strongest year since 2007.
Existing-home sales climbed 4.7% last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.55 million, the National Association of Realtors said on Thursday, just shy of the postrecession high touched in July.
September’s gains came on the heels of an unexpectedly weak August. The NAR on Thursday revised down August’s figure to 5.3 million from an initial estimate of 5.31 million. Stock-market turbulence and uncertainty about interest rates might have prompted some buyers to hold off on making purchases in August, economists noted.
The September increase puts the market on pace for its best year since before the recession. Better job growth, continued low mortgage rates and pent-up demand are fueling activity, according to Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors group.
Many economists expect the pace of sales to flatten or slow later this year, but Mr. Yun said sales still should record their best performance in eight years.
“We knew that the recovery would be coming, and it’s been a slow, steady process,” said Mr. Yun. “This year it’s finally coming out.”
Friday and Foist!
Stock up on Pillows.
Wall Street Journal
“What We Know About the 92 Million Americans Who Aren’t in the Labor Force
The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Zumburn looks at the portion of the population that isn’t actively looking for work, as the number of Americans not in the labor force continues to increase, a trend now in its 15th year.”
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/10/21/what-we-know-about-the-92-million-americans-who-arent-in-the-labor-force/
This movie is now 40 years old.
Retirement at 30 years old in the 23rd century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSUAAKFLoL0
Zuckerberg should have spent his $100 million in San Francisco.
http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/10/22/sf_could_build_80m_worth_of_housing_reserved_for_teachers.php
New startup, and they have already raised millions.
Apparently you have an App like Uber you use to you summon a fuel truck to come to your workplace to gas up your car so you don’t have to do a mundane act like driving to the gas station and filling up your vehicle yourself.
https://boosterfuels.com/
5 – What, no artisan, free-range, organic fuel option?
Re#6- Only a $5 delivery charge, I tip the pizza delivery kid more than that, and they don’t wash my car windows after delivery.
Hickox suing Christie is good for at least 2 points in the polls. You think he’ll thank her publicly?
Pretty sure one of those guys is going to drive a truck through a telephone pole in a residential neighborhood … complete with ensuing fireball.
I’m wondering how they are going to dance around the regulatory and codes around dispensing of bulk fuel. Or do they expect the drivers to just use their own cars (ala uber) with a couple of red tanks in the trunk? You know, the ol’ why worry about regulatory, licensing, compliance, or liability when you can just pay some idiot minimum wage and dump it all on them, gig.
And it’s a complete rip off of the Bugatti logo.
9
Did the lawsuits with UPS and Fedex who “misclassified” thousands of employees as independent contractors set any new precedents or regulations? Or by settling and admitting no guilt did nothing change?
Isn’t there some kind of uber strike this weekend?
uber strike – I think that was my first Atari cartridge.
Missle Command…
Thoughts?
“In 2025, in accordance with Moore’s Law, we’ll see an acceleration in the rate of change as we move closer to a world of true abundance. Here are eight areas where we’ll see extraordinary transformation in the next decade:
1. A $1,000 Human Brain
In 2025, $1,000 should buy you a computer able to calculate at 10^16 cycles per second (10,000 trillion cycles per second), the equivalent processing speed of the human brain.
2. A Trillion-Sensor Economy
The Internet of Everything describes the networked connections between devices, people, processes and data. By 2025, the IoE will exceed 100 billion connected devices, each with a dozen or more sensors collecting data. This will lead to a trillion-sensor economy driving a data revolution beyond our imagination. Cisco’s recent report estimates the IoE will generate $19 trillion of newly created value.
3. Perfect Knowledge
We’re heading towards a world of perfect knowledge. With a trillion sensors gathering data everywhere (autonomous cars, satellite systems, drones, wearables, cameras), you’ll be able to know anything you want, anytime, anywhere, and query that data for answers and insights.
4. 8 Billion Hyper-Connected People
Facebook (Internet.org), SpaceX, Google (Project Loon), Qualcomm and Virgin (OneWeb) are planning to provide global connectivity to every human on Earth at speeds exceeding one megabit per second.
We will grow from three to eight billion connected humans, adding five billion new consumers into the global economy. They represent tens of trillions of new dollars flowing into the global economy. And they are not coming online like we did 20 years ago with a 9600 modem on AOL. They’re coming online with a 1 Mbps connection and access to the world’s information on Google, cloud 3D printing, Amazon Web Services, artificial intelligence with Watson, crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and more.
5. Disruption of Healthcare
Existing healthcare institutions will be crushed as new business models with better and more efficient care emerge. Thousands of startups, as well as today’s data giants (Google, Apple, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, etc.) will all enter this lucrative $3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today’s bureaucratic and inefficient system.
Biometric sensing (wearables) and AI will make each of us the CEOs of our own health. Large-scale genomic sequencing and machine learning will allow us to understand the root cause of cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease and what to do about it. Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die.
6. Augmented and Virtual Reality
Billions of dollars invested by Facebook (Oculus), Google (Magic Leap), Microsoft (Hololens), Sony, Qualcomm, HTC and others will lead to a new generation of displays and user interfaces.
The screen as we know it — on your phone, your computer and your TV — will disappear and be replaced by eyewear. Not the geeky Google Glass, but stylish equivalents to what the well-dressed fashionistas are wearing today. The result will be a massive disruption in a number of industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education, travel, entertainment, and the fundamental ways we operate as humans.
7. Early Days of JARVIS
Artificial intelligence research will make strides in the next decade. If you think Siri is useful now, the next decade’s generation of Siri will be much more like JARVIS from Iron Man, with expanded capabilities to understand and answer. Companies like IBM Watson, DeepMind and Vicarious continue to hunker down and develop next-generation AI systems. In a decade, it will be normal for you to give your AI access to listen to all of your conversations, read your emails and scan your biometric data because the upside and convenience will be so immense.
8. Blockchain
If you haven’t heard of the blockchain, I highly recommend you read up on it. You might have heard of bitcoin, which is the decentralized (global), democratized, highly secure cryptocurrency based on the blockchain. But the real innovation is the blockchain itself, a protocol that allows for secure, direct (without a middleman), digital transfers of value and assets (think money, contracts, stocks, IP). Investors like Marc Andreesen have poured tens of millions into the development and believe this is as important of an opportunity as the creation of the Internet itself.
Bottom Line: We Live in the Most Exciting Time Ever
We are living toward incredible times where the only constant is change, and the rate of change is increasing ( via singularityhub.com ).”
I actually had the Sears telegames which was Atari before Atari. It came with the extremely rare Outer Space game (really Starship).
re: # 9 – Disruptive Innovation Grim. Uber’s cofounders are getting into the gasoline delivery business too “gas sharing service” http://purpledelivery.com/
To get around bulk fuel transport laws, they are using 5 gallon tanks that the courier keeps in their trunk.
here is a Craig’s list ad.
Ah found their Craigslist hiring ad:
Delivery Drivers Wanted! (Los Angeles)
compensation: competitive rate per hour plus a per delivery sum
employment type: part-time
We are an App called Purple Delivery that delivers automobile gasoline to customers. Our current delivery hours are 10AM to 10PM, and shifts can be full or half day. Couriers are required to be on call for the period of time agreed upon, and deliver gas directly to the customer’s car using equipment that will be supplied to you.
Must be able to work in Beverly Hills and Santa Monica Area
Requirements:
Valid CA Drivers License
Car for making deliveries — Couriers drive in their own vehicles
Able to lift 30lb
Positive Attitude!
Compensation:
We provide a flat rate of $9-10 per hour plus a $3 per delivery sum. Your hours and schedule will be fixed prior to each work week. contact us at: info@purpledelivery.com for more info!
We should be doing the same thing with an Mobile App for Liquor. Make it/or buy it untaxed illegally, delivery it illegally by unlicensed subcontractors using their own equipment and vehicles. Get Lloyd’s of London to issue a blanket insurance policy for liabilities.
BoosterFuels is the same as Uber only real difference will end up being Lyft.
another fuel delivery startup…. http://filld.co/
Holy shit I was joking, they are really doing this?
I see little demand for this service.
Do you think this helps him or hurts him?
N.J. lawmakers vote to override Christie for first time, on gun bill
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/10/override_of_christie_veto_on_gun_bill.html#in
grim says:
October 23, 2015 at 7:52 am
Hickox suing Christie is good for at least 2 points in the polls. You think he’ll thank her publicly?cart_river
Now if they “delivered” charges for your electric car, that would be useful.
re: #20 Maybe for gasoline but how about cheap hooch delivered to your crib?
Would the filld concept work well with electric, hydrogen, or natural gas cars…where there’s a shorter range and fewer charging stations?
22 – great minds think alike?
Liquor delivery would be very popular with the under 21 set. I could only imagine the liability there.
re# 22 – The Better Place startup where you went with your electric car to swap your battery went bankrupt trying to build out the idea of swapping your drained battery for a charged one. That was $850 million in funding and six years in existence, went under in 2013.
Telsa announced a battery swapping system in 2013 but that idea is now dead.
http://fortune.com/2015/06/10/teslas-battery-swap-is-dead/
re # 26 – Liability? That is covered already and very sucessfully by Uber’s army of lawyers. The drivers are not employees they are independent contractors. If an independent contractor delivers hooch to an underage kid then we at the BoochMobile LLC have no liability.
How do these services gain access to your car to recharge or fill, don’t most cars still require the fuel cap to be popped open..?
I heard of a couple of states where you drive to the refueling station and, for NO FEE, they handle the refueling for you. This way you can stay warm and dry and play on your phone.
Innovating themselves right into planned obsolescence.
What do they do when we’re all electric in 15 years?
Fill your washer fluid?
Let’s just call all these stupid ideas “Funding Runs”. As in, we need something to keep us busy for the next year. Hey, I got an idea for the next funding run, a new app called Undorkd, that sends a fashion consultant out to a nerd’s apartment to help them get dressed! How much do you think we can raise? 300 mil. Yeah, that should keep the fridge stocked for the next year. Let’s go!
Was thinking the same thing Grim.
re# 31 – Why not take it a bit further?
Groom of the Stools LLC, we send someone buy to wipe your ass?
As long as you can use a cellphone to engage, no business plan is too stupid to get funded in our days of zero rates and government-led financial market manipulation. Because the governments of the world have a conspiracy against allowing savers to earn reasonable interest income, to encourage an environment where the most geeky and BS-artist millennials can temporarily employ other millennials in hare-brained money losing schemes to squander capital.
Thanks Bernanke, Yellen, Geithner, Lew, and Oblama.
They would charge your car’s battery.
grim says:
October 23, 2015 at 10:19 am
Innovating themselves right into planned obsolescence.
What do they do when we’re all electric in 15 years?
Fill your washer fluid?
That’s some hurricane pulling into Mexico.
FORECAST POSITIONS AND MAX WINDS
INIT 23/0900Z 17.0N 105.5W 175 KT 200 MPH
12H 23/1800Z 18.8N 105.4W 180 KT 205 MPH
24H 24/0600Z 21.7N 104.2W 60 KT 70 MPH…INLAND
36H 24/1800Z 24.5N 102.5W 20 KT 25 MPH…POST-TROP/REMNT LOW
48H 25/0600Z…DISSIPATED
“They would charge your car’s battery.”
Isn’t that what AAA does?
33 – Done that.
https://www.dollarshaveclub.com/our-products/fresh/wipes
Say bye bye to Puerto Vallarta? Airport is closed, lots of Tourists stuck there too.
https://twitter.com/search?q=Puerto+Vallarta&ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Esearch
Biggest storm ever in NHC tracking history. I don’t know how there won’t be tons of casualties.
Is anyone as shocked as I am that Clot wrote the prologue to Snooki’s new book?
Storm surge to the east of the eye at landfall? That’s Puerto Vallarta dead on.
re #41 – biggest surprise from the book is Snooki’s SAT score was 200.
https://books.google.com/books?id=XvwqCgAAQBAJ&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=Strong+Is+the+New+Sexy:+My+Kickass+Story+on+Getting+My+%E2%80%9CFormula+for+Fierce%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=XDsydOBars&sig=c4yMdlDVPXwh2ApX46PyHoBttmI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEsQ6AEwB2oVChMIvdLXtfXYyAIVSxo-Ch0a9g1C
I cried a little bit when I read the first few pages.
I’m going to keep this one up this afternoon…
https://youtu.be/tUgyOFEI8-Q
You forgot W Bush for starting the mess, “Ayn” Maestro Greenspan for being the first to chuck out all the safety mechanism established after the Great Depression to make sure “it did not happen again”, but of course it did.
Don’t mind if you blame the left, but remember to also tar & feather you ideological side, you guys are very good at forgetting your side’s moronic behavior.
#34 Ragnar,
Thanks Bernanke, Yellen, Geithner, Lew, and Oblama.
Bernanke is a republican, is he not?
Not that his political affiliation had any business in his position at the fed, likewise for Yellen.
46
In what way was Mr Bailout himself (the Greenspan Put) an implementer of laissez- faire policies? That’s right he wasn’t. Oh yeah, I guess he did talk about those things didn’t he. Shocking that he would say one thing and then do something else.
Yes, he deserves to be on the list too.
I don’t think removing the Glass-Stiegal stuff was necessarily partisan. Both parties do whatever their financiers pay for. In the case of the financial crisis, the Repubs opened the damn, but the Dems provided the rainstorm.
Feel bad for Greenspan, he truly believed what he was doing was right. At least he will die knowing his ideology failed him miserably.
Ragnarian the Magnificent says:
October 23, 2015 at 12:09 pm
You forgot W Bush for starting the mess, “Ayn” Maestro Greenspan for being the first to chuck out all the safety mechanism established after the Great Depression to make sure “it did not happen again”, but of course it did.
Will you say the same for Krugman?
[17] Juice
“We should be doing the same thing with an Mobile App for Liquor. Make it/or buy it untaxed illegally, delivery it illegally by unlicensed subcontractors using their own equipment and vehicles.”
I would have made a killing. When I would drive back and forth from Boston to Amherst/Northampton area, I would detour through So. NH and load up the trunk with booze (NH was the last state in the nation to raise its age from 18).
Usually, this booze went to Smith College dorms where I had a small cottage industry keeping the girls in vodka.
My BIL went to medical school in Mexico. He did the same thing, loading the car with swag and cheap booze in Mexico that he would sell in NY.
Krugman is wrong at times, but he is certainly not naive enough to believe that a free market left alone will actually work. Where I agree with Krugman is on the basis of the importance of the consumer in the economy. If you don’t provide enough wages, you will eventually destroy all growth in the economy. You will battle deflation, unless you loan the consumer more money to supplement the lost wages so that demand does not fall off and lead to deflation.
I wish the economy was that simple, where you can increase profits at the expense of wages with no negative impact on the economy. Doesn’t work like that. Everything is related, and when you take more from one part of the economy, that means there will be less in another part of the economy.
Libturd in Union says:
October 23, 2015 at 12:42 pm
Will you say the same for Krugman?
[50] libturd
GLBA was pretty bipartisan in the house (seeing that I was in DC at the time and worked in banking law, yeah, I had to follow this one). Like the Patriot Act, a lot of folks on the left ran away from their votes.
Clinton did threaten a veto but it was over a provision in the bill that required banks to have a minimum CRA rating before the Feds could approve what we called “bank structure” applications. Clinton wanted to make the CRA more prominent, more important, and he was able to keep it in the bill.
What gets lost in the noise was the regulators. Few were sounding alarms about this. The Fed approved Citi-Travelers BEFORE GLBA was passed.
I could go into a lot more granularity here but that is where privilege attaches (see Joyce, there are some very real constraints on how far I can discuss some things).
I appreciate the explanation.
It really does show that besides the supposed issues both sides make up to maintain their voting base…once in office, both teams tend to vote similarly.
And by similarly, I mean they both ensure the laws favor the rich while providing crumbs to their bases. It’s so obvious. Every political conversation today ends with, it will never happen.
I agree it’s not spoken about regularly amongst the talking heads; but almost all of the I guess I’ll just call them non-mainstream financial commentators pointed out the fact that the merger was blatantly unlawful (or should I say the FED “waiver” was).
#51
Buffoon, what makes you think Greenspan believed in what he was doing? He believed a gold standard until he became a central banker. He sold out just like everyone else who makes their way to DC.
I said it a few weeks ago, one of the things that I don’t like about living in the Rockaway, NJ area is how fast people drive. There is a lot of congestion in that area too.
With that said, the bicyclists(mostly illegals) who are on the road when it’s dark need to use some common sense. For the most part they ride with no reflective gear at all. And in some of these towns the shoulders are considered a passing lane, even the cops do it.
http://www.nj.com/morris/index.ssf/2015/10/bicyclist_killed_in_hit-and-run_crash_in_rockaway.html#incart_2box_nj-homepage-featured
The most pathetic bumper sticker I’ve seen recently was “If the 99% would vote, then the 1% wouldn’t matter. What an fool that person was(of course there was a O 2012 sticker on the other side).
Go on youtube, search for the Bernie video questioning Greenspan. At the end, Greenspan will straight up acknowledge that his ideology failed him. Right from his own mouth.
nwnj says:
October 23, 2015 at 1:20 pm
#51
Buffoon, what makes you think Greenspan believed in what he was doing? He believed a gold standard until he became a central banker. He sold out just like everyone else who makes their way to DC.
62-
Here is the video. Bernie was right way back in 2003. Here is your evidence. He even touches on what would happen to IT jobs. Go the end of the video to see what I’m talking about with Greenspan.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WJaW32ZTyKE
Funny how people like to pretend that a central planner and industry regulator who explicitly distorted and stopped market forces from being expressed, who maintained a system of state-run central banking and federal deposit insurance that cultivated our era’s historically low banking capital adequacy ratios, and who worked to prop up Social Security, can somehow be alleged to be associated with “laissez-faire” capitalism because he wrote about it when he was young.
When Hillary Clinton was young, she claims to have also had “an Ayn Rand phase” and was a volunteer for the Goldwater campaign. Yet I would not claim against all the available evidence that Clinton is an advocate of laissez-faire.
Greenspan was captured by FIRE just like every politician and regulator before and after him.
Instead of debating the past actions of the FED one should be asking the question is there a limit to financialization? How long can the vast inflation of financial and real estate assets caused directly by the FED continue?
Net Worth in the US of everything private was $68 trillion at the pre-Lehman peak and only $45 billion at the time of the dotcom bubble. It now stands around $87 trillion. Are we really that productive as a nation? We have doubled net worth in less than two decades?
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TNWBSHNO
If and when it POPS or “corrects” how long and how far will it fall?
Household real estate and financial assets today stand 5.2 times GDP, where in 1970 it was 3.5 times GDP. Will it revert to 4.0 or 3.5 or less?
One has to wonder what our monetary politburo really thinks about raising rates in this environment…
For the same reasons Communism can never be taken seriously, a pure free market can not be taken seriously. Human nature will come into play and destroy the system.
You just stated below what happens. Someone comes into office talking up the free market game, but behind the scenes they are rigging it. Why can’t you understand this? The free market is a dream, human nature will never allow it. It’s as far fetched as communism.
Ragnar says:
October 23, 2015 at 1:33 pm
Funny how people like to pretend that a central planner and industry regulator who explicitly distorted and stopped market forces from being expressed, who maintained a system of state-run central banking and federal deposit insurance that cultivated our era’s historically low banking capital adequacy ratios, and who worked to prop up Social Security, can somehow be alleged to be associated with “laissez-faire” capitalism because he wrote about it when he was young.
When Hillary Clinton was young, she claims to have also had “an Ayn Rand phase” and was a volunteer for the Goldwater campaign. Yet I would not claim against all the available evidence that Clinton is an advocate of laissez-faire.
Doesn’t everyone go through a Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Ayn Rand phase? The more musical among us can throw Hendrix and Marley into the mix.
67. Once you go Zef you never go back…
#65 – I meant 45 trillion not billion
Ragnar, what is your point wrt Greenspan, that his gold support was a passing phase?
Kids growing up today get exposed to more hip hop than everthing else. Spotify Streaming muisc maps the trends and hip hop is #1 worldwide in over 1000 cities. Rock is well dead…
Sad.
Juice Box says:
October 23, 2015 at 2:11 pm
Kids growing up today get exposed to more hip hop than everthing else. Spotify Streaming muisc maps the trends and hip hop is #1 worldwide in over 1000 cities. Rock is well dead…
Pukin,
Then that’s like saying freedom as such is a dream.
Sure, as long as people hold ideas that glorify coercion, statism, violence, and the collective bullying and sacrifice of the individual.
I’ve always known which side you’re on.
What are you talking about? Apply logic to your thinking so that you can understand what I’m saying about communism and the free market. Human nature will not allow them to function. Someone will always cheat or cut corners, and in either system, that means it will break under the stress that cheating will cause in the system.
Ragnar says:
October 23, 2015 at 2:20 pm
Pukin,
Then that’s like saying freedom as such is a dream.
Sure, as long as people hold ideas that glorify coercion, statism, violence, and the collective bullying and sacrifice of the individual.
I’ve always known which side you’re on.
How can Communism exist if people are stealing and taking more than they are supposed to? How can a true free market work if people are stealing and taking more than the system justifies? Please explain.
yep, Ragnar is just another self-aggrandizing extreme right winger
Ragnarian the Magnificent says:
October 23, 2015 at 12:09 pm
You forgot W Bush for starting the mess, “Ayn” Maestro Greenspan for being the first to chuck out all the safety mechanism established after the Great Depression to make sure “it did not happen again”, but of course it did.
Don’t mind if you blame the left, but remember to also tar & feather you ideological side, you guys are very good at forgetting your side’s moronic behavior.
#34 Ragnar,
Thanks Bernanke, Yellen, Geithner, Lew, and Oblama.
nwnj,
Sure. I know people who dealt with Greenspan, and even worked for him way back.
Smart guy but a political social climber way back from the early 70s. Ayn Rand had a pretty big circle in the 60s and he had some status in that crowd as a young man, but that was also in a sense social climbing. His economics consulting business wasn’t particularly accurate or even principled but it helped him move up the political ranks. He was more or less a Keynesian/Monetarist. Being a political operator, he probably led Ayn Rand to think he was on her side while conversing with her. I think for a long time, he liked to think that he held free markets and the gold standard as an ideal, but one divorced from reality and divorced from his actual political actions and political principles. Much the same way that some mobsters like to think of themselves as good Catholics and go to confessional on Sundays as some sort of atonement for living a life entirely in contradiction to their professed principles.
Anon <— Mental illness.
“apply logic to your thinking”
That’s rich coming from the Dunning-Kruger poster child.
On music, I’ve recently put two very different groups in heavy rotation on my Sennheiser HD800s.
Rush – all the albums from 1974 through 1984. Every one is excellent. Rock, artsy rock, and artsy pop. Even catchier than Zeppelin in my opinion, and there’s more quantity of good stuff, to my ears, and more interesting ideas.
The Smiths – Ok, Morrissey is a whiney bitch, and I have to skip the “meat is murder” “song”, and most of the lyrics seem to be about molested boys, but the music is really well crafted, unique, yet catchy, apparently due to Johnny Marr.
@BMOC98: Here’s what legal voting looks like in Texas. Its why democrats want #amnesty. http://t.co/ir8E6OW2JI
Zeppelin is like c0pulation for the ears.
Recently, I was watching Black Sabbath on YouTube live at PNC a couple of years ago with Ozzy. That was fairly naughty, too. ;)
It is called a starter home, but I guess these guys don’t know how to wait….
Ben says:
October 22, 2015 at 11:13 am
Just about every middle class millenial I know is relegated to the following choices:
1. A condo
2. A tonwhome
3. A POS Cape
4. A rancher
“pummeled my uterus”….that is quite a turn of a phrase….
grim says:
October 23, 2015 at 11:49 am
I cried a little bit when I read the first few pages.
http://nypost.com/2015/10/23/the-most-terrible-real-estate-listing-photos-ever/#1
I’m a fan of #11, 13, 17 & 18.
Eddie,
How many Zep songs are about sex? At least ten. Whole Lotta Love is one. The Lemon Song is another.
To the great pumpkin: I don’t post here any more I used to be one of the regulars back in the day. And not to sound immodest coined some legendary phrases too.ny how not to beat you up but why do you appear so concern with the middle class getting screwed and they are in many many respects but at the same time totally fine with the out of control property taxes in n j. Those taxes are destroying the middle class too. It simply makes no sense to me.
#60 [nwnj]
I used to ride my bike to work back in the 80’s in Rockaway Twp. (RT. 513/Greenpond Road) during nice weather. I’D NEVER do that now!
*Illegal ATVs were a huge problem there too until NJF&W COs/Rangers cracked down on them, severely (Wildcat Ridge Wildlife Management Area now is a major part of the Township).
Since RT. 513 connects Rt. 23 and I-80 there’s a ton of traffic around rush hours. There’s also a lot of deer, bears ect.
When I was a kid sections of the road were gravel with two wooden bridges! Oh, and you sometimes had to wait for cows to cross the road.
Never have experienced a road with so many fatal accidents. They stories I could tell…
3b – still in unicorn land?
This is a good point that you bring up. My true belief is that the taxes are needed. The middle class benefits by having great schools for their kids to take advantage of, safe neighborhoods to grow up in, and the comfort of knowing that when you call 911, the police will be there within two minutes. The high tax towns are all lovely too, some of them fairy tale like. This stuff costs money. People in nj have total control of what they want in their towns because they all are little kingdoms. What the people in the kingdom want, they get, which costs money. You can consolidate all these kingdoms into one giant kingdom, costs will come down, as will your ability to control what happens in your town. Everybody wants to have it all; low taxes, good school system, safe community, 911 response times of 2 minutes, and control over their community. Guess what, it costs lots of money to create that.
So I truly believe that nj taxes are reflective of what you are getting. You want absolutely no services, then go to alabama and pay 300 dollars for nothing. You will realize quickly what your tax dollars do.
Is there waste in nj? Sure, but tell me one institution, private or public that doesn’t waste? It’s easy to pinpoint public waste because it’s public knowledge, try figuring out the waste in the private sector, impossible to know unless you are witnessing it first hand. Human nature caused the waste, not the institutions. Also, how much waste do you think is going on?
Say your taxes are 8,000 (nj state avg is 8,000) right now, do you think that 50% of your tax bill is wasted on corruption? Even then, it’s still going to be 4,000 because running a society costs money. If you think your tax bill should only be 2,000 dollars based on the kind of schools and services you get in nj, then please explain how you do it with almost 75% less money than we are currently using. Too many roads, too many emergency calls, too many fires, too many accidents, and too many kids to provide a good education for. Just not happening with a 75% reduction in property taxes. Never mind all the garbage we produce or the wear and tear on our infrastructure we produce. There are a lot of costs out there.
I do believe that nj should become more like other states in that they shouldn’t be so reliant on property taxes. Nj should adopt other measures to pay for the service costs instead of relying on property taxes to pay for most of it.
Bottom line though, I have middle class family paying 4,000 or less in property taxes in nj. If you want the best schools and safest communities, you will be paying 15,000 or more. If you want to live in a truly middle class setting, you can do it in jersey. It will be like living in other states, you will have cheap taxes, but almost no services and a shitty school system. You can’t have it all, you have to choose. If you want the better community, higher taxes will come with it, if you want cheaper taxes, you will be going to a less well off community.
3b says:
October 23, 2015 at 5:19 pm
To the great pumpkin: I don’t post here any more I used to be one of the regulars back in the day. And not to sound immodest coined some legendary phrases too.ny how not to beat you up but why do you appear so concern with the middle class getting screwed and they are in many many respects but at the same time totally fine with the out of control property taxes in n j. Those taxes are destroying the middle class too. It simply makes no sense to me.
Look at this list. They are all loaded with money. Do you think these taxes are expensive to the people living in these towns? Somehow, all these rich towns become an excuse for saying that nj property taxes are too high. They are high in the “wealthy towns”, would you expect anything less? It happens in every other state, the “wealthy locations” in every other state have the same exact property taxes as nj. No one ever brings up how wealthy nj is and correlates that to the taxes. Instead they just yell and scream that nj has the highest property taxes. Did it ever occur to these people that nj has the most valuable real estate in the country? Based on this, wtf do you expect? For us to rank last in property tax bills, but have the most valuable land in America? People need to understand the animal that nj is. Too bad most don’t. They see a rich town and want to live there, but then complain the property taxes or the house is too much money. I can go on and on with this.
http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/02/which_nj_towns_have_the_highest_property_tax_bills.html
93- couple comments from that article I thought were worth sharing.
“When I lived in two southern states, my taxes were a tenth of what I pay here. One of the things I noticed that was different was the counties ran things. The towns didn’t have their own municipal government like we have here and there weren’t police stations and road departments in every town. The county did it all. In effect, it was a shared service system. How can we support all these government workers and their buildings that need heat and power and insurance in every single town? I came back to Jersey because I love Jersey. There is money here. You get better wages here and there’s more work available. However, there is no slowing down with this kind of overhead. I live in fear of one of us getting sick and I’m scared about what will happen when we get older and can’t work like we do now. We’ll have to leave.”
“Roll everyone’s Property Taxes back to 1.25 of Original Purchase Price. .500% Transfer Tax.
More houses will sell. Values will rise and Tax take will be the same.
To replace revenue lost temporarily:
Tax Clothing.
Raise Gas Taxes.
Raise Sales Tax 1%.
Encourage Residents to shop local. Everything! Internet has decimated local Retailers.
Eliminate Govt. Pensions. Establish 401K for every new Employee with Employer match at 5 Years service.
Allow Beer and Wine Licenses to be issued to small Restaurants. Use new revenue to buy back all of the old Grandfathered Liquor Licenses at Market Prices. .25 Cent Taxes on every mixed drink going to schools.”
Thought you guys would enjoy this one also.
“Camden City residents (as one example) only pay a small piece of their tax burden. Middle class taxpayers from other towns pay most of the rest. This is the discriminatory Abbott funding at work. The liberals and liberal NJ Supreme Court created this. They own it.
Feb 4, 2015
@TaxedTuMuch It raises an interesting question – who has the bigger tax burden – the Millburn resident paying about 2% of their property value (avergae property value: a little over $1 million/21.7k average property tax bill) every year in taxes or the Newark resident paying 3% (average property value 173k/5.3k average property tax bill)?
Feb 4, 2015
The correct comparison is tax dollars payed based upon property value, and in particular – school costs payed as a percentage of your towns actual school costs.
Feb 4, 2015
@TaxedTuMuch
Correct. And the fact that annual property taxes represent 4-5% of value in many of the lower priced towns is driving their property values lower in relation to the towns where taxes represent 1%-2.5% of value.”
“The high tax towns are all lovely too, some of them fairy tale like”
Bwahahaha. Hahahahahaha. LOLOL.
Thar’s millionaires in them thar hills, I tell ya…….