Patrick’s Rants

I hate myspace. And facebook and all the other “let’s pretend we’re friends” web sites. Now don’t get me wrong, that’s partly what a blog tries to do: create a community of like minded people, but the social networking sites create a false sense of familiarity. Recently, there has been a bit of turmoil in my wife’s job. Between the economy and the self-created drama and overreactions of the powers that be there is an incredible amount of stress on the employees. I had been denigrating facebook while one of my wife’s co-workers defended it as a great tool to reconnect with old friends. Unfortunately their boss decided to “friend” all of them and started playing martyr games in their postings – blech!

Now I don’t care if my boss reads this, but I’m not buddies with him. Sure, we could have a beer or two together, but when he or I move on from our current jobs – unless there happens to be some major explosion or an unforeseen love-fest that I’m not seeing in the works – there won’t be much reason to keep in touch. I doubt he would post to my facebook page, but that’s just one more reason to not have one. He doesn’t need to know my twitter status at every second of the day. And this works because I don’t have any of those profiles set up. But what if, like my wife’s co-workers, I had a notworking profile? And what if my Alice in Wonderland’s Mad Hatter of a boss wanted to “friend” me and post statuses on my page and twitter me? Well, you can’t just say to that kind of boss, sorry we’re not really friends. Her co-workers have to suck it up and let the boss post on the web page. And to take it to the next level, what if I had adopted a child, kept the lines of communications open with phone calls, emails and photos, and then the birth parents wanted to “friend” me? And what if it was just like your boss trying to be your friend, would you keep logging into that account? This did happen to one of her co-workers. And guess what? This will continue to happen on these types of sites. There is still such a thing as a line, a boundary. Where you or I draw that line for ourselves determines where people think the line really is. I am both candid and private. I believe that there is only one or two photos of me on the net and my friends don’t have to ask to be my friends.

I started to write a post calling for Obama’s replacement to not accept the Senate seat being offered to him. No matter how clean Roland Burris seemed or was, the fact that he was appointed by an accused and arrested Rod Blagojevich should have been enough for a completely ethical man to step aside – if for nothing more than the appearance of impropriety. His protestations were too much, maybe he is dead broke from being in public service for the last thirty some odd years, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have something to “give”. And now it appears that he was attempting to help in fund raising for Rod.

It is too bad the Senate did not take the high road and permanently exclude him on principal. That is what should have happened. Let’s hope that if there is a next time, our congress people have learned from this mistake.

(Note: This post was going to be twice as long, but due to the wonder of the internet/computers – specifically a Squid upgrade on the NetBSD firewall – half of my thoughts were not saved, as I have time and remember, I will follow up on this post)

Nobody has asked me, but here are a couple of thoughts on fixing the housing mess.

First, lock the adjustable rates at 5%. Not for second homes or speculative properties – honest to goodness first homes. We can’t put in a provision that says you have to be behind and in danger of foreclosure, we know these loans are bad; we know that most people were suckered into the low rate that jacked up after a year or two. Lock the rate.

Second, if the government can spend all kinds of money on banks without strings it certainly can work with the home owners. Loans that are in danger where people were encouraged to buy above their means can be modified in the following way: subsidize those homeowners that are in trouble. $1000.00 a month for say a maximum of four years – that’s $4800.00 per household that is in trouble. Tack the $4800 onto the back end of the loan as a form of tax lien, collect no interest on it but get the payoff when the home is eventually sold. This way households that are worried about their next paycheck can get some relief even if their job is unsteady. And the same homeowners would need to attend some kind of credit counseling and budget management program so they don’t slide back into trouble once the helping hand is no longer extended.

$1000.00 month limit would mean that overpriced homes aren’t included and that households would still need to come up with some cash on a monthly basis. Obviously, the banks aren’t increasing lending so they should not be getting additional money unless those funds are directly assisting home owners.

I read something a couple of days ago that suggested that the mark-to-market rule be suspended for banks. Mark-to-market means that accounting adjustments must be constantly made based upon what a bank thinks they can sell their loans for. For instance, a $100,000.00 mortgage might only be worth $90,000.00 (to the bank) since that’s what they could get for selling it to the next bank. But a foreclosed home is only about half the original mortgage value. A $100,000.00 mortgage is only worth $50,000.00 and – if you follow the line of thinking of “strict” mark-to-market rules – every other home in that area becomes worth half of the original mortgage. That’s a huge paper loss.

David Frum might as well change his last name to Dumb. In an interview on Marketplace he blames the state of the economy on stagnating wages. This assumes that you still have wages.

DAVID FRUM: Like many Republicans, I don’t much care for Barack Obama’s economic plans. From our point of view, he is using an emergency in the financial markets as a cover to launch America into a huge, costly long-term spending program of little probable value.

Obama’s infrastructure plans are bad ideas. But they do respond to a real problem.

Even before the recession, even before the financial crisis, the income of the typical American worker was stagnating. After inflation, the median American worker earned no more in early 2007 than he or she had earned seven years before.

So he is acknowledging that the U.S. worker did not see an increase in their wages under Bush. What he refuses to acknowledge though is the fact that we need to fix bridges, fill in pot holes and replace aging infrastructure. Bridge collapses in Minnesota, exploding pipe lines in New York City and a wave of air traffic controller retirements (thanks to Reagan busting the ATC unions, most controllers are nearing retirement age).

What “little probable value” is there in keeping the roads smooth? What “little probable value” is there in replacing crumbling sewage lines and sagging bridges? What “little probable value” is there adding additional power lines and electrical capacity to the nation? It is this last notion that seems to be where Frum is going. There is no value in adding solar collecting power plants, no value in propping up some windmills on empty land, no value in employing hundreds of thousands or even millions of U.S. citizens in jobs that as Obama stated, “cannot be outsourced”. There is, in fact, tremendous value in keeping our people working. There is tremendous value in safeguarding our roadways and infrastructure and tremendous value in building out our electrical grid, slowly supplementing existing power production and eventually supplanting it. There is only so long that we can suckle at the Texaco teat.

If you were thinking about grabbing your credit scores from the three bureaus you better hurry. Experian and www.MyFico.com have had a falling out and Experian will no longer allow MyFico to offer your credit scores based upon your Experian data and the deadline of February 14, 2009 is fast approaching.

What does this mean to you? You will no longer have access to the score that Experian is selling to your bank to determine if you are a decent risk or not. Experian will not sell you that score, MyFico will not be allowed to sell you that score either. In other words, your score goes back into a black box and you can only guess whether you will be approved or not. Oh sure, you can still buy a score from Experian, but it has nothing to do with the score that they will sell to your bank – other than they still get the cash. While the FICO score has always been a bit of a black box, presumably so we can’t game the system, now you won’t even get to see the outside of the box.
The MyFico discussion boards are pretty fired up over this.