This week’s poem of the week is Vivien’s Song by Lord Tennyson. It will help you to understand why we choose it as poem of the week if you remember that Vivien’s goal in Lord Tennyson account was to trick and betray Merlin.
Projected 10 percent increase in property taxes because of the stock market downturn. And New York State has the reputation of having one of the better run pension plans.
Not that reputation necessarily means much. People use to think that Harvard had a really well run endowment.
On the other hand, some reputations keep getting confirmed all the time. Products from China can hurt you in ways you never would have dreamed of.
A bunch of graphs that will show you how the economy is doing. If your not really interested in the housing industry scroll down to the middle of the post. That is where the broader economic measures start.
The United States would recover most of its planned $50 billion investment in General Motors within five years, according to a preliminary Treasury Department estimate that foresees the company, now on the brink of bankruptcy, rebounding over that time to become a strapping global competitor.
I wounder how GM will become a global company when it will probably not be able to sell cars in Europe for a long time. If you read the whole article, you will see that the US was so confident of GM ability to compete that they made the German’s swear that Opel would not be allowed to sell cars in the US. It seems to me that the EU would be well with in its rights to demand that GM not sell cars in Europe.
Also, if you read the article you will see that US government seems to be planing on pulling some (most?) of GM production in China back to the states. How well do you think that is going to go over in China and how much luck do you think GM is going to have exporting cars to Asia?
Wait, isn’t that a game called “The Sims”?
Nowadays, a 138 billion dollar drop in revenue seems kind of small.
How we can avoid bailing out California when we are giving GM 50 billion?
After all, think of all the mentally ill who will be put on the streets if we don’t bail out California.
A reminder that playing games with figure eventually catches ups to you.
Anyone who has ever had to deal with their bosses overacting to information contained in an MSDS will appreciate this post.
Cometary on Der Spiegel’s report that Hezbollah killed Hariri. It helps balance out the people who are running around saying that the Spiegel article was just Mossad disinformation.
The Binghamton Newspaper put together a Google map showing the most heavily traveled “structurally deficient” bridges in Broome county. Their is also a list of all of the bridges in the southern tier of New York here. This type of information should be easy to get for all counties but it is not.
An interesting discussion on credit cards and “freeloaders.”
The games they play with propane tank refills.
China starting to get excited. What they are afraid off. They have a lot of money on the line. This makes printing our way out of the problem a little tricky.
Speaking of tricky, this is increasing the problems that Social Security faces.
Then there is the odd nuclear weapons test just to put all of those problems in perspective.
This week’s poem of the week is To Be or Not to Be from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.