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September SD Unemployment Stays at 10.6%
RE "Inside Job": Old news is still good news if true. I haven't seen that after-the-fact movie because I saw it everyday as it was happening, and those of us who were blogging on the daily activity on Wall Street from DJIA 14000 before the Crash of 2008 generally figured out that it wasn't going to last. I just wasn't blogging here about anything until after the guilty verdicts in USA V. SDG&E, and so yes, I have some things to say about "class" and privilege of being an American in this world, but I'll hold that for later. I was in Washington at RTC/FDIC headquarters for the S&L Crisis in the 1990s. Same stuff, different decade. As Mr. Bauder has said before, it still comes back to financial complexity leading to fraud. I suppose we really don't need factories, just like we don't need the things that come from them either. Of course, without factories, there'd be no Internet blog comments as well. Still, humans got along just fine without refrigeration, modern medicine, and plastics for untold generations. The only thing about that is to go all the way back to that, about 200,000,000 Americans will have to die of starvation and disease before we can lapse into that kind of pre-industrial subsistence in feral anarchism without refrigeration, modern medicine, and plastics. A lot of my family background is in that kind of third-world standard of living (when Mexico was just one revolution after another) where one of my great-grandmothers buried half of her twelve children before reaching their teens from what we'd now consider to be minor, very curable illnesses. Sorry... didn't mean to lapse into some separation of humans into classes like that, especially when that class of humans called Americans seems to enjoy all of the advantages that 95% of the rest of the human species can only hope for some time in the future. As some of my friends in foreign lands around the world have observed, "even the poor people in America are fat." I never said anything about making the Moon disappear and affecting the tides. If we go someplace to use up that much stuff, we might as well head to Mars and screw up their tides, if they have any.— October 22, 2010 9:23 p.m.
F is for Funding: F Street Owner Alma Vasic Comes Through for Toni Atkins
RE "The question is not, is this news, but when are our elected officials ever going to turn back a campaign contribution as too controversial, too risky, too tainted to accept?": I was in the jury pool for the Strippergate trial of Inzunza and Zucchet. From what I heard in the hour's-plus long reading of the individual indictment counts, there IS no campaign contribution too controversial, too risky, too tainted to accept. Not yet, and certainly not after the Supreme Court made its last opinion known on denial of honest service.— October 22, 2010 7:16 p.m.
Three-Year SD Consumer Spending Drop Worst Since Great Depression
From this blog post, it is possible that if passed, Proposition D may not only fail to being in additional revenues from further depressed sales but may also delay hiring in the retail sector even further. Empty stores, empty dreams. The Salvation Army may become my preferred shopping outlet. Hopefully, they have lay-a-way...— October 22, 2010 7:06 p.m.
Border-Crossing Regulations Implemented, Longer Waits Created
RE odds: Speculating on college football teams is fun and sometimes profitable. I don't really have any liquidity to start up again... I'm not a Wall Street financial institution... so maybe I'll have to make like a municipality and issue some bonds rated at something far less than San Diego City's AA-. RE punished persons at border: That's the other reason I don't cross anymore. It's a good thing Mexico doesn't need my tourism, and if I went, America doesn't really need me to come back.— October 22, 2010 6:35 p.m.
September SD Unemployment Stays at 10.6%
RE #4: We need smarter workers AND management all around. Period. Most people with MBAs are exactly as you describe them: nothing more under the belt. It was just educational ticket-punching for them to get into the game. Without damn good analytical skills, we get stuff like the Crash of 2008 by all kinds of mass-produced MBAs who should have known better than turn something exotic like a credit default swap into a mainstream product offering in a supposedly-sophisticated market where nobody wanted to be first and say "What the hell does it all mean?!?" Even they got bamboozled by Bauder's Rule on Fraud by Financial Complexity. These analytical thinkers need to be strategic thinkers. THIS COUNTRY IS AT AN HISTORIC CROSSROADS... and the jury is still out if we can take a leadership position in moving our economy off this rock to create new markets in places where most other countries (our international competitors) simply have no access. A lot of the legal framework is already in place, but most people don't realize that there is such a thing as a California Space Port Authority in the state statutes. Right now, I can see in front of me California expanding so rapidly that we will be happy to take in all of the illegal aliens that Arizona rejects because California is the place the future ought to be, and San Diego, 100 years after the start of American naval aviation, needs to be up in front with our own space-lift capable firms waiting to be utilized at full potential and beyond. Our President, like him or not, has already dropped the flag earlier this year on what will be the greatest landrush in American history: NASA dependence on private industry to put America back into space. Build the infrastructure to put industry in low Earth orbit and on the Moon, and the investors will come from all over this planet. If nothing else, the mineral potential of doing this would turn the commodity markets on their heads, and the next bunch of billionaires just could all be from Southern California. So far, nobody here is talking about the atmospheric carbon dioxide on Venus, hydrogen, and sunlight coming together to make quantities of sweet sulfur-free crude on a planetary scale that the House of Saud couldn't even dream of. BUT WE NEED TO BE SMART ENOUGH TO DO IT WITHOUT KILLING OURSELVES OFF IN INDUSTRIAL WASTE... and we can do that if the factories of the future are nowhere near this biosphere.— October 22, 2010 4:51 p.m.
Border-Crossing Regulations Implemented, Longer Waits Created
Before all this talk of added documentation requirements started a few years ago, I used to regularly hop across the border, place a handful of hopeful bets at one of the Caliente sports books, and then hurry up to wait in line to get back to the Blue Line, head home, and watch my teams lose. Ha! If the individual college teams I was picking had 70% or better odds of covering based on past performance, then I could put together a 4-team ticket backed with a teaser and a full set of four 3-team tickets paying out in my favor better that 70% of the time (probability students will tell you this is one heck of a lot easier said than done on what Caliente considers long odds or worse). Made a killing in the first three weeks of the 2006 season but got lazy and didn't track team injuries, so I was all done by the end of Week 5... my system imploded like a cheap AIG credit default swap in a Lehman Brothers' fire sale. I haven't really gone back since we got serious about rebuilding the Berlin Wall on the southern edge of San Diego County. At the same time, it might be profitable to do start doing the team research now then sell my "Hot Water" betting system to subscribers starting next summer... Maybe I just found myself a job!!!— October 22, 2010 4:04 p.m.
More SDG&E Energy Rebates Coming?
Wait... there's a smell test to this as well...— October 22, 2010 3:27 p.m.
City Council Considers Balboa Park Locales for Winter Shelter
RE #3: Apparently the homeless have the good sense not to wait for the city attorney to churn out a favorable opinion? Perhaps no such opinion is available that would be pleasing to the numerous volunteer groups involved in Balboa Park. That's a lot of organized and interested voters not to annoy with the truth about where the homeless choose to bust sod or camp out.— October 22, 2010 3:25 p.m.
September SD Unemployment Stays at 10.6%
RE #1: I guess that being a former District of Columbia Minority Leaders Fellow in the last millennium makes me one of the barbarians at the gates. On the up side, a modestly-high unemployment rate provides a good snap-back for expansion IF AND ONLY IF the unemployed have the job skills needed to get hired and stay hired. If all they've been doing is watching cartoons and eating Doritos on the couch, then they get what's coming to them only if politicians ever decide extend those unemployment benefits AGAIN. WARNING: if anyone is not on track already to get enough math and science to competently apprentice under a civil engineer, then those unionized construction jobs we all thought they were going to get hired for because of those new CCDC billion$ just might not exist anymore. At the new main library site, there could be several hundred or even a thousand hard hats with picks, shovels and other hand tools, all expecting a fat payday every other Friday for some serious manual labor. Instead, there's maybe around two-three dozen and a mere handful of large tracked shovels. The unemployed should take a clue from all those former auto-manufacturing union members who got permanently laid off when all of the newest American assembly plants went robotic while the older ones were shutting down and moving overseas. The day is coming fast for robotic construction by home builders as standard practice, a nice way of selling houses for typical big bucks while not paying much for semi-skilled labor that was replaced by overseas-manufactured robotics in America. If a developer has a choice between (A) hiring people and making a lot of money with their labor or (B) not hiring them and keeping even more money, THEN... (thinking people can fill in the blank)— October 22, 2010 2:20 p.m.
Mayor a No-Show at Second Community Forum
RE "It seems possible that it is a cost-benefit equation: depose/testify truthfully or settle w/SK? ": Horns of this dilemma seem particularly sharp. In the absence of truthful testimony by Defendant deponents, Kessler's attorney can argue that a settlement offer by Defendant CITY OF SAN DIEGO is not in good faith, where the price to us may jump significantly higher to get any settlement deal done... or we can watch them all get ready to rumble in Court. IF there is no settlement causing facts to get revealed AND Proposition D does pass by some fluke, THEN the mess may get big enough that council members may act to not implement/rescind/whatever and just float more AA- or lower general obligation bonds, whether Fitch Ratings views that favorably it or not. After all, the $244 million loan and interest forgiveness thingy to the Redevelopment Agency earlier this year was shelved back then merely on the presence of a couple of snippy Reader blog posts; beyond those, who knew? Apparently not the U-T or any other media source... at least you can't find anything from them on searching online about it.— October 22, 2010 12:27 a.m.