Although O’Donnell laudably tried to emphasis the audience’s focus onand hopefully final, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen underneath for excellent, I used to be overtaken, not through the pulling around the thread, and therefore the voracious audience he serves. It did not make me unfortunate, it designed me angry.
Relating to celebrities, we will be considered a heartless country, basking in their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Beach. The impulse is understandable, to some degree. It may possibly be grating to listen to complaints from people who get pleasure from privileges that most of us can’t even contemplate. If you should can not muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who helps make additional moolah for a day’s deliver the results than many of us will make inside of a decade’s time, I guess I cannot blame you.
With the rapid speed of occasions on the net as well as the advice revolution sparked from the Web, it is very simple for the technology marketplace to presume it is distinctive: always breaking new ground and carrying out facts that no one has ever carried out in advance of.
But there can be other types of organization that have previously undergone a few of the similar radical shifts, and also have just as awesome a stake within the long term.
Consider healthcare, as an example.
We commonly think of it like a massive, lumbering beast, but in fact, medicine has undergone a sequence of revolutions with the previous 200 a long time that are at least equal to those we see in technological innovation and specifics.
Much less understandable, but nevertheless inside the norms of human nature, would be the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and check out the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but for the blithe interviewer Sheen’s everyday living as we pass it during the right lane of our everyday lives. To become sincere, it could possibly be hard for people to discern the distinction in between a run-of-the-mill consideration whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its individual merits, a quote like “I Am On the Drug. It’s Referred to as Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we can not all be anticipated to take the total measure of someone’s daily life every time we hear some thing funny.
Swiftly ahead to 2011 and I am trying to examine usually means of becoming a bit more business-like about my hobbies (largely songs). By the finish of January I had manned up and commenced to advertise my weblogs. I had put together several totally different weblogs, which have been contributed to by acquaintances and colleagues. I promoted these pursuits through Facebook and Twitter.
Second: the very little abomination the Gang of Five around the Supream Court gave us a yr or so ago (Citizens Inebriated) truly is made up of a tad bouncing betty of its own that can quite effectively go off during the faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. Considering that this ruling extended the notion of “personhood” to both corporations and unions, to look at to deny them any best suited to run in the legal framework that they have been organized below deprives these “persons” from the freedoms of speech, association and movement. Which implies (once once again, quoting law school skilled household) that both the courts need to uphold these rights for that unions (as person “persons” as guaranteed through the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they have to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights should apply to significant companies, also.
I know that memories are short on Wall Street. But are they short on Main Street too? Reading Linda Stern’s latest paean to leverage and housing risk, it certainly seems that way. Saving for a down payment is hard, she says. It can take time!
And that doesn’t seem to pay. If you think about the cost of paying rent for five or more years, you may be better off jumping into a home with a low down payment now. That’s true even if you have to spend more money on fees and mortgage insurance to get one of those low down payment loans.
Well, yes, let’s think about the cost of paying rent for five or more years. In fact, let’s plug all our numbers into a rent-vs-buy calculator and see where we’re at after five years. The problem with Linda’s formulation here is that it helps to reinforce the common fallacy that 100% of rent payments are “wasted,” in a way that mortgage payments are not. But that’s simply not true. In both cases you’re paying money every month for your shelter; in the rental case that money goes to the landlord, while in the ownership case it goes to the bank.
Some small part of your monthly payment may or may not end up helping you build equity in your home, if house prices move up rather than down and depending on how much of your payment goes towards principal. But remember that the alternative here is saving up for a down payment — which is essentially the same thing as building up equity in a future home. If you save up $250 per month for five years and then put down $15,000 as a down payment, then you immediately start off with $15,000 of equity in your home. By contrast, if you buy today with no money down and start making mortgage payments, there’s a good chance your equity will be much less than $15,000 in five years’ time.
But Linda’s on a roll here, and manages to come out with one of the most astonishing pieces of personal-finance advice I’ve seen since the crisis hit:
Even if you have the money for a bigger down payment, there can be good reasons to save your cash. Mortgage rates continue to skirt all-time lows: Why not put your money to work for yourself and borrow as much as you can reasonably afford, on a monthly basis, at today’s rates? You can put the money you’re not paying into a down payment to work elsewhere. If home values rise, you will have done your best to leverage a small down payment into bigger equity. If they fall, you’ll have less skin in the game, and that could put more pressure on your banker to improve your loan terms lest you walk away.
This, in a nutshell, is everything that was wrong with the housing market before the crash — everything that we want to avoid going forward. Can’t Linda look around at the current devastated state of many people who bought with little or no money down, and see the dangers here? Evidently not. Instead, she seems to think it’s a bright idea to borrow more money than you need, to the point at which you’re pushing the envelope of what you can reasonably afford. And then take the cash you’re not using for a down payment, and “put your money to work for yourself.”
I barely know where to start on this. Here’s one way of thinking about it: banks are not charities, and that they expect to make money from their loans. They have a cost of funds which is lower than the mortgage rate that you’re paying; the difference between the two rates is their profit. You, however, if you follow Linda’s advice, have a cost of funds which is your mortgage rate: if you wind up getting a lower return on your savings than you’re paying on your mortgage, you would have been better off just using the money for a down payment. Needless to say, if there was an easy way of getting a higher return on capital than the mortgage rate, the banks would have done it already, rather than lending you the money. And it’s pretty delusional, frankly, to think that you can invest better than say JP Morgan. Yes, there are tax benefits to having lots of mortgage-interest payments. But they’re not sufficient to make the difference here.
Here’s another way: let’s say you own your home outright. Would you take out a mortgage against 95% of your home’s present market value, and then invest that money in the market somehow, trying to “put it to work for yourself “? Of course not: you don’t have remotely that kind of risk appetite. Borrowing money against your house to invest in the market is, always, stupid. But that’s exactly what Linda’s proposing you do.
And here’s one more: shit happens. Sometimes, you end up needing money, in an emergency. If you’re already borrowing as much as you can reasonably afford, that’s a big problem. If you have a bit of fiscal breathing room, you’re much better off. If you end up in a situation where you’re in a position to put pressure on your banker to improve your loan terms lest you walk away, that’s not a good situation to be in. It means you’re broke. It’s something you want to avoid, whereas in Linda World it seems to be something to actively court.
Linda’s also convinced that house prices are going to rise: if you buy now rather than later, she writes, that means you’re buying “while housing prices are low.” That’s debatable — they still seem quite expensive, on some measures: the price-to-rent ratio, for instance, is still well above its historical average. And more generally, buying low doesn’t help you in the slightest if prices just continue to grind lower.
Linda’s conclusion is that “the less you put down, the better off you are.” Which is true so long as you keep on making all your mortgage payments without any problem, and nothing goes very wrong either with your personal economic situation or with the US economy as a whole. That’s the way that leverage works: it makes everything sunny, so long as things go right. And then it plunges you into misery when things go wrong.
The scariest part of Linda’s post, for me, is when she talks about how it’s a good idea to “do your best to leverage a small down payment into bigger equity.” It’s not the dollar amount of the equity she’s talking about here, it’s the leverage used to get there, and the higher the leverage the better off you are. Following that advice got us into our current mess. And taking it now is a recipe for disaster.
Sure, the Darth Vader bank robber and the Scream mask Dunkin' Donuts robber get all the attention with their flashy costumes, but that kind of grandstanding is no substitute for good, old fashioned thief-work. And from the looks of this surveillance video taken from a Morningside Heights Subway outlet, there are at least two guys left in this business who don't care about making headlines; they just want the satisfaction of a job well done. And all the money in the cash register:
The efficient perps are still at large. Police sources say the robbery happened Thursday night around 10 p.m.; the Daily News reports that one man is white or Hispanic, about 5-foot-10, and was wearing a dark-colored jacket, dark pants, a black mask and black-and-white gloves. The other suspect is also described as white or Hispanic and about 5-foot-10; as you can see from the video he was wearing a dark jacket and pants, a black mask and black gloves. Another important clue: one man carried a New York Sports Club bag! Yep, should be a cinch tracking down these guys.
Source: http://removeripoffreports.net/ corporate Reputation Management
The ultimate in repairing a bruised reputation for business
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