This is one of those things that’s actually two sided.

While it is good in the sense that it seems these days corporations are spending more money than they really have, then they go around and loan out money to people for amounts greater than they have the ability to pay back…. it’s going to lead to the same problems – only postponed.

At the same time my family has finally gotten the deed to our family’s house…. within a few weeks we discovered the prior relative had damaged more than we knew, then a flood came and FEMA’s gotten involved. We’ve got close to $60,000 in damages in a house we just paid CASH to buy. Why a problem? Well think of it like this: banks are too scared to do mortgages and we can’t get one now because of it (since the damage has to be fixed ASAP — 60K isn’t easy to get in cash when you’ve just bought something big in cash).

But here’s the really, really funny thing that explains exactly why the mortgage companies have screwed themselves: they’ve been saying houses have more worth than they really have. Not all the time of course. Our house officially (as in legally capable of saying) is a 3 bedroom, 1 family room house. According to the mortgage company that we’re checking with it’s a 4 bedroom 3 family room house! The reason? It has a basement that has rooms. Legally it can’t be considered “livable” as it’s not “safe” based on the windows and furnace — based on the mortgage company it is livable.

Not sure what the problem is? The house is worth $100,000 at the moment with the damages. They’ve estimated the house to be worth closer to 225,000 (pre damages) most likely closer to 150,000 with them. If we were to get a mortgage worth, say, 150,000, we’d be lucky to get back 100,000 in actual sale (a loss of 50K — so if we got the mortgage, we’d owe 50k over the max house selling price). See the problem?

A 700 billion bailout, and the companies are still doing “business as usual” as far as the policies that got them into the trouble in the first place — or at least a good part of it.

It’s what organizations seem to be great at doing — wasting time doing stupid stuff.  It’s no that the things they waste time on are stupid in themselves, but they’re just things that don’t really mater overall.

It’s like an organization that wants to implement a new idea, let’s say whether or not to redesign their website, but instead of saying “new website with x, y, z: yes or no?” they do the following:

- Person A says “We need a new website with the following items [list of all the items in categories and subcategories, even with a summary and purpose section]”

- Person B says “we can’t vote on that!!!!  The proposal isn’t in the approved format!  It’s suposed to be [format template]”

- Person C says “but we never voted on that format, we just make proposals in the clearest way”

- Person B says “we need to implement the proposal I said since it’s the standard”

- Person C says “what standard?  we can implement whatever we want for our organization…”

(and so on, and so on…..)

- Person B says “you can’t just implement something person D says because person D said it!  The only reason it was approved was the people who disagreed left”

- Person C says “so a vote with the majority approving doesn’t count…. because they don’t agree with you?”

(ensue the fighting until personal attacks happen and a cooling off period takes place)

[months/years later]

- “Hey everyone!  We still need a new website…..”

Sadly I’m not even eggerating… corporations, politicians, even organizations spend tons of time messing around to take care of things that don’t matter — such as the method to make a proposal to do something — instead of taking on the actual problem!

Life’s short, and there’s enough messed up things in the world as it it that deserve attention.  Wasting time debating on the method to use to submit the idea needs to be stopped.

This is a spacer post — meaning we were either really busy this day, or we didn’t have time to actually post anything.  While we normally just backdate posts, there are times where there’s just nothing other than “the same old stuff” that’s going on, or we’re just way too behind on other things.

For your potential interest:

http://digg.com/

http://www.opensecrets.org/

This is a spacer post — meaning we were either really busy this day, or we didn’t have time to actually post anything.  While we normally just backdate posts, there are times where there’s just nothing other than “the same old stuff” that’s going on, or we’re just way too behind on other things.

For your potential interest:

http://digg.com/

http://www.opensecrets.org/

This is a spacer post — meaning we were either really busy this day, or we didn’t have time to actually post anything.  While we normally just backdate posts, there are times where there’s just nothing other than “the same old stuff” that’s going on, or we’re just way too behind on other things.

For your potential interest:

http://digg.com/

http://www.opensecrets.org/

This is a spacer post — meaning we were either really busy this day, or we didn’t have time to actually post anything.  While we normally just backdate posts, there are times where there’s just nothing other than “the same old stuff” that’s going on, or we’re just way too behind on other things.

For your potential interest:

http://digg.com/

http://www.opensecrets.org/

This is a spacer post — meaning we were either really busy this day, or we didn’t have time to actually post anything.  While we normally just backdate posts, there are times where there’s just nothing other than “the same old stuff” that’s going on, or we’re just way too behind on other things.

For your potential interest:

http://digg.com/

http://www.opensecrets.org/

This is a spacer post — meaning we were either really busy this day, or we didn’t have time to actually post anything.  While we normally just backdate posts, there are times where there’s just nothing other than “the same old stuff” that’s going on, or we’re just way too behind on other things.

For your potential interest:

http://digg.com/

http://www.opensecrets.org/

One of the so-called “hot” topics this year seems to be the offshore drilling to fix our problems.  While it may seem to many that it’s a great idea, or just really useful, there’s a number of things to consider.

Based on numerous shows involving oil drilling rigs (see any Discovery/Science based channel shows), take years to build and deploy.  Rigs can be moved from one location to another, but that in itself has two things against it — it takes time, and you are no longer drilling for oil where the rig was originally.

But let’s say you get a rig up in a year.  It’ll only start to help then, not now.  Prices now won’t be lower, if anything they’d be a bit higher as the companies will be offsetting their costs for the new (or moved) rig. Want a cut in our gas prices now?  Stop driving as much.  As we start to deplete our oil reserves it becomes more and more important to save what we have left for everything we use it for other than gas.  No oil, no civilization.  Low gas prices, and people will start driving places more — which will cause us to use oil even faster.

All things considered, there’s no good reason to want offshore drilling.  It won’t help now, won’t really help in the future (unless we completely deplete all current reserves).

Sad to think it might just cause one candidate to win the presidency.

Couldn’t you just picture it? A tie in the presidential race. While it’d be pretty unlikely to happen (an incident involving popular vote vs electoral college would be more likely), it’d just add to the uproar in the country.

For one, it’d go to the house to decide. And no matter what they’d choose — close to half of the country would disagree and claim some conspiracy. Perhaps it would be an interesting thing to have happen just to see how the people would react.