Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics

Househunting

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In Flint, Michigan:

As the veteran of a brutal San Francisco home-buying odyssey, there’s no denying the appeal of a place where desperate Realtors sometimes offer up houses by the dozen. But this is more than a quest for cheap housing. I have an almost unhealthy attachment to Flint. I want to do something—anything—to help my hometown. Maybe a “summer place” in what has been ranked one of America’s most depressing cities can pump a little life into the local economy. And I fear that after 15 years in San Francisco—sometimes described as 49 square miles surrounded on all sides by reality—I’m losing touch with my roots, drifting uncomfortably far from the factory town my grandparents moved to at the turn of the 20th century.

How do I know this? Sometimes I fret about the high price of organic avocados. After growing up driving a Buick Electra 225, I now own a gutless four-cylinder Toyota Camry. And then there’s the fact that I’m so jittery in the place where I grew up that I’m sleeping with a bat.

There are some good neighborhoods there still, I think, it’s close to recreation up north (though Saginaw and Bay City more so) and it’s cheap living, if you can work from anywhere. Of course, you could even live up north (though the winters are tougher there than southeast Michigan). On the other hand, there are the Michigan taxes…

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Obama’s Failed Gamble

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Jimmy Pethokoukis:

Obama wagered that the deluge of money coming from the Federal Reserve would do the heavy lifting as far as stabilizing the financial sector and keeping the already apparent recession from turning into a real disaster. Voters would, thus, continue to support his policies to assert more government control over healthcare, heavily regulate energy through a costly cap-and-trade program and further intervene into the financial industry.

The gamble appears to have failed miserably, both economically and politically. The terrible tale of the tape: a) the current downturn is arguably the worse since the Great Depression; b) household wealth has fallen by $14 trillion during the past two years, including the first quarter of 2009; c) while the economy may not shrink as much this quarter as it did in the previous three months (-5.7 percent) or the final quarter of 2008 (-6.3 percent), unemployment is soaring; d) Obama himself said the jobless rate will hit 10 percent this year; d) even worse, the Federal Reserve sees it approaching 11 percent next year. (Recall, that the original White House economic analysis of the Obama economic plan never saw unemployment exceeding 8 percent if Obamanomics was passed by Congress.)

While I don’t mind him failing, since his policy goals are disastrous, I’m furious that it’s wrecking the economy anyway.

Business, General, History

Farewell, Central High School

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My old high school in Flint is being closed (as part of downsizing the city in general). It was the oldest existing high in Flint, I think, arch-rival Flint Northern having been closed and moved to a more modern facility while I was attending high school. Here are some pictures of the farewell from its many decades of alumni. I remember playing french horn in the orchestra on that auditorium stage.

And Gordon Young (not an alumnus — he attended the Catholic school) did something that I never did (though I did wander a lot in the steam tunnels) — he climbed the tower, and took some great photos. That blue dome you see in the distance is the planetarium in the arts and cultural center, a large campus of which Central was just a part. It also contains the main branch of the public library, an arts institute and museum where I used to take art lessons as a kid, Mott Community College (where I attended my first two years before transferring to Ann Arbor) and the former home of the University of Michigan – Flint, before it moved downtown back in the eighties. The trees over to the right of the planetarium are on the estate of Charles Stewart Mott, the General Motors philanthropist who made Flint one of the great places to live in the country when I was growing up, before it all started to fall apart, about the time I graduated from Central, in the early seventies recession.

I haven’t lived there since 1977, but I would have liked to attend this farewell.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary, Space

A Response To Derbyshire

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He gets a letter from an astronaut in response to his anti-manned-space piece. Of course, it should be noted that it was anti-NASA manned space, not anti-manned space in general.

He remains unrepentant:

I would give everything I have, ten times over, to have been where Greg has been and see what he has seen. I don’t see any reason why U.S. taxpayers should fund my enthusiasm, though.

Neither do I.

He is obviously not opposed to human space flight. I think that he might think differently had the taxpayers’ money done more (and a lot more) to allow him to go. And, to forestall the usual trolls, that doesn’t mean paying for his trip. It just means doing the kinds of things that made aviation successful.

[Wednesday afternoon update]

Mark Whittington imagines that I am “misreading” Derb’s attitude:

He is obviously not opposed to human space flight. I think that he might think differently had the taxpayers’ money done more (and a lot more) to allow him to go.

Actually Derbyshire makes it clear that he is opposed to all government funded pace exploration, such as Apollo.

So sayeth the Derb today (though not in response to Mark’s own misreading — I’m quite confident that he never reads Mark’s scribblings):

…even if I grant your argument, the role of government remains to be decided. Stuck as I am with the rooted conviction that government does everything badly and in a spirit of financial irresponsibility, I’d keep government involvement to a mimimum, with just perhaps a modest subsidy here or there to encourage entrepreneurs. Shuttle missions at half a billion dollars per, though? No thanks. Not unless I’m on board!

I’m a little more principled than Derb — I’d object to billion-dollar shuttle flights (just as I object to billion-and-a half-dollar Ares I flights) as a national policy even if I were on board.

I’m sure that Mark will continue to misread it, though. It’s what he does.

[Bumped]

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Do You Hear That Little Sound?

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It’s the sound of me playing the tiniest violin in the universe:

…as much as I hate the idea of the leader of the free world being short on sleep, it’s hard to work up a lot of sympathy for a guy who can’t sleep with his own decisions, and is still trying to figure out ways to drive the deficit even higher … no matter how often he says his universal health plan is going to cut costs. In fact, the news that he can’t sleep and can’t stop is more than a little disturbing.

And you know that the last way that he’ll try to do anything about the deficit is to cut spending. Unless it’s military spending, of course.