Economy is all in your head
This is a true statement. The only reason the economy is going down is that everyone seems to think it’s going down. People are still buying products, people are still employed (I’ll come back to this statement), and all the money that used to be there is still there.
The stock market is pure speculation. The price of a stock is not what the company is worth, it’s what you think it’s worth. The only reason stocks are worth less now is that people think they’re worth less. Here’s how it works:
- Somebody sells stock for some reason at a lower price.
- Somebody else thinks “they must have a reason to sell low, I’d better bail out too” and they sell their stocks.
- Stock prices plummet.
That’s what’s happening. It then cascades and ripples from there – businesses see their stock going down and start the massive layoff procedures to try and “cut costs”, this in turn causes the unemployment rate to go up, which cycles back to the stock market as people see “the economy is in crisis”. If people would just settle down, things would go back to normal and everything would be OK.
The problem is that everyone needs to do it. Businesses need to quit laying people off, individuals need to quit selling everything, and the media needs to quit panicking people into doing all of the above.
This needs to start on top. CEOs need to quit being greedy and rather than laying people off, give everyone a raise! If everyone starts making more, they will spend more. Cash will flow again, the businesses will report their massive revenue, stock prices will go back up.
I find myself yelling at the TV as I see these news blurbs about the stock market crashing and “economists” going on saying crap like you should take all the money you need for the next five years out of the stock market. That. Is. Not. Helping.
I honestly wonder if there’s a conspiracy going on to make everyone sell all their stocks, purposefully causing an economic downturn so that these individuals can buy everything at low rates and make billions in the long term. Look around – all the prices are at crazy lows. The company whose stock you are buying is still what it was yesterday. It hasn’t physically changed. The only change is an artifical price sticker based entirely on speculation. If you were smart, you’d buy not sell.
SPAM
Like most people, I’ve been inundated with ever increasing levels of these foul, loathsome strings of characters. I hate SPAM with a passion. It’s a complete waste – time, bandwidth, system resources, and money as you pay to combat this vile beast. Does anyone actually buy crap from these messages? Buying items from a SPAM message aught to be punishable by fines and imprisonment and sending it, by much worse. I consider myself to be an enlightened individual, but fantasies of boiling oil and draw-and-quartering come to mind.
I have a solution though! Pay-per-message. The sender of the message pays a nominal fee to send the message to the destination, however the recipient of the message can “Validate” and accept the message in which case you get a full refund. Voila! It no longer makes sense to send message since all hope for profit flies to the wind yet messaging is still free. The user will be able to set up “white lists” of addresses to automatically accept.
Your house is not appreciated
I watch a lot of HGTV, especially on the weekend. One of these days I’m actually going to get around to doing some redesign myself. There are a few shows though that can’t fail but tick me off – Designed to Sell, House Hunters, Flip that House, and any other show where they’re buying or selling houses. It’s not that the show itself is bad – I like seeing the homes and I typically like the way they fix them up to get them sold – it’s the prices they want to charge!
A home is not worth more now than when it was built. It’s a myth. The land might be worth more because of demand and because there is less land available, but the house itself is inherintly worth less. It’s older, more prone to need maintenance, damaged, patched, and generally more beat up than a new home. Your home is not worth more than when you bought it. It’s not.
What’s worse is that people think that they’re making money: I bought my home for $175,00 and now it’s worth $200,000. I just made $25,000! Wrong. The problem is that you’re charging more for your home, but so is the person your buying your next house from. You might be “making” $25,000, but the person your buying your next home from might be charging $40,000 more than what they paid for it so your paying more for your next house than you should be and thus actually losing money overall. When you include the amount of extra interest you’re paying due to the larger lone for this new, higher priced home, you lose out even more.
The only real winners are real-estate agents and banks.
