It’s day 15 of the government shutdown. And there is talk of Ted Cruz for president, though he was born in Canada.
Everyone in Congress is addicted to TV airtime.
You can’t buy what they’re getting.
The debt ceiling disaster looms. But the markets go up.
Perhaps it all will be solved?
But I certainly ouldn’t employ any of them to organize a queue for an outhouse.
We are very very very lucky.
There are no babies in Japan, in Western Europe, in Russia and few in China. None of these places are having enough babies to replace their populations.
But, on New York’s upper west side, you can’t ride a bicycle for fear of hitting yet another baby carriage. Worse, most of them are double wide — twins, or babies born quickly. (Which gives new maning to that old joke:
New mother: How soon can we make love after the birth?
Doctor: Depends on whether you have a private or a public room.
I’ve never seen so many babies in my entire 44 years of living in New York City.
One of the local big hospitals recently reported that they’d given birth to more babies that day than in their entire history. All children’s friends are having babies. Our building is overrun with them. It’s a fucking plague. (Bad pun.)
Babies may be bad for my bicycling but they sure are good for the growth of U.S. and for especially for stocks — like PG, JNJ, NKE, HD, WFM, and COST (they need all those diapers) and of course, AMZN. In recent days, I’ve spied a zillion young women reading books like “I’m pregnant. Now What?“
I don’t make this stuff up.
I have the same problem you do:
I can’t get off Facebook and LinkedIn. And PayPal, Twitter and a dozen others are driving me nuts.
They’re all arbitrarily sending “invitations” from me to all my non-friends. And I’m receiving “invitations” from everyone and their uncle — 99.9999% of whom I’ve never heard of and never want to hear of, or from.
And if I bing the “invitations” to my email trash, they bug me forever that “Steven Catt’s invitation is waiting your (i.e. my) response.” (Whoever he is.)
But the worst is that all these Internet monsters are changing their “privacy” rules to make public everything you and I post. Which means that Google, other search engines and the social analytics sites can get onto my surfing and sell my data and spam me with endless offers for crap and God knows what else.
In their search to “monetize” their businesses, these guys are abusing us.
In short, be careful where you sign up — definitely stay away from LinkedIn — and be ultra careful what you post to any of these silly sites.
Of course, none of this personal abuse will hurt their stocks. Why didn’t I buy LinkedIn?
Schmuck.
Andrew Agassi interviewed in this week’s Time.
Time: Why, since leaving tennis, have you increasingly focused on education?
Andre: Because it was the only way, I eventually realized, you can make systemic change. I didn’t have a choice in my life, and I didn’t have education. I was lucky and found myself good at tennis, but without that, I don’t know where I’d be. I look at the circumstances of these kids, and without education, I know exactly where we’ll be–we’ll be building prisons instead of schools.
Time: Any hairstyle you regret?
Andre: Yes. All of them before I shaved my head. I haven’t seen a picture that I don’t want to burn.
You can read the full interview here.
Harry Newton’s serve is coming back. The shoulder no longer hurts and has regained much strength. Miracles do happen, if you give them enough time and rest. Tomorrow I want to talk about a disaster called “managed futures.” For today, if anyone pitches you on managed futures, say NO loudly and firmly.
Fall is exploding. Our weekend leaves were spectacular. Take a drive, before it’s all over, please.
You need only look at the picture on the front page of today’s WSJ to see who is producing all those new babies…their intent is to take over the world and NYC is right in line.
The leaves are beautiful…we just flew home from Halifax where we saw miles and miles of beautiful leaves;.
The financial world is not coming to an end…yet! The Aussie dollars is up.
I thought we were done with the nitpickery of scrutinizing the birthplaces of presidential candidates.
Leaves? Why are you writing about leaves, man? We’re 36 hrs from a financial catastrophe induced by Washington and you write about leaves? Go back to Australia, Newton.
So, pray tell, what can I do about Washington, except make fun of them?
They all have been told the importance of raising the debt ceiling.
But many of them are living in a different world. Their own world.
We all have our investment lives dependent on this.
Pray for sanity, somewhere. Anywhere.
Americans are not replacing themselves adequately today and we’d be facing the problems of Japan, Italy and such without immigration, both legal and illegal. We need the immigrants and should be more gracious about absorbing them into our culture.
Agree. They fill a labor niche.
Cliff, you are such a douche-bag not to mention a dumb-ass who just loves to troll.
What do you think these well recognized American companies like Google, Yahoo, AT&T, Goldman-Sachs, ebay, Radio Shack, Kohl’s, Comcast, Big Lots!, Nordstrom, Colgate, Sara Lee, Dupont, Kraft, and Pfizer have in common? They were ALL founded or co-founded by immigrants. So much for the “labor niche”. What company have you started that contributed even a fraction of what any of these companies have to the American economy? Too bad trolling doesn’t create jobs, huh?
Cliff is correct.
Immigrants “fill a labor niche” that includes all aspects of our labor market, farms to merchants to high tech and entrepreneurship, Calif and Texas to Colorado and North Dakota, even Harry’s New York City. We’d be shrinking without them, population wise, and our economy would be even worse…including far higher food prices.
So why don’t we make it easy, or at least easier, for them to legally join our lovely country?
While I share your immigration policy position, I strongly disagree that the “labor niche” is all they fill, which is what cliff asserted. Obviously, they do participate in the “labor niche” in much greater numbers than Americans in industries like farming and construction but my point is that, increasingly, they are also the ones creating a lot of the start-ups in various industries, especially in the high-tech as well as the medical industry.
There are plenty of examples of that with companies like Tesla Motors, PayPal, ebay, Google, and plenty of others who are considered major players in their respective field and they were all started by immigrants. In fact, I do remember reading about a statistic (I think it was on WSJ) that about 29% of start-ups are now founded or co-founded by immigrants.
There is nothing that makes a person appreciate opportunity more than having lived in a country that doesn’t have much of it, if any. The person who owns this site is one of those living examples. Ask Harry if he would be this successful if he never left the “land down under” and came here to the greatest country on earth. Last I checked, he didn’t work on a farm or a construction site making minimum wage to get to where he is today.