kimmy

Well, there's currently a political movement afoot to dramatically increase CPP payouts and CPP contributions, possibly doubling both. It's been in the news this week. If this results in you boomers in the late years of your working lives getting doubled payouts in exchange for just a few years of higher contributions, I'm going to completely snap. I don't even know what I'll do. Probably quit my job so that I can become a care aid and go Nurse Ratched on out-to-pasture boomers. -k

The idea that people "liberated" from low-skill jobs are now free to create wealth is a bunch of nonsense. They were always free to not work in low-skill jobs and go create wealth. They weren't working at these jobs because they were captives. They were working at these jobs because it was the best option they had for obtaining income. With the demise of their low-skill jobs, they will move on to their next-best option for obtaining income. Perhaps some imagine each laid off bank teller or burger-flipper to be a potential Mark Zuckerberg. But that's not a realistic idea. -k

This is a completely uninformed statement. There was no boycott demanding A&E remove Uncle Phil from the show. They did that on their own, unbidden. I know you don't oppose the network exercising their right to decide who they do or don't put on the air. The boycotts are being threatened by the "moral majority" types who are furious at A&E for suspending Uncle Phil. A group representing "46 million faith-driven consumers" is threatening to stop watching A&E and boycott A&E's sponsors. That's your boycott. These are of course the same "moral majority" types who have any number of shows and stores under boycott at any given time, so it's not like this is anything new. What's different this time is that messing with "Duck Dynasty" apparently has people mad enough to actually care about this particular boycott effort. -k

I love Drakkar Noir. I think it's such a sexy fragrance, so I like to wear it sometimes. I wasn't aware that NASCAR dudes have recently taken to it. I was under the impression that it was inextricably linked with the lounge lizards and club kings of the mid 1980s to early 1990s... my long-time special guy was of the age that he wore the stuff the first time around and liked to dust it off on occasion. I could understand it if colognes smelled like burnt rubber, gasoline, motor oil, meat barbequing on a wood fire, things like that. But mens' colognes don't smell like that. Men's fragrances have scents that women also like... spice, citrus, vanilla, aromatic woods, lavender, sage, musk, other pleasant and evocative scents. Womens' fragrences tend to have the very same scents, but bury them under intense floral scents so you miss the best part. I like mens' fragrances because you can enjoy the other smells and not just the floral. There's some mens' fragrances that I wouldn't wear myself... mostly ones with strong pine, moss, or tobacco I think. Lots of other women like to wear mens' fragrances too. Sometimes you want to smell nice but you don't want to burn everybody's nostrils with piercing flowery scents. -k

You guys had the good fortune to pay unrealistically low CPP contributions for much or most of your working lives. Boomer life expectancy is far beyond what was projected when your contributions were defined. Sure, you paid in, based on some formula built on the idea that you'd retire at 65 and expire at 72 like your parents tended to. They realized this sometime in the late 1990s and hiked premiums drastically sometime around 2000 to cover for the shortfall in existing CPP funding. So while you've been paying higher premiums the past 13 years to help you catch up; I've been overpaying for my whole working career also to help you catch up. Many of you guys will get to collect CPP at 65; for me it's 67 currently (and no doubt going to keep going up.) Just this week there's been another flurry of articles about the need for higher CPP premiums, again. -k

And you framed this thread in terms of the question "No jobs?" as if the internet and the plethora of digital channels were the answer to that question. For most people, "income" is an extremely important consideration when they look for a "job". 1. If someone finds a better way to do something, the people who used to do that thing to earn an income are going to have to find some other way to earn an income. 2. See 1. The people flipping your hamburgers or changing your tires aren't there because they're short of things to do. They're there as a means of obtaining income. If somebody invented a way of flipping burgers that made the human employee obsolete, that human isn't thinking "yay! Now I don't have to flip burgers anymore! I'm free to spend more time making YouTube videos." That human is thinking "I have to find some other way of earning money", and making YouTube videos is not a viable answer to that question. -k

This is exciting news if you're in the energy industry, I suppose. But I doubt it'll help gas prices here much. They have gotten us used to paying $1.20 per liter of gas. I doubt they'd let prices drift back down. -k

Here, shopping at Sears means you're in danger of getting hit by debris falling from rotting ceiling tiles. But they have much better stuff than Target. Although, in Target's favor, at least their ceiling isn't rotting. -k

I sometimes go to dollar stores when I need stuff and quality is completely not a factor. Also I like some of Dollarama's knock-off fragrances. "L'Hombre" is a pretty good Drakkar Noir knockoff. I get compliments when I wear it, which is hilarious for at least two reasons. "Your perfume smells so familiar." Yeah, it's because you used to bathe in Drakkar Noir in the 1980s, dude. Also, check out "Lazarus", which is pretty intense. If you like fragrances that have a "blast radius" instead of "sillage", Lazarus might be for you. I plan on wearing it when I'm Boxing Day shopping this year, to give me a little extra personal space. -k

Target sucks. I had been looking forward to a new department store arriving here in Kim City where shopping options aren't exactly plentiful. And the Zellers that had previously been in that location wasn't very good. Imagine my shock to find that the products and selection at Target are even worse than they were at Zellers. I didn't even think that was possible. The only positive to come from Target's arrival here is that the hobos now have colorful red shopping carts in which to take their cans bottles to the recycling depot. Excellent news for hobos looking for sportier shopping carts, I suppose. -k

I don't feel "beaten up" at all, Betsy. I don't feel harmed by your (and Shady's) whining at all. By all means continue. Get it out of your system. I suspect that Michael Hardner's plea for the thread to end is because your (and Shady's) outburst was cringe-inducing and caused him to feel bad for you. That's just my guess. Your assumption that I must be happy to see an end of AW must be because I suffered some crushing defeat at her hands is incorrect. In leaping to that conclusion, I think you're projecting your own feelings. She did get the better of me once; 2009 I think it was. I think the fact that she recently quoted something I wrote in 2008 to try to discredit me says plenty about where things stood between us. I have never been reluctant to confront her arguments and her arguing style. And with her departure made official, I can now add that she was obnoxious, self-righteous, pedantic, and tedious. And by the way, I think that my response to your "Blood Moon" thread was more polite and more thoughtful than the topic deserved. -k

Paying for universal healthcare is a discussion that we've had in Canada. Having the brokest generation in recent history paying for luxurious retirements for the richest generation in human history is not a discussion we have had in Canada. But it's a discussion we ought to have. I've done just that. I think that myself and former member MSJ discussed the rent vs buy metric here on this message board during the time I was deciding to buy, in fact. And likewise, I'm not operating the assumption that I will be able to "cash out" on the back of some future generation when I decide to downsize. I won't be downsizing; my 1br apartment is about as downsized as can be, short of moving into a travel trailer, car, or garbage can. Hopefully it doesn't come down to that. But once again, when my parents bought their first home 30 years agi they got a 3br home with a big yard in the middle of a fast growing city on a mortgage that could be paid off in under 10 years (while supporting a family of 4 on a single income). Today that's completely unrealistic. That would be science fiction if it happened today. I think the fact that you old-people don't understand why 20 somethings are still living in your basements speaks volumes. The first claim is BS, and the second is a very strange metric of whether times are tough, coming from somebody who's mocking the current generation's borrowing. Sure, lots of people are still doing well. Lots aren't. -k

It's a thread discussing "old timers". I think that the recent, highly public departure of one of the oldest of the "old timers" is quite topical. I think that she will join the likes of Mr Canada and Oleg Bach as community legends who are remembered long past their retirement. -k

I'd be able to save my money a lot faster if I wasn't paying for Derek's retirement. Saving is a lot easier for people who didn't need massive student loans to get an education, and lifetime mortgages to afford homes. Yeah, it was probably pretty nice to own property during the huge price growth of the past couple of decades. But that's a ponzi scheme that depends on the next generation of home buyers. As a growing number of Boomers are discovering, Millennials are pretty broke and can't afford homes. Student loan debt and crappy job prospects for young people make it far from a sure thing. I've been seeing a plethora of articles over the past year lamenting that those darned broke-ass Millennials are making it hard for Boomers to down-size. Going the way of the Dodo. I don't think that you old-people grasp how much the game has changed. Not in the slightest. -k

The cost of homes has risen far faster than income during my lifetime. College tuitions have risen even faster than housing prices. Those are the facts, and they won't change regardless of how much you people try and dismiss or dodge the issue with crappy arguments like "kids feel so entitled these days" or "yeah well when I was a kid we slept on a bunk bed in a single room and we didn't have iPods". I can only assume you're queuing up more of The Worst Generation's favorite lines, like "when I was your age, I didn't have no college education, I started in the mail room and worked my way up to Vice President in charge of Employee Benefits for the Mid West region" and "I don't understand what the big deal with student loans is, when I was in college I paid my tuition by getting a summer job. Why don't kids these days just get summer jobs?" My contributions to CPP aren't paying for my future security, they're paying for yours. I'll never see a cent of it; it's wasted money for me. The people who'll be paying into CPP by the time I'm ready to retire aren't even born yet, and they're apparently going to be earning a living making YouTube videos, so the best I can hope for from CPP is cat-food coupons once I reach 87. You people have your employer pension plans plus CPP, all I've got is what I can sock away right now. -k

3 weeks? Betsy just brought this up an hour ago. -k

Let me know when that happened. -k

I wasn't even talking about patents. I was talking about the financing required to bring an idea to fruition, and the financial industry's method of capitalizing on the people who actually did the work. My dad and my former long-time special guy were both involved in technology start-ups at various times, and through them I heard all about the "venture capital" process. Suffice to say that they prefer the term "vulture capitalists". And then there's the IPO process, the part of the program where the entrepreneurs get to cash in on their success. And here we find that the banks and their preferred clients make more money off the invention than the inventor does. The IPO's underwriter sets an initial share price, gives themselves and their friends first dibs on the shares at that price, and gives themselves and their friends the option to buy another large block of shares at the initial price. So the shares hit the market, the price doubles on the first day, the banks and preferred investors exercise their options, flip their shares, and they make more money off it than the inventor did. Read about the recent Twitter IPO to see how all of this happens. That was above-the-board, all out in public. The financial industry jargon would say that Twitter "left a billion dollars on the table", but the reality is that the deliberately low initial price allowed the banks and their preferred clients to make a billion dollars (on top of their regular fees) that came directly out of the pocket of the inventors of Twitter. But there's more to it. Read about the eToys IPO. That's the one where Goldman Sachs has been involved in a lawsuit for, basically, deliberately screwing eToys. They set an initial price of about $20, but their internal memos showed that they believed the shares would reach $80 on the first day (they were close-- $77). They set the price deliberately low, and giving their biggest clients the right to buy large blocks of shares at that price and sell them the same day at a quadruple profit. And they sent letters informing these clients that they had to generate a certain amount of transaction fees for Goldman Sachs to be part of this kind of deal in the future (ie, they expected kickbacks.) eToys made $164 million from their IPO; Goldman and friends made $470 million from the IPO, by holding their shares for a few hours. And it's not that eToys is the only time this happened; it's just that eToys is the only one where we have the evidence in our hands to prove it was done deliberately. GS's defense is simply that they did nothing wrong and had no duty to maximize eToys' return. That line of thinking, combined with the content of the memos obtained under subpoena, makes it clear that GS simply felt that was how things ought to work. Any time you see an IPO where the share price doubles in the first day, you ought to be suspicious. And that's why the Facebook IPO was seen as such a big disappointment in the financial industry: Zuckerberg got full value, and the finance industry failed to rob him like they've done to others. -k

Both of you guys ought to watch the movie "The Social Network", which addresses both of these issues. Regarding the hacking of Harvard servers, that was unrelated to the origin of Facebook, and was simply a stunt that gained Zuckerberg some notoriety. Regarding the theft of the idea, the Winklevoss brothers had attempted to hire Zuckerberg to build a website for them called "Harvard Connect"; Zuckerberg didn't build their website and built his own instead. The extent to which Facebook resembles the original "Harvard Connect" concept is pretty dubious, and Zuckerberg settled the lawsuit with what amounts to pocket-change (about $63 million dollars.) I don't believe that Zuckerberg built his fortune by theft. -k

We in the first world have been freed from manual labor and are now free to produce YouTube videos and cable TV shows? Is that what I'm reading? How much money are you making from your YouTube channel, August? It's great that people in India and China are much better off than they used to be. However, that's of little comfort to young people in North America. The the cost of a home or an education has risen dramatically compared to income. Stuff that our parents could pay for with relative ease now comes at the cost of massive personal debt. And this at a time when massive public debt is leading to the erosion of public infrastructure and public services. It's great that people in India and China are doing better. I'm super happy for them, and I don't begrudge them the better standard of living they've achieved. However, a central mantra of the Heroic Job Creator rhetoric has been that "the creation of wealth isn't a zero sum game". So why does this newfound standard of living seem to come at the expense of people here in North America? If "a rising tide raises all boats", when is our boat going to start rising instead of slowly taking on water? -k

I joined in summer 2004! Some of you have known me since I was just a kimlet. Once upon a time at the end of my brief stay at Rabble/Babble, I posted a message berating the moderators for blatant favoritism and blasting a small group of members who'd harassed me from the moment I joined. Afterward, somebody remarked "nobody ever storms off in low dudgeon, do they." AW had only two dudgeon settings... high dudgeon and extreme dudgeon. Simply leaving and not posting anymore would simply have not have created a sufficiently dramatic spectacle for an occasion of such magnitude. Again. Read what I meant to say, not what you think I meant to say. Again. It's not my problem if you insist on interpreting what I said instead of what I said I meant to say when I said what I said I meant to say. Capice? I'm also way over it. Once upon a time I viewed our regular tussles as spirited debate with mutual respect. The mutual respect long ago disappeared. Me too. -k

Rest assured that the bankers and their "preferred investors" will make more money from that invention than the inventor himself will. -k

"The basics" were great, back in the days when basic functional literacy and numeracy were all it took to get a job that provided a middle-class income. -k

Yes. Ok, I see no point in attempting to have a serious discussion about that opinion. Let's get back to discussing whether WALL-E is a realistic depiction of space. Do you guys anticipate that the Voyager mission will have unexpected consequences similar to those depicted in Star Trek: The Motion Picture? -k