You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2008.
Consumerist.com links up an article at Consumer’s Reports about safely carving pumpkins:
Cutting through pumpkins can easily injure your hands. Such gashes can be especially serious since nerves, blood vessels, and tendons lie just under the skin. The cuts can occur, for example, when a knife sticks fast in the rind, then abruptly dislodges as you tug, slashing your other hand. A long knife can penetrate to the other side of the pumpkin where one hand holds it steady. Or your hand can slip down onto the blade after the handle gets coated with the pumpkin’s slimy innards.
My solution: use a drywall jab saw. I carved a 60-pound pumpkin a couple nights ago, from start to finish, in about 45 minutes with nothing but a large spoon, a permanent marker, a couple pumpkin-entrail buckets, and my trusty saw.
The NY Times has an article up about the looming credit card contraction:
Big lenders — like American Express, Bank of America, Citigroup and even the retailer Target — have begun tightening standards for applicants and are culling their portfolios of the riskiest customers. Capital One, another big issuer, for example, has aggressively shut down inactive accounts and reduced customer credit lines by 4.5 percent in the second quarter from the previous period, according to regulatory filings.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. Credit card companies certainly don’t want to get burned like banks holding sacks of worthless mortgages. Even the stats on peer-to-peer loans at Prosper.com hint that credit is going to get harder to acquire, when significant percentages of highly-rated borrowers have late loans.
NYT article via Consumerist.com.
Here’s another bit of historical economic perspective: the entirety of a New York Times article from April 9, 1911 on The Great Panic of 1873.
The article is one giant image file, so you’ll have to click on the picture and zoom in to read it.
Alan Greenspan was questioned by a US Congressional Committee this afternoon.
Waxman put Greenspan on the spot, asking if he made any mistakes during his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman that may have contributed to the mortgage crisis.
Greenspan’s answer included this gem:
Greenspan said he made a mistake in presuming that lenders themselves were more capable than regulators of protecting their finances. He said he was “shocked” when that system “broke down.”
In other words, lenders are infants that must be protected from harming themselves by touching the hot stove.
Arcadia Brewing of Battle Creek, Michigan is making a seasonal beer they named Jaw-Jacker Ale with deliciously creepy Halloween artwork.
I tried some this past weekend. Good stuff. And the creepy jack-o-lantern wraith is even more creepy when you see the illustration in person.
A friend sent this graphical historical summary of the United States economy back to 1920.
One interesting thing we can see from that chart is that in 1950, national debt was about 88% of the US gross domestic product, compared to the most current numbers on the chart, which show US national debt is currently about 70% of GDP, so that ratio has been worse in the past.
The chart doesn’t extend back in time far enough to show that under Andrew Jackson, the US national debt was about $34,000, the lowest it has ever been.
“Old Hickory” also vetoed the re-charter of the Second Bank of the United States.
The bank’s money-lending functions were taken over by the legions of local and state banks that sprang up. This fed an expansion of credit and speculation. At first, as Jackson withdrew money from the Bank to invest it in other banks, land sales, canal construction, cotton production, and manufacturing boomed.
Under Jackson, easy credit fueled a boom which was quickly followed by a bust:
However, due to the practice of banks issuing paper banknotes that were not backed by gold or silver reserves, there was soon rapid inflation and mounting state debts.
Sound familiar?
This week, Tesla Motors fired approximately 90% of its Rochester Hills, MI employees via a post on its company blog, two days before telling those employees.
It gets better:
We’re hearing that approximately 90% of the office was simply let go, and the remaining employees have to make their way to the San Jose headquarters with no moving costs covered, no increase in salary and no help getting rid of their old homes. Fortunately, the real estate market in Detroit is red-hot, and the cost of living is about the same in San Jose…. right?
Via Jalopnik.
Art DeVany has compiled a list of 10 reasons that running marathons is bad for you. They pretty much can all be summarized as: running a marathon will probably shorten your life.
All 10 items are thoroughly referenced and make me glad I’ve never even considered running a marathon.
The Detroit-Windsor Marathon is this Sunday. I sure hope no one in it pulls a Phidippides.
Coupons are a venerable way to save money, and they’re recently enjoying renewed popularity, according to this NPR segment:
The use of coupons had been in a long, steady decline until last year — when food prices started to climb.
Coupons require some investment of time and organization, though technology is making that process a little simpler. Web sites and plenty of blogs offer tips and links to online coupons. There are now 36 million people who use Internet coupons, or nearly quadruple the number from three years ago, according to a study released in July by Simmons/Experian Research and Coupons Inc.
Coupons are even going high-tech:
Meanwhile, some companies are sending out text-message coupons that arrive to your cell phone. And sites like AOL’s shortcuts.com make it possible to load coupons on customer loyalty cards, which means going paperless.
With diligence, you can save a lot of money, but as one commenter at NPR notes:
We all know that driving an extra five miles to “save” 50 cents or a dollar – especially during this time of “economic downturn” and sky-high fuel costs – is anything but cost-saving.
Coupons are great, as long as you keep your total cost in mind.
Consumerist.com has an article from yesterday that explains in great detail what factors go into the price of a gallon of gas.
The numbers on the gas station sign hide a complex set of transactions. Before gas can power your car, it must be discovered as crude oil, traverse three markets, and be refined from crude into gas. Inside, we’ll explain the three markets, walk you through the role of refineries, and show how oil companies use creative tactics to manipulate gas prices…
Despite popular misconceptions, price gouging almost never occurs as prices rise. Instead, price gouging occurs when dealers keep prices artificially high in order to gain a little extra profit or recoup costs, even though the DTW price has declined.
The article is a very thorough look at how gas is priced at the pump, from oil field to the filler tube on your vehicle, and is largely based on a report by the US ”Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which produced a 324 page report that makes for a fascinating read.”
I can’t imagine any 324-page report produced by a US Senate Subcomittee being “fascinating”, but to each his own.
