Jon Robb offers a highway robbery style of Wall Street manner of business:
Actually, Wall Street in combination with the Fed and the US government, systematically looted the incomes of Americans for three decades despite scintillating productivity improvements.
I can recall Nicholas Gruen saying that income tends to rise with productivity improvements and is the best indicator of rising income.
However we have seen the rise of the information worker in the same period which has split the workforce into two; the highly paid and educated mover of information and the service economy of low paid work which supports the working and lifestyle of the information worker; keeping offices clean, restaurants served, hotels managed, etc.
This is more consistent with Richard Florida's reading of the creative class which suggests the productivity gains have been heterogenous, rather than homogenous across professions. Robb continues:
Next, dissatisfied with that pile of money, they went after the remaining wealth of Americans, their homes, via low cost and often toxic mortgages and thereby destabilized the bedrock of the global economy.
I did not use the ARM mortgages as I did not trust them. They sounded shady to me. However the construction and home buying boom meant that I moved from a condo to a house faster than normal. Our condo had fourteen people look at it over a weekend and then we were offered above market for it.
I got embarrassed about that and bundled in home insurance in return for the offer. Probably an indication or sense that we knew things weren't right.
The flip-side was that the house we bought was over-priced and expensive, and within two years, if I had not bought when I did, I could not afford to live in the neighbourhood I was in. Robb writes:
Finally, and likely worst of all, when they crashed the entire system they found the means to get at the final and sole remaining pile of relatively untapped cash left: the US government. Through a system of private gains and socialized losses, they are in the process of devouring this last remaining source of wealth.
Which is the US Government and borrowing against the ability of the US taxpayer to repay anything the US Government borrows - and this whole TARP has been done on the tick again, borrowed, borrowed and borrowed.
One of the guys I play paintball with commented one time that sometimes he wishes the whole world would collapse and the fools be weened out. As he said, he knows he can look after his family. I fell similar in that respect, I can compete in the labor market and in the free market entrepreneurially. I have no other choice.
Those working the financial markets should have to face the same as I do. The banks should have been allowed to fail. They are crap now after being bailed out, and were crap before, I fail to see the distinction, or the value of throwing US taxpayer money in there. My productivity is paying for that too, as is my ability to be productive in the future. In my not so humble opinion, it is morally wrong.
Phoenix Eats Out is the restaurant review site for
Phoenix,
Scottsdale and
Old Town Scottsdale which lists the modernist and contemporary restaurants, taverns and bars in the greater Phoenix area.
This is the list of the most popular restaurants pages from phoenixeatsout.com that have been viewed the most;
My personal favourite restaurants in Phoenix are
AZ88,
Postinos,
Bomberos with
Grazie,
Humble Pie,
Orange Table,
The Vig,
Fez and others coming close behind. View the complete list with the photo-journalistic style images on
phoenixeatsout.com
Arizona is an outdoor state and has lots of hiking in the city and around the state. Phoenix is unusual for most cities in having several large mountains in the center of the city with great hiking. Anyone who comes to Phoenix has to do the
Echo Canyon trail on Camelback and the
Summit Hike on Squaw Peak or Piesta Peak. The views of the city, suburbs and surrounding mountains are wonderful from Camelback and Piesta Peak.
For more experienced hikers there is the McDowell Mountains in North Scottsdale that has several difficult and strenuous hikes in
Tom's Thumb and
Bell Pass. Alternatively, you can hike the highest mountain in Arizona. At 12,600 feet
Humphrey's Peak is a long and difficult hike.
Between 2004 and 2009 this site,
southsearepublic.org, was a constitutional blog based on scoop which focused on Australian and global constitutional issues.
One of the strongest aspects of it was the development of constitutions by those involved in the blog. These constitutions are the outcome:
The constitutions were built using principles from Montesquieu's separation of powers, the enlightnment's universal political rights and the ancient Athenian technology of sortition and choice by lot.
South Sea Republic started in 2004 as an Australian constitutional blog in 2004 based on scoop software. It was an immigrative outgrowth of Kuro5hin. The archives for each year since then;
The articles are ordered by views.
I am an Australian living in the United States as a permanent resident.
I am a software developer by trade and mostly work in Java and jump between middleware and front end.
I originally worked in the New York area of the United States in telecommunications before moving to Washington DC and
working in a mix of telecommunications, energy and ITS. I started my own software company before heading out to
Arizona and working with Shutterfly. Since then I have joined a startup in the Phoenix area and am thoroughly enjoying myself.
I do a lot of photography which I post on this website, but also on flickr. I have a photo-journalistic website which lists
the modernist and contemporary restaurants in phoenix. I have a site on the
Australian Flying Corps [AFC] which has been around since the 1990s and which I unfortunately
lost the .org URL to during a life event; however, it is under the
www.australianflyingcorps.com URL now.
The AFC website has gone through several iterations since the 90s and the two most recent are
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2004-2002) and
Australian Flying Corps Archives(2002-1999) which are good places to start.
