I’ve had a stern talking to the cat about prancing through the living room and bothering Millie. Explaining that the staring contests had to stop seems to have had some effect. The bottom line, Tat, is that Millie has 30 times your body mass should she decide to insist, it is game over. Much like working for a corporate entity.A few newspaper articles have found the time to agree with me on the topic of real estate. The reality of why the market has not imploded is has nothing to do with those fake TV reports of economic upturn. There is no recovery in Florida and there will not be for many, many years to come. Florida is a sucker’s paradise and the suckers have run out of money.
The reality of why there hasn’t been a meltdown is that Florida banks haven’t got enough lawyers or money to repossess 1.4 million houses. Nor can the court system handle that kind of case load (they can only deal with around 36,000 per year). Disaster hasn’t struck is because existing repossessions are clogging up the courts and they can’t take on new ones. Sooner or later, this backlog will reach street level; then get the hell out of the way.
The media has further declared a “slowdown” of bankruptcies, which is true to the extent that there is now a one-year wait before the bank can file the papers. This chokepoint is oddly serving as a brake on plummeting prices. Worse, if the mortgagee just walks away there is an extra delay proving abandonment. Only this arthritic legal process has prevented 140,000 houses from hitting the market at once. There are reports of families “living for free in houses” for that year already by giving up making the payments. Recovery, my eye.
ADDENDUM
Now, our nurses and their high living. I got talking with the lab technologist about the difference between what is advertised and what kind of income nurses really have. He says it is more like $18 per hour to start. Now that makes sense to me. He says they can get a $10 per hour shift differential for working nights and another $7 for working Friday to Sunday. But that is still not $75K per year and “differential” begins to sound frighteningly like the phone company.
The tech was ex-army and gave me a few pointers on his new job. At $30 per hour, he is one of the highest paid non-physician people in the hospital. He attributes the fantastically high wages reported for nurses as due to private clinics who regularly recruit the top nurses from hospitals, but only the cream of the crop. On average, a nurse makes about the same as a good local construction worker.
Of course I asked why such a gap between his wage and nurses and he says simple—the doctors can’t make a diagnosis without someone like him knowing the trade. He was new but said a good lab technologist was also a candidate for headhunting. In return he asked why I wasn’t in the medical field. You know, that is a damn good question.
I admitted that in college, I had never studied the two pre-requisites for med work: biology and chemistry. He described the difference between a lab technician and a medical technologist (you can look that one up yourself). The courses can be taken independently at Broward Community College. I’m thinking to pick up some used textbooks and seeing if I can retain the material. It is only a two year course. This is not a commitment, the lab tech concept for me is sheer dreaming at this point.
And don’t nobody tell him he makes less than half as much as a shoemaker.
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