It was Borders for six hours and nothing else. Actually, blog rules say I must report anything truly unusual and I made Chicken a la King for the first time in twenty years. Not many people know that dish was once considered a specialty. My opinion is that during wartime, the army served it so often if fell out of favor. I like it, just be warned it is not diet food.Mainly I was researching the economy. Big Al has called again and he is totally at the mercy of supply and demand. He knows a little about computers, but his life experience is mostly mid-management, so he is caught right where you don’t want to be. He has been searching for a proper home business for years. So you’ll know, almost 13% of the American workforce was utilized as supervisors and managers for the past 40 years, or around three times the ratio in the rest of the world.
One question I answered was the hourly wage needed by a worker to raise a family these days. No extravagance, just the basic food, clothing, shelter, education and a down payment on their own house eventually. My parents didn’t know about anything except the first one. Turns out to be $17.30 per hour if you have medical and some retirement arrangement. If not, you’ll need $22.13 per hour. I’d hate to try living on that myself, much less supporting a family. Worse, unemployment is 16% among the ages 20-24, meaning a lot of college grads aren’t finding work.
The real estate market is claiming the road to recovery. Really? I found all manner of average prices, ranging from $117,000 to $172,000. Who to believe? You don’t even want to look at what even the higher price will buy you in West Palm Beach, unless you don’t mind living in the ‘hood. I stick by my predictions for 2011 as the start time for some real disasters. A reminder that I also predict most of the pension money that workers think they have is already gone.
The problem with home ownership is taxes and upkeep. When you hit 70, you have to hire help for those eaves and shingles. Several sources are beginning to point out the same as I did back in the 80s—that all the so-called retirement planners tend to make one false generalization. Their planning is based on the brazen assumption that people’s money will earn between 8% and 9% forever. I wish I knew where to get that much any more.
Looking overseas is not the answer for most people. Those places know they can just grab your money and there is not much you can do. I’ve also heard of cases where they blackmail the depositor if they suspect the money on deposit has not been reported to the tax man. Unless I come across information that totally upsets what I’ve learned over the past five years, I stick by my experience that no amount of retirement income will be enough any more. You have to find something you can do for cash money. Then we’ll find out what most people are truly worth. People who can’t play music, call bingo, or fix a shoe, the people who wasted their lives watching television.
I also researched e-books, those utterly overpriced readers such as the Amazon Kindle ($300). They are a good concept, but I’m not buying one until they come out of the stratosphere. My target price is $49 (because that is all they are worth to me). I’ll look again when they cost that much. The booksellers are toying with some dangerous ideas, such as selling an e-book for three weeks and then deleting it on you. I would never buy such a product, even if the content was ridiculously cheap. Nobody should keep tabs on what people read or for how long.
As usual, a bookstore means I got lots of excellent trivia for you today. I’m sure we’ve all heard about the brilliance of the man who invented 99 cent pricing. The supposition is that people will think $999.99 is “less than a thousand” and so on. I found out the real reason: the cash register. It further explains the persistence of small coins, such as pennies, which are more of a hassle than they are worth. The reason for the 99 cents is so that the customer expects change from a dollar, and the cashier must open the register to get it.
See how that works? The cashier cannot just pocket the dollar. The significance of the penny is that it greatly increases the likelihood of the entire transaction being recorded. The tale that it was invented by some clever salesman is totally bogus. Besides, there is no such thing as a clever salesman.
