I know I should be posting something mindless and not post something that if you think about it, it could mess up your weekend, but it is not a good idea that Saudi Arabia and China are bailing out our major financial companies.
I wish I could remember the person and the exact quote, but a famous communist once stated they didn't have to do anything to make capitalism fall, because capitalism will sell and buy the rope to hang itself with.
For 4 summers, I worked for AT&T before the break up. The first summer I was a clerk in a telephone office that serviced a government agency. One day the manager came in and said the telephone world was going to change. AT&T was pushing for a break up of itself to allow it to get into the long distance game. In short, AT&T got what they thought they wanted.
When I first got an Internet connection, I had dial-up. I got a second line so I wouldn't miss calls while I was on-line. Then, Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), wanted to charge me a business rate for the second line because I told them the line was for the Internet. The person I argued with told me they really want the ability to charge by the minute because the telephone network was designed to handle calls that lasted, on average, for about 10 minutes.
Later, before cable Internet was available, I looked into getting an ISDN line. I decided not to do it because they charged by the amount of data transferred and, at the time, my consulting business was new I and wasn't sure if I could recoup the cost. But I remembered the discussion with the telephone person saying they wanted to charge Internet use by the minute.
Now, comes this and I think it is inevitable. Home users being charged by the amount of data transferred is going to happen:
Time Warner Cable Will Do Trial on Setting High-Speed Internet Charges
Based on Usage
NEW YORK (AP) -- Time Warner Cable will experiment with a new pricing structure for high-speed Internet access later this year, charging customers based on how much data they download, a company spokesman said Wednesday.
The company, the second-largest cable provider in the United States, will start a trial in Beaumont, Texas, in which it will sell new Internet customers tiered levels of service based on how much data they download per month, rather than the usual fixed-price packages with unlimited downloads.
Company spokesman Alex Dudley said the trial was aimed at improving the network performance by making it more costly for heavy users of large downloads. Dudley said that a small group of super-heavy users of downloads, around 5 percent of the customer base, can account for up to 50 percent of network capacity.
Here it comes but the cable company is going to be the first to really try it. When it sticks, watch Internet innovation come to a crawl.
Ariel and Schwab released their annual study on investing habits of Blacks, and there seems to be some bad news:
According to this year's just-released Ariel-Schwab Black Investor Survey of 500 Blacks and 500 Whites earning more than $50,000 annually, the median amount of money saved by Blacks surveyed is less than half of their White counterparts ($48,000 versus $100,000). On a monthly basis, median savings is $182 for Blacks versus $261 for Whites.
The survey was first conducted by the two companies in 1998, when 57% of Blacks and 81% of Whites said they owned individual stocks or stock mutual funds. A decade later, still just 57% of Blacks are stock investors, compared to 76% of Whites. During the past ten years, the number of Blacks who own stocks or mutual funds rose as high as 74% (in 2002) only to fall again, while White participation has consistently hovered within a few percentage points of 80%.
However, Michelle Singletary gives her readers some more information as well as opinion:
Lost in the headlines is this fact gleaned from the survey: A larger percentage of middle-class blacks than whites work for employers such as the government that tend to provide traditional pensions plans.
In last year's investor survey, three times as many African Americans as whites (29 percent compared with 10 percent) said they planned to start a business after they retire. Wouldn't that provide them with needed retirement income?
A higher percentage of blacks than whites own real estate other than their home (42 percent compared with 33 percent), and of these, a greater share of blacks (58 percent compared with 48 percent) say they expect these investments to help fund retirement.
When we look at these surveys, we have to ask who is paying for them. Ariel and Schwab are investment companies. Of course they want to see more people invest. That translates into more business for them.
Still, I believe the overall message from the two companies is valid. Investing is important and should be a key component of a diversified retirement portfolio. It is for me.
What concerns me is the portrayal of blacks as culturally inept at understanding the importance of building wealth for retirement. But as Ariel and Schwab write in the report, "While whites have saved considerably more than blacks, the harsh reality is they, too, are underinvested and ill-prepared for retirement."
I think her comments deserve some thought and consideration.
I wonder how much of the market boom is do the the fact that people are putting money into their 401(K)s and the investment companies HAVE to buy stocks with the money so there is no where for the overall market to go but up.
Now, what happens when the baby boomers start to redeem money to live on?
Honestly, that worries me more than the Social Security disaster that is about to happen. I'm already of the mind that I'll never receive the benefits even though I'll live long enough to get them.
I don't worry too much about the future of social security. My assumption is that I won't get it and neither will my children, but we will have to put money into it because they will continue to confiscate funds to fund it.
I worry more about people who start to withdraw funds from their 401(K), 403(B), and IRAs for their living expenses. Seeing that is where I expect to have my funds for living, I wonder what happens to the stock market when stocks have to be sold and the buyers are not there. That's devaluation, right?
What got me thinking about this was this article about the first Baby Boomer who is going to file for Social Security benefits and this article about the government retirement savings program.
Wow.
Just. WOW.
One Saturday, I was in the kitchen getting dinner ready for the family when "Flip This House" came on. Mrs. D.S. was previously watching a home improvement show. After about 20 minutes, I was HOOKED! It was a show that featured a brother, his wife, and his employees and contractors going through the process of flipping a house. At the end of the 1 hour show, I was impressed. My wife said she was impressed as well but wondered about the focus on the bottom line. She even said she wouldn't buy a home from someone like that, while I said I wouldn't mind. Additionally, the amount of money made on the flip was impressive.
This morning, after I made a run to the hardware store, I came in the house and my wife just hugged me and said, "Come up stairs, I have something to show you."
I thought she was going to show me a blue stick!
Instead, she showed me this link:
ATLANTA (FOX 5) -- What if you found out an American Idol contestant was lip-synching? What if the Bachelor was really married? How real is reality TV? The FOX 5 I-Team answers that question with one of America's favorite reality shows: Flip This House. Senior I-Team reporter Dale Russell found one Atlanta developer on the show, Sam Leccima, wasn't telling the truth about his renovations.
Now, I am heart broken!
Sam was ON THE BALL! Instead, it was a scam and he not only involved and scammed people who thought they were friends, he seemed to focus on Black people. Here is part two of the investigation. Dude never made a profit! Dude even lost his license BEFORE the "Flip This House" shows!
Check out Dale Russell's blog about this.
I also started a show called "The Real Deal". The person who stars in this flipping show was also on "Flip This House". Check out the flipthislawsuit blog. It's not associated with "The Real Deal" but it's an interesting read.
After watching a few shows, one with Armando Montelongo, I was impressed with the series, BUT I told my wife that if Montelongo ever did anything in my area, I wouldn't buy from him because he really seemed to be focused more on money vs. doing a good job.
Man, I'm really crushed.
I like the look, drive, and ride of Mercedes-Benz cars. I really like the SLR and CLS class cars.
I just read the most recent issue of Consumer Reports and I was surprised to find that Mercedes has the least reliable rated cars. They are rated as less reliable than Jaguar!
You pay for the prestige and "German engineering" and the car is, essentially, a piece of crap.
Acura, Lexus, and Infiniti, in the end, will eat their lunch.
By law, your social security number is NOT to be used as a form of identification.
Bank of America Corp. has begun offering credit cards to customers without Social Security numbers, typically illegal immigrants, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
In recent years, banks across the country have been offering checking accounts and even mortgages to the nation's fast-growing ranks of undocumented immigrants, most of whom are Hispanic, the paper said, adding these immigrants generally have not been able to get major credit cards.
The new Bank of America card is open to people who lack both a Social Security number and a credit history, as long as they have held a checking account with the bank for three months without an overdraft, the Journal said.
So why is that getting some people mad?
Yes, immigration, but also, we all know that your social security number is now just that, a form of identification.
The United Way seems to be in financial trouble again.
The chief financial officer of the United Way of the National Capital Area has resigned in frustration over the organization's reluctance to abandon questionable financial practices she was hired to fix, the Washington Post reports.
Kim Tran, who left the United Way of America in 2003 to help clean up the United Way of the National Capital Area's bookkeeping, resigned in March after UWNCA CEO Charles Anderson instructed her to include $1 million in questionable corporate donations in the announced total for its 2004 campaign. "[Anderson] literally told me, 'I want that [total] as high as possible,'" said Tran, who said she was given no proper documentation for the donations and stayed at her post long enough to make sure accountants used the correct numbers when they finished auditing the organization's books earlier this year. Two other employees, including marketing and communications chief Anthony Owens, also left the organization in March and have confirmed Tran's account.
Yes, I know it's the D.C. region of the United Way. But I still think that organization should be considered to be suspect.
I had an interesting thought about money today:
It would be far easier if they just didn't tax capital gains and interest and let people do what they will with the money they earn.
Recently I decided to get a credit watch service to "protect me" against possible identity theft. The following two stories indicate, to me, that the money may be worth it.
Pin Scandal "Worst Hack Ever;" Citibank Only The Start
The unfolding debit card scam that rocked Citibank this week is far from over, an analyst said Thursday as she called this first-time-ever mass theft of PINs "the worst consumer scam to date."
Wednesday, Citibank confirmed that an ongoing fraud had forced it to reissue debit cards and block PIN-based transactions for users in Canada, Russia, and the U.K.
But Citibank is only the tip of the iceberg, said Avivah Litan, a Gartner research vice president. The scam -- and scandal -- has hit national banks like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Washington Mutual, as well as smaller banks, including ones in Oregon, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which have re-issued debit cards in recent weeks.
"This is the worst hack ever," Litan maintained. "It's significant because not only is it a really wide-spread breach, but it affects debit cards, which everyone thought were immune to these kinds of things."
...
The problem, she continued, is that retailers improperly store PIN numbers after they've been entered, rather than erase them at the PIN-entering pad. Worse, the keys to decrypt the PIN blocks are often stored on the same network as the PINs themselves, making a single successful hack a potential goldmine for criminals: they get the PIN data and the key to read it.
Here is the other story that I read about:
SSL Trojans getting ever nastier
Based on increases in Trojan technology, frequency, Roger predicts a
major bank heist is on the horizon
By Roger A. Grimes
March 10, 2006
Last week's column on SSL Trojans generated a lot of interest and some
new information. First, I must admit to feeling like I've been living
in a sheltered time warp. Although SSL Trojans are new to me, a little
Googling turned up similar Trojans going back as far as 2004.
LURHQ's description of an E-gold Trojan was an early foreshadowing of
things to come. E-gold is an e-cash operation, similar to Paypal.
Turns out they've been under constant attack from these advanced
Trojans for a few years now.
The E-gold Trojan waits for the victim to successfully authenticate to
E-gold's Web site, creates a second hidden browser session, and uses
various spoofing tricks until it drains the victim's account. Because
the stealing and spoofing is started after the authentication is
completed, no amount of fancy log-on authentication would prevent the
heist. All too telling is LURHQ's prediction that "other banking
institutions are sure to be attacked in this manner in the future."
I wonder how many of these attacks it will take before people start making the choice to go back to using snail-mail?
I've got kid duty.
CSPAN-1 is tuned on all televisions in the house, so I'm burning electricity, just to hear what is happening.
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Real life moves on...
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