America: still the cool kid on the block

2012.01.04

If you’ve follow the news over the last 2 to 20 years, you’d notice the US has a few housekeeping issues. Folks can prattle on about the various ways we’re hurting, but in short, we’ve discovered a consumption based economy is prone to bubbles and isn’t sustainable without a real economy to back it up. Apparently, when we were flipping homes and making crazy money from questionable financial machinations, the money that we saw coming in from seemingly nowhere collapsed – much like the inevitable plummet of Wile E. Coyote after noticing he’d been running for some time in mid air.

OK, so we weren’t solvent. Apparently farming out every single manufacturing job in the country to mainland China has come with some cost, chiefly a $245 Billion trade defecit.

And we can’t expect the government to fix issues like these anytime soon because they’re embroiled in their own fruitless efforts to fix our national balance sheet. Kinda like everyone else, the nation has racked up some hefty credit card bills. And, you know when a family has money problems, it causes fights. Congress can’t pass anything bipartisan anymore, so it gestures and threatens and filibusters. About the only thing they were able to work together on in the past 10 years is blowing all the cash that helped drive up our debt in the first place.

So we can’t expect to leave High School and make a living on an assembly line any more. America needs to train for tomorrow’s jobs, right? Except, if you take just a passing look, you’ll notice our public Education system is up sh-t’s creek also. Any number of documentaries (see Waiting for Superman – it made me cry) will show you that we don’t produce Engineers and Architects like we used to. But, those are what tomorrow’s economy demands. If we can’t even improve on dropout rates from the nation’s high schools, we don’t stand a chance when 30 years down the road the demand for high tech employees doubles or triples.

Overall, if you look at how the US is doing versus other countries that we’ve traditionally look at condescendingly in the past, we’re not doing so hot. We put the space race on hold – no more Nasa flights to the moon, and a mission to Mars is now left to Science Fiction writers. Since we’ve shipped all the factory jobs overseas, Engineering shops are slowly following, and if you continue the trend, next to go are the corporate offices. Like it or not, we’re a take hike away from accelerating that trend.

Silver Lining

All this to say, it feels like our prospects in the US aren’t looking great for the next fifty years. So if the economy is feeling hollow with no great future, I think the one thing we can always turn to – which continues to be true through good times and bad – is that America is still the cool kid on the block.

Half of China’s wealthiest would rather live in the US. We’re an open society; Jersey Shore proves this fact. Where else in the world would something so hideous have a chance to exist? Sure, Finland has great students, but I’ll bet they all want XBoxes and iPhones. And I bet you if I played Black-Eyed Peas in Brazil, people would recognize the song from a commercial and have the same response as we do in America (shameful, mild enjoyment). You know how suburban kids either look like Justin Bieber or Jay-Z wannabes? Same goes for German kids.

You may not have great odds at equipping your family with a great education or jobs in the US, but if they make it out of college, we’ve oodles of venture capitalists to fund all of their hair-brained schemes. Part of why we mourned so much for Steve Jobs is because we treasure his sort of ballsy, driven creativity that builds American empires like Apple. America takes risks and sometimes wins big.

If we can find away to fix our balance sheets, economy, educational system, retirement system and government – or at least delay the pain and let our children deal with our mess – America’s fabric makes it an awesome place for influence to start from. We may not always find a way to profit from it, but the US is still a global center for “cool”. Hopefully its value holds up.

Everything will blow up in a fiery inferno

2008.09.25

This is my sober analysis of the Wall Street super-colossa-crisis. It goes like this: greedy “fat cats” living on Wall Street bought some homes, but didn’t make their mortgage payments, so John McCain is camping out on the White House lawn until they receive a $700 Billion dollar check from America. If the check doesn’t get their by Saturday, everything will explode in a fiery inferno.

Por Que? What about the kids? I know, I know. I don’t write anything for months, and the first post out is topical and near political. Well, this is my site, and I’ve come to terms with my grasp of world affairs… and that three of the 5 people who’ve visited this site may be infuriated by my wildly fringe views.

So, yeah, I’ll talk about this sorta’ crap every now and then. Whatever get’s me back to writing.

Continue reading “Everything will blow up in a fiery inferno” »

Your First House

2006.12.31

Back when I was in college, I remember thinking that a few thousand in student loans would be a piece of cake to pay off, and after that happened, I’d be living on easy street. I’d live like Tom Hanks in Big, with fountains of Diet Pepsi flowing in my indoor arcade, next to my indoor gun range / bowling alley / ski slope. The concept of a home loan was totally alien to me.

Two years later, I’d be putting ink on a series of 500 home purchase documents being handed to me by a lawyer under the careful supervision of two salivating real estate agents.

I grew up in a 1 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, so stepping into a home that would me mine (MINE!!) was huge. The grass, the driveway, the front porch, the water heater, the garage… *pant* *pant* *pant*… what am I gonna do with all this space?! The possibilities were rushing to my head. Even my then fiancé was going a little crazy with the ideas.

So, our canvas was a two story, 3 bedroom home with two more rooms to play with on the lower level. Somehow (and I’ll bet every 20-something year old new homeowner goes through this) we decided a bar would be a great idea in the lower level. Yeah! We could trim it with cedar and brass, and have a nice polished banister with a sink and a minifridge, and maybe a neon sign that blinks “Kovats’ Olde Towne Pubb” – you know, in that old timey, unnecessary appended letters fashion? Yeah, that’d be cool!

We planned it out, drew up plans, and even started pricing the material costs… before it finally dawned on us that neither one of us really drink all that much. I mean, I like my beer, but not enough to need a whole room for it. So, we scrapped that.

Laminate flooring and removing a popcorn ceiling texture - 2 of my personal favorite forms of self-punishmentThe next thing that seems to happen is the slow, gradual learning process of handyman work and home repair. It starts with painting – most of us have been doing it since Kindergarten. Granted, that was using fingers and the results were a stretch even for the most encouraging audiences, but the basic process is the same.

The thing that ain’t the same is the color selection. In grade school, you had somewhere between 12 and 64 crayons – maybe 128 if you were rich or something – and that’s it. The extent of your browns were “burnt sienna“, “light brown” and “dark brown“. Today, when you go to Home Depot, they unleash a world of browns you never imagined, and their names don’t help at all. You have no friggin’ clue if “toasted cyprus” is any different or better than “mystic fudge“, and it ain’t cheap finding out.

So, you lay down the tarps and paint your first room. After some acceptable splatter (“enh, we’ll be replacing the carpet anyways“), you finish your first room. You’ve got a paint job under your belt, and so you graduate to changing light switch plates. In a month, you’re ready for installing shower curtain rods.

Around this time for us, my wife’s parents came up to visit… and to reconstruct. My father-in-law is an all-around handyman who can effectively build a home with a few piles of wood and a sharp stick, and my mother-in-law has enough motivation and energy to power a small city. Possibly St. Louis, if you gave her an extra cup of coffee.

Now, when you get your first home, like anything else, it’s your baby. You want control over every inch of it, according to the plans buried deep in your mind (and possibly years from reality). When my father-in-law came up with a truck full of tools, he had plans. A Bob Villa was now running loose in our new home, and he stuck on auto-pilot.

No quotes necessary - just buy a case of Budweiser and we'll call it even.Their first visit was nerve-wracking, because everything they did seemed to be a surprise to us (“oh, but that’s not how I pictured… oh, um, uhmm… crap.”). The second, third and fifth vists were still full of nail-biting. We’d come home from work in the evenings expecting to see an addition to the garage or a gazebo hanging off our front porch.

The humor in this is that my one gripe with my in-laws at that time was how they’d constantly work and build on our home when they visited. I tried telling this to a few other married folks in conversation and learned that my complaint was almost like winning the lottery compared to some of the other “in-law” stories. One guy told me that to this day, after years of marraige, his mother-in-law has a standing offer to pay for all divorce expenses and his wife’s next wedding costs. Ouch.

And so, today, after living in our home for 2 years, we’ve basically hit a point with most rooms where we’re content. You’re never really finished with any room at any time; you just reach a point where the paint doesn’t turn your stomach and the furniture doesn’t make your eyes sore. We’ve paid off about 3% of our monstrous home debt, and have learned to accept the American Dream of perpetual debt.

Nowadays, we’re more than happy to help my wife’s parents with whatever plans that have for the home. When you reach the point where you’ve spent your first year constantly in the middle of house projects, you learn that help is a blessing in any form. Yeah, we were thinking of crown-moudling in this room, but hell if the one-man Jakubowski construction team is willing to put up a drop-ceiling, I’m happy to help cut the ceiling tiles.

In the end…

After all the work and all the money you put into your home – which never ends – you’re left with a deep appreciation for the place you call your home, and a serious understanding of why some people choose to rent instead.