Category: Commentary

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Forrest Gump Explains Mortgage Backed Securities

(Passed to me via email, but worth posting)

Mortgage Backed Securities are like boxes of chocolates. Criminals on Wall Street stole a few chocolates from the boxes and replaced them with turds. Their criminal buddies at Standard & Poor rated these boxes AAA Investment Grade chocolates. These boxes were then sold all over the world to investors. Eventually somebody bites into a turd and discovers the crime. Suddenly nobody trusts American chocolates anymore worldwide.

Hank Paulson now wants the American taxpayers to buy up and hold all these boxes of turd-infested chocolates for $700 billion dollars until the market for turds returns to normal. Meanwhile, Hank’s buddies, the Wall Street criminals who stole all the good chocolates are not being investigated, arrested, or indicted.

Mama always said: “Sniff the chocolates first Forrest”.

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Which just goes to show you this whole thing stinks 🙂

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Ford engineers, I hate you.

I’ve changed the oil in most of my own vehicles for most of my life.  That’s a fair number of vehicles, most of the Fords, with some Honda’s, a Chrysler, and a Nissan thrown in there.

Sometime around the early 90’s the Ford engineers got stupid.   This was first witnessed making oil changes on our 1993 Ford Econo-line van with a 302.   This is down right stupid.  You need to be double jointed at the elbow and wrist to get up in there to get that usually HOT oil filter out.   It’s the only vehicle that I’ve routinely let someone else do it because it’s just such a pain.  I mean it really sucked.

The Kawasaki ZX-11 that I had wasn’t a bundle of fun with it’s cartridge filter.  But at least it was doable.

Tonight I helped teach Michael how to change the oil in "his" car.  That 1998 Ford Escort ZX-2.  

You have got to be kidding me.   If there’s a reason these motors don’t last, it’s simple because nobody change the filters.  It’s ludicrous.  It’s up high, in the back, under the alternator.  You can’t get to it easily from underneath, and you can’t get to it from the top either, at least not and see what you’re trying to do.

Yep, this car is destined for Jiffy Lube…  What a pain in the @$%@#.   The Excursion is a piece of cake.  But this, this is so dumb, that I’ll make darn sure what ever new vehicle we buy is serviceable without any special tools or double jointed anything.

Ford if you haven’t fixed this on new vehicles, you can count us out as potential customers.

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Duke Update V

Down to 113,000 Customers. 

I understand some folks are getting mighty testy out there…  Just keep in mind there are folks in Texas who won’t have power for a month.

Duke91908Outages

It sure would suck but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.  Man-Up folks.

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Duke Update IV

Now down to 212,000 Customers out.

Duke91808Outages

Note there are far fewer of these:

These

Which means the job is only getting harder for them to make headway.   I feel for those who still don’t have power.

We hope to get our cable/Internet up today, they’ve scheduled a visit between 11am and 1:30pm.   I’m not expecting much though as they think my area is clear…