Introduction, Rough Draft #1

    I’ve always loved remote control cars. Each year around Christmas time when I was young I would beg my parents to take me to Radio Shack in hopes that I might be able to document the every detail about the car I wanted so that Santa would know exactly which one to bring me. My first car was a big, grey Lamborghini with working headlights, a wicked cool sticker job and a massive spoiler. It was the 49Mhz model; exactly the one I wanted, because 49 was a bigger number than 27 and meant the car was that much cooler. I was the happiest kid on the block. I carefully placed the battery on the charger as not to be electrocuted by its devastatingly powerful 1100mah (which meant it had the power of “1100 flashlight batteries”), and started reading the manual. When I found out the battery had to charge for four hours, I rolled my eyes in frustration, but promised myself and my parents I’d wait for it to be done. After 20 minutes of dedicated waiting, I fell asleep.

    I must’ve put a hundred-thousand miles on that thing before it finally gave out. As painful as charging it for four hours after only eleven minutes of drive time was, I drove it all over the place each and every day. It was indescribably exciting watching it hit top speed right after a full charge, blazing around at a full ten miles per hour! On the flip side, it was utterly depressing watching it crawl around slower than walking speed when the battery was moments from throwing in the towel. I wanted a car that would go faster; a car with more power; a car that could go absolutely anywhere and at mind blowing speeds. But surely my car was as fast as they came. There couldn’t possibly be an RC out there that exceeded the power of 49Mhz combined with that of 1100 flashlight batteries, right?

    It was September of 1993 and I was standing towards the end of an alphabetical lineup of Mrs. Peterson’s third grade class headed for library time. Another victim clutched tightly in the jowls of Attention Deficit Disorder, reading had always bored me to tears and I was not looking forward to the assignment of choosing a book or magazine to take home and spend hours of my free time reading. Little did I know the passion that would be conceived that day; a subtle interest that would, over the years, become a passionate lifestyle. It was in that very library, the very “burrow of boredom” itself, that I first laid eyes on Radio Control Car Action magazine.

What do you think? Publishable? I think the "RC Car Action Magazine" part will leave them no choice. lol. We'll see...

    I've never been featured. It's not because I'm a horrible writer, or because my posts are "un-featurable." It's because mine is one of the few Xanga pages keeping it real. If you want to get featured, which I'm sure everybody does (even me), check out Sam (wherethefishlives). He's been featured 56,304 times, so I'm pretty sure you'll be able to find, by his example, what sorts of posts are more likely to be featured. You'll notice that each sentence in any given post of Xanga's favorite aquatic residency is funnier and/or more interesting than the one before it, and that the blogs are long which makes each post an intensely interesting and wildly hilarious blog reading experience. It's posts like these that get featured. They're clever, they're sarcastic, they're hilarious, and the content is controversial, which brings about massive amounts of discussion. If you really think about it, mass discussion is what Xanga is all about, right?

    My Xanga site is far from sarcastic. Even further from hilarious. It's when I'm pushed beyond the limits of mere thought, and I need to sort out what's going on in my head that I come to Xanga. In my precollege years, when my thoughts began piling up too quickly I sat down at my computer, opened WordPad (remember those days?), and wrote each thought down as it came. Once I had emptied the jumbled mess of thought onto the screen in front of me, I began arranging it in a way that made sense to me, and would make sense to anyone who read it. Given how fast my mind attacks a subconsciously controversial idea, straightening out all that was before me was always a tedious task. It did, however, greatly and quickly develop my writing skill (not to mention my typing speed) into what it is today.

    That said, everything you'll see on my Xanga site is real. If I write something really long on some random, uninteresting subject it's because someone brought it up and I couldn't stop thinking about it. Writing is my "excessive thought" outlet. It's a means to empty my brain so I can get on with what I was doing when said thoughts came about. I don't use ridiculous antics or sarcasm or any other attention hooks because I'm not here to become some sort of online celebrity, an insanely over hyped title.

    Why am I writing this? Who knows. Probably because I'm fighting off the blissful feelings of having a few more comments, friends, subscribers, etc than ever before. Or maybe because I felt the need to address my readers as to why exactly my hilarious and sarcastic posts aren't really hilarious or sarcastic. I'm not trying to be funny, I'm not trying to gain attention or celebrity status. I'm here on business; to get some honest input from as many people as possible so that my knowledge base on any given subject might expand. As much as I'm here to make friends, and offer up input of my own, that's not really my main focus.

    My name is Josh, and this is my blog.

A brief message from Gideon Argov, CEO of the company I work for:

    The world has changed in some very fundamental ways over the past several weeks, and it will not revert back to its prior status quickly if at all. Simply summarized, the financial crisis we are witnessing is a way for the (credit) markets to say in a very loud and clear voice:

• The level of overall consumer debt in the United States in particular but also around the world is too high, and much of it is not recoverable given the terms on which it was loaned.
• The lack of government regulation in the United States over lending practices is a major reason for the tsunami of unrecoverable debt.
• The sheer amount of mortgage-related debt created over the past 10 years or so (as well as other types of debt), coupled with the loose terms on which it was loaned, has fueled inflation in housing prices (both in the United States and other countries) which is unsustainable and dangerous.
• The United States is in effect going to have to go on a “leverage diet,” which makes an economic contraction inevitable at the present time.

    That’s the basic story. All the rest of what we are seeing around us – investment banks failing and being rescued, commercial and insurance companies disappearing and the stock markets around the world falling precipitously – is an outgrowth of what I have described above. The reason there is so much “collateral damage” is that as Tom Friedman has written: “the world is flat” today. With the securitization of debt over the past decade or so, many financial institutions (and not only in the U.S.) have loaded up on mortgage related debt instruments, only to find that their true value is now questionable and in may cases nonexistent. The result has been to deplete many financial institutions of vital capital without which they can neither expand their business nor in some cases even meet their payroll. In other words, leverage is a double-edged sword.

Thank you Mr. Argov. Brilliant.

    People deserve to know how this happened. Especially those who lost their homes! And as long as political speech is still free, which may change if Obama is elected (Google Obama "truth squads" Missouri), I'm going to go ahead and share with you something of a transcript of a YouTube video I came across.

    On MSNBC's Hardball, Chris Dodd explained what caused this economic crisis saying, "The root cause of this is the housing foreclosure crisis, and still is today." But what caused this "housing bubble"? The answer to this question, some say, is what are called "Subprime Mortgages" which are government sponsored loans to high-risk, low-income, or bad credit borrowers. These loans are made possible by the Community Reinvestment Act (or CRA) which is a federal law passed in 1977 under Jimmy Carter that was designed to encourage commercial banks and savings associations to meet the needs of borrowers in all segments of their communities (link). Had it been done right, this would've been the most wonderful thing to ever happen to the US economy.

    Part of the increase in home loans was due to lenders that do not mitigate loan risk using the new subprime authorization. In 1995  the Clinton Administration added massive new provisions that allowed the securitization of CRA loans containing subprime mortgages. This forced banks to issue $1 Trillion in new "subprime" loans, and created subprime mortgage securities. Bear Stearns was the first bank to offer mortgage loans backed by the CRA, The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), commonly known as Fannie Mae, was the second when it announced that it would be purchasing $2 Billion of "MyCommunityMortgage" loans and customizing affordable products for low- and moderate-income borrowers.

    At this point, subprime mortgages started to grow, and home prices started to rise. Fannie Mae is a "government sponsored enterprise" which guarantees mortgages and then sells them to banks and investors. The more mortgages sold, the more money Fannie Mae makes. To increase the number of mortgages sold Fannie May moved down the income ladder in a perilous pursuit of subprime loans, and gave "flexibility" to lenders by allowing variances that borrowers need to qualify for loans. These variances apply to loan-to-value ration, borrower contribution, housing expense-to-income ratio, and others. Remember, the banks had to issue subprime mortgages, or pay big penalties.

    Just how do you keep these loans affordable? By offering borrowers options such as no money down, interest only, low variable rate, no income verification, and the incessantly advertised, "Bad credit? No credit? No problem! Just sign here!" loans. Of all Fannie Mae's subprime loans in 2004, 92% were variable rate, and of the loans in 2005, 91% were variable rate. Fannie Mae guaranteed the most reckless loans for the most vulnerable communities, telling banks, "Make the loans, we'll guarantee them." Home ownership and prices continued rising at exponential rates, which is where the economic crisis we are now in started. Interest rates rose, gas prices shot up, and paychecks got squeezed (especially low-income paychecks). Some borrowers stopped paying, so banks stopped lending, and the subprime market collapsed.

    Foreclosures started piling up. No one was buying, everyone was trying to sell. Home prices started falling, more borrowers stopped paying, and Fannie Mae's "guarantees" became worthless because they kept overstating their assets. Banks collapsed due to worthless, government sponsored securities issued by Fannie Mae. Jobs disappeared, and here we are today in the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

    This crisis did not have to happen, and there have been attempts by the Bush Administration (and John McCain) which sponsored "The Housing Enterprise regulatory Act" to stop it from getting worse and work towards reversing the damage. Democrat supporters of Fannie Mae said, "efforts to regulate the lenders tightly...might diminish their ability to finance loans for lower-income families." Barack Obama benefited greatly from the Fannie Mae "affordable housing" program, receiving over $120,000 in just three years time, four times more per year than any other senator who benefited. John McCain received only $862.

    Nobody likes discrimination. Everybody deserves a home, not a house of cards. So why not focus on providing good inner-city schools with accountable teachers, an issue which Obama has been rather muted and equivocal on? Why not focus on helping people get better jobs? And why not focus on protecting low-income workers from undocumented workers who take their jobs at half the wage? Poor people did not cause this; free markets did not cause this; deregulation did not cause this. A bad government regulation that made main street banks become predatory lenders to fulfill a government mandate, offering hyped up, shell game "affordable mortgages" caused this; self-interested lawyers caused this; greed and stupidity on Wall Street caused this; and in it's happening, Obama got his wish: lots of affordable mortgages, that people could not really afford, while his friends got richer and the rest of us got poorer. This is the cruel reality that has been created by democrats, and will only worsen under Barack Obama. Please, understand who you're voting for before you vote for them.

    For some reason I was recently thinking about all the things in life I have to complain about. I hate whiners, even the ones who have real reasons to bitch, and I've never really complained (publicly) about anything. I've known so many people who do nothing but complain about everything either to get attention, or find people who agree, or sometimes for no obvious reason at all. But I took a step back from myself just now, looked around, and noticed that if anyone should be complaining, it's me. I don't want to write a bitchy post about all the complaints I have, but I am instead going to use them as examples of why people shouldn't complain.

    My apartment sucks. A lot. The windowsill in the second bedroom is rotting out, there's mold in the walls next to my bed, most of the appliances in the kitchen are close to useless, the heater runs 24/7 through the winter keeping my apartment at 90 to 100 degrees all winter long, and through the summer there's more spiders in, on, and around the place than you could possibly imagine (EEK!). I could write a book! But I won't. Why? Because the reason I'm living in a place like this is my fault. If I had saved my money, rather than spent it, while I was still living at home, I could've been in a very nice apartment, or a fairly decent house, at this point. My mistake; lesson learned.

    My car is a bigger POS than my last car (which I could've gotten $4000 for, but traded in for $100; another terrible mistake). My dad had to buy me new tires, because the ones it had were within 30 miles of blowing out, the mass airflow sensor is "experiencing some blow-by" sucking all of the oil out of the engine, and sending it out through the exhaust system making it rattle quite loudly, the center console is totally busted (which is a huge pain in the butt), the glove box (which houses my proof of insurance) will no longer open, the key hole to open the trunk doesn't work, and the upholstery is absolutely filthy. I could write a book! But I won't. Why? Because when I was looking to get into a different car, I got really excited when I found this one and completely overlooked all of it's faults in my own impatience. I wanted a 5-speed Jetta more than anything in the world, and I had finally found one at a price I could afford. If I had taken a second to think, or even a second to look the car over, I wouldn't have made the terrible mistake of buying it. My mistake; lesson learned.

    I hate my job. Each and every day is absolutely the same, my back is beginning to hurt badly, I'm fighting to keep things normal while working 12-hour nights, I'm barely making ends meet and my job security is headed in a very negative direction. We're losing hours, we're losing money, and we're no doubt headed for disaster. I could write a book! But I won't. Why? I was young, and still living at home when I first started this job, and the level of income I was drawing was absolutely massive, given the fact that all my previous jobs were part time, $100-$200 a week jobs. It was a temporary gig, at first, but when was offered full time and decided to take it, rather than going back to college, was when things took a turn. It was great, for a while, but when I moved out of my parents house, and things began to unfold as they are now, I realized that my income wasn't as massive as I thought it was, and that I had royally screwed myself by taking on this job over college. If I hadn't been so stupid, I could've been out of college and into the real world with a real job by now. Can't complain; my mistake; lesson learned.

    Do you see how constant complaining will keep you from understanding just how your complaints came to be? Sure, I could piss and moan to everybody I came across just how bad off I am, and maybe they would tell me how dumb apartment management companies are, or how evil used car salesmen are, or how greedy CEO's spit on the little guy to put money in their own pockets. But what would any of that help? If you spend your life complaining and seeking out those who can agree you'll end up nowhere, and you may in fact worsen your situation. It's important that we do everything in our power to get ourselves into the situation we want to be in, and figuring out the real reason behind our being in terrible situations is the only way to get out of them. If it's your mistake, take it as a lesson and fix the problem.

    What are some things you complain about that could potentially be your own fault?