After that depressing jobs post, here's a little good news: nationwide sales of previously owned homes rose from November 08 to December 08. Of course the story does say that foreclosure rates continue to rise and home prices continue to fall, so even the good news is tempered.
Two more pieces of not very happy news: the Greensboro News & Record is instituting wage freezes and mandating all full and part time employees take five days of unpaid leave this year, and Lincoln Financial, which has offices in Greensboro, is cutting 540 jobs overall but hasn't said how many in Greensboro.
There's a gas station – conveniene store – car wash for sale in Lewisville. Asking price is $675,000. With the credit market in the state it is I don't know if there are many people out there that are able, or willing, to pull the trigger on that kind of purchase. Hopefully that doesn't mean we'll be down another small business in Lewisville in a few months.
Esbee reports that the Cold Stone at Harper Hill Commons shut down without warning. Alert reader Camel City caught that as well and left a comment on my post about the other vacancies at the mall. Crikey, before you know it the whole mall will be empty!?
The other day I was watching Mike and Mike in the Morning on ESPN 2 (link is to audio of show) and they were talking about the girls high school basketball game that featured one team beating the other 100-0. They were rightly outraged, not by the score but by the fact that the winning team ran a full court press well into the second half and one of the assistant coaches was openly cheering them on to the 100 point mark. Some folks emailed in to defend the winning team, but the two Mikes rightly pointed out that there are right and honorable ways to play a game and what the winning team did was not that. It's not that you ask your better players to play poorly, you simply ask them to play differently. Instead of pressing, work on your zone defense. Instead of pushing fast breaks, work on your offensive sets and try to only score on the inside. Whatever, there are ways to play hard and not embarass your opponent.
Fec quotes Krugman Jim Collins who essentially said that the second half of the 20th century was abnormally stable thanks to having two superpowers keeping the world in constant, tense balance. That means that our current state of global economic instability is more normal than the relatively stable late 20th century. However it's what Fec wrote himself that I really enjoyed:
In my case, it’s normal that what few businesses remain choose to outsource their IT functions. For that, I blame Microsoft. OTOH, my best client, who chose to embrace MS, is in their back yards eating their lunch. This leads me back to my original thought: leaving IT problems to someone else is an act of immaturity and evidences itself in other aspects of a business.
It’s normal that manufacturing has gone overseas. For that, I blame our various governments. The founders of Home Depot said some time ago that creating such a business under current regulations would be impossible.
It’s normal that I spend nearly all my income paying for one kind of insurance or another. For that, I blame lawyers and runaway juries.
It’s normal that the banks have done what banks do and are having to pay for it. Scratch that – we have to pay for it.
Finally, it’s quite normal that we’ve elected another charismatic pol and have unrealistic expectations. So long as the above mentioned offenders have lobbyists, one man, no matter how great, can make not a whit of difference.
Anyone else noticed that lobbyists have become the most reviled people in America with the exception of politicians? Have you also noticed that many lobbyists and politicians start out as lawyers? Coincidence?
Not long after I blogged about my love for Costco and the fact that it had been only deepened by a robo-call I'd received from them informing me of the Clif Bar recall, I received an email from an MSNBC reporter named JoNel Aleccia asking me if I'd be available for a phone interview. The results of the interview can be found in her article Dial-a-recall? Stores use cards to warn buyers. She was quite nice and she got the parts of our conversation that she used right, except she has my age at 45 and I'm only a young 42. That's okay, because I look 55.
Mike Mulhern, the Winston-Salem Journal's ex-NASCAR reporter, has his new website up and running. He tells me that this is phase one and that phase two of his site promises more features. As it is right now he has a Breaking Now/Hot Scoop section, The Pit Bull's Daily Briefing and Mike's Take: NASCAR In Depth. He's also posting video via YouTube, which is a great idea. Looks like he's off to a flying running start.
Remember when George W. Bush's staff moved into the White House in 2001 and found that the Clinton staffers had acted like a bunch of boobs and done things like remove all the "w"s from the computer keyboards and glued desk drawers shut? Bush staffers didn't do anything like that, at least not that I've heard of, but Obama's staff is discovering that being on the government payroll doesn't guarantee that you'll get to work with cutting edge or even adequate technology. From a Washington Post story:
One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos…
"It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.
Honestly I'm surprised they inherited Atari and not Pong.
The Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools made it official today by announcing that the day of school our kids missed due to the 1/2 inch of snow on Tuesday will be made up on March 30, the first day of spring break. It's no surprise that they are scheduling the make up day for March 30 because they literally printed it in the handbook they distributed at the beginning of the school year, but that doesn't mean the policy is smart. Here's why I think the policy is dumb:
Befuddled 