Archive for April, 2009
Welcome back Franco fan! Please share your thoughts and leave some comments!
Alright…who here likes taking their car to the shop for maintenance? Anyone…anyone…Bueller…Bueller. We me neither, so I’m passing on some of Franco’s favorite tips for saving $$$ on car maintenance.
DIY
Who doesn’t want to lose some weight (even those that don’t need to will still complain about how “fat” they are)? Some need to more than others, and I was definitely in the “some” category at the beginning of this year. As motivation, I decided to join a weight loss challenge with 18 other people where the winner would be determined by the % of total body weight lost. Long story short, I ended up dropping close to 18% of my body weight in 10 weeks and took home some extra dough for first place. Since then, I’ve had some people ask for my secret, which is what prompted this post.
I came across two articles that were both enlightening, one of which was rather entertaining if you don’t mind a good dose of crude humor and sarcasm (I’ll let you determine which is the entertainingly sarcastic/crude piece based on the published magazine listed below). Both pieces are full blown articles that take some time to read but are well worth the investment. Here is a snippet from each to see if the writing style suits your fancy with a link to the full blown article:
The Quiet Coup - The Atlantic
The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we’ll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.
The Big Takeover - Rolling Stone
There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs (a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression) was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That’s the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers’ credit card.
Ciao,
Franco
