blog.noetech.com

Homeownership

Bush has this to say on homeownership during a speech about the economy:

Rising home values have helped take the wealth of American households to a new record level.

Yeah, the astronomical rise in property values is good, about as good as getting hit by a bus.

I make over $40,000 per, putting me safely in the middle class, and there's no way I can buy a house in the city I live in (at least not in a safe neighborhood). I pay 20% of my income for a studio apartment for God's sake. There used to be a time in this country that if you worked hard you were able to buy a house. Now, unless you have family to help you, you can't buy a house until you're safely in the upper class. Things are probably different in small towns, most of my hometown friends own homes, but something needs to be done in the cities.

Wisconsin Night Out

I finally made it out last night. Around midnight my friend Mike called and asked me to join him and some friends out at a bar not too far from me. It turned out to be a good time. Mike and his friends are from Waupun, about 10 minutes from my hometown. Soon we were thinking of common friends and places. Chatting about Wisconsin and friends we all knew made me feel a little homesick. It's been almost a year since I last visited. Don't get me wrong, Fond du Lac is the black hole of the world, but my friends are still great. I'm going to have to make some time this summer for quick drop by when I'm in Chicago.

Kill the Smokers!

If you live in California, there's now one more place you can't smoke. The beach. It's not a state law, but most of the beaches here are on their way to banning it. The problem they say? Too many butts left on the beach. Smoking is such an easy target, but they're missing this one big time. Unless I'm an idiot, I'm pretty sure they already have a law to stop people from leaving their butts on the beach, it's called littering. This is why it's so hard for the government to get anything worthwhile done. They're too busy pandering to nonsense like this. Enforce the laws you have, don't make new ones just because you haven't spent any money enforcing the first one. But of course, the problem isn't really the litter, it's that people hate smoking, otherwise they would be banning soda and all the cans littering the beach.