Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
Fact: 50% of welfare and food stamps recipients are children, and much of the rest are their parents are barely able to keep from being homeless. Are you suggesting we let the children starve or be so malnourished that they become a burden to our health care system? Grow up and stop blaming the poor for your problems.
Stop scapegoating hard working migrants who were forced across the borders by the bad side-effects of globalism. These migrants have earned the ability to stay here because they do the hard work that Americans have shown not to be able or wanting to do. These migrants risk their lives to cross for basic survival.
Americans are in the a fix because they have clung to an economic philosophy that lead to the worst economic downturn since the great depression. We got screwed by credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, and insane leveraging by people who used our money to fund that lunacy. We got screwed by the Supply-siders and anti-regulation zealots. Americans are screwed because they do not value education, critical thinking, and science which are the building blocks of innovation. Americans are not healthy because the health care system we want over single payer or Obama care, has NO INCENTIVES to make Americans healthy, because they make money keeping Americans alive by more and more expensive interventions. I can go all night listing all the causes of our nation's problems and never have to bring up poor people or migrants.
You save your outrage over someone getting cigarettes, while the very people who engineered our economic collapse are living in $25 million dollar homes with OUR money. You need to get some perspective.
Why Apple Is Still A Buy Even Though Amazon And Google Have Better Products [View article]
Apple does have competition, but is it quality competition? I believe that the space Samsung, Microsoft, Google, HP, and every possible competing company operates in a razor thin margins where no one company garners the loyalty that Apple products have. The consumers in this space will move to any product that has the most bell and whistles and will drop a brand in a heartbeat. So no company in this space can say how long they will be hot. Apple customers keep buying even when they know they did not get all the features they wanted. Apple customers put the total experience of ownership over the latest and coolest bells and whistles. Their competition's products take time to customize and deal with viruses and optimizing utilities to keep running the way they want. These features while cool at the moment lose their novelty when a new shiny product comes on the market. I still love my iphone 4. It works even after i broke and replaced a back panel and use it extensively. When my contract runs out with Verizon, I will probably get an iPhone 6.
Not one of the companies listed as a potential Apple-killer has the loyalty that Apple does. Only Apple has truly innovated and brought to market products that are different than any that has come before. Google is the only company that has a track record of innovation as they innovated the modern search engine and a system of getting revenue from it. Google stock is too high to buy right now, in my modest opinion. Samsung and Microsoft - not so much.
4 February 'Feel Good' Factors For Apple Fanatics [View article]
Cramer's show is like PeeWee's Playhouse for investors. He is not an advisor, he is not a journalist, but an entertainer of sorts. In March 2009, Jon Stewart kind of breaks it down while Cramer watched.
You should watch the entire interview because I think that it is not only network news that fails us as citizens, but financial news as investors. I especially like the clip Jon shows about how Cramer would talk down Apple stock.
"Apple absolutely has to make an iPhone with a bigger screen," iPhone 5 owner Henry Blodget declares. While Apple (AAPL +0.1%) insists on using relatively small display sizes to guarantee effective one-handed iPhone use, devices such as Samsung's Galaxy S III (4.8" display) make the iPhone 5 look "puny and sad in comparison." The iPhone 5's display size doesn't seem to be affecting its U.S. position much, as Strategy Analytics' numbers demonstrate, but international markets appear to be a different story. [View news story]
I use my iPhone 4 for shooting video and photography. There is a huge community around iPhonography. As a camera it is a great size and you get excellent results. People have shot professional quality commercials and movies on iPhone 4. The fact that iPhones have superior cameras and optics to other phones were a huge selling point. iPhones are certainly replacing the point and shoot, but what if they could replace DSLR cameras and video that be operated with one hand?
I also use my phone as a radio and work out to pandora. I certainly do not want anything larger.i watch movies on my iPad or my MacBook Air. I am not fond of e-readers. I prefer real books as an escape from the world of screens.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
NAFTA and the Globalism that it unleashed had many negative unintended consequences (or intended consequences depending on your point of view) while having very little of the benefits that were promised to us. There is a reason why the Clinton administration and Congress rushed through adopting this treaty and others like it even though it would have a negative effect on manufacturing, workers, and the environment. We had a rare opportunity to negotiate those things in but they wrongly believed that we could negotiate these things AFTER signing. I remain upset at the Clintons, but also all of the former Presidents from both parties for pushing it through. I had friends and family members lose their jobs because of NAFTA. NAFTA also created economic dislocation of those South of the border. Where ever the American dollar went it meant that no one could afford goods or supplies for their farms. Walmart brought their stores to Mexico and Central America and even operates as a Bank down there.
If NAFTA wasn't enough to put down American manufacturing, WALMART put the last stake through its heart by going to remaining manufacturers and telling them if they do not move to China they will not work with them. Walmart is not the only force to squeeze out American manufacturing. There was a wide spread belief in the 1990s that workers will be freed from the drudgery of manufacturing jobs and become knowledge workers. This was part of the Internet boom as everyone and their uncle were becoming web designers/knowledge workers. The problem was that there was not enough jobs to absorb these new knowledge workers without creating a bubble of companies that were not making profit. In those days, there were companies whose sole goal was to get big enough so Microsoft could buy them out.
Meanwhile entire towns were decimated economically and physically as manufacturing closed and any business that supported manufacturing.
I completely agree that we need to make things here again and the pendulum is starting to swing back to making things in the US again as fuel costs make manufacturing overseas more costly. We need to be makers, but we need to do so with producing good paying jobs that would support a thriving middle class. We need to be the leader in renewable technology, water purification and storage, and waste recycling -- things the world needs and will need in the future. We need to make investments in these things and in education.
We can solve the problem twofold: cutting off tax benefits and trade preferences to companies that send jobs and capital overseas, and give preferences and tax benefits to companies that manufacture here. Companies can still put jobs and capital overseas, but they do not get help from the public coffers or protections. If you want to be a global company you have to find benefits elsewhere, but if you want the stability of being an American company you have to contribute to the system that makes it so via court system, government R&D, transportation system, the education system, and infrastructure improvements that make commerce possible.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
For those who are still of an opinion that supply-side anti-regulation is a force for good should read AND watch Alan Greenspan's October 2008 testimony where he admits that the economic philosophy that he and the republicans have been preaching was a failure. It was not the low income sub-prime loan folk who are at fault according to Greenspan but the consequences of no regulatory oversight and markets spinning out of control. It is interesting that when business articles talk about that 1984-2007 economic expansion that was supposedly was put in motion by Reaganomics, they leave out the major dips that caused misery and economic disruption. They do not mention the unsustainable bubbles of Reagan's Military spending bubble that crashed in 1991. They give credit to Reagan for the Clinton economic boom that was also unsustainable because people were betting on a whole new paradigm that companies need not to turn a profit. They even give Reaganomics credit for the unsustainable real estate boom created by criminal level leveraging and irresponsible and predatory business practices. They ignore that since the Reagan era the gap between rich and poor has been increasing. The USA is only number one in GNP, but lags far behind in health care and education which is essential for innovation and economic health.
As someone who was born when LBJ was President and was politically engaged at an early age, I remember a lot from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, the aughts all the way to the present. There are a lot of holes that the defenders of supply side conveniently leave out.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
It helps to remember that Apple did very well during the 2007-2011 economic downturn. People who buy Apple products understand that there is an additional value to buying quality products.
Apple's Growing Slice Of The Enterprise Market Should Offset Other Concerns [View article]
Somewhere on this board I have argued the same thing -- Apple is becoming the choice of businesses. When businesses big and small consider the Total Cost of Ownership of Mac's vs. any other platform, you are going to see more and more enterprise MACs. In my experience working in companies and universities with Macs is that we have far more problems with the PCs. Mac users always had problems with the printers, while PC users had to defrag, reboot, download drivers, clean viruses and trojan horses, deal with slowness, reinstall the OS, and etc.
The resistance you hear are from those who stake their livelihoods on being PC experts. IT departments go with what they know so they pick PCs because they are comfortable with them and are used to the downtime and fixing stuff. They simply do not understand that users need to get stuff done and want their computers to just work. I want a coffee break because I finished my tasks, not because I am waiting for IT to fix my computer or miss a coffee break because I have to fix it.
My Mac at home and at Work just work. Macs let you focus on your work. I am simply able to get more stuff done with Macs than PCs. So if any business is looking to get computers I would without question tell them to become a mac house if they want higher productivity and less downtime.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
Despite my commentary I am a very optimistic person who has worked since I was 16 (actually earlier if you count babysitting). I have worked hard all my life and with passion. I am more likely to be hard on myself more than any external source. I never blame anyone for my shortcomings. My success is that I have treated my work as a vehicle to add more and more skill sets to my toolbox which allows me the ability to be productive at everything I do.
I realize that I am fortunate. I am a middle-classed white person who has had access to an excellent education. My family spends money prudently and appreciates the virtue of doing so. We reinforce in our son the importance of education and gaining skills for the future.
No matter what happens my family will be just fine. Except for a small Pell Grant in the 1980s, I have never had to rely on direct government aid. We do not spend what we do not have.
But I am also an unapologetic liberal who rejects the notion that we are supposed to be some Horatio Algeresque lone-wolves in a libertarian state-of-nature paradise. We live in an interdependent and interconnected universe. No one succeeds alone in a vacuum. Everybody had someone take interest in them making all the difference. Everybody is presented with a set of circumstances that make it easier or more difficult to succeed because of their environment and genetics. Some people are more resilient than others depending on a wide variety of factors. How we are measured as a society is how well we treat those who are struggling, not how we enrich those who have every advantage.
The fact I am interested in investing is proof that I have confidence in the future and do not listen to the doomsayers. When I commentate on the socio-political-economic shortcomings of our country it is meant to illuminate and create change for the better.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
I think it is adorable when people replace history with their own narrative that conveniently fits with their own political philosophy but never happened.
There was a time up to the 1970s that most workers worked in family owned factories when unions had power to negotiate great benefits. Workers had pensions. Workers stayed with companies for 25-40 years when they could retire comfortably. Not only were workers taken care of to their deaths, but they were certain that their offspring could get out of high school and work where they did with the same benefits. So essentially, there did exist a cradle to grave benefits for manufacturing workers.
I remember having a debate about union workers getting such salaries of $25 an hour back in the eighties. The 1980s represented the beginning of a full frontal assault on unions and workers rights. The narrative emerged that unions were bad, and that we all should be entrepreneurs. They even revived the old victorian mythology of Horatio Alger, Jr. In these debates I would have I would point out the societal and economic value of the working class earning $25 an hour. This would allow purchase power to save, buy a house, and pay property taxes. This would allow for disposable income to buy toasters, appliances, cars, and other consumer goods which creates other jobs. When you have good wages, they can pay taxes that contribute to infrastructure improvements and programs that again create jobs.
Starting in the 1970s but accelerating in the 1980s, you see a decline in family owned businesses and farms as they get taken over by larger corporate entities that have no stake in the communities where the businesses they take over reside. When corporate owners make decisions from across the country they do so without any consideration of how it will effect the community unlike the family owned business.
By the mid to late 1980s, you see the shattering of the socio-economic contract between employer and employee. An employee became an entrepreneurial free-agent and the word was that if you stayed at one company more than 2-3 years something was wrong with you because it meant you were not confident to take your skills into the marketplace. Since the socio-economic contract had been severed, workers had to take on more and more expenses like health care, take less vacations, and struggle to find a way to save for the future.
Gone are the decent paying jobs right out of high school and this is responsible for the most pain in this economic downturn of 2008. This downturn badly hit people who did not finish high school and all other non-college graduates. The decent paying jobs for non-college graduates was construction or the trades, which were hard hit when commercial and residential were hard hit. It is hard for a construction worker or a person in the trades to go back to school and get a college education because it is no longer affordable for the working class to do without taking out debt that cannot afford to pay back.
The average amount of college debt in 2012 for each student is 27k. The more debt a student or graduate takes on means they put off marriage which is the best predictor of economic success, put off having kids, put off major purchases, etc. This is caused by the privatization of college loans from government loans which would be forgiven after time. Private loans are more expensive and live on until they are paid off with enormous interest that eats into the purchase power and makes people question if it is worth getting a college education even though only college graduates are being considered in this an employers' market.
This is a few of many facets that are happening to the working and middle class.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
The thing is the migrants who come here have skills. It is a skill to be able to go into the fields when it is 90-100 degrees and pick produce for Americans. It takes skill to butcher meat, be a nanny, do landscaping, and efficiently clean houses. When Georgia cracked down on migrants, produce rotted on the field because there were few Americans who wanted those jobs and those who tried didn't last but a day. Not only do these migrants do these jobs, they work multiple jobs. They work hard, and value education for their children. Many of the dreamers want to be doctors, lawyers, scientists, teachers and their bi-lingual skills are needed. This has been the immigrant story since the very beginning. Most of the first generation of immigrants have only backbreaking work ethic to offer which has value. It is the second generation that knows what hard work is that are motivated by that and their parents to achieve more.
The only time migrants are a burden is on the local or state level, when employers offer no health care or benefits and force that cost on local governments. Migrants worried about their status put off getting medical help until it is an emergency, while taking the most dangerous jobs that expose them to harmful chemicals. On a National level they pay into our Social Security system without being able to claim any of it. They keep the country from feeling the ill effects of an aging demographic like all other industrialized countries like Japan.
The best thing is to allow that second generation to thrive and get a great education and help them contribute to our society along with all their fellow students. We need to have more science, art, music (music has been proven to increase math skills), and give kids a vigorous well-rounded education. This is the only way to help the economy.
4 February 'Feel Good' Factors For Apple Fanatics [View article]
I have been wanting to buy Apple for a long time, but I do not want to buy it at 650-700. I waited till it got under 500, so right now I have 10 at average of 472.00. I intend to be long Apple because it is a quality company that I believe in. Some people think short term, but I take the long view.
"Apple absolutely has to make an iPhone with a bigger screen," iPhone 5 owner Henry Blodget declares. While Apple (AAPL +0.1%) insists on using relatively small display sizes to guarantee effective one-handed iPhone use, devices such as Samsung's Galaxy S III (4.8" display) make the iPhone 5 look "puny and sad in comparison." The iPhone 5's display size doesn't seem to be affecting its U.S. position much, as Strategy Analytics' numbers demonstrate, but international markets appear to be a different story. [View news story]
OMG! Forget investing in devices, we should be investing in man-purses! ;-)
Why Apple Is Still A Buy Even Though Amazon And Google Have Better Products [View article]
I am extremely happy with my iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Macbook Air but I haven't taken the time to share that happiness with Amazon. Maybe I should! I am betting there are a lot of people like me who rarely rate their Apple products because they didn't buy it on Amazon but bought it at an Apple store or somewhere else.
Apple: Market Hero At The Crossroads [View article]
As a mom, I can tell you that LeapFrog was okay, but if you put a Leapfrog and an iPad next to each other, any toddler or kid will pick the iPad. iPad is surprisingly intuitive and engaging in comparison to Leapfrog and it will grow with the child. We got Leapfrog before the iPad came out, but once we got the iPad 2, my son dumped Leapfrog. His school is piloting getting iPads in the schools and since my son is advanced in math, his teacher is letting him use an iPad to let him go ahead of the class and be challenged. Our iPad will probably be a tool he can use until it wears out. LeapFrog is incredibly antiquated and limited, especially for kids who figure out things quickly and go through the content pretty fast. iPads are perhaps the friendliest for kids, because they have Macs in schools, their friends have ipod touches, and Macs are a better experience for kids because the devices work out of the box, and do not require tweeking to get them going.
My first computer was a IBM 4341 mainframe and I have been a PC girl for long time, but I have grown to like Apple products and appreciate what they bring to the table. My workplace runs smoothly without a need for IT department on all MACs. My husband's work give out MacBooks for development. I have a Macbook Air, an Iphone 4, iPad 2, and an ipod. We got my mother-in-law the latest ipod touch. You know what is a WOW factor? Not having to reboot, or fiddle, or pretend that the instability of the windows operating system is just the new normal. Everyone I know thinks that Windows 8 is awful and I hear how people find ways to work their PC by working around this new interface. More affordable, hip, and trendy gets old. Good design, stability, and quality never goes out of style.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
Grow up and stop blaming the poor for your problems.
Stop scapegoating hard working migrants who were forced across the borders by the bad side-effects of globalism. These migrants have earned the ability to stay here because they do the hard work that Americans have shown not to be able or wanting to do. These migrants risk their lives to cross for basic survival.
Americans are in the a fix because they have clung to an economic philosophy that lead to the worst economic downturn since the great depression. We got screwed by credit default swaps, mortgage backed securities, and insane leveraging by people who used our money to fund that lunacy. We got screwed by the Supply-siders and anti-regulation zealots. Americans are screwed because they do not value education, critical thinking, and science which are the building blocks of innovation. Americans are not healthy because the health care system we want over single payer or Obama care, has NO INCENTIVES to make Americans healthy, because they make money keeping Americans alive by more and more expensive interventions. I can go all night listing all the causes of our nation's problems and never have to bring up poor people or migrants.
You save your outrage over someone getting cigarettes, while the very people who engineered our economic collapse are living in $25 million dollar homes with OUR money. You need to get some perspective.
Why Apple Is Still A Buy Even Though Amazon And Google Have Better Products [View article]
Not one of the companies listed as a potential Apple-killer has the loyalty that Apple does. Only Apple has truly innovated and brought to market products that are different than any that has come before. Google is the only company that has a track record of innovation as they innovated the modern search engine and a system of getting revenue from it. Google stock is too high to buy right now, in my modest opinion. Samsung and Microsoft - not so much.
4 February 'Feel Good' Factors For Apple Fanatics [View article]
http://bit.ly/WmnKO9
You should watch the entire interview because I think that it is not only network news that fails us as citizens, but financial news as investors. I especially like the clip Jon shows about how Cramer would talk down Apple stock.
"Apple absolutely has to make an iPhone with a bigger screen," iPhone 5 owner Henry Blodget declares. While Apple (AAPL +0.1%) insists on using relatively small display sizes to guarantee effective one-handed iPhone use, devices such as Samsung's Galaxy S III (4.8" display) make the iPhone 5 look "puny and sad in comparison." The iPhone 5's display size doesn't seem to be affecting its U.S. position much, as Strategy Analytics' numbers demonstrate, but international markets appear to be a different story. [View news story]
I also use my phone as a radio and work out to pandora. I certainly do not want anything larger.i watch movies on my iPad or my MacBook Air. I am not fond of e-readers. I prefer real books as an escape from the world of screens.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
If NAFTA wasn't enough to put down American manufacturing, WALMART put the last stake through its heart by going to remaining manufacturers and telling them if they do not move to China they will not work with them. Walmart is not the only force to squeeze out American manufacturing. There was a wide spread belief in the 1990s that workers will be freed from the drudgery of manufacturing jobs and become knowledge workers. This was part of the Internet boom as everyone and their uncle were becoming web designers/knowledge workers. The problem was that there was not enough jobs to absorb these new knowledge workers without creating a bubble of companies that were not making profit. In those days, there were companies whose sole goal was to get big enough so Microsoft could buy them out.
Meanwhile entire towns were decimated economically and physically as manufacturing closed and any business that supported manufacturing.
I completely agree that we need to make things here again and the pendulum is starting to swing back to making things in the US again as fuel costs make manufacturing overseas more costly. We need to be makers, but we need to do so with producing good paying jobs that would support a thriving middle class. We need to be the leader in renewable technology, water purification and storage, and waste recycling -- things the world needs and will need in the future. We need to make investments in these things and in education.
We can solve the problem twofold: cutting off tax benefits and trade preferences to companies that send jobs and capital overseas, and give preferences and tax benefits to companies that manufacture here. Companies can still put jobs and capital overseas, but they do not get help from the public coffers or protections. If you want to be a global company you have to find benefits elsewhere, but if you want the stability of being an American company you have to contribute to the system that makes it so via court system, government R&D, transportation system, the education system, and infrastructure improvements that make commerce possible.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
As someone who was born when LBJ was President and was politically engaged at an early age, I remember a lot from the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, the aughts all the way to the present. There are a lot of holes that the defenders of supply side conveniently leave out.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
Apple's Growing Slice Of The Enterprise Market Should Offset Other Concerns [View article]
The resistance you hear are from those who stake their livelihoods on being PC experts. IT departments go with what they know so they pick PCs because they are comfortable with them and are used to the downtime and fixing stuff. They simply do not understand that users need to get stuff done and want their computers to just work. I want a coffee break because I finished my tasks, not because I am waiting for IT to fix my computer or miss a coffee break because I have to fix it.
My Mac at home and at Work just work. Macs let you focus on your work. I am simply able to get more stuff done with Macs than PCs. So if any business is looking to get computers I would without question tell them to become a mac house if they want higher productivity and less downtime.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
I realize that I am fortunate. I am a middle-classed white person who has had access to an excellent education. My family spends money prudently and appreciates the virtue of doing so. We reinforce in our son the importance of education and gaining skills for the future.
No matter what happens my family will be just fine. Except for a small Pell Grant in the 1980s, I have never had to rely on direct government aid. We do not spend what we do not have.
But I am also an unapologetic liberal who rejects the notion that we are supposed to be some Horatio Algeresque lone-wolves in a libertarian state-of-nature paradise. We live in an interdependent and interconnected universe. No one succeeds alone in a vacuum. Everybody had someone take interest in them making all the difference. Everybody is presented with a set of circumstances that make it easier or more difficult to succeed because of their environment and genetics. Some people are more resilient than others depending on a wide variety of factors. How we are measured as a society is how well we treat those who are struggling, not how we enrich those who have every advantage.
The fact I am interested in investing is proof that I have confidence in the future and do not listen to the doomsayers. When I commentate on the socio-political-economic shortcomings of our country it is meant to illuminate and create change for the better.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
There was a time up to the 1970s that most workers worked in family owned factories when unions had power to negotiate great benefits. Workers had pensions. Workers stayed with companies for 25-40 years when they could retire comfortably. Not only were workers taken care of to their deaths, but they were certain that their offspring could get out of high school and work where they did with the same benefits. So essentially, there did exist a cradle to grave benefits for manufacturing workers.
I remember having a debate about union workers getting such salaries of $25 an hour back in the eighties. The 1980s represented the beginning of a full frontal assault on unions and workers rights. The narrative emerged that unions were bad, and that we all should be entrepreneurs. They even revived the old victorian mythology of Horatio Alger, Jr. In these debates I would have I would point out the societal and economic value of the working class earning $25 an hour. This would allow purchase power to save, buy a house, and pay property taxes. This would allow for disposable income to buy toasters, appliances, cars, and other consumer goods which creates other jobs. When you have good wages, they can pay taxes that contribute to infrastructure improvements and programs that again create jobs.
Starting in the 1970s but accelerating in the 1980s, you see a decline in family owned businesses and farms as they get taken over by larger corporate entities that have no stake in the communities where the businesses they take over reside. When corporate owners make decisions from across the country they do so without any consideration of how it will effect the community unlike the family owned business.
By the mid to late 1980s, you see the shattering of the socio-economic contract between employer and employee. An employee became an entrepreneurial free-agent and the word was that if you stayed at one company more than 2-3 years something was wrong with you because it meant you were not confident to take your skills into the marketplace.
Since the socio-economic contract had been severed, workers had to take on more and more expenses like health care, take less vacations, and struggle to find a way to save for the future.
Gone are the decent paying jobs right out of high school and this is responsible for the most pain in this economic downturn of 2008. This downturn badly hit people who did not finish high school and all other non-college graduates. The decent paying jobs for non-college graduates was construction or the trades, which were hard hit when commercial and residential were hard hit. It is hard for a construction worker or a person in the trades to go back to school and get a college education because it is no longer affordable for the working class to do without taking out debt that cannot afford to pay back.
The average amount of college debt in 2012 for each student is 27k. The more debt a student or graduate takes on means they put off marriage which is the best predictor of economic success, put off having kids, put off major purchases, etc. This is caused by the privatization of college loans from government loans which would be forgiven after time. Private loans are more expensive and live on until they are paid off with enormous interest that eats into the purchase power and makes people question if it is worth getting a college education even though only college graduates are being considered in this an employers' market.
This is a few of many facets that are happening to the working and middle class.
Can The Stock Market Continue To Go Up When The Middle Class Is Suffering? [View article]
The only time migrants are a burden is on the local or state level, when employers offer no health care or benefits and force that cost on local governments. Migrants worried about their status put off getting medical help until it is an emergency, while taking the most dangerous jobs that expose them to harmful chemicals. On a National level they pay into our Social Security system without being able to claim any of it. They keep the country from feeling the ill effects of an aging demographic like all other industrialized countries like Japan.
The best thing is to allow that second generation to thrive and get a great education and help them contribute to our society along with all their fellow students. We need to have more science, art, music (music has been proven to increase math skills), and give kids a vigorous well-rounded education. This is the only way to help the economy.
4 February 'Feel Good' Factors For Apple Fanatics [View article]
"Apple absolutely has to make an iPhone with a bigger screen," iPhone 5 owner Henry Blodget declares. While Apple (AAPL +0.1%) insists on using relatively small display sizes to guarantee effective one-handed iPhone use, devices such as Samsung's Galaxy S III (4.8" display) make the iPhone 5 look "puny and sad in comparison." The iPhone 5's display size doesn't seem to be affecting its U.S. position much, as Strategy Analytics' numbers demonstrate, but international markets appear to be a different story. [View news story]
Why Apple Is Still A Buy Even Though Amazon And Google Have Better Products [View article]
Apple: Market Hero At The Crossroads [View article]
iPads are perhaps the friendliest for kids, because they have Macs in schools, their friends have ipod touches, and Macs are a better experience for kids because the devices work out of the box, and do not require tweeking to get them going.
My first computer was a IBM 4341 mainframe and I have been a PC girl for long time, but I have grown to like Apple products and appreciate what they bring to the table. My workplace runs smoothly without a need for IT department on all MACs. My husband's work give out MacBooks for development. I have a Macbook Air, an Iphone 4, iPad 2, and an ipod. We got my mother-in-law the latest ipod touch. You know what is a WOW factor? Not having to reboot, or fiddle, or pretend that the instability of the windows operating system is just the new normal.
Everyone I know thinks that Windows 8 is awful and I hear how people find ways to work their PC by working around this new interface. More affordable, hip, and trendy gets old. Good design, stability, and quality never goes out of style.