Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
GATA Communication Received (by Gary Tanashian)
[GATA, for those Slopers who may not already know stands for Gold Anti-Trust Action Commitee, AKA a Tin Foil Hat factory –GT]
I received something yesterday by way of a friend, from GATA, talking about "frustrated precious metals investors" and "bankster ambushes on the gold and silver markets". The article talks about market participants' "sense of hopelessness" about change with regard to the "Western financial crime syndicate" and the "Empire of the Wall Street Vampires".
I then stopped reading.
Surreal Headline of the Day
My Dinner with Andre
I don't go to the movies to be entertained. I go to be transformed. Sometimes it happens, and when it does, I watch the movie again and again. I guess I'm a person who feels he needs a lot of transformation.
One of my favorite movies of all time is 1981's My Dinner with Andre. I've easily watched it a dozen times. I was pleased and surprised to see it available for free in its entirety on YouTube. I wanted to share this with you. Even if you don't want to take the time to watch it, at least listen to it in the background while you're doing other things. I find it to be captivating and, in places, heartbreaking.
Schiff for Brains
I've seen a lot of chatter lately about the interview with Andrew Schiff in which he complained about how hard it was to get by on just $350,000 a year. The "smaller bonuses" environment on Wall Street is hitting the well-off in ways that the middle class finds, shall we say, unsympathetic. There are, last time I checked, 1,559 comments on this one story, pretty much all of which tell Mr. Schiff to get stuffed.
Schiff, who bears a disturbing resemblance to Judd Hirsch in Ordinary People, was not the only suffering 1% to be interviewed. Regarding another individual, the article states: "Scheiner said he spends about $500 a month to park one of his two Audis in a garage and at least $7,500 a year each for memberships at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester and a gun club in upstate New York. A labradoodle named Zelda and a rescued bichon frise, Duke, cost $17,000 a year, including food, health care, boarding and a daily dog-walker who charges $17 each per outing, he said."
I actually sort of understand what the people interviewed are trying to say: once you get used to paying for a certain lifestyle (private school tuitions, nice cars, a vacation home, a gardener, etc.) it all adds up to a pretty big figure that needs to be covered each year. I have a good income that most of the U.S. would think of as pretty healthy, but believe me, I'm always worried about money. If I were a single man living on his own, I'd be living like a king (or, more accurately, I'd be able to save about 80% of my income, since it really doesn't cost that much for me to survive on my own). But these days, tuition to elementary school for just one of my children is literally four times what I paid going to a private college each year. And that's just one of many expenses.
For those of you out there who are pulling down big salaries but have seen their massive bonuses trimmed down to simply very big bonuses, here's my tip: don't go near a microphone. It's really not going to do you any good.
