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Student Loans–Education by Doctor Evil

Student loans–yet another thing I’m against. I’m not against the fact that they exist, mind you, I just don’t think think they are a good idea for me or my posterity. You can do what you want, but Katherine Coble and several other people agree with me.

I still think that the student loans I took out were some of the biggest financial mistakes of my life.

And from the comments, Jim Voorhies adds this.

Being able to do what you love is the goal all of us should have. Knowing what that was at a time early enough in life to be able to mesh it with your degree is remarkable.

It’s totally contrary to the norm, but I think many 18 year olds would be a lot better off if they didn’t go to college right away. They’d be better off getting a job doing something, getting their partying out of the way, learning what it means to have real bills, saving some money (for school) and figuring out what they really want to do. It would have been good for me.

Maybe a good rule of thumb is to have two of these three things in place:
1) Absolutely sure of what you want to study
2) Can pay for it without loans
3) Have done enough real labor to know you don’t want to wash dishes for the rest of your life.

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A Question For Newspapers and Their Readers

Why are stock quotes still printed in newspapers? Are newspapers paid to print them, or do they print them only because they have always printed them? Is it just filler information?

It seems to me that if you are relying on a newspaper to tell you what happened in the markets the day before, you probably aren’t making as much money as you could/should. It’s just raw data. There isn’t any analysis or there, just numbers

I’m sure there is a really good reason that I’m overlooking. I just don’t get it.

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No Apartment For You!

A San Antonio man feels he’s been discriminated against because an apartment complex didn’t want to rent to him based on the fact that he has lots of tattoos.

Frankel e-mailed us a statement saying his apartment complexes do, in fact, “reject prospective tenants who have… tattoos exposed on the neck, head, hands and wrists, or large tattoos that cover over 40% of the lower or upper arm.”

Frankel says, “We do not discriminate. The above applies to persons of any race, color, gender, etc.”

I have to side with the apartment complex on this one. Dude, you CHOSE to get ink up and down your arm. That was a market decision. If you don’t like it, go buy your own apartment building and require all applicants to have a sleeve of tattoos before you’ll rent to them.

Think that will work? Probably not–the market won’t support it.

If they were denying people based on the fact that they have large birthmarks it would be different, but c’mon.

The Carrillos were also upset that the manager refused to refund their full $70 application fee. But mostly, they feel the policy is discriminatory.

So give them their money back and let them dry their tears with the check.

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Canuck Buck Catches Up

Well, the Looney has finally caught up to the dollar. What should we expect from this? What is the most likely outcome–pandemonium or bedlam? Sorry, I just like using the same phrases as wrestling announcers. Surely we should be in a panic. I mean, Canada’s dollar just caught up to ours. Before today, they were a third world country, right?

This whole situation makes me glad that I took trips to Canadia with Billymac, Halfacre, and the Shippensburg Old Boys while the dollar was still riding high. Ottawa, and The Bare Fax especially, would have been a lot more expensive with today’s exchange rate. Yet somehow, it’d still be worth every penny.

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Now THIS is Funny

SVD at KTownLowDown has a hilarious list of insurance policies we could all use. I think he is actually outlining the talking points for the 2012 Democratic Presidential Campaign.

Ugly Insurance. There’s nothing worse than standing in the Food Insurance Card Issue line and having to look at a bunch of ugly people. If we have abortion on demand, we should have Botox on demand…they may already have this in CA

Life Insurance. This is not typical life insurance, where if you die your benefactors get some money, no this is ‘I Screwed-Up My Life and I Need the Government to Bail Me Out Insurance.’ By far it has the longest title, but is the most self explanatory.

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Warning: This May Offend You

But if it does it is only because you don’t get it. It’s actually pretty hilarious. It’s a Bloomberg article written by a bitter hedge fund manager (aren’t they all?). Well, not really. But it’s written from that point of view, with all the classic claims of being victimized adjusted appropriately.

I’ve grown out of touch with “poor culture.”

Hard to say when this happened; it might have been when I stopped flying commercial. Or maybe it was when I gave up the bleacher seats and got the suite.

LOL! And this…

Transporting entire neighborhoods of poor people to upper Manhattan and lower Connecticut might seem impractical. It’s not: Mexico does this sort of thing routinely. And in the long run it might be for the good of poor people. If the consequences were more serious, maybe they wouldn’t stay poor.

I’d recommend reading the whole thing.

Thanks to Reason for highlighting this.

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You Don’t Really Believe This Do You?

Bush to Outline Aid to Mortgage Holders

Offering federal aid for strapped mortgage holders, President Bush is proposing to help hundreds of thousands of borrowers hard hit by the housing slump.

Let me rephrase this headline so that it has a glimmer of truth to it:

President Bush Wants to Make Sure Banks Get Paid On Stupid Loans They Made To People Who Could Not Afford To Pay

Of course, no one would ever throw their support behind bailing out large corporations who make bad decisions. The solution? Make it all about the little guy. That way everybody wins–Democrats and Republicans alike. That is everybody, right?

Well, everybody except for people who pay federal taxes and don’t overextend themselves. These are people whose financial role models are their grandparents, reasonable people who don’t buy what they can’t afford, not the federal government who spends as if it can just print more money any time it…

Oh, wait.

Nod to Rogel for alerting me to this!

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Democrat Has Some Great Advice For Republicans

Sharon Cobb offers some free advice that should be obvious to any thinking person, but obviously isn’t obvious to the GOP.

Y’all have got to get back to being Barry Goldwater Republicans and stay out of personal lives of consenting adults instead of trying to make what consenting adults do a political issue for you. It’s shortsighted.

Yep. You’d better believe that the GOP is missing out on a lot of folks in the late 20s and early 30s who would prefer to have the gov’ment out of our lives. Some are naive enough to opt for the liberal alternative to what is now being called conservative (although I don’t see the difference anymore) and giving up an equally important freedom by letting the gov’ment into their wallets. Big mistake.

Others, like me, are turned off by the whole situation and pushed into supporting third parties that have no chance of winning on principle.

Ron Paul has given me hope that the Republicans can actually turn this thing around and get back to basics. The longer he stays in the race, the more people will hear his message, and the further the Republicans will be pushed towards staying out of people’s lives. At the very least, they could finally have something to actually debate about when they face the Democrats. Hell, I may even finally vote for one.

Thanks to Michael Silence for pointing this one out.

** UPDATE **
A related comment in an unrelated post at TheLibertyPapers

They both believe in big government, they simply piss our money away on different issues. Both groups’ policies will eventually lead to economic disaster.

Well put by UCrawford

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Big Hole in the Universe

From Space.com…

The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it’s also strangely empty of the mysterious “dark matter” that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.

1. What human behavior caused this?
2. How long has Bush been covering it up?
3. How much money have the oil companies made exploiting it?
4. What is Hillary’s (Obama’s, Romney’s, Rudy’s, etc) plan to save us from it while still keeping taxes low for hard working American families?

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10,000 Reasons Not To Have More Money

I came upon this story by way of Reason. I’m no fan of the ACLU, mostly because they are very selective about which civil liberties they choose to defend, but I have to be cheering for them in this case, where a truck driver was forced to turn over $23,700 for no other reason than he had an amount of cash greater than $10,000. No drugs, no drug paraphernalia, no probable cause.

DEA agents told Prieto he would receive a notice of federal proceedings to permanently forfeit the money within 30 days and that to get it back, he’d have to prove it was his and did not come from illegal drug sales.

Wasn’t the whole issue of search and seizure addressed a while back? At least that’s what I remember from my learnin’ in public schools.

The lawsuit said Prieto does not like banks and customarily carries his savings as cash.

That’s great and all, but the fact is, he doesn’t have to explain it. According to the Houston Chronicle article, he was actually nice enough to tell the police that he had the money and give them permission to search his vehicle. He could just as easily refused to allow them to search without any probable cause. That’s what I would do.

“The government took Mr. Prieto’s money as surely as if he had been robbed on a street corner at night,” Simonson said. “In fact, being robbed might have been better. At least then the police would have treated him as the victim of a crime instead of as a perpetrator.”

The scary part is, I’ve transported over $10k in cash (obtained legally, btw) on at least two occasions. Good thing I didn’t have a break light out. I’ll definitely be watching my back if my dreams of winning a big poker tournament ever come to fruition. It would suck to have it confiscated before I was able to pay the outrageous taxes on my winnings.