Global Financial Crisis (Was: Subprime Meltdown)

[Fusion_power]

I live within my means. I have 1 credit card which I use to run my business and I pay it off monthly. I have a mortgage on some land east of town, I intend to build a house and retire there. I work from home so the amount of gas I consume is minimal by comparison with most people around me. I am currently saving 10% of my income. I keep some chickens to produce eggs, I grow a huge garden that easily makes all the veggies I can eat. I even sell several hundred dollars of seed from my garden each fall. My day job is as an engineer designing telephone offices so I am well paid.

How come I still feel broke?

DarJones

[R.D. Silverman]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

I live within my means. I have 1 credit card which I use to run my business and I pay it off monthly. I have a mortgage on some land east of town, I intend to build a house and retire there. I work from home so the amount of gas I consume is minimal by comparison with most people around me. I am currently saving 10% of my income. I keep some chickens to produce eggs, I grow a huge garden that easily makes all the veggies I can eat. I even sell several hundred dollars of seed from my garden each fall. My day job is as an engineer designing telephone offices so I am well paid.

How come I still feel broke?

DarJones

Wait until you have to put several kids through college.... You will learn
what "feel broke" really means.

[wblipp]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

I live within my means. ... How come I still feel broke?

My life story, too. We feel broke when allow our expectations to be set by people surrounding us who do not live within their means.

[Jwb52z]

Originally Posted by Fusion_power

My day job is as an engineer designing telephone offices so I am well paid.

I don't want to derail the thread, but I feel compelled to ask what a "telphone office" is exactly. Thank you.

[wblipp]

Originally Posted by Jwb52z

ask what a "telephone office" is exactly.

Wikipedia has it more succinctly than I could:

In the field of telecommunications, a telephone exchange or telephone switch is a system of electronic components that connects telephone calls. A central office is the physical building used to house inside plant equipment including telephone switches, which make telephone calls "work" in the sense of making connections and relaying the speech information.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange

There's a lot of "inside plant" that needs power and connections to other inside plant, as well as outside connections to the outside for the individual phone lines and trunks to connect to the rest of the world. Also a big battery plant and a generator for emergency power.

[Fusion_power]

That you even ask what a telephone office is speaks loudly of how effective they really are. When you want to communicate with someone, you pick up your telephone or cellphone and dial a number. You have no idea of the millions of dollars invested in copper and fiber cables, electronic equipment, batteries, generators, and even the buildings themselves. They have sunk so far into the background and do their job so effectively that you never even realize they are present. Consider that a telephone system must deliver 99.99999% reliability. Downtime is calculated in seconds per year.

Now contrast this with your DSL service. My DSL goes down an average of 4 times a day though it is usually no more than a couple of minutes until it comes back up. If a telephone office operated that poorly, it would be hauled to the junkyard and replaced.

Of all the bugaboos that can happen, taking a major switching system down is one of the worst. 30 minutes of downtime gets you a chance to explain in triplicate to the FCC exactly why you did whatever you did. The worst I ever had was a 26 minute outage at 4:00 a.m. in the morning in a major tandem office. It was caused by someone disconnecting one pair of wires.... the wrong ones obviously.

If you make a call on your phone or cellphone, it goes to a local switching station, then to a regional system, then to a long distance carrier, then perhaps to an international gateway before reversing course down to a carrier, regional, and then local system to terminate to whomever you called.

I've been working in the communications industry for 27 years and have been an engineer for 11 years. I've written software that is deployed around the world, and I'm not even a software designer. I work from home using a DSL line and several telephones for communications. When I get up in the morning, I sit down on my couch or maybe lie back on my bed with a computer on a table, or I might even work at my desk if I feel like it. The good part is that I get paid very well for my ability and expertise. It takes 10 years to train a person to the level of skill required to do my job.

DarJones - who knows that wblipp has a similar background

Back on topic, the market is showing obvious signs that it does not know which way to go. up 1000 poiints, down 1000 points, go sideways a while, who knows where it goes tomorrow.

Wait until you have to put several kids through college.... You will learn
what "feel broke" really means.

My oldest daughter gets out of college in 6 months. I have 3 more with the youngest due to start in less than a year. Believe me, I DO know what it feels like.

We feel broke when allow our expectations to be set by people surrounding us

I set my own standards and expectations to a far greater degree than anyone else I've ever met. I'm happy with a roof over my head, some jeans to wear, and a beat up truck to drive.

[markr]

It's interesting they're still called telephone offices. I think of offices as places where people do desk-based jobs. I assume telephone office is from when they had rooms full of people switching the calls. I've only heard their contemporary replacements called telephone exchanges. Obviously, I don't work in the industry. Thanks for the fascinating background, DarJones!

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by markr

It's interesting they're still called telephone offices. I think of offices as places where people do desk-based jobs. I assume telephone office is from when they had rooms full of people switching the calls. I've only heard their contemporary replacements called telephone exchanges. Obviously, I don't work in the industry.

[tangent]I know where my local office is and the one in my old home town. I also know where the last hand switched board was in my general area and when (1977). Then again, a relative used to work for the Bell system. And another was a PBX operator[/tangent]

[xilman]

Just got back from a week's vacation and read this:

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Consumer spending is falling off a cliff, driving prices for just about everything but consumer staples lower. That`s deflation, folks. And once the negative feedback loop really gets rolling, it`s much more dangerous than inflation, which can be reined in - not without some short-term pain, mind you - simply by jacking up interest rates and reining in the growth of money supply, the way former Fed chair Paul Volcker in the 70s.

Perhaps technical language has changed over the last few weeks, but I always thought that negative feedback drove a perturbed signal back towards the previous behaviour, and that positive feedback led either to runaway growth or to oscillations.

Paul

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by xilman

Perhaps technical language has changed over the last few weeks, but I always thought that negative feedback drove a perturbed signal back towards the previous behaviour, and that positive feedback led either to runaway growth or to oscillations.

See? Ernst really needs that vacation now!

[xilman]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

See? Ernst really needs that vacation now!

I've had some sleep since my posting and have since realised there is an interpretation under which Ernst's statement is correct.

If he was referring not to the process of reaching a deflationary state but a stable state reached after a period of deflation then, indeed, a negative feedback would act to maintain that stability.

We'll see which Ernst meant after he returns.


Paul