Probably the best place to start is here: "If you're not petrified, you're not paying attention." Commercial real estate is the next shoe that will drop unless the Obamessiah continues his attempt to re-write, by holy writ, a century of financial law so he can destroy the pension funds that hold GM and Chrysler bonds (and whatever other companies he decides to elect himself CEO of), in which case the colapse of private and public pensions will beat out commercial real estate:
Meanwhile, banks continue to fold even though we've been told the banking crisis has been solved. And of course, that puts the FDIC about one major bank failure from a big government bailout.
And speaking of bailouts and pensions, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is starting to drown in red ink from having to take over the pensions of all the failing companies out there. They are currently $33 billion-plus underwater without GM or Chrysler's pensions. I'm pretty sure if Fiat agrees to buy Chrysler, they won't be taking on the pension obligations, and any restructuring of GM that doesn't include the elimination of its pension obligations will simply be rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. (GM has two retirees drawing a pension for every current employee; the average GM unionized 30-and-out pensioner will draw a pension for many more years than they worked). Which puts the PBGC in line for a big government bailout soon.
And just in case there is anyone that still thinks the current disaster was anyone's fault other than our own, read the story of someone who should have known better.
One reason I love the internet is that I have access to British papers. This is from a review of the Honda Insight in the Sunday Times:
...It’s terrible. Biblically terrible. Possibly the worst new car money can buy. It’s the first car I’ve ever considered crashing into a tree, on purpose, so I didn’t have to drive it any more.
...The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.
So you’re sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you’re doing only 23mph because that’s about the top speed, and you’re thinking things can’t get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit.
Because the Honda has two motors, one that runs on petrol and one that runs on batteries, it is more expensive to make than a car that has one. But since the whole point of this car is that it could be sold for less than Toyota’s Smugmobile, the engineers have plainly peeled the suspension components to the bone. The result is a ride that beggars belief.
Take the time to go read the whole thing; it will make your day. Then ask yourself the last time you saw anything like that in any of the lap-dogs-of-the-auto-makers American automobile press.
And for the obligatory HCHSBTSPODTUTBGTUTHADHOI part of the post: Renewable Energy - Our Downfall? is a well-written summary of where all the renewable technologies are and where they are likely to be in the near term. The short version: the only renewable with any hope of providing baseline power is nuclear. That's not to say that there aren't places where wind or tide or solar electric or solar hot water or cow poop can't provide a supplement to that base power; they can certainly do that. Some of those are also good choices for remote areas where the grid is too far away. So, yea; continue to develop those technologies, by all means. But for baseline grid power, we have two choices: coal and nuclear. Aside from the global-warming non-issue, coal has serious issues inherent in its use, which leaves nuclear. But the tree-humpers have ruled both of those out by regulating nuclear off the table and now taxing coal to the breaking point with Gore's Cap And Trade And Make Me Richer Than God scam. Hope everyone enjoys crapping in a hole in the ground and spending every waking minute trying not to starve to death. Everyone that is, except Al Gore and Friends.
Ah, it's great to be back.
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