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.

Slum Your Way Into Riches

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As a younger man, I truly believed that those individuals who didn’t have the drive and intellect to hack it in the world of free enterprise were relegated to low-paying, boring jobs in government. Whether city, state, or federal, I figured the dullest among us would wind up with a direct-deposit paycheck from some bureaucracy and just slum their lives away with a steady diet of paperwork, fast food, and watching tee-vee at night.

How wrong I was! The City of Palo Alto makes clear that it’s ME who is the moron and the clerks in city hall that are banking coin! What a fool I was.

highpaid

And I know we’re all supposed to get misty-eyed at these “civil servants”, especially police officers and firefighters, who hang out at the station house risk their lives every day on our behalf, but I’m sorry, when a fuckin’ firefighter is getting a third of a million bucks a year, the world’s gone wrong.

Out of the Way

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As usual, Fed Day gave us quite a ride. The big news was that our friends at the FOMC plan to give us another 3 rate hikes this year instead of 4. Guess how many Fed meetings there are with accompanying press conferences left this year? Three. How about that.

My stomach went into a knot the moment the news came out, because everything – – EVERYTHING – – went against me big time. It didn’t last though. Just imagine how many people were short the utilities and got stopped out, all because of a stupid, multi-second Fed spike.

XLUS (more…)