Search Results for: dollar tree

Money Maps

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I was driving one of my kids over to a friend’s house the other day. The destination was Atherton, which is adjacent to Palo Alto and a very rich town. The houses tend to be 10, 15, 20 million dollars, or much more, and the lots are vastly larger than those in neighboring communities.

As I was driving there, what was striking to me was the map on my display. Where I was driving, the streets were very far apart, whereas just on the other side of a particular road (the proverbial “wrong side of the tracks“) the density was far greater. Here is what I mean:

Athertonmap
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The Curse of Abundance

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We are in the midst of daily events that would have been unimaginable only weeks ago. There is a particular aspect of the current environment I’d like to write about, and I’d like to approach it by way of a personal anecdote from many years ago.

Early in 1999, I had managed to get my little company, Prophet Financial Systems, on its feet again from a near-death experience from a few years before. The company had always been very thinly funded – – its initial starting capital was all of $3,000! – – and I had slowly and carefully nursed it from something I ran out of a spare room in my house into a real company with a real office and about a dozen employees.

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Inquire Within

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I guess when an entire nation has employed so much of its citizenry as cocktail waitresses and retail clerks, none of this can be a surprise.

Over the past ten years, the monthly jobs report morphed into something that was actually kind of boring. In recent months, whether the unemployment rate was 3.4% or 3.3% became sort of drab, and the only question each month was has many hundreds of thousands of jobs serving entrees at Denny’s had been created.

This has all changed, for obvious reasons:

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