This is what you call “making the news”. Apparently, two local news stations sent mobile crews to cover illegal drag racing. Obviously, the news vans would have to participate in the activity! Guess they forgot that we’re now in an age of citizen news and that the footage would appear on YouTube before their story made it to the six o’clock news…Luckily, no one was hurt.

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Image Credit: NY Times
If you played Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) or were exposed to people who played D&D, read the chart above from the NY Times, it will explain a lot. It certainly hit home for me. Enjoy! (Make sure to click the image to enlarge it, the snap above is just a small subset.)

Set aside this particular election cycle and its candidates. Consider that Michigan’s Democrats (along with Florida) decided to move their primary date earlier in the cycle without concurrence from the National Committee. Indeed, the DNC said to both Michigan and Florida, if you do that, your delegates will not be seated at the convention. Ironically, the point to move the primaries forward was to make the states more relevant in the primary process.

Well, the states moved the primaries anyway and the DNC seems to have followed through with the consequences of not having the primaries in these two states count, although, that’s where the Dumb Michigan Democrats come in. In the state, the Democratic leadership, the very same people who got them into this mess, are now touting a “do over”. They’re now working to get the Michigan Legislature to approve new rules that would allow a second primary which would be privately funded to happen before June 10. Florida seems to be exploring similar tactics, but isn’t as far along.

Without boring readers about everything that needs to be done to pull this off, it looks like a long shot. However, even entertaining this notion is rank stupidity. The states knew what was at stake, they acted in the manner that triggered the consequences, they need to own those consequences, learn from them and not repeat them. Set aside the candidates and what’s actually happening in the campaigns, let’s think about the precedent that would be set. It’s not a good one and Michigan Democrats ought to be intelligent enough to understand that.

This morning while driving to Palo Alto, I heard about the latest mortgage meltdown victim, a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group, where there is apparently a $21B exposure. Taking a step back from the macro economic view, I have to wonder where the business people are in all this? After all, there is live tangible property with value backing these securities. Why aren’t these institutions working with borrowers to renegotiate the terms of the loans where payment will happen vs. simply say “we quit, we’ll never get the value out, so we’ll just foreclose and write-it-off.”

In some cases, the value of the loan is wildly separated from the intrinsic value of the property and people (lenders and borrowers) made poor decisions to enable themselves to get into that situation. However, in most cases, I have to believe that if the value of the home and the balance of the loan are within 20% of one another, there must be a way to negotiate a debt servicing scheme if only the lender and the borrower are willing. And since lenders don’t wish to become brokers, that’s in their interest (and oh, by the way, cash flow is happening for them too) and for borrowers, who wants to lose their home?

The answer may be that loans are now packaged and resold from originators to servicers in groups of loans. Since they’re now “financial instruments” it’s perhaps so abstract that people are unwilling or unable to reduce the problem to a single lender/borrower situation for solution. But I have to believe everyone would be better served if a little business and common sense were to break out around this issue.

Last night, I was in Palo Alto for an unrelated event and bumped into a real, live Tesla on the street. Apparently, there was some sort of Tesla party at the Blue Chalk Cafe – it was quite the event. But it was nothing compared to the car, wow. It’s compact, it’s sleek, and we want one. For your viewing enjoyment, here’s a picture of a live production Tesla Coupe.