Bubbles Can Be Anywhere

As big a fan of investing in real estate as I am, I am still fully aware that feeding frenzies can happen with real estate, driving up prices beyond common sense, just as happened with dot-com stocks. I have seen it happen before and know that it is currently occurring in parts of the country. Any investment should be evaluated with a cold emotionless calculator.

Don’t Ask Me

I just learned that the best online question & answer site, AskMe.com, is shutting down its consumer section. It came as a complete surprise to me. However, they have been nice enough to provide the shut down schedule. No more new questions or answers will be accepted after November 1. All of the previously posted stuff will be removed as of November 25.

You have over a month to check out the very useful info that is still up on the site, including the hundreds of answers that I have provided over the past two and a half years. The AskMe people say they will be providing a means for us experts to download our entire contents after November 10. If it works out, I will archive my content on one of my other websites.

KMK

Pot Calling…

If this isn’t hypocritical, I don’t know what is. It is castigating investment banks and their analysts for refusing to provide unflattering reports on their customers. This has been a very real conflict of interest. However, all forms of media, including newspapers, magazines, TV, and radio, have had the exact same kind of conflicts, where news coverage has been altered to please or avoid offending advertisers. To take this holier than thou attitude is ridiculous. Newspapers have been catering to advertiser whims since the beginning of newspapers.

Hired Guns

While the first reaction may be bad to the news that IRS is considering enlisting the services of outside debt collectors to bring in past due taxes, I see it a little differently. Unless the private companies are going to be deputized with IRS’s awesome powers, it will actually be better for taxpayers to deal with them than with the Gestapo-like IRS, who have been allowed to do anything to take money from people, including several things that are unconstitutional and illegal for anyone else to do.

KMK