content analysis

Mark Cuban offers a private alternative to the government bailout.  He’s in for $50 million. I’m no economist, but it doesn’t sound like a half bad idea.

Side-note: This past winter, I frequently used the tag “debt crisis,” suggesting that I thought the crisis would be limited to the issue of housing debt.  How quaint.  I am now using the tag “financial crisis,” but I’m contemplating upgrading to “all out shit storm.”

After yesterday’s entry on enormous homes and bad neighborhoods, I couldn’t resist posting this poem (tip of the hat to NPR’s Writer’s Almanac):

Slum Lords

by John Updike

The superrich make lousy neighbors—
they buy a house and tear it down
and build another, twice as big, and leave.
They’re never there; they own so many
other houses, each demands a visit.
Entire neighborhoods called fashionable,
bustling with servants and masters, such as
Louisburg Square in Boston or Bel Air in L.A.,
are districts now like Wall Street after dark
or Tombstone once the silver boom went bust.
The essence of superrich is absence.
They like to demonstrate they can afford
to be elsewhere. Don’t let them in.
Their riches form a kind of poverty.