From a great "Sports Guy" column today....
Welcome to the NBA's world!!! Teams are locked into swollen contracts that suddenly make no sense, whether it's non-franchise players making franchise money (Vince, T-Mac, Shaq, Brand, Baron, Jermaine O'Neal, Dalembert, Okafor, etc.) or overpaid role players making six to 600 times what they should be making (Marko Jaric, Nazr Mohammed, Larry Hughes, Radmanovic, Mo Peterson, etc.). In the irony of ironies, the league finally learned something that fans knew all along -- nobody was buying a ticket to see the likes of Luol Deng, Gerald Wallace or Corey Maggette, much less Tim Thomas or Andres Nocioni. With the cap/tax thresholds slipping, teams can't dodge them by dumping overpaid mistakes like when Phoenix bribed Seattle to take Kurt Thomas' contract and two No. 1 picks last year. Someone In The Know told me that 20 of the 30 NBA teams will lose money this season … and we haven't even come close to hitting rock bottom yet. Just wait until next season.
FINALLY! some sanity might just fall on the sports world. When a very reasonable fan who makes a reasonable amount of money per year, has to pay $300 for decent seats to a regular season game for his tiny family of three, something is totally scewed and desperately needs to swing back to reality. I think it's high time we have a serious attitude adjustment for all atheletes. $60M contracts for slightly above average players is way beyond foolish. For years now I have refused to pay the ridiculous prices to see a game live. I'm hopeful in the next few years things will change dramitically and I'll be able to go see a game with my wife and son for $100 or so.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Sunday, February 22, 2009
In Awe of the Universe
The Internet rocks for finding answers to what seem like basic questions but most people probably have no clue as to the answer (myself included).
Things I learned this morning....
The sun is about 90million miles from the earth
The nearest star to earth is 4.2 light years away from earth
Light travels 6 Trillion miles in 1 year.
If you got in your spaceship and went 100,000 miles-per-hour (no spaceship ever created does even close to this), it would take you 25,000 years before you reached the nearest star.
When you look up in the sky and see a star, you are not seeing the star as it is today. You are seeing what that star looked like years ago, sometimes hundreds of years ago.
The galaxy we live in (Milky Way) is bout 100,000 light years in diameter.
The nearest giant galaxy (Andromeda) is 2-3 million light years away.
Galaxies each have hundreds of billions of stars
There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe
The "observable universe" basically is what we can see based on the amount of time it takes light to travel to the earth. If you go all the way back to the beginning of the universe, however far things were from earth at that time determines if we can now see them.
It is likely that the galaxies within our visible universe represent only a minuscule fraction of the galaxies in the universe.
The universe is approx 13.7 billion years old
Things I learned this morning....
The sun is about 90million miles from the earth
The nearest star to earth is 4.2 light years away from earth
Light travels 6 Trillion miles in 1 year.
If you got in your spaceship and went 100,000 miles-per-hour (no spaceship ever created does even close to this), it would take you 25,000 years before you reached the nearest star.
When you look up in the sky and see a star, you are not seeing the star as it is today. You are seeing what that star looked like years ago, sometimes hundreds of years ago.
The galaxy we live in (Milky Way) is bout 100,000 light years in diameter.
The nearest giant galaxy (Andromeda) is 2-3 million light years away.
Galaxies each have hundreds of billions of stars
There are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe
The "observable universe" basically is what we can see based on the amount of time it takes light to travel to the earth. If you go all the way back to the beginning of the universe, however far things were from earth at that time determines if we can now see them.
It is likely that the galaxies within our visible universe represent only a minuscule fraction of the galaxies in the universe.
The universe is approx 13.7 billion years old
Friday, February 06, 2009
The state of home ownership
The U.S. housing market lost $3.3 trillion in value last year and almost one in six owners with mortgages owed more than their homes were worth as the economy went into recession, Zillow.com said.
The median estimated home price declined 11.6 percent in 2008 to $192,119 and homeowners lost $1.4 trillion in value in the fourth quarter alone, the Seattle-based real estate data service said in a report today.
“It’s like a runaway train gaining momentum,” Stan Humphries, Zillow’s vice president of data and analytics, said in an interview. “It’s difficult to say when we’ll see a bottom to the housing market.”
--ouch! does that mean I should feel lucky that I'm not officially underwater with my mortgage at this point (very close though!)? Meanwhile I'm thinking of pulling the plug on my refinance so I don't have to cut a fat check to bring the loan to value ratio to 80% (didn't I put down 20% 5 years ago and pay-down the mortgage by another 40k since then?). I'll let this sucker adjust to the now 3.75% and sucker-punch the principal while it's at that level. Short-term thinking is an essential survival tool in these trying times.
The median estimated home price declined 11.6 percent in 2008 to $192,119 and homeowners lost $1.4 trillion in value in the fourth quarter alone, the Seattle-based real estate data service said in a report today.
“It’s like a runaway train gaining momentum,” Stan Humphries, Zillow’s vice president of data and analytics, said in an interview. “It’s difficult to say when we’ll see a bottom to the housing market.”
--ouch! does that mean I should feel lucky that I'm not officially underwater with my mortgage at this point (very close though!)? Meanwhile I'm thinking of pulling the plug on my refinance so I don't have to cut a fat check to bring the loan to value ratio to 80% (didn't I put down 20% 5 years ago and pay-down the mortgage by another 40k since then?). I'll let this sucker adjust to the now 3.75% and sucker-punch the principal while it's at that level. Short-term thinking is an essential survival tool in these trying times.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
The Happiest Place on Earth
Spent Jack's 5th Birthday at Disneyland. It had been about 10+ years since I had visited. Little has changed; it's still an amazing place! We truly had a blast. Riding Pirates first, literally walking all the way to the very front of the ride. There's almost no feeling as awesome as when you slip into that swamp and hear the banjo playing softly, knowing your little boy has never seen anything like this. as soon as we got off he wanted to ride again and we went off singing "yo ho yo ho a pirates life for me!"
Such a wonderful time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)