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The things I associate Carter with are malaise, a killer rabbit, Panama canal gifting, and Iranian hostage ineptitude. Well, besides the terrible economy.
1978 – moved to Sanford and purchased a home. Assumed the mortgages which were about 6% or so. Watched rates go up. Watched realtors go under. Roofed a Sunday School Picnic shelter with a lady Realtor who said sometimes she felt like jumping off of it.
CD rates skyrocketed. I was very active and fully invested in the market. I finally started to sell stocks and put my $$ into the CD’s that were approaching 20%….did that with all my IRA accounts.
Technically, WJC probably did balance budget with Regan’s help in the economy. BUT, it was GHW Bush (read my lips) that had to RAISE taxes and we got WJC. That begat NAFTA and the Internet Bubble. I had a mid 6 figure profit and was up about 200% when the bubble broke. I did sell some of it and kept some, but NOT that much. I took a small inheritance and tripled it within 6 months and sold it. That and my 1994 Vette turned into my 2000 Vette. SO I DID get something out of the Clinton Bubble. But, I know folks that are still carrying 7 figure losses from their late 90’s Trading….which they now describe as Compulsive GAMBLING.
Unfortunately, I was one of Ross Perot’s Poster Boys for that Great Sucking Sound soundbite. I closed or partially shut down three US plants and built a large one in Mexico. However, I DID delay it a bit and fought it tooth and nail and probably gave the US Plants more “edge” than they really had when I did the project cost justifications. Being from Piedmont NC, I know the trials and tribulations of the Textile and Furniture Industry. I have a lot of late 60’s Grads that got hurt….really hurt when they economy shifted. Some were multimillionaires and never recovered.
Walmart was an influence….when you can purchase a Microwave for $30 (maybe $40) that is better than the $450 GE that I purchased for my mother in 1984, that is POWER and cheap labor and cheap component did it. The US demanded such….and we got it…
I don’t believe one candidate and know that it will be 4 or 8 more years of the same due to their pandering to their voting block. I don’t think the other one has a magic bullet or plan, but at least there will be change that is well intentioned and NOT from a poll or focus group.
As I said I voted for Carter. Maybe he was too good to be Prez – we all who lived that can appreciate that issue. I will not call out his ideals but as prez he was not so capable.
Ross Perot’s Poster Boys
Sadly Stockdale would whoop both of those candy asses in a debate.
Some of ya’ll know, I was born and grew up in what at the time was….the Sock Capital of the World… but I spent as much time on my Granddaddy’s farm as in town…
I remember when, as kids, we’d go down to the mighty Haw River a half a mile away, just to see what color the water was… ’cause it changed everytime Cone Mills emptied their dye vats… Orange, Purple, Black.. with a frothy foam that would make Guinness Stout proud and a stink skunks chose not compete with.
At the time… there was no doubt in my mind, nor is there now…
Given two options… I’m going to the ‘bacca patch, not the weave room….That said…
One of my very best friends, who I spent 4 years with at NCState, was a Textile major. He worked his way up the ladder and when that Company finally went out of business after a late 80’s leveraged buyout ( sic… Reagan, William Simon, Michael Milken, et al) he was in charge of World Wide Operations, 20 plus mills a dozen distribution centers.He tells me these days… the American Textile Industry is very much alive and thriving.
It’s all NON-Woven and 80plus percent ADULT diapers.
and yes… you can buy ’em at WallyWorld, which does NOT mean that one Company HASNOTDONEMORE to destroy the American economic base and the Middle Class of all colors than ALL the politicians combined, because it has ruthlessly done that very thing for decades…Quality don’t count for Sh$t anymore and Wally is 99% to blame for that.
As far as diapers go… Some of ya’ll know what’s coming soon….
and it’s unfortunate that you young guys never had the opportunity to buy a pair of Florsheim Black Wingtip Shoes for $100 (in 1980 dollars) that would last a lifetime literally. I know I’m still wearing mine on occasion.
#NCSU-North Carolina's #1 FOOTBALL school!BOTB….your choices were not good. Judging from my wife’s classmates who were all farmer’s children and their descendants, the chemicals used to control weeds and enhance growth of the Golden Leaf have taken their toll on them. That is an “observation” and not based on any epidemiology study by a learned institution…..sort of like observing the deaths by cancer near Carolina Trace in Lee County many years after Buck Ward and his driver dumped all the PCB’s along Hwy 87 and they sort of migrated into the stream and the lakes there.
I spent a career in Environmental….OK, it started during my second job, so for 35 or so years of working, I was installing or running or modifying or designing or purchasing Waste Water Treatment systems….and did a LOT of remediation of ponds and “backyards” or the places behind the plant that folks took the sludge or the residue from cleaning, painting, plating, grinding, or whatever operations. I DO feel that even though the EPA has turned into a “weapon” by the current administration, that overall, it has done some good. Now, the solutions and cost are about 10 times what was really needed, but that is our government….
Quality….the GE Microwave that I bought in 1984 is still working. It is our “back-up” to be run off the emergency generator during power outages. I would also comment, as a student of Dr. Deming, that overall quality of goods today is actually better than before….IF you purchase from a quality vendor. BUT, most folks want the cheapest that Amazon has and I, too, have succumbed to letting price drive my decisions.
I was aware that Diapers were the next “big thing”…..but not to the extent that you pointed out. I watched my relatives work in cotton mills and breathe the dust. I also watched them work on farms for pay that was half of the Mill’s minimum. My dad died of lung cancer….probably being a smoker for half his life, but accelerated by working for the NC DOT and breathing tar (not asphalt) fumes and also driving a motor grader with an exhaust stack that really did nothing to protect him. His co-workers would retire around 65 and never see 70…
Talk about durability….I purchased a Craftsman Pop Rivet gun in 1964 when I was working at Sears in Cameron Village. I broke it last week….it was NOT its fault. I tried to set 3/16” SS rivets using two “torque” extenders on the handles. Poor thing finally broke a jaw. I felt like I had killed a friend. The “Lowes” POP (Brand) Rivet gun that I had in the motor home would not even pop one of them. BOTH went to the recycled steel bin…
I do think that Quality is actually more important and influences folks more today than ever….on the products that you can get reviews on. I rarely buy something without doing a check on Amazon or a seller’s site or reading the reviews that the manufacturer posts.
B’rer ‘Roo…
My choice of work until I graduated from college the second time was based on the quality of the work and the people I worked with. Truth is… at that age, I never even thought about the environmental hazards of either.
Now… on the farm way back then… there was ONE man who did the spraying. The rest of us didn’t go in the fields for three days. That was the rule. Somebody knew something, but it wasn’t me.
I chose business over the Farm. And then after twenty years, business took me back to the “Green Industry” where I have been, more or less, until this day.
You are right… 1965-1975 – all the folks that left the Farm went to better paying jobs… a lot of them went to the Mills… and only looked back on the weekends.
And by today’s standards, is it not more or less true that all “jobs” back in the day were more hazardous for a variety of reasons than they are today? Seat-belts, rollover bars, safety glasses, dust masks, sun screen, etc. were all unheard of back in the days when “real men did real work”.
Please recognize the tongue in cheek part of “real men did real work” or that there aren’t plenty of men who work hard every day for their wages today and that in no ways am I pushing any return to the “Good Old Days”.
Truth is in lots of ways they weren’t that good and in other ways… well… maybe they were….
I’m not at all sure Stoicism was as healthy as we were told.
Your last comment regarding Quality…. I think perhaps there’s some confusion between Quality and Internet Best Reviews Stars.
They are not the same.Think ’bout this…
Half of everything we’ve all ever been told… was wrong. Dead wrong. Bad Advice.The question is “Do you or me know ‘which half'”?
#NCSU-North Carolina's #1 FOOTBALL school!Just wanted to make sure if the “all or nothing” paradigm is in play here.
Of course they might have just built a road for political reasons instead of the implied position of destroying a successful black community, like evicting the sharecroppers in the bad photo-op shanty, but as long as a greater good is found then it can be balanced out.
I’m pleased that is the ground you appear to be laying out.
McCallum
I never said the road was built for the purpose of destroying a successful black community. Go back and double check me if you don’t believe me.
Roo and BOTB, either one of you guys remember being around DDT? Nasty stuff. And who would have thought asbestos would be a bad thing? The elementary school I attended had ceilings made of the stuff. The roof was corrugated steel with a blown layer of asbestos exposed inside the rooms. I’m not sure how the stuff didn’t become airborne but the claim is it wasn’t a hazard. The county can’t demolish the building due to removal costs but “it’s not a hazard”. Me thinks that may not be completely true. I was on a submarine that had asbestos insulation removed for the reactor compartment which was roughly 30 X 30 X 40 and it took months with guys in special suits with forced air and them stuffing it into triple bags. Not a hazard, yeah right!
On another subject I just ran across this. You all might get a chuckle.
His MajestySmarter than the average bear
When we were at the beach, mama always made us come in the house when the Skeeter truck came down the street and then we had to wait 30 minutes before we could go back out….
you remember, kids played in the yard, NOT in mama’s house… back in the day…
On the farm, the ‘bacca patch as a general rule was sprayed twice a season… once with fungicides when the land was bedded up and once with MH30 for suckers… We were always in school for the first and as I said earlier, we stayed out of the fields for a few days after topping.
In the early seventies while I was attending State, folks in the Piedmont started planting soybeans for the first time and then shifted a lot of land to No-Till with corn and beans. Everything changed with respect to chemicals. During the same time, the last of the tenants moved to FHA houses and got jobs elsewhere. They were eagerly replaced by the first Amigos…. who seemed to be immune to hard work and farm chemicals.
And I remember that PCB roadside weed control program over in Warren County. North Carolina at it’s finest.
I guess I missed all the really bad stuff until years later.
One day, maybe I’ll tell ya’ll about “The Turf Farm — 450 acres of fescue, bermuda and zoysia.” Toxic.
#NCSU-North Carolina's #1 FOOTBALL school!First job out of NCSU was covering a large sales territory for a big automotive finishes supplier in the Midwest. One of our premium products was a diisocyanate-cured polyurethane commercial finish widely used in a variety of markets. The big commercial operations handled the product properly (labeling was loaded with warnings), but I called on more than one smaller user that was not properly equiped to operate safely-you could become sensitized to these chemicals in a fairly short period of time depending on your physiology. Been out of that market for decades-hopefully users are more circumspect.
The Ward Transformer PCB dump was over a very wide area. I know that it was dumped all around Angier, and I know some people there who died of cancer years before they should’ve, if then. I also got lost on the Fort Bragg Post one late night, back in the mid-70s when trying to find a short cut from Laurinburg to Angier. I rode around that base for hours without seeing a single soul, and the PCB black streaks beside the road were rampant. I finally managed to find someone and stopped to ask directions as to how to get off the base.
Now, I’d probably be in Fort Leavenworth if I pulled that stunt today.
opinions:
1. yes you would, 13OT:
News outlets reported that busy Fort Bragg Boulevard that allowed civilians to cut across the base near Fayetteville was closed Thursday to civilian traffic. http://www.foxcarolina.com/story/33111794/end-of-era-civilians-can-no-longer-cut-across-fort-bragg
2. YogiNC, here’s a quote:
ban the use of the pesticide best known by the acronym DDT—the very substance that had made it possible to vanquish malaria from vast portions of the globe. By means of that ban, environmentalists effectively ensured that, over the course of the ensuing 30+ years, more than 50 million people would die needlessly of a disease that was entirely preventable.
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1259
3. bill.onthebeach: robots make Depends.bill.onthebeach: robots make Depends.
that’s right… the textile ‘machinery’ guys are rolling it…
old age ain’t what it used to be….
#NCSU-North Carolina's #1 FOOTBALL school!One day, maybe I’ll tell ya’ll about “The Turf Farm — 450 acres of fescue, bermuda and zoysia.” Toxic.
It shouldn’t be bill.
A little atrazine for broadleaf control on the warm season stuff and Trimec on the cool season stuff. Pre-emerge anything you are holding after May 1 for crabgrass and goose grass.
Fertility speaking it should be all slow release unless you are pushing some fescue or trying to get cut Bermuda to spread back.
Nematicides were the roughest thing to deal with bill.
McCallum
Mac…
You continue to find ways to make me think…
somewhere you and I have met.you left out glyphos41 and the other fungicides, unintentional I’m sure…
We used 200gal sprayer on the tractor for little jobs and contracted with a guy with big sprayer truck for the big ones.
Wind drift was always a concern, as much as operator safety.#NCSU-North Carolina's #1 FOOTBALL school!Only use fungicides on the fescue and the bentgrass.
I used Daconil which has probably been replaced by now, rather benign substance.
I’ve done a bit of everything bill, never been a company man.
McCallum
Going to a “real” football game… huh?
You ought to be in a parking lot by now…. be safe!Yeah… I did that CompanyManThing… 3 times… it was ok, not great.
I was a little too independent, perhaps… or the Company just wasn’t going fast enough for me, one or the other.#NCSU-North Carolina's #1 FOOTBALL school!bill,
The tailgating at UGA ain’t all that. On campus which is a great plus but the cooking that I did in Raleigh, and others I saw, were vastly superior to anything in Athens. Overall the cooking and the gathering is a major plus in Raleigh.
The massive downside is that the peckerheads in Raleigh will not open the gates soon enough and the off campus site and centralization of parking.
It will take me 30 minutes o get out of Athens tonight. Ten minutes back to the car, 5-10 minutes in traffic then out if there and that is at a place that will hold 90,000 plus.
It takes a long time to get out at Raleigh and that is only around 60,000.
McCallum
No competent nominating committee I know would offer up either of today’s presidential candidates to America’s “board of directors” – the American voter.
http://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/2016/11/08/rnc-and-dnc-have-failed-us.html
I’ve thought throughout the campaign that if either party had nominated a competent candidate, then last night would have looked like 1980.
The best part of watching the results come in was seeing all the media slowly, and I mean SLOWLY, transform from cheerful confidence into complete childish dumbasses with egg all over their faces. I think one lady even started crying while she was trying to report towards the end of the night. It was fantastic!
By the way, my presidential bid went to a write in candidate. But it was super satisfying seeing those “geniuses” knocked down a peg.
Whatever you think about chippy orange face, you gotta admit it’s pretty impressive he took down two political dynasties in a single election (Bush & Clinton).
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