Complex Numbers

That didn't take long.

We are people of this generation, bred in the most hedonistic society the world has ever known, housed now in over-mortgaged tract homes, and looking uncomfortably to the world we leave to our children. We were born in the days when the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire, a college degree was the ticket to the middle class, and being born American meant that unlimited opportunity was your birthright.

http://corporatemofo.com/society_and_antisocial_tendenc/reality_bites.html

You know, I follow financial discussion boards and websites, and you can probably imagine the kind of freaking-out that's going on at said boards these days. People with portfolios down 30, 40, 50%. People who have lost or are about to lose their jobs. People wondering why they should keep their home when it's worth 3/4 of what they paid for it - without interest...

[Allow me a venture into digression; as this is my blog, I don't feel too out of line doing this: I don't understand the "We're upside-down on our mortgage, so we're just going to default and let the bank foreclose" kind of mentality. You bought a house, you signed the papers - whether you fully understood all the Ferengi print is another discussion entirely, but let's assume "yes" - and you entered into an agreement to faithfully pay off the mortgage under the terms provided. Not ONE of those terms included a clause guaranteeing that your house would always appreciate in value; you just assumed that it was despite all historical evidence to the contrary. And now you want to default on a contractual obligation? There's a word for you, dude, and it's not a nice one.

[To continue my digression, consider a house that you may have purchased for, say, $300,000 - "modest" by the standards of the real estate boom, depending upon your area. Assuming a $50,000 down-payment and a 6.5% fixed interest rate on a 30 year loan, you're going to pay the bank a total of $568,861.22 over 30 years. (That's in today's dollars. Since you got a fixed rate mortgage, your monthly payment of $1580.17 is effectively less in 2039 dollars, when the mortgage will be paid off) (I never said there would be no math; quite the contrary). Anyway, the point is, you're already upside-down to the tune of $568,861.22 - $300,000 = $268,861.22 right from the get-go. So if your home value drops to $225,000 because of the current housing crisis, your upside-downedness is $343,861.22 instead of $268,861.22. Big effing deal.

[Besides, what are you going to do, rent? Fixed-rate mortgages never increase, except for any escrow portion. Rent will go up ever year. End of digression.]

Getting back to the essay at hand,

We grow into middle age not surrounded by prosperity and security, but by our doubts and fears. Even as the rich have gotten richer, we have seen our standard of living fall. The middle class is barely reproducing itself, bifurcated into those barely treading water and those on an endless paper chase after useless honors. Our hopes have been dashed, our dreams sold for firewood to keep warm and hold back the wolves for one more night.

That, fellow writers, is how to mix metaphors. This guy uses a Cuisinart.

Somewhere along the way, someone might have tricked us into caring or having hope, but we have come to realize that the current "crisis" is not the result of a great country hijacked by a cabal of free-market capitalists: It is, in fact, the new baseline.

In other words, in the immortal spirit of Queen Victoria, perform your duties faithfully. It will be unpleasant, but just lie back and think of England.