America

It’s a rare day when America’s beleaugered minimum-wage earning fast food workers book a victory in their struggle to sustain their labor-market dominance before the machines inevitably take over.

But as McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and other fast-food and fast-casual chains experiment with order kiosks and other technology to automate parts of the food-service process, one small chain that hoped to disrupt with industry by embracing automation is throwing in the towel.

This and That Vol 3 – Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

By

Cognitive Dissonance

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Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Sometimes it is possible to read or view something that completely changes the way one looks at things. I had that experience last week when I read an article at Lobelog entitled “A Plea for Common Sense on Missile Defense,” written by Joe Cirincione, a former staffer on the House Armed Services Committee who now heads the Ploughshares Fund, which is a Washington DC based global foundation that seeks to stop the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Just under a year ago, US home prices finally surpassed their prior all time highs, one decade after the 2006 bubble...

... and haven't looked back since. Which, all else equal, would be great news for America, where the bulk of middle-class wealth is not in the stock market contrary to conventional wisdom, but in its biggest, and most illiquid asset-cum-investment: one's home.

America's obsession with the ever-growing McMansion, combined with a perpetual lack of funding for said McMansion, has resulted a unique phenomenon which Trulia has dubbed "The Incredible Shrinking Yard."  Analyzing public records to compare residential lot sizes to home footprints, Trulia says that homes built over the past two years occupy a staggering 25% of the land on which they sit, compared to roughly half that amount in 1975. 

Here are some of Trulia's key findings: