To solve housing you need to give each person who owns a house a new loan.  The loan would be for 80% of the houses current value and would be fixed at 4.5%.   All of these loans are bundled into a security and proportioned out to the current lenders.  So if you owed a bank 200k and the value of the house was 100k then you would get a loan for 80k and the bank would get payments on 80k for that loan.    If you owed 100k and the house was worth 140k you would get the new rate if it was lower if you wanted to be included in the program.

Why do this? because the rules of the game encourage spiraling forclousers its the best option for people and it just drives more people to do it.  If the government did my plan they would stop the incentive as no new house you could buy would give you 20% equity and that rate.  Thus the only way you would leave your house is if someone purchased the house which should be possible because you have equity.

You do it this way because there are no rules that would allow for “fair” fixing of loans you do them all or you let them all go to forclosure.  You can nolonger just get a few of the markets because the government waited to long to act and the problem has spread.  It will continue to spread until the value of forclosure is less then the hit to the credit of the individual.

My vita-mix arrived today. I got the refurbished 5200 for about $400 total. For that price you get a blender with a base larger then some small microwave ovens. You get a cookbook that rates fairly high compared to other appliance cookbooks. An introductory DVD that is well introductory. A LARGE blender container and a taping device.

First thing I had to try was peanut butter. The process consisting of cutting open a bag of peanuts that were salted and roasted, dumping them into the blender, and then turning the thing to high. About 3 mins later with a little help from the tapper I had perfectly smooth and slightly warm peanut butter.

Ok the thing can turn a bag of peanuts into a smooth butter. Can it cook a soup? Tossed in a backed potato, 1 cup broth, 1 cup milk, some cheese, salt, pepper, rosemary, and about 2 Tbs of butter. Blend for 4 mins. I had hot potato …. Something. I would say I made a hot potato milkshake as it was extremely smooth, but to thick. I am impressed and confused. It seems cooking with a blender may take a little practice.

For desert I will make strawberry ice cream….

Personally I think it works but I love viniagar so it would not be hard for me to like vinigar flavored ice-cream.  As with the other ice creams from Four Play it really does need to acompany another item to really make for a truely greate desert.

In order to fix consumption I would look at bosting consumable items that produce very little real world value.  basicaly use stimulas to boost virtual items like music, games, video, books, etc.  This will provide the most bang for the buck.  Any stimulus aimed at hard material consumption will simply be to distructive to sustain in the long run and would colapse the economy.  You can grow an economy from industrial to information but not from information to industrial.

Someone was saying to me that a 3.5 wizard has so many more options in the main handbook then a 4.0 wizard.  Here is the math lets start with 3.5

Level 1 3.5 wizard

Spells

3 – Level 0 spells from a selection of 19  choosen daily

1 – Level 1 spell from a selection of 3 from a selection of 39  choosen at creation and daily.

Level 1 4.0 wizard

Spells

– 1 Implement mastery from selection of 3

–  4 cantrips that are a mix of 3.5 level  0 powers

–  2-3 level 1 at will spells from a list of 5

–  1 level 1 encounter spells from a list of 5

– 2 level 1 daily spells from a list of 4

–  3 level 1 rituals from a list of 8

So from a strait spell stand point the 4.0 wizard has more options at his disposal then the 3.5 espesialy when you consider the fact that the 3.5 must choose all his spells at the beginning of the day except for read magic.  A 4.0 only needs to study that one big daily spell each day the rest it is assumed he has remembered by now.

The other stupid argument I keep hearing uninformed players make is 4.0 does not have a performance skill or a forgery skill etc.  Ok these are stuipid skills you do not learn to play an instrument and then have a 1-20 chance at suddenly forgetting how to play it.  Every skill that is needed mechanically is in 4.0 as a main skill or a sub skill of a main skill.  So yes in 4.0 if you are trained in athletics it means you know how to climb, jump, and swim.  In 3.5 you could make a really good swimer who could not climb a rope if his life depended on it.   And just beacuse I know you will say well what about performance I play a flute and I need to roll a d20 to see how good I am well the Diplomacy skill covers that.  Its in the book if you would bother to read it.

In other news our party did good last night taking out the first big bad while he slept.  Its amazing how quickly you die when a rouge gets a coup de grace attack.

So for all of you that need dice to tell you how to role play please stick with 3.5 they have very detailed rules for all that stuff.  For those who like systems that logically make sense and leave your character’s interactions and actions up to your imagination then 4.0 is the game for you.

“But…Oh no!”  she jumps up out of bed and runs to the closet returning with a large target bag with a big box inside.

“Merry X-mas!”  she replies smiling.  Apparently it was hidden in a diffrent place from the rest of my presents and she had forgotten about it until just then.  I wonder if she was holding it back until I did something nice that would warrent the gift.

So on to attempting to make esspresso with a black friday door buster(yea it was the first x-mas gift she purchased for me).  It worked ok only one small steam powered milk explosion.

I find soy milk to be a great soft flavor to tea as it does not overpower as much as regular cow milk.