Am I the only one who heard the TV announcer mention that "TV's Kramer" had lost it and gone nuts live on video, and immediately thought that he must be talking about Jim Cramer, without even considering that Michael "Kramer" Richards was still around?

http://www.tmz.com/2006/11/20/kramers-racist-tirade-caught-on-tape/

And why do they insist on saying he was "caught on tape," when it was really a cameraphone and involved no tape whatsoever?

-btc

OK, I'll admit it. I've had my differences with Jim Cramer over the years, and I actually think he does his viewers a disservice by oversimplifying things. (Or as Toddo might ask on Minyanville, "How can you give somebody buy and sell advice without knowning anything about their risk tolerances and timeframes?")

That said, this is hysterical. Apparently Cramer thought so too:

I just got a rather desperate email sent out to my business school's alumni email list, from a current student:

I am a [current graduate business school student], selling a house in [a pretty nice area in a pretty good section of SoCal]. I need to sell this house ASAP as it is seriously affecting my ability to pay for school and my family.

This is a great house and fully-remodelled ($60k of upgrade value). Zillow.com (as of 11/14/2006) valued the house at ~$545,000. That means this house is worth around $605,000 and I am selling it for $569,000.

It is a 2 bedroom, 1.5 bath townhome, ~1350 sq feet. The exact same model with less upgrades (but they did split the master bedroom into two rooms), just hit the market for $599,000 last week. Also, if the buyer uses my real-estate agent, we have even more room to negotiate on price.

Please help me.

Words fail me.

Let's see, a business student who didn't have simple accounting skills necessary to determining that he couldn't afford his lifestyle before he made the expensive choices related to remodeling (and maybe even buying) a house. Who is so inexperienced in the real world that he doesn't realize that in normal markets, upgrades rarely add more than 50% of the actual costs to the eventual selling price? Perhaps he doesn't realize that comps in a declining market are just as useless as they were in a rapidly rising one? Maybe he's one of the people who never believed that his ARM would reset and throw him into a crunch? Possibly one who presumed he'd be able to extract equity indefinitely in order to pay for his other choices?

I don't know.

The fact that idiots like the guy on http://www.iamfacingforeclosure.com would end up in a bind is not surprising. The fact that a guy who could get accepted to a pretty good graduate business school would suddenly find himself begging for financial assistance is more troubling. If the mania was truly that widespread, it'll be a long time before we hit bottom.

-btc

Been busy this week and Jeff Matthews beat me to the punch in commenting on the latest election.

He said everything I would have, and then some. My comments are also on his blog.

This isn't a political blog, but I'll have some additional thoughts over the weekend, that tie into the overall theme here.

-btc

I'm a certified project manager, and project management is how I make most of my money.

In recent years I've become fairly disillusioned with the profession, particularly as it's been promoted by the Project Management Institute. In fact, I've slowly been reducing my ties to that organization because of the monolithic approach they take towards everything. Their philosophy is completely antithetical to the world I see developing, yet it is at the core of what new project managers are taught is the "right way" to do things.

At its core, PMI is about doing things in the way that was mastered during WWII: Plan carefully, budget, assign resources, measure progress against the desired tasks, make adjustments if anything deviates from the plan, and meet the goals for delivery. Like most organizations, PMI tends to promote what it knows. When reality conflicts, it tries to identify reasons that the reality should change.