Tony’s Place

Here in Montgomery County Maryland, work is slated to begin on the Inter-County Connector (ICC) that will connect Montgomery and Prince George’s County. This road might have been worth building if it landed further north on I95. Think BWI airport access for folks and businesses in the I270 corridor.

Take this a step further and extend I370 to Rt 28 in Sterling VA. Finally, another river crossing that would be used by millions and reduce beltway traffic. I’m not sure why Montgomery County is so scared about building another bridge into Virginia. Are they going to take all our precious jobs? Get a clue they already did. All the software engineering jobs migrated to the Dulles corridor over the past 10 years leaving us with Biotech and government jobs. While these are good jobs, having 3 airports withing 40 minutes of Gaithersburg (non-rush hour) would be a huge benefit to business in the I270 corridor.

And don’t give me any crap about protecting our farms in the western part of the county. Better to build a road though them now before they too are sprawling suburbs.

I survived another round of layoffs.   My manager had 0 layoffs in his group of about 40 people.   We are the exception though, several of our colleagues are being shown the door.    Its been a depressing day.

Since its in all the papers now, I guess its safe to blog about the AOL layoffs that are coming tomorrow. This will be about the 9th round of layoffs since I’ve been with AOL.. Not that I’m counting but we usually have about 1 round a year.

Will I still work for AOL tomorrow? I can say with 100% confidence that I will still be employed by AOL but that doesn’t mean I won’t be laid off.  Thanks to the WARN act, anyone axed tomorrow is still an employee for 60 days. That said I honestly don’t think I’m getting laid off but someone is always surprised. Maybe it will be me this time.

So what’s my plan for tomorrow?

1) get to work around 6:30AM and hit the gym

2) call into my 7:30AM meeting with Bangalore (from the gym) and hope that the team there is still intact

3) Head to my cube and for a depressing day

Some of the headlines that came in on my “aol layoffs” alert today.
Google News Alert for: aol layoffs

AOL Layoffs Highlight Time Warner’s Quandary
TheStreet.com – USA
By Nat Worden News of more layoffs at AOL came as no surprise on Wall Street, where recent setbacks for the beleaguered Web concern have convinced many …

» AOL to lay off 2000; 750 in Northern Virginia «
Examiner.com – USA
The AOL layoffs aren’t the largest set of job cuts to hit the region; MCI cut 3500 jobs when Verizon purchased it in 2005.

AOL (TWX) Layoffs: T Minus One*
Silicon Alley Insider – New York,NY,USA
Assuming the AOL mass layoffs aren’t just an elaborate ruse to make us look like idiots (possible but unlikely, given the number of sources), a thousand or …

AOL To Lay Off 2000 Out of Its 10K Employees
paidContent.org – Los Angeles,CA,USA
By Rafat Ali – Mon 15 Oct 2007 08:12 AM PST The much-rumored AOL (NYSE: TWX) layoffs have been officially announced, at least internally. …

AOL to Cut Workforce by 20 Percent
Washington Post – United States
In December, AOL completed a major layoff of nearly 600 employees locally and 5000 worldwide as part of a major restructuring.

disclaimer.. I’m just making this up.

With the sub-prime mortgage mess many people are wondering why the US stock market continues to soar. For the past several years the US economy has been driven by gains in the housing market. People borrowed against these gains and spent freely, this in turn resulted in more gains. That is, until prices started coming back to reality. I don’t see a gain in home prices for over 10 years, unless inflation gets out of control. Why? In the DC area where I live, government workers buy houses 40 miles out of town because that’s all they can afford. But.. in the coming years the baby boomers, who live close-in, are going to try to sell their homes and there will be no one who can afford them. Plain and simple, valuations are out of control in many areas.

This brings us to the fact that the stock market is soaring even as the economy is at risk of recession. You only need to look at what started the housing boom to see what is happening. Back before the markets crashed in 2000 the connected people with money started shifting their stock market gains into real-estate. After the crash, the folks who got crushed in the market pulled what they had left and started putting it into real estate. Now the real estate market started to gain and everyone was getting rich. At this point the momentum would carry it for years. Rockefeller knew it was time to get out of the market when his shoe shine boy was giving him advice but in real estate the momentum carries 2 years after this point.

So here we are, the well connected people have been moving money out of real estate and into the stock market for the past 3 years. Now real estate investors who aren’t broke are also moving their money into the market. Further fueling the market is weak dollar, it is making US stocks look cheap so foreign investors are also moving into the market. So how long does it go up? I’d say another week but I also figured the housing market was at its peak in 2002. Since markets seem to move on emotion instead of logic, I think we can say that the US market will rise 20% a year through 2010.