Reply #24: Ironically, I worked in commercial real estate for a while in the 80s

[EFerrari]

in a family business. We'd put up "for lease" signs in store fronts in malls. Those signs never came down because that tenant wasn't going to be there long enough to make taking the sign down and putting it up again worthwhile.

I think (and hope) that part of the fall out from this meltdown will be that we go local again. It will be a little too much like "Road Warrior" for me to get used to it but, I don't see another answer for what we're facing.

And local in every sense of every resource we have. I used to laugh (out of discomfort) hearing good people like Al Gore say that even if our manufacturing went overseas, we'd develop new industries to replace those jobs. Because that's not going to happen. Gore talked about information industry as Obama is talking about green ones and neither is going to happen. It's up to our localities to repair what has been broken as far as I can tell.

Maybe I'd have more of an appetite for that challenge if I hadn't been a witness to the forty years that came before.