How are YOU being affected, if at all, by the economic downturn?

And what industry and region are you in?

I get one picture from the mainstream media: "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!!!"

I get quite another looking at my own situation and those of friends and family.

In my practice, I see a lot of guys in the construction industry and related fields who are having to seek bankruptcy protection and retail people (Wal-Mart not incluced) who have had their hours drastically cut. And the newspaper has had to start a special section for the foreclosure notices of all the niggers who were allowed to buy houses with payments that consumed 80% of their bring-home pay, so the sales of existing homes is depressed. But beyond that, it looks not unlike the slowdown we had in the early 90s at the start of the first Iraqi war for Israel.

Something is telling me that most of this is by design; that things aren't really ALL THAT bad if you were middle class to begin with and not dependent on retail or the sale or building of residential housing. But if all a person hears every waking moment on the TV and the radio is how terrible things are, and he believes it and cuts back on his spending; and that is multiplied by millions of others in the population, then to some extent, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Now that the groid has taken office, I expect the news media to soon slowly start shifting gears into a "It's-still-bad-but-starting-to-get-better-we-can-see-the-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel mode.

So, without setting this up as a formal poll, I wanted to get the members' input on how the slowdown is affecting them, their fields of endeavor, and their region of the country / world.