People Are Having Trouble Getting The Finance
A report from Global News in Canada. “The Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver says that home buyers weren’t very active in February as sales dipped below the long-term average. It says last there were 2,207 sales in February, a 9 per cent dip compared to last year, and more than 14 per cent below the 10 year monthly average. By property type, the board says detached properties were down more than 39 per cent. President Jill Oudil said that rising interest rates and stricter mortgage requirements have reduced purchasing power for home buyers, especially for those just entering the market. ‘We have also seen the detached category, it’s moving into… more heading towards the buyers territory as far as a buyers market there.’”
From Buy Association on the UK. “A new crackdown on UK property being bought using ‘murky’ money from overseas has seen the first ever instance of the National Crime Agency issuing two unexplained wealth orders (UWOs) on £22m worth of London and south-east property. A ‘politically exposed person,’ said by the Financial Times to be a central Asian politician, who owns a range of homes and offices in London and the south-east, is the first person to be investigated using a UWO by the National Crime Agency (NCA) – a measure which first came into effect on 31 January.”
“Donald Toon, NCA’s director of economic crime, said: ‘Unexplained wealth orders have the potential to significantly reduce the appeal of the UK as a destination for illicit income. They enable the UK to more effectively target the problem of money laundering through prime real estate in London and elsewhere.’ He added: ‘We are determined to use all of the powers available to us to combat the flow of illicit monies into, or through, the UK.’”
“According to anti-corruption campaigners, more than £122bn worth of property in the UK is owned by overseas firms, and it is vital that any of these properties where the owner cannot prove the origins of their funding should be investigated.”
From the Business Standard on India. “As many as 440,000 housing units were unsold in seven major cities at the end of 2017 with Delhi-NCR contributing maximum at over 150,000 property consultant JLL India said. JLL said, ‘as many as 440,000 residential units remain unsold across key cities of India at the end of 2017.’ Mumbai, Delhi–NCR, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Bengaluru, Kolkata are seven cities covered in this survey.”
“Out of the total unsold housing stock, the consultant said, 34,700 units are ready-to-move-in flats. Delhi–NCR has the highest volume at around 1,50,654 units which remained unsold in 2017, while Chennai has the highest percentage of completed unsold inventory at close to 20 per cent. Upon analysis, Noida and Greater Noida together contributed to nearly 60 per cent of the total unsold inventory, mostly in under–construction projects. ‘Noida and Greater Noida have had a tumultuous past because of which, end users are circumspect in making their purchases,’ JLL said.”
From the New Zealand Herald. “Auckland’s average house sale price dropped by just over $15,000 in the last month while the city’s median fell $10,000, according to new data out this morning from Barfoot & Thompson. The agency, with more than 40 per cent of the city’s house sales market, today announced January’s $934,753 average sale price fell to $919,454 last month while January’s $830,000 median dropped to $820,000.”
“The number of Barfoot listings is up. Inventory jumped from 4320 available listings at the end of January to 4648 listings at the end of February. New listings rose from 1200 in January to 1747 last month. ‘Sales numbers for the month at 665 were up 12.1 percent on those for January, and were up 19.6 percent on those for the previous February. The average sales price at $919,454 was down 1.6 percent on that for January, and down 1.1 percent on the average price for the previous three months. A feature of February’s trading was the relatively high number of sales of properties valued at under $500,000,’ said Peter Thompson, Barfoot managing director.”
From The Australian. “Chinese buyers are returning home empty-handed as Chinese New Year, the 10-day holiday characterised in recent years by buying an offshore trophy home, draws to a close. This year, hopeful buyers have been caught by restrictions on transferring funds out of China and reluctant local banks asking for evidence of income earned in Australia rather than overseas.”
“The slower sales come amid a broader cooling with prices falling 1.2 per cent across the capital cities over the past three months and Sydney posting its first annual price drop since 2012. Treasurer Scott Morrison said in April that foreign investment applications for residential housing had fallen to an expected 15,000 last year from 40,000 the year before. ‘We’ve been very busy showing the properties but as far as transactions go, they’re down on last year, mainly because people are having trouble getting the finance,’ Sydney Sotheby’s International Realty managing director Michael Pallier said.
“Non-resident buyers can buy only new property, not an established home, under Australian regulations. Monika Tu, founder and director of Black Diamondz Property Concierge, had more than a dozen clients — including Kathy Zhou and Nicole Shi — flying into Sydney for the holiday, with her buyers recently receiving permanent residency and now looking for somewhere to live.”
“Credit Suisse research in October found that foreign buyers, mostly from China, were buying about one in four new homes sold in NSW, 17 per cent in Victoria and 8 per cent in Queensland.”
The Vancouver Courier in Canada. “My take on the NDP affordable housing strategy: they wimped out. So I find it amusing to watch while people set their hair on fire over the provincial government’s modest attempts to cool down the real estate market. The influx of Chinese — excuse me — foreign capital has been at the heart of escalating real estate values here and many places around the globe.”
“Anne McMullin, the CEO of the Urban Development Institute, was left to sing that same old song: we need more supply to increase affordability. She also predicted that adding or increasing taxes such as the foreign buyers’ tax will only drive prices up.”
“But the simple fact is, as a number of academics have concluded, and the Globe and Mail’s Kerry Gold has reported, the problem is not supply — it is a matter of the right kind of supply. We produce more new units of housing per person coming into Metro Vancouver than Toronto or Calgary. But it is the kind of supply that appeals to wealthy foreign and domestic speculators not your average working stiff. If, as Simon Fraser University’s Andy Yan points out, you can only afford a Honda and all the cars in the show room are Lamborghinis, well, welcome to Vancouver.”
“Of course, Metro Vancouver isn’t the only place plagued by housing affordability. That why the NDP’s proposed changes extend beyond here and will include Victoria, Nanaimo and bits of the Okanagan. This has caused the mayor of Kelowna, Colin Basran, to have a severe case of the vapors. ‘There may be some dire unintended consequences,’ he gasped to the CBC. He predicted that taxes like the empty home tax ‘is potentially going to stop people from investing in our economy.’”
“Exactly. Because that is part of the problem: Housing is treated as a commodity, like a stock share to make a profit off of and not a place to live.”
“Barrie McKenna, writing in the Globe and Mail. is even more alarmist. He says if B.C.’s Minister of Finance Carol James ‘gets her hoped for real estate correction, it could push many home owners into default, depress retirement savings and even trigger a recession.’ Wow. Of course it is not declining house prices that would stretch people. Assuming they could handle their mortgage payments when they bought their house, it would be raising interest rates that may cause them grief.”
“He also argues parents will have less money to pass on to their kids if prices drop. Well, if prices drop, the kids will need less money to buy their little piece of heaven. Of course, he may want to talk with Anne McMullin (see above) about her prediction that prices will actually go up as a result if the NPD’s measures. In fact, if I have any criticism of the plan introduced in the NDP’s budget last month, it is this: It simply did not go far enough. At the very least they should have banned foreign ownership of residential property in this province.”
“Last month Premier John Horgan headed out on a trip to Asia as generations of Canadian premiers and prime ministers have done before him, searching for foreign business and foreign capital to be invested here. Before he left he had this to say about banning foreign ownership of residential property as is done in New Zealand: ‘British Columbia is the gateway to Canada and I don’t believe we should be curbing people from coming here. I’m the child of an immigrant. Virtually everyone I see here is the child of an immigrant.’”
“Nobody asked about immigrants. But his answer reminds us that one major reason for the housing affordability problem is that governments of every stripe crave real estate-generated foreign capital filling their treasury to the point they are willing to be duplicitous.”
I guess your kind of feeling like a real stooge now if u let your house go only to see the value come back even more and u are stuck in a rental?
If the last shock knocked over your debt donkey cart and you decided to cut the harness you’d be miles ahead by now.
‘As many as 440,000 housing units were unsold in seven major cities at the end of 2017 with Delhi-NCR contributing maximum at over 150,000′
Hmmm, these Chinese investors aren’t interested in Indian airboxes. Probably cuz it’s not much of a gamble for big winnings.
‘Inventory jumped from 4320 available listings at the end of January to 4648 listings at the end of February. New listings rose from 1200 in January to 1747 last month. ‘Sales numbers for the month at 665′
Only more than twice as many new listings as sales. Looks like that foreign buyer ban has worked. Might work in California too. If one was really concerned about affordability, that is.
‘Nobody asked about immigrants. But his answer reminds us that one major reason for the housing affordability problem is that governments of every stripe crave real estate-generated foreign capital filling their treasury to the point they are willing to be duplicitous.’
Or maybe because India is a sh!thole? The Chinese seem to want to preserve their wealth in countries with a relatively clean environment and not much corruption. Even if they take a loss on a property, it still has value as a safehouse.
Our president has set a potty mouth example which all his fawning admirers are emulating.
It’s not attractive.
‘China’s billionaires gather in Beijing for NPC meeting’
‘Xi Jinping’s policies added four new billionaires every week last year - Wealth of billionaire ‘lawmakers’ more than doubled since 2013′
‘The 13th National People’s Congress (China’s pseudo parliament, the NPC), opens its plenary session on Monday in Beijing. Thus begins two weeks of furious rubber-stamping (the dictatorship has already decided which policies will be adopted).’
‘Among the 5,130 appointed ‘delegates’ attending the NPC and its sister body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, there will be 104 dollar billionaires (45 in the NPC and 59 in the CPPCC). Their total net worth amounts to US$624 billion (4 trillion yuan), which is more than double Ireland’s GDP. This is the richest ‘parliament’ in the world by a very big margin.’
‘Just like everywhere else in our crisis-ridden capitalist world, the rich are getting richer and doing it faster. The 104 billionaires wielding ‘votes’ in Beijing’s halls of power this week have increased their combined wealth by almost 20 percent in the past year as a result of Xi Jinping’s policies. Since Xi took office their wealth has more than doubled (from 1.84 trillion yuan in 2013 to 4 trillion).’
‘This is despite the government’s pledges to tackle poverty and close the wealth gap. There are no proposals on the NPC agenda for a wealth tax, for nationalisations, for confiscation of millions of empty houses or other measures to trim the obscene wealth of the billionaires and use the resources for the benefit of ordinary people.’
‘The government’s credit policies to support big business have fuelled a housing bubble which inflicts real pain on working class and middle class people. Average residential property prices have risen 23 percent in the past year in the 10 largest cities. This is a faster rate of increase than any single year in the US housing market.’
‘Millions of city people are taking on extreme levels of debt in order to buy a home. At the same time, millions of migrant workers are being evicted from the major cities in a social cleansing campaign against what the CCP calls the “low-end population”.’
‘Tens of millions of workers especially in the service sector, where most new jobs are created, are driven into precarious informal work, as ‘agency workers’ or ‘individual contractors’, with rates of pay and working conditions worse than in the factory sweatshops, many of which have moved to cheaper countries. The number of workers’ strikes each year has risen 7-fold during the first five-year term of Xi Jinping’s presidency.’
‘To coincide with the opening of the ‘twin meetings’, the Hurun rich list, a research group based in Shanghai, published its latest survey of the super-rich in China and globally. It shows the world’s billionaires had another “record breaking year” with an additional 437 people becoming billionaires in 2017 – almost half of them (210) in China.’
‘Totally, the world’s 2,694 billionaires increased their wealth by a staggering 31 percent last year, to US$10.5 trillion. This is equivalent to 13 percent of the world’s GDP, up from 7 percent in 2011. This is happening as the poorest 50 percent of the world’s population saw no increase in their income last year, according to a separate report from Oxfam International.’
‘China leads the world in dollar billionaires for the third year, with 819, compared to 571 in the United States. And Beijing is the “billionaire capital of the world” according to Hurun, with 131 billionaires compared to New York’s 92. The continuing rise of China’s super-rich elite is partly explained by the big gains on the Chinese stock market in 2017 and the fall of the US dollar. Most Chinese billionaires are in the property sector.’
I wonder why all the “progressive” media in the west never talk about this aspect of China? Oh, but they came home empty handed! Boo hoo!
Let’s not forget this from the WSJ no less:
January 16, 2018
“China’s housing market has defied gravity and government restraints for two years, floating on a tide of bank loans and speculation. Until now. In Beijing and Shanghai — two of the country’s largest markets — and other megacities, sales have stalled and prices have dropped, falling slightly in some pockets and dramatically in others. Luo Chuanyun, a 29-year-old liquor distributor, bought his first apartment on Beijing’s northern edge for $150,000 in late 2016, when prices were climbing by more than 20% a year.”
“The purchase put Mr. Luo up to his neck in debt, with mortgage payments of about $15,000 a year on an annual income of a little over $18,000. Mr. Luo said his real-estate agent told him that to find a buyer for his apartment now he would need to sell for half of what he paid. ‘I’d be short too much money,’ Mr. Luo said.”
“Some developers that a year ago put up special crowd barriers when apartments went on sale are now biding their time. In early December, a group of homeowners stormed the sales office of their Shanghai complex, Central Washington, whose developer, Shanghai Zhaoping Real Estate Development Co., was advertising new apartments at prices about 7% less than ones sold earlier in the year. One apartment owner said the new prices suggested the value of the apartment she bought from the developer in March had dropped by about 17.5%.”
“The developer couldn’t be reached to comment. It said on the project’s social-media account that price fluctuations are normal and that talk of substantial price cuts was ‘purely a misunderstanding.’”
“In some neighborhoods on Beijing’s outskirts, prices have fallen by double-digit percentages. In March, main street in the town of Yanjiao was lined with busy property agencies. Buyers who couldn’t pass Beijing residence requirements or afford its prices flocked there, pushing up prices in a sleepy exurb without much of its own economy. Since then, homebuying limits helped push prices down more than 30%. ‘For Rent’ signs now adorn the windows of abandoned brokerages.”
“‘There are people who bought multiple homes who are now trying to sell one to pay off the mortgage on another,’ said Ran Yunjie, a property agent. One of his clients bought an apartment last year for about $230,000. To find a buyer now, the client would have to drop the price by 60%, according to Mr. Ran.”
http://thehousingbubbleblog.com/?p=10315
Seems like the PBOC can only extract from the society and inject in their FIRE sector for so long before social instability develops.
If that WSJ report is accurate, we may be witnessing the creation of the largest number of ex-billionaires in human history:
‘And Beijing is the “billionaire capital of the world” according to Hurun, with 131 billionaires compared to New York’s 92…Most Chinese billionaires are in the property sector.’
Fang Nu Billionaire
Seems like Wall Street isn’t that upset over Tradeageddon. The stock market is going up, as always.
Sh!tcoin $1MILLION!!
“Founder of defunct bitcoin exchange has a trail of lawsuits, judgments and at least one unpaid lawyer”
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/05/founder-of-defunct-bitcoin-exchange-has-a-trail-of-lawsuits.html
Like moths to a flame…the shysters are flocking to crypto to fleece yet more victims.
Suck ‘em in, shake ‘em out.
I think after last month they know the Fed still has their back.
Is the Fed buying crypto?
LOL. I’m glad I wasn’t drinking. That was good.
It seems like early 2007 all over again when it comes to the stock market. There’s volatility, and everything points to a massive swan dive, but the market ambles along. For now…
“People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them.”
― Eric Hoffer
That’s good.
Good one hwy.
“‘Xi Jinping’s policies added four new billionaires every week last year - Wealth of billionaire ‘lawmakers’ more than doubled since 2013′”
When does it end? I keep thinking the jig is up but it just keeps going, and going, and going. China had been fudging the numbers for years, yet billionaires keep growing? Something’s not adding up.
Amazon sells their factories crap made with really cheap labor
Centreville, VA Housing Prices Crater 10% YOY As Foreclosures Flood DC Area Housing Market
https://www.movoto.com/centreville-va/market-trends/
A good read …
https://wolfstreet.com/2018/03/04/are-subprime-debt-slaves-a-leading-indicator-worrying-the-fed/
Here’s an amusing snippet …
“With consumers, the credit problems appear first among the most fragile, most at risk, and most strung-out – borrowers with subprime credit ratings, and with lenders that went after these consumers aggressively. And this is happening now.
Small banks pushed with all their might into credit cards, loosening credit standards, lowering credit score requirements, raising credit limits, and offering new cards to people who had already maxed out their existing cards and had limited or no ability to service them from their income, and no way of paying them off – and thus are stuck with usurious interest rates that make these credit card balances impossible to service.”
I have a couple credit cards. I’ve been kind of amazed at the high interest rates they’ve been charging for the last decade, though I don’t carry a balance. When I was younger such interest rates were illegal. Last few months I’m getting alot of offers for balance transfers at 0% interest for however long.
My bank sends me a credit card offer it seems like once a month. I read it one time and it’s always that 0% introductory stuff, but then the rate balloons to like 21% or something. I was absolutely shocked that in a time of low rates, they can still get that.
The 21% rate includes a default risk premium for people who carry a revolving charge balance.
I’m old enough to remember that if you transferred a balance, as a bonus they would raise your credit limit by $1000 or so. I did that a few times in graduate school just to get the credit line increase.
Realtors are liars.
…along with their merry band of thieves - escrow, title, “preferred” lenders, appraisers, home inspectors, termite company, contractors/repair-people (per Trudeau)
….. and every appraisal apocryphal.
Italian voters were promised Universal Guaranteed Income bythe M5S party, but they won’t be getting it.
http://money.cnn.com/2018/03/05/news/economy/italy-basic-income-election-five-star/index.html
So many (Musk, Zuckerberg, et al) talk about this as if it was a done deal, yet no one has proposed about how to pay for it. This is the ultimate Free Sh!t Army, everyone qualifies.
This was dreamed up because their solution to a problem that doesn’t exist creates another problem. If robots are going to do all the work, how will people live? Give them money! I listened to a “futurist” describe it all. Along with this we’ll all eat bug protein, make one way trips to Mars. I guess with all that spare time, why not? I chalk it up to yellen bucks looking for a really creative way to die, now that the grilled cheese trucks flopped and all. And it’s completely inevitable of course, like the paperless office was.
You might say, “but who’s going to take out the trash if a robot flips burgers?” Another robot? You know, robots are kinda expensive. Right now my money is on the accuracy of the term behind the whole shebang: artificial intelligence.
Ditto with self driving cars and trucks. We are being told that they’re “imminent” and millions will lose their driving jobs. Of course, all it takes to shut down the robocars and robotrucks will be a mere inch of snow that will soil/blind their sensors and cover up lane markers.
Plus never mind that driving the delivery van is only part of the job. The self driving truck can’t put all those bags of cheetos or 12 packs of Pepsi on the supermarket shelf, nor can it cajole the bodega owner to stock more Doritos.
“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.” - Bill Gates
Self-driving is coming. What it will do for employment and housing is still up for debate and probably very much dependent on regulation and policy. But if you don’t think it’s coming (it’s already here in some cities), you haven’t been paying enough attention. I suggest you check out this week’s version of The Economist (special report) as they have a full special report with a myriad of articles on the subject and the implication.
‘Self-driving is coming’
And eating bugs, don’t forget that. Paid for with free money.
‘Self-driving is coming’
So is the perpetual motion machine.
Self-driving is coming.
I’ll believe it when I see people allowing their kids to be driven to school in a self-driving school bus.
You first.
Or the first time a teary eyed jury finds google liable when a school bus full of kids gets T-boned in an intersection by an automated load of steel. That’s coming too, if it gets far enough.
I’ll believe it when I see people allowing their kids to be driven to school in a self-driving school bus.
As soon as statistics say the self-driving bus is safer it will be considered child abuse to send them to school any other way.
I wonder what the self driving bus will do when kids start to fight on the bus.
I had to walk, because it was under three miles.
If adult supervision isn’t required, why would the kids have to go to a physical school anyway?
So, why exactly do you need a giant, single-purpose vehicle to take kids to school if a small, ubiquitous self-driving vehicle will do it?
You mean 40 or 50 of them.
So, why exactly do you need a giant, single-purpose vehicle to take kids to school if a small, ubiquitous self-driving vehicle will do it?
I guess you don’t if everyone trusts the commercial fleet of small taxis that everyone uses. Although what happens when a perv hangs out in the vehicle that is supposed to be empty, hoping to get lucky and be there when an unsuspecting school kid gets in? Maybe there has to be dedicated school vehicles or the parents won’t let the kids use them?
But I agree with BlueSkye, why send them all to the same building in the first place? Letting them stay home and attend online is the real solution to school violence.
You mean 40 or 50 of them.
Not really. The bus ride my daughter takes is 30 minutes to get to a school that is 5 minutes away (she’s the first pick-up). There is a heavy density of kids near the school, and a few pickups out in the boonies to get kids who live more in the country.
One car could take more than one kid and take 2 or 3 trips easily in that 30 minutes for those who live near school.
For the kids that live farther away from school, perhaps the cars only would take one trip, but still pick up multiple children.
No fleet maintenance.
No bus drivers’ salaries/pensions.
Self-driving cars could do something else when not taking kids to school.
It wouldn’t take 40 or 50 cars…and the school wouldn’t need to own them.
Although what happens when a perv hangs out in the vehicle that is supposed to be empty, hoping to get lucky and be there when an unsuspecting school kid gets in?
I recall someone asking why self-driving delivery vehicles wouldn’t be robbed. Pretty stupid robbers, when the vehicles have 360 degree vision and tons of cameras. A self-driving car is about the stupidest vehicle to ever try to rob.
You honestly think that they couldn’t design a self-driving car to detect a 150+lb person in a car that was supposed to be empty?
Housing my good friend.
Alameda, CA Housing Prices Crater 11% YOY
https://www.movoto.com/alameda-ca/market-trends/
You honestly think that they couldn’t design a self-driving car to detect a 150+lb person in a car that was supposed to be empty?
Sure, 99% of the time. I work in tech, it’s the corner cases that get you once somebody finds the weak point though. What if the perv is also the guy that maintains the vehicles?
IIRC I was 175 lb while I was still in school. Today’s corn syrup fed kids probably put that to shame.
I recall someone asking why self-driving delivery vehicles wouldn’t be robbed. Pretty stupid robbers, when the vehicles have 360 degree vision and tons of cameras. A self-driving car is about the stupidest vehicle to ever try to rob.
I was robbed in the middle of a big-box store full of cameras and it was caught on tape. Did they find the perp? Nope. I don’t even think the police tried. When I spoke to the detective assigned to the case, all I got was heavy sarcasm.
It’s not that simple to catch people or to know who they are.
You honestly think that they couldn’t design a self-driving car to detect a 150+lb person in a car that was supposed to be empty?
Microsoft can’t even make a version of Windows that operates correctly and doesn’t suck.
Some of you folks may enjoy this old critique of magical AI thinking, which I believe remains relevant.
Theodore Roszak
The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the True Art of Thinking
Reprint Edition
ISBN-13: 978-0520085848, ISBN-10: 0520085841
A car break-in was caught on a surveillance camera at work. Guy pulled up in his vehicle, got out, broke a window on a coworker’s parked car, grabbed a duffle bag, then drove off. Fortunately the camera shot included the perp’s licence plate. Unfortunately the camera was such a POS that the plate number was illegible.
Oops…
Microsoft can’t even make a version of Windows that operates correctly and doesn’t suck.
And contrary to what some people say, Linux has plenty of bugs and the kernel still has panics. And this after almost 30 years and tens of thousands of people having worked on it.
Professor, I’ve begun to think of “information pollution” as a new type of pollution that is ill recognized. TS Elliot talked about “wisdom that is lost in knowledge”, and “knowledge that is list in information.”
Sure, 99% of the time. I work in tech, it’s the corner cases that get you once somebody finds the weak point though. What if the perv is also the guy that maintains the vehicles?
What if the perv is the bus driver? The PE teacher?
The fact is that corner cases exist today with vehicles…it’s the guy who falls asleep behind the wheel, the drunk driver, the old woman who couldn’t see the pedestrian through her cataracts, the panicked driver (for whatever reason) who simply made a mistake, the distracted mother who had 3 screaming kids in the car.
The question is whether the corner cases for self-driving cars are less frequent and less deadly than what already exist with our (aging) population of drivers.
How many kids are put into taxis/Ubers to go to school today? More than one, certainly. This is despite stories of the rapist Uber driver, the lunatic cabbie…the corner cases.
When my dad was growing up, my grandmother worked nights as a nurse, my grandfather worked days. My grandma used to get home from the graveyard shift, get my dad and uncles/aunts ready for school, put them in a cab, and go to bed. This was 50+ years ago, and NOT in NYC (in the SF Bay Area)…you don’t think there were stories of sketchy cab drivers then?
If self-drivings cars take off (yes, it’s still an “if”), I don’t think that self-driving school buses will be early in the adoption curve…not a chance. But if a kid grows up only knowing self-driving cars, they will be far more likely to put their kid in a robot taxi than you or I.
Self driving will likely start off small, something like this which is in play in Las Vegas now:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/6/16614388/las-vegas-self-driving-shuttle-navya-keolis-aaa
Elsewhere:
SAN FRANCISCO — More than a year after Uber’s self-driving trucks made their first commercial delivery — 2,000 cases of Budweiser beer on a 120-mile hop in Colorado — the company said it has taken its robot big rigs to the highways of Arizona.
Uber said on Tuesday its self-driving trucks have been carrying cargo on highways in Arizona for commercial freight customers over the past few months. The trucks operate with a licensed truck driver at the wheel, ready to take over in the case of an emergency. But Uber said the eventual goal is to eliminate human drivers inside the cab.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/technology/uber-self-driving-trucks.html
My disillusionment with artificial intelligence started when I first went off to college. We had always washed dishes by hand at home but my rented airbox had a store-bought dishwasher. I happily loaded it up and dang if they didn’t come out covered in food. My roommates girlfriend informed me that I had to wash the dishes first, then put them in. “What’s the point in washing dishes and then washing them again?” I said. At best it’s a plate and spoon finisher. Can’t really do pots and pans. All these years later and not one bit of advancement has happened with that artificial intelligence.
I have published in the area of AI, specifically using neural networks to classify satellite imagery for the purposes of climate studies, albeit some 15 years ago or so and havent kept up much. At least for the purposes of what I was doing, it was a helpful method to sift through many thousands of images and produce a fairly good result - one that would be accurate ~ >85% on a per image basis. But it takes weeks or even months to train these things; I had access to a beowulf cluster that was one of the most powerful in the world at that time so once trained I could get my results in a day or two which was nice.
My understanding is that convolutional neural networks really changed the game with respect to image identification and its applicability to self driving cars. I remember following the DARPA grand challenge and not too many years later google and others were getting cleared to test self driving cars in public and wondering how that much advancement was possible.
But yeah, dishwashers are kind of lame, and no way am I getting in a self driving car anytime soon. The backup camera on my car is on the fritz maybe 30% of the time; people often dont make the connection and realize sensors - all of them, any kind - have some sort of weirdness that has to be characterized. Redundancy, sure, but then you get into cost, weight, etc.
The human is an amazing computer. Think about all the processing that is involved just to cross a somewhat busy street successfully. Your eyes take in imagery, identify moving objects, estimate velocities, and then you make a decision as to when its safe to cross. And yet a pretty young child can do it with a little training, something that would take quite a bit of work to get a robot to do.
‘The human is an amazing computer’
I’ve thought about that. What would it cost to make a robot that could do everything a minimum wage worker can do? Many millions for sure. So why not just hire the human? Can a robot smell a fire and put it out? Give someone CPR? Run out to the car and give a customer the item they left behind?
There’s lots of space between what can be done and what will take. For instance, in Japan they’ve had automated vending machines that can put out even hot meals, and they’ve had them for decades. Here, maybe a yogurt machine.
It should be noted that what we’ve got is a bunch of people being paid a lot of yellen bucks to come up with the next big thing. It actually working isn’t very important for some reason.
Google plans $2.6bn New York expansion as tech execs claim ‘Silicon Valley is over’
‘The news comes as a number of other tech giants are looking to find alternative locations for investment opportunities and expansion. The New York Times said Robin Li, an investor with the San Francisco venture capital firm GGV Capital, recently led a three-day bus tour through the Midwest, stopping in Youngstown and Akron in Ohio, Detroit and Flint in Michigan and South Bend in Indiana.’
“I’m a little over San Francisco,” Patrick McKenna, the founder of High Ridge Venture Partners, told the newspaper. “It’s so expensive, it’s so congested, and frankly, you also see opportunities in other places.”
‘Last December, AOL founder Steve Case, pledged to invest mostly in start-ups outside of San Francisco, “we’ve probably hit peak Silicon Valley.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/google-new-york-expansion-tech-giants-silicon-valley-over-peter-case-jd-vance-patrick-mckenna-a8240746.html
I’ve thought about that. What would it cost to make a robot that could do everything a minimum wage worker can do? Many millions for sure. So why not just hire the human? Can a robot smell a fire and put it out? Give someone CPR? Run out to the car and give a customer the item they left behind?
I don’t think cost is the issue, it’s capability. A 2-year-old human can see a cat a once and know what a cat is the next time it sees one. A computer still has a hard time doing this. In other words, if you had unlimited amounts of money, you couldn’t yet create a robot to do all the tasks that a minimum wage worker could do.
Humans will lose out to robots one small task at a time. I think that there will be lots of robots created in the coming years that will do single tasks well-enough to replace humans doing those single tasks.
However, I seriously doubt that a robot will be created in my lifetime that will do a meaningful number of tasks like Data from Star Trek. So, there will always need to have humans around…they’ll just do less of the menial tasks.
Consider Amazon’s robots originally developed by Kiva systems. People used to walk aisles of shelves to find items to put in boxes and ship. Now the robots move the shelves to the packers.
Does this mean that all humans have been replaced in Amazon warehouses? Nope…they just do more packing of boxes, and no walking the warehouses. Per hour, more boxes are packed per human.
Another company that I was intrigued by was soft robotics…designed to be able to pick up produce without crushing it. Will they replace ag workers? Not entirely.
Could they reduce the need for ag workers? Sure.
“I don’t think cost is the issue,”
That’s why you’ll always be a money loser.
‘I don’t think cost is the issue’
Oh no, you only have to insure the robot, secure the robot, pay property taxes on the robot. Repairs, maintenance? It’s all la la la in a yellen bucks cost free world. Of course, I don’t do any of that with my minimum wage worker. And if things don’t work out, I just tell him C ya.
‘I think that there will be lots of robots created in the coming years that will do single tasks well-enough to replace humans’
This is why I read this blog. The stick your neck out, cutting edge thinking. You know Henry Ford had a conveyor belt for his Model T’s and A’s. When I was a little kid at school they showed us one of those old timey films with light bulbs being manufactured without people touching them.
“So why not just hire the human?”
A robot is more efficient, reliable, obedient and honest.
Unless the humans who progammed it are inefficient, unreliable, disobedient, or dishonest. Or simply inept at creating, then explaining to, an automaton what a low-IQ human innately understands.
But think of all the research funding that hyping these things can generate!
“However, I seriously doubt that a robot will be created in my lifetime that will do a meaningful number of tasks like Data from Star Trek. So, there will always need to have humans around…they’ll just do less of the menial tasks.”
Teach your children to think independently and creatively if you want them to avoid joining the portion of the labor force who lose their jobs to automation.
Why not buy a few sex robots and pimp them out?
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/relationships/sex/sex-robots-could-soon-be-in-brothels-sooner-than-we-think/news-story/4f0754973e2b021508539653fbd576ad
Or just marry one …
http://metro.co.uk/2017/11/05/the-man-who-built-and-married-his-own-sex-robot-is-now-making-them-for-other-lonely-men-7054550/
Those of you who are bored might enjoy this class I took online on Machine Learning, which is a cousin of AI. Very well organized, and it was free, at least when I took it.
‘I don’t think cost is the issue’
I come here for the laughs.
“Or just marry one …”
I’m imagining potential mechanical glitches with painful and tragic consequences.
Flipper, Flippy, Flim.Flam … Looks like the NAR kids are bit slow on their copyright name acquisition$ …
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/flippy-burger-robot-job
My favorite is “50 years from now, x% of the jobs in existence today won’t exist”.
So, how many jobs that existed 50-years ago still exist today? 100 years ago?
In other words, there is nothing new about new technology “destroying” jobs. However, new technology frequently brings about goods that are cheaper and better, freeing up capital in the economy to find another home.
‘In other words, there is nothing new about new technology “destroying” jobs.’
Lud·dite/ˈlədˌīt/
noun
a member of any of the bands of English workers who destroyed machinery, especially in cotton and woolen mills, that they believed was threatening their jobs (1811–16).
Combine universal basic income with a “social credit score” as detailed in link, and this is the path to total enslavement. No free sh*t for you if you’re a deplorable:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-03/chinas-social-credit-score
The future just keeps getting worse and worser under these globalist totalitarians.
I do wonder how long until “bad think” will lower regular credit scores. “so you post comments on VDare, huh? That’s gonna cost you 40 points, pal!”
Swiss turned it down 65/35
Miramar Beach, FL Housing Prices Crater 9% YOY As Vacation And Second Home Demand Collapses
https://www.movoto.com/miramar-beach-fl/market-trends/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/technology/dorm-living-grown-ups-san-francisco.html
SAN FRANCISCO — In search of reasonable rent, the middle-class backbone of San Francisco — maitre d’s, teachers, bookstore managers, lounge musicians, copywriters and merchandise planners — are engaging in an unusual experiment in communal living: They are moving into dorms.
Hmmm. San Jose already has hacker houses for about 1k/mo where you get a bunk in a shared room with a shared bathroom. My guess is this gives you a little more privacy but then tries to squeeze about 2k/mo out of you?
Oops, checked the article, 1400-2400.
Apparently this type of arrangement appeals to recent divorcees. From the article:
“so when she and her husband divorced, she packed up and moved out. (There are quite a few divorcées in Starcity)”
And:
“She divorced her husband, packed her Yorkie Pomeranian, Stanford, in the car and drove west.”
“The idea of sharing a bathroom was initially alarming, but the pictures of the house looked nice and Ms. Shiver wanted to meet new friends. For $2,200 a month, she now rents a Starcity room with a queen-size bed, a bedside table and a chair.”
“She said she could not imagine any other life.”
$2000+ a month for a room with a shared bathroom.
I’m sure it’s worth it.
The sea was angry today my friends, like a Hillary voter being kicked off a flight for abusing someone who was celebrating the Trump Presidential victory.
But we grilled some Chuck-eye on the Weber to go along with Mrs. jeff’s baked spuds, broccoli and cheese and out of bankruptcy Hostess Cupcakes which made for a better dinner than the $140 million the Clinton Foundation received for 20% of the United States Uranium reserves could buy.
All is well in Region IV tonight.
Victory for Eurosceptic, populist parties shocks the establishment in Italy election
‘Italian voters have flocked to anti-establishment, Eurosceptic parties and rejected mainstream, traditional political parties, the latest predictions from the country’s election indicated on Monday. The populist Five Star Movement, founded by stand-up comedian Beppe Grillo as a bombastic challenge to the established order, emerged as the big winner of the general election, in a result that will be viewed with trepidation in Brussels.’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/04/italian-election-country-goes-polls-latest-news-results-forecast/
If France goes, the EU is over.
As it should be. The people are wise to the scam now. Globalism is DOA.
If France goes, the EU is over.
Marine LePen was soundly defeated by centrist Macron and his “en marche” party. Prior to this he belonged to France’s socialiste party. Macron has made some admirable labor reforms, but he is more of a pragmatist and a moderate than a Euroskeptic.
With regards to Italy, M5S is more of a moderate, anti-establishment party, nothing like the far right authoritarian party of Poland. Silvio Berlusconi and the Northern League hardliners are much more far right and, in my opinion, quite corrupt.
LePen did better than ever before. We’ll see how “pragmatic” Macron does next election as he continues to deliver more of the same: high unemployment and unfettered 3rd world immigration.
Admittedly, LePen did better than Jean-Marie LePen ever did, but that is basically because she has disowned him and his racist, anti-Semitic, and Nazi-sympathizing views. Still, it was a walloping at the polls. National Front has 8 out of 577 seats. They get a lot of media coverage for their radical views, but they are a rounding error as far as actual legislative heft is concerned. Macron is a political neophyte, so time will tell if he can govern. But if not, NF will likely not grab power. If anything it will be the conservative-liberal Republicains who take over.
“The sea was angry today my friends”
Angry indeed. People who live in RageCages shouldn’t throw CraterTaters…. It’s a painful truth to accept.
if you were not invested in stocks and homes the past 10 years I dont think u will ever recover.
I have a portrait of you hanging…. on my shlthouse wall.
u r my hero. SHP
I don’t wish for another massive economic meltdown, but have been wondering if it’s even possible to get housing prices back to affordable levels without one.
The fact that the term “bubble economy” is widely used to describe what the reckless Federal Reserve’s policies promote and create, I also wonder why the deleterious effects of these harmful policies aren’t widely discussed to neuter this rogue cabal once and for all.
Don’t you expect the Fed to keep backstopping home prices, now that they have set a precedent?
You mean they will just park housing prices at a permanently high plateau?
high property taxes keep the pensions and big paychecks flowing.
Welcome to the game.
AWWWW take time out for a sad story
http://www.kolotv.com/content/news/Happy-Happy-Joy-Joy-closes-its-doors-475783413.html
Was this a bored housewife business that the husband kept alive?
Murphy, TX Housing Prices Crater 9% YOY As Housing Market Corrects Across Dallas/Fort Worth
https://www.movoto.com/murphy-tx/market-trends/