The Housing Bubble

No comment on the last line but on the comment above: Platinum and palladium hitting 16 and 17 month highs suggests some growth with the inflation being some pull with the push. But that is more true outside of the U.S.

With all the “Blackstone” type groups buying thousands of homes from banks for cheap in hopes of turning them into rentals, wont we see a rental glut down the line?

Last I heard, Tucson’s rental vacancy rate was around 16%. But that sure hasn’t stopped the SFR investors from snapping ‘em up, doing a little fixup, and then hanging the “for rent” signs out front.

And don’t get me started on the student housing building frenzy. I’ve already ranted that rant once this week.

Pretty much the anti-John Rocker. How’d you know?

I think Darryl was mostly right about his money/debt rants. Just like I think RAL is mostly right about his schtick.

I always thought people ganged up on Darryl because he bought a house in PHX for his children.

I always thought people ganged up on Darryl because he bought a house in PHX for his children.

I agree—and I thought it was messed up at the time. There are a great many reasons one might buy in _spite_ of a belief that prices still have lower to go.

Life is not all about money.

“the people who attacked him didn’t understand what he was saying.”

folks should just spend half an hour or so on youtube watching “money creation” videos.

Who’s Darryl?

LOL…

Ben, did you end up banning him, or did he just wander off?

Still insulting the guy by misspelling his name…awesome pack behavior.

But the reason many of this board want to get rid of the m.i.d. is because they know it supports house prices. So maybe j6p who owns a home is not as stupid as you make him out to be. Personally, I believe that many that laugh at j6p would not last as long as he would, should a major disaster hit the U.S.

“But the reason many of this board want to get rid of the m.i.d. is because they know it supports house prices”

not nearly as much as the federal reserve…let’s get rid of them?

Agreed.

“many that laugh at j6p would not last as long as he would, should a major disaster hit the U.S.”

…..sing it Hank Jr.!!!!

I’d support killing the MID for a few reasons:

1) Encourages higher prices to “get the max discount”
2) Encourages borrowing against the house and not paying down the loan as much as possible
3) Is used as a “sales tool” non-stop by Realtors -but—
4) it’s not that big a savings until you get to higher income and loan values. The “average” family doesn’t see much from the MID, but they THINK they do, therefore doing the stuff in 1 and 2 (not generally a good idea).

We should do everything possible to discourage debt, not encourage it. The MID does exactly the opposite.

We should do everything possible to discourage debt, not encourage it.

Now that the whole system is based on debt, is that still true?

lesser

Lessor.

What do you mean they couldn’t find a way to monetize 14yo girls taking “duck face” pictures of themselves on their i-phones? That’s unpossible!

This can actually be a good business model. See, for example, The Chive.

Bwahahaha, nothing more pathetic than some boomer business person who bought the whole social media meme hook, line and stinker.

As my sis has observed, some businesses went all in for social media thinking they could avoid the one thing they really have to do in order to increase sales: actually talk to someone, either face to face or over the phone.

My stock line when someone expresses (gasp!) shock that I don’t have a faceschnook page is that it was never my ambition to become one of Mark Zuckerberg’s unpaid-for assets.

” never my ambition to become one of Mark Zuckerberg’s unpaid-for assets.”
————————–
So you don’t want to help The Zuck fund Chris Christie’s campaign war chest?

Just thinking how Gropeon and Faceschnook really missed the IPO boat through Really. Bad. Timing. Got all caught up in their own mythology and held out..and out.. and out.

Worse for Gropeon than Faceschnook, of course. Zuckerberg could afford the mess-up. Even if Schnook goes into the crapper, no biggie. Zuck’s still ridin’ high and laughing at all his “assets”.

fb is for the olds now. the lucrative demographic (kidz + young adultz) are all about tumblr and pinterest. 2012 was the yr of instagram until they went and f***ed it up with whacked out new policies, which was not surprising because of who purchased them (using 50% cash, 50% stock, which dilluted everyone who bought the FB IPO… oops!)

yelp looked like it was going to be huge but now there’s a backlash against it because its most vociferous reviewers often act like d-bags.

The few tumblr pages I have seen all look like jumbled messes.

“The few tumblr pages I have seen all look like jumbled messes.”

But… but… they’re “curating the future” (or somesuch).

USV and Flatiron still own most of tumblr, I think. They might have brought some West Coast VCs in last round, though. These guys aren’t idiots, their track record is staggeringly good, check their crunchbase dot com profiles. I think tumblr has the #5 traffic of any website in the world now? And they just canned their last ceo john maloney who always seemed mildly retarded to me.

The guy who runs USV has a pretty interesting blog about VC called avc dot com.

“As my sis has observed, some businesses went all in for social media thinking they could avoid the one thing they really have to do in order to increase sales: actually talk to someone, either face to face or over the phone.”

They also used Facebook as a substitute for a real business website, just like they do with blogs.

Now there’s nothing wrong with blogs, but neither were made for day-to-day business operations.

I just dont get pinterest….how can it be useful for business?

FB is getting lame….you could have 5000 friends yet very few post any kind of response…And that is the most important part of the social interaction..so what to do when there is none?

Is it time to clear out unfriend the 3000 friends that never post a response and hope the next 3000 do?

My dj radio friend asked me this last week. is there a way to unfriend in bulk?

“jumbled messes”

to be fair, i think this too. and i don’t understand what tumblr’s plan is as far as profits in the future. but until I see the VC’s rush for the exits (by rushing into an IPO so they can get paid out) i have to assume they know what they’re doing

also, i think the “kidz” like that tumblr is customizable, whereas facebook is pretty rigid, has a ton of weird default rules, and doesn’t care about anyone’s privacy, creativity, etc.

that said, the best tumblr add-on ever, something called “the missing e”, was banned by tumblr. so it’s not like tumblr is completely open-ended. they will allow mods, but they want to retain control as much as possible too.

google up “tumblr missing e contoversy” and some interesting stuff should pop up.

It’s sort of dot.bomb all over again. I don’t “get” tumblr, anyway. As to pinterest, meh. Pictures of stuff. Wow.

“These are a few of my favorite things!”

Ann Romney does pinterest, so I’m not sure if the youngsters are really the demo there. Maybe it has universal appeal, I dunno.

It’s all a confused mess, as far as I’m concerned. Just got an email from ebay, they’re trying to do a pinterest thing. Poor ebay. They had a good thing going and effed it up majorly by trying to be Amazon. Now they’re trying to be pinterest. Patooie!

“They also used Facebook as a substitute for a real business website, just like they do with blogs.

Now there’s nothing wrong with blogs, but neither were made for day-to-day business operations.”

Nailed it, eco. Az Slim is in the business and has commented on this phenomenon. I can understand why businesses might do this, but there really is no substitute for one’s own website, unless you are in a niche in the “stuff” business. For that there are marketplace websites that give you your own store. I had hopes for this model, but less than a handful do it well. And Google Shopping took a dump and screwed it up for all the marketplaces that were depending on that search.

“how can it be useful for business?”

Are you kidding? Pinterest has the most potential of any of these, via promoted posts. Brands will pay to create special posts, have their “pins” displayed on boards that have matching #tags or text, etc.

Tumblr also does promoted posts on its dashboard, I think. (I have a tumblr but haven’t updated in a while… I may check later today or on the way home on train)

Gilt Groupe is another example of what is currently “hot”. Gilt is a much better model than Groupon or Living Social.

FB is getting lame….you could have 5000 friends yet very few post any kind of response…And that is the most important part of the social interaction..so what to do when there is none?
————————–

Pay me to pretend to be your friend?

lol

Hmmm could be a new business opportunity…..heck they pay people to post glorious reviews of your book on amazon

Must be a way to automate your posts to your paid “friends”….

Must be a way to automate your posts to your paid “friends”….

—————-

This is already being done. There are services that will sell you Twitter follows, twitter re-tweets, facebook friends, facebook “likes”, etc.

Just use google. Type in “buy twitter followers” etc. Prices are surprisingly low. You can get thousands of twitter follows for ~$20.

Joe, How about a business like a fast food franchise on lease?

a franchise (any) seems like the worst fit for what I’m proposing. you have an unnecessary middle man and a slew of procedures, invoices, and accounting procedures that basically prevent what i’m suggesting.

you also likely get all the fun of meeting all the franchise “goals” and keeping your business up to corporate’s “standards”.

but the real big problem is that that your business can easily be compared to a baseline of other franchises. it becomes pretty easily to see what revenues “should” be, what the value of the inventory is, how much depreciation is normal, etc.

If you lease the business you get none of the accelerated depreciation deductions (paper losses) that are the real tax advantage. If you lease, your expenses are limited to what you actually pay, and someone else is taking the depreciation against your payments to them.

There’s the rub, central banks are enabling speculation a lot more than they are enabling demand from consumption. Free money for bankers and higher taxes for consumers.

I know you put a lot of weight on established, proven REITs but if you saw the big players moving in to set these up there might be a good play for the first few years depending on the leverage. This ain’t trading carbon credits.

As for utilities I wonder who is going to get hurt when the Energy Futures Holdings LLC blows up? They leveraged this $43 billion dollar deal with long term natural gas contracts that are 50% underwater.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-22/energy-future-2012-preliminary-net-loss-widens-to-2-17-billion.html

I understand if you can get on the ground floor, it might make sense (you might get the yield to justify what could be less efficient dividend taxation). Otherwise, my concern really relates to tax treatment and stability of business model. If solar REITs trade at traditional utility company dividend yields, they’ll be kicking off 5% or so, which COULD be taxed as ordinary income (unless there is heavy enough depreciation to lower the tax bill). Utilities, while not having the tax efficiency of REITs (ie. double taxation at corporate and dividend levels), at least the 5% you get paid is “qualified” meaning tax to the investor at 20%, not 40% of a REIT (if they are kicking off ordinary income).

On the REIT front, while I like established well-run REITs, I actually only own one of them in any significant amount. I’ve made a lot more money (on paper) by buying REITs that were nearly driven into the ground due to too much leverage, but owned “bread and butter” real estate…industrial/distribution and basic needs retail. The other kind broadly that I own, and are performing solidly (with hopefully more improvement to come) are essentially start-up REITs with very good management, in similar “recession-resistant” product types (I don’t consider anything “recession-proof”).

Don’t have time to read the Bloomberg article, but will later…thanks for the link.

BTW, PLD had their earnings call today. Hamid Moghadam (CEO of PLD) is among the brightest bulbs in the world when it comes to industrial. Here is a piece of the conference call (courtesy of Seeking Alpha, who posts the transcripts).

Here’s the part from Hamid related to how the income in their portfolio lag actual increases in market rents.

“….given the nature of how this stuff rolls through the portfolio with expiration of leases, obviously in 2008 and ‘09, certainly in 2008, you’re still rolling off peak rents, and by 2009, you pretty much got to the bottom of the market and every new lease you were doing there was at a pretty low number. So when you roll out 4.5, 5 years forward of that, by ‘14 it should really pick up. But we roll 15%, 20% of the portfolio in any given year. So even the market — if the spot rents recover substantially, it still takes a while before it works through the portfolio.”

And here’s the link to the transcript:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/1162221-prologis-management-discusses-q4-2012-results-earnings-call-transcript?part=single

So when you roll out 4.5, 5 years forward of that, by ‘14 it should really pick up.

Have their rents really increased that much on leases written since 2009?

I find that surprising… Sure, there may be some recovery relative to the rock-bottom rates they were giving out to avoid huge vacancies during the trough. But not THAT much, I wouldn’t expect. It’s not like the economy was really rockin’-n-rollin’ in 2010 or 2011.

You can see the numbers from their reports, annual rent per square foot by year of expiration:

2013: $5.31
2014: $4.97
2015: $5.00
2016: $5.38
2017: $5.40
Thereafter: $6.18

Looks like the roll up in rents (gross) will be anywhere from 5%-20%, depending on the lease/location.

For perspective, if they increased their revenues by 5%, all else equal, their core FFO would increase by 13%.

When the market does tighten though, many expect market rents to increase by upwards of 5-10% per year from where they are today as well…I think the comment from Hamid is more a comment related to the discounting they did to keep the buildings full than it was related to a booming recovery in 2010/2011–I think market recovery in rents are coming in the future.

We have a (tiny compared to PLD) portfolio of industrial assets, and we have seen significant improvement in rents over the past 6 months…it’s amazing how much a nickel per month means when your starting point is $0.30 per square foot.

“ten years AGO”

Joe, well said. Universities nowadays are nothing more than factories, like the business schools churning our MBAs in evening, part-time, weekend, executive etc. programs. Primarily to make money for their highly paid professors and facilities in their buildings.

I wonder if MBAs are still getting jobs as they used to get. Is MBA still worth the money especially if not from a top10 school.

I wonder if MBAs are still getting jobs as they used to get. Is MBA still worth the money especially if not from a top10 school.

I don’t know about startups and finance. All I know is that for a techie who would like to move into management they are not worth it. They can be used to justify why you are on the fast track, but they will not put you on the fast track if you’re not already there.

Having said that I enjoyed learning about that side of the business world and do not regret doing it.

Meanwhile, quite the opposite of the public universities, the top colleges will fall over themselves offering full ride scholarships to any admitted student who has a combined parental income under 100k.

Maybe at the well endowed Ivies. The best we were offered from regional private schools was 50% (my kids both scored in the 95th percentile on the ACT) which still left a tuition bill in the 15K+ range. At 5K (after the merit scholarships) the local State U was far, far cheaper. I did know a kid who got a full ride to the University of Denver, but his ACT score was in the 99th percentile.

I don’t know about startups and finance. All I know is that for a techie who would like to move into management they are not worth it. They can be used to justify why you are on the fast track, but they will not put you on the fast track if you’re not already there.

Having said that I enjoyed learning about that side of the business world and do not regret doing it.

Agree 100%. Plus I was lucky that theMBA program at CSU was cheap at the time ($8000 for the entire program). But it never opened any doors for me. All potential employers saw was a middle aged techie who wanted to change careers.

The trick is that for the very top schools, the alumni are very successful and the alumni fund the school. Tuition and fees are really just bonuses for the school, a rounding error in their total budget. The only reason the top 25 schools (roughly the top 15-18 universities and top 8-10 liberal arts schools) charge tuition is because it’s basically free money. If the parents make 250k/yr and have a couple million in assets, they will cough up the money to send their kid to Amherst or Swarthmore or Hopkins instead of sending them to the local state U.

The trick is getting into one of these schools. A person from the true middle class has an uphill battle because they’re against kids from resource-rich families. Once you get in, though, the school doesn’t really need the tuition money.

Most schools today don’t really follow the traditional university model. When we think of a traditional university, we think of very prudent financial management, stockpiling of endowment money, and money being directed primarily (if not exclusively) at academic ventures and research. People like to hate on Berkeley, but they’re the only flagship state university that still does this and even their tuition is rising (almost $12k for in state tuition). Another interesting case is Northwestern vs the rest of the Big10: the difference in priorities is staggering. If you can get admitted to Northwestern, you’ll get better fin. aid than the other “sportz factory” schools.

Another interesting case is Northwestern vs the rest of the Big10: the difference in priorities is staggering. If you can get admitted to Northwestern, you’ll get better fin. aid than the other “sportz factory” schools.

True, dat. I almost went to Northwestern so that I could attend Medill.

Michigan reports a total cost of $27k in state this year and over $50k out of state.

What was it like a generation of so ago? Safe to assume it was much more affordable? I wonder how much of the increase went to educational reasons.

“Maybe at the well endowed Ivies.”

Colorado, he is talking about a dozen schools in the entire country, maybe two dozen if you include the top kids at honors colleges at the very few state universities that still have them and fund them. The ivies have zero scholarship money for anything other than lack of money - not for sports, not for academic prowess, not for being the best tuba player in the country, nothing. You gotta be broke.

Actually, when I was at one of these schools, a friend was required to pay a few thousand even though her family was dead broke from rural Maine and provided her with nothing. They thought she should be married and pushing out babies, not learning anything. Her department bent over backwards to get her work related to her classes to make up for the extra her parents wouldn’t even try to cover. I’m pretty sure the financial aid office was violating its own policies because her parents wouldn’t even fill out the forms for her.

“What was it like a generation of so ago? Safe to assume it was much more affordable?”

Heck yeah it was more affordable. Another reason to hate us boomers. A quarter’s tuition at the state U was less than some people’s cable bill today. So 3-4 mo high end cable if you count for inflation. Out of state tuition at UGA was about the current monthly payment you’d expect on a mid size SUV with a few options.

Tell your kids to travel the world, then go to college at age 25, it will be nearly free then if they have zero income. Yours does not count at that point.

Back when it was relevant to me, there was one other approach that was shorter than waiting until age 25: if you were financially independent (e.g. not receiving support from your parents) for two years, then you also did not have to list your parents’ income.

That worked great for me, though it was logistically challenging at times.

I’ve heard that financial independence can be difficult to prove these days. It was easy as a married veteran in 1991.

Why the rush to go out and put on a tie and get a “real” job?

25 is young. you can start the junior college route at 18-23, be sure to get all A’s, be all done at 27. With high marks you will get scholarships.

“Bush had full control for 6 yrs and did nothing.”

Sigh. The last president who really DID anything about illegal immigration was Ike. Every pres since has more or less permitted it, Reagan did the first amnesty.

Ike showed how it could be done. He also showed how to bring the non-productive parasitical rich to heel.

I Like Ike!

But it must have been consensual because you can’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape”, right?

And just imagine, if her kidz and their kidz and their kidz all start young too, she could be a great great grandmother at age 36

Dad was 17 at the time and has not surprisingly “disappeared”.

Btw, palmy, my baby was born with “prematurely budding breasts” and I can assure you he wasn’t “had at” in utero. There are any number of medical and non-medical conditions that can account for premature puberty, including… puberty.

So assuming that a young pubescent girl in a “family group” has been sexually active is kind of creepy when you stop and think about it.

“my baby was born with “prematurely budding breasts” and I can assure you he wasn’t “had at” in utero.”

I should hope not.

“Dad was 17 at the time and has not surprisingly “disappeared”.”

“So assuming that a young pubescent girl in a “family group” has been sexually active is kind of creepy when you stop and think about it.”

Indeed.

“my baby was born with “prematurely budding breasts”

I always wondered who gave birth to Simon Cowell.

Hah!

If only….$$$!

Could oxide please chime in with a list of sources of environmental estrogen that can lead to precocious puberty so we don’t have to listen to palmy’s absurd hypothesis. Sperm doesn’t give you breasts. Estrogen does.

Before you personally attack Palmy you should know they are some supportive studies of Palmy’s view:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090518134142.htm

Palmetto, there is a link coming soon that supports your view.

An excerpt:

Survivors Of Childhood Sexual Abuse

May 22, 2009 — African-American women who were younger at menarche, or the onset of their menstrual periods, were more likely to report a history of childhood sexual abuse, according to a new study led by a researcher at Boston University’s Slone Epidemiology Center. The results suggest that a history of sexual abuse may increase the risk of early menarche (i.e., onset of menstrual periods before age 12 years

“Could oxide please chime in with a list of sources of environmental estrogen that can lead to precocious puberty so we don’t have to listen to palmy’s absurd hypothesis. Sperm doesn’t give you breasts. Estrogen does.”

Conclusive proof no, but from from an absurd hypothesis.

B

God help us all if these folks gain dominance in the US. I don’t think people have any clue as to the depth of depravity and chaos in these primitive societies that are taking root here. Complete denial.

The “prophet” of Islam had a nine year old wife. Many Imams defend the marriage of girls before puberty. With the illegals I have a problem with the subculture but with many of the Islamic countries you cannot even call it the subculture, it is the culture.

far from an absurd hypothesis.

It never occurred to you that girls that develop secondary sex characteristics at a younger age are more likely to have had unwanted sexual encounters?

Cart, meet horse. Now get the heck behind him.

“palmy’s absurd hypothesis”,

B*tch, PLEASE!

Sigh. I think I prefaced my post with the information “I READ about this phenomenon, and IT WAS SAID that this comes about as a result of someone having been “at” the child.”

So, not my hypothesis, but as dan demonstrated, something published by those who have studied sexual abuse and who are far more learned in the subject than I.

With that said, I’ve recently read H.L. Mencken’s somewhat amusing but ferociously condescending screed on the “lintheads” of the South and the fate of latter day Honey Boo-boos at the hands of their male relatives. And it sort of lines up with the conclusion of the British travel author who wrote “God’s Middle Finger”, an account of his (sometimes harrowing) sojourn in the Mexican hinterlands. The conclusion being that the inhabitants of those areas are basically hillbillies, Latino version, and accordingly, act as such.

PS: Thanks, dan. I’m no fan of Rush, but I swear, getting feminazi’ed just wears out the soul, especially when said razor-toothed double breasted mattress thrashers don’t bother to READ before they react.

Cart, meet horse. Now get the heck behind him

And with the BPA plastics and all the hormones in the milk and meat (that Lucky Ducks who don’t shop at Whole Foods buy), expect to see many, many more “jailbait” eight year old girls tempting the horny teen Sons of Aztlan

Los Angeles clothing manufacturer American Apparel has normalized the sexualization of pre-teen girls (and boys:)). Having sex with eight year old girls is only the next logical step in Obama’s secret agenda to implement Sharia law in USA.

“Obama’s secret agenda to implement Sharia law in USA.”

Does that mean we’ll have to address Michelle as The Begum Obama Khan?

According to lead author Lauren A. Wise, ScD, an epidemiologist at the Slone Epidemiology Center and an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health, it is biologically plausible that childhood sexual abuse could influence age of menarche.

So Polly maybe you could read the link before commenting. Don’t think the “experts” asked whether the sexual abuse occurred prior to the menarche? Funny I can’t dispute the experts of climate change but you can dismiss this expert without even examining her methodology. Cart meet Ass, now get the heck behind me.

“So Polly maybe you could read the link before commenting”

Silly fellow, people who know everything, and are NEVER wrong, don’t read links.

Once again, appreciate the backup, bro’. Thanks to you, I survived the attack of the razor-toothed double breasted mattress thrashers. Felt like someone had tied me into a bag with a bunch of cats and then started beating the bag. Dang! (palmy applies some more hydrogen peroxide to the scratches) Well, none the worse for wear!

Anyway, it’s all goonie’s fault. He likes to get everyone going with links to provocative articles, and then steps back and enjoys the show.

goonie, you little dickens, you.

We wuz goonie’d. lol.

No problem. I use to ignore personal attacks but I feel that until you respond in kind they will not end. You made it very clear that it was something you read and I was able to find the study in about 5 minutes. I wish we could just stick to the facts and not attack each other on a personal basis. If she disputes the study she needs to find a study that contradicts the results. It is kind of like Obama’s attack on S & P when you think about it, shoot the messenger.

“I use to ignore personal attacks but I feel that until you respond in kind they will not end.”

It’s gettin’ so you almost have to wear a cup in order to post here. Chomp, Chomp, Chomp indeed.

That said, I do enjoy the give and take on this blog, it’s a heckuva lot more interesting than some of the more saccharine venues where the people post photos of their pets and post those cutesy emoticons after just about every word.

Why not read this with that data, which the author admits has a very fluke like quality to it:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/05/uah-global-temperature-for-january-up-significantly-but-other-data-doesnt-match/

When the link posts you will see the fluke nature of the data. However, I will admit surprise since it is not confirmed by ocean data but the explanation in the link sounds plausible and should reverse in a major way in February. BTW, the explanation was natural event that we have talked about previously on the board.

Sudden Stratospheric Warming? I read somewhere these SSW events dwarf the energy released by a hurricane and do it in a really short period of time. I think SSW events are like a boiling pot of water with a loose lid. When too much heat builds up in the atmosphere it’s nature’s way of dumping it into space. Of course just the IR heat is radiated into space, the CO2 and the rest of the gases just cool off and sink which is why the polar vortex splits when it happens.

While as you can read the link does not use the terminology but what they describe does sound like it. You probably have more knowledge of the phenomena since I have always considered it a weather and not a climate event. However my curiousity is peaked since it impact on the short term satellite readings is stunning. Of course, in the medium and long term it is a cooling and not a warming event.

But I think I might have a link Goon. Blue areas of the country are 02 deprived hence the crime and voting patterns. Red areas are rich in oxygen so they have low crime. (sarcasm).

here is information from the climate emergency institute which while being a very AGW site puts this data into perspective:

Conclusion

Although atmospheric O2 levels are gradually declining as CO2 continues to accumulate in the air from fossil fuel combustion, fortunately an O2 crisis is not yet a likely scenario. Oxygen is quite abundant in the atmosphere that even when fossil fuel reserves (mostly coal) are exhausted, the maximum potential loss in oxygen is only small (Broecker, 1970). The oxygen decline of 0.0317% is considered not significant and should not arouse serious concern at this point. Mr. Ray Langenfelds of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Australia further adds that this level of oxygen reduction actually has no impact on our breathing (Science Daily, 1999). He said that typical oxygen fluctuations indoors or in city air can actually be greater than this.

In fact, scientists agree that today, oxygen levels are even less than 20.95% in certain areas such as densely populated, polluted city centers and industrial complexes (Tatchell, 2008). According to a UN adviser, Professor Ervin Laszlo, “Currently the oxygen content of the Earth’s atmosphere dips to 19% over impacted areas, and it is down to 12% to 17% over the major cities” (Tatchell, 2008). Hence, the oxygen decline currently recorded is still not a serious environmental concern at this point.

BTW, if you compare January of this year to January 1998 under this set of data, January 1998 was cooler:

http://www.remss.com/data/msu/monthly_time_series/RSS_Monthly_MSU_AMSU_Channel_TLT_Anomalies_Land_and_Ocean_v03_3.txt

Thanks Dan. Sometimes I like to pull your chain but I agree we are not running out of oxygen. Still the depletion of O2 is a man made side effect, just one of hundreds that are happening concurrently with natural cycles.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature

You may disagree with his conclusions(I do) but he has good numbers to back up his claims. But just like global climate statistics, if you want to be a skeptic you got to look at both sides.

It’s all good until somebody fires off a nuke on a population center then his theory goes poof!

What does stating some facts have to do with justifying the situation?

I feel bad about the situation, I am pointing out that speaking about a city as a whole isn’t really that useful. The aggregate data isn’t nearly as useful as the varied and nuanced picture.

My solutions to the problem are probably different than yours, but that’s a different issue entirely. For example, I think that we need to come up with ways to make work (labor) make sense and be preferable to welfare. We should focus on actual homeland security by discontinuing the war on drugs and watching drug prices crash. We should spend far less on the military and on medical care for the last months of life invest some of it in re-thought K-12 ed and health care for children. We should close the border and require people staying to obtain a legal status (not necessarily full citizenship). Etc. I’m sure we could argue about the details, but that’s not the point.

Bluestar, I think that there are three main causes for the decline of crime in the U.S. and reasonable minds can disagree on the importance:

1. Increased incarceration of habitual criminals. We have started to release more people and crime rates are inching up.
2. Taking lead out of gasoline and paints. The link between lead and violence is clear.
3. Abortion. No question that taken as a whole the a lot of the people that have been aborted are people that genetics and environmental circumstances would have led to a life of crime.

I think the topic was violence not crime. The drug war is 90% crime and maybe 10% violence. Crime is a legal definition of what a society decides is moral and ethical. In the jungles of New Guinea they say there are still some tribes that practice cannibalism. To them it’s not a crime but it sure seems violent!

Bluestar put violence where I say crime and I stand by what I said.

@Albuquerquedan

The Freakonomics guys outline a lot of research on the abortion/crime link the things that stuck with me after reading that book (the gist);

1. Lots of politicians (ahem, Giuliani, ahem) took credit for “cleaning up” the streets, when the abortion link is much more clear than increased police presence; and
2. It is easy to say that with legal abortion, there are fewer kids brought up in environments without strong AND present parental figures, with stable finances, thus leading to fewer criminals. Decreased crime rates started to take hold roughly 18-20 years after Roe v. Wade. The most convincing part to me though was the research into countries where abortion was made ILLEGAL, and the converse turned out to be true…a spike in crime rates 18-20 years after abortion was made illegal in those countries.

What you just described isn’t really near any of the nice neighborhoods. You were near the backdrop for The Wire.

If you went North on Reisterstown you would’ve eventually hit Pikesville, though. Which is very tony.

Yup Oxide, some hoods look like Stalingrad circa 1942; and even if they had enough police (which they don’t) they have no legal duty to protect you from harm.

Many people are not aware of this; I know cause I was one of em.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb3rAglRsqU

*be advised*