The Housing Bubble

I thought all we had to do is build things and people will come. Just build some high-rises and tiki bars and Walmarts and people will want to live year round in PR. I don’t get it. Everyone wants to be near beaches and good weather and hustle and bustle. An acre of nothing special PR land must go for $100K easily. Land is expensive everywhere. Look around. Nothing is meant to be owned by the J6P crowd.

Markets
Factory Weakness Hits Stocks
Dow Drops 326 Points as Lackluster Read on U.S. Manufacturing Adds to Worries
By Dan Strumpf and Neil Shah
Updated Feb. 3, 2014 7:27 p.m. ET
Stocks tumble – and this time emerging markets are not to blame. Steven Russolillo joins the News Hub with details. Photo: Getty Images.

A round of weak manufacturing reports Monday reignited fears about the health of the U.S. economy, fueling the sharpest one-day decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average since June.

After weeks of focusing on economic and political troubles in emerging markets, investors shifted their attention to domestic concerns. Factory output expanded more slowly in January as manufacturers dialed back on adding to their inventories, while weakness abroad and unusually cold weather at home muffled activity.

The Dow tumbled 326.05 points, or 2.1%, to 15372.80, in its seventh triple-digit drop of 2014. The average is down 7.3% this year.

Asian markets fell in early trading Tuesday, with Japan down 2.3%, Hong Kong down 2.2.% and South Korea down 1.5%.
Emerging Markets’ Unsettling Tune

Current Account: Turmoil has gripped markets from Turkey to Argentina, but many smart fund managers aren’t recommending a complete retreat, writes Francesco Guerrera.

Recent reports have raised concerns that the U.S. economy may have lost some of its momentum. Job creation skidded sharply in December, and some worry January’s report, due Friday, might also disappoint. Several big retailers have reported lackluster holiday sales, and the housing market has shown signs of cooling in the face of higher interest rates.

Car sales fell last month compared with a year earlier, several major auto makers said Monday, blaming unusually bad winter weather for depressing demand.

Concerns about the economy come at a time when the Federal Reserve has begun its long-awaited steps toward reducing economic stimulus. The result Monday, traders said, was stepped-up selling from long-term investors who up until this point had largely sat tight during January’s stock declines, when the focus had been on woes in places such as Turkey, Argentina and China.

Hardest hit Monday were the stocks of smaller companies, whose fortunes are often seen as more closely tied to the U.S. economy than are those of large-company stocks. New York Stock Exchange composite volume was 4.68 billion shares, the most in a session this year.
…

will the lower yields help home buyers?

Hard to buy a house without a job. BTW, should get very interesting for California’s finances. The Economist Magazine recently had an article that stated that 1% of the population of CA paid 33% of the income taxes. With the social media stock bubble bursting with the general decline in stocks, watch that revenue plummet.

“Hard to buy a house without a job. BTW, should get very interesting for California’s finances. The Economist Magazine recently had an article that stated that 1% of the population of CA paid 33% of the income taxes. With the social media stock bubble bursting with the general decline in stocks, watch that revenue plummet.”

I don’t think this is unusual for state income taxes. They typically exempt a lot of income. For states, income taxes are not the major way to raise revenue at all.

For states, income taxes are not the major way to raise revenue at all.

That is not true for California hence the tendency to go from a balance budget to a large deficit every time a bubble bursts.

“The Economist Magazine recently had an article that stated that 1% of the population of CA paid 33% of the income taxes.”

Actually, that is my bad. The 1% through income taxes provide 33% of the state’s tax revenue is the more accurate way to phrase the finding. It is primarily capital gains that causes that result. Thus, a bad stock market and the state is in a deep hole.

Step away from the keyboard, boy.

Let the real journalists handle this.

Highlight of the “debate” was when the Creationism guy was citing to Genesis and the Old Testament to say the world was roughly 6000 years old and Bill Nye told him there are living trees that we know for a fact are much older than that and then walked him through how exactly we know that.

http://i.imgur.com/B7WALZA.png

Gotta hand it to the creationism guy though, he has stumbled onto a great business. He gets a ton of religious donations, his museum is profitable, and he writes off all his travel expenses as business expenses.

We need to start an anti-science museum.

The use of science for political control is anti-science. The Mayans and the Aztecs are just two examples of using science for political control. In this case, you know that the average peak of temperature in an interglacial period is 2 degrees c warmer than we are now so you predict that man will make the world 2 degrees Celsius warmer and even higher unless you pay a carbon tax and transfer wealth to emerging markets. Maybe that is part of the why they are falling, the greenhouse money looks less likely given this winter.

I wasn’t really even wading into the whole “are humans primarily responsible for climate change” debate. I was going slightly OT with that recent debate at the creationism museum. I’m somewhat fascinated that wide swaths of religious people deny evolution or creationism.

I guess they think this is a conspiracy devised by the devil?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko (nearly 10,000 yr old tree in Norway)

Add that to the list of things you do not know but are sure of Joey. The wiki article on that tree says the tree is only a couple hundred years old, but some wood from the ground beneath it was carbon dated at 10,000 years. Since the tree is a cloner, it is assumed that the piece of wood is that tree’s granddaddy. Maybe, but you don’t know. As for carbon dating, it is known to be based on silly assumptions, to be often completely wrong and there is a whole population of carbon dating deniers.

I think it is ironic that one scientist says he’s got a 10,000 year old tree while other scientists “know” the place was under a glacier less than half that time ago. I love irony, and science!

Comment by Blue Skye

. As for carbon dating, it is known to be based on silly assumptions, to be often completely wrong and there is a whole population of carbon dating deniers.
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What I find ironic is Evolutionists ridicule Creationists even though Evolutionists must believe in spontaneous generation in order for their model to work.

Isn’t Creationism a form of spontaneous generation?

What country they from?

Comment by Suite Joey Blue Eyes

Best comment on the post: “Look at all those happy white people who believe in magic.”
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Well, as long as life only comes from life; and you can’t make life from nonlife,

it kinda is magical.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1mV_5-bRPo

From phone, the targeted ads I get are for Thai wives. It makes sense I think Asian women are hot and love Thai food. Never thought about getting a Thai wife but goggle knows all.

“Come on Joe, just come out, it is the 21st century, do not use your wife as cover just be honest with her.”

Meh, dan, you were raised in the Northeast, weren’t you? Then you should know that the whole sexual orientation thing is very complicated for many of the upper crusty, effete fellows from the Northeast-Mid-Atlantic region for reasons of family, class, expectations and income. It’s just not that easy. If anything, this whole gay marriage issue has really gummed up the works for some of them, because it forces them to make a choice they never had to in the past, and really don’t want to.

My parents were friends with two couples from their NYC social group that had to deal with this issue, and in both cases children were involved. For one family, it was very difficult. For the other, not so much because the wife was an heiress from an old and very sophisticated family line that understood “arrangements” and “accomodations”. I know it sounds twisted, but in her milieu, pretty much de rigeur.

Not saying this applies to Joe particularly, but calling people out when they’re just trying to work things through is not helpful.

My other post hasn’t shown up yet, but I just want to clarify, before it does, that when I mentioned there were children involved, I was referring to the fact that the couples had sons and daughters that complicated the whole marriage-divorce situation, not the Woody Allen type allegations.

Jose, I was just joking about Joe being gay but I could make a circumstantial case:

1. Obama supporter
2. Public transportation user
3. Over 21 and uses a bicycle for transportation, probably wears spandex.
4. Probably lives next to or visits it Gayborhood in Baltimore.
5. Listens frequently to NPR.

This is very similar to how an election campaign or Google identifies people. If you use 2-5, you probably would identify an Obama supporter 95% of the time. I can see a computer targeting someone who shares the traits identified as 1-5 as potentially gay and worth targeting a gay ad to them.

Sounds more metrosexual to me than gay, but what do I know? All these divisions and subtleties give me a headache.

Although Frazier was set in Seattle, the Crane brothers (yes, I know, David Hyde Pierce is in fact gay, but his character wasn’t) really nailed it in characterizing what we used to consider the effete, but mainly hetero (and often fiercely so) upper crusty guys in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic states. They would usually do 4 and 5, maybe 1 if they were especially afflicted with class guilt, although most weren’t normally so afflicted.

2 and 3? Wouldn’t be caught dead.

this is the article that downlow joe posted in the 9/13/2013 bits bucket about a married man having gay sex:

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/dear_prudence/2013/09/dear_prudence_my_wife_no_longer_likes_sex_after_cancer_treatment_so_i_cheated.html

I thought he implied that he was the author of the letter?

I don’t live in or visit Hampden (the “Gayborhood”) very much. That’s up near Johns Hopkins - approx. 3 miles north of me. The bars near me are fratty.

I don’t wear spandex often when biking. I’m not saying never, but not usually. Esp. not in this weather.

I was less of an Obama supporter than a Romney LOL’er. I’ve said countless time that Gary J was the best guy for the job, if not Ron Paul. MSNBC disgusts me now, they have gone full shitlib. The point where I defend MSNBC is that their ratings aren’t bad when you look at the demographics. Fox actually acknowledged this when they switched their lineup despite a huge lead in total viewers — Megyn Kendall is clearly an appeal to younger people. I think Andrea Tantaros on The Five is the same.

Public transit — I used to drive to DC, trust me, that felt infinitely gayer. Balt-Wash Parkway & I-95 are festering dumps. Embracing the MARC train was actually about increasing the freedom in my life by reducing wasted time and cutting down commuting costs drastically.

I don’t listen to NPR much - only to two shows that many of you listen to: Marketplace and Car Talk. Even with Marketplace, since I listen on Slacker app, I skip over much of the fluff content. I also listen to right-leaning podcasts like EconTalk and Dave Ramsey.

Are you sure?

The main point is the computer program is not sure and that is why it is providing him ads about gay strippers. The other more important point that people do not recognize is that all this data being collected really does create a situation where the government with probably 99% accuracy can describe the political leanings of people. If a totalitarian government comes to power, that government could use that data to identify “enemies of the state” and liquidate them. If Stalin or Hitler would have had such information more people would have died and they would have had less internal opposition to their policies.

I wasn’t sure if you considered Denver home or would be open to something else. That is the true BiLA/OC lifestyle, no?

I also get the not applying for a new job thing. The ability to entertain offers is the way to go and you actually _need_ more salary, that shows a spending problem. Oddly enough, when you turn someone down it makes them want you more.

I’m not about to go fully BiLA/OC. As far as considering here “home”, if I was going to move somewhere else in the U.S., I don’t know where that would be. My closest sibling is here and we want to start our own business (I’ll probably keep some kind of day job for at least another decade, I would like a slightly spendier lifestyle than MMM has if I pull the plug on the day job).

I want to buy some land in Chaffee County, near Salida or Buena Vista, and RAL can build my TEOTWAWKI cabin for less than $55 a square foot. You should come out here this May/June and go rafting down Browns Canyon, as of today the Arkansas River headwaters snowpack is sitting at a respectable 114% of normal depth, should be a good rafting season when it melts out.

(single family housing/living with a female) Each present their own set of challenges and problems, combine the two and it becomes incalculably worse

Or incalculably better if you get a good one of each, and don’t overpay for either.

I didn’t “need” to rent a 3 bedroom house, not for the space.
What I really wanted was a yard.
Yards come with SFH.
There are very few SFH with less than 3 bedrooms.
I had rented 1-bed for 15 years and didn’t know if I could handle cleaning a larger dwelling.
So I rented a 3-bed to see if I could handle it.
I could.
So I felt more comfortable buying a 3-bed house.

So you took a $300k hit “for a yard”.

The only reason I would ever need/want SFH is to get a dog.

I’ll grow my veggies at the Rosedale Community Garden, and you can keep your lawnmower and rake and snow shovel.

“I want to buy some land in Chaffee County, near Salida or Buena Vista, and RAL can build my TEOTWAWKI cabin for less than $55 a square foot.”

If you CM it yourself you can do it for $40/sq.

HA, this is a serious question, I honestly don’t know. Remember, I’ve spent my entire life burying my nose in books and wouldn’t know what to do with a level if I tripped over it.

How the heck do you ‘CM your own’??? Is there a paint-by-number version of this? A “CM-ing for Dummies” kind of thing? How would one know what to do first, second, third, etc? And - how does one know who to trust?

Quite frankly, I am not exaggerating when I say that every downline dribble from a real-t-whore’s pissing stream I have ever dealt with in the Metro DC area has looked at me with that unmistakable “ka-ching! ka-ching!” in his eye.

Why not put together a series of workshops over consecutive weekends. Charge (your number here) per weekend. You might have to put in some spadework to understand the area and who you can trust, and the particular flavor of extortion, fraud and embezzlement that drives the realty, building materials and contracting mafia there. Maybe pre-vet some people, or get hooked up with the local enforcement community. Err - the ’shadow’ one. You’ve got a nationwide network - why not?

In Metro DC, and I suspect in VA - unless tradesmen, builders and materials suppliers you deal with are afraid to cross you, you will wind up with a $20K on-demand invoice for the five yards of concrete currently rolling around in the truck outside. Into which you would fit quite easily.

See? There’s a need for strength in numbers. That is, numbers of people who have gone through the HA school of how to CM your own $40/sq ft house.

You’d be famous. A celebrity within a year. There’s a crying need for somebody with your capability to open the kimono on the housing mafia. After all, Holmes is Canadian (and the tradesmen are honest there). Few of us have the eye or the domain knowledge to do a “this old house” by ourselves. There’s a hole in the market.

OK, ok. Just sayin’.

I thought about your long post. Alot. The various methods I could go through to explain CM but that’s really not the issue here. The issue or rather the blindspot is one that relates to money and how one values or doesn’t value money. I don’t think that can be explained or taught. It’s a combination of street smarts, knowing how to go without, intuitively understanding the difference between want and necessity and a keen nose for bull$hit. Without any one of these, you’ll be in debt or jail the rest of your life.

As far as CMing work, requisites are;

-A source of cash ready to draw
-time
-the ability to coordinate trades
-Wisdom to know when to bark or bite
-A set of drawings, spec’s if necessary
-A basic understanding of construction contracts

Erecting buildings isn’t complicated. And by the time you’re out of the ground it’s already quite boring before a single piece of dimensional material is lifted. Erecting buildings and then doubling or tripling your durations and contract price by filling the new building with equipment required by the owner is complex.

The last thing the housing crime syndicate is capable of discussing is cost. And if they were capable, they’d keep a closed mouth or lie about it.

HA, thanks for the thorough response. Can you see why I was so gung ho on building a house out of concrete block, lol!? I viewed it as E-Z! Still think you’d be a fabulous TV show. “The New Hard Times Survival House”, or some such. Look at the cash all those other survival shows have raked in.

Laughing in anticipation… I bet someone will pawn off second hand aluminum wiring. Or leave out the insulation and plumbing fittings, connect the pipes with tape and hide the omissions behind the world’s fastest sheetrock job. I can imagine so many other fubar moments that I’m itching to write the book and make it funny!

No HeeHawing.

Alas, the temptation of lead pipes, porn, bad eyeliner, stone-washed denim, feathered hair, stoner dudes, and camaros proved too much.

Once you’ve had a taste, it’s a hard life to say no to.

There was some stuff on the interwebs recently about that whack on the knee. It’s hard to believe for some of us, but that was 20 years ago last month. There was a lot written about how the figure skating establishment considered Tanya Harding to be WT, while Nancy Kerrigan, whose father was welder or something, nevertheless looked and acted like “a lady”.

One interesting that I didn’t know was that Harding was one of the few people to complete a triple something-or-other in competition. Her athleticism was such that she needed special skates, which is why her laces broke ocassionally. Nobody gave her any credit for overcoming her tough background to achieve so much.

The interesting thing was that part of the description of miserable childhood was that she grew up in a rental house. The horror!

Even if you can’t hit there’s a lot to be said for just getting warmed up as the other person starts really sucking wind. Who of those people is going to keep up with her aerobically?

Right Carl, Mayweathers shoulder roll has proves it every fight.

Poor defensive skills is the reason I usually can’t watch womens boxing. Im not sure if they just don’t teach them, or females have a more difficult time integrating the skills into their offensive package.

I strongly suspect the former.

Sometimes its just sad to watch a girl get the sh*t beat outta her.

(((shakin my head)))

“Who of those people is going to keep up with her aerobically?”

At this point any of them.

Tonya Harding

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

On April 20, 2002, she was involved in another accident with her truck. She was cited for drunk driving and a violation of her probation agreement from her 2000 conviction.[59]

On October 23, 2005, Harding, apparently under the influence of alcohol again, was involved in a fight at her home in Vancouver, Washington with Christopher Nolan, a man she described as her boyfriend. Initially, she made a 911 call claiming to have been assaulted in her home by two masked men. For his part, Nolan claimed that she attacked him after having too much to drink. In the end, he was charged with assault and ordered to stay away from her and to avoid alcohol.[60]

On March 11, 2007, the Clark County sheriff’s office responded to two calls related to her.[61] The first call was from Harding, at 5 a.m. She told the officer who responded that she had observed five armed intruders trying to steal her vehicle and hide rifles on her property. The responding officer’s report described her as “agitated” and her story as “very implausible,” and recorded her frustration that others could not see the people she saw. He could find no evidence to back up her claims. The second call, four hours later, at 9 a.m., was from a friend who had agreed to let her visit. Her host told police that although she was not violent, she was “tweaking out, seeing animals,” and she was worried about her children’s safety. She requested police return her to her home. Police reported that the officer who returned to her home inspected her house, to reassure her, and advised her to seek medical help. Linda Lewis, her longtime agent, attributed her behavior to a bad reaction to legitimate prescription drugs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonya_Harding - 146k -

“Who of those people is going to keep up with her aerobically?”

At this point any of them.

Hah hah…yeah. I meant back in the day :-).

Lowes? LOL. You go gypboard sub!

Quote me 120 sheets, taped, 1 story. You’ve got two ten hour days to install it.

“..I went in their…”

In their what? Did you go into their bathroom? Their lumberyard? Where did you go into?

your sorry @ss cant hang drywall and I’m sure of that.

I bet you use that chinese drywall don’t you wonder boy?

Where’s the quote.