Just once I'd like to see a housing marked blog that isn't covered head to toe in ads, mostly for mortgages.
yeah, that blog randomly had indian mortgage ads just now. how many crores of lakhs was that again? it's a good blog, though, just badly designed and ugly.
On a quick skim, the article looked pretty good. The US (global) economy is either going to get much worse, or stay bad for a very long time, depending on central bank policies. Most neo-liberals/classicals would prefer "stay bad long time" because hard crashes can cause things like the New Deal, and well, Lenin & Hitler & wars. We are still near the beginning. Maybe save your money for the food riots. Barcelona is near starvation.
But more sanely, yes California home prices will fall a lot further, but do you really want to buy a house in a development that has 7/10 house boarded up and rotting? Whole developments will get bulldozed.
2) Banks and lenders will be failing in droves. Those that survive will be marginal. Credit will become scarce. Mortgage lending standards are going to become very tight, and NDP is gone. Expect a return to the good old days of 10-20% down payments. Maybe best to get in now or very soon before exogenous bullshit creates chaos.
3)Unknown unknowns. How high will oil go? I wouldn't buy in the suburbs/exurbs. I wouldn't buy, period, at least until I saw a clear bottom in RE and a top in oil.
Unknown unknowns. How high will oil go?
That's a known unknown.
mcmanus, "near starvation"? I know the truckers are on strike and some perishable goods are harder to get, but I don't see anything quite so dire as near starvation. Can you point me in the evidentiary direction?
Whole developments will get bulldozed.
I hope they remain intact but are allowed to return to nature, with bird nests in the bathrooms and bees buzzing in the rotting kitchens. That would strike me as very beautiful, like a sunk-ship-turned-habitat in the bottom of the ocean.
Bats love houses, even when you're living in them. Once you leave, they love them even more. I foresee paradise of bats in the American future.
5:Well of course I exaggerate and hyperbole and stuff. But just googling "barcelona food shortages" turned up pages of links. And some of the poor could be hungry. And while it may be temporary due to trucker's protests, I guarantee future headlines and stories along those lines.
Here's a blog entry, since you wanted a link:
Inadequate evidence!!
I surf econblogs at 90 pages at hour some days, so I don't quite remember where I saw that headline.
But here's Mish
The latest news is that the Spanish gov't forced truckers back to work (cleared the roads?) at gunpoint, and people have died in Spain. If truckers are losing money, I don't know how broke gov'ts can force them to deliver food. Spain being broke because of their own housing problems.
Global economy is fucking fragile beyond comprehension.
We're actually having a serious die-off of bats in upstate NY, where I have returned for the summer.
The rewilding of America will only be complete when we get some large non-human primates, like chimps. (Also, elephants) It would be fun to see them occupying abandoned suburbs, but I don't know if our houses provide enough climbing opportunities.
IM IN UR FORECLOZURS, EATIN UR ABANDOND PEENUT BUDDER
Emerson, have you been fucking the shit out of bears again?
The northeast now has predators again, in the form of coyotes.
(I guess there were always black bears, but coyotes seem to have a bigger range & get closer to major cities).
Sometimes I just surf to get impressions of sentiment. Money=credit=optimism. Keynes 101:The only thing you have to fear is fear itself. Corollary:Capitalism, especially finance capitalism, is pure-D 100% bullshit, and only works when we believe the bullshit. Add real unbullshitable scarcity, and capitalism is in trouble. We had enough trouble in the 30s when it was all psychological/sociological.
Socialism doesn't have as much upside, maybe, but also much less downside. People will believe in each other more readily than in whatever the fuck a Lehmann Bros is.
Am I trying to accelerate the gloom? I don't want President Obama to have the option of returning to Rubinism. I want a New New Deal
I want a New New Deal
Not blood in the streets? I like this moderate version of bob.
I think we'd all like to see the return of a real Democratic party economic policy. The Democrats haven't been Democrats on the economy since LBJ.
My feelings about bears are limited to purely Platonic admiration for their beauty and hottness. The lady bears of the world need not fear violation by me.
Technically "sows", but what a horrible name for such lovely creatures.
Also on the plus side: more time to look for houses, more time to develop a better down payment.
Texas has havolinas, which are some weird ROUS-esque creatures.
Part of me is hopeful that personal financial responsibility will become the new thing for the conservatives' moral wand to beat us with. That maybe this will re-norm living within one's means, and diminish the conspicuous consumption frenzy.
Not blood in the streets? I like this moderate version of bob.
Umm, I want improvement very very badly. It bothered me when I read in another thread that Emerson doesn't expect real change in his lifetime. I am more optimistic than that. And optimism doesn't exclude "blood in the streets". Some blood isn't the worst that can happen.
Re streetblood:Balkinization post on 1968, Danny the Red and his concerned friend Hannah Arendt. Links to a long serious 1968 piece by Arendt on political violence. Not:Arendt says "political violence" is an oxymoron.
I don't necessarily completely agree with Arendt, but I do think on these things more than I imagine people imagine.
Part of me is hopeful that personal financial responsibility will become the new thing for the conservatives' moral wand to beat us with.
What are the odds of that? The republicans have been pushing borrowing and conspicuous consumption for decades. Greenspan was advocating ARMs as late as, what 2003? Bush II has been demanding normal consumption levels while maintaining we are in a war. I still distinctly remember the time when GHW Bush made a photo op out of buying a pair of socks in order to encourage consumer confidence.
Personal financial responsibility will never be a republican cause, but it is a great place for Democrats to final take back some of the rhetoric of virtue and responsibility.
The lady bears of the world need not fear violation by me.
What if they make the first move?
26: That is awesome, and I'm sending it out to all of you next February.
What are the odds of that? The republicans have been pushing borrowing and conspicuous consumption for decades.
I know. Sometimes it feels like they are just creatively evil for the sake of showing off how creative they can be.
Rob laughs, but if Americans had stopped buying socks, the cascading butterfly effect easily could have brought America to its knees, and we'd be living under Iraqi rule today. People smarter than hi have studied wartime sock markets and their implications.
More seriously, we're being convinced that constant war is the normal state, and that the people's role (and Congress's) is to pay taxes, go about their lives, and let things happen.
The constitutional presumption that war is an exceptional state that has to be decided upon and declared has been obsoleted.
AWB, before you make any hasty decisions, you should also check out his other Valentine's themed comic.
Disregard 30. That one can be for someone else who is not a white bear.
OT, but if anyone hasn't visited the food wiki in a while (pass "wmybsalb"), there is a lot of tasty new stuff up, including summer salads, cardamom cake and cardamom ice, seafood lunches, etc. I'm going to make that cake today, probably, while I procrastinate.
The Spanish government did not force the strikers back to work, they forced them to stop forcing other truckers not to work. Not quite the same thing. The class analysis if you insist on it is small business owners vs. unionized employees of large companies and the owners of those large companies - i.e. petit bourgeoisie against both the working class and the upper bourgeoisie.
What is this food wiki of which you speak and how can I get access?
Magpie, that link should work, and just type in the password "wmybsalb". I do warn all that if you use your handle here, which is nice, know that in the "recent visitors" thing, it will show what state you're in. So if you don't want your location attached to your pseud, feel free to pick a new pseud.
it will show what state you're in
What!? My carefully-preserved aura of geographical mystery, swept away in a too-trusting login!
Oh, right. Nevermind.
Let's go Bucs!
"Posted by John Emerson in an unhinged state"? Count me out.
What, John, you think sometimes people will mistake you for hinged?
OT: Does anyone have suggestions for a team name for a bunch of math people?
(The implied sport is long distance running.)
All I've got so far is Department of Mathletics . . .
I think that people should be more appreciative of my relatively hinged states.
Just messing around (is there a verb form to dilettante?) I discover Kotsko liveblogging Agamben and add him to my blogroll, which is how I got 200 daily reads a while back.
One could look at my 16 above, about the modern global economy, modern civilization being based entirely on faith and then read Kotsko. If one were a scholar or had a brain, one could be interesting, entertaining, or even useful about it.
I remember being horrified years ago when reading a Berube three-parter on Raymond Williams and thinking:"Dammit, this shit could be really useful if it wasn't ghettoized to the theorysphere." I know Tyler Cowen & DeLong have read some recent philosophy, but I am just not seeing much mixing of disciplines out there. But I could be blind.
-Finding the Limit
-The Hamiltonian Circuits (seems like graph traversal would be a good place to look in general)
-L2-Norms of Velocity
-The Power Sets
-The Random Walks
-The Nonstationary Time Series
Our math soccer team was called The Eulers. Which I feel like I should explain, because I didn't get initially that there is a team called The Houston Oilers, and it was so much better once it was explained to me.
OT: Does anyone have suggestions for a team name for a bunch of math people? (The implied sport is long distance running.)
Major Catheti.
cardamom cake
The one from My Bombay Kitchen? Rfts made it yesterday, and it's frigging delicious.
I just pulled it out of the oven. Nearly set my damn kitchen on fire, too.
I've met Niloufer -- a friend of ours used to work for her -- and she's an incredible perfectionist; I'd imagine that there's going to be a really high success rate for the recipes in that book.
||
Is Ayn Rand a consequentialist or a deontologist? I gather most people assume egoism is a consequentialist philosophy, but it doesn't have to be. Does Rand have a overt statement about this?
|>
hey, snarkout, I know Niloufer too. Weird.
I just pulled it out of the oven.
Yay! I just put another dish from the same cookbook (sliced winter squash with garlic, chiles, and curry leaves) in the oven.
Nearly set my damn kitchen on fire, too.
Whee! Good show.
hey, snarkout, I know Niloufer too. Weird.
! That is weird. Tiny world.
55:You'll just have to read Objectivism to find out. It is not a huge volume, and may be available online. I stopped at the first sentence:"Existence Exists" but I was all Kant-ridden at the time.
5:Post Peak Iberia ...Oildrum
Elsewhere, Irish fishermen are suspending the blockade to the ports of Cork and Waterford. Belgian drivers are planning action against high fuel prices for the 19th and 20th of the month, considering a blockade of Brussels [hat tip Migeru]
You'll just have to read Objectivism to find out.
See, that's really the last thing I wanted to do.
If Heidegger can have the nothing nothing itself, then I guess Rand can have existence existing.
Hey rob. Objectivism considers itself a type of virtue ethics and rejects deontological reasoning because it lead to fascism, communism and (even worse) the welfare state. The article 'Objectivist Ethics' at the wikipedia will likely answer most of your questions.
I put a little spice and honey glaze on the cake and am eating it now and wishing life were a little longer.
I started watching This Movie just the other night hoping to see a hot threesome with Eric Stoltz, Julie Delpy, and Helen Mirren. But after fifteen minutes they were still passionate about TRUTH and then were passionate about TRUTH in NYC and I knew Mirren had lost creative control. Mirren with Stoltz wouldn't be enough, so I turned it off.
Just a possible alternative to Objectivism. Maybe Mirren answers your question about consequentialism in one of her nude scenes.
Thanks you, small multi-sexed person.
I skimmed wikipedia, but didn't see what I wanted.
Helen Mirren naked is incredibly sexy, but Helen Mirren playing Ayn Rand naked probably wouldn't be. She's a good enough actress that the Randishness would come out, and that would just be the end of it.
I love how I can't tell if 61 is joking or not. I always have this problem with objectivists.
Well then there are surely primers at the Ayn Rand Institute Homepage and its enemy counterpart The Atlas Society, but I don't think they will be more comprehensive than wikipedia. Perhaps you should simply bite the bullet and get yourself "The Virtue of Selfishness". It's mercifully short.
Bob, if you think truckers or fishermen striking is new and terrifying....well, just keep off European politics. That is all.
@essear
Just to avoid confusion, I am not an Objectivist.
69: thanks. I've heard things like "communism and (even worse) the welfare state" from people who seemed fervently convinced that they were making sense, so I'm never sure.
70 is sad statement on our fallen world.
68 is the kind of bad faith argument that pisses me off, and I shouldn't respond to it.
Ob-fucking-viously it ain't striking truckdrivers that is disturbing, it that they are striking for the same reason in five+ countries, said reason being fuel prices and shortages.
And since we are seeing strikes, social unrest, violence, & food shortages at $140 a barrel, and since today I read that $250 a barrel may be expected in the near future, I don't feel insane for being concerned.
For the interested:
Riffing off 45, we went with Zeno's Research Foundation.
Not totally satisfied, but it should get us through the race.
16
"Socialism doesn't have as much upside, maybe, but also much less downside. ..."
North Korea? Cambodia under the Khemer Rouge? Looks like plenty of downside to me.
Can we retire the red-baiting analogies? I don't think socialism is a good idea either, but come on. The people advocating socialism are advocating something closer to Britain or Sweden in the 50s, not Cambodia in the 70s.
Don't you get it? North Korea refers to itself as socialist, so it's basically the same type of thing as Sweden. And Nazi Germany. It's all one big goosestepping Dear-Leader-worshipping lingonberry-drenched continuum.
one big goosestepping Dear-Leader-worshipping lingonberry-drenched continuum
Lingonberries *do* go well with goose...
She's right, you know. And we've already assimilated Minnesota. Tremble, California!
Bob, continent wide strikes aren't that unusual either, especially with truckers.
I mean, I can remember French fisherman blockades from 1992 and trucker ones from 1995...
Bob, continent wide strikes aren't that unusual either, especially with truckers
But of course that couldn't have been Alex's obvious point! That a trucker's strike, far from being a Sign that there is Imminent Starvation, could be just a sign that European workers tend to strike more than American ones!
Also, "Barcelona is near starvation" is something of an overstatement. A friend of mine just got back from there and reports a steady availability of (rather good) food. There is an issue with drinking water, apparently - this is Spain, it happens - but it doesn't seem to be stopping people watering their lawns, and in the long run they plan to pipe it in from France. It was raining while he was there.
If being opposed to Pol Pot is wrong, James B. Shearer doesn't want to be right.
Aww, Alameida, thanks. It's so nice to have the cultural capital to know people who actually know shit about money. It makes up a little for having grown up with a mother who seriously says things like "as long as you can make the minimum payment on your credit cards, you're doing fine."
many who once thought they were "prime" are going to be realizing there is nothing prime about themUh, yes, that would probably be me and Mr. B. When we first started trying to get serious about house-buying, I talked to someone at WaMu who ended up offering us one of those minimum payment loans. My "what, are you kidding?" was basically met with "well you just refinance." Thank god I'm not *that* stupid.
Still haven't decided if we'll move to a cheaper rental (the intelligent pain-in-the-ass option) or just suck it up and tighten the belt for a few months in the place we're in (the wasteful path of least resistance). But I SWEAR TO GOD I'm holding out for a tile roof.
Aww, Alameida, thanks. It's so nice to have the cultural capital to know people who actually know shit about money. It makes up a little for having grown up with a mother who seriously says things like "as long as you can make the minimum payment on your credit cards, you're doing fine."
many who once thought they were "prime" are going to be realizing there is nothing prime about themUh, yes, that would probably be me and Mr. B. When we first started trying to get serious about house-buying, I talked to someone at WaMu who ended up offering us one of those minimum payment loans. My "what, are you kidding?" was basically met with "well you just refinance." Thank god I'm not *that* stupid.
Still haven't decided if we'll move to a cheaper rental (the intelligent pain-in-the-ass option) or just suck it up and tighten the belt for a few months in the place we're in (the wasteful path of least resistance). But I SWEAR TO GOD I'm holding out for a tile roof.
You're gettting a 30 year fixed when you jump, yeah?
Also, "Barcelona is near starvation" is something of an overstatement.
Giant puppets is what I do.
88: Of course, dear god. That's what we were bidding with.
B, we're also looking to buy (not a house, probably, but an apartment). A place we looked at just 3 weeks ago has already come down in price by 30K: which may not sound like a whole lot, but for the past decade, the prices have only gone up up up, so this is a real reversal in the trend. I really love this apartment (pre-War, huge rooms, architectural charm, etc) and I know somebody else is going to buy it...but, we've decided it makes sense to hold off for another six to eight months.
we've decided it makes sense to hold off for another six to eight months.
At least.
pre-War
And another big difference between Americans and Canadians. Down here, we have to be rather more specific than that.
The air conditioner guy is here at the house telling me I need to spend 10k. Joy.
Holy crap, 10K? That seems outrageous.
That's exactly what my in-laws just found out fixing their AC was going to cost.
95/97 yikes. (makes mental note never to buy a sealed box house in a hot part of the country. could be tricky.)
10K? But don't they cost less than that to put in in the first place?
98: They live in a very big house (family of 6 and my b-i-l is a quite successful engineer) and the unit that cooled the entire upstairs had to be replaced outright.
Why not just pack ice around your genitals?
Wet pants suck, Tweety. You need dry ice.
The most painful pwn is the least expected.
The most painful pwn feels very much like dry ice on your genitals.
That picture is so fucking awesome.
My house isn't very big, but has a separate unit for the second floor -- just bedrooms. It's leaking coolant in the coil in the upstairs unit -- cleverly built in so that several square feet of ceiling have to be ripped out just to get at it -- and at the compressor outside.
Just out of interest, how much does air conditioning cost to run? It seems to me that if we're looking at oil prices killing suburban life, they will kill air conditioned suburban life that much quicker.
111: turns out to be slightly more efficient to live in a warm climate and run AC than to live in a cold climate and heat your house in the winter, I believe.
Air conditioning is a lot cheaper than heating. Less necessary, of course, but still cheaper. Especially if you don't try to cool your house to 65, like a moron.
111: It depends a lot on how much air you have too cool, unsurprisingly. Current suburban design runs mostly to `build a box, mostly seal it up, use central air and heat to control temperature.'. This is cheap and has been applied in almost total ignorance of local conditions, but really stupid from an energy efficiency point of view. Building houses differently (less `dead' airspace, go back to designs that work with prevailing local weather, etc.) could make a huge difference.
how much does air conditioning cost to run?
Depends on the size, layout, and energy efficiency of your house, what kind of HVAC unit you use, etc. Our power bill for the past month was just over $60, but it's a small house that's mostly shaded.
Living in Ventura is the most efficient of all.
116 is true, but then again, you'd have to live in Ventura.
116: as long as you don't need water.
Living in Ventura a van down by the river is the most efficient of all.
118: I'm packing up the rainstorms we've been having all week in Minneapolis and taking them home with me.
Don't bother, B. They'll just confiscate them at the border with any oranges you happen to have.
111: I thought of that as I posted. But there are parts of the USA, surely, that need a/c in summer and get blizzards in winter. And New England was supporting a large white population long before New Mexico. Thick sweaters more popular and practical than dry ice down the pants.
And New England was supporting a large white population long before New Mexico.
Pure speculation, but this may be partly because fire was invented a few years before air conditioning.
apo: thanks for the figure. That is a lot less than heating, and, of course, all these things could be better designed. So it probably doesn't matter very much, and possibly more for offices.
123: Or maybe because New England is on the Atlantic coast.
That is a lot less than heating
In the dead of winter, our power bills are roughly double that despite our winters getting increasingly warm here.
125: plus, the Pilgrims were idiots.
turns out to be slightly more efficient to live in a warm climate and run AC than to live in a cold climate and heat your house in the winter, I believe
according to a really dodgy piece of research for Wire magazine that seems to assume some quite funny things about insulation. And of course, in carbon footprint terms, it makes a big difference that burning gas to produce heat is pretty much the only thing you can do that has more or less 100% energy efficiency.
129: I believed less than correctly, apparently. Makes more sense that way around, really.
123: Lots of places on the Atlantic coast where no one ever wanted to live: Florida, Georgia, all those places to which most immigrants came in chains ...
Our power bill for the past month was just over $60
In summer Dallas, add a zero. Our winters are probably like Ventura, but I don't think we can run our computers for that little.
126, 129: Efficiencies aside though the fact remains that for most of the US, there is a lot more need to heat than cool, even in NC Heating Degree Days is approximately twice Cooling Degree Days (although as apo notes this has been changing). People live in Florida without A/C, no one lives in Minnesota without heating. Does not take away the point about the sloppiness of the calculation, but Tweety's overall point in 112 (if you don't focus on the "efficiency" but rather the overall amount of energy used) is somewhat correct, less energy would be used by a general southward movement of the population in the US.
less energy would be used by a general southward movement of the population in the US.
This works in two senses. Global warming might take care of both of them!
Apostropher has a really good memory and is industrious, so much time and efforts just to click on all the links, i give up, maybe in the evening
hope you'll blog about how did you trained your memory so well
i wonder whether ogged's hiatus this time is also about poetry translation, i so hope it's so
i think this is the wrong thread
i thought i commented in the uppermost thread
how come been reading that thread and wrote here
really i'm so confused with all this havoc
