Wait until the state workers can't hold on to their houses to to the drop in income from furloughs. Definitely more brown weeds than green shoots in Sacto.
Not only do the state workers have about 15% less pay due to the furloughs, but they also got the same sales and income tax increases as the rest of us.
(Damn, you can't even write "zero" as O or 0 without something turning into a "textual smiley". I don't want a textual smiley! And get your goddamn hand off my inner thigh, you Senatorial Pervert! I want restoration of dignity in America!)
I would suggest that you read about the discovery of innovative drugs. Almost all such drugs were discovered by accident, hunches, luck and serendipity.
But you cannot say that at Pfizer.. can ya?
//My point was most of the new drugs are going to be incremental improvements over existing drugs. For example, finding better antibiotics. Try to beat nature//
Tim waiting for 2012, yeah - just one month in one city ... but something to watch.
Lucifer, I'm not surprised - I'm just happy to see short sales broken out. Too bad we don't have some history - but this will help in the future for Sacramento. It would be great if more areas did this.
Given that a capital city is a "seat of government", and that neither California nor New York have functional legislatures at the moment, I'd say neither Sacramento nor Albany is a "state capital" right now. (Also given that both states are broke, using "capital" in the financial sense doesn't make any sense either!)
Back to Bio:
I thought Polymerase Chain Reaction was also a pretty wild idea in its time.
Part of the problem as I've heard it, is that the young innovators only hold junior positions in senior researchers' programs, where they cannot easily get money to try out ideas of their own. The senior researchers have reputations to defend and also are quite expensive (highly paid, large overheads...). On average, the larger the budget the more conservative the proposals have to be.
In the old days the creative (some might say "rebellious") junior researchers would be able to pursue their own personal projects in the night hours. But current, stricter safety practices make that very difficult now.
Why not study the champions! We have genetic sequences for rats and mice. This thing is a rodent and many housekeeping genes will likely be conserved. The secondary structure of most proteins is probably almost identical.
I'd love to. But this would require a large and well-funded lab. Alas, I have neither. But I have a lot of fun.
Matt- a protein isn't a gene.
I agree. I didn't name it; the Italian group that authored the paper did. And it doesn't increase longevity, either.
In the U.S., NIH just got an enormous budget turbocharge from the stimulus bill aka ARRA. Ought to be a way for some enterprising biologist to get the naked mole rat sequenced...
I wish. The terms of the stimulus grants stipulated that funded projects should be able to start immediately and be completed within two years. This wouldn't be a two-year project. And the Universities put enormous pressure on the PIs to apply for this "easy money"; as a result, over 200 applications went in from my school alone. I heard that NIH received something like 23K stimulus grant applications for maybe 400 spots. That's a much lower hit rate than your ordinary R01. And most of these hastily written grants will be resubmitted through the standard funding mechanisms and will completely gum up the next few funding cycles. And Lord knows who's going to review all those grants.
Tell a politician about a problem and he or she will derive a way government can fix it. Tell a Wall Streeter about a problem and he or she will derive a way to profit from it.
Some food for thought for those betting on a near term collapse of the dollar...
Today GMGMQ traded up nearly 40% and ~70M shares traded hands. The share represent the "old GM" which of course is worthless.
Multiple generations are conditioned to believe in GM and many people lost significant money today when FINRA halted trading in the late afternoon. Now multiply that level of commitment by 10 fold... that's what has to crumble for the dollar to fall quickly.
bANK fAILURE (profile) wrote on Fri, 7/10/2009 - 7:34 pm
Zero
__
Whoa! ... That was cool!
Thanks for the link -- it led me down through a black hole into an era of 'kinder, gentler' bank failures (ot the S&L type). Great memories of the late-80s, early-90s: no shortage of ever-higher paying jobs, hot women, and Beavis & Butthead -- what else could a guy ask for?
tim 2012 -- i've never understood the seasonality of house sales. i understand the seasonality of ice, ice cream, sports drink, etc. sales but i don't understand how assuming three decades of debt can be motivated by sunny weather. "Man it is hotter than hell today! Baby, let's go buy us a house!"
I thought Polymerase Chain Reaction was also a pretty wild idea in its time.
Cary Mullis says he was smoking some really good stuff when he came up with one. I believe him.
Part of the problem as I've heard it, is that the young innovators only hold junior positions in senior researchers' programs, where they cannot easily get money to try out ideas of their own.
A bigger problem is that the experiments have gotten more expensive, and the money in a research program has to be spent the way you promised it would be spent when you signed for the grant. Can't have those scientists wasting taxpayer dollars, you know.
sneering nihilist: Housing is seasonal at least in part because people don't like to move during the school year and mess up their childrens' schooling. Buying a house earlier doesn't work very well because the carrying costs are high and most people need the revenue from the sale of the last house to make the down payment on the new one.
Also, people are idiots and in most places houses are prettier in spring and summer than in winter.
lack of rain hopefully. Moods also improve in better weather. More likely to be optimistic I guess. Early summer has always been the peak of home purchases.
"Great memories of the late-80s, early-90s: no shortage of ever-higher paying jobs, hot women, and Beavis & Butthead -- what else could a guy ask for?"
Hey I went to that concert when that tour came through Austin. '94 ish? I still have a Zero * shirt around here somewhere...
I worked in biotech for 5 years designing graphical viewing software for displaying sequence data from gene down to base pair level. That was probably the most enjoyable time of my whole software career. That was back during the race to sequence the human genome between the NIH, Celera and Incyte. NIH may have been slow but they put out good quality data.
Most biotechs have a lot of academics in the trench now.
My wife still works in biotech and things seem to be stabalizing a bit. The smaller biotechs I'm in contact with aren't laying off anymore.
my parents badly want to buy a few homes in sac for <100k and rent them out for at least $1k a month. Can someone please tell me some arguments against doing that? They are say things like "these homes can't go down to 0" and "my friends own a few and they have no problems renting them out for more than $1k a month", "it beats putting your money in a 1% cd".
Previous CA crash lasted 5 to 6 years before it bottomed.
We're in year three so what's the hurry?
Demographics suggests a deeper downturn in 2011-2013.
I've often thought that there is a market for your lifestyle. That is, an account of your attitude at this point in your life. I hope you produce something. I think it would sell.
my ex roomate bought a condo in the detroit area suburbs when he was going to med school there (and is a resident now at some ghetto hospital). $180k in 2007. I'm sure he thought the same thing about goin gto 0.
thanks broward, i totally agree but their argument is that we are likely at the bottom and how much lower can a 3 bedroom home go if the sale price is $80k? I mean $80k does look quite cheap for a home.
*REALTOR®, REALTORS®, REALTOR-ASSOCIATE®, the REALTOR® Block "R" logo, REALTOR.com, and REALTOR.org are trademarks, service marks, membership marks, and/or logos of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®. All NAR trademarks, service marks, membership marks and logos appearing on REALTOR.org are the property of NAR and all rights in those trademarks, service marks, membership marks and logos are reserved. Members of NAR using any of the membership marks are bound by and should refer to the rules and regulations governing use of those marks to assure proper usage.
Found myself reminiscing with a old buddy tonight - bond trader once upon a time and sharp financial economist - at a function in the leafy climes of NW DC, about a conversation we had roughly a year ago in the same place. Figured credit markets were all going to hell in a handbasket in mere months, and the real economy globally would be seriously skrood for years. But had thought we were probably being a bit silly and things always muddled through...
Tonight we got a bit stuck when we moved on to what was genuinely, structurally, sustainably improved; and what classes of fat tail risk had been competently managed down.
hi hong konger; ironically these parents are from hong kong and lived through the great property boom in san francisco and never seen such "enticing" prices until today. I keep telling them it's pretty much over for housing as far as an investment vehicle. I feel that if you are looking for a home to live in, then there isn't much downside risk left unless all hell breaks loose.
like others have said, people in the bay area still think the party will continue.
//my parents badly want to buy a few homes in sac for <100k and rent them out for at least $1k a month. Can someone please tell me some arguments against doing that?//
i grew up in sac. there are acres and acres of housing that will turn into slum. most of what we built in the last 15 years is unsustainable at every level (from city services to access to basic living needs). think detroit for many areas.
in the late 1980s, I was planning to leave L.A. so I travelled all over the city & clubs until I left.
That comment was right, it was a pretty good period.
.
I was playing pool last night and the waitress was giggling when she brought my cranberry juice. Then two waitress show up and they're giggling. She comes by again and makes some sexual innuendo. I'm baffled by her behavior but keep playing. Then my opponent asks, "Where'd you get that t-shirt?"
Then i realize I'm wearing my SEAF 2006 t-shirt.
All it says is "Seattle Erotic Art Festival, 2006" in small print over the right breast and the waitresses were trying to get a glimpse of the back. No doubt they were disappointed by the PG-rated Centaur graphic.
I should go do something fun tonight.
Quite a few good jobs showed up this week but I only got a response from one so far.
I don't even understand a lot of the past ten years.
@mattdog, Lucifer - thanks for the education. I also agree with both of you that government-funded science has in many ways become too "programmed" - propose to do X, better do X lest your proposal to do Y not get funded - and leaves too little room for the serendipitous "positive black swans" that can revolutionize history. Even worse, people are trained to think in terms of the grant submission process (where only incrementalism is likely to get funded, since far-out stuff is by definition hard to explain to anyone). The entire culture is black-swan averse, which is a real pity because those are the discoveries that change everything.
For the nonscientists: imagine if Galileo had built his telescopes but could only get funding for the military application, had to work 24/7 for that application, and had no time to look up into the sky with them. And then, even if he had looked up at the sky, imagine he had been programmed only to look for what he could "sell" to his funding agency. You think the motions of the Jovian moons would have been noticed? Think he would've made a big deal about them and derived the sun-centered rather than earth-centered solar system from them? No, he would've been incentivized to think only of how to get his next 3 years' pay from the powerful families who could afford to sponsor him, and let it go. Fortunately the real Galileo was made of more stubborn stuff, and was willing to go to Inquisition and jail for his conclusions...
@rickrolled: Have they factored the maintenance cost on that $100K house? If the housing market is so glutted that homes are worth that little, where will the renters come from? How about the future property taxes (in a post Prop-13 world where California gets its house in order)? The city can't pay for the services unless the average homeowner is paying enough property taxes. At first blush $1k/month looks like a 12% return on $100K, but after you take out the inevitable expenses the place may not even cash flow. And as someone said, entire developments are likely to go back to scrubland...
@r0m30: Time for a line-item veto on that state spending report! This is gonna be harsh, but dammit, if we can do it, Sacramento ought to be able to do it.
Looking at Pages A3 and A4, and assuming we need a roughly 25% reduction in the budget (from $98.2 billion to about $73.6 billion, a drop of $24.6 billion) to balance it:
Start with a 10% cut across the board. $9.8 billion.
Additional 20% reduction (30% total) to prison system. $1.8 billion
First time, nonviolent offenders can be released on parole.
Encourage justice & prison system to seek revenues by confiscating ill-gotten and fraudulent capital gains.
Begin the process of reforming the prison system's outrageously cushy union jobs to new market norms.
100% cut (Eliminate) to state "contributions to teachers' retirement system". Teachers and schools sort that out; shouldn't be a state issue anymore. $1.0B.
100% reduction to "Other Education" (if whatever that buys is important, fund it out of other listed education accounts). $3.2 billion.
Additional 20% reduction (30% total) to state Dept of Health Services "medical assistance program". $2.5 billion.
Yes, this will hurt, but if the voters want to keep it they'll need to vote to tax themselves to pay for it, dammit. And maybe it's time to incentive people to get themselves healthy (not at taxpayer expense), instead of the other way round. It's also time to tighten up on the fraud in this area.
100% cut (Eliminate) state "Other Local Assistance". Let the cities and counties sort that out. $2.9 billion more.
That's $21.2 billion in spending reductions so far, and the essential core functions of education, justice, medicare and social services have been protected (relatively). Only $3.4B to go.
Cut mental health spending by 40% more at both state and local assistance levels. Saves $0.8 billion.
Eliminate whatever handouts are masquerading as "Tax Relief". Saves $0.4 billion.
Apply another 2.5% across the board cut and you get the last $2.2 billion.
Problem Solved!
So, not everyone will agree with these choices, but the point is that choices can be made, and must be made. The only thing that matters at this point is getting it over with. There will be pain no matter what. The political process will still be there afterwards, to resolve the future problems created by these immediate solutions.
@creditcriminals - thanks for that El Nino link. I mentioned this a few threads ago; it could help alleviate the California drought, and reduce the risk of another Katrina this year...
On the positive side, El Niño can help to suppress Atlantic hurricane activity. In the United States, it typically brings beneficial winter precipitation to the arid Southwest, less wintry weather across the North, and a reduced risk of Florida wildfires.
El Niño’s negative impacts have included damaging winter storms in California and increased storminess across the southern United States.
I follow the Climate Impacts Group research for WA state, and they say cliamte change (and El Nino) here means more precipitation over the winter, but not in a steady, snowpack building way. In a flash flooding, Chinook, snow-melting way. Catastrophic rain storms, with no benefits to the summer water needs.
While the El Nino rains can do a lot of damage (mudslides on the coasts especially), I don't recall snowpack destruction being an issue down here. I was thinking that in California, the reservoir levels are so low that any reasonable amount of precipitation will get captured by the storage system. We'll have to see what the real experts come up with.
Excuse me for skipping the first 97 comments, but, gee, the Victor Valley has been reporting distressed sales for months now and, last I looked, it was 92%.
Okay, so Victorville isn't Sacramento. It isn't a State capitol. It isn't even a County seat, though it would have been the County seat of Mojave County, California if we could have gotten the hell out of San Bernardino County about 20 years ago, okay, exactly 20 years ago.
In a market as distorted as the current one for US housing, distressed sales are the only way for prices to travel through the down portion of the underlying market cycle. Larry Summers and Congress and just about every other person in a leadership role in the US remain convinced that they should and can mitigate the downward portion of the housing cycle. But in a few spots, like some neighborhoods in Florida and California and Nevada, even the dozens of measures designed to boost prices are not enough to fully overcome the impact of distressed sales, so we get some clues at what a free market price would be. Pretty low! Some day we'll see a lot more of this, but maybe not in this cycle, with the combined firepower of our entire government and financial system pushing prices back up. It might take another 10 or 20 years, and a lot more retired baby boomers, to see prices in most areas pierce through the govt backstop.
Maybe, sportsfan, but baby boomers (especially early baby boomers) are sitting on an amazing amount of home price appreciation accumulated since their first home purchase back in 1975-1995. They will not give that up without a fight to the death. Until they start dying off in big numbers, government action will preserve big chunks of those gains.
Hack,Tahoe is east of Piedmont.I spent a small amount of time at the Irvine Family place and thought it quite desirable,especially the private trout stream ( I was the first to fish it one year).Yes,that Irvine family.The 16 bedroom guest house wasn't bad either,or the main house.
Wisdom Speaker (homepage, profile) wrote on Fri, 7/10/2009 - 9:26 pm @mattdog, Lucifer - thanks for the education. I also agree with both of you that government-funded science has in many ways become too "programmed" - propose to do X, better do X lest your proposal to do Y not get funded - and leaves too little room for the serendipitous "positive black swans" that can revolutionize history. Even worse, people are trained to think in terms of the grant submission process (where only incrementalism is likely to get funded, since far-out stuff is by definition hard to explain to anyone). The entire culture is black-swan averse, which is a real pity because those are the discoveries that change everything.
We're all underwater now!
Wait until the state workers can't hold on to their houses to to the drop in income from furloughs. Definitely more brown weeds than green shoots in Sacto.
"Total sales in June were off 7% compared to June 2008, and that breaks a string of YoY increases."
Needed to be repeated... although it is just one month but it is a summer month.
Surprised?
Not only do the state workers have about 15% less pay due to the furloughs, but they also got the same sales and income tax increases as the rest of us.
From last thread:
Meant to write Diffusion index of ZERO.
(Damn, you can't even write "zero" as O or 0 without something turning into a "textual smiley". I don't want a textual smiley! And get your goddamn hand off my inner thigh, you Senatorial Pervert! I want restoration of dignity in America!)
sue,
I would suggest that you read about the discovery of innovative drugs. Almost all such drugs were discovered by accident, hunches, luck and serendipity.
But you cannot say that at Pfizer.. can ya?
//My point was most of the new drugs are going to be incremental improvements over existing drugs. For example, finding better antibiotics. Try to beat nature//
Isn't Sacramento the capital of California?
Wisdom Speaker,
Who is sitting next to you Larry Craig or Barney Frank?
Yes..
//Isn't Sacramento the capital of California?//
Zero
smashing punk kids.
werthless add of an ess.
Isn't Sacramento the capital of California?
For the moment.
Sacramento Association of REALTORS®
SAR means Search And Rescue
Irony is so common nowadays...
Tim waiting for 2012, yeah - just one month in one city ... but something to watch.
Lucifer, I'm not surprised - I'm just happy to see short sales broken out. Too bad we don't have some history - but this will help in the future for Sacramento. It would be great if more areas did this.
best wishes
Given that a capital city is a "seat of government", and that neither California nor New York have functional legislatures at the moment, I'd say neither Sacramento nor Albany is a "state capital" right now. (Also given that both states are broke, using "capital" in the financial sense doesn't make any sense either!)
Back to Bio:
I thought Polymerase Chain Reaction was also a pretty wild idea in its time.
Part of the problem as I've heard it, is that the young innovators only hold junior positions in senior researchers' programs, where they cannot easily get money to try out ideas of their own. The senior researchers have reputations to defend and also are quite expensive (highly paid, large overheads...). On average, the larger the budget the more conservative the proposals have to be.
In the old days the creative (some might say "rebellious") junior researchers would be able to pursue their own personal projects in the night hours. But current, stricter safety practices make that very difficult now.
@Mike in Long Island: How many of the 535 would have fit the "too touchy feely to be dignified" description? A lot. Sigh.
I'm checking out again.
Lookey there! Upper left corner of the chart... A GREEN SHOOT!
From the last thread...
Why not study the champions! We have genetic sequences for rats and mice. This thing is a rodent and many housekeeping genes will likely be conserved. The secondary structure of most proteins is probably almost identical.
I'd love to. But this would require a large and well-funded lab. Alas, I have neither. But I have a lot of fun.
Matt- a protein isn't a gene.
I agree. I didn't name it; the Italian group that authored the paper did. And it doesn't increase longevity, either.
In the U.S., NIH just got an enormous budget turbocharge from the stimulus bill aka ARRA. Ought to be a way for some enterprising biologist to get the naked mole rat sequenced...
I wish. The terms of the stimulus grants stipulated that funded projects should be able to start immediately and be completed within two years. This wouldn't be a two-year project. And the Universities put enormous pressure on the PIs to apply for this "easy money"; as a result, over 200 applications went in from my school alone. I heard that NIH received something like 23K stimulus grant applications for maybe 400 spots. That's a much lower hit rate than your ordinary R01. And most of these hastily written grants will be resubmitted through the standard funding mechanisms and will completely gum up the next few funding cycles. And Lord knows who's going to review all those grants.
Tell a politician about a problem and he or she will derive a way government can fix it. Tell a Wall Streeter about a problem and he or she will derive a way to profit from it.
good articles... Interesting Finance & Economic articles
Some food for thought for those betting on a near term collapse of the dollar...
Today GMGMQ traded up nearly 40% and ~70M shares traded hands. The share represent the "old GM" which of course is worthless.
Multiple generations are conditioned to believe in GM and many people lost significant money today when FINRA halted trading in the late afternoon. Now multiply that level of commitment by 10 fold... that's what has to crumble for the dollar to fall quickly.
if anyone wants more context
DQNews - Sacramento Bee Zip Code Chart
is the jan '08 sac bee report
DQNews - Sacramento Bee Zip Code Chart
is may '09
nanotechnology is the snake oil they sell when macro is broken
If yer upset, take some Lithium
Nirvana in my favorite bar as I listen to the commentariat.....
The emperor has no close.
bANK fAILURE (profile) wrote on Fri, 7/10/2009 - 7:34 pm
Zero
__
Whoa! ... That was cool!
Thanks for the link -- it led me down through a black hole into an era of 'kinder, gentler' bank failures (ot the S&L type). Great memories of the late-80s, early-90s: no shortage of ever-higher paying jobs, hot women, and Beavis & Butthead -- what else could a guy ask for?
JD +1 LOL
Austere Gm cannot be compared to Eighty Years of OPEL
tim 2012 -- i've never understood the seasonality of house sales. i understand the seasonality of ice, ice cream, sports drink, etc. sales but i don't understand how assuming three decades of debt can be motivated by sunny weather. "Man it is hotter than hell today! Baby, let's go buy us a house!"
I thought Polymerase Chain Reaction was also a pretty wild idea in its time.
Cary Mullis says he was smoking some really good stuff when he came up with one. I believe him.
Part of the problem as I've heard it, is that the young innovators only hold junior positions in senior researchers' programs, where they cannot easily get money to try out ideas of their own.
A bigger problem is that the experiments have gotten more expensive, and the money in a research program has to be spent the way you promised it would be spent when you signed for the grant. Can't have those scientists wasting taxpayer dollars, you know.
Sacramento is a hellwhole cleverly disguised as desirable California real estate.
sneering nihilist: Housing is seasonal at least in part because people don't like to move during the school year and mess up their childrens' schooling. Buying a house earlier doesn't work very well because the carrying costs are high and most people need the revenue from the sale of the last house to make the down payment on the new one.
Also, people are idiots and in most places houses are prettier in spring and summer than in winter.
sneering nihilist
lack of rain hopefully. Moods also improve in better weather. More likely to be optimistic I guess. Early summer has always been the peak of home purchases.
Sacramento is a truckstop on the way to Clownbucks.
All Apologies
Im easily amused, its all my fault.
bANK fAILURE:
I give you a piece of CAKE Figuring that a Sacto band is more relevant to this discussion that a Seattle one.
Been away from the computer for a bit and come back to see only one bank failure and it is now 8:03 on the west coast.
Does this mean that speed racer is the reigning champ for the week for guessing the correct number of bank failures?
I do think so. Yea baby!
bANK fAILURE (profile) wrote on Fri, 7/10/2009 - 11:01 pm
Im easily amused, its all my fault.
--
Boy, do I feel stupid and contagious ...
Sacramento == Casey Serin
winston you're a Smooth Criminal
alien ant farm's
Inventor of Sarin gas ...
BF, thanks for that version and not the MJ one.
Damnit, unemployment is making me strange.
summa the best cake Ive had in some time..
Cheers' Win Stun.
Damnit, unemployment is making me strange.
Nobody remembers your name.
Hey, Lefty!
Zero
"Great memories of the late-80s, early-90s: no shortage of ever-higher paying jobs, hot women, and Beavis & Butthead -- what else could a guy ask for?"
Hey I went to that concert when that tour came through Austin. '94 ish? I still have a Zero * shirt around here somewhere...
Major scientific breakthroughs have a tendency to be unplanned.. taleb talks about it too.
subculture folk cake sells false hopium.
I will survive"
"it's only right to leave you with a little bit of false hope"
That was funny, BF.
I worked in biotech for 5 years designing graphical viewing software for displaying sequence data from gene down to base pair level. That was probably the most enjoyable time of my whole software career. That was back during the race to sequence the human genome between the NIH, Celera and Incyte. NIH may have been slow but they put out good quality data.
Most biotechs have a lot of academics in the trench now.
My wife still works in biotech and things seem to be stabalizing a bit. The smaller biotechs I'm in contact with aren't laying off anymore.
Dupe
my parents badly want to buy a few homes in sac for <100k and rent them out for at least $1k a month. Can someone please tell me some arguments against doing that? They are say things like "these homes can't go down to 0" and "my friends own a few and they have no problems renting them out for more than $1k a month", "it beats putting your money in a 1% cd".
Are they crazy or am I crazy?
"many people lost significant money today when FINRA halted trading in the late afternoon."
Ha! Ha! /Nelson
"I wish the NAR broke out the data like this!"
Who is NAR and what do they do?
please tell me some arguments against doing that?
Previous CA crash lasted 5 to 6 years before it bottomed.
We're in year three so what's the hurry?
Demographics suggests a deeper downturn in 2011-2013.
I'd wait two more years to see what happens.
Only one BK today...there are going to be a lot of unhappy pizza joints tonight...
Mortgage Default Crisis - Brutal Past 2-Months
Mortgage Default Crisis - Brutal Past 2-Months - Big Picture's posterous
broward - it'll take at least two years to see what happens in two years. You know that.
C
broward-
I've often thought that there is a market for your lifestyle. That is, an account of your attitude at this point in your life. I hope you produce something. I think it would sell.
I don't think anyone has ever confused anywhere east of piedmont with anything resembling 'desirable'
Do they take IOUs for California distress sales?
I just read that major banks stopped accepting California IOU's today...
Arnold reminds me a bit of Marie Antoinette. (another ill-fated Austrian)
buy them some tickets to visit detroit.
my ex roomate bought a condo in the detroit area suburbs when he was going to med school there (and is a resident now at some ghetto hospital). $180k in 2007. I'm sure he thought the same thing about goin gto 0.
I've often thought that there is a market for your lifestyle
Only if you have exceedingly great parents.
Actually, my parents planned for an extended family situation.
It's a pretty big house.
thanks broward, i totally agree but their argument is that we are likely at the bottom and how much lower can a 3 bedroom home go if the sale price is $80k? I mean $80k does look quite cheap for a home.
their argument is that we are likely at the bottom
It's possible.
I think interest rates are a problem if anyone thinks prices are heading up again.
Is fellatio via text dignified?
David, please, leave us all be...
OP-ED COLUMNIST; In Search Of Dignity - NY Times
When that $100k home rents for $400, you'll see it was no bargain...
NAR = National Association of REALTORS (R)*
*REALTOR®, REALTORS®, REALTOR-ASSOCIATE®, the REALTOR® Block "R" logo, REALTOR.com, and REALTOR.org are trademarks, service marks, membership marks, and/or logos of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®. All NAR trademarks, service marks, membership marks and logos appearing on REALTOR.org are the property of NAR and all rights in those trademarks, service marks, membership marks and logos are reserved. Members of NAR using any of the membership marks are bound by and should refer to the rules and regulations governing use of those marks to assure proper usage.
What are these "parents" you speak of? I was reared in the factory like everyone else. What with the autogyros and whirlygigs about.
From where do you hail, stranger?
I read Brave New World this week, and although set 600 years in the future (written in 1932), it feels more like 77 years in the future.
Found myself reminiscing with a old buddy tonight - bond trader once upon a time and sharp financial economist - at a function in the leafy climes of NW DC, about a conversation we had roughly a year ago in the same place. Figured credit markets were all going to hell in a handbasket in mere months, and the real economy globally would be seriously skrood for years. But had thought we were probably being a bit silly and things always muddled through...
Tonight we got a bit stuck when we moved on to what was genuinely, structurally, sustainably improved; and what classes of fat tail risk had been competently managed down.
Ah well.
C
From where do you hail from stranger?
The distant past.
hi hong konger; ironically these parents are from hong kong and lived through the great property boom in san francisco and never seen such "enticing" prices until today. I keep telling them it's pretty much over for housing as far as an investment vehicle. I feel that if you are looking for a home to live in, then there isn't much downside risk left unless all hell breaks loose.
like others have said, people in the bay area still think the party will continue.
I talked to my sister-in-law, who had previously worked @ the biggest law firm in her state...
She told me her firm jettisoned all of their 2nd and 3rd year lawyers, who had toiled like slaves putting in 85 hour weeks.
It must suck to be them right now...
Yu can never compete with my muzik......ever.
the family values tour
In the Air of the Night
Phill Collins
o.jeff - thx for that....been here for years it was a shall we say a facious quesion...
If gold ascends to $5000/oz., a dollar will still buy the the same amount of sorghum.
It's funny, really.
Buy what you like. It won't buy you anything you need for a year or so.
Patience, dear friends...patience.
You guys are somking something. It all means GreenShoots dummies.
Barley - LOL! Naughty... I would have tried "So who's this NAR oufit? Do they make money out of this stuff somehow?"
nytol
C
//my parents badly want to buy a few homes in sac for <100k and rent them out for at least $1k a month. Can someone please tell me some arguments against doing that?//
i grew up in sac. there are acres and acres of housing that will turn into slum. most of what we built in the last 15 years is unsustainable at every level (from city services to access to basic living needs). think detroit for many areas.
Hey, this does mean "green shoots" for Sacramento. Think of all the houses that'll get turned back into useful farmland!!!
in the late 1980s, I was planning to leave L.A. so I travelled all over the city & clubs until I left.
That comment was right, it was a pretty good period.
.
I was playing pool last night and the waitress was giggling when she brought my cranberry juice. Then two waitress show up and they're giggling. She comes by again and makes some sexual innuendo. I'm baffled by her behavior but keep playing. Then my opponent asks, "Where'd you get that t-shirt?"
Then i realize I'm wearing my SEAF 2006 t-shirt.
All it says is "Seattle Erotic Art Festival, 2006" in small print over the right breast and the waitresses were trying to get a glimpse of the back. No doubt they were disappointed by the PG-rated Centaur graphic.
I should go do something fun tonight.
Quite a few good jobs showed up this week but I only got a response from one so far.
I don't even understand a lot of the past ten years.
More green shoots out of Sacramento
The controllers office released the June revenue numbers.
Revenues down 11.2 Billion YoY.
http://www.sco.ca.gov/Files-ARD/CASH/0809_june.pdf
@mattdog, Lucifer - thanks for the education. I also agree with both of you that government-funded science has in many ways become too "programmed" - propose to do X, better do X lest your proposal to do Y not get funded - and leaves too little room for the serendipitous "positive black swans" that can revolutionize history. Even worse, people are trained to think in terms of the grant submission process (where only incrementalism is likely to get funded, since far-out stuff is by definition hard to explain to anyone). The entire culture is black-swan averse, which is a real pity because those are the discoveries that change everything.
For the nonscientists: imagine if Galileo had built his telescopes but could only get funding for the military application, had to work 24/7 for that application, and had no time to look up into the sky with them. And then, even if he had looked up at the sky, imagine he had been programmed only to look for what he could "sell" to his funding agency. You think the motions of the Jovian moons would have been noticed? Think he would've made a big deal about them and derived the sun-centered rather than earth-centered solar system from them? No, he would've been incentivized to think only of how to get his next 3 years' pay from the powerful families who could afford to sponsor him, and let it go. Fortunately the real Galileo was made of more stubborn stuff, and was willing to go to Inquisition and jail for his conclusions...
@rickrolled: Have they factored the maintenance cost on that $100K house? If the housing market is so glutted that homes are worth that little, where will the renters come from? How about the future property taxes (in a post Prop-13 world where California gets its house in order)? The city can't pay for the services unless the average homeowner is paying enough property taxes. At first blush $1k/month looks like a 12% return on $100K, but after you take out the inevitable expenses the place may not even cash flow. And as someone said, entire developments are likely to go back to scrubland...
Love cake. Italian leather sofa is the best song ever.
Shingle Springs, Colfax, Auburn, El Dorado Hills, Fair Oaks, Granite Bay, Loomis and Rocklin would be easy places to live...
I am the better boss
//She told me her firm jettisoned all of their 2nd and 3rd year lawyers, who had toiled like slaves putting in 85 hour weeks.//
How does the median home price translate into IOU's?
I consider 30% of home sales being 'equity sales' as very positive.
An interesting question..
//How does the median home price translate into IOU's?//
I also agree with both of you that government-funded science has in many ways become too "programmed"
So true. A friend's friend works in a lab performing various tests, and they do exactly what they're told and nothing else.
Unproductive systems stagnate, die off or get run over.
//A friend's friend works in a lab performing various tests, and they do exactly what they're told and nothing else.//
I'm back....
NOAA - National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - El Niño Arrives; Expected to Persist through Winter 2009-10
Me and El Nino caught some good waves thru-out baja, mexico and california..we surfed and partied like rock stars..or at least like Broward...
@r0m30: Time for a line-item veto on that state spending report! This is gonna be harsh, but dammit, if we can do it, Sacramento ought to be able to do it.
Looking at Pages A3 and A4, and assuming we need a roughly 25% reduction in the budget (from $98.2 billion to about $73.6 billion, a drop of $24.6 billion) to balance it:
Start with a 10% cut across the board. $9.8 billion.
Additional 20% reduction (30% total) to prison system. $1.8 billion
First time, nonviolent offenders can be released on parole.
Encourage justice & prison system to seek revenues by confiscating ill-gotten and fraudulent capital gains.
Begin the process of reforming the prison system's outrageously cushy union jobs to new market norms.
100% cut (Eliminate) to state "contributions to teachers' retirement system". Teachers and schools sort that out; shouldn't be a state issue anymore. $1.0B.
100% reduction to "Other Education" (if whatever that buys is important, fund it out of other listed education accounts). $3.2 billion.
Additional 20% reduction (30% total) to state Dept of Health Services "medical assistance program". $2.5 billion.
Yes, this will hurt, but if the voters want to keep it they'll need to vote to tax themselves to pay for it, dammit. And maybe it's time to incentive people to get themselves healthy (not at taxpayer expense), instead of the other way round. It's also time to tighten up on the fraud in this area.
100% cut (Eliminate) state "Other Local Assistance". Let the cities and counties sort that out. $2.9 billion more.
That's $21.2 billion in spending reductions so far, and the essential core functions of education, justice, medicare and social services have been protected (relatively). Only $3.4B to go.
Cut mental health spending by 40% more at both state and local assistance levels. Saves $0.8 billion.
Eliminate whatever handouts are masquerading as "Tax Relief". Saves $0.4 billion.
Apply another 2.5% across the board cut and you get the last $2.2 billion.
Problem Solved!
So, not everyone will agree with these choices, but the point is that choices can be made, and must be made. The only thing that matters at this point is getting it over with. There will be pain no matter what. The political process will still be there afterwards, to resolve the future problems created by these immediate solutions.
@creditcriminals - thanks for that El Nino link. I mentioned this a few threads ago; it could help alleviate the California drought, and reduce the risk of another Katrina this year...
On the positive side, El Niño can help to suppress Atlantic hurricane activity. In the United States, it typically brings beneficial winter precipitation to the arid Southwest, less wintry weather across the North, and a reduced risk of Florida wildfires.
El Niño’s negative impacts have included damaging winter storms in California and increased storminess across the southern United States.
I follow the Climate Impacts Group research for WA state, and they say cliamte change (and El Nino) here means more precipitation over the winter, but not in a steady, snowpack building way. In a flash flooding, Chinook, snow-melting way. Catastrophic rain storms, with no benefits to the summer water needs.
Not sure if this holds true for Cali or not...
While the El Nino rains can do a lot of damage (mudslides on the coasts especially), I don't recall snowpack destruction being an issue down here. I was thinking that in California, the reservoir levels are so low that any reasonable amount of precipitation will get captured by the storage system. We'll have to see what the real experts come up with.
G'night whoever's left...
Excuse me for skipping the first 97 comments, but, gee, the Victor Valley has been reporting distressed sales for months now and, last I looked, it was 92%.
Okay, so Victorville isn't Sacramento. It isn't a State capitol. It isn't even a County seat, though it would have been the County seat of Mojave County, California if we could have gotten the hell out of San Bernardino County about 20 years ago, okay, exactly 20 years ago.
Wisdom Speaker, thanks for your efforts on the comment to which I reply.
My only question is: Is Anyone Listening?
Or do they all think there really isn't any problem?
In a market as distorted as the current one for US housing, distressed sales are the only way for prices to travel through the down portion of the underlying market cycle. Larry Summers and Congress and just about every other person in a leadership role in the US remain convinced that they should and can mitigate the downward portion of the housing cycle. But in a few spots, like some neighborhoods in Florida and California and Nevada, even the dozens of measures designed to boost prices are not enough to fully overcome the impact of distressed sales, so we get some clues at what a free market price would be. Pretty low! Some day we'll see a lot more of this, but maybe not in this cycle, with the combined firepower of our entire government and financial system pushing prices back up. It might take another 10 or 20 years, and a lot more retired baby boomers, to see prices in most areas pierce through the govt backstop.
It might take another 10 or 20 years, and a lot more retired baby boomers, to see prices in most areas pierce through the govt backstop.
I'd go with two to three years. JMO.
Maybe, sportsfan, but baby boomers (especially early baby boomers) are sitting on an amazing amount of home price appreciation accumulated since their first home purchase back in 1975-1995. They will not give that up without a fight to the death. Until they start dying off in big numbers, government action will preserve big chunks of those gains.
Hack,Tahoe is east of Piedmont.I spent a small amount of time at the Irvine Family place and thought it quite desirable,especially the private trout stream ( I was the first to fish it one year).Yes,that Irvine family.The 16 bedroom guest house wasn't bad either,or the main house.
sorry, 104 comments and nobody points out that the 70% distressed sales does not include foreclosures?????????????????
if you add in foreclosures, i wonder what it becomes, 80-90%?
Wisdom Speaker (homepage, profile) wrote on Fri, 7/10/2009 - 9:26 pm @mattdog, Lucifer - thanks for the education. I also agree with both of you that government-funded science has in many ways become too "programmed" - propose to do X, better do X lest your proposal to do Y not get funded - and leaves too little room for the serendipitous "positive black swans" that can revolutionize history. Even worse, people are trained to think in terms of the grant submission process (where only incrementalism is likely to get funded, since far-out stuff is by definition hard to explain to anyone). The entire culture is black-swan averse, which is a real pity because those are the discoveries that change everything.
Sounds like one excuse after another....
creditcriminalslovetarp:
What? No love for Auburn, Cool, Georgetown, Grass Valley?