patrick.net

A good example of infill vs. new suburban development is that it cost Mayor Willie Brown about $250mm to “renovate” about 100 public housing units in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill while at the same time Angelo Tsakopoulos was able to buy the land, build the roads, and build 100 brand new single family homes in the Sacramento area for less than $250mm…

yeah, but that can become a whole other issue -- the cost of renovating existing structures vs building from scratch -- it's held to be about twice as expensive per sq. m. to renovate as it is to build new, which is the classic infill or refurb conundrum.

because it's hard to get to things inside existing structures, rewire, replumb, etc it takes more labour, and therefore the costs go up.

further, we don't know whether mayor willie brown managed to completely bollocks up project management and got gouged somewhere along the line, which again is a whole other argument -- for instance, should such work be put out to tender on a PPP basis to control costs, as is done with public housing projects here?

it would be fairer to compare the costs of constructing a new high rise development with the same number of low rise sprawling developments -- and then you would have to break it down to see which components blew out the cost one way or the other.

finally, there are hidden long-term environmental and resource costs which should also be factored in, and are worn by the inhabitants -- somewhat like total cost of ownership (TCO) -- how much more fuel will the sprawl inhabitants have to use to get around? can they walk to the nearest store, or will they have to drive? how far is the nearest Tube station? schools? what rates will be charged by council to maintain the area, etc. (i guess utilities charges get equalised amongst all subscribers, so perhaps the low maintenance cost users are really subsidising the high cost users, so there is no direct penalty for sprawling.)

sometimes builders save money by effectively passing on costs to the people who purchase -- e.g. constructing cheaper buildings with poor design, shading or orientation which will require occupants to run expensive A/C or heating more often, and so on.

however, dysfunctions of the market approach to housing also mean that price differentials may occur which are just about 'location' etc, also making comparisons harder, or wiping out any of the environmental benefits at first sight.

The San Diego investor thread is pretty tragic, LILLL. See what happens when you turn human shelter into a speculative asset investment class? Brings out the best in people...

Here was one wonderful solution:

"Here in CA, if you sell a house with a purchase-mortgage loan on it, you are not responsible for the loan after the sale. If you ARE NOT personally responsible for the loan, I’d suggest the following approach. Deed the property over to somebody who does not care about their credit report. Perhaps a minor, a derelict, a very elderly person who never buys on credit, somebody else who does not care. Make sure that you “sales agreement” makes you responsible for the ownership expenses so you will be able to deduct them from your taxes. Then rent out the property for as much rent as you can. After a few months, stop paying the mortgage and let the property go to foreclosure. Later you have “credible deniability” for the loan. That is, you can explain to credit granters that you were not responsible for the new owner’s having defaulted on the loan."

"Maybe my memory is frazzled here but the usually excellent Ron Starr just suggested to commit pre-meditated lender fraud, a felony.

Somebody tell me I'm wrong please!"

"szabo is a slick operator and I didn't do enough due dilegence about the rental market. Rents don't come close to covering mortgage payments. Live and learn. I am not giving up investing in real estate, but I certainly won't be doing another pre-con."

so basically these specuvestors didn't even spreadsheet the numbers before purchase, just took a realtor/developer's word for it... one estimate here, for a small country, puts investor losses from real estate scams in the billions...

Sir Rick of Shmend Says:
LILLL, the chemtrails thing is totally real. im serious. you see them all the time in phoenix.

are these the west coast locations which are held to be most at risk from a Chinese or N. Korean missile, etc?

Chemtrails are Real.

(unless declared integer)

"The massive appearance of Sylphs in 2004 and their neutralization/transmutation of chemtrails into harmless elements was a huge leap forward in neutralizing the diabolical chemtrail genocide aerosol spraying operation, but apparently we have progressed to yet another level. People are now reporting the ability to clear the skies of chemtrails by use of the mind alone to obtain assistance from unseen helpers (Sylphs and others) and do the job for you based on your focused intention. It's really amazing to see this development. I first posted an article in 2002 by Rich Work about using the mind and the the power of prayer to disperse chemtrails, and now we see this ability coming into reality with many people. We are winning the battle against chemtrails and defeating the satanic traitors at their own game. Spread the word: DEPLOY ORGONE GENERATORS IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD and you too will be free of chemtrail laden skies!"

why do people worry about america?

Shmend,

Contrails can last much longer than 10 minutes. They can grow to an enormous size in the absence of cumulus clouds, and in the right meteorological conditions even start the process of cloud formation.

Commercial jets follow "highways" in the air, literally in a very grid-like pattern. You can find many of their flight paths on the Internet, although not as many as before 911. Actually, they don't fly in a grid because the earth is curved, but it looks like a grid from a ground observer.

How do you know they are "rectangular"? You can only see them from one point of view. Such objects at a distance will always appear planar when viewed without any other point of reference.

You cannot tell how close "intersecting" contrails are from the ground. You may see a grid, but in actuality they are often separated by many thousands of feet of vertical distance.

Then there's the whole parts per million problem. Unless they're spraying plutonium or something else so overwhelmingly powerful per unit (which would be easily detectable as certain weather patterns would cause occasional overconcentration), then anything they're spraying at that altitude has no effect. What is the dispersion from 10,000 feet, let alone the 35,000ft at which these contrails are really located? Something like hundreds of square miles. That's some pretty darned powerful "spray".

In short, this is tin-foil stuff. Seeing isn't always believing. I saw city lights out on the farallon islands one dusk as I drove north over the GG Bridge. I swear to you to this day I saw a city out there. I did, but it wasn't a city; it was a reflection of SF lights in a "mirage". Don't believe your eyes, believe your common sense and critical thinking.

What is the dispersion from 10,000 feet, let alone the 35,000ft at which these contrails are really located?

Right, I was wondering that too. If the gov. really wanted to get to us, why not just add it to our drinking water, "for our health"?

"Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?"

i was just about to say all the stuff randy said -- no, really! particularly criss-crossing flight paths and atmospheric conditions -- supersaturated air in the stratosphere can end up producing very long-lived vapour trails that then slowly extend outwards -- just depends on exact weather conditions at the time.

or else it's a sign of the end times that vapour trails are lasting longer.... 8O

plus they also regularly jettison surplus jet fuel and human poo from planes over the ocean (or suburbia) and no-one is complaining much about that...

makes one wonder- is it really about tooth decay?

i think they were injecting nanobots into your system...

I have no military background nor am I a pilot. My father was in defense and always attached to a SAC center, which is how I ended up growing up most of my childhood in the shadow of Wright Pat.

I am just invoking some physics, chemistry and other science education. One need not be especially accredited to figure out that chem-trails is a really complicated conspiracy theory that is very likely impossible, and which could be accomplished through much easier methods like KurtS mentions.

Occam's Razor is a good thing. Why spray from planes when you can just put it in water or milk or asthma inhalators or dogfood or insulin or sneakers? And if "it" is a bad thing, then surely someone would leak "it". Not everyone in the guberment is evil, and they'd need thousands of people including blue-collar types to pull off the logistics. If "it" is for our own good then an easier way would be a public education campaign.

I saw city lights out on the farallon islands one dusk as I drove north over the GG Bridge. I swear to you to this day I saw a city out there.

Atlantis!

further, the contrails are dispersed from the engines over the tailplanes of ordinary jet liners, and therefore give some people the impression of 'spraying' rather than exhaust. much of the exhaust of a jet is in fact water vapour, with a few other gases and probably solid burned carbon deposits.

apparently a very small amount of it can also be barium-based meteorological wind detection solutions.

looking at the chemtrail websites, and for some reason there are dozens of them, i find the psychological tendency to 'attribution' to be quite strong in the posters, who are probably not in the most critical thinking end of the spectrum. attribution is a spurious cause and effect assumption by associating coincidences or near-coincidences incorrectly. e.g. pollution in places like LA, HK, etc is absolutely abysmal, and will cause respiratory problems etc, but apparently it's all due to the chemicals they're spraying...

it seems to correlate with a 'suspicious' mindset also, and it's probably no surprise that their attributions quickly switch to a global conspiracy -- all govts are doing it! i've found when working in computing support that people who are at the extreme end of suspiciousness in their general observed behaviours also seem to make these false attributions a lot -- probably a deeply ingrained evolutionary cognitive survival technique, which, while it may be wrong many times, works well enough that it keeps you alive by constantly trying to put 2 and 2 together.

of course, the whole thing may be true, and i can't rule that out until i go into the stratosphere with a sampling container and catch some of the stuff to analyse for both inorganic or organic substances, or talk to some military deep throat who admits they were doing something nefarious as a project... worldwide... 24/7...

ajh Says:
DS,
I read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” recently. Very interesting, but I got a bit mistrustful after reading the chapter on Australia, where a segment talks about the Australian dam-building experience but doesn’t mention the Snowy Mountains Scheme (for all its faults).

Collapse is coming on TV very soon, maybe I can skip the book... I've got a couple of Jared Diamond things on human behaviour and saw Guns and Steel -- he's certainly very wide-ranging, but a little quirky and maybe off the mark at times, especially in Collapse, apparently.

The tapping of the Great Lake at Poatina in Tasmania for hydro power has been very successful with minimal environmental disruption, as it used an elevated lake in an extinct volcano crater. You have to be choosy about locating your hydro schemes if you're serious about not damaging the environment tho. The proposed Gordon below Franklin scheme was blocked by protests, probably wisely, which also served to create the Greens Party.

They were trying to sell the Snowy to private interests very recently, the public backlash was immense, so they're not doing it now. Unfortunately, I missed a talk on all that on Friday night - THE SNOWY MOUNTAINS SELLOFF - NATIONAL INTEREST BETRAYED
http://www.politicsinthepub.org/current.htm
sounded almost like ecuador selling off its drinking water to private companies.

yes, not sure what the collapse chapter concerning australia was about - you'd have to summarise it here in 1 para or less ;)

IMO hydro should not be used for base-load power unless you’re somewhere like Iceland with huge supplies of water. Far better to keep it for peak relief. I like the concept of pumped storage too, and I have a nice thought for large-scale renewable energy on those lines if global warming really does raise sea levels more than a few metres.

they will be looking to pump it all over the place before long, if the estimate that sea levels will rise 21 feet just with the melting of the greenland icecap comes true - read a story in the LA Times online just a minute ago on this thru some coincidence.

i think tasmania obtains all of its electrical power needs from hydro projects, and it's meant to be very cheap -- serving about 400 000 people plus an aluminium smelter which uses 1/3 of it at cheap rates.

are you a hydraulic or electrical engineer, ajh? are you interested in commercialising a PE water tank idea of mine? which countries are you working from? :P

yes, not sure what the collapse chapter concerning australia was about - you’d have to summarise it here in 1 para or less ;)

IMO hydro should not be used for base-load power unless you’re somewhere like Iceland with huge supplies of water. Far better to keep it for peak relief. I like the concept of pumped storage too, and I have a nice thought for large-scale renewable energy on those lines if global warming really does raise sea levels more than a few metres.

they will be looking to pump it all over the place before long, if the estimate that sea levels will rise 21 feet just with the melting of the greenland icecap comes true - read a story in the LA Times online just a minute ago on this thru some coincidence.

i think tasmania obtains all of its electrical power needs from hydro projects, and it’s meant to be very cheap — serving about 400 000 people plus an aluminium smelter which uses 1/3 of it at cheap rates.

are you a hydraulic or electrical engineer, ajh? are you interested in commercial-ising a PE water tank idea of mine? which countries are you working from? :P

you're up early, newsfreak - never too early to start reading the news...

interesting about DDT - everyone's saying it's harmless again - and how millions of lives could've been saved if they'd kept using it. it might be more innocuous than people feared - although a lot of the other pesticides are pretty nasty...

actually, forget that last post... i'm not a fan of the michael crichton supposed 'junk science' camp...

RE: DDT. It is definitely dangerous. But some of those arguments aren't denying that DDT is dangerous, but instead challenging the relative value of safety. That is, could more lives have been saved by continuing DDT use in certain situations? For DDT, this is pretty complicated and probably highly uncertain either way.

A better example (and keeping with the air-travel conspiracy) is the recent decision by the FTSB/FAA to not enforce child-restraint seats for children under 2 on commercial aircraft. There is no question that putting all children in restraint would save lives and injury due to turbulence. But, the incidence is low, and well documented.

After studying the issue they found out that forcing parents to buy tickets for toddlers would result in a pretty high percentage of marginal trips (could drive or fly) where parents decide to drive instead due to cost of the 3rd ticket, even at 75% discounts. (A bit of mental accounting going on here). Even with child restraints, driving is so exponentially more dangerous than flying, the conclusion was that more children were spared death and injury by allowing them to fly unsafely on their mother/father's laps.

yeah, there are counter-arguments to the somewhat emotional '50 million lives could have been saved if DDT wasn't banned' line from michael crichton et al.

for instance, mosquito populations become resistant to DDT after 6-7 years, there are other ways of managing the populations, etc...

further, DDT hasn't been banned in many countries which have a malaria problem, so you wonder where the poor science is emanating from...

more on the politics of govt decision making and the power of lobbies: i like the way american airline companies chose not to ban cigarette lighters and books of matches on planes post 9/11... because the tobacco companies know smokers want to light up just as soon as they get off the no smoking flight...

Even with child restraints, driving is so exponentially more dangerous than flying, the conclusion was that more children were spared death and injury by allowing them to fly unsafely on their mother/father’s laps.

hmm, maybe it's that airlines are so desperate to get any customers to stay solvent post-9/11 they're willing to throw safety concerns out the window... (figuratively speaking...)

randy, can u delete this post and one awaiting moderation with the word 'commercial ising' in it -- i already posted it a second time with a hyphen to get round the spam filter. sorry to increase your workload...

What troubles me most is the number of innocent families that are going lose their homes through foreclosure because of this real estate bust.

You heard of "Survival of the Fittest", let's just call this the "Survival of the less Ignorant". There are too many idiots in this world, some of them just have to go!

go where

Here is a sheeple about to be vaporized.

see, the bull dust is working already.... that just proves it....

hey, i said civil union, and they're already a reality in several states... massachusetts has gone all the way to marriage in the high court...

only 40% are against civil unions in 1 poll...

USA Today
Americans' views are sharply divided on gay rights, with most against same-sex "marriage" but fewer opposed to "civil unions," a new poll shows.
The word "marriage" makes a difference, suggests the latest USA TODAY/ CNN/Gallup Poll, based on phone interviews with 1,003 adults Jan. 9-11.

A majority (53%) opposes a law that "would allow homosexual couples to legally get married," while 24% favor it. But significantly fewer (41%) oppose "civil unions," giving homosexual couples "some of the legal rights of married couples."

Vermont legalized civil unions in July 2000; Massachusetts will begin issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in May. In California, legislation establishing domestic partnerships with the same legal rights as marriage goes into effect in 2005.

I miss Jack. :-(

Any of you regulars heard from him? I know he teaches, but I thought he might start stopping by again now that summer is here. And I'm curious to hear his opinions about Marin, now that Dataquick is showing a YOY decline. Wasn't his prediction that Marin County would decline only 10% due to fundamentals?

A lot of people think this is some kind of Scrooge-like turn for Buffett, but there's nothing new to see here.

Obviously, Buffet was waiting for Bill Gates to announce his going full-time on the foundation.

Buffett has long had a way for shareholders (of A shares, at least) to designate a charity.

Buffett was the one who got Bill interested in philanthropy in the first place. But Buffett has always been careful about giving away money, because it's hard for lots of money to be given (witness the corruption of the money donated for the last few catastrophies).

Also, Buffett has always planned to give away his money, so this isn't news, really. He's just getting old now. And he's never wanted his kids to inherit his money (not good for them).

Obviously, Buffett is impressed with the B&M G foundation, and thinks Bill and Melinda and Bill's dad will do a good job.

>>oh please, i have a really hard time believing anything good is ever going to come from that ruthless nerd Gates.

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Grants/

New thread: Doh!

Mexico is for mexicans. America is for americans.

except you took california and texas from mexico 1846-48 in a war of territorial expansion. there IS an irony that they are slowly taking it back by other means...

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

gatesy has quit his job to manage the foundation, which is a Good Thing -- I don't see many other billionaires setting up and running foundations of that magnitude with those humanitarian goals.

but i agree with you on 9/11, which has some rather scary implications for the psyche of the american ruling elite and just what sort of mess you're in over there.

hee hee, you're funny, bap. glad you could bring more of your famous rationality back into the debate which was otherwise derailing and going downhill...

Is it not odd that the same lefty-libs that demand safer cars, gun control, speed limits, child-proof everything, super clean waste water, super duper clean drinking water, no hate speech, child proof everything, no spanking of kids …

so by implication, normal american families want dangerous cars, guns everywhere, no speed limits, dangerous toys, dirty contaminated drinking water containing giardia and typhus, loads of hate speech, more dangers for children, and the ability to abuse kids and traumatise them... o-ka-a-ay... just so long as we're clear on those biblical principles of enhancing well-being...

HIV/AIDS happens to be everyone's problem, if you look at the very high heterosexual infection rates in other parts of the world. faithful and monogamous same-sex couples committing to a civil union are extremely unlikely to be a part of the epidemiological problem.

Bap33,

I'm sorry, but your earlier comment was over the line. I am a pretty tolerant moderator, but I won't allow such broad vitriol in my threads. Please keep your political comments on point and directed. Any "all X people are evil" kind of stuff is better left on more reactionary forums. Please consider that we welcome all readers here, not just the ones you would choose in your own utopia.

Any of you regulars heard from him? (Jack)

I talked to him in May before I went on vacation, haven't heard from him since. It would be cool to hold a N.Bay meet again, maybe we can lure him for a few beers?

Wasn’t his prediction that Marin County would decline only 10% due to fundamentals?

Sounds familiar, and not to burst his projection, but I was seeing 10% reductions last fall. And just today, I went to an open house where the realtor offered me 10% off without asking; I'm sure I could get 15% if I were serious.

started what? :|

given that all your policy ideas contradict each other, it's hard not to say anything that won't set off some strange reaction...

Is only his lefty lib, anti-American, anti-establishment view welcome?

yes. you're being too antidisestablishmentarian.

Bap33,

I welcome any views and I think you probably know by now that I'm not ideological. The specific comments about homosexuals were over the line. I ask people to keep in mind that we have all types of readers. Arguments about the relative position of homosexuality in society are fine. Calling them names based upon a personal viewpoint is not.

I would have similarly censored anyone calling all southerners stupid, or all republicans heartless.

The only broad generalizations I let slide are all FBs using NAAVLPs are imbeciles.

well, that's a tidy little 555 posts...

i came in at about post 400 with time zone lag, and repeated half the arguments already made... oh well...

but i still maintain that 2+2=4 is not 'true', it's 1) a symbolic representation and 2) a claim or belief that is actually not even real, but is a semiotic representation of physicalness enforced by an overweening semantic patriarchalism... neodeconstructivist conceptualism ... social convention... experential intersubjectivity... etc... burble...

Rancher:
30 = gross profit for rancher
-5 = discount paid by rancher
25 = net profit to rancher

Men:
-30 = gross cost
3 = rebate
-27 = net cost

Boy:
2 = gained from stealing portion of rebate

The Boy's $2 is the difference between the Rancher's profit and the Men's cost.

Bap33, thanks for demonstrating the power and import of accounting principles.

Bap33

LOL! I guess I did assume the Rancher leveraged at 0% in order to have a $0 cost of goods sold.

Damned exotic cow financing products.