patrick.net

A very savvy hedge fund trader client (multi millionaire high school drop-out type) tells me that having a mortgage of any type is a bad financial investment.

@ SFwoman and Skibum: thanks for the good wishes!
It's an old recurring problem (the back) and comes from being 'swaybacked' - ie I walk around all the time with ma old Ts & A sticking out, leading to compression of the lower spine. I haven't had a yoga class in a month (great help in both posture and stretching) but have one planned for monday, once the muscle spasms have subsided.

And, no, our 'vacation' was in a bone-jarring F350 wheelchair lift-eqipped van, over 3000 miles of decomposing Southwest roads.
Add to that the stress of finding suitable hotel rooms for my sister-in-law who is wheelchair-bound due to advanced MS.
In Flagstaff we had to scout out 7 different hotels, all offering 'hadicapped access' rooms, with differing and often hilarious interperations of 'handicapped access', despite having booked rooms a month earlier.
And, what exactly is meant by 'easy paved trail' in most National Parks... don't do the Lower Emerald Pool trail in Zion, with anyone not capable of propelling themselves in a wheelchair, despite what the Rangers may tell you - its scary for the wheelchair user and much too up/down for the wheelchair pushers.

Throw in the fact that all the in-laws are 'fussy' eaters - ie nothing spicy/garlicy thankyou, so the whole vacation fuelled courtesy of Denny's and the like.

Anyway, the point being that the whole thing pretty much beat the tar out of us, so no surprise that our bodies gave up in surrender as soon as the In-Laws got on the plane back to the UK. They had a great time, we're knackered....;-)

DinOR: I get your point re:trolls, but I'm beginning to think of perma-bulls as some sort of endangered forest creature like the Ivory Billed Woodpecker or (bigger and out of the forest) the American Bison.
Once they were plentiful and now they're not.
As long as they don't become too agressive then they are free to roam here. If they stray beyond the park boundaires, then, like the buffalo in Yellowstone, they're fair game to all comers

'iconoclast' literally means 'one who breaks icons' from the Greek, i think... referring originally to the movement against icon worship or idolatry that sprung up in eastern churches etc. (i'm willing to be corrected on the finer historical detail by anyone who wants to google it.) it now means anyone who is 'contrarian', i suppose, or breaks with commonly held ideas or traditions. 'postmodernism' was described concisely but perhaps too narrrowly by lyotard as 'an incredulity towards grand metanarratives', which is a philosophical form of iconoclasm by defn. i suppose i am a postmodern socia1ist iconoclast, altho in my circle that's more or less mainstream... sociology ruins you for any good work, sigh

DS

I'd call myself a neomodern contrarian amongst iconoclasts. Or is that an iconoclast trapped amongst neoregressive postmodernists?

CR

I agree that wages are strengthening. This is supported by national, state and Bay Area data. The Bay Area real wages have grown the past couple quarters stronger than any time since 2002.

However, that follows a long period of *falling* median real wages. And the key word here is median

You well know the old joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar and by average salary everyone is instantly a millionaire. But the median salary doesn't budge.

The FT had a full page opinion piece yesterday with lots of data, charts and fact references regarding the US' languishing middle class income. The fact his those private equity firms you're talking about enrich only the top 15% (I'm being very generous). Meanwhile the rest are left working harder for less of the pie. Rising productivity. Rising GDP, corporate profits, global share. Falling real wages.

These are the fundamentals that will deflate the housing bubble; here and elsewhere. But it won't be any 50% correction in 6 months like some folks continually insist. It will probably take longer and be less pronounced.

I’d call myself a neomodern contrarian amongst iconoclasts.

i'd say so...

Or is that an iconoclast trapped amongst neoregressive postmodernists?

what about unreconstructed apologists for anarchic libertarianism...

You well know the old joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar and by average salary everyone is instantly a millionaire. But the median salary doesn’t budge.

that's

wow, managed to trash an entry just from the keyboard...

You well know the old joke: Bill Gates walks into a bar and by average salary everyone is instantly a millionaire. But the median salary doesn’t budge.

that’s a good one -- i was only just thinking the boring old line about a statistician drowning in a lake of average depth 4"...