patrick.net

Here's a fun article...

Relationship Management 101

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Wow, Jennifer Siebel is one beautiful woman. She's not one of history's great beauties, but she is very beautiful.

Normally I don't much care for the "rich heiress" look -- a tall, skinny blond woman with classic, somewhat cold and distant features who looks good an evening gown and silly in jeans -- but I find her beautiful.

Her elegance is natural, it's not just the result of good bone structure and a photographer getting her to strike a particular pose. She'd still be an elegant, beautiful woman if you met her in the frozen vegetables aisle.

IMO she's the real thing.

OK, the gossip I am getting at the moment on our mayor is that he is going to be hit with two sexual harassment suits. The office is in a bit of an uproar, and the harassment suits are what is making his advisors leave in droves.

I get along with the guy and he has been quite helpful with several of my projects. We could potentially get a real lunatic in the mayors office should Gavin not serve again. This isn't good for the city.

(For those of you not in the Bay Area, Gavin Newsom, who started marrying gay couples at city hall in 2003, is considered right wing by many in the city).

A couple guys on the way to Bubblepalooza:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvH6hjlidbw&NR

(For those of you not in the Bay Area, Gavin Newsom, who started marrying gay couples at city hall in 2003, is considered right wing by many in the city).

1. Some argue that that move helped Bush get re-elected in 2004.

2. The Democrats actually had to spend money here to make sure Gavin got elected - and not the Green party candidate.

Only in SF.

With inventory of 66, the BA population virtually guarantees enough GF / cash rich people to keep Cupertino market strong. Unless we see meaningful changes in rates and/or lending standards, I doubt Cupertino will be affected much in the 0.8-1.2M range.

Seriously dude, go fuck yourself, really. Type in "cupertino" in maps google com and then read your tired fucking diatribe out loud. I think you will hate yourself even more than I do. 800 to 1.2 million for a fucking fuck $hit box in crapafuckingtino? GO FUCK YOURSELF. What we need is meaningful changes in the laws protecting fucking assholes from breeding. Again for the fucking record what kind of income does it take to afford a 1 million dollar house? Oh, shit, sorry thats right, it's not the house but the school district. That's right isn't it? Hmmmm, how about a 200K house and hiring a teacher for 50K/year for 16 fucking years. Really dude, get the fuck off the enamor of crap a fucking tino.

I imagine Ms. Siebel, as pictured here, tinyurl.com/2rpojf covered in martini puke stumbling back to her crapatino palace.

I would put her with stuckintheba but I think her command of English be better. I mean all strong indicators suggest cupertino not go down because school district very good and make many smart people who make money king sized in future. Isn't this how sometimes it is in areas where many people go to afford school that aren't bad?

Gavin Newsom, who started marrying gay couples

Gavin is married to a gay couple?

Surfer said:
"Seriously dude, go fuck yourself, really. Type in “cupertino” in maps google com and then read your tired fucking diatribe out loud. I think you will hate yourself even more than I do. 800 to 1.2 million for a fucking fuck $hit box in crapafuckingtino? GO FUCK YOURSELF. What we need is meaningful changes in the laws protecting fucking assholes from breeding. Again for the fucking record what kind of income does it take to afford a 1 million dollar house? Oh, shit, sorry thats right, it’s not the house but the school district. That’s right isn’t it? Hmmmm, how about a 200K house and hiring a teacher for 50K/year for 16 fucking years. Really dude, get the fuck off the enamor of crap a fucking tino."

You gotta stop being so wishy washy and say what's really on your mind. However, I gotta hand it to you...you covered sex, birth control, housing, and income....all at once. Next time someone mentions Cupertino, wherever that is, be sure you include a blue and a couple of reds so Surfer doesn't blow a gasket....chill, my friend. :o)

Surfer-X :

Yes, trolls haven't visited us for some time. So now you have started shooting the messenger ?

Dude, I do not make up stats. Nor am I responsible for creating desperation in the mind of people who are still buying, and participating in bidding wars. I do not like this craziness either, but why is commenting on it a crime ?

Hugs! Normal now equals in peoples minds 1.2mil 1200 sqft $hitbox on the valley floor. Does it get props for being close to Saratoga? Perhaps you could just call it East Saratoga, while you're at it rename Milpitas South Fremont, or better yet just re-label the entire south bay South San Francisco. Whoops too much baggage with that perhaps North Malibu.

Just quoting stats? Name the fucking source and then strip out the liar loans and tell me just how fucking many of the houses were bought on 2x the median family income for the bay area. And then quit wasting my mother fucking time.

before you start jerking off over crapatino real estate look at this and then please please pretty please tell me which fucking asshole making over 200k/yr would buy this

tinyurl.com/2z5tag

Oh shit, I'm sorry, that's right new paradigm no land great schools everyone making money rich foreigners.

wow, this is the answer -- Short Sale Magicâ„¢

I got another Sacramento Bee email (why me?) with a housing ad:

"Truly unique at no extra cost. Each home is engineered for a specific site, making it unlike any other. More costly to build, yet not to purchase. Special savings on select homes ends 2/14/07."

I'm confused. Don't houses need to be engineered to their site? Wouldn't you have problems if they weren't? Are these subdivisions just plans that are slapped up wherever the lot is, regardless? Don't you run into drainage and seismic issues if houses aren't engineered to their sites?

surfer-x Says:

"...Type in “cupertino” in maps google com and then read your tired
f-cking diatribe out loud. I think you will hate yourself even more than I do. 800 to 1.2 million for a fucking fuck $hit box in crapafuckingtino?
_____

Exactly.

To people like me who grew up in the South Bay Area, this whole surreal-estate market is nothing short of heart-breaking.

I'm in AZ and can't go home to San Jose because I can't even afford the shittiest shitbox, even though I jumped through all the hoops society said I had to to become "successful:" served in the military, got a BS then an MBA (granted, I'm a "state school" guy, and not Crappertino-bred Stanford material, but still).

Do you know how much a common Crappertino $800-1.2M house looks to the common working man? And San Jose is almost just as expensive as Crappertino.

This is friggen' insane. Mind numbing.

Perhaps this is old news but I just encountered a beta feature on housingtracker.net. They have mortgage/rent ratios, price/income ratios, etc, all plotted over the last 10 years.

Looking over the SF numbers, I realize how much more bubbliscious it is than Boston. Yet strangely prices here in Boston are falling here first.

http://www.housingtracker.net/affordability/california/san-francisco

I think that Bay Area people, especially the transplants, can be pretty addicted to the idea of success, the bright and shining future. Believe, baby, believe. Real estate here, go down? Never!

I saw it with the dot com bubble, too. I knew more than one newly minted Cali couple who held onto their doomed stock options all the way down because they weren't going to give them away for $500K when they knew they were worth $1.5M. Would you give away your Apple stock for just $500K? And it was all Apple stock, you know, the Pets.com and the Webvan. Some of those folks ended up having a bit of a problem with the AMT, since the fed still wanted a chunk of what they had "made" on their now-worthless stock options, and that led to loans from family, bankruptcy, divorce--it was ugly. But you gotta hand it to them all--they had a great capacity to believe.

Are we there again? Yeah, maybe. I know a stay-at-home mom who is all about buying broken-down houses for bargain prices--usually less than $600K!--then fixing them up for resale. I don't know what will happen to her family if there is even a 15% drop in prices, since that 15% is more than she would make in a year if she went back to work--never mind the cost of childcare. But she believes, she knows she's right, she knows that she deserves success and that her potential is unlimited.

The Google-area stuff might retain it's value--I am sorry about that, but lots of two-income tech families with no kids want to live down there. Anywhere else, though? The suburban communities full of .org families and folks with normal incomes? Pheh. Doom, I say.

Bork

Sometimes targeted marketing is invoked by something as innocuous as a bit of catalogue shopping, or a holiday gift card. Marketing firms often cross-reference their data, and when a platinum card indexes a 'golden' zipcode, your mailbox and telephone may become temporarily lively.

Hateful, but there it is.

SQT,

It astounds me, people paying $500,000, $1,000,000, and up for what are basically disposable houses. Shoddily constructed, cookie cutter, no trees. I don't understand it. If you can scarpe together the financing for that amount of money you'd think you'd demand more in terms of quality.

Jennifer Seibel has weirdly unfocused eyes, though not nearly as wonky as Paris Hilton's. Her forehead is also very shiny - lots of botox injections there.

GC said: "A man of the same upbringing tends not to view the woman as a sexual object."

I agree.......Flat chested women are NOT sex objects.

GC Says:

> Interesting. I just checked out J. Siebel’s website.
> Her detailed BIO — which exclaims “adore me,
> understand me, want me” — and her pictures all
> tell the same thing: She is an unhappy woman.

I meet a lot of girls like Jennifer in the Bay Area who have a lot going for them but seem unhappy since they can’t find a guy who measures up to their Dad. Jennifer is an extreme example, since the odds are slim to none that she will find a tall handsome smart guy like her Dad who does so well that he can afford for her to stay home and raise her kids in a beautiful $10 million estate in Ross and give millions to charity every year like her Mom did.

Most girls I meet that grew up around here are bummed out since the odds are very low that they will find an even average looking guy who does well enough to afford for them to stay home with the kids in a crappy little $1.5mm house in Burlingame or Mill Valley and maybe give a few $ to KQED and make it to the Symphonix Bash before the Ball every other year like their Mom did.

That’s absolutely fine, but then you can’t complain about not being able to afford a place in SV where people tend to make lifestyle choices which are different from yours. You can’t have it both ways, unfortunately.

Honestly homes in Silly Valley are not really that expensive in terms of price. However, they are just crap at that price. I blame the NIMBYists for that. There should be more urban development/renewals.

Most people confuse about their life purposes and I am sure they do not make optimal lifestyle choices.

Just look at this list:

http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/10/Worth_1.html

Most richest people are not in technology. And the richest tech barron is not in Silicon Valley.

GC, have you gone hunting (deer, elk, etc) lately?

No. Why do you ask? I have never hunted, although I was quite interested.

Oh, I thought you were pro-hunting. I may be interested too. It is probably a good sport.

GC Says:

> I don’t know if it’s just me . But I’ve noticed that a man’s
> perception of a woman is heavily influenced by his relative
> social background (vis a vis the woman’s). A man of the
> same upbringing tends not to view the woman as a sexual
> object. He more or less views her as an intimate friend.

I’ve noticed that most guys with a Dad that dumped their Mom for a younger hotter wife when they were a kid and (and is currently married to their 3rd or 4th hot young wife) tend to view women as sex objects, while guys with parents happily married for 35 years (and grandparents happily married for 65 years) tend to be looking for a life partner and intimate friend.

Then Doug H. Says:

> I agree…….Flat chested women are NOT sex objects.

Most guys forget that (almost all) girls that are “curvy” with a “big rack” in their 20’s become fat and gross in their 40’s. You won’t see a lot of slim classy looking women working as strippers, but many guys considered Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy and Grace Kelly “sex objects” and they were all A cups…

I dunno, I still think she's hot.

Maybe she's unhappy, maybe she's had Botox injections (the picture surfer-x linked to is more than a little scary), and maybe my appreciation for her is the product of subconscious feelings of inadequacy...but I still think she's hot. Or I would, if I were a single man.

The idea that rich girls are often unhappy because they can never find a guy who measures up to dad (and almost inevitably have to accept a lower standard of living once they leave the nest) is very interesting. There is some truth to that. I know several beautiful rich women who are still single. They are in their mid to late 30's and do not appear to be headed toward marriage. They are all from broken homes, too, and I suspect that also plays a role.

Poor parenting probably has something to do with it as well. Their parents are probably wrapped up in a materialistic, self-indulgent life. They have not taught their daughters to focus on someone's character instead of their material possessions. So the girls are confused, on the one hand they are instinctively attracted to ordinary guys, but the values instilled by their parents cause them to reject regular guys as unworthy working stiffs. That's sad.

astrid,

Sometimes the shiny skin is caused by microdermabrasions. When I was pregnant with my second child my forehead broke out, so I went and had microdermabrasions every other week for a couple of months until it cleared up. I thought my shiny skin was pregnancy, until I noticed that all of the other, non-pregnant women having it done also had really shiny skin. It goes away a few weeks after you stop.

I have asked a couple of dermatologists and plastic surgeons why botox makes you shiny, and none really knew. One told me he just assumed that the tighter skin had a smoother reflective surface.

Why do people Botox their foreheads and then leave the rest of their face alone? Ah, your forehead looks 28 but the rest of your face looks 45? I see that all the time. It's odd looking to me.

Does anyone know where to buy Spanish magazines in SF? My son is taking Spanish as his third language, and I got him a Mad Magazine in Mexico a few weeks ago. He loves it, and actually looked up words from it. He actually said 'I need to learn to read Spanish better.' I'd love to get him more.

SP :

Thanks. I was a bit perplexed at the outburst myself. Sometimes people get up on the wrong side of the bed.

Eliza, thanks for the nostalgic post about the dot.com days. I still choke up when I see old Webvan vehicles on the road (sans logo) -- dang, some of their warehouses WERE profitable. Okay, still haven't totally let that one go :-)
Had a lot of funny (read: options now worthless) money when I bought in 2000. Thankfully I bought based on real cashflow, and parental advice that I carried around in the back of my mind -- buy a house you can afford on one income. As it was I ended up pretty stressed out but my marriage survived and things that mattered came out intact. Unfortunately, I think the current housing meltdown will make the dot.com bust look like a picnic for those who bought above their means...

I hate to break from the gossip/society pages (great insider coverage, BTW), but here is an article that answers the question "How much does it cost to heat a McMansion?"
Netta Conyers Haynes and her husband paid $700 to heat their five-bedroom Benicia home last month, compared with $200 to $300 in a typical January. They've resolved to leave the heat off in February and cut back expenses to hammer out the dent that their heating bill left in their finances.

"The trips to the bowling alley, eating out just to eat out -- we're not doing that," said Conyers Haynes, 33, a marketing executive for a technology company.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/02/BUGV1NTD3E1.DTL

SQT Says:

What amazes me even more is how people seem to have forgotten that $500k is a lot of money. It’s a half-million and yet people act like it’s just the standard home price now, even if you make less than $100k a year. There is this sense of unreality where people don’t have any concept of what the value of money is anymore. I think our area is particularly vulnerable, so I think a lot of people will be forcibly reminded in the near future that $500k is in fact a lot of money.
_____

Yeah.

I look forward to the day when, once again, $500K commands some respect from the middle class.

Maybe then things will start to balance out...

It’s similar to Manhattan in this sense - it’s just tech instead of finance, law, and media.

Except that Manhattan is generally accepted to be the Center of the World(TM)...

I don’t know what you’re talking about. Holding on to Apple stock was the right thing to do. The stock is worth now more than twice what it was worth even at the peak of the bubble. Many Cupertino folks have done well for themselves thanks to this.

I know someone who just retired after 9 years at Apple. :(

Except that Manhattan is generally accepted to be the Center of the World(TM)…

... outside of California.

Unless I missed something, it looks like you get all the way down to #15 before you see a Silicon Valley name (Ellison) in that list.

You did not miss anything. There are wealthier people in Mexico and China. :)

Except that Manhattan is generally accepted to be the Center of the World(TM)…

... outside of anywhere but Manhattan.

Lucky me. I was raised in impoverished graduate school housing, so my material standards are quite low.

On the other hand, I'm not very tolerant of stupid people. Maybe I would be more tolerant if I was raised in a trailer park.

Is Manhattan even on a leyline?

Lucky me. I was raised in impoverished graduate school housing, so my material standards are quite low.

Astrid, it takes no time for you to get spoiled. Trust me.

On the other hand, I’m not very tolerant of stupid people. Maybe I would be more tolerant if I was raised in a trailer park.

I am very tolerant of stupid people beause I am one of them.

Counter to the social conditioning argument - maybe not. I'm quite intolerant of stupid professors and stupid graduate students - and there's quite a few of them. Extreme right wing economics professors and ditsy left wing ethic studies professors tend to be the worst.