patrick.net

I remember starting out cold calling one of the toughest things was to get the prospect to give you out their SS # over the phone. You really had to be good at it and work hard as well. Of course this involved the prospect writing out a check for an investment. I guess when you're "giving away money" to a McDebtor it's a whole different deal.

Not long ago I was vacuuming out my car at the car wash and when I went to throw something into the trash can I noticed a whole bunch of documents from our local hospital. They thanked me and sent someone down right away. My buddy told me I should have asked how much they were worth to them but I just didn't feel right about that. Besides there probably was some of my stuff in there too!

I will not jump into conclusion just yet.

However, experience suggests that arguing with a Leo is not a wise thing.

skibum,

Right on! I've begun to wonder if the didn't insert some sort of poison pill so they might retain some of their academic integrity when this thing blows up in their face. All analysts have some caveat in their research reports that absolve them of any "wrong doing" and they just move on to their next report.

I will add you to Mr. SQT and Peter P, as people most likely to guard my nest egg.

Me? I suggest not.

I feel happy, oh so happy.

SAN DIEGO – San Diego County's home prices took their biggest tumble for any spring on record last month, DataQuick Information Systems reported Tuesday.
The median price of all homes sold in May was $490,000, down $15,000 from April, although it was still slightly higher than a year ago.

Snapshot: Home/condo sales May '05– May '06

Sales slowed for the 23rd straight month on a year-over-year basis, reaching 4,217 transactions in new and existing homes and condos.

Local real estate agents reported about seven months' worth of unsold inventory, but argued that the pace of activity reflects a normal market rather than a crash.

tinyurl.com/h86ek

Leslie Appleton-Young, chief economist for the California Association of Realtors, said she no longer uses the term “soft landing” to describe the state of the housing market, but has yet to find a way to characterize current conditions.

Leslie Appleton-Young, chief economist for the California Association of Realtors, said she no longer uses the term “soft landing” to describe the state of the housing market, but has yet to find a way to characterize current conditions.

I wonder what the new term will be.

How about...

cushioned landing, controlled crash, bouncing touchdown

John Haverty Says:

> FormerAptBroker HBS guys aren’t good because
> they came from HBS. I’ve worked with 5 guys from
> HBS out here, and only one has made any success.
> Point is, never put people on a pedestal for their
> credentials alone.

I never put anyone on a pedestal. Super Rich Dad (the HSB grad) explained to me that when I got to grad school I would meet not only other hard working smart kids, but many the not so smart children of his well connected friends from the Bohemian Club and the not so smart children of other super rich well connected people. Everyone at a top 5 business school is there for a reason and there is a reason to get to know them. John Arrillaga’s (good looking single) daughter Laura has four degrees from Stanford including a MBA and is so smart that she probably would have done well at Sanford even if she came from a poor family. If Laura ever get’s married and has kids they will be guaranteed to get in to Stanford now that her Dad is getting close to a quarter Billion in total donations to the school. Even if her kids are dumb as a box of rocks there are many good reasons to get to know them if they come from a family that has donated hundreds of millions to the school…

RE: school credentials and their relative merit, it's clear to me that elite schools all operate by the same principle, which some may call a scam. These schools have built enough of a "brand name" that they become sought-after commodities. They can then pick and choose the people who will be associated with them (students and eventually alumni). However, these people are for the most part people who would have done just fine with or without a degree from X school (as FAB points out). But in the end, the schools benefit from the association with these successful people as much, if not more than, the other way around, from donations, further positive associations ("rich and successful guy Y or Z went to X school, that's why they're rich"). The real benefit to students at these schools is that the brand name opens doors, both through making friends and contacts at school and using the name subsequently.

John Haverty Says:

> Also the masses should be wary of what Rich people
> did to get rich. Living life exactly as Bill Gates lived it
> wont net one much these days. Becoming rich is a
> touch of luck, lots of hard work and being at the right
> place and time for your aptitudes. Also, knowing rich
> powerful / well connected people helps considerably.

Bill Gates comes from a classic “very rich dad” family

1. Happy marriage of two smart kind well educated people
2. Education at the best schools was very important to the family
3. Philanthropy was very important to the family

It all came together when Bill’s Mom Mary overheard a fellow United Way board member who worked for IBM comment that they needed a PC operating system. She suggested that her son and friends from Harvard may have something that will work for them (the good schools paid off since she suggested that Billy and his friends from South Seattle JC had an operating system they probably would have never had the meeting with the IBM execs.)…

Becoming rich is a touch of luck, lots of hard work and being at the right place and time for your aptitudes. Also, knowing rich / powerful / well connected people helps considerably.

By far the greatest determining factor for financial success in life:
Choose your parents wisely.

If you rigorously follow this advice, everything else will fall into place.

Choose your parents wisely.

Do more good things this life and you will be born at a better time in a better place.

Another fatal thing Kiyosaki once said is that his net worth is somewhere in the range of 50M to 100M “depending on the day,” I don’t know about you but a portfolio when from 100M to 50M in one day there is something drastically wrong with it.

it turns out it's more likely to be $2-3 million, mostly from the recent sale of his fairly useless and dangerous books and from selling the 'cult of personality'. half his wealth also comes from buying in phoenix before the boom, which is presently evaporating again. he's been bankrupt, and had a low income for many years before finally coming up with a book with a title that would sell -- just like writing a book called 'how to satisfy your partner and keep them coming back for more' and filling it up with a load of pedestrian old rubbish and selling a title.

John Reed is a super smart guy (I have every one of his self published books) and most of the pot shots he takes at Kiyosaki are about his financial history and military service not what he actually says.

well, no, he takes a lot of potshots at what he says also, in great analytical detail. he has also researched kiyosaki's claimed past and more or less proven him to be a pathological liar and exaggerator, in order to puff up his books, in the greatest faux 'success' tradition. (much as james frey's work is fiction masquerading as non-fiction) and since kiyosaki's supposed lessons in life are completely fictional, there's a reasonably good chance they won't actually work if you attempt to apply them to anything.

The bottom line thing I was left with after reading Kiyosaki’s first book was that you need to save some of your income so you can buy income producing assets (cash in the bank is a good start at building a portfolio of income producing assets) that will give you more income. If we could get poor people to understand this simple fact we would have a lot less poor people…

that's right, the poor people are at fault, not the system. there is enough wealth in the world that everyone can all be millionaires, right down to the last peasant in china and villager in ethiopia. the rich don't throw their weight or power or intelligence around to keep other people down. and, of course, the whole world will all end up driving hummers without polluting or exhausting the world's resources and leaving it a hollow burned-out shell.

and, of course, stupid people who just do ordinary jobs like working in a bank or collecting garbage or doing all the necessary jobs in society that require hard work deserve to be stuck down there forever becuase of their stupidity in performing a socially useful function, when they could have top corporate defence lawyers instead.

-- could have
+ could have been

How on earth can you guarantee a house for a year after it’s sold?

guarantee no earthquakes

Peter P,

I track Cupertino school district, Evergreen, and many pockets of East Bay. For example, Pleasanton PROBABLY had more sales in May than in April. I do not have access to any official information. This is pure guesswork based on various web-sites and talk to friends. agents etc. Cupertino, on the other hand, seems to have slowed in May, and in April bubble was still going fine there.

DataQuick has not updated their site in a long time. Their SJMN weekly chart still has info from May 17th.

But the uptick does not seem like a general trend. Surfer-x posted a link that shows that official numbers are bad. So I guess, let's wait for the BA numbers. They will be out in a week or so.

I think the one difference between people who can become financially successful and those who fritter away everything is the ability to defer gratification, to see the larger, long term goals.

then there's the outright poor who can't get well-paying jobs. not counting countries where virtually everyone is poor. and the nature of high modernity capitalist markets where wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and real wages have dropped over the years. bill gates could put quite a few of his kids through college with $40bn in the bank... it's not all rugged individualism to blame...

randy's away...

I track Cupertino school district, Evergreen, and many pockets of East Bay.

I see. I think some parents may be rushing to buy just in time to register for school. That will pass.

Different Sean,

And a big "Randy's away" to you to Sir!

Both Kirsten Dunst and Minnie Driver have rich and well-connected parents. If they are from any ordinary background, I can hardly imagine how they can secure the first acting contract for any role.

Kirsten is ok, she looks distinctively Scandinavian, and there are guys out there who are very smitten by that kind of look. Minnie Driver is downright UGLY, no matter how well she can act, she is just unattractive, she has bigger jawbones than Maria Shriver before her cosmetics surgery.

I think the one difference between people who can become financially successful and those who fritter away everything is the ability to defer gratification, to see the larger, long term goals.

And how do you support your rock and roll lifestyle? This is a sweeping generalization at best. I know many people who life paycheck to paycheck not because they buy Prada, but because they chose to pursue engineering when the only value in society is for parasites, like fucking lawyers, real estate agents, and loan brokers. tss tss. Bad blueblood, no grey poupon for you.

-life
+live

I think the one difference between people who can become financially successful and those who fritter away everything is the ability to defer gratification, to see the larger, long term goals.

Huh? If stars do not align, you have no chance.

@OO,

I agree. I think Kirsten Dunst is fairly pretty --in a girl-next-door sort of way. Minnie Driver? Not my cup 'o tea.

On the subject of wealth/poverty, a few observations...

(1) No matter how well informed/educated every poor/working-class person decides to become or how hard s/he works, there is just no way they're all going to become wealthy (as DS & Surfer-X already pointed out), by the very definition of the word. Wealth without poverty is like yin without yang. The two concepts are inseperable --they define one another.

The more important question to me is, what constitutes poverty where you live? In some Western European countries, it means living on the government dole with guaranteed healthcare, free education, free food, subsidized housing, utilities, etc. Not a grand existence to be sure, but a shitload better than even the "merchant class" has it in Somalia.

(2) The local wealth distribution has a huge impact on how large/healthy the middle class is and whether or not people perceive themselves to be "poor". Unfortunately, the world's wealth is being ever more tightly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, and this seems to be a global phenomenon. In the U.S., it's as high as it's ever been, going back to the 1920s, when they started measuring this kind of data. Not a positive trend.

(3) If the world collectively decided reducing human numbers were an important goal and really worked at it, then we could all be "rich", or at least middle class, by North American/European standards. A U.N. study I read several years ago estimated that if the world's population were no more than say, 2 billion, then we could all consume and live like N. Americans (or Europeans, or Aussies, etc.). Our current population is already beyond the earth's carrying capacity to provide everyone with enough natural resources, food & energy to sustain everybody at a U.S. standard of living. Now, over time, improved technology and productivity per worker of course increases this metric. Problem is, we're producing people faster than the rate of productivity gains.

(4) Some people could not save two nickels to rub together if their life depended on it, just as some are inveterate savers. Whether or not we like to admit it, personal choice/responsibility does affect our ability to succeed financially and accumulate wealth over time. Personally, though, I believe this ranks rather low on the scale of what ultimately determines individual wealth potential --well behind choosing your parents, choosing your birth country, choosing the correct decade to be born in, your family's busines/persoanl connections, etc.

I know many people who life paycheck to paycheck not because they buy Prada, but because they chose to pursue engineering when the only value in society is for parasites, like fucking lawyers, real estate agents, and loan brokers. tss tss. Bad blueblood, no grey poupon for you.

It's fucking so true (or it's so fucking true).

If you wanna make money, you'd better be closer to the asshole that spews out the green stuff.

Most people (including moi) lack the courage to die honorably. If people can face the truth and are willing to die, there won't be retirement problems, 'cause old age without a lot of money and familial connect to children and grand children just aint worth it.

Why don't they form a legion of old people and go to Iraq to beat up the insurgents?

@GC,

:lol: Call it the "Geezer brigade"! That would certainly help mitigate the recruitment problems the Army's been having lately. Only problem is they's drive the tanks/Hummes way to slow to actually catch any insurgents.

-they's
+they'd

That's right. The International Geezer Brigade. You know, it may happen when the world gets crazy enough. Fuck it. When I am old, regardless whether I have children or not, I still want adventures. Better die fighting than lie dying.

The other thing I don't understand is why children won't live with their aging parents. It's just plain immoral. When I select a wife -- if such a time shall come -- i'll make sure that the woman should be entirely willing to live with my parents. Of course, ideally, this also requires a fairly large house, preferrably staffed as well.

Also, it's immoral to send young men to die in order for the old folks to live lavishly. It's just fucking wrong.

I remember watching a norwegian film a few years ago about two really old people (a man and a woman in their 70's). Both fled the nursing home. The man came to live with his daughter's family in the city. Needless to say, he had to leave after a week or so. He then joined his nursing home girl friend and went back to the chiling coast where they grew up. It was desolate. The buildings were complete abandoned. But they were determined to stay till they die.

So I think the modern world is fucked up. All these technological advances are just temporary drug fixes. They don't solve the problem. As a matter of fact, they make matters worse by tricking people into abandoning the traditional way of life but yet failing to offer a feasible alternative.

So I think the modern world is fucked up. All these technological advances are just temporary drug fixes. They don’t solve the problem. As a matter of fact, they make matters worse by tricking people into abandoning the traditional way of life but yet failing to offer a feasible alternative.

yes, well spoken, M. Rousseau...

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

Different Sean Says:

SF Woman wrote:

> I think the one difference between people who can become
> financially successful and those who fritter away everything
> is the ability to defer gratification, to see the larger, long
> term goals.

Then Different Sean (who should write press releases for the DNC) wrote:

> then there’s the outright poor who can’t get well-paying jobs.
> not counting countries where virtually everyone is poor. and
> the nature of high modernity capitalist markets where wealth
> is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and real wages
> have dropped over the years.

Let’s stick to the US since I’m not going to argue that it will be tough to get a good paying job in Sub Saharan Africa.

One of the things my Dad (who dropped out of college to work full time at 20) told me is when you hear someone say they “can’t do something” it just means that they “won’t do something” (or are just too lazy to do something”).

If you work hard in America you will make plenty of money even if you have no education. My tree trimmer and tile guy both make over $250K a year and my tile guy even has a second home (with servants) back in Mexico near the town he grew up in

Governor Conan Says:

> The other thing I don’t understand is why children
> won’t live with their aging parents. It’s just plain
> immoral. When I select a wife — if such a time
> shall come — I’ll make sure that the woman should
> be entirely willing to live with my parents.

I’ll let my parents live with me (or move down to their house if they want someone other than paid help to keep an eye on them some day) since they are nice people. Many people do not do this because their parents are not nice people.

Since as SF Woman points out many people don’t know how to delay gratification so more and more woman don’t wait until after marriage (or even High School) to have kids. Most Dad’s who never marry don’t stick around and most single Mom’s end up living in a crappy place and making their kids deal with a long line of the pathetic looser type guys that can’t get a date with a woman without kids.

Most people who had crappy parents just let them die in a state run housing facility…

I talked to Kiyosaki at the bus stop the other day, you know, "off the record" so to speak.

He said that the important thing to remember is to keep your eye on the ball, and buy his books, so that he can make money off them and get rich pimping your dreams of wealth without effort.

I said, "well, what about guys like me and Surfer-X, down here in the trenches, swinging a bat the old fashioned way and racking up college credits because we bought the Boomer line about education and working hard and all that sh-t?"

He said, "f-ck 'em. Let 'em eat cake!"

Now that's fricken' hard core! Damn, he's soulless!

yay!
Just checked the CL Austin listings. There are now over 2,000 homes under 150k. That's freakin' awesome. There was like 500 just a few weeks ago. It is nice to see that at least one cool city in the country is going in a totally opposite way RE wise than here. Hell- I bet those prices will drop even more than that. Yee haw!( sorry, just kinda excited)

I was under the impression we were discussing the economics of people within the US.

OK, so in a market society with lots of advertising distractions, people who defer gratification will end up with more. QED. The ol' hoard it and never spend it Protestant work ethic prevails.

I still say it's a highly individualistic world view, and takes no account of other life chances, as Max Weber would put it. However, it is a common 'pop psychology' explanation put about a lot in the highly individualised US (and psychologists tend to work 'inside the box'), and it becomes a circular explanation, like the signs of the zodiac describing personality... In other environments, perhaps those who don't hoard fare better in an adaptive evolutionary sense? Which is why we see a spectrum of behaviours - most behaviours are adaptive in some way to some environment, past or present. Let's posit that in the wild, the person who eats what they find straight away is more likely to live, and who breed on a whim will populate the earth more successfully... 'Lifelong success' in a long-term acquisitive and materialistic capitalist society is a different thing to success in the wild where you don't know where your next meal is coming from, and you have to make the most of it... and maybe the non-delayed types enjoy their lives more from moment to moment?

Besides which, did the marshmallow experimenter control for other variables such as intelligence (and there are many kinds of intelligence), parents SES, social and cultural capital at the homes of the children, educational opportunities, individual emotional lability, and so on? Does childhood gratification patterns equate to adult gratification patterns? I find the explanation of a single behavioural variable a little unsatisfying. How many other variables did he control for? Is it causative or just correlative? etc...

And I’ll even argue that if you want to be an artist, and can’t support yourself and expect others to chip in and do so, then you are the very definition of a parasite. Pay=job, can’t support yourself=hobby.

I'm a corporate lawyer, and I expect to be helped out by generous corporations -- I find that when I lie in a certain way, they chip in and pay me a lot of money to get them off the hook. I particularly like to say things like tobacco doesn't cause cancer and that a company should not be liable for asbestos deaths. I might become a politician or politician's adviser next, and put favourable spin on wars that kill thousands. After that, I'll become a lobbyist and take bribes to piss in some politician's ear. I expect a socially useful $500 K p.a. for all the abovementioned noble duties. That's far more morally superior than just producing silly art for the sake of people's ephemeral happiness, when I could be helping big business to get off the hook with my skills in glibness, and making so many people unhappy... See what modern society values? My glib tongue is worth its weight in gold...