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I got you beat TOLurker, we don't have a car at all. In the summer months, I commute by bicycle, during the winter by MUNI and BART. My wife uses MUNI and BART, too.
For shopping, we use City Car Share. I guess on those rare times that we have to refill the shared car, that would count as "refilling" the car, but it is about one in six times. On average we must drive about 10 miles a week.
Not counting the 1200 mile trip in the rental car to Southern California and back, of course :-)
We have a baby imminent, so that might change, but my wife is determined to remain carless, so we shall see how it goes.
I am convinced that not having a car makes us much better off financially, since your average car costs $400-500/mo when you factor in depreciation.
We are cheap, too. I find my best furniture on the street, from other people's discards, though my wife turned her nose up at a crib the neighbor was throwing out.
Wow, 180 posts in 3 days on this topic...
I liked the initial blog article, it seems the irrational exuberance of markets, the commodification of human shelter and the rhetoric and hype of RE agents is pretty well universal... at least in free-wheeling, free property market societies with no responsible governance...
Unfortunately, what happens in classical economics theory when the non-renewable resource runs out? Doesn't seem to mention anything about mad scrambles... Remember it will take fuel to make the machines to make the machines in future -- think of the manufacturing transitions that will be required to make electric powered vehicles recharged overnight from nuclear power stations... and yet they're still making SUVs and running Formula 1 Grand Prixs like there's no tomorrow...
Anyone seen the Mad Max films?
Help! re hybrid drive minibus
Just on the concept of commuting, I'm trying to source a hybrid powered minibus for a concept here that I'm pushing with local council and state govt around short range commuting.
Does anyone posting here have any knowledge of a production hybrid powered minibus? There's one or two nibbles on the Internet, but the closest I've come is the work by Evobus in Europe on the Mercedes-Benz Sprinter platform, combined with a developmental diesel-electric drive on the same paltform at Mannheim in Germany. It's hard to get this in a production form at this stage though.
Any pointers? My e-mail is seanreynolds@netspace.net.au
hmm, Peter P, if you have respect for Robert Kiyosaki, perhaps you should read:
http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html
(In fact the whole site is worth a look, especially http://www.johntreed.com/Reedgururating.html)
Bear in mind that Kiyosaki has admitted that 'Rich Dad' never actually existed as a person, and there is no inside cover acknowledgement to anyone in that series of books corresponding to whoever Rich Dad was supposed to be. This guy was a property developer/restauranteur/'businessman' apparently (heh) and thus lead a busy life, but checks on Kiyosaki's childhood and his neighbourhood turn up nobody like that. (Sounds more like a drug dealer anyhow with that set of connections...) Further, Kiyosaki's own background is largely manufactured in his books, including the reality of his army service and his business 'success'. So there's not a lot left to admire after all that...
hmm, it's hard being the 183rd post, it's all been said already....
Randy H:
I had a finance teacher who used to say "Theory and practice go hand in hand". The fact of the matter is I speak with business owners in CA every day, and I know what they are borrowing money for. They are getting the hell out of CA as fast as they can. Whether it's relocating to NV, AZ, or outsourcing to China functions that they might have otherwise done here. The China/India option is there first choice, if they can get it.
In particular what I hear over and over again is that the credit bubble is causing lowered hurdle rates and lower returns due to malinvestment--In China. There is capacity being added--in China. What can't be relocated to China is just shifting East frm the BA. Even companies that can't offshore, or ""off-State" are moving to the Central valley because the malinvestment and lowered risk premium prevent them from being competitive in this global environment awash with debt. Like I said, in practice, the US economy and the CA economy are being hollowed out by the lower interest rates, not getting stronger. The theory just doesn't fit the facts. Maybe it's a conundrum.
Second, it is a theory that M&A results in increased efficeincy. I have seen so many deals for business purchases based on synergies and SG&A cost take outs. It just that in practice these roll-ups tend not to work and tend to be based on rosy assumptions. The cynicism that you cite comes from practice in the face of theory. I'll take reality over academics any day of the week. I'm thankful for the ivory tower; I'm not willing to be a prisoner of it.
Finally, on R&D taxation, you got me there. I'm not an accountant. That is not to say that in practice that I have not seen R&D cut during times of low interest rates. The money still has to come from somewhere, regardlees of GAAP. Low interest rates means recession, and recession means cost cutting.
--Deo V
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James Howard Kunstler has recently equated Peak Oil as a contributing factor to the decline of the Housing Bubble. In one of his Blog entries of a few weeks ago, he writes the following:
"You can only introduce so much perversity into an economic system before distortions cripple it. From 2001 through 2005, consumer spending and residential construction had together accounted for 90 percent of the total growth in GDP, while over two-fifths of all private sector jobs created since 2001 were in housing-related sectors, such as construction, real estate and mortgage brokering. Much of the money spent did not really exist except as credit -- incomes as yet unearned, hallucinated liquidity, wished-for wealth, all based on the expectation that house values would continue to rise at 10 to 20 percent a year forever. It became a reckless racket, all predicated on sustaining an economy that had lost its other means for generating wealth -- foremost its infrastructure for making things besides suburban houses.
This housing bubble economy represented, holistically speaking, the wish to maintain a sense of normality in American life, under conditions of disintegrating normality, and it is no symbolic accident that it centered on the images of hearth and home, because fundamental comforts were what many Americans actually stand to lose in a reality-based future. The decay of standards and norms in banking behavior applied-to-housing started, as in the case of the proverbial rotting dead fish, at the head, the federal reserve, and infected every lowly loan officer through the body until, in effect, lending standards ceased to exist.
The suburban housing bubble and its related activities were predicated on the idea that we could continue building out a living arrangement dependent on cheap oil and methane gas, and that all the subdivisions and strip malls would retain value for decades to come. Of course, this was the central delusion of the suburban sprawl economy, because it was obvious to anyone who gave the situation more than a cursory glance that cheap oil and gas were the things we were least likely to have in the decades to come.
This reality had begun to penetrate the American collective consciousness and will be represented in 2006 by millions of individual choices to not buy a new suburban house, either because the individuals fear the expense of long commutes or they fear the cost of heating a 4000 square foot house occupied by only a few people (or both). As the inventory of unsold new houses mounts up, the prices of all houses, new and old, will start to go down. There will be enormous psychological resistance to this reality, expressed in a lag of correct pricing, as the owners of these value-shedding "investments" wait for the bubble behavior (anticipated 10 t o20 percent asset appreciation) to return. Eventually they will get the picture.
The velocity of change in the housing bubble (and the psychology involved) will be greatly affected by oil and gas prices. It seemed to many of us watching the energy markets that the world may indeed have passed through its all-time oil production peak in 2005. Production in 2005 was nearly flat over 2004. The world was producing and also using roughly 82 million barrels of oil a day. "
So what do you all think? How real of a phenomenon do you think Peak Oil is and how much does it relate to the energy price spikes of this past year? Will it have a real effect on the housing bubble and is it indeed a harbinger of decline as Kunstler suggests above? Is it likely that we're on the path toward a lower-energy future? Is high-density centrally-located housing the wave of the future?
#housing