patrick.net

Just on the healthcare thing, somewhat belatedly (blog wouldn't take an earlier post):

Different Sean,
I have used doctors in France and England, and they were as good as here. Also, since we don't have either the longest lifespan or the lowest infant mortality rate I'm not sure why we are always disparaging every other country's medical system. Yes, we can keep the dying on machines and keep them in agony for an additional three months or so, but is that necessarily good?

the WHo estimated that about 50% of healthcare costs worldwide is on people who die within 12 months anyway, mostly the elderly...

i can't even get the 2nd part of this post on, the blog keeps rejecting things arbitrarily... doesn't seem to have anything to do with length, formatting characters, etc...

no such thing as “good” government. That’s why we get to keep and bare arms.

that's just a myth following mistrust of british rule under capricious monarchs... so you created a monarch-style president to replace it...

definitely less lawyers - the US is the most litigious country in the world...

don't you bare arms at the beach?

Ha Ha Says:
March 30th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
Report Predicts Housing Market Slowdown
A grim new prediction for California real estate: a slowdown that could last for years.

That seems to have happened in Sydney over the last 1-2 years. The real estate agents won't admit it, of course. However, the consensus I've heard is something like a 10-15% slump in prices in that period - certainly not 10% growth every year ad infinitum, underpinned by magical forces that belie economic fundamentals!

The question is, will it 'plateau' for years, or will it turn back down anywhere up to, say, 33%? (A 50% gain = 33% loss) It would be interesting to try to model this, because the inputs are really interesting -- only a small % of total properties are put up for a sale in a boom time, so all the people who purchased earlier are unharmed -- so a housing boom doesn't hurt everyone, just that small % trying to buy in the boom time who don't have some existing equity or an inheritance or whatever. Ongoing boom conditions start to hurt more and more people, obviously. So, when you've run out of all available credit and imagined credit, prices will start declining...

It's a 'self-regulating market' of sorts, which is what the politicians hope for so they don't have to do anything, but at what cost? Like the tech wreck and the '87 crash and all the rest of it, nothing is ever said in the media in a systemic way of all the people hurt in the capitalist boom/bust cycle...

Owneroccupier Says: March 29th, 2006 at 10:25 pm
I am only too familiar with the type you are talking about in Vancouver BC. The entire circle of my parents’ friends supplanted themselves to Vancouver and Sydney when the news broke out that Hong Kong were to be returned to China.

Interestingly, that probably helped to feed a local bubble in Sydney - Melbourne tended not to go up at the same time. Likewise, there was a sudden spike in Sydney R/E straight after the '87 stockmarket collapse - but not elsewhere. Then there's a spreading-out effect to other states shortly after simply because investors sought out of state investments when Sydney prices got too high... But it's hard to prove this empirically in amongst all the realtor hype, and other postulated drivers...