patrick.net

SFWoman -

I don't mind digressions into economics, but statements meant to be un PC and designed to draw ire, well, I agree they could be better directed elsewhere.

Unfortuantely, I think surfer x opened the door in this direction with his *direct* diatribes, but for some reason I like Surfer X, maybe because the surfer's statements are rarely accompanied with pontifications about childhoods in China and cafe culture in Paris, all a kind of bloggish name dropping, if you know what I mean...

Linda,

Intellectual voyeurs are a different creature from sexual predators. I've contemplated plenty of actions that I would never act upon. Thus far, you have no conclusive proof either ways. Furthermore, GC's offending comments were already erased (noticed that I have no problem with erasing on a comment by comment basis, only with all out banning?) and he more or less said he was wrong.

Are his comments obnoxious? Perhaps. But this blog doesn't delete for obnoxiousness alone. Or insults? You have no problem with Surfer-X's diatribes.

Yet you expect me to agree with you on a decision to ban and since I disagreed, then I must be a fan and a pedophila enabler.

What is the harm of GC unbanned, other than that he made a series of ill judged comments that pissed a bunch of unforgiving concerned mothers off? If he was indeed a sexual predator (a very unlikely thing, even his worst comments spoke of distant hypotheticals), what would be so bad about having him on this site, which has virtually no children traffic, no openly available contact information. His offending comments were already taken off.

Anyways, that's just fantastic. I'll keep in mind not to respond to your future queries, for fear of offending you further.

I personally do not care for people that use multiple screen names. What's the point?

Astrid
Why are you being all snippy with me?

This is a housing site
Not a site for perverts to drool.

Girgl,

when you experienced the German property bubble, were average German homebuyers heavily leveraged in their own personal finance?

I was in Japan in 1990-1991, and based on my expereince, I never saw an average japanese as leveraged as an average American middle class. The Japanese companies were in deep doo doo for property flipping, but property flipping was very rare for an average Japanese family, the younger generation just couldn't buy a home, Neg-am, No-money-down was unheard of. The most creative Japanese mortgage loan was 100 years in duration, and the 100-year mortgage deserved a lot more sound bytes than its true market share (No statistics, but I believe it to be below 10% of the total loan share). On top of this, Japanese are obsessive savers, they never let their annual savings rate get below 5%.

That's why I think what we are about to experience in this property market will be quite unprecedented.

Astrid said
Yet you expect me to agree with you on a decision to ban and since I disagreed, then I must be a fan and a pedophila enabler.

I never said you were a ped. enabler.
I did say that you've been chatting away with him.
I've never asked for anything from you.
I expect nothing from you.You can agree or disagree. I asked the group.
He has *offended* plenty of people.

Read your own posts.
You've been clearly defending this guy.
Even in your most recent post.

Randy,

I hope you'll enjoy this article about Whole Paycheck and the organic food movement.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/060515crat_atlarge

Fewlesh
I bought an out of reach house in 1989.Held on for 5-6 years...then sold at the bottom!
OUCH!
If I didn't learn my lesson then...then I deserve to buy now!
Bwahahah!

Linda,

Here are some of my responses to GC

"GentleCheetah is just going for the stealthtroll triathlon. He’s already a sexist and a postmodernist. However, he is very quiet and rather zen, so I’m cool if he’s cool.

Congratulations to GC for completing his events! "

"Complaining about other people’s materialism is best if not followed by bragging about money, especially money you haven’t made."

"I doubt the Poles and the Italians harbored the same sort of global ambition as the Chinese. It goes beyond irridentism. Having a history of a powerful empire for so long, they believe they deserve to be the world’s leader."

"I’m not actually offended by any of your comments. However, you do seem awfully boastful about your uber man status. That, in my mind, makes you a fun target for teasing"

"GC,

Well, you can believe whatever you want to believe. History already demonstrated the ruling classes are more fluid than your construction and that the fates of the upper classes are tied to happenings of the lower classes. "

"You just said in the last thread that you’re not gay.

Are you or aren’t you? :) "

"GC,

Wow, you’re really going for as many un-PC events as possible!

Linda,

Hehe. But Jake Gyllenhaal is often suspected of being Peter Saarsgard’s gay lover! "

So yes, I did engage GC in conversation, but I'd hardly call what I said to be fandom.

Finally, in the conclusion of those particular offending statements:

"GC,

You’ve toyed with us and just now discovered that your toys come with teeth and a conscience.

You’re the young urchin who makes obscene gestures to get other people’s attention. "

"Linda,

It’s fine. You’re right to be angry.

Although I don’t think GC would actually act on his impulses, that sort of dehumanizing of victims thinking is the sort that aids many a gruesome crimes. "

"GC,

Alas, we’re social creatures. Fortunately or unfortunately, what we say can be held against us. "

The best writers cherish their audience. They choose every word carefully to evoke a desired reaction. That reaction may be pleasure, laughter, anger, enlightenment -- but the focus is always on the dear, gentle reader.

The writer who just "expresses himself" with no concern for his audience is the guy on the corner gesticulating and arguing with the sky.

The name of my target audience for this post shall remain nameless but his initials are infamous.

Astrid
Hopefully, when you went through all those posts, you saw that you also have been defending him.
So what? It's your right.
You have a right to defend him if that's what you want to do.
And I have a right to disagree.
Oh, well. This "unforgiving concerned mother"
often forgives,
however,
there are some things
that one
cannot
forgive.

Fewlish
We bought Adelphia on its way dooowwwwnnn! :lol:

Linda,

"I know you’ve been a fan of his as you’ve defended him from the start. You said that he probably wouldn’t act on such statements…(BTW…how do you know? Is he an old friend or something?)
I’m talking about for the integrity of the site to have someone throwing out random flamelike comments…"

You said I was fan. If you'd bothered to check the back history, you'd see I'm not. I do chat with him, just as many here did, and I disagreed with him much more often than I agreed with him. I did not defend him from the start, I merely said I think he should be censored as needed and not banned, that's a consistent position. He has not engaged in troll like behavior and he's been responsive to queries, I see no reason to ban.

You also called him a pedophile, even though I recall no statement that suggest he ever attempted such an act or would attempt such an act. Furthermore, GC has later called his earlier statements to be wrong and an attempt to provoke. I chose to take him at face value rather than accuse him of being a pedophile. It's hard to not draw lines between the dots and see that if I defend him and he is a pedophile (though how that's relevant on this blog and requires banning, I don't know), then I am enabling his (erased) pedophile behavior.

Fewlesh,

I made statements about holding a value-weighted diversified commodity portfolio which would necessarily be heavy in agriculture. I've talked a lot about ag as a macro thing, but my comments are really very long term in nature.

As for GM Crops; I'm incredibly bullish on the technology and its future economic potential. But again, it's a very long-term thing. Since there is both politics and education/misperception involved, not to mention cultural biases, it could take over a generation for the tech to really take hold. But, short of any mass population calamity like a pandemic killing off 1/3 of the world's population, GM agricultural technologies will happen. Even if disaster strikes, they may still happen due to climate change pressures.

The problem betting on it financially is that you could go broke before it pays off. This is again why I favor old-fashioned, boring, never make you a billionaire diversification.

Aiyah, some trolls just last forever!

There are certain political sites that tend to disallow comments, or are swiftly efficient in their removal of those that don't "stay on message". Such rigid orthodoxy in the end tends to be harmful, as it acts as an evolutionary selector against creativity. Such a situation can be recognized in part by a large quantity of phrases similar to "but who would do such a thing" or "how does someone even thing of that".

As such groups tend to pride themselves on a certain moral superiority, it is amusing to note that removing the possibility of contemplating "sin" also removes the free will that is a necessary prerequisite for "sin" in all but a few dogmatic cases. A population unable to make moral decisions because of such limited cognitive ability should at best be called amoral. The moral population is one that is able to freely contemplate all actions, and then choose to act on them in accordance with an assumed moral framework.

For this reason, I tend to have a greater antipathy to posts that call for the removal of offensive material, subject to my own somewhat liberal standards. Also, as the material has in this case been elided from the record, is is often through such objecting posts that the initial offense is kept alive for an unmerited length of time.

And a bit of unsolicited advice for the other resident lightning rod : brevity.

Fewlesh,

I think I had a share in pimping grains too:-) But I pimped BG a while back, and have already sold ADM.

SFWoman Says:

> I bought nice (white!) low flow toilets with a little button
> that you pull up on to flush. Everything goes down!

My Dad has a collection of over 100 “high” flow toilets under one of his apartments in San Mateo. He is not against saving water, but years ago my He noticed that he started to make a lot more calls to Roto Rooter on all the new buildings he bought with low flow toilets (it was about 1986 that CA required every toilet that was not low flow to be replaced prior to the sale of an apartment building). Since then my Dad has told fellow apartment investors that he will send his plumber down to install the new toilets for free if they let him keep the old toilets. Low flow toilets are fine in new buildings with new plumbing but for some of the 80 year old buildings my Dad owns in Burlingame and San Mateo you need a little more water to push all the “crap” through the old pipes aka “clogged arteries”…

> I despise those low flow showerheads though.

Over 20 years ago my Dad had a sales guy come by and give him a sample low flow showerhead called the “Nova 2.35” and tell him to try it at home to see how great it worked. These “Nova” shower heads worked so great that my Dad called the guy back and bought 200 of them. I don’t know if the company is around anymore but since my Dad still has at least 20 I don’t have to worry. I’ve had a couple that I move from apartment to apartment since it is a “low flow” showerhead that seems to have even more power than a “high flow” head (and I need a lot of flow since still fortunately have as much hair as I had 20 years ago)…

> I would consider a great showerhead with an on/off valve for times of drought.

Back when I was managing property in Berkeley 20 years ago we got a lot of sample shower heads with on off switches (the companies must have sent us all the samples figuring that they were a sure sell in Berkeley)…

I’m not the tallest guy in the world at 6’3” but have to bend down to get my hair wet in most showers. Can any architects comment why we don’t just put the average shower head a few inches taller than the average American male?

P.S. Every since SF Woman posted that she was a bridal model years ago I picture her looking like this (http://tinyurl.com/nkewy ) whenever I read her posts…

astrid, LILLL

calm down. CAT FIGHT is strictly illegal on this site (although I always fantasize of watching of in real life). So let's behave ourselves before Uncle Randy cracks the whip.

Garth,

Sorry, I didn't want to be accused of cherrypicking.

fantasize about watching one, can't help mistyping when I am drooling...

astrid,

Thanks for the link. Not much to disagree with in that article. I especially like seeing someone finally point out that GM crops actually feed lots of people, something of a basic deficiency in much of Africa recently. I read a piece a few months ago which estimated the number of people killed per day in African nations that are essentially forced to avoid GM imports due to bilateral EU trade deals and the EU's insistence on prohibiting GMOs. I'll see if I can find it, and if it was really a valid conclusion (I just read it, didn't really check to see if it was a legit assertion).

Guys & Gals
Just to be clear.
I had dropped the pedophile topic
and had continued with the
Hitler
and then
suicide
comments.
The random
ramblings
were getting to me.
And others.
It is not my intention to keep these topics
alive.
It was my intention to put an
end
to them.
And him.
Never mind. :(

Owneroccupier,

It's not a cat fight. It's just that I think Linda has been too quick to judge.

I'll be happy to move onto something else. - how does Whole Foods organic vegetables relate to the credit and housing bubbles? OR was Warren Buffet a polygamist?

I'm too tired to think.
Good night.

Randy,

Yup. I'm amazed by the report of 30% gross profit. Whatever else WF may be, they've done an extremely effective job of marketing very overpriced Brussels Sprouts. I hope HBS is adding it to their case studies.

Astrid,

Your posts are always delightful -- even when you're kicking my butt.

WRT GM crops:
I've generally considered the famine problems in Africa to be of a political nature. That is, the necessary infrastructure for large agricultural production is essentially non-existent, and donated food is repurposed by various political powers.

I disagree with the EU on the potential dangers of GM foods, but do feel that it creates vulnerabilities to the food supply, mostly relating to monocultures and non-reproductive breeds.

Fewlesh,

no doubt, Global Crossing was a most disappointing scam, to say the least...

I think you have to be a bit careful with GM foods, because you are basically producing something that is almost tantamount to an untested drug. Other foodstuffs have effectively been tested over millennia for safety. Clearly, of course, a diet of nothing but fatty steak will probably kill you as well, but I advocate for caution in all genetically modified foods until they have been tested for a very long time.

e.g. the tryptophan problem where a GM bacteria was developed that produced many time more tryptophan than the natural bacteria. it also produced a tiny amount of a highly toxic amino acid that produced shocking lifelong immunity problems in people who took it, e.g. all the skin on their bodies is flaking off painfully forever. the company put the new tryptophan on the market without testing it, assuming it was chemically the same as the old stuff -- but testing of these things implies you would have to go through the whole gamut of animal trials, then Phase I-IV human trials, etc! will try to find a link to the story.

This is good enough, but i've seen an analysis which names the offending amino acid:

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/11/303903.shtml

Further, giant multinationals like Monsanto (evil) are busily engineering non-reproducing seed stock so that you have to keep going back to them every year to purchase more seed. The logical outcome of that sort of biological control becomes like the 'corporation'-controlled world of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall -- or privatising and selling water to the locals in Bolivia in the present...

i think GC is making jokes, but his blood sugar gets low from coding all night without drinking several cans of FULL SUGAR coke...

it could even be donny rumsfeld's aspartame at work ;)

We’ve had trolls in the past who went so far out of their way to derail threads...

This is why we have rail-less threads - impossible to derail. ;)

Owneroccupier Says:
Girgl,
when you experienced the German property bubble, were average German homebuyers heavily leveraged in their own personal finance?

Well, the issue was that rents were exceptionally high the years before the bubble popped, to the point where, in 1990, I was told by a landlord that we cannot afford to rent his so-so 2BR condo in a so-so area of Munich. I had just finished my master's degree and had started my first (decently paid) job. The rent would have been about 60% of my after-tax income. He was probably right, but we didn't have much choice.
After a while, we found something equally expensive where the landlord had no problem with our rent/income ratio.

Rents stayed high, but mortgage interest rates dropped below 7% in the early 90s, and house prices went up accordingly.

In 1994, the buzz about folks having moved up from one to two to three bedrom condos to a house just through the magic of appreciation was becoming louder and louder, and so we looked at buying. As luck would have it, our landlord wanted to sell the condo we were renting, and offered it to us first.
After doing a bit of research, we found that 1) we needed 33% down in order to qualify for a mortgage, 2) our parents and my employer would help us get there and 3) our PITI would only be about 10% more than the rent.
So we bought, right at the top.

Fun fact: the rent I'm charging my tenant today is only about 20% higher than what I paid myself in 1994 for the same condo.

To answer your question:
I don't think anybody was have been leveraged in Germany at all. Banks were and still are very conservative with their money over there. I don't think that zero down was ever an option, and 20% down was considered risky. Probably still is.

I was in Japan in 1990-1991, and based on my expereince, I never saw an average japanese as leveraged as an average American middle class. The Japanese companies were in deep doo doo for property flipping, but property flipping was very rare for an average Japanese family, the younger generation just couldn’t buy a home, Neg-am, No-money-down was unheard of. The most creative Japanese mortgage loan was 100 years in duration, and the 100-year mortgage deserved a lot more sound bytes than its true market share (No statistics, but I believe it to be below 10% of the total loan share). On top of this, Japanese are obsessive savers, they never let their annual savings rate get below 5%.

That’s why I think what we are about to experience in this property market will be quite unprecedented.

America is the land of opportunity.

jeez, let's bowdlerise bap's post some more... selective editing!

I thank some members. I wish to name no names for fear of inciting unhealthy feelings and karma.

D.S.,
That is a huge insult. I do not code for living, although I am a first-rate artist on operating systems, computer architecture, networks, computer vision, computer graphics, computer security. Coding is a blue-collar job. I write code when I feel like it and when I have some great ideas to demo to my directors and when I do not trust others to do it. To me, coding is of experimental nature. It's play. I leave engineering to others, although I have the capability of a first-rate engineer, actually better than the guys who wrote Windows and Linux. I am NOT kidding. You have to believe my words.

Let me repeat. I do not code for living. I am not a programmer. Get it??

I think the New Yorker critic article about Whole Foods is quite a good one, it covers all, or most, of the bases quite fairly. however, rather than being a criticism of organics, it's more a criticism of creeping corporatisation and the PR machine. the 14x wage multiple limit of WF is about equal to the outer extreme of most australian companies tho, which shows a relativity -- the US is alone in regularly having wage multiples in the 100s, the rates are much lower in EU and elsewhere. maybe it's a case of 'all business corrupts, big business corrupts absolutely', although their stuff is still certified organic and they presumably don't dump toxic waste into the river at night. if their stuff is overpriced because of fat executive salaries, you would think that many enterprising small stores would be able to flourish by offering something similar at lower prices in the same street, and possible even commence a cheaper rival chain for purchasing power. interesting points about the 'externalities' of large-scale fertiliser-based agriculture too, i.e. toxic blue-green algae blooms etc... caught between a rock and a hard place. it's a very postmodern view of the situation - 9/10

I can see certain members here make this place look like a prison. Bap33 certainly passes off as an incalcitrate inmate. Bap, this is a compliment.

yeah, alright, GC. you're definitely showing some manic and other signs though. people are attempting to cut you some slack, but you're digging a deeper hole...

D.S., what did I do wrong again?