patrick.net

This is exactly playing according to the script. What else do people expect ?

It is happening. I just do not want everyone to be too excited over the coming correction. It will come. We should be smiling. But we will save the laugh for later.

Just for clarification, when people on this blog speak of engineers and their high salarys they mean:

1) Mechanical Engineers
2) Civil Engineers
3) Chemical Engineers
4) Electrical Engineers
5) Materials Engineers
7) Petro Engineers
8) Aerospace Engineering
9) Biomedical & General Engineering
10) Environmental Engineering
11) Computer Science & Software Engineering
12) Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering

Give up? Ok the answer is 11) Computer Science & Software Engineering, if working the current "hot" area and are willing to work 60+hrs/wk, and 4) Electrical Engineers if working the current "hot" area and are willing to work 60+hrs/wk

Red Whine Says:

The choice is obvious. Spend and enjoy. When you buy a memory by going to a show, taking a weekend trip, etc., you have “banked” something that cannot be deflated into non-existence. It was — and hence cannot be un-done.

True, but what if the government invents a memory-wiping device? They could then sell us a device for recording/restoring our memories (to protect us from the government's own memory-wiping device), which of course would be enormously expensive --requiring a negatively amortizing adjustable-rate 50-year loan. Of course, finance capital would be no problem --China, Japan, Korea, et al will gladly loan us the money by purchasing MBS (Memory Backup Securities). :twisted: :lol:

At least Intel is honest, "how many hours do you expect", reply "plan on 50, sometimes it's less and sometimes more".

This at least I can respect. Other sweatshops forget it. Not working 60+ then you'll get the crappy projects and your work will get taken away and given to those willing to "pull their weight". Whoops, what's that? A revolving layoff, not to worry, they only get the "dead wood". Nice. Enjoy our cool aid are we? Wake up fools, your lifestyle sucks, do you even know what lifestyle means? No fool it isn't driving your leased 5 series to your cube farm and participating in weekly blame sessions.

But we will save the laugh for later

Yes: at least one satisfying cackle reserved for that once steely-eyed flipper, who's now chasing a cigarette blown down the street. :twisted:

They’ve just spent two years jacking up prices. If that’s not a seller’s market, I don’t know what is.

I’ll know a buyer’s market when I see one.

Buyer’s Market: When used by a Realt-Whore®, this means a housing market with exploding inventory, plunging sales and sellers that refuse to negotiate on price.

Red Whine, kindly recommend a nice red in the 2-300 price range, aged, with a long tail and subtle tannins.

You like clarets.com?

>>Buyer’s Market: When used by a Realt-Whore®, this means a housing market with exploding inventory, plunging sales and sellers that refuse to negotiate on price.

Well, I'll agree that all those conditions are met, and that the sellers may indeed be miserable because they've taken a second mortgage and spent it on the good life.

But just because the seller is miserable doesn't mean a buyer would be happy.

While it is big fun thinking of the boomer hoard when the lights get flicked on and they realize that the 24 yo trophy wife has turned into a 50yo hag, the simple fact of the matter is they are likely to be too coke'd up to even care.

Peter P Says

It is happening. I just do not want everyone to be too excited over the coming correction. It will come. We should be smiling. But we will save the laugh for later.

Can't argue with that !

Here's your Google orb of influence:

http://money.cnn.com/2006/06/20/technology/google_bear/index.htm

skibum WHAT? Google is complety re-contexulizing the ebusiness environment. Whoops, sorry, that was Razorfish. What does google do again?

Sir Surfer-X, Lord of Profanity Says:

While it is big fun thinking of the boomer hoard when the lights get flicked on and they realize that the 24 yo trophy wife has turned into a 50yo hag, the simple fact of the matter is they are likely to be too coke’d up to even care.

Dude, I just about peed in my pants from laughing so hard when I read this.

If anyone debates that $80 is too much for an engineer; I know for fact that that agencies charge over $80/h for ENTRY LEVEL people.

Ptiemann,

I think we've already been over this before ad nauseum. The vast majority of Bay Aryan households --much less all Californicators-- do not make $200k or even $150k (1 haha). I work for an IT department in a large company and our entry-level QA staff don't make anywhere near $80/hr. They exist of course, but you are talking about a very small, select group of high-skill people.

http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty.htm

Kobrick said that Google clearly has a great product, but that alone isn't enough to make it a good stock

Funny I cannot recall for the life of me buying any of Google's "products".

Last year, around same time. Everyone believed RE could only go up. Crash ? Huh. Hard landing ? Are you nuts ? The worst case was not soft landing, but a permanently elevated plateau.

Fast forward 12 months. Where are we ? Exploding inventory. Prices are not going up, no matter what the median indicates. Houses go "below" asking. Who thought that could happen ? In BA ? What happened to all the rich people ?

Just 12 months. Very short time. Very very short time. And interest rates are STILL historically low. This was a mania. It is ending on its own. All the other things HARM mentions can only add to the downward trend.

No bear market ends in a short time span. The trend continues till everyone is convinced that this is how it will be forever. We have just begun the bear market.

How long will it go ? How will it end ? Who knows. But I plan on being in an economic downturn for a long time.

If anyone debates that $80 is too much for an engineer; I know for fact that that agencies charge over $80/h for ENTRY LEVEL people.

I do not know any agency that charges $80/h and pays $80/h. What kind of charity is that?

If I charge $80/h I will only pay $40/h or I rather close my doors.

Here’s your Google orb of influence

Should we say Google in Retrograde?

Not to sound mean here.. but as someone making 50k and now hearing from people that seem to be making 200k or more here, on other sites, and in the papers now bitching that they can't afford, and what an outrage it is, well.... welcome to the club! I've been in it for a hell of a lot longer than some who make 2,3, and 4 times as much as I do. Actually, hearing so many people here that make a shitload of money concerns me. That means as soon as the prices start coming down... KABOOM! tons of people who are doing very well, who've saved up, and are in a better position than I am, even though I've been saving my ass off for years. A person making 200k can save more than me in 6 months than it took me 5 years to save. depressing.

ptiemann Says

Someone wrote:

Just take 2 married immigrant engineers. $250k combined income easily.

The are not making any more "immigrant engineer couples" ! Those who existed before, have already bought. The newer ones are very happy earning fabulous salaries in India and being "nouveau rich" there.

A person making 200k can save more than me in 6 months than it took me 5 years to save. depressing.

True, if you are thinking of a person just like you but making 4X the loot. But let me assure you most if not all BA jackasses making 200K plus are tapped to the max. Know what goes good with your new 5 series? Well thats a 5K mt bike that you never ride. What goes good with your uncomfortable but stylish danish modern sofa? Well a 50" flat screen, nevermind that there is nothing to watch.

@WW2,

Ignore the "everyone here makes $___,000,000.00 a year" nonsense. Census numbers (plus personal observation and common sense) should have disabused any non-troll of that foolishness long ago. I put that myth right up there with the "wage inflation will bail us out" crowd.

>>A person making 200k can save more than me in 6 months than it took me 5 years to save. depressing.

They can, but do they?

Ignore the “everyone here makes $___,000,000.00 a year” nonsense. Census numbers (plus personal observation and common sense) should have disabused any non-troll of that foolishness long ago. I put that myth right up there with the “wage inflation will bail us out” crowd.

Perhaps you would be happier back in Russia you Amerika hating fiend.

To BA Or Not To BA Says:

I was in self-doubt till the beginning of this year. I thought there was bubble, but I was about to give up. There was enough theory on this and other boards about why the house prices should correct. But there was no evidence in real life that I could find. Zilch. Nada.

Now I see evidence of the beginning of the crash all around me. I see the change of psychology. I see change of tone in RE agents speak. Not only I see high inventory, I see price reductions, and house not selling even AFTER the price reductions.

This is exactly playing according to the script.

What else do people expect ?

_____

Very good, positive post. It makes me happy to see that you are observing the unfolding of a housing crash like the unfurling petals of the Golden Lotus Flower.

What else do people expect? Hmm...good question!

Well, what I'd like to see...what I expect to see is a growing anger...a smoldering rage that finally expresses itself in explosive, medieval vigilante sort of ways as you see mobs of angry folk, carrying lighted torches, hoes, brooms, and shovels, chasing their naked realtors down the street, screaming, "kill the lying, little rat! Kill that motha..."

Greg,

Just remember that my opinions are worth what you paid for them. I think 1-2% deflation falls within the "zone of error", and is not sufficient to constitute real price deflation to be worried about, so long as it's not protracted for too long.

Michael Holliday Says:

Well, what I’d like to see…what I expect to see is a growing anger…a smoldering rage that finally expresses itself in explosive, medieval vigilante sort of ways as you see mobs of angry folk, carrying lighted torches, hoes, brooms, and shovels, chasing their naked realtors down the street, screaming, “kill the lying, little rat! Kill that motha…”

That's just more of the same, though - people refusing to blame themselves for bad decisions and finding a scapegoat. This is already happening in the media/NAR publicity machine, with all those claims that either the Fed raising interest rates are the main culprit in the slowing market, or that all the bubble stories are just a "self-fulfilling prophecy." What a joke.

Micheal Holiday,
As mentioned yesterday, the boycott housing site is evidence of a vein of people that all feel the same.. which is PISSED. The visitors seem to be people that have had some pent-up rage for some time now, as evidenced by some of the messages in the visitor's section. Mob mentality for sure.
I think that this is one life-altering event that doesn't get discussed much amoungst those that feel helpless about it. If more sites like patrick, boycott housing, and Craigslist can eventually harness this mindset, then the battle is already partially won. Then again, I assume the amount of people actually pissed enough to look for sites that discuss it is fairly small, so who knows?

Where I live in Sunnyvale and Mt. view areas there still is not that much inventory available. YES, it’s higher than what it was but not materially so to get sellers to panick and lower prices materially.

These places are within the orb of influence though.

Blogs are a very powerful media, and we should take comfort that our form of information and debate is growing in influence and importance.

However...

We should not delude ourselves about the relative size of "us" versus the "sheeple". We are still a very small majority compared to the population of those who buy and sell homes. I assure you many many times more people are influenced by those stupid "nasty wife" ads than by all these blogs combined. This is why, if we want to have the biggest impact possible, we need to remain credible, self-challenge our own community's most objectionable and outrageous claims, and cooperate when the "mainstreamers" pick up on our torrents.

It seems unfair that some jackass talking head gets to have his/her staff dip their big toe into a world we've all worked hard for years to create, and then present it to the masses as if they are the fount of knowledge. But life ain' fair, it just is.

I've been pondering ways we (all the legit bubble bloggers and their blogs represented here) can get more exposure to big media.

Any ideas?

$95k is only about the median income in Santa Clara. So… a lot of people are making a lot more.

If $95K is the median, then half are making more by definition; the amount by which they exceed median is not revealed by this number.

Fyi for burbed, hellboy, etc.

When quoting a previous post, it's helpful to offset it using italics tags:
<i> Quoted text here. </i>
Diplays as: Quoted text here.

This makes your responses much easier to distinguish from the quoted text.

When I interviewed at Sega (I declined the offer, because I would have had to sell my house to rent there), the guy RUNNING the place had not bought yet because prices were so high. This must have been 10 or so years ago. Bay Area prices are unfathomable to me. I don't understand how it works.

I'm more interested in what happens to the places that Californians retire to. I feel like at least I have a chance of understanding those markets.

Greg,

If "inflation" does not match real GDP growth, then growth will be halted in short order. This is why there is "normal inflation", and why it is normal for it to be sustained over very long periods of time. There will continue to be real GDP growth for so long as there are productivity improvements, we continue to replace depreciated capital stock, and there is 0 to positive population growth.

Actually, so much of the alienation we feel is a product of the fact that the MSM never tells our story.

The MSM is dominated by the Boomers. The issues we are experiencing aren't on the radar screens of people at the SF Chronicle or the CBS Evening News.

And it's not just the housing bubble. Most of us are in our late 20's and 30's. Let's see a show of hands: how many of us would like to trade places with a recent graduate. Anyone?

(This is something that we Gen-X'ers will have a duty to change in the future once we are in charge -- we will have to insure that the kids who come behind us have a future and do not have to struggle needlessly like we did.)

The MSM doesn't ever talk about either of these issues. Partly because its principals, 50-something Boomers, can't relate. And partly becuase they just don't give a damn. In the case of housing prices, their interests are actually opposed to ours.

So don't feel bad if you get frustrated by the fact no one talks about the issues that are important to you. Your feelings are normal; the MSM is not reporting them.

>>I’ve been pondering ways we (all the legit bubble bloggers and their blogs represented here) can get more exposure to big media.

>>Any ideas?

Easy. You pointed out how effective the nasty wife commercials are. Take up a collection and advertise on TV.

I vote for a commercial where all the realtors are werewolves and all the mortgage brokers are vampires.

(Randy's comment prompted the above post, meant to cite to him but forgot.)

hellboy says:

Where I live in Sunnyvale and Mt. view areas there still is not that much inventory available. YES, it’s higher than what it was but not materially so to get sellers to panick and lower prices materially.

On the other hand, those places are suburban sprawl to the max, enough to suck your soul dry, places I don't plan to live in anyway.

@SQT,

I agree with your sentiments, but your math is slightly off: you should have pegged specuvestors at "two in five buyers" (40%), not one in four (25%). 25% is soooo 2004 ! :-)

I know one thing for sure, come the next RE crash, SoCal will be much more toast than BA, as it has always been.

I thought we were nuts, until I checked out some Santa Monica homes online, absolutely unjustified. It is not like the entire Santa Monica is nice, there are many half run-down alleys and houses, yet they sell at an even higher price than Pac Heights, or Portola Valley, Saratoga, etc. LA beaches? Give me a break, cold water, polluted, drills in sight, nah, thank you very much.

I second Joe's opinion and LA SFHs in good or bad neighborhoods can see easily another 50-70% crash from here. Plus, you guys are quite overdue for another big bang in the next few years. It could be any time now.