patrick.net

This might be new topic material, but curious on people’s thoughts — other than the weather and proximity to Stanford/Berkeley, what prevents the Bay Area from becoming Detroit one day (technology being commoditized and sent to the south or India, state’s brutal fiscal situation prohibiting upward mobility, etc)?

Stanford alone is sufficient to keep it alive for a long time. You can feel the good feng shui just walking in the campus. I think the luck of the Bay Area is still there.

June Phillips,

I'm a little curious about your motives for buying. You said, "I had the opportunity to buy before I took on this oversea assignment in 2001, and again when I came back for a visit in 2003, but I didn’t."

Does this mean if you had bought back in 2001/03, you would still have gone overseas anyway? If so, then your primary reason for buying would have been expected price appreciation, no? Doesn't this make you a speculator by definition?

Not to trying to be a jerk here, just trying to point out that what's been driving the market for the past several years has been this severely warped "new paradigm" that your PRIMARY HOME has transmogrified from being mere SHELTER for your family to sure-fire "INVE$TMENT".

Personally, I would like housing to go back to being "just" shelter. I would also prefer to live in a place where my ability to purchase said shelter on a common man's salary does not depend upon laser-precise market timing of that rare "window of opportunity", which only seems to come around once every 15 years.

Fuck California and it's once-in-15 Golden Wonka Bar Housing Lotteries. If it is not willing to adopt housing, immigration and tax policies that enable working class people to provide adequate shelter themselves, then it deserves to go down the toilet.

-to provide adequate shelter themselves
+to provide adequate shelter for themselves

I am now leaning a bit closer to hard landing again.

Welcome back, Peter P. Perhaps you will earn back your old title of "Darth Bubblehead" ;-) .

funny, George & I posted almost the same thing simultaneously.

If this guy is right, it won't be until 2014 that it will be a buyer's market:

http://www.oftwominds.com/blog.html

Maybe we could have some fun with him???
Of course he did have that special way of p!ssing us off!
What is the consensus?

I have nothing against him. Moreover, no troll can harm us anymore at this point.

Fwiw, here is a graph of the median income in Santa Clara from 2000-2004:

http://www.kidsdata.org/topictrends.jsp?t=31&i=1&ra=3_132

If this guy is right, it won’t be until 2014 that it will be a buyer’s market:

Booms and busts are not symmetrical though, because greed and fear work differently. The Elliott Wave theory may offer some insight?

Lift the ban. He won't come back anyway. He's probably begging to get his investment banker junior analyst job back now that he realizes you actually have to work for income; and usually very hard for high income.

Fwiw, here is a graph of the median income in Santa Clara from 2000-2004:

Is that per household or per capita?

Lift the ban.

Let's take at least 5 more votes.

It wasn't really my intent to get snippy with June Phillips. It's just that with all of the "horror stories" just now coming to light I get a little edgy when someone comes across as "having regret" and "had I listened to you guys I wouldn't have the big fat stacks" etc. etc.

As much as it pains me to admit it, we are in August. Summer seems to be passing with frightful haste. For Oregonians, we can almost start the countdown to drudgery from here. I will try to keep in mind that as hard as it may be for me to say good-bye to the summer how much more difficult it must be for prospective sellers (and FB's) as we enter "the Dead Zone". Rather than rejoice in the fall colors it will be a time of desperation, defeat and last ditch efforts to find someone that will do a generous appraisal to tap the old HELOC one last time to carry them into the spring selling season of 2007. No such worries here.

Booms and busts are not symmetrical though, because greed and fear work differently. The Elliott Wave theory may offer some insight?

I don't know about Elliott Wave; a bit astrological biorhythmic for my tastes. But the same effect is explained by the risk/reward fear/greed curve (ala Thaler)...

In generally people place 2 time or more value on avoiding pain/fear than they do on reaping reward/gains. For big risky things that they perceive will affect their future profoundly -- like major surgery or a house buy/sell -- they put way more than 2X value on avoiding pain & fear.

It's this psychology that keeps me uncertain about the viability of a soft landing, even though many fundamentals point that direction. Once people start experiencing perceived losses they can start to move much more quickly than most would expect.

Randy,

"The second idea is so preposterous it need not be countered thoughtfully. Archaeological evidence is to the contrary. Early human societies — at least any you might label “pre-markets” — were marked by short, and often intensely violent lifespans. I posit that anyone today prognosticating about the virtues of ancient existences would not survive themselves in such an environment for more than 2 weeks."

That's why I don't actually support putting the market genie back in the bottle. It's impossible and most attempts to take away the market has backfired spectacularly. We can't go back to a universe with a couple million hunter gatherers and stone tools.

However, we do seem to have impulses that are hardwired from those hunter gatherer days (your example of people's Communist/Capitalist duality) rather than market driven impulses.

So currently we have:

Randy, LILLL, SFWoman, ME

who favor un-banning MP.

Anyone with a different opinion?

Peter P,

I assume since there's a market for illegal bear gall bladders (and probably bear pe nises), bear paws will also be available. Fortunately, I never get invited to those kinds of parties so I don't know for sure.

The bulls just don’t come out to play much anymore…

True. Where is Face Reality?

Fortunately, I never get invited to those kinds of parties so I don’t know for sure.

Me neither. I will have duck webs instead then. :(

I'd rather the MP ban stay in place. He was incredibly distracting while he was here and he didn't offer much in the way of information - just a lot of boasting about his alleged lifestyle.

I agree with un-banning Mr. Prime. If he does wish to post here again, it will be interesting to hear his take on the changes in the market over the past few months.

I don't know who Marina Prime is. But if you need 5th vote, I will give mine. Unban him. Is it worth going over the archives ?

I miss the bulls. Like the one who said he made money in Vegas and now investing in Idaho.

They will come back. Wait for next spring season. The seasonal uptick can start a dead cat bounce, esp in BA. (But if the lending standards actually change, it's hard to envision even that.)

So folks who believe this is just a temporary glitch will come back to taunt us in April 07. I am looking forward to it.

Sure, whatever. Let MP back in the show. (I could use a laugh). What concerns me more though is Surfer X's absence! Maybe if we invite one we could get the other?

Or how about having a cameo appearance "guest RE perma-bull" to use as a pinata?

Personally, I don't see how MP ever brough anything of value to the debates here --unlike Face Reality or Fake P. Mostly, he just ignored whatever anyone else said and spewed the same old crap, spamming up the board and annoying everyone.

I vote "no".

New thread: FuckedCounty.com “dead pool” revisted

BTW, how is the craigslist hosuing forum doing nowadays?

Hmmm. Let me think about this notion. A “market” is somehow a contrived, artificial concoction; markets wouldn’t exist “naturally” except but for all this human greed and consumption. The extension is that in the “pre-market” dawn of human civilization people lived some kind of gentle, noble utopian existence.

The second idea is so preposterous it need not be countered thoughtfully. Archaeological evidence is to the contrary. Early human societies — at least any you might label “pre-markets” — were marked by short, and often intensely violent lifespans. I posit that anyone today prognosticating about the virtues of ancient existences would not survive themselves in such an environment for more than 2 weeks.

I was being tongue-in-cheek, really, but I would contest some of those assertions. Anthropologists find that people in simpler societies try to tend towards reduction of uncertainty and keeping relations fairly stable. I doubt you will find much evidence that Hobbes' savage lead a life that was 'solitary, nasty, brutish and short', e.g. see Sahlins 'The Original Affluent Society'. Later critiques of Hobbes' formulation were that he had simply extrapolated 17th C. man's more individualistic outlook and warfare patterns into the palaeolithic in what amounted to simply a philosophical thought experiment not backed by any real ethnographic research or data.

Recent contemporary examples of these lifestyles could be found in Australia, Polynesia, Micronesia, South America, Africa, and so on. Clearly these peoples had not wiped themselves out, nor did they lead lives which were nasty, brutish and short, although disease processes were more of a problem and inter-tribal warfare is/was always a threat. However, I don't see that things are much different in the West. Modern medicine as a science is almost a 20th C. phenomenon only, and the last century also saw WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq, not to mention the nuclear standoff. A % of the population has always been called to war or enlist, and that % has actually increased in the last century. America is one of the more militaristic of Western countries, and I note it also has a lower average life expectancy than many other comparable countries.

Most of the squabbles in Africa now stem from Western interests in mineral resources 'distorting' the way of life of the local peoples.

Some of the biggest life-threatening wars etc started only with the advent of civilisation, once metal working was discovered, people got organised into bigger and bigger groups, and more complex hierarchical social structures started to form. You then have the rise of kingdoms and empires, where conquest was the order of the day. The justifying discourses of people like Alexander or the Caesars simply wouldn't have occurred to simpler peoples.

The first idea is just a misunderstanding of what a “market” is. Markets exist whenever there are more than one person competing for the same scarce resource. Many primate species exhibit distinct market making behaviors. There are also aspects of market making that occur in organized collective hive insect colonies.

The notion of 'scarcity' can be contested, of course, it's just a word, and a rather odd economic convention. There is in fact an abundance of goods to be found in the environment. After all, we don't seem to want for much.

I think if you want to study the history of markets you really need to look at a timeline of human evolution and cultural organisation, where you will find that man did very little for 100,000 years, then the dawn of civilisaton 10,000 years ago lead to more and more complex interactions between groups. The first thing you would see is the concept of value exchange and inter-village trading of goods -- barter, followed by the creation of local currencies as a more convenient value holder. Pretty recent history, really...

Looking for markets in hives I think is a little contrived. To call animal behaviours a market I think is fitting the data to the theory. I suppose there are plenty of animals who sing, dance, communicate with words and gestures, make tools and clothes, write books and construct 100 storey buildings as well, if we look hard enough. Well, beavers and termites make reasonable structures, there's clearly a connection... Chimps do a bit of drumming sometimes... Anyway, I think it's a stretch to look for complex cognitive human-style behaviours in other species to that extent.

I thought these Hobbesian and neoclassical economic formulations had been adandoned years ago??

Archaeological evidence is to the contrary.

Is it? hmm, I would like to see that evidence...

Sorry to thoughtfully defend those preposterous ideas... :(

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

The "Original affluent society" is a theory postulating that hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society. This theory was first articulated by Marshall Sahlins at a symposium entitled "Man the Hunter" held in Chicago in 1966. The significance of the theory stems from its role in shifting anthropological thought away from seeing hunter-gatherer societies as primitive, to seeing them as practitioners of a refined mode of subsistence from which much can be learned.

At the time of the symposium new research by anthropologists, such as Richard B. Lee’s work on the !Kung of southern Africa, was challenging popular notions that hunter-gatherer societies were always near the brink of starvation and continuously engaged in a struggle for survival (Barnard, 197). Sahlins gathered the data from these studies and used it to support a comprehensive argument that states that hunter-gatherers did not suffer from deprivation, but instead lived in a society in which "all the people’s wants are easily satisfied" (Sahlins, Man, 85).

cajun,

Thanks for writing and I hope we'll see more of you here in the future. I think you're getting on a very important point that patrick.net's blog crowd usually only touch on, which is the utility function for someone like you (money relatively not a concern, settled) is quite different from the utility function of young people (still have their fortune to make, unsettled, can move easily). Although financially it might make sense for folks like you to move elsewhere, that extra money isn't necessarily worth the hassle and the severing of old friendships.

Still, maybe sell and then go renting in the BA for a couple years could work for you. You might lose a low tax basis (could be important, especially if you're on fixed income or have kids you like to pass the house to) but you could gain a lot more money to spend in the BA and take some money off the table.

SHTF and Harm:

I have already gone before you and came to the same conclustion fall 05. I even took more of a risk I took a temporary assignment to see if I would like the south. I'm in SC it's got it's own kind of charm but like you said lacking alot of the amenities of LA. I think if you can find a job to support the kind of lifestyle you want you'll do fine. I too got tired of the "waiting game". Am I homesick? god yes. I don't think it's the place but more it's your adaptability.

I until my divorce six years ago I was never mobile I see alot of you have traveled and lived in different parts of the US and abroad. My SO and I have decided this will suffice in the short term until a better job situation presents itself for either of us. The good thing about renting is you can pick up takes until you find that perfect fit. I'm still searching for mine. It's cheap to live here for now.

Cajun is right I'm 48 and that california is gone forever. Globalization killed the middle class there as did illegal immigration. Only in my fantasy will it ever become affordable, uncrowded, commuter friendly. I don't know if I'll ever return but I'll always miss my friends and family. Good luck and godspeed.