patrick.net

I do not eat brains.

So the cat was not a zombie cat.

Hey, theotherside, do you know what the real (and nominal) appreciation rate for housing has been for California for the period from 1945 to 2000?

I think that is an appropriate number to use for estimated long term numbers in these buy vs. rent calculators. I read somewhere that it was 3%, but I cannot find it now.

So the cat was not a zombie cat.

My cats hate me anyway.

@Different Sean

You only see unstratified societies when there isn't 'enough' for one person to be on top. Hawaii kings lived like kings. Living where resources are scarce enough that you can't take a cut from other people as a 'tax' leads to universal equality. Even the 'leader' has to grub for grubs if he wants to live.

SFBB,

Don't crack the Rousseau tinted glasses.

shot in the dark, but any chance someone can send me Bill Gross' email address?

Like I said, a shot in the dark.

Casey Serin is an In-n-Out burger eating vegetarian.

Someone said:

> “Whoever figured out to sell shirts to girls that
> only go down to the midsection is my absolute
> favorite person on earth. ”

Then HeadSet Says:

> YES! And they fashion leader who coupled that
> with the low-rise jeans deserves a Nobel Prize.

Then Malcolm Says:

> SDSU in my opinion has the highest concentration
> of beautiful girls on the planet. Going there was like
> some of those early Nazi society movies of beautiful
> people everywhere.

Does anyone know if they still have the ISVT (Inter Sorority Volleyball Tournament) on the beach at UCSB every year? I went for about 6 years in a row and the girls from SDSU (along with the girls from ASU) were always the best looking.

While nothing is hotter than a 5’10” 120 pound 19 year old sorority girl in a short shirt and low-rise jeans most girls I see wearing low-rise jeans make me ill with their “beer guts” hanging over their belts…

Casey Serin is an In-n-Out burger eating vegetarian.

I am sure you can ask them to leave out the meat.

Quick question: do some vegetarians use lard in their pastries?

Randy H Says:

> shot in the dark, but any chance someone
> can send me Bill Gross’ email address?

It looks like the Pimco site was down for a redesign. If you don’t find the e-mail address you might try:

http://www.pimco.com/TopNav/ContactUs/Contact+Form.htm

No, I believe Serin believe In-n-Out burgers are okay because they are "better somehow." (They don't freeze their burgers, but the meat still come from corn fed cattle lot cows).

I like my burger medium. And it is not safe to have under-cooked burger from most places. I do not know.

I'm open to steak tartare.

SFBubbleBuyer Says:
@Different Sean
You only see unstratified societies when there isn’t ‘enough’ for one person to be on top. Hawaii kings lived like kings. Living where resources are scarce enough that you can’t take a cut from other people as a ‘tax’ leads to universal equality. Even the ‘leader’ has to grub for grubs if he wants to live.

That's not true, SFBB. You'll have to go off and do a year of anthropology or read some books to look at the history of development of societies and stratification as unearthed in the archaelogical records and by contemporary observation. There has been a progression from roughly equal neolithic hunter-gatherer societies, stratified only by age and gender, to more elaborate systems of social organisation involving role specia1isation, such as your Hawaiian 'kings'. (I don't think you will find that they possessed much wealth so much as influence.) Many early 'chiefs' (not so much 'kings') were actually required to generously donate most of what they had to their people -- this still occurs in many African tribes, and used to occur in many American Indian tribes. There are a range of societal type in Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia, many of which were settled in the last 7,000 years or so or even more recently.

The transition of power away from the masses into the hands of 'kings' in the last 10,000 years has in many ways been an unfortunate one, ref Marx's 'primitive communism'. The accepted 'stages' of technical evolution seem to be from flat hunter-gatherer societies to horticultural to agricultural to industrialised, with political evolution (or devolution) from equality to chieftains to kings to other systems of representation and leadership such as we see in 'modern' industrialised societies (really disguised kings). You are right that stratification often appears with the accumulation of surplus, but the Australian Aboriginal societies could meet all their material needs with only 3 hours work a day, for instance, the rest of the time was spent mostly relaxing and socia1ising. ref Marshall Sahlins 'The Original Affluent Society'. Some modern industrialised countries with a healthy surplus still retain strongly egalitarian political and economic features, however.

I’m open to steak tartare.

I love steak tartare. With quail eggs.

Using non-humanely raised eggs and dairy products should also be abhorrent to them, but most vegetarians seem to eat enough of those things.

Peter P: Quick question: do some vegetarians use lard in their pastries?

Don't know about here, but in the UK several supermarkets sell vegetable lard for baking tasty non-meat pastries.

I refuse to believe that humans evolved from monkeys.

Something human-like with a large brain could, of course, evolve from monkeys over time. It is most likely that we originally evolved from small lemur-like primates anyhow, which in turn evolved from earlier rat-like mammals and proto-mammals. Effectively, all of the mammals we see today stem most likely from a single rat-like species some 64 million years ago... The same proto-mammals could have had a shot at it some 250 million years ago, but they blew their chance due to reptiles and dinosaurs gaining hegemony and eating them, leaving them to scuttle in the undergrowth and devour their own offspring...

Non-vegetarians should also seek out humanely raised and sustainably farmed foods. They usually taste better.

(Possible exception for goose livers, lobsters, live crabs, veal etc., where cruelty is directly related to tastiness)

I'd say given the last oh, say, 40 or so posts, it's about time for a new thread.

speedingpullet, HARM and other SoCal'ers,

Have you seen the DQ numbers for SoCal that just came out?

http://dqnews.com/RRSCA0407.shtm

I find it very interesting that, in addition to volume being WAY down everywhere, prices are down or flat YoY everywhere except, glaringly, LA county. What are your thoughts on the contrast between LA and the rest of SoCal? Are LA and OC the "prime" areas holding up the rest? Is there a shift in the type of home being bought there (from condos to sfh's, for instance)?

steak tartare scares me now. 5-10 years ago great but agribusiness has probably made this an unecessary risk today. Likewise I wouldn’t drink much mainstream milk these days either.

Huh? Haven't food safety practices gotten better with time? irradiation and etc?

Robert,

Ventura's #1 on price decline, but what about the decline in sales number in San Bernadino and Riverside? Holy crap! Basically HALF the sales volume compared to last year????

@skibum,

The only explanation I have for why LA County is *still* posting YoY price gains in the median (despite some anecdotal evidence to the contrary), is that there really is some truth to the permabulls' "limited supply/growing demand" argument here.

There is virtually no part of LA County that is not already built out --and has been built out for at least 20+ years. The only "new" development I see going up around my neck of the woods (San Gabriel Valley) is very old SFRs that are being torn-down to create high-rise condos/townhomes, or zero-lot line houses.

Tear-downs & high-rises are almost always more expensive on a sft basis than SFRs built on raw land. Then you add in all the zoning, easements & gratuitous developer fees. Contrast this to the relative ease and low cost of building in San Bernardino or Riverside counties, where the sprawl can literally spread as far as the eye can see and beyond --all the way to the AZ border if necessary.

Add to that, the fact LA County is still the primary job-growth engine for all of SCAL (kind of like Silly Valley is to NCAL) and attracts more than its fair share of the half-million or so in "diversity" being added to the population each year, and you have relatively stronger underlying "real" demand vs. a geniunely more limited supply.

Does this mean there was no reckless/speculative buying here and we're immune to a crash? Hardly. It'll just take a bit longer to register here, and may not fall as far as the less densely populated counties.

I only track SFRs and only in certain parts of Westside, using ZipRealty and Zillow, so my obsvervations are anecdotal at best.

However, as I mentioned above, people are still adding psylocibin to their drinking water when it comes to prices here.

To cheer myself up, after hearing about massive price crashes in other parts of the country, I've taken to producing little on-the-fly frequency counts of properties by asking price.

Then I shake my head and go back to reading blogs such as this.

Here, then, is today's insanity by numbers:

Using my ZipRealty search, there are 2012 properties (SFR, 2+ beds, any price, in Westside, south San Fernando Valley, Topanga and Malibu) on ZipRealty today.

PRICE RANGE - FREQ - %of total - cum %-
over $ 10 million - 61 - 3.0 3.0
$10m - $5m 155 - 7.7 10.7
$5m - $4m 74 3.7 14.4
$4m - $3m 187 8.9 23.3
$3m -$2m 335 16.7 40.0
$2m -$1m 719 35.7 75.7
$1m - $500K 462 23.0 98.7
under $500K 27 1.3 100.0

So, from this very unscientific poll, it seems that asking price median falls somewhere over 1.5 mill, and that the lower quartile falls somewhere near the Million mark.

Then, as you notice that there's twice as many places for sale over 10 million as there are under 500K (and many of these are actually condos that got lost in the SFR search by mistake - telltale '#XYZ' in the addresses gives them away), you realise that you're better off spending time baking a nice cake, than considering buying ANYTHING in L.A at the moment.

LOL, we call this at Corporate as back end loaded... ouch!!!

"Third, it's becoming apparent that a lot of the 2004/2005 buying activity was drawing from the future, and that future is now. A lot of demand was pre-met, otherwise these low sales counts would have put more downward pressure on prices by now," Prentice said. "

So there is no more demand!!! Thats it folks...

Looks like DQ is a week late on SANTA CLARA
All they have for weekly is through 03/26/2007
two weeks late for SF and SM counties.

I would be carefull about these loan and financial calculators you find
on the web.

SFBB,

I disagree with what you said about the evolution. Among the acquaintances that I know, the richest all have stay-home wives with at least 3 kids, some up to 5. It is the struggling middle class (or self-proclaimed middle upper wage makers) that are making fewer babies, because they want to live like an upper class with a middle class wage.

If you go to Portola Valley, Woodside, Los altos Hills, you can see that most families with kids have at least 3.

I think the new sign of wealth of today is, whether you can live in a decent neighborhood with a stay-home wife, and a bunch of kids.

@OO,

While you may personally know people who buck the prevailing trend, the macro demographics on fertility and population growth are pretty clear:

--poorest countries in poorest regions with least education (esp. among females) have highest fertility rates (Africa, M. East, India, Latin America)

--richest countries with most education have lowest fertility rates (now negative in W. Europe & Japan, and would be in US too if not for immigration).

--wealthiest strata within each society tends to have the lowest fertility rate & poorest has the highest.

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

Also see Demographic-economic paradox

OO Says:

> If you go to Portola Valley, Woodside, Los altos Hills,
> you can see that most families with kids have at least 3.

HARM Says:

> Wealthiest strata within each society tends to have the
> lowest fertility rate & poorest has the highest.

I agree with both OO and HARM.

As a whole wealthy people don’t have a lot of kids. It is amazing how many people I know over 40 (both single and married) that have never had any kids. It seems like at least half the poor guys that rent apartments from me have a “baby moma” or two out there…

I can’t think of a single married working couple that has more than two kids (most have just one), but most (well over half) of my friends with a wife who does not have a job have at least three kids…

I have one child, which we had "late" by some people's standards (though not late by Marin standards). We talked a lot about 2, but have continually decided against a second. We both grew up in families of 3 children. None of our siblings has more than 2, most have 1 or 0.

Of those with which I graduated high school, those who attended and completed college (maybe 5% of the class) have 2-0 children. Of those who disappeared after freshman year into the vocational school out on the old Nike Missile base, the average is probably 3.5 "official" children and another 2.5 "unofficial" children. Most live in mobile homes and have lost personal property to tornadoes.

I know, anecdotes. But them's the flyover states.

Touring the old Nike Base in the 80s was cool. All you had to do was sign up for one of those "career-days" on the vocational campus as senior, sign up for the slaughterhouse, then leave (quite legitimately) with nausea after seeing how them hamburgs is made. The rest of the day you could run around through the abandoned nuclear war waging tunnels.

OO,

The rich do breed more, but they're a tiny minority of the population. Meanwhile, the top quartile of the population as a whole have smaller families and longer gaps between generations, especially compared to the bottom half of the population.

This top quartile is the most productive part of the population, they're what keeps things running and moving ahead. The permanent dwellers of the bottom half are pretty much worthless to the economy. If they're gone, they can be replaced efficiently by robots and consumption pattern changes.

Demographically, the US is screwing itself by subsidizing its third world population at the expense of its first world population.

Anyhow, I'm a little surprised that no one said anything, nice or otherwise, about Kurt Vonnegut.

I invoked "Player Piano" 2 threads ago.

And I admit, rather depressed. I recall the long discussion about Anna Nicole Smith, so why can't we be bothered to commemorate a great American novelist.

Hier ist Amerika. Was kann ich sagen?

It seems that you think very highly of yourself but remember that your self-evaluation is very SUBJECTIVE, especially if it is only based on YOUR set of VALUES and on YOUR PERCEPTIONS of reality…

I think very lowly of myself...

But I do think that it is very important for a person to make value judgments. Everyone can be objective so being overly objective gives no edge.