patrick.net

BTW, something like 80 or 90% of CA's budget is tied up in nondiscretionary spending, largely due to passed proposition measures. Those measure pretty much remove the legislature and governor from resolving the budget crisis. All your governator did was issue a lot of bonds to delay the day of reckoning.

It's not the liberal carpetbaggers doing the social engineering, Californians do it to themselves during each election cycle.

theotherside,

Las Vegas and South Florida are growing [population] at two to three times the national rate, so it's no surprise that their home prices have been appreciating rapidly.

What was true in May 2005 might not be true today. ;)

@Cindy: ...true victims of fraud, e.g. where there was forgery

I would say not even then. We're paying a real estate attorney to help with a transaction. When the time comes to process the actual mortgage paperwork, she gets a copy to clear, we notarize a copy (I'm going to insist upon notarizing every single page) and put it into a safe, then the mortgage company will get a nice phone call and letter from us after taking possession of the paperwork asking for a copy for verification "that our respective copies of paperwork agrees with each other", and the mortgage broker will know the extra steps we are adding. It would take collusion on a very unlikely scale to perpetrate fraud. If newbie first time home buyers like us know to do this, and I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer (just a hard worker), then I would say the bar for proving fraud should be very high indeed.

Yes, we are buying at this time, in the very beginning of the bubble implosion. In Austin. An old house on a quarter-acre lot, 3BR/2BA, more than 2000 sf, inside the center of town (biking distance from work for one of us, the other works from home). 14% below Zillow, $2K (two thousand) above county tax assessment. No realtors on either side (we asked around a neighborhood mailing list if anyone was planning to sell in our area as a last desperate move before looking at more rentals, and it turns out a next door neighbor had just separated and was planning to pull up stakes). 3.33 X gross annual income. Straight, conventional, 30 year fixed at 5.875% under a 815 Fair Isaac credit score, 20% down; it is the only debt we will carry until it is discharged (we're going to plow all surpluses into paying it off as quickly as possible; if my business simply runs at its current level instead of continuing its growth, we could be done in five years). Developers have been pulling old houses out by the foundations in our neighborhood for 87% of the purchase price and slapping up glued-together McMansions (we saw the sausage being made) for 34% more of the purchase price on lots 31% smaller.

We're not moving from this house for at least 15 years, and we're never selling it, so as far as I'm concerned, I'm paying a PITI psf per month before tax deduction of $1.24 (after tax deduction, according to the RentvsBuy spreadsheet Randy hosts, is $0.95 psf per month). After tax deduction, PITI is $50 more per month over rent. The PITI psf per month figures go down if we pay it off quickly according to plan, and slice off a big chunk of the interest payments. From my perspective, I'll be paying about what I would expect to pay while renting, and I'm treating it as a pure expense for shelter and not an investment, so if housing prices in this area crash by even 90%, it simply means I pay less property taxes.

Someone in the same neighborhood just paid $15,000 more than what we put under contract for a house that is half as small on a lot a third smaller. That house was a lot more polished, but by the time I pay off the original note and save up one HaHa in cash for the purpose, I figure we'll have a lot of leverage to negotiate for an extensive remodeling job and get more bang for our buck. By then, the housing crash should be well under way and only the strongest contractors will have survived the bloodbath.

Brand,

PS - I just looked up the gay scoutmaster case, it looks like the Supreme Court narrowly agreed with you (and me, sort of). So it's a non-issue.

Boy is there egg on my face.

Still good to know ACLU is fighting those battles, even if I think they push the individual liberty aspect too far and encroaches on the rights of others.

hee, unfettered right of reply in the graveyard shift...

I’ve got plenty of bones to pick with the Clintonites and I’m firmly against Hilary ‘08.

Clinton has the critical mass, unfortunately, and the stamina to stay out the adjusted long dates on primaries...

Peter P Says:

Canada has 1/10 the population of USA and arguably more natural resources. No wonder they can afford some social programs.

hmm, Canadian per capita GDP: $20,020, US: $29,340

something instead about equitable policies of redistribution and social democracies, perhaps

Randy H Says:

Thus my ongoing, evolving theory that a frightening number of Americans — in fact I now believe *most* Americans — don’t like Capitalism or Free Markets.

'The market' makes a good servant but a poor master.

* I won’t hold my breath (waiting for DS’ witty reply).

;)

DS,

If Hilary is presidential candidate in 2008, I may hit you up for restaurant tips in 2009.

Hum!!!! As a native Californian nothing scares me more than liberals from the east coast coming into our state and telling us how to run it.

For instance, Nancy Pelosi or Barbara Boxer, eh? Other than Pelosi's more-than-scary plastic surgery look, the jury's still out on her IMO. Boxer (and Feinstein) haven't done jack for the state in well over a decade. Just look at how powerless CA is in the Fed government in comparison to its relative size. And yet these are both senior Senators.

skibum,

Well, were you born in CA? There is such a thing as voting your senators out if you truly dislike them.

You would have a stronger argument on the House side (and there is a strong argument to be made, I rarely hear anything from CA's House delegation), the weakness of CA's senatorial delegation comes from the fact that there's only two senators regardless of size.

CA's interests haven't been well looked after, but neither has New York's interests, or Florida's interest, and so on. The smaller the state, the bigger the boondaggle (relative to the state), it's one of the pitfalls of our system of government.

The idea of a senator or house member "doing" something for his or her constituency is rather unsavory. They should focus on doing what is right (and then get graded every 2 to 6 years on their performance). Right now, too many focus on pandering and doing what is convenient rather than what is right.

I don't think it's the politicians' faults, we voted for those people, again and again, in the primaries and the November elections. If we collectively failed ourselves, we have only our selves to blame.

astrid Says:

They joined to get money for college and because they thought their government wouldn’t waste their lives for nothing. And waste of lives for nothing is exactly what they think Iraq is; is exactly what I call starting a war on false evidence, starting a full scale civil war, destabilizing a sensitive region, imprisoning and torturing the natives as suspected terrorist,and creating by many measures the most corrupt and violent society on Earth.
_____

In your "blame America first" mentality, you somehow manage to conveniently overlook the fact that the responsibility for the violence in Iraq rests sqarely on the shoulders of the barbarians themselves: the Iraqis. Iraqi-on-Iraqi sectarian violence is not an invention of the United States, nor is homicide bombing your neighbor as he tries to cast a vote at the ballot box. That is the province of the reckless, Muslim extremist mind.

It seems like too many people in power and war-making authority are intent on "nation building" and trying to win the hearts and minds of the uncivilized. The question is: how do you win the hearts of the heartless and minds of the mindless? All that these maniacs respect, it seems, is violence and power.

Order, stability and security prevailed under Saddam Hussein only because of his willingness to employ the sword through violence, oppression, torture, rape and mass murder against his largely captive & helpess population.

You are confusing cause (Saddam Hussein's actions) with effect (war).
We didn't start a civil war. Actually, we didn't start any type of war. Saddam Hussein started this war. All responsibility for what followed as a military response by the free world rests squarely on his totalitarian, psychopathing shoulders.

Sorry to rain on your blame-America-first parade, but were aren't the bad guys here.

Now, are we mismanaging the war? Yeah, I believe all kinds of mistakes are transpiring, but we're doing a lot of good, too. However, because of our lack of decisiveness in acting to employ force when and where necessary--to kill the enemy and establish domestic tranquility--the place is turning into a giant, human meat grinder for both Iraqis and Americans.

Pelosi is really looking pretty good for a sixty year old woman. Stiff and a bit scary if I was walking down an unlit alleyway, but far better than Katherine Harris. Considering how scary Nicole Kidman is nowadays, Pelosi is certainly not the worst plastic surgery abuser.

Michael,

What I said to Space Ace will also stand as answer to you.

I was once very impressed by American values and accomplishments, and I found 1931-1965 to be full of examples of American's once lofty and justifiable superiority (even though they were also punctuated by ugly incidents).

How quickly and how deeply we've sunk! You can mentally whitewash all the horrors and unnecessary brutality of Iraq. You can write off the lives of thousands of young Americans. You can blame Iraqis for killing each other, but what did you think would happen when the US goes into a place like Iraq, dismantle what policing power there is and have ideological incompetents run the place?

Why should I not mourn this and hope for better? Why should I think "but they were even worse" be an inadequate response to our own growing callousness. What the hell did you think would happen when we go into Iraq, cheers and flowers? What the hell are we still there? Do you think the Iraqis will like us if we stay for another five years? Another generation? Another hundred years?

As a long time responsible gun owner (who has never shot an animal with a gun or even pointed a gun at a person) I thought I would chime in…

Brand Says:

> You know, I’m not a gun nut. I don’t even own a gun.
> But if everybody in Columbine had been packing heat,
> that siege would have lasted 10 seconds.

Then Different Sean Says:

> oh right, that would have been a pleasant scenario. it
> must be nice living in a clint eastwood movie while
> calling it ‘modernity’.

Most people in American that want to have guns carry them all the time and it is not like “living in a Clint Eastwood movie”. When you pull the drug dealers, gang members, criminals and suicidal idiots out of the mix there is very little gun violence in America. The problem we have has nothing to do with a large number of guns it has to do with a large number of drug dealers, gang members, criminals and suicidal idiots

> They got the guns ‘illegally’ in a country where it’s
> easy to get guns. (There’s a leaching effect between
> states when laws differ.) Hence, it’s illegal in Australia
> now to possess anything much beyond a single-shot
> rifle (with proper licensing), and now illegal to carry a
> knife on your person with a blade longer than 2″. You
> will find it hard to steal guns even from ‘collectors’ as
> a result.

This may come as a shock to Different Sean, but you can still easily get illegal guns in Australia if you really want them just like you can easily get illegal pot, coke and heroin anywhere in the US. If we banned every gun in America tomorrow they would still be easier to get than illegal drugs (since you don’t smoke, snort, or inject guns the supply of guns just gets bigger and bigger every year)…

> ‘Pipe bombs’ are not going to do anywhere near the
> damage that firearms will. I’ve never heard of a pipe
> bomb siege of a school, btw.

Tell that to the widows of the US troops killed in Iraq (more have been killed by IEDs aka “Pipe Bombs” than gunfire)…

> Bottom line: while you have massive domestic production
> of guns, a ‘gun culture’ and easy availability, you will
> continue to have school and shopping mall massacres.

Bottom line we have more nut balls in America than most of the first world (but as bad as out psychos are they can’t hold a candle to the massacres in the third world)…

> First off, the second amendment is meant to protect the
> American people from their own government.

I’m not joking when I say that I’m impressed that a foreigner will at least weigh in on the modern interpretation of the US constitution. It is sad to say that I might be able to walk from SF to NY without meeting a single person who knows anything about a foreign constitution (and I would bet that well over half of my fellow Americans would not have any idea what our 2nd amendment was about)…

Michael,

The Nazis saw themselves as the "good guys" too. So did the English and French imperialists. Do did Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun.

If we're to meddle so deeply in the internal politics of another nation, the least we can do is cut out the vanity of "I'm the good guy" and constructively look at what's possible. Nobody is right all the time and nobody is wrong all the time. If you won't even bother to think about the other side of the story, you're already in the wrong.

FAB,

I'm a lot more worried about the state of Amendments 3-10. I bet only one in twenty five people know what they are.

Esp. 4th, 5th, and 6th. Very few people worry about how much the Bush administration has eroded those three Amendments.

Malcolm Says:

> I just saw a post office mailbox painted
> as R2D2. That is awesome!

Were heading in to the Presidio (toward the Lucas campus) through the Lombard gate (or are the R2D2 mailboxes popping up all over the place)?

astrid

We part company on the interpretation of US accomplishments post 1965. You are white washing fundamental, paradigm shifting changes world wide which have occurred in the 1965+ period which are the result of distinctly American innovations.

We're conversing over one of those right now.

As I look at this graph, it tells most of the story:

The US, UK, Germany then France account for just about all the Nobel prizes awarded. The US has more than 3x those of France. Of course people criticize the Nobel system of recognition. I've yet to hear any of those critics offer a better alternative.

astrid Says:

> FAB, I’m a lot more worried about the state of Amendments
> 3-10. I bet only one in twenty five people know what they are.

When most American’s can tell you the name of the people who came in 3rd through 10th on American Idol but don’t have any idea what the 3rd or 10th Amendments to the Constitution are about is there any wonder that so many people are making poor financial decisions (“wow you can get me cash to buy some spinning 24’s for my Hummer and put fake granite in the old lady’s kitchen “and” lower my payment, that’s great. I wonder why I waited so long to get me one of these neg am/IO/HELOCs)…

Randy,

You're right, I spoke too broadly as to subject and too narrowly as to time. I was thinking about political shifts rather than technological accomplishments. America was and still is ahead in technological innovations, though not as ahead as we used to be.

Even politically, America is still doing some good. It is simply frustrating that a great country, with so much ability to do good, has gone down the wrong path and mired itself in a dangerous quagmire. If America has the geopolitical significance of Zimbabwe, the misrule would merely be a tragedy for its citizens. But we're more than that and have a higher standard to live up to, and I think we're failing that ideal more and more.

"The stawberry picker most be a drug dealer on the side. : )"

I always wondered about those "flower sellers" who stand in the medians next to stop lights...

@FAB: since the minorities usually believe that someone from their country will not screw them…

Note that this thinking is not limited to recent immigrants. I had a business associate who spent his early childhood in India but lived in the U.S. for most of his life. He has no trace of an accent and is quite thoroughly assimilated. He entered into a deal despite my warnings with a company based out of India, with a U.S. subsidiary run by Indians; my alarm bells started going off when the company demanded an absurdly long time for payment terms. The overriding rationale he employed was they were from the same country, they couldn't possibly screw him over. The end client paid in full, the Indian-owned U.S. subsidiary paid on 10% of the invoice, then stiffed him (and a bunch of other U.S. consultants) when they filed bankruptcy and just pulled out of the country. The parent company told us they had no responsibility, erased all traces of their U.S. presence from their web site, then sat on their bankruptcy filing until the middle of last year when they simply had it terminated (with no discharge of debts).

He was more livid that his own countrymen thoroughly screwed him over than the actual amount of money that was involved. We're still pursuing the debt more than two years later.

After that first-hand experience, it doesn't surprise me at all that there are complete scumbags who will sign up their fellows with the same ethnic background into suicidal loan products, and even fraudulently fill out the papers. There are absolutely no repercussions for mortgage brokers who egregiously step over the line, unless a real estate attorney was paid to help shepherd the papers at the same time, and most home buyers today seem unwilling to shell out $2-3K for an attorney as part of the transaction.

Well, were you born in CA? There is such a thing as voting your senators out if you truly dislike them.

astrid,
I never claimed I was. And voting out the likes of Feinstein or Boxer are about as likely in this pseudo-liberal state is about as likely as Casey Serin ending up in jail - just about nil.

The Congressional delegation is lame, I'll agree. Perfect example of this knee-jerk reactionary old-school liberalism - Henry Waxman.

skibum,

The reason I asked was because you were following up to Space Ace's comments about carpetbagging liberals hijacking (since Pelosi and Feinstein were both from the East Coast, even though they've been in CA for decades).

I thought you were agreeing with Space Ace's comments. It sounds like you were actually arguing the opposite side and I agree with you wholeheartedly.

I dislike knee-jerk reactionary anything, the other side always has some valid arguments or reasons, it's better to figure out a way to effectively work with or against the other side, rather than grand stand in one's holy self righteousness.

astrid,

I'm just old and jaded beyond my years. I have no love for either side of the political aisle.

Canada has 1/10 the population of USA and arguably more natural resources. No wonder they can afford some social programs.

hmm, Canadian per capita GDP: $20,020, US: $29,340

But natural resources are like tax-free inheritance from Nature. They are not counted in the GDP until they are extracted, right?

A Gen-Y bar-hopping trust-funder is richer than a Gen-X startup legal professional, right?

skibum,

I'm already so pessimistic and jaded that I don't want kids, just try to beat that :-)

Peter P,

It depends on the size of the bar tabs and the student loans.

By this analogy, the Middleeast is like the Daniellynn, kinda rich but kinda screwed. (I take back whatever I may have said about that little girl being better off, the poor child is now left in the care of one of the few people less responsible than Anna Nicole Smith).

Prop 13 is a great law. As a homeowner you can easily predict next years property tax bill. Few other states allow for that. Good savers are being taxed out of their homes in other states.

Why do good savers deserve protection from the market? Life is unpredictable anyway.

Perhaps there should be some property tax hedging services. With them, a homeowner can be guaranteed a fixed future tax schedule for a "reasonable" fee.

I save almost half my pretax income but I rent. Does that make me a *bad* saver?

I save almost half my pretax income but I rent. Does that make me a *bad* saver?

It means you are a bad spender. :)

One thing though, saving is a little bit over-rated here. Yes, it is important but growing your money is a lot more important.

Why fight inflation when you can join it? :)

the other side always has some valid arguments or reasons

Randy may not agree.

Peter P,

Part of the "saving" will go to pay off my student loans. The other part is just trying to live on less (now that I've gotten over my kitchenware and cookbook buying frenzy).

And a lot of the savings will be gone after this summer. We're planning to either go to Alaska or Scandinavia this August.

"the other side always has some valid arguments or reasons

Randy may not agree. "

2 + 2 could equal 5 in an alternate dimension.

. We’re planning to either go to Alaska or Scandinavia this August.

I have never been to Alaska. And Scandinavia is a beautiful place.

But I believe your money is better spent in Alaska.

2 + 2 could equal 5 in an alternate dimension.

It is called New Math, an important concept in the New Paradigm.

If you won’t even bother to think about the other side of the story, you’re already in the wrong.

I think you have pretty much captured the essence of what is wrong with modern conservatism in a nutshell here.

I have really had to bite my tounge to stay out of the Iraq War debate, but really, why do you waste your time? That debate is over and the good guys won, belatedly. Only 28% left of the American public think Bush is doing a good job in Iraq. Similar amounts believe in UFO's, Astrology and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Some kool-aide drinkers will never change their mind.

Alaska would be a much bigger trip, I would probably need to use 3 weeks of vacation and 1-2 week of unpaid time off, if I plan to go to Alaska.

(drive from DC through the northern plains, take the ferry up the inside passage, see Denali and Wrangell St. Elias or Katmai, drive back through the Canadian Rockies.)

New thread: New Thread

Jimbo,

I usually stay away from the Iraq issue too, but I can't stand when the suffering of Iraqis and daily deaths of young Americans are written off as if it is nothing.

I'm close to some people who are in danger of being sent there and know of friends of friends who are there right now, the idea that they may be maimed and killed for some bozo's macho posturing is just unbearable.