The Iron Yuppie

this can not end well

Boy, Chooky's title has hit it right on the head. Anytime you have a situation where EVERYONE thinks they can get rich, you're screwed. I wonder what the most effective way for me to short the market would be?

My favorite quote is one that Chooky highlights: "LA homeowners expect their home values to grow 22% every year for a decade." Just FYI, the math on that says that if you bought a house in 2005 for $200,000, your house would have to be worth $1.2 M in 2015. That would be absolutely absurd.

My thoughts are that, though I don't think housing can maintain the sustained growth rates, the pull of being close to the center of the city and/or where you work is so strong that you won't quite see a burst bubble. Likely, you'll just reach a point where the total number of owners goes down (with each owner owning more) and more renters come into the picture. A depression in prices would mean that people see a reduction in values of the homes... I don't think that will happen. The best you could get is some retreating off the peaks, but that's it.

What eBay Could Learn From Craigslist - New York Times

I thought this was a really cool article. As a recent seller of stuff on Craigslist (or more accurately, as the recent beneficiary of my girlfriend's hard work of selling stuff on Craigslist), I was floored how easy and quick it was to sell the stuff. I guess shipping is a bigger blocker than I had previously imagined (all my goods were sold to local people). The best part about it is how easy it is to participate. On the other hand, for more obscure items, the lack of a universal search (such as Ebay) for those items makes it hard when people in your area are not looking for what you are selling (or vice versa). I think Ebay's number one take away is exactly how easy it is to setup and sell... reduce the cost of entry and you'll just naturally get everyone increasing what they are doing.

RealClimate takes on Michael Crichton

Commentary on Michael Crichton's "State of Fear" book by climate scientists. It's always particularly interesting to me when someone who does a job daily weighs in on that subject. The New Yorker just finished running a three part series on the state of the environment, and when I'm done with it, I'm sure I'll have some nonsense to spew. But the authors of the above talk about this stuff because they actually write the papers. What always confuses me is when someone comes along and says "I don't know the science" when you try and make a point. Doesn't that mean you basically have no idea what's going on, and have no business talking about the subject?

Anyhow, I'm also particularly surprised that so many people are up in arms about Crichton's book. I mean the guy is a fiction writer; he is paid to make things up for a living. He did opened himself up with the points at the end where he tried to claim some of his stuff was fact. I love debunking pieces like the one I linked to, regardless of which side is doing the debunking. I just wish they revolved faster. Or better yet, put the people in a room and let them go back and forth until we understand EXACTLY where people do not agree. Then you know what you need to decide on in order to make your decision on the whole issue.

Stamkey stamps transfer personal info to your cellphone via Engadget

Yet another idea whose time has come. People are so focused on producing techniques for outputing data that humans can read (from a computer) and then reading that back in. But there's no reason to let a human read it! I've known about these two-dimensional barcodes for quite a while, and I love them. So dense with information, as well as having checks built in so even blurry images can be read. Everyone focuses so hard on getting optical character recognition levels up, but it's stuff like this which will be the real revolution in passing information from the cyberworld to the meatsphere and back.

You can't beat Nature via NewScientist

I talked about this a little bit before, but nature figures everything out before us. The deeper I dig into stuff like this, the more impressed I am that a random bunch of neurons has created the drivel on the screen you see before you. One thing in the article above which I know very well is about vision. I am absolutely ASTOUNDED that we can see at all. The level of complexity on top of complexity when it comes to the eye is ridiculous. My favorite little tidbit? Every sensor in your eye is pointed backwards, such that light has to travel through all the plumbing to get detected YET your eye can detect the equivalent of a single candle light from 50 miles away on a perfectly dark night. Sick huh?

D

Boy, talk about something that is perfect for advertising:

Tiger Did It

and screwing it up royal:

How did it go in (.com) and the commentary there on

People please! Why can't you understand that less is more? The first cut is so perfect an ad for Nike, why wouldn't you just show that over and over? It's an absolute crime what they did afterwards. Not because the ad is particularly bad; it's more that they did not let the purity of the original message work for them.

D

Portable High-Resolution NMR Sensor Demonstrated at Berkeley - MedGadget - www.medgadget.com

This is one of those little inventions that has the possibility to change the world. NMR is a technology which can unambigously identify a material and the components thereof. Today, the only way to get that material tested is to grind it up and take it to a very large lab where very powerful magnets will test the material. This is all well and good, but it takes a damn long time to do it (get time on the machine, run the test, etc etc). The author calls out the interesting facets of this new invention in that you could have one of these machines in your back room at the airport, but now that it's getting smaller and the amount of energy required to run the test is much lower, expect that you'll be able to run this stuff in a portable (hand held) format in 10 years or so. That means on the field MRIs during sports events, or scanning every shipping container that comes through or a hundred other things. Very neat!

Top 10 mistakes of home sellers

Yeah yeah. These are good pieces of advice, no question. But I'm a big fan of the following article:

Market Distortions when Agents are Better Informed

The number one thing you can do is leave your house on the market longer. It's one more proof that there's almost nothing that can't be made better with patience.

The beauty part of this research is that it proves that the experts who know more about the situation are optimizing for themselves rather than their clients in the most clear way possible: when THEY are the clients, they do a better job. Further, it's a particularly interesting information disparity, in that it's not like the agent is hiding potential leads; instead, the agent is likely just SAYING that the potential leads will not be as good or very difficult to find. But that is proveably not the case, since the agents are able to get those leads and do it without difficulty when they're selling their own home. Just fantastic research. Remember, when you're selling, if your agent owned and was selling your house, they'd sell it for $7k more than you're likely to get.

Microsoft security guru: Jot down your passwords | Tech News on ZDNet

This is non-intuitive, but certainly makes sense when you think about it. It's one more case where a situation becomes so one-sided, the opposite outcome is actually induced. Kind of like gun shows. Because there are so many regulations on guns purchased in stores, gun shows have now become a major area of buying and selling weapons in an illegal way. Close a door, open a window. Anyhow, I'm a big fan of "writing" down passwords... I use a text document that is PGP encrypted. The funny part is I don't think it's going to last very long anyway... at the rate computers are speeding up, we'll either have to have 60 character long passwords or figure out some new way of verifying an individual.

Wikipedia: Internet Phenomenon

I'd love to say that everything I've seen on the web was worth saving. Actually, I'd love to say that 0.001% of everything I've seen on the web is worth saving. However, here's a fairly decent site capturing lots of those 1997-1999 things I did see that I'm glad are out there. In the interest of participating in the distributed storage that is the web, here you go:

Mahir's Flash Video: "I Kiss You"
Hello my future girlfriend: Web page

Enjoy.