Society

The fickle real estate market

It seems like most Americans are ill-equipped to deal with the vagaries of real estate. This does not bode well considering the high cost of an investment that can run several hundred thousands of dollars. From the NY Times: It Seemed Like a Good Bet at the Time:

One such owner, who requested anonymity rather than risk the embarrassment of exposing a financial blunder, bought a house in Port St. Lucie, Fla., as an investment in April of last year and financed the $410,000 purchase with an ARM, with an introductory rate of nearly 7 percent. The loan was an afterthought, since he expected to sell the house almost immediately for a profit. He didn’t, and now the developer recently sold a similar house in the neighborhood for $325,000.

“I just didn’t know what I was doing, and I shouldn’t have done it,” said the man, who does not have enough equity in the house to refinance and who will run out of money to pay the mortgage in 10 months. “Maybe the Lord will send a miracle.”

Presumably, the best time to buy real estate is when everyone else is losing their shirts, not when everyone is talking about all the quick money to be had. With houses as with stocks, buy when everyone else is selling, sell when everyone else is buying.

Business / General / Society — Comments Off

Trend spotting: Circa 1997

Entrepreneur Magazine posted an interesting article by Faith Popcorn about spotting widespread consumer trends. Read the list below and decide for yourself how accurate trend-spotters have been over the past ten years. It is strange to think that you’re just caught up in the zeitgeist of an era, rather than directing your own reason for being.

Continue reading →

History / Society / Technology — 1 Comment

4th Generation Warfare

The Israel-Lebanon Conflict has created tons of good discussion on geopolitics and warfare. This little nugget by William S. Lind caught my eye and indicates why states have so much trouble attacking terrorism and guerrilla warfare:

But his alternative, at least for a rollback force, includes privatizing the fighting function. The problem with this is that as the state privatizes security functions, for foreign wars or here at home, it strikes at its own reason for being and thus accelerates its crisis of legitimacy, which lies at the heart of 4GW. Once security is privatized, why have a state at all?

Conveniently, private armies have a long history of overthrowing states. There is good reason why the rising state of the 17th century abolished private armies and forcefully asserted a monopoly on violence.

International Pol. / Military and defense — 2 Comments

You got to know when to hold ‘em

Ever since my trip to Shreveport for a friend’s wedding, I’ve taken to small amounts of casino gambling. I’m not much of a gambler due to my unwillingness to get totally violated by the house odds, but it is an enjoyable pastime if you think of the money as already burned. When you lose, it’s gone. Just try not to lose too much. Sometimes you’ll win some, but the gambling bug will keep you playing until you lose that too. Let it ride.

I’ve been to casinos in Las Vegas, Shreveport, and Oklahoma, and the best thing I learned is: don’t blow your whole casino bonus check. Otherwise here are a couple other things.

  1. Casinos in Oklahoma suck. The Indian casinos have gotten their revenge on the white man by charging fifty cents ante per hand just to play. That means if you play $5 a hand Black Jack, you’ll also have to kick in fifty cents or 10% to the house for each hand. After ten hands, you’ve paid $5 just for the privilege of losing your chips. Not only does the house have the advantage, they also make easy money off each player each time the cards are dealt. Las Vegas and Shreveport do not do this.
  2. You can win with Black Jack and Poker. If you look at the odds, the only games where you can beat the house and make some money are Black Jack and Poker. This is because in each of these games, you can affect the outcome to a certain degree. For example, if you’re at a table where the dealer is dealing out of a six deck shoe and for several hands everything is low cards, you can be relatively certain there will be more high cards at the end of the shoe. Then you just bet accordingly. In Poker, you’re playing against other people. So, if you get some good hands and play against people worse than you, you can win there too. In almost every other game, it’s pure chance.
Society — Comments Off

Smart people are immature?

Interesting surface discussion about “psychological neoteny“:

“By contrast, many modern adults fail to attain this maturity, and such failure is common and indeed characteristic of highly educated and, on the whole, effective and socially valuable people,” he said.

“People such as academics, teachers, scientists and many other professionals are often strikingly immature outside of their strictly specialist competence in the sense of being unpredictable, unbalanced in priorities, and tending to overreact.”

Psychology / Society — 1 Comment

The Comforting Words of the Long Since Dead

Meditations (Modern Library Classics)I’ve been rereading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the archetypical philosopher-king and Roman Caesar. Meditations is a diary-like accounting of Marcus Aurelius’ thoughts and ideas. You can almost imagine him encamped with his legions on the Danube, writing down his thoughts and examining his life. The original title is closer in meaning to “notes to himself” rather than what most modern people think of when they hear the word “meditation”. It is a highly enjoyable and thought-provoking read. The personal, thoughtful writing style gives you a real sense of the man, who lived and died more than two thousand years ago. A student of the Stoic school, Marcus Aurelius reflects on life and death and often about how to endure and accept what we cannot change. Here are a few quotations:

  • Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.
  • Anger cannot be dishonest.
  • Dig within. Within is the wellspring of Good; and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig.
  • Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
  • We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.
General / History / Religion/philosophy — Comments Off

Hank Paulson is new Secretary of Treasury

In a huge nod to Wall Street, Bush nominates Goldman Sachs’ Henry “Hank” Paulson for Secretary of the Treasury. This is about as high profile a cabinet pick as you can get as Paulson is one of the most well known and respected captains of finance. This follows on the heels of the high profile selection of Fox talking head, Tony Snow, for White House spokesman. It looks like Bush is signalling the business world (rather obviously) that he may need their help to keep the wheels on.

I found this quote, which in this context is rather interesting:

“The thing I learned in Washington is that just as important, or more so, as what you do is who you do it with.” -Hank Paulson, CEO Goldman Sachs

Business / International Pol. / Politics — 1 Comment

The Father Factor

On the Father Factor:

In “The Father Factor,” Stephan Poulter lists five styles of fathers — super-achieving, time bomb, passive, absent and compassionate/mentor — who have powerful influences on the careers of their sons and daughters.

Children of the “time-bomb” father, for example, who explodes in anger at his family, learn how to read people and their moods. Those intuitive abilities make them good at such jobs as personnel managers or negotiators, he writes.

But those same children may have trouble feeling safe and developing trust, said Poulter, a clinical psychologist who also works with adolescents in Los Angeles area schools.

“I’ve seen more people hit their heads on what they call a glass ceiling or a cement wall in their careers, and it’s what I call the father factor,” Poulter said in an interview. “What role did your father have in your life? It’s this unknown variable which has this huge impact because we’re all sons and daughters.”

Styles of fathering can affect whether their children get along with others at work, have an entrepreneurial spirit, worry too much about their career, burn out or become the boss, Poulter writes.

Even absent fathers affect how their children work, he writes, by instilling feelings of rejection and abandonment.

Business / Psychology / Society — Comments Off

Martin Random: Bullshit Genius or White House Insider?

This guy is either a great liar or he knows some things. It doesn’t have to be true to be entertaining. Be sure to read the whole thread. From Something Awful:

Homeland security buys in bulk and at great premium millions of dollars of useless personal appliances from China, such as rice cookers, nose hair trimmers, massage wands, and heating pads, boxes them up, and buries them in railroad shipping containers in the Arizona desert for no reason whatsoever other than to spend its budget and prevent sub-agencies from getting the funds. I suspect that the money goes to a middleman in order to secretly siphon funds into foreign organizations which we can’t support over the table, but this is just me trying to find a justification for this massive and intentional government waste.

Donald Rumsfeld needs to wear iced underwear because of some medical condition, and he has his secret service detail hold his spares. He was recently getting uncontrollable long-term erections and had to change up his medical treatments. The underwear and the erections is why he uses a standing desk, not because he is some super-man. He also wears nylon stockings, not because he’s gay, but to control some vascular problem with his legs which causes him intense pain.

General / Society / Software / Internet — 1 Comment

Solutions to Laptop Theft

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a story recently on an increase in laptop theft in San Francisco coffee houses. One victim was stabbed in the chest for his laptop during a recent robbery.

Lynch said people working on the high-priced computers are easy targets. “You walk by any Starbucks and you see people with a laptop, it’s so tempting for the crooks. They walk in, right on top of the person, and the person has all their attention on the laptop. They snatch it right out from underneath their fingertips. ‘

It’s surprising that there aren’t more incidents of laptop theft considering how expensive laptops can be, especially a nice Mac with titanium case and 17″ LCD. There are tons of people out there who walk around with thousands of dollars in their bags: laptops, ipods, digicams, etc. Luckily, there are a couple of options out there to help prevent laptop theft:

  • Get a laptop cable lock. Lock down your laptop with a cable lock that snaps into a specially designed loop on most laptops. Then loop the cable around something that can’t be moved. Unless thieves threaten you with body violence this is a good solution since it actually prevents theft.
  • Install Laptop Lojack. There’s a company called Computrace that makes a product by the name of Lojack for Laptops. They even licensed the name and everything. The idea behind it is simple: as soon as your laptop is stolen, you call the police to file a police report then you call Computrace and they set your laptop into “I’ve been stolen” mode. Basically, once the stolen laptop is connected to the Internet it sends notifications back to Computrace that help pinpoint its location by using the IP address, which is tied to your physical address. Computrace then notifies the police with information sufficient to serve as a search warrent. This is a good solution unless the thief wipes the hard drive before he connects to the Internet. Computrace has partnered with Lenovo, the maker of IBM Thinkpads, which now include the Computrace software on the actual BIOS chip. So, even if the hard-drive is wiped the software is still able to run and report back when stolen. Eventually all laptops could include something like this. Computrace claims that 90% of the laptops its customers report lost or stolen are either recovered or the data on them is destroyed using remote commands.
  • For Mac Users: Orbicule Undercover. Orbicule makes a similar program called Undercover that dials home when the laptop has been stolen. It also features support for iSight if you have a built-in webcam and will take snapshots of the thief. One interesting feature is that it simulates a hardware failure by gradually darkening the screen. The hope is that if the laptop is sent to Apple for repairs and connects to the Internet while at Apple, Undercover will detect the network settings and launch a special screen with instructions on how to return the stolen laptop to its rightful owner. It’s a novel approach, but who knows how well that works.
Business / General / Society / Technology — 2 Comments
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