Hellraiser II
| Posted by Chill on 31 Aug 2010 at 06:45 pm |
Absolutely demented but great costume.
One score and 5,000 pounds ago
| Posted by Chill on 31 Aug 2010 at 11:49 am |
These quizzes on how portion sizes have changed in only 20 years are really eye-opening.
Is it just because food is cheaper that people eat so much more now?
Seems like more than that.
Without knowing it, basically all I did on my diet is eat the portions that people did 20 years ago.
I smell a best-selling book.
Crashination
| Posted by Chill on 31 Aug 2010 at 11:35 am |
Dumping
| Posted by Chill on 31 Aug 2010 at 07:54 am |
This is way too geeky for all but a few of you to want to read, but this sort of thing is what I used to do when I worked at Bank of America.
Investment vs. a house
| Posted by Chill on 31 Aug 2010 at 07:14 am |
I don’t think there is anything at all wrong with buying a house — I just wanted to be clear on that.
There are many, many reasons to buy a house that have nothing at all to do with the economic calculations. What I object to is the post hoc rationalization using outright false information that buying a house is a good investment. The simple truth is that the evidence shows that it’s almost never a good investment for the average person.
If you are buying a house, looking at it as an investment is one of the worst things you could possibly do.
If you are buying a house because you want a place of your own, don’t want a landlord watching your every move, want to tear out a wall and make a huge kitchen — there are thousands of reasons — then buying a house is the right decision. Just make sure you don’t get ripped off.
GW
| Posted by Chill on 30 Aug 2010 at 08:46 am |
More evidence of the vast, worldwide conspiracy to fake that pesky global warming data.
Every thermometer in the world is in on it!
Update: They seem to have moved what I linked to, and I am too lazy to find it. But it was temp data from the area.
Science: the magic that works
| Posted by Chill on 29 Aug 2010 at 12:03 am |
Best comment I’ve read today, from here.
Anti-science comments on the Internet are like Teabaggers shouting “Keep government out of my Medicare.”
I’ve had that same thought when anti-science nutters are spewing their nonsense on the internet. The internet — built on 2,000 years of science, so some wacky anti-vaxer (on the left) or anti-evolutionist (on the right) or global warming denialist (on the tard side) can tell me how science ain’t work right.
Awesome.
What the numbers show
| Posted by Chill on 27 Aug 2010 at 10:33 pm |
I like Nancy Nall, but the numbers show that almost everything she writes about here is wrong.
People who don’t own houses or apartments get a little impatient with this, and I guess I don’t blame them, but trust me: This crash hurts everyone, owner or not.
The boom is what hurt people. The crash was an inevitable result of a greed-ridden irrational boom that was completely unsustainable.
They were of the generation that saved up for a down payment, shopped carefully, bought and stayed put. No flipping or trading up for them. Three bedrooms, 1.5 baths, bought in 1962 and sold in 1995, paid off and worth seven times what they paid for it.
No way she’s using inflation-adjusted numbers — a very common mistake. Without knowing where the house was located (local housing markets vary a whole hell of a lot), but there has been 500% inflation from 1962 to 1995. Which means that her parents only doubled their money, which was almost certainly wiped out by interest payments on the mortgage (a 30 year mortgage would generally cost 3.2x or so the actual price of the house).
The evidence shows her parents would have, over that time period*, been much better off having put their money into stocks.
For years, for practically ever, real estate was the safest investment you could make.
Real estate is a terrible, terrible investment. Most people lose vast amounts of money on it when you calculate interest and upkeep especially. The only reason people perceive it as a good investment is that it’s like a forced savings plan.
And housing always went up. It didn’t rise at the redonkulous rates of recent years, but a steady 1 to 3 percent was a given.
If you ignore inflation….(you are fucked)
When you have a financial stake in something, you pay more attention to it.
A security deposit and a rental contract is plenty of fucking financial stake for me.
But that’s only part of it. Local governments rely on property-tax revenues to provide services. When property values slide, so do tax receipts.
Property values were ahistorically high, and so were tax revenues. QED.
It is sad that a lot of homeowners who made poor buying decisions got wiped out in the crash. We could (and should) help them. But there is no way I can support the idea that the boom was some kind of net positive. Housing being so expensive locked a lot of people out of the market and made it so that new prospective homebuyers could not afford even a rickety, run-down starter house in many markets. How is that a net positive?
Like most folks, Nancy has little knowledge or understanding of how quickly compound inflation builds up, or understands that the real problem was the boom and its causes, and the crash was only an inevitable side effect of that.
Homeowners like her are just upset. I get that. I would be as well if I’d been dumb enough to buy a house during that time. But fortunately, I was not. I’m pretty damn good at avoiding irrational markets, and I know one when I see it.
*This era was one of the largest bull markets in history.
Things are different in the bad way
| Posted by Chill on 27 Aug 2010 at 11:51 am |
We might not get a double-dip recession because in reality the economy might never have emerged from the first recession.
It is even possible that the apparent economic recovery is a mirage, and that the recession that began in December 2007 never really ended.
Increasingly it seems that the unprecedented measures taken in 2008 and 2009 to revive the economy are not working because the recession is unlike any this country has seen in the past 60 years.
People are gradually beginning to realize that this time, things are different — and not in the Pollyanna-ish way that folks usually mean that.
Increasing automation, computerization and outsourcing are simply eliminating many jobs, and those jobs will never return no matter how well the economy does.
Misleading bullshit
| Posted by Chill on 26 Aug 2010 at 03:00 pm |
Just think: this person has a PhD.
And yet with all that education, still didn’t take into account the massive effect of millions of women entering the workforce for the first time on median income per household member.
Now, I have to ask. Is it just idiocy, or disingenuousness? Or perhaps both?
Every eventuality
| Posted by Chill on 26 Aug 2010 at 01:14 pm |
I’ve had very nearly this same conversation before.
I just said, “There is no possible document I could produce that would make this very complex, event-dependent task into something that Jenny from accounting could do. It is simply not possible, and never will be.”
My boss was not happy, but it was true.
Western minds
| Posted by Chill on 26 Aug 2010 at 01:37 am |
Western minds’ cognition differs greatly from the minds of the rest of humanity.
All shallow
| Posted by Chill on 25 Aug 2010 at 10:29 am |
Though it’s become verboten to say it of women, men and women are equally shallow in choosing mates, just in different ways.
Beyond that, men’s height was the most important feature to women. In fact, the researchers were able to put the value of height into numbers. By comparing height to salary, they found a man who is 5 feet 9 inches tall needs to make between $35,000 and $40,000 more per year to get as many responses as a man who is 5 feet 10 inches tall.
Meanwhile, men prefer their women underweight.
That women care about height so very much indicates it’s more than cultural. My guess is that there’s probably a genetic basis for that preference, while I’d guess that men’s preference for underweight women currently is probably more cultural, though not wholly so.*
I’ve known women who’ve coldly rejected men who were in every way perfect for them, but were just an inch or two too short. Strange to see. (And no, it’s not happened to me that I know of.) Everyone has a right to their preferences, no matter how shallow of course — especially if their preferences are somewhat hard-coded.
*Just me blue-skying. No science supports this, or denies it. If I had to guess, I’d say that, excluding sexual orientation, about 60-80% of the average person’s mate preferences are genetic and the rest cultural or accidental.