TI-Burr-Brown parts shartage?

[Eeyore]

What? With Islamic servants?

Uh ?

Graham

 

[Eeyore]

Bubbles always do, and the people who wait til the peak to jump in are
the ones that get hosed. I bought my house at "the worst possible
time" so it's worth maybe 4x what I paid for it.

Mine's getting on for being worth 10x what I paid (admittedly 24 yrs ago).

Graham

 

[John Larkin]

What's anti-American in pointing out that stock markets around the
world have all gone done in the past week in reaction to to reports
that several of the U.S. "sub-prime" mortgage sellers are in financial
problems because their clients are having to default on their mortages
in large enough numbers to depress the housing market?

Your perennial hope that terrible things will happen to the US. They
likely won't in your lifetime, you know. You take hope in the
occasional negative glitch, but the longterm trends are good. Sorry.

What would be a "pro-American" stance? That of an ostrich with its
head buried in the sand?

You could try shutting up. This ostrich thing implies that you are
anticipating disaster. I'm not. My only problem is how really hard it
is to find employees these days.

I was a home owner in England in 1990 when that housing price bubble
burst

Bubbles always do, and the people who wait til the peak to jump in are
the ones that get hosed. I bought my house at "the worst possible
time" so it's worth maybe 4x what I paid for it. In California,
property tax is pinned to the purchase price, even better.

Continental Europe has a bigger problem: unless people start making
babies fast, it's facing a population demographic on the scale of the
Black Death. What will that do for the housing market? For industry?
For defense? Whatever, it won't be a glitch. Hey, maybe I can buy a
villa or two in Tuscany.

John

 

[John Larkin]

What? With Islamic servants?

...Jim Thompson

Hmmm, good point. I'll have to buy them Italian cookbooks.

John

 

[Jim Thompson]

Buy low, wait, sell high. It's not all that complex.

John

Then comes the replacement cost :-(

...Jim Thompson

 

[Jim Thompson]

The Channel may save you yet again.

John

Not likely, the Brits are already overrun. They've even had some
bombings.

...Jim Thompson

 

[John Larkin]

Mine's getting on for being worth 10x what I paid (admittedly 24 yrs ago).

Graham

Buy low, wait, sell high. It's not all that complex.

John

 

[John Larkin]

Uh ?

The Channel may save you yet again.

John

 

[Eeyore]

Not likely, the Brits are already overrun.

Muslims account for 2.8% of our population.

Graham

 

[John Larkin]

Not likely, the Brits are already overrun. They've even had some
bombings.

...Jim Thompson

It's interesting that the US has about 6 million Muslims, and nearly
zero resulting problems. Arab Muslims, in particular, are well
represented in engineering and have higher than average household
incomes. Black Muslims do much worse, partly because many Black
Muslims converted while in prison.

John

 

[[email protected]]

Your perennial hope that terrible things will happen to the US.

I'd much prefer that they didn't - when the U.S. sneezes, Europe and
Australia catch cold. The fact that the U.S. has been running a huge
balance of payments deficit for the past twenty years is rather
worrying from this point of view, and I'd greatly prefer the sort of
soft landing that a responsible administration might be able to
engineer, if you ever manage to elect one with some kind of contact
with reality.

They
likely won't in your lifetime, you know. You take hope in the
occasional negative glitch, but the longterm trends are good. Sorry.

I do hope you are right.

You could try shutting up. This ostrich thing implies that you are
anticipating disaster. I'm not.

That is the ostrich thing. New Orleans didn't anticipate Katrina, and
it cost them dearly. Anticipating disaster - as opposed to expecting
disaster - involves making sure that if something does go wrong, the
equivalents of the dykes, or oil reserves or whatever are available to
minimise the consequences.

The current crisis in the "sub-prime" mortgage market has a lot in
common with the savings and loan disaster of the 1980's. Those who
don't know history are condemned to repeat it.

My only problem is how really hard it
is to find employees these days.

You probably need to spread your net a little wider.

Bubbles always do, and the people who wait til the peak to jump in are
the ones that get hosed.

So how do you know when a market has peaked? And where do you live
while you are waiting to find out?

I bought my house at "the worst possible
time" so it's worth maybe 4x what I paid for it. In California,
property tax is pinned to the purchase price, even better.

Continental Europe has a bigger problem: unless people start making
babies fast, it's facing a population demographic on the scale of the
Black Death. What will that do for the housing market? For industry?
For defense? Whatever, it won't be a glitch. Hey, maybe I can buy a
villa or two in Tuscany.

You can certainly buy villas in France and Belgium - the slow
transformation of European agriculture to Australian and American
levels of productivity has freed up an enormous number of houses in
the country-side that were built to accomodate agricultural workers
and administrators back when it took 50% of the population to feed the
other 50%, rather than the 3% that now feed the remaining 97%.

The rural housing market collasped a long time ago - you won't have to
pay much for your decrepit villa and the estate that surrounds it,
though rennovating it to the point that you could live in it will cost
you.

City accomodation is expensive, and it isn't easy to find land to
build more of it - the town planners are looking forward to the
forecast population decline to solve that particular problem. The
governments have started raising the retirment age - it is now going
to be 68 in Germany for anybody born after 1950 - to keep up the
supply of workers while the age structure is skewed.

 

[[email protected]]

Any excuse to live off your wife, eh?

And why not? If I'd insisted on maximising my income at the expense of
hers, we'd we a lot worse off than we are now.

 

[Eeyore]

And why not? If I'd insisted on maximising my income at the expense of
hers, we'd we a lot worse off than we are now.

Marriages are a *partnership* after all.

Graham

 

[Robert Latest]

Your perennial hope that terrible things will happen to the US.

It would only be Anti-American if Bill had shown any signs of welcoming or
enjoying such news.

Continental Europe has a bigger problem: unless people start making
babies fast, it's facing a population demographic on the scale of the
Black Death.

That's one of the things that are being hyped as much as global warming, and
are based on just about as shaky evidence. Fact is that although the number
of babies a women has while she is fertile seems to be data that is awfully
easy to obtain, no one really has a clue. The same goes for hard facts about
migration, legal or illegal. Although nobody doubts that Western Europe's
population is stagnating or shrinking (just as nobody doubts that the
climate is getting warmer), much of the demographic panic in Europe is
little more than inflated media hype. Europe is one of the most densely
populated areas on Earth, so a little correction may not be the worst of
things to happen.

robert

 

[[email protected]]

It's interesting that the US has about 6 million Muslims, and nearly
zero resulting problems. Arab Muslims, in particular, are well
represented in engineering and have higher than average household
incomes. Black Muslims do much worse, partly because many Black
Muslims converted while in prison.

"Nearly zero resulting problems"? That makes sense, in a sick kind of
way. Most of your numerous and serious social problems come from your
enthusiasm for "social Darwinism" and the consequent gross social
inequalities, poor public health, inadequate education for the
children of the less well-off and anti-labour trade union
legistlation, most of which are pretty much independent of religious
affiliation.

It isn't so much that Muslims don't have problems because they are
Muslim, and exposed to the idiot prejudices of inland security amongst
others, but that these problems are minor compared with the other
problems that bedevil the U.S. social structure.

Arab Muslims do better than Black Muslims because most of the Arab
Muslims were rich enough to get educated elsewhere in the world and
rich enough to be able immigrate to the U.S. Black Muslims are drawn
from your home-bred poor, with all the disadvantages that entails.
Have a look at "Inequality by Design, Cracking the Bell Curve Myth"
by the Sociology Department at Berkley - ISBN-10: 0691028982 ISBN-13:
978-0691028989 - which is still available from Amazon, new and used,
for $29.95 or less.

Although it doesn't mention him explicitly, it does make clear how an
idiot like Dubbya can have a successful career in modern U.S. society
while many more able people from less privileged backgrounds go down
the tubes - getting into Harvard because your grandfather was a
student there is the kind of thing that helps the terminally mediocre
to rise to the top.

 

[Eeyore]

It's interesting that the US has about 6 million Muslims

About 2% as opposed to 2.7% in the UK.

, and nearly
zero resulting problems. Arab Muslims, in particular, are well
represented in engineering and have higher than average household
incomes. Black Muslims do much worse, partly because many Black
Muslims converted while in prison.

Where do most of your Muslims originally come from ?

Do they live in self-imposed 'chettos' ?

Graham

 

[John Larkin]

Arab Muslims do better than Black Muslims because most of the Arab
Muslims were rich enough to get educated elsewhere in the world and
rich enough to be able immigrate to the U.S. Black Muslims are drawn
from your home-bred poor, with all the disadvantages that entails.
Have a look at "Inequality by Design, Cracking the Bell Curve Myth"
by the Sociology Department at Berkley - ISBN-10: 0691028982 ISBN-13:
978-0691028989 - which is still available from Amazon, new and used,
for $29.95 or less.

Sociology is the least rational of all the soft sciences, and UCB
collects the goofiest of sociologists. The only academic field that's
arguably worse is Labor Relations.

John

 

[John Larkin]

I'd much prefer that they didn't - when the U.S. sneezes, Europe and
Australia catch cold. The fact that the U.S. has been running a huge
balance of payments deficit for the past twenty years is rather
worrying from this point of view, and I'd greatly prefer the sort of
soft landing that a responsible administration might be able to
engineer, if you ever manage to elect one with some kind of contact
with reality.

The foreign trade defecit will be a problem only if someone does try
to "engineer" it. If the dollar drops a bit more, Boeing will be happy
and Airbus may go under.

I do hope you are right.


That is the ostrich thing. New Orleans didn't anticipate Katrina, and
it cost them dearly.

I grew up in New Orleans, and was up all night when the eye of Betsy
passed over the city, leaving devastation. The Lakefront flooded then,
too. Everybody knew the "ideal" hurricane (and Katrina wasn't even
that) would eventually cover the city, and the pumping stations, with
12 feet of water. But the Big Easy, The City that Care Forgot, Laissez
Les Bon Temps Roulle (really, that's the way they say it), forgot to
care. Hell, it took them 20 years to install guard rails on some
terrible roadway curves, and then they installed them backwards, sharp
edge out.

Anticipating disaster - as opposed to expecting

disaster - involves making sure that if something does go wrong, the
equivalents of the dykes, or oil reserves or whatever are available to
minimise the consequences.

The current crisis in the "sub-prime" mortgage market has a lot in
common with the savings and loan disaster of the 1980's. Those who
don't know history are condemned to repeat it.


You probably need to spread your net a little wider.

My last hire was from Houston. I met him here.

So how do you know when a market has peaked?

When it is accepted wisdom that real estate is a good investment, and
everybody is doing it.

And where do you live
while you are waiting to find out?

Wherever you already are?

John

 

[[email protected]]

Sociology is the least rational of all the soft sciences, and UCB
collects the goofiest of sociologists. The only academic field that's
arguably worse is Labor Relations.

Read the book - goofy they may be, but they didn't have any trouble
making mincemeat of Herrnstein and Murray.
Even the goofiest of regular academics can think rings around Charles
Murray, the republican ideologist, and the rest of that lame-brained
flock. Of course, if you want to include the fundamentalist Christian
"universities" who don't teach evolution - where Dubbya seems to find
his electorate - you are into a whole new dimension of goofyness.

 

[[email protected]]

The foreign trade defecit will be a problem only if someone does try
to "engineer" it. If the dollar drops a bit more, Boeing will be happy
and Airbus may go under.

The dollar is going to have to drop a great deal more before your
balance of trade gets back into equlibirium. That won't save Boeing -
the A380 is a step ahead of Boeing, with its "Glare" composite
structural panels, and once Airbus has finished sorting out the
production problems they will wipe the floor with Boeing.

I grew up in New Orleans, and was up all night when the eye of Betsy
passed over the city, leaving devastation. The Lakefront flooded then,
too. Everybody knew the "ideal" hurricane (and Katrina wasn't even
that) would eventually cover the city, and the pumping stations, with
12 feet of water. But the Big Easy, The City that Care Forgot, Laissez
Les Bon Temps Roulle (really, that's the way they say it), forgot to
care. Hell, it took them 20 years to install guard rails on some
terrible roadway curves, and then they installed them backwards, sharp
edge out.

New Orleans isn't all that special in this respect - read up on the
1953 floods in the Netherlands, when the North Sea rolled over the
dykes and some 1300 people drowned, or read Jared Diamond's
"Collapse" (ISBN-10: 0143036556
ISBN-13: 978-0143036555) which describes a few other complacent
administrations squandering their way to disaster. I suspect that
Dubbya has a good chance of featuring in the second edition.

Anticipating disaster - as opposed to expecting




My last hire was from Houston. I met him here.

So you aren't casting your net all that wide.

When it is accepted wisdom that real estate is a good investment, and
everybody is doing it.

That sorts of works for the stock market, but the only time when
people act as if real estate isn't a good investment is while prices
are actively declining after a bubble has burst.

Wherever you already are?

Not always an option.