This cost is the down payment, but you wanted no leverage, or 100% down payment, so there is no insurance cost involved.
Nah, nah, nah. I'm talking about averaging into something with cash purchases. If you want to call that "100% down payment", be my guest. How do you say there is no need for some form of insurance? Averaging in is a form of insurance in and of itself; but at some point you'll want to insure your investment. Option collars, for example, are a way to sell some upside in exchange for downside protection. It's a form of insurance.
I think we just have very different ways of looking at the world. It's like you were raised in a foreign country or something. I'm a 43 yo white male who was raised on the East Coast of the US, FWIW.
Anyway, ther channel of communication is just poor here. This may or may not be easier to hammer out if we were in person. I don't think we'll resolve it on this thread. I don't view houses as special. I don't buy into the gold standard either. It's got serious flaws, and that might be part of our dissonance here. Anyway, I'm hanging it up for tonight. No need to answer my questions. They're rhetorical. I'm done with this. I wish you well though.
Forget about the dollars. It could be priced in gold, silver, Drachmas, or Quatloos. The currency doesn't matter.
Leverage isn't a profit amplifier. It's a price fluctuation amplifier. It's like taking cocaine to wake up and heroin to get to bed at night. Most of us would rather drink coffee and warm milk. It's healthier in the long run.
Of course maintenance has to be done. You factor that into rents. I think you're overestimating how much leverage can boost your gains. Also, with less leverage in the game, asset prices will stay lower and more stable. The cost of insuring against falling prices will be lower, because volatility will be lower.
The precious metals ETFs are non-leveraged, produce no income, and have an expense -- 0.4% for GLD. That doesn't prevent them from being a worthwhile part of an investment plan. They also have very liquid options markets.
Now, what would that market be like if you could only buy a whole London Good Delivery Bar, and everybody was taking out loans to do it?
Oh, so you just mean make the down payment requirement 100%
You're totally not getting this. When you exchange $300k of REIT shares for a $300k house, you're not making a 100% down payment. You're exchanging a real-estate backed instrument for physical real estate.
It would be like accumulating GLD, and then selling GLD, and buying a gold bar.
I'm not suggesting requirements either. I'd simply like to see highly liquid, diversified, non-leveraged residential REITs made available.
So it has nothing to do with people buying a house to live in, it's for people buying houses to rent out
You can cash your REIT shares in and buy a house after 30 years; or you can enjoy the fact that you have enough shares to pay your rent until you die. It's your choice.
Rent would be lower if house prices were allowed to fall and foreclosures were foreclosed on. So how is this a solution? Unless you concern is that the inflation isn't going into houses fast enough. By tying houses to dollars, then when you print dollars, house prices go up immediately.
My plan is not designed as a solution to the current crisis. It's a plan designed to prevent the crisis from happening again.
Plans for the current crisis are a bit irrelevant at this point anyway. It is what it is. We are stuck with too much leverage, and not enough time to unwind it.
Just use the Reverse Pol Pot method, forcibly relocate the population to hives, and empty the countryside
Just use the Reverse Typing method the next time you reply to a post, take a screwdriver, and pry up the letters on your keyboard in the appropriate order.
I'm not sure if I follow you here. You're not being paid on money you owe. You're being paid a substitute for the interest that you'd ordinarily get from a bank. Instead of your money coming from interest paid by other borrowers, it comes from rent paid by other tenants.
Truly, "neither a borrower nor a lender be" under the system I envision. If you like, you may think of it as a form of money backed by real estate. The Rentenmark that rescued Germany from 1920s hyperinflation was, BTW, backed by real estate. The big problem with making it a true currency is that it's backed by something that's not fungible.
When "government by the people, for the people" goes to sleep, this is anarchy. Anarchy is against human nature. Power accrues and consolidates. That which arose out of the initial consolidation was the first form of government--monarchy.
Do tell, dear hard money advocates, what the price of gold is when one king has all the gold?
Of course it has no price--it ceases to function as currency. You don't need to have one king hoarding for this to happen. A cadre of royals is sufficient. That's what's happening in this country. A cadre has hoarded more and more dollars, and paid fewer taxes on them.
Inflation is the government's attempt to replace lost tax revenue. It's a regressive tax.
I know it's absolutely galling to conservatives to suggest that money is anything more than a reward for hard work justly beloning entirely to those who have obtained it lawfully; and certainly it is in part. At the margins though, money is a moat, a barrier to entry, a multiplier of power.
Without progressive taxation, wealth concentrates in the hands of the few, the economy polarizes, and we are back to monarchy. The epithet "Robber-barron" applied to 19th century industrialists was not too far off the mark.
Why do people want more expensive houses? Falling prices are good, think of electronics.
Because houses are leveraged. The solution to this problem is diversified non-leveraged REITs and options. Alas, I'm not aware of any non-leveraged REITs. Options are also a bit too sophisticated for some, or abused by speculators.
Long story short, most homeowners have a concentrated position in a leveraged asset. It's like having a $500k stock account, and putting $450k on FOO, with margin. It works great as long as FOO rises steadily. When FOO falls, you can lose everything so nobody wants FOO to fall.
A housing finance system based on a diversified non-leveraged REIT would solve a lot of problems. Even the options are not really necessary--they're just a "nice to have" so you can insure your "house". When you sit down and do the math on all this, you come up with a system that solves an awful lot of problems. It would take banks and insurance companies out of the equation for most people. Instead of spending the next 30 years watching your interest/principal ratio fall to zero on mortage payments; you'd watch your dividend/rent ratio approach 1 (and even exceed it) on REIT shares.
Combine this with a DRIP, and then finally people would actually welcome falling housing prices (I've been through this with a DRIP on a utility company--compounding rates trump share price. Once again, it's counter-intuitive until you do the math).
Radicly reducing the roles of banking and insurance would obviously not sit well with certain corporate elites; but I don't think there's a conpiracy here. I reallly think the plan just doesn't have much knowledge or advocacy behind it, and I bring it up whenever I can. Certainly there are some details to work out; but I think it has inherent benefits and can compete along with the traditional bank-financed purchase system.
It's a long screed. The relevant part is the first paragraph in his linked post. His claim is that "taxes kill infrastructure" because FDR subsidized auto companies at the expense of rail.
The auto corporations lobbied the government. That's what killed the rails, not taxes. These Libertarians would have you blame government for the fact that government is corrupted by corporations!
The answer is not to play into the corporation's hands, but to build a bulwark against further corporate influence, before they dismantle the only thing that has ever defended us against them.
If they have their way, we'll be back to unlimited workweeks, no minimum wage, no pollution controls, etc.
I don't see anything in the graphic about urban planning. If they incentivized development near light rail hubs and discouraged car-dependant suburban development it would do a lot.
First, there's the carrot of new development projects. There's the houses themselves, and the light rail. Secondly, don't tax the suburbs as that would be very unpopular and counterproductive. Instead, simply give Federal money to jurisdictions based on their ability to reduce non-walkable development. This would reduce the *supply* of this type of development. Buyers who still want 0.25 acres of grass and a 5 mile drive to the store would see their home values increase due to the supply side effect.
Done right, we could kill two birds with one stone: The real estate slump, and gasoline consumption.
I told people years ago that some day we'd walk into a drugstore and buy PCs next to the cigarette lighters and cheapo fans.
It just seems like a logical conclusion to the "cheaper, faster" trend. I started thinking this way in the late 90s. Prior to that, it was always $2000 for a PC. They just kept getting faster. Once they got fast enough to do video it seemed like there was not much more need for speed. It seems like price competition really heated up after that.
After the money, the biggest complaint about the IRS is how complicated compliance is. Gas tax? You just pay it at the pump. They want to bring IRS paperwork into the driving experience? What. Are. They. Smoking???
Sheesh! Just teach them all Maxwell's equations, some quantum theory and particle physics Be done with it. Enough of this coddling people with circuit analysis and all that other high level stuff they've glued on top of it.
It took me a bit longer to parse your answer than the one further down.
As long as I've been studying languages this is the first I've heard of the term "single assignment". After looking at the wiki for it, it seems to be nothing more than the consequence of being "purely functional". Maybe that's why I haven't heard it yet, the former being quite common in things I've read. Borrow/own is obvious enough.
I'm not sure if limiting yourself to purely functional programming qualifies as a "cheat" or not. Every practical "functional" programming language I've looked at has some kind of hack to let you do non-functional programming. Some even have object systems (CLOS, for example). It seems to be human nature to not do purely functional programming. The real world is not purely functional. Some of the things you need to interact with the real world (like Monads) are difficult to grasp and/or not explained well. In some ways that's a good thing--it means there's still interesting work for language designers.
Now this is what Slashdot should be. Your answer is a bit more clear to me than the "borrown/own semantics" the other poster described. Since Haskell is "type oriented", would anybody be aware if it does this kind of analysis?
What's your plan of attack on GC? Reference counting doesn't pause; but fails if you create cyclic references. Mark and Sweep doesn't have that problem; but creates the dreaded pause. The state of the art, AFAIK, is to check for recently created objects and kill them early (generational GC). There are heuristics to avoid a full mark-and-sweep; but AFAIK there aren't any airtight algorithms.
Now I wonder, is it possible to do a static analysis on a parse tree for some language and determine whether or not it could create cyclic references at runtime? I'm inclined to think that it's generally impossible... but I'm not even sure how to set that equation up. At any rate, rejecting a program that creates cycles would be cheating. Also, there might be some valid reason to create a ring-like data structure.
Anyway, good luck with your project. It reminds me of a lot of the independant language development project I hack on; but I'm less concerned with parallelism. I admire the Erlang message-passing and lightweight process approach for that.
Consider the alternative (usually unexpressed) "The money is the No. 1 perk at FooCo", Awad said during a break from filling out his TPS report. "It's the main reason I will work for FooCo until it goes bankrupt".
One or the other should change their name to Jerk Store. They might have to license it from NBC; but it would fit either way and I don't think anybody is using it.
I haven't used it for a wihle so forgive me if it's gone; but Slashdot has historicly given you the ability to ignore posts below a certain rating. Yahoo forums do this now too.
I've always thought it would be interesting to have more than one dimension to the ratings. Let's say you have a preference for "Funny Troll" posts. Instead of Funny+, Troll-, the equation would be something like (Funny AND Troll) ? (Funny-Troll) : (Funny+Troll);
It could be really flexible if you gave users the ability to enter a small snippet of code, which would be eval'd. Surely there is some Perl regex line-noise that would let you enter a simple equation and not something dangerous.
I actually thought online ordering would be a negative for the environment since point-many seems less efficient than point-store; but point-store is a myth. It's really point-store-many, with the "many" being done by amateurs.
In theory, you could even get rid of your car by having everything delivered; but I doubt many people are doing that except in the East Coast megalopalis and a few other places. I was actually in a situation like that for a while. I had ZipCar as a backup plan, and never used it.
And how do you reserve a ZipCar? Online, of course.
Long story short, there are more variables than you can shake a stick at. It's always interesting to start with Wikipedia. The first big takeaway is that where you live seems to be the biggest factor. The Pacific Northwest consumes very little electricity. The temperate climate probably has a lot to do with that.
Has Greenpeace calculated reduced fuel consumption due to decreased snail-mail volume? Reduced travel CO2 due to IM, video-conference, and other IP-based technology? The contribution of computing to developing greener technologies?
Not unless you get the cost down. There's no way you can ship enough people off to the Moon or Mars to make an impact. You'd have to be selective about who you exile in order to control the number and/or the quality of the population.
Hey! Sheen, Bieber, and the entire NBA--we're looking at you.
Slashdot Mirror
This cost is the down payment, but you wanted no leverage, or 100% down payment, so there is no insurance cost involved.
Nah, nah, nah. I'm talking about averaging into something with cash purchases. If you want to call that "100% down payment", be my guest. How do you say there is no need for some form of insurance? Averaging in is a form of insurance in and of itself; but at some point you'll want to insure your investment. Option collars, for example, are a way to sell some upside in exchange for downside protection. It's a form of insurance.
I think we just have very different ways of looking at the world. It's like you were raised in a foreign country or something. I'm a 43 yo white male who was raised on the East Coast of the US, FWIW.
Anyway, ther channel of communication is just poor here. This may or may not be easier to hammer out if we were in person. I don't think we'll resolve it on this thread. I don't view houses as special. I don't buy into the gold standard either. It's got serious flaws, and that might be part of our dissonance here. Anyway, I'm hanging it up for tonight. No need to answer my questions. They're rhetorical. I'm done with this. I wish you well though.
Forget about the dollars. It could be priced in gold, silver, Drachmas, or Quatloos. The currency doesn't matter.
Leverage isn't a profit amplifier. It's a price fluctuation amplifier. It's like taking cocaine to wake up and heroin to get to bed at night. Most of us would rather drink coffee and warm milk. It's healthier in the long run.
Of course maintenance has to be done. You factor that into rents. I think you're overestimating how much leverage can boost your gains. Also, with less leverage in the game, asset prices will stay lower and more stable. The cost of insuring against falling prices will be lower, because volatility will be lower.
The precious metals ETFs are non-leveraged, produce no income, and have an expense -- 0.4% for GLD. That doesn't prevent them from being a worthwhile part of an investment plan. They also have very liquid options markets.
Now, what would that market be like if you could only buy a whole London Good Delivery Bar, and everybody was taking out loans to do it?
Oh, so you just mean make the down payment requirement 100%
You're totally not getting this. When you exchange $300k of REIT shares for a $300k house, you're not making a 100% down payment. You're exchanging a real-estate backed instrument for physical real estate.
It would be like accumulating GLD, and then selling GLD, and buying a gold bar.
I'm not suggesting requirements either. I'd simply like to see highly liquid, diversified, non-leveraged residential REITs made available.
So it has nothing to do with people buying a house to live in, it's for people buying houses to rent out
You can cash your REIT shares in and buy a house after 30 years; or you can enjoy the fact that you have enough shares to pay your rent until you die. It's your choice.
Rent would be lower if house prices were allowed to fall and foreclosures were foreclosed on. So how is this a solution? Unless you concern is that the inflation isn't going into houses fast enough. By tying houses to dollars, then when you print dollars, house prices go up immediately.
My plan is not designed as a solution to the current crisis. It's a plan designed to prevent the crisis from happening again.
Plans for the current crisis are a bit irrelevant at this point anyway. It is what it is. We are stuck with too much leverage, and not enough time to unwind it.
without the government intervention there wouldn't have been robber barons
Without government intervention there wouldn't be an Internet, and thus, no Zuckerberg. I find your ideas intriguing...
Just use the Reverse Pol Pot method, forcibly relocate the population to hives, and empty the countryside
Just use the Reverse Typing method the next time you reply to a post, take a screwdriver, and pry up the letters on your keyboard in the appropriate order.
I'm not sure if I follow you here. You're not being paid on money you owe. You're being paid a substitute for the interest that you'd ordinarily get from a bank. Instead of your money coming from interest paid by other borrowers, it comes from rent paid by other tenants.
Truly, "neither a borrower nor a lender be" under the system I envision. If you like, you may think of it as a form of money backed by real estate. The Rentenmark that rescued Germany from 1920s hyperinflation was, BTW, backed by real estate. The big problem with making it a true currency is that it's backed by something that's not fungible.
When "government by the people, for the people" goes to sleep, this is anarchy. Anarchy is against human nature. Power accrues and consolidates. That which arose out of the initial consolidation was the first form of government--monarchy.
Do tell, dear hard money advocates, what the price of gold is when one king has all the gold?
Of course it has no price--it ceases to function as currency. You don't need to have one king hoarding for this to happen. A cadre of royals is sufficient. That's what's happening in this country. A cadre has hoarded more and more dollars, and paid fewer taxes on them.
Inflation is the government's attempt to replace lost tax revenue. It's a regressive tax.
I know it's absolutely galling to conservatives to suggest that money is anything more than a reward for hard work justly beloning entirely to those who have obtained it lawfully; and certainly it is in part. At the margins though, money is a moat, a barrier to entry, a multiplier of power.
Without progressive taxation, wealth concentrates in the hands of the few, the economy polarizes, and we are back to monarchy. The epithet "Robber-barron" applied to 19th century industrialists was not too far off the mark.
Why do people want more expensive houses? Falling prices are good, think of electronics.
Because houses are leveraged. The solution to this problem is diversified non-leveraged REITs and options. Alas, I'm not aware of any non-leveraged REITs. Options are also a bit too sophisticated for some, or abused by speculators.
Long story short, most homeowners have a concentrated position in a leveraged asset. It's like having a $500k stock account, and putting $450k on FOO, with margin. It works great as long as FOO rises steadily. When FOO falls, you can lose everything so nobody wants FOO to fall.
A housing finance system based on a diversified non-leveraged REIT would solve a lot of problems. Even the options are not really necessary--they're just a "nice to have" so you can insure your "house". When you sit down and do the math on all this, you come up with a system that solves an awful lot of problems. It would take banks and insurance companies out of the equation for most people. Instead of spending the next 30 years watching your interest/principal ratio fall to zero on mortage payments; you'd watch your dividend/rent ratio approach 1 (and even exceed it) on REIT shares.
Combine this with a DRIP, and then finally people would actually welcome falling housing prices (I've been through this with a DRIP on a utility company--compounding rates trump share price. Once again, it's counter-intuitive until you do the math).
Radicly reducing the roles of banking and insurance would obviously not sit well with certain corporate elites; but I don't think there's a conpiracy here. I reallly think the plan just doesn't have much knowledge or advocacy behind it, and I bring it up whenever I can. Certainly there are some details to work out; but I think it has inherent benefits and can compete along with the traditional bank-financed purchase system.
It's a long screed. The relevant part is the first paragraph in his linked post. His claim is that "taxes kill infrastructure" because FDR subsidized auto companies at the expense of rail.
The auto corporations lobbied the government. That's what killed the rails, not taxes. These Libertarians would have you blame government for the fact that government is corrupted by corporations!
The answer is not to play into the corporation's hands, but to build a bulwark against further corporate influence, before they dismantle the only thing that has ever defended us against them.
If they have their way, we'll be back to unlimited workweeks, no minimum wage, no pollution controls, etc.
I don't see anything in the graphic about urban planning. If they incentivized development near light rail hubs and discouraged car-dependant suburban development it would do a lot.
First, there's the carrot of new development projects. There's the houses themselves, and the light rail. Secondly, don't tax the suburbs as that would be very unpopular and counterproductive. Instead, simply give Federal money to jurisdictions based on their ability to reduce non-walkable development. This would reduce the *supply* of this type of development. Buyers who still want 0.25 acres of grass and a 5 mile drive to the store would see their home values increase due to the supply side effect.
Done right, we could kill two birds with one stone: The real estate slump, and gasoline consumption.
I told people years ago that some day we'd walk into a drugstore and buy PCs next to the cigarette lighters and cheapo fans.
It just seems like a logical conclusion to the "cheaper, faster" trend. I started thinking this way in the late 90s. Prior to that, it was always $2000 for a PC. They just kept getting faster. Once they got fast enough to do video it seemed like there was not much more need for speed. It seems like price competition really heated up after that.
After the money, the biggest complaint about the IRS is how complicated compliance is. Gas tax? You just pay it at the pump. They want to bring IRS paperwork into the driving experience? What. Are. They. Smoking???
Sheesh! Just teach them all Maxwell's equations, some quantum theory and particle physics Be done with it. Enough of this coddling people with circuit analysis and all that other high level stuff they've glued on top of it.
It took me a bit longer to parse your answer than the one further down.
As long as I've been studying languages this is the first I've heard of the term "single assignment". After looking at the wiki for it, it seems to be nothing more than the consequence of being "purely functional". Maybe that's why I haven't heard it yet, the former being quite common in things I've read. Borrow/own is obvious enough.
I'm not sure if limiting yourself to purely functional programming qualifies as a "cheat" or not. Every practical "functional" programming language I've looked at has some kind of hack to let you do non-functional programming. Some even have object systems (CLOS, for example). It seems to be human nature to not do purely functional programming. The real world is not purely functional. Some of the things you need to interact with the real world (like Monads) are difficult to grasp and/or not explained well. In some ways that's a good thing--it means there's still interesting work for language designers.
Now this is what Slashdot should be. Your answer is a bit more clear to me than the "borrown/own semantics" the other poster described. Since Haskell is "type oriented", would anybody be aware if it does this kind of analysis?
What's your plan of attack on GC? Reference counting doesn't pause; but fails if you create cyclic references. Mark and Sweep doesn't have that problem; but creates the dreaded pause. The state of the art, AFAIK, is to check for recently created objects and kill them early (generational GC). There are heuristics to avoid a full mark-and-sweep; but AFAIK there aren't any airtight algorithms.
Now I wonder, is it possible to do a static analysis on a parse tree for some language and determine whether or not it could create cyclic references at runtime? I'm inclined to think that it's generally impossible... but I'm not even sure how to set that equation up. At any rate, rejecting a program that creates cycles would be cheating. Also, there might be some valid reason to create a ring-like data structure.
Anyway, good luck with your project. It reminds me of a lot of the independant language development project I hack on; but I'm less concerned with parallelism. I admire the Erlang message-passing and lightweight process approach for that.
I kinda thought of that after I hit submit. You're right.
Consider the alternative (usually unexpressed) "The money is the No. 1 perk at FooCo", Awad said during a break from filling out his TPS report. "It's the main reason I will work for FooCo until it goes bankrupt".
One or the other should change their name to Jerk Store. They might have to license it from NBC; but it would fit either way and I don't think anybody is using it.
I haven't used it for a wihle so forgive me if it's gone; but Slashdot has historicly given you the ability to ignore posts below a certain rating. Yahoo forums do this now too.
I've always thought it would be interesting to have more than one dimension to the ratings. Let's say you have a preference for "Funny Troll" posts. Instead of Funny+, Troll-, the equation would be something like (Funny AND Troll) ? (Funny-Troll) : (Funny+Troll);
It could be really flexible if you gave users the ability to enter a small snippet of code, which would be eval'd. Surely there is some Perl regex line-noise that would let you enter a simple equation and not something dangerous.
I actually thought online ordering would be a negative for the environment since point-many seems less efficient than point-store; but point-store is a myth. It's really point-store-many, with the "many" being done by amateurs.
In theory, you could even get rid of your car by having everything delivered; but I doubt many people are doing that except in the East Coast megalopalis and a few other places. I was actually in a situation like that for a while. I had ZipCar as a backup plan, and never used it.
And how do you reserve a ZipCar? Online, of course.
Long story short, there are more variables than you can shake a stick at. It's always interesting to start with Wikipedia. The first big takeaway is that where you live seems to be the biggest factor. The Pacific Northwest consumes very little electricity. The temperate climate probably has a lot to do with that.
Has Greenpeace calculated reduced fuel consumption due to decreased snail-mail volume? Reduced travel CO2 due to IM, video-conference, and other IP-based technology? The contribution of computing to developing greener technologies?
Run those calcs and get back to us.
As someone who lived during the 80s, I think epic is awesome. Some of the older guys here probably think it's groovy.
Not unless you get the cost down. There's no way you can ship enough people off to the Moon or Mars to make an impact. You'd have to be selective about who you exile in order to control the number and/or the quality of the population.
Hey! Sheen, Bieber, and the entire NBA--we're looking at you.