Back in 2004 the Economist magazine had a series of articles on housing. According to them (and to many other sources I've read over several decades) the long term stable relationship between house prices and rents is 80:1 - a house is worth about 80 times monthly rent. This number has been stable over decades, even centuries, and over the long term even for different interest rates. Now, rents are relatively stable - they don't go up and down a lot, but just go up more or less with inflation.
So, according to the Economist, in 2004 house prices world wide were running close to 160 times monthly rent - twice the stable price. This was true in the US, in Nigeria, pretty much everywhere. So, based on the natural growth of rents, the Economist was predicting that, unless there was a huge shock to house prices, if you bought a house in 2004 you could not expect to break even on the house until rents caught up - in 14 years.
Then the financial wizards really stepped on the interest rates and mortgage policies, and generated the bubble as you mentioned. Today I am in the process of buying a house, and I'm using the 2004 valuation as the target price - less than 1/2 of the asking price last year. We are settling at about 10% above that. I am willing to spend that extra 10% but in reality I consider it just a premium I'm giving away for a house I like.
You are correct - the best solution to all of this is to excise the rot, clean the wound, and let it heal naturally instead of keeping the patient on life support. Maintaining house prices is protecting the banks, at the cost of housing for those who need it, but don't try to maintain an inflated price structure. Provide a safety net for those who need it, to survive. (Even if it's me - I have no illusions about my wonderfulness.)
As a case in point, back a decade or so Argentina was in the same boat that Greece is in now, and defaulted on their loans - essentially bankrupted. For several years life sucked in Argentina. But without the huge interest load the country was able to recover quickly, and for quite a while they were doing quite well.
I had a girl friend back in the mid-1980s, when I lived in Irvine CA. At the time I was head of R&D for a startup, and making $45K. I paid $1200/month for rent. (Irvine is upscale and expensive). I was working 70 hours per week. My girl friend worked 20 hours per week at a day care place making minimum wage. She bemoaned her poor income, until we ran some numbers. I don't recall all the details, but because she worked in 'education' she got an apartment in Irvine for free (value $800/mo.), plus welfare (she was a sin,gle mom), free medical care, food stamps, and some other things that I don't recall. She paid zero income taxes. So adding it up, the value of her net receipts was almost the same as my after-tax income (which was not much over 50% of my gross).
Of course I have little idea of how things work these days, whether she would get the same deal.
Which is great until someone miscalculates demand and they run out of fuel in the middle of winter
Actually what happened, IIRC, is that the normal last-before-winter-ice delivery scheduled in November had to be cancelled due to a big storm. Then they had the logistical problem of getting a tanker AND an ice breaker there at the same time.
IIRC back a few years the local phone company said that the money they made on the copper paid for removing the old copper cables and installing fiber.
It's worth also mentioning that the PR campaign was not the idea of Pons and Fleischer, it was the university's PR department IIRC. I think P & F were planning to follow normal scientific publication protocols, but things got out of hand once the uni got involved.
I used Xenix back in the day (I think before MS acquired it) - it was handy for our application, as it had all the UI and unix tools we needed for development, but the system we were building could go underneath it and run in soft realtime, which was necessary. Xenix just quietly waited in the wings until the program gave the machine back - which might be several days or weeks. Our application involved four servers and two data stores on a SCSI-based LAN (yes, we abused the SCSI protocol) with hot failover and 24 graphics terminals running a 911 mapping system.
IIRC Ford at least has a cooperative agreement with Microsoft and has shown cars with (among other things) automatic updating of your music into your car, so yes it might well be running some form of Windows. The increasingly prevalent and probably I-fear-soon-to-be-required OnStar or equivalent is basically a cellular modem connection, which can do almost everything to the car but steer.
And the average car has had more computing power than most desktop PCs for ten years or so. I read somewhere several years ago that the 2000 Cadillac had five Pentium-class CPUs. When you step on the gas, all you are doing is telling the car you want to go faster. When you start your car, you may notice that all the dashboard dials (speedo, etc.) will all go through a calibration cycle where the pointy arrow swings all the way from off to max. That's the CPU that drives the controls getting itself situated.
All in all, the car folks have done a pretty good job of making everything virtual, while maintaining the same user interface as a fiction so few people notice any difference.
And the floor gets it worse. Long ago in my construction days, I learned that the spike heels that were popular in the 1950s and early 1960s had a heel surface (the pointy end) of about 1/4 inch square = 1/16 square inch. And the way they made a woman walk more than doubled that force as an impact on the floor. So a 110 lb. (50 kg) woman was producing an impact on the order of 16 * 110 * 2 = 3420 PSI. Given the normal range of women's weights, this equates to 3000 to 4000 PSI on the floor, which is approximately the yield strength range of concrete!
I hoped to be living aboard by now, but (sigh) it's now looking like another two years of repairs and refit. By that time, perhaps fuel cell technology will have advanced enough that I can toss the auxiliary engine and use electric drive (for when I'm not sailing - the ideal near-zero-footprint motive power). It's worth noting that a majority of cruising sailors are very energy and resource efficient. For instance, my boat's previous owners lived aboard in Alaska for a year and a half, and got by with 320 gallons of water and 200 gallons of fuel (including heat, cooking, etc.) for three to four months at a time.
That happened to my brother. The mechanic at the car dealer only put one nut on the wheel studs after replacing the brakes, and that one was on by only one turn. My brother was driving home in rush hour traffic when the wheel (left rear) came off, went bounding through the air, narrowly missed bouncing off two cars - one a cop car!, and fell off the road. My brother's truck came sliding to a sparking halt in the middle lane, blocking traffic for quite a while. No collisioins ensued, the cop never saw a thing. The car dealer repaired the truck of course - I think they had to replace the bed of the pickup.
... it's best to just hire a generalist or polymath and have them learn your specific set-up than to require someone who knows everything about your technologies as they walk in the door.
I totally agree - unless you're just filling a slot in an existing team, if you have a long term perspective it's better to find _good people_ who can learn. I was just recruited for a job working in Erlang (with a bit of PHP), because I mentioned on LinkedIn that I've been teaching myself the language. The company told me that they preferred to find someone they can teach 'their way'. Depending on interviews etc. they were prepared to move me from one coast to the other. (I'm not really in the market, so I suggested someone else that I happened to know, who actually knows a significant amount of Erlang.)
Actually the one guy who responded to our advertising started writing code when he was 12, wrote significant web-based applications for his high school, and now has a couple of iPhone apps in the App Store - he hasn't gone to college at all yet. He is completely self-taught. And in my fairly long experience, I've found folks like that to be almost always better for most general application programming than the CS grads. He codes because he can't NOT code, while too many (not all) CS grads I've worked with have an inflated sense of their own accomplishments, abilities and value. Of course, if you need someone with strength in more difficult areas or areas requiring strong theoretical knowledge or some other areas, that's another story. But sometimes it can still be worth while to send that kid to class, to add knowledge to his already-proven interest and natural ability. In this particular case, the guy's actual web design work was not great and his knowledge of javascript and AJAX was minimal, so he wasn't a very good fit for us. Also his resume had a bunch of typos, which showed some carelessness in an important product (if you can't take the time to spell check your resume, what is your attitude to finding the hard bugs??) We might still have tried him out but he had another offer and we had a better candidate.
But regardless of how you start off, if you can scrounge up a website, build something interesting, use it as a platform to try things and see what you can do - that goes a long way to giving employers something to chew on. It's also a good learning experience to try to make a real application, even if it's a toy. That's how I learn new programming languages. There's just no alternative to grinding something out that does what you intend it to do. (One of these days I'm going to write a project/task manager in Erlang, and when I'm done I'll know enough about Erlang to actually say I know how to write Erlang.)
There is an interesting story from back in the 1930s - some lefty artists were proposing that all of the artists and writers should go on strike and stop producing art. And a famous artist said he was all for it, because then all the real artists - the ones who couldn't stop writing and painting, would be the only ones producing art. And all the others could just go away, because they were hacks who just did art for money. I'm not sure how or why this is relevant, but I think it is.
From my limited study of this, it appears unlikely to be cost-effective to bring back to the Earth's surface, but could be invaluable for building things in space.
Having looked into this a bit, it appears that most of the metals that might be found would probably not be economical to bring back to Earth for various reasons (we can't just toss them down as big, dangerous meteorites), but will be invaluable as raw materials for space development.
Withstanding is not the same as insulating against. No matter how much heat a paint can withstand, it's no good if the material it's painted on melts due to conduction and radiation. Also re-entry is not just heat but erosion - can the paint withstand the battering of all those air molecules bashing into it (at all angles of attack) at speeds that make a blowtorch look like a candle flame? It may be wonderful stuff (I actually read the Wikipedia article on Starlite) but I would not leap instantly to any conclusions about its capability in actual applications - especially as the now-deceased Ward made it so frigging impossible for anyone to actually work out a deal. Of course he was in a spot, vulnerable to the formula being stolen etc., but (with all due respect), maybe now he's deceased his heirs can work out a deal to allow _someone_ to really test it out and analyze the formula and the structure. No reputable defense or aerospace company is going to touch it without that. Otherwise they would be buying a pig in a poke. He wanted $zillions on essentially a few very restricted, preliminary tests and his promise that it was wonderful - and he was not qualified to say so.
Perhaps the best solution would be for a big company to buy it on a royalties basis, where their major upfront risk would be the cost of doing the testing necessary. I personally suspect that the folks who tested it were not convinced.
Heck, just look at how hard it is for the detailed knowledge about how a company's software and systems work after a few people have come and gone. There's all those little details, that may never have seemed important at the time, that make things work. As someone once said, "Every project has at least two programmers - you, the day you wrote it, and you, six months later when you've forgotten how it originally worked."
And my brother (a beam steering hardware geek) spent most of his career building systems that the physicists designed, but could never have made work, because the real materials and parts and sensors just aren't quite what the theory says they are. It's the 'black arts' behind so many technologies, that often get lost when that one guy retires.
I worked on a research project involving auto headlight designs at a very large car company. The guy who had been designing all their old head and tail lights (by stacking pieces of glass together to get the desired far-field pattern) was in his 80s, had retired twice and brought back because nobody else could do as well. We were trying to build a computer-aided design system that could allow mere mortals to replace that guy, preferably before he died. For a long time he hadn't had much to do with headlights because the sealed-beam lights were all made by others, and just plugged in. But with the advent of halogen bulbs the new designs could be incorporated into the body styling - but still had to work right.
I was just a contractor myself, building out a small ISP in the building that was to be located in the building. The wiring was contracted to a local company that was supposed to be competent. I think they were much more used to wiring telephone systems. They had a hard time believing there was a problem until I demonstrated, in fact I actually took a couple of wall outlets apart to see what was going on, which was when the problem was 'uncovered' so to speak. This was all back in 1996 or 1997, so it was early days for CAT-5 in general, especially out in the wilds of Central Oregon. I think it was actually the first CAT-5 installation in the area. But the installer should have known better than to split twisted pairs in any case - that's just basic.
Haha. I once had to deal with a new building wired with CAT5. All the little lights on the tester worked, but no data went through. It turned out that the installer had kept the same wires to the same pins at both ends, but had split up all the twisted pairs, which of course broke the isolation from interference. AND he had run all the wiring down through the same hole in the floor from the wiring closet as the main power line coming into the building. Sigh. It's a good thing that the induced 60Hz on the CAT5 wasn't enough to fry some routers, but not much was actually plugged in at that point.
Yes. It's amazing how we can manage to keep creating ever-larger software that manages to suck up all those cycles - it's a dirty job, but we're up to it!:D
Slashdot Mirror
Back in 2004 the Economist magazine had a series of articles on housing. According to them (and to many other sources I've read over several decades) the long term stable relationship between house prices and rents is 80:1 - a house is worth about 80 times monthly rent. This number has been stable over decades, even centuries, and over the long term even for different interest rates. Now, rents are relatively stable - they don't go up and down a lot, but just go up more or less with inflation.
So, according to the Economist, in 2004 house prices world wide were running close to 160 times monthly rent - twice the stable price. This was true in the US, in Nigeria, pretty much everywhere. So, based on the natural growth of rents, the Economist was predicting that, unless there was a huge shock to house prices, if you bought a house in 2004 you could not expect to break even on the house until rents caught up - in 14 years.
Then the financial wizards really stepped on the interest rates and mortgage policies, and generated the bubble as you mentioned. Today I am in the process of buying a house, and I'm using the 2004 valuation as the target price - less than 1/2 of the asking price last year. We are settling at about 10% above that. I am willing to spend that extra 10% but in reality I consider it just a premium I'm giving away for a house I like.
You are correct - the best solution to all of this is to excise the rot, clean the wound, and let it heal naturally instead of keeping the patient on life support. Maintaining house prices is protecting the banks, at the cost of housing for those who need it, but don't try to maintain an inflated price structure. Provide a safety net for those who need it, to survive. (Even if it's me - I have no illusions about my wonderfulness.)
As a case in point, back a decade or so Argentina was in the same boat that Greece is in now, and defaulted on their loans - essentially bankrupted. For several years life sucked in Argentina. But without the huge interest load the country was able to recover quickly, and for quite a while they were doing quite well.
I had a girl friend back in the mid-1980s, when I lived in Irvine CA. At the time I was head of R&D for a startup, and making $45K. I paid $1200/month for rent. (Irvine is upscale and expensive). I was working 70 hours per week. My girl friend worked 20 hours per week at a day care place making minimum wage. She bemoaned her poor income, until we ran some numbers. I don't recall all the details, but because she worked in 'education' she got an apartment in Irvine for free (value $800/mo.), plus welfare (she was a sin,gle mom), free medical care, food stamps, and some other things that I don't recall. She paid zero income taxes. So adding it up, the value of her net receipts was almost the same as my after-tax income (which was not much over 50% of my gross).
Of course I have little idea of how things work these days, whether she would get the same deal.
Which is great until someone miscalculates demand and they run out of fuel in the middle of winter
Actually what happened, IIRC, is that the normal last-before-winter-ice delivery scheduled in November had to be cancelled due to a big storm. Then they had the logistical problem of getting a tanker AND an ice breaker there at the same time.
IIRC back a few years the local phone company said that the money they made on the copper paid for removing the old copper cables and installing fiber.
It's worth also mentioning that the PR campaign was not the idea of Pons and Fleischer, it was the university's PR department IIRC. I think P & F were planning to follow normal scientific publication protocols, but things got out of hand once the uni got involved.
I used Xenix back in the day (I think before MS acquired it) - it was handy for our application, as it had all the UI and unix tools we needed for development, but the system we were building could go underneath it and run in soft realtime, which was necessary. Xenix just quietly waited in the wings until the program gave the machine back - which might be several days or weeks. Our application involved four servers and two data stores on a SCSI-based LAN (yes, we abused the SCSI protocol) with hot failover and 24 graphics terminals running a 911 mapping system.
To entertain the arm candy.
IIRC Ford at least has a cooperative agreement with Microsoft and has shown cars with (among other things) automatic updating of your music into your car, so yes it might well be running some form of Windows. The increasingly prevalent and probably I-fear-soon-to-be-required OnStar or equivalent is basically a cellular modem connection, which can do almost everything to the car but steer.
And the average car has had more computing power than most desktop PCs for ten years or so. I read somewhere several years ago that the 2000 Cadillac had five Pentium-class CPUs. When you step on the gas, all you are doing is telling the car you want to go faster. When you start your car, you may notice that all the dashboard dials (speedo, etc.) will all go through a calibration cycle where the pointy arrow swings all the way from off to max. That's the CPU that drives the controls getting itself situated.
All in all, the car folks have done a pretty good job of making everything virtual, while maintaining the same user interface as a fiction so few people notice any difference.
And the floor gets it worse. Long ago in my construction days, I learned that the spike heels that were popular in the 1950s and early 1960s had a heel surface (the pointy end) of about 1/4 inch square = 1/16 square inch. And the way they made a woman walk more than doubled that force as an impact on the floor. So a 110 lb. (50 kg) woman was producing an impact on the order of 16 * 110 * 2 = 3420 PSI. Given the normal range of women's weights, this equates to 3000 to 4000 PSI on the floor, which is approximately the yield strength range of concrete!
Oddly enough, my yacht is made of wood. :D
I hoped to be living aboard by now, but (sigh) it's now looking like another two years of repairs and refit. By that time, perhaps fuel cell technology will have advanced enough that I can toss the auxiliary engine and use electric drive (for when I'm not sailing - the ideal near-zero-footprint motive power). It's worth noting that a majority of cruising sailors are very energy and resource efficient. For instance, my boat's previous owners lived aboard in Alaska for a year and a half, and got by with 320 gallons of water and 200 gallons of fuel (including heat, cooking, etc.) for three to four months at a time.
... Not to mention that almost everyone in the US is in the top 1% worldwide.
That happened to my brother. The mechanic at the car dealer only put one nut on the wheel studs after replacing the brakes, and that one was on by only one turn. My brother was driving home in rush hour traffic when the wheel (left rear) came off, went bounding through the air, narrowly missed bouncing off two cars - one a cop car!, and fell off the road. My brother's truck came sliding to a sparking halt in the middle lane, blocking traffic for quite a while. No collisioins ensued, the cop never saw a thing. The car dealer repaired the truck of course - I think they had to replace the bed of the pickup.
... it's best to just hire a generalist or polymath and have them learn your specific set-up than to require someone who knows everything about your technologies as they walk in the door.
I totally agree - unless you're just filling a slot in an existing team, if you have a long term perspective it's better to find _good people_ who can learn. I was just recruited for a job working in Erlang (with a bit of PHP), because I mentioned on LinkedIn that I've been teaching myself the language. The company told me that they preferred to find someone they can teach 'their way'. Depending on interviews etc. they were prepared to move me from one coast to the other. (I'm not really in the market, so I suggested someone else that I happened to know, who actually knows a significant amount of Erlang.)
Central Mass, about 20 miles out of Worcester in former mill country.
Actually the one guy who responded to our advertising started writing code when he was 12, wrote significant web-based applications for his high school, and now has a couple of iPhone apps in the App Store - he hasn't gone to college at all yet. He is completely self-taught. And in my fairly long experience, I've found folks like that to be almost always better for most general application programming than the CS grads. He codes because he can't NOT code, while too many (not all) CS grads I've worked with have an inflated sense of their own accomplishments, abilities and value. Of course, if you need someone with strength in more difficult areas or areas requiring strong theoretical knowledge or some other areas, that's another story. But sometimes it can still be worth while to send that kid to class, to add knowledge to his already-proven interest and natural ability. In this particular case, the guy's actual web design work was not great and his knowledge of javascript and AJAX was minimal, so he wasn't a very good fit for us. Also his resume had a bunch of typos, which showed some carelessness in an important product (if you can't take the time to spell check your resume, what is your attitude to finding the hard bugs??) We might still have tried him out but he had another offer and we had a better candidate.
But regardless of how you start off, if you can scrounge up a website, build something interesting, use it as a platform to try things and see what you can do - that goes a long way to giving employers something to chew on. It's also a good learning experience to try to make a real application, even if it's a toy. That's how I learn new programming languages. There's just no alternative to grinding something out that does what you intend it to do. (One of these days I'm going to write a project/task manager in Erlang, and when I'm done I'll know enough about Erlang to actually say I know how to write Erlang.)
There is an interesting story from back in the 1930s - some lefty artists were proposing that all of the artists and writers should go on strike and stop producing art. And a famous artist said he was all for it, because then all the real artists - the ones who couldn't stop writing and painting, would be the only ones producing art. And all the others could just go away, because they were hacks who just did art for money. I'm not sure how or why this is relevant, but I think it is.
From my limited study of this, it appears unlikely to be cost-effective to bring back to the Earth's surface, but could be invaluable for building things in space.
Having looked into this a bit, it appears that most of the metals that might be found would probably not be economical to bring back to Earth for various reasons (we can't just toss them down as big, dangerous meteorites), but will be invaluable as raw materials for space development.
Ain't.
Inner Platform Effect.
Withstanding is not the same as insulating against. No matter how much heat a paint can withstand, it's no good if the material it's painted on melts due to conduction and radiation. Also re-entry is not just heat but erosion - can the paint withstand the battering of all those air molecules bashing into it (at all angles of attack) at speeds that make a blowtorch look like a candle flame? It may be wonderful stuff (I actually read the Wikipedia article on Starlite) but I would not leap instantly to any conclusions about its capability in actual applications - especially as the now-deceased Ward made it so frigging impossible for anyone to actually work out a deal. Of course he was in a spot, vulnerable to the formula being stolen etc., but (with all due respect), maybe now he's deceased his heirs can work out a deal to allow _someone_ to really test it out and analyze the formula and the structure. No reputable defense or aerospace company is going to touch it without that. Otherwise they would be buying a pig in a poke. He wanted $zillions on essentially a few very restricted, preliminary tests and his promise that it was wonderful - and he was not qualified to say so.
Perhaps the best solution would be for a big company to buy it on a royalties basis, where their major upfront risk would be the cost of doing the testing necessary. I personally suspect that the folks who tested it were not convinced.
Heck, just look at how hard it is for the detailed knowledge about how a company's software and systems work after a few people have come and gone. There's all those little details, that may never have seemed important at the time, that make things work. As someone once said, "Every project has at least two programmers - you, the day you wrote it, and you, six months later when you've forgotten how it originally worked."
And my brother (a beam steering hardware geek) spent most of his career building systems that the physicists designed, but could never have made work, because the real materials and parts and sensors just aren't quite what the theory says they are. It's the 'black arts' behind so many technologies, that often get lost when that one guy retires.
I worked on a research project involving auto headlight designs at a very large car company. The guy who had been designing all their old head and tail lights (by stacking pieces of glass together to get the desired far-field pattern) was in his 80s, had retired twice and brought back because nobody else could do as well. We were trying to build a computer-aided design system that could allow mere mortals to replace that guy, preferably before he died. For a long time he hadn't had much to do with headlights because the sealed-beam lights were all made by others, and just plugged in. But with the advent of halogen bulbs the new designs could be incorporated into the body styling - but still had to work right.
I was just a contractor myself, building out a small ISP in the building that was to be located in the building. The wiring was contracted to a local company that was supposed to be competent. I think they were much more used to wiring telephone systems. They had a hard time believing there was a problem until I demonstrated, in fact I actually took a couple of wall outlets apart to see what was going on, which was when the problem was 'uncovered' so to speak. This was all back in 1996 or 1997, so it was early days for CAT-5 in general, especially out in the wilds of Central Oregon. I think it was actually the first CAT-5 installation in the area. But the installer should have known better than to split twisted pairs in any case - that's just basic.
It was definitely a screw-up.
Haha. I once had to deal with a new building wired with CAT5. All the little lights on the tester worked, but no data went through. It turned out that the installer had kept the same wires to the same pins at both ends, but had split up all the twisted pairs, which of course broke the isolation from interference. AND he had run all the wiring down through the same hole in the floor from the wiring closet as the main power line coming into the building. Sigh. It's a good thing that the induced 60Hz on the CAT5 wasn't enough to fry some routers, but not much was actually plugged in at that point.
I just happened to think - 100,000,000 students time $25 is $2.5 billion.
Yes. It's amazing how we can manage to keep creating ever-larger software that manages to suck up all those cycles - it's a dirty job, but we're up to it! :D