C'mon...if someone wanted to know where their one and only power plant was and Google sensored it, I'm quite sure they'd find it through some other means.
Especially now that this story has been posted on Slashdot and hundreds of geeks just went to google to download the image just in case it does get censored.
So, go check out QRZ.com for the Technician (no morse code required) test
Alright, how high do I have to score? I got a 60% on the practice test, and that apparently wasn't high enough.
Then, assuming I read up on a few things, and can get a passing score, all I have to do is go to one of the places listed at http://www.arrl.org/arrlvec/examsearch.phtml?State =FL , give them $14, and take the test? I guess that isn't too bad. Not sure how useful it'll be, though, especially since I live in an apartment and can't access the roof.
So are sidewalks, but I don't need a license to walk down the street. So is the internet, and where do you think the internet would be today if you had to take a test and get a license to use it?
It's actually fairly similar to certification exams for IT professionals, for MS developers, or DBAs.
Except that you aren't required by law to take those exams in order to be an IT professional, MS developer, or DBA.
As for low tech, far from it. I just finished building a PIC-based microprocessor controled module for my radio; it's actually quite similar to the kind of experimentation that people do now with home robotics, only when radio signals instead of stepper motors.
It's still low tech compared to commercial products, and that's what I was talking about.
I was very surprised when the phone company told me I couldn't have DSL. Also pissed off since I had specifically called and asked the phone company if I could get DSL before I signed the lease for this apartment. But I went to dslreports, and it says I'm 13195 feet from the CO, which is right around the limit.
Next time I move I guess I'm going to have to look at this map first.
Re:A necessary "Utility?" I think not...
on
When Pigs Wifi
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· Score: 1
Radio and tv are seen as public necessities because of public service announcements (hurricanes, enemy attacks, etc).
Eh, if you're going to say that, then you could make the same argument for the internet.
But... that means that PBS should be available to everyone, and an AM station available to everyone (for emergencies). It says nothing about NBC and the Top40 radio station being free (they just happened to be free because of an advertising-financed business model).
Historically, that's quite inaccurate. NBC and FM radio are free because the government mandated that they be free. The government mandated that they be free, because they gave the broadcasters exclusive broadcast rights for free.
Anyway, I somewhat agree with what you say. I don't think internet access should be free, of course I don't think broadcast television or radio should be free either. I'd make an exception for one public access tv station and one public access radio station, but even then I think they should be run by a non-profit organization with little government oversight, not directly by the government. The internet is a peer to peer network, though, so saying we should have one public access internet station doesn't make much sense. One subset of the radio spectrum could be allocated for mesh networks. The government could facilitate the setup of a non-profit organization which helps organize the network, and the government could enforce a few laws ensuring that people play fair and turn down the power as the density of the network increases. But that's about it.
Think about it, what do local DSL providers actually provide? They provide a link between your computer and some internet backbone. And how is this link made? By going over "the last mile" of copper, which is owned by the phone company.
So, why does it cost more to get DSL than it does to get a regular old phone line? Either one requires the same amount of copper.
Basically instead of the copper getting plugged into SBC / Bell South equipment it is physically moved into our collo equipment. This is actually better for our company, leasing a copper pair is far less expensive than just reselling DSL or local phone service, and it gives us the opportunity to grow into new service areas and offer price points we weren't able to meet previously.
Don't you have to lease two copper pairs for every customer, though? One going from the customer to the CO, and then another going from the CO to you? Or are the phone companies required to give you access to colocate your equipment at the CO?
If it's the former, I imagine real estate near the CO must be rather expensive, since the farther you are from the CO, the fewer customers you can sell access to without reaching the distance limits of DSL.
Maybe now that internet access is being deregulated, municipal networks will become popular again. If that happens, this might just turn out to be the best thing that could have happened.
They might not cut your service for a year, but the reseller providing your service might, when they realize that they're only going to be making money off you for one more year. A lot of them might just go out of business.
It's the law that the telco provide your phone with power, meaning even in a power outage, you can use your phone (dial 911, etc.).
It's also the law that they provide this 911 service whether you order phone service with them or not. In my old apartment if you picked up the phone you'd get a dialtone, and if you dialed anything other than 911 you'd get a message saying something like "to order phone service, press 1; if this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911".
Your broadband provider isn't under that same law. No power = no service.
So, if your small children are alone in the home when the power goes out and an emergency happens, they have to use a cell phone to call 911?
You want a better network than the telcos and cable companies provide?
Not really. I want a cheaper network than the telcos and cable companies provide.
Build one.
Seriously though, how would I go about doing this? Who would I have to talk to to get access to the right of ways so I could lay or string cables? I'm not asking a rhetorical question, I really want to know.
you need to find an investment that would outperform real estate appreciation
That's not very hard to do, especially when the housing market is in a bubble. Or, trivially, you could get an equal investment to real estate, and invest the money in...real estate!
you need two sets of money: one to pay your rent with, and one to invest with.
What, so it isn't all combined on one easy to read statement so you can't do it? I never said a trained monkey could do it. Some people don't know how to save. For them, maybe forcing them to save through a mortgage makes sense. But what would make more sense is teaching them how to save in the first place. To buy a $150,000 condo equivalent to my $750/month apartment I'd have to pay at least $1250/month in mortgage payments, PMI, property taxes, repairs, and homeowners insurance, plus $15,000 down. That $15,000 plus $500/month can grow quite nicely when invested properly. In the end, it comes down to a matter of which do I think will appreciate more, the housing market or the stock market. I think the housing market is overvalued right now compared to the stock market, so that's where I'm putting my bets.
And 10 years? Come on, within a year of purchasing my last house (haven't checked the value on this one), it had appreciated enough to cover all my closing costs. Within 5 years it appreciated enough so I could use the profits to make almost 40% downpayment on my current house.
You got lucky. You entered at a time when housing prices were soaring. But there's no way to know whether that's going to continue or not. One year from today home values may be down, not up. Sometimes home values grow faster than other investements. Sometimes they don't. Making a blanket statement that it's almost always better to own a home is incorrect, especially in today's housing market.
Yes, not everyone is better off buying, but from what I've seen, most people who could afford a house would be better off doing so.
Better than what? You're making way too broad of a statement. In hindsight, can you point to a home that a person could have bought which would have been better financially than investing in some random investment (say the S&P 500 index) and renting from some random landlord? Sure. But if you have the benefit of hindsight, why not just invest in Google?
What does it mean to be able to afford a house? Obviously you don't mean that they can afford to pay cash for the house. But if you include mortgages, then just about anyone can afford a house. The only real question is how high an interest rate they're going to get. If you haven't declared bankruptcy, and aren't in default on any loans, you can get a mortgage, and if you're willing to pay a high enough interest rate and PMI, you can even get a fixed rate mortgage.
When your house value tanks, you still have a house -- albeit with an upside down equity position -- but you don't lose the asset.
As long as you can keep up with the mortgage, and you don't need to move, it's actually not such a bad position to be in, since your property taxes will go down if your house is reappraised at the lower value.
Of course, it'd be better if you waited until after the value went down before you bought, but that's very risky. What if prices continue to go up, instead?
Personally I've chosen to wait. My employment history hadn't been very steady a year ago when I looked into buying a home, so I would have been forced to take either a no-doc mortgage with a high interest rate or an adjustible rate loan. I certainly wasn't going to do an adjustible in that environment, so I chose to pass. In another year I'll try again, and hopefully prices will have come down, but if not I'm going to be in a very tricky position.
There are also other issues at play here. Namely, you get a tax deduction for your mortgage interest and property taxes paid.
With the new tax laws that deduction is becoming less and less useful. The standard deduction is $5000 for a single person or $10,000 for a married couple. At a 5% interest rate, that's a $200,000 loan for a married couple. Even in the 25% tax bracket that's only $1250/year in tax savings on a $300,000 home. And it's a non-refundable tax savings, there are many people who don't even pay $1250/year in income taxes (excluding FICA).
The tax savings for real estate is still there, but it's much bigger for landlords than it is for individual home owners. Landlords get an above the line deduction, and get to depreciate the home. Of course, home owners get the $250,000/$500,000 capital gains exclusion which can be nice when using a home as an investment for retirement, but even then you could get the same exclusion by using a Roth IRA.
This is more true with an electrician or a plumber than a home builder, though. The home building market goes through definite boom and bust phases, and during those boom phases it's usually the investor and the general contractor (usually) who make the big bucks, and the subcontractors get a decent wage but nothing huge. Meanwhile, during the bust phases, the investor can invest in something else, and the subcontractors get out the "will work for food" signs.
And with those who work on some outside parts of a home, you don't even know if you're going to have a job the next day - it might be raining.
Does anyone know of a way to 'short' the housing market?
The first and easiest way is if you own your own home, in which case you sell it and start renting. Then you're essentially short in the housing market, since you need somewhere to live.
As for the rest, it depends what part of the market you think is overvalued. If you think it's everything, then you should have no problem finding a REIT index to short. If you think it's more specific, you'll have to do more research.
And of course there are more indirect factors. If you think interest rates are going up, you can short sell in the bond market, or buy certain interest rate swaps. If you think the home builders are going to tank, there are stocks of companies that are heavily invested in that, like Pulte Homes (NYSE:PHM) for instance (they're big here in Flordia which is one of the faster rising real estate markets in the country).
Seems like a good thing to do - if it can be done...
Personally I'm long on REITs, because I'm already short one home - I rent. If the housing market tanks, I'll lose some money on my REITs (it's only about 10% of my investment money), but I'll be able to pick up a home to live in at a steal. I've been trying to find a way to get some interest rate swaps, though, because I'd like to hedge against interest rates going way up between now and the time I do get around to buying a home.
My REIT stocks went down 5% last Friday. Looks like the end is near.
So, barring really stupid investements, you never lose everything.
If you buy a property with cash, maybe, but if you fund a property with debt, which almost everyone does, you might just lose more than everything.
Even if you don't decide to really invest and get pure investment properties, you should get a house if at all possible. When you rent, your money goes nowhere. It just dissappears to your landlord every month.
As opposed to when you buy a house with a mortgage, and your money just disappears to the bank (interest), home depot (repairs), and the government (real estate taxes)? Yes, a growing portion is going to be going toward equity, but if you had taken that down payment and invested it you'd get to see compounded interest work in your favor as well.
Not all people should buy rather than rent. It depends on your tax bracket, how much cash you have for a down payment, how good your credit is, how secure your job is/how often you plan on moving, etc.
Granted, as long as you are sure you're not going to move within about 10 years, and you have at least good credit, the numbers usually work out in your favor. But even then you usually have to consider the tax benefits, and you have to assume the value of the house is going to grow.
Not everyone wants to get in to actual real estate investment (like buying rental properties and such) but nearly everyone should look in to investing in to a home.
I'd say just the opposite. The way the numbers work out, it's usually better financially to own a rental property and rent yourself. This is because for tax purposes you can depreciate a property you rent out, but you can't depreciate a property you live in. As a quick example, if two families own equivalent $100,000 homes that would rent out for $1000/month, they'd be better off if each rented the property from the other rather than if they lived in the house they owned, because they'd get to depreciate the value of the property on their taxes.
Of course, this ignores the intangible benefits of owning a home. You don't have to deal with as many rules. You can paint the walls however you want. You can install solar panels on the roof. That kind of stuff.
Maybe you have to take a step down and buy something older, and smaller than you are used to living in, but at least your money is then going somewhere that will do you some good.
Why not rent something older and smaller, and invest the extra money you save?
Real estate prices don't tend to drop as much in such a short period of time because people have to live somewhere.
If you're talking about the national real estate market, this is true. But if you're talking about local markets, or the stock market, you're not right.
The thing with the stock market is, these real estate stocks (mostly REITs) are trading for more than the value of the property minus the debt. In some ways they are like highly leveraged bond funds, in that their dividends are relatively fixed (rents aren't going to go up that much, especially not in a stagnant real estate market). If interest rates go up, REIT prices are going to go down. This is partly due to the REIT itself spending more money (usually REITs have some exposure to variable interest rates), and largely because of a substitution effect. If I can get a 6%/year return on a government bond, it starts to look mighty nice compared to an 8% return in a risky investment like a REIT where I could potentially lose it all.
So even though the real estate market may be in a bubble, it wouldn't drop like the dot-coms...
Just last Friday REIT prices dropped 3-5%, in one day. I agree it's not going to be quite to the magnitude of the dot coms, but the whole REIT market could easily see a 50% drop over the next few months, and some of them might just go out of business.
In all probability, the real estate bubble burst last Friday. But compared to the dot com bubble, the real estate bubble isn't anywhere near as big, and it is fundamentally backed by something that demand for will never go away (at least not until we move off the Earth). And also unlike dot coms, the government gives you a huge tax break for owning property. It's not like the IRS lets you depreciate Google stock. But with real investements, you can do just that.
What's wild is how startups would spend money. I worked for one here in Indiana. $750 top-model Aeron chairs.
I co-founded one of them in New York, and we had those same Aeron chairs. I've read a bit about the whole thing, and I think one of the biggest problems is that venture capitalists don't understand software companies. See A Unified Theory of VC Suckage. In hindsight it makes a lot of sense. Our VC fund gave us way way way too much money, and then forced us to spend it. None of us wanted the Aeron chairs, but our CEO (who also was involved with the VC fund - big mistake) was forced to buy the $750 Aeron chairs and other ridiculous items (we spent half a million dollars on some ridiculous networking equipment at our colo just so we could handle the millions of users that would be coming when we launched, which for all intents and purposes never actually happened (we had like 100 beta testers at our peak).
VCs don't invest $x million because that's the amount you need, but because that's the amount the structure of their business requires them to invest. Like steroids, these sudden huge investments can do more harm than good. Google survived enormous VC funding because it could legitimately absorb large amounts of money. They had to buy a lot of servers and a lot of bandwidth to crawl the whole Web. Less fortunate startups just end up hiring armies of people to sit around having meetings.
Sure, but where is the rule that applies in this particular case?
Your Home Owners Association cannot prevent you from putting up a direct TV type dish.
I suspect the FCC will say the same here
Unless Congress told the FCC to pass such a rule trumping contracts, I seriously doubt they would have the jurisdiction to do so. The FCC was given the power to pass such a rule regarding television broadcasts by Section 207 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
because a different agency, the FAA, says you cant when onboard a part 121 flight.
I thought it was both:
FCC rules currently ban cell phone use after a plane has taken off because of potential interference to cellular phone networks on the ground. In addition, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has rules prohibiting in-flight cell phone use because of potential interference to navigation and aircraft systems.
Slashdot Mirror
C'mon...if someone wanted to know where their one and only power plant was and Google sensored it, I'm quite sure they'd find it through some other means.
Especially now that this story has been posted on Slashdot and hundreds of geeks just went to google to download the image just in case it does get censored.
So, go check out QRZ.com for the Technician (no morse code required) test
Alright, how high do I have to score? I got a 60% on the practice test, and that apparently wasn't high enough.
Then, assuming I read up on a few things, and can get a passing score, all I have to do is go to one of the places listed at http://www.arrl.org/arrlvec/examsearch.phtml?State =FL , give them $14, and take the test? I guess that isn't too bad. Not sure how useful it'll be, though, especially since I live in an apartment and can't access the roof.
Well, it's an international limited resource
So are sidewalks, but I don't need a license to walk down the street. So is the internet, and where do you think the internet would be today if you had to take a test and get a license to use it?
It's actually fairly similar to certification exams for IT professionals, for MS developers, or DBAs.
Except that you aren't required by law to take those exams in order to be an IT professional, MS developer, or DBA.
As for low tech, far from it. I just finished building a PIC-based microprocessor controled module for my radio; it's actually quite similar to the kind of experimentation that people do now with home robotics, only when radio signals instead of stepper motors.
It's still low tech compared to commercial products, and that's what I was talking about.
I was very surprised when the phone company told me I couldn't have DSL. Also pissed off since I had specifically called and asked the phone company if I could get DSL before I signed the lease for this apartment. But I went to dslreports, and it says I'm 13195 feet from the CO, which is right around the limit.
Next time I move I guess I'm going to have to look at this map first.
Radio and tv are seen as public necessities because of public service announcements (hurricanes, enemy attacks, etc).
Eh, if you're going to say that, then you could make the same argument for the internet.
But... that means that PBS should be available to everyone, and an AM station available to everyone (for emergencies). It says nothing about NBC and the Top40 radio station being free (they just happened to be free because of an advertising-financed business model).
Historically, that's quite inaccurate. NBC and FM radio are free because the government mandated that they be free. The government mandated that they be free, because they gave the broadcasters exclusive broadcast rights for free.
Anyway, I somewhat agree with what you say. I don't think internet access should be free, of course I don't think broadcast television or radio should be free either. I'd make an exception for one public access tv station and one public access radio station, but even then I think they should be run by a non-profit organization with little government oversight, not directly by the government. The internet is a peer to peer network, though, so saying we should have one public access internet station doesn't make much sense. One subset of the radio spectrum could be allocated for mesh networks. The government could facilitate the setup of a non-profit organization which helps organize the network, and the government could enforce a few laws ensuring that people play fair and turn down the power as the density of the network increases. But that's about it.
Think about it, what do local DSL providers actually provide? They provide a link between your computer and some internet backbone. And how is this link made? By going over "the last mile" of copper, which is owned by the phone company.
So, why does it cost more to get DSL than it does to get a regular old phone line? Either one requires the same amount of copper.
Basically instead of the copper getting plugged into SBC / Bell South equipment it is physically moved into our collo equipment. This is actually better for our company, leasing a copper pair is far less expensive than just reselling DSL or local phone service, and it gives us the opportunity to grow into new service areas and offer price points we weren't able to meet previously.
Don't you have to lease two copper pairs for every customer, though? One going from the customer to the CO, and then another going from the CO to you? Or are the phone companies required to give you access to colocate your equipment at the CO?
If it's the former, I imagine real estate near the CO must be rather expensive, since the farther you are from the CO, the fewer customers you can sell access to without reaching the distance limits of DSL.
Maybe now that internet access is being deregulated, municipal networks will become popular again. If that happens, this might just turn out to be the best thing that could have happened.
They might not cut your service for a year, but the reseller providing your service might, when they realize that they're only going to be making money off you for one more year. A lot of them might just go out of business.
I live in Tampa, Florida, have cell phone service and EVDO, have the ability to get cable modem service, and can't get DSL (too far from the CO).
It's the law that the telco provide your phone with power, meaning even in a power outage, you can use your phone (dial 911, etc.).
It's also the law that they provide this 911 service whether you order phone service with them or not. In my old apartment if you picked up the phone you'd get a dialtone, and if you dialed anything other than 911 you'd get a message saying something like "to order phone service, press 1; if this is an emergency, hang up and dial 911".
Your broadband provider isn't under that same law. No power = no service.
So, if your small children are alone in the home when the power goes out and an emergency happens, they have to use a cell phone to call 911?
You want a better network than the telcos and cable companies provide?
Not really. I want a cheaper network than the telcos and cable companies provide.
Build one.
Seriously though, how would I go about doing this? Who would I have to talk to to get access to the right of ways so I could lay or string cables? I'm not asking a rhetorical question, I really want to know.
I just made a nice chunk o' cash when Amazon blipped up last week. Exactly at whose expense did I make that money?
Amazon's employees.
you need to find an investment that would outperform real estate appreciation
That's not very hard to do, especially when the housing market is in a bubble. Or, trivially, you could get an equal investment to real estate, and invest the money in...real estate!
you need two sets of money: one to pay your rent with, and one to invest with.
What, so it isn't all combined on one easy to read statement so you can't do it? I never said a trained monkey could do it. Some people don't know how to save. For them, maybe forcing them to save through a mortgage makes sense. But what would make more sense is teaching them how to save in the first place. To buy a $150,000 condo equivalent to my $750/month apartment I'd have to pay at least $1250/month in mortgage payments, PMI, property taxes, repairs, and homeowners insurance, plus $15,000 down. That $15,000 plus $500/month can grow quite nicely when invested properly. In the end, it comes down to a matter of which do I think will appreciate more, the housing market or the stock market. I think the housing market is overvalued right now compared to the stock market, so that's where I'm putting my bets.
And 10 years? Come on, within a year of purchasing my last house (haven't checked the value on this one), it had appreciated enough to cover all my closing costs. Within 5 years it appreciated enough so I could use the profits to make almost 40% downpayment on my current house.
You got lucky. You entered at a time when housing prices were soaring. But there's no way to know whether that's going to continue or not. One year from today home values may be down, not up. Sometimes home values grow faster than other investements. Sometimes they don't. Making a blanket statement that it's almost always better to own a home is incorrect, especially in today's housing market.
Yes, not everyone is better off buying, but from what I've seen, most people who could afford a house would be better off doing so.
Better than what? You're making way too broad of a statement. In hindsight, can you point to a home that a person could have bought which would have been better financially than investing in some random investment (say the S&P 500 index) and renting from some random landlord? Sure. But if you have the benefit of hindsight, why not just invest in Google?
What does it mean to be able to afford a house? Obviously you don't mean that they can afford to pay cash for the house. But if you include mortgages, then just about anyone can afford a house. The only real question is how high an interest rate they're going to get. If you haven't declared bankruptcy, and aren't in default on any loans, you can get a mortgage, and if you're willing to pay a high enough interest rate and PMI, you can even get a fixed rate mortgage.
When your house value tanks, you still have a house -- albeit with an upside down equity position -- but you don't lose the asset.
As long as you can keep up with the mortgage, and you don't need to move, it's actually not such a bad position to be in, since your property taxes will go down if your house is reappraised at the lower value.
Of course, it'd be better if you waited until after the value went down before you bought, but that's very risky. What if prices continue to go up, instead?
Personally I've chosen to wait. My employment history hadn't been very steady a year ago when I looked into buying a home, so I would have been forced to take either a no-doc mortgage with a high interest rate or an adjustible rate loan. I certainly wasn't going to do an adjustible in that environment, so I chose to pass. In another year I'll try again, and hopefully prices will have come down, but if not I'm going to be in a very tricky position.
There are also other issues at play here. Namely, you get a tax deduction for your mortgage interest and property taxes paid.
With the new tax laws that deduction is becoming less and less useful. The standard deduction is $5000 for a single person or $10,000 for a married couple. At a 5% interest rate, that's a $200,000 loan for a married couple. Even in the 25% tax bracket that's only $1250/year in tax savings on a $300,000 home. And it's a non-refundable tax savings, there are many people who don't even pay $1250/year in income taxes (excluding FICA).
The tax savings for real estate is still there, but it's much bigger for landlords than it is for individual home owners. Landlords get an above the line deduction, and get to depreciate the home. Of course, home owners get the $250,000/$500,000 capital gains exclusion which can be nice when using a home as an investment for retirement, but even then you could get the same exclusion by using a Roth IRA.
This is more true with an electrician or a plumber than a home builder, though. The home building market goes through definite boom and bust phases, and during those boom phases it's usually the investor and the general contractor (usually) who make the big bucks, and the subcontractors get a decent wage but nothing huge. Meanwhile, during the bust phases, the investor can invest in something else, and the subcontractors get out the "will work for food" signs.
And with those who work on some outside parts of a home, you don't even know if you're going to have a job the next day - it might be raining.
Does anyone know of a way to 'short' the housing market?
The first and easiest way is if you own your own home, in which case you sell it and start renting. Then you're essentially short in the housing market, since you need somewhere to live.
As for the rest, it depends what part of the market you think is overvalued. If you think it's everything, then you should have no problem finding a REIT index to short. If you think it's more specific, you'll have to do more research.
And of course there are more indirect factors. If you think interest rates are going up, you can short sell in the bond market, or buy certain interest rate swaps. If you think the home builders are going to tank, there are stocks of companies that are heavily invested in that, like Pulte Homes (NYSE:PHM) for instance (they're big here in Flordia which is one of the faster rising real estate markets in the country).
Seems like a good thing to do - if it can be done...
Personally I'm long on REITs, because I'm already short one home - I rent. If the housing market tanks, I'll lose some money on my REITs (it's only about 10% of my investment money), but I'll be able to pick up a home to live in at a steal. I've been trying to find a way to get some interest rate swaps, though, because I'd like to hedge against interest rates going way up between now and the time I do get around to buying a home.
My REIT stocks went down 5% last Friday. Looks like the end is near.
So, barring really stupid investements, you never lose everything.
If you buy a property with cash, maybe, but if you fund a property with debt, which almost everyone does, you might just lose more than everything.
Even if you don't decide to really invest and get pure investment properties, you should get a house if at all possible. When you rent, your money goes nowhere. It just dissappears to your landlord every month.
As opposed to when you buy a house with a mortgage, and your money just disappears to the bank (interest), home depot (repairs), and the government (real estate taxes)? Yes, a growing portion is going to be going toward equity, but if you had taken that down payment and invested it you'd get to see compounded interest work in your favor as well.
Not all people should buy rather than rent. It depends on your tax bracket, how much cash you have for a down payment, how good your credit is, how secure your job is/how often you plan on moving, etc.
Granted, as long as you are sure you're not going to move within about 10 years, and you have at least good credit, the numbers usually work out in your favor. But even then you usually have to consider the tax benefits, and you have to assume the value of the house is going to grow.
Not everyone wants to get in to actual real estate investment (like buying rental properties and such) but nearly everyone should look in to investing in to a home.
I'd say just the opposite. The way the numbers work out, it's usually better financially to own a rental property and rent yourself. This is because for tax purposes you can depreciate a property you rent out, but you can't depreciate a property you live in. As a quick example, if two families own equivalent $100,000 homes that would rent out for $1000/month, they'd be better off if each rented the property from the other rather than if they lived in the house they owned, because they'd get to depreciate the value of the property on their taxes.
Of course, this ignores the intangible benefits of owning a home. You don't have to deal with as many rules. You can paint the walls however you want. You can install solar panels on the roof. That kind of stuff.
Maybe you have to take a step down and buy something older, and smaller than you are used to living in, but at least your money is then going somewhere that will do you some good.
Why not rent something older and smaller, and invest the extra money you save?
Real estate prices don't tend to drop as much in such a short period of time because people have to live somewhere.
If you're talking about the national real estate market, this is true. But if you're talking about local markets, or the stock market, you're not right.
The thing with the stock market is, these real estate stocks (mostly REITs) are trading for more than the value of the property minus the debt. In some ways they are like highly leveraged bond funds, in that their dividends are relatively fixed (rents aren't going to go up that much, especially not in a stagnant real estate market). If interest rates go up, REIT prices are going to go down. This is partly due to the REIT itself spending more money (usually REITs have some exposure to variable interest rates), and largely because of a substitution effect. If I can get a 6%/year return on a government bond, it starts to look mighty nice compared to an 8% return in a risky investment like a REIT where I could potentially lose it all.
So even though the real estate market may be in a bubble, it wouldn't drop like the dot-coms...
Just last Friday REIT prices dropped 3-5%, in one day. I agree it's not going to be quite to the magnitude of the dot coms, but the whole REIT market could easily see a 50% drop over the next few months, and some of them might just go out of business.
In all probability, the real estate bubble burst last Friday. But compared to the dot com bubble, the real estate bubble isn't anywhere near as big, and it is fundamentally backed by something that demand for will never go away (at least not until we move off the Earth). And also unlike dot coms, the government gives you a huge tax break for owning property. It's not like the IRS lets you depreciate Google stock. But with real investements, you can do just that.
What's wild is how startups would spend money. I worked for one here in Indiana. $750 top-model Aeron chairs.
I co-founded one of them in New York, and we had those same Aeron chairs. I've read a bit about the whole thing, and I think one of the biggest problems is that venture capitalists don't understand software companies. See A Unified Theory of VC Suckage. In hindsight it makes a lot of sense. Our VC fund gave us way way way too much money, and then forced us to spend it. None of us wanted the Aeron chairs, but our CEO (who also was involved with the VC fund - big mistake) was forced to buy the $750 Aeron chairs and other ridiculous items (we spent half a million dollars on some ridiculous networking equipment at our colo just so we could handle the millions of users that would be coming when we launched, which for all intents and purposes never actually happened (we had like 100 beta testers at our peak).
Yeah, it's a bunch of low-tech do-it-yourself stuff that I'm not even allowed to play with because of stupid government rules.
The FCC has rules that trump contracts.
Sure, but where is the rule that applies in this particular case?
Your Home Owners Association cannot prevent you from putting up a direct TV type dish.
I suspect the FCC will say the same here
Unless Congress told the FCC to pass such a rule trumping contracts, I seriously doubt they would have the jurisdiction to do so. The FCC was given the power to pass such a rule regarding television broadcasts by Section 207 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
because a different agency, the FAA, says you cant when onboard a part 121 flight.
I thought it was both:
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cellonplanes. html