You're just plain wrong. Yes history shows patterns of boom, bust, plateau but that was then when there were still unexplored continents and unexploited regions of livable land... now you've got people developing deserts because it's what is available.
I agree about the stupidity of it. If home prices were less then wages could be less and the US wouldn't have to export so many jobs, etc. But the reality is that there simply isn't more land begin created any time soon. There may be a few nice areas that have been overlooked because they are underdeveloped from an industry and jobs opportunity POV.. like the Southeast US for instance - but even there, larger homes in desirable areas are selling for well over a million these days.
The biggest problem with not buying is that you still have to live somewhere. Unless you have a family home to crash in or your company provides housing (like in the 50s), you are throwing away 20-30 percent of your income every year.
So with less land, all that means is that the quality of home available will decline while the prices stay affordable. Look at Japan as an example. Population growth means we all have to deal with the problems they have now sooner or later.
Yes it feels stupid to buy a home now at the exorbitant prices.. but wait 5 years and it won't feel any better, except that you will have more income to work with and hopefully the prices won't have compensated by rising to match you.
OTOH if you buy now and struggle for a year or two... you'll have saved all those rent checks in the form of equity and will have a very nice bonus from natural appreciation (even if it isn't 30% rise every year... 10-18% is more likely). Then you can go buy something even better locally or you can go abroad with your fat wallet and buy a truly lavish spread somewhere no one wants to live 'right now'. Finally if you want to start a real estate portfolio you can use that equity to buy another property (make it commercial.. higher rent and less maintenance required).
I was quoting you and refuting in the same breath... ie; people make money every day WITHOUT having to beat the market. You just misread or I misspoke. Assumptions eh. especially about what, someone you don't know thinks, is obvious.
Uh yeah... MBA 'profs' are just Businessmen who are passing along experience and networking connections and of course looking for young blood to do their dirty work for them. I woudn't really call that teaching so much as mentoring which is why these courses are typically referred to as 'mentoring programs'.
Now if you're talking about management schools or something like that then you're talking about something completely different.
I'm pretty sure most people who responded to you assumed you were talking about an economics program since why would MBA or business degree program offer any insight into how the stock market works, other than how to run a public company? More specifically why would a 'business professor' know anything special about the markets? Whereas you'd expect an economist whose area of specialty IS the markets to have a much better clue.
a) is there such a thing as a 'business' professor? business isn't academic... it's charm, savvy, legal and illegal deals.. how do you teach that? b) you don't have to 'beat' the market to make money, people do it every day.
c) err your next statement: median, right so there are economics profs who are 30 and still paying off their school loans and of course the luck few who have bad habits and drank, snorted, gambled, f@cked away their money shamelessly. Then there are the idiots who are smart enough to get a position teaching the stuff but too academic and afraid of risk to actually put it into practice.
Moving on to more important aspects... real estate appreciates in value regardless of whether you maintain it, rent it or just let it sit there deteriorating. If you finance it then sure your mortgage is an issue. Which is when renting becomes a headache if that's what you're doing... don't bite off more than you can chew. Put a large down payment on any rental property so that you can easily make your mortgage payment whether there is a tenant or not. You can do this by taking an equity loan against your personal residence or if you're a nomad;-p you'll just have to build up some capital (which is harder IMHO when you're flushing money away renting).
And hire a reputable management company to take care of your rental property(s)... don't do it yourself... they manage hundreds of properties and have bulk supply and servicing options you don't have that keep their costs down. What costs you hundreds for repairs from a 3rd party costs them tens to have done by their own private staff of maintenance crews.
Finally, who cares about liquidity when you can simply borrow against your equity... never pay in cash when there is nearly free money from someone else to do the buying for you. Invest your cash in an additional interest bearing fund of some sort, make it a money market account if you want liquidity.
i know parent is meant to be funny BUT IF a professor of economics isn't already wealthy and trading, etc. as a result of having worked private for many years before going to education... then the reason would be that they have no cash reserves with which to invest. Lots of people have what it takes mentally to be good traders, few people have what it takes financially. This is why most people are in 401k mutual funds, etc.... cause they just can't pull enough together at one time to invest independently.
"Yes, I'm quite happy that Windows seem to mostly have that accomplished with Windows 2000. That means that *everyone else's* products run stable on top of it."
Just FYI.
I tried running Windows for a while... Win2k to be exact. I use big software, Adobe, Macromedia applications that put the PC through it's paces... ie: rendering and manipulating several thousand vectors with transparency, color compositing, masking and various mathematical transformations applied to them. Win2K would crash about every ten minutes. Not just the app, the whole OS. I tried out XP a year ago and put it through it's paces.. much better... it just locked up for tens of minutes at a time while processing, ie: wouldn't let me go to another app or even cancel an operations.. but at least it didn't crash the OS.
In the same time period I moved to OS X and came to love it's ability to truly multi-task and it's rock-solid stability. Barring it's 10.0 beta release, ever since.1 it has never crashed on me though apps have... and since.2 I've never had an application crash either... and while I'm waiting for some intense calculations to happen, since the beginning of OS X, I've been able to switch to my browser or mail and continue working on peripheral tasks.
SO I suppose for a typical user Win2K of XP may have been sufficient for basic PC functionality but when they were asked to do anything more they failed me and failed in many of the worse ways possible (destroying my work, corrupting my files, losing my changes) and so were completely unacceptable.
"don't bother fooling yourself into thinking you ever actually 'own' a house (it owns you). Go nomad."
This is a misguided misunderstanding of what owning a home should be. You are absolutely right if you think of a 'house' as your final resting point. You are absolutely wrong when you consider a 'house' to be Real Estate (the only real property in the world) and an investment and further a vehicle for future investment an wealth building. Real Estate values rise consistently in value well above stock markets, ie: the indexes which means they are a much better investment than anything like a 401k, mutual fund or similar portfolio type investment. Real Estate is probably the best SECURITY, in the financial sense, of all available.
So go ahead and go nomad if you want... but don't forget to buy some Real Estate along the way, preferably in a place where growth is expected but real estate values are depressed temporarily. In fact if you are a traveler you will get the best opportunities, if you're paying attention.
SO travel far and wide but also buy low and sell high.
HA! then the tech support girl said something like "WOT YAH NEED TA DUE EEIS, TAKE THAT THERE MOUHUS AN CLIKKK EEIT RIAHT ON THAT THEYRE IKAHN". I had no idea what she was saying, her accent was so heavy... so I asked to speak to a manager and an hour later I finally go a hold of Rajiv in Bangalore and everything was straightened out.
Is a 'theme' really going to turn you off a piece of software? Ask the company if you can have it re-branded. Many companies will do this for free, especially web-based tools... and if they don't, well it's web based... there are stylesheets, graphics and html, it really shouldn't be that hard to make some radical visual changes without too much work.
So go with the tool that works best, looks are pretty easy to adjust, as long as usability is there to begin with... if it's clunky, confusing and you hate how it looks... well that would take a bigger commitment to fix than just looks but it's been done before. Example... I once completely redesigned the UI for Bugzilla, canned queries, new workflows, collapsing panes, calendar widgets, color coding and more... but it was worth it in the end and that company still uses it 90% the way I left it. Which means it wasn't wasted effort.
Keep the old version around to review with... then rebuild the whole thing in a CMS.
- Set up your stylesheet to cover all the examples in the old version... just click through the old site and pick out consistent examples of html entities... don't forget to scope your entities by providing IDs around such areas as menus, masthead, sidebars, advertising, etc.
- Ignore anything that is similar enough to look almost the same, no one will complain if you resolve inconsistencies... but will if you make unilateral decisions like 'All lists should look the same'
- Add in any custom classes... for when 'All lists just aren't the same'
- Hire an assistant with no web experience to copy/paste all the plain text scraped from a browser view of the page into a vanilla Dreamweaver generated html page and save it using the page title as filename.... no links, no formatting... just text. Takes 10 minutes to instruct on this one, then they go do it for a day or two.
- Instruct said assistant to go back and use the WYSIWYG viewer to add paragraphs and select lists and convert them to html lists. Takes 10 minutes to instruct, another day to complete.
- Instruct assistant to go back and add h1, h2, etc where needed.
- You can see where I'm going. Delegate the job in easy to do, hard to mess up, bite-sized tasks.
- While they are doing this you can be finishing up the more complicated pages and adding in stuff like form validation, unobtrusive dom based javascript to replace the horrible Dreamweaver scripting that's inevitably in there... and swapping script based mouseovers for CSS based ones... etc. and setting up all the chunks of html that need to be handled more delicately for accessibility.
- When pages are complete... just copy/paste the final html into the CMS according to your layout requirements for content regions
Essentially I'm saying that instead of using Tidy or something like that which will require you to go back and double check that it's automation went well... use a human equivalent which if constrained to simple tasks will do a much better job.
The nice thing that you get as a bonus is an assistant who knows enough html to be useful but not so much as to be dangerous... and that's hard to come by without paying for a full fledged developer. If that person wants to learn more, great... you can teach him/her the right way and won't have to unlearn them of bad habits. In the meanwhile you can teach them how to make maintenance updates to text via the CMS using FCK or TinyMCE as a WYSIWYG... very easy for making text changes.
If you have to pay a license for a server to run the software I wouldn't call.Net free but sure I'll concede it's not an additional expense.
However, just because you run Windows in the office and have an Exchange server and an IIS server running a few old Access apps you haven't ported over, doesn't mean you have to go a pay again when it comes time to deploy your new CRM or a new set of web services... and it would be a lazy CTO who would decide to go that direction just because... kind of sad to think that people just expect to pay it.
You're forgetting that you also pay a license for IIS,.Net and the Development tools you'll need to work with them competently which are going to be per seat licenses.... plus you're locked in to MS products and so any scaling needs you have will cost you additional licenses for each of those rather than just for the DB... just a reminder...
WITHOUT Net Neutrality we all pay extra.... not for our internet access, but for the products and services we use... and in our decreased wages due to higher operating expenses at the company we work for. First it will be Google and Amazon, etc. but then it will be all businesses....
As a professional I can follow up on this remark. "Whatever tool fits the job." MS in some cases is best but rarely. Most often is is a LAMP platform or LAPP platform unless the requirements dictate a more serious DB, DB2 or Oracle fit the bill in which case it is a LAOJ (Linux, Apache, Oracle and JSP) solution.
Again, rarely, rarely is it ever a MS, IIS, MSSQL,.NET solution (MIM.N for those in the know)..... simply because those systems/apps don't provide anything substantially better than the license free options (dependent on whether the client has ignorantly already paid for them, in which case they are fine solutions).
printers, backup devices, cameras, web cams, projectors, scanners... pretty much any workgroup peripherals where the workgroup is on one floor of a building and not sequestered in real rooms, ie: cubicle farms would work... studios, conference rooms.
10M from the device... so a 10M radius... just put your device someplace central to it's users.
IMHO the WikiPedia team needs to establish a procedure for flagging a version of a document as 'verified' and make it a special edition of the document which is uneditable for a period of time. This would act as a sort of checkpoint for the data. This would require a periodic audit of articles by an objective team who's job it would be to verify the current state of the article, lookup references and facts, etc.
This need not stop the ability of people to add new data.... in fact they could continue adding to the article while it was being audited.... but at the end of the audit the team would have compiled a 'verified' version which would then be the standard baseline version that could be used as a 'reference'.
Additionally a diff routine performed against the latest live copy and the reference version could send out a notice to WikiPedia editors that a substantial change had occurred which could mean that the article is due for another audit...
I'm talking about human nature in my comment... chemical biological imperatives, not right vs wrong or ethical social imperatives. A baby has a mother and father and relatives and other people around who will make sure that baby gets food, as long as there is food to be had. An adult at the stage in life a typical CFO has made it to has a lot of dead relatives and a lot of live dependents but no one is going to pick him up if he falls. He's an adult with means... he's on his own.
Get it?
Glad to have provided a platform for you to rant on thought;-p
That's cause a hungry baby has lots of supporters waiting nearby to feed it with their own portion rather than see it go hungry, whereas the CFO has little or no supporters and must fend for himself or die.
Slashdot Mirror
You're just plain wrong. Yes history shows patterns of boom, bust, plateau but that was then when there were still unexplored continents and unexploited regions of livable land... now you've got people developing deserts because it's what is available.
I agree about the stupidity of it. If home prices were less then wages could be less and the US wouldn't have to export so many jobs, etc. But the reality is that there simply isn't more land begin created any time soon. There may be a few nice areas that have been overlooked because they are underdeveloped from an industry and jobs opportunity POV.. like the Southeast US for instance - but even there, larger homes in desirable areas are selling for well over a million these days.
The biggest problem with not buying is that you still have to live somewhere. Unless you have a family home to crash in or your company provides housing (like in the 50s), you are throwing away 20-30 percent of your income every year.
So with less land, all that means is that the quality of home available will decline while the prices stay affordable. Look at Japan as an example. Population growth means we all have to deal with the problems they have now sooner or later.
Yes it feels stupid to buy a home now at the exorbitant prices.. but wait 5 years and it won't feel any better, except that you will have more income to work with and hopefully the prices won't have compensated by rising to match you.
OTOH if you buy now and struggle for a year or two... you'll have saved all those rent checks in the form of equity and will have a very nice bonus from natural appreciation (even if it isn't 30% rise every year... 10-18% is more likely). Then you can go buy something even better locally or you can go abroad with your fat wallet and buy a truly lavish spread somewhere no one wants to live 'right now'. Finally if you want to start a real estate portfolio you can use that equity to buy another property (make it commercial.. higher rent and less maintenance required).
I was quoting you and refuting in the same breath... ie; people make money every day WITHOUT having to beat the market. You just misread or I misspoke. Assumptions eh. especially about what, someone you don't know thinks, is obvious.
Uh yeah... MBA 'profs' are just Businessmen who are passing along experience and networking connections and of course looking for young blood to do their dirty work for them. I woudn't really call that teaching so much as mentoring which is why these courses are typically referred to as 'mentoring programs'.
Now if you're talking about management schools or something like that then you're talking about something completely different.
I'm pretty sure most people who responded to you assumed you were talking about an economics program since why would MBA or business degree program offer any insight into how the stock market works, other than how to run a public company? More specifically why would a 'business professor' know anything special about the markets? Whereas you'd expect an economist whose area of specialty IS the markets to have a much better clue.
anyways I'll leave you to your thoughts.
a) is there such a thing as a 'business' professor? business isn't academic... it's charm, savvy, legal and illegal deals.. how do you teach that? b) you don't have to 'beat' the market to make money, people do it every day.
c) err your next statement: median, right so there are economics profs who are 30 and still paying off their school loans and of course the luck few who have bad habits and drank, snorted, gambled, f@cked away their money shamelessly. Then there are the idiots who are smart enough to get a position teaching the stuff but too academic and afraid of risk to actually put it into practice.
Moving on to more important aspects... real estate appreciates in value regardless of whether you maintain it, rent it or just let it sit there deteriorating. If you finance it then sure your mortgage is an issue. Which is when renting becomes a headache if that's what you're doing... don't bite off more than you can chew. Put a large down payment on any rental property so that you can easily make your mortgage payment whether there is a tenant or not. You can do this by taking an equity loan against your personal residence or if you're a nomad ;-p you'll just have to build up some capital (which is harder IMHO when you're flushing money away renting).
And hire a reputable management company to take care of your rental property(s)... don't do it yourself... they manage hundreds of properties and have bulk supply and servicing options you don't have that keep their costs down. What costs you hundreds for repairs from a 3rd party costs them tens to have done by their own private staff of maintenance crews.
Finally, who cares about liquidity when you can simply borrow against your equity... never pay in cash when there is nearly free money from someone else to do the buying for you. Invest your cash in an additional interest bearing fund of some sort, make it a money market account if you want liquidity.
i know parent is meant to be funny BUT IF a professor of economics isn't already wealthy and trading, etc. as a result of having worked private for many years before going to education... then the reason would be that they have no cash reserves with which to invest. Lots of people have what it takes mentally to be good traders, few people have what it takes financially. This is why most people are in 401k mutual funds, etc.... cause they just can't pull enough together at one time to invest independently.
"Yes, I'm quite happy that Windows seem to mostly have that accomplished with Windows 2000. That means that *everyone else's* products run stable on top of it."
.1 it has never crashed on me though apps have... and since .2 I've never had an application crash either... and while I'm waiting for some intense calculations to happen, since the beginning of OS X, I've been able to switch to my browser or mail and continue working on peripheral tasks.
Just FYI.
I tried running Windows for a while... Win2k to be exact. I use big software, Adobe, Macromedia applications that put the PC through it's paces... ie: rendering and manipulating several thousand vectors with transparency, color compositing, masking and various mathematical transformations applied to them. Win2K would crash about every ten minutes. Not just the app, the whole OS. I tried out XP a year ago and put it through it's paces.. much better... it just locked up for tens of minutes at a time while processing, ie: wouldn't let me go to another app or even cancel an operations.. but at least it didn't crash the OS.
In the same time period I moved to OS X and came to love it's ability to truly multi-task and it's rock-solid stability. Barring it's 10.0 beta release, ever since
SO I suppose for a typical user Win2K of XP may have been sufficient for basic PC functionality but when they were asked to do anything more they failed me and failed in many of the worse ways possible (destroying my work, corrupting my files, losing my changes) and so were completely unacceptable.
I'm cool with everything except this part:
"don't bother fooling yourself into thinking you ever actually 'own' a house (it owns you). Go nomad."
This is a misguided misunderstanding of what owning a home should be. You are absolutely right if you think of a 'house' as your final resting point. You are absolutely wrong when you consider a 'house' to be Real Estate (the only real property in the world) and an investment and further a vehicle for future investment an wealth building. Real Estate values rise consistently in value well above stock markets, ie: the indexes which means they are a much better investment than anything like a 401k, mutual fund or similar portfolio type investment. Real Estate is probably the best SECURITY, in the financial sense, of all available.
So go ahead and go nomad if you want... but don't forget to buy some Real Estate along the way, preferably in a place where growth is expected but real estate values are depressed temporarily. In fact if you are a traveler you will get the best opportunities, if you're paying attention.
SO travel far and wide but also buy low and sell high.
*hindi accented english*
HA! then the tech support girl said something like "WOT YAH NEED TA DUE EEIS, TAKE THAT THERE MOUHUS AN CLIKKK EEIT RIAHT ON THAT THEYRE IKAHN". I had no idea what she was saying, her accent was so heavy... so I asked to speak to a manager and an hour later I finally go a hold of Rajiv in Bangalore and everything was straightened out.
Is a 'theme' really going to turn you off a piece of software? Ask the company if you can have it re-branded. Many companies will do this for free, especially web-based tools... and if they don't, well it's web based... there are stylesheets, graphics and html, it really shouldn't be that hard to make some radical visual changes without too much work.
So go with the tool that works best, looks are pretty easy to adjust, as long as usability is there to begin with... if it's clunky, confusing and you hate how it looks... well that would take a bigger commitment to fix than just looks but it's been done before. Example... I once completely redesigned the UI for Bugzilla, canned queries, new workflows, collapsing panes, calendar widgets, color coding and more... but it was worth it in the end and that company still uses it 90% the way I left it. Which means it wasn't wasted effort.
Well, think about it anyways.
Keep the old version around to review with... then rebuild the whole thing in a CMS.
- Set up your stylesheet to cover all the examples in the old version... just click through the old site and pick out consistent examples of html entities... don't forget to scope your entities by providing IDs around such areas as menus, masthead, sidebars, advertising, etc.
- Ignore anything that is similar enough to look almost the same, no one will complain if you resolve inconsistencies... but will if you make unilateral decisions like 'All lists should look the same'
- Add in any custom classes... for when 'All lists just aren't the same'
- Hire an assistant with no web experience to copy/paste all the plain text scraped from a browser view of the page into a vanilla Dreamweaver generated html page and save it using the page title as filename.... no links, no formatting... just text. Takes 10 minutes to instruct on this one, then they go do it for a day or two.
- Instruct said assistant to go back and use the WYSIWYG viewer to add paragraphs and select lists and convert them to html lists. Takes 10 minutes to instruct, another day to complete.
- Instruct assistant to go back and add h1, h2, etc where needed.
- You can see where I'm going. Delegate the job in easy to do, hard to mess up, bite-sized tasks.
- While they are doing this you can be finishing up the more complicated pages and adding in stuff like form validation, unobtrusive dom based javascript to replace the horrible Dreamweaver scripting that's inevitably in there... and swapping script based mouseovers for CSS based ones... etc. and setting up all the chunks of html that need to be handled more delicately for accessibility.
- When pages are complete... just copy/paste the final html into the CMS according to your layout requirements for content regions
Essentially I'm saying that instead of using Tidy or something like that which will require you to go back and double check that it's automation went well... use a human equivalent which if constrained to simple tasks will do a much better job.
The nice thing that you get as a bonus is an assistant who knows enough html to be useful but not so much as to be dangerous... and that's hard to come by without paying for a full fledged developer. If that person wants to learn more, great... you can teach him/her the right way and won't have to unlearn them of bad habits. In the meanwhile you can teach them how to make maintenance updates to text via the CMS using FCK or TinyMCE as a WYSIWYG... very easy for making text changes.
If you have to pay a license for a server to run the software I wouldn't call .Net free but sure I'll concede it's not an additional expense.
However, just because you run Windows in the office and have an Exchange server and an IIS server running a few old Access apps you haven't ported over, doesn't mean you have to go a pay again when it comes time to deploy your new CRM or a new set of web services... and it would be a lazy CTO who would decide to go that direction just because... kind of sad to think that people just expect to pay it.
You're forgetting that you also pay a license for IIS, .Net and the Development tools you'll need to work with them competently which are going to be per seat licenses.... plus you're locked in to MS products and so any scaling needs you have will cost you additional licenses for each of those rather than just for the DB... just a reminder...
WITHOUT Net Neutrality we all pay extra.... not for our internet access, but for the products and services we use... and in our decreased wages due to higher operating expenses at the company we work for. First it will be Google and Amazon, etc. but then it will be all businesses....
More likely it was William S. Burroughs
As a professional I can follow up on this remark. "Whatever tool fits the job." MS in some cases is best but rarely. Most often is is a LAMP platform or LAPP platform unless the requirements dictate a more serious DB, DB2 or Oracle fit the bill in which case it is a LAOJ (Linux, Apache, Oracle and JSP) solution.
.NET solution (MIM.N for those in the know)..... simply because those systems/apps don't provide anything substantially better than the license free options (dependent on whether the client has ignorantly already paid for them, in which case they are fine solutions).
Again, rarely, rarely is it ever a MS, IIS, MSSQL,
yep, they should use DomTT (anonymous plug)
If only they would SandBox such hacks so that companies that don't need them could turn them off and have a nice clean OS.....
printers, backup devices, cameras, web cams, projectors, scanners... pretty much any workgroup peripherals where the workgroup is on one floor of a building and not sequestered in real rooms, ie: cubicle farms would work... studios, conference rooms.
10M from the device... so a 10M radius... just put your device someplace central to it's users.
IMHO the WikiPedia team needs to establish a procedure for flagging a version of a document as 'verified' and make it a special edition of the document which is uneditable for a period of time. This would act as a sort of checkpoint for the data. This would require a periodic audit of articles by an objective team who's job it would be to verify the current state of the article, lookup references and facts, etc.
This need not stop the ability of people to add new data.... in fact they could continue adding to the article while it was being audited.... but at the end of the audit the team would have compiled a 'verified' version which would then be the standard baseline version that could be used as a 'reference'.
Additionally a diff routine performed against the latest live copy and the reference version could send out a notice to WikiPedia editors that a substantial change had occurred which could mean that the article is due for another audit...
And this means that it is probably configurable to backup to any WebDAV service....
Can you do this on Windows?
Oh but it is.
p.s. Every time you write a sentence fragment a kitten dies, hence the growing ranks of dead kittens in America.
I'm talking about human nature in my comment... chemical biological imperatives, not right vs wrong or ethical social imperatives. A baby has a mother and father and relatives and other people around who will make sure that baby gets food, as long as there is food to be had. An adult at the stage in life a typical CFO has made it to has a lot of dead relatives and a lot of live dependents but no one is going to pick him up if he falls. He's an adult with means... he's on his own.
;-p
Get it?
Glad to have provided a platform for you to rant on thought
That's cause a hungry baby has lots of supporters waiting nearby to feed it with their own portion rather than see it go hungry, whereas the CFO has little or no supporters and must fend for himself or die.