It was time for another look at real estate. I see the market is holding steady but I don’t can’t see any reason why it isn’t going to plunge again. The business review, shown here, shows at least three to four times as many properties in foreclosure than listed for sale in Broward. Who or what is propping things up, I’d like to know. There are no first time buyers and no construction starts. The housing Ponzi game is over.
The prices anywhere I’d live are still in the $150k range, down from $400k, but still overpriced. It doesn’t make sense because there are no jobs around here that pay enough to buy any house over $80k. The dates on the foreclosures are generally 2009, so the market hasn’t begun to catch up to the reality. I say another collapse is pending and since I am more than comfortable right where I am, I’ll wait it out.The park ranger and I had an impromptu discussion about picking up women. We are opposites, in that I don’t pick up women, but it was damn funny to actually talk with somebody who does. He knows pickup lines and brags about spending “only $50 on drinks”, things of which I have no concept. He says it is really easy, but I’m not sure about that. I think I have never resorted to such tactics and he only thinks it easy because he’s got a lifetime of experience at it. But he’s funny, not scary like my brothers who think the only reason you don’t do the same is because you ain’t as good at it as they are.
Want to see some though-provoking charts? Take a look at the graphs for health care, education, and income for South Africa. Possibly there is a law that requires whites and blacks be compared. From the graphs, one could almost conclude the blacks are ill-done by. Almost, until you compare them not to whites, but to the other blacks in neighboring countries. South African blacks are infinitely better off than they would be elsewhere in Africa.
A trip to Bal Harbor took up the afternoon, meaning an extended coffee break and a quiet time to read and think. I visited with Ruth and programmed a modem and router. I remain incredulous that nobody has built a model of either that works right by itself. I can’t quite recall the good looking lady who was there last summer, but apparently she is now a disk jockey in Miami. Back to the modem, I’d like to explain something that confuses people about DSL.
Bridged mode. Back in the bad old days, the phone company was powerful enough to make its own laws, and it was illegal to connect anything else to “their” phone lines. Sweet. Using this premise, they demanded the customer pay for a separate phone line for each fax machine, etc. Thus most DSL modems, to this day, work only with a single computer on each line.
To get around this, routers are capable of cloning the computer’s internal address. When the phone company looks out on the wire, they see a simulated computer. But this proved cumbersome when the law changed to allow the customer more than one computer on the same line. Now we have modems that bridged or bypassed the router. That’s the concept, anyway.
I still, after ten years, occasionally re-read the tale of Dien Bien Phu. If you are ever down in the dumps and think the world hates smart people, you are probably right. Seriously, I mean if ever it looks like stupid people always get their own way because they outnumber the rest of us, read “Hell In A Very Small Place”. It is a chronicle of the stupid. The French for placing their men at the bottom of a valley, and the Vietnamese for sacrificing untold lives to attack it. The French lost by proving they were the more stupid of the two.
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