Notes and Jottings

I’ve been following threads about Irish property prices at places like http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=31710 (sadly a closed thread, perhaps because the owners/moderators did not want to be blamed for the inevitable), http://www.thepropertypin.com/forum/, http://forum.globalhousepricecrash.com/index.php?showforum=16 and http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055033806. There is also the highly recommended site, www.itulip.com, which offers a more US-centric view of the property market, but highly relevant to the Irish market as well.

It’s obvious to me that either Irish property experiences a ‘bust’, a serious drop in prices, or else the Irish economy suffers from high inflation for an extended period of time. Either way, we are between a rock and a hard place - neither is good for the country. In practice, the damage has already been done, and it would take a better person than me to see a solution without further compounding the issue. Thousands of people cannot use their houses as permanent ATMs without somebody paying further down the line; of course, it’s often a different set of people who pay the piper. This period between 2001 and 2006 must surely eventually be seen as the huge disaster it is for the country, once the dust has settled.

Just today, I’ve been reading http://www.fff.org/toc/monetarypolicytoc.asp, a document extolling the author’s belief that the current protectionist/inflationary policies put in place by governments and central banks are what are fundamentally responsible for these boom/bust cycles (this is known as the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle). I am becoming a lot more inclined to believe this.

There is a comment in part 12 of the document which (for me) describes the issues with housing perfectly:

It is the essence of inflation that it affects some prices before others, that its final effects are different from its impact effects, and that production is affected differently at different stages of the process. In an inflationary boom, it is this unequal incidence of the inflation which gives rise to the maladjustments, which eventually produce the slump. Entrepreneurs are encouraged by artificially cheap money to embark on enterprises which can only be profitable provided costs do not rise. As the new money works through the system, costs do rise, and their enterprise is thus rendered unprofitable. For the time being, trade seems good but when the full effects of the inflation have manifested themselves there comes a crisis and subsequently depression.

In this case, one can see the entrepreneurs as normal people who buy a house, either to live in or as an investment. If we consider profit for investors as the rental return after accounting for tax breaks/upkeep/empty periods, etc., this was only profitable both if interest rates did not rise, and if the capital value of the property rose over time. The second item should not be the case forever (even if it works for a while during a housing boom), as there is not a fixed supply of housing; eventually the cost of housing should reduce to its cost of building, plus marginal profit for the builder; this should be true as long as there is sufficient housing stock and land to hold the people in the area (which there is).
Some of the recent reports are that the government are just now beginning to buy large numbers of housing for so-called ‘affordable housing’. To quote from the article:

Homes will be made available at an estimated 30 per cent discount on market prices, to eligible buyers. This is the first time the AHP has intervened directly in the market to buy houses from private developers. The arrangements for selling these will be finalised shortly and will be advertised widely, the minister’s spokesman said.

The funny thing is that this happens just as market forces are beginning to push down the prices. Government sponsored protectionism? No, never! And note that this helps builders, not people who bought at the height of the property bubble, and would like to sell to newer buyers…

One last point to make is that any government intervention at this point would reinforce the idea that people are not responsible for their own actions. Irresponsible actions in lending and borrowing could become seen as win-win, with the obvious negative repercussions down the road.

I will be travelling to Mountain View (CA) for training during the month of January. Which is good - it’s a great area! Well… Silicon Valley/San Francisco in particular… I’ve heard it suggested that MTV sometimes seems more like a retirement villa these days, whatever the truth is in that.

Since I still have a lack of driving skills, I’m going to need to keep an eye on the weather - I hear that Silicon Valley can have very rainy periods at times during the winter. Which would be crap if I was cycling to work (I am). Rain gear will be accompanying me, I think, even though I have never before associated the area with any kind of bad weather.

The world of XML technologies has been an interesting one to follow over the last few years. It’s strange to see how a relatively straightforward standard such as XML (okay not so straightforward if you need to deal with PIs or CDATA or…) can be tangled in knots by the insistence of the standards bodies to go in the direction of complexity and yet more complexity.

Two cases which have been discussed recently in the blogging community are RELAX NG and REST - for example, this post by Tim Bray. RELAX NG has been around for donkeys’ years, and for most purposes required by people “on the Internet”, it is more useful. But XML Schemas have been promoted by the W3C in spite of it being both much more difficult to learn, and also being less expressive for certain forms of XML documents. Rather than go into all the arguments for/against, it’s worth having a look at this post by Dare Obasanjo for details about some reasons why people might go for one rather than the other. But most people don’t look at the technologies like in that post. For most people, you’re either a “cool technologies” person, or a “do it the way everybody else does it” person. I like RELAX NG, but not XML Schemas. And if I could help it, I would never ever look at RELAX NG. I’m in the first category, I guess Others will take whatever tooling is given by their usual vendor (IBM, etc.).

Check out this post as well - this was the reason for this post, really. Again, I tend to like to choose REST rather than WS-I. For a start, it’s what I know. Again, it seems that many people choose what they’re given, though the protocols are yet more ugly ugly beasts.

Similarly, people will choose subversion rather than git (or mercurial or monotone or insert your own cool distributed SCM here). Or in some places they still use CVS (escaping from the world of CVS tomorrow, last day in work!), or some poor *astards use Clearcase - no comment there…

There’s been some debate on the rather draconian Ask About Money banning that’s been going on recently, especialy at The Property Pin.

It appears that AAM moderators are now handing out bans left, right and centre for just mentioning the property market. One person got the following message:

Forum Message

You have been banned for the following reason:
opening the debate on property market

Date the ban will be lifted: Never

This is rather remarkable considering that the debate was a welcomed part of the forum for a few months, and miju opened the thread many months ago.

(I do have to admit that some of the discussion had been lower quality than usual recently, but I don’t think that accounts for all the banning that has occurred)

This morning, the US election results are everything I hoped. Democratic control of congress (working majority), and possible control of the Senate (recount pending in Montana). I think it’s obvious what needs to be done; bring accountability (and some modicum of sanity) to US politics, and reel in Bush’s war game fantasies.

And try to heal the rifts which at times seem to have split the US into two enemy armed camps…

Heading to bed (after usual Irish pub evening), and results are beginning to trickle in from the US. Nothing especially worrisome yet, I see Lieberman is beating Lamont in exit polls, which is unfortunate, but that doesn’t necessarily feed into the final results.

Lots of fingers crossed that the Democratic Party at least take over Congress. The GOP really really need a few decades in the wilderness to rediscover what it means to be a political party rather than a criminal party.

I don’t think FF here in Ireland have quite reached that stage yet

It now looks like I’ll be moving to a new company at the start of December; new job, new challenges and opportunities! It’s going to be exciting…

http://www.google.ie/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=34883

たぶん今週ニュースがあります。

Do not be fooled. This election is not about the sexual misdeeds of a Congressman, or even about a hideous and unnecessary war. It is not about national security. In the long sweep of American and world history, this election is about the same issue that Americans believed they confronted in 1776: whether or not we shall live in a state defined by unchecked tyrannical power.

What am I talking about? Bush Junior’s attempt to rewrite laws enacted by Congress, completely, through the use of signing statements.

In the law Bush signed Wednesday, Congress stated no one but the privacy officer could alter, delay or prohibit the mandatory annual report on Homeland Security department activities that affect privacy, including complaints.

But Bush, in a signing statement attached to the agency’s 2007 spending bill, said he will interpret that section “in a manner consistent with the President’s constitutional authority to supervise the unitary executive branch.”

Or how about this…

Bush’s signing statement Wednesday challenges several other provisions in the Homeland Security spending bill.

Bush, for example, said he’d disregard a requirement that the director of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency must have at least five years experience and “demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security.”

His rationale was that it “rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office.”

Another attempt to ignore or alter the law, as enacted by Congress. Shouldn’t US citizens be up in arms about this? What happened to the separation between administration, legislation and judiciary? The Legislature creates the laws, the Administration carries them out, the Judiciary rules on legality/illegality, right? Have I missed something?

While cleaning out a room in the apartment yesterday evening (other person in apartment leaving), I came across an unclaimed copy of “Peanuts”. One of those little booklets with stories of Charlie Brown and Snoopy and the others.

I started reading for a page or two, and had a feeling that things weren’t really making as much sense as they should. 1. 2. 3. Ah, I had been reading in right-to-left mode! Right-to-left is the traditional Japanese writing style - 縦書 - and used in all manga drawings. Recent manga imported to the US, in an attempt to stay “authentic” have also followed this format, rather than mirror the pages horizontally.