Author: Aaron Weber

Sunday Sunday Sunday

Sunny out today, finally. Exercise is in order, of some sort. The desktop team will be working long hours tonight. Me, I got some thinking to do.

Not thinking about the FCC, (ambivalent: while radio’s domination by ClearChannel is an obvious negative, there are many more independent media channels now, so it no longer makes as much sense to ensure diversity with the old regulations).

Not thinking about WMD (again, ambivalent: I’m guessing Bush and his crew are guilty of willful ignorance rather than deliberate falsehood, but I’m not sure that’s much of an excuse. And of course it’s done now, maybe even for the better, and we’re going to need to put more boots on the ground before we get out of Iraq safely, and if we get peace between Israel and Palestine we’ll be better off than before).

Not thinking about motorcycles, despite the obvious attraction of my hot new class-M learner’s permit.

I need to do hard thinking about me, and what I mean to myself, and to others. Thinking about what it means to be valued by others, to respect and love and befriend. What am I willing to sacrifice for love?

I imagine that in the past, people tried harder at relationships, although I have little evidence for this, except that the penalties for failure were higher back then. I don’t know that I’d be willing to try as hard as my parents did, at the outset of their relationship. I know few women, certainly, who would do something so risky and foolhardy as my mother did, embarking on a headlong, lifelong love at the age of seventeen and a half.

So, answer yourself this: What do you want from a romantic relationship? What are you willing to sacrifice for someone else’s love and happiness? What won’t you give up? What would make you abandon an otherwise healthy relationship?

I overthink everything.

I wonder if I will ever experience clarity of purpose in the way that I imagine my parents did, back in the day, casting aside doubts and leaping forward. Weighing options and making a decision and not looking back too much, knowing that the decision was made. I wonder if the 21st century will have any certainty– Dubya, with his moral clarity, certainly seems like a throwback to an earlier era (even to those who approve of it!).

Herd Behavior

A memo from Steve Ballmer outlining the challenges to his company from open source software, and Linux in particular, was responsible for driving down the stock today. “We need to woo young programmers away from Linux” said the memo, which was quoted in financial television. Then the reporter said, “Linux stock is up fifty percent this morning” and showed a chart in which LNUX had, indeed, risen. Linux is not a company. VA Software, the company that trades under the symbol LNUX, is a Linux software vendor, but that’s not at all the same thing, in fact its business is less and less related to the operating system, given that it’s changed its name from “VA Linux.” Stupid investors.

Why Real Estate Prices Will Fall

A quick summary of the Economist’s arguments about real estate pricing:

People say prices are stable because supply is static. That’s not true:

  • New buildings are constructed, and old buildings retrofitted for new uses.
  • The rate of increase in supply lags behind demand. If the need for offices drops off suddenly, the supply will still be increasing, since it takes so long for buildings to get built. This can cause excess supply.
  • The increasingly precarious financial situations of many families means that foreclosures could cause a glut of available properties.
  • Increasing numbers of non-resident owners means that properties are more likely to be sold in a tough economic period (owner-occupiers are more likely to try to stay put), which again could lead to excess supply.

People say prices are stable because there is an inherent value in property that does not exist in stocks or other securities. However, the price of property does not necessarily reflect its inherent value: it reflects what people are willing to pay for it. Real estate speculation can and does distort the market. One measure of distortion is that property purchase prices have been rising faster than rents; this cannot continue any more than spending can outpace income for very long.

People say that prices are stable because interest rates are low. However, low inflation means that these interest rates aren’t really all that good: borrowing at a higher interest rate, but during a period of higher inflation, is equivalent or better. This involves calculating the difference between the nominal and real interest rate, based on the eroding burden of your debt just due to inflation.

Examples or warnings: Boston suffered a significant drop in pricing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Office rental prices are 50% of what they were a year ago in Boston. San Francisco prices have dropped significantly since 2000 as well. Hong Kong real estate prices are off 60% from their peak a few years ago, and Japan’s are severely anemic as well.

So there. Not like it matters, since I, and most my cohort, are not in much of a position to buy property, nor are we responsible enough to own and maintain it properly.

My Political Spam

Feel free to send this on to your rulers. I’ve sent it to all of mine (Tolman, Fox, Travaglini, Romney), plus a slightly changed version to the Globe. Obviously nobody responded (yet– just been a few days).

Dear [Elected Official]
I’m writing to ask you to uphold the separation of church and state. Yesterday’s Boston Globe had an article about how the Catholic church has been lobbying against gay marriage, which reminded me once again of the importance of the divide. Mixing state and church is not and cannot be good for either.

The Catholic opposition to homosexuality is a purely religious opposition, and should not influence the laws of our state any more than Catholic regulations about confession or church attendance. There is no civil, secular reason to oppose gay marriage. A “Defense of Marriage” act is actually an encroachment of religious edict upon civil liberty, and should not pass.

Please bear this in mind when you vote.

Your Constituent,
[Signature]

Esp. for representatives, be sure to include your address and zip code so they know you’re in their district.

Body

I’m up above the 160 pound mark now, which is pretty exciting, although I’m still recovering from a cold so we’ll see how that affects things. I am increasingly tempted to try to count my calories and protein intake, just to see what’s happening.

A lot of the information on men and eating disorders is pretty old– 1999-2001, mostly. I think it was one of those media frenzies that didn’t quite catch on. I mean, I’d at least expect a Livejournal community centered on it, given the number of pro-anorexia groups. Oh, there’s a few: a whole Hydroxycut interest group, for example, and the odd suspiciously self-aware workout journal though. But even the weightlifting groups are populated nearly exclusively by women. I wonder if it’s a LiveJournal thing, or a distribution of illness thing, or labeling, or what.

Thesauri

A visual thesaurus describes the relationships between words as a three-dimensional network, letting you interact with their relationships, traverse them, etc.

AllConsuming does something similar for books, and, tangentially, for ideas. It tracks book links on blogs, so that you know that persons A and C are reading the same book, and can infer that they’re thinking similar thoughts, or working on similar projects, and so forth.

I wonder if you could find a thesaurus for concepts, or maybe an encyclopedia of ideas that pointed out the relationships between them: derivation, opposition, refinement, sub-categories.