Category: Consuming

You know that clank, clank, clank noise as the roller coaster goes up? And how, just at the very top, it seems to stop, and there’s this pause? The housing market has stopped rising in Australia, and people are beginning to wonder if it’s going to go up again, or go back down.

Washington Post on other newspapers on real estate prices. Two amusing tidbits: 1) “The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette sounds a bit wistful in reporting: “Pittsburgh Has No Housing Bubble to Burst.” 2) The ad links at the bottom are for bubble bath.

The houses where B.T.K. murders took place are … still houses, and people still have to live there. Creepy.

After I posted the link to Condoflip, grey-eyed John Fleck emailed to ask if that was a joke or not. I wasn’t sure, but I was pretty sure people did buy and sell unbuilt condos– very windhandel, as the Dtuch would say (tangent: a search for English results for the word on Google turns up things like an article on the surge in the skateboarding industry).

I told John that I’d be willing to offer him a nice tulip bulb in exchange for his daughter’s hand in marriage, and he replied that she wasn’t for sale but for the right tulip, I could have her collection of beanie babies.

Apparently, though, people still make money in the tulip market, just as they make money in futures, a.k.a. windhandel— just not with the same profit margin of the bubble days of the 17th century (or the late 90s, in the case of futures trading). The city of Holland, Wisconsin. for example, has a thriving tulip industry.

Still, I don’t think I’d buy a big pile of rare of tulips as an investment any more than I’d buy Dennis Rader’s old murder houses– stigmatized property.

I think I’ve posted more today than I have in weeks. Anyway, Bookdwarf sent me this review of the book “A Nation of Realtors: A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class”, which describes how the real estate trade has pushed for tax-deductible mortgage interest and against public housing, and how that pressure has shaped suburbia and the middle class.

Neat.

I’m thinking that the internal dialog of this real estate vendor is something along the lines of wow, this is a really bad idea that encourages irresponsible speculation and oooh commission!

There’s a BusinessWeek article about an online-gambling IPO and its associated legal risks, and one from Wired on teh prOn industry’s recordkeeping requirements.

Online gambling is already run from abroad– the new recordkeeping requirements for pornographers are basically going to drive pornographers abroad as well. I guess that’s yet one more industry we’ve outsourced.

This weekend Bookdwarf and I went to sit on Motorcycles at Riverside Motorsports. We liked the Bonneville but she really fell in love with the Monster 620 Dark. Conveniently it is also the least expensive bike. You can’t see in the picture but it has a matte-black finish and a low seat-height so that short people can ride it. There’s even a matte-black helmet that goes with it. We didn’t buy one, of course. The trips to the stores to sit on motorcycles are ways of sating the motorcycle lust. They are substitutes for actual spending of money.

I mean, we might eventually get one. First she has to get a license. Then we have to wait until someone sells one used on Craigslist Motorcycles, because hell if we’re buying new.

There was also a farmer’s market and some fresh strawberries. But mostly I was excited about the sitting on big expensive equipment, more than I have been since I was eight and got to sit on a tractor.

Brainshare 2005 is in Barcelona and since I might have a chance to go, I figured I’d try and get a reservation at the avant-garde restaurant El Bullí. No luck: they’re booked at least to the end of 2005. Reviews say it’s the hardest restaurant in the world to get a table at: open half the year, for one meal a day.

Maybe I should consider The French Laundry, which is perpetually booked 2 months in advance– every morning there’s a window of about an hour when people basically just hit redial like they’re calling a radio show, until the reservations book (and presumably waitlist) is full. People make pilgrimages to this place. From across the country. For lunch.

But I can’t plan a meal that far in advance. It’s just not within my ability. I don’t know if I’m going to be hungry at seven this evening, much less whether I’m going to be interested in flying to San Francisco, renting a car, driving out to some suburb, and paying through the nose for a ten course meal on August 20th.

I guess the odds are pretty good I’ll be hungry at some point in August though. That’s a bet I’d make.

If you drove like a Masshole, you’d be home by now.

I’m changing the environment– ask me how!

This article is the culmination of many years of astrotuf lobbying by captains of destructive and corrupt industries. It highlights as the work of a man whose job it has been to assemble fake public-interest groups that make tobacco look good, to undermine the public welfare, to make powerful titans appear to be sympathetic grandmothers, to paint as corrupt the defenders of the defenseless.

The article is very well written, but it fails to actively point out corruption and unethical behavior. I expect the paper of record to point out lies and deceptions, not merely to note that certain people disagree with the Creation Science Group’s assertion that the earth is flat, the Citizens for Wonderful Things position paper on the idea that tobacco is a healthful tonic for nerves, or the Mountebanks and Patent Medicine Manufacturers of America press release on the subject of laudanum as a remedy for neurasthenia.