Race relations are hard. Society is complicated. Your bike shed is the wrong color. Don't fly that flag on it.

One of many big lies that politicians tell is "we want more affordable housing". Nonsense. Whenever we get affordable housing, everybody panics. That's what 2008 was--a very brief spate of affordable housing, and as soon as we got it, almost everybody was in a tizzy.

Why? Leverage.

Very few can buy a house for cash. Most of them are financed. By their very nature, such purchases are financially damaging to you unless the asset you finance goes up. The damage is usually bearable for smaller items such as a car, or appliances. It's too much to bear for a house, which became the overweight item in most middle-class investment portfolios.

So. We encouraged most of the country to have an investment strategy that could be summed up as "overweight leveraged real estate" and this is the natural result--everybody wants housing to keep going up in price.

Furthermore, governments rely on property tax revenue which is... proportional to assessed value. The government wants housing to go up too. Then the people that run the show have the gall to say, "we're going to create affordable housing". Nonsense.

What they call "affordable housing" usually requires you to be in some kind of welfare program to qualify. Being on welfare is, in some sense, actually a high price to pay for housing.

Another thing they called "affordable housing" was the shoddy loans that caused the 2008 crisis. Once again, that's not affordable housing. It's affordable *credit*, ie, cheap money, used to buy expensive housing.

REITs are one way for people to buy real estate without having an over-weight portfolio. They're still leveraged though, because it's too difficult to make money in this system without leverage. It's like an arms race. If we took the leverage out, it might be possible to run the system using non-leveraged REITs. You'd put a significant portion of your savings in a non-leveraged REIT. Instead of earning interest, you'd earn dividends. The possibility of the REIT going to zero wouldn't be there like it is with today's leveraged REITs. In other words, we could make housing something like a regulated utility.

Needless to say, this is a huge leap and I've been made fun of for suggesting it before. Debt finance is very, Very, VERY entrenched in this market. It'd be revolutionary to do it any other way.

My favorite IQ test works like this: 1. Throw imaginary stick. 2. IQ is inversely proportional to distance run.

That test is just for dogs though... usually.

I can haz conflicting study next Tuesday.

Your search returned 1,245,245 results, none of which included the actual text you typed, but at some point in the past they apparently linked to pages that did contain the text you typed.

Will Buzz Aldrin please pick up the white courtesy phone? We have need of your your services.

OK, I was like, "meh". Traffic in Boston. Whatever. Then I noticed the hi-rises on the right... slowly moving (yes, I know the station is actually moving; but everything is relative).

Like trees. Smokey the HR bear. "Only you can prevent fire fires".

Uhhh... it was never cool. We're nerds. NERDS!!!

Stop eating anything that comes in a box or Bag.

Very well then. I'll just grab a few of these loose potatoes here... that 24 oz. steak wrapped in paper looks good, and uh... let's wash it down with a couple of those 40s over there.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck load of CD-ROMs". That's what it was when I heard it. It goes back further

I had the same knee-jerk reaction too. I blame sensationalist journalism. He isn't being thrown in prison for teaching about Bitcoin. I could publish the same thing and not go to prison. The difference? I wouldn't be doing it as part of my tech-support functions for ISIS. He's not going to prison for teaching. He's going to prison for providing support to ISIS. The teaching is just part of that.

I see you're not up to date with current german politics. We are.

Merkel doesn't give a flying fuck because she really doesn't give a fuck about anything. She was trained very well how to get into and stay in power, and that's the only thing she's doing. Every move of her makes sense if you analyze it from that perspective. This is no different - big trouble with the USA is not a career-improving path, but the people of Germany are too forgiving and will let her and her party get away with all this shit.

You don't even have to be all hush-hush about it. Stuff is all over the news. They busted one lousy warehouse in the Bay Area a few days ago. Estimated value: $15 million. Even if that figure is inflated, it's one grow-op in a warehouse that got careless and/or greedy and didn't hide the smell properly, and didn't have a plausible explanation for their electrical usage. There have to be a bazillion that don't get caught.

PC may or may not be the PC term for this PC and its PC boards.