Real Estate’s Gold Rush Seems Gone for Good - NYTimes.com

The following are highlights from David Streitfeld's Aug 22 New York Times article "Real Estate’s Gold Rush Seems Gone for Good," aka:

Housing Fades as a Means to Build Wealth, Analysts Say

None of it is "me" talking--my only footprint is in the passages I selected.

• Real Estate’s Gold Rush Seems Gone for Good - NYTimes.com - Annotated

  
  
  • But many real estate experts now believe that home ownership will never again yield rewards like those enjoyed in the second half of the 20th century, when houses not only provided shelter but also a plump nest egg.
  • The wealth generated by housing in those decades, particularly on the coasts, did more than assure the owners a comfortable retirement. It powered the economy, paying for the education of children and grandchildren
  • All those theories advanced during the boom about why housing is special —
  • that we were running out of usable land — didn’t hold up.”
  • Instead, Mr. Humphries and other economists say, housing values will only keep up with inflation. A home will return the money an owner puts in each month, but will not multiply the investment.
  • Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, estimates that it will take 20 years to recoup the $6 trillion of housing wealth that has been lost since 2005. After adjusting for inflation, values will never catch up.
  • Set against this dismal present and a bleak future, buying a home is a willful act of optimism.
  • The couple’s first venture into real estate
  • That quick appreciation started them on the same track as their parents, who watched the value of their houses ascend for decades. The real estate crash interrupted that pleasant dream.
  • “I don’t think we’re ever going to see the prosperity our parents did, but I don’t think it’s all doom and gloom either,”

  • With minor swings in sentiment, the latest results reflect what new buyers always seem to feel. At the boom’s peak in 2005, they said prices would go up. When the market was sliding in 2008, they still said prices would go up.

    
    “People think it’s a law of nature,” said Mr. Shiller, who teaches at Yale.

  • For the first half of the 20th century, he said, expectations followed the opposite path. Houses were seen the way cars are now: as a consumer durable that the buyer eventually used up.
  • The notion of housing as an investment first began to blossom after World War II, when the nesting urges of returning soldiers created a construction boom. Demand was stoked as their bumper crop of children grew up and bought places of their own. The inflation of the 1970s, which increased the value of hard assets, and liberal tax policies both helped make housing a good bet. So did the long decline in mortgage rates from the early 1980s.

  • Not everyone views the notion of real appreciation in real estate as a lost cause.

    
    Bob Walters, chief economist of the online mortgage firm Quicken, acknowledges that the recent collapse will create a “mind scar” just as the Great Depression did. But he argues that housing remains unique.

    
    “You have to live somewhere,” he said. “In three or four years, people will resume a normal course, and home values will continue to increase.”

  • All homes are different, and some neighborhoods and regions will rebound more quickly. On the other hand, areas where there was intense overbuilding, like Arizona, will be extremely slow to show any sign of renewal.
  • “It’s entirely likely that markets like Arizona will not recover even in the 15- to 20-year time frame,” said Mr. Humphries of Zillow. “The demand doesn’t exist.”

Posted from Diigo.

Video: '200 Years That Changed The World'

Geeking out about the Digital Revolution

Check out this article from Kevin Kelly, in Wired:

The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

Here are a few highlights:

· …digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

· unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

· Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

· Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there's rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

· But there is one way in which socialism is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.

· Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans from perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Every public health care expert declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, prove that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what you're thinking (Twitter), what you're reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Wesabe), your everything (the Web) is becoming a foundation of our culture. Doing it while collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don't know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step. […]

We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. […]

Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective?

Tinkering!

It's been on my mind. It's in the air.
Here are highlights from Alex Pang's "Tinkering to the Future." (I found it via Boing Boing.)

• Vodafone | receiver » Blog Archive » Tinkering to the future

  Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
  
  • Tinkering is about seizing the moment: it is about ad-hoc learning, getting things done, innovation and novelty, all in a highly social, networked environment.
  • What is tinkering? Discovering that certain snack tins can be used to make an antenna that extends the range of your wi-fi network, using electric toothbrush motors to power small robots, building a high-altitude balloon that takes video of the edge of space, are all examples of tinkering. It is technical work and a cultural attitude.
  • Tinkering is customizing software and stuff; making new combinations of things that work better than their parts; and discovering new capabilities in or uses for existing products. Despite its fascination with things and bits, it is resolutely human-focused: you don't make things 'better' in some dry technical sense, you make them work better for you. Tinkerers modify everything from cars, computers, and cellphones, to virtual worlds and computer code. They are driven by a desire to experiment, to make existing technologies more useful, and to customize them to better suit users' needs.
  • According to MIT professor Mitch Resnick, tinkering might look at first like traditional engineering, but it is very different. Both are about designing and making things; but engineering tends to be top-down, linear, structured, abstract and rules-based - a highly formal, organized activity, meant to be carried out in (and in the service of) large organizations. Tinkering, in contrast, is bottom-up, iterative, experimental, practical and improvisational: informal and disorganized, accessible to anyone who is willing to learn (and fail) and it doesn't follow any plan too closely.
  • The realization that users are often innovators – that they find new uses for, extend the capabilities of, and expand the appeal of existing products – has further empowered tinkering. Tinkering can also (somewhat paradoxically) be a protest against consumer culture and corporations: in an era of restrictive, end- user license agreements, cracking open a case can be defended as an act of resistance.
  • Tinkering is an amazingly powerful way to learn. It is not about mastering dry, arcane bodies of knowledge: it is about learning how to use your hands, materials, and tools, scrounging stuff and ideas, learning from others and your own mistakes.
  • Tinkering has found fullest expression in personal computers and electronics. There are good reasons for this.
    In the last thirty years, personal computers have evolved from programmers' toys to word processors to entertainment platforms to social media, thanks in part to the efforts of users.
  • The costs of computers and memory are continuing to fall and the demand for digital flexibility and connectivity is growing; aging populations in the advanced world want devices that will help them stay healthy and independent; countries want technologies to monitor emerging threats; companies want to be able to more precisely manage their supply chains and resources; and people show an inexhaustible appetite for connecting with each other.
  • As the digital infrastructure of pervasive or ubiquitous computing is woven into more everyday objects, more of the world will be tinkerable. And not just more individual objects. As we start to give technologies greater capacity to work together, to self-organize and share tasks, we will start to see tinkerers working with groups of technologies, rather than single objects. We will also see people tinkering with environments filled with sensors, smart dust computers and other technology. Already architects and activists talk about hacking urban infrastructures and tinkering with cities: in a few decades, the descendants of today's car customizers could be working with city blocks.
  • The world's problems are fiendishly complex. They are [...] a mix of complexity, urgency and uncertainty. They are too complex to be reduced to simple (albeit potentially very difficult) scientific problems; they are too important not to act on, even if we don't have all the information; and it is sometimes not clear if we can ever have certainty about what to do.
  • These are problems that cannot be entrusted to technocrats or elites: complex problems have to be solved collectively. In such a world, the only way to make a better future is to have people learn to create their own futures: to develop the capacity to solve problems, to see the consequences of their actions, and to be able to act now in ways that help them reach a better future.

Posted from Diigo.

The Case for Working With Your Hands - NYTimes.com

The following highlights are taken from the New York Times article by Matthew B. Crawford, with excerpts from his book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” published by Penguin Press.
I've meant to edit this--process it, analyze it--for a year now, and I know now I won't have the time. I still think it's worth publishing the highlights, if only to draw people to his book.

The piece certainly dovetails with the turn my own life is currently taking. I want to write about the origins of "Jessicello," and so this post will have to remain as is--a series of excerpts from the original article. Lazy blogging, I know, but where did I ever say I was committed to anything more? I've got chicken tractors and renewable flooring to research...

• The Case for Working With Your Hands - NYTimes.com

• confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.

• High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.”

• The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding.

• More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

• When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

• This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale.

• repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have.
  
  
• The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers.

• The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.

• Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”
  
  
• A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children.

• The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience.
  
  
• ...satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents

• I landed a job as executive director of a policy organization in Washington. This felt like a coup. But certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. It sometimes required me to reason backward, from desired conclusion to suitable premise. The organization had taken certain positions, and there were some facts it was more fond of than others. As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn’t fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style — that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning.
• As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having a lot of fun.
• After five months at the think tank, I’d saved enough money to buy some tools I needed, and I quit and went into business fixing bikes.
• The work is sometimes frustrating, but it is never irrational.
• And it frequently requires complex thinking. In fixing motorcycles you come up with several imagined trains of cause and effect for manifest symptoms, and you judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a mental library that you develop. An internal combustion engine can work in any number of ways, and different manufacturers have tried different approaches. Each has its own proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire.
• As in any learned profession, you just have to know a lot.
• It would probably be impossible to do such work in isolation, without access to a collective historical memory; you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians.
• There is always a risk of introducing new complications when working on old motorcycles, and this enters the diagnostic logic.
• The attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand. The mechanic’s proper response to the situation cannot be anticipated by a set of rules or algorithms.
• There probably aren’t many jobs that can be reduced to rule-following and still be done well. But in many jobs there is an attempt to do just this, and the perversity of it may go unnoticed by those who design the work process.
• Mechanics face something like this problem in the factory service manuals that we use. These manuals tell you to be systematic in eliminating variables, presenting an idealized image of diagnostic work. But they never take into account the risks of working on old machines. So you put the manual away and consider the facts before you. You do this because ultimately you are responsible to the motorcycle and its owner, not to some procedure.
• What you need now is the kind of judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules. For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.
• Put differently, mechanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street.
• Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate.
• The slap of worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at once cognitive and moral.
• I sometimes barter services with machinists and metal fabricators. This has a very different feel than transactions with money; it situates me in a community. The result is that I really don’t want to mess up anybody’s motorcycle or charge more than a fair price. You often hear people complain about mechanics and other tradespeople whom they take to be dishonest or incompetent. I am sure this is sometimes justified. But it is also true that the mechanic deals with a large element of chance.
• Moments of elation are counterbalanced with failures, and these, too, are vivid, taking place right before your eyes. With stakes that are often high and immediate, the manual trades elicit heedful absorption in work. They are punctuated by moments of pleasure that take place against a darker backdrop: a keen awareness of catastrophe as an always-present possibility.
• Contrast the experience of being a middle manager. This is a stock figure of ridicule, but the sociologist Robert Jackall spent years inhabiting the world of corporate managers, conducting interviews, and he poignantly describes the “moral maze” they feel trapped in.
• Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable.
• Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain (and there is always someone higher up the food chain). It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you.
• Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions.
• Those who work on the lower rungs of the information-age office hierarchy face their own kinds of unreality
• In some of the titles I was assigned, articles began with an abstract written by the author. But even in such cases I was to write my own. The reason offered was that unless I did so, there would be no “value added” by our product. It was hard to believe I was going to add anything other than error and confusion to such material.
• My job was structured on the supposition that in writing an abstract of an article there is a method that merely needs to be applied, and that this can be done without understanding the text.
• I was always sleepy while at work, and I think this exhaustion was because I felt trapped in a contradiction: the fast pace demanded complete focus on the task, yet that pace also made any real concentration impossible. I had to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of an author’s argument come into focus. This can only slow you down. To not do justice to an author who had poured himself into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself.
• The quota demanded, then, not just dumbing down but also a bit of moral re-education, the opposite of the kind that occurs in the heedful absorption of mechanical work. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself, and to others — to the author, to begin with, as well as to the hapless users of the database, who might naïvely suppose that my abstract reflected the author’s work. Such detachment was made easy by the fact there was no immediate consequence for me; I could write any nonsense whatever.

• Your hands are sliced up from twisting wires together, handling junction boxes made out of stamped sheet metal and cutting metal conduit with a hacksaw. But none of this damage touches the best part of yourself.

• But despite the beautiful ties I wore, it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. In that job I had made quite a bit more money. I also felt free and active, rather than confined and stultified.

• A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.

• Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate.

• Labor unions address important concerns like workplace safety and family leave, and management looks for greater efficiency, but on the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

• In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make.

• Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

• There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit.

• There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it.

• An economy that is more entrepreneurial, less managerial, would be less subject to the kind of distortions that occur when corporate managers’ compensation is tied to the short-term profit of distant shareholders.

• Ultimately it is enlightened self-interest, then, not a harangue about humility or public-spiritedness, that will compel us to take a fresh look at the trades. The good life comes in a variety of forms. This variety has become difficult to see; our field of aspiration has narrowed into certain channels. But the current perplexity in the economy seems to be softening our gaze.

• Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

Posted from Diigo.

Gardening with Greenzona and the Aerogarden, 2

Chronicling the garden experiments with our new camera:
From greenzona: Beans, melons, and peppers!


The greenzona compost is full of surprises. These mushrooms just showed up. (We had some unexpected, unidentified sprouts in our worm bin as well.)

Delicious basil!


Moving indoors: Here's the hydroponic garden at 11-12 weeks. It was fun to watch the tomatoes turn in four days.





We've had it nearly 12 weeks, and I've eaten most of the tomatoes in this picture. They were OK, but nothing like Sweet 100s from the Midwest, warm from the sun.

The hydroponic jalapeno plant is another story. Although I hand-pollinated all three plants dutifully, I've had all flowers and no fruit from the jalapeno.
Beautiful flowers, but no peppers. Feeling discouraged.

So greenzona=still good. Aerogarden=meh.

Gardening with Greenzona and the Aerogarden

One corner of our greenzona garden was planted from seed. Now we've got bean and melons!



This is happy basil corner! We've used our basil several times now.


Finally, the hydroponic garden at 10 1/2 weeks. Jalapenos and cherry tomatoes!