Sunday, March 17, 2024

Comission Changes in the Real Estate Market

Like most people I have a love-hate relationship with realtors.  I know a few personally, including family members who dabble, but my experience with realtors has been mostly negative because they either sucked or worked against my interests (realtors I knew always worked outside the state or region where I was buying so could never use a friend or relative).

That main problem with realtors - working against my interests - was when I was on the buying side because when you buy a house, you are not the client!  The realtor is being paid by the seller as a percentage of the sales price, so the realtor's interest is not aligned to the buyer, but to the seller with the highest priced house with the highest commission.  A realtor would rather put you in a $1M house with a 3% sellers commission, and not even show you the $800K one offering 2% to the selling agent.

This dynamic played out in my current home, which I found had all sorts of issues after I moved in.  The inspection report, from an inspector recommended by "my" agent, had outright lies, and my theory is the two agents paid off the inspector to give the house a clean bill of health so they would each collect their 3% from the seller.  By the time I figured this out the inspector had shut down his business, so I couldn't go after him, and the hassle of a lawsuit against the realtors or sellers was not worth it as it would take a lot of money and take a couple of years.  I ended up having to do a lot of work and spend a lot of money to fix problems that should have been called out in the inspection report. 

So besides declaring to never again trust a realtor to use "an inspector I've known for years who is great!", the other thing I decided that moving forward I would find a "buyers agent" that I would hire, and get out of the situation of the seller paying "my" realtor.  That way the person helping me with the house would be aligned to me, then I would find my own inspectors and any other third parties related to the sale.  But that model was actually hard to set up, until now.

Thanks to a settled lawsuit, my preferred model is what the real estate industry will start moving towards this summer:

Under the current rules, buyers typically don’t pay their own agents out of pocket. Going forward under the new system, buyers might have to foot the bill if they want an agent to represent them.

Starting in the summer, the new rules will require most home buyers to sign agreements detailing how much their agents will be paid for their services. If home sellers are unwilling to cover the cost of the buyer’s agent, these agreements would likely require the buyer to pay the agent directly.

The counter-arguments that buyers have to come out of pocket or can't roll the fees into the house financing run into the saying used for social media: if a service is "free" you are the product!  Basically the real estate industry has been ripping off buyers for years by aligning agents to only the sell-side of the street, so this this settlement is a welcome change to the industry dynamics, and look forward to using for my next real estate transaction.


Saturday, March 16, 2024

My Reverse Bucket List

I was already using the term "Reverse Bucket List" before a saw an article of the same name making the rounds (now can't find the link).  In this article the term meant something you wouldn't do again, but in my case it is a list of places I hope to die before ever having to go to:

1. Anywhere in Africa (before killing tourists became popular I would have seen Egypt).

2. India.  I guy I knew had to go to India on a technical project and brought a giant jar of peanut butter and box of crackers, and ate only that for three days.  He was okay and everyone else got violently ill.  And ask anyone who has been there about all the beggars.

3. China again.  The one exception to the list where I have been a few times, and outside the major cities it's $&%-hole.

4. New Jersey

As for things I would still like to see, I can't say I have an official bucket list.  I have been to a couple dozen countries, and have seen and done amazing things.  There is nothing left where I am thinking "I gotta do THAT".   But things that might interest me would be like a reboot of the show Booze Traveler:

1. Port tasting in Portugal

2. Scotch tasting in Scotland

3. Vodka tasting in Russia - I would like to see the Kremlin and St. Petersburg, but don't think tourism will open back up there for another decade or two, so a question of when Russian tourism will return versus my longevity.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Short Term T-Bills As a Good Investment

Wolfstreet confirms my investment strategy for the last six months of parking lots of cash into short term treasuries (T-Bills), or money markets that hold them and pay about the same.

I never bought into inflation coming down (I can see it with my own eyes), nor the Fed lowering interest rates multiple times this year (not for economic reasons anyway, politically they will be pressured to do one in an election year).  So I have lots of money in a ladder at 5.1-5.3% where one matures every month, which I just put it back into another T-Bill earning 5.1% or better.  Note I am in a high tax state so it would take a CD earning 5.5% or better to match a T-Bill.

The risk here is if I get caught with lowering interest rates then end up having to re-invest at a lower rate than if I had locked in a longer duration.  I am betting my own money that inflation isn't going anywhere and rates are not coming down.

My run-on sentence comment there:

I’ve been keeping a large pile in short terms and money markets that buy them since I never bought into the rate cut mania. I’ll make 5+ risk free all this year, just a question on when I lengthen duration, but won’t buy anything less than 5%, which I expect to happen further out the yield curve since inflation isn’t cooling and government spending keeps going through the roof.

Monday, March 11, 2024

So What Do I Do With My Old Blog?

Way back in 2003 I was working at a job with nothing to do (hence the term "Window Manager", from a Japanese phrase) and I was bored out of my mind.  Blogging was a New Thing 21 years ago, and I spent a lot of my spare time wandering around the Blogosphere.

One day I decided "I can do that!" and started my blog, naming it after how I was spending my time.

I really enjoyed it the first several years, and it became a part of my daily routine.   I posted mostly on business, economics, tech (where I work), and started wandering into politics.  I also put a lot of personal stories and details on the blog since most of my friends and family read it (remember this was before Facebook).  At its peak in the mid 2000s I had quite a bit of traffic, with hundreds of unique readers a day. I kept things mostly anonymous, but maybe someone with a lot of effort could figure out who I was. 

Several things lead me to ramp down and abandon it for years at a time.  Part of it of course was the rise of social media like Facebook and Twitter, which killed traditional blogging.  I also got busy with other things in life, and like many hobbies my interest simply waned.

A strong under-current was the rising Cancel Culture, and although I don't think I ever posted anything controversial to a normal person, one never knows what the HR gate keepers at potential employers might think.  So although I had abandoned the blog for years at a time, I did take the effort to delete most personal related posts.  Except the rant against Rice University stays public forever, the woke *%#$ers.   

Although my blog laid fallow I still read and commented at traditional blogs using the moniker "whatever" (yeah, whatever).  These blogs are getting fewer and narrower as more readers abandon long-form blogging for the quick dopamine fix of Twitter (sigh, I mean "X") and Facebook.  But I really enjoy (and of course don't always agree) with blogs listed on the right like The Z Man (alt right), The New Neo (moderate right), WolfStreet (economic, libertarian) and Mish (economic, left-center).  I also read daily but don't comment at Instapundit (a bit of everything from the moderate right), Ace (more of everything, further to the right) and Zero Hedge (economic with a dash of conspiracy theory).  Sadly American Digest will have no more posts, its talented writer Gerard Van der Leun passing away last year.

But starting by blog back up, my main question is: who would read it and why?  I don't think I have anything particularly new to say as every opinion can be found on the internet, even as repression has vastly increased.  I suppose I could be on the few people blogging about tinnitus?

I suppose "how" something is said can be different or more entertaining in a blog.  And some blogs have incredibly interesting comment communities, which are often more compelling than the original blog post.  I don't expect much commenting here, but will keep commenting at my usual locations and now link back and copy here if the comment is interesting or pertinent.

Fundamentally, however, I think a blog exists for the writer.  Even if no one ever reads it, it is an outlet for the author, basically a hobby.  And I think I need another one of those these days.


Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Demand Limited Economics

(Updated to Remove Missing Links)

From an article no longer on the web:

What has changed in recent decades is that the mobility and automation of productive processes, combined with a glut of the supply of financial capital, results in a macroeconomic production function that is demand-constrained rather than supply constrained.
I have walked through empty malls with miles and miles of goods stacked to the ceiling, and no one around to buy.  We have global over capacity, and for the economy to run (or at least not break down) governments have to get more people to soak up this excess capacity.  So we have these perverse effects:
  • The need for mass immigration, to create more consumers to buy crap
  • The push for broken households, who spend more and save less 
  • The push for more welfare and income distribution programs to create more buying
  • The push for ever increasing amounts of consumer debt
  • The push for ever more student loans
  • The push for people to buy houses who shouldn't (yes, it's happening again)
  • Ever increasing levels of government debt and monetary devaluation
The global economy is in a giant debt trap.  If consumers stopped buying the whole house of cards would come down. 



Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Let's Ban Gas Leaf Blowers

One of the fun side effects of tinnitus for a large portion of suffers is hyperacusis, which is increased sensitivity to sound.  It's not bad enough that there is constant ringing or whooshing in the ear, what sounds you do hear seem louder than they are and can actually be physically painful.

And one of the most annoying, painful sounds is gas leaf blowers.  There are no house walls or windows thick enough that can block the sound.  I am a climate skeptic, but like most who push it, I am willing to sign on in order to push an agenda (and ignore it for stuff that I like to do).

According to the State of California, gas powered leaf blowers and hedgers will pass cars to become the number one polluter in 2020.  Politicians rail on everything from cars to planes to cut down pollution, but for some reason no one ever talks about leaf blowers and other 2-stroke gardening tools (which mix oil with gas for fuel), all of which have quieter electric counter-parts. 

If we are in a 12 year crisis, as claimed by many, how come nothing is being done with these devices that generate not only the most pollution, but unwanted noise?  How come politicians are pushing regulations for more electric cars but not more electric gardening tools, which would provide more bang for the regulatory buck?

Several California cities have banned gas leaf blowers, and I hope the trend picks up, but it is infuriating to hear "green, green, green" but no one has suggested this very simple, big solution. Instead you have the idiot Deblaseo talking about banning skyscrapers or the FAA "NextGen" rules creating noise nightmares in order to save a few pennies of jetfuel per flight.

It goes to show that "climate change" is BS.

Friday, May 24, 2019

Americans Don't Have Savings by Choice

These stories come out every few months: Almost 40% of Americans Would Struggle to Cover a $400 Emergency

What Americans don't have to struggle to pay for: big screen TVs, ipads, expensive tennis shoes, Starbucks, streaming TV services, cellphone service, legalized marijuana, and everything else in this mass consumer society.

No one is saying "Hey, we should cut off our cable and Netflix, which cost $100 a month, and check out free library books for the next four months so we can save $400 for an emergency".

Few people live below their means, or are willing to sacrifice to do so.  Mass debt shoveled at everyone means relatively poor families max out the cards for that Disney vacation.  Gratification now, and worry about paying later.

The lack of savings is just a reflection of debt-fueled mass consumption encouraged not only by corporations, but by the government.


Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Goodby Rice University


My kid who has straight As, a 1530 SAT, speaks two languages fluently, plays sports, and did summer internships in Japan and Ukraine was rejected from my alma mater Rice University.  Worse than that, it was also my mother’s alma mater.  My mother was one of only 100 women at the whole university when she attended in the late 1950s, and was the first in her family ever to attend college. She was a major reason I attended Rice for both a bachelors and an MBA, and this rejection was a spit in both of our faces.  It shows the admissions office is divorced from Rice’s own history and driving their own agenda.

This along with the college bribery scandal shows college admissions is irreparably broken.  Kids who shouldn’t get in are admitted.  Kids who should be admitted are not, in this case probably due to an anti-legacy effort, or because my daughter is not “diverse” enough.  I have no doubt at all she would have been accepted if the ethnicity box were checked differently. She is an honor student, and I was not some alum hoping for “legacy” to dump my C-student onto my old school.

Over the years I have gotten fellow alumni jobs.  Not job leads, but jobs.  Students often reached out to me over LinkedIn for internship leads since I am one of very few alumni working in Silicon Valley.  In the early 2000s I did a marketing project for a group of professors who were trying to spin out a technology.  A few years earlier I had connected my father’s company to hire a Rice professor for a consulting project.  

Despite over 50 years of family connection and my staying involved, Rice decided to cut ties with me while at the same time letting in dozens of foreign students with no ties at all, and who will all drop all ties to Rice once they return home.

Rice has a frighteningly small number of alumni – they graduate in ten years what or Texas A&M or UCLA does in two years – and should be nurturing their network, not alienating it. But like the foreign students will do once they are out, I will now be cutting all ties with Rice.  No job leads.  No internship leads.  Applications or resumes listing Rice go to the bottom of the pile.  Students can’t find me on LinkedIn since Rice is deleted from my profile. My own networking efforts will not be hindered since there are so few Rice alumni in my field.  I was a pathfinder. 

And after all, why would I help a university that wouldn’t accept me as a student if I were applying today?

Sunday, May 19, 2019

WSJ Not Understanding What the "Crisis in Democracy" Is All About

It's more than a little ironic that an article lamenting about a crisis of democracy turned off commenting.

Unfortunately the author was not talking about democracy here in the US.  No, he is worried that it is not being exported enough throughout the world.  I don't particularly care about that as I watch our own democracy crumble (like the author I am using "democracy" interchangeably with "republic").

One of the problems is that an increasing number of people believe no one is listening to them, like the comment section above.  And if no one is listening, people will go to greater and greater lengths to be heard.

Of course Western "democracies" are cracking down ever more on speech, a result of multiculturalism.  The more MC there is, the more the population and its speech has to be controlled.

In New Zealand, it is illegal to even possess the manifesto of the recent mass shooter, and they are activity prosecuting several who distributed the video.  In England, criticizing the make-up or religion of immigrants can lead to fines and jail time.   The idea of using the state to enforce and prosecute “hate speech” was signed on by most Western democracies just last week.

And with increasing control of speech in "democracies", aided and abetted by Google, Twitter and Facebook, why would anyone think "democracy", as it is developing today, is better than other forms of government?