Einzige

As someone who skews heavily Extropian, I tend to be very optimistic about the future. This, in spite of being brought up by a paranoid (though otherwise intelligent) guy who always seemed convinced that a catastrophic economic collapse was imminent. In the '80s it was hyperinflation and thermonuclear war. In the '90s it was Bankruptcy 1995, followed by Y2k. Nowadays it's global warming (somehow we've managed to skirt around the issue of Peak Oil). All the parental paranoia helped to cultivate in me a healthy skepticism (though it got to me just enough to unfortunately keep me out of the stock market for far longer than I should have been). So, my optimistic/skeptical attitude has been keeping me up-beat about the real estate market in Phoenix - at least until recently. Given the way things have been going - neatly summarized by the two graphs on the right - a combination of factors now have me a little worried about the next year or so, at least. As I have argued elsewhere, Phoenix housing prices are too high. There's no reason to buy houses when you can rent them for a lot cheaper (and you thus can't make any money with them as investment properties, either). As you can see from the Appreciation graph above, even though houses are overpriced, as of the last data point on the graph we were still seeing a 10% appreciation over last year. Even the quarter-over-quarter line is still in the positive. I have to believe that we're going to be seeing a strong reversal of that trend in the coming months--or else we'll see whatever drove that crazy spike (in the second graph above) manifesting itself in some other area of the economy. Then there are those pesky notices of foreclosure [in the graph below, the blue line is monthly notices, while the orange line is the yearly moving average]. In spite of the fact that, according to some analysts, we haven't seen most of the interest-only ARMs kick into their higher payments, yet, we're already seeing an alarming uptick in notices of foreclosure (an indicator of people who've already been in serious financial difficulty for at least 5-6 months). February saw a total of 1577 trustee sale notices filed. That's off a bit from January's 1623, but when you consider that January had 21 business days for recording documents, against only 19 for February, there really was no slow down at all. In fact, as you can see from this graph, February 2007 had the highest average daily recordings (83/day) of all months for which I have data. It beat out January of '03 by 0.24 recordings/day. If the trend continues then this month should see over 1900! This may be good news for all the mythical short sale foreclosure investors, but it's bad news for pretty much everybody else. Historical Comments Einzige (2007-03-15): We're at the halfway point of the month and our current tally is 794.It would seem that 1588 trustee sale notices for March would be a safe bet. Not a record, but certainly an outlier. ...

Are neo-conservatives really this humor-impaired? This show comes off like something Kevin Trudeau should be involved with, somehow. Lippard (2007-02-17): How bit, with Rush Limbaugh as president of the United States and Anne Coulter as vice president? Lippard (2007-02-17): That was supposed to say "how about this bit." Einzige (2007-02-17): Neo-Conservatives ARE humor-impaired!How is Anne Coulture saying what she actually believes (or at least purports to believe) made funny in any way by imagining her saying it as vice president? ...

It’s been two months since my last update of Maricopa County’s Notices of Trustee’s Sales. January’s 1623 notices didn’t beat the past 145 months’ record high of 1738, like I initially thought they would. However, before you go shouting such fantastic news from the rooftops, you should know that 1623 is the second highest number. Here are the latest descriptive statistics: Trustee’s Sale Notices Mean917.2Median811Mode746Standard Deviation296.35814Range1256Minimum482Maximum1738Sum132994Count145 Since I started compiling this data I’ve noticed a sharp uptick in real estate gurus trying to sell info on the latest real estate investment fad: the “Short Sale” - a technique designed to get around the problem that most of the defaulting mortgages behind these sad numbers are less than 2 years old, and thus are tied to properties with zero equity. I’ll probably write a little more about this technique at some point over at Die Eigenheit. I promise to update this post as necessary.

A bit of an update from my post in May where I asked “Is there really a housing bubble?” Although I wasn’t completely convinced then, I think it’s getting a lot more difficult to question the evidence now. The graph below chronicles Maricopa County’s Trustee Sale Notices over the past 11 years. The blue line is the monthly count. As you can see, this number is pretty variable from month to month, so I’ve included the orange line, which is a 1-year moving average. Presumably it’s a better indicator of trends. ...

I plugged all the previous data into Excel and generated this graph: I wonder what happened in December and early January. The trend is amazingly linear, otherwise. When do we start considering Phoenix a buyer’s market? Now? When inventory hits 6oK? When the trend shows clear signs it has reversed? As I said in the comments to the previous housing inventory post, I think I want to start making lowball offers when I get back there!

To many, the housing bubble seems a foregone conclusion. Uncountable blogs devoted to the bubble give the impression that you must be crazy or stupid to not see it. In spite of this, I remain unconvinced. I’m not even sure I know what the “housing bubble” is. Here is a working definition: …that housing prices have been pushed well beyond any semblance of reasonableness and the dictates of healthy market fundamentals due to excessive liquidity, extremely relaxed lending standards, a speculative mania, and the increasingly irresponsible “cheerleading” of vested interests.Endless scary graphs, like this one, which shows Phoenix appreciation rates over the past 30 years, seem to bear this out. Nonetheless, I am left with questions. For example, who decides what price is “reasonable”? What standard should we use? Value is entirely subjective. Price, being a function of value plus ability to pay, can seem “unreasonable” to some, but “very reasonable” to others. The only one that matters, though, is the person who actually buys—and who, in so doing, reveals his opinion that the price is “reasonable.” Where is the evidence of a “speculative mania”? You can’t simply point to the recent rapid appreciation rates and say, “See?”, because that’s assuming what you’re trying to prove. What evidence I’ve seen for this has been sparse and unconvincing, so far. Of course I could be wrong, and we could be on the precipice of the largest housing price decline in history. Unfortunately we’ll only know in retrospect. The charge of “excessive liquidity” and “relaxed lending standards” also rings hollow to me. Now, it seems certain that the amount of borrowing taking place has increased significantly, but that could be caused by any number of things. Why does this automatically mean that lenders have become “extremely relaxed” with their money—which I presume means they’ve suddenly become willing to lend to any fiscally irresponsible idiot, as long as he has a heartbeat? This seems a testable hypothesis to me. If such an explanation were true, wouldn’t you expect to see foreclosure actions increase over time, as the bad debtors began defaulting on their loans? When debtors default on their loans, lenders need to provide public notice of the impending sale of the property. These notices get recorded at the county recorders office, usually in the form of a Notice of Trustee’s Sale. In order for a lender to record a Notice of Trustee’s Sale, a borrower has to be at least 90 days late on her mortgage payments. Luckily, Maricopa County makes these records easy to obtain. This graph shows data I’ve compiled from the Maricopa County Recorders office. The blue line is the number of Notices of Trustee’s Sales per month, over the past 11 years. The dotted red line is a 3-month moving average. What does this graph tell us? My first impression is that it’s easy to see evidence of the 2001 tech bubble, but, if anything, Maricopa County seems to have recovered from that, as the average number of notices has returned to 1996ish levels. Admittedly this one graph is hardly a death-blow to the idea of the bubble, but I believe it’s important to take note of it, if for nothing else, then at least as a caution against our tendency to succumb to Chicken-Littleism and confirmation bias. ...

Over at Multipolarity Memes there’s a post about a short (though large), 3D-rendered, animation of a hypothetical nanofactory. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no expert at this stuff, but I did take some intermediate chemistry and physics classes in college, so the animation immediately raises a number of questions in my mind; viz.: At that size, can they realistically assume that the envisioned structures will be as rigid as they make them out to be? What about Brownian motion? What about transfer of heat—especially given that there are, presumably, chemical reactions taking place, and these reactions will involve energy transfers? What type of bonding is happening at the transfer points? Chemical reactions don’t happen magically—and they don’t happen without some energy input or energy release—neither of which are being obviously represented in the video. It’s a pretty fantasy, but how realistic is it, really? ...

If the online trailer is any guide, then Special looks like it will be a pretty good–though cringe-inducing–film. I can’t find a release date anywhere, though. UPDATE by Jim Lippard (August 2, 2009): Looks like it never saw theatrical release, but I just watched it on Netflix-on-Demand via TiVo HD. It was pretty good–not fantastic, and indeed occasionally cringe-inducing, but far better than many films that make it to the theaters.

Via Steve’s No Direction Home Page: Apparently presidential wiretapping is frowned upon–when it’s done by Clinton. Some of the reader comments are hilarious, viz.: “Any chance of Bush rolling some of this back?" “As quietly as possible (although it sometimes breaks out into the open, usually with the sound of gunfire and the death of innocents), a “shadow government” has been set up all around us my friend. It’s foundation is not the constitution, but Executive Orders, Presidential Procalamations, Secret Acts, and Emergency Powers." “This is wherein the danger lies in the precedent set by the Clinton criminal administration. God only knows who will be in power next, but there are no checks and balances anymore. This is exactly the SORT of thing I’ve been protesting all along. Libs just don’t see this!" ...

Maureen, of “Fucktard” fame, was apparently exposed by Justin, at fifteen minutes, as a college student at WVU, and not the poor uneducated woman she claimed to be. By all appearances, she has deleted the Dying in Christ blog and her own Blogger profile. Justin just posted this (off-topic) comment about it over at Die Eigenheit: I mainly posted those ones you found at the other site, asking her what they were about and why she swore so much. She deleted them, saying I had blasphemed the holy spirit, so I reposted them… asking if WVU had a policy about using their computers to spread hate speech and the like.She told me she didn’t go to WVU, I was clearly wrong and that she “was too old” to go to “university” and blamed the profanity-laced comments on the other blog on “Zach” whom had already apologized for doing such naughty things. I told her they weren’t possibly from Zach (or he’s the smartest 12 year old in the world), and then within a half-hour… the whole thing was gone. I don’t know about anyone else, but as I sit here and laugh hysterically, contemplating Maureen’s accusation that Justin blasphemed the Holy Spirit, I have to admit that I’m going to miss the old broad. UPDATE: It appears that we are witness to a resurrection, as Dying In Christ has been reincarnated as a blog “intended to start reflecting a more Unitarian/Universalist or a Secular Humanist point of view. More to follow :)”. Sounds like it won’t be quite so funny, though. ...