For the unfamiliar: “negative equity” is a situation where people owe more on their mortgages than their property is worth. Those in the USA, UK and Japan are quite familiar with the term with over one-fifth of US mortgages in negative equity since their real estate market went kaput.

Pro property gambling media

The Sydney Morning Herald (and other Australian media) is very pro-property. Unsurprising really as they rake in a lot of cash from glossy real estate advertising. An article “Bubble-burst fears rise” is somewhat strange in amongst the business-as-usual real estate spruiking. There have, in the past, been articles proclaiming half of sydney siders would be millionaires thanks to property doubling though as one blogger points out the absurdity:

Maybe the illusive dream of six zeros is within reach for all people around the world. All you have to do is borrow a million dollars. The fact that you owe the money to the bank isn’t relevant. According to news.com, you are still a millionaire!

I know the trick to becoming rich that none of these people do: real estate!

Another guy lost a bet to walk to the snowy mountains because the Government whipped out the best of all artificial price inflationary devices: the new home-owner’s grant. Basically this was a tax payer funded leap of people who hadn’t been able to save for a house or pass the necessary financial criteria into the real estate speculation game. Was it designed to increase the supply of new houses, new developments etc? Nope, not really. It was a chunk of money that went straight to banks, real estate agents and lawyers for the exchange of existing property (it did give more to new property, but let’s face it: in urban areas there’s not many spare blocks awaiting a new house). Additionally we had reductions in state revenue via stamp duty concessions and a bunch of people scamming the system for an investment property (“Oh, of course I live there..”). That decision to inflate the cost of existing houses was money that we as society were taking away from hospitals, schools, police, fire, universities etc in order to fuel a real estate boom.

Some unofficial free (non-financial adviser) financial advice*

Call me crazy, but I still cling to the idea that you shouldn’t buy shit you can’t afford. If you can’t afford it then.. wait for it.. Don’t fucking buy it! If you need to get a loan make sure you look at the historical rates and factor in some slack and money to still eat.

If you can’t afford it then at least do the political process a fair deal and not whinge when your foray into the world of debt fuelled real estate gambling doesn’t pay off.

If you are only able to get into real estate at the lowest interest rates in 20 something years and rates typically sit at double that (and have gone as high as 18-19%) then perhaps you should just save for a while longer or go with another plan. Asking a bank or someone making a commission from a bank as to whether you can afford a particular loan and them saying “yes, of course” is like asking the wolf whether he can mind the chicken coop.

* should not be taken as actual financial advice. I may work for a bank, but I have no formal credentials in this space whatsoever.. Purely interested in the topic from a rant point of view.

The spin can spin
It’s ok, the Sydney Morning Herald and other newspapers can go from inflating the bubble via puff piece real estate hype to handy guides on “dealing with negative equity” and “cooking gruel for the mortgage stressed”.
Perhaps “The reality of debt obsessed society” or “see, real estate prices DO go down”?
Either way I’d lay money we will we keep getting terms like “hardship” and “endure” used to describe people’s voluntary debt-to-the-eyeballs situation. I even had a religious workmate compare mortgages to slavery from biblical time. Such is the horrendous injustice foisted upon the public by evil banks dangling mortgages in front of people with future millionaire property mogul aspirations.

But Australia’s situation is special
Oh we’re special alright, just “needs to be told not to hit self in head with a brick daily” special. We’ve got the world’s most overpriced property, but that doesn’t mean a thing apparently.

Fight club quote on the matter.

We’ll continue to hear that unlike every other real estate bubble (US, UK, Japan etc) Australia is DIFFERENT, we’re UNIQUE. We’ll hear how it’s not crazy that people are paying a million bucks for a junkie infested rats’ nest, or an $800K “bargain” for living next to a toxic waste dump. Don’t worry about the toxic waste dump because soon you’ll just get another mortgage on a slightly better place once you’ve built up enough equity in your current place. *slaps head* Of course! Two mortgages on this notion of price increase gambling must be twice as safe as having just one.

Oh, of course we’ve got immigration.

The redneck approach to immigration control. Also funnily enough what the real estate industry is saying effectively with their "shortage of 200-300,000 houses" garbage.

That whole “big Australia” concept and some very dubious sounding “Shortage of 200,000 houses” (now 300K I saw somewhere, or just rounding up?) that keeps getting thrown into articles. Where did that number come from? If this was the homeless figure: perhaps. If it’s the number of people thinking of buying or who would like to buy: that’s a bullshit figure. Outside the unfortunate Asian students getting rorted by dodgy landlords stuffing them 3 or 4 to a room in the high-rises around Chinatown in Sydney I think density of living is pretty low in Sydney at least. I know of lots of people with spare rooms or a couple in a 2 or 3 bedroom flat that could quite easily move someone in if rental prices rose too much.

Never mind Sydney (and other places) have got a tonne of “kidults” (adult age, but never left home and don’t tend to pay bills, proper rent etc) perpetually living at home because they think that to move out of home they MUST buy a property (in amongst their instant CEO position at their first job). That’ll somewhat dent any future profits having to pay food, electricity etc for your useless 35 year old kidult sponging off you until you die.

The future?

Well, the USA has pioneered the concept of a “strategic default on mortgage“, I’m not sure that’s as much of an option in Australia because you can’t just put the keys in the mail (“jingle mail”) to the bank and walk away.

If we get higher interest rates perhaps that will make saving more attractive.  Those of us with savings currently are enjoying our 6 something percent returns on savings accounts that we can withdraw in a day or two (versus 6 months +) when needed or investing in the stock market (which at least has the honesty of an investment choice able to acknowledge it goes down on occasion). The sooner we start affording people the same tax advantages as negative gearing the better: we might get away from burying ourselves in debt.

As a thought for the future: it’d be nice if people were pouring money into research/development rather than property. Or banks devoting more time to business loans instead of housing mortgages (as one NAB banker said recently).

If ever there was “dead money” as far as the history of mankind is concerned it’s buying and selling land to keep up with the Joneses. Inventing things, solving the problems of the world: now there’s money that’s doing something.

Ceiling cat approves of the non scripture option.

But now we have the hope of a more structured approach to learning (something other than taking the vent off the air-con ducting): the NSW trial of an “ethics course” alternative to scripture. Or as I like to refer to it “the long overdue first death nail in the coffin of religious indoctrination in public schools”.

What happens currently in Scripture

Well, I’ve outlined a some of my thoughts in an earlier post: Letter to Dept. of Education about Scripture. But basically scripture is an unfiltered vomiting of religious garbage in government funded, supposedly secular schools. While mostly offering a Christian denomination (picked by the head master/mistress), some offer a choice to parents.

The people presenting this have somewhere between zero and some training, not usually qualified teachers or even particularly well read people (beyond their own book of religion). I guess the lord is guiding them through their poorly controlled, poorly planned and poorly executed classes.

Parents have to write a letter if they want to avoid inflicting it on their children and the only non religious option (in our government secular schools I remind you) is to have kids sitting around doing nothing (I believe they are now at least supervised.. so no stress testing the tensile strength of aircon ducting attachments these days).

In the actual classes (which, if you’re Jewish and go to one particular school I heard about from teachers:kids have to paydonate sufficient amounts to be allowed in.. scumbags!) children are made to:

• say prayers or go through rituals of the religion,
• state they believe in God/Jesus etc and
• presented teachings of the religion as absolute fact
• fed all manner of information while the teachers hover around and try to keep order (because this routine is exactly the same as the previous session kids are bored shitless).

Kids naturally see the gaping holes in what’s been said and are only given childish answers in response. Teachers are unable to assure children that there’s no basis for the beliefs and it’s all reliant on having faith despite no evidence.

The results so far..

Best case scenario they just switch off, worst: they go home with the belief that someone is constantly watching them and has a long list of things they’re quite likely to be tortured in fire for all eternity. BUT they’re assured there’s a way out of that: just ask Jesus for forgiveness and believe in him.

Note: Kids at young ages still believe the Easter bunny is real, so when a grown up makes arguments from authority in a place of learning, they tend to believe them.

A little something I hacked up from a wallpaper from Sydney Anglicans. Jesus deserved bunny ears and the atheists deserved backup.

Hell, I almost went away thinking that if I just had enough faith I could walk on water (like the idiotic story we were told).

Other kids go away worried they’re going to hell if they don’t get baptised with magic water or punished for merely thinking something heretical.

Do kids get an ethical basis for dealing with strange situations? No, absolute morals (what little they teach) are always going to fall over in the grey areas. In amongst the good stuff (which is found outside the religions from earlier philosophers) there are damaging concepts and absurdities that contradict everything the kids are taught outside that hour or two.

I’ll concede something to the current approach: it does teach some kids a very important lesson: that religion is boring as hell, its followers often a little weird and that religion doesn’t make much sense.

So what happened on the 20th of April 2010?

A secular (despite the religious sounding name) mob from the St James Ethics Centre (and Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations of NSW) have developed an actual curriculum (unlike the “show up with a bible and wing it” that seems the norm) for discussing ethics and it had its first run through in front of kids.

This article gives an idea of the way the class would have operated:

Associate Professor Philip Cam, of the University of NSW, developed the curriculum and conducted the training workshop. Cam is an expert in philosophical and ethical inquiry for children, and recently co-authored guidelines on incorporating ethical behaviour for the draft national curriculum.

The two-day workshop was run in classroom mode, replicating the methods to be used when it is introduced to classrooms this week. Volunteers were seated in a circle and needed to have possession of the speaker’s ball before commenting. ”No put-downs” was also part of the rules.

Cam stressed that it was not the role of the volunteer ”teacher” to ethically instruct the children, but rather explore ethical ideas and facilitate a discussion among members of the class. Good listening, an awareness of when to intervene, and a light touch would be necessary.

He warned against buying into the discussion, as that could change the dynamic in the room and students would be listening for the ”right” answer.

”It is about dealing with kids making reasoned judgements, the business of thought. And learning to be reasonable with people you disagree with, not attacking them, and providing reasons as to why you disagree,” Cam says.

Now unlike this snooty moral high ground ethics course I don’t have a “no put down” rule on my blog (and I can hold my own balls when I want to talk on it). Perhaps that’s because instead of doing this ethics course I was twiddling my thumbs in the library.

I’ll happily call (and rationally defend calling it) what the churches have offered largely a useless pile of shit. It was when I went through school and teachers I’ve talked to think it is the same today.

Compare their offering which is person turns up, reads some fairy-tales which are presented as fact. If ethics even comes up (which is a bit if with all the time taken talking fairy-tales and praying to sky-gods): Kids are not encouraged to develop their own ethics if they step outside the drone’s interpretation of what their book says.

Gods views: Strangely indistinguishable from your own.

It’s certainly not a case of religious instructor indoctrinator avoiding buying into the discussion or avoiding changing the dynamic of the room: that’s exactly why they’re there to imprint young minds before they learn to question things too hard.

Why the churches are shit scared of this Ethics course

Churches love scripture in public schools, it gives them a very young, largely gullible audience on which to peddle their wares and slow their flock’s decline (if the census reports are anything to go by religion is dying). Without it they immediately lose access to imprint the idea that god exists from 2/3rds of the population and I suspect they realise that means a massive increase in the “no religion” group.

Given their revenue stream (e.g. necessary to keep the pope in gold bling, bullet proof cars and castles) often depends on poor saps believing that God wants them to give up X percent of their income to these paedophile harbouring rich beyond belief scumbags (ok, I’m picking on the catholic church here): they’re worried they won’t make quite as much tax free money to further promote their religion. Plus it’s pretty cost effective going after kids in schools.

If kids actually discuss ethics in a matter of fact way amongst their piers they’ll learn a bunch of things hopefully:

• ethics and morals are created by people (even kids!)
• there are many different ways of justifying different behaviours (equality, self interest etc)
• exploring ideas yourself is much more satisfying than hearing religious books regurgitated
• the act of considering all of the above gives you a framework to handle new situations

These lessons make it quite tough for religious indoctrination. A healthy scepticism in kids? Worst nightmare for religious “teachers”.

Realising this the religious leaders are lobbying hard behind the scenes because if they lose this they’ll lose the “by default” crowd and be left with the same lot they already have for sunday school. People will also get to see that the world will not implode: in fact perhaps less people will be seeking the comfort that religion often gives in a world torn apart by religion. Just imagine! If kids have a well developed sense of morality on which to test run their decisions against: perhaps crime/anti-social behaviour etc might fall.

Religious leaders want right to censor/restrict the course

What really gets me mad about recent articles is that these religious leaders demand rights to censor/vet the secular ethics course. I don’t recall the Catholic church allowing Muslims to dictate what they teach kids. Or perhaps a bit on Xenu from our friendly scientologists would go well with the zombie Jesus story?

Uniting the causes..

Where’s my say as a secularist/humanist/atheist in their dealings?

For a start I’d rewrite some bits in the interests of harmony (and if you’re going to tell a crazy story, at least put some time travel in it!):

Lost and Heros did it to make things a bit more crazy.

Back on track: So basically they want to keep their stranglehold over access to children and want to remove the choice. One particular knob end (Fred Nile.. that’s not a put down for him really if you have been following his trail of fail over the years.. homophobic, sexist, racist etc voids his right to be described politely) type reckons he was given assurances the course would only be offered to those who have already opted out! Why would one set of kids get the offer and not another?

Fred Nile: WTF! How about we only let religious stuff be taught to those enrolled in sunday school? Or those who can recite the bible from memory perhaps (to prove they are actually Christian already)

Fred Nile and other religious leaders involved in this “not in MY school’s religious time” whinge: what you’re advocating there raises some ethical questions. Or perhaps you need to ask the St James ethical centre what “ethics” means?

Firstly you’ve brokered some sort of back room deal to suit your own completely out of whack morals to the exclusion of others and then you aren’t in any way giving concession to non Christians.  Secondly where’s the fairness in your model: you provide one viewpoint, so do the other religions therefore it’s natural that you can expect a secular one. To be honest your version of ethics hasn’t worked out too well in the past and present so perhaps you should keep your gob shut.

What is next (in the ethics course)

Here’s the list of topics for the course. Notice no need for fairy-tales and prayers (although perhaps the ethics of lying to children like that might come up):

• Getting started
• Fairness
• Lying
• Ethical principles
• Graffiti
• The use and abuse of animals
• Interfering with nature
• Virtues and vices
• Children’s rights
• The good life

I like to think I base my ethical framework on fairness (the good old “fair go” policy). It seems to me to be an important part of empathising if you can put yourself in other shoes and consider whether you’d like it. This idea has been around far before any of the bunch in scripture scrawled it down. It’s an intuitive concept. I’m glad it’s topic number two, because consideration of it is important across any situation. Sure they might get that from the bible (in amongst the praying, outsourcing to scape goat, loving enemies, praising men willing to sacrifice their children etc) but it certainly isn’t necessary to read the bible to get this. Any number of philosophers or earlier now dead religions had this message. There’s also a cost associated to almost any action, which is something worth considering.

There’s a section on lying, I guess if religious leaders want their material in there it can go under there as a case study in lying. Could also do the topical “religious scandal of the day” where kids discuss whatever the latest stupid Muslim Cleric or Idiot Christian pope has said and to what degree of poor ethical base it comes from.

I’d be interested in knowing where “the good life” discussions would go with a group of kids and the children’s rights would also be interesting. The Church leaders complaining about this course obviously don’t understand that with freedom of religion (essential for them to stay employed) there’s also freedom FROM religion. “No religion” is an equally supported stance under our constitution.

Really, the whole thing is damned interesting I really wish this programme had kicked off a hundred years ago. Never mind, that’s what late night discussions at the pub or BBQ are for I guess, but this is one thing that kids starting early would be great for society.

* Well, we sent a guy called Arron up into the vent as he was most keen. I believe someone blabbed later which cemented the non scripture group as agents of the devil and untrustworthy. Although I do recall something about our off the street local churchie scripture teacher being later embroiled in some sort of child abuse accusation (something which I actually was pretty upset hearing that the accusation was floating around as he seemed like a nice man, albeit spouting rubbish.. anyhow.. Note: I have no idea what happened, could have been baseless or just a rumour or the guy could be in jail now, I dunno..) Yes, we in the unsupervised non scripture group were the untrustworthy ones of course because we were bored and locked in a tiny room with nothing to do.

Not about a particular person, I'd be here all year filling these out!

Pretty big industry this tax evasion thing.

Let's be clear: negative gearing robs taxpayers and feeds bank profits.

Have my doubts it'll be fixed.. But..

Wonder whether they'll actually look into it?

Hope it gets a chuckle from someone at the ATO.. 

The letter: Re: Scripture should not be taught in Government schools.

To Whom it may concern,
As it has been a concern of mine for a long time now: I’d like to ask is there any reason why we are still allowing religious people into public schools for the purposes of promoting their religion? I would have thought this would have ceased a long time ago.

It must NOT be opt-out requiring permission from parents, it must be a special opt in with strict syllabus if it is allowed at all. Having it opt out (with no material/alternative instruction) makes it seem like the parent is skipping an important aspect of their education to let their kid run around doing nothing.

The Education Act

From the Education Act, Section 30 – “Secular instruction”
“In government schools, the education is to consist of strictly non-sectarian and secular instruction. The words secular instruction are to be taken to include general religious education as distinct from dogmatic or polemical theology.”

I’m not sure at what point this got missed when Christian scripture in public schools was deemed to be the default choice and a secular education required parents to object in writing. I would think parents can assume that there will be no default religious element whatsoever (or else they would have sent them to a religious school surely?). In the several schools I’ve got knowledge of it is expected that parents either fill in a form and in some cases provide written and/or face to face justification for their reasons for not wanting religious indoctrination.

Referring to Section 32 of the act:
“Children attending a religious education class are to be separated from other children at the school while the class is held.”
The language of this implies that they will be a minority, not the default choice with the “non scripture” group left to fend for themselves as it is currently. Currently the process is that those “opting out” are separated grudgingly from the religious class.

Content of Religious instruction

Assuming nothing substantial has changed in the religious types since I was growing up: it was nothing more than Christian indoctrination. A bit of investigation (discussion a teacher friend and several parents of infants/primary school age children) and the recent media attention reveals it has not changed. In particular parents are regularly upset at some of the messages (e.g. “You’ll go to hell for not believing in Jesus” or “I’m not baptised and I’m worried I’m going to hell”) they come home with. It appears that these concerns are not raised to the department level and are referred to the church bodies (sounds just like how allegations of child abuse are handled in the Catholic church), thus hiding the many instances of inappropriate messages delivered by (unqualified to teach) religious people.

There is also a school where Jewish religious people are demanding “donations” from children or else the kids are not allowed to return (several parents expressed concern over this.. with little action to immediately terminate any arrangement with those religious groups). This effectively turns our secular schools into a fund raising activity as well as an indoctrination opportunity.

Anti-discrimination policies violated by religious teachings

It appears to me to be a violation of the department’s policies to be allowing some of the teachings of religions which contain anti-gay, anti-other religions, anti-non believer content with a clear message that they will be tortured for eternity just for being themselves or thinking differently from a 1500, 2000 or 3000 year old set of stories.

One can find ample evidence that the reason we have to have a policy on homophobia is thanks to religious prejudices. Imagine the position of a child who is gay (or who has gay parents) sitting in on a lesson on what biblical sin is, or a child who does not believe in God and told that (contrary to our justice system) their punishment will be torture and hell fire. Or just any child presented with the Orwellian notion that they are under constant surveillance and constant evaluation of thoughts for “thought crime”.
That’s to say nothing of the incest, mass murder, slavery, genocide and other barbaric concepts contained within the bible making it unsuitable study material to be presented to young impressionable children as if it were fact or a source of good morals.

Church is the appropriate venue

It’s fairly obvious that if parents wish their children to be indoctrinated as Christians then they have an obvious avenue: Church. As Muslims: the Mosque. As Jews: the Synagogue. That scripture is opt-out (an option which only became available part way through my experiences) rather than opt-in (with no teaching time filling the gap) is particularly worrying. Parents are faced with having their children sitting idle or else in the company of people filling their heads with Christian mythology presented as facts. I can’t imagine other religions getting as easy a ride either (the recent outrage over Scientology in schools and certainly I haven’t heard of Islamic/Hindi content in scripture provided alongside Christianity in every school). I certainly haven’t heard of any attempts to introduce a humanist or ancient Greek philosophical moral lessons.

Of little educational value

When I was a child and subjected to the local “Churchies” attempting to convert us, there was no attempt whatsoever to take an impartial stand, consider other religions or provide reasonable answers to childishly simple questions. It was also never varied: always a Christian viewpoint presented as fact. It was merely an opportunity to force the kids to go through the motions of Christianity (making kids say prayers, recite verses etc).

Given the completely unsubstantiated claims made (that even I as a young child could see) it seems somewhat at odds with our secular, rational, fact based based curriculum.

The classes presented absurdities (“If only you had enough faith you could walk on water” which as a child I actually took as something plausible for a while) through to the most abhorrent immoral lessons imaginable (“A father prepared to slaughter his son for god was a noble thing”). They were there to make stone age arguments from authority and to instil a guilt at the “thought crime” of doubting the patently unbelievable stories presented as fact in a government school.

The strong message was that God absolutely exists, doubting that is a sin, accepting Jesus is the only way to heaven and that eternal torture awaits those who have heard of Christianity and rejected it. This is a very damaging concept to be polluting the minds of children with and unlike other material in the syllabus: absolutely no evidence to back it up. Might as well teach alchemy rather than chemistry, astrology rather than astronomy.

Qualifications of religious people to teach children

From the reports of the real teachers the educational abilities of the scripture “teachers” are often rather poor. Classroom behaviour is not maintained at any sort of acceptable level with the teachers having to step in to keep the peace (perhaps because the students realise the ridiculousness of the material presented).

There’s also absolutely no reason for religion to be taught by unqualified religious types (who as recent news stories have shown have a rather bad track record with respect to child molestation) rather than as a general topic on religion (not taught from the viewpoint of one within the religion). If a broad topic on religion is to be taught in school it MUST be from outside the religion and by those qualified to teach children. To allow anything else is pure religious indoctrination, not education. That teachers are currently unable to voice any opinion on religion even to console distressed students (“no, actually you aren’t evil because you don’t believe in Jesus”, “you shouldn’t worry about being constantly watched 24/7″ or perhaps later on “the pope is wrong on condoms and that position has increased the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa”) and the scripture “teachers” can say whatever they like.

Replace scripture with real education

I would urge you to immediately discontinue the teaching of scripture in all schools, to be replaced with a subject with a broad curriculum and taught by real teachers. A secular based course in philosophy and moral discussion would be far more beneficial to developing an awareness of right and wrong. This could be a part of the civics and citizenship subject to be introduced in coming years.

regards,
Nathan Lee

The "Where the bloody hell are you?" campaign.

So there was something about a nude photo snapped by some other dodgy sportsman. That’s when she became truly noteworthy (the law of “flashed celebrity pink bits” kicks in.. a la Paris Hilton et al) and the frenzy began. Somewhere in there she and her meat-head sportsman decided to call it quits.

Latest development in the saga is plumbers called to try and retrieve “an item of value” from the toilet. So a $200K diamond ring is somewhere between toilet seat and deep ocean outfall. Although as a model it’s a nice change that she might throw something other than expensive meals down the toilet.

I wonder if at the moment we have Lara Bingle bent over the toilet yelling to her engagement ring “Where the bloody hell are you?”.

Boom tish.

A news.com.au article is for once apparently not pushing the myth that “housing prices always go up” (well, kinda):

A QUARTER of Sydney homeowners who bought and sold their properties during the past five years lost money.

Despite a broadly rising market, property analyst Residex has revealed 24 per cent of properties bought and sold between January 2005 and January 2010 fetched less than the vendors had paid.

The average shortfall was more than $54,000 but varied between suburbs.

Ok, so that’s about the first time I’ve read a newspaper report that has pointed out that “house prices always go up, except when they don’t”. Must be time for one of those Hitler parodies that humourless political killjoys get so upset about:

The trouble with real estate is that it’s very much like a religion at times: everyone wants to believe a bunch of myths and bullshit stories passed on down through the age. Just like the religious: they don’t like having the harsh reality pointed out to them lest it offend the carefully arranged justifications and half truths that belief is based on. Every single bubble then crash seems to have the same core of delusion oblivious to the lessons elsewhere in the world.

We’re told that the average shortfall was more than a year’s average wages, so that much we know went straight to the bank. An extraordinary amount of money to just blow away in the breeze. In other words: people bought a house and ended up paying on average “more than $54,000″ bank fee essentially (that’s on top of whatever else they paid them.. see below). I bitch and moan about copping a late fee on a credit card, let alone having to work for some number of months just to make up the difference that flows straight to bank CEO bonuses.

So I’d go further if I was in charge of doing the actual journalism for this story because even this apparently negative story is hiding some pretty big problems with their analysis of who lost money. We can most certainly NOT assume that the 3/4 made any money with the metric chosen.

No bullshit sugar coating please.

Let’s look at why the first paragraph isn’t at all accurate and hides the true number of people that lose in the property game.

Inflation

Firstly there’s inflation, if you sell a house for exactly what you paid for it a year or two later then you’ve lost money because your dollar amount doesn’t purchase as much as it used to. So for each year you keep the house you have to make (currently) around 2 and 3 percent in order to not lose money. If you don’t, you lose money. So at very least the calculations should have been based around beating inflation which would have increased that quarter by a little bit. Not huge amounts, but still.

Loan expenses/Interest

Now I don’t have a mortgage, but I’ve heard what’s involved with getting one (and understand the basic concept). There’s loan application fees, insurance (if you don’t have enough of a deposit), interest charges on a rather massive amount of money.. So unless you pay for the house with a suitcase of cash: you have to have the house price go up by whatever amount that all is. Then you most likely will have early exit fees if you sell the house before paying the loan off. So assuming even the nice low rates we have currently house price needs to rise by at least that plus a the other loan entry/exit fees.

I think it is a fairly safe bet that as we now owe our GDP (thanks largely to mortgages) for the first time ever: people are using loans to get into the real estate concept. The trouble that follows is that people become mortgage rate obsessed and vote against anyone who appears to threaten their fragile maxed out finances.

Taxes/stamp duty etc

Unlike the “house prices always go up” myth, there is certainty in two things in life: death and taxes. Assuming you don’t die first government will either take a chunk at the start, during, at the end or at all times.

Kittens.. A more enjoyable alternative to tax.

Sure the govt has been waiving/reducing some of their fees, but somewhere in there there’s some tax being collected. If it isn’t from the housing industry then the rest of us are copping it elsewhere. Again, this wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to factor in a rough amount to work out whether certain house sales were profitable or not.

Real estate fees

Marcus Brigstocke once said “Have you ever noticed that you never see an old real estate agent? Surely proof that you CAN die from shame!”.

Going off my experiences with real estate agents: I know those smarmy bastards aren’t in it for the love.. One day I’ll come across one that’s even remotely professional, but til then I’ll keep the insults flowing. They’re lurking around like a bad smell when you buy and pop up again when you want to sell. There’s really no way to avoid them digging out a kidney’s worth of cash, taking it off to their little real estate lairs and doing whatever they do with their money when they aren’t biting the heads off puppies and kittens for kicks.

Feeding time for your contract waving estate agent.

So whatever the privilege of the company of real estate agents costs you: the house has to rise at least that amount times two. More if you attach a cost to putting up with the crap.

Strata fees, council rates, repairs, etc etc

Unlike moving into a dodgy rental property that has rising damp or light fittings falling from the ceiling (I lived in one of those back in uni): you can’t just decide to escape the dive and leave it to the cockroaches.

Nope, you bought the thing. That means instead of calling up a landlord and sticking them with the thousand buck repair bill unexpectedly: you have to pay it. If you have tenants: they can do it to you at any time.

Then there’s strata fees: perhaps the most inefficient, pointless waste of space organisational structures on the planet. Their sole purpose seems to be to funnel massive amounts of money out of owners and throw it into an incredibly deep dark pit with vampire like lawyers/accountants feasting off a large percentage of the money as it falls past them down into the darkness. When enough money collects at the bottom of the pit a big money intensive scoop in the form of “essential building maintenance” or the generic “improvements” will ensure the money pit remains a money pit.

Opportunity costs/passing up earning interest to pay interest

I currently earn on my “easy to get to” money just below 6 percent mark. If I had a loan I would be paying interest rather than earning interest. I would also not have money to spend on various things, experiences, nice food/booze etc. While I’m opposed to rampant consumerism as a measure of society: the way things are structured now is that consumption equals jobs equals economy continues to go around. If people are spending all of their available income on mortgage payments (e.g. bank profits.. which do generate some small number of jobs and pay a small number of people large salaries) then surely they’ll have to spend less on other things. Restaurants will be shunned in favour of eating at home. Clothes won’t be bought. Night outs will be replaced with tv nights. Weekends away will be weekends at home.

Granted, this might be a good thing for the environment cos we sure as all hell don’t need half the stuff we buy in developed nations: but hasn’t anyone in the government thought beyond the “everyone should own a house” idea and to what that means?
US president Eisenhower made a speech about the importance of the USA not falling into dependence on the Military Industrial Complex for some very good reasons.

Think we need something similar about the dangers of the Housing Speculation Dependence. Rent money is no more dead money than buying food or paying for the bus is dead money. It’s acquisition of an essential thing in life (shelter, food, water etc). Interest money is just as dead as rent money (except you pay a lot more of it and end up with a less nice/convenient place to live for far more money).
Currently we’re treating housing as some sort of vehicle to immense wealth when it should be treated as shelter, nothing more. It certainly shouldn’t be a government sanctioned tax evasion technique (investment properties allow people to claim interest payments as tax deductions for some insane reason.. which means taxes have to be higher than they should be to make up this loss.. in addition to the other subsidies).
That or maybe it just sucks to not be able to buy a beer without considering the mortgage dragging behind you.

So just how many people did lose money in real estate?

Hard to tell really as the people coming up with the “a quarter” didn’t even attempt to work it out. All I know it’s more than the quarter stated though unless there are a lot of people buying things without the need for loans/paying taxes/making repairs or who are opposed to earning interest on their money had they put it in investments. It could be as high as a half? Or maybe it wouldn’t make much difference.. But picking purchase and sale price, although easy, is a stupid measure: especially without even taking inflation and taxes into account.

So perhaps though we’ll start to see a bit of critical reporting as the moronic “appears to be the start of a bubble” realises that the bubble’s been going for ages and a pop is on the near horizon. I notice quite a lot how selective wording is used to gloss over or paint a pro-buyer picture whenever at all possible. The trouble is (and we’ve seen this) that people are rather stupid when it comes to economics, interpretation of statistics/numerical information. The baby bonus and first homeowner’s grant is proof enough of that; “bogan economics” is rather short sighted. This guy has a good idea on how mathematics has to change to give people more of a hope of understanding such concepts:

Conclusion
I wouldn’t be jumping in to buy real estate just yet until this silliness of “I’m banking on building equity” or “housing always makes money”. The UK has had a big crash with prices falling to half, the USA was even worse (still is). Absolutely nothing in the lead up to this indicates Australia is immune (and foreclosure rates would be an interesting one to watch with the rising interest rates): it’s obsessed with owning property (life worth defined by house ownership?). The papers, politicians and lots and lots of people are all drunk on selling each other the tales of an easy, risk free path to overnight wealth. No critical debate/argument appears in the papers.

Common sense says that you can’t infinitely raise the prices of houses because demand will dry up. Housing can’t get too much more unaffordable now and it’s only the greed of the banks that is allowing so many people into the market who would normally have to save for a number of years. Those people can’t really afford big loans, it’s an enormous risk when interest rates rise.

I’d urge anyone considering buying to carefully read the language and terms used and compare it to the metric/statistics in the article. For example the focus was on profitability so when sale prices were rising they used averages, then they swapped to median (a type of average.. but seems a bit pick and choose). Recently I saw an article talking about “activity” (but conspicuously avoiding mentioning whether prices at those sales were high). By that measure a firesale crash situation can be spun “housing activity rises 20%.. flurry of activity in the market.. strong auction figures” etc while completely skewing reality. Only if people take the effort to understand what the real data is will they avoid joining their voices to the unthinking frenzy of property speculation.

Or maybe I just want to make myself feel better about my financial choices or my choice to rent and live in a much nicer place/area than I could afford to buy in? Time will tell: but I think once we get some critical reporting on the situation start to appear: people will perhaps not be so keen to get into debt. I haven’t made many public predictions, but this one I’ll take the risk. After all, it’s not my house on the line, but I might pick up a bargain in the future when the insanity is over.

Electric vehicle fleet

A tonne of Government vehicles could be run on batteries and electricity for a number of reasons (this on conservative/out dated notions of what electric vehicles can do):

• short trips within urban areas (let’s assume electric means short range.. a myth but hey.. Let’s be conservative)
• idle time spent in other government spots or depots (which could easily have, or already have, electric outlets handy)
• large fleet purchasing power to kick the arses of the car manufacturers to stop stalling with proper electric cars (see “Who killed the electric car” if you want to get mad about it)

If nothing else the government could throw some money and give a big boost to the efforts of groups like Better Place who are rolling out electric vehicle infrastructure in Australia and other parts of the world (go to their site and get a bumper sticker if nothing else).

Electric vehicle street park-and-charge

Imagine never having to go to another petrol station again. Smelly, dirty places based around pumping stinky, dirty fuel into your vehicle. I’ve spent plenty of time at service stations while touring (I managed to make one video of that journey before I got distracted by work/life/play etc)

Sure, perhaps a way to win over the fuel supply guys would be to have removable battery packs (I’ve been talking about this for years..) and make removable batteries the equivalent of “fuel”:

That could work too.. But whether that’s done or not: Government car spots could have re-charging stations built in just as easily as they build in parking meters (and there are a growing number of those around aren’t there??). Hell, you could make it via induction plates on the ground hooked to some sort of RFID on the bottom of the car I’m sure wouldn’t be too much of a technological stretch.

At a minimum to support the move to an electric fleet any reserved parking spots for government vehicles should have recharge points. Then you could make certain public spots “electric only” (not to suggest it’s like a disabled parking spot.. far from it!). I have heard some rumblings that this is starting to happen for hybrid vehicles in some parts of the world. It’s an ok start, but we really need proper electric cars and infrastructure. Hybrids are always going to be a half arsed attempt to get away from oil. Plug-in hybrids are better, but really: we should just cut our losses (we’ll be paying off that environmental debt for some time now) and revel in the clean air in our cities as we push on with solar.

I only hope the car companies don’t pull the same shit that resulted in some perfectly good (and loved by owners) cars getting crushed rather than serve as a reminder that we could have ditched coal a long time ago. The idea of not selling but leasing electric vehicles smacks of that sort of thing all over again.

I’ll let you judge whether I could just recycle this every year at the same time:

(from “Nathan’s random roundup week ending 21st Jan 2007″)

This week had multiculturalism at its finest on display for the tennis. This is what happens when you a policy of encouraging other people to completely retain their culture: warts and all. Serbs vs Croats vs Greeks was the real battle..
Why the fighting? Because there’s a tennis match scheduled between their national teams.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/tennis/open-rocked-by-ethnic-brawl/2007/01/15/1168709679372.html

Ball boys ready? Umpire? Police?

To be honest (and I’ll go out on the assumption limb here) I’d almost lay money than none of these people brawling are actual born-there Serbian/Greek or Croatian.
They’re usually second generation Australians who have probably never visited their pseudo-homeland, yet describe themselves as “Greek”, “Serb” or “Croatian” and feel the need to continue on the long tradition of fighting for reasons unknown.

Turned up in same outfit to kick the shit out of each other

Although I think the two guys kicking at each other are just having a dispute over wearing the same outfit to the tennis. Look how one has draped himself in a flag to try and make it a bit less obvious that the greeny-grey cargo pants, black t-shirt, white shoes and no brain combination is the same as his.

To give you an example, from the article as to how wars get started elsewhere in the world (Australia doesn’t start wars, we just get dragged into them by everyone else).
“Leaders of Melbourne’s Serbian and Croatian communities accused each other’s compatriots of provoking the fracas.

Melbourne’s Serbian Cultural Club president, Toma Banjanin, said while the fight at the tennis was “deplorable”, old enmities could be stoked by overzealous Croatian flag-waving.

“Probably a few of those Serbs they say, ‘OK, you want a fight, let’s have a fight’.”

The Croatian Community Association’s secretary, Tom Starcevic, believed it was the Serbian supporters who were the aggressors. He said his daughter, Emilija, 14, had seen a Serbian supporter strike a Croatian fan on the head.”

Must certainly be some zealous flag waving. Perhaps it was the beating someone over the head with the flag that got things started?

From another article (http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/01/15/1168709679555.html):
“But another Serb supporter said the violence was organised days ahead. Text messages saying “come to the tennis and punch on” had been circulating, and would continue.

“We hate those Croat c—-, we want to smash their heads in after the game,” he said. “We knew they were coming, tomorrow there will be more. There’ll be 200 Croats, but that doesn’t matter, we’ll bring shanks and stab every one of them.””

Yep, it was *them*.. *They* started it first! Always the other side, but no one can be sure.. Blah blah blah.. Rumours and unverifiable statements (much like the stuff I spout out in the weekly roundups) used as justification to bring the quaint rest-of-the-world charm to Australia. That is: self sustaining tribal wars and disputes based on nothing more than some 1000 year old bickering.
Yep, hooray for multiculturalism’s stupid side..

Citizenship test

Can’t we just all get along? Fair enough: you have a background from somewhere else, bring your skin colour, funny customs and tasty foreign food with ya: leave the violent ethnic grudge bullsh*t at the door..:)

Or maybe they should just give the supporters at the tennis game flares. Like with this soccer/football match:
http://www.glumbert.com/media/flare

Scary how applicable it is..

Although my comment about flares at the Australian open was obviously taken on board:

The mob, who were ejected for disruptive behaviour and smuggling flares into Melbourne Park on the first day of play, seemed to have learned nothing from past years.

Banish those bare rooftops says SA's premier!

The target set for SA is better than the national target, which is also good news:

Speaking at the Copenhagen climate conference, the premier informed that the South Australian government had came up with a new 2020 energy target that will generate 33 per cent power from renewable sources. The revised target is far higher than Australia’s nationwide 20 per cent Renewable Energy Target (RET).

Realistically though: we’ve truckloads of sunshine falling on Australia. The vast hoards of backpackers washing up bright red with sunburn on beaches over the summer is proof enough of that. So I can only hope that every government building in every country with half decent sunshine does this. Solving the global energy situation is like the eating an elephant concept: you have to do it one bite at a time. Government roof space is an easy win. I blogged some time ago about the nation building money going to good use on solar in Australia and how we should use the dead space for solar generation. I’ll post up some ideas in a separate post about some possible next steps Government could take.

The other thing that could fill some of that spare rooftop space, roof gardens:

Another use for that dead space: green rooftops.

I’ll leave you with the thought that if every government building rooftop was producing electricity: it’d be at least one thing in the building producing something worthwhile. Might even make up for the hot air coming out of parliament?

Hard at work on the planting!

The morning began with an introduction (after a pickup at central or else self drive/ride/jog/whatever to homebush). Everyone seemed get stuck in and enjoy the weeding far more than they should have.

Weeding: fun for everyone.

It wasn’t quite “tree planting” because the habitat was for a bunch of green and golden bell frogs rather than Koalas or possums.

Green and gold frogs.. Australian colours! No, I didn't take this picture (wikipedia did!)

Had to chuckle when the guy talked about these little green buggers “hunting”. I guess they’re always presented as pretty innocent little things, unless you’re an insect of course then it’s a horrible eating mouth attached to tongue of death on springs.

Apparently they love popping up in areas like Homebush that were once industrial dumping grounds. Not so interested in living where the conditions are too easy for some reason. Maybe when the post apocalypse is over it’ll be green and gold bell frogs and cockroaches raging battles over the waste land?

It felt really good to be out and doing something more useful than sitting inside working on software for a day.

One planting done.. erm.. Hundreds to go!

It was pretty time consuming work getting rid of the weeds (and some native species of high seeding grass that would quickly take over the whole area) and planting native stuff. Apparently the frogs like to have clusters of grass together then open spaces for a few metres then cluster of grass and so on.

On the work front I think it was the first time some of the people had done any manual labour judging by the questions and the incredible amount of obvious type information given by the minders (e.g. “don’t stab yourself in the head”, “this is how you make a small hole with a tool”). Perhaps they were as bored with the instructions as I was. I guess that’s also side affect of lawsuits and our ever increasingly sedentary city based lives (particularly as I was the only male along too.. poor showing by the boys.. which further damaged the statistical likelihood that people would have done anything outdoors or used tools). Everyone seemed to have fun though and no one stabbed themselves in the head.

I think the following picture sums up the level of “hardcore” physical labour required (if you’re worried and considering doing some volunteering):

Redbacks and Blundstones have nothing on these pink bad boys one girl was wearing.

So the end result: we carted away a tonne (not literally.. but a Ute load) of weeds, planted native grasses/reeds and spread mulch/woodchips to keep it weed free for a bit longer.

My little grassy babies.. Aaw..

All in all a good day’s work.

Oh, one thing though, make sure you put sun cream on your lower back, just trust me on that one.

Quite a surreal light this morning, thought initially that I was just up at the crack of dawn, but an hour of sleep in later and it was still a funny red colour. Thought my eyes were just not working properly for a while there. Where was the blue sky?

The view from the living room

The view of Coogee beach wasn’t quite so good this morning.

Coogee beach.. No really, it's there somewhere behind the dust.

Just like the snow sitting on cars! (Well, not really).

Car cleaners will be busy this week

On the way to work I couldn’t help but think this might be a sign of things to come worldwide if we keep destroying our farmland and having it blow away.  This was freak wind doing the work, but if we don’t watch things: it might be the norm in a decade or two.

Heading to work, post apocalypse. The traffic lights looked fantastic though.

If anyone was filming a sci-fi movie about the end of the world today they just saved a bundle on post production specialfx.

ABOUT 2 million people are considering ditching their fixed-line home phones, as Australians move closer to becoming one of the world’s first wireless economies.

I don’t think I even know any of my friend’s home numbers because they all have mobiles. 100% of them have a mobile phone that is generally going to be in their pocket or handbag versus a home phone that will most likely ring out. Going off the statistics there are more phones than people:

There are 105 mobiles for every 100 people, making Australia one of the most saturated markets in the world behind South Korea, with 114 mobile phones for every 100 people.

This is the inverse of the older generations (say the retirees):

An ACMA study last year found the decline of fixed lines has been led by younger consumers. About 91 per cent of retirees said their main form of communication was the fixed-line phone, while 70 per cent of 18-to-31 year-olds consider mobile phones as their main form of communication.

Death to fixed lines I say! Until we discover we’re giving ourselves brain cancer or something.

The room was slightly packed for Dick's talk..

Debunking divining

Dick first up gave a very engaging talk about some of his experiences back around the 1980s with a competition he and James Randi held to test the claims of water diviners. The prize: 40 grand, the challenge: a ploughed up field with series of pipes that diviners demonstrate their craft. Contestants agreed on the conditions of the test as fair and that they wouldn’t have any complaints later. Results: no better than chance and the only thing flowing was a stream of excuses.

The interesting part of the night was that at the end it was revealed that in the audience were two family members of one of the original divining test participants. A son and a granddaughter I believe. Funny how times change.

But he stressed that the people weren’t lying when they said they believed they had powers (or bits of wire with powers), but it is just a case of self delusion – which we humans (“except for me of course”) are pretty damned good at.

You can’t trust your own eyes

One of the themes he explored was the notion that “you can’t trust your own eyes”. His personal example was the search for the Kookaburra (a plane sent out to track down another missing plane piloted by Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm) which he swore he saw as he flew over a patch of outback. With a closer look it had vanished. That was ok, because a few years later he found it quite a distance away thus proving that you can’t automatically trust your eyes (or else the ghosts moved the plane in the meantime I suppose).

This is one of the things I have brought up when discussing guns with pro-gun types. They’re convinced they’ll be perfectly able to tell the difference between the dark shapes creeping through their living room at night and not shoot someone they don’t mean to. My take is that our brains have evolved to automatically assume the worst (e.g. a predator/enemy) as a survival trait. It stands to reason that natural selection would favour those who run or fight an ambiguous potential threat rather than quietly waiting to see whether it eats you.

The legend of Dick Smith

Anyhow, it was good getting to hear Dick speak, he’s been one of those larger than life characters throughout my life. As we’d term in Australia “a bit of a legend”.

Like a slightly less flamboyant, Australian, beardless version of Richard Branson. My parents talked about him when I was a kid. He was talked about in cub scouts (as one of the successful scouting figures) in between learning reef knots and sleeping bag rolling. In school the story of Dick Smith Electronics growing from nothing was almost required reading in business studies (a great rags to riches story and some sound advice on properly marking the prices on all stock).

The guy has circled the world in a helicopter, staged stunts involving towing an iceberg into Sydney harbour, flown around doing nature documentaries (Australian Geographic) and owned the electronics store that had the biggest Australian flag on it my young eyes had ever seen.

Seems to have a good amount of patriotism (the proper kind, not what Americans have done to the meaning of the word “patriot”) in his attempts to boost up the “made in Australia” stuff.

‘Til next time

The skeptic bunch seemed friendly enough, although without the discussion section to the night it wasn’t as social as I’d expect normal nights to be.

We did have some reading material: one of those holistic alternative medicine magazines. Though looking at some of the ads I wonder if I’m in the wrong industry, there was a guy doing “clearing services” whereby you pay him to come and remove negative energy of a property. How fantastic: zero costs, just rock up and wave your arms and talk about room auras and leave in a cloud of money. Completely unethical and bullshit, but hey: the types to hire these people are going to spend it on other equally pointless stuff (homoeopathy etc).

I grabbed Richard Saunders to demo his spoon bending abilities, he comes well equipped with a handful of spoons in his pocket (although he may be a dinner guest that requires counting the silverware after he leaves).

Anyhow, that was my Thursday night.. I’ll be sure to try and make the next one.

Australia plans to build the world’s largest solar power station with an output of 1000 megawatts in a A$1.4 billion (US$1.05 billion) investment, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Sunday.

Finally! maybe this will be the boost that is needed to get solar over the tipping point from the niche “isn’t that a shiny expensive novelty” to something substantial. Or at least to the “isn’t that a shiny expensive widespread thing”.

Always good to compare things to the rest of the world:

“The government plans to invest with industry in the biggest solar generation plant in the world, three times the size of the world’s current biggest, which is in California,” Rudd said.

I think solar has enormous potential in Australia to cut down the amount of coal we’re burning for daytime things like air conditioners, factory equipment, aluminium smelters etc. Particularly when (as I’m still enjoying the novelty after the UK) we get so much bloody sunlight:

It’s a bit of a pity we’re also blessed with oodles of coal, which means Australia can afford to be lazy and polluting and still have enough electricity for everything.

As an aside: here’s an interesting quote from the long dead Thomas Edison from way back in 1931:

We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.

Incidentally, he was talking to Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone.

For practical solar hitting the mainstream: I’d like to see more use of dead space as solar collection areas. We’ve lots of roads/railway lines/rooftops that could surely be feeding back into the grid. Lots of space you can run strips of metre wide solar cells for long distances. All we really need is for the cost per unit and the ability to plug back into the grid without too many $$$$.

Anyhow, good to see a proven real technology like solar getting such a chunk of cash, rather than more bleating on about the hopes and dreams of a clean coal fantasy land. I’m hoping we get to a point where we just leave the coal in the ground and it becomes just another geological feature because we just don’t need it.

House-hunting is always one of those seemingly onerous tasks that I hate because you have to try and juggle things:

• Good people
• Good accommodation
• Decent sized room
• transport/parking etc

Over the years I’ve lived with random people along the way, probably slightly more random households than pre-existing friend households. The good thing about sharing with random people is that you tend to make some lasting friendships. If you think about it: the risk is quite low compared to sharing with friends. It’s one thing to be friends with someone socially, it’s another to be able to live together and end up friends at the end of the day if something goes wrong with household bliss. If something goes wrong with the random flatmates: all that really can happen is you lose some stuff and end up out of pocket a bit. Better than losing a friend I reckon.

Anyhow, Bronte suffers from the “rent a room” syndrome that most of the Eastern suburb beach side places suffer from. Not so many people have leases on the flat/house, they tend to be renting a room with other people who are also renting a room. Quite interesting really, but a lot of the places to tend to end up being drop in shelters for the backpacker refuse of the world, particularly near the famous tourist trap: Bondi beach. But the advantages are that if bills are included (a major source of share flat pain) then that takes a big worry out of the equation.

I’ve a bit more evaluating to do to see whether I end up in Bronte.. But so far I think there’s a pretty good chance I’ll be within strolling distance from my favourite weekend fish and chip shop: “fishy bite” (which after a bit of googling seems to be for sale??! Hope the new owners keep up the marinated barramundi).