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.

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.

This weekend we had sky-writing (more on that another time), showing that the church funds scammeddonated for this purpose are certainly not helping anyone in need.* Wonder how many people could have been fed, watered, clothed or vaccinated? The dollars involved in sky-writing make my contributions to (genuine and secular) charities e.g. Oxfam, Fred Hollows foundation etc (By all means go donate too!) look trivial. I wonder if instead of spending money fixing people’s eyes Fred Hollows would prefer the dollars collected to go to writing up “Fred Hollows = vision” in sky writing.

I’d wonder why God can’t just settle this once and for all without the need for hiring planes to do what an almighty all powerful being could do with the snap of the fingers. Pull that burning bush out of storage and wave it around the sky if nothing else.

Jesus couldn't just do this himself? Or at least turn the wind down a bit, because it was gone in a matter of minutes.

*Unless your need was to have the sky drawn on for the briefest of moments before the wind blew it away.

The goal of the campaign was to encourage discussion on a mythical figure that has most certainly been discussed ad nauseam for, oh, about two thousand years or so with no conclusive results and no evidence forthcoming to back up the wild supernatural claims. Certainly no need for millions of dollars to be spent on the hope of converting some “cynical Sydney-siders”.

Jesus isn’t about life

I’d have to question whether the campaign knows anything about Jesus. Saying Jesus was all about life is kinda silly when the whole Jesus concept is “God creates son to be sacrificed so that said god will be able to forgive mankind for various accumulated sins”.

The Jesus mythology is pretty clear that the whole point is blood sacrifice (e.g. DEATH): without the end of crucifixion there is no life-death-rebirth type mythology. Sure you can gloss over this and claim that he died for humanity to live, but it’s some pretty spectacular doublespeak to get to “all about life” from “all about death”.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the symbol of Christianity a tortured guy nailed to a cross?

Jesus: all about death. Nailed it!

Doesn’t look like much of a life eh?

Childish (and child targetting) posters making ridiculous claims

Check out some of the posters here (warning 3.2 meg PDF): here.

Let’s look at the claimed creation of a giant chair.

Chairs made by Jesus?

The poster thanks Jesus for it. Hmm.. Funny, because I found this little picture that shows a bunch of PEOPLE making this.

The real creators of the giant chairs

Funny, I don’t see Jesus in there or maybe he’s running the crane.

The real creator is Giancarlo Neri and the piece is called “The Writer”. Of the things claimed as inspiration I didn’t read anything about Jesus either (see here for a PDF archive of a tonne of articles on the work). There’s no mention of the word Jesus and one reference to “my god it’s vast”.
From an article on it:

Neri calls the design a “monument to the loneliness of writing” but says he hopes people in London will make of it what they will.

No dedication to Jesus there. But I guess the Bible Society made an ad of it to promote their religion without any basis. *shrug*

Another “bizarre” one mentioned in a newspaper article thanks jesus for hot chips: have these people never been into the local fish and chips shop? It sure as shit isn’t Jesus accumulating oil burns over the deep fry vats.

Then there’s one claiming Jesus created parrots (I’m a little fuzzy, but I don’t remember any mention of Jesus being around until long after genesis).

Poor evolution gets screwed again. This time outside the USA for a change.

So can just anyone claim natural processes as their own without a shred of scientific basis? I’d like to claim rights to the natural process of cow digestion so that I can claim royalties every time the churches put out future religious bullshit. Since my taxes are subsidising this sort of rubbish, it’s only fair I get my cut.

Then there’s the one I really think crosses (boom-tish) a line  (or two) that shouldn’t be in a public place directed at children. The R.I.P. cartoon one. Here it is:

Some disclaimers missing from this. Oh, and evidence.

Clearly aimed at children (or those of a childish mind I guess) and I think a pretty clear violation of the relevant advertising/marketing code for Children.

Firstly: there’s absolutely zero proof that there’s an afterlife. None. Zip. Zero. If this was a medical product making claims about care it’d need disclaimers and hard evidence.

Secondly: Substitute anyone’s name in there and it would have equal proof. If Christianity can claim it with no proof, why not (other) corporations?

Ronald McDonald looking after the dead. Just as much proof and just as misleading.

Muslims could run an identical ad thanking Allah or Mohammed for looking after their dead mother. Scientology could thank Xenu or thetan alien spirits whatever it is they believe in.

But perhaps more accurate would be the following (which falls within the findings of effectiveness of prayer studies e.g. like this one showing prayer not only doesn’t aid recovery, actually made recovery statistics worse):

Proof that praying really doesn't work that well.

Or perhaps if they’re going to claim parrots and other man made or biological things as the realm of things to thank Jesus for:

Also fair to say huh? Thanks Jesus for cancer, AIDS, pig flu, poor eyesight, birth defects etc.

Of course I’m forgetting the golden rules of this “God” concept which is:

• responsible for all good, even if you did it yourself
• testing your faith or a deserved punishment if bad stuff happens

Anyhow, I lodged a complaint with the advertising standards bureau because I think these ads breach a number of the standards on advertising for children. We’ll see how that goes. If making any and all unfounded claims to promote the Jesus corporation is fine with them then what’s to stop other businesses from doing so (assuming Religion doesn’t magically deserve an exemption to the rules about deceptive advertising and misleading children targeted information).

If you’re going to productise Jesus then just like other product advertisement you can’t make unfounded claims. Keep it nicely contained in that little book of fairy-tales and it isn’t as much of an issue.

Other links:

• Jesus about life (parody site as the idiots forgot to register the .com)
• The official site is here

Fenced off free (dodgy) parking

What does this mean?

• more pressure on other parking (which already fills up by about 8-8:10 am)
• unused dead space once again
• expense on the labour and fence which could have been used to take down the no parking signs

I suspect a bit later we’ll have a little ceremony and the Sydney city council will announce the creation of 50 new bike parking spaces in the CBD. The old “take it away, re-brand it and sell you what you already had before”.

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.

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.

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).

In terms of work itself I’ve been doing the usual reading half a wiki to find out what things are and how things are done. Fighting the urge to track down and torture the people responsible for making J2EE (JEE sorry) and messaging kinda painful to get up and running: IBM.

RANT WARNING!!

I mean I used to whinge about IBM’s painful install process back 5 years ago when I taught Sun’s J2EE architecture and developer courses and STILL nothing has changed?? Get on with it guys. You do so much other stuff so well, but boy do you make people suffer to get things installed!

END RANT!!

What else is new in enterprise techie stuff in Sydney:

• Still no one using ruby (or one of these other fanboy languages) on anything important or real (thank fuck for that) and using either Java or .net based stuff.
• Lots of places with hiring freezes, the usual stupidity to get around such things (hiring contractors instead of employees).
• A bit of gloom about the economy but no where near say the UK (the part of the world that invented gloom).
• Ajax stuff making a bit more of a show (google’s framework in particular)

I’m working with a couple of colleagues of mine from the old days at CustomWare Asia Pacific. Things seem to be in place fairly well: automated build stuff, unit testing, morning status stand-up (although what sadistic fucker puts these at 9am eh?).

Anyhow, it’s kinda good to be back working although thankfully the daylight saving hour helped me be a bit more awake. Guess I’m an upstanding member of the community again (e.g. I’m paying tax and helping clog up the CBD again?) and I don’t feel quite so worried about dropping a chunk of cash on a new toy.