ChezLark

How dangerous is the housing bubble?

David Rosenberg, chief North American economist for Merrill Lynch, says in this MSNBC article, says that even if the housing bubble doesn’t burst with falling housing prices, if prices simply flatten out, it could take a full percentage point off US economic growth, currently running about 3.5 percent a year.

Rosenberg figures that over the past five years rising home values have added $4 trillion to the nation’s net worth, or 70 percent of the total rise in household wealth in that time frame. That “wealth effect” probably has translated to about $50 billion in additional consumer spending a year, adding half-a-percentage point to growth every year.

Other economists quoted in the article concur that simply stopping the increase in housing prices (rather than actually decreasing them) could take a percentage point or more off the economy’s growth rate.

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that some displays of the Ten Commandments on government property are OK, but not the specific displays erected by the Kentucky counties involved in the court case. The Ten-Commandments display in Kentucky was revised twice in response to ongoing legal battles, each time in an attempt to satisfy judicial review by making the display more secular.

The counties argued alternatively that it was illegitimate to inquire into the purpose of a display such as this one, and that even if such inquiry were permissible, the display was sufficiently secular in nature to pass scrutiny. SCOTUS was not impressed, concluding that inquiry into the purpose of a display is permissible, that purpose was discernable from legislative records, the history of the displays, etc, and that the display’s purpose remained religious, notwithstanding the secular flourishes added over time.

[Regarding the first version of the display, showing the Commandments alone] The reasonable
observer could only think that the Counties meant to emphasize and celebrate the Commandments’ religious message.
[...]
The Counties’ second display, unlike the first, did not hang the Commandments in isolation, but included the statement of the government’s purpose expressly set out in the county resolutions, and underscored it by juxtaposing the Commandments to other documents whose references to God were highlighted as their sole common element. The display’s unstinting focus was on religious passages, showing that the Counties posted the Commandments precisely because of their sectarian content. That demonstration of the government’s objective was enhanced by serial religious references and the accompanying resolutions’ claim about the embodiment of ethics in Christ. Together, the display and resolution presented an indisputable, and undisputed, showing of an impermissible purpose.
[...]
[The third] display placed the Commandments in the company of other documents the Counties deemed especially significant in the historical foundation of American government. In trying to persuade the District Court to lift the preliminary injunction, the Counties cited several new purposes for the third version, including a desire to educate County citizens as to the significance of the documents displayed. [...] The Counties’ new statements of purpose were presented only as a litigating position, there being no further authorizing resolutions by the Counties’ governing boards. [...] Indeed, the sectarian spirit of the resolutions found enhanced expression in the third display, which quoted more of the Commandment’s purely religious language than the first two displays had done. No reasonable observer, therefore, could accept the claim that the Counties had cast off the objective so unmistakable in the earlier displays. Nor did the selection of posted material suggest a clear theme that might prevail over evidence of the continuing religious object. For example,it is at least odd in a collection of documents said to be “foundational” to include a patriotic anthem, but to omit the Fourteenth Amendment, the most significant structural provision adopted since the original framing. An observer would probably suspect the Counties of reaching for any way to keep a religious document on the walls of courthouses constitutionally required to embody religious neutrality.

The Court gives an interesting aside:

[The Court does not hold] that a sacred text can never be integrated constitutionally into a governmental display on law or history. Its own courtroom frieze depicts Moses holding tablets exhibiting a portion of the secularly phrased Commandments; in the company of 17 other lawgivers, most of them secular figures, there is no risk that Moses would strike an observer as evidence that the National Government was violating religious neutrality.

Final randomness:

• The Kentucky counties apparently passed resolutions citing the Commandments as Kentucky’s “precedent legal code.”
• The Kentucky state legislature apparently acknowledges Christ as the “Prince of Ethics.” I’m not sure what to make of this.

I just had a disturbing experience: I saw a kalidescope-themed M&Ms commercial featuring Iron and Wine’s cover of “Such Great Heights” by the Postal Service!

Imagine!

This song was previously released as a B side, and was sufficiently obscure that Ben Gibbard alluded to it obliquely when he did an acoustic benefit show at the Showbox a few moths ago.

And now it’s in an M&Ms commercial!

Oh the humanity!

I read Slate article (ok, a slideshow) on Toothpaste for Dinner, a minimalist cartoon on the web that many people claim is pretty funny (it is pretty funny).

This got me thinking about why it’s funny. It seems funny in a similar way to Red Meat; both rely on minimalist or static images and lean mostly on their text.

It occured to me that a three-panel cartoon format encourages a certain structure and pacing (Toothpaste doesn’t have this). I wondered if you could make a text-only version work, sort of like haikus.

Here is my lame attemt for today:

Here is another picture I like from Steve and Catherine’s wedding a few weeks ago:

Last week, Jack Kilby, inventor of the integrated circuit (aka the microchip), died. The chairman of Texas Instruments has purportedly said of Mr. Kilby,

There are only a handful of people whose works have truly transformed the world and the way we live in it: Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers…and Jack Kilby.”

The computer you are reading this on is Jack Kilby’s brainchild.

As an interesting coincidence, Eastman Kodak announced last week that they would no longer manufacture their line of black-and-white wet-darkroom photographic paper. The fact that I need to specify “wet-darkroom” when mentioning this indicates why: the market for traditional black-and-white printing supplies is no longer strong enough to justify manufacturing the stuff.

This probably means little to people not interested in photography, but photographers have been talking about this event as a major milestone in the relentless march to digital-everything. I think I still have a package of half-used Ilford black and white photo paper in a closet somewhere; it comes in a thick opaque black rubber wrapping, since, obviously, it’s light sensitive. I haven’t used it since college and it’s probably become fogged by heat and possible light leaks.

Epson has released the successor to the fine-art photo printer I use; the new model is the Epson 2400. For less than $800USD, you can have a printer that produces prints that are permanence-rated at possibly as long as 200 years using the right materials, for black and white. This is very comparable to the permanence of traditional black and white prints. The color prints from this machine easily surpass the longevity of traditional color printing processes.

Computers everywhere! Now if we could only figure out how to archive digital pictures on a durable and obsolescence-resistant medium, we would be all set…

I arrived super-late to Steve and Catherine’s reception (due to having attended another wedding earlier the same evening!) but I got some snaps as people were standing around in the bar. Check them out in my account on Flickr. Note that I’m too cheap to spring for the “pro” account as of yet, so if I have added pictures to my account since this was posted, you may need to poke around a bit to find the ones from Steve and Catherine’s wedding.

This is my favorite, I think:

More Canyonlands:

Sentinel Rocks, Canyonlands National Park

I am determined to write down my recollections of our Utah trip before I forget them entirely…

When last we left our heroes, we had finished a busy day of hiking in Dead Horse Point park and Arches National Park. That night, we camped a second time at the Dead Horse campground.

The next morning, I completely failed to get up and photograph dawn, as I had planned. We were all pretty beat up from all the hiking the night before, and decided we would take things a little easier.

We pulled up stakes and headed to our next destination, Canyonlands National Park. Canyonlands is a very rugged park; only a fraction of its area is accessible by paved roads. There are three distinct areas, all mutually inaccessible by passenger car (you have to drive out to a main road and re-enter the park via a different route): “Island in the Sky”, “The Needles” and “The Maze”. The Maze doesn’t even have any paved roads running into it at all, only dirt tracks. Canyonlands is a major 4WD destination, although we didn’t see much evidence of people in offroad vehicles while we were there.

We made camp first in the Island In The Sky area. This park of the park is on a huge plateau (”mesa”) and offers more views along the lines of those we had first experienced at Dead Horse Point: sweeping vistas across redrock canyons. Looking back over my images from this part of our trip, though, I’m struck by the fact that I mostly photographed smaller details, and I chose to render my “keepers” from the park in B&W:

Wizened Tree, Canyonlands National Park

We did a handful of short hikes around the park. One particularly cool hike was up Aztec Butte, a rocky outcropping a few hundred feet high. Under the lip of the butte, the Anasazi Indians had built rock granaries, away from larger animals and sheltered from rain:

Anasazi granary, Canyonlands National Park

We had a mellow day stomping around the park and retired to our tents at sundown.

One of the scenic highlights of Arches National Park is Delicate Arch, which is also featured on the Utah license plates.

After our desert trip, I stumbled across news from a few years ago about a reasonably famous landscape photographer called Michael Fatali who was caught setting fires under Delicate Arch to get dramatic lighting for night-time photography. The strange thing is that his web site stresses the fact that he uses “nature’s light” for his work, doesn’t use computers in post-production, etc.

The fires under Delicate Arch scorched the slickrock and parts of the arch itself; the park service wasn’t able to remove all the smoke marks.

Apparently, Fatali had used fires in the past, as well; he had apparently caused some smoke damage in a slot canyon in nearby Canyonlands National Park, as well…

Coincidentally, given my commentary yesterday about the laziness mystique around Father’s Day, I wound up pretty much doing the opposite of spending the day in a hammock.

I had dim sum around 11AM and then went to work; there’s a big demo tomorrow of the research project I work on, and I hadn’t quite finished putting it together. I figured I had between 4 and 6 hours of work to do, and I could be home in time for dinner.

At around midnight I started getting kind of grumpy. I was running into many more problems than I had anticipated.

Around 5AM it started getting light out and I figured there wasn’t any point in going home.

I wound up packing it in and going home around 3PM this afternoon. I had been at work for 25 or 26 hours. Interestingly, I didn’t really bonk at any point, and I hadn’t stopped for a nap. I was a little worried about driving but managed to make it home in one piece.

Overall, I was surprised at the fact that I was able to actually be productive for pretty much the entire time. This represents more than half a full work week compressed into a single day. It was sort of fun, in a strange way. I even got to experience some very mild visual hallucinations.

…maybe it’s that they just don’t care [mandatory follow-on]?

Here is Google’s whimsical logo for today:

MSNBC is running an article that reads, in part:

Given half a chance, a beer and a good, long nap, Dad might well forget it’s Father’s Day, too. And if he doesn’t, that’s OK. If you confess your forgetfulness, any dad worth his salt will belch, say, “Oh, it’s Father’s Day?” roll back over and re-engage in what he had hoped to do on his special day anyway: sleep.
[...]
I have identified the Father’s Day X factor (or is that XY factor?): Z’s! Guilt-free ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzz’s. If Dad gets a reasonable nap on his day, all is right with the world, no matter who remembers what or forgets everything.
[...]
All Dad needs for his nap is a sofa. Or a hammock. Or a rug. The spot in the sun if the cat will share. If you really want to make the experience special, make sure that when he wakes up, the remote is where he left it when he went to sleep.

Why is our North-American cultural image of a father an alcoholic, narcoleptic couch potato? Discuss.

P.S., for Father’s Day, Laura got me this book. I am amused. Also, I am impressed with the snazzy graphic design of the book; ask to see it sometime.

Did you know Greenspan said this recently?

“The income gap between the rich and the rest of the US population has become so wide, and is growing so fast, that it might eventually threaten the stability of democratic capitalism itself.
[...]
As I’ve often said, this is not the type of thing which a democratic society - a capitalist democratic society - can really accept without addressing”

(the story I link to above explains that Greenspan’s solution is better education, not progressive taxation).

The gap between the rich and poor in the US is apparently the widest it has been since 1929. This interesting article / discussion thread on Plastic offers more links and discussion.

NPR ran an interesting story on the increasing difficulties that photographers are experiencing post-9/11. Increasingly, local law enforcement have been questioning, detaining, intimidating and even arresting (often illegally) photographers taking pictures of federal buildings, bridges, highways, and other infrastructure.

The general principle that it is almost never illegal to photograph anything visible from public property continues to apply. The NPR story is just a few minutes long and is worth a listen.

Continuing the fruit / vegetable metaphor, the pluot is now the size of an avocado, is turning somersaults in utero and is breathing amniotic fluid. A factoid that I find strangely powerful is that the pluot is coming up on various thresholds of fetal viability: after around 20 weeks, there starts begin a non-negligible probability that the little tyke could go it alone (not that we would want him/her to). Laura’s going into week 17.

I seem to be doing poorly at maintaining my desert-trip narrative. Here is a random image from the Canyonlands park:

Bob Cringely, in his latest column, says the recent Apple announcement that they will start bulding Macs that use Intel chips, is the obvious prelude to Intel buying Apple in order to try to rebuild some clout in the PC market, in defiance of Microsoft.

It seems pretty crazy, but then again, I’m ready to believe almost anything about why Apple would, more or less inexplicably, choose to switch gears after 20 years and start using Intel chips!

The recent US Supreme Court decision upholding the federal government’s right to regulate even the private production and consumption of marijuana when allowed by state law was a disappointment to everyone who hoped that this case would mark a turning point in the court’s interpretation of the “Interstate Commerce” clause of the Constitution:

The Congress shall have Power To [...] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes

The court’s opinion makes clear that its action in this case follows very well-established law on the matter: a strongly controlling precedent is Wickard v. Filburn:

Congress’ power to regulate purely local activities that are part of an economic “class of activities” that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce is firmly established. See, e.g., Perez v. United States, 402 U. S. 146, 151. If Congress decides that the ” ‘total incidence’ ” of a practice poses a threat to a national market, it may regulate the entire class. See, e.g., id., at 154–155. Of particular relevance here is Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U. S. 111, 127–128, where, in rejecting the appellee farmer’s contention that Congress’ admitted power to regulate the production of wheat for commerce did not authorize federal regulation of wheat production intended wholly for the appellee’s own consumption, the Court established that Congress can regulate purely intrastate activity that is not itself “commercial,” i.e., not produced for sale, if it concludes that failure to regulate that class of activity would undercut the regulation of the interstate market in that commodity.

People disappointed with this cementing of federal power may take a small measure of consolation from O’Conner’s forceful dissent:

We would do well to recall how James Madison, the father of the Constitution, described our system of joint sovereignty to the people of New York: “The powers delegated by the proposed constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. . . . The powers reserved to the several States will extend toall the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” The Federalist No. 45, pp. 292–293 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961).

Relying on Congress’ abstract assertions, the Court has endorsed making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one’s own home for one’s own medicinal use. This overreaching stifles an express choice by some States, concerned for the lives and liberties of their people, to regulate medical marijuana differently. If I were a California citizen, I would not have voted for the medical marijuana ballot initiative; if I were a California legislator I would not have supported the Compassionate Use Act. But whatever the wisdom of California’s experiment with medical marijuana, the federalism principles that have driven our Commerce Clause cases require that room for experiment be protected in this case. For these reasons I dissent.

The Associated Press claims that Seattle is the most wireless-friendly city in the US, edging out San Francisco, although they repeatedly refer to wireless base stations as “access towers”, so I’m not sure how much credence to put in the report…

Last week, of course, France rejected the proposed European Constitution in a national referendum. There wasn’t much coverage in the US press, so I did some reading in the French press (particularly Le Monde, which has quite comprehensive coverage).

I was struck by a number of things:

• French citizens voting No frequently cited the excessive “liberalism” of the Constitution. It took me a little while to realize that they were referring to economic liberalism, that is, the increasing dismantling of protectionist borders, and not to social policy. If anything, this use of “liberal” is associated with increased social conservatism, because it is seen as undermining social programs.
• The No camp largely sees their vote as a deliberate wake-up call to the ruling elite, who are seen as pawns of big business.

If you’re inclined to see the rejection of the EU Constitution as a bone-headed move, then you can easily claim that the French voted No out of fear of the effects of Globalization: increased competition for jobs and more pressure to dismantle “structural rigidities” in the French economy.

On the other hand, explanations from folks on the street are compelling [translated]:

• Wieland, a young teacher of history and geography at Aubervilliers, voted Yes to the Maastrucht treaty because “that treaty moved us forward, politically. But not this Constitution”. He is also troubled by the scorn reserved for No voters. “All around me, teachers mostly voted No. But they are not soverainists, nor idiots, nor puppets”. Their motivations are varied, but there are some common threads: “the trend towards the privitization of education among certain European administrators”, and the preservation of social services, that form a common ground in the teacher’s lounge.
• This is also worrying to Bertrand, who can’t bring himself to be happy about the No victory [despite having voted that way]. “There is a growing disconnect between the electors and the elected that is very worrying”, says this French professor in Paris. “The political parties, the editorials, and the heads of industry all called for a Yes vote and yet people voted No. Their reaction is to brand the electors as irresponsible, frustrated, or xenophobes. This looks a lot like denial”. He says he voted strictly with Europe in mind, after having read the [apparently impenetrable] treaty, “as did many other No voters”. His hope is that this will lead to “the erection of a Europe modeled on the French republic, that will defend public services and the rights of workers”.
• Hélène, a psychology student, regrets that “Europe focuses on the economy rather than education or the environment. Just look at all the offshoring — only the businessmen gain from this”.

If you listen to what people are citing as reasons for voting No, the picture becomes murkier. Yes, the French are afraid of what globalization will do to their country. They want assurances that the social structure they value, with strong labor rights, unions, social support programs and other such programs, will be respected and preserved. Furthermore, a great many of the No voters seem prepared to dismantle economic barriers between the EU states if the Constitution struck the right balance between US-style capitalism and socialism. Is this a completely unreasonable request?