From Reuters:
U.S. housing market seen strong enough to handle Fed rate hikes: Reuters poll
The U.S. housing market is probably strong enough to stand up against an interest rate hike by the Federal Reserve this year, with stabilizing home prices supporting sales, a Reuters poll of top economists showed on Wednesday.
Of 22 economists surveyed, all but two said the market could withstand the Fed’s expected rate hikes. They pointed to job creation and growing demand for houses from millennials as factors contributing to the market’s resilience.
“Rates are very reasonable now, and the signal the Fed will give when they begin raising their key lending rate will push more people into the market,” said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the economic forecasting center at Georgia State University.
…
Economists say home price increases of about 5 percent are just strong enough to raise equity for homeowners to encourage some to put their properties on the market and help address a persistent shortage of houses available for sale.The increase is also not big enough to price out first-time home buyers, economists say.
But the economists were evenly divided over whether the home ownership rate, which dropped to a 35-year low in the second quarter, would decline further before rising again.
…
“The recent strength of housing activity suggests the market is well placed to cope with a gradual rise in interest rates,” said Capital Economics economist Matthew Pointon. “Rising rates will also be accompanied by an improving labor market and gradually loosening of credit conditions.”Some said potential buyers would try to lock in low rates, but others said staggering student debt would continue to prevent young people from buying homes.
“There are no bargains in the market now,” said FAO Economics economist Robert Brusca. “Maybe high rents will drive people to buy. But it seems the opposite is true. High house prices make high rents look cheaper.”
Totally not surprised at all. I’ve worked long enough with direct markers to know the scam right off the bat. You get some idiot guy to join in the middle of the night, and then you slap them with a huge cancellation fee once he freaks out he will be caught. Kind of like how gyms make money – their profit is derived from those who sign up and never use the service, not the people who do.
From Gizmodo:
Almost None of the Women in the Ashley Madison Database Ever Used the Site
When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.
What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.
…
Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.
Sure, some of these inactive accounts were probably created by real, live women (or men pretending to be women) who were curious to see what the site was about. Some probably wanted to find their cheating husbands. Others were no doubt curious journalists like me. But they were still overwhelmingly inactive. They were not created by women wanting to hook up with married men. They were static profiles full of dead data, whose sole purpose was to make men think that millions of women were active on Ashley Madison.
Ashley Madison employees did a pretty decent job making their millions of women’s accounts look alive. They left the data in these inactive accounts visible to men, showing nicknames, pictures, sexy comments. But when it came to data that was only visible on to company admins, they got sloppy. The women’s personal email addresses and IP addresses showed marked signs of fakery. And as for the women’s user activity, the fundamental sign of life online? Ashley Madison employees didn’t even bother faking that at all.
Speaking of scam, Noel Biderman doesn’t hold a candle to the king of scam. I did work for Feder (indirectly) 20 years ago, worked with all those guys at Access Resources and Psychic Friends Network.
I helped build an outbound telemarketing platform for those guys that drove upwards of $250,000 of additional revenue A DAY. We would analyze the inbound caller database for specifics patterns of repeat callers, we’d then make outbound calls to these people with various scripts about an important message or vision, and that they had to call a special number to get their reading. On average we’d get at least 2000 people to call back on any given day, at $25-50 a pop. We were only making something like 10,000 outbound calls a day to hit that number, which is an amazingly high conversion rate. Wish I saw 1/10th of 1 percent of that.
As amazing as that was, we had the full database on callers, every night they send us the calls from the previous day to build the database. It was easy to work backwards to figure out how much they were making, it was an astronomical number.
From the NY Post:
Psychic ‘swindler’ rents out NYC’s second-priciest pad for $100K a month
A Bermuda-based Canadian investor has just inked a deal to pay an eye-popping $100,000 a month for two years to live in a 75th-floor pad at the Time Warner Center.
It’s the city’s second-most expensive finalized rental agreement. (Robert De Niro lives in the city’s priciest — a $125,000-a-month home that A-Rod once rented at 15 Central Park West.)
This pricey TWC spread is a five-bedroom, 4,400-square-foot condo.
It comes with two kitchens and floor-to-ceiling windows.
There’s also a 40-foot great room with an adjacent 30-foot master bedroom suite, which has his-and-hers marble bathrooms.
The owner of the apartment is alleged psychic swindler Steven Feder, who was once persuaded to forgive $500 million of bills to customers charged by his now-defunct Psychic Readers Network for dialing what they thought were free calls to “Miss Cleo.”
Grim if and when the Feds get involved they will find out Avid Life and all of it’s dating sites were fake including cougarlife.com. Racketeering and Wire Fraud charges perhaps? Specifically because you had to pay to have your account deleted?
There were lots of documents dumped in the hack including 197,000 emails from Biderman’s email account.
Apparently Biderman was not getting too rich. He had to borrow from the company to buy his stock.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8lt9GVo1oPsTVlUMmZGWGctRkU/view
Like Nom says they had better be hiding in a Non-extradition country.
grim, did you ever meet Dionne Warwick at Psychic Friends Network?
That broad is way wackier than Whitney ever was.
[3] juice
Feds won’t get involved. Consider the demographics.
Since 2010 they probably brought in 300-400 million top line. I have no doubt he way paying himself more than 5 million a year once they were doing 50m+
Anyone have a line on a big ass swing set for me? Used preferably. I can break down.
If you do go new, the Costco one is the way to go. Buying direct from Rainbow is criminal. We bought the Costco one at the multi 9 years ago, never treated it and the tenants are still playing with it.
Oh…and F that rubber mulch crap. Just put it on the grass.
3. JB
Loan for share purchase is a benny, not a need.
Not sure about Canadian tax law but in the US it allows you buy the shares at current market value (as opposed to receiving options) so when you cash them in it is a capital gain, not current income. Plus you have the ability to transfer them to more preferred vehicles. Also, there is no repayment on the loan until you cash the shares in so basically you get $3m of shares for signing a sheet of paper back to the company for the same amount. No capital outlay of your own until you get the proceeds and profits from the sale. Neat trick when you can get it.
I could own Netflix tomorrow on those terms.
Rubber mulch is used tires……do the math……
http://center4research.org/child-teen-health/early-childhood-development/caution-children-at-play-on-potentially-toxic-surfaces/
Libturd at home says:
August 29, 2015 at 10:04 am
Oh…and F that rubber mulch crap. Just put it on the grass.
grim: just find people with kids that are over 10…..they will probably give you theirs for free if you are willing to dismantle and move it……smooth out the rough spots so avoid splinters……
10 most expensive places to raise a family in the U.S.
NJ doesn’t even crack the top 10. Though other NYC suburbs and exurbs do (Nassau-Suffolk; Westchester; Stamford, CT; Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown).
I have some doubts about the methodology (source website here). Morris county is considered the “Newark Metro area”… yeah… right…
Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-Middletown
Maybe in the fact that there aren’t any actual jobs there.
#12 – ” just find people with kids that are over 10…..they will probably give you theirs for free if you are willing to dismantle and move it……smooth out the rough spots so avoid splinters……”.
Stain it, too.
I was the second owner of the set we had. Hear it’s now on to a fourth family. Sorta like those battery powered miniature cars for kids except they always want some money for them and you have to buy a new battery ($60?). ALWAYS see them at our town wide garage sale (twice a year).
Problem with those cars: (if you have more than one kid around the same age) they’ll fight over who gets to drive it and how long and if you buy two they’ll try and play ‘bumper cars’.
Question re: Contingency sale.
We want another house in town (a COMPLEYELY renovated sorta Craftsman – with a reasonable seller that is willing to wait – ya, I know, rare) as I’m now admitting I don’t have the time or motivation to fully restore our Victorian.
I’ve never done this before. What’s the BEST way to go about it?
14. Yeah, Poughkeepsie LOL.
Also Ithaca? Really? Three houses total above $1m…..
I could see if methodology took into account earnings to cost, but on straight up costs?
@cthagod:
I need Kanye to Kanye at this year’s VMA’s. 10 year anniversary of Katrina he needs to update us on who don’t care about black people.
@HillaryClinton:
Today, we remember those lost in Katrina & recommit to finishing the work of rebuilding. No city should have to endure what NOLA endured. -H
“@HillaryClinton:
Today, we remember those lost in Katrina & recommit to finishing the work of rebuilding. No city should have to endure what NOLA endured. -H
blah, blah, blah, blah ,blah, sympathy, empathy, blah, blah, blah, blah, did I dupe them yet, blah, blah, narcissist, blah, blah, give me money, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, and btw, ‘I feel your pain’. [right]. blah.
I really should save this for Monday, but here is why Anon, Otto and the like make me sick.
http://tinyurl.com/Progressive-Montclair-Madness
Libturd, #7 yesterday, HAHA that was a good one!
Closed Friday in Raleigh, its great!! So im in new home and love it! Went out to the new gym, went furniture shopping, and just love Raleigh. Today was great. This was so worth all the work. Now if I could only get my cat to come out from under the deck I would have no problems. Poor thing is so stressed.
I noticed the Twidiot was silent (again) over the latest assassination of a cop.
IMHO, the left wants a war. To that, I paraphrase the inestimable Aldo Raines: “Oblige them”.
Any recommendations for good quality painter’s tape that doesn’t strip paint from covered areas or bond too strongly with adjacent new paint to wreck the clean edge?
Bullet-riddled ruins of Camden in pictures. Damn shame those bike paths didn’t work out….
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3214507/Boarded-buildings-bullet-ridden-walls-Pictures-dark-underbelly-one-America-s-dangerous-cities.html
Scotch Clean Release Blue.
I’ll send you pictures of my wife’s painting work. She is meticulous and does heavily masked wall painting. She has gone through cases of the stuff. Her paint jobs are signifantly more complex than wall paper.
You need a primed wall first, no finish coats over dirty old paint. Sand if you need to.
Second you can not release either too early or too late. If you wait until the paint is dry you are going to have a bad time. When latex is dry it is like rubber. If you accidentally find yourself dry, you need to score with an exacto.
#25 Comrade – I don’t see anyone else commenting on the assassination of that cop. Perhaps you should call out everyone?
#22
Lactation cookies? I just lost my cookies…
What are lactation cookies? Do they help with lactation? Or are they made out of the product of lactation? (*woof*)
The truth is, they supposedly make one lactate better. But seeing the question made me laugh.
Rainman photos
http://s442.photobucket.com/user/stuw6/slideshow/VP
Libturd,
Do casinos allow use of your phone at the machines (i know they don’t at tables)? Wouldn’t have to memorize optimal strategy if i could just have it queued up on my phone.
Libturd,
Do places allow use of your phone at the machines (i know they don’t at tables)? Wouldn’t have to memorize optimal strategy if i could just have it queued up on my phone.
Thx……dude….I think you married the right girl for you…..
Grim says:
August 30, 2015 at 9:03 am
Scotch Clean Release Blue.
I’ll send you pictures of my wife’s painting work. She is meticulous and does heavily masked wall painting. She has gone through cases of the stuff. Her paint jobs are signifantly more complex than wall paper.
You need a primed wall first, no finish coats over dirty old paint. Sand if you need to.
Second you can not release either too early or too late. If you wait until the paint is dry you are going to have a bad time. When latex is dry it is like rubber. If you accidentally find yourself dry, you need to score with an exacto.
To be clear, the “spectrum” question is that you derive enjoyment from this repetitive task……profits be damned….
Libturd at home says:
August 30, 2015 at 11:42 am
Rainman photos
http://s442.photobucket.com/user/stuw6/slideshow/VP
I have found just over 1 hour of drying time, then remove the tape, if you wait more than that it will require scoring. I had a pro do our great room, guy was in his 60s, did not mess around freehand no tape 12 ft ceilings, lots of angles, made me look like a piker with my blue tape all over the windows and mouldings. Hopefully the scrubable paint we put up will survive the kids and I won’t have to touch it for a long time.
Agree with Grim re: tape brand and time. Could go freehand but that slows the process (at least for me). But hey, if you have a steady hand, the wife and kids are out for the day and you havn’t listened to you favorite music in a while….great zen.
Old plaster walls are a bit different, especially bathrooms. I put in flexible plastic trim (EASY to cut on angles and available in many styles) and any slop is easily wiped off – ‘”dresses it up’ a bit, too. Most love the ‘detail’ not realizing it was a cheap, quick and easy way out.
Looked at Vic. in town a few hours ago. Best one I’ve ever inspected. 90% finished. Too big, too much property tax, too costly to heat and would take two years to complete (crap paint and spackle job in a few rooms and…other things).
Good/realistic price, though.
Pass.
Re: the Vic.
‘Tag team’ women ‘Realtors’ (one the typical bleached blonde 50 ish type with bright red lipstick…are you kidding me!?). LOL! Tried every trick in the book even ‘boxing’ me into a corner! PUSHED them out of the way laughed and left. Wife and kids got a good laugh, too.
God bless (if there is one) whoever buys that place. Not a bad joint but…They are going to get raped.
36
Like Frog tape. I don’t do anything too complicated, but have done lots of trim over the past year. All new floors, moldings, quarter round, etc. Green if it’s dry, yellow if less than a week old.
I tape everything, hands are too shakey, typically hung over.
[29] 30
They don’t comment on other shootings either. So they aren’t being inconsistent or hypocritical, are they?
Com – you are an angry old man.
Stu, can you ask those Montklair ginches where I can get some cookies that make my dick harder?