From Business Insider:
Home prices are poised to drop as the frozen housing market thaws, 2 top experts say
House prices may be headed lower, dealing a blow to sellers but providing relief to buyers, two experts say.
“The only way out of the box, the only way to get sales back up is mortgage rates have to come down, incomes have to continue to improve, we have to avoid a recession, and I suspect we’ll have to see some house price declines at some point here,” Moody’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, told Yahoo Finance this week.
Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman made a similar call in a Fox News interview this week. Asked about Morgan Stanley’s latest forecast of a 3% drop in home prices next year, he replied that a decline “seems not just possible, but likely.”
The housing market ground to a halt this year, as the Federal Reserve’s inflation-fighting hikes to interest rates have boosted mortgage rates to two-decade highs.
Homeowners who locked in much cheaper rates have balked at selling up and paying heftier monthly payments for their next place. Meanwhile, prospective buyers have been priced out, and many are waiting for rates to fall instead of settling for a worse home than they wanted.
“Housing’s taken it on the chin, particularly demand,” Zandi said. He pointed to new data showing annualized sales of previously owned homes fell below 3.8 million units in October, the lowest figure in 13 years. “You have to go back to the teeth of the financial crisis to find sales that low,” he said.
“many are waiting for rates to fall instead of settling for a worse home than they wanted.”
That’s all you need to know. Rates go down, home prices, sales, number of offers go up! 2024 spring housing market will be very interesting.
Sorry Jersey:
https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Oct-2023.png
“I trust the Valley bros, with all their acknowledged shortcomings, a hell of a lot more than the DC clowns…This is such an irresponsible comment.”
“The DC clowns should start asking for roadmaps, whatifs, and accountability at every step of the way from here with respect to AI.”
Having seen the inside of each sausage factory I would posit the latter thought is much more irresponsible and dangerous than the former….
Although, many thanks to the poster of the ‘demon core’ link last night.
Provided a good laugh as one cannot make this shit up….two separate incidents of physicists irradiating themselves to death while testing criticality on one of the unused plutonium spheres at Alamos…one as he accidentally drops a tungsten brick on the plutonium core and the other (wait for it) as he was using the narrow edge of a screwdriver to elevate the reflector shield that controlled criticality and (really wait for it) neglected to insert simple shims to prevent accidentally dropping the shield on the core to initiate criticality which, of course, happened….
Seems like seven years intervened between the discovery of nuclear fission and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki….we still have some time before our robot overlords take control. Enjoy your upcoming golden years.
“The only way out of the box, the only way to get sales back up is mortgage rates have to come down, incomes have to continue to improve, we have to avoid a recession, and I suspect we’ll have to see some house price declines at some point here,” Moody’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, told Yahoo Finance this week.
And the moon needs to be in the seventh house, Jupiter needs to align with Mars, peace needs to be among the planets and love needs t0 steer the stars… then and only then is when we’ll be out of the box. Oh, and Taylor and Travis need to have a love baby.
For those who didn’t push through the link here’s the money shot on the second incident…total face palm….seriously cannot make this shit up…
“On May 21, 1946, physicist Louis Slotin and seven other personnel were in a Los Alamos laboratory conducting another experiment to verify the closeness of the core to criticality by the positioning of neutron reflectors…It required the operator to place two half-spheres of beryllium (a neutron reflector) around the core to be tested and manually lower the top reflector over the core using a thumb hole at the polar point. As the reflectors were manually moved closer and farther away from each other, neutron detectors indicated the core’s neutron multiplication rate. The experimenter needed to maintain a slight separation between the reflector halves to allow enough neutrons to escape from the core in order to stay below criticality. The standard protocol was to use shims between the halves, as allowing them to close completely could result in the instantaneous formation of a critical mass and a lethal power excursion.
Under Slotin’s own unapproved protocol, the shims were not used. The top half of the reflector was resting directly on the bottom half at one point, while 180 degrees from this point a gap was maintained by the blade of a flat-tipped screwdriver in Slotin’s hand. The size of the gap between the reflectors was changed by twisting the screwdriver…
On the day of the accident, Slotin’s screwdriver slipped outward a fraction of an inch while he was lowering the top reflector, allowing the reflector to fall into place around the core. Instantly, there was a flash of blue light and a wave of heat across Slotin’s skin; the core had become supercritical, releasing an intense burst of neutron radiation estimated to have lasted about a half second. Slotin quickly twisted his wrist, flipping the top shell to the floor. The heating of the core and shells stopped the criticality within seconds of its initiation while Slotin’s reaction prevented a recurrence and ended the accident. The position of Slotin’s body over the apparatus also shielded the others from much of the neutron radiation, but he received a lethal dose of 1,000 rad…”
Sounds like what might occur under Pumpkin’s supervision, were he actually qualified in the hard sciences.
one as he accidentally drops a tungsten brick on the plutonium core…
I almost did this once. Phew! Good thing I caught it with my foot and precariously balanced it as I put my coffee cup down.
This is who want AGI and they are probably right –
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
BUT they keep forgetting about this –
https://principia-scientific.com/the-5-basic-laws-of-human-stupidity-according-to-cipolla/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla
That is why you need this –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle
From NY Times opinion. Copy and pasted because of wall.
Guest Essay
A Tech Overlord’s Horrifying, Silly Vision for Who Should Rule the World
Oct. 28, 2023
By Elizabeth Spiers
Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and digital media strategist.
It takes a certain kind of person to write grandiose manifestoes for public consumption, unafflicted by self-doubt or denuded of self-interest. The latest example is Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of the top-tier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and best known, to those of us who came of age before TikTok, as a co-founder of the pioneering internet browser Netscape. In “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a recent 5,000-plus-word post on the Andreessen Horowitz website, Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.
In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few. As for the rest of us — the unwashed masses, people who have either “unskilled” jobs or useless liberal arts degrees or both — we exist mostly as automatons whose entire value is measured in productivity.
The vision has attracted a good deal of controversy. But the real problem with Mr. Andreessen’s manifesto may be not that it’s too outlandish, but that it’s too on-the-nose. Because in a very real and consequential sense, this view is already enshrined in our culture. Major tent-poles of public policy support it. You can see it in the work requirements associated with public assistance, which imply that people’s primary value is their labor and that refusal or inability to contribute is fundamentally antisocial. You can see it in the way we valorize the C.E.O.s of “unicorn” companies who have expanded their wealth far beyond what could possibly be justified by their individual contributions. And the way we regard that wealth as a product of good decision-making and righteous hard work, no matter how many billions of dollars of investors’ money they may have vaporized, how many other people contributed to their success or how much government money subsidized it. In the case of ordinary individuals, however, debt is regarded as not just a financial failure but a moral one. (If you are successful and have paid your student loans off, taking them out in the first place was a good decision. If you haven’t and can’t, you were irresponsible and the government should not enable your freeloading.)
Would-be corporate monarchs, having consolidated power even beyond their vast riches, have already persuaded much of the rest of the population to more or less go along with it.
As a piece of writing, the rambling and often contradictory manifesto has the pathos of the Unabomber manifesto but lacks the ideological coherency. It rails against centralized systems of government (communism in particular, though it’s unclear where Mr. Andreessen may have ever encountered communism in his decades of living and working in Silicon Valley) while advocating that technologists do the central planning and govern the future of humanity. Its very first line is “We are being lied to,” followed by a litany of grievances, but further on it expresses disdain for “victim mentality.”
It would be easy to dismiss this kind of thing as just Mr. Andreessen’s predictable self-interest, but it’s more than that. He articulates (albeit in a refrigerator magnet poetry kind of way) a strain of nihilism that has gained traction among tech elites, and reveals much of how they think about their few remaining responsibilities to society.
Neoreactionary thought contends that the world would operate much better in the hands of a few tech-savvy elites in a quasi-feudal system. Mr. Andreessen, through this lens, believes that advancing technology is the most virtuous thing one can do. This strain of thinking is disdainful of democracy and opposes institutions (a free press, for example) that bolster it. It despises egalitarianism and views oppression of marginalized groups as a problem of their own making. It argues for an extreme acceleration of technological advancement regardless of consequences, in a way that makes “move fast and break things” seem modest.
If this all sounds creepy and far-right in nature, it is. Mr. Andreessen claims to be against authoritarianism, but really, it’s a matter of choosing the authoritarian — and the neoreactionary authoritarian of choice is a C.E.O. who operates as king. (One high-profile neoreactionary, Curtis Yarvin, nominated Steve Jobs to rule California.)
There’s probably a German word to describe the unique combination of horrifying and silly that this vision evokes, but it is taken seriously by people who imagine themselves potential Chief Executive Authoritarians, or at the very least proxies. This includes another Silicon Valley billionaire, Peter Thiel, who has funded some of Mr. Yarvin’s work and once wrote that he believed democracy and freedom were incompatible.
It’s easy enough to see how this vision might appeal to people like Mr. Andreessen and Mr. Thiel. But how did they sell so many other people on it? By pretending that for all their wealth and influence, they are not the real elites.
When Mr. Andreessen says “we” are being lied to, he includes himself, and when he names the liars, they’re those in “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview,” who are “disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable — playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.”
His depiction of academics of course sounds a lot like — well, like tech overlords, who are often insulated from the real-world consequences of their inventions, including but not limited to promoting disinformation, facilitating fraud and enabling genocidal regimes.
It’s an old trick and a good one. When Donald Trump, an Ivy-educated New York billionaire, positions himself against American elites, with their fancy educations and coastal palaces, his supporters overlook the fact that he embodies what he claims to oppose. “We are told that technology takes our jobs,” Mr. Andreessen writes, “reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.” Who is doing the telling here, and who is being told? It’s not technology (a term so broad it encompasses almost everything) that’s reducing wages and increasing inequality — it’s the ultrawealthy, people like Mr. Andreessen.
It’s important not to be fooled by this deflection, or what Elon Musk does when he posts childish memes to X to demonstrate that he’s railing against the establishment he in fact belongs to. The argument for total acceleration of technological development is not about optimism, except in the sense that the Andreessens and Thiels and Musks are certain that they will succeed. It’s pessimism about democracy — and ultimately, humanity.
In a darker, perhaps sadder sense, the neoreactionary project suggests that the billionaire classes of Silicon Valley are frustrated that they cannot just accelerate their way into the future, one in which they can become human/technological hybrids and live forever in a colony on Mars. In pursuit of this accelerated post-Singularity future, any harm they’ve done to the planet or to other people is necessary collateral damage. It’s the delusion of people who’ve been able to buy their way out of everything uncomfortable, inconvenient or painful, and don’t accept the fact that they cannot buy their way out of death.
Don’t forget gain of function research. We are lucky to still be alive today.
Don’t look up post credit scene.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDWkCMOlILs&t=2s
Whoops wrong scene, this one with the nude Meryl Streep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iELeY7RNDKI
There is stupidity and there is active evil.
Or those who no longer give a f, or who believe they have nothing to lose. Get one of them that is reasonably intelligent and you can have lots and lots of entertainment.
Where I work the latest thing is stealing food from co-workers.
A whole discussion goes on about it, and how angry people are.
I think I am the only one that finds it amusing. I mean, it hasn’t been my food, but watching their anger just made me laugh.
If someone stole my food, I wouldn’t be angry at all. Just head to the cafeteria and buy something.
I guess having all of your stuff, including your kid almost taken from you changes your perspective. I wasn’t always this way.
So rob the banks, rob the stores, loot the treasury you elected cretins. You are gonna do it anyway. Use your AI to steal the food from a baby’s mouth. Your are gonna do that too.
America has become the human centipede. If you don’t know what that is look it up.
Joe Biden training lesson:
https://youtu.be/dlNq2Qaa4XY?t=93
America has become the human centipede.
Release the Kraken!
thanks for sharing
HeadHurts4 says:
November 25, 2023 at 9:49 am
From NY Times opinion. Copy and pasted because of wall.
Guest Essay
A Tech Overlord’s Horrifying, Silly Vision for Who Should Rule the World
Oct. 28, 2023
By Elizabeth Spiers
Derek Chauvin stabbed while in prison.
Welcome to the jungle.
Juice,
That was a great movie. I liked Death to 2020, the sequel not so much.
Gen Z and Gen Alpha has pegged you for the lying rats you are. Things they never would have noticed are instantly visible on social media.
The corrosion has eaten past the clearcoat, the basecoat, and the primer.
And while some of their disaffiliation is driven by the same reasons we’ve seen for older millennials and Gen X, what distinguishes the under-30 set is a marked level of distrust in a variety of major institutions and leaders — not just religious ones. So it makes a certain kind of sense that they don’t want to associate too closely with any defined group.
Phoenix: Gen Alpha?
3b Gen Alpha is already on TikTok.
You would be surprised how fast kids grow up these days and the things they notice.
Phoenix: So Gen Alpha the ones behind Gen Z. God help them if they are getting their information from Tik Tok.
Black Friday on line spending set a record this year , up 7 plus percent over last year. Party on!
3b,
I have six credit offers sent to me that are sitting on my desk, unopened. I don’t plan to apply for any of them, I have enough cards that I need. I assume it’s six digits worth of credit combined. The muppets are whipping out credit cards as if a meteor will destroy the earth in a matter of days.
Fast: After the conversation last week, I looked at some of my credit cards on line that had request credit limit increase, 4 cards had this feature . All four gave me instant credit line increases I kept the requests on the lower end. The results all four gave an increase for a total of 15k in increases. The whole process for all 4 lines took less than 5 minutes. It’s unbelievable!
Life hack….don’t wake up hungover at 9p somewhere…especially in a Z bed. After buying her mother shots.
Left a pair of name brand Rx sunglasses. Guess it’s a cost of doing business. Fucking certainly not going back for them.
Protect your daughters. Red States just as hypocritical as the Peoples Republic of Montclair….just in different ways.