Yesterday I wrote a blog about how our country is too complex. Then I found that one of the blogs I read often wrote a blog on the same subject, only he did a better job about it than I did. Read his blog here. As it turns out he is quoting from a book about the same subject, called The Collapse of Complex Societies. I guess many people are coming to the same conclusion. Too bad for them they see it as only the fault of the Republicans, when there is much more at fault than just that. This must be much more important that I thought.
Category Archives: Government
Our world is too complex and getting worse…please help.
Many people have jobs, where your job is to make something better. In order to keep your job you need to show results. Now a problem happens, many companies make their product just about as good as it can get. In the real world of products they just move on to the next thing, but in software they keep adding features well beyond what is useful.
There are many examples of this. Winamp was perfect 8 years ago, it played music well, it had good skins and an equalizer. Then they started adding stuff, and adding and adding. They put in a video player, but it sucks. They put in a browser, what is the point in that? Adobe Acrobat is a program that never really worked well. And every update just makes it slower. There are third party ones that are much faster and better. There are many other examples.
So companies that make programs have figured out that most people don’t need their updates, but if people don’t get their updates they can’t push future changes on them, that may include more advertising, or toolbars on your browser, and these companies love to do that. So they have made their programs “phone home” each time they load, and if the company decided they want to send an update they will do so. This makes these programs slower, and many of them gripe if you are not online when you load the software. At least 20 programs I know of now try to push the Yahoo toolbar on their customers each time you update and unless you are very careful and unselect a box hidden somewhere you get it. And it is hard to remove and almost totally useless. There is really a battle going on for your attention, and these companies are trying more and more intrusive things to make you use their software, even though most of it is free. The other day I noticed that if you update java, it tries to install download and install open office, a almost 180MB download. Java is just a programming language, why should they push an entire office suite on users. Most users are not smart enough to catch this stuff, then they call me when they see stuff they don’t understand, and these calls are increasing. (As a note I love open office, I suggest it to many people and install it on all systems we sell.)
Now in the world of software this is a minor annoyance. You can run older versions, or usually disable all updates. But this is also done in many other areas, it is human nature that once something is very good you will keep changing it, even if the change is bad, simply to look like you are doing something. One area where this is VERY costly and actually dangerous is in the area of Government. The government keeps adding rules, and regulations in areas where none really is needed. Many people running for office brag about the number of bills they introduced, and the number of laws they passed. All of this makes life more complex. Do we really need such a complex tax system that you have to call an expert for help and even the experts don’t know half the time. Do we really need over 20,000 classifications for imported items. Do we really need to have so many regulations on hiring employees, increasing complexity and costs so much that companies get fed up with it and simply hire people in other nations. Should it really take over a year for a citizen to bring his wife to the US legally? Do we really need the government to tell us what food is safe, to tell us that we need to give our babies over 20 shots, many of which cause more harm than good? Should it be so complex to get a Federal grant that Matthew Lesko has become famous for his awesome 3000+ page book with over 15,000 DIFFERENT programs listed (BTW read his blog). Do we really need a government with 1000’s of different divisions?
This has cost our country a huge price. Our power has allowed us to survive for a while but now a crisis is coming. It is so hard to appease the government regulations that no nuclear power plant or oil refinery has been built here in over 30 years. Most factories are built overseas simply because lack of regulations make them much more profitable. Why would you want to build you widget here, and deal with the EPA the IRS and OSHA when you can built it overseas and import it for less. This is why our balance of trade is so bad, this is why are money is flowing out of this country and we are all in debt, as a nation we are living well beyond our means. This has been a problem for many years, but just recently it has gotten so bad that people have stopped lending to us, whole nations are writing down our debt, and this is causing problems for millions of Americans. This is a problem, created by our own government decades ago, the symptoms were hidden for years, the official government report showed almost no inflation from 1997 until 2005 while the average person saw huge inflation. Now it is all catching up, and millions of people are SHOCKED by it. It will ruin the lives of millions, it will also improve the lives of millions. I have written many times about this subject, see here or here.
Anyway this was suppose to be a simple post about how everything is getting more complex simply because people want to keep their job and have nothing better to do. Please comment on what you think about all of this.
The future of Real Estate
Many people are wondering if Real Estate will bounce back. Well the answer must be “OF COURSE”.
It is all supply and demand. The run up in 2002-2005 was simply due to huge demand. This demand was caused mostly by very cheap lending rates and how easy it was to get loans. During this time millions of people purchased their first house. Another factor was the reduction of the value of the dollar. Something can go up in price while keeping a steady value when the value of the currency it is measured in falls. This is also what happened in the 2000-2006 years.
So what caused prices to go down in 2007? Well supply and demand again. In many places developers were very excited about the prices going up so they ramped up production to record levels. (Increase supply) Next came a credit crunch, and the cheap money and the easy money left the system. This made most people not able to qualify to get the house they wanted. (Lower Demand). To make matters worse many people felt they were at the top and that it would be a good time to sell so they listed their house for sale. (Increase Supply). Then in many places like Phoenix, there was a huge crackdown on illegal aliens. Tens of thousands left their houses, many did not sell they simply just left. Most were renters and left their lease, making the landlord have issues. (Reduced demand, increased supply). Some people were used to the easy credit and have been living well beyond their means for years now, and when that stopped they could not pay their bills, and that included their house and they could not sell or refinance so they were foreclosed on. (Lower demand for ownership, higher demand for rentals. Higher supply of homes) So with all of these things working together there was no reason for prices to not go down.
So where do we go from here, Well prices must go back up. Builders stopped most building in mid 2007, and most places have many more people moving there than houses being built. (Decrease Supply) Well the credit crunch seems to be letting up, more deals are getting approved, mostly with government support. (Increase Demand) The lower prices are making people think twice about selling now, and many houses are coming off the market and turned into rentals. (Lower supply for ownership, higher supply for rentals) The illegal alien mess will not be resolved any time soon but most the people who are going to move already have. The number of loans that have payments that reset soon is going down, also the government is making new rules to help these people keep their houses, which will result in less foreclosures.
In 1974 the median home price was 32,000.
In 1984 the median home price was 72,400 (a 126% gain in 10 years)
In 1994) the median home price was 107,200 (a 48% gain in 10 years or 235% in 20 years)
In 2004) the median home price was 185,200 (a 72% gain in 10 years or 478% gain in 30 years)
During this same time the size of houses increased from less than 900 square feet to well over 1700 on average.
So it is now a great time to invest, everything is on sale due to these supply/demand factors. But where do you invest?
There are a few underlying economic facts to consider when picking the location of your investment. First you want to be in a place that is growing, meaning more people are moving there than moving out. Then you want to see how many vacant houses are on the market. If you look at a city with 50,000 vacant houses but 10,000 people move there each month (These are the numbers for Phoenix) you can see that soon the houses will be full. A city like Detroit is not good because people are leaving, there is no growth. You need growth for demand, and demand vs supply sets the price of real estate.
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Freedom in the modern age.
Well I have never talked on here about entertainment before but here is one that is good. If you do or do not know there was a show called Jericho. Last night was the last episode of it. It was a really great, well written show. It lost some people because for a while it went a bit slow, and most shows with arc don’t last once you miss a episode or too and the network changed it’s time slot at a very critical time in the development of the show. (Arc is when a show is a story from one episode to the next so you have to watch them in order to understand fully what is going on.) Basically they did not give it the chance they should have and it failed. It was canceled after the first season, but the largest fan outcry in TV history made them bring it back. They did so with little advertising and fanfare, and had a second season of only 7 episodes that mostly concluded the entire story.
The reason this show was special is because it touched on subject that are almost never talked about on TV in this way. Maybe it made some of the corporate people unhappy with the direction it was going.
WHAT FOLLOWS IS A SPOILER.
Basically the story goes like this. There are bombs that go off and destroy the 23 largest cities in the US except New York. Communication and power stop. Food runs out and people in rural Kansas start fighting to survive. Well equipped mercenaries raid towns and take all the resources and kill many people. At some point a goverment is put in place. The old US has the east, TX is independent and the west forms a new nation. The nation formed in the west is totally controled and financed by a huge mega corporation, the same one that ran the war in Iraq for the US and hired all the mercanires that the US used worldwide before the attack. The corporation quickly takes part of everything. They take away freedom, they surround each town with checkpoints so that only products that say can get in or out. They rush a new constitution that takes away all the power of the people and gives it to the corporation. Everything is unfair but they have all the resources and power. Soon the people start to revolt, and by the end of the show all the viewers are calling for revolution. The last episode is the start of this revolution with Texas shooting down airplanes from this new western nation.
Much of the show focused on the trap of giving corporations too much control of the government, which in turn takes rights away from the people. This is something that is happening right now in the United States. There are so many ways that our freedom has been taken. The government is fairly corrupt. They spend way too much, and take way too much. They also spend so much more than they take in. Who said the federal goverment should secure travel? Who said they should put so much control on what we eat? Who said that the government should run the school system in such a poor way? We tax people so unevenly but yet the government mails out billions of dollars in checks. The show Jericho showed how this line of thinking will only result in loss of freedom, and at some point the people will revolt.
If you told anyone 20 years ago the things that are going on in this nation right now they would have said you are crazy, that could never happen. That is way overstepping the role of government. I guess they are doing it just slow enough that most people don’t notice. The education system has failed the public by creating the dumbest population this nation has ever had.
People in our nation now expect to carry ID everywhere, go through government checkpoints to travel. It took me over a year to have our federal government allow my wife to enter the nation, they have no right to say who I can and can’t marry. People expect to give a personal ID number every time they talk business on the phone. People expect their information, privacy, and rights to be disrespected. Most of them are so miseducated that they simply believe what they are told by the media, they have no idea how to think for themselves.
If it goes much farther down this path I will really start to fear for the future success of my country, the United States of America. Most of the nation and the decisions are totally out of the control of the people, and most of the people disagree with many of the decisions. Most people think we are not to be the world police, they think we spend way too much and should not carry debt. Everyone I know thinks the tax system is crazy and needs to be replaced, but yet every year it gets more complex. When will the craziness end. Maybe only with revolution.