BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Disintermediation (page 2 of 43)

February 22, 2011

Hey, Wisconsin: Here’s a better idea: Divest your state of its education monopoly!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m totally digging the contretemps in Wisconsin. My take is that a lot of formerly-innocent Americans are seeing the naked grasping of Rotarian Socialism in a new way. Even without 2008, I think most people got it that business and government lived hand-in-pocket with each other. But the holy aura of the union hid a lot of ugliness — which is not to say that many people were looking all that closely, anyway. But a few of the schoolteachers of Wisconsin and a passel of imported ideologues have managed to illustrate undeniably a very potent idea:

They see themselves as your owners and you as their slave.

[continue reading at SplendorQuest.com.]

February 8, 2011

Farewell to Fannie and Freddie? Hold your breath…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Obamanation plans to offer up three proposals to eliminate FannieMae and FreddieMac from the secondary mortgage marketplace. Expect to hear much mournful keening, in coming weeks, from the country’s best enemy of private property, the National Association of Realtors.

From the Wall Street Journal:

More than two years after the government seized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Obama administration will recommend phasing out the housing-finance giants and gradually reducing the government’s footprint in the mortgage market, according to people familiar with the matter.

The administration is expected to include three options for a post-Fannie and Freddie world when it releases a long-awaited proposal for the future of the nation’s $10.6 trillion mortgage market, which could come as soon as Friday. Together with federal agencies, Fannie and Freddie have accounted for nine of 10 new loan originations in the past year.

The White House’s “white paper” will begin what promises to be a prolonged and fiery debate about the future of how homes are financed across the U.S. Any wind-down of Fannie and Freddie would happen gradually to avoid roiling markets, and the central, unanswered question is what kind of federal function, if any, the administration and Congress will invent to take their place.

Steps to reduce the government role in the mortgage market likely would raise borrowing costs for home buyers, adding pressure on the still-fragile U.S. housing markets. Consequently, analysts believe any transition could take years and would be driven by the pace of the housing market’s recovery.

The fight over how to restructure the housing-finance system has roiled Washington, and yet both parties have been hesitant to propose detailed legislation.

For conservatives, Fannie and Freddie played a starring role in the financial crisis, and any solution that is viewed as replicating their function could face fierce opposition from some Republicans. But more moderate Republicans may resist such an approach and could join Democrats who have said a federal role is necessary to ensure broad access to home ownership.

While advancing one detailed plan risks providing fodder for partisan battles, offering multiple proposals may help the administration force those views into the open, said Michael Barr, Read more

February 7, 2011

“If government doesn’t steer capital into housing, the capital doesn’t disappear; it could fund other job-creating businesses.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The Washington Post:

Advertised as a way to stabilize the housing market, government-backed mortgage securitization ended up distorting and destabilizing it. The resulting misallocation of resources – evident not only in today’s massive bailout of Fannie and Freddie but also in the vast quantities of land, water and energy wasted on suburban sprawl from Las Vegas to Fort Lauderdale – is a true American tragedy. Today’s housing crisis is an opportunity to make sure nothing like it ever happens again.

Damn straight. This is the Post, so the solution proposed is still WelfareLite, but any movement away from Rotarian Socialism is a move in the right direction.

July 23, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.1.3: Praising Cain: Change the world forever by learning to love your life the way you actually live it.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Imagine this: You are the High Priest of a nomadic tribe following a herd of foraging sheep. When the tribe needs food, a beast is slain and the meat is shared equally. The political structure is hierarchical, but even the Chieftain is governed by the unchanging traditions of the tribe.

One year the herd wanders toward the seacoast. You encamp a short walk away from a trading post built by a sea-faring civilization.

For the first time in their lives, your tribesmen discover a way of life different from their own. The traders live indoors, sleeping on beds! Their diet consists of more than meat and foraged nuts. They eat grain, fruit and fish, flavoring their water with delectable nectars.

Wealth is not shared. Villagers trade with each other to get what they need — and each family owns its own land! Disputes are resolved by reasoned conciliation, not by fiat. Even so, each family seems to own more weapons than your whole tribe combined.

Anyone can introduce a new tool, technique or idea at any time — upending the whole civilization if it comes to that — and not only is this not forbidden, it is avidly sought!

This is horrifying to you as High Priest, but your horror is nothing compared to the apoplexy of the Chieftain. As he watches tribesmen disappearing into the village one by one, he turns to you for a solution.

Now you understand the story of Cain and Abel.

Cain made a sacrifice of grain, Abel of meat, and the meat — the wealth of the herders — was pleasing to the god of the tribe. Why does Cain slay Abel in the story? To scare the tribesmen back into the herd.

The Greeks found a better way to live, spreading it with capitalistic abandon. Those who abhorred the Greek way of life crafted their mythologies to portray Hellenism as evil.

Would you like to change the world, forever, for the good, one mind at a time? Here’s how:

If you live in Cain’s world, stop pretending to live in Abel’s.

If your life depends on capitalism, private property and free trade, stop pretending to Read more

July 22, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.0.3: When you resolve never to let other people dominate you, you come to be indomitable.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That’s a lot to take in, so indulge me as we summarize what we’ve talked about so far:

  • You are a sovereign soul. Your purposive behavior is exclusively controlled by your self.
  • You cannot be governed. Other people cannot control your behavior, nor you theirs.
  • To the extent that other people — your religion, the government, your family or friends — might seem to control you, this is a consequence of your own freely-tendered consent, your own explicit, freely-chosen, on-going cooperation.
  • Because other people’s seeming control over you originates in your own sovereignty, you can recover your freedom at any time you want, simply by withdrawing your consent.
  • If you have surrendered any of your sovereignty in the past, your life will be better — for you — once you have regained full control over yourself.

If you have made the mental effort to recover your sovereignty in full, your life will already be better. This is a profoundly important reason to be cheerful, wouldn’t you say?

In other essays, I take up the mental, physical and moral benefits of a full commitment to self-adoration, but this is simple enough to see in summary: If you devote your life to doing everything you can think of to make your life better, more perfect — more perfectly, more abundantly rich in every kind splendor — your life will be immeasurably improved.

Now reflect that we’re talking about what might happen if the shit really does hit the fan. If the government of the United States does not collapse under its own vast weight, so much the better. But even if it does, your own unique life will still be better than it might have been had you not made this change, won’t it?

There is no downside to self-love. You’ve been poisoned on the idea, for your whole life, by people who know they cannot rule free minds. But just by daring to let your mind run free, by daring to be the uniquely beautiful specimen of humanity you have been all along, your life will be everything you’ve always known it could be.

Yes, the world outside your mind can be Read more

July 21, 2010

Reasons to be (less than) cheerful, Part 3.0.2: What has it cost us to have been so wrong for so long about selflessness and self-adoration?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You’ve been told your whole life that all the troubles of the world owe to selfishness, and that the only true path to happiness is to renounce the self and to damn the only life you have ever known. Who told you this? Amazingly enough, it was thugs, priests and politicians — and their many, many minions. If you’ve read this far, you must know by now that every bit of this is a lie, the Big Lie that has been used in infinite variations over the course of all of human history to con decent, honest, innocent people like you into giving up everything you have for the benefit of the worst sorts of people.

This is a premise I believe can be defended in reason to infinite precision: Everything squalid on the face of the earth, for all of human history, is the consequence of selflessness, of the deliberate, conscious, completely voluntary renunciation of the self by a person who has self-induced the belief that some objective he seeks can only be attained by an act of self-destruction.

But that argument is just the corollary of this one: Everything we know of splendor, within our own minds and in the world around us, is an artifact not just of selfishness but of the most profound and most profoundly-beautiful self-love. If there is any normal state for human beings — normal as a matter of ontology, not statistics — this is it: To be so much in love with the things you make with the time of your life and the effort of your mind and your body that you cannot bear for those things to be less than perfect.

Think of that: Whether you’re looking at a skyscraper or listening to a symphony or simply teaching a child to read, the source of the splendor you experience is self-adoration and nothing else — not just your own delight at being alive, or the child’s, but also the architect’s, the composer’s, the author’s and all of the people who worked on those creations. And then consider that it is self-love — the self-love Read more

July 20, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.0.1: You are ungovernable: Other people have power over you only because you have surrendered your own sovereign authority to them — and they can’t stop you from taking it back.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Let’s start with this idea: You are a sovereign soul. I have a lot more to say about the nature of the self, within this series of posts and throughout my writing, but, in a political context, this is the most important fact of your life: You cannot be governed.

All of human history, ultimately, is an attempt to contravene and negate and obviate this simple fact, and it is for this reason that every human civilization — so far — must be rated a failure. Some have been better than others, of course, and I sing the praises of the Greeks not just for what they did in the Hellas of old, but for what they are still doing all over the world. The Greek idea — each man has the right and power to own and control his own life and property — undergirds the best approaches we have seen — so far — to truly human civilizations.

And the United States — for a while — was the best-ever expression of that Greek ideal, the freest civilization ever yet seen on the earth. But like the polities of the Greeks before us, American society carried within it the seeds of its own destruction and the horrors visited upon you every day in the news are those seeds bearing their full fruit at last.

Here is the problem, for the government of the United States and for any would-be governor of human behavior: There is nothing I can do to cause or prevent your purposive actions. I can threaten you or beat you or tax you or imprison you or kill you, but I cannot cause you to do anything I want you to do, nor can I prevent you from doing anything I want for you not to do. You are a moral free agent as a manifestation of your nature as a human being, and there is nothing I can do to contravene or negate or obviate your sovereign freedom.

But wait. Isn’t it true, as Rousseau had it, that “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains”? Indeed Read more

July 19, 2010

Reasons to be (not so) cheerful, Part 3.0.0: While it may be implausible that western civilization could collapse, this much seems certain: You will not be prepared for what happens next.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So: Let’s drop the shit-hammer, shall we?

Greece is broke. So is England, and so is most of the rest of Europe.

California is broke, Illinois is broke, and, if you count unfunded pension liabilities, not only are all the rest of the states, counties and cities broke, so are all of the surlier labor unions.

Social Security is broke, as is the metamorphosing medical scam to be known, soon enough, as no-healthcare-for-you!

The United States government is broke, of course, limping along, for now, on funds borrowed against the promise of future confiscatory currency inflation, future crippling taxation — or both.

Socialism is a Ponzi scheme, and, before you know it, you run out of suckers to milk. Sooner or later, welfare-state socialism has to collapse. As I’ve argued, I don’t think that time is now. Despite our talent, as a species, for forecasting apocalyptic, pandemic doom, in reality the sky hardly ever falls more than once or twice a day.

Moreover, even though we are enmired in a deep recession — and even though our puerile president is making that recession much worse with every boneheaded error at his command — even so, it is very likely that we are out-producing welfare-state socialism in the long run. That might stick in your craw, but it remains that — even despite the drag on the economy caused by taxes, regulation, deficit spending and waste — the trajectory of the standard of living of every American — and virtually everyone on earth — is steadily upward.

But, but, but! Government is impoverishing us! I saw it on the big-screen HD-TV in the bedroom, and also on the even-bigger-screen HD-TV in the living room, and, just to be sure, I followed-up on the high-speed internet connection on my 27″ quad-core iMac! Don’t try to tell me the world’s not going to hell in a hand-basket! I’ve got the best hardware and software in the world to tell me how terrible my life is!

That much is funny to me, but, even so, these circumstances can’t last forever. At some point the parasites will overwhelm the host, and, when that happens, Read more

June 22, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part two: If we are wise, and if we are lucky, we won’t “meet the new boss” because there won’t be any bosses.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Watch this:

Yes, everyone knows Saturday Night Live is not funny, but that sketch is interesting, even so.

Why? What is that bit actually saying?

Actors are puppets for writers, never forget that. What are the writers of that unfunny little skit trying to say?

Imagine this: Your parents spent a ton of money to send you to Brown or Yale or Dartmouth, and now you have the thoroughly unsexy job of writing unfunny comedy bits for an unwatched variety show that can’t even sell its own advertising time.

Do you want to believe that some mouth-breather in Dubuque can get an education just as useless as yours at, say, one percent of the cost your parents paid out?

Worse, what if that guy’s education is better than yours? What if he can get a job that amounts to something, in an industry that is growing, not dying? What if people make or lose money — or even live or die — based on his academic performance?

He doesn’t have your class ring, and he doesn’t belong to your network of drunken dissipates — each one of whom is stuck in a going-nowhere job just like yours. But, but, but: He doesn’t feel himself endowed with the centuries of effete sneerpower to which you lay claim but have done nothing to deserve.

The truth you don’t dare admit is that your education distinguishes you in no way at all. You studied nothing serious, and you learned nothing of what you studied. You put in time and you made connections, but you don’t actually know anything, you can’t actually do anything, and if you are ever required to be anything more than an expert at supercilious self-pity, you will be dismissed at once. You are nothing but your vaunted pedigree, and that pedigree is based entirely on the accomplishments of other people — the vast majority of them long since deceased.

This is the naked essence of that fake advertisement, the snarling envy and resentment of an entire social class composed of nothing but empty suits.

Welcome to the disestablishment, y’all…

The question is, what if we’ve really screwed the pooch this time. Read more

March 3, 2010

Computer “expert” insists, in 1995, that, “No online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Technology “expert” Clifford Stoll precisely 15 years ago in Newsweek:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

Wicked stupid, huh? It gets better:

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

It’s interesting to me to note that the predictions Stoll is denouncing were Read more

March 2, 2010

SplendorQuest: Should we celebrate John Galt Day on June 1st?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this coming on four years ago, one of my last posts to PresenceOfMind.net, my philosophical/political/literary home on the web. The planned strike of our undocumented friends has come and gone, but the underlying idea — a strike against the looters on June 1st — still resonates with me. What say you? Is this something worth pursuing? –GSS

 

Francisco looked silently out at the darkness. The fire of the mills was dying down. There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible.

“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco D’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.” –Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The photo above is the Sonoran Desert, a vast unpopulated wasteland in the midst of which is Metropolitan Phoenix, home to three million children of Cain.

Contrary to popular opinion, the desert was not designed by Walt Disney, and it will kill you with a blithe indifference if you make even one small mistake. If you have never been to the desert, you do not have a referent for solitude. Far more than the serenity that comes from a fundamental awareness of your own aloneness, true solitude must carry with it at least a tinge of fear. When you experience a silence so total that you can hear the footfalls of a tiny lizard fifty yards away, you also come to realize that no one, no one, no one will hear you if you shout for help. Twist an ankle and you die. Lose the path and you die. Misjudge the weather and you die. Set you hand where you should not — and you die.

And yet I can go to the desert on a lark, armed as a child of Cain with nothing but two bottles of water, a tank Read more

March 2, 2010

Dawn In America- Part 3-Can We Educate the Masses (For Profit?)

by

Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL

Author website

Information can be a glow in the  darkness. Traditional higher education models are losing market share to cheaper education delivery systems.    Young people now have the opportunity to learn the very same principles for free that are taught to the people they may eventually hire to run their businesses.  I think this free market trend will eventually overtake the traditional post-secondary education models.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find a fully-funded college education available, competitive with some of the best traditional colleges, in the not-too-distant future.

I can see a future where the ultimate end-users of that education (private industry),  see the benefit to developing accredited curricula, and offering them to current and potential employees, at a greatly reduced cost (maybe for free).  I’m not just talking about an MBA from “Mutual of Omaha University“.  Think “University of the American Way“, delivering bachelor’s degrees to the masses- graduates might receive checks from the alumni association rather than sending checks to it.

Education via extension isn’t a new idea.  This ACC school has been granting degrees, to off-campus students, since the 1940s.  Online education is now a pop culture phenomenon. If this educational delivery system grows like I think it will, how can the real estate brokerage or mortgage lending communities profit?

The idea that education can get cheaper (moving towards free) and more readily available will be an irreversible trend.  No longer can we hide behind the phrase “proprietary information” or “specialized knowledge”.  Consumers may educate themselves about how to get a VA condo complex approved and find that my “specific knowledge”, while helpful, doesn’t permit me to charge a one point premium to my lesser educated competitors.  My specific expertise DOES drastically reduce my marketing costs, allowing me to retain more profit than my competitors.

Information can be exported inexpensively. Imagine holding a webinar online, explaining the benefits of owning a Costa Rican vacation property, to German pharmaceutical executives.  Then, imagine holding a different webinar, to a group of retired Americans in Costa Rica, about investing in mortgages so that those Germans could borrow their money and buy from those properties.  Would that add Read more

January 19, 2010

What is the Apple “tablet” computer going to look like?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Some semi-informed speculation from the Financial Times:

The name and functions of the new machine are not known, but intense speculation and leaks from component manufacturers and business allies have pointed to a number of expected characteristics.

The consensus is that the tablet will have a large screen, perhaps 10 inches on the diagonal, and run the same operating system as the iPhone and iPod, as opposed to the Mac computers.

That means that it would be able to handle many of the more than 100,000 applications – or apps – that are designed to run on the smaller gadgets. A touchscreen would be a significant feature.

Video game manufacturers expect the device to have strong appeal for their audience.

The iPhone and iPod are already challenging portable products from Sony and other console makers as popular gaming devices.

Among the big unanswered questions are what internet connectivity will come with the tablet and what other forms of entertainment it will provide.

Apple has been in discussions with cable network channels about carrying bundles of video for a monthly fee.

Book and magazine publishers, meanwhile, have been hoping that Apple might enliven their electronic formats.

Time Warner recently showed off a conceptual version of an electronic, full-colour Sports Illustrated magazine that allowed for fast-flipping, zooming and other functions in need of support from new hardware.

Don’t Vook now, but dedicated device makers might want to slash prices on standing inventory — and cancel those reorders. AT&T told us yesterday that they’re going to be in the game, so figure 3/3.5/4G wireless plus Wi-Fi. This is going to rock.

January 17, 2010

What does “information wants to be free” really mean? It doesn’t matter how long you spent making that mudpie, it’s worth nothing to me.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Reflecting on Jeff Brown’s post on economics, which in turn referenced an argument by Malcolm Galdwell, I made a short movie explicating the meme “information wants to be free.”

Cliff’s Notes: When a market good is so redundantly abundant as to be, essentially, ubiquitous and unavoidable, its market price will tend to plummet to zero. It doesn’t matter what the sellers of those goods might want to earn. All that matters, in this context, is what buyers are willing to pay. If the discounted probability of procuring an acceptable alternative is very high, then the price will tend to be very low.

Ordinary information is ubiquitous and unavoidable, and, therefore, the market price it can command is effectively zero. What the sellers or anyone else thinks about that is irrelevant. I have no reason to pay even a penny to you if I can get “just as good” next door for free.

That in turn references the very first post I wrote for BloodhoundBlog:

If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?

The answer? Almost always zero.

In the clip I talk about the difference in the paywalls of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Ironically enough, there comes news this morning that the Times plans to finish off its slow suicide with yet another tilt at a paywall. Much good may it do them.

Here’s the video:

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