Posts by linger
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Hard News: Judicial caprice is no way to…, in reply to Katharine Moody,
"The power of consumerism" is not what you have behind you here, unless you're a direct client of the legal firm. Indirectly funding them through taxes doesn't have the same imperative force.
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How can I be unhappy, / When the sun shines out my bum?
(Illuminating illustration of survivor’s bias!)
Ignoring mass-energy conversion
(so, casting light aside, rather than behind),
the law of conservation of fecal matter entails that
someone who doesn’t give a shit must be full of it. -
I’m getting kind of sick of this.
Inequality is: people from different backgrounds (class, gender, ethnic, cultural, physical or mental differences) having systematically different access to such things as education, healthcare, food and shelter.
If you care about other people at all, you should care about inequality.
But even if you’re a selfish tosser who doesn’t give a shit about others, you should still care about inequality because (i) one day it could be you; and (ii) it eventually affects the quality of society you have to live in. A society with a larger number of marginalised people is a more dangerous and depressing society to live in.
If you still don’t give a shit, that can only mean you don’t see yourself as part of society.That said, look at the title of this thread. Inequality is too neutral a word. We need to call it what it is: unfairness.
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bad at strategy
One example of unfortunate framing: using the word "strategy" for "acting in accordance with your stated principles". "Strategy" isn't entirely positive in politics: it tends to connote a plan not just cunning but downright deceptive. (Though that may simply be a function of placing the word in proximity to politicians.)
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Speaker: House prices and the "Magic Money", in reply to B Jones,
It seems fair to assume banks tightened mortgage lending criteria post-GFC.
What David’s differential graph of month-on-month price change shows is a sharp drop in price immediately post-GFC, followed by an accelerating price increase since.
I can think of two ways to get that initial drop (and both may be true):
(i) failure of finance companies leading to a temporary glut of mortgagee sales by receivers, at bargain prices;
(ii) price drop in response to decreased demand resulting from higher lending criteria (the resulting drag on demand should also be temporary, but over a longer term).The first of these is self-limiting. The second should be an ongoing condition, leading to a new equilbrium position (imposing an initial lag, but with a subsequent rate of increase consistent with inflation) – which didn’t happen; instead the increase has been above inflation.
So the first was probably more important than the second; and in subsequent years, both have been dwarfed by a third demand driver, fuelled by finance external to the NZ economy. -
Speaker: House prices and the "Magic Money", in reply to David Hood,
You also need the people excluded to be permanently out of the market
Not necessarily – people (in or out of the market) aren’t immortal. What you do need, though, is for the average lag time before people can enter the market to keep increasing over time.
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So: over this period, we’re probably seeing an increase in external-sourced funding for land sales. That much seems a safe conclusion.
This may also translate to an increased absolute number of sales involving such funding – which could mask flat or declining local-funding-based sales totals. But we really don’t yet have sufficient information to support that interpretation.—
The “it’s-not-really-an-outlier-if-the-market-shifts” argument isn’t convincing, as it assumes that the market is rational and that bubbles don’t happen. Things don't have to revert immediately, especially if more air keeps being pumped into the bubble from outside.
I'm not sure we're entirely at odds here?
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Speaker: House prices and the "Magic Money", in reply to David Hood,
"small number of sales having a disproportionate effect” arguements.
- there is no evidence for a dramatic drop off in sales,.The argument being made probably isn’t about there being a smaller total number of sales (’cos, as you say, that’s a non-starter), but rather, that it may only take a small number of high-price outlier sales to shift the price expectation for most sales in the same region (through a false consensus effect).
The central limit theorem does not apply to psychology – because our reactions do not follow a normal distribution.
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Speaker: House prices and the "Magic Money", in reply to David Hood,
our major national asset is worth about 60% of what we have been claiming it is
Can we use an overall figure this way? If the “magic money” is from foreign investors/ speculators, it will likely be directed towards properties with the highest perceived (short-term) rise in value, mostly in big cities, and not in places like (for example) Eketahuna or Timaru. So, some sectors of the market may be valued more or less correctly, and others wildly inflated.
(Reading back: this may be a restatement of Rich's point above. I'm not sure.)
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Hard News: Deep Dream: Looking at clouds, in reply to Bart Janssen,
So does this mean Deep Dream knows you are a dog on the internet?
More accurately, Deep Dream (if it’s set to look for dogs)
treats everybody on the internet as a potential dog.
Then again, it’s unaware of the existence of individuals as such, so
more accurately still, it treats all input fields as potential dogging sites.