dingosity

Retirement is a little tweeting bird, chirping in the meadow. Retirement is a wreath of pretty flowers that smell bad.

"Is Math Real?"

Define real.

FWIW, I have an MBA and Unity's behaviour doesn't make sense to me either.

Oh... and... "Not all MBAs"

Aha. It looks like BWB changed the schema on their customer record DB so the front-end pre-payment page is looking for the phone number field somewhere other than where my record(s) stores it. You can go to the account page and see some weirdness with the address records. Some views of the same record show a phone number, others don't. I was able to fix it by deleting my existing address and adding it again (address records contain phone numbers (or maybe that's what they were changing?)). But delete the address record, add it back and select "default shipping" and/or "default billing" and you should be able to complete the front-end order creation process.

Or maybe your record isn't borked like mine is.

So far it doesn't seem like I was double-billed or anything, but I trust the BWB guys to resolve that if it does happen. But fulfillment might be borked, so let's see what happens when their back-end fulfillment systems try to make sense of this order. But, again, I trust them to fix problems if they arise. This is the first complaint I've had w/ them in over three years of being a customer.

Do we really need to OWN icebreakers? Maybe we could start a website where countries and companies who own icebreakers can operate them for the benefit of other countries and companies who want to use them. They just walk to the shore in the Canadian north, click the "Call Icebreaker" button on the app and wait for an icebreaker someone else owns to arrive.

Um. Are you suggesting that denizens of internet comments forums are somehow not armchair economists?

Uhh... wat?

Ah. I thought we were talking about new homes, which are sold by builders (or the bank if the builder goes bust.) On the secondary market, opportunities for weirdness certainly exists. Investors buy older homes as well as new. And my sense is fewer people are looking to buy homes in this market with mortgage rates having gone up recently. I think people who don't HAVE to sell their homes are waiting it out until rates go down and they think they can get more for their home. I have no data to back that up, it's just anecdata from talking to a few realtors and noticing there are fewer homes listed on zillow in areas I've been looking at for the last several years.

Which is to say... I think there's less inventory than we would have seen had rates remained lower. But that's sort of unrelated to the issue of builders manipulating their rates of inventory creation (which I can't imagine they don't do, at least in response to macro-economic conditions.) The reason I think they should be treated differently is it takes a noticeable amount of time for a builder to build a house. First they have to negotiate financing and insurance, negotiate plans with the county, recruit a construction crew, etc. Home owners in the secondary market can respond to market conditions much faster.

Look at my post immediately previous to yours. It links to a Lending Tree study that indicates an inverse relationship between vacancy rate and median home price. Hawaii is an obvious outlier, but interestingly, so is New Jersey. (What's going on in Jersey?) The data in this study is broken down by state; SMSA would probably be better, but I didn't spend a lot of time digging up data.

Lending tree did a study which ranked states on % vacant.

https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-stud...

If you trust the data (some of which comes from the 2020 census), it implies a nation-wide vacancy rate of 11.67%. Which was lower than I suspected, but higher than @falcolas' guess at 10%.

Also... I think I saw something go by indicating prices were still falling, at least in some markets.

This is from last year: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/22/homes/us-home-prices-falling/...

And more recently: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/bay-area-home-pri...

Though that last one is a little confusing, citing data from the last three months in one section and data over 2 years in another. But it does (at least) make a nod towards explaining pricing in terms of supply and demand. I assert, and I think this is similar to @falcolas' point, that participation in the market by builders, foreign and domestic investors and banks has veered US house pricing noticeably away from true elasticity.

I do not damn builders for trying to increase their profits. We're a "wealth creation" economy, after all. But there does seem to be some conflict between stated national policy objectives of "affordable housing" and "profitable housing market." Alas, I bemoan the erosion of sensible policy-making in Washington. In the old days we would have just come out and said something like "we have affordable housing targets and will manipulate the market to achieve them." Now we're too spooked to say anything lest we upset the markets; or at least it seems.

Necessary for what?

Not to sound too much like a marxist, but @falcolas has a point here. If builders were offering a public service, they would likely sell their new homes (condos, townhomes, high-rises, etc.) for cost plus a reasonable percentage. But new homes go into a speculation market where the exchange value of the home factors in profit by the rentier class who add nothing to the value of the transaction.

I would like to say I evaluated this site on the contents of their argument. But... I landed on the page, noticed the zero margin paragraphs and ads and realized it was put together by a 19 year old trying to look cool in front of his objectivist friends.

A big +1 for https://heavens-above.com/ (referenced in this article.) I love that site.

Hmm. This seems like an ad for someone's courseware. That's totally fine, but might have wanted to label it as such.

Person 1: I have a problem. Suggestions?

Person 2: Here is a suggestion.

Person 3: How dare you offer a suggestion when someone asked for suggestions!

Aha. One more problem with using FORTH and Lisp for microcontrollers: there don't seem to be very many (any?) sites dedicated to making the language work on micros, just a bunch of sites where people document their own projects. Hmm... I have a couple ESP32 dev boards and a text editor... maybe there's a market for such a site.

I think the best you can do is just search for "lisp on <platform>" or "FORTH on <platform>" and see if any of the hits are useful to you.

I just looked at https://www.parallax.com/ and it seems the BASIC Stamps are being EoL'd, but their remaining stock is on sale. The Propeller (the follow-on to the BASIC Stamp) is kind of interesting and the site implies you can run PBASIC code on the Propeller 2 ( you learn something new every day. ) I used a BASIC Stamp way back when and it wasn't a horrible experience. People dis on BASIC, but if you have a simple app, it's not that bad.

I'm sure I'll get downvoted for mentioning this, but FORTH and Lisp are also options. FORTH is exceedingly simple to implement in assembly and has the benefit that it's easily modifiable, informally verifiable (it's easy to look at the code and convince yourself no one has inserted malware), has essentially zero dependencies and is generally space and CPU efficient on small platforms (I implemented 95% of the dpANS FORTH standard on an 8086 in about 8k of opcodes.)

On the downside, the FORTH community seems to be shrinking and many people find postfix notation a bit of a brain-twister. While it's "kind of" portable, it's probably not as portable MicroPython. Both FORTH and Lisp "allow" you to build programming constructs other languages provide out of the box. This is a blessing and a curse. If you ever wanted to change the way a for(){} loop worked, it's not uncommon in these languages. If you just want for(){} loops to work out of the box, you may be annoyed by having to check whether the person who wrote the for(){} keyword in your language is doing what you want. (Forth has the LOOP keyword and lisps like fe or micro-lisp have various flavours of if you use to build your own control structures with macros.) I also imagine you may have to write your own drivers for anything more complex than a UART.

I've recently gone back to some of this as I'm working again with old controllers whose dev tools have atrophied. I spent quite a bit of time in the 80s building commercial products with FORTH and Lisp, so I've already climbed up the learning curve. I'm not trying to convince you YOU MUST use FORTH or Lisp, but they're interesting language / environments from a simpler time. ( "This is the tool chain of the Jedi Developer; not as clumsy or random as C++, but an elegant environment for a more civilized age." )

Which is to say... there's still some benefit in learning a little bit about these old systems in that understanding what their constraints and objectives were might help you create evaluation criteria for modern systems.

If only this were true regarding the ChromeBook I bought 9 years ago.

Monaco won the European Song Contest. Very clearly that is the reason the economic world goes weird after 1971.

</snark>

be nice.

Sure. But a better treatment might be to say "here's a lot of metrics, some of which might be related and here's a list of reasons people have proposed for the causes behind these metrics."

This one reads off like BADGER-BADGER-BADGER-MUSHROOM, but it's GRAPH-GRAPH-GRAPH-HAYAK QUOTE.

Yup. Turns out reality is complex. Most of the time, anyways.

Going off the gold standard isn't EXCLUSIVELY crypto-currency related, but yeah, that community seems to harp on it a lot. My guess at a reasonable conclusion is "dang, there was a lot going on in the 70s, economically speaking."

Seems more than just a crypto ad; it's an ad for a philosophical libertarian utopia where we ignore actual market behaviour that doesn't support a post-consensus monetary view of the world.

Not only is someone trying to get rich off of hashes, they're trying to convince you any theory which suggests burning fossil fuels to calculate hashes might not lead to increased productivity is heretical.

Nice page, but it doesn't seem to try very hard to create a framework to answer the question it asks. It ends with a Hayak quote which is interesting, even though it's taken out of context. You could argue taking the dollar off the gold standard is the reason metrics go wonky starting in '71. But some of the metrics go wonky slightly later after the NYC credit crisis. The suez canal was more or less blocked from '67 through '75, at a time when oil might have been more important economically than gold. And the US had to start paying it's VietNam debt during a period of high inflation.

I guess what I'm saying is there's probably no one factor that made '71 special, but a collection of factors; a "perfect storm" of economic sadness.

Everyone in my company uses emacs, except the few who use vi. There is one guy who uses VSCode. I have no idea what he uses to type text documents for human consumption. So, sure. Use whatever tool works for you. Kind of bizarre you're wanting everyone to use Word and Edge (and Win 11). I mean... you should use what works for you. But you shouldn't freak out when people use different things. I hear some people use Macs, for instance.

I mean... most of my daily effort goes into supporting a bank. There's A LOT of mainframe stuff. Some COBOL. Some guys using AIX (actually, a surprising number of guys using AIX) and (as mentioned previously, xterms and emacs or vi.) On the dev side there's more focus on file format standards than tools. So use whatever tool that generates files in the appropriate format. We probably could use Win11, but they started using AIX in the 90s and just never got around to moving to Windows.

lol. I think I typed "Irving" when I meant "Irvine".

You would think that Irving (in the heart of the D/FW metroplex) would be a place you would encounter homophobia, given the popular opinion of Texas. But people there seemed to not care who I was holding hands with.

Here's a random musing: I recently thought about joining a fraternal organization just to have a ready-made friends group. Granted, they all seem WAY more extrovert than me, and the group is one of the ones with a mystos, so I don't think it's going to be a solution for EVERYBODY.

Maybe we need something like "Tech Masons" where you have a built-in social group, continuing ed and everyone promises not to disrespect each others' tech stack decisions. "Oh. So you're going with COBOL? I'm sure there are aspects of the project I don't understand that make COBOL the ideal language for that project. Let us grab a beer and talk about inverting trees, brother (and/or sister.)"