Desultory Profundity

Nice sign.

"Bush don't..."?

But what about illiterate whites who struggle with subject/verb agreement?

Obviously I haven’t been posting much these days. Quite frankly I have just been too busy with the stock market and with family stuff. But my indefatigable brain is still chugging, reading some good books, and plotting global Marginalization strategies.

Google is presently 135 points off its high and I bought some more. It just ran up too much over the winter and the bandwagon got crowded. Seemingly every other day there has been a negative Google story circling around Big Media outlets. None of this changes the fact that probably only 1 in 20 people use Google regularly right now. I reiterate my belief that the growth ahead is still almost unfathomable. People still don’t have good broadband connections (DSL blows, as does much of cable broadband). Morons still buy cheap computers and bury them in a non-central locations of the house (and leave them off to save electricity). Also, Blackberries and other mobile surfing devices are still not widely used. Again, it is still very early in the game for Google. BUY. BUY. BUY.



Those loud creeks you hear at night are the sounds of an impending real estate collapse. I have put a lot thought and research into this subject and I find myself more and more bearish. I now firmly believe that there will be a Category 5 housing crash. I will give more insight into this on a later post. I just wanted to get my Category 5 prediction on the record.

Another thing, there are very few ways to make money off my prediction. One can’t short housing stocks like Toll Brothers, Pulte, and Lennar because

1) they are very cheap
2) are leveraged to more than just rising home prices.

Let me explain 2). The big builders like Toll have been stealing market share from the smaller builders for years. Just think of them as homebuilding Wal-Marts who have the economies of scale to outflank the so-called “mom and pop” builders.

One probably can’t short Home Depot or Lowes either and hope to profit from a housing bust. Lowes has climbed nicely during the past years, but remember that Home Depot has not gone up at all during the last 7 years. That’s right, this housing bubble didn’t move HD’s stock one iota. So there’s certainly no guarantee of any one-to-one correlation on the way down.

If you are a homeowner (or more aptly a home mortgager) right now, there is also very little that you could do to hedge or profit from real estate’s impending decline. Pretty much all you can do is delay purchasing “extra” real estate, like a Floridian condo or a beach house.

On of the Chicago exchanges is coming out with a real estate future designed to provide this erstwhile elusive hedging vehicle. We’ll see what it looks like in a couple of months.

The only really good hedge I can think of is shorting the stock market. But again, this could be a completely stupid bet to place. Just think of the guy in 2003 who thought oil would skyrocket and it would cripple our economy? He was half-right and half totally wrong.

The LESSON is, don’t out-think yourself

IF YOU THINK SOMETHING IS GOING UP OR DOWN, TRY TO PLACE YOUR BET ON THAT, NOT SOME THEORETICAL DERIVATIVE THEREOF.

I couldn’t count how many times (or how many dollars lost) I have seen gold go one way and the stocks of gold mining companies go the other. The same goes for crude oil and oil companies and numerous other theoretically linked pairs.

The same goes for real estate. Even assuming my Category Five real estate implosion, the billion dollar question remains:

How will a fall in real estate affect the overall economy and financial markets?

We may soon find out.

At the risk of provoking Mother Nature, I hereby declare winter over. (Knock on wood.)

What I really mean is that the winter heating season is effectively over.

My heating bills for the last three months were all around $120.

I bring this up because remember CNBC and the rest of the Perma-Negative media went bananas all fall about the impending cost of heat this winter.

I chided Blockhead Steve Liesman over this,

Just yesterday, while inveighing broadly against energy companies, perma-Commi Steve Liesman said people are freezing to death over heating costs. Liesman must be counting fictional people - I guess.

Hey Stevie, why don't you wait for the actual winter before you unleash your agitprop?

Nobody froze to death this year or any other for that matter. “Freezing to death” is just a ruse to bash dreaded Big Oil and solicit the affection of the “little guy”.

Devil’s Advocate: But C-Nut, people would have froze if it weren’t for a global warming induced mild winter…

Yeah, DA, oil companies are responsible for the global warming which is heating the earth and lowering the demand for heating oil and natural gas. It is one giant conspiracy to kill their own business.

One hallmark of conspiracy theories is that they have to keep changing to reconcile new evidence. At first it was,

EVIL OIL COMPANIES CONSPIRED TO RAISE ENERGY PRICES AND FREEZE THE “LITTLE GUY” TO DEATH.

And then it morphed to.

EVIL OIL COMPANIES ARE CAUSING GLOBAL WARMING AND BURNING THE LITTLE GUY UP.

But my favorite ridiculous oil canard is,

BIG OIL COMPANIES ARE SUPPRESSING ALTERNATIVE ENERGY TECHNOLOGIES.

Yeah, Exxon has 16 MIT geeks locked up in a basement somewhere...

Devil’s Advocate: But didn’t you also predict 50% higher home heating bills this winter.

Yes I did. More accurately I extrapolated it from the $15 price of natural gas in the fall which has cratered to $7 today. I certainly didn’t predict anyone freezing to death. And I mentioned it in the context of real estate prices – how a sharp rise in the costs of homeownership (be it heat, taxes, hurricane insurance, etc.) could imperil the housing market.

But I also took precautions. I sealed up all of the windows in my house very thoroughly. I bought those bean bags to place beneath all of my doors. I closed the shades at night and had them all open when the sun was out.

Devil’s Advocate: That stuff doesn’t matter that much...

Bullsh*t it doesn’t. My neighbor above me who has the identical living space has been paying $400 a month to heat her house this winter. And she,

1) keeps the thermostat at 62 degrees while mine is at 67.
2) didn’t seal her windows at all (they are forty years old – the same as mine)
3) doesn’t open her shades when sunny (we have a tremendous southern exposure).

So DA, it does matter you dope. You can’t get a much better control than that. Furthermore, according to my gas company, the bills from my unit were over twice as high last year.

I also have a friend who lives in a similar sized unit, about 1500 square feet, who keeps her thermostat on 55 degrees and also paid about $400 a month this year. It’s one thing to stay warm and get nailed with a high heating bill but she freezes as well – pouring salt on the wound.

Why does she freeze?

Old inefficient radiators, old windows, no sunlight at all, etc.

And this leads me to another of my lucid assertions,

NEW ENGLANDERS CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING.

1) First of all they should live in the south where no heating oil is needed. There is plenty of space down there and culture to boot!!!
2) Hidebound anti-development laws up north consign residents to drafty old homes with outdated insulation and heating systems. All of this is self-imposed. New homes are simply so much more energy efficient.

Running central air conditioning at my relatively new condo in Charlotte, 24 hours a day, in a place twice as big, and much hotter, was cheaper than occasionally running a window unit in my century-old Brooklyn apartment.

New Englanders simply consume more than their fair share of fossil fuels. Since the Global Warming Gestapo wants to tax SUVs, shouldn’t they also indict New Englanders who disproportionately heat the earth?

This kind of reminds me of a conversation I once had with an urban planner.

A tenet of so-called urban studies is that cities are good and suburbs with their resultant sprawl, highways, cars, and gated communities, are evil. One of the justifying canards is that cities are ostensibly more efficient. People living vertically save land, can walk places, and the population density allows for more efficient allocation of resources: food, energy, services, government, etc.

There is a serious problem with this theory.

EVERYTHING IS MORE EXPENSIVE IN CITIES.

The urban planner TRIED to disagree with me, so I went down the list.

Taxes, food, and energy are all more expensive in cities like Boston, New York, Washington, than they are down South.

Apparently he thought about it for a second, realizing that food and taxes are certainly more expensive in the cities but still tried to attack what he thought was my weakest argument – energy.

He said,

“there is no way it is cheaper to get utilities, like electricity, to fewer people who are further spread out as there are down South.”

Now this is a case in point of what happens when people substitute theory for hard evidence.

First of all, look at the utility bills. Look at the rates for New England.

How did I know more about this subject than the alleged expert?

Well, for one thing I have lived in several states. Also, I don’t just regurgitate the pabulum of communist professors. Lastly, I happened to know a bit about power generation. Most electricity is generated in the South and the Midwest and it rises steeply in price as it flows up to the Northeast, because it obviously costs more money to transmit it there.

So why do we have Urban Planning departments at all of these schools when one of its central tenets is a complete sham?

And shouldn’t there at least be Suburban Planning fields of study too?



Amazingly, during my recent trip to Florida, I almost spent as much money on cabs as I did on airfare.

I live only 11 miles from Boston's Logan Airport. A cab ride there is $50, and that is if you are lucky enough to have no traffic issues.

I was very close to paying a friend $30 to drive me. It was the same thing down in Fort Lauderdale, though not quite as expensive on a per mile basis. But they make up for it by charging "per person" on the airport limos. Four cab rides ended up costing me $223, while my flight was only $250.

Here is the thing with Boston, the people here may be very stupid, but they are also cheap. Nobody takes cabs to the airport - they have friends or family take them. Bostonians are stupid for innumerable reasons, but in this case they are dumb because they merely accept the high taxi price reality and adapt to it. You can't find anyone that is trying to politically address the issue. In fact, the politicians have created problem.

Let me tell you something about CaptiousNut. When he meets a plumber, he asks him about plumbing. When he meets a teacher, he asks them about classroom antics and whatnot. And when in a cab, he invariably will pick the cabby's brain about all sorts of stuff. Of course the topics and intensity of these discussions are directly proportional to how "overserved" C-Nut is that night.

Anyway, a Fort Lauderdale cabbie responded to an innocent info request and told me that he averages 8 airport trips a day. His car held four people and was filled up on each trip for $96. So the guy is making close to $800 a day, even if he only took home half of that, say $400, multiplying by 250 work days lands him $100,000 per year.

Remember the guy drives a cab. He didn't spend 100k on college or 250k on medical school. That is a lot of damn money for an unskilled laborer. In other words, there surely are plenty of people that would drive a cab for considerably less, providing quite a cost savings for travelers.

Why do cabs cost so much?

Government intervention. End of story.

They limit the number of taxi medallions and set the meter rates. And in Boston they even inject other costs such as the $4.50 toll only for cabs leaving the airport (other cars pay $1.50).

For a city that acts obsessed with reducing road traffic (when it suits them, i.e. shooting down every attempt at new construction with "we have to do a traffic study.."), Boston's taxi management confounds the mind. They have made it so expensive to take a cab, that instead of one cab driving 15 people to the airport a day, they have 15 cars on the road making that family/friend airport dropoff.

Don't forget the Bostonians think they are the smartest people in the country too.

If you don't believe me that cabs are a racket, try to digest this. Boston taxi medallions are currently $320,000. In the last five years they have more than doubled. If cab drivers were just "scraping by", medallions would not be appreciating like this, especially in light of gasoline doubling in price and higher insurance rates.

And remember from a prior post that the Boston Globe thinks "fare relief" is when the cabbies get rate increases approved.



If you are not watching American Idol you are really doing yourself a disservice. It is not a fad like Survivor where the ratings nosedive each year. Idol is more popular than ever. It is entertaining, dramatic, and hilarious. Typically, Morons who don't watch the show respond to my advocacy with,

"I don't watch reality tv..."

They don't even realize how dumb that sounds and I have to prod them with, "What do you only watch fantasy television"?

They remind me of all of these people that pooh-pooh golf as "not a sport" or "seems like a stupid waste of time" for their entire lives. But then they retire, fall in love with the game, and lament over and over again how they should have played when they were younger. Well maybe if they weren't such close-minded meatheads...

When I hear of something that is gaining popularity I make a concerted effort to check it out. What is that old perverted axiom? Something like don't knock it until you have tried it. I can't stand these Morons who bash stuff of which they are completely ignorant.

In the end, they are only depriving themselves and corroborating my definition of a Moron as one who repeatedly acts against their own self-interest.