patrick.net

Astrid - Joan Didion has done a garlic number on Cheney for your delectation:

www.nybooks.com/articles/19376

Now I suppose I'm a bot.

SFGuy,

I always think of Peter P as an angelic creature. He says many reactionary things but he has absolutely no malice in anything he says...he's a lot like Ronald Reagan in that way.

I find most good tragedies to be quite funny and all good comedies to be quite touching (that includes Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back - yes to good comedy and yes to touching).

Tragedies usually have more depth. I hate movies with the classic "Hollywood ending".

But I like Hollywood Ending (by Woody Allen). :) I like most of his movies.

mrsburnside,

I love the New York Review of Books! If you're a bot...we probably got programmed by the same vast evil conspiracy.

I would love to hear CG's review of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking...that would be very interesting.

Reagan is not George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. I think Reagan truly believed he was doing good. The current White House crowd seems to be amoral evil robots on autopilot.

astrid,

Bon appetit.. Next you'll tell me you have a well-worn copy of 'Eat Drink Man Woman' on the shelf (as I have).

I want to see Peter P’s response to CG’s “thinking is a reflection of processing power” treatise.

I may not be good enough to issue a response. I will think about it a bit.

I love the movie, but my all time favorite Asian cinema movie is A Taxing Woman's Return by Itami.

SFGuy,

Why won't anybody think I'm a spambot?

I don't want to pick that fight! I just want some suspicion or affirmation of my roboticness.

SFGuy,

My designers will be extremely pleased to hear that. Thank you for your feedback. :-)

ugh, professions of admiration by a self alleged virtual being???

Yeah, that damn Las Vegas condo market...

How about some nice tomato seeds next spring? Or a CD sampler?

Well, in that case, buy a gun and some switchblades.

SFWoman

die Schlosspanik would more likely translate into Castle Panic or Really Big Stately Manor Panic, or Château Panic.

Maybe using McMansions as pseudo-Manors you could say something like Falschschlosspanik, implying the owners of fake castles are panicking. I think Irrschlosspanik would mean the same thing, but "falsch" has a better ring to it.

I took a look at the oqo product, SF, it's quite a nifty little device. A marked improvement over using PDAs to net surf because of the larger screen and hardware keyboard. My biz idea was to try to source an inexpensive, ruggedised laptop-sized device that was somehow unattractive to steal -- the intent to make net surfing easier for people on the move was the same, altho coming at it from a different angle, more like an internet cafe concept. hmm...

astrid Says:

I envy linear thinkers…my boyfriend claims that he only thinks about problems on hand - apparently my mental habit of flowing from food to the economics of club DJs past the age of 35 to bad Goth novels is not a universal pattern.

Perhaps if I was a more disciplined thinker, I would be rich (or gained an avocation to catch a rich man) already.

I have often wondered about this myself, as I am very disorganized and non-linear (I am officially diagnosed with lifelong ADD). But I always reach the conclusion that it is better to go through life deeply absorbed in trying to understand interesting or difficult things. Thinking shallowly must be so... boring? I guess it's not if you don't realize it, but it still seems tragic. I can't say that I would trade for it, except in moments of pure frustration with myself.

Also, I can't decouple the mental chaos from creativity. Not perceiving the world like everyone else opens the door to many worthwhile things. And sometimes, those things are fortunately lucrative. :)

SFWoman, no need to clarify, I know exactly what you mean. :) Not everybody is meant to draw within the lines. From reading your posts, it sounds like you know many interesting people.

sfwoman, does your brother do the biometric thumbprint readers? customising the case in a way that was hard to reverse was one idea i had, amongst others, including physical locking systems. other things were to alter the laptop hardware in such a way that it became useless away from a base station (hard to do) or otherwise making them unsaleable. i've thought of a few different avenues here, including chasing up the 'dumb laptops' etc. (the dumb laptops have some utility in a range of non-corporate contexts i can think of). all to no avail... :cry:

Reagan’s contemporary opponents, considered him pretty close to an amoral evil on autopilot too. Until the USSR expired.

The USSR arguably expired by itself. Except it's still breathing and planning a comeback, just like the cliche at the end of all Hollywood action movies where the bad guy is riddled with bullets, but the pure evilness of his twisted mind always means he will try to pull out one more weapon and try to ice the good guy while he is hugging his new-found girlfriend... And the good guy of course is never the one who riddled the bad guy, somehow it happens by accident or due to the bad guy's last evil move backfiring on him. (Just like in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shock and awe.)

Meanwhile, the USSR is reverting to a form of national socia1ism once more -- the oligarchs are in jail, national resources are nationalised once again. Next move?

---
Ronald Reagan's ambitious ideals included large tax cuts skewed to the wealthy, slashing welfare programs and deregulating the economy, policies that would be embraced by governments around the world.

Reaganomics won admiration especially from Margaret Thatcher, but also burdened America with the largest budget deficit in history as he insisted on massively increasing defence spending to stare down the Soviets.

Mr Reagan ignored critics of his policies by reducing complex debates to one-liners that could be stamped on a campaign button. Black mothers from single-parent families were "welfare queens in designer jeans" squandering government money; Middle East terrorists and Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini were "misfits" and "Loony Tunes"; and the answer to the nation's cocaine epidemic was "Just Say No".

Always optimistic, Mr Reagan offered the country certainty and strength. This, he believed, was only possible by ignoring moral ambiguities. He wound back abortion rights, civil rights, affirmative action and the influence of the United Nations.

His belligerent ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, cut off aid for the UN's population fund because it offended the Right to Life movement and cast the single vote against a World Health Organisation code on infant formula that had upset the global food companies.

Liberals were forced into retreat as Mr Reagan's popularity grew. His political dominance reopened debates on welfare dependency, drug use, crime and human rights in eastern Europe. But his enthusiasm for freedom and prosperity did not extend to the developing world, where his Cold War policies led the US to support brutal generals backed by death squads in El Salvador and Contra leaders in Nicaragua who dealt in cocaine.

On the eve of a critical G7 economic summit, Mr Morris said, Mr Reagan ditched the briefing book and went to watch The Sound of Music with his wife. In arms talks with the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mr Reagan would mask his lack of knowledge with grating jokes about the Soviet system, to the point where Mr Gorbachev asked for the one-on-one meetings to be kept short.

Mr Reagan's deep lack of interest in detail allowed his cabinet secretaries and personal staff wide latitude. The result was often bitter power struggles inside the White House as the warring players attempted to push forward their agendas.

In his second term, Mr Reagan's hands-off style almost proved fatal to his presidency when it was revealed that the administration had tried to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of US hostages in Lebanon.

The scandal tore away the mystique from the Reagan White House, revealing a dysfunctional president unable to control what one historian described as "a crew of absent-minded mini-Frankensteins".

Investigations exposed a scheme by a bizarre cast, including the CIA boss, William Casey, the National Security Council aide Colonel Oliver North, Mossad agents and arms dealers, who plotted to deliver hundreds of missiles to Iran in exchange for the hostages. In the end, only two were released, one was killed and six more kidnapped.

Worse still, some of the profits had been illegally diverted to arm the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. As the first mutterings of impeachment were heard, the president insisted he had done nothing wrong. Unfortunately, a commission of inquiry he appointed found that he did.

Reagan's supporters credit him with a new age of prosperity, the fall of the Soviet Union and the restoration of conservative values. His critics argue that he divided the US, exacerbated the gap between the rich and poor, increased poverty and homelessness and ignored the onset of the AIDS crisis. He also failed to realise the Soviet Union was collapsing under its own economic woes and unleashed an unnecessary arms race that included the president's pet project, the Stars Wars missile defence system.

Final applause for the ultimate feelgood president - World - www.smh.com.au
---
there, google lets you write a term paper in 5 minutes or less... (now no-one's going to talk to me anymore, i know the pattern :cry:)

Randy H. said Turing. Nice. I love Bletchley Park and purple. How do you find a needle in haystack?

Randy H. said Turing. Nice. I love Bletchley Park and purple. How do you find a needle in haystack?

Randy I was very impressed with what happened after the 8th wheel was added.

I came very late to patrick.net, so will venture no opinion regarding the MSM blame game.

But I must say a word of thanks here. I learned in early August that high-end RE sales hit a wall Q206 in Sarasota and, in looking for similar conditions in other locales, followed a link to your discussion.

As Randy has broached the subject of anonmity, let me take the opportunity to confess being nobody's Mrs., and to return Mame Burnside to Patrick Dennis where she belongs. I intended a mild joke, but nobody twigged. I'm a musician, classically-trained, with an interest in chamber repertoire and the Renaissance - so no expertise in macroeconomics, Marxist-Leninist social engineering, or the enigma code.

This could be the beginning of a deflationary spiral.

"They are going to be very price aggressive. And it is going to have an effect on everyone. It is going to force other retailers to cut their prices, which in turn will squeeze their profit margins."

A lot of people say, the best time to buy real estate was yesterday, every day. I think there’s a lot of truth to it.

Not what these people think!

_snip_

With real-estate prices falling around the country and even pro-industry trade groups predicting further declines over the next year, buyers are backing away from deals in droves. At a semiannual housing forecast conference last week in Washington, D.C., economists reported that contract-cancellation rates for big builders were running around 40 percent - about twice as high as last year's levels. Anecdotally, real-estate professionals say they are seeing a similar dynamic in existing-home sales.

Even though it may mean losing a deposit that could run tens of thousands of dollars - deposits typically range from 1 percent to 5 percent of the purchase price - many buyers are deciding that is less onerous than the alternative. With median new-home prices already 9.7 percent below last year's levels, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, bailing out now may be less painful than committing to an expensive, and possibly depreciating, investment.

CR,

Maybe you should buy, I'm sure these people would be more than happy to sign their contracts over to you and let you keep their deposits as well! Take your time, there are plenty to choose from and more will soon be available!

My colleagues are getting calls from headhunters left and right with offers of 50-150% more.

...and don't be greedy, there are PLENTY to go around for your clients as well! :lol:

-clients
+colleagues

Now, remind me again what you do for work?

I can't wait to hear the answer to this!

Meanwhile, those who bought have moved forward in their lives and have spent their time doing other things.

Such as looking for bankruptcy attorney's.

I know it’s a very scary decision to purchase, but in any market, there are good opportunities. You just need to know where to look.

No, you just need to wait. We are just starting to come down the other side of the mountain.......a very big one!

Putting your life on hold is a mistake.

Huh....How is renting putting your life on hold? You can rent a house just the same. You really are a silly person, we are happy to have you here. :lol:

Meanwhile, they could have made 15% last year and started the next chapter in their life instead of always trying to time and short the market.

Anything anyone made last year is gone already, they just don't know it yet.

Life is short folks. The older you get, the bigger the percentage of your life that year is.

Yes. Life is short, another reason not to waste it on being a slave to an overpriced house.

… and CR yet again dodged the question (2 posts up) about whether
he is a real estate agent.

Well we all know the answer to that one, don't we. :lol:

CR,

Your marketing tactics are as weak as someone telling a kid he will not get the best candy on halloween if he doesn't have the best costume. I think it's time for a new career.

CR - cut the crap already, yes yesterday was a good day to buy a house and shares (although maybe not when the market was crashing) and a lottery ticket and everything else on hindsight.

But not everyone can afford to buy a house now or yesterday or the day before that or the 4 years before that in the Bay Area.

I'm so pleased that you are able to - so go busy yourself buying something now, the rest of us will take our time and buy when the prices return closer to the mean. I'm not going to throw away money just because we can.

You know what, just because someone rents, it doesn't mean they put their life on hold, contrary to your opinion.

You know what, just because someone rents, it doesn’t mean they put their life on hold, contrary to your opinion.

Exactly....and everyday I wait, I feel richer because prices are dropping....at the same time the debtors are shaking, worrying and are so stressed out that how could they possibly be enjoying their life? You see, as Patrick says, "it's our turn".

Although he would like to buy a house, he's not in any hurry. He guesses that the market may take a good five years to fully correct itself. His recommendation for fellow would-be buyers is to put their feet up. "Rent and watch and enjoy, 'cause now it's our turn."

I agree with you SFW. Being a realtor is a normal market is a good career and there are some decent, honest realtors out there, some that have been in business for decades. There are 500,000 realtors in CA and many of them will be gone next year. Judging by what CR has been saying, I would comfortably make a bet that he will be one of them.

Awe, come on back CR.....we're not done with you yet. :evil:

- is a
+in a

Well, it looks like the troll is gone. He must be busy with all those "potential clients" calling him up. Psychology is a beautiful thing, isn't it?