Quantum Theology

Yes and no, it really depends on the individual situation. We do know that we may be in the eye of the hurricane with respect to foreclosures. The backside of the hurricane is going to come from Option-ARM recasts, and the effects of the recent rise in the unemployment rate. From a financial standpoint, it’s not the best time to buy, but it’s no longer the worst.

Some things to consider:

• What is the outlook for your company and your industry in the next 5 years? Can you maintain steady employment?
• What are the chances that you may have to move due to things like marriage, divorce, job changes, etc?

If you want or need the freedom to respond to the curveballs of life, then now really isn’t a great time to buy unless you have the cash to extricate yourself from an underwater loan. There is nothing better than month-to-month rent when it comes to doing what you want, when you want.

Then again, one of the great benefits of owning is stability and constancy. If things are looking pretty stable, why not buy now and start making a home?

The 2Q numbers for the GDP came in at a 3.3 percent rate of increase. The Gross Domestic Product is just one measure commonly used to determine if the country is in a recession or not. There are a lot of numbers which point to a current recession, but GDP doesn’t appear to be one of them. Why not?

First off, one reason the GDP number was so good was the fact that the GDP deflator was so low. The GDP deflator is what attempts to adjust for the impacts of inflation. While we have had the highest inflation in the last 5 years, the deflator was infact implied that lowest inflation rate in the last 5 years. Is this manipulation before an election? Where does that deflator come from? Can the disconnect be explained in ordinary terms or do we need to resort to the evil overlord manipulation theory?

The old adage is that there are lies, damn lies, and statisitcs. The whole point of statisics is to come up with something from which you may make good conclusions based on. Sadly, things are often so complex that this is not possible. Take for instance the Consumer Price Index which tries to measure consumer inflation. From one standpoint, we have recently had a bad bout of inflation after a period of very benign inflation. However, you get an OPPOSITE picture if you look at the numbers. About a third of the CPI index is housing related, and this huge part of the index doesn’t measure housing directly. It uses a term called ‘owners equivalent rent’ which measures neither actual rents nor actual housing prices for sale. In my opinion it’s quite useless over the short term. Suppose the owners equivalent rent was swapped with a measure of house prices? How would that affect the CPI numbers? Some people have cranked the numbers and found out that inflation would have been raging during the housing bubble and that we would now have deflation, or negative inflation!! The devil is in the details…

I don’t fully understand how the GDP deflator differs from the CPI index. Still, after reading this blog posting on the subject, it appears that the differences are greater than the similarities and thus it should be no surprise that they come up different. After all, the devil really is in the details. The conclusion I draw that I’m going to continue to ignore the headline numbers as they really don’t tell you something that you can act on. You have to dig in and understand the interactions of the component parts in order to get a better picture. Are we in recession? More likely than not, even if the GDP number says otherwise. Should we worry about inflation? Probably not. The destruction of credit is the big story and this is very deflationary. Energy is going up, and that simply means that energy may need a higher percentage of our expendatures than before. As a consequence, other parts of the budget need to drop in response. This is nothing more than a re-balancing of relative worth from housing to other budget items.

This looks like a LOT of fun:

I used to do dips with weight dangling from a special belt. Now I can only manage 3 reps of dips and two pullups. Man, how pathetic! At least I can still do pushups…

I’m what the body building industry calls a hard gainer. This is someone with such a high metabolism that it makes weight gain very difficult. After doing some research, it appears that in order to gain weight, I’ll have to eat around 3500 calories a day, and 200+ grams of protein. Yikes!!!

When I worked out in my late teenage years, I hit the weights but I did not properly hit the food. I got strong, and my upper body had good definition, but the raw mass didn’t show up because I wasn’t consuming nearly enough protein  and calories.

I’m going to shoot for that 3000 - 3500 calorie range, and I hope to reach 155 in 6 months. Can I do it? It depends on if my internal discipline holds up.

I really like coding and designing bymyself because I don’t have to spend time justifying my decisions or warding off pointless religious wars. The design is taking three times as long because there are three developers instead of just me. Still, it’s important that everyone owns the decision, so it’s a necessary evil - even if I have to navigate religious wars like wether or not to use a single primary key or a compound key.

Personally, I think California’s rule to require a 2/3s majority to pass a budjet is a good idea in principal. It requires the parties to own the budget so that you don’t get that partisan finger pointing. Their inability to pass a budget is due to a bunch of people fighting the budget equivalent of religious wars. It’s a hinderance in government just as it’s a hinderance in software.

The penalties range up to 500-pound fines and even jail for offenses such as speeding, eating and drinking while driving, or having a baby in the front seat, a common practice.

This excerpt was from an article talking about driving in Egypt. Do people really drive around having babies in the front seat, or do they drive around while giving sexual favors? I know Egypt is a very conservative country, so I’m not sure that you get people going down on the driver in public. But, is having a baby in the front seat REALLY a common practice? On the odd chance that you are an Egyptian and you are reading this … I’d love some clarification on this.

From my recent forray into posting on internet message boards, it appears that there are some people really lacking in analytical skills and reasoning ability. Some cases are so out-of-this-world crazy that I think it’s just that some people have different vulnerabilities to cognitive biases. People can’t REALLY be this dumb.

I don’t think anyone can claim to be free of these biases, but I think that people with stronger biases are just easier to demolish in an argument. And, the stronger the biases, the harder it will be to change their mind on something through argument or reasoning.

It’s interesting that a person with strong biases may be very confused, but it does not follow that they are wrong. For that reason I have to keep reminding myself that utterly demolishing someone logically doesn’t logically validate my view.

While I’m on the subject of biases, I just ran across this interesting blog posting about the 2008 election process.

4.  The magnitude of the federal deficit and government borowing is a shock to most people.  They are very disturbed by it but don’t think that the spending they like or benefit from should be cut or their taxes should be raised to deal with it.

5.  Magic, painless solutions is what many people continue to believe is all that’s needed to deal with the federal budget.  The ones I’ve heard most often repeated are eliminating earmarks; cutting waste, fraud, and abuse; and reducing foreign aid.

6.  Except for a very few, there seems to be little belief that tax cuts always pay for themselves.  But…almost everyone would like to believe it.

7.  There is a definite expectation that ending activities in Iraq and Afghanistan will create a peace dividend that will be large enough to pay for everything everyone wants to do. There has been silence when I have explained that the reality may be quite different.

These points all show cognitive dissonance, even though the people are very intelligent. In fact, I wonder if the downfall of the country might eventually be linked to a massive case of cognitive bias? I really love the last part

10. Whoever he is, there seems to be real concern about the ability of the next president to deal what’s ahead.

That can’t be good, but the fact that so many people will end up either not voting at all or voting for the ‘lesser evil’ is almost like Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I sat down at my computer and this code was just staring me in the face. This may be the first time I’ve ever laughed while looking at source code. I don’t know if this code is actually in use, but wouldn’t it be fun if I inserted some code to play this squeak?

Muahaha!!!

public Indenter(int userWidth) {
width = userWidth;
depth = 0;
}

/**
* Move in one width.
*/
public void in() {
depth += width;
}

/**
* Move out one width.
*/
public void out() {
depth -= width;
}

Robert Shiller is a smart guy, but oh so liberal. I bash Republicans a lot because they are doing a lot of really dumb things and screwing up the country, but I’m still very conservative. In the bi-polar world a lot of people live in, a Republican basher must be a Democrat. Not quite.

I was just cringing in this video when he starts talking about the poor homeowners who are going to get thrown out of their homes and how we need to bail them out. It’s not like they are getting thrown into the streets. It’s more like they are getting thrown back into rental properties. They might have to move. Why would you cry about that? I’ve moved on average once a year for the last 5 years. It’s not the end of the world and it’s not something to justify using public funds to bail out people who can’t make good decisions. Instead, what you do is you turn people who CAN and DO make good decisions into suckers. You turn the financial incentives towards those who do dumb or risky things. What kind of country is that going to make? See the previous post. Shiller is a smart guy, but a typical bleeding heart liberal. Still, better to be a smart but bleeding heart liberal than a retarded Republican. Where are the Republicans with sound policy? Say hello to Ron Paul. Ron Paul who? The guy who cleaned up the internet polls but couldn’t get more than 10 percent of real votes in the Republican primary.

Without further ado, here is the video.