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Is Bruce Jenner Elite?
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Celebrities are tools of the elite. They are not the decision makers, merely agents. He is being used at the moment to degrade society and destroy the last vestiges of the family structure, religion, and other cohesive traditional bonds that are seen as threats to government and the plutocracy.Is Bruce Jenner Elite?
Celebrities are tools of the elite. They are not the decision makers, merely agents. He is being used at the moment to degrade society and destroy the last vestiges of the family structure, religion, and other cohesive traditional bonds that are seen as threats to government and the plutocracy.
And thank you for calling Bruce by his not-pretend name.
If he had to live off of it, he'd care.
Jeb Bush backs higher Social Security retirement age. Big issue for 2016? (+video) - CSMonitor.com
I hate John Ellis Bush, well all Bushes, but the dude has a point there. People live too long to be retiring so early unless they, you know, have the money to do so.
I prefer just ending Social Security and letting people take responsibility for their own futures... like adults.
OfficePants will love this one
No One Who Hasn’t Sold Their Soul Can Afford a Home in London | Ian Welsh
No One Who Hasn’t Sold Their Soul Can Afford a Home in London
2015 June 3
tags: London Real-Estate, Useless Rich, World Cities
by Ian Welsh
And that’s why London is losing its soul and becoming an uninteresting place to live:
London housing price to earnings ratio
From 2.6 to 9.1.
This is a government choice. It is related to allowing the financial sector to take over London’s economy, with fake profits driving out real profits. It is related to the withdrawal from social housing. It is related to a decision to allow foreigners to buy real-estate they don’t live in most of the year. It is related to tax policy. It is related to the deliberate priming of the mortgage and housing markets by the central bank.
London is where the jobs are in England, but you can’t afford a home there if you’re an ordinary person and not attached to one of the various money hoses.
This same dynamic is playing itself out in world-cities worldwide: from Vancouver and Toronto in Canada, to New York, to Paris, to San Francisco, and so on. There are too many rich people, too many poor people, and too much pump priming from the central monetary authorities. If you live in the “rich sub-economy,” which can just mean being a retainer, you’re golden. If you don’t, you’re forced out.
There aren’t that many cities the global rich actually want to live in, play in, have vacation homes in, or retire to. There also aren’t that many financial centers in the world. Those cities that are both (like New York and London) are becoming impossible to afford the fastest, but so are all the “world cities.”
The irony of this is that huge real-estate prices drive up rents for businesses, and the interesting businesses (like book stores and one off retail outlets) are driven out of business. The artists, intellectuals, rebels, and so on that made places like New York, San Francisco, and London interesting are also driven out. The rich, being largely uninteresting and useless at anything but sucking from money-tits, make cities boring and sterile; they destroy much of what attracted them to a city in the first place.
What is left are expensive restaurants and overpriced chain fashion outlets: soulless and boring.
The rich, in numbers, are locusts, destroying what they think they value.
The Japanese economy boomed in the 1980s and there was a massive real estate bubble, centred on Tokyo, at the same time.
The bubble popped in 1990 or 1991 and real estate prices in Tokyo plummeted. I remember reading that, in 1989 or thereabouts, the value of the land occupied by the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo was equivalent to the value of the entirety of California, or something ludicrous. People were signed real estate contracts for both themselves and their children - multi-generational contracts - so that they could purchase a place in Tokyo. It was insane and it resulted in a massive misallocation of capital - money that could have been productively invested in businesses was instead invested in non-value-producing bricks-and-mortar.
Following the bursting of the bubble, there were losers. People who had spent the equivalent of $500 000 (a lot of money back in 1990) on an apartment in Tokyo found that, virtually overnight, their property had halved in value or more, but that they were locked in to paying off $500k.
Japan struggled through the 1990s and, even now, the Japanese economy is still largely stagnant. However, although the bursting of the bubble was hard, one good thing about it is that property is still, relatively speaking, quite cheap in Tokyo.
Of course, land is scarce and expensive, but if you are happy to live outside the trendy, glitzy, central Tokyo suburbs, then it is entirely possible to buy a house in a quiet street, near shops, schools, parks and train stations, for under $400 000. You can get 3LDK (three-bedroom, living, dining, kitchen) apartments for quite a bit less. In other words, Tokyo is relatively affordable, despite being a "world city", particularly when compared to other global financial centres such as London and NY.
In fact, a lot of the real estate in Tokyo is substantially cheaper than real estate in my home town of Brisbane, Australia. This is despite the fact that Tokyo is basically the financial capital of Asia and one of the largest cities in the world, and Brisbane is an entirely unexceptional and largely unimportant city. Despite that, unless you want to live in god-forsaken suburbia miles from anywhere with little to no public transport, you'll pay more for a house in Brisbane than you will in Tokyo.
And lastly, last time I looked, 500k is still a lot of money today.
Not where I am. Sigh...
The difference between Tokyo in the very early 1990s, when I first went there, and the Tokyo of today, when compared to the changes in Australia over that some time, are quite astonishing.
Japan's been pretty stagnant for much of the past quarter-century, whereas Australia's had a long boom, driven mainly by the mining industry and construction (including housing construction).
When I first went there, even though the bubble had already popped, Tokyo was still far, far more expensive than Brisbane and Australia in general. Nowadays, pretty much everything in Australia is more expensive than Japan. Bizarrely, we actually *save* money when we visit my wife's parents in Tokyo, as costs are lower.
Of course, if we wanted to buy a large rib fillet steak, it would cost more in Tokyo. However, pretty much everything else - restaurant food, clothing, public transport, and so many other things - is cheaper in Tokyo than in Brisbane.
I'm frustrated by the widely-repeated mantra that rising real estate prices are good. They're good if you own more than one property (ie an investment property as well as your principal home). However, if you only own a principal home, I fail to see why rising real estate prices are good. Yes, your home has appreciated in value but, if you sell it to purchase another place, you will have to pay more for the new place so you haven't benefited from the rising prices. In fact, you may be worse off, as if you sell your house for $200k and buy a new house for $250k, you only have to borrow $50k, but if you sell your house for $400k and buy a new house for $500k, you have to borrow $100k. People don't seem to see this - all they think about is how they've now got so much more equity in their houses than they used to - "Oh, my house is now worth $500 000 and I only owe $100 000, so I have $400 000 equity." Well, that's great, but unless you're going to use that equity to borrow a shed-load of money - which you'll have to pay back with interest - then what's the benefit?
Furthermore, of course, rising real estate prices make it more and more difficult for first-time home purchasers to actually purchase a place, so they have to move further and further out of the city to buy a place, which means that they have to travel further to work, which means that they have less free time and they use more fuel and so on. It also leads to capital mis-allocation as, instead of investing in productive assets, people with money to invest put their money into bricks-and-mortar, which makes nothing and which simply sits there, being unproductive.
It's an enormous waste and it really only benefits those who already have a lot of cash to invest.
Wouldn't happen to a wealthy person. Oh. Over a backpack.
Ah, bugger. I remember reading the New Yorker story on him via the Longform app (which, by the way, is a great app/website) and thinking what an utter travesty his case was - and Browder was far from the only one caught up in such a situation.
OfficePants will love this one
No One Who Hasn’t Sold Their Soul Can Afford a Home in London | Ian Welsh
No One Who Hasn’t Sold Their Soul Can Afford a Home in London
2015 June 3
tags: London Real-Estate, Useless Rich, World Cities
by Ian Welsh
And that’s why London is losing its soul and becoming an uninteresting place to live:
London housing price to earnings ratio
From 2.6 to 9.1.
This is a government choice. It is related to allowing the financial sector to take over London’s economy, with fake profits driving out real profits. It is related to the withdrawal from social housing. It is related to a decision to allow foreigners to buy real-estate they don’t live in most of the year. It is related to tax policy. It is related to the deliberate priming of the mortgage and housing markets by the central bank.
London is where the jobs are in England, but you can’t afford a home there if you’re an ordinary person and not attached to one of the various money hoses.
This same dynamic is playing itself out in world-cities worldwide: from Vancouver and Toronto in Canada, to New York, to Paris, to San Francisco, and so on. There are too many rich people, too many poor people, and too much pump priming from the central monetary authorities. If you live in the “rich sub-economy,” which can just mean being a retainer, you’re golden. If you don’t, you’re forced out.
There aren’t that many cities the global rich actually want to live in, play in, have vacation homes in, or retire to. There also aren’t that many financial centers in the world. Those cities that are both (like New York and London) are becoming impossible to afford the fastest, but so are all the “world cities.”
The irony of this is that huge real-estate prices drive up rents for businesses, and the interesting businesses (like book stores and one off retail outlets) are driven out of business. The artists, intellectuals, rebels, and so on that made places like New York, San Francisco, and London interesting are also driven out. The rich, being largely uninteresting and useless at anything but sucking from money-tits, make cities boring and sterile; they destroy much of what attracted them to a city in the first place.
What is left are expensive restaurants and overpriced chain fashion outlets: soulless and boring.
The rich, in numbers, are locusts, destroying what they think they value.
That's the elite of the elite. You can't get within sight of the place, security like it's Area 51.Bilderburg is happening soon. But it's not important, it doesn't exist. 150+ world leaders meeting in secret in Austria isn't important.
I didn't want to ruffle his feathers too badlyShouldn't this be in the why Florida is number one thread?
Sadly enough, I figured the percentage would be well over 50.