Been in the..........................

................real estate brokerage business for a long time.  I'm not sure they've thought this through:

The 6% commission, a standard in home purchase transactions, is no more. . . .

Although it’s unclear what the future of the housing market will look like, Miller said he expected homebuying to pick up somewhat as costs fall dramatically for homebuyers.

Back story here.

Most pundits seemed to think that low interest rates helped the buyers.  Strikes us that low interest rates actually helped the sellers.   

Most buyers around here seem to think mostly in terms of their monthly mortgage payment.  A monthly payment of $2,000 will amortize a $360,000 mortgage at 3% interest over twenty years.   At 6% interest, that payment will only support a mortgage $280,000.

In a hot and competitive real estate market, which much of the country has experienced lately (mostly because of a shortage of supply of housing), who do you think reaps the reward of the extra $80,000 available mortgage financing that 3% interest provided?  Why do you think housing prices got so high so quickly?  You are kidding yourself if you don't think that part of the housing "affordability" problem was caused by ten years of 3% mortgage money.  When it comes to real estate, low interest rates are inflationary, and that favors sellers.

A similar thing will likely happen with the real estate commission issue.  If commissions fall, in a hot and competitive market, the buyer will not be seeing the benefit.  It will likely go to the seller.  All other things being equal, the buyer working with a broker who will work for a reduced fee, can now afford to offer more.  If the supply problem ever gets fixed and a "buyers' market" emerges, then it might be different.  In the meanwhile, two people can't save the same reduction in fees. (This assumes there will actually be a reduction in fees).  It will benefit either the buyer or the seller.  In a "sellers market," bet on the seller.

Time will tell, but my bet is that pundits thinking changing the long-established commission structure will help buyers, in what is still a "sellers' market," are fooling themselves - and the public.

Prickly..........................

When in doubt
let nature be your guide.

Specifically, cactuses

Be still.
Stay hydrated.
Shelter owls.
Stab your predators.

It's that easy.

-Jarod K. Anderson

image via

The game.........................

  The “game” may be hockey or public policy; the insight is the same. Unintended consequences may reduce, or even eliminate, the good you expect to result from a policy change. People aren’t chess pieces.

-Michael Munger,  Is Capitalism Sustainable?

the chess-board.................

 The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.  He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or the strong prejudices which may oppose it.  He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful.  If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

-Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

About those plans................

      Adams would proudly claim that he never troubled himself with plans for his future.  All evidence corroborates that approach, one not everyone could afford.

-Stacy Schiff,  The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

certain risks...............

 I may know who and what I am.  I cannot know in advance who or what I could become.  There are certain risks you have to take, such that only in retrospect can you know whether you were right to take them, and perhaps not even then.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

not your friends...........................

 They are not your friends, but they are your enemies in fact, though not in intention, who teach you to look to the Legislature for the radical removal of the evils that afflict human life. It is the individual mind and conscience, it is the individual character, on which mainly human happiness or misery depends.

-William Ewart Gladstone, 1871

such a thing as truth..........

 Bagehot held that Gladstone did believe in truth—that is, he believed that there was such a thing as truth—but, like a clever lawyer, he was seemingly prepared to argue either side of a question of what constitutes that truth: "he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate."

-James Grant, Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian

Fifty years ago..........................

The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band.....the debut album

 

 

What is something you want, but you haven't asked for?

-James Clear

Out walking.......................

 When the cacophony of market doom reaches ear-piercing levels, the best remedy is to go outside and take a walk—by yourself.

-Tony Isola, from here

on being questioned.........................

 In the last resort, man should not ask, "What is the meaning of my life?" but should realize that he himself is being questioned."

-Viktor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy

the constitutive uncertainty................

 Fatih is the human response to the phenomenon that defines the human condition: the constitutive uncertainty of our lives as we walk towards the undiscovered country called the future.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

The new math..................................

Sometimes, the best addition to our lives is actually subtraction.

1,408...................................

 

........................................and counting!

From Chris Lynch's..............................

..........................................latest substack:

 Analysis true! Good life advice for avoiding problems and unworthy people...

Letting go......................................

 

...............................................for dear life.

Taking a stab.................................

 ...................at understanding the electorate.

Motivation..........................

 ..........................................in a crazy world.

Fifty years ago........................

Rory Gallagher......................... Irish Tour '74 album

 

Past and present.................

. . . they, too, believed that history and heroism were things that belonged to the past. Theirs was a nation, like ours, that was addicted to likes and to TikTok, hopelessly unserious, run by an elite with all of the noblesse but none of the oblige.

-Bari Weiss, from here

Constructive..........................

 

Having a calm mind that is focused on the outcome is our greatest asset when we are in conflict at workplace.

-Tanmay Vora, from this post

Important facts..............................

15.  Two 12-inch pizzas have less pizza than one 18-inch pizza.

-more fun here              math here

Not to say......................

...........................that paper cuts don't hurt:

 1. Unless you’re working in a coal mine, an emergency ward, or their equivalent, spare us the sad stories about your tough job. The biggest risk most of us face in the course of a day is a paper cut.

becoming........................

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

-Robert Louis Stevenson

art via

stumped.....................

 I’ve always been stumped by people’s naivety, or willingness to accept for others what they themselves would never abide.

-Joel Hirst, from here

One can only hope...................

 North America may suffer from some of the world’s poorest political leadership. Yet it seems destined to remain the wealthiest, most dominant place on Earth.

-Joel Kotkin, from here

Fun on the dance floor................

Led Zeppelin........................Boogie with Stu

 

thanks Ray

Fifty years ago..............................

Blind Connie Williams/Philadelphia Street Singer album

 

Vantage points....................

 What qualified from one vantage point as sterling patriotism appeared from another as bare-faced treason.

-Stacy Schiff, The Revolutionary: Samuel Adams

20 investing lessons.....................

..........................from twenty years:

 2. Intelligence doesn’t guarantee investment success. Warren Buffett once wrote, “Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.”

I’ve met so many highly educated individuals who are terrible investors. They can’t control their emotions because their academic pedigree makes them overconfident in their abilities.

Emotional intelligence is the true sign of investment smarts.

The unknowable future.........

 Are stock prices too high? I don’t know, and neither do you. I am too much of an Efficient Markets adherent to believe otherwise. Though, I am also Schumpeterian. So, yeah, we just may be in a new AI-powered economy where we will be much more productive, and the firms best poised to make money off this are worth a lot—and will be worth much more than what they are now. But until we figure many things out, and that could take decades (possibly many decades), there will be some froth along the way. We will make big bets on the wrong horses. Or some companies that seem poised for greatness will falter after a while. Or companies that seem unstoppable now may not exist then. Who the winners will be and what winning even looks like is unknowable right now.

-Allison Schrager

deeply..................

      To feel deeply is dangerous.

      To do anything else is a tragedy.

-Jarod K. Anderson

deep thoughts about deep thoughts.............

       I had come to grad school as a nontraditional student, older than my peers, leaving my job at a real estate development business to pursue a life of the mind.  I had failed as a student when I first went to college directly after high school, but when I returned in my twenties, I had a much different level of focus and commitment.  Unlike my first brush with higher education, I knew why I wanted to be there.

     When I reached my master's program, I took academia (and myself) very seriously.  I wrote dense essays about John Milton's Paradise Lost.  I attended conferences on pedagogy.  I thought deep thoughts about deep thoughts, and I was eager to tell you about them.  I used words like "epistemologies" before breakfast, without a hint of irony.

     My mental health struggles, my insomnia, and my fear of fully committing myself lest I prove my best wasn't enough meant I missed class fairly often, but I was still on the path to being respectable.  I was becoming a scholar.  A writer. A professor.  Somebody who left his small rustbelt town to do smart things with smart people.  I didn't have time for frivolous women and their frivolous art doodles.

     I was an idiot.

-Jarod K. Anderson

Recommended...................

      The Stoics believed in social reform, but they also believed in personal transformation.  More precisely, they thought the first step in transforming a society into one in which people live a good life is to teach people how to make their happiness depend as little as possible on their external circumstances.

-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Live (the ancient art of stoic joy)

Choices.........................

 When the choice is between effective and smooth, choose effective.

-Michael Wade

A coming attraction.......................

 ..................Lots of hype in our part of the world about the coming (April 8th) total solar eclipse.  One of my favorite memories about total solar eclipses was my junior high school reading of Mark Twain's tale, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, wherein our hero, Hank Morgan, outwits Merlin and King Arthur.

image via

Surrender.................................

 

He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

C. S. Lewis, from his 1939 sermon, Learning In War-time

Fun with mergers and acquisitions..........

 

All of these are big serious companies with good lawyers who have written these contracts before. Chevron’s proposed acquisition of Hess is as straightforward as can be, a completely standard all-stock reverse triangular merger; there is no weird structuring here to either get around or trigger the right of first refusal. It’s a simple question: Does the right of first refusal apply to a normal merger of Hess? Exxon seems confident that it does; Chevron and Hess seem confident that it does not.

Weird stuff. I obviously cannot tell you who is right. The language of the Stabroek joint operating agreement is not public, and neither is the arbitration filing, so I don’t know what the contract says, and even if I did I probably wouldn’t be sure what it means. The people who wrote it aren’t sure!

-Matt Levine

Can we please stop..............................

 ..............................this time change thing?

redefinitions..................

 We need to redefine "problems" into opportunities.

Problems are an opportunity to create value.
Problems are an opportunity to strengthen relationships.
Problems are an opportunity to differentiate yourself from others.

Every problem is an opportunity in disguise.

-Farnam Street, from here

staying power..................

 As the Soviets proved, lies don’t have staying power, but even passed hand to hand, truth and good art do. 

-Matt Taibbi, from here

a point of view............

Edward Hopper   Cape Cod Morning   Oil on Canvas   1950

It is a woman looking out to see if the weather is good enough to hang out her wash.

-Josephine Hopper remarking on her husband's painting, Cape Cod Morning.

Did I say that?  You're making it Norman Rockwell.  From my point of view she's just looking out the window, just looking out the window.

-Edward Hopper's reply

The very definition.........................

 ............................................of public service.

Who is not in favor....................

..........................of Type 2 growth? 

In English there is a curious and unhelpful conflation of the two meanings of the word “growth.”  The most immediate meaning is to increase in size, or increase in girth, to gain in weight, to add numbers, to get bigger. In short, growth means “more.” More dollars, more people, more land, more stuff. More is fundamentally what biological, economic, and technological systems want to do: dandelions and parking lots tend to fill all available empty places. If that is all they did, we’d be well to worry. But there is another equally valid and common use of the word “growth” to mean develop, as in to mature, to ripen, to evolve.  We talk about growing up, or our own personal growth. This kind of growth is not about added pounds, but about betterment. It is what we might call evolutionary or developmental, or type 2 growth. It’s about using the same ingredients in better ways. Over time evolution arranges the same number of atoms in more complex patterns to yield more complex organisms, for instance producing an agile lemur the same size and weight as a jelly fish. We seek the same shift in the technium. Standard economic growth aims to get consumers to drink more wine. Type 2 growth aims to get them to not drink more wine, but better wine. 

-Kevin Kelly

Fifty years ago.......................

Jimmy Buffett....Living and Dying in 3/4 Time

If I had a bucket list................

 ..........................this would be on it.

On nectar and honey..............

      There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention.  Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water's surface.  Pay attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world.  An acorn.  The geometry of a beehive.  The complexity of whale song.  The perfect slowness of a heron.

     Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize.  Of course it does.  The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shadows to entrance the bluegills.  Not unless you do your part.  You must choose to meet her halfway.  And when you do, you may find that magic isn't a dismissal of what's real.  It's a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.

-Jarod K. Anderson

the absurd beauty of it all.......

      There are wonders here.

      Things worth experiencing, worth knowing.

      Magic hidden in plain sight.

      Bats can hear shapes.  Plants can eat light.  Bees can dance maps.  We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all.  These are some facts that are easy to overlook.

      These are facts that saved my life.

-Jarod K. Anderson

Some thoughts about AI.......

 As soon as economists started doing experiments on generative AI, they found an incredibly consistent pattern: AI narrowed the productivity gap between high-skilled and low-skilled workers.

-Noah Smith, from here

Appreciation.......................

Instead of feeling guilty when someone helps you, your only obligation is to be grateful.  Expressing appreciation doesn't just make givers feel good, it also motivates them to keep doing good.  It allows them to feel values and shows them their time was well spent.

Generosity is not a loan to repay or a debt to settle.  It's a gift to appreciate.  Yes, you can reciprocate a favor by paying it back.  But the best way to honor an act of kindness is by paying it forward.

-Adam Grant, from this substack

boldness.....................

 8.  appreciate that which is easily taken for granted;

100 more here

Fifty years ago.......................

Ozark Mountain Daredevils...It'll Shine When It Shines 

 

hijacks...............................

      Our brains are special, fascinating miracles of the natural world, but they are also organs of the body.  They are flesh and water and electricity, and the fact that they are the seat of our thoughts does not negate their physicality or susceptibility to sickness.  Depression is, without any doubt, an illness and should be thought of as such.

     If a virus hijacks the machinery of your cells to manufacture more of itself, you wouldn't talk ownership of the decision to produce viruses, would you?  If you have a reaction to poison ivy, you wouldn't measure your self-worth by the itching of your skin, would you?  Can you imagine considering chickenpox to be an indictment of your life or evidence that you are lesser than other people?

     No.

     So how is it that our self-worth and the value of our personhood becomes tied to the painful negative thoughts that depression sufferers neither willfully create nor invite into our lives?  Depression is not a mirror held up to our identities, nor a yardstick with which to evaluate the quality of our essential selves.

     It's the flu.  It's a rash.

     It's the emotional equivalent of a persistent headache.

-Jarod K. Anderson

faith..........................

 I have known people who lost their faith in God during the Holocaust, and others who kept it.  But that anyone can have faith in humanity after Auschwitz to me defies belief.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

harbingers........................

 

Checking in................................

 .............................with Jasper Johns:

Three Flags            1958

Target      1961

Between the clock and the bed            1989

Scent              1975-76

False Start    1959

Bread     1969

Dancers on a Plane     1981

0 through 9    1961

Map              1961

Flag above white     1955

Target           1955

I make what it pleases me to make.. ..I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason. I intuitively paint flags.

I made the flags and targets to open men's eyes.. ..[they] were both things - which are seen and not looked at - examined.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.

I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life. 

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a confusion, or a freedom.

To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.

Taking some of the fun..........

............................out of doing our taxes:

 SOME 90% OF TAXPAYERS claim the standard deduction on their tax return. Thanks to 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, today’s standard deduction is larger than the itemized deductions of most taxpayers, including those who previously itemized.

The wonder of accounting..............

 Washington DC continues to spend much more than it gets in revenue.  In the Calendar Year of 2023, the federal government spent $6.3 trillion, but only collected $4.5 trillion in taxes.  This $1.8 trillion gap drove the national debt to $34 trillion in December 2023.  And it is only going higher.

One problem with these budget numbers is that government accountants, rightly or wrongly, lowered spending in 2023 by about $300 billion after the Supreme Court struck down a large part of President Biden’s proposal to forgive student loans.  That legal decision didn’t change the government’s cash flow last year in any significant way, but it did let the Department of Education “write up” the value of its loan portfolio by about $300 billion.  This, they counted as “negative spending,” which then reduced the official budget deficit.  So, while the reported deficit in 2023 was $1.8 trillion, the Treasury needed to borrow more than $2 trillion to make ends meet.

The high levels of borrowing are causing some investors to fear some sort of imminent and unprecedented snowballing of federal debt.  Continual borrowing will lead to skyrocketing interest rates (and higher interest payments), which will lead to severe problems in the financial system.

-as extracted from here

refuse.......................

 In particular, the Stoics don't think it is helpful for people to consider themselves victims of society—or victims of anything else, for that matter.  If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self by conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take.

-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)

missing the point................

      This old story is a myth, but it is not hard to imagine why such a story gets passed on.  It tells a figurative truth within a literal falsehood, a pathway to a kind of knowledge.

     Yes, technically speaking, it's a lie.

     Technically speaking, you can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions, in much the same way as you can look at any beautiful painted as a simple collection of pigments, which is to say, you can miss the point of anything.

-Jarod K. Anderson

the common denominator.................

 

Mark Rothko   Number 10     1950   Oil on canvas

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.

This is surely the death of all thought.

-Mark Rothko

The trouble with really smart people......

 Comedian Robin Williams was a terrible student. During a macroeconomic class at College of Marin, Williams’ final paper contained a single sentence to his professor: “I really don’t know, sir.”

He failed the test, but it’s the right answer to most economic problems.

-Morgan Housel, from here

Recommended....................

      As the war drew to a close and Washington stepped down from command, he turned the army over to Knox, who was given the assignment of reducing it to 700 men.  He demonstrated a prophetic vision as a statesman.  While serving as secretary at war under the confederation government, Knox realized that he needed to redefine perceptions about the army to suit the needs of a democratic republic.  Many prominent American leaders wanted to disband the army completely and viewed any force as antithetical to representative government.  Knox created a vision of a new kind of army in which solders were instilled with the nation's most cherished values.  He believed that soldiers could be trained to fight to preserve political ideals rather than geographic boundary lines, to love liberty more than personal ambition, and to value honor above greed and the spoils of war.

Entropy...........................

 Entropy applies to every part of our lives. It is inescapable, and even if we try to ignore it, the result is a collapse of some sort. Understanding entropy leads to a radical change in the way we see the world. Ignorance of it is responsible for many of our biggest mistakes and failures. We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. To maintain our health, relationships, careers, skills, knowledge, societies, and possessions requires never-ending effort and vigilance. Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary.

-Farnam Street, from here

Fifty years ago.......................

Linda Ronstadt...........Heart Like A Wheel (the album)

 

Life skills..................

 it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished.

-attributed to John Donne

It's a process........................

 Human intelligence is collective. Pretty much everything I know I learned from other people, either directly or indirectly.

-Arnold S. Kling, from here

Aging like a fine wine..............

 

more aging fun here

Expectations..........................

Jack Levine   The Feast of Pure Reason   Oil     1937

 

The satirical direction I have chosen is an indication of my disappointment in man, which is the opposite way of saying that I have high expectations for the human race.

-Jack Levine

On spinning.......................

 .................................................your wheels:

Fifty years ago.................................

Gene Clark............................No Other (the album)

 

The dopamine...................

.............................................................culture:

    via

A useful channel.....................

 ..................................for questions and answers.

The weaponization..............

 ........................................of "scientific consensus."

via

19 paths..........................

 .....................................................to sureness. 

Eighty percent.......................

 ...........................................of human wisdom!

The trouble with facts................

 There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced.

-Norman Cousins

thanks Michael

36 more.......................................

 9.   When you’re lacking motivation, remind yourself: discipline now, freedom later. The labor will pass, and the rewards will last.

-Ryan Holiday, from here

AI has been in the news lately..................

  .............................there will be implications.

source