The people who have and want to sell can't ...because the ones who need to buy can't afford 'em. The housing market is still upside down, and is going to remain upside down for ...twenty years? At least.

The twin "lost decades" in housing ...

10,000 baby boomers are retiring per day. This two decade trend has only started but will certainly have an impact on the housing situation moving forward. In most economic reports the boom and bust of the housing market was not factored into the equation. Many boomers will downsize or sell as they age. This is just a matter of demographics. While trends are harder to predict, we know that 10,000 baby boomers will be retiring on a daily basis for well over a decade. What does this do to housing? The challenge we will face is that the younger home buying generation is less affluent and more in debt prior to purchasing a home. Instead of growing households, we saw over 2 million young adults move back home to live with their parents. So much for household formation taking up all that excess demand. The recipe for the moment has been to constrain inventory and artificially push rates lower but this has done very little to increase actual financial security. What happens when millions of baby boomers retire?

...read the whole thing. This is a mess. Of course, if you want to buy a home, there's going to be a buyer's market for a long time to come.

Posted by: fairwhether at 06:07 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Why I left, 1:

LA Times: Rising Costs Push California Cities to the Brink.

Why I left, 2:

NRO, Conrad Black: The 2012 Contest.

...The judges haven't judged; the legislators haven't legislated, the presidents haven't presided, but nor have the teachers taught, the information industry informed, or the beneficiaries and inheritors of responsible government acted responsibly.

...But in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve, and the fault is in ourselves.

Rearranged. Substitute "governor" for "presidents" ...but the reasoning is the same: I finally realized that the problem in California wasn't so much the officials, as the voters who kept electing those officials.

Time to leave (with apologies to Roy Batty).

Posted by: fairwhether at 10:55 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Sound familiar?

Forbes: Americans Revolt Billion of Times a Day.

It's not civil disobedience that I'm talking about. It's the opposite: Civil disobedience is meant to be noticed. It is a price paid in the hope of creating social change. What I'm talking about is not based on hope; in fact, it has given up much hope on social change. It thinks the government is a colossal amoeba twitching mindlessly in response to tiny pinpricks of pain from an endless army of micro-brained interest groups. The point is not to teach the amoeba nor to guide it, but simply to stay away from the lethal stupidity of its pseudopods.

Uh, yeah. What's your point?

Posted by: fairwhether at 07:14 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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...statistically, it's pretty much impossible to become thin. The key word: statistically.

Fat is Officially Incurable (According to Science).

[The studies] all find the exact same thing: You can lose and keep off some minor amount, 10 or 15 pounds, for the rest of your life -- it's hard, but it can be done. Rarer cases may keep off a little more. But no one goes from actually fat to actually thin and stays thin permanently.

The more serious paper is here: Long-term weight-loss maintenance: a meta-analysis of US studies.

A more accessible NY Times article: The Fat Trap.

For years, the advice to the overweight and obese has been that we simply need to eat less and exercise more. While there is truth to this guidance, it fails to take into account that the human body continues to fight against weight loss long after dieting has stopped. This translates into a sobering reality: once we become fat, most of us, despite our best efforts, will probably stay fat.

There you go.

Lessons from the Amish.

A new study of Old Order Amish living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was reported as showing that physical activity can combat obesity and keep people trim, even among those with a genetic susceptibility to obesity. Today's modern lifestyles and obesogenic environment, with its perceived more fattening, processed foods and lack of exercise, are believed to cause the current obesity epidemic. And people living simpler lives, eschewing the trappings of modern life, eating natural foods and getting lots of exercise, don't have weight problems...or so the myth goes...

...Assuming, for a moment, that the correlation is real, for a man of average Old Order Amish height and BMI, working out 16 hours versus 12 hours a day would equate to about a 15 pounds difference; and for a woman, working out 14 versus 10 hours a day would correlate with a whole 12 pounds difference in body weight. These nominal weight differences would still not transform someone naturally obese into someone thin. Similarly, even these weight changes seen among the least active Amish in this cohort compared with the most active, didn't raise their mean BMIs into the obese category.

Keep in mind: if you were originally thin, you can be again ...at a cost. But the best advice (for thin people) seems to be: don't put the additional weight on in the first place.

For those "always been fat" people though? - No amount of dieting, and no amount of exercise, is going to help. You have no hope.

...well, possibly until there's some kind of medical breakthrough in genetic therapy. Or something.

Posted by: fairwhether at 06:37 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Exercise doesn't help you lose weight.

Why?

It can't.

Skinny people aren't skinny because they exercise: they exercise because they're genetically pre-disposed to be active.

Fat people aren't fat because they do not exercise: they're fat because they're genetically pre-disposed to a certain kind of metabolic storage of sugars (carbs).

It's genetic.

If you're the latter, you have to change your diet: get rid of the sugars (carbs). Eat more meat. Keep in mind that when you exercise, it's going to make you hungry (of course it will!), so when you eat, choose foods that don't convert to long term storage in the fat tissues.

Again: eat meat!

Posted by: fairwhether at 09:27 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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