Re engineering

The hope for my other blog was to cover different topics, but my life has taken a turn, so I have decided to blog about it:

http://reengineered.blogspot.com/

I'm finally 5 by 5 with Twitter

It took me a long time to figure out Twitter. Frankly, I spent little time thinking about it. I was more or less obsessed with the housing market and the distinct possibility of an economic depression. I had eventually evolved to believing that we were doomed to relive the 1970s, not the 1930s, which is mostly a good thing.

Anyway, about Twitter... It seemed to me like you have to have a real sense of self-importance to really get into it. Way more than blogging, I think (or hope). So I dismissed it as a strange fad. But now that I think of it in the context of "The 70's Are Back :-/" I have found the analogue.

Twitter is the CB Radio for this generation. You can broadcast to friends and anybody who will listen. You can tell people how you are doing, when in the past you would have to hold all your thoughts inside. I suppose some people could snap under that pressure.

traffic stop+go on 405. safeway veggies r fresh. Going out for Chinese food at Panda Express. Just landed in L.A. Saw some cute shoes at the mall.

So, we have Twitter. If it's like CB, it will be huge, get some movie references, then fade into obscurity. Enjoy the ride.

Googling 'twitter cb radio' is a fun excercise. Here is a fun one from the results, dated April 28, 2009:
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/04/the_fickle_twit.php

When MySpace and Facebook were at the stage that Twitter is at today, their retention rates were, according to Nielsen, twice as high - and they've now stabilized at nearly 70 percent. Twitter's high rate of churn will, if it continues, hamstring the service's growth, says Nielsen's David Martin: "A retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure ... There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point. [Twitter] will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty."

CB Radio indeed.

Whom can you trust?

If you paid somebody to look after your financial interests, could you trust them? Here is a sampling of professional stock analysts in action, providing advice on Countrywide Financial Corporation stock, excerpted from Yahoo! Finance:

CFC Analyst Ratings
Month......: Jun Jul Aug Sep
Stock Price: 38. 37. 27. 18
Strong Buy.: 4.. 3.. 3.. 2
Buy........: 3.. 3.. 3.. 4
Hold.......: 4.. 5.. 5.. 5
Sell.......: 3.. 2.. 2.. 1
Strong Sell: 2.. 2.. 2.. 4
Sell or SS.: 31% 27% 27% 31%

So, in no case do more than 1/3 of the analysts tell you to reduce your exposure to CFC while the stock has already lost half its value in three months. Does that mean that your chances of finding a good analyst are less than 1/3, or does that mean that this is random and unknowable, so a prudent population of analysts would distribute itself in a gaussian distribution about the zero change case?

There has been some data showing that the general public cannot perform well at picking their own investments, and that it is best for them to have professional guidance. One example is traditional pensions versus IRAs, with pensions managed professionally, and IRAs managed individually. At least one study have shown that less money-savvy worker bees perform much worse than the more highly paid executives. I found this Frontline piece fascinating and frightening.

GenY = GenX + (deltaTime)

There was no baby bust between Gen X and Gen Y. There were a boatload of Boomers, to be sure, but then things settled down again. From the Census department: Please excuse the oddX-axis gridlines, I didn't feel like letting MS make my Mac
experience frustrating. They get to make my 8-5 frustrating enough.

Living closer to our means

The Bureau of Economic Analysis has a set of data that they collect, trying to compare economic trends over time. I follow Table 2.6 pretty closely... September preliminary numbers indicate a savings rate of -0.2 percent. Better, but still out of balance.

The Elanus leucurus photo set

Lou in Houston made me think about my small set of White-Tailed Kite pictures from June 13, 2006. I thought I would post them.

Pick a Lie: They aren't making any more land, buy now or get priced out forever

Flagstaff is land-locked. Las Vegas is land locked. The Bay Area is land locked. The satellite picture (from Google Maps) is of the Tri Valley, east of the San Francisco Bay, but west of the Central Valley. The undeveloped land seen in the picture is mostly quite developable, except for the artificial development restrictions. I'm not going to argue about whether it should be developed, I just want to point out that we're not short of land, we just are choosing to allocate it to other purposes.

The maps (from the Census Bureau) are population density by state and by county for the U.S., and by county for Southern California. The country is full of land. People choose to live near other people. Maybe it's the beach. Maybe it's the trendy clubs downtown. That makes land more valuable. I get that. The strange thing about manias is that people will be priced out (for, like "ever"), then go far away to find land (and they usually find it pretty easily when you come to think of it). Then they overpay for it, assuming that their local scarcity will soon be repeated in the near future in this new place. Perhaps someday, but people don't understand that area scales as the square of the distance. Get a little into the countryside, and all the dirt is the same, or nearly so. Moreover, there's acres and acres of it. Especially if you're going to put up tract houses in order to maximize your return.




To be certain, there are and have been local, temporary scarcities of land. Europeans came to the Americas because of misallocation of land as much as because of density pressures. In England, the principle of primogeniture caused massive misallocation of lands. I don't think the U.S. has that problem yet. Nobody can predict the future, so I don't know how long we have until that's our problem. Maybe we'll stop short of irrecoverable misallocation. We have plenty of land, and we can therefore afford to pave some of the world's most fertile soils for houses.