sphinx65

Wow, that might be the worst I've ever seen.

Does anyone here buy from auction sites often? Those are a nightmare, they let the sellers do pretty much anything and very few accept paypal (they're THAT stingy) - sellers on liveauction.com routinely ask buyers to provide credit card info over email. It looks like a lot of sellers are flocking to these because ebay is too strict, wait, I mean "sane".

What an incoherent article

Yeah, as if a "spare DNS" has anything to do with solving the problem. You could get into your own infrastructure, but your customers are still screwed.

Am I supposed to care what some pimple covered idiot thinks of Noam Chomsky? I do not recall seeing anything in my life as sad as "Mencius Moldbug".

Now, HERE is a great article on "Moldbug" http://thebaffler.com/blog/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

The hedge fund buying spree happened after 2008.

They're huge players in single family rentals. Blackstone (a hedge fund) is the largest owner of single family rentals in the USA. And they really don't care about cash flow that much, they are trying to inflate the price of the asset, hence all the "cash over asking" sales. Which means they will dump it when they can't keep causing the prices to rise.

Pensions don't make any money with interest rates as low as they are. They need to be around 8% or so for pensions to be viable. Currently pension funds are doing the same unwise speculative investments everyone else is making because nothing else pays enough. As go pensions so goes retirement in general. Pensions were perfectly viable until the reign of Greenspan.

Huh? CA has had real estate values vastly above the average since the 1980's. I remember seeing dumpy ranch houses in Salinas, CA for nearly a half a million in 1992. Such a house would have been $40K almost anywhere else.

Pensions aren't the mistake, low interest rates are the mistake.

Because they were promises made a long, long time ago, when interest rates were high enough to support the idea of pensions and retirement?

This is happening almost everywhere, but at a less frightening pace than CA. And we are told continually by the chattering class and politicians that skyrocketing real estate prices - asset inflation - is a good thing. Since forever a stable residential real estate market was the goal and people understood its value. Now we're all gamblers, meaning losers. When the hedge funds and REIT's stop speculating in residential real estate and pull out, there will be a deafening crash.