Dispatches from Москва

Recently there has been a lot of news about home declining prices.  I remember a long time ago (before i bought my first property) a person that trust a lot about finance said to assume 2-3% annual appreciation of real estate when comparing renting vs buy.   That same person said don’t buy unless you want to live in a place for at least 5-7 years.  That turned out to be sage advice.

Now it’s a big deal that house prices are falling.  But I just grapped the Zillow quarterly report for metro Boston.  And it has this nugget:

last quarter, down -2.7%; last year, down -8.5%; 5 year, down 0.4%; 10 year, up 6.4%

All those percentages are annualized!  Sure, if you bought a year ago, you have lost a lot of value.  But over 10 years, prices have gone up by more than double what used to be the conventional wisdom.  Wow.  So we have a little further to go before this is a “10 year correction.”  Just one more quarter like the last one and we will be close to the assumption I was given.

The moral of the story, don’t buy a house planning to flip it in 2-3 years.  Buy if you want to stay at least 5 years you will probably recoup your costs… Sounds like I got good advice.  I’m a lucky man (thanks Fred :-).  And for the time being, a renter .

Here’s a press release I found on the web:

“We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to provide greater choice and innovation in the marketplace and create real value for our respective stockholders and employees,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft.

Here’s my charitable translation, merely leaving out what may not be true (and is impossible to know):

“We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo! and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to provide greater choice and innovation in the marketplace and create real value for our respective stockholders and employees,”

Dropping the 3rd person (hiding behind every company are a bunch of people):

“I believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for me. My goal in pursuing a combination with Yahoo! was to create value for me.”

Cheerleaders of all kinds (corporate executives, polititians, pundits) love to talk about motivations. It’s a great realm for spin - there is no evidence to accidentally contradict. Here’s my guess at what Mr Ballmer really thinks (based on how I’d react if I were in his shoes):

“What the fuck, Yahoo? We offered more than you are worth. I could have made a bundle, instead you’re making me look bad.”

But what do I know.

This reminds me why fake steve jobs diary is so funny :-)

When I was a young man I thought that Steve and Steve we dishonest scumbags who would do anything to make money. Of course I knew they were very smart, hard working and lucky too. Now I still believe pretty much the same thing, minus the scumbag part. Their behavior seems like a natural reaction. If no one accorded them more status than they deserved, if people accepted that other people think like they do but have have different motivations, they wouldn’t have to say the stuff they do. But it does matter. A lot.  If a CEO came up who spoke honestly about his motivations or his company’s behaviour, he would be either be fired immediately or skewered in the media and then fired.

“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

Trying to get a feel for the quality of the options here for running some Windows apps under Ubuntu Linux. The choices I know about are: VMWare, Virtual Box, and Parallels.

Besides this comparisson, which includes Qemu, any thoughts?

Oh, the host is AMD 64bit, and it would be easier if Windows XP was 32 bit.

Back when i had basic cable I used to watch Dr. Katz. It was a cartoon about a psychologist in Manhattan.  I would poop myself about once an episode.

Well yesterday I discovered Hey He’s Back. Same guy, similar style of comedy, but audio only. Funnier than anything on TV. Obviously comedy is a matter of taste. But this is funnier than the office, 30 rock or curb your enthusiasm, which are about the funniest things I’ve seen.

A few weeks ago I read a review of Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.  Forgetful in a book store, I bought Irrational Exuberance.  By about the 3rd page I was wondering if this was the right book.  But it was interesting enough given housing prices that I read the 1st 3 and last 2 chapters.

Also, following on the heels of the Undercover Economist, I got and read More Sex is Safer Sex by Steven Landsburg.   Steven would be proud, I bought hard cover, something i rarely do.  It is great and funny and everyone should read it.

I succumbed to peer pressure and started messing with my iPhone. Today I got secure shell working.  The PDFViewer sucks (i’m trying 0.03 from Conceited Software).  Here are the major ways:

• no landscape mode. without it normal print books are just too small for these old eyes.  I read a hack where you encode the pdf using you can open it in safari, but the URI did not work for me.
• the reader forgets your page when you close it
• the above is made intolerable for anything bigger than a short article by the lack of navigation beyond flipping pages one at a time
• the reader forgets your zoom level (this is pretty minor, but Apple charges a premium for taking care of such details)

But there are two buttons on the lower left that didn’t do anything as far as I can tell :-)

I read Tim Hartford’s Undercover Economist, loved it. It was the really accessible, like most economics books i might read. Explains the basics of how markets operate at the margin and the 3 broad ways that they fail. Highly recommended.

Also, upgraded to the high end DSL. SBC, aka at&t, has 3 levels; i started at the introductory level - $20/month for 384 kbs upload and 1500kbs download nominal or maximal. Now I’m at $34/month for 512 up and 6000 down.

The old speed test result:

And the new:

I’m actually considering not bringing my laptop with me when I fly to my client on Monday. This would be a first for me. They won’t let me connect the machine to their network and i don’t have a cell card for it. So it’s just for the hotel at night. But i’m also going away next weekend and that means I wouldn’t have the computer there either. There are so many downsides that my head might explode. At least I’ll have my iPhone and the bags will be a lot lighter :-)

The VP of Strategy bought all of us copies of The Happiness Hypothesis a few months ago. They were handed out to employees at the California headquarters. But, since I was working in Russia, I didn’t get mine. So last time I was in a book store I bought a copy along with Stumbling On Happiness because I couldn’t remember which one he bought.

It turns out I had heard an interview with Daniel Gilbert the author of Stumbling On Happiness. I enjoyed both books, but in the end I found Stumbling On Happiness more to my liking.

Learned from both, but they are different in tone and topic. Stumbling on Happiness is more an ad hoc collection of interesting things researchers have learned about how the mind works, with specific emphasis on happiness. Maybe ad hoc is the wrong term - what i mean is the findings don’t form a consistent theme - they represent what we know. Because much is not known, the findings seem disconnected. Of course they are broadly connected in that they explain how we are.

By contrast The Happiness Hypothesis tries to unify all it’s findings. It is more a call for life improvement. Somewhere between self help and non-fiction. It too was interesting, but it focuses too much on it’s own cohesion. I think this is 1) because far more people are drawn to things that are consistent (consider the reelection of G W Bush); 2) the book was funded by the Templeton Foundation. I have no comment on the foundation, you can look it up - but I can almost feel the author self-censoring to get published.

Dialectical diversion
These books could have been titled Stumbling On Despair and the The Depressive Hypothesis. But of course people don’t want that. If you like, you can chalk my opinion to the rantings of a hyper-critical mind (read them to learn the how neurotic I am). You can take solace that it will undoubtedly cause me to have a shorter, less happy life. I’d rather have 68 years of critical thinking than 85 years of optimistic bliss, some would not make that choice. But I’m happy with that :-)

well after a long hiatus, i have a weekend to myself. i have become a US resident again, having moved back to the 2nd city last Monday.

some things i noticed and appreciated about the US after being away for a year
- the copy machine work (ahh- it’s the little things)
- the people in chicago and louisville are not as uptight about fashion as in Moscow, so i look fairly normal here
- lot’s of good food (this is really something we do well is the US, maybe too well)
- when i put on my blinker, other cars sometimes slowed down to let me in :-)

But not everything is happy in happy valley -
It took 3 calls to “the new at&t” (now with small letters) and 2 service visits to get DSL working. And they can’t connect it to my phone bill, because i kept my old number when i moved. i should be getting a $4 a month discount, but because 703 is not in the chicago area, they couldn’t connect them. they suggested i get a chicago number - i said that kind of defeats the purpose of the _law_ which requires them to allow me to keep my number. So i have some more calls to make

Now back to unpacking and taxes…

I am told that this is the biggest holiday here. The USSR combined the secular new years with the religious christmas into one. Now most eastern christians will celebrate christmas (rajdestvo) on January 7, but new years is still a big deal here. so my house mate and i decided to utilize our location near the center of the city and have a party.

Unfortunately my girlfriends daughter was sick so they did not come. but we had a few people over, walked to the river at 11 and watched fireworks. it was a bit cold, but a lot of fun.

Before this undertaking everyone that knew about it said the same thing - be careful: it will be extremely crowded; there will be many drunk out of towners and they will be happy to get into a fight. my direct observations were quite different. the bridge to red square was closed and the militsa would not let us across, so i couldn’t see well it that well. but the square did not look very crowded. definitely the north side of the riverbank was not crowded. I was on the south side and it was not crowded either. I saw many drunk people, but there were many families and the drunks were pretty happy. The fireworks were over the river, not the square, so we were as close as you could get.

Maybe they keep people away so that the chosen few can enjoy the square calmly?? in any event, it was a good time. I think Russians are just better behaved than they like to admit to outsiders :-)

Last trip to the US, i changed carriers to AT&T to get GSM support, so i could use the same phone in the US and abroad. Leave it to the “free market” to fuck up phone interoperability.

I bought an HTC Tilt, which is a nice Windows Mobile 6 device. Everyone wondered why i didn’t get an iPhone. Two reasons, it costs $150 more, and then I would have an iPhone like everyone else.

But the day i left for the US Google announced Andriod. Philosophically I am with them. Ever since I saw Lilly Tomlin say “One ringy dingy…” I knew the phone company sucked. Now they have switched to lower case letters and actually used the word “cool” in their documentation. But they still suck. In two years, maybe i will to buy a GPhone? But maybe google will be the man by then?