Letters to the Editor
aveutter
Published Letters: 198 Editor's Choice: 32
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The Great Mexican Land Rush
[Read the article: Housing starts: Bad numbers keep getting worse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Housing is like any commodity. This is like saying people need to eat less cornflakes to work off the excess supply of corn, when a box of Cornflakes costs ten bucks. Applied to housing, lets imagine the price of corn went too high, no one could afford corn, so farmers stopped planting it?
I am not concerned about the housing industry, however. The Mexico Land Rush will happen soon enough, and US home builders will be putting up homes all over Mexico, mostly Northern Mexico probably. Mexico has long had restrictions against foreign land ownership, but these restrictions are about to lift. One Mexican capital group is planning a major seaport south of Tijuana, that will rival the Port of Los Angeles.
Donald Trump is in Tijuana building condo's for future expatriot Americans, but also for middle class Mexicans. The fall in the dollar won't end until both economies have some relative parity. If the US market doesn't mark these existing homes down, then a glut of new, cheaper homes will replace them, and they will be built south of the border. Its ironic to watch the Bush administration work both sides of the street, first by destroying the dollar, which makes Mexicos economy more on a par with the US, and secondly by trying to prop up the US housing industry, and reinflate the asset bubble.
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RD: Last one out turn out the lights
[Read the article: Housing starts: Bad numbers keep getting worse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The American standards of housing are unsustainable. They are among the highest in the world. Meanwhile America has lost its industrial base, destroyed its financial standing, and dissipated its military might in a series of debilitating foreign wars. The American standard of living is quickly becoming equitable with that of India, China, and Mexico. Too bad, Wall Street thought globalism meant everyone would be living large by now.
The next thing for housing should be technological advances which greatly reduce the need for renewable resources, like lumber, and which are more labor efficent. The great wooden framed McMansions will sit empty, like Roman castles in Europe, only they won't last as long. Secondly the strain on water resources will make permanent communities less viable. Communities will build up around water sources, and then disappear when the water is tapped out, as Americans become increasingly nomadic. Part two of the Great Mexico Land Rush will be based on desalination technology. Mexico has a large expanse of coast line.
Greenspan doesn't refer to it those terms, but he has always spoken of the America's mobile workforce, as a good thing. Eventually those workers moved to China, and nobody told us. He also suggested a more liberal immigration policy to supply the labor for America's manufacturing needs. People, and businesses will escape to Mexico to avoid regulation, to find cheaper labor, and affordable housing. The outsourcing of American businesses will continue.
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per-capita?
[Read the article: Bush's lame-duck climate change proposal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How about Bejing? They make all the crap we buy. Getting back to the US, Isn't that part of Southeast Texas home to several oil refineries, which are notorious polluters? Per-Capita means nothing, probably, except this is where a lot of manufacturing is being done.
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Online advertising is like gold plated Buggy Whips
[Read the article: The Google Earth economy ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Microsoft analogy is perfect, what a piece of crap that company is. For the next POC look no further than Apple. All of these so called Tech giants are last centuries business models with rehashed technology.
Are the dissidents in China hitting those Google ad clicks, from their jail cells maybe. to make cigarette money. The business of adclicks is slightly more perverse than Wall Street finance.
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No it only TRIGGERS the obesity gene (See Autism 101)
[Read the article: The bisphenol A blues]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You see the inherent obesity defect was already present (your generic fault, sorry) and the plastic merely triggers the gene. Your problem, sorry.
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lets cut to the chase
[Read the article: The haunting of the Democrats]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]who do want to be McGovern or Nixon?. WOuld you rather be the guy who wins the election and screws up the country, or the other guy. there is some morality here, and maybe its not history we face, or god, but just ourselves. do you want to be bush or al gore? run a poll, and but i think you know the answer. politics is exceedingly irrelevant, those who provide the leadership are no longer in washington. that americans continue to elect the wrong people is something which keeps the comedians in business. but even guys like jon stewart show respect for certain people, and we all know who they are.
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Service economies have no real sustainability.
[Read the article: Malthus is in the air]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The food problem isn't so much a matter of quantity as quality. When millions of rural Chinese move into cities, their diets change, and they consumer more calories. One prediction states that 2/3's of the worlds people will live in cities by the end of the century.
The solution is two fold. Stop the urbanization of the worlds population, which is also the leading catalyst for terrorism. Terrorism is a city problem.
City dwellers effectively jump start the collective metabolism of society. Thoreau mentions this in Walden. It's not a matter of having more to eat, its having meat instead of grain and vegetables. The reason people are moving into the world's cities is almost baffling. In the last century cities were near the centers of industrialization. The internet has given people the choice to work and live just about anywhere they choose.
Perhaps the service economy requires us all to live on top of one another, but that is good reason to examine this economic model and make changes.
Since a service economy cannot produce growth, it has no real sustainability.
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The issue is autonomy
[Read the article: Your very own climate change Victory Garden]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you are thinking of a wide screen TV, but you went for a solar panel, congratulations, you get it. There is no shame in not gardening, especially if you buy vegetables from your neighbors and you provide them with something, (perhaps the pleasure of watching you pedal by on your bicycle). Autonomy is not synomous with freedom, and or independence. It simply means you are not interdependent. America is interdependent with China, and that isn't a good thing. Being interrelated is good, that is built on sharing things which have no recipricocity.
By the way what do you consider a long bicycle ride?