The Long Season is a slice-of-life Chinese streaming series I've been enjoying on Amazon streaming, starts with a funny pair of taxi drivers.

I have no thoughtful comments about China's economy, beyond mentioning that Brad Setser tries to reconcile official figures with externally accessible ones to get at the actual rate of capital flows, those would be how changes to China's economy would first leak to the rest of the world. Ramping up cheap EV exports soon, maybe this year, seems likely.

Neither community nor attention I guess, interest in esoterica doesn't go either direction. From another thread, started Secret History of Western Esotericism, thanks for mentioning it.

There's a guy building me a new bathroom right now. I forget his name, which is kind of embarrassing because he's fixed a ceiling and resided the house and redid the wall of mold.

Some big Chinese thing went broke and all the reddit investment people were excited. But really I don't trust the reddit investment people much more than I trust Chinese government officials.

2: we're trying to slow-play our bathroom renovation because, after getting things started last spring, it seems like things are ready-ish to go, except for Jammies and me, who are at the most-busy-time-of-year. So we're trying to act like we're on board while casually dragging things out till late March.

We only have one shower and now we have zero. And some tile person sent the wrong tile.

That sounds terrible.

I am making sure that all the supplies are here before we let them in, which is one reason it's taking so long to get started.

When it finally happens, we'll still have 1 shower and 1.5 bathrooms.

That's what we have, but half as many people.

2, 4, 5,6,7, 8: On-topic because bathroom renovation is a growing segment of the Chinese economy (?).

We're choosing community.

We've been planning to renovate our house for probably more than two years. (Definitely thinking about it in some sense for longer than that, but the first email I can find from our current architect was in May 2022.) The paperwork has turned into a huge problem. For eight months and counting we've been trying to get our mortgage company to sign off on a form required by the city government. It's been one objection after another. One thing on my to-do list for today is to print off a letter and prepare the latest package for them in hopes that this time they'll be able to figure out what we want and actually agree to do it.

I don't want to complain too much, at least we haven't actually borrowed the money or vacated the house like some of our friends did before hitting a snag, but in addition to paperwork problems, it would be nice to have the new living space we're planning: a third floor for more total living space, including a second bathroom. Atossa is getting old enough to be territorial in the only one we currently have.

I got really annoyed 2 or 3 months ago when Cassandane announced she didn't want to do it until after Biden won the 2024 election. Admittedly this isn't totally irrational. General concerns about fascism aside, if Project 2025 happens, she'd lose her job and my prospects would get a lot worse. But it's still frustrating to think about that much more delay.

Pro-tip: Everything is easier if you don't apply for permits.

I don't know a lot about China, but I wouldn't assume their real estate woes lie in building photogenic new cities that didn't get filled. I think it's just the semi-familiar story of companies (in this case especially a couple of big dogs Evergrande and Country Garden) getting pumped up by excited lending (in this case partially governmental, looking for ways to goose growth), that excitement and upbidding fed on itself until the companies overextended and are now tanking, which took real estate into a vicious spiral.

Real estate developers are pretty much always criminals, right? You need them, but they're crooks.

Make approvals routine based on checking boxes and connections/bribery capacity stops being a competitive advantage like it is now.

Then you're left with tons of labor exploitation, but that's a matter for more muscular regulation, just like restaurants.

My understanding here is a lot of it was driven by personal investment. That is, upper middle-class Chinese people had a strong preference for investing in real estate specifically, and didn't realize that they were all buying investment properties in fake cities consisting entirely of investment properties.

Also my understanding is we had a related phenomenon in town here, where there's a small segment of condos that are very expensive for our local market ($800k+) which were mostly purchased by parents of Chinese students, in part to hide money abroad, but also in part because well-off Chinese people wanted to invest in real estate specifically.

Usually when people say such-and-such new housing is being primarily bought up by foreigners for whatever reason, I'm skeptical. False rumors can grow into common knowledge, especially when xenophobia is an easy takeaway. There tend to be domestic buyers at the high end even when it's well above median affordable, since so little gets built. But I don't know your market, real estate as laundering is indeed a thing on some scale (although new regs may strike big against the practice soon), and you're saying it's a small segment, so sure.

The guy who bought the house next to mine is Chinese. He's hiding the money laundering by living there.

His car still has California plates.

Yeah, I'm not *that* confident in that explanation. That said it was certainly true (before the new Cold War with China) that every $100k sports car was owned by Chinese undergrads. But yeah, it's only like 5 apartments.

There are a few office and maybe real estate developments in San Jose that turn out to be stalled because the same Chinese company has failed to follow through. I don't think that company's problems are a recent phenomenon. One of the properties is supposed to be built around renovating a historic church* and that's been shuttered for at least a decade. Not sure how long the current owners have been failing to build, though.

*The only reason I've read news about this is the church. I used to go by it all the time and it's sad to see that whole block neglected.

It was only a couple of years ago that I learned San Jose was really big and not just another suburban enclave like San Dimas.

They used to like to act like a suburb. Slowly changing now. Very slowly.

People around here complain about buyers from Massachusetts the same way people in other places complain about buyers from China. There is a parallel situation with a bunch of capital chasing after a limited amount of real estate. Also parallel in that the problem is probably overstated.

And of course everywhere west of the Mississippi complains about Californians.

With much good justification other than real estate, I'm sure.

Having spent last June on the NH coast, I can't guarantee that all of those homes are owned by people from Massachusetts, but I'm very confident that 90% of them are second homes that weren't occupied, and the hypothesis that it's mostly people living in Boston seems very reasonable.

In South Carolina they complain about Yankees.

New Hampshire: Vacationland

Some of them also live in Connecticut.

People owning second seasonal homes in vacation areas is not a problem and is, in fact, very important to the economy. The problem is when people buy nice houses in cute towns and turn them into second homes, squeezing out locals who need first homes.

Then the locals get to live in "workforce housing" which means big shitty apartment buildings with few amenities, not built in walking distance to anything.

2: The crucial difference between residing the house and residing in the house.

NMM to Carl Weathers.

12
Pro-tip: Everything is easier if you don't apply for permits.

The reasonableness of this permit seems medium. Not a no-brainer, obvious thing every development should have, but not completely crazy Byzantine rent-seeking either. I'm definitely more mad at the mortgage company. So far, they've told us they can't sign it:

1. Unless we give them a whole bunch of documentation that is unrelated to it
2. But instead they'll be happy to write a letter to the same effect, but that doesn't satisfy the city agency
3. Because they don't have Adobe Acrobat, and won't use DocuSign either for some reason

If today's attempt fails, I think the next step really is to talk to a lawyer.

30
People owning second seasonal homes in vacation areas is not a problem and is, in fact, very important to the economy. The problem is when people buy nice houses in cute towns and turn them into second homes, squeezing out locals who need first homes.

My "vacation area" is your "cute town" is someone else's "prime investment opportunity", right?

25: And in Pittsburgh too. Supposedly, IT workers from California are why all the houses in my neighborhood now cost over $300k.

33: I'll get a stew going in his honor.

34 was me, obviously.

More about non-locals buying residential property: where do properties primarily being used as airb&bs fall?

I remember what felt like too many vacant storefronts and empty new buildings. But covid contributed to this too, of course, and I have no idea about actual reliable numbers on this.

I really should watch Arrested Development.

||

The leveling spirit of the Jacksonian era convinced a number of Democratic state legislatures that medical licensing laws were elitist conspiracies designed to perpetuate aristocratic privilege. The repeal of these laws in the 1830s and 1840s allowed the profession to slide even further into chaos.

30.2, 34 last: the township (full of lakes) where my mother has a vacation home in Michigan charges non-Michigan residents huge taxes on those vacation homes, and the area has so many beautiful parks and nature areas and cross-country ski trails. I think the wonderful public lands are paid for by soaking the out-of-state second-home-owners. Not sure what the air bnb or second home situation is "in town."

||

NMM to Carl Weathers and Wayne Kramer

|>

My "vacation area" is your "cute town" is someone else's "prime investment opportunity", right?

No, its different. People live and work in towns, except for a few specific ones that are run as tourist destinations. But not every cute town needs to be a tourist destination! And there are plenty of vacationable areas - lakesides, ski areas, big empty tracts of wooded acreage with streams and mountain bike trails. Nice places to stay but otherwise somewhat removed from day-to-day economic activity. Those are the places where second houses should go.

Yeah, but you can't draw a bright line between "tourist destinations" and "places for regular people". Millions of regular people live in tourist destinations like New York. And decreeing what people can and can't use their homes for, while not completely infeasible (limitations on airbnbing make some sense), is still hard to enforce.

Building enough homes (and, incidentally, hotels) is the most reliable and feasible way to keep these use-conflicts from festering.

41: Half pwned.

43.1: You can't decree what people can and can't use their homes for, but you can structure the incentives to encourage certain behaviors. For example, see 40.

That is, punishingly high property taxes combined with an appropriately set homestead exemption on single or 2-family houses, so that when the two are combined, the net property tax is reasonable.* This would likely discourage PE from buying up houses and renting them out, discourage many from buying, if not 2nd houses, at least 3rd, 4th and 5th houses. One advantage of this as far as policy goes is that because the owners don't reside in these houses, they cannot vote on the tax policy. In any event, it would soak the rich which is rarely a bad idea.

*The wikipedia link explains the homestead exemption as an exclusion of an absolute amount of property value from taxes (e.g., subtract $50K from the taxable value of the property). Decades ago, I lived outside Minneapolis, and IIRC the exemption was then structured to cut property taxes by 50%. No reason not to set this to 90% and raise tax rates accordingly; similar to what elite private colleges do with their tuition and financial aid so that affluent families pay the full rate.

I've lived outside Minneapolis my whole life.

Pittsburgh used to have the land value tax, which may have been good for keeping tourists out. I don't know. It sure would be handy when you have a lot that is basically just your house plus a driveway, plus a patio, plus a planter.

42: some of us don't want to be in a town for other people's second homes!

||

the mosquitoes he encountered there were "the largest, hungriest, and boldest of their kind."

45: So now you want to discourage homes being rented out period? I was talking about discouraging short-term rentals and vacation homes. Some European cities are trying owner-occupancy requirements in large swathes and the main impact per research (trying to recover the link to the paper) was increasing rents, plus more high-income families getting to buy homes.

If you want to push down PE, I'd recommend regulating those companies directly. But all this is kind of flailing about to match aesthetic ideas of what a market should look like when bringing supply in line with demand is an available option.

Here we go. Plenty of people need to be able to rent housing, it's not some kind of moral stain on your community.

The best way to soak fat cats is land value tax.

I thought I knew who Alison Brie was, but apparently I was thinking of Allison Janney.

The movie may have worked better with Janney.

I that problem with Brie Larson.

I *had.

Wait, Allison Brie is different from Brie Larson?

Then who is Allison Larson?

She was in Aquaman?

Weird how Aquaman was the only good DC movie.

No, I meant between Brie Larson and Allison Janney.

I liked emo Batman.

||
Not sure if this has come up yet, but how are you California folks doing ahead of this storm? Sounds scary.
|>

I thought I was going to be laid off and I was all prepared to become a flâneur. Now I'm sure I'm not to going to be laid off, so I should buy better flâneuring clothes in case I get laid off later.

The storms are going to be a worse in SoCal, but I saw a sign by the highway - so presumably the word of Caltrans - recommending people avoid travel Sunday and Monday.

Going places is for assholes anyway.

Seeing Justin Timberlake look like he's in early middle age makes me feel old.

Has anyone here read Muir's Thusan Mile Walk?

*Thousand

No, but walking the Pacific Crest Trail is my ultimate goal as a pedestrian.

And as a flâneur.

Does the PCT even have arcades?

Nowhere has arcades now that you can play video games at home.

lourdes is in Japan and missing the storm fun. I also saw the signs advising against travel on the freeway.... it's wearying, honestly. We got a ton of rain last year and even though there was no flooding or serious consequences, by the end I was tired of worrying about it and especially tired of the stress of driving in heavy rain. (My windshield wipers are crap and I should probably have thought to replace them before now.) Other people have it much, much worse. I think I still prefer this extreme to drought, and greatly prefer it over fire season.

I still haven't read the OP link, sorry. I even care about China's GDP and everything! Maybe I need a video where action movie stars summarize it in 5 minutes. Time-lapse video, detonations, whatever it takes.

We've been enduring an unusual cold snap for a week or so; the past couple days it's been getting down around -20F at night. It's supposed to warm up a bit now, though. Already it's a little above zero.

I have a hard time figuring out if they're emphasizing the storm's potential because it's really going to be "historic" or if they're overemphasizing it because they got caught off guard by the last couple of storms that caused (localized) flooding. Similar to how last December they didn't issue dire warnings about high surf until after a few incidents where people got swept up in waves, and then the surf didn't get that high again during the subsequent period post-warning.

Predictions are hard when they're about the future and all that, and no doubt it will be a big storm but the numbers being cited don't sound out of line with multiple storms last year, some of which were worse than others. The places with evacuation warnings seem to be the same places hit hardest last year.

I do enjoy hearing the phrase "do not attempt to travel except to flee" though.

Can anyone explain to me how the weather forecast works? My weather app predicts that, for every hour of the 24-hour period beginning at midnight tonight, there is a less than 50% chance of rain in my area. Yet the same forecast predicts that the total amount of precipitation expected in my area tomorrow is over three inches - an amount that would surely need to take most of the day to fall. If we expect such a huge quantity of rain tomorrow, shouldn't the chances of rain falling during at least some of the 1 hour periods be higher? Or conversely, if there's only a so-so chance of rain at any given hour, shouldn't the total amount of expected precipitation be less?

I think you are over estimating how long it takes 3 inches of rain can fall if the storm is bad enough.

Update: It rained a lot last night, but on & off. Not at the moment. (I'm in a good position to tell with a bathroom skylight.)

And I jinxed it, naturally. On hard again.

You've been in the bathroom a long time.

The weather app has updated the precipitation total to 5.3 inches in the next 24 hours. It's raining right now, but it shows the current chance of rain at only 70%, so maybe the app is just very skeptical.

Some parts of Ventura county got like 3-4 inches in an hour during one of the December storms. I think the San Diego area had something similar recently.

The predictions for this storm seem to be more along the lines of steady rain for longer rather than occasional bursts. So I can see how that could lead to more of a sustained crisis. Meanwhile, if the rain is still fairly light in about an hour, I'll probably go see if I can take a look at some coastline from the top of sufficiently high dunes.

Meteorologists recommend adequate fiber consumption.

It took me a while, coming from Pittsburgh, to understand that a 90% chance of rain did not mean "it will rain all day."

And yeah, water can come down fast. We're supposed to get the tail end of the river later this week. It's one of those things that if it's cold enough, it means feet of snow.

Stay safe, all!

I feel like, as someone who grew up in FL and lived through many hurricane seasons, I should be more blasé about weather, but that's just not how I'm built.

The small waterfall in my parent's' backyard is a bit of a concern. But water isn't pooling so either the flat part of the yard is still draining or it just hasn't gotten saturated yet.

Was it always there and now it's bigger?

A relative who was a local TV meteorologist for a few years recently explained to me that the percentages ("90% chance of rain tomorrow") means how much of the (viewing) area can expect rain during the time period (day, hour, whatever). Very counter-intuitive, non-obvious, etc., etc.

Oddly enough, one of the previous owners of the house had built a small, and extremely ugly, waterfall-ish water feature.* It was ugly enough that either the same owner or a different one placed a tool shed in front of it at an angle that blocked the view from the house. I don't know why they didn't remove it. My parents got rid of it shortly after they moved in.

*I don't have a distinct memory of it. Maybe there was some sort of cheap fountain at the bottom?

I guess Taylor Swift won the grammies. I was watching John McEnroe play pickleball instead.

Attn (esp.) Doug:
https://inmoscowsshadows.buzzsprout.com/1026985/14414457-in-moscow-s-shadows-133-books-on-russia-books-on-ukraine

Nice! I haven't read any of them...

Given where the American right has gone, I worry about a book published by AEI. The parents of the author of The Showman missed an opportunity to give him the middle name And. Or, at a stretch, Ann.