White flight, anti-redlining, and the mortgage crisis

I had planned to start this post with the popular story, that the Community Reinvestment Act caused the mortgage crisis. The general story goes something like this: in the name of equality CRA forced banks to give mortgages to people who couldn't pay them back, leading to a surge in home prices out of proportion with income and inflation, peaking with the bubble that we just saw burst. And somewhere I'd seen the graph of home prices, incomes, and when CRA was enacted. It all fit. So obviously I had to prove it wrong.

So please accept this strange assumption: let's assume that the narrative which I disagree with is based on facts, but draws the wrong inferences.

Cancel that, this works. Sort of. It places the bubble at around 1995. But that doesn't fit the data so well. Let's not let facts get in the way of our opponents. Oh the comment makes me laugh.

Let's look at the other side of racism in real estate: where you can buy a home. Once upon a time people would write and accept contracts which stated that they would not resell the home to black people. This was an effective way of keeping white neighborhoods white. At about the same time that CRA went up, so did segregation contracts become illegal. Combine that with legislation for race-neutral lending, and suddenly black people can move into white neighborhoods.

If they can afford it. In fact there was not a flood of poor, uneducated, criminal blacks to white neighborhoods. Instead the black middle class, who wanted to go somewhere better and to get out of that mess, they moved. But why didn't they move to good black areas? Well, there weren't a whole lot, since race-based lending tends to bring down the middle class along with the poor who they are stereotyped with.

But white residents weren't entirely clear on the "middle class black people will not rape your daughter and rob your house while smoke pot" thing. So they left. Simple supply and demand, even without any discounting due to urgency, will drive down prices. That allows a lower class of black people to move in, driving down prices even more, bringing in more, and so on. Meanwhile the middle class blacks see that the neighborhood has gone to shit, so they leave too.

On the surface this would appear to cause prices to drop. On the contrary, it's actually a perfect scenario for both oversupply and higher prices.

Moving out means a new home, driving construction. There's also a rush, meaning the new houses will cost more. Meanwhile in the previous neighborhood the home values are plummeting, after they have been bought, resulting in upside down mortgages. Walk away from that and buy a new house.

Why would the banks give loans for this? Well sure the white people might seem to be overpaying and rushing, but they're responsible middle-class people who have been paying off their loans and have savings accounts and whatnot, so it would seem to make sense to loan money to them. The black middle class, well it is black, but it's middle class and they can't legally discriminate. As for the poor coming after, everything is so cheap, there's nowhere to go but up. It helps when you can just mislabel and sell off the loans if they don't look as good as expected.

So a wave goes out from the city, driving prices up at the front, crashing them behind, and creating the Alice in Wonderland scenario of overpriced homes, oversupply of homes, and a whole lot of unoccupied places.

This shouldn't be taken as factual, and hopefully hasn't, but just as a "maybe this is it?" theory. I'll have to do some more digging to see if it's actually worth anything.

Have some of my wireless

A while back I got into a bit of an argument with my brother regarding unsecured wireless networks. Most of what I concluded is that law should not be written by people with next to no experience in the field, as is most internet/electronics/computing law. He's a law school graduate and has passed the Georgia bar, so one can assume he has some concept of the relevant legal concepts. The problem is that there are almost no relevant concepts for this strange new world.

All current notion of theft involves exclusivity: what I have you don't have. In the physical world theft is very straightforward: you have what I own without my permission. In a digital realm, it's not so simple. I can have what is yours without you not having it. We can both have it. I didn't earn it, but I didn't deprive you of it either, so while there is clearly something wrong, theft is not the right word. Incidentally, I believe this is part of why the record companies have so many problems: they keep accusing people of theft when they haven't. Switching to calling it piracy isn't much help when we all think pirates are awesome, and pirates are thieves anyway.

To the point: I felt that it was not theft or trespassing to use an unsecured wireless network as long as the use was not reducing the effectiveness of the connection for the owner. If they were using it at something near capacity, then outside use of it would be limiting their service, and that would be theft: the bandwidth someone else has, they do not have.

I could think of no good analogies at the time, though I was confronted with many terrible ones. But finally I have it. Broadband connections are like a water pipe to the house which is always open, always running, and tends to spill out onto the sidewalk and evaporate. Most if it is excess, wasted.

There is one major problem with my assertion that use of someone else's network is not innately theft: we can't easily measure their usage. Wouldn't it be great if there were a way to ask a network and connection, "Are you busy?" But let's not stop there.

Here are the features I'd love to see:
Password/key to be 'inside' the network.
Guest access to 'outside' the network, but retaining internet access.
Outsiders could not see anything inside: no information on the computers, router, or anything besides remaining bandwidth and network name.
Insiders would have absolute priority. Outsiders would only get leftover capacity, so insiders are never slowed down.

Have this built in to every wireless router and make the default "No one without the key can use this network for anything". After all, people have the right to decide how their own resources are used. Instead the sharing would be an option, a way to make some use of excess or unused bandwidth without going totally unsecure with no password or priorities.

If you happen to run into a network like this and use it a few times, drop a dollar on their doorstep and a note thanking them for the generosity.

Environmentalist Suicide

Apparently today is Earth Day. Who knew?

A former friend of mine once said something incredibly stupid: She'd kill herself to protect the earth from her humanity. I believe this was caused by several factors. She had terribly low self-esteem, wasn't of anything close to sound mind, thought she was a druid, and didn't seem to value humanity very much. Her life was a sad story, which she liked to tell any time anyone else had a bad day and needed to vent. Got a bad grade on an exam? "I'm an orphan." Well fuck, that helps so much!

This is a fringe movement, those who believe that humanity should cease to exist in order to save the planet. I say cease to exist because they have different methods: murder, suicide, no next generation, so it's not quite accurate to say they want to destroy humanity or kill it. The thought behind the movement is that humanity is unnatural and harmful to the world and therefore must be removed.

I consider myself an environmentalist, but I consider the concept of 'environmentalist suicide' to be incredibly stupid. Humans are animals, naturally evolved like any other. We have as much right to exist as any other species, meaning that we have no right to exist but also do not deserve to not exist. Nature doesn't have morals, it just is. Survive or don't, that's it.

To suggest that humanity has less right to survive is based on the false notion that humanity is unnatural, that we break the rules. Bullshit. We're no better or worse than any other creature and we're all just trying to survive. The whales wouldn't die to save us (or at least have made no such indication), so why should we do the same for them? Does a wolf starve to death before it eats a rabbit? No. It eats the rabbit and doesn't question it. Instead it survives. Does the rabbit complain? No. It does what it can to survive and has a hundred siblings to carry on.

I'm not trying to justify all human action. It is equally stupid when people gloat about wasting energy and littering and going out of their way to destroy the world. Their kids need that world to live in.

There's a terrible situation of extremes. On one side you have those who don't consider any larger impact on the world and the next generation. On the other side you have the static world advocates. Who are the static world advocates? They are the ones who fight tooth and nail to not let anything change, who believe that any alteration of the environment is bad and should be stopped. They advocate taking a picture of the world and never letting that change. How boring. The irony is that they like to talk of biodiversity, when preventing any change means that we won't see new species, and so over time we'll have less diversity.

Evolution doesn't just happen. Something causes it. There is a balance to the world, which tends to remain unless upset. Humans are not the only cause. The world changes in temperature and air content and sea level and all sorts of things change and have changed without us. We should not fear changing the environment. It is not an antique to be locked away in a glass case and never touched. Certainly we should not break it, but we shouldn't be so afraid of some dust, or new paint, or using it as a pitcher rather than a vase.

Let's not get caught up in extremism. Humanity should not end. It also should not foul its own nest. We should not fear changing the world, but we should be careful to not destroy it. That means not destroying ourselves, for we are part of the world.

Producer regulation does not imply consumer restriction

The FDA is moving towards regulating salt. My first thought when I saw that was "wtf?" Then I started actually thinking and decided to see what they meant. Were they looking into salt types? Purity? Sources? Turns out I was entirely at the wrong end. The regulation would be on salt levels in manufactured foods.

As I finished the article I looked over the comments. In summary they expressed outrage at Obama telling them what to eat.

Let's start at the place where you would start if you were being logical. Or complete illogical. The Soviet Union and the Communist Party's regulation of industry. In this extreme example, regulation of the producers is a direct restriction of consumer choice. If there is one car design, one apartment layout, there is no choice beyond buy or not buy.

At the opposite extreme, no regulation at all, there is theoretically unlimited choice brought on by the wonderful productive nature of the free market. Until you introduce patents, copywrite laws, and all the other restrictions which are necessary to prevent intellectual property being ripped off, and all of which restrict consumer choice to some degree.

It appears inevitable that regulation would restrict choice. But that's at overly-general extremes.

Let's look at the specific example: salt. I go to buy my soup and that damn socialist has reduced the salt in it. What an outrage! I take it back home, heat it up, and grab my salt shaker. At this point Obama personally takes away my salt shaker and dumps it in the trash. Actually that second part doesn't happen. I have just as much control over what I eat as I did before. In fact, I potentially have more. If the soup starts with less salt, I have the choice of having less salt, or more salt, or the same salt as right now.

Just to review the facts: Obama has not killed my grandma and he has not stolen my salt shaker.

Day of Silence and Mass Murder

Not being in school I have no reminders of when Day of Silence is. It's today. People plan ahead of time to not speak for the day in order to spread awareness and protest or something like that. At college one group also held one to protest abortion. I didn't bother to point out that fetuses have no voices because they literally can't talk and have less mental capacity than a brain-damaged hamster; they knew they were putting on a good performance.

My Google news brought up this article. Students protest hate speech with ‘Day of Silence'
It ends with this:

In the past year, hate speech has also been highlighted in Massachusetts bullying cases which ultimately led to student suicides. Though he did not identify as gay, 11-year-old Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, a sixth-grader at New Leadership Charter School in Springfield was repeatedly taunted with anti-gay slurs and endured other forms of bullying. He hung himself at his home with an extension cord last April.

That got me thinking. Why commit suicide? That seems rather dumb. It's a surrender, a submission to those who are wronging them. If you're going to kill someone, kill someone more likely to be the problem: the other people. I'm not advocating killing every 6th grader who ever called someone gay, since then there would be no 7th grade the next year, and so on until humanity is gone. I am suggesting though, that if this were say, 10 years later and the people in question are in their 20s rather than 12; that by then people should have outgrown their "everyone is gay" phase. If you're going to commit suicide, don't, take down the people who are the problem instead.

Same as in those shitty oppressive culture where women are abused and neglected and sometimes kill themselves to get away, or do nothing and eventually are killed for some petty offense like "exposed eyelid in public." The world would be a better place if those women either refused to die and tried to escape or accepted death and made it useful, taking a queue from the suicide bombers, except fighting for something worthwhile. Or at least die for a useful crime like "cut off everyone's balls and eliminated the next generation."

Of course the ideal would be no suicide, no murder, and no defocused hatred:homophobia, racism, sexism, etc.

Dear President Ahmadinejad,

Do you need a hug? You seem angry. It's not that we hate you. I don't hate you, at least. But you've been acting crazy lately. By lately I mean since we first heard of you. We're not going to nuke you. We just say stuff like that because certain morons in our country think we should. But they're not in power and sensible people will do what they can to keep them out.

So here's a hug.
*hug*

Signed,
An American

P.S. Israel is not using mind-control devices to spread belief in the Holocaust. You're mixing up "Israeli mind-control devices" with "Hitler killing millions of Jews and Eastern Europeans". It's the second one that makes us think there was a Holocaust. Have a nice day.

The gold standard is pointless

The value of gold comes from two sources: commercial/industrial use and perception. The former would give it much less value than it has. The latter is well, perception.

Gold is a useful material commodity. It isn't a stable currency or a reserve. It's just a rare metal which we hype up and fool ourselves into believing it has innate value comparable to the market price.

Moving to a gold standard would fix absolutely nothing. Anyone who advocates a gold standard or investment in gold is either speculating on a bubble or deluding themselves. Gold isn't special or magical. It's a rare metal that makes shiny stuff. That's all.