Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

The chart below shows the five year rise a housing price index for the top handful of metro regions.

Presumably some of the varation from one region to another is grounded in fundamentals while some is irrational exuberance.

Meanwhile one of the future’s markets has a thinly traded product you can buy. In a perfectly functional market that would be your best estimate of what the future holds. This chart shows the price as of yesterday for a contract on a somewhat different housing index for various dates in the future. You can see that they are all falling, but also that there is little variation from one region to another; at least nothing to compare to the variation in historical price rises.

This was all triggered by reading a story this morning of a seller in Washington who entered the market asking 1.1 million and sold after an auction for half that.

Today’s Dilbert amused me.

One of the standard problems in all system design is what to call the root of your class hierarchy. I worked for a company once that started with the name “object,” and then in a later version they wanted something yet more general so the inserted “entity” above object. Later yet they inserted “item” above entity.

This pretty well sums it up:

In days past, these professional courtesies were almost necessary in building a strong agent/client relationship. Those days are long gone. At one time, it was a loving and trusting relationship built on mutual respect. But as with most modern relationships, the agent/client, once sacred bond, has been destroyed by the Internet.

I like to say that the intermediary must love both sides; that gets harder to sustain in a hurricane of disintermediation. Craig’s list and eBay don’t sport much relationship. Amazon’s model of your buying habits is the best you’re likely to get along those lines.

Another solution to the challenge of coordinating collective action.

June 1984:

The Lisp Machine is a product of the efforts of many people too numerous to list here and of the former unique unbureaucratic, free-wheeling and cooperative environment of the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. I believe that the commercialization of computer software has harmed the spirit which enabled such systems to be developed. Now I am attempting to build a software-sharing movement to revive that spirit from near oblivion.

Since January 1984 I have been working primarily on the development of GNU, a complete Unix-compatible software system for standard hardware architectures, to be shared freely with everyone just like EMACS. This will enable people to use computers and be good neighbors legally (a good neighbor allows his neighbors to copy any generally useful software he has a copy of). This project has inspired a growing movement of enthusiastic supporters. Just recently the first free portable C compiler compiled itself. If you would like to contribute to GNU, write to me at the address above. Restrain social decay–help get programmers sharing again

From the preface of the Lisp Machine Manual.