Dr. Ben Luce at Monument Mountain

http://preservelenoxmountain.org/


The following is in response to a video of a presentation Dr. Ben Luce made at Monument Mountain (Found on the above link to Preserve Lenox Mountain) to a friend Scott Sawyer who still lives in the area where I grew up. Scott and I have been communicating about wind turbines via Facebook.


Hey Scott,
Great presentation on the fallacy of wind power and especially visuals on the "High impact" of creating infrastructure to the sites and the final impact of seeing these turbines along the ridge line. I thought it was ironic the position Texas commanded on the chart showing which state could produce the most. Not only does Texas play a big role in oil and gas but it is tops on the ability to generate wind power!

Ben Luce was very balanced on his presentation, facts, understanding of the balance between need, ability and political and economic reality. He made a resounding "no way" argument to wind turbines. I thought he went off the rails when he began to promote solar power over wind. Yes, solar is excellent in mitigating the negatives of wind generation but as for solving the need for more electrical generation to meet growing needs I think he is as wrong as those proposing wind generation. My philosophy is people are not going to go backwards. The great increase in America's power consumption cannot be mitigated by "weatherization" and "efficiency." American's are not going to give up their laptops, Ipads, Kindles, Iphones, Smart Phones, Facebook, Google, Netflix etc. This is where the consumption is occurring - powering and charging of electronic devices and the enormous consumption by server farms like Facebook, Google and Netflix. The evidence I see is social networking, cloud computing and large corporations providing online selling, services and streaming are growing exponentially and into the future as far as anyone can predict. I also believe there is a revolution of personal servers, not computers, coming where many homes will use these servers to secure proprietary rights to their writing, photographs, music, movies and personal information. These proprietary rights and security are currently under attack from "Big Media"  through their attempts to regulate, via legislation, ISP's and large server users like Facebook to root out copyright infringement. Personal servers and virtual private networks will insure individual control, privacy, security and avoid entanglement with these laws by bypassing these corporations. So by my prognosticating the future of conservation of electricity is doomed by the future skyrocketing upward trend of consumption.

My last point I would like to make is: like so many other great ideas of protecting and preserving the environment and resources - it is a fools errand. People wrapped up in doing their part will install their solar panels and reduce their consumption from the grid. But what happens to the electricity they have saved? Is it set aside for them for a later date, or has the power company slowed down the turbines and not produce that small amount? Of course not, it was gobbled up immediately by someone else who wanted it or sent to another power company who wanted it to sell. It really was not saved at all. We especially can see that now as we read reports about gasoline being exported to other countries because American's are not consuming as much. What! you mean they don't slow down production or store it for a later date? Outrageous all our conserving are going to someone else. Like the early economy cars the Pinto, Vega, and Gremlin were soon abandoned when people realized they were not making an impact on the 1970's fuel shortage and what they were actually doing was tolerating horrible cars for a lost cause. So to the solar panels and wind turbines will be left in disrepair when those who have committed themselves to conservation or alternative energies realize they are just living inconveniently.

Is-the-Knowledge-System-Broken

Claire Berlinski - Ricochet "Is the Knowledge System Broken"


"When that paper ceases to be reliable, when it no longer functions as a signal for collateral, as an enforceable guarantee, a credible assurance, or a reasonable measure of risk, then — Whoosh! — private credit vanishes. Just as your identity does when you step up to the immigration counter and discover you’ve lost your passport."

"That’s what happened when the subprime crisis exploded. The derivatives that financed the nonperforming sub-prime mortgages were rapidly losing value, threatening to cause a run on the banks because there was — and remains— so little property knowledge about them."

I like the word "Whoosh!" It is a great descriptor for the devaluation of my own home! I had several posts to Claire on Ricochet I will share here.

Well if knowledge about value of property and housing is what has been lost then it might make sense to correct the "perception" of value of property and housing. It is what I call fake money. Property and housing was never worth what we were told, it was always based on inflated value based on supply and demand. Just because someone said the property was worth an amount and someone paid this amount and someone financed this amount does not make it so. So if we assume it was based on falsehoods and overinflated lies then we must assume the correct value is what it will fetch today. This is an unpleasant reality to those who claim they are experts on buying, selling, financing, brokering, predicting trends and policy on real estate since they were scammed more than most. This reminds me of the time I bought a used car and thought I had a great value, till the next day when I went to start the car to find the battery was junk and I needed to purchase a battery. Just because I believed it was valued at what I had agreed to pay did not make it so.

     Following my previous post; my solution, to move away from the post-war thinking of housing as an investment up-scaling at several intervals, retirees selling to extricate themselves from their mortgage, moving where housing is cheaper and buying a bigger better home, to housing as a pre-war model. A home is to be lived in, paid off in thirty years and sold with a modest gain. The first model requires inflation and necessitates rising wages leading to boom and bust cycles, less savings for retirement and college. My standard is young families. Young families will fuel the rise in housing prices (Demand) to a certain point, but when they feel too squeezed (They begin to see housing as cutting into their families well being) they will abandon the market and cause a bust or correction. The latter denotes long incremental valuation, modest homes, stable neighborhoods, life long neighbors, planned obsolescence school life cycle, substantial life long savings for retirement and college,  Now I know others are going to say post - war investments are in the home, however the miracle of compound interest is in time -  changing homes and up-scaling busts long term investments.

So I have two more points the first a prediction  - warning, the second a solution to the current horde of toxic assets.
We have yet to see non-high risk homeowners abandoning their homes. These are families who still have great stable jobs, who are affluent and continue to pay their mortgage. But what they have is a monthly mortgage payment for a home worth $1.5 million but is now worth $600,000.00. They will come to realize they were scammed by the overvaluation of housing. They will realize they will never see their home rise back to $1.5 million (Since the valuation was a scam in the first place). The idea of walking into their mortgage company and asking for a refinance to a $600.000.00 level would be smiled up on or laughed at. So what to do - abandon their down payment from their previous house sale - stop paying their mortgage and save what they would have paid for a fairly substantial down payment, abandon their home - laughing at the mortgagee as they are left holding another useless home and bid their time till they can buy a correctly valued $600,000.00 home?

   An idea for a solution:
Anyone can buy a foreclosed property with certain caveats:
     Must be a conventional loan - 20% down - no mortgage insurance.
     Must be a conventional loan from the mortgage company holding the foreclosure.
     Can either be a 15 year or 30 year mortgage.
     The mortgagee cannot bundle and sell the loan.
In return for the 20% conventional loan the Federal government will allow the buyer of said above foreclosed property a special capital gains timeline:
      If sold in the first year 100% capital gains is required.
     If sold in the second year 6/7 capital gains is required
     If sold the third year 5/7, fourth year 4/7, fifth year 3/7, sixth year 2/7, and finally the seventh year would require 1/7 the capital gains.
     The eighth year would require no capital gains if sold.
     Then the ninth through fifteenth year the capital gains would rise incrementally by 1/7 till the fifteenth year 100% capital gains would have to be paid.