Why I dig redfin

’cause they show you the last sales date and price of any house you are looking for. What do I see? That about 3/4 of the houses coming on the market in central Seattle over $600,000 were purchased within the last 24 months and have been marked up 30%-50% over their last sales price. Now I didn’t do any formal research on this. It is based on me picking a couple dozen houses for sale off the website, but I did cover Magnolia to View Ridge, Queen Anne to Northgate.

What does that mean? Well, I guess it depends. Does it mean that the market is constricting? That non-flipper-scum can no longer afford a new house so they are staying put? Does it mean that the increases in Seattle home prices are being driven by investors and not real people? Does it mean that the Seattle housing market is as strong as ever? I have no idea, but I think it is more the former than the latter given the housing market in the rest of the country.

It’d be nice to see some of the “real” media locally spend some time to actually evaluate the data; rather than jumping on the newest announcements and trying to correlate them against nothing else. Otherwise, they’re just blogging AP wire stories and not doing their jobs as journalists.

The new curmugeon on the block

Andrew Keen thinks the user-created-internet is full of crap. A bunch of self-important blowhards talking to no one. I am one of them, and I think he is right. Will I give up this blog to let the “real” journalists restore order, doubtful. I have grown tired of the web 2.0 hype though and I’m glad to see someone skewering the insanity of this stuff. Even if you disagree with him, it is worth getting the other side of the story from time to time.

Andrew Keen’s blog at ZDNet

Michael Arrington kisses Microsoft’s butt

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/01/take-time-to-understand-silverlight-its-important/

I agree that Silverlight is important, but Mr. Arrington gave such a content-light, gushing, oh-my-gawd report of it, that all my BS meters went off. Then they went off the charts when it turns out that HE WAS PART OF THE PRESENTATION, ON THE STAGE INTERVIEWING THE DEVELOPERS.

The comments have more meat, but of course there is the usual MS-bashing lowering the signal-to-noise ratio.

Here was my post in the comments:

Something that seems lost in the original post and in the comments is the business angle on this.

Microsoft is a platform company.

They have consistently made business decisions on attacks to the platform. IE was a repsonse to Netscape, Windows Media was a response to Real, .Net was a response to Java, etc… Now that Flash/Flex is becoming a platform in its own right that is diminishing the importance of the operating system that it runs on, MS unveils silverlight. MS may talk about how cross-platform silverlight is, but if it isn’t going to sell more copies of Windows it would never make it out the door. This announcement is just another in a series from MS (see the above list and remember MS’s commitment to cross-platform on those) where the other shoe will drop eventually. Maybe this will be like IE or Real where MS comes out with Mac versions only to drop them after they have achieved dominance or maybe this is like .Net where there is a head-fake to cross-platform, but that was really just FUD.

It isn’t this announcement to watch, it is the follow-on ones.

weird iPod moment

I’m not sure if this was an anthropomorphic moment or a fetishistic moment, but as I put my old iPod in a box today to send it back to Apple to get it’s click-wheel fixed, it turned on, showing my favorite A Silver Mount Zion song paused. It was like saying good bye to an old friend for the last time. I was actually kind of sad.

I’m scaring myself.

The RIAA is supa-evil

from Daily Kos: State of the Nation

There has been an understandable public outcry against the RIAA’s attempts to more than triple the sound recording copyright royalties on Internet radio. (See Save Internet Radio from Corporate Money Grab) One solution proposed by Webcasters is to just not play RIAA-member songs under the assumption that then they don’t have to pay the royalty to the RIAA’s collection body, SoundExchange; Webcasters would then just pay the independent artist the royalty.

This sounds fair and just because it is. However, the RIAA is not about being fair and just. The game is rigged and the RIAA has rigged it in their favor. The strategy of playing only non-RIAA songs won’t work though because the RIAA has secured the right to collect royalties on all songs regardless of who controls the copyright. RIAA operates under the assumption that they will collect the royalties for the “sound recording copyright” and that the artists who own their own copyright will go to SoundExchange to collect at a later date.

Let me just state for the record that if Unit Circle Rekkids gives permission for you to play a track on your internet radio station don’t pay SoundExchange a dime, ’cause they aren’t going to pay me a dime and I will sue the crap out of them if they collect money in my name that they have no intention of paying me.

gee thanks, W, for restarting the cold war

It’s bad enough that this horrible administration is rolling back all the liberal victories of the last few decades: a woman’s right to choose, civil rights, protection of endangered creatures, worker safety, and much more. Now it is even looking to destroy some of the conservative ones as well.

It turns out now that our nation’s mismanagement of foreign policy is leading back to another blast from the past, the cold war.

The issues around the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe are complex. I’ll admit that I don’t think I know enough about this to make a comment on the viability of the treaty itself (A blogger first!), but I do know that statements like “The idea that somehow 10 interceptors and a few radars in Eastern Europe are going to threaten the Soviet strategic deterrent is purely ludicrous, and everybody knows it” from Donna, oh, I mean, Condoleezza Rice don’t fucking help when the Secretary General of NATO has called CFE, “one of the cornerstones of European security.”

Yet again, the W administration has a complete incompetent running the show. This time it is the most intelligent of the bunch. When she became Secretary of State it seemed a bit weird since her background as an academic was Soviet Russia, not the Middle East. Finally, she gets a problem that talks straight to her experience and she resorts to 80’s style Cold War attacks on one of our freaking allies. Yeah, can I double-check that your PhD isn’t from some university run by a televangelist?

[nytimes article]

proof that H1-Bs are used to hire cheaper labor

I have railed against the abuse of the H1-B program in the past, having seen it up close in a previous company.

The program was cut back seriously after the bust, but several key tech heavyweights have been arguing for its return to old levels even though there are still 800,000 fewer people employed in the tech sector compared to 2000.

The InfoWorld Reality Check blog has some more data dispelling the lie that H1-Bs don’t drive down wages for the rest of the industry. Part one is anecdotal evidence from a former HR person, the other is real study data from John Miano. Unfortunately, he seems to work for some right-wing anti-immigration think tank. Can we get some more impartial data or anecdotes?

Flex goes Open Source

Flex:Open Source – Adobe Labs

this is freaky awesome news. I work at Adobe and I didn’t even know about it. This will totally open up the tool chain and allow lots of cool authoring apps addressing the different needs of Flex developers. I won’t jump the gun and declare Expression or WPF/e dead, but in the minds of web developers, who are the kinds of people who actually care about this stuff, this makes the decision a no-brainer.