A while back I may or may not have written about the foreclosure extension law in California – basically delaying foreclosure by 30 days to ‘allow lenders to work things out’ with tenants who have likely already bounced to a rental at 1/5th the price of their mortgage. Well, I said at the time (either here or *gasp* somewhere IRL) that all this bill would do is delay foreclosures by 30 days, and after that 30 days things would probably be worse than before. Guess I was right:
via CR via HW:
We’ve written for months now that extending foreclosure timelines — either via the use of legislation to lengthen notice periods, or through more direct moratoria efforts — will accomplish little more than delaying defaults, while simultaneously driving up costs and stretching servicers to a whole new level of thin. Proving that point yet again is ForeclosureRadar’s latest report on California foreclosure activity during December …
Notices of Default, which represent the first step towards a foreclosure, rebounded sharply from an earlier stall caused by California State Senate Bill 1137, ForeclosureRadar reported. With 42,421 filings recorded in December, Notices of Default are back to the record levels reached in the second quarter of 2008, nearly doubling the 21,557 Notices of Default recorded in November alone. NOD filing levels in Dec. were 24.7 percent above year-ago totals, as well.
So the sad truth is nothing is going to stop the housing/credit/stock collapse but the bottom of the collapse. We can drown the banks in money and it’s not going to make a fucking lick of difference. Jobs? Yes, jobs will help, which is what Obama’s about. But we also need a receding from our rampant consumerist ways. We need to go from the mall culture to the eBay culture, get away from the stigma of ‘used’ meaning ‘gross’ and ‘inexpensive’ meaning ‘worthless.’ People also need to get away from brand identity becoming self identity. You have watched shows like How It’s Made on the various Discovery channel networks, haven’t you? You notice them saying “and this time, they’re stamping brand XY on the bottles” and sometimes you even see glimpses of multiple brands. All coming out of the same factory.
Same. Factory. It doesn’t matter what brand you buy, there is a high likelihood that it was made of the exact same stuff by the exact same people using the exact same machinery. Srsly, do some research on who makes what and you will never find yourself paying more for a brand than a generic, you will find yourself studying the actual construction of items in a store or online and making the best choice between available products regardless of brand.
You know how you can buy memory chips of different kinds and there’s like a thousand brands of each. There is something like 3 actual manufacturers of memory chips. There are more manufacturers that package these into various forms (onto RAM sticks, into USB keys, SSD drives, etc). Then another company buys them, rebrands them, and packages them for sale or sticks them in a product as a value-add. And to top it off, the various speeds of memory that’s out there? They just test the chips and see what the maximum standard speed they can hold without fucking up is, then rate it at that speed and silkscreen some stats onto the chip. The inferior chips from a given batch become the lower rated speeds, the best ones become the highest rated speeds, but unless there’s a huge gap in the speeds, they’re probably all manufactured at the same exact time to the same exact specs.
So, honestly I’m looking forwards to when our future robotic overlords build a city like Zero One from the Animatrix and start kicking out technology and not messing around with who it comes from. (Incidentally, starting a robot city in the middle of a desert – sand is made of silicon atoms – is pure fucking genius on the robots part.)