Just Ask

 

Several online videos show elders--often late '80s or older--competing in triathlons and "iron man" competitions. This typically means swimming, cycling and running a half marathon. 

When asked how he managed to do this at his advanced age, one man responded that you can ask your body to do things like stay healthy, and it will generally respond by doing it. You can ask your body to run a marathon or swim, cycle and run a triathlon, and it will do it. 

Your body does what you ask.

So all we have to do to maintain our strength, endurance and flexibility is ... ask? 

Obviously, the "asking" isn't always simple. Training to do physically stressful things like triathlons isn't trivial, but the persistent asking manages to improve even a natural process like aging. One elderly triathlete suggests "food, fitness and fun" are the keys to graceful aging.

Another question is, really, what are we asking our bodies to do now? A population of obese, out-of-shape humans, dying early of strokes, heart attacks and diabetes has been asking their bodies to adapt to unhealthy food and a lack of exercise. "The wages of sin is death," says Jesus. Amen, I say. 

Where's the fun in that?

 

The truth about bitcoin...

 

Remember when the bitcoiners were telling us that bitcoin would eliminate wars and usher in global peace?

Die hard bitcoiners are basically goldbugs with a lobotomy

— Dow (@mark_dow) February 4, 2026

Realtor Baloney

(c) by Mark Dempsey

As a former Realtor, I was disturbed to read Tamara Suminski's, Sacramento Bee editorial (1/30/26 "California leaders can expand homeownership opportunities. Here's How"). She's President of the California Association of Realtors. In it, she promotes the "abundance" talking points, saying taxes and frivolous litigation are among the biggest obstacles to home ownership. As is common, the omissions are more important than the points she makes.

She makes no mention of the fact that, as of 2024, one in six homes purchased in the United States was bought by investment buyers and speculators, more than triple the number in 2000. In low-price homes, investment buyers bought one in four. Philip Pilkington says, "Housing in America is being treated as a financial asset from which investors extract wealth—this is not unlike how land and property were treated in the feudal era."

Ms. Suminski also ignores the fact that there are more vacant homes than our current, record-breaking homeless population, the biggest since the Great Depression. San Francisco has five times its homeless population in vacant homes.

Vancouver, Canada, had an epidemic of speculator-owned vacant homes, too. This reduced the supply of homes available for purchase, making home prices increase. Vancouver had some success keeping prices reasonable by by taxing vacant property, a measure that discouraged the speculators. Is there any discussion of that in the current housing "debate"? Nope. Taxes are always a problem, never a remedy. And rent control? Why that's completely taboo!

Everyone keeps saying America has a “housing shortage.”

It doesn’t.

Divide total homes by population and you get this:
We’ve never had more housing per person than we do right now.

The problem isn’t supply.
It’s prices. pic.twitter.com/KS9iIPyGXs

— Jon Brooks (@jonbrooks) January 30, 2026

The home ownership problem comes down to affordability. Banks are partly responsible for the prices increasing. They love making homes ever more expensive, and, as the subprime/derivatives meltdown in 2007-8 proves, they will even accept fraudulent appraisals if it means they can make bigger loans. For banks, bigger mortgages mean bigger profits! Meanwhile, government financing underwriters and insurers (VA, FHA, FNMA, FHLMC) and the Federal Reserve, our central bank, do relatively little to penalize misbehaving banks. Instead, they excuse and bail them out.

Public policy matters when it comes to affordable housing, too. Nixon stopped the federal government from building affordable housing, and, as he was cutting taxes on the wealthy roughly in half, Reagan cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. Clinton signed legislation with the Faircloth amendment, placing an upper limit on federal affordable housing programs. The attack on affordable housing has been a generations-long, bipartisan project.

Meanwhile, public policy was responsible for the possibility of home ownership in the modern era. The New Deal popularized 30-year mortgages and the FHA, a mortgage insurer that made such long-term mortgages safe for banks. More recently, government agencies like FNMA and GNMA have bought mortgages from the banks that originated them, creating a secondary market to encourage even more home-purchase lending. 

Ms. Suminski says that housing is "the most reliable engine of generational wealth...Over the past 33 years, California homeowners built approximately $165,000 in household net worth per capita..." This ignores the previous observation that "Housing in America is being treated as a financial asset from which investors extract wealth," and the fact that most of that "wealth" accrues in making housing unaffordable.

But did homeowners really build wealth with their homes? Never mind that the figure Ms. Suminski quoted favors the most expensive homes, not affordable ones; nobody "built" their equity. They passively let the asset inflation that has accompanied the financialization of the economy's productive activity do it for them. 

Such "wealth" is the definition of "economic rent," that is, money paid for nothing productive. Adam Smith observed that the wealthy feudal landowners who collect rent make money in their sleep. Home appreciation didn't create any new land, and didn't necessarily mean the homes were improved. Thanks to such omissions, the entire housing "debate" looks like Trump's declaration that he's going to make sure present homeowners keep the high values of their houses, while he'll make the homes more affordable. 

In related news, gambling is currently the second fastest-growing sector of the economy--an activity Warren Buffett called "a tax on ignorance." And ignorance sure looks like it's in the driver's seat when it comes to housing policy.

--

The author was a Realtor for more than a decade and a half, appraising property and representing those buying and selling it. 

 

The Chinese Advantage

 

He does a good job of explaining China’s economy. Also covers some common misconceptions.

Much better than my ghetto one take top of my head videos ;) pic.twitter.com/CiQKqI1NzU

— Larry 長祥 (@jambuki888) February 3, 2026

Jail, Jail, Jail, Jail, Jail

(c) by Mark Dempsey

The County is sponsoring "listening" sessions about the County Jail. Of course no alternatives to jailing are offered, further validating Boss Tweed's political wisdom: "I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates. Here's my email to the "listeners" and supervisors:

Dear "Listeners," Supervisors, and others,

The announced South Sacramento "Listening Session[s]" about jail planning are too far away, and too late at night for me to attend, so I'm writing this email to tell you what I would say if I were present:

First: People are easily influenced, and Hollywood tells us that detectives always nab the bad guys and that Perry Mason gets the ones the cops miss. In real life, though, the police and courts solve far fewer crimes--13% in California in 2022 (says Governing.com ). Cops, courts & cages don't get an A-plus; they get an F-minus. They are a terrible way to handle crime!

Nevertheless, since the '80s, spending on policing and prisons has increased more than four times faster than population growth. The influence of these fictions also appears in incarceration rates. With five percent of the world’s population, the US has 25% of its prisoners, five times the world’s per-capita average incarceration rate, seven times Canada’s or France’s rates, per-capita. Is Canadian or French crime worse than US crime? No, it's not as bad.

What's different in Canadian and French societies that lets them incarcerate at one-seventh the US rate and still have lower crime rates? For one thing, the US has more than half a million medical bankruptcies annually. Canada and France don't have those.

Could treating people better influence crime rates? Never mind Canada and France, multiple studies (here [pdf], and here, among others) conclude that treating poor people better lowers crime rates, and is cheaper than cops, courts, and cages.

Yet the US--and certainly Sacramento County--continues to believe that increasing people's desperation, not treating them well, is the way to solve the crime problem. True, the County has programs to lessen recidivism, but even the ineffective ones continue receive funding.

The vengeful impulse for punitive penalties has some local support, but Hollywood’s fiction and the media’s scary headlines keep the public anxious. Rather than house the homeless, open local free clinics, or experiment with basic job or income guarantees for the poor, the Board of Supervisors has actually considered enlarging the County jail more than once. spending millions that could conceivably fund more effective, less costly, and cruel alternatives.

Supervisor Rodriguez's newsletter even celebrated a court ruling that lets the County "sweep" (i.e., remove) homeless people camped on public land, whether there's alternative housing or not. Ms. Rodriguez apparently is in the running for the “Cruella D’Evil” award previously won by her predecessor, Sue Frost.

Meanwhile, the County's jail is full and has even lost a lawsuit about how its conditions mistreat prisoners. But 60 - 80% of its prisoners are convicted of nothing more than an inability to afford bail. They're doubly poor, too, because they'll likely lose whatever job they might have had if they await trial in jail, never mind the damage keeping them incarcerated does to their families and community.

Nevertheless, Sacramento County continues to send the message that you're not innocent until proven guilty, you're guilty until proven wealthy. Incarceration without trial also pressures innocent people to plead guilty just to get out of confinement sooner. That's not justice, it's an extortion racket.

As far as I know, the County has not considered supervised release or no-cash bail. In fact, the US and the Philippines are the only countries worldwide that require cash bail. That policy is a recipe for an expanding punishment bureaucracy, not a solution for crime. Incidentally, you'll seldom hear it from the Supervisors, but crime has been declining for decades now.



Opponents of a kinder approach to people accused might cite Yolo County's unfavorable experience--more crimes and more recidivism--when they released inmates early during COVID times. Yet Washington, D.C., and the state of Illinois have adopted no-cash bail for select offenses, and reporting from Illinois suggests there are ways to successfully do this. The headline: Nearly 8 months into Illinois' new era without cash bail, experts say recidivism and jail populations are trending lower.”

There are certainly ways to sabotage the kinder alternatives to incarceration. Oregon attempted to decriminalize drugs, then repealed that legislation as a failure. In Oregon, police were tasked to offer the alternative to drugs–rehab–with tickets. The drug users were not impressed, to say the least, and the police didn’t handle their defiance well. Why it almost looks like the police are tasked to implement such solutions to sabotage them!

Meanwhile, incarceration is seven times more expensive than medical addiction treatment and has a lower success rate. One study says: “If 40 percent of offenders receive rehab vs. incarceration, it saves the system $13 billion. Choosing drug treatment leads to fewer crimes, lower addiction rates, and saves society money.” Other countries--Portugal and Switzerland, among them--have successfully decriminalized drugs.

For those interested in more information, I'd recommend Alec Karakatsanis' Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System, and Copaganda: How the Police and the Media Manipulate Our News, which describe how pervasive the problems described here are. Getting this information would require reading as well as listening, but the Supervisors have surely mastered that skill. If they like, I'll send them copies, just let me know who wants one.

I've sent this information to the Supervisors repeatedly, so you'll pardon my skepticism about their ability to "Listen." I even sat on a County commission (a Community Planning Advisory Council) and can testify from my experience that County officials are at least hearing impaired when it comes to public input.

Grinding any opposition to pre-determined outcomes to dust with endless hearings (always halted once the opposition gets too close to success) and "listening" appears to be the County's preferred approach to public input. The County would rather continue its bankrupt strategy to ensure citizen safety than actually do something--competently, without sabotage--that's kinder, cheaper, and more effective.

Local Government Financing Shortfalls

 My letter to the local public media news publishers abridged@kvie.org

Hello,

I read your story about the financial troubles local governments have been facing lately. You have a few significant omissions. 

For example, there's a loophole in Prop 13 for commercial property that costs the state an estimated $12 billion annually. Prop 15 was narrowly defeated when it attempted to close the loophole. Did local politicians lobby for passage? Not that I could detect.

Then there's all the land speculation that could have served the public, but largely ends up in private coffers. 

Speculators bought, or more likely optioned, North Natomas farmland for roughly $2K per acre. It was cheap because it was 20' underwater ag land surrounded by weak levees. It was so unsuited for development that a federal grant to expand capacity included a $6 million penalty if local governments used that capacity to serve the North Natomas development.

The speculators went all the way to then-vice-president George Herbert Walker Bush and got that prohibitive, up-front penalty transformed into a pay-as-you-develop fee...oh yes, and they got $43 million to improve the levees to pre-Katrina standards.

After getting the entitlements to develop, they sold those acres to builders. Winncrest homes bought at $200K / acre. If your calculator isn't handy, that's a 10,000% (gross) profit...and I promise you that's after tax if they exchange out of the purchase.

Germany requires developers to sell outlying ag land to the local government at the ag land price, then repurchase it at the development land price. All that egregious profit inures to public benefit. And they have terrific benefits, including single-payer healthcare, excellent infrastructure, and free college tuition. The arts budget for the City of Berlin exceeds the National Endowment for the Arts for the US of A.

Finally, you didn't mention that sprawl is a Ponzi scheme. Outlying development is roughly twice as expensive to maintain as infill. So has that stopped the locals from approving more and more edge-city development? Nope.

All you're doing is documenting the fact that those maintenance costs are finally catching up to the locals. 

--Yours truly,

--Mark Dempsey

The destination of prosperity

From a tweet by Rutger Bregman:

Wrote this 12 years ago, in Utopia for Realists. I didn't realize at the time how soon this scenario could play out: 'For us today, it is still difficult to imagine a future society in which paid labor is not the be all and end all of our existence. But the inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not of the impossibility of change. In the 1950s we couldn't conceive that the advent of refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and, above all, washing machines would help prompt women to enter the workplace in record numbers, and yet they did. 

Nevertheless, it is not technology itself that determines the course of history. In the end, it is we humans who decide how we want to shape our destiny. The scenario of radical inequality that is taking shape in the U.S. is not our only option. The alternative is that at some point during this century, we reject the dogma that you have to work for a living. The richer we as a society become, the less effectively the labor market will be at distributing prosperity. If we want to hold onto the blessings of technology, ultimately there's only one choice left, and that's redistribution. Massive redistribution. 

Redistribution of money (basic income), of time (a shorter working week), of taxation (on capital instead of labor), and, of course, of robots. As far back as the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde looked forward to the day when everybody would benefit from intelligent machines that were "the property of all." Technological progress may make a society more prosperous in aggregate, but there's no economic law that says everyone will benefit. 

Not long ago, the French economist Thomas Piketty had people up in arms with his contention that if we continue down our current path we'll soon find ourselves back in the rentier society of the Gilded Age. People who owned capital (stocks, houses, machines) enjoyed a much higher standard of living than folks who merely worked hard. For hundreds of years the return on capital was 4–5%, while annual economic growth lagged behind at under 2%. Barring a resurgence of strong, inclusive growth (rather unlikely), high taxation on capital (equally improbable), or World War III (let's hope not), inequality could develop to frightening proportions once again. 

All the standard options – more schooling, regulation, austerity – will be a drop in the bucket. In the end, the only solution is a worldwide, progressive tax on wealth, says Professor Piketty, though he acknowledges this is merely a "useful utopia." And yet, the future is not carved in stone. All throughout history, the march toward equality has always been steeped in politics. If a law of common progress fails to manifest itself of its own accord, there is nothing to stop us from enacting it ourselves. Indeed, the absence of such a law may well imperil the free market itself. "We have to save capitalism from the capitalists," Piketty concludes. 

This paradox is neatly summed up by an anecdote from the 1960s. When Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company's new, automated factory, he jokingly asked, "Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?" Without missing a beat, Reuther answered, "Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?"