#system d

[arcadebroke]

Visit Original Link

[businessdaily05]

What is this new alert message on Windows 11?

What is this new alert message on Windows 11?

From the next update, Microsoft has decided to permanently display an alert message if your PC is not optimized for Windows 11. Users are already complaining, but Microsoft does not intend to remove it. You may also be interested [EN VIDÉO] The first computer bug in history Computer bugs are as old as the computer itself. The first bug in history dates back to…1947. Since then, malfunctions…

View On WordPress

[pleaseenteravalidname]

[metaliquid-blog]

The Rise and Decline of Commercial Real Estate

Real Estate is probably the oldest form of “capital” in the sense of an income-generating/saving asset that can be assigned per property rights to individuals or institutions. While proto-tribal civilization may well have been anarcho-communist matriarchy, or perhaps not, looking at Catal Huyuk 10,000 years ago it seems there’s a precedent for property. The Old Kingdom of Egypt at least, 5000 years ago, had the concept  of nobles owning their homes in orbit of the supreme monarchy. Residential real estate is something everyone can understand because we all live somewhere and either own our home, pay a mortgage on it, pay rent, or own our home and collect rent on someone else’s home. Owning one’s own home is a stable bastion that makes everyone’s life easier.

Commercial real estate is a more recent development, and financially it acts like a more specialized derivative of the residential real estate we all know and love. In the 20th century, the financialization of real estate brought favored money flow to commercial floorspace. The great department stores of Manhattan, towered over by the vertical scaffolding of value that high rise construction allowed to create offices, board rooms, kitchens and break rooms, a parallelization not just financially but also in the logistics of everyday life. 

The corporate balance sheet made use of formal space that replicated creature comforts while spatially ensconcing official hierarchies, or that made mass produced goods sold at a lean-but-measured gross profit pay rent on expansive and decadent floorspace. As individualistic marketing came to warp the commercial spaces into psychedelic buffets of temptation fueled by credit cards, in the latter half of the century, there developed the notion that sales could be measurably boosted by an investment in a comprehensive space - immersive shopping - beyond the multi-storied department store to the full-blown shopping mall; movie theater and food court plucked on top like the cheery and walnuts of a sundae you neither needed nor deserved but ordered anyway. 

And it worked. Commercial real estate has appreciated in excess of the equivalent square meter prices of its more mild, residential counterpart. Sales did grow, and also the money supply, as the psychological effect bought with all that concrete and lighting exceeded the stagnant purchasing power of the middle class, and made them net-debtors to a dream of shopping excellence. And to pay off that debt, take on more debt to get a college degree so you can live in the office complexes and make 60k a year. For everyone else, a global construction boom boosted commodity prices, floating entire national economies on export revenue, and created many millions of low-skill jobs all over the world.

From an investor’s point of view, CRE is quite attractive for both its stability and growth potential, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy on the capital gains side masked by the decent yields that a global boom in financed-consumerism enabled. You can take a million mortgages and securitize them or put 5,000 rental units under a REIT and have minimal dividend interruption, but investing in a new building in Manhattan has been just as seemingly stable with all the excitement of high upside. 

But this may be ending. Decentralization is not just for crypto-finance, it’s rooted in the premise of network communications. The economic growth that we have enjoyed in the last 20 years, and perhaps moreso in the 20 years ahead, can be attributed to the capacity for anyone to contact anyone else in the world and therefore do more with less. Crypto-finance is merely extending the contact to payment and auto-enforced contractual agreement. Then there’s the decentralization of food, energy and manufacturing, which is 40% better tech, 60% re-organization based on more individuated incentives. The Internet of Things ties them together with cryptographic signatures allocating operational “ownership” in a more-real-than-legal sense. 

Given this horizon, it would make sense to me if Commercial Real Estate stopped being the darling asset of banks and corporations, or the investors they have pawned off securities to. We may see a period where defaults return to CRE financing models, where the capital gains underperform residential, and way underperform in a crash. Meanwhile, a generation already pinned with stagnant incomes and debt, paying record-high rental yields just to live because dislocations created by the bubbles-on-demand policies of central banks make buying a house implausible, they are going to try and reduce their economic footprint in order to gain the agility that might allow some upward mobility. Oil back at levels last seen 10 years ago, despite money supply now several times greater, says something about this secular shift in mentality.  The nuts-and-bolts trend to look at when considering the decline of commercial real estate would be the adoption of eCommerce as an alternative to brick-and-mortar shopping. The US and Europe have already adopted to near-saturation and we’ve seen the fortunes of many publicly traded retail outfits plummet as their volume moves online. Locations close, CFOs divest assets, fuel usage is consolidated to a single UPS truck instead of 50 SUVs - that odious vehicle class that will always remind me of the Bush Era, when farms were turned into McMansion scatterplots and people spent their home equity loans at Best Buy. 

Credit card payments in the “emerging” world have allowed eCommerce in Asia, LatAm and Africa to get some traction - the room for growth is enormous and may pre-empt a few trillion dollars of value from going to commercial real estate valuations that “should” show up there under the 20th century model. But the even more significant trend is people doing things at home or in ad-hoc commercial spaces under the System D model, where we are likely to see the majority of economic growth. Until fully decentralized eCommerce platforms such as OpenBazaar catch on, and transactions get recorded in blockchains, it will be hard to measure this most-important dimension of the decentralization trend and its impact on commercial real estate.  It’s worth noting that while CRE has been a huge asset class, one of the biggest, CRE securities have not caught on in the way that REITs have with mainstream investors. Many of these buildings are closely held by private interests still. But the decentralized assets that will instead attract the growth in money-flows, like shares in renewable energy, medium-scale farms and rental properties, these will become liquid soon thanks to more open financial technology. I can only lament the lack of a good liquid index product to short CRE long-term against a basket of decentralized property assets, this ETF looks ok, but maybe if I do my homework I could find some CDS to trade against the debts secured by particular properties that seem sensitive to these trends. 

For those positive people who don’t like shorting things: keep your eyes open to opportunities to invest in more decentralized real estate. Maybe take a position in BABA when it gets to a reasonable forward P/E. Within the next few years, renewable energy and rental securities may become available to global investors through a hybrid structure of a legal Trust and blockchain-tokens. 

[modesresearch]

Back in 2011, we wrote about the fascinating culture of "shanzhai" production -- Chinese companies manufacturing counterfeit goods that ignore intellectual monopolies like patents. The post drew on insights from the open hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang, who has been following this world closely, drawing on his first-hand experiences of visiting and using shanzhai companies. In 2013, Huang gave the shanzhai approach to sharing -- like open source, but not quite -- a name: "gongkai". In a long and fascinating new post, he explains the background to the term: ["Gongkai"] is deliberately not the Chinese word for "Open Source", because that word (kaiyuan) refers to openness in a Western-style IP framework, which this not. Gongkai is more a reference to the fact that copyrighted documents, sometimes labeled "confidential" and "proprietary", are made known to the public and shared overtly, but not necessarily according to the letter of the law. However, this copying isn't a one-way flow of value, as it would be in the case of copied movies or music. Rather, these documents are the knowledge base needed to build a phone using the copyright owner's chips, and as such, this sharing of documents helps to promote the sales of their chips. There is ultimately, if you will, a quid-pro-quo between the copyright holders and the copiers.

[modesresearch]

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about a $12 “Gongkai” cell phone (pictured above) that I stumbled across in the markets of Shenzhen, China. My most striking impression was that Chinese entrepreneurs had relatively unfettered access to cutting-edge technology, enabling start-ups to innovate while bootstrapping. Meanwhile, Western entrepreneurs often find themselves trapped in a spiderweb of IP frameworks, spending more money on lawyers than on tooling. Further investigation taught me that the Chinese have a parallel system of traditions and ethics around sharing IP, which lead me to coin the term “gongkai”. This is deliberately not the Chinese word for “Open Source”, because that word (kaiyuan) refers to openness in a Western-style IP framework, which this not. Gongkai is more a reference to the fact that copyrighted documents, sometimes labeled “confidential” and “proprietary”, are made known to the public and shared overtly, but not necessarily according to the letter of the law. However, this copying isn’t a one-way flow of value, as it would be in the case of copied movies or music. Rather, these documents are the knowledge base needed to build a phone using the copyright owner’s chips, and as such, this sharing of documents helps to promote the sales of their chips. There is ultimately, if you will, a quid-pro-quo between the copyright holders and the copiers.

[modesresearch]

Well, you see all these people working on their gardens? They used to not be here. People had grass lawns, and would compete with each other for having the greenest, nicest grass. But your gramma came home from the supermarket one day, sat down, and said, 'That's it. We're going to grow our own food.' And the next spring, she planted a vegetable garden where the grass used to be. And boy, were some of the neighbors mad. The Homeowners Association sued her. They said the garden was unsightly. They said that property values would fall. But then, the next year, more people started planting their own gardens. And not just their lawns. People started making improvements on their homes, to make them more energy-efficient. They didn't do it to help the environment, but to save money. People in the neighborhood started sharing ideas and working together, when before they barely ever spoke to each other.... And people also started buying from farmer's markets, buying milk, meat, eggs and produce straight from nearby farmers. This was fresher and healthier than processed food. They realized they were better off if the profits stayed within the community than if they went to big corporations far away. This is when your gramma, my Mom, quit her job and started a bakery from home. It was actually in violation of the zoning laws, but the people sided with gramma against the government. When the government realized it was powerless to crack down on this new way of life, and the people realized they didn't have to fear the government, they became free. And so more and more people started working from home. Mommies and Daddies used to have different jobs in different places, but now more and more of them are in business together in their own home, where they're close to their children instead of putting them in day care.

James L. Wilson,  "Standard of Living vs. Quality of Life," The Partial Observer, May 29, 2008 <http://www.partialobserver.com/article.cfm?id=2955&RSS=1>, via Kevin Carson