Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company
FRIDAY REPORT OF 09/15/06
The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy
Excerpt from KIPLINGER’S print edition of October 2006:
“Advice for the HOUSE RICH”
by Fred Frailey, Editor:
“The boom in home prices is over. No more bubble. People with expensive houses on the market, like my friends Larry and Linda, don’t need to be told this. Their home in a pricey Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. (itself a pricey market), is listed at several multiples of $1 million and is sitting like a wallflower at a dance – four months, little traffic and no offer. Linda says they like to a lowball offer and then negotiate. I suggest they take $1 million off the price, then hope for that lowball.
Ideas for sellers. How bad is bad? The latest numbers from the National Association of Realtors should concern all homeowners contemplating a sale. Nationally, the numbers of sales of existing homes fell 7% during the quarter of 2006 compared with a year earlier. But in some populous, high-priced states, the bottom opened up: Arizona and Florida down 27%; California, 25%; and Virginia and Nevada, 24%. Only 20 states had increases…
“A big thump? David Lereah, chief economist for the Realtors, says home prices are headed for a soft landing. I hope so. But in the housing market, like the stock market, matters get carried to extremes. Plus, for every reader of this column who hopes for a soft landing for home prices, there’s another who’s in the market to buy and is rooting for a big thump.”
“THE HEAT IS ON”
Our quotes are from an article in the 09/07/06 edition of TheEconomist:
“For most of the Earth’s history, the planet has been either very cold, by our standards, or very hot. Fifty million years ago there was no ice on the poles and crocodiles lives in Wyoming. Eighteen thousand years ago there was ice two miles thick in Scotland and, because of the size of the ice sheets, the sea level was 130m lower. Ice-core studies show that in some places dramatic changes happened remarkably swiftly: temperatures rose by as much as 20 degrees in a decade. Then, 10,000 years ago, the wild fluctuations stopped, and the climate settled down to the balmy, stable state that the world has enjoyed since then. At about that time, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, mankind started to progress.
“Man-made greenhouse gases now threaten this stability. Climate change is complicated and uncertain, but as our survey this week explains, the underlying calculation is fairly straightforward. The global average temperature is expected to increase by between 1.4 Degrees C and 5.8 Degrees C this century. The bottom end of the range would make life a little more comfortable for northern areas and a little less pleasant for southern ones. Anything much higher than that could lead to catastrophic rises in sea levels, increases in extreme weather events such as hurricanes, flooding and drought, falling agricultural production and, perhaps, famine and mass population movement.
“Nobody knows which is likelier, for the climate is a system of almost infinite complexity. Predicting how much hotter a particular level of carbon dioxide will make the world is impossible. It’s not just that the precise effect of greenhouse gases on temperature is unclear. It’s also that warming has countless indirect effects. It may set off mechanisms that tend to cool things down (clouds which block the sunlight, for instance) or ones that heat the world further (by melting soils in which greenhouse gases are frozen, for instance). The system could right itself or spin out of human control.
OUR FAMOUS PARTNER
The October 2006 issue of KIPLINGER’S describes the history of John Wiley & Sons, our publisher. It’s been in business for nearly 200 years and published Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Charles Dickens. Will Pesce, its chief executive, was quoted as saying, ‘Fiction publishers get all their revenues in six to nine months. Our books have useful lives of years.’ We are proud to be one of Wiley’s tiniest clients.
Excerpt from article in REASON of 9/8/06:
“The Snap, Crackle and Pop of Doom?
The bogus furor over GM rice
Ronald Bailey
“In August, Bayer Cropscience reported to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that some of the American long grain rice crop had been commingled with its genetically modified (GM) LL-601 rice. LL-601 is the abbreviation for the gene that confers resistance to the Liberty Link herbicide. LL-601 rice, which has not been approved for human consumption, was field tested between 1998 and 2001 and was dropped by Bayer when other varieties proved more productive and it judged that the time was not ripe for introducing GM rice. No one currently knows how the LL-601 rice got commingled at a rate of six grains of LL-601 to about 10,000 grains of conventional rice….
“So should you dump the boxes of Rice Krispies and Uncle Ben’s in your pantry into a biohazard receptacle? Nope. First, keep in mind that you’ve probably already been eating foods made with ingredients from Liberty Link crops. The USDA and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have found that LL-601 gene and the protein it produces are safe for consumers and the environment in such crops as corn, soybeans, and canola. As USDA Secretary Mike Johanns declared, ‘It is important to note that the protein found in this regulated rice line, LL Rice-601, is approved for use in other products. It has been repeatedly and thoroughly scientifically reviewed, and used safely in food and feed, cultivation, import and breeding in the United States. It is also approved for use in nearly a dozen other countries around the world.’ Of course, inevitably some American rice farmers are suing Bayer over their lost sales to the regulation-happy Europeans and Japanese. It’s a pity they can’t sue foreign regulators for lost sales due to stupid directives…”
To read the printed article, click on http://www.reason.com/rb/rb090806.shtml
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