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From A Volume Correction To A Value Correction

A report from the Oklahoman. “The Hill, an upscale housing development in Deep Deuce, was due for completition in 2008. The project has gone through more than a dozen extensions. Bill Canfield is in default of his agreement with the Urban Renewal Authority and a new developer will be sought to complete the neighborhood. The Hill is one of the ritziest residential developments downtown, featuring several million-dollar homes with most others having sold at over $400,000. But the highest point of The Hill remains barren.”

From Bisnow Boston on Massachusetts. “Boston’s newest luxury living tower is making its long-awaited debut in a tenuous, coronavirus pandemic-afflicted multifamily market. The HYM Investment Group and development partner National Real Estate Advisors have opened The Sudbury, a 480-foot, 46-story tower at the center of downtown. The year-over-year median condo sales price in Boston was down 0.2% in November, and active listings were up 62.8%, according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors.”

“Bozzuto is managing the Sudbury’s apartments, where rents range from $2,350 for 647 SF studios to $11,855 for 1,547 SF, three-bedroom units. A deal of up to three months’ free rent is advertised on the building’s website.”

The Real Deal Miami on Florida. “Nest Seekers International has been falsely claiming exclusivity on a number of listings in Miami, and in some cases feeding that information to Zillow and Realtor.com, an investigation by The Real Deal reveals. The New York-based brokerage, led by founder and CEO Eddie Shapiro, has a number of listings on its website that are labeled ‘exclusive,’ which state that ‘This is a Nest Seekers Exclusive Listing.’ However, in many cases, the listings belong to another brokerage, have already been sold, or have not been listed by the developer.”

“‘It appears that these brokers are misrepresenting the truth in an effort to fraudulently drive traffic to their business,’ said Josh Migdal, a partner at Miami-based law firm Mark Migdal & Hayden. ‘This ultimately could result in losses to the appropriate brokers and losses to the buyer and seller who could pay additional commissions and/or improper prices for the home.'”

“Chris Zoller, an agent who sits on the Miami Association of Realtors board of directors, compared the public listings sites like Zillow.com and Realtor.com to the ‘Wild, Wild West’ and said listings agents should be diligent about protecting their listings. Brokers were alarmed to hear that Nest Seekers has been claiming exclusivity and sharing listings without permission, and planned to contact the brokerage immediately. Zoller said it was ‘robbery.'”

“‘It is unfortunate that sometimes an unscrupulous player can slip under the radar and lay claim to something that is not true,’ Zoller said. ‘We [South Florida] are the capital of fraud. We seem to allow more fraud than most other parts of the nation, and it’s really scary.'”

From Oregon Public Broadcasting. “With Oregon expected to continue a statewide eviction ban for at least six more months, three landlords are asking a judge to end the policy. ‘Plaintiffs are being legally compelled to provide, for some indeterminate amount of time that has already stretched beyond 18 months, housing, utilities, and other services associated with habitability for large numbers of this state’s population — and Plaintiffs will likely bear the cost of this state-run public benefit program entirely on their own,’ the lawsuit said.”

“‘The practical reality is that the tenants who cannot afford to pay one month’s rent now will be highly unlikely to afford the total past-due rent that will continue to accumulate each month until the State declares the ‘end’ of the statewide emergency,’ the lawsuit said. ‘Plaintiffs’ ‘right’ to unpaid rent is little more than an illusion.'”

From Bisnow New York. “The city is on pace to see $8.4B in building sales volume in 2020, a nearly 70% drop off the 10-year average, per Avison Young’s latest data. That figure represents a 50% decrease from last year. Pricing and values are another matter — brokers point to reductions of as much as 30% in some cases, as well as their growing concerns that investors are turning their backs on the city in favor of more business-friendly parts of the country.”

“‘The landlords already were taking a bloodbath on their valuations,’ Meridian Capital Group Managing Director Shallini Mehra said, pointing to rent reform legislation that was passed by the state government last year. Now, the general feeling among investors is that prices have further to fall. ‘We have a lot of landlords who bought in the last five to seven years, and there is a certain amount of devaluation that has gone on,’ Mehra said. ‘Maybe they want to exit the New York City market and they just want to be in other markets because of the rent laws or they’ve just decided to cut their losses.'”

“Avison Young Head of Tri-State Investment Sales James Nelson said that, on the whole, some of the investment sales pricing in the city hasn’t been seen in a decade. ‘If you take the second quarter and the third quarter and you compare it to 2019, the price of land dropped 30%, multifamily was [down] 29%, office and retail [down] 24%,’ Nelson added. ‘The only thing we have to compare this to is 2009, when sales volume dropped 90% from 2007.”

“‘It was a year in which the pandemic converted a 53-monthlong correction in investment sales from a volume correction to a value correction,’ said JLL New York Investment Sales Chairman Bob Knakal, adding that October 2015 is when the bull market officially ended. Buyers offered less and sellers have balked at their offers this year, so Knakal expects this sales volume to hit a cyclical low in 2020. ‘I thought the savings and loan crisis was the worst thing I ever saw, and that was only 47 months,’ he said. ‘This is 62 months now and not over yet.'”

The San Francisco Business Journal on California. “With just 2.8 million square feet leased to date, San Francisco’s commercial leasing activity in 2020 is down about 75% compared to the previous year, reaching a low that the city has not seen in 20 years. Only four direct leases over 100,000 square feet were signed, and all were renewals.”

“‘The majority of the leasing activity decline had to do with the lack of expansion activity in the market this year. That’s really what drove leasing activity in 2019,’ said Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE’s Tech Insights Center. ‘Last year about 80% of the top 20 largest leases were expansion related. This year it was only half that amount. And the majority of that expansion activity would have been either signed or initiated pre-Covid.'”

From Socket Site in California. “With the average asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco having dropped 23 percent over the past year to under $2,700 a month and the average asking rent for a studio having dropped even more, the weighted average asking rent for an apartment in the city, which currently measures around 2.3 bedrooms when counting a studio as having one, has dropped to $3,100 a month. It’s now $1,000 a month or 24 percent cheaper than in January of this year and nearly 31 percent below a 2015-era peak of closer to $4,500 a month.”

“And despite the precipitous drop in rents, resultant pro forma cash flows for investment properties and inputs for rent versus buy calculations, there are still over three times as many apartments currently listed for rent in San Francisco than there were at the same time last year with an overall vacancy rate that’s ticked up to around 10 percent (and climbing).”

The Los Angeles Times in California. “One can even detect hand-wringing from this side of the state line. California’s population growth in the year ended July 1 fell to 0.05%, a level not seen since 1900. The trend was attributed in part to a ‘continued exodus’ of residents exasperated by the cost of living. The Sacramento Bee mined the same data and pronounced California ‘no longer a boom state.'”

“The flattening out of population growth looks like a ‘sea change’ in historical terms, observes Hans Johnson, a demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California. ‘For a Western state to join the ranks of states with zero population growth,’ Johnson told me, ‘is something we haven’t seen before.'”

“Lurking within all these statistics, to be sure, are grounds for concern about California’s future. The cost of housing is a persistent and intensifying drag on growth. It’s a challenge that the state’s leaders and voters have been utterly unable to get their arms around. From the days of the Gold Rush and the earliest years of statehood, visitors to California have noticed dross mixed with the glitter.”

“In an 1855 screed titled, ‘The Land of Gold: Reality Versus Fiction,’ a transplant from North Carolina named Hinton R. Helper cursed the state’s ‘rottenness and its corruption, its squalor and its misery, its crime and its shame.’ Horace Greeley, famous for having counseled young men to ‘Go West,’ bemoaned the spiritual and civic poverty of the Golden State following his own sole visit, in 1859. ‘In the course of several hundred miles’ travel through the vest settled portions of this state,’ he wrote, ‘I remember having seen but two school-houses outside of the cities and villages.'”

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This Post Has 107 Comments

    1. The Mechanics Behind the Electronic Vote Steal Operation

      https://www.bitchute.com/video/OJrljwQFcIvc/

      https://twitter.com/tom2badcat/status/1325126091460268032

      https://archive.vn/KPwUa

      https://everylegalvote.com/country

      https://hereistheevidence.com/

      “Dominion-izing the Vote”

      https://www.bitchute.com/video/qlEUbPLvW98w/

      Eric Coomer Explains How To Alter Votes In The Dominion Voting System

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtB3tLaXLJE

      Eric Coomer, Dominion’s head of product and strategy, has disappeared.

      ‘Representatives from Dominion also did not attend a court hearing in Pennsylvania on November 19. Its US headquarters in Denver was also suddenly closed and moved away. Their employees deleted their names from LinkedIn.’

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oYQeeNCzZM

      https://www.theepochtimes.com/poll-watcher-describes-pennsylvania-election-irregularities-including-47-missing-usb-cards_3594549.html

      Here’s the testimony on video:

      “Baggies of USBs” – PA Witness Gives Explosive Testimony

      https://www.bitchute.com/video/AdaglXlcuqYt/

      Dem Ballot Inspector Says She Was Threatened with Violence for Speaking Up About Suspicious Activity

      “The majority inspector threatened to slap me in the face,” said Olivia Jane Winters, a registered Democrat and minority ballot inspector in Pennsylvania, testifying to Pennsylvania State Republicans Wednesday that she had been threatened and harassed by other election officials after she asked about suspicious activities during the 2020 election.’

      https://www.bitchute.com/video/_KrpyDlHTe8/

      Crowd Gasps after Finding out about Absurd Spike of Votes in Favor of Biden

      https://www.bitchute.com/video/jmNUAx8wQYdO/

      Sen. Doug Mastriano closing remarks PA state legislature meeting.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIqujobvDFI

      https://censoredbyjack.com/channel/evidence-of-widespread-election-fraud

      https://www.deepcapture.com/2020/11/election-2020-was-rigged-the-evidence/

      ”We began to look and realized how easy it is to change votes.”

      ‘Election security expert @RussRamsland
      has performed many investigations on US election machines.’

      ‘The most *shocking* thing about this interview is it took place just days BEFORE the election. Watch’

      https://twitter.com/kylenabecker/status/1327511568993701888

      Col Phil Waldron Confirms Experts Witnessed Dominion Communicating with Frankfurt on Election Day

      https://www.bitchute.com/video/n7j5lg9fYyzz/

      Dominion forensic report from Michigan (PDF):

      https://www.depernolaw.com/uploads/2/7/0/2/27029178/antrim_michigan_forensics_report_%5B121320%5D_v2_%5Bredacted%5D.pdf

      1. ‘KRAKEN is DOD cyber warfare program.’

        ‘They cheated & got caught!’

        Sidney Powell
        🇺🇸
        ‘Who knew?’

        https://twitter.com/SidneyPowell1/status/1331435411286192128?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1331435411286192128%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fheadlines360.news%2F2020%2F11%2F24%2Fsidney-powells-kraken-is-department-of-defense-cyber-warfare-program%2F

        I did some digging around and found this (WARNING) PDF:

        https://www.dacis.com/budget/budget_pdf/FY20/RDTE/F/1203110F_294.pdf

        It’s dated Feb. 2019. If you word search Kraken (‘respond’ category), you’ll find it twice on page 4. This unit 305 person is in the affidavits in Powells lawsuit.

        WARNING PDF with filing:

        https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mied.350905/gov.uscourts.mied.350905.1.15.pdf

        Zuckerberg on page 15. Obammie on page 8.

        ‘Response: Yes, our “White Hat” hackers – they have that traffic and the packets.”

        https://twitter.com/themodalice/status/1333505965857984512

        ‘Ruby Freeman Makes Video of herself Showing MOUNTAINS of GA ABSENTEE BALLOTS With NO RETURN ADDRESS’

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFYaxvxdfXY&feature=youtu.be

        Example

        Note the vote spike at the Atlanta treason:

        https://twitter.com/EricTrump/status/1334812236322381826/

        Corrupt Georgia Election Worker Seen Loading Same Ballots 3 Times into Machine

        Poll Worker Ruby Freeman Loads Up The Same Stack Of Ballots To Be Counted 3X

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiREC3Zy20E

        Ruby Freeman – “I need an attorney”

        “This is bigger than me. I need an attorney.” at 4:55.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsU-CXcJ4Lg

        A video worth watching:

        https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1341948764068704256?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

        https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1341948764068704256?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

        1. This is what happens when the #Narrative runs dry and Real Journalists find themselves scraping the bottom of the barrel (Breitbart, 12/25/20):

          “In a Washington Post editorial published Wednesday, authors Deborah E. Lipstadt and Norman Eisen argue for the radical comparison of challenging recent election results with denying that a Nazi Holocaust, the “best-documented genocide in the world,” ever occurred.

          The essay, titled “Denying the Holocaust threatens democracy. So does denying the election results,” makes several comparisons while suggesting how to combat such “denial.”

          Claiming to have “learned the hard way” to take Holocaust denial seriously, the authors state they have “watched with alarm the birth of another powerful disinformation mythology,” referring to the “false conviction pushed by Trump and his enablers” that the recent election was “stolen.”

          We’re not going to give any clicks to the Washington Post. Did you know that President Trump was, in fact, correct when he stated that “the media is the enemy of the American people?”

          1. WaPo is going the whole nine yards on this. Good. Eventually they will lose the Dems in the middle. I expect to see the infighting start within the year.

          2. “In a Washington Post editorial published Wednesday, authors Deborah E. Lipstadt and Norman Eisen argue for the radical comparison of challenging recent election results with denying that a Nazi Holocaust, the “best-documented genocide in the world,” ever occurred.

            WaPo is going the whole nine yards on this.

            The globalist oligarchs aren’t nameless faceless people, they are household names. JEFF BEZOS is an anti-American traitor who owns the WaPo. JEFF BEZOS peddles Chinese counterfeit goods through his massive network that destroys American jobs and the standard of living. Jeff Bezos should be first in line to have his head chopped off by guillotine while broadcast live on tv.

          3. the Dems in the middle

            I lived in PA half my life. Some of that was near Scranton and some near Philly. Trust me, Dems know that the city elections have a long tradition of being rigged.

    2. Trump tweets out a video that sums it all up so we know what we’re fighting

      https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/trump_tweets_out_a_video_that_sums_it_all_up_so_we_know_what_were_fighting.html

      I made up the word “sinosization,” because “sino” means “Chinese.” We are living in a “made in China” world, which means a world with rapidly decreasing prosperity and liberty. It’s a world in which our leaders, for fame and money, or in response to being blackmailed for their sins, have sold us out to a communist nation that steals our technology, takes our jobs, drugs our citizens, exports disease, and spreads oppression and despair wherever it goes. We know this – and, finally, there is a video that sums it all up.

  2. ‘October 2015 is when the bull market officially ended…nearly 31 percent below a 2015-era peak’

    These bubbles popped long ago.

  3. ‘active listings were up 62.8%, according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors’

    Wa happened to my shortage Boston?

    ‘rents range from $2,350 for 647 SF studios to $11,855 for 1,547 SF, three-bedroom units. A deal of up to three months’ free rent is advertised on the building’s website’

    So that’s 20% off, not counting vacancies, other cuts and goodies.

  5. “‘It appears that these brokers are misrepresenting the truth in an effort to fraudulently drive traffic to their business,’ said Josh Migdal, a partner at Miami-based law firm Mark Migdal & Hayden.

    Realtors are liars.

  6. Now, the general feeling among investors is that prices have further to fall. ‘We have a lot of landlords who bought in the last five to seven years, and there is a certain amount of devaluation that has gone on,’ Mehra said.

    Gosh, I sure hope that doesn’t cause a 2007-style degradation of the underlying securitized collateral on those loan portfolios, because that would trigger another financial crisis that Yellen the Felon assured us would not happen “in our time.”

    1. There will be no crisis – the Fed has already picked up a bunch of that market and will just magically re-price it if the value of the assets goes to zero.

  7. “With just 2.8 million square feet leased to date, San Francisco’s commercial leasing activity in 2020 is down about 75% compared to the previous year, reaching a low that the city has not seen in 20 years.

    Is that a lot?

    1. LOL@ imagine opening a business in San Francisco.

      California is the most impoverished state in the country.

      1. “LOL@ imagine opening a business in San Francisco.”

        Retailers and law enforcement officials state that since shoplifting below $950 is now a misdemeanor, it means shoplifters face no pursuit and no punishment. Sources quote some large California retailers such as Safeway, Target, Rite Aid and CVS as saying that shoplifting has increased at least 15 percent, and in some cases, doubled.

        1. shoplifting has increased

          Stores will adapt to this like a liquor store in a high crime neighborhood. Everything will be behind glass. You point to what you want, pay, then you can touch it.

          Prices will double.

  8. ‘On its surface, the shift in Ma’s public image stems in large part from the Chinese government’s growing criticism of his business empire. A look beneath the surface shows a deeper and more troubling trend for both the Chinese government and the entrepreneurs who powered the country out of its economic dark ages over the past four decades.’

    ‘A growing number of people in China seem to feel the opportunities that people like Ma enjoyed are disappearing, even amid China’s post-coronavirus surge. While China has more billionaires than the United States and India combined, about 600 million of its people earn $US150 a month or less. While consumption in the first 11 months of this year fell about 5 per cent nationally, China’s luxury consumption is expected to grow nearly 50 per cent this year compared with 2019.’

    ‘Young college graduates, even those with degrees from the United States, face limited white-collar job prospects and low wages. Housing in the best cities has become too expensive for first-time buyers. Young people who have borrowed from a new generation of online lenders, like Ma’s Ant Group, have debts they increasingly resent.’

    ‘For all of China’s economic success, a long-running resentment of the rich, sometimes called the wealthy-hating complex, has long bubbled below the surface. With Ma, it has emerged with a vengeance.’

    “An outstanding people’s billionaire like Jack Ma will definitely be hanged on top of the lamppost,” an online commentator wrote in a widely circulated social media post, referring to the famous lynching slogan in the French Revolution, “À la lanterne!” The article was liked 122,000 times on the Twitter-like Weibo platform and read more than 100,000 times on the messaging and social media app WeChat.’

    ‘In an annual leadership meeting last week that set the tone for the country’s economic policies for the coming year, the party vowed to strengthen antitrust measures and prevent “the disorderly expansion of capital.”

    ‘Some businesspeople say that the hostility toward Ant and Ma makes them wonder about the fundamental direction of the country. “You can either have absolute control, or you can have a dynamic, innovative economy,” said Fred Hu, founder of the investment firm Primavera Capital Group in Hong Kong. “But it’s doubtful you can have both.”

    https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/why-china-turned-against-jack-ma-20201225-p56q5i.html

    1. China’s “ant tribes” need to dust off their grandparent’s copies of Mao’s Little Red Book and read the Third Strata, which indicates what happens when members of the former middle class get dragged under by debt and economic destitution. The CCP Comrades of Proven Worth who have comprehensively betrayed hundreds of millions of their countrymen need to swing from lampposts and be impaled by pitchforks.

    2. Young college graduates, even those with degrees from the United States, face limited white-collar job prospects and low wages.

      Actually for a few years now Chinese kids were better off staying in China. Everything is (or at least was) changing so fast that you could come back from the USA with a prestigious degree and be completely out of date the moment you arrived back. So more and more the Chinese coming to go to college in the USA were just the rich kids who couldn’t get into a top Chinese college but could still buy their way in here.

        1. By “out of date” I think Carl means that they are now outsiders and irrelevant. Sure, if you come back with a PhD in some STEM field you won’t be irrelevant, but if you just have a Bachelor’s it might not be any better than a degree from a top tier Chinese university. Those who stayed home also probably had internships and developed connections, which gives them an advantage.

          1. By “out of date” I think Carl means that they are now outsiders and irrelevant.

            Right, they are no longer inside the system that is rapidly evolving.

            Those who stayed home also probably had internships and developed connections, which gives them an advantage.

            Exactly. Plus some fields like AI are moving very fast in China, and in a few specialized cases like that you might also be technically out of date on the flavor of the month technology. But mostly it’s a connections thing. It used to be an American degree would be impressive enough to overcome that, but not so much any more.

          2. The rich ones came to the US because their crazy rich parents wanted out of china . They were forced to chooses STEM because that’s how H1B works or that’s what they tell me.
            Specialized work skills American lack.. blah blah blah

          1. Plus like I mentioned before all the higher level students have already been brought into the CCP automatically. It’s just considered a normal part of becoming a professional there and doesn’t necessarily mean anything politically to them. But their default will be to have at least some loyalty to the party because that’s also built into the system from childhood.

  9. ‘The majority of the leasing activity decline had to do with the lack of expansion activity in the market this year. That’s really what drove leasing activity in 2019…Last year about 80% of the top 20 largest leases were expansion related. This year it was only half that amount. And the majority of that expansion activity would have been either signed or initiated pre-Covid’

    In other words, yer dead in the water.

  12. ‘In an early morning Christmas Day interview, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said that governors should never have been allowed to accumulate so much power that they can lock down the economy.’

    “You know, nobody ever intended that governors would be sort of czars or dictators in charge of the economy,” Paul said. “In my state, you can’t have indoor dining, you can’t have outdoor dining, and your kids are not in school. We’re worse than New York City right now. In Kentucky, our governor has shut the schools down even though all of the science shows that—and all of the evidence—that you really aren’t having a surge when you have the schools open,” he added.’

    ‘Many people are leaving states like New York and California, citing pandemic restrictions. More than 126,000 people moved out of New York state between July 2019 and July 2020, according to preliminary Census Bureau data. That’s the biggest population drop of any state this year.’

    ‘The Kentucky senator criticized governors locking down their economies because they have been receiving money from the federal government’s various stimulus packages, including the last CARES Act.’

    “The only thing that will get de Blasio and Cuomo to finally open up is when they run out of other people’s money,” Paul said. “So I think that we shouldn’t be passing out any money to the states, we shouldn’t be rewarding their bad behavior,” he continued. “And really, this has probably been the worst time in the history of our country for power being accumulated into the hands of very few people.”

    ‘Newsom’s recently issued “Blueprint for a Safer Economy” and “Regional Stay at Home Order” was found by the state’s Superior Court Judge as failing to satisfy the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom of worship and practice because they aren’t applied equally and in the least restrictive manner required to achieve an essential public interest.’

    ‘Paul said leaders should give good advice, not curb First Amendment rights. “I lost two good friends this week to the virus. I’m not saying it’s not deadly,” Paul said.’

    “I’m not saying there’s not good advice. If you’re 85 years old and you ask me, should you go to church and sit there for two hours, I’d say my best advice is don’t. But I would never mandate that you can’t go to church. I would never mandate that you close the church. I would never mandate that you close religious school,” Paul said.’

    https://www.theepochtimes.com/sen-rand-paul-governors-should-never-have-been-allowed-to-become-dictators_3632629.html

    1. ‘For 22 years, Kailash Mahadev Shinde lived his life to the rhythm of the dilapidated trains that pounded through the Indian megacity of Mumbai. In the morning, he would cycle through the sprawling suburbs, scooping up stacked metal tins of piping hot curries and roti from front doors with industrial precision, before clambering aboard a train clattering toward Mumbai’s southern business districts.’

      ‘There he would rush from office to office to deliver each fresh, homemade parcel to its recipient in time for lunch, then haul the empty tins back to their suburban homes come afternoon — and repeat the routine with the same relentless efficiency the next morning.’

      ‘Shinde is one of Mumbai’s 5,000 dabbawalas, the often illiterate white-capped workers whose low-tech but reliable delivery network has garnered global renown. Yet Shinde, 42, now spends his days not hopping on and off bustling trains but toiling in rice and sorghum fields 50 miles away, the drumbeat of locomotives giving way to the rustle of dry grass.’

      ‘Like so many working in India’s cities, the dabbawalas lost their income overnight when Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered a lockdown in March. Nine months later, with Mumbai’s commuter trains still not fully running and offices half empty, many have abandoned the city, surviving on subsistence farming and wondering if they will ever work again.’

      ‘“Everyone else will get their income back at some point. But the dabbawalas might not,” Shinde said, sitting on the porch of the rural home he shares with his brother. Desperate to support his three teenage children, Shinde made multiple trips back to the city to find an odd job — as a gardener, perhaps, or a security guard — without luck.’

      “I served the community for so many years, but there’s no help to fall back on,” he said.’

      ‘An estimated 140 million workers lost their jobs during the lockdown, sparking an epic reverse migration from India’s cities. The economic and public health damage was severe, with the country entering its first technical recession and recording a COVID-19 case count second only to that of the United States.’

      ‘The dabbawalas are symbolic of the opportunities that had once been available to hundreds of millions of Indians, now at risk as the country struggles to revive what had been the world’s fastest-growing large economy.’

      ‘Young men with little education, hailing mostly from the villages nestled between the green flat-top hills of the Sahyadri mountains, would travel to nearby Mumbai to learn the trade. For the thousands of dabbawalas who returned — often penniless — to their villages after India’s lockdown, reintroduction to rural life has been particularly harsh.’

      ‘A cyclone hammered the area in June, lifting the roofs off homes. Disease then attacked their rice crops, leaving many to rely on food rations handed out by local businesses and charities.’

      ‘Kailash Chindu Shinde, a 37-year-old dabbawala in a nearby village who lost half his crop to disease, said he worried about the future of his 7- and 10-year-old sons, who returned with him from the city and no longer attend school. “I would have loved for them to have a wider horizon,” he said. “I was expecting a few days or a week [of lockdown], but not months and months.”

      ‘Subhash Talekar, president of the dabbawala association, said demand was so low that the few who were working made only a couple of deliveries a day. Others now drive rickshaws or labor on construction sites.’

      “We have to start from zero all over again,” Talekar said. “For 130 years dabbawalas have helped fill Mumbai’s belly. Now we have hunger of our own.”

      https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-23/mumbai-india-dabbawalas-coronavirus-covid-19

      Millions more people are starving to death right now than will die from the CCP virus.

      1. ‘More than 50 million people in the U.S. will have experienced food insecurity by the end of 2020, an increase of more than 13 million from 2018, according to Feeding America, a national network of 200 food banks.’

        ‘Rayne has woven together a safety net since her business fell apart. She receives $192 a month in SNAP benefits to buy groceries. She also relies on the $500 in Social Security survivor benefits she began to receive after her father’s death before the pandemic. Her mom pays her phone bill. But Rayne says that her safety net is fraying. She has maxed out several credit cards and has started to take out payday loans to cover bills. She fears some of the holes in her safety net have grown big enough to fall through.’

        “My bank account has $4 in it right now,” Rayne says.’

        1. When opportunity for a lender knocks the sound goes something like this:

          “’My bank account has $4 in it right now,’ Rayne says.”

          😁

          I love this covid lockdown, it possesses the victorious fragrance of napalm in the morning.

          1. She has maxed out several credit cards and has started to take out payday loans to cover bills.

            She’s falling right into your trap, Mr. Banker. Maxing out credit cards and taking out payday loans ensures she’s never getting out of the hole she’s digging for herself, except through bankruptcy.

          2. “My bank account has $4 in it right now,” Rayne says.

            LMAO, with $4 ‘ya can’t even buy a 2.5oz travel bottle of Astroglide personal lubricant.

          1. Have you noticed how low the death rate from CCP Flu is in sub-Saharan Africa?

            Compare that with who does most of the dying from CCP Flu (under the age of 70) here in the US and A, across racial and ethnic lines, and conclude that it is the processed, industrialized, Western diet that is to blame.

          2. Compare that with who does most of the dying from CCP Flu (under the age of 70) here in the US and A, across racial and ethnic lines, and conclude that it is the processed, industrialized, Western diet that is to blame.

            I still tend to conclude that being indoors in the same building with people you don’t live with is the problem. And never going outside in the sun at all makes you much more susceptible.

          3. Lose a few pounds … which they can easily do by eating low carb and fasting for 6 days per month. A woman can eat decent paleo (11 cal/day) for $150/month.

          4. If indoors with strangers is a problem, why is Wal-Mart, home depot, Costco and all the other big box retailers not just open but in many cases packed? Shouldn’t people be dropping like flies?

            Your theory sucks.

      1. The preparation of baked goods in quarantine was clearly driven by more than just the joy of cooking, Lustig said. “Baking means carbohydrates and particularly sugar — both for diversion and for addiction. And aren’t they really the same?” he said.

        Wow, the MSM is now quoting low-carber Dr. Robert Lustig. It’s becoming mainstream. And watch that cortisol. It can lower you metabolism even if your diet is good.

      2. “Dopamine is the reward neurotransmitter. It is held in check by the prefrontal cortex. When that inhibition is released, the reward center looks for hedonic stimuli,” Lustig said.

        While I never woke up in the morning and couldn’t remember where I left my car the night before after eating too much chocolate cake, that did happen to me after indulging in other vices.

        I went to a rehab 32 years ago and although they did not prepare me for a seat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company they did go over what happens to a person like me when they use certain drugs. I remember a couple of things pretty clearly, the chemical THIQ and what was discovered about the brains of alcoholics in Houston Texas by Virginia Davis. The other was dopamine and what happens to your brain after doing a few lines and then thinking to myself…

        No wonder it’s so damn addictive.

        The Neurobiology of Cocaine Addiction
        Eric J. Nestler, M.D., Ph.D.

        One particular part of the limbic system, the nucleus accumbens (NAc), seems to be the most important site of the cocaine high. When stimulated by dopamine, cells in the NAc produce feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.

        By artificially causing a buildup of dopamine in the NAc, as described above, cocaine yields enormously powerful feelings of pleasure. The amount of dopamine connecting to receptors in the NAc after a dose of cocaine can exceed the amounts associated with natural activities, producing pleasure greater than that which follows thirst-quenching or sex. In fact, some laboratory animals, if given a choice, will ignore food and keep taking cocaine until they starve.

        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851032/

        1. some laboratory animals, if given a choice, will ignore food and keep taking cocaine until they starve

          While technically true, I think that was partially debunked by showing it was only animals who lived in crappy boring conditions. The animals with happy interesting lives were much less likely to get that addicted.

          1. “While technically true, I think that was partially debunked by showing it was only animals who lived in crappy boring conditions.”

            Did that really take a debunking job?

            You’re going to have a hard time finding a Coke dealer to constantly refill a mouse’s mirror in the wild. But if you did I bet there would be more than a few mice passing on the nuts, seeds, oats, roots, centipedes, larvae, worms, and crickets to hoove up a few lines a day until he or she died or there was a mouse intervention. 🙂

          2. animals who lived in crappy boring conditions

            That describes an awful lot of humans, so I fully expect the mouse experiment to be 100% applicable.

        2. Never forget that “producing pleasure greater than that which follows thirst-quenching or sex” was tough to turn down even for Kings of Wall Street, mega rich athletes, rock stars, movie stars as well as “animals who lived in crappy boring conditions”.

          1. thirst-quenching or sex

            At first I read that as thirst quenching sex. Anyway, if your mind can see past the next five minutes, if you’re fortunate, you may choose a better long term outcome.

      1. It has the woke San Diego Unified School District that’s been in the news the last few years.

    1. I am. The other day I put a teensy bit of Roth-monies into BITW. But I’m treating it like a tulip bulb, prepared to pull out at any time. Let’s hope this woman pulls out sooner than the men do.

        1. Bitcoin was closing in $27K due to short covering, before reversing. I didn’t know it was even possible to short it, but that sounds like a good way to get your face ripped off, with the stampede out of the dollar.

        2. BITW is a brand-new crypto basket ETF. I don’t know much about it. Yeah yeah, I know I’m not supposed to invest in something I don’t understand. But a good chunk of my retirement account is locked in money market, waiting for the crash. I feel like waiting for the crash is like waiting for Godot, so yup, I’m speculating with a little. If nothing else, that little pinch of skin in the game has made me more interested in the space.

  15. Now the media has taken to shaming Trump for not signing The Pork Stimulus, saying he’s off golfing while Americans are going broke because of him not signing it, never of course mentioning the Pork Special.

      1. Far be it from Real Journalists to point out that Comrade Pelosi held up the relief bill for months out of spite for Trump.

    2. At noon, CBS This Morning had a video titled: “Trump shuns stimulus bill as pandemic relief expires for millions of Americans”
      However, the comment section was all over it with the same message: “Stop sending money overseas, and $600 is a slap in the face why bother.”

      Right now, I just checked the same video again. Looks like they’ve unleashed some bots to “adjust” the like/dislike ratio. But the bots can’t keep up with the comments. I wonder how long these news sites will allow comments. If they keep comments, they are overrun. If they disable comments, the viewers will just call them Pravda and go to A. Jones, so to speak.

      And what will they do when Trump is out of office? Even if the Dems take the Senate and start sending money directly to the people, how long can they hold out until the system collapses and we all own nothing? I don’t think even the Dems will be happy.

      1. I don’t think even the Dems will be happy.

        Shouldn’t they all just melt into a pool of blissful serenity once they have the Oval Office?

        1. Correction

          Shouldn’t they all just melt into a pool of blissful serenity once they have stolen the Oval Office?

      2. It must be discouraging for the Narrative-purveyors when at least 80-90 percent of posters, in the rare instances where comments are allowed, call BS on the lies, spin, and propaganda. People on lockdown must’ve turned to alternative media en masse, because everyone but complete dolts are starting to see the disconnect between the MSM’s lies and the objective reality they can see with their own two eyes.

        1. I don’t even go to Marketwatch on the regular anymore, but when I end up there from a Yahoo link or something I’ve noticed the comments section is down over 90%. It used to be very busy and lively, but they banned everybody because they didn’t like hearing about reality.

          1. I only go to the home page to check the markets at the top. Even then, sometimes I’ll just use the stock app on my phone, to avoid giving the globalists clicks.

    1. I wonder about Astra-Zeneca. It appears to be a hybrid between traditional and mRNA. Instead of injecting the full weakened virus, AZ uses only the spike protein DNA piece carried on a different adenovirus.

        1. A ha, thanks. So it looks like the adenovirus delivers COVID DNA to a cell. The cell churns out its own spike proteins, effectively turning the cell into a giant COVID virus, which the body fights. It sounds like this vaccine is like getting a very very mild case of COVID. Something like that.

    2. RR,
      My response to your vaccine article.

      WE ARE ALL A BUNCH OF GUINEA PIGS.
      I have been watching for decades now some wonder meds put on the market, only to see them pulled 5 years later.
      Apparently the FDA keeps lowing the standards, or something is amiss.
      But with vaccines I hate the concept of being dependant on something. Like it’s bad enough that I’m dependant on air, water, food, shelter to survive.
      The trouble with vaccines is you always have to have another one because oh my God it mutated.
      Before you know it you have to take countless shots, and don’t forget the boosters.
      Just like meds where you have to take them until they kill you.
      The Medical Cartel seems to have a acceptable level of side effect on vaccines and meds that I don’t agree with. The do no harm isn’t operative anymore. Or, the concept that’s it’s for the Greater Good just doesn’t fly with me.
      I just hope they don’t mandate taking these vaccines, I just don’t know what I would do. So, far I haven’t been forced, except when I was really young in school we had to have a few.

        2. I guess you haven’t heard the back story on smallpox.
          Let me put it this way. Sometimes two things take place at the same time, but the wrong thing gets the credit.
          But bottom line, if someone wants to take a vaccine than that’s their choice.

  17. It’s funny that Ben’s post from the other day was titled “Hey, where do you want to live?” The article was about different neighborhoods in San FranPoopo. But you could ask the same question of almost any white-collar cubicle farmer on the brink of full-time work-at-home. This especially applies to the mid-career types: the fifty-year-old who is past the point of ladder-climbing and whose kids are out of the house. I think you’ll see a lot of Gen-Xers looking for their retirement homes now, and just coasting for the next 10-12 years in what used to be a weekend home. Here’s an example:

    https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/23-Carriage-Ln-15968-Rehoboth-Beach-DE-19971/2076952503_zpid/

    $53K single-wide with $500/mo lot rent. Needs about $30K of cosmetic updating. 4 miles from the water, half mile from super Wal-Mart. You almost don’t need a car. You could live low-key year-round. If you’re a beach type with some equity from a city house, you could buy the house outright and have enough left over for a decade of lot rent.

    1. Unless you own the land, buying a trailer is foolish. That lot rent can skyrocket, or they can decide they’re selling the land and you have to move your trailer. It’s not cheap, and finding another place that will take it is iffy.

      1. Now you’ve got me curious. As of 3 years ago:

        For a single-wide, full-service move – from transporting the home within 50 miles to acquiring the permits to hooking up the utilities – customers will pay somewhere between $5,000 to $8,000. Moving a double-wide mobile home this distance will likely cost between $10,000 to $13,000.

        https://www.moving.com/tips/moving-mobile-home-expect-pay/

        It’s risky for poorer people who can’t afford higher lot rent or a moving fee. But it’s much less risky for a middle-aged white collar empty-nester with a financial cushion. Say I bought something like this outright, and three years later the trailer parks kicks everybody out. So what? I would have had three years of a very low housing payment, and could pack away enough savings to handle a move.

        And there’s risk in just about any living arrangement. These days it’s not hard to blow through $10K.

    1. Zenger News publishes the Powell binder in its entirety.
      In a Dec. 23, 2020 interview with Zenger News, attorney Sidney Powell stepped through a binder of information her legal team provided two hours before cameras rolled.

      Powell contends that documents in the binder prove direct foreign interference and fraud tainted the Nov. 3 presidential election, and that President Donald Trump was re-elected. The entire binder is reproduced here for exclusively.

    2. There is that “binder” of women again….. the media was so clueless about how you apply for a top level government job.

  22. I am patiently renting and waiting for the overheated Sacramento, California housing market to crash. So far the record low inventory and pending sales of home listed on Redfin and real estate websites is weird given record unemployment and COVID. Hopefully it does crash so one can buy a home to live in rather than an ATM.

      1. Mafia Blocks

        Yes, every home I viewed went pending in less than a week from Redfin. Somebody with $ is buying up the homes. My guess is bay area locusts that can sneak and work at home. Also, low inventory due to covid is to blame and California has not been building enough homes. Less than 5k homes for sale now in Sacramento county. Over 5k buyers. Mortgage moratoriums. Low interest rates.

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