Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?
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@acrow wood is not wood is not wood.
https://www.esf.edu/pubprog/house/default.htm
While much of the wood flooring and molding used in homes is made from softwood grown in the U.S. and Canada, about 94% of flooring imports and 32% of molding imports are made from hardwoods, including maple, birch, beech and a variety of non-coniferous tropical species. Overall the U.S. imports most of its foreign-made hardwood flooring from Canada, China, Sweden, Indonesia and Brazil. Along with Malaysia, all of these countries except Sweden are also major sources of hardwood molding. But this example highlights the complexities of timber flow and international markets. The U.S. exports over $190 million dollars worth of hardwood logs to Canada each year. Some of this wood is processed and shipped back to the U.S. in the form of flooring and molding, indicating that although the finished product was imported from Canada, the trees were not necessarily grown there. Likewise, China is the largest supplier of imported softwood flooring, but manufacturers often import raw materials from other parts of Asia. Brazil and Chile provide the bulk of softwood molding imports, but manufacturers often use logs from countries throughout South America.
Also apparently Canada has been cutting back (hah!) on logging:
The importance of overseas lumber supply has increased in recent years as the supply from Canada has dwindled. Despite record-high lumber prices in the US in 2020, Canadian lumber shipments to its southern neighbor have fallen for the fourth consecutive year. A reduction in the Annual Allowable Cut (AAC) in the province of British Columbia has reduced production volumes in that region by over a third in just five years.
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This could also go in a linguistic trolling thread, but since it has to do with apartments, here's one to offend our French-speaking colleagues (@remi is the one I can think of off-hand): The name of this apartment complex in my city. If I can speak Romance languages (hint: I can't), it says something like "House House." Except it's missing some funny marks on the characters.
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@Benjamin-Hall I think the literal translation is "Pretentious Town Homes" here
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
House House
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
If I can speak Romance languages (hint: I can't), it says something like "House House." Except it's missing some funny marks on the characters.
This happens surprisingly often.
- There's a big desert in Africa named after the Arabic word for "desert".
- Ever meet a girl named Colleen? That's Gaelic for "girl."
- The capital of Japan used to be in a city named "capital."
- The Bible tells us that the first man was named "man."
- The Mekong river in eastern Asia gets its names from the words "mae" and "khong," both of which mean "river."
- Even Pixar got in on the fun. In Brave, the clan's name, DunBroch, comes from the Scots and Gaelic words for "fortress." That would make Castle DunBroch...
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@Mason_Wheeler or the classic, if apocryphal, Torpenhow Hill, all 4 components of which can be interpreted as "Hill".
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@Benjamin-Hall My long-time favorite is the La Brea tar pits (a site near downtown Los Angeles where there is active, ongoing excavation and study of late-Pleistocene fossil mastodons, dire wolves, saber-tooth cats and other animals). That is, the "The Tar" tar pits.
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@HardwareGeek At least they didn't name it "pozo de la brea"
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@Mason_Wheeler visit The Tarpit* nightclub in the Pozo de la Brea Tar Pits* Tar Pit area!
* not tar pit adjacent
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
it says something like "House House."
More like “House Castle”, or, if it’s intended as Romance language word order, “Castle House”.
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@Gurth huh. So it's an extremely subtle threat vs intruders, then. Fair enough.
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@topspin said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@remi said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
But France, Germany, or the whole of Scandinavia has tons of it
All of which is currently being exported to the US and China, from what I've heard. With the current prices of wood you might as well build a house out of printer ink.
It's also fun that they're apparently paying absolute crazy prices to chop entire lots at once, and that's going to have consequences in the future.
You see, the people growing commercial trees generally plant an area in a very dense pattern. This way the young trees try to outcompete each other in height, making sure that they grow tall rather quickly. However, after some time they can gradually cull trees to get some wood, spread out over the years, and then chop the more sparse but wider trees once they've grown in girth (and so yield lumber of more useful dimensions).
If they're chopping it all at once right now then there will most likely be years where there is less wood, or at least supply will have less predictable patterns, and most certainly less of the larger dimensions.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
our French-speaking colleagues (@remi is the one I can think of off-hand)
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@Zerosquare soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur.
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@HardwareGeek said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
Housing prices made sense 10 years ago
I'm pretty sure you have to go back farther than that to find sense. Granted, they made relatively more sense then than now, but still not sensible on an absolute scale.
1400 square feet for $150k wasn't sensible?
(Okay, technically that was 11 years ago, but still.)
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@HardwareGeek said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@Benjamin-Hall My long-time favorite is the La Brea tar pits (a site near downtown Los Angeles where there is active, ongoing excavation and study of late-Pleistocene fossil mastodons, dire wolves, saber-tooth cats and other animals). That is, the "The Tar" tar pits.
Not the The Angels Angels?
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@GuyWhoKilledBear When I lived there, they were the California Angels. And they were never my favorite anything; they were the hated cross-town rivals. Not as hated as the Giants, but still hated.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
This could also go in a linguistic trolling thread, but since it has to do with apartments, here's one to offend our French-speaking colleagues (@remi is the one I can think of off-hand): The name of this apartment complex in my city. If I can speak Romance languages (hint: I can't), it says something like "House House." Except it's missing some funny marks on the characters.
Sine both words mean approximately "grand house" or "castle", what you have there is both a linguistic and semantic crime.
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@dkf We can make it better by calling it: "Schloss Chateau du Villa".
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@dkf and, knowing the area, more evidence for my theory that the grander the name of the housing complex, the crappier the quality.
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@Rhywden said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@dkf We can make it better by calling it: "Schloss Ch
aâteaudude la Villa".
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@dkf and, knowing the area, more evidence for my theory that the grander the name of the housing complex, the crappier the quality.
It looks like it’s right in an airport approach lane.
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@Zerosquare said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
Chaâteau
French is strange. Why do you call those chicque houses cat (chat) with water (eau)?
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@BernieTheBernie said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@Zerosquare said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
Chaâteau
French is strange. Why do you call those chicque houses cat (chat) with water (eau)?
Probably because that's what defines a posh house for the French: a cat to keep the mice out, and running water so you do not have to walk with your bucket to the pump on the village square?
languages are weird. Asking "why" rarely gives a usable answer
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@BernieTheBernie said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@Zerosquare said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
Chaâteau
French is strange. Why do you call those chicque houses cat (chat) with water (eau)?
But wait, there is more!
Did you ever hear about a chat-château?
(though tbh, I had not before 5 min ago, and apart from Wiktionary I can't find any other relevant source)
Note that, according to Wiktionary, the chat-part is related to échafaud, not cat. Which makes a bit more sense as I can see the use of a (mobile) scaffolding to attack a castle, but not really what you'd do with a cat.
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Also villa is a fun one (well... if you're into that, I guess).
The latin origin is "agricultural domain" and originally covers much more than the main (group of) buildings, but then it became that group of building only. And then it progressively morphed into ville i.e. town, which is still the modern meaning. Though the old one is still very visible in many place names in, roughly, the north-eastern half of France, a lot of tiny villages or farms are named <something>ville.
At the same time, villa kept closer to its original sense in Italy and thus came back to French, as villa (not ville!), for a (rather grand) house.
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@remi See, I live near the town of "Eltville"
Alta Villa, Latin for "high estate, high town"
says Wikipedia.
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@BernieTheBernie I've probably already mentioned (but nobody cares and thus everybody has forgotten, and anyway repeating oneself is a clear marker of ), there is a town next to Lyon called Villeurbanne.
We've already discussed the ville-part, but the other part comes from urbs i.e. city (originally the city i.e. Rome!). So it's town-town. But then the official website proudly claims "ville de Villeurbanne" i.e. "town of town-town!" Much fun ensues.
Except that villa urbana was a thing, designating originally the core administrative/palatial part of a villa (=the wider domain) (and opposed to the villa rustica which were the purely agricultural buildings). And there are enough historical traces to believe that, yes, a villa urbana was at the origin of Villeurbanne.
So "ville de Villeurbanne" really is "town of administrative center of land-based domain." Much less fun ensues.
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This whole discussion reminds me of the city of townsville.
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@PleegWat said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
This whole discussion reminds me of the city of townsville.
But does it have a castle?
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Bubble Status: I was supposed to go visit/tour a rental this evening. Only time they had available when I checked the day it was posted, which was Friday. They cancelled the showing today because it had already been rented. Sigh.
Coming around to the idea that I'm not going to be moving this year. Which is good and bad. Good because moving is a pain, bad because I'm not particularly fond of where I am right now.
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@PleegWat said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
townsville.
Garden Village, or Fence Village?
The English word town is cognate with Dutch tuin and German Zaun. One means “area where people have built houses“, the next “delimited area associated with a house“ and the third, “something that delimits an area”, AKA “fence”.
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@Benjamin-Hall Just stay away from the Red Door people. I worked for them for about 3 days once and they are SCUMBAGS.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
- The Mekong river in eastern Asia gets its names from the words "mae" and "khong," both of which mean "river."
Nope, "mae" means "mother" in Lao and Thai. Wikipedia got it right:
Mekong is originally called Mae Nam Khong from a contracted form of Tai shortened to Mae Khong.[3] In Thai and Lao, Mae Nam ("Mother of Water[s]") is used for large rivers and Khong is the proper name referred to as "River Khong". However, Khong is an archaic word meaning "river" [...]
It's also often colloquially called "Nam Khong" (i.e. "Water Khong") though, and "Nam-Something" usually designates a river so you could say "nam" means "river" in this combination.
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@LaoC said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
"Nam-Something" usually designates a river so you could say "nam" means "river" in this combination.
Well, that's Lao language, not Thai. But may be used in Thailand, since Isaan dialect is actually a Lao language...
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@BernieTheBernie said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@LaoC said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
"Nam-Something" usually designates a river so you could say "nam" means "river" in this combination.
Well, that's Lao language, not Thai. But may be used in Thailand, since Isaan dialect is actually a Lao language...
Yeah, น้ำ is the same word in Thai.
Google Translate's transliteration is horrible BTW. No idea how they do that when the voice synthesis is just fine.
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Heck, I remember when $59K for a house (now valued at around $800K) was "a bubble".... Amazing what 40 years will do....
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@TheCPUWizard said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
Heck, I remember when $59K for a house (now valued at around $800K) was "a bubble".... Amazing what 40 years will do....
It'll turn the Bay Area into Tokyo, and Tokyo into... fuck, they must be using high-compression sleeping vats by now.
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@LaoC said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
Google Translate's transliteration is horrible BTW. No idea how they do that when the voice synthesis is just fine.
It's an "English" transliteration...
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@BernieTheBernie said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@LaoC said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
Google Translate's transliteration is horrible BTW. No idea how they do that when the voice synthesis is just fine.
It's an "English" transliteration...
That would even make sense with Thai as that's the standard. They use some diacritics that are probably meant to mirror Vietnamese, which would also make sense, but that they clearly pronounce the m in "nam" but leave it out in the transliteration doesn't.
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@topspin if memory serves, I am now obligated to call you a greasy thug.
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@topspin said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
Look, they've got cute chalkboards and WiFi, it's totally different.
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@PotatoEngineer yes, they’re paying for it.
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@topspin said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@PotatoEngineer yes, they’re paying a lot for it.
FTFY. The stupid prices in that area smell an awful lot like a grifter to divert tech salaries into the greasy hands of real estate owners. That money has got to be going somewhere and it sure isn't the savings of those young fools.
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@topspin said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
When I first started hearing about these, my first thought was kitchen/bathroom access is gonna suck. It's bad enough sharing with just a couple roommates.
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@dcon I'm sure that none of them cook more than microwave.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@dcon I'm sure that none of them cook more than microwave.
Burnt popcorn for all!
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@dcon said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Housing Bubbles? Is this a housing bubble?:
@dcon I'm sure that none of them cook more than microwave.
Burnt popcorn for all!
Nothing heats up fish like a microwave.