Checking up on my 2003 Chinese-made car price prediction

by philg

From 2003, The Chinese car:

Within 10 to 20 years the Chinese will be able to sell a car that is very similar to today’s rental car: 4 doors, 4 seats, air conditioner, radio, new but not fancy. It will cost between $2000 and $3000 in today’s dollars. With cars that cheap it will be unthinkable to manufacture in the U.S. Consumers won’t bother to finance a $2000 purchase separately (maybe they’ll add it to their credit card debt).

Among the large range of my failed predictions, this one would appear to have been an unusually spectacular failure. Very few Chinese-made cars are available in the U.S. and they cost $40,000-70,000, not $3,000. Maybe there is some hope for salvaging my reputation as a prophet. “What a $15,000 Electric SUV Says About U.S.-China Car Rivalry” (Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2025):

For an American used to a $50,000 gasoline-powered SUV as the standard family choice, the Chinese market is hardly recognizable. … Chinese car buyers no longer need to debate whether an EV can be made affordable, not when a decent starter model costs $10,000 and a luxury seven-seater with reclining massage chairs can be had for $50,000. … Toyota said its bZ3X—the recently introduced model that starts at $15,000—was designed in China by the company’s engineers in the country, who worked with a local joint-venture partner. It is made in Guangzhou with Chinese batteries and driver-assistance software from Momenta, a Chinese leader in that field.

I was off by a factor of more than 3X, then? What if we adjust for the inflation that the government assures us doesn’t exist? Adjusted for official CPI, $3,000 in 2003 is equivalent to about $5,250 today. So I was off by only a factor of two! What if we try to adjust for inflation as experienced by Americans who buy houses? (official CPI excludes the cost of buying and living in a house in favor of a hypothetical “owner equivalent rent”) The Case-Shiller Index has gone from 133 to 324:

If we adjust the $3,000 number from 2003 with the growth in house prices, we get $7,300. My prediction was of a $7,300 car, then, in today’s money and the WSJ says that $10,000 now buys a reasonably good car (denied to Americans, but available in the world’s largest market for cars).

Related:

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Are America’s rich people betting on the rich becoming more concentrated and isolated?

by philg

“The Ultra Wealthy Are Riding Out the Market Chaos in Luxury Real Estate” (WSJ):

Despite a chill in the overall housing market, ultraluxury home sales in areas like New York, South Florida and Los Angeles are accelerating as the wealthy buyers bet on real estate’s long-term value. Since February, the number of homes sold for $10 million or more has surged in major markets nationwide, according to an exclusive analysis by The Wall Street Journal. Between Feb. 1 and May 1, sales at that price point in Palm Beach, Fla., surged 50% from the same period last year, while sales in Miami-Dade County jumped 48.5% year-over-year, according to public records and local multiple listing service data. In the luxury ski destination of Aspen, Colo., sales jumped 43.75% in that same period, followed by Los Angeles County at 29% and Manhattan at 21%.

When President Trump’s tariffs were first announced, some wealthy buyers tapped the brakes and backed out of deals. In recent weeks, however, real-estate observers have been surprised to see a wave of big-ticket sales across the country.

The largest was the $225 million sale of a residential compound in Naples, Fla., in late April, the country’s second-most expensive home sale ever recorded. The seller was tied to the DeGroote family of Canada, property records show. The same week, billionaire David Hoffmann paid $85 million for a waterfront property nearby.

Home buyers at lower price points, by contrast, are holding off on buying and selling amid the chaos, agents said. For Miami homes below $20 million, for example, listing prices have dropped 10% to 20% since the start of the trade war, said agent Danny Hertzberg of Coldwell Banker.

“The most bullish buyers seem to be the highest-net worth buyers,” said Hertzberg, who knows of at least three Miami homes in contract to sell for $40 million or more. “The rest of the market is soft—frozen in some aspects—whereas the top of the market is accelerating in the number of sales and prices.”

The estimates of construction costs don’t seem right:

Hoffmann, an activist investor, already owned a smaller home in Naples but was searching for a larger compound in the area for five years. “This wasn’t a spur of the moment thing,” he said. The $85 million house, which measures about 17,200 square feet with eight bedrooms, ticked all the boxes in terms of design, size, quality and location. He is also in contract to buy the adjacent property with a guesthouse, bringing the total purchase price to just over $100 million. The two properties had been listed for a combined $125 million.

Hoffmann said he has diverse investments, including a “significant” amount of money in the stock market, but isn’t worried about short-term fluctuations. Moreover, he felt he got a good deal on the Naples home, since it would cost about $110 million to build today.

Even at $1,000 per square foot, a 17,200-square-foot-house would cost only $17 million to build.

Especially in higher-end neighborhoods of South Florida, a physical house is seen as a depreciating asset that will require a bulldozing or a gut rehab after 20 years. In my brain, the only ways that it could make sense to consider such an asset an “investment” are (1) interest rates are near 0 percent and it is easy to get a 90-95 percent mortgage, (2) an expectation that the land underneath will become much more valuable. Interest rates are not close to 0 percent anymore. The only reason that land would rise dramatically in price is if rich Americans decide that they need to cluster together even more tightly.

(See the classic 1997 “A Long Run House Price Index: The Herengracht Index, 1628–1973” in which real estate doubled in value… over 345 years; “The Amsterdam rent index: The housing market and the economy, 1550–1850” (2012) is similarly discouraging regarding appreciation potential beyond whatever is happening in the larger economy; a 2002 paper by Gregory Clark (of The Son Also Rises fame) found that constant-quality rents actually did rise substantially in England between 1550 and 1909.)

Why should we care? Rich Americans control our political parties, especially the Democrats (The Nation). If the rich are concentrated in just a handful of neighborhoods they have less reason to care about what happens to the rest of us. It might be rational to support filling the U.S. with Tren de Aragua members if you are assured that you will never encounter one.

Some porn from the WSJ (the $51 million Palm Beach, Florida house that Bren Simon, widow of the real estate tycoon Mel Simon, recently bought):

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AI adds some joy to my life

by philg

I’m continuing the project of archiving my mother’s documents and artwork, including some photo albums that she made. Here’s Adobe Acrobat’s opinion of a 1968 trip to France album in which your ignoble blog host plays a small (5-year-old) role:

Don’t waste time on family history when AI can summarize it for you!

This reminds me of the old story…

A management consultant attended his first symphony concert and submitted the following analysis:

a. For considerable periods, the four oboe players had nothing to do. The number of oboes should therefore be reduced, and the work spread more evenly over the whole concert program, thus eliminating the peaks and valleys of activity.

b. All twenty violins were playing identical notes. This would seem to be an unnecessary duplication, so the staff of this section should be cut drastically.

c. Obsolescence of equipment is another matter warranting further investigation. The program noted that the leading violinist’s instrument was several hundred years old. Now, if normal depreciation schedules had been applied, the value of this instrument would have been reduced to zero and the purchase of more modern equipment recommended long ago.

d. Much effort was absorbed in the playing of demisemiquavers, which seems to be an unnecessary refinement. It is recommended that all notes be rounded up to the nearest semiquaver. If this were done, it would be possible to use trainees and lower-grade operatives more extensively.

e. Finally, there seemed to be too much repetition of some of the musical passages. Therefore, scores should be pruned to a considerable extent. No useful purpose is served by repeating on the horns something that has already been handled by the strings. It is estimated that, if all redundant passages were eliminated, the whole concert time of two hours could be reduced to twenty minutes and there would be no need for an intermission.

What did AI have to say about this 63-page photo album? It found an Avis rental car receipt and our future overlord’s entire summary of the monthlong vacation was based on that:

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The long dark winter is finally over

by philg

February 2024, regarding a tragedy that began in 2023: Microsoft keyboards back from the dead.

After massive daily injections of healing Paxlovid, the Sculpt keyboard has risen! Amazon now stocks the Incase “Designed by Microsoft” keyboards.

Get yours before the 6,000 percent tariffs kick back in (the case is stamped “Made in China”, almost surely by the same factory that Microsoft used).

The new supplier’s site:

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Conclave movie notes

by philg

(spoiler alert)

My notes to a group chat:

Just watched movie Conclave about choosing a Pope. The bad guys are the conservatives who say that male Catholics shouldn’t go to the bathhouse and have sex with five different guys every night. What the movie calls “liberal” cardinals are heroes. They suggest continuing a program of throwing out everything that was sacred to Catholics in the 19th century. The best of the cardinals, who ultimately wins, is a hermaphrodite. He/she says “I am as God made me” and claims that being a hermaphrodite makes him/her a way better Pope. The movie’s villain is a cardinal who wants Muslims out of Italy, partly due to the potential for jihad, and points out that Muslims don’t tolerate the presence of Christians in Muslim countries.

A friend:

So basically a Netflix show

Here’s someone who might have been pope:

From the same article on Cardinal Robert Sarah:

“By losing its faith, Europe has also lost its reason to be. It is experiencing a lethal decline and is becoming a new civilization, one that is cut off from its Christian roots.”​

“All migrants who arrive in Europe are penniless, without work, without dignity,” Sarah reportedly said. “This is what the Church wants? The Church cannot cooperate with this new form of slavery that has become mass migration.”​

“If truth no longer exists, if everything is relative, then man becomes a slave to his passions.”

Sarah argued that gender ideology is an affront to God’s creation and cannot fundamentally change whether a person is male or female in “The Day is Now Far Spent.”

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Gender Studies class goes to the eye doctor

by philg

Registering at the eye doctor, whose patient portal credits CPT©2025 American Medical Association with all of the questions and choices below:

Hatefully, there is no “ze” nor a write-in box:

The default sexual orientation is “don’t know”:

But some other choices are available:

Should there be an “irrelevant” choice for people who’ve been in heterosexual marriages for longer than 4 years? Psychology Today:

What’s more, we found that marital satisfaction for both husband and wife deteriorated in step with the wife’s loss of sexual desire. (The husband’s sexual desire was irrelevant to anybody’s marital happiness.) Might wives lose sexual desire because the marriage is turning bad? No: Time-lag analyses indicated that her loss of desire came first, leading to lower satisfaction later. Early levels of (dis)satisfaction did not predict how rapidly the wives lost interest in sex. … Crucially, it was not due to childbirth. Becoming parents made the mismatch worse, as in steeper declines in wives’ sexual desire. … A possible explanation that fits our data is that female sexual desire increases during the brief phase of passionate love. Nature may have arranged that as a way of encouraging the man to make a long-term commitment.

We can also see how the American Medical Association thinks about race, the default for which is “any” (the racial equivalent of “pangender”? Why isn’t it “panracial”?):

1.4 billion people in China, a country with 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, are lumped together as “Chinese”. For cousins of Elizabeth Warren, i.e., the 3,000ish enrolled Chinooks, there are five categories:

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MIT Nobel laureate says you’re not going to make money on Nvidia and LLMs

by philg

“A Nobel laureate on the economics of artificial intelligence” (MIT Technology Review, March/April 2025):

For all the talk about artificial intelligence upending the world, its economic effects remain uncertain. But Institute Professor and 2024 Nobel winner Daron Acemoglu has some insights.

Despite some predictions that AI will double US GDP growth, Acemoglu expects it to increase GDP by 1.1% to 1.6% over the next 10 years, with a roughly 0.05% annual gain in productivity. This assessment is based on recent estimates of how many jobs are affected—but his view is that the effect will be targeted.

The full paper is available for download as a PDF.

The news gets better:

“We’re still going to have journalists [especially in Gaza where food, health care, education, and shelter are all paid for by US/EU taxpayers via UNRWA?], we’re still going to have financial analysts, we’re still going to have HR employees,” he says. “It’s going to impact a bunch of office jobs that are about data summary, visual matching, pattern recognition, etc. And those are essentially about 5% of the economy.”

If “artificial intelligence” includes self-driving, I’m not sure that the effects on the economy will be small. As of 2016, supposedly about 3 percent of jobs were for drivers per se (CNBC). As anyone who has taken an Uber or Lyft can attest, many of these folks speak no English. If their driving jobs disappear, at least some percentage of them will be on track for the lifetime full welfare lifestyle (public housing, Medicaid, SNAP/EBT, and Obamaphone).

Related: Mindy the Crippler is preparing for the stock market panic when people realize that AI is fizzling…

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CVS and RFK, Jr.’s MAHA program

by philg

Our local (Jupiter, FL) CVS adapts to RFK, Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again program. You no longer have to buy three huge bags of Twizzlers to get a discount, as one did under the Biden administration. “Must buy 2”:

Admission: Our 11-year-old was home sick with a cold (a ridiculous situation in Florida!) and requested Kit Kats so I bought him some.

Related:

  • COVID-19 state of emergency ending? (March 2023, when Biden was considering winding down the COVID-19 emergency in May 2023, a CVS in Maskachusetts incentivizes buying Cadbury candy eggs in quantity 10 and washing them down with 36 cans of Coke)
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Trip to Barnes & Noble

by philg

A few photos from the Palm Beach Gardens (Florida) Barnes & Noble…

The secret to American female happiness is more focus on the self:

A book for ICE employees tasked with picking MS-13 members out of the crowd of 30+ million undocumented Americans:

A book by an Egyptian who wrote “a heartsick breakup letter with the West” but won’t leave the U.S. and return to Egypt (he says that he wants to help Gazans, bombarded for no reason and through no fault of their own (according to the book jacket), but won’t go back to his native Egypt and cut some holes in the border fence to help his Gazan brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters escape?).

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