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Bubble Concession
Do you foresee the Real Estate Bubble bursting anytime soon?
Statistically, incomes are NOT keeping pace with the prices & inflation. I foresee California leading the pack in the Real Estate market 'crash'.
(Texas)I can't afford anything over $120k, and under $150k, the homes are outdated, neglected, disrepair, no concessions by Sellers,in questionable neighborhoods.
In 1962, my parents bought a 2500 sq ft home in a suburb of San Jose, California for $30k. In 1966, they sold it for $33k. Today, because of taxes, inflation, extreem demand, and the Real Estate mindset, that home - with general upgrades - would go for over $650k. I would not expect the home to sell for $33k, but a fair price would be $100 a sq foot...
So, now people are beginning to realize - in this FEEDING FRENZY of Real Estate - that in very short time, homes in San Diego and other such communities will be unapproachable.
What is your spin on this?? See link...
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Banking/HomeFinancing/WhyYouCantAffordAHome.aspx
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I hate to tell you this, but prices are down almost 30% in San Diego, right in line with what I predicted over two years ago. The bubble has already burst in most of the country. Those places that were on the leading edge are on the verge of a turn around.
The prices thirty years ago have nothing to do with conditions today. Price is where marginal supply and marginal demand balance. There just isn't a whole lot of supply, and demand is very high, for places like the Bay Area, San Diego, etcetera. It isn't important to the price level that someone making $10 per hour can't afford it. There are enough people who can, and who want to, to keep the pricing level where it is. If there weren't, prices would have fallen a long time ago.
This is probably about as affordable as things are going to get, right now. I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't make a promise as to how soon, but the economics is a much better predictor of what than when.
You want housing to get more affordable? Make it easier to build. For over thirty years now, we here in California have been doing everything short of completely outlawing new development to slow down development. But this has consequences in the price of housing. You can't pretend to be surprised that in an area so many would like to live, where the supply has been highly constricted, that the prices have shot up like they have.
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L.A. Concession $12.49 L.A. Concession |
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The Bubble $13.99 The Bubble |
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Designing and Operating a More Profitable Concession (DVD) $44.73 Designing and Operating a More Profitable Concession reviews the key elements to an efficient health club concession design or remodel. The DVD identifies what factors can enable a health club to make a profit in its food-service program. The DVD also examines the basic purchase and pricing considerations for food products in a health club. Among the topics covered: concession design, concession operations, menu management, keys to success, and the one million dollar idea. Produced in cooperation with the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association (IHRSA). |
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Man Buying Snacks at the Movie Concession Stand $79.99 Peter Stackpole Man Buying Snacks at the Movie Concession Stand - Premium Photographic Print |
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Nostalgia Electrics CCP-610 Vintage Collection 59 Popcorn & Concession Cart $339.99 Nostalgia Electrics CCP-610 Vintage Collection 59" Popcorn & Concession Cart |
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SnoKone Syrup 4 Gallons Bubble Gum $46.57 Sno Kone Syrups for Concession Stand use from the leadr in Fun Foods Gold Medal Ready To Use (RTU) Deluxe Snow Cone syrups in 1 gallon containers. Can be used with our 1 gallon (1071DZ) snow cone syrup pumps sold separately. Great for concession stands carnivals midways and boardwalks these snow cone syrups are the favorite colors and flavors for maximum sales With one ounce syrup per cone yields over 125 servings per gallon jug Four gallons per case. Sweetened with pure all natural cane sugar No high fructose corn syrup stretchers artificial sweeteners or gums. |
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Bubble, Bubble, Toil & Trouble $9.56 Bubble, Bubble, Toil & Trouble |
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Nostalgia Electrics Vintage Popcorn & Concession $474.99 Brighten up any game room or play room with the Nostalgia Electrics Vintage Popcorn & Concession machine (CCP-610). This authentic-looking machine and stand comes equipped with a popcorn maker that features a 6 oz stainless steel kettle with a built-in stirring system and a wheeled cart with drawers for accessory storage and easy portability. With delicious carnival-style popcorn at your immediate disposal, movie nights will never be the same. Add this playful popcorn maker to your home today! Popcorn For All:This fun machine makes up 24 cups of popped popcorn per batch Storage Galore:The cart has lots of great storage for all of your popcorn supplies Multi-Functional:Remove the cart for counter-top popcorn making |
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L.A. Concession [Remaster] $22.99 Track Listing: 1. Never Gonna Let Her Go, 2. On Dangerous Ground, 3. Caught Inside Your Heart, 4. Worlds Away, 5. In My Crystal Ball, 6. Way of the Night, The, 7. Leave Her to Heaven, 8. Only in My Dreams, 9. From L.A. to Tokyo, 10. Lost in Your Eyes, 11. Don't Let Her Go, 12. Love Has Found Its Way, 13. Can One of Your Kiss Do All This?, 14. Secrets in Her Heart, 15. Spark of My Soul, The, 16. Gonna Let Her Go |
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Prather video one.
The Looming Crisis of Content
Significant change, especially in organizations, doesn’t happen because someone wakes up one day and suddenly decides to do things differently. Change comes as the result of a crisis that underscores a problem so dramatically and forcefully that it can no longer be ignored. Since the technology bubble burst half a decade ago (and probably even before that), such a crisis has been looming in the way we conceive of, create, and deliver content. Most notions about content are still rooted in old paradigms, but signs have increasingly pointed to significant shifts to come.
SIGNS OF A CRISIS
• Cost-cutting
Anyone who’s been in technical writing for more than a few years has been witness (victim?) to some dramatic cost-cutting measures. Remember technical editors? Gone. A vice president at one of the largest companies in the world once told me that he asked content development teams in one of his divisions why they no longer had editors. The doc manager told him, “Because no one knew what they did.” Then there’s the desktop publishing department. Page layout came in-house with much fanfare in the 1980s. Over the following decade it devolved to fewer and fewer “specialists” until nowadays writers are simply expected to integrate the function in their everyday work. Technology changes like XML may even make format and layout considerations completely obsolete. These cuts intensify the focus on writing and meaning, rather than process and delivery.
• Offshoring
At the risk of stating the obvious, content is created by people. Since the tech bubble burst, many companies suddenly seem to have become aware of this fact. When cost-cutting measures failed to reduce content costs enough, companies went searching globally for solutions. And they found them in places like Bangalore and Mumbai, where technical writers are 50-80% cheaper. Global technology infrastructure has made the whole process of offshoring easy and affordable, too. But, U.S.-based tech writers lament, what about quality? Given the non-stop wave of offshoring, it seems that cost savings still outweigh any perceived “quality” concessions companies may have had to make. Did quality become unimportant all of a sudden? No (at least no more than it ever was), but the perception appears to be that the quality from offshore labor is roughly equivalent to that of their erstwhile onshore counterparts. That’s a bitter pill for tech writers to swallow and may indicate a trend to commoditize the way content is currently produced.
• Productivity pressure
Technical writers have come under increasing pressure to produce more content with fewer resources in less time. Writing teams have been reduced across the board and those that are left are expected to take up the slack. Most departments now have to make do with half the staff they once had. Full-time tech writing positions have become scarcer, too, with contract work the norm now, not the exception. This puts the emphasis on production, because the only way to get things done with fewer resources is to be more efficient. And efficiency invariably means technology, which has been allowed to define the content development process more. The result is a loss of focus on the value of content to the end-user.
• Localization price pressure
For years now, translation and localization have been under tremendous, increasing price pressure. Per-word pricing for most commercial language work has dropped by one-half or more. Costs for content-related services (like desktop publishing) have experienced similar pressures. Technology has facilitated this trend (and made it more palatable to service providers), but anyone who sells language services for a living will tell you that lower localization costs are still a top priority among customers. Why does this point to a looming crisis of content? Because as efficiencies and cost savings in localization (the back of end of the content cycle) are exhausted, companies are hunting further and further upstream for optimization opportunities. It is finally becoming obvious that the solution to content quality, cost, and time problems will be found in the content itself. (Those who have begun addressing this problem already know that it’s much, much more difficult than squeezing costs out of localization.)
• Volume creep
In the old days, content announced itself with a resounding thud (17 manuals for the IBM Peanut? Impressive!). The digital era and the Internet have muted the thud factor, but volume grows unabated. In 2005, the CEO of a major enterprise software company mentioned documentation for the first time ever. Good news for writers? Hardly. He complained that there was too much of it and that the company was spending too much money translating it. A director of globalization at another major software company recently told of his company’s volume crisis. The documentation set for one of their most popular products stood at 7,500 pages, and the writers expected the next release to need 12,000 pages (!). These companies are at the bleeding edge of volume creep, and the crisis they’re staring down is not for the faint-hearted.
CAUTION: INFLECTION POINTS AHEAD
Will we see a sudden content calamity at some point? I doubt it. Crises rarely occur at a single point in time, nor are they static. They tend to mutate with time and new influences. The crisis of content will probably manifest itself at different inflection points in different ways. Responses to the crisis will need to vary and may well depend
on the success (or lack of it) that neighboring companies have in dealing with it. Here are some thoughts how responses to these inflection points may be shaped:
Creating what users want, not what writers like
Just as technologists like to develop, writers like to write. It’s only natural. But that doesn’t mean anybody wants what they produce. Content groups will have to develop content that is truly meaningful to end-users. They’ll need to challenge formulaic notions of what content is (quick start, user’s guide, on-line help, lather, rinse, repeat) and focus on why people are using the product to begin with. As Harvard’s Ted Levitt observed in 1960, “People don’t want quarter-inch drills; they want quarter-inch holes.” The product authors are documenting isn’t a product at all, but a way for end-users to solve their own “crisis” (and that is all they care about!).
Valuing substance over form
Not every possible screenshot in the software needs to be reproduced. Nobody on Earth (except the writers) will notice or care whether a stem sentence introduces each bulleted list. Templates and guidelines do not create usability; they may, in fact, diminish it. Writers will need to stop serving up content that is logical and satisfying for them to produce, but inconvenient and stultifying for the end-user to deal with. This means rethinking formats and deliverables to suit the information requirement, not the other way around (as is currently the case).
Keeping the information super-highway from becoming a landfill
Despite years (decades?) of warnings – even writers themselves say users never read the documentation – writers have continued to shovel information at an all-too suspecting public. Molly Ivins once said, “The first rule of holes: when you’re in one, quit digging.” Even if content developers can’t climb out of their hole and make documentation truly usable overnight, they must at the very least stop piling up so much of it. With nearly every word, writers will have to choose whether the waste pile gets bigger or not.
Emphasizing results, not process
Technology is a set of tools used to deliver information to users. It shouldn’t drive content decisions, but rather the other way around (just because a huge manual can be ported into on-line help doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do). Documentation doesn’t have to be comprehensive or preserve some internal logic; writers will have to come to terms with the fact that content only exists to support the user’s objectives. People may need to learn something to reach those objectives, but learning is not what they want to do. People don’t like to learn; they like to know. They like to “get it.” The purpose of documentation is to enable users to get it. So, the documentation experience must be made painless, transparent, and brief. Our goal is for users to have learned, not for the content to have informed.
How will a crisis of content shape up in the next few years? It’s hard to say. But it seems certain that many of us will have to give up our preconceived notions about content and establish new user-centric paradigms. Until the crisis of content becomes acute enough, though, users
will continue to bear the brunt of information that often just plain doesn’t work.
“A mobile phone needs a manual in the way that a teacup doesn’t.”
– Douglas Adams
Hans Fenstermacher is president of ArchiText, a division of Translations.com. He was founding chairman of the Globalization And Localization Association and was recently elected Associate Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication. He can be reached at hansf@architext-usa.com
About the Author
Hans Fenstermacher
president of ArchiText, a division of Translations.com
