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fri posted: Fri 2016-06-03 14:32:33 tags: housing
First coffee, still no breakfast supply but I held out for greek yogurt (18g) and PB sammiches at work. Around 4PM I was feeling like a nap, but that wouldn't do, so I washed down a caf pill with a cup of instant. Thursday was traditionally my bookkeeping evening, but I stayed late puttering with the last of the old computers in storage last night, so that's a to-do for today instead.

Getting very discouraged with housing search. Hard to believe it's been 4 years at Casa Cascade, and I have a gnawing feeling I'm not going to find anything close to that affordable, almost certainly not within the 1/3 guideline of 714/mo. Or not without finding myself in cracktown.

Trulia and Craigslist both have a "within X miles of zip code Y" search parameter. In my case, the ideal location is about midway between Palmetto in Boca and Oakland Park Blvd, within say 1-2 miles of I-95. The midpoint is around zip code 33064 (Pompano Beach east of 95), and within 3 mi seems like a sufficiently broad radius without getting me all the way to 441 again. Armed with this information I emailed a couple of leads.

* * *

MLPJ has recovered significantly - down only $0.36/share against my buy-in price, so like, 1.5 quartlery dividend payout cycles. JNK has been recovering slowly, took a bit of a dive this morning but still well ahead of where it was in February. And VWO... still stagnated at around 15% down from what I paid for it. Boo.

Long inconclusive thoughts about Haiti and failure of statehood last night. In 2013 Business Insider ranked 25 "most failed" states. Chad, Sudan, Yemen and the like were out in front, #7 was Afghanistan (when major U.S. troop withdrawal wouldn't happen until late 2014), and #8 was Haiti. I guess I knew in a scattered-trivia sort of way that Haiti had a history of military coups, brutal police-state dictatorships and foreign interventions, but never looked at a big-picture chronology for perspective. Still #8 in 2013, 3 years after the 2010 earthquake and ensuing cholera epidemic.

I got thinking about Haiti because St. Gregory's is a key partner in South Florida Haiti Project. We have a deacon stationed in Bondeau running an orphanage (combatting the custom of "restavec", which often amounts to nothing more than child slavery) and partnering in the village's economic development. There's a school there now, and a church, soon they'll have solar electricity and a well instead of having to trudge 2 miles for potable water. When sea levels rise, will Bondeau be underwater? Most likely. So of course it melts my heart to think of these disowned kids who would otherwise have been treated as slaves, perhaps sexually abused, instead having a home and some education. But I have to wonder about the wisdom of developing this coastal village when it's going to be ineffably washed away in a generation, maybe two, if the superpowers of the world don't start investing in massive carbon-fixing projects.

I often hear about "reducing demand" for energy as part of the greenhouse solution.

 G O O D   L U C K 

The reality is energy demand can only increase proportionally to terrestrial conditions increasingly hampering human comfort, safety, and production. I hear statistics like "we need to cut emissions by 80% by 2050", but I think we're past the tipping point. Politically, the attitude has been "okay we'll spend 4 years figuring out how to cut 1% for the following 4 years, and 2046-2049 can cut 3% per year to take up our slack". Or, "we're real busy with infrastructure development right now, you other guys should deffo cut your emissions though".

So the alternative is atmospheric "scrubbing". Instead of inhibiting the processes that emit CO2 into the atmosphere, develop more neutral processes to simultaneously withdraw CO2 from the atmosphere. A 2011 SciAm article proposes that it's too "costly", that is, the cost of scrubbing exceeds the cost of prevention, but I think even if we managed to convert ALL energy production to carbon-neutral TODAY, we're past a tipping point. When bankers start crunching the numbers to assess the cost of losing developed coastal land, I think the "cost" will turn out to be affordable after all. Moreover, the SciAm article casts the energy cost of scrubbing in terms of "burning" more fuel - but if we're going to beat global warming, we have to uncouple the notions of "energy production" from "burning", and acknowledge that setting things on fire is only one of many energy sources. We can have scrubbing without clear-cutting timberland to fuel the scrubbers.