Lingering blog threads.

Since this blog started as a bubble blog way back, I always pay attention to the local housing.

Housing prices went up in Bend?  Why do I feel this is manipulated by artificial shortages created by bureaucratic bungling and real estate manuvering?  And not by a rise in local employment and consumer confidence?

A couple other lingering threads from way back toward the beginning of this blog.

Early on, I wondered if Bend could really count on telecommuting tech people from large companies.  (Since we weren't likely to get the companies themselves.)  Turns out, according to the new Yahoo CEO, maybe not so much.  She's ordered them back to the fold, or quit.

Rumor was, many of them were indeed more or less forgotten, as I suspected.  But unlike the result I mused on back then -- that they would fall behind in their careers, the result seems to have been that they just kept collecting their paychecks.

Then Farhad Manjoo of Slate pops up an says, not so fast, that this telecommuting is a good idea.  Well, that just confirms it.  You can't go wrong by doing exactly the opposite of whatever Farhood Manjoo says you should do.  Farhad Manjoo is an idiot.   So that's another lingering thing I've noticed writing this blog. I notice how often the same columnist is wrong.  How do columnists who are wrong every time keep getting hired?

Another thread I've returned to over and over again, is questioning why Barnes and Noble is committing retail suicide.  That the ebook reader they created was unlikely to be the winning platform, that they were distracting customers from books, and so on.

Turns out, the platform reader is not doing so hot, the bookstores are actually profitable, and if the former owner of the company can take the bricks and mortars private, and shed the tech, that he thinks he can may be able to have a viable company.

I agree.  I mean, I really think bookstores are still viable if you try.

So two things I figured were kind of weird have quietly been confirmed.

Interesting, no one pops up and says, "Hey, that really was a dumb idea.  What were we thinking?"

These ideas -- which defy common sense on the face of it -- have instead died sort of whimpering deaths, don't pay any attention to how stupid they were type deaths.

But writing about them on this blog has made me notice.  Gives me a bit of continuity to tap into.

I may have been wrong about a few things, but for some reason I don't seem to be noticing those....