Like the expected death of a sick and elderly relative, the demise of Millenium Water in Vancouver---expected for months by many housing realists---is still a shock. Perhaps we secretly hoped that the laughable boosterism of the Vancouver Real Estate industry was somehow going to pull it through. RIP

Bloomberg:

A majority of global investors predict Ireland will default on its sovereign debt, showing that weeks of efforts by the government of the onetime Celtic Tiger havent allayed concerns about its creditworthiness.

and from the Sunday Times

FEARS are mounting that Ireland could default on its soaring national debt pile, amid continuing worries about its troubled banking sector.

Maps and Wave inventor Rasmussen talks about why he's decamping to Facebook. Not surprisingly, the ramp up of Google to a whopping 25,000 people is part of the problem. Although, Facebook, already at a headcount of 2000, can hardly be considered a startup.

Steve is one of the best product guys in high tech, perhaps THE best ever, but he's no engineer. Combine that with a propensity to hyperbole and the result is periodic outbursts of ill-judged, misconstrued and reputationally-damaging silliness...

For the last 100 years houses have primarily provided shelter and a hedge against inflation. It's only recently that they've become a widely used source of speculation and --- via home equity loans --- collateral for collosal household debt.

"Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying."

Studs Terkel

Talk about closing the door after the horse has bolted...

The Paris-based OECD, a club of wealthy nations that includes Canada and 32 other economies, suggested Ottawa could require home buyers to put up bigger down payments if they want their mortgages federally insured. The government could also consider forcing banks to disclose the sensitivity of their mortgage revenues to rate hikes.

Finally, media stories are starting to confess what the data has been showing for more than two years. The Vancouver bubble is bursting. In fact the recent stimulus-induced bounce (a temporary reverse in the decline that was just getting started) has boosted the peak even higher, which makes looking over the precipice even more vertigo-inducing than it was two years ago.

Nice to see the usually smug Bob Rennie looking seasick for a change...

Really nice way into the economist's latest stories

From Paul Grahama's "Hackers and Painters" comes a wonderfully insightful essay about contribution and reward. In describing a startup as a place where individuals can be rewarded for their contribution, he identifies the biggest impediment to smart and/or ambitious people in bigger companies: that their contribution is averaged out with all the other dumb or unambitious folks.

According to Graham: to get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.

One more commentator dancing around Otto Von Bismark's famous aphorism.

Poltics is stlll just the art of the possible, but the 'possible' has changed a bit in a world of Entertainment Tonight and Larry King Live

Clay Shirky on people power and "cognitive surplus"

Track your personal or corporate brand's recognition, or perhaps ongoing besmirchment, with these useful tools

"Our analysis depicts a coming generational transition in the housing market that will upset the historic balance of buyers and sellers. Residents in most states are net buyers of homes well into their 50s. The resulting upward pressure on demand by the large baby boom generation will soon peak, and after age 70 they will be net sellers in all except three states."

more

ycombinator competitor: dogpatch labs

It's probably time to start taking html 5 seriously. Especially as it's so nicely documented at Mark Pilgrim's Dive into HTML 5 site.

Dave Kellogg's information continuum