In God's Bathroom, He Has This Showerhead

So Christy and I have begun compiling a list of things we'd like to get for the new place. During out trip to Hawaii this past summer, we stayed at a bed and breakfast that had a shower with a showerhead in it that was the size of a dinner plate. We thought this would be a cool thing to have in our new place and we started looking online to see how much they cost. We found this one on Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/yra96x). It's official name is the "Waterpik AST233CC Total Body Drenching 2 Mode Wall Mount Aquascape Showerhead." Impressed yet? Well, that is nothing compared to what one of the reviewers has to say about it. I'm still torn about whether this guy was doing this tongue-in-cheek, or if he's serious. You be the judge:

"Right off the bat, let me warn that this showerhead is not for everyone. If you like standing in a gentle mist while being drizzled with cascading rain droplets, there are other units that accomlpish this . . .On the other hand, if you prefer to be pummeled by what feels like the Colorado River, the Aquascape stands alone. I am, by most standards, a hefty man, yet when fully engaged the Aquascape literally pushes me backwards in the shower as though I'm being sprayed with a firehose. . . Also, before buying note that this is a fixed wall mount unit. There is no detachable, handheld piece and, quite frankly, it's probably much safer that way, as a handheld component could easily spiral out of control with this kind of pressure."

Sweet; where do I sign up?

Anyway, it looks like we are full steam ahead with the condo. The contract is being reviewed by the attorney and the appraisal was done on Monday. Financing is getting finalized and we officially told our landlord that we will be leaving at the end of December.

As I think I mentioned before (maybe) I finally finished Greenspan's book (The Age of Turbulence). Probably the best book I've read this year (and I know you're all eagerly awaiting my top 10 from this year). I won't overly bore you with too much economic detail, but there were two things I found really interesting. Neither one is necessarily his idea (and in fact I'm sure many others have written about them) but he had a way of presenting them that made them very straight forward and easy to understand. The first is the concept of something called "Dutch disease" (not to be confused with Dutch Elm Disease that affects trees). This is a counterintuitive idea that talks about how the more natural resources a country has, the more crippled their economy will be. This is especially true of developing countries. The reason is that because there is high demand for the natural resources the country has, it keeps that country's currency at a much higher exchange rate than it would be otherwise. This, in turn, makes it nearly impossible for the country to be a low-cost leader in any other industry, since it is competing with countries with lower value currencies that can easily underbid them. Of course, the country can still achieve and maintain a relatively healthy GDP, but it will almost exclusively be due to sales of their resources which, as we all know, are finite. This goes a long way towards explaining why countries such as Saudi Arabia have not been able to make the leap to first-world standards despite the presence of the huge petroleum cash cow.

The other idea I found extremely revealing was a discussion on what prices are likely to do over the next 30 years or so. In general, over the last 20 years inflation has been pretty low. A big reason for this has been the emergence of developing countries taking over a lot of the outsourced manufacturing jobs (i.e. kids in Thailand making Nike shoes for $.07 an hour). Being able to exploit cheap labor markets has served to suppress the overall price of things, as company's have continually been able to find ways of making the same or better quality goods for progressively cheaper and cheaper. As a result, the money being poured into these countries has helped their economies develop tremendously. That has certainly been a net positive for them as a whole, but the one drawback is since their economies are stronger now their exchange rates are higher and thus they are finding it more difficult to remain the low-cost leader and underbid everyone else. As an example, China has now started complaining that they can't compete with Vietnam on cost since the Chinese currency has strengthened so much. So we see a cycle appear where developed countries outsource to developing ones until they improve themselves and then the investment shifts to a new, less developed country. The trouble is that we are running out of developing countries to do that with! We are rapidly approaching a point where there will be no "lower tier" to go to anymore because all the countries that are in a position to grow will have grown and all the other poor countries (i.e. most of Africa) are not yet ready to step up. The end result will be that this large deflationary force that has been present and increasing for the last 20 years will no longer be present and we can expect significantly higher inflation to be the norm. Of course, the key is determining when the inflation is going to start picking up, and not even the great Alan Greenspan knows that. All I can say is, despite the housing market slump I'm still thinking it's a good time to be buying a place. Even if property values continue to relatively decline, they are likely to still be buoyed up by inflation.

Ok, I think that's all I got for now. Got back from Houston early last Sunday and got back to the work grind this week. Looking forward to having a relaxing weekend and then I need to jump back into CPA studying next week.

Have a good weekend all!