Gyroscopic Investing

The last 2 years we spent a month in central Europe (Austria, Czech Republic, and upper Bavaria) vacationing.  Obviously there are a lot of great sites to see but the small things that exude Old World charm I noticed really make this a great getaway.  In Prague especially you notice:

Absolutely no TV (the only channels we got were Czech or German language)
No neon signs
No plastic anywhere
No billboards
No concrete or asphalt - you only see cobblestone
No air conditioning - in Prague it's illegal to have central air units on roofs and window mounted air conditioners are illegal.  It's felt it ruins the old ambiance of the buildings
No satellite dishes - illegal also since it ruins the ambiance
No trash or litter on the streets
No graffiti
No traffic jams
No blatant advertising - restaurant had printed menus on the sidewalk or chalkboards with menus.  This included the one McDonalds we saw in Prague.
Zero crime - You can walk around anywhere past midnight and feel safe
99.9% of Austrian/Bavarian houses (and most Czech houses) have beautiful window boxes filled with hanging petunias.  Every house also seemed to have a small flower garden.
Wonderful farmer's markets in every city (Prague, Vienna, Munich, Salzburg, etc)

The relaxed laid back atmosphere free of modern annoyances makes you question our way of life in the US.

I love pedestrian-only urban areas and farmer's markets. I'd love to see the former and I enjoy the latter where I live. No plastic bags would be nice, too. Never mind the pollution - I hate the sound!

Sounds like you had fun.

do you speak German? If not, has that been an impediment?

My husband and I visited the Czech Republic, last year, while on a Danube cruise. It is a beautiful area. We had no trouble navigating around on our own, knowing only English.

The Old World charm rivals Western Europe, IMHO. And, the cost of living is much lower than the US and W. Europe. I'd love to spend an extended length of time there.

BTW, we stayed in an AC hotel in Prague. Most restaurants concert halls, and other public places were AC, as well. I'm not sure where they put the AC units.

FarmerD, You didn't mention the construction workers who sit outside having beers with their breakfast.

murphy_p_t wrote: do you speak German? If not, has that been an impediment?

Nein!  I never found it to be an impediment since most restaurants and sites of interest have English speakers.  By the way, on this past trip, we rented a car in Munich and drove everywhere using our Garmin.  No problems driving whatsoever.

MarySB wrote: My husband and I visited the Czech Republic, last year, while on a Danube cruise. It is a beautiful area. We had no trouble navigating around on our own, knowing only English.

The Old World charm rivals Western Europe, IMHO. And, the cost of living is much lower than the US and W. Europe. I'd love to spend an extended length of time there.

BTW, we stayed in an AC hotel in Prague. Most restaurants concert halls, and other public places were AC, as well. I'm not sure where they put the AC units.

AC isn't illegal, it just can't be seen on the building exterior. The place you stayed probably had the air handler in the attic somewhere and it was vented somehow to the outside.  We have always rented apartments and none of the places we've stayed had A/C.  I bring along a battery powered 5" fan with me so it really wasn't a problem. 

Crossing the Charles Bridge at midnight with the castle lit up on the bank Is my best memory of Prague.  What was yours?

[img width=650]http://www.hdrshooter.net/Portfolio/Pho ... ped-XL.jpg[/img]

(Shrunk the image size a bit via putting [img width=650] as the opening tag -- TPG)

FarmerD wrote:
The last 2 years we spent a month in central Europe (Austria, Czech Republic, and upper Bavaria) vacationing.  Obviously there are a lot of great sites to see but the small things that exude Old World charm I noticed really make this a great getaway.  In Prague especially you notice:

Absolutely no TV (the only channels we got were Czech or German language)
No neon signs
No plastic anywhere
No billboards
No concrete or asphalt - you only see cobblestone
No air conditioning - in Prague it's illegal to have central air units on roofs and window mounted air conditioners are illegal.  It's felt it ruins the old ambiance of the buildings
No satellite dishes - illegal also since it ruins the ambiance
No trash or litter on the streets
No graffiti
No traffic jams
No blatant advertising - restaurant had printed menus on the sidewalk or chalkboards with menus.  This included the one McDonalds we saw in Prague.
Zero crime - You can walk around anywhere past midnight and feel safe
99.9% of Austrian/Bavarian houses (and most Czech houses) have beautiful window boxes filled with hanging petunias.  Every house also seemed to have a small flower garden.
Wonderful farmer's markets in every city (Prague, Vienna, Munich, Salzburg, etc)

The relaxed laid back atmosphere free of modern annoyances makes you question our way of life in the US.

So a group of people decided to impose their tyranny on everyone else by banning people from doing certain things that would negatively impact "ambiance". Sounds like the opposite of a place I'd like to live. It's why I'll never live in a place with a home owners association. I already have one mom. I don't need a bunch of other moms, holding guns to my head, telling me what I can and can't do to my own home because it bothers them.

As far as no crime, I imagine that's likely due to a destruction/elimination of low SES classes. People in middle to high SES don't commit violent crimes for the most part. If you go to cities in the US where there's a ridiculously high cost of living, there's no low SES people, and no violent crime. Unfortunately, the liberal agenda in the US has pushed the SES divide to drastic levels by things such as 2-year unemployment benefits, Obamaphones, Obamacare, increased minimum wage, etc. In an effort to help the low SES, the liberals have severely hurt them for reasons that you already understand, or will never understand/believe so there's no point in arguing.

Thread hijack over. Back to the Euro Vacation

Politics aside, that's a beautiful photo!

TripleB wrote:As far as no crime, I imagine that's likely due to a destruction/elimination of low SES classes. People in middle to high SES don't commit violent crimes for the most part.

Wait, so what's wrong with that, exactly?  Shouldn't it be a goal of society to not require any low "SES" people?  Or by "destruction/elimination" do you mean killing individuals as opposed to moving them up the ladder?  If so, is that what you're saying happened?

TripleB wrote:
So a group of people decided to impose their tyranny on everyone else by banning people from doing certain things that would negatively impact "ambiance". Sounds like the opposite of a place I'd like to live. It's why I'll never live in a place with a home owners association. I already have one mom. I don't need a bunch of other moms, holding guns to my head, telling me what I can and can't do to my own home because it bothers them.

HSA's can be a very good thing.  We're going to have to move this next year.  We're tired of the half dozen mutts barking and howling every night, the f$cktard renters that live by us with their 3 foot tall weeds in the front yard, and the guy two doors down from us with a junked out car in his driveway.    That kind of crap ain't tolerated in a good HSA neighborhood. 

flyingpylon wrote: Politics aside, that's a beautiful photo!

I got that picture from Miroslav Petrasko's photography blog.  Check out the link for some more spectacular photos of Prague.

http://www.hdrshooter.com/top-5-spots/t ... ts-prague/

At its core, I think this discussion concerns, to use an Apple word, "curated" experiences: the idea of limitations on choice being desirable as long as the limitations are chosen sensibly by rational people with the goal of make the total experience more pleasant for a chosen target audience rather than simply exercising control for control's sake. Bans on neon lights, satellite dishes, and street-facing AC compressors are examples of government curation, just as Apple's decision to prohibit certain apps from the App store is an example private curation.

The inherent danger with curation is how easily it can turn into petty tyranny. It's a fine line at times, and I think one of the reasons why many hate HOAs is because of how frequently that line gets crossed and the organization turns into the aesthetics police run by nosy control freaks. Governments often mess this up even worse. I don't have to give any examples because this is a libertarian paradise and we're all familiar with oppressive, control freak governments. Power corrupts, and the power to say, "you can't do this not because it's directly hurting anybody, but because it's contributing to an overall degradation of the whole experience for others" is a level of power that frankly very few people can really be trusted with.

I think one of the things that makes curation work is the degree of ease with which one can free oneself from it if one doesn't like the limitations that other people have chosen. In most of the private sector, you have a lot of choice; if you don't like the Apple-curated iPhone world, you can get a differently-curated Windows phone, or a far-less-curated Android phone, or a totally-non-curated Chinese ripoff phone, or a dumb phone from any of a zillion manufacturers, or lots of things. You have choice, and the difficulty of switching is low. So people gravitate toward the thing they genuinely prefer, because not only are there many choices, but the ease of choosing one is high.

But with HOAs (which are private organizations, let's not forget), the ease of choice is diminished due to the difficulty of switching. Leaving your HOA requires selling your house--an enormous, stressful, risk-fraught financial transaction. It's nothing like buying a different phone. As a result, I think people who make up HOA boards feel more comfortable exercising more of this petty control--because they can. They know, even if subconsciously, that they have more power due to the greater difficulty of evading it.

In this respect, governments are like HOAs times ten. Leaving your country is even more difficult than selling your house and moving to a different neighborhood or city. You have to uproot your entire life! Leave your friends, leave your family, leave your job, adapt to a completely different culture, and maybe even conduct the rest of your entire life in a whole new language! On top of that, many destinations don't even want you as a permanent resident nowadays. As a result, governments generally feel highly comfortable oppressing their people. It's possible to find a government with a light touch or whose restrictions are generally popular (like the Czech Republic, perhaps) but these are anomalies just like the awesome HOA is. The institutional structure of these organizations encourages abuse and it is generally a culture or set of individuals who are fighting this trend. The danger is that if the culture changes, or the individuals leave or die, things will rapidly change for the worse.

As an aside, this is why I think federalism is a good idea for government: it makes government work better by reducing the barriers to switching from one set of governing rules to another, giving every individual government more of an incentive to treat their people well rather than badly so as to attract rather than repel people. When an overarching federal government increases uniformity by reducing the differences between any given state, that weakens this force and makes individual states more comfortable behaving badly--not to mention, the big federal government is a force one cannot easily escape, increasing its power to misbehave with impunity. I can totally understand the point that moda makes about standardization and uniformity being benefits in some cases, but it can't be forgotten that they come at a cost: your ability to escape, which increases the potential for mischief.

The harder it is for you to escape, the more easily you can be oppressed.

Pointedstick wrote: But with HOAs (which are private organizations, let's not forget), the ease of choice is diminished due to the difficulty of switching. Leaving your HOA requires selling your house--an enormous, stressful, risk-fraught financial transaction. It's nothing like buying a different phone. As a result, I think people who make up HOA boards feel more comfortable exercising more of this petty control--because they can. They know, even if subconsciously, that they have more power due to the greater difficulty of evading it.

I have a very positive view of the HOA for my neighborhood; we have lived here 23 years.  One of the features that helps make it a positive is a comprehensive set of things that are allowable, things that are not, and things that require HOA approval prior to doing.  This set of rules is written and set before everyone who wishes to move to the neighborhood with signatures required that they have been read and agreed upon.  If the rules are too restrictive for someone, they have the choice, before spending a dime, to not move in and look for someplace better suited for their barking dogs, junker cars up on blocks, and shacks in the back yard for their sheep and goats.    If you move to this neighborhood and put up some $$$ for a home, you will be reasonably assured you can get a reasonable sales price when you leave ... the potential for neighborhood decay is somewhat reduced, albeit not assured.  So far, people seem to take pride in the neighborhood, fixing up houses and landscaping, keeping them maintained and painted in appealing colors, crap out of sight, lawns mowed, streets plowed of snow, etc.  Restrictive?  Yes.  Objectionably so?  No, not yet, not really even noticibly so for anything I or my neighbors have ever wanted to do.  Cost?  Extremely reasonable, around $100/yr for dues, mainly goes to grass cutting of some community property, street lighting, and snow removal in the winter. 

I think HOAs end up being disliked when people move in and want to change it to "their" culture.  Similar to people who move to the US for whatever reason, then decide they want to change the school system to support their home language, home religion, their culture, etc.

... Mountaineer

barrett wrote: FarmerD, You didn't mention the construction workers who sit outside having beers with their breakfast.

That's because the frikin beer in Prague is ~ $2 for a TALL glass. And it's GOOD. And I'm not even a beer drinker!

[img width=500]http://04varvara.files.wordpress.com/20 ... h-beer.jpg[/img]

from this page

Pointedstick wrote: As an aside, this is why I think federalism is a good idea for government: it makes government work better by reducing the barriers to switching from one set of governing rules to another, giving every individual government more of an incentive to treat their people well rather than badly so as to attract rather than repel people. When an overarching federal government increases uniformity by reducing the differences between any given state, that weakens this force and makes individual states more comfortable behaving badly--not to mention, the big federal government is a force one cannot easily escape, increasing its power to misbehave with impunity. I can totally understand the point that moda makes about standardization and uniformity being benefits in some cases, but it can't be forgotten that they come at a cost: your ability to escape, which increases the potential for mischief.

The harder it is for you to escape, the more easily you can be oppressed.

Part of the reason it is so easy to move from state to state instead of US to another country isn't just distance (really, distance is barely relevant in this day and age), but the uniformity of the federal government.  My money is valid in all 50 states.  My DL license and marriage license is valid in all 50 states.  Driving laws are relatively uniform.  I know that I won't drive through some random town that treats "outsiders" like criminals... well... I KINDA know that .  Ever seen rural West Virginia!?   (Don't get me wrong... absolutely beautiful countryside).

Never-mind, for all its issues already, the amazing degree it is relatively simple to engage in inter-state commerce without wildly differing rules and norms.  I know I sound like I'm contradicting myself, but what is currently annoying could be SO bad that businesses simply just don't engage in it much.

And being a quasi-Keynesian (more MR'ist) one of my main reasons for liking some strength in the federal government is that it's easier to have counter-cyclical spending increases and tax-cuts without problems, since we're a much-more closed system than states are (though, that is a chicken-egg thing, as the reason states aren't very closed systems is due to inter-state conformity).


But if we're talking about countries like this, if someone can tell me where individual property rights end, and community property rights begin with perfect certainty and precision, I think they've essentially invented a fantasy land in their mind, and it's going to piss them off for the rest of their life.  It's really, really easy to have differing views on what, exactly, property rights are, not to mention the utilitarian affects on a society of implementing community rights vs individual rights in different circumstances.

See my quote for what I think is an interesting perspective on what property truly is to an individual.

Uniformity can be good if it's good more like standardization, and if those standards make sense, are well-maintained, and are well-supported by the people who adopt them and are affected by them. The problem is that something are much easier to standardize on than others. We have a relatively uniform set of motor vehicle rules, for example, and most people seem to accept them. However, we currently have a patchwork quilt of gun carry rules, with wide disagreement on which approach is better. What would a national standard look like? Should it be licensed, with the licenses being subject to discriminatory police discretion? Should you not even need a license at all? Should you be able to carry into a church? A sporting event? Does that include neighborhood ball games? A bar if you don't drink alcohol? A restaurant that serves alcohol? A school? 100 feet of a school? 500 feet of a school? 1,000 feet of a school? What is a school, anyway? K-12? Universities? Should you not even be able to carry at all?

Etc.

With such diversity of opinions, uniformity is bound to piss off a lot of people. Think about how many people would be alarmed by a national standard that says anyone can carry any gun wherever they want throughout all the 50 states… or also a national standard that said that nobody could ever carry any gun anywhere outside of a locked box with no ammunition loaded.

barrett wrote: FarmerD, You didn't mention the construction workers who sit outside having beers with their breakfast.

I was stationed in Germany in the Army, and the first thing I saw when I got off the plane at like 7 in the morning was that exact thing

Not only having "some" beers... but working on the last one, with several empties (half liter empties, Germans don't do 8oz beers) on the ground.