This is not a hole; this is someone's house...
"This is not a hole; this is someone's house..." Everett Fire on Twitter

Seattle Times business reporter Heidi Groover reports that "nearly one in four homes is selling for all cash." This information, gathered by Redfin between January and April, explains why the market is so hot. There is a lot of money out there looking for capital sinks, and a house is, of course, a capital asset. The buyers with hard cash in Redfin's reading of the situation are from the "tech industry" and have "high salaries and stock-option packages."

But this explanation sounds too good to be entirely true. As is, it justifies the non-stop rise of prices in the housing market. This is how capitalism works best. There is demand, and there is a limited supply. And the function of the market is to sort out this imbalance. But this hoary economic logic rarely works in this simple and direct manner. Demand is not often associated with a conventional need, but with one that reveals a distributive imbalance at the level of value (and value as opposed to wealth). You feeling me?

To see what night and day looks like in Seattle politics, compare the Stranger Election Control Board's endorsements for the current election (2021 Seattle and King County) with those made by the Seattle Times editorial board. Let the races begin!

In the Gaza Strip, people dig tunnels to transport goods (food, appliances, weapons, what have you) because of the sea blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt. In the Seattle metropolitan area, which has, as everyone very well knows, a piping hot housing market, tunnels are built for the homeless to live in. KIRO 7: "Authorities told KIRO 7 they believe the tunnel had been built and used by a homeless man in the area. The man’s friends said he had been routinely hiding in the tunnel for at least two years."

Yes and yes and yes to all of these clouds on a finally cool Friday morning. Clouds, clouds, thank you for taking that blasted sun away. And please stay the whole day and don't be smoke. Or, put in a Bobby Brown way: "Please, don't be cruel."

What is at the bottom of this new luxury machine? One of so many luxury machines?


An automated parking system. All you have to do is drive your pollution machine into the dock, leave it there, and, as you ascend to your splashy place around the top of the 41-story tower, the system does the rest. Marc Stiles, senior reporter at the Puget Sound Business Journal, writes that the system, the first of its kind in Seattle, "can park twice the number of vehicles in the same amount of space." This means packing more cars into the city. But supposedly there is some good news in this story for the warming environment: "Since cars aren't running during the parking process, the experience is emissions free." The polar bears will certainly be happy to hear about this. Bravo.

Vancouver, I will see you in the third weekend of August. Your dashing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is opening the Canadian border to Americans who are fully vaccinated. I'm fully vaccinated. I'm ready to go. What a long, long time it has been without your bay, your slim towers, those black mountains, your glorious food. We shall meet again.

Do you agree with this reading?

Redmond police release video of former Seattle Seahawks star Richard Sherman trying to crash into the house of his father-in-law. It is sad to watch. Yesterday, Sherman was released from King County Jail with several restrictions: no more drinking, no more drugs, no more encounters with his father in law.

American philosopher Graham Harman and co-founder of an anti-Kantian school of thought called Speculative Realism marvels at the bizarre 21st century odyssey of the 90s icon of gangster rap, Death Row Records.


Wikipedia: "Among [Hasbro] products are Transformers, G.I. Joe, Power Rangers, Rom the Space Knight, Micronauts, M.A.S.K., Monopoly, Furby, Nerf, Twister, and My Little Pony. ." Wikipedia: After the 2007-2010 subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, Blackstone Group LP bought more than $5.5 billion worth of single-family homes to rent, and then be sold when the prices rise." Wikipedia: "By the late 1990s, the label [Death Row Records] began to decline after the death of its star artist, Tupac Shakur, imprisonment of co-founder Suge Knight, and the departures of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg."

In April Blackstone bought "eOneMusic, the owner of Death Row Records, Dualtone Music Group and other music catalogs from Hasbro for $385 million in cash."

"Death Row is the record that pays me..."