Price discovery in process (that's for you, Publius) up in nosebleed country

159 Bedford Road has cut its price to $3.295 million after trying to get $3.495 for the past 56 days. Nice looking house, and certainly a more substantial property than you’ll find in SoPo Riverside, but Bedford Road can be a slow sell, especially up this far. On the other hand, these owners paid full price, $2.895 million in 2004 during our last land rush; they snapped it up just two days after it hit the market, and may now regret their precipitous action.

Final sales price reported for Riverside house

27 Stoney Ridge Lane, priced at $3.295 million, closed at $3.576. I like Stoney Ridge: it’s that small dead end at the end of Lake Drive South, so it’s quiet, but also an easy walk to the train and both Eastern and Riverside schools.

A March contract, as you may have suspected from the snow in its listing picture.

Uh oh, now they've done it, they've pissed off the barista

your tax dollars at work

AOC threatens to IMPEACH all six conservative Supreme Court Justices after Trump immunity ruling

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Monday she will be filing articles of impeachment against the conservative justices after they ruled on Donald Trump's immunity case.

Supreme Court Justices are appointed for life unless they choose to step down or are impeached - and the last and only time a justice was impeached was in 1805.

'The Supreme Court has become consumed by a corruption crisis beyond its control,' AOC posted on X. 'Today’s ruling represents an assault on American democracy.'

'It is up to Congress to defend our nation from this authoritarian capture,' she continued. 'I intend on filing articles of impeachment upon our return.'

Pretty house, pretty setting, but the wrong price, apparently.

7 Orchard Drive, Milbrook, has whacked another $500,000 off its price and is now looking for $4.995 million. It began at $6.050 April 24th and so far there have been no takers, but to the owners and agent’s credit, there have now been two substantial price “adjustments”. Too often, owners cling stubbornly to the price they want, or the price they “need”, while the market marches around and past them. That’s a losing strategy.

Ah, gay pride

1979, we hardly knew ye

And there’s much to be proud about.

Police appeared to opt out of taking action as San Francisco’s Pride march attendees openly performed oral sex on each other and engaged in disturbing sexual acts, including urinating on one another, during Sunday’s pride parade, social media video shows.

One attendee laid down in an inflatable pool in a designated area called “The Fetish Zone” and let a woman pee on him. Another man wearing only a dog collar and a small cloth around his genitals stood in the pool and clapped, video that reporter Savanah Hernandez posted to Twitter shows.

WARNING EXTREMELY GRAPHIC:

SF PRIDE- A man lies in an inflatable pool of urine in The Fetish Zone where attendees are encouraged to pee on him.

Other booths featured participants getting spanked, whipped and imitating sex acts on each other, all in public.

This is an 18+… pic.twitter.com/AwqfRb5IKe

— Savanah Hernandez (@sav_says_) June 30, 2024

Here and gone in Riverside

8 Hendrie Avenue, $3.350 million, is pending after 12 days on the market. Built in 1880, this house may have been — and I stress “may” — one of farmhouses a developer in the 1920s purchased in other parts of the state, disassembled, and brought down here to Hendrie. More knowledgeable readers (a low bar) can probably correct my dates and identify whether this house was part of that project. Regardless, it’s a nice house, and it’s easy to see why it went so quickly, and probably above-ask.

Another price war "winner" is about to lose

Though not too badly, probably. The owners of 26 Shore Acre Drive in Old Greenwich purchased it last year for $3.05 million in a bidding contest that began at $2.795. They changed their minds about its desirability, apparently, and put it back up for sale this May at $2.995 million. Twenty-two days later, it’s reported under contract. While that’s not a very long time, in this market, three weeks on the shelf, instead of mere days, suggests that it won’t be going for above-ask. We’ll have to wait until it closes to learn its final selling price.

A cozy weekend cabin for practically peanuts — gourmet peanuts, to be sure, but …

0 Rich Island, Byram, hit the market Friday at $7.495 million. Nifty place, although anyone who has ever had a weekend retreat on an island will tell you that it can be an inconvenient way of living.

It might seem to be low to the water, for some, especially considering that our best scientific minds tell us that sea level will have risen 50’ by 2030, but the house has stood up to storms and floods since 1900, and the current owners have been using it since 1980, so intrepid buyers can probably relax.

Besides, the type of buyer who is terrified at the prospect of ice floe-surfing polar bears invading his property cant’t even hang a picture, let alone operate a skiff, and would probably get lost trying to reach this place from shore without a hired guide — he’s not the market here.

50 Sumner Road has been put back up for sale

Houlihan has the listing and has priced it at $4.995 million. The house needed some serious work when I toured it in 2015, and that was accomplished by new buyers, who paid $1.575 for it that year, then pretty-much completely rebuilt and expanded it before returning it to the market in 2018 at $3.6 million. They ended up getting $3.150 million, eventually, in 2019, and those buyers in turn sold it two years later, post-COVID, via a bidding war “won” by these owners for $4.6 in 2021 (obtaining a mortgage for 100% of the purchase price, which is nice work, if you can get it).

Now it’s back. It’s a nice house, if this is your taste, and the grounds are pretty special. But the back country has traditionally sold at a discount from properties closer to town, and I’ll be curious to see if the area’s new popularity is still enduring. Yes, houses up here are typically described as “just minutes away from shopping”, but when a dash into town to pick up that forgotten quart of milk or a dozen eggs is a 30-minute roundtrip, or children need to return to school to retrieve their forgotten homework (do they still assign homework these days?), the cost of the privacy and spaciousness so far above the Merritt can grow old, for some.

not sure if anyone is expected to actually use this “kitchen”, but up here, who cooks? And the caterers will be brining their own equipment anyway.

Another Hollywood multi-millionaire calls for the peasants to shiver in the dark over their bowls of lentils

smug idiot

Some clown named Adam MacKay (he was a screenwriter for SNL, thus proving he has no sense of humor, and went on to get rich as a director and producer) has defended the vandalism of Stonehenge in the name of ending the the western world’s use of fossil fuels, and asserts that “if we care about protecting history, monuments, art, culture, sports, and all the other things we love about our society, then we need to get off fossil fuels as quickly as humanly possible.”

The trouble with his appeal is that he and his crowd do NOT care about preserving history, monuments, art or even western culture; in fact, they want to destroy all those things, as they show by their actions, every day.

Why doesn’t he take his fellow celebrities from Hollywood to China, and attack the Great Wall? After that, they can travel west to India and spray paint the Taj Mahal .

The climate scaremongers: Proof that our Net Zero drive is pointless

FOR years BP has published its Annual Review of Energy, with loads of detail about global energy production and consumption trends. This year the job has been taken over by the Energy Institute, but the format is the same.

The latest report shows that emissions of carbon dioxide continued to rise in 2023, hitting another high. This continues the pattern of recent years, interrupted only by the lockdowns in 2020.

 The highlights of the report are:

•    CO2 emissions are up 1.6 per cent year-on-year

•    Fossil fuel consumption is also up, by 1.5 per cent

•    Primary energy consumption up 2 per cent

•    Wind and solar power account for only 6 per cent of total energy, up from 5.3 per cent in 2022

In short, increasing generation from wind and solar is not even keeping up with rising demand. The following three graphs tell the story:

https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review/resources-and-data-downloads

Since 2015, when the Paris Climate Agreement was signed, non-OECD emissions have grown by 18 per cent.

The message is stark. While Western countries are slowly moving away from fossil fuels, the rest of the world have made it clear that they are not concerned about climate change, real or imaginary. Their only priority is to grow their economies and improve the lot of their people. For this they need abundant and cheap energy, something that renewables cannot supply.

It must be painfully apparent, even to the Milibands of the world, that the rich OECD countries are rapidly becoming irrelevant in overall terms. Whatever sacrifices we make, the rest of the world will carry on with business as usual.