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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> As Will 
> Rogers famously noted, they ain't making any more land. 

Heard that many, many times.  I'm sure there was a Latin or Anglo-Saxon, 
problably even a Sumarian or Egyptian phrase for that.  People fought bloody 
battles over a particular bit of truck and bid each other into poverty when 
vast 
tracks of land a few score miles away were unused.

I recently read, but alas did not record, a comparison between clothes and 
real estate as it is traded now of days.  There's the use value of clothes, 
they 
keep you warm and modest, etc.  And then there's the affective value ... why 
a pair of used jeans at the Salvation Army store cost a tiny fraction of what 
designer jeans cost.  Both are functional, both have a practical use that 
will 
be realized no matter what.  If fashion changes, the economy collapses, 
whatever, both pair of jeans will retain their full use value.  But the 
affective 
value can evaporate like the dew for the smallest reason or none at all.   

So a shrinking world taken into account, how much of the real estate prices 
now of days is ... well ... 'real' and how much is affective?  No way of 
knowing for sure, but I am guessing we will soon find out.

James