[sprite]

I am in 100% agreement with your point of view, Scott. The fact that the victim was an American is incidental and not even germane to the story. The lifestyle, character and habitat of the victim are the essential facts.

[sprite]

Send Baldi an email inquiry. They may prove to be helpful. I was just at Baldi a few months ago and there are so many little resorts around Arenal that they may not even know.

[sprite]

Wow! That mosaic of the Monet painting sounds like a beautiful piece of tile work.

I am no expert, but the quality of the work I saw in progress at the Palmares house seemed quite good.

[sprite]

Maravilla, I hope you are correct about building costs. I spent some time talking with an engineer on the site where he was supervising the construction of a 5000 sq ft house in Buenos Aires, just outside of Palmares. This was almost two years ago and his estimate for this house was about $65 a sq ft at that time. The house was very luxurious. Time has passed and material costs have gone up substantially since then.

[sprite]

My goodness! Don’t you guys know who is running the show now? They are not a race or a religion or a political credo.

[sprite]

I have between $60 and $80. Perhaps $60 is more correct if things go exactly as planned but budgeting for $75 to include the inevitable problems as well as appliances might be wise.

I would never choose wood framed construction. It just feels and looks so insubstantial.

[sprite]

Costa Rica has a healthy Israeli population and I consider myself lucky to have made friends amongst some of them. It is suspicious that you choose this one waste of our taxes among all the many others to rant on. If you want to talk about Israelis in Costa Rica, that is a topic which would interest me. The few I have met there are absolutely wonderful people who have a unique take on living in Costa Rica.

[sprite]

there is probably a long list of pros and cons for wood versus cement as far as suitability for Costa Rica. I have only ever considered cement because it is by far the most utilized there. Logs have a certain cosmetic appeal to many but there must be other pluses.

[sprite]

Pretty slick. Where is this factory?

[sprite]

Thanks. I’m always interested in seeing photos. There was a half hour TV show of an American from Florida who built a fabulous log home in Costa Rica in the mountains. He was told by the locals that wood was not a good idea in CR because of the insects. He did it anyway and so far has had no problems. He had to get the logs from North Carolina, though.
He also mentioned that the local construction workers had no experience with logs.

[sprite]

Lotus, there is NO PLACE in the US that has the climate of the Central Valley of Costa Rica. To the extent that climate is important, Costa Rica simply cannot be bested by any other place with a similarly friendly culture and beautiful scenery.

[sprite]

When you invest in paper (stocks and bonds, you have the option of holding or trading quickly for cash regardless of the liquidity of the market. Real estate investments in general only offer that option when the market is liquid. (Is there a way to go “short” with real estate?) I don’t know. I assume real estate investors must have fallow periods of some duration. The question here is whether or not Costa Rica is entering a fallow period, a downturn. My sense is that it must do so sooner or later since the world economy seems to be headed in the same direction as the U.S.. Diversification is always a good idea. Have some real estate and some paper.

Edited on Sep 03, 2008 03:54

[sprite]

You cannot have totally free markets. There is a good reason they don’t exist anywhere. Markets are the direct result of corporate activity. Corporations exist only for economic profit and only sometimes have a weak, ancillary interest in public welfare and only when that welfare affects the bottom line.

Left unchecked, which is the direction the U.S. has been going for a long time, corporations consume resources and concentrate wealth into the hands of a controlling minority. Those in that controlling minority are the crooks I refer to above.

The “shackles” on markets you refer to are weak, mostly ineffectual attempts at regulatory checks to keep the psychotic corporate monsters from devastating the populations they reign over presently.

[sprite]

“Who ended up with zero?” Are you serious? If you are, then you haven’t paid any attention to what has been going on around you and far away. Take a guess at how many children die each day from malnutrition and disease.

Let me try again and make this as simple as possible. The planet is finite. There is nothing we can invent or produce that does NOT come from this finite basket of resources.
Every thing is recycled or used in a way that changes it substantially. We can maximize the extent these limited resources can be used to our benefit, but even that has limits.

Experts have estimated that the planet cannot sustain a population greater than between 7 billion and 14 billion people. We are approaching 7 billion quickly.

[sprite]

Thank you for making my point for me. Any added value to real estate such as the construction of a condo is merely the transfer of wealth from one place to another. The construction materials and labor for the construction are extracted from somewhere else at one price and put into the land. The developer then sells the finished product at a higher price to the buyer. That transfer of the difference in price is wealth from buyer to developer and is the zero sum transaction.

There is no mana falling from the heavens. This planet is finite. The idea that we can just consume our rear ends off till the end of time and never run out of stuff is absurd. This is a closed system. New wealth is an illusion. We are just recycling the same old same old.

Edited on Aug 20, 2008 18:21

Edited on Aug 20, 2008 18:22

[Author]

Posts