Any sufficiently advanced callousness is indistinguishable from hatred.
JESR @ 397: Have you tried Foottraffic? They sell opaque tights. Not marketed for dance use, though, and I don't know if they have crotch gussets.
Reminds me of the layers of meanings of the phrase "the fifth elephant" in the book of the same name.
Nona @40, what sort of fruit fillings do you want to make for your hamentaschen?
Glenn @535 wrote: "Question: A decent while back, Teresa had a post comparing the Bush administration to a bust out con. I've been looking for the original post and have been coming up empty. Any ideas?"
I think I remember the same thing you're thinking of. Check out comment 67 here. One of Teresa's other comments from that thread was promoted to full-fledged posthood, but this one was substantive enough that I bookmarked it.
On the subject of wills, since Vicki @ 419 brought it up: keep your funeral instructions separate, and tell all your close family where to find them when the time comes. Per Jessica Mitford, people tend to put their funeral instructions in or with their wills. Then the bereaved family respectfully wait until after the funeral to read the will, and find out they've just done it all wrong.
Backing up Abi's remark at #175, the Associated Press quotes a Federal Reserve economist as saying, "Mortgage-backed securities had historically been a fairly safe investment offering a better return than even safer U.S. Treasury debt. With interest rates near historic lows from 2001 to 2004, investors around the world were trying to earn more on their investments. At the time, mortgage-backed securities, which had been heavily promoted abroad by the U.S. government, seemed like a fairly safe option.
"As global investors demanded more mortgage-backed securities, banks began looking for more mortgages to buy, repackage and resell. This was one of the reasons lending standards loosened. By the time it became clear that many home loans had gone to people who wouldn't be able to repay them, the market had grown large enough to shake investors all over the world - from community banks in California to multi-billion-dollar banks in Germany."
Browser tricks: In Internet Explorer and Firefox, there is a shortcut for entering URLs of the form www.foo.com. Just type "foo" in a blank address bar, then hold down Control and tap Enter, and the browser will automatically add the "http://www." and the ".com".
Shift-Enter does the same thing for ".net" addresses.
And, even if you don't have a scroll-wheel, you can change the text size by holding Control and tapping the + or - keys on the number keypad.
I'm not sure how that would work on a laptop, though.
If you're willing to invest some money, Naturally speaking is good with spoken commands to page up, page down, next tab, highlight all visibly hyperlinks, click link three, and so forth.
Those of you who enjoy the Brokers with Hands on their Faces sidelight may also enjoy Fine, Fine Line, by the Richter Scales. It predates the current market crisis but the emoting is completely applicable.
I'm also fond of their song Here Comes Another Bubble, which is more specifically about computing-tech bubbles.
Not that he knows me at all, but best wishes.
I have read pretty much every entry in Making Light, including the Astroturf entries, and I read the original post as Mia did: suggesting that the Twitter commenters were lazy or inconsiderate, not that they were unreal.
Albatross, Sica, Heresiarch, Madeline, and the other people who've been discussing why the mortgage risk assessments were wrong:
The best source I've found for this is the analysis posts on Irvine Housing Blog, particularly Structured Finance 101 and Systemic Risk in the Housing Market.
Conventional mortgages are the way they are for a reason. The interest rate is fixed so your payment will be fixed and predictable. You have to prove you can afford it by documenting your income and its reliability.
'Afford it' means the mortgage payment is only 25% of your monthly income; maybe 28% if the banker feels like living on the edge. Anything higher means you won't have enough left to cover other expenses. No, really: owning a house means maintenance and repairs are no longer covered by your rent payment. So homeowners have to save money toward predictable long-term expenses, like replacing the roof every twenty years, and unpredictable ones, like repairs after the furnace blows up or after a tree knocks the house down.
This is why you also need a down payment from your own money: owners have to be people who can reliably save money from their current income, and the down payment demonstrates that.
As near as I can tell, the reason the standard down payment was 20% is that in previous housing bubbles, house values fell by 20 to 25%. So even if a person bought a house at the peak with a 20% down payment, and then the bubble popped suddenly and one year later they lost their job, the bank could foreclose and sell the house for most or all of the outstanding mortgage balance. 20% down payments meant banks could reliably get their money back.
Also, banks used to insist on an appraisal by an independent appraiser to make sure the house was worth more than you wanted to borrow. Borrowing more than the house's value was right out. During the bubble, though, brokerages started lending more than the price of the house. And they started pressuring appraisers to inflate values.
A lot of people who bought during the bubble used adjustable mortgages, negative-amortization mortgages, or 100+% mortgages specifically because they couldn't afford the payment on a conventional mortgage: they could only afford the teaser rate on an adjustable mortgage, and they were counting on refinancing or selling for a profit before the rate adjusted. This means they couldn't really afford to buy the house.
Banks and brokerages knew their customers couldn't afford those houses; knew those loans were ticking time bombs. Nevertheless, when they sold those loans as CMOs or SIVs or CDSs, they used the default-rate data from conventional loans to design and market investments in no-documentation, adjustable, negative-amortization, 100+% loans. This is why far more of them are failing than was predicted by data on completely different loans.
The cascade effect of mass foreclosures driving prices down is just a side effect of making huge numbers of unpayable loans.
Side note: IIRC, individual mortgage brokers, like insurance brokers, get paid a commission shortly after they originate a loan. Their personal income is not affected if the loan goes into default a few years later. They also tend to be highly money-motivated. Brokerage companies are the ones who lose money when loans go into default, so they usually enforce strict rules about which loans brokers are allowed to make.
But with all these nifty ways of selling mortgages for immediate cash, brokerages figured they didn't need to worry about the long term either, so they gave up the strict rules. Instead they sold out for quick cash and invested it in...other people's unsupportable mortgages.
Constance @62 asked: "Whatever whyfore does the independently wealthy Cindy put up with the old troll? He NEEDS HER money. She doesn’t need him."
I don't know much about her personally, but, like his first wife and his running mate, she is a former beauty queen. McCain seems to have a thing for them. And one of the traits beauty-pageant contestants have in common is a willingness to be judged by their looks and performance of femininity. She may feel she needs A Man, especially A High-Status Man, as proof of achievement; and in that game, it's important to lock in your position early (through marriage), and then hold on no matter what, because the older you get the less you can compete with the floods of younger women.
MPE @ 313: Well put, and thank you for articulating that.
The trouble with the Republicans currently in power is that they KEEP making unfixable messes.
I want to cry.
“It’s not based on any particular data point,†a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.â€
That statement crystallized things for me: this is the last stage of a deliberate scam. They're making one last attempt to carry off as much as they can of our money.
Linkmeister, one last clarification, and then I will butt out: Pulverizing pills leaves a gritty texture. Sprinkling it on top would leave it visible and the dominant flavor at first lick. I was talking about stuff that came as unflavored powder in a gel capsule: we opened the capsule and mixed it into soft food with a fork so it was thoroughly diluted.
Linkmeister, I don't know your dog's problems, but my dog's arthritis improved enormously with a dietary supplement called Joint Rescue. It was glucosamine, chondroitin, and assorted anti-inflammatories including yucca and turmeric. I ordered it from Ark Naturals over the net. We mixed it into canned food (which was a treat for our dog), but when he stopped tolerating the flavor we found that plain powdered glucosamine & chondroitin, sold for human consumption, worked almost as well and didn't have the nasty flavor. The supplements added years of movement and comfort to his life.
I do not work for Ark Naturals, I have no association with them, and nobody bribed me to post this.
Thena @ 150: We've been having snowy winters and hurricanes in the same place for a long time: that's the New England coast, particularly Cape Cod.
The New England farmhouse style is two to three stories, medium-pitched roof with overhang to keep the runoff away from the foundation, often with covered porches. Good against snow.
The saltbox style is specifically one and a half stories. It tends to be more compact.
The term "Cape Cod style" is widely misapplied. Properly, it is based on the farmhouse, but smaller and very compact, with shallower roof pitch, no overhang at all, no porch, no attached outbuildings, no surface concavities, no ornamental trim, nothing that a strong wind could grab and rip off. The only outside feature may be shutters, permanently affixed to the frames and capable of being securely latched to protect the windows during storms. It was invented specifically as defensive architecture against hurricanes.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 3 |
| 2008 | 43 |
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