link round-up

[cellio]

Maritan Headsets (from Joel on Software) is a long but worthwhile article on software standards -- both not having them early enough, and having them and trying to enforce them. Parts of it made me laugh out loud, like the paragraph containing this passage: "[...] but of course when you plug the headphones into FireQx 3.0 lo and behold they explode in your hands because of a slight misunderstanding about some obscure thing in the spec which nobody really understands called hasLayout, and everybody understands that when it's raining the hasLayout property is true and the voltage is supposed to increase to support the windshield-wiper feature, but there seems to be some debate over whether hail and snow are rain for the purposes of hasLayout..."

Rescue me: a fed bailout crosses a line seems (to this non-expert) like a good analysis of what just happened to the market and the dollar. (Need a login ID? Try BugMeNot.) I am more scared, and more angry, about our government's economic policies than I've been in a while. As someone on my subscription list said (I forget who), the people who actually took personal responsibility and saved rather than spending recklessly are the ones who are going to get hammered by this, while the idiots who bought houses (or corporate holdings) they couldn't afford and racked up tons of debt will be bailed out because we can't stand to say "too bad you were an idiot".

As long as I'm saying "too bad"... too bad, Michigan and Florida. Agreed.

On a lighter note: Garfield Minus Garfield is surreal. And since seeing it a week or so ago, I haven't been able to read Garfield "straight".

Comments

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

What bothers me is that they will bailout those who are behind on their loans or who are already so mismanaged they are in foreclosure. Those who don't let it get that far are getting hit by the credit scare which is keeping the rates up and preventing refinancing (by those who would meet current guidelines). I'm worried they are going to lose confidence for so long that values are going to drop more, thus cutting off the refinance avenue, and things will spiral worse.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

I know you're a libertarian, but I still wince at this a bit. Corporate holdings are one thing, houses are another... really it is useless in the housing market to blame the people who took out the loans, I think, because people lived in a context where the danger was very hard to understand. Pittsburgh is not New England or the West Coast. The markets in these places made it nearly impossible for anyone in the middle class to buy a house.

Believe me, we're the ones on the shaft here -- unable to move because of this grand national stupidity (in general) and all the foreclosure signs around here (in particular). And we were careful enough to not get an ARM or do anything ridiculous to get into that situation. But I don't blame the people who did, really. People around here who got ARMs and whatnot were just trying to do what we were doing -- get a house for their family in a New England market that makes it almost impossible for the average middle class family to do so. The size of a reasonable home purchase is so mind-boggling that you have to use whatever conventional wisdom around you that you can get -- you take on faith that the mortgage and everything else makes sense. If the bank will lend you so much money, not to take it seems to be only marginally less rational than hoarding gold under your bed (you never know, the government could default). We were told we could borrow almost $40K more toward this house whose mortgage is killing us -- people tend to go along with what the bank tells them they can borrow, stupid or not.

So talk about people being idiots makes me uneasy because the real fault is with the banks that threw money at people even as they knew they were bad risks. In any event, the cause is irrelevant -- my house (and yours) will continue to lose value on the market as long as there's not enough money floating around to prop up the price. So when people get indignant about bailing out home buyers to punish bad choices, the joke is on them -- it's your own house value you're cutting. Really we need something like the Depression-era FHA that stabilized prices on a systemic level by rescuing people who were trapped in their houses by the market. Surely some of that $200 million a day we're spending on Iraq could be put to good use.

[sethg]

I'm sure that if anyone had suggested, six months ago, that there should be some kind of orderly write-down of subprime mortgage debt to prevent this kind of catastrophe, the folks at Bear Stearns would have been speaking eloquently about how important it was for borrowers to take personal responsibility and for the market to work things out all by itself.

One reason I'm not a libertarian is because I believe that no matter how thoroughly a government pledges allegiance to free-market principles, when given a choice between following those principles or providing some kind of benefit to the rich and well-connected and noisy, the principles will go out the window.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

That NYT article was full of beans. Completely and utterly full of beans.

Bear Stearns screwed up. Big, bad, bold and brash and for a very long period of time. The managers and owners are getting their teeth kicked in for it. (They are paid annual bonuses for performance - they aren't getting any for 2008. They get paid in stock, which is worth nothing to them. They own nothing, now. There was no "moral hazard" here.)

In times of plenty, there is capacity to absorb the failure of a bank with as many customers as Bear Stearns. This is not one of those times. Not only would there be failure, and many thousands of customers punished (and who would lose their shirts), but if the Fed didn't act, there could be trouble.

There are LOTS of banks in similar pain to Bear Stearns. It was the worst of them all, but not by as much as one might hope.

Plus: that industry runs on confidence, investor confidence, which is in very short supply.

"Saving" Bear Stearns (and they saved it like that village that was burned in order to save it), is actually preserving all the other banks, and if they collapsed there goes your company, your pension, and maybe the bank that has yours savings. And perhaps even the dollar, and who knows how far it would go?

It was necessary, it was smart.

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

Ah, Joel. I occasionally forget about him. Great stuff.

One thing that does disturb me about all this IE8 stuff is the "all browsers have a 'standards' mode". Sorry, I use Opera, and there is just one mode. It may not render everything perfectly according to how people think it should work, but it's closer to standards-compliant than most browsers. For some set of standards, of course.

And to counter myself, the HTML5 in-progress standards make me feel quite ill.

As someone on my subscription list said (I forget who), the people who actually took personal responsibility and saved rather than spending recklessly are the ones who are going to get hammered by this, while the idiots who bought houses (or corporate holdings) they couldn't afford and racked up tons of debt will be bailed out because we can't stand to say "too bad you were an idiot".

Word. I might get a few hundred bucks from this "tax rebate", but probably not. Fiscally irresponsible people will get much, much more. As are all of the banks who made poor investments in those people.

I won't comment about Michigan and Florida, assuming you can guess how I would feel. ;-)