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

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

I'm neither omniscient nor particularly clueful about home ownership, so I'm going to ask a stupid question.

whereas we lived within our means until we could do better... and then the value of our house dropped 20%.

Why is this a problem? Is it primarily that you can't easily move anywhere until you pay down the mortgage to what the house is currently worth? I mean--unless your income goes down as well you're not suddenly going to be unable to afford the payments you had been making before and thereby get kicked out on the street, and if anything you'll get a break on property tax, no?

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Essentially, yes -- I have a job in another city, and would very much like to move there, but the drop in the value of the house means that in order to move, I'll probably have to bring money to the bank that we don't have since the value of the house has dropped enough to cancel out our equity. Nothing is certain until we find a buyer, of course, so we don't know just how unlucky we are. While the payments are the same, the growth in other costs (the heating bill more than tripling since we've moved in) makes it very hard, thus the desire to move somewhere where the housing cost is cheaper to begin with.

As far as property tax... the city's costs will stay the same, it seems to me, so while they might value the house less, I'd imagine they'd up the millage so the tax would be the same. Hey, if we're stuck here, we need the schools to be decent... so there are no real breaks in all this, I think.