It is all very basic maths, and nowadays the Intarweb has calculators for you so you know exactly how much you need to pay each month.
I worked myself out this, compared the monthly payments for different mortgages against my salary, and chose one that I could afford (the mortgages brokers I talked to didn't offer the one I chose BTW, what a surprise).
4 years later I am perfectly fine, in spite of having being unemployed for more than a year.
If all had been banks not getting paid, they would have got the houses, would have lost a bit of money (or a lot, that is irrelevant) and that would have been the end of it (not really, it would have affected the economy, but would not have provoked a worldwide meltdown).
The problem is that investment banks, thanks to lax regulation, decided that packaging those bad loans in crazy quasi ponzy schemes was a good idea.
And the people measuring risk (rating agencies) did not to their work.
Bad mortgages would have not come close to cause such monumental problem, no matter which way you want to look at the mess we are living through.
... when you buy you are left with two very valuable assets at the end of the mortgage: the house and the usage you got out of it.
If you treay a house like your home then you don;t care if its price rises or falls, at the end, the day after the mortgage is paid, you begin to make money (either by not paying rent or by renting the house out and pocketing most of what you charge).
If you are renting, after the same period of time you are left with, er.. nothing, and better you pay your rent next month, otherwise you will be thrown out.
Which is exactly what happened (sigh, months of this going on and there are still people out there that are not grasping the issues).
Once sub prime mortgages where securitized and those securities divided (and those bits sold individually) there was no chance in hell that any bank buying the stuff could say if they were buying a pot of gold or of the proverbial shit.
Enter rating agencies. These idiots didn't do their work, they simply looked at the securitized mortgages, saw a big name behind them (like Lehman Brothers lets say) and gave them a good rating, anyway Lehmans is paying for the service and you don't want to upset your client....
The whole system is full of incompetence, corruption and complexity.
The problem is that clever banks like Lehman Brothers (RIP) took those debts and spread the risk by nefarious, unregulated means.
If somebody had stopped the securitization of bad mortgages the problem would have stopped with the banks making bad loans and their costumers. As things were these securities eventually led to such distrust in the interbanking lending system that credit literally stopped worldwide.
We could have bad mortgages as long as corporate banking had been moderately risk averse...
Why do I need parental controls in any device of mine?
Parental controls just give lazy parents the feeling of doing something when in reality they are doing nothing about the education of their offspring.
I can decide myself if an application is tasteful or not and if I want it in any device of mine.
Which is why I don't have an iPhone, but all the rest of you that feel compelled to be treated like an audience of captive putative children, enjoy your poison (and to think people actually pay for the privilege....).
If they are selling ad space, then why don't they stop publishing anything at all and sell a publication with ads only?
The newspaper lives and dies by its content, no content, no readers, no readers, no sales and no ads.
Newspapers should look for a business model that takes them back to their original roots: people paying for opinion. When they gave so much prominence to advertisement as the main tool for their survival they moved into the territory of marketing people and all kind of varied snake oil peddlers.
In spite of everything, a content free newspaper can't sell anything.
Newspapers all around the world have a long tradition of bringing the powerful to account, very often when the rule of law doesn't.
No question that there are plenty of newspapers whose only reason to exist is to make money, but saying that all newspapers are like that is showing monumental ignorance and intellectual laziness.
HID (Human Interface Design) studies those topics, it is a well known fact in the field that familiarity increase the appeal of any given interface, no matter how bizarre or illogical it may appear at face value.
Linux proponents should forget about anybody older than 20 years and younger than 60. they are beyond redemption.
Younger people are openminded, willing to learn and are always in the lookout for th cool factror (which Linux provides in spades).
Older people have a different incentive: money. Once you begin to rely on a pension for a living, all of the sudden paying 2 or 3 hundred bucks for the software in your computer begins to look stupid.
If you play with the data you will see that air quality has improved around 25% respect to 10 years ago. Anecdotally speaking you surely remember the environmental contingencies, when birds died and children didn't go to school. We haven't had one of those for long time, and now once in a while you can actually see the volcanoes surrounding Mexico City again (I just did in my last visit there a couple of weeks ago).
But of course, you can ignore the objective data and allow your political biases to cloud your judgement.
Also medical coverage has actually being widened to people that do not have a formal job by means of a new health insurance.
Notice that air quality has been achieved by leftiest governments, while the medical insurance was promoted by the Federal (right wing) one...
So Mexico may be far from perfect, but there have been improvements and to deny this is misinformed, to say the least.
Those problems you mention are sporadic and localized.
As for population density there are many other places in the world with similar or higher densities and this hasn't been a significant factor in spreading sicknesses.
And just so you know, all Mexicans working formally automatically have free medical care for them and their families, recently the government introduced medical insurance for all the people not involved in the formal economy.
In other words, a Mexican will never be ruined by his health bills if he has been working and paying taxes.
Many companies are invested in SPARC not because they fail to interpret financial reports(the writing in the wall you are talking about) but because the solutions offered by Sun on SPARC are much better, or the only ones for certain problems.
Banks, oil industry, CAD, education, research, there are frankly many fields to name.
Yes, Sun got bitten by Lintel platforms, no question about it. They were idiotic in their approach to Solaris in Intel, and reacted too late (now Solaris in Intel is a serious platform, in many circumstances I would not give Linux a second view).
If you have seen the latest Sun offerings in the storage arena (appliances built around Solaris) you would understand that Sun is a real innovator, it is a shame that they are falling like this.
Sparc into legacy mode?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Didn't get that impression last time I attended one of their seminars a few weeks ago.
The multicore stuff Sun is doing is miles ahead og anything anybody else is doing,. I hope Oracle do not axe that.
The irrefutable proof of this is that we have different bodies of law to deal with copyright infringement and to deal with theft.
I have rarely seen any/.er claiming that copyright infringement is OK, most people recognize the illegality of this, nevertheless most people recognize also that copyright has been unethically and immorally subverted by the recording cartel an the governments of most countries.
So in synthesis, this is not different from copying music illegally, they are both illegal activities which should not be condoned, while at the same time pointing the unreasonable nature of the current legislation....
Yes, we call them H-1B's. In other news, our local unemployment rate is now above 10%.
Silicon Valley is special to me because of its cultural diversity. In one medium sized company you can work shoulder to shoulder with people from every major world ethnic group...
Can you assure us that those unemployed can cover the unfilled positions? When I used to interview people (the UK, I know, not the same, but it seems to be in a similar situation) we could not fill positions (even entry level ones) because most students were going for soft option education in University (media studies, photography, film making, etc) instead of science and engineering, which is the exact opposite of what has happened in other countries.
Also kids from other countries have lots of experience under their belt: in the UK university is only 3 years, and very often kids take a gap year, that is all great and good, but people their same age elsewhere will have 4 or 5 years university under their belts and they don't take gap years but instead start working, so when you get both of them in front of you it is frankly a no contest.
Slashdot Mirror
It is all very basic maths, and nowadays the Intarweb has calculators for you so you know exactly how much you need to pay each month.
I worked myself out this, compared the monthly payments for different mortgages against my salary, and chose one that I could afford (the mortgages brokers I talked to didn't offer the one I chose BTW, what a surprise).
4 years later I am perfectly fine, in spite of having being unemployed for more than a year.
If all had been banks not getting paid, they would have got the houses, would have lost a bit of money (or a lot, that is irrelevant) and that would have been the end of it (not really, it would have affected the economy, but would not have provoked a worldwide meltdown).
The problem is that investment banks, thanks to lax regulation, decided that packaging those bad loans in crazy quasi ponzy schemes was a good idea.
And the people measuring risk (rating agencies) did not to their work.
Bad mortgages would have not come close to cause such monumental problem, no matter which way you want to look at the mess we are living through.
... when you buy you are left with two very valuable assets at the end of the mortgage: the house and the usage you got out of it.
If you treay a house like your home then you don;t care if its price rises or falls, at the end, the day after the mortgage is paid, you begin to make money (either by not paying rent or by renting the house out and pocketing most of what you charge).
If you are renting, after the same period of time you are left with, er.. nothing, and better you pay your rent next month, otherwise you will be thrown out.
Which is exactly what happened (sigh, months of this going on and there are still people out there that are not grasping the issues).
Once sub prime mortgages where securitized and those securities divided (and those bits sold individually) there was no chance in hell that any bank buying the stuff could say if they were buying a pot of gold or of the proverbial shit.
Enter rating agencies. These idiots didn't do their work, they simply looked at the securitized mortgages, saw a big name behind them (like Lehman Brothers lets say) and gave them a good rating, anyway Lehmans is paying for the service and you don't want to upset your client....
The whole system is full of incompetence, corruption and complexity.
The problem is that clever banks like Lehman Brothers (RIP) took those debts and spread the risk by nefarious, unregulated means.
If somebody had stopped the securitization of bad mortgages the problem would have stopped with the banks making bad loans and their costumers. As things were these securities eventually led to such distrust in the interbanking lending system that credit literally stopped worldwide.
We could have bad mortgages as long as corporate banking had been moderately risk averse...
Why do I need parental controls in any device of mine?
Parental controls just give lazy parents the feeling of doing something when in reality they are doing nothing about the education of their offspring.
I can decide myself if an application is tasteful or not and if I want it in any device of mine.
Which is why I don't have an iPhone, but all the rest of you that feel compelled to be treated like an audience of captive putative children, enjoy your poison (and to think people actually pay for the privilege ....).
If they are selling ad space, then why don't they stop publishing anything at all and sell a publication with ads only?
The newspaper lives and dies by its content, no content, no readers, no readers, no sales and no ads.
Newspapers should look for a business model that takes them back to their original roots: people paying for opinion. When they gave so much prominence to advertisement as the main tool for their survival they moved into the territory of marketing people and all kind of varied snake oil peddlers.
In spite of everything, a content free newspaper can't sell anything.
Newspapers all around the world have a long tradition of bringing the powerful to account, very often when the rule of law doesn't.
No question that there are plenty of newspapers whose only reason to exist is to make money, but saying that all newspapers are like that is showing monumental ignorance and intellectual laziness.
I am just curious....
Oh wait, it isn't.
In any big corporation the poor Windows support people are constantly spending time with users holding their hand as well.
HID (Human Interface Design) studies those topics, it is a well known fact in the field that familiarity increase the appeal of any given interface, no matter how bizarre or illogical it may appear at face value.
Linux proponents should forget about anybody older than 20 years and younger than 60. they are beyond redemption.
Younger people are openminded, willing to learn and are always in the lookout for th cool factror (which Linux provides in spades).
Older people have a different incentive: money. Once you begin to rely on a pension for a living, all of the sudden paying 2 or 3 hundred bucks for the software in your computer begins to look stupid.
Air quality has improved enormously. Mexico City has an objective measurement of air quality (IMECA), you can find historical data here: http://www.sma.df.gob.mx/simat2/index.php?opcion=69
If you play with the data you will see that air quality has improved around 25% respect to 10 years ago. Anecdotally speaking you surely remember the environmental contingencies, when birds died and children didn't go to school. We haven't had one of those for long time, and now once in a while you can actually see the volcanoes surrounding Mexico City again (I just did in my last visit there a couple of weeks ago).
But of course, you can ignore the objective data and allow your political biases to cloud your judgement.
Also medical coverage has actually being widened to people that do not have a formal job by means of a new health insurance.
Notice that air quality has been achieved by leftiest governments, while the medical insurance was promoted by the Federal (right wing) one...
So Mexico may be far from perfect, but there have been improvements and to deny this is misinformed, to say the least.
Those problems you mention are sporadic and localized.
As for population density there are many other places in the world with similar or higher densities and this hasn't been a significant factor in spreading sicknesses.
And just so you know, all Mexicans working formally automatically have free medical care for them and their families, recently the government introduced medical insurance for all the people not involved in the formal economy.
In other words, a Mexican will never be ruined by his health bills if he has been working and paying taxes.
Many companies are invested in SPARC not because they fail to interpret financial reports(the writing in the wall you are talking about) but because the solutions offered by Sun on SPARC are much better, or the only ones for certain problems.
Banks, oil industry, CAD, education, research, there are frankly many fields to name.
Yes, Sun got bitten by Lintel platforms, no question about it. They were idiotic in their approach to Solaris in Intel, and reacted too late (now Solaris in Intel is a serious platform, in many circumstances I would not give Linux a second view).
If you have seen the latest Sun offerings in the storage arena (appliances built around Solaris) you would understand that Sun is a real innovator, it is a shame that they are falling like this.
Didn't get that impression last time I attended one of their seminars a few weeks ago.
The multicore stuff Sun is doing is miles ahead og anything anybody else is doing,. I hope Oracle do not axe that.
As have done several of my buddies and former buddies, all of them Slashdot users.
There is nothing wrong with asking Slashdot, this stupid snobbery has got to stop frankly...
With friends like these ....
No matter which way you want to slice it.
The irrefutable proof of this is that we have different bodies of law to deal with copyright infringement and to deal with theft.
I have rarely seen any /.er claiming that copyright infringement is OK, most people recognize the illegality of this, nevertheless most people recognize also that copyright has been unethically and immorally subverted by the recording cartel an the governments of most countries.
So in synthesis, this is not different from copying music illegally, they are both illegal activities which should not be condoned, while at the same time pointing the unreasonable nature of the current legislation....
Where did I hear that one before?
What you are doing is still illegal.
People blaming need for their moral failings are beyond contempt.
You do something unethical or illegal then you can't excuse yourself hiding behind the needs of your family.
Sorry but we honest people know that abiding by proper ethical standards is not always easy.
Whistle blowing is protected in all civilized localities.
Some people in /. have a very strange view of life, in which company policy has higher precedence than the law of the land...
If their ideas are so good they should start a proper party and get people elected in congress first.
Trying once every four years to get the big job without a national presence is simply not going to happen.
Yes, we call them H-1B's. In other news, our local unemployment rate is now above 10%.
Can you assure us that those unemployed can cover the unfilled positions? When I used to interview people (the UK, I know, not the same, but it seems to be in a similar situation) we could not fill positions (even entry level ones) because most students were going for soft option education in University (media studies, photography, film making, etc) instead of science and engineering, which is the exact opposite of what has happened in other countries.
Also kids from other countries have lots of experience under their belt: in the UK university is only 3 years, and very often kids take a gap year, that is all great and good, but people their same age elsewhere will have 4 or 5 years university under their belts and they don't take gap years but instead start working, so when you get both of them in front of you it is frankly a no contest.