Most desktop users would prefer to work with updated software, and do not prioritize stability. While there is no reason you couldn't run a desktop machine off of Debian stable, I think you would have a better experience running the testing release.
That is, if you run Debian on your desktop at all. If I were building a new desktop machine right now, I'd use Ubuntu.
I remember that one of her first assignments was to write down every detail of their trip home from school that day, just to get a feel for their capabilities. A typical result would be something on the order of: "Left school. Side door. Went to car. Got in. Went home."
The student communicated all of the requested information in a clear and concise fashion. Sounds like the problem is with your ex, not the students.
For crying out loud - MAKE IT INTERESTING. I remember doing what I referred to as "Math for the sake of Math". Show how it's useful - the easiest way is through teaching Science.
Everyone says that, but no one can agree on which applied math to teach. Many people here argue that it should be physics, but I think it should be finance (I am an economist).
I guess the bottom line is that everyone thinks math should be taught, as applied to whatever they personally find interesting. Personally, I hated physics just as much as math. Shoehorning math into physics would not have made me enjoy either discipline. But econ... what a great class.
If you're physically inclined you can attract a lot of attention (and thus popularity and girls) in school by becoming a star athlete. If you're not physically inclined then you can do the same by getting into the arts. Pick up an instrument, start doing drugs and attract a different kind of girl and become popular that way.
If you go into math and science most of the girls (and the people having all of the fun) will label you a nerd and want nothing to do with you because you are associated with courses that they find hard and boring.
This is an oversimplification, and ignores that people can be well-rounded.
I lettered in 3 sports, and got 4s and 5s on all of my AP exams--none of which I did to try to pick up chicks. I did sports because I am an adrenaline junky, and I took AP classes because they were more interesting and were taught by better teachers.
Regarding chicks, I had much better luck with chicks at other schools. The stakes were lower (I didn't have to get made fun of over a rejection for the next year or so), and none of them knew about the time I wet my pants in 5th grade. I could just be myself. God only knows why that actually worked.
Pay the Teachers enough to make more Science and Math majors WANT to be teachers (in other words support the union).
Public schools can never compete on compensation with private enterprise. I am an economist, and I earn in the top 1% of US households. No public school could lure me to teach high school econ with dollar signs--the property tax bills would be too high.
Even if public schools could offer stratospheric salaries, you would not like the result. Remember all of the expert-level "HTML engineers" of the late 1990s whose only value was to provide a steady source of carbon dioxide to the office plants? All they wanted was the inflated salary, which they got. But I wouldn't let one of those bozos teach my kids.
The schools need to do a better job attracting (and not alienating) teachers who want to be teachers. That means treating teachers more like professionals and less like babysitters.
Well, don't project what you want unto the rest of the world.
Debian stable is a server distro. Every time there is an upgrade, a full regression test must be done to the server. This is expensive and time-consuming. The whole idea of Debian stable is that it is stable and doesn't change often. No one running stable wants the latest and greatest. We want stability and security fixes. That's it.
Clearly you already know about the testing and unstable releases, but did you know about backports and volitile? Volitile is great for things like anti-virus and anti-spam software that you really do want and need upgrades. Backports is a little different--it's basically upgrades for popular packages in stable, and you can pick and choose which ones you want.
Stable means stable, and backports and volitile are great tools to help you. If you want the latest and greatest, that's what the testing release is for.
They then convinced ratings agencies to give these new securities AAA status even though the ratings agencies didn't understand them.
The securities were collateralized with real estate and insured against any loss. The AAA ratings were not unreasonable until it became clear that the insurers were undercapitalized with respect to the growing default rate.
At that point, ratings were slashed, banks could no longer continue to buy them like they used to, and the rest, as they say, was history.
And how does the incumbent party responsible for the largest increases in national debt in history continue to claim that they're the fiscally responsible party?
I'm pretty sure that was the cause of the Republicans getting booted out in 2006, and will probably cost them them the 2008 election.
Republicans do a great job talking about fiscal conservatism, but my conservative friends all tell me they've had enough. My response: "What took you so long?"
That said, most cloud services today ARE very expensive. EC2, for example, can be trivially beaten with managed hosting, and in some cases totally crushed by maintaining your own servers.
Most people who say that the Elastic Compute Cloud is expensive with respect to managed hosting fail to expand the acronym Elastic Compute Cloud and take special note of the first word, Elastic.
If your computing needs are Static, then yes, you can do better with managed hosting or maintaining your own servers. Maybe you have a load spike at a certain time of day or time of month or time of year. Maybe it happens at unpredictable times (you get slashdotted, you get hard during events of some sort, when your commercial runs on TV, etc.). In that case, you can build an application on EC2 that can automatically add capacity when needed and remove capacity when it is no longer needed.
Another situation is when you have a small web site or service, and you think you are poised for explosive growth, but you are not sure. These things can be hard to predict, both in terms of timing and scale. When you site goes viral, do you want to be calling Dell asking how soon they can ship you a few (or a few dozen) more servers? Or do you want your service to automatically scale to meet the demand, whatever that may be?
Again, if your computing needs are Static, you will do better somewhere else. But if your Elastic, then the Elastic Compute Cloud can be extremely cost-effective.
Guess how many times I've thanked 8 lb 6 oz baby Jesus that I had the foresight to separate the two? All my data from my college days is still intact under/home.
I never bothered to separate / and/home way back when. Guess how many times I've cursed 8 lb 6 oz baby Jesus that I didn't bother? Zero.
I keep these things called "backups". One day, I wanted to switch from Slackware to Debian, so I followed the following procedure:
Run backup process
Nuke/home
Create new partition for/home
Mount it on/home
Run backup restore process for/home
Glad you did plenty of good praying, though. I'm sure it will help you in the afterlife, despite it's lack of relevance with respect to your superior foresight.
isn't it customary for the courts to throw out illegally obtained evidence?
Yes, of course it is. But the whole point of this case is whether or not the search was legal.
Herring got arrested based on an outstanding warrant, and his car was searched. Nothing wrong there. When you get arrested, the cops are allowed to search your car.
The problem was that the warrant was due to clerical error. If all were right and just in the world, Herring really shouldn't have been arrested, and his car really should not have been searched. But the cop did arrest Herring in good faith based on the warrant for his arrest.
Anyhow, this is why it's not clear whether or not the search was legal.
Only $50 dollars? Must be small and minor boo-boo. If you make a real mistake of thousands or more, and depending on severity of the mistake, jail time is a real possibility.
It actually depends more on the nature of the mistake than on the dollar value. Earlier this year, I forgot to file a tax deposit in the $50k range. End result? IRS waved all interest and penalties because it's the only time I've done it.
On the other hand, an associate of mine failed to report about $15k in income. He maintains that it was a mistake, but knowing him, I'm not so sure (neither was the IRS). I never pressed him for the exact amounts involved, but he is definitely paying penalties.
This year, I had to pay taxes and so mailed in a hard copy of my taxes. They made a mistake on entering in my taxes. They sent me a nasty letter informing that if I did not pay I would be in all kinds of trouble.
Every letter from the IRS is menacing. I bet even their Christmas cards threaten dire consequences. The letter they sent me informing me that my request to waive interest and penalties was granted went to great pains to let me know what a lucky soul I was and how this was a one-time exception and what the penalties should have been, etc.
The big deal is that if Mr. Herring wasn't an unlicensed gun-toting drug user, the detrimental effects of the bad data would be obvious.
Um, no. If the cops hadn't found anything in Herring's car, there would be no search to be thrown out. Herring would have been released, and that would have been the end of it.
The only reason a challenge can happen is that there was a subsequent prosecution of Herring. Had there been no such prosecution, the search of Herring's vehicle would have been, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. I suppose Herring could have sued on some type of civil rights violation, but those cases rarely go anywhere unless the plaintiff is a minority and being harassed over a period of time.
if anyone ever posted the authentic recipe, the KFC mafia would find them and smother them to death in beakless, clawless chickens with enormous breasts.
That is supposed to have a deterrent effect... how?
Seems like the abuse was on a pretty massive scale though. Otherwise there wouldn't be nearly so many defaults.
This is a serious understatement. In the height of the housing boom, applicants with 2-year-old bankruptcies were getting 6-figure mortgages. I had countless tenants with low incomes and FICO scores in the 500s vacate in order to purchase a home. Shady mortgage brokers were qualifying them based on teaser rates, and those brokers assumed zero default risk despite having all the information necessary to determine that the applicant was never going to be able to make those payments.
If you ever want to correct this mortgage mess, 1st trusts with anything lower than a 20% down payment need to go the way of the dodo bird. If you can't put 20% down, you can't afford that house, sorry. What will you do if the furnace craps out or the roof springs a leak?
When I sell a property, I'm always happy to do seller financing (why should a property quit paying me just because I sold it?), but only with 20% down. I'll allow a portion of the funds to come from outside sources (bank loans, family members, etc.), but the buyer must have some of his or her own funds in the deal. This is how lenders behave when it's their money on the line.
Well, I wonder what the market actually knew about these securities.
They knew they were getting the best mortgages in the pool, and that the security was fully insured. I don't know your level of familiarity with the bond market, but bond risk normally looks like this (in order of increasing risk):
Full Faith And Credit of the US Government (treasury securities)
Insured bond issues by taxing authorities (they can meet their financial obligations by simply raising taxes)
Collateralized, Insured bond issues by AAA-rated entities
Uninsured bond issues by taxing authorities
... it just goes down from there...
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that these AAA-rated MBS looked a heck of a lot like #3 above, and were considered to be extremely low-risk at the time. It would be like buying an insured, collateralized GE corporate bond: extremely low default risk.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the mortgages in the pool, while being secured against real estate, wound up being severely undercollateralized once real estate prices fell (but real estate prices only go up, right?? Yeesh). Way more undercollateralized than the securities' insurers were prepared for. So borrowers defaulted, the insurers also failed to meet their obligations, and what are you left with? Junk bonds, but with low AAA yields. Investors lost their shirts and now want nothing to do with these securities. I can't hardly blame them.
Aside from the complexity that they keep talking about, I wonder if they had any idea of the abuse of the various loans, and if not, who didn't come clean about the level of risk that was actually involved rather than the risk that would be expected if the abuse hadn't occurred?
Investors were lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that these pools were insured. "Insured" means "risk transferred to someone else" aka "not my problem, dude". But when the insurer can't meet its obligations... well.. now it's your problem, dude.
Seems like you're saying "safest" in a relative sense, compared to the other loans. That still doesn't seem like a safe investment, considering the types of loans that were made.
Well, they're not safe in the T-Bill or FDIC sense of the word "safe", but the loans are secured by real estate, and the pools were insured against loss. Obviously in hindsight they were not safe at all, but assuming you are looking for higher returns than T-Bills... In the bond market, that's considered to be a pretty safe investment, hence the AAA ratings. If you think you are smarter than Moody's, feel free to start your own rating agency.
Who creates these loan products that someone with no job and no collateral can qualify for?
It's not as crazy as it sounds. For someone who is self-employed, a stated income loan makes a lot of sense. A self-employed person who makes, say, $100k/year is in better shape financially than a W-2 employee who makes more because that self-employed person is making $100k/yr after tons of deductions. So it may not be easy to document it, but the self-employed person could easily make mortgage payments.
High LTV loans aren't as insane as they sound, either. Neither are Option ARMs. But they are sophisticated products and many people got them who did not comprehend them. Personally, before the bubble burst, I purchased 7 properties using high-LTV option ARMs. But I was purchasing properties that needed significant repairs. While the repairs were being made, I paid the ultra-low negative amortizing payment and used the difference to pay my contractor. When repairs were complete, I refinanced to a 30-year fixed with 70-80% LTVs. I still own the properties and rent them out. The monthly passive income is nice, and when I sell I'll have a nice capital gain. Too bad I can't get option ARMs anymore. They were great while they lasted.
The problem isn't the products. The problem is that people abused them. High LTV products, Option ARMs, and stated income loans all have perfectly legitimate uses, and I have used them all. "Qualifying" unqualified borrowers is not a legitimate use, but I guess I don't need to explain that now.;)
Seems like the banks that were packaging these things should have known how to price them. How do they manage to create what are, by all accounts I've heard, extremely complex securities, without knowing what they're worth?
Well, it's not up to bankers to set prices. Prices are set by markets. It was the market that didn't know how to value these securities. Currently, I believe they are vastly undervalued. I've actually been buying nonperforming mortgages for the last 2-3 years (although not at the rate that Secretary Paulson seems to like buying them!), modifying the terms so the borrowers can actually afford the payments, and then selling improved the notes for a profit since, as you might imagine, a performing note is worth considerably more than a nonperforming note.
I think Congress would be amazed to see McCain show up for a vote at all, given his record.
Slashdot Mirror
Then which Debian release is for desktops?
Most desktop users would prefer to work with updated software, and do not prioritize stability. While there is no reason you couldn't run a desktop machine off of Debian stable, I think you would have a better experience running the testing release.
That is, if you run Debian on your desktop at all. If I were building a new desktop machine right now, I'd use Ubuntu.
Buying a house in such a good district was a real hardship, and required us to get one of those 'sub-prime' loans
Heh heh. Forgot to remember a few of your mathematics lessons, eh?
Good luck!
I remember that one of her first assignments was to write down every detail of their trip home from school that day, just to get a feel for their capabilities. A typical result would be something on the order of: "Left school. Side door. Went to car. Got in. Went home."
The student communicated all of the requested information in a clear and concise fashion. Sounds like the problem is with your ex, not the students.
For crying out loud - MAKE IT INTERESTING. I remember doing what I referred to as "Math for the sake of Math". Show how it's useful - the easiest way is through teaching Science.
Everyone says that, but no one can agree on which applied math to teach. Many people here argue that it should be physics, but I think it should be finance (I am an economist).
I guess the bottom line is that everyone thinks math should be taught, as applied to whatever they personally find interesting. Personally, I hated physics just as much as math. Shoehorning math into physics would not have made me enjoy either discipline. But econ... what a great class.
If you're physically inclined you can attract a lot of attention (and thus popularity and girls) in school by becoming a star athlete. If you're not physically inclined then you can do the same by getting into the arts. Pick up an instrument, start doing drugs and attract a different kind of girl and become popular that way.
If you go into math and science most of the girls (and the people having all of the fun) will label you a nerd and want nothing to do with you because you are associated with courses that they find hard and boring.
This is an oversimplification, and ignores that people can be well-rounded.
I lettered in 3 sports, and got 4s and 5s on all of my AP exams--none of which I did to try to pick up chicks. I did sports because I am an adrenaline junky, and I took AP classes because they were more interesting and were taught by better teachers.
Regarding chicks, I had much better luck with chicks at other schools. The stakes were lower (I didn't have to get made fun of over a rejection for the next year or so), and none of them knew about the time I wet my pants in 5th grade. I could just be myself. God only knows why that actually worked.
Pay the Teachers enough to make more Science and Math majors WANT to be teachers (in other words support the union).
The schools need to do a better job attracting (and not alienating) teachers who want to be teachers. That means treating teachers more like professionals and less like babysitters.
Wow...where do you live that math teachers (any teachers) make $100K a year?
Long Island, NY
What I would like to have is a 4.1 release
Well, don't project what you want unto the rest of the world.
Debian stable is a server distro. Every time there is an upgrade, a full regression test must be done to the server. This is expensive and time-consuming. The whole idea of Debian stable is that it is stable and doesn't change often. No one running stable wants the latest and greatest. We want stability and security fixes. That's it.
Clearly you already know about the testing and unstable releases, but did you know about backports and volitile? Volitile is great for things like anti-virus and anti-spam software that you really do want and need upgrades. Backports is a little different--it's basically upgrades for popular packages in stable, and you can pick and choose which ones you want.
Stable means stable, and backports and volitile are great tools to help you. If you want the latest and greatest, that's what the testing release is for.
Which changelogs are you referring to? These? Or the changelogs within the package?
trying to be a vegan for the gf
I'll never cease to be amazed at the utterly stupid things men will do in pursuit of pussy.
They then convinced ratings agencies to give these new securities AAA status even though the ratings agencies didn't understand them.
The securities were collateralized with real estate and insured against any loss. The AAA ratings were not unreasonable until it became clear that the insurers were undercapitalized with respect to the growing default rate.
At that point, ratings were slashed, banks could no longer continue to buy them like they used to, and the rest, as they say, was history.
I don't recall Senator McCain being discussed here. This was a conversation about Senator Biden.
Possibly, but at least Biden gives the impression of understanding the constitution.
Riiiiiight.
On Passage of the Bill (H.R. 3162) aka the USAPATRIOT ACT: Biden (D-DE), Yea
On H.R. 3199 aka USAPATRIOT ACT II: Biden (D-DE), Yea
And how does the incumbent party responsible for the largest increases in national debt in history continue to claim that they're the fiscally responsible party?
I'm pretty sure that was the cause of the Republicans getting booted out in 2006, and will probably cost them them the 2008 election.
Republicans do a great job talking about fiscal conservatism, but my conservative friends all tell me they've had enough. My response: "What took you so long?"
Thank you very much for the citations. I stayed up all night reading, and I could not find anything that supported your assertion:
with the Patriot Act and the new FISA bill they can do whatever the hell they want in regards to search and seizeures and we can't do $h!t about it.
I'm therefore going to have to conclude that you are simply wrong.
Have a nice day.
That said, most cloud services today ARE very expensive. EC2, for example, can be trivially beaten with managed hosting, and in some cases totally crushed by maintaining your own servers.
Most people who say that the Elastic Compute Cloud is expensive with respect to managed hosting fail to expand the acronym Elastic Compute Cloud and take special note of the first word, Elastic.
If your computing needs are Static, then yes, you can do better with managed hosting or maintaining your own servers. Maybe you have a load spike at a certain time of day or time of month or time of year. Maybe it happens at unpredictable times (you get slashdotted, you get hard during events of some sort, when your commercial runs on TV, etc.). In that case, you can build an application on EC2 that can automatically add capacity when needed and remove capacity when it is no longer needed.
Another situation is when you have a small web site or service, and you think you are poised for explosive growth, but you are not sure. These things can be hard to predict, both in terms of timing and scale. When you site goes viral, do you want to be calling Dell asking how soon they can ship you a few (or a few dozen) more servers? Or do you want your service to automatically scale to meet the demand, whatever that may be?
Again, if your computing needs are Static, you will do better somewhere else. But if your Elastic, then the Elastic Compute Cloud can be extremely cost-effective.
Not to belabor the point, or anything.
Guess how many times I've thanked 8 lb 6 oz baby Jesus that I had the foresight to separate the two? All my data from my college days is still intact under /home.
I never bothered to separate / and /home way back when. Guess how many times I've cursed 8 lb 6 oz baby Jesus that I didn't bother? Zero.
I keep these things called "backups". One day, I wanted to switch from Slackware to Debian, so I followed the following procedure:
Glad you did plenty of good praying, though. I'm sure it will help you in the afterlife, despite it's lack of relevance with respect to your superior foresight.
with the Patriot Act and the new FISA bill they can do whatever the hell they want in regards to search and seizeures and we can't do $h!t about it.
Citation needed.
isn't it customary for the courts to throw out illegally obtained evidence?
Yes, of course it is. But the whole point of this case is whether or not the search was legal.
Herring got arrested based on an outstanding warrant, and his car was searched. Nothing wrong there. When you get arrested, the cops are allowed to search your car.
The problem was that the warrant was due to clerical error. If all were right and just in the world, Herring really shouldn't have been arrested, and his car really should not have been searched. But the cop did arrest Herring in good faith based on the warrant for his arrest.
Anyhow, this is why it's not clear whether or not the search was legal.
Only $50 dollars? Must be small and minor boo-boo. If you make a real mistake of thousands or more, and depending on severity of the mistake, jail time is a real possibility.
It actually depends more on the nature of the mistake than on the dollar value. Earlier this year, I forgot to file a tax deposit in the $50k range. End result? IRS waved all interest and penalties because it's the only time I've done it.
On the other hand, an associate of mine failed to report about $15k in income. He maintains that it was a mistake, but knowing him, I'm not so sure (neither was the IRS). I never pressed him for the exact amounts involved, but he is definitely paying penalties.
This year, I had to pay taxes and so mailed in a hard copy of my taxes. They made a mistake on entering in my taxes. They sent me a nasty letter informing that if I did not pay I would be in all kinds of trouble.
Every letter from the IRS is menacing. I bet even their Christmas cards threaten dire consequences. The letter they sent me informing me that my request to waive interest and penalties was granted went to great pains to let me know what a lucky soul I was and how this was a one-time exception and what the penalties should have been, etc.
The big deal is that if Mr. Herring wasn't an unlicensed gun-toting drug user, the detrimental effects of the bad data would be obvious.
Um, no. If the cops hadn't found anything in Herring's car, there would be no search to be thrown out. Herring would have been released, and that would have been the end of it.
The only reason a challenge can happen is that there was a subsequent prosecution of Herring. Had there been no such prosecution, the search of Herring's vehicle would have been, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant. I suppose Herring could have sued on some type of civil rights violation, but those cases rarely go anywhere unless the plaintiff is a minority and being harassed over a period of time.
if anyone ever posted the authentic recipe, the KFC mafia would find them and smother them to death in beakless, clawless chickens with enormous breasts.
That is supposed to have a deterrent effect... how?
raped by a professional dominatrix (Adobe)
How did I miss that option? I guess Adobe doesn't offer that with Photoshop Elements. :(
Seems like the abuse was on a pretty massive scale though. Otherwise there wouldn't be nearly so many defaults.
This is a serious understatement. In the height of the housing boom, applicants with 2-year-old bankruptcies were getting 6-figure mortgages. I had countless tenants with low incomes and FICO scores in the 500s vacate in order to purchase a home. Shady mortgage brokers were qualifying them based on teaser rates, and those brokers assumed zero default risk despite having all the information necessary to determine that the applicant was never going to be able to make those payments.
If you ever want to correct this mortgage mess, 1st trusts with anything lower than a 20% down payment need to go the way of the dodo bird. If you can't put 20% down, you can't afford that house, sorry. What will you do if the furnace craps out or the roof springs a leak?
When I sell a property, I'm always happy to do seller financing (why should a property quit paying me just because I sold it?), but only with 20% down. I'll allow a portion of the funds to come from outside sources (bank loans, family members, etc.), but the buyer must have some of his or her own funds in the deal. This is how lenders behave when it's their money on the line.
Well, I wonder what the market actually knew about these securities.
They knew they were getting the best mortgages in the pool, and that the security was fully insured. I don't know your level of familiarity with the bond market, but bond risk normally looks like this (in order of increasing risk):
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that these AAA-rated MBS looked a heck of a lot like #3 above, and were considered to be extremely low-risk at the time. It would be like buying an insured, collateralized GE corporate bond: extremely low default risk.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the mortgages in the pool, while being secured against real estate, wound up being severely undercollateralized once real estate prices fell (but real estate prices only go up, right?? Yeesh). Way more undercollateralized than the securities' insurers were prepared for. So borrowers defaulted, the insurers also failed to meet their obligations, and what are you left with? Junk bonds, but with low AAA yields. Investors lost their shirts and now want nothing to do with these securities. I can't hardly blame them.
Aside from the complexity that they keep talking about, I wonder if they had any idea of the abuse of the various loans, and if not, who didn't come clean about the level of risk that was actually involved rather than the risk that would be expected if the abuse hadn't occurred?
Investors were lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that these pools were insured. "Insured" means "risk transferred to someone else" aka "not my problem, dude". But when the insurer can't meet its obligations... well.. now it's your problem, dude.
Anyhow, I'm still interested to hear why you made this earlier claim: Have you been paying attention? We're in the situation we're in now thanks to Republican policies.
Seems like you're saying "safest" in a relative sense, compared to the other loans. That still doesn't seem like a safe investment, considering the types of loans that were made.
Well, they're not safe in the T-Bill or FDIC sense of the word "safe", but the loans are secured by real estate, and the pools were insured against loss. Obviously in hindsight they were not safe at all, but assuming you are looking for higher returns than T-Bills... In the bond market, that's considered to be a pretty safe investment, hence the AAA ratings. If you think you are smarter than Moody's, feel free to start your own rating agency.
Who creates these loan products that someone with no job and no collateral can qualify for?
It's not as crazy as it sounds. For someone who is self-employed, a stated income loan makes a lot of sense. A self-employed person who makes, say, $100k/year is in better shape financially than a W-2 employee who makes more because that self-employed person is making $100k/yr after tons of deductions. So it may not be easy to document it, but the self-employed person could easily make mortgage payments.
High LTV loans aren't as insane as they sound, either. Neither are Option ARMs. But they are sophisticated products and many people got them who did not comprehend them. Personally, before the bubble burst, I purchased 7 properties using high-LTV option ARMs. But I was purchasing properties that needed significant repairs. While the repairs were being made, I paid the ultra-low negative amortizing payment and used the difference to pay my contractor. When repairs were complete, I refinanced to a 30-year fixed with 70-80% LTVs. I still own the properties and rent them out. The monthly passive income is nice, and when I sell I'll have a nice capital gain. Too bad I can't get option ARMs anymore. They were great while they lasted.
The problem isn't the products. The problem is that people abused them. High LTV products, Option ARMs, and stated income loans all have perfectly legitimate uses, and I have used them all. "Qualifying" unqualified borrowers is not a legitimate use, but I guess I don't need to explain that now. ;)
Seems like the banks that were packaging these things should have known how to price them. How do they manage to create what are, by all accounts I've heard, extremely complex securities, without knowing what they're worth?
Well, it's not up to bankers to set prices. Prices are set by markets. It was the market that didn't know how to value these securities. Currently, I believe they are vastly undervalued. I've actually been buying nonperforming mortgages for the last 2-3 years (although not at the rate that Secretary Paulson seems to like buying them!), modifying the terms so the borrowers can actually afford the payments, and then selling improved the notes for a profit since, as you might imagine, a performing note is worth considerably more than a nonperforming note.
I think Congress would be amazed to see McCain show up for a vote at all, given his record.
Both McCain and Obama have been preoccupied with their presidential campaigns. I suppose it's less critical that Obama be back in Washington since he wouldn't add anything to the debate, and there's a 96.0% chance he'll just vote whatever his party tells him to vote, anyway.