Month: December 2008
Chinese laundry
Posted by miri On 31 December, 2008
Beaded gate
Posted by miri On 30 December, 2008
A Mortgage Paper Trail Often Leads to Nowhere
Posted by miri On 29 December, 2008
What a mess! I don’t understand how crap like this can happen.
With home prices in free fall and mortgage delinquencies mounting, pressure to modify troubled loans is ratcheting up.
But lawyers who represent candidates for modifications say the programs are hobbled by the complexity of securitization pools that hold the loans, as well as uncertainty about who actually owns the notes underlying the mortgages.
Problems often emerge because these notes — which are written promises to repay the full amount of a mortgage — weren’t recorded properly when they were bundled by Wall Street into pools or were subsequently transferred to other holders.
How can a loan be modified, these lawyers ask, if the lender cannot prove that it actually owns the note? More and more judges are asking the same thing about lenders trying to foreclose on borrowers.
What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting
Posted by miri On 29 December, 2008
TEXT messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.
Alley
Posted by miri On 29 December, 2008
The United States of Mind
Posted by miri On 28 December, 2008
Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal. Does where you live affect your personality?
Certain regional stereotypes have long since become cliches: The stressed-out New Yorker. The laid-back Californian.
But the conscientious Floridian? The neurotic Kentuckian?
You bet — at least, according to new research on the geography of personality. Based on more than 600,000 questionnaires and published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, the study maps regional clusters of personality traits, then overlays state-by-state data on crime, health and economic development in search of correlations.
Gone fishin’
Posted by miri On 28 December, 2008
Little figure sitting on an electric box on the back of a house.
Passion flower
Posted by miri On 27 December, 2008
Coal Ash Spill Is Much Larger Than Initially Estimated
Posted by miri On 26 December, 2008
Hey, they were only off by a few million cubic yards. I mean, that’s pretty close, right? And it’s just 2.8 million cubic yards more than they said the pond actually held. Hmmm…wonder if that pond was a bit over-stuffed and that’s why the retaining well said “screw it.”
A coal ash spill that blanketed residential neighborhoods and contaminated nearby rivers in Roane County, Tenn., earlier this week is more than three times larger than initially estimated, the Tennessee Valley Authority said on Thursday.
Coal ash, a byproduct of burning coal, contains toxic heavy metals like arsenic, lead and selenium that can cause cancer and neurological problems.
Authority officials initially said that about 1.7 million cubic yards of wet coal ash had spilled when the earthen retaining wall of an ash pond breached, but on Thursday they released the results of an aerial survey that showed the actual amount was 5.4 million cubic yards, or enough to flood more than 3,000 acres one foot deep. The amount now said to have been spilled is larger than the amount the Authority initially said was in the pond, 2.6 million cubic yards.
Thing bad!
Posted by miri On 26 December, 2008