Renting vs Buying

An interesting article from The New York Times comments on the current real estate market and asks “Is It Better to Buy or Rent?”

But renting might deserve another look right now. After five years in which rents have barely budged while house prices in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and elsewhere have doubled, renting has become a surprisingly smart option for many people who never would have considered it before.

Owning a home often ties up hundreds of thousands of dollars that might be invested more safely and more lucratively elsewhere over the next decade. And while real estate brokers may hate to acknowledge it, home ownership involves its own versions of throwing money away, like property taxes and the costs of borrowing.

The New York Times did, in an analysis of the major costs and benefits of owning and renting, including tax breaks – and owning a home today is more expensive than renting in much of the Northeast, Florida and California. Only if prices rise well above their already lofty levels will home ownership turn out to be the good deal that it is widely assumed to be.

While the article focuses only on a few specific areas and notes that it doesn’t hold in various midwestern cities it does make me wonder if this trend holds true up and down the Hudson Valley.

Hurricane Rita Happy To See Us

A bit of dark yet accurate humor can be found from the image below. It shows the predicted storm track of Hurricane Rita (currently Category 5) as of the time of this writing. Considering it already outranks Katrina among the top five strongest hurricanes recorded in the Gulf of Mexico the shape of the storm track in the image seems to take on an almost prophetic aspect… (as seen on Crooks and Liars)

I’ve seen quite a few meteorology blogs referring to this Hurricane as a “Perfect Storm”. The storm and the very warm water currents the storm is drawing its powers from seem to be textbook examples of the development of the strongest of Hurricanes. There is speculation over some forecast models suggesting that the hurricane may actually stall for up to two days over central Texas. If such a thing were to occur it would mean two days of intense 100+ mph winds with 15 to 30 inches of rain. This is already looking to be worse than Katrina.

For those who care to track some of the immediate economic impacts this storm should check out The Oil Drum. The site focuses on the oil industry and currently has some discussions on what operations and pipelines would be affected by a hit in Texas.

In Defense Of Cursing

From Pandagon comes this great article “In Defense of Cursing“:

For some reason, “You’re a fucking racist idiot” is a more offensive statement than “black people have less native intelligence than other races, and embrace poverty accordingly”. Even worse is the “the major goddamn drain on the budget is the tax cuts, as the federal budget has shown every fucking year since 2002″, which simply blows “the tax cuts have increased revenue, because that’s the power of fiscal conservatism” out of the water. A lie, an insult, a grossly racist imputation is afforded legitimacy because it’s said nicely.

…

I also do it because I find the conservative blogosphere to be one of the most closed-minded, insular, circular pits of denial I’ve ever encountered. The ringleader of the group has been calling those of us who are anti-war traitors going on three years at this point.

…

You want to break into the message drivers and actually have a debate? [snip] You’re a little bit more likely to enter in to some form of dialogue with them if you piss them off than if you pretend they care about having an honest debate.

The article matches my experiences and is well worth reading for insight into how the two sides regard each other online.

Totally Random Crap!

Credit Cards and Jabber: My hosting company’s blog has an article on credit card processing and how useless CSC/CSV codes really are for credit card security. On the same blog is a prediction involving the future of Instant Messaging technology based on Google’s choice to adopt the Jabber protocol for Google Talk. The VoIP standard SIP makes an appearance also.

Blog Posting Tools: I’ve been using a program called “Drivel” for posting to this blog for a couple weeks now. It is a nice simple GNOME based program with spell checking and the ability to edit already posted articles. Involves significantly fewer clicks than using the web based interface that is part of WordPress.

Mindless Humor: Yep, its the ol’ profanity “hidden” on the T-shirt trick. Of course I find CBS’s horrible programming more insulting than any profanity found on a shirt…

Music: After not listening it for a few weeks after playing it a few dozen times in a row I was reminded how fucking awesome Nightwish’s Once album is.

Katrina Timeline

Think Progress has an excellent timeline of events before, during, and after hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. It includes things that were on President Bush’s agenda as part of the timeline. Of course the talking points are taking over so expect the scrubbing of federal websites and twisting of the timeline by pundits on FOX news to continue.

I love how the press keeps “falling” for the same “anonymous sources” who feed the press garbage information about when certain people declared the state of emergency. I was greatly amused this evening when Bush was caught on TV saying “We never expected these levees to break” days after representives from DHS and other government agencies were on TV saying the levees were expected to break. Uhh Bush, you may wish to either coordinate your ass covering with your underlings or just shut the fuck up.

And I’m loving the “bipartisan” investigation being announced when not a single leading democrat had been contacted until after the announcement. And yes, Bush was shown on TV saying the White House will have its own investigation… of himself? Blah.

The motto goes: If you are not pissed off yet you have not been paying attention.

Disaster and Bankruptcy

In a calmer note this article with commentary ponders who will recover from the Hurricane Katrina disaster faster? The Haves or the Have-Nots? The finances of american families and bankruptcy law may make the answer to that surprising.

And The Winner Is…

I could not have said it better myself.

Bush, the man your fever dreams built into the next Winston Churchill when he is really the live action Chauncey Gardiner, has failed to everyone, in plain sight, without question. Rick Perry is trying to save his ass, but it ain’t working. NOLA looks like ANGOLA and that ain’t flying.

Say 9/11 changed everything now, motherfuckers. Ooops, 9/11, 9/11. 9/11. Doesn’t work anymore? Gee, maybe the sea of alligator MRE’s once known as the citizens of New Orleans has something to do with that. Now you can shut the fuck up about 9/11. Bush just proved what would happen with another 9/11. Dead Americans as far as the nose can smell.

Drunken Chris Hitchens muttered some nonsense about blacks having it so good here. The poor man needs to stay in his bottle or go to Betty Ford before someone beats his treasonous ass stupid. Islamofascism means what, now motherfucker? Shove Islamofascism up your well travelled ass. The most dangerous thing to average Americans is not some mullah in Iraq, not even Osama Bin Laden, but George Bush. If he doesn’t get you killed in Iraq, he’ll fuck up saving your city so it turns into Escape from New Orleans. Armed junkies roaming the streets, looking for a fix, robbing and looting like Serb paramilitaries and about as sober.

George Bush’s ineptitude has killed far more Americans than Osama could have dreamed of.

I mourn for the minds of the 30 to 40% who still approve of this useless fuckwits performance as President.

And for the dumbasses out there who go “Oh you can’t blame any of this on the President, there isn’t much he can do.” That is total bullshit. He is the elected head of the Federal government. He is responsible for the fuckwits he picked to be part of his administration and all those underlings in charge of every major part of the Federal government. Him and his political douchebag friends were responsible for the disasterous reorganization of FEMA into the Department of Homeland Security that brought on this total non-response to the country’s worst natural disaster ever. The buck stops at the President’s office fuck-o.

So what have we learned about this administration? This reply to the above article sums it up well:

Stock up, my friends. Because if there is a natural disaster or a terrorist attack in your area, you’re on your own.

I’m getting cases of water and canned goods tomorrow to keep stocked in our basement. I will NOT be stuck in a Superdome watching my daughter get raped.

God help those people still stuck in NOLA!