Zeroization

The NY Times has an article about DCM Services, a shitty little company that takes advantage of bereaved people and attempts to get them to play their dead relatives zombie debts.

My advice: if a debt collector calls about your dead or living relative’s debt, tell them absolutely nothing. You are only encouraging these disgusting bottom feeders.

I’ve installed version 1.3 and it seems that they’ve disabled the hack that allowed you to point the software to the HD. This was previously accomplished by updating the DiskID field in the Issues table and pointing it to ’9′ which in turn points to the HD. It doesn’t seem to work anymore. Anybody manage to hack this?

Yet another example of why The Big Picture is required reading. The graphs provided today of housing value and debt as percentage of GDP and existing home prices vs. median income fundamentally tell the entire story of why housing prices are still too high. The fact that housing value has gone from 170% to  130% of GDP tells the story of our illusory wealth and our continued comeuppance. The ratio of median income to housing prices is a good indicator of affordability and indicates an ongoing process of regression to historic means. But there is another important metric not shown by the charts and that is the price of the least expensive homes:

Go to any suburban neighborhood — the one you or a freind/family member lives in. Look at the starter homes that a newlywed couple just starting out might consider. Small capes, 2/3 bedroom houses or cottages. Assume that this couple are late 20s/early 30s, and are making decent — but not 6 figure — salaries.

Can they afford that starter house? If not, then the entire real estate chain is frozen.

What’s left is mostly lateral moves, greatly reducing the overall sales.

So don’t expect a recovery until the prices of those starter homes return to reasonable levels, perhaps for those people who make just above to just below the median national income. (Below that, renting is probably the way to go.)

New Morrissey single and it’s pretty damn good…

The city is messing with your brain.

I could have just as easily used a freaking Bee Gees reference.