You seem to think these industry controls are effective. Maybe they prevent an appraisal from being, say, 10x higher than the recent sale prices on either side, but they don't prevent the equally bad event of a series of 10 sales on the same block each being 10% higher than the previous. Every one of those houses in Las Vegas that turned out to be worthless in 2007 was appraised for at least the sale price the year before. The appraisers in those cases didn't do a damn thing, for example they didn't come out to the house and write down "this neighborhood is in a desert with no access to water where the unemployment rate is 20% and the employed people make minimum wage therefore this cannot be a neighborhood of $850000 houses." They just said "the last house sold for $800000 and this market seems pretty hot so $850000 okey dokey."
HN user
honkhonkpants
I for one think the imminent demise of human civilization is of interest to the intellectually curious and thoughtful readers of HN. I also believe that hurting the feelings of willful climate change deniers and suchlike people is a really good idea.
What incentive does the lender have? The involved parties are the seller, the buyer, their agents, and the originator of the loan. All of these people are working to close the deal at the negotiated price. The originator of the loan will hold the loan for somewhere between 72 hours and 30 days, so they don't care.
Appraisers absolutely do pull numbers out of hats, because appraisers who regularly fail to write down a large enough number will stop getting calls.
The job of the appraiser is to write down a number as large as or larger than the amount to be financed. They know this and they know the number in advance. What they do is not rigorous.
Geez, complain much? It's a miracle it works at all.
Do you think it's possible that your prior policy was one of the garbage plans that got outlawed by ACA? Those are the ones that didn't survive the "you can keep it" claims. Those were plans with uselessly low annual or lifetime limits, too much small print, etc.
Bit of a rant. The site is the mouthpiece of people who are suing the city of Lafayette, for violating state law by not building enough housing.
What did your premiums look like before? In my case I just didn't have insurance because there was no functioning market anywhere that would sell you a family health care plan including childbirth, at any price. Now I get health insurance from my employer which isn't affected by ACA so I don't know what the market looks like.
At that rate you could enroll every household in America in 3.5 hours.
This makes the app flat out not work for me. I just get blank panes top and bottom.
Yeah REALLY obnoxious. I was just disabling this after another Uber ride. They do not provide the option to enable location services only when the app is running on screen. I think it might be nice if iOS presented this option regardless of what Uber wants.
A really large amount goes through Canada. The port of Vancouver is bigger than Oakland, and the port of Manzanillo Mexico is only slightly smaller. Both ports have rail connections to the US interior. The Mexican ports have lower market share because they are pretty far from Chinese origins, but if you want to amuse yourself you can Google up a lot of crazy conspiracy theories about the connections between Mexican ports and the US city of Kansas City. Many deranged people believe that the Mexicans are usurping our sovereignty via an obscure customs office in Kansas City that is (barely) connected by rail to the port of Lazaro Cardenas.
The port of Pittsburg is teensy and the port of Stockton is specialized. Container traffic at Oakland is pretty heavy and many cars are offloaded at Vallejo. There are also the oil terminals at Richmond and elsewhere.
I thought there were there to connect coal fields in the Powder River Basin to power plants in the midwest.
Hrmm name collision with Google's previously published XRay function tracing system http://research.google.com/pubs/pub45287.html
No. This is the tone I intend to take with all dimwitted or disingenuous climate change deniers on this site.
You think spending time together makes married people happier?
Nobody is impressed by your stupid stories of having been a weatherman in the air-army. Annual average volcano emissions are three orders of magnitude smaller (that's 1/1000, for the innumerate in the audience) than human CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion. And you can't fucking _see_ CO2 anyway. It's fucking invisible. Whatever you saw from that volcano was water or dust or ash or whatever, the things that volcanoes spew into the upper atmosphere that counteract the warming effect of their CO2 emissions.
I've been reading these but it's become apparent that the author lives in a universe parallel to mine. I remember reading that in most languages "A null dereference or out-of-bounds array access is treated the same way as a network connectivity problem or parsing error" and scratching my head, because while I know some languages are like that (Java) there are others were a null dereference and the failure to establish a network connection have radically different effects (C++). At another point discussing error handling he says "This leads us to a beautiful sweet spot. It does suffer from the performance problems I mentioned earlier, but does very well on all other dimensions." so the author's sweet spot is a spot with poor performance, which also put me off because his articles all talk about performance but never concretely (in terms of nanoseconds).
Anyway it's an interesting, if long, series but most of the interest for me has been in reading things from a very different perspective from the one I hear at work every day.
I disagree with the central thesis of this article that Google is a product company rather than a platform company. I think that's wrong because throughout its history Google has asked itself "what if we had this?" first, and built the products around that later. Essentially the company believes that products will naturally emerge if you hire tens of thousands of engineers and deploy an unholy number of computers. I said this before on this site: Google's core product is dirt-cheap computing. Everything else follows from that.
I put his conversion kit in my X61t and it is whoa-Nelly bright and the colors are spectacular. I recall that it also costs a fifth what a genuine ThinkPad CCFL backlight module costs.
I still think you are presenting a false choice. It isn't necessary for the US to put goods on trucks in order for us to put people on trains. Nobody today drives their cars from the coal field in Gillette, Wyoming to the electric power plant in Montrose, Missouri. Adding trains for people will not somehow make the coal-hauling railroads of America more congested or less effective.
I'm not sure how you arrived at your conclusion. US transportation energy consumption for all purposes (goods and passengers) is much higher per GDP per capita than for any European country. For example Germany has a per-capita GDP about 2/3rds at much as USA, but uses less than 1/3rd of the energy for transportation.
Not sure what you're getting at with ignoring metro rail systems.
America has only about 5x the freight rail traffic of Europe, while Europe has over 100x the passenger ridership that America has. I don't think the freight advantage (if it can be called that) justifies the disadvantage of our relative passenger immobility.
By the way 40% of US rail freight traffic by weight is coal, which is nothing to be proud of. If you erase the fact that USA is still a massive coal consumer, it starts to look like Europe moves as much freight as America does.
Perhaps but I'm not sure it's healthy to be nostalgic for the Macintosh line of 20 years ago. It was a train wreck, really.
JLG seems deliberately stuck in the past. Just for starters they retired the Macintosh brand 18 years ago.
Good idea! The more people we get to buy into the cooperative the better it will be! If we get everybody to participate we can just call it "government".
Are you using the past tense because you are going to tell us about another contemporary ISA that has more code per byte? X86 _is_ compact and this continues to be relevant to performance today.
Wacky and yet, so typically American. I wish we had a lot less "innovation" in this country's infrastructure.