quacky: —–+—+—–

Ever wonder how housing finance crises get started?

… [the] five-bedroom house in the good school district, the high-quality medical care, the college education, the designer clothes, etc. — credit becomes a lever that pushes up the prices of these goods exponentially. Whoever is willing to take on the most credit wins the most goods. Take the Home Depot cashier as an example: If she opts for an interest-only, negative amortization, adjustable-rate mortgate, she can easily outbid a family with twice the income, as long as that family has chosen a traditional, thirty-year fixed-rate mortgate. If, as Dave Ramsey strongly recommends, the family opts for a fifteen-year mortgage, they could have three times th emoney to spend on their home and still lose. It’s easy to see how those who are unwilling to leverage their credit to its fullest, i.e., who refuse to be irresponsible, quickly fall out of the middle class and begin to look and act suspiciously like the poor.

from: MAXED OUT, the book

Words to live by:

By writing too much, too often, we’re trouncing on the attention of the commons…. Blogs with restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity (okay, that’s a long way of saying “making every word count”) will use attention more efficiently and ought to win.

Seth’s Blog: The noisy tragedy of the blog commons

San Diego Weather, 10/24/2007

The smoke graphic is, to me, a poignant representation of the horror that must be Southern California right now.

Don’t worry ma’am. .. | Incredimazing

Sorry. This is not at all indicative of the kind of people I’m proud to associate with. It’s just, well. It’s just that it’s probably kind of true. Not true of me, per se, but true of the internet. Again, I’m sorry.

Via

denver - news - Porn in the USA

we can’t win

MySpace.com - Celebration - BALTIMORE - www.myspace.com/celebrationcelebration

Enormous Milla shows what NOT to wear when you are pregnant | the Daily Mail

Well. I’m only putting this on here because the headline is funny, and the picture is, well, stunning. I’m not endorsing the daily mail making fun of Milla, and I’m certainly not looking kindly on the implication that she somehow should not have gained five stone in her pregnancy. Also I’m not one of those weirdos who is all “raar rarr” about pregnant ladies, or even a super-big fan of Milla Jovovich.

I’m just sayin, how do you top Enormous Milla?