From the Walkable Dallas blog:

Housing prices rise (in relation) based on proximity to amenity. Yes, certain people prefer urban lifestyles and others, suburban, but why are some areas in urban locations high priced while others lower? Same goes for Suburban, where the two price points tend to be grossly disconnected, i.e. isolated in single- ( Read more... )

From America's Peasant MentalityAfter all, the reason the right-winger crowd can’t find a way to be coherently angry right now is because this country has no healthy avenues for genuine populist outrage. It never has. The setup always goes the other way: when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the ( Read more... )

Found a great (if depressing) article on how frequently health insurance companies cancel policies. In summary, the CEO of Assurant said they only cancel policies of "less than one-half of one percent of people we cover." Which sounds nice and rare and not at all evil... except the conditional probability of losing coverage is actually much, much ( Read more... )

My favorite sense is sight, but my best sense is smell. This usually doesn't work to my advantage, as it means I'm bothered by smells no one else even notices. I always end up taking out the garbage or cleaning the drains because it stinks to me and not Marc. One time, our cat Olly left a dead bird under our couch and for days I complained about a ( Read more... )

Right now in World of Warcraft it's "Children's Week", the yearly event where players are encouraged to visit one of the capital city orphanages and take an AI orphan sight-seeing. They pester you for ice cream and say "Are we there yet?", and it's all pretty cute ( Read more... )

Well I'm back at work after almost three weeks of quasi-vacation. I've been working desultorily from home on learning ActionScript/Flash, and went in to the office a few times when the buses weren't snowed in, but mostly I've been reading vast quantities of science fiction while drinking hot cocoa with my feet on the radiator. It was nice while it ( Read more... )

I've written before about my hatred for Christmas but things seem to be improving now that my family has accepted that I really truly don't want gifts. The only present Marc and I got was a donation in our name to the Arbor Day Foundation (a tree-planting organization ( Read more... )

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Last week, an ex-coworker of mine gave me his first-gen iPhone after he bought a 3G one. I spent about 2 hours figuring out how to unlock it so that I could keep my T-mobile account, and jailbreak it so that I could run 3rd-party apps, but I never did find a reliable hack to get around iTunes. I just want to view my phone as a drive, why is that so ( Read more... )

Obama
McCain

If you make
you'd save
you'd save

less than $19,000
$567
$21

$19,000-$37,600
$892
$118

$37,600-$66,400
$1118
$325

$66,400-$111,600
$1264
$994

$111,600-$161,000
$2135
$2584

$161,000-$227,000
$2796
$4437

Top 5% of ( Read more... )