smccrory

This time, home valuations will likely be much less frothy as banks want to hedge their repossession risks and investors know to look out for this kind of exposure now. That wasn't the case in 2007 leading up to the 2008 crash. There are also higher loan loss reserve requirements in place for every lender, so there should be less systemic risk if this happens again. I'm not saying there's isn't significant risk, but more that I'm agreeing that certain buyers (and their direct lenders) will be held more accountable than the last round.

PM on its way..

It's right beside the word "musket."

Fair point, but at least a Libertarian can exercise veto powers to limit federal expansion.

Since suffering is a given with our aging bodies, I love your philosophy.

At one time I thought it was wasting a vote, but then again, when you're so disgusted with the alternatives, why not? Viable parties and candidates don't suddenly appear - they need time to build support.

This is mostly what a few of us from Columbus are planning on - we're planning to arrive somewhat soon after opening to sit on bikes and talk with vendors without massive drunken crowds. As such, we might not be able to connect with other Ohio Riders unless it's at a landmark in the IX at a certain time or for a late lunch.

Fair point. Here are Dropbox's defaults: https://www.dropbox.com/security You can also encrypt individual files and directories on the client side using WinRAR and many other tools but it'll often reduce accessibility to those assets on mobile clients. The perennial trade between convenience and security.

I think so. I started with Carbonite 5 years ago and loved it, but found that Dropbox not only fulfilled my off-site backup needs but also solved my problem of needing to share documents across multiple computers, tablets and phones, across multiple family members and friends. Dropbox is SO integrated into SO many other partner products and plugins, I would be shocked if they went under without us seeing a year or more of writing on the wall. I get 1 Terabyte of online storage for about $100/yr which is roughly what I'd spend on a networked storage device of similar capacity, and it wouldn't benefit from being hosted off-site. It takes several days to upload/sync your files at first, but once done, it stays pretty caught up if you have a remotely decent internet pipe. You can also throttle how much it uses to avoid killing your spouse's Netflix experience. :-)

Agreed, and maybe back in the early days of our republic, coarsely-grained representation worked well enough on its own. You could sort of trust a representative to act in your interests without consulting you for every detail. But today, I think that's an unrealistically simplistic expectation because there are SO many details to weigh in on. We went from less than a million citizens to 323 million and added a whole industrial age, an information age and globalization that couldn't have been envisioned at the time (or if it was, it just wouldn't have been time to pre-scale). Today, we elect people with pre-disposed biased representing, in VERY coarsely-grained ways, what probably are our interests. Then we are responsible for investing in special interest groups to apply specific pressure on specific political opportunities. Yes, it biases the game towards those who have money, but at the same time, it can be argues that those with money are the ones with the greatest engagement in national interests and thus an interest in lawmaking. These days, if you like to knit, you'd better join a knitting lobby, because someone somewhere is thinking about regulating knitting needles. Because of this logic, I'm seriously thinking about re-upping my American Motorcycle Association membership. An eponomous Aeronautic Modelling Association fought hard against the FAA's requirements to register flying things over 1/2 pound, and although they lost on many points, they did win on a few. Similarly, I anticipate potential blowback from the Oregon ranger's actions which may further remove trails available for ADV/enduro motorcycle rides.

Mechanically, that's what special interest groups are for - to collectively organize coherent representation of particular interests. They're like unions in that they collectively "bargain" for those setting the agenda and writing the checks. And they're evil if they lobby for things each of us is individually against. Do you like guns? TThen the NRA is an awesome flexion of gun owner's interests. Hate guns? NRA is an evil stranglehold on the political process. Like credit liquidity? Then financial lobbies are wonderful because they stabilize operating room. Hate the abuse of financial markets? Then they're and insidious influence that colludes government with capitalism. It's how it all works. It's all situational bias. It's messy and expensive. It's en-vogue to spit "community organizer" as one of the worst pejoratives a conservative can say, but community organization works just like any other special interest group - by identifying, tapping and mobilizing shared perceptions of interest. Sometimes I think conservatives spit the term because they know deep down that conservatives haven't been that great at it as of late, yet the Tea Party was starting to catch onto the mechanics a couple presidential elections ago, then somehow lost steam, or leadership, or just corroded to rust like every collective does if not continually fed.

If I'm not careful, I'm going to run out of "Vote Post Up" quota points for the day.

^^^^^ Love it!

Ditto, I'm sorry sprocket and to the others who have lost friends and family. Brian, I'm particularly sorry for your loss, even if it was 18 years ago. One of my deepest fears while my daughter grew up was Anorexia because it is such a hard disease to treat. Thankfully we didn't go through that.

Politics can of course be very personal to people, and it's effortless to generalize and misappropriate cause and effect out of emotion or insufficient time to fact-check and think about things rationally. At some level, your uncle probably attributes the downfall of America through Obama to you, because if you're not with his opponent, you're with him, and he's the reason why Sara McGlaughlin's cats are mangy or some such loose logic.

Having gone through a dark period myself with multiple level neck issues, I can sympathize with your friend's back injury. Spinal issues are very serious, no matter how much we'd like to think we're invincible or have all the medicine we could ever want in the US. The fact is, the best procedures with the best outcomes are NOT what most insurance plans cover, even "platinum-level" ones). What they do cover is a cascading slide of one fusion or discectomy into another into another until you're a broomstick, and that still doesn't reliably rid you of the pain. While some do great, fusion success rates are appallingly low overall, and many patients end up on life-long pain management regimens which results in a drugged-out existence of restricted mobility and pain, pain, pain. Your world narrows and shrinks. You think dark things. You wish not to lash out at everyone around you seen through filters of pain and inevitable decline. You wish to remove your "problem" from the burden of others. If anyone reading this knows friends or family going through chronic spinal issues, please keep an extra eye on them and help them get MULTIPLE opinions from orthopaedic and neurologic specialists with track records of positive experience. I personally chose to go to Germany to have 4 discs in my neck REPLACED, OUT OF POCKET to break the cycle I describe above. It's a serious thing. Our bodies (mine at 48) are past their original expiration date and we're no longer mating fodder, so lots of things are changing. Many of our children are becoming adults and our relationships are changing. We're having to compete with younger, more physically able men and women. It's time to retool, to rediscover who we are and what we want to get and give out of the rest of our lives. And that's a GREAT thing as long as we recognize it and do a bit of letting go of what we expected.

To your point, I hate getting shots, but I hate fatal diseases worse. The problem is, people don't want to realize there are fatal "diseases" on the horizon if we just keep cooking along as-is. What's worse is that mutual trust has broken down between business and government, liberal and conservative, scientist and believer, rich and poor, race and different race, etc. What we need is a big trust-building event, like a corporate rock climbing off-site, for something more resembling 8 years of collaborative problem-solving in areas everyone pretty much already agrees with instead of trying desperately to sneakily capture one another's entire base. Cooler heads make better decisions that desperate ones. Unfortunately desperation, outrage and butthurt are too valuable in politics, ad revenue and voter turnouts.

I'm a believer in off-site backups like Carbonite, Dropbox, etc. and I've had to test it a few times. External hard drives can and do fail, homes burn and flood, and it's easy to forget to perform backups if you don't have a sophisticated setup that powers itself on regularly.

Probably right. Dependency is hard to break once it's expected.

How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? None, talk to the server team, it's a hardware problem.

DB problem this morning?

You're alive! Haven't seen you since '14 Pelotonia escort duties, but then again I don't get on OR as much. Hope you're well!

Is there hate in there too?

A few of us might drive up that Saturday morning from Columbus. I think the key is to leave before 2 or 3 pm. I I've been there the last 2 years and it was good for sitting on bikes and talking with reps before belligerent pirates start drinking.