Author Archives: Jean-Paul

How (not) to buy a foreclosed home part one

The housing market is still, by most measures, crap.  The good news is that it’s looking more and more likely that we’re at a bottom.  Sunny days are here again.  Or something like that.  If you have money, of course, the sunny days really never left.

And that leads me to the first step in buying a foreclosed home.  Have money.  Lots of it.  I don’t know if the foreclosure market is always like this or if its current incarnation is just a function of the really horrible housing market combined with a disastrous financial sector.  Whatever the reason, most foreclosures require you to pay with cash.  If you have the cash, though, you can pick up a foreclosed house for well below current market values.

If this seems like a perversion of economic motivations that favors a class of people that doesn’t really need any favors, well it is.  Welcome to the second gilded age in America.

We have a middle class that would have enough money to buy the foreclosed houses and need to buy the foreclosed houses if they could only get easily affordable loans (which the banks won’t let them) and if they were able to use loans to buy the foreclosed homes (which, again, the banks won’t let them).  So, in the next few years, what we will see is a bunch of rich people buying homes they don’t need to supplement incomes that are plenty big already.  And the beat goes on.

If you are sensing some ambivalence on my part about buying a foreclosed home, you are observant.  But just like the Cylons, I have a plan.  Stay tuned.

Won’t the real Mitt Romney please stand up?

If I had any creative talent whatsoever, I would write a parody song about Mitt Romney set to Eminem’s song “The Real Slim Shady”.  And boy, would it be awful.  In my decade or so of following politics, I have never seen a politician who tried to be all things to all people as much as Mitt Romney has.  To call Mr. Romney a panderer would be insulting to panderers everywhere.  Like almost everything Republicans do these days, he takes it to its own different plane of pandering.  At least with most pandering politicians, you can usually get a decent feel for what they actually believe.  As a prominent Romney operative said in the best gaffe of the election (which is when a politician accidentally tells the truth), Romney etch-a-sketches his beliefs so often there is no center to grab hold of.

The beauty of this strategy is that supporters can just say, “But both sides do it!”  And of course, they’d be right.  Because Barack Obama once talked all black-like to a black audience.  This is the equivalent of me throwing a rock at you and you emptying a clip into me and then arguing that what I did is just as bad as what you did.  There are levels of wrong and while I wish one party would just not do wrong, I’m certainly not going to support a party that raises the wrongness stakes and then pleads false-equivalence.

OMG! Voter Fraud!

On this date in 1872, Susan B. Anthony voted and was later convicted of voting illegally.  So you see, voter fraud is an enormous problem and the only solution is passing laws that prevent as many people from voting as possible without looking like complete douchebags.  You understand, right?

Movie Review: Flight

Ratings for reviews will appear above the fold, while the review itself will appear below the fold to avoid spoilers for anyone that wants to go into it with a blank slate even though I’ll try to keep the spoilers to what can be seen in the trailers.

Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars

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Shame Hair

In the German language, pubic hair translates to Schamhaar, which literally means ‘shame hair’.  I wonder what that says about Germans.  But more importantly, Schamhaar is an essential word to know if you plan on going to Oktoberfest in München.

Wasabi Peas FTW

Oh, Trader Joe-san, why must your wasabi peas taste so good?  I once ate so many wasabi peas that I couldn’t taste anything for three days.  True story.  I guess you can say that I OPed.  Ha!

I’m building a house!

I recently bought a house that was foreclosed on over two years ago for pretty darn cheap.  Like cost of the land cheap.  Yay, me!

As you can imagine, the house wasn’t in the best of shape, but I still had hopes that I’d be able to renovate it and turn it into a livable abode.  It turns out that, while I could have done that, with the renovations that were necessary, it’d cost only a little bit more to tear the sucker down and build new.  So that’s what I’m doing.

I’ll be blogging about the progress here under the category of ‘Housing’.  So those of you who are thinking about buying/building your own house can learn something about the process.  It’s going to be slow going for a while since winter will quickly be upon us and I’m still coming up with a design.  I’ll fill the time in between now and construction with my travails so far.  And let me tell you, nothing in my life has caused so much anxiety as this house has.  Stay tuned!

A note about statistics

There is a lot of brouhaha about pollsters (most notably Nate Silver) predicting an Obama win in the coming election.  As of this post, Nate has the chance of Obama winning at 83%.  Various news personalities are complaining that Nate must be in the bag for Obama to dare predict that Obama will win and that a Romney victory will prove that Nate Silver is a lying liar who lies.  A Romney victory would prove nothing of the sort, though.

Why?  Nate Silver has been eerily accurate at predicting electoral outcomes.  He has a model that he follows and he is mostly public about his methods.  His methods haven’t changed and they predict an over 80% chance of Obama winning.  Does that mean Obama will win?  No.  Romney still has a 20% chance of winning.  If you were to bet on the outcome, though, you’d be wise to put your money on Obama.

Look at it this way.  Take a 10-sided die.  What?  You don’t have a 10-sided die?  Ok, go back in time and play Dungeons & Dragons as a kid.  Poof, you now have a 10-sided die.  Pretend that an Obama win is represented by 1-8 and Romney is represented by 9-10.  Roll the die.  There’s an 80% chance you’d roll an Obama.  Roll it a couple of times.  Most of the time, you’ll roll a Romney in only a few rolls.  If there could be two elections, there is a 36% chance of rolling a Romney one of those times:  2/10 + (2/10 * 8/10).  A third election would give you a 49% chance of rolling at least one Romney: 2/10 + (2/10 * 8/10) + (2/10 * 64/100).  Generally, you have a 1 – (8/10)^n chance of rolling a Romney in n rolls.

Of course, this is all just a useless exercise in math and probability because there is only one election and Obama currently has an 83% chance of winning according to the polls.  But don’t go attacking Nate Silver or math if the die rolls a 9 or a 10.