It’s a cliche, I know, to say family, friends and great experiences with them are the most important things in life. But in these frightening financial times, it’s calming to focus on something other than the stock market and politics for a few minutes. To that end, Abi Southerland has started a thread on Making Light in which people are sharing memories. Very thought-provoking and well-written discussion.
This is awesome (and truly awful) all at the same time.
We applied for (and got) a mortgage in California in 2005, and can attest to the mortgage broker’s modus operandi. The guy we worked with didn’t even present a “normal” 30-year fixed mortgage to us as an option — until we insisted upon it. Every loan he originally suggested had some crazy loophole. Most involved a gigantic balloon payment or interest-rate change a few years into the life of the loan, and he always said, “oh, you won’t ever have to really deal with that. You can refinance in a few years, when your home will surely have increased in value,” this being N. California, and all…. Of course, we needed a Jumbo loan, given that all of the crazy lending practices had allowed people to buy homes for much higher prices than they would have been able to, otherwise — allowing prices to climb.
The above PPT shows how our experience was typical, and just part of a vast, intricate web of craziness that got the economy where we are today.
– Via Continuous Beta
The market research firm NPD Group gets a glimpse of national eating habits through the food diaries it has collected from 5,000 consumers since 1980. The percentage of those consumers who are on a diet is lower than at any time since information on dieting was first collected in 1985. At the peak in 1990, 39 percent of the women and 29 percent of the men were dieting. Today, that number has dropped to 26 percent of women and 16 percent of men.
The diarists also report eating more organic foods and whole grains, said Harry Balzer, an NPD vice president.
“Instead of trying to avoid things, they’ve started adding things,” Mr. Balzer said.
