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Jul. 11th, 2007 11:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickLots of fun things for you today in a link-o-rama of information.
Galaxyzoo lets you do real astronomy with real galaxies for science. For real. It's free and has a tutorial. Go help the scientists gather data to see how the universe was formed AND look at cool pictures of galaxies while you're at it.
I've mentioned in the past some of the wonky mortgage products that were bandied around as housing prices flew higher and higher. I said they weren't a good thing. (I'd link to this but it was a while ago and I can't find it anymore.) I'm not the only one noticing that there are some issues out there in the mortgage lending industry. There's a pretty solid overview of the current issue on Metafilter that's worth a look if you have any interest at all in the housing market and/or the finance market. Short form for the lazy: It doesn't look good.
Also, we went to see some trailers going up for sale on Friday. The trailers-for-sale were in Cumberland. They were FEMA trailers "for emergency hurricaine housing" (WaPo article on the subject here.) None of the forty or so trailers we actually looked at had ever been lived in though some did have cosmetic water damage. (Interested parties can see the auction site here by picking the tab "More" and putting "Trailers" in the blank. Then, sort by state (Maryland) and there's the list.) A new three-bedroom trailer with siding and a peaked roof and air conditioning is worth approximately 35K. I'd like to believe that the gummint got them cheaper for buying in bulk, but this report suggests that the gummint got them for 34K per each. Stupid gummint. There are forty trailers going on the market on Friday, most of them never lived in according to my own personal inspection, some with slight-to-severe water damage on exterior walls but rather a lot with nothing hugely wrong that I could see.
There were probably three hundred trailers on the lot... all alike, or near enough not to matter, but they were only selling forty of 'em at the sale on Friday. All the trailers we looked at were furnished (mattresses and box springs for the bedrooms, furniture for the living room, stove/fridge/microwave, dressers), had A/C, washer-dryer hookups, electric heat. The sale is an internet auction thing, kind of like eBay, so the bids aren't really what the prices are yet... but there are forty trailers and the bids are like 3K. We'll have to see what happens... but I'd been hearing how there was a metric shitload of money wasted and fraudulated away in Katrina and I am now a believer. Plus also, we'll be in clover if we can pick up a very cheap never-lived-in FEMA trailer for putting at 629 and renting out for four hundred a month. :) The possibility of renting it out for four hundred a month... I have a shit-tastic three bedroom trailer from the 1970's that is totally falling apart and it rents easily for $375 a month. It's rented right now, actually. We were planning to tear it down and throw it away but someone rented it before we could get started on that project.
Galaxyzoo lets you do real astronomy with real galaxies for science. For real. It's free and has a tutorial. Go help the scientists gather data to see how the universe was formed AND look at cool pictures of galaxies while you're at it.
I've mentioned in the past some of the wonky mortgage products that were bandied around as housing prices flew higher and higher. I said they weren't a good thing. (I'd link to this but it was a while ago and I can't find it anymore.) I'm not the only one noticing that there are some issues out there in the mortgage lending industry. There's a pretty solid overview of the current issue on Metafilter that's worth a look if you have any interest at all in the housing market and/or the finance market. Short form for the lazy: It doesn't look good.
Also, we went to see some trailers going up for sale on Friday. The trailers-for-sale were in Cumberland. They were FEMA trailers "for emergency hurricaine housing" (WaPo article on the subject here.) None of the forty or so trailers we actually looked at had ever been lived in though some did have cosmetic water damage. (Interested parties can see the auction site here by picking the tab "More" and putting "Trailers" in the blank. Then, sort by state (Maryland) and there's the list.) A new three-bedroom trailer with siding and a peaked roof and air conditioning is worth approximately 35K. I'd like to believe that the gummint got them cheaper for buying in bulk, but this report suggests that the gummint got them for 34K per each. Stupid gummint. There are forty trailers going on the market on Friday, most of them never lived in according to my own personal inspection, some with slight-to-severe water damage on exterior walls but rather a lot with nothing hugely wrong that I could see.
There were probably three hundred trailers on the lot... all alike, or near enough not to matter, but they were only selling forty of 'em at the sale on Friday. All the trailers we looked at were furnished (mattresses and box springs for the bedrooms, furniture for the living room, stove/fridge/microwave, dressers), had A/C, washer-dryer hookups, electric heat. The sale is an internet auction thing, kind of like eBay, so the bids aren't really what the prices are yet... but there are forty trailers and the bids are like 3K. We'll have to see what happens... but I'd been hearing how there was a metric shitload of money wasted and fraudulated away in Katrina and I am now a believer. Plus also, we'll be in clover if we can pick up a very cheap never-lived-in FEMA trailer for putting at 629 and renting out for four hundred a month. :) The possibility of renting it out for four hundred a month... I have a shit-tastic three bedroom trailer from the 1970's that is totally falling apart and it rents easily for $375 a month. It's rented right now, actually. We were planning to tear it down and throw it away but someone rented it before we could get started on that project.
