I have been wondering how Fox News wold handle reporting Ron Paul. So far they have managed to ignore his success, ridicule his positions and shut him out of debates. So it should be no surprise that Fox even manages to down play Ron Paul’s latest success in Nevada. Then I stumble upon Fox’s front page graphic shoing Ron Paul with the wrong results!
Here is Fox’s reporting on South Carolina’s results….
Now take a look at CNN
and Drudge at the same time…
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong….
your ads here (468x60) - after 1st post.
Courtesy of the free market champion Mitt Romney!
In 2006, Governor Romney proposed and signed into law a private, market-based reform that ensures every Massachusetts citizen will have health insurance, without a government takeover and without raising taxes.
In other words, a law forcing everyone in a state to obtain health insurance under penalty of a fine is a free market reform? Further more, the law subsidizes most health care plans (More of those market based reforms) and the government decides which insurers are actually selling plans with appropriate coverage. Resulting in effective government control of the health insurance market. What kind of republican is this because he isn’t free market friendly.
What gives with Christians these days? They should be salivating at the chance to support the first real choice in politics since Regan/Mondale. They should walk…no…run to their computer and donate money on the Ron Paul website. Instead, they settle for politics as usual choosing to watch two nominally republican candidates one a divorced pro-choice mayor and the other a governor of the most liberal state in the union.
What does it take to shake these thick headed Christians?! Alright, Laurence Vance does a fine job spelling out why the Religious Right should pull the scales from their eyes and vote for someone who represents a principled position any Christian can get behind.
Wavering? Thinking Huckabee or Romney? Read This Article
Today is a very special day for my laptop. As you probably already new, I have a HP Pavilion zv6000 with an upgraded Athlon 4000+ 64 Bit processor. Now this isn’t a screaming fast machine but I have really enjoyed it for the price I paid ($500) for it 2 years ago. One thing troubled me about my little laptop. It was a 64bit machine in a 32 bit world having only Window XP HOME installed by default. My poor little wide screen didn’t get to use all the horsepower strapped into the motherboard. Even a year later when I made the switch to Ubuntu, I couldn’t pull the trigger on a 64 bit version of the distribution choosing the 32 bit version instead. Finally my little lappy toppy found true bliss when I upgraded to the latest release from Ubuntu (Gutsy 7.10) downloading the 64 bit version. Life in 64 bits has been pretty good. Sure there are the usual dissenters, telling me that 16 bits was good enough for the Super Nintendo and it should be fine for me. Still I press on and Ubuntu has done a great job ensuring a smooth experience. In fact I have only run into one situation where I had to dig for an x86_64 package.
I had to have the latest “Europa” version of Eclipse and woudn’t you know it they virtually hide the 64 Bit download in an out of the way place of their downloads section. It was so elusive, I even ran across posts telling me there was no 64 Bit download for Eclipse. LIttle did they know that by clicking “Downloads” then “Find Out More” under “Eclipse Classic” followed by “Other downloads for 3.3.1″ then scroll down to “eclipse-SDK-3.3.1-linux-gtk-x86_64.tar.gz” where you are cronfronted with “Important Notes”. I was only able to escape by clicking “download” (2nd time!) and choosing a mirror.
Or click here.
Everytime I turn around someone I know just got a graduate degree or came up with some clever business deal or had a baby. What do I have to show for the last few years? A PHD? A Masters? How bout some designation….anything…? We I have been fiddling with camp registration software and I managed to become a father but Megan did most of the work on that project.
So I am resolving to shuffle my priorities:
Down
Camp Registration Software
Video Games
Television
Up
Exercising
Reading
Bible Study
The fall semester will include some new reading material for our “Worldview Reading Group”. Kuyper, Pearcey and Schaffer as well as new podcasts. I’ve dropped Reasons To Believe infavor of some Atheists shows. Now I don’t want to make a habit of picking on atheists for their beliefs but their 90’s era websites and Buffy the vampire slayer t-Shirts are fair game.
Last time we took a poorly punctuated romp through the real estate industry. This time, I report on our experience looking for homes without a full service agent.
In an ideal world, I wouldn’t need an agent. I would use the tools mentioned in my prior post and find the perfect house on my own. Then when bargaining with the seller, I could point out that since I have no agent I would just collect the commission they normally get. Better still, I could reduce my offer price by the amount of money a seller saves by not paying a buyer’s agent. Sadly, the industry grew wise to this plan and countered by having a listing agent collect a both halves of a commission from the seller then splits it with the buyer’s agent after the transaction. This new arrangement insures that 85% of all transactions will carry the full overhead of 2 agents (normally 6%).
Experience bears this trend out. Most listing agents I have bargained with, aren’t interested in returning half the total commission to the seller or giving it to me the unrepresented buyer. Instead the listing agent would offer to act as my agent as well as the sellers. I guess they didn’t see a conflict of interest in representing us both. This leaves the unrepresented buyer in a odd position where they are unable to bargain for a lower price because the listing agent is holding 3% hostage.
Fortunately my friend who shall remain nameless, pointed me to a no frills service called buysiderealty.com. They act as your agent and rebate 75% of the commission they get from the listing agent. This works out to about 2.25% or $6,750 on a $300K home. Now let me warn you, a no frills agency is a different animal. They do not show houses, they only arrange appointments between you and the listing agent. They also have a website that helps you facility making offers and requesting appointments or open house schedules. Finally they help draw up contracts and offers.
With a workable agent arrangement in place, we set about searching the internet for properties and found several that peaked our interest. We then drove out to 15 houses over 2 weekends just to see them from the street. In a few cases, the house was vacant or being remodelled, allowing us to walk the lots. We scheduled about 12 showings through BuySide with the following results:
-1 Scheduled showing
-1 Open House
-1 Lockbox Combo
-2 Under Contract
-7 Listing Agent Refused to show
I spoke with several agents and they all gave the same response. “I will not show you my property because I do not approve of BuySideRealty.” That’s funny, I thought a listing agent was supposed to represent the interests of their seller. Wouldn’t the seller want to get as many qualified and interested buyers in their house as possible? Nevertheless, we were snake bit having properties that we wanted to see but no way to get in them. What’s a tight wad to do?!
I’m not sure how you do things in your country, but in America we have people that help you buy and sell property. They are called Real Estate agents and they get a cut of the total transaction when their work is done, typically 6% split between the buyer’s and seller’s agents. 6% isn’t a big deal right? What is that on a $300K house, 18k?! No freaking way?! You mean to tell me that a buyer’s and sellers agent combine to earn 18 THOUSAND dollars facilitating a transaction? Agents don’t earn their keep, worse still they enlist the help of law to protect their racket and prevent the market from adapting to the 21st century. The net result is hurting consumers by forcing us to keep paying for service that is rapidly becoming obsolete.
The world has changed such that we don’t need “Full” service agents yet they cling to an old way of doing things. It’s like foisting full albums on consumers who want to download singles for a quarter! In the old days, you may need a buyer searching though paper based listing compiling homes that meet your criteria, now google will take you to 221K websites offering the same service for free. What’s more, do I really need an agent out showing me every house? What I really want is someone to get the lockbox code and unlock the door. Thanks Jerry, you’ve done you part now go wait in the car. Got questions about the house? Check out public records or request a disclosure form. Is the house worth the listing price? Try the web again. The seller’s agent isn’t fairing any better. They list the house, suggest a good price and conduct an open house. Again, anyone with a 4th grade education can pull this off for a lot less. List your house here, find comparable sales here, print flyers at Kinkos.
It is clear agents are facing increasing competition but they cling to an old model where they are on top when better alternatives exist. The role of an agent won’t dissapper right away, in fact there is still a place for people to facilitate large scale transactions like homes but not at the prices they are charging.
How does this industry survive? Well that is a good question. In part 2 we’ll get into my experience trying to buck the system and buy a house without an agent.
Hello all,
It is with great joy I can announce the birth of our first daughter, Eleanor Grace Jenkins (The First) on July 3rd at 2:45pm. Megan and I can report that the birth of a child is joyful in every sense of the word. Our hearts burst as we laid eyes on what surely is the most beautiful girl Northside has delivered this year. She weighed in at 7lbs 14oz measuring 20 3/4″ inches with sparkling blue eyes and a fist full of dark hair.
I have a new respect for Megan and any mother who delivers new life. My wife put on the most impressive display of determination and grit I’ve ever seen. Despite an induced labor and failed epidural, she shook off excruciating pain and showed her strength when it was needed most. While little Ellie is a wonder to hold, my wife an inspiration making me truly blessed by God.
We thank God and all of you for your love, support, thoughts and prayers and hope to see you soon.
Pictures are available here:
http://nofun.org/photos/Ellie_Birthday_07/
So last night at 10pm my wife, yes the bed ridden wife who waddles and gets stuck on the couch, decided there was no better time to do laundry then a time we normally reserve for sleep. She was very excited, she stayed awake to finish the laundry after I had already gone to bed.
Nesting Instinct
Aside from physical early signs of labor, you may experience nesting, which is nesting instinct. This is another of the emotional early signs of labor, and nesting is characterized by emptying drawers, clearing out closets, scrubbing floors, and other cleaning chores. This feeling is a maternal instinct that having a baby is drawing near. While want to make the most of this sudden burst of energy, don’t to overdo things. Although this urge to prepare for the arrival of your baby is there, you need to conserve your energy, as the early signs of labor will result in other signs of labor.
http://www.pregnancyetc.com/signs_of_labor.htm
There’s more. I’d tell you all about it but I have to pack for the hospital.
I ran across this post and figured I’d comment on it’s validity in debunking an argument for design.
Take Paley’s watch, for example. Paley’s rhetorical watch is not the result of one designer being efficient. That is not, after all, how the watch developed. The watch developed over centuries, through trial-and-error. The watch had many “designers,” all of them fallible, and hardly an analogy to an infallible Designer-deity.
The watch went through many incarnations: as a stick in the sand, then a sundial, then a marked candle, then a water-clock, then a timepiece, etc., until it finally could keep time accurately enough for Paley to naively posit the mechanism as a model of supernatural design. But even though the watch was indeed “designed” by human beings, the story of the watch is actually the story of evolution, after all!
Most evolution is co-evolution, and humans and their tools co-evolved. “Design” doesn’t subvert Darwin’s theory, any more than artificial selection subverts evolution, or any more than my intention to drop an apple, as opposed to seeing one drop, subverts gravity.
http://amused-muse.blogspot.com/2006/10/complexity-is-easy.html
While this is an interesting perspective on the watch, it seems to assume that there is a designer in the whole process of developing a watch. Who put the stick in the sand or marked a candle? The designer silly!
“The watch had many “designers,” all of them fallible, and hardly an analogy to an infallible Designer-deity.”
I’m having a hard time following the logic here. The watch is a piece of evidence where a designer best fits the evidence. Why does the designer have to be infallible because you aren’t impressed by a watch? Should we find something more complex?
I suppose I could make a better argument by showing that evolution cannot create organisms of irreducible complexity but these guys do it for me.
Biochemical Design: Life’s Minimum Complexity
http://www.reasons.org/resources/tnrtb/200604.shtml (first section)