In need of disruption ...

Posts will likely be short for a while. We’re in the process of buying a house and moving. Hooray!

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However, over the past 3 months, while house hunting, open housing, making offers, accepting offers, and everything else that goes into the process, nothing has been more clear to me than the fact that the process of buying and selling a home needs to be massively disrupted.

When making what is likely the biggest purchase you’ll have made to that point, you basically see a house for 30 minutes in as optimal a situation as possible. You have to go through agents on both sides because, well, why would you be able to act on your own? That would be cutting out the middle man. The hilarious part of it all is that the least expensive part of the entire thing are the lawyers, who basically have the whole thing covered and end up costing pennies out of the whole process.

Companies like Redfin, Trulia, and Zillow are helping with connecting buyers and sellers, but really, they’re now just full of buyer’s agents and seller’s agents. It’s a market where it’s very hard to actually find the real person on the other side. That probably works fine when the market is hopping, but if/when the market comes down, the loads of agents just hanging around the market and acting as gatekeepers will get churned out and replaced by either a) nothing, or b) real, value added agents.

During this process, there are lots of places where I’d happily pay someone to solve a problem with skills I don’t have (a mortgage, legal documents, moving). Those services seem to be priced appropriately. The real estate agent side of things is a place where the price you pay seems to dwarf the services rendered. The interwebs have a tendency to solve that problem over time. I expect that by the next time I buy a home, it’ll be a very different experience.

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Post-Script: I did some googling around to see if I’m the only one who feels this way. I’m clearly not. This post resonated so strongly with me. I heard nearly every one of those canards during our buying process.

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Post-Post-Script: Our agent was quite nice, and I don’t think doing anything that was deceptive or misleading. It’s really just a case where the goals of the real estate agent are not aligned with the goals of the buyers/sellers. They don’t get paid for their time, just for the sale. Like car dealers, the folks working the floor of your local Home Depot, or the folks calling you to offer you some new phone service, they make money when you buy something. And they don’t, when you don’t.

Because what could go wrong? →

Depressing article from the Times this week …

Under Dodd-Frank, the general rule was to be that if a lender wanted to securitize mortgages, that lender had to keep at least 5 percent of the risk. There was an exception. The lender didn’t need to retain any risk in mortgages deemed to be supersafe. Those mortgages were to be known as Qualified Residential Mortgages, or Q.R.M., in the jargon that promptly developed.

In 2011, when the regulators first proposed rules to carry out the risk-retention law, the idea was that there would be a two-tier mortgage market. Mortgages deemed to be Q.R.M. would be characterized by substantial down payments that would minimize the risk of default, while the other tier would include riskier mortgages — although still safer than some of the ridiculous mortgages that characterized the boom — and could be securitized only if those responsible for either the loans or the securitizations kept some of the risk.

But when the final rule was adopted this week, that idea was dropped.

“The loophole has eaten the rule, and there is no residential mortgage risk retention,” said Barney Frank, the
former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and the Frank in Dodd-Frank.

Because what could go wrong if banks take on a bunch of risky mortgages that eventually go belly up?

Fixing the Ruby Error "Symbol not found: _SSLv2_client_method (LoadError)"

I was doing some work on my computer this weekend and when running a ruby script, I got a whole stack trace, with the main error being:

Symbol not found: _SSLv2_client_method (LoadError)

I use rbenv and build my own rubies, so that I don’t have to muck about with the system ruby (and gems). It should have occurred to me that after the POODLE SSL flaw, Apple would have patched (at least partially) the SSL libraries.

After a bit of Googling, Stack Overflow to the rescue. I needed to simply rebuild ruby, which would build it against the updated SSL libs.

On rbenv, if you have ruby-build installed, that’s as simple as:

rbenv install 2.1.2

Need any more GamerGate evidence?

Read this from TPM.

Angry. White. Men.

Not at all about video games. It’s just anonymous angry white men.

GamerGate: Angry White (Young) Men

If you’re curious about GamerGate at all, which its proponents would have you believe is about getting truth in gaming journalism, go read this amazing Deadspin article.

As is often the case, GamerGate is really about a minority of angry white men (in this case, they tend to be teens to twenties) who are mad that somehow talking about sexism is akin to violating “men’s rights”. (As if being born a white man wasn’t already about as big an advantage in the world as is humanly possible.)

It’s so incredibly disheartening and so incredibly infuriating. There are a billion good things about the internet and anonymity, but the bad things are rapidly eroding any value that anonymity brings. When you get the chat log talking about whether or not driving someone to suicide is the right PR move, you’ll realize how bad people can get when hiding behind an anonymous screen name.

The whole thing is an amalgamation of everything that is awful right now. Sexism, anonymous online threats, the media reporting both sides of a story as having equal truth/value. The tide may be turning in a positive direction, though. The recent abuse handed out over Twitter to a local (and prominent) game developer may have caused enough of a stir that the media might actually a) pay attention, and b) not treat both sides as equivalent.

A few well place prosecutions and this whole sordid issue may be in the past.

Ayn Rand: Still Ruining Lives

If you follow me on Twitter (or know me in real life), you’ll know I’m not fond of Ayn Rand, her books, or her philosophy. I found it entirely disheartening to read this Re/code article about the suicides of three startup founders from the Downtown Project in Las Vegas.

Damania said there’s a tendency to say the suicides were just a fluke or a coincidence, but that they’re
actually a fundamental problem with entrepreneurship.

“It’s a symptom of this performance,” he said.

It’s part of an ultra-individualistic, stoic ethos similar to one espoused by philosopher Ayn Rand.

“Founders are the worst,” he said. “There’s a Randian — I must be the John Galt — feeling. You can be as
liberated as you want, but there’s a web of connectivity, and they forget.”

It’s incredibly unfortunate that these people, who’ve often given up so much of the structure and support in their lives to go build the company of their dreams, think that they have to do it alone, because, you know, Ayn Rand.

(Yeah, yeah, that’s reductive.)

It was apropos that this week John Oliver covered, to his normal hilarious effect, “How is Ayn Rand Still a Thing?”

A great rule of thumb in life: if someone says they really love Ayn Rand’s books/philosophy/point of view, assume they’re a giant douchebag.

Marvin Gaye's Isolated "Heard It Through the Grapevine" Vocals →

It’s not new, but it’s the first time I’ve seen it. Jeez, the man can sing.

I love that the internet unearths these isolated vocal tracks.

My Favorite iOS 8 Feature

Clear notifications from the lock screen or notifications screen with a swipe. Not groundbreaking, but it’s the little things.

Ignore the score of the atrocious Pats game.

It's Not That Apple Forced an Album Into Your iTunes ...

it’s that they chose U2. With the Beats staff on board, you’d think that someone would have pointed out that U2, while iconic, hasn’t been relevant for years.

I know there’s a long relationship between U2 and Apple, and making the U2 album a free album purchasable through iTunes would have been an amazing gesture. But, if you want to give people a “gift” (and, really, use it as a lever to get credit cards for Apple Pay), there are loads of other artists that would have had more resonance.

(My guess for artist with most cross-cultural appeal: Lorde.)

WordPress 4.0 is the Perfect Time for Some WordPress House Cleaning

WordPress 4.0 is out, and since it’s a major upgrade, you’ll need to manage the upgrade yourself. It’s easy (just click a button), but while you’re in there, there’s some house cleaning your probably should do.

WordPress themes and plugins are an awesome part of the WordPress ecosystem. Need a feature that WordPress doesn’t have out of the box? Someone has probably built a plugin. Want to give your site a fresh coat of paint? Go grab a theme.

The problem is, you’re now installing someone else’s potentially bad code into your site.

And, using someone else’s code on your site can be a big problem.

Not only can your site get hacked, but your site could end up being used to hack or attack others, which could lead to you getting your site shut down. You probably don’t want that.

While you’re in your WordPress admin area, after you clicked the upgrade to 4.0 button, take a little time to clean up your install.

• Make a backup of your site. (You should always have a backup of your site.)
• Go to the Updates section of the Dashboard and make sure your themes and plugins are up-to-date. ^[1]
• Go through your plugins and identify any that you’re not using any more, deactivate them (if active), and delete them. You can always install them again. By deleting old, unused plugins, you’re reducing the surface area that can be used to compromise your site.
• Do the same for your themes. Yeah, we all went through and installed 50 themes one day, thinking how great it would be to switch themes at will. How many did you really use? How many even look good any more? Delete them.
• Now, if you’re using a caching plugin (which you should be to get great performance), clear your cache to ensure that you get any of that potentially bad code off of disk.

Set a reminder in your calendar to do this every couple of months (at a minimum). It’ll only take you a few minutes, and reduce the likelihood that your site becomes a victim.

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1. If you’ve got a theme or a plugin that you can’t update because you’ve hacked modifications into it, you should see if you can download the newest version and port your modifications into that version of the code. Yeah, it’s a pain, but less painful than having to go through looking to see how badly compromised it is.

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