Details of Stag

A chronology of some of the world's recent air disasters

 Air disaster timeline

NYTimes: Filling a Photo Frame via a Cellular Network

Isabella Products' Vizit photo frame lets you send pictures to it
over a cellular network....

http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/filling-a-photo-frame-via-a-celluar-network/index.html

Ireland - The drift into national bankruptcy looks increasingly unstoppable

Instead of recognising bankers and developers as parasites on our national prosperity, the Government came to see them as its source. While everyone else in Ireland has come to see the past decade as an embarrassing episode of collective insanity to be put behind us as soon as possible, the Government still sees it as the high point of our nation’s history. Nama is effectively Fianna Fáil’s shrine to the bubble, and likely to be an expensive and enduring one.

Prepare to pay 10 per cent more in income tax for the next 10 years to pay for NAMA

Read On...

IMF - The Irish economy is in the midst of an unprecedented economic correction

The stress exceeds that being faced currently by any other advanced economy and matches episodes of the most severe economic distress in post-World War II history. Banks face extensive losses and double-digit fiscal deficits over the next three years will imply a run up in public debt. The short-term dislocations come on top of a sharp decline in potential growth, implying a modest pace of recovery.

Read On...

NYTimes: Why Home Prices May Keep Falling

From The New York Times:

ECONOMIC VIEW: Why Home Prices May Keep Falling

By ROBERT J. SHILLER

Despite the uptick last week in pending home sales and recent improvement in consumer confidence, we still appear to be in a continuing price decline....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/business/economy/07view.html

A good intro to my maps on googlemaps

http://earth.google.com/outreach/tutorial_mymaps.html

A Handy Mashup

Track where your blog readers are coming from...

http://tins.rklau.com/2009/06/who-and-where-are-you.html

NYTimes: Let the Kid Be

From The New York Times:i

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: Let the Kid Be
By

House prices continue to fall as buyers hold out - The Irish Times - Thu, May 28, 2009

The rate of the decline is speeding up, read on...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2009/0528/1224247598562.html

McWilliams: houses prices are likely to fall another 50 per cent

Take a long look at the chart below. Digest it. Maybe look again if you have to. This happened in the most sophisticated economy in the world. This is what happened to the price of development land in Japan. Prices roared upwards and then collapsed, ending up below where they started at the beginning at the boom. This is likely to happen here; development land is likely to settle back to 1996 prices. We haven’t seen the half of it yet.

Read On...

NYTimes: Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google

From The New York Times:

PING: Data, Not Design, Is King in the Age of Google
By MIGUEL HELFT

Google, a company driven by engineering, expects design decisions to
be backed up by data on customer preference. Is this shackling bold
design?...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/10/business/10ping.html

Priorities for Department of the Taoiseach

Says a lot for the state of this country when the head of government and/or his office spends time on this...

1- RTÉ apologises for news item on Cowen nude portraits
2- Gardaí visit radio station in Cowen painting inquiry

A general election can't come quick enough!

Huff, puff and build your house

I signed the deeds on July 7th and went straight to the library to learn everything I could about roofing, plumbing and electricity. Six weeks later the house was built. It cost, as I say, €6,000 (I could probably build it for €10,000 today). The walls were made of bales of oaten straw, laid like Lego blocks on to a thin band of concrete.

I squashed the bales down tight with bands of wire looped from the foundations and up over the wall plate, and then I built a roof on top. Everything wobbled a bit at first, but I kept tightening the wires until it firmed up, and then plastered the walls with lime and sand. Erecting the walls took five friends and me a day, and another four days for the roof. Then we left it all to settle for a while before I began plastering.

Building a basic house should be no more complex or expensive than this. Unfortunately, a lot of vested interests ensure that it is. Governments, banks and employers all benefit from having a society yoked under mortgages – it ensures control, compliance and vast profits through taxes and interest payments. Now might be a time to reconsider all this. A house should, and can, cost the price of a car – something you repay over a year or two, instead of your life.

Read On...

awe-inspiring desert storm

The moment an awe-inspiring desert storm engulfed the Saudi capital

Crunching numbers

From Celtic Tiger to Bob the Builder - this place is vaporising!

[Morgan] Kelly expects the economy to contract by 20%. And his latest prediction - to which he attaches a 25% probability - is that Ireland will default, and that Anglo Irish Bank, the recently nationalised bank that has become a reviled symbol of rampant lending and corruption, has not only underestimated its loan losses but has a swelling book of derivatives contracts gone bad.

The result, he warns, could be bank losses at Anglo Irish and other banks that supersede the Irish government's promise to guarantee all liabilities in the banking sector. What would follow would be a run on the banks, inability of the government to finance its 12% budget deficit, and ultimately a bailout by the European union.

"That is the optimistic scenario," Kelly said, arguing that his worst fear is a collective economic failure of several countries in eastern Europe, along with Ireland and those on the southern periphery of the eurozone - Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal - that would be beyond the capacity of any government or group of governments to stem.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/01/ireland-economic-crisis

Low-Tech Fixes for High-Tech Problems

Tips and tricks for fixing misbehaving gadgets with supplies as simple as paper and adhesive tape.

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Siftables - cookie-sized computers...

...with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication. They act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them - piling, grouping, sorting - to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provides a new platform on which to implement tangible, visual and mobile applications.

The small plastic cubes are about one inch in size with screens, processors and infrared ports that communicate with one another in pre-programmed ways when placed next to one another.

Ireland could default on its national debt

Credit ratings agency Moody's recently followed rival Standard & Poor's in warning it might downgrade Irish debt, amid fears that one of Europe's former success stories is falling into a deepening recession.

Read On...

Goodbody Stockbrokers - house prices will fall "AT LEAST" 40% from there peak

A new report from Goodbody Stockbrokers has forecast that the Irish economy will shrink by 6% this year. Goodbody's economic forecast compares with the 4% falls for this year recently predicted by the Government and the Central Bank. They also go on to say house prices will fall "AT LEAST" 40% from there peak.

Based on the above let's take a house originally priced at €890,000 now reduced to €650,000, based on the Goodbody Stockbrokers forecast this house should be valued at €365,000

RTE Link

and

George Lee, Economics Editor, reports that previous indications showed the economy could contract by 4%

Ireland's Economic Meltdown

Warning that house prices may fall by 80%

UCD economist Morgan Kelly said he had been hailed as being extremely prescient as a result of his
warnings in relation to the property bubble, when in fact he and a
handful of other “amateurs” were merely stating what was obvious.

Link to original article