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