From the Philly Inquirer:
The foreclosure nightmare continues in New Jersey
The neighborhood’s zombie has, at long last, made it through foreclosure and is on the market.
A quick tour of the house, which was vacant for nearly 30 months, revealed few surprises. When water and electricity have been turned off for more than two years at a property, you always assume the worst.
The good news is that the raccoon family living in the attic has moved.
The bad news is that no one has yet dared to open the refrigerator in the kitchen, perhaps waiting until the Ghostbusters have a free moment.
…
The state’s number of zombie foreclosures is among the nation’s highest. The reason is simple:It now takes an average of 1,262 days for a foreclosure to make it through New Jersey’s congested legal system, the longest time in any state, according to Attom Data Solutions (formerly RealtyTrac).
In September, for example, one in every 691 properties in New Jersey was in foreclosure, even as the national number was one in every 1,600 homes and foreclosure activity was the lowest since 2005, nearly two years before the housing bust began.
…
In Atlantic City, the ratio was one in every 375 houses, Attom Data Solutions reported, a result of the decline of the casino industry and the effect it has had on other employment.“There is a tripling effect,” said Patricia Hasson, president and executive director of Clarifi, the financial-counseling and education nonprofit, which has begun counseling troubled Atlantic City borrowers.
“Casino employees lose jobs, they don’t go out to eat, restaurants lay off employees,” she said.
While most states are processing recent foreclosures, New Jersey is working on a backlog of many years, which continues to hamper full recovery and lowers property values in many municipalities.
It’s an old desktop and we have never shut it off. It’s on a backup power supply so every time the power went out in the building, it still remained on. The computer has been on continuously since 1998. The inside of it must be disgusting as there is a huge cantilever of dust protruding from the fan.
Old hard drives are notorious for running perfectly for years while constantly powered, but failing as they power down, as the bearings and spindles will immediately seize up and the motor is not powerful to spin them up again. A spinning drive might spin for nearly forever, a stopped one – that’s the problem. Fans too – they’ll fail to spin up and usually you end up seeing the CPU melt down.
2nd
Expat…I was 11 in 1981. It would not be until I was 12 that I would spend countless hours between Brower Commons, the river dorms, the Student Center on College Ave and the ZBT and Peek frat houses. 4 of my sisters and 2 brothers are RU alum. I was pretty much raised on Easton Avenue. I remember Greasy Tony’s and that cool mural which mimicked the view of the Raritan in that electrical building on 27. I also remember how seedy New Brunswick was. I could tell you stories of some pretty crazy frat parties too. I went to one where everyone wore Depends and the bathroom was locked for example.
Steamturd, my wife, who I met at Rutgers did undergrad at Arizona. It was funny because Greasy Tony’s apparently moved to Tempe, Arizona and that was the only place she would go for pizza because he was from NJ.
I lived on Easton ave for a good 6 or 7 years. What I miss was the non-stop entertainment. I would just sit outside on the porch and watch chaos ensue. Fights, accidents, cars driving into the building….fires…cops outside every 20 minutes. What I don’t miss is the fact that it lasted until 3 am on some nights.
Lib – Those images bring back great memories. Do you remember the original Greasy Tony’s? Greasy Tony’s was always at the intersection of Easton Avenue and Somerset Street but in 1977 it was across the street in what is now Efes Mediterranean Grill. It had a row of counter stools just like your average greasy spoon diner and the grill was immediately to your right as you walked in. Sometime in the next couple years the big glass version was built that you surely remember. New Brunswick was certainly seedy back then with Easton Avenue being only slightly sketchy, but once you got two blocks away from College Ave it went downhill fast. The same thing applied across town at Douglas Campus. Nichol Ave to Commercial Ave was “OK”, but Commercial was a hard race line, all black on the other side. In ’80-’81 we lived right on that line at 64 Baldwin St. All night, every night Feaster Park was filled with people, all of them black while right across the street the neighborhood was all white.
There’s a good chance I was at some of those Frat parties and you could for sure find me at Lambda Chi playing beer pong after the RUsty Screw closed a lot of nights. Some really good frat parties actually happened over the Summer at RU, with even less than the almost zero oversight frats enjoyed during the school year. Probably the last round of parties I attended in the Easton Avenue area was right after graduation (not mine) in Spring ’83. I graduated from FDU a semester later Just as calendar year ’84 began. I guess you could say my “college days” ran from 9/77-1/84. It was a good run.
Expat…I was 11 in 1981. It would not be until I was 12 that I would spend countless hours between Brower Commons, the river dorms, the Student Center on College Ave and the ZBT and Peek frat houses. 4 of my sisters and 2 brothers are RU alum. I was pretty much raised on Easton Avenue. I remember Greasy Tony’s and that cool mural which mimicked the view of the Raritan in that electrical building on 27. I also remember how seedy New Brunswick was. I could tell you stories of some pretty crazy frat parties too. I went to one where everyone wore Depends and the bathroom was locked for example.
An interesting piece because it parallels my thinking on the future of the profession but is, obviously, better informed and detailed. As an aside, I like reading the KevinMD blog for a better understanding of the medical profession and I commend it. Those of you in the field might find it simplistic but IMHO it is well written for lay professionals.
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2016/11/physicians-finally-joined-working-class.html
His follow up is on whether doctors should organize, a topic discussed here in the past.
Old hard drives are notorious for running perfectly for years while constantly powered, but failing as they power down, as the bearings and spindles will immediately seize up and the motor is not powerful to spin them up again. A spinning drive might spin for nearly forever, a stopped one – that’s the problem. Fans too – they’ll fail to spin up and usually you end up seeing the CPU melt down.
I have an old Sony desktop from 2003 there as well running Windows XP. I haven’t turned it off since then and the thing does everything we need. I find that desktops in general are incredibly durable.
Foreclosure backlog…It would appear that NJ sheriffs have been told to step up the pace of sales and are beginning to comply. The number of properties being sold each week in all counties my group bids in (8) have increased by nearly 100% in the last 4 weeks. Bergen sold over 40 properties this past Friday.
Trump got nothing on this:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-04/family-reveals-29-billion-fortune-as-india-hunts-tax-evaders
Grim [11:16];
India is taking certain large bills out of circulation. People with fortunes and/or lives’ savings stuffed in coffee cans and under mattresses have to declare it all or lose it all.
When you occasionally read Larry Summers talking about banning the $100 (the Euro has a 200€ and 500€ note in general circulation as well — here you’d be hard pressed to find a $500 or $1000 in the wild) to “stop crime”, the only crime he’s worried about is tax evasion.
Read that first line:
A family of four Indians told the government it had evaded tax on $29 billion of income. That fortune would make them wealthier than the nation’s richest man.
I remember that building burning down in Woodbridge. Some of those people had 70k in cash stored in their apatments
Grim,
They should have just got eleceted and formed a cabinet.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-cabinet-could-avoid-millions-in-taxes-thanks-to-this-little-known-law/2016/12/02/509d009a-b7f5-11e6-959c-172c82123976_story.html?utm_term=.434f5cc68c9b
Feel the Bern.
https://www.good.is/articles/bernie-rips-house-committees-science-denial
You embarrass yourself you closed-minded political hack……
OPINION
My Unhappy Life as a Climate Heretic
My research was attacked by thought police in journalism, activist groups funded by billionaires and even the White House.
By ROGER PIELKE JR.
Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank’s climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer: “I think it’s fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.”
WikiLeaks provides a window into a world I’ve seen up close for decades: the debate over what to do about climate change, and the role of science in that argument. Although it is too soon to tell how the Trump administration will engage the scientific community, my long experience shows what can happen when politicians and media turn against inconvenient research—which we’ve seen under Republican and Democratic presidents.
I understand why Mr. Podesta—most recently Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—wanted to drive me out of the climate-change discussion. When substantively countering an academic’s research proves difficult, other techniques are needed to banish it. That is how politics sometimes works, and professors need to understand this if we want to participate in that arena.
More troubling is the degree to which journalists and other academics joined the campaign against me. What sort of responsibility do scientists and the media have to defend the ability to share research, on any subject, that might be inconvenient to political interests—even our own?
I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I’ve studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades. My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career.
Instead, my research was under constant attack for years by activists, journalists and politicians. In 2011 writers in the journal Foreign Policy signaled that some accused me of being a “climate-change denier.” I earned the title, the authors explained, by “questioning certain graphs presented in IPCC reports.” That an academic who raised questions about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in an area of his expertise was tarred as a denier reveals the groupthink at work.
Yet I was right to question the IPCC’s 2007 report, which included a graph purporting to show that disaster costs were rising due to global temperature increases. The graph was later revealed to have been based on invented and inaccurate information, as I documented in my book “The Climate Fix.” The insurance industry scientist Robert-Muir Wood of Risk Management Solutions had smuggled the graph into the IPCC report. He explained in a public debate with me in London in 2010 that he had included the graph and misreferenced it because he expected future research to show a relationship between increasing disaster costs and rising temperatures.
When his research was eventually published in 2008, well after the IPCC report, it concluded the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.” Whoops.
The IPCC never acknowledged the snafu, but subsequent reports got the science right: There is not a strong basis for connecting weather disasters with human-caused climate change.
Yes, storms and other extremes still occur, with devastating human consequences, but history shows they could be far worse. No Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane has made landfall in the U.S. since Hurricane Wilma in 2005, by far the longest such period on record. This means that cumulative economic damage from hurricanes over the past decade is some $70 billion less than the long-term average would lead us to expect, based on my research with colleagues. This is good news, and it should be OK to say so. Yet in today’s hyper-partisan climate debate, every instance of extreme weather becomes a political talking point.
For a time I called out politicians and reporters who went beyond what science can support, but some journalists won’t hear of this. In 2011 and 2012, I pointed out on my blog and social media that the lead climate reporter at the New York Times,Justin Gillis, had mischaracterized the relationship of climate change and food shortages, and the relationship of climate change and disasters. His reporting wasn’t consistent with most expert views, or the evidence. In response he promptly blocked me from his Twitter feed. Other reporters did the same.
In August this year on Twitter, I criticized poor reporting on the website Mashable about a supposed coming hurricane apocalypse—including a bad misquote of me in the cartoon role of climate skeptic. (The misquote was later removed.) The publication’s lead science editor, Andrew Freedman, helpfully explained via Twitter that this sort of behavior “is why you’re on many reporters’ ‘do not call’ lists despite your expertise.”
I didn’t know reporters had such lists. But I get it. No one likes being told that he misreported scientific research, especially on climate change. Some believe that connecting extreme weather with greenhouse gases helps to advance the cause of climate policy. Plus, bad news gets clicks.
Yet more is going on here than thin-skinned reporters responding petulantly to a vocal professor. In 2015 I was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Paige St. John, making the rather obvious point that politicians use the weather-of-the-moment to make the case for action on climate change, even if the scientific basis is thin or contested.
Ms. St. John was pilloried by her peers in the media. Shortly thereafter, she emailed me what she had learned: “You should come with a warning label: Quoting Roger Pielke will bring a hailstorm down on your work from the London Guardian, Mother Jones, and Media Matters.”
Or look at the journalists who helped push me out of FiveThirtyEight. My first article there, in 2014, was based on the consensus of the IPCC and peer-reviewed research. I pointed out that the global cost of disasters was increasing at a rate slower than GDP growth, which is very good news. Disasters still occur, but their economic and human effect is smaller than in the past. It’s not terribly complicated.
That article prompted an intense media campaign to have me fired. Writers at Slate, Salon, the New Republic, the New York Times, the Guardian and others piled on.
In March of 2014, FiveThirtyEight editor Mike Wilson demoted me from staff writer to freelancer. A few months later I chose to leave the site after it became clear it wouldn’t publish me. The mob celebrated. ClimateTruth.org, founded by former Center for American Progress staffer Brad Johnson, and advised by Penn State’s Michael Mann, called my departure a “victory for climate truth.” The Center for American Progress promised its donor Mr. Steyer more of the same.
Yet the climate thought police still weren’t done. In 2013 committees in the House and Senate invited me to a several hearings to summarize the science on disasters and climate change. As a professor at a public university, I was happy to do so. My testimony was strong, and it was well aligned with the conclusions of the IPCC and the U.S. government’s climate-science program. Those conclusions indicate no overall increasing trend in hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or droughts—in the U.S. or globally.
In early 2014, not long after I appeared before Congress, President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren testified before the same Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He was asked about his public statements that appeared to contradict the scientific consensus on extreme weather events that I had earlier presented. Mr. Holdren responded with the all-too-common approach of attacking the messenger, telling the senators incorrectly that my views were “not representative of the mainstream scientific opinion.” Mr. Holdren followed up by posting a strange essay, of nearly 3,000 words, on the White House website under the heading, “An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr.,” where it remains today.
I suppose it is a distinction of a sort to be singled out in this manner by the president’s science adviser. Yet Mr. Holdren’s screed reads more like a dashed-off blog post from the nutty wings of the online climate debate, chock-full of errors and misstatements.
But when the White House puts a target on your back on its website, people notice. Almost a year later Mr. Holdren’s missive was the basis for an investigation of me by Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. Rep. Grijalva explained in a letter to my university’s president that I was being investigated because Mr. Holdren had “highlighted what he believes were serious misstatements by Prof. Pielke of the scientific consensus on climate change.” He made the letter public.
The “investigation” turned out to be a farce. In the letter, Rep. Grijalva suggested that I—and six other academics with apparently heretical views—might be on the payroll of Exxon Mobil (or perhaps the Illuminati, I forget). He asked for records detailing my research funding, emails and so on. After some well-deserved criticism from the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, Rep. Grijalva deleted the letter from his website. The University of Colorado complied with Rep. Grijalva’s request and responded that I have never received funding from fossil-fuel companies. My heretical views can be traced to research support from the U.S. government.
But the damage to my reputation had been done, and perhaps that was the point. Studying and engaging on climate change had become decidedly less fun. So I started researching and teaching other topics and have found the change in direction refreshing. Don’t worry about me: I have tenure and supportive campus leaders and regents. No one is trying to get me fired for my new scholarly pursuits.
But the lesson is that a lone academic is no match for billionaires, well-funded advocacy groups, the media, Congress and the White House. If academics—in any subject—are to play a meaningful role in public debate, the country will have to do a better job supporting good-faith researchers, even when their results are unwelcome. This goes for Republicans and Democrats alike, and to the administration of President-elect Trump.
Academics and the media in particular should support viewpoint diversity instead of serving as the handmaidens of political expediency by trying to exclude voices or damage reputations and careers. If academics and the media won’t support open debate, who will?
Mr. Pielke is a professor and director of the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His most recent book is “The Edge: The Wars Against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports” (Roaring Forties Press, 2016).
A tale of two refugees…
Dahir Adan
“At about 8:15 on the evening of September 17, 2016 an individual began stabbing patrons at the Crossroads Center shopping mall. He was armed with two steak knives, one 10 inches and the other 9 inches. The stabbings first began outside the mall, at a nutrition store, before the attacker entered the building, stabbed an electronics store employee, and ran past a couple of other stores towards the Target and Macy’s anchor stores.
Before the spree ended, ten people were injured, three of whom were hospitalized with non-life-threatening wounds. Reports said the attacker made references to Allah, including shouting “Allahu Akbar”, and asked several people if they were Muslim.”
Abdul Razak Ali Artan
“An Ohio State University student has been identified as the suspect behind the gruesome attack Monday on the school’s campus.
The alleged attacker, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, was killed by police, but not before driving a car into a group of people and then attacking victims with a butcher’s knife, said Monica Moll, public safety director at Ohio State. FBI agents had joined local police in investigating the incident. Eleven people were injured; all are expected to survive
Artan was born in Somalia and living in the United States as a legal permanent resident. Investigators discovered a message he posted on a Facebook page before the attack in which he expressed anger about the treatment of Muslims around the world”
BLLJ5y Very good post. I am going through some of these issues as well..
cXA8TU this article to him. Pretty sure he as going to have a good read.
qvCYfO Stupid Human Tricks Korean Style Post details Mopeds