Last Thursday, I flew up to NYC (unbeknownst to Rachel). The following morning, Rach arrived to meet with clients for an interior design project, or so she thought…
Her office txted her, said the lunch meeting was running late and her boss was milling around in Central Park. She was to meet him at the Central Park Mall and from there they would walk to the appointment.
Surprise, surprise – no boss, just me with ring in hand.
Big, big thanks to Lindsay from Rach’s office as my planning partner in crime, Eric & Elisha Krauss for being my incognito photography team, and Ryan Swinford for providing me with an affordable crash pad. I would not have been able to pull this off without your help.
Jeremy Cowart, a Nashville local, is the brainchild behind a new non-prof called Help-Portrait. Help-Portrait’s mission is simple: host a photoshoot for people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford one and then deliver your pictures after they are developed.
On December 12th, photographers, make-up artists, creative directors, and a host of other creatives will go out to the communities and shoot those in need.
This video shows how powerful it is to take someone’s photo. Want to make someone feel special? It’s easy, get involved with Help-Portrait and show people that they are indeed beautiful creations.
After seeing this trailer, I am really anticipating the release of Garden to the City. According to the website, ”G2tC will be a series of short films revealing the story for God’s renewal of all things.” Thanks to Roy Keely and David Wilhite for the heads up.
I turned in my 2nd iPhone after a week of usage. Why?
Couple reasons, the phone isn’t THAT great and the carrier is subpar. Chris Dixon took the words out of my mouth – you never buy a phone, you buy a phone/carrier combo.
Here’s what I’m looking for in my next phone:
Seamless integration with Google (Gmail, Google Voice, Google Docs, Wave, etc)
Plan that includes ~700 minutes, unlimited messaging & data for under $80
Colson makes a brilliant point in this podcast, the cost of healthcare is a surface issue. There’s something deeper lurking beneath, we need to reform our litigation process.
“You can make 30 times as much money as doctors, by becoming a trial lawyer suing doctors. You need no skills, no superior board scores, no decade of training and no sleepless residency. But you must have the morals of a drug dealer.”
further,
“As long as we’re studying the health care systems of various socialist countries, are we allowed to notice that doctors in these other countries aren’t constantly being sued by bottom-feeding trial lawyers stealing one-third of the income of people performing useful work like saving lives?”
‘It’s a good investment’ A lot of people honestly didn’t believe real-estate prices could ever fall.
Some people were not only convinced that real estate could only go up, but that real estate guaranteed a far better return than any other investment. Of course, everybody has learned otherwise.
But aren’t we near a bottom? Might this not be the ideal time to get in and see some serious appreciation? Maybe, maybe not. Just because prices have dropped a lot doesn’t mean they can’t go lower.
The pace of decline does seem to have slowed. But the foreclosure crisis isn’t over, and prices won’t recover as long as banks keep dumping houses with fire-sale prices on vulnerable markets.
Double-digit-percentage returns on home prices were an anomaly. Before the real-estate bubble, average home price appreciation barely outpaced inflation. (By contrast, in every 30-year period since 1928, the stock market’s average annual return has beaten inflation by at least 4 percentage points and typically by 7.) Homeownership can help you build wealth over time. Paying down your mortgage is a kind of forced savings, and price appreciation (when it returns) will help you build equity. But you can’t count on home values snapping back anytime soon, so anyone who buys these days should be prepared to stay put for a good long while.
‘I’m tired of throwing away money on rent’
Renting usually is cheaper than owning. In really expensive cities, such as New York and San Francisco, renting is so much cheaper that it’s tough to make the case for becoming a homeowner. Buying in these markets often means settling for a much worse property or an awful commute, compared with what you can afford if you continue to rent.
You’re not really throwing money away when you send a check to your landlord, anyway. You’re exchanging it for a place to live. You’re also getting flexibility and freedom — things you sacrifice when you buy a home.
When you’re a renter, it’s the landlord, not you, who is generally responsible for maintenance, repairs and fixing the toilet that blows up in the middle of the night. If the neighborhood should start to slide or you get or lose a job, you can up and move, often with just a few weeks’ notice.
It’s true that you may have to deal with rising rents and recalcitrant landlords. Homeowners, however, are often stuck with rising taxes and maintenance costs, as well as recalcitrant neighbors.
Moving is never fun, but moving when you own a home is an expensive, time-consuming process in the best of times. Finding a buyer can take months. Selling costs will eat up about 10% of your home’s value, once you add agent commissions and moving expenses. If you’re already “underwater” on your mortgage — owing more than the house is worth, as 20% of U.S. homeowners do these days — you may wind up with a short sale or foreclosure on your record, which will trash your credit.
by Taylor Brooks on September 18, 2009 · 1 comment
There’s a great story about Pablo Picasso. Some guy told Picasso he’d pay him to draw a picture on a napkin. Picasso whipped out a pen and banged out a sketch, handed it to the guy, and said, “One million dollars, please.”
“A million dollars?” the guy exclaimed. “That only took you thirty seconds!”
“Yes,” said Picasso. “But it took me fifty years to learn how to draw that in thirty seconds.”
People often gripe1 about the high cost of creative work2 because they have no framework for what makes quality work.
What makes a quality design or a good photo? Is “beauty in the eye of the beholder“? Or is there an objective way to judge art?
Thoughts?
Here’s a funny video on vendor/client relationships:
1 If people aren’t gawking at your rates, you aren’t charging enough. 2Graphic design, web development, motion graphics, photography, etc.
by Taylor Brooks on September 15, 2009 · 0 comments
Joel Salatin is a self-proclaimed “Christian-Libertarian-Environmentalist-Capitalist-Lunatic.” Sounds like my kinda guy.
In a recent interview with Blue Ridge Outdoors, Salatin sheds light on challenges local food producers face. Buying local food is generally more expensive than going to the supermarket; you would assume it’s cheaper in the supermarket because large corporations can achieve economies of scale. Not so says Salatin,
“…the cost of local artisan food has nothing to do with inefficient delivery or production. It has to do with the onerous government regulations that are non-scalable. A normal business that is our size should be paying $2,000 for worker’s comp, but we have to pay $10,000 because we don’t fit into a specific category. A lot of the problem is strictly regulatory requirements, as opposed to inherent inefficiency of small-scale production.”
Here are two videos from a question/answer session at UC-Berkeley.1
The term “organic” and how the USDA has perverted its true meaning:
What determines meat texture and how government intervention is bad for farmers:
