Can’t reign forever: Via ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
crypto, Just a Band: Really good electronic-type music; you can get Ha-He for free and Usinibore is just 99 cents at iTunes, along with other songs!
Adam Selzer, I Kissed a Zombie, and I Liked It: Lightweight first-love book about Alley Rhodes, small-town Iowa girl yearning to go to college in Seattle, and her adventure in posthuman romance. There’s a nice sendup of advice to teens and how it’s hard for teens to trust adults’ dire warnings about everything, which here includes not just sex but also becoming undead. It seems like a perfectly nice book, and the teenagers ring true in striving for more wittiness and world-weariness than they can deliver, but its very charm lies in the absence of heaviness, and it's heaviness which usually makes books more memorable for me.
Harlan Coben, Long Lost: I think Coben’s books might get worse the more he tries for plausible explanations for the terrific coincidences on which his books rely. This one features a long-lost love who reappears in Paris needing the protagonist’s help with a secret involving her dead daughter, skeevy Middle Eastern terrorists, and waterboarding. But see, Coben has his POV character worry that we treat people differently depending on whether or not they have blue eyes and blond hair, so he’s aware of the racial problematics! I also didn’t appreciate the trying-to-cover-all-the-bases discussion of torture: we’re against it, of course, a good-guy character says, but it’s a difficult issue because what about the conceded terrorist who definitely knows where an active nuclear bomb is? This, and nobody bothers to mention that the torture in this book was inflicted on an absolutely innocent man—including the innocent torture victim to whom this straw man argument is offered? Look, I don’t mind if Coben’s not thinking very hard—that’s not what the books are for. I mind if he’s not thinking very hard about stuff that actually matters, and since we’re apparently now making public policy based on what Jack Bauer gets away with on 24, Coben is not helping.
Hernando de Soto and Property in a Market Economy, ed. D. Benjamin Barros: de Soto is well-known among property types for his thesis that titling—formal recognition of actual property ownership—is necessary to help poor people turn what they actually own—“dead capital”—into the ability to participate in a market economy by, for example, accessing formal credit secured by mortgages. The essays mostly complicate this thesis, pointing out that, for example, while de Soto is considered a conservative, his basic proposal often requires transferring title in land from the wealthy, powerful interests that are the record owners to the poor people who actually live there and generate income from the land. Carol Rose’s contribution is typically insightful, and Ezra Rosser has a really interesting piece on the disaster of Indian land allotment in the US as a counterexample to de Soto’s stories of titling success. Nicole Stelle Garnett contributes a fascinating look at informal businesses operating in public spaces—jitneys and street vendors—in the US and the reasons why it’s hard to use title to move from the informal to the formal sector. Juliet Moringiello’s essay on intangible assets is tough going if you don’t already know secured credit, but brings out an important aspect of the titling thesis: formal title has to be coupled with a really good recording system so that other people know what you own, and intangible assets in the US are often not subject to such a system; this was arguably a huge problem in the recent credit crisis, where trades off the books were impossible to identify, much less value, to figure out what was at risk and who owned what. (There’s also great work going on now about how mortgage brokers and banks deliberately evaded the really comprehensive titling system for land we have—or anyway had—in the US, leading to situations in which banks foreclose without being able to prove that they own the mortgages at issue, and potentially to multiple sales of the same mortgage in different securitization packages. De Soto does not approve.)
crypto, Just a Band: Really good electronic-type music; you can get Ha-He for free and Usinibore is just 99 cents at iTunes, along with other songs!Adam Selzer, I Kissed a Zombie, and I Liked It: Lightweight first-love book about Alley Rhodes, small-town Iowa girl yearning to go to college in Seattle, and her adventure in posthuman romance. There’s a nice sendup of advice to teens and how it’s hard for teens to trust adults’ dire warnings about everything, which here includes not just sex but also becoming undead. It seems like a perfectly nice book, and the teenagers ring true in striving for more wittiness and world-weariness than they can deliver, but its very charm lies in the absence of heaviness, and it's heaviness which usually makes books more memorable for me.
Harlan Coben, Long Lost: I think Coben’s books might get worse the more he tries for plausible explanations for the terrific coincidences on which his books rely. This one features a long-lost love who reappears in Paris needing the protagonist’s help with a secret involving her dead daughter, skeevy Middle Eastern terrorists, and waterboarding. But see, Coben has his POV character worry that we treat people differently depending on whether or not they have blue eyes and blond hair, so he’s aware of the racial problematics! I also didn’t appreciate the trying-to-cover-all-the-bases discussion of torture: we’re against it, of course, a good-guy character says, but it’s a difficult issue because what about the conceded terrorist who definitely knows where an active nuclear bomb is? This, and nobody bothers to mention that the torture in this book was inflicted on an absolutely innocent man—including the innocent torture victim to whom this straw man argument is offered? Look, I don’t mind if Coben’s not thinking very hard—that’s not what the books are for. I mind if he’s not thinking very hard about stuff that actually matters, and since we’re apparently now making public policy based on what Jack Bauer gets away with on 24, Coben is not helping.
Hernando de Soto and Property in a Market Economy, ed. D. Benjamin Barros: de Soto is well-known among property types for his thesis that titling—formal recognition of actual property ownership—is necessary to help poor people turn what they actually own—“dead capital”—into the ability to participate in a market economy by, for example, accessing formal credit secured by mortgages. The essays mostly complicate this thesis, pointing out that, for example, while de Soto is considered a conservative, his basic proposal often requires transferring title in land from the wealthy, powerful interests that are the record owners to the poor people who actually live there and generate income from the land. Carol Rose’s contribution is typically insightful, and Ezra Rosser has a really interesting piece on the disaster of Indian land allotment in the US as a counterexample to de Soto’s stories of titling success. Nicole Stelle Garnett contributes a fascinating look at informal businesses operating in public spaces—jitneys and street vendors—in the US and the reasons why it’s hard to use title to move from the informal to the formal sector. Juliet Moringiello’s essay on intangible assets is tough going if you don’t already know secured credit, but brings out an important aspect of the titling thesis: formal title has to be coupled with a really good recording system so that other people know what you own, and intangible assets in the US are often not subject to such a system; this was arguably a huge problem in the recent credit crisis, where trades off the books were impossible to identify, much less value, to figure out what was at risk and who owned what. (There’s also great work going on now about how mortgage brokers and banks deliberately evaded the really comprehensive titling system for land we have—or anyway had—in the US, leading to situations in which banks foreclose without being able to prove that they own the mortgages at issue, and potentially to multiple sales of the same mortgage in different securitization packages. De Soto does not approve.)
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It's a matter of public record that, in one instance of mortgage fraud, Fannie Mae failed to notice that it held first liens secured *on the same property at the same time* in over a hundred cases.
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