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Pluto will be a planet once again!

Imagine living on a South Pacific island and naming all aquatic life in your lagoon “fish.” But your definition was so specific it didn’t apply to whatever creatures lived in the rest of the ocean. This is what the International ... Found via...

Tishman Speyer Properties and its co-investors just walked away from the largest real-estate deal in US history, simply defaulting on the properties and the loans that bought them and leaving their creditors in the lurch. The properties, Manhattan's 56-building, 11,232-unit Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, were "under water" (worth less than the debt hanging over them), so the corporate developers elected to simply jettison them.

They're not alone -- Morgan Stanley recently dumped five San Francisco office buildings, stiffing their creditors when the buildings went underwater.

As a business-strategy it makes sense: why repay loans secured by assets that are worth less than the loans? Just turn the assets over and cut your losses.

But individuals are shamed, bullied, and counselled not to do this when it's their private homes that fall underwater. Everyone from former US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to credit counsellors to the Mortgage Bankers Association tell you that defaulting on underwater property is low and dishonest (unless you're a Wall Street player -- then it's just "protecting shareholder value").

Former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson once said: "And let me emphasize, any homeowner who can afford his mortgage payment but chooses to walk away from an underwater property is simply a speculator - and one who is not honoring his obligations."

The head of the Mortgage Bankers Association, John Courson, played up the moral argument against walking away, telling the Wall Street Journal last month: "What about the message they will send to their family and their kids and their friends?

But corporations and businesses don't play by those rules. Like CalPERS's McKinley said, "You come to a point where you write it off or stay in the game. If you want to stay in you got to put in more capital. We reached our limit on that. It was not a prudent thing to put more money into it.

"You get to a point where you can't keep throwing good money after bad," he said. "These are illiquid investments. You gotta fish or cut bait."

As for homeowners walking away en masse -- perhaps lenders' biggest housing-related fear -- McKinley added: "We're hopeful that won't happen."

Don't Look Back: Major Players Continue To 'Walk Away' From Poor Mortgages (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

(Image: Friendly's Underwater Restaurant, a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike image from nlnnet's photostream)

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I would totally play Harm's Way. That sounds like an awesome game!

We hate to pick sides, but we think we've already settled on a favorite competitor of the two Doritos Unlock Xbox finalists. See if you can detect which one. Jill Robertson's "Avatar Crash Course": Maneuver your Avatar through a zany obstacle course. Justin Carpenter's "Harm's Way": It... Found via...

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Love it. While i love that insurance companies have money to pay for my industry's products and generally keep some people healthy, i would prefer that everyone be healthy and that slightly less money went from my wages to insurance companies.

Hey you. You there in the Glenn Beck T-shirt headed off to the Tea Party Patriot rally. Stop shouting for a moment, please, I want to explain to you why you're so very angry. You should be angry. You're getting screwed. I think you know that. But you don't seem to know that it doesn't have to b... Found via...

Sit perfectly still. Only I may dance.

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Is a snow shovel left on the front porch a violation of neighborhood association laws? This email exchange shows what happens when suburbanites stop being polite ... and start getting real.(Thanks, Mark B.!)

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The federal gas tax. It needs to be raised. We’ve hammered this point home enough. Our infrastructure needs help, and that help involves money, and that money has to come from somewhere. Politicians know this. But they won’t touch the gas tax with a ten-foot pole. Why not? Because come election time, no one wants to be the candidate responsible for raising the most soundbite-ready and execrated tax on earth. Just think of all the campaign slogans you could come up with — and if you can’t think of any, there are about 200 strategists in Washington who can.

But what we may not realize is that much of the problem lies in public perception of the tax — specifically, what Americans know (or don’t) about how often it gets raised. Here’s a startling fact we came across in a poll done last year by Building America’s Future, Public Opinion Strategies, and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research: There is widespread agreement, among people of all demographics and political parties, that the federal gas tax goes up every year (unrelated to state gas taxes, which vary). Even people who closely follow infrastructure/transportation news believe this.

The survey was done from June 30 through July 2, 2009, and involved 800 adults, with a +3.46% margin of error. And a whopping 60% of the respondents — Republican and Democrat alike — believe the federal gas tax is raised annually. Geographic location didn’t make much of a difference — 61% believed this incorrect statement in the Northeast, 58% in the South, 54% in the Midwest, and 67% in the West.

The truth, of course, is that the federal gas tax has been unchanged at 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. And, in a colossal error of judgment, the government neglected to index it for inflation. So it’s worth even less now than it was then.

Other results of the poll made this lack of education on the tax even more striking: When asked, “Thinking about your experience with transportation infrastructure in your area today…in general, how would you rate the condition of and your experience with traffic congestion?” 31% answered “very poor.” A majority also answered that traffic congestion was not “a fact of life” — in other words, people believe something can be done about it. A majority (55%) also responded that our country’s infrastructure is outdated, unreliable, and inefficient. On the statement, “Transportation infrastructure funding decisions are based more on politics than need?” a whopping 62% said they strongly agree.

So in other words, we know that our infrastructure needs money, and that our lives could be improved by investment in it. We know that the principle way to raise money for infrastructure is through taxes, and that politicians are making infrastructure decisions based on political gain rather than public good. But what we don’t know is that we’re objecting to the raising of a tax that hasn’t been raised in almost 20 years, and could do wonders for all the troubles we’ve identified. Maybe it’s time for a Gas Tax Education Initiative?

Image courtesy of MCT.

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This video deftly skewers the food industry's current fixations, including This-Is-Why-You're-Fat-grade hamburgers, fancy TV dinners, and junk food masquerading as wholesome:

We take the finest ingredients and put them in a bowl with salt and butter.

And "hide your salad" describes my salad dressing technique perfectly...it ends up more like ranch soup, really.

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Dear Microsoft and TiVo, I would love it if you resolved this little quarrel by allowing Windows Media Center to serve as a Tivo Extender. Because really TiVo, the TiVo Desktop software is kind of crappy.

Microsoft has filed suit against TiVo, specifically accusing the company of infringing on its video purchasing and delivery patents. This comes just days after a lawsuit was filed by TiVo against AT&T, one of Microsoft’s biggest customers. The best way to explain this complicated series of a... Found via...

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File under "History Repeats Itself: Some more"

A study of recent—and not so recent—financial reform and regulation yields two rules. Rule No. 1: The banks have no idea what kind of regulation is good for them. Rule No. 2: If you ever think the banks have a point, remember Rule No. 1.

This rule dates almost to the beginning of American history. Many commercial banks in the United States opposed the creation of the first and second national banks of the United States in the late 18^th and early 19^th century. They saw the proto-central bank as competition, since it was essentially a congressionally chartered private bank that would compete with them. As a result, the United States, in contrast to economic rivals England and France, lacked a central bank in the 19^th century—despite periodic banking panics and failures, the severity of which could have been mitigated by a central bank. It was only after the Panic of 1907 that forces were set into motion for the creation of a central bank. Would it surprise you to learn that many bankers and their political allies opposed the creation of the Federal Reserve? Didn't think so.

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