Short Sale and Taxes

(As you might recall mortgage is from two Latin rules “mort” meaning death and “gage” meaning grip.)

With all the mortgage troubles that folks are experiencing, some folks view a “short sale” as a way to get out from under their debt. However, you might be in for a surprise. The portion that the bank looses in the transaction might be considered taxable income to you by our friends in the Eternal Revenue Service. Yeah, you could be the astonished recipient of a Form 1099C from your lender.

There are IRS tax rules in place for when lenders are forced to foreclose because home owners have become delinquent in their mortgage payments. You will owe taxes on the difference between what the lender gets for the home and the outstanding mortgage loan balance. The same is true for a mortgage short sale. You will owe taxes on the amount of your loan or mortgage that the bank or lender has forgiven. That’s right, you are taxed even when you don’t receive any actual money.

IRS instruction for Form 1099C

If a federal government agency, certain agencies connected with the Federal Government, financial institution, credit union, or an organization having a significant trade or business of lending money (such as a finance or credit card company) cancels or forgives a debt you owe of $600 or more, this form must be provided to you. Generally, if you are an individual, you must include all canceled amounts, even if less than $600, on the “Other income” line of Form 1040.

Remember, the first rule of holes is stop digging. See a tax professional before you go down this path.

Apple Quicktime Busts Vistas Buffers

Symptom: You try running Quicktime media player from Apple on your Windows Vista PC and after a few seconds playing, Quicktime chashes and gives you a buffer error.

If this is you, then you are probably running SATA drives using an NVIDIA RAID Driver. If you run Quicktime files from the Internet they work great but any file on your hard drive will crash the Apple player.

Don’t panic, this is normal behavior, albeit, very irritating. The solution is that you need to run the files from either a USB hard drive or an IDE one. At this point neither Apple, Microsoft nor NVIDIA is admitting that there is a problem.

See thread that Apple has on their website.

If I play any files encoded in the MOV file format that are stored LOCALLY on any of my 3 internal SATA HD’s, the file play for a few seconds with sound, but without video, then eventually the buffer overrun error occurs.

If I stream the EXACT SAME file via the internet, or my local home network, or play them from my external USB HD, USB Thumb drive, or even burn them to CD/DVD and play them from that, I do not encounter the buffer overrun problem, and the files play just fine, even the files that are in high definition. I’m not an expert, but in my case, this may point to poor Nvidia SATA drivers, although I could be wrong.

Just to recap. If I play any MOV files from the internal SATA HD’s attached to my motherboard directly, I get a problem. If I stream them, or play them from another storage medium, I do not encounter a problem.

Outsourcing Parents

Yesterday I saw a news story that combined a multitude of cultural and social issues into one story. Some of the issues that come to mind include NAFTA, healthcare and redefining the family.

Since the days of NAFTA and Ross Perot, many Americans that favor protectionism and isolation have railed against “out sourcing” jobs to other nations. I have vivid mental pictures of “that giant sucking sound” of American jobs.

Also in the 1990’s, we were bombarded with “Hilary Care.” This resulted in the lively discussion of how the government (and trial lawyers) created rising costs of healthcare and the solution was more government.

Many of us have wanted to divorce our children when they were teens, but what should they do with us when we get old and can’t care for ourselves? Should families expect to bankrupt themselves to care for the elderly in their final years? Should we rethink “Logan’s Run”?

Most people have had to struggle with these issues at some point in their lives (or will soon). Some people have been thinking outside the proverbial box and come up with a novel approach.

Why not simply do what corporate America does, let’s outsource our parents!

That’s right! Who needs astronomical rest home bills and medical expenses when we get more bang for our buck overseas. Yes, people are really shipping their parents to India for care in their later years.

India, the second most populous country on the planet and home of some of the most wretched living conditions ever known, has a five star resort to warehouse middleclass old folks.

The article on one level is absolutely funny and upon reflection says a great deal about what is wrong with our country.

Man turns to India for cheap care for parents
By Laurie Goering
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Sunday, Aug. 05 2007

PONDICHERRY, INDIA — After three years of caring for his increasingly frail mother and father in their Florida retirement home, Steve Herzfeld was exhausted and faced with spending his family’s last resources to put the couple in a cheap nursing home.

So he made what he saw as the only sensible decision: He outsourced his parents to India.

Today his mother, Frances, 89, who suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease, gets daily massages, physical therapy and 24-hour help getting to the bathroom, all for about $15 a day. His father, Ernest, 93, an Alzheimer’s patient, has a full-time personal assistant, and a cook who has won him over to a vegetarian
diet healthy enough that he no longer needs his cholesterol medication.

Best of all, the plentiful drugs the couple require cost less than 20 percent of what they do at home, and salaries for their six-person staff are so cheap that the pair now bank $1,000 a month of their $3,000 Social Security payment. They aim to use the savings as an emergency fund or to pay for airline tickets
if family members want to visit.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a solution for everybody, but I consider it the best solution to our problem,” said Herzfeld, 56, who made the move to India with his parents, and now, as “care manager rather than the actual worker” has time for things such as strolls in the botanical gardens with his father.

With the cost of nursing homes, home nurses and medications painfully high in the United States, the elderly and their caregivers have long looked abroad for better solutions. Many families now drive regularly to Mexico or Canada to buy cheaper drugs, or hire recent immigrants — some of them undocumented — to help them look after frail parents.

A growing number of aging couples have bought retirement homes in Mexico, where help is cheap and Medicare-funded health care just a quick drive across the border.

From http://www.stltoday.com

China and Lead: Silent Epidemic

I am concerned about a silent epidemic that can be laid at the feet of Wal-Mart and globalization. We all know about the mercury threat from compact fluorescent light bulbs in our landfills but there is an even more insidious problem in our midst: lead.

That’s right, lead! Although outlawed from almost every segment of American life except fishing (where mercury in fish is a bigger problem than lead weights), lead is a growing menace in our landfills. The primary source of this lead is China! Yes, all the recalled toys and food products that Americans discard are going to our landfills and it is just a matter of time before this lead begins to be found in our ground water and domestically produced food.

China is trying to export their industrial waste by hiding it in products that it sells in the United States. This is obviously a prelude to their planned colonization of the good ole US of A. They are trying to pollute our nation to the point that it is just like theirs and then they will come.

Soon there will be a flood of Chinese movies, campaign donations, and clothing. Next they will corner the market on raw materials that should be going to the United States to build our economy. Oh, no they already did all that!

It is no coincidence that the heart of this conspiracy is in Arkansas. Both Bill Clinton and Wal-Mart are based in Arkansas. Hilary was on the Wal-Mart board until she had aspirations to be President. Obviously Bill didn’t finish the job in his eight years as President so his wife must pickup where he left off. While it is hard to conceive of any military secret the Chinese didn’t get during the first Clinton administration, there must be something more that they want.

Perhaps the answer is in a different direction. Look at the facts; we outlawed lead (and mercury) “for the children.” Hilary wants universal healthcare “for the children.” My doctor went to college and medical school in China. Medicine is one seventh of the US economy and one of the few economic areas were America can still excel in the global economy. Wal-Mart wants to corner the market on prescription drugs. The liberals see Cuba as a model for medical care and China as the most successful Communist country still in existence.

Given all the above facts, it is clear that the Chinese are purposely putting lead in children’s toys that it is selling at Wal-Mart to grow their economy while simultaneously offloading their industrial waste and increasing our government’s intrusion into our lives by trying to protect the children of greedy middleclass consumers from lead while simultaneously using its presence to make the case for universal healthcare and thus creating a need for Americans to elect Hilary Clinton so the Chinese can do to us what Bill did to Monica in the Oval Office.
wink

What is Next for President Bush?

Yesterday, talk radio, voters and a bi-partisan group of Senators saved George Bush from himself. Bush has always had a blind spot when it comes to illegals from Mexico. He was ready to push for this type of amnesty legislation when he was first elected in 2000 but his plans were thwarted by the terror attacks on 9/11.

Unfortunately, President Bush is incapable of seeing border security as an integral part of the War on Terror. The evidence is plain for any unbiased person to see but it just doesn’t register in his view of the world. To say that his time as governor of Texas was formative for his views is an understatement. When it comes to Mexican illegals, he is trying to turn the whole country into a Texas type paradigm. He keeps looking at the issue with the same impotence that many state officials do. It is a Federal problem. He just doesn’t get the concept that he is on the other side of the looking glass now and he not only has the opportunity to fix it but the obligation.

Bush lacks the vision and the desire to solve the broken immigration system. His managerial skills have compounded the problem. Instead of appointing good people to be strong in areas where he is weak, he has appointed longtime friends and people of like mind, often with disastrous results. Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and Alberto Gonzalez as Attorney General are two examples.

Either we are at war or we become ostriches to the threat of radical Islam. President Bush seems to oscillate between both beliefs. I wish he would return to the path of stopping terrorists and act accordingly. His neglect of most domestic issues at the expense of winning the war is not the best alternative but understandable. If he wants to do something constructive domestically, he should help get Republicans elected in 2008, especially, in the White House. Committing political suicide and destroying our national sovereignty is not a constructive or rational policy.

Hopefully, the President will take a cold shower and go to Crawford for a week of barbequing and reflection and return to Washington ready to work for the American people. We need his help and leadership not more backstabbing of the folks who voted for him. Secure the borders, win the war, confirm the judges.

NVIDIA plus RAID yields Chaos

The US Senate is not the only thing running amuck this week. If you are running Windows Vista with any flavor of NVIDIA RAID then this could be a challenging time for you. The NVIDIA drivers that were just released via both their website and Microsoft Update are causing major issues for many folks that rely on RAID controllers in their computers.

The drivers from the Windows Update and those from NVIDIA totally kill my RAID 5 array. I get the legendary “blue screen of death” and the system reboots into the boot window where you can choose Last Known Good Startup. This will get your computer back up but then a window asking to install the new RAID drivers greets you. If you say NO the system tries to install the driver anyways.

My immediate concern is that I need to kill the automatic update from prompting me to install the RAID drivers each time I boot my computer. Sounds like a registry tweak or I need to delete a downloaded update program on my hard drive.

The support boards at NVIDIA’s website are full of stories by other hearty souls dealing with the same type of issues.  The drivers are part of the 158.18 update. The manufacturer considers these drivers a Beta for Windows Vista. Half of this driver package can be installed automatically; the Ethernet, SMBus & SMU, however, the RAID portion cannot. Don’t install the RAIDtool application. If you want to try this part of the driver package then create system restore point and give it a try. Oh, and good luck.

I went on the website for my motherboard and their driver site had an additional nugget of information missing from both the NVIDIA and Microsoft websites that I had already deduced from reading the support forums on the NVIDIA site, these RAID drivers must be installed by booting your system with the original Vista DVD and pressing F6 to install additional drivers.

For those of you that are not familiar with the significance of this fact, it is important. First, it means that the driver that Windows Update is trying to force feed me will never install correctly. Since my bootable driver is my RAID array, the driver that Windows is trying to replace is currently in use whenever my system is running. In fact my system cannot run without it.

Second, I need to create a floppy disk with the updated drivers in order to update the RAID drivers. There are actually two drivers that need to be updated. Once the NVIDIA update is downloaded and expanded, the necessary drivers can be found at the following location: C:\NVIDIA\nForceWinVista64\15.00\IDE\WinVista64\sataraid. Copy all files in this directory to your freshly formatted floppy drive. (Before trying this update, it would be good to locate your original 64-bit drivers and have that floppy available just in case you need to undo this experiment.)

Insert your Vista DVD in the driver, set BIOS to boot off of this drive and start the system on the DVD. When prompted, press F6 key to install additional drivers. You may now select the first driver from the floppy and install. Next press the S key to install additional drivers and select and install second driver from the floppy. If you mess this up, reboot and do over. You cannot damage your system and have made no changes to the drivers at this point.

Disclaimer: This next step is based on experience and I am relying on memory because I have not done this in a while. Next select Repair. (The goal on this step is to get the drivers on floppy copied to hard drive to replace old drivers.) If floppy is still in the drive this should happen without much user input. Once the system has completed repair, remove floppy disk and DVD and reboot. If system successfully reboots then you are done.

I am leaving for a much-deserved vacation and won’t be trying this before I return. If you run this update, write me and let me know how it went.

My Turn on the Immigration Bill

I have been listening to the debate over the proposed immigration bill for several weeks. The bottom line is that supporters say they must do something about immigration. Their basic argument in support of this law is that the current system is broken. Supporters argue that this bill will fix the problem. They say trust us, we will replace the laws that aren’t enforced now with more laws that have no enforcement mechanisms. We make all illegals legal and then there is no problem.

I have heard members of Congress, administration officials, staff from The Wall Street Journal and others claiming to support the bill try to argue in favor of this legislation but they cannot cite why this bill is better than current law and more importantly how this law will fix the problem of illegal immigration once and for all.

The bill’s supporters are utilizing emotional arguments both in favor of the bill and also to attack its opponents. Anyone that opposes this bill is a racist, bigot, Nazi, xenophobe. Facts are not relevant to this discussion. I have not heard a single person who says that they favor the bill try to argue the merits of the legislation by citing chapter and verse from this wonderful compromise worked out in secret. Ultimately supporters claim that President Bush will sign it so it must be ok.

What a joke! President Bush will sign anything that Congress gives to him no matter how bad, unconstitutional or fiscally irresponsible. He holds the all-time record for the fewest vetoes of any President in history. He has vetoed only one bill and that was after almost six years in office!

I am in favor of immigration by legal means. I wish the numbers allowed were at least doubled if not tripled from what they are now. Let folks in legally; lots of them.

The bill’s approach of granting blanket amnesty to all illegals is a national security nightmare. There is no agency assigned to do background checks, no money to hire manpower for the checks and no responsible agency assigned by the legislation. 24 hours for a background check and then a visa that will be good for the rest of your life is just stupid. What database will be used for the check? If we can’t even stop the Virginia Tech shooter from buying firearms through legal means including a background check, why do we think we will catch some terrorist from Jordan before he is given legitimate papers when twenty million people try simultaneously to get their background checks?

We have had a check-in/check-out law on the books for eleven years for legal visitors and it still does not work. The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have had major computer issues since the 9/11 attacks. Now the same people who created and funded these notable computer failures think we can create a nationwide system from scratch in 18 month that will screen people from every corner of the globe!

There needs to be as much time as necessary to do the background checks. The visas much have expiration dates and renewal requirements.

We need to secure the borders before any regularization program for illegals is adopted.

The cornerstone of making the system work needs to be employer verification. Only one or two forms of identification should be allowed for employment. These identification documents must be verified by the government prior to employment. If employee information is suspect either at hire or due to errors later found by the Internal Revenue or Social Security Administration, the employer needs both the legal right to terminate and the legal protection not to be sued by some ACLU type if they do.

If the borders are secured and the employer is empowered to check-up on new hires, the economic draw for illegal immigration will be drastically reduced.

Why I Hate the Recording Industry

As I approach the issue of why I have a gripe about the Recording Industry, let me say that I do agree to the concept of intellectual property and copyrights. The Good Book says a laborer is worth his hire; in other words, you should get paid for your hard work. However, the current system does not do that for most recording artists.

Most recording artists (groups, bands or whatever they call themselves) would sign with a label. Between the booking agency and the recording label, they would handle recording, production, marketing, distribution and publicity. This would free-up the musicians and performers to do what they do best and let others with more resources handle the business end of things. Everybody got a share of the success of the group. Sometimes the label would make lots of money and often they would not. In exchange for the risk involved the recording companies ended up owning the rights to the intellectual property of the artists that they represented.

My complaint is not with this initial arrangement but what happens in subsequent years. Because the recording companies own the songs, only they can control what is released and what is withheld from the public. In my case, I have many recordings on vinyl that were never released on compact disk. You can no longer buy them. Not in a brick and mortar store and not on the Internet. Even the recording companies don’t offer them for sale. I know they exist but nothing is happening with them. It is as if they never existed. If you are really lucky, a few tracks might end-up on a “best of” CD.

This system is stupid. Recording companies are sitting on literally millions of songs that they have no intention of ever releasing again. They won’t ever do anything with them. To me this is criminal.

The intent of copy protection enjoyed by the recording companies should not give them an automatic moratorium on all recorded works for 99 years or even longer. The recordings were intended to be enjoyed by the public and also to earn money for the recording artist. Neither of these interests is served by the current system.

I think that the recording companies should be required to release the complete works of any artist that they own every fifteen years. No not a “best of” but everything originally done on the LP or CD. If they fail to do this, then all rights revert to the artist or their estate. Should they fail to release the material at some regular interval then the recording becomes public domain.

The bottom line is that the recordings be made available and the copyright is only in force as long as the recording is making income for the recording company and/or the artist.

The availability of the recording should also be in a format that is technologically relevant. I have an example that I wish to offer on this point.

One of my favorite groups is DeGarmo and Key Band. They did a double album of a live concert during the era when vinyl was being replaced by CDs. The album was later released on a double CD set. So far, so good. However, it was discovered many years later that millions of CDs released during that period were defective. The film in the CDs was known to decay in just a matter of years. My disk two is so bad that it will not play.

About two years ago, I found the recording on a download site owned by Sony. I thought to myself, this is great; a large corporation bought the music company and is making all their stuff available for download on the Internet. What a visionary and enlightened view of corporate management. I signed-up for their service and gleefully downloaded a digital version of the album. Finally I could replace my defective disk 2 of the set. I pressed play and was shocked. They had simply ripped the CD and put it for sale online. No remastering or ripping from a master. Their CDs were defective also! There were gaps in the recording and the quality in some spots was terrible. It was better than my defective disk but it was still wrong. I sent them an email to complain and instead of fixing the problem, they gave me a credit for another download. I just want a clean copy of what they were selling. I went back to the site about a year later and the download is no longer offered. They too have slipped into digital oblivion.

There needs to be changes in the current system. It is broken. The recording companies are hurting. They need a 21st Century business model instead of one from the 1960s.

Need a Primer on Mormonism?

With all the publicity about the Mitt Romney candidacy, you might be wondering what are the differences between historic Christianity and the LDS church. Does it matter?  Hear one of the best experts on the subject. Walter Martin’s classic lectures on the Maze of Mormonism Part 1 & Maze of Mormonism Part 2 are now on the web.

Many of Walter Martin’s lectures and other material are available at Walter Martin’s Religious InfoNet This site is run by one of his daughters and her husband. Many of his teachings can be found in the Listening Library in RealAudio format. All are from cassette tapes that were converted to digital. The audio quality is not the best but it is worth a listen. Additional teachings can be found at the page for Kingdom of the Cults page The audio teachings on this page are not the same as the book but go along with some material presented in the book.