Author Archives: Timothy B Lee

I love it when people comment who know more about the subject at hand than I do. Commenter Mike explains the differences among loans (and states): Debts are categorized as either “recourse” or “non-recourse”. Under a “non-recourse” debt, the lender … Continue reading →

A quick follow-up on the mortgage default issue: people left some great comments on my last post. The key question, I think, is the nature of the agreement between a bank and a borrower. Luis characterizes it as follows: The … Continue reading →

Matt Yglesias makes the case for guilt-free mortgage defaults: My mortgage is an agreement I’ve made with Bank of America which is a publicly traded for-profit corporation. Companies like that, unlike people or people agencies or other kinds of institutions, … Continue reading →

Catching up on my RSS feeds, Tom Lee has two posts on Avatar that strike me as so obviously correct that they leave me with very little original to say. Go read them. Especially this part in response to this … Continue reading →

I hope everyone had a great end to the naughties! Regular blogging will resume later this month as promised. In the meantime, here’s some reading material: At Ars Technica, I cover the patent office’s latest efforts to tighten the rules … Continue reading →

The New York Times was kind enough to invite me to contribute a post to its “Room for Debate” blog about employee privacy while using employer-owned equipment. You can read the result here.

If I weren’t on hiatus, I’d write a blog post about this generally sensible column and its incoherent tenth paragraph: What makes these voters potential Republicans is that, lifestyle choices aside, they view big government with great suspicion. There’s no … Continue reading →

I’m still on hiatus, but here are two quick notes that might interest Bottom-Up readers. First, over at Ars Technica, I have a new article on mesh networking: Multi-hop mesh networks, confined to university labs at the start of this … Continue reading →

It turns out that if you enroll in grad school in computer science, they expect you to do computer science work. And apparently writing a blog doesn’t qualify. So this blog is going on a holiday hiatus. I’ll be back … Continue reading →

Last week, Mike Masnick posted this funny tweet: PR people keep sending me names of people who can “comment” on stories. If they want to comment, we have comments enabled on the site. It’s a funny statement, but Mike was … Continue reading →