Sacred cow: the mortgage deduction

In Germany we don't get to deduct interest on a mortgage from taxes. It does make it a bit less attractive to buy a home. This article exposes an interesting debate on how that deduction might distort housing cost and even land use:

...
Problem #1: Subsidizing interest payments encourages people to leverage themselves to the hilt to bet on housing markets. The size of the tax benefit is proportional to your debt. The deduction essentially encourages us to make leveraged bets on the swings of the housing market. That leverage means that housing price swings can easily wipe people out. We are currently experiencing the consequences of subsidizing gambles on housing.

Problem #2: The deduction pushes up prices in places where the supply of new homes is constrained, as it is in many coastal markets....

Read the rest here.

Tamara besucht uns!

That means, Tamara came to visit!

Tamara found a last minute ticket deal that allowed her to come for two weeks of fun. She cooked us an amazing meal, she brought us mustard direct from Paris, she went to Venice with me, and other sundry fun items!

I have a Flickr photo set with all the pictures here. Click here to go straight to a slideshow view of the pictures. A few teaser pics are below:


The boys in the horse buggy at the Partnachklamm in Garmisch, Germany.


The fabled city of canals: Venice.


Michael and Tamara in the clock tower of Saint Mark's Square.


Kris and our neighbor in an exciting venue: our Lehel Farmer's Market!

Summitpost Bulk Uploader

Last night I burned the midnight oil to finish a code project I've been working on since Christmas. It's a bulk uploader for Summitpost.org, a beloved site for many mountain climbers and hikers around the globe. Despite a snazzy "Web 2.0" interface, there is still no possibility to bulk upload pictures. Therefore, creating a content page on your favorite mountain or climbing route can become an exercise in manual drudgery once you upload more than 10 pictures or so.

First I wrote the tool on the Mac in Python with wxWidgets for the GUI. But deployment was a real pain, and I didn't feel I had sufficient control over the UI. So I re-wrote it in C++, also with wxWidgets. Right now I have a Windows version, but it shouldn't be too hard to port it to the Mac in the future.

Documentation and download information is here. There is a discussion page over at Summitpost already getting some interesting responses.

It's been a fun hobby project. Especially because I believe a lot of people will want to use it. That is very motivating!