Another update from the bang-head-on-desk dept…
I just wanted to drop a quick note for future reference and for your quick pain relief when installing Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (it looks like installing Update 1 may cause the same problems. I just got…
Fairness and Reasonable Pricing
I know that past couple of posts have not been technical in nature. Today’s rant isn’t either, but…
Location Independence
It’s something that most of us talk, or at least dream about, but never really act upon. I have…
Web Essentials 2012 Is Nice, But It’s A Labs Tool
I am watching a great series on Microsoft’s Channel 9 called Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start. They made a clarification about the Web Essentials 2012 extension/add-on for Visual Studio that is important, and that is that it is a “labs” tool, a…
I have been battling a frustrating scenario for a while now, and while I haven’t figured out why it is happening, I have figured out how to work around it. In this post, I will describe my dilemma and how I got it to work. As soon as I figure out the…
Being the enterprise business applications developer that I am, ASP.NET development has not been a major focus of mine up until recently. Because of this, finding my way around the web side of the Visual Studio fence has been a learning experience which…
I was just working with a co-worker of mine who, according to his own words, knows just enough T-SQL to be dangerous. He had a query that he put together that has a nested subquery which was taking about 4 minutes to complete on its own, but when he ran…
Ever consider living in a shipping container, the corrugated steel containers you see stacked in shipyards? Well after the last real estate bust, living in what amounts to a steel box has grown in popularity—thanks, in part, to slick design and green amenities.
In the late 90’s and early 2000’s Americans buying real estate had an appetite for the grand and ostentatious.
Michela O’ Connor Abrams, president of Dwell Media LLC says, “The McMansion, the idea of building this gigantic house that one family lives in and probably never goes into many of the rooms, but it became the moniker of success, right? The bigger it is the more you know I’ve achieved.”
An idea that didn’t last long after 2008 the housing crash. Conspicuous consumption gave way to conservationism and minimalism says housing & design magazine executive, Michela O’Connor.
Michela says, “We do we have a consciousness in a much grander form in society.”
A consciousness that changed with the times. Cheap can be chic is the new sensibility.
Pre-fabricated homes,“pre-fab” for short, are homes that builders manufacture at another location, and ship to the homeowner’s address. While pre-fab homes are supposed to be cheaper than homes built on site, shipping and transportation can actually make them just as expensive as those built the conventional way.
Gordon Scott, co-owner of Connect Homes says, “And the cost of moving one of those cross-country often ends up rivaling the cost of actually building the home in a factory.”
Enter Gordon Scott and his partner Jared Levy, two young, hot-shot architects with a new approach to an old idea. Take the “modular,” pre-fab home concept and make it even cheaper.
Gordon says, “Basically, we’re the first company to figure out how to leverage the inter-modal shipping container network, which is the network that brings all of us all of our goods and can do it incredibly cheaply. The intermodal shipping network can deliver basically 64,000 pounds of anything, anywhere in the world for $5,000 as long as it’s in a container. So we figured out a way to sort of dimensionally containerize a housing module.”
Unlike traditional modular homes that may be 60-feet long, 16-feet wide, Connect Homes are the size of, well, a shipping container: 8 Feet-by-40 feet-by-9 ½ feet.
Gordon says, “We found a way to fit a home into that network, so now these modules can be delivered for very low cost anywhere in the world. This is $105,000 out of the factory. And once it’s delivered and installed on-site, it’ll be about $128,000.”
Add to that the cutting-edge design, luxury amenities and the eco-friendly features and you may understand why these properties – and other modular homes like them – are a hot commodity.
Even the Airstream trailer has seen renewed interest in recent years with a 40% uptick in sales in recent years and it’s clear why with leather furniture, flat screen TV’s, and a walk-in closet, it’s perfect for the person looking for all the modern conveniences of a luxury home in a much more compact size and at $38,000-to-$95,000 – a much more compact price.
Related stories
- US home resales up 2012-05-23
- US home goes solar 2012-05-18
- Training missile falls from U.S. military helicopter, 100 homes evacuated 2012-05-17
- Half of U.S. homes own Apple products: survey 2012-03-29
- US home prices decline in 16 of 19 cities in January, prices back to 2002 level 2012-03-28
Editor:James |Source: CNTV
OK, I’ve just got to unload this, so bear with me…
I work in the healthcare space, specifically in Medicare, for subsidiary of a major health plan, designing and writing systems to process claims and membership data for multiple clients. Part of our service offering involves a fairly simple web site that people can submit applications to purchase coverage through products our clients sell. Some of these services are outsourced to 3rd party vendors, the website included.
Recently, we received a simple change request which we need to coordinate with our vendor, to be able to accept a small piece of data—an ID, in a query string that could be optionally submitted byanother 3rd party vendor used by our client. There is already a field on the form for this data, and a corresponding field in the database to store this value. All that is being requested is that this form be able to also accept a query string containing this value.
This is a very simple change, literally requiring likely no more than 1 or 2 lines of code to handle the query string. Additionally, no transformation is to be done on the value—just pull the value verbatim from the query string and store it in the database. That’s it. Nothing more. Nada.
Our vendor comes back with a 3 page statement of work, which obviously took longer to create than the change itself would to implement, which shamelessly proposes that this change can be made, but it’s going to cost over $3600.
WTF??
The thing is that I see this kind of thing happening all the time…I mean literally, all the time. Now, I am not here to argue or even discuss the origins or causes responsible for the critical state of our healthcare system as those are far beyond just this simple type of issue. However, when this type of gouging is happening—and the one being gouged accepts it not only willingly, but happily—it’s no wonder we are in the shape we’re in, paying unsustainable amounts for our healthcare. This isn’t any different than the $1500 toilet seat, or the $400 hammer, etc…
This is wrong in every way. There is so much ingnorance, or at least willingness to claim as much, behind the forces driving healthcare today, compounded by what appears to be companies making vast amounts of money off of the healthcare system because of the very fact that it is broken. If it gets fixed, that cash cow goes away. This is a problem that perpetuates itself and is grounded in a lack of standards, ignorance and greed. There needs to be accountability, but even more so there needs to be a change in culture.
There is incredible opportunity in this field, however it lies on both sides—greed on one side, improvement and quality of life on the other. Unfortunately, this is such a politically charged topic which in itself means that this will continue to be an uphill battle. However from the perspective of a technology professional, it can start here, one little step at a time, deflating the value of that simple query string and bring it back down to earth.
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