The usual mistake people make in reciting this is to say the fox jumped over the lazy dog, causing them to omit an ‘s’ from the sentence.
Making sure it’s ‘the’ lazy dog rather than ‘a’ lazy dog is actually important if you care about completing the lowercase alphabet, as without it there’s only an uppercase ‘T’.
Interest rates doubling over the past year change the math on this. For instance, to keep my same mortgage payment, even with significant equity, i could only afford what I paid for the house originally, which would be a significant downgrade in today's market.
Yep, and if you fell for one of your lender's incessant pitches on borrowing on your equity or refinancing and taking equity out, you're really locked in to your situation. I'm very convinced that most people doing home equity loans or refis with cash out don't understand how much they are backsliding when they do that.
I think that depends on what they did with the cash. If they invested it in the S&P 500, that was generally a very good trade. If they turned it into new cars and expensive vacations, well, that was hopefully something that they really enjoyed, because those are things that are even more expensive when financed.
That assumes you started your mortgage in roughly the last 10-15 years in the US or somewhere else with the same rate history. Average rates before then were consistently higher. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US
If you started your mortgage before then its a neutral to positive rate-wise.
agree, what really makes me upset is how housing prices in certain areas has not gone down at all given that rates are double what they were a year or 2 ago. The un-affordability is beyond reason.
Lots of people have made that point, but I’ll respond here.
Yes this is true, but only at this point in time when interest rates have shot up from historically low. Most of the time this won’t be the case, and soon this effect could work in the other way in that you could move to a house of similar value for a lower cost if interest rates come down.
And the 30 year fixed rate mortgage is unique to the US. Here in the UK, we only fix for 2-5 years typically.
It is actually pretty much the case for most US homeowners. Everyone I know refinanced their mortgages when interest rates were lower. I got a 2.874% 30 year fixed rate mortgage in 2021 which was a great deal, but now I am essentially stuck here. There's no way I can afford to move. Existing home sales volume is way down.
You are lucky to win the housing lottery. Congrats! Can you imagine being a young couple (20s 30s) trying to buy your first home the US right now? Hopeless. Wait a few years as an oppressed renter!
Yes, I am lucky in many ways. But the US home ownership rate is 65%, so it's hardly a lottery. Many young couples are buying homes in lower cost states like Utah, Minnesota, and Ohio. HN users focusing on California often have a distorted perspective on the situation out in the real world.
I am very symphathetic to this issue for UK borrowers. They face way too much interest rate volatility. There is a gambling effect in the UK about housing.
Are you aware that 30-fixed in the US is essentially gov't backed via three mega pseudo-gov't guaranteed orgs called Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie Mae? It is great for increasing home ownership and utterly oppressive to low income people renting. It is tough.
I cannot believe that more countries do not (politically) prioritise a similar system: Cheap, fixed 30-year'ish home mortgages. To be clear, I'm not saying this is economically ideal, but it is great for your political party!
Do people expect interest rates to lower again any time soon? Inflation just recently started trending down.
Right now US supply has shrunk so prices don’t seem to be declining enough to offset the rise in interest rates; the monthly payments for anything in the market are still eye-watering even factoring in price declines.
> Skin color certainly is not a factor on ability to get an ID.
"GAO compared turnout in two states—Kansas and Tennessee—that changed ID requirements from the 2008 to 2012 general elections with turnout in fourselected states—Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, and Maine—that did not. GAO used a quasi-experimental approach, a type of policy evaluation that compares how an outcome changes over time in a treatment groupthat adopted a new policy, to a comparison group that did not make the same change. GAO selected states for evaluation that did not have other factors in their election environments that also may have affected turnout, such as significant changes to other election laws. GAO analyzed three sources of turnout data for the 2008 and 2012 general elections: (1) data on eligible voters, using official voter records compiled by the United States Elections Project at George Mason University, (2) data on registered voters, using state voter databases that were cleaned by a vendor through data-matching procedures to remove voters who had died or moved, and (3) data on registered voters, as reported to the Current Population Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. [...]
GAO also estimated changes in turnout among subpopulations of registrants in Kansas and Tennessee according to their age, length of voter registration, and race or ethnicity. In both Kansas and Tennessee, compared with the four comparison states, GAO found that turnout was reduced by larger amounts:
among registrants, as of 2008, between the ages of 18 and 23 than among registrants between the ages of 44 and 53;
among registrants who had been registered less than 1 year than among registrants who had been registered 20 years or more; and
*among African-American registrants than among White, Asian-American, and Hispanic registrants. GAO did not find consistent reductions in turnout among Asian-American or Hispanic registrants compared to White registrants, thus suggesting that the laws did not have larger effects among these subgroups."
This makes me wonder about competition. Theoretically if there's competition, one food provider could offer food for the old price, or halfway in between and attract all the consumers and make extra money from the additional business.
I think this has the same problem as all non-legal security. I can see entrepreneurial big guys deciding this a good business, and just paying some people a nominal amount to squat, while offering their services to the property owners to "remove them". Eventually, they don't even need the squatters in the loop, just "Nice place you got here. It'd be a shame if someone squatted in it."
That's what the government does already with the police / court system / lawmaking.
You pay taxes for protection. In the past they were at least removing squatters. We're at a point where they don't even bother doing their job.
Any use of violence need opposing and competing forces in a market to work.
Judging by the quality of service, it obviously doesn't work when the government has a monopoly of legal violence.
As you mentioned, having people doing it illegally is prone to the creation of a black market.
Black markets need to stay hidden so they'll have lower standards and generally a worse experience for everyone involved.
If there wasn't any control on these "big guys", eventually someone would come up with a way to broadcast these "big guys" reputation. Someone could easily hire some other "big guys" to keep the other ones in check.
The black market can have higher standards because the barrier for entry is much smaller or nothing which creates more competition.
Having a legal and black market operating side by side can mean more quality and variety for the black market. The drug market is a great example where in places a legal market exists the black market can offer better prices, better quality and a variety of strains the commercial growers cannot.
That's a very interesting point of view! I wonder if maybe you're describing a Canadian point of view? I've heard the government screwed up / over-regulated (not sure about the details) distribution of Cannabis in Canada and people still had to use the black market to buy cannabis.
We don't need a black market, we just governments not to get in the way in what they consider legal or not. I think you're advocating for small independent producers vs big monolithic ones (which sounds great, I'm in!). In a world where licenses don't cost half a million, that can be a legal market as well.
> The black market can have higher standards
From my anecdotal European experience this hasn't been the case.
Eg. If I think about cannabis in Netherland, what you can buy in a coffee shop is generally much better than any black market deal you can find in all of Europe. You can get cannabis from Amsterdam in the rest of Europe as well (amongst the dozen fakes) but it will cost much more.
In a black market you have a higher risk of getting scammed, lower quality and no controls.
Online marketplace with reputation systems help a lot but it's still not like buying on Amazon.
The barrier to entry is higher because you have to setup the tools to act anonymously (eg. Tor, cryptocurrencies), you have to worry about stealth and you're running the risk of going to jail.
The quality / price ratio goes down pretty quickly.
Sure, you're not paying taxes and you don't have to do accounting, but I think the negatives are more expensive than that.
That's because Afghanistan isn't a government, the Western world just tries really hard to try to make people think it is or should be for a variety of mostly grifting reasons
If the government comes for you, good luck explaining the officers you don't accept their laws and that you're just defending yourself.
You'll end up in jail, a fugitive or dead - unless you're in GTA.
But the legal system probably wouldn’t treat these types of thugs as nicely as garden-variety squatters, no? Otherwise such gangs would have already taken over France.
I think in order to avoid open conflict from law enforcement, these types will try to avoid residing at the scene of the crime. Instead, they will rely on referrals for repeat business, while keeping things on the down low.
Well, a large percentage of new property owners by now is most likely to be some money laundering organization, pumping there ilicit gains into a new housing bubble. So why should we be concerned with thieves stealing from thieves while a third type of criminals actually uses the value created to contribute to society -for example by raising kids?
Who cares about the old lady stealing sweets from the reception candy dish during a bank robbery on a mafia bank?
I got the impression it was a lump sum payout, or at least came with golden handcuffs that were purely in terms of "exclusivity and X-podcasts-per-week for X weeks", rather than subscriber count.
I think this could be a very effective countermeasure. It reduces trust between members of a crew, and between crews themselves. If you're constantly suspicious of Ivan the mail campaign guy ratting you out for a payday, it makes the whole business focus more on opsec and less on offense. Though sole operators can do plenty of damage on their own, they probably are less likely to be state-backed.
with known criminal background? That is my point - without State Department waiving such requirement and issuing GC/witness protection the Ivan would be easy reachable for FSB in any other country.
