351–360 of 421 posts
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It may be optional for individuals, but as a society, if a significant portion of people cannot afford to have children, that society will go "extinct" very quickly.
Yes, humans being too sparse is headline news weekly.
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Of course it is a joke, it is Terry Pratchett after all. But there is a serious problem behind it. For example, with food, if you have enough money you can afford to buy large quantities and take advantage of discounts. For rent, it you have money, deposits won't be a problem, and landlord may be more willing to give you interesting offers. Poor people are at risk of not being able to pay the rent, and landlords have…
I mentioned higher up in the thread, but this is exactly why we need UBI. UBI gives the poor some leverage to avoid being exploited due to circumstance(s). Yes, we will get some inflation - but I don't see that as bad. A lot of the reason we have very low inflation right now is because the balance is skewed too far in favor of capital over labor (and that is due to being able to offshore - which should be penalized a…
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> no such thing as too late Go ahead and buy some homes for investment! Go buy some Dogecoin! Some GME! What a low information take, to say something about rural homes and Biden or whatever. In the service of curiosity: maybe if you sold your $185,000 home from 1986 for $1.5m today, you’ll walk away a millionaire. A lot of people are looking at that arithmetic in San Francisco. And yet they do not sell! The index for…
> They will watch the market fall The market won't fall, that is the entire point. It reasonably cannot fall, since the only politics that could make it fall (buildout of rural infrastructure, overriding NIMBY shit) won't ever pass. Inertia is massive.
> The market won't fall, that is the entire point. It reasonably cannot fall, since the only politics that could make it fall (buildout of rural infrastructure, overriding NIMBY shit) won't ever pass. Inertia is massive.
That's probably overoptimistic. There are political circumstances that could cause metropolitan property values to fall on annual or even decadal timescales.
Consider, for example, the possibility of policies that have the effect of curtailing real estate investment by those exfiltrating funds from various regimes.
Or policies that made every school a good school, ending the (sometimes huge) price premium homes in 'good' school districts get.
Oh man this resonates in a weird way... I don't know jack shit about being poor. I grew up extremely well-off in the late 80s and 90s. My college education was paid 100% by my parents without a loan. We had nice cars and belonged to country clubs. Even in my first job where I was only making 35K/yr my parents gave me quite a bit of help so it was easy. I have a few friends that are poor... I feel for their issues, I…
Diapers are sold as single items in corner stores in low income areas at extreme markups, and sometimes parents can only afford one a day. If the baby poops or pees right after the change… Well. Yeah.
I serve on the board of one [1], and we’ve had events that have given out 100k diapers to those in need in a day. The frustrating thing is that there is no sustainable model here - the diaper banks get donations from companies and and we can buy them using donated money / grants for a discount, but we obviously don’t charge those who need them for the diapers (and I do not believe we can sell them as a bank).
I think there are two main pain points for people who do not have a lot of money:
1) There are economies of scale as you “level up” in income - cost per diaper gets much cheaper when you can buy from Sam’s club vs. paying $1 per at the corner store. Even shopping at Sam’s is out the window because it assumes you have a car to get there…
2) the “fixed costs” of life are fairly standard. It takes a salary of $85K for the happiness to have marginal returns, and I think this is because you hit the point where your basic needs are met for an American lifestyle and everything else is gravy. It covers medical (within reason), insurance, transportation, some fun thing, housing, food, etc. and gets you to the level where you can finally get ahead.
[1] https://www.wpadiaperbank.org/
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/money-buys-...
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Each step is aimed at increasing the wealth of incumbent homeowners, not making housing more affordable. The economists at the Fed and GSEs are not stupid.
The Fed mostly wants to decrease unemployment via 2% inflation. The conventional wisdom is that supply side stimulus will create companies that hire workers. So handing out loans should do the trick. Yeah, except building housing which is one of the easiest ways to employ people is illegal.
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> The incumbent homeowners voted themselves massive returns. This is a popular meme in these threads, but could you be more specific to back that up? In >20 years owning a home, it has never come up that I've been asked to vote on anything related to giving me any returns. Where are these votes happening?
house owners vote in large numbers against up zoning, against densificatjon and against public transportation funding. (2 sides of the same coin)
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I thought this for the longest time. An embarrassingly long time. Then I volunteered with a program that helps people who qualify for EITC to prepare their taxes and budget how they’ll use their tax return to “get them out of their situation”. Person after person came in, we did their taxes, and then we went over their expenses and each case was a frustrating puzzle that was impossible to solve. There just wasn’t eno…
The ability to save money relies on the ability to "reduce your lifestyle costs" by cutting certain expenses (raising income is oftentimes not realistic. Poor People in general are not lazy) Below a certain limit there is no way to do that without loosing more money like getting rid of your car. And it's not only the obvious things. An acquaintance of mine was a single mother (ex-husband in prison) and had to decide…
Tons of these decisions are non-factors for those who have enough to just have their kid take a bath without worrying about it.
Another example are those who can fill up a gas tank when they stop, because they’d rather minimize the number of stops at gas stations and don’t need to worry about whether they will over draw or be able to eat if they fill up their tank).
I have both my father and my uncle who became dirt poor just by making terribly poor life choices so I've got a very different take on this. They had good jobs but couldn't help screwing it up by: gambling, buying sportcars, overall trying to bite more than they could swallow (houses too big, with monthly mortgage too expensive), etc. In both cases it ended up with foreclosures / lawyers etc. My brother and I are now…
In practice, a lot of bad choices aren't truly volitional; they are mainly the result of conditioning. Repeated bad choices reflect a reduced capacity to learn, which is a kind of disability. It's annoying and costly that so many people make these bad choices, but I think we still have the obligation to care for each other. I expect to make at least some bad choices and I may need help. But usually, nobody can help y…
Is more of a "do we really have free will?" debate
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>Or worse job opportunities. Then people tell you to move where the jobs are. Which has really expensive housing. This is not entirely true. I live in Baltimore City and there's cheap housing + access to the great tech market between baltimore and dc
I understand Baltimore has insanely cheap housing for its size, but I’ve always imagined it as a Detroit like situation, where yeah the housing is often cheap, but not areas you want to live. It may not actually be as bad as I think though.
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The comment you're responding to is actually a conservative perspective, one which I agree with - make big business and banksters suffer the preexisting rules, rather than changing the rules for some larger overall goal after they run into trouble. The desire to narrow the scope of government comes from a place of wanting to help all people, believe it or not. The big picture is that both professional political parti…
A lot of it boils down to the fact that conservative thinking is needed after we have exhausted the maximum potential of the economy. Right now the economy needs to be run as hot as possible so that everyone has enough money and once it is hot we need to immediately rearrange it to become productive again. That means republicans have to shut up for a while until the economy follows the textbooks again. It has to be d…
If the plan is to bail out businesses when there is a credit crunch, then to be consistent, it needs to be illegal for those businesses to take on so much debt in the first place. When businesses need to be bailed out because executives looted their coffers into bonuses, those executives need to go to prison. Direct restrictions on companies to prevent undesirable behavior is part of the left's paradigm.
Instead, such controls were rejected with the idea that shareholders would keep executives in check, because long term they didn't want to lose money. This is the right's paradigm, but its political function turned out to be only as a convenient unprincipled excuse - when it came time to follow through, there was no support.
For this subject I'd personally favor the right-paradigm approach rather than the left-paradigm approach. But history has shown that the right-paradigm approach is untenable when the problem happens, and only plays as a justification to loot during good times. And so despite how I would prefer society to be structured, I'm forced to support the left's restrictions if I don't want to be played for a fool.