131–140 of 1001 posts
That implies housing has risks. Since 2009, that risk has been eliminated by the FED owning 30% of all mortgages on its balance sheet. We've nationalized housing risk and privatized the gains.
And the fed is absolutely, 100% riskless, right? Nothing ever will happen to it?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One can define effort in that way, and arrive at the conclusion you did, but it is not what cognitive dissonance is typically used to mean. But that definition of effort as it relates to the ability to “survive” does not seem useful to me. It takes a lot of effort to manually dig a ditch compared to using an excavator, but you would not pay the person that shows up with a shovel more than the person that shows up wit…
I used to dig ditches in places where excavators couldn't go for a living, and I'm familiar with the contract rate differences for that type of labor and equipment. My point is that the disparity is such a chasm that my brain can't reconcile it. We aren't talking about ditch digging, we are talking about serving food to the people of Seattle. All the software engineers in Seattle, in my experience, love to frequent d…
I put “unaffordable” in quotes because eating out is easily replaced by eating at home, or eating frozen dinners, etc, so restaurants do not have the pricing power they might need to allow the food service workers to have decent pay to QoL ratio in a place like Seattle.
> Meanwhile, renters are desperate. They’re begging for housing prices not just to slow, but to fall. I have a friend who is a head chef at a decently popular bar and restaurant on Broadway in Capitol Hill, Seattle (very trendy part of town if you aren't familiar, steep commercial rent). He lives in a 400 sq ft studio and is barely, barely making it from one paycheck to the next. I am sitting on a 2.6% interest rate…
My rent for my cockroach invested, 150 sq ft apartment is larger than my parent's mortgage for their suburban McMansion about 45m-1h away, and my rent is absolutely on the cheap side for a 1bd room in the area.
Appropriate typo.
It's practically impossible for US society to get out of treating housing as an investment. Americans believe in home ownership as evidence of prudence (hard work + savings), acumen (housing always goes up so it's smart to buy a house!), and sense of security and achievement. These ideas aren't going to change any time soon. That's the ideological component. Home-owners also protect their investments because they're…
> It will take a lot more housing inaccessibility, especially if it hits the currently affluent class.
This is already happening. The millennial children of the youngest upper-middle-class Baby Boomers are bordering on being unable to afford the kinds of houses that they grew up in, at the same ages as their parents, without significant intergenerational financial assistance that their parents did not need or have access to.
> Meanwhile, renters are desperate. They’re begging for housing prices not just to slow, but to fall. I have a friend who is a head chef at a decently popular bar and restaurant on Broadway in Capitol Hill, Seattle (very trendy part of town if you aren't familiar, steep commercial rent). He lives in a 400 sq ft studio and is barely, barely making it from one paycheck to the next. I am sitting on a 2.6% interest rate…
Cognitive dissonance means harboring contradicting thoughts. The difference in you and your friend’s situation is caused by the fact that they are selling labor which has a much lower price than the labor you are selling. This is not contradictory, just a consequence of supply and demand.
Policy solution to intractable social differences: Fund UBI with 2.5% SALSA, problem solved. https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/plural-property/ Yes, new problems appear. Maybe new problems are less vexing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One can define effort in that way, and arrive at the conclusion you did, but it is not what cognitive dissonance is typically used to mean. But that definition of effort as it relates to the ability to “survive” does not seem useful to me. It takes a lot of effort to manually dig a ditch compared to using an excavator, but you would not pay the person that shows up with a shovel more than the person that shows up wit…
I used to dig ditches in places where excavators couldn't go for a living, and I'm familiar with the contract rate differences for that type of labor and equipment. My point is that the disparity is such a chasm that my brain can't reconcile it. We aren't talking about ditch digging, we are talking about serving food to the people of Seattle. All the software engineers in Seattle, in my experience, love to frequent d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cognitive dissonance means harboring contradicting thoughts. The difference in you and your friend’s situation is caused by the fact that they are selling labor which has a much lower price than the labor you are selling. This is not contradictory, just a consequence of supply and demand.
Yes, there is an inconsistency in the amount of effort expended to survive versus the outcomes of that effort. I can't reconcile them in my head. I'm watching my friend trying not to physically deteriorate and have some modicum of comfort while I sit here on my couch living off savings from the job I recently quit. Nothing I do can be so much more valuable than what he does.
Software can pay well because the code you write can service 100, 1K, 1M, or 1B customers.. with some time spent on scaling.
There's not much a single chef can do such that their labor which serves 100 tables/night can suddenly scale to serve 1000 tables/night.
The only way the replicate that kind of outcome in restaurant trade is to for example, open multiple restaurants with investor capital, hire cheaper chefs as your understudy to run each location, while you set menus, standards, and find efficiency on things like procurement, accounting, lease deals, etc.
Other options are to move more aggressively into some sort of profitable takeaway menu, selling food kids, branded merchandise, etc.
> Meanwhile, renters are desperate. They’re begging for housing prices not just to slow, but to fall. I have a friend who is a head chef at a decently popular bar and restaurant on Broadway in Capitol Hill, Seattle (very trendy part of town if you aren't familiar, steep commercial rent). He lives in a 400 sq ft studio and is barely, barely making it from one paycheck to the next. I am sitting on a 2.6% interest rate…
I had absolutely no idea that 30 year fixed mortgages were not only widely available but the common standard there.