191–200 of 1001 posts
another example of dumb and costly mistakes is putting a capitalistic-optimization scheme in charge of medical care
alas, for some reason (many of them, indeed) most of these 'problems' cannot be corrected. for a few powerful interests these aren't problems at all.
> 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…
This astonishes me about the US real estate market and is something I was only educated to on HN in the last week or so. I had absolutely no idea that 30 year fixed mortgages were not only widely available but the common standard there.
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I majored in economics and it still boggles my mind what we make as software engineers versus the guy who unclogged my sewer drain allowing me to use the toilet.
You will be surprised how much good plumbers make in the USA. You probably used a bad example. Source: I know my trusted plumber makes well over six figures a year and he cannot take all calls. I asked him once if he has problems generating leads and he smiled saying "I have too much business that I turn people away". He is a "master plumber" which these days is not easy to get certified for in many states. He told m…
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What sucks is a lot of young renters with steady jobs can afford to pay off a mortgage month to month, but they just can't afford that down payment (especially the 20% needed so as to not need to get mortgage insurance)! I was in that position for a while. Every time it seemed like I could afford to put that money down, the housing prices went up! It took a handful of years of renting cheap places (with roommates), l…
And here at the bottom of the see, there is no down payment (financing up to 100%), but young renters still can't get the a mortage of the same monthly amount as they pay rent, because of regulatory reasons -- mortage ceiling is defined as something like 5x gross yearly salary. Somehow it's fine to pay half the salary in rent, but not fine if it's financing the mortage.
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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…
This completely overlooks the reliability of owning. If Alice rented, she would always be at risk that the owner of the home she's living in would decide to stop renting it, or sell it to someone who didn't want to rent it, etc. The most important piece of owning a home to me is knowing that I cannot be forced out of my home as easily as a renter.
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?
Lately I've been thinking that perhaps the solution to the housing shortage is a technology that makes it easy, cheap, and extremely fast to build housing that is both attractive and illegal. Uber and Airbnb were both pretty much illegal from the get go, but ultimately worked because they were incredibly popular. They forced the laws to change to accommodate what people actually wanted. Similarly, living in tents and…
In San Francisco (and other big metros) landlords build illegal/unpermitted units all the time.
What about illegal additions or illegal buildings? This seems less common to me.