301–310 of 312 posts
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Ah yes, the down votes have started I forgot that this is a forum for the rent seeking class
not really, mate. usually people downvote replies that add nothing of substance or something similar to reddit reaction reply, you get the gist. but yes, this is a forum of rent-seeking class.
a lot of temporarily embarrassed millionaires, some of whom may actually cross that threshold.
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Exactly this. There's something about housing which causes so many people to think its an easy thing to solve by just building more and that's not actually true
You know ... building more where people want to live would really helped. Building houses in places 3 hours away from closest job wont.
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I keep getting these hail-corporate responses here. It's a wee bit strange to me. Let me tell you about the bodega man. I'd walk over there to his shop if I wanted to buy something -- a soda, some beer, a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk or some pasta sauce or whatever. It was a good bit of healthy exercise, and it was as local as it could get. He didn't keep a ton of inventory (it was not a big shop), but he'd stoc…
Like most people, I always try to give preference to local merchants instead of giants like Amazon. And most of the times I regret it I don't buy groceries online, have never liked the idea. But for other goods, Amazon or other corporate giants are normally the best choice. And you probably know it too. > How many specialty items has Amazon kept in stock just because you, individually, wanted to buy them? Places like…
I have much better results with nearby merchants than that.
Like: A couple of weeks ago my furnace died. On a Sunday, at the end of a 4-day weekend. It was cold outside, and getting colder inside.
I could have called someone and they could have come by to fix it, but I would have paid dearly for that and that's never been my style anyway.
So I troubleshot it myself and worked down the flowchart of what a furnace needs to do, and what this one was not doing. I deduced that the ignitor was both not working, and that it was open-circuit, and that it had 120v available to use at times when it should have been doing its thing.
Thus, it was proven that the ignitor should have been working but was instead NFG.
I looked at Amazon (easy enough, right?) and found plenty of ignitors that could be made to work, or that were dead-ringers for the one I had in my hand. They were all cheap-enough (excluding some were that definitely too cheap), and they promised delivery in 4 or 5 days.
Now, I can sort out some temporary heat for a night or two (I even have a plan in-place just for that situation), but I don't want to deal with that for an entire work-week. Besides being inconvenient, that's also a money-losing proposition.
I looked harder. I found one in a store that was open, about 30 minutes away. I set forth immediately to go get it.
And then I installed it. It worked perfectly.
It did cost about twice what Amazon wanted for a seemingly-appropriate ignitor, but meh: I found a place that had the product I needed in (close-enough to) the right place, at the right time.
I was very happy to pay them.
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Right now, I'm about to go outside to put new spool valve gaskets on my Honda. They're leaky; it's a known issue with this version of the J35 engine. And when they leak, they drip oil on the alternator. These alternators are known to die from being bathed in oil.
Amazon would have cheerfully sold me very inexpensive gaskets from any number of alphabet-soup vendors, but those are all known to leak again sooner instead of later and this isn't a thing I want to repeat soon. Besides, a new Denso alternator is expensive (and the other aftermarket offerings are known to be failure-prone in this application).
I found gasket part numbers from Mahle -- a German company with a very long history of making engine oiling system parts, and of not selling junk -- instead.
I ordered them online at O'Reilly Auto's website late last night as soon as I noticed the issue. They had them at their store two blocks from my house this morning before noon.
This was not inexpensive. I paid a -lot- for these two very specific little rubber gaskets.
But Amazon (with their selection of bad parts, and also fake parts) was a non-starter -- and their delivery times are still bogged down in the holiday business anyway. It was also both cheaper and faster to get them from down the road than it was to have them overnighted from Rock Auto.
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And, you know, that works great for me. Right now when I need a thing ASAP, I can get it done with local(ish) shops that have local people working there. I can get it done faster than Fedex Overnight can.
Or at least: I can do this for as long as the local shops manage to stay alive.
After they're gone, I'll be left with extra-long delays every December (that's only 1 month out of every year, for the rest of my life) or spending even more money to keep my own personal inventory of spare parts for the important machines in my life.
I don't like that version of the future.
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There will be a squeeze on real estate as the sea level rises and insurance increasingly withdraws from coastal and fire-prone areas.
If insurability becomes a crisis, I'd expect it to reduce housing availability and raise prices for competing (insurable) properties. Of course it wouldn't happen in isolation, so there are other massive forces to consider. Maybe wide swathes of formerly-occupied (but now uninsurable) land would sell cheaply enough that middle-income people could build inexpensive semi-disposable vacation cottages, like the old days.…
Check the population pyramid for the US. the baby boomers are moving into the top part (I call the grinder) where they will die out over the next 20 years. At the bottom, we have 20 years of slowly decreasing births, so the bottom AND top are shrinking. Combine that with current policies stopping immigration and I don't know how the US population can be doing anything but decreasing. College admissions people are talking about the cliff (an exaggeration for sure) in enrolment this year and for years to come. People are also getting married closer to 30, and having much less than 2 children per couple.
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If insurability becomes a crisis, I'd expect it to reduce housing availability and raise prices for competing (insurable) properties. Of course it wouldn't happen in isolation, so there are other massive forces to consider. Maybe wide swathes of formerly-occupied (but now uninsurable) land would sell cheaply enough that middle-income people could build inexpensive semi-disposable vacation cottages, like the old days.…
>> GP's assertion of population collapse in five years is a bit extreme for me! Check the population pyramid for the US. the baby boomers are moving into the top part (I call the grinder) where they will die out over the next 20 years. At the bottom, we have 20 years of slowly decreasing births, so the bottom AND top are shrinking. Combine that with current policies stopping immigration and I don't know how the US po…
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> would a flat tax (which is nominally regressive) actually be more progressive than the regressive taxes we have? That's an easy one to fix regardless. Use a flat tax with a large fixed refundable credit. Now everyone pays e.g. 30% but gets a $12,000 credit, so someone who makes $40,000 is effectively paying zero, someone who makes $80,000 is effectively paying 15% and the effective rate approaches 30% as the number…
> Now everyone pays e.g. 30% but gets a $12,000 credit, so someone who makes $40,000 is effectively paying zero, someone who makes $80,000 is effectively paying 15% and the effective rate approaches 30% as the number goes up. This only maybe works if you count capital gains as regular income. Otherwise they do the Steve Jobs $1 salary thing. Even the capital gains can be largely evaded. https://www.propublica.org/art…
Yes, that's how a flat tax works. It's flat, for everything.
The nominal reason capital gains has a lower rate is that the amount of the gain is calculated without respect to inflation. But that's dumb; just use the normal rate and actually do the inflation adjustment from the time of purchase instead.
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> IIUC any landlord can use depreciation to lower their tax bill. This is also not really how depreciation works for assets that retain their value. If you buy a building to rent it out, the cost of the building essentially a cost of doing business, i.e. a tax deduction. You pay tax on the profit which is revenue (rents) minus costs (building, interest, maintenance, advertising, etc.) Depreciation is the building, th…
It's true depreciation reduces your cost basis and creates a higher capital gain. But the gain can be rolled into another property with a 1031 exchange, deferring taxes. I already said this in the comment you responded to. Homeowners get a tax exemption but only up to a certain amount in gains.
They can also keep the property forever and continue renting it out, and then never realize the gain. But in both cases that means they don't get to realize the gain -- or even recover their original principal -- except insofar as they're renting it out, and the rent is taxable income.
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Shortage in the absence of price controls generally means that something is inhibiting supply from increasing as demand does, causing increased demand to have the primary result of increasing prices rather than increasing production. Sometimes this is expected or unavoidable, e.g. if you have a sudden increase in the demand for electricity then the price will increase temporarily until new power generation or transmi…
Shortage is almost always used with a hidden assumption that the current price is "bad." Truckers are currently retiring faster than they're being replaced. So some folks are saying there's going to be a "trucker shortage." In reality, there are plenty of people out there who could get a CDL license and drive a truck, but don't. Why? Because the compensation for being a trucker isn't high enough because the demand is…
And who is right is then determined by the market, because "not enough" means "the price is higher than the cost of creating more" at which point the market creates more. Unless the government is suppressing the ordinary market through rules imposing artificial scarcity, which is the evil to be prevented.
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I'd expect to see a surge in self insurance. These areas are so valuable already in a lot of cases where rich people are content to pay six figure property tax bills. Especially with cost of construction being a fraction of that property's value.
> a surge in self insurance What is this? Would this just be "putting a little to the side each month" to cover your 12 million dollar loss to Hurricane Micheala ?
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It's true depreciation reduces your cost basis and creates a higher capital gain. But the gain can be rolled into another property with a 1031 exchange, deferring taxes. I already said this in the comment you responded to. Homeowners get a tax exemption but only up to a certain amount in gains.
> But the gain can be rolled into another property with a 1031 exchange, deferring taxes. I already said this in the comment you responded to. They can also keep the property forever and continue renting it out, and then never realize the gain. But in both cases that means they don't get to realize the gain -- or even recover their original principal -- except insofar as they're renting it out, and the rent is taxabl…