absolutely, what I hate the most are the super brights on large SUVs when I'm driving in a smaller (lower down) car. there can be big distances where I'm completely blinded as the light is near my head level.
It gets even worse in europe where you have cars with RHS and LHS drive on the road (usually, headlights in the US have a slight angle to the right so your left headlight doesn't blind oncoming traffic as much).
The last thing I want is even brighter headlights. If current ones aren't bright enough for you to drive safely, you are driving too fast for your skills.
this has little to do with courtesy. You can talk on a phone and not be an ass (use noise canceling headphones, noise canceling microphones, keep your voice down, and talk.
Much more annoying are the kids on a college or high school trip who feel the need to shout at their friends 5 rows away. When you make it illegal for people to hold conversations at all, I'll get behind this.
that isn't true at all, all industry, when you pay off government to put in nice barriers to competition in the name of safety/quality/job preservation/"efficiency" tends towards monopoly. Of course every business would love to be a monopoly. But that isn't the natural state, and in relatively deregulated industries, you don't see them naturally forming. The profit motive brings in competition too quickly.
leaving the market to work it out does work, the problem is that any one business man can buy enough politicians to make sure he doesn't have to compete. And it is rare to find a person supportive of deregulation but also for efficient taxing of externalities.
actually helping to prove my point by getting testing that was given at the end of compulsory education as public schools were becoming common (and at least a portion of the population moved from one room school houses for the local farms to more structured environments).
btw, I'm not saying the state is the sole purveyor of education and that a private system or local system can't do as well. I do believe perfectly good private school systems exist that provide education at this level. I'm merely saying that for the vast majority, the public school system was a boon, allowing them to answer questions like the ones in those tests.
Whether public schools have IMPROVED in the last 100 years is another question entirely. In my opinion, they have gotten much worse in the sciences and maths, and held ground in writing/reading comprehension. But at the same time, the quality has leveled out significantly and access to education has improved quite a bit. So probably on net, the total intelligence has gone up a decent amount.
First they can be taxes if you are giving more than 25% of your income away (there are nice loopholes with cost basing stock at purchase price rather than current price).
Second charity is not only money to the poor. Charity is money to your favorite lobbying group, money to your favorite theater an average person couldn't afford a seat in for his family, and money to erect statues of your family members as well.
Why should you get a tax break to build a statue to yourself in some private building run by a private corporation that sets itself up as charitable for donation purposes?
What are you talking about? There are lots of problems with public schools, but quality of education relative to 150 years ago when the state was not involved is not one of them.
If you were educated back then you were unlikely to learn anything other than the minimum to support farming and reading. Your parents had none of the baseline knowledge to even consider privately tutoring you. Either that or you were born into wealth.
Public schools have issues, but parents who don't care about their children's education have been around for a long time(and used to be a stunning majority), and luckily with mandatory public school those parents have a lot less influence than they used to and those ideas have been mostly wiped out.
horseshit. organized labor only existed in certain industries, and many others have never had organized labor or it's influences on employee's work. in general though, all those jobs require EDUCATION. Highly educated employees have always had pretty good working conditions, even when working very long hours. And that same story has played out around the globe. Hell, Organized labor didn't make car factory workers have a better life on it's own. Increasing the required skill level far enough so that people couldn't be wantonly replaced gave them real influence. Else they were just a bunch of replaceable, unskilled people who wanted more than the guy next to him.
When janitors organize and try to go on strike, they have NO skill that can't be replaced by anyone looking for a job. When my neighbor who worked at GM went on strike, I'm really well educated and have 0 chance of learning how to build engines in any reasonable amount of time to keep the company running.Conversely, it's also why a union is no longer required for good pay in the industry (look at things like the Boeing plant in SC or many car plants that are non-union). Those wages aren't held up by the unions; the problem is you don't want your skilled work force to get pissed off. If you take 3 years training up employees to build Boeing 787s, you can't afford them quitting/not caring/ not wanting to be careful and interrupt your flow.
actually, if you look at both productivity and hours worked, they were superior in asian rice growing (namely, communally owned property) vs serfs. And a quick look at the differences in productivity between southern slaves and northern laborers will show you slaves were FAR less productive.
Only in a world where uneducated work is the vast majority is your view validated (and yes, that was true several hundred to thousands of years ago). But in a modern country, that is far enough from true that you find people who are incentivized to become educated and skilled are far more valuable than those who you force to do X. Education and command of skills is antithetical to a society that promotes slavery, serfdom, or child labor. Even modern labor movement couldn't really begin until the work demanded enough skills that you couldn't just fire your entire workforce and hire a different one.
if I'm dumb enough to work in such a place, and I freely choose to do it, who are you to tell me I can't? Maybe the job comes with daily blow jobs from models or a paycheck of a million dollars a month and I'm willing to risk it? If you don't create laws that basically institutionalize certain companies, and freely allow labor to organize (i.e. you can union bust via physical intimidation and unions can't imprison the manager till they get a good contract) you end up with good outcomes. I credit unions with improving labor's situation far more than OSHA (or any other government group).
People won't magically start doing dumb things because the government says they are allowed to. A small group may, but history tells us labor isn't just some powerless group that can't organize. The problem in the 1800s and early turn of century was the use of force to break union organizing, and the problem (in my opinion) today is making it incredibly easy for labor to behave badly and have their benefits government guaranteed.
ok, I understand the problem, you don't know the finances of owning vs renting. If you did, you'd realize the reason you don't get to own anything when renting is because by and large you pay a fraction of the total cost of ownership and that extra the owner pays is why he gets equity and you don't. You also seem to think commuting is not relevant, though it is. Everyone commutes, whether it is 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour. That commute can be walking across the street or taking the A1 in. But I found you a place to buy a home and own something while working in Santa Barbara. If you want to live in the nice areas of Santa Barbara, where homes are a million bucks on average, get a better job or save more money. But it is eminently possible to live/work in the Santa Barbara area and own.
Now the quick math, which seeing as how you own a place is not very relevant. Buying a home usually takes about 4% to the broker, 1% to the bank for fees, 20% down, and then a 4.3% interest (if conforming, but if it isn't because of a lower down payment, welcome to at least an extra 100 points) on the home. Let's say you don't have to make a down payment at all, finance the entire home (now you need mortgage insurance, that adds to the rate), and you finance the broker fee and bank fees (i.e. let's take a loan like it's 2006). You have a 105% mortgage at , best, 5.5%. So in interest alone, in the first year, you will pay about 1/20th the cost of your home. Now add in property tax (usually 1.2-1.5% the price), and basic maintenance (another 0.5 to 1% depending, it can be much more if this is a condo), and you will need to have at least 7.5% the cost of your house before you generate even 1 dollar of equity. Hurrah for owning.
Now I have the numbers on hand for London and NYC, which are huge renters markets (where you want to force everyone into ownership which is probably financially destructive to them), the price/rent ratio is around 40:1. This means a renter pays only 2.5% or less than HALF the interest on the mortgage for the owner. In addition, you get these nice things like if something breaks, you don't pay to fix it, the flexibility to move within a month, and the ease of saving a significant portion of your income that would have gone to the bank as interest/mortgage insurance, etc. This is buying in the real world, which you are supposedly part of but seem very ignorant of. Maybe you were lied to and told your rent is just paying someone else's mortgage, but usually it doesn't come anywhere close in the big rental markets (small markets are a different world, you can get price/rent ratios of 20:1 and suddenly buying as soon as you can makes sense).
So first let's see about all the people who rent who can't buy in your world and are now just homeless. First, there is every young person who doesn't have the savings for a downpayment. Not everyone has a rich uncle to get them into an apartment during their first job. Even if you got banks and mortgage investors to allow the extension of loans with no down payment, they can't afford the basic costs of getting a mortgage. And if you are going to allow >100% LTV, you are living in a fantasy land. So they are just screwed. Of course, the cost now of moving between areas is so steep, it'll be hard to move quickly between jobs or get retrained unless you have all the facilities you will ever need right where you are. What happens for college students who are just coming out of high school? Oh, sorry, no college for you unless you want to be homeless during this time? Most colleges don't support dorms for everyone, instead allowing a private rental market provide places to live.
Ah but you expect prices to drop if we outlaw renting (because you know, rentiers in expensive areas are "making you pay their mortgage"). This is great, the prices of property will fall, and of course, to make those areas similarly priced for renters and owners, the prices will fall 50-65% percent. This sounds awesome. It's exactly what happened to Ja
By the way, in case you don't realize it, eliminating rent does not solve the problem of the number of jobs in an area (for whatever reason) being far greater than the number of units in the immediate vicinity. Even if everyone owned in New York City, you would still have a commuter population many multiples the borough population. It's not a question of capital owners hoarding.
In fact, in many areas where investors hold large amounts of property, the rents end up REDUCED. This is true in London and NYC in my experience. Neighborhoods with lots of investors who have to have units filled for income reasons are much easier to negotiate down10--25%. Add to that the incredibly low rental yield in these areas and you'll see you are basically getting a lot more "house" for your rental dollar.
And the entire argument is based on whether or not buying is a good idea. Buying a home is a long term, leveraged investment. It needs to suit your lifestyle and you have to be committed to that one location. If I were able to telecommute, I would be living in areas much cheaper than your preferred neighborhood, because I can get a lot more open space for very little money.
you are full of it. If you work in Santa Barbara, a very congested area, and want to own your own hope with lots of land (as compared to a small condo or renting), you move to Lompoc. It takes 5 minutes searching to realize house prices drop by 80%, which means you can comfortably by there.
Of course, now you have to commute each way to do that job. The people in Santa Barbara will pay higher prices to make up for this (just like wages are higher in NYC and SF vs Davis). Of course, if you decide to never have a skill and want to make a career of burger flipping, you will never own your own home. But then, home ownership isn't some kind of right.
So yes, in the same way the people who wait tables in Manhattan for 100% of their income can't afford to live in Manhattan and commute an hour in each day, those who want to work in Santa Barbara (for whatever reason) and don't have a job that provides a very high income cannot. There is no loop hole. The rich aren't keeping you out by keeping homes empty. In most expensive areas, the vacancy rate is regularly less than 2%. It's that there are X number of Units and Y people, Y>>>X who would like to live there so it gets very expensive. This especially happens when you have a large business district that uses up most of the land, providing jobs to a greater area. Actually New York City, San Francisco, and Washington DC are exceptional examples of this, as all 3 areas (manhattan of NYC) see their population surge by a large multiple every day as commuters come in. Tokyo and London are the same. Wages are higher in every single one of these areas to make up for the time and cost of commuting. In Tokyo, almost every business actually pays you a addendum to your salary for the cost of public transport commuting on the cheapest route.
Try again. Pick any area and I can tell you where working class wage people live. This one took about 45 seconds to debunk.
no, they don't. my home town had regular public marches by the KKK. And while the majority of the town was disgusted, it was their right to organize, pass out fliers, and stand on a soap box and shout their views for all to hear.
If these protesters are not violating noise ordinances and are not physically harassing a resident, then it's fine. In the same way pro life protests work, there are legal boundaries and just because those in the neighborhood don't like to hear it doesn't make it legal or harassment. In fact, in my limited experience, gentrification protesters are usually far worse than Pro Life supporters, but I can believe I haven't seen the worst of either group.
While google may not spend the money to open these stores (because they don't feel like running every possible business), these stores will and do regularly open and thrive as areas fill with people with more disposable income.
If you want to see this in action, go look at the vast improvement in neighborhood services after gentrification in many New York City neighborhoods. Alphabet city now actually has services worth going to compared to 30 years ago. The reason these businesses weren't open before is because the previous residents could not afford to pay prices that support the convenience of those stores nearby. The nicest part of gentrification is that neighborhoods become nice.
Yes. you got it right. Only rich people can live in expensive areas (whether you think those areas are nice or not is up to you). I could pay you 30 dollars an hour to wait tables, and there are cities in this country you still could not afford to rent in (or buy). A "nice" one bed room in NYC is 3300-4000 bucks a month (and I'm not talking about high end luxury condos). Low end service jobs do not pay you enough to live in nice areas in New York. On the other hand, those wages take you to a reasonable level if you don't feel the need to be in one of the most expensive areas in the world. Low end service jobs in NYC do pay you enough to commute though, and many people are willing to fill those jobs by commuting between home and work.
There are homes near your area in your price range, but if you are stuck being in those neighborhoods you define as "nice", yeah, you probably are going to struggle to be there. I'd like to live on Jupiter Island myself, I'm just a few million short of a down payment for a home in the "nice" area. If I take a job in San Francisco, I may just be able to afford to live walking distance from my office. But that would mean I don't save a dime unless I get a bonus. On the other hand, if I'm willing to do a 30 minute commute each way, my costs drop by 50-60%. So I will commute so that I am not living paycheck to paycheck and have some money here and there to do things with my family. If I'm willing to extend the commute to an hour each way, it drops 80-85%. It's all about making a choice.
Similarly, you have a choice. You can own your own slice of America and commute, or you can own a mobile home and be near your work. You seem to have made your choice. It's not right or wrong, just what suits you. But complaining that you need to be paid more so you can have and live in whatever home you want is a little disingenuous. Everywhere in the world (even very worker friendly countries like Japan) people handle this balance just fine. And in many places, a 90 minute commute in each direction is seen as acceptable(I know, the first time I complained about my 105 minute commute people told me it was only 10 minutes longer than average).
you don't know much about tenure do you? It may be rigorous at the college/university level. But for most teachers of secondary and primary schools, tenure is automatic after X number of years of employment. That's why there is a push to abolish it in many states, not just California.
this is actually very well studied. It's well shown in the data that more school days and longer school days add up to significantly better performance. And in fact, this gap is MOST NOTICEABLE in the demographics that Chicago has (namely, poor, uneducated, single parent households).
There are large scale studies of this across countries (all high performing nations use some combination of longer school years, longer school days, and higher paid teachers, and many use all 3). And the experience of many small charter school programs in the US is the best way to stop or lessen the backslide experienced by poor/minorities is by longer school days and longer school years.
In fact, there are good studies that a major portion of the performance difference can be related to the effectiveness of the time people aren't in school, so it makes sense that charter schools found they can do a lot better if they make the school year longer.
Gladwell references a ton of these studies in Outliers. And as it is well documented, you can use the appendix to go read the actual studies and come to a conclusion yourself. But to save you some time, 10 days a year DOES make a difference. And 1-2 hours a day makes a huge difference as well.
chess is similar, there are tests showing chess grandmasters are no better than a random person at memorizing pieces on a board that are random (i.e. not reachable in a reasonable game).
the median home price in the US is 220k. If you are earning the median income, that is the amount of house you should be buying. It is not capitalism's fault that you want a house far more expensive than your income can support. Live within your means, which obviously you aren't if your long term goal is a house well outside of those means.
Or, as the gp said, go get training to have a job that allows you to afford that house you want. If your rent is going to paying the mortgage of someone else, why not buy the place you are in (obviously, if your rent is equal to the mortgage, it basically works out). If you can't afford to buy it, then either you have a great deal on rent or you are, again, living in a place far nicer than your means allow.
no, they are wrong, 100%. industrial uses of precious metals are a tiny fraction of the demand, and NOT what drives most of the practices people find abhorrent. Should we give up on technology because a lot of women(and men) like gold and diamonds? or maybe we should stop feeding the beast by validating a love for shiny crap.
worse, it's not like the majority of any precious metal is used in technology. If we only used precious metals and stones for their technological uses, there wouldn't be massive exploitation in those areas because the money wouldn't be nearly as good.
what hacks do you actually have to worry about on healthcare.gov if it was designed reasonably?
A person with an account sends you information (encrypt it on the way there). You insert that information into a database and it can be called back by the user with the right username and password. No other access of information should be possible and most half decent websites do this. Hell, banks are 100x better in that there is a lot of information you CAN'T recall from the website and must phone in to modify or authenticate.
Then all healthcare.gov has to do is do a quick query as to what subsidies you qualify for (basic, trivial test of your expected AGI) and display from a public database all the insurance schemes you qualify for with the prices modified by your discount. All that needs to pass from the IRS servers to the website are the expected subsidies, no other data is required.
I can imagine a pretty trivial implementation with no front end holes to it (and it sounds like most of these holes are in the front end). Then if you were reasonably smart and standardized the format for customer data to go to the insurance companies, you just request new public keys from them each week and send them the encrypted file. What hacks are you open to? When I went to the website (I'm american but live abroad) I found the entire thing clunky. Hell,when I was inputting personal information it seemed to load data to the database every time I switched fields rather than me typing in 25 things and hitting "upload" once. It was bad enough I never did get around to comparing health insurance costs in different locales.
whether or not the gold in Ft Knox could collapse it's very unlikely. At 100 dollars at ounce, you are only talking aobut 15 billion dollars to buy all of ft knox (147 mio ounces of gold there). There are many billionaires in the emerging markets who would happily drop a billion dollars into this type of investment if it got there.
And your silver story is wrong. The government did not sell a single ounce of silver to break the Hunt Brothers. CBOT changed the margin rules, meaning the Hunt brothers could no longer hold the (margin) position they did the day before, causing a panic and forcing them to liquidate all their holdings at a large loss. It took about 48 hours to shatter their hold on the market, which they had spent years building up.
that's ridiculous, no one uses a dog or an animal as a legitimate way to pool resources and lobby the government. People do it all the time. Most churches are "corporations".
And no one on the right is calling corporations legally equivalent. They are simply calling for corporations to be treated the same as a union, or other group that people get together and put money in to lobby for certain political positions. How else would you fund single issue lobbying? Should everyone have to have enough money to run their own commercial and get their own billboard or should there be a way for people to aggregate their money and lobby for a particular issue without also sharing legal risks for stupid actions by others in the group or ridiculous lawsuits?
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absolutely, what I hate the most are the super brights on large SUVs when I'm driving in a smaller (lower down) car. there can be big distances where I'm completely blinded as the light is near my head level.
It gets even worse in europe where you have cars with RHS and LHS drive on the road (usually, headlights in the US have a slight angle to the right so your left headlight doesn't blind oncoming traffic as much).
The last thing I want is even brighter headlights. If current ones aren't bright enough for you to drive safely, you are driving too fast for your skills.
this has little to do with courtesy. You can talk on a phone and not be an ass (use noise canceling headphones, noise canceling microphones, keep your voice down, and talk.
Much more annoying are the kids on a college or high school trip who feel the need to shout at their friends 5 rows away. When you make it illegal for people to hold conversations at all, I'll get behind this.
that isn't true at all, all industry, when you pay off government to put in nice barriers to competition in the name of safety/quality/job preservation/"efficiency" tends towards monopoly. Of course every business would love to be a monopoly. But that isn't the natural state, and in relatively deregulated industries, you don't see them naturally forming. The profit motive brings in competition too quickly.
leaving the market to work it out does work, the problem is that any one business man can buy enough politicians to make sure he doesn't have to compete. And it is rare to find a person supportive of deregulation but also for efficient taxing of externalities.
actually helping to prove my point by getting testing that was given at the end of compulsory education as public schools were becoming common (and at least a portion of the population moved from one room school houses for the local farms to more structured environments).
btw, I'm not saying the state is the sole purveyor of education and that a private system or local system can't do as well. I do believe perfectly good private school systems exist that provide education at this level. I'm merely saying that for the vast majority, the public school system was a boon, allowing them to answer questions like the ones in those tests.
Whether public schools have IMPROVED in the last 100 years is another question entirely. In my opinion, they have gotten much worse in the sciences and maths, and held ground in writing/reading comprehension. But at the same time, the quality has leveled out significantly and access to education has improved quite a bit. So probably on net, the total intelligence has gone up a decent amount.
First they can be taxes if you are giving more than 25% of your income away (there are nice loopholes with cost basing stock at purchase price rather than current price).
Second charity is not only money to the poor. Charity is money to your favorite lobbying group, money to your favorite theater an average person couldn't afford a seat in for his family, and money to erect statues of your family members as well.
Why should you get a tax break to build a statue to yourself in some private building run by a private corporation that sets itself up as charitable for donation purposes?
What are you talking about? There are lots of problems with public schools, but quality of education relative to 150 years ago when the state was not involved is not one of them.
If you were educated back then you were unlikely to learn anything other than the minimum to support farming and reading. Your parents had none of the baseline knowledge to even consider privately tutoring you. Either that or you were born into wealth.
Public schools have issues, but parents who don't care about their children's education have been around for a long time(and used to be a stunning majority), and luckily with mandatory public school those parents have a lot less influence than they used to and those ideas have been mostly wiped out.
horseshit. organized labor only existed in certain industries, and many others have never had organized labor or it's influences on employee's work. in general though, all those jobs require EDUCATION. Highly educated employees have always had pretty good working conditions, even when working very long hours. And that same story has played out around the globe. Hell, Organized labor didn't make car factory workers have a better life on it's own. Increasing the required skill level far enough so that people couldn't be wantonly replaced gave them real influence. Else they were just a bunch of replaceable, unskilled people who wanted more than the guy next to him.
When janitors organize and try to go on strike, they have NO skill that can't be replaced by anyone looking for a job. When my neighbor who worked at GM went on strike, I'm really well educated and have 0 chance of learning how to build engines in any reasonable amount of time to keep the company running.Conversely, it's also why a union is no longer required for good pay in the industry (look at things like the Boeing plant in SC or many car plants that are non-union). Those wages aren't held up by the unions; the problem is you don't want your skilled work force to get pissed off. If you take 3 years training up employees to build Boeing 787s, you can't afford them quitting/not caring/ not wanting to be careful and interrupt your flow.
actually, if you look at both productivity and hours worked, they were superior in asian rice growing (namely, communally owned property) vs serfs. And a quick look at the differences in productivity between southern slaves and northern laborers will show you slaves were FAR less productive.
Only in a world where uneducated work is the vast majority is your view validated (and yes, that was true several hundred to thousands of years ago). But in a modern country, that is far enough from true that you find people who are incentivized to become educated and skilled are far more valuable than those who you force to do X. Education and command of skills is antithetical to a society that promotes slavery, serfdom, or child labor. Even modern labor movement couldn't really begin until the work demanded enough skills that you couldn't just fire your entire workforce and hire a different one.
if I'm dumb enough to work in such a place, and I freely choose to do it, who are you to tell me I can't? Maybe the job comes with daily blow jobs from models or a paycheck of a million dollars a month and I'm willing to risk it? If you don't create laws that basically institutionalize certain companies, and freely allow labor to organize (i.e. you can union bust via physical intimidation and unions can't imprison the manager till they get a good contract) you end up with good outcomes. I credit unions with improving labor's situation far more than OSHA (or any other government group).
People won't magically start doing dumb things because the government says they are allowed to. A small group may, but history tells us labor isn't just some powerless group that can't organize. The problem in the 1800s and early turn of century was the use of force to break union organizing, and the problem (in my opinion) today is making it incredibly easy for labor to behave badly and have their benefits government guaranteed.
ok, I understand the problem, you don't know the finances of owning vs renting. If you did, you'd realize the reason you don't get to own anything when renting is because by and large you pay a fraction of the total cost of ownership and that extra the owner pays is why he gets equity and you don't. You also seem to think commuting is not relevant, though it is. Everyone commutes, whether it is 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour. That commute can be walking across the street or taking the A1 in. But I found you a place to buy a home and own something while working in Santa Barbara. If you want to live in the nice areas of Santa Barbara, where homes are a million bucks on average, get a better job or save more money. But it is eminently possible to live/work in the Santa Barbara area and own.
Now the quick math, which seeing as how you own a place is not very relevant. Buying a home usually takes about 4% to the broker, 1% to the bank for fees, 20% down, and then a 4.3% interest (if conforming, but if it isn't because of a lower down payment, welcome to at least an extra 100 points) on the home. Let's say you don't have to make a down payment at all, finance the entire home (now you need mortgage insurance, that adds to the rate), and you finance the broker fee and bank fees (i.e. let's take a loan like it's 2006). You have a 105% mortgage at , best, 5.5%. So in interest alone, in the first year, you will pay about 1/20th the cost of your home. Now add in property tax (usually 1.2-1.5% the price), and basic maintenance (another 0.5 to 1% depending, it can be much more if this is a condo), and you will need to have at least 7.5% the cost of your house before you generate even 1 dollar of equity. Hurrah for owning.
Now I have the numbers on hand for London and NYC, which are huge renters markets (where you want to force everyone into ownership which is probably financially destructive to them), the price/rent ratio is around 40:1. This means a renter pays only 2.5% or less than HALF the interest on the mortgage for the owner. In addition, you get these nice things like if something breaks, you don't pay to fix it, the flexibility to move within a month, and the ease of saving a significant portion of your income that would have gone to the bank as interest/mortgage insurance, etc. This is buying in the real world, which you are supposedly part of but seem very ignorant of. Maybe you were lied to and told your rent is just paying someone else's mortgage, but usually it doesn't come anywhere close in the big rental markets (small markets are a different world, you can get price/rent ratios of 20:1 and suddenly buying as soon as you can makes sense).
So first let's see about all the people who rent who can't buy in your world and are now just homeless. First, there is every young person who doesn't have the savings for a downpayment. Not everyone has a rich uncle to get them into an apartment during their first job. Even if you got banks and mortgage investors to allow the extension of loans with no down payment, they can't afford the basic costs of getting a mortgage. And if you are going to allow >100% LTV, you are living in a fantasy land. So they are just screwed. Of course, the cost now of moving between areas is so steep, it'll be hard to move quickly between jobs or get retrained unless you have all the facilities you will ever need right where you are. What happens for college students who are just coming out of high school? Oh, sorry, no college for you unless you want to be homeless during this time? Most colleges don't support dorms for everyone, instead allowing a private rental market provide places to live.
Ah but you expect prices to drop if we outlaw renting (because you know, rentiers in expensive areas are "making you pay their mortgage"). This is great, the prices of property will fall, and of course, to make those areas similarly priced for renters and owners, the prices will fall 50-65% percent. This sounds awesome. It's exactly what happened to Ja
By the way, in case you don't realize it, eliminating rent does not solve the problem of the number of jobs in an area (for whatever reason) being far greater than the number of units in the immediate vicinity. Even if everyone owned in New York City, you would still have a commuter population many multiples the borough population. It's not a question of capital owners hoarding.
In fact, in many areas where investors hold large amounts of property, the rents end up REDUCED. This is true in London and NYC in my experience. Neighborhoods with lots of investors who have to have units filled for income reasons are much easier to negotiate down10--25%. Add to that the incredibly low rental yield in these areas and you'll see you are basically getting a lot more "house" for your rental dollar.
And the entire argument is based on whether or not buying is a good idea. Buying a home is a long term, leveraged investment. It needs to suit your lifestyle and you have to be committed to that one location. If I were able to telecommute, I would be living in areas much cheaper than your preferred neighborhood, because I can get a lot more open space for very little money.
you are full of it. If you work in Santa Barbara, a very congested area, and want to own your own hope with lots of land (as compared to a small condo or renting), you move to Lompoc. It takes 5 minutes searching to realize house prices drop by 80%, which means you can comfortably by there.
Of course, now you have to commute each way to do that job. The people in Santa Barbara will pay higher prices to make up for this (just like wages are higher in NYC and SF vs Davis). Of course, if you decide to never have a skill and want to make a career of burger flipping, you will never own your own home. But then, home ownership isn't some kind of right.
So yes, in the same way the people who wait tables in Manhattan for 100% of their income can't afford to live in Manhattan and commute an hour in each day, those who want to work in Santa Barbara (for whatever reason) and don't have a job that provides a very high income cannot. There is no loop hole. The rich aren't keeping you out by keeping homes empty. In most expensive areas, the vacancy rate is regularly less than 2%. It's that there are X number of Units and Y people, Y>>>X who would like to live there so it gets very expensive. This especially happens when you have a large business district that uses up most of the land, providing jobs to a greater area. Actually New York City, San Francisco, and Washington DC are exceptional examples of this, as all 3 areas (manhattan of NYC) see their population surge by a large multiple every day as commuters come in. Tokyo and London are the same. Wages are higher in every single one of these areas to make up for the time and cost of commuting. In Tokyo, almost every business actually pays you a addendum to your salary for the cost of public transport commuting on the cheapest route.
Try again. Pick any area and I can tell you where working class wage people live. This one took about 45 seconds to debunk.
no, they don't. my home town had regular public marches by the KKK. And while the majority of the town was disgusted, it was their right to organize, pass out fliers, and stand on a soap box and shout their views for all to hear.
If these protesters are not violating noise ordinances and are not physically harassing a resident, then it's fine. In the same way pro life protests work, there are legal boundaries and just because those in the neighborhood don't like to hear it doesn't make it legal or harassment. In fact, in my limited experience, gentrification protesters are usually far worse than Pro Life supporters, but I can believe I haven't seen the worst of either group.
While google may not spend the money to open these stores (because they don't feel like running every possible business), these stores will and do regularly open and thrive as areas fill with people with more disposable income.
If you want to see this in action, go look at the vast improvement in neighborhood services after gentrification in many New York City neighborhoods. Alphabet city now actually has services worth going to compared to 30 years ago. The reason these businesses weren't open before is because the previous residents could not afford to pay prices that support the convenience of those stores nearby. The nicest part of gentrification is that neighborhoods become nice.
Yes. you got it right. Only rich people can live in expensive areas (whether you think those areas are nice or not is up to you). I could pay you 30 dollars an hour to wait tables, and there are cities in this country you still could not afford to rent in (or buy). A "nice" one bed room in NYC is 3300-4000 bucks a month (and I'm not talking about high end luxury condos). Low end service jobs do not pay you enough to live in nice areas in New York. On the other hand, those wages take you to a reasonable level if you don't feel the need to be in one of the most expensive areas in the world. Low end service jobs in NYC do pay you enough to commute though, and many people are willing to fill those jobs by commuting between home and work.
There are homes near your area in your price range, but if you are stuck being in those neighborhoods you define as "nice", yeah, you probably are going to struggle to be there. I'd like to live on Jupiter Island myself, I'm just a few million short of a down payment for a home in the "nice" area. If I take a job in San Francisco, I may just be able to afford to live walking distance from my office. But that would mean I don't save a dime unless I get a bonus. On the other hand, if I'm willing to do a 30 minute commute each way, my costs drop by 50-60%. So I will commute so that I am not living paycheck to paycheck and have some money here and there to do things with my family. If I'm willing to extend the commute to an hour each way, it drops 80-85%. It's all about making a choice.
Similarly, you have a choice. You can own your own slice of America and commute, or you can own a mobile home and be near your work. You seem to have made your choice. It's not right or wrong, just what suits you. But complaining that you need to be paid more so you can have and live in whatever home you want is a little disingenuous. Everywhere in the world (even very worker friendly countries like Japan) people handle this balance just fine. And in many places, a 90 minute commute in each direction is seen as acceptable(I know, the first time I complained about my 105 minute commute people told me it was only 10 minutes longer than average).
you don't know much about tenure do you? It may be rigorous at the college/university level. But for most teachers of secondary and primary schools, tenure is automatic after X number of years of employment. That's why there is a push to abolish it in many states, not just California.
this is actually very well studied. It's well shown in the data that more school days and longer school days add up to significantly better performance. And in fact, this gap is MOST NOTICEABLE in the demographics that Chicago has (namely, poor, uneducated, single parent households).
There are large scale studies of this across countries (all high performing nations use some combination of longer school years, longer school days, and higher paid teachers, and many use all 3). And the experience of many small charter school programs in the US is the best way to stop or lessen the backslide experienced by poor/minorities is by longer school days and longer school years.
In fact, there are good studies that a major portion of the performance difference can be related to the effectiveness of the time people aren't in school, so it makes sense that charter schools found they can do a lot better if they make the school year longer.
Gladwell references a ton of these studies in Outliers. And as it is well documented, you can use the appendix to go read the actual studies and come to a conclusion yourself. But to save you some time, 10 days a year DOES make a difference. And 1-2 hours a day makes a huge difference as well.
chess is similar, there are tests showing chess grandmasters are no better than a random person at memorizing pieces on a board that are random (i.e. not reachable in a reasonable game).
it's not the UK, india, or Japan. there is no "test" to memorize for.
the median home price in the US is 220k. If you are earning the median income, that is the amount of house you should be buying. It is not capitalism's fault that you want a house far more expensive than your income can support. Live within your means, which obviously you aren't if your long term goal is a house well outside of those means.
Or, as the gp said, go get training to have a job that allows you to afford that house you want. If your rent is going to paying the mortgage of someone else, why not buy the place you are in (obviously, if your rent is equal to the mortgage, it basically works out). If you can't afford to buy it, then either you have a great deal on rent or you are, again, living in a place far nicer than your means allow.
no, they are wrong, 100%. industrial uses of precious metals are a tiny fraction of the demand, and NOT what drives most of the practices people find abhorrent. Should we give up on technology because a lot of women(and men) like gold and diamonds? or maybe we should stop feeding the beast by validating a love for shiny crap.
worse, it's not like the majority of any precious metal is used in technology. If we only used precious metals and stones for their technological uses, there wouldn't be massive exploitation in those areas because the money wouldn't be nearly as good.
what hacks do you actually have to worry about on healthcare.gov if it was designed reasonably?
A person with an account sends you information (encrypt it on the way there). You insert that information into a database and it can be called back by the user with the right username and password. No other access of information should be possible and most half decent websites do this. Hell, banks are 100x better in that there is a lot of information you CAN'T recall from the website and must phone in to modify or authenticate.
Then all healthcare.gov has to do is do a quick query as to what subsidies you qualify for (basic, trivial test of your expected AGI) and display from a public database all the insurance schemes you qualify for with the prices modified by your discount. All that needs to pass from the IRS servers to the website are the expected subsidies, no other data is required.
I can imagine a pretty trivial implementation with no front end holes to it (and it sounds like most of these holes are in the front end). Then if you were reasonably smart and standardized the format for customer data to go to the insurance companies, you just request new public keys from them each week and send them the encrypted file. What hacks are you open to? When I went to the website (I'm american but live abroad) I found the entire thing clunky. Hell,when I was inputting personal information it seemed to load data to the database every time I switched fields rather than me typing in 25 things and hitting "upload" once. It was bad enough I never did get around to comparing health insurance costs in different locales.
whether or not the gold in Ft Knox could collapse it's very unlikely. At 100 dollars at ounce, you are only talking aobut 15 billion dollars to buy all of ft knox (147 mio ounces of gold there). There are many billionaires in the emerging markets who would happily drop a billion dollars into this type of investment if it got there.
And your silver story is wrong. The government did not sell a single ounce of silver to break the Hunt Brothers. CBOT changed the margin rules, meaning the Hunt brothers could no longer hold the (margin) position they did the day before, causing a panic and forcing them to liquidate all their holdings at a large loss. It took about 48 hours to shatter their hold on the market, which they had spent years building up.
that's ridiculous, no one uses a dog or an animal as a legitimate way to pool resources and lobby the government. People do it all the time. Most churches are "corporations".
And no one on the right is calling corporations legally equivalent. They are simply calling for corporations to be treated the same as a union, or other group that people get together and put money in to lobby for certain political positions. How else would you fund single issue lobbying? Should everyone have to have enough money to run their own commercial and get their own billboard or should there be a way for people to aggregate their money and lobby for a particular issue without also sharing legal risks for stupid actions by others in the group or ridiculous lawsuits?