The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
15m ago
I wonder why Plattsburgh isn't on his list. There's nothing much there but SUNY Plattsburgh, but it is a real (if small) town and he apparently already thinks favorably of it. Certainly it's a better choice than Utica.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
19m ago
No, the house is the wealth. It's made liquid by borrowing against it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
20m ago
Not necessarily. If more people are buying with cash, you can have both rising prices and people unable to get mortgages.
You could, but that wouldn't stop developers from building. Unless cash buyers are somehow only interested in existing homes.
You seem to assume that only one thing can be wrong at a time, but this is America in 2025, everything can be wrong at the same time.
I don't think it's actually possible for unavailability of mortgages to dissuade developers AND for home prices to be rising precipitously.
It is theoretically possible for mortgages to be unavailable and for cash buyers to still drive up prices, though I think this article utterly fails to demonstrate that. But the price signal should work regardless of the source of the money. What's happened is the supply has become less elastic.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
36m ago
Second Gulf War was perhaps largely about Saddam taking a shot at Bush Sr. First Gulf War was the US supporting an ally, as I recall. Oil never was anything but the standard leftist talking point.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
If I sell an appreciated painting, I no longer have it; my standard of living is decreased by exactly as much as having that painting increased it. Further, I CAN extract some value from my home (by borrowing from it) without reducing my standard of living. That you have arbitrarily rejected this does not make it not so.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
Yes. This is a case that really looks bad -- it looks not only like the US killed some shipwrecked survivors of an attack (which is generally considered perfidious, right?), but that Hegseth not only authorized it but lied about it, not just to the press but to his boss. If that's so, he should resign.
However, the press is so unreliable that it's quite possible this isn't the case, and e.g. even if they're telling the literal truth, the second strike was not to kill survivors but to destroy a drug boat after a first attack failed to do so.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3hr ago
Do you think the drop in the number of bad-credit homeowners is because bad-credit people suddenly stopped wanting houses?
The first drop occurred because of a change in lending standards, but that happened when the GFC hit and (eyeballing their graph) finished around 2010. There's another post-COVID drop, and I think that is explained not by a change in lending standards but a change in the population of homebuyers. With wealthier homebuyers driving up prices, people with bad credit (who are generally poorer than those with good credit) are simply less able to buy a house, and thus don't get mortgages.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
Nobody was talking about the man's daughter. His daughter has Down's syndrome, Trump called Tim Walz a retard. There's the sometimes-joked-about mechanism of offense, which is that he was offended by the comparison of that loser Tim Walz to actual retards like his daughter. And there's the real mechanism, which is just that "retard" is considered a no-no word because it can be used derisively to refer to people with Down's and others with actual mental retardation.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4hr ago
It's too bad the Republicans have to lose seats over no-no words, but we've seen what happens when they yield to this kind of thing, and it's no different than losing.
The mechanism for offense seems pretty tenuous anyway.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
5hr ago
In January 2020 (to get a pre-COVID number), the National Case-Shiller index was at 215. In January of this year, it was 330. That's about a 53% increase in the value of property, which means all that older mortgage debt is now a considerably smaller percentage of the total. As for liquidity, housing sales have stalled (after increasing up until COVID, then a massive increase during it) but at a level similar to pre-bubble levels.
On the other side of the coin, I know quite a few people who would desperately like to buy a house, but can't afford the monthly payments anywhere near their jobs. Historically, those people might have found a fixer upper somewhere and taken on a lot of new debt that bumped up the average. These days though, they're not taking on that debt at all.
Someone's buying those fixer-uppers, but they're wealthier people who are paying a lot more for it.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
If a painting goes from $1,000 to $1,000,000 at the same time general inflation goes up by a factor of 1000, you have gained nothing. If shelter inflation goes up more than general inflation, then if you own a home which goes up only by the value of shelter inflation, you have in fact gained (though not by as much as if your home went up and general shelter did not). It is true that to realize these gains you need to actually spend something, but that's just a matter of not being able to have your cake and eat it too -- if you want to realize the gain from the painting you won't have it after you sell it either.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
What the article is trying to say is that the availability of mortgages to prospective buyers is low, and is using as evidence for this the fact that the lion's share of mortgages go to people with good credit. I don't think that's reasonable.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
6hr ago
The median age of first time homebuying has gone up from 28 in the 1990s to 40. First-time buyers now comprise just 21% of all home purchases.
I think this statistic, plus this well-known one about Millennials being "behind" on homeownership, plus COVID, goes a long way to explaining the current run-up in real home prices. Compared to Boomers and Gen X, more Millennials preferred to remain renters. Then COVID hit, and that changed those attitudes, in a lasting way. So there's a fairly large group of older non-homeowners. Being older, they are wealthier than typical first-time homebuyers in years past, so they can outbid Gen Z (and younger Millennials) who are also in the market. That's the demand side. The supply side is also messed up, for various reasons including (but not limited to) the ideological success of anti-growth and anti-sprawl policies.
Nothing about this seems sustainable to me. At least the younger generation will inherit the houses? Well, no. Usually inheritance passes down to the next generation, which currently owns their own homes. And many elderly are forced to sell their houses to pay for eldercare, meaning that all that home value goes to the health care system instead of anyone else.
When the elders leave the houses (whether due to death, incapacity, or moving to a rental unit) they typically become available for another buyer, whether the money goes into healthcare or not. This will drive prices down. But it's going to be a while before the boomers start dying en masse; life expectancy for an 80-year-old (the oldest boomers as of 2026) is ~9 years, and for a 62 (youngest boomers) year old, 20 years. So yes, house prices will have to fall (barring a massive increase in immigration, which is definitely possible in that time frame if President AOC opens the floodgates)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9hr ago
Butttt if we're going with long-term evolutionary explanations, I'm a fan of the idea that long, harsh winters tend to produce human populations that are good at long term thinking and directly linked to that, cooperation in iterated games. "If we start fighting over food supply now, all it will achieve is everyone dies when winter arrives."
But this theory has to contend with Russia, which has been low-trust (by European standards, anyway) for long before Communism.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9hr ago
The Economist doesn't seem to know economics.
I was presented this article by Reddit as an ad. Though the ad used the subtitle about Trump as the title. This article packs more "wrong" in a coherently-written article than I've seen in a long time. The actual title is "America’s huge mortgage market is slowly dying".
Right out of the gate, we're told mortgage debt has dropped over 30 points as a percentage of the GDP since the housing crisis, and now is at its lowest level since 1999, before the bubble. Wait a minute? Isn't that a good thing? We've finally returned to normalcy after the bubble? In fact, the graph appears to show just that. Mortgage debt is still higher as a percent of GDP than any time other than the bubble.
We're then told "mortgage debt has shrunk to just 27% of the value of American household property—a 65-year low". Uh, yes, but those of us who are paying attention realize that this isn't because mortgage debt has shrunk, it's because the value of American property has increased. Which doesn't have much to do with any dying of the mortgage market.
Then we get this howler:
The availability of mortgages, as measured by lenders’ appetite for risk, is at its lowest in decades.
Uh, how exactly is lenders' appetite for risk a measure of mortgage availability?
The article then goes on to call this a "collapse in credit", because in 2003 (peak bubble), 35% of American mortgages went to people with credit scores below 720, whereas now that number is 22%. But the attached chart shows total originations are fairly close to immediately pre-COVID numbers. There's no real drying up in credit since the end of the bubble, just extension of the same credit to more creditworthy borrowers. Note that more than half of Americans with a credit score have one over 720. American's credit scores have increased, and lending less to people who are higher risk just makes sense. The bubble lending DIDN'T make sense, that's how we got the bubble!
Did I call the previous one a howler? No, that wasn't a howler. THIS is a howler:
The drought is also stopping fresh supply from entering the market. If developers have no prospective buyers to sell properties to, they are much less likely to build at all.
Uh, bitch, prices are high. Time on market is low. There's LOTS of buyers. It's a seller's market. If developers aren't building (and indeed they aren't) it's not a lack of prospective buyers causing it.
This is heart of the problem with the article: if there is indeed a mortgage drought preventing people from buying houses, house prices should be falling, not rising. Basic Econ 101 stuff. The article completely ignores this right up until the very end, when it notes
Goldman Sachs, a bank, estimates that the 1.6m privately owned properties completed last year still leave the market short of 3m-4m homes. Unless that gap is plugged fast, any policies meant to make mortgages more widely available will only push house prices higher, nullifying their effect.
I don't know what G-S means by that, but "any policies meant to make mortgages more widely available will only push house prices higher" makes more sense than anything else in the article, and it contradicts the whole thesis of the article.
The housing market has plenty of problems. Unavailability of credit is definitely not one of them.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9hr ago
Republicans in Blue States are some of the worst blockers.
This is because in Blue States, the choices are between pods and nothing. In particular, the state government wants to build multi-family low-income housing in Republican-leaning areas of blue states in order to turn those areas Democratic-leaning. No need to gerrymander if you can move the population.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
· Edited 11hr ago
Suburbs are sometimes exclusivist, but theres also plenty of suburbs that are affordable to the lower working class- I live in one. They’re simply a practical solution to ‘everyone gets a single family home with a yard’ in a rich country where you have to be quite poor not to have a car. Most of my neighbors, if offered the choice, would not move to a walkable safe neighborhood, because they want a single family home with a yard.
In blue states, though, you can't build new suburbs of single-family homes, because the anti-growth mindset has won. For instance, there's lots of space in Western Maryland to build such things, but the Maryland Master Plan says no, that's gotta be preserved. This has been a sore point for people living in those counties who DO want the growth for well over a decade. Blue Tribe has been causing the housing price increases itself.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Odd, since it's just a screenshot from one of the Fallout games showing the wrecked US Capitol, National Mall, and Washington Monument.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
In the 1950s most people were making coffee with percolators, and there was no market for high-end coffee beans. Pourover Folgers is still Folgers.
By 1959 you can get decent coffee, at least in NYC; our rich man should be able to get it for home if he cares to. Some perhaps more available than today -- the Mocca (Yemen) of Mocca Java is not available today, for instance, and Puerto Rican coffee production has been falling for over a century.
Mountain biking is a loss, but road biking is doable; the modern two-derailler (though no indexing) road bike is available. Not sure if it's a max of 8 speeds or 10 in 1959. No Spandex kit for the rich cycling enthusiast, though.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The people who end up as senior software engineers at a FAANG (a position I have held) are generally not bros of any sort. There's a few; they don't remain in the role; bros are generally climbers, and if they can't climb within the company they'll head somewhere else. Mostly it's geeks, as you'd expect. And the bros still DO go into finance, at least in NYC.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
If you pay each employee a generous $100k/yr then you can easily do that with 1/3 of your money.
2/3rds, because you lose almost 50% in taxes. 37% Federal + 6.85% NYS + 3.876% NYC.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
Certainly Italian would have been available in Philadelphia and Baltimore also. Washington, D.C. would have had French and Italian.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The US is not going to be deliberately shooting down civilian airliners (not even Venezuelan ones) in Venezuela, and even another USS Vincennes incident would be bad for Trump's domestic support.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The developers don't care about the balance of power; the politicians who set up the incentives so you can build (or make more money on) low-income multi family housing but can't build (or will make less money on) market-priced single family housing absolutely do. The developers just follow the incentives.
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