I'm fully exposed to the 2022 rate shock (which is to say I took an ARM at 2021 rates), but there are lots of ARM products that lock for 7-10 years, so I have about 5 years left. My presumption as a buyer is that I will either be able to refi at attractive rates or make enough career progress to blast the principal down if it comes to that. 10 years is a long time to not get a downward rate cycle, though yes I may end up burned.
But as a current buyer, the rate shock is already like 90% in place. I seriously doubt anyone at all doing a 30 year today will not refinance long before its time is up... in general it is worth it to refinance when rates move 1.5%.
chooky
20hr ago
I agree with others that the 15 year terms are not favorable enough to incentivize it. Something I would consider if I were you is an ARM, which will offer lower rates than fixed. Interest rates are already high, so there is less to lose with an ARM and a greater chance for a refinance to become worth if they descend.
I am somewhat nervous about the 10 year fixed and thereafter ARM I took in 2021, but I have a few more years to still hope for better policy (from the political branches; I think the Fed is currently pretty darn close to correct).
chooky
4d ago
Labelling Obama as a radical seems more or less in with a claim that Romney or Rubio are examples of right-wing radicals.
chooky
5d ago
I don't contest any of that, and I certainly appreciate that being toxic is clearly the winning strategy for both sides, especially in primaries.
But I would vote for a Romney-like over Hillary or Harris in a heartbeat.
chooky
5d ago
Maybe, but there is also not much criticizing me that I would not swing. McCain was an old man hawk with a populist side kick - the obvious wrong choice. Romney was a good choice but this is the coin flip of centrist vs centrist - okay, I lean Dem based on this, but, I mean, I dont think we will ever see a candidate on either side as good as either of these guys for at least a decade. I think it has been extremely correct to vote against Trump every time, thougb I cede that has handlers did a pretty good job on his first term - unfortunately, Trump inmediately undid all the good of TCJA in his second term.
chooky
5d ago
No. I thought Obama was good abd vastly superior in 2008, especially with Palin as a proto-Trump and even more with Obama's Iraq war opposition since I view that war as a huge error. I greatly regret not voting for Romney in 2016, though in my defense I think that Obama and Romney were both basically good choices. Today, I do not believe there is any scenario in which the Democrats present me with a good candidate, but the Republicans keep giving me Trump. It would take very little for me to vote against a Sanders-esque Dem nominee - probably literally anyone except Vance or with the last name Trump.
chooky
5d ago
I would never vote for Trump, for sure, but the Republicans haven't sought moderate votes with a presidential candidate since Romney. I would have absolutely voted for someone like Rubio over Harris in 2024.
chooky
5d ago
It sounds like you think TKAM's condemnation of "secular" morality is good, though I think that your definition/labelling of identity-based morality as "secular" is quite poor. (For one, the peak of contemporary non-religious morality is probably MLK's "I have a dream" speech, which strongly rejects identity as the main driver of morality.)
But given that this is a right-leaning forum and a thread in which most posters seem very sympathetic to Christianity, I'm now even more confused why TKAM would be "worthless slop" and "actively detrimental to creating wisdom". Perhaps it is my own bias, but I think that identity-based morality is not very good and that works critiquing it would usually be thought of as "good" from a morality perspective.
chooky
6d ago
This is like saying Trump wouldnt do somethung crazy like follow through on his campaign promises to implement a bunch of tariffs. Why on earth would I expect that Trump is not serious about lowering interest rates no matter what?
chooky
6d ago
Do you means shits on "non-secular" morality? Jonah can be easily read as a critique of religious righteousness. Personally, I think the critique is fairly trenchant.
chooky
7d ago
What is the complaint against To Kill a Mockingbird? (And no fair bringing up Go Set a Watchman.)
chooky
20d ago
Consumption taxes are generally considered the best taxes, but they are pretty damn regressive. This sounds... really good from an efficiency standpoint, is appropriately targeted on the wealthy (though we need some way to exclude middle class HELOCs) and seems much harder to game than a consumption tax too. Go run for office.
chooky
20d ago
Eh, oil futures are down to 80-85, which seems consistent with the deal to reopen Strait holding. This is still 25-30% above pre-war, so we still have a substantial lingering impact as shipping and inventories slowly normalize.
chooky
22d ago
This kind of seems to me like a ringing endorsement from the USG about just how great and valuable Anthropic's models are! Certainly, the USG could never ever permit Anthropic or OpenAI to ever follow what had once been a practice of publishing openly about their models since that would ruin their business model, I mean national security.
Seems like a publicity coup for the frontier companies to me.
chooky
23d ago
This doesn't address the true constraint - financial resources and parent time/attention - at all. Sure, I guess theoretically a husband and wife could pump out more and more babies until they reach a certain age, but the reality is that most families these days have 1-2 kids, and a lot of the reason for this is the financial/time resources needed to have more. A Down's syndrome kid very obviously takes a lot more resources to raise, though it is perhaps a fair point that a great deal of these resources will come from society/taxes (public school or other programs) rather than the family; since a Down's syndrome kid might need a lot less college/etc money than a normal kid, I'm actually not sure I'm willing to take a strong position for the family's finances/attention either way. Possibly, it ends up a wash and comes down to someone choosing between having only one kid (with Down's) or being forced to forego one of the two normal kids they would have. Personally, I would choose the non-Down's choices. I mean, maybe you are thinking of someone with unlimited financial/family resources, in which case fertility/biology is a more reasonable binding constraint, but I think we should obviously think of a typical family for which money actually exists.
chooky
23d ago
Surely any business would welcome their competitor randomly exiting the market. This seems like an unambiguously great piece of luck for a business.
chooky
27d ago
I would totally disagree, and I don't particularly care for any Killers.
I think we can make a reasonable argument that STM's chorus is much better, but the rest of STM is very, very mid. The verse, from a catchiness standpoint, is completely disposable, which is a huge problem because the song takes forever to get to the first chorus. Brightside, on the other hand, opens with a signature guitar melody and then immediately jumps into catchy verse. Even if we acknowledge the lack of actual melody, the rhythm of the Brightside verse is very successful; like many of the best emo-punk songs, it's frequently unclear if the good part of the song is the verse or the chorus (many Paramore songs would be a major example). While the guitar riffs in STM might be better, the synths really drag the song down, and there is, again, no competition with the opening guitar notes of Brightside.
chooky
1mo ago
That's funny. I insisted to my IT that they user their admin privilege to install the desktop app so I wouldn't have to use the browser-based!
chooky
1mo ago
And it's increasingly just not relevant for customers. I basically never carry cash unless I have recently had to go get some to send to my kids' school. What need would I ever have to carry hundreds unless I am at a restaurant that charges substantial card fees or dodges taxes?
Final shift employees hate making bank runs, and businesses hate theft risk and working capital costs.
chooky
1mo ago
There are little notches that engage different plates. They are ingenious, but a total nightmare if they break.
chooky
1mo ago
Hmm, are you claiming too much, though? I'm concerned that your standard would not allow for a distinction between the Borderers versus other English groups that emigrated to the US as described in Albion's Seed.
chooky
1mo ago
We called it just Snatch, but yes it was, or at least was very popular as a cool and good movie among college kids interested in such things. In Latin America, it was called something that translates to Pigs and Diamonds.
Oh god, did Trump somehow manage to make the perpetually underdog USMNT the bad guy during their home World Cup?
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