“working as a server” - I have to get rid of thinking everything is about computers…
I have a friend who asks people whether they’re running Windows or Linux when we go out to eat and they come to our table to introduce themselves as our server. None of them has yet to get the (bad) joke and I die inside a little more every time I hear it.
That’s hilarious but I would also cringe every time.
Time to give my wife another reason to sigh at me in public.
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What’s he going to say when they respond “FreeBSD” one day?
“Can I have your number” would be a good start
No, they get it. It’s just not funny.
Responding to HTTP request all day is hard work.
For the last time, make the coffee yourself, I AM A TEAPOT!
I see an HTTP 418 in the wild, I upvote.
Not when every response is a 503 (taps head)!
For a second I wondered if it was an old timey job, similar to how one could be employed as a computer.
I mean, you needed someone to crunch non-financial numbers before machines were invented to do that. A major discovery in astronomy (the relationship between period and luminosity) that’s central to how we measure distances in space was actually made by a woman doing that job (Henrietta Swan Leavitt). If she’d lived a few years longer she likely would have won the Nobel for it.
I hadn’t heard of her, thanks for putting her name on my radar!
Look up ‘Hell’s Angels’ by Hunter Thompson. He has a chapter on the economics of being a biker/hippie/artist in the early 1970s.
A biker could work six months as a Union stevedore and save up enough to spend two years on the road. A part time waitress could support herself and her musician boyfriend.
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No, that’s only one of a much larger suite of factors.
Hmm… I knew a Hell’s Angel when I was younger and he certainly didn’t work a union job. He was essentially a gangster, who made bundles of money doing illegal things.
So, you’re saying you have no concept of things changing over time?
He was a Hell’s Angel in the 70’s and 80’s, so it was during the same time period that the book was written about.the Hell’s Angels have always been a criminal organization, despite trying to paint themselves as a simple motorcycle club.
And there were bikers who weren’t in the Hell’s Angels.
Yes, but they’re not called Hell’s Angels. There are still bikers who aren’t in the Hell’s Angels. I’m replying to someone who specifically said “Hell’s Angels”. If you’re a biker that isn’t a Hell’s Angel and you call yourself one, you’re going to have a real bad time.
A biker could work six months as a Union stevedore and save up enough to spend two years on the road. A part time waitress could support herself and her musician boyfriend.
The name of the book was ‘Hell’s Angels.’
I would imagine most homeowners couldn’t afford a loan for their current house at its current value. I just ran a borrowing capacity calculator for a local large bank, and it’s well below what my house is worth.
I bought at 21 and had it paid off at 38. I earn triple what I did back then.
That’s part of the reason I bit the bullet when I did and bought a house where I didn’t want to. I started building equity and when housing prices went up I was able to roll that over into a house I wanted in the area I wanted. At some point you have to get in and start building the equity even if it’s somewhere you aren’t as happy in. YMMV.
Yeah, but I honestly feel terrible for younger people just starting out. I’m locked into a 2.35% APR loan on a house that’s valued nearly 3 times what I bought it for less than 10 years ago. I would never be able to afford mortgage payments going in at today’s rates for the full value of the house, let alone come up with 20% to get rid of mortgage insurance.
The starter townhouse my wife and I bought almost 20 years ago has gone up similarly. What kind of person in their early 20s can afford to come up with a 6 figure down payment? Or afford a mortgage payment that’s several thousand dollars a month? Shit’s crazy.
It’s starting to look like that model might be dead too. Mortgages continue to rise, but prices aren’t coming down because everyone with 2% interest mortgages are never going to move, so there’s no inventory. This means that the prices will hold, but not increase. So even if you can get a house you don’t really want now, it’s not going to appreciate much, and might even slowly depreciate as the current owners are forced to sell because of life events.
Well, people who own lots of shit had to be properly compensated for owning lots of shit, otherwise - or so we are told - “they wouldn’t invest”.
It’s funny how we’re told to “work hard” and there’s even lots of criticism of the “workshy poor” all the while the entire economic system has been changed to maximize the returns of rent-seeking (which is the single most parasitical economic activity there is) at the cost of the returns from working AND the purchasing power of said returns (because life essentials like housing are way much more expensive).
A rising tied raises all boats - Ronnie Regan (but if you don’t own a boat, you drown)
He meant to say “yachts” not “boats”.
*tide
The apartment I’ve lived in for 20+ years recently got sold to a property investment firm. They gave us all 60 days notice. They are going to spruce up the apartments and then rent them. They were nice enough to offer current tenants first dibs on the new apartments. At 3x the current rent. A group of people, families, retired folk, a lady going through cancer treatment, we’re all at a bit of a loss. Can’t afford to live here, can’t afford to move. I really don’t know what where we’ll end up.
Burn it down. Honestly. Not trying to he a prick but fuck these greedy cunts. 3x. Only answer is war on our front
It’s not an answer. The problem is bigger than one company deciding to try for higher rent. This is happening because of housing supply and society-wide wealth distribution.
Yes please do- then the insurance money will build them brand new apartments and they’ll probably make a but on top of it if they use the right contractors. Then they could rent for even more as they are now new builds. Great plan. Much thought.
Your sarcasm was missing a disclaimer.
On top of that, state funded homing for the next years!
That’s fine they aren’t making rent from it though. And then you do it again. Each time they lose that much more rent and their insurance rates go up that much more.
Sure and you go to jail for arson. Oh and your insurance won’t go up that much as you’d probably just build in a less insane area. Oh and insurance will also cover the lost rent too. Either way you still have no place to call home. Well- except your cell. Fucking dumbass grow the fuck up and learn how the world works. You listening to a podcast and thinking you know something will never bring about your commutopia.
If this is such a great idea, why aren’t you doing it?
Cause someone told him communism was the way and he never looked back.
Is there a third way, then? Because this isn’t working.
Neither is communism genius. Capitalism is alive somewhat functional. Communism is dead in ever place its attempted to be implemented. Of course there’s other ways. Pick up a book.
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People think I am full of it when I say that my household income (largish household with kids) is a quarter million a year and we are basically living like we are middle class. Money just doesn’t go as far as it used to.
As a millennial, I never would have imagined working my way up to this point only to find I can’t even buy a house. Oh sure, I could make the bare minimum down payment and get stuck with a super high mortgage payment, but if I lose my job or become disabled or unable to work, we would have no way to pay for it.
Groceries, housing, and insurance costs have more than doubled for us since 2019.
Same. My wife and I are in the process of trying to buy a house over an hour from town, because it’s the only way we’ll ever be able to afford one, and it’s still more than what our landlord paid for the house we’re renting. Housing prices have tripled in the last 8 years here. They doubled in the last two years alone. The house we’re renting would cost a million dollars to buy today and our landlord has a $1000 per month mortgage on it since she bought it right before the housing explosion. It’s pretty wacky that you can become a millionaire just by having been alive and financially stable a few years earlier, while everyone else is destined to be poor for the rest of their lives, even if they’re making a quarter million dollars per year.
The house we’re renting would cost a million dollars to buy today
Where in the world is this?
Also, is that a high-end neighborhood or a middle-class/lower class neighborhood?
It’s a normal-ass 1960’s neighborhood that your parents would have paid normal-ass prices for. The job market here exploded over the last 20 years, so there’s just too many people and not enough land. I’m one of those people, so it’s not like I don’t contribute to the problem.
My family house that we sold recently, sold for $1.2 million. It was bought in 94 for $90k. Expensive town, but the cheapest neighborhood in the town.
Expensive town, but the cheapest neighborhood in the town.
I would expect that in the expensive towns, but not in all towns. Your basic supply and demand situation.
While it’s not quite as much, I’m in what was once the cheapest town within 30 miles in any direction, and our housing prices have gone up 800% in the last 20 years, compared to the 1000% in the other city I mentioned.
Rental prices are up about 1000% since then too. My first apartment was $400/mo in the early 2000s. That same apartment is now $3500/mo, and it hasn’t even been renovated.
in the last 20 years
Well that’s a long range of time to not expect housing prices to go up as there’s a population increase and more demand for the housing.
Is 1000% a reasonable increase to you over 20 years? If wages had gone up similarly, I might agree. It’s pretty clear to me that communities prioritize high earning tax bases over their existing citizenry in nearly every situation, and in doing so, purposefully or not, they impoverish those citizens and disempower them from the possibility of advocating for change, as now they have to work so much there’s never any time to go to city council meetings or engage in active governance.
The average Gen Z, nationwide, pays over 50% of their income to rent. Its unsustainable, as evidenced by the insane increase in people experiencing homelessness over the last 5 years. My state had a nearly 40% increase last year alone, and a majority of our unhoused people work full time jobs, and a larger majority have lived here their whole life, contrary to the perceived narrative of people “moving here to be homeless”, which is absurd.
$250,000 a year is middle class and has been for a long time - it’s about how much a doctor (who isn’t in a particularly high-paying specialty) makes. But DINKs with that household income could afford a million-dollar house.
This meme is so old, those prices have increased even more by now
posted 9 hours ago
Yep, that actually checks out.
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Housing is the thing most exploding in cost.
About half the population already owns a home so they’re immune to this problem.
The other half is just moving to shittier and shittier conditions and living with roommates and family members.
Plus this is a very regional problem. Housing in shithole flyover places is still somewhat affordable.
If everything went up five times in price over the last 20 years then it might be a better argument for saying we’re in a depression.
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About half the population already owns a home so they’re immune to this problem.
Don’t forget, many of those people won’t be alive much longer, and many of their houses will not be passed on to family, but sold off to pay off debts owed by their estates, and will end up as more overpriced rental properties.
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No, we wouldn’t be, Mr. Negative Karma Throwaway. A recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. The US had exactly two in Q1 2022 and Q1 2022 before going back to positive growth. The US had a much larger recession in Q1 and Q2 2020 before a big recovery in Q3 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/188185/percent-change-from-preceding-period-in-real-gdp-in-the-us/
You still care about karma?
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I don’t know either
Please retake Economics 101.
Source?
Interesting, thanks for the link - at the very least, things are trending upwards so fingers crossed we are through the worst of it for the time being. Which is probably 8-10 years, it is cyclical.
This is aimed at the person i originally responded to. General thoughts about about political agendas couched in loaded language below. Nothing is apolitical, and everyone has an agenda. The key is to figure out what it is.
“Worst recession since 2008” is one of those phrases that sounds almost like the economy is just as bad as 2008, but actually doesn’t mean much of anything.
For demonstrative purposes I’ll use some arbitrary numbers here.
If we rated the 2008 recession at an 10/10 on the badness scale, rated any recession between 2009-2022 as a 2/10 at the most, and rated the current recession we’re in at say, a 4 - I could say that this is the worst recession since 2008, and it would not be untruthful.
Language is deceptive.
During these 20 years we already had 2 major economic crisis, one occurring right now and with no sight of ending. During that time, the central banks printed a shitload of money creating a shitload of inflaction. That plus the housing crisis, a great recipe to disaster.
Adjusted for inflation, that $700 rent would be $1,242 today. Not quite enough to get it all the way to the $3,600 they are quoting today. There’s something else very funky going on right now. A lot of cities are experiencing massive population loss… yet rental costs continue to rise. I’m sure the housing crisis has a large part to play in that, but it still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
I think part of it is because of pricing software like RealPage.
On a summer day last year, a group of real estate tech executives gathered at a conference hall in Nashville to boast about one of their company’s signature products: software that uses a mysterious algorithm to help landlords push the highest possible rents on tenants.
“Never before have we seen these numbers,” said Jay Parsons, a vice president of RealPage, as conventiongoers wandered by. Apartment rents had recently shot up by as much as 14.5%, he said in a video touting the company’s services. Turning to his colleague, Parsons asked: What role had the software played?
“I think it’s driving it, quite honestly,” answered Andrew Bowen, another RealPage executive. “As a property manager, very few of us would be willing to actually raise rents double digits within a single month by doing it manually.”
I lived in a building that used this software. In 6-7 years, rent went from around $1200 to about $2,000. More and more apartments stayed empty. They kept raising prices during the pandemic. Surprise surprise, a tent city popped up down the street. A couple people died there.
My two cents on this is that, the same house developers own a shitload of buildings in each city, meaning they basically up the prices quite a lot without competition to undercut them.
How we solve this goes from country to country.
In case of the US I’d say something must be done, either build more, or adjust economy in order to the middle class to be able to purchase in cities again.
In my country the issue is close to being the same, the main difference is that state regulation isn’t helping at all either, causing people who have properties to not even rent at all.
Rent incomes are taxed at 28%, plus the “IMI”, which is a yearly tax the Portuguese pay on properties, and the owner doesn’t even profit enough to pay for the damages usually caused by the renter. So they either up the prices like crazy (average rental in Lisbon is about 800€), or don’t even rent at all.
Edit: I have people in my family that inherited houses from deceased family and tried to rent it. The renters stole all the furniture, house applicances, everything, from 6 months paid only 2 and after being kicked out even came back to break into the house. Police had to be called to solve the issue but their hands are also tied so they can only give empty threats. Guess who’s never renting again.
In case of the US I’d say something must be done, either build more, or adjust economy in order to the middle class to be able to purchase in cities again.
Building more doesn’t solve the problem. There is vacant real estate already. If you don’t have a tenant for a property, you’re operating at a loss. A loss is a tax write off. With some creative accounting, it might be better to keep a place empty and increase the rate no one will pay you.
My solution is to devalue money.
A network of businesses and merchants that based on income, estate assets, and their contribution to the wield as recognized by the network, add a fee or a discount.
If you are living up to your potential doing good things, you can afford to spend less. If you have no income, but you are doing good to your abilities, potentially all basic needs are covered.
If you are hording value and causing harm, then you pay additional fees.
Combined, the fees cover the discounts. The economic gap grows smaller.
It would be massively more simple, and more profitable to government, to simply levy a colossal tax on property owners who leave their rental properties empty for more than six months or so.
Ah, they’re trying that in Portugal. It doesn’t work. They’re going even as far as expropriation the houses from the owner, forcing them to rent at state agreed rates.
My wild guess? The only solution is reducing inflation to the negative to make money more valuable.
Deflation can be even more destructive than inflation. It would basically make all kinds of debt more expensive, to which real estate is particularly sensitive. There’s a chance that could force over leveraged property owners to sell, but with more expensove debt, there will be fewer buyers and it would tend to be those who can take on the higher risk (aka the already wealthy).
All that is to say, I don’t have a solution either (especiallly if high taxes on non-dwelling properties doesn’t seem to be making an impact), but deflation is almost never good…
Yeah I understand the effect of deflation… Other solution would be increasing people’s wages by like 300%<…
My solution is to devalue money.
Isn’t that inflation?
Taxing more isn’t the solution, believe me there are countries trying that without success. The solution would probably revert the inflation we’ve been having for decades now, to make the money more valuable.
It’s not inflation and it isn’t taxation. It would be closer to deflation. However, this would be a few market program. Businesses would join it and there could be incentives for the customers to do business in this affiliated network.
In Canada, we don’t seem to have anyone trying to solve it. We have a housing minister who promises to make housing affordable without lowering existing home values. Can’t do one without the other…
Vancouver runs an average of 3800 for a two bedroom apt. Not a luxury suite. A standard, 90-00s era decor apartment.
It’s a financial bubble.
It’s because the home owners think, if they charge too little, they won’t be taken seriously.
The issue here is buying power is dramatically dropping which is a function of both wages and prices. Raising the minimum wage alone won’t fix that; instead, price controls will have to be implemented such that all housing is bought back down to prices that are satisfactory to consumers. That can’t happen without federal legislation.
Price controls cause shortages. The solution is plain old taxes - take money away from the rich. Housing will be cheaper to buy up front when recurring taxes are higher. Your dollar will go farther when other dollars are removed from circulation.
A 4% tax on millionaires in Massachussets got free lunch for school kids in the state
We need more housing in general too, to be honest, and to stop people buying it and directly distribute the housing to families looking for a primary residence.
Tax the shit out of the businesses that are holding onto these houses. Extra penalties for letting them sit empty. Special tax for companies with more than x% of purchasable inventory within certain regions. A lot of this could be fixed by taking money away from the people hoarding it.
We need to tax holding property as an investment if you aren’t living there or using it for your business. I’m not sure if it’s already taxed as capital gains or not, but it sure as hell should be. There’s nothing wrong with property being an investment – you should think of your house as an investment – but there’s a significant problem in treating property like stocks.
The best way to reduce the viability of housing as an investment is to just build more housing.
There’s fairly few units that people are just letting sit unused and empty.
In 2022, 23% of vacant for-rent units were vacant for less than a month. Only 26% were vacant for more than 6 months.
There’s more vacant housing “held off market”, but keep in mind that includes housing occupied by people with usual residences elsewhere, housing that’s currently held up in legal proceedings, housing currently under construction or repair, or in need of repair. The amount that’s being held off market by Blackrock to keep prices high is tiny at best.
Vacancy taxes have been tried, and their effect is generally fairly small. That’s not to say that they’re bad, just that they’re only a small part of a larger solution.
Rent control is absolutely not the solution. Building more is the solution.
Only for it to be snapped up by corporate interests and not handed to the families that actually need it.
We need a list of all of the families and single people looking for a primary residence, build new housing, and just give it to them first. No buying allowed.
Some estimates put the number of vacant homes upwards of 30% a few months back, and it’s been climbing
It’s not about a lack of supply, it’s about homes being both an investment and a basic need - someone like Black Rock can go into a small town in Georgia, snap up every property that goes on the market, then dictate rental prices while jacking up the house prices by bidding on everything. Even if they greatly overpay, by doing it a few times it drives up the valuation of the entire area, overall making their net profit grow
And it’s not just Black Rock, it’s a bunch of investment companies doing this everywhere. They have the same goal and their interests are aligned - they’re not competing for tenants, they just want to jack up the values and use homes like stock investments
Some estimates put the number of vacant homes upwards of 30% a few months back, and it’s been climbing
It’s not about a lack of supply, it’s about homes being both an investment and a basic need - someone like Black Rock can go into a small town in Georgia, snap up every property that goes on the market, then dictate rental prices while jacking up the house prices by bidding on everything. Even if they greatly overpay, by doing it a few times it drives up the valuation of the entire area, overall making their net profit grow
And it’s not just Black Rock, it’s a bunch of investment companies doing this everywhere. They have the same goal and their interests are aligned - they’re not competing for tenants, they just want to jack up the values and use homes like stock investments
The worst part isn’t a corner bedroom going up 5 times…
It’s even a shitty hole in the wall is 1500 now.
My wife and I couldn’t afford to live in our own neighborhood if we were looking to buy now. We bought in 2019.
Same. Somehow my house has more than doubled in that time frame.
server
there was that post about parking meters being $27/hr so I thought this was computer servers speaking at first
Welcome to crony capitalism
