pstack

So, I think even the expenses I've incurred (I replaced the power junction box and ugpraded it from 50amp to 200amp, installed several dedicated circuits, and did tons of other work to this place) will seem small in the long run, as will the interest included in my mortgage. Of course, I only have a 30yr mortgage as a failsafe. So that "if things go really bad, I only am obligated to a certain amount per month". Unless things go totally awry, I'm expecting to pay it off in half that time, which will be an enormous savings. (Also, payment on mortgage interest is tax deductible).

And best of all, in the end, I have a house and property to show for it. So even if it came out to be on par with renting for thirty years, I don't end up owning anything at the end of those three decades when I'm renting.

Of course, in the meantime, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that something doesn't arise that requires me to move and spoil the whole plan. That would suck. But the long term game will be beneficial. That's an admitted risk I have to take, since just about none of us can ever be absolutely sure that we'll still be where we are in five, ten, fifteen, or twenty years.

Unless I'm missing another aspect of potential impact, which is totally possible. I can barely tie my own shoes, sometimes. :)

Also, buying last year had the added bonus of an $8,000 tax credit. Not a discount on your income, but an actual dollar for dollar credit (ie, come tax time, I add $8,000 to the refund amount). That's seven months of rent at my prior place. Not a bad deal. Thanks to the deductions from paying my mortgage (versus no tax deduction that I'd have gotten with renting), I saved just enough money on qualified income to fall under the first time home buyer credit limit. Worked out well.

Anyway, it definitely depends on where you live. Circumstances change drastically, even within a state. Even just outside of a main metro area. San Jose is cheaper than San Francisco. Beaverton is cheaper than downtown Portland. Westminster is cheaper than Denver. In some places, owning will simply never be an option. I couldn't afford a million bucks for a 900sqft home in San Francisco. Hell, I could probably barely afford rent.

Based on my personal experience, I would advise people to buy sooner than later. That is, I personally wish I'd have bought five or ten years earlier. On the other hand, I think I was also wise to wait until just the right time in my life and the market to buy and I think that's a wise path to take, too. You may be putting off the benefits of a home if you delay, but at least you're not making any commitments by paying rent, either. In the long run, I think that is the mistake too many people make. They feel the ticking clock and buy because everyone else says that's what adults do. That leads to buying too much and extending yourself and your credit too far. I know home-ownership is "the American dream", but I think it's a dream that you have to let come to you, when the time is right for you.

I could rent out all the bedrooms, including the master bedroom (with its own bathroom). I don't even know what the right price would be and I've heard plenty of horror stories about renting to people, but if I renteded even two of the rooms at only $350/mo, I'd have two thirds of my housing costs covered!

And, if I ever need to move, I could buy a house somewhere else and keep this one to rent it out. Again, I hear being a landlord sucks - but I have a handyman nearby who could do on-site work for me and once the house is paid off, the renters would basically be paying the mortgage on my second home.

Also, I plan to pay down the principal, too. I'm not making any extra payments just yet, but I am putting money in a savings account. If I have an emergency, I have access to that money today. If I don't have an emergency, then once I have enough saved up, I can pay off a hell of a lot of my house at once.

Owning a home can be a hassle. God damn, I sure as hell learned that right out of the gate. (I did a lot of remodeling to fit my lifestyle and my electrical needs, among other things). One thing it gives you, however, is more options. More choices, even if not mobility.

Part of it depends on content. If you're a real community, then having people sign up for commenting and rating comments is a good solution. It helps promote good content and the requirement to sign up keeps the community free of a lot of hit and run commenter who might often degrade the experience.

If you're a news site, then most of your content is from hit and runs (hits and runs?). You don't have people hanging around your site all day, waiting to post on the next story. You have Drudgereport linking to you and then a flood of mouth-breathers leaving a quick comment about "libtards" or "republicraps" or a quote from some religious text and so on. In these communities, the discussion will never be lifted up and no voting system will work, because nobody is invested in it. Further, if you require a sign-up, nobody is going to bother.

Then, there are blogs. Sometimes you may want people to have to sign up but in other cases, you might need or want to just let anyone freely comment without any hurdles. Nobody wants to go through a signup process if they're only going to see your blog once or twice in their life (when linked to from HN or elsewhere, for example). It's hard to choose the right path, here.

I think much of the answer comes down to two things;

1) Human moderation - both by the community itself and designated moderators - is very valuable. 2) Not every page on the planet needs to allow comments. Frankly, the local CBS news website doesn't need to accept comments on stories. Neither does the BBC's articles. Neither do most.

Of course, they have dismissed everything in this article, so the only thing left is for the government to require every internet user to use their real identity online and then have a single discussion/forum/conversation system that all runs on the same API (or have a standard API that ties together very different discussion/forum/conversation systems). Then, you will have no choice but to post as your real world identity and every comment you ever leave anywhere on the internet will be part of that identity and you will be rated on that identity, always. A truly unpleasant idea and I would rather put up with having to ignore the dregs of the internet versus losing the option of anonymity. Of course, people who live their lives in public often have a different view than this, since their personal desire is to get their own identity out there. Not everyone has that same goal or desire.

(I won't even bring up my distinct hatred of things like Disqus and Facebook whatchamacallit that sites implement instead of drawing up their own conversation tools).

The cities I listed as having lived in were actually three (I realize that I was unclear about California, where I worked in SF but actually lived in San Jose). I can break it down to under a year in one place and at least six years in each of the other two places. Even there, I actually could have probably found a way to not move, so it wouldn't even have been an issue. (I've had the same employer for almost fifteen years).

So, in my case, it was only a perceived need for mobility and unwillingness to say "I'm here, for a long time" that kept me from owning a home and it was probably not the best financial decision, looking back. I sacrificed a lot of income over the years for something I thought I needed, but never did.

It is definitely a bigger concern, now, than ever before. I absolutely concede that point. My grandfather built his home and lived there for more than fifty years. I will be happy if I keep my home for ten or fifteen. Our lives and careers change too often, now. Buying a home now requires the added consideration of whether you'll still be here in five or ten years and how many times (especially in technology) has taking a new job also required moving? (By the way, I think they say it tends to require about five years of ownership to compensate for the costs of buying and selling a house - and that was back when houses were increasing in prices, instead of decreasing).

Of course, if home prices reached a naturally lower point instead of being artificially kept up, then the affordability may trump all the other concerns. Hell, if I could own a nice home for $100k, I'd buy one in all three of my favorite cities and never have to worry about uncertainties of live and mobility again!

I make a solid income and owning a home isn't a trivial expense to me, so I can't imagine someone making a go at it if they have a family and an income that is half or a third. Prices should drop to whatever their natural un-aided point would be, so that all those people out there who will either never own a home or only do so by getting into unfathomable debt (all over again) will actually be able to own a piece. Imagine what the long term benefit to the economy would be if prices dropped just long enough for tens of millions of people to lock in rates on their own home? It would transform the economy as well as, perhaps, society. Owning a home would be the rule, instead of exception. Being in debt to own a home would be an exception. High rent would be an exception. There would be much more discretionary income to put back into other industries. Or, better, for people to stick into their savings so that they can retire with a home to live in and finances to support themselves.

The rent/own ratio may be different in San Francisco (where I've lived) and New York, but there's a lot of other country out there that exists besides those two and Seattle. There's Portland, Denver, Chicago. Plenty of places. I live in a fairly expensive city (on par with Portland, where I lived most of my life). Still, my house didn't cost a lot more than the mount I'd already paid in rent during my adult life. I did the math and I have paid about $170,000 in rent. That includes apartments I've lived in in Portland, San Francisco and Denver since 1999 and is not adjusted for inflation. It includes the 400sqft hellhole in San Jose that I paid $1,200/mo for in 2000 and the 400sqft studio and 585 sqft 1bdrm in Portland, and the 1,000sqft 2 bdrm in Denver. The house I bought last year was only $25,000 more than that. Even if my home loses a ton of value (and it probably has and will), at least at the end of paying $200k into it, I'll have something worth something, versus what I have after about thirteen years of renting for $170,000 . . . which is nothing.

The real problem with the home market is that it's being artificially buoyed, to keep current home owners happy at the expense of houses dropping even more in price, so someone can reasonably eventually buy a home even if they're making an average income. After all, isn't that how the market is supposed to work? Stuff drops in price, other people get an opportunity to own that stuff who previously may have been priced out of participation.

Also, the article states that someone who just bought a house and lost 10% due to decrease in value plus commissions when selling is unlikely to enter the market again any time soon. Well, why are you buying a house just to sell it a few years later?

I bought my house so I could live in it. I would like it to increase in value, eventually, too. I'm not counting on it, but it would be nice. If it doesn't, at least I have a home to live in and will eventually own it (because I didn't buy the maximum house that my credit score and loanability would have allowed).

I don't know a lot about the housing market and I'm not an economist, but I do know that I'm glad I bought a house last year (with a rate under 5%) and wish I would have done so many years ago, instead of putting it off for a decade. (On the other hand, if I had done it a decade earlier, I probably would have taken a big hit over the last few years, so whatever).

Also, the other nice thing is that I'll be paying the same amount (except for tax changes) for the next 15-30 years that it takes me to pay off the house. In my apartment, I'd gone from paying $900 to $1,200/mo in only four years for the same unit. Oh, and I don't have people stomping on the floor above me 24x7, so I can't sleep. And I don't have to allow someone from the maintenance/leasing office come into my home nearly any time they want with a 24hr notice. And I can (and did) run ethernet in the walls. And I can (and did) setup my home theater and run it at 50% power instead of having neighbors complain when I ran it at 5%, before. And when I have a guest that stays for more than three days per year, total, I don't have to register them with the leasing office. And I know my neighbors and they have lived here for a couple decades and are friendly and helpful. I never even saw the neighbors at my apartment.

So, yeah. I guess I'm dumb enough.

They need to require DOB for an account on consoles (guess you can't do much about it on PC) and then give people an option to say "don't match me in games with people under the age of X". The 360 has an option that lets you choose what "community" you want to be part of, but it ignores it completely. If it actually worked, it should keep the twelve year olds playing with the twelve year olds. Not that half the racists and inane idiots aren't in their 20s and 30s, of course. . . :/

I spent a good fifteen seconds, minimum. :)

If you're a professional that works with knowledge, you're told "hey, that's the world market, baby -- if you can't compete on a fifth of your salary, then to hell with you".

If you're a professional that works in labor/manual work, we involve unions and national programs to re-invigorate interest in the field of welding or laying pipes or wiring homes and treat it like news that the national flag has just been replaced.

I find both a concern, yet am bothered by the seeming double-standard.

As a personal anecdote: My grandfather was a pacifist who none-the-less served his country when called during WWII. He was an engineer who was responsible for a lot of stuff in Anchorage during the time. (He had an amazing panoramic photo set he took of Valdeze back when it was whole). He was a pianist. He was a chemist. He touch mathematics in college. He threw discus in college track and field. His home was filled with books on chemistry, math, history, physics, geography. I grew up surrounded by stacks of OMNI, National Geographic, Discovery, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and plenty of other great reads. And for a living, he chose to build houses. He became a general contractor who didn't really contract out that much work. He did almost everything himself, except pour foundations and wire the homes. He built beautiful homes that often took two to four years and cost a few million dollars (and some people hired him more than once to build their homes over the decades as their tastes evolved). He just loved building stuff and working outside and he did it his entire life. I was also fortunate to spend many years of my childhood going onto his job-site with him day after day and goofing around, helping, watching. There's a lot to be said for loving your job and doing it excellently.

All the things they've enacted, attempted to enact, and done behind the curtain (often knowingly violating rights and laws in letter, if not at least spirit) are reason enough to laugh at their proposition.

"Using their vast pools of free labour, China's prisons produce everything from green tea to coal, paperclips to footballs, medical gloves to high-grade optical equipment."

http://www.goiam.org/index.php/news/iam-news/2007-iam-news-a...

"Prison Labor is also being exploited in China, according to executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation Harry Wu, who said prison laborers make garments, electronic components, coffee mugs and toys that end up in U.S. stores. “The Chinese government continues to use forced labor to make goods, condones sweatshop conditions in its factories, and refuses to allow workers to create independent unions-- is it really any wonder that low-quality, harmful toys are being exported to the US and into the hands of our children?” said Wu, who spent 19 years in a Chinese prison.

Wal-Mart was singled out for their role in allowing the exploitation of cheap Chinese labor. “Wal-Mart bears a lion’s share of responsibility for pushing the toy industry into a region where product safety and worker safety inspection is virtually nonexistent,” said Bama Athreya, executive director of the International Labor Rights Forum."

http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa45502.000/hf...

1998 FORCED LABOR IN CHINA - HEARING BEFORE THE SUBCOMMITEE ON INTERNATIONAL OPERATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS

It's weird how we decide what people deserve "liberation" and what people we just shrug our shoulders at and keep supporting, in one form or another, the government that is oppressing them.

Or you could pay a ton of people that you hate the most a dollar per hit to punch themselves in the face for a year straight.

Or you could build your own Skype service from scratch and have about $8,499,500,000 left over to maintain and market it.

I work in a company of about 140k people and I'm far more aware of the CEO than I am my boss or his boss. I don't even know who my boss' boss is or what he does, but I hear about the CEO on a regular basis (beyond just showing up in movies). It seems to me that in a large company, you're aware of your boss and the figureheads and everywhere in-between those two levels are given the gift of obfuscation.

Anyway, there are certainly already-existing entities that serve the public good, but government corruption isn't irrelevant as long as there is government corruption. You can benefit social good all you like, but how exactly is it going to wholly displace the existence, expense, and function of a government office or committee?

The FDA example. Or the Goldman Sachs example. How are you going to displace the need for the FDA to exist or for the SEC and the Treasury to exist? Or the need for the military industrial complex? These are all functions that seemingly need to exist and be performed for the good of the people. The problem is that they require oversight. The public needs to be aware of the corruption and given the power to do something about it and it seems we either don't or won't. (And I'm part of that group, because if I knew how to change it, I would).

It is so massive. So complex. So layered. And so corrupt. I really almost can't expect someone busy trying to keep a roof over their head and their children clothed and educated to somehow be aware of many of these corruptions, much less have a way to change it (beyond the trivialities of voting, which mostly seems to just serve us as a way to make us feel better about ourselves).

When we have lots of regulation, we're told that the solution is to deregulate and then industries are singularly corrupt. When we don't have enough regulation, we're told the solution is to regulate. Then the regulator positions are staffed with people from the companies being regulated and corruption is there.

If there are some great solutions, I'm all ears. :)

The few people with any power in politics are expelled by the system itself. They're either not viable to begin with or if they somehow absurdly get into the system, it marginalizes them. They're called crazy or otherwise derided and made irrelevant through all the modern mediums we have available to us and society itself is too pre-occupied with what church they go to or if they ever smoked pot.

I didn't say I have any meaningful way to contribute or improve the process. Nobody else really does, either. It's not merely as simple as "well, run for office and be the first honest person in the government!". Very few people can even stand up against a single company and fight injustices. What hope does anyone have against the corrupt government plus all of the companies - together?

I know, this is all very anti-American. We're raised to believe that there's always hope and "we the people" and "power to the people" and all. Just check the right box in the voting booth or volunteer your time to support the right magic politician that we've been waiting a couple centuries for.

There is a critical point past which an organism is so consumed with cancerous tissue that nothing can be done to save it.