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LanceHunter posted:I mean, the main fix would just be having FDIC insurance cover all deposits with no limit. This is entirely possible solution, it's not very desirable for the banks because they don't want to pay the extra amount for their FDIC insurance premiums under such a system. It's also politically unpalatable because it raises the specter of small, retail depositors getting wiped out in a bank collapse bad enough to swamp the FDIC. At the very least they'd have to get out ahead of that by spelling out that depositors will be paid out in order of the size of their deposits, smallest first, to avoid some VC firm walking out with a few hundred million while some working stiff with $10k in his checking account gets nuked.
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Mar 17, 2023 17:56
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Really the tension is between what a bank deposit really is, and how the vast majority of normal people use their bank accounts. In reality it's a loan to the bank. You give them their money, and they pay interest on it. The only thing special about this loan is that it's revocable at any time. What basically everyone at the retail level uses them for is a glorified lockbox. It's a safe place to park your cash that isn't your mattress. It's not going to get stolen in a robbery, it's not going to disappear if your house burns down, and in our modern system you can carry cards that link to it so you don't even lose anything of value if you get mugged. The fact that most people just use it for security is why banks can get away with paying piss-all interest on typical savings accounts: the value the typical retail customer gets in exchange for their loan is security, not interest. After a certain point you've got to recognize that parking huge sums at your bank does in fact mean you're giving them a loan and, like any loan, it can be defaulted on. The $250k limit is a convenient way to split that difference and let Joe Retail have his checking account without worrying about bank solvency while forcing at least a little due diligence on a business that needs to park $25 million.
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Mar 17, 2023 18:03
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Baddog posted:
Oh yeah, not arguing that at all. The response is moronic from what I can see. My personal not-an-economist idiot suggestion is to pay out small depositors first. In a normal bank failure the FDIC will have plenty to make everyone whole, including the whales, even if that means raising insurance rates for the banks. If the whole loving thing melts down everyone, as you said, is hosed but at least a small depositors first rule would protect people who were just trying to have a safe place to stick their grocery money.
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Mar 17, 2023 18:13
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I read an article at the height of the pandemic that quoted only about a third of office buildings as being suitable for conversion. Now, I'm sure there are caveats to that. Probably "suitable for conversion into the kinds of apartments most people want to live in." Most apartment buildings are relatively narrow, for example, because most people don't want to live in the windowless center of a cube. So it's going to be a bit of a sliding scale depending on how willing you are to try to get people to live in MegaCityOne. Either way, even if the proportions are reversed - if fully 2/3rds of office buildings could be converted to housing - (which I think is unlikely) then you're still looking at a poo poo ton of buildings for which the answer is going to be: demolish it and build something more suitable in its place. Which is also how a lot of old factories and warehouses were dealt with. For every charming historical warehouse district with fancy apartments and walkable dining there are a hundred old brick warehouses that were knocked over to make room for a new condo development.
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Apr 13, 2023 16:43
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:for sure, i'm not implying anywhere close to full conversion but it's not like there's no precedent for "we don't need this much of this kind of building any more" Well, the precedent is probably in the building itself (vs. the equipment housed in it) being really loving expensive. Your typical warehouse or dockyard or factory etc. had a bunch of buildings that were cheap garbage when they were built. Glorified brick sheds more or less just there to keep the rain off the poo poo people were working on. They also tended to be relatively low affairs. You don't really build a high-rise warehouse. So now we've got these gently caress-off huge office buildings that were built expensive and tall. That's going to be a bit of a kick in the nuts to just tear down. It's going to be necessary, but I understand people working harder to avoid it than they did with wharfside brick warehouse #3345
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Apr 13, 2023 16:57
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LLSix posted:Or just make the apartments bigger. When the competing rent is $0, from the businesses that doesn't need it anymore; it makes a lot of sense to convert and rent them for less than the market average per square foot. Buildings don't cost $0 to maintain, and there's the opportunity cost of what you COULD be doing with that real-estate instead. At some point it makes sense to tear the building down and build a new purpose-made apartment complex if keeping the old one means you make $X on $Y units per month but you could be making $X+500 on $Y+100 units in a new building. If the old building is set up to provide power and AC for a bajillion office workers under the assumption that you're making $fuckoff renting the space to big corps that can also really gently caress with the profitability of the building if you're setting up for rentals. It might actually be cheaper to knock it down and build new if you can lower those fixed costs with a building purpose-designed for individual apartments. You also get into the sub-divided buildings themselves being janky. I lived in a few apartments that had previously been larger buildings (one a government building, one a big assed rich person's house before communists took over and turned it into apartments) and hoooly poo poo those were incredibly janky places to live. Interesting, fun, great in your 20s, but hoooly crap there was some weird stuff. There are situations that can make that acceptable, but at the end of the day if there's a property owner who is trying to maximize income for the building footprint the actual cost of the building might not come into account. IIRC that sub-divided rich person's house was still there because there was a city ordinance against tearing them down or something.
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Apr 13, 2023 19:35
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Ramrod Hotshot posted:What do you all think are the odds the us defaults on its debt? I know the conventional wisdom is no way, but politically it’s at an impasse and I can’t see a plausible way out It's been at a similar impasse every time this has come up since . . . gently caress, at least Obama's first term. I agree that it's bullshit, but a lot of it is performative bullshit at this point. That said, if they do play chicken poorly enough and actually manage to default it would be disastrous.
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Apr 18, 2023 13:13
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Hadlock posted:ets/us/us-single-family-housing-starts-increase-march-2023-04-18/[/url] I don't know if they're going to rise a bunch, but I doubt they'll be going back down to the 2-3% range any time ever. I just don't see the Fed getting that loose with money again unless it's in the face of another catastrafuck like '08 or Covid. Basically my take is that we're back to the ~5-8% norm that we saw all through the late 80s through ~08. Hell, looking back to before the massive spikes in the 70s gets a bit dicey because policy was so much different then, but that's still ballpark about what it was at from ~the end of WW2 through 1972. My rear end in a top hat on the internet opinion is that 4% is going to be a pretty sturdy floor for a long time barring drastic measures due to a crisis.
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Apr 18, 2023 17:54
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mrmcd posted:Shower thoughts: If you work for the Federal Reserve System, does that mean you're technically getting paid in company scrip? Post lunch thoughts: if you work for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing does that mean you're technically getting paid in kind? edit: it's gotta be kinda weird to be one of the guys who literally makes the money printer go brrrr and spot a bill with your facility's stamp on it out in the wild and know you probably saw it whiz by for a fraction of a second on its way out the door.
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Apr 19, 2023 18:57
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You saw a similar spate of articles like that in the early 00s when the Euro came out. Like, no poo poo some people are getting off the dollar right now. They want to trade with Russia and/or they don't want American sanctions to bite as hard when they try to genocide their local ethnic/religious minority.
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Apr 22, 2023 16:08
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lifg posted:Do dedollarization articles increase in frequency every time there’s a recession or a crisis? Pretty much, yeah. It's standard "the empire is crumbling, the US is doomed to be a third rate power in the new Japanese/European/Chinese/Indian/Russian world order" doom bait. I remember my grandparents fretting about how the Yen was going to become the new international currency in the 80s.
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Apr 22, 2023 20:07
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The thing that really stands out is that you don't need some central committee to declare a reserve currency. The UN security council has about as much pull in that as I do, myself, personally. It just kinda happens with the currency that is the most convenient for 3rd parties to do business in because of a mix of ubiquity, utility (e.g. a desire to buy stuff from or otherwise trade with the issuing country), stability, and politics. Theoretically speaking it could be loving anything. Countries could decide tomorrow to do trades denominated in Bolivars, or ancient Roman denarii, or loving Alf pogs if they wanted to. Just, you know, they don't because that would be dumb, and there's really no pressure in the world that is going to force them to if some magically competent and muscular UN decides the global currency is yellow Starburst candies. A prime example of that is to look at countries that are in the middle of a currency collapse. There's a whoooooole lot of dollar-denominated trade going on inside Bolivia right now, despite the government's attempts to convince people the Boliviano is doing fine. edit: and none of this means it has to be the Dollar, forever. Once upon a time it as the British pound, but economics and history caught up with that. Could it be the RMB some day? Sure, it could be, but there are some obstacles for it to overcome on the way to that.
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Apr 26, 2023 17:42
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ranbo das posted:The problem with saying "everyone over $250k get hosed" is the second the Fed actually does that, every company and everyone with more than $250k is going to pull it's cash out of any bank that's not a G-SIB because those are effectively zero risk, and the most well- funded and well- hedged bank out there still dies if you remove a big enough chunk of deposits. you say that "too big to fail" was a loving mistake and make it clear that if JPM fucks up bad enough that, yeah, the billion and a half you have on deposit there isn't protected either. Alternatively you make all banks go through routine and actually thorough audits and stress tests to ensure their health, and anyone given the "too big to fail" label gets a whole set of extra regulations that basically turn it into a utility. Frankly they should be stringent enough and focused enough on stability vs. profitability that your average investor will want to split the business themselves long before that, which is good because too big to fail is some bullshit that should never happen.
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May 3, 2023 13:56
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hypnophant posted:this is exactly what a SIFI/GSIB is. The Dodd-Frank stress tests that got unpassed for mid-tier banks like SVB are still in place for the eight largest US banks. Also JPMC isn’t considered the safest bank right now because people expect the government to bail it out, it’s because it’s sitting on enough cash to bail out the government. dodd-frank should never have been repealed for mid-tier stuff.
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May 3, 2023 14:06
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Leperflesh posted:Oh, for sure, and I think most of us agree that the inflation was and perhaps still is being driven by supply shortages, not (or not only) by demand, which is why rising rates is predicted to have less of an impact. But wage growth lagging price growth probably will, IMO, in that at some point there will be a new equilibrium between supply and demand that fixes prices in place. No? Part of the issue is also that consumer spending is very unevenly distributed. It's surprisingly hard to find good data broken out by income bracket, but here's a WaPo chart I found that shows at least the big trends:  Basically your highest quintile in the economy is spending 3x-4X what the lowest quintile is in general. If you're just talking discretionary spending it's more like 10x. I suspect that if this was broken out by deciles it would be even starker. The people who have come out the best from wage growth have been on the very bottom (e.g. servers actually beginning to get half way decent pay as a result of labor shortages in part due to more of them moving out of the industry because of covid) and at the very top (something obscene like 70% of the increase in savings during covid happened in the top 10%). So if you're talking about the median earner it's very possible to find someone who hasn't seen that wage growth, but is still getting squeezed by inflation. So, yeah, we're in a situation where a few groups have more disposable income than before and can afford higher prices on luxury items, but at the same time a lot of other people aren't seeing that wage growth and are feeling squeezed by rising prices on daily goods.
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May 5, 2023 17:15
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:gently caress tegel so much I always had great luck with it but the key is to only fly out at the absolute rear end crack of dawn. Going out when there are other people there is madness. It’s well located for a quick cab ride as an incoming flight though. Customs on the way in was always super painless and fast, at least with a US passport.
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May 9, 2023 23:41
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notwithoutmyanus posted:The first half of the article is the wrong premise anyway as answered by the second half, building new homes and apartment buildings is how you resolve a lack of supply. Government is actually trying to solve it but that takes time. That actually has been somewhat going up as is, in the important areas. People staying in their homes is of course going to happen. People will probably sell when more supply hits to create oversupply and thus a crash. When? "crash" is a bit strong of a word to use here. I don't think house prices are going to crash in the near or even long term, barring something truly catastrophic like a re-run of 2008. Houses take a long time to build, and I doubt we're going to see such a housing boom that it actually gluts the market and forces prices down drastically. What I do think we'll see is a stabilization of home prices, maybe after a modest correction, and they'll flatline for a while. That's assuming robust and ongoing construction, though. That said, it's almost meaningless to talk about this on a country-wide level. It's all so hyper-local that it feels weird to talk about the extremely volatile markets or even the straight up stagnant/declining ones in the same paragraph as ones that are turbo-charged by a money-flush industry or geographical constraints. No matter how much someone wants to build another huge condo development an hour and a half drive outside of Cupertino, that long-rear end drive is still going to prop up home values closer in. Same with North Virginia - whole poo poo ton of land available to build on out in Reston or Manassas, but that's not going to put too much of a dent in prices in Arlington or Alexandria, just because there are plenty of high-earners in the area who value a shorter drive to DC.
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May 16, 2023 14:01
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pmchem posted:what i've read about the debt ceiling deal so far indicates a very minimal departure from actual planned spending and revenue collection by biden/dems. some culture war fodder in there affecting very small dollar amounts but... basically no nominal discretionary budget cuts, minimal actual cuts to future IRS spending, entitlements/defense continue their upward path, etc. it seems like something dems would've agreed to even without all the drama, since FY22 discretionary spending as % of GDP is far above pre-pandemic levels. makes me wonder if the GOP is gonna take another swing at spending when appropriations bills come around. Eh, the $20B the IRS is loosing isn't nothing, and my understanding is that it was specifically earmarked to help with their staffing woes. It's not the end of the world, but that agency is flailing and really needs to be properly funded. edit: The Republican talking point is that the money would have hired "an army of auditors." Setting aside that I don't think it was auditors (iirc it was fixing their hosed tech backend?) even if that was true I mean, yeah. . . . that's kinda the point. We have existing tax legislation, people need to pay their taxes, some people don't and this is how you find them and get them to pay their taxes. If you don't like that pass some legislation to decrease taxes but trying to gut the enforcement mechanism only helps the people who are under-paying to begin with. What I'm saying is the Republicans like criminals.
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May 29, 2023 17:34
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Hadlock posted:So I looked into this some more, the two hotels were bought using a "Non-Recourse CMBS Loan". So they didn't even have to look for a buyer and sell it at a(n additional) loss. They can just walk away and the underwriter can't go after their assets I don't know piss all about how this stuff works, but the whole situation surrounding some of these big corporate loans right now smells like people were getting dumb when money was cheap and everyone was chasing insane poo poo for whatever returns they could get, and a whole lot of poo poo is going to tighten up as lenders realize "oh holy poo poo sometimes people don't pay back their loans and that's bad for us."
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Jun 6, 2023 04:08
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Leviathan Song posted:This is also very city dependent. Seattle and Philadelphia, for example, both have very narrow block layouts so almost none of those thick rectangle buildings get built. Washington DC on the other end of the spectrum has a lot of mega buildings that I don't know how you would convert. One of the prime examples there was Philadelphia and I've definitely seen others that have been converted or converted to mixed use. From what I’ve been reading most places tax commercial and residential very differently, and that’s before you get into the value of assorted business taxes and the knock on economic activity- eg commuters from the burbs buying lunch in the city. Tldr seems to be that it’s going to be painful for a lot of city finances.
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Jun 12, 2023 19:56
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Hadlock posted:https://www.politico.eu/article/us-europe-buy-american-weapons-military-industry-defense/ From an economics standpoint, yeah the US doesn't want Europe making their own poo poo, but on the other hand they've also kept domestic industry going along for a loooong time. Most of the European NATO countries aren't exactly flying American jets, for example, and they even make a poo poo ton of their own armor domestically. Same for ships. PGMs is where they buy a lot of American stuff, so I guess it's not good for Raytheon's bottom line if they build that out. Not to get too ColdWar/Airpower thread, but from a policy standpoint this is exactly what the US has been screaming for Europe to do for something like two decades now. No one in a policy making position is wringing their hands about this.
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Jun 20, 2023 13:25
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bob dobbs is dead posted:they havent changed because they dont use guns anymore on significant ships lol Even just looking at the 5 inch mk 45 it's very different from the closest WW2 approximation, the WW2 vintage 5 inch guns (the Mk21 through Mk30 were all pretty much identical with the differences being in the housing). I mean, to name the most obvious one, the modern gun can be loaded with a 20 round internal magazine feeding an automatic loader. The WW2 version was 100% manual. The new gun is also a single-piece projectile (shell and powder in a single package) while the WW2 one was two-piece ammunition (shell and separate powder that had to be loaded behind it). There's a ton of other poo poo, especially when you get into shell design, but they aren't anything like the same gun. edit: poo poo, like all military stuff that old the differences bewtween the 70s vintage Mk45 Mod0 and the modern day Mk45 Mod4 are significant. Mechanical vs. electrical fuse setting is a big one.
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Jun 20, 2023 18:27
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Hadlock posted:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_artillery#Industrial_era_and_the_Age_of_Steamships This is a bizarre argument. Just because they could huck a shell really far with a 16 inch gun in 1940 doesn't mean that naval gunnery in 2023 is the same as it was in 1943. Autoloaders alone are a huge, big thing. Advances in how the shells are fused, advances in aiming and tracking at distance, radar gunnery, how the guns are laid, etc. all also lead to some pretty major advances in just the basic "shoot this thing over there" part of the equation. This is like arguing airplanes haven't been improved upon since Boeing first flew the Dash 80 and more or less gave us the modern jetliner. edit: as I said before, the WW2 era 5 inch gun and the modern 5 inch gun are very, very different pieces of kit with some pretty significantly different capabilities.
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Jun 20, 2023 18:32
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Jenkl posted:
To expand on this: Let's say you are in a two-income household making about 75k/yr in Arizona or Vegas or something. Your wife is a server in a restaurant, you are an electrician working in construction. You have a pretty comfortable living, but you've also got some debt. CC debt has crept up, and you've got a nice fat car loan. With mortgages being handed out left and right you get a 30Y conventional 5% mortgage on a house for $250k. The monthly payment comes out to about 1700/mo, which is stretching things for you, but everyone knows that home values are only going up so really this is a way for you to save for the future. Your buddy sold the house he bought in East LA in the 90s for almost twice what he paid for it a decade later, after all. You own it for 4 years, and everything is looking good. Then the economy implodes. Maybe your loan was sub-prime, maybe it wasn't. House values start going down in the markets that saw rapid appreciation, and now your "$250k" house which was only ever supposed to go up up up is now more like a $150-200k house. Because of the way home loans are loaded heavily towards interest rather than principal in the first yers, your note is still worth $236k. You're now underwater on your loan. If nothing else changes that's a bummer but maybe you ride it out. But with the economy in the shitter and construction stopping you're not getting many jobs. You find the odd work with a buddy and do some odd electrician jobs for random homeowners, but poo poo is grim. Meanwhile with everyone else feeling strapped people aren't eating out as much and your wife's hours get cut. God knows her tips went in the shitter. So now your annual income is more like 40k/yr combined, and that's assuming that you're one of the lucky families that doesn't have one or both of you flat out laid off. So now that $1700/mo mortgage payment is a LOT less affordable. You pile on credit card debt to try and stay afloat, you cut back on discretionary spending, but $20,400/year in mortgage payments on an unstable ~$40k/yr gross income isn't sustainable. If you got hosed like this during normal times you'd sell the house, cash out any equity you had, and move on with your life. Only now, since your house is underwater, you can't even do that. If you sold the house tomorrow for $200k you would still owe the bank $36k. So you walk away from it. You stop paying the mortgage, and eventually you just mail the bank the keys to the front door. Now you've got a massive black mark on your credit, and guess what landlords want to check to determine how likely you are to pay your rent? So that's how you and your kids end up living in the car when at the beginning of the year you were a proud homeowner. edit: the house sits empty for a good while. The bank doesn't want to realize the loss, so they don't try to sell it at the depressed value. If they do that they're admitting they're never getting the full value of the mortgage. Eventually they get in enough trouble that they do this, but it's been empty long enough that it's in pretty terrible shape. It's not even being rented out (nor are all the other empty houses in your old neighborhood) so it's not even taking the pressure off the rental market. One day someone finally comes along and buys the property at auction for $100k, restores it, and either lives in it themselves or flips it in the early 2010s for ~$250k. These are the people who made out like bandits post-2008. Some were individuals who got a really affordable house, some were investors who ended up with dozens of rental properties or just made a fat buck flipping. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jul 9, 2023 |
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Jul 9, 2023 20:49
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hypnophant posted:
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that if there are major unknowables that you can't model, you don't give the asset a high rating. I, at least, would argue that's not doing their job. If you can't calculate the risk for something with the tools at your disposal, that in and of itself is a pretty major risk factor.
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Jul 10, 2023 17:21
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Does anyone else here remember when the sort of nutter who worried about UN one world government and Clinton bringing in the Blue Helmets in the 90s was convinced that NAFTA was going to lead to the disillusion of the dollar in favor of a US/Mexican/(sometimes Canadian) "Amero"? That's what this BRICSbuck thing smells like to me. Admittedly less doomsday rant from angry old man at the gun show because UN/ZOG but that same flavor of how the monetary world is totally going to get upended tomorrow by Euro 2.0, completely ignoring how the development of the Euro was a multi-decade affair that took place in broad daylight and was telegraphed way in advance. gently caress the Euro broke a lot of people's brains.
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Jul 11, 2023 19:14
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bob dobbs is dead posted:emotionally and politically yes. financially, it would gut every large exporter, including china itself The other problem is that their interests aren't at all mutually aligned other than not wanting the US to be able to shut off the tap. Which, yeah, is a pretty strong incentive, but beyond that it's not like India and S. Africa are on the same page about a bunch of poo poo, much less everyone and China. Honestly, even if a BRICS international transfer system emerged to be a viable alternative to SWIFT, it's just going to mean towing the line for Beijing instead of Washington. There's a lot of "one of these things is not like the others" when you look at the relative economic power of China compared to all the others. India's the closest to being in China's league, but come on - South Africa? Russia? Brazil? loving drops in the bucket, relatively speaking. It might be a pretty compelling club if you don't want to worry about your elites getting sanctioned when you invade a neighbor, but it's also going to be problematic when Beijing leans on you to give them favorable investment deals as part of Belt & Road.
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Jul 16, 2023 17:22
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Whistling rear end in a top hat posted:I would argue that it's more than a "pretty strong incentive" -- it would create a choice where right now there is no choice. Your currency is either pegged to the dollar (or petrodollar) or nothing. Sure, but the larger issue is that it's not just about having options, it's about what kind of pressure the people who can control them can put on you and who those specific people are. A lot of the objections to running everything through the current system is that if you piss off certain countries bad enough, you can get embargoed and hosed. Ultimately you're just shifting that power to Beijing, and as problematic as Washington can be it's not like Beijing doesn't attach strings to poo poo either. Because let's face it, the BRICS are not equal partners in any kind of hypothetical new monetary system. It's not the choice between two food places (with the implicit option of cooking yourself) it's the choice between two hegemons. That doesn't make the current system good but it also doesn't make the alternative inherently better, either.
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Jul 16, 2023 18:43
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drk posted:Eh, Intel isnt that far behind TSMC/Samsung. Maybe a year or two. There's also ARM in the UK, although IIRC they got taken to the loving cleaners by the Chinse basically hijacking one of their factories in China and turning it into Totally-Not-ARM edit: Well, ARM does the design, not the fab, but the point with the Chinese factory was that they've basically got whatever generation of ARM designs were being made there. edit 2: apparently they got control of it again?. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 14:55 on Jul 18, 2023 |
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Jul 18, 2023 14:52
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Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:Millennials were born 1980-81 to 1995. Thirties to early forties is not peak child-bearing age by any sane definition. The median age for giving birth has been climbing steadily, and made headlines a bit ago for crossing 30. Now, I don't know if that's median age for first child or what, but women waiting longer to have children is a pretty pronounced trend. It also increases if you control for income - long story short, the sort of people who are in the home buying market are also delaying children. fake edit: Mean - not median - age for first child is now 27.3 according to the CDC. Note that that's across all socio-economic groups. I can't find any easy statistics about mean income and how that correlates in the US, but here's a 2016 NHS study in the UK that examines mean birth rate by socioeconomic status and country of origin that tl;dr's down to women in managerial and professional job categories delaying children until their 30s.. real edit: Anecdotally I've got a whole loving bevvy of friends - older millennials all - who are having their first kids in their mid-30s and even in one case early 40s. Lots of hand-wringing and angst about fetal health, lots of people anxiously waiting around on the results of tests for genetic abnormalities. This group is mostly people I know from grad school or who my wife works with (job that has everyone with post-secondary education and a pretty brutal career ladder), so again lots of bias towards that same group the NHS study highlights. But those are also the people I know who own houses. Because they can afford them. Because of their high paying jobs and, until very recently, status as DINKs. it's not PRIME childbearing age by any means, but there's a whole poo poo ton of people out there who have delayed kids, are realizing it's poo poo or get off the pot time, and how have the economic means as a result of the education and careers that they deferred children for to bid up those 3 bed 2 bath "starter homes." Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jul 26, 2023 |
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Jul 26, 2023 18:26
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Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:Prime child-bearing age hasn't changed, material conditions have. If you mean "prime" as in the ideal age to have children, yes you are correct. The biology of when it's best to have a kid hasn't changed. If you mean "prime" as in when most people in an age cohort are doing it, it has absolutely been trending up and is older across the board if you compare millennials to boomers. If you control for socio-economic status and look specifically at the people who are focusing on careers and education in their 20s, it goes up pretty significantly.
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Jul 26, 2023 18:33
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Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:"Millennials are in their peak childbearing years" is a result of our hosed up housing situation, not the cause of it. The previous poster is confused. The fact that women want to pursue advanced degrees and careers is a major part of it. I've known a lot of women who chose not to have children in their 20s in large part because juggling grad school and then the hectic, time-intensive first years of a career and childcare wasn't feasible for them. The lack of affordable, quality child care in the US is part of this, but it is far from the only factor. I've known a fair number of female European academics who made the same decision in situations where they had much better childcare options available to them. The reality is that trying to care for a 2 year old while you're writing a dissertation (or are a junior partner in a law firm, or are trying to do your surgical residency, or are the bottom person on the totem pole in a financial services firm, etc) is frankly not realistic for a lot of people. I know two women who were able to do so precisely because their jobs paid well enough for their husbands to stay at home and take on primary caregiver duties. This golden age you're imagining of women all jumping at the opportunity to have kids in their early 20s also involved a whole poo poo ton of women choosing that option because others were not available. And, yes, this does tie back into housing because those same educated, professional women, once in their mid-30s and realizing time is running out, are often earning enough money that they are far less price sensitive than your hypothetical 20-something first time house buyer, at precisely the moment in their lives when they're looking around at the 2br condo that was just fine for years and realizing that it's time to upgrade if they're going to start a family. You're not wrong that the ideal time for a woman to give birth isn't in her late 30s, but everyone else in this thread is using "peak" to describe the average age of first childbirth in a population (or a subset of said population - socio-economically and educationally advantaged women in this case), not the way you're using it.
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Jul 27, 2023 16:14
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hypnophant posted:"geriatric pregnancy" technically starts at 35 because that's when statistically significant elevated risk starts to show up for fetal abnormalities or other health complications, but it's a difference of percentage points until you get into like your mid-to-late forties. I want to highlight this, because I've seen a lot of doom from people in that age bracket and yeah, it's very much not ideal, but it's not like if you conceive past 35 you're guaranteed to have problems. I'm going to use trisomy (downs) as an example, because maternal age is pretty much the only risk factor worth talking about and it's extremely well studied. Over-all risk is about 1 in 1,000 live births. I forget what the risk is for a younger woman, but it goes up significantly in the 30s, to the point that over 80% of children with down syndrome are born to women over 35. That sounds really bad, but the numbers are still fairly small. At 35 the rate is about 1 in 350. At 40 it's about 1 in 100. At 45 it's about 1 in 30. Which, yes, that is a very much elevated risk. Someone who is thinking of having a child at 40 needs to have a very frank conversation with both their doctors and their partner, and go into it with eyes open. But, even at 45, you are still talking about a 96.6% chance that the child will be - at least as far as trisomy goes - healthy and normal. A close friend got pregnant at 37 recently and hoooooly poo poo the amount of bullshit she's gotten from people acting like it's basically a toss of the coin whether her kid will come out with massive abnormalities. To hear some people talk it's a miracle if a kid born to a mother over 35 comes out normal. It's not ideal. If you have the option to have a kid at 30 or 40, 30 is the better choice, both for the mother and the child. But if you wake up at 35 and decide you want to have a child you're not some kind of reckless monster. edit: , Note that downs is not the only maternal-age related genetic defect you can run across. A lot of the others follow similar patterns, though. There are also additional risks for the mother (I think pre-eclampsia risks go up? not sure on that), so it's not all roses and sunshine. But, again, it's within the realm of risks where someone can educate themselves, talk to their doctor, and make an informed decision, not an automatic reckless and irresponsible choice. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Jul 27, 2023 |
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Jul 27, 2023 16:55
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LanceHunter posted:
My prediction is that in the next decade or so we're going to see a mini-construction boom in housing renovations. People who have to move to a whole new region are going to bite the bullet and get a higher mortgage because presumably their new job in NY pays enough to make abandoning their 2.5% mortgage in TX worthwhile, but people who normally would have bought a new, bigger house in the same zip code as their family gets larger aren't going to want to do that. If you've got a 2020 2.5% mortgage on a 2br/1bath 1500sqft house that you bought as a couple of pandemic DINKs, it might make more sense in 2030 to get a HELOC and build an addition to it when kid #2 gets old enough that they really need their own room rather than take on an entire new mortgage at 8% or whatever.
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Aug 28, 2023 21:34
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Any time anyone says "BRICS will do X" it's wise to be skeptical. Even just taking the core Sure, but I do think there's something to be said for the BRICS - however you want to name them - being an identifiable grouping of countries that are trying to operate outside what I'm going to just hand-wave as the Bretton Woods economic system. Much Bretton Woods is largely defined by the US economy and how people interact with it, the BRICS system is pretty dependent on China. I don't have a solid thesis on any of this, but to my eyes there's definitely a there, there. If you're a developing country that wants financial aid (whether to build roads or a corrupt prestige project for the leadership) there's an alternative now to sucking up to DC, the IMF, etc. Is it a good alternative? Probably depends on what your priorities are. In a lot of ways it's a return to the Cold War system where Moscow provided a plausible alternative source of economic aid as well.
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Sep 5, 2023 13:57
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Lord_Hambrose posted:People always need to live somewhere. If the rates are crazy you ultimately end up picking a slightly less expensive house than the one you would have otherwise. Not that nobody won't be priced out at the lower end but unless you are there you will just settle for something else. All the houses in my area have gone beyond my reach, but I can move 45 minutes away from where I work and get a house with a decent yard for what my rent is now. And if my landlord raises the rent again this year it becomes an easier choice! Hypothetically the price of housing should be tied to the interest rate, because as you said at the end of the day the monthly payment is what matters to people. The problem is that prices haven't come down despite rates going up, which means that a house that was $400k at 2.5% is just hilariously unaffordable at 7%. Ignoring insurance and taxes etc, just the raw loan, you're looking at about $1600/mo vs $2700/mo. There are a lot of different opinions out there about why that decoupling happened - lack of building, increase in cash buyers insensitive to rates, increase in corporations (cash buyers) building rental property portfolios - but at the end of the day whatever the root cause it's a supply problem. Available houses are limited enough that the people competing for them can all afford those higher monthly payments. Part of the issue with that limited stock is that we have a fuckload of people who bought houses in the last 10 years at very low rates. In the example above, if you have that 2.5% loan there's nothing for you to upgrade to that's even remotely as affordable on a per-month basis as your current mortgage. We're just not going to see that normal churn of people moving to be twenty minutes closer to a new job or to change school districts or upgrade the size of their place when they have their 3rd kid, and that also affects how much supply there is on the market.
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Sep 22, 2023 13:29
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Re: rural grocery stores. I don’t really have a dog in the logistics argument, but something to keep in mind is that not all monopolies and cartels are huge national level things. Mom and pop businesses absolutely do price fixing and it’s endemic in rural places with few options. In the 90s my family moved to rural BF Egypt in the north east right in the Canadian border. Think the kind of town where you’re a two hour drive to an airport where you fly for two hours to get to the nearest actual decent sized city. When we moved there all three of the grocery stores with about 30 minutes of the house were owned by, two families, who slso had a lock on drug stores and iirc most of the gas stations. My mom was loving flabbergasted when she found out a loaf of generic whole wheat bread cost $2. Keep in mind this is around 1992 or so. A few years later Walmart came to town, and with them came $.25 loaves of wal mart bread. There was a LOT of complaints about how the local grocers couldn’t keep up, how it was going to put main street out of business etc, but in the end they somehow managed to cut those $2 loaves down to less than $.50 without going out of business. Still not Walmart cheap but holy gently caress price cuts across the board. It’s no exaggeration to say the standard of living in that area went way up. Walmart is full of poo poo and causes tons of problems. They absolutely do undercut local business with the intent of becoming a monopoly and abusing that position in the future. But the people they’re loving in those kinds of super rural areas are frequently already fleecing the locals for everything they can, and often have been for generations. Edit: a friend’s dad who worked the border later told me that cigarette smuggling from Canada also dropped by orders of magnitude. Just over night not a problem, because people had someone to buy smokes from other than the local grocery/convenience store cartel. Turns out the smuggling wasn’t tax evasion, it was monopoly evasion.
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Dec 1, 2023 19:45
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"bumfuck egypt" is just an expression that means "rural as gently caress, in the middle of nowhere." Frequently just shortened to BFE.
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Dec 1, 2023 19:58
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Hadlock posted:Inflation at 3.9% in December; 3.4% less food and fuel Caveat that all of this gets into state tax law so really there are 50 answers. But the short version is that you are generally taxed on income where you earn it, and where you earn it is defined by the primary place of business. So if you work in Chicago and take a business trip to LA, for tax purposes you are still working in Chicago. There can be extra paperwork if you live and work in different states. Now where that can get dumb is WFH, because a lot of states reacted to covid by wanting commuters to pay taxes where they lived since that was now the workplace. Iirc that was short lived but it’s a wrinkle. That’s the broad strokes but, again, in reality there are 50 slightly different answers.
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Jan 12, 2024 20:20
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To be honest I'm surprised it's being allowed to happen. My money was on them quietly getting bailed out and becoming more or less a state run enterprise, with a gentle wind-down over the next decade or so.
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Jan 29, 2024 05:06
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