That wiki page was a good initial read for me, it’s about to send me down a rabbit hole reading primary sources. Cheers for the link.

This is interesting. I do get that if you have initial money to buy a house outright, there are better mostly safe things you can invest in, to get a higher return on investment than a house. If I got a 30 year mortgage in 1994 and paid $1M over that time to pay it off on say, a 5% fixed rate with no PMI or downpayment required, the purchase price was probably closer to $500K assuming 2.5% average annual inflation. And average housing inflation since then was more like 2.8%, so factoring in maintenance and taxes and insurance, guessing no real appreciation over that time. But the quality of life difference to an apartment of the same cost would I think in most cases more than make up for it.

I think where I’m stuck is, we’re starting from the idea of having $1M in hand to start out with to buy a house outright or rent + invest, where a much more common situation is either: I have not got anything saved up, so I can neither invest nor get a mortgage without an initial downpayment; or else, I have enough saved up for a downpayment or PMI and hopefully a secure enough income to pay the mortgage every month.

In my case, mortgage + escrow + maintenance costs are still less than half what I was paying for my cheapest studio apt nearly a decade later, and a much better quality of life because of the extra savings. My neighbors are renting a nearly identical house, and it’s criminal how much they have to pay to stay there. I wouldn’t be able to afford rent here.

Where is the money that is stuck in the house, that would hypothetically be able to be invested if not spent on the house? You have to pay to live somewhere, and if you’re paying less to purchase than rent, that is money saved which is available to invest. Do you mean the up-front downpayment money needed to acquire a mortgage in the first place (typically 10-20% of the purchase cost), that could be invested in the market instead for a higher return than slowly building equity through principal payments?

Still cheaper to own, if you have the initial funds or loan to buy and know you won’t be leaving the area for awhile. If you rent a property those maintenance and tax and insurance and interest costs associated with owning it are just passed on to you in to your rent, plus a profit margin so the owner can make money off renting it out to you. Owning the same property would cost less, over time, and not just that, but you would have something to show for it.

You’re not a “private citizen” when you’re supposed to be a public servant. Johnson’s name is appropriate, he’s a total dick.

If there were a steady growing economy and no crazy events for the next 20 years, and no major health issues, my Roth 401k would probably be enough for a modest retirement.

I was just wondering what the penalty would be to withdraw everything before 59, so I could figure out if it would be enough to immigrate somewhere with reasonable healthcare and a social safety net that would take those worries out of the equation. I think since it’s Roth it would just be 10% of gains + one-time capital gains tax?

It might be enough. Simply having a lump of $ makes so many more countries welcome to immigrants.

all default purple theme apps are dog shit, and there are a lot of them. any graphic designer who chooses purple needs to be prevented from designing anything ever. i have to see that fake color a third of my weekdays and it takes a full weekend of spending time outdoors and seeing green to recuperate.

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It must feel like living in an asylum if you’re a decent person in Texas.

I expected this after watching Khalid Attaf videos of talking to customers in his family’s gas station/convenience store. It was depressing to see the reasons people were planning to vote this way. If you watch this, save at least a thread of sanity and don’t read the comments.

https://youtu.be/E-Il-hLjKGY

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Logseq. Free, cross-platform (I just sync my journals through github), more convenient than any other notes or tasks app I’ve ever used since it auto-organizes everything you tag with graph db relationships. Organizing and constantly reorganizing my notes and tasks has always taken the longest amount of time, and now I can just stream of consciousness everything and let the app do the work. I hear Obsidian is good too, and it was next on my list to try if Logseq didn’t work out. But I do love Logseq.

He was supposed to be on SCOTUS, too, nominated by Obama. I truly wonder what the court decisions would’ve looked like if the Republicans didn’t obstruct that nomination.

And racists, and just antipathic people in general, and those traits overlap.

They also voted against the possibility of ranked choice voting.

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These numbskulls who want the 10 commandments everywhere don’t even know what the 10 commandments are, or that there are multiple versions of them, or that basically half of them are explicitly about God, a specific God, and not the “common sense commandments” to not steal, not commit adultery, not lie. Why are they teaching children about adultery if they’re so opposed to sex ed, anyway? And the common sense ones aren’t clear, either. It’s not “don’t lie,” it’s, “don’t bear false witness against your neighbor.” They couldn’t even get that right. The dumb commandments.