lmt55 · HackerTrans

lmt55

no profile record

comments

4년 전discuss

A 'few hundred thousand' is a lot of money to inherit, and for lots of middle-aged people and young families it will go straight back into the housing market, typically in areas that are already quite hot.

Note that the upper quartile having $800k includes $500k which isn't in their primary residence. Older people tend to own cheaper houses than you might think, since they are more likely to live in more rural areas.

If you're 70 and have a house you might be able to live quite a few years on half a million. In practice, you have a decent chance of dying before you spend all your capital.

4년 전discuss

It is saying that the purpose of trying to understand what Lacan had to say is not to achieve empirically proven therapeutic effects, either as a patient or as a therapist, yes.

4년 전discuss

I think the reality is more subtle.

A large number of poorer elder people will be in dire financial straits, forced to work beyond their ability to do so and unable to pay for health care.

However there are also a smaller number of extremely rich baby boomers and a very large number of comfortable middle-class ones. The former will obviously pass on large amounts of wealth. The latter have been forced to save large amounts for their old age, because they have known since middle age that the state would not provide for them very well.

In some cases they have decent final salary based pensions and other very good retirement benefits, no longer available to younger generations. In other cases, they have invested significant sums over the last decades and also made large investment gains.

This group has tended to save for the 'worst case' scenario - a long retirement of leisure spending, followed by drawn out old age with significant care needs. Most of them will not need all this capital - they'll either die younger than expected, or have better health into their 80s and 90s than they feared. The excess will be handed on to their children - and will be a significant source of intra-generational inequality in the future.

Remember also that middle-class baby boomers remain an electoral 500-lb gorilla. Governments have been very reluctant to claw back their benefits and care provisions as fast as has happened to other groups. In some cases they will be provided for better than expected when they planned for retirement.

4년 전discuss

You are literally evaluating psychoanalysis as a scientific theory in this response - which is exactly what I pointed out we should avoid doing if we want to understand its value. Lots of types of thought and culture do not have scientific content, and yet are valuable.

Psychoanalysis, when tested empirically, produces therapeutic effects no worse than other talking therapies. In fact the great empirical paradox of therapy is that they are all similarly successful, regardless of the exact details of the theory they are based on.

4년 전discuss

I don't understand how you draw this conclusion from what I said.

Regardless of high or low rates, banks borrow low and lend high, and live on the difference.

High rates, if you want to express yourself in those terms, a transfer of wealth from people with debt to people with assets.

4년 전discuss

Can you tell me an area where average house prices have doubled in the last 5 years? I can't think of one. Most expensive areas have gone sideways since Brexit, and risen a bit since the pandemic. Most cheap areas have grown slowly since Brexit.

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/property-prices/london/ shows the median as having gone up around 6% in total since 2017. Trying a mix of neighbourhoods in that tool, I can't see any which are close to 100% up.

4년 전discuss

Doesn't your example illuminate why systems of thought like psychoanalysis are useful?

We currently don't know concretely how psychological phenomena like consciousness, happiness, selfhood, desire are formed or what they consist of. We know they exist, because we experience them 'in normal human experience'.

Analogously, Aristotle did not know anything concrete about how atoms, energy, time, cells in the body worked. But his natural philosophy created a speculative framework to talk about these things, explore possibilities, and try to relate what was known or observed, to what might possibly be true.

The potential advantage of modern theories like psychoanalysis, is that today we are able to make a clear distinction between falsifiable scientific knowledge, and other types of statements about the world. Thus, we can evaluate Lacan's thought on the correct level - as a form of philosophy which gives us a way of thinking about certain matters without attempting to provide definitive information.

4년 전discuss

It doesn't matter where I bought. If I haven't made much money in the last 5 years, nor has anyone else (on average), regardless of how long they've owned their property.

The suggestion that 'the return will take longer than it has in the past' is a prediction with no evidential basis.

4년 전discuss

Doesn't the boomer die-off mean that the boomers' children will be inheriting, not just homes, but piles and piles of liquid assets, much of which they will use to get into the housing market?

After all the boomer generation, on average, has over-provisioned for old age, whereas millenials are still underhoused.

4년 전discuss

If in 10 years you want a year off is your landlord going to give you one?

4년 전discuss

You will get hammered by the ERCs, but with a few caveats:

  1. Often if you move house they will let you transfer your mortgage (actually take out a similar product and avoid the refi costs).
  2. If you win the lottery, or otherwise are in a situation to prepay your whole mortgage? Well you might care much less about the 5% early fees in that case.
  3. You can prepay usually 10% a year, at their discretion, without any early fees. If you just become a fair bit richer than you expected, prepaying at this level will reduce the mortgage quite quickly.

4년 전discuss

An old rule of thumb was 'buy at 10, sell at 20'. That's the ratio of price to annual rent. So if you could get 0.86% of the house price in monthly rent, it was a big bargain. If you couldn't get more than 0.43%, then it wasn't worth owning.

The rule of thumb is now obsolete, and 30-40 times rent is perfectly common in lots of places.

The newsletter is quite a lot more aggressive than even the rule of thumb from the 'good old days' when interest rates were much higher.

I used to pay around 0.2% of the market price of my apartment per month. The landlord was a professional property management company, and this situation persisted through several new contracts.

4년 전discuss

I own a house in London. Its total value increase since I bought it 5 years ago is much less than my salary.

4년 전discuss

No offense to the author, but I hope that I don't accidentally buy a book written by him or someone like him, when looking for a decent book on a topic I want to learn about.

4년 전discuss

This is fair, you didn't miss those people. But I think it was worth me highlighting them because they are, as I argued, very important.

I somewhat agree with your argument. Housing costs more than other assets compared to its economic value, exactly because people have an emotional reaction to the idea of owning it - or the idea of not owning it.

However I have seen middle-class people overextend themselves to 'buy the dip', while their equally wealthy peers sit it out, for over 15 years now. Many of the people who did the former now consider themselves to have got a bargain, while many of the latter changed their minds and ended up buying several years later and at much higher prices.

I'm definitely not arguing that this makes buying right and renting wrong! Just that so far, this is how that choice played out.

4년 전discuss

I would say that the 'mirror stage' is a clear and concrete idea (not necessarily clearly and concretely elucidated by Lacan) which, while it doesn't have the same status as a scientific statement about the mind, provides a helpful illustration, with some explanatory power, of how the 'self' is formed.

(Note that when I say 'a scientific statement about the mind', I would regard very little of the scientific discipline of psychology as meeting this standard. In most cases it is also far less interesting than psychoanalysis.)

Of course, many people are content that they are able to live with a 'sense of self', without worrying about how it is constructed. That doesn't mean that it's not an interesting, useful or accurate idea.

4년 전discuss

How do you know?

4년 전discuss

In other (npi) words, the Other is the entity that we think about when we imagine how other people in general will think or feel.

I believe in (say) the validity of money because I think that shopkeepers will accept it. But shopkeepers also only believe in it because they think other people believe in it, and those people that the shopkeepers want to pay also think that other people believe in it, including me and the original shopkeepers.

We describe this state of affairs by saying that I believe in money since I know that the Other also does.

4년 전discuss

Surely there is no connection between the appropriateness of the notation to the subject and the appropriateness of the subject to reality.

Non-Euclidean geometry has applications to reality, but before these applications were known, how did they determine that the notation would appropriately apply to the field?

4년 전discuss

7 and 10 years are quite widely available now, although they're still not particularly popular.

Not sure why brokers didn't mention them to you. Perhaps they like to show people low headline rates, or perhaps they see longer initial terms as bad for the broking business?