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.

Responding to HTTP request all day is hard work.

I think that's part of the point. The system doesn't want the majority to be able to say no to a job because they were able to save easily and can take time off whenever they feel. On top of the things mentioned here like food and insurance costs there are also other things now like being certified in a field or needing to continue education or paying for permits every year that seem way to calculated in cost which is just another way of keeping you from getting to far ahead.

My family does ok, but we were still cutting it close a few years ago. Today we are looking at new jobs that we hopefully can get and pay more because ours stopped giving raises and inflation has us stuck living paycheck to paycheck.

I wish I could take more than a few weeks off a year to do what I actually enjoy doing for once. 1 of those weeks is a cheap vacation and the other is just spent getting things done because work takes up most of our time. It's stressful and tiring and the longer it goes on the more depressing it becomes.

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.

Burn it down. Honestly. Not trying to he a prick but fuck these greedy cunts. 3x. Only answer is war on our front

He meant to say "yachts" not "boats".

*tide

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.

posted 9 hours ago

Yep, that actually checks out.

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.

Prices are a matter of supply and demand.

Housing starts plunged during the Great Recession, and recovered to only mediocre levels. However, over that time the population continued to grow.

We fundamentally have a housing shortage, particularly in places people want to live. One massive problem is that it's currently quite difficult to build net-new housing in places people want to live, due to a combination of overly-restrictive zoning and NIMBYs who ate empowered to block new projects.

The problem is particularly bad in popular urban areas. Either you build outwards or you build upwards. But if someone wants to live "in Boston", "in NYC", etc, they probably don't want to live in a new build an hour's drive away from the city in traffic. And infill development is generally highly regulated.

Adding a price ceiling without fixing the underlying shortage is going to benefit the people currently living in an area, but it will make it harder to find a new unit. Adding units isn't the only important thing, but it's pretty important.

I bought in October 2020 and couldn't afford it now. I bought with a 15-year mortgage, which I feel unbelievably fortunate to have been able to do. If I was to refinance to a 30-year loan, I'd be paying $500 per month more than I am now, and that's not accounting for the 25% increase in house value. It's insane.