Trainguyrom
@Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 12 hours ago:
Yeah I compared some numbers and guessed a plausible interest rate for the 50 year based on the 15 vs 30 year interest rates at a couple of real banks near me
50 years at 6% with 5% down on 200k (fairly plausible for a decent home where I live and realistic for a first time home buyer who 50 year mortgages are clearly catering to) is 1k/mo almost exactly
30 years at 5.85% is 1,121/mo 20 years at 5.75% is 1,334/mo 15 years at 5.50% is 1,553/mo
So the difference is pretty small on a realistic first time home buyer’s home, but having been on the edge of approval for a home loan before that $100/month can absolutely be the difference between getting the home now and having to wait another 2-4 years depending on markets. In my case they assumed my insurance would cost more and that actually made all of the difference in my home loan application because that shaved about $100 per month off
One interesting side note, one of the local credit unions I looked at offers different interest rates depending on the value of the loan! For a 30 year fixed loan they offer the following rates:
800k or less: 6% 300k or less: 5.875% 200k or less: 5.875% (presumably they have this bracket for future rate changes) 100k or less: 5.75%
So yeah that’s new! I’ve not seen that before!
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 12 hours ago:
And my property taxes are 2k per year and that’s high for this county. It’s all relative and back of the envelope math is all about getting a rough idea, not getting spot on for any specific person
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 13 hours ago:
good luck finding a 350,000 home
This is going to vary wildly by region. There’s tons of large cities where the going rate for homes is around 300k and there’s notable large cities where you’re lucky to find any property for under a million.
Depending on the market you might simply need to lower your standards if you’re filtering by homes built too recently or homes with a ton of square footage or a high number of bedrooms/bathrooms. Or you might be in a truly fucked market where your best bet is to get creative and either buy a home with friends and/or family or even buy a home with a family member or friend helping with the intial mortgage and then rent out some space or find some other hustle with the property (I’ve heard of folks buying homes & property in the country and turning it into a wedding venue for example. Or renting it out for film shoots or AirBnB or whatever else happens to work where you live. I know a guy who built an ADU just to rent out on AirBnB as a side stream of income)
Even the homes that are 40 years old in my area
That’s…extremely new even by American standards. I say this sitting in a home which was built while the ottoman empire still existed. Yeah there’s quirks and it would be nice if the home was built to more modern standards, but it’s nothing that a bit of creativity, ingenuity and maybe a contractor or two when you can afford them can’t sort out. Plus the equity I’ve gained in just a few years makes it a damn good choice that I bought when I did and didn’t wait until I could afford to buy the perfect house
So getting a home at $260,000 that you got would be a dream.
Hey, the house across the street from me is listed at that right now. It’s got a pool and some nice updates, decent amount of bedrooms and bathrooms. Cute place. I live in a pretty small town so you might not like that, especially since job availability can be a struggle here even during good job markets if you’re in a white collar role. On the other hand if you’re willing to change careers entirely it’s pretty affordable. Guy who’s selling it works for a landscaping company and mows lawns on the side for several folks in the neighborhood. Or I’m thinking I’ll go be a school bus driving as a backup if things go south with my employment status for example. See above about either lowering your standards to what you can afford or getting creative if you’re in a more fucked market.
Ultimately life in this world is all about finding the best way to enjoy the opportunities available to you. If you’ve got a career you love living somewhere you love maybe it’s worth renting for an extra decade or two until you can finally afford to buy. Or maybe you aren’t fully in love with your career and/or where you live so relocating or a creative change to your finances might make sense.
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 13 hours ago:
Usually folks signing a very high interest mortgage do so to snag property while prices are down due to the rough market then will refinance in 2-5 years when rates are lower.
As long as homes are investments, buying a home as soon as you can regardless of interest rate is the most accessible path to financial success for the average middle class American
For one thing, when you buy a home you’re basically locking in your home payment for decades. A 30 year mortgage originated in 1998 would have the exact same payment this month as it did in 1998. Unless of course you pull equity out of the home in a HELOC or refinance but that’s generally not a good idea anyways since you’re trading long term wealth for short term cash, and that’s basically always a path to economic ruin. Point is though, whatever payment you lock in with your initial mortgage it’s not going to change significantly until the mortgage is fully paid off. Even if you refinance, even considering property tax changes, your home costs are largely not going to increase. About the only wildcard is insurance which those rates are mostly determined by the risk of property loss, so as long as you don’t live somewhere that is at relatively high flood, fire or hurricane risk you’ll probably not see a dramatic increase
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 13 hours ago:
Truth is rural any state usually has affordable homes, just not the jobs. It’s a good option if you work remotely or in an extremely in-demand job like healthcare
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 13 hours ago:
Having worked at a bank before (in their IT dept specifically), banks are extremely risk averse (and that extends to all aspects of the bank, from financial risks to HR risks to IT risks), and all of the loan officers I worked with were far more interested in doing their job right than being sales people.
It’s in the banks best financial interest if it’s customers get wealthier because where does that wealth go? Into the bank they already bank at. Banks need to keep a certain amount of deposits in reserve, so the more cash deposited the more money the bank can invest in financial products itself to make itself more money. If all the bank does is mint loans that customers struggle to pay back their deposits will be very low and therefore they’ll make less money.
Also sketchy loans are harder to sell as securities, as security bundles have to have balanced risk profiles both for legal compliance and for investors to be interested. Investors in mortgage backed securities (MBS) aren’t investing in MBSes for insane growth, they’re investing in a relatively safe security to park some cash in as part of their diversification
- Comment on Bank Workers, Rejoice! 14 hours ago:
I think it’s a famous photo of folks at NASA celebrating but it does look different. You might be right that this one’s been touched up or even fully generated by AI as the depth of field is just all over the place in a way that cameras don’t do. Also some funky compression artifacts that don’t really look like compression artifacts (which I’ve seen AI image generators add generate fake compression artifacts to generated images before)
- Comment on The height of sophistication: the 1994 McDonald's manager collection 4 days ago:
My first job was as a cashier at a grocery store. When I started they required everyone to wear a white button up shirt, black pants and a tie. Hilariously that’s the only job I’ve worked where I’ve been expected to wear a tie. Anyways about a year after I started they shifted to these weird slightly patterned shirts and you could either wear that or a dress shirt and the tie was optional. Now they’ve shifted entirely to just black pants and a red or black logo wear shirt and nobody wears ties anymore. It’s not even been that long! I’m not old enough to see this much of a change am I?!
- Comment on grindr dump (in post body) 1 week ago:
NO: Guns, dead animals, motorcycles, trucks or other vehicles you wish to show off
Dang it so no train pics I take it?
No pics that include other women, no matter who they are. I’d try to leave male friends out as well.
See I’ve heard the opposite advise. A non-cover photo of you with some friends including non-male friends if you have any indicates you’re not a loner and might have some idea of how to talk to other humans
- Comment on They even do Price Discrimination on video games now 1 week ago:
My wife and I got a switch a few years ago. It was our first console either of us bought that was current and we were both blown away by the sheer cost of games. We’re too spoiled by the sales on PC, so the idea of spending more than $20-30 for a major title is just foreign to us
- Comment on YSK before you buy a replacement for your cellphone that has stopped charging, buy the $10 cleaning kits and spend the time deep cleaning the phone's charging port. 1 week ago:
Depends, were you drinking it from a shoe?
- Comment on YSK before you buy a replacement for your cellphone that has stopped charging, buy the $10 cleaning kits and spend the time deep cleaning the phone's charging port. 1 week ago:
When I cleaned mine out recently it was very clearly dust and skin cells in there, meaning just the crap the builds up on and around anything by existing
- Comment on If video games actually determined our real world behavior, we wouldn't be violent we would be obsessed with powerwashing and all have CDLs. 1 week ago:
I feel like Civ always punished you too much for being too successful in repelling another civ’s attacks. Like, what do you mean they can take a couple of cities but when I do it it sours my relations with every single civilization on the map? Always pushes me to a domination victory when that happens. Sometimes I can manage it without gaining too much of a warmonger reputation, but it’s too much of a balancing act
- Comment on If video games actually determined our real world behavior, we wouldn't be violent we would be obsessed with powerwashing and all have CDLs. 1 week ago:
ETS2 is getting a bus expansion too so you can drive buses instead of trucks of you prefer. The American counterpart ATS (same game engine, same studio and updated in lockstep with ETS2) is similarly getting a road trip expansion, where you can drive many classic American cars on a road trip.
Honestly I highly recommend the games because they’re incredibly chill driving simulators
- Comment on If video games actually determined our real world behavior, we wouldn't be violent we would be obsessed with powerwashing and all have CDLs. 1 week ago:
I was going to say similar. Gonna start laying track on my new micro model railroad this evening.
I acquired some German models by pure happenstance but they’re in a different scale from all of my other stuff so I need to build a small home for them. I’ve got a track plan for a basic little 1x4 foot micro layout and just got the last few pieces of track that I needed
- Comment on China solves 'century-old problem' with new analog chip that is 1,000 times faster than high-end Nvidia GPUs 1 week ago:
That’s potentially useful then at least!
The big challenge with AI generated summaries is that LLMs are so prone to innaccuracy that a summary that’s never checked for accuracy by a human who has read the source material that’s being summarized, it just exists in a weird limbo state of maybe-false maybe-perfectly-fine and the onus is still on the reader to read the source material to make their own decision just as it is without posting an AI summary
LLMs are brilliant first draft machines. Unless there’s a major breakthrough that improves accuracy they will need to stay that way
- Comment on China solves 'century-old problem' with new analog chip that is 1,000 times faster than high-end Nvidia GPUs 1 week ago:
That and the way companies have been building AI they have been doing so little to optimize compute to instead try to get the research out faster because that’s what is expected in this bubble. I’m absolutely fully expecting to see future research finding plenty of ways to optimize these major models.
But also R&D has been entirely focused on digital chips I would not be at all surprised if there were performance and/or efficiency gains to be had in certain workloads by shifting to analog circuits
- Comment on China solves 'century-old problem' with new analog chip that is 1,000 times faster than high-end Nvidia GPUs 1 week ago:
The article is like 5 paragraphs, not even a single sheet of paper of printed. Why does it need a summary‽
- Comment on [deleted] 1 week ago:
Probably by getting hired in a companies marketing department. Realistically these astroturfing campaigns are either farms of accounts managed by ad agencies to push whatever they’re getting paid to push at the moment, or smaller campaigns run by individual companies marketing departments, and not just random people getting paid to mention specific products on their personal accounts
- Comment on She is making a GREAT point 1 week ago:
I tried 4 times in a 24 hour period once with a partner and we were both far too sore to finish the last time. Maybe if we did so more regularly we might have been able to do it but the flesh is weaker than the spirit a lot of times
- Comment on Minecraft is removing code obfuscation in Java Edition 1 week ago:
Complete with microtransactions and a horrible lack of customizability! Seriously I just wanted to play some Minecraft in RTX but you literally can’t use the nVidia RTX stuff outside of the demo maps, otherwise you have to purchase a different texture pack with real money. And basically everything in the Bedrock Marketplace costs real money, and very little is free.
Meanwhile Java edition doesn’t have any paid content in part because the original Minecraft license specified anyone was free to make mods and custom content but were explicitly restricted from charging money for it
- Comment on Minecraft is removing code obfuscation in Java Edition 1 week ago:
1.7.10 (or 1.6.4, or 1.5.2 for that matter)
1.3 was another nasty one. That was the one where multiplayer and singleplayer were merged and LAN play was introduced. Before that mods were released specifically for either single or multiplayer and authors would have to specifically build 2 versions of every mod if they wanted to enable use in multiplayer. This shift killed a ton of mods and version 1.2.5 was a peak for mods like Red Power for example
If you use an alternate launcher like Prism Launcher it is trivial to install tons of modpacks for any version of Minecraft and manage many different mod loadouts (with handy search and auto-download of both modpacks and individual mods, plus it makes it super easy to modify a modpack you downloaded and add/remove mods) Its really the best way to play modded Minecraft (and has been since the fork from MultiMC) plus unlike most launchers which are super-simplified to not scare newbies, Prism Launcher also exposes tons of handy technical stuff if you want to dive deeper, such as optionally displaying full logs, java version and argument management, world edit and other tool integrations and more.
- Comment on Minecraft is removing code obfuscation in Java Edition 1 week ago:
I’d say its more like going to a fancy ice cream shop with amazing ice cream and ordering vanilla (hehe see what I did there?) or a fancy pizza place known for their amazing topping combinations and just getting a slice of cheese pizza. Its perfectly fine and probably better than some other places you’ve had vanilla ice cream or cheese pizza, but holy crap are you missing out!
- Comment on School pickup lines are wild 1 week ago:
So funnily enough a majority of my friends are feminine-presenting and several of them are single so I hear a lot about their experiences with dating guys and almost universally their primary concerns are hygiene and listening abilities (and past that concerns for their ability to budget and be financially stable), because that’s how low the bar is for men.
Given how consistently the only people I ever see saying that women like big trucks/expensive cars happen to be men, and every women/feminine presenting person I know never even mentions vehicle choice when talking about what they do or don’t like in a potential partner, plus the memes posted by women consistently matching this opinion, I have to believe that that’s the case.
How are you meeting these dates who scoff at your sound financial decisions? What are your filters for a potential date? I strongly suspect you may be inadvertently filtering your dates either by where you meet them or expecting certain characteristics (or potentially you might be doing something that scares away non-gold diggers) so that most of who you date happen to be overly veign
- Comment on YouTube is taking down videos on performing nonstandard Windows 11 installs 2 weeks ago:
Fuschia did get used on some of their smart home stuff that they’ve shifted focus away from. I suspect they were just building a dedicated embedded OS to standardize on for non-phone gadgets that don’t need full fat android
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 2 weeks ago:
Strangely enough SiriusXM has a really good punk channel called Faction Punk focused on punk from the 90s and newer. I’m guessing it doesn’t get enough attention to cost SiriusXM more than it makes them right now.
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 2 weeks ago:
If you’re going to take such a nihilistic approach you could at least take a nihilistic approach while doing something to try to make things better for everyone left behind.
Go obstruct fascists at a protest, be the next tank man and be a hero. Help with directing traffic around protests (a critical but risky job to do!) and get involved with whatever local movement you can to find action you can take
Or, if your risk tolerance is too low for any kind of action like that then don’t be a nihilist and instead find what small acts you can do to help even if that’s purely in a harm reduction capacity. Help out at a food bank, set up a little free food pantry/library, print zines to distribute, put anti-fascist stickers in public places and cover/remove fascist propaganda. Help friends and neighbors in need. Connect with neighbors so you have someone you can lean on when you’re in need
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 2 weeks ago:
That song is old enough to die in the wars it was written in protest of though. The OP seems to be asking about much newer stuff than 90s/2000s punk.
Rise Against is of course still around and still writing music but they’ve softened their sound a ton in the last 10 years or so. Which like, bands sounds change which is good but also they changed away from what I’m into and their early albums are still amongst my favorite albums of all time
- Comment on Where is modern Punk? 2 weeks ago:
A lot of early punk started in church basements. The best punk movements start in the spaces they can get, might be a church basement, someones garage, a retail space between leases, etc.
- Comment on Dear neighbor... 2 weeks ago:
Conveniently, the beeping smoke alarms often beep at a frequency that exits older individual’s hearing range
Also there is simply not enough smoke detector safety education right now. I only learned about the 10 year life space of smoke alarms when one in a rental started alarming as it’s “it’s been 10 years replace me!” warning (and being a super young adult I had no clue what to do and called the fire department which was quite a way to start my day)