If you're watching through VLC, you can set the mix to stereo in the audio settings - perhaps there's a similar setting you can find? Not sure if you've got the tv's optical going straight into an amp. Some stereo receivers also have a "night mode" that can do this, you might find an older cheaper one with pre-outs or similar.
Feels like the way a video game will render the outside of a wall or solid surface, but you can run into it and warp partly through and there's nothing internal to it at all.
To add on - complexity itself is a perceptual feature introduced by language - we treat and describe things as though they are made of an unimaginable number of tiny parts. So this also increases the fun of the wordy wine/coffee/whisky descriptions!
Not certain if this has been posted here before. I found it a fascinating thing to read as context. The author also has some interesting theories about universe evolution over time.
And Bach did indeed write variations on B-A-C-H[1]. But lots of composers have self-referencing cryptograms and other riddles in music. You would find far more in Scriabin, Bartok or Alban Berg for example.
It also doesn’t fit the narrative but the idea of self-reference in art didn’t start with Escher either. For example the Arnolfini wedding portrait by van Eyck[2]
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnolfini_Portrait
The artist can be seen in a reflection in the central mirror that he has ostentatiously signed his name above. It’s an incredible painting and worth a trip to the National Gallery to see if you’re ever in London.
It would go up less and the climate would likely stabilize by the end of this century. People treat climate change like it's a binary when it's really a range.
30 year mortgage is founded partly on the idea that your house will be worth more in the future when you sell it. That you can lock in a lower price now.
Number cannot always go up. We are at the top of the carbon pulse. Financialization has taken us far from the material baseline of the rock we are flying through space on. Debt will only get us so far.
For this and many other reasons, why would you believe a house "as an investment" is a reasonable thing to keep hoping for, especially 30 years from now? If you have even a reasonably stable rental, it's less risk exposure if you can save some money that isn't tied up in a down payment.
You're falling for the trap of just thinking of buying a house as an investment.
Buying a house can be an investment, but it's also buying a place to live. Even if the home's value merely keeps pace with inflation over 30 years, you've converted a largely fixed housing payment into ownership rather than paying ever-increasing rent indefinitely.
Along the same lines, you are buying a place. A place that you own and can do whatever you like with. I spent twenty years renting and twenty years of feeling like you can’t hang a picture on the wall, paint a room, upgrade an appliance, or really do anything to improve your surroundings, tends to get tiring.
Not sure, but they likely won't know. Too many people ask permission for things. You'd have better luck doing what big corporations have done for decades. You just do the thing, cover it up, and hopefully never have to ask for forgiveness. And if you DO have to ask for forgiveness, well that's still easier than asking for permission!
> Buying a house can be an investment, but it's also buying a place to live.
I'm a strong proponent of both owning and renting, and each has tradeoffs vs. the other. I've moved between renting and home ownership a couple times, and I appreciate the customizability of ownership along with the very real financial advantages.
On the other side, I've also enjoyed "freedom" of renting, where I didn't have to spend any additional time, energy, or money on maintenance tasks. In my HCOL part of the country, I could also afford the rent to live "downtown" when owning anything remotely similar was out of the question.
Your "also a place to live" line is fantastically underrated. When the housing market was flat or declining, I'd always get annoyed when people said something like "I've owned this house for 5 years, but now it's worth $20k less than when I bought it!". That also means if they sold it right now at that $20k "loss" then they effectively paid $333/month plus upkeep to live somewhere for 5 years!
> That also means if they sold it right now at that $20k "loss" then they effectively paid $333/month plus upkeep to live somewhere for 5 years!
This also ignores the costs in buying/selling, including agent fees, lawyers, etc. You should probably only buy if you plan on living in a single place for at least a decade.
That isn't true. States levy taxes and buyers brokers are a thing in some states, and in some cases they're less fully paid by seller (less than the customary 2.5-3, leaving buyer to provide 1 or 1.5).
Closing costs include mortgage costs, too.
I've only ever heard of that stuff paid by seller if seller was a sponsor, and the market was a down market. Think new build in 2020 or in a depressed housing market today.
That isn't a trap if we're talking about how other people perceive things. You might want a place to live, but the houses are all owned by people who want investments, so for the purpose of explaining the housing market, they're investments.
No constant anxiety that you’re going to be serially priced out of your own home or that the landlord is going to decide they’re giving the apartment to their nephew or something is worth quite a lot.
I’m not against renting but the rate at which prices are rising in many areas is unbelievable and the inherent instability it brings frankly sucks. It makes renewal time every year needlessly stressful.
If prices were more stable over long periods and one could more easily secure assurance that the owner isn’t going to rugpull them so one could only move every decade or so at most frequent that’d be easier to deal with.
There is virtually no security in renting outside of whatever landlord-tenant laws your municipality will offer you. The landlord can simply say that they're not going to renew your lease at the end of the year because the neighbors don't like your barking dog. And you have no recourse.
Home ownership comes with costs, too. There's maintenance, taxes, etc.
It can also be a prison, as many people who locked in at low interest rates are learning. If they move, a lot of them will have to reset their mortgage rates and end up paying a lot more. This has trapped people into housing that is substandard for their living situations (growing families, moving for career opportunities, etc).
Renting can be perfectly fine for society, though the explicit tax benefits in the USA usually tilt in favour of home ownership. But a lot of very wealthy countries are majority renters, including Switzerland (where the home ownership rate is in the 30-40% range). This gives the Swiss a huge leg up on lifestyle flexibility and the majority of their wealth isn't tied up in a single asset.
I'm not trying to shit on owning a place, but ideally there should be nothing wrong with renting (assuming a competitive market where rental units can be built and aren't zoned out due to restrictions, etc).
Buying a house isn't just about expected return. It's also about hedging. You need to live somewhere, so you have an implicit liability of a stream of rental costs. The most natural hedge for that is a house. If expected future rental costs go up, your house value goes up. If they go down, your house value goes down. Overall, your risk, in present value terms, is reduced.
Of course this doesn't work exactly and you can nitpick this, but I think people should at least look at housing assets as more than "is it going to go up?", and more about long-term risk reduction. (And, just to be clear, this doesn't mean that you should lever up beyond reason to buy a house.)
Right. This would make it possible and reasonable if you could find a house that is enough, such that you can live in it, expect a reasonably good experience in it for the life of your time in it, and that that mortgage payment, plus all maintenance, insurance, tax, etc. is reasonably comparable to an equivalent rental. Depending on where you are, this is not always the case. Or you need to buy a small place at current rates and prices to make it at all comparable.
You have to decide what "enough" is, and that's variable depending on your expected standard of living, etc. I am personally currently lucky enough to be in a good rental situation, which colors my view.
Having a landlord that will fix problems and eat incidental appliance/roof/major expenses is a form of insurance paid as rental.
Exactly- owning one home is actually the neutral position. Renters are persistently taking a short position on real estate and landlords/multiple owners are effectively long.
Keep in mind though that by entering into a 20% down mortgage you are effectively levered up 5x against your local real estate market. So it’s not like you’re totally reducing your risk. Luckily for homeowners, home prices only go up since the GFC so this leverage seems like a good position to be in.
Yeah, I thought that when I was young too. The housing market can keep going up for much longer than you can hold out. Then, if there ever is a correction, it probably won't drop lower than this point right now.
My advice to any young'un thinking they can wait out the market: you can't, buy whatever you can afford as soon as you can and watch inflation reduce that painful monthly outgoing to something more manageable over time.
Housing isn't an investment opportunity. It's where you live.
> My advice to any young'un thinking they can wait out the market: you can't, buy whatever you can afford as soon as you can and watch inflation reduce that painful monthly outgoing to something more manageable over time.
I don't think that is quite right. Buy whatever you can afford as soon as life puts you in a position where you can reasonably expect to live in the same place for at least 7 years. You will never perfectly know your future, but predicting 7 years generally isn't too hard, and if you are wrong it is probably close enough to 7 years that you are okay.
My first house I had to sell after 10 years (I got a job in a new city) and I lost money on the sale despite the 10 years, but that is an outlier. Most people will see enough value appreciation in less years as to not be out too much if they have to move. 7 is just a good compromise for most people.
Don't forget when buying a house that you have to pay for maintenance. Make sure you can afford this somehow. If you have friends/family that can help with that work that can save a ton of money over if you have to hire someone.
This is false. Can you cite a source for the idea that the 30-year mortgage was "founded" on the idea of appreciation? The thirty year mortgage was introduced to reduce the housing appreciation requirement the old balloon loan system relied on.
The mortgage was to allow people to eventually OWN THE PROPERTY, not a leveraged investment.
It's an interesting development that some (most?) regular people have forgotten that there is a 3rd option, not just rent or loan. You can actually OWN the thing and pay only property tax on it.
You don't really own it because of the property tax. Unless you live in Malta or a handful of other countries you are effectively renting from the state.
If paying property taxes is considered "renting from the state", then I'll be glad to pay the $600 a month in rent in order for the state and my county to maintain the roads, sewers, drains, school district and everything around me that allows me to enjoy my home and participate in society.
Exactly, a house in the middle of nowhere, with no infrastructure, quickly becomes worthless.
If anything, property taxes could be considered ‘maintenance’, which is an inevitable part of ownership. Nobody likes paying for the maintenance work, but you have to, otherwise the house falls down.
You are claiming infrastructure can only be maintained by a government? That's a ridiculous assertion. Most of the work is outsourced to contractors. They are acting as mediocre project managers, not the masters of inscrutable infrastructure technology.
The state has a monopoly on certain types of infrastructure that it ultimately sustains through the threat of repossession. It uses that monopoly to racketeer property owners under the threat of repossessing their property.
If what you are claiming is true, then why does Malta have higher property values than countries with property tax?
I would agree to a property tax if the voting systems worked fairly at a sufficiently granular level, but they don't. They are farces maintained by criminal organizations beyond a certain scale.
You are part of a society. You exist and thrive because of that society. Otherwise you’d have had to fend for yourself: no healthcare, no education, no roads, no refuse collection, no security, etc. etc.
People who think they have no obligation to contribute to the running of society are delusional and utterly selfish.
I am assuming you’re American, because it is always Americans who have this selfish individualistic view of the world. Seemingly all cooperation or altruism is communism. It’s a national sickness.
Government exists to do the difficult things that individuals or corporations can’t or won’t do. Like build a road network, provide security, or educate the nation’s children (for all, not just you). They have the buying power of a nation, something an individual, local group, or company could t achieve. And they often have the legal authority to do things that individuals or companies cannot (compulsory purchase of land when building a railway or road, for example)
And the most effective way of paying for it is through a ‘national insurance scheme’ aka tax.
And honestly, who cares about Malta? That’s just blatant whataboutism. Malta is a country of 500,000 people. How they raise funds to pay for their infrastructure isn’t important. The point is, they have to do it one way or another. A tourist destination like Malta could be better off with a tourism tax (assuming there are more hotel rooms than residential properties). The end result is the same.
If you want a functioning society it is better to do it formally, rather than ad-hoc (for all but the smallest societies). Because otherwise the bureaucratic processes end up being repeated and become burdensome and in the worst cases descends into factionalism and tribalism. And the ad-hoc approach would certainly lead to inconsistency of provision. That can range from ‘a bit inconvenient’ to societal breakdown between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.
Is Government perfect? Of course not, but replacing it with an anarchic “I’m alright Jack” free-for-all is madness. It is better to work on the focus of what government is for and how to build the correct incentives for high performance.
You didn't read my post objectively. My point is that the current governments, with the exception of some local governments, do not represent or serve their constituencies; in fact, they actively subvert them. I'm assuming your European, that's especially true for you.
No, you are putting words in my mouth. I would gladly pay more taxes for representation that had me and my peoples' interests in mind. I'm not a libertarian idiot.
>Number cannot always go up. We are at the top of the carbon pulse. Financialization has taken us far from the material baseline of the rock we are flying through space on. Debt will only get us so far.
Why can't it? GDP per capita has been steadily marching up since the dawn of industrialization. You mention carbon but most developed countries have decoupled carbon emissions from their economic growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth is why. The financial economy sits on a finite store of physical goods, and as a dissipative structure, our high-energy, high-complexity global society acts as a low-friction conduit from stored past energy to high-entropy degraded heat.
Number go up until we cannibalize the foundations.
Mathematics agrees with you, there are in fact infinitely many numbers.
Physics and reality do not. Once the number gets big enough it loses all practical value. Humans are not really built to reason about very large numbers. At some point you reach Zimbabwean inflation and your currency loses all value because everyone is paid in the trillions. Then you reset your currency back to lower numbers because that's what humans and their systems can handle.
So, no, the number cannot always go up. There is a practical ceiling beyond which numbers lose meaning and value.
Inflation is more probable than deflation: Meaning, over 30 years, we're more likely to hit a period of inflation where the value of your house (in dollars) will go up even though the real value (in your earning potential) might stay the same.
But, if we hit deflation and a lot of people need to default... Well then we're all in the same boat anyway.
> 30 year mortgage is founded partly on the idea that your house will be worth more in the future when you sell it.
Another meaningful reason is that it is a hedge against inflation. You pay a fixed amount for housing for 360 months, rather than having to adjust rental payments that will tend to go up over that time frame.
Realistically mortgages are also forever - very, very few people actually outright own their homes. Because when you sell, which you might be forced to do due to a new job, divorce, etc, you enter another mortgage.
Also homes are a bad bad retirement plan. If you're debating paying off your mortgage early, or investing said money in a 401k, 401k is almost always the correct choice, in just about every market. Debt is not a bad thing. Often having more debt means having more cash flow, which means greater investments. That's why companies don't outright buy their real estate, either.
I can, rent in cheap cost of living location. Why pay 600k+ usd to purchase in m-hcol when instead can live abroad during retirement and pay 1k/month and use the remaining for better living or health care or whatnot?
I can sell my house when I'm retired if I choose to do that.
I can only save so much money in retirement plans. A house (in the US - other countries have different rules!) is my next best retirement investment because I can live there rent-free after I retire, or I can sell it for more cash.
If you are not maxing out your retirement accounts then the house may be a worse investment than adding more to your retirement accounts.
Agree here. But I'm a doomer/collapsenik - so, the same future coming for "retirement" is the same future coming for "house always appreciates in value". Maybe 1990 -> 2020 was an okay 30 year period, 2026 -> 2056 sure won't be.
I don’t have that information, but I’m also not claiming I do. The GP is claiming “1990 -> 2020 was an okay 30 year period, 2026 -> 2056 sure won't be.”
The fact that there was Black Wednesday, 9/11, the dot com crash, the Iraq War, a once in a century global financial crisis, Brexit, and a global pandemic… suggests it wasn’t an “ok period” for markets. Yet, somehow, over the period of a mortgage, they all went up.
The idea that humans won’t adapt to whatever happens in the next 30 years is ludicrous. There will be short term market instability, just like the events I noted from the previous 30 years, but planning for the apocalypse is mind numbingly stupid.
If the apocalypse happens, everyone is in the same boat. If it doesn’t and you didn’t get on the housing ladder early, well, you’ll probably be buying a more expensive house in the future.
I’m saying this as someone who waited far too long to get on the ladder when I saw how rapidly prices were ascending in the 2000s (leading up the the GFC). I used the exact language lots of people in this thread are using about prices coming down eventually. But I was wrong.
Post the crash I couldn’t buy because deposit demands doubled. It took me out of the market for a long time. Ultimately costing me more when I did buy.
The future always seems risky, it’s the nature of the beast.
In the UK at least there’s significant tax advantages to home ownership compared to renting.
Easily 30-50% of the money you pay in rent is immediately burned in tax/letting agent fees that don’t happen to a homeowner who “is their own landlord”. Additionally there’s no capital gains tax on one’s primary home.
Even if house prices stay flat it’s usually still better to own if rental yields in your area are higher than 5%.
A house is a good hedge against inflation - my payments stay the same for 30 years of inflation, then go to zero (I still have taxes and maintenance so this is wrong - but it is close enough to true for discussion). Meanwhile rent is expected to go up with inflation. The longer you live in a house the better an investment it is.
I Eat the Stars was pretty good. Nice take on grasping the absurdity of the coming metabolic failure of the complex systems we live inside of. Everything dies, even big patterns like industrial society.
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