MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
This only really affects second mortgages - a foreclosing first mortgage holder will normally set the upset price equal to the outstanding balance plus fees. If nobody bids enough at the auction to make the lender whole, then they will take back the property and sell it the usual way as REO* (which normally gets a better price than an auction because you can sell to normie buyers). In fact, this is what almost always happens, because properties with enough equity to cover the fees and expenses of a foreclosure don't normally end up in foreclosure.
The situation is different when there is a second mortgage and the property is valuable enough that a sale will pay the first but not the second. In this situation the second mortgage holder may bid above the upset price, win the auction, and sell the REO themselves. (They are able to do this because they are in effect paying themselves - anything the first mortgage holder collects at auction above the upset price goes to the second mortgage holder anyway). But if someone exercises a "Jersey first refusal" to buy the property at the upset price set by the first mortgage holder, the second mortgage holder gets wiped out.
Easy mortgage availability subsidizes demand
That would be easy first mortgage availability. Using a second mortgage on a purchase was one of the shady practices that were mostly banned after the 2008 crisis. Most second mortgages are used when the homeowner wants to cash in equity (for any of multiple good or bad reasons) without refinancing the first mortgage (either because they have a fixed rate which is now below market, or because their credit has deteriorated so they couldn't get a prime refi - this second case is the classic use case for subprime).
My guess is that this is intended as a straightforward taking from subprime second mortgage lenders to benefit sympathetic-to-Democrats financially irresponsible homeowners.
* Real Estate Owned
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Towns never handled conflicting land uses with common law nuisance - explicit regulation of land use inside the city walls is as old as self-governing towns. And the most problematic rural nuisance in the US (straying livestock) was regulated by explicit statutory codes which varied by state (open range vs closed range) because applying common law nuisance led to unsatisfactory results.
Common law nuisance works better than nothing as a default where there is no codified solution in place, but people replace it with governmental codified solutions (environmental regulations, zoning etc.) or privatised codified solutions (condo/co-op/HOA rules, restrictive covenants, long leases instead of freeholds) at the first opportunity.
Coase's theorem tells us that something like the common law rule allows market participants to cut deals and achieve efficient outcomes (and, in particular, may do better and will not do worse than a Pigouvian tax on the nuisance) if:
- It is clear upfront what the rights are in the absence of a deal
- There are sufficiently few people involved that it is reasonably possible to do a deal (i.e. there is no tragedy of the anticommons)
The second condition almost never holds in the context of urban land use, and both courts and legislatures can see this, so you end up either with command-and-control regulation or Pigouvian taxes. In the urban context you can model a municipally-imposed and collected Pigouvian tax as a Coaseian bargain between the polluter and the community as a whole.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Universal eldercare is an even harder problem, but every advanced country claims they are going to solve it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Anyone making money off being visibly jacked and isn't subject to a drug testing regime is roided, especially if they say they are not.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Your goals moves from military victory to creating a total feeling of helplessness. Take the tactics pimps use to break the girls and scale them to country size.
The first tactic pimps use is target selection, not breaking girls - to a first approximation you can only profitably turn out a girl who was broken to begin with. If the mullahocracy was that kind of girl, I doubt they would have lasted as long as they did.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Yes. We socialised the obligation to care for aging parents - and did so almost completely, whereas we only socialised a small part of the obligation to raise your own children. (Interesting question - why?) With hindsight, this was a mistake.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Which is unsurprising if he is showing off his success on Youtube. The first approximation is that everyone you see on TV is being paid to be there, and the vast majority of them are in some sense professionals. (Back in the elder days of broadcast TV, the most notorious example was that the vast majority of contestants on game shows that were not as intellectually hardcore as Mastermind, Jeopardy or Millionaire were out-of-work actors). Big-budget pro Youtubers count as TV here.
If I wanted to create pro-quality footage of me successfully picking up girls, I would hire actresses to pretend to be picked up. The alternative involves spitting game while being followed around by a cameraman, which would make even normie chicks who were willing to be picked up for NSA sex run away.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Step I. Consume More Art By Women
I have seen several thoroughly red-pilled guys offer the same advice. Chicklit, romance, and by-women-for-women erotica (which is a majority of textual erotica because men don't read while wanking) all provide a view of what women actually want which is a lot less filtered than you are going to find in explicit dating advice.
Admittedly a substantial fraction of it is "a man who is unreasonably rich, powerful or physically attractive expresses genuine interest in the girl next door" which is non-actionable to men reading it for research.
Was the progressive claim really that misogynists find it impossible to get laid?
I'd say it was the converse - that most men who can't get laid can't get laid because they are misogynist. Not even feminists are sufficiently disconnected from reality not to notice that some misogynists are getting laid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
I think the US is going to "lose" this war, because ultimately Trump is better off losing than winning. The consequences of a US victory are either a US-led occupation of Iran, or a Houthis-on-the-Hormuz failed state under circumstances where it is obviously Trump's fault. Both of these are worse, in US domestic political terms, than declaring victory and going home (even if the declaration of victory is non-credible outside the MAGA filter bubble). If Trump's economic team were competent enough to impose export controls on US crude oil in a way which limited the impact on pump prices, then making Iran Iran's neighbours' problem is the obviously correct America First policy.
Iran, even with nukes and intermediate-range ballistic missiles, is a threat to America's no-longer-needed proxies in the Middle East, not to America.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
GPT-2 cost about $40k of compute to train in 2018. Naively applying Moore's law, that much compute would have cost about 400 times as much in 2005, so someone would have needed to be willing to drop $16 million on a hunch. (What actually happened is that the first deep learning models were used on narrower problems so you could get a higher performance on less training).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
There are many cases of American martyrs whose stories are just completely made up, like Matthew Shepherd who died from a meth-related incident.
I think made-up martyr stories are a lot older than that...
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
I'm fully on board with this - I wouldn't accept a small risk of attracting police attention for a fun online hobby either. But that remains a reasonable decision on the part of Zorba even if the risk is very small indeed.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Prince William's and Princess Katherine's security cost £1.4 million a year back in back in 2010 (the breakdown of Royal security isn't public, but that number leaked), which would be £2.2 million adjusting for inflation. Other full-time working royals who are not the Sovereign probably get something similar. The cost of providing security details to nine living ex-PMs is £13 million pa in direct costs and £24 million pa including a contribution to police overhead. So a cabinet minister/ex-PM/mid-level royal tier security operation costs about £2 million a year. The leader of the official opposition (currently Kemi Badenoch) gets this level of taxpayer-funded protection as a matter of course. Other opposition politicians only get taxpayer-funded security details if there is intelligence of a specific, individualised threat - and "People like to throw milkshakes at me when I go out in public" doesn't qualify.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Modern German military medals look sufficiently similar to the Iron Cross that I am not sure you could tell them apart in the context of a tattoo. Fundamentally, it is a German-coded symbol of martial virtue, and is mildly suspect for the same good reasons that German militarism has been ever since 1945.
In an Anglosphere context, the Iron Cross is a symbol of anti-establishment-coded martial virtue and is used by people like outlaw biker gangs before being adopted by Motorhead and then spreading around heavy metal culture.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
I think this is part of a wider pattern. In a world where political violence is not, in fact, acceptable (very much including the one we live in), a ghoulish but rational response to your own ally being assassinated is "Excellent - this is a huge pile of free political capital. Let's celebrate." Letting on in public that this is how you feel means you lose the free political capital you were hoping to celebrate. Erika Kirk's behaviour makes perfect sense if she is rushing to capitalise on the political capital of her husband's death while it is still fresh, which she was. And she wasn't the only Republican who very visibly saw the assassination of Kirk as more of an opportunity than a tragedy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Horst Wessel was killed by members of an organised Communist paramilitary. That is an easy martyrdom story (although Christianity doesn't count soldiers who die due to enemy action as martyrs, so by the Christian rules he wasn't one).
The Republicans failed to make the martyrdom thing work because they didn't convince anyone outside their own filter bubble that Kirk was a victim of organised left-wing political violence. It isn't clear to me whether this is because he obviously wasn't, or if it is because they overreached in the aftermath of his death by trying to claim that school librarians and HR ladies shitposting was political violence.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
If you applied the same lack of charity to Donald Trump's poasting that you need to get to "half of the left wing said it was a good thing", then he would be at the business end of a noose. Trump repeatedly shitposts about beating up demonstraters, molesting teenage girls in locker rooms, suspending the Constitution, celebrating political violence against the Pelosis, deporting US citizens, invading NATO countries, and running for a third term. Fundamental to the case for Trump is that this is just shitposting, and Trump's opponents who take it seriously are either dishonest or mentally ill.
"Every premature death is a tragedy, that of Charlie Kirk less than most" is not a belief I hold (I feel more commonality with people doing the work of politics on the other side of the aisle than I do with my own allies who stick to shitposting) but it is one that is entirely compatible with a commitment to democracy, free speech, the rule of law etc. Unlike the Cult of Luigi, I do not see any comparable sympathy for Tyler Robinson, which is what you would expect to see if large numbers of normies did in fact think the murder was a good thing. Essentially everyone on both sides of the aisle's attitude to Robinson is "please let him not be one of ours." What I saw was a lot of shitposting in violation of de mortuiis nil nisi bonum, which is a rule of etiquette and not of law or custom.
Is the claim here that the President of the United States should be held to a lower standard of public decorum than a classroom assistant in Minneapolis, or is it that it is different when it is our guy doing it?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Moderators here, quite properly, have decided that they don't want fedposting on their forum. Even if it wasn't a legal risk to the mods, tolerating fedposting makes the forum less able to fulfil its stated purpose.
That doesn't mean that the mods receiving a warrant for a common or garden fedpost is particularly likely.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Kirk was both a minor celebrity (because of his "I will debate anyone" college speaker tours) and an important political organiser (because of the work TPUSA did recruiting, training, and placing the next generation of GOP staffers). The work as an organiser was more important, but was not visible outside the organised GOP, so most people think of him as the "debate me" meme guy.
Kirk's opponents hated him because he was a "debate me" bro who expected members of oppressed groups to do the work of countering his hateful message. Kirk's dumb supporters loved him because he was willing to take the core movement-conservative message to a hostile audience. His smart supporters feared and respected him because there were already enough young GOP operatives who owed their career to Kirk to staff a future Kirk for President campaign.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
The US navy has something of a record of stupid crashes. The inquiry into the Fitzgerald crash in 2017 came to the conclusion that one of the contributing causes was crew fatigue due to a sustained high operational tempo. The idea that basic safety compliance collapses during combat ops making a technically non-combat crash an order of magnitude more likely seems obviously correct.
That said, if the Iranians had shot the chopper down, the Trump administration would probably lie about it. To those familiar with combat helo flying, how likely is a near miss which does enough damage to render the chopper inoperable (e.g. by taking out the tail rotor) leading to a ditching without blowing it to smithereens in mid-air?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
8d ago
Farage is accused of taking cash gifts from dodgy crypto businessmen in exchange for promises to influence government policy.
Although some of Farage's opponents are muttering about quid pro quo, that isn't really what the argument is about. "The UK should build on our existing strength in financial services by becoming a crypto hub" is obviously correct unless you think that the cryptofinance industry is inherently malignant, so to someone who doesn't already hate Farage it looks like "crypto money finds crypto-friendly politician" rather than "politician becomes crypto-friendly in exchange for crypto money". The argument is (in theory) about transparency and (in practice) about aggravated spivvery.
Newly-elected British MPs are required to declare certain types of payment received in the 12 months before they were elected. Farage didn't. And when caught, rather than trying to spin it as "outsider gets caught on a technicality and is punished overly harshly for a paperwork violation" he tried to double down. First he tried to claim that the gifts were personal and didn't need to be declared*, then he went for the "enforcing generally applicable laws against a Man of the People just proves how much the establishment hates you" approach, and eventually to calling for a criminal investigation into whoever leaked to the media. (Remember that this is information that was supposed to be on the public record anyway).
Farage will be censured when the investigation is complete, because he uncontroversially broke the rules. And given the large amount of money involved (£5 million when the scandal started, now £6-7 million across multiple undeclared donors), he will be suspended from Parliament for long enough to trigger a recall petition. The current by-election automatically suspends the investigation, but it will restart when Farage is re-elected, and there will almost certainly be a second by-election after Farage is censured and recalled.
Even before this became Farage vs Binface, the politics of this don't make sense to me. Calling this by-election means that an what would otherwise have been an inside-baseball funding scandal is going to be the current thing for several months. I can see that the "It's not the £5 million in dodgy overseas** crypto money, it's the persecution" line working in Clacton where 70% of the voters are right-populist, but it isn't going to land with swing voters in the seats Farage needs to win if he wants to be Prime Minister in 2029. It could (low probability, but potential high impact) also sink him if Rupert Lowe finds a good local candidate - something that is more likely now that delaying the process gives Lowe more time to do so. (Restore can land the "I'm work for you, Farage works for foreign billionaires" attack even if the establishment parties can't.) And even if the other parties had run in the by-election and being trounced, "Farage can still win in Clacton" doesn't shift the narrative.
The best theory I am seeing is a Bulverist one, which makes me doubt my own judgement. But "Farage is high on his own supply with the persecution narrative" seems very plausible, because politicians getting high on their own supply happens all the time. Farage says that he is at such high risk of left-wing political violence that he needs a bigger security detail than Prince William***, and that the taxpayer ought to provide it. That he actually thinks this is entirely plausible and the leap to thinking the voters will agree with him is not a large one. If you accept that narrative (and Farage's online supporters do) then "I only needed to take money from foreign crooks and criminals because the police denied me the level of protection I clearly deserve" makes sense.
* This doesn't pass the laugh test. The explanatory notes to the rules say that the exemption for personal gifts is about things like Christmas and birthday presents from family and close friends. This was a £5 million gift where both Farage and the donor have said the money is linked to his political activity.
** The donations aren't legally foreign donations because the people writing the cheques are British citizens living abroad. But the ultimate source of funds is foreign and everyone knows this.
*** The only British public figures who get £5 million in taxpayer-funded security are the King and the Prime Minister.
On a somewhat related note, I remember reading one of Steve Sailer’s posts ages ago in which he made a claim that was only tangentially related to his main argument that the Democrats’ best chance of winning the presidency is by fielding as a candidate an older African American man with a military background who’s from a working class or lower-middle class background and is center-left. If we accept this as valid I guess it means that the main disadvantage Platner has in this case is that he’s white.
Also that he isn't lower-middle class (his father was a lawyer and his grandfather was a starchitect with his own Wikipedia article) and he isn't centre-left (he was explicitly the far-left factional candidate in the primary, supported by the usual suspects). If you think that being uncouth in public makes someone "centre-left" and pro-working class despite their support for open borders and trannies, you don't understand working-class politics.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
9d ago
"Men will endure bitter poverty, cold isolation, drink piss and eat lichen just for a chance to be free from the tyranny of the United Nations."
This is a purely hypothetical tyranny, of course. The United Nations has less power, and a lower budget per head, than your high school student council.
I also note that the internationally recognised government of Somalia has not controlled its internationally recognised territory for decades, meaning that de facto sovereignty was there for the taking. And the only people to take it were a group of locals who got their act together (Somaliland), pirates, and jihadis. And the pirates and jihadis aren't about freedom, they are about using "borrowed" Somali sovereignty as a base for predation.
I'm happy to concede that Kowloon Walled City prospered as a libertarian loophole, although every account I have written says that it wasn't as libertarian as it looked because the Triads enjoyed de facto sovereignty in the gap between Chinese and British de jure sovereignty.
You are using "tall" in a non-standard way in that sentence, meaning it evaluates to "not even wrong" rather than "true" or "false".
Transactivists are using the word "woman" in a way which is non-standard to the rest of us, but standard in their filter bubble. The word string "Caitlyn Jenner is a woman" has different meanings in English and Wokespeak, in the same way that the word string "I'm going to bum a fag" has different meanings in British English and American English*. Both meanings are clear, and the English meaning evaluates as "false" while the Wokespeak meaning evaluates as "true". Caitlyn Jenner being a woman in the Wokespeak meaning of the word is a true fact about the world (regardless of whether you like the use of the word "woman" to refer to it) in the same way that whales being feesh is.
I happen to think that the English meaning is more useful than the Wokespeak meaning, because (among other things) it allows you to talk about reproductive medicine using words that 100IQ patients can understand.
* One of my university friends was kicked out of a biker bar in rural Michigan for this. Both possible meanings turned out to be false, although the fool had intended for the British one to be true. Apparently outlaw bikers don't commit more crimes than necessary, so if you leave politely when asked, you don't actually get beaten up.
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