wraelk
13d ago
Does seem like you have to thread a pretty narrow needle to be able to afford the upset price of the house, but not to have an income stream that a judgment could seize.
Of course, the family part of this law makes it all more workable, because the person with no assets and the person buying the house can be two different people.
wraelk
13d ago
Awesome, this makes it a lot more clear to me. Thank you for providing your expertise on the topic!
wraelk
14d ago
But in the situation we're talking about with the New Jersey law, we'd end up in a situation in which of the two mortgages on the property, only the first one is paid off (because the first bank is only incentivized to set an upset price that makes them whole, and the second bank isn't capable of outbidding the family because of the right of first refusal). I'm pretty sure the unpaid second mortgage can't follow the property, but it still wasn't paid.
In this situation, does the second mortgage just disintegrate, or does the bank holding the second mortgage have a way to pursue a judgment against the homeowner for the unpaid debt? If so, how does that interact with a subsequent bankruptcy by the homeowner, keeping in mind that the homeowner would have a house with no mortgages attached to it and thus probably be past the equity number for an exemption?
From what I can tell, in chapter 7 they protect a certain amount of equity on the home: if your equity in the property is less than the legally specified amount, which in New Jersey is 63,150 for a spouse-jointly-owned home, they won't trigger a sale. The original intent seems to be "it's not going to make a significant difference in your debts anyway, so we're not going to bother", although I don't know if subsequent legislation raised it to a point where banks would want to trigger a sale if they could.
That wouldn't be super applicable here, since under this system you'd own the home outright and have the full value of the home in equity. It would work only for very low-value homes where the full value of the house is under the exemption(which might also be hard to get any significant second mortgage on). I'm not actually sure you could use the right of first refusal to have multiple people purchase a house, as well, which might mean you end up with half that amount of equity.
In Chapter 13 it seems like you can keep your house as long as you maintain your payment plan, but they can take it if you fall behind. So you might be able to negotiate some sort of discount, but that requires convincing creditors and/or a judge, and with a newly paid-off house sitting there it might raise some eyebrows.
So I do think you need a cutout here: one person defaults on the first mortgage, the relative uses right of first refusal to snap up the house, and the original homeowner just declares bankruptcy with no remaining assets.
wraelk
14d ago
Wouldn't the pursuit of a judgment from the second mortgage (or bankruptcy proceedings, if they're taking that route) just lead to the house being sold?
edit: ok, no, I guess if you default on the mortgage they can't force a sale of the house. I'm pretty sure bankruptcy can lead to it being sold though.
wraelk
16d ago
I addressed that above as well.
Graham Platner was running on essentially a generic Democrat party platform, and that's mostly what people were excited about, taking the same old Democratic talking points but with a "manly man" that could deliver them in a new form that might attract different demographics.
If he defects to the Republicans, he's either going to retain his generic Democrat positions or more likely switch to Republican ones.
If he retains his positions:
- For Democrats, he's got all the problems he does now with the added problem of the R next to his name. "Vote Blue no matter who" people are going to not vote for him because he's not blue, and people who previously supported him might worry that he's going to change his positions.
- For Republicans, he holds no positions in common with them: they're not going to vote for him JUST for the rape allegations when he's otherwise their opposition.
If he switches to Republican positions:
- If what Democrats really wanted was to vote for a tough guy ex-military sort that holds generic Republican positions, they've undoubtedly had the opportunity before now. He has no appeal for them whatsoever: he's not going to drive their favored positions forward, and he's not a cultural match. Some small fraction might suspect he's just outright lying and will swap back to Democrat positions, but that's an incredibly risky move. Plus he still has rape allegations.
- Similarly, he holds no special benefit for the Republicans: his positions are generic, his style is tremendously common among Republicans, and he's got the added burden of the allegations. If such a candidate was going to win an election for the Republicans, they would have already have found one, and likely one with less baggage. They might not actively oppose his conversion, maybe go "see how bad it is on the Democrat side?" but they're not going to promote him or be associated with him.
There's maybe some middle ground where he tries to only switch on a few limited positions, but that's not going to fly for either party. At least for white men, the Democrats aren't going to allow deviation on core party tenets, and for Republicans an 80% defection where the 20% focuses on gender relations isn't going to draw a lot of people. There may be some "communist incel" demographic that this might work for, but that's not a significant number of votes.
wraelk
16d ago
It would make sense to back these if it was part of his general political plan, but I don't think he was intending to come at the topic from that angle: he genuinely did believe the Democrat party line of "the aggressor is always at fault", or at the very least had cynically decided to take the generic Democrat line.
All he ever was was a "tough guy" wrapped around a generic Democrat party platform, so if he started bucking that trend and going "actually don't believe all women" earlier, it's likely that he would have just lost his voter base, without a corresponding gain elsewhere. The media would have revved up on how he was basically a rapist, women would have been uncertain about him (with later stuff like that Republican ex-girlfriend gossip hitting much harder, even if we imagine a world where the current news stuff didn't happen), and he almost certainly would have just lost the primary.
wraelk
16d ago
I think the problem with that is that up until the allegations surfaced, he was throwing those people under a bus.
He had some previous posts on Reddit back in 2013 talking about victims needing to take responsibility for his actions, but when confronted he immediately backed down, said he was "myopic", and said it was never the victim's fault, always the aggressor.
If he had consistently pushed for a perspective of mutual responsibility there might have been some space to rally around "the situation is more nuanced than that, as it often is" and cross the aisle, but his own stated philosophy, applied to him, means that he has no defense. He was the aggressor, so by his own words it is entirely on him.
wraelk
18d ago
The new habit of remastering and re-releasing old games might affect that too. Civ 2 was 1996 and dropped off, but Age of Empires 2 is 1999 and just got a remaster. Being able to trivially pirate what's functionally the same game might be a problem.
Especially when some of those remasters go badly: Warcraft 3, for example, I think there are a number of people who would rather have the fresh-off-a-disc-install version of that.
I also wonder if, as the rate of graphics improvements drops off, the old games might become more valuable relative to their successors. Morrowind and Oblivion in their original forms are visually rough, but Skyrim is a 15-year-old game that is still totally fine visually. ES6 will look better, but probably not that much better, and if there are design, story, or mod opennness issues, it's much more likely that people would go back to Skyrim than that they'd go back to Morrowind in the Skyrim era.
wraelk
18d ago
Platner going over to the Republicans means that he's going to have to change position on culture war issues: he'd probably have to be positive towards Trump, be negative on immigration, maybe talk about LGBT stuff going too far. If he's not doing that, just changing the D next to his name to an R and changing nothing else, he has all the same problems with the added bonus of losing anyone who's voting blue no matter who. He'd need to actually adjust his platform to appeal to Republicans.
With Fetterman that kind of works: his thing has always been working class economy stuff, and that doesn't really force him to take a position on most of these things. The working class has at least some level of support for Trump, so he can just kind of sit on that, take centrist positions, not talk too much about the culture war stuff. I'm sure there are people in PA that voted in Fetterman as a Democrat and still support him now even when he's often taking Republican positions.
There are other politicians that have a following of their particular brand of politics that might be able to hold constituents crossing the aisle. Bernie could conceivably be very concerned about immigration (there's a quote from him about immigration oppressing the working class or something, from before 2016) and end up as a R: he'd lose a lot of voters but I bet he'd hold some number. Thomas Massie might make it as a D, certainly the Israel focus would go over well. As long as there's something that's orthogonal to the red/blue divide you might be able to be on either side of it.
I don't know what that orthogonal thing would be for Platner. My impression of him is that his unique edge is that he's a "military tough guy" that we'd expect to be a generic Republican, but instead holds generic Democrat positions: he's an unusual delivery vehicle for those positions that might attract voters that wouldn't normally be amenable to them. If he switched sides, that edge is gone: a military tough guy who holds Republican positions is not hard to find in the slightest.
I can't imagine who would be voting for a Republican Platner, over Collins or whatever generic candidate the Democrats end up putting up.
wraelk
18d ago
It'll be interesting to see what Steam does when it's been around long enough that there's no conceivable way some of the account owner as can still be alive.
Unfortunately this is likely to happen at a time where Gaben is also gone, so I'm not hopeful about the answer.
wraelk
18d ago
It's hard to imagine that working: Platner's "hype" is mostly around him being willing to speak up on a bunch of issues the extremely-online crowd cares about and be blunt and "manly" about it. "This is what a male feminist looks like, willing to beat up the fascists and protect trans rights".
But the Democrats aren't going to stomach an abrupt about-face in terms of values, even if Platner was mercenary enough to do it, and I think he's a true believer given the post history that's been dug up. They're supporting him despite his aesthetic because he's saying the right things, they're not going to stick around if he switches to the wrong things. Fetterman pulled it off because he's able to stick to his working-class focus and just making the case that the Republicans aren't that bad for that, and the working class to some extent buys it (remember when some major union was voting to endorse Trump?). Platner would have to drop a lot of the culture war stuff that made him popular in the first place.
And the Republicans have no reason to accept him: they already have a fairly unobjectionable centrist candidate, there's no point in risking splitting the vote, especially now when the Democrats are going to drop in whoever the committee approves without a lot of time to get the base excited, and it's just going to be "vote blue no matter who" really pushing for the new person, with potentially people who got excited about Platner staying home when he's sidelined and talking theories about how this was trumped up to cut him out. Republicans wouldn't want Platner even before the allegations: if they wanted to run a blunt ex-military guy with dubious tattoos and ideas about consent, there are probably a few of them available to the Republican party already.
wraelk
1mo ago
This doesn't mean patronize them anyway though, it means choose somewhere else while not spreading the culture war reason you're doing it.
Don't go there, find a competing place that's better (possibly along a different axis) and if anyone asks why you don't go there, take the opportunity to advertise the better place.
This makes their choice decrease their customer base without a corresponding increase from people on the other side of the culture war.
wraelk
1mo ago
This seems hard to square with his clarification that he's not doing it in a gay way: you wouldn't expect him to need to clarify if he's using the term "rape" to refer to "beating them soundly in a fight". I'm sure there is a way to fight in a homosexual manner, but it's unclear why he'd expect someone to assume that's what he'd be doing.
And having to explain that you'd beat up a home invader to show that you're dominant doesn't make a lot of sense either: you'd beat them up to get them to stop invading your house!
From the way it's phrased it really seems like he's referring to a separate action besides just "get in a physical fight and win".
wraelk
1mo ago
I want to target "suspect doesn't know what to do" specifically here: my goal is for the default behavior when interacting with cops to be things that don't worry said cops.
It seems like asking about weapons first before asking them to do anything else makes a lot of sense: Castile can respond before having to get anything, the cop now knows he's got a weapon to worry about but Castile's hands are still clearly visible, and the officer can temporarily disarm him as you mention. But maybe we should have it on the citizen side (or both): if you as a citizen are asked to do something that puts your hand near your own weapon, maybe there should be a standard of not doing that and explaining the problem. That could be an issue right now because from the cop's side you're not complying, but if we make that the norm it'll be less of an issue.
I do wonder if this starts cutting into rights though: obviously from the police side they'd rather you just incriminate yourself of whatever they might get you for, and it's possible the eventual script gets a little too "volunteer information that the police don't necessarily have rights to, or you're considered a threat". But I'd at least like it to be something we're working on, and it seems far more realistic than "defund the police" or "just shoot the gun out of his hands".
wraelk
1mo ago
I can imagine some friction around teaching kids not to talk to police, but I like this a lot because it would make the effort pretty politically neutral.
Here's what you should do to make an officer feel as safe as possible in terms of you getting violent... and now here's what an officer is and isn't allowed to do, and here's a detailed description of your rights. Look like you're going for a lawyer, not a gun.
wraelk
1mo ago
Huh, that's interesting to me, I must have missed them growing up.
I have some vague heuristics (no sudden movements, don't reach for things at your waist) but I was never actually taught them, I just kind of picked them up, often from watching people do very badly by not following them. Details like "would the officer prefer I already have my license and registration ready, or should I just wait until he comes up" I still don't know, and I wouldn't be surprised if different police have different answers.
The degradation aspect in particular is interesting to me, because my interactions with police (even while being in the wrong, albeit for minor things) have generally been as pleasant and respectful as they could be, and I genuinely would like to make their job easier in the future if I can. I'd much rather interact with an officer who's not worried about what I might do, and I respect the job he's doing even if I'd rather not be part of it in the moment. Can you give examples of the kind of thing that people wouldn't do?
I guess a reminder to me that police officers differ: I know you've talked before about the frustrations with NJ cops, and I am in a different state and level of urbanization than that, so it's probably not surprising that I have different experiences.
wraelk
1mo ago
The thing I want the most from police reform is a script for people interacting with police. Figure out the motions/actions a police officer is the most concerned about, figure out how a citizen can make it clear they're NOT doing that, broadly publish it as a best practices and teach it in school, then train the police to be expecting the script at least as a "this person seems to be cooperating".
For example, it seems like traffic stops can get scary because it's hard to tell if someone's reaching for a gun. Maybe the script should be "person being pulled over keeps their hands on the wheel until the officer comes over and can see what they're doing". And now if I'm pulled over, I can do that, the officer knows what to do with it, and my action isn't something he's worried about.
Standardize behavior on both sides as much as we can, and it decreases tension in most situations and makes it easier to see when things might heat up.
wraelk
1mo ago
I randomly stumbled across Light up the Night on a Spotify shuffle, absolutely loved it, and eagerly dove into the band's other work only to find out that nothing else they've produced sounds remotely like that, everything else is a totally different style that's way slower and not what I was looking for at all from Light up the Night.
Even the Iron Maiden Trooper cover, which I usually love to see in a band, is just kind of uninspired with some weird vocal effects that only take away from the core melody. And actually Iron Maiden is a great example: it's like hearing Run to the Hills, getting excited, and then finding out that everything else they've produced is oriented around Wasting Love.
I can definitely enjoy story albums (Kamelot's Epica/The Black Halo is probably my favorite album taken as a whole), and the story seems interesting, but I can't survive on story alone.
wraelk
2mo ago
This actually fits a lot with my experiences: I can get good results, but sometimes it just absolutely fails in a way the makes me think I'm getting different underlying code.
wraelk
2mo ago
This is good information, but I was really hoping I would not have to do either of these things. At some point I was able to get reliably quality artwork with transparent backgrounds, so I know the technology is there. It's possible it's not something I can access.
wraelk
2mo ago
What's everyone's favorite AI image generation model?
I'm running a Pathfinder campaign, and being able to generate on-demand NPC art that looks like the vague idea I had in my head for a character is a huge step forward from having to scour the internet for stock art and make sure I haven't reused anything.
Unfortunately, I've been working with Microsoft's Copilot and ChatGPT (with a brief disappointing dip into Gemini), and recently I've noticed that both of them seem to have regressed in their image generation models: wonky eyes that don't get better, one side of the face significantly differently styled than the other, and my personal most annoying issue, being unable to generate with transparency in the background. ChatGPT can do this, but Copilot and Gemini regularly fail over and over at this task, often generating a white-and-grey square pattern that browsers will use to indicate transparency, but that's the actual background of the image, and you can see points in the background where it messed up and did the same color multiple times instead of alternation. These all feel like issues from the early days of image generation, so I suspect they've regressed their free models to something that's cheaper for them to run.
I'm not opposed to paying for it (though free is clearly better), but I'd really rather pay someone other than OpenAI, I just don't like Altman or how the company is run. And if I'm going to pay someone I'd want a good text model as well, I often use the text models to generate names or flesh out ideas.
wraelk
2mo ago
Met my wife on OkCupid, we chatted for a week or two before setting up a first date. We were about 2 hours away from each other, and I set up a first date closer to her. While we were waiting for the date to arrive she asked if she could come up and see me before that. It's quite nice to have someone else clearly excited about the relationship and willing to go out of her way for it.
I told her I loved her on the first date, and while that was obviously premature it turns out to have been correct. The experience was just so overwhelmingly better than any relationship I had been in before, and I didn't think the past relationships were bad, but this was just a whole other level. She would not say it back to me, though she expressed interest
We talked about marriage and children on the first date, in the sense of "is this where your plans eventually end up?" but I don't know when we actually started talking about "ok, let's get married for real". I know at some point her position was "it's up to you, I'm ready to say yes any time you're ready to propose", probably about a year or so in.
I ended up effectively moving into her place within a month or two of seeing her, in that my visits would just span multiple weeks. I was looking to buy a house at the time and when I did so, <6mo after the relationship started, I invited her to move in with me. From there, my strategy was essentially "let's wait and see to make sure nothing bad pops up": over time living together you learn each others' quirks and any problems you might have, you see the other person at their worst. So I gave it about 2 years, nothing concerning happened despite some decent low points (surgery recovery, difficult work conditions), and went ahead and proposed.
This social vulnerability of Mrs. Cowles actually points to the real problem though.
Returning to our original concern:
The people pushing these kinds of approaches are generally not backing it with nearly-ironclad scientific literature that can be picked apart only with an advanced degree. At most there might be something that kind of looks like a study if you don't squint too hard at it. Usually it's a headline with zero backing: for an example, an anti-vaccine friend recently gave me a picture of a man in a doctor coat, with a label stating that six children died in the clinical trial for a particular vaccine. Attempts to find out what the study was, how big the sample size was, what the death count in the control was, etc. have been so far unsuccessful.
Mrs. Cowles' knowledge of the financial system didn't matter because she wasn't engaging on that level at all: there were undoubtedly financially-related red flags, but she wasn't applying that knowledge. And if our goal is to create mothers resistant to incorrect health decisions pushed by someone with an agenda, their degree won't matter because it's far easier to take an approach that bypasses the topical discussion in favor of social weaknesses, which don't seem to be remedied as part of a higher education.
Teaching bullshit detection in schools is probably fraught with culture war concerns (undoubtedly everyone will be attempting to teach only how to detect the outgroup's bullshit). But if we're not going to do that, I'm not sure a master's degree is going to change vulnerability to these kinds of arguments. It's the equivalent of an intimidating twelve-foot-high barbed wire fence, but the gate is secured with a cheap rusted combination lock set to 1234.
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