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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2576 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 23, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I cannot log in on Firefox under Android.

The behavior is different between a login with a bad password and an unsuccessful login with a correct user and password. In the latter case no error is produced and I see the list of threads but I am not logged in.

Enhanced tracking protection is standard and there are no exceptions. Desktop site is off.

Chrome works fine.

What is your own personal risk/cost tolerance for housing these days - particularly for purchasing a home? Looking around, I see advice that ranges from "15 year mortgage at most and no more that 25% of your post-deduction take home income" all the way up to "up to 28% of your gross income on a 30 year mortgage". That much of a spread seems crazy to me, and I'd like to hear some personal opinions. If you can explain how you reached that conclusion, that would be even better.

One thing worth bearing in mind is that the biggest risk here is short term. Rent goes up every year like clockwork, while your mortgage is going to stay the same (or even go down if you refinance into a better interest rate). My wife and I have owned our house for 7 years now, and our mortgage is already about on par with what we would be paying for our apartment if we had stayed renters. Plus we have more space here (1300 sq ft at the apartment, 2000 here with 1300 finished and 700 unfinished). It was a stretch at times for the first few years, but between our payments getting cheaper (due to refinance) and rent going up, we are already at the point where we're glad we bought.

There are too many variables to make any absolute rules. How stable is your job? How much of an emergency fund do you have built up? How long do you expect to stay in the house? The calculations if you think being laid off is not entirely implausible and you intend to upsize to a larger house in the future are entirely different than if you're near retirement and expect this to be your "forever home." Do you have kids? Do you have a spouse contributing to the mortgage? If you are worried about risk, then the big questions are "What could happen to reduce my income, and how would I pay my mortgage if that happens?"

A 15-year mortgage is usually tougher to swing unless you're buying way less house than you can afford. A lot of people will tell you take the 30-year mortgage and make extra payments. If you can keep that up, the net result is like taking a 15-year-mortgage but with the flexibility to make lower payments if you run into financial difficulty. The downside is that you're still paying a higher interest rate, so it's not as economical as if you'd taken the 15-year mortgage.

28% of your gross income on a 30-year-mortgage seems a little high, but is probably okay if you feel your income is secure and you can swing it even if you start putting kids through college or something. 25% of your net is pretty conservative, but if I could have bought a house with 25% of my net with a 15-year-mortgage I'd have grabbed it. Unfortunately, in my area houses like that are probably either major fixer-uppers or in terrible neighborhoods.

The big mistake most people make with buying a house is either taking a mortgage they are one or two missed paychecks away from going into default on, or buying on the assumption that it will appreciate and they can easily sell it if they suddenly need to downsize. Winding up underwater when you badly need to sell (as happened to many people in 2008) is a bad place to be.

Big problem with the housing market right now is that lots of people are sitting on their 2-3% mortgages from pre-2020 (which are unlikely to happen again in our lifetime), so people who want to move can't afford to.

A huge factor is what interest rate you get on your mortgage. If your interest rate is below the appreciation rate of your house, then in the long term, it's basically free money.

I recently bought a house in June, and I did 20% down on a 30 yr with a mortgage rate that put me at 29% of my gross for everything (Principal, insurance, taxes, interest, HOA). It's a bit tight but not egregiously so, and my rate was 6.875 no points. So I'm essentially waiting until rates drop (and the 6 months has elapsed) to refi.

Neither my parents nor my realtor thought it was a particular risky maneuver. I was a bit nervous paying that much but it has been fine. I did have to lower my 401k contributions from 20% to 12% and I got some good budgeting software and have been pretty aggressively sticking to it. I'm pretty risk adverse in general but I'd say it has been worth it so far.

idk if this is helpful.

It's enormously helpful. Thank you.

Glad to be of service. I assume this is about house hunting for you are your partner?

Sure is

If anyone is interested, mister Turok is over on the SSC open thread complaining about us: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-409/comment/180699602

I'm curious, why on earth do people think this is a "hugbox for fundamentalist Christians"? If anything I see progressive folks get more leniency. Anyway, sad to see.

Hugbox for fundamentalist Christians? Nobody told me.

Thanks for defending our honor, and hopefully some new people will follow the links over.

Lol I thought of you when I read it. Exactly!!!

And no problem. I try to post the link here over on the open thread every now and then just to make sure folks know we're here.

Yer a Christian, Harry.

IIRC he had the same issue with DSL as well, despite some very active atheists there. I wouldn't consider the Christians either here or on DSL to be particularly fundamentalist, but they are better received than in other rationalist adjacent spaces, I suppose.

There's definitely a fair amount of talk about Christianity, but that word "fundamentalist" is doing a lot of work there. Just looking at the Wikipedia pages on Christian Fundamentalism makes my head spin, because I have literally never heard of 99% of the people mentioned. There's like a tiny amount which I know from reading about creationism.

Look at the page for the admittedly ancient essays described as "widely considered to be the foundation of modern Christian fundamentalism." It's just a long parade of names that I've never heard about.

This is something that I've noticed about people who criticize "evangelicals" too. I hear a lot of talk about them, but I almost never hear names of actual evangelical writers mentioned, much less their specific ideas. It looks a lot like there's a rich history there that I'm just unaware of, and I suspect that's true for a lot of people on The Motte.

Are you seriously asking? Yes, it does come off as a bit of a Christian hugbox at times.

Many posters here, yourself included (yourself especially?), take ample opportunity to mention that they are Christian, and often use the forum to discuss Christian topics and Christian theology as if it would be uncontroversial.

It's not so frequent that I can quickly dig up an example, but I've noticed it and been annoyed by it before. It's innocent enough - one person sees the other mention their faith, and takes that as license to proceed in a discussion where the baseline axioms of Christianity are assumed. I hope you can appreciate that an atheist watching a thread devolve into bible study would be miffed.

I hope you can appreciate that an atheist watching a thread devolve into bible study would be miffed.

I'm an atheist/antitheist. My stance on the Bible study threads is bemused tolerance, sure, it's not for me, but I'm sure that my passion for AI alignment research isn't what others are looking for. In both cases, the sensible thing to do is collapse the thread and look for something else to read. Perhaps appreciate that this sub has a diversity of opinion and discussions!

I certainly don't see an assumption of Christianity in general, most of the discussion is usually found away from the CWR threads, and where it does come in, well, topics like abortion or immigration and one's attitudes towards the same do hinge on religious beliefs or lack thereof.

Yes, it does come off as a bit of a Christian hugbox at times.

Somewhat true

Many posters here, yourself included (yourself especially?), take ample opportunity to mention that they are Christian, and often use the forum to discuss Christian topics and Christian theology

Definitely true

I hope you can appreciate that an atheist watching a thread devolve into bible study would be miffed.

Wait why? I just immediately close these threads because I have no interest in them, just like I close every thread I have no interest in. Why does this bother you? I'm happy they have their hugbox and I don't interact with it.

Now the pre-marital sex-ed discussions, those are fun to wade into

I hope you can appreciate that an atheist watching a thread devolve into bible study would be miffed.

Why would you be miffed? Atheists and agnostics regularly talk about AI, transhumanism, and all sorts of other things here as well. I genuinely don't get why this is a problem, or makes this place seem like a hugbox?

Just because this type of convo is allowed?

Why would you be miffed?

I'm not @celluloid_dream, and I am also not an atheist. I am not observant, and I am not even certain that I could say that I am a Christian, even though I desperately wish that I could say that I was.

There is something about that particular kind of thread that bothers me. It seems, for lack of better terms, both condescending and sinful.

It feels to me like many of those threads are rooted in a faith that is almost Calvinist, where anyone who is not already among the elect will not and cannot understand the ineffable nature of God's grace; it seems more a way to reaffirm the holiness of the speaker rather than to spread the Good News of universal salvation that is offered to anyone. I'm not sure if this is the intent, but it feels that way when you are on the "other side".

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

Jesus himself said to be circumspect about discussions of faith. It is difficult for me to reconcile that with what I have written above.

Idk man I have seen prideful faith, and it’s bad. I don’t see that here.

I think in reality it’s just culture shock from seeing Christians who actually deeply believe speak. Most Christians in the modern world are in name only sadly.

Genuinely not trying to be condescending here but at least imo I haven’t seen much bragging or holier-than-thou. Usually it’s people nerding out about weird historical or theological points. Not talking about how often they pray or that they met this Saint or elder or got to touch this relic or icon, went to this or that monastery, etc.

I'm not exactly sure how to articulate it, but I've seen a lot of discussion between Christians and atheists here where the Christian stance has a strong theme of "you just don't get it". I don't know if it's because the other side of the conversation has a fundamental difference in viewpoint, but the "vibe" is frequently there. Much like the 2014 era meme of "it's not my job to educate you", it feels like it's meant to absolve the speaker of having to explain their stance in a way that allows someone to get it.

That is such a strange stance for me. If Christianity is real, and I could bring myself to believe, I don't think that I would morally be capable of saying something like that.

I don't remember who it was, but someone on this forum once wrote up a long response that could be compressed to "Jesus loves you. Yes, even you, even though you don't think he should." It was probably the single best case for Christianity that I have ever read. It actually made the faith make sense on a visceral level for the first time in my life. I wish we saw more of that here, rather than comments about religion social technology.

Isn't that a pretty standard proselytizing angle, used especially on criminals and drug addicts etc? It may work on spiritual/culturally christian but nonpracticing people, but why would anyone use that line here? It would be a comically bad misread of rationality-community adjacent atheists to believe they "don't think Jesus should love them".

Interesting! I was initially attracted to the faith due to the social technology discussion, but over time Christ's love is what fully won me over.

If it helps, I absolutely believe that the fact that God loves us personally is the most unique and shocking thing about Christianity. I was healed of a horrible set of chronic pain and illness issues in large part by coming to Christ.

Not a problem. It's just mildly annoying sometimes.

The difference between topics of material fact and those of a spiritual bent is that the former are comprehensible to anyone, and the latter only make sense if you have already bought in to a specific belief system. You can discuss geopolitics or tech without anyone having to accept contested metaphysics. The annoyance comes from moving the discussion to a place where not everyone can play.

The term "hugbox" is probably not fair. It's more like the accumulated weight of all the Christian-posting starts to make the place feel kind of Christian by default.

As an atheist/agnostic, I am rather happy to have a community where I can talk to Christians who take Christianity seriously, and aren't ashamed of having serious beliefs. If themotte can occasionally feel very Christian by rationalist standards, that's because basically every other grey/blue tribe space are aggressively atheist hugboxes for obvious historical reasons (descent from New Atheism etc.).

I don't know of any meds that can help, he's not psychotic, he's just a dick. Can't cure ASPD.

TLDR: To an atheist, Christianity is quite literally 'unbelievable' and not being able to say so loudly and clearly (and repeatedly) is ridiculous.

As a former militant atheist, anything that prevents one from saying, "Fuck off with your stupid fairy-tales, and don't come back to debate unless you can find a basis for your way of life that isn't 'but sky-Daddy said so'" comes across as a Christian hugbox. It's somewhat equivalent to the reaction I have to being told by trans activists that a man can become a woman by wishing really hard and to be fair to Turok it is probably true that I would be reported for the Christian bit and not for the trans bit.

OTOH you are perfectly able to make the atheist argument here provided you aren't obnoxious about it, and indeed lots of people do if you actually try to assert the tenets of Christianity as literally true in a debate (we had one a while ago about 'what does it mean that God allows bad things to happen' where I earned a decent number of downvotes and pushback for giving what I see as the Christian answer. 'Christian culture has a pretty good track record even if we can't prove the religion is literally true' is a much easier sale and offends fewer people here.

we had one a while ago about 'what does it mean that God allows bad things to happen' where I earned a decent number of downvotes and pushback for giving what I see as the Christian answer.

Damn I might try and dig this up, sounds funny

TLDR: To an atheist, Christianity is quite literally 'unbelievable' and not being able to say so loudly and clearly (and repeatedly) is ridiculous.

I am so confused by this conversational mindset. What could someone perceive as the value to themselves of jumping into a discussion among Christians, with Christian premises, to declare that actually Christians are morons who believe in a "sky fairy" or whatever? If you truly believe that Christians are benighted superstitious freaks, then surely you're wasting your time yelling at them on the internet. Or if you think they're ordinary people with mistaken beliefs, then it seems like the attitude should be one of polite curiosity and question-asking?

Taking the time to explain one's reasoning for why one's audience is incapable of reason seems like a weird self-own more than anything.

I'm an atheist, and an antitheist, but I don't bother with being militant about it.

I feel like we reached the heat death of the theism debate sometime around 2011. Every argument has been deployed, countered, steelmanned, mothballed, and then resurrected as a zombie argument so many times that the marginal utility of another forum post is effectively zero. I am happy to report that life as a Western atheist is actually quite pleasant. I leave them alone; they generally leave me alone. It is a functional equilibrium.

I am so confused by this conversational mindset. What could someone perceive as the value to themselves of jumping into a discussion among Christians, with Christian premises, to declare that actually Christians are morons who believe in a "sky fairy" or whatever? If you truly believe that Christians are benighted superstitious freaks, then surely you're wasting your time yelling at them on the internet. Or if you think they're ordinary people with mistaken beliefs, then it seems like the attitude should be one of polite curiosity and question-asking?

But I want to push back on the quoted dichotomy. It suggests that if I believe religious people hold fundamentally absurd beliefs, I must either view them as raving lunatics worthy of scorn or simply be politely curious about their worldview.

This assumes a unitary model of the human mind which psychology tells us is almost certainly false. The correct model is that humans are world-class champions at compartmentalization.

The average religious believer is not a caricature. They are behaviourally indistinct from the general population. They take out thirty-year mortgages. They trust the FDIC to insure their deposits. They accept the efficacy of amoxicillin. They engage in normal signaling regarding movies and electoral politics. They are hosting a parasitic memeplex, yes, but it appears to be a commensal organism rather than a fatal one. It is not metabolizing their ability to function in a modern economy.

I have an uncle who is a highly credentialed microbiologist. He spends his days applying the scientific method to bacteria, running PCRs, and adhering to rigorous evidentiary standards. He also believes, with total sincerity, in homeopathy. If you tried to model this as a consistent worldview, you would fail. But he doesn't have a consistent worldview. He has a work-mode partition where dilution removes active ingredients, and a home-mode partition where dilution increases potency. I have tried to bridge this gap in debate. It does not work. It only generates heat, not light.

The peace treaty works both ways. The religious generally grant that despite my lack of a divine command theory of ethics, I am probably not going to eat their babies or harvest their organs for the black market. I am a Cooperator in the Prisoner's Dilemma of civilization.

In return, I acknowledge that their "God module" is just an unfortunate quirk of their hardware. It is a glitch, perhaps a spandrel of our evolutionary history that makes them susceptible to hyper-active agency detection. Maybe they genuinely do have a God-shaped Hole, which I fortunately lack. But outside of that specific theological blast radius, we share a surprising amount of epistemological territory. We can agree on the price of tea in China. We can agree on the laws of thermodynamics. We can agree that the new Star Wars movies were disappointing.

I feel a certain distant pity for the condition, the same way I might pity someone with a benign but annoying tinnitus. But since they are otherwise high-functioning members of the tribe, I see no utility in screaming at them until they admit the ringing sound isn't real. We can (usually) just ignore the noise and watch the movie.

I am happy to report that life as a Western atheist is actually quite pleasant.

In terms of not being subject to Christianity, yes.

It's a deep personal irony for me that while I had my minor annoyances with Christianity as a youth, most of my atheist grievances were secondhand. The personal grievance was being forced to engage with it at all; a lot of time spent being bored, bored enough to dwell on how in addition to being boring, it contradicted all the science/natural history stuff that I was actually interested in. In a conflict between Jesus and Dinosaurs, Jesus didn't have a chance.

Now, as an adult, I actually have experienced being subject to an oppressive ideology that deranges the people around me in obviously unhealthy ways.

Everyone assumes I share this ideology, but also talks constantly about how much they hate/fear those who don't, resulting in a vibe of "You better agree with me, or else". I get to hear incessant little digs about my immutable characteristics that imply they make me a Less-Than. Sometimes I even get a backhanded compliment that's the equivalent of "Wow, you're very articulate for a Black."

Just about everyone (as in, a social peer, not a rando) who's been interpersonally foul to me in the last six years has used ideological lingo while doing so. And didn't suffer social consequences for their foulness, once more because of ideology, and my immutable characteristics that are disfavored by said ideology.

So yeah, all my under-justified dislike of Christianity has been redirected into a quite-justified dislike of, you guessed it, Intersectionalist Leftist-ism.

From "I Am A New Atheist, And I Repent" by Eneasz Brodski:

Over the past few years I watched a new religion born. A secular religion, which doesn’t have the dead-easy failure mode of requiring belief in a sky-fairy. But, since it was created in America, with strong Christian roots, it has all the trappings of Christianity.

  • Original sin
  • Essentialism
  • Repentance and confession
  • Manichean good/evil dichotomy
  • Focus on martyrdom and victimhood
  • Salvation dispensed by the church and needing constant reaffirmation

Even worse, since it is a new religion that is being seized as a lifeline by people who’ve been spiritually drowning for over a decade, it is full of fiery zealots. All conflicts are recast as spiritual struggles focused around the original sin. Like the puritans, they can harbor no dissent in their midst. Everyone must be equally zealous and on their side, or they are on the side of evil. Any price is worth paying to save a soul from evil.

When the scales fell from my eyes and I finally realized what had happened, I felt true crushing failure. Not because I had failed in my objective. Tradition religion is less relevant than ever. The New Atheists won. But in winning, having not realized how different others are, we left a massive religion-vacuum in society. We laid the groundwork for a new religion. One that had been purged of the greatest weaknesses of traditional religions, and with a dense underbrush of religion-starved kindling to tear into.

So, yes. New Atheism helped to create Wokeism. I repent of my ways, I was wrong. Religion is needed, and we should have focused on strengthening the least harmful religion(s) while tearing down the most harmful ones, rather than trying to eliminate them all. Forgive us, for we knew not what we did. :(

try to assert the tenets of Christianity as literally true in a debate

It's not so much that people do this (although it does happen). More often they proceed with a discussion as if the tenets of Christianity are literally true, and at that point, it would be rude to question them, because they're trying to talk about kenosis or apokatastasis or whatever and not have an edgy 2000s atheism debate.

As a former militant atheist, anything that prevents one from saying, "Fuck off with your stupid fairy-tales, and don't come back to debate unless you can find a basis for your way of life that isn't 'but sky-Daddy said so'" comes across as a Christian hugbox. It's somewhat equivalent to the reaction I have to being told by trans activists that a man can become a woman by wishing really hard and to be fair to Turok it is probably true that I would be reported for the Christian bit and not for the trans bit.

Yeah exactly. People over there were claiming the Motte is full of "Christian literalists" and I'm like huh... do you just mean people who believe Christ literally rose from the dead? Because yeah, that's kind of the whole point.

It is interesting how hard it can be to have conversations across these inferential gaps. Makes me sad that we have so few progressive / liberal folks.

But the motte is still, last I checked, majority atheist/agnostic, Turok was upset that he was required to not flamebait pro-lifers. The motte sometimes discusses the metaphysics of Christianity but rarely takes a Christian frame particularly seriously. ‘God says so’ is not treated as an argument here. Turok was upset that ‘you believe in a sky fairy’ as an argument against pro-lifers who had only made secular arguments thus far wasn’t either.

IDK, I don't think you/we want this. If the gap is too big, no meaningful discussion can happen. At best, when everyone is careful and on their best behaviour, every conversation is a careful working through to 'we disagree because you axiomatically believe stuff that I don't' and you each end up at Ozy's position of 'it's not that I hate you, it's just that you're the carrier for a set of memes that needs to be wiped from the earth'. It's nice to agree on generalities but disagree on specifics or have different experiences, because then you can learn something that might help you.

I like my debating partners to follow the Goldilocks Principle: not too similar (boring or infuriating) but not too different.

I found this on a quick search: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/conservatives-as-moral-mutants/

Wait what, Ozy said that? Can you link? That is pretty wild. Ugh.

Yeah fundamental value differences are pretty tough but like, it's best to acknowledge them at least, no? And hopefully shed some light on why we value what we value?

Yes, it's the Moral Mutants essay. She's not wrong, either, it's just there's not much to be done from there.

it's best to acknowledge them at least, no? And hopefully shed some light on why we value what we value?

Granted, and those can be valuable conversations. I just feel like I had enough of those convos when I was younger. I have a reasonable theory of mind now IMO and I'm interested into digging into the details of how to work with my beliefs rather than changing them.

Plenty of Christians and book lovers here. What are some notable, unusual or interesting variations on the bible that you've seen or own? Let's be honest, the commonplace optically-and-materially compressed version that is printed so very close to its cigarette grade paper stock isn't the most appealing format.

The two that I own are the Pocket Canon series, which is 20 of the major books broken out into small standalone pocket sized paperbacks, and The Illustrated Book of Genesis by Robert Crumb. At some point I'd like to get a collection of the Gustave Dore Bible illustrations and the Jefferson Bible.

Oh yeah, I've also got the audiobook narrated by James Earl Jones.

Physically, the Orthodox Study Bible is beautiful, but still of the similar super thin paper.

I also like David Bentley Hart's translation quite a bit so far.

"Hopefully their future will see a little less gradatim and a little more ferociter."

A few weeks ago, the topics of SpaceX and their competition came up, and although I was "non-ironically excited for the possibility that Blue Origin's upcoming second attempt to accomplish a booster landing is about to succeed", I might have primed myself to fear disappointment by talking about Boeing's Starliner first. A year and a half ago Boeing were poised to be the ones to break SpaceX's current monopoly on United States crew launch ... and then they launched crew on a vehicle that still hadn't fixed all the Reaction Control System thruster problems from three years earlier, and they needed SpaceX to get them safely back down again.

It's a good thing I didn't quite finish this post yesterday like I'd planned, because today it's been announced that Starliner won't even try to fly humans again until after another cargo flight, and NASA's brought their contract down to 4 missions instead of 6. I don't think either side of that contract wants any part of it anymore; it's all trying to recover a fraction of sunk costs at this point.

Blue Origin, on the other hand, appears to indeed be moving from "gradatim" mode to "ferociter" mode!

After a number of minor delays, the NG-2 mission successfully launched New Glenn's first mission out of Earth orbit: two ESCAPADE spacecraft (buses by Rocket Lab, instruments by NASA and a few University labs) are now on their way to the Earth-Sun L2 point; after an Earth flyby late next year they'll be headed to Mars next. Despite the long-term SpaceX focus on Mars colonization, the Blue Origin + Rocket Lab combination will likely beat them to putting spacecraft in Mars orbit; even the SpaceX launch of Europa Clipper only included a Mars flyby, on the way to Jupiter.

The first New Glenn launch lost its booster due to engine relight failure; in NG-2 a little of the live video was lost, but the booster itself stuck the landing perfectly, as seen more clearly from more distant footage, making Blue Origin the second institution to accomplish a powered landing of an orbital rocket booster, with the second-most powerful rocket to ever be recovered, and the most powerful to be recovered on its own landing gear.

The landing was very inefficient, aiming far from the target initially (as SpaceX does too, to ensure that if engine restart for landing fails the rocket will instead impact at a point where it can't do any damage), but then taking a very slow, almost "hovering" horizontal slide over to the precise center of the landing pad, burning much more landing fuel than SpaceX's "hover slam" landings. Unintuitively, this is probably all a good thing for Blue Origin. First, it's a demonstration of the ability to hover, which although inefficient as a nominal trajectory, adds robustness when things go wrong. SpaceX is well over 500 successful landings now, but this is after burning through a test vehicle and multiple "splashdown" landings before they felt ready to risk a barge, followed by four or five failed landing attempts, all due in great part to the difficulty they had landing a booster whose Merlin engines couldn't throttle down enough to hover if necessary. Second, this is a good bit of context for the rumors (anonymous, but via a trustworthy reporter) that the first New Glenn vehicle capabilities were well under the design's target payload numbers. It's common for a new spacecraft to gain unwanted mass and so lose performance during the design and testing process, but this can sometimes be fixed with subsequent iteration, and that big plume of burning mass ought to be a relatively easy target for them to quickly fix. They've also announced a 15% improvement to each of BE-3 and BE-4 engine thrust, to be deployed on future missions, so they'll be getting performance back from reduced gravity losses on both the way down and the way up.

Adding metaphorical weight to the performance problem rumors was the removal of literal weight from their first launch, whose "Blue Ring Pathfinder" looked like a toy compared to the full "Blue Ring" spacecraft bus+vehicle they'd been working on. There's still no semi-firm launch date for the full Blue Ring, but they've released photos of their first flight vehicle, in production now and at least intended for launch early next year.

We've also now got pictures of a more impressive flight vehicle: the Blue Moon Mk1 cargo lander, to be launched to the lunar surface early next year. It's half the height and only a fraction of the cargo capacity of their planned Mk2 crew-and-cargo lander, which is itself tiny compared to Starship HLS, but until those are launched this will be the largest craft ever to land on the Moon, roughly a third bigger than the Apollo Lunar Module.

We've even been shown a glimpse of test hardware hinting at long term design work: a deployable hypersonic aerobrake, "saving significant mass and cost and enabling heavy cargo delivery from the Moon, to Mars, and point-to-point missions on Earth."

And finally, as part of that thrust improvement announcement, we got a look at their longer-term plans: a scaled up "New Glenn 9x4", with 9 first-stage and 4 second-stage engines (as opposed to the existing newly-renamed "New Glenn 7x2"), stretched to be taller than Saturn V thanks to the additional thrust, expected to give them roughly 50% more capacity to Low Earth Orbit and nearly triple their payload to Trans-Lunar Injection. The 9x4 still won't have as much TLI payload as even the Block 1 version of the Space Launch System, but this is still likely to be a little more beyond-LEO payload than a fully-expended Falcon Heavy, but with a much roomier fairing like Starship, from a rocket in a (partially-) reusable configuration - and unlike with SLS, Blue Origin has been designing with multi-launch mission plans and orbital refueling in mind. That payload to LEO (two thirds of the Starship V3 target, and twice what V2 was reportedly capable of) may end up being more important than the TLI numbers in the long run.

None of these future numbers from either company are guaranteed, of course. The first Starship V3 booster just got wrecked in a failed pressure test, pushing the next Starship flight back from "January" to "Q1". New Glenn was originally supposed to launch those Mars probes a year ago, but juggled their schedule a bit after they lost two New Glenn stages, one also to a test failure and another to worker mishandling, last year.

The obvious thing Blue Origin really still has to work on is cadence. In Fall 2024, Blue Origin was expecting to do 8-10 New Glenn launches in 2025; they ended up managing one in January and a second in November. Rocket Lab likes to brag that their Electron was the only commercial rocket to ramp up faster than Falcon, and that's a fair brag, because cadence is much easier said than done. The Space Shuttle fleet was supposed to fly at least 24 missions per year, ideally more like 50; they ended up at 4-6 with a peak of 9, and cut some tragic corners just trying to reach that. I think Blue Origin has the right design to start with, at least. The difference post-landing between their gleaming methane-powered New Glenn booster and the soot covered kerosene-powered Falcon 9 boosters is like day and night, and hopefully that lack of coking is going to make inspection and maintenance of the rocket internals easier as well. Blue Origin is still talking about doing one or two dozen launches in 2026. I'll be very surprised if they even come near the low end of that, but I'm hoping to be eating crow in a year.

Still, seeing two successful New Glenn flights in a row, including their first successful landing, is heartening. Blue Origin not only managed to land an orbital rocket under the wire of SpaceX's landing 10-year-anniversary, this year they've already managed a couple entries on my checklist of what SpaceX has been up to since:

  • Added downrange booster recovery options
  • Added booster recovery from and (coming soon, in Blue Origin's case) reflight after missions beyond LEO
  • Begun launching national security payloads

And they're working on more, both in the next year:

  • Launching payload to the Moon

and in the longer term:

  • Adding fairing recovery
  • Adding extended fairing options
  • Launching a multi-thousand-satellite constellation (hopefully starting with the first launch next year)

They're still behind, but for the first time in decades it feels like they're not falling further behind. Space launch in the USA may soon actually have options other than "keep praying Elon Musk doesn't go full Howard Hughes" or "just go back to paying far more money to Boeing or Lockheed for a fraction of the results".

Site loading slow again today for anyone else?

Maybe I should finally pitch in for the dev fund. I'd be open to it!

Yes earlier today but not 10 seconds ago

Are people here familiar with git frontends?

Having again lost a day's work to git deciding to delete files I hadn't committed yet (nor will I ever commit to the master), I'm now looking for a git frontend that doesn't completely suck balls. Is there anything that fits the following tenets:

  1. My local files are sacred. Under no circumstances can they be deleted without some way to undo it. No exceptions. If the files in the repo and my working copy differ, show it to me so I can choose what to do on a per-file / directory basis.
  2. The repo has only a single origin. I don't care if Linus needs twenty thousand different repos to pull and push things from. I use one. The tool shall treat every branch as always having that as origin.
  3. A submodule should only mean the short text file that contains the SHA hash. The contents of submodule directories should be completely ignored when pulling, merging, committing or pushing. Yes, I know the repo's submodule refers to a different set of files than the ones in my working copy. That is intentional.
  4. I don't want to ever have to see or care about staged files. My files are either being worked on or have been committed. There is no such thing as a staged file.
  5. No operation should leave things halfway, something staged or any ><!¤#"¤#% characters in files. It either completes succesfully or leaves the working copy as it was before. Not some quantum Schrödinger's halfway state.

It gets really laborous having to have the actual working copy, the one git wants to see and the authorative origin/master and manually trying to manage them without git completely fucking up my working copy just because a branch pointer was changed somewhere.

I don't want to ever have to see or care about staged files. My files are either being worked on or have been committed. There is no such thing as a staged file.

Maybe take a look at jujutsu: https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj

It uses git as a back-end so it's completely compatible with git, but it follows the idea that you always have a commit in the works:

Working-copy-as-a-commit: Changes to files are recorded automatically as normal commits, and amended on every subsequent change. This "snapshot" design simplifies the user-facing data model (commits are the only visible object), simplifies internal algorithms, and completely subsumes features like Git's stashes or the index/staging-area.

It doesn't really address your specific concerns, but I prefer lazygit over pretty much any other way of interacting with git. A coworker keeps pushing me to switch to jujutsu but I'm too old to switch vcs conventions.

  1. IIRC the only high-level git commands that will remove untracked changes are clean, checkout, reset, and restore. You should be able to avoid this by not using them: every usage of checkout can be replaced by another command, and the others are specifically for discarding changes.
  2. Set push.autoSetupRemote to true. This will automatically create remote tracking branches on push. If you run push, pull, or fetch with no arguments they will automatically use your single origin.
  3. Use status --ignore-submodules=dirty. There's also the config option submodule.<name>.ignore=dirty, but that needs to be set for each submodule. You can make that status command an alias if you don't want to type it out every time.
  4. For existing files, you can do commit -- file1 file2 .... You still need to explicitly stage any newly created files, and it won't work during merges.
  5. In your git attributes file, put * merge=binary. If both branches have changes to a file, git will not modify the file, but will print an error saying there was a conflict and put it in the "unmerged paths" section of the status.

I have enjoyed using Sublime Merge. I would say that

Having again lost a day's work to git deciding to delete files I hadn't committed yet (nor will I ever commit to the master)

sounds like the best solution would be using .gitignore more. We're all hypocrites but IMO all your files should be either committed to git, or ignored.

I'm now looking for a git frontend that doesn't completely suck balls

I've been working with git for a long time, probably over a decade. Never seen a frontend that would replace CLI for me. And in fact I don't think there exists any frontend that would deliver on what you're asking for. It's just not how git is meant to work. You have the right to want to do different things, but I don't think any git frontends would deliver them to you, because they are mostly paving the walkways, not trying to make git look like not git.

For (1), git is usually pretty conservative about touching your files, unless you tell it not to. But yes, each command has a "force" flag which will completely ruin your day if you force something that wipes your files. I feel like asking for a tool that can't do that is like asking for a safe knife - the only safe one is a useless one, as it won't cut.

For (2) if you have one remote, you should be fine, if you have multiple ones, there some setup is requires, probably some custom scripting and hooks would help. Unfortunately, that part of git UI is not excellent - I have occasionally pushed and pulled from a wrong remote and it's confusing as hell.

For (3), by default that's how git treats it, if you're in the main repo, the submodule diffs would only be shown as "modified" without any details. If you need more stuff happening there, probably hooks could help.

For (4) that's not really how git is supposed to work, but if you never use "add" command and only use "commit" then it should be like that. Of course, some more advanced command may have implied "add" so it again can get confusing.

For (5) unfortunately I don't think it's possible, at least not with how git models the universe - it keeps the state in files themselves during merge process, so if you are in the middle of this process, that's what you'd get and I don't think any frontend can change that, unless it basically reimplements a lot of it in a different way.

I am not a git GUI guy, I've always used IDEs and the CLI. I've heard, however, that many high-caliber devs I know have historically paid for Kraken.

Some of the other things you demand here can and should be set up with pre-command hooks (outlawing other repos). Some can be accomplished by writing your own commands or overwriting the stock ones. I've written 3 for myself:

  • checkpush - single command to create a new branch on the remote and commit to it
  • fullprune - removes local branches that were deleted in the remote after squash merges
  • refresh - gets the latest commits from master and merges them into your current branch. If you squash, it's very reliable.

Making committing a single step (no staging) will be very simple this way.

I'm not a high-caliber dev, but I've used and will recommend gitkraken, especially for very large teams or very distributed projects; it's one of the few that handles heavily forked projects and related PRs well. That said, I don't know that that it does much to solve these specific issues.

I have a genetics problem I don't know if my math/analysis is right because I haven't had to do math or Punnett squares in approximately 20 years and I was always kinda shit at statistics. I nerd baited myself I guess because I've been thinking about this for a week:

My wife has blue eyes. I have brown eyes as did both my parents, but both my grandmothers had blue eyes. So I know my parents were both carriers for blue eyes. The chances of me also being a carrier is 2/3 then, so the chances of my first child having blue eyes is 1/3. Our oldest came out with blue eyes so now the chances of having a kid with blue eyes is 1/2 because that confirms I'm a carrier. But what if my oldest came out with brown eyes? What would be the chances for every subsequent child to have blue eyes if all their older siblings had brown eyes?

My initial guess was 2/3s of whatever the last probability was. So kid #2 would be 2/9, then #3 would be 4/27, but that seems to drop off way too quickly. Doesn't pass the smell test.

I thought maybe I have to evaluate the probability that I'm a carrier before bringing the wife into it. So that would mean if I had a brown eyed first born, my chances of being a carrier are the chances I had a blue eyed kid for #1 [without knowing my status yet], divided by the chances that I had a blue eyed kid for #1 [without knowing my status yet] plus the chances that I had a brown eyed kid [in the event that I'm not a carrier, which is 1/3 atm]. I reasoned this because having a brown eyed kid will lower the chances of subsequent blue eyed kids so it goes in the denominator. That way, it still maintains the possibility while making it subsequently less likely.

This would be (2/3 x 1/2)/[(2/3 x 1/2)+(1/3)] which is (1/3)/(2/3) which is 1/2, making the chances of us having a blue eyed kid for #2 now 1/4. Kids number 3 and then 4 would be 1/6 and 1/10 respectively. This seems way more reasonable, but my equations are just going on vibes here. I have no idea if its right so can any math people clue me in?

both my grandmothers had blue eyes. So I know my parents were both carriers for blue eyes

both my grandmothers had blue eyes. So I know my parents were both carriers for blue eyes.

Maybe. Kind of. There are recessive brown eyed genes. Two blue eyed parents can possibly have brown eyed children. The examples of Mendelian genetics used in high school tend to be extremely oversimplified. They really shouldn't use these examples without a huge warning that any practical application on humans may defy what you were taught. Reality tends to be very polygenic with a lot of codominance unlike the Punnett squares we learned in school. When we learned Punnett squares in middle school in the 90s, our teacher warned us this is a huge oversimplification that only works for carefully selected traits like pea plant stalk shape and not common traits in humans.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41433-021-01749-x.pdf

I am never not awed by the things Mottezins obsess about. My own mother had blue eyes, and so did my dad. My eyes are hazel. My high school biology teacher told me to check the milkman's eyes. My high school biology teacher was an ass.

Are you sure? The prior probability for a man who is confident of "his" kid's paternity to actually be a cuckold is 2%, and the eye thing must raise it by at least a few more percentage points. I'd check, if I were you.

Hell, I didn't even have any indication to doubt my lineage (my father and I look a lot alike), but one of the reasons I got a set of 23andMe kits for me and my parents is that I wanted to be certain (the other reason is that I wanted to know how white I was; it's a Hispanic thing). Turns out, he truly is my real dad; good to know.

I am sure, yes.

Seems like the kind of thing one would want to know. Do you have other objective biological indicia to support the assumption that your mother's husband is your father?

It was always incredibly obvious that my dad was my dad. It was like those, "don't talk to me or my son ever again" memes.

This is a standard application of Bayes's theorem. The probability that you are a carrier given that you have N consecutive children with brown eyes and zero with blue eyes is 1/(2N-1 + 1) so the probability that your next child will have blue eyes is 1/(2N+2). When N = 0, this agrees with your correct statement that the probability that the first child has blue eyes will be 1/3.

Bayes's theorem says that

P(Carrier|N children with brown eyes) = P(N chlidren with brown eyes | carrier) P(carrier)/P(N children with brown eyes).

You are correct that the a priori probability that you are a carrier is 2/3. Clearly P(N children with brown eyes | carrier) = 1/2N. To compute the probability that you have N children with brown eyes unconditionally, you need to take P(N children with brown eyes | Carrier) P(Carrier) + P(N children with brown eyes | Not Carrier)P(Not Carrier) = 1/2N * 2/3 + 1 * 1/3 = 1/3 * [(2N-1 + 1)/2N-1].

Hence Bayes's theorem gives

P(Carrier|N children with brown eyes) = [1/2N * 2/3]/[1/3 * [(2N-1+1)/2N-1]] = 1/(2N-1+1).

A nice visualization of this answer:

Draw three squares of equal area 1/3, two squares representing you being a carrier and one not. Then, carve out a 1/2N-fraction of the two carrier squares and color those blue (this represents the probability that your children all have brown eyes AND you are a carrier), and take the entire non-carrier square and color it brown (this represents the probability that your children all have brown eyes AND you are not a carrier). The probability that you are a carrier is the blue area divided by the blue + brown areas, which is [2/3 * 1/2N]/[2/3 * 1/2N + 1/3] = 1/(2N-1 + 1)

What are groypers? The discussion(s) in the CWR doesn't make much sense, if you don't already known what they are.

A kind of low-IQ antisemite.

Can you be more specific? Those two qualities are highly correlated. ;)

Nick Fuentes fans. Generally the ones who form online mobs. If you talk about Fuentes on Xitter you'll attract a big group of them at once.

Reporters have been trying to stretch the term by talking about "Groyper-adjacent views" but it's generally very narrow and specific.

And what distinguishes Fuentes from... whomever else is in whatever category he's in?

So the thing about Fuentes is that he's basically a pure streamer. He doesn't really write articles that people read, come up with original insights, or do any effective organization.

He came up doing political commentary on YouTube so he wasn't ever doing gaming streams or anything before that. Also he's been at it since 2017.

So he's basically in a category by himself, similar figures haven't built up an audience. It takes a huge amount of time dedicated to something that doesn't make much money and has huge downsides to get where Fuentes is.

My understanding is he's gotten bigger recently largely because of Netanyahu burning up so much good will towards Israel on the right.

I mean...?

The Groypers, or the Groyper Army, are a far-right group loosely defined as followers, fans, or associates of the American white nationalist political commentator, activist, and live streamer Nick Fuentes. They are named after a variant of Pepe the Frog, an Internet meme.

Basically, (mostly) young (mostly) men who are engaged with (whether seriously or as a LARP or meme) ideas on the identitarian right, in particular taking their cues from Fuentes. It's sometimes hard to tell whether they're being serious or just being incendiary for the lulz. Maybe they would say it is always or often both.

Is wikipedia trustworthy for culture war topics?

Part-time wiki editor, I know enough to quickly identify and avoid problem areas and stick mostly to dry, non-CW stuff. That being said, always check the Talk page, including its archives. It can sometimes be hard to locate the links to the archives if the one of the pages "guardians" is especially good with the system and knows how to obscure them. This is generally done by archving a Talk page that is no where close to the size that would actually require it to keep the page tidy, in order to push inconvenient comments and topics off the "front" talk page and bury it behind hard to find links. If you know what the URL format for archived pages it though you can just manually edit the URL. I've found a few articles where this is the only way to see them too. The reason to do this is two fold, first you have to establish if a page has 'guardians': personally motivated editors with a dog in the fight who use their familiarity with the processes and rules of wikipedia to maintain a partisan/biased presentation in the main article and crush anyone who tries to correct their deceptions. Its usually only one person but can be a team on some higher profile articles (the Mao article is a good example of a team of guardians). Once you have confirmed that a page is camped out by a "power-editor", the next step is see what they are hiding. Page reverts, suspicious locking, agressive archiving, high levels of vitriol to basic questions about the article are all good signs. Its very hard to actually delete things forever on wikipedia, so they have to hide and obscure the history of the article as best they can. See what they are hiding to see what is missing from the article. Once you get fluent with reading Talk pages and version histories, its one of the more entertaining parts of wikipedia imo, though it does real harm to the quality of their obstensible 'mission'.

Have you writtten an effort-post about this? If not, any interest in doing so?

“There's ways you can trust an enemy you can't always trust a friend. An enemy's never going to betray your trust.”

Wikipedia reliably reports one perspective on culture war topics. Figure out what that perspective is and what you gain by learning it, and you'll never be betrayed again.

I have literally never heard of a female groyper. Antisemitic women like Candace owens instead.

A Wikipedia article is not necessarily a good source for such a right-wing topic.

Generally true, but in this case I think it reflects the real state of affairs. See also on Groypers: https://roddreher.substack.com/p/what-i-saw-and-heard-in-washington

should note that Ross Douthat expressed some skepticism about Rod's approximation of the scope of the problem

Rod Dreher is one of the least trustworthy sources going, but that doesn't mean that groypers aren't loud and annoying.

I am not sure who to believe because in my area (very red state with a lot of Mormon and Evangelical presence) there are virtually no presence of groypers or groyper-adjacent propagandists, as far as I could see, but I am not sure who to believe about what happens in DC - and what happens in DC may have much more influence on the national politics.

I'd like to read Ross Douthat's view on that (link?) but I think it won't be able to convince me, on this stage, that groypers aren't a problem for Republicans. I may be very wrong on the size and importance of that problem, but it is the problem nevertheless. And it's not only a problem from my POV (which is obvious - I am not going to vote for a politician that genuinely considers me subhuman evil monster, whatever other position he could hold, I am only a human and have my limits) but from purely practical purpose - most of the normies won't flock to a platform that enables edgelords so far out of the consensus. At least unless they have something very attractive to offer, which groypers don't. And, also, if you want to bank all in on hating the Joos, there is enough competition to vote for on the other side, so you don't have any advantage even if you embrace that oldest of all low roads. Maybe if they ignore them enough they'd just wither away. Why couldn't we get lucky just this time?

Like everything else with Zoomers, this is all online. I’m not sure you would see a visible Groyper presence anywhere, no matter how much support there is.

Also the types of Christian conservatism pushed by actual God-fearing Christians (including Mormons) tend to be an antidote against some of the nuttier online stuff. The stereotypical right-idiotarian ticks the "Christian" box on the census but attends church at most three times a year.

The stereotypical right-idiotarian

I'll cop to being one of the people under discussion but this just seems like a boo-light to me. If you have actual specific arguments against right-identitarianism then make it by all means make them, but in the nicest possible way this seems like heat for the sake of it.

More comments

Thank you, I had been meaning to make a Sunday question about this as well.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on The Dawn of Everything. Not much progress.

The conservative imprint Encounter Books has released the first volume of James Hankins & Allen Guezlo’s Western Civ textbook The Golden Thread. It’s a warts-and-all history of Western civilization, designed to be attractive to both students and casual readers, that is nonetheless a rebuttal to oikophobic, postmodern academics who genuinely dislike the West. I’m only a couple hundred pages in but am very much enjoying it.

A Bridge Too Far.

Kind of slow going. Still in planning phase before the drops. It’s honest, perhaps to the point of polemic, about how poorly things are about to go. I feel like that actually detracts from the experience.

Castles of Steel told a similar bureaucratic, egotistical tragedy. But I remember it held off on assigning blame. Bridge jumps right in.

And no, I haven’t seen the whole movie.

I'm reading through Jonathan Franzen's Freedom right now and damn, I've been devouring it. I was worried given the critical acclaim that I'd hate it, but it's been extremely enjoyable so far. Reminiscing about my days in the midwest and the people I knew from my time there.

I was worried given the critical acclaim that I'd hate it, but it's been extremely enjoyable so far.

I had the same reaction. It was a great read.

About one-fifth of the way through Cryptonomicon. The setting and tone make me want to re-read Catch-22, which I last read over a decade ago.

Currently reading The Balkan Languages by Victor A. Friedman and Brian D. Joseph, from the Cambridge Language Surveys series.

Went back to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I tried to read it once and got to about the middle and abandoned it because I just couldn't make any sense out of it. On the second attempt, I kind of understand what he's talking about much more - not exactly agreeing or liking everything, but at least I now understand what's going on. Willing to see how far I get this time and if I can get to the end without losing it again.

Also after finishing Asimov's autobiography that I mentioned a while ago, I realized I never got to read the prequels to Foundation series, and read Prelude to Foundation. Which was pretty decent, but a bit underwhelming - maybe a curse of all prequels, since reading the Foundation series (a long, long time ago) was so exciting, and the prequels do what prequels usually do - describe things that happened before the important things happened. Also, the appearance of robots there was kinda meh - yeah, robots, so what, nothing really changed. So I got exactly what I should have expected, which wasn't bad, but also wasn't an absolute must read. I'll probably read Forward the Foundation next sometime soon.

If you still don't get on with Zen you could try Pirsig's Lila.

I'm currently reading the last book in the Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio. The subtextual Catholic apologia is threatening to lose its "sub" status, but it's still quite enjoyable if you're looking for something that straddles the sci-fi fantasy line in the same way as Dune.

Can you summarize the last couple of books? I'm curious what the deal with the "gods" is but didn't enjoy it enough to finish.

The evil gods are Lovecraftian monsters that may or may not be Angels who rebelled against future God.

Future God seems to be some kind of ultimate post-singularity intelligence that is impacting the past in order to guarantee its existence.

Thanks!

Threshold: Unbound Book 5 by Nicoli Gonnella.

Shogun by Clavell. Someone mentioned a new miniseries being created based on it, which I will never see (have never seen the original miniseries, either), but it reminded me of the book's existence. It seemed like every household I visited as a kid had a copy, and it was easy to spot because it was massive.

I'm half done. It's entertaining but far from high literature. The political parts are very well-written and he picked good surnames for the Japanese characters so it's easy to remember them all. No massive battles so far, but the little fights have not been well-written. Definitely his weak point. All the ways the two cultures view each other as horrific barbarians is enjoyable, but the Japanese overall come out looking better (so far).

The anti-Catholic animus is prominent and amusing. It's basically the Predator 2-arm meme between the Japanese and Protestants for hating the Catholics. I've read out-there criticism of the Jews that could be swapped for what everyone in the book thinks of the Jesuits.

I can't imagine it's all that historically accurate (and I don't mean his descriptions of castles or the messenger pigeons, which the wiki entry fixates on), so I mentally think about it as an early-1600s-Englishman traveling to the fantastic land of Nippon, where instead of elves, orcs, or dwarves, there are Nipponese creatures. Someone here mentioned wanting a high fantasy work set in 1600s Europe instead of a fictional medieval Europe where most fantasy tends to take place and I try to view it through that lens.

I loved Shogun, but I understood it completely differently after reading King Rat, Clavell's first and largely autobiographical novel. Viewing Shogun as the work of a man who lived through imprisonment by the Japanese, I think it's asking much more interesting literary questions. The book is about forgiveness, How can Blackthorne ever forgive the Japanese for boiling his crewman alive and pissing on him? Meaning how can Clavell forgive the Japanese for what he went through in Changi? And how, in turn, can the Japanese forgive the West for Hiroshima? Clavell, personally, experienced having his life saved by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, how can the Japanese forgive that?

Viewed as Clavell working through those questions psychologically, I think the book is much more interesting.

What's always disappointed me about Clavell is that I read Shogun first, and all his other books are only half as good by comparison.

Here is one for you - what will happen if the Federal Government straight out forbids mortgages longer than 15 years? This question was raised in my head after the consensus about how terrible the Trump idea about 50 year mortgage is. So what happens if we go in the other direction?

A lot of people discover they have no hope of ever buying a home, and probably elect some asshole that promises them to fix it quick and easy, usually by taking other people's money who don't deserve it anyway, and it'll get only worse from there.

A series of 5 year mortgages with 30, 25,20,15, 10, and 5 year amortization terms only differ from a 30 year mortgage if interest rates change dramatically or your credit changes (because you underwrite the series 6 times rather than once).

So while my sympathies are with Quantum's effects practically for many homeowners it could end up being very little change except more worrying that rates will change next time.

Single-family homes would get a lot smaller. Hard to tell what the effects on the financial system would be though.

The 30-year-mortgage is a tool for hiding the extent of government subsidization of the housing market. For all we know, it might be the only thing propping-up the economy. The buisiness model of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is offering "too-big-to-fail" government credit backstops to mortgage originators as a service.

"The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is because we got our fingers on the scale in their favor. I take my hand off, well then the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do, but they don't.

You need a higher credit score and a bigger down payment to qualify for one.

Which will lead to prices falling and stabilizing in another point.

"Prices falling" means massive amount of underwater mortgages - we all saw how much fun that is - and also massive budget problems in every place that relies on property tax income.

also massive budget problems in every place that relies on property tax income.

This part is 100% not true -- if your home price goes down so will your property taxes, but if everyone's home price goes down, the taxes will stay the same. Your town has a budget -- it determines the tax bill per dollar value, not the other way around.

In practice, that would just gum up the housing market and prices would ossify at a high level, because noone wants to take a loss.

And yet in all other markets people take losses all the time while still not wanting. And everyone that wants to sell their house can't afford to wait forever. They will break and probably sooner than later. Of course we will also have to keep private equity and some other over capitalized entities out of residential housing, but that is hardly a bad idea anyway.

And yet in all other markets people take losses all the time while still not wanting

Not the same "people". Most individuals that participate in stock market, for example, do that via relatively safe vehicles, or if they don't, it's commonly understood as being a very high-risk activity. Buying a house is understood as a part of being a responsible adult. If that results in massive losses, you'd have a lot of very angry people around who would demand the government to "do something about it" - and since we have a democracy, people usually get what they want, for better or (usually) for worse.

we will also have to keep private equity and some other over capitalized entities out of residential housing

Or just make local zoning less restrictive so that more housing can be built.

The local zoning codes are as they are not because of some random accident. They are such because usually people want them as they are - or are ok with them as they are. What would make them change their minds? If housing markets suddenly drops - e.g. because it became harder to get a mortgage - then they are unlikely to say "well, let's make it drop even further by increasing supply now!".

They are what they are because the voters are current homeowners not future homeowners.

I mean to be clear, zoning regulations are almost universally the way they are because people don’t pay attention to them. That’s true both in low-zoning regulation cities like Houston and high-zoning regulation cities.

That could be so, but to change them, you will need to make those people active and on your side. And to make homeowners actively on your side with the message "you home price just dropped, we will make it drop even further!" does not look like a winning strategy.

The problem with doing this is that then more housing is built and the Venn diagram of "reliably votes in municipal elections" and "actually wants more housing to be built" is two unconnected circles.

There is no need for an outright ban. In the absence of government subsidies, the 30-year mortgage is not "abolished"—it withers away. Quote from Hidden in Plain Sight chapter 4:

After the speculative boom of the late 1920s, in which mortgages with LTV (loan-to-value) ratios of 100 percent were not uncommon, the Great Depression produced excessively conservative lending policies by the banks that had been the primary sources of housing finance. At the time, there were no national markets for mortgages, many local and regional differences in mortgage terms, very low LTV ratios of 50 to 60 percent, and a homeownership rate of less than 44 percent. Mortgages tended to be relatively short-term, with bullet payments at the end. If a mortgage could not be refinanced at the end of its term—and many in the Depression could not be—it was foreclosed.

The US government's direct involvement in housing finance began in 1934 with the creation of the FHA (Federal Housing Administration), which had the authority to insure mortgages for up to 100 percent of the loan amount. By providing a government guarantee, the FHA was intended to overcome the reluctance of banks and others to make long-term mortgage loans. Over time, the FHA had a major role in standardizing mortgage terms, increasing acceptable LTV ratios to approximately 80 percent, and encouraging the development of mortgages that amortized over multiyear periods. In 1934, FHA-insured loans had a maximum LTV ratio of 80 percent and a maximum loan term of 20 years. A 1936 FHA underwriting manual shows that, in addition, FHA underwriters wanted to see a good or excellent credit record and a relatively low debt-to-income ratio that took into account the borrower's residual income (remaining income after taxes, household costs, and outstanding debts). Because of these strict underwriting standards, the FHA's record for the next twenty years—through the Great Depression, World War II, and the post-war housing boom—was exemplary: defaults on FHA mortgages remained well under 1 percent.

Of course. But the politicians who don't offer the voters some goodies also wither away and are replaced with ones that do. It's easy to discuss theory but when the question is "do you have a chance for your family to have a home or you'd need to move to some bumfuck place in the middle of nowhere to afford it, or rent increasingly shittier apartments for your whole life" - how many people would be disciplined enough to still maintain "the government should not have any role in it"? Sadly, not so many. The politicians successfully sold the nation the dream of "every family can own a house" (with some sad exceptions of course, but you don't want to be a sad exception, you want to be a normal family) and now it is expected to deliver on it, and if certain politicians don't, then others will replace them who do.

What is your favorite part about your parish, if you attend church?

Or your social group, if not!

Personally I love that I go to a Greek church and they all kiss each other on the cheek. I love the physical warmth there.

…Thé religion.

I don’t post about it to the motte, because this is an argument forum, and I would flame people replying to my posts with blasphemy. But I am religious for the religion. Having a natural fertility bubble is nice, Jesus is better.

kids everywhere. Had a friend visit from out of town today and he remarked how he had never seen this many young families in a Catholic church.

Like @FiveHourMarathon, my church is the one I grew up in and my children go to school in the same Catholic school attached to it. It’s very beautiful to really feel such a circle of life sense to the place

Yeah that’s a beautiful thing. I hope to give that to my future kids.

I like that it's active. We reach out to the wider community regularly. I live in a transient are, near many military installations do we have a healthy amount of turnover over the years but it's about Dunbar sized with the long time members.

This may sound shallow, but I value most that my church is mine. I was baptized there, took first communion. I disliked the architecture as too modern when I was young, now I admire it as an artifact of its time and fight to preserve it from those who want to make it more modern.

I like our pastor a lot. He's a young-ish (in his 30s) guy from Brazil, who really strives to care for all the people of our parish. He also doesn't make any pretensions to holiness - I've heard him talk at various points about the sins he has struggled with at times, and how if you were to talk to any of his friends from Brazil they would say it's a miracle that he joined the priesthood. He's the model of what a priest should be like imo, and I'm really grateful we have him.

My group of friends is very proactive an intentional about socialising. We all take turns to arrange/host get-togethers. Nobody is doing all the work.

A question mainly for coders/website designers etc:

What might be the reasons why a platform used for graphing and screening the stock market in a browser has got (according to ublock origin) 230 trackers/third party connections running? A very similar competing site has got 3 trackers on their site according to the same Firefox addon.

The main question is: did you pay for accessing that platform?

The main two reasons why trackers are used are actually same reason, but in two instances. It's behavioral tracking. Internally, it is used to see how the site performs, which functions are used and which are not, what links are clicked, which options are selected, etc. etc. This happens in every single project I've ever seen, and it can be (actually, will be) both client-side and server-side. The former is visible to you, the latter is usually not, but it's always there. If it's a paid product, it will be used to make more people pay more money for the product - and for the provider to spend less money on providing it (e.g. by optimizing it or shutting down options that aren't used). Some of it can also be outsourced, because not everybody is an expert in properly doing that, and there are shrink-wrap solutions that can do a lot of it for you.

If you didn't pay for it, then somebody else did. Usually via ads, which serve two functions - one obvious, exposing you to the information the advertiser wants you to see, another unobvious, collecting the same behavioral information, for the same purposes, but for third-party advertisers or marketers. This also has a lot of specialization, so ad platform may have its own tracker and also use a third-party tracking solution to track some aspect that their own tracking doesn't provide. Finding high level of third-party tracking on a private paid platform is usually a case for a beef with the provider - though some providers are big enough to pull it off (like ads on Netflix - what you gonna do, stop streaming?) I.e. if you have no alternative, then why not make a quick buck on the side?

That said, 230 sounds like a very high number - even with what I said, that many separate tracking items look excessive. Though if it counts tracking events then it's plausible - depending on how much things are being tracked and how diligent are the tracker developers on optimizing the performance (not always their best suit since their competitive advantage lies elsewhere) it certainly can get that far.

Yes, I have paid for accessing it. There's no sort of free access or tiered access. There are no visible ads for anything. The price they charge is higher than what the main competitor charges, but they do provide some data that is usually only included in a 3x more expensive product from a different competitor.

During a live youtube stream where the site in question was demonstrated, I thought I detected some shills in the chat, and feedback where a user claimed that the site is very buggy, was promptly deleted.

First, it's not clear what the ublock numbers are actually measuring. It could include things like ad-like elements removed from the page, or requests blocked that get automatically re-attempted. Maybe on one, it manages to block a whole script that would have done a bunch of stuff, earning a block count of 1, while on the other, the script runs but gets all of the things it tries to do blocked, leading to hundreds of block count entries.

I don't think anyone deliberately adds hundreds of trackers directly to a page. But it's plausible they have a single-digit number of moderately sketchy advertising and analytics services directly added which provide various overlapping services, each of which themselves pulls in several other tracking and analytics gadgets.

They might also have no skill or budget for proper website building tools, so they use sketchy no-code services for basic stuff like account management, accessibility, social media sharing, etc, which all insert their own tracking and analytics scripts using yet more third-party services. There's a whole ecosystem for this sort of thing that most people who would consider themselves coders never touch.

For a stock trading site specifically, they may not bother with visible ads. It's likely they have a lot of analytics for stuff like, which prompts and arrangement of controls etc makes it more likely users will actually create an account and execute a trade, what prompts for higher tiers make it more likely you'll actually upgrade, which of their own ads leads to users coming to the site, creating an account, and using it, where their users are and when they're active, that sort of thing. It's quite possible they also make extra from ad network tracking scripts, connecting your use of a stock trading site at all plus your activities there to your advertising identity for more valuable and better targeted ads elsewhere.

It's not a trading site. There's no broker integration. The platform is only viewable by those who have already paid for access.

What I'm a bit worried about is whether the company is a data broker 50/50 with actually providing the service they claim their business is all about.

First explanation greed or something even shadier. Second - just pulling crap dependencies without thinking (hello wordpress)

I figure they're double dipping on monetizing the user. Both with a pretty steep subscription cost (they have no free tier or anything) and also with intense data collection on user behavior, sold on to third parties. Stock traders must be a pretty juicy demographic to get detailed data from.

Money

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