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For those of you who play guitar, you have probably played a stratocaster at one point or another. Or maybe you haven't. The "stratocaster" shape (also called the S-body) is one of the most copied and cloned electric guitar designs in history. Back in 2009, Fender tried to trademark the body shape in the United states and failed. However, Fender recently went back on the offensive and filed a new suit in a German court.
The defendant did not show up, and it appears that Fender has won the German equivalent of a summary judgement.
Why is this in the culture war, you ask? Mostly because it represents another crack in the monolithic corporate-mass media culture that defined the United states from circa 1950 to 2010.
Leo Fender launched the Fender Electric Instrument Company in 1946, and created several iconic stringed instrument designs between 1950 and 1954, including the Telecaster guitar, Precision Bass, and Stratocaster guitar. The Stratocaster, in particular, set the musical world on fire due to its heavily contoured body, flexible pickup arrangement, and and tremolo bridge. Guitarists like Dick Dale, Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan took the instrument and created brand new, incredibly popular styles of music.
Things were going great for the strat, but the Fender Electric Instrument company wasn't having the best time. Leo Fender sold his interest in the company to the Columbia Records Distribution Corporation or CBS. Musicians derided instruments produced under the new ownership, and "pre-CBS" instruments developed a mystique that made them highly coveted prizes.
Eventually, CBS decided to unload the Fender brand, and a car dealership-turned private equity company called Servco Pacific Capital picked it up. This launched ushered in a cambrian explosion of product lines meant to ruthlessly segment the market into every possible price point. Around this time, Fender started running into a real problem. It turned out that other people could also make guitars. Japanese companies started undercutting Fender with clones of their most popular products. Some companies would attempt to double down on quality, but not Fender. Instead, they bought out the biggest clone company and rebranded them as their own "Squier" product line, turned to aggressive IP protection (securing a trademark on their headstock design in 1991), and engaged in a public marketing blitz to make sure that the musical community understood value of a Real Fender™ over an inferior clone. This worked pretty well for a while, but eventually Fender started seeing real competition from above and below. While they could buy out low-end competitors, all it did was incentivize more clone builders to spring up in countries across the world with cheap labor. Indonesia, Korea, Sri Lanka, and China all started cranking out Fender clones at a fraction of the prices Fender was charging. At the same time, "boutique" builders like Suhr started nibbling away at the high end. Fender started losing its mystique. When a $300 guitar with a $50 setup could rival a pre-CBS guitar for ergonomics and tone, enthusiastic amateurs stopped dreaming about the day that they could get a Real Fender™. Instead of shelling out for a Real Fender™, serious musicians (and rich guys) would go straight for the boutique builds instead.
The end result is that the Fender brand is a shadow of what it used to be, largely propped up by a shrinking-but-affluent market, while their leadership is either unwilling or unable to branch out.
The Stratocaster suit, in particular, offends me in a way that's somewhat hard to articulate. If you've ever built a slab-bodied instrument before, you start to realize that there are only so many ways to accomplish the task. If you want an instrument that's comfortable to play while sitting, you need to cut a contour that matches the curve of a person's thigh. If you want to play high notes, you need to cut material out below the neck. You need a projection above the neck to attach the strap at the instrument's balance point, but you don't want to add too much weight, which results in a "horn". You need room for electronics, and you probably want a contour at the top for comfort while playing as well. In the end, there are only a handful of designs that can flow from those requirements. Unless you're a psychopath like Ned Steinberger, whatever you build is probably going to end up looking similar to a strat.
Fender isn't the only company out there suffering from a similar malady. In fact, it's almost identical to the trajectory of the Harley Davidson corporation. Both became aspirational, iconic symbols of Americana. Both started banking on tradition and mystique, while trying and failing to hold back the tide by buying out competition (see: Buell). Both they eventually ended up trapped by their own early success.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I drive back and forth to band practice. I see far fewer motorcycles on the road than I did a decade ago. Musicians still exist, but the community of "instrument players" around me is going increasingly gray. Young people generally don't create music, or they stick to various flavors of electronica that they can produce on their own.
At the same time, the entire concept of "brand" has been eroding. In my youth, a brand generally traded on its reputation and relied on customer goodwill for its continued existence. Broadly speaking, 80s and 90s America trusted "brands". We hung out at the Dairy Queen. When somebody got a new guitar, we'd be excited to hear how that slick new Stratocaster sounded. A guy with a Harley was the coolest guy we knew. Craftsman tools were the last set you'd ever have to buy. Corporate consumer culture was mercantile, but at least it felt like you were getting something out of it.
In 2026, the American consumer/vendor relationship seems broken. Everything is owned by an increasingly small number of conglomerates who wear different skin suits to con suckers into buying from them, and not from those other guys, who are also them. It's starting to feel like a home-grown version of Chaebols, or Zaibatsu, and people are checking out.
This has has some real downstream effects. In a secular, essentially constructed nation like the US, the necessity of commerce and the prosperity that flows from it is one of the few universal experiences that citizens of this nation have. It feels like we're losing our lingua franca, however thin and materialistic it might be. At the same time, I can't tell what is cause and what is effect. Are the "lifestyle" companies all converging into a sleezy car dealer modality because it's efficient, or because Americans have stopped engaging with the idea of "lifestyle"? If it's the latter, is it because of a broader rejection of materialism, or because we're all fuckin' broke?
I don't think I have any answer to this, but if there's a moral to this story, maybe don't buy a Fender.
I have a half-baked theory on why brands fail like this. In theory, there's nothing wrong with a mass-market brand providing offerings for as much of the market as possible. I think the problem is that you have to commit to a certain minimum standard of quality for something you're willing to put your name on. For example, Specialized is one of the most respected bike brands in the US, and their line ranges from the Sirrus 1.0, a hybrid/commuter bike retailing at $699 to performance road bikes with carbon everything topping out at over $12,000. They are, along with Trek and Giant, one of the Big Three American bike companies, yet their actual market share is vanishingly small. Add up sales of the Big Three, plus close peers like Scott and Cannondale, plus boutique brands like Ibis, Pivot, and Revel, plus direct to consumer brands like Canyon and YT, plus imported brands, plus every other brand that I could possibly recommend that anyone buy, and it all totals up to about 30% of the total market. The remaining 70% are being sold at department stores like Wal-Mart and mass-market sporting goods stores like Dick's, and are being purchased by a non-discriminating public who doesn't want a lecture from a bike snob about why they need to spend $700 at minimum for what they essentially see as a children's toy.
In other words, while the reputable brands try to appeal to as many market segments as possible, they don't make junk. A Sirrus 1.0 isn't going to have the best components on it, but it's going to be reliable and will be worth maintaining. The department store bike is going to be built with extreme cost-cutting measures and is likely to malfunction relatively quickly, at which point the unsuspecting customer is faced with a repair bill that amounts to a significant percentage of the bikes cost and a warning from the mechanic that it's likely to fail again in short order. Yet the market for this stuff is huge, as most bikes (and guitars too, I imagine) are bought as part of a temporary enthusiasm that may or may not stick. A good bike is useless to someone who never rides it, much as a good guitar is useless to someone who doesn't know how to play it. It would be really easy for a reputable bike brand to stretch the bottom of their line to include junk that's sold at sporting goods stores and purchased by an ill-informed public who believes they're getting a better value than some no-name brand because they "heard Trek was good".
The reason why they don't do this is because when you get into extreme cost cutting territory, the profit margins become razor thin. This isn't a problem if the business model of the entire brand revolves around thin margins, but the bike companies are currently structured to be able to make money on well-heeled enthusiasts dropping several thousand dollars on higher margin items. If this customer base stops trusting the brand because they see it when they go grocery shopping, it turns into a race to the bottom where low-end sales become increasingly central to their business. This is basically what happened with GT and Diamondback, two reputable brands that got sold and the new owners tried to stretch into the low end. Those in the know knew that they still made good bikes, but new riders who instinctively knew that department store brands were junk didn't even consider them when looking to make their first serious purchase, and the retailers who carried the low-end models didn't carry the high-end ones, making them hard to find. I found this out myself when I was considering a GT that got good reviews. GT was sold at Dick's, but of course not that one, but they couldn't even order one for me, because big box stores don't operate like bike shops. I'd have to go to a GT authorized dealer to buy one, but of course there weren't any around me, because what independent bike shop owner in their right mind would try to compete with Dick's?
I think whether a brand is susceptible to this depends on which end of the market existed first. Prior to the 1970s, bikes were considered children's toys in the United States, and there wasn't much call for domestic companies to produce high-end models. When this market emerged in the 1970s, companies like Trek and Specialized filled the gap in the high end of the market, and while they would eventually grow to a wide range of models at different price points, they knew they never had a chance of competing with the Schwinns and Huffys of the world so they didn't try. Electric guitars were in the opposite situation; musical instruments were always known for being expensive, and in the early 1950s the few manufacturers making electric guitars were making them for the higher end of the market and thus able to charge prices commensurate with their quality. When rock took off in the 1960s and every kid wanted a guitar under the Christmas tree, CBS had to deal with the reality that most parents would balk at the cost of an instrument the kid would get frustrated with in a couple months, and their parents would choose some budget brand. It's easy to say in retrospect that they shouldn't have cut corners, but it's hard to make that decision in 1967 when sales are exploding and the bean counters at headquarters tell you you'll sell 10,000 more units next year f you can knock $20 off the price tag. And then 20 years later the older, good versions of your product have become iconic and the product practically markets itself, except you aren't going to sell that many models similar to the one Hendrix had if they all cost $3,000.
By the same token, they don't want to completely deprecate the brand, so they allowed the situation to become ridiculous. By all rights, Fender should offer their flagship Stratocaster and similar iconic models like the Telecaster in one mid- or high-range base model with 4 or 5 upgraded price points. Say the Stratocaster 100, which retails for $1800, up to the 400, which retails for $2400, or something along those lines. Or better yet, just sell one Srat for $2400 and be done with it. If they want to sell less expensive models then come up with model names and use those, with similar price points. And don't sell any junk; you aren't competing with the guitars Estaban sells on TV, so don't try. Instead they offer 94 models (literally) of Stratocaster ranging in price from a $250 Squier up to a $3500 Jeff Beck 1965 Signature Edition or whatever, and you can't tell which Stratocasters are good and which ones are bad based on the sub-models alone unless you really know guitars, and then they make things even more confusing by changing specs year by year so that you need to also look at the spec sheets to know that this year's version is selling at the same price as last year's but has inferior electronics, or something along those lines. It's just an example of doing things that make sense in the short term but metastasize into something unmanageable when compounded over several decades.
An important factor here is that most of those bikes are being bought for kids who are expected to grow enough to need a new one in a few years anyway. It's the same reason you don't buy them expensive formal clothing they'll wear maybe twice before outgrowing it. Investing in quality might have made sense when you had a pack of 8, and could expect the same size bike to service 3-5 kids, but if Modern Couple has a boy and a girl and lives 500 miles from any potential younger cousins, then that's that.
Also for formal clothing the relative cost of tailoring/adjustment versus buying a new item has skyrocketed versus what it would have been a century ago.
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The weird thing is they had this figured out in the 2000s. You could get an American Strat, a Mexican/Japanese Strat, or a Squier if you were ultra cheap. And the second tier Strats weren't crappy! I have a Mexican Strat from 2003, which cost $500 at the time (so more like $900 today), so it was pretty reasonable in price, and is honestly a nice guitar. It might not be as nice as the American models were, but it's still a good instrument that can last you a long time (I mean, it's going strong for me 23 years later).
Then you look today, and I honestly have no idea what kind of guitar I would get from Fender if I was in the mood to upgrade. There was no need to add more models until a casual purchaser has no hope of figuring out what the product line is all about. They had a pretty good system, and then trashed it for... no reason that I can tell.
At least on the bass guitar side, things have really changed at the lower price points. It used to be that a $300 bass was barely useable. These days, the advent of CNC machining and better QA means that a $300 bass today is probably nicer than a bass that cost $800 back in the 90s. If you're willing to replace the tuners and pickups, it'll compare favorably to an older MIA model.
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Related to my thoughts on Private Equity buying out local businesses, particularly those with lengthy presence in a community.
On the one hand you could chalk this up to just inevitable outcome of Capitalism where all goodwill, consumer surplus, and 'brand loyalty' is converted into shareholder value whenever possible.
I think its not inevitable, but just as in nature, any excess calories will invite predators, scavengers, or parasites to 'restore equilibrium.' "Oh boy, people will pay a bit of premium on this particular brand to gain status/ensure functionality/avoid copycats. Let's see how much money we can pump them for before they balk."
I kind of disagree that "the entire concept of 'brand' has been eroding."
Its starting to appear like the brand is now the only factor that matters, when the individual consumer is not independently able to judge the quality of their products.
One of the more stark examples is the apparent widespread, entrenched preference for the iPhone over any competitor, even though the average smartphones are almost identical in capabilities these days. The higher end Samsungs are usually better than the iPhone in terms of cutting-edge tech. But Apple has a TON of lock-in and goodwill purchased during Steve Jobs' tenure, and current execs seem competent at maintaining that edge. (Yes, I know Apple software itself has some real advantages over Android).
It feels like MBA-types are very keen about recognizing a brand-name that has a positive reputation (even or perhaps ESPECIALLY if the brand is all they have, they don't own any manufacturing capacity), and then 'rug-pulling' the fans/aficianados who 'bought in' while it was on the rise to squeeze a burst of cash from them even while removing those factors/features they most loved about the product itself.
This is perhaps most annoying to me because I think 'brand loyalty' is mostly a good thing insofar as there's an 'implicit' contract that the company will keep its products of generally the same sort of quality and, one hopes, pricing as they've been, absent some external forces acting upon them and the customers are able to buy said products without having to do extra research to know what they're getting. And usually don't have to worry about the customer service because the company knows repeat business will come so keeping satisfaction high is prioritized.
When the company changes ownership and management, they usually go right about breaking that implicit contract (ADMITTED that there is no legally enforceable cause of action here!) but are happy to coast off customers' belief that little has changed, and certainly won't ever explain that they're cutting corners to save costs.
Fender is notorious for this. They tend to reshuffle their product lines every year, and this inevitably results in a product line disappearing, only for a new product line with a nearly identical name appearing one quality tier down. It's reached the point where people are starting to catch on, because a lot of buyers on the used market are demanding a manufacturing date now.
One pet peeve I have, which is bad enough that if it occurs, I will usually write off a particular brand, is making small updates to a given product line, maybe not even enough to render them 'incompatible,' but now its got a different product ID, slightly different parts here and there, and shows up as a different item on Amazon, whilst filling the exact same product/price niche.
Even worse when it means that you either don't sell parts for the old model or, fairly often, the old parts are now prohibitively expensive so repair becomes less appealing than replace.
These days you can almost always get around that factor by going and buying a cloned part made in china, but I dislike that since now you're REALLY eating some risk on quality control.
Look, I want you to be trying to innovate and improve the product, and sometimes I buy a replacement and think "why yes, this is a meaningful improvement over the previous version." I just want a certain amount of transparency when that's been done. Software generally does this the right way with versioning.
i just UTTERLY DESPISE when a company intentionally adds to my 'mental overhead' in hopes of confusing me into making a purchase I might not make if given consideration. You're making me think harder about the value I'm getting in hopes that I will not want to bother with the effort and will coast on autopilot.
Meanwhile, a big reason I'm loyal to your product AT ALL is because I'm able to buy it on autopilot and generally won't regret the decision later. I reserve my mental energy for important decisions, don't have me waste it on figuring out if your company's headphones are still up to snuff! (one such 'important' decision is whether to trust your brand or not. And if I decide not, then I flip the switch and leave, and it takes much less energy to leave that switch off than to consider if I should flip it on again).
"Hey we changed the design of our packaging for [reasons], don't bother reading the size/weight to see if we reduced the amount you're getting." Then you see they've shaved a couple ounces of product out and you have to do the mental math to see how the price per ounce or what-have you compares to other options... again.
AI actually makes it WAY EASIER to spot and avoid this practice. Literally just ask it to figure out how the product has changed from generation to generation, compare prices over time and between brands, and if needed see if the brand has changed ownership anytime recently.
I share your despisement for that.
Breyer's got me once years ago with some frozen dairy dessert next to their ice cream. That was the last time I bought anything from them. Now it's just store brand 4 ingredient (plus flavors) ice cream that I check the ingredients on each time.
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I will believe this is about defense against taxation and antitrust judgments, and not capitalistic hypercompetition, until someone gives me sufficient evidence my priors are mistaken.
Elaborate?
While private equity is often seen merely as predation of slack time / redundancy in a business, I see it as an attempt to find profitable business models in the face of blatant anti-business sentiments in governance.
“See?” the PE-bought biz says, “We’re no Randian exceptional beings trying to make the world better. No need to try to kill us, we’re already dead inside.”
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Another Intellectual Property disaster:
For the unfortunate fellows and fellas who aren't following the Italian brainrot universe, Tung Tung Tung Sahur is having legal issues (Fall Guys video for those illiterate or with short attention spans). Not one, but two companies are claiming to own the titular character, suing everyone including each other.
What's surprising about this case (to people who still believe in IP's integrity), neither company owns Mr. Sahur: AI-generated works are public domain in most countries including Indonesia (a draft regulation to change this has been proposed but not yet accepted), as they should be, in part because they themselves are trained on others' copyrighted data.
Yet the court case is delayed until October. In the meantime, he has been removed from the Roblox game Steal a Brainrot, played by over 25 million children and pedophiles (won't somebody think of the pedophiles?) This is no small drama: the game is so popular apparently a movie is being made about it, and by the time this is resolved, it may be too late to include him in the cast.
I just don't know how anyone can look at this and not feel...utterly dejected by the state of society. Copyright is a scourge, abused by large corporations and not actually benefiting small creators, and should be severely curtailed if not fully eliminated.
Court documents
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This sounds suspicious to me. I have no idea about Indonesia, but the usual criterion for copyright is creativity, not the tool. If you type a long prompt and then iterate and select after many generations, then it should be enough human creativity in there. And how the model creator got the training data should have no bearing on this. As long as it's not regurgitating a particular copyright protected character or image in that specific output, there should be no problem.
You didn't specify why any of these actors are claiming they own this character. That seems quite a big omission. If one of them is the original individual who used AI to make this character's image, then I'm actually on their side. It is a creative act to specify this nontrivial character form and presumably the prompt wasn't two or three words and they probably didn't pick the very first result.
At least in the United States, the specific rule is :
I don't know how well that will stand up to legal challenge. It's very rare to just give a prompt and get back a complex output. There's a lot of design, iteration, and thought.
Right. Generally, as I understand, copyright is very generous (when no AI is involved), in the sense that as long as you exercise the slightest creativity, they don't question stuff like "but you just randomly threw a pile of trash on the floor, that's not a sculpture" or "you just put a red square on white background, that's just geometry, not an art piece" etc. because that would kill a lot of contemporary "what even is art anyway" type of art.
So it seems like if you use a ControlNet, or any similar guidance, you're good for sure. But
Now if the user types "change the rhyme pattern to ... and make the lines shorter" and gets another poem fitting this requirement. Under the historical broad interpretation of "creativity" (which doesn't have to be impressive or painstakingly high effort), this would have to count as enough creative input I think.
Same with images. Today's AI chat apps can do iterative work on images that wasn't available in 2023 (when the doc was written), you could just re-generate with the same or a different prompt, but real editing wasn't possible. Today, you can tell ChatGPT what to change, and it will only change that part and keep the rest the same (as much as it can). So if you do 3 such iterations, each time specifically naming an aspect you want changed, that has to be enough... And what about selection? Is that exercise of creative judgment enough? Generate 10 Shakespeares and pick the one you like best? Based on the above text, I guess no. But what if you change your prompt inbetween?
I highly doubt the guy just sat down to the computer, typed out the perfect prompt for Tung Tung Sahur and got an image and he ran with that. He likely experimented with lots of weird and absurd character ideas and this one came out the funniest and he wrote and rewrote that prompt to make it maximally funny. It's absurd to deny him authorship for this.
That would be broadly my suspicion as well, with the caveat that the government and AI lobbyists may decide that the wind is blowing the wrong way and that some concessions on copyright may be needed to forestall serious rebellion/challenges to the training of AI as a whole.
Sorry I don't understand the polarity of which way you think it will go. You mean anti-AI people will get it their way and govt and pro-AI people will retreat, and refuse to grant "authorship" to AI-generated stuff, where AI-generated is broadly interpreted? Because that takes away the commercial value of AI art, hence AI art-making won't be profitable and hence not done, and hence human artists can keep making money?
Basically, yes. A kind of:
'We acknowledge that our system is a reconstituted blend of totally-not-copyrighted material, and as such we acknowledge that we should not be able to re-claim copyright on the output of that material. You can use our systems to do useful things and make SaaS but not to create XYZ products in competition with humans.'
Obviously this would be a big step down but being a commodity server is better than being bankrupted.
I don't think there's a high chance of this - I agree with you that the most likely scenario is that human input from a sophisticated prompter is deemed sufficient to gain copyright.
That said, I know a LOT of young people who are upset about AI and there's a chance that just explodes at some point.
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In its complaint, Spyder Games quotes a 2023 statement of policy from the US Copyright Office.
This statement remains in force, though the Copyright Office is continuing to investigate the topic.
Spyder Games alleges in its complaint that the characters are AI-generated, but Mementum Lab actually denies this allegation in its amended counterclaim.
On page 9 of the amended counterclaim begins a five-paragraph section with the title "Defendant’s Creators Use an Involved, Artistic Process to Create Some of the Most Iconic Brainrot Characters, including Tung Tung Sahur", in which AI is not mentioned at all.
This seems useful for the case of a particular image, but I believe copyright extends to the full fictional character, like I can't draw e.g. Lion King characters even in novel settings and poses and make a product out of it, and this is not just due to trademarks, as I understand.
Now in that case, we'd need to know the very first original brainrot images. If the person created one version without AI, then also prompted some AIs to make the character, that presumably doesn't reset the copyright. Like, if I describe Simba's appearance to AI and it draws me a Lion, it doesn't mean it's now public domain. Of course one would have to prove there was a non AI version.
But if the fictional characters can be copyrighted as such, not specific renditions of them, then does the specific execution of a particular depiction really matter? The creativity is in the invention of the character itself.
What are the traditional elements, when it comes to the design of a character in the abstract, as opposed to the creation of a particular image as artwork?
(It's also a question what is with 3D renderers like Blender, which use complex shaders to make the final image. Is that traditional? How about photoshop and generative content fill? Does it have to involve mouse movements that move on top of the image? Or does it have to be deterministically predictable what it will look like if I click a button labeled "Render" as opposed to "Generate"? What's up with procedurally generated textures and terrains?)
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Policy statements are not dispositive. Cite the statute.
The statement mostly cites court decisions in support.
Modern AI systems are so far beyond anything we have seen before that I would treat these court opinions as advisory.
I want this to be the case that makes it to the Supreme Court. Meme magic is real.
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Mementum is partnered with the individual who created him, but they’re a corporation based in France. Judging by that and their name, they buy others’ fads to make money, for example by suing others for using them without a license.
There’s a valid argument that Tung Tung Tung Sahur shouldn’t be in any game without permission, and maybe this is less popular, but I still disagree. Steal a Brainrot doesn’t just include Mr. Sahur or make him the focus, he’s one of many characters. I’d rather see more remixes and compilation games like Super Smash Bros without insane corporate backing and licenses. If Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s creator was broke I’d want him to get some revenue from somewhere, but I believe he’s making more than enough from the character’s likeness already, why does he need more?
Actually, I’ll accept if Steal a Brainrot can’t make money off Mr. Sahur’s likeness, by for example selling him specifically. But at least any free media should be allowed to include him without being DMCAd.
I believe Roblox has made enough money already, why do they need more?
It’s not only Roblox but mainly Spyder Games. However I agree: I’ll accept if there’s a different way to fund them that digital games shouldn’t have copyright either, and I already believe Spyder Games shouldn’t be allowed to DMCA Steal a Brainrot copycats.
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I’m somewhat confused by all this, but especially by the last screenshot, which shows that the plaintiffs are saying no one owns AI generated characters and are seeking a court order saying Momentum does not own them. This seems inconsistent with the narrative that Momentum is being sued because those other companies are saying they own the characters? What is actually happening?
Mementum (partnered with Tung Tung Tung Sahur’s creator) is threatening to sue Spyder Games (owner of Steal a Brainrot). Spyder Games is counter-suing Mementum to get official permission to use him, and the screenshot is from that. Spyder Games is simultaneously filing takedowns of Steal a Brainrot copycats.
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Interesting case study, thank you for explaining it for people who know little about guitars.
As far as niche hobbyist supplies, artist's paint companies have mostly maintained their brand identities, which I appreciate. Professional paints sometimes contain toxic substances, and so have to disclose the chemical makeup of their pigments, for instance this high end red paint uses, in place of a cadmium compound, "PY216-Rutile Tin Zinc, PR254-Pyrrole Red, and PV19-Quinacridone Violet", and lists information about each pigment. I like this system, it is very useful! I am happy that these paints are treated as potentially hazardous chemicals and clearly labeled by the serious brands.
The paint brands are differentiated primarily by their consistency and pigment load, with some creamier or stickier, with higher or lower tinting strength, with different preferences held by different artists, depending on what they're trying to do. It looks like the medium mixtures are proprietary, but the pigments are not.
Also, if you want a very specific oil pastel experience, you should still get the Sennelier's version.
I don't know if it matters very much, in that space, whether all the paint companies are ultimately owned by the same overarching corporation or not, as long as they make consistent products. But maybe there's some entertaining IP drama on behind the scenes.
Edit: I found it interesting to learn that glass casting brands are incompatible, they crack if you mix them, so glass artists have to go all in on one company and don't buy anything from the other. As I recall the main US art glass companies are located in New Mexico and Oregon, but the teacher I was learning from had moved from Oregon to New Mexico and brought her supplies, so she couldn't go to the excellent local glass store for supplies, she has to order them from another state.
Do you know why the different brands are incompatible? Is it a chemical thing?
Yes, it's chemistry based, I don't think they're antagonistic, but just developed and tested their glasses separately. Their website says they have different expansion and contraction rates when heated and cooled. Not being a materials science person, I don't really understand the reasoning behind it, something about different flux ratios and other chemical differences.
Ceramic glazes are also developed to heat at different temperatures, and in the 20th Century were classified into "cones" that droop at a certain point of heat absorption, so that a mid fire potter might look for "cone 6" clay and glazes, whereas a low fire potter, firing about 400 (f) cooler, might look for cone 06, which is weird but at least predictable and the different temperatures can be easily sold in the same store.
Edit: I'm not aware of any potters here, but Coyote Clay Glazes are great fun! They create different colors and effects based on kiln, location, thickness, and other idiosyncratic things, and each piece is unique and beautiful. Next time I'm firing, I want to try their "Texas two step" series, which creates spots by one glaze breaking over another.
This is why I am member of the Borosilicate Master Race. This is what the american Pyrex were once made of. Now I think that only the Simax and Schott are left of the traditional manufacturers.
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There's a lifecycle produced by higher-level capitalization. You have a company, you build a reputation for quality, value, service, whatever. You grow this company into a major success. Then you die/retire/sell. New company comes in, they want to make money off your reputation. They cut whatever it was that made your product successful, first a bit, then a lot. They switch suppliers, use inferior materials, drive out all the old skilled labor, outsource, etc.
The old reputation is sticky. If your product isn't something people buy with great regularity, it may take decades or even centuries for that reputation to fall to its proper place. My relative expertise here is firearms companies. Colt, for instance, the most iconic American gun brand. They haven't made a profitable new firearm since the 1930s, and the old company went under in teh 1980s, even with the military contracts. It's a brand name owned by a series of shell corporations that produces garbage knock-offs of old Colt designs that retards think is still Sam Colt's own shop. Anyone who knows guns knows Colts suck and have for a century. And yet every month you'll see the newest model Colt in every gun magazine, dipshits in trailer parks the nation over will jerk off in their basketball shorts over it, and even bigger dipshits will actually buy them.
Firearms are terrible for that kind of thing. Colt, Springfield armory, Kimber, the list goes on and on.
It really seems like "expensive hobby" brands are the worst offenders.
Eh, I mean look at Remington and Winchester. Both being run as budget brands and getting hosed by Savage.
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Applies to countries as much as it does to products. Europe has been declining since at least the end of WWII and definitely since Suez but its reputation still allows it to go around collecting rents because people (rightly or wrongly) want to suck off on the residual prestige (I'm personally guilty of this as well).
There's many layers of institutional power that don't just disappear, even after GDP dips and direct international influence wanes. Over time these erode in a failing society, but parts may last a long time. As an example, English being the lingua franca of the world isn't because Britain is so powerful right at this moment, but the fact that it is gives Britain more power than it would otherwise. Britain will always have an outsize influence through the language alone as long as this is the case.
European societies are broadly in a bad way compared to their recent relative status, but they remain advanced societies with great technical expertise and ability to organize along national lines. Most of them remain nations in a way nothing on the African continent or much of asia can possibly match. Nothing is irreparable, but it remains to be seen if their elites will change course by some means and hold to that policy. I'm guessing the answers will be uneven at best. Europe will likely be dominated by the first large country to fix their current malaise for some time.
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I mean define "decline" and Europe? Different countries peaked at different times. Europe in the 90s and 2000s didn't look like a decline story.
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Long ago I read website that broke down how Craftsman tools degraded in quality. The example being an old and a new adjustable wrench. By every criteria the old one was great and the new one a minimum viable product. So I'd say yes, but mostly because the brands abandoned us.
If you ever find that link again, I'd love to see it
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This reminds me of Jacobs' concept of 'handmind'. The physical business of manipulating an instrument introduces resistance and friction, and perhaps also opportunity, that is not necessarily accessible otherwise.
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In North America (the US and Canada), both Canada Dry and Schweppes are owned by the same company: Keurig Dr Pepper.
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This seems like a strange conclusion when above you write that Fender can't whack all the moles undercutting them from the bottom and is powerless to do anything about those taking over the top of the market. It's difficult to say how profitable Fender is since it's private but given that it keeps changing hands it's hard to imagine it's a flourishing business. Seems like the market is giving them their just desserts, and hopefully this copyright thing won't undermine that. What's the problem here?
You're not exactly wrong, but I'm somewhat concerned about what kind of damage they can do on the way down. They've been doing a lot of acquisitions.
Here's a list of what I can remember off the top of my head.
They're pretty voracious.
I don't know anything about guitars so I'll have to take your word for it. But ultimately if there's so many companies to acquire and they still are being undercut it seems like the cost to entry to this field are not exactly massive and the bigger concern is regulation making stratocaster shaped guitars illegal rather than Fender somehow buying out all the competition. A fat monopolist with no moat is extremely attractive prey.
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We've talked about Anthony Bourdain here a few times.
Here's this travel writer's account of following in his footsteps and after Bourdain finally meets with her and validates her, she has a bit of an identity crisis when she realizes he's a sad loser.
Firstly, being a travel journalist is not as glamorous as it looks, having tossed her cookies after eating token cooked goat brain and local fruit
But also, at some point she comes across an episode where Bourdain interviews Iggy Pop, the godfather of punk and his personal idol, and finds that an older and more mellow Iggy had come there from the gym, orders one drink, has the shrimp. Talks about how love and relationships are what sustain him now. It seems to crush Bourdain, who realizes the guy who invented live fast die young was just putting on an act, not leaving an instruction manual to be taken seriously.
Bourdain, who grappled with drug addiction and depression, kills himself at 61 during a bout of unrequited love.
I can't help but make the connection that the punk ethos and the travel-slutting ethos of taking the highs and the peaks and dodging the responsibilities and commitments, they might be a sign of enlightenment, or making the best of a cold uncaring world where nothing means anything, but probably it's an appealing outlet to the mentally ill and we should be skeptical of attempting to romanticize this kind of transience.
Quote our local @coffee_enjoyer back in 2024:
I am mostly unable to convince people in the progressive sphere that Bourdain's mental illness had anything to do with his lifestyle. Even Claude refuses to admit it. And adding the detail and sober account from this travel writer is met with the similar rejection. Mental illness just happens to people and living like a transient and dropping out of society and rejecting connection is just like, a totally valid way to live and says nothing about the mental state of the people living it, don'tchaknow? I just don't buy it, I guess.
I enjoyed travel slutting (and by this I mean extended tourism) and while I never identified with punk, for awhile I did the psychedelic Timothy Leary adjacent thing of trying to take drugs with numbers in their name and break out of default living, but ... it's kind of hard. And neither of these things are all that fulfilling at length. I'm not sure what's going through the heads of people who say they could just happily tour Europe or drop acid for forever. The fact that Bourdain is not a fringe figure but like a progressive hero meant to be celebrated and emulated is wild.
Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying your sweetheart and having 2.3 kids and buying the house with a white picket fence and your thrills are drinking a beer, smoking a brisket and giving your wife a creampie every Saturday, but after seeing friends die so young or losing their minds or never really being able to hold a marriage together, to say nothing of the grim meathook reality I've seen traveling the third world, that lame conformist life looks more like a precious gift and I feel sorry for people who get conned into rejecting it.
Even though Bourdain was the reluctant champion of wannabe vagabonds everywhere, I don't think this travel writer's Come to Jesus moment makes him a loser. It's no secret that he struggled mentally and his lifestyle offered a soothing escape, but after becoming close with a few bohemians over the years I think their brains are just wired different. There's less overthinking and more acting on impulse and desire. They are well traveled, and often end up spending large chunks of time in other places. They take on projects related to food or crafting much easier than I do, and they spend more time with people or pursuing their interests like thrifiting, gardening, or random stuff around the city. It seems to me that they are just following their natural inclinations.
It is of course, a double-edged sword. They aren't as financially stable, and with the risks they take and the analysis they forgo, they make mistakes, get burned, and suffer the consequences. But they are always experiencing and learning. They seem more grounded in lifestyle and conversation than your typical type-a desk-sitter. I'm currently trying to take some of their mentality into my own thinking so that I can expand my life experience.
It may be attractive to limit Bourdain to a mentally-ill escapist, and reduce his followers to misguided idealists who run from their problems and look down on the well-adjusted, but as always, the picture is much more nuanced than that. I'm starting to notice that a lot of online discourse is just p-hacking. Ideas are getting tortured down into their simplest form so that they can be packaged neatly and shipped to their loyal customers.
I'm disappointed, if not surprised, that it took 15 hours for this comment to appear. The blatant attempt at pathologising anyone who doesn't live a straight-and-narrow life is frustrating and I think inaccurate. There has always been a place in society for transients; in premodern times they would have been your merchants and traders and nomads, and the notion that nobody's psychology could be suited for that and it has to be motivated by some kind of deep spiritual brokenness is impressively provincial. Hell, Diogenes was a semi-revered figure in ancient Greece, and all the way on the other end of the world there was a prominent and respected hermit tradition in ancient China (which actually continues to this day), vagabondism has held sway for a long time.
I think there is a good point hidden somewhere in that post about the vaunting of alternative lifestyles that in practice won't be suitable for the majority of the population and the demonisation of lifestyles that do work for the majority of the population such as the supposedly "conformist" life so lambasted by the counterculture of the 70s (who were just reflexively in favour of anything hoe-scaring), and if the post had just made that argument I would consider that a fair enough point. But it loses the plot once OP tries to imply that nobody could ever be happy living transiently, using the case study of Anthony Bourdain as if it's necessarily the norm for people who do choose to live that way. It's very possible that some of the people who do so are trying to run from something, and it's also very possible that many of the people who do this just possess outlier levels of openness to experience and aren't "broken" in any meaningful sense except being weird. So much of the argument appears to almost be a definitional one - if you are not doing Normal Things then you are not normal and that indicates something wrong with you.
Also to add to the list of TheMotte cliches that this post appears to be attempting to speedrun through, there's that one obligatory throwaway line about the Third World. I have to say that my experiences in many third world countries in Asia have led me to conclude that much of the "third world" is badly miscategorised; it's a sloppy category error to lump them in with places mired in a horrific, almost Hobbesian state-of-nature, which I think represents a far smaller proportion of the world than most here appear to believe.
First time?
Do you think I'd piss on Ram Dass' grave too? Did I pick on Iggy Pop?
I pick on Bourdain because he's so widely celebrated and because I think it's misplaced. If you're going to be an advocate for the Hero's Journey, I require you to at least not die pathetically.
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I do think that a philosopher ought righty to be judged by his death. As Solon tells us, judge no man happy until his death. Similarly, we ought to judge no man wise unless we approve of his death. It seems relevant when discussing Foucault, and especially his work on human sexuality, that he dies of AIDS. The question of what one thinks of Socrates is mostly a question of what one thinks of the Hemlock, and of course there's Empedocles. Similarly, I admire David Foster Wallace's writing, but when people cite his philosophical insights from This is Water
I think it's relevant to note that DFW hanged himself. Is that kind of radical empathy perhaps beautiful and perhaps true and perhaps admirable? Sure. But can you live with it? DFW couldn't, could he? Does this imply that this kind of effort to constantly consider the circumstances of everyone around you might be overwhelming, that in fact we need to degrade others to meaningless NPCs in order to survive the world we live in? Sure it would be nice to live in a world where we consider the circumstances of everyone in traffic with us and have empathy for them, but does that make living in a world with traffic impossible?
I think it's relevant to note that Bourdain hanged himself when considering his lifestyle and his life advice. I loved Kitchen Confidential, it's an upper-end beach read, and No Reservations was a great cable content show, a little higher brow than your typical cooking show but ultimately within the same format and the same relaxing emotional range.
But when one assesses the philosophical depth of his malattributed and oft-memed deepities, we should consider that Anthony Bourdain hanged himself, and that maybe that way of living doesn't actually work if it's most famous adherent wound up tying that knot. Willful suicide*, the negation of life, seems to undermine any idea of one knowing the way to the Good Life. And clearly there are a lot of people who still admire and seek to imitate Bourdain, when you consider that there's an active subreddit for him years after his autopsy. So it's relevant to talk about why he shouldn't be uncritically admired.
There's a flip side to this where people want to hate on Bourdain and say he wasn't that talented or that interesting, I've even seen accusations that he was a bad cook and a nepo baby in publishing, but I think that goes too far. He was a pretty good media celebrity, as they go. And I think there's something to enjoying oysters fresh off the beach. But we have to consider where it all ends up.
*I should note that the word "willful" is necessary, instrumental suicide like Socrates or other ancients choosing suicide as a particular form of death sentence, or the proverbial secret agent biting down on a cyanide molar to avoid torture, or a soldier jumping on a grenade, may meet the technical definition of self-killing, but they're rather different implications philosophically.
((As an aside, while I think it's valid to question someone's moral fiber or entire life philosophy as a result of their suicide, I don't think we should over-attribute someone's suicide to particular circumstances or the actions of other individuals. For every bad thing that happens to anyone that kills themselves, there are a dozen people who had the same thing happen and are still here. It's hardly common for an unfaithful model/actress gf to drive men to suicide. I knew people who killed themselves after divorce, but I know more people who didn't. I don't think you can really drive someone to suicide, some people kill themselves and some people don't in any given circumstance.))
Should we judge a book purely by its final page, a song by its last verse?
By their nature philosophers are not happy people and are more likely to die by their own hand. Happy, fulfilled people do not go around looking for meaning in life, they've already found it. That doesn't mean that there isn't value for others in what they found while out searching. People are not all cast from the same mould, no "one-size fits all" method of finding happiness and meaning exists.
Also I just have to add that I find this a bizarre line of thought, imagining someone finding a man's hanging body, shaking their head sadly as they mutter to themselves "If only he'd berated more cashiers".
Point out where I said we should judge philosophers only by their deaths.
I admire both Bourdain's and DFW's works, and would say I admire their life philosophies and think there is something to be drawn from them. I would also say that it's relevant, if not dispositive, to consider how they died when considering their advice on how to live.
This is an exceedingly common line of thought that goes back to at least Victor Hugo, that of the man so obsessed with moral purity with no outlet for his human vices and desires, who eventually snaps and does something evil or self destructive. This is just applying the same standard we apply to a puritan Christian to a liberal icon.
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"If only he'd been a little more selfish, a little less selfless, he would have been able to endure the world."
Talking about the suffering of cashiers brings to mind other words, though: thin skin.
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Great post. For context, I would just like to add that I also enjoyed reading Kitchen Confidential and also binge watched a bunch of No Reservations episodes and would do it again.
Exactly. One can enjoy the philosopher and find the philosophy interesting, but one must grapple with the death.
Another good illustrative example of a writer/philosopher who offed himself: Hemingway. There's so much to admire in the Hemingway Hero, but then you have to ask about the shotgun waiting at the end of the line. Honest conversations about Hemingway's vision of masculinity and life cannot ignore the suicide. I love Hemingway, but his life philosophy must be considered in that context.
Foucault is undoubtedly one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work on sexuality is seminal and must be grappled with. Ignoring him as a crank, dismissing him, is impossible if one is a philosopher. But one can't admire his work without asking questions about his death.
Lindyman actually posted on the same topic today:
I think Bourdain's work presents an interesting and coherent set of questions and attitudes about modern life and meaning. There's a reason his work is so good! But, you have to consider his life as a whole.
You could perhaps pin his father's prior and brother's later suicides on the same memes, but his sister's and granddaughter's later suicides probably weren't because of a malformed conception of their masculinity. There might be some genetic mental health factors and/or suicide contagion here too.
Sure, you're correct, I don't think it's good to pin anyone's suicide on anything in particular. Suicide seems to be caused mostly by some kind of outside-factor separate from life-story, probably genetic in some way.
But if mental health factors impact the decision to commit suicide, then they impact the whole work of the person. Mental health isn't well-modeled as a debuff in a video game that comes in and changes them, especially when we're talking genetics.
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"This is Water" has good practical value for organizing your thoughts against the tedious chore that is grocery shopping. It's worth reading for that reason, at least.
As far as its actual advice about taking control of your thoughts goes: it seems of dubious value for the average person (at least going off of myself and my own brain, where I strongly doubt I could successfully redirect my thinking processes intentionally in any direction over any long-lasting timescale).
However: you could argue that for the peculiar mind that is DFW (and perhaps others who go down that insane path that is becoming a writer), it might have helped him compared to the counterfactual where he didn't follow that advice, where maybe he would have otherwise killed himself sooner.
Does it though? What does "good practical value" mean here? It seems to mean something like, don't be angry and hate other people or reduce them to nothing. But isn't the practical value of philosophy living a good life, and at some level a happy life? Is one's life happier if one tries to imagine the internal narratives that make everyone act like the way they do?
I'd contend that no, in many cases it doesn't. That the human brain and spirit cannot contend with this kind of massive self-abnegation. That pursuing this ideal to extremes leaves human nature nowhere to go. To quote the great philosopher Sennett
Sometimes the world is better when you just dismiss people as NPCs or Chuds or whatever.
For me, my outlet for this is team sports. Fuck Dallas. I can tell you rationalizations for why I hate the Cowboys (and the Redskins and the Falcons and the Patriots, who are ontologically evil, and the Rams...no one likes us we don't care). But I can recognize that they are just rationalizations and there is no substantive difference between me and a Cowboys fan, my joy in an Eagles' victory is not of a higher moral order or priority than his in a Cowboys victory in any utilitarian sense. But I root for the birds anyway, and wear my Dallas Sucks t shirt to the stadium and boo. Because it feels good, it's an outlet for the atavistic tribalism that the human mind craves. There are few activities I look forward to more than lifting weights after a devastating Dallas Cowboys loss, and listening to the seethe on post-game Cowboys podcasts, hearing the pain in the fans voices when Dak Prescott bottles it. That's my pressure valve.
Hugo had it right, purity must end with Inspector Javert or with the Archdeacon Claude Frollo.
In my view, Infinite Jest is maybe the last great work of the Western Canon of Literature, but it is also in many ways the world's longest suicide note. DFW tried to understand everyone and sympathize with everyone and overlook no one, and he couldn't live with it.
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Have you tried it? I can well believe it's the way to go on net, but it's not like nobody has ever felt overpowered by quiet desperation on that path either.
I think the picket-fence life works better than the alternative for the vast majority of people, and that you should not gamble on being in the minority unless you have a very good reason to believe otherwise.
Good point. I'm feeling this one lately, though in terms socio-economic rather than romantic. Not that the romance is going all that well, mind you.
I've always been odd, first tried and failed to find an alternate way of life, then buckled down hard on trying to make it somewhat conventionally. And now, at the meridian of middle age, I suspect I'm meeting my limits. The conventional ways aren't working out. But there aren't any promising alternatives either.
I'll just let Comac McCarthy speak for me here.
I understand why you feel the latter way. If you don't mind my asking, why do you feel the socioeconomic path you've taken isn't working out for you?
A lot of the more eccentric socioeconomic paths fizzle as you get older. The old careers have dealt with the problem of people aging up, if even their solutions aren’t always well-suited to the modern world. It’s recognised that there are a bunch of 50/60 year old bankers around who aren’t hotshots and people have some idea what to do with them.
If you do something newer and weirder, like NFT transaction consultancy, then when NFTs fall out of fashion you have to pull a new career together for yourself while all the traditional ones are already full of the people working their way up the old fashioned way.
To a certain degree your NFT transaction consultancy kind of character will survive by just skimming the waves of whatever becomes new and hip. Obviously lots will blow up in the attempt but I know enough crackhead energy crypto types who manage to skid along on occasional lottery hits
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Chiefly, I suppose, because it involves interacting with humans, which I am not good enough at. I can muddle through with great effort, but I slip up too often and end up not being on the same page as my nominal peers. Not being aware of the same information as them, not sharing their implicit norms and expectations, and not pursuing the same goals as them, and thus communicating and cooperating poorly with them. Over time, this has compounding effects - alienating people, stalling career, running out of friends, failing to build up capital, dropping out of my starting socioeconomic class, which in turn makes it even more difficult to interact with people.
Even my supposedly very technical job is maybe 10% making machines do things, and 90% coordinating with others. The exact percentages may have varied depending on the company and position, but it's always been soft skills over hard skills. And my abilities as a programmer may be decent, maybe even above average, but certainly not good enough to compensate for my shortcomings in all other areas. Including my ability to learn to adapt, which isn't that hot.
So why do I feel that way? Because I'm just not much good at any area of life. I consistently make poor decisions and deliver poor performance, even when trying to adapt and improve. And it has always been that way.
But what alternate paths are there? I'm not creative or innovative or entrepreneurial enough to be the randian superman. I'm not cut out for the maverick rockstar influencer rebel life either, lacking the people skills required for it. Doing the hippie hermit self-sufficiency thing isn't viable either; I am ultimately a civilized, technology-dependent modern human with no agricultural skills and no land or capital with which to buy land. And the obvious route of becoming unemployed and living off of social welfare (which the current federal government intends to reduce, anyways) outright disgusts me; if I fail my fellow humans, then let me at least not be a burden. Then there's the option of just taking a menial job like delivery driver - but I can't realistically make do with a significantly reduced salary; I do have a family depending on me, and costs of living are high. There's not enough slack.
So muddle through I will, on and on.
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Because he's living in Germany, I assume.
Partially, but not mainly. Mainly it's just me. Germany is making it more difficult for me in some ways because
But again, plenty of people deal just fine with all that, and prosper.
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Are any of McCarthy's works translated into German? Just curious.
I hope not. I strongly doubt there's any translator who can do him justice. Frankly, I don't think it's possible at all. It's a piece of American literature written in English, and IMO needs to be read as such.
That said, of course there are. Translators were always desparate for work, and nowadays translations are practically free. Whether or not they live up to the original work - barely anyone ever bothers to think about it.
Literary translation, particularly for prestige authors like McCarthy, is not really "desperate for work" work. The money's not good, but you generally do it on a grant, so you have to plan the project and justify it and so on.
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Apparently:
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Very probably true. I'd just rather not get too confident about the virtues of a life we haven't actually lived (if you're not one of the confirmed wife guys around here). Or maybe more precisely, even if it is the best life a guy could reasonably live, he might still expect to feel a certain amount of Bourdain-esque existential despair from time to time, if he's the sort of guy who's predisposed to feel that way. Wherever you go, there you are.
The purpose of the holiday I'm currently taking was to meet my future in-laws, so I suppose I am.
Not yet!
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Christ I resemble this article. I do like the overall life lesson though.
You come at the King, you best not miss
You decide to have an MMF threesome with your wife you best not freak out when you see the other man's dick
If you're gonna be Napoleon, you best not be sick about it for six days
Generally: if you're going to claim the exemption, you best actually be exempt. One is not granted the exemption by merely claiming it.
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Hey, I resemble that remark!
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Also I'm skeptical about the one creampie every Saturday part.
The funny thing is it sounds pathetic in your teens but by middle age in a marriage you're doing well if you have sex once a week.
When my wife and I were dating, we would have sex every single time we got together (which was about 3x per week). I was kind of excited when we got married, thinking that living together would mean we'd have sex perhaps even more, like 3-4x a week. Yeah no - I'm doing good if we have sex once per month. I'm not happy about it to be honest, but ultimately I do love her, and I also took a vow before God to stay by her side no matter what - there aren't take backs on that kind of thing. So I make do.
Also once kids enter the equation you'd kind of have to be a nonsensical psychopath to expect honeymoon period girlfriend frequency.
We bought a fairly small house for Americans when we first got together and the error of having our bedroom right next to the kid's bedrooms has not been more clear. Next house we are going to be floors apart.
A lot of women just won't have libido for a while after going through childbirth and infant caretaking, too. Which is perfectly reasonable considering the impacts involved.
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Imho, outside of a very rare few, the best way to get laid in your 40s is to have gotten married and grown old together in your 20s or 30s. In my 20s I had a fun string of girlfriends I had nonstop sex with. Including my future wife! But I can scarcely imagine that having kept up with aging, peers all settling down without me, career monopolizing more of my time, etc. Plus every time I creampie my 40 year old wife she still looks 25 to me. Beat that.
Sometimes, the sex will even be with one's wife!
I've been wanting to downsize careers for a while now, but the loss aversion with regard to a smaller paycheck prevents me from doing so. When I was younger I thought (hoped?) that I as my net worth grew I'd be more down to fuck-around career-wise, but it has not happened.
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Which is why I'm skeptical of the notion that weekly creampie-included sex is the standard normie NPC suburban experience.
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Great post. I have my own thoughts about the specific catalyst that prompted Bourdain to kill himself. Pleased to see that @coffee_enjoyer seconded it in the linked post (before I changed my handle).
I've met some of these people who are addicted to "wanderlust", and they often seem rather unstable and unreliable. They remind me of a Reddit thread I once read about underrated red flags, and one comment said if a person often says "I used to have this friend..." (Good example, even if I felt a little personally attacked by it.) Or one of de la Rochefoucald's maxims (I'm paraphrasing): we get excited by making new friends because we feel we aren't sufficiently admired by our existing ones, and hope that our new friend will admire us as much as we feel we deserve. Living your life on the road is advantageous for dysfunctional people, as all the people you meet will only know you long enough to learn about your good qualities: you don't plan on sticking around long enough for them to find out that you're careless with money, short-tempered or have a bad relationship with your family. As Chuck Palahniuk would say, they're single-serving friends.
People who struggle with long-term intimate relationships instead opt for short flings and holiday romances, but it's a vicious circle, because the longer you spend behaving this way, the less practice you're getting at the skills you'll need for actual relationships. By the time you decide you're getting too old for this shit and want to form a real relationship and settle down with someone, you may find yourself wholly at a loss for how to comport yourself in this context. Habitual womanisers know exactly what to say to get a woman into bed within a few hours of meeting her, but don't have a clue how to express their affection for her in the context of an actual romance. This is equally true of platonic relationships: I bet Anthony Bourdain would seem effortlessly charming the first time you met him, but I imagine people who'd known him for years might say he was a bit of a shitty friend.
It's not unlike how socially awkward people find social situations stressful and emotionally taxing, so instead they retreat into video games and social media – but the longer they spend in those spaces instead of in the real world, the more stressful and emotionally taxing they find social situations in real life, causing them to retreat...
Why do you think Bourdain’s suicide had a specific catalyst? By all accounts he struggled with mental illness, lived a lifestyle that doesn’t exactly root people in their lives, and it could easily have just been his unlucky break; no doubt he’d been close to suicide before.
I don't think it's a coincidence that he killed himself just a few hours after an angry row with his girlfriend in which she admitted being unfaithful to him but dismissed his feelings about it. No doubt the lifetime of drink, drugs and mental illness didn't help, but I suspect this was the straw that broke the camel's back.
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One missing, but important piece for judging B according to content of his character: when he killed himself, he left behind his 11 years old daughter.
Sorry, but when you have children, your life is no longer your own, that's the point of the whole enterprise. If your "twu wuw" is more important to you than your kid, you are, in technical terms, piece of shit.
Wow, I assumed B was childless. A self-proclaimed thief of restaurant supplies AND a deadbeat dad.
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Dang, I hadn't realized she was 11.
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This is the kind of post that scares people away from having children.
Sometimes I think about what an alien sentiment this would be to someone from 150+ years ago. Children just happened, just like back pain and gray hairs. Except children laughed and learned, and you loved them.
I recognize this opinion is a dime a dozen here on this board where we all try to out-trad each other, but the older I get the more I think the Catholic doctrine might have this one right. The kind of sex that avoids the possibility of conception either sucks, or you've got your wife on a hormone regimen. The kind of sex required to conceive exactly when you want to conceive also sucks. It's joyless and mechanical. Slamming the switch on and off, from trying to avoiding to trying, feels like...I don't know...like putting a subtle but deep friction way deep down in your marriage.
In my marriage we disagreed on the timing of children. As a result we have some regrets that we resist lingering on, but I'm now convinced it probably shouldn't have been our choice to make. Who should want to accept the burden of a choice like that?
Uh…me?
I think conscious choices are one of the main dividers between us and other animals. If you’ve seen a feral cat colony, you’ve seen the unfettered id.
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Non hormonal IUDs exist, and so does cycle timing.
Unless you want to have 7+ children, your options are:
Contraception
No sex
Marry your wife shortly before menopause
In the first two cases you are still stuck with the burden of deciding when to have kids.
What’s wrong with having 7+ kids?
There's nothing "wrong" with it per se, but most people don't want to do it and historically speaking most people have never wanted to do it and have generally not done it in times and places of low infant mortality.
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Sure, when you're a child you're subordinate to your parents and your teachers, then in college you're supposed to be subordinate to your instructors and subordinate yourself to the goal of finding work post college. Then when you're working you've still got to be subordinate to your bosses, but at least that's part time... then someone comes along and tells you you have to also subordinate yourself to your children. When do you get to be you? Never.
This attitude, despite being a 'conservative' one, seems to be new to the generations which grew up after WWII. Earlier generations did not maintain that the parents lived for the children.
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
— John Donne, "pre-WWII"
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On the other hand, the idea that living for oneself is a bad thing is not new- the old style expression of it would have been that you lived for the community, and having children was part of meeting obligations to those around you.
A sort of primitive fascism, where everyone is basically a cell in the communal body. As E.O. Wilson said in a slightly different context, "Wrong Species".
Only insofar as "fascism" has become a generic sneer-word for any philosophy that makes leisure class liberals uncomfortable.
Historical Fascists had a very clear and specific idea of what thier movement was about.
Yes, that's why I called it a "sort of primitive fascism" rather than actual fascism. Of course, sweep away the high-sounding language and everyone being expected to act as a cell in the body (or a cog in the wheel) isn't really such a good thing. And if you were to look at such a society, you'd probably find, as always, that there were a few people who were doing the directing of what the rest were doing.
Sweep away the high-sounding language about emancipation and radical individualism and what's left is a intellectual, moral, and biological dead-end.
You are alive, posting on this forum today because when you were small the people around you cared for you. They fed you, they clothed you, they taught you to read and write. If you really view this as "slavery" then perhapse they should not have done those things.
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No? Fascism is a specific thing. Obligations to the community is much much broader.
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As a parent myself, Good.
If you find the idea of living for someone other than yourself problematic, you're probably going to end up being a shitty parent.
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Provided that they want to keep the option of suicide open, I presume?
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If the idea of taking responsibility for another humans life and prioritising it above your own scares you, you probably shouldn't have children.
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What do you live for man, if not for someone else? I mean there's always drugs, but you don't seem the sort.
What indeed.
My life ended 19 years ago; I simply lacked the courage to do the honorable thing.
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His suicide always struck me as so preventable.
Even before the last day/night’s series of simping text messages to Argento that sent her deeper into Icksville—with some more “toxically masculine” advice from a male friend or family member, he could have been disabused of the one-itis and still be alive, for example:
She’s a chest-tattooed single mother, a seasoned carousel rider, one for whom you’ve already bought out a 17 year-old boy to help protect her reputation. Her Wikipedia page contains both a “Sexual assault allegations by” and a “Sexual assault allegation against” section, like a soccer or hockey team has “Goals For” and “Goals Against” statistics. She’s not the one, bro. She’s not yours; it’s just your turn.Unfortunately I doubt he had any toxic male bros.
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Now that you point that out, this must be pretty unusual. I wonder are there many other pages meeting that description.
ChatGPT only reports Argento, Amanda Seales (whom I'd never heard of) and Stoya.I believe Armie Hammer claims to have been molested as a child.This is the sort of thing you need search enabled for the answer to be correct. As it is more retrieval of niche facts, rather than reasoning.
I like the way even the free version of Claude starts by listing what sources it's looked at, while I wait for an answer. It conveys that it's researching something, unlike Free GPT, which answers instantly, and maybe there's a website embedded somewhere.
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I just checked their Wikipedia pages. It seems ChatGPT is incorrect.
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Man, they really trained the LLMs on that coffee_enjoyer post.
Interesting that your experiences diverge so much from mine. If you ask me, travel slutting is a totally different experience if you're a man and also not a celebrity, in that you actually have to plan everything and pay for things yourself (I'll be honest, I did once have my debit card stop working in Antwerp and had to pull an Italian girl to get dinner and a bed). Self-reliant backpacking, in my experience, teaches you the exact opposite skillset and vibe, an upbeat cynicism that always ends in a yearning for the familiar bed back home. Things change a lot when you introduce enough drugs, though. At a certain point, you start thinking "wouldn't it be nice if I had the resources for me and my best friends to get a beautiful rental, spend a weekend rocketing through the psychosphere, and then go home to routine - so, how do I make this happen".
As a wise man once said: when you get the message, put down the phone.
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In my imo I feel like it's pretty clear that his lifestyle is a result of his mental state and not the other way around. Doing that shit won't make you mentally ill, but most of the people doing that had mental illness before they started.
In my in my opinion?
Yo dawg I heard you like my opinions
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In his Japanese sweet potato
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I didn't know Bourdain apart from his reputation as a chef, and let's face it, celebrity chefs are not role models for stable, happy lives.
But this seems to be rather harsh on the guy - "he's a sad loser"? Whatever his mental state or situation, he ended up killing himself. Let's not piss on the grave. You can criticise the globe-trotting lifestyle as much as you like, but we don't know the man's last moments.
It's known that he killed himself mere hours after learning that Asia Argento, the woman he loved (and to whom he'd offered generous financial assistance by paying off the man threatening to sue Argento for sexually exploiting him when he was a young boy) was fucking someone else, and that she had so little respect for Bourdain that she didn't even bother being discreet about it. I don't know Bourdain, but it wouldn't surprise me if he thought of himself as a sad loser.
She sure seems to be a lot of trouble.
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He's a role model in the progressive sphere for a lot of reasons. Honest blue collar work in a kitchen, diverse cuisine enjoyer, sneers at McDonald's, successful writer (the only way to get rich without exploitation under capitalism), had a show where he travels the world and advances the multi-cultural project.
All of these things are apparent virtues, but they weren't enough to save his life and maybe did him in instead. Maybe loser is the wrong word, but my claim is that the mental illness <-> lifestyle causal arrow might point both ways. What word would you use?
Have you ever seen anyone hold him up as such? Like, “I want to be like that,” or even “he had such an amazing life”?
Maybe this is generational, and I’m just not exposed to the Bourdain fan club, but it was easy for me to slot him into the tortured-aesthete archetype.
All the time. If I asked 10 of my progressive millenial friends to give me a list of 5 heroes who inspired them, at least 3 or 4 would include Bourdain. He occupies the same space as writers like David Foster Wallace
Man, that’s bizarre.
I don't see why. I'm not sure if you could rate his shows as 'insanely popular', but No Reservations ran for 9 season and 147 episodes, and it's spiritual successor, Parts Unknown, ran for twelve seasons and 104 episodes.
I don't know how that compares in the great scheme of things, but when you consider the two combined ran almost solid from 2005 to 2018, that's probably a longer career than some talk show hosts, nevermind all the other stuff he did. Hell, that's edging close to shows like Top Gear, and that show almost conquered the world.
Judge Judy ran from 1996 to 2021. I’m sure a lot of people approve of her…sass, or whatever. Does that qualify her as an inspiring hero?
I dunno, I’m sure someone would say it. But there’s definitely more than one kind of celebrity, and I didn’t realize Bourdain had that much admiration.
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You frequently see his quotes on life thrown around as deepities, to the point that copypasta of them is a meme on twitter. Both Kitchen Confidential and No Reservations have a strong element of lifestyle-porn to them, imagine living that way like this fun interesting guy!
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Read his books. He was heavily suicidal even while basking in the Kitchen confidential success. There are a lot of stories there.
He was extremely sad. For loser - it is not a good description. But how can you call a man that achieved tremendous success in things he didn't care about, and failed in everything he desired.
A tragedy.
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I think "seems to have it all" and then kills himself is a tragedy, as Tanista says. We never know, looking from the outside, what is going on inside.
If you read Kitchen Confidential - there is a restaurant mentioned next to his current where they go from time to time. You read the longing when he describes it - 3 stars, cause the owner don't care about fourth, the kitchen is quiet, professional, calm and not rowdy, they serve simple excellently prepared comfort food, and have great work life balance.
Not saying he didn't enjoy the frantic pace, but was obviously not fulfilled by it.
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Happiness comes from within, not without. There is no amount of success or achievement or material wealth that will satisfy someone who is not able to accept himself.
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For what reason do you think Iggy Pop was putting on an act? I don't know much about him but it seems his punk self-identity was genuine.
The linked article doesn't quite imply it, more that he mellowed as he aged:
Was just an act as a revealed preference, perhaps as the weight of it all caught up with him. But I think it would have ruined his image considerably if Iggy Pop's albums in 70s all included a little card that said "time traveler from the future confirms in 2026, Iggy Pop will be 79, still alive, living ascetically, vegan, no drugs, pursuing the simple pleasures where he values love and connection above all".
There is little doubt that Iggy lived fast. Happily for him, he didn't die young.
It does not seem like he needs to live fast as an old person to avoid hypocrisy, nor do I think that someone not dying young means that they lived insufficiently fast while young.
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You either die an icon, or live long enough to become the Boomer.
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Good catch! It’s when a person’s image of themselves shatters that they’re most susceptible to rumination and ideation.
I vigorously maintain that the poetic and glamorous reporting on Kate Spade’s suicide is what killed Bourdain: “She hanged herself with a scarf from her own fashion line,” said the news report on the car radio, and I literally yelled at the radio, “You fools! You’re causing a wave of suicides!”
I don’t think there’s anything on his death that could be said that hasn’t been. It is almost the least interesting of the famous celebrity suicides of that decade.
But I do think he wanted a grand exit. He wanted to show that bitch that broke his heart. This is what narcissists are wont to do. It’s why your piece of shit ex threatens to kill themselves when you break up with them. They won’t do it, probably, but it adds a grandiose element to their wallowing, to their pitiable state.
Some were always going to follow through. He wanted to show her, he wanted to make a woman he thought was uncaring (about him) suffer. You can’t do that in life. Complaining about an ex lover leaving you for a younger man isn’t really socially acceptable, even for women it makes you look pathetic and for men it’s worse. He obviously didn’t want to move on. The ego was bruised. Death seemed a final victory over her.
I often find myself nodding with your takes, but not this one. Mind you, I am one of those people who barely had heard Bourdain's name until he died, and have still never watched an episode of any of his shows nor really do I think I've ever heard his recorded voice, though I've read a good bit about him and I've seen his picture many times. Thus, perhaps you have more insight into him than I do if you were someone who followed his meanderings and respected his foodie-ness or whatever.
But from my perspective, as a man who has been rejected and burned many, many times (and the last I lingered on my image in the still forest pool I was not a narcissist) I never wanted to "show" anyone, even at my most desperate, not-quite-suicidal. As a kid I had the "if I got hit by a bus and died they'd really wish they had known me better" type thoughts, but not out of malice or one-upping. More straight self-pity feeling sorry for myself. And I don't know a lot of men who would off themselves to "get back at" someone.
You maybe be right that he did not want to move on (though I have no idea why, the Argento woman certainly does not seem magical in any way to me, but different strokes) but killing himself to spite her or earn a victory is not quite how I'd put it. More--"Now she knows how much I really cared about her." This may be a rephrasing of your point, but I think it's different enough to warrant mentioning.
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To be quite honest this is maximally uncharitable salacious conjecture about the motives of a dead man who can't defend himself. I was never some great fan of Anthony Bourdain, but to trash his suicide as a "narcissistic act" done out of spite in a thread where he is already being dogpiled is impressively distasteful.
I have a lot of sympathy for Bourdain. Like him, I’m a romantic at heart. Like him, I feel at home nowhere, really. He had a very nice PMC Jewish upbringing, his parents were a record label executive and an editor at the New York Times. He felt a certain emptiness his whole life.
So I don’t think I’m trashing him, or at least I don’t mean to. But I wanted to reply because I disagree with the post by @coffee_enjoyer cited above. I don’t think Bourdain killed himself because he was a hedonistic liberal boomer individualist. I know plenty of those who are very happy indeed. I think he killed himself because he became fixated on one woman and this is the most dangerous thing when one loves oneself or a certain image of oneself.
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All I know about Iggy Pop is that he brutally murdered the Pet Shop Boys before himself being brutally murdered by Vanilla Ice.
That's so old that it's mentioned in the Vesuvius scrolls.
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What does the grim meathook reality in the third world refer to? By the way, great post, never thought about the food guys suicide like this.
Watch this from beginning to end and see if it isn't the ugliest damn place you've ever seen.
Warning: The "?si=", "?pp=", and similar portions that YouTube has started adding to any URL created with the "share" button allegedly can be used to reveal the YouTube username of the user who created that URL. For that reason, those portions of the URL should be deleted before copying and pasting.
Eh, I don't care who knows I shared video of a Congolese rail journey.
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As an aside: a million views in 4 days, with commenters all japanese train-enjoyers apparently, experiencing the call of the void here. Too interesting finding random pockets of youtube.
Notice the remnants of many other tracks alongside; apparently only the one is used nowadays.
The still-standing totally nonfunctional signals are a nice touch too.
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This might be a good book form accompaniment
I actually have that on Kindle!
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That felt bad, I had to skim to save my sanity. Meathook reality indeed.
By the way, why are there so many Japanese train enthusiasts (I assume?) watching these videos? Is it some kind of schadenfreude? Here I am sitting in my luxury class bullet train, thank goodness I don't live in the Congo?
The Congo is pretty much the exact diametrical opposite of Japan in a lot of ways!
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I always thought about working in a kitchen as a post-made enough money leisure job. It’s hard work but seems more fun than a lot of jobs. Big issue would be the pace of cooking and probably gets repetitive like any job. But cooking is essentially a leisure job for the wealthy.
I think it depends. Guy who made his fortune in tech or whatever and now wants a hobby restaurant where he doesn't much care if it bleeds money? Sure. Guy who wanted to be a chef since the age of sixteen, sweated in hotel kitchens and restaurants under star chefs, and is chasing that Michelin star or stars? Hell on earth, if I go by the stories of "when I worked for Marco Pierre etc." other chefs tell. Fallow, a highish-end London restaurant cooking channel on Youtube that I watch to see how the other half live, is a lot more fun and a lot more relaxed, but they also work damn hard (this is why you pay restaurant prices, nobody is going to do this at home). If you're driven, you have demons and the demons come screaming out.
Academia is the same way. All the vocational / ‘luxury’ careers are, I think.
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Both are true
Yes, hours are fucked too. Also co-workers are fun but at the cost that many of them are dipshits or addicts (or both).
This is wildly incorrect
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Court opinion somewhat relevant to the culture war:
According to lawmakers: "New Jersey is consistently in the top three in the nation with the highest foreclosures. Our state also has the widest racial wealth gap in the country. Black and brown wealth is hemorrhaging through the loss of foreclosed property, and the people who live in the community often do not have deep enough pockets to even participate in the foreclosure process." "The current process favors companies that have the money to purchase property at sheriff sales and resell it for a profit." In response to these concerns, the state govt. enacts a law ensuring that, whenever a residential property is foreclosed on, a right of first refusal is granted to the owner, his next of kin, and his tenants (if the owner is an individual rather than a company), and a right of second refusal is granted to certain redevelopment-oriented nonprofits (regardless of the owner's identity). Normally, foreclosure results in an auction starting at an "upset price" (minimum/reserve price) set by the foreclosing lienholder (presumably the lender of the property's first mortgage). However, these two new rights of refusal allow the property to be purchased for the upset price without an auction. The lawmakers say: "This legislation will help to keep property ownership within the community." "This is what equity in systems looks like."
However, the new law causes problems because it often results in undervaluation of the property, so that junior lienholders don't get paid back. For example, in one of the cases consolidated here: A residential property with estimated fair market value of at least 680 k$ was foreclosed on. US Bank held a first mortgage for 281 k$, and PNC Bank held a second mortgage for an amount that I can't find in the court documents. US Bank set the upset price at 309 k$. PNC was prepared to bid the auction up to 401 k$, which presumably would suffice to pay off both mortgages. However, instead a nonprofit exercised its right of second refusal and bought the property at the upset price of 309 k$, paying off US Bank's mortgage but leaving PNC with substantially less than what it would have gotten at auction. In PNC's words: "The refusal to recognize other bids results in illegal lien-stripping and the illegal taking of substantial surplus that would have been realized, and the deprivation of PNC's property interest that would have attached to that surplus." (PNC also alleges that the nonprofit is a sham. It was created just a few days before the auction would have taken place, and is not registered as a nonprofit with the state govt. or with the federal IRS.)
The trial judge rules that the nonprofits' right of second refusal is an unconstitutional taking without just compensation, and the appeals panel affirms. The federal Supreme Court recently found that it is unconstitutional for the govt. to foreclose on a property for a 200-k$ tax delinquency, sell it at auction for 300 k$, and pocket the extra 100 k$. Likewise, if a property is encumbered with a 300-k$ mortgage, it is unconstitutional for the govt. to let a nonprofit buy it for 200 k$ and magically extinguish the extra 100 k$ of debt owed to a lender. (Nobody has invoked the owner's, next of kin's, and tenants' right of first refusal, so it technically is not at issue in this case. But if the right of first refusal is challenged in the future it presumably will be held unconstitutional under the same rationale.)
As a side note, it seems like this New Jersey law (before it got struck down) was an open invitation for people to engage in this kind of fraud.
As a second side note, I have to ask: If this law had not been struck down, what bank would ever write a HELOC or other loan secured by a second mortgage? Maybe I don't understand the law correctly, but it seems like it's almost guaranteed that if the first mortgage is foreclosed for any reason, the remaining equity will get stripped away.
Basically, it seems like this is a case of liberal legislators not thinking carefully about the incentives they are creating. But maybe I am missing something.
That's the generous take. The more cynical/realistic one is that they deliberately want to encourage exactly this kind of behavior as an under-the-table giveaway to the non-profits, which will be kicked back to them in various forms. And if other disreputable people want to engage in fraud, well, that's just fine.
More generally, it is past time for major reform (or possibly just the abolition) of non-profits/NGOs.
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Yeah, the way the law was written, it appears a homeonwer could get a second mortgage, default on the first mortgage, exercise the right of first refusal on the sale, and get the property free and clear of the second mortgage. They'd still owe the second mortgage but they could default on it or even declare bankruptcy (if they dumped all their assets into paying the upset price).
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.
Primary residences have some protection against bankruptcy, though this trick probably works better if you have a relative exercise the right of first refusal.
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.
Looping in @The_Nybbler since he's party to this discussion.
I did bankruptcy law fora couple years so I can outline how the process typically works. It's worth pointing out at the beginning the difference between unsecured and secured debts. Unsecured debts, like credit card debt or personal loans, are secured only by the borrower's promise to pay. If the borrower defaults, the lender can attempt to collect the debt, sue and obtain a judgment, and attempt to enforce that judgment through various mechanisms provided by the law. A secured debt includes an additional element where the borrower pledges specific property that the creditor can seize in the event of nonpayment. When a creditor initiates a court action to seize property for payment of debts, state law establishes who gets priority when it comes to payment. Generally speaking the earlier recorded interests get priority, but various policy considerations make this a bit more complicated (for example, taxes and HOA fees almost always get top priority regardless of when they were accrued). Chapter 7 bankruptcy extinguishes the personal obligation to pay, but it does not extinguish security interests. To that extent, the liquidation of the bankruptcy estate is only concerned with assets that can be liquidated to pay unsecured creditors. Additionally, one of the policy goals of bankruptcy is to give the debtor a fresh start, not to leave him destitute, so certain small amounts of assets can be exempted from liquidation as set forth by law.
With that out of the way, let's look at a typical Chapter 7 scenario: Debtor owns a home worth $300,000, subject to a first mortgage with a balance of $200,000 and a HOLC with a balance of $50,000, leaving the debtor $50,000 in equity. The mortgages are current and the property is not in foreclosure. Debtor also has $50,000 in unsecured credit card debt, and no other assets worth mentioning. If the available exemption is $63,150, then it covers the debtor's $50,000 in equity. The trustee classifies the case as "no asset" and the credit card companies get nothing, and the debtor is not required to pay them. As for the mortgages, the debtor is no longer personally obligated to pay them, but they still secure the property, meaning that if the debtor doesn't continue to pay them after the discharge then the bank can foreclose. The practical effect of the discharge, however, means that foreclosure is the only remedy available to them; if the foreclosure sale does not cover the loan, they can't pursue the debtor individually.
When you talk about "triggering a sale", keep in mind that sales are never "triggered" in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy; sale of an asset is wholly within the discretion of the trustee. The more important thing to keep in mind—and I'm not sure if you were insinuating this but I want to make it clear just in case—is that secured creditors play little to no role in the bankruptcy process. The most obvious interaction I can think of is that mortgage payments will be rolled in with Chapter 13 payments, but they won't be reduced like other debts might be. The other one is that if there are any pending or potential foreclosure actions they will automatically be stayed upon filing. This is of little consequence in a Chapter 7 because the stay will be lifted upon discharge, which only takes a few months, and if the bank is impatient they will almost always get the stay lifted if they ask the court. The only consequential involvement of secured creditors in the bankruptcy process is when a debtor in mortgage arrears files Chapter 13, which allows him to repay the arrears under the payment plan.
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?
The New Jersey law would strip the second lien, but it wouldn't absolve the debtor of the requirement to pay the note. The creditor could sue the debtor for nonpayment and get a recorded judgment, which would allow them to garnish wages, levy bank accounts, and, yes, attach a judgment lien to the debtor's property. While it sounds like they get their mortgage back, this is more of a consolation prize, because in any foreclosure action they would be junior to any real mortgages, including ones that were recorded after the judgment lien. They would also be junior to any mechanic's liens. Effectively, they're now at the bottom of the list. If the debtor receives a bankruptcy discharge at any point in this process, it would eliminate their obligation to pay anything. The only exception would be if the creditor obtained a judgment and recorded a judgment lien against the property before the creditor filed. Then the lien would remain, though the personal obligation would be extinguished and they couldn't continue any other collection activities.
I apologize because it's only now that I'm wrapping my head around what you guys were talking about; before I was just trying to give some general background on how bankruptcies work. Suppose the house is worth $400,000. Mortgage 1 is $200,000 and Mortgage 2 is $100,000. Under the NJ law, Mortgagor 1 initiates a foreclosure action with an upset price of $200,000. Per the law, the owner exercises his right of first refusal and buys the house at the upset price, stripping Mortgage 2. Mortgagor 2 now has a note worth $100,000 but no security interest in the property. Mortgagor 2 then sues the owner for nonpayment of the note, but the owner files for Chapter 7 bankruptcy before judgment is entered, staying the suit. There are no other liens on the property at this point, and the owner's only debt is the $100,000 he owes to Mortgagor 2. After applying the exemption, the trustee has $336,850 available to distribute to unsecured creditors, which easily covers the $100,000 owed to Mortgagor 2. The property is sold for $400,000, $100,000 of which goes to Mortgagor 2, $100,000 goes to the trustee's commission, and $200,000 of which goes back to the owner. Maybe this counts as "abusing the system" in a strict technical sense, but like most such abuses, you'd have to be really stupid to think you're getting one over on anyone.
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In theory, the bank could sue on the note just like a credit card company can sue you if you don't pay your credit card bills. In practice, those kinds of lawsuits usually don't accomplish much because most people don't have assets which can be seized. Which is why credit card companies usually end up settling for pennies on the dollar.
Let's suppose that the bank holding the second mortgage gets a judgment which then becomes a lien on the original property. I'm pretty sure that this is nowhere near as good as having a mortgage. For one thing, there may be a homestead exemption. For another, it's difficult or impossible to convince a sheriff to actually seize the property in that situation. Usually you will be told to just wait for the person to sell or otherwise transfer the property.
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Do Americans not have laws against organizing your own insolvency?
I think there are definitely laws which could be used to fight against the sort of abusive transactions @Nybbler is proposing, but (in my opinion) it would still be a big problem for a potential lender on a second mortgage. It's sort of like the situation where someone squats in your house illegally and the police tell you that your remedy is to file a civil lawsuit against the squatter. Yes, you have a remedy but that remedy is expensive, time-consuming, and could take months or even years to get results.
In the case of this law, I think it's kind of the same. Second mortgagees are losing a remedy which is (relatively) simple, clean, and effective and receiving one which is complicated, time-consuming, and uncertain.
From the bank's perspective, arguably the reason they are willing to loan you hundreds of thousands of dollars at a modest interest rate is because they know that whatever happens, there's equity in the house which secures their loan.
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Hilariously, this law was watered down from an earlier bill that would have capped the upset price at just 50 percent of the mortgage! (The text isn't clear as to whether it's referring to the first mortgage or to all mortgages combined.) This original version was passed by the legislature, but was vetoed by the governor.
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Yet another one of the Great Moments in Unintended Consequences. If only politicians were mandated to demonstrate second-order level thinking.
It's terrifying how many bad laws are written because they think there's a magical button to fix a problem with no downstream effects. (Assuming they did this out of incompetence rather than malice.)
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On the topic of 5th amendment violations
If this right of second refusal is an unconstitutional taking of the financial interests of the mortgage-holders, it seems pretty straightforward to me that rent control is an unconstitutional taking of the financial interests of property owners, and I have no idea how we've managed to get this far without a court ruling to that effect.
The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that rent control is not an unconstitutional taking because the owner is renting voluntarily. He can just stop renting and sell the property if he wants to.
Not in NYC he can't. He has to buy out the existing tenants.
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This seems obviously bogus to me because the value of the property depends on your ability to commercially exploit it. If a new regulation reduces or destroys your ability to commercially exploit the property, the value of the property is now obviously lower, it will not be worth as much to anyone who would buy it. I cannot see how the lost value of your property is not a taking!
Again:
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I see a couple issues with this.
First, a new (restrictive) regulation might actually increase the value of your property if it applies to other properties in your area. So for example, suppose you own a brownstone in a "historic district" and a regulation requires you and everyone else in that district to maintain the exterior of your property in a certain style. As a result, the district is quaint and beautiful and everyone wants to live there. Not guaranteed to happen, but not out of the realm of possibility either.
The other issue is that government is constantly doing things which have effects on peoples' property values. A new regulation about parking might result in more people parking on your street, making it look more busy and less attractive. The same thing with a new bus route. Or a Cannabis license to a business in the downtown area of your town. Or a prison being built a mile away. Or an airport 20 miles away changing its take-off and landing patterns.
As a practical matter, it would be impossible to adjudicate all these little issues. There just aren't enough judges, courts, or lawyers. So the only realistic choice is to limit the concept of a regulatory taking to the most extreme cases.
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The issue courts have seen with this logic is that vast swaths of regulation lower the value of property, including longstanding practices like zoning and setbacks and even nuisance. A property might indeed be more valuable if the owner can store cars on the front lawn or dam a stream.
Where I think the line is currently drawn is that regulation cannot completely extinguish the value of a property and it can't be specifically targeted. That's a workable legal one, but probably a suboptimal policy.
[ BTW, that court case is actually a pretty good example of bad facts making bad law. A mobile home situation is one where the "renter" owns the home on top of the pad and is substantially invested in an asset that costs more to move than it's worth. This is probably one of the strongest cases for how a landlord/tenant situation can be financially coercive because the realistic cost to the tenant of moving out is giving up a huge asset. ]
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This theory of ownership seems bizarre to me. If I convince the local paper to run an article saying my house is much nicer than my neighbour's, and this results in his property value going down while mine goes up, am I stealing from him?
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The constitution says what the SCOTUS says it says, for better or worse, and for better or worse it does not regard restrictions on how you can use your property to be taking away of your property per the 5th.
If you buy a tenement because you believe (1) that people will pay rent to live in it and (2) that due to former fact, other people will want to buy it in the future, that is entirely speculative, and the government is under no obligation to compensate you if general laws make either or both of these untrue.
If the government disallows you to use your munitions factory to supply Saudi Arabia, you are not entitled to compensation due to the 5th. If the government decides that they do not want any brothels within the city limit, they do not have to pay you the difference to what you could have made if sex work had been kept legal.
If the government decides to institute 100% land value taxes so rational actors will be indifferent towards owning land (which I find personally a much nicer idea than rent controls), and property prices crash as a result, that is a business risk.
I think that there are some goods where capitalism is working very well (e.g. things with supply elasticity, e.g. shovels), and goods where markets do not work very well (e.g. things without supply elasticity, like land). People who are investing in the former are capitalists, and we might tax them but should keep in mind that they have an important ecological niche in society. People who are investing in the later are rent-seekers, and we do not need to be very careful not to step on their toes.
If you invest a million dollars into the production of shovels, that is honest capitalism. Nothing is preventing the next 99 guys with a spare million to also invest in shovels, and over time this will result in an effective supply with shovels.
Of course, it is hard to make money under honest capitalism. Perhaps you have a hunch that there will be a gold rush and shovels will be in high demand and you make a killing for a time, but if shovel production is very profitable, that means that more people will enter the market until that is no longer true.
This is why being a rentier is so much more comfortable. If you buy the best plot of land for one million, then the next 99 guys can not do the same, because nobody is producing new land in the middle of the city. This puts you in a very comfortable position.
On the other hand, while I would argue with a pitchfork-wielding mob that the shovel producer is actually important for the long-term health of the economy, I find it much harder to make a similar argument for the land-owner. There is no elasticity of supply for unimproved land. Where we might suffer a shovel to cost 100$ in the middle of a gold rush because it will result in the creation of more shovels, there is no benefit for society in the unimproved land being worth anything. If anything, it would better serve society if the gains from the fact that land is in limited supply were socialized. It might not directly lower rents too much though, rents need to be at a level where the supply and demand curve meet, after all.
Sure, the rentiers would find such an arrangement unfair, but to me that sounds like someone who bought stolen credit card numbers whining that they were revoked before he could recoup his investment.
Framing deliberate government action as a "business risk" is ridiculous. If a mobster shows up at your door expressing his sincere concern about the flammability of your property, you wouldn't call your protection money payment a "business risk," that would be absurd! If the government decides to deliberately reduce your ability to commercially exploit your property, destroying the value of your investment, calling this a "business risk" is insane. The 5th amendment requires the government to compensate you if public policy requires the use of your property. I don't see where the 5th amendment says "unless it's a business risk."
The court in Penn Central basically asked about investment backed expectations. The basic idea is if you bought property knowing the regulation is likely presumably the purchase price reflected that ambiguity so providing compensation is giving a windfall to the regulated entity.
Now whether this is reasonable is a different matter but that’s the theory.
By that reasoning people should have been able to sue the government on fifth amendment grounds before the regulation was passed on the grounds that even making the regulation likely reduced the value of their property. Otherwise this becomes a sleight of hand where it doesn't count before because the regulation doesn't exist yet and it doesn't count after because it happened before, leading to lack of remedy.
Yeah there is an original mover problem to SCOTUS’ logic.
It's not an original mover problem to SCOTUS logic, it's a baseline definition problem in the 5A. Defining a "taking" requires comparing against some counterfactual to compare against.
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Government decisions affecting the value of your asset is literally a Tuesday. When the prohibition was enacted, I do not think that the breweries were compensated for lost earnings. When Trump's Iranian adventure changes the price of oil futures (which is once a day or so), the USG is under no obligation compensate the people who bet on a different outcome.
The government can make decisions which will affect the prices of real estate property has been true for as long as there have been governments. All of these risks are priced in. If the people of some city would vote for getting rid of cops, or cars, or public transportation, or laws against arson, that would very likely affect property prices. So would, to a lesser degree, a myriad other municipal decisions.
At the end of the day, citizens get to vote, properties don't. This is well known to any property owner. If you do not like that, invest in some other country.
By this reasoning, the government affecting the value of your asset can't ever be considered a taking even under the most extreme circumstances, because since it's always possible for the government to do that, it would always be priced in in advance.
For that matter, the same could be said of a conventional physical taking. If the government is known to take things, the chance that the government takes it would be priced in in its sale price, and the government doesn't have to compensate you for the physical taking either since you already (on the average) received the compensation through buying it at a lower price that takes into account the chance of government greed.
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Let me give you an alternate example. Massachusetts mostly prohibits grocery stores from hard liquor. As a result, a substantial fraction of shopping plazas that have a grocery store also have a liquor store.
It is a deliberate government action to repeal those prohibitions and allow the grocery stores to sell liquor. It is also a business risk to those liquor stores as they would likely lose significant business to the larger grocery store that can offer better prices (due to amortizing fixed costs over a larger sales base).
It is, however, insane, to think that MA cannot repeal those laws without running afoul of the 5A.
So where does this land? I think a mobster or government specifically targeting individual properties for regulation is likely illegal (as under Penn) but that the uniform application of general laws is fine.
This is why so many small towns will have laws on the books along the lines of 'x establishment cannot be located less than y distance from z place', and you look at the history and the town's fleabag bar was across the street from a church in the 70's.
Yeah, but it's also why not every deliberate legislative action that materially impacts a business, even if it causes real harm, can be a taking. That would imply that once those laws are passed, they can never be repealed.
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First off, a mobster showing up at your doorstep is totally a business risk. So are commies taking over and nationalizing your enterprise, or an asteroid wiping out your business.
Taxing the heck out of your earnings, rent controls or prohibiting from running a brothel are all unlikely to fall under the 5th, as far as I am aware.
If you do not like that, I would recommend finding a nation with stronger property rights to buy real estate in.
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That’s not entirely true. There can be regulatory takings where your use of the property is wholly frustrated. See Lucas v South Carolina Coastal Commission
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This line of thinking is dangerous. Eventually you will start questioning ADA and Civil Rights Act
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It seems to me that rent control is not as extreme because the landlord still gets to collect rent on his property and can apply to some pink board somewhere for rent increases. Of course I agree that rent control (and other price controls) are, generally speaking, bad public policy, but it's debatable whether they rise to the level of being a taking.
I think that the government is constantly interfering with property rights and that interference runs the spectrum from what is generally thought to be reasonable (e.g. you aren't allowed to build a factory in a residential neighborhood) all the way up to something that's clearly a taking (e.g. the government simply seizes your land). It's very difficult to draw the line, and that's what judges do -- exercise judgment.
Depends on what you mean by property rights. You bring up nuisance but that really involves a situation of conflicting property rights. A wants to use its property for X which conflicts with how B wants to use its property. How do you solve that? Well the law of nuisance. Or if you like law and Econ read The Problem of Social Costs by Coase.
That is fundamentally a different kind of regulation compared to rent control. In the first, there is a conflict in property rights. In the second, there is no conflict.
I'm not sure I understand your point here. If you tried to build a factory in a residential neighborhood, what would stop you is zoning laws. Are you saying that society could or should get rid of zoning laws and just stick to the concept of common law nuisance? (I agree that would let you stop a cement factory, but I'm not sure it would help if someone built a two-family house in an area which was zoned for single family houses.) Not trying to trap you, I genuinely don't understand your point.
Zoning law is kind of a shitty version of common law nuisance. You won’t find defending zoning qua zoning. But it is an out growth of common law nuisance and is getting at something inherently different than rent control (ie what do you when rights are incompatible). Thus comparing the two is a category error.
FWIW, I would get rid of zoning and permit restrictive deeds including racial.
I think you have that backwards. I'll never understand why libertarians and others persist in the belief that the civil court system is a kind of frictionless plane. Granted, if you have an actual dispute to resolve, it's indispensable and better than a lot of alternatives I've heard proposed, but if you can pass regulations to cut lawsuits off at the pass, you should. Imagine you want to build a cement plant. You have two options:
Build it and hope that nobody complains. You have nothing to go by ahead of time. If someone doesn't like what you're doing, or thinks it's too noisy, or complains about dust, you can pay your attorneys to spend several years litigating the definition of "reasonable" to a jury that is probably going to have more people sympathetic to noise and dust complaints than it does people who own industrial plants. Repeat this situation for every use that anyone could find remotely objectionable, which is any use you can think of. Be prepared to suspend your operations throughout the duration of the suit. Be prepared for the court to rule you have to shut down permanently, or pay ongoing damages in an amount that makes it economically unfeasible to continue.
Look at the municipalities ordinances for zoning and noise and dust abatement. Make sure you comply with the ordinances and obtain formal exemptions if you can't. If nearby homeowners want to litigate, they can do so before you've spent any serious money, and they won't be suing you so much as they will the municipality that granted the exemption. If the use is allowed by right and you are complying with the regulations, it's going to be a tough row to hoe for the plaintiffs.
These days, almost every private nuisance action I've seen has been based on independent studies showing that the defendants violated a municipal regulation that the governing body has failed to enforce; the arguments boil down to whether or not a standard was violated. The system you'd prefer is a system where both parties have to argue their version of what the standards should be. Maybe ya jury is convinced that 90 dB at the property line is an unreasonable amount of noise. We know nothing about whether 85 is okay or not. Actually, we know nothing about whether 90 is okay in another case because a different jury might see things differently, or maybe the guy suing is a huge asshole and they all agree that he deserves to live next to a hog rendering facility.
Which brings me to my second point, which is that zoning regulations were not an outgrowth of common law nuisance, at least not as we'd recognize nuisance today. Traditional common law nuisance laws, i.e. things actionable under an Assize of Nuisance, almost exclusively related to water runoff and land support. The idea was that nuisance was a counterpart to trespass; where in trespass I damage your land by entering onto it, in nuisance I do something on my own land that causes your land to be damaged. The distinction between the two was always fuzzy and by the 19th century they were all trespasses and nuisance was practically a dead letter. The doctrine as we know it today to apply to noises, smells, and the like was part of a 20th century revival that went hand in hand with the development of zoning regulations. Courts and municipal governments were looking for way to mitigate the negative effects of development, and these were two of the things they came up with.
This is why I'm not sure what you're talking about when you act like nuisance has something to do with "rights" while rent control doesn't. All rent control legislation—which coincidentally arose around the same time as zoning legislation and the modern conception of nuisance—does is create a right of a tenant to not be charged rents in excess of a specified maximum. It's no different than any other right a tenant has, whether derived from statute or common law. And if you think that there's something about common law rights that make them superior to statutory rights, keep in mind that the right to sell your property was created by statute.
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Towns never handled conflicting land uses with common law nuisance - explicit regulation of land use inside the city walls is as old as self-governing towns. And the most problematic rural nuisance in the US (straying livestock) was regulated by explicit statutory codes which varied by state (open range vs closed range) because applying common law nuisance led to unsatisfactory results.
Common law nuisance works better than nothing as a default where there is no codified solution in place, but people replace it with governmental codified solutions (environmental regulations, zoning etc.) or privatised codified solutions (condo/co-op/HOA rules, restrictive covenants, long leases instead of freeholds) at the first opportunity.
Coase's theorem tells us that something like the common law rule allows market participants to cut deals and achieve efficient outcomes (and, in particular, may do better and will not do worse than a Pigouvian tax on the nuisance) if:
The second condition almost never holds in the context of urban land use, and both courts and legislatures can see this, so you end up either with command-and-control regulation or Pigouvian taxes. In the urban context you can model a municipally-imposed and collected Pigouvian tax as a Coaseian bargain between the polluter and the community as a whole.
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Thank you for clarifying that. I think the line is blurrier than you are making it out to be.
For example, it's very common for zoning laws to mandate minimum lot sizes and maximum numbers of units per lot.. Even though the developer (and eventual landlord) would prefer to have a larger number of units so as to maximize revenue, the municipality limits what he can charge, albeit in a roundabout way. The unstated purpose of these types of requirements is to keep out the riff raff, so to speak.
To be sure, you could argue that the neighbors of this developer have a property interest in limiting the intensity of use of neighboring lots, you could just as easily say that rent-control tenants have a property interest in being able to stay in their apartments while paying a reasonable rent.
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This is incoherent. There's no philosophical difference between "I am buying this land and subdividing it with a restrictive covenant that it may only have single family homes" and "I am founding a town and passing a zoning ordinance that only allows SFH".
Nah — the point is zoning is top down with one body deciding everything. Restrictive deeds would be more de centralized so you end up with a lot more actual diversity in land use while maintaining the ability to minimize conflicts.
It's not one body, it's every locality!
If your argument here is "the optimal size of a town is somewhat smaller than the current size", I can see that.
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And just what is a 'pink board' when it's at home?
Most of the search results were about insulation.
In my day, the word "pink" was slang for "somewhat communist." It meant someone who had communist leanings but who wasn't a full on Soviet.
So a board unlikely to be sympathetic to arguments of the form "$LANDLORD1 and $POTENTIAL-TENANT2 are richer than $CURRENT-TENANT3, therefore $LANDLORD1's desire for a fancy car to compensate for his anatomical shortcomings and $POTENTIAL-TENANT2's desire to move into the district that two decades ago he treated as more dangerous than Fallujah are more important than $CURRENT-TENANT3's desire to stay in the home where she has lived through the entire Elizabethan era while still being able to afford to taste something other than shame."
Agreed. A more interesting question is whether that board would be sympathetic to the landlord's argument where (1) the current tenant has been retired for many years; his children have moved out; and not only does he have a lot more space than he needs, he has a location which is much nearer to the financial district than he needs; (2) the potential tenant could make much better use of the apartment since he has a wife, small children, and a job nearby; and (3) the landlord is a real estate investment trust with many investors who are themselves retirees who are struggling to make ends meet.
That being said, I think your hypothetical exposes a basic question of economics: Should scarce and valuable resources be distributed (1) based on a committee's opinion about who is most deserving; or (2) based on peoples' willingness to pay some private owner for those resources. I think it's fair to identify the first approach with Communism and the second approach with Capitalism.
You can certainly argue things both ways (and it doesn't have to be all one or the other) but my observations of history strongly suggest to me that option (1) tends to be counterproductive -- to put it politely.
I think it's also worth keeping in mind that other than the landlord, the first potential tenant, and the second potential tenant, there is another party to your hypothetical: Another potential landlord. Because as a society we want and need capital to be invested in building new housing stock. If the rent control mechanism sides too strongly with incumbent tenants, it will chase away investors and ultimately harm the class of people which the system is, in theory, trying to help.
One last point:
This is a big part of my issue with Communism or Marxism or whatever you want to call it. In practice it is typically infused with a kind of mean-spiritedness to the point where it can be seen as a kind of hate ideology. If the goal is to punish and humiliate rich people, well, even if a case could can be made for Communism in the abstract, it's probably not worth pursuing.
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A board that treats competence and contributing to society in ways that people actually desire enough to pay for, pale skin, and indeed the ability to spell your own name as being spiritual defects and anatomical defects per your charming descriptor, decided that being able to use the fruits of your labour to improve your life and to make a new prosperous district mattered far less than the right to contribute nothing while defecting on your debts and shoving the costs onto other people.
Isn't bulverism fun?
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I assume it's a derogatory use of "pink" to mean "left-wing" (an older meaning of the word, but it checks out).
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SCOTUS does not want to go down the path of acknowledging regulatory takings.
SCOTUS has acknowledged regulatory takings on numerous occasions. It's fairly common in the land use permitting context under the so-called unconstitutional conditions doctrine (Nollan/Dolan, Koontz, Sheetz). Then there's Palazzolo, Cedar Point (technically a per se physical taking under Loretto, but invalidating government-imposed private trespass as a taking even though nothing was actually seized and the total loss in value was negligible), etc. And of course Lucas and the granddaddy of them all Pennsylvania Coal.
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They did somewhat in Lucas v South Carolina Coastal Commission
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Interesting. I have no opinion on constitutionality, but it occurs to me that if this were legal, the main consequences would be that mortgages would be harder and more expensive to get. Which would be... Not entirely a bad thing? Easy mortgage availability subsidizes demand, perhaps beyond the economically optimal equilibrium level given the irrationality of people around home purchases. (I now feel qualified to speak on that given I am irrationally buying my first home currently.)
If it were legal, people would find some clever solution to default and reap the rewards, like they used to do for student loans. You are correct that mortgages would have to price in the cost, which would be distributed by law to the parties that don’t have the problem in the first place. Eventually, banks may stop serving the state, as we see in the insurance market.
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Or as has become the popular term, a home ownership desert forms.
Someone has to own the underlying land, and the government can just tax that land to provision services to the residents. The government is the ultimate landlord, and therefore inevitably capable of abrogating most economic rents to itself.
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If I understand the law correctly, the effect would be that second mortgages become difficult or impossible to get. The holder of the first mortgage would be fine, because if there is a foreclosure, all it needs to do is set an upset price a little higher than the outstanding debt on the mortgage plus costs.
I guess what would happen is that people who needed a loan secured by a second mortgage would go to whatever bank holds the first mortgage.
Maybe. For what it worth, when I started a business a number of years ago I financed it with a HELOC secured by a second mortgage. It was extremely useful to have a line of credit to get me through the ups and downs.
That being said, I'm sure a lot of people would be better off if they were unable to get HELOCs or other loans secured by second mortgages.
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This only really affects second mortgages - a foreclosing first mortgage holder will normally set the upset price equal to the outstanding balance plus fees. If nobody bids enough at the auction to make the lender whole, then they will take back the property and sell it the usual way as REO* (which normally gets a better price than an auction because you can sell to normie buyers). In fact, this is what almost always happens, because properties with enough equity to cover the fees and expenses of a foreclosure don't normally end up in foreclosure.
The situation is different when there is a second mortgage and the property is valuable enough that a sale will pay the first but not the second. In this situation the second mortgage holder may bid above the upset price, win the auction, and sell the REO themselves. (They are able to do this because they are in effect paying themselves - anything the first mortgage holder collects at auction above the upset price goes to the second mortgage holder anyway). But if someone exercises a "Jersey first refusal" to buy the property at the upset price set by the first mortgage holder, the second mortgage holder gets wiped out.
That would be easy first mortgage availability. Using a second mortgage on a purchase was one of the shady practices that were mostly banned after the 2008 crisis. Most second mortgages are used when the homeowner wants to cash in equity (for any of multiple good or bad reasons) without refinancing the first mortgage (either because they have a fixed rate which is now below market, or because their credit has deteriorated so they couldn't get a prime refi - this second case is the classic use case for subprime).
My guess is that this is intended as a straightforward taking from subprime second mortgage lenders to benefit sympathetic-to-Democrats financially irresponsible homeowners.
* Real Estate Owned
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I quite like the first right of refusal part of this law, and find the second right of refusal for non-profits to be a pretty obvious opportunity for abuse which has been rightly litigated.
I also think such a right of refusal should side-step the foreclosure rules. The problem is that the debts on the property are discharged in foreclosure, whether they're paid off or not. If I'm a tenant who wants to purchase the building that the owner defaulted on, either I should pay enough to discharge those debts, or I need to take them on myself. The whole reason foreclosure exists is for a mortgaged property that nobody is willing to buy normally - if there is a buyer, but at a discounted price, then foreclosure shouldn't even apply. Or am I missing something?
Isn't even this ripe for abuse? You have a big mortgage; you get foreclosed on; and your spouse or kid buys it at a steep discount. Or am I misunderstanding how it works?
I had written up a response about how buying a foreclosed property requires way more cash up front than a normal mortgage and that seems like a rare situation where a parent is really hard up while a kid has a decent amount of money laying around, but AI tells me NJ specifically wrote this law to give a 90 day window to find a normal mortgage.
They are trying to prevent misused directly with:
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If the price they pay for it is enough to discharge the mortgage debt, then they should be free to do so. If not then yes it's potentially abusable.
But according to op the first right of refusal has never been exercised. I think that's because if your spouse or kid can afford to buy your house at a discount, it's likely much better for them to help you avoid foreclosure in the first place.
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Is that how "right of first refusal" usually works? I was under the impression that they would run the auction as normal, then take the $410k (or whatever) bid to the family/charity and give them the chance to overrule the otherwise-winning bidder.
The participants in the auction might not like that their highest bid got rejected, but that's just business.
In this case, that's (apparently) not how it works. As I understand things, the lender who is foreclosing the loan gets to set what is called an "upset price" which is the minimum price the auctioneer is allowed to accept.
So for example, suppose there is a house with a market value of somewhere around $600k and nobody knows what it will bring in at auction, perhaps somewhere between $500k and $700k, but who really knows. The mortgage lender is foreclosing and the outstanding balance on the (first) mortgage is $400k. So the lender might set an "upset price" of $425k so that if the house sells at auction, the bank knows it will be made whole. If nobody bids $425k or higher, the bank can just bid the $425k itself, end up with the deed to the house, and try to sell the house at a later date on the open market.
On the other hand, suppose the bank sets an upset price at $425k but the house ends up going for $600k. That's great news if you hold a second mortgage because it means that after the foreclosing bank gets paid, there is money left over to pay the debt you are owed.
Anyway, under the law, this sketchy non-for-profit gets to buy the house for the "upset price" of $425k even if there were bidders who were willing to pay $600k. Which is fine for the bank that's foreclosing, but if you are a second mortgage holder, you're screwed. It means hundreds of thousands of dollars which would have gone to you are now, in effect, transferred to this sketchy not-for-profit.
In this case, no, but we have to understand that NJ specifically did the thing where they label it ROFR but it operates totally differently. In the standard understanding, ROFR would be the option to purchase the property at the winning auction bid.
Agreed. In a way it's misleading to call it a right of first refusal. Arguably it should just be called an "option."
It's not even an option in any traditional sense. It pegs the option to the auction's strike price, which is nonsensical.
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Under these rules, why would anyone who is not the holder of the first mortgage grant the property owner the second mortgage?
Typically, I would expect that the total mortgages on a property are generally less than the house is worth (aside from market fluctuations). But then it would be in the interest of the owner to sell of the property before it gets foreclosed upon, so they at least make the difference between the sale price ant the outstanding mortgages back rather than nothing.
Yes, in my view, there is a strong disincentive. And in fact I hypothesized elsewhere that this is the actual point of the law: To ban working class homeowners from taking out loans which are not in the homeowners' best interests and are often predator in nature.
Yeah, and I think that foreclosures are strongly correlated with significant drops in the real estate market.
But still, this law would (arguably) offer distressed homeowners another option: Allow the house to go into foreclosure and then buy it back at the upset price with financing from another lender.
I think the actual point of the law was to allow lefty NGOs to get homes, though whether they'd move Democrats into them in a reverse-gerrymandering maneuver or just resell them for profit in an ordinary corruption maneuver could go either way in New Jersey.
Well what do you make of the fact that (apparently) anyone and his brother can just set up a not-for-profit and take advantage of the law? Since you are apparently familiar with New Jersey, you probably know which town in Ocean County would end up having 20 or 30 sketchy "community investment" non-profits set up. Is this something the lawmakers failed to consider? I don't know. The whole law seems pretty half-baked to me.
I don't know much about Ocean County (though I assume you're referring to Lakewood), but I'd expect any such law to be taken advantage of by local networks of corrupt people, whether that was intended or not.
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By the way, I've been thinking about this situation a little more and another interpretation occurred to me. I noticed that out the law's 6 sponsors, 5 are black. Perhaps the actual point of the law is to protect their constituents from predatory lenders.
I mean, they can't really propose a law that would explicitly ban home equity loans to working class black people who own homes that have appreciated in value over the years. But this law would appear to achieve basically the same thing.
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