OT: US is a Weird Place to Live

Seems to me that decreasing housing costs would benefit the population.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Those who don't own houses but who are looking to buy houses, sure. We've seen what a housing price collapse has done to the rest. OTOH, I made out well (house as appreciated 100% in five years). The previous owner's bank (FNMA) didn't, though. We all picked up the tab.

It makes a big difference whether people treat houses as speculative investments, or as places to live.

I know people who kept re-financing their house as valuations went up. They had an interest-only mortgage and went on cruises and bought $100 bottles of wine with the refi money. They lost it all, of course. They were lucky that they could pack up and walk away.

Gosh, maybe they were the smart ones.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

lunatic fringe electronics

Right. At 5 microns of sea level rise per day, one day everybody will panic and decide they can't stand it any more and shoot up the place.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

S-Video

You're nuts. You probably do use a PC with an S-Video output.

Investment speculation

I know a lot more who didn't and still got burned.

They had no house. That's smart?

OTOH, the people who BR'd out of our house in '11 then bought back into the same neighborhood two years ago. I believe their house just went up for auction again. Someone will loan money to just abut anyone.

It's how I connect my Circuit City DIVX player.

It's a well known fact that you're illiterate. No need to convince anyone else.

John Larkin wrote on 10/5/2017 11:53 PM:

The first thing they do is hire a CFO who actually knows a few things about taxes. I am sure that you aren't taxed or in any other way spending 60% of salaries because of the government. Second, you get a tax break when buying equipment either by depreciation or if the cost is small enough direct cost. That is no different than not paying taxes on salaries because it is a cost of doing business. Is your company paying tax on the money you spend on salaries??? Wow, you really need a new CFO. I expect that is you and your CPA. Ask your CPA, I but they can correct your poor understanding of tax law.

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Rick C 

Viewed the eclipse at Wintercrest Farms, 
on the centerline of totality since 1998

That's what krw understood Obama's plan to be. More rational observers would beg to differ.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

d a whole bunch of small changes. We have too many special provisions like the manufactures of washing machines getting tax reductions for making mor e efficient clothes washers. The tax code is thousands of pages because of special provisions. It should be about 30 pages. But there will be thous ands of lobbyists working to keep special sections.

The USA is particularly heavily infested with lobbyists, and it's legislati on is equally heavily infested with the loopholes for particular interests that the lobbyist seem to be able to insert into legislation dealing with v ery different matters.

You need a large change in your constitution to fix that. There are plenty of more modern constitutions around for you to copy - though I'd avoid the

1958 French Fifth Republic Constitution which was written by de Gaulle with his particular interests in mind.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Most of them don't. They talk about house price bubbles, and making home ow nership inaccessible to the average home owner.

In the US, rising house prices favour the rich, and the rich have a disprop ortionate amount of political, some of it over sycophant economists.

Remember the subprime mortgage crisis? Dubbya knew that there was a house p rice bubble, but wanted to use it as an excuse to gut the CRA, and did noth ing about it when that ambition was stifled.

James Arthur - being the right wing twit that he is - kept on blaming the C RA for the sub-prime mortgage bubble until the question had been looked int o, and the blame got laid squarely on the fringe banks that had made the lo ans that had mostly gone sour, while the CRA rules meant that their loans h adn't (or at least no more often than regular bank loans).

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

John Larkin keeps on missing the point that sea levels are going to rise ra pidly when the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets start sliding off in to the ocean. His 5 microns a day sea level rise is the oceans acting like the mercury in a thermometer, and expanding as they get warmer.

Look at the sea level rise through the end of the last ice age, where you g et rapid rises when particular ice sheets became mechanically unstable, and a slowly rising level in between. There was rather more ice sheet to melt back then, so the total rise was bigger than we are looking at.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

If your neighbors are a mob you should move. If none of them know you then you are one of those "quiet guys who keeps to himself" and you shouldn't have a gun. But that too should be up to the people. If you live in a region where people think even those quiet guys whom they don't know personally (even though there are no other houses in between) should have guns then they can approve it. Their safety is the issue so they should be in control.

The state licensing agency can send the forms to the nearest 100 addresses. Your license application fee would pay for it.

Why should my neighbors dictate my safety? Are they personally going to replace what's lost (life?) after a home invasion?

Perhaps we should publish the names of all 100 (neighbors who don't approve of guns).

Because your safety is related to theirs in several ways, facing the same external threats and each other. And you can move.

Show me where the Constitution says anything about neighbor's permission. You can't.