[poorgradstudent]

You’re in a good position as it sounds like you don’t need to buy a car tomorrow. You know the market, it’s probably time to set your price, make the offer to multiple dealers and see who bites. You’re right that there are perverse incentives that either make dealerships super willing to negotiate at the end of the month, or totally ambivalent if they have hit their numbers already.

[poorgradstudent]

The rule of thumb I’ve heard is if your kids are in college, you probably don’t need a big life insurance policy.

Obviously it depends on your wife and how much money she’d need to be comfortable if you passed away. But based on what I know about your finances, I get the vibe if you died tomorrow she wouldn’t exactly be destitute.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=FormerSanDiegan]When bears capitulate and buy… it usually is a sign of nearing a top.[/quote]

Another sign is when you start seeing more and more commercials on TV targeting individual investors.

ETrade’s first Superbowl commerical was… 2007.

Also when the mainstream news magazines start talking about the market it’s another bad sign.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=FlyerInHi]There is a labor shortage of doctors. Rural communities increasingly rely on foreign doctors. Maybe that’s why the rural folks are unhappy with healh care. Better some health care than none.[/quote]

But really only in certain fields, the lowest paying fields of medicine (Internal, Family), and yes, especially in rural areas. Some of that gap is being covered by a trend towards PA and NPs for most general needs; when little Susie has a cough she doesn’t REALLY need to see an MD to determine if antibiotics or antiviral medication is needed.

We actually have a pretty good system in place to control the pipeline of new MDs in this country. If there was a true shortage UCSD and friends could all start pumping out a few more doctors a year.

[poorgradstudent]

Our visa system is broken at least in the sense there is little oversight. I’ve worked at more than one company where the renewal process is a joke; the company makes a posting, but they can tailor the posting so narrow that only the person currently in the role could possibly fit it. And “we can’t find an American worker to fill the job” often means “We can’t find an American who will do the job for as little as we want to pay”.

These days its less of an issue, but during the Great Recession there were a lot of companies employing cheaper imported labor while American talent sat unemployed.

I don’t think the program is all bad, but I do think there is a lot of room to reform the abuses that occur.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=gzz]I loved sim city when I was a kid. The game is set up so you have no incentive to zone low density, not too much like the real world where it would get you thrown out of office to zone everything high density.

China needs to build like crazy as it is in the process of moving a billion peasants into urban areas. Prices are also much more out of whack than any other large economy compared to either rents or income. Lots of condos sell for 50x annual rent or more.

That is another reason in addition to freedom, stability and pollution to get out of China. Urban condos are priced higher than in major west coast cities but incomes are still a fraction of US incomes.[/quote]

I must have been playing a different version of SimCity. The one I remember you wanted to pack as much density in as possible to increase your population and hit the 1m (or whatever the target was) population goal and get the reward.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=spdrun]^^^

That’s a good thing.[/quote]

Yeah. It also is one more reason to suggest the increases in home prices aren’t sustainable, as the gap between median home prices and conforming loan limits grows.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=FlyerInHi]
Lots people, you know who, bitch about the cost defending allies, yet they want to project more American power which leads to escalating military spending.
[/quote]

And this is where the “average voter” is just stupid. Either you want America to have the most Dominant military force in the world (and the cost that comes with it) or you want Rand Paul style isolationism. I suppose you can also be a moderate. But you can’t demand the goodies without paying the price. But then again 95% of politics is promising to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, or free college for all.

[poorgradstudent]

So, 1.7 increase%?

Way less than the rate of home price increases, although about in line with overall inflation.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=spdrun]
Problem with the US isn’t our taxes are terribly high — it’s that we don’t get much back for the tax money spent. We waste it on homicide sprees abroad (aka, power projection) and abuse of our own citizenry (overpolicing, mass incarceration, war on the bugaboo of the week).[/quote]

I think this is the main catch. Aside from a support network for old people, which most people with any sense of history and plans to be old one day themselves are ok with, we don’t get a lot of visible stuff for our low taxes.

A huge chunk of our taxes go to national defense, and there’s the biggest irony; a lot of people who want lower taxes want higher defense spending. The sequester actually was helpful in temporarily stemming ballooning defense spending, but unfortunately most of that eventually got exceptioned out.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=scaredyclassic]
i am dumb. but i idiotically thought he meant at least some of what he said. at least the prosecution of HRC.

power means saying literally anything to get the desired response.

truth is absolutely irrelevant.[/quote]

When someone has a long history of lying and cheating to get what they want in business, it suggests they are willing to lie and cheat to get what they want in Politics. Of course all politicians over promise; Obama promised a lot of things that he would have needed a permanent Supermajority in congress to actually implement. Trump’s promise to prosecute HRC was always empty; the President doesn’t have that authority.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=FlyerInHi]Non college white males and their wives in MI, WI, PA. Of course OH and IN also. And non-college retirees in FL.

I told my relatives in OH and IN that I’m boycotting their states. They have to come visit me instead. I’m not setting foot in a red state nunca mas![/quote]

Y’know, I can see skipping Indiana, that state is a crazy mess and has been for a while. But Ohio really is purple, and I’m sure you’re well aware has a lot of variability between the different cities.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=poorgradstudent]Well, considering mortgage rates are shooting up after Trump’s election, it looks like he may be the factor to finally deflate prices a bit.

It’s nice for me that at least rates are finally higher than my most recent refi, so I can fell good that my rate is lower than what other people are getting now! But it does mean that the price on paper of my house estimate has stopped going up.[/quote]

Well, now rates are more or less back up to when we purchased 2 years ago! Looks like our most recent refi may have caught the true bottom.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=bearishgurl][quote=poorgradstudent]Companies who donate money to candidates love H1B visas.

End of the day, H1B visas don’t affect that many American workers, and they people they do affect can still find jobs. It’s not the same as a factory being shut down and workers in a city not being able to find anything close to as good.

If Trump does go after H1B visas it will be more theater than policy based. The people who elected him care a lot more about factory work and Mexican laborers than they do visiting Engineers and Computer Programmers.[/quote]I DO think there are engineers and computer programmers living in flyover America who voted for Trump. However, they can’t afford to live in or near SV (San Mateo and Santa Clara, CA) or in SD County to take a tech job in coastal CA so the H1B hires in these areas won’t affect them.

I disagree that all Trump supporters in flyover America were factory workers and miners before their employers closed up shop. They were from all walks of life, including medical and legal professionals and teachers/school administrators, as well as Federal, state and local govm’t personnel and law enforcement. And I think Trump supporters are beyond tired of hearing that they have all been pigeonholed into the same (deplorable) little boxes by the (sore-loser type) liberal set.[/quote]

I’m pretty sure teachers broke pretty heavily Democrat, as they always do. Especially considering the Republican platform regarding public education from the last 10-20 years, and the fact that teaching on the whole is dominated by women. Government workers on the whole tend to prefer Democrats as well, although that does vary a bit by state.

On the whole, Trump supporters were largely white, largely lacking college degrees. Does that describe every trump supporter? No. I know a Vietnamese Computer Programmer who for some reason supported Trump, despite the fact he’d be told to Go Back to China at a Trump Rally. But ON THE WHOLE you can draw a profile of a Trump supporter demographically. There’s nothing wrong with being a working class white male; plenty of them are not deplorable, but overall that’s the group that voted Trump into office.

[poorgradstudent]

[quote=spdrun]Those foreign/OOS students pay 2-3x the tuition of in-state students: they help pay in-state students’ tuitions.[/quote]

This.

Foreign students paying sticker price is the open secret of how college administrators balance the books at top universities that lack deep pocketed donors.

[Author]

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