Post Race!

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How is it my fault if you live in the casino?

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I think it's your portrayal of the mortgage system as a casino, and therefore borrowers as flippant gamblers that caused offence. Particularly when you use phrases like "The wasters who bet against prudence and diligence are whining... "

Most responsible borrowers over here fix their rates but you'll be lucky to find a term of more than 5 years. There are a very few ten year deals around but at higher rates because the bank, understandably, wants to hedge their risk. So what are you suggesting a borrower do?

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

Bankers in the UK have it a bit better. A borrower with a 30 year fixed rate can calculate whether or not to refinance as interest rates drop, but the banks have no means to real means to force them into refinancing at a higher rate as interest rates rise. The banks kept trying to get my parents to get a second mortgage, or refinance, throughout the 80s, because they had a 6.25% interest rate. Now, there are people with 30 year mortgages paying less than 3%, and likely loving it. Not much incentive to pay off a mortgage early when you get more in interest on a bond fund than you are paying on your mortgage.

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Yeah, my last mortgage was 3.25%. It was strange because the bank refinanced my loan, think it was around 5 or 6%, for free. Which means they were making less money. This was a couple of years after the 2008 housing market collapse. I think the government was funding these refinances.

I paid off my house, which had a mortgage of @ 4.25%. I looked at it as the best fixed income investment I could make. I wasn't getting any tax benefits from the mortgage and CD's where only paying @ 1% and treasury bonds @ 2%.


Edit: btw - CD's are really on the rise. I just got a one year CD at 4.5%.

Short term it doesn't sound like there are really any options aside from borrowing from parents which for most people is probably not remotely practical.

Long term people need to rally for some banking reform, because every mortgage being adjustable is pretty awful. Only commercial buyers, real estate flippers, and the imprudent take out such mortgages here. Those paying attention are making a bet that when the balloon comes due they can refinance at a reasonable rate for the life of a new loan. It's a gamble to try to get around temporarily high interest rates that can turn into a trap.

In the US, it would be something of a casino system, but only because we have alternatives. When it's the only game in town, you don't get much of a choice if you want to buy a house.

ARM loans in the US are a bet that either you will sell before the rate floats, or by the time it does, interest rates will drop. None of us in this discussion are all that young, so we all remember the bad rates of the 80s, but there's a generation growing up that thought interest rates as high as we are seeing today were a myth. I work with people who have never seen mortgage rates anywhere near this high. Meanwhile, people of our age probably never thought of an ARM as a good deal, because we found the low rates of the last couple decades miraculous rather than normal. Just look at how we talk about them.

They were always a gamble, but we didn't HAVE to take that gamble, because the US has had 30 year fixed rate mortgages for....well, I don't know how long, but as long as I have been alive, anyways.

We pay lower rates for shorter term mortgages, too, so while those of you across the pond pay MORE for a 10 year fixed term, we pay LESS for a 10 year fixed term.

Forget hedging risk, I have no idea why we pay less for shorter terms. I could make something up, but I have no idea.

My ego's inflated if you know what I mean -big hearty midwestern man in a cowboy hat laugh-

Ignoring the craziness right now with the ups and downs of new and used car prices and loan interest rates, I wonder if car rental is in bad trouble.

Ignoring everything else the "cockpit" of a car is getting so weird and non-standard that you are lucky if you know where the buttons and knobs are, much less which are for what. And that's before you start fighting with the soft controls relegated to the screen and menu trees of wildly varying custom touch displays.

It was bad enough two decades ago if you didn't locate the headlight switch before darkness fell while hurtling down the highway.

That's a good point. We got in a work vehicle and had to pull out the owners manual just to figure out what the light on the dash meant. It turned out to mean that the car was on. The engine didn't start till it was needed, so until we started moving, the car was on, but stationary.

Ha! You said cockpit!

I haven't seen the details of those "one pedal driving" EVs. Are the reflexes of a lifetime of driving all out of the window in an emergency situation? I'd hope you still have a brake pedal that does what it should.

Sure, accommodating to change takes time but how frequently will such change occur from here on? And there is still that issue of renting a car or as described using a fleet car on some rare occasion.

This may not be much of an issue...aside from an inability to set the temperature and the radio. Or, perhaps it just isn't much of a NEW issue. I remember back in the 80s when my mother rented a car with an automatic. She had never driven anything other than manual before that, and didn't know to put the car in D for drive, but instead did what you would in a manual: Put it in 1 (which all automatics had at that time), then 2, then D....except that automatics didn't really work that way, and even trying to start up in 1 was pretty rough.

I was thinking of things like turning on headlights, operating high/low beams, wipers, defogging which often includes A/C operation, and other things impacting safety while in motion. That can even include other things like cruise control operation, navigating among primary display screens, and clearing alarms and indications. Most of those don't have direct impacts on safety but fiddling and fussing while in motion can be an unsafe distraction.

You might even have gotten a power roof opened and then run into rain and have to scramble trying to figure out how to close it.

Yeah, that could be pretty entertaining.

For the most part, turn signals, high/low beams, and wipers are pretty well standardized, by now. There was that time when the high/low beams were operated by a switch on the floor in some vehicles, but that's over with, these days.

It all changes if cars move away from sticks on the column. I haven't seen that, yet, but I could see it happening in some cars.

One thing that is fairly certain is that car manufacturers really really suck at UI design. I have a Subaru with a backup camera. However, the camera displays on the console, and the manufacturers, in their wisdom, decided to display a safety message on the screen whenever the car starts. It is possible that there is some kind of boot sequence that the safety message is acting as a false front for, but that seems REALLY unlikely. Showing a camera display should be instantaneous, even if there is some kind of boot sequence for the entertainment console. The result is that, if you are going forwards after starting, the only drawback is that you can't change the station. If you are backing out of some space, though, you have to sit through that message before you can use the camera. The message is pretty long, too, and they give you plenty of time to read through it before having it go away.

It's a pretty bad design.

I get that message, but it has a button I can jab to dismiss it. Pretty annoying thing every time though.

This is a touch screen, but it does nothing during the warning message. Is there a specific button you press? Normally, I don't do anything with it, since I usually back into parking places, so it doesn't matter that the warning message shows up. It would be nice to be able to dismiss it, though.

The message is pointless, anyways. I've driven the car for years, and have seen that message thousands of times, yet I'm not even sure what it is warning about. Had I been reading it, I'd have it memorized by now. I'm clearly tuning it out, which means it's pointless....yet there it is.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

One thing that is fairly certain is that car manufacturers really really suck at UI design. I have a Subaru with a backup camera. However, the camera displays on the console, and the manufacturers, in their wisdom, decided to display a safety message on the screen whenever the car starts. It is possible that there is some kind of boot sequence that the safety message is acting as a false front for, but that seems REALLY unlikely. Showing a camera display should be instantaneous, even if there is some kind of boot sequence for the entertainment console. The result is that, if you are going forwards after starting, the only drawback is that you can't change the station. If you are backing out of some space, though, you have to sit through that message before you can use the camera. The message is pretty long, too, and they give you plenty of time to read through it before having it go away.

It's a pretty bad design.

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All new cars sold in the US since 2018 are required by law to have a backup camera and I'm pretty sure the lengthy message is the law as well. All because a few idiots managed to back over their own children.

Funny how I've owned 3 full-size cargo vans since I started working as a musician in the early-'90s and never managed to back over a single child. :afrog:

Yeah, I can't remember the details and right now I can't even find a picture searching Google.

The "button" is an on-screen button though and the one image I did find was from one model year earlier and it doesn't have the (soft) button on the screen.

My mom hit me backing up her big ass astrovan when I was a boy. She wasn’t going fast and nothing was broken, but it sure did hurt.

Looking at childhood photos, my mom was all drugged up on Valium so I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case.

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Originally Posted by homer13j

All new cars sold in the US since 2018 are required by law to have a backup camera and I'm pretty sure the lengthy message is the law as well. All because a few idiots managed to back over their own children.

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That's when the lawyers are sicced on a problem. They make the situation worse, because the message overrides the backup camera at the point where it is most useful.

I managed to back a semi into a guard rail. I only knew I hit something because my boss started laughing his ass off. I guess I pushed it right up out of the ground. I couldn't see back there because I was turning the wrong way, so I was watching my boss. I think he guided me into the guardrail just to see what would happen. That wasn't your typical trailer, either. It was seriously solid, with a steel platform attached to the back. It wasn't going to lose against darn near anything.

Bump.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

Bump.

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Bump? That's the best you could do? A random word would be more in the line of what Post Race demands!

Or a silly joke, that will probably only make sense to those in the USA...

I just discovered, that if you start a post on one PC - and then find out the image you want to upload is on another PC, that when you start a new post on that other PC, it gives you that RESTORE YOUR POST message, and it pulls the POST from PC #1 and restores it onto PC #2. User cache, instead of Session caching...interesting...

I've noticed that, but never really paid much attention to it. Pretty interesting.

And the joke's a real stinker.

Not sure why those characters were used. Guess it was just cause they were there.

There was a quote from some time back where a guy wrote a long response to something and added, "I'm sorry for the long response, I didn't have time to write a shorter one."

In my case, I went FAR shorter, so just imagine how long it took me to come up with THAT!

This made me laugh,

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Or a silly joke, that will probably only make sense to those in the USA...

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I have absolutely no idea but I'm intrigued.

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Originally Posted by FunkyDexter

I have absolutely no idea but I'm intrigued.

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Dawn is our most common liquid dish detergent - it's tough on grease

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

And the joke's a real stinker.

Not sure why those characters were used. Guess it was just cause they were there.

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Riker is known for slapping his palm against his forehead - kind of fits the dad-joke nicely...

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Originally Posted by wes4dbt

This made me laugh,

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Reminds me of the Friends skit when firefighters come put out a fire on Valentines Day. When they're leaving, one ask the other "you told her you have a girlfriend right?" and he responds "no way, my wife doesn't even know about my girlfriend".

Didn't know that Dawn was the most common dish detergent in the US, though now that you mention it, it sure does seem to have a large amount of shelf space. I did know the ad campaign about it being tough on grease, though.

Dawn's been knighted, though, so you really should use the proper name: Dawn Sir Factant, who can make even a duck get waterlogged.

LSU is coming in at number 10!

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Originally Posted by dday9

LSU is coming in at number 10!

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Beat Alabama and you can move to 6th.

I’m not confident in being ranked number 10. We got creamed by Tennessee. And while Jayden Daniels is hot right now, he performed terribly against Auburn. It’s just such a hit and miss year.

Being from the Boise area, you won't get a whole lot of people who are complimentary of the college football ranking system. BSU fans tend to feel aggrieved when the team is doing well. It's much easier living here when they don't do TOO well, because it takes the edge off the argument when the team clearly isn't great. People argue about Top 25 or Top 10, but nobody argues much when you're outside of those categories.

The problem with college football is that the number of games is pretty small relative to the number of schools, and a good team can always pad their schedule against creampuff teams, so the ranking is always a bit of a guessing game.

Interesting seeing the Phillies leading the Astros, though.

My mom brought me to the opening of Minute Maid stadium and I just remember hating the Astros growing. They had Craig Biggio who was a decent first baseman and then no one. I watched them lose my entire childhood, got fed up, and became a Red Socks fan.

Minute maid. Better than minute made, I suppose.

What a difference a week makes. Temps have dropped 15-20 degrees and a couple days with rain. Almost forgot rain even existed.

What is rain? Like the actor, Rainn Wilson? Dwight Schrute of Schrute Farms?