You mean the bank?

I have been telling people as of late that interest rates need to go up to 11%-14%. People simply cannot afford a house at $3000/mo payments; more generally, a house isn't sold by a price tag, but by a monthly payment. People will pay a particular monthly payment, which is why the falling interest rates came with rapidly rising house prices: that $120,000 house that cost $1150/mo became a $350,000 house that cost $1150/mo.

In any loan, you have a balance to be paid every month, and a continuous compounding interest. That means you may start the month with a $300,000 balance and an $1150 payment, but you'll make your first payment on a balance of around $350,600--meaning your balance only comes down about $500. We tell the lay person there's a "principle" and "interest" payment, but that's sort of a defrauding view, as the simplification precludes a lot of interesting financial management.

Truth be told, your $300k house at an incredibly low interest rate (2.5% would be an $1185/mo payment) will command a $560 principle payment in the early months, and around $625 of interest. You can skip payments by paying those next months's principle, not payment in full: if you pay $5,600, you'll skip ten months's payment, and save $6,250 off the total cost. Most people can't find an extra $560/month, or $5,600 regularly.

At a price of $100k and a high interest rate (14% would be an $1185/mo payment), the situation changes. The total cost still comes to about $325k; however, your early principle payments are around $18. That means coming up with an additional $200 in that first month's payment skips around 10 payments, saving you $11,700 in total. Even scrounging up a few tens of dollars each month takes thousands off the final total--a $100/mo extra payment cuts over 12 years off the 30-year loan, and saves $162k, more than six times the *total* interest paid on a 2.5% interest loan.

Take that all into consideration, the effect of a high-interest-rate market in driving prices down means we only want the lowest interest rate we can get in the highest interest rate *market* we can manage to buy in: we want a 14% market, but we want to secure a 12.25% loan in that market, if we can. Most homeowners only process that they want a low rate, but not what market they want the rate in; they jump at low-rate markets, instead of shying away.

Remember the rich always had 5-10 year mortgages, up until FDR created the 30-year mortgage. Us poor and middle-class came into the market on lifelong bank slavery, never living in an age of general 10-year mortgages. What I describe above implies an easy route to get down to a 15-year mortgage, if the market rates are high, by putting little additional payment onto the home--an additional 8% payment to save 50% off the total purchase cost of the home. If we could spread the idea far enough, consumers may decide the extra is worth it; more importantly, consumers would become accustomed to 15 or even 10 year loans, and so consumers who *can't* afford the extra $150 (or, to get to 10 years, $400) would become wary of buying, driving prices downward.

In other words: a high-interest-rate market gives an opportunity to educate consumers to get 15-year loans. Widespread middle-class consumption of 15- and 10-year mortgages will drive middle class wealth sharply upwards, as people in their 20s enter their 30s suddenly free of that $1200 or $1500 or $2000 monthly payment--filthy motherfucking rich. Besides the broader economic effect, the public mind may react to this by assuming 30-year mortgages are untenable bullshit (especially when the costs of long-term, high-balance debt are understood), and so the poor may refuse to lock themselves into interminably-long loans, requiring a lowering of house prices to keep the housing market solvent.

A generation of sellers would suffer from their lost equity; further generations would notice absolutely no impact in that regard, only that they are much more wealthy after paying their houses off. This is the same, really, as normal fluctuations: increasing house prices make a seller rich, and then later the end of the chain of buyers makes up the balance as his house's value drops. On the other hand, living expense equity has a curious economic effect: if you can escape the mortgage in short order, it acts as a governor on wages. Wages (and salaries) must provide enough for that wage-class to purchase a house; however, since the term is, say, 10 years, the wage class has an enormous amount of free income 10 years into their career--homeowners hit age 30 and suddenly find themselves with twice as much spendable income.

I bought my house when the financial advantage was greater than renting; I'm uncertain about that advantage now, and may have been... immediately better off had I rented for $800/mo rather than taking a $500/mo 15-year mortgage. Nevertheless, I don't believe the extra $30,000 in costs over the first 5 years (nor the probable new roof at a cost of $5000-$8000 in the next 5 years) completely offsets my profitable positioning. I didn't make this purchase as a matter of raw cost minimization; I made it as a matter of leveraging my income stream to cut more recurring costs away. I'm willing to spend $5000 to save myself $4000 if that $4000 comes as a $120/mo reduction in expenses, which of course means $6000 for new heat pumps, $6000 for new insulation, $4000 for new windows, $1000 for masonry work, and so forth, to get sub-$100 monthly utility bills out of a $170-$380 monthly payment (depending on time of year) works for me: even though it's more than an 8 year ROI, the immediate effect is $250/mo less pressure on my accounts, meaning more free income, even though those accounts are badly bruised and battered.

In short: I spend an awful lot of money to immediately save myself financial risk. At the same time, I'm not such a fool as to line my house with expensive solar panels, since they bring their own financial risk.

They did it over 14 years in diverse areas.

In such conditions, shouldn't parked cars leave their parking lights on?

The passenger-side headlight in US cars points up and rightward on purpose; the driver-side lamp is cast downward.

GMO grains command a higher price; they do not *cost* more.

Nice thing about writing "Contains no GMO" and "organic" on your box is you can sell it for 3x as much, which then raises the acceptable price of food, which reduces competition pressure, which raises the price of shit food, which helps keep the poor poor and improve the rate of starving niggers.

What you describe seems more likely in hybridization than in GMO. At least in GMO we know what we're doing; in hybridization, we slap two things together and see what happens.

It's not a technical solution; they'll just throw a handful of leaves on the ground and piss on that.

Your argument is: "premium shit costs like $500 and this costs $300, so their +$50 offer isn't a premium option."

The problem is they sell two options: the basic 16GB option and the premium 64GB option. The fact that their PREMIUM OPTION is cheaper than some Rolls Royce bullshit doesn't mean it's not a premium option.

The original argument was that availability of SD card slots would suppress the market value of in-phone storage. This is a fairly complex concept.

First off, SD card readers in wide-spread use (in many base-model phones) would sway customers away from non-SD phones if storage space becomes a consideration. At the same time, a market where most phones do not have SD cards readers would capture very little market by putting an SD card reader in the phone, yet would drive its existing customers away from its premium, higher-storage version to its lower-storage version. Thus the market implications of putting an SD card reader in a particular model depends on the general phone market as well as what other models are available in the particular product line.

Second, price suppression isn't as simple as people going after the cheapest, lowest-storage phone. A 1GB phone will have trouble installing apps and overloading with data that can't go to the SD card; whereas a 16GB phone will be more than comfortable, and even more so if all videos, music, and photos go to the SD card. The availability of an SD card reader affects in-phone storage prices above some minimum which the user perceives as necessary: once users learn that phones with less than 4GB or 8GB of storage have trouble after the apps have had time to fill mandatory in-phone storage, they'll refuse to purchase phones with less storage; but they'll also more often refuse to buy additional storage at a premium when they can spend a tenth as much to add that same amount of additional storage.

The point was overall market effect. Why don't phones have SD storage? Why doesn't *this* phone have SD storage? You can argue that price gouging doesn't matter in this case, or whatever you want; that doesn't change the cost of components and the market effects I describe. These are the reasons phones don't generally carry SD storage: it's more lucrative to not offer it.

People don't seem to understand the point of typing multiple capital letters in a row, as they hold shift with a pinky to type COBOL or UNIX. Chromebooks put that useless search button where capslock goes.

You're all thinking in terms of technical implications; I'm thinking in terms of economics.

How many people can you find who can't flip a hamburger or fill a box of french fries?

Making everyone a programmer--indeed, the whole concept of universal access to college--is just a campaign to make a minimum wage job out of *everything*. College itself is a great thing, and good higher education options are important for a society; but access to those options needs restriction, and not by quota or the color of your blood.

Giving absolutely everyone unrestricted access to career education means a strong job market in a field only encourages everyone, unknowing of how many actual jobs are available and how many of their peers are entering that market, to go into vocational training for that field. After that, you have ten times the trained professionals ready to take up those jobs than there are jobs available, and so unemployment increases, employer negotiation power goes up, employee power goes down, and, with that, salaries and benefits decrease as well. Were I the type to maximize my systematic abuse of my employees, I would lobby heavily for a public college infrastructure--loans-based especially, but also free college, even if it were paid for entirely by taxes on businesses--in order to put my employees constantly on low ground, allowing me to stomp all over them as I see fit.

The bare reality is businesses need us. That's not an ego statement or a rally cry; every business have a strategy to execute, the vital plans required to maximize their profits, and that strategy relies on the capability to perform certain types of labor. Just like a merchant requires salesmen and inventory managers, a software company requires programmers; an aircraft company requires engineers; and a construction company requires construction workers. Without trained, if not experienced, laborers available in the market, these businesses must pay exorbitant salaries to hire talent from competitors, greatly increasing costs; on the other side, their talent may be hired away, greatly increasing risks.

My own economic theory suggests this creates a good argument for free, public college: raising costs and risks (risks only become greater costs) raises the cost of products; and, as I've said many times, we increase wealth by *lowering* the cost of production--lowering labor costs, essentially, by reducing labor or reducing the unit cost of labor--and so it seems reducing these costs and risks will bring us cheaper products and, thus, greater residual wealth and opportunities for new markets, meaning new jobs. Unfortunately, this direction also implies the middle-class will shrink--we lower cost by squeezing down middle-class salaries--and the power and wealth of the great many laborers is diminished, which is socially not in line with my own philosophies.

Fortunately for my philosophies and for my grasp of economics, this is not the only way to reduce those risks and their associated costs.

As a matter of strategic management, businesses routinely project what load they will put on their resources in the future--indeed, that's what work performance information and human resource management are for. Even the most oblivious employers I've worked for have 2-3 years of foreknowledge about what departments they need expand; of course, since there is so much available labor out there, they simply squeeze everyone they have (in management, this is called "running lean") until they break, and then put out "urgent need" postings just before collapse. Management is, however, fully capable of predicting their labor needs, and approves the hiring budgets 6-18 months before hiring actually begins.

With the public effectively barred from college by the barrier of sheer individual cost, the labor pool for these needed skilled laborers drops as I suggest. Those "running lean" tactics don't work. Instead, as Miyomoto Musashi observed, a successful business would strategically hire on unskilled but eager entrants, shifting low-skill work (think refactoring, code clean-up) away from their high-value employees. Such work requires a great deal of time to perform, but comparatively little time to verify (git merge request reviewed by senior programmer), and so this displacement gains a relative reduction in cost immediately. At the same time, on-the-job training, off-site training, and funding of the employee's college education allow the employer to build a more competent and useful employee in steps: as skill improves, so does the range of tasks the employee can complete effectively--as does his speed and effectiveness (correctness) in performing those tasks.

This strategy places the cost and risk of job training on businesses, and allows them to balance away the cost and risk of hiring fully-trained employees by carefully displacing time-consuming tasks from highly-utilized, high-value employees to those lower-value employees. Further, the actual risks are smaller for a business than for an individual: a business often genuinely knows what employees it will need in 6 months to 3 years's time, at least to a high degree of certainty, and knows it isn't hiring 5 employees to fill 1 slot. The salary run-up of hiring professionals from other businesses will increase costs greatly over just training, and so salaries may rise, but only to the actual value of an employee--the value of building an employee rather than buying one, not the value the employee thinks he is worth, so long as he'll settle for what he's offered.

At the same time, a divide is made between labor you have, labor you can acquire, and labor you can create. This puts more power in the hands of the individual laborer, commanding higher salaries and better job security; and it also raises the value of that employee to the business, justifying that power. If an employee finds himself suddenly unemployed, he is valuable, immediately-available labor, most valuable to businesses with multiple entry-level positions open, as he will bring the immediate benefit of multiple entrants and more quickly produce the full benefit of a trained professional (which reduces risk of training taking too fucking long, thus leaving you somewhat short on man power).

That's really what all this business about making everyone into a programmer is: cheaper IT. Programmers are expensive, so let's turn everyone into a programmer so they'll be the modern-day burger flipper. Girls are shit negotiators, and business is IT heavy, so let's get more girls into IT so we can push salaries down. So on and so forth. The same, really, is true of broader individual access to college: it relieves businesses of their social responsibility to build a workforce by relieving them of the consequences of not building that workforce--consequences which everyone has forgotten, and so they imagine businesses prospering in an endless stream of gold and silver while poor people die in the streets without any way to get jobs or college degrees, not considering how these businesses are getting any work done without anyone to work for them (they also imagine labor create jobs, and so having 1000 people with IT skills means having 1000 more IT jobs available).

That, of course, is a particularly later focus of my overall goals. I want to get a Citizen's Dividend passed first, and then remove the minimum wage once it's no longer necessary--once people with zero income are able to afford housing and food--so as to first confer that "minimum standard of living" to people who aren't fully employed, and to second spread the transition to widespread automation over a longer time period (hopefully weakening its negative economic impacts, and giving us time to recover along the way) by way of reducing labor costs. I'll fight the more difficult economic issues after I've solved poverty--that is, after I've gotten the solution implemented; I haven't yet decided if I should follow my education reform with college economics policies, or run both in parallel and keep emphasis that the two issues are separate.

Hitler did, in fact, collect up all the guns while explaining that the S.S. would protect everyone. They then proceeded to protect everyone from living in communities with jews, gays, or anyone they didn't like. Second Amendment nannies are so up in arms about everything that restricts their firearm freedom, in part, because of that example; they are, of course, loonies, and nobody will listen to them as they scream loudly into the night about a government which wants to "protect" us by expansion of domestic spying and enforcement power.

That's the OnePlus One. The OnePlus Two gives additional RAM on top of NAND; the One only gives 64GB or 16GB of storage as options, with the same amount of RAM. I was discussing Bacon.

Why would you ever price based on those numbers when the premium market by and large is willing to open their wallets quite a bit wider for a little more storage? Do you not like maximizing your profits? $30 this way or that won't sway people onto or away from your phone.

It's not simply that. This is an incredible example of careful diplomatic speech. Read something like Off Armageddon Reef (a better example than The Gap Cycle or Dune) and you'll see this shit all over the place--importantly, with attention drawn to it for storytelling purposes. In context, there's a whole several paragraphs around the statement discussing the theft and publication of secret information, for which Snowden must face trial; but, when examined closely, the blunt statement I describe is in fact made.

On a technicality, you can take apart my analysis and show that no such thing was ever said--which is exactly the point. The listener will hear the statement I describe: "If something is wrong, speak up; but don't expect to escape consequence, as do all men who fight and die for what they believe is right." The speaker can, of course, point out the context of the statement and show no such thing has been stated.

This is how politicians work on a large population over a long span of time. The statements they make incite a certain type of thought, certain emotions, specific beliefs and understandings in response. Things like, "Remember that God has ultimately given us all the ability to think, and to know evil from good when we see it," which a pastor can point out was in the context of those around us--our peers, our parents, our secular leaders--may lead us astray, all the while catching the Church in that sweeping statement--a heretical proclamation that the church may be wrong. Such a pastor could protect himself even from the Spanish Inquisition, claiming he was protecting the Church from outside influences who would lead their good followers away, all while setting up for his followers to recognize and resist a corrupt Church.

It really is an amazing thing to watch; unfortunately, it's much more terrifying to observe in real life than in fiction.