I for one think the imminent demise of human civilization is of interest to the intellectually curious and thoughtful readers of HN. I also believe that hurting the feelings of willful climate change deniers and suchlike people is a really good idea.
The job of the appraiser is to write down a number as large as or larger than the amount to be financed. They know this and they know the number in advance. What they do is not rigorous.
They won't write down a completely insane number. They're a first level filter not a fine detailed filter. "I'm willing to go on record that I found three recent sales in the neighborhood for about $whatever" where whatever is reasonably near what you're financing. One need only go a few miles to find houses a tenth the cost or ten times the cost. If your neighbors house sells for $X and you want a loan for $X they're not going to sweat it, if you are trying for a loan of $X times ten its going to be difficult.
I paid a couple hundred bucks for an ex-general contractor with a thick binder to inspect my house for hours, looking inside the furnace heat exchanger and testing every wall outlet and inspecting the plumbing and roof inside and out and insulation and foundation and everything. That is a detailed analysis of what you're likely to spend on maintenance and upgrades over the next ten years. Its probably more useful than an appraisal but it takes a lot more time and money.
You seem to think these industry controls are effective. Maybe they prevent an appraisal from being, say, 10x higher than the recent sale prices on either side, but they don't prevent the equally bad event of a series of 10 sales on the same block each being 10% higher than the previous. Every one of those houses in Las Vegas that turned out to be worthless in 2007 was appraised for at least the sale price the year before. The appraisers in those cases didn't do a damn thing, for example they didn't come out to the house and write down "this neighborhood is in a desert with no access to water where the unemployment rate is 20% and the employed people make minimum wage therefore this cannot be a neighborhood of $850000 houses." They just said "the last house sold for $800000 and this market seems pretty hot so $850000 okey dokey."
Certainly you can influence the appraiser, but the way you state it is nonsense. Their job is also to provide feedback to the buyer, they won't just pull any number you like out of a hat.
What incentive does the lender have? The involved parties are the seller, the buyer, their agents, and the originator of the loan. All of these people are working to close the deal at the negotiated price. The originator of the loan will hold the loan for somewhere between 72 hours and 30 days, so they don't care.
Of course they care; any money they give you over the value of the home is unsecured! They're not going to lend you e.g. 20k @ 3.5% with no collateral. C'mon.
And yes, the site is connected with the Yimby Party[0] and SFBARF[1], who have been featured in HN before.[2]
FWIW, I helped put together the website, which uses Armin Ronacher's Lektor CMS.[3] And as far as this has gone, it's been a tremendous success, for putting together a straightforward news site that is usable for both tech-savvy operators as well as those unacquainted with the command-line.
I can't take any credit for the site's content (aside from the time I live-tweeted a Palo Alto City Council meeting)[0]-- my hat is certainly off to the journalism that site has come to provide, covering stories one won't find anywhere else.
Good! I'm glad there's an organization out there representing my viewpoint.
I'm a "tech worker" who moved here for a job, and I'm pretty sick of being the scapegoat for the housing woes while half my income goes to my landlord who enjoys the benefit of being perceived as an upstanding long-term member of the community as he grows fat suckling at my teat.
What did your premiums look like before? In my case I just didn't have insurance because there was no functioning market anywhere that would sell you a family health care plan including childbirth, at any price. Now I get health insurance from my employer which isn't affected by ACA so I don't know what the market looks like.
We were paying about $650 per month and a $4,000 annual deductible.
Obamacare forced our insurer to cancel our plan.
First lie: "If you like your plan you can keep it".
The new plan was $1,450 per month and a $9,000 annual deductible.
Second lie: "A family will save $2,500 per year".
Even at that, we lost many of the doctors.
Third lie: "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor".
There's more in the details (co-pays, etc.). The above would be enough to throw any business person in jail for fraud. Yet we somehow tolerate and rationalize our elected officials behaving this way.
I don't particularly like Trump but if anyone is wondering why he got elected, well, start by understanding the true depths of Obamacare and go from there.
Do you think it's possible that your prior policy was one of the garbage plans that got outlawed by ACA? Those are the ones that didn't survive the "you can keep it" claims. Those were plans with uselessly low annual or lifetime limits, too much small print, etc.
Yep, I've got exactly the same yesterday until Uber asked me to grant "Always" location tracking. Not only I dislike the forceful location grant but they had a bug that didn't prompt me for it until I rebooted the app twice :)
Yeah REALLY obnoxious. I was just disabling this after another Uber ride. They do not provide the option to enable location services only when the app is running on screen. I think it might be nice if iOS presented this option regardless of what Uber wants.
> I think it might be nice if iOS presented this option regardless of what Uber wants.
I delete any application that requires all-or-nothing location privileges; if Uber acts this way now I'm done using Uber.
Being able to make it such that location services are an all-or-nothing proposition when there is clearly support for "only when using" in iOS annoys me to no end. The fact Apple doesn't do this is what is actually alarming, given their stance on "privacy".
>>I delete any application that requires all-or-nothing location privileges; if Uber acts this way now I'm done using Uber.
This is the calculated risk Uber is taking. Presumably they believe that they will only lose a tiny sliver of their user base over the all-or-nothing approach. Now that they're well past the "early adoption" phase in many markets this is a "smart" corporate play.
On one hand I agree with you, but it wouldn't work as a unilateral policy. There are definitely apps (such as a weather widget, for one example) that lose major functionality if you don't allow location even when not technically in the app. Either way, I won't be using Uber anymore for this reason.
A really large amount goes through Canada. The port of Vancouver is bigger than Oakland, and the port of Manzanillo Mexico is only slightly smaller. Both ports have rail connections to the US interior. The Mexican ports have lower market share because they are pretty far from Chinese origins, but if you want to amuse yourself you can Google up a lot of crazy conspiracy theories about the connections between Mexican ports and the US city of Kansas City. Many deranged people believe that the Mexicans are usurping our sovereignty via an obscure customs office in Kansas City that is (barely) connected by rail to the port of Lazaro Cardenas.
The port of Pittsburg is teensy and the port of Stockton is specialized. Container traffic at Oakland is pretty heavy and many cars are offloaded at Vallejo. There are also the oil terminals at Richmond and elsewhere.
