Barry Zuckerkorn

My 4-person household has one car, one electric cargo bike with two kid seats, a regular bicycle, accounts with bikeshare/scooter options around our city, plus mass transit passes, plus the option of Uber/Lyft.

Bikes might not work as a replacement for a first car, but they can work pretty well as a replacement for a second car, and a tool for reducing total mileage on the car you own.

Everything depends on where you live, of course, but a substantial number of people live in a place where a bike can reduce the number of miles you drive, even if you never actually give up the car.

There seems to be a misunderstanding here. Who’s keeping ill gotten gains? This is like the Madoff case where the investments on paper simply didn’t exist. There are no gains, much less ill gotten gains, that aren’t being returned to victims.

That’s like telling Madoff’s victims they get paid back in 2024 the amount they invested in the 1990s.

No, people are getting paid based on the value of their investments at the time of the FTX collapse, not tracing back years to when they first deposited funds. That distinction makes a huge difference, especially in a case like Madoff (or the original Ponzi scheme by Charles Ponzi himself).

He already did argue that, and it backfired.

The FTX restructuring officer wrote a letter to the criminal court specifically arguing that SBF’s argument was bullshit for all sorts of reasons, and the court agreed: “A thief who takes his loot to Las Vegas and successfully bets the stolen money is not entitled to a discount on his sentence.”

Plus that argument and a few other statements he made showed his lack of remorse, which denied him credit under the guidelines for acceptance of responsibility, and probably factored into his fairly harsh 25 year sentence.

Convenient for who? The people who orchestrated the theft are going to prison. The people who came in to pick up the pieces are the ones who were able to claw back the money to pay back the victims.

Yeah, FTX stole customer investments, sold them, then invested that cash in other stuff and hand out cash to executives. Some of it was traced to specific people (including SBF and his parents), and the restructuring officers clawed that back. Some of the investments paid off, some didn’t, but the end result was that there was enough to repay people based on what things were worth on the bankruptcy petition date.

There’s just not the critical mass of knowledgeable users for professions outside of programming on any Lemmy instance, from what I can tell.

I kept my reddit account for the lawyers subreddit and some of the others around the practice of law, because I like the community of people who are in the same career as I am. I also tried esq.social (mastodon, matrix, and Lemmy instance for lawyers), but basically only the matrix server gets anything close to a critical mass of user engagement.

I’m considering creating a new reddit account for sports discussion, too, because there just isn’t anything like the NBA subreddit.

If you’ve bought a small starter house 10 years ago then you have lots of options when you want to upgrade. Your starter house should have appreciated and a good chunk of your mortgage payments have gone to increasing your own equity.

Do the math. The S&P 500 would’ve outperformed the equity in the starter house over most 10-year periods of time. The renter is in a superior position when bidding on homes, compared to the owner who wants to put in a contingency on the sale of their current home.

Plus look at what people are actually experiencing today: they’re ready to upgrade in their home, but are finding that the equity they’ve built (from high housing prices) isn’t actually enough to significantly upgrade (because of high housing prices). So they feel stuck in their old house that no longer suits their needs.

After all, if the starter home appreciates from $250k to $500k, that means other $500k homes out on the market are generally similar, and your equity can’t actually buy as much as you imagined 10 years earlier.

And more to my point, is living in the same house for 10 years a mistake? For most 20 somethings, yes. That “starter home” is a compromise in lifestyle: extra bedrooms they don’t need yet, commuting distance to work or to family, shitty neighborhood for dating, school district they don’t need, etc. Actively planning to live somewhere for less than 5 years makes buying a mistake, but actively planning to live somewhere for more than 10 years requires a lot of contingency planning and anticipating changing needs (and sometimes living with those incorrect choices).

In the U.S., buying is a mistake if you don’t think you’re going to stay for more than 5 years. The up-front transaction costs of a purchase, and then a sale when you move, needs to be amortized over a long enough time period to be worth it.

A typical $500,000 home is going to see something like $520,000 paid by the buyer for $480,000 in the seller’s pocket. That $40,000 is an expense that can only be justified if you’re staying there for more than 5 years ($8,000 per year). Maintenance, taxes, and insurance on that $500k home will also be continuous, and will vary heavily based on age/condition of the property and the jurisdiction/location. On the upside, maybe the property will appreciate, but historically that has basically only happened about as fast as inflation for specific properties.

Renting is generally better if you want the flexibility. If you’re single and childless, but anticipate maybe getting married and having children later, do you buy the place that works for a single person today, or do you buy the place that might work for raising kids 10 years in the future? Contrary to this piece’s argument, it’s precisely the young people who are least equipped to predict the medium term future, and renting can buy time so that when they do buy, they buy the right place for them at that future stage of life, with full knowledge of their household income, expenses, and household size. Plus city, neighborhood, etc. Nobody wants to commute an hour per day because of a decision they made 10 years ago.

Renting is almost always better for people under the age of 30, and the financial calculators basically prove it.