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On our current trajectory, the report warns, "planetary and human systems [are] reaching a 'point of no return' by mid-century, in which the prospect of a largely uninhabitable Earth leads to the breakdown of nations and the international order."
The only way to avoid the risks of this scenario is what the report describes as "akin in scale to the World War II emergency mobilization"—but this time focused on rapidly building out a zero-emissions industrial system to set in train the restoration of a safe climate.
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2050 is When Analysts Suspect Widespread Global Strife Will Begin
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< nobse> bleh... last night I had a dream... someone NMU'ed vim...
nightmare
-- in #debian-devel
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 15 2019, @03:37AM (6 children)
You really want to hit them with the house price thing, you need to take inflation out of the equation:
40 years ago you could buy a house outright with 4 of 5 times a basic laborers yearly wage. Now it's 20 to 30 times.
The interest on that means that you will never own it. 30 year mortgages where 95% of what you pay each year is interest. How many families go 30 years with no expensive personal emergencies? The whole bullshit system is designed to bleed you forever and then steal the house back
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday June 15 2019, @04:17AM
Glad you pulled that out, because I was lying in wait for some dumb motherfucker to challenge me with muh inflation. Nobody here did. I guess these sonsabitches on Soylentnews do have some semblance of intelligence. There may be hope for us all yet.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Sulla on Sunday June 16 2019, @01:31AM (1 child)
Another fun metric is to ask them how much of their monthly income went to paying for their apartment or mortgage. Most people I talk to (parents, grandparents) had 1/6 to 1/4 of their income go toward housing. The same property, and the same wage (adjusted for inflation) would now take 1/2 or more of that income.
Another thing that is killing millennials right now was cash for clunkers. Right or wrong, it removed the glut of used cars on the market and took them permanently out of circulation. Instead of being able to get out of high school and pick up a beater for 500 bucks or 1k that would last you a few years, you have to pay 2-3k for something that doesn't have a bad head or a slipping tranny, at least in my area.
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 20 2019, @03:35AM
That fits.
Go from a one income to two income family, and from (1/6 -1/4) to 1/2 of income : 2 x ( 2 to 3) = 4 to 6
Matches pretty well with: (20 to 30 years) / (4 or 5 years) = 4 to 7
So either absolute housing values have gone up by a factor of at least four or wages are now less than a quarter of what they were.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Sunday June 16 2019, @10:43PM (2 children)
You might be right about the ratio of income to payments, but this has nothing to do with how a mortgage works.
With a 30 year mortgage, you own the home after 30 years, assuming you can make all the payments. Incidentally, an initial monthly payment that is 95% interest corresponds to a rate of roughly 10%. A typical home mortgage rate for a 30 year fixed is under 4%.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 16 2019, @11:29PM (1 child)
You're not exactly contradicting me there.
So I didn't bother working out the math exactly. I should have typed ">95% of what you pay is interest". 30 year mortgages are still becoming common and are blatant usury.
It also isn't much more than 30 years since interest rates were higher than that. Going to bet the farm that they won't go up again within 30 years?
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Monday June 17 2019, @11:57PM
I’m not contradicting you. I fundamentally agree with what you’re saying, but I don’t think mortgages are worth including in the discussion. The structure of a 30 year mortgage hasn’t changed in generations. It’s really the interest rate that matters, hence why I picked on your math. When interest rates were up around 18% in 1980, you could forget about even getting a loan, let alone making the first payment. Nowadays the problem for new buyers is their income relative to the price of the house. Likely a bigger and longer term problem than a spike in interest rates which has to be squashed by the Fed.