Investing

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, Screwball said:

More auto recalls. This from a couple days ago;

 Honda to recall over 406,000 US vehicles over wheel detachment issue, NHTSA says

Wheel "detachment." Really? That's a nice way to say your ****ing wheel might fall off the car.

Usually not a good thing.

Steel lug inserts falling out of Al wheels. Have had a lot of alloy wheels, have never had them with steel lug inserts. - why? Honda claims only 3700 bad wheels out of 1.6M total sold, but they have to find the bad ones. 🙄

Not really a fan of steel and Al together unless you absolutely have to, it's  two metals that don't play together particularly well.

Edited November 9 by gehringer_2

[Screwball]

Yea, me either. It's probably another case of cost cutting over design integrity. Our products are full of these failures waiting to happen. Tick tick tick.

[Screwball]

Reading around on the 50 year mortgage thing, one thing people are talking about is the annual rise in land taxes and insurance, which many times are baked into their monthly payment. Their payments go up annually to adjust, and when paid off, you have to pony up the money yearly, instead of in your payment.

Depending on the local rates and insurance company. Our little burg decided they could raise our land taxes, based on our appraised land value, and we couldn't really do jack **** about it. You could set up a meeting and challenge it, but those I knew who did, failed. Some seemed really excessive. Lot's of pissed off people. 

My home insurance is going up at a not so good rate too.

Thank you very much.

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, Screwball said:

Reading around on the 50 year mortgage thing, one thing people are talking about is the annual rise in land taxes and insurance, which many times are baked into their monthly payment. Their payments go up annually to adjust, and when paid off, you have to pony up the money yearly, instead of in your payment.

Depending on the local rates and insurance company. Our little burg decided they could raise our land taxes, based on our appraised land value, and we couldn't really do jack **** about it. You could set up a meeting and challenge it, but those I knew who did, failed. Some seemed really excessive. Lot's of pissed off people. 

My home insurance is going up at a not so good rate too.

Thank you very much.

And we live in relatively 'safe' places insurance wise. What is happening to rates in CA and FLA has to be pretty frightening.if you are a homeowner.

[Screwball]

My point was really about the other factors to the loans. The schedule is what it is and you can budget around that, a constant, but the other charges are not under our control. Depending on area and insurance company. I haven't heard any of those getting any cheaper no matter who or what.

And to go the next step, as a homeowner, rather paid off or not, you must maintain it.

[gehringer_2]

32 minutes ago, Screwball said:

My point was really about the other factors to the loans. The schedule is what it is and you can budget around that, a constant, but the other charges are not under our control. Depending on area and insurance company. I haven't heard any of those getting any cheaper no matter who or what.

And to go the next step, as a homeowner, rather paid off or not, you must maintain it.

we have a stub end of low APR mortgage that will be up in only a few month now. The total annual payment is less than my property taxes are now, and if some poor fool buys this hose when we're gone and the Michigan "Headlee" and "PropA" tax limits get reset, they be paying 40% more that that.

Edited November 10 by gehringer_2

[Edman85]

My fiscal conservative roots take over when I hear about things like 50 year mortgages and crypto deregulation. Not for me, but if people want to be stupid and partake, it is their funeral.

[Deleterious]

Carry the water

 

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, Deleterious said:

Carry the water

 

Moving toward official Buy Borrow Die policy.

[Screwball]

On 11/8/2025 at 9:14 PM, Deleterious said:

Why is the government ballyhooing this like it's a good thing?

Google tells me the average age of a first time home buyer is now 40 years old.  You will be 79 when you achieve 50% equity?  

My heart hurts. 

 

I'm only using the above post by Del because the one below uses the same chart porn.

More on 50 year loans.

Trump Proposes 50-Year Government-Backed Mortgages, I Propose Something Else

[Screwball]

Not a bubble.

[Screwball]

This one caught my eye today. DIS. Did the ESPN spat have anything to do with this? They got hammered. But as we can see in the chart porn below, this stock trades goofy anyway. I don't follow the sector/industry so I don't know what is going on, but interesting.

First chart 1 year by day. You can see it has been all over the place.

The next one is 3 months. The yellow box is from 11/7. Rocket shot up for the next 3 trading days then gets jackhammered. Notice the volume. WTF?

Bonus chart porn - 3 year of DIS. Makes me wonder - how many times do we see these pissing matches between the provider nazi's and the insiders make a killing insider trading it. This chart is a traders dream.

[Deleterious]

Sort of shocked.  I read data wasn't even collected.  Maybe I'm thinking of the October report.  

 

[Deleterious]

It was sort of odd she quit so close to her term ending.

 

[Screwball]

 

[Screwball]

I won't bore anyone with the back story, but this was kinda fun. 

This was from December 23, 2001 from the Toledo Blade. Searching AMZN a 5 pack is now over 8 bucks. Doing the math, I guess the good news is it's only a 4% a year. Exponents are a bitch.

 

 

 

Edited yesterday at 02:29 AM by Screwball

[oblong]

I think it was Einstein who said compound interest is the most powerful thing created by man. 

[Screwball]

It's kind of funny. I was always a cheap bastard because my dad was born in 1911 and mom in 1918. They lived through the depression and were poor as dirt. They couldn't even pay attention. 🙂 They were very frugal, and I was taught that very way. I used to wrap Christmas presents with newspaper. I caught holy hell over that, but I didn't care. Why spend money on wrapping paper when they deliver it to your door every Sunday (Toledo Blade - buck fifty)? All you need is a little tape. It's get's ripped up in milliseconds anyway.

I found this paper in a place I never expected. It was wrapping a 2 or 3 year olds toy fire truck. I had to think why I bought it, my kids are too old. It was for my golf partner's son's birthday. The loudest and most annoying thing I could find just to hear him bitch at me. Then I decided I couldn't be that big of a prick and got him something else. This ended up in my closet somehow. He was old for a dad, so I gave him a break.

 

 

[oblong]

My mother in laws uncles were born in that time frame. All from Poland. Same way.  They found money hidden in all kinds of places.  $20 here or there. Garbage bags filled with cleaned out styrofoam containers and zip lock baggies. Can’t throw **** away.  On the one hand I’m glad I don’t worry about money and am blessed with the means to be that way.  I’m not rich but I make ok money I think and know of too many people who died in their 60s for me to not have fun now.  I have no debt other than 9 years on a mortgage at <3% I love concerts and baseball and hockey games.  Live life. I do not take it for granted but I also never saw a brinks truck driving behind a hearse on the way to the cemetery.

but I also think of uncle Ted and Bruno and I wonder if I am wasteful and gluttonous. 

[Deleterious]

We are losing the penny tomorrow. We are going to start rounding all cash orders down to the nearest nickel. We figure if we went both ways someone would eventually have a fit and we don't want our employees to have to deal with that. Only about 12% of our transactions are cash, so not a huge deal. 

We are also about to get a group of employees together to study the idea of including sales tax on our menu prices. So if you order three things that are $25, $10, and $5 your final total is $40 instead of $42.40.

[Screwball]

The penny thing is going to be really really fun to watch. And you know someone is going to get pissy.

How much is this going to **** up the POS registers?

 

[Screwball]

Just for fun I asked my MS Co-Pilot AI Aussie buddy about this penny thing. Didn't know how to approach it or what to ask, so I'll save a bunch of fluff. Too funny.

Quote

since they are going to eliminate cash transactions using pennies and round the number up or down to the nearest nickel and a nickel can't be divided by two to produce and even number, how do they divide the 5 cents?

It then told me about the digital division of a penny, as in .5 cents.

Quote

I'm talking about cash - computers can divide numbers - cash can't

It then explained the rounding systems that will no doubt be implemented by our retailers who deal in cash.

Quote

can you set prices to take advantage of the rounding?

 If a business knows that cash totals will be rounded to the nearest nickel, they can tweak prices so that the final total consistently rounds in their favor. This is especially effective in high-volume, low-margin environments like convenience stores or fast food.

***

Isn't that something? You had to know there was a way to arb the round. I also read it cost $3.7 cents to manufacture a penny. Wild stuff.

[Deleterious]

28 minutes ago, Screwball said:

The penny thing is going to be really really fun to watch. And you know someone is going to get pissy.

How much is this going to **** up the POS registers?

 

Setting the POS is simple.  A couple of clicks in our admin panel, save it, and it pushes it to every terminal on the network. 

Then it just depends on how you pay.  If your bill is $45.59 and you pay with a $50 bill, the employee types in $50 and it knows it a cash transaction, so it will round down to $45.55 automatically.  If they swipe a card, the price will remain $45.59.  

[Screwball]

29 minutes ago, Deleterious said:

Setting the POS is simple.  A couple of clicks in our admin panel, save it, and it pushes it to every terminal on the network. 

Then it just depends on how you pay.  If your bill is $45.59 and you pay with a $50 bill, the employee types in $50 and it knows it a cash transaction, so it will round down to $45.55 automatically.  If they swipe a card, the price will remain $45.59.  

Thanks. I figured it was easy to fix on the computer. I also think about some of the little bars and clubs who aren't very good at changing the POS thing.

Unrelated to the penny.

I watched $15,000 bucks of Ohio Lottery money go missing because of a cigar box behind the bar instead of two buttons on a cash register. There were three lottery machines, two that you had to put money in and one behind the bar that didn't. The workers would play Keno all day. They were the only ones who didn't have to pay for a ticket. When they won, they took the cash from the cigar box. I found 6 Keno tickets that I dug out of the trash by the two machines that needed money. They all had the same 3 numbers, with a booster, for $40. Six in one day, and I might have missed some.

ON EDIT AGAIN: The ticket has a code that proves where the ticket was printed.

If this goes on by one employee one day a week, there is almost your $15 grand.

ON EDIT: Part of that point is they said they couldn't reprogram the keys so you could have a lottery in and lottery out, while saving all the winners.

Edited 21 hours ago by Screwball

[oblong]