This comment of the week is brought to you by Jonness:
All’s I know is my household income is 6 figures, I have no kids, I have 20% down, and I still don’t feel like I can afford a house priced $400K. How people are pulling the FHA trigger with 3.5% down and $70K in household income is beyond me. I mean, what happens if a spouse loses a job or a family member gets ill? Don’t people care about long-term stability in their lives? It appears to me, a lot of people borrow as much as they possibly can at every new moment in time.
IMO, no houses are affordable right now, because buyers like me have to compete with 10 flaky families overstretching themselves to get a dump on a 6K sq. ft. lot. They do this purely out of ignorance and an inability to control their impulsive behavior disorder. Then when they default, I pay taxes to bail their irresponsible arses out. Meanwhile, the govt. floods the market with borrowed dollars in order to artificially inflate the price of the foreclosed home so that the crazy banker who made the outrageously risky loan can continue to live in a house that I cannot afford to buy.
This game is crazy.
So what’s the cure for impulsive behavior disorder? Is there one? Surely there must be a way out of this self-destructive cycle, right?
Anyone else starting to notice that the ‘bubbles are forever’ positions are starting to sound a lot more like Jon Madden? “Boom, you see this house? What it wants to do is appreciate in value. So it’s going to use granite countertops here and here and here [scribbles all over the screen] to keep the bubbleheads off balance. We ran the countertop play in Oakland, and it always either worked or didn’t.”
Seattle Bubble Commenters: Thank You!
By The Tim on November 5th, 2009 at 6:00 AM · 69 Comments
Seattle Bubble hit a geeky milestone yesterday, with the posting of its 0×10000th comment! That’s hexadecimal—base 16—65,536 for you non-geeks out there. The 0×10000th comment was posted by Flying Ape.
In commemoration of this geeky occasion, here are a few statistics relating to the comments on Seattle Bubble.
As of the 0×10000th comment, 65,536 comments had been posted across a total of 1,852 posts, for an average of 35 comments per post. Seattle Bubble was launched on August 5, 2005, so that’s an average of 42 comments per day.
Stupid spam robots have attempted (and failed) to post 89,069 (0×15BED) spam comments, outnumbering comments by real people 1.4 to 1. And that’s just since Seattle Bubble’s move to its own domain in May 2007, meaning that the spambots (failed to) post an average of 99 comments per day. Yikes!
Top 10 most-commented posts:
Top
1012 most prolific commenters:[Update: There was a glitch in the auto-generated top ten that caused some commenters' count to be split. I have updated the list to correct for this error.]
Technically, “Anonymous” was #1 with 2,651 comments (a throwback to Seattle Bubble’s old days at Blogger.com), but since that’s not really a single person, it doesn’t count. What’s really impressive about Kary’s spot at #1 is that he only just started commenting on Seattle Bubble in July of last year, so in less than 16 months he has managed to rack up nearly twice as many comments as the next-closest competitor (not counting myself), averaging 5.4 comments per day.
And let’s not leave out the forum!
Top 10 forum posters:
A giant THANK YOU goes out to everyone that participates in the discussion here at Seattle Bubble. I have learned a lot from you, and I think on the whole we have made a positive contribution to the understanding and demystifying of real estate and related economic issues in the Seattle area. I hope that we can continue the conversation for many 0×1000s of comments to come. ;^)
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Tags: comments, forum