It's no wonder people can't afford to buy a home

 

This article applies to California, where the problem is particularly bad, but it's evident in other states too.

Glenn and Lorraine Crawford paid about $500 a month to insure their home in Agoura Hills northwest of Los Angeles when they bought it in 2012.

The Crawfords say they have little alternative but to pay the bill that arrived last month, which, at more than $44,000 a year, is almost as much as their mortgage bill. The only other insurer willing to cover their home, Lloyd’s of London, quoted them $80,000 a year.

More than a year after infernos tore through Los Angeles County, millions of Californians like the Crawfords are suffering through a home-insurance crisis that has rolled on for years with eye-watering rate increases, canceled policies and rejected claims.

Two of the biggest insurers, State Farm and Allstate, aren’t selling to new customers in the state, despite getting double-digit rate increases approved for their existing policyholders. A third, Farmers Insurance, has committed to cover more homes in fire-prone areas, but only a fraction compared with the drop in its overall number of policies since the crisis began.

The insurance dysfunction has spread to California’s housing market, the country’s biggest and most expensive, with nearly one-in-five real-estate agents reporting a canceled sale last year because of clients unable to find affordable insurance, according to a survey by the trade body California Association of Realtors.

There's more at the link (may be paywalled).

Florida looks like another problem state for insurance.

Slake Counts has made a frightening decision. After the price of his homeowners insurance skyrocketed, the Tampa, Florida, resident has chosen not to renew his policy.

Now, he’s pondering his future, which may include selling his home and leaving the state.

“There may be other options for me at this time in my life that don’t necessitate me continuing to live in Florida or Tampa,” Counts told Tampa Bay 28 ... “I’m not the only one in this boat.”

He might be right. According to Bankrate, Florida is the third-most expensive state for homeowners insurance in the U.S. Premiums in the Sunshine State average out to $5,828 per year ($486 per month) for a $300,000 home, while the national average is $2,424 ($202 per month), as of November. Counts showed Tampa Bay 28 the amount of his 2026 renewal increased to $14,523.

Factors that have made home insurance increasingly unaffordable for many Americans include higher home prices, the cost of building materials and the impacts of climate change — especially in disaster-prone areas like Florida.

It’s no wonder that some insurers are pulling out of certain states, and why some consumers are taking the risk of forgoing coverage. But experts emphasize the risks to those who “go bare” can outweigh the benefits.

Again, more at the link.

Those are scary, scary numbers.  We bought our home in north Texas ten years ago, paying a relatively low price for a modest 3-bedroom home, and putting down a 20% deposit to keep mortgage payments affordable.  Even so, a quick check reveals we're now paying as much per month to insure our home as we are on the mortgage.  The premium has increased fairly sharply over the past two to three years, and seems likely to go up by more than 10% this year - perhaps double that, thanks to weather-related disasters and losses elsewhere in the state.

Most of us can't claim our insurance costs against taxes, and that's part of the problem.  When a big conglomerate such as Blackrock buys up thousands of houses to rent them out, it can claim their insurance premiums as a business expense against its taxes, making them that much more affordable.  On top of that, it can increase its rental charges to cover what it actually pays.  Given the very large discounts such a company can squeeze out of an insurance company that wants its business - an insurance company that it may partially or wholly own, at that - it may be paying only a small percentage of the retail or consumer cost of insuring its houses.  Is it any wonder that so many consumers find that rental costs in some areas are actually less than the cost to buy a home?

How have you found your home insurance costs and premiums lately, dear readers?  Please let us know in Comments.

Peter

The danger of unrealized tax gain

 

Fellow blogger Mr. Garabaldi, writing at My Daily Kona, warns of the real dangers of so-called "unrealized tax gains".  We're seeing this pop up in almost every progressive, left-wing-oriented government and political party.  They want to tax you on any gain in value of any property you own, whether or not you've cashed in that value by selling it.

You buy a Pokémon card for $50.

Someone offers you $500 for it. You say no. You love that card. You're keeping it.

The government says: "Cool, but that card is worth $500 now. You owe us $100 in taxes."

You: "…I didn't sell it."

Government: "Don't care. Pay up."

You don't have $100 lying around. So you're forced to sell the card you love just to pay a tax on money you never received.

Next month? That card drops back to $50.

Your card is gone. Your money is gone. And the government shrugs.

That's a wealth tax on unrealized gains. They don't pay you back the tax...

There's more at the link, including more examples.  Recommended reading.

What this is, of course, is an all-out drive to reduce or even eliminate private property, by forcing us to rent what we use, or rely on government to provide it, because it's no longer affordable to buy it.  It's a growing movement, particularly in Europe, but also in progressive-left states in the USA like California.  Essentially, it embodies the World Economic Forum's oft-repeated mantra that "You'll own nothing and be happy".  Personally, I can't think of many things that would make me more unhappy than that!

Peter

A reminder to those of us...

 

... who may not clean our ears as thoroughly or as often as might be necessary.  Click the image to be taken to a larger version of the cartoon at its Web page.

How do you know if your ears aren't clean enough?

1. The farmer next door offers to run his harvester through them.
2. Your spouse offers you shampoo to use on them.
3. Every time you shake your head, the hairs in your ear shiver and scare the bats into flight.

Let's hear your own contributions in Comments!

Peter

A long overdue update to legacy computer software?

 

Way back when, in the 1970's and 1980's, I programmed computers in COBOL (among other languages).  COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language, ruled the commercial computing world back then, with millions upon millions of lines of code written every year.  Many of the older, so-called "legacy" systems that are the computing backbone of large businesses were written back then, and have been maintained and updated (with greater and greater difficulty) ever since.

I'll give you a brief example.  In the early 1980's I wrote the so-called "price book" program for a big oil company in South Africa.  This program calculated the current price for every single product they sold - something like 4,000 different items, at the time.  I wanted to make it modular, with a separate program for every major group of products, to simplify maintenance and reduce the amount of time it would take to update the thing.  I was told that would not be acceptable:  I had to write a single monolithic program, calling in sub-programs and sub-routines whenever needed for specific product groups.  I did as instructed, and produced a program with several thousand lines of code.  I had to file detailed work flow diagrams for each major product section, showing which routines were called from outside and which of those routines served multiple product sections, so that a modification to one of the latter might affect one or more of the others (all of which cross-references had to be tested after every modification).  I warned at the time that this might become a maintenance nightmare, due to its sheer size and the number of modifications and updates that might be required.  I was told to shut up and get on with the job.  I obeyed orders.

When last I checked, some years ago, that price book program had ballooned in size to well over double the original length, and a team of three programmers were kept busy doing nothing but maintenance updates.  So many of the latter came in that one programmer would be finalizing an update and putting it into production, another would be midway through implementing another, and a third programmer would be picking an urgent change order out of the incoming pile to start yet another update.  The various additions, edits, alterations and mutations had added so many odd lines and sections to the coding that my original flow charts were almost unusable.

That's COBOL for you.  It was a very strong, stable business computing language, but it was clunky and maintenance-intensive.  Trouble is, very few people use COBOL today.  The old farts like myself who remember it are mostly retired and dying off, and the youngsters today want to use the "cool stuff" like C++ and other fancy tools.  I'm informed that a skilled, experienced COBOL programmer can almost write his own ticket in data processing today, just to keep the legacy systems running.  I know one formerly retired COBOL senior programmer who was tempted back to work with a package of well over $150K per year.  He smiles all the way to the bank.

That being the case, Anthropic claims to have developed an AI system that can update legacy COBOL systems, convert them into modern coding languages, and replace the old systems with the new.  This means it will have to read and understand COBOL (not always an easy task with rambling, much-modified legacy coding), break it down into more understandable chunks, rewrite each chunk in modern computer languages, test them for accuracy, produce easy-to-understand flow charts or other technical documentation for each of them, and gradually replace all that clunky stuff with modern software.

That ability is very long overdue.  If it works (and I'll want to see lots of evidence of that before trusting its output), mainframe computer manufacturers such as IBM may be drastically affected, because modern codes and languages can run efficiently on much smaller computers.  Modern computer hardware is being optimized for such use:  see heterogeneous computing for more information.  The Apple computer with its M-series chip that I'm using to write this article is just one example.

If you'd told me all those years ago that the COBOL code I was writing would still be in production use over half a century later, I'd have laughed at you.  Guess COBOL and corporate inertia are having the last laugh . . .

Peter

How many infractions? Let me count the ways...

 

From Bill Melugin on X:

DHS announces the ICE arrest of a Liberian illegal alien who they say was working as a Minnesota corrections officer while also being AWOL from the PA National Guard, all while masquerading as a U.S. citizen despite having no legal status in the U.S.

There's more at the link.

I'm tempted to call it American enterprise at its finest, except that there's nothing American about him.  I'd love to follow his paper trails in those various organizations, to see precisely how they all came to let him slip through the cracks.

Peter

A very sad morning, and a fond farewell

 

Regular readers will know of Ashbutt, our farm kitten that we adopted back in 2016.

He would have celebrated his tenth birthday in the second half of this year . . . but sadly, that won't happen any more.

We have a couple staying with us, along with their two cats, which we've segregated in a room behind a closed door, because Ashbutt is very territorial and possessive.  Last night, it got much worse than that.  He was trying to open the door to the guest cats' room, yowling loudly, and behaving very aggressively when we tried to stop him.  Finally, when one of our guests came out of the spare bedroom too close to him for his comfort, he must have been startled, because he attacked her, biting and clawing, drawing blood.  When I ran over and tried to shoo him away from her and the closed door, he tried to attack me!  He's never behaved that way to us before, but once was more than enough.  (Last weekend we had a family staying with us, including an eighteen-month-old infant.  We segregated our cats to avoid issues with small children, but even so, what if Ashbutt had got out?  The thought of what a big, aggressive cat could do to a toddler is just too scary for words . . . )

With my wife's help, Ashbutt was shut in the garage for the night.  She and I talked about it, but it was obvious what had to be done.  We simply can't risk the injuries he might inflict on our next guest, or even on us, if this sudden violent, aggressive streak continues.  With great sorrow, I took him to the vet this morning and arranged for euthanasia.  His body will be sent for rabies testing (which is apparently a legal requirement in cases like this), and his ashes will then be returned to us.

I absolutely hated having to say goodbye to Ashbutt.  He's always been a "daddy's boy", as opposed to our older cat, Kili, who's definitely my wife's cat.  He would jump on my lap at every opportunity and snuggle for a while.  That won't happen any more, and I know I'll miss him very much . . . but . . . there's the "but" for you.  When an animal turns aggressive towards you, you absolutely cannot take the risk that he'll do the same towards others.  The injury aspect is only part of the problem:  there are legal exposures involved when it comes to damages, reimbursement, etc.  Tolerating that sort of behavior could cost a whole lot of money down the road.  (Our current guests have been very gracious in assuring us they understand, so that won't be a problem in this case;  but that doesn't prevent possible future recurrences.)

Goodbye, Ashbutt.  We'll miss you very much.

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 300

 

When I started this weekly collection, I never thought it would last this long - the equivalent of 6 years.  However, readers keep showing up for it, and it attracts the biggest readership of all my weekly blog articles.  I'm glad you like it!

Sadly, one of the problems with keeping this column going is the increasing scarcity of memes that are genuinely amusing, rather than centered around politics or the latest crisis du jour.  Sometimes I can find more than a dozen memes in a week, but that's hard to do in a humorless world.  I'll do my best to find new sources, and keep them coming.

__________

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

As a child, I had several favorites among my parents' long-playing records, including two albums with martial songs by the Merrill Staton Choir (who also produced many other albums).  I believe they were active in the post-war years up until the 1960's, but I haven't been able to find out any biographical details.  I was reminded of those old memories by a couple of chance encounters while browsing the Web, and I thought I'd share them with any other old fogeys veterans who might remember them too.

First, from the album "Sound Off!", here's a medley:  "This Is The Army, Mr. Jones", "Comin' In On A Wing And A Prayer", and "Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition".

Next, from the album "Up Anchor!", here's a favorite from the Civil War, "Shenandoah".

And finally, from the same album, another medley:  a World War II ballad about "Torpedo Jim", followed by "Your Boy Is On The Coal Pile Now".

Those brought back many memories of my childhood.  I reckon I wore out those long-playing records until they were more scratch than song!  I wish someone would bring out the Merrill Staton Choir's albums in digital form.  I'd buy them all.

Peter