r2d2stay

[r2d2stay]

1200 for rent, sure, 750 for mortgage, denied

That's pretty egregious right? That would be a pretty cool topic for a post, right? Here's a curatedtumblr thread about it, and here's the original post:

Wait a second, someone said they read the linked article, and only 1700 people qualified under this program, out of 5 million homes in a year. That's nothing!

Ah, but I tricked you.

This is a post about misinformation, misuse of statistics, and general internet best practices.

The top three comments at the moment are all super pessimistic, and in particular, the third, and first response to the second, are actively misinformed.

The 1700 thing is not entirely false! To quote the article:

"Positive rental history (PRH) has been included... since October 30, 2022, and lenders have been required to report PRH since March 25, 2023... Because of this policy change, as of August 31, 2023, 1,727 endorsements that otherwise would have required manual underwriting were accepted through TOTAL."

...There's a problem here, though, beyond the fact that it was only really active for 5 months or so (because why would lenders help you if they weren't forced to).

Why are we comparing 1727 to 5,000,000? Well, that's the number of extra homes bought, out of the number of extra homes, right?

Nah, sorry.

The Actual Statistics:

That's the number of extra homes of first time buyers, with at least 620 credit score, who wouldn't have been approved, who got extra homes.

Which means, we should be looking at those. First time buyers accounted for 32% of buyers (Statista and Opendoor corroborate, direct links updated to 2024, sorry) out of 4.03 million total (National Association of Realtors, also updated). That already cuts us down to 1.28 million.

620 credit score is... basically nothing here; that's less than 2% of current home applications (Ellie Mae), so basically everyone qualified on that.

And here's the big one: Who wouldn't have been approved? It's like, 10% of the rest.

Depending on source, you get somewhere between 86% and 90% general home approval rate, i.e. between 10% and 14% aren't approved. According to NAR again, 77% got financing, and of the remaining, 41% didn't apply, which roughly matches the 14% number.

In addition to that 41% who didn't apply, 12% were due to low credit, 9% insufficient down payment, 7% not enough cash in reserve, and 6% insufficient time in job. 30% were "other", with little bits making up the rest.

Okay, so the low credit people are probably out; you can get loans at 580, so they wouldn't have benefited. If we keep everything else, that leaves 10.8%, or out of 1.28 million, 138,000 people per year.

Note that this isn't accurate. In particular, first time home buyers are more likely to not get approved. But this is an okay approximate.

So we've gone from 5 million to 138,000, a multiplier of 36.

"But that's still like 1% of the people!", I might hear you say.

And this is true! For 2023.

Policy Takes Time Guys

For comparison, the Affordable Care Act recently released data showing that about 12 million people were covered in 2013. But in 10 years, this has expanded to 45 million people. That's going from about 4% of the population, to about 15%!

You might say, significantly fewer people signed up each subsequent year, then, right? You'd be technically correct, but Positive Rental History has every indication that it will do better than the 4x rate, not worse.

First, the ACA was targeted at uninsured people in the US. That's already a target of less than 8% of the population; compare to the 34% that currently rent. It has way more room to expand.

Second, home loans are more of a continuous stream, while covered individuals are more of a population. (This isn't entirely true, as you can think of "homeowners" as a population, but given that we just said less than a third of home buyers are first time, I think this is fine.)

You can think of it this way: When you help someone buy a home, you're assisting in 1 purchase. When you help someone get health insurance, you help them buy many things over time; if they need it once a year, you're assisting in 1 purchase a year. So just as 12 million purchases a year is analogous to 1700 purchases a year, 45 million purchases a year is analogous to 6000 purchases a year.

Third, they didn't even fully implement it until halfway through the year. Obamacare was plagued by the fact that it had a 90 minute crash at the beginning, before it even kicked in - What's not forcing renters to follow this act going to do to the adoption rate? If we account for the 5 months renters were forced to play ball instead of 12, then it's more like 4100 houses a year.

Estimation With Wild Abandon

With all of this, it would not be unreasonable to expect this to go from 4000 houses to 20,000 over 10 years, helping well over 200,000 people buy houses. Not crazy good, but extrapolating linearly over the 30 year lifespan of the generation/mortgage cycle, that's 200k, then 400k, then 600k, for a total of 1.2 million houses.

(I should cite u/nat20sfail here, since while their math is wrong in several places, they did come to 120,000 in 10 years, which is pretty reasonable, and most of my numbers are following/correcting theirs.)

And we can do even better!

Because Knowledge is Power

The WHOLE POINT of the original post was to say people should be shouting this from the hills! Everyone should know that this is a thing that exists!

The reason that nearly 90% of applications are accepted is because people don't know that they can try. Memes about how awful getting a mortgage is, and worse, actual misinformation about it, is actively preventing people from buying homes! Over a quarter of affordable homes were purchased by corporations in Q1 2024. Take some of that back!

Now, should everyone who can pay 1200 rent with a 650 credit score be scrambling to make the $6090 3.5% downpayment on an FHA loan on a $174,000 house, paying roughly $754 for the loan and $371 in taxes and fees? No, obviously not. Not only do situations vary, there are more expenses than that and you should save a much larger emergency fund before going all in on a house.

However, if you do have at least a 620 credit score or are close enough to build it, have an emergency fund, can make either a bigger downpayment or buy a smaller house, are pretty sure you know where you want to live for the rest of your life, and are sick of paying rent? Biden/Harris has actively helped get you qualify for a house and/or lower your mortgage payment. Now you just have to go take advantage of it.

[r2d2stay]

This did numbers on r/curatedtumblr so I'm gonna put it here:

I have done this in an RPG! After years, both IRL and IC, players figured out it's not actually infinite but a series of planar portals at the edges of conical worlds on the surface of planets.

Basically, the starting "knowledge" is that the world is flat, with waterfalls going straight off the edges of the world. The players were isekai'd with their normal college gear (I literally had them check what they had on them in the first session) so while the theoretical curvature of the "flat" world was known, the players used higher level physics/math to prove that gravitational consistency just over the "edge" implied the world was spherical. (Notably, they actually invented a magical book generator, creating illusory, self updating, addictive games that improved literacy and math skills, then outsourced the math.)

Once they figured out that its actually a cone world on a sphere, not a flat world, they tried to fly over, and found that it was actually a planar boundary, i.e. past the "edge" was a new plane of existence entirely. So they used epic-level magic (higher level than the stuff they used to hijack the magic scrying orb TV and kill a god via consensus reality), and hopped to the "next" plane of existence over. Sadly they were distracted with the god killing thing i.e. the main plot and never investigated that the new world was a totally different planet. But they got it in an epilogue!

Edit: A quick FAQ:

What system did you use? TL;DR, any edition D&D/pathfinder for characters, rules light execution. See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dp2d3e/comment/laezh6p/

…What? Yeah, I kinda rushed that explanation. Here's a diagram! https://imgur.com/RSVjE06

Basically, you have cone-shaped segments of the spherical planet. But you can't just walk (or fly) between those segments; they're technically different planes of existence, and so you need powerful magic, or you'll just walk/fly endlessly. Even if you do have powerful magic, you end up in a totally different planet, and so this patchwork of planes of existence form a weird, interconnected web in the broader universe, where distance is a lil funky and edges are a lie.

Oh, and this wasn't frequently asked but I wanna answer it:

How do you kill a god with consensus reality? See here: https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1dp2d3e/comment/lafwcrg/

Credit to The Wandering Inn, though most of this stuff cannot possibly be canon anymore (it was plausible when I started)

Also credit to @hollowedskin I think, I can't find your response to this that I was technically responding to, sorry D:

probably shitty worldbuilding idea: fantasy world that keeps going

[r2d2stay]

lmao so I just started using garage band and I didn't realize the metronome + piano echo would record

oh well. Guess it's not fully acapella, but it is other than those two things, so it's like 99% there. I mostly had to get this one out of my brain before moving onto things I liked more, so I'm calling it a day.

note that I'm not as sad as this rendition makes it out to be; I did want the "rice farmer antifacist rebellion" vibe and not the "money heist" vibe, and also to reference the Hopsin rap, and also a personal note, and I guess that's what came out?

art is from a "space orchid collective", they do music, unrelated, I just needed a "galaxy orchid" that was purple

[r2d2stay]

Today I will summarize math mistakes in TFT, hopefully in a way anyone can understand

A quick overview with minimal understandability, sorry:

-Deathcap was never better with more ability power

-Valkyrie Mirages were better with Jeweled Gauntlet than non-Valkyrie Mirages

-Kai’sa was better with Blue Buff than with Rageblade for almost all situations for almost all of set 8

-There was also one time I got referenced in some patch notes for a highly controversial one but I ain’t touching that ever again, pls no dox

Ok, now for the short (for me, lol) summary of the first example, to give you an idea of the type of counterintuitive nonsense I seem to regularly demonstrate:

Mortdog, lead designer, said Deathcap needs more Ability Power (AP) to be better, so they changed it to not need more AP. However, the first half of this statement was false! 

Basically, the way AP works is you add the amount to 100%, and that’s how much more effect your abilities have. Deathcap would give +40 AP, and multiply all AP by 1.5, for initially 60 total. That’s x1.6 damage overall; the same as our hypothetical x1.55 damage item.

However, if you add more AP, let’s say 100 AP, we can check how much Deathcap increases your damage. You used to have a x2 damage multiplier from 100 AP. Now, you add +40, for 140, then multiply by 1.5, for 210 overall. That’s x3.1 damage overall.

If you had taken the x1.6 damage item, you’d have x3.2 damage overall instead. By gaining more AP, you’ve made Deathcap go from the same power as x1.6 damage, to worse. More AP made Deathcap worse.

This was highly counterintuitive for people because the item said “multiplies your AP!” and everyone was like “oh, so good with more AP!”, and also it was functionally true because AP increased things like shielding and healing so things that were good with AP tended to value more AP over more damage.

But people were putting Deathcap on pure damage carries! And claiming it wasn’t as good because they didn’t have more AP! That’s just untrue!

Anyway, I got my post saying this removed by subreddit mods for being misinformation until I did the above example for them twice.

That’s a general vibe between me and TFT, I think. I come up with stuff that’s mathematically true and everyone freaks out :( sad because I love the game for being one of few where you can still come up with new math facts