Had this on laser disc as a youth. Absolutely amazing video and audio presentation. https://youtu.be/HriYRoxWo1I

… Fuck I’m old

What country are you in? It might matter.

Assuming you are in the US, the process is lengthy and there’s a lot of hurry up and wait, but it’s not too bad.

• First you save up your down payment which can be as low as 3% of the purchase price (or even lower for some people, many vets pay 0% down). 20% or higher will get you a lower payment because you don’t have to buy insurance for the bank and may get you better rates.
• Next pick a lender either by manually calling around to a bunch of banks and seeing what they offer or by going through a mortgage broker who gets paid by the bank for bringing them business. When you have picked your bank you want to get pre-approval for the amount of money you wish to borrow.
• Contact a real estate agent who works for buyers. Recommendations from friends and family help a lot here. Broadly you want somebody with a lot of experience who helps a lot of people buy homes. You generally don’t want your cousin’s friend’s barber who’s starting up real estate as a side gig.
• Your real estate agent helps guide you through the local market practices. You tour houses and if you find one you like your real estate agent helps put in the offer which will likely include a payment of earnest money which you will lose if you pull out of the contract.
• If the offer is accepted you and your agent negotiate the purchase agreement with the seller including any contingencies such as passing a home inspection.
• You sign a bunch of papers with the bank, nowadays probably on a website. The title company does their work including writing a title insurance policy. This stage takes about a month.
• When everything is already you will sign the final papers and get the keys.
• After a month or two your bank will inevitably package your mortgage into a bond which is sold to one of the hilariously evil and predatory mortgage-backed security companies that are still doing the same shit they were when they ruined the world economy 15 years ago.
• Budget roughly 1-3% of the home’s value in savings per year to pay for maintenance and repairs.

Edit, addendum: hire your own lawyer to review the contracts. This will cost about $1,000. If you don’t already have a lawyer you can contact your state bar association to find one that is relevant to your needs. Don’t buy a home as co-owner with a person to whom you are not married. If you must, you will need your lawyer again to draft up a full partnership agreement that describes how to divide the asset in the event of death, disinterest, disability, disloyalty, etc. You don’t want to be half owner of a house with your deceased girlfriend’s parents who want to sell it out from under you. Pick a number as your budget and stick to it. The temptation to get a house that is a little bit nicer will always be there. This is how stupid decisions are made.

Stolen from another discussion thread: Interest rates are up and quantitative evening is over. For nearly 15 years money was basically free for tech companies. Banks don’t pay anything, bonds don’t pay anything, the stock market is overheated and investors are still looking for return. So if your tech company was already public you could borrow in the form of bank loans or bonds for dirt cheap and if it was still privately held you can get money from individual and corporate investors.

Now that the free money era is over a lot of companies have had to finally think about making a profit so that they can keep the lights on. This is why there have been tens of thousands laid off in the tech sector in the last year or so.

As far as Reddit goes I have no idea what they’ve been thinking. It seems like they’ve been spending money developing features nobody wants or needs: locally hosted images and video which have to cost a fortune, live chat, and NFTs, to name a few. They’ve got the ~20th most popular website in the world with millions of daily active users and they can’t figure out how to make it profitable?

The API the third party applications used doesn’t serve ads. All they had to do for a bump in revenue is to insert ads and require third party applications to display them or risk losing their API access. Users would grumble but it’s a pretty reasonable ask. The fact that they didn’t do this demonstrates to me that they don’t think the money is in serving ads, they think it’s in data mining and they can only get the data they want from the official app.

Frankly I’m surprised Imgur has made it this long. I suppose it’s because they morphed into a community in and of itself.