honkhonkpants

You seem to think these industry controls are effective. Maybe they prevent an appraisal from being, say, 10x higher than the recent sale prices on either side, but they don't prevent the equally bad event of a series of 10 sales on the same block each being 10% higher than the previous. Every one of those houses in Las Vegas that turned out to be worthless in 2007 was appraised for at least the sale price the year before. The appraisers in those cases didn't do a damn thing, for example they didn't come out to the house and write down "this neighborhood is in a desert with no access to water where the unemployment rate is 20% and the employed people make minimum wage therefore this cannot be a neighborhood of $850000 houses." They just said "the last house sold for $800000 and this market seems pretty hot so $850000 okey dokey."

I for one think the imminent demise of human civilization is of interest to the intellectually curious and thoughtful readers of HN. I also believe that hurting the feelings of willful climate change deniers and suchlike people is a really good idea.

What incentive does the lender have? The involved parties are the seller, the buyer, their agents, and the originator of the loan. All of these people are working to close the deal at the negotiated price. The originator of the loan will hold the loan for somewhere between 72 hours and 30 days, so they don't care.

Appraisers absolutely do pull numbers out of hats, because appraisers who regularly fail to write down a large enough number will stop getting calls.

The job of the appraiser is to write down a number as large as or larger than the amount to be financed. They know this and they know the number in advance. What they do is not rigorous.

Geez, complain much? It's a miracle it works at all.

Do you think it's possible that your prior policy was one of the garbage plans that got outlawed by ACA? Those are the ones that didn't survive the "you can keep it" claims. Those were plans with uselessly low annual or lifetime limits, too much small print, etc.

Bit of a rant. The site is the mouthpiece of people who are suing the city of Lafayette, for violating state law by not building enough housing.

What did your premiums look like before? In my case I just didn't have insurance because there was no functioning market anywhere that would sell you a family health care plan including childbirth, at any price. Now I get health insurance from my employer which isn't affected by ACA so I don't know what the market looks like.

At that rate you could enroll every household in America in 3.5 hours.

Yeah REALLY obnoxious. I was just disabling this after another Uber ride. They do not provide the option to enable location services only when the app is running on screen. I think it might be nice if iOS presented this option regardless of what Uber wants.

A really large amount goes through Canada. The port of Vancouver is bigger than Oakland, and the port of Manzanillo Mexico is only slightly smaller. Both ports have rail connections to the US interior. The Mexican ports have lower market share because they are pretty far from Chinese origins, but if you want to amuse yourself you can Google up a lot of crazy conspiracy theories about the connections between Mexican ports and the US city of Kansas City. Many deranged people believe that the Mexicans are usurping our sovereignty via an obscure customs office in Kansas City that is (barely) connected by rail to the port of Lazaro Cardenas.

The port of Pittsburg is teensy and the port of Stockton is specialized. Container traffic at Oakland is pretty heavy and many cars are offloaded at Vallejo. There are also the oil terminals at Richmond and elsewhere.

I thought there were there to connect coal fields in the Powder River Basin to power plants in the midwest.