#profiteering

Making home loans even longer, to 50 years, sounds to me like a good way for profiteering, and more severe debt chains on people. We should surely be working to go in the other direction. 

Trump’s 50-Year Mortgage Plan: What You MUST Know! Nov 14, 2025 Patrick Boyle The psychological dimension really matters too. A mortgage that outlives a career—and possibly the borrower—really changes the cultural meaning of homeownership. A home becomes less of an asset and more of a perpetual liability. Other countries have experimented with ultra-long mortgages – and - Spoiler Alert! it  didn’t end well... Japan introduced 50-year and even 100-year loans during its property  bubble in the 1980s. Those products were   designed to let families pass debt across  generations. When the bubble burst, borrowers were trapped in negative equity for decades.

My letter to reps: 

This 50 year home loan idea is bonkers. We should have a system working to make mortgages with far shorter debt time frames possible for all of us. We've already been forced into this weird contortion of the market with 7 year auto loans, where we know that car sales are just all about profiteering on the interest on the loans. So much so that some of these subprime auto lenders have gone under. Japan tried 50 year mortgages in the 1980s and spoiler alert: it didn't end well! The housing market is already distorted and harmful to ordinary people, nobody should be making it worse. We need more affordable housing, and consumer loans that are better regulated and more fair, accessible, and sensible. The whole reason people in our region have been able to stay afloat was the fact that they got houses their parents passed along because they had paid off long before passing away. That system for the working class has been mostly destroyed by this point. The idea that elites in government playing games with the economy and finance would want to thoughtlessly make the situation so much worse for us is offensive. We need more housing, not fancy people playing games with financial gimmicks. 

Please feel free to copy or repurpose for your own letters to reps.

AAA Rated Junk: What Tricolor and First Brands Reveal About Credit Markets! - Patrick Boyle Oct 4, 2025 Tricolor – Like many dealerships, earned more from the loans it made to its customers than from the cars themselves. According to Bloomberg – they regularly charged interest rates above 20%. Those loans were bundled into asset-backed securities and sold-on to investors. First Brands was built up through acquisitions – which were financed by borrowing. Its owner, Patrick James, expanded the company by stitching together smaller manufacturers - he then layered on further leverage by borrowing against invoices and inventory—tapping private credit funds and specialist lenders. Their business models weren’t inherently flawed. Tricolor served a niche market with limited access to traditional credit. First Brands built scale through acquisitions and supply chain finance. But each was exposed to pressures that have intensified in recent years: immigration enforcement, rising tariffs, inflation, and a consumer base stretched by higher interest rates and elevated vehicle costs.

I've been thinking a bit about animatronicswarehouse, Aaron Fetcher, and the ethics of putting rare or lost media behind a paywall. Last month, animatronicwarehouse launched a subscription service in which for $30 a month you can receive rare prints of CEI characters and shows. This is quite similar to Aaron Fetcher's premium video service where for $65 you have access to private videos of Aaron's current projects, old CEI show footage, stories, or just general updates. Aaron's service is pretty notorious for being needlessly complex for subscribers and easy for "thieves" to just screen record.

What really gets me though is the wealth of lost/rare footage sitting there collecting dust. Many of the digitized films from CEI's earliest shows sit behind a paywall. I wouldn't be as frustrated if premium subscribers received videos a month or two earlier than people watching the main channel to make both parties happy, however it seems that many won't be released for quite some time, will only have very short samples posted to lure more people to the premium service, or worst case, not seen at all.

Back to animatronicwarehouse. I'm concerned that this new service will become very similar to Aaron's service, albeit much less bloated. AW already knows Aaron, I mean, they did a good amount of work together to create one of, if not THE best RAE shows. They seem close and I'm worried that he'll start taking cues from Aaron. Yesterday he announced that he's selling posters of rare, high quality images of CEI shows that are presented as a must-have collector's item. Now, I don't really have a problem with this. My and other people's complaints start with the price. Most posters cost $120 with the most expensive costing $195 for a poster of the RAE that looks extremely similar to one that can easily be found on showbizpizza.com. You can also buy a $150 picture of the Hard Luck Bears that can be found online as well.

AW's Poster vs Photo posted by Hourly Rock a-fire Explosion (@HourlyRock) on twitter