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Clark made WNBA history in her most recent game.

A routine operation at two San Francisco substations triggered a massive power outage Saturday morning that knocked out electricity to about 9,400 PG&E customers — while a separate system glitch mistakenly alerted roughly 120,000 customers that they had lost power. The blackout began around 9:45 a.m. when a protective device on the electrical system activated...

FCC Head Carr Moves To Reshape TV Ownership Rules, Save Local Broadcasting From Being 'Mouthpieces'

The Federal Communications Commission is preparing to scrap longstanding national limits on television station ownership - a regulatory overhaul that Chairman Brendan Carr says will give local outlets critical breathing room to compete and invest in community journalism - instead of being 'Hollywood mouthpieces.'

The agency is scheduled to vote on August 6 to eliminate the ownership caps in favor of a flexible, case-by-case approach for reviewing deals. Carr detailed the plan in a Breitbart News op-ed, arguing the change will help local broadcasters counter the growing influence of national programmers.

"Repealing the national cap will provide essential relief for local broadcasters by restoring a healthy counterbalance to the growing leverage of national programmers. Increased scale will enable broadcasters to attract the capital and advertising revenue needed to sustain and produce trusted and community-focused news and programming," Carr wrote.

Carr warned that inaction would risk repeating mistakes seen in another corner of local media.

"If the FCC does not act, we do not need to imagine the bleak media future ahead. Just look at local newspapers. Much like the national cap, the FCC maintained an outdated rule for more than 40 years that limited investment in local newspapers," the Trump administration official continued.

"The FCC kept that rule in place until 2017, long after the economics of local journalism had shifted. Meanwhile, local newspapers shut down by the dozen, and many Americans are now left to choose from a small number of national papers. We can't let local broadcast TV follow the same path," he added.

Carr also highlighted the growing challenges for local stations competing against national media conglomerates.

"Many local broadcast TV stations are getting hollowed out as a result and turning into little more than mouthpieces for programming produced in New York and Hollywood. That is not what Congress or the FCC intended," Carr wrote.

Carr framed the stakes as a straightforward choice about the character of American news, arguing the country would be better served by "a little less Hollywood and a little more local reporting."

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/18/2026 - 16:55

"The View" co-host Ana Navarro praised Hunter Biden for being "the biggest troll" during ABC's "Behind the Table" podcast.

Former Warriors two-time NBA Finals MVP Kevin Durant had an awkward moment during Friday's Fanatics Fest in New York.

These two teams have both played well offensively during Summer League action.

An ominous new Iranian billboard unveiled after the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham alludes to President Trump as the Islamic Republic's next target -- the latest escalation in a series of threats on the president's life over the past week.

Maher told NPR that legal exonerations, acquittals should carry weight in the court of public opinion.

Is Home Affordability Actually Better Than Headlines Suggest

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The doom feed says home affordability locked a generation out. The math on the payment you actually write says something the headlines won’t.

Here are the “facts” that the media tells you about home affordability.

Let’s start with a recent survey. Two out of three Americans now say it’s a bad time to buy a house, the most negative reading Gallup has ever recorded. Another study showed that a record 25.2 million adults under 35 are living with their parents. Scroll any feed, and you’ll hear that home affordability has priced an entire generation out for good. Those are the “facts” according to the media.

However, here’s the problem with that story. When you measure home affordability today against the metric that actually governs the check you write each month, the picture flips. By that measure, buying a home may be easier now than it was for the Boomers and Gen Xers who get blamed for everything.

Let me be clear about what’s real, because I won’t build an argument on a false floor. Since 2019, the median listing price has jumped about 34% to roughly $430,000. The payment on a median home went from near $1,700 in early 2020 to about $3,100 by late 2025. Rates tripled off the 2021 lows. That shock was real, and it landed in five short years.

So the frustration makes sense. What doesn’t hold up is taking a recent, regional price spike and turning it into a permanent law of physics that applies to every zip code and every buyer. The honest version of home affordability today is narrower, more local, and far more fixable than the headline suggests.

But let’s start with the narrative that the Boomer generation had it easy. As one individual posted on X:

“You boomers had it easy, you could buy a home for the price of bread and a gallon of milk.”

Boomers Did Not Have It Easy

Here’s the part the narrative skips. The Boomer who bought in 1980 financed at a 30-year fixed rate of 13.74%, watched it climb past 18% by October 1981, and had no way to know rates would ever come back down, which made every payment feel like a life sentence. Think about that. For a median home price of $64,600 with 20% down, that household sent roughly 39% of its income to the mortgage before property taxes.6 Add the taxes, and the typical 1980 family spent close to 47% of their income on housing.

Today’s buyer, financing about $417,000 near 6.5%, spends closer to 32% on the mortgage and about 43% all in. Two independent analyses ran this exact math and landed in the same place. On the payment that matters, 1980 was as hard as, or harder than, 2026. So home affordability today is mostly a payment story, and the payment math favors the present. Notice what the work did. It isn’t the price of the home, it’s the rate.

The Crisis Is Regional, Not National

Now look at where the “home affordability” pain actually sits. A typical home in Iowa costs about 3.7 years of household income, near where the national buyer stood in 2000. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kansas still sell near or below $300,000. Among large metros, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, and Philadelphia rank among the most affordable in the country. Home affordability today is a function of your zip code first, your generation second.

The expensive markets are real, but they’re specific. And here’s the twist most coverage misses. The old escape hatch of moving somewhere cheap is closing, because Montana now costs 8.7 years of income, worse than California or New York. The same regional pattern shows up in who’s living at home. In New Jersey it’s 44% of young adults. In South Dakota, 18%.8 The map of “kids who can’t move out” is mostly a map of expensive states.

That “one in three” figure above also deserves a second look. It counts everyone ages 18 to 34, which includes college kids, 22-year-olds in their first job, and people who’ve always lived at home for a stretch. If you narrow that gap to a more realistic home ownership range, ages 25 to 34, the share drops to about 18%. And roughly 70% of those 25-to-34-year-olds at home are employed.2 So this “home affordability” story isn’t about a lazy generation or a broken job market. It’s a story about down payments, rent, and a marriage age that has drifted six years later since 1980.

Where The Skeptics Are Right

I won’t pretend that nothing has changed. Two things genuinely got harder, and waving them away would insult the reader. First, the down payment. In 1980, 20% down ran about two-thirds of a year’s income. Today it runs a full year or more, which is why the median first-time buyer now puts down just 9% to get in the door, and why the first-time buyer’s median age has climbed from 29 to roughly 40. That capital wall is a real barrier.

Second, insurance. Premiums jumped 24% from 2021 to 2024 to an average of $3,303, twice the rate of inflation, rising in 95% of zip codes. In Utah, insurance premiums rose 59%. That cost isn’t your fault, and it won’t be fixed by skipping lattes, but notice what both problems have in common. They’re specific and addressable, not a sentence handed down to an entire generation. The home affordability debate today has two honest exceptions, and naming them is what separates analysis from a comment-section rant.

Where They Aren’t

Here’s the irony buried in the down payment story. The 1980 buyer didn’t just face a 20% norm; they put down even more, averaging about 28%. To skip mortgage insurance on a conventional loan, you needed the full 20% in cash, no exceptions. There were no mainstream 3% conventional programs, no piggyback structures in wide use, no stack of state assistance grants to pull from. You saved the lump sum, or you stayed a renter.

Today, the menu is wide open. A first-time buyer can go conventional with as little as 3% down, FHA with 3.5% down, or zero down with a VA or USDA loan if eligible, and can cover even that with gift funds, a 401 (k) withdrawal, or a state assistance grant. The 20% rule is dead. The median first-time buyer actually put down 10% last year, not 20. Less down means PMI and a bigger payment, of course. But the belief that you need 20% in cash just to walk in the door is the single most expensive myth keeping renters stuck, and it hasn’t been true for decades.

The Playbook: Home Affordability Today Is on You

So what’s the move? Stop reading a national headline as a verdict on your situation. The buyer who treats “homeownership is dead” as gospel, while sitting in a market where a solid house costs three or four times income, talks himself out of a purchase he could actually make. Bob Farrell’s ninth rule fits here. When every expert and forecast agrees, something else usually happens. Sentiment just hit a record low. That’s historically when the patient buyer gets paid.

But mindset only gets you to the starting line. Here’s the part nobody wants to hear.

Working isn’t enough. Roughly 70% of the young adults living at home already have jobs, so a paycheck alone clearly doesn’t get you out of the basement. What gets you out is a set of decisions most people dodge because they sting. So let’s say them plainly.

• Run the number, then automate it. A 3.5% down payment on a $250,000 home is $8,750, about $730 a month for a year. If you can’t find $730, that’s a spending problem or an income problem, and both are yours. But here’s the part the pushback misses. The inability to save that money isn’t just a down payment problem. It’s a signal you can’t afford to own yet. The mortgage is only the floor. Property taxes, insurance that now averages $3,303 a year, the roughly 1% of a home’s value it consumes in annual upkeep, and HOA dues, if you have them, all add up to the monthly payment. Can’t bank $730 a month as a renter? You’ll drown in those carrying costs as an owner. The savings test isn’t the barrier. It’s the readiness check.

• Cut the big rocks, not the pebbles. The daily coffee isn’t what’s keeping you in your childhood bedroom, but the $650 truck payment, the $1,900 rent in a city you picked for the nightlife, and the lifestyle you finance to look successful on a phone screen absolutely are. Sell the financed truck. Get a roommate. Buy smaller, because the median new home is 38% larger than it was in 1980, making a 1,500-square-foot starter a choice rather than a hardship. Live below your means on purpose. Nobody is coming to subsidize your standard of living.

• Then move to the money. The good jobs and the cheap houses rarely sit in the same expensive zip code you grew up in. They sit in Columbus, Des Moines, Indianapolis, and Greenville, where a median income still buys a median home. Remote work made that move easier than it has ever been. If you won’t relocate for opportunity, fine, but then you’ve made unaffordability a choice, not a fate.

• Raise your income and your credit score at the same time. A side income of $1,000 a month is a full down payment in under a year. A credit jump from 580 to 620 can move you off a 3.5% FHA loan and onto a 3% conventional, saving you thousands up front and more over the life of the loan. And every year you stall has a price tag. The National Association of Realtors estimates that delaying a purchase from age 30 to 40 costs the typical buyer around $150,000 in lost equity.

The market isn’t fair. It was never fair. The only question that matters is what you’re going to do about it.

The bottom line is this. Housing isn’t unaffordable everywhere, for everyone, forever. It’s expensive in specific places, for specific reasons, and most of all since 2020. The rest is geography, a savings problem, and a story people keep repeating until they believe it. After three decades of watching cycles, I’ve learned the worst financial decisions get made when people accept a narrative instead of running the numbers.

Home affordability today is better than the Fed admits. Run your own numbers and see.

Tyler Durden Sat, 07/18/2026 - 16:20

Saturday marks the 24th anniversary of Lakers great Kobe Bryant showing up at Rucker Park to play pickup games against fans.

Trade $10, get a $20 bonus for Yankees vs. Dodgers with ProphetX promo code NYPBONUS.

A man resembling the crazed stalker can be seen on video just 15 minutes before he slipped into the studio.

A man resembling the crazed stalker can be seen on video just 15 minutes before he slipped into the studio.

New bettors can apply the bet365 bonus code to bet $10, get $150 in bonus bets win or lose.

Brewers pitcher Brandon Woodruff is likely to miss the rest of the season in a massive blow for his team. Woodruff, 33, told reporters Saturday that he was set to undergo right shoulder capsule surgery. He previously underwent the same procedure in 2023 and rehabbed the injury for 20 months in that instance before returning....

O'Donnell claimed she triggers the president like schoolgirls who told him 'you're nothing' as a kid.

A caught on camera New York City street brawl between a skateboarder and a Mercedes driver erupted after the two tangled over a prime parking spot in the East Village, police sources told The Post.

Landen Roupp didn’t want his night to end. But he didn’t put up a fight.

Sporty Spice and the model met on the Raya dating app in 2023.

Sporty Spice and the model met on the Raya dating app in 2023.