184900+ entries in 0.043s
mircea_popescu: i know, i know, "british researches discover antioxidants hold secret to eternal lyf"
mircea_popescu: the existence of landlords as a class is no more to their detriment than the existence of fire as a phenomena.
mircea_popescu: manufacturers are putting stuff like "it's what's inside that counts" on the remaining space and winning with it.
mircea_popescu: omaigawd these idiots with forcing cigarette packs to depict whatever valuable messages.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: e. this is a very vulnerable position to be in, and it requires immediate and insistent attention.
mircea_popescu: it's not like i hate you or anything. the problem is that you're intellectually imuno-compromised so to speak, by which i mean : you get ideas, which is fine, but also a common function of the human mind. but then when you go to evaluate them, your evaluator is broken, and when the evaluator is called into question it's discovered in turn that the building blocks are also broken and in turn the building blocks for thos
mircea_popescu: not only is this a horrible idea, but it is my considered opinion that you are very far yet from the intellectual maturity that'd allow you to marry, let alone raise children, and that running any kind of business is many many years in the future AFTER THAT.
mircea_popescu: you can tell if dirtyness occurs from amateur shot digicams ?!
mircea_popescu: what do you do when the landlord and the tenant each upload a video and they don't even look like they come from the same place ?
mircea_popescu: so ima spend two hours shooting amateur footage to (maybe!) save 60 bucks a year from now ?
mircea_popescu: except they already did that and are lying about it now.
mircea_popescu: you mean, like it is "obvious" that the rental agency suycks ?
mircea_popescu: leaving aside the failures of "evidence based" in "process", be it political, juridical or otherwise
mircea_popescu: and you promise. for all he knows you throw dimes to figure out who to side with.
mircea_popescu: but the tenant still only gets his deposit back maybe.
mircea_popescu: the outcome is that he gets his deposit back SOMETIMES. so maybe.
mircea_popescu: in fact, your idea sounds to alf like it was invented by the landlords in question, because the mere presence of this bad (horrible!) option on the table makes the miserable first more palatable than it would be on its own.
mircea_popescu: so let me get this straight, you want to give people too poor to litigate, too stupid / desocialized to talk to the landlord and too scared to act the option "you can either pay 100 to the landlord as deposit or 300 to me and unlike the landlord I PROMISE to give it back (maybe), except im not anywhere near you and you can't burn my house down" ?
☟︎ mircea_popescu: yeah. evne if you don't have a crt, 6300k is better than 9
mircea_popescu: anyway, as a take-away : if you're depressed, before you try seroquel or whatever, try changing your lightbulbs.
mircea_popescu: but at home, ima have the warm tones of old style filament, tyvm.
mircea_popescu: i have no problem flood-lighting industrial spaces in sodium lamps, or blowing the shit out of consumable beauties in the studio with halogen projectors.
mircea_popescu: haha no, actual light bulb (proper incandescents, not the bullshit halogens emplaced in an incandescent ampoule) is still produced, and still sold.
mircea_popescu: you have NO IDEA what an impact quality of lighting has on quality of life.
mircea_popescu: they're often in rental units because hey, "energy efficiency". i have to take them out every time.
mircea_popescu: no but i mean the "energy efficient" mercury dispensers.
mircea_popescu: well, if you don't know where it goes maybe it's legitimate ? maybe they actually spend ~1.1k after each tenant leaves, on average.
mircea_popescu: this is not in any sense related to the concept of bezzle.
mircea_popescu: a slush fund is money a government body, such as an embassy, secret service, captured "business" runs to bribe people with.
mircea_popescu: if they have expenses, the only reason can possibly be insanely shitty tenants,
mircea_popescu: what's a property manager spend money on anyway ?! they're all cash flow positive, that's the point.
mircea_popescu: specifically : there exist two classes of solutions and they both come from stakeholders in the problem.
mircea_popescu: anyway. if there's actually a problem agency you got there, the solution is either for the tenants to start an association/class action suit if you have them/whatever is the equivalent in the jurisdiction ; or else for a competitor to start advertising deposit fairness.
mircea_popescu: so you're saying a tenant taking a property with a market value of 120k for a year at the usual ~10% ie 1k a month is being gypped for the fabulous sum of 60 bux ? this can't quite be right can it ?
mircea_popescu: not really. you're offering them the opportunity to push up your venture for free on their own influence/dime. which they won't take - if they were the sort of derp to fall for that they'd be on reddit complaining about how they have no money and the landlord's scamming them.
mircea_popescu: none of this will ever work in any sense, but if you play it right and get lucky might get you dinner with obama, which... i hear the food sucks and the table manners are worse, but then again they're not inviting me so it's all good.
mircea_popescu: anyway, not for me to change your mind. let me only suggest that once you get this business off the ground there's a ready avenue to expand : you could do the same for paycheck loans.
mircea_popescu: (and they can do A LOT of damage with that, many jurisdiction have the notion of problem landlord in some manner, and you can often get treble damages, heck in one case a guy i know got the landlord kicked out of town. as in, had to sell ALL his property and not buy there again, ever.)
mircea_popescu: seems dubious landlords compete for passive-agressive tenants with no options. they do compete for rich tenants, but you don't have a value proposition for those guys.
mircea_popescu: this is like saying the mcdonalds makes a tidy living off giving out wrong change.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: and the dispute isn't whether "You have them" or not, the dispute is whether you are one. because that's fundamentally what you're trying to do here, redistribute resources "for fairness" is how the government calls it, but you're neither a government nor have the option to be come one. at the level where you go into business, the thing is not a government but a gang.
mircea_popescu: HeySteve the point is there's a big demand for such a service << yes, but the demand is from people who aren't willing to take any steps to enforce it. and it's for you to magically oppress property holders on their behalf. this isn't how property works, the fact that the landlords hold that property "free and clear" specifically means that they are immune from a guy named heysteve and his plans for the future. this is
mircea_popescu: sure, it can be good, but it leaves you with some things you don't know what to do with
mircea_popescu: once you buy into the theory that "the state isn't the CAUSE of criminality but the protection from it", you'll necessarily swallow the "science is the path to knowledge" string all the way into "paradigm good".
mircea_popescu: but the point stands. the only thing you can definitely say about a paradigm (kuhn sense) is that it has nothing to do with reality. the one thing people involved WISH to say is that it is the only basis upon which science can be produced. which happens to be true.
mircea_popescu: i do believe him when he keeps saying he drinks a lot. he'd have to. the damage imbecile "social agreements" do to smart people.
mircea_popescu: but it's a lot more likely he just found something to shut the brain up with
mircea_popescu: one could hope that the reason he dropped off the map is because existential crisis finally triggered
mircea_popescu: he just understands some stuff exceptionally well, but it didn't seem to have percolated through.
mircea_popescu: haha. well, in truth the guy's politics are utterly indefensible.
mircea_popescu: all it says is that a system of thought is ipso facto worthless, but hey, i can see why he prefers the counterfactual statement of it.
mircea_popescu: "The Economist, an excellent magazine which offers excellent analysis of complex political and economic questions, yet still manages to be on the wrong side of history every single time"
mircea_popescu: We got a brief moment of the possibility of 1980s style black and white American might with George Bush after 9/11, when half the country went, "hell yeah, let's go kick some ass!" and the other half went, "wait a second, don't you guys know we suck?" That being the full extent of our national dialogue. You see the results.
mircea_popescu: Well, the possibilities never came true, so heroes can all go to hell. And God, too, while we're at it, he didn't deliver either.
mircea_popescu: skills would be uploaded straight by God when needed, sudden and immediate, just as they came to JCVD in Bloodsport. Life is a movie and movies are only 90 minutes long. Not a whole lot of time for training.
mircea_popescu: What happened? I think the generation raised on action movies felt betrayed. Those movies promised possibilities, promised that when you grow up, your powers will kick in. When you grow up, if bad guys take over a bank, you'll be able to use kung fu on them. It seemed not to have occurred to anyone to learn actual kung fu, or look up how banks are typically laid out, where the alarms are-- just in case. No, these
mircea_popescu: it's really a nicely coalessced dementia, this post-cold war west.
mircea_popescu: ided of course he doesn't expect and in any case doesn't get any actual power over the derps through this.
mircea_popescu: "the end which is so obvious and predictable but at the same time the only one that would speak to this generation of narcissists: when we need a hero, heroes are obligated to rise up and serve, but please have the decency to die afterwards so we can go back to second guessing the ethics of your actions. " >> and when "we" need a monkey that knows how to push the levers one has the moral obligation to materialize, prov
☟︎ mircea_popescu: faster, even faster than cheating wife stories, than detecting hypocrisy in the elites."