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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."
mircea_popescu: "This generation, this, The Dumbest Generation Of Narcissists In The History Of The World, they hate heroes-- except dead ones, they're ok, and superheroes are ok too, people with magic or from other planets-- but human heroes are anathemas, they want to tear them down and show them to be regular mortals, flawed-- and the best is if they can catch them being hypocritical, nothing brings an impotent narcissist to orgasm
mircea_popescu: but seriously, the libtards/hipsers actually need " People aren't seeing Eastwood play Walt; they are seeing The Man With No Name now aged 70 and living alone, still clinging to his horse, I mean gun, I mean car. That's the guy they want to see "grow," that's the guy they want to see admit he was wrong. " ?
mircea_popescu: im not about to see the movie, for one thing i never gave much of a shit about eastwood and for the other he certainly went to shit in his later life (what is with this, pacino doing incredibly bad bullshit a la simone and de niro doing the worst infomercial "movies" conceivable ?)
mircea_popescu: so in this sense, finding shit in yourself is about as valuable as growing tomatoes on your window sill.
mircea_popescu: that book is useful to people ~with independent clincal experience~, even if it is read first, before the experience is actually had (on the expecation that it will sturcture the comparatively more expensive process of actual clinical exposure, thus gettiong more bang per buck)
mircea_popescu: it has a much deeper root. the problem with medical education is that your own body constitutes no clinical experience.
mircea_popescu: you know, the ancient "sophomore's disease", where young minds encountering the big book of medical semiology for the first time diagnose themselves with everything is not MERELY an amusing story.
mircea_popescu: who the fuck permits these imbeciles to pretend like they're faculty i have no idea.
mircea_popescu: "She can't understand why the ideal isn't the same as the average. So she wants to create reasons why the average is the ideal. " <<< Elizabeth Cashdan, woman in science.
mircea_popescu: meanwhile at reality ranch, training a sex fied takes me six weeks, training a perfect soldier takes six months, and training a PASSIBLE intel summarizer takes six years.
mircea_popescu: yes the result is directly equivalent with "enemies control the decision process at all points and at all levels". but the cause is much more pedestrian : the innate MISTAKEN belief that "anyone can make a summary".
mircea_popescu: how the fuck did you get a laptop that supplants a half ton desktop ?
mircea_popescu: yes well, the eulora box is maybe 30lbs, and it's made of common materials.
mircea_popescu: and "i want one like joe has" is a perfectly valid definition file.
mircea_popescu: the only example i can think of would be "consumer designed laptop". you go in the shop with the definition files and they fedex you the item later that week
mircea_popescu: actual community maintained game client ius such a fucking all-obliterating win...
mircea_popescu: you don't even have to boither with anything, keeps its own logs, they get awked and gnuplot.
mircea_popescu: it's ten minutes to set up and ten minutes of use to make itself indispensable. the chick can code, i don't remember a tool becoming THIS FUCKING NEEDED in recent times.
mircea_popescu: i'm playing it as we speak, making congressional pulp.
mircea_popescu: it occurs to me i have in this selfsame year never showed anyone anything.
mircea_popescu: i own like 3 of the things, i used them for maybe five hours total the past year.