DBDr
1yr ago
True re. housing as asset; but not for me. I'm different in that the property I [the greater family investment pool] own is across several countries and is in desirable locations that will remain desirable even in the 85% worst case climate change scenario; and we don't actually rent most of it out. It mainly gets used by members of the pool or lent to people we know in exchange for other services or for adhoc payments; lets us avoid tenants rights or squatters rights situations by not being landlords or absentee assholes; and it's better for out karma. It doesn't scale, but we don't want it to.
Actually owning property for rent as a small time investor is a fucking pain and half; even more so if you don't live in the same building. Much easier if you have lawyers on call and float a huge amount of money than owning 2.5 rental units 600 miles apart.
I've actually managed to avoid the pitfalls of getting fucked by tradies by being a former tradie myself; but it is precarious.
DBDr
1yr ago
Just got back from month long vacation # 3 this year, perspective fully changed: Working for money is fucking stupid. Wow, is it stupid.
I've met dozens of people who travel full time from property and investment income from their grandparents; and I am probably a couple years from fully supporting myself purely from passive income (though I'll probably keep working just to get the number higher; maybe pile up some burnable cash to buy more investment property during the next crash).
The switch was sudden and totally unrelated to anything specific I had done; it is just a result of two generations of skin flint behavior and interest rates. If your family line can get together mid six figures of money in investments and assets and sit on it for 1.5 generations without anyone buying penis compensation trucks or boats or developing a gambling addiction or fentanyl addition; you can just be fucking set. (Said in the tone of a joke, but actually a big ask according to the facts.)
The people talking about class war are 100% right; I can say that for a fact now that I've experienced it from both ends. It's really nice to be on the winning side for once. I just watch the money I float in my checking accounts go up 70k every couple months and most of it goes into investments that will only be dinged if the government of the USA collapses; recission proof and inflation proof and 98% risk free. It is so fucking easy to live solely off the sweat of other peoples brows; no wonder these dudes who were born into it start thinking they can't possibly fail.
All this to say: What the fuck do we do about the fact that owning shit and renting shit is just flat out better in every way than doing shit or making shit?
It's easier, it's safer, it's more sustainable over the course of your life, and you can pass it down to your kids locked away in trust so even the frailest son can't fuck it up.
I know that my solution (radical wealth redistribution, red-black shit at large, etc and so forth) isn't popular here; but even conservatives have got to recognize there is a problem.
How do you solve it without the revolution? Is that question even coherent?
DBDr
1yr ago
IT's hard to say, because it's a lot, right?
But if I had to bet on one thing it would alienation; both in the Marxist sense (from you labor) and in the common sense (from communal living.)
That seems to be the main difference. Two examples: We had really excellent avocado trees on our property, and everybody near us knew that. So, when they wanted good avocados for some reason, they'd come to our house, yell up the path, and bring us some baked goods/coffee/a fish they caught/ some nails/ whatever.
Nobody tracked the value of exchange, everybody just kinda had a feeling of "our ledgers are more in X's favor, better bring them some chicharron from the pig we just slaughtered."
The thing that makes this different from similar structures in the VERY capitalistic USA is that this would happen with people you barely knew or had only met once, because the community was actually a community. You can't get this in any way other than actually living communally I think; no amount of church groups will replicate it.
If you want the benefits of communal living, you have to be a communist in a literal sense type of thing. It isn't enough to attend a reading circle once a week, you have to be willing to put someone's cousin who you've never met up in your house for the weekend because the river flooded and he's stuck on your side.
DBDr
1yr ago
I always tell people who want to get into cooking (as the food guy in the social networok): get a Kirkland french oven (if you can find it), a tramotina non stick skillet, a madin carbon steel 10", and a Victorinox chefs knife and you are fucking set for life.
You can pay more money for all those things, but you are seeing fractional improvements for geometric price increases; and if you pay less you are actually seeing a serious difference in performance.
(The madein pan is a bit of luxury; you can get a cheap cast iron and get the same or better performance but cast iron is a big hassle.)
DBDr
1yr ago
It might be because I came to the US from a semi-subsistence based farming community in central America (we grew most of our own food, but also raised cattle and exotic hardwoods for sale and had some amount of tourism.)
Going from there to Socal and seeing that people actually worked harder and had shittier lives has kinda made me suspicious of the entire neoliberal enterprise: if shit is materially better for people in a town with no electricity, no municipal water, and one phone line just because they aren't participating in the modern capitalist economy; it seems like the whole system fails to justify itself.
Having gone from one to the other, I can say it's not the stuff. The stuff is great! Cellphones and hamburgers and the internet and all that shit is fucking wonderful.
And it also can't be a monoculture. We had black Caribbeans, white expats, and the mestizo locals all living together and speaking different languages/having different religions.
And it can't be all that gay shit, because nobody gave a shit if somebody wanted to have sex with the same sex or trans their damn gender; people just shrugged and moved on like "Well, it makes them happy and we have spend hours at the pilon husking rice by hand so who gives a shit."
So, if people are sadder and have shittier lives, it has to be everything else.
Not to dump my personal political journey on you down thread, but I've been ruminating on why I have the opinion that I have since you posted your first comment.
DBDr
1yr ago
Eh. Pre covid MY life was at least a decade in to getting "ruined" just by society functioning as intended.
I can sympathize with people that got fucked by covid, and I would happily live in a society where people didn't get fucked by covid; but that's not what we got. The majority of everyone is getting fucked every day, and I've finally managed to ascend high enough in the crab bucket that I get to stand on the little people while my bosses stand on me.
It's shit, but it is what it is, right?
DBDr
1yr ago
If you care about the objects around you, having nice objects is stressful because you have to give a shit.
I have a very nice very expensive santoku I bought from a dude in japan; and I made a little wooden magnetic knife rack just for it and it has a special set of king stones for sharpening it and it gets dried and put away after every use; where as I overarm throw my Victorinox into the sink after I'm done slamming it into bones and shit (this is an exaggeration, but still).
DBDr
1yr ago
It is worth getting a bigger power supply for sure before doing anything else; every weird computer problem I have ever failed to troubleshoot was resolved by getting a new PSU.
You can get a 750w 80+ gold pus on amazon with free returns; give it a shot and see if you can reproduce the crashes.
DBDr
1yr ago
It's worth pushing through; but only if you are having a good time. You gotta go to the writing where it is, it has jokes and funny shit in it but designed to be an easily consumed disposable piece of entertainment.
Just put it down and pick it up when you feel like it; there is no hurry.
DBDr
1yr ago
I can't imagine a human being who was disappointed with the ending;
DBDr
1yr ago
The diversity of human experience, right?
It let me stop being a human beast of burden and get on the social capital accruing section of the ladder.
Truly proves meritocracy is a myth: no covid, I work for wages until I'm dead. Yes covid: I get a degree, and now I own a house and have a funded retirement and all sorts of shit; where as you (maybe?) get absolutely fucked by the thing that helped me immensely trough no fault of your own and with no way to stop it (I assume).
DBDr
1yr ago
I could travel to Japan for a month with a budget of 2000$ for all my lodgings and travel and tickets; now the plane ticket on it's own will eat most of that.
DBDr
1yr ago
Man, I want from being poor as shit to being fully middle class just from school moving to fully online. That was it. Being able to attend remote classes at a four year was all I needed to jump three income brackets.
This on top of avoiding the vast majority of senseless bullshit associated with life: No commutes, no waiting in line for no fucking reason at the Drs, the DMV, the industrial supply, the airgas.
Everything that should never have been in person or queue based since the webpage was invented suddenly wasn't; even when I was still hauling around conduit and cables and pump motors instead of going on the computer and pretending to work everything was so much faster and easier.
Maybe it's just my autism; but I feel like covid really exposed the extent to which human labor and human socialization is mainly involved in a giant game of pretend where everyone works sooooo hard in such important jobs, you can't believe how important this thing I'm doing is; only it turns out that 40% of it can totally stop happening and everything keeps ticking along with barely a hitch.
All the office managers and Jr. cfos and second chair purchasing committee members in the world could die tomorrow and cause less damage than the LA port longshoreman getting laid off without enough consideration, style of thing.
DBDr
1yr ago
I'm taking my third month long vacation in the past 12 months; given that we are probably seeing the very end of the covid price extravaganza that let me go to japan and london from Socal for a couple hundred bucks; this time filling out my map of Europe with Romania, Bulgaria, and greece (which I somehow managed to avoid up until now.) If I don't go now, I'm probably gonna not go for a long ass time; prices look like they are bouncing wayyyy back up.
I'm really gonna miss covid; that whole situation was so fucking convenient to me. Cheap plane tickets, cheap lodgings, cheap car rentals, incredibly cheap train tickets (including that summer ticket in Germany that was all local and national and some international rail with unlimited rides for like, 12 dollars or something. Shit was wild; I hope they do that again.), and short lines.
I guess It has to end eventually though, or all the places I like will go bust. This is me bidding a fond Farwell to the Coronavirus era, I really hope the people who want me to eat the bugs and live in the pod don't also make me go back to the fucking office.
DBDr
1yr ago
I second Spotify: I always at least check out all the music on my discover weekly; but don't let the algorithm decide everything every time. I like to checkout random new releases or curated playlists by other people also.
DBDr
1yr ago
Dude has good pipes, mediocre fingers, and no songwriting talent. Politics aside, if you are a dedicated listener to this style of music it sounds extremally trite and standard and played out, style of thing.
The genre is going through a bit of a Renaissance right now with Billy Strings and friends tearing it up, down and sideways; but most new talented artists in the field are either hard left or socially conservative but sympathetic to the homeless/criminal/welfare crowd (because they come from there; half the time. 90% of the population of Appalachia receives welfare of some sort, the vast majority of traditional bluegrass areas eat the government cheese. ) this dude wouldn't get any oxygen if it wasn't for the politics IMO.
DBDr
1yr ago
The first couple dates are about proving to her that you aren't a fucking phsyco that's going to cook and eat her toes; so something very in public but not involved with the public. A place where you can be seen by other people but don't have to interact with them. Museums are good, going to markets or art shows, the Zoo, the Beach, the Park, etc.
I've blown it before by trying out my favorite thing, which is going on a mountain walk with my dog. Everybody likes dogs and mountains and walks; or at least everyone I'm willing to try tolerating. What's no to like?
The fact that she doesn't know me and I invited her into the murder zone; to a really good place to star in a true crime drama where they find her earrings in a pile of coyote scat. You gotta save that second location shit for the fourth date at least!
DBDr
1yr ago
I would too, actually; if polling places where selected at random then pared down by population density and there were mandatory voting holidays.
The voting place where I was got fucking annihilated by population density on the weekend and I'm not even in the city, it was actually faster to drive out into the country then drive back than to wait in line in the 'burbs.
DBDr
1yr ago
Yes but no IMO.
I think they are seeded, but not as a tool to discredit cons. They are probably seeded by people with a financial interest in creating a media sphere distinct from reality; so people get locked into the conspiratorial universe where Hilary Clinton isn't a made-man venal corporatist stooge but a literal satanic pedophile blood drinker.
The same exists on the left; from tankies and such who aren't content with the boring Marxist critique of capital and has to make the further leap that rich people and the US personally crush third worlders in wine presses for entertainment.
It's the same everywhere and forever 99% of the time 100% of the time: there is no grand conspiracy or narrative; there are individual actors reacting to market forces attempting to maximize profit and therefore coordinating with no coordinator.
I think that is why a lot of these dudes that I am familiar with on the left conspiratorial media sphere spend no time at all attacking Trump/Desantis/the Reps; and all of their time and energy attacking AOC/ "Elites"/ the Dems: because they aren't primarily trying to steer politics. They are trying to lock their audience in by providing a unique product; so their main competition isn't the right, it's the left.
DBDr
1yr ago
Consider the actual situation you are describing in case one: Baltimore in the 90's. Somalia. Zanzibar. Early Colonial America.
Basically, you are describing the situation up to the creation of the modern state, where (once you normalize for famine and infectious disease) the most common cause of death for men was being murdered.
DBDr
1yr ago
I guess it's how you think of the poll.
If I was in a prisoners dilemma situation with one other person, I take the red pill. Duh. With ten? Red pill. With 100? Red pill.
I see the actual question as: We are posing this question to everyone who speaks your language on the internet. That changes the calculus, and I start answering the question by modeling what an ideal society would do, guessing how likely it is, and if it's =+51% doing that.
DBDr
1yr ago
You can search out the data from some polling agencies; which generally agree with me (hence me believing it) or you can go off of anecdotes from workers at abortion clinics; but that is all there is and the data is such that if you gave me even one even Trafalgar survey saying otherwise I would return to neutral.
DBDr
1yr ago
Only if their are enough people who pick red to create a low trust society; which is worse in every regard for every participant (except for people that are good at scams and violence and shit.)
If the majority of prosocial humans select blue as the did and habitually do in the non fake twitter quiz versions of this question; everything is fine for everyone.
DBDr
1yr ago
Abortions do not generally decrease in a given area or among a given population in correlation with their religious beliefs or political beliefs (not in all cases; eg. seventh day Adventists and JW's and orthodox jews have WAY less abortions.)
So, if you are a white woman who is firmly upper middle class, you are exactly as likely on a population level to have an abortion weather you are an evangelical republican or a satanic communist.
The only people who actually poll for this or collect the information are (naturally) pro choice NGOs and certain states (Guttmacher, state of Texas, and so on) but it is enough to be a revealed preference type of thing, imo. It is hard to collect and noisy data though.
Every property in the pool is owned outright; and aren't included in the low risk pile.
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