I love lying to my landlord. “We’re currently looking at a comparable unit in the area at $[a hundred dollars less than our current rent]/month, so if your offer has any flexibility to come down on the rent, that would help us reach a decision about whether or not to renew our lease here” and the comparable unit exists only in my own beautiful mind
Actually, no! And since several people have replied asked for my script for negotiating lower rent, I’m gonna share that below, as well as the philosophy behind it. Full disclosure that I’m not a leasing office person or a realtor or god forbid, a landlord—I’m just someone who has been a renter for 10+ years across different states, and I know for a fact that I have saved myself thousands of dollars by successfully negotiating a lower monthly rent on almost every lease I’ve ever signed. (Also, I’ve only ever rented in the U.S., so this advice may not be as applicable elsewhere.)
Step 0: Know Thy Enemy
The key thing to understand about all residential landlords, whether they’re corporate conglomerates or Just Some Asshole, is that their asset—the property—is a Cinderella carriage that magically turns back into an expensive ass pumpkin of a liability any time it’s sitting empty. The property taxes, insurance, mortgage, HOA fees, and maintenance costs all still come due every month/quarter/year whether they have a tenant to cover it all and then some, or not.
Because of this, at the end of the day, their ultimate goal is to fill every unit at all times with someone who will reliably pay the rent on time and in full. And because everything else is secondary to that goal—and because with the exception of Just Some Asshole landlords, the person responding to your emails and writing up your lease paperwork is several degrees of separation removed from the shareholders who profit off your rent money—they’re almost always willing to negotiate with you. As long as it gets the liability converted into an asset faster or keeps the carriage from turning back into a pumpkin for longer, then in the long run, it’s actually in their best interest to give you a better price.
Step 1: Identify Your Leverage
If you understand how supply and demand works, you can figure out how much leverage you have pretty easily. High supply and low demand = you have more leverage, and vice versa. Do they have an “AVAILABLE NOW - MOVE IN TODAY” sandwich board on the sidewalk or a web banner that says “First month free”? Does their website and/or Apartments.com show a bunch of currently open listings? Do you already live there and know at least two families on your floor have moved out in the last several months with no one new moving in to replace them? These are all indications that they have more than one unit currently sitting empty, meaning higher supply and lower demand. No sandwich board and a website that just says “call for availability”? They might just suck at marketing, but more likely, supply is lower and demand is higher.
You have the least leverage if you’re a prospective tenant looking to move in somewhere that has a waitlist. They have no reason to offer you a discount if six other people are already in line to pay full price for apartments that aren’t even vacant yet (but you can still ask!). You also have no leverage to negotiate if you’ve already signed a lease and you’re in the middle of the lease period; you legally agreed to pay $X/month for Y months, so you’re stuck with that until the lease is up.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have the most leverage if you’re a current tenant who has always paid your rent on time and you’re being offered a renewal on your existing lease with higher rent than you're currently paying, especially if they already have some units that have been empty for a while. If you move out, not only is your unit going to sit vacant for at least part of a month, they’re also probably going to have to put in some work to “turn” the unit (repainting, professional cleaning, etc) to get it in move-in condition for the next tenant.
All of this means that if you move out, even if they can fleece you out of your security deposit and find a new tenant the very next month, it’s still gonna cost them at least a few thousand dollars to turn that pumpkin back into a carriage again. They’re probably willing to come down by $100-$200/month or so on the renewal offer rent if you ask, because they know it’ll actually save them money in the long run. Similar situation if you’re a prospective new tenant—if they can’t get you or anyone else to sign a lease and move in this month, that’s $[whatever the monthly rent is] down the drain, and they’ll never get it back. It’s a perishable item about to spoil.
Step 2: Get Their Opening Offer
This is the first number they’ll quote you for the rent—the sticker price that you’ve always just accepted as set in stone. The truth is, they’ve built some buffer into that number. There’s almost always some room for them to come down, and depending on your leverage, they will if you ask nicely. But for reasons that baffle me, most people don’t!
Step 3: Wait, Research, & Counter
Don’t reply to their initial offer right away—unless there’s a waitlist (in which case, you have little haggling power anyway), wait a few days. It makes them sweat a bit, and it shows you aren’t desperate. The person who is rushing to reply is not the one who has more leverage in the negotiation, and making them wait reminds them of that. In the meantime, use Apartments.com or Zillow to get an idea of what similar units in the same area are currently going for. Then you come up with your counteroffer.
As a general rule, anything more than about 20-25% below their opening offer (or below market rates) will probably just piss them off or make them take you less seriously. But when we’re talking about your monthly rent over the course of a year or two, even a 10% discount adds up to a lot of money!
When I negotiated our original lease for my current place, I also asked for and got a two year lease term instead of the standard one year. But whatever automated calendar event system they use to remind their leasing office staff when it’s time to send out renewal offers didn’t get the memo about that, so they mistakenly sent me a renewal offer the following year, meaning I got to see how much they would have jacked up the rent if they could’ve. For that second year of the lease alone, my negotiating saved us $3,000!
Step 4: BDE (Big Dick Emailing)
Here’s the tricky part. You need to write an email—always negotiate over email if you can, it’s too easy for a salesperson to bowl you over on the phone and anything they say that isn’t in writing means nothing—which simultaneously makes it sound like you would sign a lease with them in a heartbeat and like you are actively flirting with five other apartment complexes right now who all want you so bad it makes them look stupid, because you are just so sexy and fun and your credit score is eight inches flaccid. You need to make them believe you are both highly motivated and ready to sign on the dotted line and willing to just walk away from the table at any second, but if they could just come down a little bit on that number, you’d delete those other hoes’ numbers forever! Here’s the rough script I use every time:
“ Thank you for [your email/the tour/sending over the offer letter/etc]. I have had a chance to review and consider it. I think [name of apartment complex] would be the perfect fit for me, but I am also exploring and touring other options in the area, including a comparable unit nearby at $[a little below your counteroffer number]/month.
If we could come down to $[your counteroffer number]/month on the rent, I would be prepared to sign the lease today. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks! "
Step 6: You Win Either Way
Sometimes they really do just accept your counteroffer without question and send you over a revised lease to sign. (When this happens, I make a note for next time that my counteroffer was probably too high and I should’ve asked for more!) More often, they get approval from The Powers That Be and come back with a number that’s higher than your counteroffer but lower than their initial offer. Assuming I can afford it, I always accept this offer; you’ve achieved your goal of saving yourself money from sticker price, and they’re likely to lose patience if they have to keep going around and around with you. And sometimes (though only very rarely), they may come back and say the price is firm—in which case, guess what? You still didn’t lose anything by asking!
THIS!!! Exactly this. I didn’t mention it above because I just couldn’t fit it neatly anywhere, but once while negotiating a lease renewal, I got as far as receiving their counteroffer, which was basically “price firm :(”, but then life happened, so I forgot to respond and accept. The email sat in my inbox for a week. And then, completely unprompted, they magically replied again saying, “actually, nvm, how’s $[number that is lower than our opening offer] sound?”
To them, it looked like I was staring them down cold as ice like
I was literally just busy with other stuff! and they were sweating!!! BULLETS!!!
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A lifesaving injection given at birth to prevent severe bleeding has become collateral damage of the anti-vaccine movement.
talk to your coworkers about this. remember that the "taking advice from everyone except the experts" thing cuts both ways. you can be the non-expert guy at work who isnt an expert and gives someone advice they decide to follow based on vibes, but your advice can be the right advice instead. this is something we can all do.
the vitamin k shot has zero side effects, it is literally just a vitamin that does nothing except prevent babies from bleeding to death internally. its one of those things that does absolutely nothing except what it's supposed to do, is cheap, and has drastically reduced infant mortality this century and the last
[“Emotional need is historically constituted and tied to specific forms of sociality which entail potentially exploitative forms of labour. This construction of need can also mean that mothers’ emotional wellbeing is sacrificed for the sake of their children. Mothers’ own emotional needs then have to be adjusted so that they are satisfied through the emotional satisfaction of their family members. But if we start to disentangle those needs, we can see that they are often conflicting and cannot all be satisfied at the same time. Emotional need cannot be taken as a given, as there might be competing needs that cannot be satisfied. A care worker’s need for rest might come into contradiction with another person’s need for emotional comfort. This makes need a shaky foundation for radical politics – we cannot change society based simply on what people need.”]
alva gotby, from they call it love: the politics of emotional life, 2023
2026 Energy Crisis Policy Response Tracker - Data tools. A data tool by the International Energy Agency.
May 30 2026 - International Fuel Crisis Chart
Are you curious and/or dealing with idiots going on about how nothing ever happens? Here's a really interesting chart about how different countries around the world are dealing with the completely absurd but also completely real fuel crisis.
Some countries are encouraging working from home, using mass transit, others are already having vehicles fuel up on certain days. This chart doesn't include all the awesome expansion in solar panel projects exploding, or increased EV or hybrid vehicle sales.
As far as I can tell, the reason why things are still flowing as well as they are is that rich countries with oil reserves agreed in March to start releasing tons of fuel from those reserves, and the US is included in that group. No one honestly knows how much is in the reserves, there could be secret reserves for all we know, and also the Chinese have a very large amount of reserves. There are limits to the reserves though, and at some point, presumably, they'll have to be refilled.
Inflation is still coming for us all. The owners of oil companies started to really speak out this past week, worried. They're having record profits right now but there's this thing called "demand destruction" where if prices are too high, people will refuse to use / not be able to afford to use fossil fuels. They'll also try to pivot to alternatives, hence people buying more EVs and hybrids. The LAST thing they want is for people to permanently wean themselves off fossil fuels.
The Economist is talking about how Chinese solar producers have overproduced and are going under. This means that their stuff is cheaper than ever (and it would be even cheaper without the tariffs).
Consider picking something solar power generating up, if you can. Specialty oil for vehicles is already getting scarce. I talked my coworker out of buying so many balloons for an event at work because the price of helium is rising. Oil is in everything from pharmaceuticals to clothing to packaging to fuels. The poorest are already taking major hits from this, like the Philippines and Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Interestingly I did hear an interview a few weeks? months? back with a cotton farmer who was pleased that now his cotton was looking like a better product for clothing compared to all the plastics. Not sure if he was taking his increased diesel costs into account or not though.
Walmart is also rapidly expanding their EV charging stations across the US.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
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I'm reminded of that one part in Frederick Douglass's autobiography where he gets to the north for the first time and assumed, since they didn't have slaves, that everyone was about as poor as non-slaveowning white southerners. And they weren't! There were poor people, sure, but there were lots of people living very comfortably or in luxury.
He mentions how angry it made him, that not only were thousands and thousands of people suffering to create luxury for a few, but that slavery wasn't even necessary for wealth to exist. That's really stuck with me.
screenshot of a tweet by @pot8um: “Does anyone have that recent study that determined all 8 billion of us could be easily housed and fed with only 30% of the current global labor output and that our collective suffering is manufactured by capitalism...”
reply by @jasonhickel: “Yes: sciencedirect.com/... [a url that is cut off in the screenshot]” and an attached image of text:
“With this approach, good lives can be achieved for all without requiring large creases in total global throughput and output. Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. Such a future requires planning to” [text is cut off here].
Second image transcription:
Poverty is not an intractable problem that requires complex solutions, long timeframes and large increases in production and throughput that conflict with ecological objectives. The solution is straightforward. We need to actively plan to shift productive capacities away from capital accumulation and elite consumption in order to focus instead on the goods and services that are necessary to meet human needs and enable decent living for all, while ensuring universal access through public provisioning systems. We have framed this work around the concept of human needs, following the recent literature. However it is important to underscore that this approach is ultimately about far more than just satisfying material requirements for human well-being. Achieving decent-living for all is critical to enabling broader human capabilities, individual and collective self-realisation, full participation in society and politics and, ultimately, freedom.
there's never enough money each month. there's always an unexpected illness. new symptoms pop up or old symptoms flare up. meds have to be managed always and refilled constantly and any refill has the opportunity to go wrong. any regular care has the opportunity to go wrong. any mistake can send your health spiralling. it's always "i just need to get through this bad patch" but as soon as one ends another begins. another crisis begins in the middle of the last crisis. managing one thing leaves another thing to be neglected until that becomes a major issue and has to be managed asap and the cycle starts anew over and over and over
I got told by someone who manages a mutual aid resource that I was getting suspended for asking constantly for help.
I know she meant well, she wants this resource to flourish and help many people in the years to come.
But I still got suspended for 12 weeks.
The reason was donors fatigue. Like genuinely, look it up, it's apparently a real thing.
People got tired of seeing me weekly ask for help to afford groceries, medication, my healthcare monthly renewal, rent, house repairs to deal with the humidity, black mold, rust, falling roof, falling ceiling, falling wall or the water leak in the lightbulb and many other things.
The thing is I am chronically ill, I have no degree or higher education than my high school certificate, my partner is the same except for some english certificates that he has an advanced language.
We take care of our kids, the cats we've rescued from the streets and his parents and sister after they lost everything in a house fire.
We are always struggling to stay afloat paying the bills, keeping a roof on our heads and feeding our family while chronically ill, with chronic pain, dare I say some of us are disabled.
And people got tired of us. I got told because I keep changing what our main need/goal is I look like a scammer.
And ok, I get it, it must be really hard to see people struggle all the time to stay alive when all you want is to share a funny meme, cat pics, fanart and fan fiction.
But what about begging fatigue? What about poor fatigue?
Having to shake our can and beg for a kofi every day is exhausting. And no amount seems to fix our struggles and get us out of the red because by the time we get some help our bills are already overdue, we've got extra charges, we no longer need only the groceries and regular medication, now we need to run to the hospital or we already did and all that stacks up.
And every day, every week, month after month, year after year it just gets worse.
Chronic illness and disability are disabling in more than the physical way, we are shunned from every place for being considered a burden.
Show more compassion, you have no idea how hard it is.
All anti-trans rhetoric is, at its core, bioessentialist - that is, that people's genetics determine their behavior and role in civilization to such a degree that attempting to overcome them is not only impossible, it's a functionally meaningless concept.
You will often see transphobes bring up the "fact" that "trans women still have male rape rates." This claim is false, by the way, but the core of this argument is what's interesting to me. It essentially claims that men (or a percentage of men, at least) are genetically predisposed to rape.
Their motives for proposing it differ, but both conservative and radfem rhetoric agree on this sort of genetic predestination. To them, it's simply a fact of life that men rape, and attempting to do anything about it is as futile as trying to hold back the tide. There's no point in trying to teach men not to rape, because that's just a thing men do. They can no more control it than they can their heartbeat. That's not a belief compatible with the idea that human beings have agency and can make their own choices.
(You will note that conservatives - and, let's be fair, many radfems - also allege that CERTAIN TYPES of man are more predisposed towards rape than others, as well as having other negative characteristics by virtue of their genetics. This is, of course, just scientific racism.)
it’s not my business what people joke about in private but if you are going to joke about lobotomy i think you owe yourself the 22 minutes it takes to listen to howard dully’s 2005 npr report on the transorbital lobotomy he was subjected to at the age of twelve. it’s a hard listen, but it’s a hard subject. like i said, it’s not my business, but it’s always good to know what exactly you’re joking about.
tl;dr: all "algorithmically" pushed stuff on a newsfeed is mostly ads. nothing that's really surprising form this vulture article, but it is dismal and makes me grateful for one website where you only see things from people you follow WITHOUT horrible short-form video content
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sounds very similar to a radio story i heard in 2014 ago about credit card debt. the debt got sold to a collection company and a couple received a court summons. they knew they had taken on debt, but they were confused about who this new company was and where specifically the number they were supposed to owe came from.
they show up in court and just ask the lawyer for the collection company: can you prove where this number comes from? Do you have a contract showing that you purchased our debt? probably luckily for them, a reporter researching a book on the topic showed up and asked the same questions.
10 minutes later they get in front of the judge and the collection company drops the whole case and theyre free to go. story is below, it has a transcript in the link too
Ira talks to reporter Jake Halpern about a scene he saw take place in a Georgia courtroom where a couple uttered some magic words that seeme
Alert citizen of Bitch Nation @sobekcrocodile brought this to our attention and we're sharing, but with a caveat:
WE HAVE NOT YET LOOKED INTO THIS.
... but holy shit it's worth pursuing if you're drowning in debt and these are your circumstances. I'll definitely be adding this to the Big List of Future BGR Topics. Here's more of our advice on debt:
MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about How to Pay off Debt
Since I hate having to do my own searches to verify stuff, here’s a Science Daily link and the journal article it cites for any similarly lazy-but-conscientious people after me. (And the University of Michigan press release, for what it’s worth.)
A new study published online today, April 25, in the scientific journal Science provides the strongest evidence to date that not only is nat
From the article:
“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”
This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.
This shows that conservation efforts really work and money invested is put to very good use. Legally protecting endangered species really works, restoring habitat really works, removing invasive species really works, returning land to Indigenous communities works. All of the blood, sweat, and tears being poured into protecting the natural world has been making a real, big, tangible, difference on a global scale.
behold the genderfuck radical queer character who is disrupting the fuck out of gender norms. and then the character is just someone with facial and body hair wearing a dress. and the implication here is that the combination of these traits makes it obviously wrong or imperceptive to assume that this character could or would simply be a woman -- it has to be something else, something Radical -- since women couldn't possibly-- !
back in 2019 when i was doing research for my thesis, i read Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (2000) by Vivian K. Namaste and around page 145 in that book, there's a description of a 1978 study that was done on sexed physical characteristics and how quickly people assume sex from these things, and what the study showed was that even when presented with abundant and obvious female-sexed characteristics (e.g. long hair, soft face, breasts), several of them were required without contest for participants to be confident sexing a subject as female, but if a single male-sexed characteristic (e.g. facial/body hair, square jaw, penis) was present, participants would overwhelmingly sex the subject as male with much more confidence even if there were contradictory female-sexed features. crucially, the presence of a female-sexed feature did not inhibit their confidence in sexing a subject with otherwise exclusively male-sexed features as male to nearly the same degree. the conclusion of the study, in Namaste's words, was that "interpretation of sexed bodies [is] overwhelmingly skewed in favor of masculine referents." surely this documented bias has no implications for the way people perceive or respect trans women, and surely when it comes to character design decisions or vacuum-assumed assertions that "clothing has no gender," ignorance won't be functionally interchangeable with malice. now to just take a big sip of coffee and
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these murderous idiots are teaching young girls and women to be afraid of calories when eating a LOT of calories is literally vital for performing well in competitive sports. and then claiming it's 'natural' to uphold sex segregation bc of this imposed malnutrition. it's fucking crazymaking.
the mechanics here are truly horrific. systematically deny [cis] women athletes adequate nutrition and hydration, overwork and injure them. deprive them of the ability to realize the true extent of their strength and skill. segregate athletics based on false ideas of "sex" based on generations of malnourishment and poor training. blame trans woman athletes for the mere possibility that one might beat a cis woman, while claiming that the cis woman's defeat is inevitable. create emotionally stressful and often sexually humiliating tests to "purify" competitive athletics rather than foster the physical health of athletes. continue punishing all women for daring to play sports + have bodies.
The rapid electrification of the world (especially with how ludicrously cheap solar panels have gotten) is going to change the world. Ten years into the future is going to be unrecognizable to us.
one of the major things about solar power (as opposed to nearly every other method of power production) is that it's radically decentralized. Yes one can have major solar power plants in the desert that take advantage of land capital and economies of scale to make the biggest power producer in the area - but as solar gets cheaper and cheaper, literally anyone with access to land can do it!
You can have solar panel roofing, solar panel fences, solar panels just in your yards. Every building can find ways to subtly incorporate solar power generation and offset costs of power production.
Power generation has long been the realm of major capital holders. You can't have windfarms without the land. You can't have geothermal without owning or having rights to the places where it's feasible. The entire geopolitical order is structured around who has access to oil and natural gas.
Power generation that is decentralized, that everyone (or at least, every landowner) has access to is an economic force that deconstructs and destroys some of the biggest old titans of imperialism.
