The Many Deaths of Junk DNA

"Sir, an alien fleet has appeared!" "That is indeed a worry. But first: Australia. We must not be waylaid by trivial concerns."

And, most recently and jarringly, in a story about a girl wandering the South Island fixing local problems. "How did we end up in Canberra again?"

I just got off a phone interview, and it was essentially the Old Dude version of the problem I went through last week.

I am going to guess that the next market bubble is rental properties. This is the SECOND company I’ve interviewed with that it attempting to make money off rental properties without any idea what the fuck they are doing.

I can only assume that these Old Dudes fucked up in the housing loan market and are now trying to use the same business model on rental buildings. And when I say “business model” I mean Collect Underpants + ? = Profit. I’m not even exaggerating.

The guy I talked to had built a model in Excel that takes data from rental properties - at a macro level no less, one whole building at a time rather than broken down into individual living units - and projects how much money can be made off it by playing with rent, fees, etc.

Let’s forget for a moment that you could probably get your accountant or your 10-year-old to build an Excel spreadsheet for you. Let’s forget that this company was keeping customer data in a cloud database for no reason at all (why download it into your spreadsheet when you can just keep the whole thing on your computer?). The thing that attracted this guy to my resume - and he SAID THIS in the interview - was that my cover letter stated I was good at fixing stuff that is broken.

His model that he built is broken, and he doesn’t know how to fix it.

Hell, it probably isn’t even his model. He probably stole it or had a consultant do it for him. But what gets me is that in this day and age, you can sell stuff that you don’t understand and that doesn’t work, and make a killing off it before people figure it out (that is, if they ever do). That’s why Herbalife is still around, and why Madoff got so far with a Ponzi scheme.

Imagine if your Model T broke down and you brought it back to Henry Ford, and asked him to fix it. Would he say, “Hell if I know how it works”? No, he had at least a basic understanding about how a car functions and how to put one together. He couldn’t build an empire based on something that was as foreign to him as an alien spacecraft. But nowadays you can, because nobody knows fucking anything.