Hanging Fruits

This twitter trending summarizes it quite well. This is the biggest undercover investigation since the Panama papers and it covers the same premise. It uncovered large quantities of unreported wealth and spending by the richest people in the world. The cyber attacks against these large social media and communication apps are most likely an attempt to divert attention away from this. For more information look at the articles I linked below:

This eventually morphed into the idea that spiritual disease is therefore caused by spiritual sin. I.e. you think bad things, you go insane.

His followers were banned from:

John Harvey Kellogg invented Corn Flakes, William Kieth Kellogg was a factory owner and designed the factory process to mass-produce them, and thus held the patent. In 1897 they started the Sanitary Food Corporation.

In 1936, he filed a petition for his invention of improvements to an "irrigating apparatus particularly adaptable for colonic irrigating."

Basically, he invented a chair that would pump water up your ass at over a gallon a minute, often followed by a half-pint of yogurt.

Crochet Patterns

i’ve looked repeatedly for houses in the area, i have enough money for a down payment on a nice house. but like, home prices were high 6 years ago when i moved in and over the pandemic they have gone up astronomically. it’s insane.

i thought home prices were overvalued even coming out of the “mortgage bubble” in 2008 but now they’re insane, back up to bubble levels and sometimes higher.

i’m not gonna take out a mortage to buy something that’s a financial stretch and that might fall in value.

i don’t really know how my landlord is able to keep things so cheap, but i’m happy with it. i get a great deal, great place to live, and have been saving a ton of money while not having to think or worry about maintenance and all the other stressors of home ownership.

and they even let me and other residents have a garden!

Many tenants are the most horrible, disgusting, destructive people you can imagine. They cost way, way more in damages than they pay in rent, and the way that you make your money is because the property is leveraged through debt, which is tax deductible if you rent it out, but not if you don’t, and the tax savings can make up for the damage, usually. But not in the worst cases. And since the worst cases keep getting kicked out of places or feuding with neighbors, they’re most of the applicants. There are three ways to deal with this (four, if you count “not having any tenants,” but then you’re just a real estate speculator, and you aren’t helping solve the housing crisis at all, if anything, the opposite):

1) Keep rent high enough that you can pay for the damage for the average tenant. This is usually less than you’d think. People who can pay more rent usually aren’t as shitty. (Well, in their long-term dwellings. The comfortably well-off can still be super super shitty to vacation housing.) So, if you raise the rent a little, the quality of tenant goes up a bunch (with diminishing returns), and you eventually find a nice balance.

2) Make sure there’s nothing valuable there for them to destroy. You can’t break what’s already dilapidated. People who pick this option are called “slum lords,” and while I get it, lots of people wind up in their housing who wouldn’t have been shitty, and being shitty to your business partners first, as a preventive measure, is a pretty dishonorable way to conduct yourself. I can’t say that I don’t recommend this, under the wrong circumstances, but I probably wouldn’t be the friend of someone who does this.

3) This is what I do, and what I’d guess your landlord does: Make rent kind-of high in the first year, security deposit super, super high, and then cut the rent as much as you can in subsequent years, but only for people you get good vibes from, and maybe don’t renew people you don’t. Do your walk-through, or whatever, and people who are taking care of little maintenance things on their own? Who don’t have visible food-rot on the counters? Who aren’t the cause of noise complaints? Maybe send them the same contract again without the inflation adjustment. Maybe keep doing that year-after-year. Maybe do what you can to make sure they don’t go away.

So of-freaking-course they let you have a garden! Not because they like gardens. (Maybe they do, maybe not.) But because they love tenants who are the sort of people who garden.