Author: Greg Swann (page 2 of 209)

Another day, another stupid dog study: “Everyday household noise stresses dogs out.”

Is that true? Your dog can’t snooze through the vacuum cleaner or the dishwasher? Every new thing is a dragon to your dog – and to your toddler – but toothless dragons get ignored in due course.

What does the study actually study: Are dogs uncomfortable with random sounds in laboratories that look, smell and feel like the vet’s office? No one observing an adult dog at home could draw these stupid conclusions. Only childless and probably dogless Ci academics would ever imagine they could assess a dog or a toddler from a laboratory.

Here’s the news, no useless Ph.D. required: If your dog is snoozing through anything – from house-cleaning to the football game on TV – he is telling you by his tells that he does not give a shit: Not threatening, not rewarding, not interesting. If your dog is at peace while you are getting other things done, that’s just exactly right. Dogs and toddlers are pack animals, and sleeping near you, where the night-watchman can still hear you, is participation with the pack.

Want to stress your dog out? Leave him alone – at the vet, at a kennel, at an academic’s laboratory or just at home. If you want to know how that feels to your dog, imagine doing it to your toddler.

Stop listening to academics: They can’t even keep a houseplant alive. Instead, recognize that your dog is never not a toddler and respond accordingly.

In other news:

Redfin.com: Redfin Predicts a More Balanced Housing Market in 2022. Kenosha won’t burn, “refugees” won’t be made millionaires and black swans cannot ever be permitted to exist. Who needs a window when you’ve got a weatherman? [PS, post-Kyle-verdict: Oops!]

City Journal: Mandates Won’t Immunize Against Crime: Cities imposing vaccine requirements on public employees are making their police-retention problems worse – and endangering public safety.

Julie Kelly: Terror in the Capitol Tunnel.

Here are three facts about intelligence:

1. Your dog is not intelligent, nor is any entity lacking a properly-functioning thinking brain.

2. “Artificial Intelligence” is quite a bit less intelligent than your dog – and it is never capable of even the most basic forms of awareness, understood biologically.

3. The only actual intelligence in the universe, that we know of so far, occurs between the ears of mature genetic homo sapiens within whom a properly-functioning thinking brain has been appropriately cultivated. Importantly: Nothing of “Artificial Intelligence” can or even attempts to do any of this.

Why does this matter?

When Rich Barton blames “Artificial Intelligence algorithms” for his abject failure as an investor, he’s bullshitting you yet again: Computers – even computers decked out in the Incumbent’s New Machine Learning – do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do. In this one way, they are preferable to our sometimes willful dogs, taking account that neither is capable of informed discretion.

Zillow’s computers were bossed around by CEO Rich Barton, a tyro “investor” who insisted that tomorrow would always replicate yesterday – static market fallacy – and that black swans cannot exist – where, of course, real estate is a black swan business.

The computers did what they were told to do – by a fool drunk on his own hubris, blinded by his self-seeking sycophants and blindfolded by his absurd insistence that deliberately knowing nothing about real estate investing is the best way to make bank. I wish I were joking.

Take some responsibility, Poindexter. You made a classic egghead mistake, “reasoning” by unreliable proxy signals, but it doesn’t do to blame your vehicle. It went where you drove it – blindfolded.

In other news:

Bari Weiss: The Media’s Verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse: Why so many got this story so wrong.

ZeroHedge.com: The Rittenhouse Case Proves The Establishment Wants To Bring Back Star Chamber Tyranny.

Christopher Rufo: Enemies of the School Board{ Parents in some school districts find their input suppressed – and their dissent criminalized.

I was aware of the Rittenhouse shootings the night they happened. I watched a lot of riot video last Summer, but I wasn’t watching that night. I read about the shootings when I woke up in the dead of the night, and I watched some of the street video then. Everything I read seemed to be about Kyle rushing back to give first-aid to the people he had shot, and it was obvious from the first who he was: Richard Jewell, Jr. – an earnest young man of long-standing good will and deep Incandescent need martyred to whitewash the incompetence of powerful people.

There is more to the Rittenhouse trial, of course: Undermining everyone’s right to self-defense and putting other earnest men of good will on notice: Being a Brownshirt is heroic. Stopping Brownshirt rioting is the crime that is to be punished.

If you’ve been watching the news, you’ve heard one blabbermouth after another tell you how surprised they are to have learned the facts of this trial. Take them at their word: They are just as well-informed about everything else they spout off about.

Ultimately, though, this is the Kyle Rittenhouse news as his case goes to the jury: In a riot full of truly shitty kids, we’re crucifying the good one. I may have heard that story before…

In other news:

Jonathan Turley: Rittenhouse Goes To Jury After Case Collapses in Court.

Andrea Widburg: The Rittenhouse trial lawyers had their final say and the jury has the case now.

Peachy Keenan: Unfortunate Son.

City Journal: When Demography Isn’t Destiny: There’s nothing inevitable about American immigrants joining the progressive coalition.

John Tierney: The Covid Children’s Crusade: Against ethics and evidence, public officials push vaccine mandates for kids.

True fact: I am a certified antique. I am but old in years, never in mind, but it remains that I was born in the midst of the last century.

Among my earliest memories is the JFK funeral on TV. I had just turned four years old, so what I saw was more dots that connections. An example: The broadcasters kept talking about the body, so I wondered what had happened to the head – a puerile false distinction that turned out to be an impossibly prescient conspiracy theory!

And as it turns out, the Kennedy assassination marked the end of authentic America, the country rhapsodized in the textbooks of the era. The Deep State put everyone on notice – oppose us and die – and nothing about the Federal government has been uncompromised since.

It is right to say that the 2020 election was overtly and obviously stolen, but it is more right to say that no American election has mattered since November 22, 1963.

In other news:

Spengler: US Inflation more horrible than Washington admits: Shelter inflation is running at 10%-15% a year, not the reported 3.4%, and that’s a third of household budgets.

City Journal: Buttigieg’s ‘systemic racism’ claim is the leftist myth about Robert Moses. Moses prototyped many Deep State ideas in New York State. He is the archetype of the Ci intellectual-tyrant.

Steven Malanga: States Versus Cities: As local officials plunge into controversial policy areas, they clash increasingly with governors and legislative leaders.

When first I met Miss Cleopatra Chioux, coming on a year ago, I would take her every Sunday to Rio Vista Park – for socialization with people, but especially with other dogs. We stopped when it got too hot for her – not hard for flat-faced dogs. Because she gets to meet everyone at her church, she is very good with people, but, so far, not so much with dogs.

She’s not a problem, she’s just awkward and uncertain how to proceed. Usus est magister optimus, and she just isn’t around dogs enough.

Until now. Moving back to Sun City puts us back into Duffeeland Dog Park, about which I have written much in the past. It’s a great place for her: There cannot be any bad dogs in Sun City; they get trained or rehomed. All of the dogs are pampered, and quite a few of them are overfed.

Cleo loves it, but she doesn’t know what to make of it. She races around to greet every dog, but she doesn’t stick around to play. By the time she’s run the circuit, she’s exhausted. No kidding: I have to carry her out.

It’s fun to watch her – all those dogs, all off-lead! – but I’m sure she’ll get used to it in time. But the dog park raises yet another epistemological question for me:

How does Miss Chioux know those other critters are dogs?

She didn’t know rabbits were prey until one ran away from her. How does she know that other dogs are dogs – and how does she know they’re not predators? Tail-signaling, of course, although Cleo doesn’t have a tail, but I wonder how – or even if – she knows that she and the other dogs are the same thing.

In other news:

Don Surber: 72% of office workers left Manhattan.

Andrea Widburg: January 6 prisoners evacuated on stretchers after guards gas them.

Monica Showalter: Bannon indictment: Joe Biden takes another political prisoner.

I am enduringly annoyed by the iBuyers. You may have noticed.

The most significant factor in Zillow’s ignominious retreat from iBuying is that it was entirely a Dunning-Kruger exercise: Rich Barton and his devoted team of seven-figure eggheads actively and persistently refused to learn anything about real estate brokerage.

All of the iBuyers are lousy at real estate, as I’ve been pointing out for years, and none of them are interested in improving. But Barton’s explicit insistence was that Zillow would do best at real estate by not listening to anyone who has ever sold real estate, not even the Realtor “partners” they used as their hands and feet in their first two years of iBuying.

It’s awful that Rich Barton screwed up so badly – leaving damaged neighborhoods behind him nationwide. But it is much worse that he did it deliberately – by refusing to learn any better – even as his errors racked up by the millions.

If drunk driving is bad, then driving blind-folded is so much worse. Zillow CEO Rich Barton – very proudly! – drove blind-folded into America’s real estate market. He should be held to account for it.

In other news:

Joel Kotkin: California Dreamin’.

Andrea Widburg: One fuzzy drone image may send Kyle Rittenhouse to prison.

Andrea Widburg: The DOJ and FBI have combined to destroy Project Veritas.

J.R. Dunn: The Left’s Bungled Revolution.

What hell it would be to have a job right now!

I am lucky that I am able to make my way in the world without having to take shit from morons for money. I can’t imagine how awful it must be for people like me who still have employers.

I was thinking that we’re going to need a website – call it CommieDoxxing.com – to document which employers – and which doctors! – have gone off the rails, like every other Marxist loco motive.

What you need is a plan: If you are ambiguously-employed – if your boss is desperate to destroy the business to get ahead at dinner parties – figure out how to be otherwise-employed, ideally self-employed, ASAP.

There’s all kinds of good advice out there – get fit, pack the larder with protein, grow your own food – but all of it is about being independent. Accordingly: Work to make your future free from self-abnegating idiots who presume to hold your livelihood hostage to their mutiny against reality.

Your bosses are planning to choke on the smoke of their own incineration. Why would you want to get what they deserve?

In other news:

William Jacobson: The media framed Kyle Rittenhouse — and won’t come clean even after the prosecution’s case falls apart.

Seth Barron: What’s Really on Trial in the Rittenhouse Case?

Joanne Jacobs: Grading for equity: What if kids don’t learn?

As previously dreaded, Zillow CEO Rich Barton is electing to leave devastation behind him, as he demonstrates to everyone’s dismay that he is by far the world’s worst real estate “investor.”

“The Incumbent” said everything it takes to get an “investor” ejected from my car – the clueless things people insist on when they have huge dreams and zero experience. The stupidity of the “business plan” was obvious to everyone who has brokered real estate, but it was this – the risk of wrecking the real estate market – that turned me against the iBuying “idea.”

Barton sold his bullshit as a benefit to consumers, of course: That’s how all bullshit gets sold. But his own high regard for his Presbytyrannical apple-polishing is betrayed by his ignominious exit from his “investments.”

Zillow bought thousands of homes from owner-occupants that will now be turned into rental housing – gradually degrading every neighborhood Barton betrayed. They have more than enough money to sell the homes retail, as intended, but they are cutting and running because that’s just what preening sociopaths do.

The Zestimate is the joke that dominates the conversation, but as anything other than a rapid-bankruptcy plan for inept agents, Zillow is a menace.

In other news:

Chronicles: California Exodus.

John Di Leo: Kyle Rittenhouse And The Streets Of Kenosha.

Here’s a true fact about iBuying: The sellers are gonophs. Home-sellers are often gonophs, of course, and, even if not, the information asymmetry runs all their way: Neither your Buyer’s Agent nor your home inspector is likely to identify that semi-annual drainage problem.

But many of the sellers who turn to iBuyers do so because they believe – correctly – that the iBuyers are idiots who will buy any pig in any poke. The seller knows everything he didn’t know about the property when he bought it – the negative externalities that make it sell consistently for 4% less than model-match comps – and he’s betting that the iBuyers will be too dumb and too rushed to see their pricing mistakes.

Gaming “Artificial Intelligence” will be the extreme sport of our young century. Whether or not there are actually any “machine learning” “pricing algorithms” behind the bloviating iBuyers, the sellers are gaming them astutely.

In other news:

Jonathan Tobin: If The GOP Wants To Remain The Party Of Parents, It Must Fight For School Choice.

The Los Angeles Times: Faced with soaring Ds and Fs, schools are ditching the old way of grading. Daycare gonna daycare.

One late-Summer Prime Day in 2019, from the depths of Death Valley – cancer brain, chemo brain, insane-in-the-membrane brain – Cathleen bought a Roomba, an “artificially-intelligent” robot vacuum.

She parked it at my desk, saying it was mine to work out. I approached it the same way I do every other project not my own: I neglected it. My wife is not the nagging type, and Death Valley brain pushed her off in other directions, so no rumba for the Roomba.

When we were packing up, I thought, “I should sell this thing” – but we ended up moving it anyway.

And: I have been vacuuming a lot at the new house. Tile floors betray what carpets conceal: Desert air, at least at around shoe level, is full of grit.

And so that Roomba was suddenly much more interesting to me. I don’t mind vacuuming, and I like any job where I can tell the difference when I’m done. But: Scutwork is never first on my list – except my list of jobs to delegate.

Enter Rosie, named after The Jetsons’ housekeeper, who swept away the grit in two short shifts yesterday and is gamely sucking up dust right now. She was duck soup to set up, with a little extra thought devoted to preventing her from becoming beached by her own enthusiasm.

Rosie is hyper-diligent, but she is dumb, dumb, dumb. The “artificial intelligence” is a variation on the drunkard’s walk – that is to say, nothing anyone would even loosely describe as intelligence. If the iRobot people are selling data from this relationship, I cannot imagine what it is. This device – a Roomba 690 – is definitely not mapping the house.

It could be – it must have a Cartesian relationship with its home base – and, accordingly, it could be much more intelligent in its approach to vacuuming. Vide: Map the perimeter, then work that map by segments, lawnmower style. That would make most-efficient use of Rosie’s battery. Or: Keep records of where significant “dirt events” occur and give Read more

What will remain of the iBuyers, once the market turns?

As noted long ago, iBuying as such is a very stupid idea. A flipper came up with it, and it may be that he didn’t really even get the math of flipping, he just started at the perfect time – the bottom of the Big Short real estate bomb; iBuying has lived in no other market than this one, steadily steaming upward for years, now screaming like a tea kettle. In any case, owning a house to fix and flip for resale only makes sense because that’s what you have to do in order to do the rest – where owning non-producing assets (financed!) is always a bad idea. Even then, you have to cheat the original seller – you have to buy even lower the the home’s actual as-is Fair Market Value. You have to control your turnover expenses. And you have to get in and get out fast.

Corporations can’t do anything fast, nor can they control costs. Buying low is only possible where Zestimates don’t grow, so the pure iBuyer business model would seem to have been completely frolicked ab initio – which is of course what I have been saying all along.

iBuyers with a value-add like Curbio or EasyKnock may have a business for a while, and Redfin uses the promise of iBuying to upsell its slow-moving discount listings. Pacaso is an international small-business: A niche offering with any profit potential emerging from its being a time-share: The only winner will be the management company, in the form of recurring fees, and today’s buyers will probably never see a resale return on their “investment.”

That is to say: None of them will matter, going forward. The claims that Zillow has some great data-prescience have always sounded absurd to me: Real estate is a black swan business, and Zillow has seemed to me to be nothing but flat-footed for years now – since Spencer Rascoff did the math on iBuying and went off to find what he hopes is Read more

Every time we move, our network topology gets simpler. By now, we’re wireless for everything except for two network drives hardwired into the cable modem/router.

Those live in the living room, since that’s where the wiring is, in a tiny cabinet of their own. The modem and the drives continuously flash pointlessly, of course, so we’re thinking of festooning their housing with flashing Christmas lights – like a little hi-tech hearth.

What’s radically simpler this time is the power. I have been accumulating all sorts of multi-pronged outlets since before I could drive. I don’t need watts or amps, but I always need more outlets than are available. That need has transmuted over the years, too: On my desk right now there is a power strip charging seven USB devices and three camera batteries. We did everything here with power strips; greater flexibility and better line-protection – I hope.

Perhaps I am too much talking to myself, but I think rethinking is fundamental to the praxis of praxes: If you truly aim to get better at the things you do, you have to admit it when you have been wrong – and then re-do everything you did wrong.

That last bit is the hard part: It’s hard enough getting things almost right. What’s the benefit of undoing everything, then redoing it better?

My answer would be: In order to have done everything better.

I amaze Cathleen whenever there is massive work to be done, because I am unabashedly amazing at daunting tasks. But I astound her most, I think, when I scowl at some huge job I’ve just finished – then proceed to rebuild it all over somewhere else instead.

Everything gets a little better every time you think something all the way through – if you act on your thinking. We are long since done moving in, but I am only just now getting to the place where I’ve stopped rebuilding things.

In other news:

RedState.com: The Read more

So: We are all Colorado cake-bakers now. Who didn’t see this coming?

In other news:

Eugene Volokh: Realtors Group Hearing “Hate Speech” “Ethics Complaint” Against Pastor-Realtor.

Geekwire: Redfin CEO explains how its iBuyer home buying program avoided pitfalls that sunk Zillow Group. Totally not whistling past the graveyard.

I’m playing with some new ideas for 2022. We haven’t done anything to campaign for new business since 2010, but I want to move to the supply side, so I’m sliding in that direction. Just lately, on a training podcast with Brian Brady, I mentioned that the way to get around the Realty.bots is Old School: Direct mail.

Brian and I came together over a shared love for Guerrilla Marketing – not the books, which are excellent, but the underlying strategic praxis: Achieving maximum marketing impact for the minimum spend.

I specifically mentioned the USPS’s Every Door Direct Mail program: Hit every mailbox in a particular carrier route with a mail piece as big as 8-1/2 x 11” for around twenty cents a door. You won’t get the investors – title can get their addresses for you – but you will get every resident.

There is a lot you can do with this: For example, you could leave once side blank and use that to laser print your monthly newsletter to your farm. My pitch is more prosaic: If I list your house, I will manage the rehab to maximum financial benefit. I already do that, of course, but some folks can’t taste the steak until they hear the sizzle.

I can buy the cards I want for around fifteen cents each, and I will do my own copy and design, so my pilot project is to hit around 500 doors a month for twelve months for a total spend of around $2,000. One conversion is worth around $10,000, and two a month is about as hard as I want to work, for now. If it pulls, it can scale until it’s pulling us where we want to go. And if not: Cheap to try something different.

Zillow may have dinosaur-robot egg on its face right now, but it won’t stop coming between you and your clients. To get around the Realty.bots, approach the marketplace in ways they can’t match.

In other news:

Andrea Widburg: The Kyle Rittenhouse trial is a master class Read more