BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 7 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

August 21, 2011

SplendorQuest: “You behave in certain ways and you lead people to have certain expectations of you. If you’re comfortable with those expectations and if you want to make everything that much more secure you say the words out loud: This is what you are to me and this is what you will always have from me and I give you my solemn vow that I will never withhold from you anything that is yours to demand. That’s what we do at our very best. But what if you’re not comfortable with the expectations? What do you do then? Maybe you follow through anyway, but you never take that extra step, you never put it into words. You’re accountable for what you do as well as what you say, but if you don’t come right out and say it, you can always deny things, you can always claim you were misunderstood.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is an extract from a book I wrote in 1997 called The Unfallen. This amounts to me letting people I make up speak for me, too, but it’s apposite to the larger conversation, and it’s good, I think. I like art about adults, and this is fun for me because we get to watch a teenage boy growing into his adulthood. I have never yet written a good book, and I don’t know that I ever will; the last chapter of childhood consists of coming to grips with your own mediocrity, after all. But The Unfallen is concerned with nothing but my world — my kind of people tackling my kind of issues. I hope this book is not the best I will ever do, but it’s the best I’ve done so far. And if you want to get drenched my way, it will do that job from the very first page. –GSS

 

Devin stood with Spencer as the car pulled away. He said, “Are you cold? Can you stand to walk?”

“I’m all right.”

“Let’s just walk, then. I learned how to think on the streets of Boston and Cambridge. I don’t always find the answer I’m looking for, but I can always walk my way to peace, to serenity.” They walked their way to the Harvard Bridge across the Charles — named the Harvard Bridge because the students of M.I.T. thought it was too badly designed to be called the M.I.T. Bridge. Elements of the more-or-less perpetual repair crew were out in their orange vests and traffic was backed up in both directions. The walkways were free, though, and they walked, one foot in front of the other, without speaking.

Finally Devin said, “Are you a boy or a man, Spencer?”

“I’m not sure I get that…”

“It’s yours to say. People will treat you like a boy for the most part, I guess. But if you decide you’re a man, and if you decide to behave like a man, who can stop you?”

Spencer grinned, his smile as bright as the sun. “There’s that, isn’t there?”

“I ask because I think it’s a very brave Read more

August 21, 2011

SplendorQuest: My world…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[This is me in February of 2004. It’s fun for me to read now, because we were selling a lot then, and — like a lot of folks — the next year, 2005, was my best year so far. I’m not selling success as a matter of dollars and cents. That matters to me, but not as much as Splendor does, not as much as integrity and follow-through and a comprehensive commitment not just to the good but to getting better — all the time. I have an essay aborning in me about everything I have learned about sales in the last ten years, but even that’s not as much as I want to do — as much as I want to have done. I want better money, yes, for us and for everyone who listens to us. And I want for Realtors to be better. I want for us to have an earned and deserved reputation as honest brokers who put our clients’ interest first. But before all that, I want for people to do better, to be better, to experience life more as a rapturous treasure and less as an unwanted burden. I want for the world to be better, remarkably better in every conceivable way.

This essay is me, the real deal, entirely unedited. I know I’m not alone in being like this, but no one dares to talk this way. We are children of Abel in every way that matters, and we are too much ashamed of being alive to celebrate the simple fact of our vitality. And yet this is the change that matters. To be free of other people means to be free of them in the silence and solitude of your own mind. If they can’t get at you there, then chains and walls are nothing but expressions of their inevitable failure. But if you forebear to be who you really are at the command of some internal editor, you are imprisoned everywhere — even when you are completely alone.

If you want to buy or sell some real estate in Metro Phoenix, I’m your guy. Read more

August 19, 2011

Escaping Room 101…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[I wrote this in the late Summer of 1995. –GSS]

 
I moved to a new apartment this Spring, and it happens that my new apartment number is 101. We live by symbols, like it or not, and I can’t look at my door or write my address without thinking of George Orwell’s “1984.” For in Room 101 is housed one’s greatest fear, the secret dread that, Orwell implies, will drive a person to betray every value in his life. Nothing like that here, thankfully, but there’s nothing so fine as a metaphor to focus the mind.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the love of life and its antithesis. For me, the quest for human liberty has little to do with laws or strictures or jack-booted thugs hiding behind mirrored shades. We are not enslaved or set free by other people, and we will not change our interior existence by convincing other people to change their behavior. We are free as we dare to rejoice in the beauty and glory of life, and we are enslaved as we shrink from that rejoicing. The ego is a realm infinite in extent, and it cannot ever be invaded from the outside.

And thus, some of the secret desires of libertarians seem a little silly to me. Assuredly we need to stand firm against new statist encroachments and complain incessantly about those already in place. But the Minerva fantasies and Atlantis fantasies are a bit much. To the world, we speak of free countries where free men and free women can produce untold wealth in free markets by the free exercise of free thought. But I suspect that in the privacy of imagination what is foreseen is the Neverland, where one can play forever and never grow weary. That’s fine, I suppose; life would be dull without daydreams. But the essence of a daydream, or the vice at least, is imagining a universe where one is not oneself, where one is not who one really is.

“‘I like people who live their dreams in the day.'” I made a fictional character say that a long time Read more

August 12, 2011

“This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: The ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dang. There goes the NAR’s chance to force every American to buy three or four more houses, thus to save the starving real estate brokers.

As President Obama himself has noted, there is something wrong with our politics when perfectly reliable campaign donors cannot despoil the taxpayers at will, without judicial interference…

August 9, 2011

Reasons to be cheerful: Defying the specter of ugly fates.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top from June, 2010. I had occasion to re-read my thoughts on sex earlier today, and then I went back and looked at this essay. I like it better today than I did last summer, and I hope you will, too. –GSS
 

Reasons to be cheerful, part zero: The ground we stand upon is firm and the lever of the human mind grows ever stronger.

I need to take this someplace else. I am madly off-topic here more often than not, this for the past couple of years. I think I may be in the third act of this spectacle of ideas I have made of my life, and I can’t even say, yet, if it’s a farce in three acts or a tragedy in five. I would prefer an epiphany, to say the truth, a symphony, a grand opera composed of nothing but the simplest and most obvious of abstractions, an idiot’s guide to what every last idiot among us has always known forever, has never once doubted, and has always, always betrayed — until now.

But that’s why I’m cheerful, I think, despite everything. There is still so much time left to us, amidst the crush of on-rushing events. I am thrice lucky, I know it: I can see and I can understand what I am seeing. I can think and I can transcribe my thoughts. And I live in a time when the thoughts of everyone in human history who ever thought productively are instantly available to each one of us — on demand, no charge, quantities unlimited, with every taste in depth and rigor satisfied and then some.

This is an amazing thing. It’s never happened before, and it remains to be seen how deeply humanity is willing to set its roots in the boundless praries of the mind. But the simple fact that this is possible — and that people all over the world are taking advantage of it — is a profoundly important reason to be cheerful, no matter what despair might be unearthed in the day’s events.

Clearly, Barrack Obama is incompetent. That’s Read more

August 7, 2011

A practical governing strategy for the Republican party. It won’t happen, but at least it’s potentially doable, unlike everything else.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Back to the top from November 3, 2010. –GSS]
 

Here’s what the Republicans won last night, most probably: The opportunity to be left holding the bag if the whole creaking kleptocracy crashes.

Here’s what they mostly can’t do, at least not right away: Cut spending or taxes. A huge and growing portion of the budgets at all levels of government are entitlement payments — a subsistence dole under various labels. We have taken a once-free people and turned it half-predator, half-prey — often with both halves living under one scalp, amazingly enough.

So what can Republicans actually do, right now, to deliver on their promises?

They can eliminate every form of business regulation, at all levels of government.

Civil court has always been more than adequate to deal with actual injury. Not coincidentally, statutory regulation is always anti-economic nonsense: Banning competitors (as with the real estate licensing laws), government make-work, monkey-see-monkey-do, superstition, ossified tradition, power lust, etc. If no one is getting hurt, what is being regulated out of existence is this: Human intelligence.

That’s significant for two reasons: We need for business people to get to work and to take a bunch of us along with them. If we decriminalize human intelligence, at least partially, it’s reasonable to expect to see more of it — to everyone’s benefit. But even without the innovations we currently forbid in many businesses and industries, business people need to be able to plan for the future. If they are constantly subject to a vast, unknowable array of ever-changing regulations, they will not take risks. This is news to no one.

So: I’m not talking about some kind of “temporary moratorium” on regulation. This is an old, old leftist dodge: If the cows start to look scrawny, let them fatten up a little before you take up the slaughter again. Alas, because Republicans often have no firmly-held philosophical principles, they fall for these stunts again and again — as with the Bush tax “cuts.”

No, what is needed is the complete eradication of regulation: Repeal the enabling legislation, pay off and dismiss the staff, liquidate the chattel- and real-property. (All of this will Read more

August 7, 2011

It’s not enough for the tea party movement to throw the bums out. To contain the federal government, we have to cut its powers.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

[Back to the top from January 21, 2010. –GSS]
 

What a delight it is that the citizens of Massachusetts have risen up against the federal leviathan. All across the country, the tea party movement is furiously aboil, angry Americans anxiously awaiting the opportunity to pull some levers in a voting booth.

But if the current populist uprising is nothing more than yet another throw-the-bums-out movement, it will come to nothing. We threw the bums out good and hard in 1994, and yet the federal leviathan has done nothing but grow since then. By now the national government is so huge that it threatens to crush the nation and its people and productive plant beneath its enormous weight.

It is not enough to throw the bums out. To contain the federal government, we have to cut its powers. Nothing else will stop its long-term growth.

The United States was originally conceived of as a confederation of sovereign states. The states joined together for those common purposes that seemed to make sense to them, with each state retaining is sovereignty in all other matters.

That was the theory — the federal government was to be the hand-servant of the states. In practice, the federal government has usurped the power of the states from the very beginning, with the abuses becoming more bold and more comprehensive with each passing decade.

This turns out to have been a mistake — as we are discovering. Where each state is independent of all the others, each one can try different policies. The states can become the laboratories of democracy that the founding fathers envisioned.

But to achieve this, we will have to rein in the federal leviathan. The states and the people need to reassert their ownership of and control over the national government.

How? By constitutional amendment. Probably by constitutional convention, since it seems unlikely that sitting members of Congress will vote to circumscribe their awesome and terrifying powers.

But here, in a very short summary, is what needs to be done, if the head of steam built up by the tea party movement is not to be wasted. The text within the quotation marks Read more

August 3, 2011

A demonstration of the value of VirtualOmniscience.com: “I don’t remember offhand what I was doing last Tuesday, but this does not automatically lead me to assume I was gang-raped.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ann Coulter gets a bad rap, I think. She is a demagogue, a dirty-pool artist, a Menckenesque presence in the public prints. But she is not a rhetor, a champion of pure debate. Rather, she is a satirist, and she is damn good at it. The shrieking she incites seems like so much group-glowering to me, whipped up, I expect, by people who know that a chorus of grievances, no matter how loud or plaintive, is not an argument.

Tonight she brings us a problem near-omnipresent video can easily solve: False accusations of rape:

Having showcased Jones’ original, false accusation in a 1,500-word article splashed across its front page, as soon as her story unraveled, the Times stared at its shoes and said nothing. In another six months, liberals will once again be citing Jones’ case as evidence of the “troubling trend” of sexual assaults among military contractors.

If only Jones had accused Bill Clinton or any member of the Kennedy family of rape, the mainstream media might have treated her allegations with a little more skepticism. But she accused employees of a company with a tertiary, long-ago, six-degrees-of-separation relationship with Dick Cheney. This was no time for journalistic integrity.

Still, wasn’t it the tiniest bit suspicious that Jones claimed KBR management responded to her rape claim by locking her in a shipping container?

Why would a company that already had a PR problem stick its neck out to protect accused rapists? Isn’t it more likely that a corporation would sell out even innocent employees accused of rape? Wouldn’t it have occurred to them that she’d eventually get back to the U.S.?

None of this could happen if there were video cameras everywhere and on everyone, and if the captured video were stored forever. No need for visual interpretation or database mining. Just a permanent record of everything that happens, for anyone to view in real time or review later. This is the omniscience we have always wanted from our gods, the irrefutable information necessary to correct injustices. But by making it an omni-omniscience — everyone has the capacity to observe anything they want to see — Read more

August 2, 2011

iPad observation #8: The death of mediocrity and, along with it, the death of contempt for the consumer

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top from February of 2010, when the iPad had just been announced. In another of the posts in this series, I wrote: “The implication of a computer that can train its end-users how to use it is that teaching as a profession is dead. All teaching, at all levels. Just imagine what the iPad could do for you if you really wanted to learn a foreign language…” Technology is giving us the power to disintermediate vast numbers of state employees. No telling if we will actually do it, but it is by now eminently doable. This essay addresses that kind of disruption in the Rotarian Socialist marketplace. –GSS

 
I don’t know if I’m ready for this yet, but I need to get it out there where I can take a look at it. Discursive prose is thinking, first, not communication, and this is a big idea. It’s possible I’ll have to return to it again and again to make it completely pellucid, but I promise to do my best today.

So: One of the events the introduction of the iPad foretells is the death of mediocrity in the marketplace, and, along with it, the death of the kind of endemic contempt for the consumer that results in mediocre products and services.

Why would this be so? We’ll get to that, but indulge me long enough to discuss what is — the world as we live in it now — before we take up what is to come.

Why doesn’t the caps-lock key work properly on any Windows keyboard? When you have the caps-lock key down and you then type the “a” key while holding the shift key down, why do you get an “a” instead of an “A”? Surely when you typed shift-“a”, what you wanted as an “A”, not an “a”. Why has this always been broken on all Windows machines, and on all DOS machines before that?

The answer to those questions is quite simple. It’s because Microsoft has never once cared enough to get this right. It’s been wrong for decades in Windows, right for decades on Read more

August 1, 2011

Get rich fighting crime! Save the girl — and make big money doing it — by correcting one simple error in your thinking.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The pitch…

That’s a sweet offer in the headline, don’t you think? It’s like Batman meets Ironman, but it’s all real — achievable now, no super-human powers required.

Not enough? You want more?

How’s this?

I can show you how to all-but-eliminate every sort of street crime.

I can show you how to protect any real estate or personal property you own from theft, mayhem, mishap or from simple maintenance oversights.

I can show you how to resolve almost every kind of civil dispute — without courts, without attorneys — and usually without rancor.

I can show you how to perfect your sales praxis to an amazing state of efficiency.

Hell, I can even increase your chance of successfully hooking-up at the singles bar.

I can cut your commute time, maximize your work-day productivity and save you from getting Aunt Whatshername’s name wrong when you see her.

Watch me: I can show you how to create a brand new trillion-dollar industry that will spin off dozens of start-ups as it is aborning and hundreds more later on.

I can show you how to mine an incredible new source of vast, uncountable wealth, a source no one has ever thought of before. I can put you there, at the dawn of a new age of human productivity — a pioneer, a prospector, and ultimately a tycoon in a brand new way of making money.

As you gaze upon that incredible motherlode of riches — knowing that there are unfathomable trillions more buried within it — I have one simple question to ask you:

To gain access to those riches — no fear of crime, no more petty lawsuits, better closing skills on and off the job, plus hundreds of new businesses, each one throwing off astounding new opportunities — would you be willing to correct one simple error in your thinking?

Are you willing to consider the proposition? Stay tuned…

 
The moth, the cat and the ontological nature of error…

Oh, good grief! Was there a fifty-cent word in that subhead?

There was, alas.

The good news is that, if you can hang in there, and if you have the guts to change a fundamental error in your thinking, I Read more

July 4, 2011

SplendorQuest: A real-estate professionals’ guide to anarchy in the USA

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. This is what independence means — independence from the tyrannical intrusions of government. You’ve been trained your whole life to recoil from ideas like this, but there has never been a better time than right now to ask yourself this question: How is the dispute resolution system you have in place now working out for you? — GSS

 
I thought about making a short movie addressing a host of common questions about the political philosophy we’ve been discussing, but I decided to undertake the task in text, instead. A video would be faster for me, but not so much for you. Plus, text is easy to search and easy to revisit, where video can be ungainly. So: FAQ-style:

What does this have to do with real estate?

Human liberty begins when you have a redoubt that is yours to defend from any would-be usurper. That’s real estate, and, as I write every year at Independence Day, the civilizations we associate with human freedom are those where ordinary people had the power to claim, own, use, enjoy, buy and sell the land. If you want for a real estate weblog to concern itself solely with surface-level bread-and-butter real estate news, you’ve come to the wrong place. If, on the other hand, you want to learn how better to defend your liberties, including your power to buy, sell and broker real estate, stay tuned. None of this is easy, but it is fundamental for understanding real estate as philosophy.

Isn’t anarchy a creed of chaos and violence?

1. No, that would be socialism in its collapsing phase.

2. No, that is what you have been told by people who want you to volunteer to be their slaves and toadies.

3. No. Anarchism as I define it is the politics of egoism, which itself is the ethics of self-adoration. People actively pursuing self-adoration will tend to avoid chaos and violence except when chaos and violence are the only means of avoiding even worse fates. When might this be the case? When socialism undergoes its collapsing phase, for example.

So what is anarchism “as you define it”?

What Read more

July 4, 2011

Private ownership of the land is the source not just of our freedom but of our civility and of our humanity itself

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top. Happy Independence Day! — GSS

 
This from my Arizona Republic real estate column (permanent link):

The “cap and trade” bill that passed in the House of Representatives last week contains within it the seeds of a national building code. It rarely rains in Phoenix and it rarely fails to rain in Portland, but both cities will build new structures according to the dictates of some Washington bureaucrat.

Drive along 19th Avenue in Phoenix and you’ll pass block after block of condemned houses. They were taken by the city for the planned light rail expansion, now delayed. The neighbors are left to fight off the kind of vermin vacant homes attract while they worry what that blight is doing to their home values.

In Glendale, the city government is doing everything it can to prevent the Tohono O’Odham tribe from developing its own sovereign land as a casino.

The essence of the freedom we celebrate on Independence Day is the free ownership of the land. The Hoplite Greeks fought and died to protect their own lands. The Roman Legionnaires fought and died because their farms were their own property. A Cincinnatus — or a George Washington — lays down his arms because being a dictator is nothing when you can instead be a freeholder in the land.

The essence of our freedom is the free ownership of the land, and yet everywhere we turn, private property is subjected to one law after another, and everything that is not forbidden is compulsory instead.

This is a grievous error. The men who become Brownshirts or Klansmen or Khmer Rouge — the men who make up murderous mobs — are men without land. It is the husbandry of the land — each man to his own parcel — that most makes husbands of us, that sweeps away our willingness to live as brigands or rapists or thugs.

By robbing the private ownership of the land of its meaning, the state is, by increments, robbing its citizens of their humanity. No one burns down his own home, nor his neighbor’s home. But when the time comes that we Read more

July 4, 2011

The unchained epiphany: Working in the Web 2.0 world is not mastery of technology but the celebration of your own independence

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top from April 8, 2008. — GSS

 
In comments to Sean Purcell’s “NAR Challenge”, Scott Rogers wonders why the NAR could not teach hi-tech real estate as well as or better than BloodhoundBlog.

The short answer is that we’re not teaching hi-tech real estate, not even close, and what we are teaching is anathema to the NAR.

In her own comment to Barry Cunningham’s post on the typewriter being state-of-the-art NAR technology, Newport Beach Realtor Stacey Harmon offers this serendipitous explication:

WOW. This video really highlights for me the opportunity that exists for Realtors who really embrace not only technology, but Web 2.0. What I see in this video is the application of technology to improve the “traditional” way of selling real estate. I think there is a whole emerging group of Realtors out there who are looking to utilize technology (in particular Web 2.0 technologies) to TRANSFORM how real estate is sold. I agree with Dave that this video speaks to 75% of Realtors – I work in one of the most lucrative markets in the US (Newport Beach, CA) and I’d say that this video accurately represents how most Realtors (that do any business in my market) view and utilize technology. I see this as a huge opportunity for anyone who is savvy enough to have even found this blog. Thanks for a very interesting post!

That’s an epiphany in text form. I don’t know Stacey, and I don’t want to characterize her thoughts, but that kind of epiphany is what BloodhoundBlog is all about.

We don’t teach technology, even though we talk about it all the time.

We don’t teach marketing, new-wave or old-school, even though marketing is constant obsession around here.

We don’t teach Web 2.0, even though many of the brightest lights in the wired world of real estate write, read and reflect here.

What we teach is independence, the recognition that you alone are the source and the sink, the alpha and the omega of your knowledge, of your business and of your success or failure.

I am a rude, crude and vulgar man, so it falls to me to Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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