BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 13 of 30)

July 7, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.1.2: Redemption is egoism in action, so do the world a favor and catch your self doing something right.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I hope I don’t seem to be a scold.

It suits my ends to poke around in the trash can inside your brain, but I’m not doing it to be mean — nor to induce you to feel bad about yourself. I know a whole lot about the interior mental processes that motivate the pursuit of values and disvalues — and about the subsequent and secondary consequences of those mental processes — but it’s not as if I can actually read your mind.

So how do I know so much about how your mind works? I don’t, not by any means except inference. What I know about is how my mind works. We are alike as things — we are ontological equals — so I know that your mind works the same way mine does — no less than and for the same reasons that your heart works the same way mine does. Moreover, I can look you in the eye and tell you the truth of your life in excruciating detail, working from nothing other than past experience with myself and other people. Our differences make us unique and beautiful, but our similarities make us comprehensible to each other.

So without intending to scold you, I need to say something to you in the gentlest way I can:

You’re getting everything wrong!!

Wrong, wrong, wrong. All the time, for all your life. Everyone, everywhere, for all of human history. Wrong, wrong, wrong — always and everywhere wrong — with wrong heaped upon wrong in twisted, corrupt dogmas of wrongness.

Do you want proof?

It could be you’re all hunched up in resentment at being called wrong. Or maybe you’re folded in on yourself in guilt, revisiting all of your past perceived sins. But here’s how I know that you’re wrong, and that you’ve been wrong about nearly everything, for almost all of your life:

Because being wrong doesn’t matter. Being right is the only thing that matters.

We all tell lies, the worst of them to ourselves. We all shirk our responsibilities, crafting sullen silent soliloquies to justify our laziness. We all hurt other people, and we are all Read more

July 4, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.2: Yuppie love: The egoist’s guide to mastering the art of frolicking naked with the one you love.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s an eye-opening item from the news feeds: Up to four out of five women are faking orgasms, at least some of the time. Last weekend, I was incredulous at Camille Paglia’s lamentations about sexlessness in the middle class, but, even though I’ve read — and doubted — all of the claims about anorgasmic women, still, I have never been prepared to lend any of this any credence.

And, yes, I’m talking about adult subject matter. If you’re still a giggling pre-teen, you might giggle off elsewhere. I intend to approach this as philosophy, but, if anything, that will just bring out more self-induced juvenility. The actual reason that normal adult Americans have bad sex is because they refuse — very probably in every realm of their lives — to take joy seriously. But we can’t even get that far without a commitment on your part to stop blushing and start thinking. If you won’t do this, what I plan to do here will be a waste of your time.

And must I also defend this as real estate? If you want to learn every new vendorslut trick for not making money while you betray your own soul, get thee to Agent Shortbus or any one of a hundred other sites. If you want to learn how to be a whole soul, to be the highest and best person you can be — at work, at home and in the privacy of the bedroom — let’s talk. But the only subject that matters to me is being alive as a self-conscious human being — and being good at it — and this post is 100% on-topic for that theme.

Are we down to nothing but adults who are prepared to be serious about human joy? Let’s start with a very basic premise: Normal, healthy adult human beings who love each other romantically should have great sex together virtually all of the time. Disabled? That could be a problem. Disabled in the mission-critical hardware? A bigger problem, but not an insuperable one. Stressed? Distracted? Drunk? Your timing is bad. Not in love? You’re screwed — Read more

July 2, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 2.9.5: Carrying a concealed firearm is the first step to reclaiming responsibility for your own self-defense.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Arizona State Senate Bill 1070 — the “Welcome to the Hotel California” legislation that has drawn so much attention nation-wide — will take effect on July 29th, 2010. Two other bills that will become law that day are more interesting to me, if not to TV-camera-mugging know-nothings in other states.

First, it will be lawful in Arizona for citizens to carry a concealed weapon without applying for a state permit. Arizona has always been an open-carry state, and, until now, a concealed carry permit required nothing more than a small fee plus 16 hours of instruction. With or without the legal requirement, the instruction is not a bad idea. But what will change on July 29th is the attitude of bad guys. Unlike thugs in, say, Chicago, criminals in Phoenix know there is a high degree of likelihood that ordinary people will be armed. As Robert A. Heinlein said, “An armed society is a polite society.”

Second, firearms manufactured and sold within the state of Arizona will not be subject to the Federal Brady Law’s national firearms database. It’s not a big deal right now, but it is plausible that there will come a time that the Feds — or their surlier successors — might try to confiscate every gun they know about. Having weapons Johnny G-Man knows nothing about might turn out to be an important advantage, if the shit hits the fan.

Look at this:

Isn’t that a sweet little pistol? It’s a Ruger LCP, specifically designed for concealed carry. It’s a .380, six rounds in the grip, one in the chamber, so it’s strictly a self-defense weapon. But it’s just a little bit larger in all dimensions than a pack of index cards, so it is very easy to conceal on your person. You can get a belt-mounted holster for it that looks like a camera case.

That’s a Realtor’s gun, a salesperson’s gun, a weapon for people who go to a lot of places they’ve never been before and don’t know what to expect. Less than ten ounces, and no one knows you have it until it turns out to be your Read more

July 1, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.1: The song of the self.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a dumb thing to say, but at the same time, I think it’s the essence of everything, the one thing that most needs to be said:

I love life. I love living. I love being alive as a human being — a genetic homo sapiens within whom has been cultivated a self — and I love, love, love being that self with a deep and abiding adoration. I don’t want to be anyone but me, but I want to be me to the utmost, to the evermost — without shame, without hiding or disguising myself in any way and without one word of apology to anyone, ever.

This is fact, obvious and dumb to say but utterly necessary to understand: We are each of us all alone inside the mind, and the self of atoms, actions and events that others see is the physical expression of the self of the imagination that each one of us sees only of his own self and only alone, within that perfect solitude of the mind.

Just that much is breathtakingly beautiful, if you take the time to think about it: A reflexively recollecting mental process, by iteratively expressing itself — in the observable world, of course, but first and most and almost continuously in purely introspective activity — essentially becomes itself and then, over time, progressively recreates itself — learning, changing, growing — over and over again. The self is its own self-abstracted abstraction, and your relationship with your own unique self is by far the most important relationship in your life.

The self is the song of itself, and each one of us is his own song, his own soul, unique and incomparable and fundamentally inexpressible to others. Without human upbringing, we are bad imitations of animals, at best. But with it, by age five each one of us is his own song, his own soul, his own ego, his own “I am.” Are we but ghosts, lost and horrified in a lurching, chaotic machine? Are we mindless fleshy worms squirming without purpose across the fertile fields of time? Or is each one of us Read more

July 1, 2010

$5 Real Estate Marketing At Fiverr.Com!

by

Retechulous...

Author website

I’m giddy. Really giddy.

The other day a friend told me about Fiverr.Com.

The first thing I noticed on the site was that some dude would be willing to write my URL on his arm and sport it for a week…. for only $5.

So, I gave it a shot, and Here’s the result…

Real Estate Leads

Then, I noticed someone would actually write a jingle for my little company… for only $5. I wasn’t expecting much, but had to give it a try of course.

Here’s the little jingle that has me trip tripping right now:

LINK TO THE JINGLE I JUST PAID $5 FOR. [compliments of this guy.]

and I’ve got a Twitter background on the way for the same price…. $5!

Where Are You Going With This?

Yep, that’s the $5 question of the moment… where are you going to go with this? I can’t wait to see other ways that the Bloodhounds around here to promote (or get cheap labor for) their ventures using this awesome resource.

But in the meantime…the ability to find quick inspiration for fun goofy marketing ploys aside, here’s the biggest way that I can think of for Real Estate heads to benefit from Fiverr.Com on the quick:

Say you invest $20, and get 4 jobs done via Fiverr.Com.

Then say you’re happy with a few of the results… Could you see hiring the provider to do more stuff for you on an ongoing per-task basis within your practice. Not assuming it’ll always be $5, but at least you’ll have the opportunity to interview a few different folks with a few different skill sets quickly…re-utilizing the services you like, as you need them. Seems a much better alternative to hiring a full or part time assistant who you’ll have to train and manage?

[Please do send me a copy of your jingle once you have it made 🙂 ]

And here’s mine again… something about the douche in me can’t help but post this link everywhere I can right now 🙂 –> LINK TO THE JINGLE I JUST PAID $5 FOR.

June 29, 2010

Four years of the dog: Happy Birthday to all the hounds…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I want to challenge everything.

After four years of hammering away at this thing, the other night I finally came up with a mission-statement that best describes my own involvement here — and everywhere:

I want to challenge everything.

I love classical ideas, but not because they’re old, and I love new ideas, but not simply because they’re new. I don’t love the sound of breaking glass, but I definitely understand the appeal of iconoclasm — image-breaking. I’m pretty sure that anything I might think about is oriented 178 degrees out of true, but I also know I am at odds with the hideous sameness of everything no matter how badly it is twisted out of reason. I want things to be better — I can’t look at anything without seeing how it could be better — but even before that, I just want for things to be different. We have this incredible gift — this reasoning, recollecting, choosing, daring, defying mind — and yet all we can think of to do is the stupid, the small, the vicious and the banal.

I want to challenge all of that.

And this has been a very good home for me, for that reason among many others. Four years ago today I posted the first entry in BloodhoundBlog. The post was about disintermediation, a very common theme in my writing, and it still holds up pretty well. More than 60 people have written with us over the years, producing almost 4,400 posts as I write this. Just short of 2,300 of those posts are mine, to give you an idea of the kind of howling I’ve done, but everyone who has worked here has done exemplary work. For some of them, the best writing they’ve done anywhere has appeared under Odysseus’ nose.

I’m very proud of this thing, and it matters to me a great deal that I am able to find pride in the things I do, the things I’m involved in. I’ve always been very good at making enemies, and BloodhoundBlog has proved to be an excellent resource for making new enemies. But I’ve forged some irreplaceable Read more

June 25, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 2.5: It’s raining soup and all you can do is piss and moan that Big Mother hasn’t given you a free bowl.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Take note: If you slaved away for 152 hours at an ordinary job in 1964, you could have bought yourself this classy stereo from Radio Shack:

Put in the same 152 hours in 2010, at the same kind of job, and you can buy this much stuff instead:

This is the power of (relatively) free markets. Not only can you buy more stuff, better stuff, stuff that was completely unobtainable in 1964, at the same time very smart people have figured out how to make you much more productive than you would have been in 1964.

Chances are you had almost nothing to do with this incredible productive miracle. If you are like most Americans, your major exports are half-digested junk food and bitter lamentations about the unseemly unfairness of everything for everyone, everywhen and everywhere. But this simple example, provided by The Enterprise Blog at the American Enterprise Institute, illustrates what has really been going on in your life, while you have been so busy complaining about how horrible everything is.

We are puerile as a race, about which I will have much more to say later. But even if you are thoroughly grown up in your own thinking, it’s good odds that you have spent your entire life looking at the world upside down, concentrating with a dour dread on everything that does not matter while blithely ignoring everything that does.

Do you want a very good reason to be cheerful? The world outside your mind is all but entirely wonderful, a thing of beauty and infinite splendor. It’s only that world inside your mind that is a mess. I’m thinking it’s time you cleaned house. How about you?

< ?php include "cheerful.php"; ?>

June 22, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part two: If we are wise, and if we are lucky, we won’t “meet the new boss” because there won’t be any bosses.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Watch this:

Yes, everyone knows Saturday Night Live is not funny, but that sketch is interesting, even so.

Why? What is that bit actually saying?

Actors are puppets for writers, never forget that. What are the writers of that unfunny little skit trying to say?

Imagine this: Your parents spent a ton of money to send you to Brown or Yale or Dartmouth, and now you have the thoroughly unsexy job of writing unfunny comedy bits for an unwatched variety show that can’t even sell its own advertising time.

Do you want to believe that some mouth-breather in Dubuque can get an education just as useless as yours at, say, one percent of the cost your parents paid out?

Worse, what if that guy’s education is better than yours? What if he can get a job that amounts to something, in an industry that is growing, not dying? What if people make or lose money — or even live or die — based on his academic performance?

He doesn’t have your class ring, and he doesn’t belong to your network of drunken dissipates — each one of whom is stuck in a going-nowhere job just like yours. But, but, but: He doesn’t feel himself endowed with the centuries of effete sneerpower to which you lay claim but have done nothing to deserve.

The truth you don’t dare admit is that your education distinguishes you in no way at all. You studied nothing serious, and you learned nothing of what you studied. You put in time and you made connections, but you don’t actually know anything, you can’t actually do anything, and if you are ever required to be anything more than an expert at supercilious self-pity, you will be dismissed at once. You are nothing but your vaunted pedigree, and that pedigree is based entirely on the accomplishments of other people — the vast majority of them long since deceased.

This is the naked essence of that fake advertisement, the snarling envy and resentment of an entire social class composed of nothing but empty suits.

Welcome to the disestablishment, y’all…

The question is, what if we’ve really screwed the pooch this time. Read more

June 20, 2010

Superman

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

The little boy came gamboling up to me when I was just over the ridge. He was big for three, small for four, and cute by any measure. Brown hair, blue eyes and a smile as quiet as firecrackers.

I was cutting across the park on my way to the library, and I’d come a little closer to the playground than I had wanted to. Unaccompanied adults have no business being at the playground. It spooks the parents, and it ought to. For myself, while I like kids well enough, I don’t much like what comes with them these days…

“I’m Shotterman!” said the little boy. He struck a menacing pose. He was wearing little blue shorts and a black Mickey Mouse tee shirt. He had Spiderman sneakers on his tiny feet.

“Hi, Shotterman,” I said. “What are you?”

“Huh?”

“What are your powers, Shotterman?”

“Oh,” he said. “I can shoot.” He cocked his finger. “Pshew! Pshew pshew! Pshew!”

“Shotterman!” I announced. “Strange visitor from another planet with an uncanny aim and accuracy. Shotterman! Able to compete for marksmanship prizes on five continents.”

Shotterman laughed with delight, as I knew he would. This was entertainment he thoroughly understood.

And here’s a little something I understood: He doesn’t have a dad, not at home. Little boys don’t crave male attention when they’re getting enough of it. The nation is crawling with little boys looking for big boys to play little boy games, and I knew without being told that Shotterman was one of them.

“Who are you?” he asked.

I knew what he meant. “Nothingman,” I said.

“Nothingman?”

“Nothingman! A vanishingly small amount of substance, barely here at all. Nothingman! A homeopathic quantity of humanity.”

He looked at me as if he wasn’t quite sure if I was serious in my nonsense.

“Hunter!” called a voice from the benches over by the swings. Shotterman blanched a little.

“Hunter!”

“Is that your name? Hunter?”

“No, I’m Shotterman.”

“Hunter Ryan Daniels! You get your butt over here and I mean this instant!”

I winced. I can get enough of that stuff. “C’mon,” I said. “Let’s motivate.”

We walked back over toward the playground equipment and Hunter went “Pshew!” at anything that Read more

June 17, 2010

Politician admits human behavior is not subject to coercive control: “You can write all the laws that you want. But it sometimes doesn’t make a whole lot of difference. People don’t follow them.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer — made famous by Senate Bill 1070, which requires Los Angelenos, expatriate Canadian basketball players and huffy has-been musicians to act like idiots in public — observing that a state-wide ban on texting-while-driving will have zero impact on texting-while-driving.

I figure I violate about 300 traffic laws on a typical day — with no consequences, obviously. I’m not being reckless, just efficient, and the cops don’t waste their time on me — which assumes they’re even paying attention. Meanwhile, the City of Phoenix already has a texting ban, which I violate at will, also without consequences.

If you have cultivated the habit of thought, you might stop to think about how many laws you routinely violate. The logical next step would be to wonder if everyone else is just like you: Scrupulously obeying laws that hinder them in no way and breaking all the others.

After that, you might be so bold as to entertain the notion that laws among civilized people are redundant, while laws among the uncivilized are meaningless. And who knows where that kind of thinking might lead you…

June 16, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 1.5: Who cares about the tunnel? All I can see is the light…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this eighteen months ago, when this economic recession was just getting started. I looked at it again tonight and found nothing in it that I wanted to change. I have more to say on the subject of a long recession, perhaps a depression, but this is a very good place to begin to look for optimistic portents. –GSS

 
Hope and despair at the onset of economic recession: Who cares about the tunnel? All I can see is the light…

I don’t do well in despair.

Clarify that. I don’t mean that, when I find myself in despair, I fare especially badly.

What is mean is, if despair were a classroom discipline for which one could be tested and graded, I would probably flunk out.

I’ve lived through some ugly stuff in my life — who hasn’t? — but mostly I didn’t notice. I’m good at thinking — or so I like to think. And, good at it or not, I really do like to think. But I can only think about one thing at a time. For most of my time, for most of my life, I like to think about work. I like to think about what I’m doing. I like to think about what I’m getting done.

That doesn’t leave much room in my mind for despair. Or depression. Or gloom or sadness or fear or doubt or pain or worry or any of the things that people talk about when they’re not talking about work. I know about those ideas, much as I know about ideas like schadenfreude or universal guilt, things that I’ve heard about or read about but never seen from the inside.

You could say that’s my good luck, I suppose, but I’m sure it’s a choice on my part. Who hasn’t known sadness, after all? It’s not that I’ve never lived with painful emotions, it’s simply that I choose not to live with them any longer than I have to — which almost always turns out to be no time at all. I turn to my work not to escape from pain, nor even to work to alleviate it. Read more

June 16, 2010

“In a sense, Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From The Atlantic, an explication of economist Paul Romer’s idea to build modern-day Hong Kong-like enclaves to promote development in poverty-stricken counties:

When Romer explains charter cities, he likes to invoke Hong Kong. For much of the 20th century, Hong Kong’s economy left mainland China’s in the dust, proving that enlightened rules can make a world of difference. By an accident of history, Hong Kong essentially had its own charter—a set of laws and institutions imposed by its British colonial overseers—and the charter served as a magnet for go-getters. At a time when much of East Asia was ruled by nationalist or Communist strongmen, Hong Kong’s colonial authorities put in place low taxes, minimal regulation, and legal protections for property rights and contracts; between 1913 and 1980, the city’s inflation-adjusted output per person jumped more than eightfold, making the average Hong Kong resident 10 times as rich as the average mainland Chinese, and about four-fifths as rich as the average Briton. Then, beginning around 1980, Hong Kong’s example inspired the mainland’s rulers to create copycat enclaves. Starting in Shenzhen City, adjacent to Hong Kong, and then curling west and north around the Pacific shore, China created a series of special economic zones that followed Hong Kong’s model. Pretty soon, one of history’s greatest export booms was under way, and between 1987 and 1998, an estimated 100 million Chinese rose above the $1-a-day income that defines abject poverty. The success of the special economic zones eventually drove China’s rulers to embrace the export-driven, pro-business model for the whole country. “In a sense, Britain inadvertently, through its actions in Hong Kong, did more to reduce world poverty than all the aid programs that we’ve undertaken in the last century,” Romer observes drily.

Of course, versions of China’s special economic zones have existed elsewhere, especially in Asia. But Romer is not just arguing for enclaves; he is arguing for enclaves that are run by foreign governments. To Romer, the fact that Hong Kong was a colonial experiment, imposed upon a humiliated China by means of a treaty signed aboard a British warship, is not just an Read more

June 14, 2010

Reasons to be cheerful, Part one: Things rarely change as quickly or as dramatically as we expect them to.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Do you want to hear some really bad news? I mean dauntingly bad, horrifyingly bad, news so bad you could spend days or even weeks ruminating on it, worrying about it, desperately praying for it not to be true.

Are you ready? Here goes:

While you might have heard that the national debt in the United States is approaching $14 trillion, the actual unfunded liability of all American governments exceeds $125 trillion.

Stupefying, ain’t it?

And stupefying is precisely the right word, since news like that brings out the stupid in people. Nothing enervates the chicken in Chicken Little like a weather report predicting falling skies. If you find yourself in the business of selling advertising or shrieking treacly books or quack nostrums to Chicken Little, it behooves you to hire yourself some weathermen. Worked for Al Gore, didn’t it?

Am I being cynical? Not so much. Mainly I’m just being old.

I am an old libertarian. Not an old man, I hope, though of course I’m not getting any younger. But I have been a very radically committed libertarian since I was 19 years old, and an anarcho-capitalist since I was 24. I have been swimming in this ocean for 30 years, where many folks all over America are just now daring to wet their toes. I can defend the proposition that I am the first consistent theorist of both rational egoism and market anarchism, but, leaving that claim aside, it remains that I have been a libertarian for a long, long time.

Why does that matter? Because I’ve seen the gravely-predicted collapse of the starry firmament before. More than once. More than twice. More than a dozen times. It does seem plausible to me that the-world-as-we-know-it will someday come to an end. But with every passing day, I become more resolved in the belief that that day will not be tomorrow, regardless of the breathless weather reports.

It’s like this: New libertarians can be excitable. You’ve lived your whole life in an eyes-glazed-over sleep-walking state, and then, all at once, you wake up. The precipitant cause might be Atlas Shrugged or a John Stossel TV special or Read more

June 12, 2010

Reasons To Be Cheerful

by

Instigator, anthill kicker.

Author website

view from my back yard.jpg

For loads of reasons, I moved my family from what Greg once called the “tiny town of Westerville, OH,” to Gresham Oregon, a suburb of Portland.  I move into my rental house in a few days.  picture is what I see in my backyard.

My front yard is pine trees, and past that is a pristine view of Mount Hood. I crossed the plain in my minivan with my wife and kids, over 3 days–followed by my first vacation in years, a week in Manzanita Beach. We’ll do a 6 month stay in Gresham, and then figure out if Vancouver, WA is the mecca of tax avoidance that people say it is.

I have been delivered.

Now, I go back to work feverishly on the Sabbath, working like a dog to help my clients get what they want (and paid for).  I am joyful about the task at hand, my lists are set.

Many of you know (and I’ve never really hidden it).I have survived an ordeal, and I am happy because I’ve learned that I can’t be killed.   I can’t be extinguished.  I can get better faster than the government can harm me.  I took their best blow.  Yes, it hurt.  But I got tougher. They will never harm me.  And when  they try again, my stuff is together and I’m ready, and it will be a mere inconvenience, a half day’s work and a check to some Tax Attorney.

Like Martha Stewart before me, I had to maneuver in unpleasant ways.  I had to give plasma to keep the lights turned on 3 years ago. I wasn’t able to adorn my wife in the way that I’d like.   I joined the non prestigious Chapter 7 Society.  But I never broke, and I never said “do it to Julia.”

I’m guessing I’m not the only one.  I’m guessing that other people are shaking off the blows right now, learning that we can produce the income sufficient to pay for an extra house over a three year period in “the worst economy ever.”   Over 3 years, I paid what it would cost to buy a Read more

« Older posts Newer posts »

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.

Media Contacts