Category: Marketing (page 17 of 191)

Bill Gates says he’ll fly a lot less and eat more synthetic meat to fight climate change. And that, most assuredly, is totally not bullshit.

However: If the point of living is to save the planet from himself, he could do so much better. For example, he could check into a Seattle SRO, sit down in a wooden chair and shut-the-frolic-up, thus reducing his ‘carbon footprint’ even more drastically.

Or, of course, he could do as all misanthropes should do and deliver himself to oblivion – thus curing his imaginary obsession and relieving the rest of us, at least a little, of the pestilence of ‘merciful’ genocidal maniacs.

The bad news? Comic-book super-villains are not Ci by accident. The good news, ever and always: Where it is possible to choose not to reproduce, Ci is self-extinguishing. Assuming Fauci and Gates are not sterilizing all of us with either the virus or its vaccines, only Ds matters, going forward.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Could the great refi boom finally be over?

City Journal: Hanging in There: On a landlord’s pandemic plight.

Brad Polumbo: Federal Government Lost 5x More to COVID Stimulus Fraud Than It Spent on Vaccine Development, New Report Reveals.

Naiomi Wolf: The End of America?

I had a text from “Steve at Common Cause” entreating me to lobby for some piece of legislation. I responded thus:

“Does your plan entail taking private property by force? Since we both know it does, accept that you are an exponent of crime and ultimately genocide. Please do better with your life. And take me off your list.”

“Steve” is a bot, no doubt, but you never know who sees what. Meanwhile, I got a meme of my own that I have wanted for a while – an opportunity to set a lasting example of how to confront political hypocrisy.

The claim that Marxism is “merciful” or “compassionate” is absurd. Marxism is genocide, everywhere, eventually. But in its meekest forms, Marxism is devoted to pain: It seeks to hurt people for responding appropriately to the facts of reality.

Accordingly, you should always hold Marxists accountable for their crimes. They should have been purged along with the Nazis – for millions more murders. No one should treat them as anything but evil.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Buyers are overpaying, but are there signs of a bubble?

CNBC: Mortgage rates just moved sharply higher, but homebuyer competition is fiercer than ever.

Housing Wire: A 3% mortgage rate may be the new norm.

Housing Wire: Spencer Rascoff SPAC to take iBuyer Offerpad public. Dead-money stalking.

CNBC: Petco CEO says shift to suburbs is fueling company growth.

Josh Hammer: Recover the Moral Imperative of Law and Order: Conservatives should lead the way in moving the pendulum back toward the rule of law.

The Fedralist: A Prescription For Fixing American Family Life.

I realized yesterday that my ultimate objection to crypto-currencies is familial, not financial: Like all of the rest of libertarianism, crypto is a Ci solution to a Ds problem.

How do you engineer trust? You don’t. You cultivate it – in toddlers – and if you don’t cultivate it, you can’t have it. Bitcoin is underfathered money.

Jokes are easy. Comity is hard. How do you cultivate Ds trust in a Ci technocracy?

Fatherhood, of course, but that implies two things: Couples have to cooperate rather than competing in marriage. And moms have to put their child-bearing years ahead of their career-triumph years.

Sending your daughter away to college at 18 is the best possible way to avoid grandchildren. Had she married at 18, she might have brought home five apples of their daddy’s eye. Instead, she’ll be lucky to spawn two crabapples – or one – or none – daddy or not.

But if we schedule things the other way, kids first, then school and career, families can have the ‘having it all’ that takes 50 and 100 years to have.

He marries when he’s established – five years older, not ten – she marries when she is most-propitiously fecund. She studies from home as she can, as the kids are growing, and she’s only 30 or 35 when she is able to make a full-time commitment to her career – if that still seems wise.

But it is certainly wise to get the sequence of these priorities in order. The way to put families first is to put your own family – however it might be composed – ahead of any value outside the home. And, as above, if you want trust, this is the only way it comes into existence.

In other news:

Housing Wire: What happens to Realtors if the PRO Act passes?

CNBC: Here’s how the Fed decision impacts your wallet.

Housing Wire: Homebuilders are slowing production despite wild demand.

Fox News: Americans move to freedom – people fleeing these 5 states. Here’s why.

Joel Kotkin: How Declining Fertility Rates May Deliver Us Into Read more

We call them ‘the dots’ – the subdivided channels that emerged, mushroom like, from the HDTV rules. It’s classic TV with long commercial breaks, much like ‘the independent stations’ when you were a kid.

They’re ‘the dots’ because of the way they are denominated. We mostly watch channels 45.1 – a classic ‘independent’ – and 15.3, which is LAFF – antique reruns and pay-per-performance advertising.

The latter is a marketing channel, if you’re looking for a way around everyone else. A phone number and a web site can make a 30-second spot pull like a 30-minute infomercial:

“Everybody wants to buy your home, but nobody wants to pay for it. Wholesalers and iBuyers scheme to low-ball you, while fast-talking Realtors just want to stick their sign in your yard. I can show you how to maximize your return on your investment in your home – whatever its condition. I am the champion of your hard-earned equity – and I don’t get paid until you get paid. Don’t sign anything until you talk to me first.”

I may do something like that, but that’s not why we watch the dots. It’s the entertainment quality. If we watch a ‘free’ movie on a streaming service, we may like it, or we may want our time back. But if we watch reruns of “How I Met Your Mother” on LAFF – we’re going to laugh. Note bene: We second-screen or pee during the commercial breaks, so caveat emptor on the ad buys.

But: Whatever: The dots may in fact your best entertainment value: Time-tested reliable content at just the right price.

In other news:

Mike Del Prete: The Economics of iBuying, 2020 Edition.

CNBC: Mortgage refinance demand tanks 39% as rates continue to climb.

Housing Wire: Insane lumber prices mean new homes cost $24K more.

The Washington Examiner: Omar pitches national cancellation of rent and mortgage payments until April 2022.

The Daily Wire: Teachers Compile List Of Parents Who Question Racial Curriculum, Plot War On Them.

The National Interest: The U.S. Economy Is Now A Giant Bubble. A ‘Pop’ Read more

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” So said Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. It’s a metaphor about transparency, but those sorts of metaphors work – and stick around in memory – because they are radically true.

And never so much as now is sunlight infection’s best enemy: I live near the I-10 – the very sunniest side of the street, that region of America where bugs of all sorts come to fry – but everywhere in the U.S. on or south of the I-40 or generally west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rockies will turn out to have done better with the virus than cloudier realms.

Sunlight is UVC – kills all viruses in seconds – and vitamin D, the miracle drug Fauci, Birx and the DNCCP kept secret all last year. Sunlight is why the homeless were not wiped out by the Coronavirus, and it’s why they are not wiped out every year by “the common cold” or “the seasonal flu” – both of which would now seem to be rent-seeking marketing ploys.

Be fit. Stay away from sick people. Wash your hands. Catch some rays. And, by all means, keep your own counsel. The “experts” are apparently working for the virus.

In other news:

The New York Times: ‘I’d Much Rather Be in Florida’.

CNBC: 31% of young adults relocated during Covid. But they aren’t giving up on cities altogether.

American Greatness: What South Dakota Can Teach America.

Housing Wire: Redfin: Former redlined neighborhoods at massive flood risk. I skipped this yesterday, because Redfin is making me sick. Rich people live in the heights. Poor people live in the flats. Not news. Were the flats redlined by race or poverty? Which reason applies now – since Redfin Offers almost certainly is also redlining these exact same neighborhoods. I’d say “motes and beams” – but they know they’re liars spinning a bigoted narrative. What’s going on in and near CHAZ/CHOP, Redfin? And what are you doing to help the poor people Read more

We are mad, and we are intolerant only of those who call us mad. The actual news of the day consists of briefly vanishing truths instantly smothered under the Hissy-Fit Veto – the hysterical version of the Heckler’s Veto.

Don’t believe me? Tucker Carslon made the factual observation that the military’s effeminization and war-fighting are incompatible objectives. This is obviously so, so of course the armed forces declared war – “Mean Girls” style – on Carlson. Now he’ll never be Prom King.

Here is an obvious truth, one so easy to understand you need six-figures’ worth of student debt to miss it: Fertile women ought not be put in peril.

We say “women and children first” but the purpose of civilization is children. We can tell we are at war with ourselves – with our undeniable natural identity as organisms – by how much we are at war with that simple fact.

A woman in combat is not as stupid as a man in a birthing chair, but both are obvious misapplications of limited resources. But while a man dying in combat loses one life, when a fertile woman is a casualty of war, she takes legions with her: Her eggs, of course, but also the family she won’t have, the investment that family would have made in the future, and all the children and grandchildren never to come…

All lost because we are mad – and in our madness desperate to cease to exist.

In other news:

Michael Totten: Leaving Portland.

FEE.org: Target Announces It’s Abandoning Its Minneapolis Headquarters. Here’s Why It’s No Surprise.

Kay Hymowitz: There Goes the Neighborhood School.

Daniel Payne: One year later: A look back at inaccurate projections that helped drive COVID lockdowns.

Joy Pullman: 5 Ways To Use ‘Stimulus’ Hush Money To Fight Democrats’ Plans For Your Serfdom.

Salena Zito: The culture curators want to think for you.

Conrad Black: A Kingdom of the Anti-American Elite: Joe Biden, a man who 34 percent of Americans think is not sufficiently mentally alert for his office, is presiding amiably over a regime infested with anti-American forces.

The economic theory behind crypto-currencies is not that far from Marx’ Labor Theory of Value: Pointless activity pursued rigorously creates new value.

That’s absurd, of course, but long cons always are. But the inverse of that stupid ‘theory’ is surely true: Pointless activity destroys wealth.

There’s nothing wrong with doing the crossword puzzle. Just don’t call it work.

In other news:

National Review: New Yorkers Must Be Punished: A Modest Proposal.

American Thinker: Why is Biden releasing thousands of Covid-positive migrants into the country?

Matt Taibbi: The Sovietization of the American Press: The transformation from phony “objectivity” to open one-party orthodoxy hasn’t been an improvement.

The Pipeline: No More Cakes and Ale.

American Greatness: Are We Still Free?

Until 1974, production homes in Metropolitan Phoenix were block-constructed ranch houses: The side-walls, frequently windowless, bore the load of a rafter-and-shingle roof. Single-story, necessarily, and wide-and-shallow on the lot, like all ranch homes. Galvanized-steel ducting, so low hallways – and low ceilings generally. The trade-off, of course, is that a block-home will stand for centuries. The roof needs maintenance, but the walls are not going anywhere.

They built zillions of these homes in the decades after World War II – America’s suburbanizing miracle. But then in 1974 the brick-masons went on strike and the new-home builders switched to stick-and-stucco construction – Orange County vaulted. Because the homes are built on a truss, the ceilings can soar – with aluminized-mylar hose to hide the ugly ducting. When AC-compressors were pulled off roofs, the roofs got tiled, and we’ve been building stick-stucco-and-tile ever since.

But unlike block-homes, stick-stucco-and-tile houses are wedding cakes: They melt in very short order without constant maintenance.

Because block-homes last – and because they can withstand repeated remodelings – they seem to represent a better long-term value for home-buyers. By contrast, the steady maintenance required by stick-built homes can lead to whole communities seeming to crash all at once, with too-obvious deferred maintenance leading in lockstep by bad example.

My point would be what? I’m delighted to see concrete returning to the new-home subdivision sales office. Not here quite yet, but the price of lumber makes thoroughly-modern masonry more competitive every day.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Real Estate Exchange files antitrust suit against Zillow, NAR.

CNBC: 3D-printed housing developments suddenly take off – here’s what they look like.

Victory Girls: Ilhan Omar Wants to Take Your Rental Properties.

City Journal: Crossing the Line: The CDC stretched its authority to halt evictions, but it has taken a hands-off approach to preventing the spread of Covid-19 across the southern border.

Julie Kelly: One Year Later, Vindication for Lockdown Skeptics: The overwhelming majority of Americans last March acted in good faith to do what we were told was in the best interest of Read more

I think Trump got played on the virus – and I fear the worst news is yet to come.

Lots of chatter about Biden’s speech last night, but the funniest bits turn on China Joe trying to claim credit for the vaccines.

Rushed medicine of unknown risks seems like a poor idea under any circumstances, but when the actual objective of everyone involved except Trump was regicide – no matter who else gets hurt – I think I might let Hidin’ Biden steal the show.

Oh, yes: I am a vaccine skeptic. I am an everything skeptic, and I am an early-adopter on nothing. We would all be better off had Trump listened to Navarro and Atlas, instead of Fauci and Birx, but Trump will be better off, going forward, letting the Democrats take the blame for the vaccines.

In other news:

CNBC: The housing market stands at a tipping point after a stunningly successful year during the pandemic.

Redfin: Home Prices Increased a Record 17%, Pending Sales Up 19% From a Year Earlier.

Tim O’Reilly: The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?

Joanne Jacobs: Researchers: School closures endanger children.

City Journal: Breaking the Spell: Fighting poverty requires more than just sending money to the poor.

Glenn Reynolds: To defeat woke tyrants, the rest of us must treat them like the monsters they are.

Dennis Prager: Most American Schools Are Damaging Your Children.

There’s iBuyer news today – half truth, half lies – but, as usual, the big news is missing: The big-budget iBuyers are by-now swarmed by many, many mini-iBuyers. Hardly anyone knows how to build a magnetic website, but lots and lots of people know how to flip houses.

Here’s more fun: By setting a floor price on many bread-and-butter homes, Zillow is graciously telling flippers how to flip to it: Guaranteed dough in 14 days – or fewer. And, or course, they’re also giving good listers a sweet pitch: “We know the iBuyers will pay the Zestimate. Let’s see how much better we can do on the open market.”

The iBuyers will be truly frolicked when the market turns, but they are frolicking easy to FUD right now: Two words: Shop around.

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Young People Are Moving To Red States.

In other news:

Mike DelPrete: Massive iBuyer Financial Losses Continue.

Redfin: iBuyer Market Continues Slow Recovery, With Decline In Home Purchases Narrowing to 48% In the Fourth Quarter.

Housing Wire: Mortgage rates continue to rise to 3.05%.

CNBC: Covid changed how we think of offices. Now companies want them to work as hard as they do.

American Rifleman: February Sees 79 Percent Increase in Sales Over 2020.

The Federalist: The Real COVID Nursing Home Scandal Is Why Cuomo And Other Democrats Did It.

The American Mind: Out of His Census.

Christopher Rufo: Revenge of the Gods: California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum urges students to chant to the Aztec deity of human sacrifice.

Michael Anton: The Weather Underground’s Lasting Victory.

City Journal: Can Republicans Capitalize on Urban Political Opportunity? A lifelong Democrat suggests how the GOP can become viable in American cities.

Every “news” story about the ongoing Ant-exodus roiling America’s real estate markets attributes the phenomenon to the Coronavirus. This is a lie, of course, as I have been pointing out for months. People who can are racing away from riots, rioters and urban chaos in general.

Folks on the receiving end should rejoice and be glad in it: The new neighbors are Ants, even if they come from Grasshopper towns. Bring in them sheaves: They’re starving for Ant values.

But what about the Ants who can’t race away? What’s going to happen to them?

The people who have moved or are moving are “knowledge workers.” They can work anywhere, and the exsanguination of big cities was accordingly already baked in the cake.

The workers who are left behind use non-laptopian tools on fixed capital. Though they may be better-grounded Ants than the ones who have fled, they cannot leave.

This will not be reported, either, but the hard-working folks left behind to live with the disasters of Grasshopper politics will be “disproportionately” black and brown skinned people.

In other news:

Housing Wire: Mortgage credit, and the coming purchase storm.

CNBC: Mortgage refinance demand plunges 43% from a year ago, as higher interest rates take their toll on borrowers.

New York Post: NYC faces crisis of empty hotels amid COVID pandemic.

Brad Polumbo: Biden just endorsed a law that endangers 57 million jobs.

Joel Kotkin: Climate Policy: Covid on Steroids?

Razib Khan: Empire of Memory, or Empire of Dreams? America still has time to decide which it will be.

Bari Weiss: The Miseducation of America’s Elites: Affluent parents, terrified of running afoul of the new orthodoxy in their children’s private schools, organize in secret.

I’ve been meaning to mock Glenn Kelman and Redfin for its commissions hypocrisy, so forgive me my diversions:

Redfin, a national real estate brokerage currently under investigation for undeniable anti-black disparate-impact redlining, is today making claims about primarily black and primarily white neighborhoods – the latter type being where you can get a Redfin Offers offer.

It ain’t easy being racist about being racist, so, of course, Redfin capitalizes “Black” and lowercases “white.” Nothing like granting ornamental trinkets to the folks you’re screwing over.

Racists are the people who talk about race all the time, so Kelman and Redfin definitely qualify. Redfin seems to be committed to hurting people, more than anything else: Using false narratives to inhibit the progress of people – of every color – who respond appropriately to reality. Which, of course, is exactly what they’re doing about commissions, too – hurting people wise enough to avoid them.

Glenn Kelman has posting privileges on BloodhoundBlog, but I would love to see an honest defense of his company’s spastic bigotry here or anywhere: How does deliberately hurting people help anyone?

Yesterday on BloodhoundBlog:

Brian Brady: Can a veteran buyer waive an appraisal when purchasing with a VA mortgage?

In other news:

Housing Wire: Spring housing market forecast: record purchase volume.

Housing Wire: Is Q1 the last quarter to ride the refinance wave?

Stephen Moore: Red States Should Revolt Against the ‘Blue-State Bailout’.

John Daniel Davidson: Without debate, President Biden has decided on complete open borders.

Helen Raleigh: Stopping The Next Cultural Revolution Starts With Your Home Library: In a totalitarian regime, children’s books are not meant to bring joy or inspiration. Their sole purpose is to instill the correct political ideology in the young mind.

Tim Rice: Paging Dr. Hayek: Free-marketeers should make their case with renewed vigor after central planners’ pandemic missteps.

The best argument in favor of liability limitation is industrialization itself, and all of its further fruits – including this one. Arms-length investment permits the brightest managers to scale rapidly and hugely, causing prices to plummet. That’s a Utilitarian argument – what’s a few deaths compared with all these riches? – but it is nevertheless a truly cornucopian display.

As with the U.S. Constitution and its chiseling rent-seeking, the progenitors of these ideas lived amidst a very-high-trust civilization they did not understand. They could not conceive of how much more underfathered people could become, nor how much more predatory they could be in consequence.

This is what I call Candy-Machine thinking (a little cheating won’t make a difference). Turns out there’s no such thing as a little cheating: Either everyone is honest because everyone is raised to be honest or, eventually, everyone is continuously both predator and prey – briefly – and unlamented thereafter.

Civilization is fatherhood – institutionalized anti-cheating. Cheating undermines it, and, ultimately if not by original intent, destroys it.

In other news:

Daniel Greenfield: Cancelled Tech Genius Behind Brave Preps the First New Search Engine.

City Journal: The Campus as Factory: Corporatist progressivism and the crisis of American higher education.

American Thinker: Preventing a Repeat of Disastrous Lockdown Policies.

Joy Pullman: 15 Insane Things In Democrats’ H.R. 1 Bill To Corrupt Elections Forever.

Roger Kimball: Peak Cancel Culture? Don’t Bet on It.

Predatory traders are not new. Crassus, to pick an ugly example, would bring his fire brigade to your burning Roman insulae – apartment building – but he wouldn’t have them start to put out the fire until you sold the property to him. The longer it burned, the cheaper it got. Desperate businesses get sold this way to this day.

But it is liability limitation that made predation normal – or at least common, to be expected – in trade. We want to do business with the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, but instead we wake up with fleas from Bezos, Dorsey and Zuckerberg – the law firm of all the people who didn’t read the Terms of Service.

This is me, nearly sixteen years ago:

“The essential defining characteristic of a corporation, as against other ways of organizing a business enterprise, is liability limitation, a conspiracy between the proprietors and the state to defraud tort claimants of all they might otherwise obtain in redress for their injuries. It’s pure Hamiltonian Social Engineering, Mercantilism at its worst. The idea is to encourage investment by limiting the risk. But by limiting responsibility, investment is distorted away from the individual integrity that is the sine qua non of enlightened self-interest. The limited liability corporation is the rope by which Capitalism hung itself.”

Some people are much better at particular jobs, which is how task specialization brought us the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. Some people are better at organizing and managing things, too, and this, also, is a talent to be exploited in the marketplace – within limits.

Liability limitation rewards investors for hiring ruthless managers. The butcher marks up cost-plus not because everyone else does it that way, too, but because friends don’t gouge friends. The baker gives you a baker’s dozen doughnuts because you take care of the people who take care of you. The candlestick maker employs your kid part-time – not because he’s worth it, but because someday soon he Read more

Arizona is opening back up – much like and in lock-step with Texas. Doug Ducey, R(ino)-Purple Gang, our governor, is not bright enough to do the right thing for the right reasons, so I assume this was a marketing move forced upon him by the real estate industry, Arizona’s strongest power base. Texas just stumbled stupidly in the snow, so, by all means, Keep Arizona Housing Competitive™.

Reopening the “red” states will be a good pretext for the next phase of the Ant exodus: Riot Season is upon us in Minneapolis, so the virus that will be gone by the first crack of the bat on Opening Day will be blamed all year for the further flight to safety.

In other news:

CNBC: The spring housing market just lost more than 200,000 new listings.

Spectrum News: Nation’s First 3D-Printed Homes for Sale Hit Austin Market. Architecture has been lost for 100 years, like everything else, but this house is straight outta Sullivan: The method of construction is its own ornamentation. It is beautiful because of the way it is built.

The Fence Post: ‘30 x 30’ — Progressives pushing for massive federal land grab.

City Journal: Opportunity Knocks: Cities hoping to attract footloose workers should embrace growth and affordability.

AND Magazine: The Left’s Revolution Is Just Getting Started – More Riots Are Planned.

Townhall: Time to Start Talking About America’s Coming Bankruptcy.