Category: Real Estate (page 4 of 266)

Inside my head, I have never felt myself to be a day over nineteen years old, but in fact I am a walking antique. In consequence, I can see everything that has gone wrong with education since it was ruined in my behalf. I hope I am not smug: I am crushed by my ignorance, so great I cannot even weigh it, much less comprehend it. I know how much better education was 50 years before I hit the books – but I know how much worse it is now.

Lately I am beswarmed, it would seem, by trivial, obvious spelling errors. It is a given that most people younger than me can’t read to any profit. The ability to spell properly is sustained by reading lots and lots of properly-spelled text. The implication would be that, not only can paid writers not spell, they don’t read very much, either. And these same facts must also be true of their editors, who are literally paid to know better.

My solution would be Latin, of course. No one who can decline in linguam Latinam can confuse affect for effect – nor any a-, ad- (accusative) words for similarly-spelled e-, ex- (ablative) forms. Attic Greek will work, too, to make you exacting and to train your memory. But spelling is grammar in Latin, so if you get it wrong, you get everything wrong.

Looking for an easier answer: Mark down, consistently, for spelling errors – in school but more importantly at work. At a minimum, they are indicia of carelessness, and carelessness breeds catastrophe.

In other news:

Redfin.com: Housing Market Update: One-Third of Homes Find Buyers Within a Week.

CNBC: Foreclosures are surging now that Covid mortgage bailouts are ending, but they’re still at low levels.

Andrea Widburg: Thanks to Biden’s policies, prepare for a cold, expensive winter.

Kyle Becker: Internal Capitol Police Documents on Ashli Babbitt Shooting Released: ‘No Good Reason for Shooting,’ Judicial Watch President Says.

American Thinker: The silver lining in the Democrats’ assault on kids in the Read more

A Christmas carol in celebration of all the festivities so far:

It’s going to be a Facebook Christmas!
Nothing will be under the tree!
You didn’t vote for Biden
because he’s always hidin’
but the only name that counts starts with a Z!

So it’s going to be a Facebook Christmas!
Empty shelves from sea to shining sea!
“Own nothing and love it?
Tell all those clowns to shove it!”
But they’ll be nothing left to own eventually.

Because it’s going to be a Facebook Christmas!
The paradise the billionaires foresee
includes no middle classes
nor none with elapsed passes
but they don’t know they’ll be hanging from the tree!

That’s why it’s going to be a Facebook Christmas!
The last Christmas any one of us might see.
They promised “No malarkey”
they delivered oligarchy
so your deliverance will come to you for free!

There will never be another Facebook Christmas!
Yours is a freezin’, wheezin’ destiny.
But when the day comes ’round for dying
let there be no denying:
Facebook was a suicidal luxury!

In other news:

CNBC: Today’s tight housing market is already overbuilt, one analyst says.

CNBC: Weekly mortgage demand stalls, as rates jump to highest level since June.

RedState.com: Supply Chain: We’re Running out of Food – Thanks to Biden.

PJMedia.com: Big Trouble Ahead as Record Number of Workers Quit Their Jobs in August.

Paul Bedard: After 30 years, Clarence Thomas now ‘the most important justice’.

Betsy McCaughey: Dems’ Attack On Smart Kids.

At the Arrowhead Towne Centre Mall, where Loco Willie drives the choo-choo train, the Lego store is right next door to the Build-a-Bear store – this so parents can have both their arms torn off at the same time. Whatever gender-confusion might be found among the tweens and all those evertweens, the lines are bright and the lanes are clear for three- and four-year-olds: Girls like girly stuff and boys like warriors and weapons and every manner of manly jobs.

There is a middle ground: Mega and Duplo blocks are all about blocks – and dexterity – not grown-up identities. But Lego blocks are about ships and battles and airports and architecture.

Little boys play with simulations of manly efficacy because they are powerless and they know it. Their games are all about achieving results that are, so far, entirely beyond them.

Divorce is the best way to rob boys of a masculine role model, but stripping masculinity from everything boys touch won’t make anything better – it will just make our conquest by manlier men that much easier.

In other news:

FloridaRealtor.org: HUD Says It Will Make Climate Change a Housing Priority: HUD says it will consider climate risk when underwriting loans (VA, Agriculture, etc.), promoting new energy-efficient housing and updating guidelines for grants. From Brian Brady: “FHA and VA loans are about to become more expensive in Florida – maybe California, but definitely in the Southeastern states. Forget that insurance prices the risk mitigation for extreme weather, this will be an added cost, priced into the loans.”

Michael Walsh: Vaccine Mandates Awaken Calls for Freedom.

The Federalist: The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen, It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg: The true story of how Mark Zuckerberg privatized the government’s voter registration and vote counting for Democrats in 2020.

John Daniel Davidson: The Purpose Of The Jan. 6 Select Committee Is To Suppress Free Speech.

I’ve seen no “official” confirmation of this, but it looks like some air-traffic controllers and Southwest Airlines employees are sicking-out over the vaccine mandates.

This will cause pain in a world that is asking for it, but it is exactly the right way to communicate where mutually-beneficial trade ends and personal autonomy begins. “You wanna push me around? Be prepared for the push-back.”

This country was founded by people who would rather freeze and starve than take shit from morons. More power to ’em!

In other news:

The Washington Examiner: ‘Housing first’ is a failing approach to homelessness.

City Journal: The Most Frightened Nation: Why the United Kingdom will never be the same.

So here’s the funny part about Cleo’s instincts and the palpably tabula rasa state of her conscious awareness:

Until this week, Miss Chioux did not know what rabbits are for. That’s a funny way of saying things, since it puts telos in the eye of the observer. Even so, Sun City being what it is, Cleo has seen thousands of bunnies in her life, but until one ran away from her, she didn’t know to hunt them.

She sure does now. Every walk starts with a bunny hunt, and if she spots her prey, all near-term prospects of elimination are swapped out for the hunting frenzy. I am coming to be worried that she will never poop in that big block-walled back yard, so avidly will she be hunting for rascally rabbits.

The empathy of her chase – the unerring way she had of predicting and capitalizing on the rabbit’s mistakes – has me rethinking her love for balls, too.

Cleo doesn’t know that what makes the blue blanket snuggly is her own retained body heat. And she doesn’t know that her many toy balls move entirely on her own energy. But qua telos, from her point of view, the balls lack motivation – they are not alive – and so they are inherently less predictable – to her – than is live game.

That’s just fun. Billiard-ball physics is duck soup to us – but running a rabbit to ground – not just the speed but the instant empathy and split-second decision-making – is completely impossible to over-thought-out human beings.

In other news:

Andrea Widburg: Life in Seattle is about to get very interesting (and that’s not good).

Joel Kotkin: Even Elon Musk is leaving California behind.

Clarice Feldman: Green Policies Return the World to Coal.

Cleo is with us, and she and I will be working at the new place today. I installed a TV over there yesterday, so we can have college football on while we work. She likes the colors, I like the cheerleaders.

The stands will be filled with white people, of course, while the playing field will be peppered with black people. What explains this “segregation”?

It’s merit, obviously. The racial composition of the football team will be black, with white, yellow and red people thinly represented in the long tail. This is not racist, it’s selection by merit among racial groups who different skills and talents. It is alike and equally not racist that the chess team is all Asians and Jews. But of course, the football team does not feel itself obliged to recruit a token nerd.

The war on merit is a terrible idea – for everyone – but the people most trapped by it are the ones for whom superior ability is their only way out. Children of moneyed families will always get a leg up, within the system or by escaping it. But it’s the kids of all races who have no one to fall back on but themselves who need and deserve the chance to claw their way out of poverty.

In other news:

David Harsanyi: Biden Administration Is Trying to Intimidate Parents.

Matt Welch: NYC Scrapping Gifted and Talented Program Is a Triumph of Redefining Language: Branding disparate racial outcomes as “segregation” is an effective way in Democratic polities to tear down programs some progressives don’t like.

On Cleo’s first birthday, she ate a lizard.

The first time I took her for a walk, when she was but barely weaned, she ate a bug. I regarded that as a salutary accomplishment for a young apex predator, but the lizard was a quantum beyond mere bugs: She saw it, captured it, conquered it and devoured it – very slowly.

My joke now, about food she likes, is that it’s made out of genuine lizard – worth the chewing. Everyone else Miss Chioux knows thinks that a girl dog is a girl, where I know all dogs are dogs. I can make them squeal simply by saying, “Remember: Nothing builds bones like bones.”

There’s more: Tuesday, late afternoon, I took Cleo over to our new place, to start getting her acclimated to it. All transitions are disruptive to toddlers, but gradual transitions become adventures. I had some of her toys there, and the house it empty for now – just another gym to Miss Chioux. The back yard is circumvallated – it has a block wall – so we played outside, too, with her dodge ball and with tennis balls.

But there was (is?) a rabbit trapped in the back yard. Cleo scared it up and the race was on. The bunny was fast, but Miss Chioux is, too. He managed to find a place to hide, but Cleo could not forget him. I took her inside, hoping the rabbit would find a chance to escape. No joy. When we went back out, she scared him up again. One, two, three times around the yard and she had him, pinned to the ground with a mouth full of fur. I pulled her off by her harness or that bunny would have been dinner – to a roly-poly little bloody-faced girl.

I took her back in to what will be my office, but she was crazed, yipping and barking, Read more

“Showing causes damage.” I said that to a seller last week, in support of taking an early cash offer, in preference to waiting through the weekend to see if financed buyers could try to beat it.

Fun, then, to see Redfin.com – America’s highest-tech national database of Pending listings – promising to double sellers’ unvetted showings.

Want me to sell you on Buyer’s Brokerage? Someone has met the buyer, has run his credit, has photocopied his driver’s license.

Redfin is bragging that it is adding security to a stupidly insecure process, but so what? Will double the showings surface the best-qualified buyer? No, that’s the all-cash offers that come in without showings on the first day. Will it result in less damage to the property? Will unsupervised access get some houses trashed, others burned to the ground? Hide and watch.

What’s most interesting about big-talk technology in real estate? Everything it says to the marketplace is nuts – and all of its “listings” are Sale Pending.

In other news:

Brad Polumbo: #MintTheCoin: Economist Explains Problem With Just Minting $1 Trillion Coin to Pay the Government’s Bills.

Sharyl Atkisson: America’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal: ‘It’s even worse than people know’.

Roger Kimball: Is this the beginning of the end of the Biden administration?

So you know: The physical addiction to caffeine can be shed with only three days of excruciating headaches. True fact. There are other ways of getting there without the pain, but if you want to be done, the quick way is three endless days of absolutely no fun.

I’m guessing ditching Facebook would be even easier…

In other news:

CNBC: Even with low interest rates, mortgage payments are increasingly unaffordable.

City Journal: Unsustainable: The Biden administration’s new immigration-enforcement guidelines will have bad practical and political effects.

Legal Insurrection: AG Garland Weaponizes FBI Against Parents Protesting Critical Race Theory, Mask Mandates.

I would hate to have to have a job, but there is a benefit: You get to see the same places at the same times every day: You get to watch the world change: You get to see it costumed by the ever-changing light.

That’s not just warm beer, it’s warm near-beer. But in the age of the internet, if you want to be in business for yourself, you have to do something the internet can’t do – at least not without your help.

Mere brick ’n’ mortar won’t cut it: We’re talking blood, sweat, toil and tears. If something can be bought or sold remotely, it will be. If a task can be effected remotely – or robotically – it will be. What remains are jobs that can only be done on-site, in-person, by laying human hands on real stuff.

That’s a lot of scut-work – what we used to call craftsmanship – but it’s also all of art. Human beings are built for better things. We educate people terribly, for now, and Ci makes a hell of school, of work – of everything. But if we are to be relieved of everything machines can do, it is so we can do the work they can’t.

In other news:

City Jounal: The New Secession Movement: States increasingly look to ban travel and business with other American locales.

Roger Kimball: The January 6 Insurrection Hoax.

California Globe: Homeschooling Inquiries Skyrocket After Gov. Newsom Announces Statewide Student Vaccination Mandate: Statewide mandate ‘final straw’ for some parents on fence about homeschooling.

The fate of big cities is to become Grasshopper ghettos: Working-from-home was happening anyway, but it was vastly accelerated by the virus, and soon Elon Musk will inaugurate working-from-anywhere. Meanwhile, the worst of urbanity becomes more-concentrated as the Ants withdraw. That argues that big-city demographics, going forward, will skew toward dissipates and welfare slaves – and the predators who profit on them.

This coincides nicely with the current urge to secede, apparently held by virtually everyone. As discussed, the United States cannot split up. But it can make the big cities – red blotches of pustulant Marxism pock-marking an otherwise healthy country – “sovereign nations” – you know, just like the Indian reservations. All the fun of being a “nation” – with none of the pesky responsibilities. As Willie foresaw, they could even have casinos, just like the other red Americans.

What they can’t have are weapons of war – you know, just like the Indian reservations. Lose the nukes, keep the kooks? That will sell in Manhattan. Lose the kooks, keep the nukes? That works just right for Manhasset. Problem solved.

We may have a basis for splitting up, but the Grasshoppers do not occupy whole states but only major metropolitan areas – and not all of those. As noted above, this self-sorting will continue, as Ants realize they have fewer and fewer reasons to remain in Grasshopper cities. Split away those Marxist metros, giving them all the power and dignity of an Indian reservation, and all the conflict is gone from our midst.

Are Grasshoppers wrong in their life choices? I would say yes, as would any Ant who dares to speak, but Grasshoppers are not at all shy about criticizing Ants. So be it. Different strokes for different folks, and each man to his own saints. But: Ants do not live comfortably among Grasshoppers – and now they don’t have to.

Big cities will become Grasshopper ghettos. Were they wise, they would defuse the Civil War talk and assure their own Read more

I studied Latin as an adult, in pursuit of nothing but self-improvement, which might-could tell you something: I spent my time and my money – costing myself earning opportunities – and, accordingly, I studied. I learned Latin well enough to teach it, and my study guides earn me plaudits from young Latinists all over the world – when midterms and finals roll around.

The other students were mostly kids, but all of them were taking Latin as a course required by their majors, not because they wanted to read De Bello Gallico in the original. As a result, they discovered real studying for the first time in their lives. They had all just been shining it on, all along – class discussions and rambling essays and group projects – even in math classes! They found the wall in Latin class: If you can’t keep up, you will be left behind.

The teacher graded from A to J – and even an F was once worse than an E. The point she was getting across is that there is a lot to get wrong, and she was kind enough to point out everything. If you studied, you were fine, but you had to give the work as much time as it needed – every day – or you were instantly overwhelmed. The class went from 40 to 20 students in three weeks.

No one lives or dies on discriminations among semi-deponent verbs, but everything we rely on relies on people who know what they are doing. A middle-school in Minnesota proposes to eliminate the F grade – to combat the ‘systemic racism’ known as academic excellence – which notion deserves a grade lower than J.

I realized when I was a young scruffian in New York than the welfare system replicates the plantation system – “the second time as farce.” It is funny but not fun to watch people attempting to erect an aristocracy of the inept. But it won’t be funny at all when you tender you life into the Read more

So the house I’ve been rehabbing for the past month sold for $20,000 over list in around twelve hours. It’s a good time to list houses, to be sure, but fortune favors the prepared mind: I knew just what the house needed to attract the offers I wanted. We spent a lot to get there, but we made a lot more by doing the work than we would have by leaving it for the next guy.

The supply-chain crisis is real. We bought a new Arcadia door for this home, and getting the glass to the window-maker took three weeks. Some things you just can’t get around, but I’m more than usually jaundiced about glass, cabinets and countertops. Paint, flooring and blinds, on the other hand…

Cosmetic flips are easy for us, and effecting Diamond Jubilee upgrades on postwar tract homes – block and shingle, built to last – is an eminently doable business. Cathleen would love do The Dowdy Scottsdale – updating a dated luxury home – but I’m not that greedy.

But: I need to move to the other side of the table. Controlling the listing is everything now, and there is no better way to control the listing than to be on title. Here’s fun: If I do this, I may ditch the MLS and “list” on Zillow, as I do with rental listings. Buyer’s brokers take heed: Ain’t no way to go broke like no co-broke.

In other news:

Real Clear Policy: Democrats Want to Hand America’s Failed Public Housing an $80 Billion Slush Fund.

TownHall.com: Between Afghanistan and Immigration, Have We Ever Had a Less Competent President?

American Thinker: Faux Capitalism.

Jordan Davidson: Leftist School Boards Association Begs Biden To Use Domestic Terrorism Laws To Target Concerned Parents.