We have seen pop media people move over, Trump, Schwarzenegger, Reagan, but at least so far it’s not been, ironically enough, political celebrities. They seem to prefer commentating from the sidelines rather than being in the thick of things. Easier to always be ‘correct’ when you are not actually accountable for your ideas.

It cuts both ways. Saw where some guy got a phone call from a company looking to fulfill a contract and he said he would basically drive 50 miles for $20,000 and the AI voice said “sounds good, let me connect you to someone to finalize the contract”, and presumably at that point the human was going to intervene and say hell no, but hilarious that the AI voice was so upbeat about accepting a ludicrous offer.

I guess the same way email can have html as an attachment for the same thing a plaintext does, evidently some of these mails suggested a mailer actually pdf encoded the email and attached, as well as the plain text.

So when someone replied with plaintext the base64 encoded PDF that they were replying to got ‘quoted’, meaning the unredacted email they were replying to is in there, just messy due to font confusion in the provided format.

Some of the reactions are some in an effective way, and I assume this example is one of them. The problem being evidently they didn’t think any what might be in big base64 blobs in the PDF, and I guess some of these folks somehow had their email encoded as PDF, which seems bonkers…

Want really his trajectory anyway.

Way easier to just cash in from the sidelines and take the profits without the potential accountability of actually being in any office.

Most celebrity commentators never go anywhere near an actual office. Whether they be left or right.

I’m not saying that his activities were completely unknown, just that some internet rando wouldn’t even recognize his name back then. I think that a faked email could only be a likely scenario if we were talking about after everyone knew who he was and what he did.

So the ‘oh watch out, that 2014 Epstein email might have been faked/forged’ is a relatively small likelihood to bother assuming, and totally beside the point since they censored the ‘from’ in that email and the message didn’t indicate previously unknown behavior on Epstein’s part.

The key word being those that knew him. He wasn’t famous for things so strangers wouldn’t have done that, and I think if this were a fake email, then sending it to a high profile person would be more of a stranger activity than an associate.

I don’t think an Epstein associate would send a fake email like that, as it would be more likely to blow back on them than implicate Epstein any further than he was already implicated.

So yeah, this email seems a credible thing and consistent with Epstein. Also I would not suspect a fake header if we knew the sender, so I’d think the sender could be presumed not to be a victim of spoofed headers too.

Well, the only one you have to spoof to incriminate is already redacted, so there’s not really a ‘spoof’ concern to worry about unless that is unredacted.

Receiving such an email doesn’t have to be a spoof. See typical spam folder of anyone for all sorts of crazy implications about the recipient.

However, the date is more reliable and back in 2014, nearly no one would be motivated to fake that sort of email toward Epstein. That was before his whole situation was popularly known. The people aware of it were largely in on it that early on.

Also some of their own manufacturers got caught up on this stupidity of electronic door latches too

I suppose the question is what upkeep people get hit with that a renter doesn’t. Housekeeping isn’t a renter amenity and landscaping is not an amenity when you rent a house.

Maybe the house is older or something… In my car the three things were a leaky water heater, a roof (which was big, but 15 years and insurance partially covered), and the central air conditioning falling. Day to day haven’t had plumbing or electrical problems. I suppose I’ve had to replace a few parts of my toilets, but just flappers which are like a 15 second job and a few dollars and fill valves, which take about 5 minutes and are maybe 15 dollars. Some folks seem to think that every weekend there’s another repair, but for me it can be months and months before even a minor thing like a light bulb or a toilet flapper needs attention.

rent prices are well above mortgages

So this is even in the USA over here not seemingly universal. Hitting up some detached housing in Zillow in my area, even with 20% upfront, mortgaging 80% over 30 years, the minimum property tax+mortgage+insurance on a house that might be $3,000 based on the sales price of other houses in the neighborhood in the past year, the typical rent is about $2300… So absolutely someone renting out a mortgaged property in this area is paying for that equity while the renter can come in with a modest deposit and get maintenance taken care of at a much lower rate than even a 30 year mortgage. At least the rental market here seems to be aggressively competing with 30 year mortgage payments with 20% down sort of picture…

I would imagine it’s nowadays at the point where employment verification is automatically fired off to some vetting agency automatically during the process where software does all the cross referencing and anomalies would be caught and reported.

I don’t think they have to go all private investigator to get basic employment verification from the actual employers anymore.

PLEASE

That’s why you have to keep it modest at ‘regional manager’, significant enough to be useful looking, insignificant enough so you can’t possibly be to blame for the downfall of the company.

I will say that as an owner, I have a lot more disposable income and pretty much all the free time I had as a renter.

I paid of my mortgage early, so now that’s just on the ground.

House maintenance is a thing, but it’s not as scary as people sometimes act like it is. Cleaning is far more work than maintenance/repairs and I had to do that either way. I have had three relatively big repair bills that I had to pay for, but that’s over decades, and I could have paid a company some monthly fee if I wanted more predictability (though the home warranty companies tend to be scammy). I have a lawn to mow, but that’s more a function of detached housing rather than renting/owning, renters of detached housing have to mow their lawn too, and a friend who owns a townhouse doesn’t mow but has to pay big HOA fees that include landscaping services.

But absolutely, between closing costs and interest rates and risk of the housing market having a short-term dip, you aren’t going to reliably and meaningfully gain equity in under 5 or 4 years. One could make a persuasive argument that a different system wouldn’t have that much overhead to a purchase, but within the system we have, that’s the timeframe where owning doesn’t make any sense.

Of course, that said, there needs to be healthy choice in the market, so that people aren’t stuck renting when it doesn’t make sense for their situation.

He was pretty milquetoast, but he got saddled with the post-covid ‘wtf’ the economy went through with shortages and price hikes combined with impacts from Russia’s invasion…

None of it reasonably Biden’s fault, but he got stuck with it happening on his watch so lot’s of people need to blame something vaguely controllable so they blame and vote against the president.

Presidents are usually as likely to be defined by their circumstances as their actual actions or inactions.

Yes, absolutely. Easy to turn viable farmland to bullshit data center, almost impossible to do the former. The datacenter boom causes us to act against our collective interests.

Their scenario was that they bought the house and rented it out while their kid went to college, with the expectation that they would have the house for the kid after college (their college was like 30 minutes away, and the kid lived in the dorm, so it was a perfectly reasonable expectation they might want to move into a house in the area).

Ultimately, the kid didn’t move back and they sold the property, but they bought it during what they saw as a dip in the market and used rent to keep it active while waiting for the kid to return.

You might say that a different system could have provided for all of this, but within the framework of the system they had, they were decent folks doing the right thing as landlord and not sucking up housing stock that they didn’t plan on actually having be owned by the resident. I’m reasonably confident that they even charged less than a mortgage+insurance+taxes would have been for me and between interest and closing costs, no way I would have come out ahead buying and then selling the property in the short time I lived there. Even with that reasonable rent they waived it when I got laid off from my college job.

Again, not every rental experience and in fact probably a small minority, but a landlord is not automatically evil.

If they’re monopolizing the housing market, absolutely.

I think there’s a middle ground between ‘consuming all housing stock in hopes of making airbnbs’ and ‘illegal’. There’s a legitimate case for short term and medium term residence that doesn’t make sense with ownership. However while we should accommodate those, it is a fair point the market should be regulated so that people have a reasonable path to ownership if it makes sense without being stuck with competing with rent-seeking corporations sucking up all the inventory.

There are a few fundamental things a landlord provides:

• Avoiding cost of transitioning a property. Government, insurers, and lawyers make transitioning ownership of a house expensive. That by itself erases about a year of typical ‘equity’ gains. If you have to mortgage, then net loss is likely over the first couple of years. If you know you will leave in say 4 years or less, this has value.
• Ease of leaving. If you own, you can’t just immediately cash in and move out with the proceeds. If you have to move, you get stuck having to pay for two residences until you can manage to offload.
• Potentially access to rent a home when no one will loan you money. On top of being only there for college, when I started renting I had no history, so no bank would have loaned me money anyway, certainly not at a reasonable rate. Sometimes landlords will have as strict a credit requirement as banks, but it’s at least more likely to find a willing landlord than a bank willing to risk the loan.

This comes together for renting making a whole lot of sense for people on a remote work assignment, college students, and seasonal occupants who need a residence for a few months or a couple of years. Also for people who have just moved out on their own and need a residence while they get some credit history under their belt, hopefully being in a situation like university where the need is short term as well.