Bartleby retweeted
There's one more factor - cars bought cheap in USA and shipped to e.g. Guatemala where the cheap labor allows the body work & motor/transmission rebuild to be done cheaply. $2k pickup in USA with blown engine needs USA priced labor to replace engine for American but, not in Guat
Bartleby retweeted
I consider myself a fb marketplace professional and I disagree with the “cash for clunkers” theory.
I think there are multiple reasons why used trucks prices are higher than giraffe p:
1 - new trucks cost 5 times this
2 - women / immigrant / cell phone distracted drivers are totaling out cars in record numbers
3 - good used trucks bought at auction and towed down to Mexico
But I’m ok with blaming Obama too
Bartleby retweeted
This is also my own experience. Every time a dog has jumped on me, or nipped me, even drawn blood, it was in the wake of an owner telling me that their dog is well behaved. Dog owners will often insist that their dog is a good dog immediately *after* it has done something to demonstrate that it is poorly trained.
At the hearing regarding the dog that recently attacked my son, the owner protested that his dogs are friendly and well-trained and, “you can ask anybody.”
Presumably by “anybody,” he doesn’t include the people who were complaining to the city that they were attacked by his dog.
Every single dog owner says that they have a good dog. They all think that they have a trained dog. They all think their dogs are well-behaved. They blurt out, “he’s friendly” as their dog bites somebody as if they have Tourette’s.
Hearing this from a dog owner has absolutely zero value.
So far as I can tell, what dog owners mean when they say that their dog is friendly and well trained is that they like their dog. It means nothing more than that.
I want every dog owner to hear this: every dog who has violently attacked me, someone I know, or a dog I was walking had an owner that assured me this never happens and their dog is safe. Your assessment of your own dog means nothing to me. I don’t trust you to evaluate your dog’s safety. Just put it on a damn leash, and don’t be a tiny woman with a dog that can easily overpower you. I don’t care how well you “know your dog”. That’s what every owner of a shitty dog says.
Bartleby retweeted
We’re firmly in the “deal guy” era. You can raise venture to make deals, you can do foreign policy via deals, build frontier tech via deals. We’re trading off stability for dynamism. It’s unclear if it’s long term optimal but it’s certainly more fun.
Bartleby retweeted
Friendly reminder that, yes, we essentially gave Indians a monopoly on gas stations and convenience stores through government handouts and that's why you can travel to the most rural, white areas and find only Indians staffing them.
Bartleby retweeted
for pretty obvious reasons this is the thing that maximally hits my boomer resentment rage button. they lived in a world where you could take this journey and just fucked around coasting off the hospitality of poor people and looking for drugs.
Bartleby retweeted
An oldie but a goodie. In 1968 a bunch of entitled hippy bastards sent a letter detailing their specious demands to the Warden and Fellows of Wadham College, Oxford. This was their letter of reply, which speaks to how far the academy has since fallen.
Bartleby retweeted
The way how African migrants are able to find their way into the most exclusive social housing all across the West is a genuine superpower.
they're still falling for the Mamba Mentality PR spin
Byron Scott says that Kobe Bryant would lift at 4am, come back and make 500 shots, do a full practice, then work out again at night, and says Kobe told him he did that because over the course of five years the gap would become impossible to close for his competition
“There’s three people in my lifetime that I admired on how hard they worked: Jerry Rice, Walter Payton, Kobe Bryant. His was legendary. Kobe, as far as he never worked out just once a day. He would get up at 4 in the morning, or he’d say, ‘Meet me at the gym at 4 in the morning,’ and he would work out for two, three hours lifting because he knew he had to get stronger, had to get bigger.”
“Then he would go eat breakfast, and then he’d come back and he’d make 500 shots, so he’d be there another two hours. Then he’d get ready for practice. He’d go through a two-and-a-half-hour, three-hour practice like it’s nothing. Then he’d go have lunch, chill out for another hour, then he’d come back at night and work out again.”
“And it was crazy to me because his method of it was scientific. He was like, ‘B, if I work out three times a day and all these other guys who are so-called great players work out just for practice, they just work out that one time a day, over a five-year period they can’t catch me. I’ve worked out that much. I’ve worked on my body, I’ve worked on my footwork, I’ve worked on my shot, so five, ten years from now they can’t catch me. They’re that far behind.’”
“I never thought about it until he explained it to me. I was a guy that in the summertime, go to the gym, lift weights, go to the track, run for two hours, then go play — and that’s equivalent to three times a day. But I never thought of it or put it in the type of method that he was talking about.”
“I just thought it was ironic that a young man got it that quickly. He understood that if I worked out harder and longer and more than the guy who’s supposed to be on my level, sooner or later he won’t be on my level anymore. Kobe was extremely intelligent. He just said, ‘Scientifically, if I do this, you can’t catch me.’ And he was right. It worked.”
Bartleby retweeted
It's the same pretty much everywhere with rent controls. A story from Berlin:
True in Spain too. Every landlord in Madrid and Barcelona screens the renters now. This is an obvious consequence of rent control. The most vulnerable, ostensible protected by the legislation, are in fact excluded from the rental market: if you cannot be evicted for non payment, then you are too risky a renter.
Bartleby retweeted
It really is fascinating how well Indian-Americans score on metrics that are self-reported (like household income) while doing much worse on metrics where the data is centrally collected.
I watched The Thomas Crowne Affair (1999) for the first time recently
Really enjoyed it. Brosnan is unbelievably handsome in it
Bartleby retweeted
A lot of nominally anti-immigration people have a really bad mental model of the world, and they don't really understand on a visceral level what the population levels of India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines etc look like - there is a de facto *infinite* supply of these people and by simple entropic logic they will get *everywhere* in the absence of extremely strict controls at both ends.
