2024 LC Thread #1 - Elder Fraud Advice

I went through Bukowki’s novels, then got into John Fante since that is who inspired him. Wait Until Spring Bandini is one of my favorite novels. Better than most of Bukowski’s after Ham on Rye.

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Been only paying some attention to my local government, but I’m really happy with what I’ve been seeing. Two issues for every california town is homelessness and housing.

  1. Got a big federal grant to pay for a homeless navigation center.
  2. Multiple huge new single family home projects
  3. About 3k new apartments approved to be built in the next 2 years.
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3k in 2 years is, I guess, better than zero but wow that’s a drop in the bucket (you’re in the bay area IIRC??), probably needs to be closer to 3k every 2 weeks to even hope to move the needle

I live in a smaller town, 3k new apartments is enough housing for ~10% of our population. Plus there’s a ton of single family homes going up too.

ah ok just in one town that’s pretty impressive

are your neighbors all up in arms about APARTMENTS? I live in a first ring suburb and any time the topic of apartments comes up people lose their mind even though the only thing they would even conceivably build here would be way, way more expensive than any of the people they are afraid of moving in would ever be able to get approved to lease. It’s just hard-wired in their brain that “apartment = migrant farm labor.” The only apartments that have been built in the last 20 years here are in super fancy high-end mixed-use developments, but these people literally think every unit is housing 30 illegal immigrants.

Not that I’ve seen. They’re doing a good job selecting the sites though. Current massive apartment projects are along lesser desired areas like along a freeway, in an empty lot next to commercial area, etc.

That being said I’m just getting info from our local media, not trolling facebook groups or something. I know the homeless transit center sparked a big protest, but they can get fucked.

AI is going to be a fucking shit show but I do take some small delight in some of the casualties being the shitweasel fuckwads over at Bain and McKinsey who are currently gleefully designing layoffs that are going to come for them in the pretty near future.

When AI starts doing that kind of consulting, I wonder if it’ll be long-sighted enough to advise against the trainwreck of late stage capitalism we’ve been living. Like, it’s not incentivized to juice the next quarter or two’s earnings regardless of the long-term cost. Maybe it’ll be an improvement. Would be great if it not only put those types out of work but proved they were stupid, too.

These morons don’t realize they’re being paid not for their brilliant ideas (you don’t need to be a genius to suggest layoffs), but because their complete lack of morality or standards for decent human behavior let them serve as a shield for management.

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I think it really says a lot about the consultants that private equity is literally just an offshoot branch of the same necromancy they practice.

I really cannot overstate how much I fucking hate MBA’s as a group. But I challenge anyone to find someone who actually hates any minority group as much as I hate consultants and PE people. My level of prejudice towards MBA’s as a group is pretty steep (I generally assume they’re idiots who are huge dbags about it), but I don’t hate them individually the way I hate every single one of the consultants lol.

If there is a hell lasting 2 years at McKinsey is more than enough to get you sent there. (No I don’t mean the back office drones at McKinsey, you all know exactly who I mean)

The big management revelation they’ve been dining off of for decades can be easily boiled down to ‘yes but what if we just fucked everyone over and took everything that wasn’t nailed down today.’ What doesn’t directly fall under that heading is a variety of ‘let’s corner the market in some competitive small industry that has the potential to be used as a front for extorting someone’. The Sinaloa drug cartel was infinitely more innovative than the big consulting firms or private equity have ever been and quite possibly low key less evil. The best case morally for a private equity project is that the investors are the people getting screwed, which is the third big category of private equity deals lol.

EDIT: If it makes anyone feel like it makes me less of a hypocrite I very much hope there is no hell, because I’m almost certainly going there lol.

https://x.com/dpd_/status/1757066924142514348?s=46&t=45vgHoZvsEXz2aWNi8tmcw

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These guys love telling on themselves.

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Goddamn do billionaires absolutely love pretending they invented a concept like nominative determinism.

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Ackman is, it is extremely important to note, the son of a very very wealthy man. The reason he’s so passionate about this is because he wants very badly to be able to take all of the credit for the success I guess he has had (Pershing Square has returned 7.9% since inception in 2014, thanks to the 2/20 fee structure Bill Ackman has done very well indeed and it’s all capital gains lolol).

This dude is a great example of everything wrong with our system. He’s insufferable even to other oligarchs because he doesn’t get it. He actually believes that he is a good person. Imagine being such a clueless asshole and being able to be this supposedly successful? He makes them uncomfortable partly because he’s obnoxious, but I gotta think that him being so obviously fraudulent as a person has to trigger some real cognitive dissonance about the lies they tell themselves.

I’m sure it would be less obnoxious if he was some rainman type stock picker, but that’s absolutely not him. These people have met Warren Buffett and Ackman is no Warren Buffett.

Heard a commercial advertise a “proprietary AI” for selecting job candidates.

“AI” is the new .com

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Annualized, or total? If it’s annualized the returns are very close to putting the entire thing in the S&P and then taking your 2&20 lol… If it’s total, LOfuckingL.

More violent NHL or NFL?

NFL

Injuries have been trending downward in the NHL while doing the opposite in the NFL, despite all rules amendments.

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I’ve seen NFL football and AHL hockey (triple A) up close and personal. Football is more violent overall. Hockey can sometimes have more vicious one off collisions and hits, in particular because there’s no protection around the bottom half of the face.

I’d rather get hit by a linebacker over the middle in full football pads and helmet than take a shoulder to the chin coming across the blue line, but overall if I were a parent, I’d rather my kids play hockey than football from a safety perspective.

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