patrick.net

The U.S. government doesn't represent Americans. It represents corporations. And corporate approval of Congress is high.

Big business, not the citizen, is the boss of Congress and the White House.

C'mon, you slaves, businesses walk away from loans all the time and continue to obtain new loans. Tishman Speyer is an infamous deadbeat RE developer who continues to obtain new financing. For that matter, jP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, GE Capital, all of the investment banks that were bankrupt received new money from us taxpayers. I understand that those who hate slaves who escape slavery the most are those who accept their lot as slaves. But please tell my why it is OK for businesses to walk away from debt, worse, to market fraudulent products, and yet continue to receive loans, but when the little guy does it, tsk, tsk, tsk.

There is nothing real about money. It can be created out of thin air for the well connected. You slaves actually have to work for it, and instead of killing bankers, you are bitching about runaway slaves. Pathetic.

robertoaribas says

Sorry, but that is actually going to be positive for home prices.

And therefore positive for everyone that actually works a job that does this weird thing involving productivity?

I don't see how anyone can spin Wall Street buying-up swaths of residential properties as a positive thing. You have said repeatedly that you don't care what the paper-value of your rental empire is, so surely you aren't rooting for valuation increases. These are the same Wall Street psychopaths that held a gun to the collective heads of all pensioners in the US in order to get the US taxpayer to pay for their gambling tab a few short years ago. These psychopathic entities should have been burned to the damn ground, not paid to receive a hand-job from the taxpayers then then handed the keys to become those same taxpayers' landlord.

All I hope is that we manage to get another FDR at the helm to gut these vampiric entities. If we don't, it'll be pitchforks and AR15's from people that have had enough, but I don't want to see that. It's too bad that the mentally unstable folks with guns are running around shooting up schools. If they directed their ire at board rooms on Wall Street, we'd be naming national holidays after them someday.

Obligtory:

True, Prop 13 is starving the schools, but people who bought recently do pay a reasonable property tax rate. So a parcel tax on top of that is unfair to them.

The real problem is that Prop 13

* lets businesses get away with paying almost no property tax, forever
* lets landlords rake in rent and pay nearly none of the cost of police, fire, etc
* lets the elderly pass on their ultra-low property tax rate to rich children, forever
* lets the very rich avoid property tax, since Prop 13 has no means test at all

What was supposed to protect poor old people ended up protecting the ultra-rich, landlords, and corporations. Of course the people who created Prop 13 knew that all along.

Obama pardons drug dealers, Trump pardons a sheriff.

personal

The Federal Reserve should not exist.

The idea that we can trust a cabal of bankers to manipulate the currency in the public interest is laughable.

To be rich is to control the labor of other people. To be rich is to have other people serve you. Everything else is an abstraction that obscures the fundamantal division into masters and servants.

If you just think about that for a minute, it becomes obvious that we cannot all be rich. Who then would be the servants? No matter how hard we all work, no matter how smart we all may be, it is mathematically impossible for everyone to to be rich.

So if we're going to have rich people (and I think we should have some) the question becomes this: What is the proper qualification for being rich? Here are your choices:

1. Being born into wealth and accumulating more via your mere ownership of assets.
2. Personally creating useful products and services.

If you agree that number two is the answer, that argues strongly for high inheritance taxes, and high taxes on unearned income from mere ownership, and low taxes on actual work.

There are some other options though, by thinking beyond national boundaries:

3. Importing people from Africa and making them your hereditary slaves.
4. Exporting work to poor countries, the way the US is doing with China.

All women are crazy. No exceptions, and I say this as a married man.

Everyone on this blog is a dipshit. Except me, who bought condos and homes in Phoenix at drop dead low prices.
I am the smartest investor you will ever meet. You are the moron loser that didn't buy homes in Phoenix.

Me: the super duper star investor. You: the mouth-breathing moron that isn't me.

I will keep reminding you of my great investment decisions, over and over and over again, in case you forget how great I am.

Well, here is one of my greatest deals: I bought a van near the river for $100, did $25 work on it and a family of 4 is living in it now for $100/month. Try to learn from my success!

I am not worried.
Everything will be fine...

There is something seriously wrong with the Realtor® code of "ethics" when an agent can get fired simply for giving his honest and very humorous opinion.

The NAR says it's "ethical" to publicly say only things which lead to commissions, but it's "unethical" to say anything in public which might prevent a commission.

Why would you want anyone with such bogus "ethics" representing you? I'd much rather have a really honest guy like Tom Stone!

Maybe I will create a "Secret Agent" system where agents can write anonymous reviews of open houses, and if you like their style, you can hire them by the hour for real advice. Should I do it?

The oil facility probably had information that would lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton.

Tim Aurora says

Disagree with hat socialist agenda. I think it penalizes the parents who paid for college.

It penalizes everyone who paid for college...not just the parents......and sets a precedent that people who pay their obligations are fools.

Hillary today shattered the glass ceiling - Most faithless electors for a Presidential candidate in over 100 years!

No one should watch anything sponsored by those propagandizing for lies.

I will no longer watch, listen to, or be present at anything which is pushing sodomy to children, shoehorning race where it is irrelevant, or replacing men with feminists as if they were men. None of that.

If my grandmother puts on NPR, I will leave the house until it's off.

I'm done.

It's sad. This site was awesome back in the day when Patrick had his section of selected real estate articles... and those were augmented by other members. Once he stopped posting his selected articles, there was a real shift in the membership of this site.

First, the real crazies started to appear. Some were new members, others were old members who shocked everyone with some of their VERY twisted views. I'm not talking about people with strong views on the fringes of the political spectrum... I'm talking about people who are clearly a few cards short of a full deck. It seemed like they descended on the site one day and then tried to dominate many of the discussions by attempting to redirect all "conversations" to their twisted agenda items. Attacks against women, races, sexual preference went through the roof.

Since the posting of articles turned into a free-for-all, the general quality of what was being posted went in the toilet. We get a few really good, substantive articles here and there... But those often fall off the list because the current cast of posters don't have the interest (or intelligence) to respond with well-thought-out posts. And why would they want to work hard at a response when the site is inundated with articles that serve, once again, to bait people into twisted attacks against women, races, and sexual preference? Some days, Patrick.net reads more like a middle school forum than anything else.

In turn, we lost many of the members who had provided the real substance to this site. They got sick of it and left. Can't say I blame them.

I guess Patrick got busy... or he lost interest. It's just a shame. He had a great idea and he executed it well. I just wish you could still glimpse some of that original idea. Patrick.net isn't special anymore. It's just one of the millions of bitching sites that exist around the internet, where intelligence is scorned and outrageousness, applauded. Jerry Springer will be thrilled to know that the dumbing down of the general population continues, un-thwarted!

Why is it mostly the leftist that resort to violence or threats of violence?

It's pretty brave to live in the belly of the beast and openly run this website.

Thanks Patrick.