patrick.net

It’s not the dumbest scam. You wanna bid on this low price house? Okay, you gotta use our lender. Put your earnest money in this escrow account while our lender approves you. Uh oh, you didn’t qualify, we keep your earnest money now.

I’m afraid to not have a valid USA driver’s license so I need to have a home state somewhere.

The car registration lasts 2 years so I can do that before making “a run for the border.”

Social security and Medicare don’t care where you live, but Delta Dental and United Healthcare do.

I want to be sure that I won’t get any shit from insurance companies if I come back for a medical reason.

Credit cards are an issue too come to think of it.

For banking in Mexico some guys get a Wise account and skip getting a bank account there.

Prince Harry out.

What ever happened to the good ole days when renters were nothing more than quartered mendicants and could be beckoned for labor on demand.

DooDahMan says

PROSECUTORS CHARGE 3 WITH MURDER IN SACRAMENTO MASS SHOOTING

A senseless dispute over interest rates and Fed policy.

clambo says

Credit cards are an issue too come to think of it.

How so? I've used CC's in Mexico all the time. Only like 8 visits, but I've never had an issue. My experience is using US$ they'll just fuck with the exchange rate if paying cash at local places. Dollar wise it's a joke even though you pay more. Living there I suppose might be different over time. I've actually yet to visit Baja. Caribbean side is my jam. I'm not a Pacific coast guy outside of CA, OR and WA. Though I despise all 3 in all honesty. Costa Rica was the only Pacific side vacation I personally enjoyed. If you don't surf, west coast beaches are shit. Opinion, feel free to tear it apart, but I've seen a lot of beaches.

If you really want privacy with CC transactions in Mexico or elsewhere, you could get one of those pre-paid Visa cards from CVS or other stores.

OTOH, someone who gets that Visa number might be able to drain the card.

pudil says

It’s not the dumbest scam. You wanna bid on this low price house? Okay, you gotta use our lender. Put your earnest money in this escrow account while our lender approves you. Uh oh, you didn’t qualify, we keep your earnest money now.

First of all, we are not talking about earnest money but downpayments.

reading the article helps:

"The group would then accept offers — sometimes more than one to a house — and direct the buyers to deposit down payments in supposed escrow accounts that the scammers actually controlled."

And second, its the dumbest scam ever because you can easily be tracked down.

Yeah, but they've been able to get away with it for almost 10 years. If they could have kept their greed in check, they could have left the country will their ill-gotten gains for friendly (i.e., non-extraditable) shores.

(channeling Richwicks)
For example, Shrub and Cheney have 10,000 acre spreads in Uruguay. Don't you know that they expect someday to be indicted as war criminals, and have their bugout haciendas ready and waiting?

I wasn’t clear about the credit card issue.

One reason for wanting a USA address is to maintain the credit cards which need replacing from time to time.

I have used them in Mexico in addition to my bank ATM card with no problem.

I’m considering Wise as another ATM card which will have lower fees to convert US dollars to pesos.

Edit
I can also transfer $ from my USA bank to my friend’s bank account and get a good exchange rate from western union, then get cash from her.

This has obviously a few drawbacks: “I’m going to town, I need $100.” “What for?!?”

So anyone who comes end of month typically is con artist. Because landlord is eager to bring them in they don't do due deligance. Learned from expensive problem.

1Credit history is must , tells you if they pay their bills.
2 Income to check if they have capability.
3x rent.
3 eviction record shows they been painful before n they can make it hard for u.

clambo says

I want to be sure that I won’t get any shit from insurance companies if I come back for a medical reason.

We use a PO Box address for everything. Only ones who made me give them a different address was care insurance. They looked it up, and forced me to give them my "real" address. I have it saved in an email so I don't forget it. And that's actually a pretty common tactic used by people as Postal Annex and UPS boxes addresses can look like a physical address. Very common for people living in TJ if they don't have a relative to use.

On the bank thing, you can take your American bank card to any Mexican banks ATM and withdraw cash in Pesos. You will get a small charge from your bank, but the exchange is usually very good, so I think it comes out ahead.

Answer: No

WineHorror1 says

Answer: No

I'd disagree. Religion is just a hijacking of moral and intellectual thought. If there is a higher purpose and a higher meaning, it's up to each of us to discover it ourselves - no supposed "religious leader" is going to help you do that - in fact, quite the opposite.

If there is some true purpose in life, it would be commonly found in nearly all cultures. Have you ever looked at the prohibitions that nearly every culture has? For example, name a culture in 18th century OR BEFORE in which homosexuality was openly accepted. As near as I can tell, it's been frowned upon in nearly all cultures for most of time, and only exists for short periods of time during a nation's decline.

Now, does correlation imply causation? This is something we are currently forbidden to think about.

Pedophilia has never been accepted, criminality has never been accepted, corruption has never been accepted, murder has never been accepted - but these things do happen, during a decline of a nation.

I’m not religious and I don’t think life has a meaning, although I try to make my life meaningful.

Helping my friends in certain ways is the only thing that I do which may be meaningful.

Edit
I have already helped my parents, which I wanted to do.

I've seen their ads around town. But I do my own work, I think these guys sub-contract. I buy, remodel, add or split rooms, then rent. I didn't know anything about construction but partnered with a retired construction worker and we have been flipping and holding for more than 10 years

charlie303 says

We're just packing peanuts really that's all. What is the purpose of packing peanuts, and how insignificant is just one?

richwicks, where does morality come from? Right and wrong...where do they come from? How would "criminality" even be a thing without them?

You're saying morality is innate?

Heck, folks be trying to market time RE, goodness gracious!

Investing replacing interest baring saving, is the biggest fuck job, H.W. Bush and his henchmen ever pulled on the world.

See S&L crisis of 1986, the collapse of our Savings institution, was a controlled demolition, just like the 2000's tech stock market crash was.

The notion that everyone can be a prudent knowledgeable investor trader is the biggest bunch of malarkey in modern day economics.

The way it was done for most of America's history was working slobs put their money into a savings account. That got interest in return, a guaranteed return, often more than what our stock indexes payout in normal times. You gave the bank money, and Widget factory ACME, then went to the bank to borrow money to expand and grow.

After the S&L destruction, Workers are forced to just give ACME Widget factory your money directly and allow them to spend anyway they see fit, and not owe you one single red cent, unless they grow or can find more idiots to give them their money. So it can create an illusion they had growth.

And don't kid yourselves, the minute the majority of the workforce figures out the real winners and losers in the stock market, and stop putting their money into indexes and consumer financial products. Will be the day they pull the plug on the stock market crashing it and bringing it all down.

They want our money, they don't want us making money. Or when/if we do, they will just toss the chess board, and collect all of the marbles and go home, leaving everyone broke.

Funny how the tech market of the late 90's early 00's crashed, yet it didn't! Tech stocks are more valuable today than they were way back then. The problem was Marge the secretary day trader was the hot shit investor, beating out the top cats at the brokerage houses, pushing consumer financial investment vehicles.

Doodahman is correct.
The reason is a little surprising.
It's because of the similarities between the interest compounding effect and the compounding effect of dividends and capital gains (in mutual funds).
Look at a graph of the compounding effect; notice it begins gradually rising and later goes up like an exponential equation.
You get that big rise after many years invested.
Of course, some stocks are exceptional, AAPL is an example.
My advice to young people is have a shitload in mutual funds and spend their "beer money" or "funny money" on a few stocks if they can't resist the urge.
Always have mutual funds to back you up.
$500/month invested for 33 years=$ 1million
If you can't come up with the 500 you should examine your life choices.
"Money talks, bullshit walks." Someone

DooDahMan says

I only invested in companies that I knew something about that were related to the field I worked in. As for trading - I was a buy and hold type that went for those with a history of paying dividends.

Every trade is an investment or they wouldn't buy the damn thing!

What I bet you know, or have experience in deducing or realizing yourself, that your average 401K contributor doesn't know.
Will be the difference in losing it all when the market tanks.
You probably know where to find relevant investment news, you can read investment news, while most it's like trying to read tealeaves.
You can probably know a company is going to get in trouble and might go bankrupt in the coming months, while the other folks will be advised to keep their money parked because they are in it for the long haul .

Since 1999 the same person has told me their 401k is worth the same value over three times. It keeps going back down to a starting point.
There has been a good run for the last 12 years or so. But there will be folks who will be back to the same spot they were in 2007-2008 the last time the stocks took a shit on their 401K.

That doesn't happen to saving accounts.

The only thing more expensive than having a top-notch military is NOT having a top-notch military.

Cloaking technology aint' cheap.

I highly recommend John Vervaeke's Awakening From the Meaning Crisis series. Vervaeke is a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto and has been working on a grammar for dealing with meaning making, wisdom and relevance realization. Many of these concepts have been part of the religious domain, and are not going away even as many religious traditions fade.

Life is suffering.
Suffering without meaning is just torture and unbearable.
A belief in a higher power and a transcendent purpose for life is what gives most people meaning, making the suffering of life bearable.

By this logic, we could surmise that the increased health, comfort, ease, and distractions of modern life make for less suffering and thus less need for meaning, thus less need for faith in the eternal.

But everyone gets there someday. To that point where suffering is everything and you wonder what the point of it all is. When you get there will you submit to the despair or look up to the Father?

WineHorror1 says

richwicks, where does morality come from? Right and wrong...where do they come from? How would "criminality" even be a thing without them?

The best explanation I think of how morality develops is through evolutionary psychology. Behaviors that a group engages in either helps or harms the group, and most behaviors and beliefs are passed down from the old to the young. If the group has thinking which harms the group as a whole, it works against the group's expansion and survival. IF the group has thinking which is beneficial to the group as a whole, it expands.

There's more than one group though of course. Eventually these groups come into conflict with one another and that's a war. Ideas and beliefs can combine when this happens while other ideas are extinguished.

Foot binding was done away with in China. Sati was done away in India and the Caste system lost a lot of its power. Cannibalism has been done away with in certain parts of Africa. 1000's of years ago though we adopted the Arabic numeric system doing away with Roman numerals.

What's interesting about this hypothesis is that morality doesn't only exist among people, but any social animal.

Slavery was a moral advancement. The practice came from turning conquered people into forced servants. Prior to that, they were just exterminated. People, properly, decry slavery - but it was a moral and social advancement. Had the United had different moral principles in the 1950's, it could have taken over the world, extinguished the Chinese, Russians, Indians, and Africans in time. Had we the same morals that were prevalent in 0 AD, we probably would have.

I like Jordan Peterson. He puts into words many of my own feelings. For Example, About Belief in God: (yes, it;s Twitter)

https://twitter.com/i/status/1521849619055091712?source=patrick.net

rocketjoe79 says

I like Jordan Peterson. He puts into words many of my own feelings. For Example, About Belief in God: (yes, it;s Twitter)

https://twitter.com/i/status/1521849619055091712?source=patrick.net

Peterson just had a run in with the grim reaper which he escaped.

It's a common feature of people to "find god" at their end of their life. I'm going through the same process, although I'm not nearly as close to the end of my life as he is.

richwicks says

rocketjoe79 says

I like Jordan Peterson. He puts into words many of my own feelings. For Example, About Belief in God: (yes, it;s Twitter)

https://twitter.com/i/status/1521849619055091712?source=patrick.net

Peterson just had a run in with the grim reaper which he escaped.

It's a common feature of people to "find god" at their end of their life. I'm going through the same process, although I'm not nearly as close to the end of my life as he is.

What run in did Peterson have?

It’s facilitated to see how people live with a nonexistent s* and lazy enough to know that they were brainwashed by parents.

mell says

Peterson just had a run in with the grim reaper which he escaped.

It's a common feature of people to "find god" at their end of their life. I'm going through the same process, although I'm not nearly as close to the end of my life as he is.

What run in did Peterson have?

I cannot say. He had some medical problem, the family elected to keep it private and I respect that privacy.

It happened about a year ago. I have no idea what it was, but I suspect stroke or something that effected him neurologically. I may be wrong about this, and it's wrong for me to poke and prod. He's basically recovered.

Peterson was a hard atheist at one point, to his credit, I don't think his medical condition was what changed his viewpoint - I think merely age did, but I would bet whatever he experienced further solidified it.

atheist will never take u turn. It’s non atheist appears like atheist are the ones take uturn to become none atheist, duh!

richwicks says

I cannot say. He had some medical problem, the family elected to keep it private and I respect that privacy.

He had a severe and life threatening addiction to valium congeners. Yes, valium can be addictive, and the withdrawal process is slow, but very distressing and long due to the slow clearance from the body. He had to go to Russia where they had a particular withdrawal and treatment protocol. Jordan and his daughter believe that it saved his life. They did an interview on it a while back when Jordan disappeared for a while and came back months later looking like a few miles of really bad road. It was bad enough that he nearly died. However, valium in and of itself has an extremely high lethal threshold, so one wonders if something else was involved as well, like suicide attempts.

Thanks for the "heads up"! I should go buy a gasoline-powered generator, assuming they haven't been outlawed for sale in the state. It'll be especially fun knowing that the state's anti-pollution and anti-carbon stance is causing me to use something that is far more pollution and carbon producing than normal generation in normal states.

Electricity rates go up to 42¢ (off peak) in June, but I doubt this will be high enough to reduce demand.

DooDahMan says

No water, no power - what's next ?

Along with crime at its highest in over 2 decades, rampant homeless, and the highest state income tax in the nation!

California Democrat voters are literally braindead. True mouth breathers. Unthinking and uncaring imbecile drones.

I will not live in the pod. I will not eat the bugs.

Oh man this sounds awful and degrading.

I move to Anywhere, USA before I live in a pod.

For $800 you can listen to Austin, the Fentanyl ass whore get crammed in the ass by his John, in the stall above you, all night.

When Privacy doesn't matter!