I have never seen "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" and likely never will. I feel I abstained with good reason, and that reason being I saw "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" meaning I fell into the demographic "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" was created for.
There is so much content on Youtube that basically attributes the derailing of Disney's Star Wars to Rian Johnson that it could be classified as a genre of "subverting-expectations-bukkake" (nsfw) however, I for one, tire of how often Rian Johnson's film is credited, angrily or dismissively, as the franchise turning point. Some revisionist history is going on, something significant is being erased.
I present a transitional fossil:
I see him and “I'm like dude force awakens I loved it.” he goes “I hated it
and then we fought for three hours. Like everything he said I had an answer to; he's like “well the plot felt too familiar” and I'm like “familiar like comfort food? like mashed potatoes? You dumb dick yeah that sounds terrible.”
People seem to have forgotten "The Force Awakens" was divisive. This forgotten fact presents Rian Johnson's "subversion of expectations" as a symptom, rather than a cause. If we walk upstream, the underlying cause is that Disney bought Lucasfilm because it was paying undue attention to Star Wars' fanbase.
This was not a purchase based on artistic vision. It was the purchase of hogs to grind out sausage. The underlying problem was that Disney was not a visionary, but a pollster.
The Force Awakens is exactly the movie you get from listening to the chatter of fandom. What did the fans want? They basically wanted an apology for the prequal trilogy. They wanted words to be unsaid, words like "midi-chlorians" they wanted Jar-Jar Binks to be erased.
So Disney hired minimally creative and quite competent JJ Abrams to create a soft reboot.
Sometimes, a band radically changes direction. Bob Dylan plugs in, David Bowie does dance music, Ice-T starts rapping, Beasties Boys start rapping, Green Day add synths, Radiohead go ambient noise, Succubus and Red Hot Chilli Peppers take sedatives, Guns and Roses go Nu Metal. Inevitably this creates "I Like Your Old Stuff Better Than Your New Stuff" fans who don't want to go with the artists, a reaction so predictable Regurgitator could write a song about it for the album Unit where they dramatically switched from Alt-Rock-Grunge to Synth-Pop.
I have this friend Tommi that had a retort to these kinds of fans which is "you can still listen to the old stuff." which made an impression because it is profoundly wise.
sequelitis (uncountable)
(informal, derogatory) The tendency of a well-received work to spawn many inferior sequels. ~ from wiktionary
Sequelitis is an ailment not found in the work, but in the fan. It is a form of mental retardation, in the most literal interpretation of those words. A failure to recognize a pattern - as Gabor Mate describes addiction "it isn't the having, it's the getting." We can see sequelitis exhibited amongst the user and consumer base of Nijijourney as they generate a relentless torrent of "anime style" illustrations. These are people that want familiar-novelty.
AI has much promise for scratching the consumer itch of sequalitis with its incredibly low production costs, the perfect solution however would be a form of selective inability to form memories, so people could watch a movie they love like Star Wars: A New Hope, endlessly without tiring of it. Warren Buffet has asserted that the reason Cola's outsell virtually all the other soft drinks combined is because it has no taste-memory. Something my own practical experimentation found to be true (I haven't drunk Coke in any significant quantity for over a decade) it cleanses the pallet as you drink it, compared to say, parmesan cheese. You can't just keep chowing down on parmesan, you'll get sick of it.
This happens with Fanta, but not with Colas. Such that, Buffet alleges, if someone drinks 2L of Fanta today, they probably won't drink 2L of Fanta tomorrow. They've scratched that itch. But someone who drinks 2L of Coke today, will drink 2L of Coke tomorrow, because you don't get sick of something that you can only experience the taste of while you are drinking it.
As yet, there is no Cola of imagery, or Audio.
Fans wanted to see Star Wars original trilogy again for the first time. They wanted a new experience they were guaranteed to enjoy. That's what sequalitis is. And they got it, from JJ Abrams. The problem is you can't please everybody.
There is going to be a frontier of points a line going from Star Wars IV to Space Balls where something is recognizably Star Wars but also novel. For example, you could remark Star Wars IV shot for shot, but recast every human role with Asian actors, or you could bring back every living actor of the original cast and put them in the same wardrobe and setting but write a whole new story, like Luke's partner leaves him and he enlists Han to fly him around the Galaxy to meet up with all his exes and find out what's wrong with him.
JJ Abram's took a point on that frontier that is more similar to my former solution - Female Luke, Black Stormtrooper, Lady Stormtrooper, Electro-Baton, Angsty Darth Vader, Bigger Death Star that can destroy a Solar System instead of just a planet.
This solution scratched some people's sequalitis. Most people's sequalitis. People who don't want a new story in a familiar setting. This is what Disney produces by listening to fan chatter.
However, fan chatter is lose-lose. Fans want an Itchy and Scratchy that is realistic and down to earth, while teeming with robots and magic powers ("Adventure Time").
The problem is, that fans of "The Force Awakens" didn't need "The Force Awakens" they could just go watch the original Star Wars again. Sure, some fans of "The Force Awakens" will be activists, who like it for its demographics and so there's going to be some tiny minority that prefer it to the original Star Wars, for reasons nothing to do with entertainment. But for the demographic represented by Brian Posehn, I defy any of them to say "The Force Awakens" is superior to the orginal film. I'm sure, with the tide out, "The Force Awakens" just scratched their sequalitis.
Alas, Disney had a formula, and they stuck to it. Just as they had listened to chatter, thrown out Lucas' outlines for the new trilogy, and given the fans their undeserved apology for the prequals, they now listened to the fans demanding an apology for "The Force Awakens" lack of originality. They hoped to win me back, and rightly. People who enjoyed "The Force Awakens" evidently went to see "The Last Jedi". Whereas, people like me, who just felt Disney's hand in my pocket taking my money for a new coat of paint on a rusted chasis, needed something new story wise.
My brother has sequalitis, and he really enjoyed "The Last Jedi" where I by that stage, resolutely didn't care. My brother illustrates that just as "The Force Awakens" was divisive, people seem to forget that "The Last Jedi" was divisive also. There are people who like what Rian Johnson did.
Disney, forked themselves. This explains the disaster of "The Rise of Skywalker", the whole problem is that Disney try to give fans what they want. They were fucked, because they did this twice. They gave the fans who wanted something familiar, something familiar, then they gave the fans who wanted something novel, something novel.
What is JJ Abram's best work? One of his reboots? Lost? Super 8? Cloverfield?
Rian Johnson has made great films. Brick is great. Looper is great. Knives Out was great, Glass Onion...sequalitis. I don't hold Johnson responsible for a character like Rose Tycho, I think perhaps the best defence of Rian Johnson is the character of Rose Tycho.
Rose Tycho exists because of intersectionality. Because Disney listened to fans who demanded of JJ Abrams an Asian in Star Wars. Disney gave them Zatoichi in Rogue One, and then killed two birds with one stone (intersectionality) by putting in body positive Rose Tycho into Last Jedi.
Conclusion
Fans are out of control and they need to be put back in their fucking place. They seem to have been encouraged to adopt this misguided notion that they in fact own the Intellectual Property (IP) rights, and furthermore that they own the Intellectuals too. That someone, for the crime of making something they like, needs to keep making things they like.
Fandom is an issue analogous to gun control. There's this libertarian streak that drives the regulating of a prisoners dilemma.
By this I mean, fans want more. But what is good for fans, is less. Fans had all the entertainment calories they needed with 3 Star Wars films. They already were oversaturated with 6 Star Wars films. George Lucas was wisely regulating them by not producing any more films. Then he sold Lucasfilm to Disney.
Maybe Rogue One is good, I don't care. Maybe the Mandalorian is good. I don't care. Maybe Andor is good. I don't care. I never needed any of them to be made. I don't have sequalitis. To be honest, one Star Wars movie is probably sufficient for me. 3 certainly were satisfying.
Fans need to be told to eat their fucking vegetables. There is, I'm confident, a silent majority analogous to the majority of adults that see a parent who lets their toddler eat only pizza and chicken nuggets because "that's all he likes" and judge them harshly, that watch the movie industry let grown-toddlers watch nothing but DCMCU, Star Wars and Anime and know it isn't fucking good for them. (The pinnacle of this sad state we live through, is Oscar winning movie "The Joker", where nerds had to be tricked into seeing a Scorsese movie by arranging Broccoli into a clown face.)
Forget a writers strike. There needs to be a producers strike, where Cinema chains and Streaming services alike say "we are going to have Nerd-free months. where no nerd-shit can premier, and you have to watch grown up stories about grown up adults."
I'm going to start my story in China. I think with an end of day accounting, there's little that Xi Jinping and I would agree upon, I might even describe Xi as a moral monster. But we don't agree on nothing. Where he and I have common ground, I suspect, is that we don't want people investing in real estate and crypto.
Way back in 2008, not knowing what to do with my remaining time in Beijing, I did what I discovered I do whenever I am somewhere for no particular reason and that is to find a tall building with a viewing deck. In Beijing I found the CCTV tower, not "Closed Circuit" but "Chinese Communist" and you could walk around its viewing deck and it would have photos of what used to be in the direction you were looking. One of them had this photo and plaque:
"It was the origin of the idiom: grasp at feathers when gooses [sic] fly by. (It stands for taking advantage of others whenever there is a chance.)"
Over two decades or so, I got tired of trying to explain what is wrong with property "investment" and in the last 5 years I've tried to flip that burden of having people explain to me what is right about property "investment", and I do that flip with the proposition: "Sell me a landlord."
So ubiquitous is the practice and received wisdom of "investing in bricks and mortar" that my experience is that most people find the question unintelligible. Few people on the face of it, get what I am even asking them to do.
What I'm asking is to imagine I have a choice. I'm moving from Palookaville to the Big Smoke for a new job I anticipate holding for at least 20 years, and I have money, a big pile of cash and a line of credit. I as a consumer have two choices a) I could buy a house to live in for the next chapter of my life. Or b) I could rent a house owned by somebody else. I'm asking you to persuade me to take option b.
My experience is that most people have only ever examined the question: "is investing in property good for me?" and almost nobody has ever looked at "is investing in property good for anyone else?" and I generally experience that people struggle with cognitive dissonance like a kayaker struggling with a Hippopotamus and eventually blurt out something like "Because I smart you dumb!"
Which can otherwise be worded as "grasp at feathers when geese fly by."
Australia is in Trouble
This year I've watched as the AUD has been nerfed almost to parity with the Mexican Peso. Which is surprising to me because Australia has been raising its interest rates, pretty much all year. Usually, a rise in interest rates makes buying that currency more attractive, and lowering those rates makes the currency less attractive.
There's an explanation, which is that big economies like the USA have raised interest rates even higher, with the US central bank interest rate at 4.75% and Mexico's central bank interest rate is at 11.25%. Sydney Morning Herald/The Age journalist Shane Wright wrote something I'm not going to read, like the vast majority of SMH/Age articles under the headline "RBA plays ‘recession roulette’ as it steps up inflation fight" this is the knight fork many economies I suspect are facing post pandemic.
Here is a way too simple explanation of the dilemma economies like Australia face. The first thing is the go-to response for combatting rising inflation and cost of living is to chill the economy by raising interest rates.
Wage rises have been practically non existent since around mid-1970s, 80s at the latest. With employers routinely giving workers 2% pay increases annually while inflation runs at 2.2% a lot of people would have seen themselves going slowly backwards over decades. Slightly less than a lot of people didn't experience this backward slide because they began speculating on property.
Investment is when you by a share in a spoon factory that manufactures and makes spoons at profit. You buy into the factory for say $100, and gradually over time the money made from selling spoons at profit pays you back your initial investment and then some.
Speculation is when you buy a piece of art and then hope an air conditioner falls on the artist so they can't make any more art and then someone who really wants some of that specific artist's art like their mum comes and buys the piece back at a profit to you. The most common object of speculation is property. It might help to think of it as "reverse mining", people borrow money from their future selves and pump it into the ground instead of extracting it, in the hope that someone else will buy your goldmine for you for more than you pumped into the ground.
A very, very large part of Australia's economy, is borrowing as much money as you possibly can to buy a piece of land and for the most part reliably sell it to someone who is willing to borrow even more money than you did a couple of years later.
It's true that many people speculate on stocks, doing complicated mathematics in order to forget that they are buying pieces of actual real world businesses. One key difference between shares and property, is that you don't need to live in a share of a business, so if you sell a share you don't simultaneously become rich and homeless. In fact there isn't a single share that millions of poor S.O.B.s are forced to buy or rent in order to not die from exposure.
I can't remember when Australians, particularly in the two most populous cities Sydney and Melbourne, began to tug their shirt collars over housing becoming unaffordable. Australia's housing market didn't crash (or rationalize) during the 2008 global financial crisis. So for about two decades, Australia has periodically discussed how to make housing affordable without house prices going down.
You can't have house prices go down, because that would force the general public to confront the fact that they've been largely going fucking nowhere since the mid 1970s.
The thing is, that the longer you allow this moron game to get going, the more devastating it is to stop.
So you kick the can up the road. You just try and keep the game going so the devastating consequences don't happen on your watch. That is viable, if you only have wolves at the door, and no fire in the kitchen, but not when you have a fire like inflation in the kitchen.
Below is basically the Australian economy since the 1989~91 recession thru to present day:
I don't know why the "throwing balloons" game needs to be mixed with Dance Dance Revolution, nor why this is what my doppelganger chooses to do with his life, I'm just glad he's indoors because I think if you ever come face to face with your doppelganger you die.
Why Me - The Window and the Mirror
When bad stuff happens to people, somewhere in the grieving process they might ponder as to why the bad stuff is happening to them. Sometimes this is straight forward, you are going to jail because you robbed a liquor store. Sometimes it is hard, like why you got an illness that has a quite horrible treatment process and some prospect of death for no apparent reason.
In the difficult cases, it is my position that often people will compare themselves to everyone else, contemplating how not special they are. Maybe even wonder why the worst people they know appear to have better luck.
Author Jim Collins in his book 'good to great' invoked a metaphor to describe good managers called 'the window and the mirror' this was more about attributing credit, but he noticed the good managers had a tendency to professional humility. That is to say, when things went wrong, they looked in the mirror and when things went right they looked out the window.
Poor performance they were to blame, good performance their people were to be thanked. The major limitation of "The Window and the Mirror" is that poor performing narcissistic managers also tend to look in the window and the mirror, just everything that is good is owing to their genius and everything bad is because their people let them down.
Most people have the fragile ego and accompanying positive illusions of a poorly performing manager. An explanation in and of itself as to why more people opt to invest in property, than run a successful business.
The framing of "Sell me this Landlord" is specifically to provoke a "why me?" kind of reflection, when people feel entitled to good things happening to them, good things like "passive income".
Because good fortune and success, results in most people un-skeptically accepting the preposition that they are truly special. That they are savvy, street smart or whatever else they tend to tell themselves. Rarely do they reflect upon how utterly average they are, as they might with a diagnosis of MS, cancer or early onset Parkinson's. Nor take time to contemplate how people they look up to, or aspire to be in some respect aren't as fortunate as them.
Xi don't care, Xi don't give a shit.
An advantage of a totalitarian regime, is that you don't much have to give a shit about the people you rule over. Yes you may live in perpetual fear of a popular uprising, but you don't live in perpetual fear of people going "boo hoo, I spent my life making malinvestments into the unproductive part of the economy and now you want to undo that, I'm going to vote for someone else!" and subsequently you don't have to play a farcical game of trying to make property affordable without reducing the price.
Xi is in such a position, and basically drew 3 red lines to try and arrest the Chinese obsession with property speculation. However, as everyone knows, Xi is more Pooh-bear than Honey Badger and while he can push the vast number of people he dominates around somewhat he has limits.
By unflattering contrast, Australia cannot get rid of fucking negative gearing. Many people don't understand what negative gearing is. Comedian and recovering cocaine and prescription medication addict John Mulvaney provided a perfect example in his Netflix special Baby J, where he used his credit card to purchase a $12,000 Rolex in order to convert it to $6,000 cash so he can buy drugs.
Negative gearing is where the government turns up and says "good job on just flushing 6k down the toilet, we'll allow you to deduct that from your taxable income."
This would be less problematic if the Australian government allowed drug addicts to deduct the losses they took on motivated sales from their taxable income because the vast majority of non-functioning drug addicts (the kind, that like a friend of mine, sold books on ebay for 50c just to take the shipping money and spend it on heroine) do not tend to benefit much from reducing their taxable income.
Whereas, the government congratulating the fucking geniuses that buy a cash flow negative property (a house whose income via rents do not exceed the mortgage repayments) allows them to deduct the monthly losses from their taxable income.
What this means in practice, is that your landlord might also be a dentist and for ease of calculation let's say he makes $120,000 per year, or $10,000 a month. We'll assume he's in the highest tax bracket and for simplicities sake, we'll say he pays $4,000 a month in taxes. Taxes that are spent on maintaining roads, sanitary drinking water, law and order, education, healthcare etc.
Except that you in the house you rent from him, pay these days about 60% of your income after tax to him in rent, drinking the rest because your life is so depressing. You pay the landlord about $2000 per month.
The thing is, your landlord had to borrow a lot of money to purchase the home you live in, so much so, that he repays $6,000 per month on his mortgage, $2,000 of which you effectively pay for him, meaning $4,000 of his $6,000 a month after taxes goes to repaying a bank.
The Australian government looks at this situation and says 'there's something wrong here...we are charging the rich guy who owns too much housing too much tax! You can deduct the $4,000 you pay to the bank that you lose on your investment property from your taxable income!'
To which the tenants excitedly exclaim "and us too! The $2,000 we pay to him to help pay off his "investment" we can deduct that too!" and the Australian government says "are you fucking kidding me? There's a reason we don't teach everyone economics in school. Someone has to finance roads, sanitary drinking water, law and order, education, healthcare etc."
Reverse Engineering the Thought Process I Don't Have
When asked to sell someone the valuable service of a landlord, I imagine the framing of the question would throw most people. They will confuse my challenge with the question "should I buy or should I rent?" and likely ponder why I'm asking a question everyone knows the answer to.
This would give someone pause, and consider that generally it is more expensive to own a home in a slightly less desirable suburb, (cash flow wise, a 3 bedroom median priced house in the suburb of Reservoir as at Feb, 2023 with the average interest rate of 5.13% entails a repayment of $4,155 per month) than to rent a home in a more desirable suburb. (A 3 bedroom house in South Melbourne costs a median monthly rent of $3,900)
If you are unfamiliar with Melbourne and thinking "that's not too different" there is a big difference between South Melbourne and Reservoir, if a landlord helpfully offered to buy the house you are living in, they would be paying in the vicinity of $11,262 a month.
That is big money, fortunately it is subsidized by the people who get to enjoy the quality of life improvements the landlord paid a premium for, and the rest you can deduct from your tax obligations to finance health, education, law and order, infrastructure, national defence, the perverted arts etc.
At which point, confusion should set in, because the best selling point of a landlord is that they subsidize your living, but the underlying asset should improve in value. So even if you can supercharge your savings by renting, the landlord is basically doing the same, just instead of depositing it in a bank they are paying down debts and accumulating equity that will come back as cash when they sell off their superfluous housing.
Furthermore, when they flip the property, the new owners may want the property to live in, in which case you'd have to move, not just get out of the fucking house every time the realtor is showing the property, making sure you don't leave shit stains on the ceramic.
So the first thing you blurt out isn't going to be "it's cheaper to rent than own!" rather "you wouldn't do it, because you lose access to capital gains..."
Forcing me to repeat and specify, that the task is not to advise me that I should buy and not rent. It is to sell me the valuable societal function of landlords.
A common response I get is "they provide housing." This is confusing the property construction industry with property investment. It's not like property developers have a glowing reputation, but they develop property for sale to both people who want housing for housing and people who want housing as an investment.
By definition, a landlord owns housing excessive to their own needs. That's how they have spare housing to rent. The only sense in which landlords provide housing is by permitting someone to rent it. They are under no obligation to do so. This is an area I know a bit about as a former author of Prosper Australia's Speculative Vacancy Report for me the most frustrating thing about Australia's pantomime discussions of "Housing Affordability" is not that the solution must always be increasing supply by cutting red tape, but the premise that the Australian housing market is efficient. It is not.
We are rapidly approaching the limits of my imagination as to how someone could sell me a landlord, because in my general experience, tenants do not appreciate their landlords, and landlords do not appreciate their tenants. Tenants are generally regarded as a liability, stinking up your asset, wearing and tearing it while simultaneously needing things.
The remaining selling points for landlords, are that they assume the costs of property maintenance, if there's a broken pipe that ruins walls and carpet, they pick up the bill. If termites eat the entire frame and it has to be demolished, the landlord is stuck with the bill.
The problem being that any repairs that do not destroy the housing, it is generally a better deal if the tenant just paid the bill and no rent. It is rare to have to fork out $46,800 in home maintenance bills any given year. Anything that destroys the house, yes, is a pain. But many landlords destroy the houses they buy in order to subdivide and flip smaller shittier housing for a profit.
There are even landlords that pay unscrupulous individuals to destroy heritage listed properties in the night. That's because with house and land packages, very little of the value paid for by property investors is the house. The vast majority is the land, and the value is not really generated by the land but all the land around the land. This is even the case in the Metaverse, though the Metaverse is shit.
It isn't generally the pH level of the soil that makes a location desirable. A piece of land overlooking the beach and a 5 minute light rail ride to restaurants and entertainment that is geologically identical to the same area of land 6 hours away from the nearest hospital are not of the same value.
This is known and expressed in idioms like "location, location, location" and "better to own the worst house on the best street than the best house on the worst street." and in somewhere in Beijing "grab at feathers when geese fly by." All of which suggests that the main function of landlords is essentially scalping beds, bathrooms and kitchens.
As in, landlords are literally scalpers, people who insert themselves between the producer and the eventual actual buyer and take a cut. Unlike a concert or sporting event though, there's no expiration, meaning you can buy and hold land until you can gouge someone. Property investment guides can literally be boiled down to "buy 10 tickets to see Taylor Swift and sell 9 of them for double or triple what you paid."
I'm confident I can sell a landlord to someone, but only under very specific criteria - namely being the long term owner and custodian of a property somewhere people have to live for short chapters of their lives. Pretty much, property with good access to a tertiary Education where young people are going off to experience independence for the first time and briefly before returning home because every young person's parents' retirement aspirations involve scalping housing to young people.
Company towns pose a potential problem with wage theft, if for example I need to move to Cypress Creek for the duration of my contract I would rather not have to invest in real estate whose value is going to be determined by the longevity of the town's major employer, given that any one employee has little control over a company's performance. Enron going bust produced stories of loyal employees that invested all of their 401(k) retirement funds into Enron and not just losing their jobs but their retirement. Subsequently to me it makes sense that if all a town has going for it is a single employer, if that employer goes bust they should be left holding the baby.
Renting a room in a nice house that you aren't free to trash at your own expense for a few years is something worth renting from someone else owning. I would honestly prefer that than spending my final summer between high school and university purchasing a home near the institution that accepts me and then selling it so I can be moved out the day after graduation.
The clue is in the name.
So there might be a "Energy Czar" or a "Business Tycoon" but how often have you applied for a job position like Human Resources Sultan, or Payroll Viscount, or Sales Marquis.
Landlord's aren't a hallmark of Capitalism, they are a hangover from feudalism. Yes it has been democratized out over several centuries to largely include the upper 20% of society, where it used to just be the aristocracy and the king.
But the middle ages was probably the last time landlords provided any valuable service, namely stopping the neighbouring landlord from raping and pillaging. It was like an involuntary scheme where working people all had to retain a lawyer throughout the course of their lives. A lord and other nobility with land holdings that didn't fish or farm or craft but trained in the yard. In practice people belonged to the land which belonged to the lord. Not the other way out.
Now you pay tax to upkeep an army and navy in a nationalized military that is under some kind of civilian oversight and the landlord is someone who has bought the right to levy a private income tax should they choose to provide housing, which they increasingly don't bother with, because there is more money to be made in trading the rights to levy a private income tax than there is likely ever to be in charging rent.
What Water?
If this is the first time you've heard me articulate that landlords are basically useless and we shouldn't be encouraging people to become landlords, you may be feeling a little disoriented as you ponder for the first time, whether your owning a rental property is good for anyone but you.
What I would point out is that it is in no way unusual for people to just live entire lives unaware that some fundamental thing is in front of them all the time.
A semi-famous example is the fish parable from David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
Do you believe in a God? Or not? Pretty much unless you believe in all the God's, like Lord Krishna has many aspects, including aspects that won't tolerate any other aspect of Krishna, you would already recognize that vast numbers of people are convinced of a God that does not in fact exist. They can persist their whole lives under the apprehension that all the unnecessary suffering they and animals experience is a completely justified test of their faith. Maybe even a fun wager with a divine antagonist they all-powerfully choose not to stop.
And crypto, the number of people who find crypto really exciting is startling, a digital magic bean that has produced some of the largest financial crashes, bankruptcy and fraud in history as well as bad art, and nobody in it seems to have noticed that crypto isn't good for anything. Bitcoins scarcity might be ironclad, but it also seems that while we have one crypto currency that nobody uses for any transactions, anyone can make another blockchain crypto currency that nobody uses for any transactions.
The fact is, most people will not believe in something that is right in front of their noses, and believe in shit that has never existed.
So you live your whole life with these people of the asset owning class called "landlords", and cinema never portrays them in a flattering light. You maybe play Monopoly with the family as a child where the aim is to drive everyone else into bankruptcy. Media informs you that the [insert your country here] dream is to own your own home.
As presented, this "dream" is never questioned, questions like "why is this the dream and not the default?" "Should a nation in the 21st century be proud of people having a prospect of housing security? Or is this like being proud of having drinking water in the 21st century?" (Actually the Mexican dream could be "drinking water from the tap.")
Ultimately it becomes normal to be advised that you don't really invest in property for the rental income, but the capital gains. A statement that is logically equivalent to saying you don't open a store to sell goods to customers, but to sell the business. I haven't really come across someone who enjoys being a landlord, and I'd expect this to be more common than someone who enjoys having a landlord.
Alas, I am good friends with my current landlord, but that is because I don't live in Australia. The only other landlords I've had that I like are my parents, but my parents always dreamed of me moving out.
The Future
Do I ever expect someone to sell me the valuable service and societal function of land lords?
Expect, no.
But I am not closed to it. Frankly, I have always expected a better effort than I have ever received. I expected some back and forth like:
"They give you a place to live, call a plumber at 2AM, fix your dishwasher, replace the carpets and the rent isn't even worth it you ingrate shit!" Something like that, to which I would ask "Why don't you sell me the house then at a reasonable price? Surely it's quicker for me to call a plumber, get an electrician in, replace carpets etc."
Most people being oblivious that for a landlord to be renting property to a tenant, the fundamental premise is that they don't need the property, don't want to use it, they just want to own it and retain control of it.
I don't ever expect someone to sell me a landlord, because were that the case, rent should generally come as a premium paid by tenants to forego the hassle of ownership. Landlords would look more or less like cleaners. People can do, or not do, their own cleaning, or they can pay for a cleaning service at a premium. There is a threshold at which, if you earn $120 an hour it doesn't make sense to spend another hour every day or two, cleaning in order to save $30.
The renter-landlord relationship appears to be the opposite of the tenant-cleaner relationship. A landlord is a service forced upon the poor, you cross a threshold of earning where one can become their own landlord at an increasingly eyewatering cost.
For this reason, I no more expect anyone to sell me a landlord than for someone to compel me through a reasoned argument to believe in any variation of the Abrahamic God. But I'm open to both. People like me can appear closed minded because so many people fail to appreciate that the most intuitive arguments are F-tier. It would relieve a lot of angst and irritation if I could be shown how wrong I am in my apprehension. That I was confident people in charge of the economy could sell me a landlord.
I'm not holding my breath however.
To Schadenfreude or Not to Schadenfreude?
“Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." ~ Attributed to John Maynard Keynes.
I spent my early 20s predicting the imminent and catastrophic crash of the Australian housing market. I associated with, but never bought into, the crowd that believes in 16 or 20 year economic cycles that allow someone to predict with no understanding the market. I'm generally not in the prediction game any more, even though the Australian real estate market directly impacts my life.
My general position is that Australia is "The Lucky Country" in it's original, intended, pejorative sense. Australians generally do not have the imagination to invest in anything productive. Australian entreprenuers and innovators exist to be sure. Many great artists. But these are not really representatives of Australia.
I am content to be confident that whether property investment secures someone's financial future or not, it is wrong. I also feel, much as I can look at former President Donald Trump and be confident that for all the wealth, or appearance and access to wealth he has enjoyed, he is probably miserable in some fundamental way. Even winning the presidency and serving a term, was likely a situation that exacerbated both his wealth and his misery, and were he to wake up tomorrow with my life, it would probably come as a great relief.
The thing is that too many people I know, love and care about have bought into the Australian housing market. Generally speaking, the buy in to own their own home so they never have to go through being informed the landlord has decided to sell the property and they have 3 months to find a new place to live and their kids new schools to go to.
Though most of my loved ones wealth is tied up in some of the most overvalued property on earth, the potential devastation they face just from defaulting on their mortgage is no fault of their own. It's the cunts that congratulate themselves for owning 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 homes, the speculators that have forced anyone who wants to raise children indoors to speculate on their own homes.
While there's something potentially delicious about watching people who didn't earn their wealth and have been smirking for decades losing it all, the devastation will be undeniable.
My position is more that property investment is something I simply wished my fellow Australians didn't do. I wish they invested in productive things and bought homes to live in that pretty much just tracked with inflation. I also appreciate why they don't. People are risk averse.
So I anticipate no gloating, because their will be no pleasure. I also anticipate that I will feel more remorse than any participant will show. I would also not put it past the Australian government to basically outlaw mortgage defaults, simply because the law of the land is that property markets cannot fail.
If it happens on a good government's watch, the kind of government that tried to undo policy that has created this fucked up situation, like the governments currently in office everywhere bar Tasmania, the media isn't going to own up that they are far more responsible through their dependence on real estate advertising, than any government. So I expect to be basically gaslit.
