Federal Rent Price controls: a vision

[Enon]

No, it is not regulation, but greed. There are more apartments being built than ever in Atlanta. They are more cheap and flimsy than those of any earlier decade, giant five-story wood-framed firetraps, each apartment renting for over $1600/month, often for $2000/mo.

To show how great the difference is, by comparison, in 2003, for $120k ($200k in today’s money) I bought a 7th-floor 1BR condo, completely gutted and remodeled to my specifications, in a solitary concrete-construction high-rise built in the '60s on a hill in the best area of town, Buckhead, on Atlanta’s main street (the Peachtree St., there’s about 30 others of the same name) with a magnificent view - a sea of trees running out to the clustered skyscrapers downtown, with a supermarket, hardware store, cafe and restaurant across the street, my job and most of the best restaurants in the city within a mile. That, including all fees, cost under $1000/month, $1600 in today’s money, the same as the average Atlanta apartment rent today. I’d have about $150k in equity ($625/mo.), and would have been able to take about $10k off my taxes, too. Today’s renters don’t get that for their average 1BR sheetrock sh!thole in a run-down 1000+ unit, 320-acre complex or half-gentrified ghetto, costing them over $22,500 per year in pretax income.

Gavin wrote:
“There are many people ahead of landlords when it comes to apportioning blame .”
I mentioned

True, I mentioned employers paying below subsistence wages (less than slave wages), those employers’ pet state agencies, and later banks as my targets for civil RICO suits. It’s hard to compress over 100 pages of code and briefs into a pithy statement, but under Georgia law:

it is a felony and a tort to own or control anything through repeatedly causing or threatening financial harm to a person who has trouble paying rent.

Let that sink in: it is literally illegal for them to own anything.

In the language of the statute (Ga. Code 16-14-4 (a)):
It shall be unlawful for any person, through a pattern of racketeering activity or proceeds derived therefrom, to acquire or maintain, directly or indirectly, any interest in or control of any enterprise, real property, or personal property of any nature, including money.

Violations of 16-5-100, 101, 102, & 102.5 are defined as racketeering activity. That section covers, among many other things, exploitation, abuse and trafficking of anyone over age 65, or over 18 with an impairment substantially affecting ability to provide necessities of life such as shelter. Exploitation, abuse and trafficking are quite broadly defined, e.g. “coercion” is a listed means of exploitation and trafficking, and “causing or threatening to cause financial harm” is a listed definition of coercion in the statute.

Lest you think I’m straining here, there are hundreds of valid ways to charge employers, landlords, and government agencies just under this abuse of the disabled statute. There are dozens of other statutes that are predicate offenses under just the Ga. code, dozens more incorporated from the federal code, and thousands more incorporated from the laws of other states, territories and possessions.

None of these underlying offenses have to be charged!

None of these offenses have to be proven to criminal standards!

Civil RICO can be brought by ANYONE!

---

Hypatia wrote:
"S’why I think a federal cap on rents will result in fewer, not more, rental units available "
I agree, but that was not the original issue you brought up, which was:

“the federal lawsuit brought against the maker of the software landlords can use to gauge what rent the market in their locale will bear”,

which was itself a tendentious way of defending an illegal price-fixing cartel making it impossible for much of the American people to afford housing, apparently on the theory that a few criminals’ interests in extorting enormous unearned profits outweigh the interests of the majority of people to sleep indoors and to not have such crimes committed against them.

Criminals such as my old landlords, King Rook Capital’s partners, Israeli lawyer and investment advisor to “global institutional and high-net-worth clients”, Mor Assayag,

and Jewish South African ex-Glencore Switzerland ($73B market cap., #20 in world; originally Marc Rich + Co, yes, mafia Marc of the Clinton pardon) senior partner David Issroff.

In 2012 KRC purchased this 216-unit apartment complex in a slum so bad that one of the scariest people I have ever met, an “ex” crackhead paroled on a life sentence, refused to live anywhere in that neighborhood for FREE.

4565 Covington Hwy Decatur, GA 30035

(I don’t know this complex, but I’ve seen many of the type, it’s a lot worse than it looks in this picture.)
KRC spent about $2,300 per unit on “capital improvement to enhance the physical characteristics of the property through a detailed renovation program”. They sold it 10 years later for a 10.4x equity multiple, Realized IRR: 40%.

I hope you agree that such foreign racketeers have no business even being in the US, let alone owning property, still less extorting and exploiting Americans, or harboring and probably also employing and trafficking hundreds of illegal aliens. (Not to mention reinforcing antisemitic stereotypes, but that’s for Jewish people to police.)

What landlords like this are doing is illegal in many different ways. I mentioned some above. I hope to sue under RICO and literally take everything they have or had or ever will have.

But first I’ve got a franchised “non-profit” employer to go after under RICO, the Atlanta-area “independent subsidiary” CEO pays himself over $1M a year, and the “charity” has amassed over $100M liquid assets from exploiting the disabled just in Atlanta-area stores. After that, there’s other defendants to prioritize: DOL, SBWC, GAA, etc.

This requires significant amounts of lawyer time and other expenses. I’ll do what I can do pro-se if I have to, but it’s not the best way, and pro-bono or contingency arrangements are a lot to ask in cases like this, regardless of facts or law or connections.

[Gavin]

You obviously feel strongly about this issue – and with good reason. But you are missing the target – the human beings responsible for the ills you describe:

Everything “costs” more than it used to, because the Political Class has reduced the value of the “dollar” by spending more than they take in and printing to make up the difference.

People don’t earn as much in real terms as they used to because the Political Class de-industrialized the US, leaving many people without genuinely productive jobs.

The legal system is a mess thanks to the Political Class, with growing numbers of laws & regulations which contradict each other and are often selectively enforced only against regime enemies. In the meantime, the lawyers who constitute an important part of the Political Class get fat on resources extracted from ordinary people.

Bad things are indeed happening – you are right. But you have not correctly identified those responsible.

[civilwestman]

When it comes to making policies which are intended to cause society to be generally fair and equitable, I begin my thoughts with a big dose of humility. That’s because when one tries to predict the results of policies which affect the motives and actions of millions of individuals - here, landlords and tenants - we fail badly. Thus has led me to approach every issue with a general predilection: on which side ought I prefer to err. My (probably unavoidable) bias is informed by observation and experience of related events to date.

Also part of my bias derives from my experience as son of a landlord. My dad, a high school graduate, initially worked for his dad in a small retail business. He saved some capital and taught himself the building business - having failed in his attempt to obtain financing to build a bowling alley, which were all the rage in the mid '50’s. Unlike nowadays, banks then didn’t care to finance such large ‘fads’. He soon learned he could finance apartment units of, initially, about 30 units.

He worked long and hard, first to build, then to find tenants and - himself - manage the building in all aspects. Over the next 20 years, he built about 8 such units, graduating to condominiums in more upscale communities and finally to two 150 house tracts of middle-income single family houses. He did well. It appeared to me his success was largely due to hard work. He believed in that markets determined what he could charge; whatever the market would bear. At the same time, I saw him give some tenants below “market price” because he liked, respected or just felt sorry them.

Eventually, in the northern NJ suburb of Elizabeth, where he stared and had 5 of his units, along came rent control. From then on for many years (I since lost track) no new residential rental properties were built and a severe shortage of rental apartments quickly developed. He finally sold off his buildings, because under the rent control regime it was in no way possible to make a decent return - if, indeed there could be ANY profit - on capital and the tremendous, ongoing, difficult and emotionally taxing work of fixing problems (many of these were downright malicious, caused by tenants).

In part, many such problems were due to ancient abiding rites and sacraments of LDS - landlord derangement syndrome - we do have some experience with political parallels to this powerful phenomenon today, of course). An astute observer might even say some portion of these problems arise at the unconscious psychological level. Some tenants, I believe in retrospect, projected an almost ‘parental’ role upon the landlord; subliminally, they may have felt the landlord should act in loco parentis.

While this may seem odd at first, I must say was quite struck by the repetition of this mechanism - and not only in landlord/tenant interactions (I have acted out similar dramas myself, on more than one occasion and only recognized it in retrospect). Many other kinds of interpersonal interactions, I believe, may be informed at the emotional level by early such childhood mechanisms of interaction with parents. This is especially likely when a customer interacts with a small business owner, as here. I think it also applies when a customer feels abused by a large, impersonal corporation. There, a good case can be made that the individual feels righteously abused - as by the powerful parent who refuses to even listen. This is the stuff class action cases are made of.

Anyway, I have gone too far afield. In erring on policy choices, this one (like most all issues today) devolves to: what is the locus of where individual choice is allowed? Do we want a society where individuals and business entities may bargain with each other unimpeded as they see fit? Or, do we want to live under a set of rigid rules both sides are mandated to follow? I am offering only a binary solution and omitting a “regulated” hybrid system. That’s because any system which initially purports to give “equity” or “fairness” by creating a set of rules which each side must follow will inevitably become a totalitarian system under which no choice is permitted to anyone so “regulated” (read “controlled, completely” - thus totalitarian).

If the incremental metastasis of the Constitutional representative republic into totalitarian governance by the deep state, stands for nothing else, it definitively shows that the “middle way” of regulation is impossible; in this case “rent control” is the result - with no choice for anyone. That’s because the intermediary party - here the administrative state - knows no restraint or limits to its power. Its own ends are immediately divergent from those of the parties they purport to serve and its only goal going forward is to extend that power.

Living in this shadow of a nation today you know, the one where the state’s function was supposed to be to “secure” our God-given natural rights, the tenor of the interaction with any bureaucracy is unmistakeable: the apparatus of the state does not exist to “secure” me rights or fill my needs. Rather, I exist to satisfy its mandates. That’s the case when it comes to just about every aspect of life today in “the land of the free”. It is unmistakeable.

If I have choices, I would prefer to err on the side where individuals may meet each other as equals and work out their differences. Yes, the results will be imperfect. The alternative is worse. The state (in loco parentis?) seems to have a knack of creating a “one size fits NONE” solution most every time. Decisions by those most affected are inevitably better than those made from afar by non stakeholders in a power structure with a life and motives of its own. We can hardly avoid observing that every day. That’s why I err on the side of the former imperfect option.

[magus]

@Gavin

Everything “costs” more than it used to, because the Political Class has reduced the value of the “dollar” by spending more than they take in and printing to make up the difference.

People don’t earn as much in real terms as they used to because the Political Class de-industrialized the US, leaving many people without genuinely productive jobs.

And because the political class has imported millions of immigrants (a.k.a. free votes) who depress domestic wages.

There are also cultural factors. For example, women’s desire to have careers puts downward pressure on wages as the size of the labor force has effectively doubled.

Since these working women prefer not to marry and form households, but would rather live alone, we need twice as many apartments and houses as prior generations. I believe this is an important driver of housing costs.

We may also blame globalization for allowing companies to outsource their labor overseas. And yes, we can blame boomers for not preparing their children with marketable skills. Here is an interesting bit of history from Will Durant’s, The Story of Civilization:

… the Athenians are exempted by law from caring for the old age of parents who have failed to teach them a trade.

However, wondering about who to blame is not going to create new housing. Nor will David versus Goliath legal challenges against housing developers or the government.

@Enon

This requires significant amounts of lawyer time and other expenses. I’ll do what I can do pro-se if I have to …

Even if you are 100% right, what are the odds you actually win your lawsuit? Since you are currently homeless, allow me to submit that your time might be better spent searching for a job or training a marketable skill that will lead to a job.

My advice is to look for remote work, as this will allow you to move to a rural area (or even another country), with much lower rents and costs of living.

[Gavin]

@civilwestman

it was in no way possible to make a decent return - if, indeed there could be ANY profit - on capital and the tremendous, ongoing, difficult and emotionally taxing work of fixing problems (many of these were downright malicious, caused by tenants).

Two tales from people I knew who, a quarter century or so ago, bought into the then trendy idea that investing in rental properties was a smart choice:

One of them told me what he had learned from being a landlord: “People are no damn good”. It was a rare tenant who treated the place she/he rented as one would expect a normal person to treat her/his home … and when he found one of those few tenants, he went the extra mile to hold on to her/him.

The other complained about all the doors he had had to fix. Mostly the renters were youngish unmarried people “shacking up”. Eventually, they would argue. The woman would lock herself in the house, and the male would burst open the front door. Then the woman would retreat to the bathroom and lock that door – which again the male would knock down. It is expensive to replace doors & frames … and of course the tenants would disappear and not pay anything towards the cost.

Advice like that dissuaded me back then from investing in rental properties. I do wonder if Blackrock is going to find that buying up US rental properties is any smarter than buying up land in the Ukraine?

[Hypatia]

Re Blackrock: no, see, if you don’t give a shit about the property, there really isn’t any burden to being a landlord. Oh yeah there are regs, but the class of tenant you’ll be getting pretty much guarantees there won’t be many complaints. In my scenario, this corporate slumlordship may be an intermediate stage I omitted. But then, when even they can’t make any profit, the criminal gangs will take over.

[Enon]

Good comment.
"Do we want a society where individuals and business entities may bargain with each other unimpeded as they see fit? "

That’s not on the table, today contract terms are always dictated by the more powerful party. In court, the law is a secondary concern, if it is a concern at all. The winner is determined by who has the higher status. Women over men, lenders over borrowers, landlords over tenants, employers over employees. My mentor, Chief Justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court, Richard Neely, was quite candid in his book: How Courts Govern America, which is still assigned in law schools. Judges are better than legislators or bureaucrats (all of which he had been from his late twenties to early thirties), but without a monarch, judges are the most capable and likely to correct institutional oppression of the populace (as Judge Neely did with reforming the abusive W.V. system of reform schools). Businessmen aren’t even in the running, they are the ones who buy legislators to allow them to import and keep slaves at below slave wages, to ensure that injured employees have no recourse, etc.

“If I have choices, I would prefer to err on the side where individuals may meet each other as equals and work out their differences.”

That’s also not an option. Throughout history, and before, better men have always ruled their inferiors. The transactional, haggling, negotiated point of view is that of the trading class dealing with each other (and even then it would be projecting a foreign worldview on them to impute any form of honesty or any but the most attenuated form of honor on them), not of sovereigns, aristocracy, warriors, priests, or even the peasantry or tradesmen. Employers, with the rarest of exceptions, perhaps a few Quakers, never dealt with employees as equals. To this day, the topic is taught in law schools as “the law of master and servant”. Throughout the history of all civilizations, the ethics of the sovereign, aristocratic, warrior and priestly classes have been that enemies and inferiors, including the wicked, are not to be negotiated with at all, let alone as equals, but to be defeated, conquered, subjugated, expropriated and, if necessary and possible: destroyed.

My people, the Quakers, may have been replaced by cowardly “progressives”, almost to a man, but we only forswore “outward weapons”, and never had any truck with “equality” with the rest of the world. Until we were replaced by creatures for whom treatment as equals was far better than they merited.

But for better men, equal treatment is unjust. It is unjust for better men to be treated as merely equal. It is intolerable injustice for lesser men to rule their betters. It is an offense against God Himself for the best men to be oppressed by the worst, and that offense demands vengeance. Every lasting culture, even those before history began, has held it unjust, unethical, intolerable and unmanly not to punish the oppression or even the mere insult of the best men by their inferiors.

The laws provide for doing so now, if judges will obey them. If they will not, then their oppression will itself be subject to appeal, and punishment, not only in courts of men but those of nature and its God.

[pturmel]

@Enon

That’s not on the table, today contract terms are always dictated by the more powerful party. In court, the law is a secondary concern, if it is a concern at all. The winner is determined by who has the higher status. Women over men, lenders over borrowers, landlords over tenants, employers over employees.

Wow. The most eloquent class warrior couldn’t have said it better.

You should apply for a job with the Harris-Walz campaign. They are sorely in need of your eloquence.

[Enon]

What a remarkable lack of reading comprehension. It seems almost as if you believe merchants and magistrates represent the highest possible class. I don’t hate that class from below, I despise it from above.

There are more classes than one above your upper-middle. Lacking nobility of spirit, that class doesn’t have an ethos of noblesse oblige. The swinish merchant mentality thinks money is class, that no gain is ill-gotten; it recognizes neither moral authority, nor natural aristocracy. Mediocrity is its highest aspiration, yet still it often falls short.

Magistrates decide how they want to rule before considering law or sometimes even facts, then make up the reasoning for their decisions afterwards. How they want to rule comes from common (or sometimes personal) conceptions of the social pecking order, that is, which party has higher status, which party is better. Partiality, prejudice, call it what you like – they have no qualms about it, and are never made to answer for it. This is not a theory, but an observation from litigating dozens of cases. Judge Neely says much the same thing, though his experience is from the other side. My experience is that magistrates often are poor judges of status compared to Judge Neely.
*

A lifetime of treating people as equals or superiors has cost me everything. It was always dishonest of me to pretend that I wasn’t better than them. I deeply regret it, and I am belatedly trying to make amends.

No one has come forward as a patron or even partner for more potentially productive proposals, so I have to move on to others: lawsuits that benefit as many as possible and punish those who deserve it most.

[Hypatia]

Gents, now that I know our monocular interlocutor is a Quaker, all is revealed unto me. He’s George Fox, bare feet bleeding in the snow, crying “Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield!” He’s the men and women who barged into Anglican Church services stark naked, as “a sign”. I have personal experience with the leveling and confounding tactics of this “ persuasion”and their descendants ( I lived near Philadelphia for a long time, after all!) so: though I know I’m inviting still more opprobrium. yet will I testify.

[pturmel]

@Enon

natural aristocracy

This is America. Our founding principles explicitly reject that. I think you might be suffering from some delusion that you are heir to your family’s nobility. I grant a small chance, but certainly not here. Your “vision” is that of a pampered child that is unable to produce the basics of life for themselves, and therefore demands that society pamper them when family ceases to do so.

[Enon]

Mediocrity can’t comprehend anything above itself. For example, your hostile incomprehension of my proposal to revolutionize design, manufacturing, distribution and the economy. As for your childish taunts, what new and good have you created, discovered, or invented yourself, or even assisted in developing or promoting?

And I do mean childish, compared to me on the gold line:

Those scores represent the probability of being right on a given question, or the difficulty of questions one can answer correctly.
The gap between me and the average professor is as big as between the professor and a 10 year-old. By age seven, I was smarter in an absolute sense than most teachers, after age 10 I never had a teacher who was as smart. Imagine living that – I know you can’t, for envious mediocrities like you, who adhere to the Law of Jante, people like me are tall poppies to be cut down. After you knock your betters down, you sneer that we’re “pampered children”. Projection is a marvelous thing. Yet no doubt you consider yourself superior to children and even employees of merely average intelligence. As much better than them you are, that’s how much better than you I am.

I may have posted this here before, but it bears repeating:

The thing is, literally no one wants geniuses or inventors enough to pay them a living. No one wants to hire people smarter than they are, particularly disagreeable people who will tell the boss that he’s wrong, make him feel inferior (which he is). Geniuses don’t like being subordinated to midwits, either.

Nor is independent inventing a viable path. If patents were as easy to get as copyrights, or even just as inexpensive, I’d have hundreds at least, but anyone smart enough to come up with many good inventions is too smart to play the game, the “incentives” for innovation are in fact nothing but severe impediments, even punishments. It’s about the same penalty as a first-time DUI to file for a patent. Patents are around $10k, which only gives a license & duty to sue infringers, suing will cost about $1M - $2M per case, and has a poor win rate, at that. At least 98% of patents never earn out their filing fees, let alone attorney’s fees.

The number of inventors that make a living at inventing is pretty close to zero, at least two orders of magnitude lower than the number of patent attorneys. There is no market for patents, let alone inventions.

Every invention is competing not only with every other method of doing the same thing that has ever been published, and specifically against the ways that market incumbents have sunk capital into, capital which will be stranded by innovation, but also against every potential way of accomplishing the task that might be conceived before the invention has a chance to earn out the investment required. The transaction costs for what sporadic patent deals do occur are far more than the inventor can expect to get. Any valuable patent will get reexamined until it’s invalidated.

And the worst thing is, even if you don’t patent, but instead publish an invention, you effectively not only lose all rights, you taint the IP so that no one can seriously invest in it – it’s unpatentable (worse, the patent will probably issue then get invalidated after expensive litigation) and not a trade secret. The smart move for inventors is to keep valuable inventions secret, even if they can’t develop them, so as not to spoil things for someone who could make a go of the idea later.

Which brings me to another problem, which is that a good inventor can come up with a dozen or more inventions per month, culled from hundreds of ideas, but the system has no real division of labor to allow inventors to just invent - no, to profit from any idea requires all the time and money investment and the traits and skills of a successful startup founder, which are mostly incompatible with such inventors’ personality types. Even when such a rare Musk-monster is to be found, even when he isn’t crushed by one adversary or another and manages to get access to capital on good terms – there is only enough time in life to implement a very few innovations; spending the time on entrepreneurial / corporate / social BS instead of on the mind-play of invention costs that inventor – and society – nearly his whole output.

That comes far from exhausting the problems with the system, for instance the fact that universities usually claim rights to inventors’ work, even for undergraduates who are paying the school. Businesses also regularly claim the right to legally take employees’ patent IP without any compensation, even when not developed with company resources or at company direction. Inventors are thus either shut out of universities and large and tech companies, or they are exploited.

There is a systematic oppression of intelligence – which is to say, of people with a literally exponentially higher likelihood of solving hard problems. (citations on Rasch measures omitted) In “Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress” by Jay L. Zagorsky (2007, using NLSY data) found no correlation between net worth and IQ above 100. The correlation between income and IQ is less than 0.3 overall, and nearly 0.0 for intelligence in the top 10%. Those with top 1% intelligence are more likely to have financial hardship than average people.

This is not because smart people aren’t more productive,Schmidt & Oh’s 2016 update to Hunter & Schmidt’s classic paper (which was perhaps the first meta-analysis) found IQ validity for predicting job performance is 0.67, vs. e.g. 0.0 for experience, 0.2 for education, 0.3 for biography. (Table 1, p.71). IQ is in fact the best single predictor of job performance, but it is not rewarded in the market, costing at least $5T/yr. in lost productivity in the US alone.

This post is long enough; let me close by saying that mispriced brains are the biggest economic inefficiency I know of. Putting people with exceptional intellectual ability in control of investment in innovation is the optimal strategy for both profit and long-term good.

Regarding: “This is America. Our founding principles explicitly reject that.”
What is this “our” of which you speak? Among my ancestors are signers of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but you’d have to go back to the 1500s to find so much as a “Sir”, sir.

[Hypatia]

“Alack, George, where are thy shoes?”

[pturmel]

@Enon

what new and good have you created, discovered, or invented yourself

I am a self-employed engineer and software developer that provides services and software products in a small niche of the Industrial Controls market. Within this niche, I am a globally-recognized subject matter expert, and am regularly engaged for consulting at hundreds of dollars per hour.

I have supported myself and my family this way for the past twenty one years.

As for IQ, I’m the trace just below your gold line. As Murray and Herrnstein noted some decades ago, IQ only accounts for 40% of any individual’s probability of personal success. Other factors, particularly drive and discipline, determine the rest. I’m sure personality plays a role.

IQ is not noble. It can be twisted and evil, too.

[magus]

No one is going to give you an apartment just because you’re smart. You need to provide something of value to other people (even your intellectual inferiors) for them to want to give you something in return. To be useful, your intelligence must be directed toward an appropriate goal, and it’s not clear that intelligent people are any better at selecting goals than unintelligent people. Case in point: you’re wasting time writing lengthy posts about your brilliance on Scanalyst instead of solving the more pressing issue of your homelessness.

[Enon]

Everybody, look at what he didn’t respond to! Everything I have written in this thread! Look at the claims he abandoned! What happened to his assertion that I’m a “pampered child”, etc.? I doubt he actually went back and read what I wrote about giving thousands of late-night Uber rides in dangerous Atlanta neighborhoods, or repeated indoor heatstroke while being smothered by a sweat-soaked mask, denied any medical or legal aid (and winning anyway). He dropped the claims not because he learned better, but because he’s just lashing out some more. His ego was bruised, and he wants to show who’s boss.

Think of me as a sausage grinder, Phil. Not something to stick your dick in. Don’t blame the grinder for what happens if you do.

You’re a retail salesman, a shopkeeper. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s hardly creative. I don’t believe your IQ claims, but I haven’t been impressed by many in the ultra high-IQ societies, either. Most of them are narcissistic liars and/or Cabal.

“IQ is not noble. It can be twisted and evil, too.”
So you know Kevin Langdon, too? My condolences.

A person with higher intelligence has literally exponentially greater likelihood of solving the hardest problems. All progress has been made by my sort of people, the rest of civilization lives off what we create. The legitimate other factors besides intelligence that you mention are not just being disagreeable and contemptuous of your sort, but inventiveness, being a “mapper” rather than your sort, “packers”, those who have true understanding, accurate maps of reality in their minds, rather than those who think that learning is just stacking up packets of facts provided by those who profess to be “experts”. We take a lot of abuse. We earn far more than we are paid. If you don’t want to be on our side, that’s on you.

[pturmel]

@Enon

What happened to his assertion that I’m a “pampered child”

I thought this appeal to your family history buttressed my point without further comment from me:

@Enon

Among my ancestors are signers of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but you’d have to go back to the 1500s to find so much as a “Sir”, sir.

And I honestly no longer care about your work struggles.

@Enon

Think of me as a sausage grinder, Phil. Not something to stick your dick in.

I wasn’t thinking of you at all, actually. But dive in the gutter if you must.

@Enon

but it’s hardly creative.

You obviously have no idea what it means to work in engineering or software development.

And I have never bothered to join elitist, intelligence-worshipping, self-serving “societies”. I am as unimpressed with them as you claim be, without constantly whining about my fortunes in life.

@Enon

know Kevin Langdon

I don’t actually. Even know who that is. But no need for you to explain. I developed that phrase from actual exposure to such.

@Enon

If you don’t want to be on our side, that’s on you.

That you think those with high IQ have a natural “side” perfectly explains your predicament.