[HN Gopher] The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hil...
___________________________________________________________________
The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool
(1993)
Author : zeveb
Score : 261 points
Date : 2025-02-26 17:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| pvg wrote:
| https://archive.is/eRc3M
| blakesterz wrote:
| I don't know why I found this so interesting to read. After the
| first few paragraphs I wondered why this was in The New Yorker,
| afterall, this is about a place in CA. The answer did appear,
| eventually... "My story begins on the Lower East
| Side of New York," he said...
| tmiku wrote:
| The NY specificity implied by the publication name is archaic.
| Apart from the event listings or performance/exhibit reviews,
| The New Yorker's long form coverage has been nationally
| (sometimes globally) focused for decades, albeit through the
| lens of what America's coastal elites find interesting.
| dhosek wrote:
| There's a great scene in the movie _World's Greatest Dad_
| where Robin Williams plays a frustrated writer. Another
| teacher at the school where he teaches gets a story in _The
| New Yorker_ 1 and Robin Williams's character tells him
| something along the lines of "how nice, I hope your next one
| gets published somewhere that isn't regional."2
|
| [?]
|
| 1. This is generally considered the pinnacle of literary
| short fiction publishing.
|
| 2. He was, of course, being ironic (and bitterly jealous). As
| an aside, the movie is a brilliant dark comedy, written and
| directed by Bobcat Goldthwait who's come a long way from his
| _Police Academy_ days.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Yeah, it's kind of a lost idea now, but through the 80s and
| 90s the absolute best places to get a story published were,
| in no particular order:
|
| * The New Yorker * Harper's * The Atlantic * and, believe
| it or not, Playboy
|
| In re: the latter, see https://ew.com/books/playboy-hugh-
| hefner-famous-authors/
| dhosek wrote:
| Hugh Hefner was a surprising patron of the arts. Playboy
| made so much money that he poured it into funding some
| amazing writing (while the standard joke was "I read
| _Playboy_ for the articles," the articles were generally
| quite amazing) not to mention funding some significant
| work in printing and typographic technology (one example:
| the magazine used Palatino for its text and when the type
| on the gravure pages didn't match the type on the offset
| pages, they had a custom version of Palatino made to
| correct the discrepancy).
|
| Those three are still the top tier, at least when it
| comes to money for short fiction, although it's
| depressing to read stuff from the 30s which has dollar
| amounts attached to publications and realize that even in
| nominal dollars, those would be better paychecks than
| most writers receive today.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Nowadays I think people just lump it into the same
| category as other mass-market brown-paper-cover mags from
| gas stations like Penthouse and Hustler, but Playboy
| really was different.
|
| Hefner set out to create a respectable, top-tier
| publication -- by design -- that just happened to _also_
| include nudity. "Golden age" Playboy pictorials were
| pretty tame and generally tasteful, and they were in a
| magazine that'd have (as noted) top-tier fiction,
| excellent reporting, and high-profile interviews.
| TeaBrain wrote:
| This is like being confused if The Atlantic had an article
| about the west coast, only to believe the question of
| topicality for the publication's article was resolved when the
| article mentioned the east coast.
| fifticon wrote:
| one national newspaper where I live is famous for viewing
| everything from the perspective of 'their office'/the city they
| are in. An great example of this was when they discussed
| something happening in a different city in same country, and
| they would proceed to write
|
| "... <name of city> (that is 275 km west of here) ..."
|
| which only makes sense when you are in their offices/city.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| The New Yorker has always done long-form journalism and
| profiles about a variety of subjects, with no regard to a
| geographic connection to NYC.
|
| It's not a magazine about a city. The first few pages DO remain
| "Goings On About Town," but that's a fraction of the page
| count.
|
| I have the February 10th issue on my desk right now, actually.
| The long articles in this one are:
|
| - A discussion of an unusual development in a high-rise condo
|
| - A long article by MacArthur winning music critic Alex Ross
| (ie, not the comics artist of the same name) on Alma Mahler-
| Werfel
|
| - A piece on the struggle of the US Military to keep recruiting
| up ahead of ordinary depletion
|
| - An article on the pursuit of an artificial blood substitute
|
| Incidentally, if you're interested in modern classical music at
| all, Ross' book THE REST IS NOISE is pretty great.
| jl6 wrote:
| > I don't know why I found this so interesting to read.
|
| It's a well-written piece by a professional journalist,
| published in a magazine that people were willing to pay money
| for. It stands out against the kind of ad-supported click-
| optimized dreck that passes for journalism today.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| (1993). The hotel reopened in 1996 but Irving never returned.
|
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| Wonderful accompanying piece worth reading - thanks for posting
| owenversteeg wrote:
| https://archive.ph/LmhBD
|
| What a lovely article. A lot to learn from that old man. I
| quoted a few things, for the HN crowd (myself included) that
| often reads comments and seldom reads articles:
|
| >He's also a youthful, gentle man glowing sans peur et sans
| reproche while bringing a moment of grace, manners and style to
| largely impolite, undignified and profane times. That's why
| people, even the known and confident, seek admission to his
| court, to be touched by politesse: Because he's an escape, a
| salve that somehow, just for a moment, delivers us from what's
| out there, which is harsh and threatening. Or as friend and New
| Yorker writer Adam Gopnik says: He is our perception of the
| ideal grandfather. Or how grandfather would be if he left
| grandmother home. "People . . . ask to meet Irving just so they
| can say they had at last met a man who has it all figured out,"
| says Gopnik, now living in Paris. He sees Link as a true
| California type as much as any snazzy actor or wealthy
| courtesan. "He puts me in mind of some great performance piece.
| Irving is his own creation."
|
| ...
|
| >Yet Link's daily ritual hasn't gone away. He walks two miles
| from home each morning to the hotel, for granola, bananas and
| berries over The Times and the trades. One cup of decaf. Then
| onto Wilshire and Camden and Little Joe's barbershop, where
| little Giuseppe Bausoue ("I make house calls to Frank Sinatra")
| coiffures, blow-dries and sprays Link's pearl-white hair into a
| stiff sculpture. Max, chauffeuring the hotel's black Rolls-
| Royce, has Link back at the Peninsula around 9:30 a.m. Upstairs
| to the spa, into a terry robe and slippers, and out to a cabana
| for the first of dozens of incoming and outgoing phone calls.
| Maybe a turkey sandwich lunch alongside the pool where tans are
| oiled umber, cellular phones tinkle incessantly, and nobody
| swims. Usually there's gin rummy twice a week, Fridays and
| Sunday, for 5 cents a point. Sometimes dinner at Drai's. But
| always the framework of a permanent schedule. "Call me a
| creature of habit," suggests Link. He doesn't drive, doesn't
| move far from the Peninsula, doesn't shock his system with
| unfamiliar experiences, doesn't get close to people who
| converse in negatives. "That creates stress, which is the root
| of bad health. A routine means I don't worry about what I have
| to do this afternoon, or should be doing later in the week, or
| must get done by next month. "That way, I hope to live to 100."
|
| ...
|
| >"Everything went," Link says. "I sold our home and our
| properties and moved into an apartment in Santa Monica." But he
| did have the support of a wife and his children. "They knew
| that in both cases I had done the right thing," he says. "So I
| really couldn't have cared less what other people thought. I
| didn't mind eating at McDonald's." He picked up new work as a
| $15,000-a-year public relations spokesman for National
| Distributing Co., his brother-in-law's liquor business. At 64,
| for the first time in his adult life, Link was working for
| someone else; a hired hand, a salaried employee. "That was the
| saddest point of my life," he says. "What I really cared about
| was what I had done to myself and my reputation and my self-
| respect. I could find excuses. I could come up with
| explanations. But deep down I knew. I blamed myself."
|
| ...
|
| >Believe part of that. Friends suggest that engineering
| something for nothing today is a smart way of setting up deals
| for tomorrow. It has to do with quid pro quo, creating
| allegiances, issuing markers. Link is aware of his gift: "You
| approach this business the way you approach life. Positively.
| With a sense of fun, with humor, and with a certain amount of
| mental creativity. "But if you aren't sincere and are involving
| yourself with perceptive people who know facts from bull----,
| then you've created a negative. Then your deal's off."
|
| ...
|
| >Link gets a 10-minute coif, stiff enough to last until July.
|
| ...
|
| >"You have the impression that [Link] irons his socks and gets
| dressed in the middle of the night just to go to the bathroom,"
| Davis says. "I think he truly believes in the saying that
| anybody will be in good spirits and good temper if they're well
| dressed."
|
| ...
|
| >"I miss the past to a degree," he muses. He's drinking Evian
| at lunch and saving his one Chardonnay for dinner. "But I've
| adjusted to what exists now. I've learned to prefer the day I'm
| living in. If you don't grow with the times, you grow old with
| the past."
|
| ...
|
| >Link has tallied his life. Its rewards are "family and friends
| who have supported me, loved me, cared for me." The price has
| been no higher than "always giving a little more than you get."
| shmeeed wrote:
| >Is he a horrible name dropper? Does he really know Marvin
| Davis?
|
| This paragraph threw me off. The author goes on to quote
| Davis about Link - so I suppose the second sentence is to
| meant to be rhetorical and for effect, as in "is the sky
| blue?"
| james4876 wrote:
| Yes likewise, thank you for sharing!
| the_doctah wrote:
| Bot comment? What would 'likewise' mean in response to a
| hyperlink?
| htk wrote:
| Or he never returned to the hotel, just like Irving?
| Aloha wrote:
| He did make it to 101 -
| https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/irving-lin...
| hengheng wrote:
| This is completely all over the place, like it would be to listen
| to an 87yo, but I'm not too sure about the author or editor.
| fifticon wrote:
| this is what life is, at its finest. Not staying by a pool, but
| weaving and meandering this way. Though they say taste can't be
| argued.
| NathanKP wrote:
| If, like me, you were curious about the visuals to go with this
| piece, it appears that this is the pool today:
| https://www.dorchestercollection.com/los-angeles/the-beverly...
| brink wrote:
| That's lovely
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Good luck zooming into that photo on an iPhone
| Kailhus wrote:
| Made me laugh, "what the? No way, what if.. eh!? And maybe.."
| _crash_
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I found a picture of him here:
|
| https://patrickdowns.photoshelter.com/image/I0000Hbr_mkY_p2A
| rmnwski wrote:
| > uses the hotel Rolls to do errands
|
| that's the way!
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I mean it's nice but spending all of my adult life there?
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| Sounds better than spending whole life in an office.
| permo-w wrote:
| >scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs
|
| do people not eat eggs anymore?
| 1024core wrote:
| Have you seen the egg prices lately...? ;-)
| jacekm wrote:
| I am curious how much they are in your country? In Poland one
| egg costs about $0.30
| buildsjets wrote:
| About $0.60 currently in the USA, which is quadruple what
| they were at this time last year. Supposedly this is mostly
| because many egg suppliers had to cull their flocks due to
| the current H5N1 bird flu. But there is also concern that
| egg prices have been rising in general in the long term due
| to industry consolidation and monopolization.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/business/egg-prices-
| bird-...
| 1024core wrote:
| > About $0.60 currently in the USA,
|
| ... _IF_ you can find them in a store. Our local Trader
| Joe 's (a grocery store) in SF has been out of eggs for a
| while.
| grogenaut wrote:
| No shortage in Seattle. About $8/dozen which is about
| double normal.
| sgt wrote:
| About USD 1.50 per dozen here in South Africa.
| buildsjets wrote:
| I would not consider Trader Joe's to be a grocery store.
| markdown wrote:
| USD$0.30 to $0.40 per egg in Fiji.
| sgt wrote:
| Why so expensive in Fiji? I mean it's not that expensive,
| but more than I'd expect from Fiji, where I can imagine
| chickens and pigs are running around everywhere between
| the straw huts and palm trees.
| bregma wrote:
| One dozen is about CAD 3.00 just north of the US border. So
| I guess about $0.20 USD each.
| fifticon wrote:
| anyway, the new political administration is bound to solve
| the problem with costly eggs any minute now, and the
| soaring egg prices were without a doubt caused by the
| previous administration :-)
| bdangubic wrote:
| billionaires do, us mere mortals can no longer afford them :)
| bena wrote:
| Eggs had a rough go of it in the 90s. There were studies where
| it seemed like even looking at an egg would cause your
| cholesterol to sky rocket and kill you.
| colechristensen wrote:
| The fed a bunch of cholesterol to rabbits who then got heart
| disease. But it turns out you're not a rabbit and dietary
| cholesterol has nowhere near the same effect on humans.
| Filligree wrote:
| And also rabbits do not normally eat eggs, in fact aren't
| even carnivores.
| fifticon wrote:
| how do you explain easter egg bunnies then??
| jandrese wrote:
| Who could have ever guessed that a herbivore would be
| poorly adapted to high amounts of cholesterol in their
| diet?
| lynx97 wrote:
| One item on the rather long list of dietary advice/findings
| that have turned out to be wrong or overstated. Looking back
| at what we've been told would kill us, the older you get, the
| less you actually trust in the latest "findings". A local
| cabarettist had a 10 minute piece about this already 15 years
| ago. It seems, most dietary advice holds roughly 10 years,
| until someone else publishes another "study" and the press
| picks up on it to "entertain" the masses. Remember spinace
| and its supposed iron content? Or the milk industry doing an
| ad compaign (for decades!) to promote milk for school kids?
| The former was a misplaced comma, IIRC. And the latter was a
| blatant attempt to sell more product.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the
| older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest
| "findings".
|
| Seems like a bit of confirmation bias here - tons of things
| that people were told would kill them, did in fact end up
| killing them. Science is wrong sometimes, of course, and
| science journalism even more often.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Well, eggs just triggered me. I am from the "I will stop
| eating eggs when there are no chickens anymore" team...
| And sure, you're definitely right. Learning about and
| eliminating aspestos, for instance, was probably one of
| the bigger well known positive counter-example from the
| previous century. However, I can't think of many great
| counter-examples when it comes to dietary advice and the
| science journalism (thanks for the word) attached to it.
| Maybe you can poke a hole in my confimraton bias?
| rightbyte wrote:
| Drinking too much soda with sugar?
|
| Now the acidity in artificially sweetened soda makes
| peoples' teeth bad. My dentist mother is furious about
| that people believe that it is only the sugar in the soda
| that is bad for the teeth.
| soperj wrote:
| the misplaced comma was also a myth.
|
| https://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/Sutton_Spinach_Iron_and_Pope
| y...
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Looking back at what we've been told would kill us, the
| older you get, the less you actually trust in the latest
| "findings".
|
| This is where I am for sure. I don't trust any trends as to
| what people figure will kill you any more, because they're
| almost always wrong in the end. In 20 years if it turns out
| to not be recanted, then I'll pay attention I guess.
| toast0 wrote:
| Thankfully, they were let out of prison.
| https://www.adforum.com/creative-
| work/ad/player/34447709/bad... (circa 1991??)
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > There were studies where it seemed like even looking at an
| egg would cause your cholesterol to sky rocket and kill you.
|
| Except there really weren't studies, and this is why the
| nutrition "science" was so bad back then. A sibling comment
| mentioned a study in rabbits and points out the obvious
| problems with making conclusions based on a herbivore, but
| the general belief was that since high blood cholesterol was
| linked with heart disease, eating a lot of cholesterol is bad
| for you.
|
| When they actually _did_ to the studies, they found that the
| vast majority of people do _not_ get high blood cholesterol
| from (reasonable amounts of) dietary cholesterol. There are
| apparently a small subset of people (like 5% or so) who are
| particularly sensitive to dietary cholesterol though.
|
| That was why nutrition science in the 80s/90s should be such
| a cautionary tale. So much of it was bad science, or more
| charitably there were "reasonable" hypotheses that were
| presented as government-sponsored "facts" that turned out to
| be false when they were actually tested.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > or more charitably there were "reasonable" hypotheses
| that were presented as government-sponsored "facts" that
| turned out to be false when they were actually tested.
|
| The Covid debactle could be a more recent experience.
| Guesses was reported as facts. Then the flipfloping made
| peoples heads hurt and the consensus on what to do ended in
| a mess and a heated political point.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > anymore
|
| The article is from 1993, not today.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Not in the 1990s, no. DIETARY CHOLESTEROL BAD was the mantra of
| the day.
| esafak wrote:
| Who knows, nutritional scientist might get it right one day
| :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=485Em2JF34M
| permo-w wrote:
| I do think that with the loosening of corporate control on
| mass media, we are slowly iterating towards reasonable
| dietary advice
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| Hope springs eternal
| permo-w wrote:
| the current dietary advice in my local segment of society
| goes pretty much like this: try not to eat too many
| processed foods, keep it balanced, and fats aren't
| actually bad for you. that all sounds fairly reasonable
| to me
| rightbyte wrote:
| It is strange. As exposure to strange diet advice have
| gone up via internet exposure, Youtube, Instagram, blogs
| etc, the amount of people actually following strange
| diets seems to have gone down.
| Dig1t wrote:
| I came back here to comment this exact thing, this was a very
| confusing line.
|
| I wasn't around in 1993 but I'm pretty positive my parents and
| grandparents ate eggs in 1993.
|
| I guess this line made more sense in the context of other news
| articles at the time.
| excalibur wrote:
| > Often he and the hostess, Bernice Philbin, would be the first
| two people there, and they would have a polite conversation
| before Irving took his place in his booth--the first half circle
| to your left as you came in--and ordered breakfast: scrambled
| eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently,
| banana and granola with skim milk.
|
| TIL that my last 30+ years of egg eating has been a faux pas.
| bena wrote:
| This might have been during the "eggs are bad for you" part of
| the egg cycle.
|
| So it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek jab at contemporary cultural
| mores.
| lazide wrote:
| My favorite part was when eggs were bad, then were good, then
| were bad again. Then people stopped talking about them at
| all.
|
| It was a very informative time for me personally.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| The article is from 1993. If you are old enough to remember
| that time, it was indeed when official nutritionist advice was
| a complete failure. Eggs were advised against because it was
| thought their high cholesterol levels raised blood cholesterol,
| which is false for most people who consume a moderate amount of
| eggs. This is the time during which fat was demonized (anyone
| remember SnackWell's???), the "foot pyramid" was the rule of
| the day that was based on eating lots of bread, pasta and
| carbs.
| bena wrote:
| I actually liked their devil's food cookie things. And after
| a quick glimpse at the internet, I am not alone in that. It's
| probably the major thing they're known for now.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't remember a foot pyramid. There was the food pyramid,
| the $64000 pyramid, but nothing about feet. Just to have fun
| with an obvious simple typo
| pvg wrote:
| The 90s foot pyramid explained, in the 90s:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCO-SBPTF5E
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Fat is still bad in excess, you are just stuck in a different
| meme cycle where Americans pretend it doesn't matter and
| surely couldn't have anything to do with the rampant obesity.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I don't know of any memes where people say it's OK to eat
| fat in excess or pretend "it doesn't matter". Even the
| extreme low carb diets aren't about eating fat in excess -
| if anything, people on those diets tend to lose weight
| because (a) not being able to eat any carbs gets monotonous
| fast and (b) fat induces a feeling of fullness, so people
| eat fewer total calories.
| lmm wrote:
| > I don't know of any memes where people say it's OK to
| eat fat in excess or pretend "it doesn't matter".
|
| Hang around on Reddit for a day or two and you'll see
| them. Or heck, remember the Atkins diet, which was
| explicitly advertised as "you can eat as much fat as you
| want"?
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Atkins doesn't say that, at all, and then explicitly
| mentioned extreme low carb diets in my comment.
| lmm wrote:
| > Atkins doesn't say that, at all
|
| The meme version of it does, and their official website
| gets pretty close - fat is unrestricted, it's fine to eat
| as much fat as you have an appetite for, it's fine if a
| large proportion of your calorie intake is saturated fat.
| I guess "to excess" is subjective, but Atkins certainly
| says that fat consumption levels that respected medical
| authorities say are dangerous are fine.
| DrFalkyn wrote:
| Atkins theory was if people restricted their carb intake
| they would naturally eat a lot less calories. Because
| counting calories is difficult, the easier thing to do
| was just restrict foods to ones that were low in carbs
| sfjailbird wrote:
| Try eating as much fat as you can, without any carbs to
| go with it. It's not going to be much.
| TylerE wrote:
| It doesnt' matter in the sense that like 80% of what's in
| the typical American diet is far worse. All that fat that
| got removed was replaced with salt and corn syrup.
| newsclues wrote:
| Funnily enough this was also going on...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Ag.
| ..
| profsummergig wrote:
| I was thinking: "an entire article about a guy who used to tan at
| a hotel pool... when we start focusing on such trifles, it's
| usually a foreshadowing of some major upheaval coming."
|
| Then I saw the year of publication: 1993.
| 1024core wrote:
| I wonder how much of the HN readership was not even born
| then....?
| codetrotter wrote:
| Probably a decent number. I first heard of HN around 2010
| when I was in university.
|
| I assume that plenty of university students find their way to
| HN still. And that many of them will have been born around
| the mid-2000's.
|
| I only barely make the cut myself to having been born a few
| years before 1993.
| dbl000 wrote:
| Can confirm. Recent graduate who found HN during my second
| year at university.
| dang wrote:
| That's good! Do your friends know about / use HN?
|
| (Sorry for conscripting you as a guinea pig but it's hard
| to get this kind of info!)
| sureglymop wrote:
| Person born in 2000 here. My friends and colleagues at
| university generally don't know about HN.
|
| Have told a few people about it but the only person I
| really converted into also becoming a regular reader is
| my dad. It's good because now whenever we see each other
| we have a lot of topics and stuff to discuss that we both
| read about here.
| pvg wrote:
| HN is officially a dad site now.
| tkgally wrote:
| One of the nice things about HN is the wide age range of
| the participants. I have read interesting and thoughtful
| comments from people who said they were high school
| students all the way through to people a decade or more
| older than me (I'm sixty-seven).
| ubermonkey wrote:
| OTOH, I first read the article when it ran in 1993.
| tolerance wrote:
| I'd reckon that the trifles got to getting truffled around 20
| years prior.
| tolerance wrote:
| There is a strange sort of cerebral experience that elicits a
| visceral response about glimpses into ordinary life through plain
| black ink...err...fonts.
| plasticsoprano wrote:
| He made it to 101
|
| https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/irving-lin...
| Alex63 wrote:
| Sad, but not surprising given his age, that his son predeceased
| him by about a year.
|
| https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/pressdemocrat/name/rand...
| jpmattia wrote:
| I can't be the only person curious about his Fortunescope:
| https://www.etsy.com/listing/719052863/antique-1935-fortunes...
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I find it wonderfully clichee that the guy who's job was linking
| vendors and customers was called Mr. Link.
| dmayle wrote:
| It's called nominative determinism:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
| mmh0000 wrote:
| This is the fun but useless information I visit HN for!
|
| I can't wait (seriously, not sarcasm) to tell my wife about
| this.
| memco wrote:
| I've also seen "Aptronym" used for this:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym
| ziptron wrote:
| https://experts.mcmaster.ca/display/ironsga <-- A professor of
| steel making named Dr. Irons
| jannyfer wrote:
| Dr. Doctor
|
| https://www.nygh.on.ca/areas-care/maternal-newborn-and-
| paedi...
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| So he would just go hang out at a pool all day and avoid his wife
| and children? No wonder he lived to 101.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I mean, most do by going to the office instead. I'm not sure
| how the pool is much different in that regard.
| snailmailstare wrote:
| Any man can avoid one boss, the trick is avoiding both.
| HocusLocus wrote:
| If you enjoyed this consider William Least Heat Moon's "Blue
| Highways". He is a quiet unassuming guy, or at least I assume he
| is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice that strangers
| open up to.
|
| As opposed to this monster of minutia that is one life, Moon
| traveled the back roads and collectively met hundreds of people
| and made conversation, gathered famous and obscure lore of the
| places he visited. He encountered them on their own turf and
| elsewhere. Even a chance meeting by a lake with a mosquito-bitten
| teenage runaway girl who opened up to him about the awful life
| from which she had just fled, and he made the 'courageous'
| decision to drive her across Wisconsin and deliver her safely to
| her grandmother's house in Green Bay.
|
| He is essentially a documentarian, and delivers the plain truth
| of the tales told to him. It is a transformative read.
| prasadjoglekar wrote:
| Thank you for that recommendation.
| Loughla wrote:
| It's really, really good. You made a good recommendation.
| Anyone reading this thread should check it out.
| robocat wrote:
| > assume he is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice
| that strangers open up to.
|
| In my experience it is multiple traits that people open up to.
| Zero judgement, approachability, interest, friendliness and
| non-gossipy/tight-lipped about sensitive information.
|
| Most people present as judgemental. It's hard not to appear
| judgemental, and it's even harder not to be judgemental. I love
| non-judgemental people, and have managed to collect a few
| (mostly female) as friends. One or two get told the most
| intensely personal stuff
| punnerud wrote:
| Article summary: " Irving V. Link spent 42 years at the Beverly
| Hills Hotel pool, where his meticulous daily routine of
| breakfast, sunbathing, and gin rummy became legendary. He was
| admired by hotel staff and Hollywood figures alike, symbolizing
| the timeless charm of a bygone era in Los Angeles. His life was
| deeply intertwined with the hotel's evolution, reflecting the
| glamour of old Hollywood and the shifting dynamics of its
| clientele. The hotel's closure by the Sultan of Brunei for
| renovations disrupted his routine and marked the end of an era.
| Link's personal narrative weaves together memories of luxury,
| business intrigue, and cultural transformation. Ultimately, his
| story is a poignant meditation on the inevitability of change and
| the enduring power of tradition."
| poglet wrote:
| Thanks I was just thinking I wish Firefox had a 1 paragraph
| summary button next to the reader button. Then I came to
| comments and saw this.
| d-sky wrote:
| https://orbitbymozilla.com/
| realfeel78 wrote:
| It's built into Safari now too.
| schiffern wrote:
| >Ultimately, his story is a poignant meditation on the
| inevitability of change and the enduring power of tradition.
|
| I wish, occasionally, AI would close with
| >Ultimately, his story is a trite and shallow distraction which
| fails to leave a lasting impression upon the reader.
|
| The article may indeed be a "poignant meditation" (I liked it
| personally). but when AI shoehorns the last sentence of _every
| summary_ into this exact same sort of vaguely-positive cliche,
| it becomes worthless as an uncorrupted signal of real
| information.
|
| A fun experiment would be to ask your favorite AI
| "Find me a recent article that is not worth reading and has no
| worthwhile journalistic, philosophical, emotional, or any other
| kind of takeaways."
|
| Then (separately) ask it to summarize the article and see how
| it closes...
| ragazzina wrote:
| Your intuition is right. ChatGPT can suggest you a book that
| is not worth reading in its opinion (The Secret by Rhonda
| Byrne) but then its summary is basically positive.
| foundart wrote:
| Summary of Romeo & Juliet: "A few teenagers get way too
| dramatic about a crush and end up dead."
|
| My point being that for a story like this the journey is more
| important than the destination.
| deepsun wrote:
| Not always. Or not for everyone I would say. I personally was
| just interested in facts: why, when, how.
| endoblast wrote:
| My goodness, 42 years of sun bathing at the same latitude as
| Tunisia. Should he have got skin cancer or did he benefit from
| all the naturally produced Vitamin D?
| reddalo wrote:
| I think he benefitted from the Vitamin D, since he died at 101.
| endoblast wrote:
| Well I agree, and I myself supplement with D3; however the
| mainstream advice is to avoid sun exposure, for example:
|
| https://www.skincancer.org/skin-cancer-prevention/
|
| Clearly more research is needed.
| zeroday28 wrote:
| Insufficient sun exposure is responsible for approximately
| 340,000 deaths annually in the United States and 480,000
| deaths annually in Europe, while non-melanoma skin cancers
| account for 63,700 deaths worldwide. Skin cancer only
| occurs due to excessive exposure combined with a weakened
| immune system, which is really rare.
|
| You're more likely to die in a traffic accident or from
| insufficient sun exposure than to ever develop skin cancer.
| theshackleford wrote:
| > You're more likely to die in a traffic accident or from
| insufficient sun exposure than to ever develop skin
| cancer.
|
| In your neck of the woods maybe. This is not accurate
| everywhere.
|
| It's the complete opposite where I live.
| fragmede wrote:
| Which is where?
| theshackleford wrote:
| Australia. We have the highest rates of skin cancer in
| the world due to high UV levels.
|
| "Skin cancer causes more deaths than transport accidents
| every year in Australia."
|
| I can't leave the house for more than like five minutes
| for big chunks for at least half the year without having
| to smother myself in sunscreen so for large parts of the
| year I just don't go outside during like 9AM-6PM.
|
| I fell asleep once in the car with the window open by
| mistake, I was out for like 45 minutes. A decade later
| that arm is still an entirely different color to my other
| one. Wild, one of the worst burns I've ever had.
|
| _edit_
|
| And to think, that's _die_ from a skin cancer, not merely
| develop it. So it actually blows that claim out of the
| water for Australia by a way larger margin than I
| initially thought.
|
| 2 out of 3 Australians will develop skin cancer in their
| lifetime.
| fragmede wrote:
| Thank you for sharing! Yeah, the thinner ozone layer
| there does sound like it makes things worse, especially
| for people with more European ancestry.
|
| What a great big world we live on!
| theshackleford wrote:
| Yeah, one of the things I loved about Europe was being
| able to go outside on a lark without worrying that if I
| wasn't watching my watch that I'd burn to an absolute
| crisp. I miss that :/
| sgt wrote:
| He had very strong skin, look at how tanned he is:
| https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2NG12TA/irving-link-
| left-a-41-year...
| kelnos wrote:
| The article takes some poetic license, and makes it seem like
| he sunbathed daily. There's another article in the LA Times,
| linked in a few comments here, that is a bit more "serious". He
| certainly didn't sunbathe every day, and it seems there were
| periods of time (not even only during his "riches to rags" time
| period) where it seems he didn't visit the hotel every day.
|
| He also had a poolside cabana that he used often; cabanas are
| usually covered and provide shade.
| irrational wrote:
| > Then Irving would either walk back home to his wife and two
| children
|
| What the... he'd leave his wife at home with the kids while he
| hung out all day at the pool with "magnificent-looking young
| women, full of theatrical drive" and eat all his meals at the
| hotel?
| compiler-guy wrote:
| In those days you didn't get divorced, you "stayed together"
| for the children.
|
| So they were effectively separated most of those years. Just
| informally so.
| colordrops wrote:
| Many people still "stay together" for the children.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| I have no doubt this is a widespread behavior, but I do
| have doubts as to whether or not this benefits children.
| Children seem to benefit primarily from watching
| relationships that genuinely make both parents happy.
| There's very little evidence to support that faking it
| yields results of children reacting as if you weren't
| faking it. You might as well divorce.
| zdragnar wrote:
| My friend in high school suffered from depression in part
| because he was well aware of that fact that his parents
| were only staying together until he graduated. Despite
| any attempt to put a rational face on it, he believed his
| existence was the source of his parents' unhappiness.
|
| Another friend of mine is doing this with his wife right
| now. He's utterly miserable, but the racial stereotype of
| the missing black father weighs so heavily in his mind
| that he's resigned to just counting down the years
| (despite my own attempt to convey the above story).
| bowsamic wrote:
| I think that staying together for the kids is essential
| for the very early age, but if someone goes it must be
| the dad. My mum left when I was 1 and a half and that is
| obviously horrifically painful
|
| At a certain age though the parents should split if it
| isn't working. It's definitely far easier to deal with
| your dad or mum leaving if you're 10 years old than if
| you're 1 year old
| thewanderer1983 wrote:
| > Children seem to benefit primarily from watching
| relationships that genuinely make both parents happy.
|
| I think you'll find the data supports chidren benefiting
| from a happy loving home. Not from the concern of the
| parents relationships with others.
|
| My childhood friends were mostly from divorced parents
| and it very much impacted them all in negative ways.
| Parents are security blankets for children. It's who they
| run to when scared and need love. They are dependent on
| them survival. Ripping that apart causes harm.
| smogcutter wrote:
| Most people with happy loving homes don't get divorced.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I know people with kids that have divorced for the most
| stupid reasons.
|
| In many cases I feel the problem could have fundamentally
| been solved by being better at dividing household work
| such that someone can rest one or two days and then
| switch.
|
| For many divorce seems to be a way to divide labour,
| which they could have done without one.
| bowsamic wrote:
| It is undeniable that it seems that way for us as outside
| observers at least. It seems more like both are stubborn
| and would rather burn everything than take
| responsibility. It would have to be pretty bad on the
| inside for that external appearance of the divorce to be
| justified at all
| rightbyte wrote:
| That is true. I might be reading too much of my own pain
| point into their situations.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I don't think anybody will disagree that watching parents
| divorce is harmful to children.
|
| But I think parents sticking together for the kids is
| _worse_. Kids can see the contempt between their parents
| and might get the wrong impression that that 's what a
| normal relationship looks like.
| somenameforme wrote:
| It's not all just about the relationship, but about the
| father and mother. Both offer very different aspects of
| life that help children develop in a way they'd never get
| from something like a 'visiting' parent, let alone the
| Big Brothers/Sisters program. Those latter things are of
| course much better than nothing, but the ideal is an ever
| present father and mother. For but one example, the most
| obvious is that a father understands what a 13 year old
| boy is going through in a way a mother never could, yet
| that mother will do a far better job with that same boy
| in his early years than the father ever could.
|
| Statistically children from two parent households just do
| _dramatically_ better by just about every single
| measurable metric, with 0 control for the quality of that
| household /relationship.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| But the point is that many, many more don't.
| kelnos wrote:
| Many do today, but in those days nearly everyone did.
|
| These days we realize that two unhappily-married parents
| can often be worse for the children than if they get
| divorced and continue to be active parents.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| A woman I dated about 15 years ago came from a household
| where her parents clearly did not like each other.
|
| She treated our relationship as being adversarial. She
| felt like she had to "win" every conversation, and one
| time even admitted to choosing to take a side that she
| knew was factually wrong just to stir things up. I think
| she truly believed that love was constant bickering.
|
| Within a year of her and her sister's moving out, her
| parents divorced. They stuck together "for the kids", and
| as a result, the kids got a terrible impression of what a
| loving relationship is supposed to look like.
| magneticnorth wrote:
| The article mentions that he'd go home for dinner, up until his
| wife died. The hotel pool was apparently also where he did his
| "job": being a deal-making middleman for a 2% cut, per a later
| description in the article.
|
| His job, or at least his former jobs, paid well enough to have
| a home in Beverly Hills, drive a gold lexus, and wear beautiful
| suits every day.
|
| So they weren't necessarily estranged - he just worked long
| days every day that afforded a very nice lifestyle.
| kristianp wrote:
| Of course when they bought their house it would have cost
| mere 10s of thousands. You can see why there's an attraction
| to owning your own house.
| dexterdog wrote:
| If you live in a place that doesn't have oppresive taxes
| and the real estate market maintains an unrealistic growth
| rate.
| walthamstow wrote:
| You have described London. There are no taxes on owning a
| property at all, the growth rate has slowed somewhat
| since the 00s heyday but it's still going up.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Prices are going up, that is, not the rate. A classic
| economics faux pas!
| kamaal wrote:
| Owning a home is always good no matter what the finance
| influencers tell you. In fact, earlier the better. Its not
| even the buying vs renting thing, renting is bad, you don't
| get to own anything at the end of the journey, and often
| the kind of things you have to put up with to save rent, or
| avoid getting homeless in case of of a job loss or other
| life crisis is just worth your mental health. Most of your
| life is spent paying up for the landlords ownership.
|
| People often arrive at the scene when most of the options
| are gone years back, and they wish they bought at the price
| that existed back then. Get disappointed and lawyer through
| the arguments to justify renting a home.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| its not renting vs owning that's the problem, its renting
| vs mortgage where mortgage is improperly considered
| synonymous with ownership. but that's because its so rare
| to be able to own the home near the places you can rent.
|
| so sure, renting vs buying a home in cash will give the
| cash ownership a leg up. but then it shifts over to
| people that would love to espouse about the 'time value
| of money' and leverage, where putting all the cash down
| is suboptimal vs a mortgage. the % increase of the home
| value isn't amplified when using cash up front either.
|
| so lets optimize this further, renting vs mortgage with
| the option to pay it off at any moment is always better.
| but nobody has that cash, so we're back at square one.
|
| if you HAVE to do a mortgage, then its likely that
| renting will be a better deal for you for over 10 years
| straight, before the mortgage pays dividends.
| eru wrote:
| > if you HAVE to do a mortgage, then its likely that
| renting will be a better deal for you for over 10 years
| straight, before the mortgage pays dividends.
|
| How do mortgages pay dividends?
|
| In any case, it's all about opportunity costs, and
| yields.
|
| To give an extreme example: if the house costs 100x the
| yearly rent, you are probably better off putting your
| money in the stock market instead of buying the property,
| and paying your rent from the returns on the stocks.
| kamaal wrote:
| Having to pay rent likely makes retiring early, or even
| retiring itself impossible.
|
| Somethings like marriage, kids, buying home just have be
| done in life as early as you can.
|
| Note money is just a number at the end. The idea is not
| to have max($money), rather max($free_time, $health).
| Optimise for $free_time and $health, and then you have a
| very different life strategy to work towards.
| eru wrote:
| You are still ignoring opportunity costs.
|
| If you have $x, you can buy a house and save on $y rent.
| But you could also buy eg bonds, and make $z return per
| year. If z > y, going for the bonds is better.
|
| Free time and health don't even come into the picture
| here. [0]
|
| (Of course, taxes and regulations can make this more
| complicated. And there are systematic and idiosyncratic
| risks to take into account.)
|
| It's not automatic that buying owner-occupied property is
| always the best way to invest your wealth.
|
| [0] Well, I assume renting is better for your health: I
| was significantly less stressed about all the water
| damage that we had about two years ago, because I knew it
| was ultimately my landlord's problem, not mine. But the
| overall effect is likely to be rather minor, and it can
| go either way, as some people get a mental health benefit
| out of knowing that they own their home.
| somenameforme wrote:
| [0] is so unbelievably true having lived through a major
| natural disaster. People don't realize how much, in
| general, you're on your own you are after something like
| that. Really life and perspective changing. _BUT_ I think
| you 're also misunderstanding his point about buying -
| it's not about maximizing your wealth which in the end
| doesn't even matter, but rather about minimizing the
| things you need to worry about. Even bonds can be
| stressful because they're not guaranteed money as they
| might seem due to 'guaranteed returns.' If
| rates/inflation go up you're left with money losing
| pieces of paper. See Silicon Valley Bank [1] for the
| obvious example. Even if your house depreciates, it's
| still a house! There's even an upside - your rent to the
| government decreases.
|
| The one case where I think buying doesn't really make
| sense is for people who enjoy traveling long-term. You
| can still theoretically rent or sell the place, but now
| you're back to increasing life stresses especially in the
| rental cases because you have a lot of obligations there
| that would require employees if you're remote and so on.
| And then moving money internationally, especially between
| currencies, and all of this stuff. Just ugh, no no no.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_V
| alley_Ban...
| eru wrote:
| Yes, even bonds can be stressful.
|
| But also: an owner occupied house is a single lumpy,
| undiversified asset. And in many cases it's bought on so
| much leverage, that its value is bigger than the buyer's
| entire net-worth.
|
| > Even if your house depreciates, it's still a house!
| There's even an upside - your rent to the government
| decreases.
|
| Yes. Though depending on government policies, you can
| also lose use of your house (or even lose your house).
| Depending on where you live and how you set up your
| holdings, investing in international stocks and bond can
| be more stable.
|
| To summarise: owner occupied housing does make sense for
| a lot of people. But it's far from being automatically
| always being the best choice.
| kamaal wrote:
| Im guessing different people have different life
| priorities. So in some way its not correct to argue a
| point derived from an assumption/axiom other person
| doesn't believe in.
|
| >>Well, I assume renting is better for your health: I was
| significantly less stressed about all the water damage
| that we had about two years ago, because I knew it was
| ultimately my landlord's problem, not mine.
|
| Paid by your money.
|
| >> But the overall effect is likely to be rather minor,
| and it can go either way, as some people get a mental
| health benefit out of knowing that they own their home.
|
| I get a feeling if one is fairly rich they don't have to
| worry about money. When you are that rich, it doesn't
| matter whether you rent or own.
| eru wrote:
| > Im guessing different people have different life
| priorities. So in some way its not correct to argue a
| point derived from an assumption/axiom other person
| doesn't believe in.
|
| Yes, definitely. That's why I am saying that whether it's
| better to invest in owner occupied housing or in
| something else and using the returns to pay rent, depends
| on yields and prices and personal preferences. It's not
| automatic that buying a house to live in is better.
|
| > Paid by your money.
|
| Yes, definitely. Just like when I go to a restaurant, all
| the ingredients and the chef's labour is paid for by my
| own money.
|
| Owning a house is a bit like having an extra part-time
| job with all the things you have to worry about and work
| on.
| tanewishly wrote:
| Around here, houses appreciate in value. Quite
| significantly, actually. A house can gain 100k in value
| in just a few years.
|
| If you bought it, you're paying off the old price. If
| you're renting, rent increases every year to keep more or
| less in line with the accruing value. So while renters
| and buyers may both start out paying (eg) 20% of their
| income on housing, for buyers, this will typically go
| down (due to inflation --> higher wages), while for
| renters, it will stay the same and might even increase.
|
| You're right about considering opportunity costs, but
| around here, it just turns out far, far worse for
| renters.
| consp wrote:
| > 20% of their income on housing
|
| Wha a world that would be. More in the 35-45 range.
| eru wrote:
| For a proper comparison, you need to pay up the guy
| paying off the mortgage with someone who eg invests
| similar amounts in an index fund.
|
| To be even more proper, you'd need to allow the stock
| market investor to use leverage, just like the guy with
| the mortgage does.
|
| Or, if you want to avoid the mortgage/leverage
| complication, we can compare someone buying a house
| outright with someone investing the same amount in
| stocks, and uses the returns to pay rent.
|
| > Around here, houses appreciate in value. Quite
| significantly, actually. A house can gain 100k in value
| in just a few years.
|
| Total returns on eg the S&P500 over the last few decades
| have been pretty good, too. And it's a much more
| diversified and liquid investment than a single house in
| a single location.
|
| For some people in some places, buying a house might be
| better than buying stocks, for some others it might be
| worse. Results also depend on taxes and jurisdiction and
| personal preferences. But it's not automatic that buying
| a house is better than renting.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Results also depend on taxes and jurisdiction
|
| If things were different, then the results would be
| different; but, being as they are, for most people in
| most Western jurisdictions the rules favor homeowners.
| eru wrote:
| > [...] but, being as they are, for most people in most
| Western jurisdictions the rules favor homeowners.
|
| Alas, no, not necessarily. There are feedback effects.
| The rules favouring owner-occupied housing mostly drive
| up the demand for that, and if you don't allow supply,
| then all you get is higher prices, that those would-be
| homeowners have to pay.
|
| But in any case: my point is that it's down to
| circumstances which path is better. It's not an automatic
| 'home-ownership is always better'.
| kemitche wrote:
| An important thing to consider is not just average
| return, but risk factors, and worst case scenarios.
|
| If you buy a home instead of investing, you've got a
| locked in, controlled rate for your housing expenses.
| (Yes, there's some variability with property tax and
| insurance). In difficult times, you can still plan very
| carefully around your housing costs and wait for better
| times.
|
| If you rent and invest, your housing costs can be highly
| variable and uncontrollable over time. Your investments
| may not cover increases in housing costs.
|
| A critical factor is that housing is more or less a
| _required_ cost of existence - just like feeding oneself.
| It is not something where one can necessarily "invest in
| other areas" instead. There are extreme cases (living out
| of an RV or in a tent on the side of the road), but for
| the most part those extremes are not representative of
| how someone wants to live. One can only downsize so much,
| and downsizing your housing investment comes with very
| real changes to quality of life (storage space, commute
| time, access to grocery stores, etc).
| joncrocks wrote:
| And are you considering the risk factors and worst case
| scenarios when it comes to housing?
|
| Housing is not as liquid, and prices can also go down as
| well as up. Often there are large transaction costs
| associated with buying/selling property.
|
| What if an event happens that is not covered by
| insurance? Subsistence, large-scale repairs required etc.
| Changes in housing regulations c.f. the fallout from
| Grenfell in the UK.
|
| There are risks in both, and risks from housing can also
| be large. The leverage offered by banks works in your
| favour in good times but can work against you in bad.
| pjc50 wrote:
| https://trustforlondon.org.uk/data/housing-as-proportion-
| inc...
|
| "Households living in poverty are spending a
| significantly larger proportion of their net income on
| housing costs than households not living in poverty. This
| is true both in London and in the rest of England.
|
| London households in poverty are estimated, on average,
| to spend 54% of their total net income on housing costs.
| In comparison, those living in households which are not
| in poverty spend just 11% on average.
|
| The trend is similar in the rest of England with
| households in poverty spending 32% of their income on
| housing compared to 8% for those not in poverty"
|
| (a lot of that is numerator/denominator issues - of
| course if you have more income you're spending a lesser
| fraction on housing - but it does show just how dominant
| housing costs are in people's lives)
| elif wrote:
| When i paid off my house and calculated my total
| payments, it came out to 6.8 years of the rent we had
| been paying when we bought it, (which was of course going
| up annually so it's probably better than 6x)
|
| 100x is just bad decision making
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Where I live, rents are about equal to the cost of
| mortgage + property tax, if not slightly more. This means
| you don't save money in the short term by renting.
|
| Mortgage is temporary though, rent is eternal and usually
| increasing over time. This means you don't save money in
| the long term, either.
| kamaal wrote:
| From where I come(South Indian Muslim), there is a saying
| that how quickly you own a home, get married and have
| kids decide the overall affluence you have in life.
|
| If _eat that frog_ is a think for daily schedule, there
| is also such a thing for life itself. You just have to
| get a few things done as early in life as you can. Or you
| end up living for other people.
| somenameforme wrote:
| It's only as one ages that we begin to realize how much
| wisdom there is in 'traditional' ways of life. It's
| almost like over millennia of humanity, we gradually
| found ways to maximize overall outcomes, even if they
| might come with aspects that aren't as ideologically
| ideal. At least this is something I can pass on to my own
| children.
| eru wrote:
| Most 'traditional' ways of life often aren't all that
| old. Definitely not millennia.
|
| (However they might still be a good idea. I don't know.)
|
| It also depends on how you translate the 'traditional
| way'. For example, on the one hand, for most of history
| people had about one surviving descendant per person, ie
| two kids that made it into adulthood to have their own
| kids. [0] On the other hand, they gave birth to many,
| many more kids. Which of the two perspectives do you want
| to preserve?
|
| Similarly, during most of the last few millennia most
| people used to have kids really late in life: they
| typically only had about perhaps 20 years or less left to
| live when their first child was born. Should we emulate
| that? Viewed through a different lens, people used to
| have kids really early in life: the distance in years
| between your own birth and the birth of your children was
| much shorter, too.
|
| Of course, the above paragraph is just a long winded way
| to say that people live longer these days. But still: how
| do you want to translate past behaviour? It's a choice
| that's up to you.
|
| [0] I'm basing that purely on the mathematical
| observation that population numbers have only gone up
| substantially in the last few hundred years. Thus
| replacement level fertility used to be the norm.
| somenameforme wrote:
| You're relying on a typical misunderstanding of the past.
| The increases in life expectancy in modern times are owed
| almost exclusively to reductions in childhood mortality,
| not actual extensions of life. In the past it's not like
| people just hit 40 years old and keeled over.
|
| So for instance the Founding Fathers died at an average
| age of 72 including things like Hamilton being killed in
| a duel at 47 years old. Only 2 of them died before 60 -
| Hamilton and Hancock (who had health problems throughout
| most of his life). John Adams lived to 90, and Sam
| Adams/John Jay/Ben Franklin/Jefferson/Madison died in
| their 80s. In fact this mortality age of ~70 expands all
| the way back to at least the Ancient Greeks. [1] The
| Bible also references this in Psalm 90:10: "As for the
| days of our life, they contain seventy years, Or if due
| to strength, eighty years, Yet their pride is but labor
| and sorrow; For soon it is gone and we fly away."
|
| All the advances in medicine over the past millennia have
| _dramatically_ reduced childhood mortality, but its
| impact on people who would have already made it into
| adulthood has been relatively small - perhaps 5-10 more
| years of very limited quality.
|
| [1] - https://aeon.co/ideas/think-everyone-died-young-in-
| ancient-s...
| eru wrote:
| Your 'Founding Fathers' only lived a few hundred years
| ago, not thousands of years ago, and were elites in one
| of the richest societies in the world at the time. I
| wouldn't use the bible as evidence; from what I heard
| they also talk about people living hundreds of years in
| that book, don't they?
|
| I agree that most of medicine itself hasn't necessarily
| made much of a dent in average adult life expectancy at,
| say, age 30.
|
| In any case, feel free to ignore that part of my comment.
| And concentrate on the part about the number of children.
|
| Or you can replace the now missing part with: how much
| should you spend on clothing? Should you spend the same
| in inflation adjusted terms as your ancestors? Or should
| you spend the same in terms of proportion of overall
| income (or time, in case of home production)?
| somenameforme wrote:
| Germ theory didn't exist, or at least wasn't accepted,
| until the late 19th century. In fact even things like
| handwashing before surgery weren't accepted until a
| similar timeline. Prior to that it would have been
| insulting to insinuate that a surgeons hand's might be
| 'unclean.' All the money in the world couldn't change
| this lack of knowledge. And indeed one of the Founding
| Fathers, George Washington, was likely killed more by the
| bleeding edge treatment of the day, than the disease that
| was being treated. In response to a throat infection he
| was bled for nearly 5 pints in order to remove 'bad
| blood.' His deathbed portraits showed him as white as a
| ghost.
|
| You're right we don't need to have as many children per
| person thanks to reduced infant mortality. Each and every
| woman having an average of 2.1 children is all that's
| required for a stable population. So each family that
| can/does have children should probably have somewhere
| between 2 and 5 to compensate for those who will not or
| cannot.
|
| And indeed we do need to start relatively early. By the
| time a woman reaches her 40s her fertility (assuming a
| perfectly timed effort) is going to be around 5-10% per
| month. When she's younger that can be > 30%. And in
| between each child you really want at least 9 months
| before starting on the next, a bit more is even better.
| And then you need to actually succeed at pregnancy.
| Contrary to popular conception things like IVF are not
| just guaranteed pregnancy. They're an _extremely_
| expensive roll of the dice. The dice are more weighted in
| your favor, but the odds of success can still be quite
| low for older parents. So perhaps 2-3 years per child,
| increasing with age, multiplied by 2-5 children. That 's
| a _lot_ of years and you want to finish this all up
| before your 40s if possible.
|
| And most importantly of all - this isn't an option.
| Societies that fail to maintain themselves will simply
| die off and end up being replaced. Much of what I'm
| saying here runs face first into contemporary ideological
| ideals, but the reality of what I'm saying will win
| simply because contemporary ideals are not self
| sustaining.
| kamaal wrote:
| There is a saying in Kannada language veed sullllaadruu
| gaade sullllaagdu which means the vedas can go wrong, but
| a _saying_ never turns out wrong.
|
| There is a wisdom in this. Most of the sayings in any
| culture are largely a distillation of a kind of
| civilisation darwinism. All it took people to survive big
| problems in life, distilled in neat statements.
| thowawatp302 wrote:
| You can't ever roll rent forward into the new purchase.
| That's not the same for a mortgage
| kelnos wrote:
| This is a bit of a weird take.
|
| For starters, people don't buy a house to live in solely
| because of the financials around it. They also buy the
| house because they _want_ it.
|
| When it comes to mortgage vs. buying outright, it just
| depends. I managed to get a very low interest rate for my
| primary home; the money I _didn 't_ put into the house is
| busy making quite a bit more than that very low interest
| rate for me yearly. If I were to rent out the house, I
| could probably get more for it than what I'm paying in
| mortgage interest + property taxes, so renting isn't
| really better (and then I'd be subject to the rent-
| jacking whims of my landlord). But even if I couldn't, I
| still just... want this house to be mine. There's value
| in that to me.
|
| > _if you HAVE to do a mortgage, then its likely that
| renting will be a better deal for you_
|
| This is _very_ regionally-dependent. There are places
| where rents are significantly more expensive than
| mortgage payments, and places where homes cost so much
| that most people rent at a fairly reasonable rate in
| comparison.
| eru wrote:
| Have you ever heard of opportunity costs?
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| How does that even apply here? Assuming you aren't living
| with family it's fair to assume you have to spend money
| on housing. So the question is, do you want to keep
| _some_ of that money in the form of equity or give _all_
| of it to your landlord?
| gamedever wrote:
| Japan would like have a word with you. Houses in Japan
| are like cars. The moment you buy it it's now "used" and
| worth less and it keeps doing down in value.
| rtpg wrote:
| This is not as true as it used to be. I don't even know
| how true it used to be!
| gamedever wrote:
| it's still true except in a few special popular areas
| eru wrote:
| That's actually not (much) less true in other places.
| It's just that in eg the US the land is typically a lot
| more valuable, and people tend to mix up the value of the
| land (which doesn't really deprecate) and the value of
| the structure on top.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> the value of the land (which doesn't really deprecate)
|
| Maybe in urban centers. But go out into the hills and you
| will find many towns where land prices tanked once the
| local resource industry moved on. It isn't just 18th
| century gold rush stuff. There are towns from the 80s
| that just emptied when the local industry moved on.
|
| https://justinmcelroy.com/2022/07/26/visiting-
| canadas-50-mil...
| eru wrote:
| And I assume houses in these places aren't exactly
| holding up well as investments?
|
| EDIT: Oh, I think you were talking about deprecation?
| Even in the downtrodden areas, land values going down
| isn't technically deprecation. It's just like a bar of
| gold sitting in your garage: its market price might
| fluctuate, but that has nothing to do with deprecation.
| gnarlynarwhal42 wrote:
| Sorry to be nitpicky, but I think the term for the
| concept you're talking about is depreciate, not deprecate
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _its not even the buying vs renting thing, renting is
| bad, you don 't get to own anything at the end of the
| journey_
|
| let's say you are an investor (crypto and day trading,
| living at home rent free in your parents' basement: "more
| tendies mom!")
|
| but alongside your crypto and day trading, you scrape
| together enough cash to buy a house as an investment.
| it's an investment, you rent it out and earn rental
| income. What's rent? let's say it's $10,000 a month.
| Great! so, in addition to the appreciation of the
| property over time, you also get $120,000+ a year (the +
| is because you get some of the money at the beginning and
| middle of the year and you can pour it into lucrative day
| trading and crypto)
|
| with me so far? nothing up my sleeve.
|
| now you're feeling flush and you figure with your
| success, you don't have to live in mom's basement any
| more. Heck! you own a house, you can live there! and eat
| your cheetos in the the living room instead of the
| basement! So, you move in.
|
| If you live in the investment house you own, you no
| longer get the $120,000+ a year. Why...why...why, wait,
| it's just like you are paying $10,000 a month rent!
|
| Moral to the story: owning does not save you from paying
| rent, you are still paying rent, forgoing that income on
| your investment. Yes, that "it's so obvious everbody
| knows it" personal finance advice you read in major
| publications is complete and utter garbage.
|
| don't thank me [tips cap] glad to help. And now you know
| how i feel sharing the planet with people, "experts"
| even, who don't have a clue what they are talking about.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Is this sarcasm? Because this entire story is predicated
| on the fact that while you're renting the home you bought
| you're living somewhere else and that somewhere else is
| either something you're renting or something someone else
| has bought and you're living in there rent free.
| ralferoo wrote:
| I don't think it's sarcasm, just poorly explained. Owning
| a house serves two distinct purposes - as a home or as an
| investment. Despite what a lot of people think, it can't
| be both at once.
|
| As an investment, you forego some upfront capital
| (downpayment), have some monthly costs (mortgage payment)
| and a monthly income (rent) and at the end you have an
| asset (current value) and maybe an obligation to pay
| another lump sum (principal - downpayment if interest
| only mortgage).
|
| In the UK at least, for buy-to-let properties, the
| interest-only mortgage is common, so at the end of the
| mortgage term you have to repay the principal, and the
| profit comes from the different between the current value
| and the principal. In most situations, the rental income
| is almost entirely used to cover the mortgage payments,
| maintenance, costs, and paying tax, so during the
| mortgage period most landlords actually make very little
| income. It's essentially a bet on whether over the term
| (maybe 20 years), the difference in value will be better
| than the lost opportunity cost of not investing the
| downpayment elsewhere and the risk of periods of having
| to cover the mortgage and expenses without income during
| periods when the house is unoccupied, or tenants refuse
| to pay, etc. Particularly in the early years, the rental
| income may be substantially lower than the costs to the
| landlord, but over time, inflation will allow rental
| prices to increase but the mortgage costs will remain
| level. A smart landlord will invest the monthly profit at
| that point, to reduce the impact of the principal at the
| end of the mortgage.
|
| In some ways, a house bought as a home is very similar,
| but in others very different. Typically bought as a home,
| a mortgage will be higher because the aim is usually to
| pay off all the principal as well as interest, and the
| simplistic view is that obviously having a mortgage for
| your home is better because you're always paying off the
| capital and end up with an asset at the end, the GP's
| point is that it isn't actually that simple.
|
| Let's say you lived in the house. You're paying for the
| mortgage directly, let's assume that on average the
| mortgage costs are the same as the rent for an equivalent
| house, but actually at the start, the mortgage is
| probably going to be a significantly bigger chunk of your
| monthly expenses. On top of that, you have all the
| maintenance costs - some will be urgent and necessary,
| others can be deferred for later (although financially,
| perhaps not the best option because inflation will make
| the cost more or less the same now as later).
|
| If you had the same house as a buy-to-rent property,
| you'd have the same maintenance costs and the same
| mortgage costs (whether it's interest only or capital
| repayment, the main difference is just when you pay it),
| so really the only difference is that you are receiving a
| rental income and losing the ability to live in the
| house.
|
| As such, there is actually an equivalence between having
| a mortgage on a house that you live in and paying rent
| for that house instead - and the equivalent amount is the
| amount that you would have received as rent (minus taxes
| and costs from renting). If you _could_ have rented that
| property out at PS1000 per month, by choosing to live
| there, you are effectively paying that PS1000 a month
| rent yourself.
|
| In truth, the main factor in choosing whether to rent or
| get a mortgage is a mixture of availability and cost of
| credit (which varies depending on your financial
| situation) and how much you have available to spend on
| accommodation each month. Having a mortgage front-loads
| the payments - having a much higher payments initially,
| but fixed so that as inflation reduces the monthly cost
| in real terms, much cheaper later on, compared to renting
| where there is effectively a constant monthly cost in
| real terms once inflation is applied to it (probably
| annually, every time the price is renegotiated).
|
| Personally, I'd chose a mortgage, because I was chose a
| cheap house compared to the area so that I was able to
| afford the monthly payment (the base mortgage was
| approximately 50% more than the equivalent rent would
| have been), and then used every bit of spare money I had
| each month to overpay, which meant that I paid off the
| house before the end of the mortgage term.
|
| You might think that paying off the mortgage is an
| obvious success - I now own a house I can live in rent-
| free, but the alternative - paying much less each month
| and investing the rest, with compounding gains would
| probably be returning me an income that's equivalent to
| the rent that I would be continuing to pay if I didn't
| have a house.
|
| Which one is better is down to personal preference, and
| also quite heavily influenced by societal norms - in the
| UK and USA, we're very strong believers in owning
| property, but in much of Europe, the vast majority of
| people rent and see no problem with that.
| fsckboy wrote:
| it's not poorly explained, it's poorly understood (to
| paraphrase Mr Miyagi, "no bad teacher, only bad
| students") This is like the Monty Hall problem and I am
| Vos Savant. Just listen and learn.
|
| Part of the value of a house is the value of living in
| it, the rent. It costs to live in a house, and the amount
| it costs is the rent. And this is true _whether you own
| the house or if somebody else owns the house._
|
| Living in a house you own vs renting out the house you
| own decreases your net inbound cash flow by the amount of
| the rent; rent is paid, even if it is your house.
|
| this is very basic economics, very basic finance, but, as
| understood by somebody smarter than all of you, who has
| kindly taken the time to explain it. You are welcome.
|
| (Consider living in a house that you do not own, and
| paying the rent. Now, marry your landlord. What has
| changed? Answer: nothing, the rent you now save is also
| income the couple has now lost.
|
| (you will need to make adjustments for depreciation
| allowance for investment property, tax deductibility of
| expenses, etc. but that's details, not conceptual. Do you
| suspect that these line items actually could make the
| difference between this being a wash vs a no-brainer
| money machine? they don't. If tax deductions make
| landlordship more (or less) advantageous, then the market
| will shift landlords=tenants till a new equilibrium is
| achieved where the rents and deductions balance out, with
| people living in all the same places. no value was
| created or destroyed, except less govt interference in
| markets is better, dead weight losses and all that))
| gnarlynarwhal42 wrote:
| You are completely ignoring equity
| oarla wrote:
| Assuming fixed rate mortgage, in most places the rate at
| which rent can grow is faster than rate of property
| taxes+insurance can grow. So the cost of ownership will
| generally be cheaper than renting. Not to mention
| increasing equity in an asset with time
| DanielHB wrote:
| Not in the US, but I live in a CoL place in Europe and
| when I bought my first apartment I was baffled by the
| amount of money I was saving every month. My previous
| rent was about the same as my mortgage, but 40% of my
| mortgage was going down to reduce the principal. And I
| only had 15% downpayment.
|
| Bought the apartment in 2018, sold in 2024 (close to the
| bottom of the local-market slump). Still profited ~10%
| (before fees) compared to buying price. All that
| principal amortization payed for the downpayment (and
| some) of my much bigger current apartment.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye it is strange. I mean to some extent the lesser
| service you get explains it. But shady land lords does
| not provide the required services and still charge a
| premium for rent.
|
| To some extent the apartment board might be to optimistic
| on future maintenance costs too.
| DanielHB wrote:
| No, it is just the messed up rental market in Stockholm.
| Government and HOA controls don't let people be landlords
| for more than 2 years of a time and require you to ask
| permission from the HOA and to have a reason.
|
| The actual apartment I was renting was pretty well kept
| though, proper cleaning, air ventilation inspections,
| very good laundry room, fully renovated less than 10
| years before I moved in. The apartment I bought however
| was similar conditions.
|
| It is possible to get a first-hand rental contract but it
| takes years upon years and you can never get something in
| the location you want.
| eru wrote:
| Doesn't Stockholm have cray rent control, too?
| DanielHB wrote:
| Yes for first-hand contracts, which are impossible to
| get. So your options if you are not born into the first-
| hand contract queue (people put their 5 year old children
| on the queue) is to rent second-hand which was what I was
| doing.
|
| The HOAs don't let you be a landlord and rent out your
| apartment for more than 2 years at a time, and you need
| to have a reason like you are moving to another country
| for studies.
|
| Technically when you buy an apartment in Sweden you are
| (almost always) not actually buying the apartment, but
| rather just a stake in the HOA corporation with the
| attached right to live in the apartment. So the HOA has
| last say about who can live in the apartment (and what
| renovations you can do).
|
| It is all very complicated and specific to Sweden, but
| this HOA corporation thing avoids a lot of fees/taxes
| when selling/buying the apartment (which is a BIG deal,
| stamp tax alone is 4% of the asset last I heard). But you
| get these downsides as well.
|
| Detached houses usually don't have HOAs, those you can
| rent out more freely. However they are not exactly
| affordable housing, especially considering heating costs
| of detached houses triple during winter (maybe they only
| double _if_ you have modern heat pumps). Banks won't lend
| you money to buy real state with the intent to rent out
| either.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>So the cost of ownership will generally be cheaper than
| renting. Not to mention increasing equity in an asset
| with time
|
| With age your ability to earn decreases as well.
| bdowling wrote:
| No one lives forever. You can't take it with you. In the
| long run, we're all renting.
| dominicrose wrote:
| That's a good reason to sell an extra home when you
| need/want cash, not to rent where you live. Even if you
| don't have children to inherit, it's nice to own a home,
| but I guess it depends on ones lifestyle.
| kamaal wrote:
| Most of what one calls nepotism, or dynasty is simply
| people thinking about their grandchildren while making
| these decisions.
|
| Why wouldn't you want to leave behind wealth for _your_
| kids? They are _your_ kids.
| jajko wrote:
| Quite limited view thats valid in certain times in
| certain cases, in certain countries etc.
|
| What about drawbacks of owning a house? You will spend
| non-trivial amount of your time, energy and money just to
| keep it up, keep fixing all things that deteriorate. And
| everything deteriorates. I mean really non-trivial, count
| how much your hourly rate is and how much you will waste
| instead of making some fun good activities, getting more
| healthy, enjoying life, resting, traveling and so on. Is
| that really how you want to spend some part of your me-
| time?
|
| You are also locking yourself down at very specific place
| which may be a craphole in a decade, without good jobs
| around etc.
|
| Also it will in normal cases vacuum your savings,
| degrading quality and fun in life in (at least) initial
| years after purchase - those are often the best years of
| one's remaining life.
|
| People tend to look back with rosy glasses on the past,
| highlighting positives and shrinking negatives, thats
| basic psychology of each of us. Looking back at period of
| ownership people mostly look at money made, not all that
| stress and time with just keeping some property in same
| state.
|
| Middle grounds are apartments, very little maintenance
| compared to house&land, much lower costs, but also less
| privacy and less feeling of 'in my own'.
|
| There is room for each approach, ie right out school
| locking oneself in specific place may not be the smartest
| idea. Maybe you will earn some money on sell but maybe
| also some much better opportunities and better life will
| be missed due to inflexibility. Freedom is invaluable,
| properties ownership tends to take some of it away.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>You will spend non-trivial amount of your time, energy
| and money just to keep it up
|
| To up keep _your_ home! You also pretty much up keep your
| rented home too. And at the end you spend to maintain
| other people 's home.
|
| >>Is that really how you want to spend some part of your
| me-time?
|
| Most of the times its not that bad, you talk like you are
| on-call 24x7 throughout the year.
|
| >>You are also locking yourself down at very specific
| place which may be a craphole in a decade, without good
| jobs around etc.
|
| That's called stability, and that brings wealth and
| happiness. Honestly people look down upon these things,
| people use wrong words(lifer, coaster etc) to put down
| stability. In reality stability, with a predictable
| schedule is one of the best things that you do to your
| health, and overall life stability/happiness.
|
| >>Also it will in normal cases vacuum your savings,
| degrading quality and fun in life in (at least) initial
| years after purchase - those are often the best years of
| one's remaining life.
|
| This is mostly an assumption, in my experience the exact
| opposite is true.
|
| >>People tend to look back with rosy glasses on the past,
| highlighting positives and shrinking negatives, thats
| basic psychology of each of us. Looking back at period of
| ownership people mostly look at money made, not all that
| stress and time with just keeping some property in same
| state.
|
| Its always a bad idea to make any investment today, and
| you feel deep regret to have not made an investment 20
| years back. Im not talking about real estate in specific,
| but even things like education, or exercise, look
| pointless and something you can do without today, but you
| wish you had done more or atleast started decades back.
|
| >>Middle grounds are apartments, very little maintenance
| compared to house&land, much lower costs, but also less
| privacy and less feeling of 'in my own'.
|
| You don't even own walls in a apartment, its like the
| worst of all the worlds.
| jajko wrote:
| lol lets just say we disagree on practically everything
| :) to each their own
|
| Just one point - there is no way ownership of some home
| brings actual _happiness_ , you overload the term
| massively. Not only some theory, I simply never met such
| a person so that this would be actually valid. I've lived
| in 3 different cultures and talk about 100s of folks
| knowing well personally.
|
| Although I've met quite a few folks that, by chasing the
| dream of some home in suburbs 'to have their own place'
| ruined their marriage often beyond repair, including
| happy childhood of their kids.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>Just one point - there is no way ownership of some home
| brings actual happiness, you overload the term massively.
|
| There was this stock broking platform owner here in India
| who was going on Youtube for years and telling people to
| rent instead of buying.
|
| Last year, his landlord showed him the door, and he had
| to vacate.
|
| Even for the rich. Not being to able to continuously
| associate with a place. Not being able to modify the
| premises, not being able to keep the beautification they
| would have done to the premises or just being asked to
| leave without having any control over the place is
| grounds enough to own a place.
|
| >>Although I've met quite a few folks that, by chasing
| the dream of some home in suburbs 'to have their own
| place' ruined their marriage often beyond repair,
| including happy childhood of their kids.
|
| Their wife and kids will likely hate homelessness more.
| Some times you have to experience worse to value to these
| things.
|
| Everytime food gets bland at home, I go fasting for a
| while. Suddenly the blandest salad tastes good.
|
| You can talk to the sages modern or ancient. They will
| give you this one advice- Avoid the big problems, and
| things that can kill you. You can only go upwards from
| here.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Sure there's a way owning a home brings happiness . . .
| when you're ready to retire, you've paid off your
| mortgage, and then you can actually, you know, retire. As
| opposed to funding your landlord's retirement paying rent
| for the rest of your life.
| cratermoon wrote:
| There's a reason the phrase "money pit" is used to
| describe owning a house.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Typically by people that don't own their own home and
| never have. Most everyone else uses the term to describe
| renovation projects the owners lack the skills to
| complete (contractors are expensive) or boats. Seriously,
| how often do y'all think a house needs major repairs or
| renovation work in the course of 20 years?
| cratermoon wrote:
| It depends on how well the owner maintains the house. My
| dad spent some time nearly every weekend doing something
| around the house. He did nearly everything himself:
| painting interior and exterior, plumbing, appliance
| repair and installation, window frame adjustments. He
| even rolled out fiberglass installation in the attic, and
| in the process accidentally slipped off a joist and put
| his foot through the ceiling, but he fixed the drywall
| himself. About the only thing he didn't do himself was
| re-roof. I'm sure he saved a ton of money not paying
| contractors to do all that.
|
| For someone who doesn't do upkeep, or can't afford
| competent contractors to do it, major repairs can happen
| any time, without warning.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| You're ice-skating uphill trying to convince someone
| who's perfectly happy to spend their money on their
| landlord's retirement that there's a better way. The
| giveaway here is when someone makes home maintenance
| sound like residential construction is made of cheese.
| They don't have any idea what goes into maintaining a
| home, don't have the skills, and don't want to learn. The
| first time I encountered this particular flavor of
| willful ignorance I was absolutely certain that I was
| being subjected to some kind of elaborate practical joke.
| It took me a solid six months to come to terms with the
| fact that an otherwise educated and intelligent grown-ass
| man would keep his family stuck in an apartment for the
| rest of their lives for no other reason than a
| comprehensive misunderstanding of the financials and time
| requirements of home ownership.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Get disappointed and lawyer through the arguments to
| justify renting a home.
|
| As opposed to just flatly stating that owning a home is
| always good and dismissing any opposition out of hand as
| "lawyering"?
|
| Here's my first attempt to lawyer: I don't want to live
| in a house. Is owning a house always good for me?
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| You can own apartments too. I assume the logic is pretty
| much the same either way.
| vel0city wrote:
| Many markets don't have many individually owned
| apartments. In my area, many hundreds (maybe even
| thousands?) of apartment units have been constructed.
| Practically none of them are individually owned, they're
| all large apartment complexes owned entirely by
| corporations. There are some condos and townhomes that
| come on the market from time to time but generally
| speaking if one wants apartment life you're renting.
| xp84 wrote:
| I'm curious, what area is this? That sounds strange to
| me.
|
| Some people in your boat would choose to buy an
| investment property in one place and rent in another in
| order to still get exposure to the real estate
| appreciation that is so common, while not having to buy a
| condo in a difficult area like yours. But it would
| probably be so much easier to just to invest in a few
| good residential property REITs.
|
| Probably lower return than the best case scenario of
| owning a rental, but with all the costs diluted across a
| large portfolio (instead of 'surprise, you need a new
| roof!')
| vel0city wrote:
| Richardson specifically, but honestly most of DFW. Pretty
| much any apartment complex built in this area in the past
| 20 years is corporate owned. These days even a lot of the
| townhouses around are corporate owned rental units.
|
| In fact, this area (and other places in Texas) has given
| rise to a new kind of apartment architecture called the
| "Texas Doughnut", which is a 5-over-1 apartment complex
| wrapping a central parking garage and often other
| courtyards in the middle. These things are everywhere in
| DFW. Just take a peek on Google Maps.
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/KKHx47n7qooQCjNz9
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/uqwBGv3nRrTLfWvw7
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/SX9wNG1441xrWwBAA
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/SL49yPkoA8VqE23F6
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/MEiqBnhMF8pQjGu36
|
| But it is not just DFW. A lot of other cities in the US
| have similar things going on. It seems like most cities
| I'm in often have most new apartments I see be corporate
| owned units, not a lot of individual ownership.
| tacocataco wrote:
| The current exploitative nature of renting is a policy
| choice. Renting doesn't have to be like this.
|
| There are real-world examples of providing affordable
| housing that allows people to live with dignity, even if
| they can't afford to buy a home.
|
| How Britain (almost) solved the housing crisis:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZpLiJdIGbs
| pempem wrote:
| Oof - it cuts both ways. Its near impossible to _own_ a
| home in London when everything is on land-lease. You 're
| just buying the house for a while...so...renting. Because
| some generations old family owns the land.
| eloisant wrote:
| No, it depends how long you stay in the house.
|
| If you stay long enough, buying is cheaper. But if you
| move after just a few years, you'll have mostly paid
| interests on your mortgage, you had closing tax, your
| house may even have lost value... So there are many cases
| it would have been cheaper to rent.
|
| How long you need to stay to make your purchase
| worthwhile depends where you live.
| xp84 wrote:
| Agreed. Over a decade ago, to try to overcome my fear to
| make such a large purchase, I did the math and decided to
| bake very conservative assumptions into my decision-
| making. My rent then was $1800 a month, so 5 years of
| that is $108k. If I kept a similar mortgage payment as my
| rent (in reality, my payment was actually more like
| $1450), I realized that all I had to do was stay there 5
| years while having it _lose_ ($108k minus property taxes
| paid) in value and I 'd break even in terms of cash flow,
| whereas the upside, if it stayed flat or appreciated, was
| that I'd have built up substantial equity.
|
| (In the end, the gamble paid off great - the condo
| appreciated by about 300k in those 5 years)
| elzbardico wrote:
| emphasis on owning, I mean, having it fully paid.
| DANmode wrote:
| You can see why there's an attraction to visiting the
| casino, as well.
| kamaal wrote:
| >>he just worked long days every day that afforded a very
| nice lifestyle.
|
| Some people do work jobs where affluence and a nice lifestyle
| are kind of baked into it.
|
| I do know quite a few people who travel for work often, they
| stay in luxury hotels, business class travel, great food and
| fun opportunities at a often basis.
|
| You need to get lucky with the job you do.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| "As Link tells it, Nan's attention from their births went to
| son Rand and daughter Gale. There was no time for his work, his
| life and love. Despite separating ways, Link says, they stayed
| married for the sake of the children. Because that's what
| parents used to do."
|
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...
| elif wrote:
| This was incredibly the norm in the 90's. A 'good dad' back
| then spent an hour a day with his kid after work.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Was looking to buy an apartment which had had a single owner
| for decades, likely since it was built in the 70s.
|
| At the viewing I noticed how it looked quite distinctly worn.
|
| Like, the ceiling above the stove was full of grease from
| frying and the interior of the oven had clear signs of only
| being used for frozen pizzas. Looked like he'd only ever made
| like pork chops or frozen pizzas.
|
| The floor in the main bedroom was very well preserved, except
| for a noticeable worn path leading to the bed and a small oval
| next to the bed. Similar things in the living room.
|
| I mentioned this to the agent, which replied: *Oh yeah, the guy
| bought the place so he could stay here when he needed a break
| from his wife. Apparently he'd come here every few weeks or so
| and stay for a couple of days."
| kristianp wrote:
| Apparently the Eagles song, "Hotel California" is loosely based
| on the fokelore around this hotel.
| rzz3 wrote:
| I always thought it was about the Hotel California in Todos
| Santos, Mexico.
| lordleft wrote:
| Marvelous article. I was prepared to read about an eccentric and
| mild recluse but Irving seems to been witness to extraordinary
| things.
| tanujsh979 wrote:
| Amazing read!
| kelnos wrote:
| > _ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people
| ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk._
|
| It's funny how much life cycles. I do kinda remember a phase
| where people were eating a "healthier" breakfast of some kind of
| fruit, and when granola became popular, and when milk fat was
| considered the worst thing you could do to your body.
|
| But now eggs are fine, again. Great, even.
| b800h wrote:
| I was immediately struck by this remark too. Were eggs
| particularly unfashionable in the early 1990s in the USA?
| Apparently so.
| morsch wrote:
| Egg consumption was considered to lead to high cholesterol
| levels and thus linked to cardiovascular disease.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4632449/
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/wellness/19.
| ..
|
| https://australianfoodtimeline.com.au/egg-consumption/
| ekianjo wrote:
| The idea that granola would be healthier is rather strange
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| One of the best examples of a food industry (grains)
| being able to influence eating habits to their benefit.
|
| Anyway, the phrase "healhty" in relation to food is a bit
| of a trigger phrase to me nowadays, healthy how? It's
| completely lacking in nuance. Apples are healthy, except
| when you eat 200 seeds at which point the cyanide gets to
| a lethal dose. Granola is healthy, unless you eat it
| three times a day and little else. You get the idea. The
| problem there is "x is healthy" makes people overconsume
| it and ignore anything that isn't marked "healthy".
|
| "healthy" eating takes work, study, and moderation.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| At the same time, there is also a faction that appears to
| argue _against_ overly studying or obsessing about
| nutrition science, saying that if you really just
| prioritize variety, moderation, and made-at-home, then
| you 're already 90% of the way there.
| Reefersleep wrote:
| I wonder what the value is of that advice, it's so
| incredibly vague. What's "varied"? What's "moderated"?
| Feels a bit like an excuse to stay ignorant.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I mean, I'm obviously giving the one line summary that
| usually leads into a significantly more detailed
| treatise, eg: https://openbooks.library.unt.edu/nutrition
| forconsumers/chap...
|
| I think point is less to stay ignorant and more to focus
| on macro-level changes (water > soda/beer, vary your
| starches, get sugar from fruit, avoid "filling up" on
| purely protein) rather than obsessing over this or that
| micronutrient and trying to boil it all down into a
| perfect formulation that you consume in a sludgy pancake-
| batter-tasting "shake" twice a day.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > Apples are healthy, except when you eat 200 seeds at
| which point the cyanide gets to a lethal dose.
|
| Speaking of things from back in the day, an episode of GI
| Joe featured this idea (only it was dumping truckloads of
| apples onto a giant gelatinous blob to kill it).
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| Healthy is something the shopping mall checkout register
| can quantify?
| bmelton wrote:
| People can be persuaded to silly things on silly logic.
|
| There was a time after prohibition when the prevailing
| theory was that vodka was healthier than whiskey because
| it was clear and whiskey wasn't.
|
| Our educational institutions marched an entire populace
| right into obesity because the government insisted the
| food pyramid was scientific, and not the result of
| lobbying.
|
| Honestly it's a bit wild to me that we ever think we know
| anything for certain.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Some people have less reaction to vodka because whiskey
| includes other compounds. But that says nothing of
| healthier just histamine levels.
|
| https://www.eds.clinic/articles/low-histamine-alcohol-
| histam...
| bmelton wrote:
| Oh, sure. There are lots of things in lots of spirits.
| Sugars, distillation methods, heart-cut precision can all
| yield different _effects_ from a spirit, but I can
| distill a bottle of vodka that 's predominately methanols
| and acetaldehydes from the heads that are perfectly
| clear, and definitely not better for you than the same
| spirit from just five minutes later in the distillation.
| buescher wrote:
| Fiber. People used to go to the doctor a lot for
| digestive issues. "An apple a day" and all that.
| mock-possum wrote:
| My parents (in their 60s) still think this way - they
| mostly use that 'egg substitute' that comes in a carton (I
| think it's some sort of processed egg white) as the bulk of
| their eggs, e.g. scrambled eggs using a 4:1 ratio of
| substitute to real eggs. They used to almost exclusively
| use margarine instead of butter too.
|
| I like eggs a lot better now that I've learned to make them
| myself.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| > they mostly use that 'egg substitute' that comes in a
| carton
|
| I like to make a fried egg sandwich in the morning, and I
| can't get that stuff not to stick to the pan.
| buescher wrote:
| That stuff is pretty much just egg white and food
| coloring. Nowadays they sell undyed egg white in cartons
| alongside it because the trend has shifted to high
| protein diets.
| vasco wrote:
| The street wisdom was that eggs gave you high cholesterol due
| to the yolk having loads of cholesterol (which doesn't get
| absorbed, we need to produce our own cholesterol).
| lazide wrote:
| There were a bunch of studies saying high cholesterol was
| bad and would give you a heart attack. Then also ones
| saying low cholesterol would make you crazy
| [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4215473/].
|
| And also ones saying food high in cholesterol was bad. Then
| ones saying food high in 'bad' cholesterol were bad, and
| one's high in 'good' cholesterol were good.
|
| Then eventually we figured out that dietary cholesterol has
| almost no impact on blood cholesterol levels except in a
| tiny portion of the population.
|
| Fun times eh?
| mopenstein wrote:
| Simpsons did it
|
| https://youtu.be/AHAFMFFQlkI
| buescher wrote:
| It was about health. You know, trying not to grow old and get
| sick and eventually die. Between the seventies and about 15
| years ago, educated people in the US, the sort of people who
| got their toehold in the middle class by doing what their
| betters told them to do, would look at you like you were
| deliberately trying to kill yourself if you had eggs and
| bacon and white bread toast with real butter on it for
| breakfast. It probably peaked around the turn of the century.
|
| The margarine section of the dairy case was bigger than the
| butter section. Imitation cheese slices were sold right
| alongside regular processed cheese - they're now completely
| dairy free and banished to the vegan food section.
|
| There's a famous scene in "Sleeper" (1973) by Woody Allen
| where the character wakes up in the future to find out that
| everything that was considered bad for you is considered good
| for you again. Woody Allen was born in 1935 so had been
| around long enough to know these things go in cycles.
| xp84 wrote:
| I have a good memory of, in the 1990s, what must have been a
| rehab campaign from Big Egg, slogan: "The incredible, edible
| EGG!"
| vladms wrote:
| I always find fun these "generalizations". Like: "Eggs are
| fine". If you are a 50kg person that eats 20 eggs for breakfast
| each day I doubt it would be fine.
|
| We would need something like LD50, or even better a range over
| a period (eggs are mostly fine if you eat between 2 and 5 per
| week)
| osrec wrote:
| I heard 2 per day, especially if on a meat free diet.
| xandrius wrote:
| What's interesting some of the reasons why 20 eggs are too
| much for someone weighing 50kg:
|
| - Too much Vitamin A
|
| - Too much protein (yes, there is such a thing)
|
| - 1450kcal from eggs alone (might be ok but other nutrients
| are needed)
|
| Even before touching the fats.
| tmerc wrote:
| Assuming female, 5'5", age 35, somewhat active because it's
| more conservative; daily caloric intake is like 1700. Your
| egg macros are about 5.5g of protein and fat per egg for
| about 72 calories per egg. A large egg is 7g protein, 7
| fat. 91 calories. My math is based on large eggs, 9 cal/g
| fat, 4cal/g carbs and protein. To get all of of their
| caloric intake from eggs would be around 18 eggs.
|
| Vitamin A in eggs is 75iu, 23ug RAE. RDA is 700ug for this
| person. 30 eggs. The tolerable upper limit is 3000ug. 130
| eggs.
|
| Macros: 126g of both fat and protein. Carbs in eggs are
| negligible at maybe .5g each, totaling 9g or 36 cal.
| Harvard recommends .36g/lb for protein, which is about 40g.
| They also set the theoretical upper limit at 2g/kg ;
| .91g/lb, which is 102g. So this is 24g excessive (3.4
| eggs). The quantity of too much protein is debatable,
| though in the absence of heavy weight lifting, this is at
| least excessive for most people. Harmful depends on
| context.
|
| 126g of fat is 1134cal. This is below what they need to
| maintain weight (calorie deficit) and the biggest problem
| with this diet so far. If this person are more than 150g of
| carbs per day, I would be concerned because with
| circulating glucose, body fat is not used readily to supply
| caloric need. The body may want to use protein as a calorie
| source, which is where the danger of eating too much
| protein comes from.
|
| After being on this diet for several weeks, they will be in
| ketosis, which will actually make it much safer. Body fat
| is used more readily in ketosis to fill energy needs and
| could make up the 600 calorie per day deficit, totaling to
| a little over the safe 1lb per week recommendation for
| weight loss.
|
| I would advise adding more fat and reducing protein a bit
| (80g should be plenty though potentially excessive still),
| not because this is dangerous but because it is excessive
| and the body will need to remove the excess protein as
| waste. This isn't really harmful in smaller quantities but
| does put more strain on the kidneys.
|
| Maybe 12 eggs a day and another 50 of mostly fat to get 500
| calories, 500 deficit. If trying to maintain weight,
| increase fat by another 50g. Mix carbs if you want under
| 300 calories (75g) with that amount removed from fat intake
| and preferably in one meal with protein.
|
| Doesn't consider vitamins other than A.
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| It's a fine generalisation because it's assumed that people
| eat 1-2 eggs for breakfast, not 20. "Something like LD50"
| can't help because it is literally another generalisation
| that may not apply to you personally: eggs are mostly fine
| unless you have an eggs allergy or problems with cholesterol
| or whatnot.
| jhbadger wrote:
| At least at US restaurants, a "small" omelette is three
| eggs and larger ones more, though. And likewise for
| servings of scrambled eggs. Pretty much the only case where
| 1 or 2 eggs are the norm is when ordering fried eggs (and
| those are generally accompanied by bacon, potatoes, toast,
| etc.)
| BoxFour wrote:
| That doesn't really change the point though.
|
| There might be longterm malnutrition problems if you're
| solely eating eggs in mass quantities (since 20 eggs for
| a 50 kilo person would be hitting near your daily caloric
| intake just in eggs), but for most people this isn't a
| concern.
|
| Having 5 eggs for breakfast (not as an omelette, which
| obviously has other stuff in it) every day would probably
| _improve_ most people's health.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Or, you know, when eating at home. Breakfast is the meal
| I'm least likely to eat out for, and I don't think I'm
| alone.
| tim333 wrote:
| Yup fine https://www.quora.com/Can-you-survive-by-only-
| eating-eggs
| Y_Y wrote:
| With the help of a stochastic parrot I've determined the
| following: Consuming an LD50 quantity of eggs (400-500 eggs)
| would amount to about 29% of a 70 kg person's body volume.
| This suggests that such an amount would be physically
| impractical to ingest in one sitting, even before metabolic
| toxicity becomes an issue.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Ain't no man eat fiddy eggs
| vel0city wrote:
| Gaston eats five dozen eggs.
| psyclobe wrote:
| These are the kinda articles I like to just read the last
| paragraph. So much work to paint some annoying ass story; sorry,
| I skipped to the end haha.
| 16mb wrote:
| I thought the journey was well-written, captivating and worth
| the read.
| psyclobe wrote:
| Huh, maybe I should give it a go...
| kittikitti wrote:
| I'm still trying to find the reason this was posted and
| boosted, instead of some very important AI news coming out
| recently.
| yownie wrote:
| probably because we're all sick of AI news
| lqet wrote:
| Reading the article, looking at pictures from the Beverly Hills
| Hotel in the 70ies and 80ies, and considering the fact that
| Irving V. Link acted in a movie once, I get the strong feeling
| that an episode of Columbo in which Link played himself as a
| wrongfully accused prime suspect (saved by Columbo in the end)
| would've been _excellent_.
|
| Just imagine Peter Falk and Link conversing next to that pool:
| https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/travel/discover/photos...
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Oh man YES.
| nelblu wrote:
| The picture of that pool reminded me of this Columbo episode
| (S4 Exercise in Fatality) :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRoVLfuADqw&t=220s
| motohagiography wrote:
| what stands out of me is a sense of place the hotel represented
| that isn't present anywhere today. if you were at the hotel when
| something occurred, the hotel was a part of america and by being
| there, you were _there_ , a small part of the story. the
| starkness in the story to me is that the culture today lacks
| belonging. no matter how many followers you have, you will never
| belong anywhere the way this Irving character had become a
| fixture. he was a part of the story.
|
| maybe I'm just nostalgic, but there's an essential dynamic in the
| story that isn't present in the culture now.
|
| the hotel was a place with durable meaning that cohered in the
| culture over a long period of time. I couldn't name one place now
| that isn't just a theme park to its former meaning, full of
| toursts taking selfies, people who themselves know they don't
| _belong_ somewhere. the thrill of taking photos of themselves or
| their food is the same as they might get from shoplifting a lip
| balm. maybe what 's changed in the culture is the people lack
| belonging and go from place to place like this stealing bits of
| meaning without their lives becoming any richer, or particularly
| less poor.
|
| the physical places themselves didn't change, but I think the
| identity of people who use places to tresspass and share with
| their imaginary followers somewhere else has hollowed out the
| presence and meaning of these places, and that is what has made
| characters with romantic and interesting lives like this Irving
| guy something from the past. maybe people just don't act like
| they belong anymore.
| jerrycruncher wrote:
| What a lovely, sumptuously-written piece. Thank you for sharing!
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