One year ago today: March 18, 2024, a log of mandolin.
Five years ago today: March 18, 2020, no insurance.
Nine years ago today: March 18, 2016, I encounter Blackrock.
Random years ago today: March 18, 2005, turnips are okay.
I posed the question on-line about how these Obama-appointed judges were able to get advance notice of what Trump is doing while the rest of us have to wait for later news reports. What is with that? It took me two coffee refills to ponder this. It’s a cold morning and we are up early, mind you in the toasty warm back office with the chicken-coop heater. It was down to 69°F inside the house overnight. (49°F outside,) It’s too dark to see the outside birdie thermometer and too chilly in the kitchen to make grits. (The inmates in CECOT are not allowed any meat.)
This product is hard to beat. Once dry, it easily destroys a wood surface if you try to pry it apart. The bench I’m making is totally held with this glue, there are no nails. The first pieces are clamped in place, you should give this 24 hours. If I did not say, the bench is a heavy piece of furniture, totally solid.
Cold is not my friend, it can feel like somebody standing on my shoulder blades. Good morning, what adventure will today bring? Hopefully it is something small, local, and free. My days of long-distance adventure are now curtailed and I like it like that. By dawn, it is still cold so we will take this morning to re-evaluate fractional real estate ownership. Caltier is not quite the best choice, but it served its purpose of giving me answers I could not get elsewhere. The failure of Lofty to give any answers at all puts them out of the picture.
The new companies I’ll look at are Arrived and reAlpha, and another peek at Fundrise. I’m leery of reAlpha because they buy airBNB which I regard as a faulty business model subject to a complete wipeout by minor government regulation. I also disregard Landa as they buy only in Brooklyn apartments, but I will look. These companies have the right idea, to let smaller investors participate in a commerce out of reach to beginners. True, these startups put pressure on an already overpriced market, but they also scare the likes of real estate giants like Zillow who derive their profits from the traditional manipulations of the trade. (For example, how banks will not grant mortgages to properties that drop in value.)
This investigation is not without the rules I’ve picked up on. One is only to invest when the property is purchased outright, or has massive positive cash flow due to high occupancy and rents. (It was influential in picking Caltier.) Renters, don't look to me for pity, I know exactly what it is like to work over half the month to pay the rent to some landlord whose daddy gave him the house. I did some arithemetic. The ratios are not rocket surgery, with Arrived, the average investor puts up $3,415 and there have been advancements in automatic rent collection. I formerly rejected Fundrise because they did not apportion ownership of individual properties. But they would be fools to buck that trend, so we’ll have a boo.
Real estate is risky. I shun Blackrock for a number of reasons. One is that they do not buy outright, just make downpayments, trusting rents and new investors will carry the mortgages in bad times, the worst form of debt investing. You are also really investing in the Blackrock fund, not the real estate. For sure, landlords can be an unsavory lot, but all too often the law favors bad tenants. Thus, I want a company that buys outright (saving the rip-off 7% real estate commission), manages the property themselves, and isolates me from any contact with the hoi polloi. It’s my money and I worked hard to lay down these conditions. (Industry insiders refer to these different brands of “ownership” as equity investing where you own the property, and debt investing where the property is used to secure a loan for its own purchase, also known as a mortgage.)
Later, we have already hit a snag. You cannot open an Arrive account without a phone number that can be used to track you. I shut down the 800 number 18 months ago because we were not using it. There is a workaround anything and it is a fool who gives strangers anything they ask for these days. Also, Arrive pays monthly dividends where I was more curious about how daily payouts worked.
Illegal store in Colony Ridge, TX.
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I crawled back in the sack till noon and it’s a balmy 70°F. Do we do some work or go for a van ride? Looks like the van ride won. More video on CECOT, the big prison in El Salvador. The country is still hunting down the 20,000 estimated remaining gang members who are plainly on the run. We can’t have that in the USA because we have too many lawyers and a police force that is already corrupted by what powers they have. Let’s go for a ride and see if that cheers us up any. We’ll listen to how Loreda is doing and whether Jack unionizes her mother.
I’ve decided the way to practice Sight Reduction is not to follow the guidebook, but do a series of dead reckoning positions near where I am. Even if you are miles off, the sightings still work, just not as accurately. Using the book examples, you are dealing with two moving targets. My plan is to bring one of them to more or less a standstill until the system makes more sense.
Another nonsensical item is the way so many of the navigation instruction books have a conversational style. Yet the navigation process is a series of distinct steps that is better taught by a list of instructions. But it is quickly noticed few instructors want to make such a list. I have no theory why that is.
In this case, a rancher takes a shine to a pregnant school teacher. They never say rape but that what they meant because everybody knows unmarried women never had sex until 1962. Then all hell busted loose. They also lowered the drinking age in Canada, which I think is why there are so many ugly women in the vicinity these days.
Later, I may take a closer look at Liquid Nails as a box adhesive. It seems a little gooier than I remember, but that makes it easy to work with. If it holds and dries not too bad a color, it is much cheaper than other wood glues. Then my system went into self-protect mode and I fell asleep in my office chair till bedtime.
