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Category: Egoism in Action (page 23 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

March 15, 2008

Announcing my Obama Rodham McCain universal bumper sticker

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I could make Barack Obama jokes all day. Like this: “Bill Clinton might have been the America’s first black president, but Barack Obama is the nation’s first black Kennedy.” From this you should not surmise that I am for John McCain. I find all three of our current maladies to be just about equally repellent.

But: I did hit upon an idea for a universal Barack Obama bumper sticker.

Writing a workable bumper sticker is the hardest copywriting job there is. Writing at my voluminous length is easy. All you need are ideas and a vocabulary. Writing poetry is hard, because that economy of words is hard. Writing a matchbook or a billboard is even harder.

Here is my best-ever matchbook:

“Save the world from home in your spare time!”

But a bumper sticker… That’s a real writing challenge…

It’s almost typographic iconography: The message has to be brief enough to be big, short enough to be readable in a glance, and yet it must convey a virtual book’s worth of message. Very rare to see it done well.

And I make no claim for this bumper sticker except that it is universal. Whether you are for Barack Obama or against him, you can display this bumper sticker with pride:

my official Barack Obama universal bumper sticker

If someone wants to pony up the dough for printing — heavy vinyl and UV inks, please — I’ll provide a PDF file. ObamaNation.com is already owned, alas.

March 13, 2008

Wow… Life stinks when you’ve got your head up your… community…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Notice anything missing?

In a world without middlemen, no one can prevent you from discovering anything you want to know. That’s a freedom more complete than humanity has ever known, until now.

The counter-proposition is that no one can protect you from derision, if you insist on trying to communicate with your head up your “community.”

All of the dinosaurs are extinct.

 
Update: Todd Carpenter has a hammer:

This is beside my point, but now the whole of our little world is watching.

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March 12, 2008

David Mamet: “Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We owe David Mamet for Glengarry Glen Ross (and, therefore for Glen and Gary and Glen and Ross NSFW!). This essay, extracted from The Village Voice (and tipped by The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid), is a fine job of work. I knew Mamet was reading Thomas Sowell when he got to the tragic versus perfectionist world-view, which was further confirmed by the idea of lifelong class mobility, but, that aside, he manages to surprise throughout. This is off-topic, in a sense, but it is dead-centered on the topics we have been addressing lately, here and elsewhere. A thoughtful man thinks about his own thoughts. What could be more human than that?

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the “writing process,” as I believe it’s called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.

But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it’s at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished Read more

March 12, 2008

Four photographs from a day spent looking at houses: Two of them are tragic — but the other two are infuriating

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m working this weekend with an out-of-state investor. I don’t know that Phoenix has hit the bottom in what is the ninth quarter of declining home prices, but we’ve shed enough value that newer suburban tract homes can once again throw off positive cash flow as rental properties.

That’s the happy news. The sad news is that many of the houses that seem to be attractively priced to investors are in some stage of the foreclosure process, from negative equity to short sales to lender-owned properties.

If you do this job long enough, you see just about everything. If you’re good at drawing inferences from artifacts, you can figure out the story of the home life in just about any house — family structure, recent financial history, reason for moving — whether or not the survival machine that is a home is functioning properly.

But in a normal market, in a normal time, in a normal neighborhood, the tragic stories don’t come so thick and fast. Who hasn’t seen a skip? Who hasn’t seen an eviction? Who hasn’t seen the sad tell-tales of divorce? But it’s a rare thing to see these awful signs twelve or fifteen times in a single day.

Look at this:

I saw kids’ bikes left behind in several garages today. Not enough room on the pick-up truck, the truck packed to bursting with everything the family could carry. Children are so easy to hustle. I can hear the fake enthusiasm behind the lie: “We’ll get new bikes! Better bikes! You’ll see!”

That’s sad, but it was those ceiling valences that got me, those fabric clouds in a girl kid’s sky. That’s a mother-daughter thing — “What can we do to make this your room?” Not too much money to spend, but just the right touch, just the right expression of a budding young lady’s individuality. Abandoned in the rush to get gone. Will that little girl ever be able to look at a ceiling and not miss those fabric clouds?

I see this all the time, and I never get over it. That’s a man trying to kick down a door so he Read more

March 8, 2008

Another record-breaking week: Is 2008 the Year of the Bloodhound?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

BloodhoundBlog has had one record-breaking week after another in 2008, but this week was the first time we had more than 14,000 unique visitors, an average of 2,000 “uniques” a day.

Nothing exceeds like excess: We add new subscribers every day, our Technorati links are on the upsurge, and we are pushing 100,000 backlinks. If the RE.net is like the Roman Republic, then we are like Gaius Marius, Caesar’s uncle: New on the scene, rude, crude, vulgar — and very powerful. That’s a role that suits me just fine. I’m happy to leave the Patricians squabbling amongst themselves over emoluments and honors. I’m much more concerned with the work-a-day Plebeians — and with the Barbarians at our gates.

Why are we the biggest? Because we deliver the goods to hard-working grunts-on-the-ground like you. How are we going to grow even bigger? By delivering the goods to hard-working grunts-on-the-ground like you. It ain’t rocket science.

Russell Shaw is convinced we have reached the “tipping point”, the point past which everything we say here can have an impact on the way our business is conducted. I retain my doubts, but I do not doubt for a moment that our words have a deep, a penetrating and an enduring reach. And to that notion, I cannot but shout out some slightly edited sentiments from latter-day America’s greatest satiric philosophers, Matt Stone and Trey Parker:

America! [Heck] yeah!

In the Web 2.0 world — in the disintermediated world — in the world without middle-men — delivering the goods is all that should matter. The BloodhoundBlog idea is simple enough — keeping the wealth that you alone produce in your own pocket — but it is in a sense a very ancient idea, a very Greek idea. The Hoplite Greeks were their own men, and this is why they fought better — and why they thought better — than any human beings who had come before them. The BloodhoundBlog idea is but a small reflection of the Hellenic revolution, but it is an idea that should win, that should prosper in a world where no middle-man can squelch an idea or Read more

March 6, 2008

Do you want some earth-shaking news? In showing us a first tentative glimpse of its new mortgage lending product, Zillow.com may in fact be reinventing — and perfecting — Capitalism

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m going to get the newspaper news out of the way first:

Starting now, if you are a loan originator, you can register with Zillow.com to receive mortgage and refinancing referrals from that Seattle-based internet start-up, once it ramps up its full — but still Top Secret — mortgage lending product. From Zillow’s PR team, presumably in the form of a Zillow Blog post:

To participate in this new product offering, lenders must have their professional status confirmed prior to connecting with borrowers, so we want to give lenders a head start on the process:

  1. Register with Zillow, if you haven’t already.
  2. Then apply as a lender, and answer a few questions about yourself.
  3. While access to borrowers is free, a one-time application fee of $25 is necessary to cover the costs of having an independent third party confirm your professional and employment status to Zillow. This is the only charge to participate; there are no other fees.

Why register early? The confirmation process can take up to several days. By registering early, lenders ensure they will be among the first to be notified when the product launches and ready to service borrowers on Day 1. We’ll also send out an e-mail to all pre-confirmed lenders giving them notice immediately after launch.

I don’t know what form Zillow’s lender referrals will take, but the important point — to which we will return — is that only duly-registered loan originators will be receiving them.

Zillow takes some pains to take away your fear of future pain:

While we’re not sharing more details right now, we can say that we’ve built our product around Zillow’s model of openness and transparency that is increasingly important in today’s home lending environment. And, consistent with our information-based model, we have no intention of being part of the transaction.

There’s a sweet little teaser at the end:

And if you happen to be in the market for a home loan, stayed tuned to this space as we announce an entirely new kind of mortgage offering built just for you.

Brian Brady believes that what Zillow will offer as its sticky mortgage product is a sort of interest-rates Zestimator. In Read more

March 1, 2008

People who write too much: One Bloodhound’s manifesto

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Mike Farmer’s post on philosophy got me thinking. I knew I had written fairly extensively, fairly recently, on some of the same ideas, but I couldn’t remember where. I write a lot, and I don’t always remember what gets posted where.

What I was thinking of was Todd Carpenter’s “Blogger Spotlight” interview with me. That post was much longer. In the extract below, I’m clipping out the Big Issues philosophy. The confluence of recent events — webloggers-at-war and the death of William F. Buckley — seems to have left us a little more open than we might otherwise be to new ideas. This is an exposition of the ideas that move me, in particular, my personal manifesto.

 
Todd Carpenter: One of my mottoes in life is that everyone has an ax to grind. I blog for money. Most RE agents blog for money in the form of clients. On the other hand, you don’t even have Amazon affiliate links attached to the books you recommend. What’s your ax to grind? Why are you doing this?

Greg Swann: In order that it might be done, and done properly. I don’t think I fit your theory about having an axe to grind. I may be as close as one can come in the modern world to being an actual Attic Greek, a doer for the sake of having done, a thinker for the sake of having thought, a poet for poetry’s own sake. People often accuse me of having ugly motives — which says a lot more about them than it does about me. But there is a sense in which you could say that I don’t have any motive for the things I do, none other than the doing itself. I like for things to be done. I like for them to be whole and complete and perfect and esthetically beautiful and mathematically elegant and philosophically sound. I work very hard on everything I do, and I can concentrate very intently on what I am doing, and I don’t like to do anything except what I am doing right now — but I love to Read more

February 29, 2008

It is a mistake to think that the language of the bureaucrats is merely an ignorant, garbled jargon. They may not always know what they are doing, but what they are doing is not haphazard. It works, too.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More, for Diane Cipa and others who have commented. You can’t buy Mitchell’s books, except used. The man is an incredible gift America mostly never bothered to unwrap. The fun part is that you can have everything he wrote as The Underground Grammarian at no cost. That’s not the same as “for free,” of course. If you’re going to get anything out of Richard Mitchell, you have to have the means to pay attention.

 
The Voice of Sisera

by Richard Mitchell

The invention of discursive prose liberated the mind of man from the limitations of the individual’s memory. We can now "know" not just what we can store in our heads, and, as often as not misplace among the memorabilia and used slogans. Nevertheless, that invention made concrete and permanent one of the less attractive facts of language. It called forth a new "mode" of language and provided yet another way in which to distinguish social classes from one another.

Fleeing the lost battle on the plain of Megiddo, General Sisera is said to have stopped off at the tent of Heber the Kenite. Heber himself was out, but his wife, Jael, was home and happy to offer the sweaty warrior a refreshing drink–"a bottle of milk" in fact, the Bible says. (That seems to find something in translation.) It was a kindly and generous gesture, especially since Sisera asked nothing more than a drink of water.

Having drunk his fill, the tired Sisera stretched out for a little nap and told Jael to keep careful watch, for he had good reason to expect that the Jews who had cut up his army that day were probably looking around for him. Jael said, Sure, sure, don’t worry, and when Sisera fell asleep, that crafty lady took a hammer and a tent spike and nailed him through the temples fast to the earth.

I suppose that we are meant to conclude that the Kenites, not themselves Jews, were nevertheless right-thinking folk and that Jael’s act had a meaning that was both political and religious. I’m not so sure. I’d like to know, before deciding, just what language it Read more

February 29, 2008

Words never fail. We hear them, we read them; they enter into the mind and become part of us for as long as we shall live. Who speaks reason to his fellow men bestows it upon them. Who mouths inanity disorders thought for all who listen. There must be some minimum allowable dose of inanity beyond which the mind cannot remain reasonable. Irrationality, like buried chemical waste, sooner or later must seep into all the tissues of thought.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From Less Than Words Can Say

by Richard Mitchell, The Underground Grammarian

A colleague sent me a questionnaire. It was about my goals in teaching, and it asked me to assign values to a number of beautiful and inspiring goals. I was told that the goals were pretty widely shared by professors all around the country.

Many years earlier I had returned a similar questionnaire, because the man who sent it had promised, in writing, to “analize” my “input.” That seemed appropriate, so I put it in. But he didn’t do as he had promised, and I had lost all interest in questionnaires.

This one intrigued me, however, because it was lofty. It spoke of a basic appreciation of the liberal arts, a critical evaluation of society, emotional development, creative capacities, students’ self-understanding, moral character, interpersonal relations and group participation, and general insight into the knowledge of a discipline. Unexceptionable goals, every one. Yet it seemed to me, on reflection, that they were none of my damned business. It seemed possible, even likely, that some of those things might flow from the study of language and literature, which is my damned business, but they also might not. Some very well-read people lack moral character and show no creative capacities at all, to say nothing of self-understanding or a basic appreciation of the liberal arts. So, instead of answering the questionnaire, I paid attention to its language; and I began by asking myself how “interpersonal relations” were different from “relations.” Surely, I thought, our relations with domestic animals and edible plants were not at issue here; why specify them as “interpersonal”? And how else can we “participate” but in groups? I couldn’t answer.

I asked further how a “basic” appreciation was to be distinguished from some other kind of appreciation. I recalled that some of my colleagues were in the business of teaching appreciation. It seemed all too possible that they would have specialized their labors, some of them teaching elementary appreciation and others intermediate appreciation, leaving to the most exalted members of the department the senior seminars in advanced appreciation, but even that didn’t help with Read more

February 27, 2008

Wanna see how to win the BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest? You’re not selling us, you’re selling you . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Mike Farmer wrote a sweet note this morning about using single-property weblogs in his marketing, but his post was not an entry in the BloodhoundBlog Black Pearl Diver’s contest.

What’s the trick to writing a winning entry?

Think your benefit, not ours.

How can you write a post about an idea you first heard about here that better establishes your competence and expertise with your readers?

How about something like this?

When we list your Encanto-Palmcroft home for sale, why do we give it is own custom weblog? To make sure it sells, that’s why

We’re Encanto-Palmcroft real estate specialists. A jack of all trades is master of none. But, when we list a home for sale in Encanto-Palmcroft, we always give it its own fully-detailed custom weblog.

Actually, we build a full-blown web site, with rich color photos of everything. A floorplan. A custom Google Map of all the nearby amenities — schools, parks, shopping. We include a downloadable version of the listing sheet itself — along with the full-color flyer, the plat map, historical photos — everything we can lay our hands on.

Why do go we to all that trouble?

Because, along with all the other things we do to earn your business, custom weblogs sell houses.

We first heard about this idea on BloodhoundBlog, a nuts-and-bolts weblog for real estate professionals, but we’ve added our own unique twists…

And like that. You go on to detail those unique twists, you sprinkle in some screenshots and links from single-property weblogs you have built for past clients. And you make your call to action.

There’s more: This is a good example of how to use your most valuable keywords without being irritating. Relevance to search engines equals Title plus Headline plus Body Copy. I have written a highly relevant post about Encanto-Palmcroft — not about BloodhoundBlog — and about our real estate practice there.

You can’t win if you don’t play, but your victory is guaranteed if you play the game this way. You might win the scholarship to Unchained. You might win a spot on our sidebar. But — let the dog biscuits fall where they may — you will certainly Read more

February 25, 2008

Do you want to understand what Web 2.0 means in your own life? On the internet, Socrates would have lived

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I just wrote this in a comment to Kevin Tomlinson, but it’s important, so I want to address it in the larger arena:

On the internet, everything is Kevlar.

This is for real, and it’s a lesson people are slowly learning all over the globe:

  1. Muscle power accumulates, brain power does not. A group of people is no smarter than its smartest member, and the sclerosis imposed by group decision-making will tend to make a typical group seem to behave as though it were dumber than its dumbest member.
  2. Groups cannot interdict the flow of information, so there is no longer any way to prevent most of the people on earth from discovering anything they wish to know. The middle-men who have been disintermediated first were the people who wanted to prevent the other members of their groups from gaining free access to the truth.
  3. Even when they manage to cohere, groups have no power where they cannot amass muscles or accumulate weapons.
  4. In consequence, any competent individual can take on and defeat any group of people on the internet, no matter how large it might be.

Ergo, on the internet, Socrates would have lived.

This is the triumph of the Greek ideal, an amazing, world-changing accomplishment.

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February 25, 2008

Egoism in action: What should you do when a half-assed sock puppet makes a half-decent joke?

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Laugh, of course:

What’s the difference between BloodhoundBlog and a porcupine?

With the porcupine the pricks are on the outside.

It’s quoted from Dustin Luther’s High Temple of Unidirectional Virtue. (“Where poking fun at other people is always wrong, except when we’re doing it.”)

The joke is stolen, of course, but it’s still funny. Anyway, who expects originality from trolls?

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February 23, 2008

Why does BloodhoundBlog have a comments policy? In order to prevent my property from being hi-jacked and our contributors and guests from being abused, insulted, maligned and harangued

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Dave Barnes, may the gods cherish his every atom, offers up this observation in a comment to another post:

Ardell wrote (on another blog): “Greg blacklists and deletes comments when anyone chooses to argue a point on BHB. You can’t have a conversation there or call them out there. That’s the joke of the whole “let us teach you about WEB 2.0″ thing. AS IF!”

Is this true?

Do you blacklist and delete?

Oh, you bet! We have to.

We don’t blacklist. In all of our thousands of pages, there is no black-bordered list of unpersons. But our comments policy is carefully defined and elaborately documented:

Comments policy: Everyone disagrees with us about something, and we welcome this: It’s how we learn. We encourage a free and spirited debate about the issues we raise here. We police comments with a very light hand, deleting comments and banning commenters only for extreme obscenity, flaming or flame-baiting, plagiarism, spam, impersonation (sock-puppetry) or copyright infringement (a fair-use quotation with a link is fine). This warrants emphasis: We are all about ideas, and, because of that, we are very strict about bad behavior. If you get the notion that your fear or anger or rock-ribbed moral fire accords you the right to abuse or insult or brow-beat the other guests in our salon, you will be ejected with dispatch. Nota bene: When you’re done, you’re done. Anyone can make a mistake, but if your behavior is palpably malicious, you will be banned from BloodhoundBlog forever.

I think I’ve probably told you this before, but I have a great respect for you, Dave. I’ve always found you to be open minded, and I don’t think you are one to be swayed by what one might call political considerations — looking good (or bad) in someone else’s eyes. I don’t think this was intended to be a softball question, but, who, practically speaking, tolerates intolerable behavior on his or her own property?

Even so, Brian Brady and I are each playing our own variations of a game we call What would David Gibbons do?, so I am going to take some pains to answer every Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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