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.”
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>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.”
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>“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.”
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>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.”
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>Link gets a 10-minute coif, stiff enough to last until July.
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>“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.”
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>“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.”
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>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.”
>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?"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Idk my grandma was like 5'6" and tiny, probably like 120lbs. She ate a dozen eggs for breakfast often and lived a very long healthy life before passing of lung cancer at an old age.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Renting second-hand means 'subletting'? Or something else?
> 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.
Yes, routing around regulation and taxes often gets pretty complicated.
Here in Singapore we don't have rent control, but stamp duty can also be really high (especially for foreigners). Fortunately, we don't have capital gains taxes, so if you aren't particularly tied to owner-occupied housing, you can instead invest in the stock market and use the returns to pay rent.
> Renting second-hand means 'subletting'? Or something else?
Renting second-hand means renting outside of the rent-controlled system. Either from someone who owns the apartment (or rather a stake in the HOA corporation) or someone who has a first-hand (rent-controlled) contract.
The HOA corporation thing is actually really nice most of the time, the two big downsides is that you can't do major renovations or renting your apartment without asking permission.
The paperwork to buy/sell real estate is really minimal if you buy through a HOA, also makes mortgages paperwork a lot easier. HOAs are regulated by the government so banks only need minimal information to authorize loans for HOA-property. Also the banks won't loan to buy property in mismanaged HOAs (HOAs with too much loans) so you don't need to do a lot of due diligence yourself.
So for real state ownership the government kinda handed over control to HOAs and decided to regulate the HOAs instead of doing it all themselves.
Note that HOA is the equivalent term in english, in Sweden the name is BRF (bostadsrättsförening) which means the same thing.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
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?
I am doing no such thing. Down payment goes straight to principal, so that's equity banked from day one. And you're going to have to define "relevant time scale" because property demonstrably appreciates over time.
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.
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!')
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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?
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.
> For someone who doesn't do upkeep, or can't afford competent contractors to do it, major repairs can happen any time, without warning.
We're in violent agreement here. Home ownership is unforgiving if you lack all ability and the willingness to learn. I'd like to believe that this level of learned helplessness is rare enough in the adult population that it shouldn't factor meaningfully into a discussion of major investment decisions like owning property.
So you're saying there's a mass of helpless financial illiterates walking around unsure of which end of a screwdriver does the work? Depressing if true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a saying in Kannada language ವೇದ ಸುಳ್ಳಾದರೂ ಗಾದೆ ಸುಳ್ಳಾಗದು 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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
> 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.
You are right to an extent.
First, if the inclination to have more or fewer children is at all hereditary, there is a strong natural selection effect over time. Evolution in action.
Second, (sub-) societies don't have maintain themselves via their _own_ children. Priests in the Catholic church were famously barred from having children for at least a few hundred years by now. Yet, the Catholic church persists. Similarly, throughout most of history cities had below replacement level fertility, just because we didn't have the hygiene and medicine necessary to keep the diseases at bay. Yet, cities persisted.
You can say that they have been 'replaced', but so are families every generation. Drawing a strict line is only possible, if you put an undue emphasis on genes only.
You are right however, that for a culture or 'ideology' to persist, you need to replenish the pool of people in some way, either with children or converts/immigrants. (Or, I guess, you can figure out immortality for your members?)
Almost by definition, migration/conversion can only be an option for the most appealing of societies: those migrants have to come from somewhere; they are other people's kids.
The Catholic Church persists because of followers of the religion, not Priests. That those followers have healthy fertility rates is the main reason it, and quite a number of other religions, are growing to rapidly growing - in spite of the perception many in the West would have about the global increase of secularism. In fact we're likely to become a far more religious species in the future thanks to secular individuals removing themselves from the gene pool with a disproportionately high frequency.
And replacement is not about genes, but about culture. Europe experimented with mass migration with peoples of very different cultures. The idea is that they would nonetheless be assimilated, integrated into the culture, and everybody would grow all the richer for it. It instead just led to the emergence of countries within countries, increasing violence, extreme social divides and extremism, and is arguably playing a significant role in the ongoing decline of Europe. Migration is, in general, a good thing - but if it ever goes beyond a rather small scale, you're just setting the stage for your own downfall. Migration was even one of the major causes of the fall of the Roman Empire!
> The Catholic Church persists because of followers of the religion, not Priests. That those followers have healthy fertility rates is the main reason it, and quite a number of other religions, are growing to rapidly growing [...]
The same logic can apply to western culture. People already living in the west are the 'priests'.
What you're arguing here is largely ahistorical. Immigration to the US was relatively small scale and almost entirely from highly compatible cultures. There's a decent write up here [1]. Some datums: Immigrants today (including illegal) are about 14.3% of the population - that's about the same level as it was following the great migration of the late 19th century shortly before it started to become an issue leading to immigration being clamped down on hard, reaching a low of 4.7% in 1970. [1]
Fertility, when shared amongst a population, has an easy to model effect on population. It's a population scalar of fertility_rate/2 per ~20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 would mean your population is dropping by 50% every 20 years. That is compounding/exponential and never ends until you go extinct or start having more babies. Compensating for this by immigration is basically impossible, and at that scale you will quickly become the country of origin of immigrants in any case. Of course we're not even especially close to a fertility rate of 1 yet, but that is the trendline and really the same argument even applies to rather higher levels of fertility.
> 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.
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.
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 was a bit extreme for the sake of a simple example, but rental yields in eg Singapore are around 2-4% apparently. And they don't have capital gains tax. So investing in stocks or bonds and using the returns to pay rent really does look more realistic in that part of the world.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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)
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.
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).
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.
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.
> [...] 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'.
[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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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 £1000 per month, by choosing to live there, you are effectively paying that £1000 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.
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))
Equity isn't relevant to the argument, that's why.
The argument is simply that by living in a house yourself, you are effectively paying rent on that property at the same rate that the house could be rented out if you were not living on it.
Any equity gain in the property itself isn't relevant to the rental value discussion, rather the separate transaction between you and the bank, whereby they lend you money up front to buy an asset and the terms by which you repay that money and the capital gains on that asset in the mean time.
The potential rental income of a property may be similar to the value of the mortgage payments, but generally won't be over the lifetime of the mortgage. As I stated 2 posts up, the cost of a mortgage is front loaded, so the price you pay on a mortgage at the start is generally more than the equivalent rental price would be for the same house, and towards the latter stages of the mortgage it will be much lower, because the monthly mortgage payments are still the same but the real-world cost of those payments has decreased due to inflation.
The simple point is that any time you choose to live in a property, you are either paying rent for the privilege of doing so, or you are missing out on the rental income from someone else who could be paying you to live there instead.
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.
>>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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I don't know how you'd exclude the influence of parents relationships from impacting the happiness of a home. If a kid is aware of a relationship, they're absorbing.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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
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."
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.
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.
> 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
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."
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).
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.
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...
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.
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 Yorker¹ 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.
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.
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.
I was going to say that the print magazine was defunct, but apparently they‘re relaunching it as an annual. I don’t think that the literary side of things continued during their online-only era, but I could be wrong.
There used to be (not sure if it’s still there) a newsstand near one of the “L” stations in downtown Chicago that sold primarily porno mags, but it’s been a long time since I’ve boarded by that station and whenever I’m near there, I always forget to check to see if it’s still there. It was the subject of the first poem I wrote in my Chicago sonnets sequence¹ although that one remains unpublished.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.”
>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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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"?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
I agree with this. the fucked up diets I heard about in my youth seem to have been replaced with some quite reasonable fare. maybe a comments section was all we needed all along
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.
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 :-)
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.
Our producers don't have the economies of scale that yours do. Also, our chickens refuse to stay in their cages and lay eggs, preferring to spend all their time lying around on hammocks under coconut trees sipping pina coladas.
you're earnestly wondering if there might have been discrimination of some kind at one of the most legendary Los Angeles celebrity institutions between between the 1950s and the 1990s?
i'm wondering how it works - does security simply kicks you out ? And i think today similar places are also not filled with poor people, and not for their lack of interest i'd guess.
I suspect there are two or three layers of discrimination.
There's probably a bit less overt racial discrimination now than there may have been in, say, the 50s, though what's left sets you up for the next two layers.
You're going to have be judged (by hotel security) as "the right sort of person". This is clearly open to all sorts of discrimination (race, age, gender, social class, genetics and more), but I suspect that if you don't actively violate someone's mental model of what they want their poolside to look like, you might be OK.
On top of that, you'll need to be able to spend money. This is not a coffee shop where a single americano gets you a seat for the day. If you're not regularly ordering drinks and food, I imagine that hotel security is going to ask you to move on after not that long.
I didn't get the impression that the article was a celebration of the man, it was more like a deep dive into the oddity of the whole thing.
I think you're assigning an agenda where there is none. The author isn't trying to glorify the guy. The story is an interesting story because the circumstances are so unusual.
I realize the scale of wealth skewed far upward from the typical working class person, but I will also point out that you don't really have to be very wealthy to afford to do nothing all day and buy meals at a hotel pool and not work. It sounds like the hotel was really just charging him money for his meals, it's not like he was staying overnight at the hotel.
That's not really Elon Musk territory, that's attainable via the 4% rule [1] if you've got single digits of million dollars saved up (in 2025 dollars).
Even less money is needed to live this kind of lifestyle if we are talking about low cost of living countries with beachy vibes like Thailand/Cambodia/Laos.
Weird take, it seems to me like his success was driven by being a net value-add for his community. Going to his same barber everyday is less "being waited upon by legions of servants" and a lot more sharing your success with the community.
He helped the hotels he hung out at earn lots of money by getting rich people to come often and spend money. If he got paid in dollars instead of free cabana time when it's empty it'd be called sales. Everyone seems to enjoy his presence, and talking to the staff and giving them yearly presents definitely seems worth letting a guy stay a couple hours after they've finished their purchased meal.
If living alone in a small one bedroom flat with no car after retirement constitutes "excesses and inequalities of capitalism", then I can only assume you are anti-elderly and would rather they produced value for you until death.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 :/
https://archive.is/eRc3M
(1993). The hotel reopened in 1996 but Irving never returned.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...
He did make it to 101 - https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/irving-lin...
Wonderful accompanying piece worth reading - thanks for posting
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.”
>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?"
Yes likewise, thank you for sharing!
Bot comment? What would 'likewise' mean in response to a hyperlink?
Or he never returned to the hotel, just like Irving?
> 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.
I was immediately struck by this remark too. Were eggs particularly unfashionable in the early 1990s in the USA? Apparently so.
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/
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.
> 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.
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.
The idea that granola would be healthier is rather strange
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.
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.
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.
In a situation where one does not know a lot it also mitigates the risk that the thing you ate a lot of turns out to be really unhealthy.
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/nutritionforconsumers/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.
> 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).
Healthy is something the shopping mall checkout register can quantify?
Granola was never healthy even in moderation. It's just pure sugar.
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.
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...
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.
Fiber. People used to go to the doctor a lot for digestive issues. "An apple a day" and all that.
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).
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?
Simpsons did it
https://youtu.be/AHAFMFFQlkI
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.
I have a good memory of, in the 1990s, what must have been a rehab campaign from Big Egg, slogan: "The incredible, edible EGG!"
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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)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Idk my grandma was like 5'6" and tiny, probably like 120lbs. She ate a dozen eggs for breakfast often and lived a very long healthy life before passing of lung cancer at an old age.
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.
Ain't no man eat fiddy eggs
Gaston eats five dozen eggs.
Yup fine https://www.quora.com/Can-you-survive-by-only-eating-eggs
I heard 2 per day, especially if on a meat free diet.
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...
I found a picture of him here:
https://patrickdowns.photoshelter.com/image/I0000Hbr_mkY_p2A
> uses the hotel Rolls to do errands
that's the way!
That's lovely
I mean it's nice but spending all of my adult life there?
Sounds better than spending whole life in an office.
Good luck zooming into that photo on an iPhone
Made me laugh, “what the? No way, what if.. eh!? And maybe..” crash
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't Stockholm have cray rent control, too?
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.
Renting second-hand means 'subletting'? Or something else?
> 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.
Yes, routing around regulation and taxes often gets pretty complicated.
Here in Singapore we don't have rent control, but stamp duty can also be really high (especially for foreigners). Fortunately, we don't have capital gains taxes, so if you aren't particularly tied to owner-occupied housing, you can instead invest in the stock market and use the returns to pay rent.
> Renting second-hand means 'subletting'? Or something else?
Renting second-hand means renting outside of the rent-controlled system. Either from someone who owns the apartment (or rather a stake in the HOA corporation) or someone who has a first-hand (rent-controlled) contract.
The HOA corporation thing is actually really nice most of the time, the two big downsides is that you can't do major renovations or renting your apartment without asking permission.
The paperwork to buy/sell real estate is really minimal if you buy through a HOA, also makes mortgages paperwork a lot easier. HOAs are regulated by the government so banks only need minimal information to authorize loans for HOA-property. Also the banks won't loan to buy property in mismanaged HOAs (HOAs with too much loans) so you don't need to do a lot of due diligence yourself.
So for real state ownership the government kinda handed over control to HOAs and decided to regulate the HOAs instead of doing it all themselves.
Note that HOA is the equivalent term in english, in Sweden the name is BRF (bostadsrättsförening) which means the same thing.
>>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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
>> 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...
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.
Sorry to be nitpicky, but I think the term for the concept you're talking about is depreciate, not deprecate
Thanks.
This is not as true as it used to be. I don't even know how true it used to be!
it's still true except in a few special popular areas
Have you ever heard of opportunity costs?
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?
You're ignoring the costs of buying and selling and supposing incorrectly that property always appreciates on a relevant time scale.
I am doing no such thing. Down payment goes straight to principal, so that's equity banked from day one. And you're going to have to define "relevant time scale" because property demonstrably appreciates over time.
emphasis on owning, I mean, having it fully paid.
> 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?
You can own apartments too. I assume the logic is pretty much the same either way.
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.
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!')
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.
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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.
>>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.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
There's a reason the phrase "money pit" is used to describe owning a house.
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?
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.
> For someone who doesn't do upkeep, or can't afford competent contractors to do it, major repairs can happen any time, without warning.
We're in violent agreement here. Home ownership is unforgiving if you lack all ability and the willingness to learn. I'd like to believe that this level of learned helplessness is rare enough in the adult population that it shouldn't factor meaningfully into a discussion of major investment decisions like owning property.
> I'd like to believe
You'd like to believe in a fantasy that doesn't exist? There are netflix shows for that.
So you're saying there's a mass of helpless financial illiterates walking around unsure of which end of a screwdriver does the work? Depressing if true.
No one lives forever. You can’t take it with you. In the long run, we’re all renting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is a saying in Kannada language ವೇದ ಸುಳ್ಳಾದರೂ ಗಾದೆ ಸುಳ್ಳಾಗದು 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.
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.
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...
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)?
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.
> 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.
You are right to an extent.
First, if the inclination to have more or fewer children is at all hereditary, there is a strong natural selection effect over time. Evolution in action.
Second, (sub-) societies don't have maintain themselves via their _own_ children. Priests in the Catholic church were famously barred from having children for at least a few hundred years by now. Yet, the Catholic church persists. Similarly, throughout most of history cities had below replacement level fertility, just because we didn't have the hygiene and medicine necessary to keep the diseases at bay. Yet, cities persisted.
You can say that they have been 'replaced', but so are families every generation. Drawing a strict line is only possible, if you put an undue emphasis on genes only.
You are right however, that for a culture or 'ideology' to persist, you need to replenish the pool of people in some way, either with children or converts/immigrants. (Or, I guess, you can figure out immortality for your members?)
Almost by definition, migration/conversion can only be an option for the most appealing of societies: those migrants have to come from somewhere; they are other people's kids.
The Catholic Church persists because of followers of the religion, not Priests. That those followers have healthy fertility rates is the main reason it, and quite a number of other religions, are growing to rapidly growing - in spite of the perception many in the West would have about the global increase of secularism. In fact we're likely to become a far more religious species in the future thanks to secular individuals removing themselves from the gene pool with a disproportionately high frequency.
And replacement is not about genes, but about culture. Europe experimented with mass migration with peoples of very different cultures. The idea is that they would nonetheless be assimilated, integrated into the culture, and everybody would grow all the richer for it. It instead just led to the emergence of countries within countries, increasing violence, extreme social divides and extremism, and is arguably playing a significant role in the ongoing decline of Europe. Migration is, in general, a good thing - but if it ever goes beyond a rather small scale, you're just setting the stage for your own downfall. Migration was even one of the major causes of the fall of the Roman Empire!
The US (and even the UK) are a lot better at integrating immigrants than most of Europe.
> Migration was even one of the major causes of the fall of the Roman Empire!
You might like https://acoup.blog/ for a few more nuanced takes.
> The Catholic Church persists because of followers of the religion, not Priests. That those followers have healthy fertility rates is the main reason it, and quite a number of other religions, are growing to rapidly growing [...]
The same logic can apply to western culture. People already living in the west are the 'priests'.
What you're arguing here is largely ahistorical. Immigration to the US was relatively small scale and almost entirely from highly compatible cultures. There's a decent write up here [1]. Some datums: Immigrants today (including illegal) are about 14.3% of the population - that's about the same level as it was following the great migration of the late 19th century shortly before it started to become an issue leading to immigration being clamped down on hard, reaching a low of 4.7% in 1970. [1]
Fertility, when shared amongst a population, has an easy to model effect on population. It's a population scalar of fertility_rate/2 per ~20 years. So a fertility rate of 1 would mean your population is dropping by 50% every 20 years. That is compounding/exponential and never ends until you go extinct or start having more babies. Compensating for this by immigration is basically impossible, and at that scale you will quickly become the country of origin of immigrants in any case. Of course we're not even especially close to a fertility rate of 1 yet, but that is the trendline and really the same argument even applies to rather higher levels of fertility.
[1] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/key-findi...
> 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.
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.
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
100x was a bit extreme for the sake of a simple example, but rental yields in eg Singapore are around 2-4% apparently. And they don't have capital gains tax. So investing in stocks or bonds and using the returns to pay rent really does look more realistic in that part of the world.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
> [...] 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'.
> 20% of their income on housing
Wha a world that would be. More in the 35-45 range.
[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_Valley_Ban...
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.
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.
> This is very regionally-dependent.
Exactly, and so is a mortgage to home equity belief system. That's the point. Be objective.
You can’t ever roll rent forward into the new purchase. That’s not the same for a mortgage
>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.
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.
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 £1000 per month, by choosing to live there, you are effectively paying that £1000 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.
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))
You are completely ignoring equity
Equity isn't relevant to the argument, that's why.
The argument is simply that by living in a house yourself, you are effectively paying rent on that property at the same rate that the house could be rented out if you were not living on it.
Any equity gain in the property itself isn't relevant to the rental value discussion, rather the separate transaction between you and the bank, whereby they lend you money up front to buy an asset and the terms by which you repay that money and the capital gains on that asset in the mean time.
The potential rental income of a property may be similar to the value of the mortgage payments, but generally won't be over the lifetime of the mortgage. As I stated 2 posts up, the cost of a mortgage is front loaded, so the price you pay on a mortgage at the start is generally more than the equivalent rental price would be for the same house, and towards the latter stages of the mortgage it will be much lower, because the monthly mortgage payments are still the same but the real-world cost of those payments has decreased due to inflation.
The simple point is that any time you choose to live in a property, you are either paying rent for the privilege of doing so, or you are missing out on the rental income from someone else who could be paying you to live there instead.
If you live in a place that doesn't have oppresive taxes and the real estate market maintains an unrealistic growth rate.
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.
Prices are going up, that is, not the rate. A classic economics faux pas!
You can see why there's an attraction to visiting the casino, as well.
>>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.
"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...
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.
Many people still "stay together" for the children.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I don't know how you'd exclude the influence of parents relationships from impacting the happiness of a home. If a kid is aware of a relationship, they're absorbing.
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.
Most people with happy loving homes don’t get divorced.
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.
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
That is true. I might be reading too much of my own pain point into their situations.
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.
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).
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
But the point is that many, many more don't.
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."
This was incredibly the norm in the 90's. A 'good dad' back then spent an hour a day with his kid after work.
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...
The picture of that pool reminded me of this Columbo episode (S4 Exercise in Fatality) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRoVLfuADqw&t=220s
Oh man YES.
He made it to 101
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/irving-lin...
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...
I can't be the only person curious about his Fortunescope: https://www.etsy.com/listing/719052863/antique-1935-fortunes...
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.
> 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
It's really, really good. You made a good recommendation. Anyone reading this thread should check it out.
Thank you for that recommendation.
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.
I wonder how much of the HN readership was not even born then....?
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.
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).
Can confirm. Recent graduate who found HN during my second year at university.
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!)
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.
HN is officially a dad site now.
OTOH, I first read the article when it ran in 1993.
I’d reckon that the trifles got to getting truffled around 20 years prior.
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...
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.
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 Yorker¹ 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
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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.
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/
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.
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.
I was going to say that the print magazine was defunct, but apparently they‘re relaunching it as an annual. I don’t think that the literary side of things continued during their online-only era, but I could be wrong.
There used to be (not sure if it’s still there) a newsstand near one of the “L” stations in downtown Chicago that sold primarily porno mags, but it’s been a long time since I’ve boarded by that station and whenever I’m near there, I always forget to check to see if it’s still there. It was the subject of the first poem I wrote in my Chicago sonnets sequence¹ although that one remains unpublished.
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1. Most of these are in print only, but links to those that are online can be found at https://dahosek.com/publications/
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.”
A fun experiment would be to ask your favorite AI
Then (separately) ask it to summarize the article and see how it closes...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.
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.
Not always. Or not for everyone I would say. I personally was just interested in facts: why, when, how.
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.
https://orbitbymozilla.com/
It's built into Safari now too.
Apparently the Eagles song, "Hotel California" is loosely based on the fokelore around this hotel.
I always thought it was about the Hotel California in Todos Santos, México.
There is a strange sort of cerebral experience that elicits a visceral response about glimpses into ordinary life through plain black ink…err…fonts.
> 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.
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.
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
The 90s foot pyramid explained, in the 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCO-SBPTF5E
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.
Funnily enough this was also going on…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Ag...
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.
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.
> 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"?
Atkins doesn't say that, at all, and then explicitly mentioned extreme low carb diets in my comment.
> 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.
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
Try eating as much fat as you can, without any carbs to go with it. It's not going to be much.
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.
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.
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.
I find it wonderfully clichee that the guy who's job was linking vendors and customers was called Mr. Link.
It's called nominative determinism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
I’ve also seen “Aptronym” used for this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym
This is the fun but useless information I visit HN for!
I can't wait (seriously, not sarcasm) to tell my wife about this.
https://experts.mcmaster.ca/display/ironsga <-- A professor of steel making named Dr. Irons
Dr. Doctor
https://www.nygh.on.ca/areas-care/maternal-newborn-and-paedi...
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So he would just go hang out at a pool all day and avoid his wife and children? No wonder he lived to 101.
I mean, most do by going to the office instead. I’m not sure how the pool is much different in that regard.
Any man can avoid one boss, the trick is avoiding both.
Marvelous article. I was prepared to read about an eccentric and mild recluse but Irving seems to been witness to extraordinary things.
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.
Wonderful comment. Thank you. I think the "theme park to its former meaning" line is very right.
What a lovely, sumptuously-written piece. Thank you for sharing!
Amazing read!
>scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs
do people not eat eggs anymore?
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
> 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.
the misplaced comma was also a myth.
https://www5.in.tum.de/~huckle/Sutton_Spinach_Iron_and_Popey...
Thankfully, they were let out of prison. https://www.adforum.com/creative-work/ad/player/34447709/bad... (circa 1991??)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Who could have ever guessed that a herbivore would be poorly adapted to high amounts of cholesterol in their diet?
And also rabbits do not normally eat eggs, in fact aren’t even carnivores.
how do you explain easter egg bunnies then??
Not in the 1990s, no. DIETARY CHOLESTEROL BAD was the mantra of the day.
Who knows, nutritional scientist might get it right one day :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=485Em2JF34M
I do think that with the loosening of corporate control on mass media, we are slowly iterating towards reasonable dietary advice
Hope springs eternal
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
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.
I agree with this. the fucked up diets I heard about in my youth seem to have been replaced with some quite reasonable fare. maybe a comments section was all we needed all along
Have you seen the egg prices lately...? ;-)
I am curious how much they are in your country? In Poland one egg costs about $0.30
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-...
> 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.
No shortage in Seattle. About $8/dozen which is about double normal.
About USD 1.50 per dozen here in South Africa.
I would not consider Trader Joe's to be a grocery store.
One dozen is about CAD 3.00 just north of the US border. So I guess about $0.20 USD each.
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 :-)
USD$0.30 to $0.40 per egg in Fiji.
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.
Our producers don't have the economies of scale that yours do. Also, our chickens refuse to stay in their cages and lay eggs, preferring to spend all their time lying around on hammocks under coconut trees sipping pina coladas.
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.
> anymore
The article is from 1993, not today.
billionaires do, us mere mortals can no longer afford them :)
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you're earnestly wondering if there might have been discrimination of some kind at one of the most legendary Los Angeles celebrity institutions between between the 1950s and the 1990s?
i'm wondering how it works - does security simply kicks you out ? And i think today similar places are also not filled with poor people, and not for their lack of interest i'd guess.
I suspect there are two or three layers of discrimination.
There's probably a bit less overt racial discrimination now than there may have been in, say, the 50s, though what's left sets you up for the next two layers.
You're going to have be judged (by hotel security) as "the right sort of person". This is clearly open to all sorts of discrimination (race, age, gender, social class, genetics and more), but I suspect that if you don't actively violate someone's mental model of what they want their poolside to look like, you might be OK.
On top of that, you'll need to be able to spend money. This is not a coffee shop where a single americano gets you a seat for the day. If you're not regularly ordering drinks and food, I imagine that hotel security is going to ask you to move on after not that long.
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I didn't get the impression that the article was a celebration of the man, it was more like a deep dive into the oddity of the whole thing.
I think you're assigning an agenda where there is none. The author isn't trying to glorify the guy. The story is an interesting story because the circumstances are so unusual.
I realize the scale of wealth skewed far upward from the typical working class person, but I will also point out that you don't really have to be very wealthy to afford to do nothing all day and buy meals at a hotel pool and not work. It sounds like the hotel was really just charging him money for his meals, it's not like he was staying overnight at the hotel.
That's not really Elon Musk territory, that's attainable via the 4% rule [1] if you've got single digits of million dollars saved up (in 2025 dollars).
Even less money is needed to live this kind of lifestyle if we are talking about low cost of living countries with beachy vibes like Thailand/Cambodia/Laos.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/four-percent-rule.asp
He had a long term lease on a cabana - that wasn’t cheap. Also ate lunch and bought drinks there.
Not saying this was out of reach for anyone, but the cabana alone probably would have been for the vast majority of people.
If you read the piece he was gifted the cabana
Weird take, it seems to me like his success was driven by being a net value-add for his community. Going to his same barber everyday is less "being waited upon by legions of servants" and a lot more sharing your success with the community.
He helped the hotels he hung out at earn lots of money by getting rich people to come often and spend money. If he got paid in dollars instead of free cabana time when it's empty it'd be called sales. Everyone seems to enjoy his presence, and talking to the staff and giving them yearly presents definitely seems worth letting a guy stay a couple hours after they've finished their purchased meal.
If living alone in a small one bedroom flat with no car after retirement constitutes "excesses and inequalities of capitalism", then I can only assume you are anti-elderly and would rather they produced value for you until death.
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?
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.
I think he benefitted from the Vitamin D, since he died at 101.
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.
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.
> 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.
Which is where?
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.
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!
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 :/
He had very strong skin, look at how tanned he is: https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2NG12TA/irving-link-left-a-41-year...
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.
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.
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.
I thought the journey was well-written, captivating and worth the read.
Huh, maybe I should give it a go...
I'm still trying to find the reason this was posted and boosted, instead of some very important AI news coming out recently.
probably because we're all sick of AI news