Some years ago I had a similar situation--a claim letter from the IRS that didn't account for quarterly payments. I was able to resolve it by mail, sending copies of checks. Another time, they misread a 1099. Again, a copy in the mail resolved it. Now, even that is getting closed off.
When I was in college I took a class in modern poetry. The teacher showed us a film about Bukowski. Before the film, there was a trigger warning. "I must warn you," he said, "Charles Bukowski is an asshole."
> the best writers have said very little and the worst, far too much.
> bag over his head in a bathtub full of water. what Hitler couldn’t do, he did to himself. happy journey.
Throughout reading the "Betting on the muse", I had plenty of "what an asshole" moments.
I live in the Boston area, where academia, research, and the biotech industry bring in a lot of people and money. Visa restrictions, research funding cuts, mishegas at the FDA, CDC, etc., and so on and so forth, have clearly had an impact on the local market. It's still pretty expensive here, no doubt, but the market has slowed. There's a brand new and entirely empty office tower a few blocks away. There's still a need for more housing, but developers aren't going to be rushing in to build if they think the price is going to be lower when they finish building.
Lots of slowing left to go. Note the rapid rise in the index after the pandemic [1]. The Fed misstepped pretty badly, in hindsight, by lowering rates near zero and buying up mortgage backed securities at the volume they did to support the capital markets when uncertainty was high. This has led to a painful macro situation where this excess aggregate real estate equity has to be burned off over time, through a combination of higher for longer interest rates and demand destruction. It’s from a combination of artificially low interest rates and mortgage rates from during the pandemic along with 30 year fixed rate mortgage duration, like a balloon that was squeezed from cheap capital market debt into real estate asset ownership. And so the unwinding continues.
As a production editor at a uni press, who has to occasionally translate jargon into English, I find Orwell's essay to still be entirely relevant. The kinds of writing Orwell warned about still flourishes in the pablum emails we get from HR, the management reports with roundabout justifications for more layoffs, the political speeches that use a lot of words to say nothing. I just had a manuscript where the author was very fond of using trite filler phrases that added very little. It kind of made me miss the days of red pencils, a somewhat more satisfying way of cutting.
Strunk & White, I have to agree, is mostly not very useful.
There's some older stuff, but it seems kinda random. I see also two cameras in their collection (a Speed Graphic Pacemaker, and a Fuji GW690ii) that I have in my cabinet. I will refrain from telling them they are 'extinct' (at least until I run out of film for them).
He arrived just in time for the 'Snowmagedden' winter--four blizzards in the space of a month, dropping a record snowfall. That's going to leave a mark.
Any individual human (or frog, obviously) is getting out of the pot when it gets uncomfortable.
True stupidity requires a group of humans, all sitting in the pot, telling each other how lucky and special they are to have this wonderful pot, getting paranoid about outsiders who might disrupt their god-given pot-dwelling way of life, and mocking anyone who suggests that the pot might be getting a little too warm.
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