Last night's unposted FB status update: no offense, LA, but it'll be worth it getting out of here just so I don't have to look at any more American Horror Story billboards This morning's unposted FB status update: Twelve, in case you were wondering. Twelve is the number of hours a mattress can sit outside in my neighborhood before somebody tags it. This morning's other unposted FB status update: Ever had one of those mornings where every single LITTLE thing goes wrong and you hate life but then you run into Judd Hirsch on your way to the shower and suddenly everything's A-OK? _________________________________ Discovered destinystatus.com yesterday. It informed me that I spent 240 hours playing Destiny, which was horrifying. Then it informed me that most of the people I play with regularly have spent around 600 hours. Then it informed me the choad who kicked me out of his clan for not being hardcore enough spent three thousand two hundred hours. Destiny's only been out three years. Dude has literally been playing one video game for more than twenty hours a week since mid 2014. If he spent that time driving for Uber he'd be able to buy a BMW M2 brand new. __________________________________________ This morning I discovered nine-axis Swiss-type lathes. These are useful for watchmaking. They are also expensive. However, I am in a position such that if I wanted to walk out of this job right now, pay for two years of a watchmaking degree and then buy all the tools I need to become a watch manufacturer, I could bloody do it and have money left over to live off of. It has also been made known to me by our landlord that he expects to divest himself of the 9000sqft medical-dental building we built a half-million dollar birth center in once his kids have graduated high school. His twin daughters are in 8th grade. When you first look into commercial real estate loans you discover how punitive they are - they involve things like ten years to pay back over 25 years amortization so that you have to make a balloon payment for about 95% what you got loaned in the first place because your rates suck and fuck you. But then you discover that the economics of commercial real estate are so lucrative that if you can dig up the down payment you still profit. And thanks to mk's counsel that, too, is a possibility. It's the sort of thing that bouys me up because I've been reading a bunch of bad shit lately. Dust bowl. White trash. The economics of inequality. Behold Temin's Corollary to Piketty: It's basically an essay-format exploration of noxious shit like Lewis curves and the "investment theory of party competition" to argue we're already in a dual economy, we're a de-facto oligarchy, and there's nowhere to go but down. I feel like one of these people: