Now bury a whole sit of wrenches standing straight up in a row, out in the middle of a random field and call it “art”.

You’re absolutely right. You, the client, don’t get to see what goes on the backend so it’s often impossible to know up front who is going to represent your interests and who is going to be more interested in padding their own commission. Zillow reviews are basically useless because all it means is that the reviewer liked their realtor. That’s great and all but “likeability” and quality of work are not the same thing.

There was a lot of media speculation that the recent court case and settlement with the National Association of Realtors would bring commissions down and make terms more favorable, especially for sellers.

I don’t believe that has happened at all. In fact, it’s just helped make an industry known for its opaqueness and underhanded tactics even more opaque and underhanded. As usual, it’s the client who gets the shaft.

If you want to find a good realtor, or avoid a bad one, there are a few things you can do.

• Beware of realtors that aggressively push you toward certain vendors (banks, title companies, etc). If you’re looking at your third house and they’re now asking you for the fifth time if you’ve applied for a mortgage at a specific bank, that’s a red flag. Kickbacks are illegal in both banking and real estate. But some people like to treat those pesky laws like suggestions.

• Beware of dual agency in general, but especially Realtors that are very persistent about it. With dual agency, the same realtor represents the buyer and the seller. It’s not a guarantee that your realtor is going to do something unethical, but let’s be real. Collecting commission from both sides in a real estate transaction is a very clear conflict of interest. But it’s a conflict of interest that is considered acceptable as long as The buyer and seller both approve. You do not have to approve. But you may have to find another realtor depending on who your initial realtor was representing first.

• If a realtor has been in the business for a long time AND is willing to show you rentals, that’s actually a positive sign. Rentals pay shit. Around here if you get $300 - $400, that’s a good rental commission. As the agent you get to keep maybe half of that. Depends on what the split is with your broker. Agents who sell more can negotiate a better commission split. So the rental commission is dog shit and on top of that, landlords and property Management companies are notorious for trying to either weasel out paying the commission or they will drag their feet on it as long as possible.

As the agent, you could easily spend many many hours showing rentals and lose money doing it because rentals are not profitable for agents. Agents that are relatively new to the business will do rentals just to help build up their client portfolio. But if you get an agent who’s been in the business for a while, doesn’t try to pawn you off on another agent, and will take the time to actually show you rentals, they’re not doing it strictly for the money even if they do hope that you’ll remember them if If you ever need to buy a house.

• Call a few local title companies and see if you can get them to tell you what they think of the realtor that you’re considering working with. Title agents spend all day working with real estate agents and they’re the ones who know which agents are on their game and which ones are a shitshow. If you can get them to divulge anything, you may learn something valuable.

A good realtor is worth every penny you pay them and in addition buying or selling your home will:

• Listen to and help you manage your expectations.
• Make sure you get a knowledgeable and thorough home inspector.
• Keep you from getting the shit sued out of you for one of numerous mistakes.
• Make sure you fully understand the giant pile of paperwork you’ll be signing.
• Have O&E insurance so if they fuck up the paperwork, it’s on them and not you.
• Go to bat for you if you’re being discrimated against in any way by banks, buyers, sellers or landlords (all of which are rampant).

The problem is that a lot of realtors are good at “shaking hands and taking names” and terrible at everything else or they’re just plain unethical. Unfortunately, that’s the vast majority of realtors in my experience.

Source: wife is a realtor who tells me all kinds of “you’ll never believe the shit [other realtor] tried to pull today” stories.

Got-dangit!

Presbyterians don’t have canonized saints but if they did, Fred Rogers would be the first on the list.

Knees are overrated.

Sell your Enron stocks immediately!

My wife: “What are we doing this weekend?”

Me: “The same thing we do every weekend. Try and take over the world.”

Both of us laughing

Me: “No, seriously, I’ve got a bunch of yard work to do.”

Nah man. Jesus is cool. It’s the people selling knockoffs that you gotta watch out for.

Knew one family that had a big rear projection in their “media room”. Going to watch movies at their house was a legit event.

Bringing back Gnutella.

Hi dad!

The Mayor should just go ahead and resign. Take the city attorney with him while he’s at it.

What a bunch of asshats.

I wouldn’t pay for an AI subscription but I have no problem using my own PC for work on the condition that they give me a VM to remote into. Mainly because I like using my three big monitors and the shitty laptops my previous employers provided are either underpowered or locked down to the point where multi-monitor support is really poor.

I do pay for tools that I use outside of work and if it’s something that helps me with my day job, I have no problem using it for that. That said, using AI to generate code is usually a waste of time. Unless it’s something really, really basic.

You’re not missing anything.

Even if it were actually doable, this a dumbass idea. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that night/darkness are necessary for life and that we already have enough environmental problems related to artificial light pollution.

I seem to recall about 13 years ago when “the cloud” was going to put everyone in IT Ops out of a job. At least according to people who have no idea what the IT department actually does.

“The cloud” certainly had an impact but the one thing it definitely did NOT do was send every system and network admin to the unemployment office. If anything it increased the demand for those kinds of jobs.

I remain unconcerned about my future career prospects.

Uwu probably think this sign is about Uwu.

Just the other day, the Mixtral chatbot insisted that PostgreSQL v16 doesn’t exist.

A few weeks ago, Chat GPT gave me a DAX measure for an Excel pivot table that used several DAX functions in ways that they could not be used.

The funny thing was, it knew and could explain why those functions couldn’t be used when I corrected it. But it wasn’t able to correlate and use that information to generate a proper function. In fact, I had to correct it for the same mistakes multiple times and it never did get it quite right.

Generative AI is very good at confidently spitting out inaccurate information in ways that make it sound like it knows what it’s talking about to the average person.

Basically, AI is currently functioning at the same level as the average tech CEO.

“OMG. Are you a hacker?”

“…I’m just using Powershell.”