Did anyone else read this paragraph wonder wtf really happened...
"Bachman enrolled at Tulane University in the fall of 1975, but his time there was rocky and brief, ruptured by a horrific incident in January at the Sigma Chi house, just off campus. Although Bachman was not a member of the frat, he told Friedman he’d been hanging around the house with a friend from Elkins Park, a boy a year older named Ken Gutzeit. Suddenly, a man had appeared with a knife and slashed Gutzeit’s throat. “The word Jamison used was beheaded,” Friedman told me. According to news reports, Gutzeit was killed by a 25-year-old student librarian named Randell Vidrine. The two were said to have been feuding since the previous fall, after Vidrine called campus police on Gutzeit for eating a cheese sandwich among the stacks. (“I know it sounds incredible, but from what we understand they never argued about anything else,” a police spokesperson told a reporter at the time. “It was always about the sandwich.”) Gutzeit stumbled onto the frat-house steps and bled to death, surrounded by Bachman and some two dozen other witnesses. (A grand jury declined to indict Vidrine.)"
What a weird story. One strongly suspects that there must be more to it. As reported, to not even be indicted (which usually has a low bar) for stabbing someone to death in full view of numerous witnesses seems like a pretty abnormal outcome.
From the article it sounds like it happened in the course of a fight that the other guy started; the grand jury may have just viewed it as self-defense.
Maybe? Self-defense doesn't usually extend to "He shoved me while in a public space with other people around so I killed him." One has to believe that there were indeed extenuating circumstances but it's not really clear from the article what they were.
I'm extrapolating a bit from the article, but it sounds like he was walking past the frat house on the street when Gutzeit left the house approached him on the street and attacked him.
If you are minding your own business walking down the street and someone approaches you to physically attack you, especially with 10-20 fraternity brother behind them ready to jump in, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to use a knife in self defense. That is a life threatening situation, or at least a risk of grievous bodily harm situation.
The fact that he wasn't indicted makes it hard for me to believe the situation occurred otherwise. It seems to me like the Ny Mag article may have significantly misrepresented the event.
I worked on an ambulance rig as an EMT during college. My first night of working on the rig, around 7am, we were called to a house on the outskirts of Champaign, Illinois.
When we arrived, we found a man running through the street with a tiny pencil sticking out of his back. Turns out, his father-in-law had plunged a complete pencil ~6 inches into his back during breakfast. Why? He had eaten some of his father-in-law's hash browns. He wouldn't stop talking about it for the entire trip.
Sometimes, people have disproportionate reactions to slights against them.
You don't steal a man's baloney. Everyone knows that. I'm curious...why did he steal just the baloney and not the entire sandwich? Common decency dictates that if you steal a man's sandwich you take the entire thing. You don't leave someone with just two empty pieces of bread. That's probably why it escalated so quickly.
My coworker was a member of that fraternity in the 80s, and he said he had never heard about that event. He was skeptical that it even happened until he read the newspaper article you posted. I would think a knifing death is the type of thing to be passed down in stories, but apparently not.
Someone needs to figure out why the Grand Jury chose not to indict. This man was murdered in front of multiple witnesses. There must have been incredible extenuating circumstances if a Grand Jury chose not to indict.
Edit:
Come to think of it, the likely reason why the Grand Jury chose not to indict could have been self defense.
Thanks SO MUCH for this article. I hate it when questions like that go on answered in stories like this one. I am most threw the magazine across the room, but your research skills calmed me down.
Oddly not. Though, this Bachman guy was the direct cause of so much crazy stuff, I can hardly blame them for glossing over a proximal event (but wouldn't be surprised if he was somehow an instigator). If someone made a movie about this guy's life, I would watch. (also, just a trivial note, this is a NYMag piece, not NYT)
The newspaper article says the student was eating a bag of cheese snacks, which is COMPLETELY different than a cheese sandwich!
It's just NYMAG's liberal fake news 'sandwich hating agenda' peeking out again.
Edit: I was trying to make a joke, but as a former assistant librarian I can tell you, there really is a difference between someone eating a sandwich, and someone thumbing through books with Cheetos fingers.
Maybe not 'inconsistent' so much as neglected to include the key details necessary to understand why Vidrine was acquitted (or, 'not indicted'). I mean, it's presented as a heinous murder. But yeah, you are right, after a second read there isn't major inconsistencies.
The “key detail” is Bachman was close to a traumatic, seemingly-random violent interaction in his youth. Whether it was cheese snacks or a cheese sandwich, and who attacked whom first, are largely irrelevant to the main story.
1. had i said key details to the main story, yes, i'd agree
2. see my comment below, where i point out that, indeed the players and events that unfolded here are only proximal to not directly in the scope of the story about Jamison.
3. I already admitted there wasnt major inconsistencies, whaddayawant from me. A formal retraction?
The kind of tenancy laws I read in articles like these, sound absolutely idiotic. If you let someone into your home, and they aren't on the lease, you should be able to kick them out anytime they overstay their welcome. If you do sign a lease with someone, and they haven't paid their rent, you should be able to throw their stuff out and change the locks as soon as their security deposit has run itself out.
As a former master tenant who had to deal with 4 sub-tenants, I lived in mortal fear of the day one of them realised that they could just stop paying me rent, and there's nothing I can do about it whatsoever. It boggles my mind the amount of legal BS you have to wade through, just to reclaim your home from someone who thinks they are entitled to free housing.
> I lived in mortal fear of the day one of them realised that they could just stop paying me rent, and there's nothing I can do about it whatsoever
That is of course false. It may be a hassle, but you can absolutely to something.
And giving people housing is important, that's why the laws often favor the person renting, not the owner. The laws is a risk you have to take if you want to rent out your place. Price it into your rent. Or just don't live in "mortal fear" by not being a master tenant..
Realistically, there's nothing I can do about it because the eviction process is so long and time consuming, that by the time I finally evict the person, my lease would be over and I'd be moving out anyway. After having given my roommate free housing for many months of course.
> "Giving people housing is important"
I agree! So let's make the government financially liable for any missed rent payments, while the eviction process is pending. After all, if providing its citizens with housing is so important, it should be the state's financial responsibility, not that of a random landlord whose contract was violated. I'm all for universal basic income, but not income-appropriated-from-a-few-random-landlords.
> "Price it into your rent"
Ah, now we get to the real rub. Everyone already does this. If you're a rich, successful individual, you have the luxury of living anywhere you want, at market prices. If you're down on your luck, but want to turn things around, you'll find that many places will refuse to accept you anyway, because the risk is too great. Or they will offer you housing at significantly higher rents, because of the additional risks involved. Either way, you're getting screwed, just because some other deadbeat thinks he's entitled to free housing at the landlord's expense.
Most people don't understand the second order effects you've described. The downside of so much renter-favorable protections is an increase in rent which prices out those very same renters.
The person whose comment you are replying to doesn't understand that. So then when the rental market gets too hot for working people, his next demand will be that the government force landlords to rent at a particular price.
So then landlords don't want to rent at that price, because they would take a loss, so they choose not to rent at all. So then the market for rental properties contracts.
Then the person asks that the state appropriate the properties and rent it out directly. So then people lose their property and have no incentive to invest in property in the jurisdiction, and future workers, not interested in living in government dormitories, choose another jurisdiction to go build their companies and careers.
Then this person, aged 60 at that time, will be sitting in their rundown neighborhood where all the young people have left to go to another jurisdiction, and will be muttering ... things used to be soooo good. What ever happened?
> And giving people housing is important, that's why the laws > often favor the person renting, not the owner.
As though if you think housing is important, all a policy maker should have to think about is the first order effect of protecting the renter's rights.
You did a lot more than say they exist. You said housing is important, that's why they exist. As though rental protection somehow advances the important goal of providing housing. One doesn't need more than that to identify who you are when it comes to reasoning about housing.
Well, here in Uruguay, eviction is also awful, so tenants are required to pay for "rent insurance", which is awful if you're a diligent rent-payer (as it's an extra month's rent every year), but it's great for the owner - if the tenant loses one month's payments, the owner gets reimbursed for every month and the judicial arm takes care of eviction.
It has never been easier to check background, credit, rental history. Something like $30 per applicant and you can require they pay the fee.
It’s not perfect but being blacklisted as an evicted deadbeat (or being someone who won’t provide verifiable rental history / references) is a pretty big disincentive to go nuclear on your rental. Sure some people are just leeches like the subject of this story but I wouldn’t imagine that’s anything but an edge case.
> That is of course false. It may be a hassle, but you can absolutely to something.
It depends where. In France you are completely stuck when someone dies not pay. It can take over a year to finally kick someone out.
And this is just if he is not paying. If someone pays, it is simply impossible. Every three years you may take back the house for your or your close family use only. You cannot sell it empty. You cannot end the contract.
You are awfully stuck.
Germany has strong tenant protection, but the situation in the article would not be protected because the tenant and the landlord share the same space. The protections are only strong if you do not share. (2 weeks notice for both parties otherwise)
Takes 15 days where I live to fully evict someone.
I was going to buy a house when I lived in SF and rent out the other 2 floors (to make it both reasonable to me and renters). After reading up on the laws I noped the fuck out of that.
The housing crisis is that there is less housing than people who want housing. Whether the homes are rented or owner-occupied has nothing to do with it.
> It depends where. In France you are completely stuck when someone dies not pay. It can take over a year to finally kick someone out.
But then how do you kick them out? By doing something! Which was my point. Saying "nothing whatsoever to do about it" is a lie by the OP.
I'm not saying all the rules are sane. But it's better to protect the weak that need roof over their heads, than the persons renting out a house they don't need.
One could even argue the French law is good. If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for many.
Owning multiple properties and renting them out isn't a right. Having a house to live in should be.
I think their is a confusion of rights and duties occurring here.
You have a right to own a house. What you are speaking about is others having a duty to provide you with a house. In particular, we need to be clear on exactly what the duty to provide housing is. For example, there is a significant difference between the government offering safe homeless shelters because society has a duty to provide some shelter, and legally being allowed to continue living in a rental unit that you stop paying for, because this constitutes a duty of the owner providing you with that particular house.
Sex is a common idea that helps establish the difference between a right and a duty. Banning gay individuals from having sex is wrong because it violates their right to sex. But no one has to have sex with another person because there is no duty to provide sex.
>If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for many.
There is also the possibility of regulatory capture. It prevents someone who happens to own two properties from being a competitor in providing rental services while companies that specialize in it and have many properties of the right value to be able to spread out the risk are not threatened by the laws.
As someone looking to buy a house, I've considered the ability to rent it should I seek to move verses having to sell it, and it seems that tenant rights where I live (which are much weaker than French law) increase my risk of renting far more than it increases the risk of a company specializing in renting. Its weird to be in a position where I rent but feel there isn't enough protection while at the same time there is so much protection that it strongly impacts the logic of if I should buy.
Every able-bodied human has the capacity to provide their own housing, given enough land area on which to build. But in most places on Earth, the local legal regime has been constructed in such a way as to provide for a means of land ownership, where other people may be lawfully excluded from using the land, or even just being present on it.
There must be a tradeoff there. Everyone requires the legal right to occupy the volume of their own body. It would be completely unethical to make it illegal for a person to exist. Any attempt to do so induces such a person to treat the legal structure as a mortal enemy.
So in exchange for respecting a land property right of another, those land-owners have a duty to provide those who might otherwise develop that owned land for their own purposes with a location on which they may exist. They don't even need to actually build any houses, just to allow for any type of housing to be built without attempting to prevent it. If they fail in this duty, they have abrogated the social contract that allows land property to exist, and those with no place to stand could ethically seize the land property.
The right to own land comes with a duty to supply living space to those whom you would exclude from it. Surface volume is a limited resource, and impossible to defend in large parcels without the cooperation of others.
It would be advantageous for the landowners to form a cartel, such that they could retaliate against renegades that undermine the collective property right by neglecting the duty, because the natural game-theory equilibrium is for everyone to be a NIMBY until the landless people reach a breaking point and murder all the landowners, just to take a reasonable portion for themselves.
If you don't build houses, you need to build strong walls.
Georgists have put a lot of thought into this concept, even if I don't entirely agree with their proposed solutions to the problem.
> ...than the persons renting out a house they don't need.
Is a camera rental company just "renting out cameras they don't need"? Maintaining rental properties is a livelihood, a bad faith tenant is just as abusive as a bad faith landlord.
People buy properties on loans to rent them out, when a tenant refuses to pay the rent, the utilities and the loan payments fall to the landlord. The obvious effect of this is that only people who can afford to lease and rent many properties out at once to spread the cost of this can become landlords.
Furthermore, if this dwelling is some part of an existing home, and you can't evict them for violating the lease agreement, then you have unwanted strangers who don't care about you, forcibly staying in your own home. You don't have to be a steenking bourgeois to own a home, and you don't need to be "advantaged" to draw the short end of this straw.
Some countries have a mix of laws for tenant relations, for example sublet agreements in some places are afforded little or none of the extreme tenant rights that direct let agreements are. That would likely have helped in this article's situation.
Do you think immediate eviction as a remedy for late rent is comparable to fines for shoplifting?
If we had adequate state-provided housing available at short notice for any household, as a social safety net, then laws about eviction could be considerably stricter without violating renter’s basic human rights. I doubt you’ll find much support for that policy change from landlords though; the competition would likely reduce prevailing rents quite a bit.
Clearly tenant rights aren’t (and shouldn’t be) unlimited, but the protections for tenants currently in place were established to counter bad abuses by landlords.
Various measures to preventing shoplifting (whether food or cameras) are not really comparable in my opinion.
That's what's usually known as risk. They invested in an asset to provide their livelihood, that form of income has a set of risks associated with it, just like having a job carries a risk of losing it or how investing in securities carries its own risk.
How much are we willing to protect the investor from risk, in this particular case, at the potential expense of a tenant's ability to have shelter? Obviously we need some form of balance but the finer details of it are wildly arguable.
> If it deters people from buying properties for renting to others by making it not as lucrative, it keeps the prices down and makes housing affordable for man
Eviction control makes “some form of rent control necessary: in its absence, the landlord could charge an astronomic rent instead of sending a notice of termination” [1]. Rent controls have a documented effect of suppressing new housing supply, thereby raising rents. Furthermore, “subsequent to the introduction of [German] eviction control in 1971 and 1975, the number of evictions first decreased and then, after some short time interval, returned to its normal average” (page 473).
> Owning multiple properties and renting them out isn't a right. Having a house to live in should be.
I’m not sure I’m reading this correctly. You believe it should be a human right to have a home to live in? Every person is just given a free home? Who would build all these homes in this utopia?
That's a very non-charitable way of reading my statement, I believe you are very sure you're not reading it correctly.
But yes, I do "believe it should be a human right to have a home to live in". Not given freely, but having the opportunity for housing. It's even in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Even if it's at the cost of someone else who does not wish to single-handedly carry this burden? I have seen first hand the damage someone can cause to a home. I really think that when they are not paying for it they have even less of an emotional stake in the livability of the home post inhabitance.
Yep, I was an accidental landlord due to the housing bubble bursting in 2008 (had to move for a job, couldn't sell the house without taking a huge loss).
Hired a property manager, found a tenant, and did my best to be a good landlord. Let the tenant pay a couple of weeks late a few times without getting bent out of shape, fixed things promptly, etc.
Then the time finally came to sell last year. The market had recovered, I could sell the house and actually make a profit. My reward for doing "the right thing" (not defaulting/short-selling/etc.) was ready to be reaped.
Tenants moved out... got our first look at the house. It was a complete nightmare. Turns out they raised rabbits (as in, to sell) in the property and trashed the place (poop everywhere, stained walls, and egads.. the smell). Ended up taking a large loss on the property anyway - had to basically dump it in order to find a buyer and just be rid of the thing.
The tenants lost their security deposit. That's it. I lost tens of thousands on the sale price (and this was a sub-$200k home), not to mention the years of maintenance, etc. I spent (well, my useless PM charged me) while they were in the house.
Yea, should have just sent the bank the keys in the mail and walked away. In the end it would have been less painful.
Our property manager (standing in for the owner) inspected our rental every 3 months for the first year, then every 6 months after that. If we'd've trashed the place, they can start the eviction process straight away. Do you not have the right to inspections?
Going from "Having a house to live in should be a right" to "having the opportunity for housing should be a right" is a very non-charitable way of arguing.
I would phrase it more as "a human has the right to access any resources necessary to continue existing".
That includes having a place to be, and the means to acquire food, water, and medical treatment. At minimum, this would be in the form of subsistence farming, including medicinal crops. One person has the exclusive right to enough land surface area to meet all their own needs, the exact number depending on the local environmental factors.
When it is more advantageous to society at large to exclude would-be subsistence farmers from access to vital resources, it creates a duty for them to replace the products that the person would otherwise create from them. With economic specialization, this should be trivial. A thousand subsistence farms may be replaced by one industrial farm that can feed tens of thousands. It stands to reason that the industrial farmer should feed those prevented by law from farming for themselves, because if that person does not, the thousand will burn the law and take the land by force to feed themselves, and people elsewhere may starve. In the interest of preserving the benefit of economic specialization, which allows billions more of us to exist than the planet would otherwise support, those who benefit from owning property should share enough of that benefit with those who do not that they are not forced to rebel against property itself in order to survive.
The more specialized society becomes, the more critical it is that transfer of "unearned" benefits take place. Those benefits are the price that the winners must pay to the losers, for continuing to play by the rules of the game instead of cheating at it, or flipping over the game table and stomping on all the pieces.
You believe in responsibility, but the tenants (OP's hypothetical ones) have failed the responsibility that got them into their housing. At that point, to allow the tenants to stay is giving them the home freely.
It's funny you mention this, because it is an actual right in France. People have a right to housing. That's why the government provides (or should provide more) shelter to homeless people.
Do you believe that people do not have the right to have a shelter where to live, but only those who are rich enough to afford it ?
You can do something but in many cases it can be a very long and tiring battle. There are a few people who thrive on rental fraud. They understand how the system works and repeatedly take advantage of landlords to obtain free rent.
An example of this: A malicious tenant can just stop paying rent, the landlord will then start the eviction process. But the tenant already anticipated this and filled for bankruptcy without the landlord knowing. That then makes it so you can no longer evict the tenant and they receive protections. This buys them even more time to live for free and the landlord is powerless.
I think it is important to have tenant protections and landlord protections. I am sure there are many tenants who have a legitimate reason they cannot pay rent and should be given leniency with the expectation that they are trying to get back to normal. But when landlords come across tenants who purposely work the system in order to obtain free rent there should be a course of action the landlord can take to ensure these people cannot continue doing so. Based on my experience, and in my area, there are no real penalties for rental fraudsters, like are described in this article. This guy has been running the same scam for years against multiple people, why can this not be stopped?
In San Francisco, it is illegal to for a master tenant to rent a room for more than the subtenant’s proportionate share of the space. You can charge more, but hell will descend upon you once the subtenant figures it out.
In the UK renters only have rights if the landlord doesn't live there. If they are a "lodger" they basically have fuck all rights and can be kicked out immediately.
You can certainly do something, but you will lose a lot of money doing it. Where I live in Illinois it can take months. If someone isn't paying that whole time, that's a real hardship.
I still rent out my old place because I took a bath in the financial crisis and I needed to move. I can't just "price it in" as I can only charge what the market will bear, which just barely covers my mortgage.
If you do sign a lease with someone, and they haven't paid their rent, you should be able to throw their stuff out and change the locks as soon as their security deposit has run itself out.
I hear this and I think "You probably don't know what it's like to be in that situation."
It's often temporary, so a little flexibility fixes the problem.
But yes, sometimes you're right. You just phrased it in a bit of an inhumane way.
I agree with you. In practice, if I had a roommate who was genuinely going through some difficulties and needed 1-2 months to get back on his feet, I would help that person out. What really disturbs me is people taking advantage of the law, acting like they are entitled to free housing, and not showing gratitude/remorse for the predicament they have put others into. That's the kind of person I would want to change locks on, not the former.
Perhaps my wording was too strong, and I apologise for that.
Nah, it's more of... Nowadays, it seems like the problems in the world are increasing. Programmers are probably the most insulated from the effects, but even we are starting to feel them. On HN you'd get the impression everyone makes $300k and courts VCs, but the vast majority of the audience is more along the lines of mostly broke and quiet. I know because I've talked to them.
In that context, it's very important for us all to work together. And I've been trying to think of ways for us to do that. There must be something better than the rat race to the bottom, with a few survivors reaching the top by scrambling over the fallen.
It's not you. It's the society around us that coaxes us into thinking the way you expressed. It's a cartoon, a caricature of real life. Very few people wouldn't be embarrassed to be an imposition on others, or feel like trash for not being able to afford rent. We're all trying, hard.
But there are so many people now. And some people really aren't trying, and really do put others into weird predicaments.
It's hard to mentally separate the former from the latter.
> Very few people wouldn't be embarrassed to be an imposition on others
Your implication is that parasitic people have the same density among people who don't pay their rent as among the general population. This seems like an extraordinary claim in light of what we know about phenomenon like adverse selection.
In the UK if the landlord lives at the same place (i.e. you live with the landlord) then you have far less rights as a tenant. Including a very short notice period.
You would typically be an excluded occupier, meaning that you could be evicted with only "reasonable notice" - typically seven days. The landlord doesn't have to give a reason, you have no right to appeal and the police can remove you if you refuse to leave.
I didn't notice in the article that "they signed a lease/contract".
"He signed the check in a messy scrawl" but not a contract.
In the UK (and many other parts of the world) a contract is (almost) always signed before anyone moves in. Handing a checque means nothing is not bulletproof. One can claim that it was a payment for a selling an old computer (and then the courts will have to do the talking).
But this was a roommate situation. I doubt most people sign any formal letters when hiring a roommate, as most people don’t come from a legal / business background.
He also handed a check instantly to people who were desperate for money...
If you are both leasing from the landlord you have equal rights and actually only the landlord can evict.
If you are the master leaseholder and your roommate is subleasing then you have many of the obligations of a landlord.. which means you actually have a lot of regulations to comply with that will probably trip you up if your lessee is both malicious and litigous. Especially if the sublease was established without a contract.
Usually you can get away with it bcause the kinds of people who just stop paying rent are deadbeats and won't challenge.
No, you got it wrong. They love jokes, but they have a super-sophisticated sense of humour that the unwashed masses have absolutely no hope of matching.
Evicting someone takes many months, often more than a year. And durign that time, they have no incentive to take care of the property. It can be an economic disaster.
Where I live it's pretty common to have multiple tenants in housing zoned for single-family residential use (I imagine this is true of much of the US). I'm curious whether that makes it easier or harder to evict someone.
I support him. If you want "tenant rights" you can sign appropriate lease contract that allows you to stay longer in case you are in some trouble. Perhaps you could also buy some insurance for that. But why owner of the property would have to keep it in hands of somebody who is not paying? Because tenant is in some bad life situation? I think in most cases if that really would be the case, property owner would help, but in general this problem is to be handled by tenant, state or charities.
Professionally managed properties respond to this by issuing a “pay or quit” notice immediately when you miss a payment, then begin eviction proceedings as soon as they can. Sometimes it can take a few months, but they’ll have the cops come and escort you away if they have to. At my apartment complex, like clockwork, you’ll see folded-over papers taped to doors the first week of every month. Home owners renting a room or two might be more forgiving, but every property management place I’ve heard of doesn’t care about your life situation or whatever. You might get super lucky and get a manager willing to give you a few extra weeks to make rent, but typically they start trying to evict you as soon as they can to cover themselves.
> If you want "tenant rights" you can sign appropriate lease contract that allows you to stay longer in case you are in some trouble
“Tenants do not highly value protection from eviction” at the time of lease signing “because the objective probability of arbitrary eviction is small” [1]. (The same paper notes that subsequent to the introduction of [German] eviction control in 1971 and 1975, the number of evictions first decreased and then, after some short time interval, returned to its normal average.”)
Well, the thing is, by coming to an agreement, you automatically enter a contract. There is not need for a signed piece of paper; a written, explicit contract is just for both parties to be clear on the terms, to deviate from default terms set by law, and to make possible litigation easier. You do not need to sign a contract if you buy a piece of gum from a vending machine, yet, legally, it is the same process as buying a car.
If I agree to let you stay in my apartment as your residence (that is, not simply a visit), we have entered a lease contract. Thus, tenancy laws come into effect. There is no need for a piece of paper to make what we have a lease.
I don't know where do you live, but I'm happy that "you over there" do things with a handshake. Over "here" without a contract only a court of law can determine who is at fault when two sides (owner - tenant) have a fall-out. And a (proper) piece of paper protects both sides by stating the rights and obligations.
Verbal contracts do exist. But hey, a piece of paper with signatures looks sooooooo much better in a court of law :)
> But hey, a piece of paper with signatures looks sooooooo much better in a court of law :)
It does. But the parent post suggested that if there is no signed lease, tenant laws should not apply, and I tried to point out that it does not work that way.
The rights you have to continue a close personal relationship with someone by living with them should be distinct from the rights you have over a large-scale landlord to live in one of its investments. Cohabitation is a level of intimacy that it’s completely inappropriate for the state to prevent you from withdrawing.
The author of ZeroMQ wrote a book on recognizing people like this, and more importantly how to get yourself out of prison they’ve put you in. The action plans have helped me.
The lucky ones in the NYmag article here did many of the things he recommends.
Free PDF here, look for the hard to find “read” button.
Thanks for the pointer to the book, quite interesting so far.
The author talks of psychopathy as an "adaptation" and not a "brokenness" in an individual ... but the adaptation so far mentioned is only in the sense of "the relatively small number of psychopaths is adapted to prey on other humans". I suppose that having too many psychopaths would render human trust very frail and would make a society prone to failure (and so be a negative pressure) -- so psychopathy can only occur within limits to be successful.
I wonder though whether there's another use for psychopaths: when a society or humanity at large faces a "bottleneck event" where extinction is very possible, the psychopaths "rise to the occasion" and do all the nasty, non-empathetic, distasteful things that a society needs to survive in those weird situations.
If so, then, ... psychopaths are harmful to individuals and society, until they aren't.
EDIT: actually, there's the brilliant Marlon Brando speech in Apocalypse Now (https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho...), where he describes bastards with empathy, people who love their families yet are able to perform the unthinkable atrocities [on their family] to win. So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths -- they do terrible things when necessary and doubtless feel the anguish of it.
EDIT: in other words, psychopaths are society's ultimate catastrophic re-insurance, the last resort.
Not sure about psychopaths (I imagine they fit in there somewhere) but as a less extreme version the complainers and confronters and grudge holders of this world do those of us who are less confrontational some service at times.
I tend to think of "social enforcement" as a sort of commons good. It often doesn't benefit the person doing it that much but overall it helps keep everything balanced.
Someone cuts in line? I'm the kind of person who would usually let it go because well, maybe they're having a bad day. And is it actually worth getting worked up about? Say it's an older lady and maybe she's rude but is it worse to get in an argument with her?
There are some people in this world who will really not let that stuff go. I am glad I'm not one of those people but in many ways I am also glad that those people exist, even if I find myself on their bad side once in a while.
I suppose there are some people who would simply call this assertiveness and describe it as an unmitigated positive. But it's really quite exhausting to do on a continuous basis unless you have the personality for it. I think of it as a boundless capacity to "sweat the small stuff" and I am actually glad that some people have it.
I am one of those people. It comes from my mother being a union leader, my dad being a complainer with a short temper, and being unpopular in school, teaching me to not care what others think of me. It doesn't bother me one bit to stick my neck out at the workplace and (productively) call out BS, or to make some Comcast customer service representative's life hell until they rescind some BS charge on a friend's account. I wouldn't call it "assertiveness" - I don't consider myself very assertive - but more a very low tolerance for BS and "injustice".
This means that I've spent most of my adult life learning not to sweat the small stuff (especially since moving to a major city), but rather focus my energy where either it will actually benefit others, or against someone who is actively taking advantage of me in a harmful way. I have to consciously remind myself that to do otherwise - to confront every line-cutter and litter-dropper - will at best drain me of energy for fights that matter, and at worst, invite trouble I'm not able to handle.
Relevant to the article, I credit this same ability with having helped me escape two emotionally abusive, back-to-back, relationships (both made possible thanks to my otherwise lack of assertiveness in social areas).
I don't think I'd call myself a psychopath, though I share some traits (e.g. low - but not absent - empathy). If my parents hadn't instilled in me a strong sense of morality maybe I would be.
It's interesting to me that your Dad was a complainer with a short temper and you were unpopular in school. That's my upbringing too. I share your low empathy trait, although that's something I'm actively working to improve as I get older.
However, unlike you I couldn't classify myself as a social enforcer.
My Dad was the guy who would call someone out who cut in the queue, or approach somebody who's hogging all the things that he feels should be shared fairly in a social environment, be that the bowling balls in a bowling alley or whatever.
He would ask for things in a restaurant that they weren't capable of providing. One example in recent years was that they forgot to include the tomatoes in his full English breakfast. Rather than accept that the tomatoes would be there in a minute, he asked for a refund on the tomatoes. He wasn't kidding, and made the waitress awkwardly explain it wasn't policy to do that.
He'd ask for discounts on EVERYTHING, no holds barred, everything was up for negotiation. He was a salesman after all...
My Dad was one of 7 kids in a small house in East London. So he learned the hard way to make people respect his wishes.
As such - I endured 100s of toe curling experiences like these between the ages of 6 and 16. Most of them I've managed to block out but as a collective they all still haunt me.
I'm super assertive at work, I'm a Managing Director for a twenty person strong software company so that's no issue.
However, in a social environment it's unlikely I'll call somebody out on queue cutting and I'll go out of my way to be kind and polite to waiting staff in restaurants. Having endured that in my youth I now find those circumstances completely unbearable.
>I don't think I'd call myself a psychopath, though I share some traits (e.g. low - but not absent - empathy). If my parents hadn't instilled in me a strong sense of morality maybe I would be.
> EDIT: actually, there's the brilliant Marlon Brando speech in Apocalypse Now (https://simonamooon.deviantart.com/journal/Apocalypse-Now-Ho...), where he describes bastards with empathy, people who love their families yet are able to perform the unthinkable atrocities [on their family] to win. So these folks are the opposite of psychopaths -- they do terrible things when necessary and doubtless feel the anguish of it.
Psychopathy is not the reason behind this scenario. It is in fact a polar opposite of it: in this context, doing horrible things is motivated by belief in a greater good. That is also the problem with Milgram's famous shock experiments: in his own explanation he completely ignored the part where the people willing to apply possibly lethal shocks to people where those goaded into believing it was for the greater good of mankind (that is, they were told the experiment was necessary for a better scientific understanding of the human mind).
I suspect you have very secular Western view of the world. You may want to have a look into Scott Atran's work, who dives deeper into this. This RSA lecture[0] is a fine place to start.
I am not qualified to speak authoritatively on this matter, but here's how I see it: Psychopaths are mutant parasites. They lack certain abilities that enable them to integrate well into human groups and would not survive well in the paleolithic. With increasing population densities in the neolithic and in the modern age, it became possible for psychopaths to survive and pass on their genes. I think that psychopaths are still rare for a few reasons: the mutation may be recessive, or high population density is too recent for the mutation to have spread widely, or psychopaths may be more likely to die by violence, or they may invest too few resources in their children. In any case, I think increasing numbers of psychopaths would pose a long-term existental threat to human civilization. As far as productive uses for psychopaths go (if we can identify them before maturity), I have no suggestions; it is not wise to put guns into the hands of heartless people who would turn them on us if they perceived any advantage in doing so; one need only look at the example of Mexican cartels founded by special forces to see this.
They're not literally parasites or any more/less mutated than the next person whose genes are different from their ancestors.
Hyperbole like this is really destructive and close-minded. Consider if you lived in a world of psychopaths and you were the rare empathetic one. If the greater population openly regarded you as a mutant parasite, would this alienation inspire you to behave in a pro-social way or an anti-social way?
No SNP was significant, nor any single gene. MAO-A (the "warrior gene") is ruled out. However, many genes showed strong association with Anti-Social Personality Disorder, with multiple alleles working together.
My read is that these behavior patterns emerge in certain brain phenotypes, combinations of which were advantageous in antiquity. But much of that genetic information was stored as allele distribution, and we've lost a lot of that data with generations of assortative mating.
If you are referring to hunters and gatherers, they rarely lived in nuclear families but instead extended family groups. They also socially impose the norm of egalitarianism and are in constant contact with each other. I suspect the original author saw these in direct conflict with sociopathy.
In evolutionary nomenclature they call this frequency dependent selection. Some trait can have a selective advantage and low frequency but the selective advantage is lost as the frequency of the trait increases in the population. Also, I think you analysis is spot on. This trait is preserves at low frequencies because it has been benefited from positive selection in the past.
This is a really horrible way to put things -"psychopaths are society's ultimate catastrophic re-insurance, the last resort". It's indulging itself in grandiosity and dumbing down a richer picture than that with more gray area.
Referring to someone as a psychopath is quite similar to people calling you a hacker because you majored in computer science then asking you to fix their computer.
Outside of the dramatics, it is true that leaders tend to exhibit typical psychopathic qualities. Things like diminished empathy, cutthroat competitivity, predatorial cleverness, selfish rationality at the cost of emotion, and the ability to project the right mask at the right time are usually needed in high business and politics. At the same time, you can't lump Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates into a group with the high school shooter kids.
It's not really an adaptation considering humans evolved into empathy - psychopathy, physiologically, refers to part of the brain being underdeveloped leading to these characteristics being formed as an individual progresses through life. Of course, it seems like individuals who go through traumatic events or extended drug use often develop at least a subset of these behaviors separately. I'm not a psychologist so I'll stop myself. Either way, it is a much broader picture than you're painting - the humans and the "evolved" psychopaths.
The grandparent to your post here, the one referring to "author of ZeroMQ", links to an interesting article by that "author of ZeroMQ" ... and that article is a "layman's rejection" of the notion that you lay out, that "psychopathy, physiologically, refers to part of the brain being underdeveloped leading to these characteristics [of non-empathy, etc.] being formed as an individual progresses through life".
I was playing along with that contention, seems to make sense to me, that perhaps some people just inherit traits or predispositions to lack-of-empathy. I also don't know the psychology or neuroscience, and I imagine there's still some debate -- "is it a neurological disorder, or is it an adaptation?"
Didn't read - I've had enough run ins with people that I don't need any help spotting them. Maybe will glance over if its short.
Part of what I was trying to argue, if I didn't word it well - is that if you're we can't distinctly tie the list of characteristics we've contrived as being psychopathy to something like a malformed amygdala, and we instead refer to it nebulously as this genetic aberration, we might as well go back to calling people witches as well (which, I suppose our species tends to enjoy looking for).
One of the books that I liked was: In Sheep's Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People and Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People
> Dude you seem to have a problem. Beating folks into one inch of their life looks to me a significant overreaction.
Without further articulation on the un-crossable line, this is by no means true. My brother is a bonafide, diagnosed psychopath, so I have much more experience than most in the subject. Sometimes such things are necessary.
And what line was that? Are you exaggerating the description of the beating or not? Not sure if you actually know what it looks to actually see someone getting beaten to death, and I'm not sure what justification there could be to do that to someone unless they continued to pose a threat to you until the very end of the fight.
Yes, and especially, I don't know if a psychopath would cower in their bed.
Psychopathy goes along with a diminished sensitivity to pain and a generalized dissociative state, and I'd expect after a high-stress event, this dissociation to be extremely pronounced possibly to the point of total detachment from their environment.
Psychopathy is a "fight" response to stress, coupled with a extreme impairment to self-imagine/empathy. Its not a choice, its a lifelong pathology that I struggle to see diminish after a mere fight.
In particular, I wonder if a psychopath would really have much concern for their body in this way. I think they would be more concerned to protect its integrity/image than afraid of damage.
Maybe the were pretending to cower because that's what they thought this chump wanted to see. The way he talks about this situation though -- he comes off strongly as a person self-justifying and duty bound to do something obviously wrong.
This story is not presented in away which is sympathetic at all. We're taking it as a given a person deserves a serious physical assault, and then invited to enjoy the idea of their assault.
It reads as a kind of revenge fantasy.
Whether it is true or not, the preoccupation with the humiliation and defeat of this person; the duty-bound self-justification of what has to be done. The enjoyment of physical violence and the expectation that others will be impressed by this display of physical violence.
Nothing here is very healthy.
Conceivably there are serious predators of people who can be deterred by violence. I don't think this post communicates this point, rather, something more disturbing about its author.
The paralipsis of " While I don't revel in this ..." is revealing.
The thing is, this is purely cultural.
In my country(eastern Europe), victim's male relatives would do this almost certainly and the police would not intervene.
There is also posibility that the guy would simply vanish.
Criminal organizations also handle psychopaths and child molesters. They have families after all.
Welllllll, most people are way more pacifistic than you are. I can't think of anyone I personally know who's beaten someone else up. For most people, once they've ruled out violence, they've left themselves with no good options.
Sadly, that's all some people seem capable of reacting to. Those who say that violence never solves problems have never had to live around a sociopath.
But unless you actually kill them, by beating them up, don't you just run the risk of the other person escalating the violence and ambushing you later?
You've already established that he's a psychopath and doesn't live by the rules of most normal people, so if you push him down, maybe tomorrow he'll stab you with a knife, run you down with his car, or just shoot you.
He runs a risk of going to prison. If you beat someone "within an inch of their life", then you just committed real crime that gets you to real jail and you will have to live your life with real criminal record.
There was also the chance that you kill somebody. Hitting people is riskier than movies make you believe. Occasionally people die even from a single punch.
While in New York, I was frustrated with my cousin because she got caught multiple times trying to get off the subway. People kept getting in her way.
I told her to just walk out the exit confidently and directly. If people get the sense that they need to move or be bumped, they will move.
I forget what my cousin said to me, exactly, but it made me realize that she was a slight woman whereas I am a not slight man. People really will move out of my way if it appears I will plow through them. If they don't, I will push through them. For her, that strategy doesn't work as well.
My point is - there are some situations, for some people, where fighting is an option. Just like there are some people and situations where fighting isn't an option. Beating someone isn't always an option.
I just lived for my last semester of undergrad with two people like this who really got on each others' nerves (all three of us just needed a semester of housing to finish school). They'd both brought their own toasters and just wanted theirs out and the others in a cabinet. I think they had less than 5 conversations in person, instead putting all their incredibly minor complaints in a group text so I'd have to see it. The bathroom just had two towel hangers and they both wanted to hang two towels and would put the other's on the floor even if it was just wet. One would go away for the weekend and try to calculate that they should pay 5% less in utilities for the month because of that. They'd buy something like paper towels and announce that we each owed them $1.50 for that. We had a mail slot and they'd pick up their mail off the floor when they got home and then step on everyone else's.
My only solace is that these people must be incredibly unhappy all the time.
I’ve never had problems like this. I had a policy with flat mates which was. If you put food in the fridge, expect me to eat it, if I put food in the fridge, I expect you to eat it, I’m not going to argue about fridge space or who bought what. It’s not worth the time and effort.
Do you also eat co-worker's lunches? Why is eating what you don't buy an issue?
You'd be spending an evening on the toilet by the third day. And I would have laxatives and air freshener as part of my regular grocery shopping list. This arrangement I would be okay with; you get your food, and I get my entertainment.
Stool samples must be fresh – if they aren't, the bacteria in them can multiply. This means the levels of bacteria in the stool sample won't be the same as the levels of bacteria in your digestive system. If the levels of bacteria don't match, the test results may not be accurate.
If you can't hand your stool sample in immediately, find out how long it can be kept in the fridge. Your GP or the healthcare professional who requested the test will be able to tell you.
I'm guessing you made more than your flat mates. Is it really that hard to remember what you bought? I can understand this for condiments and spices but I'd be pretty upset if someone took something like chicken.
One of the most important tools we have for social encounters like interviewing a stranger as a potential new roommate is our "gut" reaction, which is our hard-won evolutionary instincts warning us of potential danger -- warning that something is off about the person or their situation.
I completely disagree. I think our "gut" is infinitely biased. No one is immune. If you believe you do not have racial, ethnic, and gender biases you are wrong.
And, if you read the article, everyone's gut reaction was that this man was an unassuming, down to earth, great guy, and they got along with him very well at first. The article makes clear that their gut reaction failed them.
I'm just going to post this quote about going with your gut from Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
"But one example of the unconscious bias that still exists was a Title VII suit brought in the late 70s, and the plaintiffs were women who had not succeeded in getting middle management jobs at AT&T. They did very, very well on all the standard criteria, but they flunked disproportionately at the last stage, and what was that last stage? It was what was called a “total person test.” The “total person test” was an executive interviewing the candidate for promotion. And why were women dropping out disproportionately? It was because of a certain discomfort that the executive had in dealing with someone who is different. If he’s interviewing a man, well, he sort of knows this person is just like me and he’s comfortable. But if it’s a woman, or a member of a minority group, he feels uncomfortable. This person is a stranger to him and that shows up in how he rates the candidate."
Sure, using your gut instinct in things like hiring, things where we want and need to be as objective as possible, is probably a recipe for bias and that's bad. Interviewing for roommates is something different, more intimate. You're going to be sharing space with this person and letting your gut reject someone is fine. If you're not comfortable having a female rommate, fine. If you're not comfortable with someone, for whatever reason, there is nothing morally or legally[0] wrong in rejecting them.
I get what you're saying but I never understood why people make a distinction between doing it in your private life vs doing it on the job. Yes, I understand that it's more intimate and personal, as you mentioned. But why is it inherently more acceptable to do when, for example, finding a roommate? I mean a lot of us spend more time with coworkers than family. Is it simply because laws require business practices to not discriminate against protected classes? Or is there something more to this line of thinking? Like a moral justification for the personal case or something like that.
> If you believe you do not have racial, ethnic, and gender biases you are wrong.
When does trusting your gut mean you don't know you are biased?
Everyone is biased, get over it. If you are living with someone - yes please trust your gut, live with who you want to live with.
as per the article the move in happened quickly and they were seemingly desperate to get someone in to cover the rent.
I'm not sure what you mean by gender bias, but I am pretty sure, all things being equal, I'd likely let to a woman than a man, even if I were a different sex. All things being equal --income, social traits, etc.
I think guys in these cases would be at a disadvantage.
I agree with your second paragraph, but I suspect that a person holding your views is more easily persuaded that they are being unreasonable when things start to go wrong. One should be much more suspicious of one's gut instincts when one is in a position of power than when one might be a victim.
So, you're a trusting fool? Having the ability to quickly discern someone's initial intentions is a good trait to have. Second guessing your own subconscious judgement based on concern for biases is going to make you an easy dupe.
No, I'm not a trusting fool. I don't know how you came to that conclusion.
I think you're arguing for the opposite of what you're saying. Con artists rely completely on our subconscious judgement, rather than rational thinking, and second guessing it is often the key to realizing you're a mark.
Not trusting your gut instincts, but rather taking the time to think things through rationally and come up with a basis for your judgements is what I am arguing for.
On the other hand, gut reactions to sociopaths and psychopaths are a thing. Too often though people take your view of it, and try to rationalize that feeling away. I’d rather trust my gut and ignore the pretty mediocre studies about unconscious bias that seem hard to replicate, thanks.
Gut reactions to psychopaths tend to be the opposite: they are charming, and charismatic. Theres's a very good chance that you will like them, from the first impression. That's one of the traits/signs of a psychopath. That's why you shouldn't trust your gut, at least not in this case.
And the experiences of the victims in the article reinforce this point, at least in the first encounters: a courtly gentleman, he was very respectful.
Actually that's the thing that threw me off. I mean why would a successful, well-adjusted "gentleman" even be in a situation where the best option for him is to live in a shared apartment with a woman considerably younger than him? Sure he gave her a reason, but well, he has to come up with _something_ doesn't he?
To me it seems much more likely that she agreed to him as her new room-mate out of desperate need for another person paying half of the rent.
I find the dismissal of "gut feeling" in these answers a bit ridiculous (when it comes to non-professional arrangements). Sure, you might be biased, but if you're not feeling comfortable living with someone don't move in with them!
> I mean why would a successful, well-adjusted "gentleman" even be in a situation where the best option for him is to live in a shared apartment with a woman considerably younger than him? Sure he gave her a reason, but well, he has to come up with _something_ doesn't he?
But isn't this your logic/rational mind kicking in? I think you're making my point that trusting gut feelings (a well-adjusted gentleman) isn't reliable, and taking some time to calmly and rationally assess the situation (the quick background check the victim's mother did for example) is a much better alternative.
You're right that being in a desperate need for a roommate, for financial reasons, may have been a major factor here. But again, psychopaths are manipulative and able to choose their victims and spot their weaknesses. Bachman may well have sensed this was a great opportunity, and pushed the right buttons (immediately writing a check).
When I was 35 I was getting divorced, and for simplicity, I moved into a shared apartment with a bunch of students (as I had to pay for the apartment with my wife, I didn't want to pay rent for two full apartments at the same time). I was a professional software Java developer at the time.
I appreciate 35 isn't 55, and I appreciate Java software developer isn't successful lawyer, but I can still see it happening even if I was older and in an even more lucrative profession. I mean people do have strange times in their lives, and not everyone is rich just because they're successful (e.g. divorce, health issues, downturn in the job market, bad decisions, etc.)
Your situation seems considerably less weird too me though. Another important difference is you moved in with „a bunch“ of people whereas the woman in the article was alone. I‘d sure as hell not want to be on my own if it turns out my new 35-year-old Java-developer roommate is a lunatic after all :D
No. It's in the eyes. If you know what you look for, psychopaths eyes are different. I can't explain it in physical terms, but when I look into a psychopaths eyes, there's nothing there.
Also, psychopaths don't have a startle reflex (but sociopaths do). So, drop a dish and see if they jump.
That’s a common myth. In fact the reaction tends to be highly negative, but subsequent charming behavior leads people to ignore their initial reaction.
In other words, a gut reaction isn’t proof of anything, and neither is a lack of a gut reaction, BUT... when it happens, and when it’s a high risk situation, listen to your gut.
The Gift of Fear is all about listening to your "gut". We have a very highly evolved ability to take in the high bandwidth data from our environment and decide "danger", but living in large anonymous social groups can lead us to suppress this feeling.
The Gift of Fear and Other Survival Signals that Protect Us From Violence
Yes in this instance false negatives are very bad. It's better to reject ten perfectly acceptable roommates than to accept one crazy ax-murderer roommate.
Sorry, I know I'm reading into your statement, but your reaction is very stereotypical 'liberal', aka 'thinks too much'. I do agree with you in that people do have biases, but there are several levels to this, perhaps. The biases you speak of are surface level ones, but 'gut' things are at a deeper level, at least how I'd define things.
I'd say there is a learning curve associated with 'gut' instincts. If your parents were good ones, you'd have acquired such knowledge earlier than I ever did, which to say was much later than ideal... But once you have dealt with enough assholes and full blown psychopaths, your 'gut' is better at picking up the subtle clues.
Then you can start seeing thru the surface impressions easier - I'd say the people you speak of just hadn't had enough adversity in their life yet - and from a BS New Age point of view, that's what allowed this guy to install himself in their lives, to provide them with some life lesson they needed to go through. I'm certainly not blaming the victim - it's just that if they don't take away a useful life lesson then they're missing out on extracting some value from the experience.
I empathize with the people in the article immensely. I'd just say they were too trusting, too 'liberal' (in all the associated stereotypes) and their 'gut' was dumb/inexperienced. The psychopaths/Machiavellians I've had to deal with were not involved in my life as much as a co-tenant would be, but they were close enough. And I consciously picked up little clues to their essential nature over time, but kept not integrating them into a larger more comprehensive picture till it all became a crisis. It is acting on those clues fast enough that is key, and that requires learning through experience.
tldr; there are book smarts and there are street smarts. Both have utility and to rely heavily on one and discount the other is unwise. Street smarts involve training your gut to deal with the jackasses and worse you will encounter in life.
One rule of thumb that's served me well: the sooner someone brings negativity and hard luck stories into your interactions, the more negativity they'll bring into your life.
I think it is psychos strategy to find people with empathy for targeting or finding out other psychos. You just talk about bad stuff that happened to you and observe reactions. Reasonable people will be put off and those vulnerable will show how they care.
So I am not dating anyone who is in 'bad luck', if you are in bad luck you should not be looking for new friends, lovers. You should be working on making it better. Question would be also where are your current friends? Having something to hide?
I was just reading "Man and His Symbols" by Carl Jung who argued for somewhat of the same attitude in his book.
What you are calling the "gut" he called the unconscious and his argument was that the unconscious was composed of primitive brain structures that evolved over millions of years for good reason and that provide valuable intuition.
It's remarkable how much the "rationalist" side of HN responding to you coincides with critics he described in his book who fail to understand the value of intuition.
I agree with your perspective in general: I think that often we underestimate the power of our intuitive reactions (particularly in the tech world, where we often embrace that platonic notion of rationality as a tool to suppress emotion and instinct rather than something working with it).
In this case, I do think it's difficult because these sorts of manipulators thrive on making a good first impression. But in general I think that we in the tech world undervalue our trained instincts.
Just the thought of being forced out of my house, or even having it invaded confrontationally by someone like this who is relentless and antagonistic, immediately gives me the gut reaction that if I take a baseball bat at night, catch him while he's sleeping, and beat him badly enough to the point where I can safely call the cops and claim I just defended myself after he tried to drag me into his room and I grabbed a bat, what's his recourse? I play a convincing victim of assault, and he's got what to counter it, a serial history of manipulation while recuperating in the hospital? I might even call the cops a few times leading up to the big night with fake domestic violence complaints just to butter it up even better in preparation for it. I can't be the only one who thinks along these lines.
People like this are intuitively manipulative and often strangely good judges of character. If you're the type of confident person who would not in a million years put up with his crap then it's very likely you would never have to, because he would seek out someone more malleable to make a victim of.
The police are really, really not that stupid. And remember, this guy is a lawyer, who spent his fighting tenant battles, has stabbed people, and shortly after this, murdered someone.
If you live, his words alone as a lawyer and a practiced manipulator would be win out over you. Much less the actual crime scene evidence.
And you just might not live, since you were going into it without the idea that this could be a fight to death, and he could legaly kill you in self defense.
No, what solves this kind of thing is the truth, relentless pieced together and recorded, gaining the ability to say no, while protecting yourself from harm.
Well, if that ever happens in your future, I'm sure your comment will be used as evidence against you in court :)
I'm not a lawyer, but I'd definitely recommend you don't "take the law into your own hands." I've seen more than enough episodes of Forensic Files to know that very intelligent people can play back an attack and put it together no matter how counterintuitive it seems.
If you start calling the cops on some bogus claims, what's to prevent him from doing the same? This is purely one person's word against the other's, so it isn't really going to work.
There are criminal solutions to these problems where you're unlikely to be implicated, but getting the police involved in your conflict a priori is certainly not the way to promote success.
If you’re committed to assault and battery with a risk of murder, you might as well just disappear him. Note that I recommend neither course or action for obvious moral and legal reasons.
Huh, as I started reading I was thinking "I've had some pretty bad roommates, I wonder if this is worse." About a quarter of the way through I realized this is way worse.
About three quarters of the way through I was filled with dread as I was pretty sure it wasn't going to end well.
I had the exact same experience. I was an inch away from not reading the end, then the stabbing happened, then the murder happened... then everyone was dead.. Insane. It escalated quickly.
It's crazy how people who were terrorized by this guy blame themselves for the fact that he turned out to be a murderer, and couldn't take the punishment. Must have been a master at gaslighting.
i think this is due to two human traits/biases, 1) seeing something wildly out of the norm leads to doubts about one's perceptual abilities immediately after the fact (in other words, did I just see that happen, I know I saw it, but that can't have been what just happened...) and unless you write down careful notes immediately you will doubt that it actually happened. 2) people want to be right because it makes them feel safer that the world they know is the world they live in, hence people will hold out hope that all the weirdness can be explained away (and sometimes it can).
Most people aren't psychopaths. The man was crazy, but he was still a person and didn't deserve to die.
You should celebrate the fact that even people who he antagonized were upset by his death. Even if they reacted irrationally, at least they reacted at all.
There’s a big difference between empathy and guilt. That people feel guilty and responsible for what happened to the man is a legacy of his manipulation, and not something to be celebrated.
Barring a real-time clearance system (as I believe most stores still accepting checks tend to use), a check is just basically an IOU with a promise that there's enough money in your banking account to cover it. Especially in a rental situation, I'm not sure that the lack of an address is a huge red flag--after all, the person is probably between addresses. But a complete blank check without even a name on it? Yeah, that's a red flag given that, even if you've just opened up a new account, today you can get personalized checks within a few days if not on the spot.
I have never seen an address on a cheque. Sounds like a really bad idea to me (privacy etc). Since when was that a thing, and what banks should I be avoiding?
In the US, printed checks don't need to be issued by banks and it's pretty much up to the person you're giving the check to whether they think it's an acceptable check or not. But, yes, to the degree checks are still used, the norm is to have an address printed on them. At least historically, a lot of stores wouldn't accept so-called blank checks without any personalization (understanding that's not quite the same thing as not having an address.)
In the US, mechanically speaking, you only really need an account number and routing number to pull money from someone else's account. (Legally, you also need their permission.) These two numbers are printed on the check.
In fact, some merchants will accept a check at point of sale, and then use those numbers to initiate an ACH electronic transfer, then void the check instead of cashing it.
Checks really are nothing more than IOU notes for the writer's bank to honor.
"So we're making a T-shirt and we do this Kickstarter campaign and we raise $590,807 (which, really, we can't thank you enough).
It turns out the money collected on Kickstarter is handled by Amazon. Great, we figure: This is the company that will sell you anything on the planet and get it you you the next day. And what we need in this case isn't even a thing, really. We just need Amazon's bank to send money electronically to a checking account at Chase bank. It's just information traveling over wires. How long could it take: A minute? An hour?
It took five days.
On today's show: Why the invisible pipes that move money around America are so slow. (And why the ones in England are so much faster.)"
Checks almost certainly fall into the category of US systems that we'd never design today but which work well enough for most people most of the time that there seems to be no great urgency to roll out a better replacement system. Obviously options exist even today but "writing a check" is still the norm for a lot of people in a lot of circumstances.
Holy cow! About yet more things. I think the last time I bought anything at a shop with a cheque was 1997. I think almost all shops around here (UK) stopped accepting them a long time ago.
It's pretty uncommon in the US to pay at a store with a check. I certainly haven't done it in years and it's probably been a long time since I've seen anyone else do it. Larger retail chains tend to use some sort of electronic check verification system but they don't make it easy to pay by check (if they allow it at all) and it's pretty rare these days.
However, it's still the norm to pay service people who come to your house or individuals who you owe money to for something by handwritten check.
Imagine being his brother. Yikes. I can't even imagine what it must have been like to feel a sense of familial duty toward such a person. Those tenants were entrapped for sure, but I get the feeling none of them were as trapped as his brother was.
I housed a guy temporarily who was eerily similar to this. Reading this article rings too many bells. Very good looking. Mysterious past, including pretending to have a law degree (he had taken a bunch of law classes and rambled as if he were an expert). He was being chased by the Columbians and the Jews with a truly absurd story behind it. Used encrypted phone apps. Stalking his ex girlfriend at an expensive nightclub once a week. I could go on. Things got a little old after awhile but we had quite a few fun adventures together and he wasn't (at least then) violent. I would be highly unsurprised if he eventually turns violent when he gets older and he questions his own delusions of grandeur.
Moral of the story: be very careful of who you let into your home and personal life. It sounds easy until you find out the hard way for yourself. Trust your instinct if it's good, if not, always make sure close friends and family are aware of any strangers you're bringing into your life, even if they seem innocuous at first.
"... they handed him the Rubbermaid bins and Abigail. But Bachman was enraged when they declined to give back Zachary — they had sent him to live with a woman in the suburbs, and the judge had permitted her to keep him. "
God, that hurt. I actually do feel sorry for this man.
Actually it does revolve around a guy who essentially hacked the laws around tenancy through extreme cleverness, and social engineered his way through a very peculiar life. This story is really wild and it looks like you and many others didn't actually read it before commenting. It's one of the best longform pieces that I've read in a while.
Actually I read the whole thing - it was written really well. But it's far from extremely clever what he did. Anyone who's studied tenancy law for more than a few days could do the same. The only difference he had was being sociopathic enough to do so - a point which the article makes in the end when he turns out to be a murderer.
Furthermore, none of the above are in any way related to engineering or hackernews, and it's completely off topic for this site.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
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Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
This is one of those extreme pieces that illustrate a libertarian trope about property rights.
"Due to some crazy librul laws about renting apartments this psycho stabbed me and ate my cat..."
Landlord laws are there to protect people from property owners that are often unfair and discriminatory. It is the VAST-99.999%-almost-always-few-exceptions-case that landlords are unfair to tenants rather than psycho's like this or other scenarios.
Also, usually the tenancy laws are much less strict when the landlord is sharing the dwelling with the tenant. There is pretty much zero chance that they wouldn't have been able to evict him quickly if they had good legal representation. This is more of an example of how the legal system is unfair to people without good legal representation than it is of how tenancy laws are unfair.
"Bachman enrolled at Tulane University in the fall of 1975, but his time there was rocky and brief, ruptured by a horrific incident in January at the Sigma Chi house, just off campus. Although Bachman was not a member of the frat, he told Friedman he’d been hanging around the house with a friend from Elkins Park, a boy a year older named Ken Gutzeit. Suddenly, a man had appeared with a knife and slashed Gutzeit’s throat. “The word Jamison used was beheaded,” Friedman told me. According to news reports, Gutzeit was killed by a 25-year-old student librarian named Randell Vidrine. The two were said to have been feuding since the previous fall, after Vidrine called campus police on Gutzeit for eating a cheese sandwich among the stacks. (“I know it sounds incredible, but from what we understand they never argued about anything else,” a police spokesperson told a reporter at the time. “It was always about the sandwich.”) Gutzeit stumbled onto the frat-house steps and bled to death, surrounded by Bachman and some two dozen other witnesses. (A grand jury declined to indict Vidrine.)"
I looked into it...
The Times Shreveport, Louisiana 31 Jan 1976
https://goo.gl/E7za2q