I was about to get out my pitchfork but then I discovered that this is not used for marketing false authenticity. It is actually used in a service that attempts to help people lower their property tax rates. Due to the peculiar aspects of how this works in Texas, a "handwritten" note can improve the chances of a reduction.
I received a letter from an attorney telling me I could lower my property tax. I expressed interest and he sent me a 5 page form to fill out.
I looked up online that it was a 1 page form to dispute my taxes myself. Filled it out, was in the room for 5 minutes and my taxes went down almost $2,000 per year.
Yeah you can definitely do it yourself! Usually they give homeowners "courtesy cuts" for showing up. Or sometimes they do stonewall them.
Either way, many of our clients prefer to have us do it since we do that all day, every day, every year.
A lot of people view it as found money. Sure they could take an afternoon to pull comps, go to the district, wait for the appointment, and then haggle with an appraiser for a small cut, or... they could just send us! Each person values their time differently.
To quote Big Tom Callahan: Of course, I can get a hell of a good look at a T-Bone steak by sticking my head up a bull's ass, but I'd rather take the butcher's word for it.
I actually value my time at a very high hourly rate. The point I was making is that this attorney’s marketing worked… but his process was terrible. It was more work for me to have the attorney do it than doing it myself.
Opinion revised: I'm looking forward to the day when a "handwritten" letter causes your aging mother to forward your inheritance to a scammer. Stop doing things you know are wrong to make a quick buck.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments? It's not what this site is for, you've done it repeatedly lately, and when accounts do that we eventually ban them. We have to, because it destroys the intended purpose of the site.
(I'm not defending whatever it is that you're flaming - I haven't absorbed any of the details, and they're irrelevant to the moderation point here.)
If the US was nuked into oblivion the only things remaining would be cockroaches and intellectual property attorneys. I don't know why I repeated myself just there.
Tesla and Spacex are not perfect corollaries but they have shown that it is possible to produce things in the US at a lower cost so long as some level of quality is an important aspect of the product. It requires a level of competence that these thin marketing shells of companies like Nike etc cannot achieve though. The underlying problem is that they have lost any know how about how shoes are made, their only remaining competency is how to push slop down the marketing chute.
I think an overlooked part of teslas very high valuation is that it seems inevitable that legacy, stagnant and mostly incompetent companies like Ford and GM will fold (and would have long since if they didn't keep getting propped up by the feds).
It’s one thing to argue that an AI terminator WW3 scenario is unlikely or implausible. It’s just disingenious to claim those three things have nothing to do with each other.
Terminator is a movie about how AI was given too much control over military resources and started WW3 in order to wipe out as much as possible of humanity in one go. This story is about the integration of AI into the military, in a way designed to kill humans.
Well, WWII has been over for a while now and if those who are dissatisfied with the outcome continue to be on the increase, there will eventually be enough of them who see no alternative to WW3 and become quite enthusiastic for such an event no matter how destructive.
There could already be critical mass among the dissatisfied they just don't have the resources to get the whole world involved.
That's exactly what Gatling thought of machine guns. They were supposed to automate the military jobs which was supposed to limit casualties and also make humanity reconsider going to war.
I only have this quote from Gatling himself: "It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished."
I'm am at a loss that otherwise smart people didn't see this coming. The employer/employee relationship is ALWAYS adversarial. An employer is never ever ever going to be watching out for your interests as an employee and always going to be seeking the maximum means of exploiting you, act accordingly. This isn't a new thing. It's not much consolation but mailchimp folks still made out way better than wework folks.
Adam Neuman is every bit the fraudster Elizbeth Holmes is, he just wasn't in a regulated industry. He repeatedly fabricated fake financials and fradulent books to trick investors. His victims (private equity) mostly realized it was a scam and played a huge game of ponzi scheme until, for reasons that seem particularly murky, softbank made them all whole. No one had any illusions once Neuman starting cashing out his own positions in 2015.
wework 2.0 . 200x+ valuation to earnings. Spend 400 million to get 1 billion in revenue, not the worst that has been seen. "$1 billion annualized revenue run-rate". We said it that way cause putting it in GAAP terms would make people realize the emperor has no clothes.
