#Real Estate Jobs

[onlinerealestateinvesting]

Careers in Real Estate

Real estate offers a lucrative career with flexibility, high-income potential, autonomy, the opportunity to help people, and earning status in the community.

[otaku553]

Ok so I have been stewing this crossover au in my brain nonstop for the past few days and. I am nothing if not committed to the bit, so. Volume cover redraws :)

Here are the originals:

If you want to read more about my one piece spy x family crossover, keep reading!

So the idea is simple! Crossover reincarnation au where ASL is reborn in Spy x Family. They’re each born separately and none of them are born with the same names as their previous lives, and with no way of finding each other, they each find their own thing to do in the world.

Sabo, too used to the dangers of being a spy, eventually finds a cause to devote himself to again, in preventing war from engulfing the country he was reborn in. Ace, drawn to fire as he was in his previous life, used arson as a means to rob rich people for sustenance and survival, and is eventually scouted and hired by Garden as a fire specialist and assassin. And Luffy, though born in perhaps the poorest condition, grows up happily and takes whatever part time jobs he wants to do.

The thing about Sabo is that, as much as he seems like a young man of good repute and high standing within society, everyone in WISE knows that he is a massive nuisance. Nobody knew in the beginning how a child less than half the age of most of their veteran agents could have the same skills and knowledge in their profession. Sabo was— and still is— hyper competent, and by the time WISE figured out just how much of a menace to society he was, it was too late.

Ace forgot for the first few years of his new life that he wasn’t made of fire, and consequently, received multiple accidental burns. This did not deter him, however, from growing up to be a very skilled arsonist, well-practiced in every which way to start a dumpster fire or house fire. As a teenage he would use this often to draw attention as he robbed rich people blind. When he was caught, he was given an ultimatum by Garden: join them and receive payment for starting fires and causing problems under contract, or face the government and authorities for his crimes. Begrudgingly, he joined Garden, but eventually comes to appreciate that he can make substantial money in his element.

Luffy is Luffy. No telepathy or experimentation, no fancy schools, no gimmicks or secret identities. But he has still lived an extremely colorful life in this world, full of fascinating and kind individuals who have helped him grow up healthy and relatively happy. He goes where he is free, and he takes whatever part time jobs he wants in order to make the minimum he needs to survive.

Ace and Sabo find each other first, in their late teens, and neither of them realize that the other remembers their previous life, but both refuse to separate. (Sabo thinks Ace doesn’t remember, because Ace didn’t recognize him. Ace never saw Sabo grow up past 10, however, so he doesn’t recognize older Sabo immediately. By the time he does realize who exactly Sabo is, Sabo has backtracked and pretends to know Ace from a dream, or from somewhere else.)

Sabo’s attachment to Ace, predictably, causes problems between Sabo and WISE, but by then, Sabo is indispensable to the organization, and they make an exception for Sabo to be able to remain with Ace, so long as Ace never finds out what Sabo’s actual job is. Ace, on the other hand, hides his job because he doesn’t want his brother, who he has just found and who does not know Ace well enough yet, to know that he makes a living from killing people.

And they find Luffy sometime afterwards, prior to the beginning of the Spy x Family canon. Luffy figures out, not long after moving in with his brothers, both of his brothers’ secret occupations and the fact that both of them remember their past memories. He thinks it is common knowledge, however, and so he never brings it up.

[the-witchhunter]

DP x DC: Homme Fatale

Noun. homme fatal (plural hommes fatals) An ultimately seductive and dangerous man; a womanizer.

On a bit of a Film Noir kick right now, so blame that

Imagine, if you will:

Danny, a private eye in Gotham, ever the hard boiled detective, sitting in his dark office, drinking coffee you could use to tar a roof. The office isn't in a good neighborhood but rent still ain't cheap. He's fixing to get a new case on his desk soon

Enter one Timothy Drake-Wayne, CEO of Wayne Enterprizes. He walked in shirt unbuttoned dangerously low in a suit sharp enough to cut yourself on and bags under his eyes to large to be counted as carry on. Mr. Drake has a job for him, one he wants to keep quite, and one important enough that he's willing to add a couple zeros to Danny's usual rate. This job is a dream come true... almost too good to be true...

or

Tim Drake aka Red Robin(yummm) needs plausible deniability on a case tied to his civilian identity and so hires a PI and lays down a trail of clues for him. All the while playing up the Noir tropes to flirt with the cute detective.

why doesn't he just take care of it as Red Robin? Shhhhh... the detective is cute and he's having too much fun playing the homme fatale

Bonus: Immediately after wrapping up Tim's case Kon walks into Danny's office dolled up in a vintage dress, period appropriate makeup done, all to play the part of the Femme Fatale and do the exact same thing Tim did. Does he know Tim literally just did that? Maybe, maybe not

[one-time-i-dreamt]

My father, a real estate agent, and his clients were discussing a purchase in our living room. The clients grew increasingly dissatisfied with the negotiation, turned into harpies and flew away, breaking through our roof.

[ellora-borealis]

Happy Pride Month to Paul (who's a real estate novelist who never had time for a wife) and Davy (who's still in the Navy and probably will be for life)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kinkslump Linkdump

This is my dozenth linkdump! The world comes at you fast, and even though I'm writing 4-5 essays a week for this newsletter, many's the week that ends with more stray links than will fit in that format. Here's the previous ones:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I managed to turn out five posts last week, despite being on tour with my latest novel, The Lost Cause, a hopeful solarpunk novel endorsed by Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. The tour went great – the book's now a national bestseller on the USA Today list! Here's an essay I wrote explaining the structure of the feeling that the book is meant to convey:

https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/14/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

This is a climate emergency novel full of rising seas, terrible storms, wildfires and zoonotic plagues, and yet – it is a hopeful novel. What makes it hopeful? It depicts a future in which we are treating these phenomena with the gravitas and urgency they warrant, with our whole society's focus shifting to moving coastal cities inland, weatherizing and solarizing our housing, and creating permanent housing for internal refugees.

While it would be infinitely preferable to live in a world where none of that is necessary, that's not the world we have. This is an sf novel, not a fantasy novel, so all the climate harms we've locked in through decades of expensively procured inaction are present. But the difference between disaster and catastrophe is how and whether we address those harms. Sure, this is a world where superstorms wipe away whole cities and Miami is a drowned mangrove swamp, but it's also a world in which oil executives do not chair UN climate summits or complain that oil companies are being "unjustly vilified":

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/27/opec-says-oil-industry-unjustly-vilified-ahead-of-climate-talks-.html

I write a lot, and it's not just this newsletter. Writing transports me from my anxieties and aches. That's how I came to write nine books during lockdown ("when life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla"). Lost Cause was one of three books I published in 2023.

I'm going to greet 2024 with another novel, The Bezzle, a sequel to 2023's Red Team Blues, about the hard-charging, high-tech forensic accountant Marty Hench:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

The Bezzle is a story about the shitty technology adoption curve – the way that the worst technologies we have are first rolled out on the people least able to complain about them. After these bad technologies have their sharp edges sanded down on the bodies of prisoners, refugees and kids, they move up to blue collar workers and discount store shoppers, and so on, until we're all living under their thumb.

In The Bezzle, a dear friend of Marty finds himself serving a long sentence in a privatized California prison that flips from one private equity fund to the next, each with even worse, more extractive ways to use technology to bleed prisoners and their families dry. You can read the opening scenes in a just-published excerpt on Tor Books's site:

https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/20/excerpt-reveal-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow/

The period immediately before a book's publication is always a tense one, as the first reviews trickle in. Library Journal's Marlene Harris is the first out of the gate, with a spectacular review:

https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-bezzle-1802415

Marty’s reminiscences range from obscure financial machinations to heaping helpings of social commentary but always move the underlying thriller story forward in a backwards heist tale that delivers a righteously satisfying ending to the surprise of both the reader and the villain. This novel, like his previous outing, rides on Marty’s voice. He has a jaundiced view of everything, but he tells it with such style and verve that readers are caught up and ride along on the surface until the shark beneath the water jumps out and bites the villain where it hurts.

I'm headed into Skyboat Media's studios on Monday with @wilwheaton to record the audiobook for this one, directed as ever by the amazing Gabrielle de Cuir. Keep your eyes peeled for a presale crowdfunder in January!

I am often asked how I decide when to present an idea through fiction and when to do so with nonfiction. The answer is a complicated one, and I got into it in some detail on Nature's Working Scientist podcast, in discussion with Paul Shrivastava:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03394-8

When it comes to politics, fiction and nonfiction are intensely complementary. Nonfiction can convey the data about a social phenomenon, but fiction can convey the meaning of the data. It's one thing to see a chart about inequality, and another to inhabit it through fiction. Marty Hench's narrative adventures are a way into the feeling of living in a corrupt oligarchy.

There are other ways into that feeling, of course. Take Barry Bowen's "Lifestyles of the Blessed & Famous: Preacher Homes Sold in 2023" for The Roys Report:

https://julieroys.com/lifestyles-blessed-famous-preacher-homes-sold-2023/?mc_cid=9678383b64

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then carefully staged realtor drone shots ganked from the Redfin listing for a "pastor"'s $3.5m mansion in Newport Beach is a full-on sermon about the corruption of the Hillsong megachurch:

https://www.redfin.com/CA/Newport-Beach/503-30th-St-92663/home/12363926

Narratives and photos are all well and good, but there's always room for some data. The USA's weird breed of federalism and devolved power makes for some very interesting data. Writing for The American Prospect, Paul Starr rounds up several studies evaluating the "natural experiments" created by enacting very different policies in otherwise similar states:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-12-08-life-death-cost-conservative-power/

The data is in: conservativism kills. Living in a red state shortens your life expectancy. The redder the state, the worse it is. The bluer the state, the longer you're likely to live:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-0009.12469

The exemplars here are Connecticut and Oklahoma, whose life expectancies were at par until they began to diverge in policies. Oklahoma got more conservative, Connecticut got more liberal. Today, the average Oklahoman will pop their clogs at 75.8, while a Connecticutensian can expect 80.7 years.

Different scholars have parsed out different policy outcomes. Giving Medicaid to children, for example, shows benefits for the next 50 years:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20171671

The big one, of course, is gun control. Here's the topline: "restrictive state gun policies reduce overall gun deaths." Water also wet:

https://journals.lww.com/epidem/fulltext/2023/11000/the_era_of_progress_on_gun_mortality__state_gun.3.aspx

Fact-free spiritual beliefs like "an armed society is a polite society" are key to conservative policymaking. Pesky progressives who confuse the issue with relevant facts are playing dirty, pointing out reality's unfair leftist bias.

But after 40 years of neoliberal deference to corporate power, the worm is turning. Somehow, a world on fire, filled with megapastors in megamansions who brief for lethal policies, has finally inspired a global vibe-shift (and not a moment too soon!). One of the most tangible expressions of that shift is the revival of antitrust, which has been in a coma since the Reagan administration.

All over the world – the EU, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and the USA – there are new competition enforcers challenging corporate power in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago. If I'd written an enforcer like FTC chair Lina Khan in 2010, critics would have slammed me for wish-fulfillment too unrealistic for science fiction.

But today, Khan is taking big swings at corporate power, fighting against a calcified edifice of decades of bad, pro-monopoly precedent. The pro-monopoly press hate her, which is why the WSJ keeps publishing sweaty op-eds insisting that she is wasting her time and that monopolies are good, actually:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

But she is still out there, fighting for all of us. After a pro-monopoly judge stymied the FTC's bid to block the rotten Microsoft/Activision merger, Khan re-filed, appealing the decision:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/us-ftc-tries-again-stop-microsofts-already-closed-deal-activision-2023-12-06/

Critics insist that she's on a foolish errand, but Khan is tackling the most promising face of a sheer cliff, and the plainly anticompetitive merger between one of the world's largest console makers (a convicted monopolist!) with one of the world's largest games publishers is the right place to start. If she can get her piton into one of the hairline cracks in that face, her arduous climb gains a solid anchor for the next stage of her assent.

Of course, Khan's highest-profile action is her case against Amazon, the omnipresent, dystopian poster-child for enshittification, a platform we can't avoid, but which is so haphazardly policed that the bestselling bitter lemon energy drink you order might be bottled piss harvested from its immiserated drivers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

In a world of murderous, community-destroying monopolies, Amazon stands out for the sheer number of ways it makes the world worse. Amazon maims its warehouse workers and kills its drivers with impossible quotas. It poisons Black and brown neighborhoods with truck exhaust from its giant depots. It destroys small businesses that sell on its platform. It was part of the studio cabal scheming to destroy actors and writers' livelihoods with unfair contracts and AI. Its audiobook monopoly stole at least $100m from independent authors. It makes goods and services more expensive at every retailer (not just Amazon), and price-gouges on its own storefront:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Keeping that scam going requires a lot of skullduggery. A new set of leaked internal Amazon documents shed some light on how that inedible sausage gets made:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxjbm9/amazon-brags-it-cultivated-california-mayor-with-donations-in-leaked-policy-document

Amazon's "Community Engagement Plan 2024" brags about buying off small-town mayors and astroturf groups in its bid to resist regulations that would limit warehouse delivery van emissions in communities of color (Amazon calls this "philanthropic work"). Coincidentally, that "philanthropy" targeted Perris, a town where residents voted for a warehouse tax to repair the roads that had been trashed by fleets of Amazon vans.

But the real focus of Amazon's "Community Engagement" is California's AB1000, a bill that will limit the construction of supersized, 100k+ sqft warehouses near daycare centers, schools or rec centers. Secondarily, Amazon is hoping to get California to make it easier to advertise alcohol around kids, to "unlock" California's liquor market.

This kind of shameless, mustache-twirling villainry can only go on so long before it meets resistance. One of the longest-running, hardest fought struggles against corporate malfeasance is the farmers' right ro repair fight against John Deere. Deere boobytraps its tractors so that after a farmer repairs a Deere tractor, they have to wait for days, and pay hundreds of dollars, for a Deere technician to come out to the farm and type an unlock code into the tractor's console:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

Despite multiple state right-to-repair initiatives and a pending rulemaking from the FTC, Deere is still fucking around. Now, they've found out. US District Court Judge Iain Johnson just handed Deere a scathing, 89-page memo rejecting the company's bid to kill a class action suit brought by its customers:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/deere-must-face-us-farmers-right-to-repair-lawsuits-judge-rules-2023-11-27/?ref=404media.co

The memo hearkens back to company founder John Deere, "an innovative farmer and blacksmith who—with his own hands—fundamentally changed the agricultural industry":

https://www.404media.co/a-massive-repair-lawsuit-against-john-deere-clears-a-major-hurdle/

Judge Johnson tells Deere's lawyers that the real John Deere "would be deeply disappointed in his namesake corporation," and calls out their lying. You love to see it.

This kind of thing is happening all over the world as policymakers, regulators and lawmakers take aim at corporate power. The Australian government just announced that it would force Apple to open up iOS to alternative browser engines:

https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/new-digital-competition-laws-for-australia/

This is obscure and technical, but that's why it's so exciting: rather than mumbling broad platitudes about competition and user choice, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's regulation targets a critical leverage point where a small change will deliver huge benefits:

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/consumers-and-small-businesses-to-benefit-from-proposed-new-regulation-of-digital-platforms

While there are many browsers in Apple's App Store, they're all just reskinned versions of Safari, all running on the same core engine, Webkit. Webkit is ancient, undermaintained and feature-poor. Crucially, Webkit does not implement the parts of the HTML5 standard needed for WebApps, which would allow app developers a safe channel to offer apps that don't go through Apple's App Store monopoly chokepoint:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/13/kitbashed/#app-store-tax

Now, there's a big jump between announcing this kind of regulation and enacting it. As Mark Nottingham points out, Australia's had an "in principle" commitment to enact a privacy regulation for two successive governments, with no actual regulation in sight:

https://techpolicy.social/@mnot/111546662237364754

So we can't take these announcements as a sign to declare victory and stand down. The policymakers who announce these proposals deserve our accolades for the announcement and they require our constant vigilance until they make good on their promises.

That's the case in Ireland, where the Coimisiún na Meán has just published a fantastic regulatory proposal for recommendation systems, requiring recommenders to be turned off by default and that recommendations based on "political views, sexuality, religion, ethnicity or health" have to be switched off by default:

https://www.cnam.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Draft_Online_Safety_Code_Consultation_Document_Final.pdf

It's especially significant that this is coming out of Ireland, a corporate crime haven that has successfully lured the world's tech giants into flying its flag of convenience, with the guarantee of tax evasion and lax regulation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

This rule won't enforce itself. It'll require constant vigilance and pressure. There's plenty of ways to do that on a part-time, voluntary basis, but if this kind of thing enflames you enough to make a career out of it, here's a tenure-track job for an infosec professor at Citizen Lab, fearless slayers of high-tech corporate ogres:

https://jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-Assistant-Professor-Information-Security-ON/576463017/

That's all for this week's linkdump. It's time for me to go hole up in my office and wrap presents. When I do, I'll be tuning into the latest Merry Mixmas MP3 of Christmas mashups from DJ Riko:

http://www.djriko.com/dls/DJ%20Riko%20-%20Merry%20Mixmas%202023.mp3

Riko's Christmas mashups have been part of my holidays for more than two decades now. He's been making them for 22 years! That's a lot of great holiday mashups:

https://www.djriko.com/mixmases.htm

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/09/gallimaufry/#marty-hench-rides-again

[girljeremystrong]

i got a job interview tomorrow morning for an office job!!! want this so bad!!!!!!!

[artsandstoriesandstuff]

Boris!

The, um, other guy. (On the left.)

[highfunctioningfleshrule63]

glad to know hes a fellow cranberry juice + bottom shelf cheap vodka drinker

[irenespring]

Time for one of my favorite TV traditions, "watch the new episodes of Selling Sunset and argue with the screen like the people can hear me."

[s735]

7/20/23

I got around to reading Dragon Ball and DBZ for the first time recently. Raditz, Nappa and Vegeta are my faves. I wish we saw more of them before they died.

[meimi-haneoka]

Every time I see the English translation of a certain Clear Card panel with Touyuki appearing on my TL I want to pull my hair because that line was mistranslated so, so badly and people are making speculations and going nuts about it in the tags and it's all based on something that doesn't exists because that's not what Touya says, not at all. Like, not even remotely. It's also so out of character for him to say something like that, I don't know how his fans don't realize something is off in that line.

One day I will compile those translation mistakes in one giant google sheet or something, I need to turn this into a mission because it's honestly so irritating to see how riddled with mistakes this localization is, sometimes to the point of messing with important parts of the plot. I don't see them releasing a decently translated edition in the near future, so it's all I can do to give back some respect to the story. Clamp are aware of the translation mistakes and how they change the perception of the story for the foreign readers, just as they are aware of the posts I've made about them over the years (they talked about this in a Space long time ago, and I still cherish that mention in my heart with pride). But there was basically nothing they could do at the time, if not suggesting the English readers to check the posts mentioning the translation differences. That's great and all, I'm glad I have their blessing but this is also not really how ideally one should read a story. My posts are long and filled with personal comments and maybe that would deter many people from checking out what a certain line actually says, so I need to find a quicker and easier way. Also, I started to do those only from chapter 40 onwards (and in the beginning I was way overzealous, I would need to revise) and this panel I'm mentioning above is part of the butchery they did in the first volumes, which weren't covered by my posts yet.

[duckapus]

AU where Meggy gets turned into a vampire and Mario gets turned into a werewolf

They were bit in completely separate incidents and are keeping it secret from everyone, including each other and the rest of the Crew.

Luigi's the only one who knows that Mario is a werewolf because he was there the night Mario got bit (well, nearly mauled to death is more accurate).

Meggy initially doesn't have anyone who knows about her being a vampire, at least until Whimpu happens to stumble across her while she's feeding.

Mario can shift voluntarily into either a very-big-but-seemingly-normal wolf form, himself with wolf features, or a big scary wolf-man form, but it takes him a while to properly figure out how both because he and Luigi have to figure it out with no help and because he's an idiot.

He's also got an uncontrollable fuckoff-Massive wolf form with a mind of its own that he turns into when there's a full moon.

He's got some wolf mannerisms now, obviously

While Meggy does have the classic vampire weaknesses, they're thankfully the manageable versions (so the sun does hurt her but sunscreen deals with it, mirrors and cameras only don't work if they have silver, needs to drink blood but can still eat normal food no problem (unless it as garlic obviously), etc.) since for plot reasons I need her to actually be able to keep it a secret.

She can shapeshift into a variety of animals, not just bats, and one form in particular makes all the shit she has to deal with now almost worth it: Vampire Squids are a thing that exists, which wouldn't matter for most vampires with how situational it would be (due to vampire squids specifically being deep sea squids) but in her case it means she gets to have her Swim Form again (though modified a bit since vampire squids have webbed tentacles with tooth-like spikes on the underside)

Also I know that vampire squids are actually octopi but let me have this

The vampire and werewolf that turned them are still at-large and causing trouble in the Mushroom Kingdom (including making more vampires and werewolves, many of which are less inclined than Meggy and Mario to not follow their new darker impulses), bringing all manner of monster hunters out of the woodwork to deal with the problem (some, like the Belmont Clan, are more competent and altruistic than others, like the Guards (because of course those two would want to get involved in the latest violent trend)), which is a large part of why the two of them are keeping themselves a secret

Another big part is of course the fact that Anti-Shroomy Exists

It also turns out that Bob was a big-name monster hunter a few hundred years ago, and shockingly he's easily the most competent of all the hunters in town, so the Bros, Meggy and Whimpu are understandably extremely wary of him right now

and as if the situation wasn't bad enough, Demon Peach has somehow managed to crawl her way out of the Creep Pit and is prowling the Kingdom (surprisingly stealthily for something of her size and disposition, I might add)

more details and (hopefully) some pictures to come in later posts

[cupiidzbow]

ummm

i was trying to think of our designs for new leaf and i scribbled down his outfit from this game and I think….. i hauve covi

[rowenabean]

It is becoming abundantly clear that I am in fact finding the process of selling my house stressful

[grahamkennedy]

I just made two (2) big boy phone calls today and I'm about to make a third