Intelligence and Ignorance.
I figured out a way to string a few topics together. (Well, not really. Because one happened just a few hours ago.)
My friend who shanghaied me into this accounting gig called to chat. These calls are exhausting but he's a good friend and the only person who calls me. Anyhow, he's pretty smart. Could be as smart as me. Beat me at chess aaround half the time when we were college roommates. Knows things about software and the details of accounting processes that are so complex they only start to make my head hurt (because I'm only starting to understand them enough to get frustrated and confused). Well today I mentioned "BRRRR." It's a pretty basic real estate investing concept: Buy, Renovate, Rent Refinance, Repeat. Renovating a house (if you do it right) makes it more valuable. Having a renter in it makes it less risky. So lenders will give you more money than they did when you bought the place. Plus you have the cash flow from the tenant paying the mortgage. You use the money from the refinance to buy your next rental. It's a bit of a house of cards, but if you're smart and disciplined and lucky, you can build an empire and get rich in under a decade with relatively little money of your own.
Well this concept was amazing to my friend. I mean, this was one of those moments where--and I'm not that perceptive of people--I could hear the lightbulb going on at the other end of the line. It's funny. Because I'm miserable, trying to understand the things that are very basic for him, while something so obvious to me was so revolutionary to him.
Which segues me into the dichotomy of doing brainy consulting part of the week and working at a factory another part of the week. I'll get one off-topic thing out of the way first: I can't count the number of times someone working next to me has confided to me an obscene amount a friend is making every week. I smile and nod and bite my tongue because I'm making 20% more than that part time working for my friend. There really are 2 (or more) worlds.
But the point I was going for--along the lines of intelligence and ignorance (and ignorance has such a needlessly negative connotation. I'm very VERY smart. But I'm very VERY ignorant on a lot of subjects) is dealing with people who aren't particularly intelligent AND are ignorant. Other day I had a very nice conversation with a guy about Keno. He liked it. And I confessed I didn't understand it and that it seemed like a bad idea. He explained the basics of it enough for me to grasp it. After a few more questions I smiled and nodded. Today I looked up "Keno odds". Around 1 in 4. That's the best you can do playing Keno. If you play as smart as you can, you're going to lose 75% of the time you play. I'm too drunk to parse math right now, but that may or may not be worse odds than playing slot machines. And 1 in 4 is the BEST you can do. If you pick more numbers it actually REDUCES your odds of winning. Meanwhile the conversation flowed to pull-tabs and scratch-offs where even these guys realized they might as well just light dollar bills on fire and throw them on the floor--but they still took a chunk of their tax refund to play them.
So. Show of hands. How many stories have you heard of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and Elon Musk hitting it big on Keno or the Pick 6? None? I wonder why that is. I mean, they've got plenty of money to...invest..in gambling. Anyhow, I'm too tired to smoothly lead this back to where I'm going. The point is...among the points, is that I'd have only pissed these guys off if I explained that they were paying a voluntary tax. And that wealth redistribution doesn't work because the wealthy people are that way because they know how to make money. And the poor people are poor because they lose their money. And you can no more convince a Bingo fanatic that they're burning money than you can get Bill Gates to sit down with a blotter and a bunch of cards.
Meanwhile, a nice girl that I'd very much like to have sex with except for her engagement ring told me all about buying her house and how much over the asking price she paid to get it. And to be fair, you might have to pay a lot over the list price to get a house--especially if it's already been "flipped." But I know people (myself included) who've paid around 60-70% of the asking price and got the house so I felt a little bad. The good news is, I've almost certainly paid too much for houses. And even so I've never lost money on real estate. So she'll probably be fine. And she's happy with the deal she got. Mostly. If the conversation hadn't moved too fast I could've told her about my roof and plumbing and she would've felt better about her electrical. But that's another story.