[spdrun]

(1) Don’t hire a parasite … I mean property manager
(2) Get to know some tradesmen (electrician, plumber, handyman) that you can call if your tenant has problems
(3) Vet tenants yourself. You need the kind of job where you can take a week or two every few years to check on the places.
(4) Tenant quality — grad students and self-employed are best. The former are likely to stay for a defined term and tend to be less rowdy than undergrads. The latter have every incentive to stay since they might have problems with other landlords being small-minded about non-W2 work.
(5) After buying the place, fix everything that might break in the next year or two. Replace any dodgy appliances, water valves, etc and so forth.

[spdrun]

For what it was worth — my friend was renting a one-bedroom in Carlsbad for $800 in mid-2009. Nice complex with pool, etc, though the window faced the railroad tracks and we’d get woken up by train horns at night.

[spdrun]

I don’t know about others, but as a landlord, I don’t like to rent to self employed people whose income i cannot easily verify.

I do. If their references/credit check out, they’re more likely to stay longer and pay on time, since they’ve probably had experience with narrow-minded a$$hat thinking as above. i.e. harder for them to find other options makes them a good tenant.

Grad (especially med) students and self-employed tend to make the best tenants.

Also, I like the idea of giving someone who’s operating outside the “system” where good, boring drones are “supposed” to operate a leg up. It’s my small version of a “F Yourself With a Cossack Dagger” to corepirate Dumbericantia.

[spdrun]

Fortunately, it has NOT worked very well so far. The last read on the homeownership rate in the US was 62.9%, lowest in 50 years.

Hope this continues — a lot of people aren’t cut out to own homes.

[spdrun]

BLM doesn’t kill cops. Nutjobs that are angry at cops, justifiably or not, do.

If we have fewer things that make people pissed off at cops like…
* Rapacious civil forfeiture
* Warrantless searches/internal checkpoints
* Jailing someone based on a flawed test of a crumb of a white substance found on a vehicle floor
* Breaking the neck of an unarmed Indian man who was walking around his son’s neighborhood looking at houses
* Shooting at unarmed people
* Abuse and punishment of suspects not yet convicted of a crime. “Rough rides” didn’t only happen to Freddie Gray.
* Random harassment of people not suspected of a crime (aka stop and frisk).

… then maybe fewer people will be angry enough at cops to want to shoot at them. If anything, opening a dialogue about the proper behavior and role of law enforcement is likely to SAVE police lives down the line.

Kudos to Mr. President Obama for supporting BLM and continuing the dialog.

As far as cooperation with cops, don’t you think there should be limits? If a cop reaches up your wife’s skirt to search her nether regions for contraband, would you be OK with that, or would you want to punch the sonofabitch’s teeth down his throat?

Yes, incidents of that type have actually happened…
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/13/in-texas-police-stick-hand-up-womans-vagina-to-search-for-marijuana/

As far as street protests, they have their place. They draw public attention to a problem that they might not be aware of, sitting at home watching TV in their nice, safe, suburb.

And speaking as someone whose children will likely be biracial, I don’t want them subject to more scrutiny and abuse from police because of how they look versus because of how they act!

[spdrun]

On that note, police recruits are down 90% in some areas, and as things get worse, no doubt there will be more and more early retirements and fewer applicants, so it will be interesting to see how society functions, should we ever get to the point where those in need call and no one answers.

The question is, who are the recruits who are not applying? If people who are considering the job for the power are being weeded out, good riddance. If decent people are being discouraged and power-hungry asshats are still applying, then that’s unfortunate.

Anyway, the goal should be to weed out the power-hungry asshats via psych testing and/or training before they step foot on the street in a uniform.

[spdrun]

^^^

This.

[spdrun]

Chicago seems to use a different (expensive) system that more closely approximates lab tests, not the $2 throwaway test kids. Illinois also has a truly fucked up legal system if they can jail people for 30 days without a preliminary hearing over a crumb of a mystery substance found in their general vicinity.

And as you said, there are other issues:
(1) Why are people being coerced into giving permission to have their cars searched when their initial violation has nothing to do with drugs. Ticket them, and unless something is in plain sight, send them on their merry way.
(2) Tiny bits of residue could have come from anywhere and anyone between the time the stop happened, and the time the car was last cleaned. There’s no proof of intent, and any such law that doesn’t require intent is a bad law.
(3) As long as someone is not driving while high, who cares what drugs they have in their car? I’d have no problem with a Breathalyzer-type system for drugs in active quantities in a driver’s system. Such things exist via saliva testing.

If addicts want to hurt themselves, let ’em.

If we insist on arresting people for victimless crimes, may I suggest a compromise? Hold THEIR CARS until lab tests come back. If the tests come back negative, apologize profusely and compensate the victim for the loss of use of their car, including any rental costs, costs from loss of working time, etc, incurred.

If the lab tests are not done in a timely manner, return of the car and payment of compensation should be mandatory. No long-term civil forfeiture.

If making false accusations and arrests begins to COST the injustice system, then maybe they’ll stop their abuse of the public.

[spdrun]

Tile it or just use good hardwood, not hipster reclaimed junk.

[spdrun]

The union should defend him — after all, he’s innocent till proven guilty. Everyone should get a chance at a fair trial.

This being said, if he’s guilty, I hope he gets a few decades in San Quentin.

[spdrun]

You think you can trust the government to investigate itself impartially? LOL.

There might be jerkish behavior on both sides, but guess what? Cops are paid to be professionals, and put their safety on the line to protect the public. Not shoot first or use physical force first and ask questions later.

The way things are now, if I have kids (G-d willing), they’re likely to be a shade or three darker than me. I’d hate to think they’d be at risk of violence from their own government because of the skin color they’d be born with.

When are people going to accept that others can disagree with them politically without being stupid racists (conservatives) or hypocritical narcissists (liberals)? And frankly – I agree that conservatives don’t like to be wrong. Neither do liberals. Do you know anyone, zk, who likes to be wrong? There is equal jerkish behavior on both sides of the political fence – it just bugs you more when you don’t agree with the jerk’s politics.

I don’t like the behavior that a lot of these police officers have been accused of. . But when did a virtual jury of the Internet replace a careful and thorough investigation? Police behaving badly makes great copy for the news networks, but there is a reason we pay people to conduct careful investigations before we decide to prosecute.

[spdrun]

The worst are the water valves with corrugated hoses permanently attached, from the 80s. Pure junk. If you have those, replace ASAP.

Technically, your water valve doesn’t need to be welded. It needs to be soldered. Easy enough to do with a blowtorch, some flux, and some solder, but you need to get the water co to shut off the water to the house since you can’t solder a squirting pipe.

You can also get a freezing kit that creates an ice plug in the pipe further from where you will solder.

As far as the valve in future, close and open it once every month or so. That keeps deposits from building up and jamming it open or making it leak.

[spdrun]

You mean, just ignores its own reading. It uses the remote sensor, period — just ignores the internal sensor entirely.

[spdrun]

Or just connect the thermostat to the Internet, but not to the HVAC unit, then use a different ‘stat for the actual control.

I think the remote sensors are good for certain situations, like if a thermostat is mounted in an area (kitchen or near a window) that doesn’t reflect the true temperature of the rest of the home.

It might make sense to have it in a certain place to maximize ease of access (or because the home was built that way with the wiring), but that doesn’t make putting the sensor there a good idea.

[spdrun]

You can probably add a remote temp sensor by desoldering the existing sensor from the board and connecting it remotely using relatively thick (read: low resistance) wires.

It’s likely to be just a thermistor.

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