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The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

newyorker.com

291–300 of 324 posts

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#291

These are the kinda articles I like to just read the last paragraph. So much work to paint some annoying ass story; sorry, I skipped to the end haha.

I'm still trying to find the reason this was posted and boosted, instead of some very important AI news coming out recently.

probably because we're all sick of AI news

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#292
post #162
post #161

> ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk. It's funny how much life cycles. I do kinda remember a phase where people were eating a "healthier" breakfast of some kind of fruit, and when granola became popular, and when milk fat was considered the worst thing you could do to your body. But now eggs are fine, again. Great, even.

I was immediately struck by this remark too. Were eggs particularly unfashionable in the early 1990s in the USA? Apparently so.

I have a good memory of, in the 1990s, what must have been a rehab campaign from Big Egg, slogan: "The incredible, edible EGG!"

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#293
post #256

These are the kinda articles I like to just read the last paragraph. So much work to paint some annoying ass story; sorry, I skipped to the end haha.

I thought the journey was well-written, captivating and worth the read.

Huh, maybe I should give it a go...

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#294
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Owning a home is always good no matter what the finance influencers tell you. In fact, earlier the better. Its not even the buying vs renting thing, renting is bad, you don't get to own anything at the end of the journey, and often the kind of things you have to put up with to save rent, or avoid getting homeless in case of of a job loss or other life crisis is just worth your mental health. Most of your life is spen…

No, it depends how long you stay in the house. If you stay long enough, buying is cheaper. But if you move after just a few years, you'll have mostly paid interests on your mortgage, you had closing tax, your house may even have lost value... So there are many cases it would have been cheaper to rent. How long you need to stay to make your purchase worthwhile depends where you live.

Agreed. Over a decade ago, to try to overcome my fear to make such a large purchase, I did the math and decided to bake very conservative assumptions into my decision-making. My rent then was $1800 a month, so 5 years of that is $108k. If I kept a similar mortgage payment as my rent (in reality, my payment was actually more like $1450), I realized that all I had to do was stay there 5 years while having it lose ($108k minus property taxes paid) in value and I'd break even in terms of cash flow, whereas the upside, if it stayed flat or appreciated, was that I'd have built up substantial equity.

(In the end, the gamble paid off great - the condo appreciated by about 300k in those 5 years)

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can own apartments too. I assume the logic is pretty much the same either way.

Many markets don't have many individually owned apartments. In my area, many hundreds (maybe even thousands?) of apartment units have been constructed. Practically none of them are individually owned, they're all large apartment complexes owned entirely by corporations. There are some condos and townhomes that come on the market from time to time but generally speaking if one wants apartment life you're renting.

I'm curious, what area is this? That sounds strange to me.

Some people in your boat would choose to buy an investment property in one place and rent in another in order to still get exposure to the real estate appreciation that is so common, while not having to buy a condo in a difficult area like yours. But it would probably be so much easier to just to invest in a few good residential property REITs.

Probably lower return than the best case scenario of owning a rental, but with all the costs diluted across a large portfolio (instead of 'surprise, you need a new roof!')

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#296
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> the value of the land (which doesn't really deprecate) Maybe in urban centers. But go out into the hills and you will find many towns where land prices tanked once the local resource industry moved on. It isn't just 18th century gold rush stuff. There are towns from the 80s that just emptied when the local industry moved on. https://justinmcelroy.com/2022/07/26/visiting-canadas-50-mil...

And I assume houses in these places aren't exactly holding up well as investments? EDIT: Oh, I think you were talking about deprecation? Even in the downtrodden areas, land values going down isn't technically deprecation. It's just like a bar of gold sitting in your garage: its market price might fluctuate, but that has nothing to do with deprecation.

Sorry to be nitpicky, but I think the term for the concept you're talking about is depreciate, not deprecate

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#297
post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's kind of a lost idea now, but through the 80s and 90s the absolute best places to get a story published were, in no particular order: * The New Yorker * Harper's * The Atlantic * and, believe it or not, Playboy In re: the latter, see https://ew.com/books/playboy-hugh-hefner-famous-authors/

Hugh Hefner was a surprising patron of the arts. Playboy made so much money that he poured it into funding some amazing writing (while the standard joke was “I read Playboy for the articles,” the articles were generally quite amazing) not to mention funding some significant work in printing and typographic technology (one example: the magazine used Palatino for its text and when the type on the gravure pages didn’t m…

Nowadays I think people just lump it into the same category as other mass-market brown-paper-cover mags from gas stations like Penthouse and Hustler, but Playboy really was different.

Hefner set out to create a respectable, top-tier publication -- by design -- that just happened to also include nudity. "Golden age" Playboy pictorials were pretty tame and generally tasteful, and they were in a magazine that'd have (as noted) top-tier fiction, excellent reporting, and high-profile interviews.

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#298
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many markets don't have many individually owned apartments. In my area, many hundreds (maybe even thousands?) of apartment units have been constructed. Practically none of them are individually owned, they're all large apartment complexes owned entirely by corporations. There are some condos and townhomes that come on the market from time to time but generally speaking if one wants apartment life you're renting.

I'm curious, what area is this? That sounds strange to me. Some people in your boat would choose to buy an investment property in one place and rent in another in order to still get exposure to the real estate appreciation that is so common, while not having to buy a condo in a difficult area like yours. But it would probably be so much easier to just to invest in a few good residential property REITs. Probably lower…

Richardson specifically, but honestly most of DFW. Pretty much any apartment complex built in this area in the past 20 years is corporate owned. These days even a lot of the townhouses around are corporate owned rental units.

In fact, this area (and other places in Texas) has given rise to a new kind of apartment architecture called the "Texas Doughnut", which is a 5-over-1 apartment complex wrapping a central parking garage and often other courtyards in the middle. These things are everywhere in DFW. Just take a peek on Google Maps.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/KKHx47n7qooQCjNz9

https://maps.app.goo.gl/uqwBGv3nRrTLfWvw7

https://maps.app.goo.gl/SX9wNG1441xrWwBAA

https://maps.app.goo.gl/SL49yPkoA8VqE23F6

https://maps.app.goo.gl/MEiqBnhMF8pQjGu36

But it is not just DFW. A lot of other cities in the US have similar things going on. It seems like most cities I'm in often have most new apartments I see be corporate owned units, not a lot of individual ownership.

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's sarcasm, just poorly explained. Owning a house serves two distinct purposes - as a home or as an investment. Despite what a lot of people think, it can't be both at once. As an investment, you forego some upfront capital (downpayment), have some monthly costs (mortgage payment) and a monthly income (rent) and at the end you have an asset (current value) and maybe an obligation to pay another lump s…

it's not poorly explained, it's poorly understood (to paraphrase Mr Miyagi, "no bad teacher, only bad students") This is like the Monty Hall problem and I am Vos Savant. Just listen and learn. Part of the value of a house is the value of living in it, the rent. It costs to live in a house, and the amount it costs is the rent. And this is true whether you own the house or if somebody else owns the house. Living in a h…

You are completely ignoring equity

Re: The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool (1993)

#300
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not renting vs owning that's the problem, its renting vs mortgage where mortgage is improperly considered synonymous with ownership. but that's because its so rare to be able to own the home near the places you can rent. so sure, renting vs buying a home in cash will give the cash ownership a leg up. but then it shifts over to people that would love to espouse about the 'time value of money' and leverage, where p…

This is a bit of a weird take. For starters, people don't buy a house to live in solely because of the financials around it. They also buy the house because they want it. When it comes to mortgage vs. buying outright, it just depends. I managed to get a very low interest rate for my primary home; the money I didn't put into the house is busy making quite a bit more than that very low interest rate for me yearly. If I…

> This is very regionally-dependent.

Exactly, and so is a mortgage to home equity belief system. That's the point. Be objective.

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