A Fancy Pants House is Stupid

I got in the habit of watching youtube bodycam videos a few months ago. I'd like to know who the OG bodycam video content makers are because it was an ingenious idea. The footage is public record, so there's and endless supply of often compelling, funny and dramatic real-world content available to serve up to the public.

There's some minimal dose of bodycam videos that will lead the most blue-haired progressive lesbian democrat "them" to the conclusion that loads of black people are dysfunctional and stupid. For example, there's a bodycam video of a shooting and inexplicably nonsense chaotic aftermath where a crowd of maybe 50 black people swarm around the fallen guy to: 1.) rob him and 2.) freak out hysterically. While they scream out for someone to help, they simultaneously prevent the police from rendering first aid and even assault the cops who are trying to help. Nothing in the video "makes sense".

The problem with this criticism of the black people isn't that it's "racist", it's that it is implicitly based on the notion that whitey "has it all figured out" and that the white people society and methods of organization are rational and therefore optimal because the white people individually are rational. This is obviously not true.

One example of irrational behavior that applies to almost everyone in the US, but maybe especially the "upper class" white people is the pursuit of luxury, and luxury housing in particular. This topic is apparent to me because I think about what my family "should do" with our house and property on a regular basis.

We have an ideal parcel of land in an ideal location, but the house is kind of dumpy and tired out. It turns out, though, that the dumpy house works in our favor because it keeps our property taxes, one of our only housing related "fixed" expenses, as low as possible. In fact, it would make sense to reduce those as much as possible by minimizing the market value of the home, while at the same time maximizing the property's real productive capacity, e.g. farming or the like. That is you can add "real utility" to a property without the county auditor giving you a higher tax bill. Now that I understand this strategy, I see other people doing the same thing here and there in my neighborhood.

This is what everyone should be doing in my area if they were practical/pragmatic people, but typically they do the opposite, that is, they maximize the nominal and imaginary value of their property so they pay maximally high property taxes. For example, there are several couples living in $800,000 McMansion homes in the immediate area. The maintenance and taxes on their property is probably 5x ours, but there's nothing that comes from that extra expense. Typically they do nothing productive with their property, like running a farm. It's just all expense and lots of extra maintained space for a couple of people. It's actually stupid and counterproductive and keeps people running on the work treadmill for extra years of their life because all they really care about is totally imaginary status.

In many cases the people who live the imaginary status luxury life are really in dire financial straights to appear wealthy. They live on loans and can't even really afford to maintain their McMansion, and certainly can't afford to burn $30,000 on new car cost every few years, but they do that also.

Anyway, as per usual, when the mass of people does something it's almost by definition "wrong".