Friday, June 22, 2018

that said, i could look at it the other way, too - i should be excited if i can find a landlord with the foresight to advertise with sufficient notice.
it's june 22nd, and there are still listings coming up for july 1st.

and, i've been told by one property owner that if i want to apply for august 1st then they won't take my application until after july 1st. of course, they are requesting first & last.

so, what is the expectation, then? are they expecting to rent solely to people moving away from parents? from break-ups? from eviction notices?

or is this just a good example of the short-sightedness of capitalism & the self-destructiveness of accumulation?

i don't know, but i'm learning the lesson: by following the rules, i'm getting burned.

you'd think they'd stop making the same mistakes and begin to realize that if they want a good tenant then they should advertise a month ahead, but that's going to mean losing a month's rent - or taking a bad tenant to court. so, the bad tenants set the rules, and the property owners follow along, out of greed. what ought to be a way to determine a stable tenant from an unstable one gets abolished; the idea may have even been largely forgotten. the market here operates entirely on the last minute. people live week-to-week. tenants get evicted mid-month, and move in on random dates. it's complete anarchy in living arrangements...

allowing my landlord to hold last month's rent, then, puts me at a disadvantage, as i can't compete with people getting evicted, or students saving up deposits. or, not unless i take matters into my own hands.

it needs to be one way or the other: if we're going to have first & last, it ought to be enforced. and, if we're not going to enforce it, we ought to get rid of it.

i can't afford to give my landlord a $700 gift for negligence in maintaining the unit. sorry. so, i'm going to have to take a bold stand, and argue the point in court: in order to be a serious participant in the market, i need to reclaim my last month's rent deposit. otherwise, i'll be here forever.

i'd suggest that the landlord write her mpp a letter requesting stronger enforcement of this rule on the market. so long as i continue paying rent regularly, such an action should not affect my credit.

the air quality in here tonight was horrific, and i spent the evening sleeping as a result. i think i'm alert, now, and ready to get some work done over the quiet hours of the night & the morning.
claim: the english & american (and french, too) puritans of the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries, along with the jesuits and other fundamentalist christian groups, were every bit as barbaric as modern-day islamic jihadists, and should have been resisted by civilization using contemporaneously comparable methods.

or, you could make the claim the other way around - but i would not agree.

discuss.
but, when are we going to genetically engineer a bear-cat?

this is what the court orders were trying to shut down, and what trump's executive order is going to bring back.
mackenzie-king - A
st. laurent - B
diefenbaker - B
pearson - A
trudeau - A
mulroney - F
chretien - C
martin - F
harper - F
trudeau - D?
carter - F
ford - F
nixon - F
johnson - A
kennedy - C
eisenhower - D
truman - F
fdr - A
it's admittedly hard to weigh it, right now.

but, in absolute terms?

from a hard-left perspective, you could get more positive change out of trump than obama - even if you get deeper negatives, too.

or you might not.

hard to say, still...
reagan - F
bush - F
clinton - C
bush - F
obama - F
trump - D?
trump and obama have both been bad for the planet.

but, is trump worse than obama?

it's not obvious.

trump's climate policies appear to be worse than obama's, but i'm still waiting for him to start a war.  trump's economic policies are clearly worse, but there's still some chance he might get a daca answer through, where obama failed. he may fail to get rid of nafta, but at least he stopped the tpp. & etc.

what i'm saying is that i'm not willing to judge yet. but, i'm actually expecting trump to end up with one of the better ratings in the post-reagan era, when you balance everything out.

to be clear: this is a question of whether trump ends up with an F or a D. but, the only other president with a passing grade in most of our lifetimes is clinton...so, a D is actually pretty good, on the curve.

...as low as the standards have become.
it took a few hours to clear my sd card off. i'm clearly not going to make the july 1st deadline, but i am still vlogging.

i'm going to have to make some calls in the morning, but the non-response from my landlord regarding july's rent suggests to me that it isn't coming - which means i won't be able to move on july 1st, even if i find the perfect spot. but, it also means i might have to withhold rent, without a clear intent to move.

there is some possibility that i could convince somebody to let me sign a lease for august 1st on an empty unit, but it's not likely.

the way this is supposed to work is that you're supposed to sign a lease for the next month, and then use your last month's rent for it. that way, everybody has proper notice and can plan. but, this doesn't seem to be reality at all. the units on the market are either available immediately or for july 1st. i have every reason to think that i'm going to run into the same problem next month - meaning that, by being responsible and following the rules, i'm just going to get burned. i could even be in a situation where the unit sits empty because the landlord would rather gamble, and we all lose - stupid, sure, but that's capitalism for you.

so as long as i'm not staying here for free at any point, i think that, if the situation comes in front of a judge, i'll be able to win the argument. and, if i can't find anything for august, i may even be able to get away with keeping august's rent for moving costs, so long as the issue eventually comes up in court.

but, keeping july's rent means i'm going to have to fight the case on the 5th, unless i fax in a request to move it forward.

yeah...

i'll think this through properly for monday.

right now, i want to try and finish what i didn't finish yesterday.

how is the air quality in here? well, the pothead appears to have reappeared, unfortunately. i'm feeling tired and drained from it, it always hits you between the eyes, but i'm hoping i can blow it off for a few hours at least.

i'd like tonight to be an all-nighter, to get these loose ends tied up early in the morning and to sleep next in the afternoon. we'll see if i can struggle through the drugs and accomplish this or not.