Various screenwriters read this blog, so if anybody is looking for supporting characters for a superhero movie, here's my advice: read up on the billionaire Candy Brothers, whose firm Candy & Candy serves as real estate developers and interior decorators for oligarchs, oil sheikhs, and hedge fund guys. The pages on Google read like headlines of newspapers twirling in an old-fashioned 1930s movie montage:
The Real Estalker: The Candy Brothers Do It Again
The Candy Brothers Sell Their Monaco Penthouse For A Whopping ...
Candy Brothers in Monaco Make Millions in London Housing Slump ...
Candy brothers lose millions of dollars on LA property deal that ...
Billionaire Candy brothers were duped by con men - Telegraph
and so forth and so on. Your main problem would be how to make the Candy Brothers sound more believable so they'd fit into a comic book movie more plausibly.
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Real estate is a huge racket. It's based on asset price inflation that's built structurally into economies, especially economies like the US and UK (less so in Germany and some other places). The vast majority of lending is for mortgages, against real estate, collateralizes land and property, and land values are generally taxed very little. These serve to build in asset price inflation for real estate into the economy. The real estate sector translates its rising capital gains into political power, and uses it to shift or maintain the tax burden on labor and industry.
This of course increases debt loads, rents, taxes on the general population.
The combination of debt service, financial charges and higher taxes can also deflate the goods-and-service economy even as this revenue will be recycled to inflate asset prices.
A return to land tax mitigates this. Taxing the land would leave less rental income to be capitaiized into bank loans, dampening asset price inflation. And it enables taxes on labor, industry, capital, etc. to be cut. And unlike taxes on labor, industry, or capital, taxes on land don't decrease the supply.
The Candy brothers are billionaires in the same way that Donald Trump is a billionaire.
The Candy brothers don't look English the dark haired brother looks positively non-western european...
Are they men with gold chains?? What sort of a name is Candy? The only time i heard it before was John Candy.
the fact that these guys, and the super wealthy, are thriving, means that our elite don't even think anything is wrong with the economy (would you?) so why 'fix' it?
here's their site
http://www.candyandcandy.com/#/home/
I looked at their picture and didn't think they looked ethnically English, and then looked on Wikipedia and saw they were half Greek so that explained it.
Careful, Steve. Candy brothers are arranging a hit on you as we speak. They do not take lightly when people make fun of them.
The people that buy those properties referred to the article buy them with hard cash. In fact, one of the reasons they buy them is because they have far too much cash. London's property market has survived the downturn and held up because for some reason wealthy Chinese, Indians, Russians, Arabs, Africans etc want to have a property here. It is as simple as that. Why not Paris or Berlin or Milan or Rome? No one can really explain this to me. But the rich from east of the Atlantic love London and they have driven property prices to stratospheric levels. None of this has to do with leverage or mortgages (that applies to properties bought by Joe Bloggs).
Both Madmen and Pan Am seem to be set in the Camelot yrs between the 'conformist' Eisenhower 60s and the tumultuous and crazy Johnson-Nixon 60s.
Camelot yrs were a time of 'hope' when there was youth exuberance(but hadn't yet turned ugly with drug excess and nihilism), blacks marching(but not yet burning down cities), ideas for new social programs(before turning into the hellhole of 'Great Society), and concerns about war(before degenerating into the fiasco of the Democratic convention in 68).
There's the notion that the Camelot yrs had the best of both worlds: Eisenhowerian stability and New Frontier optimism. The desire for something new but also a kind of innocence. Changing times and social mores but still a world when men were men and women were women.
And the rise of Obama was a kind of neo-Camelotism, the fantasy of re-doing the sixties as if we could go back in a time machine and prevent the assassination of Kennedy and ensure that everything the leftist boomers had hoped for had smoothly and successfully come to be.
Nobody likes to admit they were wrong, but liberals were wrong on so many things, and now they are using the politics of nostalgia to relive and re-imagine their fantasies all over again.
I would tie the movie into a line Matt Yglesias twittered yesterday about Mr. Facebook.
"So, Zuckerberg is worth another $10 billion? Call me when he dumps it all into a personal, never-ending war on crime and I’ll be impressed."
Very true. What other business is allowed to depreciate an appreciating asset, as well as deduct the maintenance expenses which prevent the asset from depreciating? It's completely ludicrous when you think about it. But it's also the way the wealthy hide money and transfer it to heirs. Our real-estate laws were put in when the income tax was instated. The wealthy bought enough politicians to create enough loopholes to protect themselves. Not that I'm in favor of giving more money to our government to throw away!
"Why not Paris or Berlin or Milan or Rome? No one can really explain this to me."
The rich all over the world understand English. Only a small subset of them understand French, with all the other Euro languages being even less international than French.
Those people get "hard cash" from land, resource rents that accrue to the assets they own and control. The "free lunch" of these economic rents don't get taxed but go into the coffers of these "elites" and they tax everything else - labor, capital, sales, VAT, etc.
They then park this "hard cash" in a favorable environment such as the property market of London which has low land value taxation. This causes asset price inflation in London real estate, which raises rents, which means more rent can be pledged to the banks. More rent becomes available to be capitalized into bank loans, so the volume of lending goes up, which puts more upward pressure on real estate and increases asset price inflation.
Places like Germany aren't as favorable to this as the UK and US are.
Thanks, Steve! I thoroughly enjoy your movie reviews and blogging about obscure and interesting aspects of human biodiversity, even if I'm off the train when it comes to the racial IQ stuff (American black culture is so deeply dysfunctional that IMO it can account for the achievement gap all on its own).
Best wishes,
an A-list screenwriter
Mmmm....... Candy.
Steve, the writer Joan Walsh of Salon.com is surprised that a woman who identifies herself as black would play the race-card about Obama. Read it at Salon.com
"Why not Paris or Berlin or Milan or Rome? No one can really explain this to me."
Modernized people around the world grow up worshiping The West. But the west has two sides to it. On the one hand America has the cool awesome factor that is hard to explain to non-westerners. On the other hand, Europe has the fairy tale, romantic-sophisticated vibe. The thing is that the majority of the world doesn't see much difference between the white, English-speaking countries. I've lived and worked in 4 non English-speaking countries for extended periods of time and the general population of these countries used "American" and "English" as interchangeable. The super-expensive cram school where I worked while I lived in East Asia had ordered beautiful toy money professionally printed with "One English Dollar", "Five English Dollars" and so on as the central part of the design. So, England has the coolness factor by such close association with America, but is in Europe as well with all the castles and romantic history. Many people see it as the best of both worlds.
"And the rise of Obama was a kind of neo-Camelotism,"
This styrofoam king-for-a-day has any number of fantasists who have tried to make us run with that, but it never really took. Thinking perhaps this was my personal bias, I forced myself to watch a news show, about 2009, with a number of youngish libs, all or mostly white as I recall, discussing the administriation and other stuff. Towards the end of the natter, somebody brought up the "Camelot" reference and to person, a look of amusement and, yes, something approaching disgust, came over ther faces and they said, to a person, "no, that doesn't work", or something to that effect. It wasn't a deliberate response, it was involuntary to judge from its immediateness and their expression. Even they seemed to know at a gut level how absurd and inappropriate the "Camelot" reference is to Obama & Co. BO & MO are, at best, a grotesque parody of Jack and Jackie, even if you did not admire the first dynamic duo. Like all those lame, black-face remakes of white shows.
The chatting MSM commenters referenced here then tried to cover their negative opinion with something about this administration being new and unprecedented, at that was at least truthful.
Why not Paris or Berlin or Milan or Rome?
well Berlin is a giant holocaust memorial and not really a major city yet, still sewing itself together but it does influxes from the east (germany russia and its flooding with jews again (seriously) from israel and russia. Plus german is not widely spoken.
Paris is actually a small city with small apartments and much tighter restrictiions - its a giant open air museum.
Milan does have the jet set, just on a smaller scale. Same goes for Rome, but Rome is ran by Italians remember...
London - major world metropolis - huge city, much loser building codes than say paris, major airline hub, perhaps the major, English spoken, easiest access to NYC, cultural capital of Europe, for the time being.
Also, major financial center and probably the most friendly to criminal oligarchs besides the US thanks to Tony Blair.
I'm still waiting for someone to explain why Steve thinks the character Nino in "Drive" is Jewish. Looks way more Guinea than Jewish. Just because his boss is Jewish?
OT. ALTERNATIVE RIGHT is now officially a Neo-Nazi site. That cretin Alex Kurtagic, #2man at AR, has a list of noble 'our women' in his latest article, and it includes Mrs. Goebbels, the crazy Hitler-worshiping bitch who murdered all her children. It also has the lead singer of SAGA, a neo-Nazi band that bemoaned German defeat in the Eastern Front in the song 'And then the snow fell'. Another face is that of Janaelle Antas, a Neo-Nazi groupie who toured with David Irving the Holocaust denying creep. There is also Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler's favorite filmmaker. She was a great artist--credit must be given where it's due--, but she was a lying two-faced bitch all her life. Maybe Kurtagic doesn't know, but later she turned to worshiping Negro muscle in Sudan.
It's also amusing that a site that calls itself the the ALTERNATIVE Right pulls the kind of silly stunts that Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin are famous for.
Now, what's the point of showing ugly leftist women and good-looking rightist women? Looks are everything? What if there's a good rightist woman who is ugly? What about good-looking liberal or leftist women?
What about anti-Nazi or pro-leftist women like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Simone Signoret, Jane Fonda, Catherine Deneuve, and 1000s of others? Most good looking movie stars and celebs are liberals. Using the Kurtagic logic, the left is better since it has more famously good looking people. Most fashion models are 'gay marriage' pushing liberals, not neo-nazi hags(with funny hair cuts and body piercings).
Also, how fair is it to compare an old Susan Sontag(who was beautiful when young) with a young Leni Riefenstahl(who looked repulsive in old age)? Alternative Right is a shitty neo-nazi site. It once had promise, but it's turned to shit. But at least it finally came out of the closet.
Somebody actually approved that "gormless" screed for posting in the comment section?
Somebody actually approved that "gormless" screed for posting in the comment section?
I tried to post [on this very thread] something just profoundly important, but I think it must have triggered the antisemitism filter.
I guess maybe Komment Kontrol just doesn't want to risk offending any of those high & mighty Hollyweird screenwriters who might chance by.
Modernized people around the world grow up worshiping The West. But the west has two sides to it. On the one hand America has the cool awesome factor that is hard to explain to non-westerners. On the other hand, Europe has the fairy tale, romantic-sophisticated vibe.
Many non-Emglish speakers, never mind non-white, non-English speakers when you meet them, cant tell between Brits, Americans, Aussies etc. Thats hardly earth shattering news but I feel it chimes in with Maya's comment.
I note that Americans often confuse Brits and Aussies by accent. But then we confuse Americans & Canadians.
Those people get "hard cash" from land, resource rents that accrue to the assets they own and control.
Arabs and Russians make their money from oil and gas, not land price appreciation.
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