Alberta has shown us that proper policy incentives can drive meaningful change. Instead of leaving rats to languish in cellars, they created incentives for them to do meaningful work in the provincial government instead.
It also depends on how hot the housing market is at any given time. Often time a realtor is just someone who decided everything else was too much work. (My whole family has been in the business for almost 70 years, both commercial and residential.)
I'm sure some do more, but my personal experience on the sales side is that realtors do nothing except serve as gatekeepers to get your house listed in the local MLS. Then they show up at closing to collect their commission.
On the buying side, they do more such as drive prospective buyers around to look at houses, though it's been long enough since I bought a house that I don't know how much virtual tours have replaced this. Either way, it's not what I'd call difficult work.
It is "work" in the sense that you can be busy doing things. Nothing is difficult by any reasonable sense of the word. All the realtors I know who are actually successful are constantly busy, constantly taking phone calls or responding to texts, there's very little downtime. I'm sure there's some nuance to it, and it probably helps to be in the business for a long time, but it's a backup job for 99% of people for a reason.
I've bought and sold a handful of properties in a couple states through my life and have dealt with probably 2 dozen realtors in some professional capacity, and only 1 has been what I would call "good" and that was basically just him giving us insight into the market, being willing to tell us not to buy a house because it wouldn't fit our needs 5 years in the future, etc. Basically just willing to sacrifice a faster or larger commission to get us what we wanted rather than just closing a deal ASAP, which IMO should be the minimum and not the mark of a "good" realtor.
Whenever I read Cory Doctorow, I feel like someone took the complement of Paul Graham's writing and posted it. I personally find both of them vapid and annoying.
Edit: the article that the author is commenting on is IMO much better than the linked commentary. There's not much to it
I wonder what degoogled chromium will do. I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to drop MV2 support given all the other stuff they're doing, but it would be nice if I could continue to use full uBlock with it.
I had the exact opposite reaction. Around 2006 I came across two of his OSCON Talks on the IT Conversations Network and totally loved them. I must have listened to them hundreds of times and forwarded them to a lot of friends and colleagues. They fundamentally influenced my self-conception as a software developer.
I have felt that he does push his agenda and can be subtle in doing so, which is disconcerting. But i do actually like his essays alot. Once you identify and subtract his biases from it, his observations are very intelligent and always resonate with things ive seen in my life. And i dont even fault him his biases guven that they arent that bad, the man just loves entrepreneurship and thinks everyone should do it. Even if hes wrong, there nothing wrong about believing so
I'm curious as to why? Regardless of the rest of his output or how you feel about him, this essay seems somewhat interesting (at least to me). There are many examples of where this applies and small teams appear to have an advantage (eg. Posthog).
reply