Because it's a massive East Coast city but the property values are probably like $200 a month for a three bedroom apartment, and most Gothamites are like, "Hey, Bane never swore to break my back."
And here's the thing: you're not just moving out of Gotham City. You're moving into the rest of the DC universe. And it has hero-based power scaling.
Oh, Metropolis looks fucking great. But it gets invaded by aliens and robots and demigods, because Superman is there.
Wonder Woman's tangling with gods.
You go to Central City, and some Reverse-Flash motherfucker runs backwards from an alternate future and kicks your balls off at the speed of light.
You could move to the West Coast, and oh, an entire city just gets exploded by Cyborg Superman or some shit.
How about you move to Indianapolis, or Cleveland? Haha, no. They have no protector during the alien invasions, and you're in Cleveland
So stay in Gotham. Sure, you have lunatics, but you know that if you had a gun, you at least have a chance against the Joker or Riddler. Mongo of War-World would crush you. But Gotham just has creeps, and you know you have a chance. Even Bane, R'as Al-Ghul, Killer Croc, and Mr. Freeze are just slightly altered dudes. Oh no, Poison Ivy is going to kiss me to death! Who gives a shit, you kinda wanted to go out that way anyway.
There are super-intelligent telepathic gorilla warlords in Africa and the Greek titans are real and chained in the abyss
This does beg the question of why Gotham has such a horrible in-universe reputation when all its villains are relatively human compared to the cosmic bullshit that most other heroes put up with.
I think it's all about perception. Gotham City has crime. But when Ares sends his undying legions to march upon the mortal realm and Wonder Woman has to punch all of them, people don't internalize that as "crime." That's "a crisis" or "a religious event" or at best, terrorism. Same thing when Superman has to stop Brainiac from shrinking Metropolis or whatever. That stuff is objectively more dangerous but it's on such a huge scale that "crime" is not the word for it. The cops don't involve themselves in this at any point.
But the stuff Batman deals with is like, robberies, assaults, gang wars, serial killings. All his villains commit actual crimes, so they go into police reports, which end up as statistics. So when someone compiles all this data, oh look, Gotham City has the highest crime rate in the country, yet again. Forget the fact that 10% of Keystone City's population had their skulls crushed by invading superintelligent gorillas. Who cares that a random guy in Opal City accidentally teleported the entire state to Hell after he found out the hard way that he was born a wizard. Those are not crimes. There's nothing in the police recordkeeping app's drop-down menu for a Gorilla invasion. Closest thing we've got is Random Chimp Event.
So my theory is that while Gotham does have a lot of crime, what it does not have is space catastrophes. And so it ends up being the most dangerous city based on a bureaucratic technicality.
something i really enjoy in horror movies is when the victim(s) start to hunt the killer in return in order to kill them first, both because it's an interesting parallel that (if done well) asks the audience to consider the question of when violence and killing are a justifiable means to an end in order to survive and at what point it crosses the line from acceptable to abhorrent and condemns the perpetrator, and also because it's a little bit funny. like i can do that too bitch you're not special.
I'm very very glad that my knee-jerk, gut-feeling, primal-instinct reaction to seeing a Default Influencer is embarrassment. I think this saves me from a lot of bullshit.
Some lip-filler lady on enough Ozempic to euthanize a horse: "The sad truth is an elite lifestyle takes money and discipline. Buy these brands on credit if you have to. Skip meals."
Me: "Oh. Oh I'm physically experiencing the effects of secondhand embarrassment. You live like this? This is your life? Your interiority? If I was anything like this I'd kill myself I think."
To be clear ☝️, absolutely not gender-exclusive. Some broccoli-haired shirtless 23-year-old man on enough trenbolone to euthanize a different horse starts talking about how to be a high-value male and I start thinking instantly about how I'd have 4,000 slugs use me as a jungle-gym before I'd want this man within cootie-contagion distance of me.
one of the funnier parts of having online friends is when they casually reference something that seems weird as hell from your perspective and you have to go "okay so is this like a reigional/cultural difference or is your specific life experience just insane"
#the fact that 'can prove access to an online account at least 12 years old' or even 'account to be verified is itself fully 18 years old'#AREN'T accepted methods of age verification is such a telling sign of what the real purpose of age-gating laws is:#data harvesting and deanonymization and the buildout of state-controllable ways to restrict both content and internet access itself en masse (via @shinelikethunder )
(in case anyone needs context, since i know there's a bunch of younguns who didn't even know the "It's gonna be May" meme... The song playing is NSync's song "It's Gonna Be Me", the guy in the mint green t-shirt is NSync member Lance Bass, and the guy in the pink hoodie is his husband Michael.)
my miis keep complaining when i give them an outfit thats a near recreation of the chracter theyre based on and every time they do i feel this image go through my head
Ok but the concept of Simon, who rocky and Grace took in and deduced is from a separate universe, saying something like “where I come from we don’t joke about Ryland grace or the Hail Mary. He was a coward who refused to do what was needed of him and his selfishness got people killed.” In response to Grace telling him his first name is Ryland. And Grace just looks like this across the dinner table
I love lying to my landlord. “We’re currently looking at a comparable unit in the area at $[a hundred dollars less than our current rent]/month, so if your offer has any flexibility to come down on the rent, that would help us reach a decision about whether or not to renew our lease here” and the comparable unit exists only in my own beautiful mind
Actually, no! And since several people have replied asked for my script for negotiating lower rent, I’m gonna share that below, as well as the philosophy behind it. Full disclosure that I’m not a leasing office person or a realtor or god forbid, a landlord—I’m just someone who has been a renter for 10+ years across different states, and I know for a fact that I have saved myself thousands of dollars by successfully negotiating a lower monthly rent on almost every lease I’ve ever signed. (Also, I’ve only ever rented in the U.S., so this advice may not be as applicable elsewhere.)
Step 0: Know Thy Enemy
The key thing to understand about all residential landlords, whether they’re corporate conglomerates or Just Some Asshole, is that their asset—the property—is a Cinderella carriage that magically turns back into an expensive ass pumpkin of a liability any time it’s sitting empty. The property taxes, insurance, mortgage, HOA fees, and maintenance costs all still come due every month/quarter/year whether they have a tenant to cover it all and then some, or not.
Because of this, at the end of the day, their ultimate goal is to fill every unit at all times with someone who will reliably pay the rent on time and in full. And because everything else is secondary to that goal—and because with the exception of Just Some Asshole landlords, the person responding to your emails and writing up your lease paperwork is several degrees of separation removed from the shareholders who profit off your rent money—they’re almost always willing to negotiate with you. As long as it gets the liability converted into an asset faster or keeps the carriage from turning back into a pumpkin for longer, then in the long run, it’s actually in their best interest to give you a better price.
Step 1: Identify Your Leverage
If you understand how supply and demand works, you can figure out how much leverage you have pretty easily. High supply and low demand = you have more leverage, and vice versa. Do they have an “AVAILABLE NOW - MOVE IN TODAY” sandwich board on the sidewalk or a web banner that says “First month free”? Does their website and/or Apartments.com show a bunch of currently open listings? Do you already live there and know at least two families on your floor have moved out in the last several months with no one new moving in to replace them? These are all indications that they have more than one unit currently sitting empty, meaning higher supply and lower demand. No sandwich board and a website that just says “call for availability”? They might just suck at marketing, but more likely, supply is lower and demand is higher.
You have the least leverage if you’re a prospective tenant looking to move in somewhere that has a waitlist. They have no reason to offer you a discount if six other people are already in line to pay full price for apartments that aren’t even vacant yet (but you can still ask!). You also have no leverage to negotiate if you’ve already signed a lease and you’re in the middle of the lease period; you legally agreed to pay $X/month for Y months, so you’re stuck with that until the lease is up.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have the most leverage if you’re a current tenant who has always paid your rent on time and you’re being offered a renewal on your existing lease with higher rent than you're currently paying, especially if they already have some units that have been empty for a while. If you move out, not only is your unit going to sit vacant for at least part of a month, they’re also probably going to have to put in some work to “turn” the unit (repainting, professional cleaning, etc) to get it in move-in condition for the next tenant.
All of this means that if you move out, even if they can fleece you out of your security deposit and find a new tenant the very next month, it’s still gonna cost them at least a few thousand dollars to turn that pumpkin back into a carriage again. They’re probably willing to come down by $100-$200/month or so on the renewal offer rent if you ask, because they know it’ll actually save them money in the long run. Similar situation if you’re a prospective new tenant—if they can’t get you or anyone else to sign a lease and move in this month, that’s $[whatever the monthly rent is] down the drain, and they’ll never get it back. It’s a perishable item about to spoil.
Step 2: Get Their Opening Offer
This is the first number they’ll quote you for the rent—the sticker price that you’ve always just accepted as set in stone. The truth is, they’ve built some buffer into that number. There’s almost always some room for them to come down, and depending on your leverage, they will if you ask nicely. But for reasons that baffle me, most people don’t!
Step 3: Wait, Research, & Counter
Don’t reply to their initial offer right away—unless there’s a waitlist (in which case, you have little haggling power anyway), wait a few days. It makes them sweat a bit, and it shows you aren’t desperate. The person who is rushing to reply is not the one who has more leverage in the negotiation, and making them wait reminds them of that. In the meantime, use Apartments.com or Zillow to get an idea of what similar units in the same area are currently going for. Then you come up with your counteroffer.
As a general rule, anything more than about 20-25% below their opening offer (or below market rates) will probably just piss them off or make them take you less seriously. But when we’re talking about your monthly rent over the course of a year or two, even a 10% discount adds up to a lot of money!
When I negotiated our original lease for my current place, I also asked for and got a two year lease term instead of the standard one year. But whatever automated calendar event system they use to remind their leasing office staff when it’s time to send out renewal offers didn’t get the memo about that, so they mistakenly sent me a renewal offer the following year, meaning I got to see how much they would have jacked up the rent if they could’ve. For that second year of the lease alone, my negotiating saved us $3,000!
Step 4: BDE (Big Dick Emailing)
Here’s the tricky part. You need to write an email—always negotiate over email if you can, it’s too easy for a salesperson to bowl you over on the phone and anything they say that isn’t in writing means nothing—which simultaneously makes it sound like you would sign a lease with them in a heartbeat and like you are actively flirting with five other apartment complexes right now who all want you so bad it makes them look stupid, because you are just so sexy and fun and your credit score is eight inches flaccid. You need to make them believe you are both highly motivated and ready to sign on the dotted line and willing to just walk away from the table at any second, but if they could just come down a little bit on that number, you’d delete those other hoes’ numbers forever! Here’s the rough script I use every time:
“ Thank you for [your email/the tour/sending over the offer letter/etc]. I have had a chance to review and consider it. I think [name of apartment complex] would be the perfect fit for me, but I am also exploring and touring other options in the area, including a comparable unit nearby at $[a little below your counteroffer number]/month.
If we could come down to $[your counteroffer number]/month on the rent, I would be prepared to sign the lease today. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks! "
Step 6: You Win Either Way
Sometimes they really do just accept your counteroffer without question and send you over a revised lease to sign. (When this happens, I make a note for next time that my counteroffer was probably too high and I should’ve asked for more!) More often, they get approval from The Powers That Be and come back with a number that’s higher than your counteroffer but lower than their initial offer. Assuming I can afford it, I always accept this offer; you’ve achieved your goal of saving yourself money from sticker price, and they’re likely to lose patience if they have to keep going around and around with you. And sometimes (though only very rarely), they may come back and say the price is firm—in which case, guess what? You still didn’t lose anything by asking!
THIS!!! Exactly this. I didn’t mention it above because I just couldn’t fit it neatly anywhere, but once while negotiating a lease renewal, I got as far as receiving their counteroffer, which was basically “price firm :(”, but then life happened, so I forgot to respond and accept. The email sat in my inbox for a week. And then, completely unprompted, they magically replied again saying, “actually, nvm, how’s $[number that is lower than our opening offer] sound?”
To them, it looked like I was staring them down cold as ice like
I was literally just busy with other stuff! and they were sweating!!! BULLETS!!!
My dad raises grass-fed beef cattle and I help him sell it, mainly by maintaining an online presence. For a while, I kept having the most ridiculous conversations with people who I assume were marketing students. I didn't want to be rude so I'd try to let them down gently but this one guy just kept insisting that with his magical marketing skills he could grow our business.
What he could not seem to comprehend is that we could not grow our business, at least not without significant time and monetary investment. Cows take two years from pregnancy to the size that you can sell. If we buy adult cows, our margins become razor thin or even negative. Even if we somehow could acquire some cows, our barn and hay fields are already near maximum capacity. Renting another field would be relatively easy, building a bigger barn not so much.
Cows are living animals, they aren't widgets that can be produced infinitely. Besides that, many businesses inherently cannot grow, because if they do they'll become something else. The delicious bakery down the street cannot produce much more than they do, if they began mass marketing and production they'd eventually be selling the equivalent of Twinkies. We grow grass-fed, organic beef, if we expanded how long would that last? Eventually we'd become the very factor farms that we hate. Some things can only ever be made on a small scale and they are usually the best things.
But also, what are they teaching them at marketing school and how is it so disconnected from reality?
People kept trying to do this to my petcare business. “Let us build you a website! Let us buy you some ads! Let us print you flyers and cards!” I have exactly as much business as I can handle, and I’m happy with that. “But if you expand you could hire other people to do the work and pay them less, and raise your prices and eventually you can work from home!! Let us help you!” I’m doing this because I like playing fetch for a living, I like being outside moving around all day every day, I like spending time with each animal separately, I like being trusted by my clients with the keys and codes of their homes, it makes me feel proud. None of what you’re offering me is what I want. I don’t want a dozen miserable contractors who I pay 40% of each visit, I don’t want to try and wrangle and hire and vet people to do the part of my job that I like for me. That sounds bad. That’s a bad idea. And they looked at me like I was speaking an alien language. “But… website!! SEO! Ad buys! Targeted coverage! Constant growth!!” I don’t want any of that in my life it sounds fucking awful
One of the cruelties of capitalism is that if you want to do work you’re good at and love, a lot of the time your only option is to enter into some kind of business, and as soon as you do that, all the structural incentives of the system start trying to pull you away from the parts that you’re there for (i.e. the things that make life worth living) and towards various kinds of exploitation. Anyway, this also applies to writing and selling novels.
I agree with OP down to my bonessss. The best things are done with pasison by artisans, who deseve to be compensated respectfully, but aren't into their work from a place of greed or whatever misguided capitalist-brained bros think 'efficiency' is.
I'm plenty efficient, at getting things done the way i intend to.
i described to my econ-brain-rotten brother how i run my tattooing business and got the same responses as above.
It's like he absolutely didn't hear me when i explained the nuanced reasons i even started doing this work; I started tattooing because i was tired of the isolation of my (at that point) decade-long career in the animation industry. I was sick of my best work rotting on hard drives in shut down studios, of never getting to see anyone interacting with my art.
Moved to a big queer city, where my community got me started: queer tattooers patiently shared information and resources with me. early on, friends volunteered to let me experiment on their skin. Then they started offering to pay for materials, then more. Then they brought their friends to me...
I have a beautiful community of people who know me from the drag scene, from the poetry and writing scene, from the techno scene - and all these ppl come to me because they know me, met me, trust me, because they felt comfortable in my presence.
I only have like 1200 followers on my tattooing Instagram - which rly isn't a lot for a tattooer. But i stay busier than some ppl who have more followers - and im pretty sure that it's because 90% of the ppl following me have actually met me irl. I don't give out my info to just anyone. I have to have a nice interaction with them - and they with me - and i basically invite them to get to know my work, if i think they'd be interested, if they seemed excited about it.
I built my business out of love and care, and connection. I built it because i wanted more of these things in my life. I am making what i wanna see in the world.
Im deeply proud of what I've accomplished as a tattooer, exactly because i stuck to my own beliefs and built a business that is fully customized to me, what im excited about, my abiliy and disability levels, and my philosophical values. This part of my life is all mine, crafted and chiselled just how i want it.
I don't like getting up in the morning, so my sessions never start earlier than 1300. I have a hard time focusing alone + i wanna empower ppl who aren't artists to play with art + help ppl practice and engage their decision making and request making skills - so i design the tattoos with them sitting right next to me, being part of the art process. I don't like doing math and counting so i give my clients a sliding scale based on project complexity, and they get to choose how much they pay me. This also doubles as a way to give ppl more agency in the process of getting a tattoo. Etc etc it goes on and on - every aspect of the process is considered and phislophically and emotionally calibrated. I love what I've created and i love giving the gift of a well-crafted thing......
And after hearing me explain all that, my brother said my marketing wasn't efficient and my business isn't scalable...
I dunno, i think smtng abt capitalism legit gives ppl brain damage or smtng wtf
the year is 2039. season 17 of the pitt is coming to an end. in the finale, trinity santos finds a sad and exhausted pittling dealing with the idea of a lonely night after an exruciating shift where they and their coworkers were all weirdly forced to face their inner turmoils at the same time. she tells them it's mercury retrograde and offers them a movie night at her house. 37 other doctors of various importance she's previously adopted wait for them in the car. they all fit in it like clowns.
samira “just not being on shift” in season 3 as scott gemmill has confirmed, is probably the worst reason for her not to be there. that means that she is there, she is still around and is finishing her r4, but that the showrunners didn’t think she would add value to that shift/season in a narrative sense. and that in and by itself is crazy
with the way they wrote samira in season one, we see that she is an amazing teacher, that she is flawed in ways, but that her kindness prevails and that she can thrive in chaos when needed. her presence as a woman of colour in that er has helped many patients, and her having and using her intersectionality to treat patients and teach people like santos and whitaker, while speaking up for those who need it? her work is incredibly valuable. her presence is valuable and needed.
so why get rid of that? why not write a story about someone who has struggled to find a way to thrive because of the obstacles and discrimination she faces, why not make her overcome that and find a path forward no matter where it goes. why not? why write her out, after beating her down all season and not giving her a resolution to her problems besides her apologising to a person that’s been terrible to her. why make her agree with geriatrics and then write that story forward. why diminish her character from what it was in season one and end her story with doubt and a sad fade out and not something hopeful. why.
writing her to be absent in season three tells me everything these showrunners think about samira. about the value they think she adds, the importance she has in this story and in medicine. to them, they aren’t important anymore. to them, it’s a story driven decision to just have her not work. what story? we have no idea what is happening with her. we don’t know how her mother is doing, we didn’t even get to find out what her fellowship in jersey was about. if it’s a story-driven decision, it certainly isn’t in favour of her story. it’s disrespectful, disappointing and just plain fucked.
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