jaedalus

When I lived in Baltimore, I thought about buying one of the burnt-out brick shells listed on HUD for around $20,000, and rolling in some money in a 203k to repair it. They were all 2 or 3 story buildings, so I figured I could live on one floor and rent the others out and get equity for free from renters.

The one thing that gave me pause was that nobody else had done this with these homes. Is there a reason? The only thing I figured was that many of them were not in prime areas in the city, and so would not always fetch a profitable rent (which I didn't particularly care about).

I'm still thinking about doing this if I move to a large city after I graduate, I'd like to hear your thoughts.

This year we talked about doing an episode on weight loss and what we culturally get wrong about it, which is a fascinating topic with a ton of potential for our show, but we weren't able to get the research in a place we were happy with in time; the problem is that the state of science on dieting and weight loss is very nebulous, so it's hard to come to strong conclusions. So we decided to take a beat and do it next year when we're able to research it more thoroughly.

The /r/loseit community would love this, and might even be able to contribute to it! E.g. in the IRC channel #loseit, we maintain a small reference list containing some touchpoints in the professional literature for this kind of thing.

Definitely agree about things being nebulous and difficult to make strong statements on. For an example, I highly recommend what the USDA's DRI has to say about suggested "minimum" intakes of carbs and fat (tl;dr it says there isn't any strong evidence for a particular amount of either).

On the other hand, some things are very clear-cut and have pernicious cultural myths surrounding them. Another example from that list is the idea of a thyroid/etc. problem with a low metabolism causing people to gain lots of weight (into the 100 lb range, even), where the evidence supports a much lower figure like 10-20 lbs for gain that can be "attributed" to this cause.

You mean a physical presence? I would likely try to live out of the home if I bought one, and would try to keep the mortgage such that I could pay for it myself without any tenants at all if need be.

I probably would avoid buying a home and trying to manage it from elsewhere. At that point, I'd probably contract out the management to a local company, which is very popular in my current college town.

He did some initial sound work for Doom 3 IIRC, and his soundpack was the nuts; it was always the first thing I installed on a fresh copy. I'd bet he still checks in from time to time.

My father's employer did something similar to this. He owned an apartment building in front of the shop, and the people living there had their rent subsidized because they were recovering drug addicts.

The people were shady as hell, and unfortunately all their mail was delivered to the shop, so they were constantly coming in asking about their mail, but it was a good way to make his land doubly valuable.