Selling Condos and Jets and Picassos

Selling luxury condominiums and townhouses at Rancho Santana was slowing down because prices were going up. A luxury three-bedroom, three-bath condo that sold for $350,000 10 years ago is selling for more than twice that today. There are still some buyers out there willing to pay $700,000+ for luxury condos, so we may build another group of them next year. But the hot market is for units that cost considerably less.

We realized this about six months ago. And after some research and discussion, decided to sell our three/three units at the price the market wanted. We did it by turning them into three-month timeshares at $250,000.

Of course, you can’t call them timeshares these days. That old phrase has a slightly tarnished reputation. Instead, we’re using the current nomenclature: fractional ownership.

Fractional ownership is a sales strategy that is also being used for expensive assets like boats and planes. And six years ago, I noticed that a company called Masterworks was selling fractional ownerships in a market I would have never imagined: museum-quality art. So, you can’t afford a $10 million Andy Warhol or a $20 million Matisse? No problem. Masterworks will sell you a piece of one of them for 10% or even 5% of the estimated value.

I thought the idea was clever. And I was tempted to try it. But since fractional ownership of art was a new industry, I decided to resist the temptation. To wait and see.

Meanwhile, other fractional ownership companies have entered the fine art market. One that sent me a promotion last week – Freeport – offered shares of works by some artists I love, including a Matisse.

After five years of following this corner of the fine art market, I am pretty sure it is legitimate. (I haven’t heard or seen anything to the contrary.) And since these companies buy mostly pieces by well-established masters, the outlook for future appreciation on one’s shares is very good. (The market for fine art is very much like the market for any collectible. The rarer the piece is, the more valuable it is. Investors that focus on the top tranches do better than those that buy secondary pieces, even if they are done by top masters.) And, in fact, Masterworks’ five-year published track record has been impressive.

So, once again, I find myself tempted. But I went to bed last night wondering why I’m still hesitant. When I awoke this morning, I realized why.

If I invest in one of these works of art – something I would really, really like to own – it would become a de facto line on an impersonal balance sheet, rather than a cherished piece I could look at every day.

In fact, it’s quite possible that after I bought a share of the piece I loved, I’d never see it again. It would likely be stored in some anonymous vault leased by Masterworks or Freeport. Or, worse, end up hanging on a wall of one of their company managers!

Hmm. I have an idea. The way Masterworks and Freeport work is by fractionalizing the ownership of a fine art piece into hundreds of shares. But it might be possible to do the same thing on a smaller scale, like we’re doing with the Rancho Santana timeshares. You organize a limited partnership to buy a million-dollar painting for $80,000 per share… and all of the members get to enjoy it personally for, maybe, one month a year.

What do you think?

Click here to find out more about buying art on a fractional basis.

And click here to see a pitch by our Sales VP on why you should buy a timeshare at Ranch0 Santana.

I was going to write an essay today about identity politics and gender ideology. It’s a big, interesting subject, with plenty to argue about. But one aspect of it has become a wedge issue politically. I’m talking about the crusade to mandate (either by social force or by legal force) “gender preferred” pronouns.

In case you aren’t familiar with the debate, it has several iterations. Three of the most common are:

* Gender is a social construct. Masculine and feminine are adjectives that describe personal traits that society has invented. They purport to describe the differing tendencies and characteristics of males and females. But in reality, they are traits that either sex can have and exhibit.

* Sex, too, is a social construct. Unlike other mammals, the sex of Homo sapiens is not determined by DNA or the biological results of DNA, such as genitalia. One’s sex is determined by the sex one “identifies as” at any point in time.

* Because both gender and sex are social constructs, gender and sex don’t exist. To put it differently, gender and sex exist only as notions of identity on an ever-changing ideational spectrum that cannot be, and should not be, defined by either law or custom. Doing so, even accidentally, is a form of violence, and should be prohibited by force.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am well aware that there are people that feel like they were born in, or are otherwise living in, a physical body that does not comport to the sex they identify with. Furthermore, I believe that adults who feel that way have a right to change their physical appearance and emotional tendencies by taking hormones and having surgery – measures that require a great deal of bravery. My guess is that having “gender affirming care,” as they call it, is unlikely to improve their mental health. Still, they have every right to give it a go. And when an individual has completed this transformation, I believe it would be mean spirited, when in the presence of such a fully transitioned individual, to refuse to use the pronoun that comports with their renovated (however artificially) body. I don’t think it should be outlawed, but I don’t see why any considerate person should do otherwise.

That said, I do have a problem when the “preferred” pronoun debate gets bizarre and irrational. For example:

* When people who have not transitioned insist on being called what they do not in any way look like.

* Or when, as is the case with Canada, the state mandates that citizens use preferred pronouns under penalty of law.

The problem with these two stances is obvious. It is only by the threat of social or legal punishment that a society can force individuals to say they believe something is true that is obviously false. A big, hairy man with a penis wearing a skirt and lipstick is not a woman. No matter how he dresses or what sort of cosmetic he puts on his face.

What we could call such a person… what we should call such a person is “a man that identifies as a woman.”

That’s it. Nothing more. If he hasn’t done the transition, he is not, by any stretch of logic, a woman. Why, except for mental illness, should he claim to be?

And by the way, what’s wrong with being called “a man that identifies as a woman” when that is what one is? Don’t be embarrassed. Own it. Say it. Be proud of it!

Likewise, how can anyone that is rational agree to call such a man a woman? One can argue that using a non-transitioned person’s preferred pronouns is “a courtesy” and “no big thing.”  But it is a big thing. It’s scientifically and provably false.

To say that to take part in a very dangerous social deceit that cannot be described as anything other than a new religion.

I was going to write more on the preferred pronoun issue, but I’m running out of time. So I’ll just outline my arguments by saying this:

* If you can redefine a word, you can redefine a thought.

* If you can banish a word, you can silence a thought.

* If you can silence a thought, you can silence an idea.

* If you can silence an idea, you can banish an ideology.

* If you can banish an ideology, you can banish rational thinking.

* If you can banish rational thinking, you can create new laws.

* If you can create new laws, you can vanquish your opponents.

* If you can vanquish your opponents and banish rational thinking, you can have a contented, tyrannical state.

* Mandated language is the single most important step on the road to tyranny.

And here are some thoughts on the subject that I’ve gathered from others:

* Pronouns are the gateway drug to a larger ideology. Our kindness and politeness is weaponized.

* Pronouns are a wedge of speech control under the disguise of politeness. It’s a huge, narcissistic burden upon other people.

* When asked for my pronouns, I say “I have no special requests.” And if they push, I tell them “I have no desire to dictate your speech. Use whatever pronouns you want for me, and if they aren’t correct I promise I will not crumble.”

* Pronouns are words that other people use to describe you. To dictate pronouns is to dictate another person’s speech.

* No one ever addresses why a person with gender confusion’s right to coerce speech from other people trumps my right to live in reality. I find it traumatic to be forced into saying things I know are not true. This is significant stress. So why is it not considered cruel and unfair to FORCE me to go along with the pronoun game?

* What I do is first say, “Are you sure it’s okay. I mean, I don’t want to impose.” Given encouragement, I say, “Thank you for the freedom to finally express my inner self. My pronoun is “His Sublime Majesty.”

Why Salvador Dalí Is the Most Counterfeited Artist in the World

In the early 1980s, soon after my first retirement, I got into the art business, buying a half-interest in an art gallery in Boca Raton. I met lots of interesting characters through this relationship – none more interesting than B, an art broker and dealer, who, among other credentials, claimed to have had some sort of exclusive deal with Salvador Dalí to sell the master’s limited edition prints and lithographs during the prior decade.

B was not an aesthete. Nor a student of art history. He didn’t speak like an art critic. Nor did he dress like one (whatever that means). Instead, like so many art dealers and brokers I have met, B struck me as a used car salesman that had figured out he could make more money and work less energetically by cultivating a customer base of a few dozen wealthy buyers and selling them more art than they could ever hope to hang in their lifetimes.

I was (still am) a big fan of Dalí. I believed then that he was a genius, and I still do. But he ruined his reputation as one of the greatest modern artists by developing an addiction to the rock and roll lifestyle, which diminished his production of oil paintings and diminished, too, the quality of everything he did.

During the 1960s, he was developing a reputation as an artistic sellout when he began to pay for his expensive and degenerate lifestyle by selling quickly executed, half-assed paintings, gouaches, and drawings. During the 1970s, he began producing signed lithographs and prints, which, he figured, could bring in more money faster than creating original pieces, however shabby.

And he was right about that. Rather than spending, say, a month on an original oil that might sell for $50,000, he could spend a day making a limited-edition lithograph of 500 pieces and another day signing them, and then sell each for $1,000.

B was one of the brokers he sold those pieces to. “In the beginning, Dalí was satisfied with editions of 200 or 300 or 500,” B told me. “But when he realized he could make much more with editions of 500, 1,500, or 2,500 – by investing only the additional time it took to sign the prints – well, he couldn’t resist the temptation.

“Larger editions were fine with me. He could make more money. And so could I. So, he’d do a print, and I’d pay him for it and then pay the printmaker to have a bunch made. I was out ten or twenty thousand dollars, but that was okay. There was a strong market for his prints. I’d make my profit after I got them signed.

“The problem was, his partying was getting crazy. When I’d visit him to get him to sign the prints, he’d be gone. For days. Sometimes for weeks! So, I told him, ‘Enough is enough!’ I told him that, from then on, he had to sign the blank paper first. He’d sign the blanks. I’d pay him. Then I’d take them to the printer. It was a perfect solution.”

Dalí liked it, too. And he realized that B was not the only dealer that would pay him for signed blanks. So, in the 1960s, he began making similar deals with other dealers. And before long, he was signing thousands of blanks.

With aides at each elbow, one shoving the paper in front of Dalí and the other pulling the signed sheet onto another stack, there was a rumor that he once signed 1,800 sheets an hour for $72,000.

Many of these signed sheets were sold off to dealers who had no connection with Dalí, but went ahead and had the multiples printed themselves. This then led to some crooked dealers producing blank sheets with forged signatures on them.

All told, according to one expert, Dalí signed 40,000 to 60,000 blank sheets that made their way into the market. And that prompted tens of thousands more forgeries to satisfy the public’s demand for authentic Dalís.

By the time I met B, these stories were already out there, and the market for Dalí multiples had become very weak. Pieces that once sold for $10,000 were selling for $1,000. Larger edition pieces that once sold for $1,500 were selling for $150.

You can read more about all of this here.

And here.

Florida Will Soon Be a “Constitutional-Carry” State.

Should I and My Fellow Floridians Be Worried? 

Last month, Florida passed House Bill 543, which eliminated the requirement for Floridians to have a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

RF, my brother-in-law, who is not a DeSantis fan, was not happy about it. “Did you hear what your boy just did?” he asked me.

I hadn’t. He told me.

“That’s scary,” I admitted. I imagined all hell breaking loose when it takes effect on July 2, with people shooting one another in malls, on supermarket checkout lines, in movie theaters, and up and down the entirety of I-95.

Since I had recently done a bit of research on the general effect of gun control laws and found only the weakest evidence that they reduced injuries and deaths, I thought I’d do another, more specific, search. I wanted to find out if the violence increases when citizens are allowed to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.

The first thing I discovered is that it’s not easy to study the issue. Like just about everything else today, gun control has become so politicized that the stuff you find when you go scouting – reports, and anecdotal evidence, and summaries of studies – is almost always biased.

One way this happens is with the terminology. In the legal literature, a distinction is made between “shall-issue” states and “may-issue” states. (Shall-issue states are those that allow citizens to carry without permits.) In the political literature, “shall-issue” laws are called “constitutional-carry” (versus “no-permit”). And other sources equate “may-issue” with “right-to-carry.”

Another problem is that some studies are countrywide and statewide, but gun control regulations often vary by smaller jurisdictions (like counties).

But the biggest problem is that there have been so many studies on the subject, from many different perspectives and using different metrics. On top of that, the results of those studies are often misinterpreted.

For example, the idea that “more guns = less violence” originated from a study published in 1997 that compared gun violence to permit-less concealed-carry regulations from 1977 to 1992. The study concluded that “states implementing shall-issue laws saw significant decreases in rates of violent crime, murder, rape, and assault.”

Apparently, this finding did not sit well with gun control advocates, who raised funding for several more studies that found the opposite result: States that legalized permit-less concealed-carry protocols saw increases in gun assaults by 11% to 15%.

Today, those studies are quoted by gun control advocates. But when I looked at them, I noticed the same “trick” you see in studies published by the medical-industrial complex. They quote differences in relative terms, which is misleading. In the case of those 11% to 15% increases, the actual numbers were something like 5.6 assaults for every 100,000 people, versus 4.9 assaults. That sort of difference is statistically meaningless.

More recently, two meta-studies were done of most of the previous studies – one by the National Research Council and one by the US Dept. of Health and Human Services. They both came to the same conclusion: If there is a difference between jurisdictions that have shall-carry versus will-carry regulations, it is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

That made me feel better. And here’s a second thing that eased my mind: In becoming a shall-carry state, Florida will not be some rogue outlier. It turns out that 25 other states already have shall-carry regulations.

So where does that leave me?

I’m not going to worry about getting caught in a gun fight every time I walk into a 7-Eleven. But I need to remember that anyone anywhere might be packing.

As for gun control regulation? I’m in favor of it. Notwithstanding the data, which I do believe, I’d like to see more, not fewer, requirements. I like the child-protection requirements. I like the cool-down provisions. I also like required gun safety training.

I respect the Second Amendment. Americans have a right to carry guns. But gun control doesn’t negate that right. People also have a right to start businesses, drive cars, operate heavy machinery, and cut hair. And all of those activities require permits and training. (Interesting: In Florida today, it takes 1,200 hours of training to obtain a license to cut hair, 500 hours of training to obtain a massage therapist license, and 240 hours of training to become a licensed manicurist.)

And yes, the bad guys will be able to buy guns without permits and even guns without serial numbers. That won’t prevent the good guys from having guns, too. Everyone will have guns. But if the bad guys get caught carrying illegally, they can be prosecuted. And if they get caught using their guns to commit crimes, they’ll get extra years attached to their sentences.

Anonymous Giving

The Torah says that the highest form of charity is when the giving is done anonymously. One gives for the opportunity to help someone else, without any expectation of social recompence. When we donate to charities via email or mail, we are practicing that.

When the donations are considerable, like millions, one is tempted to be repaid by some form of acknowledgment, such as a plaque on a wall. The great majority of such plaques record for prosperity the name of the donor. A tiny percentage may attribute the gift to “Anonymous.”

(There’s a great episode in Curb Your Enthusiasm about this. Click here.)

There’s another kind of charity – a common form – that is a bit more selfless than getting one’s name on a plaque. I’m thinking of donating one’s time and/or money to charitable causes that do not award donors with recognition. One performs this sort of charity because one wants the benefit of feeling good about contributing to a cause that is virtuous.

And then there is the sort of charity that is anonymous in the sense that neither the donor nor the donee knows one another – random acts of charity, such as helping a stranger change a tire or giving money to a panhandler.

If the random donation is significant, it has the capacity to brighten up someone’s day. And the recompense to the donor is seeing that moment in the eyes of the recipient. I’ve been doing this sort of giving ever since my personal income exceeded my spending, and I can avow from experience that there is a very substantial benefit to the donor, one that can equal or exceed the value of the gift.

I’m hardly alone in this sort of giving. Millions of people all over the world perform random acts of charity every day. Recently, in fact, videotaping such exchanges has become a trope on social media that is fun to watch. You can find at least a dozen new examples on YouTube every day.

Here are two examples:

Click here.

And here.

What I Believe: About People with Gender Dysphoria

And How the Woke Mob Is  Making a Mockery of Them 

In some ways, the transgender debate may be the most important cultural issue of this century. Certainly more important than ageism, xenophobia, and fat phobia. But it’s also more important than sexism, religious animosity, and even racism.

I say that because all the other debates are grounded in some level of shared reality. But transgenderism, as it is being promoted today, is based on an absolute and willful denial of reality. A denial that all rational defenders of the transgender agenda know to be false.

Let me step back for a moment to give you some perspective on my thinking…

I believe there is such a thing as gender dysphoria. I believe it is a real psychological condition that should be taken seriously. But before transgenderism became such a huge political issue, my only thoughts about it came from personal experience.

Longstanding acquaintances of mine had a daughter that began evincing symptoms of gender dysphoria at a young age. The parents struggled with not knowing how exactly to respond for many years. But they took it slowly, recognizing how common it is for young and pre-adolescent children to test out different socially recognized identities. Not just in gender, but in just about every other role, throughout their development. (As every parent knows, and as almost every study has shown, children’s personalities are not firmly established until after adolescence.)

Rather than nudge their daughter one way or the other, the parents took a neutral stance until she had finished high school. By the time she entered college, her transition was, for all intents and purposes, complete. He is today a happy, successful, and charming young man.

Much more recently, I was working on a project for a business I own that required weekly meetings with a team of four people. One of those people was a young man that looked every bit like a young man when we began the project. But gradually, as the weeks and months went by, he began to make small changes towards a more feminine appearance. At the beginning of his transition, I noticed that he was growing his hair, but that didn’t mean anything. And I was a little taken aback when I noticed that his fingernails were painted. But I knew an MMA fighter that painted his toes. By the time he began wearing a touch of makeup here and there, I suspected that something was going on. I wasn’t sure, but I was curious. I asked his manager, “What’s going on with Eric?” Being a younger person with younger person sensibilities, he looked at me like I was crazy.

By that time, we had finished the project and so I had no reason to be back in those offices until nearly a year later. When I did get back, I was introduced to Erica, an attractive and capable young woman. My confusion was gone. I looked forward to working with her in the future.

Those were two good experiences – positive for me and for the people who had transitioned. But I don’t think they are typical of most of what we are seeing today. A disturbingly large number of transgendered celebrities seem to identify more with drag queens than they do with women. And that is one of the things that perplexes me. If gender dysphoria is a real thing, it means that a transgendered woman wants to be a woman, not a man in drag.

These people are imposters. Attention seeking oddballs that are taking advantage of the transgender movement to claim their fifteen minutes of fame. And they are, in my view, an insult to the few people that have true gender dysphoria and deserve our respect and consideration.

A few examples:

* Here’s Dylan Mulvaney, the new icon of transgender woman and her view of what a woman should be.

* Here’s someone that has a psychological condition that needs a new name.

* Here’s a biological man doing what I suppose he thinks is a satire of transgenderism in front of a panel that doesn’t know if he’s serious.

I’ve got a lot more to say on the subject, but that’s enough for today. In future missives, I’ll:

* Give you the factual data on gender dysphoria over the years.

* Explain why the debate about pronouns is actually about free and forced speech.

* Talk about the insanity of allowing transwomen to compete against biological women in any sport, including chess.

* Argue that the transgender movement is not trivial and should not be dismissed… and why, in fact, it is a critical issue about the future of freedom in the “modern” world.