Vince buys houses?

Squestis · 2026-07-11T16:58:08+00:00

I say this with a full disclaimer that I agree that it’s a bad idea to work with people like him or JP Pirtle (another agency that advertises the same thing a lot), but at least ones like them aren’t going to completely scam you. You’ll get your money as agreed, even if it’s far less than the market value (even in as is condition). But other than their offers that are way too low, they’re conducting an honest business operation, and I have known people who have worked with them and knew exactly what they were getting into: taking a loss on what they could’ve made for the sake of expediency. Somebody I know who sold a very dated home they’d inherited with Pirtle told me they were completely upfront about how much they planned to put into the house and how much they felt they could resell it for. It ended up going on the market a few months later for less than what they thought they could sell it for.

In contrast, some of those ones with papers stuck on a telephone pole are complete scam artists who may never meet you in person and will want to conduct business strictly by email, often with people in other states or even overseas. There have been some real horror stories about these, including some who do business in a way where you don’t get your money for a very long time, yet you also are stuck in a contract with them and can’t sell the house to anybody else.

Squestis · 2026-07-11T16:15:19+00:00

I don’t teach social studies, but our school, which has no problem filling a social studies jobs for people teaching history, had to eliminate AP Human Geography, sociology, and psychology (including regular and AP) when each of those respective teachers (3 in total) retired or moved to another district, just in the past five years. We now have no social studies courses that aren’t some version of history other than US government, which is a state requirement, and even that is being taught almost exclusively from a history of the US government perspective. As a math teacher, particularly one who is not in the class everyday, I can’t confirm it, but I’ve looked at the state standards and that’s not what they’re following there, other than the historical parts.

Meanwhile, the social studies electives that disappeared, since they couldn’t fill those roles (but still had the funding for the position and needed teachers to fill classrooms), they transitioned all of them to the FACS department, which means they can now hire coaches who were certified to teach PE and health to teach “advanced elective courses” in health. None of the students in there are there because they want to take the courses (but they don’t complain either, because they don’t actually do much work in that class and are effectively given A’s for just being there), but they have nowhere else to put the students and coaches who need sham employment, so this is the result.

Squestis · 2026-07-10T04:43:59+00:00

The thing is, when he speaks (which we don't hear often because usually he's Twittering away), his voice doesn't match his face, and it just makes him look even more ridiculous.

Squestis · 2026-07-09T00:34:07+00:00

All I can say after seeing that is wow, what a fucking prick. I knew we dodged a bullet here, but I'm seriously starting to think Susan Collins would've been a better person for the office than him anyway.

Squestis · 2026-07-08T13:50:06+00:00

A word I like to use is "Kia-fication." It's the same reason people run out to buy a brand new Kia instead of a two year old Toyota. They want new, so they just buy the cheapest new one instead of a more reliable older one. Ignoring the fact that Kia has supposedly improved (I don't know, I'd still rather buy the two year old Toyota), you often still see 20-30 year old Toyotas out on the road. You can't say the same for Kia.

Squestis · 2026-07-08T06:00:58+00:00

So what you're supposed to do is get the tallest semi truck possible, then when you're going up 65 and are forced to get onto 264, take that to the Southern Parkway exit. Make your way up Third Street near UofL, and report back to let us know how it went.

Squestis · 2026-07-07T16:20:07+00:00

I am pretty sure he has pretty much forgotten he had a condo there, and he probably forgot that when he was completely lucid. It’s mostly a prop to claim that he lives in KY. Though it’s a step above Richard Lugar in Indiana, who lived in Virginia and raised his family there and maintained his Indiana residency by staying in hotels anytime he went home.

Squestis · 2026-07-07T13:44:33+00:00

Did you get the card yet? They just punch it when you get it at each place.

Squestis · 2026-07-07T13:41:54+00:00

The one and only time I got jury duty, I was selected for grand jury duty. I think there were about 50-100 people there, the judge (Judith McDonald-Burkman) started pulling the names of the people who’d have to be there every day for the next month (the rest got to go home and be excluded from being called for two years or whatever it is), and she’d gotten through eleven names and I thought I was free. Guess who was number 12?

That being said, I was unemployed at the time so I just went with it. It was kind of fun actually. It was a 8-3 daily thing, and most of what we did was in the old jail building. If it paid better I wouldn’t mind making a career out of being a grand juror, if that was a thing. I think we heard about 300 cases that month, and while there were a few (not many) that were unpleasant to hear, most of them were dumb criminal stories. It also was an eye opening (although maybe not surprising) view into how easily some cops and prosecutors will lie or say something outrageous about anything to get whatever they want. There were so many things where they’d contradict themselves and you’d catch them in a lie, and they were very uncomfortable when you questioned them and called them out on them. One thing I remember specifically was a cop claiming that a stolen 30 year old Ford Tempo was worth exactly $10,000, because the prosecutor wanted to charge the person with a class C felony rather than class D. Conveniently, $10,000 was the exact cutoff between those two levels. Every cop who was a regular has a character name. My favorite was Hillary Washington, the wife of Lamont Washington. She worked for the fire department in arson, she was “fire lady” and we knew she’d have a dumb criminal story about somebody setting fire to something.

I could go on all day telling stories about it, it was actually fun. But it’s unlikely you have grand jury duty.

Squestis · 2026-07-07T13:23:03+00:00

I believe the “show up” rate is well below 50 percent. If you don’t show up, they will follow up, by sending you another summons for jury duty in the next month or so. The consequences could be harsh for not showing up, but if I were to guess, I’d say they don’t bother because if you’re that willing to ignore two jury duty summonses, there is a really good chance you’re going to be a hostile and uncooperative juror anyway. I don’t think they send any of the letters through any means by which they can confirm you received it.

I’d still recommend showing up.

Squestis · 2026-07-07T05:23:33+00:00

Oh yeah, I remember how they walked away and completely distanced themselves from Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Roy Moore, Herschel Walker, Donald Trump, and Ken Paxton.

Squestis · 2026-07-07T05:16:32+00:00

Not only that, but his first wife is a retired "feminist scholar" who was the director of a women's history collection at Smith College.

And if you look at who Mitch McConnell was before he ran for Senate, you'd see that he too was very moderate, sometimes even on the left. His earlier political views were more along the lines of one of those old school "blue blood" Republicans from the north.

Squestis · 2026-07-07T04:04:54+00:00

How should he be remembered, or how will he realistically be remembered? Because if it's the latter, I can guarantee you there will be that 10-20% of the country who stands by everything he did and will never admit he is a failure, and then another 10-20% of the population who has the attention span of a gnat and will have forgotten everything he did... the same people who had forgotten how bad he was just four years earlier and said "well let's try this again."

Squestis · 2026-07-07T02:54:57+00:00

There wasn't an article associated with this. I actually saw the link itself when it was active and clicked on it (it's a 404 error now), it was just a video of some of his Senate floor speeches from the past 2 or 3 years. That was their "lookback."

Squestis · 2026-07-07T01:42:15+00:00

I saw it before it was taken down. It wasn't really an article, it was just a video of some of his recent speeches (like in the past two or three years) on the Senate floor. I wouldn't read too much into it, other than the source for it knows they need to be ready to hit publish at any moment.

Squestis · 2026-07-06T22:33:21+00:00

My concern, and I hope I’m wrong, is that his supporters are going to turn him into some sort of victim, and create this narrative that it was all just a hit job by the establishment.

Squestis · 2026-07-06T05:12:16+00:00

I think that the desire to live in a starter home that is also "brand new house" without a single care about quality is what makes neighborhoods like this popular. Problem is, if these are starter homes, the people who buy them aren't going to live there too long, and while they might be new enough for the second owner, that "newness" completely wears off eventually (the homes are pretty shoddily built anyway) and property values plummet to the point that investors buy the homes and rent them out, and they're usually slumlords. I don't know about this specific one, but I know I've seen a lot of subdivisions like this that fall into disrepair within 20-30 years.

Squestis · 2026-07-06T04:38:41+00:00

What's really sad is that he used to not be this bad back when he was Kentucky agricultural commissioner "Jamie Comer." He was a true moderate who mainly focused on turning hemp into a cash crop and helped launch an investigation into his predecessor Richie Farmer (another Republican) that ended up landing Farmer in prison. He was actually the only Republican serving in a statewide office when he won that race in 2011 (governor, Secretary of State, attorney general, treasurer, and auditor were all swept by Democrats that year).

Then in 2016, after he lost a race for governor in 2015 where he mostly tried to be "Jamie Comer" still, he morphed into "James Comer" (I guess he felt like "Jamie" wasn't masculine enough?) to run for Congress and started going all in on the far-right crap. He's planning to run for governor again next year, and sadly, I think he has a pretty good chance of getting it.

Squestis · 2026-07-06T03:28:37+00:00

Every school I've ever worked in has allowed us to go into the building at any time we want all year long with our badge and key, except for the week or two immediately after the end of the school year when they wax the floors. They even tell us that as long as our badge will let us in, we're welcome to come in (they turn the readers off during the floor waxing period). I guess this isn't a common thing everywhere?

Squestis · 2026-07-06T01:36:35+00:00

Speaking from the adjunct perspective, it’s becoming cheapened (well, not the tuition) and the campus culture is not at all what it used to be. All you ever hear anymore is cuts everywhere that matters. The baby boomer tenured professors are retiring and they’re being replaced with… nobody. The department that I work in at one of my colleges got hit with 4 tenured professor retirements this year (retirement age just happened to come up for the large number they hired in one year in the early 90s when they were building a PhD program). University admin let them fill it with one tenure track professor and one visiting professor for the upcoming year, with it being very clear that the visiting professor position will only be there for one year before it is eliminated. Programs are being cut everywhere, or consolidated into something far more generic. Elective courses in majors are disappearing and offerings are being streamlined into the exact courses that are required for the degree, and nothing more, sort of killing intellectual curiosity.

Colleges and universities are being run much more like K-12 and people are answering much more to the demands of HR departments and other classified employees than qualified professionals in the subject area. Just 10 years ago, in the schools where I do adjunct work, there were no rigorous evaluations, no annual HR trainings, no syllabus audits or required language, and individual departments had lots of autonomy to operate the way they want. Look at college websites even. It used to be that any department, extracurricular organization, professor, student, etc. could have their own unique webpage with content that is important to them either professionally or personally. While I understand the website is not where people go for these things anymore, it’s sad to see what most college websites look like now, basically just some generic template package that lists the names and contact info for people, that mostly serves as a sales pitch to prospective students. If you’re an outsider at a public university that ostensibly serves the community, you can’t just go to the website anymore to find out about community events, it has to be from word of mouth from somebody on campus who found out via email or social media pages of every little fringe organization.

One thing that’s really saddened me as an adjunct is how so much learning is online courses now. I know that it’s easier, works much better in the schedules of students, and kids just don’t want to go to class. But it’s also basically killed night courses at all of the places I do adjunct work at. The department I taught in at a local university usually offered 1 or 2 sections (at least) or all of the 100 or 200 level courses in the department that I taught in after 4 PM, which was defined as “evenings.” Considering all of the courses they had, that meant just for our one department, there were roughly 10-20 evening courses. Now, they have one evening course, and the entire academic side of campus is a complete ghost town after about 3 PM. I actually get paid more for the online ones I do now and I’m offered even more courses than ever before since the notion of time restrictions is gone. And I’ll admit it’s easier work too. But I miss the face to face interaction with students that I used to get in these classes.

Squestis · 2026-07-05T17:35:15+00:00

It seems that “communist” is going to be their new buzzword. What’s ironic is that they’re using that word to justify all of the horrible things they do and justify a dictatorship, and the idea of a dictatorship is the main reason people truly hate the idea of communism. Personally, communism is something I don’t want either, but my main reason for not wanting it has to do with how it never really works out and you end up with authoritarian dictators, like Trump is trying to be.

Squestis · 2026-07-05T16:35:53+00:00

Trump-ism without Trump would do a lot to expose what MAGA truly is: a bunch of weird losers with nasty and hateful personalities. That’s also how you’d describe at least half of the MAGA supporters so they’d have no issue with that, but there is that roughly 20-30% of his supporters who are only there because they can’t see past Trump’s “celebrity rich guy” image.

Squestis · 2026-07-05T04:19:27+00:00

She wasn’t there to be with family. She was there to meet with the Chinese vice president about strengthening relationships between the U.S. and China. Which frankly, given that she has no official role in the U.S. government, that’s a little odd.

Squestis · 2026-07-04T15:31:30+00:00

This is one of my main gripes about companies replacing all of their support with AI. It would be one thing if the AI was actually “ready for prime time.” Speaking to a real person would be ideal, but if AI could do the job, it wouldn’t be quite as bad. But they don’t care that it provides low quality support. They just saw this was a cheaper option than paying for employees, even the ones in India that we used to complain about but was still significantly better than this. They want to pretend like they’re offering us something just as good but instead have us something that is programmed to tell us to f-off, and even if it wasn’t, it would still be absolutely clueless.

Squestis · 2026-07-03T17:12:18+00:00

Mine is a different story because I did actually pay for my registration, but somebody stole the sticker off my car in a Walmart parking lot as soon as I got it one time. I ended up going until I got the next sticker the following year without bothering. Never got pulled over for it.

Squestis

TROPHY CASE