Tom Augenthaler

Japan is the only major economy where a house loses 50% of its value in 10 years and hits zero in 22. By government statute. The reason 9 million homes sit empty has nothing to do with "overlooked opportunity." Japan's tax code charges 6x more property tax on vacant land than land with a structure on it. Owners keep rotting houses standing because demolishing them triggers a tax penalty. The akiya crisis is a tax distortion, not a buyer's market. The renovation math is where most foreigners get wrecked. A $15,000 house in Kyushu needs $30,000-$80,000 in renovation. Japanese banks won't give you a mortgage without permanent residency or years of employment history in Japan. You're paying cash for a structure the Japanese government officially considers worthless. Then the resale trap. If a house was hard to sell in the first place, selling it again later is equally difficult. Rural Japanese land doesn't appreciate. The population in these areas is declining so fast that some villages will literally cease to exist within 20 years. You're buying into a market where your only potential buyers are other foreigners who saw the same viral tweet. One guy who actually made it work, a Swedish model turned renovator, spent $110K total on purchase plus renovation for a single property. It brings in $11K/month in short-term rental revenue now. But he learned Japanese, moved there full-time, built community relationships for years, and got a minpaku license that caps rentals at 180 days per year in most areas. The Italy comparison tells the real story. Those €1 homes came with mandatory renovation commitments of €15,000+ within three years or the town claws back the property. Japan's version is gentler but the underlying dynamic is identical: governments paying people to repopulate areas that economics has already abandoned. The opportunity is real for a very specific person. Someone who wants to live in rural Japan, speaks or is learning Japanese, has cash, and treats the purchase as a lifestyle decision with a negative expected financial return. For everyone else reading this as a real estate arbitrage, the 9 million empty houses are empty for a reason.

Lobster is currently served in the finest restaurants in the world at prices that require a moment of consideration before ordering. In colonial Massachusetts, it was considered so contemptibly poor a food that servants negotiated contracts specifically limiting how often they could be fed it. Three times a week was the legal maximum in some indentures. More than that was considered cruel and unusual. The lobster washed up on beaches in piles two feet deep after storms. People raked it off the shore and fed it to pigs. To prisoners. To the destitute who had no other option. Grinding it into fertiliser was considered a dignified use. Eating it yourself, if you had any choice, was considered a mark of poverty so low that it required explanation. The journey from pig feed to prix fixe required two things: scarcity and distance. The coastal lobster population was fished down. As it became less abundant, the price rose. As the price rose, it became aspirational. The railways arrived and took live lobster to inland cities where no one had ever seen one, and the inland city decided it looked exotic, and exotic meant expensive, and expensive meant desirable. The lobster did not change. The supply changed. The story followed the supply. The same animal. The same meat. The same nutritional profile. One century: too embarrassing to admit you ate it. Next century: something you photograph before touching. Nothing about the lobster justified the new position.

🇫🇷🇺🇸🇮🇷 A French general at Trump’s plan to build a runway inside Iran to fly out uranium under active bombing: “American officials should stop snorting cocaine between meetings.”

The diamond engagement ring was invented by an ad agency in 1947. Before that, only 1 in 10 American brides got one. The company behind it, De Beers, was worth $9.2 billion three years ago. Today that number is $2.3 billion, and its owner is trying to find a buyer. In 1940, diamonds were a luxury for the rich. Nobody proposed with one unless they had serious money. De Beers had a warehouse full of diamonds and no customers, so they hired NW Ayer, an ad firm out of Philadelphia. A copywriter named Frances Gerety came up with four words: “A Diamond is Forever.” NW Ayer paid Hollywood studios to write diamond proposals into movie scripts. They planted stories in gossip columns about which rock some actress just got. They invented the “two months’ salary” rule, the idea that a man should spend two months of income on a ring. None of that existed before. It was all marketing. By the 1990s, 8 out of 10 American brides wore diamond engagement rings. Then De Beers did it again in Japan, going from 5% to 60% in 14 years. Advertising Age called it the greatest advertising slogan of the 20th century. They were right. The whole business ran on one trick: make diamonds seem rare. De Beers controlled most of the world’s supply but only released a small amount each year. That artificial shortage kept prices sky-high. And the “forever” in the slogan had a second job: if nobody resells their diamond, supply stays tight and prices stay up. Lab-grown diamonds blew that apart. You can now grow a diamond in a lab that is the same thing, atom for atom, as one pulled out of the ground. Costs 80–85% less. In 2019, only 6% of engagement rings in America had a lab-grown stone. By 2025, that number was 61%. That’s from The Knot’s annual survey of 10,000+ newlywed couples. People are buying bigger rings (1.9 carats on average, compared to 1.6 for mined) and keeping the savings. De Beers saw this coming. In 2018, they launched their own lab-grown jewelry brand called Lightbox, priced at $800 per carat. The idea was to make lab-grown look like cheap costume jewelry so people would still pay a premium for “real” diamonds. Prices tanked 90% anyway. By 2025, American grocery stores were selling lab-grown diamond rings for $200. De Beers shut Lightbox down last May. Since 2023, De Beers has lost nearly $7 billion in value. It lost over $500 million in 2025 alone and has about $2 billion in diamonds sitting in storage that nobody is buying. Its parent company, Anglo American, is now in what they’re calling “advanced discussions” to sell off the whole thing. A 137-year-old company, dumped. The greatest ad campaign ever made convinced a planet that a common carbon crystal was worth two months of your salary. The product that’s killing it just proved you can grow the same crystal in a factory for pocket change.

The modern employee is now a contractor. And most haven't realized it. • You can be laid off at any time with one email. • The work you do is becoming project based. • Company loyalty is dead. • And workplace families are now a HR scam. In the digital age, everyone will become a one-person business. Instead of one employer you'll have multiple and call them customers. This is good news for high agency people. And it forces you to think like an owner and be self-sufficient. The people who will win are those who make sales and marketing a habit. Because without it, you'll have no new leads. Which means no new customers. Embrace the trend. Become a business. Think like an entrepreneur.

Crazy Frank Sinatra!

omg this is one of the cutest things I have ever seen.. The little beaver temper tantrum noises … 🥹

Teaching kids the importance of historic preservation this morning at Fourth Creek Burying Grounds in Statesville, NC. The event was hosted and taught by Scott Stevenson and he did a great job of teaching them the correct methods of cleaning headstones. This was a good way to start the day!

They lied to you about cheese…

The best apartment amenity isn't a dog park. It's a neighborhood you actually want to walk around in. Seegars just opened in the Cedars. Sandwiches, coffee, newspapers, martinis. Right next door is a legendary Dallas dive bar with a pool table and no windows (Mike's Gemini). Rhode & Sons hat shop opened late last year. Authentic hat shaping by hand. Four Corners Brewing is down the street, Sandwich Hag is around the corner, and Lee Harvey's has been here 50 years. Old City Park is great and getting better. We opened a 76-unit apartment building right in the middle of all this three weeks ago. We break ground on a bigger project one block over this year. We plan to own in this neighborhood for the next decade. Not because of cap rates or IRR. Because every new merchant that opens makes everything around it worth more. The Cedars is early. We like early.