Category: American Life

Desperate enough to rent a billboard…

by philg

… but not desperate enough to spend time with someone who doesn’t share her love for Kacklin’ Kamala.

New York Post:

What do we see at marrylisa.com?

  • 41 years old (also, “Wants marriage and kids within the next 2-3 years with the right man”?)
  • Loves cats!

Her “non-negotiable items” include the following:

  • Must be Democratic or liberal or left leaning politically.

Preferences for a mate:

  • 35-45. Flexible within a year or two at most.

One open question is why she insists on a single gender ID (“a man”). She’s a self-described Bay Area liberal. Why the heteronormativity? Second question: How is she going to produce “kids” (plural) starting at age 44?

In the background:

  • Lisa didn’t focus on dating in her 20’s and early 30’s – she prioritized finishing college, starting a career, learning new skills and working on personal development.

Let’s ignore the improper punctuation (should be “20s and early 30s”) and ask whether her life plan made sense. The New York Post article says that Lisa Catalano is “a vintage clothes retailer”. In other words, she could have the job that she has without ever having finished high school, much less having earned a college degree. So she spent the years in which she was most attractive as a mate, plus tons of tuition money and foregone income, to earn a degree that has no value to her at the moment. The result of this plan is that she’s out on Tinder at the age of a normal human grandmother.

Loosely related, “‘Men seem to make life for women worse’: single US women share the woes of dating in 2025” (Guardian):

By 2030, 45% of prime working age women in the US, defined as women aged between 25 and 44, will be single according to Census Bureau historical data and Morgan Stanley forecasts – the largest share in history.

Kellie, 43 [i.e., grandmother age], from Georgia, joined the substantial number of respondents who felt that social media narratives had made dating toxic and pitted men against women.

“I wish I could have met my person before the stupid gender wars, social media and red pill rhetoric that has ruined people’s view of dating and marriage,” she said.

Danielle, 29, a public relations professional from Tennessee, said her future partner would need to be “kind, thoughtful, emotionally available, considerate, reliable, and responsible”, but also “college educated”.

“I’m very disheartened by the shortage of quality men,” she added. “Men my age are less educated, their social skills are abysmal, and now they’re running into the arms of Trump and ‘incel’ forums.”

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Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding?

by philg

People in the U.S. who say that we have a critical shortage of affordable housing and that income and wealth inequality are a “crisis” simultaneously say that we must keep our borders open to low-skill migrants, elderly and disabled migrants, and others who will never be able to pay a median rent. The people who observe that the U.S. health care system is unusable due to lengthy waiting lists and capacity shortages also say that we should bring in child migrants with diseases that will entail months of hospital stays (at a cost of $millions and with a result of extending waiting lists for native-born Americans; see, by contrast, Australia).

Let’s compare this to animal hoarding, as explained by the Minnesota-based Animal Humane Society (I picked Minnesota because the noble citizens there are passionate about importing as many Somalis as possible, regardless of education level or propensity to work):

Animal hoarding is an accumulation of animals that has overwhelmed a person’s ability to provide minimum standards of care. … Rescue hoarders believe they’re the only people that can adequately care for their animals. Their hoarding begins with a strong desire to save animals. They also may have an extensive network of enablers, and are in complete denial about the dangerous or unhealthy conditions in which the animals are living.

Does the analogy hold up? Below, from Politico, a situation that has changed exactly nobody’s mind in Maskachusetts regarding the merits of open borders.

Related:

  • the UK is jammed with advocates for open borders despite a 2023 report by Human Rights Watch about “this system [of taxpayer-funded everything for migrants] has increasingly been plagued by serious deficiencies, in violation of people’s human rights to housing, food, education, health, and social security”
  • national ASPCA page: Animal “hoarding” can be identified when a person is housing more animals than they can adequately and appropriately care for. … guardians believe they are helping their animals and deny this inability to provide minimum care.
  • “‘You’re not welcome here’: Australia’s treatment of disabled migrants” (BBC): It is one of few countries that routinely rejects immigrants’ visas on the basis of their medical needs – specifically if the cost of care exceeds A$86,000 ($57,000; £45,000) over a maximum of 10 years. New Zealand has a similar policy but Australia’s is much stricter. … The government defends the law as necessary to curb government spending and protect citizens’ access to healthcare.
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U.S. population has doubled and housing construction has remained constant

by philg

Happy National Construction Appreciation Week to those who celebrate.

We’re supposedly building roughly the same number of new houses and apartments that we did in 1960 when the U.S. population was 180 million, i.e., roughly half of what it is now. St. Louis Fed:

During the intervening years we had an influx of about 80 million immigrants (Pew for 1965-2015 then add for the extra years before and after) and we are also home now to the children of those immigrants. How is it possible that we haven’t been building more houses in the aggregate?

One possible answer is that families are much larger today and, therefore, we have more people in the typical house or apartment. But 1960 was prior to the age of no-fault (unilateral) divorce. ChatGPT:

Another possible answer is that we have people living in tents, California-style. But Brookings says “Our calculations show that the U.S. housing market was short 4.9 million housing units in 2023 relative to mid-2000s”. I.e., if we assume a household size of 2, at most 10 million Americans and migrants are living in tents. (Note that this 10 million number is roughly comparable to the number of undocumented migrants who came across the border during the the Biden-Harris administration.)

A final possible answer is that we are living in shabby old houses. I asked ChatGPT:

Maybe this is good because it shows that we did such a great job building homes circa 1960-1980 that they’re not wearing out? ChatGPT says it is not good:

I can’t figure out how this happened. We are informed that migrants are skilled eager construction workers. Labor is 30-50 percent of the cost of building a single-family house. We are richer in migrants than at any time in U.S. history. Why wouldn’t we have at least the same ratio of housing starts to population size that we had in 1960 before we began to be enriched by migrants?

In fact, the New York Times says it is more or less impossible for us to have built any houses without immigrants: “How Would We Build Homes Without Immigrant Labor and Foreign Materials?” (April 1, 2025)

Related:

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A visit to the United Flight 93 crash site

by philg

As part of the return trip from EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) this year, we stopped at the Flight 93 National Memorial. It’s a 30-minute drive from the idiot-proof ridgetop airport that serves Johnstown, Pennsylvania (see Climate Change Reading List: Johnstown Flood).

The architecture is moving and designed around a walkway that follows the flight path of the airliner that jihadis had hoped to turn into a weapon against the U.S. Capitol. The path picks up after you go to a lower section of the memorial where the Boeing 757 actually crashed.

The building itself contains a lot of information about 9/11, not just the Flight 93 history. Visitors can listen to three phone messages to family members left by passengers on Flight 93.

Here are some of the outdoor signs:

A Harley is parked just outside the main building and includes Todd Beamer‘s final recorded words: “Let’s Roll”.

The walkway to the Wall of Names:

There’s a 93-foot-tall Tower of Voices of wind-driven chimes that look like aircraft parts (audio recording).

It’s a fitting memorial to a group of people who gave their lives in order to spare the lives of Americans on the ground.

Here’s the Hollywood version with the “Let’s Roll” line about 4 minutes in:

RIP especially to the crew: Lorraine Bay, Jason Dahl, Sandra Bradshaw, Wanda Green, LeRoy Homer Jr., CeeCee Lyles, and Deborah Welsh. Airline crews enable us to live richer lives by assuming a higher level of risk every day than those of us who earn our wages by flying desks.

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Diversity tour of Shaker Heights near Cleveland, Ohio

by philg

Photos taken walking around a rich white neighborhood of Shaker Heights, Ohio back in July…

Joe Biden won 90 percent of the vote among the folks here (Wikipedia). Quite a few houses sported political signs, 100 percent of them advocating for progressive Democrat points of view. Example from a $1 million house (a fortune by Rust Belt standards!):

Maybe the owner doesn’t want to replace the sign with one that is better condition because that wouldn’t communicate that he/she/ze/they has had a longstanding relationship with Black Lives Matter. What would happen if a Black Life from Cleveland proper wanted to dip into the “public” Shaker Heights swimming pool? Unless accompanied by a resident, he/she/ze/they would be excluded due to non-residency:

We did find some genuine diversity in the Van Aken District. One visitor was dressed in a full burqa with eye slit. Her companion wore a modest abaya with parts of her face showing and everything else covered. They walked by this clothing store whose message wasn’t exactly Islamic:

None of the closeted conservatives of Shaker Heights had the temerity to display any political message outside of their homes. One of the better examples of independent thinking was this house with a “resist” sign, an upside-down American flag, and a Ukrainian flag:

A sampling of the signs in front of some other $1 million houses:

I wonder if these signs help maintain neighborhood political monoculture by discouraging anyone who disagrees with the posted messages from buying a house. This would result in an increase in happiness among residents, according to Harvard University research as covered by the New York Times: “The downside of diversity” (2007).

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

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Why isn’t Cleveland gentrified?

by philg

Some photos from a recent trip to Cleveland. Here’s some signage from the Cleveland History Center:

By 1920, according to the local history nerds, Cleveland was rich in precious immigrants, had achieved a dream level of diversity (30 different ethnic groups), and was “progressive”. Just a few years later, though, the economic and population growth was over. It doesn’t seem as though Cleveland per se has ever recovered even as many of its suburbs have prospered and even though Cleveland is home to one of the world’s most successful health care enterprises, the Cleveland Clinic.

Nearly every other American downtown has become gold-plated. How did Cleveland manage to fail?

Across town at the Aquarium, the scientists say that immigrants “cause harm to the habitat”:

Back to the history center… It’s free to anyone who wisely refrains from work (EBT card) and they’ve preserved their COVID signage and mask-wearing habits:

The museum reminds those who are buying Cirrus SR22 G7s at $1.4 million (now fully deductible in Year 1 due to the recent One Beautiful Bill) that we live in an inflation-free society. A P-51 Mustang that could take off at 12,000 lbs. and cruise at 315 knots cost $50,000 brand new or $3,500 lightly used:

If Tesla can get Optimus to work, how about a return to wood-sided cars? The robot can apply polish to the wood every week:

The museum’s collection is especially strong in hybrid and electric cars, some more than 100 years old. Visitors are reminded that Cleveland was at one time a close second to Detroit in mass production of automobiles (which raises the question of why Cleveland auto manufacturing faded into insignificance).

The museum was hosting a special show of Islamic-American fashion:

A temporary exhibition featured Black photographers and, as it happened, all of the photographs on display were of Black subjects (i.e., there weren’t photos of architecture, landscape, or nature taken by Black photographers, but only pictures of Black people by Black people):

(More than half of the money for any museum like this comes from taxpayers, either through deductibility of donations or from direct grants from the government. So taxpayers are funding exhibitions from which some artists/photographers are excluded due to skin color, apparently contrary to the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.)

In a similar vein, the museum had a show devoted to women and politics, ignoring the other 73 gender IDs recognized by Science.

I wonder if nonprofit orgs are, after government and universities, principal sources of division in American society.

Circling back to Cleveland, though, why is this waterfront city such a spectacular failure?

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The Epstein Files

by philg

People are expressing dismay that none of the people who partied with Jeffrey Epstein (Emmanuel Goldstein?) are being prosecuted and that we’re being denied access to a possible list of those people.

I’m not too interested in a list of customers for the world’s oldest profession, but I find it fascinating that people can simultaneously hold the following two ideas in their heads:

  1. Jeffrey Epstein was a monster because he surrounded himself with paid young females, some of whom might have been younger than 18 and possibly even as young as 14 (the age of consent in Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, etc.)
  2. we need millions more immigrants from places where a standard marriage age for girls is 12
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Turn golf courses in pro-immigration states into housing?

by philg

The U.S. population has been booming due to immigration (Pew):

Most of the migrants are low-skill and, therefore, don’t earn enough to fund the construction of an apartment, even if the land were made available for free (see City rebuilding costs from the Halifax explosion and a calculation that even two median earners in Maskachusetts don’t earn enough).

The “housing affordability crisis”, therefore, gets worse every year (Brookings) and it seems to be reasonably well correlated with immigration:

How about this idea: use eminent domain to take golf courses and turn them into housing. A typical golf course is reasonably close to jobs and about 170 acres in size. I previously calculated that Vatican City, about 109 acres in size, could hold 50,000 migrants if developed like a Chinese apartment complex (any migrant-loving pope, therefore, could take in 50,000 migrants if he chose to follow the advice that he gives to other nations). So each golf course certainly could house 50,000 people in high rises.

Golf courses tend to be enjoyed by the elite so this kind of taking would have the salutary effect of reducing inequality.

A reasonable objection to this plan is that not every American agrees on continued population expansion via low-skill immigration. To keep it fair, therefore, the plan would be implemented only in those states where a majority of voters selected the pro-immigration presidential candidate. Inequality-decrying elites in California, Maskachusetts, and New York, for example, would give up their golf courses in order to ensure affordable housing for migrants (with some spillover into the market for all housing) and continued enrichment by migrants (since migrants wouldn’t feel any pressure to move away).

Maybe Palo Alto, California, Stanford University, and Governor Gavin Newsom could cooperate on the first golf course->housing complex transformation starting with the Stanford Golf Course.

Related:

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AI Parental Supervision for Teenage Parties

by philg

A friend’s 9th grader in Maskachusetts, to her father, regarding a 2 pm end-of-school-year party: “Can I tell my friends’ parents there will be parental supervision?” My friend had to commit to being home so that the studious youngsters wouldn’t go Full Hunter Biden in the TV room.

In a variation of Why doesn’t ChatGPT tell us where to find items in our houses? (cameras all over the house keeping track of where items have been set down) why not delegate the supervision of teenagers to cameras/AI? There could be a database table of possible transgressions, e.g., “CP1” for “crack pipe prepared but not lit”, and then a locally run model (for privacy, the videos wouldn’t leave the house) would look for each situation. Parents in MA, CA, NY, and DC area could adjust the AI so that it flagged cisgender heterosexual sex acts but allowed 2SLGBTQQIA+ exploration (a one-click “bathhouse mode“?).

Related:

  • MYLO AI pool alarm (it says that it can work without WiFi so presumably nearly all of the processing is done locally)
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Are America’s rich people betting on the rich becoming more concentrated and isolated?

by philg

“The Ultra Wealthy Are Riding Out the Market Chaos in Luxury Real Estate” (WSJ):

Despite a chill in the overall housing market, ultraluxury home sales in areas like New York, South Florida and Los Angeles are accelerating as the wealthy buyers bet on real estate’s long-term value. Since February, the number of homes sold for $10 million or more has surged in major markets nationwide, according to an exclusive analysis by The Wall Street Journal. Between Feb. 1 and May 1, sales at that price point in Palm Beach, Fla., surged 50% from the same period last year, while sales in Miami-Dade County jumped 48.5% year-over-year, according to public records and local multiple listing service data. In the luxury ski destination of Aspen, Colo., sales jumped 43.75% in that same period, followed by Los Angeles County at 29% and Manhattan at 21%.

When President Trump’s tariffs were first announced, some wealthy buyers tapped the brakes and backed out of deals. In recent weeks, however, real-estate observers have been surprised to see a wave of big-ticket sales across the country.

The largest was the $225 million sale of a residential compound in Naples, Fla., in late April, the country’s second-most expensive home sale ever recorded. The seller was tied to the DeGroote family of Canada, property records show. The same week, billionaire David Hoffmann paid $85 million for a waterfront property nearby.

Home buyers at lower price points, by contrast, are holding off on buying and selling amid the chaos, agents said. For Miami homes below $20 million, for example, listing prices have dropped 10% to 20% since the start of the trade war, said agent Danny Hertzberg of Coldwell Banker.

“The most bullish buyers seem to be the highest-net worth buyers,” said Hertzberg, who knows of at least three Miami homes in contract to sell for $40 million or more. “The rest of the market is soft—frozen in some aspects—whereas the top of the market is accelerating in the number of sales and prices.”

The estimates of construction costs don’t seem right:

Hoffmann, an activist investor, already owned a smaller home in Naples but was searching for a larger compound in the area for five years. “This wasn’t a spur of the moment thing,” he said. The $85 million house, which measures about 17,200 square feet with eight bedrooms, ticked all the boxes in terms of design, size, quality and location. He is also in contract to buy the adjacent property with a guesthouse, bringing the total purchase price to just over $100 million. The two properties had been listed for a combined $125 million.

Hoffmann said he has diverse investments, including a “significant” amount of money in the stock market, but isn’t worried about short-term fluctuations. Moreover, he felt he got a good deal on the Naples home, since it would cost about $110 million to build today.

Even at $1,000 per square foot, a 17,200-square-foot-house would cost only $17 million to build.

Especially in higher-end neighborhoods of South Florida, a physical house is seen as a depreciating asset that will require a bulldozing or a gut rehab after 20 years. In my brain, the only ways that it could make sense to consider such an asset an “investment” are (1) interest rates are near 0 percent and it is easy to get a 90-95 percent mortgage, (2) an expectation that the land underneath will become much more valuable. Interest rates are not close to 0 percent anymore. The only reason that land would rise dramatically in price is if rich Americans decide that they need to cluster together even more tightly.

(See the classic 1997 “A Long Run House Price Index: The Herengracht Index, 1628–1973” in which real estate doubled in value… over 345 years; “The Amsterdam rent index: The housing market and the economy, 1550–1850” (2012) is similarly discouraging regarding appreciation potential beyond whatever is happening in the larger economy; a 2002 paper by Gregory Clark (of The Son Also Rises fame) found that constant-quality rents actually did rise substantially in England between 1550 and 1909.)

Why should we care? Rich Americans control our political parties, especially the Democrats (The Nation). If the rich are concentrated in just a handful of neighborhoods they have less reason to care about what happens to the rest of us. It might be rational to support filling the U.S. with Tren de Aragua members if you are assured that you will never encounter one.

Some porn from the WSJ (the $51 million Palm Beach, Florida house that Bren Simon, widow of the real estate tycoon Mel Simon, recently bought):

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