Category: American Life

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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Happy Mother’s Day and AANHPI Month

by philg

I found an Android phone on the sidewalk today. It wasn’t password-protected so I figured it would be easy to find the owner by calling some of his/her/zir/their contacts. This proved more challenging than expected because the entire interface was in Korean. I returned the last five phone calls and nobody answered. Digging into the text messages, however, I found one that contained a “Happy Mother’s Day” meme. I called the associated number and reached the phone owner’s daughter.

Having completed a crash course in Korean for Android users, I consider my Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month off to a good start.

What did the rest of you do for moms? (Keep in mind that, according to one of America’s leading intellectuals, depicted below along with the person who helped prepare the family home for Kwanzaa every December 25, “mom” can be interpreted as “mothers, stepmoms, grandmothers, godmothers, aunties, and all the women in our lives who love, raise, and guide us.” A blind person’s Labrador retriever would be included, I think, since the Canine-American “guides us”.)

What’s a good gift for a mom? How about this translation of some of the works of Confucius, famous for telling us that we need to show filial piety? I’m not sure why it makes sense to pay $35,000 for a stupid white person’s translation of a smart Chinese person’s teachings. Who cares if Joshua Marshman was the first to do a translation back in 1809? Is there any reason to believe that it is better than a modern translation? The photos below are from Raptis, a shop in Palm Beach, Florida.

Here’s another book from the same store, a copy of Ulysses for $300,000. The price might sound unreasonable until you reflect that it would probably take the rest of anyone’s life to get through the tedious work.

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ADHD boom coinciding with older/single parents

by philg

“Trends in Mental Disorders” by Arnold Kling (an economist whom a friend follows):

So why are we seeing an increase in people being labeled as depressed, or autistic, or ADHD?

Some of these labels have become high status. Nonbinary is high status among affluent teenagers. But I do not believe that the desire for status is the main driver.

I suspect that more children are being born with innate mutations, because their parents are older, reducing sperm and egg quality. These mutations result in unusual personality characteristics.

I suspect that children are spending less time with other children. Families are smaller. There are fewer neighborhoods with a lot of children. And there is a reluctance to let children go out on their own seeking children with whom to play. I suspect that having close adult supervision most of the time stunts children’s growth in social competence and confidence.

Children are skilled at manipulating their parents. When parents are easily manipulated, the child’s self-control is less likely to develop. When there are four children, no individual child has a good chance to manipulate parents. When there are one or two, manipulation is easier.

Children are skilled at manipulating their parents. When parents are easily manipulated, the child’s self-control is less likely to develop. When there are four children, no individual child has a good chance to manipulate parents. When there are one or two, manipulation is easier.

I wonder if it’s time for my standard line: “If you think teenage parenting is bad it’s only because you haven’t seen old people with kids.”

Any chance that the above trends will reverse? It doesn’t seem likely among native-born Americans who are college-educated. I talked to a senior at Brown the other day (considering how kids will do almost anything to get into an Queers for Palestine League school these days, she was surprisingly diffident about the overall experience there). She’s moderately religious/conservative and, therefore, might be expected to have more children than average for her cohort. She said that she didn’t want to have any children until she was at least 30 years old (“my 20s are for me”). Also, she didn’t want to have any kids until she’d been married for at least two years (“in case I want to divorce,” she noted, expressing zero commitment to marriage per se (i.e., she would stay married only if it seemed like the best option going forward)). So her life plan was to get married at some point between 26 and 28 and then have children at some point between 30 and 32. This is a recipe, I think, for having exactly the kind of family that Arnold Kling decries (older parents, 1-2 children, maybe just one parent if things don’t go perfectly).

Loosely related…

A screen shot in case this Israel-hating Asian-American is disappeared…

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REAL ID

by philg

The post that was scheduled for May 5, 2025 somehow didn’t get properly handled by WordPress. In order to deliver on my tagline of a posting every day, let me backfill it with a tale of going through a TSA checkpoint: They had a lot of signage about their new demand for REAL ID. I offered my driver’s license and explained “It’s real to me.” #MyTruth

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LLMs combined with offshore and immigrant grifters make supervised bank accounts even more necessary

by philg

I’ve written about this repeatedly based on my interactions with old people… the U.S. desperately needs a simple-to-establish bank account, with associated credit card, that can be supervised by a second person. This would be useful for some young people, but it would be primarily for the elderly to prevent them from being cheated out of their savings and Social Security. The idea is that they could enter into small transactions at reliable merchants without restriction, but if they try to buy something over a threshold amount or transfer funds over a threshold, an Account Protector’s approval is sought, e.g., via text message “Grandma is trying to pay $700 for diet pills advertised online. Press 1 to approve.”

‘Gold Grifters’: Inside the growing scam using couriers to pick up gold bars from victims is a recent ABC story:

Kris Owen, a 79-year-old Vietnam veteran, had planned to spend his golden years in Indiana with his wife, Karen. They wanted to spend more time with his son and travel the world together.

Owen received a pop-up message on his computer in 2023 saying that his personal information was compromised — and was told to call a phone number.

When he did, an individual posing as a federal agent said they would safeguard his money and instructed him to convert some of his savings into gold bars, Owen told ABC News. After weeks of communications and after receiving what he thought was a letter from the FBI, Owen purchased $80,000 worth of gold bars.

“They told me to wrap it in a box … with Christmas wrap paper,” Owen said.

He then took his gold to a grocery store parking lot near his house, he said, expecting to hand it over to a federal agent so the gold could be kept in a secure location. A car soon pulled up next to Owen and he placed the gold in the back seat before the driver took off.

The FBI and a local Indiana police department had Owen go undercover to try to catch an individual who was supposed to receive $50,000 from him. Owen, wearing a wire, met with the individual at a parking lot and placed a box with fake cash in the individual’s back seat.

Law enforcement followed the individual, who they later identified as Abdul Mohammed, and took him in for questioning. He was charged by federal prosecutors with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and two counts of wire fraud.

Mohammed, who later fled the country, was a courier — an individual recruited to pick up gold bars or cash from victims, according to law enforcement officials.

(Our government tortures airlines and private pilots with APIS and eAPIS manifests of who is on every outbound flight and all passengers’ passport details and yet Abdul Mohammed was able to easily leave after being arrested, charged, and then released by our revolving door justice system?)

In an exclusive phone interview, ABC News spoke to a suspected courier from jail as he faces charges in two states for his alleged involvement in gold bar schemes.

Yash Shah, 27, who was originally charged with multiple felonies in 2023 related to the scam, claims he does not know where the gold is going. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years probation, but he was arrested again last November for his alleged involvement in a Maryland case. He is currently being held without bond in a New York detention facility.

“I’m not a criminal or anything like that,” Shah told ABC News. “I’m just a normal person. They [were] just saying … if you wanna make a little more money, you have to go pick up the package, and you have to just drop it over there. That’s it.”

Shah claims he was hired by someone from India and was paid between $800 and $4,000 to pick up packages, some which contained gold bars. His attorney, Nicholas Ramcharitar, said Shah took between five and 10 trips traveling all over the Northeast as a courier.

Mr. Shah wasn’t suspicious when offered 50X what UPS charges for the same service because… he is not a criminal?

What’s the LLM angle?

“These tech support pop-ups that initiate the whole scam emanate from a call center in India,” Delzotto said. “So we have a lot of focus on India with [a lot of] these illegitimate call centers.”

LLMs will be a lot more successful at fooling us than Indian humans (they still say “the reason of my call” instead of “the reason for my call”), so the bleeding out of American wealth to scammers around the world is likely to intensify. Right now our banking system has only two modes: (1) you’re a fully capable adult who can distinguish Agent Abdul Mohammed from a real FBI agent, (2) you’re a mental vegetable who can’t buy socks at Amazon and all of your money is held in trust and the bank takes instructions from the trustee(s). But a typical 79-year-old doesn’t fit well into either of these modes. He/she/ze/they is, one hopes, nearly capable of Mode 1 banking, but some kind of second signature or text message approval or something should be required before $80,000 is withdrawn.

Related, a March 2024 New Yorker story:

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