Photos from Day 2 (yesterday) of PBI’s reincarnation as DJT (“Donald J. Trump International Airport”)…
A nod to Donald Trump’s famous passion for fine art:
Purely functional signage:
Note that the (1988) terminal remains dedicated to Navy fighter pilot David McCampbell, who became famous by shooting down airplanes (maybe not the best possibility to remind passengers of as they check their bags?) and then retired to Palm Beach County:
The history of the airport is preserved:
The renaming is a rather bizarre turn of events given that Trump has been the airport’s worst enemy ever since he purchased Mar-a-Lago, notably in obstructing the expansion of 10R/28L to accommodate “real airplanes” and, thus, add flights (now it is just 3214×75′ vs. 10001×150′ for 10L/28R). Mar-a-Lago is indeed almost directly in line with 10R so Trump’s fight against the airport wasn’t irrational. This article describes a history of conflict going back to 1995:
A 1995 lawsuit by Trump over airport noise ended with the county agreeing to lease Trump the land where he later built Trump International Golf Club. A 2010 lawsuit by Trump over airport noise was dismissed.
Here’s the geometry that makes the conflict inevitable:
Today is a dark day for billionaire Democrats who’ve been avoiding New York City and New York State income tax by living 183 days per year in Palm Beach. Their Gulfstreams are now parked at “DJT”, President Donald J. Trump International Airport. Google is #Resisting. If you say that you want to fly from an airport named after the worst U.S. president ever to one named after the best U.S. president ever (JFK gave us the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and open borders (Lyndon Johnson had to finish the last two)), Google Flights responds that nothing is available and that one must fly instead from “PBI”:
(Maybe because the IATA code won’t officially update until August? On the third hand, the site could silently fix the discrepancy and simply display flights from what is still “PBI” for baggage tags.)
Airnav’s budget is smaller than Google’s, but their site is fully up to date with today’s change:
Garmin pilot shows that a new FAA VFR chart is apparently available:
Just a few more minutes of Pride and there won’t be any 2SLGBTQQIA+ holidays until Nonbinary Awareness Week begins in 13 days.
Here’s a typical celebration in our neighborhood: “Congratulations to Rice-Bound Britton”.
Separately, does it make sense to congratulate Bitton for choosing a $100,000/year school, even one that absurdly claims to be “ranked as a best value in higher education”? If Britton got into Rice she surely would have qualified for the Bright Futures scholarship, thus cutting University of Florida tuition to $0 from $6700/year. She probably would have qualified for the Benacquisto Scholarship, which also pays for housing, food, textbooks, fees, etc. Rice is ranked #17 by US News while University of Florida is ranked #30. Rice ranks higher, but is it $400,000 higher? ChatGPT, asked which school has the better climate: “For a typical August–May school year, I’d pick Gainesville, FL as the better climate overall, especially for kids and outdoor life. Houston has milder winters, but Gainesville has a more pleasant fall–spring stretch, cooler nights, less big-city heat-island effect, and a less flood-prone feel.” I personally love the art museums of Houston, but can’t remember seeing college kids in them. Air quality is, of course, much better in Gainesville since Floridians don’t spend all of their time and energy refining petroleum.
ChatGPT says that UF is stronger than Rice for undergraduates in some areas, including nuclear engineering (maybe now that we’ve surrendered to the Iranians they will send their future bomb developers to UF?), pre-vet, anything agricultural (AI-proof?), accounting, real estate/construction/development (AI-proof?), education, pre-health other than pre-med, materials engineering, etc. In a lot of engineering disciplines, our AI overlord says that the schools are close, but presumably Rice is less of a herd experience.
Europeans object to being mocked for their lack of air conditioning on the grounds that, pre-Climate Change, there were at most a few weeks per year when they would have wanted to use it. Note that this is partly due to European tolerance for a wider range of indoor temps than we spoiled Americans. They probably wouldn’t turn on A/C until their interiors were 8-10 degrees warmer than what would motivate an American to open up the WiFi thermostat app on his/her/zir/their phone.
Because of American profligacy with fossil fuels, Europe now has brutal heat waves (example from 1911; one that afflicted Paris in 1757) that make their decision to reject A/C appear stupid, but in reality they are the smart/wise ones.
Maybe, however, there is an analogous situation here in the U.S.: should a house in South Florida be equipped with heat? Outdoor temps drop below a comfortable room temperature for only a few weeks per year, analogous to outdoor temps being higher than room temp in Europe for only a few weeks per year. Houses are well insulated in South Florida because they’re almost all new. There is no historical weather that could reduce the indoor temp of a modern South Florida house to a dangerously cold level. Just as Europeans say that they can deal with typical heat by closing shutters, opening windows, jumping in the local canal, etc., a South Floridian without heat during a severe cold weather event could dig through the closet for a sweater and long pants, use an electric blanket or mattress pad at night, etc. Here’s one of the most extreme cold events that ChatGPT managed to find for Miami, which included a low of 28 degrees:
Running heat in South Florida is incredibly wasteful because (1) it is usually a resistive “heat strip” inside the air handler (the latest houses have fully insulated refrigerant lines in both directions and, therefore, heat pump heating capability), and (2) whatever heat is added to the house will eventually have to be pumped back out using electricity for cooling.
What is the observed behavior? Every house, by code, is built with heat capability. People turn on the heat as soon as they feel uncomfortable. As noted above, the latest houses even have heat pumps, maybe due to federal government tax incentives that encourage this super-wasteful-in-south-florida investment ($thousands extra in capital that lasts 15 years to save a couple of $hundred in electricity every few years).
If Climate Change were to cause South Florida to be subjected to a Maskachusetts-style December, Floridians wouldn’t die like the stoic Europeans. Nor would they get into a brawl at Walmart over space heaters. Houses here are already equipped to handle a multi-day freeze. The damage would be limited to higher FP&L bills (still, probably much lower than in MA, though, because rates here in FL are about one-third per kWh of what my friends who’ve remained Righteous are paying!).
As noted above, we could also explain the apparent difference in preparedness as due to a difference in tolerance for discomfort, with Americans being the wimps!
Related:
Art Palm Beach (cavernous yet nice-and-warm convention center despite record-low (for the dates) overnight freezing temps in the middle of a two-week cold spell, the most extreme since 2010)
Here’s a disturbing proposal from a politician whose policies I generally agree with:
Today in Tampa, I outlined the Save Our Homes from Excessive Property Taxes plan that will eliminate taxes on homesteads.
Property tax revenue collected by local governments has nearly doubled in the past seven years (from $32 billion to $60 billion) and is expected to reach an… pic.twitter.com/3ZcexD9L7X
While I don’t enjoy paying property tax, the idea that the majority of Floridians eligible to vote will soon pay nothing seems like a recipe for much faster growth in county/local government spending. (Many Florida voters already pay next to nothing because they’re taxed on the original purchase price and perhaps that is what accounts for the rapid rise in county spending that Gov. DeSantis decries.)
If the majority of Floridians aren’t paying property tax, won’t they vote for every blue sky spending dream that counties and cities put forward? That’s how it works at the federal level. The majority pay either nothing or next to nothing and have voted the U.S. into the world’s largest or second largest welfare state, as a percentage of GDP (we vie with France for the title). Even if a homeowner who isn’t taxed receives only 1 penny of benefit for every additional $1 million spent it would still be rational for him or her to vote for increased spending.
Is there a method to Ron DeSantis’s apparent madness? I’m sure that he understands politics much better than I do, but I am struggling to find merit in narrowing the tax base and feel that the experiment has already been run on the American people. If the goal is limiting county spending, why not a state-imposed limit on county/local government spending? Take the 75th percentile of per-capita spending in 2025 and impose that as a limit, adjusted annually for inflation, on all Florida counties. A county that is already over the limit would have five years to come down into alignment with the law. This might force counties to eliminate affordable housing subsidies, for example, which have the potential to be infinitely expensive as well as certainly unequal (some people get below-market-rate housing; others, equally virtuous and equally situated, are forced to pay market rates).
Maybe the method in the apparent madness is that homesteaded property isn’t that important to county budgets, e.g., for Miami-Dade just 7 percent of the total budget. ChatGPT says it is 9 percent of the total Palm Beach County budget. Both of these counties have a lot of commercial real estate, but property tax as a whole isn’t the lion’s share of the budget as I would have expected.
Miami-Dade: Residential homesteaded property tax is about ~$0.88 billion — just 6.9% of the $12.9 billion FY 2025‑26 budge. Removing it entirely leaves 12BB to spend: Miami-Dade last operated at less than 12BB in FY ‘23‑24. So you could eliminate completely and still operate at… https://t.co/dbwU06Hs8J
Republicans in general seem to be competing with Democrats in the “make the rich pay for everything” department. As noted above, I don’t see how this can work in a democracy where the people paying nothing have the right to vote for unlimited enhancements to whatever they’re receiving from a government funded by a minority that can be trivially out-voted. Maybe it can work in California and New York City where AI and Wall Street actually do generate infinite wealth on a recurring basis, but Florida isn’t home to NVIDIA and the AI companies that use NVIDIA chips.
New York City (and maybe the state as well) are generating outrage by proposing to tax residential real estate that isn’t a primary residence at a higher rate than the same property would pay if occupied by somewho who was a full-time NYC resident.
What other city or state indulges in this outrageous abuse of society’s successful? Florida! Let’s look at starter homes in Palm Beach. Here’s one that was purchased for $4.45 million in 2011 and is today worth $14.3 million (Zillow).
The tax assessment is still less than the purchase price, presumably due to the fact that the assessed value for a “homestead” (primary residence) can’t go up more than 3 percent or the increase in CPI, whichever is lower:
If there were an identical house next door and it sold for $14 million to someone who used it only 4 months per year, the town/county could collect property tax on the full value, i.e., 3X the tax rate paid by the primary resident.
A surcharge for part-time residents generates outrage. A discount for full-time residents doesn’t upset anyone. NYC could have doubled property tax rates, with state permission, and then offered a steep discount for anyone who pays resident NYC income tax.
Happy Middle of Hurricane Preparedness Week for those who celebrate…
Conventional insurance companies such as State Farm have mostly walked away from insuring coastal South Florida due to a combination of litigation risk (“Prior to the reforms, Florida accounted for more than 72% of the nation’s homeowners claim-related litigation in 2023, despite representing only 10% of US homeowners claims.”) and hurricane risk. Our house is about 2.5 miles from the ocean, but it is still redlined by the insurance companies most people have heard of. Here are the options for insurance:
a Florida-only carrier that turns most of its premium over to reinsurance
a “non-admitted” specialty company that isn’t regulated by the state and that may have unfavorable terms, including penalties for early cancellation and even a “wind exclusion” (i.e., they pay nothing in the event of the most obvious risk: hurricanes). (This option is so expensive and dumb that I won’t cover it here.)
a “high-net-worth” (HNW) carrier such as Chubb (mostly rejects additional Florida risk; famous for a low loss ratio (payments as a percentage of premium collected)), Vault, PURE, and Berkley One (despite the name, these are available to peasants whose house is worth less than a Palm Beach starter home ($10 million))
The cost of HNW insurance is 2-4X what a Florida-only company might quote.
Nearly all Florida insurance includes at least a 2% wind exclusion. If the dwelling value is $1 million, in other words, the homeowner pays the first $20,000 of any hurricane-related loss. Thus, the vast majority of customers with hurricane damage will receive nothing from their insurer because the typical hurricane damage might involve only some blown-off roof tiles or shingles. The band of likely serious damage from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane making landfall is 20-60 miles, e.g., for Hurricane Andrew in 1992 that resulted in major changes to the Florida building code or Hurricane Michael in 2018 that damaged Tyndall Air Force Base. Note that this exclusion results in the HNW policies paying less after what would be typical hurricane damage because HNW companies write for 2X the dwelling value on the same house.
The Florida-only carriers are typically unrated by AM Best, the standard rater for insurers. It has been historically rare for an insurer rated A or better by AM Best to fail. Florida insurers get rated by Demotech. How well does it work for an insurance company to have all of its customers in Florida? According to ChatGPT, nearly all of the Florida-only companies that have gone insolvent had A ratings from Demotech (i.e., the ratings were worthless in terms of distinguishing the vulnerable carriers from the solid ones or, perhaps, the solvency of a carrier simply depended on their luck regarding how many customers were in a hurricane destruction zone).
Insolvency after a major hurricane doesn’t work the way that one would think, with the failed insurance company realizing that it is doomed to failure and going into a bankruptcy-style process where every claimant gets paid a percentage of his or her full claim amount. Instead, the insurance company, even after a major hurricane, pays claims as they’re made and adjusted at 100%. When the company runs out of money they turn out the rest of the claims to the Florida Insurance Guaranty Association (FIGA), which will pay up to $500,000 for a destroyed house. So… the customer with a major loss either gets 100% or a fixed $500,000. The more complex the claim, the less likely it is to be paid. ChatGPT says that it is reasonable to assume a 10 percent chance of insolvency for a Florida-only carrier in the event of a major hurricane. The most recent insolvency that triggered a FIGA payout was of United Property & Casualty Insurance Company in February 2023. That’s three hurricane seasons ago. Since then we’ve had some hurricanes, but none anywhere near as costly within Florida as 2022’s Hurricane Ian. Let’s use a 20 percent risk of insolvency if a house is damaged to policy limits and a 10 percent risk of insolvency if a house is damaged to half of the limits.
What is the risk of a total loss or serious damage? Gemini starts off by saying that it is pretty high, with 300,000-400,000 single-family homes in South Florida either substantially damaged or destroyed by hurricanes over the past 50 years. That’s out of about 2.7 million homes in South Florida today, but only an average of 1.7 million homes over the 50-year period. (ChatGPT estimates this number as only about half of Gemini’s figure; our future AI overlords are smarter than humans, but equally inconsistent?) So a homeowner’s insurance company has about at least a 1 in 7 chance of making a big payout? Not exactly. First, we have to separate out the houses that were damaged by flooding or storm surge, between 120,000 and 180,000. Homeowner’s doesn’t pay for flood damage. Now we’re down to a risk of about 1 in 10 over 50 years. What about the fact that Florida established a strict statewide building code in 2002, hoping to avoid a repeat of the Hurricane Andrew aftermath, roughly 25,524 homes destroyed and 101,241 damaged (Insurance Information Institute). Gemini:
In major storms like Hurricane Michael (2018) and Hurricane Ian (2022), structural engineers found that homes built to the 2002 code (or later) suffered roughly 80% to 90% less wind damage than their older neighbors.
IBHS evaluated 3,646 single-family homes, 327 light commercial buildings, and 230 multifamily structures [after Hurricane Ian] using aerial and street-level imagery. … Homes built before 2002 had structural damage levels nearly 2x higher, and 2.3x higher in areas with peak winds above 130 mph.
It looks as though no post-2002 house actually lost the plywood sheathing supporting the roof, but at least some had exposed sheathing and, presumably, water damage as a result. A companion report from the same organization says that asphalt shingles were the weak point, metal roofs were the best (12% damaged), and tile roofs weren’t significantly damaged except those more than 20 years old (“no tile roofs assessed that had greater than 50% roof cover damage” and “the small number of roofs with greater than 25% cover damage … These roofs were all 20 years or older”). Our 2003 house has a one-year-old tile roof with two layers of “peel and stick” underneath. If the tiles are blown off, but the peel-and-stick underlayment survives then we’re looking at a $120,000 insurance claim to put a new tile roof on the house (maybe less if the underlayment isn’t too old and can be retained).
ChatGPT says that 4-6 Cat 4/5 hurricanes hit the Miami-to-Stuart coastline every 100 years. Let’s take this distance as 108 miles. If you assume that the zone of total destruction is 20 miles wide then a typical house gets destroyed roughly every 110 years. If the destruction zone widens to 40 miles, the interval between destruction is 55 years. The most recent major hurricane to hit Palm Beach County was in 1949, 77 years ago, but we could use the 55-year estimate to make the high-net-worth companies look more attractive.
[We’ll ignore tornado risk. A tornado could destroy or seriously damage a house, of course, but it wouldn’t affect an insurer’s solvency because a tornado is local. This is a 1 in 100,000-year event for a typical South Florida house, according to AI.]
As noted above, one quirk of the HNW policies is that they force buyers to pay to insure the full rebuild cost of a house, which for a 2003 house like ours is much more than the house is worth. Imagine if we insured our five-year-old Honda Odyssey for the cost of a brand new Honda Odyssey. Why would we want to do that when what is actually at risk is only about half that number? A neighbor has Chubb and they would pay him over $4 million for the house and contents in the event of a total loss (maybe $5 million if we add “loss of use”). His house has a Zestimate of $1.8 million, has its original roof and non-impact windows, and sits on a lot that should be worth at least $500,000 if the house were razed. The contents of the house aren’t valuable. So he has perhaps $1.5 million that could conceivably be lost under his $4+ million policy. (Note that the neighbor won’t get the high dwelling value unless he actually does rebuild, an irrational choice to make compared to simply moving to a similar house and letting a professional real estate developer deal with the wreck. If the family moves to a $1.8 million house a few blocks away, he gets paid only about $1.3 million (the depreciated value of the structure).
Let’s have a look at a couple of quotes. Below is one from Olympus, a Florida-based company that was founded in 2007, i.e., 19 years ago. Whoever started the company should buy lottery tickets because it was founded right at the beginning the 2006-2015 “no hurricanes making landfall” period. That said, the company has survived the following hurricanes that did make landfall in Florida:
Hermine (2016)
Irma (2017)
Michael (2018)
Ian (2022)
Idalia (2023)
Helene (2024)
Milton (2024)
Furthermore, Olympus is unusual in being rated by KBRA, which is significantly more stringent than Demotech. Olympus is rated BBB+ by KBRA (over the minimum BBB accepted by Fannie Mae; it’s ironic that the enterprise that generated the largest insolvency in U.S. history, requiring $150+ billion in tax dollars as a bailout, closely scrutinizes insurance companies). For the handful of companies that are rated by both KBRA and AM Best, the ratings seem to be similar.
Could they survive a repeat of the 1949 hurricane that came right into Jupiter? (the most recent major hurricane to make landfall in Palm Beach County) There doesn’t seem to be any way to find out. An insurance company with 50,000 customers, each of which is on its own square mile within the 53,625-square-mile state of Florida is going to be much less stressed by a hurricane that hits Fort Lauderdale than one whose 50,000 customers are all in Broward County, for example. (Broward County was last hit by a major hurricane in 1947, though Hurricane Wilma, Category 2, did about $4 billion in insured damage in 2005.) The information on risk concentration by company is nowhere to be found. In theory, the reinsurers who agree to do business with the companies are looking at this and maybe the regulators.
It is difficult to have faith in regulation when one hears about Florida-based Slide Insurance. The founder and his wife siphoned off $50 million in compensation out of a total profit of $288 million in 2023-4 (source). Based on this, it seems that an insurance company could pay out all of its profits to employees and shareholders during 15 lucky years without major hurricanes affecting its territory and then fold up its tent after a Hurricane Andrew-type event occurs. ChatGPT: “There’s no strict statutory cap tying executive pay to solvency. … As long as they stay above minimum surplus requirements, they’re compliant. But those minimums may not cover a true tail event (e.g., Andrew-scale).” People with inexpensive-by-Florida-standards houses will still do okay with $500,000 from FIGA, of course, so this is a great example of privatized profits and socialized losses.
What did the high-net-worth companies have to offer?
Notice the PURE quote with a 5% wind exclusion. If our roof were destroyed, but didn’t leak, and we lost 7 or 8 of our impact glass windows they would still pay nothing because the wind deductible would be $195,000. In a “medium bad” event, the Olympus policy at less than one third the cost could easily pay 2X because of the deductible being only 2% of a much lower dwelling value.
It’s beginning to get hot here in South Florida. Rich people without kids generally stay in Florida for 4-6 months per year, 183 days/year if they’re anxious to preserve Florida as their primary residence/tax domicile. If that’s how people with infinite money live we can presume that it is a good way to live, I think (perhaps the Jeffrey Epstein and friends situation is a counterargument to that principle).
Carl G. Fisher created Miami Beach and, for his second act, wanted to build out Montauk on Long Island as the summer home for all of his customers.
What if we adapt Fisher’s idea for families with K-12-age kids? We set up a school that operates mid-October through mid-April (183 days/year or a little more) in Florida and then shuts down for a week while everyone moves up to New Hampshire. The kids can finish their school year up there and then the enterprise segues into summer camp mode, with activities all day every day for the same kids. The family can enjoy the best weather/seasons in the two states. The family won’t have to pay any state income tax (constitutionally barred in Florida so that should remain the state for 183+ days; NH could have an income tax, but presently does not), even if work is done in both places. The kids and adults will have built-in social circles in both places. If a great teacher doesn’t want to move, he or she can stay in Florida year-round and do the beginning and end of the school year virtually while the in-classroom students are organized by someone who is primarily a camp counselor.
The New Hampshire operation would run like a “family camp” in which everyone could meet for meals 3X/day if desired. Florida already has tons of restaurants and recreational facilities, so it would be more of a standard family life during the winter.
The main objection that I can see to this idea is the difficulty of scaling immediately to a sufficient size. A school with fewer than 200 students would presumably be overwhelmed with regulatory compliance costs and classes of fewer than 18 students would likely seem lame. Rich people are drawn to elite schools and it would be tough for an upstart traveling school to compete with The Greene School in West Palm Beach (founded by a billionaire; gifted students only) for quality, actual and perceived.
Also, there’s the question of where in New Hampshire to locate. Portsmouth has a fantastic airport, a beautiful river and ocean access, but it is expensive. Lake Winnipesaukee has a good airport (KLCI) and is in a traditional area for summer camps, but it is more isolated. The border towns with Maskachusetts could work because they provide quick access to Logan Airport for summer vacation trips, etc.
Obviously this wouldn’t work for most of the parents of the 3.4 million-ish school-age children who live in Florida, but why couldn’t it work for the parents of about 200 children?
Florida’s migration patterns are changing dramatically. Residents in their prime working years are heading to other states, often citing affordability concerns. At the same time, the stream of people arriving from other states is shrinking.
Meanwhile, an influx of wealthy people from other states—turbocharged during the pandemic—has helped drive up home prices. Inflation in parts of Florida outpaced the national average over the past decade and home-insurance rates soared.
These side-by-side trends could spell trouble for a state whose economy relies on continued population growth and real-estate development.
“The affordability picture has changed in Florida almost more than anywhere else in the country,” said Eric Finnigan, vice president of demographics research at John Burns Research & Consulting.
First, note the assumption that underlies almost all American politics: infinite growth should be the goal. (Never mind that growth without limit in an organism, and without regard to available resources, is known as “cancer”.)
Second, the WSJ implicitly assumes that a place that is affordable is better than a place that is unaffordable for median-income residents.
Third, the WSJ lumps all of “Florida” together. Florida is about the same size as all of New England. The WSJ wouldn’t lump together Boston and western Maskachusetts, much less Bridgeport, Connecticut and Houlton, Maine. (It’s still possible to get a brand-new single-family house in central Florida for less than $300,000, though the same can’t be said for coastal Florida; the house will be about 1500 square feet, which is the size of the house I grew up in (family of five) and with the added advantage that Floridians don’t need as much indoor space.) The most convenient housing for a SpaceX or Blue Origin engineer is in Titusville, where a decent (not new) house can be purchased for $300,000 (relocation guide).
Fourth, the WSJ assumes that the market is full of stupid people who bid up the prices of houses in places that aren’t desirable. Single-family home prices are $10.15 million in Palm Beach and $212,000 in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, where Ayman Ghazali mostly peacefully lived. From this we can infer that living among Iraqi and Lebanese immigrants in Dearborn Heights is better than living among Manhattan immigrants in Palm Beach (perhaps not an unreasonable inference!).
Maybe in a country with a shared language and culture it would make sense to try to find an inexpensive place to live. However, in a country that is jammed with low-skill migrants from all of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies (our asylum-based immigration system ensures that someone from Switzerland or Japan goes to the back of the line), isn’t it actually an advantage from a typical native-born perspective that a place is out of reach for the median present-day American? Google AI: “Newport Beach has lower racial diversity and worse racial disparity across various indicators compared to the average for California cities.” Given the stratospheric real estate prices, it seems that a lot of people are willing to pay for low racial diversity and “worse racial disparity”. As of 2021, the town was supposedly 85 percent white (source):
The Dallas metro area is more affordable than most parts of the US with jobs, which has enabled a mostly-immigrant community of 130,000 Muslims to set up more than 60 mosques and lay out EPIC City, “a master-planned Islamic community-centered residential development project”. Non-Muslim Americans who don’t want to hear the muezzin calling five times per day might prefer to spend more on a house that is in an area that is “unaffordable” to immigrants from Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Somalia.
We could take this to an extreme. Aspen, Colorado is absurdly unaffordable for the median worker. My friend doesn’t like Aspen (see An actual skier goes to Aspen to ski), but apparently a lot of people do like it. Would we say that Dearborn Heights, Michigan is a better place to live than Aspen? That Aspen is bad because the population isn’t growing 3% per year like Gaza’s or Somalia’s? (Maybe Gaza and the West Bank are the ultimate examples of affordability. US and EU taxpayers pay for all of the basics, e.g., shelter, food, health care, education, etc. Nobody needs to work. Hamas-ruled Gaza is a model society by Ivy League standards, but wouldn’t the typical American rather be in St. Barts, Aspen, or Nantucket (all of which rank near the bottom for affordability on a median income)?) We could also consider a massive public housing project in Chicago or New York City. They’re “affordable” by definition since no tenant is charged more than 30% of his/her/zir/their income (often 30% of $0 since the tenants aren’t stupid!). Would a typical American prefer to live in the 6000-person Queensbridge Houses (“well known for its contributions to hip hop and rap music”; “a problem with drug dealers and drug users”) or in Atherton, California (population 7,000; home to Larry Ellison before he spent $450 million to escape to Florida)?
In short, given the continued flood of low-skill migrants (70 million since 1976) maybe “affordability” shouldn’t be the goal for any city or state that seeks to maintain a pleasant environment.
We’re escaping to the Florida Free State for the Maskachusetts school vacation week (April 18-25). A journey of 1,000+ miles is the best way for the kids to get a “mask break” (under what would be the “law” if it had been passed by the legislature instead of merely ordered by the governor, walking outside one’s yard, even at midnight in a low-density exurb, is illegal without a mask).
We stopped in Savannah, Georgia on our way to Jupiter. They were still under an outdoor mask order:
The kids learned about fishing from unmasked folks at Juno Beach Pier (Florida):
Having left the wet cold masked Boston spring, we encounter a crowd of unmasked people in shorts eating dinner outdoors in downtown Abacoa:
While folks in Massachusetts continue social distancing, a crowd gathers at the bow:
On the return trip, we stopped in Asheville, North Carolina, where they were solidly in masks-required territory more than a year after coronapanic began:
Biltmore tour group:
Back home to Hanscom Field, one part of the Boston area that I miss. Inequality in white:
Also in masketology, this photo is supposedly from 2020, but where was it taken? Google Image Search finds some examples of it from 2020 so it wasn’t done with AI and the date is correct, but does anyone recognize the city?
