Category: Florida

Floridians and Texans should never buy a second home in a state with income and/or estate taxes

by philg

I hope that everyone’s National Estate Planning Awareness Month is going well. As the nation’s successful make their way down to Florida for “the season”, a cautionary tale from the Wall Street Journal: “Was His Home Connecticut or Florida? The Difference Is a $13 Million Tax Bill”.

A rich douche spent 5.5 months in Connecticut during his last year on this planet and that generate a huge amount of litigation over whether CT can harvest estate tax (reducing the kids’ inheritance). He could have avoided all of the drama for his executor simply by making his northern home anywhere away from the states of color in the Tax Foundation map below.

The Islamic Republic of Michigan, for example, or Live Free and Die Free in New Hampshire. Even California would have been a far better choice since elites there refuse to live their own principles by imposing an estate tax to reduce income inequality and the “generational wealth” that they decry.

A bit part of the mess seems to be that, like Marjorie Merriweather Post, the builder of Mar-a-Lago, this douche had three regular residences: FL, AZ, and CT. So he wasn’t anchored in Florida for 183 days per year.

It is all increasingly complicated when people can work anywhere and have multiple homes. The fights between states and the wealthy are playing out in an increasing number of residency audits, said Timothy Noonan, a lawyer who leads a tax residency practice at Hodgson Russ in New York City.

The trial court judge homed in on one factor: Anderson typically spent 5½ months a year from May to mid-October in Greenwich, and 3½ months from November through mid-February in Florida. He spent three months from mid-February through early May in Arizona.

The judge concluded that “ultimately, the most persuasive evidence demonstrating Anderson’s domicile is where he chose to spend his most valuable and limited resource: his time.”

The trial court concluded that Anderson’s personal, social and property connections with Connecticut and Florida were generally equal, but that the estate failed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that Connecticut wasn’t his true home.

Here’s the Vero Beach place:

Estate tax is particularly hazardous. My late mother’s college friend was a passionate Democrat who avoided paying any tax to the Democrats of Maskachusetts by spending 183 days per year in her Palm Beach place. I hope that she lives forever, but what if in the last year of her life she falls ill while on a January visit to MA and then ends up staying through December in MA for continuity of medical care? MA wouldn’t have a slam-dunk case to collect estate tax, but they could certainly argue that the deceased had given up FL residence and it was time to collect 16% ahead of the kids, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and other beneficiaries.

Here’s an Ohio-based law firm’s web page on National Estate Planning Awareness Month showing a typical high-net-worth Ohio family (and no other client photos):

Google AI: “The median household income for Black or African American households in Ohio is approximately $42,433 to $45,800 per year, according to recent state demographic snapshots and census data. This is lower than the overall state median household income, which sits above $71,000”,

Grok: “Law firm marketing frequently uses multi-racial or Black family stock images for inclusivity branding, aspirational messaging, or to signal that services are open to everyone. It is not an attempt to accurately depict the statistical modal client. This is common across many professional-service websites and does not change the underlying demographics of who actually pays for attorney-drafted plans. In short: the image is marketing aesthetics. The typical paying customer for this service in Ohio remains a higher-wealth, usually White household.”

ChatGPT characterizes the image as “generic stock-photo family”, implying that it was chosen at random. Pressed, the AI admits that the law firm’s likely clients are rich white people. How does the image help market to those douches? “It could help if the firm thinks affluent white clients care about signals beyond “this family looks like me.” Marketing often tries to communicate things such as “modern,” “inclusive,” “welcoming,” or “serves the whole community.” Some wealthy white prospective clients may respond positively to that branding.”

Also from the Wall Street Journal, a couple in Manhattan whose kids’ inheritance will be reduced if they don’t move…

“Kids?” you might ask if you remember anything from your high school biology class.

Martin, 60, and his husband, Andrew Farach-Colton, 63, were living in that tiny Upper West Side apartment in 1999 when they found out they would be the fathers of twins. They wanted more space, but knew they couldn’t get it in Manhattan on their salaries.

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The absurdity of Owners’ Equivalent Rent illustrated by Zillow

by philg

This morning we got another absurd inflation number from the BLS (3.7%/year). As harped on numerous times here, headline inflation is untethered to actual costs in the U.S. partly because of the Owners’ Equivalent Rent scam. There’s a recent beautiful example of this in our own Florida neighborhood (Abacoa, within Jupiter, which is within Palm Beach County).

The house recently sold for $3.1 million and will, I’m sure, cost the new owners another $3.1 million in property tax, maintenance, insurance, landscaping, pool care, etc. over the years. What would an owner tell the BLS about what he or she thinks it would cost to rent? Perhaps the Zillow number of $8,593 per month. That’s about half of what an interest-only 30-year mortgage on the place would cost, if a 30-year interest-only mortgage were available. It might be 20% of the real cost of living in the house as an owner.

Note that this is pretty much the top of the Abacoa market. The owners apparently bought it, invested a ton of money in renovation (though it was not taken back to the studs nor was the room layout changed), and then decided that they were too rich to live in a $3.1 million house.

Here’s the complete price history:

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American Muscle Car Museum in Melbourne, Florida (Paging Bernie and AOC)

by philg

The American Muscle Car Museum in Melbourne, Florida is open to the public only on rare occasions. October 3, 2026 was a car show and fundraiser for the Lion’s Club and the rabble were admitted for $30 per adult (our kids got in free). It’s an amazing collection that cries out for an intervention by our political thought-leaders. Mark Pieloch, a dog pharma and supplement flavoring tycoon, decided that he needed to own about 30 Ford GTs, nearly all of them from the two modern reboot (of the GT40) generations and nearly all of them with less than 30 miles on the odometer.

(Note that I don’t think it is reasonable to call the Ford GT a “Ford”. They’ve been produced by contract manufacturers, e.g., Mayflower Vehicle Systems and Multimatic. Compare to the Corvette ZR1X, an insanely powerful machine that is built in a regular GM factory that also makes the humbler versions of the Corvette. Keep in mind that even the humblest version is “insanely powerful”, though, when you consider realistic public road situations.)

Here’s the first room. The 2020 Ford GT in the foreground has 24 miles on the clock. A 1966 GT40 rotates on the turntable in the center of the modern GTs. A museum employee said that it had cost $9 million.

Just one ring of recent GTs, then? No. There are a couple of additional rows of them, e.g.,

Viewed from the other side of the room:

We’re talking about a Gulfstream G700 hangar, essentially, entirely filled with the latest generation of Ford GTs, nearly all of which have never been driven. Is that collecting or hoarding? Either way, I feel that it is time for Bernie and AOC to step in. Just as Bernie reminds us that nobody needs more than three houses, I think that we can all agree that nobody needs more than 3 pristine never-driven modern Ford GTs. One never-driven GT is a sculpture. Two more could be backups. But the 4th one? That’s intolerable inequality and, dare I say it, billionaire greed!

If we walk deeper into the museum, we find an entire row of the 2005ish GTs:

Directly across the aisle, a 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder. The window sticker is still stuck: $915,000 (in pre-Biden dollars!). How much practical value has been delivered by this machine? 32 miles’ worth. (ChatGPT says that Car and Driver got better numbers out of the Porsche 918 than they did out of the 2017-2022 Ford GTs, which sold for substantially less.)

That’s a G-Wagen in the back. Here’s some Gemini output that makes me wonder what Google has been feeding its AI:

In Palm Beach, Mercedes-Benz G-Wagons function like a chronological alimony registry. You can pinpoint exactly when a settlement was finalized based on the specific body style and dashboard layout of the G-Class she is driving:

Speaking of German stuff, Mark Pieloch was an avid Porsche collector as well. He has about 10 Porsche-brand diesel tractors:

Imagine telling someone “I’ll pick you up in my Porsche” and then showing up with one of these tractors! They’re not unreasonably expensive:

Here’s one that Grok says might be worth $5 million, though, a 1959 718 RSK Werks Spyder that was raced:

Just how big is the second room?

There are some additional hangars full of cars, but they’re not regularly open to the rabble.

Corvettes are reasonably well-represented, though I don’t remember seeing any C7s. Almost every conceivable Ford Mustang is displayed.

Here’s a wood-paneled 1957 Ford Country Squire:

Another wagon that, if retrofitted with A/C, would be awesome to own:

The perfect pace car for Elvis:

How was the car show? Pretty good and a reasonable turnout despite the fact that it has been an unusually wet September and October in Florida despite a complete absence of hurricanes from the North Atlantic. Free and dog-friendly. Here’s another dream station wagon:

If you love cars, I recommend finding one of the special events and going. Based on the museum’s Form 990, it seems that all of the money paid goes to whatever group is supposed to benefit. Grok says that the cars and the real estate are owned by Mark Pieloch individually so it isn’t a tax-avoidance vehicle (so to speak) as you might expect. Grok even found the records for the real estate:

Brevard’s parcel record for 3500 Sarno Road lists the owner as PIELOCH, MARK J, mailing address a Melbourne post office box. The use code is a privately owned tourist attraction, the buildings date to 2016, and the 2026 value is about $18.1 million. A 2025 tax bill on that parcel is on the order of $320,000, which is what you pay when the property is not under a charitable exemption.

Unlike, for example, the Gates Foundation and Bill Gates, Mark Pieloch is apparently paying more than his fair share of tax rather than burdening those who’ve been less successful with the chore of funding government.

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The sea-level glass pavilion in Miami where elite sea level and hurricane alarmists will take shelter

by philg

Department of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up… Carnegie-Mellon has released renderings of its new home in Miami. It’s a massive sea-level almost-all-glass pavilion that will generate a ton of CO2 every minute (for A/C):

For 20 years CMU’s Nobel-winning Climate Doomers told us that hurricanes of never-before-experienced intensity would be ravaging Miami at least once per year. If forced to move to the Hurricane Belt, you’d expect the elites of Pittsburgh to build themselves something like the German U-boat base in Saint-Nazaire (26-foot-thick roof). What do we see instead? The folks who said that everyone in Miami was going to be killed by hurricanes or driven out by rising seas are going to park themselves inside a literal glass house (at sea level, of course!).

What would a structure in South Florida built by people who took their own predictions seriously look like?

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Elon Musk has made all of the world’s yachts more valuable

by philg

Last month, I attended a birthday party for a yacht broker. His co-workers said that business was booming for all sizes of boats (though maybe they don’t deal with anything smaller than 35′? 70-125′ seems to be their bread and butter). “In the old days we could have just closed the office in August, but the phone never stops ringing.” What’s changed? “Boat buyers are richer and younger,” was the answer. “They’re taking much longer trips and want bigger more capable boats for those trips. Starlink has been the catalyst. It makes a tremendous difference, especially, for the crew, and has made people more willing to work the longer voyages. The owners can still work, no matter how long the trip.” How does Starlink compare to the previous generation of satellite-based Internet for yachts? “It’s 100 times faster,” a broker said, “a total game-changer for both speed and reliability.”

Speaking of reliability, it seems that the mid-priced yachts ($10-25 million) either have two independent Starlink subscriptions and receivers or, in some cases, two antennae and a single receiver that is smart about which one to use (“diversity is our strength” in the RF world). “You need the second antenna,” the brokers explained, “because sometimes the line of sight to the satellite is block by a mast.”

What I can’t figure out is where these additional/bigger yachts are parking. The world was already short of slips before the cash showers of government coronapanic programs and, more recently, AI. “They keep building marinas here in South Florida,” said a broker.

Its infrastructure fund went from owning zero marinas in 2024 to roughly 200 marinas today — more than anyone in the world.

The company paid $5.6 billion in early 2025 for Safe Harbor, which at the time owned and operated 138 marinas in the United States and Puerto Rico, including dozens of marinas from Maryland to Maine as well as the Caribbean’s largest in Fajardo, P.R. It also runs nine marinas on the Mediterranean, catering to large yachts in places like St. Tropez, Antibes and Monaco.

What’s going on locally? An $80 million revamp of a marina just south of Abacoa:

The facility will feature two five-story indoor storage buildings with 427 enclosed dry storage slips and 20 wet slips.

Someone with $80 million to invest didn’t get the climate change memo? The buildings are designed to handle 180 mph hurricane winds (the last hurricane to make landfall in Palm Beach County in a “major” category (= 3) was in 1949). But they’ll be worthless if sea level rise happens as promised by the Climate Doomers.

How much does a true “yacht” cost an Nvidia receptionist? A Turkish-built 125′ Hargrave, which ChatGPT says is mid-market at this size, is advertised at $24.5 million. Westport is a “step up”. For the programmer who has been at Nvidia 10 years, “Feadship / Lürssen / Oceanco / Royal Huisman: an entirely different stratum—bespoke, extremely expensive, and usually much larger, though some of these yards historically built yachts around this size.”

Related:

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Larry Ellison: 82 years old with five children who need tutors

by philg

Despite my love for all things Oracle, somehow I missed that Larry Ellison, now 82 years old, has five children under 18.

“The Gated Community Where Larry Ellison Bought Eight Homes for His Staff” (Wall Street Journal, 9/28/2026):

The Ellisons have kept details about their five children, who are younger than 18, private. They are involved parents, according to people familiar with the interactions. The Manalapan home has several buildings that include areas where the older children are home-schooled. There are an array of tutors, and the children are learning several languages, the people said.

I hope for the kids’ sake that Larry is on one of those Silicon Valley life extension plans!

Unintentionally funny:

“Every single home has a view of the water,” local agent Ashley McCoy of Serhant said of Palm Meadows Estates.

Any development engineered out of the Everglades, like the one where Larry chose to park the staff, must have ponds and canals to hold rainwater and prevent flooding. Developers present these water features to newcomers as some sort of amenity that could have been more houses if they’d been greedier, but the reality is always that a neighborhood has the minimum pond acreage deemed necessary by the hydrological engineers (whose skill level is amazing, incidentally! Our development (Abacoa) has supposedly never flooded in 25+ years, despite catching the edges of a few hurricanes; the Science wasn’t as advanced in the 1960s and 1970s, I think, and Florida adopted some new rules about the miracle of land creation in the 1970s (source)). Also, the typical pond has a noisy fountain in the middle that runs all day to interfere with algae and mosquito production.

Related:

  • “Larry Ellison adds Lion Country to PBC purchases including Eau Palm Beach” (Palm Beach Post, 2025): “After almost 60 years, the family that founded Lion Country Safari, Florida’s largest drive-through safari, has sold its 600-acre Loxahatchee land holdings for $30 million to the family of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, reportedly the third-richest man in the world. … Technology magnate Ellison also has bought multiple other properties in Palm Beach County, including a Manalapan mega mansion, a waterfront estate in North Palm Beach and the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa that he purchased in 2024 for $277.4 million.”
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The climate and hurricane doomers of Carnegie-Mellon move to Miami

by philg

For twenty years, Carnegie-Mellon University has been dishing out fat helpings of climate and hurricane doom.

What’s the most obvious place to set up a new campus for 3,500 students and keep them safe from ever-more-intense hurricanes and relentless sea level rise? How about Miami, Florida?

The press release says that the new campus will be about 6 inches above best-case predicted sea level in Wynwood:

The new campus, to be built in Miami’s dynamic Wynwood neighborhood, is ultimately planned to support more than 3,500 undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. students, nearly 300 faculty, and over 600 staff members, pending appropriate regulatory approvals. The first students are set to enroll in 2028, marking a bold step forward for the university and its ambitions.

Carnegie-Mellon is home to Nobel-winning Climate Doomer Ed Rubin:

Emeritus Professor Ed Rubin was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, when U.S. Vice President Al Gore shared the prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for which Rubin was coordinating lead author of the Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage. The awardees were recognized for their “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Rubin is the first CMU faculty member to share in a Nobel Peace Prize.

Rubin, who helped establish the Engineering and Public Policy program at CMU, is the the most highly cited authority on carbon capture and storage systems and is an internationally recognized expert in energy and environmental technology innovation and climate change mitigation.

“Decarbonization: Climate change is personal now” (cmu.edu 2023):

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says carbon capture deployment is lagging if we want to meet global mitigation targets. With the stakes so high, why is this the case?

“We’re now seeing the linkages between climate change and other phenomena like forest fires, droughts, heat waves, and floods. If your house burns down in a forest fire, that gets your attention. If your house floods because of a hurricane, that gets your attention. When science links those tragedies to climate change induced by human activities, then the realization kicks in, ‘Hey this isn’t something far in the future that doesn’t affect me or my family.’ It’s getting personal now,” says Rubin.

CMU faculty won’t sit out hurricanes in Pittsburgh anymore, in other words, but will voluntarily make hurricanes part of their lived experience.

cmu.edu, 2007:

“Adaptation planning is becoming critical as communities, states and countries begin to address rising sea-levels and other challenges of a changing global climate.”

Formerly a military officer, Perkins is now one of 1,000 volunteers in the United States selected and trained by Former Vice President Al Gore and the non-profit group The Climate Project to spread the message of global warming and the urgent moral responsibility to take action.

After 19 additional years of taxpayer-funded Science, the “urgent moral responsibility” and best adaptation turned out to be moving from Pittsburgh to Miami and grabbing Ken Griffin’s money with both hands.

In 2008, cmu.edu warned us that “the climate crisis isn’t going away”.

Here’s one of CMU’s top professors in this area, Costa Samaras. Right in the middle of coronapanic (July 2020) he reminded everyone to continue to panic regarding sea level rise:

The same CMU professor said that Florida would be cooked by 2030, just two years after the new CMU campus opens.

This links to a NYT article on which the professor is a co-author:

Rising average temperatures make extreme heat more likely, hurricanes and storms more intense and threaten fresh water supplies. Climate impacts have already started to hit.

Where better to move than Miami if you’re afraid of more intense hurricanes and storms? There is so much in this guy’s feed that I can’t resist one more:

Let’s close out this post with a big thank-you to the lockdown Democrats of Chicago, Illinois, New York City, and New York State. Without their tireless efforts to degrade the quality of life in Chicago and NYC, there is no way that Ken Griffin would have brought himself and his $55+ billion to Florida!

Related, the land that CMU said would soon be underwater was worth $1.1 billion:

See also Preparing for the Age of AI with Prof. Uju Anya at Carnegie-Mellon at $93,614 per year and imagine how awesome it would be if Prof. Dr. Uju Anya, Ph.D. were to teach “Speaking Blackness in Brazil” on this new campus.

Bill Gates weighs in on the move…

In case any of the above tweets are memory-holed…

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Sixth Annual Freedom to Breathe Day in Florida

by philg

Today is the sixth anniversary of Ron DeSantis’s executive order 20-244 that prevented local governments from collecting fines from peasants who violated local Covidcrats’ orders, thus effectively rendering those orders toothless. Excerpts:

Ron DeSantis will be gone soon, due to term limits, and I will miss him despite his recent foray into what seems like madness (exempting a lot of homeowners from paying property tax while still allowing them to vote to increase county services and spending; I thought we’d tried that experiment at the federal level!; I would welcome a law that limits growth in per-capita spending by county/local governments, but not one that mints voters who have no skin in the game).

Related…

Also, “A Western Mass. lesbian bar required KN-95 masks. When it changed the rules, all hell broke loose.” (Boston Globe, 9/22/2026), regarding the question of whether, towards the end of Year 7 of coronapanic, it is safe to shed one’s N95 mask one evening per week (short answer: no).

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Bad news for the Florida Beach Season: there is no beach (NYT)

by philg

Americans in the Northeast are making plans to come down to Florida this winter, either 183 days (the “skip on state taxes” plan) or just a shorter break from misery. They might want to consider this New York Times article from 31 years ago, “Scientists Say Earth’s Warming Could Set Off Wide Disruptions” (September 18, 1995):

A continuing rise in average global sea level, which is likely to amount to more than a foot and a half by the year 2100. This, say the scientists, would inundate parts of many heavily populated river deltas and the cities on them, making them uninhabitable, and would destroy many beaches around the world. At the most likely rate of rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years. They are already disappearing at an average of 2 to 3 feet a year.

The NYT’s “experts” were sort of right. It did become impossible to go to a lot of East Coast beaches in 2020, but that was because Science made it illegal (#StayHomeSaveLives), not because the beach had physically disappeared.

Maskachusetts COVID-19 Order No. 22, issued 25 years after the NYT article predicted beach closure:

How has Florida’s shoreline changed over time? Here’s Catesby’s map from circa 1729:

Compare to today (Google Earth):

Loosely related, but I had to mention this in case it jinxes us with a repeat of Hurricane Andrew (1992; Category 5 landfall, 25-mile-wide swath of destruction south of Miami), “The Atlantic Just Broke a 60-Year Record” (ScienceAlert):

September 12th became the furthest into the year we have ever gone without a hurricane in the Atlantic basin since the advent of modern satellite tracking in 1966 – by a day.

“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” explains António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

“The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up.”

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Migrants whose TPS status has expired can stay and work for 10+ years via the asylum process

by philg

The New York Times today says that Key West wouldn’t have any tourists if not for Haitian migrants. Somalis built Boston and Minneapolis and Haitians created Florida tourism. “Haitian Workers Keep Key West Tourism Afloat. Now They’re Disappearing.”:

The Haitian hotel housekeepers, restaurant cooks and Uber drivers who quietly help power Key West’s tourism economy are disappearing.

Some have been detained by Border Patrol agents since late July, when the Trump administration ended a legal protection that had allowed 330,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States.

There is “violence and instability” in Haiti, but we can import 100% of Haitians and the same people won’t create any violence or instability here:

It’s a situation familiar to communities across Florida; the state has the nation’s largest Haitian population, including tens of thousands who have lost the legal safeguard known as Temporary Protected Status, which the United States had granted them because of the violence and instability in their home country.

(the violence and instability are features of the terrain, not something in any way related to the people who inhabit the terrain)

The New York Times constantly reminds us that workers should be paid more (they’re “underpaid”). But in the context of making sure that we max out on immigrants, it is also bad if workers in the U.S. get paid more:

When Mayor Sam Kaufman visited Hispanic-owned restaurants last month, owners shared stories of line cooks, busboys and delivery drivers, some with valid work permits, getting detained and deported. Those who remained were being crushed with extra work, with some owners delivering food themselves.

Mr. Kaufman noted that Key West was too far from the mainland to bus in workers.

“The price of labor is going to shoot up,” he said. “There is going to be real competition to retain the work force.”

Or will the supply of workers be reduced? Here’s the most interesting part of the article:

One such person, a 41-year-old father of two, said he had fled gang violence in Haiti for Brazil, before joining relatives in Key West in 2022. The man, who did not want his name used for fear of attracting immigration authorities, works at a supermarket deli, earning $19 an hour.

He lost T.P.S. in July. He is still able to work because of a pending asylum claim, but that offers little guarantee against immigration detention. Inside their tiny trailer home, he and his wife anxiously monitor WhatsApp for immigration enforcement updates last month as they care for their young children.

Asylum is a 10-year bureaucratic process, at least (see Will any Salvadorans in the U.S. go home to El Salvador today?). So by saying “I request asylum” this guy should be able to get W-2 work until his anchor babies (multiple “young children”) are old enough to sponsor him for a green card under family unification (a U.S. citizen adult has the automatic right to bring parents here).

At what rate are migrants being detained by ICE? The NYT article says that 5,000 Haitians live in Key West and that 30 were detained in August. (I don’t think this 5,000 number counts children since they’re “American”, not “Haitian”, via the magic of birthright citizenship.)

Related, a web page regarding the La Concha, built by Haitians in 1925-6 as the first luxury hotel in Key West.

See also the Overseas Railroad Wikipedia page, regarding the railroad that prominent Haitian Henry Flagler opened in 1912 and that opened Key West to mass tourism.

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