It’s 10 pm and Hurricane Ian is now forecast to slam straight into Fort Myers, Florida.
A friend’s dad is in one of the low-lying surge-vulnerable areas covered by a “mandatory evacuation order,” but he’s refusing to leave. Will the National Guard pull him out? “There’s evacuation orders in place… our recommendation is to heed those evacuation orders,” says Ron DeSantis (still making some last-minute efforts to redirect the hurricane to Martha’s Vineyard).
As #HurricaneIan approaches, locally ordered evacuations are in effect. Check your evacuation zone so you and your family can make informed evacuation decisions.
What if dad wanted to evacuate to FLL or Miami (plenty of hotels available)? Fall of Saigon situation? Not according to Google Maps. The highways are green. Google calculates 2 hours and 8 minutes right now from Fort Myers to the hotels around FLL.
What if dad wanted to stay nearby, but in a county-/state-run shelter on high ground? It looks as though the schools and recreation centers have been set up as shelters (list for Lee County). What if he wants to bring a faithful dog? “All shelters are pet-friendly” says the county’s Facebook page:
Suppose that dad #persists in staying in his flood-vulnerable house and needs to be extracted by boat? The state has a collection of redneck airboats!
.@MyFWC has readied high-water vehicles & all other storm response resources so they can be rapidly deployed to assist Floridians in need due to damage or flooding from #HurricaneIan.
The power companies have assembled what looks like an invasion force.
An encouraging sight at Roberts Arena. Rows of @insideFPL trucks at this staging area prepping to handle power outages.
As we told you this morning, chances of outages are HIGH around 90%, but FPL tells me they’re ready to respond once it’s safe for crews to roll out. pic.twitter.com/4hrhsqaEkL
Crews are being positioned at our staging site in Lake City in preparation for Hurricane Ian. We are preparing so to be ready to execute on our proven plan to restore power safely and as quickly as possible. https://t.co/WvJ0RmI05Tpic.twitter.com/mJUiyLCavN
Crews are positioned at our staging site at The Villages in Florida as Hurricane #Ian approaches. Nearly 10,000 Duke Energy crews, contractors, and support personnel will be ready to assess damage and restore power as quickly and safely as possible. pic.twitter.com/1rGf1eLAJl
It seems that thousands of crews have been driving in from other states. Helping out in Florida after a September hurricane is a lot better than helping out in New England after a February Nor’easter!
Power crews from Oklahoma passed through Tupelo this morning on their way to Florida in preparation for Hurricane Ian's landfall. pic.twitter.com/K8tDp4KMIm
That’s what’s available from the local and state governments here in Florida. Let’s not forget the vital role of Science and the Federal government. “Preparing for a Hurricane or Tropical Storm” (CDC):
If you live in areas at risk, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) encourages you to be prepared for hurricane season. … Stay up to date on your COVID-19 vaccines.
To figure out how bad a risk is, I like to look at the insurance cost of protecting against the risk. In our area of the Florida Free State, annual insurance against a house being destroyed for all reasons, including hurricanes, is about 0.2% of the value of the house. In other words, if we discount the risk of fire to 0%, destruction by a hurricane is not expected more than once every 500 years.
Orlando is far enough inland that it is never seriously hammered by hurricanes, which require warm ocean water as fuel. Orlando is also 100′ above sea level, so it benefits from Obama having turned back the rising seas. The best insurance against personal risk from Hurricane Ian is a retreat to Orlando. I searched today on Orbitz, just 24 hours before Tampageddon begins in earnest, and found that a family can move into an Orlando condo or hotel room from tonight through September 30 for $100-200 per night.
What if a golden retriever intent on providing very late term abortion care to squirrels and rabbits in her jaw-shaped reproductive health care clinic needs to be included in the evacuation? Hyatt Regency time!
Prices were similar in the Miami area, expected to be almost entirely spared from this storm’s wrath.
What will you do in Orlando? It’s business as usual at Disney World, except for a couple of mini golf courses that are closed and the fake typhoon is replaced by a real typhoon:
Sometimes freedom-loving Californians and New Yorkers say that hurricane risk is holding them back from moving to coastal Florida. But it seems that setting aside $100 per year would be sufficient to avoid all personal risk (retreat to Orlando every 5-10 years). And, of course, one could always move to central Florida! Right next to Bok Tower Gardens would be my choice, which also happens to be convenient to Legoland.
The latest analysis from the Insurance Information Institute found Florida homeowners are paying an average premium of $4,231 for insurance, compared to the U.S. average of $1,544.
Florida as a whole had about 100,000 lawsuits against insurance companies last year, while other states combined had about 20,000. Insurance company CEOs have said these lawsuits are why so many companies are going bankrupt, raising premiums, and canceling coverage — sending more and more residents to Citizens.
There might be a minor issue with the above numbers, incidentally, because the average price of a house in Florida might not be the same as the average price of a house nationwide and the average in Florida is surely not the median due to all of the rich bastards in $20-100 million beach houses (not that I am envious).
Wednesday morning is the most likely arrival time of tropical storm-force winds in Orlando.
(Science-deniers will falsely claim, as a matter of misinformation, that hurricanes have never previously hit Orlando and that, being 100′ above sea level, it is not going to be washed away via climate change like all of the rest of Florida. The deniers ignore the fact that we’re in a new age of super hurricanes caused by not enough laptop class members collecting subsidies from the working class to buy electric cars and rooftop solar.)
Separately, if you’re interested in why Disney having its own county is so important, read Buying Disney’s World: The Story of How Florida Swampland Became Walt Disney World. The company told the State of Florida that it was going to use the land primarily to build a city, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Therefore, it made sense for the new city to be able to issue tax-free municipal bonds to fund infrastructure. Given the high rates of federal personal income taxes at the time, Disney’s borrowing costs were thus halved at zero cost to Florida (did not then and does not now have a personal income tax (barred by the state constitution)) but with a big cost to the US Treasury. The Democrats who are passionate about Disney retaining its own county are essentially arguing for continued tax avoidance by Disney.
A friend whose teenage son is a fanatical Patriots fan indulged the boy and his brother with a trip to Miami to watch the Patriots-Dolphins game on 9/11. A mutual friend texted his opinion:
Football is a barbarous gladiatorial display which sacrifices black bodies on the altar of entertainment.
We were glad that we hadn’t invited him to come down from the Northeast.
My friends rated Hard Rock Stadium, entirely privately funded (compare to what New York taxpayers are doing in Buffalo), as superior to Gillette Stadium in the Boston exurbs. It took less than one minute to get through security and ticket validation.
The stadium is set up so that the home team has an enormous advantage. The “home” sideline is on the south side of the field, shaded by the south portion of the structure. So the home team in September is on the sidelines in “only” 90-degree heat. The visitors are on the north sideline, exposed to the direct Florida sun, and able to fry eggs on their helmets.
If you’re looking for backyard flag ideas, here’s what the Dolphins did for 9/11:
If you’re sitting in your $2,000/person premium seat and seized with a California-style passion for housing the unhoused, you won’t see any in-stadium messages regarding poverty or how say-gooders can help. If you’re passionate about 2SLGBTQQIA+, Pride, and the struggle for equality, you’ll be disappointed to see that there are no rainbow flags in the stadium. Those with a passion for social justice are not entirely ignored, however. One end zone bears the message “End Racism” while the opposite end zone reminds spectators “It Takes All of Us”:
Conveniently, as with waving a rainbow flag, ending racism does not require us to spend any money (except on NFL tickets!). Let’s hope that ending racism doesn’t require perfect hearing because every part of the stadium is loud. Music is played before the game and there is a literally deafening roar from the fans during the game. Calls from the referees are amplified, but difficult to understand (much harder than when seeing a game on TV). I wouldn’t take a noise-sensitive kid to the stadium.
We are informed that the Venezuelan economy is in tough shape, but there was a huge line of people at halftime for the $8 arepas.
Speaking of Venezuela, here’s a gal from that country who was forced into following the NFL and cheering for the Patriots by her fiancé (unhappy in the background as the Dolphins maintained their lead, ultimately resulting in a 20-7 victory for the Team of Party On over the Team of Science. 2.5 years of masks and “essential” marijuana did not help the Patriots win). She even had Patriot-symbol earrings.
Tip: try to eat before the game and don’t expect to be able to get any food or drink (other than from a water fountain) during halftime.
How about seats? We were in cheap ($200, including fees, purchased as “verified resale” a few day days prior) seats in section 317 and the view seemed good. Legroom is skimpy, however, so stay home on the recliner if you want to stretch out. You can see the half-empty premium seating section below. The customers for these seats in Miami are so rich that they don’t bother going to the Ticketmaster web site to transfer their $2,000/seat tickets. There were some empty seats in the nosebleed sections, but the super expensive sections had the lowest occupancy. Maybe it is time to vote in Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren so that these folks will be forced to pay their fair share?
Transportation? My friends were latecomers to the parking party and ended up in Lot #20 (buy in advance from Ticketmaster), which would be regarded as Siberia from the perspective of VIPs and season ticket holders. This is a 15-minute walk from the stadium, but the reward is that you get in and out without sitting in any traffic. Highly recommended. Another good option would be to park between the Sonic and Walmart at the SW corner of the stadium. The risk of being stuck in traffic seems a little higher, but nothing like it would be in the close-in official lots.
Inspired by stadiums in Japan that have no parking lots at all, but are instead built near train stations, I decided to join by taking the Tri-Rail commuter train from West Palm Beach. This is just like the trains in Norway, which I recently enjoyed, in that it rides on steel rails. After that, the similarity ends. Commuter lines in Norway run every 15 minutes; Tri-Rail runs every hour on Sundays (and was 30 minutes late, which means some passengers waited 1.5 hours in stations that don’t have bathrooms (the toilet on the train was broken and overflowing)). The Norwegian trains are clean and quiet. Tri-Rail has a ventilation system that overpowers the Florida heat, but at the cost of a huge amount of noise. Tri-Rail is so bumpy that it is tough to read while in motion; the Norwegian trains are smooth.
Because it is so noisy and expensive, even though I am passionate about ending racism I am not enthusiastic about returning with the family for a Dolphins game. If we did go, however, we would drive and park in Lot #20 or similar, aiming to arrive at least one hour prior to the game so as to avoid the worst of the traffic.
Part of the post-game survey:
There is no difference between Chinese and Samoan:
I was on a call with an MIT professor who, after expressing his horror at the post-Roe age in which we somehow live, expressed the belief that the dictatorship of Ron DeSantis has prevented libraries in Florida from stocking the books that Americans should be reading now. I said “DeSantis and the state can say and do whatever they want, but ultimately it is counties that decide what books to buy. If you walk into the kids’ section of our local Palm Beach County library you would see all of the same books featured in all of the same ways as in Lexington, Massachusetts or Newton, MA. You would have to dig deep, for example, to find a book describing the achievements of a white cisgender heterosexual male.”
After voting in the primary (Ron DeSantis and affiliated thugs attempted to suppress my vote by demanding ID, but I thwarted this attempt by bringing my wallet), I took a few photos in our local library. All of these are from the kids/juvenile section.
Would a child get the impression that there was anything less than glorious about the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle? Not from reading Heather Has Two Mommies, he/she/ze/they wouldn’t.
Is there anything unusual about changing one’s gender or being “genderqueer”? No.
Gender ID can change at any moment, but it turns out that nearly all engineering and scientific advances were made by people with a particular gender ID:
And gender ID of the subject turns out to be a big factor in whether a book will be featured:
The entire world is being destroyed because there are too many humans living the American high-CO2 lifestyle. At the same time, we should expand our population by 200+ million via immigration from low-CO2 countries.
Kids can prep for a lucrative career in the nonprofit sector:
One final way to guarantee being featured by the librarians:
Related:
“American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten admitted to sharing a false tweet claiming that certain books were banned in Florida on Sunday.” (Hate Central)
“Fact check: Fake list of banned Florida books circulates widely online” (USA Today): “While school districts can ban books through a process created by the new law, Florida has not banned any books at the state level, a spokesperson for Gov. Ron DeSantis told USA TODAY. In fact, several works on the list have been recommended to school districts by the state Department of Education.” [Is it accurate to say that a book was “banned” because a school district no longer promotes it to students and the book remains available at the nearest public library?]
Florida held a primary election yesterday. Democrats overwhelming chose Charlie Crist, an elderly white man, as their candidate to challenge Ron DeSantis. The 66-year-old won by 60:35 (CNN) over the 44-year-old Nikki Fried. (Voting was suppressed by Florida’s ID check requirement, yet CNN reports that millions of Floridians managed to vote anyway.)
DeSantis desperately needs to win in November, simply to keep his family housed. He had a net worth of $319,000 at the end of 2021 (law.com), not enough to buy a 1BR condo in a decent neighborhood thanks to Florida Realtor of the Year 2020 Andrew Cuomo and Florida Realtor of the Year 2021 Charlie Baker (of Maskachusetts).
As with other Democrats, Nikki Fried says that Republicans are “a danger to democracy”. Now that the Democrats control both the White House and Congress and talk about “treason,” “insurrection,” and “democracy in peril,” why don’t they imprison and/or execute Republicans in order to save our fragile democracy? A couple of examples:
I just held a press conference in Tampa, in front of @AndrewWarrenFL’s rightful office, to remind voters why this election is so important: DeSantis is a danger to democracy.
“Donald Trump is the greatest threat to our national security, but Ron DeSantis is the greatest threat to democracy.” A person who lacks even the power to collect income tax is the greatest threat to American democracy, in other words (most taxing power in Florida belongs to the counties).
If Democrats believe what they’re saying, why don’t they take real action to eliminate Republicans from the United States? If they don’t believe what they’re saying, why are they saying these things?
We know that she was against Ron DeSantis and his plan to end American democracy. What was Nikki Fried actually for? Abortion care and marriage for members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community:
The pending Supreme Court decision doesn't stop with women’s rights — gay marriage is likely next.
When the power comes back to the states, it's vital we have a governor in office who will protect us. DeSantis is not that governor.
CNN agrees that the most important question facing Florida voters is whether abortion care should be limited to 15 weeks into a pregnant person’s pregnancy (3 weeks more than in most European countries) or if abortion care should be available as part of reproductive health care at 34 weeks, as is legal in Maskachusetts (the law) or Colorado (Wikipedia).
The question of who is best suited to take the abortion fight to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — seasoned Rep. Charlie Crist or Nikki Fried, the state agriculture commissioner vying to be the state's first female governor — has sparked a bitter war of words https://t.co/Nu41rC6Uq1
(It’s the “abortion fight” and not the “abortion care fight”? Where are the copy editors at CNN?)
How about the old white guy who won? He promises “reproductive freedom” and is endorsed by Planned Parenthood, the world’s largest provider of pregnancy-ending reproductive health care (abortion care to more than 300,000 pregnant people every year):
I’m deeply honored to receive the support of @FAPPA!
We will defeat Ron DeSantis and defend reproductive freedom for all in Florida. https://t.co/NSKwMyJpAX
Charlie Crist also promises to consider a state-wide governor-ordered mask mandate (source). This is against the spirit of Florida law, passed by the legislature and signed by Governor DeSantis, but maybe not against the letter of the law since it could be a state-level order instead of one imposed by counties or school districts.
The Feds had to force companies to hire those over 40 but even this law allowed putting anyone over 65 out to pasture if important decisions were being made in that position. Given how much prejudice there is against hiring old people for regular jobs, I am mystified by American voter behavior in favor of the elderly for seemingly much more important jobs (state governor, President of the US, etc.).
Who wants to forecast the Crist v. DeSantis result in November? It was 49.6:49.2 for Ron D. back in 2018, but Democrats were a majority of Florida’s registered voters then. If we go by simple party registration (source) DeSantis wins by 51:49. However, my bet is that DeSantis gets a boost of 2 points from young people who don’t want to be locked down and/or ordered to wear masks the next time a respiratory virus appears. And then he gets another 3-point boost from parents of K-12-age students who don’t want to see public schools (a.k.a. “free daycare”) shut down. So that would be a 56:44 victory for DeSantis. It is rare for Floridians to say much about politics beyond Palm Beach County, but the most common expression that I have heard is gratitude to Ron DeSantis for keeping schools open and preventing local Covidcrats from imposing their Science-guided will regarding masks, vaccine papers checks, lockdowns, etc. The second most common expression is from older Democrats who are transplants from the Lands of Science, cursing DeSantis for failing to follow Science. So the 2018-2022 result spread will be an interesting referendum on the voter-perceived appropriate level of coronapanic!
Related:
“Most DeSantis-endorsed school board candidates win their Florida primaries” (Politico): “The majority of local school board candidates backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis — at least 21 out of 30 — won their elections Tuesday, results that underscore how the Republican governor’s stance on education has gained support throughout Florida. … DeSantis-backed candidates also scored big wins in Miami-Dade County, another school board that went against Republicans on masking students. In one race, Monica Colucci, an educator with GOP support, defeated Marta Perez, a 24-year school board member despite raising about $70,000 less than her opponent.”
A neighbor is a refugee from the Land of Lockdown (Illinois) and is a partner in a real estate development company. “We decided to stop doing projects in Chicago because so many people were leaving,” he explained. He’s finishing a sold-out project of $4 million Florida beachfront condos that will be ready for occupancy early in 2023. It is on the site of a former hotel. What does construction cost right now for a luxury concrete high-rise? “It is $450 per square foot,” he responded. Three years ago? “Mid-$200s.”
Here’s a new one near us, which was planned starting at $4 million per unit, announced at $6-10 million, and has apparently been selling for up to $18 million for a 5,000-square-foot unit ($3,600 per square foot): SeaGlass, Jupiter Island (it is not in Jupiter, but in the next town up: Tequesta).
Some friends in northeast Florida will be moving into their new 3BR house soon. They bought it 18 months ago, which is when the developer began work on design and construction (theirs is a tweak to a standard design within the development). It will cost just under $1 million and is a 20-minute drive to the beach. The developer complains that, due to inflation, this particular house will actually be unprofitable.
Related:
City rebuilding costs from the Halifax explosion, from 2019, in which I describe an affordable apartment construction project in Boston. Even with free real estate, the construction cost of each unit ($555,555 per) rendered them unaffordable, without taxpayer subsidies, to a dual-income couple in which both of the partners (who will, one hopes, come in a rainbow of gender IDs) worked full time at the median Maskachusetts wage. Presumably that construction cost has now also doubled, but the median wage won’t have followed.
Although I don’t like to sort people by skin color, I have noticed that we interact much more frequently with Black and Latinx people here in Florida than we did in Massachusetts. Everyone who worked on our house in Massachusetts was white, for example, while folks in the service industries here come in a rainbow of skin tones, often within the same crew. For white suburbanites in Boston, Black people might as well be aliens. They exist on a different planet and interactions are uncommon, even in service settings.
Although Florida has a higher percentage of Black residents, the difference is not large enough to explain our experience. I’m wondering if the explanation can be found in the states’ respective welfare systems. CATO’s Work versus Welfare Trade-Off 2013:
In Massachusetts, unless a person puts a $0 value on leisure time, being a successful welfare entrepreneur is vastly smarter, from an economic point of view, than working at the median salary. The spending power of the welfare recipient is 118 percent of the worker’s and that’s before considering cash income that the welfare recipient might obtain from under-the-table work and also discounts to EBT cardholders.
How about in Florida? The same chart shows that Florida is one of the worst states for enjoying the welfare lifestyle (unless you love the beach!). At least as of 2013, a welfare recipient in Florida enjoyed only about 41 percent of the spending power of a worker. Therefore, it is not economically rational to spend multiple generations on welfare unless one puts a very high value on leisure time/Xbox.
Whatever the reason, I think it is good for our kids to see that the well-paid guy who runs a paver restoration business happens to be Black while his helper is white.
Separately, we have learned a lot about pavers! Our patios, walks, and driveway are a mosaic of red bricks and white concrete tiles. Over time, the brick color had faded so that the contrast between these items was reduced. More seriously, tree roots had grown underneath and made the surface uneven. Cleaning up after 20 years of neglect required (1) picking up a lot of the tiles/bricks and removing all of the tree roots underneath, then putting everything back down again, (2) painting the bricks with “concrete stain” to restore their bright color, (3) putting new sand in between all of the bricks and tiles to hold them in place, and (4) sealing everything with clear sealer that is supposed to last 2-3 years (at which point it will just need a pressure wash and a reapplication of the sealer). Total cost to rehab 3,000 square feet of patio? $8,000. That’s 8,000 good reasons to continue being a renter!
At a family wedding recently, a cousin-by-marriage, on hearing that we had moved from a State of Virtue (Massachusetts) to a State of Deplorability angrily responded that he hoped we enjoyed living in a “fascist state”. (He is a retired vice president of NPR who used a massive inheritance to settle in an all-white suburb of D.C.)
A younger guy from New Jersey, without expressing any strong personal political beliefs, simply wondered aloud “How did Florida become so Republican?”
Another relative’s experience may provide the answer. He’s a 60-year-old ob-gyn physician who has carefully followed every aspect of Democrat dogma since childhood. The idea of agreeing on any political point with a Republican fills him with horror and he has always chosen to live in Blue states. Yet now he finds himself excommunicated from the Church of Righteousness because he holds the heretical belief that teenagers should not be provided with gender reassignment surgery.
I think that “Dr. Blue”‘s experience might explain what is happening on a broader scale in Florida. The Democrats nationwide have evolved faster than the Floridians who used to vote for Democrats, thus leaving behind Floridians who continue to agree with the Dogma According to Bill Clinton as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. Consider that Bill Clinton’s economic policy reads a lot like today’s Republican stated policy, including cutting taxes on small business (though Republicans in practice, of course, are happy to cooperate with Democrats on massive deficit spending). Bill Clinton never proposed that student loan debt for college graduates be transferred onto the backs of working class Americans who never went to college. Bill Clinton never used the phrase “Latinx”. Bill Clinton never tried to force Americans to accept injection with an experimental drug.
Fireworks are illegal in Maskachusetts while marijuana is “essential” and available even when schools are shut down due to plague. In Florida, however, marijuana is illegal and fireworks are sufficiently essential that Costco and Publix carry kits large enough to blow up your house:
In Maskachusetts, fetuses are sufficiently tough that on-demand abortion care is available up until 24 weeks and, after that, if a single doctor thinks abortion care makes sense (paging Dr. Gosnell). Babies, on the other hand, are too tender to be exposed to the sight and sounds of fireworks and children are too precious to handle fireworks. In our MacArthur Foundation-planned community, fetuses are considered tender and therefore abortion care is available only up to 15 weeks gestation (state law). Infants are brought in baskets to the biggest and loudest fireworks shows. Little kids run around with sparklers. 10-year-olds wield roman candles. Unsupervised teenagers run full-scale shows on neighborhood common areas.
At least according to one estimate, however, Massachusetts actually has more fireworks injuries per capita than Florida. How is that possible, given that fireworks are illegal in Massachusetts? They’re easy to buy in New Hampshire.
Where to see professional fireworks in South Florida? Our own neighborhood has a show next to the Major League Baseball spring training stadium. There’s a bigger/better one at the Flagler Museum that happens over the Intracoastal and can be viewed by the Proles from West Palm. People who join as Sustaining members ($250) can watch from the museum itself. (Of course, the theme parks in Orlando have fireworks every night!)
Readers: Where did you see fireworks tonight and how were they?
Related:
As we celebrate freedom today, I can't stop thinking about the millions of Americans who no longer have the Constitutional right to make decisions about their own bodies. We'll never realize our ideal of being the land of the free if Americans don't have bodily autonomy. #July4th
— Rep. Katie Porter (@RepKatiePorter) July 4, 2022
(Maybe she will arrange with Joe Biden to get Dr. Kermit Gosnell, the expert on providing bodily autonomy, pardoned and then appointed to an expanded Supreme Court?)
This 4t of July, I am finding it very hard to celebrate, knowing that the Supreme Court has been compromised, and certain politicians are forcing 10 and 12 year old girls to carry babies from their rapists to term! That is NOT freedom!!! I cannot wish anyone a happy 4th today. 😔
