Category: Florida

Democrats love elderly white guys, Florida edition

by philg

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:

“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:

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).

(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):

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.”
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Cost of luxury high-rise construction in Florida

by philg

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.
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Florida’s crummy welfare system leads to a lot more interracial interaction?

by philg

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!

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How did Florida become so Republican?

by philg

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.

At a local restaurant recently…

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Our first July 4th in Florida

by philg

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:

(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?)

There was a recent “coup”:

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Closing out Pride Month in Florida

by philg

The density of front lawn signs in our corner of Florida has been less than 1/100th of what it was in Maskachusetts. In fact, it seemed fair to say that an N95 mask is far more popular in Florida than expressing one’s political and social justice beliefs via lawn signs or bumper stickers.

It turns out, however, that our neighbors do celebrate Pride Month in June and signs have appeared on 1 out of 20 front lawns and house facades. Here’s one neighbor, for example:

For the other houses that we regularly pass by, however, the pride signs have all been related to a child graduating from middle school, high school, or college. Examples:

(We were fortunate to meet Ellie, a hard-working young lady who has completed Jupiter High School (run by Palm Beach County) and will soon be a student at Florida State. She did not say anything about identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+)

Here is a house where Henry and Sean are celebrated for finishing an arts magnet middle school and being admitted to the arts magnet high school, funded by a former MIT board member.

Speaking of Pride, “Miami teen accepted into all 8 Ivy League universities” (Good Morning America):

First-generation Nigerian American Ashley Adirika became one of few prospective students to be accepted into all eight Ivy League universities.

“The tears just started to come out. Like they started to flow out,” she said of her reaction to finding out. “My siblings and I were just really excited, like screaming, jumping around. It was crazy,” she said.

From being a teacher to sitting in the Oval Office, Adirika’s dreams have changed over time, but now she is focused on empowering young women of marginalized identities with her organization, Our Story, Our Worth, which she started as a high school sophomore.

She said she looks forward to learning more about herself, her place in the world and how to “maximize the impact” she has in empowering communities when she starts at Harvard University in the fall.

The recent Miami Beach Senior High School graduate and student government president also credits her time on speech and debate teams with building the confidence to make her voice heard.

She did not attend one of the killer magnet schools in the Miami area, but just a regular neighborhood high school, thus proving American Pravda correct once again: “Surprise: Florida and Texas Excel in Math and Reading Scores” (NYT, 2015).

Readers: What are you doing to complete your celebration of Pride Month?

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New York City attracts refugees from Florida

by philg

In April, Freedom of speech opposite the banner promising freedom of speech shows some of the billboards that New York City had paid to place in Florida, e.g.,

On June 1, the New York Times did a story on two people who moved from Tampa to NYC, just as Eric Adams had hoped. The move was not for the expected reason, however. “New York’s Weed Rush Is Here. They Came to Cash In.”:

For generations, entrepreneurs and dreamers have moved to New York City to strike it big. Now they’re coming to sell a lot of cannabis.

Just as they were getting into a pandemic rhythm of deliveries [of marijuana] and drop-offs, the George Floyd protests took over Tampa’s streets. Every time C. and S. were driving after curfew, they felt as if they might be targeted by police, who were out in greater numbers. During one cannabis delivery, C. noticed a car following him, and he worried it was driven by undercover police officers — either that or counterprotesters; he couldn’t tell. After the unmarked car was joined by five marked police vehicles, he told S., who was in the passenger seat with their delivery of edibles and flower, to throw everything out the window, call their lawyer, call their neighbor. The neighbor told him there were vehicles that looked like unmarked police cars in front of their house.

Concerned about raids and arrests, they decided they had to leave town. … she lobbied hard for New York. They both had relatives there, and a cannabis market was emerging in the city.

In New York, Mayor Eric Adams has proposed that the city invest $4.8 million next year in the local cannabis industry, which is expected to generate nearly $1.3 billion in the first year of legal sales.

This is also an inspiring story about the benefits of immigration:

“My dad’s Ecuadorean,” C. says. “My family’s Ecuadorean. In Miami, there’s not that many Ecuadoreans, so it was nice to be in a neighborhood where things that people talk about or say or the news that might be going on, I can kind of relate to.”

And an inspiring story about hard work:

Once settled, they spent their life savings — thousands of dollars — to buy a package of cannabis from Colorado, hoping that would enable them to establish their New York business. It didn’t. “I’ve been selling marijuana since I was like a teenager in Miami,” C. says. “Every now and then I would do a rookie mistake.” This deal was one of them. They had planned to both sell the cannabis and use some of it for giveaways — which they thought would help them gain a following in Brooklyn — but it was lost in transport. They had to get cannabis on credit in order to have something to sell.

The article informs us that “C” is 32 years old. So he was selling marijuana illegally for at least 10 years (Wikipedia says that Floridians voted to legalize medical marijuana at the end of 2016).

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Love Wins at the Florida Walmart

by philg

Happy Pride Month again!

(Only the LGBTQ Marines are recognized and honored? Why not the 2SLGBTQQIA+ Marines?)

For folks who are dismayed that the dictatorship of Ron DeSantis has stamped out the word “gay” from the vocabulary of Floridians, some photos from May 7, 2022 taken at the Walmart in Jupiter, Florida:

Related:

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Real estate market has peaked? (that $3.225 million house in our neighborhood)

by philg

From early March… Open house today in our neighborhood:

There’s a house for sale in our neighborhood (we rent a 2BR for $2800/month). It went on the market about a week ago. The first showings are today, 10a-4p, and “All contracts must be submitted by 5:00pm on March 3rd.” This million dollar home (built in 2012; re-sold in 2017 for $1.3 million) sits on a princely quarter-acre lot and offers a vast interior space of 4,574′. It was “coming soon” at $2.95 million two weeks ago, but the asking price now is $3.225 million (escaping NY, MA, and CA vaccine coercion and mask orders is not cheap!). The house comes with the opportunity for a lifetime close friendship with the appliance repair brothers, sisters, and binary resisters (i.e., there is a Sub-Zero fridge).

Zillow estimates the value at $2.225 million. Redfin admits “we don’t have enough information to generate an accurate estimate at this time.”

Zillow now says that the estimated value is $2.54 million and also that the house finally closed on May 9 at $3 million.

My theory is that the real estate market peaked in February 2022. The above failure to achieve asking price is a small data point in favor of this theory. The bigger data point is that… I made the decision to buy a house in February 2022. If I go long, that’s a signal to go short! (“I like to do everything in the dumbest way imaginable”) My feeble justifications: our rent was likely to go up to $5,000 per month in August; the mortgage on a house more than 2X the size (using the 3.25 percent rate that we locked in back in Feb) is about $10,000 per month (but not cheaper per square foot once you factor in property tax, maintenance costs, and unpaid maintenance and management labor); kids won’t have to share a bedroom; we now have a real guest bedroom; more kids in the immediate neighborhood. The house is still in the same Abacoa neighborhood that was developed by the MacArthur Foundation (search process explained).

(We just recently closed and moved in, so be prepared for numerous posts on systems and maintenance! My productive hours per week have been cut by 40. There are daily trips to Home Depot. One recent day I counted five different contractors/service people who showed up.)

Who wants to guess at the real estate price trend for the next 2 years? My guess is that house prices will fall, but not by falling. The price in 2 years will be the same as the price today (maybe with a dip in the middle), but inflation will have eroded the value in real terms by at least 10 percent.

Even if you overpaid by $1 million for a house, one great thing about this climate is that you can grow orchids by wiring them to a tree and walking away. The tree gives the orchid sufficient shade and the orchid gets everything else that it needs from the Florida sky. A neighbor’s house this morning:

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A hero flies the Cessna Caravan to Palm Beach

by philg

Tom Cruise is a pretty good pilot in real life and an even better one in Top Gun: Maverick, but my vote for pilot of the year goes to Darren Harrison, the passenger whose journey from the Bahamas is covered in “Air traffic controller guides passenger to safe landing at PBIA after pilot has medical emergency” (WPBF). The audio is available at liveatc.net (search for KFPR, then KFPR Tower, then click the “archive access” link and finally May 10 at 16Z. The action starts at 11:21 into the clip (the passenger’s full phone number is on the tape so you can text him congratulations!).

The aircraft is N333LD and here’s the path from flightradar24:

The passenger’s task was made more difficult by modern avionics. This ad for the plane shows that it is equipped with the Garmin G1000 flight deck. So the controller asked the passenger-turned-pilot to press the IDENT button, but there is no button labeled IDENT as there would have been with a discrete transponder. (With the advantage of 20-20 hindsight, what the controller should have said was “press and hold the button that has two arrows on it to tune the emergency frequency of 121.5” and then the talk-down wouldn’t have had to occur via mobile phone (good thing the passenger’s phone battery did not run out!).)

The turboprop-powered Caravan is pretty slow,, but it is not a beginner’s plane. Fortunately, the float gear had been removed! Here was what the plane used to look like:

What did he have to deal with at KPBI? The good news is that the big runway is 10,000′ long and there were just a few scattered clouds 4,200 and 4,600 feet above the airport. The bad news is that it is 10/28 (east-west) and the wind was reported from the north at 11 knots gusting 17.

KPBI 101553Z 02011G17KT 10SM SCT042 SCT046 26/15

A student pilot with 20 hours of training probably wouldn’t have been signed off by his/her/zir/their instructor to operate in that kind of crosswind.

liveatc.net also has the KPBI Tower archived (May 10 at 1630Z). Almost everything that we desperately want to hear was being said on a mobile phone call directly between ATC and the newly minted Caravan pilot. (Contrary to popular belief, the typical controller does not know how to fly a plane. My sources suggest that the phone call was between the passenger and Robert Morgan, who is a controller but also an FAA certificated flight instructor (“CFI”).) Perhaps worth a listen to PBI Tower starting around 5:00. At 8:45, a few minutes after the landing, we learn that the winds were 050 at 10 gust 16 (not quite as bad a crosswind as indicated by the METAR of 40 minutes earlier, but still more than a soloing student would likely be signed off for).

Update: interview with Robert Morgan… “a Jupiter resident”! (Trigger warning for Californians: the page shows Morgan and “the passenger” (still anonymous) without masks and less than 6′ apart.)

Loosely related, “you should be sitting back with your slippers and pipe”…

Garmin tooketh away to some extent with the G1000, but Garmin giveth back with Autoland, which would have been perfect for this situation.

Related:

  • Talk-down aircraft landing (Wikipedia), in which we learn that many of the people described by the media as “passengers” turn out to be either student pilots or rusty but fully certificated private pilots.
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