Category: Florida

A month of not being told how or what to think comes to an end

by philg

Compared to Maskachusetts or California, one of the remarkable features of life in our corner of Florida (Palm Beach County) is the lack of folks telling others how and what to think. In the Boston suburbs, I would be reminded every few minutes while driving or walking the dog to (1) have faith in leaky vaccines to end the global COVID-19 pandemic (highway electronic billboards), (2) stop hating Asians, (3) celebrate that Love is Love, (4) agree that Black Lives Matter, (5) welcome immigrants, (6) vote for Democrats, etc.

When we departed the Boston area (see Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children), I said “I’ve paid for my last shopping bag at the supermarket, driven by my last BLM sign in an all-white neighborhood, and read my last governor’s order.” We have yet to see a BLM sign, a Trump bumper sticker or hat, or a Biden/Harris bumper sticker. We haven’t bothered to check what Ron DeSantis is up to in Tallahassee and learn whether a recent order might make one of our daily activities newly illegal. Over the weekend, however, we flew the Cirrus SR20 down to Key West. Some folks were displaying rainbow flags, which didn’t necessarily qualify as educating others regarding the path of righteousness. Unlike our old neighbors (boring cisgender white heteros), the folks in Key West flying rainbow flags might actually have been living an LGBTQIA+ lifestyle. However, we did encounter the following “love comes in all flavors” sign prominently displayed on the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream freezer:

This is consistent with Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money? There were no signs in the shop regarding other social justice causes, e.g., poverty or homelessness. That might lead to questions regarding how a “single mom” (who forgot to have sex with a high-income defendant and therefore was reliant on what we no longer call “welfare”) with two kids could afford to pay $14 for two small ice creams. There were no signs reminding customers to boycott Israel. Ben & Jerry’s did not urge us to assist the tens of thousands of Haitians who’ve recently arrived, nor protest the fact that at least some are being deported in violation of international law.

(Separately, let me note for the record that I think Häagen-Dazs is much better ice cream, as long as we’re talking about mass-market. Here in Jupiter, we’ve managed to maintain a reasonable level of obesity, and therefore our coronavirus cross-section, at Matty’s Gelato Factory and Loxahatchee Ice Cream Company.)

Related:

  • Wikipedia: Cohen has severe anosmia, a lack of a sense of smell, and so relies on mouthfeel and texture to provide variety in his diet. This led to the company’s trademark chunks being mixed in with their ice cream. [i.e., the co-founder had COVID-19 symptoms before COVID-19 symptoms were popular!]
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Coronalogic in Palm Beach County

by philg

Mostly-Democrat Palm Beach County was one of the local governments ready to fight the governor’s “no mask orders in schools” order (a.k.a. “parental choice order”) with every last dollar of residents’ money. See “Palm Beach County public schools set to hire elite law firm to defend mask mandate” (Palm Beach Post, August 31, 2021), for example:

With the legal battle over masks in schools heating up, Palm Beach County public schools are hiring a high-profile law firm to advise them on their mask mandate and, if needed, defend it in court.

School board members are expected Wednesday to approve spending up to $50,000 for advice and legal representation from the national law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.

The vote comes five days a Tallahassee judge ruled Gov. Ron DeSantis exceeded his authority by ordering school boards last month not to impose mask mandates on campus. DeSantis said he will appeal the decision.

Where else on this blog might you have seen mention of Boies Schiller Flexner? They were the law firm that enabled Elizabeth Holmes to silence potential whistleblowers. From Evaluating trustworthiness; lessons from Theranos (based on reading the fascinating book Bad Blood):

Background: Roger Parloff, legal affairs reporter for Fortune, was intrigued by a story about Theranos hiring David Boies to sue a guy who had a patent that they would have needed to license if the blood testing machines had actually worked. Boies was given a fat slice of Theranos equity and a board seat in exchange for doing the company’s legal bidding. The author describes the lawsuit as entirely meritless, alleging that the inventor had somehow gotten hold of proprietary Theranos info because his son was a partner at the same huge law firm that had filed some patents for Theranos. The inventor spent $2 million on legal defense before caving in. (The big multi-office law firm’s records manager investigated the allegation and couldn’t find anything to suggest that the son/partner had ever accessed any Theranos-related information or even knew at the relevant time that the company was a client.)

So… the county is prepared to lose state funding (but they’ll get it all back from Uncle Joe: “Biden Administration Says Federal Funds Can Cover Florida School Board Salaries If DeSantis Defunds Them Over Mask Mandates” (Forbes); how are Presidents Biden and Harris able to write checks for this without Congressional funding?). And the county will happily hire a law firm that enabled one of of America’s most prominent criminal defendants, with its lead name partner actually serving on her corporate board and the firm hoping to benefit from the fraud by holding shares. All of this to ensure that when children sit together in a classroom, kept separated by however many feet the CDC recommends, they are wearing some sort of mask.

Suppose that the kids in the class decide to go to an after-school basketball program run by a different branch of the same enterprise (Palm Beach County). They will then meet on an indoor court and be close enough to actually touch each other, without any masks on. They’ll be breathing much more forcefully, of course, on the basketball court than in the classroom.

I would expect variation in coronapanic level and faith in masks from state to state and from county to county, but I didn’t expect to find this much variation in coronascience between two departments of the same county government!

(Separately, our neighborhood is packed with kids. As soon as they’re out of school, the masks come off and they play with each other outdoors in direct physical contact with no masks. They are also observed to visit each other’s homes and socialize without masks. So even if the county itself didn’t run mask-free kid gatherings, the young people and their parents would do this. Thus, it is a mystery to me how the masks-in-school plan was supposed to be effective.)

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Science: opening schools without masks stops a coronaplague (data from Florida)

by philg

Inspired by the official coronascience that I’ve seen in the last 1.5 years, here is an analysis that follows the same logic and methodology….

Florida was suffering from a terrible coronaplague, leading to an exponential rise in hospitalizations of patients tagged with COVID-19, a tweet from the Florida Hospital Association on August 23, 2021:

As a way of fighting this wave of contagious death, public health officials wisely decided to reopen schools on the usual schedule, with the last school district opening on August 23, 2021 (calendar). Mixing students from different households in the same room, oftentimes without masks (due to a governor’s order that parents retain the ultimate decision regarding whether their children would wear masks 7 hours/day), diluted the coronavirus so as to render it harmless. Same chart from the same source, today:

The red curve that was rising inexorably toward infinity is now trending down, having peaked right around the time that schools throughout Florida were back in session.

Because coronanumbers don’t move without government action (see Thomas Aquinas regarding the Prime Mover and First Cause), we can be confident that it was the reopened mask-optional (depending on county) schools that caused the decline in hospitalizations. Thus, it is fair to say that #Science proves that unmasked children in schools, or at least tightly packed children in indoor classrooms (in the counties that defied the governor), are the key to ending an exponential coronaplague.

(Separately, while on a Zoom call with a group of MIT alumni a couple of nights ago, I asked the assembled group whether hospitalizations in Florida were trending up or trending down. All of the folks on the call, based on what they’d read in the media and heard on NPR, believed that COVID-19-tagged hospitalizations in Florida were trending up.)

(On a more serious note, deaths tend to lag hospitalization and therefore there are still quite a few people dying from what seems likely to be an annual summer COVID-19 wave in Florida. The cumulative death rate remains lower than in many states, but it is still painful to confront the fact that we humans cannot escape a determined virus.)

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Not everyone in Florida is a Deplorable Neanderthal (children’s section of a Palm Beach County library)

by philg

Folks in Maskachusetts tend to be scornful of Florida, dismissing it as a “Red state” with “stupid” residents. But you won’t see a big difference at our local public library (the Jupiter branch of the Palm Beach County system).

Government workers won’t have their pay cut or jobs eliminated no matter how unpleasant they make the customer experience. Thus, in a generally mask-optional state, the librarians don’t have a problem demanding that customers wear the hijab (so both librarians and patrons can catch coronavirus 15 minutes after leaving when they walk into a mostly-unmasked store or restaurant?):

The librarians also sit behind Plexi screens that the New York Times says #Science now disclaims.

How about the featured books in the children’s section?

What if a child wants to read about a white heterosexual cisgender male? He/she/ze/they will have to dig into the stacks! (Keith Haring, above, may have identified as “white,” but was a member of the LGBTQIA+ community until HIV killed him at age 31.)

Children can learn about the female roots of aeronautical engineering:

(Maybe a book about Kitty Hawk could be featured if titled “The Wright Brothers, Sisters, and Binary-resisters”?)

A featured book in the adult section:

(Another way that Maskachusetts residents insult the idea of Florida is by talking about how old everyone in Florida is. (If the Northern Righteous have such contempt for the elderly, why do they put masks on 7-year-olds in hopes of reducing plague deaths among the 82-year-olds?) In fact, our new neighborhood is about 30 years younger than our old neighborhood. Still, it is tough not to love the fact that the librarians expect their elderly customers to still be running Windows 7 (released in 2009). There were no corresponding books about Windows 10 or 11 available. Speaking of Windows 11, will the main reason to upgrade be the ability to point to our PC and say “this one goes to 11”?)

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Florida first impressions

by philg

We’ve been Florida residents since mid-August. Here are a few first impressions…

One of the most important issues to folks in Maskachusetts, at least to judge by lawn signs, emails from school administrators, teacher email signatures, and sincere expressions from politicians and government workers, is Black Lives Matter. After driving all the way from the border with Georgia to South Florida, and driving around neighborhoods (including some mostly-Black ones in North/West Palm Beach), I haven’t seen a single BLM sign. In what folks in Maskachusetts would regard as a poor substitute for putting up a sign, what I have done is interacted with Black people. During our first weekend in Jupiter (Abacoa), I interacted with more Black people than I talked to during the preceding year in Massachusetts. A manager at our apartment complex happens to be Black, some of the neighbors, a woman in front of us on the mini golf course who helped putt back some of the wilder shots by our 6-year-old, a cable/Internet installer from AT&T, cashiers helping me check out at Walmart, Costco, and Target, etc. In our former home, a rich suburb of Boston, Black people are generally objects of pity and charity. A rich friend’s wife is Black and the righteous moms of Lincoln, MA, seeing her at the local school, always started from the assumption that she was a “METCO parent” whose children were being bused out from Boston in a government-run program based on skin color.

It won’t help our kids get jobs in the victimhood industry, but I’m happy that our kids will learn about Black Americans from talking to the Black residents in our apartment complex, rather than from seeing BLM signs, receiving anti-racism training from white teachers, etc. There are no subsidized units in our building, so when the kids meet someone who is Black they are talking to someone who has equal status with the landlord, pays the same rent as us, presumably has a reasonably well-paid job, etc.

A lot of Floridians, including some here in Jupiter, have built elaborate screen structures over their swimming pools and backyards. I was told that summer is the bug season, but we haven’t seen or felt a single mosquito. We’re right next to a golf course with a variety of water features. The no-mosquito situation was the same in a swampy nature trail area near the F45 airport (miles inland). The bug situation is far more annoying in New England.

Driving is much more challenging than in Boston, despite Boston’s reputation for having aggressive, incompetent, and rule-flouting drivers. In Boston, roads are usually either so jammed that traffic is moving at only 10 mph or they are not too busy. If the speed limit is higher than 35 mph, the road is almost surely a limited access one. South Florida is densely populated, packed with commercial strip malls that generate mid-block entries and exits, and wide fast-moving main arteries. Since traffic is moving at 45 mph (the speed limit) on these 6-lane suburban thoroughfares, one needs to be alert. After only about two hours in the state, I was eating barbecue at an intersection near St. Augustine and witnessed a terrifying-sounding crash between a pickup truck and a car (fortunately, nobody seemed to have been hurt).

At least in the summer, car navigation systems should pull in NEXRAD weather radar data. There are quite a few small-ish rain cells in Florida that are dangerous to drive through due to reduced visibility. It would be a huge safety enhancement if Google Maps were smart enough to say “Pull over at the next exit and chill out at McDonald’s for 20 minutes because that way you’ll skip extreme precipitation.”

Speaking of driving, I would expect almost everyone in Florida to drive a Tesla solely due to Dog Mode (my dream from 2003). A parked car heats up very quickly indeed. A golden retriever on the beach heats up and times out sooner than the kids in the water and needs to be put into an air-conditioned environment. Even for those without dogs, it would be a lot more comfortable on a day spent running errands to leave the car’s climate system going during all of the stops.

Mask usage among adults was actually higher among Floridians in August than it had been back in the Boston area, perhaps due to summer being a peak COVID-19 time in Florida and a COVID-19 lull for New England (at least in 2020 and most of summer 2021). There is a lot less anxiety around COVID-19, however, especially among children. The Florida children we’ve met are not afraid to approach other children, adults, etc., and don’t hurry to put on masks. Back in Maskachusetts, my friend’s kids are literally terrified to go into another family’s house, will rush to yank their chin diapers up over their nose and mouth when a non-family member approaches, etc. (This is true even after everyone eligible has been vaccinated.) Children aged 3-5 in our old town display what would have been called a panic response (back in 2019) if you ride a bike within 15-20′ of them (i.e., ride by on the street while they’re in the driveway). By the standards that prevailed in 2019, children in Florida enjoy much better mental health than children in Massachusetts.

In Cambridge, MA, a Comcast Xfinity coax cable delivers, depending on what the neighbors are doing, 200 mbps down and 5 mbps up, plus TV, for $200/month. In Jupiter, AT&T fiber delivers 1 Gbps up and down, plus TV, for $60/month (i.e., 200X faster upload for one third the price, though I think we may be getting a small discount for being part of this apartment complex).

People are far friendlier than in Massachusetts. Nobody says what they rationally should say: “go back to where you came from so that you don’t bid up rents and real estate prices and clog up the highway with your minivan and that Tesla that might show up in 2023 if you order it now.” Instead, the locals say “welcome” and try to help us enjoy everything that they’re enjoying about the area.

I’m not 100% sure that we made the right decision with Abacoa. It’s great if you want to walk to work at Max Planck Institute, Scripps, or the Florida Atlantic University campus here. There are a lot of people to meet, restaurants to visit, etc. It is not super expensive ($2000 to $3000/month for an apartment) and therefore there are a lot of young people, even before factoring in the 200 who live in the FAU dorms. The landscaping and architecture are appealing when walking around. But this neighborhood is a 15-minute drive to the beach and maybe it would be better to live a car-dependent lifestyle in a house that is only a few minutes walk from a dogs-welcome beach. Not so great when the hurricane and storm surge hits, of course!

My quintessential Florida experience thus far has been hearing Mindy the Crippler drinking from her water bowl in the kitchen of our apartment in a massive concrete building while simultaneously seeing her sleeping in the living room. It turned out that a lizard had entered the apartment and taken up residence in the golden retriever’s water bowl:

(I covered the bowl with a Chinet plate, carried the combined system out the front door, and dumped water+lizard into the bushes.)

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Florida implements my renal dialysis-inspired COVID care idea (sort of)

by philg

Since all that hospitals are generally doing for COVID-19 patients is providing supportive care (i.e., not treatment) and, in fact, patients can do just as well at home with an oxygen bottle (nytimes), it seemed like an obvious idea to look for a way to handle COVID-19 patients somewhere other than a hospital. If nothing else, this would prevent the COVID-19 patients from infecting workers and patients within the hospital. If we could build renal dialysis capacity, why not COVID-19 treatment centers? is my idea from April 2, 2020:

On the one hand, the U.S. health care system is kind of lame. It consumes a ton of money. New York State spends $88 billion per year on its Department of Health, $4,400/year for every resident, mostly just for people on welfare in New York; Mexico spends about $1,100/year across all citizens, including those with jobs. The U.S. health care system delivers feeble results. Life expectancy in Mexico is 77 versus 78 in the U.S. Despite this prodigious spending, New York has completely failed to protect its residents from something that isn’t truly new.

On the other hand, the U.S. managed to build enough renal dialysis capacity to keep 468,000 Americans with failed kidneys alive. This is a complex procedure that requires expensive machines, and one that did not exist on a commercial basis until the 1960s.

…

Of course, one issue is that we had decades to build up all of this renal dialysis capability while we have only about one more month to build COVID-19 treatment capacity. But once we have built it, can we sail through the inevitable next wave or two of COVID-19?

(Looks like I can take credit for predicting “the inevitable next wave or two of COVID-19” (the U.S. is officially in Wave #3? BBC).)

If renal dialysis can be delivered in a strip mall, why not COVID-19 care? Florida has taken a step in the direction that I suggested nearly 1.5 years ago. From https://floridahealthcovid19.gov/monoclonal-antibody-therapy/ :

Note that the locations are not hospitals. They’re not empty strip mall shops or big box stores as I’d expected, but rather parks and libraries (i.e., existing state-owned facilities). But maybe this is because these are the state-run operations rather than private sector. (Also, as far as I have seen, South Florida isn’t in the Zombie Apocalypse retail vacancy situation that Boston is.)

Also, I wonder if the 9-5 hours support my analogy between the Vietnam War and our War on COVID-19. We were in a fight where the fate of democracy all around the world was at stake… but the upper-middle class back home kept playing tennis and golf and President Johnson and Congress kept larding on social welfare programs without considering the cost. Right now we’re in an unprecedented emergency. Our best and brightest technocrats are using advanced technology and trillions of dollars against an enemy that has already killed more Americans than all wars combined… but we will fight the enemy from 9-5. (I don’t think this is completely fair because the Florida state government has treated COVID-19 as a respiratory virus to be managed like the flu, not as an entirely new phenomenon nor as something that can be vanquished by government action.)

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Reverse underground railroad journey complete

by philg

Our journey on the modern underground railroad (Maskachusetts to the Florida Free State) is complete as of yesterday!

Billboards on I-95 were interesting. Excluding those for travel-related services (hotels, restaurants, etc.), approximately 1/3rd were from employers begging people to work (curiously, however, the begging stopped at the Florida border; maybe people in Florida are more eager to work? Or the economy in Florida is not as strong as in NC, SC, GA?). The remaining billboards were dominated by personal injury and divorce litigators and by the healthcare industry. I couldn’t get any photos because it was just me and Mindy the Crippler in the Honda Odyssey (jammed with all the stuff that we forgot to pack or that the movers forgot to load).

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Effect on children’s wealth when parents move to Florida

by philg

Happy Bastille Day! Let’s look at the likelihood of kids being able to afford that trip to Paris…

Taxes weren’t a factor in our decision to relocate to Florida, but it is interesting to look at how a parental move to Florida can affect the wealth of children. I built a spreadsheet positing an already-sort-of-rich Massachusetts resident who moves to Florida 30 years prior to his/her/zir/their death (e.g., will live in Florida from 52 until 82, the median age at death of a COVID-19 victim here in Maskachusetts). The assumption is that this person will pay the top rates for any progressive taxation scheme. Since big numbers are tough to work with, I looked at the effect on the margin. The parent decides not to buy a $100,000 C8 Corvette (marked up from the $60,000 list price in our “no-inflation society” (TM)) and instead invests the money in the stock of a standard C corporation, to be saved for the benefit of the children. Keep in mind that this is a post-tax $100,000, which might have required earning $200,000 pre-tax (or, for those who prefer not to work, having sex with someone who earns a reasonably high income; see Real World Divorce for state-by-state child support profit calculations).

I started by assuming that the government isn’t lying to us and therefore use an inflation rate of 3 percent. If we assume real profits of 4 percent, that gives us a nominal return of 7 percent. The company pays 24.6 percent state and federal corporate income tax (Tax Foundation/OECD). We assume that these dividends are qualified and therefore a federal tax of 23.8 percent is due (20% plus Obamacare surtax). Maskachusetts income tax is 5 percent vs. 0 percent in FL. [2023 update: the MA tax rate on successful people was bumped to 9 percent via an amendment to the state constitution in 2022. The wealth difference would be larger for high-income people, therefore.] We assume that there is some way to invest these dividends and get a 5 percent annual return. When the 82-year-old is killed by Delta Epsilon Zeta variant COVID, Massachusetts estate tax takes 16 percent of the accumulated total while the Feds take 40 percent. Florida has no estate tax. Thanks partly to the miracle of compound interest and partly to the miracle of inflation, the $100,000 invested would have turned into $956,012 in a no-tax environment. In the Florida environment, however, it turns into $391,526 at death. In the Massachusetts environment, $275,287. Children end up 42 percent richer if the parent moves.

[As noted above, for children of the successful, the difference would now be larger due to the 5 percent income tax rate having become 9 percent. I redid the spreadsheet. The MA net goes down to $265,821, so the children of the FL resident become 47 percent richer.]

(You can check my calculations in this Google spreadsheet (downloads in Excel format; also available as a Web page).)

What’s the effective tax rate? In “I Can Afford Higher Taxes. But They’ll Make Me Work Less.” (NYT, 2010), Harvard professor Greg Mankiw calculated the total marginal tax rate on additional earnings for him was 90 percent (assuming that his goal was to help out his children). If we look the profits in nominal terms, subtracting the original $100,000 investment, we find that there was $291,526 profit in Florida compared to $856,012 in the no-tax case. Florida didn’t take anything, but the Feds and maybe some states via corporate income tax took 66 percent. In MA, the nominal profit was $175,287, resulting in a tax rate of 80 percent. What if we look at this in real terms, though. The $100,000 would have grown to $242,726 just from inflation alone. If we subtract this from the MA net of $275,287, the result is a total tax rate of 95 percent, since the real after-tax profit was only $32,561. The tax rate for the Florida residency case comes up to 79 percent of real after-tax profits (again, because of Federal taxation, not because Florida has an income or estate tax).

What if we assume the same real return on investment for corporations, but set inflation at 8 percent and therefore nominal earnings are 12 percent? The effective tax rate for a Floridian is remarkably stable, moving up to only 81 percent (from 79 percent). The effective tax rate for the person who lives and dies in Massachusetts, however, is 98.6 percent. (See revised spreadsheet (or as a Web page).)

What if the parent is a genius at picking stocks and he/she/ze/they selects only those with 8 percent real earnings (11 percent nominal)? The numbers are fairly stable, with the Florida corpse being worth 43 percent more. The Massachusetts real tax rate falls to 88.5 percent (from 95 percent).

Loosely related, a statue celebrating the “world’s first commercial airline flight,” which operated from St. Petersburg to Tampa beginning in 1914. The airline was started by Thomas W. Benoist, who died in an accident in 1917… stepping off a streetcar.

Wikipedia says that the signs should be amended to read “first fixed-wing scheduled airline” because the Germans were operating Zeppelins earlier. (The photo is from the St. Petersburg Pier, June 2021.)

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PODS versus PACK-RAT for moving and storage

by philg

For the move from Massachusetts to Florida we decided that it would make the most sense to use at least two containers and a dumpster. Container A for the apartment we’re moving into. Container B to a storage facility near the apartment for eventual delivery to a house when we become stupid enough to purchase one. Dumpster for everything else.

We looked at the market leader, PODS, first. They wanted $4,770 per container (16x8x8′) for the move and $265/month per container for rental or storage. The container is wood, steel, and fiberglass and can hold up to 4,200 lbs.

PACK-RAT does not have as large a service area, but they cover West Palm Beach and Boston. The container is the same size, but all steel, like a standard container for a container ship (suitable for jamming into the Suez Canal!). The price for the container/storage is about the same, but they’ll move three containers to Florida (all fit on one truck) for what PODS charges to move two.

A typical cluttered house will require three containers. We’re hoping to trash a lot of stuff, but we also have some aviation gear currently stored in hangars.

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Is Florida better set up to handle multi-culturalism than the rest of the U.S.?

by philg

When I talked to a neighbor in Cambridge, MA regarding our upcoming move to Jupiter, Florida (see Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children) she responded that she wouldn’t want to live anywhere that had privately set up limits on human behavior, e.g., through homeowners’ associations and the covenants and deed restrictions that go with them. She didn’t like the idea that she might not be able to stage a big political demonstration on the street in front of her house (likely illegal in Massachusetts anyway as a violation of one of the governor’s 68 COVID-19 emergency orders).

I found part of the agreement for those who live in Abacoa, a neighborhood within Jupiter. Pit bulls are banned:

Obviously this is not going to increase happiness among those who love pit bulls, but for the average person it might be nice to know that something that is legal under state law won’t happen in one’s neighborhood. (A recent afternoon for a couple of pit bulls: “3-Year-Old Was Playing in Yard for 1st Time With Family When Neighbor’s Dog Attacked, Killing Him”, which notes “a neighbor’s dog escaped an enclosure and attacked them both, killing the young child and leaving his mother severely injured, a source close to the family told NBC New York.”)

My response to the neighbor:

I think Florida’s approach is more sustainable, actually. The U.S. is trending toward a population of 500 million people who have different cultures, languages, expectations, etc. With Chinese-style population density, but without a Chinese-style unified culture and language, we’re going to need more explicit rules if we want people to get along.

If we ever become stupid enough to win a bidding war for a house down there (going to rent at first), it might be burdensome to have to clean up our front yard every evening, but maybe we will come to love the fact that neighbors can’t park ugly boats and RVs in their driveways, keep human-killing dog breeds, be as messy with their yards as we’ve been with ours here in MA, etc. I’ll be sad that I never got to execute on my dream of painting one of the garage doors in a rainbow flag and the other one as a huge BLM banner, but I’ve reached the age where I realize that not all of dreams are attainable.

Readers: What do you think? Does it make sense that a country of 331 million would need more rules than a country of 100 million (the U.S., circa 1920)?

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