Lifestyle Ideas Archives - Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Wall Street Journal celebrates an all-male gay throuple

January 3, 2026December 24, 2025 by philg

A 2023 post, No, Polygamy Isn’t the Next Gay Marriage (2015), linked to a Wall Street Journal article about the beauty of a three-female throuple: “How Instagram’s Favorite Therapist Makes Her Throuple Relationship Work”. From 2025, “One Throuple Had Three Separate Design Tastes. How Did They Manage a Renovation?”

Good clean fun:

The men contracted with interior designer Jennifer Kole of Jenami Designs for a design fee of around $405,000, including furnishings. The en-suite bathroom has a 7-foot-by-4.5-foot shower with multiple shower heads, plus a free-standing soaking tub, ensuring no one is left waiting their turn.

Product designers are also exploring intimacy through form. New York-based furniture designer Kouros Maghsoudi created a sculptural bed called Hug, designed to comfortably accommodate up to three partners.

Should everyone join in this trend?

Real-estate agents are noticing more throuples and polycules buying homes together, often with everyone’s name on the deed. “Monogamy in this economy?” says Kathy “Kiki” Sloan, an employing broker with Property Dominator in Denver. She has seen a steady uptick in multipartner buyers treating shared ownership as both a romantic and financial move. Her advice: Get the paperwork sorted early. It should include a cohabitation plan and, ideally, an estate plan. Wendy Newman, a California-based real-estate agent with Wesely & Associates, adds that polyamorous families have been buying homes together for decades, but today more are “out” from the start and set up ownership structures that support everyone. Flexible layouts, with extra rooms, double primary bedrooms, accessory dwelling units and adaptable spaces are increasingly popular, she says.

One thing that I haven’t seen in the WSJ: a celebration of the normalcy of mixed-sex polygamy. Three women: good/wholesome/normal. Three men: good/wholesome/normal. One man and two women: no representation. I asked ChatGPT to write a story in the WSJ style:

In a fictional suburban vignette that reads like a zoning-board case study, an American-born Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed finds his tidy life colliding with global custom.
His wife, Donna Jones, a blonde convert to Islam, embraces the faith with a zeal that extends beyond the couple’s split-level home.
After a family decision made oceans away, she sponsors the arrival of a second wife from Somalia, turning belief into blueprints.
Suddenly the household needs more than harmony; it needs square footage.
An architect is hired to add bedrooms, rework entrances, and persuade the local code book to tolerate an unconventional floor plan.
Neighbors whisper, contractors measure, and the mortgage grows, a familiar American story with unfamiliar terms.
For Mr. Mohammed, born here and fluent in the rhythms of suburbia, the expansion tests the elastic limits of assimilation.
For Ms. Jones, the renovation is a practical expression of conviction, drywall standing in for doctrine.
The second wife’s arrival brings cultural translation alongside luggage, as daily routines are renegotiated room by room.
In this imagined tale, the clash is less about faith than about permits, proving that in America even private lives must pass inspection.

Note that it completely fails in the task in the first sentence. The WSJ news story disclaims itself as “fictional” when we know that everything in the WSJ is factual. Let’s see if Grok does better.

In the quiet suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota, Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed, a 42-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen born in Minneapolis, has quietly become a case study in the evolving boundaries of American family life. Mr. Mohammed, a successful logistics manager, married Donna Jones, a blonde former Lutheran schoolteacher who converted to Islam in 2015, in a ceremony that drew little attention at the time. Last year, Mr. Mohammed traveled to Somalia and returned with a second wife, Fatima Hassan, 29, who holds a valid spousal visa under U.S. immigration law. The couple’s three-bedroom colonial home, purchased in 2018, soon proved too small for the expanded household, which now includes four children from Mr. Mohammed’s marriages. Local architect Sarah Kline was hired to design a $320,000 addition featuring a separate wing with its own entrance, kitchenette, and private bedroom suite for Ms. Hassan, preserving what the family describes as “cultural harmony” while respecting the existing household’s privacy. Ms. Jones, who works part-time as a Quran tutor, told neighbors the arrangement reflects “mutual respect and shared faith,” though she acknowledged the adjustment has been challenging. The project has drawn scrutiny from the city’s zoning board, which approved the addition after confirming it complies with local building codes, but some residents have quietly expressed unease about polygamy’s presence in their community. Legal experts note that while polygamous marriages are not recognized for civil purposes in the U.S., the arrangement remains lawful as long as only one union is registered with the state. Mr. Mohammed declined to comment for this article, citing a desire to keep his family’s private life out of the public eye. The addition, expected to be completed next spring, stands as a tangible symbol of how immigration, faith, and personal choice are reshaping the American suburban landscape in unexpected ways.

Note that the story becomes primarily about the narrow-mindedness of non-Muslim Americans and the scourge of Islamophobia. The prompt didn’t say anything about neighbors being upset:

Write a 10-sentence article in Wall Street Journal style about American-born Mohammed Ahmed Mohammed married to a blonde convert to Islam, Donna Jones, who brings a second wife over from Somalia and an architect has to expand their house to accommodate the new wife.

“No, Polygamy Isn’t the Next Gay Marriage” (2015) reminds us that acceptance of same-sex marriage will never lead to social acceptance of three-way and four-way sex partnerships

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Biking without bike infrastructure: the Netherlands

July 29, 2023July 18, 2023 by philg

In Danish happiness: bicycle infrastructure I described the Danish system of road/curb/bike path/curb/sidewalk. What if a significant percentage of a society used bicycles for transportation, but nobody bothered to build infrastructure? That’s the Netherlands!

I recently visited a friend in Delft, a university town south of Amsterdam. There are no generally no curbs at all in the downtown area. The road is informally divided into car/bike/pedestrian, but these divisions can change depending on what exactly is sticking out from a house, possibly forcing pedestrians into the bike area, or whether a truck is trying to use the road.

The risk of injury has ballooned in the last few years due to the popularity of cargo bikes and electric bikes. Instead of getting hit by a 200 lb. person-bike combo going 8 mph you’ll get hit by a 400 lb. person-small person-groceries-bike combo going 15 mph. “Trouble in cyclists’ paradise: Amsterdam accused of favouring pedestrians” (Guardian 2021) describes the increasing conflict between walkers and bikers in Amsterdam.

There aren’t as many collisions as you’d imagine, but pedestrians are required to be constantly mindful. This works for the Dutch, but tourists are frequently wandering casually into near-collisions with cyclists. What the cyclists have gained is balanced by a loss of mental peace and capacity among pedestrians.

Here’s a narrow street designed for pedestrians in The Hague:

The bicycle is being used for transportation, not recreation, so it might be whipping by these pedestrians at 10-20 mph. Here are the two transportation modes interacting in Delft:

Maybe those white boxes are supposed to delineate between walking and biking? Or maybe there are two lanes for opposite directions? I didn’t figure it out.

Just a few of the bikes parked near the Amsterdam Zuid secondary station:

What if you choose “neither” but don’t have a car and/or don’t want to pay what my rich local friend said were insanely expensive parking fees? Take the tram!

My take-away: the Danes did it right.

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Big Sky v. Jackson v. Park City as a summer destination

July 11, 2023July 1, 2023 by philg

Interested in escaping to the mountains for all or part of the summer? Here’s a report, based on 2023 visits, regarding three possibilities.

Park City, Utah (elevation 7,000′) is the best choice if you’re passionate about Pride and 2SLGBTQQIA+. The city purchased at least 100 trans-enhanced rainbow flags and has hung them from every lamppost in the small downtown area. You can pay obeisance to Rainbow Flagism before you think about entering a business establishment, which might in turn have its own 2SLGBTQQIA+ talismans on the windows or door. If you’re not a follower of the state religion, however, you might be annoyed by Park City’s tilted situation. There are no level streets downtown. Park City is great if you’re planning to break a bone doing an adventure sport or if you’re planning on suffering a total body meltdown due to old age. A friend went from ski accident in Park City to world-class University of Utah hospital in 25 minutes via ambulance. The surrounding area is certainly more scenic than most of Florida, but it is far from any National Park.

Big Sky, Montana exemplifies everything that is bad about American sprawl. There are three main developments spread out along a highway, none of which has sufficient critical mass to constitute a city or even a “town”. Let’s call them three strip malls, one of which includes ski lifts. Everything is part of a single “resort”, which is able to impose a 4% sales tax on everything sold by the stores within Big Sky (Montana itself has no sales tax, so stock up in Bozeman or West Yellowstone!). But the resort corporation ignored all of the principles of New Urbanism and the sprawl does not feel planned. You can be crammed into a townhouse or condo development or you can be isolated and car-dependent far out from one of the three strip malls.

For peasants, Big Sky is tough to access. It is a 1.5-hour drive from the regional airport in Bozeman. The elite will sometimes do this or Gulfstream it to KWYS, a 35-minute drive away and blessed with an 8400′ runway and approaches down to 200′ AGL.

The exception to the above might be for the rich folks who hang out together in the Yellowstone Club (two shared and one private helipad inside so that the above drives are rendered unnecessary). Otherwise, Big Sky shows the genius of the New Urbanism folks who created our community. The shared gym, pool, lawn, playground, etc. for every 150-200 households and the compact layout (but still mostly single-family homes) facilitate social connections.

If you’re going to check out Big Sky and coming from sea level, I recommend the Marriott “Wilson”, which is in the middle strip mall that is 1,000′ lower than the base of the ski hill. This hotel was built in 2019 and folks say that the base lodges are getting worn and tired. There is a good walk down to an impressive waterfall. Bidenflation is a Republican lie: my haircut (without shampoo) at the local barber shop was only $55 plus tip. Here are the prices at the local Mexican food truck where local laborers get lunch (13 Bidies for a sandwich):

Jackson, Wyoming (elevation 6,237′) shows the importance of flatness. Hills are great if it is winter and you want to ski, but they’re annoying if you’re going to the supermarket. Jackson has a huge amount of more-or-less flat valley area that enables the development of a functional city, an extensive bike path network that you don’t need to be a hero to enjoy, etc. The wildlife art museum is a great place to hang out, especially because the members’ room is open to all and there is a good restaurant on site. You could spend 4-5 hours here with a meal and then doing some reading while looking out over the elk refuge. Jackson has its own regional airport (kind of a short runway and the approaches aren’t great, but airlines serve it). It also has an in-town low-elevation ski hill that looks good for beginners (the eponymous ski resort for Jackson is huge and terrifying).

Jackson offers quick access to Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park. Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that it will take nearly 5 hours to drive to the nearest real city: Salt Lake. I’m sure that the local hospital is great for orthopedics, but if you need any other high-end specialist it will be quite a project to see a doctor in Salt Lake City. The lack of inflation meant that it was only $30 plus tip for Pad Thai in Jackson:

Residential construction was proceeding at a feverish place in all of the places that we visited (on our way to a Chinese level of population density!), but even where it seemed that a lot of land was available the prices were stratospheric. Park City was perhaps the most affordable. In Big Sky and Jackson, the townhouse lifestyle is $1-2 million and the single-family houses with a big of land and a gorgeous view were mostly $4-10 million. Here’s the downtown Jackson view on Zillow. Note that many of these multi-$million properties are either apartments or vacant land.

Tax implications: Wyoming has no personal income tax. If you end up getting stuck there for more than 6 months or fall in love with Jackson and decide to make it your primary home, you won’t pay income tax. Utah and Montana both have income taxes. None of the three states have estate or inheritance taxes. The family law systems and associated profits for alimony and child support plaintiffs are quite different among these three states as well. See Real World Divorce.

Conclusion: I think that Jackson is the nicest place among the above three. Unfortunately, it is also everyone else’s favorite so it is super expensive. The long distance from a major city is concerning as well. Due to the urban layout, it should be easier to build a social life in Jackson than in Big Sky or Park City. That said, it probably still wouldn’t be that easy due to the large percentage of transients.

On the third hand: If you stay in Florida for the summer, you are unlikely to suffer from forest fire smoke, a problem that has been common for thousands of years in the mountain states, especially up north. Here’s the sky in the Titusville/Cape Canaveral area on July 1, 2023, when folks in the Midwest and Northeast were putting their N95s back on:

(we were up there watching SpaceX push the European Euclid telescope toward the L2 Lagrange Point; even the Florida-hating NYT was forced to admit that “The weather was almost perfect for the flight”)

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Disability lifestyle getting more attractive under Biden?

September 14, 2021September 10, 2021 by philg

I’m wondering if we should expect a massive increase in the number of Americans who transition to the disability lifestyle during the Biden administration.

Let’s consider today’s world of work. Unless remote, the worker will be exposed to variant coronavirus that laughs at our feeble vaccines. The worker may need to wear a mask for 8 hours per day. The worker will be forced to accept whatever injections Dr. Joe Biden, M.D., Ph.D. orders, according to “Sweeping new vaccine mandates for 100 million Americans” (AP):

In his most forceful pandemic actions and words, President Joe Biden on Thursday ordered sweeping new federal vaccine requirements for as many as 100 million Americans — private-sector employees as well as health care workers and federal contractors — in an all-out effort to curb the surging COVID-19 delta variant.
Speaking at the White House, Biden sharply criticized the tens of millions of Americans who are not yet vaccinated, despite months of availability and incentives.
“We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us,” he said, all but biting off his words. The unvaccinated minority “can cause a lot of damage, and they are.”
The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.
Biden is also requiring vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government — with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.
Biden announced the new requirements in a Thursday afternoon address from the White House as part of a new “action plan” to address the latest rise in coronavirus cases and the stagnating pace of COVID-19 shots.

Irrational for Americans to work unless above-median income can be earned

May 17, 2021May 17, 2021 by philg

As we celebrate Tax Day (updated date for coronapanic) and you add up what you’re paying to the Feds and states, it might cheer you up to look back to this 2019 article from a former Senator and a former top executive at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a Wall Street Journal article on income inequality:

Official measures of income inequality, the numbers being debated, are profoundly distorted by what the Census Bureau chooses to count as household income.
The published census data for 2017 portray the top quintile of households as having almost 17 times as much income as the bottom quintile. But this picture is false. The measure fails to account for the one-third of all household income paid in federal, state and local taxes. Since households in the top income quintile pay almost two-thirds of all taxes, ignoring the earned income lost to taxes substantially overstates inequality.
The Census Bureau also fails to count $1.9 trillion in annual public transfer payments to American households. The bureau ignores transfer payments from some 95 federal programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, which make up more than 40% of federal spending, along with dozens of state and local programs. Government transfers provide 89% of all resources available to the bottom income quintile of households and more than half of the total resources available to the second quintile.
Today government redistributes sufficient resources to elevate the average household in the bottom quintile to a net income, after transfers and taxes, of $50,901—well within the range of American middle-class earnings. The average household in the second quintile is only slightly better off than the average bottom-quintile household. The average second-quintile household receives only 9.4% more, even though it earns more than six times as much income, it has more than twice the proportion of its prime working-age individuals employed, and they work twice as many hours a week on average. The average middle-income household is only 32% better off than the average bottom-quintile households despite earning more than 13 times as much, having 2.5 times as many of prime working-age individuals employed and working more than twice as many hours a week.

Condensed version of the above: Your spending power will be roughly the same if you don’t work at all (and therefore don’t have to file tax returns, extensions, estimated tax, etc.) than if you work full time, unless you are a high-skill worker who can command a wage that is well above the median. The article includes a chart from 2017, before all of the Coronawelfare was ladled on top:

Note the flat shape of the “Net income” (i.e., spending power) curve until one is in the top 20 percent. The old sourpusses who wrote the article conclude with a scolding tone:

America already redistributes enough income to compress the income difference between the top and bottom quintiles from 60 to 1 in earned income down to 3.8 to 1 in income received. If 3.8 to 1 is too large an income differential, those who favor more redistribution need to explain to the bottom 60% of income-earning households why they should keep working when they could get almost as much from riding in the wagon as they get now from pulling it.

But, as Cicero noted more than 2000 years ago, “The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentleman … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.” Maybe the fact that we’ve created the world’s largest group of humans who don’t work is a feature, not a bug?

(Separately, I don’t see how the above calculation can be done accurately. Many of our brothers, sisters, and binary resisters who receive free housing and/or reduced rent are in private-sector apartment buildings that have been ordered by local governments to provide free or reduced rent. The rent subsidy is reflected in higher rents paid by market-rate tenants, not in a local government’s budget.)

A CATO article along the same lines, but with a lot more data
As demonstrated by Hunter Biden’s plaintiff (in possession of Joe Biden’s cash-yielding grandchild), for an American, the most straightforward path to the highest spending power without working is “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage” (profitability varies tremendously by state, though)

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Americans were Shutdown Champions (at watching TV)

April 18, 2021April 8, 2021 by philg

A European eyeglass retailer published a screen time index based on data gathered in mid-October 2020 (i.e., during coronapanic).

Americans were champions at watching TV, dominating all other nations (175 minutes/day compared to 119 minutes in Ireland and 113 in Switzerland). Colombia and Mexico were the only other nations that came close to matching our couch potato achievement.

And, before we wisely decided, in response to a virus that attacks the obese, to lock ourselves into our apartments and park next to the fridge, how were we doing with obesity? Our government loves to sort us by race:

Keep in mind that this is based on 2018 data and Americans are likely much fatter now.

What about “fat” rather than “obese”?

If you’re a white guy whom United Airlines doesn’t want to hire, there is a 75 percent chance you’re “overweight” (i.e., fat). If you’re a Black woman whom United Airlines does want to hire, there is an 80 percent chance you’re “overweight”. Maybe after a few of these quota-arranged training classes graduate it will be time to un-mothball the Airbus A380s (1,265,000 lbs. max gross weight)!

[My recollection is that taking an average within the NHANES data reveals that American “women” (whatever that term might mean) actually have a higher BMI than American “men”. That’s not necessarily inconsistent with the above tables, which look only at those who’ve exceeded a threshold, but maybe it is worth exploring.]

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Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children

April 6, 2021September 1, 2025 by philg

TL;DR: We decided that the west coast was too old, that Miami was too congested, and that Jupiter, Florida, specifically the MacArthur Foundation-planned Abacoa section, was perfect.

Prior to 2020 the political control of a state or town had little impact on day-to-day life, with the exception of custody, alimony, and child support law. Republicans and Democrats might disagree regarding tax rates, government spending, zoning regulations, etc., but not about whether it should be legal to leave one’s house, go to work, attend school, breathe without a mask, interact with other humans without getting an injection, etc. After 2020, however, it is unclear why anyone would choose to be part of a political minority. For a Democrat, being in a Republican-run state means risking death from respiratory viruses that aren’t being controlled with Science (lockdowns, mask orders, coerced vaccination, 12-18-month school closure). For a Republican, being in a Democrat-run state means that one’s children aren’t guaranteed an education (though they might get surgery and show up at the breakfast table sporting a different gender), that one might lose what had been First Amendment rights, e.g., freedom of assembly, and that one will be surrounded by virtuous yard signs and bumper stickers.

For a Republican escaping a Democrat-run state, it doesn’t make sense to move to a place with a state income or estate tax (see Effect on children’s wealth when parents move to Florida). So the search process starts with intersecting the states that remained relatively free during coronapanic and income-tax-free states, which yields South Dakota, Alaska, Florida, and Tennessee. South Dakota is an awesome state for domestic asset protection trusts (along with Nevada, this is where America’s billionaires keep their trusts, but the ultimate protection may not work unless you live in SD or NV) and thus is a good place to preserve wealth from potential plaintiffs. It is a lovely place to spend the summer, but if you have school-age children you might not enjoy being stuck there December through February. With apologies to friends in Anchorage, that goes double for Alaska! Now we’re down to Florida and Tennessee. Nashville, for example, is reasonably nice in January, with average highs of 48 degrees, but Tennessee is more of a working state than a fun/retirement state. If you’re going to move, why not move to a playground? And Miami, oddly enough, despite being much warmer in winter is actually slightly cooler in the summer than Nashville. The WalletHub ranking of Coronafreedom may not give the full picture for Tennessee, whose governor declined the Central Tyrant job and did not order everyone to wear masks. However, unlike in Florida, where the governor forbade local tyrants from imposing mask laws with fines, the Tennessee governor simply delegated tyranny to counties: “Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has not been a statewide mask mandate in place in the state of Tennessee, however, local authorities were given the authority to issue mask mandates within their own jurisdictions.” A state with empowered local tyrants is not exactly free! Thus, as so many fleeing Wall Streeters have discovered, it all comes down to Florida.

This is a report on my own January/February exploration trip to Florida in the Cirrus SR20...

Gainesville. Beautiful campus for University of Florida, but not a beautiful or vibrant town. Apparently when the smart young people graduate they go somewhere else. Particularly unsuitable for aviation enthusiasts as the (great) airport is on the opposite side of town from the nicer real estate (tucked away in suburban developments that have a minimal relationship to Gainesville). At least with respect to Covid-19, the students seem smarter than the (cowering out of personal fear) Ivy League to whom I’ve talked recently. “We’d behave differently,” one sophomore said, “if we lived with our grandparents, but we don’t. There is no reason for us to be afraid of getting the virus and we live more than 100 miles away from our older relatives. Classes are mostly remote, so the only people that we interact with are other young people who aren’t at risk.”

Guess which department has the ugliest building? Note the students hunting for shark’s teeth in a nearby park and the selfie park at the FBO.

Sarasota. Folks with kids will want to live on the mainland rather than one of the islands (great for beach access, but the traffic can be slow getting on/off for the various services and activities that kids need). The neighborhood around the Southside Elementary School is probably the most desirable, with Camino Real being the best street and anything east of the Tamiami Trail being cheaper. Overall, however, Sarasota is more geared around the retired than those of school age. Great airport shared by air carriers and general aviation, about 13 minutes from the Southside school.

The Ringling (world’s only fine art and circus museum!) and the latest condo development for oligarchs (from my friend’s boat).

View from my friend’s apartment and his neighborhood from the air on departure…

Naples. A nice walkable downtown area. Attractive architecture. World-class restaurants at Manhattan prices (if restaurants in Manhattan were open!). There are some young people in town, but they’re apparently mostly tourists. As with Sarasota, dominated by the retired. In fact, the saying goes that “People retire to Sarasota so that they can visit their parents in Naples.” Great airport, 10 minutes from downtown, that is used only for general aviation. It was so busy in late January that jets parked on the ramp were interlaced like jets in a hangar (i.e., it wouldn’t have been possible to get one out of the middle without an hour or two of tugging).

Miami. The ultimate party town now that Los Angeles and New York have locked themselves out of the running and probably even before. “I can never get any work done here,” said one of the private equity guys I was with. KTMB is the preferred airport and it is a long haul from Miami Beach (nearly 40 minutes without traffic). KOPF is a little closer, but nobody seems to like it. If you aren’t going to hit the clubs and don’t have to be in the city for work, why put up with the congestion, traffic, and high real estate prices?

The Wynwood Walls (decluttered now that they’re charging $10 to get in), breakfast cereals for the Age of Coronapanic (Franken Fat, Cap’n Corn Starch, Obesie Os from Killkidds), transportation on which it would be good to get Dr. Fauci’s opinion regarding safety, and a group of #ScienceDeniers gathering at a rooftop club.

On the way out of town, the illegal-to-operate cruise ship pier:

Key West. We went there in a Cirrus Vision Jet to visit a Massachusetts friend who is passionate about kiteboarding and expanding government so that wise Democrats can accomplish more. As it happens, however, he lives in Key West 183 days per year and thus escapes Massachusetts state income and estate taxes. It will be folks other than him who pay for the bigger government that he advocates. Key West is so small that I think it would be tough to find specialized teachers, coaches, doctors, etc. for the modern-day helicopter parented child. The airport has a short-ish runway (5,000′) and is monopolized, with associated monopoly rates, by Bill Gates’s Signature Flight Support (jet fuel for private jet owners who are as concerned as Bill G about climate change).

Fun fact: Pan American World Airways began here. Cuba started out 90 miles away, but it is getting a little closer in spirit with every $1.9 trillion government spending bill… Found the Icon A5 on the ramp at KTMB (my flight in the A5 at Oshkosh).

Wellington Aero Club. West of Palm Beach, right up against the $25 million horse barns of America’s billionaires, you can open your garage door and taxi your twin-engine turbojet out to the 4,000′ private runway (FD38). Good public schools. Great country club for golf and tennis next door. I had a nice time here visiting a friend whose wife is a serious horse rider, but I wouldn’t want to be this far from the beach (30-40 minutes, depending on the specific beach). (See “How a Sleepy Florida Town Became the Horse Riding Capital of the World” and the 30-horse single-family stable below) My friend in Wellington (also a passionate advocate of bigger government who is careful to spend 183 days in the tax-free Land of the Deplorables!) suggested Abacoa, within Jupiter, Florida, as the best family location.

Jupiter: Palm Beach-Fort Lauderdale-Miami can be thought of as a single city, completely jammed, and with the automobile as the primary means of transportation. Juno Beach and Jupiter are the first communities on the north side of this megacity (though the Census Bureau considers them still part of the Miami metro area). The smartest folks in Germany, i.e., those who run the Max Planck Institute, picked Jupiter as the location for their one and only U.S. research lab (in neuroscience). If you’re in Jupiter you’re within a 1.5-hour drive of almost anything that you might need, e.g., the Miami International Airport and a nonstop flight to Europe, but 99 percent of needs can be handled locally. (Disney World is 2:20 away by car.) A tennis coach at the Jupiter Ocean & Racquet Club, a world class facility for (unmasked!) young learners and also great for adults, echoed my friend in Wellington regarding Abacoa, a MacArthur Foundation-created New Urbanism planned-but-not-gated community. “The schools for Abacoa are better than for the wealthier/closer-to-the-beach areas of Jupiter,” he said. [We later learned that the neighborhoods near the beach tend to be older and seasonal; not good for kids looking to play after school.] He pointed out that many of the nation’s most successful people, who could live anywhere they chose, had chosen to live in and around Jupiter. In a state that is blessed with magnificent airports, Abacoa/Jupiter got the short end of the stick. Palm Beach International is about 20 minutes away and the prices are almost reasonable due to the fact that there are three FBOs on the field. On the other hand, nobody is ever going to build T-hangars at KPBI. The North Palm Beach airport, F45, is roughly the same driving distance and it does have T-hangars, but the runway is a little short (4,300′), there is no control tower, and it is a monopoly Signature location (Jet A at $7.21/gallon; compare to $3.70 at Fort Lauderdale Executive (KFXE))

If you didn’t think inequality was as bad as the media tells you… (on the ramp at KPBI; 1960 Debonair and a newly certified Gulfstream G600):

Just south of the airport…

Abacoa. This is a planned “new urbanism” community, a bit like what you might have seen in the Truman Show movie (Seaside, Florida). It is an artificial town in that it is possible to walk/bike to a “town center”, which does have some good restaurants and a coffee shop, but the critical services, such as supermarket and Home Depot, are in strip malls on the edges or across a major road from Abacoa itself. Without traffic, it is an 11-minute drive to a beautiful dog-friendly beach.

That’s what I was able to learn in a two-week trip (including flying the Cirrus up and down the East Coast, which takes about 13 days, depending on the weather…). Measured by whether it is legal to walk out your door without a mask on, go to work, open the doors of your business to customers, send your children to school, let you children enjoy an unmasked after-school activity, etc., every part of Florida offers more freedom than New York, Massachusetts, or California. For someone accustomed to the suburban Northeast, the small yards and tightly packed houses seem like the biggest negative. In the parts of

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Why not heated furniture to fight coronaplague?

December 6, 2020November 29, 2020 by philg

In their righteous muscular efforts to “control” coronavirus, some state governors and city mayors have ordered restaurants shut down, except for outdoor dining. In response, restaurants have built four-sided tents filled with CO2-emitting propane heaters. It is unclear why this is different from being indoors, other than the lack of a real HVAC system. The tent sides are necessary, though, because otherwise the propane heat will blow away.

Why not heat the customers instead of the air?

Back in 2010, I wrote Heated Furniture to Save Energy?

A lot of cars have heated seats. When the seat heater is on, most drivers will set the interior temperature 3-7 degrees lower than with the seat heater off. Why not apply the same technology to houses?
Imagine being at home in a 65-degree house. Even in a T-shirt and jeans, it would probably be comfortable to walk around, stir a pot on the stove, carry laundry, scrub and clean, walk on a treadmill while typing on a computer (as I’m doing now!). However, if one were to sit down and read a book, it would begin to seem cold. Why not install heat in all of the seats and beds of the house? And sensors to turn the heat on and off automatically? In a lot of ways, this would be more comfortable than a current house because the air temperature would be set for actively moving around while the seat temperature would be set for sedentary activities.

There is a fine line between brilliant and stupid, of course, but could it be that coronaplague has pushed this idea over the line?

A Dutch company, sit & heat, seems to have thought of this: heated cushions that can fit into a standard frame. Serta makes a chair-shaped electric quilt (could not survive outdoors) for only $64. A plastic chair with a built-in 750-watt heater is $900 (Galanter & Jones; they have sofas too at roughly $6,000 and claim they are “cast stone”).

If heated chairs were mass-produced in Asia, presumably the cost per chair would be only about $100 more than a regular outdoor chair. That should be affordable for a restaurant.

Train Americans to use masks the way that surgeons do or restructure the physical environment? (May 28, 2020)
Plague-proof Florida and Texas with shaded outdoor classrooms? (May 21, 2020)

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Coronapanic lockdowns will devalue independent living retirement homes?

September 7, 2020August 26, 2020 by philg

The elderly folks whom I know that live in “independent living” retirement homes have now been locked down for six months. They can’t socialize, which was their motivation for moving into the dorm-style environment. The dining rooms are closed and meals are brought to their apartments. The shared athletic and activity facilities have been closed. Many are widows who are essentially locked into solitary confinement.

For folks who had only 4 years of life expectancy remaining, in order to protect them from a 5-20 percent chance of dying from coronaplague, they have now had a 100 percent chance of losing out on most of the things that they valued for 12 percent of their life expectancy.

(A friend’s mom has actually lost nearly 100 percent of the things that she enjoys for 100 percent of what turned out to be her remaining life. This widow was locked down in March, giving up her four weekly exercise classes and her multiple hours per day of socializing and excursions. She was feeling worse and worse. Eventually she got to see a doctor and was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. She is almost certain to die befor the lockdown is lifted.)

On the other hand, the elderly folks that are living in regular houses or apartment buildings are free to visit family members, free to socialize with each other, free to go out to stores (whichever ones the governors and state license rajs will permit to open!), free to go to the beach, etc.

Independent living facilities are fairly expensive. Hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy in (co-op or condo) and then thousands of dollars per month for services, most of which are now shut down. Why spend this money and put oneself at risk of a multi-month or multi-year lockdown, whatever the state governor feels like ordering? Why not instead stay in an ordinary house or apartment building and hire a helper for a few hours per day if needed?

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Get rid of single-family zoned suburbs?

July 12, 2020July 12, 2020 by philg

“It’s Time To Abolish Single-Family Zoning” (The American Conservative, so you know already that it can’t be right!):

The first of many ironies, of course, is that single-family zoning became the standard for American suburbs during the New Deal when the Roosevelt administration, through various programs such as the Home Owners Loan Corporation, required it for home refinancing assistance.
These onerous regulations were further mandated for new construction by the Federal Housing Administration as well as the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
So if you want federal support for your housing, build a single-family home. If you want to live in that downtown shop with the house on the second floor, convert your house to a two- or three-unit building and rent it out—or do any number of normal and reasonable things that humans had been doing with their property for centuries to build their own wealth and prosperity—don’t expect assistance from the government.

Regarding some new proposed laws and regulations:

So, suburban governments, you won’t get the subsidy this time unless you repeal the regulation we required you to enact decades ago to get the subsidy we were offering back then. And we oppose this today because we are conservatives?

This article seems ill-timed in light of the fact that Americans, as evidenced by recent policy and spending, care about only one thing: coronavirus infection. Isn’t the bleak isolated car-dependent suburban lifestyle (“broad lawns and narrow minds”) the best defense against the evils of Covid-19?

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