Category: Massachusetts

Fiber-to-the-home arrives in Cambridge, Massachusetts

by philg

Cambridge, Maskachusetts turned down a fiber-to-the-home deal with Verizon FiOS roughly twenty years ago. Rumor had it that Comcast was funding some pet projects for politicians and, therefore, Verizon couldn’t get authorized to compete with Comcast (not yet “Xfinity”).

As part of the process of unloading my old condo in Harvard Square, I tried to figure out if fiber-to-the-home had become available without me noticing. The answer is “sort of”. More than 90 percent of the city is remains a Comcast-only (Xfinity) territory. But the city has provisioned symmetric gigabit fiber to city-owned public housing apartments. Those entitled to public housing pay $35/month for Internet that those who pay property tax could only dream of having. (It might actually be free for those who refrain from working; there is a Digital Equity Plan to relieve people of this $35/month and multiple full-time “digital navigators” get paid to help those who don’t work maximize their enjoyment of free or near-free Internet.) Jesus pointed out, “The last will be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16). This translates to “gives [public housing] residents access to the highest internet speeds available in Cambridge at the lowest cost.”

The person who pays $100/month in rent (including utilities) gets faster and more reliable Internet than the person who lives in a $10 million house on Brattle Street and pays property tax. The taxpaying chumps will get hit for $100/month by Comcast for comparatively terrible service.

What does a person who hasn’t worked for four generations do with Gigabit fiber? Streams multiple movies and sports games in 4K:

What do Cambridge officials work on besides keeping their tax cattle in an Xfnity ghetto? Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui was born in Pakistan and might have enjoyed fiber-based Internet there if her family hadn’t chosen to enrich us here: “Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) internet is growing rapidly in Pakistan, with over 2.6 million subscribers as of February 2026.” (Google AI). City Hall was hosting a “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” event instead of a “Escape the coax ghetto” event:

Here are some of the shirt-based messages:

The one with the Star of David was almost next to a sign showing that future Cambridge residents will be, like the current mayor, primarily Islamic:

(Note the nod to the native-born Blacks in the background. Their lives matter and also they have already been replaced by migrants (see Replacement of Black workers by migrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts from MLK, Jr. Day 2026).)

Why would the mayor highlight sexual assault instead of the monthly assault of residents paying high prices for inferior Internet? Wikipedia says that her family never got out of taxpayer-funded housing (Rindge Towers and Roosevelt Towers; sometimes enrichment by migrants means native-born taxpayers have to pay for the migrants’ apartments for 20, 40, 60, or a few hundred years (multi-generational)). So, from her family’s perspective, Xfinity’s monopoly and decades-old infrastructure is irrelevant.

(Note that folks in Maskachusetts don’t seem to be serious about discouraging what we now regard as sexual misconduct. Age of consent is 16, which means that everything Jeffrey Epstein is established to have done would have been legal in Boston. (He admitted to some sort of sex act with a 16-year-old.) It would be almost impossible to prosecute an Epstein imitator in MA because he could raise the “she consented” defense.)

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The incompetence of HVAC installation and maintenance in Massachusetts

by philg

The 11-year-old high-end Carrier system at our old Harvard Square place failed in the hot summer of 2024. It was probably some sort of leak in the outdoor unit, but it was tough to say for sure. In Florida, this would have been repaired for about $6,000 via installation of a new outdoor unit and recharge. In Maskachusetts I got estimates from $24,000 to around $40,000 to replace both air handler and the outdoor unit. (This might have been a $12,000 project in Florida for top-of-the-line variable-speed gear.)

The company that quoted $24,000 was rated 4.9 stars in Google Maps. They’re an authorized Carrier dealer. They said that they needed to do $thousands in additional items in order to satisfy the building inspector. My suggestion that a building permit wasn’t needed because they were just replacing existing equipment was laughed off. They ran new coolant lines and, despite me begging them not to, decided to monkey with the hydroair system that sends hot water up from a basement gas-fired boiler into the attic where the air handler lives. Because the attic is technically unconditioned space, even though it never gets very cold (poor insulation in the old wooden house underneath allows heat to rise), the circulating water must have some antifreeze in it.

When the winter arrived, the hydroair system didn’t work. The only heating was from the heat pump, ruinously expensive at some of the nation’s highest electric rates. The company came back and said that we needed about $10,000 of work. The circulation pump was failed, which is why fluid wasn’t circulating. The boiler was from 2003 and should be trashed. At a minimum, everything attached to the boiler needed to be replaced. I called the plumber who’d installed the boiler. He came by and said “Your HVAC people are idiots. They filled the pipes with 100% glycol, which is too viscous for the pump to move. I drained it and refilled it with 50% glycol like it is supposed to be and everything works fine now. Your boiler doesn’t need any service and is working perfectly.” He sent me a $1300 bill (would have been $500 in Florida, but this guy is kind of a genius and Massachusetts is truly a paradise for anyone competent in the trades).

It’s finally time to sell the old unit. The market for short-term rentals in Cambridge never recovered to its 2019 level. I was never going there except to fix stuff. The family wasn’t interested in spending time in Maskachusetts. What did the lawyers working on the closing find? The HVAC company never closed the building permit that they pulled in 2024 and for which they said that thousands of dollars of extra work were required. (Ultimately, it did get closed, but not without multiple follow-up emails and calls from me. The HVAC company called the inspector and he actually did come by within a week, but he marked it as a “rough inspection”. The permit wasn’t closed and the HVAC company never checked to see if it was closed.)

(Note that the cost to heat and cool this 1400 sqft. condo, thanks to high utility rates in Massachusetts and low quality construction, is actually higher than the cost to heat (one week per year!) and cool (to 72 degrees; no Jimmy Carter austerity here) our 5400 sqft. house in Palm Beach County.)

Loosely related… this lamppost sticker from Harvard Square would make a good tagline for an HVAC business:

Also, a friend’s daughter got into a summer math program at Boston University. She is required to live in a BU dorm as part of this program. Faculty, staff, and students at BU are such experts on Climate Change that there are 31 pages of results from Google when searching for this string on the BU site:

How did the climate change experts prepare their own campus for the brutal heatwaves that are now hitting Boston regularly? (example) They failed to install air conditioning in their dorms.

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Building 6-story apartment houses in single-family neighborhoods in Cambridge

by philg

As part of cleaning out my old Harvard Square condo, I learned that the City of Cambridge has embarked on a plan to increase population density, a rare situation in which the people who advocate for open borders also do something about accommodating the new arrivals and their kids and grandkids.

Starting in 2025, the city began allowing developers to build 6-story apartment buildings/condos in neighborhoods that had formerly been restricted to single-family houses:

There is no requirement that the new apartment buildings be anywhere near public transit or that they make any provision for parking (i.e., competition for street parking spaces is about to hit Olympic Team levels, though maybe the Tesla Robotaxi will ameliorate the issue?).

I talked to a lady who lives in West Cambridge, which has a suburban feel. “A developer bought an 1890 Victorian house and is putting up a 54-unit building,” said said. “It’s 1.2 miles from the nearest T stop. There’s hardly any bus service except at rush hour. There won’t be any off-street parking built as part of this.” How do the Biden-Harris voters in the neighborhood feel about living next to people receiving subsidized housing (20 percent of the units must be “inclusionary”, i.e., rented or sold at below-market rates to the fortunate few)? “They’re fighting the project tooth and nail by claiming that the old house is historic and can’t be demolished.”

I remain mystified as to how those who decry “inequality” can support these programs in which a handful of people are selected to pay nothing or almost nothing for housing while the vast majority of others who are equally situated in terms of income, etc., are doomed to pay market rates (i.e., live 45 minutes away from anywhere that is considered nice).

Most of Cambridge is poorly served by public transit. The subway stations are widely separated. The subway itself doesn’t run fast or go most of the places that people need to go. Bus service is slow and infrequent, though the former “Dudley bus” was renamed in 2020 to “Nubian Station bus” (background). Google AI:

Nubian refers to an indigenous ethnic group and the ancient civilization from the Nile valley region spanning southern Egypt and northern Sudan. It describes people, languages, and cultures originating from this area, which is known for a history dating back to 3100 BC. It is also used informally to describe Black culture, people with dark skin, or specific livestock breeds.

Can anyone think of an example of a portion of an American metro area, population 2 million or larger, that has been built up to an average 6-story height, or higher, that doesn’t have horrific traffic jams? The advocates for higher density seem to assume that everyone in young, healthy, fit, childless, and happy to walk 1.2 miles through slush and/or in 10-degree temps. Or perhaps that the fit young parents will bundle their young children up like Eskimos and load them into $7,000 Dutch cargo bikes that get stolen every six months.

Trying to get to a friend’s house in Brookline from practically on top of the Harvard Square T station at 7:14 pm, i.e., after rush hour:

It was 54 minutes by public transit and add another 15 minutes for a more typical Cambridge location that wasn’t so close to the T. This should be a 15-minute drive, which shows you how much the mobility of people in the Boston area has been reduced by roads being narrowed, more people getting cars, population growth, etc.

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Marijuana and book stores in Harvard Square

by philg

Happy 4/20 Day to those who celebrate. Photos from a January trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts…

The marijuana store for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ that opened in 2022 seems to have closed.

Leah also has a specific audience in mind: “Those of us who are often left out of things.” By that, within the cannabis industry, she means consumers who are older, or identify as LGBTQ, or women of any age. “That’s who I want to educate. That’s who I want to learn to believe and know that they can be a part of the cannabis community and culture too.” The programs she has in mind for the second floor at Yamba Boutique reflect that, including demonstrations and lectures that integrate cannabis with healthy lifestyles, from yoga to cooking and sex-positive practices.

For someone who has spent a lifetime trying to remove stigmas and upend stereotypes for herself and others, Yamba Boutique is a logical step. Leah began her career as a social worker, counseling teenage mothers like she and her mother before her, having gotten pregnant at 16 and 14, respectively. “I wanted to try to remove the stigma that we have as teen moms, that we are nothing and that our lives are gonna be ruined.”

Last week:

The “Marijuana for LGBTQ” store is being replaced by “Marijuana for Everyone” (don’t forget that marijuana is “essential”, which is why adults in Maskachusetts were able to go into a weed store and mingle while it was illegal for children to attend school).

For anyone who isn’t too stoned to read, there seems to be a new bookstore in the Square (note the two Rainbow Flags in the windows, a Biden-style trans-enhanced Flag and one with an innovative diagonal stripe pattern):

“No Kings; No ICE; No Fear; Immigrants are welcome here”. Looking through the window I observed at least five people in the store wearing masks. The person in the photo was my favorite. He/she/ze/they would remove the mask, sip his/her/zir/their coffee, and then put it back on repeatedly.

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The righteous of Lincoln, Maskachusetts can take credit for the calm atmosphere in Minneapolis

by philg

Never say that the elite Democrats of our former Boston suburb fail to do anything concrete or significant to advance the causes that they advocate, e.g., slow down climate change, which they post signs about, by moving to a 2BR apartment after the kids are grown up rather than staying and heating a 6,000-square-foot house with obsolete insulation.

Here’s a mailing list message from January 25, 2026, a day after Alex Pretti was tragically gunned down by DHS thugs before he could draw and use the 9mm pistol and 52 rounds of ammunition that he was carrying (see The genius of Johnny Cash and the death of a progressive in Minneapolis):

Following our recent vigil in front of town offices, Lincoln Witness would like to continue to light a path forward. We invite everyone who wishes to honor Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and others who have died at the hands of ICE, to set two candles in their windows. These candles symbolize sparks of hope, cries of lament, and messages of solidarity for the people in Minneapolis who are out in sub-zero temperatures trying to shine a light for a brighter future. We encourage you to join us.

(The message may be inaccurate in that Alex Pretti was reportedly killed by Border Patrol agents, not ICE.)

If it is calm in Minneapolis today we can only presume that either decision-makers in DC or the ICE/CBP thugs in Minneapolis somehow drove through Lincoln, Massachusetts and saw the two candles in every window. #DoingTheWork

Here’s the web site for the group, based in a town where migrants who can afford a 2-acre lot ($1+ million) to meet the zoning minimum are welcome:

The righteous blame “politicians” rather than “Deplorables”:

Politicians have used immigration as a wedge issue that divides Americans.

If not for being misled by politicians, the working class would see that open borders keep their wages high and their apartment rents low.

Also from the town mailing list, regarding KBED:

Library talk Sunday Concord re: Hanscom expansion/author Chuck Collins– Burned by Billionaires

In Conversation with Chuck Collins about Burned by Billionaires
Sunday, February 22 2:00—4:00 PM
Goodwin Forum Main Library 129 Main Street, Concord, MA, 01742
Join us In Conversation with Chuck Collins about how billionaires are burning up the planet and undermining democracy & how this informs our fight to stop the proposed private jet expansion at Hanscom or Anywhere (Hanscom is mentioned on pages 68-70). Interview by Diane Proctor, President of League of Women Voters Concord-Carlisle. Q&A to follow the interview.

(The typical recipient of this message, as noted above, is heating a massive suburban house all through the Maskachusetts winter, usually 2,000+ square feet per person, and driving a pavement-melting SUV for every errand (since the town isn’t walkable and the weather is seldom conducive to biking, which is also unsafe due to narrow roads and no bike lanes).)

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New Floridian goes back to Maskachusetts (also: catching up with NPR)

by philg

A friend moved to Florida in the middle of 2025. He went back in February 2026 to deal with issues around selling his old house in the Boston suburbs. Some of his messages to a group chat:

After Florida this is indeed f***ing torture

I spent the entire morning doing useless shit that is neither fun nor contributes to my future well being. Shoveling snow, salting.

Even though I pay hundreds of dollars a month to an entitled lazy idiot gardener who doesn’t do anything unless you tell him repeatedly.

The house was empty yet my heat bill was $1500.

In Florida that will be the electric bill for a 20k sq ft house with another 15k sq ft of usable outdoor living space

I forgot a snow brush

Now I will have to scrape snow off my car after a [gym workout], all sweaty and freezing

Took me an hour to get to my house from the airport on Friday [about 20 highway miles]

But it is good because I can spend this time listening to NPR

He included a photo:

A little later in the chat group, from a participant who lives in a South Shore suburb of Boston:

How can anyone commute to work? It’s an hour and 20 minutes going to Cambridge now [27-mile trip, mostly highway]. I guess people don’t work from home anymore?

[me] They stopped taking the T. So even though fewer are working the traffic is as bad or worse. ChatGPT: [the MBTA has] about ~64% of pre-pandemic ridership

Speaking of NPR, we had a dealer loaner while our Honda Odyssey was being serviced (some more battery trauma, this time with a 4-month-old Duracell AGM; I paid $308 for a Honda OEM part instead of trying to get another short-lived Duracell under warranty). I didn’t want to go to the trouble of getting Apple CarPlay organized so instead of my usual Audible book I listened to Treasure Coast NPR. When I tuned in they were talking about the real victims of the Gazans’ October 7, 2023 attack into Israel: American Muslims. Islamophobia in the U.S. reached crisis proportions after October 7 and then became an emergency crisis emergency when Donald Trump was elected by the haters. This piece was followed by a story about Black-white interracial marriage 60-150 years ago in the U.S. In a country that has been transformed by Latinx and Asian immigration, thus enabling the entire economy to do without Black workers (see Replacement of Black workers by migrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts), NPR remains stuck on the idea that Black-white relations are the defining issue of our time.

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Unable to move off the Gaza Genocide in Cambridge

by philg

Back in September, I showed a $7 million house in Cambridge, Maskachusetts owned by two guys that was festooned in “Gaza Genocide” messaging. See Harvard Square: Queer Stoners for Palestine.

How did it look more recently, three months after the latest round of fighting between the Gazans and Israelis was settled, signed by the elected representatives of the Gazans (the Islamic Resistance Movement, or “Hamas”) and of the Israelis? Might the owners have, for example, moved on to the battles between progressives and ICE in Minneapolis or to the outrage of Donald Trump taking over Greenland? Apparently not:

How could they ignore the killing of Renée Good? Is it because at the current level of immigration an American who gets killed is replaced within 30 seconds by a legal immigrant? (Renée Good would have been replaced within 10 seconds by a migrant during the Biden-Harris administration.)

Finally, why does their sign read “Israel Kills in Palestina”? I don’t think that’s how the river-to-the-sea nation that some Arabs hope to establish is pronounced in Arabic. The owners are “SEIDMAN, JEROME & STEVEN B. BLOOMFIELD” according to the city property database. These don’t sound like native Spanish speakers who might say “Palestina”.

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Progressive v. Progressive in Cambridge, Maskachusetts

by philg

A tale of a political fight in a place without any viewpoint diversity…

While visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts I spent a bit of time with my Harvard Square condo neighbor. In five minutes I learned more about the crimes of Donald Trump than I had in five years talking to Floridians, both Democrat and Republican. More interestingly, she told me about a rift that had opened between her and some like-minded progressive Democrats across the street. They’d all been on the street for over 30 years and now the friendship among these righteous white senior citizens was over.

It seems that two gentlemen would park alongside a fire hydrant across the street from our small condo building and spend a couple of hours smoking “essential” marijuana. They’d laugh and my neighbor would chat with them from time to time. This went on nearly every day for a few weeks. In discussing these happy cannabis consumers, my neighbor referred to them as “Black”, not out of animosity toward noble Black Americans, but simply to provide a description. The progressives across the street called her a “racist” and an argument over virtue scraps ensued from which the 30-year friendship hasn’t recovered.

Here’s what it looks like when you walk out the door of a $1,000/sf apartment… 34 degrees, gray skies (all day), light snow, filthy worn signs, overhead power lines (considered a hideous blight in Florida and unsuitable for a neighborhood occupied by people of means):

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Replacement of Black workers by migrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts

by philg

From 2010: unemployed = 21st century draft horse?

From 2014: Revisiting the 21st Century Draft Horse posting

The above posts start with a quote from economist Gregory Clark’s fantastic book about the Industrial Revolution:

“there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.” (page 286)

I thought of this on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2026 in Cambridge, Maskachusetts. My goal was to get photos of elite whites enjoying their fully paid day off from government, university, nonprofit, and Big Tech jobs and juxtapose those with Blacks forced to work. (See Juneteenth: a day off for white members of the laptop class and government workers)

It turned out to be almost impossible to find Black people at work on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day or on any other day in Cambridge. In any business that was independently owned or a franchise, all of the workers were either native-born American whites or migrants from Latin American and Islamic countries. All of my Uber drivers were immigrants. As far as I could tell from a full week of wandering around, the only enterprises that hired Black Americans in customer-facing roles were the largest companies, e.g., Whole Foods and Target. This was in stark contrast to my experience in the same as an MIT undergraduate (Class of 1982). The only immigrants I can remember meeting then were part of a Greek family that ran a restaurant in Central Square, Zorba’s, and returned to Greece on retirement. Native-born Black people often held service jobs of various types, e.g., cashiers in stores.

Here are a few Black workers that I encountered in Central Square:

My Uber drivers were Mohammad, Ayoub, Furkan, Rohit, etc.; never a native-born person of any race. The Silicon Valley righteous behind Uber have decided that “Mohammad” is a nonbinary name (pronoun “they”):

All of this is consistent with “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (2007 paper by some Harvard economists), but I hadn’t fully absorbed the transformative impact of the post-1965 immigration boom on Black Americans prior to last week. The Central Square McDonald’s still had quite a few Black customers, but everyone employed there was Latinx. Most of the Dunkin’ Donuts seemed to have all-Latinx employees. The exception was one with all-Islamic staff:

I’m not sure how to square the above anecdotes and photos with nationwide statistics. The labor force participation rate for Black Americans has fallen since 2000, but not any faster than for whites:

I guess we could infer that Black Americans in Cambridge are working in high-paid office jobs that aren’t customer-facing. But the customer-facing jobs in Harvard Square paid enough to attract reasonably well-educated whites. Maybe Black Americans moved out of Cambridge as they have have moved out of New York City? NYT:

Citywide, white residents now make up about 31 percent of the population, according to census data, Hispanic residents 28 percent and Asian residents nearly 16 percent. While the white population has stayed about the same, the Asian population grew by 34 percent and Hispanic population grew by 7 percent, according to the data.

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Climate Anxiety therapy canceled due to Climate Emergency

by philg

A four-hour mental health session for climate anxiety caused by the climate emergency was scheduled for today at MIT:

The emergency.mit.edu web site, yesterday afternoon:

I.e., the folks who needed four hours of therapy because of their anxiety caused by the ongoing climate emergency suffered the cancelation of their therapy due to the climate emergency that had caused their anxiety in the first place. #irony?

I rescheduled my JetBlue flight from yesterday afternoon to Saturday night. Here’s our front yard yesterday as the snow was ramping up throughout Maskachusetts:

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