Meet in San Diego tomorrow or this weekend?

by philg

I’m settling into San Diego to serve as a software expert witness at a trial here in federal court. Would anyone like to get together for coffee? If so, comment here or email philg@mit.edu.

Separately, within only a few hours of walking around I was able to get images of all three pillars of 21st century California: the unhoused, marijuana, and the gender-neutral restroom.

Separately, I can’t figure out how real estate works in California. Downtown San Diego alternates between 15-20-story high modern buildings (real estate is valuable) and surface parking lots, auto repair shops, and vacant land (real estate is not valuable). You don’t see this kind of schizophrenia in Manhattan or Boston.

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Could our epic deficits drive inflation no matter how high the Fed raises rates?

by philg

Americans are obsessively following the Federal Reserve’s interest rate adjustments in hopes of figuring out if the future will be inflation, recession, or some combination (stagflation). “Fed likely to boost interest rates by three-quarters of a point this week” (CNBC) is an example.

What if nobody other than the government borrowed money for any reason and, therefore, the Fed’s interest rate became irrelevant to ordinary subjects. Could we still have inflation? Two economists say “yes” in “The Real Cause Of Inflation Is Insane Deficit Spending” (February 2022):

But proponents of MMT do get one thing correct — the Fed can create money to service the debt and avoid a default. But in real terms, meaning adjusting for inflation, this assertion is false. Creating money to service the debt devalues the currency. Investors then receive a lower real return on their holdings of federal debt.

(see also this 1983 paper from the Minneapolis Fed)

In the old days, inflation came down when the Fed raised rates. Therefore, unless our deficits are larger than in the old days, the interest rate hikes should work to tame inflation (maybe by damaging the economy). “U.S. deficit will shrink to $1T this year before soaring, federal forecasters say” (Politico):

While the nation’s shortfall has substantially declined following last year’s $2.8 trillion deficit, the Congressional Budget Office estimates the gap between spending and revenue will grow starting in 2024, reaching more than 6 percent of GDP a decade from now. The U.S. has only run greater deficits than that six times since 1946, CBO noted.

We’re actually in uncharted territory when it comes to deficit spending.

Another reason that inflation came down when the Fed raised rates is that people weren’t able to pay as much for houses, nearly always bought with borrowed money. But the current headline inflation rate has been cooked so that it doesn’t include the actual prices paid for houses or mortgages (those 1980s headlines were too alarming under the old formula!). The inflation rate won’t move until the fictitious “owners’ equivalent rent” changes.

Some prices that are part of the price index will obviously fall if the Fed causes a recession with high interest rates. Used cars, perhaps. But, given the huge deficits indulged in by Congress, will high rates and a recession be enough to push headline inflation down to the 2 percent level that the Fed claims to be targeting? Consider that if there is a recession, the welfare state will automatically kick in to increase spending on housing subsidies, taxpayer-funded health care (more people eligible for Medicaid), SNAP/EBT, Obamaphone, and free home broadband. Congress also likely won’t be able to resist massive new spending initiatives to combat the recession, just as they spent massively to combat the economic impact of the coronapanic shutdowns ordered by government.

Update, June 28: Economist answers my question about high interest rates and high deficits

Related:

  • “President Biden orders 100-percent federal reimbursement for city’s Covid hotels” (January 22, 2021), in which taxpayers in Louisiana and Mississippi were forced to pay for San Francisco’s generosity in providing 2+ years of hotel rooms for the unhoused. If there is a housing “emergency” declared due to an interest rate rise, presumably the same executive order mechanism could be used to increase the federal deficit by spending on hotels.
  • The $12 sandwich here in San Diego is temporarily $14 (up 17%):
  • Below, sign at a South Florida car dealer, June 9, 2022
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A foreigner forgets to ask for asylum and is deported

by philg

“Australian traveller strip-searched, held in US prison and deported over little-known entry requirement” (Guardian):

An Australian traveller was denied entry to the US, cavity searched, sent to prison alongside criminals and subsequently deported 30 hours after arriving, due to a little-known entry requirement for the US.

The Victorian student Jack Dunn applied for a visa waiver for his trip to the US in May and planned to travel on to Mexico. He had been warned about the need to prove his plan to exit the US, but was unaware of the rule that requires those entering on the waiver to have booked either a return flight or onward travel to a country that does not border the US.

After arriving in Honolulu Dunn was refused entry to the US and detained at a federal prison until he could be put on a return flight to Australia.

Dunn, 23, had spent more than half a year saving for his trip, and by May had enough for a three- to four-month adventure. He planned to start in the US to see the NBA playoffs, then spend most of his trip backpacking across Mexico and South America.

After landing at 6am on 5 May, he was interrogated by a US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer, who refused him entry after determining that he had not booked onward travel beyond Mexico.

He was put in an interrogation room with no wifi. Because he did not have a local sim card, had no access to the internet.

At one point, Dunn claims, an airline worker offered him his phone to book a flight from Mexico to a third country.

Dunn tried booking a flight to Panama, but did not have enough money in his debit card account, and as his own phone was not connected to the internet, he could not transfer money from his savings account, which held several thousand dollars. He then tried to book a cheaper flight to Guatemala, but the CBP officer re-entered the room and ordered the airline worker to take the phone back, Dunn claimed.

It’s a sad story because he would have been able to stay if he’d simply said “My parents are beating me up and I request asylum” or “there is a gang in my neighborhood that has targeted me for execution” (see “Biden administration reverses Trump-era asylum policies”: “Attorney General Merrick Garland withdrew key rulings that his predecessor issued in 2018 limiting asylum for victims of domestic violence and gang threats.”).

What were the consequences of this failure to claim asylum?

Dunn said about six hours after landing he was handcuffed and taken to the Federal Detention Center in Honolulu, where he was told to strip naked and was twice searched under his scrotum and anus for contraband before being admitted.

Separately, I’m not sure why we need this rule. Since anyone can stay in the U.S. more or less indefinitely merely by saying “I don’t feel safe at home,” why are Australians whose trip terminates in Mexico or Canada a threat to our society?

Related:

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Great Replacement Theory in the New York Times

by philg

From May: Is the New York Times the primary promoter of white replacement theory?

From June 6, a NYT article regarding migrants with a “high reproductive output”:

Lionfish are native to the Pacific and Indian oceans. But in the past few decades, the animal has established itself in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, where its invasive presence poses a serious threat to tropical Atlantic reefs and their associated habitats.

The effects are staggering. One study by scientists from Oregon State University found that, in only five weeks, a single lionfish reduced the juvenile fish in its feeding zone by 80 percent. And their reproductive output is remarkably high: Females can release around 25,000 eggs every few days. In some places, including the Bahamas, the density of lionfish may well be causing the most significant change to biodiversity of reef habitats since the dawn of industrialized fishing.

Noted!

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The communal apartment comes to the U.S.

by philg

Comparisons of the current U.S. system of transferism to “Communism” don’t make sense to me. In the Soviet Union under “Communism” everyone had to work, the very opposite of the American system in which tens of millions of able-bodied people are relieved of the need to work either by having sex with an already married person (“child support”), a quickie marriage to a high-income person (“alimony” and/or “Amber Heard”), or via taxpayer-funded housing, taxpayer-funded health care (Medicaid), taxpayer-funded food (SNAP/EBT), taxpayer-funded smartphone (Obamaphone), and, recently added, taxpayer-funded broadband for the Xbox. Any non-disabled adult in the Soviet Union who tried to sit at home collecting child support, alimony, or government-provided services would have been labeled a “parasite” and subject to a range of punishments.

But a signature feature of the Soviet system seems to be becoming more widespread in the U.S.: the communal apartment. “Their Solution to the Housing Crisis? Living With Strangers.” (NYT, June 1):

Two facts are painfully clear to New Yorkers: The rent is too high, and it keeps getting higher. With the median one-bedroom apartment hovering around $3,500 a month, New York’s rents are officially among the most expensive in the country. Between 2009 and 2018, the city added 500,000 jobs but only 100,000 new housing units. The profound shortage in rental units has forced the city’s residents to figure out their own ways to live affordably.

Ingrid Sletten, 68, was paired with Stacey Stormo, 37, through a nonprofit that helps older adults find roommates. They share a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx and each pay $750.

Halima Muhammad, Sukanya Prasad, Ashleigh Genus and Prisca Hoffstaetter share a spacious four-bedroom apartment together on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. Two of the roommates pay about $950 a month (and have their own bathrooms), while the other two pay about $890.

Rina Sah and her husband, Ajit Kumar Sah, share their two-bedroom apartment in Elmhurst, Queens, with Babita Khanal, whom they found through a Facebook group for the Nepali community in New York. Babita pays them $900 a month, lowering the couple’s share to only $1,200.

Kazi, Amzad, Eliyas and a fourth roommate are all recent Bangladeshi immigrants who share a basement apartment in East New York, Brooklyn. They pay a combined $1,600 and live two to a bedroom.

Alexandra Marzella has lived with more than 90 people over the last decade in a six-bedroom loft in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her five current roommates also share the space with her 2-year-old daughter, Earth, who was born in the apartment’s bathtub in 2020. Each roommate pays between $1,000 and $1,300 in rent each month, including utilities.

Things must be easier up in the frozen north, right? Maybe not… “Asylum Seekers Overwhelm Shelters In Portland, Maine” (ZeroHedge):

Guthrie, a hands-on, frontline worker in the effort to feed, clothe, and house a continuous flow of foreign nationals arriving in Portland by airplane or bus from the U.S. southern border, told The Epoch Times, “Our family shelter facilities, our warming room, and even area hotel space is at capacity. We have maxed out our community resources.

The Portland Family Shelter is a complex of four rented buildings in various states of renovation located in the heart of downtown.

Some of the structures are gradually being converted into small apartments where up to four families will share a single kitchen and bathroom.

To accommodate the stream of new arrivals, the family shelter program has in recent months placed 309 families (1,091 people) in eight hotels located in five neighboring municipalities spread over three counties of southeastern Maine’s prime tourist and vacation region.

The vast majority of the new arrivals at the family shelter in Portland have come from Angola and the Congo in Africa, with some coming from Haiti in the Caribbean.

“A new arrival tells Border Patrol ‘I am here to seek asylum. If I go back home, I will be killed. I fear for my life.’ That’s the difference between an asylum seeker and an immigrant,” he said.

Those three short sentences guarantee a person’s admission for a lengthy stay in the United States as his or her claim [why only two gender IDs for migrants?] is adjudicated.

Most are given cell phones.

The shelter provides families with three meals a day, prepared off-site by “community partners.”

According to Guthrie, the cost per motel room is between $250 and $350 dollars per night and rising as the tourist season begins.

“Pregnancy is the families’ most urgent medical concern, and their most pressing medical need is OBGYN (obstetrics and gynecology) care,” he said.

Speaking through an interpreter provided by the shelter, and in the presence of shelter director Guthrie, Samantha, a young Angolan woman with a 10-month-old baby on her hip and a toddler in tow, was not shy about sharing her dissatisfaction.

“We endured a seven-month journey to come to this! We are not happy. Conditions are not good! We really need help.”

When asked if she felt welcome, Samantha said with a look of disbelief, “No! I do not feel welcome. Look at us. We are outside.”

Landry, a housepainter and electrician’s helper, brought his wife Sylvie, two-year-old daughter, and 12-month-old son to Portland from the Congo. … Sylvie said, “We came from Texas unprepared for this Maine weather. I am not happy for how I am living here. I don’t feel welcome!”

Climate change can’t happen soon enough for these folks! (Free housing, health care, smartphone, and three meals per day cooked by paid do-gooders isn’t enough to make people “feel welcome” given typical Maine weather.)

Housing is fundamental. So maybe it is fair to say that the U.S. is becoming “Communist” at least with respect to communal apartments.

Related:

  • “How Refugees Transformed a Dying Rust Belt Town” (NYT, June 3, 2022); after all of the employable native-born residents flee the city’s high taxes, incompetent government, and spectacular public employee pension obligations, Utica, NY imports replacements who come with Federal tax dollars attached. (This is not, however, evidence that the disproved Great Replacement Theory is in any way correct.)
  • “She sought an affordable housing voucher in 1993. This Chicago alderman just reached the top of the waitlist.” (Chicago Tribune, June 7, 2022) “In one of the richest cities in the world, we ain’t got a money issue. There’s no political will to make sure people are housed,” Taylor said. … At the end of 2021, there were 170,000 families on waitlists for public housing and project-based housing, … Aguilar said that wait times can range from six months to 25 years. Most properties on a CHA website show expected wait times of 10 years or more. … “CHA currently has 47,000 Housing Choice Vouchers that it receives from the federal government. The number allotted has not increased in many years,” he said. New families will receive vouchers when families currently in the program stop using them.
  • Regarding Chicago… “This Land Was Promised for Housing. Instead It’s Going to a Pro Soccer Team Owned by a Billionaire.” (ProPublica): More than 30,000 people wait for homes from the Chicago Housing Authority. Meanwhile, a site that’s gone undeveloped for two decades is set to become a Chicago Fire practice facility.
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Who paid for the consequences of the ACLU-authored, Amber Heard-signed op-ed? You did.

by philg

From the New York Post:

Multiple sources said the “Aquaman” star had to switch legal representation and is relying on her homeowner’s insurance policy to cover the cost of her current attorneys in the case.

The bill for Heard’s attorney has mostly been footed by The Travelers Companies under terms of the actress’s insurance policy, sources said.

A vice president of the insurance firm, Pamela Johnson, was spotted in the Fairfax, Virginia, court with Heard multiple times throughout her trial. Neither Johnson nor Travelers returned calls from The Post.

When your next homeowner’s insurance bill arrives, remember that part of the increase will be to cover the loss occasioned by the op-ed that the ACLU wrote.

(This post assumes that Amber Heard will never pay the judgment against her and that the legal bills, as is typical for American litigation, were in the same ballpark as the amount at issue, i.e., $10 million per side.)

Here’s a question: will Travelers sue the ACLU to get its money back? The words that the jury found to be defamatory were actually authored by the ACLU, not Amber Heard. (As noted in Don’t let the ACLU write your op-eds and other lessons from the Amber Heard libel trial, the ACLU has at least $750 million with which to reimburse Travelers.)

“Anatomy of a Hit Piece” by Asra Q. Nomani (former Wall Street Journal journalist) lays out a timeline and contains some email excerpts:

From the ACLU:

“I’d like your and Amber’s thoughts on doing an op-ed in which she discusses the ways in which survivors of gender-based violence have been made less safe under the Trump administration, and how people can take action.” .. “If she feels comfortable, she can interweave her personal story, saying how painful it is, as a GBV survivor to witness these setbacks.”

The op-ed that the jury found libelous was approved by all of the best legal minds of the ACLU, it seems, including the ACLU national legal director, David Cole. And, as it happens, the version that was published was actually toned down from the ACLU’s first draft.

If you want to know why your auto insurance rates are going up, see “Geico must pay $5.2 million to woman who got HPV from sex in man’s insured car, court rules” (NBC):

Geico must pay a Missouri woman $5.2 million after she caught HPV from unprotected sex with her then-boyfriend in his insured automobile, a state appellate court ruled.

The woman — identified in court papers only as “M.O.” — said that she “engaged in unprotected sexual activities in Insured’s vehicle” in November and December 2017 and that he “negligently caused or contributed to” her catching the human papillomavirus (HPV), a common sexually transmitted infection, court papers said.

I don’t understand how the above dispute could be sorted out by an arbitrator, court, or even Ketanji’s panel of biologists seeking to define “woman.” The only way to determine that a disease was transmitted in the insured vehicle would be to establish that the woman who suffered $5.2 million in damages (nearly as much as if she’d been killed) never had sex with anyone else anywhere else. The vehicle’s DNA is not going to be embedded in the HPV that is now living inside this woman. Science says “HPV is so common that nearly all sexually active men and women get the virus at some point in their lives” (CDC), which means that the typical person who has had sex has suffered $5.2 million in losses even if he/she/ze/they did not get sued by a child support profiteer.

Related:

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TP-Link Omada: like a mesh network, except that it works (alternative to UniFi)

by philg

Kind readers let me know that there was an alternative to UniFi (multiple wireless access points around your house or hotel or whatever, generally hard-wired back to a power-over-Ethernet switch). See UniFi versus Araknis versus Ruckus. Due to UniFi being unavailable, I decided to see what would happen if I spent half as much and got immediate delivery of a TP-Link Omada system.

To use Omada access points, you don’t need any Omada switches or routers. Nor do you need their hardware controller device. You can download some software for your Windows desktop and configure everything from the Windows machine. If you then shut the computer down, the access points keep going.

I am running everything from a Netgear GS116PP switch that is theoretically capable of handling 50C temps in the garage and also pushing out a tremendous amount of PoE power (183 watts total). Arris is the only brand of cable modem that I could find rated for 50C so I got a SURFboard SBG8300 to use as the cable modem/router and turned off its WiFi. [Update: The Arris SURFboard proved to be a disaster on Xfinity. After 3-14 days it typically suffers a brain freeze and has to be power-cycled to restore connectivity. The software can be updated only by Comcast (this is part of the DOCSIS standard I think; modems are not to be touched by the consumer or the manufacturer but only by the ISP). The software/firmware versions on the device are the same as in a 2020 forum posting about the same problem (i.e., Comcast has not pushed an update for the purportedly supported third-party device). Maybe the answer is that if you’re stuck with Xfinity you need to rent their modem because that’s the only way to get software fixes.]

Once everything was plugged in, the Windows controller found all of the access points within seconds and it took just a few minutes to configure the system with SSIDs and passwords for private and guest networks. The hardest part was figuring out how to change the names of the access points. “Device Name” is displayed, but, in a failure of user interface, there is no way to manipulate it. You click on the device to bring up a “Properties” window on the right and then click on “Config” to change the name:

If not for that step, it wouldn’t have taken longer than setting up a standard single-point WiFi router.

What if you’ve plugged in 10 access points and have no idea which default name in the controller corresponds to a particular physical device? There’s a map pin-shaped “locate” button that causes the LED on the front of the access point to flash.

Our house has Cat 5 wires coming out at wall plates, so the most sensible solution was the EAP615-Wall, which doesn’t take up any outlets and looks like it belongs. There are three RJ45 jacks on the bottom if you want to run some hardwired gear. If you’re wiring a house from scratch, it probably makes more sense to use EAP660s on the ceiling. The outdoor device in the TP-Link Omada WiFi 6 series is the EAP610-Outdoor, which is not quite available to buy.

The other fun thing that we installed (“we” being the electrician) was a Leviton Structured Media Center cabinet. This fits between studs in the garage and has room for a patch panel, the switch, the cable model, a TV splitter, a small UPS, etc. It will cost about $500 to do everything the Leviton way, but the end result looks clean. Buy some extra pins because they’re easy to break and Leviton includes only the minimum with each accessory.

By popular demand, the cabinet…

And what was there before…

Related:

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Inflation running at 13 percent is characterized as being 8.6 percent

by philg

Inflation is at 8.6 percent: “Consumer prices jumped 8.6 percent in May compared to last year as inflation holds grip on U.S. economy” (NBC).

If we dig into the article a little, however, we find that current inflation, month-to-month, is actually at 13 percent per year (up 1 percent from month to month).

Another example… “U.S. inflation hit a new 40-year high last month of 8.6 percent“ (Politico):

America’s rampant inflation is imposing severe pressures on families, forcing them to pay much more for food, gas and rent.

The costs of gas, food and other necessities jumped in May, raising inflation to a new four-decade high and giving American households no respite from rising costs.

Consumer prices surged 8.6 percent last month from 12 months earlier, faster than April’s year-over-year surge of 8.3 percent, the Labor Department said Friday.

On a month-to-month basis, prices jumped 1 percent from April to May, a steep rise from the 0.3 percent increase from March to April. Much higher gas prices were to blame for most of that increase.

What does Zillow expect for inflation in house prices in our ZIP code (the non-waterfront parts of Jupiter, Florida)? (note that real estate inflation is explicitly excluded from official government CPI) A 14.6 percent boost.

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Progressive Insurance is Progressive

by philg

I wanted to check on our car insurance, so I went to the progressive.com web site. The #1 priority of the company, as indicated from the position of this information on the page, is a commitment to diversity and inclusion (not actual diversity and inclusion, but a commitment). Measured by screen area and location, this commitment is roughly 100X more important than paying claims:

What do we see on the linked-to page?

Communities of color are #1 in importance (gold medal in the Victimhood Olympics). The LGBTQ community takes silver at #2 (the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is simply left out). Everyone else is “marginalized”.

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New York City attracts refugees from Florida

by philg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And an inspiring story about hard work:

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

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

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