Here’s a new car being sold for $90,000 over sticker. In other words, the dealer gets $100,000 in profit while General Motors accepts perhaps $15,000 in profit.
At least the above consumer who signed the deal accepted that vehicle prices are dynamic. Why keep pretending that they’re not?
Separately, who else would love to have a Z06 for trips to Publix?
Related:
“2023 Chevy Corvette Z06 Starts at $106,395” (Car and Driver). This sounds like a lot of money, but there is a 4-year waiting list to buy at MSRP and at that point $106,395 could be the price of a Diet Coke (sadly, there is no way to lock in this price when entering the queue at the dealers who sell at list price)
Oslo might not be the best place for building tourist self-esteem. After two days in the city, here are a couple of signs:
Here’s something else bizarre… an important symbol for this city is the tiger:
I also learned that when a counter-serve restaurant offers you “potato with shrimp” that’s exactly what they deliver (for about $20):
I also learned about life in Sweden from the 40ish lady sitting next to me at the opera house (one act of Parsifal, which is more than enough for anyone). She was working as a “priest” (what we would call a “minister”) at a church outside of Stockholm during coronapanic. Her life and church continued without interruption. What about the Swedish limit of 50 for indoor gatherings that was imposed? “It did not apply to churches,” she responded. How many times had she put on a mask during two years of coronapanic in Sweden? “Zero.” Had she purchased a mask? “No.” What about on the Stockholm metro? Wasn’t it suggested? “You could wear a mask if you wanted to,” she replied, “and some people did, but I never did.”
One thing that I hadn’t appreciated about Europe is that China’s continued lockdown has substantially decluttered the demi-continent. 1.4 billion people have been removed from the international tourism pool because a resident of China who comes to Europe to look around would have to endure an onerous 14-day quarantine on returning (not a Massachusetts-style quarantine with daily trips to the “essential” marijuana store!).
Speaking of the opera house, here it is:
Note the ramp for walking up to the roof.
My first impression of Norway is that it is a great argument for the European welfare state form of government… so long as a country has a gushing fountain of oil cash and only a small number of low-skill immigrants so that the per-capita oil money remains significant. It seems as though there are dozens of neighborhoods that are great for hanging out with friends and family. Norwegians are out in pairs and larger groups enjoying the summer weather. Norway is not part of the EU and the country has retained a distinctive culture more so than France, Germany, or the UK. Despite the distinctively Norwegian-ness of everything, a higher percentage of people here speak good English than in a lot of U.S. cities. That means it is perfect for an American tourist wanting to see a European nation.
I was on a call with an MIT professor who, after expressing his horror at the post-Roe age in which we somehow live, expressed the belief that the dictatorship of Ron DeSantis has prevented libraries in Florida from stocking the books that Americans should be reading now. I said “DeSantis and the state can say and do whatever they want, but ultimately it is counties that decide what books to buy. If you walk into the kids’ section of our local Palm Beach County library you would see all of the same books featured in all of the same ways as in Lexington, Massachusetts or Newton, MA. You would have to dig deep, for example, to find a book describing the achievements of a white cisgender heterosexual male.”
After voting in the primary (Ron DeSantis and affiliated thugs attempted to suppress my vote by demanding ID, but I thwarted this attempt by bringing my wallet), I took a few photos in our local library. All of these are from the kids/juvenile section.
Would a child get the impression that there was anything less than glorious about the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle? Not from reading Heather Has Two Mommies, he/she/ze/they wouldn’t.
Is there anything unusual about changing one’s gender or being “genderqueer”? No.
Gender ID can change at any moment, but it turns out that nearly all engineering and scientific advances were made by people with a particular gender ID:
And gender ID of the subject turns out to be a big factor in whether a book will be featured:
The entire world is being destroyed because there are too many humans living the American high-CO2 lifestyle. At the same time, we should expand our population by 200+ million via immigration from low-CO2 countries.
Kids can prep for a lucrative career in the nonprofit sector:
One final way to guarantee being featured by the librarians:
Related:
“American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten admitted to sharing a false tweet claiming that certain books were banned in Florida on Sunday.” (Hate Central)
“Fact check: Fake list of banned Florida books circulates widely online” (USA Today): “While school districts can ban books through a process created by the new law, Florida has not banned any books at the state level, a spokesperson for Gov. Ron DeSantis told USA TODAY. In fact, several works on the list have been recommended to school districts by the state Department of Education.” [Is it accurate to say that a book was “banned” because a school district no longer promotes it to students and the book remains available at the nearest public library?]
On the theory that “people need to live somewhere” and the U.S. population is being dramatically expanded via low-skill immigration (see “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065” (Pew 2015), I don’t think prices for primary houses will go down in nominal dollars. Perhaps the values will be eroded by inflation, but I will guess that that real (inflation-adjusted) price of a house in 2027 is no more than 10 percent lower than today’s price. Americans are not competent at planning and building infrastructure and therefore new construction to accommodate the migrant-fueled population boom is going to be super expensive (see City rebuilding costs from the Halifax explosion).
On the other hand, an individual person or family does not need two houses. So if there needs to be a real estate collapse, I am thinking that it will happen in the vacation house market.
Arguments in favor of continued high demand for houses in vacation destinations:
the laptop class can pretend to work from anywhere
demand for ski resort lift tickets has never been higher (Smithsonian)
those who support lockdowns, school closures, masks, and vaccine papers checks are voluntarily traveling like crazy now, packing themselves into 100% full airliners, going to theme parks, etc.
Arguments against continued high demand for recently purchased vacation houses:
a second property tax bill every year
a second set of contractors to beg
rising maintenance and utilities prices
We rented a cozy cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains (report). Zillow says that the pre-Biden value of the 1,344 square-foot mansion was $350,000 and that it is currently worth about 725,000 Bidies, down from a peak of 763,000. It actually was sold by the builder, brand new, in August 2019 for $305,000.
We enjoyed being there for a few nights, but is it worth more than a townhouse within commuting distance of a highly paid job in a dynamic city? I don’t see how that is possible in the long run.
One morning in the fall of 2017, Renae Smith, a high school freshman on Long Island, N.Y., could not get out of bed, overwhelmed at the prospect of going to school. In the following days, her anxiety mounted into despair.
Given the constant doomsaying of the NYT, wouldn’t the above be a sign of mental health, rather than of mental illness? Ms. Smith was informed that the Earth was melting and that her home in Long Island would be reclaimed by the ocean. Ms. Smith was informed that U.S. democracy was at an end and that Donald Trump would be ruling as a dictator indefinitely. Only a fool wouldn’t be anxious and desperate after reading these truths.
Intervention for her depression and anxiety came not from the divine but from the pharmaceutical industry. The following spring, a psychiatrist prescribed Prozac. The medication offered a reprieve from her suffering, but the effect dissipated, so she was prescribed an additional antidepressant, Effexor.
A medication cascade had begun. During 2021, the year she graduated, she was prescribed seven drugs. These included one for seizures and migraines — she experienced neither, but the drug can be also used to stabilize mood — and another to dull the side effects of the other medications, although it is used mainly for schizophrenia. She felt better some days but deeply sad on others.
Her senior yearbook photo shows her smiling broadly, “but I felt terrible that day,” said Ms. Smith, who is now 19 and attends a local community college. “I’ve gotten good at wearing a mask.”
Here’s her list of meds:
Let’s keep in mind that these are the same folks who say that they can tell when it is time for a teenager to transition, via drugs and irreversible surgery, to a different gender ID (from among the 74 recognized by medicine). And their brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in other branches of medicine claim to know when it is time to shut down schools, forbid those who aren’t employed in marijuana stores from going to work, order the general public to wear masks, force people to take experimental drugs, etc.
This story, at least, seems likely to have a happy ending:
Her definition of success has changed. too. Whereas she had once thought about “being a doctor or a lawyer or things like that,” she said, now she works in a plant nursery and is applying to a four-year college with a focus on environmental and wildlife sciences.
“I like working with my hands,” Ms. Smith said. “I don’t want to work at a desk, and that’s what I thought I should be doing.” She added, “I’m not the same person that I was a year ago.”
Last summer, Nathan Connolly and his wife, Shani Mott, welcomed an appraiser into their house in Baltimore, hoping to take advantage of historically low interest rates and refinance their mortgage.
But 20/20 Valuations, a Maryland appraisal company, put the home’s value at $472,000, and in turn, loanDepot, a mortgage lender, denied the couple a refinance loan.
Dr. Connolly said he knew why: He, his wife and three children, aged 15, 12 and 9, are Black. A professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Connolly is an expert on redlining and the legacy of white supremacy in American cities, and much of his research focuses on the role of race in the housing market.
Months after that first appraisal, the couple applied for another refinance loan, removed family photos and had a white male colleague — another Johns Hopkins professor — stand in for them. The second appraiser valued the house at $750,000.
The industry standard, in other words, if we are to believe the Newspaper of Science, is to apply a 37 percent discount to a Black-occupied house.
An appraised-low house is a curse if you’re the typical spend-like-a-drug-dealer American and want to pull the last dollar of home equity out to spend on bling. But an appraised-low house is a blessing if you’re faced with paying the annual property tax bill.
I’m wondering what this means for sharing out the property tax burden in the U.S. Wouldn’t most members of the laptop class eagerly grab their one Black friend to stand in for them when the local tax assessor comes buy to set the house’s value for property tax purposes? Let’s consider the appraisal discrepancy that affected Dr. Connolly, M.D., above: $278,000. At Baltimore’s 2.25 percent property tax rate, a subtraction of $278,000 in assessed value would save $62,550 over a 10-year period.
Here’s some new construction near the Stuart, Florida airport, maybe evidence that someone managed the PPP and other coronarelief programs correctly. I’m betting that he/she/ze/they would pay good money to a Black family willing to move in for a couple of hours while Martin County’s assessors try to figure out how much to hit them for.
what disgusted me the most was not the intellectual corruption. It was the careerism. It was the sense that all of this—all the posturing, all the position-taking—was nothing more than a professional game. The goal was advancement, not truth. The worst mistake was to think for yourself. People said things that they obviously didn’t believe, or wouldn’t have believed if they had bothered to subject them to the test of their own experience—that language is incapable of making meaning, that the self is a construct—but that the climate forced them to avow. Students stuck their fingers in the air to see which way the theoretical winds were blowing, designing their dissertations to catch the swell of the latest trend.
I managed to publish a couple of articles and get some decent recommendations from professors over 50, and when I ventured on the job market, the year I finished my degree, I was offered interviews at five institutions (out of the 20 to which I applied). Four were lower-tier places—Auburn, the University of Montana, Georgia State, and Cal State Los Angeles—and the fifth was Yale. The explanation of this strange assortment is that Yale’s was still a very conservative department—meaning, it was still run by people who shared my intellectual values. Being able to write, for example, was not considered a liability.
After nine years in graduate school, uncertain the entire time about my future, I had been granted a new lease on my professional life. Given Yale’s generous 10-year timeline, plus leaves of absence in the fourth and seventh years, I should’ve been able to make it work: publish, get another job, make it to Castle Tenure.
For those getting ready to pony up tuition, room, and board at a research university:
The problem with spending time with students, or on students, or writing book reviews or essays, is that none of those activities do anything for you professionally. Academics are rewarded for one thing and one thing only: research. Scholarly publication. Nothing else counts; anything else is a step toward professional suicide.
After he can’t get tenure at Yale?
… 39 schools and 46 applications. Prestigious universities, public and private; non-prestigious universities, public and private; Canadian universities; liberal arts colleges. Institutions in the Northeast, the Midwest, the South, the West, and north of the border; schools urban, suburban, and rural. I would’ve gone just about anywhere. But with all that work and all that hope, I got a total of five interviews, two callbacks (the final stage in the hiring process), and zero offers.
At this point he’s presumably mid-40s, a time when an intelligent hard-working person is reaching the zenith of his/her/zir/their career prestige, and unemployable within his field.
I recommend this essay if you know anyone who is considering investing in a Ph.D.!
Finally, this seems like a good time for me to remind everyone that the cafeteria staff at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh needs to remind the academic geniuses that pecan pie contains nuts:
Oslo, Norway is the only nonstop European destination reachable from FLL (not too far from Jupiter, Florida where we moved). I’ll be on the ground Monday through Thursday next week (August 29-Sept 1) and would be delighted to meet any readers (just email philg@mit.edu).
Our 7-year-old suggested to a COVID-concerned friend that he “dress up like Dr. Fauci” and hand out N95 masks to fellow passengers on commercial airline flights. I may try this if it seems that there are diseased deplorables on the Norse Atlantic 787.
New York wants to welcome new immigrants. Its economy and vibrancy depend on them. But an influx has strained a social safety net already on the brink.
The influx of migrants to the city this spring and summer, most fleeing crime and cratering economies in Central and South America, has tested New York’s reputation as a world sanctuary. And it shows no sign of slowing, thanks in part to Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, whose decision to send busload after busload to Washington and New York to goad Democrats on border policy has helped turn the normal north-flowing river of humanity into a wave.
New York City has long been powered to a large extent by the sweat and toil of immigrants, but its ability to help them get on their feet has been increasingly strained.
The delivery of 129 migrants to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Wednesday was the biggest one-day total so far in Mr. Abbott’s campaign. But it was just part of the larger migration of thousands: According to the city, the shelter system now houses 4,900 asylum seekers.
Never mentioned in this article: New York City is home to more than 8 million people, nearly all of whom evince a Progressive political point of view, which includes #NoHumanIsIllegal. If we consider the metro area, the total size of the welcoming committee is 20 million. Given the above numbers, there should be roughly 5,000 New Yorkers assisting each asylum-seeker. How do the 4,900 compare to the overall flow across the border? Here are the numbers for the subset of migrants who are apprehended by La Migra:
The Progressives of New York City, in other words, are currently hosting 1/400th of the total quantity of apprehended migrants so far in FY2022.
Department of possibly low skill, but certainly not low intelligence:
“Imagine that we came all this way walking,” said Carolina Flores, 31, who fled Venezuela with her husband and four children and has settled with them at a shelter in Brooklyn. “Everything is very good, a hotel and house for free — that is something that would never happen in our country.”
The above comment raises a question: Why did she and her children have to walk? If we are are eager to provide asylum to those who need it, why do we insist that the asylees and refugees be fit enough to walk to the U.S.? Why not send a daily Airbus A380 to Caracas to pick up those who say that they need asylum? Mkm, a reader from NYC, asked the same question in a comment:
Why not just run free flights from Central America to JFK. Cut out all the misery in between.
From a reader in Harvard Square:
It seems much of the ire aimed at illegal immigrants is their getting something for free and straining local economies. Interesting that no one comments on the true freeloaders: the wealthy who proportionally pay significantly less in taxes than the middle class and the working class. But their venality is camouflaged by propaganda.
Wonder what all those taxes could do to repair our infrastructure and to create a safety net that serves all who deserve aid. No one seems to complain about the skimming done by the 10 percent. But give a poor person a break, and people scream.
If only the rich would pay their fair share, all of our dreams would come true and, also, all of the dreams of every non-working migrant who chooses to come through our open borders. But what stops New York City from being a shining example of fair taxation? Even many of the richest New Yorkers identify as Progressive and espouse Progressive political points of view. There are no Republicans in positions of power in NYC. Nothing would stop New York City voters from imposing higher property taxes, higher income tax rates, and/or a straight-up wealth tax. (Same question for San Francisco! With no Republicans in the way, what stops the implementation of every Progressive dream, including universal housing and health care?)
Circling back to the “unrich” (as our kids say), employers in New York City depend on migrants to keep wages low:
The city’s desire to absorb these migrants as it has earlier waves reflects the fundamental fact that New York has always relied on immigrants in every sector of the work force, from restaurants and health care to the arts, technology and finance. When New Yorkers move away, immigrants take their places, often working essential low-wage jobs that others do not want.
Progressives claim to follow Rainbow Flagism, but have neglected to build housing specifically for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ migrant community:
The newcomers’ reviews of the shelter system have been unenthusiastic. “I don’t feel good at the shelter because I’m gay,” said Pedro Gutierrez, 30, who arrived from Venezuela on Aug. 4 and was assigned to a shelter on Wards Island. “Some people there are saying bad things about me, harassing me.”
From the reader comments, Lucia Gutiérrez of New Jersey:
I work in a domestic violence shelter and now refugee women from South America are coming more and more frequently to use ours services and we are straying from our original mission to help true survivors of domestic violence. As a member of the middle class and wife to a legal immigrant, whom we had to wait 2 years for the whole process to proceed, it’s frustrating to see all these people shamelessly coming through the border and asking for services, like subsidized housing, free school supplies, free healthcare, etc., all at tax payers’ expense. The worst part of all is that they lie about their employment status. Many do work but for cash, which makes it easy to hide their income, and hence qualify for services. As a person who’s always followed the rules, it’s so unfair. The worst part of all is that if we even mention any hint of criticisms towards these migrants, we are viewed as racists and non compassionate.
Meena, from California:
I cannot believe I am agreeing with Trump era policies.
Hazelmom:
Welcome to our reality in Texas! I can’t believe y’all are whining about a measly few thousand migrants-some months we get 60K crossing the border. Good to share the burden.
Sue from NJ:
But wait, I’ve heard time and again that migrants don’t cost American taxpayers anything. And yet now NY is saying they need federal dollars to house, feed, provide medical care for the influx. Oh, and also need to find room for 1,000 kids (so far) to enter the school system.
A physician echoes Milton Friedman on whether a open borders and a welfare state are compatible:
I run a mid size ICU in Iowa currently. 2-10% of our ICU patients are undocumented. … every hospitalization runs between $15,000 -$250,000. … The cost is passed on the paying patients. The labor & Delivery dept. also has its share of undocumented who deliver newly minted US citizens who qualify instantly for Medicaid. In New York, the hospitals rent apartments to keep patients who cannot be discharged home( strokes, brain injury)and Nursinghomes wont take these non citizens. They stay in the apartments indefinitely. … can we sustain this welfare state model?
From Nevada:
The spend per student in NYC public schools is $25,000 and even more for special needs and ESL students as most of these students will be. The cost of the hotel room or apartment is at least $4k per month. The cost of health care is at least $25K for a family (even if they don’t have actual insurance they do get cared for and that care costs money). So a family with 3 kids creates a minimum $150K public spend. No amount of labor will ever pay this back. And the tragedy is $150K per year could provide basic education health care and and housing for an entire village in Guatemala or El Salvador. This does not make sense.
Gulf Coast Cynic:
The only change I would make to Abbott’s policy is having the busses unload at the front door of the New York Times & Washington Post.
From Gotham:
In 1986, we were promised that if we accepted a ONE TIME ONLT amnesty, immigration issues would be effectively addressed with workable, humane legislation, strict enforcement with sufficient BP staff and a robust employer verification system. Well, we got the amnesty but none of the rest.
(The above is unfair, in my opinion. The U.S. welfare state, as it has evolved since the mid-1980s, made the employer verification system irrelevant because there is no longer any need for a migrant to work or, certainly, to work a non-cash job.)
Joe (from Arizona) and I can team up:
I would be willing to pay for the airfare to fly an immigrant family of four back to their own (country of origin) or to any sanctuary city in the USA.
(He will pay for transportation to the sanctuary city and I will pay for food from Costco for any migrant family that a Progressive homeowner wishes to host in his or her home for at least one year.)
From a variety of commenters:
Why aren’t New Yorkers sending their own buses down to Texas to pick up more immigrants?
I’m unclear as to why we have immigration laws.
A poem on a statue is not a reason to keep expanding our society beyond carrying capacity.
After Great Smoky Mountain National Park, our family’s next stop on the way to Oshkosh was Indianapolis. We parked at Signature IND and Ubered into town for lunch in a sacred space:
Despite the sanctified-by-2SLGBTQQIA+ nature of the restaurant, it was tough not to notice that workers were unenthusiastic about being there, a sharp contrast to Gatlinburg in which genuine warmth is the usual attitude of a server.
First sightseeing stop, July 22, 2022, the children’s museum:
The museum has an epic dinosaur section with real fossils that visitors can touch. Real paleontology is going on in this museum and visitors can arrange to take part.
The museum reminds children that they can make a difference, but only if they can first be classified as victims (of the Nazis (including Donald Trump), of prejudice against Blacks, of prejudice against those with AIDS, or of the Taliban).
Comic books are available to flip through via touch screen, but only those featuring female superheroes.
Note the two guys wearing surgical masks in their lonely fight against an aerosol virus:
They’re concerned enough about COVID-19 to wear masks, but not concerned enough to refrain from sharing the museum’s indoor air with 100+ other folks nor to refrain from taking a bus ride around the track (I can’t remember if they actually kissed the bricks or not, a seemingly less-than-ideal way to #StopTheSpread).
Next stop was the Eiteljorg Museum, which specializes in Native American and Western art. The museum acknowledges that it is on land that rightfully belongs to others, but it refuses to give the land back:
And then there is the posted DEI “commitment”:
Just a few steps beyond the righteous floor sign, we get the Native American perspective on white say-gooders and their land acknowledgments:
A couple of cloth-masked visitors again raise the question for me… why are they in an indoor public place?
Native-created masks for horses and humans:
Prevent COVID-19 from spreading by shutting down the water fountains:
Will Florida ultimately be the only state left with working water fountains?
If you’ve got kids, don’t miss the basement of this museum, which has a lot of hands-on activities. Back on the main floor, the scale of the Western paintings is literally awesome:
Another museum (Newfields), another pair of masked visitors:
They’re enjoying “THE LUME”, an animated version of the Impressionists set to music. But if they’re worried enough about COVID-19 to wear a mask, why aren’t they worried enough to stay home?
Our kids loved this production (see below; #LoveIsLove) and were reluctant to leave even after two hours. “This is the best place ever,” was the explanation. There is a bar/coffee shop within the exhibit and also bathrooms, so it would actually be possible to stay the whole day.
One idea had been to leave for Oshkosh on Saturday night. The “shelter in place & stay safe” text message was not promising, especially given that it was being sent to people whose shelter options were a 10 lb. tent and a 1500 lb. (empty) airplane.
The next morning was not a lot better for getting to our actual destination of Appleton, Wisconsin:
Southwest Airlines was delayed 3.5 hours getting into Chicago, according to a friend coming into Oshkosh the easy/smart way, so we didn’t feel bad trying to wait out the weather at the Indiana State Museum.
What’s interesting about the U.S.S. Indianapolis? Not that the U.S. Navy failed to heed a distress call from the torpedoed cruiser. Not that the U.S. Navy failed to notice when the massive ship did not show up in port as scheduled. Not that nearly 900 men died, 600 of them unnecessarily (left to float in the water and be attacked by sharks until a PBY crew accidentally discovered them). Not that the tragedy figured prominently in the movie Jaws. See the sign below for what visitors can learn next to the model.
Suppose that a visitor wonders about the merits of low-skill immigration. He/she/ze/they will learn that “Securing the rights of all Hoosiers has been fought by many. Individuals and communities rally together to fight against hate and social injustices.” A migrant who shows up on a Monday morning is a “Hoosier” by lunchtime and, certainly, it would be “hate” and “injustice” if anyone were to regard the migrant as illegal somehow.
There’s a hands-on cardboard engineering lab on the top floor. Here a 2-year-old learns to build a park that is welcoming to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community:
Is there room in Indianapolis for every American who identifies as 2SLGBTQQIA+ and for the entire populations of Haiti (11 million) and Honduras (10 million) to become Hoosiers? It sure feels as though there is! Downtown, at least on the weekend, feels empty.
