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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New York Times discovers that a person cannot be killed twice by COVID-19

by philg

From this morning’s email, “The Covid death rate for white Americans has recently exceeded the rates for Black, Latino and Asian Americans.” by David Leonhardt, one of the New York Times journalists who enjoys covering numbers and economics.

One of the defining characteristics of the pandemic’s early stages was its disproportionate toll on Black and Latino Americans.

During Covid’s early months in the U.S., the per capita death rate for Black Americans was almost twice as high as the white rate and more than twice as high as the Asian rate. The Latino death rate was in between, substantially lower than the Black rate but still above average.

Covid’s racial gaps have narrowed and, more recently, even flipped. Over the past year, the Covid death rate for white Americans has been 14 percent higher than the rate for Black Americans and 72 percent higher than the Latino rate, according to the latest C.D.C. data.

In other words, the best minds of New York City have figured out that a person cannot be killed twice by COVID-19.

[A friend’s comment on the above: “Democrats previously advocated giving preferential access to COVID medical treatment to People of Color. Now that whites are dying at a higher rate, should whites get preferential access to medicine?”]

Let’s check in on Sweden. Given their horrific heresy, maybe COVID-19 is killing them twice?

The country that gave the finger to SARS-CoV-2 and kept its schools open has a much lower case rate than still-masked Portugal (“In Portugal, There Is Virtually No One Left to Vaccinate” (NYT), 2021) or the U.S. (cases trending up, despite Science-following leadership (TM) since January 20, 2021). Those are just “cases”, though, right? How about deaths? Same pattern…

Reminder: When COVID-19 hit, friends who are medical school professors said that humans would have to co-evolve with SARS-CoV-2 and all of the measures being taken and proposed were going to be counterproductive because they would slow down this co-evolution. (Also, that if they pointed this out publicly they would never get another research grant!)

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Official Lincoln Massachusetts Public School LGBTQ+ Pride Community Celebration

by philg

From back in April, part of an email from the superintendent of the Lincoln Massachusetts Public Schools (K-8 only; high school is shared with another town):

The school-sponsored event (in a town-owned house) is happening today, so I hope that readers in Maskachusetts will attend and perhaps report back to us why some members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community are excluded (it is only for “LGBTQ+”). Here’s a T-shirt to wear:

The same email that reminded us to lump together everyone on the rainbow spectrum into a single category also lumps together all Asians and Pacific Islanders into a common “culture and cuisine” that can be learned about in just over one hour via Zoom:

Happy Pride Month once again!

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British Medical Journal weighs in on forced vaccination

by philg

Me: Should the COVID-19 injections be renamed to something other than “vaccine”?

#Science: “The unintended consequences of COVID-19 vaccine policy: why mandates, passports and restrictions may cause more harm than good” (BMJ Global Health)…

… we argue that current mandatory vaccine policies are scientifically questionable and are likely to cause more societal harm than good. Restricting people’s access to work, education, public transport and social life based on COVID-19 vaccination status impinges on human rights, promotes stigma and social polarisation, and adversely affects health and well-being. Current policies may lead to a widening of health and economic inequalities, detrimental long-term impacts on trust in government and scientific institutions, and reduce the uptake of future public health measures, including COVID-19 vaccines as well as routine immunisations.

The publicly communicated rationale for implementing such policies has shifted over time. Early messaging around COVID-19 vaccination as a public health response measure focused on protecting the most vulnerable. This quickly shifted to vaccination thresholds to reach herd immunity and ‘end the pandemic’ and ‘get back to normal’ once sufficient vaccine supply was available. In late summer of 2021, this pivoted again to a universal vaccination recommendation to reduce hospital/intensive care unit (ICU) burden in Europe and North America, to address the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’.

There are also worrying signs that current vaccine policies, rather than being science-based, are being driven by sociopolitical attitudes that reinforce segregation, stigmatisation and polarisation, further eroding the social contract in many countries.

Two experiments in Germany and the USA found that a new COVID-19 vaccine mandate would likely energise anti-vaccination activism, reduce compliance with other public health measures, and decrease acceptance to future voluntary influenza or varicella (chickenpox) vaccines.

COVID-19 vaccines have also generated at least $100 billion profit for pharmaceutical companies, especially Pfizer.

The authors are from the School of Public Health, University of Washington, University of Edinburgh, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University, Oxford, Harvard Medical School (!), and Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Related:

  • “The Concept of Classical Herd Immunity May Not Apply to COVID-19” (J Infect Dis, March 2022, by David M Morens, Gregory K Folkers, and Anthony S Fauci (!)): SARS-CoV-2 appears not to substantially engage the systemic immune system, as do viruses such as smallpox, measles, and rubella that consistently have a pronounced viremic phase. Moreover, neither infection nor vaccination appears to induce prolonged protection against SARS-CoV-2 in many or most people. Finally, the public health community has encountered substantial resistance to efforts to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2 by vaccination, mask wearing, and other interventions.
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Good alternative to Windows File History? (backup tool for Windows that saves every version)

by philg

I’m almost recovered from the failed Seagate drive debacle (solution: buy Western Digital; send the Seagate to the nearest gun range to serve as a target). When I try to get Windows File History going again, however, it chokes on someone else’s vomit within a few minutes. There are some filenames especially within the Dropbox area of the C: drive that it doesn’t like (why can’t it back up anything that NTFS was willing to accept?). I tried excluding the entire (SSD) C: drive so that I could at least get backups of the two big hard disks, but even after “C:\” was excluded it kept trying to back up folders with the C: drive and shutting down (why skip files when you can terminate and leave the entire computer unprotected?).

Has anyone had good luck with a Windows tool that will do what Microsoft’s built-in Backup/File History is advertised as doing, i.e., saving every version of every file, presumably with hooks into NTFS’s journaling mechanism so that it runs shortly after any modification is made. I can just dedicate one disk to be the target of this third-party tool.

I’m already running the Synology Drive Client to push files out to the NAS. Maybe there is a way to tell this program to also copy everything to a local file? (If so, I haven’t found it yet.) Synology actually got stuck as well. It was in an infinite wait for some files on OneDrive that appear in the file system but aren’t actually on the disk, I think.

I’m also already running CrashPlan from Code42, which hasn’t choked on the cloud drives (Dropbox or OneDrive) as far as I know. I think it is possible to tell the Code42 app to write to both the cloud and a local destination (below, the data should go to both the CrashPlan cloud and a local drive).

How well does this work? Here’s the CrashPlan software trying to back up detritus left by the Synology software. The estimate is 1.6 years before the three local hard drives are copied to the new 16 TB internal backup drive. So, assuming a little downtime for Florida hurricanes, now I just need a letter from God promising that there won’t be any drive failures until an 82-year-old Joe Biden is celebrating his/her/zir/their reelection (we don’t know what Dr. Biden’s spouse’s gender ID will be in 2024).

Related:

  • “The best Windows backup software” (PC World) likes R-Drive Image 7 (but I don’t really want to make images of the disk!) and Acronis
  • “The Best Backup Software and Services for 2022” (PC Mag) likes ShadowProtect, which would make a full image of the disks and then store years of incrementals (I guess the 16 TB drive is big enough to hold a second full image of the three other drives on the PC so in theory I could do a full backup every couple of months and the software would throw out the obsolete one after it was complete (but maybe reading 100% of the data off these drives every two months would actually result in their premature death?))
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