One bad thing about Florida: fences around the schools and their athletic fields

by philg

Most comparisons of Florida to our former home in Maskachusetts are positive. The infrastructure here is new, shiny, and smooth. The landscaping in higher income parts of Florida is beautiful (palm trees, flowers, etc.) and that includes our neighborhood of Abacoa, the campus of Florida Atlantic University, the sidewalk behind the beach in Jupiter, etc.

One serious disfigurement of the landscape, however, is that every public school is surrounded in chainlink fence. Where a neighborhood would once have had a nice community feature, i.e., some grass fields on which to stroll or cut across, there is now a big no-go zone that looks like a medium-security prison. You never realized how many public schools a typical town has until you visit a place where schools and their grounds are entirely fenced!

It seems that this is a relatively recent disfigurement… “Fencing among school safety upgrades” (July 7, 2019):

One of the many safety measures school districts must implement to protect school children under a new Florida law is putting fencing up around their schools.

Florida lawmakers passed strict measures after one of the deadliest school shootings in Amercian history when 17 students were gunned down and 17 others were wounded at Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School in Parkland on Feb. 14, 2018.

Charlie Morse, safety director for the Walton County School District, said two schools this summer will get fencing but, “We don’t want it to look like a correctional facility.”

Well… Guess what? When you have a big two-story building surrounded by grass that is then surrounded by 6′-high chainlink fence, it looks exactly like a correctional facility!

The U.S. always had prisons, but now in Florida you can own a $2 million house that is right next to what looks like a prison. (I wonder if these hideous new creations have devalued houses that formerly got a boost from being near the greenspace of a school.)

I’m not sure what the convention/custom was before the fencing went up, but currently it seems that the taxpayers are barred from any access to the school fields at any time. There are a couple of chokepoints where cars can drive through the fence, but I think these are closed after school hours. In any case, I have never seen anyone on a school field after school hours.

Even if the Second Amendment were repealed, and President Harris confiscated all privately owned guns, the fences would stay up forever, right? There might still be someone with a gun in the basement and there is no price too high to pay for children’s safety, I am sure everyone will agree.

At the very least, Florida proves that this is truly a horrible idea for suburban/urban planning. In addition to being ugly, the fenced schools present an obstacle to getting around on foot (essential in a country that will soon have a population 400+ million and no congestion pricing for the roads).

Related:

  • “Nikolas Cruz’s birth mom had a violent, criminal past. Could it help keep him off Death Row?” (Miami Herald), regarding the perpetrator of the shooting that led to the above rule: His birth mother, Brenda Woodard, was sometimes homeless, and panhandled for money on a highway exit ramp. His adoptive mother, Lynda Cruz, stayed home to manage a 4,500-square-foot, five-bedroom house in the suburbs, with a two-car garage and a sprawling yard. A career criminal, Woodard’s 28 arrests include a 2010 charge for beating a companion with a tire iron; she also threatened to burn the friend’s house down. Lynda Cruz had a clean record. Conventional wisdom suggests that Nikolas Cruz should have taken after the woman who raised him from birth, rather than the one who shared only his DNA. But little of Cruz’s story is conventional. While, by most accounts, Lynda Cruz was thoughtful and disciplined, her adoptive son was violent and impulsive — characteristics he seems to share with the birth mother he never knew. (i.e., follow the science, except when science tells you that criminality is heritable; see also The Son Also Rises and this scholarly article regarding Nikolas Cruz’s sister)
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Bad news for children, but good news for schools in Maskachusetts

by philg

I received a letter from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Jeffrey Riley, the Commissioner, shared some bad news for the children whom the state putatively serves. Their test scores fell. He didn’t say by how much, but Boston Magazine reported on this last month:

According to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 33 percent of students in third through eighth grade met or exceeded grade-level expectations on their math scores, compared to 49 percent in 2019 (the 2020 spring MCAS exam was canceled due to the pandemic). In English language arts, 46 percent of students scored Meeting Expectations or higher, compared to 53 percent in 2016.

Apparently it is possible to learn English by watching TV and playing Xbox, but those are not the best ways to learn mathematics.

Where’s the good news in this, other than school system bureaucrats and teachers having been paid in full for every day that the schools were closed (a full year in Boston!)? “Fortunately, both our state and federal government have recognized the need for additional resources to meet the challenges before us,” says Mr. Riley. “Massachusetts school districts are receiving state and federal pandemic relief money for an extended period of time, and the money can be spent by districts on a wide range of priorities to meet students’ academic, social, emotional, and mental health needs resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.” (note that the virus itself is to blame for the schools having been shut; it was not a human or political decision to keep “essential” marijuana and liquor stores open and allow adults to party on Tinder during the 12-month Boston school shutdown that protected 10-year-olds from a virus that killed 82-year-olds in Maskachusetts)

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New England versus Florida (“wear a mask at your discretion”)

by philg

The police in New England will drive out to hassle kids playing soccer outdoors and arrest the unmasked for disorderly conduct (example).

What about their counterparts in the Florida Free State? I went to the Jupiter (Florida) Police Department (brand new palatial building; let’s be grateful to the folks who pay property tax on $10 million houses!) to get fingerprints that I could send to the FBI for a background check that is required for the Portuguese golden visa/passport program (seemingly a better investment every day given the proposals we’re hearing from our rulers in D.C.!). Visitors are told to “Wear a mask at your discretion”. I went into a small room with a guy about my age (i.e., prime target for Delta variant!). He was not wearing a mask.

Related:

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The former Soviet explains his decision to vaccinate his children

by philg

An immigrant friend has slender athletic children in high school. Their statistical risk from COVID-19 is negligible, possibly smaller than the risk of being injured or dying in a car accident on the way to the vaccine clinic (a handful of children are harmed by COVID-19, of course, but most were vulnerable due to obesity or previously identified disease). He vaccinated his children, despite his belief that they were not at risk and that the vaccine had no value to them. They live in Maskachusetts so they still have to wear masks at school. If they want to travel internationally, they’re still subject to testing hassles.

How about altruism? Maybe the former Soviet wants to help Joe Biden shut down coronavirus as promised during his election campaign? That’s can’t be the explanation. He doesn’t believe that the currently available vaccines have any public health benefit due to the fact that people who are vaccinated can still get infected and be contagious and also due to the fact that SARS-CoV-2 will evolve its way around the current vaccines (potentially mutating into something wildly more deadly, as happened with the Marek’s Disease vaccine). So he didn’t inject his children with the idea that their stimulated immune system would be helpful to an 82-year-old somewhere in Massachusetts.

Earlier this year I asked him to explain his decision and he responded with the following:

Because I know how collectivists think and act. Back in the USSR, we had this saying roughly translated as “Don’t separate yourself too far from the collective, or the collective will separate you.”

This week he has been vindicated. A text message:

The United States Fencing Federation voted for a vaccine mandate for everyone at national events, including kids.

(Said kids still have to wear coronarags under their fencing masks, despite everyone in the arena having been injected with a vaccine that is advertised as miraculously effective.)

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Movie review: Outbreak

by philg

I don’t know how I missed Outbreak during the first 18 months of 14 days to flatten the curve, but the 1995 movie is fun to watch to see what they got right.

The virus in the movie is Ebola, essentially, and it kills previously healthy people of all ages (not at a median age of 82, as COVID-19 kills in Maskachusetts).

The film anticipates my idea of protection camps for the unvaccinated and then asks the reasonable question “Wouldn’t it make sense to kill everyone in the protection camp in order to prevent the virus from spreading?” (How are we going to deal with the unvaccinated, whom we currently blame for all of our woes?)

The remedy for the virus anticipates Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s decision to go big on antibody treatment. It’s a movie, so of course the brilliant Army physician (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is able to develop the treatment and manufacture thousands of doses within hours.

If you love helicopters (and who doesn’t?), you’ll appreciate their central role towards the end of the movie, though you might be doubtful that a guy with 60 hours of training can fly as well as Cuba Gooding Jr. does.

What the film gets completely wrong is the level of resistance to expect from the American people. When the government locks people down they don’t go meekly back to their houses, but have to be forced at gunpoint by an Army battalion. The small-town Californians don’t welcome having their First Amendment rights terminated, but instead insist on what they claim are their rights.

Good News: the movie stars a Biden-supporting actor (for a change!); Bad News: “All the women who have accused Dustin Hoffman of sexual misconduct” (Business Insider, 2017).

Readers: What did you think of Outbreak and what are the differences and similarities between the movie and the U.S. response to SARS-CoV-2?

Related:

  • Contagion (I saw it, but don’t remember it that well)
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Does raging inflation prove or disprove Modern Monetary Theory?

by philg

Modern Monetary Theory is sometimes cartoonishly summarized as “government can borrow and print unlimited money without negative consequences so long as it issues debt in its own (printable) currency.” Based on this cartoon, what the U.S. government has been doing for the first 20 months of 14 Days to Flatten the Curve is exactly the right approach.

The Wikipedia summary of MMT is more nuanced. A government that issues its own fiat money

  1. Can pay for goods, services, and financial assets without a need to first collect money in the form of taxes or debt issuance in advance of such purchases;
  2. Cannot be forced to default on debt denominated in its own currency;
  3. Is limited in its money creation and purchases only by inflation, which accelerates once the real resources (labour, capital and natural resources) of the economy are utilized at full employment;
  4. Recommends strengthening automatic stabilisers to control demand-pull inflation[10] rather than relying upon discretionary tax changes;
  5. Bond issues are a monetary policy device, not a funding device.

(Note that the government’s stated inflation rate, alarming as it might seem, grossly understates costs to buy a house (real estate prices are not included) and also is not adjusted for delivery time (see Is inflation already at 15-30 percent if we hold delivery time constant?).)

One of the policy implications, according to Wikipedia:

Achieving full employment can be administered via a centrally-funded job guarantee, which acts as an automatic stabilizer. When private sector jobs are plentiful, the government spending on guaranteed jobs is lower, and vice-versa.

What we’ve seen over the 20 months of 14 days is sort of like “guaranteed jobs” in that people get a paycheck, but they don’t actually work (the paycheck is called “$600/week unemployment check,” resulting in higher-than-median wages for those who don’t work). On the other hand, the government has put most of its effort into making existing government jobs more lucrative. Government workers have gotten paid for not working (teachers who didn’t teach, librarians at home while libraries were closed, park employees at home while parks were closed) and more government workers, already earning salaries far above those in the private sector, won’t have to repay their student loans (funded by higher taxes paid by those who never enjoyed the opportunity to go to college). On balance, it seems reasonable to consider the higher-than-median-wage unemployment payments as the “centrally-funded job guarantee” that MMT proposes. And, in fact, as any employer trying to hire can attest, full employment was achieved (i.e., everyone who wanted a job had one).

Do you buy or sell stocks and real estate when the government is printing money?

MMT economists also say quantitative easing is unlikely to have the effects that its advocates hope for.[66] Under MMT, QE – the purchasing of government debt by central banks – is simply an asset swap, exchanging interest-bearing dollars for non-interest-bearing dollars. The net result of this procedure is not to inject new investment into the real economy, but instead to drive up asset prices, shifting money from government bonds into other assets such as equities, which enhances economic inequality. The Bank of England’s analysis of QE confirms that it has disproportionately benefited the wealthiest.

Let’s see if the MMT folks were right:

Check and check!

The primary inflation control mechanism in MMT, again according to Wikipedia:

Driven by fiscal policy; government increases taxes to remove money from private sector. A job guarantee also provides a non-accelerating inflation buffer employment ratio, which acts as an inflation control mechanism.

What are the Democrats who control Congress working on right now, as the headlines are filled with reports of raging inflation? Tax increases!

First, is it fair to say that MMT is actually the mainstream economic philosophy in the U.S. and has been since at least March 2020? (In other words, the folks who run the U.S. economy profess belief in neoclassical economics, but their actions reveal a belief in MMT.) Second, have the events that unfolded since then proven that MMT is correct?

Related:

  • “Rising Rents Are Fueling Inflation, Posing Trouble for the Fed” (NYT): rest assured that inflation is temporary, except that you’ll pay 10 percent more for at least the full year of your one-year lease (“That’s a concern for the Fed, because housing prices tend to move slowly and once they go up, they tend to stay up for a while. Rent data also feed into what is called “owners’ equivalent rent” — which tries to put a price on how much owners would pay for housing if they hadn’t bought a home.”)
  • “As Inflation Rises, Beware of the Money Illusion. It May Cost You a Lot.” (WSJ) (average people unable to comprehend that selling a house at a profit in nominal dollars is not a success when inflation has been higher than the profit)
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The new religion on display in Cambridge, Maskachusetts

by philg

Our new religion, in which God is replaced (“In Fauci We Trust”):

Source: A Deplorable immigrant friend (Joe Biden couldn’t bundle him onto one of the Haitian deportation flights, but would surely love to!). Location: Cambridge, Maskachusetts (a $5 million house as measured in Bidie Bucks?).

Related:

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MIT’s president weighs in on the shunned heretic

by philg

MIT’s President weighs in on the situation previously covered here in Corpus Juris Canonici for academic cancellations (MIT). A follower of the Climate Change Alarmism religion held a heretical belief that universities should not admit or hire people based on skin color. He was, appropriately in my view, shunned. (Why “appropriately”? If you’re going to run a religion, you should do it right!)

Apparently it is extremely rare for a group at MIT to develop something new and useful because the only subjects on which the president of MIT sends out emails are social justice-related (Donald Trump bad, low-skill immigrants good, our former best friend and major donor Jeffrey Epstein bad, coronapanic good, etc.). Continuing in that tradition, an email from yesterday….

To the members of the MIT community,

You may have heard about a situation centered on our Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) regarding an invited speaker, Professor Dorian Abbot.

In a recent letter to the faculty, Provost Marty Schmidt lays out the facts, some of which have not come through clearly in the media and on social media. I encourage you to read his letter. You will also find thorough coverage in The Tech.

The controversy around this situation has caused great distress for many members of our community, in many quarters. It has also uncovered significant differences within the Institute on several issues.

I would like to reflect on what happened and set us on a path forward. But let me address the human questions first.

To the members of the EAPS community: I am deeply disturbed that as a direct result of this situation, many of you – students, postdocs, faculty and young alumni – have suffered a tide of online targeting and hate mail from outside MIT. This conduct is reprehensible and utterly unacceptable. For members of the MIT community, where we value treating one another with decency and respect, this feels especially jarring.

I encourage anyone who is subjected to harassing or threatening behavior or language to reach out for support and guidance to the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response (IDHR) office.

I also want to express my tremendous respect for Professor Rob van der Hilst, department head in EAPS, who faced a difficult situation. I know Rob as a person of the highest integrity and character. We are fortunate to have his leadership in EAPS. In this case, when Rob concluded, after consulting broadly, that EAPS could not host an effective public outreach event centered around Professor Abbot, he chose to extend instead an invitation for an on-campus lecture; Rob took this step deliberately to preserve the opportunity for free dialogue and open scientific exchange.

Professor Abbot is a distinguished scientist who remains welcome to speak on the MIT campus, and he has been working with EAPS to confirm the event details.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that this matter has caused many people inside and outside our community to question the Institute’s commitment to free expression. Some report feeling that certain topics are now off limits at MIT. I have heard these concerns directly from faculty colleagues, alumni and others who care deeply about the Institute.

Let me say clearly what I have observed through more than 40 years at MIT:

Freedom of expression is a fundamental value of the Institute.

I believe that, as an institution of higher learning, we must ensure that different points of view – even views that some or all of us may reject – are allowed to be heard and debated at MIT. Open dialogue is how we make each other wiser and smarter.

This commitment to free expression can carry a human cost. The speech of those we strongly disagree with can anger us. It can disgust us. It can even make members of our own community feel unwelcome and illegitimate on our campus or in their field of study.

I am convinced that, as an institution, we must be prepared to endure such painful outcomes as the price of protecting free expression – the principle is that important.

I am equally certain, however, that when members of our community must bear the cost of other people’s free expression, they deserve our understanding and support. We need to ensure that they, too, have the opportunity to express their own views.

A path forward [emphasis in original]

The issues this situation has brought to the surface are complex. No unilateral declaration on behalf of MIT could either resolve them in the moment or prevent future controversies. So I believe it is vital now that we engage in serious, open discussion together.

As the provost’s letter described, we will begin with a faculty forum, being planned for the last week of October. Discussion in this working session might address questions like these: Given our shared commitment to open inquiry and free expression, are there further steps we should take to practice it consistently? Should we develop guidelines to help groups in their own decision making? Does the concept need more prominence in our curriculum? How should we respond when members of our community bear the disproportionate cost of other people’s speech?

It will be essential in this overall process to include the perspective and experience of graduate and undergraduate students; I have asked Chancellor Melissa Nobles to work with student leaders to decide the best way to do so.

I have also asked Provost Marty Schmidt, Chancellor Nobles and Chair of the Faculty Lily Tsai to begin immediately assembling a special ad hoc working group to consider the insights and lessons we should take away from this situation. I believe this extremely important topic deserves and will benefit from this kind of thoughtful, deliberative, nuanced approach, perhaps including experts from outside MIT. The themes that emerge from the initial faculty forum will help inform the working group’s charge.

From the comments that have come to me directly, I can attest that our community encompasses a wide spectrum of very strong views about what has transpired in these last weeks.

As we cope with the aftermath of this public controversy here at home, let us hold ourselves to the same standards in our interactions with each other as in our intellectual work: To learn more, assume less and ask more – and listen as closely as we can to each other’s ideas, perspectives and experiences.

I hope that, in this moment and always, we will all continue to value and respect each other as fellow members of one community, united in a single great mission.

Sincerely,

L. Rafael Reif

Speech generates an externality (“cost” repeatedly mentioned above). Thus, the sensible way to deal with it, according to Econ 101, is to charge people every time that they speak and distribute the funds received (minus an administration fee) to the BIPOC and 2SLGBTQQIA+ members of the community who currently “bear the cost” of this externality. There is already a “Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response (IDHR) office,” according to the above. This office could be tasked with running the tax-and-spend system.

(Note that the above email is self-contradicctory. President Reif says that expression is costing for those who hear it. Yet he says “I believe it is vital now that we engage in serious, open discussion together.” If “open” means that people are going to say things along the lines of what the heretic Dorian Abbot said in Newsweek, i.e., that universities shouldn’t consider skin color in admissions and hiring, won’t that generate a huge cost to be borne by “members of our community”? Wouldn’t this actually be worse than the lecture Professor Abbot was going to give? (the canceled lecture was not on the subject of skin-color-based university policies))

Related:

  • “Male Workers Allowed Into Baldwin, Unsettling Residents” (Oberlin Review): Baldwin Cottage is the home of the Women and Trans Collective. The College website describes the dorm as “a close-knit community that provides women and transgendered persons with a safe space for discussion, communal living, and personal development.” Cisgender men are not allowed to live on the second and third floors, and many residents choose not to invite cisgender men to that space. I was angry, scared, and confused. Why didn’t the College complete the installation over the summer, when the building was empty? Why couldn’t they tell us precisely when the workers would be there? Why were they only notifying us the day before the installation was due to begin?
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$112/month to live in a brand-new house in Bowie, Maryland

by philg

As part of our move to the Florida Free State, I had Everpresent scan a photo album that my mom made in 1966 (she didn’t use acid-free paper so there was no practical way to preserve it other than scanning).

Here’s the air-conditioned brand-new house that my parents purchased in Bowie, Maryland (my father was working as an economist for Census Bureau): $15,990 with $590 down and $112/month ongoing. (Deal was arranged in 1961, but the house was completed and they moved in 1962. It might have been the Cape Cod, actually, which was slightly cheaper.)

Zillow says that the median price of a single family home today in Bowie is about $500,000.

How does that compare to official inflation? $15,990 in June 1962 is worth about $145,000 today says the BLS. So a house is more than 3X as expensive in real dollars, despite the fact that the above (air-conditioned!) house was brand new. (Would $15,990 in today’s Bidie Bucks even pay for a central air-conditioning system (installed)?)

Related:

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If Zillow is right about inflation, is everyone who rents stupid?

by philg

The Zillow August 2021-August 22 forecast:

Zillow expects home values to grow 11.7% between August 2021 and August 2022, and to end 2021 up 19.9% from December 2020.

The September 2021-Sep 22 forecast:

Zillow expects home values to grow 13.6% between September 2021 and September 2022, and to end 2021 up 19.5% from December 2020.

The 10-year mortgage rate is about 2 percent. If Zillow is right, even for someone who wanted to live in a place for only one year, it would be cheaper to buy a house, pay the cost of capital, pay property tax and insurance, and pay a realtor 5 percent at the end of the year to sell the house than to pay rent (since the preceding scenario will yield at least a small cash profit).

So…. either (1) everyone who rents is stupid, (2) nobody who rents can qualify for a mortgage, or (3) Zillow is wrong about where the price of a house to purchase is going.

(Since we are renters and I am stupid, I am going to bet on Explanation 1!)

Note the pasted-on price adjustment in the chocolate alligator for sale below (PBI):

Related:

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