TWA Hotel at JFK

by philg

This is a report on a June 23 visit to the TWA Hotel, a conversion of the former TWA Flight Center terminal, designed by Eero Saarinen and used from 1962 through 2001. Essentially two big new apartment/hotel blocks were built and the preserved portion is used as the lobby.

If you don’t mind paying $200 to park overnight, the best way to arrive is by single-engine piston airplane. Once the controllers stop laughing, taxi to Sheltair, chat with the helicopter taxi pilots, and the line guys will give you a ride to the hotel.

Try to schedule your visit for a day when the airport is using the 4/22 runways. The pool and the “runway view” rooms overlook 4L/22R, with 4R/22L behind. The action won’t be all that dramatic if the 13 runways are in use, but there is a reasonably good view of 31L. We visited when the 13/31 runways were closed for most of the day (painting?). It irked me slightly that I had to land the Cirrus in a crosswind gusting 20 knots when the airport has a 14,500′ runway oriented straight into the wind, but we were rewarded with a great afternoon and morning of plane-watching.

The hotel celebrates everything that was great/groovy about the 1960s. You won’t learn about the Vietnam War or the Great Society programs that have turned roughly half of Americans into government dependents (not to say “on welfare”!). There is an awesome car collection, including a Lincoln Continental with suicide doors, a Chrysler Newport, a Fiat Jolly, and an Isetta.

You’ll want to buy a reservation in advance to use the rooftop pool on the afternoon of your arrival (it is open to everyone from 7-10:30 am). When it is time for dinner, walk through the lobby to get to the restaurant (great food, stretched-thin service, reasonable (for NYC+airport) prices).

The hotel is tremendously fun for kids, with surprises in a lot of corners. Play Twister, visit Eero Saarinen’s office and drafting table, sit in a 1962 living room, sit at Howard Hughes’s CEO desk.

How about the rooms? Here’s ours before we trashed it (the kids are like 1970s rock stars, but without the musical talent). Perhaps 1/2 to 2/3rds the size of a standard Hampton Inn room. Note the Saarinen Womb Chair ($1000). There is no coffee maker in the room and no room service is available, so consider bringing some cold brew and keeping it in the mini-bar fridge (empty).

Can you run a hotel without bothering to answer the phone? Sort of. As an experiment, I called the hotel prior to arrival and waited on hold until a human answered. 50 minutes. From the room, however, dialing 0 for the front desk, as the rotary phone suggests one do, never resulted in any contact. This proved to be a problem when two dogs nearby embarked (so to speak) on an extended barkfest starting around 9:30 pm (past the sacred bedtime for our boys!). Senior Management was forced to walk down the hallway, go into the elevator, walk through the connector tube, and talk to the front desk in person. She was informed that the hotel didn’t have enough staff to figure out from which room the barking was emanating. Therefore, it became the guest’s job to explore the floors above and below our room. (We determined that the dogs were in the room just above ours, then went back to the front desk to report. The dogs’ owners were reached, but apparently they couldn’t make it back to their room so the situation continued until midnight).

(Other U.S. hotels seem to be on the same plan. I recently stayed at the Hilton in St. Petersburg, Florida and one of the members of our group waited on hold for nearly an hour, calling from the room, to reach the front desk.)

Speaking of noise… the windows are marvels of acoustic engineering and hardly any noise from 22R makes it into the room. Isolation from other rooms and the hallway is not as good, however, as we found out when listening to the canine chorus.

What about the level of coronapanic? The airport’s official site, June 22, 2021:

Due to ongoing health concerns regarding COVID-19, as of Friday, March 20,2020 concessions are only offering grab and go and takeout options, consistent with the latest New York and New Jersey directives. Food courts remain open, but we remind passengers to follow social distancing guidelines and to maintain at least 6 feet of separation between other guests. Many retail stores in the airports have closed. Please note that concessions are adjusting their hours of operation and opening status on a daily basis, and so we cannot guarantee any specific concessions or eateries will be open.

A minimum of 16 months to flatten the curve because 15 months plus vaccines plus PCR tests for nearly all passengers plus masks weren’t sufficient?

From the reservation service used by the hotel restaurant:

Per NYC indoor dining guidelines for COVID-19 safety, all guests will be required to have their temperature checked with a reading of 100.00 degrees or less and must provide a contact name, number, and mailing address prior to entering the restaurant as well as wear a mask at all times when not seated at their table.

Even if you want to read about how wise Dr. Fauci is, you can’t do so. The reading room has been closed for 15 months, but that’s “temporarily” and they “look forward to welcoming [us] soon”. Given the postage stamp sized rooms, it is a shame that any of the common space is sealed off.

Gym showers will be disinfected after use, in case surface contamination turns out to be a significant source of COVID-19. You will be protected from the hazard of drinking fountains by using these dangerous devices only to refill water bottles.

The actual gym is huge, perhaps 5X the size of what you’d expect. Nobody inside the gym actually cared about his/her/zir/their health, apparently, because nobody was wearing a mask (consistent with Manhattan customs, roughly half of the folks in the lobby, hallways, elevators, etc. were masked).

Taxiing out… (photo taken by a 7-year-old)

Summary: It’s a fun experience and well worth the $$ (about $500 for the room, pool reservations, dinner, breakfast for two adults and two kids; let’s try not to think about what it cost to run the Cirrus SR20!). We were not even done with the first day before the kids asked when we’d be coming back.

Sad contrast: The JetBlue Terminal 5 that has replaced this magnificent Jet Age building functionally. It is huge without being inspiring, packed with dispirited people being hassled every minute or two with signs and audio announcements regarding masks, and features long lines, e.g., for security. On the plus side, the kids enjoyed riding the AirTrain around all of the terminals!

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Steeped in the religion of homo economicus, American central planners underestimated the number of satisficers?

by philg

Recent text message from a friend:

[wife] is pissed at government for extending unemployment. Our nanny won’t work until September because she is being paid to not work.

Many of the Americans collecting unemployment checks (often more spending power than what is obtainable from a median job; see nytimes) are happy to work in exchange for untraceable cash that won’t jeopardize their continued revenue stream from Uncle Joe. They’re examples of Homo economicus from Econ 101, in other words. They put some value on leisure time, but it wasn’t such a high value that it kept them from entering the workforce some years ago. If their value of leisure time hasn’t changed, they should be happy to exchange time for cash money that government computer systems won’t see.

The above-cited nanny, however, did not make the working parents the expected offer to continue her efforts in exchange for cash rather than the previous stream of checks followed by a 1099. Instead, she said that she had “enough” to meet her needs and was not interested in work at all (presumably there was some cash price per hour that would have changed her mind, but she didn’t come up with a quote).

The central planners in Washington, D.C. presumably had some idea of how the enhanced/extended unemployment benefits would change the American workforce, but I wonder if there are way more people sitting on the beach than planned due to an overreliance on the Homo economicus assumption and an underestimate of the number of satisficers like our friends’ nanny. If there are a lot of working-age people who aren’t especially materialistic, it might be easier to shrink the American workforce than economists imagine.

Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (we seem to have reached a “new normal” a year ago):

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Smartest people in the U.S. can’t figure out why the young don’t want to be vaccinated against a disease that kills 82-year-olds

by philg

“Why Young Adults Are Among the Biggest Barriers to Mass Immunity” (New York Times, today) shows that, despite scientific leadership in the White House, America is not safe from science deniers. From the folks who say that they’re the smartest people in the U.S.:

Many young adults are foregoing Covid vaccines for a complex mix of reasons. Health officials are racing to find ways to change their minds.

But the straightforward sales pitch for older people — a vaccine could very possibly save your life — does not always work on healthy 20-somethings who know they are less likely to face the severest outcomes of Covid.

Many young adults are relatively healthy, and they often have work, school and young children to worry about. Getting vaccinated does not always register as a top priority, experts and young adults said.

My comment:

“healthy 20-somethings who know they are less likely to face the severest outcomes of Covid”

“Less likely”?

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investigations-discovery/hospitalization-death-by-age.html

shows that the risk of death to an 18-29-year-old is 1/610th the risk faced by an elderly American (85+)

A slender 20-year-old is more likely to be killed in a car accident driving to/from the vaccine clinic than he/she/ze/they would be likely to be killed by COVID-19 if he/she/ze/they did not get vaccinated. If we’re confused regarding why such a person does not want to spend the time and effort to get vaccinated maybe we should question our own intelligence, not the intelligence of the young person.

I guess what is most interesting about this is that the technocrats who are now in charge of the economy and society couldn’t have figured this out 6-12 months ago and come up with a plan, e.g., to pay healthy young people for undergoing a procedure that has no benefit to them. It was already apparent then that COVID-19 was a killer of the elderly (median age of a COVID-19-tagged death here in Maskachusetts: 82). And it was certainly known as of December 2020 that the vaccines wouldn’t be FDA-approved, but only authorized for emergency use. It was entirely predictable that the side effects of the vaccines, e.g., a few days of flu-like symptoms and worse, would be rationally perceived as outweighing the benefits to slender healthy young people.

From Jun 25, St. Petersburg, Florida, part of a crowd of 10,000+ packing into the bars and clubs of Central Avenue just after 11:00 pm:

(I got out my handy bullhorn and told the young people to cease their covidiocy and disperse. I tried to get a chant going where I would say “Stay Home” and they would respond by shouting “Save Lives”, but was unsuccessful.)

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Can public schools suspend students who go away for a weekend and aren’t able to arrange a COVID test?

by philg

Keeping a child from attending public school is a crime. Parents can be arrested and imprisoned for obstructing a child’s access. See, for example, “The Story Behind Kamala Harris’ Truancy Program” (NPR):

In 2019, HuffPost reporter Molly Redden wrote about the families affected by this truancy program, including a Black mother named Cheree Peoples, who was arrested in April of 2013. She came on the show to help explain why this program, which initially launched without much criticism, ended up becoming so controversial, and why it disproportionately affected families of color. Here’s the extended cut of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Cheree is a mother in California, and her daughter has a chronic illness. Her name is Shayla, and she has sickle cell anemia, a really painful genetic disease that causes lots of complications. It’s pretty typical for people who live with this disability to miss a lot of school if they’re children. As her daughter missed a lot of school for valid medical reasons, Cheree and the school were in a dispute about how to accommodate and account for those absences.

She was in her house one morning, and the police showed up and handcuffed her. She had time to put on a jacket over her pajamas. And when she was walked by the police out of her apartment where she lived with her daughter, there were news cameras waiting, and she was booked by the police. What she said to me was that she was shocked. She was really floored. And she said to me, “You’d swear I’d killed somebody.” It felt to her like a really excessive show of force for what was essentially a misunderstanding between her and her child’s school.

[Harris] fought for this law, which raised the financial penalty and made it a criminal misdemeanor for parents, up to a year in jail, when their children missed at least 10 percent of school time.

Here in Lincoln, Massachusetts, soon to be home to the nation’s most expensive (per student) public school building, the school bureaucrats decided that students could be excluded from the building (i.e., suspended) if they went away for a Saturday overnight in another state, e.g., neighboring New Hampshire or Vermont, and did not have a negative PCR COVID-19 test result to show. As with the former state governor’s order (one of 69), the test had to be taken within 72 hours of returning to Maskachusetts. So, in a twist that only students of the absurd can appreciate, it was legal to be tested for COVID-19 on Thursday evening in MA as a way of determining if someone was going to acquire COVID by traveling on Saturday morning and returning Sunday evening.

Although the school had a fully remote option, a student kicked out of school for quarantine could not transition into the fully remote option for the period of suspension.

The governor’s order was eventually dropped, replaced by an “advisory”. The school, however, continued with their requirement that, essentially, students be tested prior to departure for weekend excursions. They’d been running a “pool testing” program at the school as well, but the pool test could not be used to meet the travel requirement. So a student who was going to go to Vermont for the weekend would end up needing two COVID-19 tests in the week prior (to see if the student acquired COVID-19 in Vermont?).

Not every family can get organized for these tests nor afford them (we spent a month without insurance and we got billed $750 per child for a test at a “doc in a box” urgent care center). Perhaps a test goes awry and a result is never returned. For whatever reason, a child may end up over the border into another state (almost any of which actually have experienced far less COVID-19 than Maskachusetts; Florida, for example, adjusted for population over 65 is at roughly 1/3rd the MA death rate) and later have no test result to show. Why is it legal to deny this child an education for a two-week quarantine period?

#BecausePublicHealth? Maybe that was a good answer when the governor’s travel order was still in place. Now that the technocrats have rescinded their order, however, what is the school’s justification for denying education to children, a criminal offense if parents had done it?

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Will Tesla’s only long-term competitive advantage turn out to be Dog Mode?

by philg

“Comparison Test: 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E vs. 2020 Tesla Model Y” (Car and Driver) has Ford crushing Tesla in every area except straight-line acceleration (useful in a country of 330+ million people using a road network designed for 150 million?) and charging network (#BidenWillFixByTaxingTheRich). The Ford Mach-E is built better, has a better user interface, offers more comfortable seats, is cheaper, and is quieter. The Ford accelerates 0-60 mph in 4.9 seconds, which should be more than fast enough for street driving.

A comment on the C&D article:

I can’t get over how bad Tesla interiors are. Take away the giant tablet in the middle and it’s completely empty inside. A $60k car with the interior quality of a Mitsubishi. The Mach E is cheaper and has better quality. If Ford is killing you in the quality department you have issues.

Loyal readers will recall my obsession with Dog Mode, going back to 2003 (see Car/Kennel). The legacy car companies seem to be refusing to add these 10 lines of code, perhaps because they don’t want to be held responsible if the feature is used improperly and a dog is baked to death? I wonder if therefore this will become Tesla’s only long-term competitive advantage vs. Ford, VW, Hyundai/Kia, Toyota, Honda, et al.

Also from Car and Driver: “Every Electric Vehicle That’s Expected in the Next Five Years”. It seems that there isn’t much interest in building the Toyota Camry of electric cars, i.e., a car that doesn’t purport to drive itself, that doesn’t accelerate faster than a C5 Corvette, that doesn’t have a huge touchscreen stuck in the middle of the dashboard, and that therefore doesn’t cost more than necessary.

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Now that we have a country with no rental cars, who’s laughing at the flying car concept?

by philg

When the founders of Terrafugia, 15 years ago, showed me their pitch arguing that a flying car was more efficient for some class of trips than a Honda Accord or a traditional piston-powered airplane, I responded that (a) nobody could argue that a small airplane was a better practical transportation tool than a Honda Accord, except for trips to islands such as Martha’s Vineyard, and (b) given the few hundred aircraft they hoped to sell, they didn’t need to convince buyers to purchase based on rational requirements.

Why wasn’t it a big advantage to have a plane that could also be a car and thereby support the last 15 miles of a trip? Nearly every airport offered rental cars, I pointed out. For shorter duration needs, the more popular airports also had crew cars that Cessna and Cirrus pilots could borrow for free. UberX launched in 2012, further reducing the friction of the interface between air and ground.

Like most of my business advice, this turned out to be wrong. It just took 15 years for the wrongness to be obvious! Here in 2021 it is impossible to get rental cars and it is impossible for Uber to compete for labor with the U.S. government (i.e., people who would otherwise be driving Ubers are relaxing at home cashing checks from Uncle Joe; see We are very short staffed and no one wants a job right now).

(Recent conversation at our local airport with the guy working a rental car desk: “We can’t get any cars and we can’t hire anyone. Nobody wants to work. We’re sold out every weekend.”)

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Why isn’t the cost of mining Bitcoin more or less equal to the current price of Bitcoin?

by philg

A comment on Is inflation already at 15-30 percent if we hold delivery time constant?:

GPU scarcity is entirely due to the growth of digital currency mining and the corresponding increase in demand for the chips that do the mining most efficiently. A top-end GPU can recoup the list price from digital currency mining in two months.

Why is the return on investment quick/high for Bitcoin mining? If the price of Bitcoin goes up, shouldn’t there be an almost immediate flood of people into the mining business such that the cost of mining rises to just below the selling price of Bitcoin?

An explanation of the mining process:

Once miners have verified 1 MB (megabyte) worth of Bitcoin transactions, known as a “block,” those miners are eligible to be rewarded with a quantity of bitcoin (more about the bitcoin reward below as well). The 1 MB limit was set by Satoshi Nakamoto, and is a matter of controversy, as some miners believe the block size should be increased to accommodate more data, which would effectively mean that the bitcoin network could process and verify transactions more quickly.

Note that verifying 1 MB worth of transactions makes a coin miner eligible to earn bitcoin—not everyone who verifies transactions will get paid out.

To earn bitcoins, you need to meet two conditions. One is a matter of effort; one is a matter of luck.

2) You have to be the first miner to arrive at the right answer, or closest answer, to a numeric problem. This process is also known as proof of work.

If mining is lucrative, e.g., because mining costs $5,000 in carbon-spewing electricity while Bitcoin is selling for $40,000, shouldn’t so many new miners flood in that it would be less probable to “be the first miner to arrive at the right answer”? This would effectively raise the cost of mining and the process should continue until mining costs $39,000+.

I suspect that I’m missing something. “Why The Actual Cost Of Mining Bitcoin Can Leave It Vulnerable To A Deep Correction” (mid-2020):

In early 2020, researchers predicted the cost to mine Bitcoin will be at around $12,000 to $15,000 after the block reward halving in May. But, it is now much cheaper to mine BTC than the initial estimates. The low breakeven price to mine Bitcoin may leave it vulnerable to a correction.

Bitcoin has become more affordable to mine in recent weeks due to two main factors: difficulty adjustments and cheaper electricity in Sichuan, China due to the rainy season.

A low breakeven price of Bitcoin can raise the probability of a price pullback because miners have more incentive to sell BTC, which may increase selling pressure in the short-term.

“To be completely accurate: Given current difficulty, 0.04$/kWh and S9 running custom firmware bringing it down to 71W per TH efficiency. The cost to mine 1 BTC is 8206.64$. Meaning its still profitable,” one miner said.

Maybe my theory isn’t contradicted by this article. At the time it was written, the market price of Bitcoin was $9,626. But what is the cost of mining today relative to the market price of existing Bitcoin?

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Why didn’t we ever get convenient neighborhood COVID-19 testing?

by philg

We spent $trillions purportedly fighting COVID-19. We said that testing was critical to this fight. There is empty retail space all over the U.S. (thanks partly to closures ordered by governors!). Why didn’t we ever get COVID testing that was actually convenient, fast, and simple?

Plainly it can be done. Here’s a storefront COVID-19 testing center near Times Square (June 12 photo):

Why weren’t there storefronts like this all over the U.S., starting around April 2020, the fees paid via the government money printing press?

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Turn opprobrium into praise by identifying as LGBTQIA+?

by philg

Happy Pride Month again! Don’t forget that

Suppose that we hear about a financially secure 90-year-old white American having sex with a 31-year-old “Brown” immigrant? That’s an unequal power dynamic, right? And we would condemn this relationship, I’m sure. Former Miss Ukraine Oleksandra Nikolayenko isn’t especially brown, but she’s 40 years old and we don’t see a lot of media praise regarding her marriage to Phil Ruffin (86-year-old billionaire).

What if Mx. Nikolayenko said “I identify as a man” and Phil Ruffin said “I am gay”? Then we would have a love story suitable for publication… “‘I Found Love At 90 With A 31-Year-Old—After Finally Coming Out'” (Newsweek):

When he arrived, John was dressed in black with his black mask. We actually both had our masks on right up until the salad course was brought out. That was the first time we actually saw each other. We got talking and soon found that we had lots in common. Neither one of us smokes or drinks and neither of us uses foul language. We talked about shows that we liked and things we both enjoy around town; we both really like Asian food.

They had as much in common, in other words, as any two people selected at random from the Chinese population of 1.4 billion.

Young John is not prosperous:

He had three roommates so I didn’t visit him as it would have been less comfortable for us.

John is an immigrant:

John is originally from Mexico, where there are plenty of tarantulas, but he’s afraid of them.

Their friends are implicitly against polyamory:

Most of our friends now are also gay, and a number of them are in younger/older unions or marriages. It really doesn’t come up, nobody says anything about it because we’re two people who are happy together. That’s all our friends care about. Whenever it comes up in Facebook comments—and it does come up—I say that age is just a number. Of course it is an important number, but it is just a number.

Just a number? Let’s compare to Jeffrey Epstein, who died at age 66. It was disgusting when Epstein was 61 and there was a possibility of sex with a 19-year-old. See “‘UNCLE’ JEFF’S PLOT Jeffrey Epstein hatched plot to marry ex girlfriend’s 19-year-old daughter to give her £40m inheritance”:

JEFFREY Epstein told pals he wanted to marry the teen daughter of his beauty queen ex who called him “Uncle Jeff”, it has been claimed.

Celina Dubin, now aged 24, is the daughter of doctor and former Miss Sweden Eva Andersson Dubin – who the paedo dated in the 1980s.

Epstein reportedly enjoyed a close relationship with Eva and her husband Glenn Dubin – who she married in 1994 – a billionaire hedge-fund manager from New York City.

And in 2014, the sex offender, then aged 61, told friends that if he was ever to marry he would choose then-19-year-old Celina, reports Business Insider.

He said that he wanted the teenager to inherit his fortune and that marriage would help her avoid inheritance taxes, the report claims.

That same year, Epstein – who died in prison in August while facing child sex trafficking charges – named Celina as a beneficiary to his $500m fortune.

A source familiar with the millionaire’s estate told Business Insider that the young girl would have inherited $50m – however the paedo banker removed her from his will in 2015 for unknown reasons.

The Dubins reportedly spent holidays with Epstein even after his conviction in 2008 for having sex with a minor.

What if Celina Dubin had said “My pronouns are he/him/his” and Jeffrey Epstein had said “I am gay and find all three of the guys pictured below attractive, including Mr. Eva Dubin on the left and Mr. Celina Dubin on the right of the photo”? Now the romance between Mr. Epstein and Mr. Celina Dubin would be heartwarming instead of “gross”?

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Good news for Californians who spent all of their money on marijuana

by philg

Both medical and recreational marijuana stores were open throughout California’s coronapanic shutdown. “Amid coronavirus pandemic, California gov classifies cannabis industry as ‘essential’ during state’s effective lockdown” (March 21, 2020):

Under a clarification document Gov. Gavin Newsom issued late Friday, all licensed marijuana businesses in California can continue with business as usual during an effective statewide lockdown implemented in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

The decision to categorize cannabis companies as “essential” in effect provides an economic lifeline to the marijuana industry by allowing MJ businesses to keep their doors open.

The entire cannabis supply chain – including all state-licensed MJ businesses such as farmers, distributors, manufacturers and testing labs – also are considered “essential” under the state policy, according to Nicole Elliott, senior adviser on cannabis in Newsom’s Office of Business and Economic Development.

Elliott noted there’s no differentiation between “medical” and “recreational” cannabis companies, which means every licensed marijuana business that chooses to continue operations during the lockdown can stay open.

In a separate news release, the state Bureau of Cannabis Control said: “Because cannabis is an essential medicine for many residents, licensees may continue to operate at this time so long as their operations comply with local rules and regulations.”

What about Californians who didn’t pay their landlords because the CDC has thus far blocked evictions and it was more important to purchase “essential” marijuana? “California Has a Plan to Pay the Back Rent for Low-Income Tenants. All of It.” (NYT, June 21):

A $5.2 billion program in final negotiations at the State Legislature would pay 100 percent of unpaid rent that lower-income Californians incurred during the pandemic and would be financed entirely by federal money. The state is also proposing to set aside $2 billion to pay for unpaid water and electricity bills.

The state’s separate rental relief program would be available to residents who earn no more than 80 percent of the median income in their area and who can show pandemic-related financial hardship. In San Francisco, a family of four would have to earn less than $146,350 to qualify.

So if you’re a working class American in the Midwest, paying rent on an apartment and paying taxes to the federal government, your hard-earned dollars will go to bail out California stoners earning $146,000 per year, so long as those Californians said “I prefer not to” when their landlords asked them to pay rent.

From 2019, when it was legal to have an in-person class at a college in San Francisco:

And, since it is Pride Month, we can take Pride in the Eros club (reopened long before the San Francisco Public Schools because bathing with friends is “essential”?):

(Of course I am Proud to have been in the Castro (dinner with a patent litigator), but I merely walked by Eros and did not go in. So my Pride level is only at 10 percent.)

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