Big Sky v. Jackson v. Park City as a summer destination

by philg

Interested in escaping to the mountains for all or part of the summer? Here’s a report, based on 2023 visits, regarding three possibilities.

Park City, Utah (elevation 7,000′) is the best choice if you’re passionate about Pride and 2SLGBTQQIA+. The city purchased at least 100 trans-enhanced rainbow flags and has hung them from every lamppost in the small downtown area. You can pay obeisance to Rainbow Flagism before you think about entering a business establishment, which might in turn have its own 2SLGBTQQIA+ talismans on the windows or door. If you’re not a follower of the state religion, however, you might be annoyed by Park City’s tilted situation. There are no level streets downtown. Park City is great if you’re planning to break a bone doing an adventure sport or if you’re planning on suffering a total body meltdown due to old age. A friend went from ski accident in Park City to world-class University of Utah hospital in 25 minutes via ambulance. The surrounding area is certainly more scenic than most of Florida, but it is far from any National Park.

Big Sky, Montana exemplifies everything that is bad about American sprawl. There are three main developments spread out along a highway, none of which has sufficient critical mass to constitute a city or even a “town”. Let’s call them three strip malls, one of which includes ski lifts. Everything is part of a single “resort”, which is able to impose a 4% sales tax on everything sold by the stores within Big Sky (Montana itself has no sales tax, so stock up in Bozeman or West Yellowstone!). But the resort corporation ignored all of the principles of New Urbanism and the sprawl does not feel planned. You can be crammed into a townhouse or condo development or you can be isolated and car-dependent far out from one of the three strip malls.

For peasants, Big Sky is tough to access. It is a 1.5-hour drive from the regional airport in Bozeman. The elite will sometimes do this or Gulfstream it to KWYS, a 35-minute drive away and blessed with an 8400′ runway and approaches down to 200′ AGL.

The exception to the above might be for the rich folks who hang out together in the Yellowstone Club (two shared and one private helipad inside so that the above drives are rendered unnecessary). Otherwise, Big Sky shows the genius of the New Urbanism folks who created our community. The shared gym, pool, lawn, playground, etc. for every 150-200 households and the compact layout (but still mostly single-family homes) facilitate social connections.

If you’re going to check out Big Sky and coming from sea level, I recommend the Marriott “Wilson”, which is in the middle strip mall that is 1,000′ lower than the base of the ski hill. This hotel was built in 2019 and folks say that the base lodges are getting worn and tired. There is a good walk down to an impressive waterfall. Bidenflation is a Republican lie: my haircut (without shampoo) at the local barber shop was only $55 plus tip. Here are the prices at the local Mexican food truck where local laborers get lunch (13 Bidies for a sandwich):

Jackson, Wyoming (elevation 6,237′) shows the importance of flatness. Hills are great if it is winter and you want to ski, but they’re annoying if you’re going to the supermarket. Jackson has a huge amount of more-or-less flat valley area that enables the development of a functional city, an extensive bike path network that you don’t need to be a hero to enjoy, etc. The wildlife art museum is a great place to hang out, especially because the members’ room is open to all and there is a good restaurant on site. You could spend 4-5 hours here with a meal and then doing some reading while looking out over the elk refuge. Jackson has its own regional airport (kind of a short runway and the approaches aren’t great, but airlines serve it). It also has an in-town low-elevation ski hill that looks good for beginners (the eponymous ski resort for Jackson is huge and terrifying).

Jackson offers quick access to Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park. Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that it will take nearly 5 hours to drive to the nearest real city: Salt Lake. I’m sure that the local hospital is great for orthopedics, but if you need any other high-end specialist it will be quite a project to see a doctor in Salt Lake City. The lack of inflation meant that it was only $30 plus tip for Pad Thai in Jackson:

Residential construction was proceeding at a feverish place in all of the places that we visited (on our way to a Chinese level of population density!), but even where it seemed that a lot of land was available the prices were stratospheric. Park City was perhaps the most affordable. In Big Sky and Jackson, the townhouse lifestyle is $1-2 million and the single-family houses with a big of land and a gorgeous view were mostly $4-10 million. Here’s the downtown Jackson view on Zillow. Note that many of these multi-$million properties are either apartments or vacant land.

Tax implications: Wyoming has no personal income tax. If you end up getting stuck there for more than 6 months or fall in love with Jackson and decide to make it your primary home, you won’t pay income tax. Utah and Montana both have income taxes. None of the three states have estate or inheritance taxes. The family law systems and associated profits for alimony and child support plaintiffs are quite different among these three states as well. See Real World Divorce.

Conclusion: I think that Jackson is the nicest place among the above three. Unfortunately, it is also everyone else’s favorite so it is super expensive. The long distance from a major city is concerning as well. Due to the urban layout, it should be easier to build a social life in Jackson than in Big Sky or Park City. That said, it probably still wouldn’t be that easy due to the large percentage of transients.

On the third hand: If you stay in Florida for the summer, you are unlikely to suffer from forest fire smoke, a problem that has been common for thousands of years in the mountain states, especially up north. Here’s the sky in the Titusville/Cape Canaveral area on July 1, 2023, when folks in the Midwest and Northeast were putting their N95s back on:

(we were up there watching SpaceX push the European Euclid telescope toward the L2 Lagrange Point; even the Florida-hating NYT was forced to admit that “The weather was almost perfect for the flight”)

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Anheuser-Busch pledges to support “the LGBTQ community”

by philg

“Anheuser-Busch CEO says his company will continue to support the LGBTQ community” (NBC, June 28):

Anheuser-Busch InBev will continue to support the LGBTQ community despite backlash over a Bud Light advertising campaign featuring a transgender influencer that has simmered for nearly three months, CEO Brendan Whitworth said Wednesday.

Bud Light should be “all about bringing people together,” he told “CBS Mornings.”

“I think the conversation surrounding Bud Light has moved away from beer, and the conversation has become divisive,” Whitworth said. “And Bud Light really doesn’t belong there.”

AB InBev, the parent company of Bud Light, drew criticism from conservative activists and consumers for hiring transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney for a promotional March Madness campaign.

Does this seem like a sensible business strategy?

“There’s a big social conversation taking place right now, and big brands are right in the middle of it and it’s not just our industry or Bud Light,” he said. “It’s happening in retail, happening in fast food.

Why would big brands be in the middle of whether someone wants to identify as 2SLGBTQQIA+? Does a toothpaste brand need to pick a victimhood group to support, for example? (Rainbow Flagism is the social justice cause that is least likely to require adherents to give money, as I noted in Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?)

It seems unfair for Anheuser-Busch to have fired two mid-level executives over the Bud Light marketing campaign when it is apparently the CEO who is desperate to make his/her/zir/their mark in the Rainbow Flag Crusade. But why does Mx. Whitworth have to do that when Rainbow Flagism is the official state religion?

Readers: Are American consumers who (deplorably) reject Rainbow Flagism going to forgive “Tranheuser-Busch” when the CEO keeps talking about how 2SLGBTQQIA+ is the one group that he wants to support? (Not the unhoused, not the disabled, not those suffering from cancer…)

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The Californian comments on the marvels of Europe

by philg

Overheard in Delft… a chubby California blonde was on her iPhone describing the marvels of the city to friends back in Sacramento and San Francisco: “It’s incredibly clean, not like the cities in our country.”

This was late on a Sunday afternoon and, in fact, the streets and sidewalks were somewhat trashed by all of the weekend tourists and strolling locals. Trash cans are relatively sparse, takeout food is common, and smoking is more common than in the U.S. In fact, even before the weekend I had noticed that the city was dramatically more littered, especially with very small items, than what we’re accustomed to in the parts of Florida that we visit.

A potential source of trash (my host forced me to eat fries with mayonnaise):

Locals eating just outside the shop:

Three tourists (background left) eating/drinking outside of the old city hall:

A lot of the houses in the center are tidy:

For fans of 1980s Artificial Intelligence:

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If Rainbow Flagism is the state religion, why do individuals and businesses need to buy their own rainbow flags?

by philg

In Rainbow-first Retail (examples from Bozeman, Montana), I displayed photos of retail shops whose owners invested time and money to ensure that consumers wouldn’t be able to enter without paying obeisance to America’s state religion. But if 2SLGBTQQIA+-ism is our state religion and the trans-enhanced rainbow flag is our sacred symbol, why do private businesses and individuals need to organize worship?

Park City, Utah provides an answer to this question: “they don’t.” Here are some photos from last month in which we can see the city’s 100+ trans-enhanced rainbow flags, enough to adorn every lamppost in town:

Who agrees with me that it would be simpler for the government to handle annual and permanent Pride observance duties?

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The Inevitable Demise of the Web

by philg

Remember to listen to the credentialed experts, such as Hal Berghel, Ph.D. computer nerd. A 1995 academic paper… “The inevitable demise of the Web”:

There is no doubt that the fastest growing part of the Internet is the World Wide Web. From its inception in 1990, the Web has established itself as the leading packet hauler on the Internet, passing beyond FTP, Telnet, WAIS Gopher and all of the other, more established Internet client protocols. The reason for this success is that the Web has established itself as the standard unifying environment for the Internet’s digital riches.However, the days of the Web are numbered. The technology behind the Web is outdated already and may not survive the decade. The current growth rate, which some estimate at 15% per month, suggests that if the end of the Web is to come soon, it will likely be cataclysmal. If this seems unrealistic, consider that this fate befell Gopherspace. As Figure 1 shows, Gopher lead the Web in packet volume as late as March, 1994. In the following twelve months Gopher presence on the Internet all but disappeared. Life cycles are accelerated to frightening paces on the Internet.

Dr. Berghel predicts that, with a little more innovation (from funded academic research?), the muscular connection-oriented Hyper-G protocol will crush HTTP and Java will replace HTML.

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Dutch government falls one day after my arrival

by philg

Just a day after my arrival in the Netherlands, the government has fallen. “Mark Rutte: Netherlands coalition government collapses in migration row – reports” (BBC):

His conservative VVD party had been trying to limit the flow of asylum seekers, following a row last year about overcrowded migration centres.

This week Mr Rutte tried to force through a plan which included a cap on the number of relatives of war refugees allowed into the Netherlands at just 200 people per month.

But junior coalition partners the Christian Union, a pro-family party, and the socially liberal D66, were strongly opposed.

A compromise proposal, known as the “emergency brake”, which would only trigger the restrictions in the event of an excessively high influx of migrants, was not enough to save the government.

The proposed law seems unworkable. What’s “excessive”? Roughly 27 percent of people who live in the Netherlands aren’t “Dutch” (stats). There was never a popular vote asking for this level of immigration or any other level. The native-born people with whom I have spoken so far have said that the country is too crowded with both low-skill migrants and mass tourists and that their desired number of both would be 0. None of them was ever asked “In an ideal world, what percentage of your neighbors would be from Africa and the Middle East?”

How does it look on the ground? I’m staying in a college town (Delft), but have seen no coffee shops or stores practicing Rainbow-first Retail (examples from Bozeman, Montana), which would be likely to offend Islamic migrants. Any trip by public transit includes companions who don’t appear to share Western sexual mores. Near the center of The Hague, the third-largest Dutch city:

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Massachusetts spends money to replace high-income residents with low-income residents

by philg

“A $100 Billion Wealth Migration Tilts US Economy’s Center of Gravity South” (Bloomberg, June 29):

Some 2.2 million people moved to the Southeast in just over two years. That’s roughly the population of Houston.

Maskachusetts did its share to unload rich people with lockdowns, mask orders, vaccine papers checks, and a recent boost to the income tax rate. Nobody on welfare would have had an economic motivation to move because welfare in Maskachusetts pays approximately 118 percent of the median wage, compared to just 40 percent in Florida and Texas (see Table 4 in this CATO report).

What kind of people are the state’s central planners seeking as replacements for the rich? “Massachusetts puts up Pride billboards in Florida, Texas” (CBS Boston, June 27):

Massachusetts is buying billboard space in places like Florida and Texas with a clear message for Pride month. The billboards say “Massachusetts For Us All” and feature pictures of LGBTQIA+ couples in the Bay State.

“At a time when other states are misguidedly restricting LGBTQIA+ rights, we are proud to send the message that Massachusetts is a safe, welcoming and inclusive place for all.” Gov. Maura Healey said in a statement. “To anyone considering where they want to live, raise a family, visit or build a business – we want you to join us here in Massachusetts.”

The largest LGBTQ+ rights organization in the country issued a Florida travel advisory in May.

“The Complexity Of LGBT Poverty In The United States” (University of Wisconsin 2021):

People who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) have higher rates of poverty compared to cisgender (cis) heterosexual people, about 22% to 16% respectively.

So… Massachusetts is spending taxpayer funds to recruit a low-income demographic, which will be great for those who qualify for the state’s comparatively lavish welfare benefits.

Here are the billboards. Note the implicit message that people should have sex only with those whose skin color matches their own and whose age is approximately the same as their own.

Related… Drag Make-Up WERKshop from the Jewish Community Center of Greater Boston, for ages 12-17:

See also “LGBTQ-Friendly Housing Project Breaks Ground in Boston” for a project that consumed $8 million in funds extracted via taxation (2022 dollars). And “The Boston Public Library Announces $1,000,000 Gift to Expand the Library’s LGBTQ+ Programming and Collections” that will fund “Interactive programming for youth” and “Resources for teens, building upon the gender and sexual orientation resources already in place”.

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Should a local TV station go all-rainbow-all-the-time?

by philg

Here’s what the Twitter feed of a Miami TV station looked like back in Pride Month:

Is this appropriate 2SLGBTQQIA+ promotion? The sacred Rainbow appears next to an article about Jose Salvador Hernandez, whose alleged actions are nothing to be proud of:

Deputies were later called to a house for a burglary in progress and arrived to find two witnesses struggling with Hernandez, who had broken into the home, grabbed the teen, held her down, told her “just be quiet” and lifted up her shirt “with the intent to commit sexual battery,” the report states.

As of Tuesday morning, Hernandez was being held without bond in the BSO Main Jail on charges of sexual battery, false imprisonment, burglary with assault or battery and leaving the scene of a crash.

Local news tends to cover the worst side of human nature. Should local TV stations refrain from changing their Twitter icons to rainbows?

Here’s another less-than-inspiring story (about Kathianna Jean-Louis) next to the symbol of America’s official religion:

And finally, a story that doesn’t seem to fit under the Love Wins rubric:

Detectives accused Ramirez, who is a migrant from Guatemala, of raping the teenage girl early Sunday morning in Homestead, according to the police arrest form.

Here’s how it looks next to the rainbow flag:

Separately, when is Elon going to give us reactions other than “love”. I seriously doubt that 6 people actually “love” this story about Sarvelio Gabriel Ramirez.

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How did the legacy admissions scheme last this long?

by philg

Nominally “private” colleges and universities get so much money from taxpayers that they are essentially part of the government. Taxpayers fund tuition grants that go straight into the colleges’ pockets. Taxpayers subsidize student loans that boost revenue by letting students pay more. Taxpayers fund research grants from which universities extract “overhead”.

The Equal Protection Clause:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

College admission isn’t exactly a “law”, but various cases have been decided in which this clause was applied to government programs generally, e.g., forcing states to allow same-sex marriage (and, eventually, throuples?). It wouldn’t be okay for the FAA to say “Your mom held a pilot certificate so therefore we’re going to let you have a pilot certificate at 35 hours instead of the usual minimum of 40.” Nor could the FAA say “We’re cutting you slack on the practical test because you paid $1 million in federal income tax last year.” Why is it okay for government-funded schools, such as Yale and Stanford, to say “We’re going to lower the bar for you because your parents attended and/or donated”?

Is the answer simply that no high-scoring-but-rejected-by-Yale applicant ever sued and obtained discovery showing that (1) second-rate legacy kids got admitted instead, and (2) Yale is firmly entrenched underneath a shower of government money?

Related:

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Would Supreme Court Justices retire younger if they couldn’t live like billionaires while in the job?

by philg

I always wondered why Supreme Court Justices didn’t quit their $400,000ish/year (total compensation) jobs and become law firm partners making $5 million/year arguing cases. Why live like civil servants when they could easily be living the multimillionaire lifestyle? And why not retire prior to becoming 98% dead? Recently we’ve learned the answer: they’re living like billionaires just as long as they keep sitting on the Court. Examples: “I shot myself a deer,” Elena Kagan said of a recent big game hunting trip with the conservative justice [Scalia] in Wyoming.” (Atlantic) and “Justice Samuel Alito Took Luxury Fishing Vacation With GOP Billionaire Who Later Had Cases Before the Court” (ProPublica).

If ethics rules were changed so that Supreme Court Justices couldn’t spend weekends and vacations on Gulfstream G700s, I wonder if they’d retire at a more typical age and/or leave government at 60-65 to earn some big $$ in the private sector before hanging up their pens.

Here’s one of our heroes on a July 2008 trip to a $1,000/day fishing lodge in Alaska:

(i.e., right before the world was about to melt down for the peasants)

From the ProPublica article:

“If you were good friends, what were you doing ruling on his case?” said Charles Geyh, an Indiana University law professor and leading expert on recusals. “And if you weren’t good friends, what were you doing accepting this?” referring to the flight on the private jet.

If nothing else, I guess we can be sure that our legal system will remain friendly to the interests of billionaires!

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