Are New York Jews now the biggest per-capita financial supporters of anti-Jewish propaganda?

by philg

“Mamdani slammed for ‘corrupting history’ about the creation of Israel in social media post marking ‘Nakba Day’” (New York Post):

The “Nakba” could equally be remembered as the anniversary of the united Arab professional militaries invading the new UN-created State of Israel with the stated intention of driving all of the civilian Jews into the sea. Arabs living in the area allocated to the Jews were urged by their invading brothers to get out of the way so that the Jews could be defeated without collateral harm to Muslims. Those Arabs who moved eventually began to identify as “Palestinians”. Those who stayed became Arab citizens of Israel (about 2.1 million people today, including their descendants). From an anti-Jewish point of view, of course, the Nakba refers to a forced displacement similar to what ethnic Germans suffered in Central Europe after World War 11 or what Hindus and Pakistanis suffered when India was partitioned. From a purely historical perspective, the term was was used August 1948 by Syrian Constantin Zureiq in his book Ma’na al-Nakba (The Meaning of the Disaster). The “Nakba” was the Arabs’ failure to win the war that they’d started, an incredible display of incompetence given that civilians aren’t supposed to be a match for even one nation’s regular military, much less five (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon; Saudi Arabia and Yemen also sent troops) and that Arabs outnumbered Jews in the region by at least 150:1 (today that’s closer to 70;1).

Who’s funding Ayatollah Mamdani to promote the anti-Jewish side of the events of 1948? Thousands of high-income Jews! They could leave center-of-Jew-hate New York City and move to Palm Beach County, Florida, the world’s largest investor in Israel bonds. It’s a 2.5-hour JetBlue flight or an easy Tesla self-drive down I-95, but they won’t do it.

If high-income Jews moved out of NYC, they’d quickly be replaced by migrants, of course, just as any American can and will be easily replaced, but the tax base might shrink to the point that Mayor Mamdani would have to focus on administering local government rather than on highlighting Israel’s misdeeds.

Why has pouring out anti-Israel points of view been a political winner for Democrats? Victor Davis Hanson explains in “The Four Horsemen of the New Antisemitism”:

in demographic terms, the US Muslim population is expanding exponentially, due almost entirely to recent immigration and higher birth rates than the American norm (e.g., 2.5–8 versus 1.6–1.7).

There are now nearly five million Muslim Americans. These numbers are anticipated by 2030 to surpass the Jewish American population.

An entire generation of young American elites has been groomed in universities to despise Israel and, by extension, to express hostility toward Jews. After October 7, the scab was torn away, revealing what had festered underneath for years.

The DEI binary fuels both anti-Israel and anti-Jewish animus. In this Marxist moral schema, the world abroad—and within the United States—is divided into “white oppressors” and “nonwhite victims,” despite the fact that people commonly classified as white comprise only a small minority of the global population.

Thus, Jews in America found themselves classified among the whitest and most privileged of the oppressor class, perhaps by virtue of their material success, while Israel abroad was deemed a white colonialist settler state because it repeatedly defeated neighboring enemies.

For figures like Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, or Chuck Schumer to forcefully challenge hatred of Israel—and, by extension, of the Jews—would now be treated as political heresy, a career-ending death wish. Defending Israel and calling out antisemitism became as unfashionable in progressive circles as praising secure borders, deportations, or fossil fuels and pipelines

what is left in the pathway of demonizing Israel and blaming Jews, here and abroad, is the supposed bigot Donald Trump and his “irredeemable,” “deplorable” MAGA movement—for now, the last dam holding back the rising flood.

The above might not be 100% correct/complete, but it is certainly bizarre that Jewish Americans support Democrats with both votes and tax dollars.

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Starlink on Norwegian Cruise Line

by philg

Celebrity tarnishes the Starlink brand by advertising “Starlink” and delivering 1990s Internet speeds (see Celebrity Starlink Wi-Fi Internet (3 Mbps at $1,000 per month)). What was it like on Norwegian during a recent Alaska trip (on the Norwegian Joy)? Similar pricing, but 100 Mbits down and 10 up:

Mid-afternoon on a sea day:

Perhaps they’re throttling uploads to 10 Mbps because it was never fast to upload photos to Dropbox. However, downloads perhaps run at a speed related to the number of users online and active.

Latency means that web pages feel slower even than on our ghetto-class Xfinity cable at home, but the bandwidth is there for streaming addicts.

What if you need to connect an IoT device, old Kindle, or something else for which the Norwegian web-based portal won’t work? A Windows 11 PC is capable of broadcasting a mobile WiFi hotspot to multiple additional devices even with just one WiFi adapter. (This also works for using a laptop and phone at the same time or sharing among family members.)

Separately, Norwegian might be the ultimate nightmare for a progressive. It was co-founded by an Israeli (Ted Arison, “third-generation sabra” born in Tel Aviv in the “Palestine” days, who later founded Carnival, which also own Cunard, Costa, and a bunch of others, with financing from Israeli-Bostonian Meshulam Riklis). If Jewish-Israeli foundation weren’t bad enough, the modern company was built by private equity (Apollo, founded and run by three American Jews)!

How’s the ship? I’ll cover that in a separate post. Derek Zoolander would probably say that it is suitable for ants and needs to be at least three times bigger.

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Florida citrus industry both created and destroyed by immigrants

by philg

Happy National Immigrant Heritage Month to those who celebrate (and if you don’t celebrate, you’re an irrational hater because diversity is our strength and immigration has made Native Americans vastly better off than if Europeans had come only to trade; Biden proclamation).

“Who Killed the Florida Orange?” (Slate; a paywall-free version):

In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last. A decline of more than 95 percent.

In 2005, Florida first got signs of a new affliction in its groves called citrus greening disease. It also has a Chinese name, Huanglongbing, or HLB, because it came from China, where oranges also came from in the first place.

Citrus greening disease is caused by a bacterial infection that is delivered by the gnawing of the Asian citrus psyllid. (It’s now believed the psyllid first turned up near the Port of Miami in 1998.) The flea-sized psyllid bites the leaves and transmits the disease, which slowly chokes out the tree’s vascular system from the inside, taking years to finally show itself. By the time a tree is displaying symptoms—three to five years, in most cases—it’s too late.

The orange tree came from China and the insect that has killed almost all Florida orange trees also came from China. Why hasn’t the Chinese citrus industry been destroyed? ChatGPT:

Because HLB originated in that region, China has had more time to adapt practices, including: Using clean nursery stock; Routine tree replacement cycles; Managing psyllid populations

China has many small, dispersed orchards rather than vast contiguous monocultures

Growers often accept shorter productive lifespans and replant more frequently; Florida’s model relied on long-lived, high-yield groves—HLB breaks that model.

Lower labor costs make intensive management and replanting more feasible

Even in China: It prevents the kind of high-margin, long-lived grove model that Florida once had

In other words, citrus might go back to being a luxury item for the rich, though Spain (#FreePalestine) and California are still largely uninfected. The article claims, without citing any #Science, that Roundup weed-killer is substantially responsible:

Then came the 1970s, and a new technology arrived: the herbicide glyphosate, created by Monsanto. The citrus industry adopted it early, and zealously, taking to it like water, spraying it all over the ground until not one sign of non-citrus life remained. When new complications came, they sprayed more. Acreage grew to 832,000, with record yields, and Florida was king, producing 78 percent of all United States citrus.

Up and up it went, and why not? The process got more mechanized through the back half of the American Century—out with the cover cropping, in with the monocrop, packed tight as can be. One innovation followed the next. Frozen concentrate fell behind the novel idea of “not from concentrate”—no longer did they squeeze it and freeze it. And they were unaware, or unconcerned, that that chemical was wreaking havoc on the soil, weakening the trees’ defenses, leaving them extremely vulnerable to disease.

What made pre-psyllid-immigration Florida such a great place to grow oranges?

A citrus grove must be planted in sand, which occurs naturally, by some geological miracle, in central Florida. (The miracle, specifically, was the Appalachian Mountains, which eroded and deposited sand there over millions of years.) The trees won’t take in wetlands, in mucky soils. But that sand itself is also in high demand for cement, for construction, for building shoulders for highways, for filling in wetlands for development. Up here, Dantzler pointed, was a sand mine, which had torn out groves and gotten to mining beneath them. “There’s a crazy market for sand,” he said.

Sandy land itself is the easiest property to develop. Wetlands are still often protected from a development standpoint, and so, in addition to infill, require pricey, lengthy permitting. Sandy uplands, hiding beneath every citrus tree, are low-regulation and ready to build on.

So, while the growers were losing money hand over fist, housing developers were coming through with godfather offers to buy them out, convert them to row housing, and sell, sell, sell. Flags of every homebuilding giant flew on vanquished ground: DR Horton, Lennar. At nearly every intersection there were signs for cheap housing—no money down, homes in the low $200,000s, yes, for real, in 2026. Bunting and grand openings and exclusive offers abounded.

This part of central Florida is 100′ above sea level and essentially immune to hurricanes (hence Disney’s decision to locate Disney World in Orlando). The reduced wind spec of 140 mph (compare to 160-170 in Jupiter and 170+ in Miami) enables building cheap wood-frame asphalt-shingled houses, just as builders throw together up north (120 mph ultimate design wind speed in the Boston suburbs). I was able to find a 1424 sqft. 3BR, 2BR house with a hideous garage door in front for $254,490. Lennar doesn’t say that it is concrete block, so I think that means “cheap wood”. (Our MacArthur Foundation-built development includes garages in the back of each house, served by alleys, even for townhouses.)

Here are the amenities:

It’s in the middle of nowhere, so it is tough to imagine what kind of job a person would get.

Eli’s Orange World in Kissimmee, November 2024:

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Happy Pride

by philg

As we kick off Pride 2026, let’s look back a few months to the “Predators” going Full Rainbow:

Science tells us that there is no correlation between spending every night at the bathhouse and contracting monkeypox. Nonetheless, “Boston health officials to offer residents mpox vaccines at Pride event, amid uptick in cases” (state-sponsored WBUR):

The city will offer mpox vaccinations at the City Hall Pride flag-raising ceremony at on June 1 at 1 p.m.

Let’s shift to the other coast… For children in Ketchikan, Alaska who want to get an early start on the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle, the local bookstore was set up for them (photos from May 29, 2026):

Rainbow: A First Book of Pride is for “Preschool – Kindergarten”.

The town is less than 1% Black and the percentage of 2SLGBTQQIA+ is unclear, but the bookstore offers a book featuring at least some people at the intersection of Black and 2SLGBTQQIA+:

Example: Marsha P. Johnson. From Wikipedia:

Born in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Johnson wore women’s clothing for the first time when she was five years old. After graduating from high school, she moved to Manhattan, where she regularly spent time on 42nd Street in Times Square, working at the local Childs Restaurants and supplementing her income through begging and sex work. … After the beginning of the AIDS pandemic in New York in 1980, she cared for her friends who were dying of AIDS and engaged in AIDS-related activism. She disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1992, with her body being found floating in the Hudson River on July 6. While police initially ruled her death a suicide, many speculate that she was either murdered, chased into the water, or fell in accidentally. She was 46.

Related:

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Multiple perspectives on Paris

by philg

Some recent video from Paris:

The New York Times perspective: the above events either didn’t happen or weren’t newsworthy:

BBC perspective: “Hundreds arrested and dozens of police injured after Champions League riots in France”.

A total of 219 people have been injured in clashes between football fans and police across France after Paris St-Germain (PSG) won the Champions League final against Arsenal.

It might have been the police who started the violence, in other words, and the only thing that we know about the non-police combatants is that they were “football fans”.

X perspective: the rioters were Muslims and/or “North African”.

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Closing out Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month

by philg

As we complete our celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, celebrating the common culture, language, and religion of Samoans, Koreans, Burmese, and Rajasthanis, here’s an ABC story that will warm the hearts of Asian American and Pacific Islander parents:

A high school senior who lived through homelessness much of his childhood was accepted to 65 colleges, and plans to attend an Ivy League school in the fall.

Note that if we believe The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications we wouldn’t expect Lamont Newell to do as well as a 17-year-old with the same grades and same test scores (assuming that he took any tests; Columbia is permanently test-optional) who came from a successful (not homeless) family. Our society has chosen to invest in Mr. Newell, who won’t be paying or borrowing a dime for his education (“California teen who grew up homeless earns full ride to Ivy League school after 65 college acceptances”), rather than invest in an Asian 17-year-old whose parents worked like slaves to avoid homelessness and/or reliance on “public assistance” (i.e., taxpayers). If University of California economist Gregory Clark is correct, in other words, by lower admissions standards for those whose families are poor, the U.S. is doing the opposite of what investors in higher education would do if the goal were a return on investment.

(Why is it “society” rather than “Columbia” investing in Mr. Newell? At least half of Columbia’s money comes from taxpayers thanks to (1) Columbia’s tax-exempt nonprofit org status (investment returns aren’t taxed; half of every donation comes from taxpayers rather than the donor because the donor’s tax bill is reduced), (2) Columbia’s federal grants that yield massive overhead profits.)

Related:

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Trip to Cambridge, Maskachusetts wrap-up (Part II)

by philg

The second (or 11th) part of a report on my April/May 2026 pack-up-patch-up-and-sell-the-condo sojourn among the world’s most intelligent humans. (Part I)

Cambridge is populated by Scientists who closed kids’ schools for 18 months and locked themselves in their crummy apartments for 2-3 years so as to deny a respiratory virus the opportunity to spread and mutate. These same people now voluntarily cram themselves, without masks, into coffee shops that are (1) more crowded than my 100%-full JetBlue flight, and (2) entirely lacking in modern ventilation.

All is not lost, however, because the Scientists do wear their masks at Whole Foods (the employees were about 50% masked):

Having Instacart deliver, thus sidestepping the respiratory virus risk entirely, is apparently not an option. CVS carefully protects precious Dawn and Windex from respiratory viruses by putting them behind locked glass cabinets:

Various retail businesses also protect their workers, and by extension all of us, from ICE and Donald Trump:

The walk home from shopping, with winds gusting over 20 knots, is made safer via outdoor masking:

The brilliance of our AI overlords was on display. I borrowed the neighbor’s ancient Mini and asked Google Maps for directions from U-Haul in Somerville to a car wash. The Tensor Processing Units decided that it would be smarter to instead walk to the car wash rather than bringing the car to the car wash:

Here’s the passenger footwell of a car owner who has lectured me for decades regarding my inadequate level of passion for protecting our environment:

Environmentalist/Hater isn’t the only useful way to categorize people. At Harvard Book Store, one learns that Americans can be neatly divided into racist/anti-racist and fascist/anti-fascist:

At Harvard, we learn that there is also a useful division into Genocidal/Not-Genocidal:

(The advocates for Arabs who call themselves “Palestinians” meet at a cafe named for Luxor, Egypt, thus reminding people that many of the Arabs who were living in the modern state of Israel in 1948 were themselves recent economic migrants from Egypt. For example, Layla Almasri is an athlete who represents the purported country of “Palestine” in the Olympics. She calls herself “Palestinian” despite having been born in Colorado. Her last name, according to ChatGPT: “Almasri / Al-Masri in Arabic is usually المصري (al-Maṣrī), meaning “the Egyptian” or “from Egypt.””)

Related, from the Harvard Book Store’s featured book table in the front:

(Americans won’t read poetry in English, but there is a market for poetry translated from Arabic?)

Aside from observing Islam, what’s going on with spiritual life in Cambridge? The First Church reminds visitors that the church has stolen some land and refuses to either give it back or pay rent to the rightful owners:

What have they placed on this stolen land? Signs that say Jesus is their “center” just above the sacred Trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag that, presumably, Jesus designed.

Kids in the day care that runs on church property learn about the importance of the Rainbow:

The Church says that they want to maximize the number of low-skill immigrants to the U.S. and obstruct ICE’s deportations. Example:

The church also has an entire page devoted to their purported passion for helping African-Americans, the very people who are most harmed by low-skill immigration, according to Harvard economists working nearby:

Black Americans who are descendants of slaves will receive a lot of kind words from this church and will also receive lower wages because of competition from low-skill immigrants whom the church brings to Maskachusetts (though maybe the immigrants will figure out that being on welfare in Massachusetts provides a higher spending power than working at the median wage (Table 4) and, thus, won’t compete for jobs).

A couple of the books left behind by AirBnBers (there was also plenty of masks stuffed into various corners):

At Logan Airport, the world’s smartest humans couldn’t handle the challenge of getting paper towels into the trash:

Floridians, despite being afflicted with low intelligence (according to the smart/full-masked-in-2026 residents of Maskachusetts), are consistently able to master this skill, as evidenced by the cleaner bathrooms at PBI, FLL, and MCO. Speaking of PBI (soon to be “DJT”?), here’s the view during the approach (Singer Island in the foreground, famously home to the MacArthur Foundation’s donor (the MacArthur Foundation set up our development).

Once inside the airport, we see the masked Bostonians waiting for the jet’s return to the Land of Science:

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Trip to Cambridge, Maskachusetts wrap-up (Part I)

by philg

A few photos from my April pack-up-patch-up-and-sell-the-old-condo trip to Cambridge….

JetBlue classifies The Godfather as a “comfort watch”. Nobody at JetBlue loves horses?

Note that this movie doesn’t contain the best line in the series: “‘A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”

A Prius drives over the sacred trans flag crosswalk (Central Square):

Compared to Palm Beach County, where apartment buildings and HOA generally ban pit bulls, seeing these loving animals (“A dog owner was hospitalized Saturday afternoon after being attacked by his own pit bull on River Street.”) is a common sight (front of Cambridge Public Library):

A few steps away, observant Muslims are forced to live in a decidedly un-Islamic society. Not only were they exposed to pet dogs (haram), but there is a shameless hussy in the background who isn’t covering her hair:

Had they wanted to sit in front of a bench by City Hall, they would have been forced to sit on the sacred trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag:

Had they gone to Harvard Book Store, they would have been assaulted by a wide variety of books on the subject of a haram lifestyle:

Had they wanted to spent a couple of weeks putting together a 1500-piece puzzle on “Women Power” they would found only a handful of hijabis (this was left in my old condo by an AirBnBer):

If they had done the “Women Power” puzzle they would have been saving our planet:

Perhaps the puzzle was made by migrants? Rust Belt cities such as Buffalo seem to be growing their economy primarily by importing people who will be entitled to taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone. “Know the Value of Immigrants and Refugees” (International Institute of Buffalo):

These 73,886 noble enrichers earned a total of $2.1 billion in 2025. That works out to an average per-capita personal income of $28,422 per year. According to the BEA, overall US per-capita personal income was $76,375 per year. So the majority of immigrants who live in and around Buffalo should be entitled to every form of what used to be called “welfare” (now “means-tested benefits”).

Had the above ladies, presumably migrants, wanted to enter a Harvard building and meet with one of the many virtuous people who say that no human is illegal and that the U.S. should be doing more to welcome migrants, they would have discovered the doors locked against them. According to the best minds of Harvard, the U.S. should allow any of world’s 10 billion humans (revised estimate) to come here and receive four generations of taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone. Requiring an ID to vote is Hate of the First Magnitude. At the same time, there are strict border walls around every Harvard building, with strict computer-enforced ID checks, and nobody can immigrate even for 15 minutes. Trying to visit a friend who teaches at Harvard Law School and also the computer science building:

Speaking of Harvard, the elite Democrats who control the institution and who say that all workers should be unionized apparently won’t pay their own union workers a fair/living wage:

According to the Crimson:

The offer, announced in an email to faculty, would raise salaried student worker compensation by 11 percent over four years — up from Harvard’s previous 10 percent proposal.

In other words, at the current rate of inflation, the workers now on strike would be paid less, in real dollars, four years from now!

That’s enough for today. See Part II for the rest.

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Ron DeSantis wants to set up Florida property taxes to be like federal income taxes (paid by a minority and benefiting the majority)

by philg

Here’s a disturbing proposal from a politician whose policies I generally agree with:

While I don’t enjoy paying property tax, the idea that the majority of Floridians eligible to vote will soon pay nothing seems like a recipe for much faster growth in county/local government spending. (Many Florida voters already pay next to nothing because they’re taxed on the original purchase price and perhaps that is what accounts for the rapid rise in county spending that Gov. DeSantis decries.)

If the majority of Floridians aren’t paying property tax, won’t they vote for every blue sky spending dream that counties and cities put forward? That’s how it works at the federal level. The majority pay either nothing or next to nothing and have voted the U.S. into the world’s largest or second largest welfare state, as a percentage of GDP (we vie with France for the title). Even if a homeowner who isn’t taxed receives only 1 penny of benefit for every additional $1 million spent it would still be rational for him or her to vote for increased spending.

Is there a method to Ron DeSantis’s apparent madness? I’m sure that he understands politics much better than I do, but I am struggling to find merit in narrowing the tax base and feel that the experiment has already been run on the American people. If the goal is limiting county spending, why not a state-imposed limit on county/local government spending? Take the 75th percentile of per-capita spending in 2025 and impose that as a limit, adjusted annually for inflation, on all Florida counties. A county that is already over the limit would have five years to come down into alignment with the law. This might force counties to eliminate affordable housing subsidies, for example, which have the potential to be infinitely expensive as well as certainly unequal (some people get below-market-rate housing; others, equally virtuous and equally situated, are forced to pay market rates).

Maybe the method in the apparent madness is that homesteaded property isn’t that important to county budgets, e.g., for Miami-Dade just 7 percent of the total budget. ChatGPT says it is 9 percent of the total Palm Beach County budget. Both of these counties have a lot of commercial real estate, but property tax as a whole isn’t the lion’s share of the budget as I would have expected.

Republicans in general seem to be competing with Democrats in the “make the rich pay for everything” department. As noted above, I don’t see how this can work in a democracy where the people paying nothing have the right to vote for unlimited enhancements to whatever they’re receiving from a government funded by a minority that can be trivially out-voted. Maybe it can work in California and New York City where AI and Wall Street actually do generate infinite wealth on a recurring basis, but Florida isn’t home to NVIDIA and the AI companies that use NVIDIA chips.

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College graduate vs. Immigrant Handyman in Boston

by philg

Happy Harvard graduation day for those who celebrate.

As part of unloading the Harvard Square condo that I bought in 1996, I hired the realtor’s favorite handyman to fix some recessed lights, shim an old Lightolier track so that the heads could be removed (an aluminum frame installed around them was interfering), replace some ancient smoke detectors in common areas, and secure a front door jamb into the rotted frame (over 100 years old?). He charged $1800 for his labor and worked from 9a-3p, including a trip in the middle to Home Depot. When I asked if that was really the going rate, he said that he makes this much every day. If he works 250 days per year, that’s $450,000 per year for the immigrant from Brazil with no college degree.

Gemini: “Harvard graduates earn a median salary of approximately $85,000 to $95,000 ten years after enrolling.”

I previously hired a different handyman whose rates were, I think, a little lower (but that was before Bidenflation). He eventually just started saying “no” to all jobs, however, because he was too booked out. Update: I searched Gmail and found that he was charging $90/hr in 2020.

If you’re going to criticize me for financial irrationality, the situation is even worse than overpaying a noble migrant. The buyer already accepted the condition of the property and I wasn’t obligated to fix anything, do anything, or pay anything. The buyer hired a professional inspector whose job it was to uncover anything substandard. Why did I hire and pay various tradespeople, invest some of my own time in doing stuff such as changing electronic lock batteries with new 9V lithiums, etc.? I just didn’t like the idea of handing over known-broken stuff.

(The $1800 doesn’t include the $20 sandwich that I got for him at the bakery around the corner.)

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