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. I’ll post a Part 2.

Full post, including comments

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.

Full post, including comments

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.)

Full post, including comments

The Righteous of Lincoln, MA celebrate homosexuality on Eid al-Adha

by philg

Today is Eid al-Adha, a “U.S. Holiday” according to Apple:

How do progressive Democrats choose to celebrate what Google AI says is “the second and holiest of the two main Islamic festivals”? They’ll be getting an early start on Pride because #OneFullMonthIsNotEnough (friend’s photo; he moved to Florida a year ago and is putting the finishing touches on unloading his house in Maskachusetts):

Note also that irrigation is limited to one day per week because, in what should be the wettest time of year, they’re already running out of water. (What do people with postgraduate credentials do in response to running out of a resource such as water? Promote accelerated population growth via low-skill immigration.)

What does ChatGPT say about this scheduling?

I asked for a clarification and received “my earlier “some are LGBTQ themselves” was about identity and lived reality, not a claim that orthodox Islamic law permits male-male sex.”

Asked if there is an “Islamic law” that isn’t orthodox and that does permit male-male sex, ChatGPT responds by citing a handful of individual writers who offered personal opinions on the subject, not proposed or adopted “laws” in any jurisdiction.

Boston by contrast (from the mayor at https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1GW7HVCExF/?mibextid=wwXIfr):

From the governor, celebrated for being a lesbian by state-sponsored PBS:

AOC fights the patriarchy by wearing hijab:

Full post, including comments

Harvard geniuses underperform the S&P 500 by 15 percent per year

by philg

“Head of Harvard’s Endowment Tells Board He Plans to Retire” (Wall Street Journal), regarding a manager paid over $6 million per year:

N.P. “Narv” Narvekar, the head of Harvard University’s nearly $57 billion endowment, recently told the endowment’s board he plans to retire, according to people familiar with the discussions. He has served nearly a decade in the post.

In the past three years, Harvard earned an annualized return of 8.1%, a rate that topped that of Ivy League rivals Yale and Princeton and which placed it in a tie for fourth among a group of 12 top schools, according to financial technology company Markov Processes International.

The Wall Street Journal doesn’t bother to ask Edward Tufte’s question, “Compared to What?” But ChatGPT can come to the rescue:

In other words, one can get paid $6 million per year for dramatic underperformance relative to the simplest imaginable investment strategy, dumping everything into the S&P 500 (a 23% annual return vs. the 8% achieved by Mr. Narvekar and subordinates). That’s a career almost as good as “receptionist in NVIDIA branch office”!

Full post, including comments

Memorial Day in Alaska

by philg

Reading to remember the sacrifices that some U.S. military personnel made during World War II: 81 Days Below Zero: The Incredible Survival Story of a World War II Pilot in Alaska’s Frozen Wilderness. When Seward bought the territory in 1867, nobody could have imagined that the interior would end up being useful for the yet-to-be-invented heavier-than-air military airplane, including the B-24 that Leon Crane was co-piloting in the crash that led to his fellow airmens’ deaths and his own remarkable survival.

Of course, most of the military deaths in Alaska occurred in the Aleutian Islands battles (see Justifying our total war against Japan for some Fairbanks museum exhibits on this subjectd). It’s tough from today’s perspective to see the military value of these fights, but we can still reflect on the memory of those who were willing to sacrifice their lives in the cold for the perceived value at the time.

I was in Juneau yesterday. Seward doesn’t look too happy about the future state that he purchased:

Full post, including comments

Environmentalists and inequality-haters in New York City

by philg

The Righteous of New York City love to talk about how they’re protecting our precious planet. Here’s their police department proudly displaying a video of perfectly functional mopeds being crushed rather than being sold and/or exported to a lower-income country:

If we want to reduce carbon emissions, does it make sense to destroy 5,700 mopeds?

Also confusing… the people who run both New York State and New York City say that they hate inequality. New York City plainly is stuffed full of richer people than New York State. The rulers of NYS and NYC, however, have agreed to funnel NYS money to NYC, thus exacerbating inequality… “Hochul forks over another $4B to bail out Mamdani’s NYC budget woes as she faces intense election pressure”:

Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled a whopping $124.7 billion executive budget for New York City on Tuesday – built on the back of $4 billion in funny money from Gov. Kathy Hochul.

The governor’s bailout – announced hours before the city budget’s reveal – was quickly criticized as a fiction used to help out her reluctant ally Mamdani as she faces re-election and pressure to appease the lefty mayor’s comrades.

If inequality haters in NYC actually do hate inequality, they shouldn’t want to receive any money from the state. (Same deal with Harvard University, which says officially that inequality is bad and then takes federal money that could have been spent at University of Michigan instead (U. Mich. is a poorer university than Harvard and located in a poorer state than Maskachusetts).)

Finally, let’s reflect that Mamdanism (steal from the rich; give to everyone else) is going to end up working beautifully because the rich won’t move out of NY and stop paying for whatever Ayatollah Mamdani and his sidekick Gov. Hochul dream up. The rest of the U.S. can reasonably vote for Mamdanism on a federal level after watching what a success it has been in NYC due to these elite tax cattle staying in place and paying.

Full post, including comments

Immigration of a disabled illiterate Rohingya goes badly wrong

by philg

“Where Was Nurul Amin Shah Alam?” (New York Times, May 11, 2026):

Nurul Amin, a 56-year-old grandfather despondent over broken American promises … he spoke no English, and was illiterate.

As a Rohingya, he was part of a Muslim minority essentially stripped of Myanmar citizenship decades ago and subjected ever since to an increasing repression of rights, the burning of mosques, the destruction of villages, even what the United States has called genocide.

After traveling more than 8,000 miles, Nurul Amin and part of his family arrived in the United States on Christmas Eve. Faisal bent down to touch the snow that symbolized their new reality: Buffalo.

“Very exciting,” he recalled.

Buffalo has benefited from the presence of families like Nurul Amin’s. Immigrants, including a Bangladeshi wave moving up from New York City, and refugees, including people from Myanmar, have revived dying neighborhoods, diversified the culture and spurred the city’s first growth since 1950, when it had more than double the current population of 278,000.

“You can’t have economic growth without population growth,” the mayor, Sean M. Ryan, said in an interview. “And the new Americans have been Buffalo’s economic lifeblood.”

Caseworkers for one of the city’s resettlement agencies, Jewish Family Services, moved the family to the ever-changing Black Rock neighborhood, where they settled into the top floor of a gray, Depression-era house.

Via the magic of federal welfare dollars, e.g., for Medicaid, SNAP, and public housing, even someone who speaks no English, is disabled, and can’t read can generate economic growth in the Rust Belt. Much of the money is skimmed off by taxpayer-funded nonprofit do-gooders:

Caseworkers for one of the city’s resettlement agencies, Jewish Family Services, moved the family to the ever-changing Black Rock neighborhood, where they settled into the top floor of a gray, Depression-era house. A caseworker helped them to adjust.

Donald Trump is the bad guy here:

Even worse, the president’s executive order also meant that Nurul Amin’s three older sons and their families in Malaysia would not be coming to the United States.

(This would have been an additional 20 immigrants who didn’t speak English?)

The hero of our story had a problem with the police that might have stemmed from the police officers’ inability to speak the Bangla and Rohingya languages that the new Americans we’re welcoming speak:

The two police officers who responded found a short, stocky man in the backyard and an aluminum shed with its door yanked off. They repeatedly ordered him to drop the poles, their voices rising with each new command, but he did not seem to understand. Where he came from, people in paramilitary uniforms represented oppression. … Nurul Amin became agitated. He began walking toward the officers, swinging the curtain rods and saying words they didn’t understand. Within 45 seconds of the officers’ arrival, there came the electrified crackle of Tasers. … He didn’t understand them any more than they understood him, as he recited, over and over, a prayer for help.

The jail is fully set up to accommodate Muslims, but the jailers might not have been fluent in the Bangla and Rohingya languages.

It is unclear if he knew how to use the commissary, or had access to halal food. “Information about special diets is provided to each incarcerated individual via the inmate handbook,” a spokesman for the Erie County Sheriff’s Office said in an email. But Nurul Amin could not read.

State-paid criminal justice officials try to avoid doing anything that would result in them losing federal welfare dollars via the migrant’s deportation:

Another Buffalo February set in. Nurul Amin had spent 12 of his 14 months in America behind bars.

His son Faisal was working part-time as a housekeeper at a downtown hotel. His son Yassin was in the fifth grade. They and their mother were living now in a cramped apartment across from the old Polish Catholic church, on Buffalo’s east side, where many of the city’s 2,000 Rohingya residents had settled.

Finally, the Erie County district attorney, Mike Keane, offered to end the case if Nurul Amin pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors. “My decision was the result of a comprehensive evaluation of his conduct, criminal history, acceptance of responsibility, medical condition, time served in pre-trial custody, and the proposed resolution,” Mr. Keane later said. “I also considered the significant collateral consequences that would result from a felony conviction — including mandatory deportation.”

(Had Nurul Amin Shah Alam been deported, the Buffalo economy would have shrunk.)

The wife and youngest son:

The tale of a man who might have lived happily among fellow Muslims in Malaysia has a sad ending. Border Patrol picks him up when he’s released from jail, but then decides that they can’t deport him because the state officials didn’t convict him of a felony. They drop him off in Buffalo at the home that taxpayers had previously been providing.

In its telling, the refugee who did not speak English agreed to be dropped off near his last known address, though a call to his family or lawyer would have revealed that the family now lived on the other side of the city. In its telling, the agreed-upon drop-off point was a coffee shop “determined to be a warm, safe location.”

At 8:19, a white van pulled into a darkened parking lot on Niagara Street, near the Tim Hortons with only its drive-thru open. A short man got out. He had no cellphone, no identification, no English skills, no reading skills and no true understanding of where he was.

The Department of Homeland Security would answer such criticism, in part, this way: “Another hoax being peddled by the media and sanctuary politicians to demonize our law enforcement. This death had NOTHING to do with Border Patrol. Mr. Shah Alam passed almost A WEEK AFTER he was released by Border Patrol.”

The refugee moved past the inaccessible Tim Hortons. Past the drifts and piles of shoveled snow. He raised his black hood and disappeared into the Buffalo mist.

Loosely related, I had ChatGPT check the above headline and our AI Overlord wasn’t happy at all.

“Disabled illiterate” is harsh headline language. It may be factual, but it foregrounds deficits and can sound contemptuous unless those facts are central to the story.

The suggested corrected headline assigns blame:

“Immigration system mishandles case of disabled, illiterate Rohingya man”

Maybe ChatGPT is correct. In our infinite wisdom we have set up a system where a Swiss physician fluent in four languages, including English, is barred from immigration while we preferentially admit people who can’t read and are comfortable only in a Rohingya- or Bangla-speaking environment in which women are covered in burqas.

Related:

Full post, including comments

New York’s pied-à-terre tax vs. Florida’s homestead discount

by philg

New York City (and maybe the state as well) are generating outrage by proposing to tax residential real estate that isn’t a primary residence at a higher rate than the same property would pay if occupied by somewho who was a full-time NYC resident.

What other city or state indulges in this outrageous abuse of society’s successful? Florida! Let’s look at starter homes in Palm Beach. Here’s one that was purchased for $4.45 million in 2011 and is today worth $14.3 million (Zillow).

The tax assessment is still less than the purchase price, presumably due to the fact that the assessed value for a “homestead” (primary residence) can’t go up more than 3 percent or the increase in CPI, whichever is lower:

If there were an identical house next door and it sold for $14 million to someone who used it only 4 months per year, the town/county could collect property tax on the full value, i.e., 3X the tax rate paid by the primary resident.

A surcharge for part-time residents generates outrage. A discount for full-time residents doesn’t upset anyone. NYC could have doubled property tax rates, with state permission, and then offered a steep discount for anyone who pays resident NYC income tax.

Full post, including comments

Are air-conditioned cars the reason that we tolerate America’s jammed roads?

by philg

My April/May sojourn in Boston was plagued by traffic jams far worse than anything I remember from our pre-coronapanic life there. Mobility for the Righteous is seriously compromised by a road network that was substantially completed circa 1970 for a population of 4 million and is now being used by a population of 5 million, each of whom is more likely to own a car (registered motor vehicles per 1000 Americans has gone from 534 to about 875 today) and each of whom is more likely to use a car than to ride public transit (MBTA ridership among people who call themselves environmentalists remains roughly 25 percent below 2019 levels). I didn’t do any trips during traditional rush hour, but still was slowed to a crawl except after 8:30 pm.

Here’s a 7:14 pm 3.6-mile route that Google expects will take 27 minutes, i.e., less than 8 miles per hour.

I wasted more time in traffic during this 10-day trip that I do in a year in and around Jupiter, Florida (that includes West Palm Beach, a reasonable-sized city, and Stuart, a small city). Bostonians who experience this every day remain passionate supporters of open borders and, thus, of population growth (growth without regard for available resources is usually called “cancer”!).

I’m wonder if Americans in general and Bostonians in particular have been lulled into complacency regarding traffic jams because their cars are so much more comfortable than cars in 1970, when traffic flowed much more freely:

I couldn’t rise to the local level of traffic jam tolerance, unfortunately, because I had borrowed my neighbor’s 12-year-old Mini, which lacked functional air-conditioning. I was literally stewing while sitting in long lines at red lights. The manual transmission was occasionally fun, but was mostly an annoyance in stop-and-go 3 mph traffic.

(I don’t think traffic in Boston will be solved by robot cars. Unlike in Florida, the typical intersection lacks dedicated left and right turn lanes. Unlike in Florida, the major roads can’t be widened. Unlike in Florida, the typical urban street in Boston/Cambridge is actually getting narrower over time as four-lane roads turn into two-lane-plus-two-bike-lanes roads.)

Loosely related, people who live in Cambridge want their local government to “fight the Trump administration” rather than try to reduce traffic congestion:

Also, the MBTA is adding elevators to a subway station. It will take three years:

Three years is how long it took the Chinese to build an 800-mile 200 mph train from Beijing to Shanghai. This includes the world’s longest bridge. Up to 800,000 people per day use the train.

Full post, including comments