Your tax dollars at work… “At Long Last, a New Rail Tunnel Under the Hudson River Can Be Built” (NYT): After four years of stalling by the Trump administration, officials in Washi… | Continue reading
An aviation friend runs a sizable business installing backup generators here in the Northeast. Media coverage of the outage that afflicted Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, has driven demand to an… | Continue reading
“‘Come On In, Boys’: A Wave of the Hand Sets Off Spain-Morocco Migrant Fight” (New York Times): Spanish officials say Morocco increasingly sees migrants as currency for financial and po… | Continue reading
Yesterday was Memorial Day and also the final application deadline for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans (actually grants, since they don’t have to be paid back). Small business own… | Continue reading
From a year ago, in Memorial Day thought: Will coronaplague bring us years of peace? Maybe there won’t be too many more sacrifices among soldiers worldwide for the next few years. Do countries that… | Continue reading
We risked death-by-variant-COVID-19 today at the Watertown Mall, meeting friends for dim sum. Although the Massachusetts state of emergency persists at least until June 15, a combination of 69 gove… | Continue reading
From Twitter, a chart of intensive care utilization by COVID-19 patients in Stockholm versus Hamburg: Related: Analysis of Sweden versus UK COVID-19 outcomes (see chart of population-weighted densi… | Continue reading
Happy National Paperclip Day (apparently popular in the Florida Free State; see this Orlando Sentinel article). Until recently, as far as anyone knew, the worse decision that Bill Gates ever made w… | Continue reading
“U.S. agency says employers can mandate COVID-19 vaccination” (Reuters): U.S. companies can mandate that employees in a workplace must be vaccinated against COVID-19, the Equal Employme… | Continue reading
As part of our move from Maskachusetts to the Florida Free State I had to spend some time cleaning out a shed attached to the back of our garage. Under the no-squirrel-is-illegal principle, rodents… | Continue reading
A friend was recently involved in a helicopter rescue effort described in “‘Not knowing is so hard.’ Hiker rescued after 5 days without food in California forest”: A hiker was rescued f… | Continue reading
About 15 years ago a polo-oriented friend was showing a teenage polo champion from Argentina around Cambridge. I invited them for a gathering that would today likely be illegal and the rich teenage… | Continue reading
From America’s moral compass: If there are Americans who are upset because some indigenous people do not own all of the real estate within and do not have political control of a region, shoul… | Continue reading
Bitcoin and Ethereum have been down lately, right? Could this be the right time to buy for those of us who have mostly missed the cryptocurrency wave? I recently heard about an alternative to Bitco… | Continue reading
I was chatting with a petroleum engineer who has lived for much of his career in Saudi Arabia (and sent three children to the Aramco school there, then on to boarding school in the U.S.). He mentio… | Continue reading
For the passionate environmentalist, it doesn’t get better than this: Costco, Waltham, Maskachusetts, May 11, 2021. | Continue reading
When I talked to a neighbor in Cambridge, MA regarding our upcoming move to Jupiter, Florida (see Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children) she responded that she wouldn’t … | Continue reading
Headline from a rich white town’s “school committee update”: We are among only 3% of MA school districts to hold in-person classes all year 5-days-per-week! Of course one would no… | Continue reading
I got a call today from my sea turtle connection (see Merry Christmas (again) to the Sea Turtles). He needed help getting some turtles from the Boston area to Beaufort, North Carolina. I said that … | Continue reading
From the Boston Museum of Fine Arts: (“We’re raising our membership prices on July 1 so we can continue to make art accessible for all.”) So a middle-class family that wants to vi… | Continue reading
From the Wine and Cheese Cask of Somerville, Massachusetts, purveyors since 1970 of imported Protected Geographical Status cheeses: After 51 years of continuous operation, the cheese counter is clo… | Continue reading
From our local education officials, who previously decided to build the most expensive (per student) school ever constructed in the United States ($250,000 per town-resident student, about $110 mil… | Continue reading
“Sweden, Covid and lockdown – a look at the data” (The Spectator (UK), May 17, 2021) should be interesting for Church of Sweden adherents. Sweden currently has Europe’s highest CO… | Continue reading
The street-facing wall of a Reform (Jewish) Temple in Washington, D.C.: If “Black Lives Matter” and “We Support Gun Sense Reforms” are the two commandments worth posting on … | Continue reading
As we celebrate Tax Day (updated date for coronapanic) and you add up what you’re paying to the Feds and states, it might cheer you up to look back to this 2019 article from a former Senator … | Continue reading
“They’re Vaccinated and Keeping Their Masks On, Maybe Forever” (NYT): Whenever Joe Glickman heads out for groceries, he places an N95 mask over his face and tugs a cloth mask on top of … | Continue reading
President Biden has promised to raise estate taxes (but wouldn’t it make more sense to get money from Melinda Gates, MacKenzie Bezos, et al.? See Would limiting charitable deductions raise mo… | Continue reading
Our April trip to Florida and back entailed a bunch of stays at Hilton-family hotels with crummy Internet. The WiFi networks at Embassy Suites and DoubleTrees seem to be throttled to about 5 Mbps w… | Continue reading
The Florida Free State ends at the border with federally-owned land, e.g., Everglades National Park. See “Biden’s first executive order will require masks on federal property” (CN… | Continue reading
A reader sent “Apple fires Antonio Garcia Martinez after employee backlash” (Apple Insider): Apple has reportedly fired Antonio Garcia Martinez after an employee backlash over sexist co… | Continue reading
From our government-funded media, “CDC Says Kids As Young As 12 Should Get The Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine” (NPR): The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that the Pfizer … | Continue reading
Kristi Noem, famous or notorious (depending on your perspective regarding governor-ordered masks and shutdown) for saying that people who didn’t want to get COVID-19 should stay home and not … | Continue reading
Back on December 9, 2020, I signed what I thought was a contract with Tesla for them to install a solar roof within 180 days (by June 9, 2021) and two Powerwalls for a total of $71,533. Somewhat mo… | Continue reading
From our Census Bureau: U.S. population on April 1, 2010: 308,745,538U.S. population on April 1, 2020: 331,449,281 That’s an increase of 22,703,743 people (unclear how many of the new undocum… | Continue reading
Back in 2012, I paid IKEA to deliver and assemble some furniture. That led to the following Facebook post: “You didn’t build that” (Ikea came to assemble some stuff starting yeste… | Continue reading
One thing that I have noticed in the Shutdown States is that public drinking fountains are nearly always turned off or blocked off, e.g., in hotels, in government buildings, outdoors near playgroun… | Continue reading
We visited a friend’s 12,000 square foot house the other day in an all-white suburb of Boston (what I learned: don’t buy a 12,000 square foot house unless you want to pay about $75,000 … | Continue reading
“Biden’s Capital-Gains Tax Plan Would Upend Estate Planning by the Wealthy” (Wall Street Journal, April 29): President Biden’s American Families Plan would raise capital-gains taxes and… | Continue reading
“‘It’s Been Devastating’: UMass Amherst Students Suspended For Not Wearing Masks Off-Campus” (CBS): Andover parents Kristin and Scott are speaking out on behalf of their daughter. She a… | Continue reading
“Biden and Republicans Spar Over Unemployment as Job Gains Disappoint” (NYT): The president said he saw no measurable evidence that a $300 federal boost in unemployment benefits was hur… | Continue reading
Happy Asian Pacific American Heritage Month! (official U.S. government web site on the subject) This is when non-Asian American say-gooders get to lump together nearly 5 billion disparate people un… | Continue reading
From Coronaplague in India proves Dr. Jeff Goldblum’s theories?: I wonder if this proves what Dr. Jill Biden, M.D.’s colleague Dr. Jeff Goldblum said: “Life Finds a Way.” The non-… | Continue reading
From this blog in 2005: People who sell $1 million condos often complain that paying a 6 percent standard (read “fixed by collusion” among realtors) commission is too much ($60,000 for what might o… | Continue reading
We had a Princess and the Pea situation in our house in which a moderately quiet A/C condenser next to a bedroom was deemed too loud, especially when clicking on. This is a high-end Carrier-built u… | Continue reading
At least to judge by our media, the U.S. is embroiled in white v. Black, white v. Asian, white v. Latinx, and hetero cisgender v. LGBTQIA+ fights. We’re also adding $trillions in debt, welcom… | Continue reading
A Facebook friend (she’s around 30 years old) psychoanalyzes those who love COVID shutdowns: Maybe the reason people born in the 60s-90s are the biggest pro-lockdown people is that it was the… | Continue reading
“I am perfectly made” and “My existence is not a box-checking exercise”: (Note that I disagree with this Twitter user’s comment, “I think it’s safe to say … | Continue reading
“Taking ‘Extraordinary Measures,’ Biden Backs Suspending Patents on Vaccines” (NYT): The Biden administration, siding with some world leaders over the U.S. pharmaceutical industry, came… | Continue reading