The Biden administration is trying to ‘figure out’ why illegal immigrants leave their countries. I will save you some time. It’s for the same reason why Democrats always say they are going to Canada and nowhere else when they don’t like the results of an election.
Local governments are offering to pay for legal representation for any tenant being evicted. This will greatly increase the costs for eviction of a tenant, especially since you are fighting the bottomless pockets of government.
So how do you avoid that? Well, if you pay attention, you will see that the program is income restricted to $25k a year for singles, and $51.5k for a family of four.
So make sure that your rental is not in the hood. Using a 3 bedroom rental as an example, make sure it is nice enough to charge a rent of $1450 a month, then require that household income be at least three times the rent in order to be eligible. Make it a criteria with no exceptions.
Then they won’t meet the income level for a free lawyer, and will also be unlikely to stiff you on the rent.
That is the secret to being a successful landlord: don’t rent to people in the lower quartile of income. It just isn’t worth the financial risk.
A married couple with ordinary jobs like teachers or electricians should make enough to have a combined income of $80k to $100k, which is enough for $2200 a month in rent. If you own a rental in that price range, you are unlikely to have to worry about eviction.
A single mom working as a bartender is not going to make enough money for that kind of rent, and won’t be stable. So owning a rental that rents for $900 a month is asking for an eviction.
The Loudon county tranny that raped two high school girls was convicted of two counts of sodomy. He won’t be forced to register as a sex offender. Why? The reason given was that it would hurt the boy’s chances of getting a job in the future, which would then cause him to reoffend:
The teen’s probation officer, Jason Bickmore, opposed forcing him to register as a sex offender, saying studies show teenage sex offenders required to register actually have a higher rate of re-offending. He said the aim of the juvenile justice system is rehabilitation, not punishment.
I have an idea. A father in Spokane found the solution to recidivism.
The Constitution defines only two crimes. One of them is treason:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.
So if this woman is convicted of what the authorities claim she did, then she should be convicted of treason.
When I was in the Navy, the ship that I was on had a 48 inch diameter carbon arc searchlight on it. The searchlight worked by taking what was essentially two welding rods, pressing them together, and maintaining an electrical arc in order to create a searchlight beam that was bright enough to be seen for miles. In fact, by shining that light at a cloud, it was possible to send Morse code signals to other ships over the horizon.
When my ship was built in the mid 70’s, these lights weren’t made any longer, and the one that was on my ship had been salvaged from a WW2 era destroyer that had been decommissioned. Built in the days before electronics, the system that ran this searchlight was incredibly complicated. It was an analog power supply that ran on a system of motors and gears, with lenses focusing beams of light on various parts of the system that turned motors on and off, pushing the rods closer together, or pulling them apart, as needed to maintain the light beam. A technical manual for a 24 inch example can be found here.
By the time I reported aboard the ship, the light no longer worked and no one knew how to fix it. At one point as a young E-4, I took an interest in this searchlight and decided to get it working. I made a project out of it. I found a manual in the ship’s tech library, brought the control unit down, and spent several weeks rebuilding it. When we finally got the thing lit, it was amazingly bright. The light hadn’t worked in years, and I didn’t get so much as an “attaboy” for getting it working. Nowadays, it seems like you would get a Navy Achievement Medal for fixing that thing.
I tell you this as a setup and explanation of where I got this interest in how early electrical engineers solved problems that seem easy today using electronics. The focus today is on the Ford Mark I fire control system.
The Navy needed a way to calculate the elevation and deflection of Naval guns so as to put shells on target. This was no trivial exercise in math. Both the target and the gun platform were likely moving, the target might even be airborne, the platform might be rocking in heavy seas. Different shells were of different weights and ballistic coefficients. Or you might want to put a starburst shell 50 feet over the target for illumination. Ranges were sometimes 30 or more miles away. All of these factors required math in three axes in order to be overcome: direction, distance, and elevation. Enter the Ford fire control computer.
A frigate might have one. Destroyers had two, allowing multiple batteries to engage different targets. An Iowa class battleship had four of them. They were accurate enough that this computer was still in use until the battleships were retired in the mid 90s. 50 years old is not bad for an analog computer living in the age of transistors.
Check out this video on how the system worked to direct the secondary batteries on the 5 inch guns of the battleship New Jersey.
What can be done today with a laptop computer took an entire room of switches and a 3,000 pound box filled with motors, switches, relays, and gears. It was bulky, heavy, and more complicated than a box full of Swiss watches, but it worked. It worked quite well, in fact.
I consider myself lucky to have worked on that searchlight. It was one of the most interesting projects that I have ever taken on.
My wife and I are going to Orlando today for a nice meal and to see Fluffy’s Stand Up. Here is a sample:
This is likely to be the only post of the day.
Biden is committing combat troops to Eastern Europe. No word on if this guy is one of them:
WIRED tries to make the case that virtual crimes should carry criminal penalties because the virtual world seems real to some people. I have a few questions:
Ridiculous.
It’s been a month since we last looked at inflation here at Sector 8.
The government has been creating too many dollars. In December of 2020, one third of all dollars that had ever existed had been printed in the past ten months.
It appears as though the Federal government was just getting started. Six months later in May 2021, it was said that 40% of every dollar that has ever existed was created in the preceding 12 months.
Another 5 months later, that had increased to 80 percent of all dollars that have ever existed were printed in the past 22 months.
This is a cycle that causes hyperinflation: Printing more money causes that money to become less valuable. To counter this, more money is printed, which causes it to become less valuable. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
In fact, the Fed printed an average of $27 billion per day in 2020 and put those dollars into circulation.
In 2021, the Fed increased that rate to nearly double that. Of course, most money today isn’t physically printed. It exists only in the electronic minds of computer systems. That’s because no one could physically print that many bank notes.
This out of control creation of money is warping the entire economy. Excluding food and energy, consumer expenses are up 4.9 percent from a year ago. This is the largest increase in 40 years.
According to a friend of mine who works in the banking industry, the Fed governors were recently polled on where they see the Federal funds rate going in the next 24 months. The average was 2 percent.
A two percent increase is a big deal. It also isn’t enough. The greatest impact that higher interest rates will have is on the largest borrower in the world — the United States government. The United States national debt is nearly 30 trillion dollars, which it finances through Treasury bills, notes and bonds. The public holds 80 percent of this debt, which requires direct interest payments, rather than ledger transfers on the Treasury books.
The fiscal year 2021 United States budget included over $562 billion spent paying interest on the federal debt. To put this into perspective, the cumulative net worth of the five wealthiest people in the US (Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffet) was $465 billion. So, the interest paid on the debt in 2021 is more than these five people’s net worth COMBINED.
An increase in those interest rates will cost the government a lot of money. Money that they do not have. Any increase in interest rates will add hundreds of billions of dollars of interest to the federal budget. In fact, a one percent increase in interest rates means an extra $300 billion in interest on our national debt.
The only way for the government to pay the higher interest is- you guessed it- to print the money, which will cause the currency to be devalued, and worsen inflation, which will again cause higher interest rates. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
We are riding this sinking ship all the way to the bottom.