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.
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.
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.
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:
If I commit a virtual crime, will my avatar go to virtual prison?
If I am accused of a virtual crime, do I receive a virtual trial?
Will I get virtual jury duty?
If my avatar is a POC, can I receive virtual affirmative action?
Do I have virtual rights under a virtual constitution?
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.
Children as young as 9 years old who are trying to win video games are launching attacks against computer networks. In an attempt to get any edge that they can against opponents in online games, they use mods and other computer software to attack the networks of their opponents, slowing that opponent’s network connection to a crawl. This gives them an edge and enables them to win the game.
Research has suggested that many young students do not consider it “wrong” to disrupt other players’ gaming experience because it is considered just “another way to win,” their peers are doing it too, and they certainly do not believe that they are likely to get into any trouble with the law.
While in the immediate, it is disturbing that children are slowing Internet service, the most troubling thing about this is the attitude. The “I need to achieve at all costs” attitude lowers the bar for what children consider cheating and unethical behavior. This attitude that it is OK to attack an opponent’s network to beat him at a game is the equivalent of hiding your opponent’s baseball bat in order to prevent him from getting on base. The children view it as “using your resources” to win the game.
It’s cheating.
This is an indication that children are viewing unethical behavior as something that is acceptable, as long as it helps you win. This is carrying over into other facets of their lives. They cheat on homework. They cheat on tests. When teachers call them on it, they claim that they were just using the resources available to them. Too often, their parents support this attitude.
So these children eventually grow into adults, and those adults have the same set of morals and opinions that they learned as children: a winner take all attitude where the ends always justify the means.
Now apply this attitude to politics. It becomes OK to stuff ballot boxes. It becomes OK to game mail in balloting. All that matters is winning, and gaming an election becomes a mere exercise in “using your resources” to win the game. At any cost.
We learn our sense of fair play, morality, and how to interact with others from playing games with other children when we ourselves are children. If we are allowing our children to think it is acceptable to damage computer networks to win at a video game, what will they think is acceptable when they want to win an election?
