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Imagine that you just bought a brand new or even a used 4×4. Then imagine that you can’t use the optional equipment without paying a monthly fee to the manufacturer. The air conditioner costs $15 a month, the ability to tow a trailer is $20 a month, and engaging the four wheel drive sets you back $40 a month. Heck, even the seat warmers cost $4 a month. It will cost you $20 a month to use your key fob to remotely unlock or start your vehicle. Sounds crazy, right? Who would buy a $45,000 truck, only to have to pay more to use most of the features that you already paid extra for?

Auto manufacturers are already doing it, and they stand to make billions in profits with the new scheme that doesn’t require them to do a thing to rake in the dollars. Toyota has already started the project. So have BMW, Subaru, Ford, Lexus, GM, and Tesla. If you think that you are immune because you own a used vehicle, think again.

Buried in the agreements that you signed when you bought the vehicle, the manufacturer retains all rights to the options installed in your car. They are letting you use them as part of a free trial. Ever since the 2018 model year, these hidden restrictions have been installed in software of new cars, allowing them to turn virtually anything in your vehicle into a subscription service that can be taken away from you at the manufacturer’s whim. You are one over the air software update from getting fleeced.

Some of the options proposed: limiting the performance of your car unless you pay extra, limiting the range of electric vehicles unless you pay extra for “bonus miles,” as well as simpler things like options and extras.

The last time I posted on this, I predicted that a new industry would take off: an industry centered around hacking your car. It turns out that I was correct. That day is already here. I drive an F150, and people are already doing some interesting hacks on Ford vehicles. Enter a piece of software called FORScan. You can already do some interesting things. Reprogramming your temperature gauges to bee more than just meaningless scales, for one thing.

Adding options that aren’t available to your model like automatic folding mirrors, daytime running lights, and more are possible.

Manufacturers are already taking steps to combat this, but the war over controlling vehicles is happening. Manufacturers are putting in software the requires you to be an authorized mechanic to access the electronics on the car.

One repair industry executive told a conference in January 2020 that he had heard of “at least two [other]” car makers moving toward an authorized-access model. Volkswagen may be one of them. Ross-Tech’s Vega said that the electric ID.4 is the first U.S. Volkswagen model with Vehicle Diagnostic Protection, requiring authentication from VW servers to alter nodes. Volkswagen (which did not return emails for comment) has seemingly not offered access to customers, or software like VCDS. As of July 2021, VCDS’s founder and its most fervent customers were trading anger, disbelief, and Right to Repair links in a long-running thread.

I don’t see it as any different than the fight over unlocking your cell phone, but with this much money at stake, you can bet it will be a big fight. In fact, I have already done a few hacks to my truck. I got rid of that annoying automatic start/stop feature in my F-150, for one thing.

Democrats are threatening violence if you don’t get jabbed, but that isn’t the reason for this post.

Carville and Hunt took a listener question wondering why President Biden would not pass a bill that bars unvaccinated citizens from interstate travel.

Because the President doesn’t pass bills. He only signs bills that have already been passed by Congress.

Personal attacks are not going to be allowed here. In my post yesterday about landlords, user Hedge posted this comment:

Idk. I kind of like that idea. What do you have to hide as a landlord? Seems fair. Asshole wont fix a damn thing. Wants to raise the rent cause college is in? Last tenant had a fucking pig in the back yard. Fuck that. People ought to know and it’s coming so sell or get ready.
And yes I do work for a large property management company in a college town for 10 years .

Fuck landlord scum. It’s all about the money so shut up and spend it or get out of the game fags.

First, let me explain to you how renting a house works. The lease lays out exactly what the landlord will do, and lays out what the tenant will do. That lease is a legally binding contract. If it says the property owner has to fix something, he does. If it doesn’t say so, then he won’t. Once that contract is concluded, that property owner is free (in most states) to charge whatever he thinks the market will bring.

As a landlord, I will tell you that the house I am renting is a large investment. That quarter of a million dollar purchase price isn’t the end of it. My insurance went up by 15 percent this year. Taxes went up by 10 percent. Landscaping costs are up another 8 percent. On top of that, I have to price increased risk into my prices.

As an example, one property company in Milwaukee filed 850 evictions in two weeks. Why? Because the eviction moratorium prohibited them for over two years, meaning that as many as a third of their tenants owed as much as $17,000 in unpaid rent, with the total being $5 million in lost revenue. That money has to be made up somewhere, and that means higher rent.

As to Hedge the commenter, I want to point out to you that back in June, you were bragging about how you are making a 6 figure income selling weed while calling bloggers a bunch of beggars who keep talking out of our asses. Maybe you should use some of those huge profits to buy a house, instead of bitching about how the man is ripping you off. As a business owner, I am sure you understand about pricing, costs, and profit.

Then you decided to come after me for getting the vaccine, even though I plainly said:

I felt it was best for me, so I got it. That may not be the same with everyone. Each of us has the same right to decide what medical care is best for us. Not everyone has the same medical situation, and there are no one size fits all solutions to ANY medical situation. You do you, and I will do me.

This blog, like my rental property, is owned by me. I pay for it, and I decide who gets to use it. Since you have decided to call me scum, you are cordially invited to fuck right off. Three times of personal attacks is two times too many. Hedge, you just earned yourself and your entire IP in Norman, Oklahoma a ban.

Let’s say that you want to borrow a quarter of a million dollars. The bank has you fill out an application and checks your credit. Do you ever ask the bank to prove that they are nice guys?

As a property owner, when a person wants to borrow my $250,000 house, I have them fill out an application. If an applicant ever demanded that I do likewise, I would assume that he was going to be a major pain in the ass and toss his application in the trash. That, according to the article, means

As if you needed any more proof that landlordism is the scum of the earth (sorry not sorry), a TikToker has revealed the wild response he got when he asked a real estate agent for a landlord reference…

Good and normal system we have! Where you basically have to beg someone to live in their spare house! While knowing that as someone under the age of 50 you will never be able to buy one (1) house of your own!

So because she can’t manage to buy a house and I am willing to invest my savings and loan her one, that makes me ‘scum of the earth.’ She goes on to say:

Honestly, this is a fucking baller move and ten out of ten way to figure out if a future landlord is a raging anal blister instead of a human being.

No wonder she can’t manage to be responsible enough to buy a house, or even get the references needed to rent one.

I also Google my applicants. Kathleen Farmilo is never renting a house from this anal blister.

Some Americans are upset that the Chinese government is pulling journalists from the air if they report on things that the government doesn’t want reported on.

Isn’t this what the American people want? After all, it’s what they are trying to do to Joe Rogan, it’s what happened to Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, and others. It’s what YouTube, Facebook, and the NBA are doing.

So what’s the difference?

A student at a Pittsburg university wrote about his school’s pronoun policy, denouncing it in an article on Red State. Here is the policy:

Any individual who has been informed of another person’s gender identity, pronouns, or chosen name is expected to respect that individual. Point Park University fosters a community of inclusivity for every member at the institution. Misgendering, continued misuse of an individual’s pronouns, or using an individual’s deadname after being informed of a chosen name could result in a violation of the Policy on Discrimination and Harassment for gender-based discrimination.

So if you call someone by their legal name you can be disciplined. If you use proper English, you will be disciplined. A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun. Pronouns exist so that you can refer to an object without having to name it. Having to learn and remember each person’s preferred and personal pronouns completely destroys the need for pronouns in the first place. Why not simply refer to everyone by name?

Still, the nutcases demand that we bow to their demands. Refusal to do so, according to them, is literally violence. Literally. If I refer to someone who looks like a woman by using the pronoun ‘she’- according to the insane left- I am committing a violent act which makes legitimate the use of force in self defense. Check out this clip to see what I mean:

They claim that this is because transgender women (men who claim to be women) who are also black have the highest rate of violence perpetuated against them. This is because of math. Since the number of black men who believe themselves to be women is so small, any act of violence against one of them has a disproportionate effect upon the RATE of violence.

If there are only two cats in my neighborhood, and one is struck by a car, the RATE of cats being struck is 50 percent. If there are 200 dogs in my neighborhood, and 90 of them are struck by cars, the RATE of dogs being struck is 45 percent. That doesn’t mean that cats are more likely to be struck by cars, it means that the one who was struck was a statistical anomaly.

Regardless, that wouldn’t give me the right, if I owned a cat, to declare that driving a car near my cat was an act of violence which allowed me to shoot everyone who drives a car near my house. This is why I remain so opposed to so-called hate crime laws. It should be illegal to commit an unprovoked assault upon another person. It shouldn’t matter WHY I committed the assault. That isn’t how “hate crimes” work. To declare that a person who assaults another because of some characteristic is somehow more heinous than a person who commits the assault for no reason at all is ridiculous and leads to one inevitable conclusion:

It allows any person who possesses that characteristic to use it as a cudgel to subjugate anyone with whom the disagree. “You only disagree with me because you are xxxphobic.” This is what the entire cancel culture has become- using some claimed characteristic as a sword with which to attack your enemies.

The problem here is that there is also only one possible outcome from the course that is being followed here- this all inevitably ends with real violence. One or both sides will eventually move to use actual violence to prevail and eliminate the other.

New Yorker who moves to Daytona hates Florida because it isn’t New York.

Prarie1 commented on my post about housing and rent. He said:

Who would pay that much in rent??? That’s almost double my mortgage for 10 acres with a house and shop.

The explanation? Inflation, the eviction moratorium, investors, and escape from New York. All four of these things are driving an incredible increase in housing prices: both sales and rentals.

• First, inflation. The dollar is simply worth less because you had the government shoveling cash into the economy with a metaphorical front end loader. More cash chasing the available housing means your housing dollar doesn’t go as far.
• Next, the eviction moratorium. Being a landlord now carries significantly more risk than it did before the year and a half that landlords were forced to allow tenants to live in rental properties for free. Many landlords dropped out of the business. The ones who stayed began to raise rents in order to recoup losses caused by the moratorium.
• Then there is the escape from New York (and other restrictive states). After being locked down for months, many people from more restrictive, northern states have figured out that, since they can work remotely, Florida is a great place to buy a second (or even third) home. Taxes are low, housing is relatively cheap, so they are buying up property like you wouldn’t believe. This has the effect of reducing supply, and driving up prices, mostly because they are paying too much for houses without even realizing it, because they still think it’s a bargain when compared to NY prices.
• Then there are the investors. These are large companies who are watching the prices of real estate skyrocket and are buying up entire neighborhoods.

All of these factors are driving prices up to unbelievable levels. I was shocked in October when I did a review of area rental rates so I could adjust my rates for 2022. The average rental price had increased from about $1600 per month to around $2500 per month in just a year’s time. That’s a 56% increase in just a year’s time.

This nurse here in Miami saw a 40% increase in rent in one year’s time, and Miami’s rents were already high, meaning that they didn’t increase as much as some other areas in the state, such as Tampa or Orlando. Here are the cities with the largest growth in rent in the past 12 months, according to ApartmentsList:

1. New York City, N.Y. – 33.5% rent growth
2. Tampa, Fla. – 31.4% rent growth
3. Scottsdale, Ariz. – 31.1% rent growth
4. Orlando, Fla. – 30.1% rent growth
5. Mesa, Ariz. – 29.5% rent growth
6. St. Petersburg, Fla. – 29.3% rent growth
7. Irvine, Calif. – 28% rent growth
8. Phoenix, Ariz. – 27.9% rent growth
9. Glendale, Ariz. – 27.5% rent growth
10. Las Vegas, Nev. – 27.4% rent growth

If rents continue to increase at a rate of 32 percent per year, you can expect rents to double roughly every two years. (a $1,000 rent becomes $1,320 in one year, then becomes $1,745 at the end of year two) This is exactly what is happening.

Buying a house was similar. There are houses in the area that sold for $235,000 in 2019 and just sold again in 2021 for $325,000. The price of the house increased by 38 percent in less than two years.

So if a rent seems unreasonable, that’s because our real estate market is being warped and stretched by government interference. That is having the effect of driving up prices. So what do governments do? Interfere in the market some more, that’s what. Look at what the UK is doing:

Private landlords in the UK will be forced by law to bring their properties up to a set of national standards. Landlords will need a license. If a property fails to meet standards for maintenance, energy efficiency, and a minimum standard for fixtures and fittings, the landlord loses his license. Nearly one in five families in the UK are renters. What do you think this will do to rental prices in the UK when landlords are forced to lay out a large amount of money to meet the new, more stringent standards?

Expect to see a push for this here in the US.

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.