Finally, a use for boys who think they're girls

A mustachioed "Andraya" yearwood triumphs over her fellow female competitors (Runner "S" doesn't look very happy about the situation, but i'm sure she's now in college and has been woked to intersectionality, white privilege, and ... whatever )

Fire departments are under pressure to hire females to meet quotas, regardless of ability and strength.

I weigh 185 pounds, a number that I'm ashamed to admit is 15 pounds heavier than I was when I was a fit, 25-year-old, and with much of the muscle that I had back then now deteriorated to flab, but I'd still like to have a rescuer show up who's capable of hauling my sorry ass out of a burning building: a 115-pound affirmative action fireperson is unlikely to have that capability, but current policies require that she be given the opportunity, and physical standards have been lowered accordingly. Phooey. 

Thanks to Obama, our military, including its Green Beret and Ranger units, has also been forced to lower its physical and psychological standards, and, just to show fairness, those standards  have been reduced for both men and women. This insanity  jeopardizes all warriors, so I think the solution is to use transgenders to meet the Obama quotas. The men who self-identify as women have the muscle and bone structure to match that of their former colleagues, as shown by their victories over real women in sport competitions, and with a whole-hearted, enthusiastic recruitment campaign, should enlist in sufficient numbers to meet all quotas: police, firemen, soldiers. and girls' tennis teams. While it is true that, until a year or so, the number of men suffering gender dysphoria was estimated at just one-tenth of one percent, that's now been recalculated as fifty percent; surely that's a large enough of the population to serve our need for first responders and military personnel, as well as college sororities and women's victimhood classes.

And, despite the current settled science, they can't get pregnant,, which would certainly be a relief to the Navy: at any given time 16% of the women on its ships are pregnant and must be returned to shore. In fact, it's a common way to avoid deployment entirely.

Bring on the boys — it's  win-win solution. 

Riverside spec house is finally selling

142 Cedar Cliff Road is reported as "pending" — last asking price $6.995 million. Started at $10.5 million, paid $160,000 in taxes since then, and (approximately) $145,00 mortgage interest since 2014 (and basis of $2.5 million from original purchase in 2002). 

My guess on final sales price? Maybe $6.2, or lower.

Pit of Misery? Dilly Dilly!

Another example of why I caution my clients to allow for a few years of mellowing on (some) house listings

My guess is that the detached garage and basketball court are included in the 8, 120 sq. ft. cited in the listing. that's useful for calculating far limits, but not much use for buyers who try to compare houses on the basis of COST PER SQUARE FOOT

12 Laurel Lane started off at $8.995 million in 2015. Three years later, it dropped today to $6.595. I suspect there's still room here for a bit more price adjustment, but the point is, if you or your agent (or both) feel there's something off with an opening price, you may very well be right.

On the other hand, if you trust your agent, you might listen when that person tells you that a particular price is on target. "Trust" being the operative word.

Successful (okay, unsuccessful — see update) flip on Dearfield Drive

8 Dearfield Drive asked $1.195 million in 2013 and sold via bidding war for $1.4. The successful bidders must have known what they were doing because, after renovating it in 2015, they placed it back up for sale at $2.5 million last October and it's now reported as under contract.

This wouldn't be my choice of location, but obviously, someone disagrees with me.

UPDATE: A broker close to the Fountain family and with knowledge of the history of this property has done my homework for me and informs me that the house was both renovated and expanded before being put back on the market 4 1/2 years ago at $3.825 million, so a sale in the low $2s was probably not a "successful" flip. We regret the error, though in my defense, although it was lost when my archives disappeared, I do recall suggesting back in 2013 that this property, cheek by jowl with a medical building, and across the street from the entrance to Greenwich Library, was a curious location to choose to renovate.

German aid worker details her bitter disillusionment with Muslim "refugees".

Useful idiots

Kind, generous woman who's worked resettling Muslims for years now acknowledges that they have no intention of accepting western values. It's a lengthy interview, but well worth at least skimming the highlights; I recommend reading the whole thing, just so you won't be surprised when Europe falls.

A brief sample:

I am a humanist and human rights activist. The first years I believed that people who come here are real refugees, happy that they will be safe now and that they will show a good faith in order to adapt here and to integrate. But with time, an unpleasant awakening came about step by step. The reasons for this were so complex that I just couldn’t ignore it anymore.

I believed that these medieval views would change over time. I placed great trust in our libertarian, equitable European values, and I naively thought that every person must delight in them and take them on.

For sure, one of the main turning points, as in many of us, was New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne. Then I finally had to admit to myself that this type of behavior describes the overwhelming majority of Muslims with whom I had to deal with in my life. It was the moment when I said to myself: “Rebecca, now you have to slow down, at least because you are women’s rights activist, with your responsibility to them as a woman.” I have tried to justify these constantly repeated patterns of behavior and thinking, their way of perceiving the world – which are based on their religion, Islam, and their culture – for example, in such a way that they are new here. I believed that these medieval views would change over time. I placed great trust in our libertarian, equitable European values, and I naively thought that every person must delight in them and take them on.
But after looking back through the years of repetitive experiences and myself in my work environment as a volunteer, I had to admit to myself that when it comes to Muslim refugees, they have grown up with completely different values, into wich they have been brainwashed and are indoctrinated by Islam, and have no intention of adopting our values – worse, they look at us, unbelievers with superiority and arrogance. I call it “headscarf in the head”. And additionally, after their arrival here, many of them fall into the tentacles of fundamental Imams, political Islam (imported from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran etc.) who strengthen them in their fundamentalism, which prohibits them from mixing with us, infidels, and our way of life, prohibits the adoption of our perception of the world and our scientific achievements, which the German state unfortunately no longer has any control over.

An additional example, which helped me opening my eyes, happened in 2016, when I learned the truth about a certain group of refugees, whom I looked after for a long time. They had become my friends in the meantime, I helped them during the asylum procedures, I dealt with their official matters, I got them apartments, furniture, cell phones, computers, clothing, courses, jobs, scholarships and spent countless free hours of my private time on individual cases. However, at some point I noticed that these people play with me an unclean game, that is, they use on me taqqiya. I was lied to by these people, which disappointed me a lot. I myself, was constantly warned against this Muslim misleading strategy, by people from Arab countries and Kurds who did not only flee from war zones, but had to flee Muslims; however, I did not want to listen to them. 

Those people who ate with me, drank, danced, laughed, who did not pray and did not go to the Mosque… – all while eating my food and sitting in my garden, they don’t talk about me other than “a stupid German whore”.

So, the same logic supporting the "ripple effect" suggests that we raise the minimum wage to $1,000 an hour, and we can all get rich

"So, you put the dollar into the "Connecticut" slot here, and it comes out on the west coast — pretty cool, eh?"

It's the "ripple effect" theory, and it is supposed to justify giving movie makers $46 million, net over payroll and sales taxes, to encourage them to film here.

Under new Connecticut estimates, a film and digital production tax credit cost the state’s budget $393 million in direct revenue between 2006 and 2014 in the form of tax credits claimed by companies and direct spending by the state supporting their growth.

Despite the direct costs to the state’s budget of the film and digital tax credit program — more than $46 million a year on average since 2006 — DECD recommends keeping the program intact. It is not a recommendation it extends to the full menu of tax credits currently under its stewardship, however; the department says Connecticut should jettison a manufacturing facilities tax credit on grounds the incentive has generated too few jobs to justify the $23 million cost to the state budget over two decades through 2014.

Ripple effect

With the state itemizing only the direct impact of business tax credits on the budget’s bottom line, and not the ripple effect of spending they create, the ultimate payoff for incentives makes for a hazier estimate.

In the case of the film and digital tax credit, Malloy’s administration believes the state is still coming out ahead. The tax credit has helped support $122 million in annual payroll maintained by tax credit recipients on average; and another $38 million in spending on varying products and services that generates sales taxes and supports jobs at those vendors.

At income tax rates between 5.5 percent and 6.5 percent that the majority of the industry’s workers pay in Connecticut, the state would recoup more than $7 million in income taxes annually along with roughly $2.5 million in sales taxes produced via direct purchases by tax credit recipients. That would cover only 23 cents of every dollar the state pays out in tax credits, however, producing an average annual deficit of $43.7 million.

More of that gap is made up in other ways, including additional spending by employees and vendors that ripples out through the economy. On those merits, DECD recommends keeping the film and digital tax credits in place on the backs of Blue Sky Studios alone, which has averaged $13.5 million in incentives annually since moving its digital animation studio to Greenwich in 2008 from White Plains, N.Y. Those tax credits have supported some 500 employees’ work on a movie pipeline that has produced two features each in the “Ice Age” and “Rio” series, and others like “The Peanuts Movie” and “Ferdinand” in late 2017.

Other entities maintain large numbers of Connecticut jobs in part or wholly due to the credits, including NBC and WWE in Stamford and ESPN in Bristol. The three film tax credit programs have produced ancillary investments in educational programs at colleges to train people to work in film, television and digital animation industries, DECD staff notes in the department’s annual report released in February.

Expanding vocational schools, say, or addressing our crumbling highways might produce more tangible results, but movie stars seem to send tingles down the legs of our politicians.

Sad.

Where are the FWIW Photoshoppers?

Fun, but doesn't capture what I'm going for

The media is in a fit of swooning, fawning adulation of North Korea's dictator, based entirely on the conviction that anyone who hates Trump is a person to be admired and praised. Seems to me that a picture of Kim Jong Un in a pussy hat would be entirely apt but so far, I can't find one on the net.

Here's your chance.

Sawing 6" off the end of a 4' 2 X 4 and gluing it to the other end doesn't yield a 4' 6" board

DUH

EU ministers push for an end to daylight savings time, contending that it's useless.

"We think that there's no need to change the clocks," Kelly said to Deutsche Welle. "It came in during World War One, it was supposed to be for energy savings—the indications are that there are very few energy savings, if any—and there are an awful lot of disadvantages to both human beings and animals that make it outdated at this point."

The claim that setting clocks an hour ahead in spring doesn't save energy or make societies safer is often used by Daylight Saving opponents. In the past, when lighting a home was the primary driver of electricity consumption, adjusting clocks to take advantage of late-evening sunlight might have made a dent in that consumption. But in today's world, air conditioning and electronics are also significant portions of electricity demand, and optimizing business hours to coincide with daylight hours doesn't significantly impact that draw of electricity.

In fact, the US added three more weeks to Daylight Saving Time in 2005, in part in the hopes of capitalizing on potential energy savings. But by 2007 that dream hadn't panned out: people just consumed more electricity in the dark morning hours instead of in the dark evening hours.

Some problems may solve themselves

I just won't bring children into this wicked world!

Global warming religionists are fearful of breeding. 

Mind you, the NYT explains that its report is based on a sapling of exactly twelve people, an unspecified number of whom are "cisgenders", who can't procreate anyway (shh! Don't tell them), but if you combine these people with the leftist abortionist crowd, the trend is encouraging.

NBC's Olympic coverage continues to shine

Who's done more to damage america's image abroad, donald trump or nbc?

Katie Couric explains that the Dutch excel at speed skating "because their canals are an important mode of transportation". 

Meanwhile, up in New Hampshire, a philosophy professor has been relieved of her duties after giving a student a zero on an exam for claiming that Australia is  country. "Australia is a continent, not a country", the professor insisted, twice, and refused all evidence submitted by her student that the land down under is both a continent and a country.

I'm speculating, but I'll bet our professor's doctoral thesis focused on some aspect of women's victimhood. As for Kuric, she's just plain dumb.,