Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more.
Greenwich, Connecticut real estate, politics, and more
Comfy at Davos
Biden promises his base: “You can keep your private jets and vacation homes”.
Unlike Obama’s promise to the middle call that “you can keep your own doctor”, politicians always live up to their pledges to the rich.
62 Park Avenue, Old Greenwich, $2.495 million, is pending after 38 days.
Park Avenue is an okay, if busy street, in a convenient location, but this 2003 construction sure reminds me of the quality of the homes thrown up by builders in the 70s and 80s. Which is regrettable.
taking a bullet for the nEA
“It’s for the good of the children and the good of society”
I’m no ant-vaxxer; I’ve even had the double-shot of Moderna myself, and any parent who doesn’t have his child protected against measles, smallpox, and the like is a chump, but submitting a 2-year-old to a vaccine that has yet to be formally approved, to protect her against a disease that poses practically no risk to the child? I’d certainly be wary, but not the government who, after all, is only here to help, and operates solely on the basis of settled science.
‘Children may not get sick, but they act as reservoirs of the virus”. Really? The studies I’ve seen show that there have been almost zero COVID cases that can be tracked back to schools. And are infected, but asymptomatic people of any age capable passing on the bug? Right now, that’s a guess, brought to you by the same experts, like Neil Ferguson, who predicted 22 million deaths in the US alone. There are plenty of studies out there that found no cases of asymptomatic COVIDs, infecting others. But why wait, when there are shots to be given, and public health administrators to be kept busy?
How do I know the vaccine’s going to be forced on parents? Because of comments from “experts” like this:
‘Vaccinating children age 2 to 11 is “a win-win situation, particularly in our attempt to get people back to school.”
Nice kid you got there; too bad if he can’t go to school.
Shut up, peasants!
This is the same governor, you may recall, who banned the use of motor, but not rowboats (???) last year, and imposed her first ban on crossing state lines. She wasn’t the least embarrassed by the revelation that her husband had twice traveled to Wisconsin to oversee the launching of the family’s cabin cruiser and made another visit to the Whitmers’ horse farm.
Governor Newsom could not be reached for comment.
Harry and his gal pal join the call for vaccine makers to be stripped of patent protection.
President Asterisk’s announced intention to “suspend” U.S. Patent law is hardly surprising: the goal of socialism is to destroy all property rights, everywhere, and starting with pharmaceutical companies is a popular place to begin, and will help our former enemies, now allies and friends, China and Russia steal still more our industrial trade secrets; both countries have lauded the move, because they have the manufacturing capability to take advantage of the transfer of U.S. intellectual wealth. The benefits for Third World shitholes like India are illusory. India can’t produce enough of its own vaccine or Astrazeneca to inoculate 1/10 of 1% of its cattle, let alone its human population, and South Africa, which has no drug manufacturing capability at all, won’t see any improvement, but they both like the idea of government theft, so they're on board, too.
But it’s Harry and his bride who most deserve to relinquish their intellectual property rights, especially copyright. These two parasites who have produced nothing on their own, ever, yet made tens of millions living on the Sussex name, have the gall to demand that the productive sector of society give it all up:
Harry and Meghan call for 'vaccine giveaway' in open letter to vaccine makers
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle today urged vaccine manufacturers to 'temporarily suspend' intellectual property rights in order to help those in developing countries gain access to jabs - as they marked Archie's second birthday by asking for $5 donations to aid global distribution.
The Duke, 36, and Duchess of Sussex, 39, shared an emotive letter to the CEOs of Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Norovax on Thursday as they launched a campaign to 'ensure equitable vaccine access globally'.
The lengthy note, published to Global Citizen, had asked the vaccine bosses to 'act with extraordinary purpose, responsibility, and leadership' in response to a 'equity crisis' and use 'every possible measure to increase global supply.'
These proposed measures included 'the temporary suspension of intellectual property and extraordinary global public-private collaboration resulting in wider transfer of technology and know-how.'
Having never invented anything (except the fiction of their worth to society because Harry is a descendant of the spawn of a German King), there’s no patent to “suspend”, but their various copyrights trading on the Sussex name should be fair game. Body deodorant, certainly, but the possibilities are endless: “Archie’s Royal Disposable Diapers”, perhaps, or “Meghan’s Royal Blood, That-Time-of-Month Pads” are just two ideas we’ll throw out there, for free, no rigts .
23 Smith Road, on the Belle Haven peninsula and a Sally Maloney listing, has closed at $27.750. Rather aggressively priced in 2019 at $39.5 million, it still ended up with a satisfactory result.
10 Frost Road has cut its price to $3.695 from $3.9 — it was purchased for $4.2 in ‘07, with substantial updates, including a new slate roof (think mega-bucks) since then.
And 22 Frost Road has been on the market for 780 days now, having dropped from $5.795 to its current ask of $4.495. Also purchased in 2007, these owners paid $5,036,624 back then, and have completely redone it, so there’s a lot more than that $5 put into it.
Frost Lane is a great street: close to town, 2-acre lots, and beautiful homes, so what gives? I assume that just like “brown furniture”, 1920s Normandies have fallen out of favor and today’s buyers don’t want them, no matter how excellent their condition.
Which is too bad, because these are both great houses, and at their current prices offer far more than the newer homes in this price range. To me, that is — if they don’t appeal to a younger buyer, that’s what’s determinative, not my taste.
But their loss.
65 Clapboard Ridge Road, has sold for $7.495 million, 17 days.
That’s an improvement over the failed attempt of 2019-2020, when it started at $9.975 and expired unsold last October at $6.995.
But the sellers purchased it in 2007 for $10 million.
“Single and multi-family — a winning combination”, it says here
The case that may end single-family zoning in CT
On a sunny spring afternoon in 2016, Richard Freedman went on a bike ride through New Canaan.
The housing developer was fresh off a disappointment. He had applied to build housing for low-income people in Westport, but his plan had just been rejected.
As he rode through the hillsides that afternoon — where mansions with gated entrances were separated from each other by four acres and stone walls — Freedman wondered whether civil rights groups or developers would ever find a way to change zoning laws so that more than one housing unit could be built on these huge lots. The properties take up most of the town and largely shut out those who need affordable housing.
……
Then, as he rode along Oenoke Ridge, he thought to himself that he could easily fit 10 separated two-bedroom apartments into each mansion.
“House after house after house, they’re the size of hotels. That’s how big they are. They’re bigger than some of the apartment buildings I own,” he said. “Then, it finally hit me: If the zoning lets you build a house that big for one family, why can’t you build a home the same size — for more than one family?”
When he returned home, he called Erin Boggs, a civil rights attorney who focuses on housing desegregation and the leader of Open Communities Alliance, and shared his epiphany. The duo then shared the idea with the fair housing development clinic at Yale Law School, and a coalition was formed to attempt to dismantle single-family zoning in a state with some of the most racially isolated communities in the country.
The idea was simple: Let developers build two, three or four housing units in the same size structure, as long as they meet all the other requirements for single-family homes that don’t need special permission.
“The remedy that they proposed is brilliant in its simplicity,” said Timothy Hollister, a land-use attorney who has made a career out of shepherding through the courts affordable-housing projects in uncooperative towns.
And so on. You can read the entire article, but you know what’s coming next.
Cultural appropriation: Chinese students preparing to eat Americans’ lunch
In the name of equity, California will discourage students who are gifted at math
California's Department of Education is working on a new framework for K-12 mathematics that discourages gifted students from enrolling in accelerated classes that study advanced concepts like calculus.
The draft of the framework is hundreds of pages long and covers a wide range of topics. But its overriding concern is inequity. The department is worried that too many students are sorted into different math tracks based on their natural abilities, which leads some to take calculus by their senior year of high school while others don't make it past basic algebra. The department's solution is to prohibit any sorting until high school, keeping gifted kids in the same classrooms as their less mathematically inclined peers until at least grade nine.
"The inequity of mathematics tracking in California can be undone through a coordinated approach in grades 6–12," reads a January 2021 draft of the framework. "In summary, middle-school students are best served in heterogeneous classes."
In fact, the framework concludes that calculus is overvalued, even for gifted students.
"The push to calculus in grade twelve is itself misguided," says the framework.
As evidence for this claim, the framework cites the fact that many students who take calculus end up having to retake it in college anyway. Of course, de-prioritizing instruction in high school calculus would not really solve this problem—and in fact would likely make it worse—but the department does not seem overly worried. The framework's overriding perspective is that teaching the tough stuff is college's problem: The K-12 system should concern itself with making every kid fall in love with math.
Broadly speaking, this entails making math as easy and un-math-like as possible. Math is really about language and culture and social justice, and no one is naturally better at it than anyone else, according to the framework.
…
Yet the framework seems to reject the notion that some kids are more gifted than others. "An important goal of this framework is to replace ideas of innate mathematics 'talent' and 'giftedness' with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway," it states. "There is no cutoff determining when one child is 'gifted' and another is not." But cutoffs are exactly what testing and grading systems produce, and it's absurdly naive to think there's nothing innate about such outcomes, given that intelligence is at least partly an inherited trait.
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