Free Republic

Snippets: During the first two months of this year, builders in California pulled 35% more permits for single-family homes than during the same period a year earlier, according to census data. Permits for multifamily continued to decline — dropping 33%. Though it’s known as the “mansion tax,” except for rare exceptions it applies to all properties sold for more than $5 million, no matter if they are gas stations, strip malls, apartment buildings or actual mansions. Under the measure, a seller is charged 4% of the sales price for properties sold above $5 million and below $10 million. “ULA is...

Per a standard set in 1975, haulers are restricted to 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight. The industry wants that upped to 88,000 pounds.The car hauling industry is lobbying various departments of the federal government to increase weight limits on U.S. highways in order to accommodate the transportation of electric vehicles. ...the industry says current weight limits on trucks roaming around U.S. roads are outdated and not equipped for the imminent pivot to battery-heavy EVs. Currently, federal highway safety standards restrict trailers to 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight. This standard was set back in 1975, back when a Honda Civic weighed...

Citizens of Louisiana and Mississippi south of the Old River Control Structure don’t need all that water. All it does is cause flooding and massive tax expenditures to repair and strengthen dikes. The best solution would be for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build an aqueduct from the Old River Control Structure on the Mississippi to Lake Powell, fill it, and then send more water from there down the Colorado to fill lake Mead. About 4.5 million/gals a second flow past that structure on the Mississippi. As mentioned, New Orleans has a problem with that much water anyway,...

Infants have “been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly.”. Lockdown restrictions, including adults wearing face masks, has left a generation of babies and toddlers struggling with speech and social skills, according to an official report. Inspectors working for Ofsted found that infants being surrounded by adults wearing face masks for significant periods of time over the last two years has damaged their learning and communication abilities. Those turning two “will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly,” the...

For the second time in under a month, The New York Times has published an article about people who developed a rare autoimmune disease after receiving COVID vaccines. Monday’s article featured two women, both of whom were described as healthy before they received the Moderna vaccine. The women, ages 72 and 48, are now being treated for immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), a condition that develops when the immune system attacks platelets (blood component essential for clotting) or the cells that create them, according to the Times. On Jan. 13, the Times reported on the death of Dr. Gregory Michael, a Florida...

A New York program requiring acute-care hospitals to develop sepsis protocols has improved detection and treatment, but the results weren't as pronounced in hospitals that serve higher proportions of black patients, according to a new study. Since the program started in 2014, the proportion of patients who underwent the sepsis protocol increased from 61% in 2014 to 72% in 2016, and in-hospital mortality fell from 25% to 21%, according to research published Monday in Health Affairs. But black patients experienced the lowest increase in completion of the protocol at only 5 percentage points compared to 6.7 percentage points among Hispanics,...

A pregnant woman living as a transgender male arrived to a hospital with severe abdominal pains and nurses didn’t immediately consider it an emergency because she appeared to be an obese man who stopped taking blood pressure medication. Healthcare professionals at the hospital didn’t even think this individual may be a pregnant woman because she was listed as a male in her medical records. Women in their child-bearing years showing up to the hospital with these same symptoms are immediately taken in and examined just in case there are pregnancy-related complications, but since nurses thought this patient was a male,...

The federal government plans to collect pay data by race, ethnicity and gender from businesses by Sept. 30. Any business with over 100 employees will have to provide this data. It will use it to develop a pay equity analysis to combat discrimination. President Donald Trump's administration failed to block this collection in federal court, clearing the path for this action. Business groups have supported Trump's efforts to stop this reporting to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). They have complained of technical challenges in bridging HR information systems with payroll data. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said pay...

Your smart lightbulb is probably storing your wifi password in the clear, ready to be recovered by wily dumpster-divers; Limited Results discovered the security worst-practice during a teardown of a Lifx bulb; and that's just for starters: the bulbs also store their RSA private key and root passwords in the clear and have no security measures to prevent malicious reflashings of their ROMs with exploits, network probes and other nasties.

"One of the unintentional consequences of GDPR is the strengthening of the duopoly," said Gil Elbaz, a former Google executive who now runs the marketing firm Factual. "If Google continues to go unchecked, their dominance will be extreme." Google is still raking in marketing dollars from advertisers, propelling the online search giant to another strong quarter in the face of costly regulatory trouble in Europe. Parent company Alphabet reported second-quarter revenue, minus partner payouts, of $26.24 billion during the second quarter. Google's advertising business grew 24 percent. Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat said most of that came from mobile and...

My 8 year old cousin is sitting across the living room from me, playing a game on a tablet which apparently involve animated balls going through a maze of some sort. He's mildly autistic, and comments to himself on the game's progress, usually unintelligibly. He just said... "Oh no, my balls are trapped!"

“Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.” — Will and Ariel Durant “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” – C.S....

Civil Rights: The Supreme Court has given the White House license to water down, if not destroy, virtually every standard dealing with housing. There's nothing stopping its push for affirmative-action lending and zoning. In a shocking 5-4 decision, the high bench ruled that housing- and lending-discrimination lawsuits based on no proof other than statistics showing different outcomes by minority groups are within the bounds of civil-rights law. It agreed with housing-rights zealots that zoning and underwriting policies that have a harmful effect — or disparate impact — on minorities are illegal, even if that harm is unintentional. Sometime-conservative Anthony Kennedy...

Attempts to reverse the impacts of global warming by injecting reflective particles into the stratosphere could make matters worse, say researchers. A new study suggests the idea, seen as a last-ditch way to deal with runaway climate change, could cut rainfall in the tropics by 30%. This would have devastating impacts on rainforests in South America and Asia The research has been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters. The concept of curbing rising temperatures by blocking sunlight has been discussed by scientists for many years now. Some of the ideas have been dismissed as crazy notions, but others have...

Obamacare is meant to provide health coverage to the millions of Americans who don't have it, but the cruel irony is that millions of other Americans may lose their current health insurance as a result. These "losers" are primarily people who buy their own health insurance rather than have it provided by an employer. Many now find their plans will be canceled because they fail to meet the minimum coverage requirements under Obamacare. These plans offer "bare bones insurance...usually catastrophic care...and beginning Jan. 1 insurance companies will not be allowed to offer these very plans," says Rick Newman, Yahoo Finance...

CONCORD -- Earlier this year, Contra Costa County won the right to run a health care call center, where workers will answer questions to help implement the president's Affordable Care Act. Area politicians called the 200-plus jobs it would bring to the region an economic coup. Now, with two months to go before the Concord operation opens to serve the public, information has surfaced that about half the jobs are part-time, with no health benefits ... The Contra Costa County supervisor whose district includes the call center called the whole hiring process -- which attracted about 7,000 applicants -- a...

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the Second Amendment, and the type of crap that may be or is going on in this country. While fictional, this book nails it on the loss of our freedoms and the sentiments of many pro-2A folks out there. This book has been out of print for a long time, and to score a copy one would have to spend $70 or more on eBay or Amazon. For now, that’s over. Buy direct from John Ross’ website. By the way, I’m not getting paid for this plug. I read the book...

James Yeager: "If It Goes One Inch Further, I'm Gonna Start Killin' People" Via Ann Barnhardt

A short review of the book “Unintended Consequences” by John Ross, c/r. 1995 Accurate Press. 861 pages. ( Note: This posting is in no way in fact, inferred, or implied to be a submission in MD’s contest! ) This tome came with a dust cover depicting a swat clad fella man… handeling Lady Liberty… the poor lady was in the midst of a wordrobe malfuncition. Rather tacky dust ‘cover’ on this book. But I would be the last to judge a book by… a tacky dust cover, so I threw it out and took a dive into this one. What...

Now that the Supreme Court has upheld President Barack Obama's health care initiative, will Congress have to rewrite it from scratch? It's not a paradoxical question. The court signed off on nearly all of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but it struck down one provision, and in doing so — whether it knew it or not — it may have put the poorest Americans at the greatest risk of being left without any health insurance. Chief Justice John Roberts said as part of the 5-4 decision that states can't be penalized for refusing to join the law's expansion...