Process

Tie – Downs

I was going to research how manufactured homes are tied down, but realized before I typed the query into Google that I don’t have to think any more.  Instead, I typed, How are manufactured homes anchored into Chat GPT, and this came out: Manufactured homes are anchored to the ground using a variety of methods, …

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Moral Hazard

Moral Hazard, by Kate Jennings, is a book that was published to great reviews and moderate sales in 2002 and then sunk like a stone.  You can pick it up for under five bucks now on Thriftbooks, but for a while you could buy it on Amazon for a penny plus shipping.  It is the …

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Incompetence Cubed

Brendan Behan made much of growing up in a tenement, but he did not say that his grandmother owned the building.  Brendan’s mother’s mother, Christine English, was referred to as the Empress of Russell Street, because she owned several tenement houses there, each of which could hold up to a hundred people.  Residents would come …

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The Next Village

–Assume a water molecule. –Where am I? -Some AirBNB in central New York.  -What time is it? –3:45 AM. –Can I take a piss, O Socrates?  -Of course. -Can I get a drink? -What can you do with a quart of water molecules? -Drink, wash, flush the toilet, put out fires. -Where does a water …

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Incompetence Squared

I have written previously about the people in the title division of the New York State DMV.  It is no longer cool to make jokes about Polish people, Italians, people with physical disabilities, people with learning differences, Black people, Asians, Hispanics, gay and transgender people, Jews or Irish people.  It is still OK, but not …

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Act of G-d

Imagine a Twilight Zone episode that occurs in a mobile home park.  There is the usual cast of characters.  The evil park owner who cares about nothing but money (think oil executives in The Wages of Fear); The busybody who is in everyone’s business; the town drunk; the conspiracy theorist who get his news from …

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Arbitrage 2.0

Here’s a text conversation I recently had with a guy who scraps homes in my park in central New York.  A very good tenant just moved out of a park-owned home and bought another home in the same park.  The home they moved out of is a crappy 1978 single-wide with a leak nobody can …

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Count Your Fingers

This does not look like someplace where history was made: That is the Androscoggin Bank Colisée.  It is where the Maine Nordiques play.  The Nordiques are a team in the North American Hockey League, which is a USA-sanctioned Tier II junior hockey league.  The Colisée is in a crappy section of Lewiston which is, quite …

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