Monthly Archives: July 2018

FREE WI-FI AT AIRPORTS.

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Most major airports in the U.S. have free wi-fi. That’s important to remember because cell phone and 4G reception at airports is often very poor. At San Francisco airport, if you connect to #SFO FREE WIFI, you get unlimited free wi-fi with no strings attached. At Oakland airport, you get 45 minutes of free wi-fi, but you have to watch a 30 second commercial first. You can get an additional 45 minutes of free wi-fi if you watch another commercial. I remember the first time I used the free wi-fi at Oakland airport. It was about 4 years ago. I had to watch a commercial for a movie titled ‘Non-Stop’ in order to log onto the airport’s free wi-fi. I remember that commercial because it seemed so inappropriate. ‘Non-Stop’ is a movie about a terrorist and an alcoholic air marshal who shoot it out on an airplane while the plane is in flight. I seem to recall that there was also a suitcase full of cocaine on the airplane and a plot to kill the passengers one at a time. I thought that was a very poor choice for a commercial that people had to watch at an airport while waiting for their flights to take off. I remember thinking: “Didn’t the thought occur to somebody that this is a really bad movie to be advertising at an airport?”

BEDROOM INFLATION.

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The single most important factor in determining the market rent of an apartment is the number of bedrooms. People will pay additional rent for additional bedrooms, but little else. An apartment with a separate dining room will rent for the same amount as an apartment without a dining room. Therefore, landlords always try to maximize the number of bedrooms in an apartment that they are getting ready to rent. Sometimes, that isn’t hard to do. With just a little remodeling, like moving a wall or adding a door, a dining room can become a perfectly acceptable bedroom. (I’ve done that myself.) On the other hand, landlords sometimes call rooms ‘bedrooms’ that is just plain fraud.  ‘Bedroom inflation’ is a term I created to describe the practice of inflating the number of bedrooms in a Craigslist apartment listing. Some landlords think that if you can put a bed in a room, then you can call it a bedroom, but that isn’t true. There are laws that define the minimum standards for a bedroom. Take a look at this listing photo. The owner of this apartment counted this room as one of the bedrooms in his listing. It is, in fact, just a walk-in closet. Yes, it is a room, and the landlord has put a bed in it, but that doesn’t make it a bedroom. I tell landlords not to engage in this sort of deception. This isn’t going to fool anyone. Nobody is really going to think that this walk-in closet is actually a bedroom just because there’s a bed in it. This is just going to make prospective tenants angry. Everybody hates the feeling that someone is trying to play him for a sucker. The most common form of bedroom inflation is counting a living room as a bedroom. Because of the high rent and housing shortage here in Berkeley, a growing number of college students are sleeping on living room couches. However, just because somebody is sleeping on a futon in a living room doesn’t make that room a bedroom. A living room with somebody sleeping in it is still a living room. I always advise landlords to tell the truth. Its OK for a landlord to brag about the features in his apartment that will make it look more desirable to prospective tenants. I do that. All rational landlords do that. But that’s different than lying or trying to play prospective tenants for suckers. (As you can tell, bedroom inflation is one of my pet peeves.)

CAN YOU CRACK AN EGG?

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I received 3 emails this month from a company trying to get me to buy an EZ Cracker. This thing is a handheld device that cracks eggs. That appears to be all that it does. Their price is $40.00. The ad says ‘Are you finding that because of advancing age that cracking eggs is getting hard to do? Do you need help cracking eggs? EZ Cracker makes cracking eggs fun again!’ Now I ask you – are there really people who are too old to crack eggs? I went online and found that a lot of companies sell egg cracking machines, including Amazon, so maybe there are a lot of people who are too old and weak to crack eggs. I am not one of them – yet.

WILL THE U.S. GET BACK THE BUSINESS WE ARE LOSING IN TRUMP’S TRADE WARS?

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In reaction to Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese-made products, China has stopped buying U.S. soybeans, and China buys a lot of soybeans. China will now be getting their soybeans from Russia. As a result, the price of soybeans in the U.S. has fallen by about 20%. For soybean farmers, that’s the difference between making money and losing money. However – the bigger concern is this – once this trade war is over or when Trump leaves office, will China ever come back and buy U.S. soybeans in the future? Maybe not. Once a country determines that they don’t want to be dependent on a particular foreign source of some commodity, they often find new sources and never go back. That happened in the Civil War.

In 1860, the manufacture of cotton textiles was Europe’s biggest industry, and European textile mills got over 90% of their cotton from the American South. However, as soon as the Civil War began, the Union navy began blockading Southern ports. Within a year, European textile mills began running out of cotton. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans lost their jobs. It was called the ‘Cotton Crisis’ in England, which was especially hard hit. Britain and many other European countries started looking for other sources of cotton. The British began getting their cotton from India. (Cotton is native to India.) Other European countries with overseas colonies also started growing cotton in lands they controlled. By the time the Civil War was over, the big European cotton buyers all had new sources for their cotton. Growing cotton for export to Europe had made Southern cotton plantation owners rich, but they lost the European market as soon as the Civil War began, and they never got it back. Southern cotton plantations were never as profitable after the Civil War was over as they had been before the war. I wonder – will history repeat itself? Will China and other countries that have been buying agricultural and mineral commodities from the U.S. come back and buy these products from the U.S. again after this trade war is over? Or – have we lost these markets forever?

WHERE DID THE WORD ‘JEEP’ COME FROM?

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Here’s a fun bit of World War 2 trivia. The Jeep was one of the most important weapons of World War 2. Jeeps gave American soldiers a huge edge over the Germans and the Japanese. That’s because the Jeep was the only mass-produced vehicle in the world that had 4-wheel drive. 4 wheel drive was invented in the late 1930s. Because the Jeep had 4 wheel drive, it could go places that no other wheeled vehicle could go. Jeeps could go across sandy deserts in North Africa and muddy field in France, places where German vehicles got stuck. But – where did the word ‘Jeep’ come from? There are a lot of stories and myths about this; however, we actually do know where the word Jeep came from.

In the 1930s, one of the most popular cartoon characters in America was Popeye the Sailor. The Popeye comic strip appeared every day in newspapers all over the U.S., and Popeye cartoons were seen in thousands of movie theaters all over the world. In 1936, a new character started appearing in Popeye cartoons named Eugene the Jeep. The Jeep was a strange creature with supernatural abilities. Eugene the Jeep could go anywhere and do anything. There was no obstacle that the Jeep could not instantly overcome. In 1941, the Willys Motor Co. began making a new vehicle for the U.S. Army with 4 wheel drive known simply as the Willys MB. Soldiers were astonished at the ability of this vehicle to go over terrain where no wheeled vehicle had ever been able to go before – and at high speed. We don’t know who was the first person to start calling this vehicle a Jeep, but whoever it was, the name caught on quickly and stuck. Below are pictures of Eugene the Jeep and a early model Willys MB.