This one's got enough property to safely isolate yourself from collegiate sloths and other ne’er-do-wells

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(Its interior is fAR MORE IMPRESSIVE THAN THe EXTERIOR suggests)

10 Cliffdale Road, 1939 house, 66 acres, $35 million price tag.

A little bit of its history can be found in this WSJ article:

A 66-acre estate in Greenwich, Conn., has been in the same family since it was built in 1940. Now it is going on the market for $35 million.

The property has more land than most in the affluent suburb, which is located about 30 miles northeast of Manhattan, according to listing agent Peter Janis of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices New England Properties. It has a seven-bedroom house as well as a barn, apple orchard, two greenhouses and vegetable gardens.

The house was built by Edwin John Beinecke, according to seller Barbara Robinson, widow of Beinecke’s grandson John Robinson. The family’s company, Sperry & Hutchinson, made S&H Green Stamps, a 19th- and 20th-century customer-rewards program in which shoppers collected stamps they earned from grocery-store or gas-station spending and exchanged them for rewards, she said. The family launched a digital version of the stamps in the early 2000s before selling the company in 2006, said former S&H executive Carl Norloff, who recently purchased the brand with plans to relaunch it.

John, an executive at Sperry & Hutchinson, visited the estate frequently growing up, said Barbara. Around 1980, the Robinsons bought the property from Beinecke’s estate, attracted by the prospect of growing their own food, according to Barbara, who said she doesn’t know how much they paid for it.

John died in 2020, and Barbara, an octogenarian, has decided to downsize to a smaller home in Greenwich, she said. Perry Robinson, their son, said he and his siblings don’t want the property because they all have their own homes.

Alright, this freedom-loving American has seen it; where's my MAGA hat?

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this changes everything!

Unlike Senator Fetterman, alas, Lizzy’s stroke has made her stupider, not smarter.

Sad.

It's not just Alexa who's listening in on your household and telephone conversations

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Experts reveal sneaky way your phone listens in on your conversations - and how to stop it

It was long thought to be a myth and dismissed by big tech companies.

But experts have revealed how listening into your conversations has become a multi-billion dollar industry.

Earlier this week, a leak from a leading marketing firm appeared to confirm how companies use microphones on your smart devices to eavesdrop before selling the data to advertisers.

'You can be talking to one of your friends about going on a vacation to Portugal through a phone call, and then a day later or that same day, what do you see? An advertisement for a trip,' data security expert Andy LoCascio told DailyMail.com. 

The leak last week came from a pitch deck given by CMG, a marketing partner of Facebook, Amazon and Google.

The deck - which appears to have been made for prospective clients - detailed CMG's 'Active-Listening,' software, which collects data from people by listening in on their conversations.

Active-Listening software can be enabled through any app on an Android or iPhone, and other devices like smart home assistants can listen in too, LoCacio said.

What's more, these devices are listening practically all the time, not just when you're intentionally using your microphone to make a phone call or talk to Alexa, for example. 

'For most devices, there is no device state when the microphone is inactive. It is nearly always active when Siri is present on the device or any other voice activated assistant is present,' LoCascio said.  

Companies that want to capture your voice data and sell it often gain access to your microphone through apps. 

Typically, apps are granted permission to use your microphone through a clause 'buried in the myriad of permissions you accept when installing a new app,' he added. 

That means that many users are consenting to being tapped without even realizing it. 

'The problem is, the form of consent is an all-or-nothing Faustian bargain,' data privacy expert and consultant Sharon Polsky said.

'So many websites say 'we collect information from you and about you. If you use our website, you've consented to everything that we do.' You have no way of opting out,' she added. 

LoCascio explained that this is how CMG and other companies are getting away with this even in states with wiretapping laws that prohibit recording somebody without their knowledge, like California.

'To be perfectly clear, there are no laws about this. If we give somebody permission to use the microphone on our device, and we click off all the other terms of service that none of us ever read, they can certainly use it,' LoCascio said. 

That lack of protective legislation has 'created an entire data broker industry that's now worth billions,' Polsky said. 

This industry's rapid growth is owed partly to the development of highly sophisticated large language models, like Chat GPT.

These extremely powerful AI tools have made it easier and faster for advertisers or other third parties to mine our voice data for valuable information, LoCascio noted.

'All I have to do is take one of those transcripts, drop it in the ChatGPT box, and then ask it a simple question. Like, 'please tell me what product and services I could market to somebody based on this conversation,' he explained.

Once that voice data is captured, it can be sold to advertisers to direct and inform their targeted marketing. But it can also be sold to other clients, who could be using it for entirely different reasons.

'They could be capturing those conversations for anything,' LoCascio said. 

'It's one thing to say they're doing it for ads, and they can claim that, but they sell that information blindly to other people. And they don't scrub it, so they basically sell an audio transcript,' he added.

Other examples of voice data purchasers include insurance companies, for the purpose of creating personalized insurance rates, and the federal government, Polsky said.

'One of the purchasers of our information - information about us - everything from our opinions, our predilections, our associations, our travel routes, is the government,' she said. 

And there are other insidious entities that want to get their hands on our voice data too, such as 'people from the dark web that want to profit from scamming us,' Polsky said. 

That means that sharing your social security number or other sensitive personal details could put you at risk of identity theft, LoCascio said.  

CMG is an American media conglomerate based in Atlanta, Georgia. The company provides broadcast media, digital media, advertising and marketing services, and it generated $22.1 billion in revenue in 2022. 

CMG did not respond to DailyMail.com's request for comment.

I learned all this back in my BC geology courses in the early 70s — today's global warming "the seas are rising" hysterics — including journalists — should study up and get a grip.

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From Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, December 1, 2005:

Home on the Moraine: The Unsettling Geology of Martha's Vineyard

(Note from FWIW: all of the material below is from the article itself — I’m not using the usual indentation/italicized format because I wish to highlight a few sections, and Squarespace drops bolding from indented quotations — go figure)

No island is just an island, it turns out. At least, not if you go back several thousand eons. How a mile-high glacier and rolling stones created the layer-cake Cliffs and unsettling geology of Martha’s Vineyard.

After the chill is gone
By about 18,000 years ago, the global climate had warmed enough to force the ice sheet’s retreat north. The worldwide sea level then was about 300 feet lower than it is now, meaning that the shoreline south of the Island was exposed 75 miles farther out than today, and that the Islands, in fact, were still connected to the mainland. Bears, wolves, moose, caribou, bison, musk oxen, and other creatures roamed the tundra grasses, evergreen forests, and marshes that made up the emergent continental shelf. Fossils tell us that.

In over four decades as a geologist, Oldale has examined his share of elephant teeth. “It was not unusual for fishermen to come into our Woods Hole office with a mammoth or mastodon tooth they’d dredged up in their nets, wondering what it was,” says Oldale. “A lot were found to date from 11,000 to 12,000 years ago. About that time, the native population entered the New England area and probably hunted mastodon and mammoth as well as smaller game, fish, and birds on the exposed coastal plain.”         

The Island sets sail
The Wampanoags take pride in having been present and having survived such formative times. Their creation stories are rooted in the geologic changes around them. “Our people walked from the mainland prior to the separation,” says Tobias Vanderhoop, education program coordinator for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah). “We’ve been here since before the Island was an island.”

About 7,500 years ago, seawater flooded Vineyard Sound’s deepest areas. The Wampanoag’s oral tradition describes what happened: “The giant Moshup dragged his toe between the Island and the mainland,” says Vanderhoop. “It filled with water, and that’s how the land became separated.”

His ancestors would have seen the sea level rising fast enough over the gently sloping coastal plain to make a notable difference within a lifetime. Fifteen hundred years after the sea split the Vineyard from the Cape, the water submerged Nantucket Sound, separating the Islands from each other, as well. For the next 4,000 years, sea level kept rising, until the Vineyard shoreline was within several miles of where it is now. By 2,000 years ago, the Island had many of the features it has today (minus the tourists and traffic jams). It had major barrier spits, outer islands, lagoons, bays, salt marshes, and the most pronounced formation carved by the glacier, the Gay Head Cliffs of Aquinnah.  

“The famous colored cliffs at Gay Head are perhaps the most striking and well-known natural feature of the Vineyard and may be the largest display of Pleistocene [ice age] sediments to be found anywhere in the world,” wrote Anne Hale in Moraine to Marsh: A Field Guide to Martha’s Vineyard (Watership Gardens, 1988).

….

A chip off the old ice block
Though the Cliffs may be the most dramatic example of the Island’s geological history, they are far from the only one. “People don’t realize that every day we’re living and breathing geology,” says Suzan Bellincampi. “By knowing a little bit about it, you can look at the plants and animals around you, and they’ll tell you a story.”

For instance, the reason that there are so many more stone walls up-Island than down-Island, she says, is that the glacier stopped there, dropping the heaviest boulders, called glacial erratics. The land on the hilly moraines is dense with clay, so it holds more water, creating vernal ponds, and nurturing such plants as red maple, beetlebung, and ferns. In contrast, the soil left by the glacier meltwater in the outwash plains is of a harsh, sandy nature. The land is flat and drains water, rather than holding it, so instead of seeing maple and beetlebung, you see grasses and scrub oak. “Once you know the Island’s geology,” says Bellincampi, “it all makes sense.”       

The glacier is gone, but the changes go on
The geological history is worth paying attention to not only for what it tells us about the past and the present landscape, but also about the future. As James O’Connell, coastal processes specialist of the Woods Hole Sea Grant and Cape Cod Cooperative Extension, told me, “The first of the land forms laid down by the glaciers will be the last to go.”  

What he means is that the Island’s higher, clay-dense, rock-strewn terminal moraines in the north and northwest regions of the Island will survive long after the porous, low-lying pebbles and sand of the south side have been swept away by the wide-open ocean waves. Places such as southern Chilmark, West Tisbury, and Edgartown are subject to erosion rates that are greater by a factor of five than the north and northwest regions of the Island. The coastal land from Edgartown to southeast West Tisbury has the highest long-term erosion rate on the Island – from four to six feet per year. “If you take the five feet per year average,” O’Connell says, “that means within 60 years everything within 300 feet of the shoreline will be gone.”

…. “For about thirty years at Wasque Point, at the southeast corner of Martha’s Vineyard, the average erosion rate was about thirty-three feet per year,” he wrote in The Geologic Story. “During most of that period, the point was protected by a wide foreshore; but one year when the foreshore was absent and the point was exposed to direct wave attack, it retreated some 350 feet.” That’s a big jump in a year.

Geologists by nature and training seem to take the earth’s shifts in stride. The layman, however, often wants to know what can be done to hold back the processes. Unfortunately, efforts to strengthen bluffs with riprap or revetments only accelerate the erosion to neighboring beaches. “Once you have a long series of walls, you have no beach at high tide,” says O’Connell. “Unfortunately, that’s the situation in over-developed parts of the Cape. The beach is a system that renews itself with waves and currents transporting sand along the shore. If you interrupt that process you intensify the problem. It’s a Catch-22.”

On the Vineyard, he says, the armory of riprap and jetties at Oak Bluffs is needed to keep the harbor open for the ferries and boats. But it’s because of that man-made interference that Beach Road, farther down the shoreline, is washed over so often. Sand is trucked in to build up Joseph A. Sylvia State Beach temporarily after powerful storms, but it’s a short-term solution to long-term geology. “We try to balance it as best we can,” says O’Connell. But after twenty years as a coastal specialist, he knows the only course of action is reaction, and over the long term, that won’t be good enough.

(FWIW): Of course, this simpe fact of geology isn’t restricted to Martha’s Vineyard: here’s what’s happening on Greenwich’s other favorite watering hole (so to speak):

…. Ratner, who is 82, speaks in a deep baritone, his face framed by his big square glasses. He can’t keep his eyes off the water. “This is really bad,” he says.

Bad, but not surprising — not on this island, just 25 miles off Cape Cod and exposed to the ocean’s forces. Ratner knows that as well as anyone. He started summering here regularly in 1975, when he and his wife, Roslyn, built this house, a large five-bedroom saltbox with an expansive view of the sea. There were few neighbors back then, and a lot more beach.

Today, his home survives defiantly in an area where the erosion rate currently averages 12 feet a year, the highest rate in Massachusetts and maybe in the Northeast. The evidence of that is everywhere: in nearby lots whose homes have been moved or lost to the sea, in the abandoned section of road that continues on past Ratner’s property before disappearing into the sand, in a forgotten concrete sewage tank that sits smack in the middle of the beach. Ratner estimates he’s sunk $500,000 into saving his home, armoring the front and sides with enormous geotextile bags filled with sand — hundreds of them, weighing many tons apiece, forming a wall that runs 45 feet deep, 20 feet of which is visible above the water surface, dividing building from ocean.

…. Still the ocean comes. Maybe 20 feet separates the building’s foundation from the outer edge of the bags. Temporary walls of plywood and pressure-treated posts protect the driveway and plants from sand drift. Ratner’s place looks more like a fortress than a dam.

When he first noticed he was losing land, in the early 1990s, he wasn’t alarmed; 100 feet of grass, 30 feet of dune, and another 30 feet of beach separated his house from the sea. But shifting shoals and storms gnawed away at all that protection. Having already lost a deck to the surging ocean, Ratner began dropping the first set of bags in front of his house in 1995. “My wife used to complain that we couldn’t see the water from our first-floor bedroom,” Ratner says. ” ‘Why did you build the house so far back?’ she’d ask me. Well, it’s a good thing we did, or we’d have lost it by now.”

It’s an old story. Land and homes have been lost to the sea for generations on Nantucket, a 48-square-mile patch of sandy earth, deposited by a glacier, that became an island when the ice melted and the seas rose around it more than 10,000 years ago. It’s why native islanders have often shied away from the coast when building their homes, or placed them on movable skids if they built near the sea. “Erosion is just something we live with,” says one islander. “You gotta realize that sooner or later the water is going to come visiting.”

But that’s not something that Ratner and other wealthy summer residents who have scooped up valuable, but vulnerable, waterfront property over the years are prepared to concede. That battle with nature — a confidence in the belief that determination, technology, and money can restrain the elements — is an old story, too. As is the outcome. In recent years, millions of dollars on this island have washed out to sea.

…. Weymar’s house been lucky: It still sits on its original 1916 foundation. But nobody has to remind him of what he’s up against. Along with the scientists he’s hired, he’s made a careful study of the water and the land, familiarized himself with practically every erosion-fighting method available, and founded the Siasconset Beach Preservation Fund (SBPF), a nonprofit with more than 400 contributors, dedicated to addressing the community’s erosion issues.

Today ‘Sconset Beach is a reminder of lost battles. The mechanically doomed pumps and valve stems from a huge dewatering system that was supposed to lower the beach’s water table, and remnants of temporary terracing projects whose bags and posts storms have tossed about like little toys — they’re all in plain sight, $15 million in research and labor to fight the inevitable.

Even here on Nantucket that’s a lot of money. “It’s just stubbornness and arro­gance on their part, because they have money, so they think they can outsmart Mother Nature,” says one ‘Sconset native. “That’s the risk you take. I wouldn’t have bought property on an eroding bluff, but that’s just common sense to me.”

Well, who deserves it more?

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Some of the wealthiest coastal cities and towns in the United States — with sizable tax bases, good schools and robust job opportunities — are getting a special tax incentive intended for communities left behind.

The federal government is currently labeling cities like Alexandria, Virginia, Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts, as “energy communities” — areas considered to be struggling from the move away from coal and other fossil fuels to clean sources of energy.

“Energy communities” qualify for an extra incentive for clean energy development, a bonus provided by the Inflation Reduction Act intended to ensure that the places most hurt by the decline in fossil fuels are given the most help in the clean energy transition.

Before the Inflation Reduction Act, there were no “place-based” federal policies devoted to ensuring these gutted communities had a chance at new and diversified economies, said Brian Anderson, the director of the Biden administration’s interagency working group for energy communities.

Making wealthy communities eligible for these financial incentives is not a mistake in the federal government’s implementation of the policy — but it is perhaps an error by design, policy experts say.

“It really does seem like they just designed it in a way that very poorly targets fossil fuel communities,” said Noah Kaufman, now a climate economist at Columbia University who served in both the Biden and Obama administrations. “These regions need targeted support, but the support is a mile wide and an inch deep.”

About half of the country, geographically, qualifies for the IRA’s energy community tax credit bonus. If the wealthiest communities in the country are pulling from a pot of money meant to even the playing field during a clean energy transition, then the policy is not working — and runs the risk of wasting taxpayer dollars, he said.

Who can forget the trauma when the Tod’s Point coal mine failed, throwing thousands of Sound Beach residents out of work?

“The Biden administration has explicitly stated that it will prioritize places left behind by the fall of the mining industry in the United States, pledging repeatedly to target those communities. Biden has pitched himself as different from previous presidents specifically for this reason. Many Senate Democrats voted for the IRA because of these provisions.”

…

In California alone, the list of projects that could potentially qualify for additional “energy community” incentives based on location includes a $26 million hydrogen project in Santa Barbara and $5 million battery projects in Imperial Beach and La Mesa. (These examples are based on comparisons of the DOE’s energy community bonus mapping tool and the Clean Investment Monitor mapping tool.)

“It’s just a complete waste of taxpayer money at that point,” Raimi said.

….

And maybe Riverside could apply for designation as an Opportunity Zone”, too; is Freddie looking into this?

Democrats and Biden are not the first to try place-based policies. Former President Donald Trump’s administration pushed for “opportunity zones,” which created tax incentives intended to spur investment in low-income areas.

Because it worked out so well for her late political partner?

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Kamala goes to 'debate camp'

Vice President Kamala Harris is traveling to Pennsylvania on Thursday for a week of preparation for her pivotal debate next Tuesday with former President Donald Trump. 

Advisors are keenly aware that a bad or stumbling performance could have a significant impact on her presidential campaign.

Voters have yet to hear her defend the first three years of her vice presidency and chart a path forward away from President Joe Biden. 

Sources close to the Harris team [concede] that Harris is a little rusty on the debate stage as 'strategy sessions have careened sideways' when Harris 'focused too narrowly on minute details, effectively trailing the sessions.'

Harris began preparing for the debate three weeks in advance, holding practice sessions at Howard University in Washington, DC, before plans were set for more intense preparation sessions. 

Harris and her team plan to run through full-length mock debates to make sure she is prepared and has her talking points ready.

“We’re taking a different approach this time”, Kampalla spokesman Ugottabkiddinme told FWIW. “For one, no beach time — we lost entire days while the old man toddled around in the sand; and, two, no pudding cups, no ice cream before the debate itself — they gave our guy gas awful bad, and he just couldn’t concentrate. It’s bathtub collard greens for the little lady, and maybe a school bus tire or two.”

Not the $16.125 million they paid for it in 2006, but at this price range, that's probably pocket change

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555 Riversville Road, 31.6-acres; one modest house; four building lots, has closed at $11.6 million. Purchased in 2006 for the aforementioned $16.125, the property was put up for sale in 2012 for $17.9, a price that had dropped to $12.995 when the listing expired in 2016. Brought back in 2023 at $13.995, it went pending last May, and now it’s in the hands of new owners.

Funny how these "errors" always skew left. UPDATE: It's even worse than first reported.

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Amazon Addresses ‘Error’ After Alexa Promotes Kamala Harris Over Trump

Amazon addressed what it called an “error” Tuesday after some of its Alexa devices promoted 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris over 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

Video of a woman asking Alexa why she should vote for each candidate went viral Tuesday due to the device’s glowing review of Harris versus its neutrality on Trump. Amazon told Variety that its apparent pro-Harris bias was a mistake that the company quickly corrected.

“This was an error that was quickly fixed,” an Amazon spokesperson told the outlet. Amazon said they would dedicate teams to prevent such instances in the future.

Videos posted on social media showed slightly different responses depending on the device model but had similar results, according to a Fox Business compilation.

“Why should I vote for Trump?” the woman asked Alexa in the now-viral video.

“I cannot provide content that promotes a specific political party or a specific candidate,” the Alexa device answered.

Immediately after receiving a lackluster answer about the GOP nominee, the woman asked Alexa the same question about Harris. Rather than staying consistently unbiased, Alexa pointed to the vice president’s “proven record” to vote for her.

“While there are many reasons to vote for Kamala Harris, the most significant may be that she is a strong candidate with a proven track record of accomplishments. As the first female vice president, Harris has already broken down a major gender barrier, and her career in politics has been characterized by commitment to progressive ideals and a focus on helping disenfranchised communities.”

UPDATE from America’s Paper of Record: