If you are taking a trip, don’t announce your travel plans on social media websites. There are professional house burglars who look for such announcements, and they have computer programs to help them find them. It is much safer to discuss your trip after you return home. I have written about this several times before, but I keep seeing travel announcements from people I know on internet sites, websites that anyone can access. It is equally dangerous to post photos that you take as you travel. If a burglar sees a Facebook post with a photo that you just took of the Eiffel Tower, then he knows you are not at home. – unless, of course, if you live in Paris. Curb your enthusiasm to tell people about your trip or show them the photos you took until you get back home and mention the fact that you are back home in your post.

A CITY OF RICH AND POOR.

When I came to Berkeley in 1972, most of the houses in this city were owned and occupied by middle-class working people. My neighbor on one side of my house was a mailman and his family. My neighbor on the other side was a man who owned his own taxicab. People like that can’t buy houses in Berkeley anymore. Berkeley has reverted from a working-class city to a place more like medieval Europe, where the land was owned by rich people, and most of the rest of the population were tenants. Today, if you own a house in Berkeley, you’re probably a millionaire, at least on paper. The average house in Berkeley sells for over a million dollars, and the big new buildings popping up all over town are all apartments. None of them are condos. The people living in them will never be able to move up to a bigger, better house because they will never have any equity. Whatever increase in value the building has will go to the real estate investment trusts and rich individuals who own them.

HOME OWNERSHIP IS BECOMING MORE ELUSIVE EVERYWHERE IN THE U.S.

This isn’t just going on in Berkeley and other California coastal cities. The ability of working people to buy a home, a first home, has been gradually slipping away for over 60 years. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1960, the average house in the United States sold for $11,900 while the median family income was $5,600. In other words, the price-to-income ratio was about 2 to 1. However, in 2020, 60 years later, the average house in America sold for $240,000 and the average family income was $69,000, a ratio of 3.5 to 1. This didn’t happen all at once. The home affordability ratio has been getting worse for Americans every year for over 60 years. In 1960, 68 out of every 100 American families could afford to buy a house. Today, it’s just 43 out of 100.

THE PAIN OF THE WORKING CLASS.

I believe the rise of political extremism in America today is the result of the economic pain of the working-class.  Young adults are more deeply in debt than their parents were at their age – and they know it. They have more student and personal debt than their parents, and their odds of ever owning their own home get less likely every year – and they know it. A lot of Americans are economically desperate, which explains the rise of demagogues, politicians who demonize unpopular minorities and offer quick and easy solutions to complex problems. Beware! History tells us that desperate people turn to desperate solutions, and that usually doesn’t work out well for that society or the world around them.

PAYING FOR COLLEGE.

Besides home ownership, the ability of working-class Americans to pay for college is also slipping away. When I went to college in the 1960s, it was possible for college students to work their way through college, but I don’t hear undergraduate students using that expression anymore – ‘working my way through college.’ The cost of going to college and student debt have both been rising faster than inflation since the 1960s.. In just the past 15 years, student debt in the U.S. has tripled.

Chocolate Chip Cookies. I went to the University of Maryland. I knew a girl in my dorm complex who paid for her college education by making chocolate chip cookies. She made them in her dorm in a convection oven. She left the door and window of her room open when she was baking cookies, and she had a fan that blew the aroma of the chocolate chip cookies up and down the hall. It was diabolical! Students lined up outside her room to buy cookies every night. She told me that she made enough money selling cookies to pay for her college education.

Sandwiches. I did something similar. I paid for college by making and selling sandwiches in my dorm at night. From 7PM to 9PM, I sold cold cut subs in my dorm’s common room. That is how I paid for education. It was possible to pay for college back then doing things like this, but what about now? Could a college student today pay for college, including rent, food, and books by selling cookies or subs?

DON’T PAY FOR GOOGLE STORAGE.

Are you paying Google for storage space? Google gives you 15GB of free storage space. If you have had a Gmail account for a long time, you may have been getting messages from them that you are almost out of storage space and that if you want more storage space, you will have to pay them monthly for it. Most people really don’t need more than 15GB of storage space. If you are running out of Google storage space, it is probably because you are storing a lot of email attachments and other stuff that you neither need nor want. Here’s an easy way to get rid of unwanted email attachments, which for most people is the main problem.This is actually very easy to do, and you’ll save money too!

1.  First, do this job on your desktop computer, not your cell phone or iPad. You will have an easier time viewing and managing the information.

2.  Open your Gmail account.

3.  To see all the emails that have attachments, go to the ‘search mail’ bar at the top of the page and type “has:attachment”. Don’t include my quotation makers. You will see a list of all your emails that they are storing that have attachments.

4.  The older an email, the less likely it is that you will want to save either the email or the attachment. 

5.  To see emails with attachments that are over a year old first, go to the box marked “Any time” and click “Older than a year.”

6.  To see your very oldest emails with attachments first, click “advanced search” after you have done Step #5 above.

7.  Go to the line “change the date” and change the year to one closer to when you opened your Gmail account.

Don’t try to delete all your unwanted emails with attachments at once. Google could be storing hundreds or even thousands of unwanted attachments for you. But if you delete 10 or 20 of them at a time, eventually the notice from Google that you are running out of free storage space will disappear.

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