Month: July 2024

Portugal Diary 4

by philg

Renting a car at the Lisbon airport takes so long that I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone getting off a transatlantic flight. Catch an Uber into Lisbon or Sintra, spend a few nights, and then send one designated victim back to the Lisbon airport to wait in various lines for 1.5 hours (the Sixt folks said that our 1.5-hour wait occurred during a “calm” period and that it could and would get much much worse; a normally polite American grandma described her experience at Hertz on a different day as a “sh*tshow”). After the car is obtained, have the rest of the family or group Uber out to the airport (only about 15 minutes from downtown Lisbon) to meet the designated victim. Some folks waiting in the line to get paperwork and then the line for people who successfully obtained paperwork:

Try to avoid being given a plug-in hybrid. These are impossible to charge in Portugal unless you apply for an EDP account, which is impractical unless you have a Portuguese fiscal number (like our Social Security number), a European bank account with IBAN, a Portuguese phone number, and a few days to wait for various hurdles to be cleared. I never saw a charging station that accepted credit cards. Our plug-in hybrid Mercedes had almost no trunk space due to the big battery that we had no way to charge. It was dragged out from an obscure corner of the garage so covered with dust and dirt that it wasn’t safe to drive (the employees cleaned the windows for us before we left). To add insult to injury, the car failed within 48 hours and then Sixt charged us 61 euros for the tow truck that had to come out (we didn’t buy “roadside assistance” for their defective cars). A little more abuse after we got back to the U.S… Sixt charge us 395 euros for a purported scratch to a wheel (or maybe just a plastic wheel cover; we never figured that out), which included fees for “loss of use” (they already said that the car needed to go to a dealer for battery/computer repairs) and “damage handling fee”. I don’t remember ever scraping a curb (Portuguese curbs are, in general, low and rounded) so I think the root cause of this debacle might be that the car was delivered so dirty it wasn’t possible to see a minor pre-existing scratch.

The car-based portion of our trip began at the Mafra palace, which has its own basilica:

Being royal meant doing a lot of shooting:

It was also possible to read:

They also had a pre-flippers pinball machine and what seems like a precursor to foosball:

Here’s lunch at a restaurant a few steps from the palace:

Next stop was the Buddha Eden garden, previously described, and then Nazaré, Europe’s capital for big wave surfing in the winter. Here’s a view from Sitio de Nazaré, which overlooks the beach and has a nice church and square;

Then it was on to Batalha, home to a UNESCO World Heritage church and monastery. A Portuguese travel agent discouraged us from staying here, but it turned out to be a great base for two nights. We were surprised to learn that the monastery contains Portugal’s tomb of the unknown soldier (the country fought as England’s ally in World War I).

On the way to Grutas de Mira de Aire (limestone caves), we stopped to walk on a Roman road. Note the difference between 1x and 3x on the iPhone (at 1x you can see the Roman wind turbine and the Roman picnic tables):

Fortunately, they’re not afraid to punch up the caves with a bit of color:

On the way back to Batalha, we stopped at Castelo de Porto de Mós:

Then it was back to our AirBnB, which was a tiny but efficient 2BR ($105/night including cleaning):

One thing that we learned is that if you want fast reliable Internet, AirBnB is the best lodging option. The large Portuguese WiFi networks never seemed to be fast or reliable. Free WiFi at the Lisbon airport, for example, never worked at all (two visits a week apart). Hotel Internet was always slower than AirBnB WiFi and also subject to interruptions, dead zones, etc.

The next day, after some tow truck assistance to reset our Mercedes plug-in hybrid’s brain, we drove to Coimbra and Portugal dos Pequenitos, a theme park of miniatures covered in Celebrating Juneteenth here in Portugal. After that, we drove up the hill to the founded-in-1290 university to see the famous library (no photos allowed) and, coincidentally, a lot of graduation celebrations:

Coimbra is a nice town, but the hills make it tough to get around, at least from a Floridian’s perspective.

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What can the mostly peaceful computer users do with AT&T call and text records?

by philg

“AT&T security breach exposes call, text data from almost all customers” (The Hill):

A security breach at AT&T exposed call and text data from nearly all of its customers, the company revealed Friday.

The records of most of AT&T’s cellular customers between May and October 2022, as well as a single day in January 2023, were illegally downloaded from its workspace on a third-party cloud platform, AT&T said.

The question for today is… why bother? I assume that a mostly peaceful download of this nature was done in order to make money, but how does money get made?

Here’s one theory: the information gets sold to our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in India who call us multiple times per day with concerns about our rooftop solar, Medicare, and final expense insurance coverage. With the purloined data, these folks can call us with caller IDs that make it seem as though a friend is calling and, therefore, the spam call is more likely to be answered.

A second theory is that the mostly peaceful Internet users who performed the download can determine which financial institutions an AT&T customer relies on. That will make it easier to call the customer and say “I’m calling from Citibank about your account. Can you please verify your account number…”.

How else can these call/text records be turned into cash?

If not on data security, what’s been the corporate focus for AT&T?

The Pride shirts might be working. AT&T says that it doubled “Percent LGBTQ+ representation in U.S. workforce” between 2018 and 2022 (from 1 percent to 2 percent, so still quite a ways to go considering that 21 percent of American Gen-Z adults identify as LGBT and 7.1 percent of Americans of all ages).

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When will we feel safe enough to remove our coronapanic signs?

by philg

For those who are logically consistent, coronapanic hasn’t ended. This follower of Science in New York begged people to protect his 2-year-old from a disease that kills 82-year-olds (tweet deleted, sadly):

and then he repeated his plea just a few weeks ago in a now-deleted tweet. I admire people like this hero because SARS-CoV-2 is still with us, still mutating, and still killing humans. Anders Tegnell pointed out in February 2020 that the rational approach to COVID-19 was change your life in ways that you’d be willing to continue forever because, as with influenza, that’s how long SARS-CoV-2 would be with us. If a New York progressive masked his/her/zir/their 2-year-old in 2020, therefore, he/she/ze/they should still be masking 2-year-olds here in Year 5 of coronapanic.

Another New Yorker who has spent more than four years terrified of a respiratory virus but hasn’t taken the seemingly obvious self-help step of moving out of one of the world’s most crowded environments:

If he/she/ze/they doesn’t want to get sick, why isn’t he/she/ze/they living in a suburb, having groceries delivered by the Latinx essential workers, and Zooming into work? (note also the two people in the background who are afraid enough of SARS-CoV-2 to wear a 30-cent mask, but not afraid enough to refrain from riding the NYC subway system)

Here’s another example of critical thinking, this time from San Francisco:

Most people, however, aren’t rational. Those who disinfected the grocery bags that Latinx essential workers dropped off at their suburban mansions switched to hosting sleepovers for their tweenagers just as soon as everyone had been stuck with what turned out to be a not-very-effective vaccine. Now that hardly anyone is continuing with the behaviors that Fauci promised would preserve them from COVID-19, when do the Faucism signs come down?

From my hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, May 2024, and an adjacent shop:

(The only rational approach to fighting a virus that kills the obese is to be careful in elevators while on the way to a donuts-and-alcohol breakfast.)

From a Marriott in El Paso, Texas, April 2024:

This seems to be an international phenomenon. Portugal went all-in on Faucism (mask orders, 100% vaccine coverage (NYT), etc.) and was rewarded with a 7 percent excess death rate (compare to 6 percent in do-almost-nothing Sweden).

Heading into the rental car center at LIS to pick up the 2024 Mercedes plug-in hybrid diesel that would fail completely after 48 hours:

It was “mandatory” to wear a mask, but the customers crammed together in 45-minute lines (Line 1 to get paperwork and Line 2 to pick up the car; allow 1.5 hours total in the summer regardless of rental company) weren’t wearing masks and neither were any of the employees.

Here’s a hotel in Campo do Gerês, a small town in the mountains where I never saw anyone wear a mask:

Here’s the Jewish Museum in Belmonte (wall and floor signs plus a remarkably succinct history of the Jews):

At a rich guy’s house-turned-museum in Lisbon, a sign celebrating “compliance”:

In Santiago de Compostela, Spain, cathedral museum:

Also in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, a store selling lottery tickets posts on the front window what seems to be an official sign from the state lottery:

In Pontevedra, Spain, the famous church ruins tell visitors to wear a mask and stay 2 meters apart (note also that the church is ruined and has been replaced by what I think translates to “Galicia with Palestine”):

Back in Braga, Portugal, a hotel/restaurant warns customers about the “new” coronavirus:

On landing in Newark, New Jersey:

Are the signs being left up in case mask orders return? People will add Post-Its to the old signs reading “now we actually mean it”?

Related:

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Which mapping app can avoid narrow roads in Europe? And which can provide walking directions that avoid dangerous neighborhoods in the U.S.?

by philg

We used Google Maps in Portugal. It made quite a few absurdly bad routing decisions. To save a theoretical minute or two it would send our Mercedes E class sedan down roads narrower than a North Carolina dentist’s driveway. We were constantly terrified that a car would appear coming the opposite direction and that we’d be forced to stop suddenly and then back up to a rare section wide enough for two cars to pass. When shown these routes, the locals said that they would never drive along those roads for transportation despite most of them having narrower cars and better driving skills than a Floridian lulled into complacency by textbook highway engineering. Below is a segment from a suggested Google Maps route for our rental car (#2 after the first E class melted down). I don’t think that our Sixt rental agreement says anything about driving up or down stairs, but the road was definitely narrower than the car:

Where was this road, you might ask? In one of my favorite towns in Portugal: Covide!

Is there a mapping app that is smarter about getting around Europe without scraping?

Related question for the U.S.: is there an app that will calculate walking directions to avoid dangerous neighborhoods? Or calculate directions and score the walk with a danger level? This tweet from a former Googler suggests that Google will never do it:

(His/her/zir/their reasoning is that sending pedestrians via a scenic route will lead to “spatial inequality” because the nicer areas tend to be richer.)

WalkSafe seems to have the crime rate information, but I’m not sure that it will provide turn-by-turn directions to a pedestrian.

Here’s a street in front of an AirBnB that we rented in Amarante, Portugal (very pleasant town!):

(The host said to navigate to a nearby parking lot and walk the rest of the way.)

I don’t have a good illustration of a crime-ridden street in Portugal because the country is one of the safest in the world and every tourist attraction seems to be in a safe area.

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Portugal Trip Diary 3

by philg

Wrapping up some of the sights of Lisbon…

We happened to be there on the evening of June 12, i.e., the night before the Festas de Santo António, patron saint of the city and of marriages. A massive parade assembles on the main avenue around 8 pm and goes until after midnight. Here is a smartphone video of one group:

It’s a respectful peaceful crowd (not “mostly peaceful”, American-style!) and if you’re 6′ tall you can get a decent view without paying for a seat in the grandstands, but you’d probably want to buy a ticket if you were serious about watching the entire event.

We hit our third botanical garden of the trip, this one right in the middle of the city: Estufa Fria. The main section is a “lath house” that enables shade-and-water-loving plants to thrive in Lisbon’s sunny dry climate. These would be great for people with big Florida back yards, though making them strong enough to get through hurricanes is likely a challenge.

After strolling through Lisbon’s monthlong book fair…

… the next stop was the Calouste Gulbenkian museum, left behind by the guy who sowed the seeds for a lot of wars by setting up what became the Arab oil industry.

After that, we went to the bullfighting ring, which wasn’t too exciting because the museum listed in Google Maps no longer exists, the ring itself can’t be seen except during bullfights, and the underground shopping mall isn’t too exciting.

Next stop: the most expensive grocery store in Portugal, which is inside the Spanish department store El Corte Inglés. One could very happily live inside this department store, which features a variety of restaurants on the top floor, many with outdoor terrace seating. I paid about $5 for a sandwich, coffee, and mineral water at the most basic of these restaurants (advertised as a “cafeteria” but you sit down and a waitress takes the order and brings the food and drink to your table).

Even when you try to waste money on groceries in Portugal, the final bill always seems to be half of what you’d expect to pay at Whole Foods back in Palm Beach County. Below are some priced items. Note that gourmet-ish coffee is about $5 for 220g (7.7 ounces).

Not everything in the store was a bargain. Here’s a 600-euro toaster:

For the Formula 1 fans, a 5000-euro Bluetooth speaker that weighs less than 10 lbs.:

I would rather have this 700-euro Sony MHC-V73D that looks like a Lost in Space robot and surely can provide much richer sound:

I checked out the specs and it looks as though this 47 lb. splash-proof (vomit-proof?) device is intended for parties and also can support karaoke.

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84-year-old Nancy Pelosi says that 81 is too old to be a government worker

by philg

“Pelosi Suggests That Biden Should Reconsider Decision to Stay in the Race” (New York Times):

Representative Nancy Pelosi, a longtime Biden ally and the former speaker, is the most senior member of his party who has so far suggested he consider dropping out.

Ms. Pelosi, 84, a longtime ally of the 81-year-old Mr. Biden and one of the most seasoned and cutthroat politicians in the House, has been more aggressive in her public comments about the president’s candidacy than other party leaders, who have publicly stated only that they remain behind him.

The 84-year-old is “seasoned” and “aggressive” (like Mindy the Crippler, our golden retriever?) while the 81-year-old is too old to work for the federal government.

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Gaza: 50,000 pregnant women in October 2023 and 50,000 babies born since October 2023

by philg

From the United Nations, October 17, 2023:

UNFPA estimates there are 540,000 women of reproductive age living in Gaza, among whom 50,000 are currently pregnant, and 5,500 are expected to deliver in the next month.

From the United Nations, July 9, 2024:

We are informed that there has been a “genocide” in Gaza and also that approximately 50,000 pregnancies from October turned into approximately 50,000 babies.

In case the above tweet disappears into a memory hole:

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New York Times investigative team digs up the truth about the world’s largest rocket

by philg

Frontiers of Journalism: “Wildlife Protections Take a Back Seat to SpaceX’s Ambitions”.

A New York Times investigation found that Elon Musk exploited federal agencies’ competing missions to achieve his goals for space travel.

The investigative team first figured out that blasting off the world’s largest rocket can be disturbing or harmful to nearby animals:

As Elon Musk’s Starship — the largest rocket ever manufactured — successfully blasted toward the sky last month, the launch was hailed as a giant leap for SpaceX and the United States’ civilian space program.

Two hours later, once conditions were deemed safe, a team from SpaceX, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and a conservation group began canvassing the fragile migratory bird habitat surrounding the launch site.

The impact was obvious.

The launch had unleashed an enormous burst of mud, stones and fiery debris across the public lands encircling Mr. Musk’s $3 billion space compound. Chunks of sheet metal and insulation were strewn across the sand flats on one side of a state park. Elsewhere, a small fire had ignited, leaving a charred patch of park grasslands — remnants from the blastoff that burned 7.5 million pounds of fuel.

Most disturbing to one member of the entourage was the yellow smear on the soil in the same spot that a bird’s nest lay the day before. None of the nine nests recorded by the nonprofit Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program before the launch had survived intact.

Based on the 2000′ scale, it looks like SpaceX has trashed or burned roughly one square mile of land in Elon’s Fool’s Errand to Mars (TM). That leaves only 268,820 square miles of Texas that SpaceX hasn’t trashed or burned (more like 261,193 square miles if one counts only the land area).

(Note that the launch operations at Cape Canaveral have been tremendously beneficial to wildlife because they’ve prevented humans from developing the areas near the pads. Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge was set up in 1963 in tandem with the launch pads. If you do a tour of the Kennedy Space Center the density of birds, gators, etc. is similar to what you find in Everglades National Park. I’m confused as to how the area escaped intensive development prior to NASA’s arrival. Wikipedia provides only a bit of history.)

SpaceX did respond to the article…

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Will American college students give up alcohol, pet dogs, and skimpy clothing in order to welcome Gazans?

by philg

One common demand from the encamped righteous has been that colleges bring in more students from “Palestine” (example in Oregon; state-sponsored NPR gives us an example from New Jersey). If we look at photos from Gaza, however, we don’t see people who dress and act like American college students. Nobody is drinking alcohol. Nobody has a pet dog (“Islam forbids Muslims to keep dogs,”). Females don’t go out without being well covered in hijab and long dress (to do otherwise would be to dress like a prostitute (BBC)). Here’s an example from UNRWA (they provided 3 million medical consultations to 2.3 million Gazans during 6 months of war, which means that it is easier to get in to see a doctor in Gaza during wartime than in the U.S. during peacetime):

Lets have a look at the encampments. Here’s one at the University of Coimbra, founded in 1290:

There were about 10 protesters (out of 25,000 students total at Portugal’s oldest university) and at least two of them had pet dogs. In the photo above, a dog is not only kept as a pet, contrary to Islam, but is allowed to walk on the sacred Palestinian flag.

Here’s the encampment at Brown:

Instead of hijabs, students who appear to identify as “female” are wearing halter tops, showing cleavage, etc.

How are students from Gaza supposed to feel welcome in this debauched environment? Shouldn’t the pro-Hamas college students demand that administrations ban alcohol (including for those over 21, e.g., at faculty and alumni events), ban immodest dress, and ban dogs from their campuses?

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How does the EU stay together when France and the eastern nations have such different goals?

by philg

France, the second largest economy in the EU, has voted for central planning and to maximize low-skill immigration (the glass ceiling for female leaders that Marine Le Pen hoped to shatter was apparently made from Florida-style hurricane laminates). That’s the right of voters in a democracy (maybe we’ll see the same thing here in November), but it seems confusing that France can be part of the same political entity, with a lot of share policy, as the eastern European nations whose citizens prefer a market economy and to exclude low-skill immigrants (short of a cataclysmic war, the biggest imaginable transformational force for any country).

How can a Eurocrat in Brussels set a policy that will be accepted by both Estonia and France, for example?

From the Iranians: “During the victory rally of the left coalition in the French parliamentary elections’ second round on Sunday evening, supporters of the left coalition and social democrats held more Palestinian flags than French flags.”

As a Muslim nation (as measured by number of hours devoted to religious observance) and one with a highly centralized and powerful government, maybe France would fit better into the Arab League? Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya was in the Arab League and implemented an Arab-Islamic Socialism.

Note that Science proves that what France needs is a larger role for government in its economy and more low-skill immigration. “Scientists relieved by far-right defeat in French election” (Nature magazine):

RN had been tipped to achieve a majority after winning the first round of voting on 30 June, and scientists feared that this could spell cuts for research budgets, restrictions on immigration and the introduction of broad climate scepticism into France’s lower house of parliament, the National Assembly.

Here are immigrant Scientists learning French back in 2018 (arabnews.com):

Why do they need to learn French if English is the international language of Science? “‘At least half of Paris crime is committed by foreigners,” said Macron (Le Monde), but it is unclear if he meant PhD biologists were perpetrating crime or PhD chemists.

Related (all from France’s “greatest living writer”):

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