Author: philg

Lack of an AI chatbot inside Audible shows that Amazon thinks that running an AI is stupid/unprofitable?

by philg

Amazon is one of the world’s savviest companies and has a sharp eye for what is sustainably profitable. Amazon owns Audible, the audiobook company.

An obvious use case for an AI chatbot is to listen to the listener and be prepared to pause the audiobook and answer questions about the material, about what happened or was said in an earlier chapter, etc. This doesn’t exist inside Audible, however, which leads me to conclude that Amazon has determined that it is impossible to make money by offering an AI chatbot.

(Why can’t the listener use his/her/zir/their phone’s built-in AI services to interrupt Audible and answer questions? Whatever chatbot is behind the phone’s Siri or similar isn’t necessarily preloaded with the complete contents of whatever book the phone owner is listening to, doesn’t immediately have access to context such as what sentence was most recently played, etc. So it would take a lot of permissions and extra programming for the phone to answer “Where is that?” after a place name was mentioned in the book.)

If we assume that Amazon is the smart money, does that mean OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI, Meta, and their respective investors are the dumb money?

Speaking of Meta, who has tried their Muse AI app on a phone? A friend in San Francisco told me to try it. Initial results haven’t been promising. It asked for access to Gmail and Google Calendar and then, asked about important events in the upcoming week, it completely failed to understand that some events on my calendar are almost sure to be handled by other family members, e.g., a dental appointment for another adult member of the household that was added to the shared calendar by said adult member.

Wall Street Journal:

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Sell replica aviation crash axes for kids dressing up as Hamam al-Hammami?

by philg

Hamam al-Hammami, a mostly peaceful Omani, apparently attacked his FlyDubai captain with the standard crash axe that is part of the cockpit gear (flight attendants may have one too, at least on larger planes; unclear how the passengers are prevented from getting hold of that one since it needs to be available quickly in an emergency).

“Airline pilot” is a fairly standard Halloween costume. Via the addition of a crash axe, a child can become a warrior against colonialism and genocide as well. On the other hand, inexpensive as a Gemtor D56 might be, it is probably not wise to send the 8-year-old out into the neighborhood with one. I found this plastic training version online:

How much would it cost to 3D print something like this? ChatGPT gives a range:

Separately, Hamam al-Hammami finally answered the question that I wondered about in 2008 when TSA would hassle me for having a couple of coins left in a pocket and setting off the metal detector. “Any pilot could just reach for the crash axe so what difference does it make if he or she brings a tiny amount of metal on board? Given aggressive intent, you’d never use a Swiss Army knife if a crash axe were available.”

Who else has been in the news lately who might be a good inspiration for a Halloween costume?

Separately, who has good ideas for regional candies to hand out for Halloween? I don’t want to be boring and get the same Costco assortments that everyone else gets. It would be fun to give out a candy that is not available in Florida at all. We expect 500 to 1,000 children because our next-door neighbor is an insanely skilled Detroit automaker senior engineer who creates a Las Vegas-quality pirate environment, complete with animatronics.

Here are some ideas from ChatGPT:

ChatGPT estimates that full-size candy bars, which some neighbors do distribute, are $1.15 each while the Costco “fun-sized” chocolate assortment works out to about 14 cents per bar.

Let’s close by looking at Hamam al-Hammami’s plan:

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American Muscle Car Museum in Melbourne, Florida (Paging Bernie and AOC)

by philg

The American Muscle Car Museum in Melbourne, Florida is open to the public only on rare occasions. October 3, 2026 was a car show and fundraiser for the Lion’s Club and the rabble were admitted for $30 per adult (our kids got in free). It’s an amazing collection that cries out for an intervention by our political thought-leaders. Mark Pieloch, a dog pharma and supplement flavoring tycoon, decided that he needed to own about 30 Ford GTs, nearly all of them from the two modern reboot (of the GT40) generations and nearly all of them with less than 30 miles on the odometer. (Note that I don’t think it is reasonable to call the Ford GT a “Ford”. They’ve been produced by contract manufacturers, e.g., Mayflower Vehicle Systems and Multimatic. Contrast to the Corvette ZR1X, an insanely powerful machine that is built in a regular GM factory that also makes the humbler versions of the Corvette (even the humblest version is “insanely powerful”, though, when you consider realistic public road situations).)

Here’s the first room. The 2020 Ford GT in the foreground has 24 miles on the clock. A 1966 GT40 rotates on the turntable in the center of the modern GTs. A museum employee said that it had cost $9 million.

Just one ring of recent GTs, then? No. There are a couple of additional rows of them, e.g.,

Viewed from the other side of the room:

We’re talking about a Gulfstream G700 hangar, essentially, entirely filled with the latest generation of Ford GTs, nearly all of which have never been driven. Is that collecting or hoarding? Either way, I feel that it is time for Bernie and AOC to step in. Just as Bernie reminds us that nobody needs more than three houses, I think that we can all agree that nobody needs more than 3 pristine never-driven modern Ford GTs. One never-driven GT is a sculpture. Two more could be backups. But the 4th one? That’s intolerable inequality and, dare I say it, billionaire greed!

If we walk deeper into the museum, we find an entire row of the 2005ish GTs:

Directly across the aisle, a 2015 Porsche 918 Spyder. The window sticker is still stuck: $915,000 (in pre-Biden dollars!). How much practical value has been delivered by this machine? 32 miles worth. (ChatGPT says that Car and Driver got better numbers out of the Porsche 918 than they did out of the 2017-2022 Ford GTs, which sold for substantially less.)

That’s a G-Wagen in the back. Here’s some Gemini output that makes me wonder what Google has been feeding its AI:

In Palm Beach, Mercedes-Benz G-Wagons function like a chronological alimony registry. You can pinpoint exactly when a settlement was finalized based on the specific body style and dashboard layout of the G-Class she is driving:

Speaking of German stuff, Mark Pieloch was an avid Porsche collector as well. He has about 10 Porsche-brand diesel tractors:

Imagine telling someone “I’ll pick you up in my Porsche” and then showing up with one of these tractors! They’re not unreasonably expensive:

Here’s one that Grok says might be worth $5 million, though, a 1959 718 RSK Werks Spyder that was raced:

Just how big is the second room?

There are some additional hangars full of cars, but they’re not regularly open to the rabble.

Corvettes are reasonably well-represented, though I don’t remember seeing any C7s. Almost every conceivable Ford Mustang is displayed.

Here’s a wood-paneled 1957 Ford Country Squire:

Another wagon that, if retrofitted with A/C, would be awesome to own:

The perfect pace car for Elvis:

How was the car show? Pretty good and a reasonable turnout despite the fact that it has been an unusually wet September and October in Florida despite a complete absence of hurricanes from the North Atlantic. Free and dog-friendly. Here’s another dream station wagon:

If you love cars, I recommend finding one of the special events and going. Based on the museum’s Form 990, it seems that all of the money paid goes to whatever group is supposed to benefit. Grok says that the cars and the real estate are owned by Mark Pieloch individually so it isn’t a tax-avoidance vehicle (so to speak) as you might expect. Grok even found the records for the real estate:

Brevard’s parcel record for 3500 Sarno Road lists the owner as PIELOCH, MARK J, mailing address a Melbourne post office box. The use code is a privately owned tourist attraction, the buildings date to 2016, and the 2026 value is about $18.1 million. A 2025 tax bill on that parcel is on the order of $320,000, which is what you pay when the property is not under a charitable exemption.

Unlike, for example, the Gates Foundation and Bill Gates, Mark Pieloch is apparently paying more than his fair share of tax rather than burdening those who’ve been less successful with the chore of funding government.

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The DEI Nobel Prize in Literature

by philg

Anne Carson, a writer from the Islamic Republic of Canada who identifies as “female”, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. NYT (has anyone reading this ever heard of her or read anything by her?):

Buried within the article:

In recent years, the Swedish Academy has tried to expand the diversity of laureates after criticism that too many past recipients have been men. Since 2018, the academy has alternated between male and female laureates. Given that last year’s prize went to the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, critics had expected this year’s accolade to go to a woman.

Given that Science recognizes at least 74 gender IDs, how is it fair to alternate between just two?

I usually try to read at least one book by every Nobel winner, but “poet” is a big ask! Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse seems to be her most popular original work. Some of the Amazon reviews from before she was anointed aren’t too encouraging, even if you’re in the market for a queer reimagining of a Greek myth (the Greeks themselves weren’t queer enough?):

2023: I’m a huge fan of Anne Carson’s translation work and was so excited to read a queer reimagining of a Greek myth. This was a disappointment. … the setting was an unexplained mish mash of modern and mythological places which left me confused and unable to immerse myself. The characters were paper thin. … the prose while beautiful is unbelievably pretentious. I think I will stick to her translation work.

2021: it just looks like a jumbled mess and you kind of get the idea that it’s popular because to say otherwise might be perceived as lacking refined taste…but the reality is that it’s just not very good. That’s this book. Which is a shame because I really wanted to like it.

2016: I was bored and more bored.

2014: My reactions upon finishing were: slapdash, sloppy, pretentious, and a waste of time. Then I read some reviews and wondered how in the world this book gained such positive reviews, or for that matter even a publisher. … The amount of material in this tome that is superfluous, loose-ended, confusing and annoying far outweighs any attempts to play with old Greek mythology and mix it with contemporary culture.

2013: Pedantic and Overrated. … Even if you didn’t know that Carson had studied ancient Greek history and literature, she flaunts it in the very first pages of the book which is structured in 3 parts as follows: … Now, call me old-fashioned, but to me a poem must have rhythm and music. Carson’s prose doesn’t!! Therefore, I don’t consider it, and I don’t read it as poem.

That first review does raise the question of DEI. The committee alternates between authors whom they perceive to be men and women. Shouldn’t they also try to include authors who are members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community for at least half of the prizes?

Separately, it seems that Anne Carson was a professor at Princeton back in the 1980s and denied tenure (i.e., “fired”; NYT). Thus we’re reminded of the poet who explained the difference between an ape and a tenured professor of English: “The ape doesn’t think that he can write.”

In other Nobel news, a 95-year-old has won the Nobel in chemistry… “French Holocaust survivor wins 2026 Nobel Prize for Chemistry”:

A Holocaust survivor whose family escaped the Nazis by hiding in a French village under assumed names has been announced as one of two winners of the 2026 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

Henri B. Kagan, who was born in France in 1930, was chosen as a Nobel Laureate alongside Kenso Soai, for their groundbreaking work in the field of pharmaceutical engineering. Conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, their respective research helped solve the problem of how to create a single molecular mirror image.

After the war, Kagan went on to receive a PhD from the Collège de France, and then went on to become a professor at what was then Université Paris-Sud, France.

I think this proves some of Brian Keating’s points in Losing the Nobel Prize and Losing the Nobel Prize: on careers in science and Who earned an old-style Nobel Prize in 2019? Trailblazing female engineer Marconi won a physics prize in 1909 for her work in radio, which was still ongoing, just 6 years after achieving practical transatlantic communication. Kagan won for work done 40 years ago. I’m sure that he deserves to be recognized, but what practical effect will the award have on someone who switched to emeritus in 1999? He did write the foreword for a book published in 2008, Amino Acids and the Asymmetry of Life:

(One consequence of Prof. Kagan’s long life is that he was able to personally experience both the German-influenced period of French Jew-hatred (1940s) and the Islamic-influenced period of French Jew-hatred (today, when around 23% of the “French” are immigrants or children of immigrants.)

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The sea-level glass pavilion in Miami where elite sea level and hurricane alarmists will take shelter

by philg

Department of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up… Carnegie-Mellon has released renderings of its new home in Miami. It’s a massive sea-level almost-all-glass pavilion that will generate a ton of CO2 every minute (for A/C):

For 20 years CMU’s Nobel-winning Climate Doomers told us that hurricanes of never-before-experienced intensity would be ravaging Miami at least once per year. If forced to move to the Hurricane Belt, you’d expect the elites of Pittsburgh to build themselves something like the German U-boat base in Saint-Nazaire (26-foot-thick roof). What do we see instead? The folks who said that everyone in Miami was going to be killed by hurricanes or driven out by rising seas are going to park themselves inside a literal glass house (at sea level, of course!).

What would a structure in South Florida built by people who took their own predictions seriously look like?

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Bill Burr on Ron DeSantis’s inadequate level of coronapanic (5th anniversary)

by philg

Five years ago: “Bill Burr Tears Into Florida Governor: ‘Fking Piece Of St Politicians’” (HuffPost)

Comedian Bill Burr tore into Florida Governor Ron De Santis on his podcast, slamming the Republican for banning mask mandates as his own state becomes the epicenter of the highly transmissible Delta variant of Covid-19.

“The amount of people who not only don’t even own a microscope or even have a pair of scrubs – you know, unless they went to some Halloween party – who are literally questioning doctors. It’s just – at this point it’s just hilarious,” Burr said in the programme released on Monday.

Donald Trump apologist DeSantis last month issued an executive order aimed at banning schools in the state from mandating the use of masks to curb the spread of Covid-19.

This is a news, not an opinion, piece and it was apparently a proven fact that Ron DeSantis work in Congress and then as governor of Florida could be fairly summarized as “Trump apologist”.

What was the correlation between governor-imposed restrictions and age-adjusted death rates? “In the end, some states that adopted dramatically divergent policies had comparable outcomes (Florida and California, for example).” (December 2022 Bioinformatics CRO, which does seem to show a correlation with pre-existing health conditions and COVID-19 death rate (see Mississippi, for example)).

Separately, here’s a timeless lecture from Bill Burr, whose COVID-19 scholarship was still some years in the future:

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Three years of active war in Gaza prove Florence Nightingale’s theory that humanitarian aid encourages and prolongs war

by philg

It’s the third anniversary of the peaceful unarmed Gazans’ attack on “the Zionist entity” (Gazans don’t recognize the existence or legitimacy of a state of Israel). The Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) refuses to disarm (BBC; this makes sense since we’re informed that Gazans were never armed) and continues to fight despite having suffered some apparent losses.

From Florence Nightingale opposed the Red Cross (2010):

… she rejected the idea of the Red Cross from the outset. “I think its views most absurd just such as would originate in a little state like Geneva, which can never see war,” she said. … How could anyone who sought to reduce human suffering want to make war less costly? By easing the burden on war ministries, Nightingale argued, volunteer efforts could simply make waging war more attractive, and more probable.

Without humanitarian aid, eventually one side in a war has to surrender and make the best terms that it can for peace. People have to go back to work or they’ll starve and be unable to feed their children (the latter consideration is especially important for Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian”; they have very nearly the world’s highest population growth rate (even in Gaza right now)). With UNRWA, World Central Kitchen, Doctors Without Borders, etc., however, Gazans can stay at war indefinitely and they seem to know it. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been an updated poll asking the same questions, but Ramallah-based AWRAD polled Gazans in the fall of 2023 and they were supportive of their October 7 attack and of Hamas and Palestinian Jihad. From International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (and a poll result):

The Gazans’ plan was to fight until total victory (“A Palestinian state from the river to the sea”) was achieved:

The new state would be ruled by Hamas and/or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, based on the poll results for which parties were most popular in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas had 75% support and PIJ had 85%.

Israel has fought this war in a radically different way than what the U.S., U.K., and Russians did to win World War II, even though a smaller percentage of Germans and Japanese supported their respective governments than the percentage of Gazans who say that they support Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The US-/UK- approach would have been to drop bombs until the Gazans surrendered. The Russian approach would have been to fire artillery shells until the Gazans surrendered. The Israelis instead sent infantry in to sort through Gazans one by one, kept the aid flowing so that the Gazans could stay at war, and tried to engineer a built environment that would allow the Gazans to stay at war with the Zionist entity for another 78 years but not be able to accomplish another October 7-style attack (tunnels mostly destroyed; significant buffer zone along the border). The Gazans haven’t launched a rocket at Israeli civilians for an entire year so maybe this is working, at least in the short run. However, it is unclear that a drawn-out war is actually better for Gazans than a one-month much more intense war would have been. On the one hand, the Gazans happiest day ever was October 7, 2023 (video of ecstatic Gazans celebrating). On the other hand, there are at least some Gazans capable of productive work and a hot war followed be a true peace would enable them to go to work.

Where else are we seeing humanitarian aid and apparently endless war? Yemen. Foreign do-gooders, including the UN, dump food in and the result is that Yemenis can spend all of their time and energy fighting each other.

Related, the peaceful Gazans killed more than 40 Thai Buddhists on October 7, 2023 and then held more than 30 hostage, some for roughly 500 days. If the hot war had been shorter, the Thais could have gone home sooner. BBC:

(It’s interesting that no Gazan “civilian” ever helped a hostage escape, not even a non-Jew such as the above-referenced Thais. All over Europe during the Holocaust there were Christians, including in Germany itself, who helped Jews hide and/or escape. Gazans, however, appear to have been 100% united in their fight against Israeli civilians and, even, Thai Buddhists. Perhaps some of that unity is cracking now, however. Various Hamas affiliates seem to be getting killed as they walk around Gaza. I don’t see how it would be possible for the Zionist entity to kill these folks without at least some snitches on the inside.)

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Elon Musk has made all of the world’s yachts more valuable

by philg

Last month, I attended a birthday party for a yacht broker. His co-workers said that business was booming for all sizes of boats (though maybe they don’t deal with anything smaller than 35′? 70-125′ seems to be their bread and butter). “In the old days we could have just closed the office in August, but the phone never stops ringing.” What’s changed? “Boat buyers are richer and younger,” was the answer. “They’re taking much longer trips and want bigger more capable boats for those trips. Starlink has been the catalyst. It makes a tremendous difference, especially, for the crew, and has made people more willing to work the longer voyages. The owners can still work, no matter how long the trip.” How does Starlink compare to the previous generation of satellite-based Internet for yachts? “It’s 100 times faster,” a broker said, “a total game-changer for both speed and reliability.”

Speaking of reliability, it seems that the mid-priced yachts ($10-25 million) either have two independent Starlink subscriptions and receivers or, in some cases, two antennae and a single receiver that is smart about which one to use (“diversity is our strength” in the RF world). “You need the second antenna,” the brokers explained, “because sometimes the line of sight to the satellite is block by a mast.”

What I can’t figure out is where these additional/bigger yachts are parking. The world was already short of slips before the cash showers of government coronapanic programs and, more recently, AI. “They keep building marinas here in South Florida,” said a broker.

Its infrastructure fund went from owning zero marinas in 2024 to roughly 200 marinas today — more than anyone in the world.

The company paid $5.6 billion in early 2025 for Safe Harbor, which at the time owned and operated 138 marinas in the United States and Puerto Rico, including dozens of marinas from Maryland to Maine as well as the Caribbean’s largest in Fajardo, P.R. It also runs nine marinas on the Mediterranean, catering to large yachts in places like St. Tropez, Antibes and Monaco.

What’s going on locally? An $80 million revamp of a marina just south of Abacoa:

The facility will feature two five-story indoor storage buildings with 427 enclosed dry storage slips and 20 wet slips.

Someone with $80 million to invest didn’t get the climate change memo? The buildings are designed to handle 180 mph hurricane winds (the last hurricane to make landfall in Palm Beach County in a “major” category (= 3) was in 1949). But they’ll be worthless if sea level rise happens as promised by the Climate Doomers.

How much does a true “yacht” cost an Nvidia receptionist? A Turkish-built 125′ Hargrave, which ChatGPT says is mid-market at this size, is advertised at $24.5 million. Westport is a “step up”. For the programmer who has been at Nvidia 10 years, “Feadship / Lürssen / Oceanco / Royal Huisman: an entirely different stratum—bespoke, extremely expensive, and usually much larger, though some of these yards historically built yachts around this size.”

Related:

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AOPA abandons 85,000 followers on X

by philg

Here’s something bizarre:

AOPA is the lobbying group for general aviation, especially piston peasants (the Gulfstreamers have NBAA). Their membership is down by about half over the past 20 years, which eviscerates their lobbying power. As the U.S. population booms via low-skill immigration (Pew), members of Congress don’t want to bother with orgs that don’t have at least 400,000 members. Why would AOPA walk away from 85,000+ followers? My comment:

LinkedIn? Isn’t someone rich enough to own an aircraft supposed to be rich enough not to have to check LinkedIn regularly? TikTok? Are you sure that AOPA HQ staff have actually met a GA pilot? Did you hire some tween girls to run AOPA social media? Or maybe I missed the Garmin avionics partnership with Taylor Swift.

TikTok shows that they have only about 38,000 followers there. Similarly, they have fewer followers on LinkedIn than they do on X (about 61,000). I guess because GA pilots are so old, they do have over 200,000 followers on Facebook. But how tough is it to post at least the bigger stories on X simultaneously with the other social media systems? Presumably it can be done automatically, even without AI.

AOPA is important because, without them, any airport too small for a Pilatus PC-24 would be closed and turned into public housing for immigrants. Also, any aircraft smaller than a Phenom 300 would be excluded from ATC services so as to ensure plenty of capacity for the elite and the airlines.

Maybe California billionaires will step in and save AOPA. Democrat thought-leader Ro Khanna says they’ll be just as rich after a 5% haircut, which of course means that they can get another 5% haircut immediately afterwards and still be just as rich, which of course sets them up for Haircut #3… By the time the wise mandarins of Sacramento are finished, California’s Falcon 8X owners will be cut back to SR22-G2 fractional and, therefore, ready to join and support AOPA.

Can someone explain this? NPR sanctimoniously departed X during the Biden administration, but they had an endless river of taxpayer money to tap into and their loyal readers presumably got a lot of joy when they heard about Elon Musk being starved of traffic and ad revenue. But the typical AOPA member isn’t a progressive Democrat aligned with AOC and Bernie Sanders. How does AOPA benefit by leaving EAA, which already has twice as many members, as the dominant GA voice on X?

In the case the original tweet is memory-holed:

Update: AOPA reversed its decision. They said that they pulled back from X because engagement had fallen. But maybe their engagement has fallen because their X posts are lame? Here’s one that has no photo. It’s just a link to a page somewhere other than X:

Is it worth the click? Maybe, but the DC-6 doesn’t have anything to do with AOPA. Very few social media users follow links. They react to what they see in front of them. Compare to this WSJ post. Most people can get what they need to know out of it without following the link.

It’s trivial to ask Grok why AOPA has been such a failure recently on X. Excerpts from Grok’s full explanation:

They post like it is still 2015. Almost every item is a magazine lede plus an aopa.org URL. On the current X ranking, an off-platform link with no image is close to invisible. A post that says “click to leave this site” does not get likes, and likes are what get the next batch of impressions. The DC-6 post is the clean example: a crowd-pleasing airplane, no picture of the airplane.

They are not in the conversation. Aviation on X is replies, quote-posts, accident threads, MOSAIC and medical fights, airport threats, and people with airplanes in the photo. AOPA does not show up on breaking general-aviation news, does not answer members, and does not quote the FAA or a member of Congress. An account that does not reply gets treated as a brochure. They also went dark for more than two months, which is enough for the ranking system to stop showing an account to its own followers.

The topics are aimed at a different feed. A large share of the summer posts were event recaps, scholarship notes, “women in aviation” features, and high-school curriculum. Those can do fine on Instagram. On X, the pilots who actually reply want regulatory substance, airplane pictures, and a named human. EAA, the same day AOPA was walking back its exit, posted a C-5 photo and a taco joke and already had more likes than most of AOPA’s July posts ever reached.

The 80% drop is real and mostly self-inflicted. X did change the rules: links are down-ranked, replies and native video are up-ranked, Premium accounts get more distribution, and dormant accounts fall out of followers’ feeds. AOPA says it tried several formats. The samples that are still up are still link dumps, occasional TikTok-shaped video, and no conversation. Other platforms growing does not mean X emptied out. The exit post proved the opposite: when they wrote something people wanted to answer, the same 85,000-follower account reached 706,000 views.

They also do not appear to be paying for a checkmark. For an association this size that is a small, fixable distribution penalty, not the main problem.

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Life with X Money (do you get wiped out when the world wakes up to Starship being a total failure?)

by philg

At the risk of being tarred with the “Elon Fanboy” brush, I’ve moved some cash into X Money, thus bumping the yield from 3.75% (a UBS money market) to the nice round number of 6% (for those who either make regular deposits (e.g., payroll direct deposit) or who sign up to X’s premium offering, which I did to get the Edit button (never fully delivered, incidentally; it works for original posts, but not for replies)).

Scientific American interviewed experts and learned that Starship, financially glommed together with X money, will never reach orbit as a practical vehicle. The world’s smartest and most productive people live in New York City and they also figured out that Starship can’t work. New York magazine (“Intelligence” is literally part of the name, which tells you how much more intelligent these journalists are than the readers outside of NYC):

Starship is “destined for the scrap heap” according to one of the brightest engineering minds in the Islamic Republic of the UK:

What happens when #Science catches up to Elon and SpaceX? Will they run off with this money to cover their losses from Starship? Not so fast. The money lives at one or more FDIC-insured conventional banks. (If you invest more than $250,000, which is still the limit for deposits despite the raging inflation that the government says we haven’t experienced, X Money spreads the money automatically across multiple banks. The $250k limit was established temporarily during the Collapse of 2008 and then Milton Friedman (“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”) was proven correct in July 2010.)

It took only a few minutes to transfer some funds from Bank of America via the Plaid service that X Money uses to connect bank accounts. It’s a little unnerving that Plaid asks for permission to see one’s monthly statements, but I assume that everyone in China and Russia has already read these so I agreed.

There has been a political and media campaign to discredit X Money by pointing out that the main bank underlying the service, Cross River Bank, was hassled by the Federales. Example:

[Native American Elizabeth] Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, wants to know exactly when Musk plans to offer the digital tool, what banking services it will provide and whether it will issue a stablecoin. She also pushed him to divulge whether he plans to work with the fintech Cross River Bank in offering the X Money services, which she noted was the subject of a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. enforcement action in 2023 for “unsafe and unsound practices related to fair lending.”

“Unsafe and unsound” is unnerving, to say the least! Did Cross River Bank lend to people who are less creditworthy than Bank of America, for example? ChatGPT says that the FDIC went after Cross River Bank because of the potential for the opposite behavior, i.e., restricting borrowing to those whom studies have shown are less likely to default.

The 2023 case is the one producing most of the scary current headlines about “unsafe or unsound banking practices.” It arose from a 2021 FDIC examination and concerned Cross River’s large business of originating loans through fintech partners. The FDIC said Cross River had inadequate internal controls, information systems and credit-underwriting practices for monitoring compliance with fair-lending laws, including the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Truth in Lending Act. Cross River consented to the order without admitting or denying the allegations.

But there’s an important distinction: the public 2023 order does not say that Cross River was undercapitalized, short of liquidity, mishandling deposits, or likely to fail. Nor did that order impose a monetary penalty. The concern was that Cross River’s controls weren’t adequate to demonstrate that the enormous volume of lending done through outside fintech companies was complying with fair-lending and consumer-credit rules. The order actually required Cross River to investigate whether particular lending disparities amounted to discriminatory practices and whether remediation was warranted, rather than publicly declaring that a particular class of borrowers had already been proven to have been discriminated against.

Prompt: “What would happen if a bank doesn’t comply with fair lending? Who wouldn’t get a loan?”

In the simplest case, someone who is otherwise similarly qualified could be denied a loan—or charged more—because of a legally protected characteristic rather than because of credit risk. Under the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the protected characteristics include race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, receipt of public-assistance income, and exercising certain consumer-credit rights. Lenders can still use ordinary underwriting variables such as income, debt, credit history and collateral.

Would a bank have any rational basis for trying not to lend to the Somalis who built Boston and Minneapolis, for example?

In U.S. mortgage data, white borrowers have historically had lower delinquency/default rates than Black borrowers on average. For example, a Federal Reserve analysis of conventional first-lien home-purchase mortgages originated in 2006 found that 24.8% of Black borrowers versus 6.4% of non-Hispanic white borrowers became 60+ days delinquent within two years. Even within credit-score bands, Black borrowers had higher delinquency rates in that particular cohort; after adjusting for HMDA variables and Equifax risk score, the Black–white gap was still about 8 percentage points.

On the broader principle, though: if a prohibited characteristic such as race carries residual predictive information about default even after all the lender’s permitted variables are considered, then fair-lending law does constrain a lender from using every statistically predictive variable available. Regulation B currently says a creditor may not discriminate on a prohibited basis in any aspect of a credit transaction, including the criteria used to evaluate creditworthiness. … What they cannot do is add something like “Black borrower: +40 basis points” even if historical data showed that race improved default prediction at the margin. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

A U.S. study using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics found that immigrants who had been in the U.S. for 10–20 years had higher mortgage-delinquency rates than otherwise similar native-born households after controlling for observed characteristics

So the headline “risk” identified by Elizabeth Warren and others was actually that Cross River Bank might not be lending enough money to people who are more likely to default. This is “unsafe and unsound”, just like it would be “unsafe and unsound” for an individual to refuse to lend to an unemployed relative.

X Money offers a debit card that sounds like it takes all of the fees that merchants pay, and some additional, and hands it back to you.

What’s an example of “up to 3%”? 0% is the fine print example, apparently. Gemini:

Peer-to-peer transfers, wire transfers, and betting/gambling. In updated terms, standard high-cost categories like utilities, wholesale clubs (such as Costco), rent/tax payments, jewelry, and university tuition have been nerfed and no longer qualify for the 3% return. On these purchases, you will earn 0%.

Complete list at https://money.x.com/en/i/cashback-rewards-terms

Another reason to be less excited about a debit card, I think, is that consumer protections are weaker, e.g., if you’re overcharged by a merchant or a merchant sells you something that is defective and won’t take it back.

I can’t keep track of the plastic cards that I already have, so I’m saying “no” so far to the debit card. I moved funds into the 6% account on September 21, 2026 and X Money shows that it is still there despite the failed launch of 52 tons of Starlink V3 satellites into orbit by Starship on September 28.

Loosely related… (SpaceX and money)

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