Author: philg

Minivan news for the 2027 model year (TL;DR: time to buy a Tesla Y L)

by philg

There were no improvements in minivans from Honda, Toyota, Chrysler, or Kia for 2026 (see Minivan news for the 2026 model year). What did the legacy automakers do with the additional year of engineering time? There are no improvements in minivans for the 2027 model year either! Honda’s driver assistance tech on the Odyssey, for example, is the same as it was in 2017 (for the 2018 model year). The only change for Honda is a $400 price increase. Car and Driver says that “the [Toyota] Sienna carries over into 2027 unchanged” (this is the only manufacturer from whom we might have to wait until October to get official news; maybe there will be some tech improvement over what was introduced in 2020).

Chrysler killed the plug-in hybrid version of the Pacific and tweaked the styling (for people like us who buy minivans for maximum style/prestige!).

So… it is time to buy the Tesla Y L. Car and Driver:

A dynamic difference we can comment on is the Y L’s new suspension. The Y L uses the Y Premium’s single-valve adaptive damping with a specific tune for the L’s larger chassis that prioritizes comfort without permitting unnecessary body roll in corners. There’s even a passenger-comfort setting that attempts to absorb more impacts for those in the rear seats. Anyone who has ever bounced around in the back of a Tesla Uber will appreciate the idea of a softer rear-seat ride. The Model Y’s excessively firm ride has long been a sticking point at C/D, and the Y L addresses it in a way that doesn’t compromise the car’s handling strengths.

I guess we won’t be able to get one until March? It would be absurd to have an AWD version in Florida (the last snowstorm in Palm Beach County was on January 19, 1977 and deposited 1/4 inch). Dragging around a second motor that compromises the range makes no sense. (The extra acceleration from from the dual motor version isn’t interesting either given that the RWD Model Y can do 0-60 in roughly the same amount of time as our Odyssey, which is overpowered for America’s traffic-choked roads.) A friend in Maskachusetts ordered the Launch edition as a replacement for his Lucid Air due to that machine’s lack of FSD and, of course, he will be able to take advantage of AWD if Climate Change doesn’t progress faster than expected by the expert consensus. When he ordered the machine, a couple of weeks after the launch of the Launch, he was told that it would be delivered in September or October. This was later updated to perhaps as late as December.

I don’t think the Y L will win any beauty contests, but maybe it isn’t dramatically uglier than the Y? It’s 7-9 inches shorter than today’s minivans.

(source)

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Fact-checking at the New England Journal of Medicine

by philg

From “Jason Arday and the Perils of Being Black in Academia” (New England Journal of Medicine, August 20, 2026):

Jason Arday had the distinction of being the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. … Black academics know that we will always be held to a different standard … Prof. Claudine Gay was hounded by accusations of plagiarism and ousted by Harvard, who bent to those who simply could not stomach a world where a Black woman was president of such a storied institution.

As pointed out in Plagiarist Claudine Gay getting paid $3.1 million/year after “resigning” from Harvard, anyone with access to ChatGPT and/or Google could determine within less than one minute that Claudine Gay was still on the Harvard payroll (not “ousted”) and with a little more diligence, determine that she was being paid a higher-than-average wage.

If the NEJM didn’t fact-check this article what else aren’t they fact-checking?

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Revisiting the new terminal at LaGuardia: awesome outdoor space, but no place to work

by philg

I changed planes between BGR and DJT(!) at LGA the other day. During my 2023 visit (The fancy new terminal at LaGuardia Airport) I didn’t note the awesome outdoor balcony:

Every airport should have this!

Not so great, however, was the lack of public desks at which to work. DJT has at least 100 workstations at which one can sit at a laptop with reasonable ergonomics, plus the laptop into 110V, etc. LGA has chairs with power outlets for aimless scrolling on one’s phone and loungers for even more laziness, but nothing for work other than perhaps in the Delta Sky Club, which is so elite that they don’t sell day passes.

Readers wouldn’t forgive me if I didn’t supply photos for a PhD in Masketology. Here are examples of (a) chin diaper, (b) under-nose mask, and (c) surgical mask worn correctly (but still useless due to not being an N95?):

If people feel unsafe after entering a place where 100 percent of the humans have been screened by TSA, Starbucks is a Safe Place:

A full range of Pride gear was for sale (August 22, so still roughly a month before National HIV/AIDS & Aging Awareness Day and Bisexual+ Awareness Week and after Southern HIV/AIDS Awareness Day and Gay Uncles Day (full calendar)). Are these for people who are arriving in NYC and realize that they forgot to pack Pride gear? Or for people who didn’t realize that they were 2SLGBTQQIA+ until they visited NYC for a weekend and need to buy Pride gear before returning home?

Here’s one approach to female modesty that is common in NYC, the niqab:

By contrast, here’s an image that could be considered haram due to the amount of female bare skin on display:

NYC is likely already a predominantly Islamic city as measured by hours spent in religious observance. How long before the people whose idea of proper dress is Image #1, above, vote to forbid the female outfits in Image #2? Maybe an adult in a niqab can tolerate this shameless display of flesh, but would she want her children to be exposed to this kind of lifestyle?

Let me close by pointing out a triumph of operations research. There are two UP escalators (from the gates) and one DOWN (to the gates), presumably because someone figured out that people are more likely to arrive in a big group (plane pulls in) than they are to depart in a big group.

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Even companies worth $1 trillion don’t want to pay Nvidia’s prices

by philg

I hope that everyone has made tons of money taking my investing advice and doing the opposite. Loyal readers may remember that I’ve been skeptical of Nvidia becoming worth more than all of the European Union combined and, therefore, never purchased NVDA (current market cap: $5+ trillion). My theory was that 50 percent profit margins for Nvidia would motivate other companies to develop chips and then the AI nerds would recompile their code (or ask AI to recompile their code). Google did this a long time ago with its Tensor Processing Unit. Intel tried and apparently failed with Gaudi (but they were very successful in DEI!). Elon Musk has his AI5 chip and, eventually, his own fab.

OpenAI is the latest entrant into this mix, apparently. “OpenAI Claims Its New Chips Can Outperform Nvidia Processors in Tests” (Bloomberg, yesterday):

The company plans to start using the new chips to support its artificial intelligence models later this year, which should significantly reduce costs for OpenAI as it rolls out more widely.

OpenAI, losing enough money every year to be worth almost $1 trillion, created Jalapeno in a partnership with Broadcom Inc., which makes custom chips for a variety of clients. The two companies, which announced their pact last year, touted the speed at which the processor was developed in June, saying it came together in record time.

Even if this thing succeeds, there will still be a huge market for Nvidia, apparently:

Jalapeno wasn’t tested against the new generation of Nvidia chips, Vera Rubin, which just began shipping. It’s also not designed for training AI models, an area where Nvidia technology excels. Jalapeno is intended for the inference phase of AI — the stage when models have already been trained and can begin responding to prompts and handling tasks.

(Why is the chip named for Vera Rubin, someone who was neither an electrical engineer nor a software developer? Google AI:

Honoring Women in STEM: The company has a specific practice of naming key platforms after pioneering women scientists. Previous examples include Grace Hopper (the Grace CPU) and Ada Lovelace (the RTX 40-series architecture)…

I guess we can’t expect the William Shockley CPU/architecture any time soon, despite the man’s Nobel for the invention of the transistor, but why not one for Jack Kilby? Kilby died in 2005, prior to the full flowering of Rainbow Science, and therefore Kilby’s gender ID is unknown (we could say the same regarding Vera Rubin, who died in 2016, some years before the trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag flew at the White House))

How much do journalists and editors need to know about electrical engineering in order to cover cutting-edge AI hardware?

Because the chip is achieving strong results at low voltage — 700 watts — Jalapeno will allow OpenAI to save money when running its data centers, where power is a key cost, he said.

Speaking of high voltage, let’s have a look at the cooling system for Google’s latest TPUs (blog entry, which Google’s massive AI brain couldn’t figure out should have a date on it; I think it is from April 2026):

It looks like they got retired Pratt PT6 engineers to work on this!

(Actually, this suggests a career path: instead of fighting it out on the crowded software front, a young person could study to become a packaging/cooling engineer.)

Vaguely related… let’s see if we can figure out where Nvidia’s passion for “Honoring Women in STEM” comes from. Perhaps nerds identifying as “women” were the principal designers of Nvidia’s hardware and software?

Prompt to Gemini (to run on Google’s TPUs so that the results aren’t biased by running on Nvidia chips):

Who were the principal engineers of Nvidia’s historically important GPUs and software architectures, including CUDA? In other words, who are the people who are primarily responsible for making Nvidia as valuable as it is today?

Answer (not in quote style):

Key Technical Leaders Behind Nvidia’s Rise

1. Curtis Priem & Chris Malachowsky (Co-Founders & Founding Hardware Architects)

  • The Role: Co-founded Nvidia in 1993 alongside Jensen Huang.
  • Their Contribution: Priem was the chief architect of Nvidia’s early graphics chips (including the NV1 and the breakthrough RIVA 128), while Malachowsky led system engineering and hardware design operations.
  • Impact: They established Nvidia’s core hardware engineering practices and designed the early pipelines that allowed Nvidia to survive the “3D accelerator wars” of the late 1990s and create the original GeForce 256—the chip Nvidia marketed as the world’s first true “GPU.”

2. Dr. David Kirk (The “Father of CUDA” & Chief Scientist 1997–2009)

  • The Role: Chief Scientist and VP of Architecture.
  • Their Contribution: David Kirk was the primary visionary behind transforming Nvidia’s fixed-function 3D graphics hardware into programmable, general-purpose parallel processors.
  • Impact: In the mid-2000s, Kirk persuaded Jensen Huang to mandate that every single Nvidia GPU include dedicated general-purpose execution units—a massive financial gamble at the time. This decision laid the groundwork for CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), launching general-purpose GPU computing (GPGPU) and making GPUs usable for scientific computing and later AI.

3. Ian Buck (VP of Accelerated Computing & Original CUDA Architect)

  • The Role: Creator of the BrookGPU programming language (at Stanford) who joined Nvidia to lead the CUDA project.
  • Their Contribution: While pursuing his PhD at Stanford, Buck created Brook, an extension of C for streaming coprocessors. Jensen Huang hired Buck to lead the software and systems team that built the original CUDA software stack and runtime environment, released in 2006.
  • Impact: Buck turned the raw, complex parallel hardware engineered by Kirk’s team into an accessible software platform for C/C++ developers. Without Buck’s software stack, AI researchers in 2012 (like Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton) would not have been able to train AlexNet on Nvidia GPUs—the spark that triggered the modern deep learning boom.

4. John Montrym (Chief Architect, GeForce/Tesla Architecture)

  • The Role: Senior Architect and Fellow.
  • Their Contribution: Montrym was a key architect behind the NV40 (GeForce 6 series) and the landmark G80 (Tesla architecture) released in 2006.
  • Impact: The G80 was the first unified shader architecture in a PC GPU and the hardware home where CUDA was born. It abandoned separate vertex and pixel pipelines in favor of unified streaming multiprocessors (SMs), setting the blueprint for every modern GPU architecture designed since.

5. Jonah Alben (Senior VP of GPU Engineering)

  • The Role: Longtime leader of Nvidia’s hardware silicon development.
  • Their Contribution: Alben joined Nvidia in 1997 and has spent over two decades directing the physical architecture, design execution, and engineering teams behind generations of GPU microarchitectures: Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, Ampere, Hopper, and Blackwell.
  • Impact: Alben’s team managed the scaling and execution challenges as GPUs grew from millions to over 200 billion transistors on single silicon packages. His team integrated specialized hardware engines directly into the GPU pipeline—most notably Tensor Cores (introduced in Volta/Ampere) and Transformer Engines (in Hopper/Blackwell)—which gave Nvidia a 10x-100x efficiency advantage in AI workloads over traditional CPUs and competing chips.

6. Dr. Bill Dally (Chief Scientist & Head of Nvidia Research)

  • The Role: Former Chairman of Stanford’s CS Department, appointed Nvidia Chief Scientist in 2009 (succeeding David Kirk).
  • Their Contribution: A pioneer in computer architecture and high-speed interconnect networks, Dally leads Nvidia’s long-term research division.
  • Impact: Dally pivoted Nvidia’s research toward optical interconnects, low-precision AI math (FP8, FP4 formats), ray tracing hardware cores (RT Cores), and multi-chip network scaling (NVLink). His architectural research predicted the massive bandwidth bottlenecks of large AI models years before ChatGPT emerged.

You can see the full answer and also one from Grok.

Fun fact from Oshkosh/AirVenture 2026: I ran into a mid-level Nvidia employee. He had shown up in his new airplane, a perfectly restored P-51 Mustang ($5 million?).

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Remembering Dolly Parton by remembering Dollywood

by philg

Eighty years is a good run (it’s what the Ancient Egyptians expected), but it was still sad to learn about Dolly Parton’s death.

From this blog in 2022, Dollywood:

In addition to the expected terrifying rollercoasters there are a lot of music shows. One artist that you won’t hear too much, not even covers of her songs, is… Dolly Parton. She uses the park to showcase lesser-known musicians.

A great example of humility.

Loosely related, a Dolly Parton pinball machine, photographed at The Pinball Dudes, Jupiter, Florida (a great dealer), January 2023:

Related:

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National Park Service funding vs. crony profit, a Dry Torugas example

by philg

Happy National Park Service Founders Day for those who celebrate. This commemorates the signing of a law by the third most notorious racist ever to serve in the White House (Prof. Dr. Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D.; the #1 racist, of course, being Donald Trump and #2 being slaveholder George Washington).

Dry Tortugas National Park is one of three in Florida. It costs $15 per person to enter or $0 if the visitor has already purchased an annual pass ($80 for US residents; $250 for rich foreign visitors), consistent with almost 90 percent of National Park Service funding coming from federal taxpayers in general, many of whom are too busy working to pay their taxes (top income tax rates being over 50% in California and NYC) in order to visit any park.

What about the favored companies (cronies) whom the NPS has put into a monopoly position with respect to park access? A single seaplane company is authorized to fly people into the park, a 40-minute trip for 70 statute miles in a slow airplane. They’re able to charge $910 for a day trip:

The National Park collects either 0% of the revenue (visitor already holds an annual pass) or 1.6% of the revenue ($15 out of $925). Let’s call it an average of 0.8% plus whatever percentage of revenue the seaplane operator got for its monopoly.

There is also a ferry (the Yankee Freedom; the crony that operates this trip is Maskachusett-based). It costs $245 round-trip for 175 passengers. So the boat company gets roughly $43,000 in revenue per day (it’s a four-hour round trip) and the Park gets perhaps $1,000 from entrance fees ($15 per passenger, but $0 for the presumed majority who have an annual pass). That’s just over 2% of the revenue from owning the asset that people have traveled to see and, in most cases, paid about $400/night for a hotel in Key West.

At least at one time, the ferry company was required to hand over 8.5% of ticket price to the NPS, but both authorized transportation providers are usually sold out, often months in advance, so the above-cited prices aren’t the market-clearing prices, perhaps because they must be approved by the NPS. If the NPS were interested in getting more from visitors and taking less from taxpayers, it could trivially insist on a much larger share of the daily price either via fees or in exchange for handing out these transportation monopolies.

(Finally, note that “Freedom” is the name of the boat operated by the company that won the right to exclude all competitors from this market.)

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A year since Iryna Zarutska died: no consequences so far for anyone in government

by philg

Previously on this blog, the consequence-free life of academic elites: Plagiarist Claudine Gay getting paid $3.1 million/year after “resigning” from Harvard

It has been a year since Iryna Zarutska was murdered by a frequent flyer in North Carolina’s revolving door justice system. I asked ChatGPT if there had been any consequences for anyone on the North Carolina state government payroll or on the City of Charlotte’s payroll. Excerpts:

As of today, August 22, 2026—exactly one year after Iryna Zarutska was killed—I can find no judge or elected politician who has actually lost a job, been removed from office, been disciplined, or suffered an obvious electoral defeat because of the case.

The clearest case is Mecklenburg County Magistrate Teresa Stokes, who released Decarlos Brown Jr. on a written promise to appear after his January 2025 arrest for misuse of 911. After Zarutska’s murder, all 10 Republican members of North Carolina’s U.S. House delegation formally asked Chief District Court Judge Roy Wiggins to begin proceedings to remove Stokes. But she apparently was not removed: the Mecklenburg County court’s current personnel directory, crawled within the past two weeks, still lists Teresa Stokes — Magistrate.

Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles was arguably the most visible elected official facing political accountability. She was not punished by voters at all. The murder became a major issue in the November 2025 mayoral race, but Lyles was reelected with 92,537 votes, 70.45%, versus Republican Terrie Donovan’s 25.53%.

Mecklenburg District Attorney Spencer Merriweather is also still in office. His office was criticized because prosecutors did not seek modification of Brown’s release conditions while the January charge remained pending. Merriweather remains DA and is up for election in November 2026.

One possible apparent personnel consequence deserves caution: Charlotte police chief Johnny Jennings retired after the killing, but I have not found good evidence that he was forced out because of Zarutska’s murder, so I wouldn’t count that as punishment without stronger evidence.

So if by “punished” you mean someone in government personally paying a price—fired, removed from the bench, defeated at the polls, censured, suspended, fined, etc.—the answer appears to be no. Stokes in particular is striking: despite a congressional delegation formally demanding her removal, she is apparently still serving as a magistrate one year later.

Here’s an example of peasant outrage a year ago:

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Tesla FSD ergonomic disaster: no right footrest (dead pedal)

by philg

A friend lent his almost-new Tesla S out (not to me!) and the result was a Cybertruck rental while the bumper got some rehab.

The Cybertruck’s FSD struggled at low speeds due to constant phantom human sightings. We’re pretty sure that this was due to a camera’s interaction with the Maskachusetts front license plate (Florida does not require this disfigurement).

I sat in the driver seat for a 45-minute FSD from Dedham to Hanscom Field in Bedford, MA. The system performed commendably except that chill mode hogged third lane (out of four) on I-95/128 and obstructed traffic flow by driving 55 mph during the intervals without significant traffic. It should be smart enough to know that a strict speed limit driver should stick to the two right lanes if four are available.

My primary take-away is that Tesla hasn’t thought through the ergonomics of 98% self-driving. For close to 100 years, cars have been engineered so that the driver can extend both of his/her/zir/their feet (need to be gender-inclusive since we’re talking about a trip around Boston). The left foot sits on a footwell rest or, sometimes, a “dead pedal” that is at roughly the same distance from the driver as the clutch (old-school manual transmission requiring quick changes of position for the left foot). The right foot rests comfortable on the gas pedal.

With the 2026 Model S, however, there is nowhere to rest one’s right foot when self-driving. Either the footwell needs to be a little wider or the accelerator and brake pedals need to be moved closer to the center of the existing footwell so as to make room for a dead pedal on the right. More complex idea since Tesla buyers love technology for its own sake: a rest for the right foot that automatically extends slightly when FSD is engaged and that retracts back into the floor when driving manually (“like an animal”).

A few photos of the Tesla Collision Center and the 10:00 am traffic that we suffered through to get there. (I can’t figure out how people in Boston are so passionate about open borders and the attendant population growth. They are gradually being imprisoned in their own neighborhoods by ever-worsening traffic.)

Car & Driver magazine, 1962, regarding the 1963 Corvette (250-360 hp!):

The pedals are extremely well placed. The accelerator is close to the tunnel, letting the foot rest against its side, and there is plenty of room left of the clutch pedal for the driver to brace himself.

A patent filed in 1961:

Related:

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New York Times says it is time to stiff the bondholders out of their $40 trillion

by philg

“An Ancient Sumerian Solution to Our $40 Trillion Deficit” (yesterday):

The U.S. federal debt has hit $40 trillion. Add the debt owed by U.S. states, corporations and consumers and the figure rises to about $77 trillion in debt, set against an annual G.D.P. of about $32 trillion. The interest on all of it is compounding constantly.

Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation. All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable, I know. But, really, that’s just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you’ve probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down our economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance.

The amargi was a response to a persistent problem that was recognized in the ancient world: Debt compounded until it destabilized society.

Understatement Department:

People who were owed money were, predictably, not always happy about the amargi.

We invented it so we can de-invent it:

The reason the practice often worked in the first place was because the ancient world understood something about our monetary system we have mostly forgotten: Money is an invented social construct. It isn’t real, not in the way a tree or a stone is real. The system of money and credit is a thing humans made up. It’s a record-keeping device for distributing resources. And since money is a human creation, we can alter it when needed.

What would happen if the U.S. were to stiff all of the bondholders, most whom are domestic (breakdown)? Would the stock market collapse because of the evaporation of money people thought that they had saved? A lot of stocks would go to zero, presumably, because a bank or insurance company could go insolvent due to the evaporation of reserves. Maybe some stocks would go up because workers wouldn’t be quite as burdened with federal taxes and, therefore, would have more spending power? That seems unlikely because our fiscal deficits are so high that ceasing interest payments on federal debt still wouldn’t result in a balanced budget (i.e., we would need higher taxes to fund the government services that we demand in a world where the federal government doesn’t/can’t borrow, even after kissing $40 trillion in debt goodbye). This is kind of remarkable. Imagine a family that is so addicted to spending that even if it is magically freed from paying a mortgage, a car loan, or any of its past credit card bills that it still can’t fund the lifestyle to which it has become accustomed and feels entitled.

If this does happen, I guess I’ll be nominally poorer (stock market collapse), but I’ll have some bragging rights because I’ve been a hater of bonds as an investment ever since the Jimmy Carter era inflation (more properly attributed to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, but Carter got the blame because hyperinflation took a while to build steam).

Here’s a misleading chart, by the way. It says “total public debt” is $40 trillion, but doesn’t count debt incurred by state and local governments (also “public”). Supposedly this is only about another $4 trillion, but that doesn’t include state and local obligations to retirees, such as pensions and health insurance (impossible even to guess at what those are because we don’t know how long humans will live).

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La Traviata in Bangor at Opera Acadia

by philg

If you’re in Maine (and, this time of year, why wouldn’t you be?), head up to Bangor for a 7 pm La Traviata put on by Opera Acadia. I was there last night and everything about it was great:

  • orchestra (sounded liked they’ve played together all year and did not overpower the singers)
  • singing (entire cast, but Sarah Joyce Cooper was amazing as Violetta)
  • acoustics (hall isn’t cavernous; seats about 500?)
  • comfort (lots of legroom, width for, um, today’s Americans, and luxurious padding)
  • supertitles (unobtrusive)

I do miss the Franco Zeffirelli sets, as seen in the 1982 movie and also at the Metropolitan Opera until they trashed them (thus beginning the financial/audience decline that was accelerated by coronapanic?). Here’s the program:

If you can’t make it to Maine, stream the movie! (Maybe it has to be pirated? Supposedly, it isn’t available on any of the usual platforms due to the licensing hassles combined with the minimal revenue potential.) Here’s an alternative that might be worthy:

Trigger warning for recent college graduates: It’s sad and somebody dies.

(I’m irrational so am posting this while in transit back to the summer heat and humidity of Jupiter, Florida. Can’t stay away from the kids (back in skool) and the pup for too long!)

Related:

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