Author: philg

Ductless mini-split HVAC is much more attractive in a country without skilled labor?

by philg

We still own our condo in Harvard Square (rented out on AirBnB; will sell once coronapanic ends in Maskachusetts and people realize that living in the suburbs while working in the city is intolerable due to traffic (but maybe coronapanic will never end?)). It has a traditional HVAC system with air handler, ducts, and a condenser outside. The contractors in the Boston area that are qualified to do basic maintenance on the system are all too busy to do maintenance (they’re happy to do a $20,000 installation project). But these types of systems need annual maintenance to avoid the risk of a drain backup and massive water leak inside the house.

A contractor here in Florida, where A/C maintenance is much more available, said that he’s never seen a mini-split suffer from a clogged drain. For some reason they don’t build up gunk inside the lines the way that traditional systems do. As the U.S. population grows while the population of skilled laborers stays constant or shrinks (we are growing our population via low-skill labor and/or asylum-seekers who don’t work at all (babies, parents of young kids, the elderly), not with migrants who have HVAC training), the problem of finding qualified service people will only get worse. I wonder if this is a good argument for ductless mini-split heat pumps. As long as there are factories in Japan and China, replacement components will be available and the overall system complexity and annual maintenance needs are much reduced compared to a traditional HVAC system.

(The Florida contractor’s favorite brand is GREE, founded 1991 in Guangdong.)

Readers: What is the argument for installing a traditional HVAC system? Easier to filter and humidify the air if desired? Lower fan noise in the interior?

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Why aren’t cars (and pinball machines) auctioned as they come out of the factory?

by philg

I was in an Uber the other day here in Palm Beach County. It was a Kia Sorento, a small SUV that supposedly costs $30,885 new. The driver had recently purchased it, a 2019 model, for $28,000. It had 125,000 on the odometer when he agreed to pay $28,000.

Plainly a new Sorento, uninspiring as it seemed to me, is worth a lot more than $30,885 retail. Thus, it amazes me that Kia will keep selling these to dealers for the invoice price. Why not auction each vehicle as it is about to go into production (for buyers who want to choose colors and options) or as it comes out of the factory? That would enable the manufacturer to capture most of the profits that dealers are currently getting and it would even work better in a downturn. Instead of having to work overtime with incentive programs and rebates, the manufacturers would just naturally get less for each car in a recession.

A friend found a Toyota dealer agreement on sec.gov. It says “To buy and resell the Toyota Products identified in the Toyota Product Addendum hereto which may be periodically revised by IMPORTER” is a right granted to the dealer, but nothing about whether every 2022 Camry must be sold at the same price.

When information was being distributed on paper and auctions could be conducted only in person, maybe the fixed invoice/retail pricing system made sense. But why does it make sense now given that the cost of running an auction is a few dollars per item at most?

Nearly every house that is sold is subject to an auction, effectively, right? If it makes sense for houses, why not for cars? Art and decorative objects are auctioned by Sotheby’s. If it makes sense for a Barye at $1,260, why not for a car at $20,000+?

The same logic can be applied to almost anything that costs more than $100. The limited edition version of the Godzilla pinball machine was instantly sold out at $10,500. Stern left a huge amount of profit on the table (some people turned around and re-sold their machines for $15,000 or more) and plenty of potential buyers who would have been happy to pay more were disappointed. Why did it ever make sense to have a list price for this item? Same question for the $9,000 “premium” version of the game, which has a multi-month waiting list.

Let’s look at watches. A used in-production Rolex is worth $44,500, but Rolex sells it to dealers for the retail price of $12,400 minus the wholesale-retail discount. If we assume that a new Rolex Daytona is worth at least as much as a used Rolex Daytona, Rolex is giving up roughly $30,000 of profit on every sale. From Bloomberg, the jewelry store that PPP built:

If the answer is “consumers expect fixed prices and to consider a purchase for a few months before making a final decision,” coronapanic can be the excuse for a switch to an economically rational system in which everything reasonably valuable is auctioned, if not to the final consumer then at least to the retailer (who can adjust his/her/zir/their price accordingly).

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Open a gentleman’s resort called Hunter’s?

by philg

A friend and I just scheduled a romantic two-day getaway at the Ron Fellows Corvette-driving school (December 7-8 was the earliest they had available). Prostitution is illegal in Las Vegas, as in most of the United States (see Where New York Times readers don’t want to follow Europe: Legalized prostitution), but legal in some other parts of Nevada, including Pahrump, where the race track is located. One “gentleman’s resort” is Sheri’s Ranch. Given recent publicity, however, such as “First Son spent $30k in five months on ‘the girlfriend experience'” (Daily Mail), I wonder if a successful competitor could be started. A name that everyone can remember? “Hunter’s”

What’s the revenue opportunity? From the Daily Mail:

In January 2019, Hunter texted Moreva (Eva) asking for eight more hours with the women. He said he had already spent $5,000 on eight hours of their time and would like an additional eight for a total 16-hour rendezvous

I am, of course, disappointed that the headline did not read “spent $30k in five months on prostitutes, $*** on crack cocaine, and then wasted the rest of his money”.

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COVID-19 vaccination coverage among the nation’s smartest people

by philg

I’m still on the mailing list for City of Cambridge (Maskachusetts) updates. Every day they send out their dead pool data. From yesterday:

Nobody died yesterday in Cambridge because everyone got the Sacrament of Fauci, right? The Harvard-educated Democrat-voting folks in Cambridge wouldn’t contribute to coronaplague by running around unvaccinated like the Deplorables in the Unspeakable Republican South, certainly. Well…

Only 73 percent fully vaccinated?!!? Now that vaccines are emergency-used authorized for 6-month-old babies, how can this be? And how does this compare to a state in which public health authorities do not promote the idea of injecting children with experimental medicines that are designed to prevent deaths among the elderly? The percentage of Floridians (DeSantis voters!) who are fully vaccinated is currently 68 percent. Maybe the answer for how the intelligent people who live next to MIT and Harvard can have such similar vaccination coverage to the morons of Florida is that the newly approved COVID shots for babies require at least 8 weeks for the baby to be considered “fully vaccinated” and the emergency use authorization for sticking babies was issued only a month ago.

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The gun violence diaries

by philg

“How Do We Get Rid of Our Teenage Daughter’s Gun Safe?” (New York Times):

Our 15-year-old daughter is very headstrong. She’s never been in real trouble, but she bristles against rules and authority: curfews, homework, appropriate clothing — you name it! Recently, she exploded when her younger brothers discovered her journal in the family room. Now, she keeps it locked in a heavy black box she found at a secondhand store. The problem: The black box turns out to be a gun safe! (A friend of my husband told us.) We’re not worried that she has a gun; she helped organize a school rally to tighten our state’s gun laws. But she refuses to give up the safe, and we don’t want it in our house. Help!

A gun safe among the righteous!

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Sri Lanka and the U.S. now share government-by-emergency-declaration

by philg

“Sri Lanka Imposes State of Emergency After President Flees Country” (WSJ):

The coronavirus pandemic decimated Sri Lanka’s tourism earnings, …

The news is not all bad. Thanks to a robust program of lockdowns and quarantine, “In April 2020, Sri Lanka’s response to the pandemic was ranked as the 9th best in the world” (Wikipedia). (On the COVID-19 death rate leaderboard, Sri Lanka ended up with roughly double the death rate of continental neighbor India.)

What other nation shares Sri Lanka’s form of government-by-emergency?

“Biden says he’s mulling health emergency for abortion access” (AP News, July 10, 2022):

President Joe Biden said Sunday he is considering declaring a public health emergency to free up federal resources to promote abortion access…

That’s just a possibility, though, right? “Biden Administration Extends COVID Public Health Emergency for 90 Days” (US News, April 14, 2022):

America’s public health emergency plan for COVID-19 will continue for at least another 90 days, the Biden administration announced Wednesday.

The emergency plan has been in effect for over two years, during which time it has made it possible for people who may otherwise have lost health coverage to stay enrolled in Medicaid without the usual paperwork checks that would be required, even if their incomes had risen higher than that allowed, The New York Times reported. The program experienced record levels of enrollment during the pandemic.

A virus that attacks obese people continues to be an emergency. Aside from vaccinating 6-month-old babies against a disease that has killed 80-year-olds, how do our best minds of public health respond? Some snapshots taken at the local CVS on July 6 (“must buy 2”):

Related:

  • After 2.5 years of the best lockdowns, mask orders, and forced vaccinations that covidcrats can dream up… “The pandemic remains a global health emergency, the W.H.O. says.” (New York Times, July 12): With known coronavirus cases rising significantly across the globe, continued Omicron evolution and increased pressure on public health systems, the World Health Organization on Tuesday said that the pandemic remains a public health emergency. “The virus is running freely and countries are not effectively managing the disease burden based on their capacity, in terms of both hospitalization for acute cases and the expanding number of people with post-Covid-19 condition — often referred to as long Covid,” he said at a news conference in Geneva. … countries like the United States have been throwing out vaccine doses, while not even two-thirds of the world population is fully vaccinated
  • An obsessive focus on the vaccines that don’t prevent infection has resulted in a failure to apply the vaccines that do prevent infection… “A sharp global drop in childhood vaccinations during the pandemic threatens the lives of millions of children.” (NYT, July 14): Millions of children around the world, most of them in the poorest countries, missed some or all of their childhood vaccinations over the past two years because of a combination of conflicts, climate emergencies, misinformation campaigns, pandemic lockdowns and Covid vaccination efforts that diverted resources, according to a new analysis from Unicef, the United Nations agency that vaccinates half the world’s children, and the World Health Organization. It is the largest backslide in routine immunization in 30 years, the report said. Combined with rapidly rising rates of malnutrition, it has created conditions that could threaten the lives of millions of young children. “This is an emergency for children’s health — we have to think about the immediate stakes, the number of children that are going to die because of this,” said Lily Caprani, head of advocacy for Unicef. “It’s not in a few years’ time; it’s quite soon.”
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What are your favorite James Webb Space Telescope videos?

by philg

Everyone hates engineering and loves science. So let’s talk about the James Webb Space Telescope, which cost us about $10 billion (enough to fund the U.S. and Ukrainian militaries for 3 days?) so far. What are your favorite videos explaining the Science? Here’s one that I like:

It contains some explanation of the instruments on board, but I’m still a little confused as to the rationale for looking at nearby objects in the infrared. Light from objects within our own galaxy, such as the Carina Nebula, shouldn’t be dramatically red-shifted. What will we learn about these objects via the JWST that we couldn’t have learned from Hubble?

Readers: What are some other must-watch videos?

Related:

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How did Florida become so Republican?

by philg

At a family wedding recently, a cousin-by-marriage, on hearing that we had moved from a State of Virtue (Massachusetts) to a State of Deplorability angrily responded that he hoped we enjoyed living in a “fascist state”. (He is a retired vice president of NPR who used a massive inheritance to settle in an all-white suburb of D.C.)

A younger guy from New Jersey, without expressing any strong personal political beliefs, simply wondered aloud “How did Florida become so Republican?”

Another relative’s experience may provide the answer. He’s a 60-year-old ob-gyn physician who has carefully followed every aspect of Democrat dogma since childhood. The idea of agreeing on any political point with a Republican fills him with horror and he has always chosen to live in Blue states. Yet now he finds himself excommunicated from the Church of Righteousness because he holds the heretical belief that teenagers should not be provided with gender reassignment surgery.

I think that “Dr. Blue”‘s experience might explain what is happening on a broader scale in Florida. The Democrats nationwide have evolved faster than the Floridians who used to vote for Democrats, thus leaving behind Floridians who continue to agree with the Dogma According to Bill Clinton as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. Consider that Bill Clinton’s economic policy reads a lot like today’s Republican stated policy, including cutting taxes on small business (though Republicans in practice, of course, are happy to cooperate with Democrats on massive deficit spending). Bill Clinton never proposed that student loan debt for college graduates be transferred onto the backs of working class Americans who never went to college. Bill Clinton never used the phrase “Latinx”. Bill Clinton never tried to force Americans to accept injection with an experimental drug.

At a local restaurant recently…

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How long before the typical American house price will be the cost of Diet Coke?

by philg

The median sales price of a house is about $400,000 (WSJ) currently. We can check inflation in the New York Times:

As with any NYT article, the above contains plenty of lies. The biggest lie is graphing the official government inflation data going back to 1965 without noting that the method of calculating the inflation rate has dramatically changed over time (to make it appear lower, e.g., by excluding the purchase price of houses and actual mortgage and property tax costs incurred). The next lie is that the current inflation rate is 9.1 percent. The actual current rate, according to the same government data release purportedly covered by the NYT, is 1.3 percent per month (CNBC), which works out to 16.7 percent per year (1.013 raised to the 12th power).

At the actual current rate of inflation, how long before $400,000 is the price of a Diet Coke? Let’s assume that we’re getting our refreshing sugar-free soda in a restaurant for $5 (including obligatory tip). Within one human’s COVID-19-shortened lifespan of 73 years, therefore, the $400,000 price of a house will become the price of a Diet Coke. From Wolfram Alpha:

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