Author: philg

The lazy Floridian’s Halloween and Christmas lighting

by philg

Happy Official Beginning of Christmas Season for those who celebrate. (I guess younger Americans think it is okay to decorate for Christmas even before Thanksgiving.)

Gretchen Wilson and lyricist John Rich in “Redneck Woman”:

And I keep my Christmas lights on, on my front porch all year long

It turns out that HOAs aren’t huge fans of this approach. Traditionally people get cheap strings of outdoor-rated lights and put them up themselves or hire professionals to do it for $thousands. The light strings then have to come down after New Year’s. The typical Florida house, however, is built with a lot of exterior light sockets. There are recessed cans underneath loggias, for example, and the typical house has plenty of loggias where people can sit outside in the shade. There will be some sort of front entrance light, perhaps coach-style lights with candelabra bulbs. There may be flood light sockets that can hold PAR38 bulbs.

Why not turn the house itself into the holiday light display? Replace all of the existing bulbs and recessed trims with RGB WiFi, Zigbee, and/or Thread bulbs? This is a report on our 2025 mostly-Govee solution.

We opted for an all-WiFi approach because we wouldn’t have to plug in a bridge, e.g., the one required by Philips Hue. Also, we have reasonably good WiFi coverage even outdoors thanks to TP-Link Omada (still going strong after 3.5 years, though it doesn’t even try to do most of the stuff that Unifi offers to do).

The front of our house has 6 candelabra bulbs that we replaced with Govee ($10/bulb). The 8 recessed cans we filled with Govee trims at $30 each. Govee, unfortunately, doesn’t make anything in PAR38 so we got Feit RGB WiFi bulbs at $15 each. For a table lamp inside we replaced a three-way bulb with a $20 Govee 1200 lumen RGB bulb. We already had some entryway recessed bulbs (BR40 and BR30) on the Philips Wiz system (their ghetto-level WiFi bulbs for people who don’t want to invest in Hue). I installed everything myself after borrowing a neighbor’s ladder for the floods and had it all connected up in less than two hours, including setting on/off schedules for each group of bulbs.

For a little more visual pizazz we indulged in two Govee light strips ($120 each for 100′) that we can hide in the bushes, but will likely have to roll up and store until next fall in order to keep them safe from the landscapers. These required some extra work because their power supplies aren’t waterproof so I purchased waterproof boxes from Home Depot. Finally, I tried to find a use for a 50′ string of Govee “permanent outdoor lights”, intended for under-eave attachment, that I’d previously tried out around a loggia in a failed experiment. These too have a non-weatherproof power supply.

The Govee app has a few built-in holiday schemes and, of course, lights can be infinitely customized by the patient or simply set to a solid color of one’s choice. Loyal readers won’t be surprised to learn how disappointed I was that there is no Pride festival scheme.

The Feit app is more basic and, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have even a Christmas scheme. The Wiz V2 app is perhaps somewhere in the middle in terms of power/complexity. It probably makes the most sense to stick with either all-Govee or, if money is no object, Philips Hue.

How did it work out? The flood lights ended up being a mistake. A bright light of color (not a hateful “colored light”) pointing at the viewer’s face isn’t useful. We got plunged into a world of tech support hell with the WiFi Govee lights after an Omada outdoor access point failed and we let the TP-Link tech support folks in to change a bunch of roaming settings. The Govee lights don’t work well if the WiFi network is trying to be clever about supporting roaming and optimizing the access point selection for each device. Probably it is smarter to user Matter over Thread or Zigbee (Philips Hue) and thus have just one hub that is a WiFi client. Many of the Govee devices are compatible with Thread, though not fully controllable using their app via Thread.

Our neighbor’s awesome house, mostly done with inexpensive non-WiFi stick-in-the-ground 12V lights (handheld RGB control):

Our house, using primarily the sockets it was built with (we can’t take credit for the lion statues; they were installed by a previous owner!):

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Meet in downtown Minneapolis on Wednesday?

by philg

Dear Readers: I’m headed to Minneapolis this week. Please email (philg@mit.edu) with a subject line of “Meet on Wednesday” if you want to get together on Wednesday evening. Perhaps we can meet at one of the coffee shops in George Floyd Square? It’s definitely safe after dark, right? Google AI:

George Floyd Square’s safety after dark is a complex issue with no single consensus, and opinions on it vary significantly among residents, business owners, and activists. … the area was often self-policed as an “autonomous zone,” and some residents reported that police and ambulances avoided the area, leading to increased crime, including fatal shootings and gang activity. Some nearby residents at the time reported feeling unsafe and experiencing ongoing trauma. … Police data from early 2025 indicated only a few isolated incidents of robbery, burglary, and gunfire over several months, suggesting a reduction in the previous levels of violent crime.

Robbery and gunfire only on Tuesdays and Thursdays and, therefore, at least “mostly peaceful”?

We are informed that the twin pillars of the Minnesota economy are marijuana (“hemp”) and harvesting federal welfare dollars (see below), but it is my comparatively boring life as a software expert witness that brings me to the city.

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Growth on food stamp spending vs. growth in immigration

by philg

I hope that none of the loyal readers of this blog went hungry yesterday.

Today is the 35th anniversary of the EBT system for food stamp benefits (later, “SNAP”). The Mickey Leland Memorial Domestic Hunger Relief Act was signed on November 28, 1990. Let’s have a look at inflation-adjusted spending on taxpayer-funded food:

We’re spending roughly 14X what we spent in 1970. What else has grown dramatically since 1970? The number of foreign-born people living in the U.S. is about 5.5X:

Correlation can’t be causation here, of course, because we’re informed that low-skill migration makes America rich and the SNAP data suggest that the number of poor people in the U.S. has grown dramatically, from 17 million beneficiaries in 2000 to 42 million in 2025 (see Number of Americans dependent on food stamps has been reduced from 17 million in 2000 to only 42 million today).

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How was the immigration of Rahmanullah Lakanwal supposed to make Americans better off?

by philg

Suppose that Rahmanullah Lakanwal hadn’t shot and killed National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom nor shot Andrew Wolfe (currently in the hospital), as he recently did. How was admitting him and multiple family members to the U.S. under the Biden-Harris administration and granting him and his family permanent residence (asylum) under the current Trump administration supposed to make the typical American better off? We are informed that immigrants enrich us, but how specifically did Congress and federal bureaucrats envision that Rahmanullah Lakanwal was going to enrich us??

Separately, just a few hours after successful asylum-seeker Rahmanullah Lakanwal waged jihad in Washington, D.C., the United Nations reminded us that “Asylum is Life-Saving”:

The New York Times reminds us that the real victim here was Rahmanullah Lakanwal:

The same story makes it sound as though Rahmanullah Lakanwal loved marijuana and polygamy (“second wife”):

Mr. Lakanwal was part of that program and had resettled with his family in Washington State. … Muhammad, Mr. Lakanwal’s childhood friend, said he has last seen him a few weeks before the Taliban takeover in 2021, when Mr. Lakanwal came to Khost to marry his second wife. He had started smoking weed, Muhammad said, and ended up divorcing his new wife a few days after the wedding. Muhammed recalled that Mr. Lakanwal told him: “When he saw blood, bodies, and the wounded, he could not tolerate it, and it put a lot of pressure on his mind.”

Of course, there are quite a few U.S. states in which one can enjoy (“essential” during coronapanic) marijuana 24/7, but I’m not sure how Rahmanullah Lakanwal was going to earn enough to hang onto two female partners. I can’t find any story describing Rahmanullah Lakanwal as having a job.

Finally, let’s keep in mind that though Rahmanullah Lakanwal might end up with 100 U.S. citizen grandchildren (“with his family” implies that he came here with at least one wife and average total fertility rate in Afghanistan is around 5 (five children in a woman’s lifetime; not too many men become “pregnant people” in Afghanistan)) and Sarah Beckstrom’s genetics died with her, it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Sarah Beckstrom and her hypothetical descendants were “replaced” by Rahmanullah Lakanwal (still alive) and his actual descendants.

Related:

In case the UN tweet is memory-holed:

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Today is your chance to join the cognitive super-elite

by philg

Below, New York City’s intellectual elites admit that they’re not capable of setting an oven to 325, sticking a $20 supermarket special turkey in, and walking away for a few hours. These are the folks whose advice we’re supposed to follow on complex economic, scientific, medical, and political topics. Wall Street Journal:

If you picked up a 99 cent/lb. turkey at Costco (below, from Stuart, Florida) or an 84 cent/lb. turkey at Walmart and managed to get it into the oven that therefore makes you one of the cognitive super-elite.

How about the intellectual elites at Harvard and MIT? Maybe they are more capable than New York elites? The answer seems to be “Yes… at setting their houses on fire.” Recent email from the City of Cambridge:

My technique, which I hope won’t burn down our concrete house with tile roof:

  • steam roast at 275 for about one hour on maximum steam (to prevent the finished product from drying out)
  • roast at 325 with light steam until internal temperature hits 125 (another 45 minutes or so if it’s a small turkey)
  • roast at 400 with no steam to crisp the skin until internal temp hits 165

Here’s our oven: LG WSEP4727F. This doesn’t produce anywhere near as much steam as the KitchenAid range that we once had (plumbed to the sink), but I think the steam does help prevent dry-out and the oven has a much larger cavity for turkey roasting and all other purposes than, for example, Miele ovens that are 5X the cost and literally half the internal size. Unlike the KitchenAid, which ran flawlessly from 2015 through coronapanic in Maskachusetts, the LG’s steam pump failed after just one use. After months of phone calls (cue the person in India who asks, after being told the model number and that it is a wall oven, whether it is gas or electric) and multiple house calls we finally got the necessary parts replaced and the steam feature has worked ever since that replacement.

So… happy Thanksgiving to everyone, especially to the undocumented migrants who enrich us with their multicultural Thanksgiving traditions from around the world.

(I would be delighted to get comments from anyone who does any steam cooking today and hear what was done and how it worked out!)

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The undocumented have departed, but the number of jobs keeps going up

by philg

In Immigrants expand our economy, but millions of immigrants exiting the U.S. don’t shrink our economy we looked at a New York Times report, “Immigrant Population in U.S. Drops for the First Time in Decades”: “An analysis of census data by the Pew Research Center found that between January and June, the foreign-born population declined by nearly 1.5 million.” (An analysis of January-September data by CIS found a reduction of 2.3 million.)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the “Civilian noninstitutional population” is up by about 2% year-over-year (this is limited to those age 16+, which is why it isn’t the same as the 343 million official Census population estimate) and “Civilian labor force” is up by 1.5%. November news:

The rate of natural increase in the U.S. is only about 0.3% (too small for those who want the Ponzi scheme of infinite growth; excessive for those who care about the environment, traffic congestion, affordable housing, etc.). If the foreign-born population, which has been driving nearly all U.S. population growth, is shrinking, shouldn’t the number of people and the number of people in the labor force be going down or, at most, be flat?

A simple answer would be that the 1.5 million (or 2.3 million) reduction is only among noble undocumented enrichers and that we enjoyed enrichment by 3 million legal immigrants (family reunification, H-1B nonimmigrant immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, etc.). But that isn’t consistent with the Pew/NYT report cited above, which says that there has been in a reduction in the number of “foreign-born” residents of all categories. (The more complete CIS study also reports a “foreign-born” reduction.)

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Some progress toward Navajo/Chilean prices for our National Parks

by philg

Loyal readers may recall What if our National Parks charged Navajo prices? (2023)

$100 per person per day is the “Navajo rate” for what could reasonably be charged … the Chileans charge foreigners $35 per adult to visit their signature national park for one day. Even at Chilean prices it would seem that the NPS could easily be self-funded.

“Department of the Interior Announces Modernized, More Affordable National Park Access” (yesterday):

Beginning Jan. 1, 2026, the Annual Pass will cost $80 for U.S. residents and $250 for nonresidents, ensuring that American taxpayers who already support the National Park System receive the greatest benefit. Nonresidents without an annual pass will pay a $100 per person fee to enter 11 of the most visited national parks, in addition to the standard entrance fee.

Orwell fans will appreciate the contrast between headline (“more affordable”) and body (“$100 per person extra”). Also, nobody questions that “American taxpayers [SHOULD] already support the National Park System”. Why does a working class American who can’t afford the epic costs of airline tickets, rental car, hotels, etc. have to pay taxes to subsidize rich people from around the world who can afford the $1,200/day cost of a hotel-based family National Parks trip? (I estimated $1,000/day in 2023, but airline ticket, restaurant, and hotel prices have gone up significantly since then.) Separately, if the NPS funds itself via entry fees it won’t have to turn people away during the inevitable government shutdowns.

I can’t understand how the new park entry pricing system will work. Americans aren’t required to carry passports. Tens of millions of residents of the U.S. have no documents at all (22 million as of 2016, according to Yale). How is a gate agent at a National Park supposed to determine if a visitor is a U.S. resident? We’re informed that it is racist to demand ID for voting. Could a National Park demand to see a state-issued driver’s license or other ID before offering the “resident discount” rate? We’re informed by CNN that “Outdoor recreation has historically excluded people of color” and “racist laws and customs kept Black Americans out of these parks”. Surely our government wouldn’t want to intensify the racism inherent in the racist National Parks by demanding ID from visitors of color?

Loosely related, a couple of photos from the Schoodic Peninsula, an often forgotten piece of Acadia National Park. As with the core portion of Acadia, the land was donated to the American People. The Rockefellers donated the island land and Schoodic was donated anonymously in 2015. This reminds me to note the tragedy of Bill Gates giving all of his money to Africa, which doesn’t seem to help average Africans (every year that the Gates Foundation has operated in Africa, the number of needy Africans has increased; maybe some rich people in Africa have gotten richer?). If Gates had to sell the Microsoft stock and pay capital gains before shipping the proceeds to Africa, the tax revenue would easily fund an additional national park. Alternatively, if he spent his money on unspoiled U.S. land he would easily be able to create five new national parks.

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Open borders don’t lower wages, but sending migrants home will raise wages

by philg

Frontiers of Migranomics from one of our intellectual elites, a New Yorker writer:

We’ve been informed, as a matter of Scientific Fact, that low-skill immigration does not reduce wages for the American working class (contrary to Harvard economists’ analysis). Now the same Scientists are telling us that employers will be forced to pay higher wages, e.g., to apartment cleaners and roofers, if low-skill migrants are sent back to their home countries. More immigrants caused wages to rise (the undocumented built the current American economy) and, also, a reduction in immigrant supply would cause wages to rise.

This reminds me of Immigrants expand our economy, but millions of immigrants exiting the U.S. don’t shrink our economy.

Separately, I’ve refined my Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding? post into a more succinct form (without even trying AI!):

The passion for low-skill immigration has the same rational basis as keeping 100 cats in a 2BR apartment: “Animal hoarding is an accumulation of animals that has overwhelmed a person’s ability to provide minimum standards of care. … Rescue hoarders believe they’re the only people that can adequately care for their animals.” The same people who say that the U.S. has a dire shortage of affordable housing and health care then say that the 70 million migrants we’ve welcomed in recent decades aren’t sufficient and we need to bring in more migrants.

My new standard response on X, featuring photos from Unlimited Car Wash in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, November 21, 2025:

Without 70 million immigrants and their children (another 50 million?) who will hand-wash and vacuum my Rolls-Royce for $21?

In case the Jill Filipovic tweet is memory-holed:

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Hand signals for Cybertruck in Maskachusetts

by philg

From a friend in Maskachusetts who owns a stainless steel monstrosity:

[college-age son] got middle finger in truck yesterday going through Boston tunnel, and today in Hanover. He has been doing Nazi salute back.

Meanwhile, at a strip mall here in Florida, an illustration of the size range of vehicles that Americans typically use to transport a single human:

Finally, my friend provided an update on Tesla’s full self-driving:

I use FSD more and more. [wife] wants me to pay for it for both cars. Thinks it makes [son] a safer driver.

(He has an old Tesla 3 and a new Cybertruck.)

If you thought that the Cybertruck wasn’t wide enough… (photo from a nearby neighborhood here in Jupiter, Florida)

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How about an AI math tutor that looks at paper and pencil?

by philg

The New York Times, which told us that closing schools for 18 months was the absolute best thing for children (keep them safe from a virus that was killing Americans at a median age of 82), now tells us that screens are bad… “The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education”:

Many of these devices are provided by schools. You might think that these school-issued devices allow only a limited number of functions, like access to classroom Canvas pages and Google Docs. If you assumed that, you would be wrong.

Sylvie McNamara, a parent of a ninth grader in Washington, D.C., wrote in Washingtonian magazine that her son was spending every class period watching TV shows and playing games on his school-issued laptop. He often had no idea what topics his classes were covering. When she asked school administrators to restrict her son’s use of the laptop, they resisted, saying the device was integral to the curriculum.

In a survey of American teenagers by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, one-fourth admitted they had seen pornographic content during the school day. Almost half of that group saw it on a school-issued device. Students watching porn in class doesn’t just affect the students themselves — picture being a teenager in math class trying to concentrate on sine and cosine while sitting behind that display of flesh. It is disturbing on a number of levels.

(Teenagers are spending 80 percent of their in-class time watching porn and then just wasting the rest of the school day?)

Based on looking over the shoulders of our 4th and 6th graders, electronic math homework is the worst idea that I’ve seen. Each problem is multiple choice. The child can click on A. The software says “Wrong”. The child can then click on B. The software says “Wrong”. The child can then select C. The software says “Right” and proceeds to the next problem. Neither teacher nor parent is notified that the homework was apparently completed via guessing. Then the test comes along and the child who got 100% on homework might receive a grade of 25-40% because the test doesn’t allow for correction of wrong guesses.

What if an AI could work like a human math tutor? My dream is a household with cameras everywhere so that an artificial intelligence can tell me where to find scissors, tape, the coffee cup that I set down 15 minutes ago, etc. (see Why doesn’t ChatGPT tell us where to find items in our houses?). Given those already-installed cameras, an AI can watch a young scholar working on pencil and paper and say “That answer isn’t quite right”, then explain where the child went off track.

Optional enhancement: eye-safe laser pointer on a gimbal so that the robot can point to a place on the physical page while talking about what went wrong and what the learner should do.

The closest existing product to the above is Photomath, I think. You can give it a handwritten math problem and it explains how to solve it. I don’t think that is what most learners need, though. They already sat through the teacher telling them how to solve the same kind of problem (maybe while simultaneously streaming porn?). Also, instead of getting kids off the screen it forces kids onto the screen to use Photomath. The above-described system would be 100 percent audio-based from the learner’s point of view.

Should this be called “MathGPT”? Of course that name is already taken. The product seems to be a way to get learners to spend more time on screens:

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