Author: philg

Goodbye to San Francisco

by philg

Today was my last morning in San Francisco.

Unhoused folks, whom the rich locals say they want to help, in front of the Rolex store and the safe deposit vaults for said Rolexes:

Outdoor maskers were everywhere, but the iPhone 16 Pro Max hasn’t proven to be a nimble tool for street photography so I managed to photograph only a few of the roughly 15 whom I saw on a morning stroll:

This picture below has the following conventional elements for San Francisco: an outdoor masker (cheap surgical mask rather than an N95); a vacant storefront; some unhoused people; a Trader Joe’s.

The rivers of cash flowing into AI seem to be helping the city’s luxury retailers. Example:

Our hotel was right next to a BART station and BART goes all the way to SFO. What did The Google say about driving vs. BART?

Matt Gaetz is in the news, condemned by Democrats for purportedly having had some sort of sexual encounter with a 17-year-old female when he was in his 30s. What if Gaetz had sex with a 16-year-old male? San Francisco might consider naming one of the SFO terminals after him. I flew out of the Harvey Milk Terminal 1 (previously covered here):

(Above, note that we won World War II due to “womanpower”. Also note the N95 mask over a beard (Californian in a green jacket; a bit tough to see due to the fact that the photo is so heavily cropped).)

CNN:

According to the late San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts’ biography of Milk, “The Mayor of Castro Street,” Milk began a relationship with Jack McKinley, a 16-year-old runaway, while living in Greenwich Village. Milk was 34. Their relationship has long been a source of controversy. The age of consent in New York was raised from 14 to 18 in 2017. McKinley died by suicide in 1980.

Finally, although I hate to brag (in fact, nobody hates to brag more than I do), here’s something that I did while on JetBlue:

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Cure worse than the disease: locked-down Americans became alcoholics

by philg

From the Official Newspaper of Lockdown, “Excessive drinking persisted in the years after Covid arrived, according to new data.” (NYT, Nov 11, 2024):

Americans started drinking more as the Covid-19 pandemic got underway. They were stressed, isolated, uncertain — the world as they had known it had changed overnight.

Two years into the disaster, the trend had not abated, researchers reported on Monday.

The percentage of Americans who consumed alcohol, which had already risen from 2018 to 2020, inched up further in 2021 and 2022. And more people reported heavy or binge drinking,

“Early on in the pandemic, we were seeing an enormous surge of people coming in to the clinic and the hospital with alcohol-related problems,” said Dr. Brian P. Lee, a hepatologist at the University of Southern California and the principal investigator of the study, published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

This adds some weight to my oft-expressed theory, starting in March 2020, that American lockdowns and other coronapanic measures would, in the long run, kill far more people than they saved. A person who goes to work in an office is well-separated from the obesity-exacerbating fridge and a stockpile of wine and beer. Co-workers who smell alcohol are likely to inquire. The office environment is thus protective and that protection was lost when the typical state governor made it illegal for Americans to go to work.

Who else noticed this? Donald Trump. From the October 2020 debate with soon-to-be-Genocide-Joe:

I want to open the schools. The transmittal rate to the teachers is very small, but I want to open the schools. We have to open our country. We’re not going to have a country. You can’t do this, we can’t keep this country closed. It is a massive country with a massive economy. People are losing their jobs, they’re committing suicide. There’s depression, alcohol, drugs at a level that nobody’s ever seen before. There’s abuse, tremendous abuse. We have to open our country.

Related:

From Teddy Wong’s (excellent) restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas (maybe don’t try this lettering/language if you’re not Chinese…):

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The High IQ Party (TM) processes their loss (conclusion: Americans are even dumber than Democrats imagined)

by philg

In recent conversations with Democrats in California, New York, D.C., and Maskachusetts they’ve volunteered their feelings regarding the High IQ Party’s recent loss of power. I’ve also checked out their Facebook and X feeds.

Typical and eloquent: “What’s WRONG with Americans?” The poster owns a $2.1 million home in Berkeley, California, holds a taxpayer-funded job that requires a master’s degree, has a husband who earns money at a technical job, has a nonbinary child (1 out of 2, I think, so only a 50 percent rate of identification with the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community), and is passionate about cats and foster kittens. She will never compete with a low-skill migrant for a job nor an apartment for rent. I responded by pointing out that low-skill immigration is economically harmful to the working class, citing a Harvard study that is consistent with Econ 101 (albeit inconsistent with the Democrat Religion in which Our Lady of Open Borders performs miracles of raising wages and lowering rent every time a migrant walks across), and therefore another explanation was that some American voters are differently situated than she is. She and her friends doubled down on how the only reasonable explanation for a Republican vote was stupidity and/or immorality. I cited the example of my mother’s Haitian aide who voted for Trump. Did the white Berkeley Righteous want to say that there was something wrong with this Black immigrant? Answer: defriending. (Just like when my friend’s daughter asked the “male feminist” (button) social studies teacher in Lincoln, Maskachusetts why companies didn’t hire only women in order to earn higher profits after the teacher asserted that women do the same jobs as men for 80 percent of the salary. Answer: Detention!)

Part of a subsequent text-message exchange with a friend who was part of the Facebook conversation:

I think this is an example of how Democrats failed to understand that peasant Americans might be turning against them. Democrats live in bubbles where they almost never interact with anyone who disagrees with them or where disagreeing with the Democrat dogma is punished so severely that dissenters stay quiet. 

If California ever finishes counting its ballots (slower pace than Ron DeSantis restoring power after Hurricane Milton!) we will likely find that there are some Trump voters even in Berkeley. But they are never going to put out a lawn sign or mention their Love that Dare Not Speak its Name in casual conversation.

The result is an asymmetry. The working class understands [let’s call her Nina] and her point of view as a homeowner and holder of a job that requires an advanced degree that undocumented migrants and their descendants are unlikely to ever earn. But Nina will never understand the working class.

(This reminds me of what a wise gringa in Corcovado, Costa Rica said about parrots: “They understand our language, but we don’t understand theirs.”)

Here’s a typical Democrat on X highlighting “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” (Democrat-run The New Republic), which points out that a majority of Americans were apparently fooled by lies in “right-wing media”. As Democrats were not fooled, that makes non-Democrats… stupid.

My mom recently had lunch with a Radcliffe ’55 classmate. The 90-year-olds, both in poor health, talked about their fears of an impending Trump dictatorship. My mom’s friend heaped derision on the Americans who had voted “against their interests” for Trump. She expressed sorrow that would-be-Assassin #1 hadn’t killed Trump. I successfully refrained from pointing out that a change of government in D.C. isn’t the biggest risk faced by a typical 90-year-old.

It’s interesting that that Democrats claim to be the Party of Empathy, a quality in which all Republicans are sorely lacking, and can’t put themselves in the shoes of a working class American for even a few seconds. On a recent Uber ride from Stuart, Florida back home the driver was an immigrant from Colombia who had voted for Trump in hopes that further low-skill immigration would be curtailed. Having never tried to make a living as an Uber driver, I don’t think any of my friends could fathom the man’s desire to not see the labor market flooded with new arrivals. Nor would they understand why he doesn’t want to pay higher taxes and/or receive fewer government services so that college graduates can fly to Europe instead of paying back their student loans.

Here’s a beautiful one. An election prophet says that his/her/zir/their prophecy of a Kamala-Tampon Tim victory did not come true because the electorate was irrational (i.e., stupid) and misled by misinformation/disinformation spread by Elon Musk.

Surveying X, we find the old reliable explanation for why not everyone supports Democrats:

(If a Trump dictatorship is all about misogyny that raises the question of why there wasn’t/isn’t more solidarity among the sisterhood. As in 2016, the Trump 2024 campaign manager identified as a woman (she’ll now be his Chief of Staff). A Representative who identifies as a woman just agreed to be Trump’s UN Ambassador. Why are people who identify as “women” helping Donald Trump against the interests of those who share their gender ID?)

Readers: What are you hearing from your Democrat friends? As noted above, mine are saying that they knew tens of millions Americans were stupid and easily fooled by Fox News and similar, but they made a mistake in underestimating the number of stupid Americans.

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The dual fantasy worlds of Republicans and Democrats

by philg

As we celebrate National Pickle Day, let’s look at a 63-year-old Democrat who expects, absent dramatic birth control measures, to become pregnant and crave pickles and ice cream. In the video below, she discusses a first person possibility of being a customer for IVF and abortion care as well:

Julia Louis-Dreyfus has reached the age of a great-grandmother in most human societies, but imagines that she could get pregnant and give birth (the Guinness Book of World Records age for this feat is 59) and also that someone other than a gerontologist is interested in her reproductive system. (The post and video above originally a tweet on JL-D’s official X account, but apparently it was deleted or restricted so that only non-Deplorables/non-Garbage can see it.)

What’s the corresponding fantasy world for Republicans? Deporting undocumented criminals:

“There’s about 4.5 million who would be the first priority for that, people who’ve already committed crimes,” Johnson (R-La.) said Thursday. “They’re in the system now [for] shoplifting, or whatever it is … or [having] done things that are untoward or unlawful.”

This politician imagines that there is a country (or countries) out there, other than the U.S., that is dumb enough to take in 4.5 million folks who’ve been adjudicated criminals. Note that criminality is heritable, so if a country takes in a criminal it will be on track to have additional criminals in the future. (Also remember that nobody can agree on how many of the undocumented are currently enriching us with their presence: “Yale Study Finds Twice as Many Undocumented Immigrants as Previous Estimates” (2018); the estimate of 11 million seems to have been in use by mainstream media for 20+ years, even as the same publications report on floods of new arrivals.)

I think the 63-year-old’s fear of getting pregnant and not being able to secure abortion care might be more reasonable than the Republican expectation of being able to dump migrant criminals on some other nation!

So the good news is that the two parties will be back to governing soon, now that the election drama is mostly over. The bad news is that both parties seem to be living in fantasy worlds of their own creation!

In case the above Instagram post is memory-holed…

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Parachute and rocket replacement option for Cirrus owners who love Disney and Harry Potter

by philg

It’s the 13th of the month so let’s talk about some equipment that you’d have to be unlikely to need…

Cirrus airplanes need new rockets and parachutes every 10 years whether they’ve been living on the ramp in Texas or coddled in a climate-controlled hangar. The typical service center can’t do this work. In the southeast, the conventional choice has been to take the airplane to Atlanta where a couple of highly regarded shops have extensive experience with CAPS replacement (see DLK/Avias and Romanair, for example). This post is about a potentially more convenient/fun option: the Cirrus-owned factory service center in Orlando, Florida (Kissimmee, actually; KISM).

Our SR20-G2 is coming up on its 20th anniversary and, thus, without a new parachute/rocket it would have become illegal to fly starting in January 2025 (maybe all private planes will become illegal to fly in Jan 2025 if my Democrat friends were correct in predicting a dictatorship if Donald Trump were elected; a dictator wouldn’t want people flying around VFR, certainly, with no government tracking).

One advantage for the factory shop is that they may have the inside track on getting the rockets and ‘chutes. Others have reported planes being grounded for 6 months as these parts failed to arrive sooner than 9 months after being ordered. Assuming that Cirrus does eventually sort out its supply chain, a persistent advantage for the Orlando shop is that it is in Orlando. A Cirrus owner can load up his/her/zir/their family and arrive in Kissimmee on Monday, visit Disney, Universal, the cathedral, etc., and fly away on Friday (I arrived on Monday at noon and the plane was completed on Thursday).

Note that Cirrus offers a ferry pilot service if you want the plane picked up or dropped off, but they have very few pilots who are qualified to fly the old Avidyne planes.

The factory service center is mostly there for Vision Jet owners, I think, and it is tough to get an estimate and make a reservation (there is a “concierge” who never seems to be available), but once organized and confirmed everything is jet-smooth. Enterprise rental car is there on the field at Signature so it is easy to do a one-way car rental if you’re based elsewhere within Florida and don’t need a week of Orlando.

What about the price? It seems to be roughly the same as having the work done at an independent service center with CAPS authorization, i.e., about $20,000 (it was $12,000 ten years ago). Speaking of our inflation-free economy, when the Cirrus maintenance manager mentioned proudly that the company was spending $15 million on an under-construction facility at the airport, I responded “That sounds great, but $15 million might soon be the price of a Diet Coke.”

I enjoyed spending Christmas (on November 9, 2024) at Disney Springs as part of my Cirrus retrieval experience:

Kissimmee itself is famous for understatement and elegance:

(See also Kissimmee’s Monument of States)

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Why isn’t the Ring camera smart enough to notice that a garage door has been left open?

by philg

We live in the glorious age of AI. Here in our concrete block hurricane-resistant fortress we have a Ring camera in the back of the garage pointed at the door. It’s called “Garage” in the Ring app. Why isn’t it smart enough to wake up once every 30 minutes and, if appropriate, notify us that the garage door has been left open for half an hour? That doesn’t seem like a huge ask of our future robot overlords.

There’s an “AI” company here in Palm Beach County called Levatas that claims to be able to do stuff like this. Amazon/Ring presumably also has plenty of smart programmers. They claim to have delivered AI recently. Why haven’t they done the basics?

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Stuart Air Show 2024

by philg

In honor of Veterans Day, a few snapshots from this year’s Stuart (Florida) Air Show…

First, let’s see what can be done with the latest and greatest iPhone 16 Pro Max. The “5X” lens (120mm-equivalent) works out reasonably well for very large aircraft and for formation/smoke displays:

Things quickly get pixelated with cropping:

How about using the Canon 800/11 lens profiled previously here for air show work? Here’s the heritage flight:

Maybe one of the positive things that will come out of the Election 2024 Nakba is that Donald Trump will bring back the A-10 Warthog:

Mike Goulian (yellow) and his former protégé Rob Holland (red/Black) were there. The 800mm lens is actually too short for these tiny planes unless one gets (white?) privileged access to a press stand. Heavily cropped:

Every glider needs two jet engines, according to Bob Carlton (the “Foxjet” pilot):

Getting back to the machines that impress everyone except the Houthis… the F-22 (see this lecture about F-22 fly-by-wire from our MIT class).

How about a show version of the F-16?

(If Greta Thunberg hadn’t been busy with a Queers for Palestine rally she would have no doubt objected both to the gratuitous waste of Jet A fuel and the fact that the F-16 is the workhorse of Israel’s air force.)

How about some relics of the old days when the objective in war was to actually win? P-51, T-28, and MiG 17:

Let’s finish with Nathan Hammond, whose night airshow performance is always the highlight of Oshkosh, and Bill Stein:

The Stuart airport (KSUA) is about to get a huge boost from the Trump Dictatorship v2.0. Any time that Trump spends at Mar-a-Lago the PBI airport will become painful to use. The (fuel-selling) FBOs at PBI will be as angry on January 20, 2025 as AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib.

Separately, seeing all of this military hardware makes me wonder what our military is for. If our borders our open then any enemy can order its troops to walk across our southern border and then attack the U.S. from the inside. That said, I am impressed with the bravery of every veteran who has flown a military aircraft, in which there are usually plenty of ways to get killed without enemy involvement.

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California vote counting vs. Florida post-hurricane power restoration

by philg

It’s five full days (about 120 hours) after the Election 2024 Nakba. The folks in California who say that they know how governments should operate have counted 72 percent of their presidential ballots (New York Times):

Let’s compare this to the numbers in Power restoration after Hurricane Milton. Recall that Milton was a Category 3 storm that hit Sarasota, St. Pete, and Tampa, knocking out power to 4 million “customers” (a household of 3 people would be just one customer). I didn’t stay organized to capture a number for how many were still out exactly five days after the hurricane made landfall, but four days afterward roughly 500,000 customers were still out, which means that more than 87 percent had been restored. Six days following landfall, roughly 190,000 customers were out from the original 4 million affected.

So.. Ron DeSantis-led Florida restored power after a Category 3 hurricane at a much faster pace than California has been able to count votes. (Florida also did count votes, but there aren’t any interesting statistics from that process because it took just a few hours.)

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The fascist dictatorship looms, but Democrats expect to overpower it in 2026

by philg

Friends on Facebook who have posted for 6-9 months about how the election of Trump v2.0 would mean the end of American democracy are now posting about how they expect to retake the U.S. in 2026 and 2028 via selecting candidates who aren’t as brain dead as Biden-Harris-Walz.

The mind of the typical Democrat seems to be summed up in this tweet from Kerry Kennedy, sibling of the traitor RFK, Jr.:

Yesterday was a bad day for our country, for our democracy, for our economy, for our party, for our family, and for ourselves. I’ve lived through 15 presidential elections, and this is not different because it is amplified or more extreme, but because it is fundamentally different. We are facing an incoming president and administration that have developed multiple, detailed plans for a fascist takeover of every department of the federal government. … But I’ve felt beat down before. And despite all of this, I’m confident we will survive. … We have two years until midterms, when we can make a comeback.

Donald Trump will be a dictator. As commander of the U.S. military, the FBI, etc. he will have practical powers to implement a police state that previous dictators worldwide could never have dreamed of. Yet at the same time, there is no doubt that free and fair elections will be held in 2026 and 2028 during which time Democrats can regain power.

(Separately, Democrats tell us that intelligence, conscientiousness, and criminality aren’t heritable. Thus, there is no reason to expect children of the unsuccessful to be unsuccessful themselves and any lack of success must be attributed to racism, xenophobia, etc. At the same time, political wisdom is heritable, which is why we should listen to advice from children of famous Democrats.)

Speaking of the Democrat mind, let’s check out what their thought leaders have had to say. AOC in 2021 wanted to “end minority rule … end the filibuster, expand the court” to “protect our democracy”:

Here’s one from Ilhan Omar in which she would “save our democracy” by abolishing the filibuster and also making sure that whoever won the popular vote would be the new dictator:

CNN on the popular vote:

Rashida Tlaib agreed that the minority party in the Senate should be stripped of all power and whoever happens to be in the White House should appoint 4,8,12, or however many more additional Supreme Court Justices are necessary for Justice:

Will these wise females, all of whom were wisely reelected by their constituents, spend 2025 working toward expanding the Supreme Court and abolishing the filibuster?

How about the “thought followers”, i.e., my friends in the Northeast and California who do and think whatever the New York Times tells them (e.g., “Biden is not senile”; “be enthusiastic for Kamala now”). One Trump alarmist said that the peasants should now “organize” (how many dictatorships have been overturned by a peasant rebellion?). A Manhattan-based doomsayer:

Which brings us to 2016, the last time I felt the way I feel this morning. Nearly all the polls predicted Hillary Clinton would beat Trump to become the first woman president. … hopefully the Democrats will analyze and learn something from this experience and put forth stronger candidates in the future.

The people who said that 2024 would be the last election in the U.S. if Trump were elected now say that they’ll offer “stronger candidates in the future”. Stronger candidates for what? Student council presidency? HOA board membership? The smartest people in America told us that there wouldn’t be additional elections for the House, Senate, or White House in the event of a Nakba (Trump victory).

Related:

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Getting into law school: Go to the most grade-inflated college you can find and cram constantly for the LSAT

by philg

College application season is upon us. A tip from a brilliant young litigator with whom I recently worked (as a software expert witness, not in the law mines themselves!)… “Rankings of law schools look at undergraduate GPA and median LSAT score and, therefore, law school admissions look at the applicant’s GPA and LSAT score.” What’s his practical advice? “They don’t adjust the GPA for how rigorous your undergrad school was. You’re better off going to community college or majoring in ‘studies’ at Harvard than going through an undergrad program where you’d have some chance of getting a B.”

If the undergrad program is so undemanding that straight As are guaranteed, how should the prospective lawyer spend his/her/zir/their time? Cramming for the LSATs! Imagine working with those prep books and prep classes starting the summer before freshman year of undergraduate!

Despite the young lawyer’s mention of Harvard, it turns out to be only America’s #3 college for grade inflation. The school with the highest average GPA is Brown. (source) Of course, for either school the 18-year-old should be sure to pack a keffiyeh and Queers for Palestine banner (also useful once the scholar arrives at the elite law school; see the recent Instagram post by Berkeley Law students regarding the “Palestinian Genocide” (exacerbated by one of the world’s highest rates of population growth)).

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