Last month, I attended a birthday party for a yacht broker. His co-workers said that business was booming for all sizes of boats (though maybe they don’t deal with anything smaller than 35′? 70-125′ seems to be their bread and butter). “In the old days we could have just closed the office in August, but the phone never stops ringing.” What’s changed? “Boat buyers are richer and younger,” was the answer. “They’re taking much longer trips and want bigger more capable boats for those trips. Starlink has been the catalyst. It makes a tremendous difference, especially, for the crew, and has made people more willing to work the longer voyages. The owners can still work, no matter how long the trip.” How does Starlink compare to the previous generation of satellite-based Internet for yachts? “It’s 100 times faster,” a broker said, “a total game-changer for both speed and reliability.”
Speaking of reliability, it seems that the mid-priced yachts ($10-25 million) either have two independent Starlink subscriptions and receivers or, in some cases, two antennae and a single receiver that is smart about which one to use (“diversity is our strength” in the RF world). “You need the second antenna,” the brokers explained, “because sometimes the line of sight to the satellite is block by a mast.”
What I can’t figure out is where these additional/bigger yachts are parking. The world was already short of slips before the cash showers of government coronapanic programs and, more recently, AI. “They keep building marinas here in South Florida,” said a broker.
Its infrastructure fund went from owning zero marinas in 2024 to roughly 200 marinas today — more than anyone in the world.
The company paid $5.6 billion in early 2025 for Safe Harbor, which at the time owned and operated 138 marinas in the United States and Puerto Rico, including dozens of marinas from Maryland to Maine as well as the Caribbean’s largest in Fajardo, P.R. It also runs nine marinas on the Mediterranean, catering to large yachts in places like St. Tropez, Antibes and Monaco.
What’s going on locally? An $80 million revamp of a marina just south of Abacoa:
The facility will feature two five-story indoor storage buildings with 427 enclosed dry storage slips and 20 wet slips.
Someone with $80 million to invest didn’t get the climate change memo? The buildings are designed to handle 180 mph hurricane winds (the last hurricane to make landfall in Palm Beach County in a “major” category (= 3) was in 1949). But they’ll be worthless if sea level rise happens as promised by the Climate Doomers.
How much does a true “yacht” cost an Nvidia receptionist? A Turkish-built 125′ Hargrave, which ChatGPT says is mid-market at this size, is advertised at $24.5 million. Westport is a “step up”. For the programmer who has been at Nvidia 10 years, “Feadship / Lürssen / Oceanco / Royal Huisman: an entirely different stratum—bespoke, extremely expensive, and usually much larger, though some of these yards historically built yachts around this size.”
The Ellisons have kept details about their five children, who are younger than 18, private. They are involved parents, according to people familiar with the interactions. The Manalapan home has several buildings that include areas where the older children are home-schooled. There are an array of tutors, and the children are learning several languages, the people said.
I hope for the kids’ sake that Larry is on one of those Silicon Valley life extension plans!
Unintentionally funny:
“Every single home has a view of the water,” local agent Ashley McCoy of Serhant said of Palm Meadows Estates.
Any development engineered out of the Everglades, like the one where Larry chose to park the staff, must have ponds and canals to hold rainwater and prevent flooding. Developers present these water features to newcomers as some sort of amenity that could have been more houses if they’d been greedier, but the reality is always that a neighborhood has the minimum pond acreage deemed necessary by the hydrological engineers (whose skill level is amazing, incidentally! Our development (Abacoa) has supposedly never flooded in 25+ years, despite catching the edges of a few hurricanes; the Science wasn’t as advanced in the 1960s and 1970s, I think, and Florida adopted some new rules about the miracle of land creation in the 1970s (source)). Also, the typical pond has a noisy fountain in the middle that runs all day to interfere with algae and mosquito production.
Related:
“Larry Ellison adds Lion Country to PBC purchases including Eau Palm Beach” (Palm Beach Post, 2025): “After almost 60 years, the family that founded Lion Country Safari, Florida’s largest drive-through safari, has sold its 600-acre Loxahatchee land holdings for $30 million to the family of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, reportedly the third-richest man in the world. … Technology magnate Ellison also has bought multiple other properties in Palm Beach County, including a Manalapan mega mansion, a waterfront estate in North Palm Beach and the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa that he purchased in 2024 for $277.4 million.”
A search for “cornell nytimes.com” yields a full page of results related to students having purportedly engaged in various sex acts on campus back in 2024:
Nothing newsworthy other than one night of sex has occurred at an Ivy League institution with 26,500 students and more than 3,000 faculty members. How is that possible? Catherine Liu, a professor at UC Irvine, explains in Virtue Hoarders:
For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes.
The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the PMC able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable. It was after 1968 that the PMC gradually shifted its allegiance from workers to capital. Since that time, the most successful and visible segments of the PMC have brazenly put their smarts at the service of the bosses.
As a class, the PMC loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation. Tolerance for them is the highest secular virtue—but tolerance has almost no political or economic meaning.
How can the elites in the PMC serve their capitalist overlords? Distract people from serious attempts to confiscate and transfer wealth from the most successful capitalists, e.g., the billionaires who can’t buy Bernie, to the deserving working class. What’s a good distraction? College students having sex.
Under the Obama administration, the state became intensely involved in the enlightened regulation of sex. From 2008, PMC triumphalism under the well-spoken and well-read president channeled the collective energy of liberals to focus on sex in one of the most important sites of class formation: university campuses, especially elite university campuses. Instrumentalized obsession with sexual violence and sexual excess is an important part of American Puritanism: moral and virtuous superiority in the sexual enlightenment makes up an important part of the countercultural inheritance of the PMC. Rather than focusing on economic malfeasance, an ascendant PMC elite under Obama pursued sexual crimes—not at work or in the workplace but on college campuses—with a zeal that liberals reserve for any policy that diverts attention away from economic redistribution. In short, rather than break up the banks or reform the financial sector after he took office, Obama wanted to use his electoral victory to eliminate sexual violence on college campuses. In 2011, his Department of Education Office for Civil Rights sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to more than seven thousand universities warning them that if they did not take action to prevent and remedy sexual violence and sexual assault on their campuses, they would risk losing their rights to all federal funding.
At the same time, sensational stories of sexual violence and sexual abuse on college campuses emerged in the mainstream media, as if to confirm the necessity of the Obama administration’s stringent new policies. In 2015, at the height of the Obama-era sex panic, Kirby Dick’s The Hunting Ground was released by—wait for it—the Weinstein Company. Dick’s documentary presented college campuses as terrifying places for young women to live. Dick, with the help of Harvey Weinstein, pandered to his liberal audience’s thirst for stories about campus sexual violence. In 2016, Amber Frost cited the National Crime Victimization Survey numbers showing that non-college-going women were 1.2 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than their college-going counterparts. Sexual violence on college campuses attracted liberal PMC elites to a new front in the culture wars, far away from inequality, oppression, and workplace sexual harassment and discrimination. Fighting sexual violence on campus allowed the PMC to reinforce its belief that white-collar professionals and lawyers like Atticus Finch were the true heroes in low-risk struggles against anything but economic abuse.
Fifty years after the Summer of Love, college-going women were armed with more information and more sex education than any generation before them, but they seemed less capable of assuming sexual agency and more in need of protection than previous generations of women, who had had to deal with sexual autonomy and male desire without the help of university Title IX officers.
Please don’t take this post as an opinion regarding what kind of sex occurred at Cornell, who was at fault, if anyone, etc. I haven’t followed the case beyond the headlines (though with the Governor of New York State hunting for the fraternity guys with a special prosecutor, I assume that the guys will be found guilty and imprisoned). My personal opinion is that as the U.S. welcomes more Muslim immigrants, the kind of situation that gave rise (so to speak) to the situation will disappear. Women will once again be a defined category and they won’t be permitted to gather with unrelated men, consume alcohol, etc. No woman will be able to file a civil lawsuit seeking monetary damages after being raped in a fraternity house because, without a male relative escort, no woman will be able to enter a fraternity house at any time of the day or night.
The complaint does have one interesting angle. The plaintiff says that she was 20 years old at the time the events occured and also that “Plaintiff was in [her sorority’s] care, custody, and control” (essentially, that she was a child or maybe a slave to the sorority).
Though eligible to vote, she characterizes herself as a “minor” (if 20-year-old students are, in fact, minors, should they have the right to vote laws into place?): “Plaintiff, as a minor under 21 years old,”.
One more interesting tidbit from the book is an explanation for the popularity and acceptance of intellectually fraudulent activities such as the New York Times’s 1619 Project (primarily organized by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has been in the news recently).
The authors of the Project reject all criticism of it: they believe that their findings do not depend on the research consensus and archival evidence sorted through by a scholarly community of historians. Using her new clout and massive audience, Nikole Hannah-Jones led the way in dismissing the accepted scholarship that had been done on colonial America as simply the highly biased work of white males. Lifetimes of careful, empirical research were simply no match for massive foundation dollars backed by one of the largest media companies in the world. It is clear that powerful financial and media interests are behind the promotion of the 1619 Project and its bold attempt to change the way we understand American history and historical research itself. The Project is on top of everything, a bold attempt to eliminate historical materialism from the teaching and writing of American history while destroying the possibility of solidarity in the American working class.
Liberals have abandoned history, because they have to believe they are superior to elites of the past and the contemporary working class at the same time.
The footprints of the destroyed buildings are preserved as memorials, surrounded by the names of those killed, starting with the 1993 parking garage jihad.
The museum is nearly all underground:
The museum has a lot of touch screens:
A cornerstone plaque was preserved, dedicated to the thousands of legacy Americans who constructed the World Trade Center:
Generally speaking, the destruction and deaths that occurred at the site are attributed to motive-free “terrorists” with no relationship to any religion. Example:
A drawing from Alexandra, age 3, whose father was killed in the not-related-to-Islam attacks:
The remains of Ladder Company 3’s truck were preserved:
All 11 members of Ladder Company 3 were in the North Tower when it collapsed and all were killed.
One fight that New Yorkers will apparently never give up on is the struggle against SARS-CoV-2. More than five years after coronapanic began, the “one person per bench” rule still applies:
The gift shop reminds us that most of the heroes of 9/11 were female:
Some were Canine-Americans:
We are reminded that “Love is Stronger than Hate”:
A last look at a tower foundation:
A few steps away, it’s back to the average New York City streetscape:
Many American Muslims have faced a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility since the Sept. 11 attacks … the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. But anti-Muslim prejudice still endures, echoing the Islamophobia that arose in the earliest days after Sept. 11.
“I think that day belongs to everyone who lived it and what came after belongs to a smaller group of us,” said Mr. Awawdeh, 39, who is now the president and chief executive of the New York Immigration Coalition and a confidant of Mr. Mamdani. “That part of the story this country still has not told itself honestly.”
… backlash faced by high-profile Muslims in politics or the arts, and attacks on Islamic religious expression, including the construction of mosques and the wearing of religious clothing like hijabs.
“Muslim America now has a greater cultural footprint, more institutional power and a lot more support from allies, comrades and friends all throughout the country,” Mr. Dandia said. “Now when people think of Muslim America, they have names and faces they can point to.”
How many haters are there?
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this year, 43 percent of American adults said Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans, and 42 percent said Muslim Americans are having a negative impact on the country. When asked to explain their views, respondents often cited the Sept. 11 attacks.
In March 2002, 25 percent of American adults said Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence, but that number had risen to 51 percent in the survey conducted this year.
Who are the haters?
Those views have become highly polarized, with Republicans expressing far more negative views of Islam than Democrats, a change from after the attacks when supporters of both parties held similar views.
Let’s close with a fatwa from a scholar of the Quran and the Hadiths…
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:
As in Maskachusetts (old law; updated recently as noted below), a pregnant person’s pregnancy can be terminated in Illinois at any gestational phase via abortion care if the pregnant person’s mental health can be thus protected . (Given that any child has the potential to “drive a parent crazy”, any pregnancy in any pregnant person can be subjected to abortion care at any time.) Here are the rules explained by the City of Chicago, which notes that “People of all gender identities need access to safe abortion care.”
The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry has an exhibit on “prenatal development” featuring preserved “specimens”:
The “specimens” can also be characterized as “fetuses”:
The museum strays from Illinois law and principles, however, in a slide show in which the legal-to-abort-at-any-time collection of cells is described as “another human being” or “this baby”:
ChatGPT’s mind is subtle enough to handle the apparent contradiction:
Yes, the exhibit uses “baby” in the ordinary prenatal sense, while Illinois law uses different categories for determining legal protection. That is a real linguistic tension, but not a formal legal contradiction. Immediately before delivery, a healthy 30-week fetus may colloquially be called a baby and could, under the statutory health exception, legally be subjected to an abortion intended to cause fetal death. Were the same child delivered alive instead, intentionally causing its death would not be abortion care and could be prosecuted as murder.
Under current Massachusetts law, abortion is legal for the first 24 weeks of pregnancy. It is allowed after that only if a physician using best medical judgment says it is necessary to preserve the life, physical or mental health of the woman, because of a lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis or because the fetus wouldn’t likely survive outside the uterus.
Under the new language, abortion would be legal at any point in pregnancy for any reason. It would leave it to health care providers whether or not to perform an abortion.
The state Senate adopted the measure Friday, sending it to Democratic Gov. Maura Healey, who has signed other laws strengthening abortion rights.
The governor is a childless white women. She’s surrounded by apparently white women whose average total fertility is statistically minimal. The progressive overlords couldn’t find any token People of Color to help them celebrate the expanded abortion care availability?
Related:
Kermit Gosnell, a Black man unjustly imprisoned in Pennsylvania for conduct that, with minor tweaks, would have been perfectly legal in Maskachusetts both before and after this new law
Happy National Financial Awareness Day to those who celebrate…
We had a family discussion about the possibility that even successful people might be forced to work, e.g., to pay for a child’s college expenses. “It doesn’t matter how much you earn,” I told the kids. “It is always possible to spend every last penny.” They dispute this. I cited examples of second and third homes, of first class airline tickets to Europe, of expensive cars and watches.
The very next day, I ran into a neighbor who had purchased a Porsche 911 GT3 Touring the day before (i.e., while our family discussion was occurring). “The dealer called me and said he had a white and gold one in stock,” said the new owner. “My initial thought was to reject the color, but I went over to see it and came home with it.” In other words, an impulse decision to spend $300,000(?).
(As far as I know, this purchase won’t put any financial strain on the owner, but I thought it was a funny coincidence!)
Meanwhile, any news on the 2020 Tesla Roadster? If it had been delivered as promised would the early ones already be ready for the lithium-ion scrap heap?
Happy World Population Day, except to Elon Musk who says that humans are going extinct and should have more children, while simultaneously Elon refuses to make a Tesla self-driving minivan. In honor of this glorious day, set up after the Earth’s population reached 5 billion in 1987 (due to population collapse, Earth now has only about 8.2 billion humans (or maybe 10 billion)) , let’s take a look at a population on the other side of an ocean from us…
Gemini says Climate Change is real. Prompt and answer:
Is Climate Change real from a European perspective? I.e., is Europe hotter than it was 50 years ago and is it almost certain to become yet hotter 50 years from now?
Yes and yes. From a data-driven, scientific perspective, the physical reality of climate change in Europe matches both of your conditions.
When I asked Gemini “Create a poster for Americans to show solidarity with European heatwave victims by turning their thermostats up from 72 to 74” (no mention of skin color), it produced the following:
Note that the U.S. is a mixture of skin tones while everyone in Europe seems to be nonwhite. Could this reflect Gemini’s belief that European leaders have chosen a Climate Change adaption strategy of replacing their heat-intolerant subjects with imports from Africa and the Middle East who are, presumably, accustomed to hot weather.
Note closely related, but I love the “feels like the inside of a McDonald’s Apple Pie” phrase:
Even though France is experiencing a heatwave that feels like the inside of a McDonald's Apple Pie, the Minister of Ecology is firmly against air conditioning.
Stingy bitch Monique Barbu said that A/C does nothing to address climate change and people should adapt to global… pic.twitter.com/0kyDoQOx2r
Also, European Union regulations require that animals being transported cannot be exposed to a temperature higher than 30C, perhaps with a +5C tolerance. The European Food Safety Authority, however, says that horses cannot be exposed to temperatures higher than 25C (i.e., about 20C cooler than temps inside upper-floor Paris and Berlin apartments when it was 40C outside?).
Let’s celebrate America at 250. What have we accomplished as a people, working together, that is great? Let’s leave out our military heroics because those are regularly celebrated in statuary, political speeches, etc. Let’s leave our literature because books are usually written by one person. Same deal with software, much of which is substantially created by small teams. In the comments, please leave what you think we’ve done that has done the most good for humanity overall outside of military.
I’ll go first: integrated circuit fabrication. While the transistor was developed by a small team, including Nobel laureate William Shockley, who later set up Silicon Valley, and the IC itself was invented by Jack Kilby, it literally takes a village to fabricate ICs in significant quantities.
What are some resources that we can use to teach tweens and teens about the miracle of birth (of their smartphones)? Here are some with promise…
From our brothers and sisters in Korea (indirect shout-out to the U.S. military since the South Koreans probably wouldn’t be fabbing chips today if not for our willingless to cooperate and sacrifice as a society in the military domain):
A high school kid who built a fab in his parents’ garage and, after attending CMU (“the school that actually builds instead of talks”), runs his own semiconductor company (example of American suburban greatness; Europeans don’t have A/C and they don’t have garages so Sam Zeloof’s counterparts in the Old Country wouldn’t have been able to do this):
Happy birthday to us and maybe readers will come up with an even better idea for something that Americans working cooperatively can take pride (not “Pride”) in!
What did I reject? Air conditioning, even though Carrier World HQ is a few minutes’ drive from our house and A/C has enabled people to work hard and achieve in parts of the world where that was never previously possible, because it was mostly achieved by one person. I also rejected aviation, even though the U.S. did a lot at the systems level (airports, radio comms, air traffic control, etc.) because there were contemporaneous efforts in other nations as well. I rejected spaceflight because the Russians started it and the impact on humanity from our headline space achievements has been limited (communications satellites have had a huge impact, of course, but we weren’t the first to put a radio station in orbit). I rejected politics because most countries that have a U.S.-style government, rather than a parliamentary system, have devolved into dictatorships.
(What did our AI Overlords suggest? ChatGPT: “Immigration and assimilation at massive scale”. Gemini: “Eradicating Disease & Public Health Breakthroughs” (absurd; all of medicine relies heavily on European biology, especially German) and “The Interstate Highway System” (guess which German got there first?); Grok: “Genome sequencing and biotech” (how much benefit has humanity actually derived from this? where exactly in America was Francis Crick born?); Claude: “The development of the polio vaccine (Salk and Sabin)” (“American” Albert Sabin was a Polish Jew born “Abram Saperstejn”; Salk was an American Jew, but how many collaborators did either of these guys need? This wasn’t a collective achievement) and “The long, hard-won expansion of civil rights” (absurd, since we’re informed that DEI remains essential due to rampant discrimination and a lack of civil rights, e.g., Republicans preventing nonwhite Americans from voting by requiring ID) and “The Interstate Highway System” (Claude says that it was only “influenced by Hitler” and not “inspired by Hitler” so I guess that’s okay to label as 100% American).)
Happy July 4: Why doesn’t Congress do anything? (representative of my non-250th July 4th output, from 2018) “We celebrate our traitorous rebellion against a legitimate government so that we could govern ourselves and yet it does not seem that our current government is any more responsive to the people than was King George III and his Parliament. Politicians ask for our votes by saying that the current set of laws and/or implementations of laws is intolerable. Yet once they get elected and the paychecks begin to flow they don’t seem inclined to change anything.”
Music for the day, by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (2021 performance). Wokipedia says that Gottschalk was rejected by the Paris Conservatoire not for his Jewish background, but because he was American and “America is a country of steam engines”. (Ironic that in the subsequent the U.S. not only ran away with industry, but also with dominance of the music world. The French turned out to be comparative failures at both industry and culture.)
