Category: Consumerism

$2449 of e-waste thanks to Microsoft (and best way for kids to organize and sort photos?)

by philg

Here’s my January 11, 2017 order for a Dell laptop computer with OLED screen:

The machine supports Trusted Platform Module 2.0, but the CPU per se isn’t supported by Microsoft for Windows 11. I had hoped to repurpose this machine as a digital photo organizer for the kids, but Windows 10 security updates will end later this year so that’s infeasible.

Is the de-supporting of Windows 10 going to be the largest e-waste event in the history of humanity? What’s Greta Thunberg going to say about this? (Maybe after shouting “Free free Palestine” she would say “Install Linux”?)

This raises a question… what is a good system for kids to use to organize photos taken with a modern camera? My preference is for the organizer to run locally with the photos stored on the laptop’s SSD with a cloud backup (maybe just Microsoft OneDrive if we stay with Windows) rather than sign them up for life to pay huge fees every month for cloud photo storage.

Could ACDSee be the modern answer to what we lost when Google discontinued (and failed to open source) Picasa? Or is the built-in Windows 11 Photos app sufficient? ChatGPT says that MacOS has a better photos app:

Maybe the kids are young enough to master ChromeOS (for skool), MacOS, and eventually Windows? I don’t love the idea of having to learn enough about MacOS to support their efforts, but it does seem that Apple is more serious about this challenge. Windows 11 runs like a pig on my three-year-old laptop, which cost $1700 and has 16 GB of RAM. I can’t figure out if it is Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, or the Microsoft Photos app that is causing the problem (if I do an “End Task” on Photos the machine seems to come out of its sluggish state).

Speaking of avoiding e-waste, Boise, Idaho offers an awesome model for other cities: Reuseum. In addition to classes for kids, they offer refurbished Windows 11 machines at low prices, e.g., these machines that could use more RAM for $80:

Plus if you want to make a sculpture out of old PCs and telephones you can buy them by the pound:

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Harry’s Plus razor defeats almighty Dorco?

by philg

I succumbed to relentless online advertising and tried out the latest Harry’s Plus razor (see Harry’s Crummy Razors for my opinion regarding the predecessor). Maybe it is the advertised “Progressive Blade Technology”, which the previous Harry’s cartridges lacked, but I think this is better than Dorco, which also means that it is better than Gillette’s finest. Neither Dorco nor Gillette seems to have been working on improvements to their respective products (Gillette owner Procter & Gamble is concentrating on preserving their race-based hiring and other DEI programs rather than on engineering). The “Plus” version of Harry’s seems much smoother and less prone to generating cuts and nicks during the first few shaves.

The blades are “German-engineered” so I guess they are Halal even if likely made in China.

Who else has tried Harry’s Plus?

Related:

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Apple in China, the rise of iPod

by philg

Second post regarding Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee. This one is about Apple’s shift from making computers to making handheld devices. (See Apple in China book, Intro if you missed Post #1 about this book.)

… just a month after the launch of iTunes [January 2001], hardware chief Jon Rubinstein—aka Ruby—and procurement head Jeff Williams were in Japan and stopped by Toshiba. The Japanese supplier showed them a new hard drive, just 1.8 inches in diameter, with a massive 5 gigabytes of capacity. Toshiba didn’t really know what to do with it, but to Ruby, the implications were “obvious” immediately: this thing could hold a thousand MP3s! It was the enabling technology they needed. “Jeff,” Ruby quietly said, “we need to get all of these.” Williams negotiated an exclusive supply agreement as Ruby made sure the $10 million check they drew up wouldn’t bounce.

Rubinstein and Fadell would later dispute who the key figure was behind the hit MP3 player, but the truth is that its brilliance had multiple authors, reflecting how each domain in the pyramid structure (ID, PD, MD, and Ops) worked on their specialty simultaneously. Ruby had found Toshiba’s disk drive and realized its potential. Phil Schiller, of marketing, introduced the idea of the scroll wheel—probably the feature most loved by consumers, as it reacted to the velocity of each turn and enabled them to race through hundreds of songs in a matter of seconds. Fadell was the overall architect. He presented to Jobs a prototype made from foam core and stuffed with old fishing weights to give it some heft. Jony Ive’s team made it unapologetically white, with a polished, chrome-like stainless steel back, a remarkably sharp turn from the childlike colors of the iMac. It was an unusually high-end material for a mass-market product, giving it a feel unlike any other handheld device. It was also durable and could dissipate heat more effectively than plastic.

The MP3 player would remain nameless for months, until four people in branding tossed ideas back and forth with Jobs. Vinnie Chieco, a creative director, recalls how the team would write down every permutation and then sort them into three piles: the worst, the ones that suck, and the not horrible. He’d come up with one: Troubadour, named after French poets who went from town to town playing music. This thing, too, was mobile, could travel and play music. The metaphor worked. The name didn’t. Jobs had his own preferred moniker, which Chieco remembers but won’t share. Like MacMan—what Steve wanted to call the iMac—his idea wasn’t very good, and Chieco is hesitant to share something now that Jobs can’t defend. The other three people in the room told Jobs they loved his name for the device, perhaps trying to avoid his infamous wrath. But when Jobs asked Chieco for his opinion, the creative director said, “Well, I understand your name is novel, but…” Feeling as if he were putting his head in a guillotine, Chieco told Jobs the reasons he didn’t like it. Meanwhile, he kept thinking in metaphors. He was struck by the all-white design, which looked space-like. Riffing on Jobs’s idea that a Mac computer was the “hub for your digital life,” he considered how in the future, the ultimate hub would be the mother ship. The only way to escape would be in a pod that flies away for temporary adventures, returning to replenish and recharge. He got the idea from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and hey—now it was 2001! It felt serendipitous, like when the Macintosh emerged in the Orwellian year, 1984. He proposed Pod. Jobs didn’t hate it, and over a few meetings it grew on him until it became the obvious name. It just needed one tweak, one letter, and then it was perfect: iPod.

Why did Apple make a phone? It was obvious to everyone that consumers wouldn’t want an iPod once reasonably capable smartphones were ubiquitous. Profits from Apple computers were insignificant compared to profits from the mass market iPod.

Around mid-2005, another project began to gain traction internally. The interfaces team had been toying with multi-touch technology for roughly two years, aided by a start-up Apple had purchased called FingerWorks. Senior engineers from Project Purple knew about it, but the original concept was about rethinking the Mac’s interface. When Steve Jobs first showed Fadell the technology, asking if it might work for a phone, it was far from obvious that the enormous contraption Jobs pointed to was the future of something that would sit on your desk, let alone be shoved in your pocket. “It filled the room,” Fadell recalled. “There was a projector mounted on the ceiling, and it would project the Mac screen onto this surface that was maybe three or four feet square. Then you could touch the Mac screen and move things around and draw on it.”

Meanwhile, the fear that the iPod business would be cannibalized by the phone giants continued to fuel anxiety and innovation. “It was an existential crisis,” a senior engineer says. “[We were saying], ‘You realize what’s gonna happen here is this business we built on iPods is going to go away. We need to build a phone.’ ” Jobs eventually canceled the other phone ideas and declared multi-touch the future. He was adamant there’d be no keyboard, so the phone would be as full screen as possible. Apple’s engineers suddenly had to find suppliers that could build multi-touch displays at scale—something that didn’t exist at the time. There was no way Apple could send the specs to some factory and wait for the parts to be built; instead, it sent teams of engineers to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China to find hungry vendors it could work with to co-create the processes. “There were a few truly groundbreaking mass production processes we were involved with, where we really had to go around to find the best people in the entire world—the peak of what humans have developed for some of these technologies,” says a product manager. By early 2006, they had a full-screen prototype enclosed in brushed aluminum. Jobs and Ive “were exceedingly proud of it,” journalist Fred Vogelstein would later recount. “But because neither of them was an expert in the physics of radio waves, they didn’t realize they’d created a beautiful brick. Radio waves don’t travel through metal well.”

(I don’t understand how “cannibalized by the phone giants” made it through the purported editing process of this book. In business, cannibalized refers to a reduction of sales of Product A after the company that makes Product A introduces Product B. In the context of Apple, the iPhone might cannibalize sales from the iPod or a notebook-format Macintosh might cut into sales of desktop Macs rather than take sales away from IBM PCs.)

The iPhone required a lot of new manufacturing techniques, mostly developed by vendors in China and Taiwan, often with significant help from Apple engineers who’d fly over from California.

Another important supplier was TPK, which placed a special coating on the Corning glass, enabling the user’s fingers to transmit electrical signals. The Taiwanese start-up had been founded just a few years earlier by Michael Chiang, an entrepreneur who in the PC era had reportedly made $30 million sourcing monitors and then lost it all on one strategic mistake. In 1997 he began working with resistive touch panels used by point-of-sale registers. When Palm was shipping PDAs that worked with a stylus, Chiang worked on improving the technology to enable finger-based touchscreens, even showing the technology to Nokia. But nobody was interested until 2004, when a glass supplier introduced TPK to Apple. An iPhone engineer calls Chiang “a classic Taiwanese cowboy [who] committed to moving heaven and earth” by turning fields into factories that could build touchscreens. The factory was in Xiamen, a coastal city directly across from Taiwan. “The first iPhones 100 percent would not have shipped without that vendor,” this person says. He recalls Chiang responding to Apple by saying, “ ‘We can totally do that!’—even though [what we were asking was something] nobody in the world had ever done before.” Among the techniques Apple codeveloped with suppliers was a way to pattern, or etch, two sides of a piece of glass to do the touch sensor, at a time when film lithography processes were being done on only one side. Another pioneering technique is called rigid-to-rigid lamination, a process for bonding two materials using heat and pressure, which Apple applied to tape a stack of LCD displays to touch sensors and cover elements to create one material. The process was performed in a clean-room environment with custom robotics.

Instead of selecting components off the shelf, Apple was designing custom parts, crafting the manufacturing behind them, and orchestrating their assembly into enormously complex systems at such scale and flexibility that it could respond to fluctuating customer demand with precision. Just half a decade earlier, these sorts of feats were not possible in China. The main thing that had changed, remarkably, was Apple’s presence itself. So many of its engineers were going into the factories to train workers that the suppliers were developing new forms of practical know-how. “All the tech competence China has now is not the product of Chinese tech leadership drawing in Apple,” O’Marah says. “It’s the product of Apple going in there and building the tech competence.”

We might owe most of our current toys to Apple’s 2010 agreement with TSMC, motivated by a desire to reduce its dependence on Samsung:

In 2010, Apple operations chief Jeff Williams reached out to Morris Chang through his wife, Sophie Chang, a relative of Terry Gou. Dinner between them launched months of “intense” negotiations, according to Chang, as Williams pressed TSMC on prices and convinced the Taiwanese group to make a major investment. “The risk was very substantial,” Williams recalled at a gathering for TSMC’s thirtieth anniversary in 2017. “If we were to bet heavily on TSMC, there would be no backup plan. You cannot double-plan the kind of volumes that we do. We want leading-edge technology, but we want it at established technology… volumes.” Williams’s narrative leaves out some of the most interesting facts about the early partnership. One is that Chang wouldn’t commit to Apple’s demands. In a 2025 interview with the podcast Acquired, Chang said that TSMC would’ve had to raise substantial amounts of money, either by selling bonds or issuing more stock. Williams had another idea: “You can eliminate your dividend.” Morris balked at the aggressive suggestion. “If we do what Jeff Williams says, our stock to going to drop like hell,” he recounted. Chang agreed to take only half of Apple’s order. Even this partial commitment forced TSMC to borrow $7 billion, so it could invest $9 billion and devote 6,000 full-time employees working round the clock to bring up a new chips fab in eleven months, according to Williams. “In the end, the execution was flawless,” he said. The partial commitment forced Apple to toggle between Samsung and TSMC, which some in Cupertino saw as a plus—it meant that Apple wasn’t beholden to just one supplier for what serves as the brain within the iPhone. But Srouji’s team found it nightmarish to manage both suppliers. So Apple turned to TSMC on an exclusive basis, establishing over-the-top contract terms to protect itself. A person familiar with the contract characterized it as saying: “We need to make sure that you’re gonna go out of business—if you’re gonna put us at risk of going out of business.” It was a “mutually assured destruction” type of situation, this person says, because if TSMC didn’t perform in any given year, there’d be no iPhone. So the Apple decision was made: “We are going to put all of our eggs in one basket, and then we’re gonna guard the basket.” TSMC’s bet would prove critical for making it the world leader in semiconductor fabrication, with Apple as its

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Florida question: Why isn’t a compressed air source a standard part of poolside equipment?

by philg

Every Florida pool has an equipment pad nearby with electric power, sometimes natural gas (electric heat pumps are better these days because they’re cheaper to run and can also chill the pool), and filtration. The question for today: Why isn’t there always an electric air compressor on the pad? Given the popularity of inflatables why wouldn’t there be a permanently stationed powerful compressed air source to top up rafts, etc.?

Most compressors don’t seem to be designed to handle the elements, but here’s one with potential:

Has anyone ever seen something similar mounted near a pool? If not, why not?

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The long dark winter is finally over

by philg

February 2024, regarding a tragedy that began in 2023: Microsoft keyboards back from the dead.

After massive daily injections of healing Paxlovid, the Sculpt keyboard has risen! Amazon now stocks the Incase “Designed by Microsoft” keyboards.

Get yours before the 6,000 percent tariffs kick back in (the case is stamped “Made in China”, almost surely by the same factory that Microsoft used).

The new supplier’s site:

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Re-roofing a Spanish-style house in Florida: concrete, clay, Brava composite, or stamped metal

by philg

Happy Hurricane Prep Season to those who celebrate (actual hurricane season is June 1-November 30th, with a peak in mid-September; due to Climate Change, there has been no increase in frequency or intensity of hurricanes since 1851 (Nature Magazine)).

Professor ChatGPT says that the concrete barrel tile roof on our Spanish Colonial Revival house will last 50-75 years:

But then it adds a little something:

Underlayment – Typically lasts 20–30 years and needs replacement before tiles fail.

So the AI thinks the “roof” lasts 75 years even if starts leaking after 20 years because tiles aren’t waterproof and the underlayment is the actual water barrier. All that you need to do to replace the failed underlayment is remove all of the tiles from the house, remove the underlayment, install new underlayment, and then put tiles on top of the underlayment… exactly as you’d be doing in a complete re-roof project.

Our roof was designed to handle a minimum of 140 mph winds, according to the 2003 permit documents, but maybe that was just the code. The tiles are adhered to the underlayment with Polyset AH-160 foam in which the “160” means it can handle 160 mph (if nailed down, tile is good only to about 120 mph (scary comparison video)).

The documents weren’t specific regarding the underlayment used. I emailed the company that built our house and got an immediate response from the owner:

It’s hard to remember 22 years ago, however the typical tile roof construction during this time frame was a 15lb. felt tin tagged dry-in, layer with a 90lb asphalt hot mop layer then the tiles applied mechanically, with mortar or foam adhesive. I suspect you will need a new roof soon.

Our neighbors have been getting new roofs installed either due to leaks or for better insurance quotes or just because everyone in Florida strives to have a house that looks new inside and out. Here are some things that I’ve learned from talking to roofers…

The only thing good about concrete is that it is cheap and it won’t break if walked on; it’s very heavy and the color gets faded by the sun and it supports ugly mold growth. You’d think that it would last forever structurally, but it doesn’t because it absorbs a huge amount of water. Concrete seems to be a “builder-grade” solution.

Clay tile has a reputation for being fragile, but it lasts forever and retains its appearance much better than concrete because mold is less likely to grow and the color of the tile is the color of the material. However, the European-made tile is much more durable than the South American-made tile (cheaper and more prevalent) and can be walked on. If you want to support river-to-the-sea liberation of Palestine (and subsequent Hamas rule over all of what used to be Israel) you can buy Verea tile from Spain. If you want the highest quality most durable tile (“it’s what Trump uses on his building,” a roofer noted), you buy Ludowici tile from Italy. For our room, the Ludowici tile would cost $16,000…. to ship from Ohio. The tile itself would be over $100,000 and take 22 weeks to create. Compare to about $30,000 for Verea tile shipped to Miami and then trucked to our neighborhood and delivered via conveyor belt to the roof. How rich are people in Palm Beach? One roofer who quoted our project said that he had about $60,000 (pre-Biden price) of Ludowici tile on his own house. A customer in Palm Beach ordered it, waited, didn’t like the color when it arrived, and ordered some other color. The tile wasn’t returnable so the customer simply gave it to the roofer.

With Verea, the tile itself will likely be 25-30% of the cost of the entire project. The clay tile can be reused when it is time to re-roof due to underlayment age/failure, but if the tile has been glued down each tile needs to be dipped in solvent and the added labor is almost the same as just buying new tile. If nailed or screwed down, the roof can handle 120 mph wind. If glued, the roof can handle 160 mph wind. Palm Beach County requires that a roofer hire an independent engineer at the end of the project to do a “pull test” on random tiles and make sure that they have sufficient uplift strength. The practical life of a clay tile roof with the highest quality dual-layer underlayment (two different variations from Polyglass; add one more “anchor” layer for breathability if there is closed cell foam underneath the roof deck) is 30-35 years, but insurance companies may demand replacement at 25 years. The tiles can’t fail, but the underlayment does.

Brava has the world’s best roofing material web site, but their roofing materials (composite barrel tiles) aren’t popular. “I’ve installed exactly one,” said a roofer. “It was for a billionaire who had a 5-year-old $500,000 slate roof on a stable and chips were falling on his horses. He wanted a roofing material that couldn’t fall apart. I don’t like the look of them, but they are rated to 211 mph if you use their screws, which I did.” Brava tiles don’t yield any improvement in roof life compared to clay because it is the underlayment that fails. Brava claims to have some “cool roof” tiles that reflect solar heat, but I’m not sure that their specs are better than conventional clay:

Here are some numbers for a Verea red clay tile:

Looks like the natural clay has better reflectance and worse emittance. The biggest drawback, I think, of the Brava tiles is that they can burn. They claim that if the right fireproof underlayment is used the tiles won’t be set on fire by a fire inside the house, I think, but it is difficult to beat a concrete or clay tile for fire resistance!

What about the big hammer of a metal roof? It is tough to see how a metal roof panel with a screw every square foot into the decking is going anywhere. It turns out that the metal roofs stamped into the shape of tiles aren’t very wind-resistant. They can handle only 120-130 mph. The standing seam metal roofs can be fantastically wind-proof (just under 200 mph for steel; just over 200 mph for aluminum), but they won’t look like Spanish barrel tile. The metal roofs have a practical life of 35-50 years before something fails (e.g., fasteners, finish (warranty of 30-35 years and after that they can be refinished for about $20,000)), but the insurance company might demand replacement at 30 years.

So… it turns out that there haven’t been significant improvements since 2003. The adhesive foam that was state-of-the-art then is state-of-the-art now. Maybe this Polyglass peel-and-stick material will last a bit longer than the “hot mop” of asphalt.

One big change for Florida is that HOAs are now limited in their ability to refuse to approve roofs that serve as hurricane protection. FL 720.3035 was amended in 2024. The updated law: “The board or any architectural, construction improvement, or other such similar committee of an association must adopt hurricane protection specifications for each structure or other improvement on a parcel governed by the association. The specifications may include the color and style of hurricane protection products and any other factor deemed relevant by the board. … For purposes of this subsection, the term “hurricane protection” includes, but is not limited to, roof systems recognized by the Florida Building Code which meet ASCE 7-22 standards…”

The law is a little ambiguous in that it says an HOA can establish some aesthetic rules and also implies that homeowners have a right to a roof that meets ASCE 7-22 standards. In our neighborhood, an online “hazard tool” says that we need a 167 mph roof, which I think means that only a metal roof or Brava would work.. On the other hand, I didn’t want to get into a huge fight with the neighborhood Karens to be the first house with a visually jarring standing seam metal roof. Due to Trump-exacerbated climate change, Palm Beach County was most recently hit by a major hurricane in 1949. If another big one arrives, I have a feeling that we will be losing some tiles whereas a Key West-style standing seam metal roof would weather the storm.

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Palm Beach International Boat Show

by philg

If you’re in the market for a 150-250′ yacht, the Palm Beach International Boat Show isn’t a terrible place to spend the day (Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show might be bigger/better, I think, and there is also Miami, but both of those shows are spread among multiple locations). Palm Beach Post: “This year [2025] will feature 45 yachts measuring 150 feet or longer and 200 superyachts surpassing 80 feet in length.”

What does it look like overall? Here’s an aerial photo from 2024 (taken from the mighty Robinson R44):

Here’s my report on a day spent strolling around. I can’t show you what the elites see because peasants aren’t allowed into the superyachts. Potential customers must be vetted and accompanied by a broker (a neighbor actually is a yacht broker, but he didn’t invite me to sneak in with him and he was busy trying to close a deal on a 112′ boat for a mini-douche; he says that new boats can usually be had for 10 percent off the list price).

One take-away from the show is that Europe isn’t quite the economic basket case that it appears to be. Americans are generally too lazy/unskilled/unionized to build nice boats at competitive prices and the Bidenflood of 10+ million low-skill migrants didn’t change that. The floating examples of craftsmanship at the boat show were generally made in Poland ($1 million), Italy and China ($1-10 million), or Holland and Germany ($10-50 million).

One of the first boats that I went on, though, happened to be made in Washington State, a Ranger Tug on which I met a guy preparing to do a 1.3-year trip around The Great Loop. He said that Elon Musk’s Starlink was critical to enabling this project because he intended to continue working via Zoom during the voyage. When I mentioned this on Facebook, a loyal Democrat questioned the need for Starlink because, in his view, mobile data service would work perfectly on every mile of the journey. Apparently, all that one needs to make cell phone service 100 percent reliable in the United States is a passionate hatred of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Here’s what a couple’s 31-foot two-bedroom home for more than a year looks like:

(When on the Intracoastal Waterway for this trip, keep the red buoys on your left if going counter-clockwise. The “red right returning” rule is a little challenging to apply on the Intracoastal until you remember that it runs from New Jersey to Texas and, as a training captain told me, “nobody wants to return to New Jersey.”)

What if you need to do the trip in a week instead of 1.3 years? Mercury offers 600 hp V12 outboard motors and 2400-3600 hp on the transom could fulfill your need for speed:

Speaking of the transom, Wiszniewski Yachts is a Polish company, founded by an Axopar partner, whose W43 has a motorized platform behind the outboard motors. When the kids are ready to swim, the platform can be lowered into the water for easy in/out access. Here’s what the 900 hp $800,000 machine looks like from above:

One neat feature has been copied from RVs. The tables appear to be wood, but they’ve got enough steel inside that glasses with embedded magnets will stick to them even if the boat tilts 45 degrees or more.

For those of us who value a quiet boat, the Dutch company Zeelander provides a dBA measurement:

Even more quiet can be obtained with a pure battery-powered Halevai party boat (made in Louisiana and retailing for $185,000):

Note that the company sends power into the outboard half of a Mercury inboard/outboard drive system. That way, in case of damage, it can be repaired at any boatyard.

It’s a fun experience to stroll around. For a $40 lunch break and a glimpse at where the real action is occurring, duck out of the show (the same ticket on your phone gets you back in) to the Ben Hotel. This is where the brokers, lawyers, etc. hang out to negotiate and finalize transactions. Don’t park near the Ben, though! It will be about $10 to park at the Convention Center and then it is a 15-minute walk or a free shuttle bus ride to the event. In 2025, at least, there was a simultaneous art show at the Convention Center and the $35 ticket to the boat show was also accepted for the art show.

Here’s an ultimate redneck vehicle, with Yamaha engines in each pontoon (Shadow Six; $250,000):

If your taste is more refined and you want to save the planet, perhaps this $566,350 Rolls-Royce Spectre will suit:

Note that the government is watching our for us by mandating a calculation of the fuel cost/savings on the window sticker. There were Ferraris, restored Land Rovers, and classic Rolls-Royces on display as well.

It’s a fun event and downtown West Palm Beach is a fun place to hang out even when there is no event. For folks in the Northeast, Chicago, and California who are wondering how the West Palm lifestyle might be different than theirs, here’s a public bathroom inside a public parking garage (Hibiscus):

(If you don’t have kids, I think a condo or apartment in one of the gleaming new buildings in West Palm Beach might be the best place to live in Palm Beach County. Publix, culture, restaurants, an off-the-charts public library, etc. are all within an easy walk. Much of this is due to the efforts of Stephen Ross, developer of City Place and owner of the Miami Dolphins (also a Jewish enabler of the Queers for Palestine movement at the University of Michigan via his hundreds of $millions in donations to the progressive Democrat institution).)

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Value of not having to rub shoulders with a peasant (JetBlue Mint vs. cattle class)

by philg

I’m looking at going out to California after teaching FAA private pilot ground school (free and open to the public) at MIT. Here’s a guide to what an elite is willing to pay in order to avoid sitting with the peasants for 7 hours: $700/hr. Prices as of December 19, 2024:

Some “extra room” seats are still available on this flight:

So the alternative isn’t cramped torture.

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Could one make a turkey deep-fryer powered by a Tesla charging cable?

by philg

As readers who love pigs get ready to shop and cook for something other than ham to serve for Christmas/Kwanzaa… Here’s what happens when elite New Englanders try to play Redneck for a Day and deep-fry a turkey (ABC):

WESTON, Conn (WPIX) – A home in Connecticut was destroyed over the Thanksgiving holiday due to a turkey frying mishap, local officials confirmed.

The home, located in Weston, caught fire Thursday afternoon after its residents attempted to fry the turkey in their garage, a preliminary investigation revealed.

No injuries were reported. But the home — which has an estimated value of over $4 million dollars, according to listing sites Redfin and Zillow — was quickly engulfed in flames.

Fire departments from the nearby towns of Westport, Wilton, Redding, West Redding, Georgetown, and Easton responded to the place. Crews battled the fire for over 16 hours, according to the Weston department.

The house — which features 11 bedrooms and 9.5 baths, per online listing data — has since been deemed “uninhabitable,” the department said.

Plainly oil, open flame, and elite New Englander is a flammable combination. Did it have to happen this way? The typical elite American has a charging cable at home for his/her/zir/their Tesla. Why not an electric deep fryer powered by this cable? The standard Tesla “Wall Connector” seems to deliver about 11,500 watts of power. That’s nominally about 40,000 BTU, but electric coils around a pot should be 2X as efficient as a gas burner underneath so that’s like an 80,000 BTU gas burner. A standard turkey fryer from Bass Pro Shops has only a 38,000 BTU burner and is theoretically sufficient for an 18 lb. turkey.

Designing and manufacturing this shouldn’t be too expensive by Tesla owner standards. A regular electric deep fryer is about $130. To this, the manufacturer of the “Turksla Deep Fryer” need only add some of the electric car charging protocol electronics and software so that it looks like a car to the charger. Maybe this is tough because Tesla keeps its protocols secret? But on the other hand, Tesla home chargers supposedly support other brands of cars that use industry standards.

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