Category: Florida

Does it make sense to pay for high-net-worth insurance in coastal South Florida?

by philg

Happy Middle of Hurricane Preparedness Week for those who celebrate…

Conventional insurance companies such as State Farm have mostly walked away from insuring coastal South Florida due to a combination of litigation risk (“Prior to the reforms, Florida accounted for more than 72% of the nation’s homeowners claim-related litigation in 2023, despite representing only 10% of US homeowners claims.”) and hurricane risk. Our house is about 2.5 miles from the ocean, but it is still redlined by the insurance companies most people have heard of. Here are the options for insurance:

  • a Florida-only carrier that turns most of its premium over to reinsurance
  • a “non-admitted” specialty company that isn’t regulated by the state and that may have unfavorable terms, including penalties for early cancellation and even a “wind exclusion” (i.e., they pay nothing in the event of the most obvious risk: hurricanes). (This option is so expensive and dumb that I won’t cover it here.)
  • a “high-net-worth” (HNW) carrier such as Chubb (mostly rejects additional Florida risk; famous for a low loss ratio (payments as a percentage of premium collected)), Vault, PURE, and Berkley One (despite the name, these are available to peasants whose house is worth less than a Palm Beach starter home ($10 million))

The cost of HNW insurance is 2-4X what a Florida-only company might quote.

Nearly all Florida insurance includes at least a 2% wind exclusion. If the dwelling value is $1 million, in other words, the homeowner pays the first $20,000 of any hurricane-related loss. Thus, the vast majority of customers with hurricane damage will receive nothing from their insurer because the typical hurricane damage might involve only some blown-off roof tiles or shingles. The band of likely serious damage from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane making landfall is 20-60 miles, e.g., for Hurricane Andrew in 1992 that resulted in major changes to the Florida building code or Hurricane Michael in 2018 that damaged Tyndall Air Force Base. Note that this exclusion results in the HNW policies paying less after what would be typical hurricane damage because HNW companies write for 2X the dwelling value on the same house.

The Florida-only carriers are typically unrated by AM Best, the standard rater for insurers. It has been historically rare for an insurer rated A or better by AM Best to fail. Florida insurers get rated by Demotech. How well does it work for an insurance company to have all of its customers in Florida? According to ChatGPT, nearly all of the Florida-only companies that have gone insolvent had A ratings from Demotech (i.e., the ratings were worthless in terms of distinguishing the vulnerable carriers from the solid ones or, perhaps, the solvency of a carrier simply depended on their luck regarding how many customers were in a hurricane destruction zone).

Insolvency after a major hurricane doesn’t work the way that one would think, with the failed insurance company realizing that it is doomed to failure and going into a bankruptcy-style process where every claimant gets paid a percentage of his or her full claim amount. Instead, the insurance company, even after a major hurricane, pays claims as they’re made and adjusted at 100%. When the company runs out of money they turn out the rest of the claims to the Florida Insurance Guaranty Association (FIGA), which will pay up to $500,000 for a destroyed house. So… the customer with a major loss either gets 100% or a fixed $500,000. The more complex the claim, the less likely it is to be paid. ChatGPT says that it is reasonable to assume a 10 percent chance of insolvency for a Florida-only carrier in the event of a major hurricane. The most recent insolvency that triggered a FIGA payout was of United Property & Casualty Insurance Company in February 2023. That’s three hurricane seasons ago. Since then we’ve had some hurricanes, but none anywhere near as costly within Florida as 2022’s Hurricane Ian. Let’s use a 20 percent risk of insolvency if a house is damaged to policy limits and a 10 percent risk of insolvency if a house is damaged to half of the limits.

What is the risk of a total loss or serious damage? Gemini starts off by saying that it is pretty high, with 300,000-400,000 single-family homes in South Florida either substantially damaged or destroyed by hurricanes over the past 50 years. That’s out of about 2.7 million homes in South Florida today, but only an average of 1.7 million homes over the 50-year period. (ChatGPT estimates this number as only about half of Gemini’s figure; our future AI overlords are smarter than humans, but equally inconsistent?) So a homeowner’s insurance company has about at least a 1 in 7 chance of making a big payout? Not exactly. First, we have to separate out the houses that were damaged by flooding or storm surge, between 120,000 and 180,000. Homeowner’s doesn’t pay for flood damage. Now we’re down to a risk of about 1 in 10 over 50 years. What about the fact that Florida established a strict statewide building code in 2002, hoping to avoid a repeat of the Hurricane Andrew aftermath, roughly 25,524 homes destroyed and 101,241 damaged (Insurance Information Institute). Gemini:

In major storms like Hurricane Michael (2018) and Hurricane Ian (2022), structural engineers found that homes built to the 2002 code (or later) suffered roughly 80% to 90% less wind damage than their older neighbors.

A report from an insurance institute wasn’t quite as rosy:

IBHS evaluated 3,646 single-family homes, 327 light commercial buildings, and 230 multifamily structures [after Hurricane Ian] using aerial and street-level imagery. … Homes built before 2002 had structural damage levels nearly 2x higher, and 2.3x higher in areas with peak winds above 130 mph.

It looks as though no post-2002 house actually lost the plywood sheathing supporting the roof, but at least some had exposed sheathing and, presumably, water damage as a result. A companion report from the same organization says that asphalt shingles were the weak point, metal roofs were the best (12% damaged), and tile roofs weren’t significantly damaged except those more than 20 years old (“no tile roofs assessed that had greater than 50% roof cover damage” and “the small number of roofs with greater than 25% cover damage … These roofs were all 20 years or older”). Our 2003 house has a one-year-old tile roof with two layers of “peel and stick” underneath. If the tiles are blown off, but the peel-and-stick underlayment survives then we’re looking at a $120,000 insurance claim to put a new tile roof on the house (maybe less if the underlayment isn’t too old and can be retained).

ChatGPT says that 4-6 Cat 4/5 hurricanes hit the Miami-to-Stuart coastline every 100 years. Let’s take this distance as 108 miles. If you assume that the zone of total destruction is 20 miles wide then a typical house gets destroyed roughly every 110 years. If the destruction zone widens to 40 miles, the interval between destruction is 55 years. The most recent major hurricane to hit Palm Beach County was in 1949, 77 years ago, but we could use the 55-year estimate to make the high-net-worth companies look more attractive.

[We’ll ignore tornado risk. A tornado could destroy or seriously damage a house, of course, but it wouldn’t affect an insurer’s solvency because a tornado is local. This is a 1 in 100,000-year event for a typical South Florida house, according to AI.]

As noted above, one quirk of the HNW policies is that they force buyers to pay to insure the full rebuild cost of a house, which for a 2003 house like ours is much more than the house is worth. Imagine if we insured our five-year-old Honda Odyssey for the cost of a brand new Honda Odyssey. Why would we want to do that when what is actually at risk is only about half that number? A neighbor has Chubb and they would pay him over $4 million for the house and contents in the event of a total loss (maybe $5 million if we add “loss of use”). His house has a Zestimate of $1.8 million, has its original roof and non-impact windows, and sits on a lot that should be worth at least $500,000 if the house were razed. The contents of the house aren’t valuable. So he has perhaps $1.5 million that could conceivably be lost under his $4+ million policy. (Note that the neighbor won’t get the high dwelling value unless he actually does rebuild, an irrational choice to make compared to simply moving to a similar house and letting a professional real estate developer deal with the wreck. If the family moves to a $1.8 million house a few blocks away, he gets paid only about $1.3 million (the depreciated value of the structure).

Let’s have a look at a couple of quotes. Below is one from Olympus, a Florida-based company that was founded in 2007, i.e., 19 years ago. Whoever started the company should buy lottery tickets because it was founded right at the beginning the 2006-2015 “no hurricanes making landfall” period. That said, the company has survived the following hurricanes that did make landfall in Florida:

  • Hermine (2016)
  • Irma (2017)
  • Michael (2018)
  • Ian (2022)
  • Idalia (2023)
  • Helene (2024)
  • Milton (2024)

Furthermore, Olympus is unusual in being rated by KBRA, which is significantly more stringent than Demotech. Olympus is rated BBB+ by KBRA (over the minimum BBB accepted by Fannie Mae; it’s ironic that the enterprise that generated the largest insolvency in U.S. history, requiring $150+ billion in tax dollars as a bailout, closely scrutinizes insurance companies). For the handful of companies that are rated by both KBRA and AM Best, the ratings seem to be similar.

Could they survive a repeat of the 1949 hurricane that came right into Jupiter? (the most recent major hurricane to make landfall in Palm Beach County) There doesn’t seem to be any way to find out. An insurance company with 50,000 customers, each of which is on its own square mile within the 53,625-square-mile state of Florida is going to be much less stressed by a hurricane that hits Fort Lauderdale than one whose 50,000 customers are all in Broward County, for example. (Broward County was last hit by a major hurricane in 1947, though Hurricane Wilma, Category 2, did about $4 billion in insured damage in 2005.) The information on risk concentration by company is nowhere to be found. In theory, the reinsurers who agree to do business with the companies are looking at this and maybe the regulators.

It is difficult to have faith in regulation when one hears about Florida-based Slide Insurance. The founder and his wife siphoned off $50 million in compensation out of a total profit of $288 million in 2023-4 (source). Based on this, it seems that an insurance company could pay out all of its profits to employees and shareholders during 15 lucky years without major hurricanes affecting its territory and then fold up its tent after a Hurricane Andrew-type event occurs. ChatGPT: “There’s no strict statutory cap tying executive pay to solvency. … As long as they stay above minimum surplus requirements, they’re compliant. But those minimums may not cover a true tail event (e.g., Andrew-scale).” People with inexpensive-by-Florida-standards houses will still do okay with $500,000 from FIGA, of course, so this is a great example of privatized profits and socialized losses.

What did the high-net-worth companies have to offer?

Notice the PURE quote with a 5% wind exclusion. If our roof were destroyed, but didn’t leak, and we lost 7 or 8 of our impact glass windows they would still pay nothing because the wind deductible would be $195,000. In a “medium bad” event, the Olympus policy at less than one third the cost could easily pay 2X because of the deductible being only 2% of a much lower dwelling value.

Let’s do a spreadsheet model to

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How about a school/camp that runs in Florida half the year and New Hampshire the other half?

by philg

It’s beginning to get hot here in South Florida. Rich people without kids generally stay in Florida for 4-6 months per year, 183 days/year if they’re anxious to preserve Florida as their primary residence/tax domicile. If that’s how people with infinite money live we can presume that it is a good way to live, I think (perhaps the Jeffrey Epstein and friends situation is a counterargument to that principle).

Carl G. Fisher created Miami Beach and, for his second act, wanted to build out Montauk on Long Island as the summer home for all of his customers.

What if we adapt Fisher’s idea for families with K-12-age kids? We set up a school that operates mid-October through mid-April (183 days/year or a little more) in Florida and then shuts down for a week while everyone moves up to New Hampshire. The kids can finish their school year up there and then the enterprise segues into summer camp mode, with activities all day every day for the same kids. The family can enjoy the best weather/seasons in the two states. The family won’t have to pay any state income tax (constitutionally barred in Florida so that should remain the state for 183+ days; NH could have an income tax, but presently does not), even if work is done in both places. The kids and adults will have built-in social circles in both places. If a great teacher doesn’t want to move, he or she can stay in Florida year-round and do the beginning and end of the school year virtually while the in-classroom students are organized by someone who is primarily a camp counselor.

The New Hampshire operation would run like a “family camp” in which everyone could meet for meals 3X/day if desired. Florida already has tons of restaurants and recreational facilities, so it would be more of a standard family life during the winter.

The main objection that I can see to this idea is the difficulty of scaling immediately to a sufficient size. A school with fewer than 200 students would presumably be overwhelmed with regulatory compliance costs and classes of fewer than 18 students would likely seem lame. Rich people are drawn to elite schools and it would be tough for an upstart traveling school to compete with The Greene School in West Palm Beach (founded by a billionaire; gifted students only) for quality, actual and perceived.

Also, there’s the question of where in New Hampshire to locate. Portsmouth has a fantastic airport, a beautiful river and ocean access, but it is expensive. Lake Winnipesaukee has a good airport (KLCI) and is in a traditional area for summer camps, but it is more isolated. The border towns with Maskachusetts could work because they provide quick access to Logan Airport for summer vacation trips, etc.

Obviously this wouldn’t work for most of the parents of the 3.4 million-ish school-age children who live in Florida, but why couldn’t it work for the parents of about 200 children?

From Helicopter images of the New Hampshire coast in foliage season:

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Is it bad that Florida is no longer affordable for the middle class?

by philg

Recent Wall Street Journal article, “Florida’s Population Boom Fizzles as High Costs Drive Away Middle Class”:

Florida’s migration patterns are changing dramatically. Residents in their prime working years are heading to other states, often citing affordability concerns. At the same time, the stream of people arriving from other states is shrinking.

Meanwhile, an influx of wealthy people from other states—turbocharged during the pandemic—has helped drive up home prices. Inflation in parts of Florida outpaced the national average over the past decade and home-insurance rates soared.

These side-by-side trends could spell trouble for a state whose economy relies on continued population growth and real-estate development.

“The affordability picture has changed in Florida almost more than anywhere else in the country,” said Eric Finnigan, vice president of demographics research at John Burns Research & Consulting.

First, note the assumption that underlies almost all American politics: infinite growth should be the goal. (Never mind that growth without limit in an organism, and without regard to available resources, is known as “cancer”.)

Second, the WSJ implicitly assumes that a place that is affordable is better than a place that is unaffordable for median-income residents.

Third, the WSJ lumps all of “Florida” together. Florida is about the same size as all of New England. The WSJ wouldn’t lump together Boston and western Maskachusetts, much less Bridgeport, Connecticut and Houlton, Maine. (It’s still possible to get a brand-new single-family house in central Florida for less than $300,000, though the same can’t be said for coastal Florida; the house will be about 1500 square feet, which is the size of the house I grew up in (family of five) and with the added advantage that Floridians don’t need as much indoor space.) The most convenient housing for a SpaceX or Blue Origin engineer is in Titusville, where a decent (not new) house can be purchased for $300,000 (relocation guide).

Fourth, the WSJ assumes that the market is full of stupid people who bid up the prices of houses in places that aren’t desirable. Single-family home prices are $10.15 million in Palm Beach and $212,000 in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, where Ayman Ghazali mostly peacefully lived. From this we can infer that living among Iraqi and Lebanese immigrants in Dearborn Heights is better than living among Manhattan immigrants in Palm Beach (perhaps not an unreasonable inference!).

Maybe in a country with a shared language and culture it would make sense to try to find an inexpensive place to live. However, in a country that is jammed with low-skill migrants from all of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies (our asylum-based immigration system ensures that someone from Switzerland or Japan goes to the back of the line), isn’t it actually an advantage from a typical native-born perspective that a place is out of reach for the median present-day American? Google AI: “Newport Beach has lower racial diversity and worse racial disparity across various indicators compared to the average for California cities.” Given the stratospheric real estate prices, it seems that a lot of people are willing to pay for low racial diversity and “worse racial disparity”. As of 2021, the town was supposedly 85 percent white (source):

The Dallas metro area is more affordable than most parts of the US with jobs, which has enabled a mostly-immigrant community of 130,000 Muslims to set up more than 60 mosques and lay out EPIC City, “a master-planned Islamic community-centered residential development project”. Non-Muslim Americans who don’t want to hear the muezzin calling five times per day might prefer to spend more on a house that is in an area that is “unaffordable” to immigrants from Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

We could take this to an extreme. Aspen, Colorado is absurdly unaffordable for the median worker. My friend doesn’t like Aspen (see An actual skier goes to Aspen to ski), but apparently a lot of people do like it. Would we say that Dearborn Heights, Michigan is a better place to live than Aspen? That Aspen is bad because the population isn’t growing 3% per year like Gaza’s or Somalia’s? (Maybe Gaza and the West Bank are the ultimate examples of affordability. US and EU taxpayers pay for all of the basics, e.g., shelter, food, health care, education, etc. Nobody needs to work. Hamas-ruled Gaza is a model society by Ivy League standards, but wouldn’t the typical American rather be in St. Barts, Aspen, or Nantucket (all of which rank near the bottom for affordability on a median income)?) We could also consider a massive public housing project in Chicago or New York City. They’re “affordable” by definition since no tenant is charged more than 30% of his/her/zir/their income (often 30% of $0 since the tenants aren’t stupid!). Would a typical American prefer to live in the 6000-person Queensbridge Houses (“well known for its contributions to hip hop and rap music”; “a problem with drug dealers and drug users”) or in Atherton, California (population 7,000; home to Larry Ellison before he spent $450 million to escape to Florida)?

In short, given the continued flood of low-skill migrants (70 million since 1976) maybe “affordability” shouldn’t be the goal for any city or state that seeks to maintain a pleasant environment.

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Fifth anniversary of our first family trip to Jupiter, Florida

by philg

Flash back to April 2021, Meet next week in Jupiter, Florida?:

We’re escaping to the Florida Free State for the Maskachusetts school vacation week (April 18-25). A journey of 1,000+ miles is the best way for the kids to get a “mask break” (under what would be the “law” if it had been passed by the legislature instead of merely ordered by the governor, walking outside one’s yard, even at midnight in a low-density exurb, is illegal without a mask).

The post cited an NBC article on the continuation of the #Science-driver outdoor mask order in Massachusetts and referenced Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children (explains the rationale for Jupiter).

We stopped in Savannah, Georgia on our way to Jupiter. They were still under an outdoor mask order:

The kids learned about fishing from unmasked folks at Juno Beach Pier (Florida):

Having left the wet cold masked Boston spring, we encounter a crowd of unmasked people in shorts eating dinner outdoors in downtown Abacoa:

While folks in Massachusetts continue social distancing, a crowd gathers at the bow:

On the return trip, we stopped in Asheville, North Carolina, where they were solidly in masks-required territory more than a year after coronapanic began:

Biltmore tour group:

Back home to Hanscom Field, one part of the Boston area that I miss. Inequality in white:

Also in masketology, this photo is supposedly from 2020, but where was it taken? Google Image Search finds some examples of it from 2020 so it wasn’t done with AI and the date is correct, but does anyone recognize the city?

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Barrett-Jackson Palm Beach car auction

by philg

2026 was my first time at a fun Palm Beach County event: the Barrett-Jackson car auction. It’s a three-day event and I attended on Day 2. The crummiest cars are auctioned on Day 1. By Day 2 there are still a lot of nice cars in tents on the South Florida Fairgrounds (just west of PBI/DJT airport) and some reasonably interesting cars are being auctioned. Day 3 is a Saturday and presumably jammed because the local authorities had everything in place for dealing with a massive traffic snarl.

Prep: You won’t need sunscreen because almost everything is under either a tent or inside a building. There were no biting insects, despite recent wet weather, so you don’t need insect repellant either. General admission tickets were readily available at the gate, with no waiting mid-morning, for about $50. Consistent with Florida norms, children 12 and younger are free (1 kid per adult admission; both parents need to show up if it’s a welfare-or-super-rich-sized family). there is supposedly a “clear bag policy”, though women were carrying sizable conventional (non-clear) purses. Expect to spend about four hours if you’re not a professional/bidder.

Gemini says that Scottsdale is the biggest auction, with the most people and the most cars. Palm Beach has about 1/3rd as many cars and is second for “high-profile, high-dollar sales”. Las Vegas is similar in size to Palm Beach and the Columbus event is “focusing on custom cars and hot rods”.

Here’s what the main auction looks like:

The seats in the center seem to be reserved for those who’ve registered as bidders.

Here’s what it sounds like:

I would love to interface recordings of this guy to Indians who call us up trying to sell us insurance, home improvement, etc. How about an app that would instantly connect a call to auction audio?

You walk into the event through a vendor area. Chevrolet and Dodge have big areas, but a company that makes 80 cars per year, Orlando-based Revology, also shows up:

A German company was pitching $500+ heavy foam blocks on which to park one’s car, claiming that the softer-than-concrete material extends tire life:

ChatGPT begs to differ:

Tire pressure (e.g., 32–40 psi) dominates the contact behavior

The deformation happens inside the tire, not at the surface interface

If your goal is tire longevity, these are far more impactful: (1) Keep tires properly inflated (or even +3–5 psi for storage), (2) Move the car occasionally, (3) Avoid long-term parking in heat + sun, (4) Use jack stands for very long storage.

For long-term storage (months): some benefit, but minor compared to inflation and movement

ChatGPT says “curved tire cradles are actually better than flat foam” for avoiding flat spots during long-term storage. For most of us, any flat spots will be temporary and the permanent damage is being done by aging. For collector cars that are driven only a few thousand miles per year, ChatGPT says that rubber gets harder as it ages, thus reducing performance noticeably after five years and that manufacturers say to replace tires 6-8 years after manufacturing date (sooner if not garaged). The last four digits of the DOT code might be 1022, which means the 10th week of 2022.

(Claude generally concurs.)

A complete range of home decor was available for the motorhead Deplorable. Imagine being rich enough to permanently park a Carroll Shelby engine in one’s living room as part of a table:

The building behind the main auction building is home to the local model railroad club, which graciously showed up to run their layout.

That same building is home to a lot of high-end cars and trucks that get auctioned on the last day:

Here’s an exotic Pagani with a twin-turbocharged V-12 that produces 730 hp, just slightly more than the Corvette C8 Z06s that one sees every day in Publix parking lots around here and the Corvette does it with a normally aspirated V-8. (Of course, 730 hp is almost nothing compared to what’s in the ZR1X Corvette, above.) Despite the lack of sliding doors and seats for 8 (Honda Odyssey always wins!), the Pagani sold for $3.2 million, including buyer’s premium.

Cars that cost less than $200,000-ish are underneath tents, which was fortunate considering that there was moderate rain for a couple of hours. Occasionally one would hear cars being started. This is part of the caveat emptor inspection done by bidders. It wasn’t hot enough, however, to truly verify A/C capacity.

If you’re in the free parking areas it could be 10,000 steps to go into the event, wander through all of the tents and return to your own car through the main auction building. The pro move:

I’m still high on the idea that we need the Chevy El Camino and Ford Ranchero brought back for people who want to carry bicycles conveniently in low-crime areas such as our part of Florida and without guzzling gas like a standard pickup. Hard pass on this one, though, due to lack of factory A/C or Vintage Air.

ChatGPT says that it would be $1,500-$3,500 for labor to install a $2,330+ A/C kit, plus additional money for refrigerant. (If Greta Thunberg and Ayatollah Mamdani become co-presidents, the Vintage Air system could be rendered useless due to its reliance on R-134a refrigerant, banned for new cars starting in 2021).

If carrying the latest generation of e-bikes, maybe what is needed is an extra axle on a full-size pickup:

The rap sheet for this 6×6 says that it suffered “severe structural damage/structural alteration”. I hope that was the conversion and not an accident!

A 1963 Chevrolet Corvair, from the pre-1965 suspension redesign, for Ralph Nader fans. The engine is truly tiny 80 hp affair, mated to a two-speed(!) automatic transmission.

If one registers at the Barrett-Jackson web site, it is possible to learn that this Lot 604 sold on Day 3 for $30,000.

For older Maskachusetts residents who can’t abandon their loyalty to Volvo, a 1972 1800ES that sold for $22,000 (it actually cost the buyer an additional 10% in “buyer’s premium” to Barrett-Jackson; bidders literally give 110%). Less than half the horsepower of our Honda Odyssey and more than half the weight for Volvo’s version of a “sports car” (admittedly, other “sports cars” of the era were also absurdly feeble by today’s standards). The result was a 0-60 time of 11.3 seconds vs. 6.4 seconds for the latest-generation Odyssey (2018-; Car and Driver).

Here’s an $11,000 1950 Oldsmobile that runs at least well enough to make it from tent to auction venue and back. Ideal for shipping up to its likely birth home in the Islamic Republic of Michigan where the black paint and lack of A/C won’t be a serious liability:

For about the same price, one can bask in the glory of British engineering and craftsmanship in this 1983 Rolls-Royce (original cost over $110,000, equivalent to $365,000 in today’s mini-dollars), with brand-new A/C compressor:

(British cars seem to be the depreciation champs. A Jaguar XJ Portfolio from 2012 that likely cost $90,000 with tax sold for $10,000. In 2026 dollars, that car could have cost the buyer $130,000 new.)

In other British items, a 1964 Lotus Seven that has been upgraded with disc brakes and an engine that was made by diligent precise Japanese people (Toyota), in place of the original British drum brakes and English Ford engine:

The car was painted to reference this TV show:

Imagine a reboot of The Prisoner today. Half of the pedestrians in London would be wearing burqas. The iconoclast’s car would be a Tesla Cybertruck?

The Chick-fil-A is next to where they’re prepping cars for entry to the auction:

On the way out, one couldn’t spit in the inner parking lots without hitting a Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, or G-Wagen:

Everyone there was super friendly and answered my questions, no matter how dumb. I would definitely go again.

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Hop a flight to Orlando or Tampa for Sun ‘n Fun this weekend!

by philg

If you don’t live in/near Florida, I recommend that you get a last-minute flight to Orlando or Tampa and then drive about one hour to Sun ‘n Fun in Lakeland.

I went on Tuesday, the first day. Here are a few photos.

P-51 Mustang and NASA’s Super Guppy:

Feel better about flying… the flight controls get disconnected and reconnected every time the plane is loaded or unloaded.

Placid Lassie is looking great despite her many trips to Europe for D-Day commemorations:

Today, it’s tough to imagine the sacrifices that Americans were willing to make to defeat Germany, which never had the same “Death to America” passion that Iran has maintained for 47 years. 2,501 U.S. soldiers died on D-Day and more than 3,000 French civilians were killed plus as many as 19,000 civilians killed in pre-invasion bombing.

Speaking of the Islamic Republic of Iran, here’s an unwelcome A-10 Warthog:

A lot of the most interesting planes are in the parking and camping areas. Here’s a 1947 Antonov biplane, for example:

And who doesn’t love a Grumman boat-hull seaplane?

Cirrus puts on a good display and has a couple of lounges and viewing areas for owners:

How they get people to move from the 200/210-hp SR20 to the 310-hp SR22:

I enjoyed talking to Dave Pascoe, the founder and operator of LiveATC.net. I learned that the service has a $5 app that makes using it much more convenient on mobile devices. Dave generously volunteers at Sun ‘n Fun Radio:

(Why doesn’t the FCC require that mobile phones have built-in FM radio reception at least, to keep communities together? Streaming radio over mobile data isn’t reliable. AM would be tough due to the antenna requirements, but maybe some RF genius could find a way?)

The secret Quiet Birdmen have a not-to-secret secret private club next to the radio station:

The high school at the airport still has a Coronapanic sign on a side door (see When will we feel safe enough to remove our coronapanic signs? (2024; the answer is “not before 2027”?)):

What if you’re irrational and choose to fly in? The NOTAM explains what to do. All of the waypoints seem to be in the Garmin 430 database (or maybe I entered them in during a previous trip?). I arrived mid-morning on the first day (Tuesday) and, therefore, the ATIS said to start at Fantasy of Flight rather than at Lake Parker. It’s somewhat unnerving to be 1 mile behind the plane in front and 1 mile in front of the plane in back, but it sort of works if everyone is precise about 100 knots and 1200′. It might have been smarter to file IFR and land on the big runway.

Not the best plane for flying the above procedure, but the under-wing graffiti is interesting. “N1972” makes sense for registration of this G650ER because that’s the year that Nike-brand shoes were introduced. I will give Nike credit for registering this to their own corporation instead of trying to hide it in a trust or LLC. In Stuart, Florida as I was preflighting the venerable Cirrus SR20-G2.

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Art Palm Beach

by philg

Happy World Art Day to those who celebrate…

Newer and less famous than its Miami Beach cousin, Art Basel, Art Palm Beach 2026 happened at the end of January and your fearless host braved Climate Change and fallen iguanas (down to freezing overnight!) to bring you the story. It’s the same concept at Art Basel and Art Miami: art galleries from around the world set up booths within a big open space and those interest in art roam the aisles, with a ratio of 1000 ticket-buyers to every collector.

First, hats off to the HVAC engineers who set up the Palm Beach County Convention Center back in 2004. Except for the bathrooms at the edges, the cavernous structure was warm and comfortable despite what was likely a temperature seen only about once in every 5,000 days.

I valet-parked the Honda Odyssey because it was too much trouble to park in the adjacent $2/hour structure and walk for 5 minutes:

(Grok: That’s a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III convertible (also known as a Drophead Coupé), likely from the 1963–1966 production run. The model was the last iteration of the Silver Cloud series, featuring a 6.2L V8 engine, updated quad headlights, and bodywork often customized by coachbuilders like H.J. Mulliner or Mulliner Park Ward.)

Tickets were $40/person and easy to buy at the door. Kids are welcome, but each must have a full-price ticket (unusual for Florida, where kids are typically free or heavily discounted).

If you show up without a service dog, you’re doing it wrong.

Unlike Art Basel Miami Beach, this show seemed to be geared to active shoppers. Gallerists sought to engage and were approachable. Nearly every work was labeled with a price as well as a description. Prices were often reasonable, e.g., $3,500 for a small Hockney print, $15,000-30,000 for an original work by a not-so-famous artist, and hundreds of thousands of dollars at the top of the labeled range.

Adam Greener’s $14,500 works to inspire young scholars:

Perfect for the kitchen if you’re fully stocked with Ozempic (Rogerio Piexoto, “Be Butterfly” 2024, $188,000):

I can’t figure out who would pay $17,000 for this 48×60″ David Drebin C print (standard photo paper for printing from a color negative or digital file). Would a woman want a photo of naked women being showered with $100 bills? If not, how would a man get approval from Senior Management to bring this work into this house? Maybe a man who was single and wanted to remain single would be the customer? Someone who appears in the Justice Department’s 3.5 million pages of Emmanuel Goldsteinism and who tells visitors “I took this photo at Jeffrey Epstein’s place in Manhattan”?

Doug Powell made this 54×54″ Monopoly mosaic from “upcycled” keys:

A couple of New York gallerists wearing masks to protect themselves from the Science-deniers of South Florida (I hardly ever meet anyone here who is sick; by contrast, a tremendous number of friends in Cambridge reported recent or current respiratory illnesses when I was there in January):

An $85,000 Warhol Mao for your elite progressive friend:

A $10,000 3′-square Sarah Fishbein glass mosaic that would be perfect for our righteous brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Minneapolis if the characters were redesigned to make it clear that it was a native-born Kamala voter promising “I’d set the world on fire for you” to an undocumented migrant:

Here’s an entire wall of Obama-era Hope from Robert Indiana at $50,000 in today’s fascist dollars (edition of 125 since the rest of us 350 million must live without hope?):

The cafe in the middle is remarkably good and not insanely priced considering the captive audience. Here’s a $26 poke bowl with which I fortified myself before a Swiss friend’s Raclette dinner (complete with the special ovens):

A 6.5′-square $27,000 reminder to limit the population to 1 inch of fish per gallon of water, from Eric Alfaro:

Here’s an $18,500 Porsche 911 painting by Conrad Leach. How tough would it be for an AI+Optimus robot to design and paint this?

(The gallerist noted my interest and said, helpfully, that they had a wide range of car models on canvas from the same artist. I replied, “We have a Honda Odyssey.”)

Here’s a clever $12,000 work by Caroline Dechamby (Dutch-born; now in Switzerland?) highlighting the ease with which Optimus might recreate a Mondrian:

A medium-sized Calder that I would love to own ($165,000):

If you want a gift for an older person, here’s a $14,000 mid-sized painting by Scottish-Italian Leon Morocco in his 83rd year. (“Marocco” was the original family name, but it got corrupted to “Morocco”.)

Any friend who is a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community might enjoy this $125,000 30×36″ John Whorf painting of Provincetown, Massachusetts:

Compare to present-day (Cape Cod Times 2022):

If you need a gift for Zohran Mamdani, a couple of paintings of IDF soldiers by Natan Elkanovich (#FreePalestine #FromTheRiverToTheSea):

Speaking of Israel, Tali Almog’s encaustic-on-cork works seemed like great choices for public spaces:

If the public space is a Rolls-Royce dealer, maybe this 6′-square $362,000 print of Ormond Gigli’s Girls in the Windows (1960) photo? Wouldn’t this be easy to update with Photoshop or ChatGPT? My version would have a Honda Odyssey on the sidewalk. All of the humans would be nonbinary. There would be a range of golden retrievers, Samoyeds, and Sheep-a-doodles sticking their paws and heads out the windows underneath the humans. It would be called “Hes/shes/zes/theys in the Windows”.

A photo of the valet area on my way out. Check the range of vehicle size between the Bronco in front and the Ferrari 296 GTS Spider ($400,000) in the background. An alien might conclude that these vehicles were built for different-sized species. (If the Bronco back up and rolled over the Ferrari, would the driver even notice?)

Summary: It’s a great event that is less snooty and more kid-friendly than Art Basel Miami Beach. It’s a better place to learn about art and artists because the gallerists are more open to conversation and the artists themselves are more likely to be there in the booths.

Separately, it’s Tax Day. If you’re mailing in a hardcopy return and check make sure that you put some extra stamps on the envelope. Your money needs to go all the way to Somalia by way of Minnesota.

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When do rising sea levels make Florida beachfront real estate less valuable?

by philg

Ten years ago, here on this blog… Are markets so inefficient that global warming isn’t being priced properly?:

During our two weeks in Ft. Lauderdale we learned that a beachfront house costs between $3 and $8 million. Most of these are approximately the same height above sea level as a crushproof cigarette pack. If the seas are rising up to swallow Florida, as the climate change doomsayers predict is imminent, why are these houses still worth so much?

The beachfront houses of Ft. Lauderdale aren’t worth $3-8 million anymore, just as the Climate Doomers predicted. The price to live in a house that Science proves will be swept away soon is $5-40 million. Is there any new Science that could explain this meteoric rise in the nominal price? “A Global Perspective on Local Sea Level Changes” (Journal of Marine Science and Engineering 2025) looks at IPCC predictions vs. observations. The paper says that sea level worldwide is rising at about 1.5 mm per year. How does that compare with the Climate Doom narrative from the IPCC? The authors say that the observed sea level rise is somewhat lower than predicted and dramatically lower for Florida: “the overestimation along the Atlantic coast of North America is 4 mm/year to 5 mm/year; the highest overestimation found anywhere”.

The authors found little evidence of acceleration of sea level rise (Conclusions), but the same section seems to contradict the above map: “Empirically derived long-term rates of sea level rise in 2020 were in majority found to be in excess of the contemporary projected rates of rise. The current generation of projections can therefore be considered conservative”. Maybe someone here can read this more carefully and figure out how most of the rates based on local measurements are lower than the model predictions while at the same time the model predictions are “conservative” regarding doom.

The IPCC:

[Global mean sea level] GMSL from tide gauges and altimetry observations increased from 1.4 mm yr–1 over the period 1901–1990 to 2.1 mm yr–1 over the period 1970–2015 to 3.2 mm yr–1 over the period 1993–2015 to 3.6 mm yr–1 over the period 2006–2015.

GMSL will rise between 0.43 m (0.29–0.59 m, likely range; RCP2.6) and 0.84 m (0.61–1.10 m, likelyrange; RCP8.5) by 2100 (medium confidence) relative to 1986–2005.

If we take the 1.5 mm/year rate of the new paper and a 50-year time horizon for beachfront house ownership, the sea level rises 3 inches in Fort Lauderdale over the next 50 years. If we use the 3.6 mm/year rate, the sea level rises 7 inches. In other words, the acceleration prediction by the IPCC would need to materialize in order for the sea level to rise by half a meter (20 inches).

Our house is at 11′ above sea level (approximately 3 miles inland within Abacoa) so I think we need a rise of about 7′ (2 meters) before it becomes impractical to occupy (need a bit of buffer to handle storm surges). Even under the Doomiest Doomer’s prediction, that will take so long that the house will have required reconstruction, potentially elevated by a few feet, purely due to age.

From September 2024, WSJ, regarding a (present-day) sea level house too shabby to be left standing:

(Imagine the environmental impact of dumping all of those almost-new solar panels into a landfill!)

Finally, let’s look at the climate change alarmists. Here’s Democrat Senator Merkley saying “Climate chaos is the existential threat of our time. We need bold climate action now, before it’s too late” less than a year ago:

Today, however, he/she/ze/they demands that gasoline be as cheap as possible so that people will maximize consumption and CO2 emission:

(Curiously, the tweet complaining about “Trump’s illegal war” was posted a day after Trump had announced the U.S.’s surrender to Iran (“ceasefire”), i.e., when the war was already over.)

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Artemis II launch experience

by philg

I went to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex yesterday to watch at least $2.5 billion of our tax dollars getting incinerated via the Artemis II mission. The best graphic that I’ve found to explain this somehow comes from Al-Jazeera:

My journey began with a flight (2005 Cirrus SR20 with no A/C) from our South Florida redoubt to KTIX. The sole FBO was slammed so they established a piston ghetto parking area on the east side of the field and deputized flight school employees to park the planes that weren’t worth dealing with. Here’s the Cirrus row:

I arrived around noon and my Enterprise rental car wasn’t there. “They had to deliver 300 cars to NASA,” explained the FBO gal. Eventually a 19-year-old flight instructor gave me and two other Cirrus pilots rides to the downtown Titusville Enterprise office. The 19-year-old had gone straight from high school to flight school and, now in possession of all her ratings, was working as a CFI rather than paying $400,000 to listen to PhD mediocrities (being a Florida, she could presumably have gone to college essentially for free via Bright Futures, but her flying career would have been delayed by four years; she can get an online bachelor’s degree if she ever needs one). I then stopped at Publix to pick up sandwiches and returned to the airport to pick up a friend in his ghetto-adjacent Piper Malibu JetPROP. My friend, an AI-coding entrepreneur, had found unauthorized resale tickets on Reddit for Kennedy Space Center viewing at $155 each ($99 face value; to have gotten our own tickets we would have had to notice an email sent from the KSC that Gmail maps into Promotions and then purchased the $99 or the $250 “feel the heat” ticket within the first few seconds (“feel the heat” is viewing from the Saturn V building, just 4 miles from the pad; the main KSC has a much larger capacity and is 8 miles away)). He brought along a guy who has some connection to a commercial space company. Let’s call him “Space Friend”. At the “real FBO” we met a father-daughter pair who’d just stepped out of their personal Challenger (“I work in finance” said the dad, when Space Friend asked). They had arranged a car service to take them to a public park, but Friend had two extra tickets so we invited them to jump into the Enterprise minivan with us and go to the KSC.

[AI for Cool Kids Tip: Claude Code for initial development. Codex for finding bugs.]

Combining the delays of getting the Enterprise car, Space Friend fighting through Miami traffic to reach KFXE, and Friend+Space Friend having to sit on the ground at KFXE waiting their turn to take off (45 minutes due to heavy flight school volume), we ended up on the road at about 3:15 pm, a mistake of monumental proportions. There was a security check to get onto the NASA Causeway and we were also asked if we had tickets, but didn’t have to show them. Somehow this caused an epic traffic jam despite the fact that the security check for us took about 15 seconds (everyone trusts minivan owners!). We arrived at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor complex around 5:30 pm (i.e., 2+ hours for what is normally a 15-minute drive). The parking lot attendant asked us to show a phone screen of our ticket, but didn’t scan it. There were some people watching the launch from the parking lot (pretty much the same view/sound as inside) so I wondered if they had pictures of someone else’s ticket or perhaps they had the $99 tickets and didn’t like crowds.

It’s a shame that we didn’t bring Mindy the Crippler because we were greeted by a bunny near the entrance:

Our sketchy Reddit tickets actually did scan, so we were able to enter and find a golden retriever:

Also the Artemis backup team:

The bleachers and prime viewing areas near big-screen TVs were packed, but nearby areas almost as good weren’t crowded:

The weather was perfect:

The launch itself was loud, but not to the point that it would have been nice to have earplugs.

We had binoculars, but it was uncomfortable to look at the vehicle with them because the rocket exhaust is so bright. I didn’t make a video because I believe in “f/8 and be there” (i.e., the cameras set up by NASA and affiliates close to the pad are going to “be there” and do a much better job).

The trip back to the airport took about 45 minutes through some traffic.

I flew the Cirrus back to her Stuart, Florida home, about 35 minutes under a full moon. Orlando Approach refused to provide “flight following” (formerly there was a big push to call this “VFR Advisories”, but that seems to have died along with “Notice to Air Missions” as a replacement for “Notice to Airmen”) due to “staffing”. Florida is bursting at the seams!

Was it worth a whole day for a 4-minute launch experience? Sure. I was glad that I was there for a Florida community experience. Although we weren’t there for long, we chatted with people who’d been there for hours in folding chairs and who were extremely passionate about space flight, e.g., a family from Melbourne, Florida whose kids are techies in Atlanta and have come home for every Artemis attempt. It would have been a lot less traffic and more fun to enter the KSC at around noon and spend the day waiting with the crowd. If you just want to experience the sound and fury of a rocket launch, though, it would be just as good to get a “feel the heat” ticket to watch a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch (much less likely to scrub) from the Saturn V building. It’s a smaller rocket, but being only half the distance away means the visceral effect is as large or larger.

Let’s hope the Artemis mission is a success. If it is, though, we’ll be forced to conclude that it is easier to send an Astronaut of Color, an Astronaut of Femaleness, and an Astronaut of Canadianness (another victimhood category?) to the moon than it is to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Mahmoud Khalil, or most other migrants.

(Given SpaceX Starship, what is the point of the SLS and Artemis, you might ask? A friend at NASA Goddard: “It’s a jobs program so that NASA didn’t have to fire the people who worked on the Shuttle.” In his view, all of the SLS/Artemis goals could be accomplished at a much lower cost by SpaceX. Keep in mind that Science NASA is jammed with haters of the manned space program!)

Related:

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Florida Legislature responds to the No Kings protest by renaming Palm Beach International Airport…

by philg

… to Donald J. Trump International Airport. I wonder if the code will change from PBI to DJT.

“DeSantis signs bill to rename Palm Beach International Airport after Donald J. Trump” (WPTV):

Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed a controversial bill to rename Palm Beach International Airport after Donald J. Trump. The newly approved legislation, House Bill 919, gives the state authority over naming major commercial service airports and officially designates the facility as “Donald J. Trump International Airport.”

Palm Beach County, of course, has more registered Democrats than Republicans, so this isn’t going to be universally popular with our neighbors…

#Ironic: Via his regular weekends in Palm Beach, Donald J. Trump has done more to reduce the utility of PBI than anyone in the 90-year history of the airport. (Temporary Flight Restrictions imposed when DJT is in town make PBI cumbersome/burdensome to use.)

Whether one loves Donald J. Trump or not, I think everyone can agree that PBI offers an awesome traveler experience. Security is a breeze, even without PreCheck. The check-in counters are always fully staffed so there are minimal lines for checking bags. The gates aren’t as crowded as in FLL or MIA. I do wish the ceilings were higher in the gate areas.

Here’s the view of Mar-a-Lago while sitting on JetBlue climbing out of PBI (DJT?) in December 2025 (en route to Minneapolis):

A car in the airport garage back in June 2025 (rare to have any political bumper stickers in this part of Florida, but it is also possible to go big):

Permanent airport exhibit on David McCampbell, “the United States Navy’s all-time leading flying ace”, who spent his youth and retirement in Palm Beach County:

Battle of Leyte Gulf: “When he landed his Hellcat aboard the USS Langley (the flight deck of Essex was not clear), his six machine guns had just two rounds remaining, and his airplane had to be manually released from the arrestor wire due to complete fuel exhaustion.”

Speaking of naming… if we had an aircraft carrier named for FDR why not one for Donald J. Trump (assuming that he wins the current war against Iran!)?

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