Category: Florida

The Brightline experience (low-speed high-speed rail in Florida)

by philg

High-speed rail in China stretches for 31,000 miles and, in my personal experience, runs at about 190 mph. High-speed rail in Florida is Brightline and boasts 235 miles of rail at an average speed of 70 miles per hour (about 3.5 hours from Miami to Orlando including stops at Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and West Palm Beach. This is about my first Brightline experience, a trip home from Art Basel/Art Miami to Jupiter, Florida by way of West Palm Beach (tragically, some years ago, Jupiter rejected the offer of working with Brightline on a station).

I paid up for Premium, which worked out to $95 one-way for a 1-hour 16-minute trip. At 8:37 pm on a Sunday evening, Google maps says that the same trip would take 1-hour 8-minutes by car (73.3 miles, station to station).

The non-Premium areas of the Miami station are clean and comfortable:

The Premium lounge has unlimited free food (bizarrely, Chinese, which is not something that most people in Miami understand how to cook) and booze:

The Premium seats aren’t especially comfortable and seem overly upright even in the most reclined position:

Maybe because my train left at 8:45 pm or maybe because they don’t serve full meals on the short legs between Miami and West Palm Beach, I was offered drinks and snacks.

Hanukkah and Christmas are the two holidays that are officially celebrated by Brightline in the West Palm Beach station:

It would be insane to pay Brightline prices for a family trip, but it could make sense for one person given the unpredictability of travel by automobile in a country that is absurdly overpopulated. Here’s a Facebook post that I stumbled on just as I was getting off the train at 10 pm (an accident, apparently):

Screenshot

Conclusion: Brightline is one of the things that makes West Palm Beach one of the best places to live in the U.S. The station is walking distance from the part of town that has been spruced up by Stephen Ross. Orlando and Miami are then easily reached with hourly trains.

(Like the Florida East Coast Railway that opened up St. Augustine, Palm Beach, Miami, and Key West to rich New Yorkers, Brightline seems to lose money on its operations and make money on real estate development around its stations. However, unlike with Flagler’s 19th century railroad, Brightline serves places that are already mostly developed. So it is unclear that the real estate good times can make up for epic annual operating bad times.)

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Remembering Roy Black

by philg

“Roy Black, Defense Lawyer for William Kennedy Smith and Epstein, Dies at 80” (New York Times, July 24, 2025):

Roy Black, a nationally prominent defense lawyer … died on Monday at his home in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 80. … it was the acquittal he won for Mr. Smith — a 30-year-old nephew of President John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert F. and Edward M. Kennedy — that gave Mr. Black a national profile, in a case that tested the outer limits of power and influence.

Today is the 34th anniversary of the acquittal that Roy Black, a legend among Florida attorneys, secured for William Kennedy Smith.

The New York Times description of how that acquittal happened is completely at odds with a law professor’s account. The NYT says that it was a class struggle, perhaps one that the election of politicians from the Democratic Socialists of America could address:

The trial pitted the word of an accuser — later identified in the news media, including by The New York Times, as Patricia Bowman, whom Mr. Smith had met at a local bar — against the word of a member of one of America’s most powerful families. Mr. Black made full use of the disjunction between accuser and accused, eliciting emotional testimony from Senator Edward Kennedy and from his nephew. … In fact, Mr. Black’s strategy in the key cross-examination of Ms. Bowman’s friend Anne Mercer had been to posit the utter unlikeliness that so presentable a young man as Mr. Smith could be capable of rape.

The law professor, Molly Bishop Shadel, of the University of Virginia, tells a different story in Law School for Everyone, lectures from the Great Courses (available on Audible). The damaging cross-examination of Anne Mercer had nothing to do with William Kennedy Smith being “presentable”. Here are some excerpts from the trial transcript, which the professor somehow got a copy of (I can’t find it with Google). The background is that Ms. Bowman called her friend Anne Mercer and asked her to go to the Kennedy Palm Beach mansion (recently sold for $70 million) and retrieve her shoes.

You say you went to the Kennedy home on the early morning hours of March 30th. Is that correct?

Yes.

Your friend says that she was raped. Is that right?

Yes.

What she tells you is that she wants her shoes? Is that correct?

Yes.

Several times, she was worried about her shoes.

Yes.

So you went into the house. Is that correct?

Yes.

Into the house where the rapist is, Right?

I guess you could say that. Yes.

It’s dark in there?

Yes.

You go through the kitchen, right?

Yes.

Into this little hallway?

Yes.

It’s dark in this hallway, isn’t it?

Right.

You meet up with this man who your friend says is a rapist, isn’t that correct?

I was not afraid of him. No. I was not afraid of him.

No, that’s not my question, Miss Mercer. You understand my question? My question is Did you meet this man who your friend says is the alleged rapist?

Yes.

In this dark hallway. Is that right?

Yes.

And you ask him for help. You ask the rapist to help you find her shoes. Is that correct?

Yes.

…

And her turns around and he goes with you out of the house, is that right?

Yes.

Through the dining room to begin with, is that correct?

Yes.

It’s dark in that house, right?

Yes.

You’re walking through the dining room with this man. Is that correct?

Yes.

The man who is allegedly a rapist, right?

Yes.

You go out the door of the dining room don’t you to a little patio area?

Patio.

With this man who is the alleged rapist?

That’s right.

You go out past the patio and onto the law, is that right?

Right.

It’s dark out, right?

Right.

With this man who’s the alleged rapist?

Yes.

You go across the lawn with him, is that right?

Yes.

Towards the beach?

Yes.

As you go across the lawn you get to a place where there are hedges and a concrete wall. Isn’t that right?

Yes.

And you’re still with this man who is the alleged rapist is that right?

Yes.

The four women and two men on the jury (this was in 1991 so there weren’t any nonbinary jurors) deliberated for only 77 minutes before acquitting William Kennedy Smith. The story wasn’t quite over, though…

Taking on the William Kennedy Smith case ended with an added unexpected benefit: his marriage to Lisa Lea Haller. Black and Haller, a cosmetics manufacturer who served on the Smith jury, bumped into each other the night after the verdict in Palm Beach. Soon after, they appeared on the Donahue show together, again by coincidence. Then, nine months later, they crossed paths again at Doc Dammer’s in Coral Gables. Not long afterward, they began dating. Black married Haller in 1995, and the two went to work renovating one of Coral Gables’ most lavish homes, the erstwhile residence of the city’s founder, George Merrick.

At the opposite end of the legal spectrum, here’s a recent deposition excerpt:

Q. Where are you located right now physically?
A. At home in Jupiter, Florida.
Q. Is there anyone in the room with you?
A. Yes.
Q. [after attempt to hide discomposure] Who is in the room with you?
A. Mindy the Crippler.
Q. And who is that?
A. She’s a golden retriever.

Related:

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Ask Me About My Pronouns T-shirt not effective

by philg

We had a dinner guest from Manhattan the other night. In order to make him feel comfortable and at home here in Florida I wore my “Ask Me About My Pronouns” T-shirt from Target in Watertown, Massachusetts. I neglected to take it off before heading out on a neighborhood golden retriever walk and we happened to meet two relative newcomers to the neighborhood, refugees from Ann Arbor, Michigan. So I had a 20-minute conversation with them while wearing this shirt. During the entire time… they never asked me about my pronouns!

Ask Me About My Pronouns T-shirt
Ask Me About My Pronouns T-shirt from Target

Related… Happy National Pansexual Pride Day to those who celebrate.

Related… let me give a shout-out to Gretchen Whitmer for keeping our neighborhood property values robust. Because she made it illegal for this new neighbor to go into work he was able to keep his high-level job with a Detroit-area company despite having moved to tax-free Florida. Google AI:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer implemented some of the strictest and longest-lasting lockdown measures in the Midwest through numerous executive orders. These policies generated significant controversy, facing both praise for prioritizing public health and fierce criticism over their scope and economic impact.

Whitmer issued nearly 200 executive orders to contain the virus spread. The primary order was the “Stay Home, Stay Safe” order (EO 2020-21), effective March 24, 2020, which: Required all residents to stay home unless they were part of the “critical infrastructure workforce”; Banned all public and private gatherings of any number of people from different households; Ordered all non-critical businesses to temporarily close in-person operations.

In May 2021, Whitmer faced criticism and apologized after a photo showed her at an East Lansing restaurant with a large group, in violation of her own administration’s standing health orders at the time which required social distancing and limited table sizes.

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Harry Potter Pinball Machine Review (and the Free Play Florida experience)

by philg

I attended Free Play Florida in Orlando last month and the machine that everyone loved and wanted to play was the new Jersey Jack Harry Potter design. It has a fascinating and frighteningly intricate flow (I can’t imagine it being successfully maintained in an arcade and there were a few stuck balls). The lighting is much brighter and better than on some previous Jersey Jack designs where it is tough to follow the ball without strong ambient room light. The typical attendee was older, male, and white, but there were some kids and also some women (central Florida and, therefore, the nonbinary weren’t strongly represented):

Speaking of nonbinary, if you can overlook J.K. Rowling’s heresy against Science, i.e., her position that there is a distinction to be made between male and female humans, this would be an awesome home machine. I’ve never read the Harry Potter books and I can’t keep the movies straight, but I loved it!

On the flip side of the Jersey Jack world, they also had the Avatar machine. I thought the movie was dumb and the pinball machine is underwhelming. It ranks #32 in the Pinside Top 100 while Harry Potter is near the top (ratings for the CE version). There was never anyone waiting to play either of the two Avatar machines while there was always at least one person waiting to play one of the three Harry Potter machines. Speaking of waiting, there was no official policy but I never saw anyone play more than one game on a machine for which someone was waiting. It seems that in a society with shared values there is no need for an explicit rule. Everyone was super polite!

The Jersey Jack Godfather was also there. Although it is a great and still-relevant movie (Somalis in Minnesota seem to have been following “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns”), its underwhelming #70 ranking on the Pinside Top 100 seems justified.

What else happens when old white guys organize a convention? A classic computer area! Here’s an emulator for the PDP 11/70 that I used in 1978 as a Fortran programmer at NASA:

Lots of classic home computers as well:

And a luggable:

I would love to thank the person who built this enormous skee ball machine with 5-gallon buckets for the slots:

The convention featured pinball tournaments as well as a charity drive for Florida-based Project Pinball, which places and maintains machines in children’s hospitals nationwide. There were a moderate number of classic machines, but various commercial arcades have more and better-maintained collections.

The most unusual video game was this Jubeat rhythm game from Japan. You play against others around the world, I think, and log in using a Tokyo Metro card. The gal playing in this photo is an Orlando local who apparently loves Japan so much that she just happened to have a Tokyo Metro card with her. I played it and learned that I have no rhythm.

After the Sunday 4 pm wind-down for the convention, I zipped over to Celebration, a Disney-designed New Urbanism community. It’s only a few years older than our beloved Abacoa, but it seems uglier except for the lake. Here’s on example of the architecture:

As in our neighborhoods, they decorated for Christmas before Thanksgiving:

Some photos of the best that Celebration can look:

In a 15-minute walk, I encountered at least three women covered according to Islamic tradition, so that would make Celebration a better place for finding a Muslim community than Abacoa (I’ve never seen even a hijab, much less a burqa; teenage and adult females in Abacoa may wear short skirts, halter tops, bikinis, and other un-Islamic outfits):

Celebration has a distinctly non-Halal outpost of Tampa’s Columbia Restaurant, founded in 1903. Pork, bacon, and alcohol lurk everywhere on the menu, e.g.,

Finally, Happy Gazpacho Day to those who celebrate!

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Meet at Art Basel in Miami Beach on Friday for lunch? Or breakfast in Miami?

by philg

It’s Art Basel time again here in Florida. See Art Basel Miami Beach and Art Basel Miami 2021 for some photos of earlier versions. Who wants to meet at the event on Friday for lunch? Please email philg@mit.edu with a subject line of “Meet at Art Basel” if interested. Alternatively, we can meet near my hotel for breakfast on Friday. Paying $2,000/night to be with all of the fabulous people in the heart of Miami Beach is a mere rounding error for me, which is why I’ll be across the Venetian Causeway next to Trinity Cathedral. I’ll be blasting back north via Brightline in the evening.

A prescient work by Christine Wang from 2021:

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The lazy Floridian’s Halloween and Christmas lighting

by philg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wall Street Journal warns New Yorkers not to move to Florida

by philg

New York-based journalists love to write about how New York taxpayers shouldn’t flee to Florida and skip paying 14.8 percent state/city income tax, 8.9 percent sales tax, and 16 percent estate tax (vs. 6-7 percent sales tax in FL and 0 percent income/estate). Here’s a recent example, “The Worst Housing Market in America Is Now Florida’s Cape Coral”:

The median home price soared nearly 75% to $419,000 in three years, transforming the character of this middle-income community that for decades has catered to retirees and small investors. … Home prices for Cape Coral-Fort Myers have tumbled 11% in the two years through May

So the prices went up about 56 percent, over a five-year period. That’s before adjusting for Bidenflation. What happened in the U.S. overall? Prices went from 218 to 331 (source), a rise in nominal dollars of 52 percent:

In other words, for people who bought a house five years ago (the average tenure in a house for an American is about 12 years), what the WSJ calls “the worst housing market in America” outperformed the U.S. residential real estate market overall.

What Zillow shows is that the Cape Coral market was more volatile than the national average:

So Cape Coral actually has been a bad market for home-flippers who had the misfortune to buy in at the peak, but for the typical Cape Coral homeowner it has been a better market (albeit, not by much) than the average U.S. real estate market. What about for the elites who put the Wall Street Journal together? How has their Manhattan real estate done by comparison? Zillow:

(“New York County”=Manhattan)

So Cape Coral is objectively speaking the worst housing market in the U.S. (reported as fact/news by the Wall Street Journal rather than as opinion). At the same time, people who owned property in Manhattan fared far worse over the past 6 years or almost any time window within those 6 years.

Related:

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Righteous contempt as Florida follows Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland into non-coerced vaccination of children

by philg

ChatGPT:

Countries like Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, and most of Scandinavia do not condition public school attendance on vaccination status. Japan – Vaccines are strongly promoted, but school entry is not denied for unvaccinated children. Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland – All Nordic countries besides Iceland follow voluntary vaccination policies for school entry. Switzerland – Vaccination is voluntary, and school entry does not depend on vaccine status.

“Which countries have mandatory childhood vaccination policies?” (Our World in Data):

A Democrat on Facebook:

What’s the punchline to this post? The author lives in… Japan, where childhood vaccines are optional. My response to him:

When do you expect the wave of unvaccinated death to hit Palm Beach, Coral Gables, Bal Harbour, Wellington, and Key Biscayne?

Note that Florida has a free “Vaccines for Children” program in which $200 million/year of injections are administered every year. Florida doesn’t have the highest vaccinate coverage rates for kindergartners, but nonetheless Florida has higher rates than the Orthodox Democrat states of Minnesota and Colorado (CDC).

The trailblazing 2SLGBTQQIA+ governor of Maskachusetts:

I personally doubt that the reduction in vaccine bureaucracy will have a large effect on standard childhood vaccination rates in Florida. People already had the option of opting out for religious reasons. Maybe the vaccination rates will go up if the lack of a legal requirement results in some additional creativity among the public health experts, e.g., free medical marijuana to any parent who brings his/her/zir/their child in for shots, convenient shot clinics at places where children are likely to gather. The Righteous assume that the only way to get humans to do something is to threaten them, but economists have found that very small financial incentives can create dramatic behavioral changes.

If we accept that the government has the right to coerce humans in the name of public health what I would do is force Americans to exercise and maintain a government-monitored BMI. Philip’s Shut-Yo-Pie-Hole System would use cameras and AI to make sure every American gets on a scale in the morning. If over 25 BMI then he/she/ze/they can’t get food other than broccoli at either a supermarket or a restaurant (control with a phone app and step tracker). Add one chicken nugget for every 5000 steps. There would be a chocolate ration of 20 grams (increased from the former value of 30 grams) for anyone with a BMI of under 21.

Loosely related, a friend in a discussion group in Maskachusetts let everyone know that he’d moved to Florida and a Democrat responded:

look on the bright side. At least you will live worry free in Florida: no state taxes, no climate change, no vaccines, and no one to tend to your lawns or clean your pools.

The emphasis on cheap/slave labor via low-skill immigration is fascinating to me. The American Righteous decided to fully open our borders to low-skill migrants almost exactly coinciding with the Age of AI/robots. (Of course, it is actually much easier to get labor in Florida than in Maskachusetts because chillin’ on taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, etc. doesn’t pay as well in Florida as in Maskachusetts (see Table 4 in Cato’s Work v. Welfare Trade-off.)

See also

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Immigrants reproduce faster, so their population can overwhelm food sources before natives have a chance to recover.

by philg

I was doing some research on termite prevention for a friend who recently moved from Maskachusetts to Florida (he and his successful hard-working wife have waved goodbye to the new progressive personal income tax rates in Massachusetts and all of the wonderful progressive programs that it supports). It turns out that the $2000-ish Sentricon system may be a reasonable insurance buy due to Formosan termites, which immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s.

ChatGPT:

Formosan subterranean termites (Coptotermes formosanus) often outcompete native U.S. subterranean termites (Reticulitermes species) when they invade the same area. A Formosan colony can contain several million termites, whereas native subterranean termite colonies often have fewer than a million. They reproduce faster, so their population can overwhelm food sources before natives have a chance to recover.

Formosan termites have foraging territories up to 300 feet from the nest, much larger than that of native species. This gives them access to more food and nesting sites, putting pressure on native termite colonies.

They defend their territory aggressively, sometimes killing or driving out native termites. They consume wood more rapidly, reducing available resources for competing species.

Once they establish themselves, they tend to displace or severely reduce local native termite populations, especially in warm, humid climates like Florida, Hawaii, and the Gulf Coast.

ChatGPT provides a simple “yes” answer to “Would it be fair to say that Formosan termites are therefore replacing native termites?”

Yes — in areas where Coptotermes formosanus becomes well-established, it’s fair to say they are replacing native subterranean termites over time.

When asked “In Dayton, Ohio the total population of humans is decreasing but the immigrant human population is increasing. Would it be fair in that case to say that immigrants are replacing native-born Americans in Dayton?” however, the answer is long and nuanced! Here’s the end of the hemming and hawing:

It’s more accurate to say immigrants are increasing their share of the population as native-born numbers decline, without implying causation.

Loosely related, a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan called “The Migrant Kitchen”:

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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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