A multiengine seaplane pilot has gone west. Let’s have a look at James William Buffett’s pilot certificate, from the FAA Airmen Registry:
Jimmy Buffett was a resident of Palm Beach County, as far as the FAA was concerned. He was typed in the Grumman Albatross (C/G-111), three Dassault Falcon bizjets, and the original Cessna Citation bizjet (bird strikes from the rear). The “date of issue” being in 2019 could have been due to a change of address, a change of gender ID, or an added rating.
Buffett wanted to see a Democrat-run Florida and Democrat-run United States. In “Jimmy Buffett takes musical shots at Trump during concert” (2018), for example, Buffett was supporting Andrew Gillum in the governor’s race against Ron DeSantis. He got his wish in 2020 for the country, at least.
Buffett became a billionaire via real estate development, mostly in Florida, and most recently with 55+ communities, e.g., in Daytona (see this New Yorker story). At the time of his death, he was working on a $400 million project just to our southeast in Riviera Beach. I hope that the project is completed. Even if I’m more of a classical and jazz listener, I’m sure that it will be an improvement over everything else that has been going on in Riviera Beach.
Or we could go to Key West, Florida. Although Buffett seems to have spent more time in Palm Beach, he is associated with Key West and built a hotel there. The good news is that Hotels.com is ready to help with the challenge of finding a gay-friendly place to stay in Key West. Note the “LGBTQ welcoming” checkbox at upper left in this listing of places available for Nov 3-5:
… the heightened ocean water temperatures that grabbed headlines this summer for bleaching coral and turning Florida’s coastal waters into something akin to a hot tub. Scientists believe that climate change has contributed to the warming oceans. The abnormally hot water temperatures provide more energy to fuel hurricanes…
Loyal readers may recall Being boiled alive in the 101-degree ocean (according to NYT) in which the New York Times said that one buoy “in the Ocean Off Florida” hit 101 (it turned out to be a buoy in a 1-6′-deep puddle inside Florida, cut off from the actual ocean by the Florida Keys). Here’s the headline, complete with photo of the open ocean where the 101-degree temperature wasn’t measured:
In August, it was “a [single] high reading”. One month later, the “hot tub” temperatures have spread to most or all of the “coastal waters” surrounding Florida.
Water temp at the most familiar Florida beach is between -1 and +1 degree of the recent historical average. A typical hot tub is at 102 degrees. The current Miami Beach water temp of 86 is about where a recreational swimming pool would be set to. Over the past 7 years, it seems that the high temp for July, August, and September has been 89. In other words, what the New York Times calls “abnormally hot temperatures” are in the middle of the recent historical range.
What have elite New Yorkers been doing recently to address the climate change that they decry? Getting into fossil fuel-powered vehicles and going to see Bruce Springsteen perform in New Jersey. Instead of spending $2000+ on decarbonizing our economy, they’re listening to a geriatric fellow Democrat sing songs that they could stream for free. (Separately, these are the same folks who say that schools should be closed and the peasantry locked down any time that a respiratory virus threatens Gotham, yet they’re gathering in a crowd of 50,000+ to spread vaccine-resistant SARS-CoV-2 variants?)
Hurricane Idalia came through northern Florida on Wednesday, August 30. Roughly 250,000 customers lost power. The situation at 10:00 am today, three days later:
It looks as though much of the problem is with two areas served by coop power companies (the numbers below are total customers then customers out):
They’re serving counties that were in the direct path of the storm. I’m wondering if they don’t have the hurricane-hardened infrastructure that we have in South Florida, where hurricanes regularly occur. Our transmission lines here are high above any trees that might fall. Delivery to neighborhoods is via underground cables. Is the problem up north simply that fallen trees have cut vulnerable lines? “About 40,000 linemen” were pre-positioned for Idalia, as for Hurricane Ian. But it seems as though the problem of restoration is tougher, at least on a per-customer basis (the affected counties are sparsely populated so maybe an entire power grid has to be reconstructed to restore 10,000 or 20,000 customers).
As the Bobs asked in Office Space, what is it that the 40,000 linemen actually do?
Separately, with all of the progress that has been made since Joe Biden took office, why don’t we have a gender-neutral term to replace “lineman”? What about electric grid workers who identify with one of the other 73 gender IDs recognized by Science?
Here’s the part of the Florida coast where Hurricane Idalia arrived recently:
Notice that the area where the hurricane was predicted to make landfall, and actually did make landfall, is covered in wildlife refuges. In other words, no humans would ordinarily be resident in this area. What does it look like for pilots? There are two airports with weather stations: Tallahassee (KTLH) and Perry-Foley (KFPY):
Winds 28 gusting 40 knots, 2 miles of visibility in heavy rain and mist, a broken layer of clouds at 3,600′ above the runway. That was around 9:08 am (1308 GMT).
What about around Perry-Foley, which is much closer to the water?
KFPY 301335Z AUTO 27033G48KT 2 1/2SM RA 25/24 A2904 RMK AO2 LTG DSNT SW T02450238 KFPY 301315Z AUTO 26037G51KT 2SM RA 25/24 A2894 RMK AO2 LTG DSNT NE T02480241 KFPY 301255Z AUTO 28050G74KT 1SM +VCTSRA 25/24 A2865 RMK AO2 LTG DSNT N AND NE P0071 T02470240 KFPY 301235Z AUTO 31044G68KT 1SM +VCTSRA 25/24 A2834 RMK AO2 LTG DSNT NE AND S P0063 T02460240 KFPY 301215Z AUTO 01054G74KT 1SM +TSRA OVC008 25/24 A2828 RMK AO2 LTG DSNT N AND NE P0029 T02470240 KFPY 301155Z AUTO 02043G62KT 1 1/4SM +RA OVC008 25/24 A2860 RMK AO2 LTG DSNT NE AND E P0046 6//// 7//// T02510240 KFPY 301135Z AUTO 04034G56KT 2 1/2SM VCTSRA OVC011 25/24 A2887 RMK AO2 P0029 T02510240 KFPY 301055Z AUTO 06030G42KT 1 3/4SM +RA SCT007 OVC013 A2913 RMK AO2 P0024 KFPY 301035Z AUTO 05024G36KT 4SM RA BKN008 OVC013 25/24 A2919 RMK AO2 P0008 T02520240 KFPY 301015Z AUTO 04019G29KT 3SM RA OVC008 25/24 A2927 RMK AO2 P0004 T02500240
About 2.5 hours of frightening wind, which peaked at 54 knots gusting 74. There was a heavy thunderstorm with rain and skies overcast at 800′ above the runway. “LTG DSNT” means “lightning distant”.
Cedar Key, Florida is a small collection of islands tenuously connected to the mainland with charming wooden buildings (i.e., dilapidated) that look like they could be blown away in a fresh breeze. Cedar Key was widely highlighted in hysterical media stories as likely to be wiped out by Idalia’s storm surge. Yet people refused to take a day for sightseeing in Orlando! “‘We Should Have Gotten Off the Island’: Cedar Key Residents Survived Idalia’s Wrath” (New York Times):
Hours after the waters of the Gulf of Mexico swept through her house, Donna Knight emerged in a windbreaker and boots to try to get her Chevy SUV to higher ground.
“It came through — the whole ocean,” she said, describing a night of howling wind, frightening bangs and flying debris as Hurricane Idalia blew through Cedar Key, a conglomeration of tiny islands connected by bridges that juts three miles into the Gulf.
By noon on Wednesday, the center of the Category 3 storm had passed, and she and her 19-year-old son knew they had survived. “We should have gotten off the island,” she said.
Officials had estimated before Idalia made landfall that perhaps 100 people were riding out the storm on Cedar Key. It was unclear how many had left the island immediately afterward.
Not a great advertisement for the Florida K-12 system…
Ms. Knight, 62, a 20-year Cedar Key resident, had every intention of heeding the mandatory evacuation order ahead of Idalia, she said. “My bags were packed.” She just needed gas and groceries, and would join her husband and mother-in-law near Orlando.
But her son didn’t want to go. “I wasn’t going to leave him by himself,” she said.
This was the absolutely the most obvious place from which to evacuate and yet 100 people (out of 700 total population; the NYT fails to provide context) decided to stay (a “mandatory” evacuation order in Florida is not backed up by COVID lockdown police tactics).
How was it in Palm Beach County, you may ask? A little windy. Hot as hell if hell were also super humid (2-3 degrees above the historical average; 3-4 degrees below the historical record). Scattered thunderstorms (common in the summer anyway). I ended up on a bug-free boardwalk in the Everglades at the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, a 145,000-acre swamp. I’ve been on about 15 boardwalks in the Everglades and never been bothered by mosquitoes or other flying predators. This is one of the big mysteries of Florida!
At least five of the folks with whom I chatted in the San Francisco Bay Area recently noted that the ocean water near Florida had been heated up to more than 100 degrees. When I asked them what part of the Florida shoreline was plagued with this scalding water, they couldn’t answer precisely. Their conjectures ranged from a few miles out to sea from Miami to maybe right near a popular beach.
The reading from a buoy off Florida this week was stunning: 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit, or just over 38 Celsius, a possible world record for sea surface temperatures and a stark indication of the brutal marine heat wave that’s threatening the region’s sea life.
So it’s “off Florida” and therefore out into the open sea, right? If we had any doubt about this, the Scientists at the NYT include a photo of the open ocean underneath the headline:
Based on the headline and the photo, then, a Marvel-style villain heated up part of the open ocean to over 101 degrees and, with a little more climate change, it is easy to imagine this hitting 213 degrees F, the boiling point for sea water. (In other words, New Yorkers with money should not follow their former neighbors and move to Florida because the risk of being boiled alive at the beach is real.)
The best-known beach in Florida is Miami Beach. Is it 101.1 degrees in the water there? seatemperature.net says that, around the time that the NYT raised the alarm, it was a degree or two hotter than the average for previous years:
Maybe “off Florida” meant into the Gulf of Mexico? The water temp on the west coast of Florida was also about average.
Let’s dig for clues in the NYT article:
Allyson Gantt of the National Park Service, which monitors and maintains the buoy, said there was no reason to doubt the measurement. The data was consistent with high water temperatures seen in the area, Florida Bay, between the southern end of the Florida mainland and the Florida Keys, in recent weeks, she said.
Just like it’s easier to heat up a shallow bath than a deep one, the depth of the water is going to affect temperatures, said Jeff Masters, a former hurricane scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a co-founder of Weather Underground, a Web-based weather service.
So… it turns out the buoy was not “off Florida”, but rather inside Florida (between the Keys and the mainland). The NYT tells us that shallow water will heat up more than the deep ocean, just as your backyard swimming pool heats up more, but the newspaper of Science doesn’t tell us the water depth.
What’s unusual about the water between the Keys and the mainland? That’s where beginner kiteboarders and windsurfers are taken to learn because (a) the wind is steady, and (b) the water is so shallow that students can stand up after falling off the board. How shallow? The charts show between 0′ and 6′ at low tide:
So the NYT reader was informed that the “ocean off Florida” had reached 101.1 degrees when, in fact, it was a protected area possibly just a few feet deep. (The open ocean off Florida’s Atlantic coast quickly reaches depths of 1,000′ and more.) Is Florida Bay even part of the ocean? Wikipedia says that “It is a large, shallow estuary that while connected to the Gulf of Mexico, has limited exchange of water due to various shallow mudbanks covered with seagrass.” (What’s an estuary? Wikipedia says “An estuary is a partially enclosed coastal body of brackish water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it, and with a free connection to the open sea.”)
A Bay Area Deplorable (deeply closeted so that he can keep his job!), when I shared these conversations with him, said “when you’re looking at the New York Times, what you don’t see is more important than what you do see.” (i.e., the unseen depth of the water and the unseen previous buoy high temp in the same area are more important than the seen recent high temperature)
When I got home on August 3, 2023, I discovered that the lifeguards on the Atlantic coast hadn’t been reading the New York Times. They marked the Juno Beach water temperature as 85 degrees:
In case the NYT article gets memory-holed, some screen shots:
Note that the article also mentions “Manatee Bay” as a place where the “ocean” is super hot. Here’s the open ocean in Manatee Bay, from Google Maps:
How deep is Manatee Bay? 4-5 feet, except where mud or coral makes it shallower.
Why does it matter? If you’re ordering a 150-meter boat from Meyer Werft, make sure to tell them it can’t draw more than 4′ (or 1′ for Florida Bay?) because you want to sail it in what the New York Times calls “the ocean”.
Although the profit opportunity from child support, e.g., from a one-night unmarried encounter, was limited in Florida, the state was a paradise for alimony plaintiffs, especially those married or 7 years or more who could seek “permanent alimony”. The successful plaintiff could use what had been the defendant’s money to throw a massive divorce party, as recently described in the Wall Street Journal. Due to the cruel tyranny of Ron DeSantis, however, the party may be over a little earlier than planned…
The length of durational alimony is not to exceed 50% of short-term marriages (<10 years); 60% of moderate-term marriages (10-20 years); and 75% of long-term marriages (20+ years);
Plaintiffs still have an incentive to quit jobs and spend like crazy in the months or years leading up to their lawsuits:
The amount of durational alimony is to be determined by reasonable needs not to exceed 35% of the difference between the net incomes of the parties, whichever is less.
“reasonable needs” = whatever a plaintiff was spending during the marriage, so a plaintiff who takes five trips to Europe before suing can say that regular trips to Europe were part of the marital lifestyle. Also note that alimony is now tax-free (as child support previously was), so 35% of the defendant’s income is roughly 50% of the defendant’s spending power (and could become more if Joe Biden delivers on his promise to make successful Americans pay their fair share). Alimony revenue entitlement is subject to modification if incomes change, so a plaintiff who wins 15 years of alimony will have a financial incentive to refrain from work for 15 years.
Embedded in an amoral society, moralism:
Courts can consider the impact of adultery in determining the amount of alimony whether or not it has a financial impact.
(In the true no-fault states, a plaintiff who says “I want a divorce because the defendant objects to all of the Tinder dates I have brought home to the master bedroom” is entitled to the same profits as one who has been faithful.)
It will be tougher to profit after a defendant’s death:
Requires the showing of a special circumstance to secure alimony with life insurance.
Here’s one from a “fascism fighting scribe” (who complains of living in “DeSantistan” (why not move away from fascism?)) in which the reduction in profitability of divorce lawsuits is characterized as “erosion of the institution of marriage in Florida”:
Note that this person also suggests that, out of 74 gender IDs recognized by Science, it is “women” who are passionate seekers of permanent alimony.
Regardless of the gender IDs of those involved, the new law is interesting from a cultural perspective. Americans apparently can agree that decades of cash payments are the natural outcome of a marriage in which one participant decided that he/she/ze/they would be better off partnering with someone else (or flying solo/Tinder). The British have a different point of view. A married defendant will see his/her/zir/their plaintiff in court over a period of months and, in an ideal world, one former sex partner will pay the other a lump sum as part of a “clean break”. And then in Germany, assuming the couple being divorced checked a “separate property” box on the marriage license application, neither former sex partner will pay the other (someone who didn’t work during the marriage is expected to work once divorced).
below is an ideal Presidential-style tweet from Joe Biden’s handlers that, in my opinion, DeSantis needs to copy if he’s going to win. Biden’s script line, “There is nothing beyond our capacity if we work together” is completely false, but it sounds great. (Why false? Building and operating a Chinese-style high-speed rail system is way beyond our capacity. Creating a health care system that an increasingly low-skill population can afford has been beyond our capacity for decades (so 18% of GDP is spent on health care compared to less than 5% in high-skill Singapore).) DeSantis would have to modify the below. Say that he’s optimistic if we change a few things, e.g., stop offering to change the depicted child’s gender with drugs and surgery, try to cut the number of Americans on means-tested welfare down from 100 million, etc. But DeSantis needs to start with a message that even the lowest-skill most welfare-dependent richest-in-criminal-background Americans are going to contribute to a bright future.
I’ve never been more optimistic about America’s future.
Here’s an intersection where a real estate developer could make enormous profits if white Democrats were sincere. Imagine the prestige of being able to tell people “I live at the corner of President Barack Obama Highway and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.”
This ideal location is in Riviera Beach, Florida, just a few steps from the water, and it is not currently overdeveloped:
The righteous occupants of the MLK&Obama Building will not be troubled by any neighbors who’ve voted for insurrection/treason. Biden won 96:3 in this neighborhood (source: nytimes 2020 election map):
Zillow says that a house near this corner is currently worth only about $200,000, so an enterprising developer could buy up quite a few lots and create a condo or apartment complex (“Progressive Gardens at MLK&Obama”? “Tower of Justice”?).
The New York Times regularly runs stories about Floridians suffering from “fascism”, “tyranny”, and “authoritarianism”, the most accurate descriptions of being governed by Ron DeSantis. What else is true about Florida, according to the newspaper of record? “36 hours: Florida Panhandle” (NYT, July 6, 2023):
The word “paradise” appears twice in the article as the most succinct characterization of the destination covered.
So… Florida is “fascist”, but also “paradise” for a tourist. Does this make sense? Did the NYT recommend attending the 1938 rally in Nuremberg, Germany (after Anschluss) because the city was a “paradise” of historical buildings, culture, and parks?
Following up on Ireland in the European heat wave… the latest map from the New York Times shows that Palm Beach County is suffering from 125-degree heat:
If it gets even 1 degree hotter, we might be into the “Extreme Danger” zone:
Due to a toilet trip lever failure (everything in this 20-year-old house seems to have been designed to last for exactly 20 years), we cautiously ventured out to Home Depot in the local strip mall (Palm Beach Gardens; 4 miles from the ocean). We decided to eat lunch at one of the high-end restaurants there and found that these two people had chosen to flirt with Danger at an outdoor table rather than enjoy the comfortable indoor air-conditioned environment where they’d received their food. Not shown: the person on the right (pronouns unknown) was wearing massive fuzzy bunny slippers, ordinarily marketed for use in frigid New England winters.
After stopping into PetSmart, we passed by a table-service restaurant in which a Floridian is wearing long pants and a sweater in what the New York Times says might be 125-degree heat:
Here’s what the Google says about afternoon temps in the heat dome over the strip mall:
Fortunately, I hope to be escaping to comfortable 93-degree weather in Oshkosh, Wisconsin for next week’s EAA AirVenture:
Just days after the Argentinian soccer star arrived in the United States to join his new team, Inter Miami, Messi was spotted shopping at a local Publix.
We are informed by CNN and the New York Times that Ron DeSantis is a tyrant and that his rule over Florida is a cruel example of fascism. Yet now we learn that Lionel Messi is voluntarily taking a pay cut (compared to what he would have earned playing for a team in Saudi Arabia) to live and work in the fascist hellscape of Florida. How is it possible that he failed to notice the fascism and tyranny prior to agreeing to play for Miami?
(How much will choosing fascism/tyranny cost Messi? NBC says that Messi gave up a three-year $1.6 billion deal in the DeSantis-free nation of Saudi Arabia.)
