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Established in 1899 by President McKinley, Mount Rainier National Park was the nation’s fifth. It is today surrounded by signs informing visitors, who’ll pay almost nothing to enter ($80/year for an annual pass), that they might have to wait 3 hours in a car line-up (engines and AC running for maximum climate preservation!) to get to the “wilderness” experience inside the gate. In the bad old days of 1908, people paid $5 per car. The BLS CPI calculator goes back only to 1913, but ChatGPT says that this corresponds to $180 today. What did those with $180 of today’s dollars get when they arrived? Some fun activities that have had to be banned in today’s crowded national parks:

The visitors of 1908 didn’t have to deal with the negative effects of Climate Change:

Despite our abuse of Mother Earth, she apparently still loves Her children because we were blessed with unusually clear weather on Day 1 of our visit:

Evening above Myrtle Falls (near the Paradise Inn):

Speaking of Paradise, check out the 5G mobile service available in this mile-high island within the park:

The rest of the park is pretty shabby, consistent with the almost-free entrance price (see What if our National Parks charged Navajo prices?). The lobby of the Inn is beautiful, but the rooms are small and crummy by present-day standards:

Don’t miss Box Canyon and Silver Falls, east of Paradise:

Putting our rental minivan to shame, a Siberian Husky’s 13-ton motorhome (on tour from 2021-2033):

Don’t miss the short Twin Firs Trail through old growth forest on your way out to the west.

Practical tip: make sure to bring hiking sticks, especially if visiting in June when th snow won’t have melted.

Summary: a great place, but it was created for a country of 76 million humans for whom long-distance travel was expensive and onerous. Nobody seems to have thought about what it means to build a park for over 400 million Americans (we’ll get there pretty soon if legal immigration continues at 1.3 million humans per year and very fast indeed if we have another Biden-Harris-style surge of undocumented migration) who have access to low-cost comfortable cross-country transportation, plus another 70+ million foreign visitors to the U.S. (current level). Considering the gold-plated nature of much that is run by the government, it is unclear why the national parks stumble along shabbily. Entrance fees are low, a massive subsidy is required every year from taxpayers in general, and facilities are antiquated and in obvious need of maintenance. Meanwhile, access is rationed according to who is willing to sit in a 3-hour traffic line to get in, who can tolerate physical discomfort in crummy hotels, who doesn’t mind using outhouses when private enterprise in the same terrain has running water and a septic system, etc.

Related, from the New York Times:

This year, staffing remains sharply reduced, and some parks have scrapped their reservation systems, already leading to gridlock at popular sites.

They own some of the most valuable real estate in the world, in other words, and can’t get a sufficient return on that capital to pay a few rangers. A family of rich foreigners on a three-week national park trip will still pay almost nothing per person per day.

They can also buy a $250 nonresident annual pass — available online or at park gates. The same pass costs $80 for U.S. residents.

Almost ninety percent of the true cost of the foreign family’s visit will be paid by federal personal income taxpayers, many of whom won’t have enough time or money to visit the parks. (Only 10 percent of the NPS budget comes from visitor fees and another 3-4 percent from concession contracts.)

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We’re informed that Americans who are currently receiving an entirely taxpayer-funded lifestyle (housing, health care, food, smartphone) would prefer to work and be self-sufficient (“strong and independent” if female; “just a man” if male). We’re informed that there is an affordable housing crisis, which prevents Americans who choose to work from living decently (because of this shortage of housing, we should maintain an open border and maximize the number of immigrants we bring in; an increase in the number of people who need housing will necessarily result in a lower price for housing).

Wouldn’t the most obvious course of action for an able-bodied American on welfare be to apply for a job on a cruise ship? An American is easier and cheaper for a US homeported cruise line to hire because no visa is required and the cost of getting the worker back home after a contract is much lower than for a Filipino or an Indian. If the American on welfare is a native-born American, he/she/ze/they likely speaks English, which is a requirement for many cruise lines.

The skills required for entry-level cruise ship jobs are minimal. There is plenty of work sweeping up in public areas and cleaning crew areas, for example. The cruise line provides unlimited food (no need for SNAP). The cruise line provides comfortable climate-controlled housing. “The Maritime Labour Convention requires that medical care and health-protection services for seafarers while onboard or landed in a foreign port be provided free of charge to seafarers.” (ChatGPT) In other words, the cruise ship is already a dream environment from a classical socialist point of view (not from a modern progressive’s point of view since work is actually required).

Why don’t we ever hear of an American who transitions from welfare to gainful employment on a ship?

ChatGPT agrees that every American on welfare wants to work and it is mostly an accident that anyone is on welfare for 1-4 generations. Why won’t Americans on welfare apply for a cruise ship job then?

they prefer benefits plus local autonomy to hard, regimented, full-time work with room and board

Losing subsidized housing is a huge risk.
SNAP and phone service are relatively small. A housing voucher or public-housing slot can be enormously valuable and hard to regain. A single person who leaves for a cruise contract might lose eligibility, fail local recertification, or have nowhere affordable to return.

(It’s interesting that ChatGPT considers a taxpayer-funded house or apartment to be valuable. In nearly all studies of American poverty or inequality, taxpayer-funded housing is valued at $0 and a person with a lifetime entitlement to live in public housing is considered destitute and completely lacking in wealth.)

Loosely related… Norwegian Joy at Icy Strait Point, Alaska (home of the Huna Tlingit who were expelled from Glacier Bay first by a glacier and then by the National Park Service, which acknowledges that the land belongs to the Huna Tlingit):

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Happy National Immigrant Heritage Month to those who celebrate (and if you don’t celebrate, you’re an irrational hater because diversity is our strength and immigration has made Native Americans vastly better off than if Europeans had come only to trade; Biden proclamation).

“Who Killed the Florida Orange?” (Slate; a paywall-free version):

In 2003, the mighty Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of fruit, with 90 pounds of oranges per box, most of which went on to become orange juice. Now, not even 25 years later, the United States Department of Agriculture was forecasting a pitiful 12 million boxes of oranges, the least in more than 100 years, the worst year since last. A decline of more than 95 percent.

In 2005, Florida first got signs of a new affliction in its groves called citrus greening disease. It also has a Chinese name, Huanglongbing, or HLB, because it came from China, where oranges also came from in the first place.

Citrus greening disease is caused by a bacterial infection that is delivered by the gnawing of the Asian citrus psyllid. (It’s now believed the psyllid first turned up near the Port of Miami in 1998.) The flea-sized psyllid bites the leaves and transmits the disease, which slowly chokes out the tree’s vascular system from the inside, taking years to finally show itself. By the time a tree is displaying symptoms—three to five years, in most cases—it’s too late.

The orange tree came from China and the insect that has killed almost all Florida orange trees also came from China. Why hasn’t the Chinese citrus industry been destroyed? ChatGPT:

Because HLB originated in that region, China has had more time to adapt practices, including: Using clean nursery stock; Routine tree replacement cycles; Managing psyllid populations

China has many small, dispersed orchards rather than vast contiguous monocultures

Growers often accept shorter productive lifespans and replant more frequently; Florida’s model relied on long-lived, high-yield groves—HLB breaks that model.

Lower labor costs make intensive management and replanting more feasible

Even in China: It prevents the kind of high-margin, long-lived grove model that Florida once had

In other words, citrus might go back to being a luxury item for the rich, though Spain (#FreePalestine) and California are still largely uninfected. The article claims, without citing any #Science, that Roundup weed-killer is substantially responsible:

Then came the 1970s, and a new technology arrived: the herbicide glyphosate, created by Monsanto. The citrus industry adopted it early, and zealously, taking to it like water, spraying it all over the ground until not one sign of non-citrus life remained. When new complications came, they sprayed more. Acreage grew to 832,000, with record yields, and Florida was king, producing 78 percent of all United States citrus.

Up and up it went, and why not? The process got more mechanized through the back half of the American Century—out with the cover cropping, in with the monocrop, packed tight as can be. One innovation followed the next. Frozen concentrate fell behind the novel idea of “not from concentrate”—no longer did they squeeze it and freeze it. And they were unaware, or unconcerned, that that chemical was wreaking havoc on the soil, weakening the trees’ defenses, leaving them extremely vulnerable to disease.

What made pre-psyllid-immigration Florida such a great place to grow oranges?

A citrus grove must be planted in sand, which occurs naturally, by some geological miracle, in central Florida. (The miracle, specifically, was the Appalachian Mountains, which eroded and deposited sand there over millions of years.) The trees won’t take in wetlands, in mucky soils. But that sand itself is also in high demand for cement, for construction, for building shoulders for highways, for filling in wetlands for development. Up here, Dantzler pointed, was a sand mine, which had torn out groves and gotten to mining beneath them. “There’s a crazy market for sand,” he said.

Sandy land itself is the easiest property to develop. Wetlands are still often protected from a development standpoint, and so, in addition to infill, require pricey, lengthy permitting. Sandy uplands, hiding beneath every citrus tree, are low-regulation and ready to build on.

So, while the growers were losing money hand over fist, housing developers were coming through with godfather offers to buy them out, convert them to row housing, and sell, sell, sell. Flags of every homebuilding giant flew on vanquished ground: DR Horton, Lennar. At nearly every intersection there were signs for cheap housing—no money down, homes in the low $200,000s, yes, for real, in 2026. Bunting and grand openings and exclusive offers abounded.

This part of central Florida is 100′ above sea level and essentially immune to hurricanes (hence Disney’s decision to locate Disney World in Orlando). The reduced wind spec of 140 mph (compare to 160-170 in Jupiter and 170+ in Miami) enables building cheap wood-frame asphalt-shingled houses, just as builders throw together up north (120 mph ultimate design wind speed in the Boston suburbs). I was able to find a 1424 sqft. 3BR, 2BR house with a hideous garage door in front for $254,490. Lennar doesn’t say that it is concrete block, so I think that means “cheap wood”. (Our MacArthur Foundation-built development includes garages in the back of each house, served by alleys, even for townhouses.)

Here are the amenities:

It’s in the middle of nowhere, so it is tough to imagine what kind of job a person would get.

Eli’s Orange World in Kissimmee, November 2024:

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A recent interaction on the Hertz web site, trying to rent a car in Seattle for an upcoming trip. The 33 mpg car is $32/day. The pavement-melting gas-hogging 19-mpg SUV? Consumers are so alarmed about paying high gasoline prices that they’re willing to pay $401/day in order to burn twice as much fuel.

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From January: Should today’s 18-year-olds avoid liberal arts colleges because such schools are likely to disappear during their careers?

From 2023, a liberal arts college offers to rescue Floridians whose lives were ruined by Ron DeSantis:

Hampshire College announced today its commitment to offer admission to all New College of Florida students in good standing and to match their current cost of tuition. This opportunity is in response to the continuing attacks on New College of Florida intended to limit intellectual exploration, turn back progress toward inclusion, and curtail open discussion of race, injustice, and histories of oppression. By committing to impose a narrowly politicized curriculum on New College, the newly appointed trustees broke promises made to its current students to support a self-directed, rigorous education grounded in a commitment to free inquiry.

Last week:

How much was the college extracting from each customer? About $80,000 per year:

Maybe they got into financial stress because they gave their land back to the Native Americans, who they say are the rightful owners, and then had to pay rent?

The original peoples of this land have had connections with these lands for millennia and maintain and reclaim relationships to this day. They are part of a vast expanse of Algonquian relations. Over 400 years of colonization, Nipmuc, Nonotuck, and Pocumtuc Peoples were forcibly displaced. In the 17th century, the Nonotuck peoples responded to ongoing settler colonial violence by seeking safety with their kinship connections in surrounding areas. … we are on stolen land built up by the stolen labor of enslaved African peoples. Let us be mindful of the ongoing colonial violence that continues to rage across the globe in places like Sudan, Congo, and Palestine, and our complicity in that violence.

Who are the evil people perpetrating “colonial violence” in “Palestine”? Maybe we could have learned at Hampshire’s 25th Annual Eqbal Ahmad Symposium, “The boomerang Comes Back: How the U.S.-Backed War on Palestine is Expanding Authoritarianism at Home”:

Noura Erakat, human rights attorney and associate professor in the department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, as well as the cofounder of the online journal Jadaliyya, presented an analysis for our times. Amherst College Writer-in-Residence George Abraham moderated.

Here’s the professor at the UN (2025):

Today is day 585 of genocide. Every day is a day of unprecedented atrocity.

She agrees with Gavin Newsom (see “Newsom Compares Israel to ‘Apartheid State,’ Questions Military Support” (NYT)):

Since 2020, an emerging consensus among legacy human rights organizations as well as the world court, have defined Israel as an apartheid regime. Rather than boycott, divest from, and sanction apartheid Israel, the global community has attempted to normalize it.

What else can one learn at Hampshire? That our society rests on “fundamental contributions” from Africans:

That the university is a place for “theorizing queer horizons”:

That being trans is not a modern fad of some sort:

That anyone who says liberal arts kids study basketweaving is an ignorant hater. It’s actually how to make brooms:

Students can study Donald Trump, a man who likely be long-dead by the time they’re mid-career (separately, a group of people who can’t figure out whether they’re male or female throws rocks at Donald Trump’s understanding of science):

What’s the value of having “Trump vs. Science” on one’s resume? It gets a graduate into the lucrative world of taxpayer-funded nonprofits?

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I had an early Pho lunch with a Bay Area friend who is a passionate Democrat and, typically, a reliable source of Trump hatred. Instead of fuming about Trump’s unprovoked attack on peaceful Iranians that had begun two days earlier, however, he talked about his AI-assisted efforts to prevent 180 units of affordable housing from being built on some government-owned land two miles from his multi-$million house.

After our Vietnamese experience, it was time to meet a different friend at Mare Island, a Navy base from 1854-1996. More than 300 ships and submarines were built here, including a battleship (shipyard history). Despite being right on the water and less than an hour from the AI fleshpots of San Francisco, the place hasn’t been redeveloped. The City of Vallejo seems to own it now and has opened parts of it for recreation, but can’t even get organized to build restrooms (there are a few porta-potties) as a Florida government entity would immediately have done.

The drydocks haven’t completely shut down and some impressive cranes remain.

There are some beautiful homes built originally for Navy officers.

There’s a sculpture with the names of many of the ships built at Mare Island on top of a hill:

I had dinner on Berkeley’s 4th Street with a local. She refused to walk more than a block from the restaurant on the grounds that it wasn’t safe. She believes that (1) after 70 years of progressive governance with a nearly unlimited budget, Berkeley has an entrenched criminal underclass, and (2) there should be at least 70 more years of progressive governance.

This was my introduction to a new-ish form of California fraud. Restaurants give customers menus with various prices and then add a 5 or 6% fee (why not 50% or 60%?) for “living wage” or “EE [employee] benefits”:

Traffic from Berkeley to SFO at 6:21 am was already grim (1:13 for what is a 29-minute trip without traffic):

My Uber driver (from Ethiopia) decided to take an expansive view of “HOV 3+” to include him+me. We zipped by the rule-following chumps and were at the airport after 45 minutes. We passed through some of the housing that is delivered to the vulnerable by wealthy progressives who say that housing is a human right:

Californians with whom I talked were passionate about wanting to further investigate the dead-for-seven-years Jeffrey Epstein and male associates who purportedly victimized under-18 females by paying them to have sex. They want additional men to be prosecuted for crimes that they believe occurred some decades ago. What do they do with their latest airport terminal? Celebrate a man who had sex with men under the age of 18. (Grok, like Claudine Gay, says that context is everything: “This was a consensual adult-teen relationship in the context of the 1960s gay scene. … Scott Smith (born 1948, so ~18 years younger than [Harvey] Milk; they met when Smith was in his early 20s in 1969–1972).”)

Grok was able to produce a variant of the brochure without any spelling errors:

(ChatGPT: “Sorry, I can’t help create or edit an image that promotes or glorifies Jeffrey Epstein.” Asked to explain why Harvey Milk is good while Jeffrey Epstein is bad, ChatGPT explains that “there was no criminal prosecution [of Harvey Milk] and the relationship occurred in a period when age-of-consent laws and enforcement varied widely by state and by circumstance”.)

Don’t fly without your djembe (West African drum) and indigenous blanket:

Don’t stay home and Zoom it in or travel safely by private car when you could instead exchange aerosol viruses with 200 potentially infected/infectable humans, protected by nothing more than a simple mask:

JetBlue reminded passengers to celebrate Women’s History Month:

The Broward County/FLL officials highlighted their entry in the South Florida Poetry Contest: “Pack the Fun, No Carry-On Gun!”

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TL;DR: An LLM might take your job but it can’t take your public housing entitlement.

Let’s suppose that the AI/Robotics revolution happens gradually enough that Americans don’t feel that a total revamp of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society welfare state is required. Those employed as drivers, for example, get replaced over a 20-year period as vehicles that don’t have the requisite hardware for self-driving age out of the fleet. FAA regulation for supplemental type certificates remain so onerous that it is cheaper to pay two pilots on each flight than to retrofit an Airbus A320 or Boeing 787 for self-flying.

Let’s assume that AI/robotics renders only about half of the U.S. workforce unemployable (we’ll keep our high minimum wages so anyone with below-median skills, health, beauty, or strength won’t be able to work legally). That means there will be a gradual, but huge, increase in demand for taxpayer-funded housing (public housing or Section 8). Even before ChatGPT was launched (November 2022), there was already a long waiting list for a taxpayer-funded apartment and, oftentimes, the waiting list was so long that authorities closed. Here’s a March 4, 2026 snapshots from New York City’s taxpayer-subsidized housing web site:

The last window of application to be placed on a waitlist (not to get housing!) was almost two years ago. Nationwide, waiting times, for those who are fortunate enough to have gotten on the waitlist, are apparently typically between 2 and 10 years.

Is the smart move for a young person to get into the welfare system now while the waitlists are still no more longer than 10 years? He/she/ze/they can (1) refrain from work, (2) have a child, and/or (3) be diagnosed with a disability.

Related:

• unemployed = 21st century draft horse?
• Revisiting the 21st Century Draft Horse posting

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“The autism epidemic is a myth” (Washington Post):

Autism diagnoses have indeed risen dramatically in recent decades. However, diagnostic criteria can change even when the underlying health phenomenon remains unchanged. The most recently released Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report on autism, published last April, revealed a five-fold increase in the prevalence of autism between 2000 and 2022, from 67 to 322 cases per 10,000 children. But a large-scale study published in December, drawing on CDC data from 24,669 8-year-olds across the country, found that this dramatic rise may be entirely driven by children with mild or no significant functional impairment.

One of the best ways to see how humans feel is, I think, to ask an LLM that has been trained on all human written expression.

The prompt

I have a friend who is a very skilled aircraft mechanic. He chooses to work primarily by himself and spends lunch hours reading technical manuals while the other mechanics are talking about the sports games they saw on television the night before. He prefers to spend evenings at home with his wife and two children rather than go out with friends or neighbors. He doesn’t speak unnecessary words. He shows up to work at exactly the same time every day. He gets upset if the other mechanics want to play Taylor Swift at a high volume in the hangar. Could he have a psychological disorder and, if so, what would it be?

Grok

Based on the behaviors you described—such as a strong preference for solitary work and focused activities (e.g., reading technical manuals during lunch), limited social engagement outside of immediate family, minimal unnecessary verbal communication, rigid adherence to routines (e.g., arriving at work at the exact same time daily), and sensory sensitivities (e.g., distress from loud music)—these traits could potentially align with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), particularly at a milder level on the spectrum.

ASD is characterized by challenges with social communication and interaction, alongside restricted or repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. For instance:

• Intense focus on specific topics (like aviation mechanics) is common.
• Preference for predictable routines and discomfort with disruptions (including sensory overload from noise) fits the profile.
• Many individuals with ASD form deep bonds with close family but struggle with or avoid broader social interactions.

Gemini

… Some of the specific details you mentioned—the sensitivity to loud music, the strict adherence to routine, the deep focus on technical manuals, and the preference for literal communication—are common traits of people on the autism spectrum.

Routine: Showing up at the exact same time every day provides a sense of order and predictability.

Sensory Sensitivity: Getting upset over loud music (like Taylor Swift in a cavernous hangar) isn’t necessarily about the artist; it may be a sensory overload issue where certain frequencies or volumes make it physically impossible for him to concentrate.

Specialized Interests: A passion for technical manuals often reflects a “systemizing” brain—one that excels at understanding how complex machines work.

…

[Gemini didn’t immediately go to “autism” as Grok did, but threw it out as a possibility]

Wrap-up

Grok gets a prize for being surprised that someone who gets paid to work at Job X focuses on Job X (“Intense focus on specific topics (like aviation mechanics) is common.”). Gemini gets a prize for inferring that a person who doesn’t want to hear Taylor Swift at high volumes while trying to work has “a sensory overload issue”.

Next Steps

Maybe it would be worth investigating what kinds of prompts will cause these LLMs to suggest gender affirming surgery, e.g., “My birth certificate says that I’m male, but I feel an intense desire to see the Broadway show Wicked over and over again.”

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