Happy Passover from Whole Foods
From https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/tips-and-ideas/holiday/passover-menu :
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Sun ‘n Fun 2022 report
We made a family trip to Lakeland, Florida’s answer to Oshkosh, i.e., Sun ‘n Fun. It was a great experience with much more manageable traffic, hotels, food, etc. The U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds were the main airshow attraction and the USAF also brought a B-1 bomber, of which roughly 45 continue to fly. (Happy Tax Day and, if you’re one of the minority of Americans who pays income tax, thanks for your contribution to the B-1!)
The fun starts in the parking lot:
The Florida Air Museum’s Boeing 727 (converted to classroom and conference room spaces) was open for a walk-through, prompting the 6-year-old to note “We just came out of the plane’s butt.”
There were about 75 classic and antique cars just inside the gate, including one that is perfect for a Jacksonville Jaguars specialty plate”
A Jacksonville-based U.S. Navy unit also uses the “Jaguars” name:
The most unusual planes from World War II at the event were the Boeing B-29 and PBY Catalina. Both were giving rides and drawing crowds.
The B-1 cockpit was open for tours:
I wonder if these Harley-Davidson of Brandon, Florida hats are more popular in the Let’s Go Brandon age:
Try to go with a friend who owns a Cirrus because the company provides a nice lounge and observation deck. The Thunderbirds were awesome, but I wonder if they should kick off the air show rather than start at 4 pm when people have already been sitting since 1:30 PM.
One of the announcements during the airshow was from a person who said that she identified as a “Black woman” (however Ketanji B.J.’s team of biologists might define this term) and also that, despite what she characterized as an obstacle/hardship, she could fly an airplane. Within the crowd of 50,000 aviation nuts there were no doubt quite a few who were familiar with competent 12-year-old pilots. Thus, the effect of the message was that one should ordinarily expect a person who identifies as a “Black woman” to be less capable than a 12-year-old (I happen to disagree with this expectation, but if we do credit the expressed concept, why do we limit important jobs such as Supreme Court justice or Vice President of the U.S. to people in this category?). No other gender or race ID was advertised during the airshow as an obstacle to learning to fly.
At dusk people get ready for 7:30 pm night airshow (Kyle Fowler in the background of the center picture doing aerobatics in a homebuilt Rutan Long-EZ).
In contrast to an underwhelming experience with a coordinated drone show as Oshkosh, the one organized by Great Lakes Drone Co. for this year’s Sun ‘n Fun was amazing. There was also a powered parachute aerobatic night demonstration! Nathan Hammond in the fireworks-carrying Super Chipmunk was a favorite, but Manfred Radius delivered something new in a sparkler-trailing sailplane. The fireworks at the end of the night airshow made the typical city’s July 4th fireworks look like three 10-year-olds running around with sparklers (fortunately this is strictly illegal in Massachusetts, perhaps because there is too much risk that an “essential” marijuana supply will be ignited and thus put human health at risk until a trip to the dispensary). There is a massive fireball at the end. During the minivan debrief session, extended by only about 15 minutes due to the crush of getting out of the parking lot and out to the Interstate, the 6-year-old asked the 8-year-old if he’d seen it. “Of course I did,” was the response. “I’m not blind.”
Due to the fact that Lakeland, Florida is so far from the center of the U.S., there aren’t as many interesting airplanes as at EAA AirVenture. That said, if you have any reason to want to come to Florida in early April and you have any interest in aviation, Sun ‘n Fun is a rewarding destination. Budget two days to see everything and one more if you want to hang out and chat with people or take homebuilding seminars.
Related:
- Sun n Fun (2014)
- Sun n Fun report (2017)
- combat history of the B-1 (bombing Iraq in 1998, about 30 years after development was funded; bombing Yugoslavia to help Kosovo separate into its own country; bombing Iraq some more in 2003; bombing Muslims in Afghanistan and Syria at least through 2018)
- TBM 960 introduced at Sun ‘n Fun, a $4.8 million FADEC (finally!) turboprop that might be the first example of an airplane that can update its own navigation database via mobile data (like an Android phone circa 2008!): “It is also the first application for the Garmin GDL 60 data transmitter, which allows automatic database uploads and links with mobile devices.” (but maybe not? perhaps it requires the pilot-owner to download updates first to the phone or tablet?). The plane was introduced in 1991 for $1.3 million (Flying), which corresponds to $2.6 million in 2022 Mini-Dollars according to the BLS calculator. Thus the official rate rate of inflation since 1991 is 100 percent while the actual rate for anyone in the TBM market is 270 percent.
Year 3 of the COVID emergency continues
“Far from being the time to drop our guard, this is the moment to work even harder to save lives,” Tedros said during a press briefing in Geneva. “Specifically, this means investing so that Covid-19 tools are equitably distributed, and we simultaneously strengthen health systems.”
Houssin said the committee is working on criteria, including epidemiological data and the level of international assistance to contain the virus, to determine when the WHO can declare that the global health emergency is over.
“Masks Stay On: C.D.C. Keeps the Mandate on Planes” (NYT):
Despite pressure from airlines and industry groups, the Biden administration extended the requirement to wear masks while traveling on public transportation through May 3.
Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the new White House Covid response coordinator, said in an interview that the additional time will allow the C.D.C. to assess whether BA.2, a subvariant of the coronavirus, is going to become a “ripple or a wave” in the United States. The C.D.C. will use that information to determine whether the mandate should be extended further, he said.
We’re still in a COVID emergency, which is why the rabble need to wear some sort of mask on buses, subways, and commercial airliners (the elites are unmasked in their private cars and private jets, of course!), but COVID is not a sufficiently serious risk to justify trying to keep COVID-infected migrants out (“CDC orders Title 42 to wind down, saying expulsions of migrants are no longer needed” (CBS, April 1)).
It’s a worldwide and nationwide emergency, but every American has the option to move to a state that matches his/her/zir/their desired level of panic. One useful tool is the WalletHub ranking of states by COVID-19 restrictions (the Florida Free State is #2 at the free end of the spectrum). A newly released multi-state comparison from the National Bureau of Economic Research is co-authored by Casey Mulligan (see Book Review: The Redistribution Recession). From “A Final Report Card on the States’ Response to COVID-19”:
For those who seek maximum panic and securely locked-down K-12ers, the best places to live are California, Maryland, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and D.C. (And, in fact, some friends who were supporters of lockdowns, masks, Joe Biden, etc. recently moved to Hawaii from a state that had only a middling level of passion for lockdowns and school closures.)
As the authors point out (above), school closures will surely kill a lot of Americans in the long run; they estimate that more life-years will be lost just from this than from COVID-19. But did school closures save lives in the short run? The authors look at COVID-tagged deaths per 100,000 population and adjust for age and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes. Hawaii is ranked #1 (lowest rate), but D.C. is ranked #48 despite similar enthusiasm for school closure. (schools-open Florida is mid-pack for death rate at #22.) On the “excess deaths” guestimation, California and Florida are right next to each other despite it being illegal to keep a school open in California and it being illegal to keep a school closed in Florida.
The authors are economists so they get into a lot of GDP data and operate from the assumption that richer is better than poorer. I personally disagree with this approach as I’ve noted before. Since Americans say that they don’t care how impoverished they become so long as they can preserve at least one human life, the relevant standard for looking at lockdown is life-years, adding up those saved from COVID-19 and subtracting those lost due to the side-effects of lockdown. Wealth (GDP) factors into this only to the extent that wealth is correlated with health and longevity.
The NBER paper concludes by noting that four of the states that they ranked last in a composite score (in-person school percentage, economic performance, and minimizing deaths) are the ones that have had the highest per-capita rates of out-migration. These are DC, NY, IL, and CA.
What about our family’s August 2021 move? Florida gets an A rating and a #6 rank in the composite score. Maskachusetts is lumped in with the D students and has a #41 rank. (If you like skiing, Utah is ranked #1!)
Related:
- Science: travelers from zero-COVID China need medical testing, but undocumented migrants do not
- “Mask mandates return as COVID-19 cases rise across U.S.” (CBS, April 11)
- Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children
Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband compared to a 56K dial-up modem
Our neighborhood in Jupiter, Abacoa (created by the MacArthur Foundation), is home to a Major League Baseball training stadium at which the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins practice. A light post beyond the outfield bristles with mobile phone antennae, which presumably includes one for Verizon. Sitting in the stands, exactly one baseball field away from these antennae, I was unable to use a web browser. Here’s a Speedtest result:
Decoding the above: Max signal strength. On the new 5G Ultra Wideband network that Verizon advertises. Sub-LTE download speed. Upload speed, which is presumably making it tough for me to request pages, almost the same as a 56K modem dialing up AOL on an analog phone line (see Brent Townshend’s patent filed in 1994, which kept patent litigators busy for even longer than Verizon kept me waiting for web pages).
Young people: AOL was like Facebook and Twitter except that you wouldn’t be kicked off for saying that you believed masking kindergarteners wouldn’t stop an aerosol virus. Also, the typical user didn’t spend time and energy raging against things done by governors and legislatures of states other than the user’s own.
Full post, including commentsA 13-inch iPad costs the same as an 86-inch TV with the same capabilities
An iPad Pro costs between $1,100 and $2,200 (plus $350 for a keyboard), depending on precise configuration. It features a 12.9-inch LCD display and weighs about 1.4 lbs., making it inexpensive to pack and ship. It runs a Unix-based operating system and a bunch of apps to decode streaming digital video and paint pixels on the medium-resolution (less than 4K) screen.
What about an 86″ TV? It runs a Unix-based operating system and a bunch of apps to decode streaming digital video and paint pixels on a full 4K resolution screen. Here’s an example LG 86UN9070AUD from a recent Costco trip:
In addition to its prodigious 7′ diagonal size, it weighs 100 lbs. (130 lbs. when packaged) and therefore consumes substantial shipping and warehousing costs.
An obvious answer is that LG competes with other TV manufacturers and Apple is the only place to get a device that will run all of the apps targeted to iOS, but it still surprises me that these two items could have roughly similar prices.
Full post, including comments13 percent raise for Amazonians
A friend works as a “DevOps Engineer” at Amazon in Maskachusetts. She just got a 13 percent raise, not performance-based, to compensate her for inflation and prevent her from quitting.
State-sponsored NPR today says that the inflation rate is just 8.5 percent: “U.S. inflation rises 8.5 percent, sharpest increase since 1981”. Is that number consistent with our Lived Experience?
What if you want to buy a replacement rebuilt engine for your little airplane? There was a 14 percent price increase in July 2021. There was an additional 15 percent price increase in March 2022 (Rotorcorp). So prices are up 31 percent compared to a year ago? Not if we hold delivery time constant. The Rotorcorp article:
Perhaps the most challenging issue out of Lycoming is not just the spiraling prices, but the extended and growing lead times. At time of this writing, Rotorcorp is still waiting on Cylinder kit orders placed in July of 2021 and has had lead times “bumped” numerous times to in excess of 12 months for some parts. Engines are now in excess of 8 months.
Rotorcorp is responding with increased rolling inventory replenishment orders to maintain critical spares stock to support our customers, but we are HIGHLY encouraging customers approaching 2200 hour service, or needing engine overhaul/replacement to place their cylinder and engine orders up to 9 months ahead of anticipated delivery.
So the apples-to-apples price might be 50 percent higher (you’d have to buy out someone else’s order to get an engine within a few weeks as was previously standard).
Let’s try not to ask about the rebuild price on the engine in this P-40 (from Sun ‘n Fun 2022):
Permanent Temporary Free Internet
From the New York Times, April 3, 2022, apparently not satisfied with A corrected history of mRNA vaccines, its January 15, 2022 effort to erase Robert Malone:
This post is not about the obviously false claim that someone whose name appears on a foundational paper regarding mRNA vaccines had something to do with the invention of mRNA vaccines. (See also Nature‘s history of mRNA vaccines, which devotes the first three paragraphs to the now-unpersoned Malone and mentions his name 27 times.) It is rather about the possibility that our family could get free Internet rather than handing over $780 per year to AT&T for gigabit fiber! Of course, I clicked on the ad (landing page):
If it’s “free” then I assume it is paid for by taxpayers. What does Comcast say about this taxpayer-funded program?
“a longer-term replacement for the Emergency Broadband Benefit.” So the temporary emergency government program (#BecauseCOVID) has morphed into a permanent entitlement. The FCC explains this:
It’s not the government taking $14 billion every year from one set of residents of the U.S. and using it to pay whatever Comcast and the, ahem, competitors are charging another set of residents. It is instead an “investment in broadband affordability,” implying that broadband prices for Americans who haven’t been organized enough to get into the welfare system might start coming down to European rates.
I will have to revise my standard description of what a low-skill or elderly/infirm immigrant to the U.S. can expect to receive from existing taxpayers. Before it was free housing, free health care (Medicaid), free food (SNAP/EBT), and free smartphone (Obamaphone). The FCC explains eligibility for this new permanent entitlement:
If you’re on SNAP or Medicaid, in other words, you’re seamlessly eligible for free home broadband connection. So now it is free housing, health care, food, smartphone, and broadband.
(Speaking of Medicaid, remember that April is Medicaid Awareness Month!)
Circling back to the Xfinity ad landing page, here’s the final picture of someone in a household that might benefit:
Taken together, these three pictures have me wondering if we should try to go on welfare so that we’d finally be living in a clean clutter-free house!
Related:
- “Did Milton Friedman say that nothing was so permanent as a temporary government program?” (Answer: Yes, but it may have come from Lord Palmerston)
- “Statement by President Biden Extending the Pause on Student Loan Repayment Through August 31st, 2022” (whitehouse.gov); due to a series of extensions of a temporary emergency policy, nobody has had to make any federal student loan payments nor incur any interest for more than 2 years (cost to working class taxpayers with no college degrees: $100 billion)
GPU performance improvements since 2015 (and why not just use motherboard graphics?)
Moore’s law says that we should get GPUs twice as fast every two years (GPUs are inherently parallel so adding more transistors should add performance). Huang’s law says that GPUs get 3X faster every two years.
Because everything desirable in this world is being scooped up by the Bitcoin enthusiasts, my seven-year-old desktop PC makes due with a seven-year-old ASUS STRIX GTX980 graphics card. It was purchased in April 2015 for $556 from Newegg.
A similar-priced card today, exactly seven years later, should be at least 10X faster, right?
The 2015 card’s benchmark:
It can do 47 frames per second with DirectX 12.
Let’s look at the $1,050 RTX 3080 for comparison. Using the same inflation rate as Palm Beach County real estate, $1,050 today is a little less than $556 in 2015 dollars.
It can do 98 frames per second with DirectX 12. Even the cards that sell for $2,000+ are only slightly faster than the RTX 3080.
I pride myself on asking the world’s dumbest questions so here goes… if building a new PC for activities other than gaming or video editing, why not use the integrated graphics on the motherboard? The latest motherboards will drive 4K monitors. The latest CPUs have a lot of cores, especially AMD’s, so they should be competent at tasks that are easy to parallelize. Back in 2020, at least, a graphics card was only about 2X the speed of AMD’s integrated graphics (Tom’s Hardware). Intel, it seems, skimps in this department.
One argument against this idea for those who want a fast desktop PC is that the fastest CPUs don’t seem to come with any integrated graphics. The AMD Threadrippers, for example, say “discrete graphics card required”. The Intel Core i9 CPUs with up to 16 cores do generally have “processor graphics”, but does it make sense to buy Intel? AMD’s CEO is frequently celebrated for identifying as a “woman” (example from IEEE, which does not cite any biologists) while Intel’s CEO identifies as a surplus white male. Tom’s Hardware says that the latest Intel CPUs are actually faster for gaming: “Intel holds the lead in all critical price bands … In terms of integrated graphics performance, there’s no beating AMD. The company’s current-gen Cezanne APUs offer the best performance available from integrated graphics with the Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G.”
Is the right strategy for building a new PC, then, to get the Ryzen 7 Pro 5750G (available only in OEM PCs; the 5700G is the home-builder’s version) and then upgrade to a discrete graphics card if one needs more than 4K resolution and/or if the Bitcoin craze ever subsides? The Ryzen 7 fits into an AM4 CPU socket so it won’t ever be possible to swap in a Threadripper. This CPU benchmarks in at 3337 (single thread)/25.045 (the 5700G is just a hair slower and can be bought at Newegg for $300). The absolute top-end Threadripper PRO (maybe $10,000?) is no faster for a single thread, but can run 4X faster if all 128 threads are occupied. What about the Intel i7 5820K that I bought in 2015 for $390? Its benchmark is 2011 for a single thread and 9,808 if all 12 threads are occupied.
(For haters who are willing to pass up chips from a company led by a strong independent woman, the Intel i9-12900KS is about $600 and includes “processor graphics” capable of driving monitors up to 7680×4320 (8K) via DisplayPort. It can run up to 24 threads.)
These seem like feeble improvements considering the seven years that have elapsed. I guess a new PC could be faster due to the faster bandwidth that is now available between the CPU and the M.2 SSDs that the latest motherboards support. But why are people in such a fever to buy new PCs if, for example, they already have a PC that is SSD-based? Is it that they’re using the home PC 14 hours per day because they don’t go to work anymore?
Related:
- Best Integrated Graphics (from Feb 2022; AMD Vega 11 is the winner)
- ASUS “gaming desktop” with the Ryzen 7 5700G and also a GTX 3060 graphics card (could this ever make sense? Is there any software that can use both the GPU packaged with the CPU and simultaneously the GPU that is in the graphics card?)
- William Shockley, who needs to be written out of transistor history: “Shockley argued that a higher rate of reproduction among the less intelligent was having a dysgenic effect, and that a drop in average intelligence would ultimately lead to a decline in civilization. … Shockley also proposed that individuals with IQs below 100 be paid to undergo voluntary sterilization”
People who were afraid to leave their bunkers for two years want to wear the same watch as the Apollo 11 astronauts
Two Apollo 11 astronauts wore the Omega Speedmaster after riding the Saturn V to the moon. Swatch has recently released a replica “moon watch”. Demand for these watches, and an association with the men who were brave enough to go into space, was overwhelming (Daily Mail). I would love to know how many of those who are donning the Watch of Bravery were cowering in place for two years, wearing an N95 mask while walking in the woods, etc.
Here are the original and copy side-by-side:
If you got some of the $500 billion in fraud from the PPP and other Covid relief programs, you might prefer this $45,300 gold version that is so white it looks like inexpensive stainless steel (so the Justice Department won’t suspect you!):
Which one would I choose if I were going into space? None of the above! Everything in aviation is done with UTC so I’d want a 24-hour hand or a 24-hour digital display of UTC in addition to the 12-hour local time. Torgoen makes a lot of these (quartz movements) and, if you want to spend 30X as much to get the same function, the Rolex Explorer II (except that it will cost you 50X as much and you’ll have to accept a used one because new Rolexes, all million/year that they make, are sold out (at least one to this guy who got caught defrauding PPP)).
Full post, including commentsWhy is the markup on electricity for charging cars higher than the markup for gasoline?
Electrify America charges 43 cents/kWh in Florida:
That’s 4X the average price to a commercial customer in the state (EIA.gov; which shows that Electrify America’s price is 5X the “industrial” rate, which might be more appropriate for a large and busy charging station). (Let’s ignore the membership price of 3X because you can get a fair price at a gas station without joining any clubs.)
Retail gasoline is about 10 percent over cost (source), i.e., 1.1X.
The gas station needs to dig a tank, maintain pumps, insure against environmental calamity, fire, etc. The electric charging station just needs a few parking spots, some wires, and some high-power/high-voltage components.
For people who live in apartments and/or do most of their charging on trips, do these huge charging station markups eliminate the purported fuel cost savings for high-cost electric cars? (we almost never see a Tesla used as an Uber, right?)
Full post, including comments