Permanent Temporary Free Internet

by philg

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!

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GPU performance improvements since 2015 (and why not just use motherboard graphics?)

by philg

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”
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People who were afraid to leave their bunkers for two years want to wear the same watch as the Apollo 11 astronauts

by philg

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)).

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Why is the markup on electricity for charging cars higher than the markup for gasoline?

by philg

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?)

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Swiss versus American CEO

by philg

From an interview with the Markus Bucher, the CEO of Pilatus (in Switzerland)….

For the first time we produced and delivered over 140 aircraft to our customers in one year, taking us virtually to the limit of our current production capacity. The enormous demand for our General Aviation aircraft, the PC-12 and PC-24, exceeds all our expectations!

The interviewer, from an in-house magazine, asks “Were our ambitious corporate goals achieved in 2021?”

2021 was a mixed year… I’m not entirely happy! Demand is incredibly positive and our finances are very health. But we work inefficiently and we remain under a lot of pressure because of the need to bypass many standardized production processes due to faulty materials and insufficient quality from our suppliers.

Readers: let me know if you can find anything similarly candid from a U.S. CEO (other than Elon Musk)!

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Meet at Sun ‘n Fun this weekend?

by philg

Who else will be at Sun ‘n Fun this weekend in Lakeland, Florida? For those who are unfamiliar with this glorious event, it is a gathering of aviation enthusiasts that is a little more manageable than Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture).

To prevent a January 6-style insurrection within the family, I splurged on the $25 Preferred Airshow Seating for Saturday so that would probably be the easiest way/place to meet.

Pictures from 2014:

Grumman Widgeon
Storch

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Rich Harvard graduate joins the Supreme Court

by philg

The NYT, under a headline about “A Transformative Justice”:

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson will help make the Supreme Court look like the nation but will have little power to halt its rightward trajectory.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman confirmed to the Supreme Court, will in one sense transform it. Once she replaces Justice Stephen G. Breyer, one of the 108 white men who preceded her, the court will look a lot more like the nation it serves. … there will be two Black justices. And a Latina.

U.S. Census says that the percentage of Americans who identified as Black in 2020 was 12.4 percent. If a numerate person were setting up racial quotas for the Supreme Court, therefore, just 1 out of 9 justices (11.1 percent) would identify as Black. With 22.2 percent Black justices, for those who “see color”, the Supreme Court will actually look less like the nation it serves.

Maybe it isn’t about the skin color criterion established by President Biden, but about socioeconomics. Wikipedia says that Ketanji went to Harvard undergrad, then Harvard Law School, and is married to a surgeon from a “Boston Brahmin” (i.e., rich) family. So someone from a household containing two Harvard graduates and enjoying an income of at least $1 million per year will make the Supreme Court look like more of a cross-section of typical Americans?

Separately, let’s look at microaggressions from the world’s nerds. Microsoft Word recognizes “Ketanji” as a legitimate word/name yet here in a text area on Google Chrome it is flagged as a spelling error. (Who else on Planet Earth has a first name of “Ketanji”?)

From CNN:

The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Thursday in a historic vote… Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to serve as vice president, presided over the chamber during the historic vote in her capacity as president of the Senate. … Senate Democrats and the White House have continually highlighted the historic nature of the nomination. … The Senate chamber was packed for the vote, with most senators seated at their desks for the historic occasion.

We have all just witnessed a historic event. What will change as a result of this rich Harvard graduate joining the Supreme Court?

Finally, if Ketanji Brown Jackson were to change her gender ID to “man”, thus disqualifying himself from the job under the race+gender ID criteria established by President Biden, would he be subject to impeachment? CNN seems to think that Ketanji Brown Jackson and 2SLGBTQQIA+ are related topics:

Notice the ad at right regarding a TV biography of Elizabeth Holmes, who certainly made history as the first teenage multi-billionaire founder of a chemistry company without any degree in chemistry.

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Massachusetts Marijuana Billboards

by philg

To celebrate World Health Day, let’s look at a state where long-term public health was optimized by closing schools for more than a year while keeping the marijuana stores open. Every retailer of healing cannabis in Maskachusetts requires a permit to operate from the government. These permits are limited and, generally, political connections are required to obtain one. Thus, the dope trade is so lucrative that these shops have outbid Verizon, Apple, McDonald’s, et al. for billboard space on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Our heroic reader/commenter Alex has done a drive-by photo project for us. The following photos are from the Pike, I-91, and some of the “poor mine” towns near Springfield, MA.

First, remember that consuming alcohol and psychotropic drugs 24/7 “is not a choice; it’s a disease.”

(Yet it is a disease that can be cured by giving people money on condition that they stop being diseased? See “Financial Incentives for Adherence: Do They Pay?” (Psychiatric Times 2017) and “California Wants To Become The First State To Pay People With Addiction To Stay Sober” (state-sponsored NPR 2021))

This one might be my favorite, the old religion of Christianity represented by a church right next to a billboard for the new religion of weed:

Dazed and Turning Leaf:

For every 200 billboards promoting the consumption of scientifically proven healing cannabis, there is 1 that is part of a disinformation campaign (in this case, disseminating misinformation that marijuana does not improve driving skills; Facebook Fact Checkers rate this claim “Missing Context”).

The Mercedes logo gets some added class by appearing right next to a weed shop billboard:

The implication is that Mercedes is better with cannabis. This concept is made explicit in the next billboard: “Springfield is better with cannabis”.

Who says that Republicans and marijuana don’t mix? A big portion of the Springfield Republican‘s building will now be devoted to cannabis retail.

The INSA “cannabis for real life” shop, right next to the Basketball Hall of Fame:

A proven-by-Science Theory of Wellness:

Illustrating the challenge of taking pictures while driving….

What if phone camera use leads to an accident? A personal injury lawyer stands ready:

Happy World Health Day to everyone and I hope that everyone stays healthy this year by following CDC guidance (to test and not to test, that is the Science).

Related:

  • “Welcoming Refugees” (Jewish Family Service of Springfield, MA): For us social justice is rooted in the Jewish commandment to remember the experience of slavery and the Exodus from Egypt. … JFS resettles refugees fleeing their homelands in partnership with HIAS (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) and the State Department. In the past five years JFS resettled over 500 refugees from around the world to Western Mass– their new home. Well before a family’s arrival, staff secure housing, furniture, and household items for new families. We then provide comprehensive support, including support for school-aged children, comprehensive employment services, and help navigating their new community. JFS continues to serve New Americans long after initial resettlement — for up to five years and beyond in many cases. [Remember that there is no archaeological evidence to support the Passover victimhood narrative. Despite the extensive body of written history from Ancient Egypt, there is nothing to suggest that Jews were ever enslaved in Egypt, that a large group of Jews lived in Egypt, or that a large group of Jews fled Egypt.]
  • “Poverty in Springfield, Massachusetts” (from Welfare Info): The poverty rate in Springfield is 28.7%. One out of every 3.5 residents of Springfield lives in poverty. … 21.1% of Black residents of Springfield, Massachusetts live below the poverty line. 26.7% of Asian residents of Springfield, Massachusetts live below the poverty line. 13.3% of White residents of Springfield, Massachusetts live below the poverty line. 43.5% of Hispanic residents of Springfield, Massachusetts live below the poverty line. Enrolled in Elementary School(Grades 1-4) in Springfield, Massachusetts have a Poverty Rate of 46.1%.
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Is it time to buy stock in Zoom?

by philg

Here’s a challenge for those of us afflicted by a belief in the Efficient Market Hypothesis:

Adjusted for inflation, Zoom is cheaper today than in June 2019, when the only lockdowns were for convicted criminals and any non-felon could work, socialize, and study in person to his/her/zir/their heart’s content. The P/E ratio is only 25. Compare this to the sexual orientation and gender identity educators at Disney with a P/E ratio of 78, and the Microsoft behemoth at 32 (though Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft have all proved that having an enormous market cap actually helps with growth since investments can be financed for almost nothing).

I had a Microsoft Teams meeting the other day that was an echo-plagued disaster unless I kept my microphone on mute. Then, using the same PC with the same webcam and speakers, it worked fine today. Zoom definitely seems to work better and the revenue is still growing (up 21 percent in nominal dollars compared to a year ago so a boost of about 10 percent in real terms).

What’s the major risk for Zoom? That Apple will crush them by bumping the FaceTime group max from 32 to 3200? That Webex and Teams will somehow wipe them out? That Google Meet won’t be canceled like everything else (except for ads) that Google has ever offered? If these aren’t huge risks, why can’t Zoom gradually increase its margins and more than justify a current P/E ratio of 25?

Warning: All of my previous investment ideas have been disastrous!

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Science: travelers from zero-COVID China need medical testing, but undocumented migrants do not

by philg

Here’s the Science question of the day…

To protect the United States, which currently has 30,000 COVID “cases” per day and 600 COVID-tagged deaths per day., from COVID, our Science-following CDC requires that someone arriving with a passport from zero-COVID China undergo medical testing for COVID prior to travel. If he/she/ze/they is not a U.S. citizen, he/she/ze/they is required to also require proof of the Sacrament of Fauci (vaccination). (See CDC order of November 8, 2021.)

The Scientists at the Science-oriented CDC, on the other hand, have Scientifically determined that a migrant who says “I am under 18” can cross the border and stay permanently in the U.S. without either a COVID test or a COVID vaccine. The Science changed after a federal judge said that the Biden administration could not exempt people who said that they were minors from the Science. See “Biden administration says it will not expel migrant children following court order” (CBS):

The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which first authorized the migrant expulsions in March 2020, terminated the government’s ability to expel children who enter U.S. border custody without their parents. U.S. border officials can still use the policy, known as Title 42, to expel single adult migrants and families traveling with children to Mexico or their home countries.

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Mark Pittman said the administration could no longer exempt unaccompanied minors from Title 42, arguing that Texas, which challenged the exemption, was financially harmed by the placement of migrant children in the state due to medical and schooling costs.

In a notice Friday, CDC officials said they recognized the “unique vulnerabilities” of unaccompanied minors.

“In the current termination, CDC addresses the court’s concerns and has determined, after considering current public health conditions and recent developments, that expulsion of unaccompanied noncitizen children is not warranted to protect the public health,” the agency said.

In a separate 21-page order justifying the decision to end Title 42 for unaccompanied children, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky cited the recent nationwide decrease in COVID-19 cases, as well as increased vaccination rates in the U.S. and in the home countries of migrants who journey to the southern border.

Science dictates that the border will be completely open to all unvaccinated and untested migrants as of May (Politico), even those who don’t say “I am under 18,” thus adding approximately 1 million additional residents to the U.S. annually (2 million were expelled during the last two years, according to Politico). So don’t say “no” if you’re offered the opportunity to invest in a crony capitalist “affordable housing” scheme!

(See “The affordable majority: Three misconceptions about investment in affordable housing”:

… affordable housing targets the masses and serves the primary rental cohort in the United States, with about 72 percent of renters falling in the affordable-housing category. … Compared with market-rate apartments, affordable and workforce housing are, in a sense, recession-proof and provide downside protection to investors. … Because of this rising demand and diminishing supply, affordable-housing units experience little to no turnover and are almost always fully-occupied, consistently maintaining occupancy rates of about 98 percent. This differs significantly from market-rate apartments, which average about a 50 percent turnover rate.

Overall, “affordable” does not necessarily mean smaller returns. Investor portfolios in the affordable-housing sector tend to have stronger returns on investment, increased and stabilized cash flows, and provide investors with downside protection.

)

Circling back to the immigration policy that Science (via the CDC) has given the United States, how is it consistent with the documented traveler testing requirement policy that Science (via the CDC) has given the United States? How is a U.S. citizen returning from a zero-COVID country a higher COVID risk, thus requiring pre-departure testing, than an undocumented migrant who has traveled overland through multiple COVID-plagued countries?

Only loosely related, a hotel in China, November 2019, that already had the tables separated for COVID prevention…

(The double boiled pig’s lung soup was about $200 at the exchange rate of late 2019.)

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