An uninterruptible power supply for A/V cabinets (lithium-ion!)

by philg

Even an antique house like ours (2003) here in Florida comes with an A/V cabinet (example from Leviton), the natural home of routers, switches, etc. because this is where all of the Cat 5 cables (Cat 5e in our case; Cat 6, obviously, for newer houses (6A is stiffer and maybe builders wouldn’t want to use it?)) to wall plates end. The Florida Power & Light grid has amazing uptime, but our epic afternoon thunderstorms do cause 1-2-second power hiccups. That’s enough time to force a 5-minute reboot of our cable modem (still in an Xfinity coax ghetto here). Having failed to find what I expected to be a wallet-sized lithium-ion-based UPS, I set the cabinet up initially with a CyberPower lead-acid-based uninterruptible power supply (UPS) of absurd weight and capacity given the use case:

The CyberPower began to shut down randomly, despite the low load. Replacing the battery didn’t help. CyberPower did not want to offer a warranty replacement. Another summer arrived and we had a couple of power glitches. I found that Liebert, the storied manufacturer of machine room AC, introduced the Vertiv PUL-350LVT back in May 2026. This costs about $142 at Amazon and can handle 210W, which seemed potentially insufficient given that the Netgear GS116PP PoE switch by itself can supply 183W of output. Due to the lack of a lead-acid battery, the weight is just over 3 lbs. I used a Tapo P110M smart plug to see what the total draw from the cabinet was (cable modem, Omada router, Netgear PoE swtich) and it turned out to be just 72W steady-state (I rebooted most of the Omada access points at the same time and power consumption did not spike). The UPS will keep our home on the Internet for over 10 minutes, therefore, in the event of a serious FPL problem.

Tangent Alert! Maybe we should buy Vertiv stock? No matter who wins the AI and data center wars, Vertiv/Liebert will have to be paid! They’re like Levi’s for gold miners, right down to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ passion:

The company also seems to admit that it doesn’t pay employees fairly:

Why is there “work we need to do to improve”? If Vertiv/Liebert pays employees what they’re worth, what would be an improvement? (paying some employees more than they’re worth?) If Vertiv/Liebert does not pay employees what they’re worth, what stops them from adjusting pay right now?

But I digress…

Returning to the question of lithium-ion to sit behind the small boxes that are critical to home happiness…. so far it works! (I bought it at Amazon, set it up in a few minutes, and simulated a brief outage by unplugging it a day after the install.) The only unknown unknown unknown is what happens if there is a 20-minute outage, the batteries die completely, and then power is restored. Will this thing turn itself back on? When initially plugged into the mains, it did not come on without me pressing and holding the button.

What would be nice to have? How about a small light lithium-ion UPS for a desktop PC with a standard 750-1000W power supply? Instead of the lead-acid monsters designed for max runtime, this would have enough battery for only a 1-minute outage and then a 2-minute orderly shutdown if the outage persisted. Let’s assume kind of a worst-case draw of 1000 watts for all three minutes, which is essentially impossible (GPU-intensive processes would be shut down shortly after the first minute). This could be accomplished with a 12.8 V 10 Ah LiFePO₄ battery, I think, that weighs only 2.7 lbs. and costs $60. It’s about 6x3x4″ in size, though, so my dream of having the UPS built into the PC power supply might not be achievable. (On the third hand, maybe the dream IS achievable. The power supply can have a small LiFePO₄ battery. If mains power dies, the power supply can pull power from the GPU after 5 seconds in order to give the motherboard/CPU/any hard drives another 55 seconds and, then, if the grid is still dark, sufficient time for an orderly shutdown. Maybe the unexpected disappearance of the GPU would cause an LLM or video game to crash, but that’s unlikely to leave any files corrupted.)

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Congolese refugee life in Oshkosh, Wisconsin

by philg

Continued coverage of the town that supports EAA AirVenture…

“‘I haven’t known happiness’: Congolese refugees in Oshkosh share resettlement experiences” (Oshkosh Northwestern, Feb. 17, 2025):

“I haven’t known happiness since coming here,” Zawadi said in Swahili, still calmly.

“The people are good [here], but the systems are not,” Zawadi said through her daughter Jeannette, who translated in English.

There was also a brief pause on federal grants that was eventually rescinded two days after it was initially issued last month.

For context, refugees like Zawadi and Tuliya, the mother of the second Congolese family, rely heavily on resettlement agencies like Christian humanitarian organization World Relief, which relies heavily on federal grants and funding.

One of the things that makes groups such as World Relief so vital is they pay immigrants’ housing, utilities and other essentials for their first 90 days in the U.S., hoping they will eventually find a job and land on their feet after those initial three months.

How much profit potential is there for World Relief in and around Oshkosh?

World Relief Wisconsin serves 660 immigrants in the Fox Valley area. According to Regional Director Gail Cornelius, World Relief Wisconsin is serving 125 new immigrants in the Fox Valley region alone, having already helped nearly 350 new residents in 2024.

Winnebago County government has since contracted World Relief to handle that initial 90-day resettlement of immigrants in the county, agreeing to reimburse the agency up until April.

But World Relief Wisconsin serves approximately 660 clients through its Fox Valley office alone, and the organization is just one of 10 resettlement agencies in the entire country.

The latter’s family has been in Oshkosh since last August and was settled by World Relief in a house with a monthly rent of $1,800. But Zawadi is still learning to speak English, leaving Jeannette, at 22 years old, as the only working member of the family of eight.

The family is still eligible for Refugee Cash Assistance, a federal program that provides temporary financial relief to refugees who recently arrived to the U.S. But it’s unclear whether the recent executive orders have put a pause to that program, too.

Americans who can’t afford to have children are funding Africans to have at least seven kids (the father was left behind in Africa, so this is a “single mom” with seven children, apparently happy to share one house; see “Densely packed invasive anoles outcompete natives”:”The Cuban newcomers also tolerate much denser living conditions, while green anoles don’t. This allows the invasive species to take over more territory.“).

Some birthright citizenship action in a different family of migrants:

Eventually, she, her husband and two children were resettled in Manitowoc by World Relief in 2021. Now, their family has moved to Oshkosh and grown with the addition of two kids.

A common theme for African refugees is the system’s refusal to acknowledge their qualifications.

Zawadi also speaks Swahili, Kinyarwanda and Kibembe and was a successful entrepreneur while moving her family through Botswana, Tanzania, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

Americans who can’t afford to have children paid an African family to have four children, so far, and then be less happy/successful compared to if they’d stayed in Africa.

How fat do the do-gooders at World Relief get? Based on their Form 990, they take in about $202 million/year in money (nearly all taxpayer funds?) and pay out $93 million to employees.

Note that none of the above-mentioned refugees are seen at the airport during AirVenture. So far all of the people we’ve seen serving as volunteers have been white native-born Americans. This is mostly true of those working at restaurants, picking up trash, servicing porta potties, etc., as well, though there are perhaps some Latinx working at Latinx-themed food kiosks.

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How many Americans does it take to support one Somali daycare owner?

by philg

¡Hola! as they say here in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, directly adjacent to the Zone of Somali Enrichment in Minnesota. (That said, the supermarkets here are also rich in shoppers who are attired in full African-Islamic garb and paying with EBT cards.)

What news from Mogadishu on the Mississippi?

“Minnesota daycare owner pleads guilty to 2 fraud charges” (CBS, July 9, 2026):

A Minnesota daycare owner who prosecutors said tried to flee the United States two days after shutting her center down pleaded guilty to fraud charges on Thursday.

Fahima Mahamud pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, according to court records.

Prosecutors said Mahamud ran Future Leaders Early Learning and pocketed money meant to feed children during the pandemic. Charges said she received more than $850,000 in fraudulent funds as part of the Feeding Our Future scheme, using most of that money to buy real estate. She also filed separate claims for about $4.6 million from the federal Child Care Assistance Program, according to the Department of Justice.

One consistent feature of our journalism heroes is that they answer the question “compared to what?” Fahima Mahamud stole over $5 million in taxpayer funds, but how does that compare to the work that honest Americans must do to supply these funds? ChatGPT to the rescue:

Using a single, childless, under-65 full-time worker earning the current median:

Median weekly earnings: $1,235, or about $64,220 annually.
2026 standard deduction: $16,100, leaving $48,120 taxable.
Federal income tax: approximately $5,526 per year, assuming no special credits or deductions and applying the 10% and 12% brackets.

At 2,080 working hours per year, that worker pays about $2.66 of federal income tax per hour worked.

Therefore, accumulating $5 million of federal personal income-tax payments would require approximately:

1.88 million hours of work

That equals roughly:

905 years working 40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year
About 22 full 40-year working lifetimes

The answer seems to be that 22 Americans must toil for their entire lives in order to fund our enrichment by one Somali. (Or maybe we could look at this as including chain migration and children of the enricher and then it would be 22 Americans working for a lifetime and receiving $0 in federal government services to enable us to be enriched by 10 or 15 Somalis?)

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Family aviation limps into the turbine era (Carbon Cub with TurboTech engine)

by philg

One year ago… The revolution in oil-powered general aviation is at least three years away

There has never been any significant progress in aviation without first an improvement in engines. A low-power high-efficiency turbine engine, for example, would enable the creation of all kinds of dramatically superior aircraft. But none of the kit companies or even the certified four-seat aircraft companies can readily afford to invest what is required.

Enter Turbotech, a startup in the Islamic Republic of France. They say that they have a 140 hp turboprop engine that burns fuel at approximately the same rate as a 140 hp Rotax (piston) engine

How long before this can be dropped into a certified airframe? The founders said that if everything goes perfect and nothing at all has to be changed in their current design, the engine could be EASA/FAA-certified in three years.

I hope to proved wrong about the 2028 date (three years from 2025), but it seems that the engine is more or less available in a more-or-less-certified airplane, the Carbon Cub:

It’s $690,000 as a “builder-assist” kit airplane (the owner doesn’t do anything challenging!):

A factory-built version (“light sport”) is “coming soon”. Note that this plane will be delivered with the awesome new Garmin AXIS panel.

It looks as though this is about $350,000 more expensive than the piston (Rotax) version, adjusted for comparable avionics.

There’s an $1,800 Starlink option, but that is perhaps best skipped given that SpaceX/Starlink have recently discovered how to charge Rockwell Collins- and Honeywell-style prices for subscriptions that work at aircraft speeds.

The sound and the fury:

July 23, 2026 update: the plane has already slipped a year. The web site still says 2027:

The sales guys at Oshkosh say “2028”. They brought one to the event, though:

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Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan as examples of GDP growth with working population shrinkage.

by philg

American and European peasants are often told by their respective elites that immigration is necessary because a shrinking and/or aging population inevitably leads to an economic crisis.

Let’s look at Taiwan. The working-age population peaked in 2015. In real terms (adjusted for inflation), the economy has grown by more than 50 percent since then. What about right now? It’s growing at a rate of over 10 percent per year.

What does Google AI say about South Korea in two separate queries?

South Korea is experiencing an unprecedented demographic crisis, driven by having the world’s lowest fertility rate.

South Korea’s real GDP grew by an impressive 1.8% in the first quarter of 2026, representing a 3.8% year-over-year increase.

Japan’s labor force has been shrinking since the mid-1990s:

During what we’re told is a demographic catastrophe, Japan’s real GDP has been growing steadily:

(Of course, this means that the real GDP per worker is growing quite robustly.)

How does the religious belief that population shrinkage is an economic catastrophe remain unchallenged given the above examples?

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Immigration as an example of animal hoarding and New York’s new taxpayer-funded cat food program

by philg

Last year: Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding?

Animal hoarding is an accumulation of animals that has overwhelmed a person’s ability to provide minimum standards of care. … Rescue hoarders believe they’re the only people that can adequately care for their animals.

New Yor City is the perfect example of the above 2025 post. There is an affordability crisis for housing, necessitating government control of prices for 80 percent of rental units. Food is also unaffordable, which is why the city government has to set up its own government-run grocery stores. At the same time, there shouldn’t be any limits on how many humans can cross the U.S. border, with or without documents, and then come to live in NYC where they are guaranteed taxpayer-funded shelter.

Could the folks who hoard immigrants that they can’t afford to care for also hoard animals that they can’t afford to care for? The answer seems to be yes. “NYC budget provides $1.5M in freebies for furry friends — including new pet-food pantry” (New York Post, July 7, 2026):

A separate $750,000 will be allocated to launch a first-of-its-kind pilot pet-food pantry, the council’s animal welfare caucus said in a social media post last week.

Frontiers of biology: free/extra food decreases the population of a species.

“These investments will help reduce animal overpopulation, ease pressure on the shelter system, and ensure that New Yorkers are not forced to choose between basic needs and feeding their pets,” the group wrote.

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How’s France doing?

by philg

We haven’t heard too much from France lately, other than in the context of ball-kicking matches. The country is out of the World Cup, but how is France doing more generally?

A photo of the French World Cup team doesn’t suggest economic greatness. The players wore jerseys with the logos of an American company (Uber) and a Hitler-founded German company (VW):

Trump-hating neural network guru Yann LeCun was born in France, but has worked “primarily at Bell Labs, New York University and Meta Platforms, Inc.” (Wikipedia). He shifted back towards his homeland in late 2025 with Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs, which claims to be doing everything better than the American and Chinese LLM companies, but doesn’t seem to have anything to show yet. Can a country where it is illegal to work more than 35 hours per week compete in the only arena that matters anymore? Given France’s prowess at building nuclear power plants, one might imagine that the country would be a natural habitat for data centers. Unfortunately, France seems to have lost its mojo in nuclear power, with recent projects subject to massive time and cost overruns (China is the superstar now, according to the geniuses at Harvard). At the rate that France and the US are going, it would be cheaper to melt Earth with CO2 and buy a new planet than to stay on the current nuclear plant construction trajectory.

The French don’t have anything like Dutch ASML that can pick up some crumbs from the NVIDIA/TSMC table.

Who wants to predict the next significant innovation from a culture that was one of the world’s most innovative? Or maybe that culture doesn’t exist anymore because the legacy French are being bred out of existence? Foreign-born women in France have a total fertility of 3, far above the 1.56 average for all of France that includes the immigrants and children of recent immigrants (with some statistical magic, France officially says that the TFR for immigrant women is only 2.37 despite the standard calculation coming up with 3). The most successful residents of France, as measured by genetics, are those from Africa outside of the Magreb (TFR over 3) and those from North Africa (TFR just under 3). In the long run, therefore, we’d expect France to be as innovative as Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and Congo have been.

Separately, how about some music to celebrate our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters across the Atlantic? In order to honor Brigitte Macron, a strong independent woman not afraid to smack a wimpy man whenever necessary, I’ll pick Louise Farrenc (1804-1875): “In the 1830s, Farrenc gained considerable fame as a performer and her reputation was such that in 1842 she was appointed to the permanent position of Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatory, a position she held for thirty years and one which was among the most prestigious in Europe. Farrenc was the only woman to hold the esteemed position and rank at the Paris Conservatory throughout the 19th century.”

Loosely related, who enjoyed the World Cup this year? Never having played soccer, I’m not in love with watching. It feels random and chaotic. I don’t like the flopping or the shirt-pulling (an NFL player who did either would be called a “sissy”?).

Only slightly related to France, but definitely related to Florida (Lionel Messi featured):

It’s great to have Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Ken Griffin, Larry Page, et al., as taxpaying neighbors, but I wonder how many Floridians would give all of them back to their respective Lands of the Righteous in order to keep Messi.

Straight Outta Fort Lauderdale…

Finally, an EU perspective:

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How’s your National Data Center Day of Protest going?

by philg

Today in Evanston, Illinois: “Say No to AI Data Centers”.

A lot of retailers display this sign, but my favorite is GadgetWorks, whose smartphone and game console customers are in no way dependent on data centers:

The Guardian says that the dream would be to find a data center that is used by ICE and involved in demanding IDs from voters:

Speaking of ID, although everyone in Evanston seems to agree that requiring ID to vote is unreasonable, the city requires ID of those who wish to visit the local (Lake Michigan) beach:

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What Would Barnes Wallis (WWBW) do with Iran?

by philg

As the world’s aviation nerds gathering for EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”; July 20-26), let’s think a bit about the impact of aviation on human conflict…

The Dambusters Raid, one of the most famous uses of aircraft during World War II, was the brainchild of Barnes Wallis, an aeronautical engineer who sought a clean-sheet-of-paper answer to the question, “What’s the most effective way to reduce Germany’s ability to fight?” Sir Arthur Harris‘s plan was simple: kill as many German civilians as possible via firebombing of cities because a factory whose workers have been killed isn’t going to be productive (and the productivity of workers who survived would be reduced since they’d be homeless). Wallis settled on the idea of destroying hydroelectric dams in Germany’s industrial heartland, thus simultaneously denying German factories the electricity, coal, and water necessary to achieve full production. He looked at the inputs to German manufacturing, especially energy, and tried to destroy those inputs so that it wouldn’t matter how effective Germany was at dispersing factories.

The vulnerability of a dam seems to have been understood by both the Germans and the British, i.e., an explosion right up against the interior wall at a time when the dam was nearly full. As such, the Germans had strung torpedo nets in their reservoirs to prevent traditional torpedoes from being used. Barnes Wallis came up with the idea of a bomb that would skip along the surface of the lake impounded by the dam, roll down the water-side dam wall, and explode. A tremendous number of engineering problems needed to be solved to make this a reality. Paul Brickhill’s classic book is excellent, especially since the author was himself a WWII military pilot, but I recently listened to a 2013 book by James Holland that adds much interesting detail and makes it clear that Barnes Wallis wasn’t quite the lone inventor that we meet in Brickhill’s earlier work.

Arthur Harris was initially skeptical, to say the least: “This is tripe of the wildest description. There are so many ifs and buts that there is not the smallest chance of it working.” A combination of engineering persistence and incredible bravery and sacrifice by 617 Squadron, however, proved that Wallis had been on the right track. Revisionist historians later minimized the damage done to Nazi Germany by the 19 planes sent out on May 16, 1943 by noting that the Germans successfully scrambled to rebuild the dams, as well as many washed-out bridges and factories, before winter. James Holland points out in his book that forcing the Germans to divert tens of thousands of workers and perhaps $10 billion adjusted to post-Biden dollars. The breached dams had terrible consequences for German arms production just when they needed to support their campaigns against the Russians and against the Allies in Italy. The breached dams also took labor and money away from beefing up the Atlantic Wall against the invasion that actually happened in 1944.

Another passion for Barnes Wallis was precision bombing with 10-ton bombs that he designed. These pioneering “bunker busters” were used to good effect against various German installations, including for submarines and V-2 rockets, as well as to sink the battleship Tirpitz. Any time that we’re bombing fortified infrastructure in Iran, therefore, we’re channeling the spirit of Wallis.

What Would Barnes Wallis (WWBW) do with Iran? More or less the opposite of what the U.S. has been doing. Wallis would almost surely have recommended taking out the Iranian oil industry, a critical energy input to everything else that happens in Iran, and the industrial-scale electric power generation currently available to the Islamic Republic to run any factories that it still has and/or rebuilds. Wallis probably would also try to destroy Iran’s ability to move energy and materials, e.g., by taking out bridges, railroads, airports, etc. At a minimum, this would keep the Islamic Republic busy rebuilding and people who are busy rebuilding can’t put their energy into weapons production or military facility construction.

Maybe the U.S. strategy of slowly surrending to Iran will, in the long run, prove to have more merit. I hope so!

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Why does birth tourism to middle class foreigners bother Americans, but millions of children of millions of TPS foreigners don’t concern anyone?

by philg

A post on X about birth tourism that turned middle class Hondurans into Americans was exciting enough to get over 750,000 views:

Stories about Chinese birth tourism “rings” also reliably generate interest/outrage. Anyone with enough money to participate in a birth tourism scheme is from at least a middle class family in a foreign country and, therefore, is unlikely to become the founder of a multi-generational welfare dynasty. (Statistically, those who grow up in self-sufficient households are likely to be adults in self-sufficient households.)

Meanwhile, the US citizens being birthed by foreigners here “temporarily” under Temporary Protected Status, some since 1990, aren’t of interest. Neither Gemini nor ChatGPT could even begin to estimate how many foreigners, total, have spent time in the U.S. under TPS. Partly because of that, neither AI could begin to estimate how many children they’ve had, each one with a U.S. passport. The best that the AIs can do is come up with 1.3 million foreign TPS holders in the U.S. right now and possibly 390,000 U.S. citizen children living with them. Gemini estimates that the majority of TPS households with children are on what used to be called “welfare” (“safety-net participation”), but even AI probably can’t see into all of the state-run programs for which immigration status isn’t relevant, e.g., health care in California, public housing in Maskachusetts, etc. Our AI overlords say that the majority of children who in welfare-eligible households will grow up to adults living in welfare-eligible households (i.e., multi-generational welfare is the expectation, though at just over 50 percent). These stats are somewhat complicated by non-welfare welfare programs, e.g., the various below-market-rate rent schemes in New York City that cover more than half of rental units there.

During the entire time that the above-described Honduras-to-US pipeline was running, there was a 26-year “temporary” program to allow some favored subset of Hondurans to live in the U.S. There were over 100,000 Hondurans granted TPS during the program’s launch in 1999. Gemini says that almost no Honduran ever went back before Donald Trump ended their status and that almost none went home after the September 2025 termination either:

The termination of TPS did not grant Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the right to summarily deport people. To be removed from the country, individuals who do not leave voluntarily must be issued a Notice to Appear (NTA) and go through the formal immigration court system.

With immigration courts already facing massive multi-million case backlogs, processing thousands of long-term residents with clean criminal histories and significant family equities in the U.S. takes years, effectively leaving them in a prolonged state of legal limbo within the United States.

So a handful of pregnant Hondurans with the family resources (maybe from U.S. relatives) to pay for roundtrip airfare to Boston generates outrage due to the resulting 10+ U.S.-born anchor babies. Not a single one of these kids has ever been on welfare, to my knowledge, unless we consider the taxpayer-funded hospital payments to be welfare. But perhaps 100,000 births to Hondurans here under TPS, nearly all of which were similarly paid for by taxpayers and then resulted in welfare eligibility for at least 18 years, aren’t interesting.

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