Thanks to the hard-working folks in China and at Walmart, stuff has gotten cheaper. The result is that we live in large environments crammed with stuff. This makes it tough to find one’s keys, the cup of coffee that one recently set down, etc.
Instead of AI taking over the creative jobs of writing poetry and making art, why not have AI watch everything that happens in the apartment or house (video and inferences from the video stored locally for privacy) and then we can say “Yo, ChatGPT, where did I leave my keys?” If we get in the habit of showing documents that arrive in the mail to a camera we can also ask the AI to remind us when it is time to pay a property tax bill or ask where we left an important document.
This could be rolled into some of the boxes that Unifi makes. They already make sensors for the house:
They claim to have “AI” in their $2500 “DSLR” PoE camera (only 18 watts):
Their basic cameras are $120 each. If the basic cameras are good enough, this should be doable on top of the Unifi infrastructure for perhaps $300 per room plus whatever the central AI brain costs.
Speaking of Unifi, I’m wondering why they don’t sell a combined access point/camera. If the customer has just a single CAT 5/6 wire to the back yard, wouldn’t it make sense to have the same PoE-powered device handle both security and WiFi? As far as I know, there isn’t any combined camera/AP.
(I’m still using the TP-Link Omada system that I bought because Unifi’s products were all out of stock. See TP-Link Omada: like a mesh network, except that it works (alternative to UniFi). Everything works, but they don’t seem to be trying to expand beyond networking as Unifi has. Maybe when WiFi 8 comes out it will be time to trash all of the working WiFi 6 Omada gear and get with the Unifi/Ubiquiti program.)
Speaking of houses, here’s a recent New York Times article informing us regarding what a typical American “couple” looks like (the word is used 11 times in the article)…
Happy Tax Day for those in the U.S. and also U.S. citizens who live abroad and get no services from the U.S. but still must pay taxes (consider the U.S. citizens held hostage by Gazans, for example).
How about a new 3 percent tax from a restaurant on the restaurant and kept by the restaurant, couched as an “Admin Fee” on the receipt?
One of my companions asked what it was for. The waiter responded, “It’s a fee that we incur to keep our prices competitive.”
Houlton, Maine has at least two downtown tattoo shops. While passing the one below I shouted out to my companions, “Brainwave: We get a tattoo with the city name and date every time we watch an eclipse.” This idea was topped with “It has to be a face tattoo.”
United Way, the nonprofit that operates about half of the country’s 200-plus 211 centers, and other poverty researchers blame that disconnect partly on the federal poverty line, which they say hasn’t kept up with the real cost of living.
The share of households below the census-designated federal poverty line has barely budged since 2010. Meanwhile, poverty researchers say a large and fast-growing group of people are earning too much to qualify for social services and not enough to afford the basics where they live.
The trend, which was hugely accelerated starting in 2021, probably isn’t going to be reversed. The question then becomes how should a person of modest means, yet not entitled to “not-welfare”, adapt to a society that has been degraded for the working class?
Humans are social animals and a lot of the misery inflicted on the working class has to do with their standard of living being lower than that of nearby non-working people on what used to be called “welfare” and is now “means-tested”. The working class person will experience pain at the grocery store when seeing a relaxed-from-not-working customer pay for a huge cart of groceries via EBT card, for example.
How about a move to a state where people who work have a higher spending power than people who don’t work? “The Work versus Welfare Trade‐Off: 2013” (CATO) is filled with pre-Biden dollar figures that are absurdly out of date, but the percentages and rankings are still relevant. Here are the states where a working class American is going to feel the dumbest for not having gone on the welfare career track starting at age 16:
Here are the states where a median worker might enjoy twice the spending power of someone who chooses the relaxed non-working lifestyle:
We then probably want to look at these states to figure out which ones have the best opportunities for free recreation, the best schools for kids so that they can move up, and the best weather. In the report covered by “Surprise: Florida and Texas Excel in Math and Reading Scores” (NYT 2015), Texas, Florida, and Colorado had the best schools among the above states. Florida and Colorado have great weather and free recreation. Florida is ranked #8 for happiness by WalletHub and Colorado is down at #31. So maybe the answer for a working class person feeling like a chump is to move to Florida! (Maybe not to Palm Beach County, though, if envy is an issue!)
The same advice applies to people who are rich, incidentally, if the rich person wants to be in an environment where anyone with a job can thrive and not suffer despair. Inequality isn’t a terrible thing, from a rich person’s point of view, but for those who adhere to the now-obsolete Protestant work ethic, there is value to being in a place where the working people one interacts with are cheerful.
An Arizona lawyer had an entrepreneurial idea: advertise his services over the Internet, the global web of computer networks.
Advertisements are beginning to appear all around the network, usually followed swiftly by messages of outrage and dismay from longtime denizens of cyberspace. However, no one can recall so relentless and pervasive an advertisement as the one sent last Tuesday by Mr. Canter’s law firm, Canter & Siegel.
Paying nothing beyond his $30 monthly connection fee, and with little more than the press of a button, Mr. Canter advertised his firm’s bid to provide legal services for people wanting to participate in the planned “green card” immigration lottery, in which the Federal Government intends to allow foreign applicants to vie for a United States work permit. Mr. Canter’s missive went to nearly every nook and cranny of the Internet, which has an estimated population of 20 million users.
The mailing list that Mr. Canter employed was the addresses of more than 9,000 Internet Usenet news groups. The Usenet is a particularly anarchic and popular segment of the Internet composed of discussion groups, typically in the form of electronic bulletin boards.
“The Internet is changing,” Mr. Canter said. “People don’t like the invasion of what has been their private world. But as long as it’s set up the way it is, where anyone has access to it, it’s a public forum, and they have to accept anything that comes into it.
“In fact,” Mr. Canter added, “I’ve received a lot of calls from people who want to know how to do it.”
So pleased is he with the the response, in fact, that he said he planned to write a book on how to advertise on the Internet.
in the early 1990s, Congress devised the Green Card Lottery program to encourage diversity in immigration. Unfortunately, it also provided an opportunity for charlatans to charge exorbitant fees to file lottery entries for hopeful immigrants.
In truth, all it took to enter the drawing was a postcard with your name and address mailed to the designated location.
Canter and Siegel, a husband-and-wife law firm, decided to join the lottery frenzy by pitching their own overpriced services to immigrant communities.
The spam is still available from Google Groups, which establishes the date as April 12, 1994:
Related:
Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel (Wikipedia): Canter and Siegel were not the first Usenet spammers. The “Green Card” spam, however, was the first commercial Usenet spam
As noted in How’s your eclipse viewing?, I wussed out on the Fredericksburg, Texas eclipse plan in favor of hitting the shorter-totality Northeast where the forecast was for clear skies. As with nearly all of my decisions, this one turned out to be bad because the friend I had planned to visit/join in Austin ended up having a perfect view of totality (the clouds disappeared due to the cooling effect of the eclipse somehow).
The day started with pocketing snacks at Jet Aviation in Bedford, Maskachusetts (Hanscom Field):
We loaded up the plane with three generations of my friend’s family and had an uneventful VFR flight at 17,500′ to KHUL (Houlton, Maine). The FAA had issued a cautionary NOTAM:
To assist FBOs with staging aircraft and to ease ramp congestion, aircraft departing airports along the eclipse path are strongly encouraged to coordinate their departure times as early as possible. There may be a higher traffic volume than normal anticipated at airports along the path of the eclipse. Traffic should anticipate delays during peak traffic periods. Aircraft parking may be limited, particularly at the smaller, uncontrolled airports.
And, indeed, many airports in Vermont had instituted a prior permission required (PPR) policy. Watching the eclipse while celebrating social justice and Bernie Sanders in Burlington, VT, for example, wasn’t possible last-minute. Despite this somewhat dire forecast from the FAA, we had no trouble getting VFR advisories from Air Traffic Control all the way into KHUL and there was no shortage of parking.
The town-run airport had plowed out its crosswind runway and had that available for parking, but used it for only about four larger planes.
2700′ of parking is a lot of parking!
They were short on fuel, but we managed to 50 gallons of Jet A in order to keep Greta Thunberg happy. Speaking of Greta T, here’s a Citation Sovereign that came in from Minneapolis. The forecast for much of the Midwest was clear, but apparently not clear enough for these (12?) Heroes of Climate Change (1,700 gallons and over 30,000 lbs. max takeoff weight!):
Some images need to be repeated from the earlier post. A partial eclipse of the sun by the moon(-ey):
The town set up a “star park” adjacent to the airport and organized a two-schoolbus shuttle between downtown and the airport:
As noted previously, downtown was hosting a lively party with music and dressed-up characters and a commitment to social justice (“All Labs Matter”):
The George Washington statue was augmented, Elizabeth Warren’s cousins danced, and costumes were worn:
All of the parks in the downtown area were filled with viewers, but never unpleasantly crowded. Note the logging truck crossing the Meduxnekeag River:
Quite a few NASA and NOAA employees seemed to be enjoying a taxpayer-funded vacation trip to see the eclipse and some of them gave talks or organized events:
I thought that these folks with a Pennsylvania plate won the award for longest drive to Houlton, but apparently someone drove more than 1,400 miles to Houlton from north of Chicago.
There were lines for most of the restaurants in town, but food trucks had come in both on Main St. and at the airport. More important, the local Amish were selling donuts for $2 each:
The Amish grow potatoes, of course, but also have quite a few greenhouses. Speaking of religion, the official established U.S. religion is observed in Houlton:
At 1:45 pm we caught the shuttle back to the airport in prep for totality at 3:32 pm.
The ramp was lively, but nowhere near as crammed as a typical South Florida airport in the winter:
Edward Tufte tells speakers to arrive early because people wander in gradually and then leave suddenly. Thus, it is better to be available for questions before a talk! It wasn’t a mad rush for the exit, but the airport and airspace was at least 5X busier for departure compared to arrival. It didn’t seem practical to get advisories from Boston Center until we were well southwest of Bangor and on a different frequency from the airspace over Houlton. The NetJets crew couldn’t depart for quite some time because they had trouble getting ATC’s attention for an IFR clearance and their ops specs prevent them from doing the obvious and departing VFR.
The Science education didn’t stop in Houlton. When returning to the Land of Science-denial via Logan Airport, I learned that an N95 mask works great when loosely arranged over a full beard. Also that healthy young females face maximum risk from SARS-CoV-2:
Some nice views of the city courtesy of Delta Airlines:
Conclusion: We should pray to the omnipotent God of the Sacred Trans-Enhanced Rainbow Flag to arrange all future eclipses so that they pass over Houlton.
Let’s close this out with some porn for aircraft owners:
(Big city airports are now at $1,000/month for a long-term lease on a hangar for a little Cessna or Cirrus. In post-Cuomo South Florida, now home to half of what used to be New York’s planes, you might pay $1,200-1,500/month to store a plane that, pre-Biden, was worth $80,000.)
Related:
“Massachusetts family among Tesla owners who waited hours to charge car after total solar eclipse” (WCVB): When the Livesey family found a charging station in St. Johnsbury, there were lines of electric vehicles dozens deep. “I got there with one mile only to find out there were about 60 cars waiting to be charged,” Livesey said. … The Livesey family waited more than four hours to charge their Tesla and the last ticket they handed out before leaving was No. 189, and they saw more vehicles pulling up to the stations. [A friend missed totality due to EV charging delays. He tried to get his kids up to northern Vermont from Boston and a combination of traffic and the time required for a mid-trip charge of his electric Ford pickup meant that they couldn’t get far enough north in time.]
The Canon mirrorless 800/11 lens is light enough to pack for Eclipse 2026 in Spain (or Iceland if you feel extremely lucky with the weather).
How well does it work for photographing totality? The magnification seems about right for photographing the full corona. Here is the entire JPEG out of the camera at 1/250th of a second and ISO 400 (no need to spec the aperture because it is always f/11):
With an exposure of 1/13 of a second, the corona gets quite a bit larger:
The camera was set to autofocus and fixed at ISO 400. It was mounted on a cheap light Slik ballhead tripod that I happened to have available in Boston (we flew from KBED to KHUL (Houlton, Maine, the last stop in the U.S. for Eclipse 2024) and these pictures were taken from the ramp at KHUL).
It’s tough enough to aim at 800mm and I certainly wouldn’t want any higher magnification without a star-tracker camera mount.
I’m generally negative on trying to photograph the eclipse. The great images are nearly all stitched together laboriously in Photoshop based on multiple exposures, e.g., one long enough to capture some details in the moon itself and the farthest reaches of the corona and some short enough to show detail in the corona right near the surface of the sun. It’s better to leave the documenting to the nerds with infinite Photoshop patience and bulky equipment and park yourself with a great pair of binoculars to simply enjoy the show.
Here’s a Photoshop special from NASA in 2017 that looks great but bears almost no resemblance to what you can see with your eyes or with a camera in a single image:
Here’s the ultimate example of the “f/8 and be there” principle of photography (an experienced photographer’s technical-sounding advice to a beginner):
Kendall Rust (Facebook post) says she took it in Jonesboro, Arkansas and that this is straight out of the Canon camera, though it looks like a Photoshop wizard created it! CNN shows a remarkably similar image and credits it to Bobby Goddin:
Here’s yet another:
Unless you’re Kendall Rust, Jack Emshwiller, or Bobby Goddin, though, I’m going to stick with the “just enjoy totality” advice and take some images of things that happen around you just before and after totality. (What if you are Kendall Rust, Jack Emshwiller, or Bobby Goddin? My advice is that you abandon your hatred of government-created inequality and load up on Powerball tickets the next time the jackpot reaches $1 billion!) Here’s a quick iPhone picture of the pseudo sunset:
But if you’re going to ignore my advice, the Canon 800/11 seems like a great choice! It’s cheap, light, and does the job pretty well.
Some years ago people envisioned a refrigerator that would track contents via RFID and alert a consumer to being low on milk or whatever. Making this a reality would have required cooperation among all of the companies that make packaged food (to add the RFID tags) so of course it never happened.
A human can inventory a fridge. Anything a human can do ChatGPT can do better, or so we’re told. If a fridge costs $15,000 (see Sub-Zero refrigerator with R600a owner’s review) why can’t it use a handful of inexpensive video cameras to look at everything going in and out in detail? It can make some good guesses about quantities, e.g., every time the eggs are removed there will be three fewer eggs remaining in the carton (refine this guess after some experience in a household as to when the carton stops being returned to the fridge (assume this means the egg count is zero)). The in-the-fridge AI could email with a list of expired stuff to throw out and a list of stuff to buy. It could email at 3 pm every day with a suggestion for what to cook for dinner given the ingredients present in the fridge, adding critical items via an Instacart order if approved.
The fridge’s technology also reportedly enables users to add expiration dates for items purchased, and the refrigerator will alert them once that expiration date is near.
Why is it the human’s job to read expiration dates off the packages? Why can’t the brilliant AI do that? Let’s give some credit to Samsung, though, for including an epic 32-inch TV on the $4500 fridge:
So the Samsung fridge is missing the Instacart ordering support, I think, as well as the automation of ferreting out expired food.
I had some worked planned in Austin, Texas over the weekend, which dovetailed nicely with the predicted eclipse and the generally clear skies in this dry part of the country.
Inmates at a New York prison who sued the state corrections department over a planned lockdown during the Monday total solar eclipse will be able to see the celestial event after all.
The lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in upstate New York claimed that the lockdown, which would have prevented many statewide inmates from witnessing Monday’s solar eclipse, constituted a violation of religious rights.
“For many, this eclipse is a moment of monumental religious significance that cannot be overlooked or dismissed out of hand,” according to the lawsuit, which listed six plaintiffs of various religious faiths.
Corrections officials agreed Thursday to permit the plaintiffs – a Baptist, a Muslim, a Seventh-Day Adventist, two practitioners of Santeria and an atheist – to view the eclipse in exchange for the lawsuit’s dismissal, department spokesman Thomas Mailey told USA TODAY.
Practitioners of Santeria also trace historical ties to chanting rituals performed during a solar eclipse. For atheists, an eclipse may not be a time for worship, but it’s still a time to marvel about the natural wonders of the universe, the lawsuit contended.
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Nervous nail-biting began on Wednesday, April 3 based on the cloud forecast at https://eclipseweather.info/eclipse/. It appears that God loves Bernie Sanders and fellow progressives in and around Burlington, Vermont. God also loves folks in Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. Why does God hate Texans?
I’m testifying as a software expert witness in Federal District Court in Newark, New Jersey on Wednesday. Getting to EWR from Austin on Tuesday was $2,000 in economy. Flights to JFK were about $1200, with no difference in cost between economy and first class. But it would have been well worth it (to the client!) if the weather had been clear.
https://www.pivotalweather.com/eclipse2024/ is also an interesting site. The “NWS Blend” cloud cover forecast as of the evening of April 4 wasn’t promising for just west of Austin:
Pivotal displayed a tempting map of Vermont and Maine:
Based on these forecasts, I canceled the Austin flights and booked a trip into Boston. From there we departed to Houlton, Maine on the Canadian border (passport and blackface kit packed just in case). The terminal forecast from 8 pm Sunday:
The relevant part is that from 15Z (GMT; subtract 4 hours to get 11:00 am EDT) on the 8th the wind would be from magnetic 300 (NW) at 7 knots, better than 6 statute miles of visibility, and a few clouds at 25,000′ above the airport.
Who has plans for North Dakota or Greenland in 2044? Don’t want to wait that long? Looks like Spain is the smartest place to be (the weather in western Iceland is not reliable!) on August 12, 2026. Has inflation gotten so severe that hotels won’t let people book more than a few months in advance?
Readers: let’s hear your heroic eclipse-viewing tales!
Post-trip update: The weather was just as forecast. We had severe clear weather and a great view of totality as well as all phases of partial. The town organized a warm welcome for thousands of visitors.
On recent trips to the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston, friends who are Democrats spoke gleefully about the prospect of Donald Trump being reduced to poverty via lawsuits. While this might be straightforward in California or Maskachusetts, stripping a Floridian of all of his/her/zir/their wealth is more challenging.
Florida law shields insurance policies and annuity contracts from creditors. Statute 222.13, for example:
Whenever any person residing in the state shall die leaving insurance on his or her life, the said insurance shall inure exclusively to the benefit of the person for whose use and benefit such insurance is designated in the policy, and the proceeds thereof shall be exempt from the claims of creditors of the insured unless the insurance policy or a valid assignment thereof provides otherwise. Notwithstanding the foregoing, whenever the insurance, by designation or otherwise, is payable to the insured or to the insured’s estate or to his or her executors, administrators, or assigns, the insurance proceeds shall become a part of the insured’s estate for all purposes and shall be administered by the personal representative of the estate of the insured in accordance with the probate laws of the state in like manner as other assets of the insured’s estate.
That would seem to protect only the family of an insured after his/her/zir/their death. But then there is 222.14:
Exemption of cash surrender value of life insurance policies and annuity contracts from legal process.—The cash surrender values of life insurance policies issued upon the lives of citizens or residents of the state and the proceeds of annuity contracts issued to citizens or residents of the state, upon whatever form, shall not in any case be liable to attachment, garnishment or legal process in favor of any creditor of the person whose life is so insured or of any creditor of the person who is the beneficiary of such annuity contract, unless the insurance policy or annuity contract was effected for the benefit of such creditor.
Donald Trump could take an unlimited percentage of his wealth and stuff it into a whole life policy and then Florida state law might protect him from, for example, Democrats in New York.
How about 20-acre Mar-a-Lago, worth either $18 million or “hundreds of millions” depending on when you tuned into CNN. It looks like the house and central 1/2 acre of land (maybe this isn’t even the entire house?) can be protected from creditors as long as it it Donald Trump’s primary residence. This is based on the Florida Constitution:
It looks as though they’ve captured the godlike powers that Democrats ascribe to Mr. Trump, e.g., immortality. Age might tarnish this medal, but never the Donald himself!
