COVID-19 killed most of America’s old people and now Social Security is insolvent

by philg

Social Security’s impending insolvency is in the news lately. The system that provided Ida May Fuller with benefits that were 1000X what she paid in tax was apparently not sustainable (even Charles Ponzi couldn’t keep a scheme like that going forever!).

We were previously informed that 1 million healthy over-65 Americans had been killed by COVID-19. These people had at least 5-10 years to live, during which time they’d be receiving monthly Social Security payments. I wondered about this back in 2021 with Wave of death among the elderly bankrupts Social Security and quoted CNBC:

The Social Security trust fund most Americans rely on for their retirement will run out of money in 12 years, one year sooner than expected, according to an annual government report.

Social Security payments would be cut, or young people further enslaved to taxation, in 2033, in other words (2021+12). Apparently, some of those killed by COVID-19 have risen from the grave and are collecting benefits once again because the “trust fund runs out” date has moved up from 2033 to 2032 (source):

It is confusing because the above official source implies that full benefits are paid until 2034. The media, on the other hand, is reporting Social Security payments would be cut, or young people further enslaved to taxation, in 2032.

What do progressives think about this? A Maskachusetts friend who previously loved whatever Democrat thought leaders, such as AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Bernie Sanders were dishing out, objected on Facebook to losing his monthly checks:

I have been reading about the concept of “means testing” for social security recipients. This means taking it away from successful people. Well, I am okay with the government taking away my social security if the government will simply return to me all the money I paid in over the last 50 years.

One of his financially savvy friends pointed out that “Every single adult worker” would be better off if they could have kept their Social Security taxes and invested it in the S&P 500. My response:

Social Security calculates and publishes internal rates of return periodically. These are in real dollars (adjusted for inflation). Very low earners who are married can get an 8% real return, comparable to the past 50 years of the S&P 500. Median earners get less than 2% (single man), 2.5% (single woman), or 4% (one-earner married couple). Someone at the income limit gets only about 0.6% real return (single man), 1% (single woman), 0.85% (two-earner couple), or 2.3% (one-earner married couple). So you could consider Social Security to be part of the U.S.’s transferist welfare state. It transfers money from high earners to low earners. It also transfers money from men to women and from those who weren’t successful in the marriage market to those who were successful. … So maybe [our mutual friend] will feel better about Social Security if he stops thinking about it as something designed to benefit him and instead as something designed to help him transfer money to low-income Americans and women

(note that the SSA doesn’t calculate or publish an IRR for nonbinary Americans)

What do readers think is going to happen? Benefits get preserved for anyone already claiming them, but drastically cut for anyone who hasn’t gone on Social Security yet? Benefits get cut for everyone? Social Security tax extended to infinite levels of earned income instead of being capped? Society Security tax extended to “unearned income” such as dividends and interest? (if the money isn’t “earned” then fairness dictates that the government should take 100 percent of it) Elon’s unearned $1 trillion gets confiscated and that plugs the hole? Robots get taxed as if they were human workers and 12.4% of the cost of buying and operating a robot must be given to Social Security?

A lot of my friends are between 62 and 67 (“full retirement age” for their cohort). Would they be better off getting on Social Security before they hit 67 or 70 (max benefit age) so as to be part of the “we don’t want to take anything away from these Boomers who are already relying on it” class?

(We can also look at Medicare, the federal government’s most expensive program (even larger than our off-the-charts enormous military!). Most proposals to cheat everyone who previously paid into it say that most or all of the stealing will be done from those under 55, e.g., by making them wait until 67 rather than 65 to receive any benefits.)

Related:

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How can the U.S. benefit from the proposed Iran peace deal?

by philg

We’re informed that a peace deal with Iran is coming any day now. Some of the terms seem worse than what Carthage had to give when they surrendered to Rome. For example, “Trump’s $300 billion problem on the Iran agreement”:

In an interview with CBS News Monday morning, Vice President JD Vance seemed to tacitly confirm the premise that Iran could be given “access” to a reconstruction fund worth as much as $300 billion.

Ever since that interview, the administration has strained to clarify things. It has emphasized that this money wouldn’t come from US taxpayers. Instead, it would be money from other Gulf countries that would only be available if Iran complies with a peace deal.

Vance said late Monday on Fox News that “we would invite other countries — not us, but other countries — to invest in” Iran. He echoed that Tuesday, telling Megyn Kelly that the US wouldn’t let the United Arab Emirates, for example, “invest in Iran, unless the Iranians change their behavior.”

When the Obama administration and other countries cut a nuclear deal with Iran in 2015, it included giving Iran access to billions of dollars. In that case, it wasn’t money from other countries, but instead Iran’s own assets that had been frozen in foreign banks under sanctions. Estimates generally placed the dollar figure around $50 billion.

The Islamic Republic of Iran still officially hates the U.S., right? They’ve been chanting “Death to America” for 47 years. To the extent that they have money and sovereignty, therefore, won’t they use that money to build weapons factories? To the extent that they have electric power, won’t they use that power to run the factories 24/7?

One purported benefit is oil can flow through the Strait of Hormuz without interference from the Iranian Navy that, we’re informed, no longer exists. But if the U.S. is an oil exporter, how do we benefit from the ability of competitors in the Persian Gulf to export through the Strait?

Maybe Donald Trump is doing this for immediate political gain? The price of gasoline will go down a little and, therefore, Democrats who were previously climate alarmists and wanted higher gasoline prices to discourage consumption will stop their recent complaints about the higher gasoline prices that they previously advocated? This explanation seems implausible because surrendering to an enemy, even if you call it “winning”, doesn’t usually make a politician more popular. Wouldn’t Trump enjoy more popular support, at least among Republicans, with round-the-clock bombing of Iran’s oil industry (thus denying the ayatollahs the money they need to build weapons factories) and electricity plants (thus denying the regime the grid-scale electric power that it needs to run its weapons factories)?

Separately, if the goal is to keep the non-existent Iranian Navy out of the Strait, couldn’t we use robot submersibles to make the waters unfriendly to those whom we don’t like? Here’s an example from Anduril that can endure for 10 days:

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Seattle Trip Report (minus Seattle per se), Part III

by philg

If you want to delight a modern child, take him/her/zir/them to the “Six Seven” restaurant next to the Norwegian cruise pier:

We sailed away from Seattle on May 22, 2026 under the kind of weather that makes summer tourists say “I’d love to live here.” Note Mount Rainier (14,410′ high) in the background:

The weather was even better for our return on June 1, 2026:

We returned and picked up a minivan at a downtown Hertz office, which turned out to save about 30 percent compared to renting at the airport due to reduced taxes. What happens when Yokohama and Chrysler engineers intersect with graduates of the U.S. education system?

(The door placard says that the tires should be at 36 psi.)

Let’s see how many readers recognize this engineering textbook regarding appropriate tire pressure:

At first I thought it was only because the tires were soft, so I took it into the Texaco station next to the Flamingo and had the tires pumped up to fifty pounds each – which alarmed the attendant, until I explained that these were “experimental” tires.

But fifty pounds each didn’t help the cornering, so I swent back a few hours later and told him I wanted to try seventy five. He shook his head nervously. “Not me,” he said, handing me the air hgose. “Here. They’re your tires. You do it.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You think they can’t take seventy-five?”

He nodded, moving away as I stooped to deal with the left front. “You’re damn right,” he said. “Those tires want twenty eight in the front and thirty two in the rear. Hell, fifty’s dangerous, but seventy five is crazy. They’ll explode!”

I shook my head and kept filling the left front. “I told you,” I said, “Sandoz laboratories designed these tires. They’re special. I could load them up to a hundred.

We made it to Boeing’s Future of Flight Museum and factory tour in Everett, Washington. This is the facility created to build the 747 and it has also manufactured the 767, 777, and 787 (the latter now made exclusively in South Carolina, free of the union labor strikes that have characterized operations in Washington State).

At the museum we learned that engineering and precision manufacturing is beyond the capability of modern white males:

As with Intel, diversity is the key to profits, though an all-female team would also yield spectacular business success:

The museum features “the first female African-American astronaut in space”, a person who had nothing to do with Boeing or its products:

No photos are allowed on the factory tour!

We departed Boeing and inched our way through mid-day traffic jams to the LeMay Car Museum in Tacoma, which will be covered in a separate post. We came back to Seattle a week later via Bainbridge Island.

The state agency that runs the ferry system promotes, in their Bainbridge Island terminal, the following:

  • Juneteenth (we saw exactly zero Black people on Bainbridge Island)
  • a Pride event with “drag performances” and an “expanded kids area”
  • a film about a Bainbridge Island resident who flowered into womanhood at age 61

The state agency officially practices “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, which would be illegal under Florida state law:

The ferry system’s diverse, equitable, and inclusive dream is to convert all of these ferries into floating Teslas, but the original budget of $4 billion isn’t going to come close to covering it in our Jones Act world where U.S. shipyards must build everything (NPR). So far they’ve got… 1 hybrid, the Wenatchee, and we were on it.

It was a perfect, albeit windy/choppy day:

We then drove past marijuana store billboards to get to the Museum of Flight (separate post). (Every town in Washington State, no matter how small, seemed to have at least one marijuana store. These were deemed “essential” by Covidcrats and stayed open while (non-essential) schools were closed for 18 months. #Science)

We met local friends for dinner at Din Tai Fung near Sea-Tac, served by a masked non-Asian waiter, and then roamed the Westfield mall, which is simultaneously rich in Islamic immigrants, masked white people, and Pride (sign below from Nordstrom):

I can’t figure out what people who live in Seattle have in common. Seattle is supposedly home to about 30,000 Somalis. Most of our Uber drivers were from Eritrea (10 percent of Eritrean migrants to the U.S. have chosen this cloudy/rainy city). Only about half of Eritreans are Muslim, and AI says that the majority of Seattle Eritreans are Coptic Christians. Maybe they at least share a language with the Somalis? No. In fact, Eritreans may not share a language with Eritreans: “Eritrea has nine national languages which are Tigrinya, Tigre, Afar, Beja, Bilen, Kunama, Nara, and Saho.” (Wikipedia) The religion of white people in Seattle proper seems to be hatred of Donald Trump and Israel and celebration of 2SLGBTQQIA+. Maybe the Islamic immigrants can get on board with the former, but will they join in practicing Rainbow Flagism?

(If we broaden the geographical area a little, we get to “Bellingham man” Rahmanullah Lakanwal. He was a successful Islamic Afghan in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan with two wives and a variety of children. Using the same thought process as that used by people who adopt 100 cats (see Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding?) we brought him to live in Bellingham, Washington, just north of seattle. He had to unload one of his wives, never got a job, and eventually killed some National Guardsmen in D.C. At all times he and his wife and five children were supported by U.S. taxpayers. Why does a Christian immigrant from Eritrea want to pay taxes to support a Muslim immigrant from Afghanistan such as Rahmanullah Lakanwal? What would the taxpayer and the recipient of the free house, free food, free health care, Obamaphone, etc. have in common that would make the relationship sensible?)

Like all of our other trips around Seattle, getting to the airport at mid-day on a Wednesday involved fighting through epic traffic.

The only thing missing was Elon Musk talking about human population collapse.

A family of Scientists chose to mask 2/3 members while designating 1/3 to pick up germs in the airport and on the flight that can later be transmitted in a shared hotel room to the other two.

Delta failed to get with the Pride program and was still promoting AANHPI Month (May!) on its seatback TVs.

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Nobel-grade do-gooding (microfinance) considered harmful

by philg

In the spirit of “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” by Edsger Dijkstra, renowned sourpuss…

“Hundreds of Billions in Loans Didn’t Make a Dent in Global Poverty” (Wall Street Journal):

Microfinance, loans issued in communities not served by traditional banks, would help poor people in developing countries start businesses and work their way toward prosperity. That was the goal of Muhammad Yunus, a U.S.-trained economist, who pioneered the practice in Bangladesh during the 1970s.

“In a poverty-free world, the only place you would be able to see poverty is in the poverty museums,” Yunus told his audience in Oslo in 2006 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

Led by the adage of “doing good while doing well,” microfinance lenders have since advanced hundreds of billions of dollars to poor people in countries from Albania to Zimbabwe. Prominent voices including Hillary Clinton and Natalie Portman told inspiring tales of women entrepreneurs lifting the fortunes of their communities. Along with easing poverty, microfinance aimed to expand access to education and end gender inequality.

That was the dream, including for yours truly (I kicked in some money circa 2000 to a web-based microfinance portal). What has been the reality?

Academic studies, including randomized controlled trials, have found that microfinance doesn’t improve the economic conditions of most borrowers. Economists found excessive microfinance lending has set off repayment crises for borrowers in half a dozen countries, including Bosnia, India and Cambodia.

High interest rates, which can top 100% in some Latin American countries, and pressure tactics by loan officers have been tied to suicides, homelessness and children pulled from school to work. Rather than using the loans to invest in small businesses, many borrowers spend the money on medical expenses and other necessities.

Does failure to achieve stated goals have an effect on nonprofit organizations? No.

The hardening evidence of microfinance’s failure to alleviate poverty should have led to a rethinking of its use as a development tool, said Rafe Meager, an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who has studied the academic research on microfinance.

“There still hasn’t been this kind of reckoning in a serious way,” Meager said.

The average microfinance borrower in Cambodia owes more than $3,900, nearly three times the median annual per capita income. Average debt per borrower is more than $6,000 when including small loans from microfinance lenders that are now commercial banks also providing other financial services.

Microfinance’s breakneck expansion in Cambodia in the early 2010s coincided with a government push to formalize land ownership. Contrary to Yunus’s vision that debts shouldn’t be collateralized, most of Cambodian microfinance loans greater than $3,000 are secured by a borrower’s land, which is the main hard asset for most poor families.

What happens when we throw AI into this mixture? Some people were already poor because their skill levels were too low to compete in a globalized economy. Do they get a boost in value for a while, at least, because the Optimus-style robots won’t be ready until well after the AI brains are perfected? Or do already-poor people in poor countries become further devalued by AI because they’re being partly paid for the use of their brains? Or, on the third hand, do they get a boost in income because they’ll use AI to become much more productive?

Separately, now that Elon is well on his way to a second $trillion, why isn’t he loaning Bosnians, Indians, and Cambodians however much money they want?

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SpaceX is worth $63/share according to the most expert experts

by philg

How’s SpaceX doing on its second trading day? The most expert experts on stocks in the United States work at Morningstar. They value the company at $63/share and say that if everything went perfect, it could be worth $154. From last week:

We value SpaceX SPCX at $63 per share, a 53% discount to the upcoming IPO’s offering price. Our valuation is the result of mathematics more than skepticism. With such a wide range of possible outcomes for the company’s financial future, we created forecasts and valuations for three scenarios and probability-weighted them.

Even at $63 per share, we give SpaceX a lot of benefit of the doubt in two of the three scenarios, in which we assume the company can achieve a rapidly reusable Starship rocket enabling multiple launches per week and successfully commercialize data centers in space. Neither of these engineering problems has been solved, and we don’t expect them to be until at least 2028.

In our most optimistic “moonshot” scenario, the company would be worth $1.97 trillion, or $154 a share. That’s 14% above the offering price and a level the shares might even reach in the short term after their public launch, given widespread investor enthusiasm about SpaceX, artificial intelligence infrastructure, and the IPO. However, we assign this scenario, in which both Starship is reusable and scaled orbital data centers are highly successful, a 7% chance of happening, which is one reason our final fair value estimate of $63 is much lower than $154.

We could try to figure out how accurate Morningstar was with Tesla when Tesla was the same size ($19 billion/year in revenue) as SpaceX is now. That takes us back to 2018. Tesla stock was at $20/share vs. $400 now (adjusted for 15:1 in splits, but not for Bidenflation). ChatGPT:

Morningstar was not recommending Tesla as a buy in 2018. In ordinary buy/hold/sell language, their view was closer to sell/avoid for much of the year, or at least don’t buy at the market price. … Morningstar’s 2018 stance was “don’t buy”; in buy/hold/sell terms, it was closer to “sell” than “hold,” especially around the August 2018 $420 buyout episode.

(Keep in mind that $420 pre-splits was a $28/share offer in terms of today’s shares.)

Democrats such as Bernie Sanders who are envious that Elon Musk is a trillionaire now have a Science-based way to catch up. They say that expert advice should be followed without question, e.g., if an expert-crafted response to a virus killing Americans at a median age of 82 is to close schools for 8-year-olds for 18 months. A leveraged bet that SpaceX stock will fall to the Morningstar-estimated value could make at least $billions if not $trillions in profit.

Loosely related…

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Sonos, eight years after the IPO

by philg

Readers are likely aware of my fondness for whole-house audio and, since 2005, Sonos, a company that has roots in Santa Barbara, CA and Boston, MA. The company went public at $15 per share almost exactly eight years ago. How’s the stock done? If you don’t adjust for inflation, it’s right at its original IPO price (down from the first-day bump, though). Adjusted at official CPI, though, someone who got IPO shares is down 25 percent. Adjusted for South Florida real estate costs, the investor is down about 50 percent.

Given that state governors ordered peasants to stay home for 2-3 years in a lot of high-income states, how do we account for a home audio company having done this badly? Sony has doubled, in nominal dollars, over the same period. Consumers don’t care about multi-room audio because they always have their AirPods in and the sound thus follows them?

Did Sonos fail to jump on the social justice bandwagon or ignore Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money? Certainly not!

Sonos in June 2020:

In celebration of global Pride the Internet radio service introduced a limited-edition station, initiated by a group of LGBTQ+ employees.

Dmitri Siegel, VP Global Brand, extended his support becoming Pride@’s official executive sponsor. “I am so grateful to have the opportunity to be an ally in the Pride@ group,” he said. “As a straight white male, it’s common to feel intimidated or uncomfortable engaging on LGBTQ+ issues because you feel like you are going to say the wrong thing or be offensive in some way. Being a part of Pride@ has given me the opportunity to do my work—listen and learn. Getting over insecurity and discomfort unlocks all these amazing people and a whole aspect of the human experience that I would otherwise miss out on.”

The article references a corporate tweet:

The station was still up and running a year ago:

How about this month? The radio web site features state-sponsored NPR and Democratic Party-affiliated MSNBC, but I didn’t see anything about Pride.

Sonos Radio has an Instagram account. No Pride station is mentioned. (The “Full Spectrum; Celebrate Child” station is still available in the app, however.)

Sonos has an X account(!), but hasn’t posted anything for Pride 2026. Nor did they post anything regarding Pride on their (rather thin) Facebook account. Their careers page assures today’s young people that working life can be a continuous Pride celebration:

It looks as though the company has abandoned its commitment to proselytizing for Rainbow Flagism to consumers, reminding consumers that Black history is more important than other kinds of history, etc. In other words, Sonos has abandoned its principles and still can’t make money, the worst of all possible worlds for a corporation.

I still love the product, even if their lightweight powered speakers can’t overcome the laws of physics (see below regarding the latest Sonos S2 gear versus their old amps driving heavier passive (ancient) speakers). They also have great support compared to most companies. I’m wondering what they could make that would be profitable in an Apple-takes-all world.

Related:

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Seattle Trip Report (minus Seattle per se), Part II

by philg

Next stop on the Seattle Trip was the Asian Art Museum, $18 for admission or $0 if you have organized your life as an economist would predict: “This program provides free admission for up to five people. In-person verification of SNAP, EBT, or WIC card is required.”

One of my favorite exhibits: a local Scientist wearing a protective anti-COVID mask over a full beard. Six years after coronapanic, he/she/ze/they couldn’t find a job with less exposure to the potentially-infected public?

(We saw quite a few indoor and outdoor maskers, but it was rare to find one with as lush a beard underneath the mask.)

Next stop: the Seattle Japanese Garden.

The surrounding arboretum has a gift shop explaining how to garden while Black:

We saw Islamic immigrants in hijabs and burqas, various Asians, and a lot of white people in the Arboretum, but none of the Black girls featured in the book that was for sale.

Next stop: the Ice Box Arcade, which answers the question “How do you keep the local progressives from vandalizing a $15,000 Harry Potter pinball machine, tainted by J.K. Rowling’s stubborn Science-denying insistence that there is a difference between men and women?”

Answer: tell them that the quarters placed into the machine will go to support a Rainbow Flagism nonprofit organization. The collection, which is wonderfully well-maintained, includes a rare James Bond retro machine from Stern:

The standard James Bond modern Stern series is Sean Connery-only. This retro machine is enhanced with Roger Moore and “Daniel Craig says he goes to gay bars to avoid fights at straight venues” (Guardian; if you live with a woman see if you can make “I need to go to the bathhouse every three nights because our water pressure at home isn’t good enough” work?).

Contrary to what you might have read, Seattle progressives most definitely did not set up a 16′-high statute of Lenin on a street corner (you can enjoy some Halal food at Sinbad Express while visiting).

Back to our hotel neighborhood, the pub requires that you pass the sacred Rainbow Flag (but not trans-enhanced?) before entering (this was taken in May, not June/Pride):

CVS keeps my beloved Dawn and Bounty securely locked up:

An awesome playground next to the Norwegian cruise ship pier:

I’ll cover our return to Seattle from the Alaska cruise in a follow-up post.

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The Swiss vote to bulk up on humans just in time for the Age of AI and Robotics.

by philg

Projects show that about 55 percent of Swiss voters have rejected a proposed population cap of 10 million for a mountainous territory that currently has 5X the population density of the U.S. Lower 48.

The population of Switzerland has doubled within the lifetimes of its older citizens:

Only about 5 percent of Switzerland is reasonably flat buildable land. The Swiss are already crammed in like rats by U.S. standards, about 500 square feet per person vs. 750 here. There is a term in medicine for growth without regard to available resources: “cancer”.

(ChatGPT says an American who has wisely chosen to refrain from work and lives in taxpayer-funded public housing may have a higher material standard of living than a median Swiss as measured by (a) square footage per person, (b) air conditioning (only 5% of Swiss have it), and (c) car ownership. While the American who hasn’t worked for four generations cruises around in his/her/zir/their air-conditioned Nissan Altima, the working Swiss is provisioned with a public transit bus that may not have A/C or that has only feeble A/C. ChatGPT and Grok agree that Switzerland has 1/10th the murder rate of the U.S., though that advantage falls when Switzerland is compared to the “more racially homogeneous (often White) areas” U.S. states, such as New Hampshire and Maine. Grok specifically wrote “more racially homogeneous (often White) areas tend to have lower crime than heterogeneous ones” so I asked “Does that mean diversity is not our strength?” and the answer was “No”. ChatGPT agrees that the correlation between racial homogeneity and crime is accurate and that, similarly, we cannot abandon the axiom “diversity is our strength”.)

It will be interesting if we can get some demographics on those who voted yes vs. no to the cap. U.S. immigration is mostly low-skill and benefits the elite at the expense of the American working class (Harvard study), hence the tendency of the working class to vote for politicians, such as Donald Trump, who promise to limit immigration. Switzerland has a much higher percentage of high-skill immigrants, with at least 60 percent holding at least a bachelor’s degree (compare to 36 percent of U.S. immigrants). So a Swiss with a white collar job could cast a self-interested vote against mass importation of humans.

Here’s ChatGPT’s summary of where each country gets its foreign residents (in the U.S., nearly all are “immigrants”, entitled to stay here forever; in Switzerland, nearly all are expected to go home eventually). Switzerland pulls its foreigners primarily from fully developed European countries, such as Italy, Germany, Portugal, and France.. The U.S. has chosen to bring in foreigners primarily from Mexico, India, China, Philippines, Cuba, etc.

In the coming Age of AI and Robotics, what’s the scenario in which existing Swiss citizens become better off because someone who isn’t in the top 10% of human intelligence/skill has immigrated?

Separately, it’s interesting that the Wall Street Journal, published in a country with 1/5th the current population density of Switzerland, describes the idea of limiting population density as “radical” (source):

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Seattle Trip Report (minus Seattle per se), Part I

by philg

Our precious children apparently cannot be exposed to reality and, therefore, our trip to Seattle skipped the parts of Seattle that have made the news recently. We stayed at an elite Courtyard by Marriott next to Lake Union in hopes of avoiding some of Seattle’s, um, more colorful characters.

Stickers on lamp posts by the hotel:

We went for breakfast to a Halal bagel shop, Toasted. According to the web site, the owners of the shop selling a baked item created by Polish Jews are “Murat from Istanbul and Jaafar from Iraq” (this isn’t cultural appropriation?). The merch sales at the shop help pay to increase the number of immigrants in the U.S., an odd thing for Seattleites to support in my opinion given that we were never able to complete one trip anywhere near the city without getting stuck in horrific traffic. Even a trip from Sea-Tac to downtown aat 11:30 pm on a weeknight was delayed because the Uber driver couldn’t reach us through the horrific traffic at the airport. The average resident of Seattle loses 87 hours per year to traffic jams (source), equivalent to two weeks of full-time work and, therefore, if the country weren’t as jammed, he/she/ze/they could presumably take an additional two weeks of vacation and still be just as productive.

Speaking of immigrants, one stated reason for filling the U.S. with low-skill migrants is to provide cheap labor for enterprises such as the above bagel shop and, also, for Uber and Lyft drivers who won’t mind spending hours in traffic jams. We already know that AI is coming for those driving jobs. How long will it be before an Optimus-style robot can do at least half of the work in the bagel shop?

Next stop: Museum of History and Industry. It’s $25 to enter, but free to anyone who presents an EBT card (which never expires because, apparently, hardly anyone ever gets off EBT/SNAP). The museum can also be free for the Latinx:

The Open Doors program works with organizations that serve communities who have historically been excluded from museum spaces. These communities include, but are not limited to, Black, Native American, Latinx, Pacific Islander, Asian, refugee, immigrant, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities, and people with low and/or no-income.

Through this program, organizations or community groups can reserve a free group visit, or receive admission passes to be distributed to their participants for use on their own schedule.

An 1889 tugboat is parked out front:

We’re informed that almost any woman who holds a job in 2026 is a “trailblazer” and “breaker of the glass ceiling”. It turns out that Seattle had a female mayor for about four years starting in 1924:

(Too bad we can’t get her back to implement my neo-Prohibition schemes!)

The museum reminds us that World War II wasn’t a time of maximum racial sensitive here in the U.S.: “Salvage Scrap to Blast the Jap”.

There’s a reasonably comprehensive history of Boeing and its founder, William Boeing. Left out: Mr. Boeing’s history as the developer of real estate with a race-based restriction. For electrical engineers, the reminder that Fluke has been based in the Seattle area for most of its life would warm the EEs’ hearts if they had hearts:

AI enthusiasts will appreciate Seattle-style AI (Microsoft Bob):

Perhaps explaining the low birth rate among native-born Democrats, the gift shop reminds those passionate about abortion care that pregnancy is unhappy news:

The book section puts Gay Seattle and a pro-Hamas work right next to each other:

(This would become a recurring theme throughout Washington State, i.e., simultaneous advocacy for 2SLGBTQQIA+ and Hamas-ruled “Palestine”.)

A University of Washington book on the subject of how immigrant plants “compete for space with native plants”, marketed to residents of a migrant-rich city with an “affordable housing crisis”:

A couple of books on how to walk in the woods while not being a white male:

A book on how to be gay and Asian at the same time:

Some items relating to righteousness in general:

Although the museum’s collection of historical photos shows men designing, building, and flying airplanes, the gift shop reminds us that building airplanes was a primarily female activity during World War II:

(ChatGPT says that the majority of workers were men and that the vast majority of highly skilled jobs in aircraft production, e.g., machinists, were held by men (probably over 90 percent).)

From the museum, we headed to Capitol Hill, which is where I had a 2019 epiphany: Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money? Diversity is our strength, but if you think that All Lives Matter rather than Black Lives Matter, “Don’t Come In”:

Note that the above photo including a trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag was taken on May 21, i.e., pre-Pride. Speaking of Pride, the local bank wants customers to pay their respects to Rainbow Flagism before engaging in any business:

Let’s hope that they have fat bank accounts because gasoline throughout Washington State was about 1.5X the cost of what we pay in Florida ($6.20/gallon was the most common price at name-brand stations):

To be continued…

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New Bumper Sticker for my Tesla and/or Honda Odyssey

by philg

A righteous neighbor here in Abacoa (not everyone in Florida is Deplorable, especially here in Palm Beach County, though it is rare even for the Righteous to have a political/social justice bumper sticker), this afternoon:

I asked Grok to redo it to read “I bought this before Elon had four commas” rather than “I bought this before Elon went crazy”:

The updated sticker is perfect for adorning any Tesla, of course, but it also makes sense for those of us with non-Tesla cars. We can proudly proclaim that we didn’t help Elon get to his envy-stoking level of wealth.

How are others dealing with their grief? New York Times front page:

The Native American community:

Not sure who this guy is:

Some folks who probably didn’t work too hard to get IPO shares:

An old lady from Maskachusetts:

(What evidence does Ms. Markey have that Elon ever “traded stocks”?

Bernie:

A reasonable suggestion regarding Bernie:

Another candidate for a wellness check:

An envious California progressive at the peasant level of wealth for Palm Beach County (at least $30 million for Mx. Newsom and the female companion he/she/ze/they plucked from Harvey Weinstein’s hotel rooms):

(If California could confiscate 100% of Elon’s $1 trillion would that be sufficient to realize at least part of their high-speed rail dream?)

The grandson of Muhammad Kenyatta:

The pro-Hamas next U.S. Senator from the Islamic Republic of Michigan:

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