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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Claude is “marginally the best, but quite expensive”

by philg

From a friend who uses LLMs to write code…

Current state of affairs according to me:

OpenAI is at the frontier. There is no reason to use Terra, as there is a Luna or Sol model at an effort level that matches it for cheaper. You can get quite a lot of inference out of the $20/mo plan. $100/mo gives you 5x, but $200/mo gives you 20x, not 10.
Claude Fable is marginally the best, but quite expensive and falls back to Opus on anything it considers remotely questionable, while still charging Fable prices.

Gemini’s latest is 3.5-flash and is well off the curve. The latest non-flash is still 3.1-pro.

GLM 5.2 is the best open weight Chinese model, but its price per token is misleading as it eats up reasoning tokens like crazy.

Best local coding model is probably Qwen 3.6 27B. Gemma 4 is a good local all around model to talk to, but not as good at coding.

Where will these various models run? New York State has banned data centers, which is forward-thinking but I prefer to reflect on the exquisite timing of the New York political elite in shutting down their massive nuclear electricity plant just one year before the AI/data center boom began (launch of ChatGPT in 2022):

How about AI data centers in space?

Loosely related:

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Don’t go outside, says the New York Times

by philg

You’ll die from the Canadian and Minnesotan (Somali?) smoke if you go outside in the north and from “dangerous” heat if you go outside in the south, says the NYT (front page):

The smoke is due to “climate change”, according to Canada’s Prime Minister (NYT).

How bad is it? aviationweather.gov:

METAR KORD 162051Z 05010KT 1SM R10L/P6000FT FU VV020 32/18 A3003
METAR KTOL 162052Z 00000KT 1SM R25/4500V5000FT FU BKN018 OVC024 31/1857007
SPECI KCLE 162109Z 36007KT 2SM FU SCT000 BKN026 BKN250 28/09 A3003
METAR KBUF 162054Z 23011KT 2 1/2SM FU SCT031 BKN065 OVC200 26/18 A2996 
METAR KTEB 162051Z 26008G14KT 1 1/2SM FU BKN020 OVC033 30/18 A298

Chicago is down to 1 statute mile of visibility (IMC begins at 3 SM so everyone has to be on an instrument flight plan) in smoke (“FU”, which sounds rude but is actually French (pre-Islamic)). Notice that Chicago and Teterboro, NJ are both at toasty temps of 32C and 30C, respectively.

Toledo, Ohio is also at 1 SM. Things get better moving east to Cleveland (2 miles) and Buffalo (2.5 miles), but get worse as one approaches the Mamdani Caliphate (1.5 miles visibility in smoke).

What about if Lionel Messi is home in Fort Lauderdale celebrating his recent victory over an African/Islamic nation? It’s “good”:

Same site for Chicago:

Let’s check the aviation weather for SE Florida, a hellscape of dangerous heat and unavailable abortion care, according to the NYT:

METAR KDJT 162053Z 22006KT 10SM FEW030 BKN250 33/18 A3005 RMK AO2 SLP175 T03330178 58016 $
METAR KFLL 162053Z 13007KT 10SM FEW030 SCT150 BKN190 BKN250 31/24 A3005 RMK AO2 SLP175 T03110244 56013
METAR KMIA 162053Z 12008KT 10SM SCT046 SCT055 SCT220 34/24 A3005 RMK AO2 TSE28 SLP177 CB DSNT SW T03390244 57006 $

Why only 10 miles of viz at President Donald J. Trump International Airport? (formerly PBI) That’s as high as the automated systems go. Note that Messi’s home in Fort Lauderdale is actually one degree C cooler than Chicago!

If this all clears before EAA AirVenture starts in Oshkosh, Wisconsin on Monday I will personally support Greta Thunberg for multiple Nobel Prizes (physics, chemistry, and peace?).

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Federal government rewrites Disney’s Circle of Life (SNAP then Ozempic via Medicare)

by philg

CBS:

Because federal tax dollars are free, of course, the CBS story covers what Medicare beneficiaries will pay ($50/month) and doesn’t mention what it will cost the young taxpayers who are being hit to pay for keeping Boomers alive forever (ChatGPT says $6 billion/year would be easy to hit since the drug companies are getting a lot more than $50/month).

The federal government starting paying for a lot of the calories that made today’s older Americans fat when it created the food stamp program, now “SNAP”, in the 1960s. By paying for weight loss drugs, therefore, we have a complete SNAP-to-GLP-1 circle of life. What about rewriting the Disney classic song to fit the current situation? ChatGPT refuses to do this, claiming that it would be a violation of Disney’s copyright to create some new lyrics for their existing melody. Grok apparently doesn’t care.

Circle of Life (SNAP Edition)

(Zulu-style chant, sung with dramatic flair)
Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba
Sithi uhmm… SNAP-onyama!

Here comes the benefit, father
Oh yes, it’s the EBT card
A feast we’re gonna fund here
A burger, a soda, a leopard… wait, that’s just the spots on the fries

Verse 1
From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the store
There’s more to eat than can ever be eaten
More to buy than can ever be bought
There’s far too much junk food to take in here
More calories than can ever be burned
But the government check rolling high
Through the welfare sky
Keeps the great and small on the endless round

Chorus
It’s the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Taxpayers fund the snacks
Then the drugs for the sprawl
Through obesity and hope
Through waistlines and scope
‘Til we find our place
On the Ozempic path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life

Verse 2
Some of us eat the surplus cheese
While others pay the mounting fees
We are all connected in the great chain
From the SNAP aisle to the pharmacy lane
The taxpayer’s wallet gives what it can
To the processed foods and the injection plan
It’s the wheel of fortune, it’s the leap of fate
It’s the government gate… that swings both ways

Chorus
It’s the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love… and rebates
‘Til we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life

Bridge/Outro
Wegovy rising like the morning sun
GLP-1 flowing when the damage is done
From the grocery cart to the needle’s prick
The federal cycle does the trick
Nants ingonyama… SNAP-onyama!
It’s the Circle… of Life!

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