Baltimore bridge destruction reading: a biography of Rudolf Diesel

As we wait for someone to explain how the Dali lost power from its 55,000 hp (or 0!) German diesel engine, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I (2023) may be worth a read. In addition to a biography of the man who created the efficient reliable (except sometimes) high-torque engines, the book has some interesting stuff about

  • the rapid industrialization of Russia circa 1900 (I’ve read in other places that it was the world’s fastest growing economy prior to the revolution)
  • the development of Standard Oil
  • the utopian dreams of rich industrialists, including Diesel, circa 1900 (see also Andrew Carnegie!)

Who else would like this book? Greta Thunberg! Diesel predicted that we would completely trash the earth from burning fossil fuel (not an unreasonable prediction at the time given that cities were already horribly polluted from coal smoke), that we would run out of fossil fuel, and that solar energy would ultimately be our primary source of power. Diesel also loved the U.S., predicted that it would become and remain the world’s dominant industrial power, and was very impressed by our passenger train system(!). He thought that the U.S. was guaranteed to stay ahead of the Europeans in passenger rail because we weren’t constrained by old cities (i.e., California high-speed rail should be easy, quick, and cheap to construct!).

MAN was a leader in diesel technology 100+ years ago and remains a leader today, an interesting story in corporate continuity right through to making the Dali‘s engine.

Let’s have a look at the engine family… (for scale, check the staircases and handrails; source)

Mark Zuckerberg also chose German-made (MTU) diesel engines for his climate-saving yacht:

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Talking with a pro-Hamas college student

All of my attempts at humor fall flat, as a general rule. In January, for example, I jokingly asked a friend who had visited family in Madrid over Christmas if he’d had to navigate around pro-Hamas protests. He took it as a straight question and gave me a detailed straight answer about the various protests and the parts of the city they’d blocked and what he had done to try to get where he was going.

I needed to talk to a friend’s son regarding an unrelated topic. He’s an avid videogamer and an engineering major at a college in a Rust Belt city whose last period of sustained job growth was during the administration of Gerald Ford. It’s not in Michigan or anywhere else where Islam is the primary religion. He lost years of high school and social life to coronapanic (and, despite diligent masking and meek acceptance of lockdowns, of course got COVID several times). One might imagine that he and his cohorts would have other issues on their minds than the suffering of the noble Gazans… and one would be wrong. I jokingly asked how the pro-Hamas encampments have been at his university. It turned out that he was a regularly attendee at said protests/encampments. “It’s got a really good vibe,” he said, “though only about 50 people actually sleep there every night.”

He took issue with my characterization of the demonstrators as “pro-Hamas”. He said that their goal was to “stop the killing of children.” He agreed that the death of bystanders was inevitable in war and said that he did not think Israel should be allowed to pursue any military activities in Gaza due to the risk that additional children would die. Essentially, the IDF would have to withdraw. I asked “Since Hamas is the elected and popular government of Gaza, doesn’t that mean that Hamas would resume their rule over the territory?” He said “yes” but disagreed that demanding an action that would inevitably ensure continued Hamas rule could be considered a “pro-Hamas” position.

The punchline to the above conversation is that the young man is… Jewish! His mother is Israeli, in fact. She’s an elite wealthy multiple passport European-heritage Netanyahu-hating Israeli, but nowhere near ready to surrender to Hamas as her son is. (Netanyahu’s core support comes from the plurality of Israelis whose ancestors were expelled from majority-Muslim countries, such as Iraq, Iran, Yemen, etc., after 1948. The European-heritage Jews who arrived prior to 1948 are generally much richer if for no other reason than they bought real estate in Tel Aviv before the population grew so dramatically.)

I tried to get him to see that his philosophy, if applied equally to all nations, meant that any army that can surround itself with children becomes invulnerable. Russia could conquer Ukraine, for example, if they just brought some children along to ride in their military vehicles. He more or less admitted that, but stuck to his position that “too many” children had been killed in the recent Gaza battles and, therefore, Israel had to accept defeat and withdraw. (Palestinians themselves do not seem to think that whatever has happened recently is bad enough that they would be willing to abandon any of their military goals. One never hears of Palestinians who say “war is too costly so we will have to compromise for peace and recognize Israel within her current borders.” Instead, they say that they are willing to wage war forever if that’s what it takes to liberate Al-Quds, destroy the Zionist entity, and enjoy a river-to-the-sea Hamas-ruled nation. (cue UNRWA to pay for food, health care, education, etc. until this glorious day arrives))

His siblings also went to public schools in an all-Democrat city and he says that they’re fully aligned with him on the Israel/Gaza issue. My text to his parents: “I would have thought with all of his shooter game experience that he’d believe that sometimes a nation does have to use its military to do military stuff.”

That’s my dive into the wisdom of today’s best-educated youth!

Here’s an example Rust Belt encampment (Syracuse, New York):

Related:

  • “The Adults Are Still in Charge at the University of Florida” (WSJ; Ben Sasse, formerly U.S. Senator from Nebraska and current president at UF): Higher education isn’t daycare. … Higher education has for years faced a slow-burning crisis of public trust. Mob rule at some of America’s most prestigious universities in recent weeks has thrown gasoline on the fire. Pro-Hamas agitators have fought police, barricaded themselves in university buildings, shut down classes, forced commencement cancellations, and physically impeded Jewish students from attending lectures. … universities must distinguish between speech and action. Speech is central to education … The heckler gets no veto. The best arguments deserve the best counterarguments. … we draw a hard line at unlawful action. Speech isn’t violence. Silence isn’t violence. Violence is violence. … universities make things worse with halfhearted appeals to abide by existing policies and then immediately negotiating with 20-year-old toddlers. Appeasing mobs emboldens agitators elsewhere. … universities need to recommit themselves to real education. Rather than engage a wide range of ideas with curiosity and intellectual humility, many academic disciplines have capitulated to a dogmatic view of identity politics. Students are taught to divide the world into immutable categories of oppressors and oppressed, and to make sweeping judgements accordingly. With little regard for historical complexity, personal agency or individual dignity, much of what passes for sophisticated thought is quasireligious fanaticism. … Young men and women with little grasp of geography or history—even recent events like the Palestinians’ rejection of President Clinton’s offer of a two-state solution—wade into geopolitics with bumper-sticker slogans they don’t understand.
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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 1

Nutrition is critical for any coast-to-coast helicopter flight. I loaded up on dim sum at Din Tai Fung in a Costa Mesa mall, then paid only $13 for a few strawberries at Hannam Chain in our inflation-free economy. The folks who run the supermarket are Korean and had neglected to boycott the Zionist entity:

I decided to skip the rainbow flag worship at the liquor store next door to the supermarket:

Our machine was waiting for us on the Robinson ramp in Torrance (KTOA), but the marine layer prevented departure prior to 11:30 am. Note the new horizontal stabilizer, not in any way resembling a Bell 206…

That gave us time to stock up on snacks at the nearby Whole Foods. The scene out front showed California at its best: outdoor maskers and a planet-saving Tesla.

In the rare moments when they de-mask, the Followers of Science detoxify their body with alkaline water in front of this Whole Foods:

We fly out of LA by following CA-91 and I-10, a route prescribed by Robinson that is the lowest path out of the mountains (the Banning Pass is at 2,200′ above sea level). I keep a cheat sheet of radio frequencies for the control towers and/or common traffic advisory frequencies (CTAF) of the 7 airports we will fly by. In the middle of the day (not rush hour) it’s up to a 4-hour trip by car, according to the Google, but we’re there after 30 minutes:

If one were tempted to complain about the R44’s 110-knot cruising speed, this sight in Carson, California (near Long Beach) is a good reminder to count one’s blessings:

As soon as we get to Banning the skies turn blue. We transition through Palm Springs and land at the Bermuda Dunes airport. After consuming all of the FBO’s Cheez-Its, it was time to continue climbing into the hills via I-10.

Blythe, California is a generally terrible airport where you need to park at the fuel pumps and where the “courtesy car” comes with precious little courtesy. We skipped it and continued across the Colorado River into Arizona.

Some more mountains before arriving in Metro Phoenix to land at the Goodyear, AZ airport:

One way to look slim:

More coffee and snacks at GYR before proceeding on toward Tucson. The Pinal, AZ airport is notable for Army helicopters and washed-up airliners:

Maybe a sharp-eyed reader can figure out what the coal-fueled facility below is. I don’t see huge powerlines coming out of it so my guess is “not electricity generation”. Also, a nice quarry:

We arrived in Tucson about 1.5 hours before sunset. If we couldn’t make it all the way to El Paso it probably made sense to shut down because southern New Mexico does not have a lot of services.

Then it was time to shop for microfiber cloths (clean the bugs off the bubble) and eat Sonoran hot dogs at El Guero Canelo (“EGC” to the locals):

(I cheat and order mine without mayonnaise)

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Annals of architecture failures: the luxury hotel with exterior corridors and no art

A few photos from a newish $500/night Marriott hotel in Newport Beach, California:

Note the circular waterfall in the middle of the driveway.

One of the more interesting features is a massive video screen above the bar at the end of the pool:

Why can’t we have this in every room of our houses?

The hotel is built around an open central courtyard and, thus, the corridors are exposed to the elements to some extent. Perhaps because of this, the architects and designers apparently decided not to put any art in the outdoor hallways:

The result is a bleak depressing walk from a fairly nice room to the very nice lobby. It makes the hotel seem cheap and old. I’m trying to figure out how they could have failed so badly. The indoor/outdoor structure isn’t that different from Spanish colonial architecture throughout Central and South America. A hotel with exterior corridors in Mexico or South America would have interesting stonework and, most likely, beautiful tiles and other decoration in the parts exposed to the elements.

On the bright side, we were able to enjoy looking at a Z06 C8 Corvette parked in front:

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Checking in on inflation

Back in 2020, a former UK central banker predicted raging post-coronapanic inflation followed by 3-4 percent annual inflation rates starting at the end of 2022 and continuing for decades (see Inflation prediction to check in 2028). Here’s the official chart of CPI, mostly fraud because it doesn’t include the actual cost of housing:

(see “Summers: Inflation Reached 18% In 2022 Using The Government’s Previous Formula” (Forbes) for a discussion of an NBER paper)

What are you all seeing? A painting contractor in Cambridge did not start a project that he’d been hired to do last year. It had been scheduled for the fall of 2023. He demanded 20 percent more to do the same work starting in the spring of 2024, an inflation rate of 40 percent.

At the Flour bakery in Harvard Square, a $72 pie:

At a McDonald’s on the Mass Pike in western Maskachusetts, $15 for a standard meal including tax:

Although we did not pony up $72 for a pie, the Flour bakery experience was worth the $40 that my friend paid for our take-out lunch (two sandwiches, a drink, a brownie, tax, and tip). The line included not only an apparently young healthy female in an N95 mask but also a woman wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh-patterned sweater. As a bonus, this high-priced establishment sports a Black Lives Matter sign in the front window:

I’m not sure how retailers decide which social justice cause to support. Patagonia, which demanded eye-popping prices before Joe Biden made them popular, doesn’t care about Black Lives and instead proudly displays its allegiance to Rainbow Flagism:

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Mark your calendars for August 12, 2045 here in Jupiter

The next total eclipse that will reach a significant number of Americans is headed straight for Jupiter, Florida! It will last for a remarkable 6 minutes. From timeanddate:

I’m not sure why they say that the average cloud cover is 64 percent. I would have guessed that 1:30 pm in August would be blue skies with a chance of thunderstorms. It would probably be smarter to travel to Nevada, but then it wouldn’t be possible to observe the eclipse from one’s own swimming pool. Here’s an August map from an eclipse nerdism site:

(some folks in Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota will see a 1.5-minute eclipse around sunset on August 22, 2044)

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Uncle Joe’s capital gains tax

Let’s consider how Joe Biden’s proposed new federal long-term capital gains tax rate of 44.6 percent would work without the inflation adjustment that other inflation-plagued economies have. We start with a California-based investor who purchased General Electric stock for $100/share in June 1997 and sold it for $162/share today:

At official CPI rates, the investor has lost money. $100 in June 1997 has the same spending power as $195 Bidies today. On top of the agony of the loss, he/she/ze/they will have to hand over to the Feds tax on $62 of fake profit. Let’s assume the investor lives in California and is financially comfortable. The total tax rate under Uncle Joe’s latest proposal will be 58 percent (44.6 federal plus 13.3 state). So the investor will pay $36/share in tax and thus net $126/share for a stock that cost $195 in today’s money. (The numbers are far worse if we use the cost of California real estate as the relevant measure of inflation rather than official CPI.)

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Could the elite universities clear their pro-Hamas encampments with Taylor Swift music?

The U.S. got Manuel Noriega out of the Vatican’s embassy in Panama City by playing Van Halen 24/7. I wonder if administrators at elite universities could clear their “river to the sea” encampments of Hamas/Hezbollah/UNRWA/Palestinian Islamic Jihad supporters via the magic of Taylor Swift. Given that the only thing more expensive, and therefore presumably more sought-after, than a day at an elite university is a day at a Taylor Swift concert (see Long term effects of taking away $5-10,000 from every upper middle class family with a female child?) nobody could complain about a DJ spinning up Ms. Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department on repeat. The schools are mostly shut down so 85 dBA (keep it within OSHA limits) of Taylor Swift 24/7 wouldn’t disturb any classes. Why not just play Taylor Swift until those who are camped out decide that they’d rather listen to something else and, therefore, have to walk away?

Separately, here’s my favorite recent social media post relating to the Ivy league:

This combines the Latinx, Queers, and a drum circle. Who could ask for more?

Lyrics to “Florida!!!”:

You can beat the heat if you beat the charges too
They said I was a cheat, I guess it must be true
And my friends all smell like weed or little babies
And this city reeks of driving myself crazy
Little did you know
Your home’s really only a town you’re just a guest in
So you work your life away
Just to pay for a timeshare down in Destin
Florida is one hell of a drug
Florida, can I use you up?
The hurricane with my name when it came
I got drunk and I dared it to wash me away
Barricaded in the bathroom with a bottle of wine
Well, me and my ghosts, we had a hell of a time
Yes, I’m haunted but I’m feeling just fine
All my girls got their lace and their crimes
And your cheating husband disappeared
Well, no one asks any questions here

(Maybe she is singing about the Redneck Riviera, more properly part of Alabama, than the parts of Florida that most people consider “Florida”? Destin is shown below, straight south from Alabama.)

In case the above is memory-holed as disinformation:

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Book tip: The Underworld (about full ocean depth submarines for recreation)

The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean (Susan Casey) is an interesting book about privatized and recreationalized (is that a word? ) deep submarine excursions. The book seems to have been written before the Titan imploded near the Titanic (June 2023) and then published shortly after the tragedy.

This is more about the personalities and feelings of deep-sea exploration, but there is enough engineering background and detail to make it interesting for the quantitative reader. It is good background for understanding the psychology of the people who built and dove on the Titan.

In 2007, [Patrick] Lahey had cofounded Triton Submarines [of Sebastian, Florida] to create a new generation of eye-catching, user-friendly subs, with acrylic spheres, decent headroom, and plush leather seats. Their maximum depths didn’t extend beyond the twilight zone, but that was deep enough for a taste of the sublime. The subs were a hit with yacht owners—and with filmmakers and scientists, who reveled in the immersive visual experience.

When the hedge fund magnate Ray Dalio loaned his Triton sub to a group of marine biologists in 2012, they captured the first footage of a giant squid hunting off Japan. Previous encounters with the animal had meant ogling a dull mauve corpse: before that dive, nobody had ever witnessed a giant squid in action. The scientists were stunned, because far from being blandly colored, the massive creature looked metallic, as though it had been dipped in silver and bronze. It moved with the fluidity of water itself, its long tentacles studded with suckers, its hubcap eye gazing directly at the camera.

How many more epiphanies were down there? A good rule of thumb is the deeper you go, the stranger things get—and now Lahey had mobilized his decades of experience to build a sub that could explore the deepest reaches of the underworld. As far back as 2011, Triton’s website had included a mockup of the 36000/3, a sub that would take three people to thirty-six thousand feet, or full ocean depth. But this dream machine existed only in pixels: no vehicle was headed to Hades unless someone with a burning desire to dive below twenty thousand feet stepped up to write a series of seven-figure checks. And extremely wealthy people who want to be sealed inside a metal ball and sent plummeting for miles into the ocean’s sepulchral blackness are not found on every street corner.

Once Triton existed anyone with a some cash to spare could launch the kinds of expeditions that previously only governments could undertake.

The saddest part of the history section:

Deep-sea submersibles are an inherently risky proposition, but the field has a sterling safety record. No one has died in a manned submersible since 1974, when an electrical fire inside a Japanese craft caused the two-man crew to be overcome by toxic fumes.

There is plenty of risk and failure is always an option:

Of the many ways a pilot can find himself in trouble beneath the ocean’s surface, the biggest risk is entanglement: getting snagged on fishing gear, cables, debris, or even ropes. There is no plan B when you’re stuck a mile down. Somehow the sub must be freed. “I’ve been hung up twice,” Kerby said, looking sober. The first time happened early in his career. “I was a green pilot, and I got caught in the lines from a shrimp trap. And I knew that if I couldn’t get out of it, I would die.” The second entanglement was more recent: Kerby ran into a pile of cable that had been dumped by a tugboat. “The worst thing you can do is thrash around,” he said. “You have to stop and take stock of your heading, and try to project yourself outside of the sub.” Both times, he added, it took hours of dressage-style maneuvering to escape. “Self-help is the only help, that’s our motto.”

The Pisces are equipped with five days of life support, so anyone marooned underwater would have plenty of time to consider their fragile mortality. This wasn’t a theoretical situation. In 1973, another Pisces submersible, the Pisces III, suffered a hatch failure that flooded its external machinery tank, overburdening the sub and causing it to plummet to the North Atlantic seafloor with its two pilots trapped inside the pressure hull.

Thankfully, the Pisces III crashed on soft bottom mud without catastrophic damage, at a depth of 1,575 feet—shallow enough to attempt a rescue. (It narrowly avoided falling over a shelf that would’ve carried it beyond reach.) That was the good news. The bad news was that submarine rescues are logistically complicated scrambles that often fail to beat the mercilessly ticking clock.

The Pisces V—at the time owned by a Canadian company and working in British Columbia—was airlifted to the scene, along with the Pisces II, which had been laying cable in the North Sea. While the stranded pilots, Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson, endured this long wait, they watched the Pisces III’s oxygen supply dwindling like an hourglass. Hypothermia set in, then dehydration, then delirium from breathing too much carbon dioxide. Terrible weather and plain bad luck slowed the rescue, but finally the other subs were able to attach lines to the Pisces III. By the time Chapman and Mallinson were craned to the surface, they’d been in the sphere for eighty-four hours. Only twenty minutes of oxygen had remained in their tanks.

The book also contains a story of nonprofit org fraud and startup fraud:

Since the International Seabed Authority opened its doors in 1994, its 168 members (now numbering 168 delegates from 167 nations and the European Union) have met annually at its headquarters in Jamaica to prepare for the biggest resource haul the world has ever known—or as one marine scientist put it, “the greatest assault on deep-sea ecosystems ever inflicted by humans.”

To date, the ISA has granted thirty-one mining exploration contracts covering about six hundred thousand square miles, a seabed footprint the size of Alaska. Nineteen of those contracts are for nodule mining, but with an expansiveness that would have delighted Mero, the other twelve contracts would allow miners to investigate scalping the tops off seamounts and grinding up hydrothermal vents. Apparently it’s not hard to get an exploration contract, because so far the ISA has approved every application. Any member state that pays a $500,000 fee and follows procedure can soon have exclusive rights to its own patch of seabed. There’s no stinting on size: an average CCZ contract area spans about thirty thousand square miles. Some nations already hold multiple contracts (China has five) and there’s nothing to prevent any ISA member state from obtaining more, usually by sponsoring contracts on behalf of private-sector mining companies. (In that case, the mining company puts up the capital, runs the show, and would pocket most of the profits—theoretically, billions. The sponsoring nation receives a small royalty, and could be liable for damages if anything goes wrong.) Ultimately the ISA stands to benefit from every contract it grants, with royalties rolling in from each mining operation. Some of that cash will be distributed to developing nations, but a portion flows to the ISA itself—a jarring conflict of interest for a group that also serves as the industry’s regulator. Absurdly, there are even plans for the ISA to develop its own nodule mining concession called “the Enterprise.”

Then add some credulous environmentally conscious investors…

The story got bigger: DeepGreen’s pursuit of nodules was about nothing less than saving the world. And [Gerard] Barron was everywhere, telling it at length. It was a blur of land-based mining destroying rain forests Africa child labor toxic tailings fossil fuel human rights violations versus renewable energy closed-loop recycling no-waste sustainable abundant nodules that “literally lie on the ocean floor like golf balls on a driving range.” “I’m doing this for the planet and the planet’s children,” Barron said. Also, for an 8.1 percent stake in a company that would soon be listed on the NASDAQ. In 2021, DeepGreen went public in a SPAC merger, changing its name to the Metals Company (ticker symbol: TMC). It was valued at $2.9 billion, which was impressive given that it had no revenue, and its only assets were seabed rights that supposedly belong to the rest of us.

The TMC stock debuted at $11.05 a share, spiked to $15.39, and fell to $3.48 within a month. (It has since dropped below a dollar.) Accounting problems emerged; lawsuits followed. Shareholders joined a class-action suit, alleging the Metals Company had made “materially false and misleading statements”;

The Explorers Club in New York City is full of members not afraid to risk anything… except SARS-CoV-2 infection:

The Madagascar hissing cockroaches were roasted extra-crispy, glistening on wooden skewers. They were bigger and shinier than the Costa Rican cave cockroaches and the Argentinian wood cockroaches, with longer antennae and a formidable set of horns. If you were hoping for a black-tie occasion to sample a variety of roaches, this was the only game in town: the 118th Explorers Club Annual Dinner. Archaeologists, anthropologists, geologists, field biologists, polar explorers, marine scientists, endurance athletes, space travelers, wildlife photographers, ocean conservationists, extreme climbers, single-handed sailors, and assorted peers: this was their party, a global gathering of adventurers. For the last two years, the annual dinner had been canceled due to COVID, so the night was both a reunion and a celebration, the rooms overflowing with the club’s members and guests.

More: read The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean

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The nutlergic work to liberate Al-Quds

The robust young activists of New York City can be felled by a single peanut or almond and yet expect to significantly assist in liberating Al-Quds and destroying the Zionist entity.

In case the above is memory-holed:

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