Some more images of the church where God speaks directly to humans:
(Sometimes the best way to “Dismantle Racism” is by first moving to a town that is 2 percent Black.)
The church reminds us that it is not Ukrainians who are fighting for their lives:
Speaking of Ukraine, another church in Needham:
Here’s what I think might be a 2SLGBTQQIA+ version of the Ukrainian flag:
What about back in Cambridge? A friend snapped this photo of Riverside Boat Club, which reminds folks that Black Lives Matter, that the trans-enhanced rainbow flag is our national symbol, and that the best way to support Ukraine is to stay safely in Maskachusetts while hanging up a flag.
Who can explain the intersection between Black and 2SLGBTQQIA+ on the boat club whose web site shows only white people? Perhaps a professor of Queer of Color Critique who will soon be working at Williams College:
The Program in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies seeks a professor of Queer of Color Critique, field open, ideally with interdisciplinary scholarship. We also especially welcome those with additional interests in Disability Studies/Crip Theory, Feminist Technoscience Studies, and/or Migration Studies.
The candidate should be able to teach introductory courses, including WGSS 101 and a Foundations in Sexuality Studies seminar in addition to electives.
We are especially interested in candidates from historically underrepresented groups
Coronapanic is over in Maskachusetts? The August 10, 2023 job post:
We recognize that these are uncertain times with changing health and safety restrictions given the endemic nature of COVID-19 and other viral illnesses. This search will follow all state and college policies, and we anticipate collaborating with candidates to best navigate health and safety during the recruitment process.
“Climate change is the biggest threat to our planet,” he wrote. “I want to work alongside others both to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share.”
Billionaire Jeff Bezos, the third richest person in the world, reportedly paid $68 million to purchase a waterfront home in Miami’s Indian Creek Village.
The mansion Bezos reportedly purchased was built in 1965 and expanded in 1985. It spans nearly 9,300 square feet with three bedrooms and three bathrooms on a 2.8-acre lot.
Last year, his parents, Mike and Jackie Bezos, purchased two waterfront homes in Coral Gables for $78 million.
Where is Indian Creek? See the top right corner:
Let’s hope that the new house is completed before sea level rise washes Miami Beach away!
Following this weekend’s unfortunate events in Jacksonville, Florida, a gun-loving friend sent me a CNN article and remarked on the phrase “white gunman” occurring within the first three words.
I used the Google to find the precise phrase “white gunman” on cnn.com:
158 results. Compare to “Black gunman”:
(Black Lives Matter, but Black capitalization does not; Google shows the same 3 results for “black gunman”.)
In other words, the reader of CNN would infer that there are 50 white gunmen in the U.S. for every Black gunman.
Photos from August 21, 2023, Allston, Massachusetts (adjacent to Boston University):
My favorite, of course, is the surgical mask over full beard as a means of blocking out an aerosol virus. However, the most confusing are the outdoor maskers. The risk of being in a crowded city is so high that they need a mask when outdoors… yet they won’t move away from the crowded city. I guess the masked supermarket shoppers are also tough to explain. Why don’t they stay safe at home and let the Latinx essential delivery workers incur the risk of gathering groceries? (See The social justice of coronashutdowns)
I visited a friend in Brookline who warned his elderly mother to stay away from me because I was insufficiently cautious about the possibility of a SARS-CoV-2 infection (I had arrived from an oceanfront estate in Maine with about 3,000 square feet of space per person). A few minutes later, he decided that it would be too onerous to cook pasta at home, safe from COVID-19, on the high-end induction cooktop. So we then all went out to a cramped neighborhood Italian restaurant in which the elderly mom was within breathing distance of about 30 local humans (presumably not Covid heretics, however).
Both the mom, a Manhattan resident, and the grandkids spontaneously offered the opinion that Florida schools were terrible, partly due to the fact that reading was banned in Florida. Said grandkids had been removed from the Brookline, Maskachusetts public schools (one of the highest-rated districts in the state) due to being bored and the school system not having any gifted program. So they were paying private school tuition ($55,000+/year per student) on top of state income tax (banned by the FL constitution), state estate tax (also banned by the FL constitution, unless it can be credited toward federal), and property tax at a similar rate to what a typical FL county charges. I pointed out that Florida state law required every public school district to offer gifted education beginning in 2nd grade and that, if necessary, there was also the Big Hammer in which Florida high school kids can take online or in-person courses for free at any state-run college or university (and taxpayers have to buy them the textbooks as well!). Finally, the larger counties run magnet schools for those who are artistically or academically inclined (one of Miami’s is the #4-ranked public high school in the U.S.).
COVID-19 is dangerous enough that one should wear a mask, but not so dangerous that one should shop for books on Amazon?
We are informed that marijuana can cure almost any illness, yet below is a marijuana shopper who feels the need to protect him/her/zir/theirself via a mask (Fauci-approved cloth version). If he/she/ze/they is about to inhale healing cannabis, why does he/she/ze/they need to worry about a minor bug such as SARS-CoV-2? Note also the trans-enhanced rainbow flag on the front door.
Speaking of rainbow flags, nearly every merchant had one, but only some featured Black Lives Matters or Trans People Belong signs.
Note the tattoos behind the Sign of Justice:
The University of Vermont featured both indoor and outdoor maskers of the young/healthy/slender variety, but unfortunately I was too slow to get good photos. Even more upsetting: the “intentional intersectional space” was closed.
Shout-out to Heritage Aviation at KBTV for the usual awesome service. Also to U.S. Customs at Burlington for hassle-free clearance inbound from the Land of Blackface and Political Unity.
Universities have substantial full-time credentialed bureaucracies to deal with gender issues and certainly MIT’s is second to none. Here’s an article from back in April 2023 about an MIT facility that was formerly exclusive to those who identified as “women”… “A home away from home”:
The Margaret Cheney Room remains indispensable after nearly 140 years.
The Cheney Room has been an oasis for MIT women ever since the original one opened on the Boston campus in 1884, when women at the Institute were scarce. Today’s enrollment numbers are much more balanced than in early days, with women making up 48% of the undergraduate and 39% of the graduate student body. But there’s still a need for dedicated spaces on campus where women and nonbinary students can gather, says Lauryn McNair, assistant dean of LBGTQ+ and Women and Gender Services at MIT.
“Women’s centers and spaces are still important, even in a changing landscape of gender,” says McNair, explaining that the space today is a haven for both women and nonbinary people. “At its foundation, a women’s space is built upon the core concepts of community through safety and support, access, affirmation and recognition, and intersectionality. I hope for students to feel at home in the Cheney Room and that this is a space for them that celebrates and affirms who they are so they can thrive at MIT.”
Updates include reconfiguring old rooms to create new, more useful spaces and adding new furniture, fresh paint, and contemporary art that was created by female and nonbinary artists. After getting input from students, McNair chose the artworks to reflect how they see themselves in the world today.
Why do the experts force “women” to share with 72 additional gender IDs recognized by Science? Instead of one room that excludes “men” but admits people identifying with every other gender, why not 73 rooms that exclude men, each of the 73 rooms devoted to a single gender ID? How are women “equal” on Women’s Equality Day if they are lumped together with 72 other gender IDs while “men” are considered a special class (admittedly for the purpose of exclusion)
Real World Divorce (sometimes “equality” before the law means winning 97-98 percent of family court lawsuits; see the Massachusetts and New Hampshire chapters, for example, and associated Census Bureau data on the gender IDs of those who’ve won custody of cash-yielding children)
Title IX, which “prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government” (but, apparently, federally-funded MIT can have facilities exclusively for some gender IDs without having any separate-but-equal facility for those who identify as “men”)
How did my favorite Nikki Haley do in the Republican debate a couple of nights ago? And, in a matter of local interest, what about the hated fascist tyrant of Florida, Ron DeSantis (who continues to oppress Latinx migrants such as Lionel Messi)?
I happened to be at my mom’s retirement apartment building on the night of the debate. The elderly Democrats there (DC suburbs, remember, so all of these folks made their money from bigger government) were intensely interested. I asked “If Joe Biden were a mental vegetable, would you still vote for him?” The answer was “yes”. I followed up with “What if Joe Biden were dead. What you vote for his corpse to serve as president rather than a Republican?” The answer was again “yes”. I never figured out why people who would never consider voting for a Republican would bother to watch. (They also expressed intense fear that Trump would return, though none can cite any example of personal suffering or even suffering of an acquaintance that they attribute to Trump’s first administration.)
There are a fair number of Jews in the building and they have followed recent political events in Israel in U.S. media. Their impression is that “everyone in Israel is out protesting.” (I didn’t have a chance to ask whether the victims of tyranny in Israel will seek asylum in Syria or if Lebanon is the preferred destination for refugees.) A couple of young visitors who had just returned from two weeks in Israel said, “We didn’t see anyone protesting,” but this wasn’t persuasive.
Based on consumption of U.S. media, another prevalent belief among the older crowd was that most of Hawaii had been torched. They’d checked in with anyone they knew who might have been on Oahu, for example.
Earlier this month, I stopped into BETA Technologies, a $1 billion (financing) electric aircraft baby that has been growing in the unlikely crib of the Green Mountains. With offices and labs in Burlington (KBTV) and flight tests across the lake at Plattsburgh (KPBG), the company is pushing ahead on making all aspects of battery-electric aviation practical.
Much of the company’s effort seems to have gone into making better electric motors. Cooling is a challenge for a motor that puts out 200+ hp continuously and there have been multiple iterations of design. The 3D printers were all running when I visited while mechanical engineers labored at desktop PCs.
Does it fly? Yes! In fact, a test pilot told me about going more than 300 nm on one charge. The company is working on two aircraft at the same time:
The CTOL version on the left (“conventional takeoff and landing”) might be more interesting for the general aviation crowd. Why pay $1 million for a new piston-powered airplane that is trying to shake itself and you apart with vibration and deafen you and your passengers with noise when you can cruise in smooth quiet electric comfort? BETA is hoping for certification in 2025 (which means 2027?) and is also working on the ground support infrastructure to make these aircraft practical transportation solutions. Charging will supposedly take about one hour, which is inferior to refueling time, but my host posted out that electric aircraft don’t waste any time in startup/runup/shutdown. The company has a Pipistrel electric two-seater and he demonstrated that it is up and running within a few seconds after flipping four switches.
One area where BETA might have less certification challenges than competitors is that they’re not trying to create a fully autonomous aircraft. In the VTOL version, one of the four seats is for a pilot with a powered-lift type rating on his/her/zir/their certificate (maybe the CTOL version can be flown by a pilot with a single-engine land rating?). On the other hand, if a commercial operator orders 100 of these, the operating will have to fight United Airlines for 100 pilots.
Just outside their engineering hangar is an example of what the ground support station would look like. The left cube is a GPU that can be hooked up to run cabin heat or A/C. The center is for a massive charging cable to top up the 800V battery. The right cube is for cooling the battery (during charging).
The company has a “study hall” where local kids can come in to learn about how battery packs, inverters, and three-phase AC motors work.
There is also a non-motion sim right by the front door:
I came away impressed with the company’s spirit and cooperative energy.
What’s the competition? Boeing-owned Wisk had a booth and a demonstration flight at Oshkosh this year:
Considering that it has the same seating capacity as a Cessna 172, the Wisk machine is enormous. It the electric future is more efficient, why does the efficient vehicle take up four parking spaces? And dare anyone ask how much it will cost to put together this much carbon fiber and plastic?
The BETA eVTOL works like a DJI drone. The rotors are fixed, but may spin at different speeds. A pusher propeller at the rear can then push the machine to cruise at 120 knots or more. Wisk takes a leaf from the Boeing V-22 Osprey, which cost $30 billion in pre-Biden money to develop, and tilts the motors as necessary.
If Wisk can achieve its engineering, certification, and production goals, the customers won’t have to worry about hiring pilots: the tilt-rotor is fully autonomous.
The best talk that we attended at Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture) was by Mike Stevens, a Cirrus test pilot, on a verification flight for the parachute system in the Vision Jet. The FAA did not demand this test, but Cirrus decided to do it anyway. Landing under the parachute carries a risk of back injury and destroys the airframe, so the idea was to cut the deployed ‘chute away, as had been done on a Cirrus SR20 test flight two decades earlier, and then fly the airplane to a runway. Stevens showed us video of the SR20 flipping over after the cut-away and said “that’s a little sporty to do in a jet.” It was impressive to see what had to go into the planning of the operation, including, for example, nets to protect the engine inlet from sucking in fragments of the cords.
“Tumbleweed” gave us a good talk on the Burning Man Airport, including the prep, the surface maintenance, and the new-since-a-few-years-ago air traffic control facility (some of the same controllers who handle EAA AirVenture go out to deal with what in some ways is a bigger challenge). She has been the airport manager in various years so could speak to a variety of aspects of the operation. See also my article Burning Man for turboprop pilots.
The worst talk, by far, was by a federal government working regarding a four-year struggle (or five?) to create a mobile-friendly version of www.aviationweather.gov. We lasted about 30 minutes and hadn’t heard anything about what the site could do for pilots. The entire talk was about the struggles of insiders, e.g., moving hosting providers. (Pilots still don’t have any simple source for a cloud tops forecast, which was formerly part of the “area forecast” that was discontinued in favor of these unusable web sites. If you can climb over the tops of clouds you’ll be ice-free in the Northeast and bump-free in Florida, so it is important to know in advance. (Elites in pressurized aircraft don’t care because they can always keep climbing.))
Russell Klingaman, a lawyer, gave a talk about the Wright brothers and their patent litigation (“the aileron wars”). For Klingaman, the Wright brothers are villains who held back aviation in the U.S. by 10-20 years. They had wanted to produce as few airplanes as possible and make as much money as possible via patent litigation.
Timothy Ravich, an aviation attorney at a big firm in Chicago, gave an overview talk on eVTOL. It was light on the practical and legal barriers these folks are going to face in getting their products FAA certified and heavy on the social injustice suffered by Americans who identify as “women”. In the slide below, we learn that women spend twice as much time taking transportation as men, pay twice as much when they do need transportation, and are more likely to die in a car crash. As Bill Burr points out, a lot of women do the hardest job in the world of being a mother and therefore shouldn’t have to incur much risk or cost of transportation (since staying home in pajamas is always an option). Nobody in the audience challenged any of these statistics. (AAA says that men spend more time driving than women; IIHS says that men are more likely to be killed in car accidents.)
Seth Washburne opened up about trying to transition from a Cessna 172 into a DC-3 restoration project that went off the rails and cost $2 million in pre-Biden money.
We didn’t make it to even half of the talks that sounded interesting. I’m especially sorry that I didn’t get to meet Zara Rutherford, who flew around the world VFR recently. There was also a talk on rebuilding a Boeing B-17. That’s what next year is for!
Let’s also not forget after hours. A few images from the SOS Brothers Beer Tent, across from our Walmart tent:
I’m sure that a lot of learning happens at SOS University!
Office space that used to rent for $80 per square foot per year is now selling for $120 per square foot for the entire building (source). If rental rates go back to where they were, in other words, a buyer could make his/her/zir/their money back in two years.
There is no question that San Francisco is suffering from a deep self-inflicted wound of shutting down during coronapanic, which emptied out the city as the elite righteous fled to their suburban bunkers. The children who lost 1.5 years of school will live shorter lives, statistically, due to their curtailed education, and also suffer from a lower lifetime income. But that suffering and those premature deaths are a long way off. Meanwhile, the negative economic effects of lockdown are already priced into the real estate in SF.
What about the disorder, crime, etc. that gets so much press? Those aren’t being addressed because the elite neighborhoods aren’t significantly affected. The elites don’t care what happens in the Tenderloin because they never go there. Similarly, the elites in government shouldn’t be starved for property tax revenue because of Proposition 13. The typical building in San Francisco has been owned for a long time and is paying property tax on a 2005 value, for example. Thanks to inflation and a period of sustained economic growth before coronapanic, nominal property values are still higher than the Prop 13 tax value for the typical building. Thus, if a building sells, even for half what it was worth in 2019, the city’s rulers get a boost in revenue.
My theory is that eventually the crime and disorder will begin to hurt the elites and they’ll fight back with an oppressive clean-up like what Giuliani did in 1990s New York City. California Democrats have already shown that they will disregard all of their stated principles, such as providing housing for the unhoused, when expedient. Thus, nothing would stop a California Democrat from rounding up all of the unhoused in San Francisco, exporting them to “protection camps” in the Central Valley, and prosecuting and imprisoning anyone who commits what today are considered minor crimes.
In other words, San Francisco peasants don’t have to wait for some kind of improvement in government efficiency or other unrealistic change. The peasants’ lives will improved just as soon as the elites’ lives are touched. This is the same mechanism that operated in 2020. The elites had insulated themselves from every conceivable bad thing. They had schedule flexibility so they didn’t have to share the jammed roads with peasants. Their neighborhoods were untouched by crime. They had private jets and helicopters so they could move around freely. Then SARS-CoV-2 came along, a virus that had the potential to kill both the rich and the poor. The elites took previously unthinkable actions, such as closing schools for peasant children, in hopes of saving their own skins. Sweeping through the city and removing anyone living in a tent is a much less difficult policy to implement than locking down peasants and their school-age children for 1.5 years.
What are the forces in San Francisco’s favor? The U.S. is headed for a population of 450 million (Pew), entirely driven by low-skill immigration. The U.S. hasn’t succeeded in building any new cities. With a larger population, therefore, the price premium for an existing city should increase. Existing cities are at the center of transportation systems.
The huge flaws in my argument: Detroit and Baltimore. Despite massive population growth for the U.S. as a whole, these cities remain poor and depopulated. The Rust Belt cities of Upstate New York and Ohio also can be considered counterexamples. I don’t have an argument for why San Francisco can’t become Detroit.
A potential flaw in my plan to get rich by purchasing an office building is that residential can come back without commercial coming back. The academics who provided the necessary intellectual cover for elite policy in 2020, by saying that work from home was actually more productive than in-office work (i.e., the companies that paid rent on office space were stupid) have now been drafted to say that work from home is 10-20 percent less efficient (paper from 2023 versus paper from summer 2020; same author at same institution, but different Science as necessary). If we believe the 20% number, therefore, even a company with moderately paid workers might find it efficient to pay 50 Bidies per square foot per year in rent (assume 200′ per worker, that’s $10,000 per worker per year).
Leaving Detroit and Baltimore aside, there has to be some price at which renting office space in the heart of a city is a smart business move. It can be used for light manufacturing, for shipping and distribution, for collaboration, for running 3D printers, etc. The most desirable workers to hire are the young, who typically don’t have big comfortable houses in which to spend all day every day. Escaping roommates and a dark apartment to look out the window of a skyscraper should have some value to a 25-year-old.
Readers who are closer to San Francisco than I am: what’s your guess about the future of the city’s office space market?
The Westfield Mall does indeed seem troubled, but not dangerous:
The elites can still buy their Rolex watches in the neighborhood and IKEA opens TODAY to serve the peasants.
If you don’t like Swedish meatballs after shopping for no-longer-that-cheap furniture, you can get trans-enhanced-plus-intersex-circle chicken and rice:
We circled back to find a Four Seasons Hotel next to some empty retail space and an ornate Hearst building:
Pedestrians are righteously masked outdoors while the robotaxis clumsily poke their way through traffic:
(Why wouldn’t a robotaxi company want office space?)
What if the Islamically covered folks in the above photo want to purchase a notebook?
Shopping at Target is a slightly different experience than what I found during a May 2023 visit in Bozeman, Montana. The store offers “secured shelves” that only employees can open. Shoppers were reminded at the rainbow-free front door that they needed to follow the orders of California Covidcrats, “including wearing a face covering,” but the majority of the folks inside the store were mask-free.
Our next stop was Fisherman’s Wharf. The Musée Mécanique displays a machine that associates providing and using opium with being Chinese:
There were plenty of vacant stores in what used to be a prime tourist area.
The tax-avoidance champions at Patagonia say that our home planet is imperiled. Like other climate change alarmists, they simultaneously fret about comparatively minor issues. If they think the Earth needs to be “saved”, as they write on their front window, why did they buy an “intersectional Pride flag” instead of a solar cell array? Won’t the manufacturing and shipping of the Pride flag actually accelerate climate change? If all humanity will be wiped out soon, along with the planet itself, does it matter whether their LGBTQ+ employees enjoy “equality” at the time that they’re incinerated?
My host lives in North Beach and can purchase equality-enhancing Patagonia clothing all day every day. What if he wants groceries? The Safeway shut down and then most of the other stores in the mini-mall died:
After enjoying observing outdoor masking in the city, we were treated to visions of outdoor masking in the woods:
The beach that would be busy with swimmers near our house was empty due to cold water and big waves:
My friend and I had a great meal at a Korean place (Toyose) in the Sunset:
(The clientele was about 90 percent Asian and the place was full at 8:30 pm on a weekday.)
Circling back to the main theme of this post…. San Francisco still has a lot of creative people who start companies. Space gets tighter in the U.S. with every immigrant who comes across the border. How can city’s real estate not recover?
What if wrong as usual and the righteous stay in the suburbs? (i.e., Detroit and Baltimore turn out to be the models, not Manhattan) Below is what I found on the coffee table of a Democrat who says that his #1 passion is helping people of color. As it happens, 20 years ago he chose to isolate his family from people of color by moving to Piedmont (just above Oakland and a world away as far as the schools are concerned).
