Mid-engine Corvette is a supercar for supersized people?

by philg

Americans are at the large and heavy end of the spectrum of humanity. Car and Driver says “The 2020 Corvette Is at the Large and Heavy End of the Mid-Engined Crowd”. Coincidence?

Large exterior dimensions portend generous passenger and cargo space; the latter has been a long-running Corvette strong suit. That remains true in the C8. Its head- and legroom figures nearly match the C7’s (legroom is down by 0.2 inch), which is above the mid-engined-supercar average. From the driver’s seat, it feels more spacious than the C7, although the Cayman, R8, and NSX have more headroom.

But generous dimensions also mean mass, especially at the Corvette’s aggressive price that doesn’t allow engineers to throw endless expensive lightweight materials at it. Chevy is being coy on weight by only divulging a dry-weight figure of 3366 pounds. That implies a curb weight of roughly 3600 pounds, which is about 150 pounds heavier than the C7 (which itself gained 100 pounds over the C6). That makes it far heavier than the mid-engined cadre, more than 400 pounds above the lightest, such as the Cayman and the McLarens. Only the Audi R8 and the Acura NSX, which is laden with electric motors and a battery pack, weigh more.

Given that we won’t trust distracted humans to drive soon enough and our roads are generally too traffic-clogged and/or police-patrolled to use more than 10 percent of this car’s capability, does it make sense to spend $60,000 on a mid-engine C8 Corvette? (not “rational sense” of course, in that a Toyota Camry will handle any transportation task better, but “fun and way cheaper than most things in aviation sense”).

One interesting aspect to a two-seat car is that I think it becomes legal to drive with a child in the front seat (the otherwise dangerous airbag is automatically disabled via a weight sensor, right?).

A few snapshots from the Conrad Hotel in Washington, D.C.:

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A fifth grader reviews Carnival Cruise to Bermuda

by philg

At a late June birthday party for one of my best 4-year-old friends, a fifth grader mentioned that she had just returned from a Carnival cruise from New York to Bermuda and back.

How was it?

“It got rough on the second day.”

Was anyone seasick?

“There was vomit everywhere,” she replied. “They didn’t have any bags, so people were throwing up on the floor, in the stairways. Everywhere.”

How about Bermuda itself?

“We were there for only 8 hours. The beach was nice.”

Related:

  • Tempted by the above to go farther south?“Why Waves of Seaweed Have Been Smothering Caribbean Beaches” (Atlantic): “In 2018, as seaweed piled up on beaches throughout the Caribbean, it began to rot. Already stinking and sulfurous, the thick layers began to attract insects and repel tourists. The seaweed—a type of brown algae called sargassum—had grown in the ocean and washed ashore in unprecedented quantities. It prevented fishers from getting into the water, and entangled their nets and propellers. It entangled sea turtles and dolphins, too, fatally preventing them from surfacing for air. It died and sank offshore, smothering seagrass meadows and coral reefs. Barbados declared a national emergency.”
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What is happening with the iPhone 2019 camera?

by philg

“Apple Suddenly Abandons Massive New iPhone Camera Upgrade” (Forbes):

Major UK newspaper The Telegraph has revealed that Apple has pulled cutting edge camera technology from its upcoming iPhone 11 line-up and the company has nothing comparable to replace it. With Apple (controversially) redesigning the iPhone 11 around its massive camera upgrade, the news is a shock.

Where does that leave photographers who want the best possible images from a Smartphone? All of the top-ranked cameraphones on DxOMark are Android (Huawei and Samsung topping the list). What has kept me on iOS, though, is that the Apple software is great at wringing the best out of the sensor, e.g., with color balance or intelligent focus point selection.

What’s the next big cycle for Android? Not until spring 2020 for the new Samsungs? Nobody is doing my dream phone with extra thickness for a substantial battery, a bigger sensor, and a bigger lens, right?

What will Apple have? A three-lens system like Android phones have already had for a while? (history)

My iPhone X is less than one year old (required replacement under warranty), but it already seems a little weak in terms of battery life. If I can hang on until September will there be a world of photographic improvement from the next generation of iPhones?

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Crazy cheap solar power plant

by philg

“World’s Largest Solar Power Plant Switched On” (Forbes):

The $870 million project was the result of a competitive tender process that will see electricity from the site sold to the Emirates Water and Electricity Company (EWEC) for around 2.4 cents per kWh, a record at the time of the auction and a record for any completed solar project. It was built by the Indian firm Sterling & Wilson with nearly 3000 people working on site during the peak of activity.

Can this be right? These profit-driven folks can recover their $870 million by selling power at 2.4 cents/kWh? That’s more or less free (the average cost in the U.S. to consumers is about 13 cents/kWh, which of course includes distribution).

Most parts of the U.S. are not as sunny as the UAE, but some parts are. Could we build a monster plant like this in Arizona or Nevada and run the power back to the cloudy East Coast? A friend who used to run a mutual fund that invested in this area said, “It would be a no-brainer economically to run a DC high voltage line from wind farms in Oklahoma to New York City. You could shut down every fossil fuel power plant in New York. But the U.S. power grid is fragmented and the people who stand to benefit from that have enough politicians in their pockets to keep it fragmented. So you’ll never see that power line built.”

Vaguely related: This investor considers Jeff Immelt to be the most incompetent executive in recent American business history. “GE actually made windmills so they knew that the price was going to drop below that of coal-fired power plants,” he said. “Yet still, GE bought Alstom, which has been disastrous. Even if the market for fossil fuel plants had held up, GE was locking itself into French labor, which any rational businessperson would seek to avoid. It is fair to say that the folks at Alstom were a lot smarter than anyone at GE.”

For the rest of the world, where they aren’t as plagued by cronyism in power transmission as we are, will it be time to go nuts with electricity (cars, planes, heat pumps, etc.)?

Also, does this mean we don’t have to worry about about climate change and CO2? Who is going to bother burning fossil fuels for any reason if they can get electricity for 2.4 cents/kWh plus reasonable transmission fees? (Aviation? Just turn the electricity into hydrogen and then run your electric motors off a fuel cell!) We were terrified in the 1970s about burying ourselves in nuclear waste. Then it turned out that we couldn’t operate nuclear plants economically, so the amount of waste generated was much smaller than anticipated (we just burned natural gas and dumped out CO2 instead!).

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Why didn’t Jeffrey Epstein move?

by philg

My Facebook feed is lit up with posts regarding Jeffrey Epstein. Example:

My current guess: Trump’s tweet was his standard distraction from something awful by starting something even more awful. He may not even have meant to do it by being an obvious racist: just to whip up some boilerplate outrage that his base would love and that journalists would eat up. The question: distraction from what? My guess: Jeffrey Epstein.

One practical question: Why did Mr. Epstein spend any time in New York, Florida, or the U.S. after his 2005-2008 encounters with the criminal justice system?

Wikipedia shows that the age of consent in New York is 17 and in Florida is 18. What is illegal “sex with a child” in these states, however, might be legal (albeit sleazy) in adjacent states such as New Jersey (16) and Georgia (16).

Once he read the news about prominent men (e.g., Bill Cosby) prosecuted and/or convicted for decades-old offenses, why didn’t Epstein get in his Gulfstream and buy into citizenship in a European country that won’t extradite its citizens? France (age of consent: 15) or Germany (age of consent: 14; legal prostitution)?

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Socialism begins at home: Bernie Sanders staff demands $15/hour

by philg

Article from Newsweek:

Campaign workers for Bernie Sanders have taken aim at one of the senator’s key policies in his 2020 presidential run — raising the federal minimum wage. According to The Washington Post, some members of Sanders’ campaign team have been lobbying to raise their wages so that they make the $15 hourly rate that the Vermont senator has frequently called for both on the campaign trail and in Washington D.C.

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Transactional sex around Lake Malawi

by philg

As someone who shares a home with African cichlids, I clicked on a headline from NPR: “The Dark Secret Of Lake Malawi”. The story, however, turned out not to be about future aquarium pets:

“Sex for fish.”

That unlikely phrase is used in some lakefront communities in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world where men catch the fish and women sell the catch to local customers.

Or if the supply of fish is low because of overfishing, several women may vie for a fisherman’s catch — and transactional sex may be used as a bargaining point.

The writer does not seem to have researched the question of whether commercial sex is more common around this lake compared to other parts of the same countries.

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Flight school lobbies should have a fleet position display

by philg

National Flight Centre in Dublin has an interesting functional decor item next to the front desk: two big flat-screen televisions showing the location of the flight school’s fleet (why two? a view of the traffic pattern and then a view of the region). ADS-B is not mandated in Ireland currently so they are doing this with portable GPS trackers that are in a key/notebook bag that students take out to the plane when renting. For a U.S. school in a transponder-required area, however, I think the same thing could be done with software pulling ADS-B data from public sources.

When customers and potential customers come in they can see all of the fun that is happening. For our school it would be planes out on Cape Cod, up in Maine, etc. (Would need to program the software to show the last received position so that the plane does not disappear from the Martha’s Vineyard airport once shut down.)

Readers: What’s the easiest way to build this using ADS-B data? What source?

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Offering U.S. citizenship to those who prove they cannot live without taxpayer assistance

by philg

I learned recently that transitioning from Green Card to U.S. citizenship requires paying a $725 fee. However, the fee can be waived if the new American can prove that this would be a hardship to pay, e.g., because the Green Card holder is receiving taxpayer-funded benefits, such as public housing, food stamps, etc. In other words, our government has an official policy of granting citizenship to working-age people who prove that they (a) receive means-tested benefits (“are on welfare”), and (b) can’t scratch up $725.

How does it work in practice? The case I learned about involves a family that won a Green Card via lottery five years ago. After arriving in the U.S., they were entitled to means-tested prices for essentials, i.e., taxpayer-funded housing, taxpayer-funded health care, taxpayer-funded food (SNAP or “food stamps”), etc. On realizing that there was no social stigma to being a divorced woman in the U.S., the wife divorced the husband, explaining that she had never wanted to be married, but had only done it because it was expected in her birth culture. Neither of the parents earned much money so there wasn’t significant divorce litigation. As children don’t yield significant cash compared to public assistance, she and the father were able to agree to a 50/50 schedule. The result for U.S. taxpayers was there were now two households eligible for government-provided housing, health insurance, food stamps, and smartphones. And soon those will be two citizen-led households…

[Note: the typical American newspaper would not describe someone living in a taxpayer funded house, receiving taxpayer-funded health insurance, eating taxpayer-funded food, and calling friends on a taxpayer-funded smartphone to be “on welfare” because the foregoing are all non-cash benefits.]

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