Just before Oshkosh: “Garmin introduces its largest TXi touchscreen flight display yet”. If you want to spend $200,000 on an avionics upgrade to a -G2 Cirrus airplane that was worth $150,000 in pre-Biden dollars in pre-coronapanic times you can now get a 12″ display from Garmin. Did they fix the absurdly low 1280×768 resolution on the 10″ displays that made approach plates illegible unless the pilot wanted to remove his/her/zir/their right hand from the controls and pinch/pan to view different parts of the plate sequentially? It seems that Garmin’s latest and greatest 2025 display has the same resolution as the old one, i.e., 1280×768. This is the resolution that consumers got in 2014 from the Samsung Galaxy Mega 2 ($150 pre-Biden dollars).
How does it look? (ignore the red bands, which are artifacts from the camera/display interaction)
I guess the theory is that the Garmin autopilot is so good the pilot doesn’t have anything better to do than pinch/zoom/pan.
The same company, for a little more than 1/100th the price, introduced a “smart buoy” that keeps track of SCUBA divers (press release). I can’t figure out why it is so difficult to deliver 1080p resolution (1920×1280) to aviation customers.
The company’s “CTOL” aircraft was on display in a spacious six-seat configuration. It can supposedly travel 150 nm with a reasonable reserve (215 nm absolute range) with all six seats occupied. An efficient cruise speed is a Robinson R44-style 105 knots. Against a typical headwind maybe the range is more like 130 nm. Make sure not to run out of battery power because the stall speed is 80 knots, which would mean hitting the ground at over 100 mph.
BETA plans to certify the aircraft under FAR 23, which limits single-engine aircraft to a stall speed of 61 knots unless the manufacturer can demonstrate above-and-beyond crashworthiness. This has been stretched to 67 knots by a couple of companies, e.g., Cirrus for the Vision Jet and Pilatus for the PC-12, but nobody has ever gone anywhere near 80 knots. If the BETA has only one propeller how can it get FAR 23 certification? Maybe the answer is that the single propeller/motor combination has two independent motors internally? Thus, the aircraft could actually be considered a centerline twin?
The actual plane at the event has accumulated 250 hours. The pilots who’ve flown it say that it is quiet enough that they remove their headsets when in cruise (electric engine in the back). An air conditioner is coming soon. Finally we might have an aircraft as comfortable as a Honda Odyssey?
(The tail number is N916LF in memory of Lochie Ferrier, a young MIT graduate and former BETA employee who died in a homebuilt aircraft accident in January 2024. We don’t yet have a final NTSB report, but there appears to have been a power loss in a piston engine that may have been unrelated to the aircraft’s experimental status. 9/16 was Lochie’s birthday.)
The vehicle is huge. If a conventional airframe company built this it would have to sell for $3 million just to pay for the aluminum and carbon fiber construction.
How are the legacy piston-powered companies responding to this innovation? A new paint scheme at the Cirrus pavilion:
Here’s a report on two days of driving an $80,000 Mercedes EQE SUV rented from Budget in Dayton, Ohio. What does it look like when parked in front of the kind of house that Mercedes owners deserve?
The FBO gave me a lift to the main terminal to pick up the vehicle. “It’s impossible to hire anyone competent,” said the line guy, “so the rental car companies are extremely short-handed these days and can’t drop off cars with us anymore.”
(Dayton is rich in immigrants and getting richer every year so the line guy’s lived experience is not consistent with economic truth regarding open borders being a surefire path to an ample labor supply. City of Dayton: “Between 2014 and 2019, the total population in the City of Dayton decreased by 0.2% while the immigrant population increased by +25.9% during the same time period.” (remember that a falling population of the native-born and a growing population of migrants is not a “replacement”))
There was a Fall of Saigon scene in the terminal. All of the companies except Avis/Budget were out of cars. Those with Avis/Budget reservations were told they’d need to wait several hours beyond their reservation time due to a shortage of vehicles. My electric reservation, however, bumped me towards the front of the queue.
I was admonished to return the vehicle with at least 80 percent charge or face a $75 failure-to-charge penalty. I discovered later that this would have been a challenge due to the fact that the car was set up to stop charging at precisely 80 percent (i.e., you’d have to tow it or push it from the charging station to the airport in order to achieve the 80 percent charge return goal). The vehicle was delivered to me with a 79 percent charge:
The fancy electronics immediately disappointed. There is a navigation system with points of interest, but it couldn’t find the long-established FBO. Fortunately, unlike with a Nazi-tainted Tesla, the entirely Nazi-free Mercedes supports Apple CarPlay.
The driving experience is very different than in a Tesla. There are instruments directly in front of the driver, rather than off to the side on an iPad stapled to the center of the dash. The EQE feels solid and quiet. It doesn’t accelerate any faster than our Honda Odyssey minivan (0-60 in 6+ seconds), but why would anyone in the U.S. (population headed toward 600 million sharing roads designed for a nation of 150 million) need blistering acceleration in a family car?
Charging infrastructure proved to be a challenge. We were in a brand-new hotel with a brand-new parking structure, shared with an office building, and I didn’t see any chargers. The USAF museum has a parking lot that can hold perhaps 600 cars. It has 4 chargers, all of them free (thanks for paying your taxes!), 2 of which were broken. Over a 48-hour period we never went anywhere else that had chargers. Near the end of the rental experience we finally waded deep enough into the menus to find the “eco” setting was preventing a full charge:
Keeping your $80,000 investment from being destroyed is as simple as following the rules on these two full screens of text:
At every startup we were prompted to download a Mercedes USA app and sync it to the car. Here’s what Mercedes USA shows as typical customers:
Here’s the EQE, at the forefront of ground transportation, in front of a building in the neighborhood where the Wright Brothers did their work at the forefront of air transportation (before they figured out that patent litigation made more sense than engineering!).
Conclusion: Although it feels like a better car than any Tesla if what you want to do is drive yourself Point A to Point B, I would rather have a Tesla than an EQE. Tesla seems to be getting its FSD act in gear (so to speak) and Tesla offers Dog Mode as well as cabin overheat protection so that Mindy the Crippler and her canine brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters can be kept safe (also good for infants and toddlers who might be sleeping back there, sometimes forgotten). Based on our experience in not finding chargers I wouldn’t want to own any electric car unless I had a charger and home and owned a gas-powered car for actual trips.
(I returned the car at about 70% charge to the FBO. It took Budget a couple of days to pick it up, presumably due to their short-staffing. They didn’t charge me a “failure to charge” penalty, but they did charge for one day more of rental than I actually used (I had reserved three days and used two).)
Checking out my United Healthcare paperwork, here are some of the latest scams from the American health care system.
The eye doctor billed $1,500, which the uninsured (sucker) would have had to pay. United Healthcare cut them back to $179, apparently the fair price. The eye doctor’s technician messed up the prescription by not using the automatic refractometer to get a basic sanity check before asking me all of the “1 versus 2” questions. I went back and United Healthcare was billed another $112, which they decided should have been $34. (Shout-out to Costco, which remade two pairs of glasses with the corrected prescription at no charge.)
I went to see a different specialist. The bill was $900 for what United Healthcare said should have been $219 worth of services.
I went to a physical therapist for a $934 look at my neck (tip: don’t sit at a computer for decades!) that was worth only $130.
How did we get to the point where stuff like this doesn’t faze Americans? We’ve become accustomed to the idea that health care providers try to rip off the uninsured, that absurd prices fly around in the system until they’re negotiated down by a computer or a person at a health insurance company (and, of course, we have to pay for that negotiation since the health insurer has no source of revenue other than us), but how did that happen?
The $27,321 MRI (the fair price was $1,287 and the value was $0)
“Some Hospitals Marking Up Treatments By as Much as 1,000 Percent: Study” (NBC 2015): “The hospital with the highest charges? North Okaloosa Medical Center, about an hour outside Pensacola, Florida. It charges uninsured and out-of-network patients 12.6 times what Medicare allows.” (the justification for this is that the hospitals also provide “uncompensated care”, e.g., for migrants who don’t qualify for Medicaid, and the best way to make up for these losses is to cheat the uninsured)
CNN story about a hero to progressives (I personally see the providers and the government regulators as the villains; in my view insurers are doing the best they can inside a completely broken system):
A friend from the Northeast is getting his son settled as a freshman at the University of Florida in beautiful Gainesville. The program starts in the middle of the Florida summer for no reason that I can understand (if kids are smart enough to get into UF, ranked #30 by US News, you’d think they’d be smart enough to run away from July in Florida). His teenage daughter accompanied him. He rented a 2023 Tesla Model 3 “long range dual motor” with 52,000 miles from Avis in Orlando for the trip. Here are some of his messages to a group chat that includes a couple of Tesla owners.
Oh so my rental doesn’t have the famous FSD. Or EAP [Tesla Enhanced Autopilot]. Took 62% of the charge to get to Gainesville from Orlando. I am at 22% now and have range anxiety.
Wood veneer is coming off. Leather on the steering wheel too.
The car wobbles at 70-80 mph.
Some sort of a noise in the cabin – my guess something came loose.
UI is cool and looks Apple-y
The key card situation is kind of [Trigger Warning!] retarded. Mercedes keyless go is more ergonomic in the sense that it opens the car when you grab the handle. The concept of affordance.
The EV acceleration is cool, probably matches most sport cars 5x its price. One pedal braking feels pretty stupid.
Anyway I have two more days, but so far it is nothing to write home about and I am perplexed why you guys are SO in love with it. In terms of positives, its UI is certainly better than that of most cars, but it is changing. [Editor: I would vehemently disagree with this. A screen in the middle of the dashboard isn’t the right UI for a car! The driver shouldn’t have to turn his/her/zir/their head.]
[responding to the Tesla owners who tell him to use the automation] I am 100% engaging AutoSteer. It is what nearly every new gas car has today. I suspected based on description that this is what it was and it turned out to be exactly that. I had that in a Mercedes GLS since February 2017. It is utterly just meh. I drive around and I don’t feel a difference between it and other rental cars except excellent acceleration.
[responding to a Tesla owner who says he loves his new Tesla (HW4) with FSD] this reminds me of how Apple people speak about apple products. Irrational excitement about things available in other forms. “You should absolutely get it. It is simply the best and next level.” Then I look at it and go “this????” I am getting a [Toyota] Grand Highlander. [Response from a Tesla fanboy: You are like the people who argued for horses after the automobile came out.]
Right now there are two chargers in Gainesville. So many hot moms at UF. Not that many but infinitely more than in Boston because the number there is around zero.
There are douchebags like me sitting for half an hour here at the supercharger waiting for their cars to charge. 122 miles are 63% [the “long range” Tesla lost 63% battery over 122 miles; it starting charging at 467 miles/hr and once over 80% slowed down to 186 miles/hr]
[in response to my question about whether the charging station was somewhere convenient] No it is nowhere I wanted to be. I drove specifically there
My car performed at 1.9 miles per % charge. That is 95 mile radius with 0% charge upon arrival. 90 miles with 5% reserve. Basically if you remove fanboyism, it is very limited. Not a real car. However, this also says charge limit 85%. Why is it there, why is it set to this value and most importantly, why are we calculating ranges based on 100%. Let us assume a 5% reserve and 85% max. This leaves us with 80% battery which implies a 76 mile [round-trip] range.
[daughter] just got into the car and asked how come this car has constant weird noises. Something is clicking something is wiggling
it was in the worst shape of any rental car i got in the last two years or more
Tesla key card only works on the driver side and not on the passenger side. I know I’m using it wrong. I should be using an app like the enlightened people. So I had to go around the car to lock it.
We got into the car this morning. The car was hot because it was black. I reached out to turn the vent to blow on my face for some time and discovered that its vents aren’t adjustable.
Navigation is seriously flawed [Tesla does not supply CarPlay and Android Auto like every other car]. It says turn right on west X road while the signs show turn left on west and turn right on east. I have never seen this happen on Waze.
Its vehicle detection has a ton of mistakes. It detects big electronic signs as cars. Sees objects on the road that aren’t there. So if FSD relies on this stuff, I am not sure it works as advertised.
[the tall son] just said – “Back seat is terrible. I had to get out and stretch because everything hurt”; These people are used to driving for 4-5 hours in the back of a car non-stop to NYC.
I will have to add 30 minutes to my travel time because I have to return the car charged to Avis. Or I will be charged at crazy rates (similar to not filling up your tank).
Tesla shackles me and adds hours of tax on my freedom.
One of the Tesla owners in the chat, whose Tesla Y is just three months old (latest AI hardware), posted a video of his drive home on FSD. “Dark, rain, lane changes, stop lights, merge onto highway, passing other cars, sharp curves.”
Question: If Full Self-Driving is great and Tesla knows that it is great why wouldn’t Tesla enable it on all rental Teslas so as to promote sales of the machines?
Also, why doesn’t Tesla have support for rentals in its app whereby Avis or Hertz can conveniently authorize a renter temporarily to use the Tesla app instead of the key card? Tesla actually does have support for authorizing additional drivers who will use the app, but it appears to be a facility more for family members who are going to be long-term authorized drivers.
He included a photo of what might be intended to appeal to white cisgender heterosexuals who claim to be “allies” of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community:
My own story: I rented a beater Chevy Malibu from Avis in Idaho (about 50,000 miles and smelled like a “bustling Gaza shisha cafe”). It had more than 500 miles of range forecast and delivered. Drove about 800 miles and spent maybe 6 minutes at two charging stations. We couldn’t have done our trip in the above-described rental Tesla without significant planning. Craters of the Moon is in a no-charger desert as well as a no-water desert (energy.gov):
We drove 154 miles from Sun Valley (Ketchum) to Twin Falls by way of Craters of the Moon:
If we’d been delivered a rental Tesla 3 at 85 percent and didn’t use Dog Mode or cabin overheat protection we would have perhaps made it into Twin Falls on fumes and with bitten nails.
I talked to the pilots after the flight and learned that special sim training is required to operate at this airport. Here’s a best-case instrument approach plate for an aircraft that can climb at 420 feet per nautical mile (might be tough after an engine fails in an airliner):
Notice that the aircraft can’t land unless the lowest clouds are no lower than 900′ above the runway (minimum descent altitude (MDA) without seeing the runway is 6180′ and the runway is 5289′ (TDZE at the top)). That’s essentially visual flying conditions. “What if you’re at 200′ above the runway and a vehicle or another aircraft drives onto the runway?” I asked. “That becomes an ‘extraction’, not a missed approach,” the pilot responded. “Can it be done on one engine?” was my follow-up. “No.” (i.e., there are no good options for a go-around once close to the runway in the event of an engine failure). You can see from this plate that an airport built at JUNOL, just 10 nm south of KSUN, would be idiot-proof.
The downtown hotel recommended by the lawyer with whom I was working, a coronapanic refugee from San Francisco who never did go back to the office, was quoting $1,700 per night. I decided on the budget option of one of the last rooms at the venerable Sun Valley Lodge for $750 per night. While the elites swan around in their G-Wagons, Grenadiers, Ferraris, and restored classic cars, the local post office reminds the peasants how to renew their Medicaid:
(Why don’t the peasants get rich working in town and become ineligible for Medicaid? Most of the servers and cleaners in the village seemed to be from Eastern Europe, here in the U.S. on temporary work visas.)
Returning to swanning around, here are the resident swans in front of the Sun Valley Lodge:
The restaurant at the lodge isn’t abusively expensive, but if you want to save some $$ and honor Maryland’s leading citizen you can zip over to El Niño Y Pupuseria in downtown Ketchum for the inexpensive snack (pupusas) that purportedly resulted in Kilmar Armando Ábrego García being targeted by unspecified gangs in his native El Salvador. The restaurant is quite smoky inside so don’t go unless the weather is nice enough for dining at the outdoor tables.
For soups, sandwiches, and salads at breakfast and lunch hit Bigwood Bread Bakery & Cafe instead (recommended by a local). Grumpy’s was the recommended hamburger joint, but we didn’t try it.
Make reservations in advance for the Thursday night barbecue at Galena Lodge, which features good company at big tables and live music. Drive beyond Galena to the Galena Summit Overlook (8,440′ above sea level according to my phone), if not all the way to Stanley (next town north after Ketchum). Do some hiking on side trails before coming back to Galena Lodge and the easy trails that begin right from there. It would be great to have a Tesla full self-driving car for this journey so as to appreciate the scenery on both sides of the road.
Downtown has an interesting free museum on the opposite corner of an intersection from the library. Part of the museum features Ernest Hemingway. Note the #Truth that the Spanish Civil War was against Fascism. The progressives who traveled to Spain were definitely not fighting for Stalinism, forced collectivization, and the killing of roughly 7,000 Catholic priests.
Stickers in the gift shop remind patrons that the library and the museum are united under the sacred Rainbow Flag:
The Library has an awesome treehouse plus the usual books:
If you’ve got a lot of leftover climbing rope, the library stocks BDSM 101:
They’d just begun to run the lift up to the top of “Baldy” (just over 9000′):
It’s unclear why a 1940s or 1950s car is the right choice for mountain roads, but we saw quite a few beautiful classics in and around town. 1959 Cadillac Coupe de Ville:
1948 Buick Roadmaster in front of the (unimpressive) supermarket (drive 20 minutes south to Hailey to get to an Albertson’s):
And we found the same car later at the National Ballet of Canada performance in the Sun Valley Village:
Sun Valley is an awesome place to spend the summer, but it desperately needs a better airport. It’s not as offensively ritzy as Jackson, Wyoming (maybe because Idaho imposes a state personal income tax rate of over 5 percent vs. 0 percent in Wyoming?). It’s reasonably flat and easy to walk around. The access to trails and outdoor activities is as good as anywhere in the U.S.
What about as a year-round home, either in Ketchum or in Hailey (probably more practical)? Aside from the skiing opportunities, one big plus for young people seems to be college admissions. The kids I talked to who’d gone to high school in Idaho had been admitted to all of the colleges where they applied whereas the kids I know in Maskachusetts, except for one bizarrely superhuman half-Asian boy (admitted even to Harvard, the gold standard for Asian hate!), were rejected almost everywhere.
Loyal readers may remember that I’m an advocate for increasing the number of National Parks as the U.S. population is expanded via immigration. From 2020, Do we need some more national parks?:
Our National Park system was set up in 1872, i.e., for a country with a population of roughly 40 million. Today there are 330 million residents of the U.S. (or 350 million maybe?). Mobility, even in coronashutdown, is greater than it was in 1872. This leads to what I would have previously called “Manhattan-style crowding” in some parks (but now Manhattan has been de-crowded!).
(Note that, due to the population collapse and near-term extinction of the human race cited by Elon Musk, the official Census population right now is over 342 million, up more than 12 million from 2020; we’ve added humans comparable to Metro San Francisco and Metro Miami during humanity’s march to oblivion.)
Back in June, I visited Idaho’s Craters of the Moon National Monument, which could easily become a full National Park with a bit of development. Due to the lack of facilities, it’s certainly much more relaxing than the current slate of National Parks! I think this place could handle the construction of a lodge. There is a jet-capable airport a 15-minute drive away in nuclear-powered Arco, Idaho that is, wonderfully, named after our next President: AOC (6600′ runway, which is a little tight considering the 5,335′ altitude, but it looks as though it could be easily lengthened).
According to the print version of the New York Times, New York City is mostly peaceful and the principal hazards to human happiness are the continued and persistent existences of Donald Trump and the state of Israel:
The parallel universe version of Manhattan covered by the New York Post is a war zone in which people carry rifles as they walk along the sidewalk:
(The gun violence, which never would have happened if Kamala Harris had been elected president, occurred at 6:30 pm yesterday and Southwest Harbor, Maine is a bit far from any printing plant so some of the discrepancy might be explained by logistics.)
As long as we’re on the subject of our media heroes, here’s a CNN story about purported starvation in Gaza in which a woman with a double chin was selected as to illustrate the story:
Screenshot
What am I doing in this nearly-all-white corner of Maine, you might ask? Waiting for BIPOC Climbing Night:
Californians love to destroy things that taxpayers fund, e.g., the Santa Monica Airport. Thirty nine years ago, this love of destruction reached the Los Angeles Central Library, torched by a still-unknown arsonist (see state-sponsored NPR). Nearly 400,000 books were destroyed. Here are some photos from the restored building.
Note the mural showing happy children with guns and also one of Elizabeth Warren’s ancestors:
We need humanoid robots so that every house can have one of these candeliers:
A plaque reminds us that Californians torched their own library twice in one year:
More than five years since the start of Coronapanic, the locals are still trying to avoid SARS-CoV-2 by voluntarily entering a crowded public space while wearing a cloth mask of some sort (note accessory Whole Foods bag):
From my earlier A Greta Thunberg yacht trip to California?, a poster in the Teen section reminding young Californians that humans are in charge of viruses and can end a pandemic via their own actions:
Also worth a repeat, the library reminds teens to cooperate in thwarting ICE:
New York City’s developers and landlords are in a mad scramble to block from City Hall the socialist who wants to freeze rent.
Mamdani is pushing for a host of housing changes to try to ease costs for renters. While he seems to have softened his stance toward working with private developers more recently, at the top of his list is still a controversial rent freeze on the city’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments.
I can’t figure out how the U.S. patchwork of government-controlled housing prices meets the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. American A chooses to refrain from work and lives in public housing and pays $0/month. American B chooses to refrain from work and lives in rent-stabilized or rent-controlled housing and pays whatever housing cost back before 80 million migrants were invited into the U.S. (60 million through 2015). American C chooses to refrain from work and is forced to pay market rates, i.e., fight with over 300 million humans for scraps. What’s “equal” about the government giving these three equally idle humans radically different housing options and prices?
It looks like Mayor Mamdani’s first act, after a huge Queers for Palestine rally, will be to freeze the rent on apartments that are already absurdly cheap compared to the market. But I wonder if that could just be a first step toward government control of all residential rents in New York City. If the government did step in to control rents on all NYC buildings that would be a tremendous step toward the Equal Protection that Americans are supposed to receive from their government.
We live in a democracy, otherwise known was “mob rule”. There are way more tenants than landlords. Nearly every American city is divided into those who are blessed by the government with free or cheap rent and those subjected to cruel market forces. Maybe suburban homeowners would feel some sympathy for landlords, but wouldn’t we expect a majority of voters in nearly every city to vote for government-set (low) rents? It seems like the kind of simple decision that voters in Maskachusetts earning less than $1 million/year were asked to make regarding raising tax rates on those earning more than $1 million/year (the constitutional amendment passed and, supposedly, the fatcats didn’t move).
