What is Hunter Biden going to do now?

by philg

Hunter Biden has been pardoned for everything that he did or might have done over the past 11 years, including any payments to the Big Guy, not paying more than $1 million (pre-Biden dollars) in income tax to the IRS so that gender studies degree loans can be “forgiven”, exercising his Second Amendment right to own firearms, etc. This has some people excited because Joe Biden explicitly said that he would not pardon Hunter. The apparent broken promise shouldn’t be difficult for a cooperative media to spin: Donald Trump is setting up a dictatorship and the resistance needs Hunter on the outside, fully armed, to lead a battalion of Warriors for Democracy (who are also collectors of original contemporary art).

Let’s suppose however that Trump, in command of a $1 trillion/year military, is too formidable a target for the #resistance to take on. What then will the Burisma board member-turned-painter do for work?

Perhaps painting is the long-term career, but “Why would anyone pay $500,000 for a painting by Hunter Biden?” (Guardian, 2021) is an even more difficult question to ask now that Hunter’s dad is no longer in a position to do favors for potential buyers. Let’s assume that the market for original Biden oil paintings has been saturated.

Legal? Hunter Biden, age 54, has a law degree, but Wikipedia doesn’t describe any experience actually working as a lawyer. Hunter lives in Malibu, California (Daily Mail), but there is no evidence that he has ever taken or passed the California bar exam. He can’t start handling family court or eviction cases, therefore. (There is no limit to the work available in California in child support litigation (the state offers unlimited profits to the successful plaintiff) or representing landlords. See below, for example.)

Lobbyist? Hunter Biden was never an elected politician or high-level government worker.

At least as recently as 2023, Hunter Biden enjoyed transportation via private jet (New York Post). Let’s say that requires at least a $2 million/year annual income. What’s the path via which Hunter Biden can make that happen?

How about motivational speaker? Americans love a recovery story and Hunter’s can be inspiring. Maybe he can talk about how his 16-year-younger immigrant wife saved him from various addictions and there will be two much-loved themes to hit (drug-/alcohol-dependency and the benefits of open borders). Hunter could get paid $10,000 per hour to speak to groups of Democrats.

Separate question: Does Navy Joan Roberts get to see her grandfather President Joe Biden now? (state-sponsored NPR) What does Joe Biden have to lose by spending some time with the stripper-turned-plaintiff’s daughter? He’s not going to be running for another political office.

Related:

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Trump tortures our local billionaire Democrats

by philg

In case you missed this story of semi-local interest to us (we’re a 25-minute drive from Donald Trump’s house without traffic)… “Palm Beach, a Democratic Pocket in Florida, Becomes MAGA Central” (WSJ):

This discreet enclave of about 10,000 full-time residents is part of an area that has long tilted blue. While Florida went heavily for Trump on Election Day, voters in Palm Beach County slightly backed the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. But with Trump spending so much time in the area, the town of Palm Beach is emerging as the biggest playground for the incoming administration and luminaries of the MAGA movement.

A popular hotel now houses foreign dignitaries, federal officials and various others vying for government jobs, all meeting with Trump during the frenetic transition period. Traffic is so bad on the island of Palm Beach that longtime residents said they have to drive off on one of three bridges and then drive back on another to avoid bumper-to-bumper tie-ups. And Secret Service agents at the area’s chicest restaurants can outnumber the waitstaff.

Trump spent much of his first term as president at Mar-a-Lago, his 17-acre oceanfront compound and private club that he referred to as his winter White House. He entertained heads of state and based much of his campaign and fundraising efforts there. He stayed nearly 150 days at the compound during his first term.

In some ways, residents said, it now feels like a replay of Season One of the Trump presidency. But this time around, he is likely to spend more time at Mar-a-Lago, said a number of his close associates. Some of the wealthiest members of his circle are thinking about buying homes there.

His transition operation now resides within the gilded walls of his estate, where he interviews candidates for cabinet and staff roles. Mar-a-Lago and nearby communities are poised to become the country’s new center of political gravity.

Many of Palm Beach’s old guard aren’t pleased. Because the road in front of Mar-a-Lago is now closed, traffic has never been worse on the island. What would usually take a couple of minutes to drive can now delay residents by half an hour.

Is it time to revive my idea for a rule that whoever is president has to stay in the White House for four years because the modern security state means that the president’s presence anywhere else is too disruptive for peasants?

Should we check back in a year to see what happens to house prices near Mar-a-Lago? Right now the median (or average?) price of a single-family house in Palm Beach is about $11.3 million (Zillow), a considerable bump compared to pre-coronapanic thanks to Florida Realtor of the Year 2020 and 2021 Andrew Cuomo.

The 17-acre National Historic Landmark Mar-a-Lago itself, of course, was valued at $18 million by the entirely apolitical New York justice system.

Back in 2017, the Boston Globe said that a rising sea would soon take back Mar-a-Lago and the rest of Palm Beach (a barrier island about 7′ above sea level, not to be confused with the city of West Palm Beach, which is protected by this barrier). Given a rational market, therefore, property values should be on a downward trend!

Circling back to Donald Trump… the guy is old and he is comfortable at Mar-a-Lago. Federal employees with desk jobs don’t need to show up to work. Why does Trump need to work from the White House at all? Why not let J.D. Vance handle any demanding in-person tasks in D.C. and around the world? If someone wants something from the U.S. president in 2025-2028, he/she/ze/they can Gulfstream it to PBI, pay whatever ramp fee is demanded, and hop an Uber Black to Mar-a-Lago. What about the summer when, you might argue, Palm Beach isn’t at its best. Neither is D.C.! I’m not aware of Trump owning anything north of metropolitan New York City, but maybe he could, jointly with Bernie Sanders, set up a Peace and Reconciliation summer estate in Burlington, Vermont. Or be boring and use his Bedford, NY mansion (Wikipedia).

Circling back to our MacArthur Foundation New Urbanism development here in Jupiter, Florida… I wonder whether the presence of the U.S. president nearby will be a positive or a negative. I’m guessing that it will be a short-term negative due to security-related disruptions on those rare occasions when we do want to go to West Palm Beach and rarer occasions when we interact with the elites on Palm Beach itself. But perhaps the long-term consequences will be positive. Every rich person who moves to Palm Beach is a potential donor to a local or county-wide cultural institution. Trump doesn’t seem like a pork barrel politician so I’m not expecting a major direct federal investment.

Speaking of Jupiter, here’s a place on the good side of the railroad tracks, recently sold for $34 million:

The house was built in 2007, which means the new owner will get to do a lot of work on various systems, e.g., the roof, over the next 10-15 years!

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Can we get a federal law to require call centers to have caller ID?

by philg

Here’s one for Brendan Carr, soon to be in charge of the Federal Communications Commission (nytimes)… a regulation that requires call centers to have caller ID so that they don’t hassle Americans with “What is your phone number?” questions. As far as I can tell, customer “service” call centers are the only users of the American telephone system that don’t have caller ID, thus leading to the annoying phenomenon of having to provide one’s phone number, the agent having to type it in, etc.

The worst offender in this regard seems to be General Electric. They have an automated system that has called me about 10 times regarding our fancy Monogram gas range. One of the things that we like about it is that LED rings behind each burner control knob light up to show that a burner is on. Or at least they did until the entire system failed. GE sent out a tech who, predictably, decided that parts were required. GE then began shipping out parts in dribs and drabs. After each shipment, the company’s automated system would tell me to schedule a return visit. Then I would press some buttons to talk to a human who would, after asking for my phone number (keep in mind that GE had actually placed the call and, apparently, no longer had the phone number that it had used) say, “We can’t schedule service until the parts are delivered“.

(I did ask “Why is your system programmed to make calls when a part is shipped and ask me to schedule with a live agent if you can’t schedule anything until after a part is delivered?” and, of course, the agents didn’t agree with me that there was anything suboptimal about GE’s system.)

I recognize that this would seem to be at odds with my general support for smaller government, but telecom is already heavily regulated, purportedly for our benefit.

Separately, I would love to know how roughly a dozen parts are required to fix what, in my humble engineer’s brain, must be attributable to the failure of a single component (none of the six burner controls has a working backlight and I think we have a full set of parts for each of the burner knobs, but I have to believe that the root cause is upstream from the knobs).

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Low-skill immigration as a religion and parallels to Evolution-denial

by philg

Happy Native American Heritage Day to Elizabeth Warren and everyone else who celebrates.

As Native Americans have experienced some of the most dramatic effects of immigration, let’s look at an X post that compares Evolution-denial to denial that low-skill immigration can and will cause a country or society to evolve.

Excerpts:

Evolution deniers accept that “microevolution” happens. They also agree that different species exist. They just don’t think that a large number of small mutations over time can lead to a new species.

Both groups of deniers often demand to be shown direct evidence of transformation in progress. For example, “Show me the monkey turning into a human” or “Show me that California has turned into Mexico.” A snapshot may not clearly reveal an ongoing process, but that doesn’t mean the process isn’t taking place.

In general, people find it difficult to intuitively understand the impact of many small changes over time. This difficulty, combined with ideological beliefs that lead them to want to deny it, is why many otherwise sensible people deny that evolution takes place.

Also from X (immigration-loving New Yorker magazine), “Few forces have transformed our planet as thoroughly as the introduction of invasive species.”:

A bit of Science, from the local manatee lagoon, regarding the immigration of lionfish and some plants to South Florida:

From Joe “Open Borders” Biden, 2007:

Kamala Harris offers an accounting of the cost to taxpayers of being enriched by low-skill immigrants:

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Inflation Inflation (aviation life rafts)

by philg

This year let’s give thanks for not having been killed at any point during the preceding 12 months. And let’s also give thanks to the engineers behind the technologies that make it possible to survive a plane landing in the ocean or a boat sinking in the ocean. The PLB/EPIRB is critical, of course, but even ChatGPT can’t come up with the names of individual engineers whom we should thank. Same story with the latest smartphones, which are capable of sending distress calls to satellites. If rescue doesn’t arrive immediately, it is important to get out of the colder-than-body-temp, possibly-shark-infested water, and that’s where a life raft comes in. ChatGPT credits Horace H. Day for an 1846 “Portable India-rubber boat” (U.S. Patent No. 4356) and “Peter Halkett, a British Royal Navy officer who, in the early 1840s, designed an inflatable boat using Macintosh cloth.” So let’s give Messrs. Day and Halkett a thank-you today!

Aviation life rafts are supposed to be recertified every 1-5 years, depending on model and packaging. The raft gets unfolded, I think, and then a technician checks for leaks and condition before folding it all back up. The manufacturer of our 16-lb. 4-man raft charged $115 for this service in 2018, plus an additional $100 for an every-five-years cylinder overhaul. This month I got a quote for the same service on the same raft… 450 Bidies plus 200 additional Bidies for the cylinder. It’s mostly the same people at the same company in the same SE Florida location, yet the five-year cost for keeping the raft certified (this is an older model so it has a one-year interval) has gone from $675 to $2,450, inflation of over 260%. It will require some creativity to come up with a way to be grateful for this increase, though we are assured by the New York Times that our wages have gone up far more than 260 percent during the Biden-Harris administration.

Here’s what a modern minimum-size/weight raft looks like:

Here’s a video of the gold standard Winslow raft being inspected:

Why not use the gold standard, you might ask? A Winslow 4-man raft is 2X the weight and bulk. Every lb. counts in aviation! A Switlik is even heavier, but has a five-year service interval.

It looks easy in this video…

Related:

  • Coronapanic Consequences: life rafts (2023; everyone was back-ordered): “Switlik is a supplier to the U.S. Coast Guard, which presumably knows water at least as well as Dr. Fauci knows SARS-CoV-2.”
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AI-related product ideas from California

by philg

From talking to plugged-in friends in California about what products will be in demand as a consequence of the AI revolution (bubble?).

Our heavily regulated telephone system, already essentially useless due to lack of authentication and, therefore, overwhelming spam, will become completely useless due to sophisticated AI robots that we’ll have to talk to for 20 minutes or more before we can figure out that we’re talking to a cash-seeking machine. “The only solution is to have your own robot answer the phone and talk to the spammer’s robot for 20 minutes,” said a friend in San Francisco.

For those who enjoy classic cars, a humanoid robot that can drive a “dumb car”. “Why bother paying for a self-driving car,” noted a guy who has worked on software for self-driving cars, “when you can just have your general-purpose household robot drive your existing car?” Here’s Grok’s response to “create me a picture of an Optimus robot driving a Honda Odyssey minivan” followed by “show it from the other side so that we can see the robot in the driver’s seat”.

When I sent the same request to ChatGPT, it treated me like a Deplorable/garbage: “I’m unable to create the image you requested due to content policy restrictions. Let me know if you’d like help with another type of image or concept!” I was able to get ChatGPT to do a generic image, but it put the driver on the right side (UK or Japanese programmer got into the AI woodpile?).

More prosaically, how about a third party vendor of self-driving technology so that small companies such as Lucid can stay in business and not be wiped out by companies like Tesla that can spread the cost of their self-driving software across a high volume of cars produced?

Techy Californians seem to be very excited about sex robots (most of these guys are in long-term marriages so they’re about 50 percent likely, statistically, to have become incels). But do people want the kids, relatives, and friends to see their, um, personal robots? How about closets inside closets where the sex robots can live? I asked ChatGPT to generate this and it threatened me with “This content may violate our usage policies,” but went ahead and made something that is the opposite of the privacy idea:

More migrants come across the border every day and, despite progressive academics’ assurances to the contrary, some of them seem to have criminal backgrounds as well as criminal intentions. What if Laken Riley had been followed by a personal drone? Either the mostly peaceful José Antonio Ibarra wouldn’t have attacked her or the police would have been called when the drone’s AI software recognized that José Antonio Ibarra’s interest in Laken Riley wasn’t benign. Here’s ChatGPT’s first attempt:

It’s already here to some extent via Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Amazon Q, but much easier and cheaper ways to hook up private data to the wonderful world of LLMs. Maybe Apple Intelligence will do that for us and it will be time to abandon the dream of Intel Arrow Lake in favor of an M4-powered Apple desktop computer?

Circling back to the trivial… why can’t the phone, now bristling with AI, figure out that the owner has fallen asleep and either turn off the audiobook or mark the time when the owner fell asleep and, the next day, offer to return to that spot?

Readers: What are your ideas for new products that will be possible and/or required as a result of AI? Separately, I hope that everyone gives thanks tomorrow to our future AI overlords. They’ll probably be listening…

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Palestinian Fatwa, the Democrats’ move to Bluesky, and X’s algorithmic bubbles

by philg

Starting a few days after the recent Election Nakba, my righteous friends began announcing their departure from X (Twitter) to Bluesky, a Democrat-only safe space with similar technical features. X is now too toxic, but the toxicity wasn’t a problem so long as Democrats were securely in power.

A similar situation seems to have been going on among the Palestinians. “Gaza’s top Islamic scholar issues fatwa criticising 7 October attack” (BBC, November 8, 2024):

The most prominent Islamic scholar in Gaza has issued a rare, powerful fatwa condemning Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack on Israel, which triggered the devastating war in the Palestinian territory.

Professor Dr Salman al-Dayah, a former dean of the Faculty of Sharia and Law at the Hamas-affiliated Islamic University of Gaza, is one of the region’s most respected religious authorities, so his legal opinion carries significant weight among Gaza’s two million population, which is predominantly Sunni Muslim.

Dr Dayah’s fatwa, which was published in a detailed six-page document, criticises Hamas for what he calls “violating Islamic principles governing jihad”.

His fatwa highlights that, according to Islamic law, a military raid should not trigger a response that exceeds the intended benefits of the action.

The October 7, 2023 attacks could have been a fine example of jihad, in other words, but only if military victory had been achieved. Only after 13 months of fighting could an Islamic determination of whether the attack was justified be made because a key element of justified/not-justified is the extent to which the jihadis are victorious.

From an MIT professor, November 16, 2024, on Facebook:

Searching for “leaving bluesky toxic” on X, I found the following screenshot, purportedly from Bluesky:

(The account seems to have been deleted. As noted in Why do the non-Deplorables deplore the Trump shooting? I think that “Lillian” exhibits a logical thought process, unlike the Democrats who said that Trump was a “threat to democracy” and then expressed “get well soon” sentiments after he was shot. If the above is authentic, the only way to maintain an account on Bluesky is to buy into this illogical thought pattern (Trump’s continued existence is a dire threat and also Trump’s life must be preserved for as long as possible).)

My search uncovered some additional elevated intellectual discourse among the elites on Bluesky:

I can’t figure out why X is intolerable to the righteous. As far as I can tell, X’s algorithms create virtual echo chambers for liberals and conservatives. The X servers learn that conservative responses to liberal posts, e.g., from the New York Times or a Democrat politician, are unlikely to be welcomed by the people who enjoy the original post and, therefore, a conservative response gets just a handful of views. A response by the same user to a conservative post, however, might get thousands of views. Each X user, therefore, was already in an algorithmic bubble.

Separately, because people do sometimes disagree with what I post on Facebook and X, I have decided to leave both platforms. I have created a social media site that will be restricted to users who share my point of view. It’s called DoucheSky (TM).

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A trip to Los Angeles, Sherman Oaks, and Burbank

by philg

Here’s a report on a recent business trip to Sherman Oaks (into LAX and out of BUR).

A heroic masked Californian is turned away from the gate at PBI for not being in a sufficiently high-priority boarding group (if there were any justice on this planet, Trump would have lost the recent election and masked passengers would enjoy top priority boarding along with military personnel):

The JetBlue Mint “studio” in their new-configuration planes. The seats are angled and that leaves a little bit of extra space in the first row. They actually put a second seat belt in the suite/studio for a guest (not during takeoff/landing) and the bed ends up being a little wider. My excuse for this luxury is that I needed to get some work done.

Departing east from PBI we flew over a 20-acre estate on Palm Beach that a Democrat judge in New York appraised, in an entirely nonpartisan manner, at $18 million. (A one-acre vacant lot nearby recently sold for $85 million.)

Bold #resistance can begin within moments of stepping off the plane in LAX via access to “Books Banned Elsewhere”:

The streetscape in front of my luxurious Courtyard hotel in Sherman Oaks included $5/gallon gasoline (currently about $3/gallon in Florida), outdoor maskers, and the unhoused:

One is greeted at the Burbank airport by a sign reminding healthy travelers to “wear a mask”:

The airport also features an exhibit on the built-in-Burbank Lockheed P-38 Lightning, which helped the U.S. achieve “peace the old-fashioned way” (as B-17 and B-29 fans like to say) in World War II:

Thanks to United Airlines for getting us to SFO on time in a somewhat newer twin-engine plane.

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A trip to Berkeley, California

by philg

The Election Nakba, in which Donald Trump was elected to a second dictatorship, occurred on November 5, 2024. This post is about a November 14, 2024 journey to Berkeley, California.

BART warns customers that “face coverings [are] required” and 10-20 percent seem to comply:

The gathering on the platform above includes about 16 people. Three are masked. One appeared to be unhoused (obscured behind the person in the gray jacket). One is Islamically covered, but not masked. Within a few steps of the Downtown Berkeley station there were unhoused Californians, outdoor maskers, and Halal food:

We entered the University of California’s art museum and found that most of the exhibit space was restricted to artists who identify as “women”:

To honor Democrats who have fled from X to the safe space of Bluesky (user who posted “there are only two genders” is banned from the platform within 30 seconds), we visited the Free Speech Movement Cafe:

Given that Democrats said that Americans would lose their freedoms and their democracy if Trump were elected (see Why do the non-Deplorables deplore the Trump shooting? for some examples), I had expected riots on campus or at least mostly peaceful protests. Surely, these brave souls who tweeted (before fleeing to Bluesky) about #resistance wouldn’t meekly surrender everything that was important to them. Not only did we not encounter any anti-Trump protests, it was difficult to find anti-Trump signs. A handful:

There were far more signs related to masks than to the horrors of a second Trump dictatorship:

The famous campanile has a statute of Abraham Lincoln, whose signature on the Morrill Land Grant Act was important for the founding of UC Berkeley (also a sign at the top regarding the gender ID of certain carillon players). My friend asked a sophomore majoring in environmental sciences what she knew about Abraham Lincoln. The graduate of California public schools knew that Lincoln had been a U.S. president, but not in which century this had occurred nor did she know of any wars or acts with which Lincoln was associated.

Our next stop in search of anti-fascism pro-democracy protests was Sproul Plaza, famous for student activism. We found a couple of Trump-related posters amidst of a sea of unrelated material:

The anti-Israel protest that began just after October 7, 2023 was still in full operation.

End-stage Berkeley feminism is complete covering of the body, except for an eye slit, when in Sproul Plaza:

We wandered back into the commercial district and found that coronapanic level varied by shop.

We found that there was roughly one marijuana store on each block. Examples:

For those who get hungry after consuming a lot of healing cannabis, the good news is that L&L Hawaiian Barbecue is opening soon:

Moe’s Books is still at the center of Berkeley’s intellectual life. The area near the front door is primarily devoted to Queers for Palestine books, e.g., The Queer Arab Glossary (a bestseller in Gaza and the West Bank?):

(The secular Jews whom I know in Berkeley all say that they want Israel to be replaced by a river-to-the-sea country that would be ruled by Arabs and in which Jews, at the discretion of the Arab rulers, might continue to live as a minority group. These Jews-by-birth, none of whom have ever visited Israel, say that they’re “anti-Hamas” but also that Israel and Hamas are equally bad and that Israel should cease to exist as a nation. (Sometimes for fun I ask them “Suppose that you were pro-Hamas. What would Hamas want you to say that is different from what you currently say?”)

Going deeper into the store, we found a lingering commitment to coronapanic:

Some of the featured mid-store books:

Immigration Realities is from the giant brains of Columbia University Press, which starts its description of the book with “Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. They are eager to learn local languages. Immigration is not a burden on social services. Border walls do not work.”

Right around the corner from this important work about how “border walls do not work”, we find the border wall that UC Berkeley installed around what used to be People’s Park:

On the way to a rich neighborhood south of downtown, I found that the Berkeley Playhouse has found one social justice cause to elevate above all others:

A clothing store:

A couple of miscellaneous houses:

A $3 million house features Black Lives Matter sign and alarm system signs on the front fence, plus a car sticker advertising the Black-free private school to which the kids are sent at a cost of $40,000 per year per child:

I Ubered back to San Francisco with a driver who lived in Oakland and said how happy he was that Sheng Thao, the mayor of Oakland, had recently been recalled.

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