… and also the best airport terminal for straight people. The Harvey Milk Terminal began to open in 2019, but construction was paused for coronapanic and the $2.4 billion building is scheduled for completion in “late 2024”.
I visited at 10 pm on a Wednesday evening and the terminal benefitted by being only about 20 percent full. Due to the high ceilings, the claustrophobic Fall of Saigon feeling should be avoided even at 100 percent. The architects and planners put some effort into making the airport quiet and seem to have succeeded in the carpeted gate areas.
What if you’re stuck for a while and need WiFi and a desk? The free WiFi is available without an annoying advertisement or an acceptance of terms process:
How about the work surface?
(Nit: It’s been only a few years, but the power outlets (“loose like wizard sleeve”) and USB-A jacks (loose and/or broken) haven’t aged well.)
What if you want to lounge instead?
What if you want to play?
There are a lot of restaurants, but maybe not enough to deal with a capacity crowd:
What if you want to teach the kids about Harvey Milk? Certainly, the airport is more forthcoming than ChatGPT. If you ask, based on the Wikipedia article, “Was there anything wrong about Harvey Milk having a relationship with a 17-year-old boy?” ChatGPT says “This content may violate our content policy”:
The airport features larger-than-life images on the walls from which teenage boys are absent:
(Regarding Scott Smith, Wikipedia notes “18 years his junior” while the caption at the airport is silent on the age difference between Messrs. Milk and Smith.)
If you’d like to sip coffee while studying the exhibits…
Need a gender-neutral restroom after the coffee?
Thirsty again after learning about the importance of Harvey Milk? There are water-refill islands:
One proposal was to rename the entire airport “Harvey Milk International” (USA Today), but that was rejected. For now, therefore, it is only the magnificently designed Terminal 1 that bears the hero-to-almost-all-Californians’ name:
This is a review of the semi-private startup airline, JSX, based on experiencing a flight from Burbank to Oakland. The company, founded by JetBlue alumni, flies the 50-seat Embraer 145 regional jet in a 30-seat configuration on the following network:
Passengers are asked to show up 20 minutes in advance of the flight. Anything bigger than a briefcase must be checked (is it luxury to hoist your own luggage over your head and then have the bag encroach on your headroom and sightlines?). Security consists of a quick walk through a metal detector. Loading and unloading takes only a few minutes because the plane isn’t jammed to its capacity (see Two-thirds full airline idea). The “terminal” on either end either is an FBO or is like an FBO. If you’re averse to crowds and lines, this is the way to travel!
The flight attendant on my BUR-OAK trip was warm and enthusiastic about her job. The fare was about 50 percent higher than what Southwest wanted for the same route. Everything ran on time. Bringing a full-size dog entails buying a second ticket. In-flight Internet is via Starlink (#thanksElon) and requires no gymnastics to connect to. A wide variety of drinks and snacks are included, including wine and beer (nobody asked for Bud Light):
The only area where JSX suffers compared to an oligopoly airline is that the Embraer E145 isn’t as quiet inside as, for example, an Airbus A320. Bring the noise-canceling headphones.
A few photos from Burbank:
At Oakland:
This is a great addition to the American commercial airline system. I wish they flew PBI/BED, PBI/HPN, and PBI/IAD (West Palm Beach to Boston/NY/DC). And, as they grow, I hope that they eventually transition to the whisper-quiet geared turbofan-powered Airbus A220 (an evolved Bombardier CRJ). Quiet = luxurious!
For the Uber ride at the end, “they” is the pronoun that Uber chooses for a driver named “Mohamed”:
Americans’ perception of inflation certainly seem to be higher than the official CPI numbers. Workers demand 30 percent raises (and get them, in California) when Pravda says that inflation has been less than 10 percent and is now down around 3 percent. Previously, I’ve wondered if part of that is due to delivery times stretching out into the next Ice Age: Is inflation already at 15-30 percent if we hold delivery time constant? The quoted price doesn’t go up more than 20 percent, but you might not get your refrigerator for a year or more (a Sub-Zero fridge that was formerly available in 7-10 days now takes 12-15 months). A Cirrus SR20 is priced at more than double what we paid for our 2005 SR20 from the factory, but delivery time is 2 years instead of 3 months. What’s the actual price of something that doesn’t exist?
After talking to HVAC contractors, a regular event here in Florida, I’m wondering if this is also partly due to repair parts shortages. A/C systems that were designed to last 12-14 years are being scrapped at 5 or 6 because essential parts (not as “essential” as marijuana in Maskachusetts or California, but required for cooling) are theoretically available, sometimes for free under warranty, but practically unavailable (lead times of 8-12 weeks, which is no solution at all in a South Florida house).
For the HVAC inflation that does make it into CPI, here’s a tracker page from a contractor (the Trane section because that’s what came with our house). The prices went up about 5% in May after going up 10% in January after going up about 4% in September 2022 after going up 9-18% in May 2022….
“Price hikes loom for consumers with the loss of Yellow trucking” (NBC, two days ago): After the shipping giant filed for bankruptcy, its competitors have already indicated they will not match its low-cost pricing. The U.S. just lost as much as 15% of its small-batch trucking capacity — and consumers are likely to feel the effects in higher prices as the holiday season rolls around.
The BLS will release official CPI data tomorrow. Last month, inflation was whipped, with the index only 3 percent higher than in June 2022. From state-sponsored PBS:
(in other good news, the chocolate ration has been increased to 20 grams per week?)
Let’s look at the actual index:
Notice the strange little peak in June 2022? I am thinking that this peak might have been measurement error that made last month’s number lower than reality.
(good news for San Franciscans who previously enjoyed fentanyl in parts of the U.S. where fentanyl dealing/use is illegal: the job is open to those with “arrest and conviction records”)
The inflation rate in Berkeley is literally infinite. A paper bag that previously cost 0 cents is now 25 cents:
Dangerous heat continues to afflict major portions of the U.S., including migrant-rich areas in Texas. Here’s the latest map from the New York Times of where 125-degree Fahrenheit conditions might be encountered:
We’re able to keep our house at a furry golden retriever-approved 72 degrees (and the garage at 78) by paying Florida Power and Light about $450/month (also runs the pool pump, the hot water circulation pump, lights, fridge, etc.). Recent undocumented immigrants, however, may not enjoy the luxury of a comfortable air-conditioned home fed by a bomb-proof power grid and/or, due to the stinginess of Republicans, may not have $450/month to hand over to the electric company.
Politicians running sanctuary cities and states have previously complained about buses of asylum-seekers from, e.g., Texas, arriving to claim sanctuary (example: the New York righteous fight amongst themselves). But the same politicians who run sanctuary cities also talk about a “climate crisis” (NYC Mayor Eric Adams, for example).
Instead of waiting for Texans to send migrants out of what the NYT says is “Danger”, wouldn’t it make more sense for governors and mayors in California and the Northeast to send Climate Emergency Escape buses to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina? Anyone who can prove that he/she/ze/they is undocumented (by presenting documents?) would be invited to hop on the bus and escape to climate safety/sanctuary.
If we have an “emergency” (and/or “crisis”) and also “danger” why aren’t there evacuations for the most vulnerable?
“Boston protestors call on Gov. Maura Healey to lead the fight against climate change” (January 26, 2023): A group of activists advocating for climate justice are calling on Gov. Maura Healey to lead the fight against climate change. … “You cannot speak about climate without talking about poverty, without talking about racism, militarism, and everything that goes along with needing clean air,” said Savina Martin of the Massachusetts Poor People Campaign.
What if we just gave each resident of the U.S. either a basic income or the necessities of life such as shelter, food, and clothing? Poverty wouldn’t be eliminated in the technical sense as defined by the poverty-industrial complex because people who did not work wouldn’t have any cash income, but poverty would be eliminated in a practical sense because nobody would be without the necessities of life.
The Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco comes pretty close to the universal basic lifestyle utopia. Nonprofit organizations (the “homeless-industrial complex”) own buildings and give away shelter. Taxpayer-funded meals are also provided by nonprofits. From the Tenderloin Museum:
As a sign in the Museum gift shop notes, almost everyone is taken care of:
(Exercise for the reader: What class of humans are left out and should be denied care?)
Predatory capitalism has been kept at bay via zoning restrictions:
What happens when you give Americans everything that they need to live, by historical standards, an extremely comfortable life? They take a lot of drugs and live in tents on the sidewalk:
(See also, this New York Times article about Portland, Oregon, three years after drug use was decriminalized: “Oregon’s overdose rates have only grown. Now, tents of unhoused people line many sidewalks in Portland.”)
Related… Dianne Feinstein made cleaning up the Tenderloin a top priority during her tenure as mayor of San Francisco:
(In a great example of American polygamy, Feinstein was the third wife of a rich guy and is now involved in a fight with the dead rich guy’s children with another wife (NYT).)
Loosely related, a sticker on display at Oshkosh that I wouldn’t expect to see in the Tenderloin or anywhere else in San Francisco:
Scanning the headlines, I see the Mega Millions is up to $1.55 billion. That’s a fake number because it is pre-tax and adds up an annual payment without discounting? Let’s assume that it isn’t a fake number. The odds of winning are 1 in 302 million and a ticket costs $2. So we should definitely play! We expect to get $5.13 for every ticket that we buy (ignoring any less-than-jackpot prizes).
But of course, the number is fake. CNBC says that the one-time lump sum payment is $757 million. This analysis says that the lump sum in a state such as Florida with no personal income tax is worth only $477 million after federal income tax. The odds of winning on a $2 ticket are 1 in 302 million. So I think one gets back only about $1.50 in expected value from the big jackpot. But maybe the lesser prizes are what make the expectation positive? This analysis adds up all of the lesser prizes. The expected value of a $2 ticket was only about $1.10 after taxes when the jackpot was $521 million and fell to about 77 cents for players who chose the lump sum option. On a $1.55 billion jackpot if you pick numbers that nobody else picks maybe it would be worth buying tickets? Would it make sense to use a random number generator? Use numbers that the Chinese consider unlucky? Pick the birthday of a 17th century scientist whom nobody cares about?
Who has purchased some tickets for what could now be a rational activity, depending on your level of risk aversion? What are you planning to buy if you win?
(I would use my winnings to buy housing for every currently unhoused resident of the U.S., to pay for immigration lawyers to help migrants prevail in the 10-year asylum process, to finance Democrats running for office (stepping in where Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX has withdrawn), etc. With any leftover money, beyond the obvious aviation items, how about a bus-based RV (about $3 million fully pimped-out). And, of course, a driver. I’d be able to watch Barbie and Oppenheimer over and over while sitting in traffic. And would have a nice place to sleep at Oshkosh!)
Separately, and speaking of Sam Bankman-Fried and crypto glory, how about this Bitcoin criminal who stole $4.5 billion? That’s way more than Mega Millions and he just hung around in New York City for years until he was arrested. From the WSJ:
If you get a lottery-style windfall, but it is illegal, wouldn’t it make sense to move to some country where they won’t extradite?
In response to a virus that killed at most 0.2% of the population in a country that did almost nothing by way of attempted prevention (Sweden; a computer system automatically tagged anyone who tested positive for COVID-19 as having been killed by COVID-19, so 0.2% is the upper bound), countries around the world locked down their peasants, closed businesses, shut down health care (except for emergencies), and closed schools.
We are now faced with an “existential threat” to the entire human species, i.e., a 100% death rate (500X more deadly). Science tells that we are sealing our doom by emitting CO2, much of which is a side effect of humans moving around (28 percent of total CO2 emissions, says the EPA). Therefore, CO2 emissions can be cut dramatically if we make it illegal for humans to move around.
Given that climate change is a much more serious threat than SARS-CoV-2 and that none of the current rulers of the U.S. say that lockdowns and school closures were bad ideas, why don’t we have climate lockdowns right now?
Here’s how it would work:
peasants cannot leave the house except to go to a marijuana store (“essential” in Maskachusetts and California)
standardized food delivered by efficient diesel, hybrid, and electric trucks going from house to house
K-12 schools and universities run via Zoom (not “closed”, but “open fully”)
WiFi thermostats become mandatory and the government prevents them from being set lower than 80 degrees in summer or higher than 62 degrees in winter
shutdown of heating and cooling systems in offices, schools, and other buildings that become illegal to occupy
Let’s check the NYT to see if we have enough to justify these restrictions on the peasantry (elites can party on, of course). From July 10:
At Oshkosh, Garmin showed off their retrofit panel for the ancient Cirrus SR2x aircraft (-G1 and -G2, made from 1999 through 2008).
The G500TXi PFD and MFD screens are smallish (10 inches) and low resolution (1280×768; makes it tough to read an approach plate without pinching and zooming, not ideal workload additions when you’re trying to fly an airplane). The Garmin 750/650 nav/coms in the pedestal are getting long in the tooth at this point (introduced in 2011).
What’s interesting about the panel, then? The GFC 500 autopilot includes Electronic Stability and Protection that fights against unusual attitudes even when the autopilot is nominally off. The -G6 G1000-equipped SR2x airplanes include a GFC 700 autopilot that also has this important safety feature, so ESP is not a big advantage for the retrofit. The retrofit panel is all-touch all-the-time, which is great in a ground demonstration and not to great in turbulence. By combining the three backup steam gauges into a single Garmin GI 275, the autopilot control head can move to where those steam gauges used to be. With remote transponder and audio panels, the pedestal can be devoted to the 750/650 instead of two hard-to-read 650s.
Here’s where the retrofit truly shines:
The $1.2 million -G6 Cirrus doesn’t have this button. If the engine quits , it is the panicked pilot’s job to pitch for best glide airspeed, figure out which airports are within glide range, edit that airport list based on terrain and weather, pick the best airport, pick the best runway at that airport, fly down to the airport, get lined up on a reasonable final approach (vertically and laterally) for a runway, and then land. If the pilot makes a mistake at any point, it is time to pull the parachute, which will seriously injure the aircraft and may seriously injure the occupants (it’s designed to save your life, not your back).
Since 2022, however, the pilot of a boned-out $200,000 Cirrus that has been injected with $100,000 of Garmin (that was the pre-Biden price; maybe it is 130,000 Bidies now?) can have the calm, cool, and collected Garmin software do all of the above for him/her/zir/them except for the final two miles of gliding and the heroic flare. (See the video below; it is unclear what happens if there is a massive amount of extra altitude available. The pilot might have to do some descending 360-degree turns. On the other hand, maybe SmartGlide will turn into SmarterGlide in a later software release.)
Because this situation can’t last forever, my prediction is that the 2024 Cirrus SR22 and SR20 will be -G7 models and will offer at least Smart Glide and touch screen.
Related… an advertising video from Garmin.
Also related… what about Brand A? Avidyne brought their announced-in-2021 Vantage retrofit to EAA AirVenture. It still isn’t certified. The Avidyne autopilot lacks ESP. The Avidyne system lacks anything like SmartGlide.
At least five of the folks with whom I chatted in the San Francisco Bay Area recently noted that the ocean water near Florida had been heated up to more than 100 degrees. When I asked them what part of the Florida shoreline was plagued with this scalding water, they couldn’t answer precisely. Their conjectures ranged from a few miles out to sea from Miami to maybe right near a popular beach.
The reading from a buoy off Florida this week was stunning: 101.1 degrees Fahrenheit, or just over 38 Celsius, a possible world record for sea surface temperatures and a stark indication of the brutal marine heat wave that’s threatening the region’s sea life.
So it’s “off Florida” and therefore out into the open sea, right? If we had any doubt about this, the Scientists at the NYT include a photo of the open ocean underneath the headline:
Based on the headline and the photo, then, a Marvel-style villain heated up part of the open ocean to over 101 degrees and, with a little more climate change, it is easy to imagine this hitting 213 degrees F, the boiling point for sea water. (In other words, New Yorkers with money should not follow their former neighbors and move to Florida because the risk of being boiled alive at the beach is real.)
The best-known beach in Florida is Miami Beach. Is it 101.1 degrees in the water there? seatemperature.net says that, around the time that the NYT raised the alarm, it was a degree or two hotter than the average for previous years:
Maybe “off Florida” meant into the Gulf of Mexico? The water temp on the west coast of Florida was also about average.
Let’s dig for clues in the NYT article:
Allyson Gantt of the National Park Service, which monitors and maintains the buoy, said there was no reason to doubt the measurement. The data was consistent with high water temperatures seen in the area, Florida Bay, between the southern end of the Florida mainland and the Florida Keys, in recent weeks, she said.
Just like it’s easier to heat up a shallow bath than a deep one, the depth of the water is going to affect temperatures, said Jeff Masters, a former hurricane scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a co-founder of Weather Underground, a Web-based weather service.
So… it turns out the buoy was not “off Florida”, but rather inside Florida (between the Keys and the mainland). The NYT tells us that shallow water will heat up more than the deep ocean, just as your backyard swimming pool heats up more, but the newspaper of Science doesn’t tell us the water depth.
What’s unusual about the water between the Keys and the mainland? That’s where beginner kiteboarders and windsurfers are taken to learn because (a) the wind is steady, and (b) the water is so shallow that students can stand up after falling off the board. How shallow? The charts show between 0′ and 6′ at low tide:
So the NYT reader was informed that the “ocean off Florida” had reached 101.1 degrees when, in fact, it was a protected area possibly just a few feet deep. (The open ocean off Florida’s Atlantic coast quickly reaches depths of 1,000′ and more.) Is Florida Bay even part of the ocean? Wikipedia says that “It is a large, shallow estuary that while connected to the Gulf of Mexico, has limited exchange of water due to various shallow mudbanks covered with seagrass.” (What’s an estuary? Wikipedia says “An estuary is a partially enclosed coastal body of brackish water with one or more rivers or streams flowing into it, and with a free connection to the open sea.”)
A Bay Area Deplorable (deeply closeted so that he can keep his job!), when I shared these conversations with him, said “when you’re looking at the New York Times, what you don’t see is more important than what you do see.” (i.e., the unseen depth of the water and the unseen previous buoy high temp in the same area are more important than the seen recent high temperature)
When I got home on August 3, 2023, I discovered that the lifeguards on the Atlantic coast hadn’t been reading the New York Times. They marked the Juno Beach water temperature as 85 degrees:
In case the NYT article gets memory-holed, some screen shots:
Note that the article also mentions “Manatee Bay” as a place where the “ocean” is super hot. Here’s the open ocean in Manatee Bay, from Google Maps:
How deep is Manatee Bay? 4-5 feet, except where mud or coral makes it shallower.
Why does it matter? If you’re ordering a 150-meter boat from Meyer Werft, make sure to tell them it can’t draw more than 4′ (or 1′ for Florida Bay?) because you want to sail it in what the New York Times calls “the ocean”.
