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 worker 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).
Some choice conversations overheard at Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture), with gratuitous photos mixed in as separators.
F/A 18 pilot: I’ve met 120 of the 30 people who flew in the first Top Gun movie. Any reference to that movie was a finable offense, but sometimes it was worth the $10. I expected to hate the new movie, but it wasn’t that bad.
Mechanic/pilot: I’m proud that both of my kids never had transgender surgery and aren’t addicted to opiates.
Jet owner/pilot: how old are they?
Mechanic/pilot: my son is 21 and my daughter is 23
Jet owner/pilot: did you manage to keep her off the pole?
Mechanic: my mother could have sucked the self-esteem out of a diamond.
Below: “We’re going on vacation in my private Boeing airplane.”
Pilot A: “Do you have kids?”
36-year-old Pilot B: “no”
Pilot A: “you’ve gotta bank some sperm because ChatGPT programmed by the LGBTQ is going to tell the Boston Dynamics robot dog to bite your balls off.”
Below: the diabetes folks sell Pepsi and Mountain Dew:
“Do they have women’s chess?”
“Yes”
“doesn’t that prove right the guys who say women aren’t good at science?”
“Who came up with the idea of putting high-speed internet everywhere? Now nobody has to drive into these sh*thole cities where nobody gets arrested.”
62-year-old to 35-year-old: “don’t get married. Domestic partnership. Keep them on their toes.”
Below, the NGPA had booths in both a regular show hangar and in a special “WomenVenture” hangar (the latter equipped with blessed air conditioning):
(I texted the above to my pilot friends who happen to be gay; note the rare use of the rainbow flag by people who are authentically gay!)
On the subject of heterosexual interactions, one pilot suggested creating fake contraceptive patches that family court profiteers could wear and collecting 2 percent of the child support revenue. Another pilot responded by noting that a vasectomy would be a defense against this scheme. The first pilot pointed out that vasectomy carried an increased risk of prostate cancer.
Below: a Beechcraft Denali, not to be confused with the Pilatus PC-12 across from which it was parked, that had flown in. It will be at least 7 million Bidies when it finally limps out of the certification process in 2024 or 2025 (the planned cost back in 2016 was $4 million).
A jet owner who owns multiple properties in desirable off-the-beaten-track locations: “Starlink revolutionized vacation home rentals. I don’t even bother trying to find local Internet because it never works as well. There is no way to AirBnB a property if it doesn’t have Internet and Starlink opens up a lot of locations that weren’t previously viable.”
Below, a twin-engine seaplane made from a kit (Seawind). The second engine can be deployed into the water after landing to facilitate docking.
Pilot 1, to the bag check lady at an entrance gate: “What are you looking for?”
Bag check lady: “drugs, weapons.”
Pilot 2: “I smoked up all of my crack last night with Hunter Biden.”
Below: a privately owned MiG-29:
HondaJet pilot regarding the rudders: “there is a delay of two seconds after weight on wheels. Then the aircraft suddenly develops a turning tendency if pedals aren’t centered. The steering is as sensitive as a clitoris, but you don’t usually operate a clitoris with your feet.” There is a mode where the nose wheel can be set to free castor. Shouldn’t it be in that mode automatically after landing and until you’re down to some speed where the rudder is no longer effective? “I have a long list of ideas that would make the plane better”
Below: C-47 (DC-3), which cost $110,000 in 1943 and flew to support the Normandy invasion on D-Day:
If Magpie, an electric airplane company in which most of the trip is powered via aerial robot tugs, isn’t crazy enough for you… Aerial refueling for bizjets. “The Garmin software would line everything up and then all of these 1,000-mile light jets could go coast to coast.”
Below: one of the KidVenture stations where kids can learn a variety of practical skills.
The loss of life in the Lahaina fire is sad, of course, but this post is about the economics. Folks I’ve talked to here in the Northeast (I’m traveling around via Cirrus) who’ve followed this by scanning media headlines have the impression that much or most of Maui has been destroyed and/or that all of Hawaii is a no-go zone for tourists. To the extent that they would have considered a vacation in Hawaii, therefore, they would now postpone it for at least a year or two.
Estimates of direct property damage from the Maui fires seem to be in the $3 billion range. But the big airport and the big resorts were untouched, so there wouldn’t be a rational reason for tourists to avoid Maui this winter. Hawaii’s extended lockdown was a serious self-inflicted wound from 2020-2022. About 20 percent of the state’s economy, pre-coronapanic, was tourism. Total revenue for 2019 was nearly $18 billion in pre-Biden money. If media hysteria reduces tourism by even 20 percent, therefore, the economic damage from journalists will exceed the economic damage from the fires.
If Hawaii is “devastated”, does that mean the winter of 2023-4 is a good time for a visit?
Update, September 1: “Tourists Were Told to Avoid Maui. Many Workers Want Them Back.” (NYT) Nearly a month after the fire, Maui, a tourism-dependent island with a hotel room for every seven and a half households, is hosting fewer visitors than at any point since the coronavirus pandemic. Pristine beaches sit empty, even those that are many miles from Lahaina. Hundreds of unused rental cars are parked in fields near the island’s main airport in Kahului, where planes arrive half full. … The implosion of Maui’s economy, of which tourism comprises about 40 percent, has been swift and severe. State economic officials estimate that the island is seeing about 4,250 fewer visitors each day than normal, representing a loss of $9 million a day. In South Maui, seven of every 10 hotel rooms sit empty, compared with about two in 10 during normal times.
if 2SLGBTQQIA+-ism is our state religion and the trans-enhanced rainbow flag is our sacred symbol, why do private businesses and individuals need to organize worship?
I took a trip to Pasadena, California on July 30, 2023, a month after the official end of Pride. I found a great bank for elites that offers much better interest rates than Bank of America and other banks that serve the peasantry.
They’re supervised by the diversity-crisis-tackling San Francisco Fed, so I’m sure that my money will be “safe as houses.” On the sidewalk in front, one see the result of Californians’ commitment to eliminating inequality:
Pasadena offers a conventional American Rainbow-first Retail experience. The observant Muslim, for example, must pay obeisance to the merchant-displayed rainbow flag if he/she/ze/they wants clothing to wear, shades for his/her/zir/their house, or a car to drive:
In case a merchant forgets, however, just as in Park City, Utah, the city has stepped up with tax dollars. Sidewalks and transformers are painted with the sacred rainbow (this would be contrary to the law in Muslim-governed Hamtramck, Michigan):
If these sacred messages were still up on July 30, 2023, a full month after the nominal end of Pride, when do they get removed?
The enchanting rose gardens are in full bloom, pride events paint the town, and Visit Pasadena, the city’s official tourism organization, celebrates pride with a citywide Pride campaign with the simple, yet powerful message that “All Are Welcome in Pasadena.”
History is hardly ever tidy, but Pasadena, California has been proudly celebrating all identities since The Boulevard Bar was established over 40 years ago. Today, it remains one of Pasadena’s staples. In 2014, Pasadena was recognized as the “Second Gayest City in America” by The Advocate. This marked a historic moment, when a gay couple exchanged wedding vows on a wedding float during the Tournament of Roses® Rose Parade for the first time ever during live broadcasts around the world.
This year, The City of Pasadena raises the Pride Flag once again at City Hall this June, with a flag designed by non-binary artist Daniel Quasar and made by San Diego-based Pride Flag SD, followed by a series of interactive and family friendly events. In historic Old Pasadena, visitors will experience the district’s powerful “commUNITY” campaign and “All Are Welcome” messaging while enjoying romantic and diverse shopping and dining experiences. In October, SGV Pride will celebrate National Coming Out day with a celebration at Central Park, with the historic Castle Green and the majestic San Gabriel Mountains as a backdrop.
Here’s something unfortunate… the City implies that there is something unhealthful about the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle that requires additional vaccines, e.g., against Long Monkeypox:
It’s a “family-friendly event” for kids to watch adults get injected?
A few more photos from July 30… (note that some stores have two “all are welcome” rainbow stickers on the front door):
What if you need a bonus hole in your body? That can be done with Pride (sticker lower left):
Here’s a restaurant with three pride stickers (the multi-colored rose is an official City of Pasadena Pride symbol):
Also, it doesn’t have to be the official Pride month for Californians to take pride in wearing masks. A restaurant:
What if you are injured by COVID-19? These billboards across from the Burbank airport offer legal help and healing cannabis:
Costco was selling Harry’s razors earlier this summer so I decided to give the system a try. The handle is much too light. The blades aren’t as good as either Gillette or Dorco and nicks/cuts are much more prevalent. A fresh-from-the-box Harry’s blade is inferior in practical quality to a Gillette or Dorco blade that has been used for 2-3 weeks. I can’t figure out how this product is so popular. The power of advertising?
Maybe the answer is that Harry’s, like Gillette and Tranheuser-Busch (Bud Light), celebrates the miracle of transgenderism.
Here is the CEO of Harry’s Razors
He calls dads “non-birthing parents” and moms “birthing parents”
I’m celebrating on Mount Desert Island, home to Acadia National Park, having arrived here via ghetto-class Cirrus SR20. I’m staying in a neighborhood of oceanfront houses that were worth $2-4 million pre-coronapanic. This evening, about 30 folks gathered for dinner two houses over. Everyone who wasn’t a full-timer had arrived by air, either private or scheduled, to the BHB airport. The lockdowns and Internet (lucky to get 80 Mbits down and 10 Mbits up here) added a lot of value to these houses, but I think that aviation is responsible for much of the value.
I can’t find any economic analysis of how much out-of-the-way vacation spots have increased in value now that they’re accessible by air. These places were worthless before the railroads. Bar Harbor became conveniently accessible via rail, it seems, in 1902 (Wikipedia). The place took a hit from the invention of modern air conditioning by pioneering female engineer Wilma Carrier ( A/C made staying in New York City or Washington, D.C. more tolerable) and then got a boost from improvements in aviation. The overnight sleeper trains from NYC might have been as comfortable as today’s Cape Air flights, but coming to Bar Harbor from Alabama (we met some folks at a restaurant who vacation in Acadia every year) was impractical.
[If we’re climate change alarmists, which I hope that we all are, we can also look at the benefits to Bar Harbor, Maine from CO2 emitted by aviation. Maine isn’t a pleasant place to swim yet, but if Greta Thunberg is correct this could be the next Miami Beach.]
Some over-sharpened iPhone pictures from a carriage road in Acadia:
View from my friend’s back yard:
Cars and Coffee at the Seal Cove Auto Museum:
The big hotel in downtown Bar Harbor:
The only rainbow flag that I could find downtown (note the lack of trans-enhancement):
What it has looked like most of this summer:
Climate change has brought a wet/cold summer to Vermont, Maine, and Quebec.
Below are some recent photos from the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. A railroad, streetcar, and real estate baron left this gift of beautiful gardens and arts to Californians and tourists. Today’s Silicon Valley rich are much richer than Henry Edwards Huntington was. Why aren’t they creating amazing art museums and gardens? A Walmart heiress did that in Arkansas with Crystal Bridges, but I haven’t heard of the tech billionaires doing anything similar. Why not? Is creating a world-class garden and/or museum not sufficiently ambitious for today’s elites? They want to instead say that they saved humanity from disease or landed humans on another planet?
Some inspiring bonsai:
Inspiration for your golden retriever and a room in which to relax after the kill:
An all-gender restroom before you venture out into California gridlock:
Trying to help my mom get some benefit from Internet/Web without all of the bad stuff and headaches, I’ve come up with a product idea: an email system in which marketing and mailing list messages are all automatically deleted by default. There can be a separate page in which the senior him/her/zir/theirself or a young relative can click “yes, do let in a flood of emails from Source X”. It is easy to sign up to email lists, e.g., if a senior does any shopping online or participates in social media, and hard to quit (buried in the fine print). So build an email system from scratch or add this behavior into AOL, Gmail, or some other webmail system.
My mom got to the point with her AOL account that she could never find relevant emails because they were buried in a tide of mailing list crud.
I recognize that Google deals with this already to some extent by having separate tabs for Promotions and Social, but it’s not quite as big a hammer as I’m suggesting.
While it is sad that the Netflix Cleopatra (3% audience score) spinoffs might be delayed by the refusal of Democrats to pay their workers properly, the public can still watch Sorcerer, the recently deceased director William Friedkin’s favorite among his movies (French Connection and Exorcist are the best known).
William Friedkin, known to his friends as Billy, was born in Chicago on Aug. 25, 1935, to Louis and Rachel (Green) Friedkin. Both parents were Jews who had left Ukraine early in the century with their families to escape the tsarist pogroms. His mother, who was known as Rae, was an operating room nurse; his father worked a variety of low-paying jobs.
“The French Connection” was rejected by every studio in town before Richard Zanuck, in his final days at 20th Century Fox, gave it the green light. Convinced that the film required a street-level documentary feel, Mr. Friedkin spent weeks on the beat with the two police officers who had broken the French Connection drug case. He said he paid an official at the New York Transit Authority a $40,000 bribe to overlook the rules and allow the famous chase sequence to be filmed.
He later called “Sorcerer,” in an interview with Indiewire in 2017, “the only film I’ve made that I can still watch.”
The lurid “Cruising” (1980), with Al Pacino as a New York City detective who goes undercover in the city’s gay S-and-M bars to solve a murder, aroused the fierce opposition of gay activists, who objected to the film’s portrayal of gay men and who picketed the location shoots, much to Mr. Friedkin’s dismay.
Another great movie from this guy: To Live and Die in L.A. (you wouldn’t have wanted to be hoping to get anywhere near where they filmed the car chase on the day(s) of filming!)
Trigger warnings: the employer of the main characters in Sorcerer does not comply with OSHA regulations; seat belts are not always worn; the roads and bridges that they traverse were not approved by Pete Buttigieg.
