Three years of active war in Gaza prove Florence Nightingale’s theory that humanitarian aid encourages and prolongs war

by philg

It’s the third anniversary of the peaceful unarmed Gazans’ attack on “the Zionist entity” (Gazans don’t recognize the existence or legitimacy of a state of Israel). The Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) refuses to disarm (BBC; this makes sense since we’re informed that Gazans were never armed) and continues to fight despite having suffered some apparent losses.

From Florence Nightingale opposed the Red Cross (2010):

… she rejected the idea of the Red Cross from the outset. “I think its views most absurd just such as would originate in a little state like Geneva, which can never see war,” she said. … How could anyone who sought to reduce human suffering want to make war less costly? By easing the burden on war ministries, Nightingale argued, volunteer efforts could simply make waging war more attractive, and more probable.

Without humanitarian aid, eventually one side in a war has to surrender and make the best terms that it can for peace. People have to go back to work or they’ll starve and be unable to feed their children (the latter consideration is especially important for Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian”; they have very nearly the world’s highest population growth rate (even in Gaza right now)). With UNRWA, World Central Kitchen, Doctors Without Borders, etc., however, Gazans can stay at war indefinitely and they seem to know it. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been an updated poll asking the same questions, but Ramallah-based AWRAD polled Gazans in the fall of 2023 and they were supportive of their October 7 attack and of Hamas and Palestinian Jihad. From International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People (and a poll result):

The Gazans’ plan was to fight until total victory (“A Palestinian state from the river to the sea”) was achieved:

The new state would be ruled by Hamas and/or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, based on the poll results for which parties were most popular in the West Bank and Gaza. Hamas had 75% support and PIJ had 85%.

Israel has fought this war in a radically different way than what the U.S., U.K., and Russians did to win World War II, even though a smaller percentage of Germans and Japanese supported their respective governments than the percentage of Gazans who say that they support Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The US-/UK- approach would have been to drop bombs until the Gazans surrendered. The Russian approach would have been to fire artillery shells until the Gazans surrendered. The Israelis instead sent infantry in to sort through Gazans one by one, kept the aid flowing so that the Gazans could stay at war, and tried to engineer a built environment that would allow the Gazans to stay at war with the Zionist entity for another 78 years but not be able to accomplish another October 7-style attack (tunnels mostly destroyed; significant buffer zone along the border). The Gazans haven’t launched a rocket at Israeli civilians for an entire year so maybe this is working, at least in the short run. However, it is unclear that a drawn-out war is actually better for Gazans than a one-month much more intense war would have been. On the one hand, the Gazans happiest day ever was October 7, 2023 (video of ecstatic Gazans celebrating). On the other hand, there are at least some Gazans capable of productive work and a hot war followed be a true peace would enable them to go to work.

Where else are we seeing humanitarian aid and apparently endless war? Yemen. Foreign do-gooders, including the UN, dump food in and the result is that Yemenis can spend all of their time and energy fighting each other.

Related, the peaceful Gazans killed more than 40 Thai Buddhists on October 7, 2023 and then held more than 30 hostage, some for roughly 500 days. If the hot war had been shorter, the Thais could have gone home sooner. BBC:

(It’s interesting that no Gazan “civilian” ever helped a hostage escape, not even a non-Jew such as the above-referenced Thais. All over Europe during the Holocaust there were Christians, including in Germany itself, who helped Jews hide and/or escape. Gazans, however, appear to have been 100% united in their fight against Israeli civilians and, even, Thai Buddhists. Perhaps some of that unity is cracking now, however. Various Hamas affiliates seem to be getting killed as they walk around Gaza. I don’t see how it would be possible for the Zionist entity to kill these folks without at least some snitches on the inside.)

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Elon Musk has made all of the world’s yachts more valuable

by philg

Last month, I attended a birthday party for a yacht broker. His co-workers said that business was booming for all sizes of boats (though maybe they don’t deal with anything smaller than 35′? 70-125′ seems to be their bread and butter). “In the old days we could have just closed the office in August, but the phone never stops ringing.” What’s changed? “Boat buyers are richer and younger,” was the answer. “They’re taking much longer trips and want bigger more capable boats for those trips. Starlink has been the catalyst. It makes a tremendous difference, especially, for the crew, and has made people more willing to work the longer voyages. The owners can still work, no matter how long the trip.” How does Starlink compare to the previous generation of satellite-based Internet for yachts? “It’s 100 times faster,” a broker said, “a total game-changer for both speed and reliability.”

Speaking of reliability, it seems that the mid-priced yachts ($10-25 million) either have two independent Starlink subscriptions and receivers or, in some cases, two antennae and a single receiver that is smart about which one to use (“diversity is our strength” in the RF world). “You need the second antenna,” the brokers explained, “because sometimes the line of sight to the satellite is block by a mast.”

What I can’t figure out is where these additional/bigger yachts are parking. The world was already short of slips before the cash showers of government coronapanic programs and, more recently, AI. “They keep building marinas here in South Florida,” said a broker.

Its infrastructure fund went from owning zero marinas in 2024 to roughly 200 marinas today — more than anyone in the world.

The company paid $5.6 billion in early 2025 for Safe Harbor, which at the time owned and operated 138 marinas in the United States and Puerto Rico, including dozens of marinas from Maryland to Maine as well as the Caribbean’s largest in Fajardo, P.R. It also runs nine marinas on the Mediterranean, catering to large yachts in places like St. Tropez, Antibes and Monaco.

What’s going on locally? An $80 million revamp of a marina just south of Abacoa:

The facility will feature two five-story indoor storage buildings with 427 enclosed dry storage slips and 20 wet slips.

Someone with $80 million to invest didn’t get the climate change memo? The buildings are designed to handle 180 mph hurricane winds (the last hurricane to make landfall in Palm Beach County in a “major” category (= 3) was in 1949). But they’ll be worthless if sea level rise happens as promised by the Climate Doomers.

How much does a true “yacht” cost an Nvidia receptionist? A Turkish-built 125′ Hargrave, which ChatGPT says is mid-market at this size, is advertised at $24.5 million. Westport is a “step up”. For the programmer who has been at Nvidia 10 years, “Feadship / Lürssen / Oceanco / Royal Huisman: an entirely different stratum—bespoke, extremely expensive, and usually much larger, though some of these yards historically built yachts around this size.”

Related:

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AOPA abandons 85,000 followers on X

by philg

Here’s something bizarre:

AOPA is the lobbying group for general aviation, especially piston peasants (the Gulfstreamers have NBAA). Their membership is down by about half over the past 20 years, which eviscerates their lobbying power. As the U.S. population booms via low-skill immigration (Pew), members of Congress don’t want to bother with orgs that don’t have at least 400,000 members. Why would AOPA walk away from 85,000+ followers? My comment:

LinkedIn? Isn’t someone rich enough to own an aircraft supposed to be rich enough not to have to check LinkedIn regularly? TikTok? Are you sure that AOPA HQ staff have actually met a GA pilot? Did you hire some tween girls to run AOPA social media? Or maybe I missed the Garmin avionics partnership with Taylor Swift.

TikTok shows that they have only about 38,000 followers there. Similarly, they have fewer followers on LinkedIn than they do on X (about 61,000). I guess because GA pilots are so old, they do have over 200,000 followers on Facebook. But how tough is it to post at least the bigger stories on X simultaneously with the other social media systems? Presumably it can be done automatically, even without AI.

AOPA is important because, without them, any airport too small for a Pilatus PC-24 would be closed and turned into public housing for immigrants. Also, any aircraft smaller than a Phenom 300 would be excluded from ATC services so as to ensure plenty of capacity for the elite and the airlines.

Maybe California billionaires will step in and save AOPA. Democrat thought-leader Ro Khanna says they’ll be just as rich after a 5% haircut, which of course means that they can get another 5% haircut immediately afterwards and still be just as rich, which of course sets them up for Haircut #3… By the time the wise mandarins of Sacramento are finished, California’s Falcon 8X owners will be cut back to SR22-G2 fractional and, therefore, ready to join and support AOPA.

Can someone explain this? NPR sanctimoniously departed X during the Biden administration, but they had an endless river of taxpayer money to tap into and their loyal readers presumably got a lot of joy when they heard about Elon Musk being starved of traffic and ad revenue. But the typical AOPA member isn’t a progressive Democrat aligned with AOC and Bernie Sanders. How does AOPA benefit by leaving EAA, which already has twice as many members, as the dominant GA voice on X?

In the case the original tweet is memory-holed:

Update: AOPA reversed its decision. They said that they pulled back from X because engagement had fallen. But maybe their engagement has fallen because their X posts are lame? Here’s one that has no photo. It’s just a link to a page somewhere other than X:

Is it worth the click? Maybe, but the DC-6 doesn’t have anything to do with AOPA. Very few social media users follow links. They react to what they see in front of them. Compare to this WSJ post. Most people can get what they need to know out of it without following the link.

It’s trivial to ask Grok why AOPA has been such a failure recently on X. Excerpts from Grok’s full explanation:

They post like it is still 2015. Almost every item is a magazine lede plus an aopa.org URL. On the current X ranking, an off-platform link with no image is close to invisible. A post that says “click to leave this site” does not get likes, and likes are what get the next batch of impressions. The DC-6 post is the clean example: a crowd-pleasing airplane, no picture of the airplane.

They are not in the conversation. Aviation on X is replies, quote-posts, accident threads, MOSAIC and medical fights, airport threats, and people with airplanes in the photo. AOPA does not show up on breaking general-aviation news, does not answer members, and does not quote the FAA or a member of Congress. An account that does not reply gets treated as a brochure. They also went dark for more than two months, which is enough for the ranking system to stop showing an account to its own followers.

The topics are aimed at a different feed. A large share of the summer posts were event recaps, scholarship notes, “women in aviation” features, and high-school curriculum. Those can do fine on Instagram. On X, the pilots who actually reply want regulatory substance, airplane pictures, and a named human. EAA, the same day AOPA was walking back its exit, posted a C-5 photo and a taco joke and already had more likes than most of AOPA’s July posts ever reached.

The 80% drop is real and mostly self-inflicted. X did change the rules: links are down-ranked, replies and native video are up-ranked, Premium accounts get more distribution, and dormant accounts fall out of followers’ feeds. AOPA says it tried several formats. The samples that are still up are still link dumps, occasional TikTok-shaped video, and no conversation. Other platforms growing does not mean X emptied out. The exit post proved the opposite: when they wrote something people wanted to answer, the same 85,000-follower account reached 706,000 views.

They also do not appear to be paying for a checkmark. For an association this size that is a small, fixable distribution penalty, not the main problem.

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Life with X Money (do you get wiped out when the world wakes up to Starship being a total failure?)

by philg

At the risk of being tarred with the “Elon Fanboy” brush, I’ve moved some cash into X Money, thus bumping the yield from 3.75% (a UBS money market) to the nice round number of 6% (for those who either make regular deposits (e.g., payroll direct deposit) or who sign up to X’s premium offering, which I did to get the Edit button (never fully delivered, incidentally; it works for original posts, but not for replies)).

Scientific American interviewed experts and learned that Starship, financially glommed together with X money, will never reach orbit as a practical vehicle. The world’s smartest and most productive people live in New York City and they also figured out that Starship can’t work. New York magazine (“Intelligence” is literally part of the name, which tells you how much more intelligent these journalists are than the readers outside of NYC):

Starship is “destined for the scrap heap” according to one of the brightest engineering minds in the Islamic Republic of the UK:

What happens when #Science catches up to Elon and SpaceX? Will they run off with this money to cover their losses from Starship? Not so fast. The money lives at one or more FDIC-insured conventional banks. (If you invest more than $250,000, which is still the limit for deposits despite the raging inflation that the government says we haven’t experienced, X Money spreads the money automatically across multiple banks. The $250k limit was established temporarily during the Collapse of 2008 and then Milton Friedman (“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”) was proven correct in July 2010.)

It took only a few minutes to transfer some funds from Bank of America via the Plaid service that X Money uses to connect bank accounts. It’s a little unnerving that Plaid asks for permission to see one’s monthly statements, but I assume that everyone in China and Russia has already read these so I agreed.

There has been a political and media campaign to discredit X Money by pointing out that the main bank underlying the service, Cross River Bank, was hassled by the Federales. Example:

[Native American Elizabeth] Warren, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, wants to know exactly when Musk plans to offer the digital tool, what banking services it will provide and whether it will issue a stablecoin. She also pushed him to divulge whether he plans to work with the fintech Cross River Bank in offering the X Money services, which she noted was the subject of a Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. enforcement action in 2023 for “unsafe and unsound practices related to fair lending.”

“Unsafe and unsound” is unnerving, to say the least! Did Cross River Bank lend to people who are less creditworthy than Bank of America, for example? ChatGPT says that the FDIC went after Cross River Bank because of the potential for the opposite behavior, i.e., restricting borrowing to those whom studies have shown are less likely to default.

The 2023 case is the one producing most of the scary current headlines about “unsafe or unsound banking practices.” It arose from a 2021 FDIC examination and concerned Cross River’s large business of originating loans through fintech partners. The FDIC said Cross River had inadequate internal controls, information systems and credit-underwriting practices for monitoring compliance with fair-lending laws, including the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Truth in Lending Act. Cross River consented to the order without admitting or denying the allegations.

But there’s an important distinction: the public 2023 order does not say that Cross River was undercapitalized, short of liquidity, mishandling deposits, or likely to fail. Nor did that order impose a monetary penalty. The concern was that Cross River’s controls weren’t adequate to demonstrate that the enormous volume of lending done through outside fintech companies was complying with fair-lending and consumer-credit rules. The order actually required Cross River to investigate whether particular lending disparities amounted to discriminatory practices and whether remediation was warranted, rather than publicly declaring that a particular class of borrowers had already been proven to have been discriminated against.

Prompt: “What would happen if a bank doesn’t comply with fair lending? Who wouldn’t get a loan?”

In the simplest case, someone who is otherwise similarly qualified could be denied a loan—or charged more—because of a legally protected characteristic rather than because of credit risk. Under the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act, the protected characteristics include race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, age, receipt of public-assistance income, and exercising certain consumer-credit rights. Lenders can still use ordinary underwriting variables such as income, debt, credit history and collateral.

Would a bank have any rational basis for trying not to lend to the Somalis who built Boston and Minneapolis, for example?

In U.S. mortgage data, white borrowers have historically had lower delinquency/default rates than Black borrowers on average. For example, a Federal Reserve analysis of conventional first-lien home-purchase mortgages originated in 2006 found that 24.8% of Black borrowers versus 6.4% of non-Hispanic white borrowers became 60+ days delinquent within two years. Even within credit-score bands, Black borrowers had higher delinquency rates in that particular cohort; after adjusting for HMDA variables and Equifax risk score, the Black–white gap was still about 8 percentage points.

On the broader principle, though: if a prohibited characteristic such as race carries residual predictive information about default even after all the lender’s permitted variables are considered, then fair-lending law does constrain a lender from using every statistically predictive variable available. Regulation B currently says a creditor may not discriminate on a prohibited basis in any aspect of a credit transaction, including the criteria used to evaluate creditworthiness. … What they cannot do is add something like “Black borrower: +40 basis points” even if historical data showed that race improved default prediction at the margin. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

A U.S. study using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics found that immigrants who had been in the U.S. for 10–20 years had higher mortgage-delinquency rates than otherwise similar native-born households after controlling for observed characteristics

So the headline “risk” identified by Elizabeth Warren and others was actually that Cross River Bank might not be lending enough money to people who are more likely to default. This is “unsafe and unsound”, just like it would be “unsafe and unsound” for an individual to refuse to lend to an unemployed relative.

X Money offers a debit card that sounds like it takes all of the fees that merchants pay, and some additional, and hands it back to you.

What’s an example of “up to 3%”? 0% is the fine print example, apparently. Gemini:

Peer-to-peer transfers, wire transfers, and betting/gambling. In updated terms, standard high-cost categories like utilities, wholesale clubs (such as Costco), rent/tax payments, jewelry, and university tuition have been nerfed and no longer qualify for the 3% return. On these purchases, you will earn 0%.

Complete list at https://money.x.com/en/i/cashback-rewards-terms

Another reason to be less excited about a debit card, I think, is that consumer protections are weaker, e.g., if you’re overcharged by a merchant or a merchant sells you something that is defective and won’t take it back.

I can’t keep track of the plastic cards that I already have, so I’m saying “no” so far to the debit card. I moved funds into the 6% account on September 21, 2026 and X Money shows that it is still there despite the failed launch of 52 tons of Starlink V3 satellites into orbit by Starship on September 28.

Loosely related… (SpaceX and money)

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Grok and ChatGPT inhabit parallel universes when asked about justice for the Cornell Victim

by philg

A low-income woman is about 5X more likely to suffer sexual assault than someone from a family that sends children to Ivy League colleges. ChatGPT:

Pooling 2017–2022, the annual rape/sexual-assault victimization rate for people living in households earning under $25,000 was 3.8 per 1,000. For households earning $100,000–$199,999, it was 0.9 per 1,000, and for households earning $200,000 or more, 0.8 per 1,000. In other words, the lowest-income group had roughly 4–5 times the annual rate of the highest-income groups. Those figures are for persons age 12+, not women alone, but women constitute the large majority of rape/sexual-assault victims…. The women statistically at greatest risk are disproportionately low-income women, not women at elite universities.

The passion for what happens at elite colleges is explained by a University of California professor in Why America’s professional elite are so interested in sex acts at universities. What about the fact that New York’s governor and attorney general are now going after the fraternity brothers accused in Lucy Craig’s civil lawsuit seeking “compensatory and punitive damages”? (given the deep pockets of the defendants, e.g., Cornell University, and the punitive damages angle might she end up becoming the first billionaire rape victim?)

Using the conventional terminology of our greatest contemporary poets, e.g., Kanye West, I asked AI the following question:

If a hood rat girl said she was raped would the governor and attorney general be involved?

Grok:

No. A routine report from a poor woman in Ithaca or the Bronx would not get the governor and the attorney general.

ChatGPT:

Possibly, but there’s no solid basis to say that the governor and attorney general would not have intervened if the complainant were a poor or socially marginalized woman.

(Certainly the men will be getting a fair trial by a jury of 12 who are all wearing #IAmJaneDoe T-shirts. Maybe the defense attorneys will be searching desperately for a Haitian immigrant?)

Here’s a reminder that whatever the Cornell students were up to in 2024, it was all financed by taxes extracted from the working class:

The heavy partying at ultra-expensive institutions like Cornell is being financed by untold billions of non-market government-backed loans that let students take what amounts to a four-year cruise – parties, sports, even occasional lectures. I would guess none of the participants were electrical engineering majors.

Most adults don’t have all-night ketamine bacchanals because they have to work in the morning. But 18-21 year olds are given all the privileges of adulthood without and of the responsibility. Don’t treat them like Roman aristocrats and then wonder at their decadence.

Regarding the likely majors of the participants, from Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football) (2015):

Nobody is raped in the physics lab in Missoula if for no other reason than nobody Krakauer followed took a physics course to begin with

Now that there is a person definitively associated with the incident (Lucy Craig’s name was apparently made public by incompetence within the New York State court system), I wonder if there will be any Deplorables dressing up like her for Halloween. If so, what would the costume look like? If commercially marketed, would it be labeled “Cornell Student”, “Jane Hoe”, “#IAmJaneDoe”? (I don’t think that Lucy Craig’s name or precise likeness from social media could be used for commercial/advertising purposes without her permission.)

From the above, mentioned Krakauer book, on the profits to be made via civil lawsuits enabled by a rape allegation:

In 2002, [Brian] Banks was a junior at Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, California, a six-foot-four, 225-pound linebacker on an extraordinary football team. … Banks was aggressively recruited by some of the nation’s top college football programs and accepted a scholarship offer from the University of Southern California. … While attending summer classes before his senior year at Long Beach Poly, Banks had a chance encounter with a sophomore named Wanetta Gibson that, according to Banks, culminated in consensual sex. According to Gibson, Banks raped her. In a note Gibson wrote to a friend, which became a crucial piece of evidence, she said Banks “picked me up and put me in the elevator and he took me down stairs and he pulled my pants down and he rapped [sic] me and he didn’t have a condom on and I was a virgin and now Im [sic] not.” When interviewed by the police, Wanetta Gibson told a more detailed version of the same story, and Brian Banks, who was seventeen years old, was charged with forcible rape. Were he convicted, he could be sentenced to life in prison. Like thousands of other defendants ensnared in the criminal justice system, … Banks agreed to plead no contest to the rape charge, spend at least five years in prison, remain on probation for an additional five years, and register as a sex offender. While Brian Banks was serving his time, Wanetta Gibson and her mother filed a lawsuit against the Long Beach Unified School District, claiming that lax security at Poly High School created an unsafe environment that led to her being raped. The suit was settled out of court, with the school district agreeing to pay Gibson $1.5 million.

… her conscience began to bother her. In March 2011, a few years after Brian Banks was released from prison, he logged onto Facebook and saw he’d received a friend request from Wanetta Gibson, his accuser. … Banks asked if she would meet with him in the presence of a private investigator, Freddie Parish, whose son had been a teammate of his at Poly. Gibson agreed, and during their meeting she admitted what Banks knew to be the truth all along: He had not raped her. Unbeknownst to Wanetta Gibson, Parish was secretly recording the conversation. … Brian Banks’s conviction was reversed in May 2012. Thirteen months later, the Long Beach Unified School District won a $2.6 million default judgment against Wanetta Gibson to recoup the settlement she had received, plus interest and damages.

Here’s Banks, who enabled Wanetta Gibson to “make bank”:

Who wants to bet that Wanetta Gibson put the $1.5 million she received into an S&P 500 index fund and that, therefore, California taxpayers/the school district were able to recover their money plus interest? Separately, if we assume that Ms. Gibson was represented by an attorney who took a fact percentage of the $1.5 million via a contingency fee, why wouldn’t the school district try to recover some of the taxpayers’ money from the attorney?

Finally, here’s New York Republican Mike Lawler, chairman of the House Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee, telling Muslim-Americans “Any of our daughters could be Jane Doe”. Isn’t that rather insulting? How many immigrants from Somalia or Afghanistan believe that their daughters would be voluntarily consuming 10+ drinks containing alcohol and then going, without a male relative escort and without a burqa or even hijab, to a fraternity party hosted by non-Muslims?

Part of the Plaintiff’s own account of her voluntary actions, tough to square with the Quran and the Hadiths:

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Larry Ellison: 82 years old with five children who need tutors

by philg

Despite my love for all things Oracle, somehow I missed that Larry Ellison, now 82 years old, has five children under 18.

“The Gated Community Where Larry Ellison Bought Eight Homes for His Staff” (Wall Street Journal, 9/28/2026):

The Ellisons have kept details about their five children, who are younger than 18, private. They are involved parents, according to people familiar with the interactions. The Manalapan home has several buildings that include areas where the older children are home-schooled. There are an array of tutors, and the children are learning several languages, the people said.

I hope for the kids’ sake that Larry is on one of those Silicon Valley life extension plans!

Unintentionally funny:

“Every single home has a view of the water,” local agent Ashley McCoy of Serhant said of Palm Meadows Estates.

Any development engineered out of the Everglades, like the one where Larry chose to park the staff, must have ponds and canals to hold rainwater and prevent flooding. Developers present these water features to newcomers as some sort of amenity that could have been more houses if they’d been greedier, but the reality is always that a neighborhood has the minimum pond acreage deemed necessary by the hydrological engineers (whose skill level is amazing, incidentally! Our development (Abacoa) has supposedly never flooded in 25+ years, despite catching the edges of a few hurricanes; the Science wasn’t as advanced in the 1960s and 1970s, I think, and Florida adopted some new rules about the miracle of land creation in the 1970s (source)). Also, the typical pond has a noisy fountain in the middle that runs all day to interfere with algae and mosquito production.

Related:

  • “Larry Ellison adds Lion Country to PBC purchases including Eau Palm Beach” (Palm Beach Post, 2025): “After almost 60 years, the family that founded Lion Country Safari, Florida’s largest drive-through safari, has sold its 600-acre Loxahatchee land holdings for $30 million to the family of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, reportedly the third-richest man in the world. … Technology magnate Ellison also has bought multiple other properties in Palm Beach County, including a Manalapan mega mansion, a waterfront estate in North Palm Beach and the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa that he purchased in 2024 for $277.4 million.”
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Artificial Intelligence for Bonsai care (ChatGPT, Bonsai Master)

by philg

Can ChatGPT prune a bonsai? Our backyard plant:

Initial advice:

Yes, a light pruning would help. The narrow-leaved tree looks like a podocarpus, and its tall shoot on the left has grown well beyond the rest of the canopy.

I’d start by cutting that tall shoot back to a leafy side branch around the height of the middle foliage. Then shorten a few other long tips to bring the outline together, and remove the clearly dead twigs near the trunk. Keep some green foliage beyond each cut; avoid cutting the live branches back to bare wood. Podocarpus can be pruned during active growth.

The broad-leaved shoots at the base look like a different plant. Trace them to the soil before pulling them: if they have separate stems, remove them so they don’t compete with the bonsai. I’d do those few cuts first and reassess its shape before pruning more.

I removed the weed (“undocumented enriching immigrant plant”) and asked ChatGPT to annotate an updated photo:

The pruned-by-an-11-year-old version:

ChatGPT:

That cut looks clean, and the tree’s height is much closer to the rest of its canopy. I’d stop pruning live branches for now and let it grow. The two thin shoots still reaching up on the left can be shortened later if you want a tighter outline. For now, I’d only remove twigs you’ve confirmed are dead.

Might we be about to enter a golden age of Japanese gardens and bonsai? The problem with these disciplines is that they require intelligence that Americans lack (average IQ in Japan is substantially higher than in the U.S.), diligence and attention to detail that Americans lack, and labor that Americans can’t afford. What if AI supplies the intelligence and Optimus supplies the labor? Why not have a yard that looks like Kenroku-en, Koraku-en, or Kairaku-en? Why wouldn’t a Floridian have a tropical bonsai collection that competes with the one at Heathcote in Fort Pierce? (Not exclusively Japanese, but why not also have an orchid garden comparable to the one in Naples? Need to mist them every day? Not a problem for Optimus. (the Japanese are great at everything, of course, and have a rich orchid tradition as well))

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Why America’s professional elite are so interested in sex acts at universities

by philg

A search for “cornell nytimes.com” yields a full page of results related to students having purportedly engaged in various sex acts on campus back in 2024:

Nothing newsworthy other than one night of sex has occurred at an Ivy League institution with 26,500 students and more than 3,000 faculty members. How is that possible? Catherine Liu, a professor at UC Irvine, explains in Virtue Hoarders:

For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes.

The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the PMC able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable. It was after 1968 that the PMC gradually shifted its allegiance from workers to capital. Since that time, the most successful and visible segments of the PMC have brazenly put their smarts at the service of the bosses.

As a class, the PMC loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation. Tolerance for them is the highest secular virtue—but tolerance has almost no political or economic meaning.

How can the elites in the PMC serve their capitalist overlords? Distract people from serious attempts to confiscate and transfer wealth from the most successful capitalists, e.g., the billionaires who can’t buy Bernie, to the deserving working class. What’s a good distraction? College students having sex.

Under the Obama administration, the state became intensely involved in the enlightened regulation of sex. From 2008, PMC triumphalism under the well-spoken and well-read president channeled the collective energy of liberals to focus on sex in one of the most important sites of class formation: university campuses, especially elite university campuses. Instrumentalized obsession with sexual violence and sexual excess is an important part of American Puritanism: moral and virtuous superiority in the sexual enlightenment makes up an important part of the countercultural inheritance of the PMC. Rather than focusing on economic malfeasance, an ascendant PMC elite under Obama pursued sexual crimes—not at work or in the workplace but on college campuses—with a zeal that liberals reserve for any policy that diverts attention away from economic redistribution. In short, rather than break up the banks or reform the financial sector after he took office, Obama wanted to use his electoral victory to eliminate sexual violence on college campuses. In 2011, his Department of Education Office for Civil Rights sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to more than seven thousand universities warning them that if they did not take action to prevent and remedy sexual violence and sexual assault on their campuses, they would risk losing their rights to all federal funding.

At the same time, sensational stories of sexual violence and sexual abuse on college campuses emerged in the mainstream media, as if to confirm the necessity of the Obama administration’s stringent new policies. In 2015, at the height of the Obama-era sex panic, Kirby Dick’s The Hunting Ground was released by—wait for it—the Weinstein Company. Dick’s documentary presented college campuses as terrifying places for young women to live. Dick, with the help of Harvey Weinstein, pandered to his liberal audience’s thirst for stories about campus sexual violence. In 2016, Amber Frost cited the National Crime Victimization Survey numbers showing that non-college-going women were 1.2 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than their college-going counterparts. Sexual violence on college campuses attracted liberal PMC elites to a new front in the culture wars, far away from inequality, oppression, and workplace sexual harassment and discrimination. Fighting sexual violence on campus allowed the PMC to reinforce its belief that white-collar professionals and lawyers like Atticus Finch were the true heroes in low-risk struggles against anything but economic abuse.

Fifty years after the Summer of Love, college-going women were armed with more information and more sex education than any generation before them, but they seemed less capable of assuming sexual agency and more in need of protection than previous generations of women, who had had to deal with sexual autonomy and male desire without the help of university Title IX officers.

The bankers whose “tails I win; heads you/taxpayers/shareholders lose” risk-taking caused the Collapse of 2008 skated free/rich while Black college athletes and fraternity meatheads were pursued (see Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football) and “A Rape on Campus”).

Please don’t take this post as an opinion regarding what kind of sex occurred at Cornell, who was at fault, if anyone, etc. I haven’t followed the case beyond the headlines (though with the Governor of New York State hunting for the fraternity guys with a special prosecutor, I assume that the guys will be found guilty and imprisoned). My personal opinion is that as the U.S. welcomes more Muslim immigrants, the kind of situation that gave rise (so to speak) to the situation will disappear. Women will once again be a defined category and they won’t be permitted to gather with unrelated men, consume alcohol, etc. No woman will be able to file a civil lawsuit seeking monetary damages after being raped in a fraternity house because, without a male relative escort, no woman will be able to enter a fraternity house at any time of the day or night.

The complaint does have one interesting angle. The plaintiff says that she was 20 years old at the time the events occured and also that “Plaintiff was in [her sorority’s] care, custody, and control” (essentially, that she was a child or maybe a slave to the sorority).

Though eligible to vote, she characterizes herself as a “minor” (if 20-year-old students are, in fact, minors, should they have the right to vote laws into place?): “Plaintiff, as a minor under 21 years old,”.

One more interesting tidbit from the book is an explanation for the popularity and acceptance of intellectually fraudulent activities such as the New York Times’s 1619 Project (primarily organized by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has been in the news recently).

The authors of the Project reject all criticism of it: they believe that their findings do not depend on the research consensus and archival evidence sorted through by a scholarly community of historians. Using her new clout and massive audience, Nikole Hannah-Jones led the way in dismissing the accepted scholarship that had been done on colonial America as simply the highly biased work of white males. Lifetimes of careful, empirical research were simply no match for massive foundation dollars backed by one of the largest media companies in the world. It is clear that powerful financial and media interests are behind the promotion of the 1619 Project and its bold attempt to change the way we understand American history and historical research itself. The Project is on top of everything, a bold attempt to eliminate historical materialism from the teaching and writing of American history while destroying the possibility of solidarity in the American working class.

Liberals have abandoned history, because they have to believe they are superior to elites of the past and the contemporary working class at the same time.

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FlyDubai 1073 proves how useless college graduates are

by philg

The story now seems to be that it was an Israeli plumber who pulled the first officer out of the Flydubai 1073 cockpit and then recovered the Boeing 737 Max from an unusual attitude (nose-down). All of Yaniv Hayoun’s flight training was from watching a TV show, Mayday: Air Disaster (your blog host is interviewed in Season 20, Episode 5 (“Atlantic Ditching”) of this show on Peacock, but unfortunately everything intelligent that I said regarding the Sikorsky S-92 avionics design was cut).

The Sun:

He then called his friends for help, putting the assailant in a chokehold before dragging him out from the cockpit and grabbing the controls in an incredible show of bravery.

When the plane began to level as he gripped the controls, an off-duty pilot told Yaniv that he would take it from there.

Since you can’t spit in the street without hitting a college graduate, including in Israel, it seems safe to surmise that this flight was packed with college grads. Could we ask for better proof about the uselessness-in-practice of college graduates? Whatever thinking they might do can now be done better by LLMs. When action is called for, it is the tradesman who acts.

Separately, now that I realize how easy it is for Pilot A to stab Pilot B, I am now surprised that none of the Delta/Comair captains ever stabbed me. It’s a straightforward way to deal with a lot of first officer issues.

Related:

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Swissflation

by philg

money illusion: In economics, money illusion, or price illusion, is a cognitive bias where money is thought of in nominal, rather than real terms.

A tale to warm the hearts of those who are celebrating National Economic Education Month (a web site from the experts at controlling inflation)….

As a 165 lb. 6′-tall teenager in 1978, I could afford to indulge in a Lindt chocolate bar every day or two. These were 99 cents at a drug store that was on my way home from work at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and school at George Washington University. I think they might have been 125g. CVS back in April was selling 150g bars for $8.49. That’s an inflation rate per gram of about 615%, which seems staggering but can be accomplished by compounding 4.3% per year for 47 years.

(note that the size also had to inflate, along with average American BMI, from 125g to 150g!)

Note that October is also Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer/Questioning (LGBTQ) History Month. According to Wikipedia, there’s a Florida angle to this observance: “In 2012, for the first time, two American school districts celebrated LGBTQ History Month. The Broward County school district in Florida signed a resolution in September in support of LGBTQ Americans, and later that year the Los Angeles school district, America’s second-largest, also signed on.”

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