Instead of reading guidebooks and working my feeble brain, I let ChatGPT do the planning for our shore time in the various ports that Norwegian Joy brought us to. I cut and pasted the itinerary, said that we preferred to just walk off the ship rather than get into some other form of transport, and that we wanted to be active. ChatGPT’s first idea for a 1:30-10 pm stop:
Option A: Mendenhall Glacier + Nugget Falls. This is the safest family bet: transit/taxi/shuttle to Mendenhall, walk Nugget Falls, then return to town. The Forest Service notes that trails such as Nugget Falls, East Glacier, Trail of Time, Moraine Ecology, and Dredge Lakes do not require a fee just to hike, though some visitor-center areas do.
Option B: Mount Roberts Tram + hike from the top. This is closer to your ideal: the tram is right by the cruise docks, and Travel Juneau describes Mount Roberts Trail as 2 miles/1.5 hours to the Mountain House, 4.5 miles/4 hours to the summit, with the option to ride the tram up and hike from there. For kids, I’d ride up, hike toward Father Brown’s Cross or farther only as conditions allow, then tram down.
A caution: I would not push Mount Roberts hard in fog/rain or near dusk with kids. There were fatal cruise-passenger hiking incidents in the mountains above Juneau in 2025, including hikers who apparently left the actual trail in wet/foggy conditions.
ChatGPT was helpful in clarifying that the Mendenhall Glacier can’t be reached on foot from downtown Juneau and that Ubers aren’t easy to obtain. I ended up manually refining the above to include (1) a rental car from the cruise pier area, (2) eliminating the Mount Roberts Tram, which was down for maintenance, and (3) adding the National Shrine of St. Thérèse (because we had the car).
Some photos as we approached Juneau for our 1:30 pm disembarkation, highlighting the absurd mismatch between the ship’s waterslides and pools and the 50-degree cloudy windy weather.
Approaching the town (note the two other ships already docked):
AVIS has apparently had some issues with previous renters…
We got a Chevy Bolt and suffered zero range anxiety because… Juneau isn’t connected to any road network. AVIS rents nothing but EVs in this location. No need to worry about charging either because they tell you up front that you’ll pay $25 extra to recharge.
Here’s the total:
Quite a few services in Alaska are about 2X the price you’d pay in the Lower 48, so $254 for half a day of car rental isn’t terrible. It would have cost more to book a bus tour for four people out to the glacier and we wouldn’t have had any flexiblity.
First stop, the Mendenhall Glacier. Cropped just right, it looks like an uncrowded wilderness, right?
In reality, the parking lot was overflowing and the trail to Nuggel Falls was about as crowded as a Manhattan sidewalk.
The trail to the falls has some nice rainforest:
The falls per se is where you see that Fred Meyer was having a sale on humans:
If you could tolerate more sitting in a boat, this might be the way to do it:
From the walk back:
On to National Shrine of St. Thérèse (Wikipedia), a 30-minute drive away. Due to a fresh breeze coming off the water, this was much colder than the area around the glacier.
Something you might not see in Massachusetts, “This Memorial is Deduciated to the Victims of Abortion”:
The stations of the cross are depicted:
Note how bundled up against the wind everyone is:
One of the kids had a wardrobe malfunction at the waterfall so we stopped at Fred Meyer and found this awesome shirt:
Prices at the one and only McDonald’s in Southeast Alaska weren’t terrible, but adding a Denali Mac to the cruise ship diet was a sandwich too far.
Back in downtown Juneau…. here’s Seward, the man who made us masters of this domain, looking none too happy about the purchase:
Nice doggie:
The gift shops included my dream Christmas tree and a trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag:
The gift shop that was celebrating our 2SLGBTQQIA+ brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters with the flag out front also displayed quite a few dead animals inside:
Totem poles are everywhere, despite the fact that it was really natives much farther south who were passionate about this art form.
The last photo:
How well did ChatGPT do? In fairness, I didn’t say “I found a rental car” and then ask it to update the plan. I think it was too conservative about how much can be comfortably packed into a 9-hour block.
The New York Times repeatedly informs us that we are currently facing a Climate Emergency, that our democracy is being eliminated by Donald Trump (the 2026 elections will, presumably, be suspended indefinitely; also it would be a tragedy if this #1 threat to our democracy were to die), and that various other dire issues demand our attention (and our votes for Democrats).
Let’s celebrate America at 250. What have we accomplished as a people, working together, that is great? Let’s leave out our military heroics because those are regularly celebrated in statuary, political speeches, etc. Let’s leave our literature because books are usually written by one person. Same deal with software, much of which is substantially created by small teams. In the comments, please leave what you think we’ve done that has done the most good for humanity overall outside of military.
I’ll go first: integrated circuit fabrication. While the transistor was developed by a small team, including Nobel laureate William Shockley, who later set up Silicon Valley, and the IC itself was invented by Jack Kilby, it literally takes a village to fabricate ICs in significant quantities.
What are some resources that we can use to teach tweens and teens about the miracle of birth (of their smartphones)? Here are some with promise…
From our brothers and sisters in Korea (indirect shout-out to the U.S. military since the South Koreans probably wouldn’t be fabbing chips today if not for our willingless to cooperate and sacrifice as a society in the military domain):
A high school kid who built a fab in his parents’ garage and, after attending CMU (“the school that actually builds instead of talks”), runs his own semiconductor company (example of American suburban greatness; Europeans don’t have A/C and they don’t have garages so Sam Zeloof’s counterparts in the Old Country wouldn’t have been able to do this):
Happy birthday to us and maybe readers will come up with an even better idea for something that Americans working cooperatively can take pride (not “Pride”) in!
What did I reject? Air conditioning, even though Carrier World HQ is a few minutes’ drive from our house and A/C has enabled people to work hard and achieve in parts of the world where that was never previously possible, because it was mostly achieved by one person. I also rejected aviation, even though the U.S. did a lot at the systems level (airports, radio comms, air traffic control, etc.) because there were contemporaneous efforts in other nations as well. I rejected spaceflight because the Russians started it and the impact on humanity from our headline space achievements has been limited (communications satellites have had a huge impact, of course, but we weren’t the first to put a radio station in orbit). I rejected politics because most countries that have a U.S.-style government, rather than a parliamentary system, have devolved into dictatorships.
(What did our AI Overlords suggest? ChatGPT: “Immigration and assimilation at massive scale”. Gemini: “Eradicating Disease & Public Health Breakthroughs” (absurd; all of medicine relies heavily on European biology, especially German) and “The Interstate Highway System” (guess which German got there first?); Grok: “Genome sequencing and biotech” (how much benefit has humanity actually derived from this? where exactly in America was Francis Crick born?); Claude: “The development of the polio vaccine (Salk and Sabin)” (“American” Albert Sabin was a Polish Jew born “Abram Saperstejn”; Salk was an American Jew, but how many collaborators did either of these guys need? This wasn’t a collective achievement) and “The long, hard-won expansion of civil rights” (absurd, since we’re informed that DEI remains essential due to rampant discrimination and a lack of civil rights, e.g., Republicans preventing nonwhite Americans from voting by requiring ID) and “The Interstate Highway System” (Claude says that it was only “influenced by Hitler” and not “inspired by Hitler” so I guess that’s okay to label as 100% American).)
Happy July 4: Why doesn’t Congress do anything? (representative of my non-250th July 4th output, from 2018) “We celebrate our traitorous rebellion against a legitimate government so that we could govern ourselves and yet it does not seem that our current government is any more responsive to the people than was King George III and his Parliament. Politicians ask for our votes by saying that the current set of laws and/or implementations of laws is intolerable. Yet once they get elected and the paychecks begin to flow they don’t seem inclined to change anything.”
Music for the day, by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (2021 performance). Wokipedia says that Gottschalk was rejected by the Paris Conservatoire not for his Jewish background, but because he was American and “America is a country of steam engines”. (Ironic that in the subsequent the U.S. not only ran away with industry, but also with dominance of the music world. The French turned out to be comparative failures at both industry and culture.)
What was the scale of those who didn’t want to be traitors to the king? “historians estimate that between a fifth and a third of American colonists remained loyal to the king.” Let’s not forget that the merits of being ruled by slaveholders such as George Washington could depend on one’s perspective:
Crucially, not all loyalists were white. For the half million black slaves in the thirteen colonies, the revolution presented a striking opportunity when British officers offered freedom to slaves who agreed to fight. Twenty thousand slaves seized this promise, making the revolution the occasion for the largest emancipation of North American slaves until the U.S. Civil War. For native American Indians, too, the revolution posed a pressing choice. Encroached on by generations of land-hungry colonists, several Indian nations—notably the Mohawks in the north and the Creeks in the south—opted to ally themselves with the British Empire. The experiences of loyal whites, blacks, and Indians have generally been segregated into distinct historical narratives, and of course there were important differences among them.
There is a Florida angle to both the story and the book. The British colonies of East Florida and West Florida remained loyal to the king during the rebellion. Just as during coronapanic, East Florida received a significant influx of refugees from states to her north. Unfortunately for the loyalists, the British quickly ceded Florida to Spain, which set many refugees on the move once again, oftentimes to the Bahamas. That said, quite a few refugees did stay in Florida and their descendants are among us today, presumably mostly around St. Augustine. The U.S. stole Florida from the Spanish, the theft being completed by 1821 when we promised to renounce our claims to Texas, which, of course, we stole about twenty years later.
The traitorous rebellion in America also gave birth to a second country… in Africa.
And in perhaps the most surprising migration, nearly twelve hundred black loyalists moved to Africa, under the sponsorship of British abolitionists, to found the utopian settlement of Freetown, in Sierra Leone.
Google AI says that we should all move to Sierra Leone, or at least visit, because it is “vibrant”:
Wikipedia shows that Sierra Leone is one of the world’s poorest countries on a GDP (PPP) per capita basis. They’re doing a little better than Haiti, at least. Here’s something from Google AI that Sierra Leone shares with modern-day England (a predominantly Muslim nation, as measured by hours spent in religious observance), from which the population of Sierra Leone embarked:
Sierra Leone is celebrated for its deep religious tolerance, with a large majority of the population being Muslim alongside a significant Christian minority.
How did patriots treat their loyalist brothers and sisters (the author does not describe any binary-resisters back then, which is odd because we are informed that trans and nonbinary people have played crucial roles in majory historical events; Google AI: “Transgender people have existed throughout recorded history … countless cultures across the globe have historically recognized, honored, and documented individuals whose gender identities differed from their assigned sex at birth … the gender binary was not the default across all cultures”)?
Thomas Brown would always remember the day the American Revolution changed his life. It was the summer of 1775, the twenty-five-year-old’s first on his own American land. He had arrived in the colonies a year earlier from the blustery English port of Whitby, with seventy-four indentured servants in tow, to start a plantation in the Georgia backcountry, near Augusta. The newcomers must have marveled on reaching this strange, subtropical landscape, where giant black oaks stood like sixty-foot columns holding up the sky.1 Within nine months, Brown and his laborers had cut much of the forest into farms. He supervised his burgeoning 5,600-acre estate from a fine new great house, his tenants surrounding him in thirty-six farmhouses of their own. Horses filled Brown’s stables; cattle and hogs got fat off his grass and feed. He applied to the governor for more land, sent away to Britain for another shipload of workers, and enjoyed “the pleasing prospect to observe that his affairs in that country were likely to succeed beyond his most sanguine expectations.” But another force was set to transform Thomas Brown’s new world. He saw it coming one August day in the form of 130 armed men marching straight toward his house.
Standing on the porch, the sticky heat clinging to him like a second shirt, Brown tried to put the men off calmly. He had no wish to fight his own neighbors, he said, but he “could never enter into an Engagement to take up arms against the Country which gave him being.” The conversation quickly turned to confrontation. Some of the patriots “threatened that unless he would subscribe the association they would drag him by force to Augusta.” Brown backed into the house to seize his weapons, “determined to defend himself as long as he was able against any violence.” “It would be at the peril of that man who should attempt it!” he declared, brandishing his pistols. Six men lunged at him. Blades flashed, a gun fired, a rifle butt swung up over his head—and smashed squarely down onto his skull. Then blackness.
What came next he would reconstruct later, from flashes of recollection in a semiconscious haze. Shattered head throbbing, body bleeding, he rattles over a track. They reach Augusta. He is tossed to the ground, his arms lashed around the trunk of a tree. He sees his bare legs splayed out in front of him, funny-looking foreign things, and he sees hot brown pitch poured over them, scalding, clinging to his skin. Under his feet the men pile up kindling and set it alight. The flame catches the tar, sears his flesh. His feet are on fire, two of his toes charred into stubs. The attackers seize his broken head by the hair and pull it out in clumps. Knives take care of the rest, cutting off strips of scalp, making the blood run down over his ears, face, and neck. Half scalped, skull fractured, lamed, slashed, and battered, Brown—remarkably—survives. Later, a doctor comes to the place where he is confined and bandages him up, setting his broken bones on course to heal. A sympathetic guard, moved by the spectacle of this badly damaged man, agrees to let Brown get away. He slips out of custody and rides over the border into South Carolina to take shelter with a loyalist friend.
A rich historical tradition has portrayed the American Revolution first and foremost as a war of ideals—not a war of ordeals. Yet for Brown and thousands more civilians caught in the conflict, this was what the revolution looked like: mobs on the march, neighbors turned enemies, critical decisions forced under stress.
The new states were officially intolerant of those who refused to join the traitorous rebellion:
Within six months of the battle, six states had stiffened and expanded their test laws, enforcing loyalty oaths. In 1778 New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, and South Carolina all passed punitive laws allowing loyalists to be arrested or banished. Pennsylvania passed an act of attainder against “divers traitors.” New Jersey established a committee of safety. Delaware prohibited trade with the enemy. Georgia implemented a vague but sinister law against “the dangerous consequences that may arise from the practices of disaffected … persons within this state.”
A different side of George Washington is revealed by the book. When he’s upset with the loyalists, he threatens to execute a completely unrelated British prisoner of war (Charles Asgill). George Washington was most passionate on the subject of whether slaves freed by the British could depart for England or to what would ultimately become Canada:
But Carleton had insisted during the evacuation of Charleston that slaves promised freedom should have it—and his word held just as firmly now in New York City. He implemented his own version of the commission General Leslie had established in Charleston, to assess the cases of blacks claiming freedom. Every Wednesday from ten till two, members of this committee (made up of four British and three American representatives) sat in Fraunces’s Tavern on Pearl Street to hear out disputes over former slaves. Those cleared by the board received a printed certificate of freedom signed by the commandant of New York, General Samuel Birch. Then at the docks, inspectors entered the names of all departing blacks into a sprawling register, together with their ages, former owners’ names, brief physical descriptions, and notes—ironically enough, much the same information recorded for slave sales. The register, known as the “Book of Negroes,” forms a genuinely exceptional document of exodus; nothing like it exists for the thousands of white loyalist refugees. The reason for such careful bookkeeping was that these migrants were also exceptional compared to whites. They could be considered property as well as people. The volume that recorded the black loyalists’ freedom thus reinscribed their former status as slaves.
But Washington started off the conference by lecturing Carleton on what, to him, was the most urgent matter of all: the removal of human property from New York. Carleton calmly explained that a fleet had already embarked for Nova Scotia with registered black loyalists on board. “Already imbarked!” exclaimed a startled Washington. (He might have been yet more surprised to know that one of the blacks embarked, Harry Washington, had once belonged to him.) Carleton replied that he could not abide by anything in the treaty “inconsistent with prior Engagements binding the National Honor, which must be kept with all Colours.”
Washington’s letter to his British counterpart:
I was surprized to hear you mention that an Embarkation had already taken place in which a large Number of Negroes had been carried away. Whether this conduct is consonant or not to, or how far it may be deemed an Infraction of the Treaty, is not for me to decide. I cannot however conceal from your Excellency, that my private opinion is that the measure is totally different from the Letter & Spirit of the Treaty.
Carleton’s answer:
The negroes in question … I found free when I arrived in New York, I had therefore no right … to prevent their going to any part of the world they thought proper.
(The exchange is consistent with Dr. Samuel Johnson’s famous line: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”)
The author points out that the exodus of the loyalists and the systems set up for housing and feeding them in England, Canada, and other parts of the British Empire, anticipate today’s internationl aid infrastructure.
Since we’re right in between Pride and Nonbinary Awareness Week (July 13-19 2026), maybe Gemini can fill in the gaps left by this author, who left out from her 2011 book the crucial role played by the nonbinary and transgender in the American Revolution:
Because regular soldiers were rarely subjected to medical exams unless severely wounded or deceased, historians widely agree that there were likely dozens, if not hundreds, of individuals who crossed gender lines to serve in the military or support the war effort whose names and stories were simply never caught or recorded.
New Yorkers pride themselves on being smarter than other Americans. Now that NYC is out of electricity (Ayatollah Mamdani has instructed his subjects to set their thermostats to 78), folks are reminded that NY’s best and brightest affirmatively decided to shut down Indian Point, the nuclear power plant that was generating 25 percent of NYC’s usage. More interestingly, it was shut down in 2021, a year before the current mad scramble for electricity was ushered in with the launch of ChatGPT (2022). MIT says that data centers will consume 9 percent of U.S. electricity by 2030.
How’s that shutdown decision for perfect timing? (See also, importing tens of millions of low-skill migrants from the world’s most dysfunctional and disorganized societies just in time for the Age of Robots.) Wikipedia credits Florida Realtor of the Year 2020/2021 and hearthrob for progressive females Andrew Cuomo with a central role in the execution of Indian Point.
Separately, we don’t share an electricity rate (ours is less than half the NYC price), an income tax rate (0% vs. 15%), an estate tax rate (0% vs. 16%), a 100-degree temp (86 high for yesterday in West Palm Beach), or a power shortage (the last FPL capacity issue was 37 years ago), but we are doing everything that we can to help New Yorkers. This morning, for example, I handed out these posters at Publix. #FloridaStandsWithNewYork
Tou Lue Vang, an immigrant to the U.S. from Laos, pled guilty to having sex with a 10-year-old girl. Under Minnesota law, this was apparently not a serious offence that would justify prison time, so he never went to prison and was thus free to maximize his reproductive success. Mr. Vang was recently pardoned by Tim Walz, who very nearly became our Vice-President, so as to throw a wrench into the works of the Trump administration deportation apparatus. The New York Times says that, despite never earning citizenship, this child molester has gifted us with six children, all of whom have birthright citizenship and all of whom have inherited genes from their enricher father:
Is being a child molester heritable? Google AI: “Research suggests genetic factors may explain roughly 46% of the variance in liability for child molestation. A large-scale Swedish study indicated that the shared family environment accounts for only about 2% of this risk, with the remaining factors being unique, non-shared environmental influences (such as personal life events or biological factors).”
How did Mr. Vang become rich enough to afford to housing, food, education, and health care for six children? NYT:
Mr. Vang has held various jobs, most recently as a custodian at a Minnesota-based wholesale company.
Unless his wife is a cardiologist, it seems safe to assume that this convicted child molester’s reproductive success was enabled by the U.S. non-“welfare” welfare system (“means-tested”). In other words, we created an immigration system and then a welfare state designed to ensure that the next generation of Americans has the maximum quantity of child molester genes and the minimum quantity of middle-class conscientious worker genes.
Via a forthcoming paper w/ @CSchmert. Here are differences in TFR across race-income groups. The expected 'u-shape' of TFR by income is clear regardless of race. Birth certs don't record HH income, but we show you how to estimate TFR using pop pyramids in the paper! Pretty cool! pic.twitter.com/UZsesZqzBG
When a detective interviewed Mr. Vang, he acknowledged having had sexual contact with the girl and called it a “minor thing,” according to a criminal complaint. Mr. Vang blamed cultural norms in Thailand, according to the complaint.
AI says that, while Islamic law (the Hadiths) may allow an adult male to have sex with a female of 9 or older, Thailand’s laws and cultural norms require that a girl be 15 and there are severe criminal penalties for sex with a girl under 13. Laos has a lot of teen marriage, but again, sex with a 10-year-old isn’t legally or culturally acceptable in Laos.
I struggle to understand the basics of the U.S. immigration system, e.g., why we would want to fill the country with people who don’t have anything in common other than disliking their home country (our asylum-based system), but this case takes matters to a new level of confusion. Why would we set up a system to help low-wage low-skill child molesters produce six children when working-class and middle-class non-criminal Americans can barely able to produce and care for one or two kids?
It happened to be what passes for “sunny” in this part of the country on the day that we visited, which isn’t ideal for atmosphere:
The iPhone 17 Pro Max doesn’t do the best job at managing the contrast and capture the experience:
They make a big deal out of this banana slug, a victim of iPhone overexposure (I don’t know of a convenient way to tell the iPhone “make all of the photos for the next hour subject to -0.7 f-stops of exposure compensation; probably this would have been a good time to use a third party camera app):
Getting to this part of the Park requires a two-hour wait in a traffic line to get in on busy days. Because the entrance fee is essentially zero ($80 for an annual pass that covers an entire carload of humans), the NPS doesn’t have the cash to accomplish the basics, e.g., repair a broken water fountain that the rangers said hadn’t worked for months. If they’d added a $10 per person crowd-control surcharge and the number of visitors fell by 5 percent as a result, that would have given them over $600,000 to fix the water fountain, almost enough even at California High-speed Rail levels of efficiency.
Practical tip: There is a good burger place, Hard Rain Cafe, on the way into the park. It would be nice if they cranked up the burger prices by enough to pay for real bathrooms, though, instead of Graham Platner-style portapotties.
What if you don’t want to deal with a two-hour sit in your rental car, various bathroom emergencies, etc.? There is a similar rainforest roughly an hour’s drive to the south: the Quinault Rain Forest. It’s part of the National Forest.
Because the U.S. Forest Service has decided to charge almost nothing, just like the National Park Service, they can’t do maintenance. Here’s a bench in the middle of this old growth forest that is probably worth $10 million:
Another example:
There’s a nice lodge (with some masked staff members), but we didn’t eat there:
A few miles up the road is the world’s largest Sitka Spruce tree. The trail there includes “Free Palestine” and “Land Back” messages:
New York City (the “Mamdani Caliphate”) is not the only American city with a Socialist mayor. Katie Wilson has been running Seattle ($9 billion/year budget) for six months now. How’s socialist governance working out? It will be ironic if she does a better job than her liberal Democrat predecessors! During our recent visit (links below), we learned that property crime, e.g., car break-ins, is rampant even in upper-middle-class neighborhoods, and that the places where drug addicts get into fights are just a few blocks from the tourist hotspots (which, of course, we were not allowed to stray from under a directive from Senior Management).
(Note that American-style socialism is the opposite of classic Lenin-Marx society, in which every able-bodied adult had to work. In what Americans call “socialism” nobody is required to work because money can be transferred from the working to the nonworking via taxation. Instead of seizing the NVIDIA’s means of production (over in Taiwan?), the NVIDIA receptionist is taxed to pay a family to relax in its 4th generation on welfare. The U.S. system is properly characterized as transferism, not socialism.)
She should have been given a lift by the Millionaires’ Tax, signed a few months ago, which funds all of these great things:
Seattle’s projected budget deficit has grown to approximately $488 million over the next three years due to inflation and lower-than-expected property and sales tax revenues. To balance the budget, Mayor Wilson is exploring both spending cuts and new revenue options—such as a local capital gains tax or an expansion of the “JumpStart” payroll tax—noting that “nothing is off the table” ahead of her September budget proposal. The budget deficit has grown about $100 million more than initial projections, now standing around $488 million over the next three years. She could ask for spending cuts, but Wilson indicated that cuts alone will not be her strategy. Taxes are also on the table, including a capital gains tax. Right now, there is a statewide capital gains tax, but not a local one.
(Consistent with American innumeracy, the professional journalists don’t tell us what the city’s total budget is and, therefore, the readers has no way of understanding whether a $488 million deficit is a lot or a little. The city proper has a population of about 800,000 and about 380,000 households. So the deficit could be closed if each household contributed $1,300. There are an estimated 21,000 undocumented migrants in Seattle. Yale says that, in fact, we cannot estimate this population accurately and the real number is likely around 2X whatever we’re told by the media. Anyway, those noble enrichers presumably aren’t going to pay (nor should they, since they built Seattle in the first place). ChatGPT estimates roughly 55,000 households on what used to be called “welfare” so they’re not going to pay. Maybe 200,000 households (“the chumps”) would bear the burden? Each one needs to cough up closer to $2,500 if we assume the tax base doesn’t further deteriorate.)
The mayor’s package of legislation will take Seattle several big steps closer to opening 1,000 new units of shelter and emergency housing this year by treating this emergency like an actual emergency. … Even the most successful shelters that do the best work and have the best relationships in their communities are currently limited to serve only 100 people. … The mayor’s proposal would increase this limit to 150 people per site on an interim basis, provide support to address any potential public safety impacts, and additionally allow one location in each district to serve up to 250 people in cases where it makes sense.
Starbucks decided to spend more than $100 million to move a lot of corporate functions to Nashville, where 2,000 people will work (US News). Right now, about 3,000 people work at Starbucks HQ in Seattle, but perhaps the number will be roughly equal to the Nashville cohort eventually because some employees are moving. (The best-known former employee already moved out: Starbucks billionaire advocates for higher tax rates and moves to Florida)
Amazon has been moving east, away from any taxes Katie Porter might try to collect, such as the city payroll tax that started in 2021 (passed during coronapanic when it might have been illegal for anyone to come into the city and work!), and toward Microsoft’s traditional stomping ground. (March 2026 article: “Amazon is abandoning offices near its headquarters in downtown Seattle.”)
Related:
Ed Murray, mayor from 2014-2017: “A Democrat, he was previously a state legislator, first with the Washington State House of Representatives from 1996 to 2007, then the Washington State Senate from 2007 to 2013. In 2017, Murray faced multiple allegations of child abuse, rape and sexual molestation, including from a family member and his adopted son. … He is gay, and came out in 1980. In 2013, he married Michael Shiosaki…”
the 16′-high statute of Lenin, who can’t be credited as an inspiration for American “socialists” because Lenin envisioned a society in which every able-bodied adult had to work:
Just a few more minutes of Pride and there won’t be any 2SLGBTQQIA+ holidays until Nonbinary Awareness Week begins in 13 days.
Here’s a typical celebration in our neighborhood: “Congratulations to Rice-Bound Britton”.
Separately, does it make sense to congratulate Bitton for choosing a $100,000/year school, even one that absurdly claims to be “ranked as a best value in higher education”? If Britton got into Rice she surely would have qualified for the Bright Futures scholarship, thus cutting University of Florida tuition to $0 from $6700/year. She probably would have qualified for the Benacquisto Scholarship, which also pays for housing, food, textbooks, fees, etc. Rice is ranked #17 by US News while University of Florida is ranked #30. Rice ranks higher, but is it $400,000 higher? ChatGPT, asked which school has the better climate: “For a typical August–May school year, I’d pick Gainesville, FL as the better climate overall, especially for kids and outdoor life. Houston has milder winters, but Gainesville has a more pleasant fall–spring stretch, cooler nights, less big-city heat-island effect, and a less flood-prone feel.” I personally love the art museums of Houston, but can’t remember seeing college kids in them. Air quality is, of course, much better in Gainesville since Floridians don’t spend all of their time and energy refining petroleum.
ChatGPT says that UF is stronger than Rice for undergraduates in some areas, including nuclear engineering (maybe now that we’ve surrendered to the Iranians they will send their future bomb developers to UF?), pre-vet, anything agricultural (AI-proof?), accounting, real estate/construction/development (AI-proof?), education, pre-health other than pre-med, materials engineering, etc. In a lot of engineering disciplines, our AI overlord says that the schools are close, but presumably Rice is less of a herd experience.
A report based on an end-of-May 2026 trip on Norwegian Joy out of Seattle. This report will cover the on-ship environment and I’ll do separate posts for the ports.
We picked this particular cruise because it was one of a handful that visited Glacier Bay and that went round-trip rather than requiring a multi-leg air journey back from Anchorage. As an added bonus, the trip departed Seattle (no need to deal with airport immigration/customs chaos) rather than Vancouver.
Our itinerary:
Cautions that apply to any Southeast Alaska cruise…
The typical cruise ship is designed for the Caribbean and nearly half of her public space will be outdoors. Especially if traveling early or late in the season, these areas will be considered unusable by most passengers and, therefore, the interior public spaces will be more crowded than on a Caribbean trip. We traveled toward the end of the coldest Alaska winter in 50 years and it was still about 10 degrees colder than typical. The outside spaces got little use except when near Seattle/Victoria.
Modern cruise ships are a too big to fit comfortably through the traditional “inside passage” routes. Here’s the Alaska Marine Highway System route:
Furthermore, the cruise lines probably wouldn’t want to pay for a Canadian pilot to be on board for roughly 3 days of any round-trip. Thus, the cruise ships do most of their “Inside Passage” travel outside of the protection of Vancouver Island, for example, and the Pacific can throw much bigger waves at a boat than the Caribbean typically does. If you are prone to seasickness, consider a cabin on a lower deck and close to the center of the boat. These have the advantage of being some of the cheapest cabins on a cruise ship. If you’re determined to splash out on a high forward cabin, just be prepared for your food to also splash out!
Finally, expect the ports to be crowded. A town of 8,000 or 10,000 might receive nearly 20,000 cruise ship passengers on a typical summer day. All of the “downtown” sidewalks are going to be at least as packed as Manhattan sidewalks (not Times Square on a Friday night, but more crowded than an average Manhattan sidewalk). If you want to experience these towns as an Alaskan might, you’ll need to go before or after cruise season and/or do it via air/hotel. If you’re there in June, for example, there is enough light to do a lot of activities after the cruise ships cast off (typically 6-8 pm). This is not to say that the whole idea of Alaska+cruise ship is dumb. A sizable Alaskan town might have only one or two decent hotels and restaurants. The situation is better than when I visited in 1993, but a Hampton Inn-grade hotel remains a rarity. The cruise ship is the only practical means of supporting significant tourism because the hotel and restaurant arrives with the passengers.
Back to our specific cruise. Norwegian Joy was launched by Meyer Werft in 2017 and holds about 3,500 passengers. It lacks an all-the-way-around walking/jogging track and purports to make up for that with elaborate water slides and an electric go-kart track. None of the “wow” items are useful in the cold. Some experts might say that the ship was designed for ants and needs to be at least three times larger:
Here’s a view from above at Icy Strait Point:
It was warm enough on departure from Seattle that some kids were actually using the main pool:
Consistent with other cruise ships, the hot tubs aren’t actually hot. Instead of the 102-104 that a homeowner might set a backyard tub to, the cruise lines are perhaps setting the tubs to 98 so that a guest can sit in the tub for five hours while consuming 10 alcoholic drinks and not suffer any ill effects. The dream of a hot soak while the Alaska scenery scrolls by must remain a dream.
Buffet
More efficient than Royal Caribbean or Celebrity, e.g., with multiple omelette stations at breakfast so as to reduce queuing, but less variety and somewhat lower quality than Royal Caribbean (much lower than on Celebrity). The Indian section is mostly vegetarian for what that’s worth. Despite a high percentage of Filipinos among the crew, there is no Filipino section. Our 10-year-old liked to sneak down to the buffet and get crepes with Nutella.
The Haven
Norwegian lets you buy your way out of much of the noise and congestion by signing up for The Haven. This has its own spectacular lounge looking out the bow from the 17th floor:
We had a two-bedroom family room that was comfortable for a family of four and came with a “butler” whom we seldom used. Our master bathroom:
The Haven has its own restaurant, which turned out to be the best on the ship (see below regarding the specialty dining options), though they didn’t begin to vary the menu until the last couple of days of the journey. Maybe it is for the best from a waistline point of view, but the bakers weren’t capable of making a decent croissant or danish even for Haven guests. Remarkably, however, they did make some good fruit tarts with custard for the lounge. (It is possible to make a good croissant on a cruise ship because Celebrity does it!) Donuts were terrible, below the standard of a supermarket donut.
The Haven has its own sundeck on Deck 19. It is theoretically limited to guests 16 and older, but on an Alaska cruise there aren’t enough people up there for anyone to want to bother enforcing the rule.
The Haven has its own solarium with pool and not-very-hot hot tub:
The Haven concierges would organize escorts on and off the ship and make use of crew-only elevators to eliminate delays at peak times.
Was the Haven worth it? I would happily go on Celebrity again in peasant class, would willington go on Royal Caribbean non-suite, but I wouldn’t travel on Norwegian except in the Haven (about 2X the cost of a standard balcony room for a comparable-size cabin).
Specialty Restaurants
Most of these are $60 per adult as a supplement to a regular cruise fare.
Le Bistro: the 12-year-old enjoyed les escargots; the 10-year-old refused to “take one for the team”. Pretty good overall, though the baguette wasn’t truly crusty. The desserts were interesting.’
Teppanyaki: our chef, Kurian, was Filipino and a great performer. Food quality comparable to what you’d get at a good “hibachi” place in the U.S., but a more entertaining experience. “These shrimp are from Maine,” our chef proclaimed. “… the Main Dining Room.”
Q Smoke House: Imagine H-E-B supermarket BBQ… then subtract three levels of quality. Nice people, both kinds of music (country and western), fun decor, but apparently the inability to operate a real smoker is fatal to food quality.
Cagney’s Steakhouse: they can’t use a gas grill and they apparently don’t want to use a cast iron pan on an induction burner. Consequently, the steaks had no crust and were a bit soggy. The lamb was overly salted. The Prime Rib would probably be the smart choice since it doesn’t need a crust. The desserts were terrible, e.g., an obscenely huge chocolate cake that room service also delivers and a raspberry crème brûlée that was absurdly over-flavored with raspberry. Ice cream at the buffet would be a better choice.
Entertainment
Performances were weak compared to either Royal Caribbean or Celebrity. Singers and dancers were talented, of course, but they weren’t backed up by a live orchestra. The most popular performers on the ship turned out to be a Beatles tribute band (awesome period costumes).
Life on board
Internet: Starlink and much higher bandwidth than what Celebrity delivers. WiFi coverage was excellent throughout the ship.
Laundry: After a few days, Norwegian offers a $40/bag wash/fold service. Unlike other cruise lines, however, they bounce the laundry back to you if you don’t laboriously count what you’ve stuffed into the bag. The “bounce” took 24 hours.
Gym: Big and well-equipped, but not at the bow like some cruise ships have and, therefore, not inspiring.
Coronapanic has degraded cruise ship life, according to our cabin steward. Where Norwegian previously assigned one steward per 16 non-suite cabins, after the post-COVID restart the number is 22-24. Guests who previously received two services per day are now cut back to one. Haven guests receive two services per day, but the first cleaning might not happen until after noon. My memory of Royal Caribbean and Celebrity was that the cabin attendant quietly kept track of our whereabouts and would dart into our room 3-4 times per day so as to undo whatever chaos we had created. In the Haven, by contrast, our cabin cleaner was a nice guy but he cleaned on his schedule rather than on ours. Consequently, we were often in the room when it was time for him to clean or do the turn-down.
Some folded-towel art from Ceasar:
What to Pack
Pack some decent binoculars because it is possible to see otters, whales, seals, and other interesting animals from various open decks and even one’s balcony. What’s “decent”? Nikon Monarch M5 8×42 is the cheapest reasonable binocular. You don’t want more than 8X magnification because the ship+your hands aren’t that steady. The M7 costs more and has a wider field of view, useful when searching for whale spouts. The Zeiss Conquest HDX 8×42 is twice the cost of the Nikon M7, has a slightly narrower field of view, and is perhaps worth the money if you love high quality optics. (Confusing, the Japanese-brand binoculars are supposedly made in China while the German-brand binoculars are, according to our AI overlords, made in Japan.)
Pack a European-to-US plug converter because half of the outlets in the room won’t be usable for Americans. Norwegian won’t lend out or sell converters on board because they’ve discovered that Americans aren’t smart enough to understand voltage and whether a device has a switching power supply. To avoid explosions and fires from people plugging 115V-only gear into a 230V outlet they try to prevent this mechanically.
Do you need to see Glacier Bay?
Should you pick a ship/cruise around the requirement of seeing Glacier Bay? It’s useful for crossing the National Park off your life list, but mostly… no. Cruise ships are so large that they can’t get close to the wildlife that perhaps thrives in the National Park relative to some other parts of Southeast Alaska. There are plenty of alternative glaciers that aren’t national parks that are still beautiful. If you are serious about experiencing Glacier Bay it is probably better to fly to Gustavus and do a day cruise into the park on a smaller boat.
