Celebrity Ascent Southern Caribbean cruise review

by philg

This is about a January 2-12, 2026 trip on the Celebrity Ascent from/to Fort Lauderdale via the following ports:

  • Tortola, British Virgin Islands
  • St. Johns, Antigua
  • Barbados
  • St. Lucia
  • St. Kitts

TL;DR: It’s a big ship, but you feel like family. The officers and staff are warm and friendly. The food is much better than on Royal Caribbean. The ship orchestra and the house band (Blue Jays with Jessica Gabrielle) were superb.

The Machine

Celebrity Ascent was completed in 2023 by Chantiers de l’Atlantique at a cost of $1.2 billion and holds about 3,300 passengers on a typical cruise, plus 1,400 crew. She’s notable for having a “Magic Carpet” that can slide up and down the ship, serving as a restaurant or bar most of the time, but also an embarkation platform for the ship’s tenders at ports where there isn’t a pier.

I don’t think she’ll win any beauty contests, but Ascent is very functional! In St. Lucia:

Note that there is no place on board to land a helicopter. If someone gets sick and needs to be evacuated, only the Coast Guard or one of the private contractors that the Europeans like to use can extract someone from the ship with a hoist.

Despite the potential of Starlink, Internet service actually provisioned was too slow for work (see Celebrity Starlink Wi-Fi Internet (3 Mbps at $1,000 per month)).

With 73,000 hp of Wärtsilä diesel power (five engines total), I’m not sure that Greta Thunberg will want to be a customer. That said, the hull design is 22 percent more fuel efficient than older ships. How is it possible to advance the art of naval architecture, already relatively mature during the Second Punic War (2,250 years ago)? The efficiency doesn’t come from an improved hull shape, but from pushing air out at the bow and, thus, enabling the ship to ride on a cushion of air rather than clawing at the draggy water. Prof. Dr. ChatGPT, Ph.D. Naval Arch. explains:

Modern cruise ships sometimes use air lubrication systems (ALS) that pump compressed air through tiny openings in the hull—usually along the flat bottom.

1. Reduced Skin-Friction Drag

  • Water is ~800× denser and far more viscous than air.
  • Replacing direct water–steel contact with air–water contact drastically lowers friction.
  • Skin friction accounts for 50–80% of total resistance at cruise speeds.

2. Lower Fuel Consumption

Typical real-world savings:

  • 5–10% fuel reduction on large ships
  • Sometimes higher on wide, flat-bottomed hulls (like cruise ships)

Many modern ships include air lubrication, including vessels from:

  • Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
  • Wärtsilä
  • Silverstream Technologies

Some notable cruise lines have retrofitted ALS systems to existing ships to improve efficiency.

Air-bubble (air-lubrication) systems have a longer history than most people realize—they date back over half a century, but only became practical for cruise ships fairly recently.

Air lubrication always worked—but it needed:

  • Cheap, efficient electrical power onboard
  • Sophisticated control software
  • Environmental pressure (fuel cost + emissions)
  • Better hull designs to keep the air where it belongs

Cruise ships finally ticked all the boxes.

The Stateroom

Booking about three weeks before departure we got literally the last room available on the ship, other than an inside cabin. We had a Concierge Class 285-square-foot stateroom including the veranda, which ends up becoming part of the room because of the top glass panel’s ability to slide vertically. It’s a clever design. Our room was laid out like the photo below, except that we had the two halves of the bed split with a night table in between. We could have used outlets on both sides of the bed, but found an outlet on only one side. The bathroom felt spacious.

The in-room HVAC doesn’t dehumidify as much as one would expect, nor does it bring significant fresh air into the room when the veranda window is sealed. Humidity without the window open would range from 50-65% (how do they avoid mold?) and CO2 levels in the middle of the night would go over 1,300 ppm (a real nightmare for Greta Thunberg!). Data from an Airthings Wave Enhance:

(I’ve seen CO2 go to 1,000 ppm in some hotels in humid environments, such as Miami. The ASHRAE standard is 800-1,000 ppm. CO2 by itself isn’t harmful (up to 5,000 ppm is tolerated in submarines), but is an indication of how much fresh air is coming in. Atmospheric CO2 is about 430 ppm. In my old Harvard Square condo (crummy 1880s construction) with just one person in the bedroom (me), the CO2 level reached 700 ppm in the middle of the night.)

The Passengers

Typical passengers seemed to be the same kinds of folks who would move into the The Villages (the most active over-55 active community in the U.S.?). Here are a couple of brothers who were, I think, traveling with their parents (flamingo suits from Amazon):

Exercise on Board

There is a beautiful and never-crowded gym on Deck 15 looking straight out at the sea in front of the ship:

Ascent lacks the “walking/jogging track all the way around Deck 5” that was a conventional exercise solution on older ships and instead has a bizarre serpentine track on (crowded) Decks 15 and 16 that is also used by people getting to and from lounge chairs. The lack of the conventional all-around-the-ship track was my biggest disappointment, which I guess means that everything else was at least pretty good!

Here’s the track. Notice that it isn’t shaded, unlike the typical round-the-ship track, and it is surrounded by clutter and people. (The Magic Carpet is in the background in its higher position.)

Food

The food is a significant step-up from what’s offered on Royal Caribbean, the parent company of which acquired Celebrity in 1997. This is good and bad, I guess, I lost weight during every Royal cruise and gained some weight on this Celebrity trip.

One important source of weight gain was that, unlike almost anyone in the U.S. and certainly unlike anyone on Royal, the baker for Ascent was able to make a high quality croissant. These were hard to resist at breakfast. (Fortunately, they were just as bad as Royal at making donuts! The worst Dunkin’ does a better job.) Then at about half the other meals in the buffet they had addictive bread pudding. There was always an option for Indian food at the buffet (4 or 5 dishes plus bread) and typically at least two or three other Asian choices.

A friend who owns some superb restaurants did the Retreat class on Celebrity and said that the dedicated restaurant for those elite passengers exceeded his expectations. We hit the specialty steak restaurant on Ascent and were somewhat disappointed. They can’t have a gas grill on board for safety reasons and, apparently, don’t know how to use induction and a cast iron pan. The steaks are, therefore, rather soggy. We ate in the main dining room and buffet restaurants after that.

The Pool

There’s an indoor solarium pool for Alaska and European cruises. Here’s the outdoor pool (big enough for water aerobics and kids to goof around; not really big enough to swim for exercise (though it emptied out towards sunset so maybe one could)):

Still open and empty because everyone is dressing for dinner?

There are some hot tubs, but they’re not quite hot enough (i.e., you could comfortably sit in one for an hour):

The Spa

If you’re doing an Alaska cruise it probably would make sense to pay for Aqua Class, which includes access to these heated loungers looking out at the sea (not all that appealing on a Caribbean cruise!). The SEA Thermal Suite:

Sports under the Stars

Our cruise coincided with NFL playoffs and people enjoyed the big screen experience in the “Rooftop Garden”:

Entertainment

The resident musicians, singers, and dancers were all great. I personally wish that cruise lines would do full plays or musicals rather than assemble songs from disparate sources and string them together, but apparently I’m a minority of one and attention spans dictate that shows last for just 45 minutes. Some of the guest stars were fantastic, notably Stephen Barry, an Irish singer with a fun attitude. Steve Valentine did a mind-bending Vegas-quality magic show. The technical aspects of the theater were up to Broadway standards or beyond.

Some of my favorite shows were ones where the ship’s orchestra got together with one of the singers from a smaller group and just played music. I’m more of a classical music fan, but the high level of talent live was compelling.

For Kids

There is a small Camp at Sea for kid kids, which some of the youngsters on board seemed to like. My 16-year-old companion rejected the Teen Club, finding only boys playing videogames.

Unlike on Royal Caribbean, there weren’t many under-18s on board. That said, I never saw a child or teen who seemed bored or unhappy. They were loving the food, the scenery, the pool, etc.

The Bridge

The bridge is worth seeing. It’s a masterpiece of ergonomics. Apparently, the captain takes direct control of the Azipods when docking. I had expected a joystick and a computer to figure out what to do with the bow thrusters and the Azipods, but that’s not how it is done.

The Dancers (Bear+Woman)

Art imitates life (“Based on May 2024 surveys, approximately 31% to 37% of women in the US and UK indicated they would prefer to be alone in the woods with a bear over a strange man, with higher rates among younger women (up to 53% for 18-29 year olds in the UK).”):

Conclusion

The whole trip cost about $8,000 including all of the extras, such as Internet and a couple of shore excursions, but no drinks package and only a few extra-cost drinks. We could have done it for less if we’d booked farther ahead or chosen a more basic room. It worked out to $800 per day for great scenery, fun entertainment, more food than I should have eaten, and an introduction to five islands, three of which were entirely new to me and the other two that I hadn’t visited for more than 20 years.

I will remember the warmth of the Celebrity crew. Everyone seemed genuinely interested in welcoming and taking care of us.

[For the cruise haters: We could have flown to a Caribbean from FLL, stayed in a hotel, picked restaurants, and flown back, for about the same price (or 50 percent more for the same level of luxury?). The boat ride itself has value to me, however. I love to be on deck when arriving or departing. It’s a different kind of understanding of how the Caribbean is put together geographically and culturally than one might get from being airdropped by Airbus A320.]

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Two Minutes Hate against Jeffrey Epstein is the new heterosexual Rainbow Flagism?

by philg

From 2019… Is LGBTQIA the most popular social justice cause because it does not require giving money?:

I’m wondering if LGBTQIA is the most popular social justice cause because there is no obvious connection between saying one is passionate about supporting LGBTQIA and having to donate money. If someone says “I care about the poor” and then buys a Tesla instead of a Honda Accord, a friend might ask “Why didn’t you give $70,000 to the poor and drive a Honda rather than your fancy Tesla?”

In the intervening seven years, Teslas have gotten cheaper so perhaps a better analogy is to the $10,000 European vacation. Certainly over those seven years, though, heterosexual Rainbow Flagism, i.e., the public celebration of homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. by white cisgender heterosexuals, has become even more common. Nominally Christian churches in majority-Democrat parts of the U.S. will usually have a rainbow flag even when their entire congregation is hetero. None of these churches have flags or signs out front saying “help the poor by giving them half of your income since you already live at least 2X as well as Americans in the 1950s”.

I wonder if we’re seeing the same phenomenon right now with respect to people indignantly condemning Jeffrey Epstein. Hardly any of these folks were important enough to be included in the Epstein Files and, therefore, they can’t have been personally offended by Epstein’s conduct. If we assume that Jeffrey Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea for “soliciting prostitution” wasn’t coerced by the threat of decades in prison, what has been established is that he had sex with a paid 16-year-old female roughly 20 years ago. (He is often referred to by the Two Minutes Haters as a “rapist” or “pedophile”, but he was never charged with rape, much less convicted of rape, and having sex with a 16-year-old is not an example of pedophilia as the term was previously used in English.)

The Two Minutes Haters often live within a short drive of places where teenage prostitution is going on right now. I’m in a politically diverse Facebook group with a Big Law partner (average partner at his firm earns about $1.5 million/year in post-Biden dollars) who posts daily about his sympathy for the Epstein victims. He lives in an elite neighborhood of Greater Los Angeles that is within a one-hour drive of the street that the New York Times recently identified as having a high-density of juvenile prostitutes:

Ana paced on the sidewalk at 68th and Figueroa, her front teeth missing and an ostomy bag taped down under her hot pink lingerie. … Ana was 19, but the girls on the street reminded her of herself and her sister when they were first put out on Figueroa for sex. She had been 13. Her sister, 11. … Ana had grown accustomed to the protocols of the Blade, a roughly 50-block stretch of Figueroa Street that had become one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States. … The Blade was an eight-minute drive from the University of Southern California … The younger the girl, the more customers would pay, which meant preteens were often being robbed and assaulted by groups of older girls trying to make quota.

My response to one of his recent demands for more action regarding the Epstein Files. I’ll call him “Hassan” since that’s the first name of one of the Somalis charged in the Minnesota welfare state frauds and we are informed that Somalis built the United States:

There are teenage prostitutes whom you can rescue tonight, Hassan. The New York Times tells you exactly where in Los Angeles to find them. I will send you $1,000, Hassan, if you will go to Figueroa St. tonight and take home one of the under-18 prostitutes and keep her safe in your guest rooms for at least one month. This is to offset the cost of her food (I know that it should be a lot less than $1,000 to feed a skinny kid, but I see you more as an Uber Eats kind of person than a competent chef).

His only response to this offer was to take issue with my criticism, admittedly unsupported, of his cooking abilities. A few hours later he was posting the assertion “Donald Trump was actively recruiting girls for Epstein”, apparently made by someone the FBI interviewed in 2021.

The easiest way for authorities to bring the criminal justice system down on men who have sex with “underage” women is to prosecute them for statutory. Then a jury doesn’t need to sort out whether providing a female with housing, private jet rides, clothing, jewelry, spending money, etc. is prostitution or just legal “dating” in our debauched country. The people who engage in the Two Minutes Hate regarding Epstein often live in states where sex with a 16-year-old might be perfectly legal because that’s the age of consent. Here’s my offer to one of the haters who sent me a stream of enraged X messages regarding my failure to unequivocally condemn Jeffrey Epstein:

If you want to work together to lobby the Massachusetts legislature to raise the age of consent in MA to 18, I will be happy to help with that.

He did not respond to this offer.

What we’re seeing is a huge group of Americans who don the mantle of righteous protectors of teenage females because they posted on social media about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, all of whom are now adults and nearly all of whom have been or are being paid $millions, i.e., more than the typical American female will earn in a lifetime of W-2 slavery. See “Jeffrey Epstein victims program shutting down with $121 million paid to abuse survivors” (ABC, 2021):

The Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program, since launching last year, received approximately 225 applications from alleged victims from the United States and abroad. That astounding number was more than double the initial expectations of the fund’s administrator and advocates for the victims. … Of the 150 applicants deemed eligible for compensation, more than 92% accepted the offers. The awards were paid by the executors of Epstein’s estate, but the claims were evaluated independently “free from any interference or control” by the estate, said Jordana Feldman, the program’s designer and administrator.

(75 out of 225 applicants were considered to be obvious liars by the administrators and, therefore, not eligible?)

“Epstein survivors secure a $290 million settlement with JPMorgan Chase” (NPR, 2023):

The lawsuit is one of several targeting banks who serviced Epstein’s financial dealings for years, even after it emerged in 2006 that Epstein was using his wealth to exploit minors and young women. Last month, Deutsche Bank agreed to a $75 million settlement in a similar case.

News of the JPMorgan settlement emerged on Monday, the same day a federal judge granted class-action status to the lawsuit, saying the number of plaintiffs involved could be “well over 100 people.”

Let’s assume it is the same 150 people who will also share the JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank cash. That’s $486 million divided by 150 = $3.24 million on top of whatever Jeffrey Epstein paid them while they were spending time with him. A reasonable person could certainly argue that $3.24 million tax-free isn’t sufficient compensation but it is unarguably far more than the typical teen prostitute receives. Thus my confusion regarding why it’s considered righteous to dwell on Jeffrey Epstein’s victims of 20 years ago rather than try to rescue today’s teen prostitutes.

Maybe the best response is to offer anyone piling on condemnation of Epstein three options: (a) spend time and money rescuing today’s young female prostitutes, (b) spend time and money lobbying to raise the age of consent in every U.S. state and every country where it isn’t at least 18 (you could also argue for 27, at least for women, given recent outraged stories about Epstein and 26-year-old females (e.g., NYT)), (c) spend time and money on imposing alcohol prohibition within the U.S. (my standard proposal for improving a lot of stuff, including sexual behavior), or (d) spend money on a new fund that will give people who say that they were Epstein victims additional money. Perhaps the new fund could find the 75 women who were denied any compensation by the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program and give each of them $1 million?

Related:

  • Fox story about Wendy Stephens, just 14 years old when she was murdered by the Green River Killer; Wendy Stephens ran away from home in Colorado and found her way to Seattle somehow. Not only did Wendy Stephens not get paid $millions, but she didn’t get to enjoy her remaining 60+ years of life expectancy. Had the citizens of Seattle shut down their teen prostitution corridor, which is where Gary Ridgway picked up nearly all of his victims, Wendy Stephens would likely be with us today. (The arch-criminal, according to Wokipedia: “Ridgway, who is dyslexic, was held back a year in high school and exhibited an IQ recorded as being in the ‘low eighties.'”)
  • “LA County reaches $828 million abuse claims settlement on top of previous $4 billion accord” (ABC, October 2025), a story that interested almost nobody either inside or outside of LA: “Los Angeles County announced a tentative $828 million settlement with more than 400 plaintiffs who claim they were the victims of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of county workers. The settlement is on top of an earlier $4 billion settlement reached on behalf of roughly 11,000 claimants.”
  • Are women the new children? (support for raising the age of consent to 27)

AI vs. Groupthink

Would it be possible to use AI to determine whether, as is commonly asserted these days, that Jeffrey Epstein was a rapist of 14-year-old girls?

Screenshot

ChatGPT says that it is fair to characterized Jeffrey Epstein as a “pedophile” because at least some women were under age 18. When asked about Mohammed and his marriage to Aisha, on the other hand, it turns out that the Prophet was not a “pedophile”:

Traditional Islamic hadith literature — especially reports in collections such as Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim — state that:

  • Muhammad married Aisha when she was six.
  • The marriage was consummated when she was nine.

These reports have been accepted as authentic by the majority of classical Sunni scholars for over a millennium.

…

4) Comparison with Jeffrey Epstein

The comparison is difficult because the contexts differ on multiple axes:

DimensionMuhammadEpstein
Time period7th century20th–21st century
Cultural normsEarly marriage commonSex with minors illegal & stigmatized
Evidence typeReligious texts & historical reportsCourt records, testimony, indictments
Pattern allegedSpecific marriagesLarge network of abuse
Legal frameworkPre-modern tribal lawModern criminal law

Because of this:

  • Epstein’s conduct was criminal under the laws and norms of his own society.
  • Muhammad’s marriage practices reflected norms widely accepted in his historical setting.

This doesn’t make moral evaluation impossible — but it makes clinical labeling across contexts methodologically unsound.

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Get together in Austin Feb 20? Or Vegas on February 24?

by philg

Dear Readers: I’m headed to Austin and should be free on February 20. Would anyone like to meet up? Terry Black’s, perhaps? (see Austin and Lockhart, Texas: 10 barbecue restaurants in 72 hours) Email philg@mit.edu if interested.

Does anyone have a good idea for activities? I went to the city’s official events page and just one event is listed for February 20:

OUTsider is an Austin-based transmedia nonprofit that celebrates the bold originality and creative nonconformity of the LGBTQ+ communities through the presentation of provocative, overlooked and out-of-the-box film, dance, theater, performance art, music, writing and visual art. Through its annual festival and conference, OUTsider unites queer artists, audiences and scholars from around the globe to exchange ideas, ignite conversations, transcend boundaries and experience new pleasures through artistic discovery.

If Feb 20 doesn’t work, how about Feb 24 in Vegas? Please email philg@mit.edu!

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Antigravity as web developer (AI in an IDE)

by John Morgan

As noted in previous posts, the web chat interface can be a cumbersome method of interacting with an LLM for the purpose of web development tasks such as adding a CSS file to an HTML page to make it render nicely on smartphones.

What if we try artificial intelligence as a companion to a programmer’s integrated development environment (IDE)? Google’s $2.4 billion baby, Antigravity, is the contender for this post, a collaboration between John Morgan and Philip Greenspun.

Installing Antigravity immediately presents the new user with a challenging question: Review-driven development vs. Agent-driven development. There is no explanation on the setup screen as to what the difference between these two might be:

Antigravity’s default user interface presents the developer with three panes: a file explorer on the left, a code editor in the middle, and an LLM chat interface on the right. We start this experiment by opening a folder we’ve created named bh-antigravity-gemini that contains the HTML for the decidedly archaic Berkshire Hathaway homepage and proceeding to write a prompt asking to generate CSS and edit the page’s HTML to make it responsive:

Antigravity offers a variety of models to choose from but for the purposes of this experiment we’ll use the default which is Gemini 3 Pro (High) in Planning mode. Planning mode causes Gemini to come up with plans before implementing them. After submitting the prompt Gemini begins to think through a plan:

As Gemini works to develop a plan Antigravity presents a Task document showing the steps to be taken:

Once Gemini has come up with its plan Antigravity presents us with an Implementation Plan document outlining the proposed changes as well as a verification plan:

Since the plan sounds sensible we instruct Gemini to implement it:

Once Gemini completes the task Antigravity presents us with a Walkthrough document with an overview of the results of completing the task:

Below the message announcing the completion of the task Antigravity presents us with a list of files that have been changed including counts for lines added and removed. Just below the list is a button to “Accept all” changes. We want to inspect the changes for ourselves first so we select the berkshire-hathaway.htm file to see what was added. Sure enough, Gemini has kept the changes to a minimum as requested and simply inserted a viewport <meta> tag and a <link> to incorporate the newly created stylesheet:

We accept the changes in the HTML and move on to examine the newly created style.css file. The CSS includes comments indicating that Gemini has tailored it to match the styling present in the original HTML while implementing the proposed changes to make the page responsive:

Satisfied with its suggestions we accept the changes and proceed to view the results. The images below are the original page as viewed on desktop followed by the new page as viewed on desktop. As promised Gemini has kept the desktop styling largely the same with the primary difference being greater spacing between links:

The images below are the original page as viewed on mobile followed by the new page as viewed on mobile. The new CSS has transformed the page such that it is no longer rendered as it would be on desktop but instead presents the links as a single column with text that is readable and easy to select without needing to zoom.

The quality of Gemini’s code generation in this experiment appears comparable to what we saw from it in our previous comparison of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. This is not surprising as Antigravity is merely another interface for a developer to interact with an LLM such as Gemini.

Our conclusion is that having AI integrated tightly into the IDE where the chat log is presented and persisted alongside the code and the model can be quickly directed to analyze files within the codebase without the need to paste them into a chat window or manually upload them via a web interface saves time and leads to a more organized and less fragmented experience. We also find that the IDE’s ability to highlight proposed changes and allow us to accept or reject them and edit our files in place achieves a level of integration into the development workflow that a web chat interface cannot match.

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Climate change alarmist pays $200 million for a sea level house; time for new envy level?

by philg

May 2017, Harvard Crimson:

Mark Zuckerberg’s Commencement address at Harvard

How about stopping climate change before we destroy the planet and getting millions of people involved manufacturing and installing solar panels? … We get that our greatest challenges need global responses too — no country can fight climate change alone or prevent pandemics.

(The last part is my favorite. In 2017 he predicted that the lavishly funded UN and WHO would, three years later, be able to prevent a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic via muscular action, Scientific interventions such as saliva-soaked face rags, etc.)

February 2026, WSJ:

Billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, are the latest California billionaires to buy a home in South Florida. … THE PRICE: While it isn’t clear exactly what Zuckerberg and Chan are paying for the nearly 2-acre property, local real-estate agents said it would likely trade for $150 million to $200 million. Last year, an undeveloped Indian Creek lot of roughly the same size sold for about $105 million.

A peasant to whom $200 million is real money might look at the contrast between the 2017 statement about climate panic (“destroy the planet”) and the 2026 sea level waterfront house purchase and shout out “Hypocrisy!”. But maybe instead it is time for a new level of envy. What if Mark Zuckerberg believes what he’s been saying about climate change and bought the house anyway? That’s the real estate equivalent of driving a $600,000 Ferrari Purosangue to an elementary school with two kids and a bag of drive-thru breakfasts in the back. The owner knows that the kids are doing $200,000 of damage to the interior and simply doesn’t care. Zuck expects the above house to be washed away in 5-10 years, in other words, and is indifferent to the consequent loss of $200 million.

Envy 101: being bitter about the people who can afford to buy beachfront mansions and pass them down to their kids and grandkids

Envy 303: being bitter about the people who can afford to buy beachfront mansions and treat them as disposable

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The Army helicopter crash in DC revisited

by philg

As noted in Reagan National Airport Black Hawk-CRJ crash, the easiest way to have prevented the January 2025 crash would have been to implemented congestion pricing on the highways around DC so that officials didn’t need helicopter taxi service to avoid the traffic jams that have been caused by dramatic population growth induced by spectacular growth in government spending (plus open borders?).

“The Last Flight of PAT 25 Two Army helicopter pilots went on an ill-conceived training mission. Within two hours, 67 people were dead.” (New York Magazine):

Black Hawks are typically flown by two pilots. The pilot in command, or PIC, sits in the right-hand seat. Tonight, that role was filled by 39-year-old chief warrant officer Andrew Eaves. Warrant officers rank between enlisted personnel and commissioned officers; it’s the warrant officers who carry out the lion’s share of a unit’s operational flying. When not flying VIPs, Eaves served as a flight instructor and a check pilot, providing periodic evaluation of the skills of other pilots. A native of Mississippi, he had 968 hours of flight experience and was considered a solid pilot by others in the unit.

In terms of flying hours, Mr. Eaves was at the same stage as a civilian helicopter pilot beginning a second year working as an instruction in little Robinsons, mostly going in circles around a training airport.

His mission was to give a check ride to Captain Rebecca Lobach, the pilot sitting in the left-hand seat. Lobach was a staff officer, meaning that her main role in the battalion was managerial. Nevertheless, she was expected to maintain her pilot qualifications and, to do so, had to undergo a number of annual proficiency checks. Tonight’s three-hour flight was intended to get Lobach her annual sign-off for basic flying skills and for the use of night-vision goggles, or NVGs. To accommodate that, the flight was taking off an hour and 20 minutes after sunset. …

Night-vision goggles have a narrow field of view, just 40 degrees compared to the 200-degree range of normal vision, which makes it harder for pilots to maintain full situational awareness. They have to pay attention to obstacles and other aircraft outside the window, and they also have to keep track of what the gauges on the panel in front them are saying: how fast they’re going, for instance, and how high. There’s a lot to process, and time is of the essence when you’re zooming along at 120 mph while lower than the tops of nearby buildings. To help with situational awareness, Eaves and Lobach were accompanied by a crew chief, Staff Sergeant Ryan O’Hara, sitting in a seat just behind the cockpit, where he would be able to help keep an eye out for trouble.

Lobach, 28, had been a pilot for four years. She’d been an ROTC cadet at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which she graduated from in 2019. Both her parents were doctors; she’d dreamed of a medical career but eventually realized that she couldn’t pursue one in the Army. According to her roommate, “She did not have a huge, massive passion” for aviation but chose it because it was the closest she could get to practicing medicine, under the circumstances. “She badly wanted to be a Black Hawk pilot because she wanted to be a medevac unit,” he told NTSB investigators. After she completed flight training at Fort Rucker, she was stationed at Fort Belvoir, where she joined the 12th Aviation Battalion and was put in charge of the oil-and-lubricants unit.

In addition to her official duties, Lobach served as a volunteer social liaison at the White House, where she regularly represented the Army at Medal of Honor ceremonies and state dinners. … She was planning to leave the service in 2027 and had already applied for medical school at Mount Sinai. Helicopter flying was not something she intended to pursue.

Though talented as a manager, she wasn’t much of a pilot. … One instructor described her skills as “well below average,” noting that she had “lots of difficulties in the aircraft.” Three years before, she’d failed the night-vision evaluation she was taking tonight. … It’s not uncommon for pilots to struggle during the early phase of their career. But Lobach’s development had been particularly slow. In her five years in the service, she had accumulated just 454 hours of flight time, and she wasn’t clocking more very quickly.

Captain Lobach had the same number of hours as a Big Tech engineer who flies recreationally for about three years and, based on the above, far less interest in becoming proficient. The small number of hours seems to be common within the Army:

Similar problems exist throughout Army aviation; the service has been having a hard time retaining its most experienced pilots and providing adequate flight time for those currently coming up through the ranks. Since 2011, the average number of hours flown per year by crewed Army aircraft has fallen from 302 to 198.

Here’s a confusing part. Maybe the issue was with the tail rotor rather than “a tail fin”?

As they passed over the Civil War battlefield of Thoroughfare Gap, an alarm called a master caution went off, indicating that a control system for a tail fin was malfunctioning. If the situation worsened and the surface became stuck, the helicopter could crash.

(This was unrelated to the crash as it happened an hour earlier and the system was “reset”.)

The conclusion of the article is bizarre. After writing about a person who wasn’t interested in aviation, the author concludes with a quote from the pilot-brother of one of the regional airline pilots who was killed by the Army crew’s incompetence:

He thinks that Lobach could have become a good pilot if they gave her another thousand hours of flying time. Instead, the Army withheld from her the training and flight time that she needed to fly safely and then required her to go fly anyway on a mission that was as ill-conceived as it was poorly executed.

The article is heartbreaking because there are thousands of superb civilian helicopter pilots who would have sacrificed almost anything to take Captain Lobach’s place behind the controls of a Blackhawk even without receiving her Army pay and benefits ($150,000/year if we include housing allowance and the actuarial value of the pension?). It’s understandable that the military is a bureaucracy, but after all of the selection hurdles how does it end up with pilots who don’t love to fly and live to fly?

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Bad Bunny’s nuanced views on immigration

by philg

“Bad Bunny uses Grammy Award win to protest ICE” (CNN, February 2026):

Accepting the award for best música urbana album, Bad Bunny began his speech saying, “Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say: ICE out!”

“How Bad Bunny Did It” (The Atlantic, February 2026):

Bad Bunny is articulating the surreal and sad feeling of seeing his homeland transformed by internet-supercharged globalization. The U.S. territory’s economy has long relied on tourism, but in recent years, a wave of laptop-toting mainlanders lured by the balmy climate and notoriously loose tax laws has driven rent increases and threatened to wash out the local identity. Bad Bunny’s new album, Bonilla wrote, is a “lament for a Puerto Rico slipping through our fingers: betrayed by its leaders; its neighborhoods displaced for luxury developments; its land sold to outsiders, subdivided by Airbnb and crypto schemes and repackaged as paradise for others.”

(The gringos at The Atlantic characterize Puerto Rico as having “notoriously loose tax laws”, but “How Puerto Rico Became the Newest Tax Haven for the Super Rich” (GQ 2018) and other sources make it clear that Act 20 and Act 22 are, in fact, tightly specified.)

Separately, if you want to enjoy Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance, but don’t understand el idioma de los conquistadores (or the way that Bad Bunny pronounces this language), here’s a recital in the English language:

The “We Accept EBT” sign on the set was a nice touch. It wasn’t inclusive, however, for viewers in Minnesota. Why not an additional “Waxaan aqbalnaa EBT” or “Halkan EBT waa laga aqbalaa” sign? (the majority of Somali-headed households are on SNAP)

In other NFL news, our home town of Jupiter, Florida was indirectly featured recently by Bill Belichick’s young associate:

Related:

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Why won’t San Francisco Democrats provide their teachers with fair compensation?

by philg

Californians love to brag about how productive and rich they are. San Francisco should be the richest city in the world right now given that most of the AI companies have set up shop within the city limits and the founders/executives of these companies also live within city limits, e.g., Sam Altman (worth nearly $2 billion) That’s a tax base that municipal governments all around the world can only envy. We are informed that Democrats protect American workers’ interests and there are no Republicans who could potentially prevent San Francisco from taxing and spending.

Separately, we are informed that public employee unions would never use their power to exploit taxpayers by demanding above-market compensation. Our newspapers report as an established fact that unionized schoolteachers are “underpaid”.

This week, however, we learn that the elite Democrats who run San Francisco refuse to provide their public schoolteachers with the fair compensation that the union has requested, thus necessitating a strike. NYT:

On Monday morning, Cassondra Curiel, the president of the union, the United Educators of San Francisco, led a rally on the steps of Mission High School, where dozens of teachers, dressed in red, rattled tambourines and hoisted signs calling for higher wages. Some brought their children, who were out of school for the day.

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If AI is useful why is gold gaining in value compared to the S&P 500?

by philg

One of my faith-based beliefs is that productive assets, such as a company that makes widgets, are more valuable than rocks or metal bars. This, of course, hasn’t been true lately. Here’s the price of gold over the period of Bidenflation (we’re still in the “Bidenflation” period even without Biden, since inflation is tough to tame once it gets going, e.g., because government is nearly half the economy and many government payments are automatically indexed to inflation):

On the other hand, the S&P 500 is also way up, especially the Big Tech/AI companies.

What does ChatGPT have to say? The S&P is worth 1.7X all of the above-ground gold:

How about 10 years ago when AI wasn’t functional and productivity gains from AI weren’t baked into investor expectations? The ratio was higher: 2.35X.

So the value of productive assets, which should be enhanced by AI, have actually fallen relative to an unproductive asset, whose value shouldn’t be directly affected by AI.

Does this mean that markets don’t think that AI is useful? Or perhaps they think that AI will make some companies more productive, but it will render so many humans useless that taxes on the productive to fund idle lifestyles for the useless will wipe out any economic gains? Or maybe there is a simpler explanation, e.g., people love gold.

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