Remembering Dolly Parton by remembering Dollywood

by philg

Eighty years is a good run (it’s what the Ancient Egyptians expected), but it was still sad to learn about Dolly Parton’s death.

From this blog in 2022, Dollywood:

In addition to the expected terrifying rollercoasters there are a lot of music shows. One artist that you won’t hear too much, not even covers of her songs, is… Dolly Parton. She uses the park to showcase lesser-known musicians.

A great example of humility.

Loosely related, a Dolly Parton pinball machine, photographed at The Pinball Dudes, Jupiter, Florida (a great dealer), January 2023:

Related:

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National Park Service funding vs. crony profit, a Dry Torugas example

by philg

Happy National Park Service Founders Day for those who celebrate. This commemorates the signing of a law by the third most notorious racist ever to serve in the White House (Prof. Dr. Woodrow Wilson, Ph.D.; the #1 racist, of course, being Donald Trump and #2 being slaveholder George Washington).

Dry Tortugas National Park is one of three in Florida. It costs $15 per person to enter or $0 if the visitor has already purchased an annual pass ($80 for US residents; $250 for rich foreign visitors), consistent with almost 90 percent of National Park Service funding coming from federal taxpayers in general, many of whom are too busy working to pay their taxes (top income tax rates being over 50% in California and NYC) in order to visit any park.

What about the favored companies (cronies) whom the NPS has put into a monopoly position with respect to park access? A single seaplane company is authorized to fly people into the park, a 40-minute trip for 70 statute miles in a slow airplane. They’re able to charge $910 for a day trip:

The National Park collects either 0% of the revenue (visitor already holds an annual pass) or 1.6% of the revenue ($15 out of $925). Let’s call it an average of 0.8% plus whatever percentage of revenue the seaplane operator got for its monopoly.

There is also a ferry (the Yankee Freedom; the crony that operates this trip is Maskachusett-based). It costs $245 round-trip for 175 passengers. So the boat company gets roughly $43,000 in revenue per day (it’s a four-hour round trip) and the Park gets perhaps $1,000 from entrance fees ($15 per passenger, but $0 for the presumed majority who have an annual pass). That’s just over 2% of the revenue from owning the asset that people have traveled to see and, in most cases, paid about $400/night for a hotel in Key West.

At least at one time, the ferry company was required to hand over 8.5% of ticket price to the NPS, but both authorized transportation providers are usually sold out, often months in advance, so the above-cited prices aren’t the market-clearing prices, perhaps because they must be approved by the NPS. If the NPS were interested in getting more from visitors and taking less from taxpayers, it could trivially insist on a much larger share of the daily price either via fees or in exchange for handing out these transportation monopolies.

(Finally, note that “Freedom” is the name of the boat operated by the company that won the right to exclude all competitors from this market.)

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A year since Iryna Zarutska died: no consequences so far for anyone in government

by philg

Previously on this blog, the consequence-free life of academic elites: Plagiarist Claudine Gay getting paid $3.1 million/year after “resigning” from Harvard

It has been a year since Iryna Zarutska was murdered by a frequent flyer in North Carolina’s revolving door justice system. I asked ChatGPT if there had been any consequences for anyone on the North Carolina state government payroll or on the City of Charlotte’s payroll. Excerpts:

As of today, August 22, 2026—exactly one year after Iryna Zarutska was killed—I can find no judge or elected politician who has actually lost a job, been removed from office, been disciplined, or suffered an obvious electoral defeat because of the case.

The clearest case is Mecklenburg County Magistrate Teresa Stokes, who released Decarlos Brown Jr. on a written promise to appear after his January 2025 arrest for misuse of 911. After Zarutska’s murder, all 10 Republican members of North Carolina’s U.S. House delegation formally asked Chief District Court Judge Roy Wiggins to begin proceedings to remove Stokes. But she apparently was not removed: the Mecklenburg County court’s current personnel directory, crawled within the past two weeks, still lists Teresa Stokes — Magistrate.

Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles was arguably the most visible elected official facing political accountability. She was not punished by voters at all. The murder became a major issue in the November 2025 mayoral race, but Lyles was reelected with 92,537 votes, 70.45%, versus Republican Terrie Donovan’s 25.53%.

Mecklenburg District Attorney Spencer Merriweather is also still in office. His office was criticized because prosecutors did not seek modification of Brown’s release conditions while the January charge remained pending. Merriweather remains DA and is up for election in November 2026.

One possible apparent personnel consequence deserves caution: Charlotte police chief Johnny Jennings retired after the killing, but I have not found good evidence that he was forced out because of Zarutska’s murder, so I wouldn’t count that as punishment without stronger evidence.

So if by “punished” you mean someone in government personally paying a price—fired, removed from the bench, defeated at the polls, censured, suspended, fined, etc.—the answer appears to be no. Stokes in particular is striking: despite a congressional delegation formally demanding her removal, she is apparently still serving as a magistrate one year later.

Here’s an example of peasant outrage a year ago:

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Tesla FSD ergonomic disaster: no right footrest (dead pedal)

by philg

A friend lent his almost-new Tesla S out (not to me!) and the result was a Cybertruck rental while the bumper got some rehab.

The Cybertruck’s FSD struggled at low speeds due to constant phantom human sightings. We’re pretty sure that this was due to a camera’s interaction with the Maskachusetts front license plate (Florida does not require this disfigurement).

I sat in the driver seat for a 45-minute FSD from Dedham to Hanscom Field in Bedford, MA. The system performed commendably except that chill mode hogged third lane (out of four) on I-95/128 and obstructed traffic flow by driving 55 mph during the intervals without significant traffic. It should be smart enough to know that a strict speed limit driver should stick to the two right lanes if four are available.

My primary take-away is that Tesla hasn’t thought through the ergonomics of 98% self-driving. For close to 100 years, cars have been engineered so that the driver can extend both of his/her/zir/their feet (need to be gender-inclusive since we’re talking about a trip around Boston). The left foot sits on a footwell rest or, sometimes, a “dead pedal” that is at roughly the same distance from the driver as the clutch (old-school manual transmission requiring quick changes of position for the left foot). The right foot rests comfortable on the gas pedal.

With the 2026 Model S, however, there is nowhere to rest one’s right foot when self-driving. Either the footwell needs to be a little wider or the accelerator and brake pedals need to be moved closer to the center of the existing footwell so as to make room for a dead pedal on the right. More complex idea since Tesla buyers love technology for its own sake: a rest for the right foot that automatically extends slightly when FSD is engaged and that retracts back into the floor when driving manually (“like an animal”).

A few photos of the Tesla Collision Center and the 10:00 am traffic that we suffered through to get there. (I can’t figure out how people in Boston are so passionate about open borders and the attendant population growth. They are gradually being imprisoned in their own neighborhoods by ever-worsening traffic.)

Car & Driver magazine, 1962, regarding the 1963 Corvette (250-360 hp!):

The pedals are extremely well placed. The accelerator is close to the tunnel, letting the foot rest against its side, and there is plenty of room left of the clutch pedal for the driver to brace himself.

A patent filed in 1961:

Related:

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New York Times says it is time to stiff the bondholders out of their $40 trillion

by philg

“An Ancient Sumerian Solution to Our $40 Trillion Deficit” (yesterday):

The U.S. federal debt has hit $40 trillion. Add the debt owed by U.S. states, corporations and consumers and the figure rises to about $77 trillion in debt, set against an annual G.D.P. of about $32 trillion. The interest on all of it is compounding constantly.

Ancient societies had another method to deal with debt. It was called an amargi — a blanket declaration of public debt cancellation. All public debts written off. Disappeared. It sounds laughable, I know. But, really, that’s just because the idea has been buried so deeply in history you’ve probably never heard of it. In the ancient world, it presented a pragmatic solution to an intractable problem. And now, faced with impossible-to-repay debts that are weighing down our economy, is the time to look at the amargi and the lessons it offers about how to think about finance.

The amargi was a response to a persistent problem that was recognized in the ancient world: Debt compounded until it destabilized society.

Understatement Department:

People who were owed money were, predictably, not always happy about the amargi.

We invented it so we can de-invent it:

The reason the practice often worked in the first place was because the ancient world understood something about our monetary system we have mostly forgotten: Money is an invented social construct. It isn’t real, not in the way a tree or a stone is real. The system of money and credit is a thing humans made up. It’s a record-keeping device for distributing resources. And since money is a human creation, we can alter it when needed.

What would happen if the U.S. were to stiff all of the bondholders, most whom are domestic (breakdown)? Would the stock market collapse because of the evaporation of money people thought that they had saved? A lot of stocks would go to zero, presumably, because a bank or insurance company could go insolvent due to the evaporation of reserves. Maybe some stocks would go up because workers wouldn’t be quite as burdened with federal taxes and, therefore, would have more spending power? That seems unlikely because our fiscal deficits are so high that ceasing interest payments on federal debt still wouldn’t result in a balanced budget (i.e., we would need higher taxes to fund the government services that we demand in a world where the federal government doesn’t/can’t borrow, even after kissing $40 trillion in debt goodbye). This is kind of remarkable. Imagine a family that is so addicted to spending that even if it is magically freed from paying a mortgage, a car loan, or any of its past credit card bills that it still can’t fund the lifestyle to which it has become accustomed and feels entitled.

If this does happen, I guess I’ll be nominally poorer (stock market collapse), but I’ll have some bragging rights because I’ve been a hater of bonds as an investment ever since the Jimmy Carter era inflation (more properly attributed to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, but Carter got the blame because hyperinflation took a while to build steam).

Here’s a misleading chart, by the way. It says “total public debt” is $40 trillion, but doesn’t count debt incurred by state and local governments (also “public”). Supposedly this is only about another $4 trillion, but that doesn’t include state and local obligations to retirees, such as pensions and health insurance (impossible even to guess at what those are because we don’t know how long humans will live).

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La Traviata in Bangor at Opera Acadia

by philg

If you’re in Maine (and, this time of year, why wouldn’t you be?), head up to Bangor for a 7 pm La Traviata put on by Opera Acadia. I was there last night and everything about it was great:

  • orchestra (sounded liked they’ve played together all year and did not overpower the singers)
  • singing (entire cast, but Sarah Joyce Cooper was amazing as Violetta)
  • acoustics (hall isn’t cavernous; seats about 500?)
  • comfort (lots of legroom, width for, um, today’s Americans, and luxurious padding)
  • supertitles (unobtrusive)

I do miss the Franco Zeffirelli sets, as seen in the 1982 movie and also at the Metropolitan Opera until they trashed them (thus beginning the financial/audience decline that was accelerated by coronapanic?). Here’s the program:

If you can’t make it to Maine, stream the movie! (Maybe it has to be pirated? Supposedly, it isn’t available on any of the usual platforms due to the licensing hassles combined with the minimal revenue potential.) Here’s an alternative that might be worthy:

Trigger warning for recent college graduates: It’s sad and somebody dies.

(I’m irrational so am posting this while in transit back to the summer heat and humidity of Jupiter, Florida. Can’t stay away from the kids (back in skool) and the pup for too long!)

Related:

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Explaining the academic socialist factory

by philg

The freshmen are arriving at elite universities this weekend. Four years from now, they’ll come out ready to do “community organizing” for Ayatollah Mamdani’s Senate campaign. Given that students don’t listen to professors, how is it possible that four years at a university is a reliable path toward becoming what Americans call a “socialist” (nothing like the Soviet Socialism in which every able-bodied adult had to work, of course!)? The Wall Street Journal carries a brilliant explanation of the mechanism, which does not require any student to learn anything from any professor, by a teacher at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, Kimberlee Josephson (not in quote style for readability):

When your first brush with adulthood involves endless consumption and no cost, it gives you the wrong idea of how the world works.

Universities operate as a closed economy: centrally administered, collectively resourced, carefully controlled by administrators who hope their plans aid retention efforts.

Over the past several decades, the college campus has morphed into a comprehensive residential and lifestyle provider. Beginning in the 1990s, when colleges started competing more aggressively for larger enrollment numbers, investing in student life became a way to recruit students. Expanded student unions, more-comfortable residence halls, larger recreation centers, campus programming offices and improved dining choices became the norm.

By the early 2000s, colleges faced an “amenities arms race.” Rec centers were revamped with climbing walls and lazy rivers; dorms gave way to apartment lofts with expansive lounges; campus coffee bars were established with national brands.

At elite institutions, students enter a nearly self-contained community. They ride campus buses without paying a fare. They enter expansive recreation centers without a membership card. They attend concerts, meet career coaches, reserve study rooms, download software, join student organizations, and participate in countless campus activities without ever reaching for a wallet.

If transportation is universally available without fares on campus, it may seem natural to ask why urban transportation doesn’t function similarly. If counseling services and mindfulness programs are readily available in college, paid time off for mental health may seem like a reasonable expectation in the workplace. If fitness centers, technology services, entertainment options and countless other amenities appear to operate without cost, comprehensive public provision elsewhere may seem practical.

A cohort raised on all-you-can-eat meal plans, campus shuttles and bundled student services may be evaluating public policy through the only economic model they have ever personally experienced.

Given these arrangements, is it any wonder that many graduates experience sticker shock on entering adult life? Grocery bills, utility payments, security deposits, transportation, internet service, gym memberships and countless other expenses suddenly become explicit rather than bundled. What many describe as an “affordability crisis” may partly reflect the shock of moving from a bundled institutional economy for which someone else usually pays to an unbundled market economy in which one has to earn his own keep.

… we should spend less time scrutinizing classroom lectures and more time examining the economic environment students inhabit every day. The most influential economics lesson many students receive may come from the institutional design of the university. Before blaming the professors, consider the campus.

A reasonable take-away, in other words, from four years at a high-end college or university is that government-run everything works great so long as chumps can be found to pay all of the bills (parents in the college case; “the rich” in the overall U.S. society case).

Note that students also get seemingly “free” stuff beyond their immediate campus. At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for example, a long list of schools give the MFA money (from the students’ parents) so that when students show up they’re not confronted with the $30 price that most visitors see ($0 for SNAP/EBT card holders!). Don’t need to show ID to vote in Maskachusetts, of course, but everyone can agree that “presenting a valid ID on the day of their visit” is a reasonable demand for entering the museum at a $0 cost.

Fun fact for pilots: Prof. Josephson previously taught at Lycoming College! (The ultimate resume would include Lycoming College and Continental Florida University!)

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ChatGPT, roof warranty analyst

by philg

Our clay tile roof was installed a year ago and came with a 7-year warranty with the following condition: “All warranties require free annual maintenance inspections, in order to maintain validity throughout the duration.” During this year’s inspection, done by drone because the roof was slightly wet and clay is extremely slippery/hazardous when wet, a cracked tile was discovered.

The roofer has to fix this at no charge? Email from the roofer: “Clay tiles will not crack like concrete tiles since they aren’t absorbing water and would only crack from impact of some kind.”

There haven’t been any real wind storms here in the past year (the last “major hurricane” in Palm Beach County was in 1949). The cracked tile isn’t near a coconut palm that could have dropped a heavy nut onto it. I uploaded the photo to my warranty analyst (ChatGPT):

The crack looks more like a structural/installation crack than a classic impact break. It is a fairly clean, narrow crack running longitudinally through the tile, without an obvious crater, chip, crushed spot, or radiating fracture pattern where something struck it. Impact from something substantial—fallen branch, tool, golf ball, worker stepping hard on an unsupported portion—often leaves some evidence at the point of contact.

On a one-year-old roof, plausible non-impact causes include a hairline crack present when installed that subsequently opened up; a tile stressed by its nail/screw/clip or adhesive; inadequate support beneath part of the tile; somebody walking on it during installation or later work; or occasionally a manufacturing defect.

(I’m pretty sure that we’ll still have to pay the roofer to fix the problem that his crew created, or maybe that the tile manufacturer (Verea in Spain (maybe they’re too busy freeing “Palestine” to go the last kilometer in quality control?)) created, but at least now we know that we’re being cheated!)

Also at the intersection of AI and Florida homeownership, I asked ChatGPT about what stain to use for the front door, beginning to look a bit shabby. Absent AI, I would have tried to buy Sikkens, making stain in the Netherlands since pre-Islamic times (1792). ChatGPT had a different perspective:

I bounced the question to Grok and Claude and learned… that Sikkens in the U.S. is marketed as “PPG”. The AI was still useful, though, potentially, because it calculated how many quarts are needed and that there is a specific stain for doors as opposed to siding.

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Did Spain prove via Ceuta that welfare is what pulls in low-skill migrants?

by philg

If the US and the EU shut down their respective cradle-to-grave welfare states, would there still be billions of humans (none of whom are “illegal”) seeking to enter?

“Spain ‘denies Ceuta migrants food and water’ to get them to leave” (The Times, August 3, 2026):

Many of the thousands who remain in the territory after crossing the border from Morocco say they have not been given aid or shelter

It is day five of Ceuta’s migrant crisis, and 60,000 people have crossed the border from Morocco, according to Spain’s interior ministry. Some 3,000 to 5,000 still remain, Ceuta’s leader Juan Jesús Vivas estimated, but many of those who have stayed claim they have not been given food, water or shelter.

The Times understands that Ceutan residents were actively discouraged from providing aid to migrants, in the hope that they would return to Morocco.

The only migrant accommodation in the territory is at capacity and has gone into lockdown. Staff prevented those inside from passing water or food to the hundreds outside the gates, lying on the dirt, including Dfalla Sliman, 21, from Sudan. They have slept here for days. Others are from Yemen, Syria and Eritrea, and they have travelled for months.

“I’m very hungry. They say everything is finished,” said Sliman, who had unbandaged wounds on his arms and legs. “And no water; they say everything is finished. I’ll wait until everyone leaves.”

“We understood that selling them water and food was necessary. It was logical to sell them so [they would not] go hungry. But the police came and said it was better if we didn’t give them anything, no food, no drink, because that’s how they left. The effect of not eating or drinking meant … that voluntarily many left.”

Spain, of course, in its eagerness to deny migrants the asylum hearings to which they’re entitled, seems to have gone beyond a simple “no welfare” approach by also trying to prevent migrants from buying things at retail and trying to block charity.

Related:

  • “Joint statement on the humanitarian situation in Gaza” (official August 2025 Spanish government communication, translated by Google Chrome): “The humanitarian suffering in Gaza has reached unimaginable levels. Famine is spreading before our eyes. Urgent action is needed to halt and reverse this hunger. … We urge the Government of Israel to authorize all aid shipments from international NGOs … All border crossings and routes must be used to allow a massive influx of aid to Gaza, including food, nutritional supplements, shelter, fuel, drinking water, medicines, and medical equipment.”
  • “Speech by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, at the Rome Nutrition Week” (May 26, 2026, translated by Chrome): “Certainly in Gaza, where some intend to win a war by subjecting its people to starvation. These are, incidentally, the same people who last week humiliated, abused, and mistreated the members of a flotilla whose only intention was to deliver humanitarian aid.” (There was no “flotilla of aid” for the starving refugees in Ceuta? It’s a 12-mile trip from mainland Spain, less than one hour in a power boat.)
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Africa, before and after the Gates Foundation begin its work

by philg

Happy World Humanitarian Day to all of the white saviors out there, especially those who’ve enabled civil wars, such as Yemen’s and Sudan’s, to continue for decades because nobody has to pause and grow food, as was the case for all pre-20th-century wars.

Let’s look at White Savior In Chief Bill Gates. The Gates Foundation was founded in 2000 and has been operated with the stated goal of helping Africans in Africa. ChatGPT says that there about 400 million Africans in “extreme poverty” in 2000 who were completely helpless and dependent on foreign do-gooders.

Bill Gates has been able to ship nearly all of his Microsoft winnings, without them even being subject to capital gains tax, over to Africa. Because he skipped on capital gains tax and will skip on estate tax, therefore, it is the rest of us who must fund the federal government by paying taxes. Americans won’t even get “trickle-down” benefits from Bill Gates becoming rich because the tax-free money is spent on another continent rather than here. When a billionaire douche spends $1 billion on a neo-Mar-a-Lago house in Palm Beach we might reasonably be sick with envy. But the spending results in tons of Americans getting construction jobs, jobs making components for the house, and jobs maintaining the house once it is occupied. After 100 years, the owner(s) of the house will have paid roughly $1 billion in property tax to Palm Beach County, thus funding schools, roads parks, police, fire, etc. None of that happens when a rich douche is able to put money into a tax-free foundation and ship the money overseas.

How many fewer Africans are needy in 2026, after 26 years of these massive transfers of American wealth? ChatGPT says that the current number of extremely poor Africans is about 580 million. So the number of helpless Africans has increased by 50% during the lifetime of a foundation whose purpose is helping helpless Africans.

Here’s the White Savior in Chief in action:

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