Why don’t heavy drinkers get Tesla FSD?

by philg

Here’s a bit of sad news from everyone’s favorite semiconductor physicist:

If Britney Spears had enough money to buy the depicted non-self-driving BMW why didn’t she instead choose a self-driving Tesla? In that case, there wouldn’t have been any possibility of the police noticing erratic driving. She might have been breaking the law and failing to be prudent, but she wouldn’t have been pulled over so long as the Tesla software wasn’t also impaired by alcohol.

Loosely related, Britney Spears’s tutorial on semiconductors:

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Brightline to Orlando review

by philg

Loyal readers may recall The Brightline experience (low-speed high-speed rail in Florida).

I recently took Brightline to Orlando. The West Palm Beach station is smaller than the one in Miami, but has better views.

The premium lounge is well-stocked with booze and food:

(Note cranes in background as West Palm Beach continues to be inflated with $billions.)

We hit 125 mph on the final stretch toward Orlando, the only completely new track on the route.

It’s not quite as comfortable as the Chinese high-speed rail, but there is much less jostling than on Amtrak Acela.

My meeting was for dinner at BACÁN, within the Lake Nona Wave Hotel.

The hotel is within a large business district that I had never heard of and that is the home of the Evil Empire (from a small airplane pilot’s point of view):

Would I take Brightline or Orlando again? It doesn’t make much sense for a family and takes longer than driving from Jupiter (partly because one has to drive south for 25 minutes to the station before heading north), but for a single traveler who will fly out of Orlando and then later return to a different airport it is awesome. It will make more sense if they can ever get a station built in Stuart, Florida, which is to our north.

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AI economy terminates as petrostate?

by philg

A friend owns a three-unit building in San Francisco (rents carefully controlled by qualified government officials!) and is concerned about the value of his place if AI eliminates most programming jobs. My response was to consider the extreme case that 100 percent of GDP is generated by AI and robots. In that case, the economy becomes like a petrostate, e.g., Kuwait. The efforts of human residents aren’t significant economically compared to oil flowing or NVIDIA chips cogitating. In petrostates, however, the rulers don’t expel most or all of the citizens (like Bhutan did!), but instead use whatever money isn’t stolen by elites to house and feed everyone. Thus, in the typical petrostate, real estate still has substantial value. “Maybe everyone in San Francisco will be on Section 8 and the rent will be paid by the government instead of individuals,” I said, “but you’ll still get rent.”

How will the government get revenue? Petrostates often nationalize the oil industry, as Venezuela did in 1976 and 2007 (Hugo Chavez for the win!). If most of the wealth and income of the U.S. ends up in the hands of the owners of NVIDIA, Anthropic, et al., the government can simply nationalize the top 20 most successful AI-related companies. (We can see a half measure of this right now with Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna proposing to harvest 5 percent of billionaire wealth every year.)

In other words, it doesn’t make sense to be an AI Doomer on economic grounds because being a citizen of a typical petrostate isn’t terrible (let’s ignore Venezuela for the moment!).

Let’s check in on a petrostate that has been shooting down U.S. fighter jets recently. Kuwait is rich, though not quite as rich per capita as it once was. It looks like they’ve grown the denominator via population growth and, thus, each individual’s share of the oil income has been reduced.

(Note that U.S. politicians, beginning with Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s, have been working desperately to grow U.S. population via immigration, exactly the opposite of what makes sense if our destiny is that most wealth comes from something that functions like an oil well.)

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Austin, Texas barbecue and pinball updates

by philg

In our continued celebration of Women’s History Month, let’s look at two areas where Americans identifying as “women” have been trailblazers: barbecue and pinball machine design and engineering.

Loyal readers may remember Austin and Lockhart, Texas: 10 barbecue restaurants in 72 hours. We had a good meal at Terry Black’s on a recent visit to Austin, but it wasn’t as great as we remembered. We tried Loro, an Asian-inflected bbq place, and thought it was okay (great sides, though!). The new favorite: LeRoy and Lewis. This isn’t an adventurous choice since the place is Michelin-listed. By the late afternoon they’d run out of brisket, but I preferred their tri tip steak anyway. The Frito pie side is perfect if you haven’t joined Ozempic Nation yet.

In addition to improving our waistlines via at least one bbq meal per day, we improved our minds with pinball. The Austin Pinball Collective is an interesting group of enthusiasts who park their 85 machines in an office building and hold an open house every Saturday during which the rabble can pay $20 for unlimited play. Members remain responsible for maintaining the machines that they place into the location so I’m not sure that it qualifies as a big convenience upgrade compared to having a machine in one’s house. It would be a lot easier on the members if the collective hired a part-time or full-time tech for the machines.

At the collective, we learned that Texas is slowly catching up to Chicago as a pinball machine design and manufacturing center. There are currently three companies in Texas building machines and there was an example of each at the collective:

Barrels of Fun seems to be the most established of the three. Their Labyrinth machine is kind of fun, but their Dune machine is the most beautifully lit pinball machine that I’ve ever seen. (You can play Dune in Minneapolis at the all-white pinball bar that I visited (consistent with my general observation that there was no mixing among native-born white Minnesotans and the Somalis whom they claim to love).)

A pre-flipper Stock Market machine, a Mars machine in case Elon Musk drops in, and one for Muhammad Ali fans.

Our other brain-enhancing stop was at Pinballz (original location on Research Blvd.) to play Hercules, a massive Atari machine with a ball the size of a pool ball.

The game is indeed quite slow. Despite the ponderous size, the game isn’t very heavy and it is possible to move it enough to influence the ball’s trajectory. Comment from Pinside: “The novelty is cool, but wears off quickly, and then there is not much left. It’s like the woman with the big tatas but no personality. OK, maybe that’s a bad example, because that novelty doesn’t really wear off.”

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If attacking Iran is a disaster for the U.S., why is the stock market slightly up?

by philg

This is my last morning in Berkeley, California. Support for the Islamic Republic of Iran is almost universal here. Nearly everyone shares the New York Times perspective that Trump’s attack on the noble legitimate leaders of Iran was reckless and exposes the U.S. to risks almost as bad as climate change. Certainly there was no imminent threat from some guys chanting “Death to America” and working on nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles. At dinner last night I asked a local, “Have you checked the stock market? If we’re in serious trouble, the market should be down.” She replied that she hadn’t checked, but was sure that there had been a market crash.

The Google shows that the market is about where it was a week ago.

How about oil?

Anyone who loaded up on oil on Friday is up 10 percent, but with standard leverage of 10:1, the lucky (or well-informed) trader has doubled his/her/zir/their money.

Loosely related, a favorite tweet regarding the fighting in and around Iran:

What else are Bay Area lifelong Democrats excited about? One friend wasn’t interested in the Iran war because he’s working to stop the construction of roughly 180 units of affordable housing that would be 2 miles from his house. (I’m also against this, of course, but likely for different reasons. A limited supply of taxpayer-subsidized housing results in a violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. 180 people will enjoy low rents for brand new units. Perhaps 5,000 nearby people with exactly the same income will be forced to pay high market rents for crummy older apartments. In what world can this be considered “equal” treatment by the government?)

Another friend was passionate about not straying too far from the 4th Street restaurant where we’d dined. She believed that we would become victims of crime if we walked away from the brightly lit main blocks. I pointed out that it wasn’t a great advertisement for 70 years of lavishly funded progressive government if Berkeley, in fact, had dangerous neighborhoods. (My local friend says that she often sees broken glass in parking spaces, evidence of prior break-ins.)

Separately, check out the “Living Wage” bump of 6 percent over the menu prices for this kosher meal.

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How was the immigration of Ndiaga Diagne supposed to make Americans better off?

by philg

New York Post:

The gunman behind Austin’s possible terror-related mass shooting entered the US and cemented his legal immigration status under Democrat administrations — despite a growing criminal record.

Senegalese national Ndiaga Diagne, 53, arrived in America on March 13, 2000, on a B-2 tourist visa during the Clinton administration, a source familiar with his immigration history told The Post on Sunday.

Diagne — who killed two people and wounded 14 more during his rampage outside a Texas bar early Sunday — then became a lawful permanent resident on an IR-6 visa in June 2006 when he married a US citizen, the source said.

He then went on to lodge a string of other arrests in the Big Apple between 2008 and 2016 — but that didn’t stop him becoming a naturalized US citizen on April 5, 2013 — around the start of former President Barack Obama’s second term, sources said. Those three arrests are sealed, sources said.

Let’s supposed that Ndiaga Diagne had never donned his “Property of Allah” shirt and murdered/wounded people in Austin. In that ideal hypothetical world how was his permanent presence here in the U.S. going to make existing Americans better off? In other words, what is the rational basis for our legal immigration system?

(Maybe the answer can be found in Is U.S. immigration policy a form of animal hoarding?)

Related:

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Larry Summers: association with Jeffrey Epstein was a serious, but not urgent, problem

by philg

Larry Summers, veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations, was also a bigshot at Harvard University. I wrote about the first time he got axed from a Harvard job in “Women in Science” (2006):

[Summers] claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren’t more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.

Summers is in the news again… “Summers To Resign From Teaching Appointments, Relinquish University Professorship Over Epstein Ties” (Harvard Crimson):

Former Harvard President Larry Summers will resign from his academic and faculty appointments at Harvard at the end of the academic year….

Association with Jeffrey Epstein was sufficiently serious that Summers must resign, but not so urgent that the resignation can’t wait until June.

Only loosely related, since nobody cares… what exactly did Summers do with the arch criminal Epstein? ChatGPT:

newly released emails from the Jeffrey Epstein estate show that Larry Summers privately consulted Jeffrey Epstein about his pursuit of a romantic relationship with a younger woman he described in the emails as his “mentee.” In one exchange from late 2018 and early 2019, Epstein even referred to himself as Summers’s “wing man” while offering advice on how to communicate with this woman.

According to news reports about the email release, the woman in question was Keyu Jin, a well-known economist who at the time was a tenured professor at the London School of Economics and a Harvard graduate. She was in her early 40s (around 43) during the period these email exchanges took place.

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Theodicy question: Why didn’t Allah protect the Islamic Republic of Iran from attack by infidels?

by philg

Infidel rogue states (U.S. and Israel) were recently successful in killing many of the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran. If Allah is omnipotent and benevolent, how was it possible for infidels to achieve this apparent military victory over a nation that follows the Koran and Hadiths?

Is the answer that those recently killed were martyrs to a larger cause and that their successors will build Iran into a stronger and more dominant nation?

Ayatollah ChatGPT isn’t tremendously helpful. Excerpts:

Iran’s interpretation of Islamic law is shaped by centuries of Shīʿī jurisprudence and legal reasoning (fiqh), not just direct literal verses from the Qurʾān or ḥadīth.

Islamic theology emphasizes that God’s wisdom (Hikmah) transcends human understanding. What may seem unjust or inexplicable from a human standpoint may be understood only in a larger spiritual context — especially one that includes the afterlife and final judgment, which humans do not see.

Related:

Flashback to 1979 New York Times, “Trusting Khomeini”:

Part of the confusion in America about Iran’s social revolution involves Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. More even than any third‐world leader, he has been depicted in a manner calculated to frighten.

The news media have defamed him in many ways, associating him with efforts to turn the clock back 1,300 years, with virulent anti‐Semitism, and with a new political disorder, “theocratic fascism,” about to be set loose on the world.

… there are hopeful signs, including the character and role of Ayatollah Khomeini.

To suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is dissembling seems almost beyond belief. His political style is to express his real views defiantly and without apology, regardless of consequences. He has little incentive suddenly to become devious for the sake of American public opinion. Thus, the depiction of him as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false.

In looking to the future, Ayatollah Khomeini has spoken of his hopes to show the world what a genuine Islamic government can do on behalf of its people. … Despite the turbulence, many nonreligious Iranians talk of this period as “Islam’s finest hour.” … Iran may yet provide us with a desperately‐needed model of humane governance for a third‐world country.

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The righteous of Lincoln, Maskachusetts can take credit for the calm atmosphere in Minneapolis

by philg

Never say that the elite Democrats of our former Boston suburb fail to do anything concrete or significant to advance the causes that they advocate, e.g., slow down climate change, which they post signs about, by moving to a 2BR apartment after the kids are grown up rather than staying and heating a 6,000-square-foot house with obsolete insulation.

Here’s a mailing list message from January 25, 2026, a day after Alex Pretti was tragically gunned down by DHS thugs before he could draw and use the 9mm pistol and 52 rounds of ammunition that he was carrying (see The genius of Johnny Cash and the death of a progressive in Minneapolis):

Following our recent vigil in front of town offices, Lincoln Witness would like to continue to light a path forward. We invite everyone who wishes to honor Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and others who have died at the hands of ICE, to set two candles in their windows. These candles symbolize sparks of hope, cries of lament, and messages of solidarity for the people in Minneapolis who are out in sub-zero temperatures trying to shine a light for a brighter future. We encourage you to join us.

(The message may be inaccurate in that Alex Pretti was reportedly killed by Border Patrol agents, not ICE.)

If it is calm in Minneapolis today we can only presume that either decision-makers in DC or the ICE/CBP thugs in Minneapolis somehow drove through Lincoln, Massachusetts and saw the two candles in every window. #DoingTheWork

Here’s the web site for the group, based in a town where migrants who can afford a 2-acre lot ($1+ million) to meet the zoning minimum are welcome:

The righteous blame “politicians” rather than “Deplorables”:

Politicians have used immigration as a wedge issue that divides Americans.

If not for being misled by politicians, the working class would see that open borders keep their wages high and their apartment rents low.

Also from the town mailing list, regarding KBED:

Library talk Sunday Concord re: Hanscom expansion/author Chuck Collins– Burned by Billionaires

In Conversation with Chuck Collins about Burned by Billionaires
Sunday, February 22 2:00—4:00 PM
Goodwin Forum Main Library 129 Main Street, Concord, MA, 01742
Join us In Conversation with Chuck Collins about how billionaires are burning up the planet and undermining democracy & how this informs our fight to stop the proposed private jet expansion at Hanscom or Anywhere (Hanscom is mentioned on pages 68-70). Interview by Diane Proctor, President of League of Women Voters Concord-Carlisle. Q&A to follow the interview.

(The typical recipient of this message, as noted above, is heating a massive suburban house all through the Maskachusetts winter, usually 2,000+ square feet per person, and driving a pavement-melting SUV for every errand (since the town isn’t walkable and the weather is seldom conducive to biking, which is also unsafe due to narrow roads and no bike lanes).)

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Wartime reading: The Last Days of Budapest

by philg

I recently finished listening to The Last Days of Budapest: The Destruction of Europe’s Most Cosmopolitan Capital in World War II by Adam LeBor. It covers the history of Hungary starting after World War I. From Wikipedia:

The Communist Party of Hungary, led by Béla Kun was a newly formed party aligned with the Bolsheviks of Soviet Russia. The Social Democrats were split in their relation to them, but on 21 March [1919], the radical faction won out, and the two parties officially merged. They declared the Hungarian Soviet Republic, and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

In terms of domestic policy, the communist government nationalized industrial and commercial enterprises, socialized housing, transport, banking, medicine, cultural institutions, and all large landholdings. Land was collectivized, which alienated most of the peasantry who still demanded redistribution. The Communists also introduced prohibition of alcohol, which was very unpopular.

That last sentence saddens me because, of course, I think that if COVID-19 justified lockdowns and school closures then alcohol prohibition is trivial to justify under the banner of public health. (See Use testing and tracing infrastructure to enforce alcohol Prohibition? and The CDC supports my neo-prohibitionist philosophy)

Eventually a right-wing government takes over and unifies Hungarian under the ideas of (1) regaining territory lost after a post-WWI Treaty of Trianon, (2) restricting the influence of Jewish Hungarians (about 5 percent of the population), e.g., with race-based university admissions programs. Hungary ended up as an ally of Germany in WWII primarily because it wanted to regain territories lost in WWI. The majority of the population supported various anti-Jewish laws, but not necessarily the killing of all their Jewish neighbors. A minority of Hungarians did work with the Germans to kill Jews while the majority, including the police and the army, much more powerful than the militias, stood by watching (in most other European countries, the Jews were first moved out of public sight and killed in more private settings).

Zionists, with the assistance of foreign diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg, worked to create papers that would ultimately protect about half of Budapest’s Jews, many of whom ultimately made it to the British mandatory Palestine and fought against the invading Arab armies in 1948 to establish the modern State of Israel that is currently in the news for her role in attacking entirely peaceful Iranians who enjoy building nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles while chanting “Death to America”. (The New York Times says that Trump and Netanyahu had no reason to attack because it would be “it would be a decade before Iran could get past the technological and production hurdles to produce a significant arsenal [of nuclear bombs mounted on ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S.]” (maybe a good reason to move from NYC to West Palm Beach, Florida? If they have only a dozen nuclear bombs to deploy, the Iranians might not bother targeting Florida!).)

The tenacity of the Germans and Hungarians was impressive. They knew that they couldn’t hold out against a Russian siege, but fought almost to the last man (killing about 80,000 Russians in the process, but the Russians weren’t discouraged by casualties). Unfortunately for the Jews, the Hungarians, notably members of the Arrow Cross, were equally tenacious when it came to killing Jews. Even as they knew that their city and country were falling to the Red Army, Hungarians spent a lot of time, energy, and ammunition killing their Jewish neighbors. Perhaps there is a modern analogy. Europe is currently experiencing economic stagnation and irrelevance to the modern world economy (ChatGPT: “EU imports would generally be easier to replace than Taiwan imports … Taiwan imports are strategically critical; Substitution is slow and difficult; Some products currently have no near-term substitute”). Legacy Europeans are being replaced by new and improved migrants. What do a lot of legacy Europeans do with their time and energy? Protest against whatever the State of Israel is doing.

An email from New Yorker just now says that there is no upside, but only risk, in attacking Iran. I don’t subscribe so I can’t read their paywalled content, but presumably the Iranians who were previously chanting “Death to America” could start chanting “Double Secret Death to America”.

Let’s close with my favorite headline about the attack on Iran, from the Wall Street Journal. Breaking new ground in the Department of Projecting Strength, the Commander in Chief of the U.S. military is relaxing in Palm Beach rather than nervously drinking coffee in an underground war room in D.C.:

(The Israeli and U.S. militaries also projected strength by sleeping late and attacking Iran at 10 a.m. local time. The bombing of Tehran was scheduled for the same time of day as a student pilot lesson.)

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