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

by philg

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

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

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

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

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

Grok:

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

ChatGPT:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by philg

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

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

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

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

Unintentionally funny:

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

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

Related:

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

by philg

Can ChatGPT prune a bonsai? Our backyard plant:

Initial advice:

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

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

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

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

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

ChatGPT:

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

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

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

by philg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FlyDubai 1073 proves how useless college graduates are

by philg

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

The Sun:

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

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

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

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

Related:

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Swissflation

by philg

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

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

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

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

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

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The climate and hurricane doomers of Carnegie-Mellon move to Miami

by philg

For twenty years, Carnegie-Mellon University has been dishing out fat helpings of climate and hurricane doom.

What’s the most obvious place to set up a new campus for 3,500 students and keep them safe from ever-more-intense hurricanes and relentless sea level rise? How about Miami, Florida?

The press release says that the new campus will be about 6 inches above best-case predicted sea level in Wynwood:

The new campus, to be built in Miami’s dynamic Wynwood neighborhood, is ultimately planned to support more than 3,500 undergraduate, master’s and Ph.D. students, nearly 300 faculty, and over 600 staff members, pending appropriate regulatory approvals. The first students are set to enroll in 2028, marking a bold step forward for the university and its ambitions.

Carnegie-Mellon is home to Nobel-winning Climate Doomer Ed Rubin:

Emeritus Professor Ed Rubin was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, when U.S. Vice President Al Gore shared the prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for which Rubin was coordinating lead author of the Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage. The awardees were recognized for their “efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Rubin is the first CMU faculty member to share in a Nobel Peace Prize.

Rubin, who helped establish the Engineering and Public Policy program at CMU, is the the most highly cited authority on carbon capture and storage systems and is an internationally recognized expert in energy and environmental technology innovation and climate change mitigation.

“Decarbonization: Climate change is personal now” (cmu.edu 2023):

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says carbon capture deployment is lagging if we want to meet global mitigation targets. With the stakes so high, why is this the case?

“We’re now seeing the linkages between climate change and other phenomena like forest fires, droughts, heat waves, and floods. If your house burns down in a forest fire, that gets your attention. If your house floods because of a hurricane, that gets your attention. When science links those tragedies to climate change induced by human activities, then the realization kicks in, ‘Hey this isn’t something far in the future that doesn’t affect me or my family.’ It’s getting personal now,” says Rubin.

CMU faculty won’t sit out hurricanes in Pittsburgh anymore, in other words, but will voluntarily make hurricanes part of their lived experience.

cmu.edu, 2007:

“Adaptation planning is becoming critical as communities, states and countries begin to address rising sea-levels and other challenges of a changing global climate.”

Formerly a military officer, Perkins is now one of 1,000 volunteers in the United States selected and trained by Former Vice President Al Gore and the non-profit group The Climate Project to spread the message of global warming and the urgent moral responsibility to take action.

After 19 additional years of taxpayer-funded Science, the “urgent moral responsibility” and best adaptation turned out to be moving from Pittsburgh to Miami and grabbing Ken Griffin’s money with both hands.

In 2008, cmu.edu warned us that “the climate crisis isn’t going away”.

Here’s one of CMU’s top professors in this area, Costa Samaras. Right in the middle of coronapanic (July 2020) he reminded everyone to continue to panic regarding sea level rise:

The same CMU professor said that Florida would be cooked by 2030, just two years after the new CMU campus opens.

This links to a NYT article on which the professor is a co-author:

Rising average temperatures make extreme heat more likely, hurricanes and storms more intense and threaten fresh water supplies. Climate impacts have already started to hit.

Where better to move than Miami if you’re afraid of more intense hurricanes and storms? There is so much in this guy’s feed that I can’t resist one more:

Let’s close out this post with a big thank-you to the lockdown Democrats of Chicago, Illinois, New York City, and New York State. Without their tireless efforts to degrade the quality of life in Chicago and NYC, there is no way that Ken Griffin would have brought himself and his $55+ billion to Florida!

Related, the land that CMU said would soon be underwater was worth $1.1 billion:

See also Preparing for the Age of AI with Prof. Uju Anya at Carnegie-Mellon at $93,614 per year and imagine how awesome it would be if Prof. Dr. Uju Anya, Ph.D. were to teach “Speaking Blackness in Brazil” on this new campus.

Bill Gates weighs in on the move…

In case any of the above tweets are memory-holed…

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Nostalgia for New England: Workshop for Women, Nonbinary, and Gender-nonconforming Writers

by philg

We’re right in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month, but this is also the time of year when I have a bit of nostalgia for New England. The early fall has a fair number of clear blue skies, the mosquitoes and other flying pests of summer are mostly gone, and the leaves are changing color. Our old house:

A few weeks ago, I was over at a friend’s house here in Jupiter, Florida. He and his family were also escapees from Lincoln, Maskachusetts. The very same day, I noticed an email from our old town’s email discussion group. It is about an online workshop that is perhaps organized by some folks farther west, but in which at least some people in Massachusetts are interested:

Writing Workshop for Women, Nonbinary, and Gender-nonconforming Writers & Aspiring Writers

.. a new online and print magazine dedicated to giving voice to women, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming storytellers in mountain literature. They are offering a thought-provoking, two-hour online writers’ workshop for women, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming outdoor writers (and aspiring writers) on September 16 at 4 p.m. Mountain Time (3 p.m. Pacific Time, and 6 p.m. East Coast Time) taught by esteemed nature writer and poet, CMarie Fuhrman. Beginners, as well as experienced authors, are welcome.

“A,” “The,” and Nothing: Articles, Attention, and the More-Than-Human World
Poet, nature writer, and part-time fire lookout CMarie Fuhrman (author of Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return, director of the Elk River Writers Workshop, and founder of the Confluence Writing Community) will lead this workshop exploring how some of the smallest words in the English language — “a,” “the,” and their absence—carry enormous weight in nature and place-based writing and social justice writing. Through close reading and writing exercises, participants will discover how article choice shapes relationships, intimacy, and the way the more-than-human world is rendered on the page. They’ll move from attention to language to craft, and leave with new tools for listening to what their writing is actually doing.

Could Graham Platner spend part of his retirement trolling for progressive females at this event? The registration page:

Desire Lines Collective is dedicated to elevating women, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming writers of mountain literature. The majority of our workshops are limited to self-identified members of these communities, including this one. We trust participants to honor this space and to uphold our value of fostering communities where women, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people feel safe taking imaginative risks.

Confusingly, though,

We encourage applications from Black and Indigenous writers, writers of color, writers with disabilities, writers from LGBTQIA+ communities, and writers whose voices have been historically underrepresented in the outdoor publishing world.

Could a disabled Black writer who identified as a cisgender male attend?

Speaking of Hispanic Heritage Month, JetBlue got an early start on it (photo from September 8 and the holy month does not begin until September 15), which is great, but then chose to feature a film by Jared Bush and Byron Howard as part of Latinx “heritage”.

Loosely related…

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MIT technology fails spectacularly for grid-scale batteries

by philg

Our house is close to the headquarters of NextEra, which has a market cap of around $166 billion and is the parent company of Florida Power & Light. We ran into one of their employees at a restaurant whose job is buying grid-scale batteries to sit next to the company’s grid-scale solar farms. “This will power your data centers,” she explained. (I loved hearing this because it gave me an opening to point out that “No data center is illegal on stolen land.”)

I asked her if the MIT geniuses who revolutionized the grid-scale battery world about 20 years ago, according to the MIT geniuses, had an impact on her job. “No,” she explained. “Those technologies are always 10 years in the future. Utilities buy LFP and NMC batteries. The Chinese are unbeatable.” The same batteries that go into electric cars, such as those made by Head Nazi Elon Musk?!?! Yes, it turns out.

What’s an example of the liquid battery hype? Here’s one from Barack Obama’s Department of Energy, March 2016… “New Chemistries Found for Liquid Batteries: Grid-scale approach to rechargeable power storage gets new arsenal of possible materials”:

Liquid metal batteries, invented by MIT professor Donald Sadoway and his students a decade ago, are a promising candidate for making renewable energy more practical. The batteries, which can store large amounts of energy and thus even out the ups and downs of power production and power use, are in the process of being commercialized by a Cambridge-based startup company, Ambri.

Now, Sadoway and his team have found yet another set of chemical constituents that could make the technology even more practical and affordable, and open up a whole family of potential variations that could make use of local resources.

“This paper brings together innovative engineering advances in cell design and component materials within a strategic framework of ‘cost-based discovery’ that is amenable to the massive scale-up required of grid-scale applications,” says Richard Alkire, a professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois, who was not involved in this research.

What does ChatGPT have to say? In a time-honored MIT pattern, the nerds achieved their goal of creating a better widget than whatever was on the market at the time they started talking about how much better their innovation was. And, in time-honored fashion, the comparative dullards improved whatever was on the market by a factor of 10X by the time that the MIT tech finally limped its way into a commercialized version. Excerpts from the full Q&A:

The research actually began around 2005, so “20 years ago” is about right, although that particular DOE release is from March 2016. MIT spun the technology out in 2010 as Ambri, backed by Bill Gates, Khosla Ventures, Total and eventually Reliance.

(Is it possible that Bill Gates will get ahead of divorce plaintiff MacKenzie Scott Bezos in terms of spending tens of $billions on nonprofit activities without leaving any trace of positive impact on humanity? Compare to Stephen Ross. For a tiny fraction of what Bill Gates has spent on becoming a Davos Idol Do-Gooder (over $110 billion in cumulative distributions; maybe that’s $200 billion in post-Biden dollars?), Ross has completely transformed the city of West Palm Beach (nytimes). Ross perhaps will end up having donated about $1 billion, but most of the money he’s “spent” is really an investment that should yield a decent return unless the Climate Doomers are correct about South Florida being washed away. ChatGPT on whether Gates can compete with MacKenzie the divorcée for incinerating cash in an ash-free manner: “$111 billion already spent is an astonishing amount of money, and there isn’t an obvious list of, say, ten Gates-created breakthroughs commensurate with that sum.” The giant artificial brain struggles mightily to find anything the Gates Foundation has done that might have a lasting impact.)

The basic idea was elegant: instead of solid electrodes that crack, swell and chemically deteriorate, use three molten layers that naturally separate by density—a light metal electrode, molten-salt electrolyte, and heavy metal electrode. The commercial version ultimately used calcium and antimony, with a calcium-chloride electrolyte. Because everything remains liquid while operating, the electrochemically active surfaces effectively recreate themselves each cycle. Ambri claimed >20-year life with very little degradation and no lithium-ion-style thermal-runaway fire problem.

First, going from a battery that works to a battery that can be manufactured cheaply by the million is extraordinarily difficult. The high-temperature seal is a perfect illustration. In the lab, having molten calcium/salt/antimony sitting at hundreds of degrees is manageable. For a utility battery expected to operate unattended for 20 years, every seal, feedthrough, weld, heater, electrical connection and insulation system has to survive thousands of thermal and electrical cycles. Ambri eventually solved enough of these problems to certify a ~1-kWh cell, but it consumed years.

Second—and probably even more important—the economic target moved spectacularly while Ambri was developing its technology. In 2010, when Ambri was founded, lithium-ion battery packs cost more than $1,200/kWh. By 2021 they were about $132/kWh; by 2024 about $115/kWh, and in 2025 about $108/kWh on BloombergNEF’s global average measure.

That’s a roughly 91% cost collapse during Ambri’s life.

Was it overhyped?

But there is a lesson in the old press coverage. MIT’s 2015 article said Ambri had built its manufacturing plant and made production sound almost trivial—“just add the electrode metals plus the electrolyte salt to a steel container and heat the can.” It then said the company was dealing with “one final engineering challenge”, the seal.

Nine years after that article, Ambri was bankrupt without a mass-production factory.

The coronapanic enthusiasts at IEEE sung Ambri’s praises in 2023, about 8 months before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection:

Ambri’s grid battery costs $180/kWh to $250/kWh depending on size and duration, the company says. But its projected cost is about $21/kWh by 2030

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Cirrus Fuel Tank Selector Failure

by philg

It’s my birthday. Soon I will be old enough to personally experience the insolvency of Medicare and Social Security. For this year, though, here’s the latest present to myself…

Like most other low-wing aircraft, the Cirrus SR20 and SR22 airplanes have a fuel tank selector that must be periodically switched from left to right tank. How does this become pilot’s job when he or she (no “ze” or “they” because the FAA has hatefully subscribed to gender binarism, even during the hate-free Biden administration) is trying to fly the aircraft? A high-wing Cessna has a “set and forget” BOTH position for fuel that flows down to the engine via gravity. Shouldn’t a Piper or Cirrus have that too? Perhaps not. If one tank were to run dry, for example, the “pump it up and out” process would result in air from that tank being put into the fuel line to the engine rather than harder-to-grab fuel from the tank that still has something left.

After 21 years, I suddenly had trouble switching between left and right tanks in our SR20-G2. After that first switch, which required some muscle power, it was fairly easy to switch tanks, but it still felt like there was a hitch or click in the system somewhere. Our local Cirrus service center owner: “I’ve never heard of this problem.” Cirrus Field Support: “The O-rings in the selector could be swelling up but I haven’t run across this issue before. I polled the group and they mentioned they haven’t run across this before.“

Always nice to have a problem that has never previously been reported in a fleet of 10,000 machines!

The mechanic went to the hangar where the airplane lives and fiddled around with the selector, including lifting up the safety to turn the selector to OFF (something you’d do during maintenance or as part of a crash or parachute landing). “we took the side panels off and inspected and tried to lubricate it, it is a sealed unit , the fuel selector has failed internally, it is stuck in the off position I have ordered a new fuel selector…”

I had thought that the simple interlock that the pilot can touch would be a separate part from the functional valve buried deep in the plane, but that’s not the case. Here’s what the complete part looks like:

It struck me as odd that Cirrus had a stockpile of these spares if nobody had ever needed to replace one, but apparently there are more than 40 in a warehouse somewhere:

Here’s the final damage from the local shop (it was quoted as requiring 8 hours of labor, but apparently took more than 10):

In the old days I would have said that I was leaving this here on the Web so that a fellow Cirrus owner or a mechanic could find it with a Google search. Now, of course, I’m leaving it here so that AI can find it.

(What were the previous presents in this same general area? The electric fuel boost pump in the Cirrus was beginning to sound louder/different. This pump is necessary for starting, so I had it replaced in July 2025 while at Oshkosh. The mechanical engine-driven fuel pump, which does most of the work required to get the fuel out of the tanks and into the fuel injectors, was declared to be leaking in July 2026 at the annual inspection and send out for overhaul (both the leak at the mixture control connection and the blades (carbon, I think, and subject to erosion)). At around the same time, the year-old electric boost pump stopped working intermittently. Absolutely dead when throwing the switch. The mechanics couldn’t reproduce the problem so they replaced the switch and the circuit breaker. The boost pump remained intermittently INOP. That’s when I learned that there is also a relay in the system. So they replaced that. So far the boost pump, which is required for starting, seems to work. Maybe it is time to save money on maintenance by buying a $1.5 million new Cirrus SR22? A friend did just that and went through three engine-driven fuel pumps in the first year (problems maintaining the correct pressure). All covered by warranty, but quite a bit of downtime.)

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