… for those who renounce U.S. citizenship. There has been a bit of an uproar regarding the Democrats’ plan to tax unrealized capital gains and Republicans are complaining that it is an unprecedented new area for the federal government. But this isn’t a new area, at least when it … | Continue reading
A few months ago I wondered if the Second Amendment right to bear arms was compatible with mass immigration: How can a country have a right to bear arms and also an open border? (people with violent criminal histories can walk into the U.S. become citizens since we don’t have acc … | Continue reading
We are informed that Americans are racist and sexist and that’s why we need to discriminate against white and Asian males in university admissions, job applications, and government contracting. We are also informed that Kamala Harris, who identifies as a “Black woman” is likely t … | Continue reading
Some folks are using Zoom stock as an example of the pain that some Americans would suffer if the Democrats’ plan to tax unrealized capital gains were implemented. They posit a prescient investor who paid $100 for the stock just as coronapanic was unfolding, then got taxed based … | Continue reading
Happy Labor Day to those who celebrate by working! Back in 2020, I covered Netflix: American Factory, a documentary of what happens when Chinese glass-making experts try to train Americans to be useful and also what happens to foreign investors when Democrat politicians circle th … | Continue reading
Ten years ago… Book review: Bad Pharma: Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate th … | Continue reading
A display on August 9, 2024 at our local Bank of America in Jupiter, Florida: Note that no other ethnic, racial, gender ID, or sexual preference group was explicitly featured by Bank of America in a rotating display. Their only focus for August, apparently, is Black Business Mont … | Continue reading
Back in 2021, I ordered a 42-inch pool cue so that the youngsters could enjoy the landlord’s pool table: They’re getting taller and we’ve moved to an 8′ table (see Buying a pool table) so they’re overdue for a longer cue. Out of curiosity, I went back to the retailer’s site and f … | Continue reading
One of America’s greatest art museums, the Kimbell in Fort Worth, is showing seven enormous tapestries right now. These depict the Battle of Pavia (1525) and were made roughly 500 years ago from wool, silk, gold, and silver thread. Each one is about 30′ wide and 14′ high, perfect … | Continue reading
Kamala Harris recently floated the entirely original idea of eliminating taxes on tip income. How would this work in practice? Consider the hypothetical case of Abu Mohammed Alsomiri, a personal trainer in Dearborn, Michigan. Clients currently see Abu twice per week and pay $80 p … | Continue reading
Gaza is run by three groups: the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) UNRWA (an all-Islamic staff except for a handful of white savior European atheists, such as Philippe Lazzarini (there weren’t any qualified Arabs to lead this funnel for US/EU tax dollars headed for Hamas?)) P … | Continue reading
A few more photos of how the folks who say that they want to end economic inequality are living, from a Robinson R44 flight out of KSNA (Orange County Airport) up to Long Beach and then back down the coast to Dana Point before returning to refuel and then land (with a certain amo … | Continue reading
Happy International Dog Day. Florida outlawed wagering on dog racing at the end of 2020, which effectively closed all of the dog tracks. The rationale for the ban was that the greyhounds who race professionally are treated cruelly, e.g., living in cages. Dogs love to run, though. … | Continue reading
The latest and greatest Florida houses are designed with closed cell spray foam insulation underneath the roof. This has the disadvantage that roof leaks are difficult to pinpoint, since the foam prevents the water from dripping directly down underneath the part of the roof that … | Continue reading
“NASA Decides to Bring [$4.3 billion Boeing] Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew” (nasa.gov): NASA will return Boeing’s Starliner to Earth without astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the spacecraft, the agency announced Saturday. The uncrewed return allo … | Continue reading
Me, in 2018: Least favorite airshow act: a synchronized drone array. These stayed pretty far from the crowd so it was essentially a bunch of lights that could have been replicated with a big TV (it is possible to project 3D onto 2D!). Unless the drones are all around a crowd I do … | Continue reading
Another installment in the series “Stuff to do on the way to or from Oshkosh.” Racine, Wisconsin is not just a center of arts and crafts. It’s corporate headquarters for S.C. Johnson, a family-run company that commissioned some of the largest Frank Lloyd Wright projects ever buil … | Continue reading
My favorite article today illustrating the magic of politics, from Axios: Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian Democrats attending the Democratic National Convention agree on at least one thing: Kamala Harris is on their side. … Pro-Israel Democrats who spoke to Axios at the convention … | Continue reading
Who’s been following the Democrats’ convention in Illinois? What have you learned? Related… On the way out of Oshkosh in July, I stopped to visit cousins who live in the northern suburbs of Chicago. They consider their biggest enemies to be white American Republicans, with Donald … | Continue reading
Intel is supposedly putting an AI coprocessor into its latest Arrow Lake desktop CPUs, but these don’t the 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) minimum performance to run Windows 11 Copilot+. Why is valuable chip real estate being taken up by this mental midget, relative to a … | Continue reading
Less that two years ago, I wrote about how Robinson Helicopter was promoting the Vuichard technique for escaping from vortex ring state (see R.I.P. Frank Robinson (and a few notes from the safety course that he loved)). While doing recurrent training in Irvine, California at Heli … | Continue reading
We showed up late for a Burt Rutan talk at Oshkosh and found an overflow crowd learning about, after a presentation of Rutan’s latest aerodynamic thinking, five of Rutan’s heroes: One thing that I learned from the talk is that Glenn Curtiss, the father of naval aviation and a con … | Continue reading
Here’s one of my recent Facebook posts (from Stuart, Florida, recently named “Best Coastal Small Town” by USA Today): Then there is the standard-for-Facebook-these-days pig butcher at the bottom: Hi! Philip I noticed you popped up on my social media feed recently and we seem to h … | Continue reading
For your Florida bookshelf: Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida by Mikita Brottman (British-born, resident in Manhattan, and a professor in Maryland so I’m not sure how she researched this book). The characters in this true-crime drama have a Florida li … | Continue reading
Let’s open Installment #2 of my report on the Oshkosh 2024 experience with weird aircraft seen… At the seaplane base, an electric Beaver: (Supposedly arrived from Vancouver by truck rather than in 10-minute hops from Tesla Supercharger to Tesla Supercharger.) A couple of times, w … | Continue reading
Oshkosh is more of a social gathering than a trade show, but people still ask “What did you see that was new?” Let’s get that out of the way, then…. Skyryse has a fly-by-wire system that can turn the $1 million Robinson R66 turbine-powered helicopter into a machine with at least … | Continue reading
At least some of the downtown areas of Milwaukee make for a nice stop on the way to or from EAA AirVenture. The Third Ward is a particularly well-done gentrification/re-purposing. If you do decide to make a stop, the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) is home to a four-story … | Continue reading
If you’re heading to or from EAA AirVenture, here’s an idea for a stop: the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee. This is a report on our July 2024 visit. The museum is close to downtown Milwaukee, not right next to the factory as you might expect (the factory is about 15 minutes … | Continue reading
The always-interesting folks at DJI have climbed Mt. Everest with a 1 kg. drone: (There is at least one cut so I think that there might have been a battery change at some point.) Watching this video it seems clear that the drone was being operated from quite some distance away. I … | Continue reading
We are informed that AI is going to transform our daily lives. Web browsers are made by companies that are supposedly at the forefront of AI/LLM research and development. Why isn’t a browser smart enough to fill out the entire form below? It has seen fields with similar labels fi … | Continue reading
NBC: A portion of the closing ceremony is dedicated to the host city handover from Paris to Los Angeles, in which Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo will give the Olympic flag to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. … The [Olympics closing] ceremony will feature prominent performers representing … | Continue reading
We visited the Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee on our way to Oshkosh. It was completed in 1892 at a cost of $250,000 for 20,000 square feet. Although we are informed that we live in an inflation-free society today, thanks to the efforts of our wise political leaders in Washington, D.C … | Continue reading
Before “Oshkosh” (EAA AirVenture), we spent a night in Racine, Wisconsin. The town is notable as the birthplace of J.I. Case, which pioneered backhoe loaders, and S.C. Johnson. The downtown square was once filled with shade trees, we learned: There are some arty/fun shops: There’ … | Continue reading
Friends have been asking me about the ATR turboprop that spun into the ground in Brazil on August 9, 2024 in which 61 people were killed. Aviation Safety Network says that it was warm on the ground (17C) with a potential for “severe icing” above 12,000′ (FL120): CNN: It began los … | Continue reading
State Farm, January 19: $936 + $884 = $1820 for six months of car insurance. State Farm, July 20: $1049 + $1001 = $2050 for six months of insurance. That’s a 12.6 percent increase in half a year. If we weren’t assured that we live in an inflation-free economy, we would call that … | Continue reading
The Jupiter branch of the Palm Beach County Public Library seems to have at least five copies of Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land: Keeping five copies on the shelf seems like an odd choice in a town where forty acres and a mule would … | Continue reading
I touched on my visit to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Is Donald Trump worse than George Washington? but I’d like to share some additional history lessons from the signage. This is a government-funded institution, so the lessons are, presumably, official State of North Caro … | Continue reading
For at least eight years we have been informed for by Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the New York Times, et al., that Republicans will end our democracy (see Why do the non-Deplorables deplore the Trump shooting?). Yesterday, however, I saw something new. A Democrat in a primary elect … | Continue reading
Into the Storm: Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival by Tristram Korten offers us a window into an unusual lifestyle. Ben Cournia, aviation survival technician (“rescue swimmer”), flight mechanic Joshua Andrews, and pilots Rick Post and Dave McCarthy sho … | Continue reading
Politicians from both parties say that they want to “control” the U.S. border, but nobody ever proposes changing U.S. law to eliminate the right to claim asylum. There are minor differences between politicians, e.g., “Biden administration reverses Trump-era asylum policies” (Poli … | Continue reading
A maritime safety lecture from Into the Storm: Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival by Tristram Korten… SS El Faro’s hull, a towering wall of blue-painted steel, loomed over the wharf at the Port of Jacksonville’s Blount Island terminal as gantry cranes … | Continue reading
Iran has been displaying its military power recently and its indifference to directives from the U.S. The country attacks the west in general and Israel in particular via support for the Houthis, Palestinian militant groups (Hamas, UNRWA, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, et al.), and H … | Continue reading
“Novak Djokovic defeats Carlos Alcaraz for first Olympic gold medal” (NBC): He had tried five times to win the gold, failing each time. … The two sets played had to go into a tiebreaker, which was neck and neck the entire way. During the first set, there were 13 unsuccessful brea … | Continue reading
Intel claims to have a faster and more cost-effective AI system than Nvidia’s H100. It is called “Gaudi”. First, does the name make sense? Antoni Gaudí was famous for doing idiosyncratic creative organic designs. The whole point of Gaudí was that he was the only designer of Gaudí … | Continue reading
We’ve been informed that, when it comes to climate change, “the Science [was] settled” as of no later than 2007 when Professor Dr. Al Gore, Ph.D. talked to fellow Scientists in the U.S. Congress (state-sponsored NPR). Science’s climate models generate accurate predictions of Eart … | Continue reading
“Iran Arrests Dozens in Search for Suspects in Killing of Hamas Leader” (NYT): Iran has arrested more than two dozen people, including senior intelligence officers, military officials and staff workers at a military-run guesthouse in Tehran, in response to a huge and humiliating … | Continue reading
A lot of houses have closets and hallways architected to fit a standard top loading washing machine, which seems to have been roughly 27x27x44″ high. Here’s a 3.9 cu. ft. Whirlpool: By cheating just a little, e.g., stretching the depth to 27 and 7/8″, Whirlpool can deliver a mach … | Continue reading
A fourth post based on The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a book about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg. Although both of these women were awarded Iron Crosses by Adolf Hitler, only Hanna was an enthusiastic supporter of National Socialism. The aeronautical engineer and dis … | Continue reading