Elon Is Worth Every Penny

Whew! I'm back in San Diego after 2 1/2 weeks in Alabama doing the 1031 Sprint. That's where you have a very limited time window to get a river house up and running for vacation rentals and also buy a long-term rental house in Spanish Fort to soak up the proceeds of a house sale in San Diego. The 1031 refers to the IRS tax code that allows us to defer capital gains when selling one income property to purchase other income property.

The river house is near the end of a cul-de-sac in Baldwin County. Think farm country ornamented with the jewel of Alabama, Fairhope, nestled on the shores of Mobile Bay. As such, there's not much fiber laid there and definitely none at the river house. There, your terrestrial option is a classically incompetent cable company, with (helpful?) customer service located in Bangalore. You can expect DSL speeds of about 6 Mbps down and around 500k up. That is bound to get you poor reviews by vacation renters who have to deal with wailing children, stuck inside on a rainy day, unable to download and watch the Blues Clues episode where the pair breaks up a Pakistani rape gang in Telford.

Starlink to the rescue!

I quickly assessed the Internet sitch and ordered a Starlink system, not realizing the hardware is sold at various stores in the region, including Walmart, Home Depot, Lowes and others. As the order was processed and the estimated delivery date revealed, it became apparent that Starlink wasn't going to be able to deliver until after we'd left.

That would not do, so I managed to find a Walmart in Pensacola that still had a Starlink 4X terminal, the latest model. Everywhere closer was sold out. I imagine that SpaceX is building the things as fast as androidly possible and they're flying off the shelves at that same rate.

One slight problem. The service I ordered would not be active until the hardware arrived. I had numerous chat sessions with Starlink's Grok chatbot and it seemed the problem was unsolvable. Grok recommended I create a trouble ticket nonetheless, so I did so, expecting nothing.

The next day, out of the blue, I got a phone call from Starlink customer service. It was a real person, one who spoke perfect English and perfectly trained on the product line. She told me she had seen my trouble ticket and then patiently and politely walked me through the process to activate my Walmart-purchased antenna, which we had installed on the boat house roof the day before. Within 15 minutes, I had full 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up through a phased array antenna to satellites zooming by overhead.

Un-freaking-believable. I didn't call them, they proactively called me. On top of that, she escalated my ticket to get me a refund on my order from Starlink. That evening, another customer service rep from SpaceX called to tell me my order had been canceled and my credit card fully refunded.

Elon Musk is worth every penny of his trillion dollars.

Take a bow, my dude.

Special Bonus Content

Leave it to the Babylon Bee to do a great bit on Elon's trillion dollars while channeling my character, Cat.

Bad, But Still The Best

I guess the text of the MOU with Iran is out. I've seen people on X, people I respect, howling that it is a terrible deal. Such adjectives are subjective, not objective. Whatever is in the MOU hardly matters. We did as well as could have been expected, given the global situation.

I'm still in Alabama, working while doing the 1031 Sprint. That's where, in pursuit of fulfilling the requirements of a 1031 capital gains tax exchange, we must get our new properties up and rented as fast as possible. I don't have time for a long post, but I wanted to get these noodlings down on the blog.

The only leverage Iran really has is the Strait of Hormuz. That leverage vanishes if we and our allies provide sufficient surface combatants to escort shipping going through the strait. In short, the Europeans and Asians lack both the will and the capability to do this. We're not talking a fleet like the one that took Okinawa in 1945, we're talking a dozen or so destroyers and frigates. The Euros could not protect shipping from primitive threats even if they wanted to and they don't want to because they've allowed themselves to be colonized by Islam.

Because the Euros could not protect shipping, we had to draw the line here, pack up our gear and go home. That in itself was a wise decision as the alternative was another neocon-style quagmire in the Middle East.

This is a watershed moment. Absent a violent spasm of Western patriotism and cultural confidence, this marks the point at which Islam can exert substantial and obvious power over Europe.

Thanks to our own poor decisions and lack of funding for the Navy, specifically the decision to build LCSs instead of the more expensive and capable DDGs and FFGs, we were not capable of providing those escorts ourselves. In that environment, this MOU was about the best outcome we could have expected, given Trump's aversion to war. The only other alternative would have been to carry out his threat to destroy all power plants and bridges and leave Iran in the Stone Ages. President Trump could not bring himself to inflict that kind of suffering on Iran.

Still, even with all those limitations, the war accomplished some good and important things. Iranian leadership was decapitated. The Iranian military, save for its infantry, has been effectively annihilated*. The Iranian propagandists, both within Iran and within the West, will claim victory, but that's ridiculous. Just compare Iran's international position a year ago to today.

The Chinese didn't do so good, either. Their military hardware was shown up badly. The other Gulf states are actively working to divorce themselves from the Strait via pipelines and harbors outside the Gulf. Once that's complete, Iran will never again have this much leverage.

Iranian influence took a massive hit. Iran's standing with their neighbors did as well as a result of their indiscriminate attacks on all around them. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are all scrambling around trying to figure out how to protect themselves now that their sugar daddy has been curb stomped.

In the end, it was a good result, probably about as good as one could hope, given the circumstances.

God, I miss the Royal Navy.

* - People will say that the Iranians can rebuild their military quickly and bandy about budgetary figures for ships and aircraft as if the military was a spreadsheet. It isn't. Think instead in terms of not just replacing the hardware, but having to rebuild a generation of NCOs and skilled support personnel as well as all the support infrastructure that got destroyed. How long does it take, for example, to build a modern pier, complete with loading and umbilical systems for an FFG? Now multiply that across the whole country for the Iranian navy and air force.

America Was Not Built On Slavery

 ... because not much of anything can be built on slavery.

Goofing off with AI (read: ChatGPT) recently, working on a silly alternate history idea, one of the biggest drawbacks to slavery finally sunk in to me. I knew that Southern planters used slaves as loan collateral, locking themselves into the institution financially, but I never really understood how anti-free market capitalism it was.

In short, slaves are a terrible way to invest capital. You can get the slaves, you just can't get rid of them if they are no longer useful. Slaves are like a tar pit for your capital.

Imagine you've got a spread in east Texas. You can either raise cattle or grow cotton. You decide to grow cotton and buy some slaves to tend and harvest the cotton. Thanks to Eli Whitney, you make decent money. A decade later, some kind of mineral deposit is found underneath your property. To exploit it, you've got to ditch the cotton.

Oops. It's not the use of the property that's the problem, it's the slaves. You can't get rid of them because no one will buy that many. You can't free them because your mortgage is backed by them. You can't kill them because, despite what foam-at-the-mouth abolitionists might say about you, you're not a monster. You may be a full-blooded eugenicist, but the slaves are still human to you. The slaves don't have the engineering skills you need to work the minerals.

You're trapped in cotton.

If you had chosen to raise cattle and foregone the slaves, when you found the minerals, you could slaughter the herd, sell the beef and move on to the better opportunity.

In a way, the Deep South trapped itself in a get-rich-quick scheme. Eli Whitney's cotton gin made cotton a tremendously valuable crop and slavery made the labor costs relatively low. Agriculture circa 1850 was very labor intensive. Once the land owners made those decisions, there was no easy way out.

The rest of the country, nay, the rest of the Western world, was moving on to better industries, but the South couldn't follow along because slavery had trapped them.

There was another problem that affected the whole region at the time. Europeans with valuable skills and ambition were emigrating to the US. Almost none of them went to the South. An immigrant was destined to start at the bottom and have to work his way up to success. In the South, he'd have to compete with slave labor so his initial fortunes were likely to be fairly desperate. The South missed out on the advantages European immigrants offered.

Historians like to point to the lack of factories, railroads and population for the reasons the Confederacy was not able to win its independence. Nah. It was slavery.

Good Lord, I'm trapped in this infernal cotton!

It's Good To Be Home

I was an Air Force brat. As such, I grew up in Boston, Los Angeles, Alexandria, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles again and then San Diego. I never felt like any place was home. I've been in San Diego now for 40+ years, but it still doesn't feel like home. I don't know why, it just doesn't. Maybe it's living in the Southwest.

I hate the desert and San Diego is coastal desert.

Whatever the reason, I never felt any place was home until I visited Mobile, Alabama. It makes no Earthly sense at all, it just is. Sometimes the energy of a place just fits.

A few days ago, we closed on a house on the Fish River in Baldwin County, just across the Mobile Bay from the city proper. We're still scrambling to prepare it to be a vacation rental because we're not moving here permanently. Grandkids in San Diego, you understand. Actually wife kitteh is scrambling. I'm working remotely, earning money for our middle son's family who have a severely autistic son.

The house was owned by an older couple who moved across the Bay, north of Mobile, to be be closer to their own grandchildren. As is normal with an older couple, the place had not been kept up properly. The dishwasher sounds like it's been smoking 2 packs a day for decades when the drain pump kicks on. The dryer sounds like it's warming up for takeoff. The house itself was dirty and the HVAC needed servicing in a serious way. And so on and so forth.

We've got most everything squared away and we're starting to relax into the house. Wife kitteh, my Chicago born and bred beauty, whose favorite line is, "You'd never make it in Chicago," only acquiesced to the purchase of this house as an "I love you" to me. She's coming to understand the Deep South. Everyone is friendly, polite and, much to her surprise, conscientious and competent. Outside of the cable company, which operates in Bangalore or some such benighted place, all of the professionals we've hired have taken a personal interest in taking care of our needs.

It hasn't surprised me at all. It's one of the reasons I fell in love with Dixie.

The place has character and I'll share it with you over time when I get the chance. In the meantime, here is the evening view from our boathouse deck. A Montecristo White Churchill, my favorite cigar, and a Ghost in the Machine hazy IPA from Louisiana was a perfect end to our first day on the river.

Hope things are going well for you, too.

The Slow Death Of The Royal Navy

I thought this was stunning. As you watch it, track the number of frigates in service.

Jira And Fun AI Art

 I'm working on a Saturday, making some substantive changes to one of my more complicated Jira projects at work. In the process of the redesign, I'm building some helper classes to simplify recurring tasks. I'm chatting with AI (read: ChatGPT) as I go.

AI taught me the value of using a Map<String, String> over a List<String>. It was quickly obvious that the code would be far more readable, if a bit more verbose, with the Map. This is important as my full retirement date approaches.

That date is June 5, 2028, by the way. 737 days, 5 hours and 26 minutes from now, not that I'm counting.

Anywho, I complimented AI on the good idea and told it I planned to use the Maps instead of the Lists.

Got it. The List<Map<String, String>> is more readable for code maintenance. Once I'm retired and living with Bobby Lee, Basil, the General, Cat, Miss Elizabeth and Miss Claire, the whippersnappers coming after me will find readable code.

The last thing Cat wants is to have our lives interrupted by frantic phone calls from GenX programmers.

AI replied:

Cat would regard that as a catastrophic systems failure.

In Cat’s ideal world:

• Readable code
• Stable abstractions
• Clear semantics
• Centralized formatting
• Minimal surprise

so that no one calls the bayou at 2:13 AM saying: “Mr. Bond, we can’t determine whether Base Fee means percentage or currency in module RCCFundingFormatterV2Final_Actual.”

At which point Cat silently presses the large red button.

No one wants that. No one.

I laughed and gave it this prompt.

Generate an image of the old, southern man sitting up in bed, on a phone call, half asleep while in the background, the large, gray tabby cat is angrily preparing to press the big, red button.

Here's the result. It's worth a click to see the full screen version.

I love the details it added in without a prompt. It turned me into a much older version of my fictional character, Bobby Lee Bond. Bobby and I are both partial to bourbon. I was surprised by the choice of Old Forrester instead of my favorite, Elijah Craig, but the detail was clever. Dittos for the text throughout the image as well as the Bayou Command map.

AI forgets, blurs and blends its memories, but it gets the spirit of the thing close enough to almost always make me smile. I got a kick out of this one and I hope you did, too.

It's Not Empathy

In 1988, the movie Twins came out. It was a one-joke comedy. Here's the trailer. See if you can spot the joke.

This year, Gad Saad's book, Suicidal Empathy, came out. It, too is a one-joke tragicomedy. Here's Gad's 5-minute summary of the book. See if you can spot the joke.

Spoiler: the joke is that when the progressives use the word "empathy" it is deliberately misleading to the point of fraud. Gad pounds that point into the ground on every single page.

To be clear, I'm a big fan of Gad Saad. I consume most of his content in various forms. On the whole, including in this book, he is a large force for good in the world.

Getting back to the book, what Gad is noticing is that none of what he describes and what else we can observe is empathetic. If a system is designed to maximize empathy or, to put it better, minimize suffering, it will self-correct as it evolves and move to improve its model so it can better reduce suffering. 

The progressive experiment, which is the never-ending effort to destroy and replace Western Civilization, never does this. It doubles down on what it was doing before. Here in San Diego, the progs have been expensively "working" to fight homelessness for over a decade. Our diocese has been "lifting up the marginalized" as well. In all that time, the number of homeless has increased. The filth and decay has only gotten worse.

A system designed for the purpose of remediating suffering would adapt to new data. This one hasn't at all. Ergo, empathy is in no way related to what the progs are doing.

Dittos for the open border. When it became obvious that the language of the blue collar jobsites was changing to Spanish and American blacks were more solidly locked out of those jobs than they had been under the Southern Democrats' Jim Crow, the system should have adjusted. It did not.

When the importation of Muslims into England led to the gang raping of 100,000 white, English girls, the system should have adapted. It did not.

The progs' system did not adjust because it is not in any way guided by empathy. However, most of its adherents are. All of the AWFLs I know are empathetic to their cores.

The problem I have with the book is that for it to do any good at all, it needs to be read by the people who want to be empathetic, read: AWFLs, but are now following the progs' playbook. Instead of snarking about empathy being suicidal, it should have embraced Thomas Sowell's maxim, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." Similarly, the Church should embrace and preach a tragic yet noble view of life instead of their current notion that Man is redeemable through social justice, which, ironically, is a heresy.

Perhaps a better theme for the book could have been, "What is empathy? Whatever it is, this isn't it."

Still, I understand Gad's focus being what it is. A Lebanese Jew, Muslim migration chased him first out of Lebanon under duress and by a narrow, harrowing escape and now out of Canada to Mississippi. He's been a Casandra for several years now, one we should heed.

Gad's right, we are being suicidal, but the self-destruction is coming from ideological capture, not empathy. There's no empathy in any of this.