InSinkErator instant hot water success-via-failure tale (and a dishwasher question)

by philg

Because I’m incredibly lazy, one of the first additions that we made to our house in 2022 was an InSinkErator under-sink instant hot water dispenser (Home Depot):

It failed in 2023 (leak under the sink, quickly caught thanks to our Chinese brothers and sisters at Govee) and InSinkErator offered to come out to replace it or send me a replacement and do the labor myself in exchange for a new 3-year warranty. I chose the latter option not because it was easy, but because I thought it would be easy (it actually wasn’t too challenging since all of the connectors were the same and no wrench was required).

The tank failed again this month, not with a leak, but by failing to heat. I called InSinkErator again, having a dim memory of the above conversation. They came back with “the warranty on the replacement expires in November 2026” and, again, offered to send me one more device and extend the warranty to 2029. The device retails for $300 right now at Home Depot ($400 at Amazon) so I’ll take this win-by-losing. (Imagine if the device had lasted just another few weeks!) Given that both adults in the household work from home and we use the instant hot water for cooking as well as making tea, the device probably made over 1,000 gallons of near-boiling water before dying. That sounds pretty good until you reflect that a standard domestic hot water heater will make the same quantity of hot water every week or so and last for 8-10 years. Admittedly, the whole-house hot water heater isn’t heating to as high a temperature. ChatGPT says that the higher temp can lead to more scale build-up and also that packing everything into a compact enclosure shortens the life.

We had the opposite consumer experience with our noisy unloved Bosch 300-series dishwasher the other day. This was installed by the previous owner shortly before we moved in. It’s almost $1,000 for a new one, which is absurd considering that a higher-rated-by-Consumer-Reports-and-quieter Chinese Midea MDT24P7CST is $700 (Midea is now rated #3 in reliability among dishwasher brands by CR, just behind Bosch/Thermador and Miele; I wonder if Miele will continue to be able to charge $4,000 for a dishwasher that is $2,000 in Europe and that doesn’t perform better than whatever Midea cooks up for its next generation). The racks began to fail probably about a year ago, but we didn’t notice until just recently when rust stains began to appear on the dishes. The plastic coating on the steel tines is worn away. Bosch has a five-year warranty on the racks and decided that we didn’t qualify even though the machine is likely right at the five-year mark. We could get new racks for around $300, I think, including shipping, but I decided that it would be a fun project for the kids to use a Dremel tool and a hand file to remove the rust then apply Plasti Dip ReRACK ($21; smells like 1970s model airplane glue), which is supposedly good for about a year.

(We’re apparently not efficient in our use of dishes and pots/pans because we fill and run the machine 2-3 times per day. Adjusted for vacation time away from the house, this is about 800 runs per year and the Federales say that 215 runs per year is the average (source). Miele aims for its machines to last 5,600 cycles, which they say is 20 years (it would be 7 for us). Some older Bosch literature says that they aim for 4,000 cycles over 10 years and our machine is probably close to the 4,000-cycle number. So our racks, perhaps, failed right on schedule. This makes me wonder why the dishwasher manufacturers don’t put a cycle counter display on the unit. Customers might feel better about a failure and an expensive out-of-warranty repair if they could see that a machine had saved them from handwashing 3,286 times, for example. The LG ThinQ app shows that we’ve used our washing machine more than once per day, on average, in the past couple of months, but doesn’t give a grand total for the lifetime of the machine. Our ghetto-class Bosch 300 doesn’t connect to Wi-Fi or the app, but ChatGPT says that even those with new machines and the Bosch app can’t see a lifetime cycle count.)

Readers: what dishwashers do you love? The Bosch that we have claims to generate 48 dBA of noise (that’s in a test chamber). In our open kitchen/family room it is way too loud and interferes with conversation, TV-watching, etc. As noted above, the machine is running for 4.5-6.5 hours on an average day (2-3 cycles at over 2 hours each). Cleaning performance is okay, but seems to have gotten weaker over time (circulation pump feebling out? The machine was serviced with a new one about three years ago; ChatGPT says that the top-of-the-line Bosch Benchmark has exactly the same pump/heater as our $900 one). It isn’t completely dead, but I’m considering euthanasia (have to find a Canadian to help?) because there is no fix for the loudness. An appliance sales guy absolutely loves his Cove (Sub-Zero) dishwasher, but a friend has one and she says that she can hear it running from a kitchen table 15′ away (not obtrusive, but audible). Consumer Reports hasn’t tested the Cove for cleaning or noise, but gives the brand a low rank in reliability (that’s based on a survey). Some people love Miele, but as noted above they mark them up to insane numbers here in the U.S. (Bosch, by contrast, is a similar price in Germany and the US). LG makes big claims for their one-hour wash, Consumer Reports found that LG cleaned better than Bosch, and Yale Appliance (big YouTube channel) says that LGs have the lowest first-year service call rate, but some online reviews say that LG was noisy for them and CR gives LG low marks for reliability and satisfaction. We have a Monogram range and Monogram makes huge claims for the low noise level of their latest ZDT900 dishwasher, but nobody has reviewed it (CR gives Monogram low marks for both reliability and owner satisfaction). Does anyone have a dishwasher that they love for (a) true silence, and (b) cleaning performance on the one-hour cycle?

Finally, as long as we’re talking cooking, I thought the kids might want to get some explicit instruction in cooking from The Joy of Cooking, but then realized that the 1975 book on the shelf (1) had ten pages about aspics that might not engage them, (2) wasn’t printed on acid-free paper, and (3) had some issues with binding separation. The 2019 update is quite a bit plumper, despite the aspic section having been reduced from 10 pages to 1. It’s amazing how much can be communicated compared to online recipes (10 pages per recipe vs. 10 recipes per page?).

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The scuffles in mostly peaceful France and what taxpayers receive in exchange for their $3,000/year security funding

by philg

CBS created a brilliant meme yesterday, characterizing what’s going on in France as “scuffles” on top of a photo of a car blazing like the wreck of the Hindenburg:

Of course, the original was quietly deleted by the Ministry of Truth and is no longer available, but some Deplorables at X archived the above as an image. It’s too bad that CBS wouldn’t own it, because it could have been as iconic as CNN’s “mostly peaceful” description of the U.S. summer of 2020:

France has a $25 billion/year national police budget, an additional multi-$billion/year local police budget, and a $57 billion/year military budget. INSEE says that 44% of the French are net taxpayers (not receiving more from the government than they pay in), i.e., about 30 million people. Each French taxpayer, therefore, is being charged about $3,000 per year for security, which is a lot of money in a country that is poorer per-capita than any U.S. state.

Nobody seems to be asking why France can’t be secured with this level of funding or, in other words, what do taxpayers get in exchange for the longer hours that they work to support the state?

Separately, who is behind these riots? It’s tempting to blame the fact that France, just like the U.S., chose to assemble a collection of humans from all of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies. But that ignores who might benefit from unrest in France. The Swiss are an obvious suspect. The wealthy French presumably already have their assets in the custody of Swiss banks so that they can escape in the event of a massive wealth confiscation or total societal collapse event (tough to leave immediately because, just like the U.S., France has a massive exit tax, but in an emergency Switzerland is a great option, especially because they won’t extradite someone over a demand by another country’s tax authority (this drove the U.S. IRS crazy, of course, in the Marc Rich case, which was finally resolved when Rich paid off Bill and Hillary Clinton in exchange for a pardon from Bill)). Then there are industrial competitors, to the extent that the French are still an industrial country. Someone who watches a video of the scuffles could decide to spend money on a factory in Poland, Hungary, Germany, or Switzerland rather than to invest more in France. (I still suspect the Florida Realtors of being the main backers of Ayatollah Mamdani’s campaign to take over NYC. If my suspicion is correct, the ROI has been stunning.)

Israel is also a good all-purpose villain (just ask Harvard, Columbia, and anyone who voted for Zohran Mamdani!). French Jews are much better educated than the typical immigrants to Israel (recall that the largest subpopulation within Israel is made of Jews who were driven out, after having their assets confiscated, from Arab-Muslim countries). To the extent that recent riots turn into a pogrom (see below for an X post about how Jewish shops in Marseille were burned; there have also been reports of synagogues damaged (example)), Israel could benefit from an influx of people with a world-class education. On the third hand, however, the median age of a French Jew is 53. The smartest, best-educated, and most energetic French Jews might already have emigrated out of what is now a Jew-hating pro-Hamas society with a moribund economy. American progressives say that the U.S. benefits when a disabled 80-year-old arrives on our shores, but I don’t think too many Israelis share this point of view.

Temporary Israeli Greta Thunberg is on the scene (Guardian):

A slightly newer Guardian story notes “Protesters hold the French and Palestinian flags as they stand on the statue of the Place de la République in Paris”:

Finally, let’s have a look at some documentary footage of the overall effects on Paris:

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Should teen drivers be charged crazy high insurance rates if they’re using Tesla FSD?

by philg

Happy National Teen Driver Safety Week for those who celebrate.

ChatGPT says that an American family with two cars can expect to pay an additional $3,250/year for car insurance when a household 16-year-old gets his/her/zir/their license (“Often doubling the premium if the base policy was modest”).

I typically think that the insurance market makes sense, e.g., in COVID-19 is sure to kill you, but life insurance rates haven’t changed and Life insurance and Covid we looked at (a) the government telling us that COVID-19 was killing healthy young people, and (b) unchanged life insurance rates for anyone who was eligible for life insurance (i.e., not ancient with one foot in the grave).

For a Tesla that does 96% of its miles on FSD, however, I’m struggling to understand how a teen “driver” adds risk. If anything, a teen should have better reflexes for reacting to a misstep by the FSD software. If the primary driver of the Tesla is the robot, then there is no reason to price insurance for the robot engaging in riskier behavior when the teen is in the car rather than a prudent adult.

Maybe there should be a special Tesla+Teen insurance policy that charges adult rates if the car is at least 95% on FSD and never in a driving mode faster than “Standard”:

On the back of a Jeep Liberty in a strip mall near us:

Update from our AI Overlord: “Florida already has a statute specifically authorizing this kind of discount. The most useful finding is Florida Statutes § 627.0653(6). “The Office of Insurance Regulation may approve a premium discount”. This language was added in 2019. … Florida § 627.0651(6)–(8) specifically allows different rates reflecting differences in expected losses and expenses. It also permits group-based rates when supported by credible actuarial evidence. … California is more restrictive about the rating factors an insurer may use.”

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What do museums, aquariums, botanical gardens, etc. get out of offering free admission to those with EBT cards?

by philg

More than four years, I began noting on this blog that Americans in means-tested everything (not “on welfare” since that is hateful language) were getting into a wide variety of expensive “nonprofit” tourist attractions either for free or at a 90 percent discount. See, for example Why you want to be on SNAP/EBT (2022) for examples sampled near Filthadelphia in which the working-class and middle-class taxpayers got soaked for $25/adult and those on EBT paid either $2 or $0. Practical advice from 2024: How to get free museum admissions for life: sign up for food stamps (SNAP/EBT), noting that the cards don’t expire and, therefore, even one month on EBT can be worth tens of thousands of dollars in the long run. The most recent post in this genre was “Black Creativity” celebrated at the Jewish-founded/Jewish-funded Griffin Museum of Science and Industry (August 2026). Maybe the X algorithm knows of my interest in this topic, but lately I’ve been seeing posts on X where others have noticed the same pricing structure. Here’s one with over 11 million views, regarding an aquarium in Monterey, California that charges $65 per taxpayer (“chump”) for a visit (and is lame compared to the aquarium in Lisbon!).

One question that I hadn’t previously considered is “Why do museums and aquariums do this?” The answer can’t be “Because they care about poor Americans.” They don’t make a serious attempt to market the free admissions program and, in fact, often don’t post “free with EBT” signs near their entrances and ticket booths. A Californian enjoying the EBT lifestyle in Oakland probably won’t travel down to Monterey.

What if the answer is that they want to preserve their own fat salaries, which are propped up by direct government grants, tax exemptions stemming from nonprofit status, and tax deductions for donors stemming from nonprofit status (half of the money “given” by a California donor will actually be given by other taxpayers because of the taxes that the donor avoids and that have to be made up with taxes from others, just as a substantial portion of the $100+ billion that Bill Gates is shipping to Africa via his foundation is actually coming from American peasants). What’s potentially at risk? Based on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Form 990 from 2025, they’re paying a huge slate of individuals $250,000+ per year. Excerpts (add up all of the numbers in each row for annual comp; note that Julie Packard worked only 28 hours per week to earn nearly half a million dollars in one year):

The Form 990 shows that they got $105 million in “contributions and grants”, all of which are either 100% tax dollars or about 50% tax dollars. They earned $26 million in investment income, which means they skipped on paying significant taxes on capital gains and dividends.

If everyone has to pay $65/adult to get in, eventually someone at the IRS might ask “How is this place different from Disney or SeaWorld?” The Ivy League universities faced the same challenge and got around it in kind of the same way. When the cost was $100,000 pre-Biden dollars for four years and that was considered an outrageous ripoff, the schools said “but we give out financial aid to kids from poor families and they’ll pay $0”. This turned out to be a nearly cost-free promise because they didn’t admit students from poor families who, as predicted by The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications, typically lacked the grades and SAT scores required. As their prices and endowments have rise, of course, the Ivy Leagues have had to keep raising the family income threshold (now about $200,000/year) for a free ride, but the idea is that same. They give up a tiny amount of customer revenue in exchange for preserving an enormous quantity of tax dollars.

Related:

  • “Harvard Endowment Soars to $68 Billion After 27 Percent Return” (Crimson): “The returns followed Harvard’s August disclosure of its $2.2 billion stake in SpaceX, which went public in June in the largest initial public offering in history. The position was worth more than all of the endowment’s other reported public holdings combined. … MIT trailed with [a return of] just over 10 percent.”
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Alternative Realities in the New York Times and New York Post

by philg

Yesterday was a day of wonder, according to the New York Post’s front page:

By contrast, the word “Tesla” does not appear on the NYT’s front page as of 10:30 am. Nothing happened that anyone might have watched last night via streaming on X on in person. Elon is mentioned, but only as a pernicious political influence destroying our sacred democracy:

(I do also wonder why anyone is interested in noncitizen voting. An American whose family hasn’t worked in four generations can vote, presumably to increase government spending on the welfare that has enabled the four generations of relaxation. Why does it matter if Kilmar Abrego Garcia (still Maryland’s leading resident, if not exactly “citizen”) can vote for more pupusas and margaritas? When the U.S. was young, a man started work at age 13 and started to vote at age 21. Since there was no welfare state, essentially everyone who voted had worked for at least eight years. Today we have people voting at age 18 who might not enter the workforce or pay taxes until they’re 28+. If they don’t vote for student loan forgiveness then they’re irrational!)

Nonprofit profiteers bleeding taxpayers dry in Minnesota, according to the New York Post, in order to fill the U.S. with humans from one of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies (Somalia):

In the NYT, a nonprofit NGO is featured for its valuable work:

Mirjana Spoljaric, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross. … Spoljaric travels to all sides of active war zones — Gaza, Ukraine, Iran — meeting with the heads of governments and armed groups alike. [where’s her hijab?] … (We spoke before Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the government would be live-streaming a public execution — another sign that the old rules and norms are eroding.) Many world leaders “simply don’t care anymore,” she told me. “And this lack of empathy, this lack of anger, is what I find most dangerous at the moment.”

(i.e., Pete Hegseth is far more dangerous and destructive to American interests than anyone in Gaza or Iran.)

The real problem, from the ICRC’s point of view, is not that the Gazans killed civilians across the border into what they call “the Zionist entity” and took, held, and sometimes later killed hostages from Thailand, Eritrea, Israel, the U.S., etc. It is that a

What happened to Gaza and in Gaza to Palestinians and Israelis supersedes every legal, moral and humane standard. There are so many people complicit in what happened there and continues to happen. The worst now is the fact that people are deprived of human dignity. The perception created that if there’s enough food, that’s good enough — for some people it’s good enough to just barely survive in rubble, and for other people it is only good enough if they can return to normalcy and bring their children back to a normal school.

Safe to say that by “There are so many people complicit in what happened there” she doesn’t mean the overwhelming majority of Gazans polled who supported the October 7, 2023 attack and who continue to support the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad? (And why didn’t this heroic female travel to Cornell where the real genocide happened?)

Let’s turn back to matters purely domestic… In the New York Post, it was a private citizen with a no-doubt-illegal-to-bring-into-the-school gun (which common sense tells us a private citizen shouldn’t have been allowed to own).

In the New York Times, the real heroes are police who investigate after all of the shooting has stopped (The Other Guys whereas the dad featured in the New York Post was either Danson or Highsmith?).

Speaking of Danson and Highsmith, how awesome would it be for a sequel to The Other Guys to feature resurrected Danson and Highsmith pursuing criminals in a rocket-equipped Tesla Roadster? Maybe they would bust into a Cornell fraternity party 2nd floor bedroom window balcony with the car/aircraft?

As long as we’re talking about demure college gals and The Other Guys….

And since we’re talking about “Gator” and the Tesla Roadster, here are some Floridians who are passionate about both:

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Alternative truths for Facebook and X users (#BelieveJaneDoe or be kicked off Facebook)

by philg

Flash back to just before the most glorious day in the 21st century history, i.e., the Election of Dr. and Joe Biden. Facebook disappeared any reference to the New York Post’s article suggesting that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden had some interesting photos and emails on it. Twitter (now X) simply prevented users from posting the link (https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad/).:

The blockbuster correspondence — which flies in the face of Joe Biden’s claim that he’s “never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings” — is contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

NY Post readers and Facebook/Twitter users thus occupied parallel universes, each with its own truths regarding the Biden family.

Facebook seems to be reprising this for the #BelieveJaneDoe era. I’m in a free-for-all discussion group on Facebook. One of the users is a Big Law partner who yet still has time to post maudlin sympathy for cash-seeking survivors such as the person variously known as Jane Doe/Lucy Craig/the Cornell Skank/Jane Hoe/The Cornell Plaintiff/etc. Let’s call her “The Cornell Plaintiff” here for concreteness. In response to one of his outpourings, I posted, without comment, a text message exchange obtained by TMZ and, after passing through their editorial process, published by the New York Post (link). In the exchange, The Cornell Plaintiff says “our body our choice asf”:

Facebook removed this post, along with a variant that highlighted Jane Doe saying that nothing “illegal” had occurred, because it is an example of “coordinating harm and promoting crime” (that allegedly occurred in 2024?):

Maybe this was a mistake by AI? No. Facebook says that a human was involved in the suppression of anything contrary to #BelieveJaneDoe:

I still hate Elon Musk for (1) not making a self-driving minivan, (2) not offering a max-range RWD version of the Y L, and (3) being a lot richer than I am (#SickWithEnvyEveryDay). But I think it is important to recognize that his takeover of X created an entire universe of facts that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. (Of course, Musk didn’t create the New York Post, but without X it would be impossible to see in one place the kinds of things that the New York Post publishes from 1,000+ different sources worldwide.)

The Cornell Plaintiff’s myriad defendants had better hope that at least some people on the jury are X users. Otherwise, The Cornell Plaintiff is going to be the richest person ever to have attended Cornell. The complaint, which contains some seemingly absurd demands, e.g., that her 20-year-old self be considered a minor with respect to the sorority defendant, has already been removed by quite a few web sites, but it seems to survive at least in one link. There are some deep pockets, not least Cornell’s $12 billion (maybe all of that could be transferred to the Plaintiff to compensate her for the genocide that she suffered?).

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What do folks expect from the Tesla Roadster this evening?

by philg

Tonight the people who put down $50,000 for a Tesla Roadster, announced in 2017, will learn what it is they’re buying and, maybe, how much they’re going to pay for it.

Tesla’s big differentiator right now is self-driving. But why is that valuable in a sports car?

Tesla’s latest creation will accelerate faster than a $50,000 used C8 Corvette? So what? A $50,000 C8 Corvette in Launch Control already accelerates at a terrifying rate, 0-60 in 2.9 seconds, for street use. (See Corvette driving school report (Ron Fellows near Las Vegas) for my report on what I did besides hang out with Hunter Biden in Pahrump.)

It will be great on a race track because each wheel can be individually controlled? If that’s a dramatic improvement then we’ll see Tesla Roadster-only racing?

The car was promised at $200,000 in pre-Biden dollars, right? If we assume that every Nvidia employee wants one, does that mean the market-clearing price for a Roadster will be closer to $500,000 post-Biden dollars? The people who paid $250,000 for a “Founders Series” car apparently weren’t guaranteed a car at that price. They can get a refund if they don’t like whatever Tesla now wants to charge them and Tesla has been holding the money all this time. (Gemini says that if they’d bought $250,000 of Nvidia in November 2017 it would be worth about $11 million today. A stupid investor (like me!) who instead bought the S&P 500 would have about $650,000 today, with dividends reinvested. So if Tesla delivers the car as promised and without charging any more money, it will cost the early adopters $650,000 in 2026 dollars.) I’m going to guess that the only Roadster that can be ordered for delivery within 18 months costs $375,000 (“Douche Edition”?) and that Tesla actually does honor the first 1,000 at $250k/$650k/$11 million depending on how one looks at the opportunity cost of the money. There will be talk about a $290,000 version, but it won’t materialize in our lifetimes.

What would it take for me to get excited about this offering? Seating for 7-plus-puppy and sliding doors!

You can see the 2017 prototype in Los Angeles at a minimum cost of $23 per adult:

Gemini says “EBT cardholders receive free general admission to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles through community promotional offers”, but Grok disagrees and says that those who wisely choose to refrain from work get only 10% off.

How does this compare to the latest gas-powered concept vehicles? Here’s one from Alfa-Romeo with a hood long enough to hold a V-12:

I’m not sure how different the 2017 Tesla looks from the Maserati MC20:

Here’s a Chevrolet C9 Corvette concept, which could almost surely never be sold due to the lack of practicality, e.g., no luggage space. GM won’t let a base Corvette be useless like the Maserati above (5 cu. ft. luggage). It has to have some functional transportation value, though I guess the ZR1 and ZR1X push the limits by eliminating the frunk and leaving owners with a small hot trunk (about 9 cu. ft. vs. 15 on the base C8).

Update: This is what the Tesla Roadster will look like when it finally comes off the assembly line in 2028 (11:59 pm on December 31?):

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Floridians and Texans should never buy a second home in a state with income and/or estate taxes

by philg

I hope that everyone’s National Estate Planning Awareness Month is going well. As the nation’s successful make their way down to Florida for “the season”, a cautionary tale from the Wall Street Journal: “Was His Home Connecticut or Florida? The Difference Is a $13 Million Tax Bill”.

A rich douche spent 5.5 months in Connecticut during his last year on this planet and that generate a huge amount of litigation over whether CT can harvest estate tax (reducing the kids’ inheritance). He could have avoided all of the drama for his executor simply by making his northern home anywhere away from the states of color in the Tax Foundation map below.

The Islamic Republic of Michigan, for example, or Live Free and Die Free in New Hampshire. Even California would have been a far better choice since elites there refuse to live their own principles by imposing an estate tax to reduce income inequality and the “generational wealth” that they decry.

A bit part of the mess seems to be that, like Marjorie Merriweather Post, the builder of Mar-a-Lago, this douche had three regular residences: FL, AZ, and CT. So he wasn’t anchored in Florida for 183 days per year.

It is all increasingly complicated when people can work anywhere and have multiple homes. The fights between states and the wealthy are playing out in an increasing number of residency audits, said Timothy Noonan, a lawyer who leads a tax residency practice at Hodgson Russ in New York City.

The trial court judge homed in on one factor: Anderson typically spent 5½ months a year from May to mid-October in Greenwich, and 3½ months from November through mid-February in Florida. He spent three months from mid-February through early May in Arizona.

The judge concluded that “ultimately, the most persuasive evidence demonstrating Anderson’s domicile is where he chose to spend his most valuable and limited resource: his time.”

The trial court concluded that Anderson’s personal, social and property connections with Connecticut and Florida were generally equal, but that the estate failed to prove by clear and convincing evidence that Connecticut wasn’t his true home.

Here’s the Vero Beach place:

Estate tax is particularly hazardous. My late mother’s college friend was a passionate Democrat who avoided paying any tax to the Democrats of Maskachusetts by spending 183 days per year in her Palm Beach place. I hope that she lives forever, but what if in the last year of her life she falls ill while on a January visit to MA and then ends up staying through December in MA for continuity of medical care? MA wouldn’t have a slam-dunk case to collect estate tax, but they could certainly argue that the deceased had given up FL residence and it was time to collect 16% ahead of the kids, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and other beneficiaries.

Here’s an Ohio-based law firm’s web page on National Estate Planning Awareness Month showing a typical high-net-worth Ohio family (and no other client photos):

Google AI: “The median household income for Black or African American households in Ohio is approximately $42,433 to $45,800 per year, according to recent state demographic snapshots and census data. This is lower than the overall state median household income, which sits above $71,000”,

Grok: “Law firm marketing frequently uses multi-racial or Black family stock images for inclusivity branding, aspirational messaging, or to signal that services are open to everyone. It is not an attempt to accurately depict the statistical modal client. This is common across many professional-service websites and does not change the underlying demographics of who actually pays for attorney-drafted plans. In short: the image is marketing aesthetics. The typical paying customer for this service in Ohio remains a higher-wealth, usually White household.”

ChatGPT characterizes the image as “generic stock-photo family”, implying that it was chosen at random. Pressed, the AI admits that the law firm’s likely clients are rich white people. How does the image help market to those douches? “It could help if the firm thinks affluent white clients care about signals beyond “this family looks like me.” Marketing often tries to communicate things such as “modern,” “inclusive,” “welcoming,” or “serves the whole community.” Some wealthy white prospective clients may respond positively to that branding.”

Also from the Wall Street Journal, a couple in Manhattan whose kids’ inheritance will be reduced if they don’t move…

“Kids?” you might ask if you remember anything from your high school biology class.

Martin, 60, and his husband, Andrew Farach-Colton, 63, were living in that tiny Upper West Side apartment in 1999 when they found out they would be the fathers of twins. They wanted more space, but knew they couldn’t get it in Manhattan on their salaries.

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The absurdity of Owners’ Equivalent Rent illustrated by Zillow

by philg

This morning we got another absurd inflation number from the BLS (3.7%/year). As harped on numerous times here, headline inflation is untethered to actual costs in the U.S. partly because of the Owners’ Equivalent Rent scam. There’s a recent beautiful example of this in our own Florida neighborhood (Abacoa, within Jupiter, which is within Palm Beach County).

The house recently sold for $3.1 million and will, I’m sure, cost the new owners another $3.1 million in property tax, maintenance, insurance, landscaping, pool care, etc. over the years. What would an owner tell the BLS about what he or she thinks it would cost to rent? Perhaps the Zillow number of $8,593 per month. That’s about half of what an interest-only 30-year mortgage on the place would cost, if a 30-year interest-only mortgage were available. It might be 20% of the real cost of living in the house as an owner.

Note that this is pretty much the top of the Abacoa market. The owners apparently bought it, invested a ton of money in renovation (though it was not taken back to the studs nor was the room layout changed), and then decided that they were too rich to live in a $3.1 million house.

Here’s the complete price history:

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Did AI stick a fork in 8K televisions?

by philg

The American dream of sitting home all day in means-tested public housing while enjoying streaming programs on a beautiful OLED TV seems to be dying due to our evil AI overlords. Televisions are becoming MORE expensive, not less, because AI is buying all the processors, memory, and fab capacity. (See “TVs are finally being hit hard by the AI-fueled memory crisis: for the first time, the cost of the processors is higher than the display panels in some models”, October 2, 2026.)

Movies are still being made primarily in 2K Digital Intermediate because Hollywood can’t afford the memory and processing power to do editing and effects at 4K. Our brothers and sisters in Japan introduced practical 8K devices about 12 years ago (Wokipedia). I would have expected 8K televisions for desktop monitor use and for living room use by now.

Should we just give up on ever having an 8K television at consumer prices? I know that the theory is we can’t use that much resolution with current sizes and viewing distances, but I don’t believe it. There are a lot of situations where one can walk right up to a TV and inspect detail, e.g., if it is displaying a document. Maybe it isn’t necessary for enjoying a movie mastered in 2K, but there are lots of ways that a big screen can be used other than for watching a movie. Family photo collage, for example. One of our neighbors recently got a 100″ TV at Costco and there is nothing in front of it. If the machine were 8K, he could put an entire vacation’s worth of photos on the screen at once and people could walk up to the TV if interested. (I don’t like how it looks in his house, incidentally, when it isn’t on. It is a truly massive black hole in the wall. If I can take over from Donald Trump as dictator, I will order TV companies to put in all kinds of great features for what the TV can/should do when nobody is watching TV.)

Separately, who has bought a TV roughly 85″ in size lately? We have a low-end 86″ LG that we got for $900 at Costco in 2022. It was a floor model and came with a 5-year warranty. I wanted to see if something that huge was actually what we wanted. Should we splurge on an 83″ OLED? We never watch when the room is brightly lit (sometimes in the afternoon because of passionate NFL fans, but windows can be shaded). Or are the vastly-cheaper LCD TVs nearly as good? One of my big dreams, as noted above, is convenient software for running a slide show when the TV isn’t being used for TV (we might actually watch 10 hours per week).

Gemini on why we could never have a $900 OLED TV this size, even without AI as our enemy (not in quote style):

The reason OLED TVs max out at 83 inches instead of the standard 85 inches comes down to the fascinating—and ruthless—math of how panels are manufactured in factories.

Every OLED TV starts its life as part of a massive, garage-door-sized sheet of glass called “Mother Glass.” Most OLED factories use what is called a “Gen 8.5” size sheet. Manufacturers need to cut this mother glass into TV-sized rectangles with as little wasted glass as possible, much like cutting cookies from rolled-out dough.

Engineers figured out a highly efficient cutting layout (called Multi-Model Glass production) that perfectly fits two 83-inch panels and two 48-inch panels onto a single Gen 8.5 sheet with almost zero waste. If they bumped the size up to 85 inches, the 48-inch panels would no longer fit. They would have to throw away a massive amount of unused, highly expensive mother glass, which would make the 85-inch TVs prohibitively expensive.

Manufacturing an OLED panel requires depositing ultra-thin organic materials with near-perfect precision in a vacuum. It is a highly volatile process. A single microscopic dust particle or moisture drop can ruin an entire panel. If a tiny defect happens on a 55-inch panel, they throw away a 55-inch panel. If it happens on an 83-inch panel, they have to throw away a massive piece of inventory. The cost of all the ruined large panels gets baked directly into the retail price of the ones that survive the factory.

Standard LCD panels are completely commoditized; there are dozens of massive factories in China and Taiwan churning them out, driving prices into the floor. Large-scale OLED TV panels, however, are incredibly difficult to make and are almost exclusively manufactured by just two companies on earth: LG Display and Samsung Display. Without a flood of cheap, third-party competition, there is no pressure to slash prices.

OLEDs will likely always carry a premium simply because the organic technology fundamentally resists the kind of dirt-cheap mass commoditization that makes 85-inch LCDs so affordable today.

CES 2012:

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