A Few Curmudgeonly Words on Those Electric Commuting Helicopters

There has been a lot of press on them over the last week or two. I have some thoughts.

First off, they are going to need helicopter pilots with commercial ratings to fly them. A lot of pilots. Where are they going to get them, unless the companies send their own people through a training mill? Helicopter licenses are expensive to get, far more expensive than fixed-wing licenses.

So they are going to be hiring from the bottom of the barrel, for any pilot with experience is going to go where the real money is,and that's not schlepping two people from lower Manhatten to JFK or laGarbage and back. Yes, I know they claim that they are four seaters, but four seaters with luggage? Nope.

Second, while localities may not be able to stop those things from flying over them, they damn sure can regulate where they land. You aren't going to be able to call an airUber to pick you up from the nearest public park.

Third, if something goes wrong, you likely will die. Adult helicopters have large rotors; if the engine fails, the pilot quickly transitions into autorotation. That uses the airflow over the rotor to keep it turning, which results in a very fast, very steep, controlled descent. If the helicopter goes too slowly, the rotor stops turning and then the helicopter assumes the flight characteristics of a similarly-sized box. (There is a zone of flight, translational flight, from takeoff to cruise (and vice versa) where the helicopter is not going fast enough or high enough to autorotate in the event the engine fails, which means you die.) The electric helicopters have little rotors that are too small to autorotate. So if the electrical system shits the bed, well, you might as well hope you're over a cemetery, because that's where you're ending up.

Fourth, if those things are flying en masse to a large airport, they are going to saturate the air traffic control system. The FAA already has problems hiring, training and retaining enough controllers as it is. Your airLyft might take seven minutes to buzz to the airport, but it might have to wait ninety minutes for its landing slot. You might be better off taking a black car.

Fifth, if there is a way that these things will be able to fly IFR and comply with Part 135.215 et sec., I don't see how.

Sixth, keeping with Part 135, look at 135.209(b). Twenty minutes of power reserve would seem to be a good chunk of the possible range of the things.

And keep in mind that light helicopter flight over land is a fairly hazardous endeavor to start with. The FAA isn't going to care very much if the pilots kill themselves doing it, which is why ultralights are almost unregulated. As the aircraft get heavier and carry more people, the FAA cares more. And when they crash and kill people on the ground, then they care even more. A few crashes near the pickup points and, like the PanAm building helipad, those will go away, too.

I wouldn't be one to invest anything with the eChopper companies that I couldn''t afford to lose. And I damn sure am not sitting my pink ass in any of those flying coffins.

Drone-on-Drone

The Ukrainians are using FPV drones to take out katsap recon drones.

I see the day when flying a manned aircraft over or near a battlefield will be a suicidal move.

Dear Apple: Thanks, But No Thanks (also, FOAD)

On Monday, Apple debuted "Apple Intelligence," a new suite of free AI-powered features for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia that includes creating email summaries, generating images and emoji, and allowing Siri to take actions on your behalf. These features are achieved through a combination of on-device and cloud processing, with a strong emphasis on privacy. Apple says that Apple Intelligence features will be widely available later this year and will be available as a beta test for developers this summer.

Not only no, but fuck, no. When I either write or receive an email or text from someone, I'd like to be reasonably sure that what is going across the ether are the thoughts of the sending party. I don't want to be corresponding with some fucking AI. And, regardless of what assurances Apple hands out, do you really trust them not to keep copies of everything they send/end?

Maybe it's time to go back to telephone calls and hand-written letters.

The future is coming and it seems to have a high potential for serious suckage.

Times Are a' Changin', and Gasoline's Not Going to be Cheap Again

After an explosing and fires in 2019, the PES refinery in Philadelphia closed for good. The Houston Oil refinery will close next year.

They aren't the only ones.

Refineries are neither cheap to build nor to operate. So when something happens at one that will cost a lot of money to fix, the owners have to ask themselves: "Is it worth putting in nine-figures' worth of money to get this plant running again?" When a company is making a huge investment to repair or upgrade a refinery, they are looking ten or twenty years out to see if they can recoup their investment.[1]

Increasingly, the answer is "no".

The reasoning is not hard to understand. More and more people are buying electric vehicles. EVs themselves are getting better.[2] More and more EVs means less and less demand for gasoline. More and more EVs means that more charging infrastructure will be built. More ease and capacity to charge up EVs will persuade more people to make the plunge.[3]

Having the infrastructure to recharge the vehicles is a major issue.[4] An alternate may be to engineer the vehicles for semi-easy battery changes. Imagine pulling into a robotic garage, where the battery is removed and a fully-charged one installed in a matter of minutes.

But all of that means that as the demand for gasoline begins to drop, then it will be refined in fewer places. The price of gasoline will then go up even more, which will create its own semi-death spiral. If you want to see an example of that, then look at the history of aviation gasoline, which has become a specialty product.

So how can this be somewhat abated? One answer is by using the Federal government to put its thumb on the scales of the market. If having gasoline available is a public good, the Feds could subsidize the operation, renovation and even construction of refineries.[5] The argument for doing so could be to have the ability to make far more JP-8 for wartime use.[6] Another answer would be to make it attractive for businesses and parking lots to install public-use charging stations. Or we can do both.

But if we do nothing at all, the cost of running a fueled vehicle will only increase, for you can drill your brains out and build more pipelines, but if there's no place to refine the product, increased levels of crude production won't matter one shiny fart.
__________________________________
[1] The irony of corporate leaders, who can't solve the problems confronting them today, planning twenty years out, is not lost on me.
[2] The difference between buying a Tesla and buying from the Big Three is that Tesla has a Silicon Valley mindeset that regards customers are unpaid product testers. The Big Three, on the other hand, test their products before selling them.
[3] There are two hard nuts to crack on this: Deeply rural areas and densely-populated urban areas. The answer to that is a topic I intend to explore at a later time.
[4] The reverse will also be true, if filling stations start to close.
[5] There is precedent for this. During the Second World War, the government's Defense Plant Corp. built aluminum plants.
[6] We may need it if Putler's War expands.

YMMV; EV Ed.

If you get one of the new electric F-150s, and if you plan on towing things, figure you'll have to stop to charge that thing up every two hours, or less.

Given the shorter range on those trucks, you'd think that the auto companies would come up with a body design that is a tad bit aerodynamic than a fucking billboard.

But what the hell do I know.

You could mount a generator in the bed, but it seems the folks at Found On Road, Dead have thought of that.

As the Water Drops, the Bodies Show Up

A body inside a barrel was found over the weekend on the the newly exposed bottom of Nevada's Lake Mead as drought depletes one of the largest U.S. reservoirs — and officials predicted the discovery could be just the first of more grim finds.

"I would say there is a very good chance as the water level drops that we are going to find additional human remains," Las Vegas police Lt. Ray Spencer told KLAS-TV on Monday.

The lake has dropped by fifty feet from "full pool" and is expected to drop another thirty-four feet by the end of next year. The mobsters that used the lake as a dumping ground to dispose of victims never anticipated that the evidence of their crimes would come to light.

The families of the victims, at least, will know the truth of what happened.

But as for those who depend on Lake Meade for drinking water and electity, good luck with that.

New Book Acquisition and The Future Arrives, Sort of

There was a mention of it on Ten Bear's blog. When I looked into the writeup about the book, it looked interesting. So I ordered it.

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Gun Jesus looks at what may be the first portable Gauss rifle.

It's not terribly practical as of yet. For muzzle energy, it's probably around a Crosman .22 pellet gun. But you know that this thing will be refined and something like it will be usable.

And, as of yet, they aren't "guns". So if you had the technical ability, you could design and make one.

Happy Blade Runner Month

The movie was set in this month:

2018

Happy New Year, Gentle Reader.

Hey, where is all the cool stuff that the futurists were talking about, half-a-century back?

Where are the the flying cars, the orbital hotels, the lunar cities?

On the other hand, fifty years ago, they were still doing a barbaric procedure called "exploratory surgery"-- cutting into people to see what was wrong. You almost never hear of that being done anymore.

Not to mention being able to look up almost anything at all without having to go to the library or leaf through an encyclopedia. Encyclopedia salesmen are now about as rare as locomotive firemen.

Thanks to both social media and everyone having a pocket video camera, the freedom to be young and stupid has almost disappeared. Youthful mistakes are a lot harder to live down. That's not a good thing.

Smart Cars and American Roads

In short: Our roads are too poorly maintained for smart cars to use them.

Shoddy infrastructure has become a roadblock to the development of self-driving cars, vexing engineers and adding time and cost. Poor markings and uneven signage on the 3 million miles of paved roads in the United States are forcing automakers to develop more sophisticated sensors and maps to compensate, industry executives say.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called the mundane issue of faded lane markings "crazy," complaining they confused his semi-autonomous cars.
...
Even Volvo's North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, lost his cool as the automaker's semi-autonomous prototype sporadically refused to drive itself during a press event at the Los Angeles Auto Show.

"It can't find the lane markings!" Kerssemakers griped to Mayor Eric Garcetti, who was at the wheel. "You need to paint the bloody roads here!"

Of course, you can bet money that the gabillionaires who want to push smart cars are whining to their pets in Congress.

Still, if you want to monkey-wrench the damn things, you could take some flat-black paint and go over assorted markings here and there. Human drivers might not even notice it, but the robots would go snakeshit.

The Weakest Part of an Automobile is the Nut Behind the Keyboard?

For the past four years, Google has been working on self-driving cars with a mechanism to return control of the steering wheel to the driver in case of emergency. But Google’s brightest minds now say they cannot make that handoff work anytime soon.

Their answer? Take the driver completely out of the driving. The company has begun building a fleet of 100 experimental electric-powered vehicles that will dispense with all the standard controls found in modern automobiles. The two-seat vehicle looks a bit like the ultracompact Fiat 500 or the Mercedes-Benz Smart car if you take out the steering wheel, accelerator, brake and gear shift. The only things the driver controls is a red “e-stop” button for panic stops and a separate start button.

There are a lot of potential good things about this, especially if going driverless is an option on a car. Had too much to drink, then just tell the car where to go, hop in the back seat and pass out while the car takes you home.

They had primitive versions of such things over a century ago, but they were called "horses and buggies". If you got potted in the saloon, you just unhitched your buggy, pointed it in the right direction and told the horse to go.

Of course, all of these driverless cars are going to talk to each other, so they can more seamlessly integrate themselves into the traffic flow. And sooner or later, it will be illegal to drive on some roads or in cities without the car being in autonomous mode. Which might improve capacities, as there is no reason why the computers couldn't drive the cars at 90 MPH and at an interval distance of inches.

But still, I think this new future as envisioned by Google is going to have a degree of suckiness. Especially since it's a dead-nuts certainty that a database of who drove where at what time will inevitably be created and maintained by one or more law enforcement agencies.

Congratulations to the Class of 2014

(From here)

That is all.

A Sad Day in Railroading

The last run of the commuter rail bar car.

Last call came Friday for the bar cars on commuter trains between Manhattan and Connecticut, a final run for rolling taverns where city workers gathered for decades to play dice, find jobs and hold annual Christmas parties with a jazz band.

The excuse is that the bar cars can't be coupled to the new MU cars that Metro-North is buying. While Metro-North says that they'll "look into" re-introducing bar cars on their new trains, we all know that horseshit. They're gone for good.

The Modern Puritans have scored another goal.

Maybe They'll Start Selling Small-Scale Anti-Aicraft Guns, Now

And tinfoil. Lots of tinfoil.

Amazon.com is testing delivering packages using drones, CEO Jeff Bezos said on the CBS TV news show 60 Minutes Sunday.

The idea would be to deliver packages as quickly as possible using the small, unmanned aircraft, through a service the company is calling Prime Air, the CEO said.

Net-shooting guns might work. And if you use compressed air to fire the net, it won't even be technically a "gun".

Who will follow to post the delivery notices?

Turn-Key Totalitarianism

There are a couple of long articles out today on the NSA, both on the NY Times and Gaurdian's web sites. Both are worth reading.

One bit of advice was given by Bobby Inman, who was the director of the NSA in the late `70s and early `80s:

“My advice would be to take everything you think Snowden has and get it out yourself. It would certainly be a shock to the agency. But bad news doesn’t get better with age. The sooner they get it out and put it behind them, the faster they can begin to rebuild.”

That would be smart, but they'll never do it. Spies airing out their own dirty laundry goes against their DNA.

One of the things that I think is interesting is how much of German pique over being spied on may be due, in part, to the fact that the NSA lumps the Germans in with a tertiary group of friends known as the "14 Eyes." They wanted to at least be in the "9 Eyes" group with the French, if not being added as the only non-Anglophone nation in the "Five Eyes". The World of Spooks seems to operates akin to a bunch of high school cliques.

Still, one thing should be considered: How badly has the NSA broken the Internet? You'd have to be several kinds of fool to trust confidential documents to a cloud server. Email is not secure, not unless you're using encryption. And the NSA is investing heavily in quantum computing, which theoretically would allow them to break any encryption scheme. It's a safe bet that they've penetrated every videoconferencing system as well.

The winners may be the airlines and the Post Office. The airlines because any business-sensitive discussions can now only be conducted face-to-face. The Post Office because writing letters may be the most secure method of written discourse left. Sure, the government can intercept your letters, but they have to physically do it. The NSA can't, as of yet, set up their big vacuum cleaner and suck up your letters.

For now, unless you are using OpenPGP or something similar, think of sending emails or buying things online or doing online banking as if everything you did appeared on one of those electronic billboards next to the highway.

Tab Clearing and Bangity

Say a man walks into your business and applies for a job.  He's a white guy.  He has a couple of visible tattoos and hazel eyes.  Your state has its legal cases online, so you run his name through it.  He has a few traffic tickets, nothing more.

No red flags, right?  Au contraire, Pierre!  You had just interviewed a potential member of the Future Felons of America. Which, as the article noted, means that we're edging into precrime territory.

On the other side of the coin, now we're going to have white guys yapping about how unfair it is to be profiled.

New rule: The little doors on digital cameras may stay open only so long as the camera is on one's hand. Following this rule may save you a bit over a hundred bucks.

Metadata may not work for shit for finding terrorists, but it works pisser for finding government officials who are blowing the whistle on government fuckery. (H/T) If you work for DasGov and you want to blow the whistle, you had better study up on tradecraft.

I had a little bit of trouble with my S&W 696. It wasn't hitting the primers hard enough to touch them off. A local S&W guru suggested checking the mainspring strain screw to see if it was loose and if it was, snugging it down. Loose, hell, it took two full turns to snug it up.

Much better:

There was a good stiff breeze from the right. As you can see, I've really cheaped out on my targets. I use a "bingo marker" from a dollar store and a sheet of typing paper, the cost of the target is about a penny a sheet.

Anyway, the guru advised me not to use threadlocker on the screw. There is a shoulder that's supposed to keep it from backing out if the screw is snugged up. There was a noticeable increase in the trigger pull; I'll look for that and if it starts feeling light, I'll know what to check.

Well, This is Somewhat Depressing; Dismal Science Edition

An argument that the economic stagnation experienced by all but the rich since 1973 is the way that things will be for a very long time.

I'd argue that even if that is the case, the situation has been aggravated by the adoption of tax policies that favor the über-rich. It is insane that a person who lives off passively-generated investment income is taxed at a lower rate than a person who holds a decent job.

The NSA Can Watch Every Click or Keystroke You Make Online

It is called XKeyscore. They collect all of it and if an analyst wants to look at everything you do for any reason, he or she can. They don't need a warrant or authorization from that toothless bag of wind known as the FISA court.

All they have to do is fill out some bullshit form that nobody ever looks at. Lord help you if you're in a messy divorce and your spouse's second cousin's lover happens to work at the NSA or a related contractor.

The vast amount of data that the NSA can collect is the reason why they are building a server farm the size of a small city out in the wastelands of Utah. They want to keep it all, forever.

Markus Wolf would be green with envy if he were still alive.

We are about at the point where you should keep in mind that everything you do or say online should be treated as though it was appearing on one of those huge LCD billboards next to a highway.

And of course, the pro-police state caucus up on Capitol Hill will see nothing wrong with any of this.

UPDATE: Seconds before a hearing in the Senate, the MTAHNS declassified and released a FISA court order and some other documents. So they can say they're being "transparent" and yet not allow the Senators any time to read the damn things.

Also, note that with regard the claim that "wiretapping everyone foiled X terrorist plots", the number represented by X keeps decreasing.

UPDATE II: Per one of the comments, Google wrote a lot of the software that the NSA is using to spy on everyone. So Google's motto has morphed from "Don't Be Evil" to "Evil, Inc.".

The Snitch to Come in Your Car

Federal safety authorities Tuesday called for all U.S. cars, trucks and buses to come equipped with technology that would allow them to "talk" to one another to help avoid accidents.

Right. And since your car would be broadcasting its speed, location, direction of travel, whether or not its wipers and/or headlights were on, you'd have no expectation of privacy in any of that information.

Which means that government(s) would be free to collect it.

Which means that corporations would collect it to sell you targeted ads.

Maybe you're on a strict diet for medical reasons, so now your car would rat you out for stopping at the local Retch `n Run for a cheeseburger, fries and a shake. Maybe your insurance company will adjust your rates because you use your brakes too much (one already does this).

Here's my reaction: No. Fucking. Way. I'll happily pour repair money into used (non-wireless) cars. I already carry one government spying device with me most of the time, I don't need one in my car.

I don't know the NTSB lunatics who came up with this idea, but they should be forced to read the 4th Amendment aloud and then flogged on the Washington Mall with an old set of tire chains.

Ratcheting Up the Paranoia Index

Well, this is good news for the makers of tinfoil.

FBI director Robert Mueller said Wednesday that the nation's top law enforcement bureau uses drones to conduct surveillance on U.S. soil, though only on a "very, very minimal basis."

Mueller, the FBI director since 2001 who is set to retire this year, acknowledged that his agency uses drones in its investigative and law enforcement practices, and is further working to establish better guidelines for the use of drones.

Of course they're only surveilling the bad guys, right? They would never ever use a drone for watching law-abiding citizens.

Because there aren't any, so they could use that "three felonies a day" argument to justify watching everyone, since we're all criminals.

Tinfoil would be ineffective. Wearing broad-brimmed hats, on the other hand, might be better (and don't look up). So would driving a silver sedan or a white pickup truck.