Target: General Aviation

 

The EPA has decided that leaded aviation fuel (avgas) is an environmental hazard.  In effect, the EPA has painted a huge target onto the sides of virtually all light aircraft used by the General Aviation community.  Spared from the ax will be anyone flush enough to own a jet-powered aircraft, and anyone who flies Part 103 (ultralights) because neither needs leaded fuel.

An article in the Orange County Register notes that "Lead isn’t in the jet fuel used by commercial aircraft", and that's true.  Jet fuel is — with all the lace around the edges stripped off — either kerosene or naphtha (cigarette lighter fluid), and neither are supplemented with tetraethyl lead, but avgas is because it improves performance in piston engines enough to allow them to actually... you know... fly.

So, what does the EPA want?  Probably, they are going to require that all engines that currently run on 100LL (100 octane low-lead) be converted to use unleaded fuel.  They will do this by interfering, legislatively or economically or both, with the production of 100LL.  The approximately quarter-million owners of such aircraft will be faced with replacing their existing power plants with ones that can run on unleaded avgas with an octane number well above 100.  Retrofitting existing engines will likely be cost-prohibitive.  General aviation, already quite expensive, is going to get even more so.  In fact, this may spell the end of most GA and the resulting closure of many small private and municipal airports.

So you typically commute in your Cessna 172 between Tallahassee and Sarasota?  Well, good thing for you that Delta flies SRQ-ATL-TLH (and return) and it only takes a little over five hours each way!  That 240 mile trip that your Cessna can do in about 90 minutes — starting whenever you wish — can now be done in just 312 minutes, but you have to get up at 4:30 to be at the airport by 5:30 for your 7:00am flight.  $450 dollars!  Cheap!  Not as cheap as flying yourself, and you can only do it twice a week because 'schedules', but you no longer need to rent a spot at the airport or have insurance on the airplane.  Think of all the money you'll save!  (Other trips by extension.)

Cherchez l'argent.  This is a giant pile of loot being redirected to the very small community of commercial aviation from the very large community of general aviation.

 

Repositioning Cruises

 

Mention 'cruising' to almost anyone and the first image that pops into their mind is a 7-day jaunt that leaves out of Miami, stops in San Juan and a few more ports in the Leeward Islands before returning to the originating port.  For a few, the cruise begins (or ends) in San Diego, passes through the Panama Canal, and ends (or begins) in New York, with the cruisers on board either flying to the first stop or flying home from the last.  For that second group, the notion of a 'repositioning cruise' won't sound at all strange.

Some cruise lines, Holland-America and Celebrity for example, cruise their fleets in warmer waters (the Caribbean, perhaps) during the Winter months, then shift the fleet to cooler waters (Mediterranean, Baltic) for the Summer.  For the North Atlantic market, this shift happens in late March through early May when each ship makes a one-way crossing from the U.S. East Coast to somewhere in Europe, and in late September through early November from Europe to the U.S. East Coast.  As with the New York-San Diego route above, most of the cruisers will have a flight either at the beginning to get them to the start-point, or at the end to get them home.

Any Atlantic crossing by cruise ship will involve a 5-7 day segment where the only thing visible for 360° is 'horizon'.  Eastbound, the first stop in Europe (or the last stop westbound) is either Horta in the Azores, Funchal (Madeira), or Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

In order to avoid sending their ships across the Atlantic with empty staterooms, cruise companies often low-ball their prices and offer deep discounts on the airfares at either end.  As a result, repositioning cruises are typically very economically attractive.  For Holland-America, as an example, prices typically break the $100/night bar, something rarely seen elsewhere on H-A's schedule.

The number of ports-of-call is generally higher than expected.  Whereas a 7-day Caribbean cruise might touch 4 ports, a 15-day transatlantic (of which 8 are sea days) will stop in 7 different ports.  This tremendous variety is not simply for the benefit of the passengers.  At each port, crew members whose contract is expiring will be dropped off and replaced with new crew starting fresh contracts.  It's a win-win for all concerned.

For cruisers who have the time available, repositioning cruises are an excellent bargain, not just in terms of price, but also for the variety of experience.  It's my favorite way to cross an ocean.

 

The American Money Laundromat

 

'Supply-and-Demand' is not simply a 'macro' concept.  It also works at the 'micro' level.  Indeed, any economic concept that doesn't work in both macroeconomics and microeconomics is automatically suspect of being flawed in ways that may not be intuitively obvious.

The other salient concept for any functioning money laundromat is that one can't sell an asset unless there is also a buyer.  A seller prospects for buyers by adjusting the price to meet the available demand.  This is how a 'Dutch auction' works, and is the method I always suggest for anxious home sellers.  An anxious seller wants to maximize their revenue, so offering prices start high and decline, perhaps precipitously and predictably.

These related concepts can help us understand what's happening in cities all across our nation as well as across the globe.  When flawed governmental policies — is that an oxymoron? — cause property values to decline, rational businesses tend to 'cut their losses' by dumping their failing assets onto the market.  When the offering price becomes low enough, buyers with available cash — and the flexibility to ride out the current bad times — can pick up assets whose value may, sometime in the future, be worth more than their book value.

This is what we're seeing in places like San Francisco, Seattle, and Maui.  Counter-productive policies and incentives drive the value — and the offering prices — of real estate down, and flush investors snap up the formerly-valuable properties at bargain-basement prices.

If this scenario is accidental and/or unforeseen, our elected officials can be forgiven — maybe.  What if it's deliberate?  We know our foreign aid structure is designed to launder taxpayer money back into the pockets of Washington insiders.  Have our state and local governments decided to get into the laundromat business, too?

 

What's a Hunga-Tonka?

 

Good golly, it's HOT!  Isn't that what everyone's saying?  Must be global warming climate change...

Well, maybe...  Maybe not.  Have you heard about the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano that erupted on January 15th, 2022?  NASA said the underwater eruption — at about 150 meters depth — blasted 'huge amounts' of water vapor into the stratosphere.  Well, that's a bummer! 

Why is that a bummer, you ask?  It turns out that water vapor is a better 'greenhouse gas' than carbon dioxide, that's why.  All that water vapor is like adding a few extra blankets...  Just what we need to make our Summers a little cozier.

So when your climate-alarmist friends start ranting about record hot days and it's all your fault because you aren't doing your part to reduce the globe's carbon footprint, you can remind them that Hunga-Tonka just wiped out all the 'progress' made in the last 15 years.

Puny humans!  You're no match for Gaia!

 

Can we really reform the Justice Department? Really?

 

Over at The Price Of Liberty, Nathan Barton suggests that the answer is a categorical 'no'.  I find it impossible to argue against that.

 

Help! Big Pharma Is After Me!

 

For months if not years, I have been complaining inwardly (and occasionally outwardly) about the number and frequency of ads on prime-time television for one after another high-priced medication that will help solve your high blood pressure problem or your urinary frequency problem or your eczema problem or your whatever problem.  Ordinary people cannot, of course, buy any of these drugs.  We OPs have to convince our doctors to prescribe those pricey meds in the hope that they'll be covered by our medical insurance.

Now, drug manufacturers have two ways of marketing their wares: they can advertise directly to doctors and hospitals (and they do), and they can advertise to the potential users of their product.  (That's you and me in case you didn't pick up on that right away.)  They can write off the advertising expense for the first route; that's perfectly normal, a typical business expense.  But they also can write off the cost to advertise to the user community.

Why?  And why would they bother?  Even the write-off costs them something; they're not paying taxes at 100%.  The answer is that by doing so, they have turned all of us consumers into their personal lobbying army.  Our task, whether we know it or not, is to convince our doctors to prescribe these drugs and generate income to the manufacturers.

There's a second benefit, however, that is much harder to discern: By sloshing ad money liberally upon this network or that one, they now hold a whip regarding broadcast content.  They can influence which content broadcasters broadcast and which they do not.  In that way, drug manufacturers can control the official opinions of broadcast and cable networks.

I'm thinking that's not such a good thing.

I'm thinking that it would be pretty easy to declare such expenditures to be non-deductible since the ads they fund are not directed at doctors — there are ways to target advertising much more precisely — and are thus not really a legitimate business expense.

I'm looking forward to having seen my last commercial for drugs I don't need and can't obtain without convincing my doctor that I do need them.

 

Anti-Woke backlash

 

First it was Bud Light getting boycotted because they decided to associate their brand with an attention-seeking cross-dresser, then Target put their 'June is Pride Month' merchandise front and center, featuring 'tuck-friendly' women's bathing suits aimed at those 'trans women' who haven't yet had their gender-reassignment surgeries.  Now Disney is facing the wrath of parents over a (sales)man in a dress helping little girls pick out their favorite Princess gown at the 'Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique' at Disney World Orlando.

Anheuser-Busch was certain the Bud Light brouhaha would blow over in weeks if not days, but they have been very disappointed thus far.  Target, apparently not prepared to become the next Bud Light, has made motions that look a lot like 'backing down', but their sales are off and their stock price is falling — not like ABInbev's, but showing signs.  Several recent Disney movies have turned in unusually poor box office results.  It looks like parents are taking the kids to the zoo instead of the theater.  What the heck is going on?

I think what's happening is that the normies have reached the limit of their tolerance.  This isn't new.  During the Age of Covid, parents discovered to their horror what their children were learning at school — and they didn't like it.  They didn't like it so much that they descended on school board meetings en masse to let the administrators know how much they didn't like it.  It could all have ended there, but the newly-installed Democratic administration decided to make an example of those uppity parents by siccing the Famous But Incompetent FBI on them.  Lots of normies suddenly were awakened (not 'woke') to the truth that they were a mere complaint away from getting the same treatment.

And their response has been a collective middle-finger.

In this game of economic 'chicken', the consumer has options; the retailers don't.  The LGBTQIA-LS/MFT community is a fraction, a puny fraction of the retail audience.  Even if that community doesn't initiate their own boycott because some retailer backs off their full-throated support of their tiny population, they aren't enough to rescue a brand that has — for all practical purposes — poisoned the well.  That's what Anheuser-Busch has discovered, much to their chagrin.  In some parts of the country, Budweiser brands, not just Bud Light, have lost up to 30% of their market share along with their #1 spot.  Miller, Coors, and Yeungling have gleefully stepped in to take up the slack.  That looks suspiciously like a Kiss of Death.  It's not outside the envelope of reality that ABInbev might be making some serious changes, perhaps 'ownership'.

It will only take one major corporation to crumble to end, completely, the current fascination with 'ESG scores'.

All things considered, I think that would constitute 'a good thing'.