Who has experienced a USB-C jack failure due to dirt/lint?

by philg

My 9-month-old pocket-carried iPhone 16 Pro Max stopped connecting reliably to USB-C cables. This had never happened in the bad old Lightning jack days. There’s an Apple Store 15 minutes south of us in Palm Beach Gardens (home to Tiger Woods’s former plaintiff/club-wielding attacker). The “geniuses” there cleaned it out in their back room so I can’t say what tools they used.

I had thought that the EU-mandated euthanasia for Lightning was a pure boon to consumers, but maybe others have noticed the same fragility?

Here’s what ChatGPT has to say:

Yes — USB-C jacks are generally more susceptible to dirt and lint issues than Lightning, though both can fail from pocket debris. Here’s why:

1. Connector Design

  • USB-C: The jack is a receptacle with 24 tiny exposed contacts along the walls. Debris can sit in the bottom of the port and prevent the plug from seating fully, or it can block some pins. Because the plug’s tongue is solid and must slide into the port, any pocket lint at the bottom tends to get compacted and cause “won’t charge” problems.
  • Lightning: Apple’s Lightning jack has fewer contacts (8), located only on the plug itself. The port on the device is a simple cavity with spring contacts on the sides. Dirt buildup still happens, but there’s less opportunity for debris to block a critical central “tongue.”

2. Durability in Daily Use

  • USB-C: More fragile if debris prevents a flush fit — wiggling or forcing a plug against lint can bend pins inside the port.
  • Lightning: More forgiving; the plug’s flat contacts scrape against the spring pins, which can tolerate a little more obstruction.

3. Real-World Failure Patterns

  • Many phone repair shops report that the number one cause of “dead” USB-C ports is lint compaction, especially in phones carried in jeans pockets. The plug simply won’t go in all the way until the port is cleaned with a pick or compressed air.
  • Lightning ports can also clog, but they usually fail from mechanical wear on the spring contacts after many years, rather than lint preventing insertion.

4. Cleaning and Maintenance

  • USB-C: Needs more frequent cleaning if the device is often pocket-carried. A wooden or plastic pick works best.
  • Lightning: Easier to clean, less prone to deep compaction.

🔹 Best Practices for Cleaning a USB-C Jack

1. Power Down First

  • Turn off the device completely.
  • If possible, unplug the battery (for laptops) to eliminate any chance of shorting pins.

2. Start With Compressed Air

  • Use a can of compressed air held upright.
  • Give the port short, controlled bursts at different angles.
  • Avoid holding the nozzle too close or using “liquid spray” mode (which can cause condensation).

3. Use a Non-Conductive Pick if Needed

If air alone doesn’t work:

  • Use a wooden or plastic toothpick or a specialized port-cleaning tool.
  • Very gently scrape or lift out compacted lint at the bottom of the port.
  • Work slowly to avoid scratching or bending the pins on the side walls.

4. Optional: Isopropyl Alcohol for Sticky Residue

  • If there’s grime (e.g., soda, lotion), lightly dampen a lint-free swab with 99% isopropyl alcohol.
  • Gently wipe the inside walls.
  • Let it dry completely before powering on.

5. What NOT to Do

  • ❌ Don’t use metal objects like paperclips or needles — they can short pins or bend contacts.
  • ❌ Don’t soak the port in liquid cleaner.
  • ❌ Don’t blast with high-pressure air compressors (too strong, may damage).

🔹 Maintenance Tips

  • Keep devices in a case that shields the port from pocket lint.
  • Store with a dust plug (tiny rubber caps for USB-C are cheap).
  • Clean ports periodically if you carry your phone in jeans pockets.

Should folks who do all of their charging and CarPlaying, etc. wirelessly invest 10 cents in a dust cover?

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Amtrak Acela ride from New York to Boston

by philg

Amtrak is spending $2.5 billion of your tax dollars on “NextGen” Acela train sets. Here’s a report on an August 2025 trip via OldGen Acela.

My $275 first class ticket from New York to Boston entitled me to use the Metropolitan Lounge at New York’s Penn Station, now named after Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal in his time and a reactionary conservative by the standards of today’s Democratic Party. In his 1965 report, for example, he seems to be engaging in victim-blaming:

The percent of nonwhite families headed by a female is more than double the percent for whites. Fatherless nonwhite families increased by a sixth between 1950 and 1960, but held constant for white families. It has been estimated that only a minority of Negro children reach the age of 18 having lived all their lives with both of their parents. …The Breakdown of the Negro Family Has Led to a Startling Increase in Welfare Dependency.

(Little did he imagine that white Americans would be incented to catch up to their Black brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters by the Family Support Act of 1988, which required states to set up child support formulae such that family court lawsuits would have a guaranteed minimum profit.)

Here’s the view from the lounge’s balcony:

The interior of the lounge, which offers free sandwiches, salads, chips, non-alcoholic drinks, etc.:

Due to the lack of crowding and the friendliness of the employees, this lounge is 20X nicer than what the airline lounges have become. Working WiFi was provided for those who want to sit with their laptops.

Separately, the lounge has a good view of the main hall’s video wall in which the New York City government promises to hire, and then retain forever (“strong labor protections”), anyone fired by the federal government for laziness and/or incompetence:

My initial Facebook post about the trip:

Just leaving Penn Station on time via Acela. Great crew on AMTRAK. The train itself bucks and bumps so much that they should have announcements in Mandarin to reassure our Chinese brothers and sisters that a derailment isn’t imminent (high-speed rail in China is perfectly smooth even above 200 mph). Maybe the idea is that everyone will be too plastered to notice?

The food in the lounge, though simpler, was generally superior.

Some hard-working guys:

My follow-up comments to the Facebook post, not in quote style for readability…

Cars and trucks were blowing past us on I-95, but now I think we’re matching their speed.

We’re in the middle of a one-hour run to New Haven. The iPhone reports a blistering speed.

we’ve cut back to a speed where we won’t have to adjust our watches for time dilation under Mileva Marić’s theory of special relativity (popularized by her husband).

Wifi doesn’t work. AMTRAK needs to adopt Starlink! [The new $2.5 billion cars won’t have Starlink, but “5G” (same idea as what the old cars have and that didn’t work for my trip.]

Our AI overlords have access to data showing that I’m on a train track and moving at 30-60 mph. Also it is time to point out that an AirTag is moving with me on the same track. Maybe this would be a useful warning for someone who owned a private rail car attached to the back of an AMTRAK train?

Approaching Westerly, CT at left lane pickup truck speed on I-95 in South Florida.

15 minutes before Providence we hit 150 mph:

Arrived on time at South Station, just under four hours after leaving Penn Station. Perfect no-waiting connection to the Red Line. Got to the Harvard Square apartment at almost exactly the same as Google Maps had predicted for leaving Penn Station at 6:30 pm by car.

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Credentialed expert consensus: SpaceX Starship will never work

by philg

Two months ago, New York Magazine Intelligencer (“intelligence” even in the name of the publication), “Is Elon Musk’s Starship Doomed? The future of SpaceX keeps blowing up, and no one knows if he can fix it.”:

“Having a rocket ascend a few hundred meters and blow up is not a success to me,” says Dallas Kasaboski, an analyst who covers the space industry for the research firm Analysys Mason.

Reusing both parts of a rocket, instead of just one, sounds like a modestly more ambitious undertaking — if you can do it once, why not twice? — but in fact, it’s exponentially harder, since the amount of energy to be dissipated while returning to Earth goes up not as a linear function of velocity but its square. The energy gets turned into heat, which sends the temperature of the Starship soaring into the thousands of degrees, such that it glows white-hot. To reduce the effects of this heat, the rocket’s exterior is coated in thermal tiles. But these are heavy. So is the internal bracing required to hold the ship together during the turbulence of reentry.

For critics, like Substack writer Will Lockett, the fact that Starship has failed so many times in a row is proof that the concept is fundamentally unworkable. “SpaceX is having to make the rockets too light, resulting in them being fragile, meaning that just the vibrations from operation with a fraction of its expected payload would be enough to destroy the rocket,” he wrote in one typically acerbic post.

“I remember reading a book in the 1970s about how the space shuttle would be flying every two weeks and cost low hundreds of dollars per pound to orbit,” says Grant Anderson, co-founder of the space-systems-maker Paragon Space Development Corporation, which helped launch SpaceX in 2002. “It never did that, obviously.” … When would we know if Starship is toast? One major red flag is persistent failures. “If you have a failure at the same stage twice for the same reason, and they can’t solve the problem, that’s an indication that there’s a design flaw that’s more than just an ‘Oops!’” says Anderson.

Readers: What do you think? Is it possible that Elon Musk and SpaceX are right and the expert consensus is wrong? Is there any way that Starship could one day make it into orbit without exploding? And, perhaps one day many years or decades from now, that both booster and Starship could land back on Earth?

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Our AI overlords will need more power than the Sun generates within 43 years

by philg

My question to Grok: “Extrapolating from the past three years how long before running LLMs consumes more power than the entire Sun generates?”

Extrapolating from the growth in global AI data center power demand over the past three years (2022–2025), which serves as a proxy for LLM power consumption given that LLMs drive much of the recent AI surge, we can estimate the timeline. Data from SemiAnalysis (as cited in a RAND report) shows the following facility power demand for AI data centers:

  • 2022: 1.451 GW
  • 2023: 4.28 GW
  • 2024: 10.6 GW
  • 2025: 19.9 GW

To arrive at the extrapolation:

  1. Fit an exponential growth model to these data points. Using linear regression on the natural log of power vs. year (with 2022 as t=0), the slope is approximately 0.876, corresponding to an annual growth factor of e^0.876 ≈ 2.401 (i.e., power multiplies by about 2.4 each year on average).
  2. The Sun generates 3.826 × 10^26 watts of power, equivalent to 3.826 × 10^17 GW.
  3. Starting from 19.9 GW in 2025, the factor needed to exceed the Sun’s output is (3.826 × 10^17) / 19.9 ≈ 1.924 × 10^16.
  4. Solve for years n: 2.401^n = 1.924 × 10^16, so n = log(1.924 × 10^16) / log(2.401) ≈ 43.

Thus, it would take approximately 43 years from 2025 (i.e., by around 2068). This assumes the exponential growth rate from the past three years continues indefinitely, though in reality, physical, technological, and economic constraints would likely slow or halt such growth long before reaching solar scales.

Note that ChatGPT 5 failed to answer this question, identically worded. It used data center power consumption growth, not LLM- or AI-specific power consumption growth.

When does the exponential growth stop? We can power a human brain with an Egg McMuffin. Is the answer an analog chip with a digital interface? IEEE has a 2024 article on a Chinese design using optical computing that supposedly cuts power consumption by 99%. But if these improvements were real would the AI companies be signing 20 year leases for nuclear power?

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Democrat economists hate Black women (NYT)

by philg

The New York Times:

Years before Lisa Cook became President Trump’s latest target in his effort to exert control over the Federal Reserve, she wrote about her experience as one of a relative handful of Black women in a field long dominated by white men.

“Economics is neither a welcoming nor a supportive profession for women,” she and a colleague wrote in a New York Times opinion essay in 2019. She added, “But if economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to Black women.”

What is the overwhelming political identity of those who are hostile to women in general and Black women in particular? “Political Affiliations of Federal Reserve Economists” (2022):

According to a new analysis of voter registration data, Democrat economists at the Federal Reserve outnumber Republicans 10 to 1. The imbalance is even larger among economists in leadership positions, among younger economists, and among female economists.

Previous studies look at the political ideologies of the broader economic profession. For instance, Langbert, Quain, and Klein (2016) report that Democrats outnumber Republicans 4.5:1 among economics faculty at 40 leading universities. In addition, Langbert (2020) finds a ratio of 4:1 among members of the American Economic Association (AEA), 4.1:1 among academic AEA members, and 2.5:1 among AEA members working outside academia and government. Earlier, Klein and Stern (2006) estimateds the ratio at 4.1:1 among public sector economists and 1.4:1 among private sector economists. McEachern (2006) shows Democrats outnumber Republicans 5.1:1 among AEA members in terms of political contributions.

I find that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among Fed economists is 10.4 to 1. The lack of political diversity is especially pronounced at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (48.5:1). Economists at regional Reserve banks range from 3:1 (Cleveland) to 12:1 (San Francisco). The lack of diversity is also noteworthy in leadership positions (22.25:1). Economists who are 40 years old or younger at the Fed are more likely to lean left (20.33:1), as are female economists (27.5:1). This suggests the Fed is likely to become even less politically diverse in time.

We are informed that if Republicans were eliminated (liquidated?) the U.S. would become a paradise of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yet it seems that the discrimination that has kept and continues to keep qualified Black women from assuming leadership positions at the Fed has been almost entirely perpetrated by Democrats.

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Support for Hamas among anti-Hamas New Yorkers

by philg

Except for a handful of Deplorables, New Yorkers whom I met recently were 100 percent aligned with Hamas in terms of what they’d like Israel and the Israel Defense Forces to do. At the same time they say that they are “anti-Hamas”. How does it work? Note that most of these folks are non-observant Jews whose principal current religion is expressing hatred for Donald Trump and contempt for Americans in “Red States” (they’re stupid and unproductive and survive only as parasites on the hard workers and heavy taxpayers in Blue States).

The New York Righteous say that, yes, Israel has the right to try to arrest or even kill Hamas fighters, but only if there is no possibility of injuring a civilian or a child. In other words, a Hamas fighter who keeps a child strapped to his chest would be permanently off limits. They accept at face value assertions that Israel is starving the Gazans, not noticing that the moms of the purportedly starved children have double chins. Here’s the most persuasive photo that CNN could find, for example:

One New York Jew in his 60s, despite being a 100 percent loyal Democrat and frequent spontaneous expresser of Trump hatred, seems to have found an area of agreement with Marjorie Taylor Greene of Jewish Space Lasers fame. He believes that Israel knows exactly where each Hamas fighter is located and has weapon systems capable of killing those fighters without harming anyone else. For reasons that aren’t clearly specified, Israel has chosen not to push the buttons in a control room somewhere that would result in the deaths of 100 percent of Hamas-affiliated Gazans. Israel is instead bombing and shelling Gaza for no reason other than Israelis enjoy killing civilians and making the noble Gazans suffer. So… he says that he is “anti-Hamas” but also that he is “pro innocent children” and that the IDF is free to fight Hamas so long as it does so in a way that no other military in the history of the world has managed to fight or win.

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Immigrants reproduce faster, so their population can overwhelm food sources before natives have a chance to recover.

by philg

I was doing some research on termite prevention for a friend who recently moved from Maskachusetts to Florida (he and his successful hard-working wife have waved goodbye to the new progressive personal income tax rates in Massachusetts and all of the wonderful progressive programs that it supports). It turns out that the $2000-ish Sentricon system may be a reasonable insurance buy due to Formosan termites, which immigrated to the U.S. in the 1950s.

ChatGPT:

Formosan subterranean termites (Coptotermes formosanus) often outcompete native U.S. subterranean termites (Reticulitermes species) when they invade the same area. A Formosan colony can contain several million termites, whereas native subterranean termite colonies often have fewer than a million. They reproduce faster, so their population can overwhelm food sources before natives have a chance to recover.

Formosan termites have foraging territories up to 300 feet from the nest, much larger than that of native species. This gives them access to more food and nesting sites, putting pressure on native termite colonies.

They defend their territory aggressively, sometimes killing or driving out native termites. They consume wood more rapidly, reducing available resources for competing species.

Once they establish themselves, they tend to displace or severely reduce local native termite populations, especially in warm, humid climates like Florida, Hawaii, and the Gulf Coast.

ChatGPT provides a simple “yes” answer to “Would it be fair to say that Formosan termites are therefore replacing native termites?”

Yes — in areas where Coptotermes formosanus becomes well-established, it’s fair to say they are replacing native subterranean termites over time.

When asked “In Dayton, Ohio the total population of humans is decreasing but the immigrant human population is increasing. Would it be fair in that case to say that immigrants are replacing native-born Americans in Dayton?” however, the answer is long and nuanced! Here’s the end of the hemming and hawing:

It’s more accurate to say immigrants are increasing their share of the population as native-born numbers decline, without implying causation.

Loosely related, a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan called “The Migrant Kitchen”:

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Americans who will reverse climate change can’t maintain a video display

by philg

The giant brains of New York University ($100,000/year to attend?) are going to reverse climate change. In “Follow the Carbon: Communicating the Path to Net Zero,” they will be assisted by experts from the pro-Hamas encampment at Columbia, from the folks at PBS who never received any federal taxpayer funds, and from politically neutral NBC. Following this meeting of experts people can sit through the Global Climate Change Film Festival. Here’s the video display these intellectually superior humans put together. Note the failure to raise the window shade sufficiently to uncover some of the segments and the Blue Screen of Death in the lower left corner:

Based on their demonstrating success at mastering the technology of video display, who is ready to give these technocrats the $50 trillion in funds that they seek for helping our beloved planet?

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Rainbow Flag vs. American Flag at the South Street Seaport

by philg

I visited the South Street Seaport for the first time in years and discovered that it has kept up with the times. The sacred Rainbow Flag is worshipped at a height of 4X the height of the American flag (Rainbow Flag at the very top of the mast of the museum ship while the American Flag is about one quarter of the way up).

The worshippers can’t seem to decide on which sect of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ religion they are following. A Biden-style trans-enhanced Rainbow Flag is flown from the front of the ship while a classic non-trans Rainbow Flag is flown from the mast near the stern. Views from the top of the building are superb:

The Tin Building includes a hidden-behind-curtains-at-the-back-of-a-tea-shop restaurant:

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New York commercial real estate news vs. the lying stock market

by philg

New York City is back, according to the media. Example… “The return-to-office trend is real — and it’s spectacular for NYC” (New York Post, August 17, 2025):

More employees now work in New York City offices than in July of 2019, according to the Placer.ai Office Index.

That’s right: The research platform, which uses cellphone data to track comings and goings at commercial buildings nationwide, found 1.3% more staffers at Manhattan desks last month than were there before the pandemic.

Similar article in the WSJ: “NYC Offices Are Back. Nothing Proves It More Than JPMorgan’s $3 Billion Tower.”

What does the lying stock market say? Here’s a 20-year chart for Vornado, a well-managed REIT whose portfolio is primarily office buildings and retail in New York City:

It’s gone from about $100 (sixty 2005 dollars adjusted for Bidenflation) to $37 today.

What about what one can see with one’s lying eyes? I visited a reader who lives near Wall Street and we surveyed some impressive towers from his 45th floor windows. We looked into the former Chase Manhattan building, fronted by an impressive Dubuffet sculpture, and found just a handful of workers at their desks at 2 pm. A nearby former Deutsche Bank tower remains vacant years after a renovation project started. In between is what used to be a name-brand hotel, now home to migrants for whom taxpayers foot the bill (their bicycles are chained up across the street):

The apparent lack of office workers means that there is more room for tourists, e.g., Fearless Tourist backs up Fearless Girl (“commissioned by State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), a large asset management company, to promote gender diversity initiatives and an index fund focused on gender-diverse companies with a relatively high percentage of women in senior leadership”):

The National Parks Service is there with 100 percent of exhibits in the “National Memorial” devoted to Americans who identify as “women”:

These exhibits that focus on a single gender ID (out of 74 recognized by Science) have apparently been up since 2021 (“Women’s Work, Never Praised, Never Done by Deb Willis, retrieving the stories of Black women in the struggle for the vote.”).

Consistent with the lack of observed office workers we found quite a few vacant storefronts, e.g.,

Maybe the retail space can be turned into mosques (masjids)? Here’s one a short walk north:

What about vacancy rates? From Moody’s, May 2025:

The current vacancy rate is a little high, but it doesn’t seem high enough to account for the observed emptiness of the Wall St. area or the terrible performance of Vornado. Covidcrats forced all Americans to learn how to work and collaborate remotely. It seems difficult to believe that a big enterprise would need to pay its support staff to work and live in Manhattan. Perhaps the Masters of the Universe still need to be in a Manhattan office building, but the trend toward moving support functions out to other boroughs, New Jersey, and other states must have been accelerated by everyone becoming proficient with videoconferencing. One would think that a typical company could get by with only half the Manhattan square footage per employee that it had in 2019 because so many people in 2025 would be either working from home or working from an office in Parsippany, NJ.

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