MIT is too rich to pay taxes

by philg

Recent email from the president of the Queers for Palestine version of MIT:

The interesting part:

MIT now pays a 1.4% tax on that investment income. The current Senate version of the bill would hike this endowment tax rate to 8%. To give you a sense of scale, for MIT that proposed tax hike is equivalent to our entire annual undergraduate financial aid budget, which provides aid to about 60% of our undergraduates or about 2,600 students every year.

In other words, the university needs the massive endowment to fund “financial aid”. Also, only 8% of the income from the endowment is actually used for financial aid.

Note that what the elite schools call “financial aid” is referred to in Econ 101 as “price discrimination”, in which each consumer is charged the maximum that he/she/ze/they is willing to pay; if the school determines that a family has $X in free cashflow annually the entire $X will be extracted by MIT. From Wokipedia:

Price discrimination (differential pricing, equity pricing, preferential pricing, dual pricing, tiered pricing, and surveillance pricing) is a microeconomic pricing strategy where identical or largely similar goods or services are sold at different prices by the same provider to different buyers based on which market segment they are perceived to be part of. Price discrimination is distinguished from product differentiation by the difference in production cost for the differently priced products involved in the latter strategy. Price discrimination essentially relies on the variation in customers’ willingness to pay and in the elasticity of their demand. For price discrimination to succeed, a seller must have market power, such as a dominant market share, product uniqueness, sole pricing power, etc.

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Air operations for the Texas flood search and rescue

by philg

Here’s the FAA visual flying chart for the area northwest of San Antonio, overlaid with temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) by skyvector.com. Based on the TFRs, it looks as though the base for air operations in the search and rescue is the Kerrville Municipal Airport (KERV), a jet-capable general aviation airport with a flight school and FBO, but no control tower (a common traffic advisory frequency of 122.7 is advertised for pilots to talk to each other). It seems as though there are two main search and rescue areas, one just to the west of the airport and one to the east.

“Terrified Girls, Helicopters and a Harrowing Scene: A Rescuer’s Account at Camp Mystic” (New York Times):

Scott Ruskan, a 26-year-old Coast Guard rescue swimmer based in Corpus Christi, Texas, woke up to banging on his door in the early hours of July 4. There was flooding around San Antonio and he was being deployed, he was told. … Mr. Ruskan and his team took off on a helicopter around 7 a.m. Central on Friday to the camp, near Hunt, Texas. It took them nearly six hours to reach San Antonio because of poor visibility and challenging weather conditions. “A white-knuckle experience,” he said.

It’s only 166 nautical miles from KNGP to KERV so the trip should have been doable in just over an hour with decent weather. (The NYT doesn’t name or credit the pilots.)

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$2449 of e-waste thanks to Microsoft (and best way for kids to organize and sort photos?)

by philg

Here’s my January 11, 2017 order for a Dell laptop computer with OLED screen:

The machine supports Trusted Platform Module 2.0, but the CPU per se isn’t supported by Microsoft for Windows 11. I had hoped to repurpose this machine as a digital photo organizer for the kids, but Windows 10 security updates will end later this year so that’s infeasible.

Is the de-supporting of Windows 10 going to be the largest e-waste event in the history of humanity? What’s Greta Thunberg going to say about this? (Maybe after shouting “Free free Palestine” she would say “Install Linux”?)

This raises a question… what is a good system for kids to use to organize photos taken with a modern camera? My preference is for the organizer to run locally with the photos stored on the laptop’s SSD with a cloud backup (maybe just Microsoft OneDrive if we stay with Windows) rather than sign them up for life to pay huge fees every month for cloud photo storage.

Could ACDSee be the modern answer to what we lost when Google discontinued (and failed to open source) Picasa? Or is the built-in Windows 11 Photos app sufficient? ChatGPT says that MacOS has a better photos app:

Maybe the kids are young enough to master ChromeOS (for skool), MacOS, and eventually Windows? I don’t love the idea of having to learn enough about MacOS to support their efforts, but it does seem that Apple is more serious about this challenge. Windows 11 runs like a pig on my three-year-old laptop, which cost $1700 and has 16 GB of RAM. I can’t figure out if it is Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, or the Microsoft Photos app that is causing the problem (if I do an “End Task” on Photos the machine seems to come out of its sluggish state).

Speaking of avoiding e-waste, Boise, Idaho offers an awesome model for other cities: Reuseum. In addition to classes for kids, they offer refurbished Windows 11 machines at low prices, e.g., these machines that could use more RAM for $80:

Plus if you want to make a sculpture out of old PCs and telephones you can buy them by the pound:

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Texas flood lives could have been saved with a smartphone app that tailored alerts to exact GPS location?

by philg

A year ago, in the context of hurricane evacuation: Why not a simple web site or phone app to determine whether one must evacuate?

In the latest Texas flooding tragedy, it seems that emergency alerts were sent out to mobile phones. As with hurricane warnings, however, it fell to the individual to determine whether the phone’s current location merited going back to sleep or running for higher ground at top speed.

Why can’t it be a computer’s job to intersect the alert with the phone’s location and, ignoring any sleep silence modes, recommend a definitive course of action? (A year ago, I asked “Why is it a human’s job to do something that can be done much more reliably by a computer?”)

The Wall Street Journal says that flash flood warnings went out, but they weren’t specific:

The National Weather Service said that on Thursday morning it briefed emergency management. By 1:18 p.m. it issued a watch that said locally heavy rainfall could cause flash flooding across eight counties, including Kerr, where Camp Mystic, the girls summer camp that was heavily struck by the flooding, is located. Kerr County is dotted with riverside summer camps as well as recreational-vehicle parks and hotels for vacationers. Overnight it would become the most severely impacted county.

At that time, forecasters expected a maximum of 3 to 7 inches of rain.

The first flash-flood warning—which means flooding is imminent or already happening—came at 1:14 a.m. Friday from the National Weather Service office in nearby San Antonio hours ahead of the Guadalupe’s rise.

Two hours later, the office issued a catastrophic warning, or a flash-flood emergency, for the region.

The warning covered “eight counties” and, in fact, the vast majority of people in those eight counties didn’t have anything to fear. Kerr County alone is 1,100 square miles. The typical resident of the U.S. is not a hydrologist. Why isn’t it a computer’s job to figure out whether a phone is currently located in a river’s floodplain and, if so, provide specific directions regarding how to reach higher ground?

Below is an example warning from the National Weather Service’s X account, which seems to require a lot of interpretation, e.g., knowledge of where one’s location is relative to the Guadalupe River. A typical young American doesn’t know north from south (I remember calling a mobile carrier store on Route 9 in the Boston suburbs and asking the clerk if he was on the north or south side of this road, which run east-west. He was completely stumped by the question and, even after seeking assistance from some fellow workers, couldn’t answer it.) Also, the warnings were issued only in English and Spanish. In a country with an asylum-based immigration system there is no reason to expect someone living in the U.S. to speak either English or Spanish. A phone app, however, can work in any language supported by a smartphone (77 for Android; roughly 40 for iPhone).

The official government attitude seems to be to keep doing whatever failed in the past. In a world where almost everyone has a smartphone (taxpayer funded for those who don’t work), the go-to idea is an early 1900s-style siren system (PBS):

Another idea from the same PBS article is that more humans can be a substitute for a computer system:

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Elio Movie Review

by philg

Downtown Boise has quite a few movie theaters and my “escape from the Florida heat” plan featured 100-degree temps so I dragged a somewhat reluctant 10-year-old to see Elio, a movie about a Latinx boy who ascends into the heavens to join the “Communiverse”. Hard SciFi fans will be disappointed to learn that all of the universe’s life forms are able to breathe the same atmosphere and drink the same drink. The bad guy who ultimately is turned into a good guy bears a strong resemblance to Satan in The South Park Movie. Queers for Palestine members will be disappointed to see “Jennifer Jew” in the credits.

All of the good humans in the movie are Latinx and/or Black. The senior military officers are Latinx and female. The military base is Latinx (“Montez Air Force Base” in a city called “Montez”). The big bad bully kid is… white male.

I’m not sure why this movie gets 83 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Star Wars is more interesting in terms of trying to conjure up what an alien society might be like. Elio envisions a universe inhabited entirely by Jar Jar Binks’s spiritual and intellectual cousins (plus a few bad guys who are, in fact, all male (the movie does not seem to envision anything beyond the gender binary).

Separately, here’s a Communiverse F-86 aircraft shared during the Korean War by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. From the Warhawk Air Museum in Nampa, Idaho (not to be confused with NAMBLA):

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Harry’s Plus razor defeats almighty Dorco?

by philg

I succumbed to relentless online advertising and tried out the latest Harry’s Plus razor (see Harry’s Crummy Razors for my opinion regarding the predecessor). Maybe it is the advertised “Progressive Blade Technology”, which the previous Harry’s cartridges lacked, but I think this is better than Dorco, which also means that it is better than Gillette’s finest. Neither Dorco nor Gillette seems to have been working on improvements to their respective products (Gillette owner Procter & Gamble is concentrating on preserving their race-based hiring and other DEI programs rather than on engineering). The “Plus” version of Harry’s seems much smoother and less prone to generating cuts and nicks during the first few shaves.

The blades are “German-engineered” so I guess they are Halal even if likely made in China.

Who else has tried Harry’s Plus?

Related:

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How useful have helicopters been in recovering from the Texas floods?

by philg

The Texas flood tragedy unfolded as I was making my way back to Florida from Idaho so I’m just catching up on the situation. How useful have helicopters been in rescuing people washed away or trapped by rising waters? I found one video of a hoist out of a tree. I think it is an Astar (can’t read the tail number due to the low resolution and what seems to be continuing rain).

I spoke to a friend in Austin and his house, in a neighborhood that is up a steep hill, was fine, but he was out helping a friend an hour northwest of Austin whose house became “a disaster”.

This weather radar loop is frightening:

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Reminder that the National Parks could run at a huge profit

by philg

It’s peak tourist season here in the U.S. Also, Americans are fighting because we want a vastly larger and more powerful government than can be funded with the taxes that we’re willing to pay. Here’s a reminder that our National Parks could be run at a huge profit if we charged the same prices that the Chileans and Navajo charge for similar experiences.

From two years ago… What if our National Parks charged Navajo prices?

We’re still charging less than 1/25th of what the Chileans charge (assume a 15-day vacation for four European visitors who currently buy an $80 annual pass) and stuffing the National Park Service full of $billions in general tax revenue (collected from the working class who already have had to pay for the deferred or forgiven student loans of the gender studies graduates). Americans assume that it is impossible for an entity to turn a profit after receiving, for free, some of the world’s most valuable land. The idea that this entity must be forever propped up by tax revenues collected from those who will never see any of this land is accepted uncritically.

I’m not sure how disturbed I should be by this, but it looks like Donald Trump has been thinking along the same lines. WSJ:

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WSJ: Open borders make the U.S. rich and also Social Security is going broke faster than expected

by philg

Happy Independence Day for those who celebrate our traitorous rebellion against legitimate British rule and a total tax burden of 2 percent of income, not a penny of which the British ever spent outside of North America (the Brits spent a huge amount of treasure defending the white immigrants from Native Americans who objected to being replaced via white immigration).

Since a country is defined primarily by its people, let’s take a look at two perspectives on low-skill immigration today. Both perspectives are from the same newspaper, one from when Joe Biden was still running for reelection on the basis of what the media reported to be his perfectly sharp mind. The second is a recent piece, published during the Trump Dictatorship v2.0.

June 2024, Wall Street Journal:

Immigration Is Behind the Strong U.S. Economy

The U.S. population is aging, and millions of baby boomers retire each year. We can expect that absent immigration, we would have a decreasing working-age population and shrinking employment for decades to come—especially considering the low fertility rate. … immigrants help the economy in a few other ways. First, immigrants are more likely to be of working age than their U.S.-born counterparts, so they can help support American retirees through their labor and taxes. Second, immigrants bring innovation that helps the economy grow.

June 2025, Wall Street Journal:

Social Security’s Potential Insolvency Date Moves Up One Year

With an aging U.S. population and a smaller share of American workers who pay into it, Social Security could become unable to pay full retirement and disability benefits in 2034, one year earlier than reported last year, the program’s trustees said Wednesday. … The report also said that Medicare’s hospital-insurance trust fund would be able to pay 100% of benefits until 2033, three years earlier than projected in last year’s report. At that stage, the fund’s reserves would be depleted and the income going into the program would be able to pay 89% of total scheduled benefits.

We had four years of open borders under the Biden/Harris/WhoeverWasActuallyInCharge administration and at least 10 million migrants who enriched us economically as well as culturally. We had SARS-CoV-2, a virus that killed nearly 1 million over-65 Americans who were, according to #Science, otherwise in perfect health and would have been collecting Social Security and Medicare for 10 additional years. Despite these massive tailwinds, Social Security and Medicare are running out of money faster than expected?

I wonder if this changes the calculation of the optimum time to begin drawing on Social Security. Traditionally, healthy people are told to wait until age 70, three years beyond Full Retirement Age (67 for those born in 1960 or later), in order to maximize the payout. But if benefits are likely to be cut in 2034, it might be smarter for a 67-year-old in 2025 to begin taking Social Security right now.

See also “Immigration does not solve population decline” (Aporia):

The thing is: immigrants age too. This means that while immigration can definitely reverse population decline, it can’t do much for population aging. Assuming immigrant age-structure and fertility remain constant, the difference in the working-age share of the population in 2060 between zero net migration and 2019 levels of migration in the United States is… 2% (57% vs 59%).

The good news for those who believe that working age migrants will solve all of our fiscal problems: “Kilmar Abrego Garcia brought back to US, appears in court on charges of smuggling migrants” (ABC). Also “Ohio man hid horrific role in 1994 Rwanda genocide to enter US, arrested after years on the run: DOJ” (New York Post). Imagine the taxes that Vincent Nzigiyimfura, admitted to the U.S. at age 49 and currently aged 65, will be paying after he serves the 30 years in prison that our wise government overlords are currently attempt to impose on him.

Loosely related, residents of Westfield, Maskachusetts who appear to have a personal stake in Social Security benefit levels hold a whites-only “No Kings” protest:

Also, it is never appropriate to conduct a fiscal analysis when considering immigration. If you’re not a hater you have to support open borders. Sticker on a mailbox outside a coffee shop in Boise, Idaho, yesterday:

Love has no borders.

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What’s in the latest 870-page spending bill passed by Congress?

by philg

I think that I found the full text of the One Big Beautiful Bill recently passed by Congress, but I can’t figure out what is in it. Has anyone here dived into this Tolstoy-scale document? I assume that whatever we read about this in the media is a lie. For example, we’ve been told that the bill cuts taxes so I assume that tax rates will either be the same or maybe increased, at least via inflation (every year with inflation means more fictitious capital gains taxes are owed and also more taxpayers ensnared by the Obamacare NIIT). We’ve been told that the bill cuts Medicaid so I assume that Medicaid spending will increase and that the eligibility expansion during Coronpanic will be maintained at least for another year or two (at which time the expansion can be extended by another act of Congress; I refuse to believe that an expanded welfare state can ever be shrunk because Americans who get accustomed to free stuff are going to be forever dependent on that free stuff).

One area where I’m confused relates to the Medicaid fight. The states that want to put everyone on Medicaid, e.g., California, are richer than average. These same states have a majority of their population agreeing with the idea that inequality is bad. Why wouldn’t they therefore be delighted to use state funds to keep everyone and his/her/zir/their brother on Medicaid? Even more confusing, California says that it is “cruel” for Trump and the Republicans to “cut” Medicaid (meaning that spending actually increases but not as much as hoped/dreamed?) while also cutting Medicaid spending at the state level. Medicaid cuts bad when Republicans do it (X, June 27, 2025):

Medicaid cuts good when California Democrats do it (nytimes, same exact day):

Health care is a human right, but only if federal taxpayers are covering it? It is not a right if Californians have to fund it with their own money?

Another recent fun news item from California, in which Democrats eliminate environmental protections established by Ronald Reagan (nytimes):

As governor, Ronald Reagan, a Republican, signed the environmental act into law in 1970 at a time when his party was much more aligned with environmental protections than it is today. It reflected a consensus among the state’s leaders over the need to protect a vast array of wildlife and natural resources — forests, mountains and coastline — from being spoiled by rising smog, polluted waterways, congestion and suburban sprawl.

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