A four-hour mental health session for climate anxiety caused by the climate emergency was scheduled for today at MIT:
The emergency.mit.edu web site, yesterday afternoon:
I.e., the folks who needed four hours of therapy because of their anxiety caused by the ongoing climate emergency suffered the cancelation of their therapy due to the climate emergency that had caused their anxiety in the first place. #irony?
I rescheduled my JetBlue flight from yesterday afternoon to Saturday night. Here’s our front yard yesterday as the snow was ramping up throughout Maskachusetts:
A young cowboy named Billy Joe grew restless on the farm A boy filled with wanderlust who really meant no harm He changed his clothes and shined his boots And combed his dark hair down And his mother cried as he walked out
“Don’t take your guns to town, son Leave your guns at home, Bill Don’t take your guns to town”
He laughed and kissed his mom and said, “Your Billy Joe’s a man I can shoot as quick and straight as anybody can But I wouldn’t shoot without a cause, I’d gun nobody down” But she cried again as he rode away
“Don’t take your guns to town, son Leave your guns at home, Bill Don’t take your guns to town”
He sang a song as on he rode, his guns hung at his hips He rode into a cattle town, a smile upon his lips He stopped and walked into a bar and laid his money down But his mother’s words echoed again
“Don’t take your guns to town, son Leave your guns at home, Bill Don’t take your guns to town”
He drank his first strong liquor then to calm his shaking hand And tried to tell himself at last he had become a man A dusty cowpoke at his side began to laugh him down And he heard again his mother’s words
“Don’t take your guns to town, son Leave your guns at home, Bill Don’t take your guns to town”
Filled with rage, then Billy Joe reached for his gun to draw But the stranger drew his gun and fired before he even saw As Billy Joe fell to the floor, the crowd all gathered ’round And wondered at his final words
“Don’t take your guns to town, son Leave your guns at home, Bill Don’t take your guns to town”
Look at this scene of total chaos in Minneapolis from a few days ago:
People are even more upset this weekend because Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents, just as his parents predicted. What confuses me is why there weren’t daily shootings. Pretti, for example, was armed with a gun and perhaps 51 rounds of ammo (3 magazines times 17 bullets; was he planning to shoot 51 people, to have really bad aim, or to be involved in a multi-hour gun battle?). If people on both sides of this unrest are heavily armed and passionate (the “protesters” say that they’re resisting fascism/Hitler 2.0/Gestapo 2.0) shouldn’t we expect multiple deaths from a scene like the one in the above video (at which nobody was killed, as far as I know).
Separately, here’s my idea for de-escalation: Trump renames ICE to “National Immigration and Customs Enforcement”. They’d be known as “NICE” for short. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) would become “Security & Welcome for Entry, Exit & Trade” or “SWEET”. Media headlines would then read “NICE and SWEET visit Minneapolis”. Who could get angry about that?
Related:
“The Subway Vigilante Who Never Left Is Back” (New York Times 2026) might explain Mr. Pretti’s epic supply of ammo. The article describes the shooting of four retired investors living on their respective pensions: “The white man who shot four Black teenagers on a downtown subway in December of 1984 … He was convicted of criminal possession of a gun and served eight months in prison … His only regret, he says, was running out of ammunition.” (Compare to NYT January 1985: “Mr. Cabey was arrested in the Bronx on Oct. 13 on charges that he held up three men with a shotgun and stole an undetermined amount of cash and jewelry. … Mr. Canty, 19, of 1372 Washington Avenue, has been arrested four times since he was 16 years old. … Mr. Allen, who is 19 and also lives in a building at 1372 Washington Avenue, is facing a jail sentence for violating probation. … He was first arrested in 1982 at the age of 16 in the Bronx for attempted assault after being accused of shooting another youth in the hand with a BB gun.”)
Consider Dan Koh, a candidate for U.S. Congress in Maskachusetts, the Smart State (TM). Wokipedia says that he/she/ze/they is a Harvard graduate, has a Harvard MBA, and was a senior official in the Cognitive Excellence Administration:
In 2021, Koh was named Chief of Staff to the United States Secretary of Labor, Marty Walsh. Later, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Cabinet Secretary at the White House. He concluded his service as Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs
Here’s his/her/zir/their own tweet where he/she/ze/they attempts to do some budget arithmetic:
Trump’s spending $30B on 10k more ICE agents. That would:
– Cover all ACA subsidies for a year – End all Rx copays – Eliminate all medical debt.
The first number in the tweet, “$30 billion for 10k more ICE agents”, caught my eye because it is only about one day of spending for our government (federal+state+local). The $30 billion figure turns out to be inaccurate/misleading as well. Brennan Center:
The budget also gives approximately $30 billion over four years to ICE to track down, arrest, and deport immigrants, allowing it to hire 10,000 new officers.
So it’s $7.5 billion per year, not $30 billion per year, and it covers all ICE agents, not just 10,000 new ones.
How far is $7.5 billion from covering the three items that this Harvard graduate imagines it will cover? ChatGPT to the rescue!
Prompt: On a nationwide basis, how much would it cost to – Cover all ACA subsidies for a year – End all Rx copays – Eliminate all medical debt. ?
Answer:
The Harvard MBA is off by a factor of about 30X, according to ChatGPT. The ICE funding, even if it were $30 billion per year, wouldn’t begin to cover just the first item on Koh’s list (ACA subsidies).
What’s interesting to me: (1) that this level of innumeracy isn’t a liability in American politics, and (2) that someone suffering from innumeracy to this degree wouldn’t check tweets with ChatGPT before posting. Let’s keep in mind that this person is a rising star among Democrats and is purportedly qualified to run a company (the Harvard MBA) where misunderestimating costs by 30X could lead to serious financial distress.
The Caribbean Sea is named after the Caribs, a group of people who were nearly all killed by open borders, i.e., by immigration from Europe and Africa (the latter mostly involuntarily).
If we were to rename the body of water after events that occurred in more recent times, what would the appropriate name be? The Caribbean’s initial wealth was all from sugar. When that faded due to technical advances in making table sugar from beets, the islands got by with rum as an export (cane sugar is required as a precursor for traditional rum). Today, the islands thrive on (1) cruise ships that serve six meals per day, and (2) all-inclusive resorts that serve six meals per day. In other words, the islands of the Caribbean prosper by making people all over the world obese.
Since, sadly, nobody remembers the Caribs would it make sense to rename the body of water “The Sea of Obesification” (not the “Sea of Obesity” because there are plenty of obese people in other parts of the world, e.g., those who’ve paid for cruise tickets or resort nights).
As we cruised the Sea of Obesification, Celebrity Ascent offered delicious bread pudding with vanilla sauce at about half the meals:
Here’s the “Cavery” where giant roasts are carved up, as in cave-dwelling times:
(Either this is a misspelling of “carvery” or someone was having fun.)
The ship also had more elegant table-service restaurants with superior presentation, e.g., a Kosher salad:
I don’t think that I gained weight on the trip, as it happens, because I was more active than usual. Certainly there was no excuse not to hit the gym, which offered a magnificent view as well as top-of-the-line equipment:
We recently took a cruise on the Celebrity Ascent to five Caribbean islands: Tortola, Antigua (annoying/aggressive vendors at the pier), Barbados, St. Lucia (nicer than I remember from 35 years ago, but statistically much more dangerous), and St. Kitts (minus Nevis). St. Kitts turned out to be our favorite among the above. Orientation map:
Basseterre:
(Norwegian Epic at left and Marella Discovery nursing her calf at right.)
The drivers tend to be colorful:
Our official Celebrity shore excursion consisted of a 22 people on a 22-passenger minibus whose driver went by “WhatsApp” and doubled as a guide. He showed us around downtown and then took us north towards Brimstone Hill Fortress National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Roughly once per minute he honked the minibus horn, not due to Maskachusetts-style road rage but because we were passing someone he knew. He would add a straight-arm wave that looked a lot like the purported Nazi salute of Elon Musk (neither, in fact, a Nazi salute according to Wikipedia, which requires the palm to be down). With a population for both islands of around 55,000, one is never far from a friend or acquaintance on St. Kitts and Nevis. (Our cheerful driver was never that far from an ex-girlfriend either. He had five children with three different females, each of whom had kicked him to the curb. “I live with my Daddy now,” he said, without apparent disappointment.)
Brimstone Hill Fortress is a great example of the wastefulness of military spending. The British spent 100 years building the fortress and it fell after one month to a French siege. Note that the Kittitians follow the same pricing program for their national park that the hated dictator Donald Trump has imposed for U.S. National Parks, i.e., foreigners must pay a higher rate:
Maybe the British troops were easily defeated because they were always on their phones?
If the guns of the day had been of Iowa-class quality they could have shelled Sint Eustatius (still part of the Netherlands):
Immigration has It’s sobering to think how short-lived the sugar industry was on St. Kitts and similar islands, considering the destruction to native peoples and cultures that resulted from the immigration of Europeans and Africans (involuntary, mostly, for the latter).
The victors get to design and print the stamps:
Our driver explained that as St. Kitts became wealthier, the native-born didn’t want to work in the cane fields. “We imported labor from Trinidad,” he said, “but it turned out not to make economic sense because they remitted most of their wages back home. So we shut down the sugar industry.” (Of course, in the U.S. it makes perfect economic sense to bring in migrants who will remit their wages back to Somalia!)
We eventually worked our way down towards the southern portion of the island, home to a Marriott and a new luxurious Park Hyatt that our driver says is now the best hotel. One can see the Atlantic to the left and the Caribbean to the right.
A few scenes of downtown:
The handset was missing from this old phone booth. If the U.S.-European war over Greenland destroys most of the Earth and all printed and electronic records how would a future archaeologist determine the function of the miniature red house?
What would a basic room at the Park Hyatt cost for January 25-31?
Burdened with kids? A one-bedroom villa is $4,105 per night. I guess the average American will have to keep toiling at his/her/zir/their job to support the Somali day cares rather than enjoy life on St. Kitts during the peak winter season!
St. Kitts also might be a no-go zone for Massachusetts elites. I didn’t see a rainbow flag on any of the churches nor on any house and it’s tough to stay healthy because smoking “essential” marijuana is prohibited at the portside food court.
How much better is cruise ship Internet a decade later if it uses Starlink and brags are using Starlink?
The bad old days of 3.36 Mbps downloads for $18 per device per day are gone. Celebrity was charging about $31 per day for 3.53 Mbps of what they call “Wi-Fi”. Actual Wi-Fi access was free, but it worked only for the Celebrity app and for iMessage.
(Customers using Starlink-based Wi-Fi on United Airlines report download speeds of roughly 400 Mbps and upload of 40 Mbps, i.e., 100X faster download than what Celebrity offers. United’s pricing so far seems to be $0 (free to MileagePlus members, but anyone can join MileagePlus).)
How did it work? WiFi coverage throughout the ship was excellent, but not perfect. A FaceTime call would often get interrupted due to a weak connection, for example. Some of my phone apps barely worked due to, I assume, the sluggish speed. Dropbox, for example, had a lot of trouble syncing photos and was very slow (maybe an hour to upload 50 or 100 images from a day in port) when it did work. A lot of sites and services were painfully slow to load, probably just because 3.5 Mbps was a much better fit for 2016 sites and apps than it is or 2026 sites and apps.
It was fairly easy to bounce a single connection from one device to another.
Let’s look at the economics. Celebrity is charging roughly $1,000 per month. Starlink sells a residential 200 Mbps plan or $80 per month with “unlimited data”. Let’s ignore that the typical customer connects multiple devices to this plan. Starlink’s retail price is 40 cents per month per Mbps of service. Celebrity is charging $283 per month per Mbps of service, a markup of more than 700X or 70,000%.
Note to Elon: Maybe prevent customers from branding an Internet service “Starlink” unless it is provisioned to at least 20 Mbps down and 5 Mbps up. Otherwise, the Starlink brand is being tarnished.
Summary: Celebrity Wi-Fi is good enough for some basic communication, but not good enough that you could live on the ship and do a remote job (Club Med Miches in the Dominican Republic was at 118 Mbps down and 196 Mbps up and we indeed found a French guy who was digital nomad-ing it from Club Med with occasional returns to his base in tax-free Dubai).
Financially struggling liberal arts colleges are probably already extending offers of admission to today’s 18-year-olds. If we leave aside the top 30 schools, would a young person be taking a huge risk by investing four years of his/her/zir/their life at a liberal arts college? Gone are the days when an American worker will spend an entire career at one company. Imagine the graduate of such a school applying for a job at age 50, exactly the age at which employers are believed to discriminate against older workers. It will be 2058. The school that was financially weak in 2026 will have shut down in 2035 and won’t be putting our PR about how great the school is. The hiring manager will therefore likely never have heard of the degree-granting institution on the resume. By contrast, University of ***pick your favorite state*** will always be there so long as there is someone to tax in that state. The hiring manager will have heard of University of AnyState if for no other reason than that university’s sports teams will be on television.
The demise of Wells College has become a familiar story. In the 19th century, pioneers and religious seekers built a constellation of private colleges across the Northeast, South and Midwest. Now these schools are steadily blinking out. The Council of Independent Colleges, a national trade association, had 658 members at the beginning of the fall 2023 semester. Over the next two years, it lost 18 colleges to closure and three to merger, adding to the dozens that had already closed over the previous decade.
Many liberal arts schools closed because they couldn’t recover from the pandemic. Others couldn’t keep up with the arms race for expensive amenities that students have come to expect. And all were early victims of a problem that is about to wash over the entirety of American higher education: not enough applicants.
The year before the 2008 financial crisis, there were 4.3 million babies born in the United States, the highest number in history. Last year, there were only 3.6 million. The birthrate decline that began in 2008 lit an 18-year fuse on a college freshman slump that starts next year. Many highly selective schools are getting more applicants by the year, meaning that the enrollment crisis will continue to burn through mostly small colleges for decades to come.
From a Texas A&M report, which mostly shows that forecasters aren’t very good at forecasting (huge change from 2017 to 2023!):
(I’m not sure how this number can be forecast by anyone, no matter how intelligent. If the president of the U.S. can by executive order either open or close the border then there is no way to predict the number of immigrants and, therefore, no way to predict the number of children of immigrants.)
The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index (MUVVI) rose to 205.5, reflecting a 0.4% increase for wholesale used-vehicle prices (adjusted for mix, mileage, and seasonality) compared to December 2024. The December index is up 0.1% month over month. The long-term average monthly move for December is flat, showing no change from month to month.
Prices actually went up in the past year? Not if you adjust for inflation. Up 0.4% is the new down once you subtract roughly 3% inflation. So the correlation with migration seems to exist, but isn’t 1.
Happy MLK, Jr. Day for those who celebrate, i.e., upper-income white people who work for the government or the biggest most virtuous companies and who therefore get a day off. Black Americans working retail and service jobs will be toiling as usual and at least some Black Americans who work in the college football industry will also be at work.
Our Florida neighbor’s license plate is “UM N1” so we probably don’t have to guess for whom the household will be rooting this evening (I won’t be watching because I need to prepare for our class at MIT):
Speaking of vanity plates, here’s a “stands with Israel” style that you probably couldn’t get in the Queers for Palestine states.
Would Dr. MLK, Jr. be out protesting with the Queers for Palestine if he were alive today? Or would he be a Donald Trump supporter because of the negative effects of low-skill immigration on native-born Black Americans? (it is rare to see a Black American trying to stop ICE from detaining and deporting the undocumented)
