Month: January 2016

It turns out that we went 112 years as a republic without a president giving a State of the Union speech (history — which reveals that a remarkable 32 million people tuned into the last one!).

If you don’t like the speech, you’re a racist, at least according to the Wall Street Journal‘s “Obama Is a Man of Political Paradox”:

[Barack Hussein Obama’s] job-approval rating in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in December stood at a mediocre 43%. … Hehas never reached … the levels of unpopularity endured by his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose job-approval rating stood at 34% at this point in his presidency. … Has Mr. Obama always confronted a ceiling in how widely he would be loved or even accepted because he is the nation’s first African-American president?

As the person who identifies as “African-American” is better-liked than the person who was identified as a “privileged white male,” a reader might perhaps be forgiven for erroneously believing that the numbers suggest the opposite. (See also the native-born American explaining to an Asian immigrant our current national mood: “we are so passionate about creating a race-blind society that we will think about and talk about race every minute of every day.”)

Given that the economy is stagnating (see “How Rich Countries Die” and “The Redistribution Recession”) and the main foreign conflicts are also mostly at stalemates (Syria/ISIS generates headlines every day but it is a slow-moving war by historical standards), I’m wondering what historians will pick out as salient about the Obama Presidency.

I’ll go first:

• The beginning of the end of roughly a century of multinational companies being headquartered in the U.S. (see Wikipedia’s history of inversions and “How Tax Inversions Became the Hottest Trend in M&A” (WSJ, August 5, 2014))
• The beginning of a wave of municipal bankruptcies and insolvencies (e.g., Wikipedia Chapter 9 list plus Puerto Rico). These are more a function of economic stagnation (since only Chinese- or Singapore-style per capita GDP growth and/or Nigerian-style population growth could make the promised state/local government worker pensions affordable) than specific presidential action but presidents tend to get remembered for stuff that happened when they were in office.

Readers: What do you think historians will remember about the Obama years?

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I’m listening to The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World in my car. What are your prejudices about people in ancient times? Were they short of stature? Frail? Short-lived? According to the professor, the minimum height to enlist in the Roman Army was 5’10” (they reduced it to 5’8″ when they got desperate for recruits).

How tough were these guys? They could carry close to 100 lbs. on 20-mile, 5-hour marches. If pushed they could march for 30 miles in a day.

How long did they live? They joined the army at roughly the same age as today’s soldiers, around 20 years old with an upper limit of 36. They were entitled to retire with the ancient equivalent of a pension after 25 or 26 years of service (compare to the U.S. military’s 20-year rule).

Obviously these were the taller and tougher men of ancient Rome.

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All of our politicians seem to agree that economic inequality is bad. It seems plain that our government is run by politicians. Why then does the government run the Powerball lottery, with a maximum prize this week of $1.3 billion (as with other government-promulgated numbers, be sure to discount for fraud! The after-tax value of an immediate payout of $806 million would be under $500 million I think)?

By the time this lottery is run, one or more Americans will be crazy rich while most of the rest of us will be slightly poorer (from having purchased losing tickets).

Am I wrong or is this like driving around in a Volkswagen diesel car with a “save the planet” bumper sticker on the back?

Related:

• the lottery winner in Massachusetts family court

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I’ve been working with an instrument student in the helicopter recently. Sometimes we fly an old-school ILS approach into KLWM that is equipped with an outer marker beacon (Wikipedia offers audio and visual examples). Thus she hears a loud tone upon reaching the final approach fix at which point the pilot typically has to do a bunch of things, e.g., decide whether or not to continue based on the latest weather report, start descending, advise ATC of one’s position, check fuel/engine gauges/warning lights, etc.

When we go to newer ILSes or GPS approaches, however, she doesn’t get any reminder that it is time to get serious about flying. If she happens to be looking down at the Garmin GPS receiver she may notice a change in the text displayed but certainly the aircraft, bristling with processors, doesn’t make any real effort to communicate with us. Back in the 1950s they figured out that pilots should be given audio wake-up calls at the final approach fix and also at the missed approach point (don’t see the runway? add power and climb out). Are humans today smarter somehow that these are no longer necessary? The Garmin GPS knows what the final approach fix and missed approach point is on every approach in its database. It is connected to the audio panel already. Why doesn’t it synthesize a voice warning: “Final Approach Fix” or “Missed Approach Point”? Why not at least use what we have in the aircraft to recover what we are losing as marker beacons get decommissioned?

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Goebbels: A Biography shows how much damage can be done by misconceptions regarding economics. The private diaries of Goebbels indicate that the National Socialist leaders of Germany believed that natural resources were the only and/or primary foundation for a nation’s wealth. For people coming of age in the early part of the 20th century, this made sense. Argentina was rich, the United States was rich, Russia was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, England was rich based on natural resources acquired through her empire. The modern examples of resource-poor countries becoming rich via intelligence, education, and hard work did not exist. South Korea and Taiwan did not exist as technology centers. Switzerland was not the industrial leader (and richer per capita than the U.S.) that it is today.

Here are some excerpts from the book showing what German leaders believed regarding how to achieve prosperity:

In the middle of October Goebbels published an article in Das Reich in which, along the same lines as Hitler’s remarks, rather than focusing on ideological differences he commented in a relatively pragmatic way on the “war aims” for which this continuing conflict was being fought: “This time it’s not about throne and altar but about grain and oil, about space for our growing numbers, who cannot live and cannot be fed in the restricted territory in which they have had to stay up until now.”

With the aim of winning the population’s support for the forthcoming military efforts, at the end of May he published an editorial in Das Reich with the title “What’s It All For?” In it, while not outlining actual political war aims, he nevertheless tried to give “the ordinary man” a foretaste of life in a future Greater German Reich. Concerned to persuade his readers of the rosy prospects that lay ahead, he produced a kitsch vision of the postwar world: “We are dreaming of a happy people in a country blossoming with beauty, traversed by wide roads like bands of silver which are also open to the modest car of the ordinary man. Beside them lie pretty villages and well laid-out cities with clean and roomy houses inhabited by large families for whom they provide sufficient space. In the limitless fields of the east yellow corn is waving, enough and more than enough to feed our people and the whole of Europe. Work will once more be a pleasure and it will be marked by a joy in life which will find expression in brilliant parties and contemplative peace.”

On the following day Goebbels took part in a meeting of Reich leaders and Gauleiters at which Hitler made a three-hour speech in order to convince this small group of elite functionaries of his own confidence in victory; the alternative to “total victory” was “total destruction.” The aims of this war, Hitler concluded, were very wide-ranging and would require many more sacrifices; however, these would be justified since the war “would make possible the lives of millions of German children.

The excerpts above also show how wrong politicians can be about the long-term goals of the citizens who elected them. The National Socialists talked about “clean and roomy houses inhabited by large families” and “our growing numbers,” just a few decades before the birthrate among ethnic Germans plummeted.

Related:

• Germany wins World War I… 100 years later

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This article on a new middle school next to our flight school has some interesting numbers. Assuming that it is completed within budget, it will cost “$34 million for the 85,000-square-foot, 310-student middle school.” That’s $400 per square foot and $110,000 per student. The latter number is interesting because our “per-pupil spending” numbers typically don’t include the capital costs of school buildings. If we assume a 30-year life for the building (the article says that the discarded school had a major renovation in 1988), and use a 4% interest rate, that would be a $5,725/year mortgage payment. In other words, if the quoted-to-taxpayers amount of spending is $20,000 per year per student (chart; scroll down to find “Lincoln”), the real number for these middle-schoolers is $25,725.

One thing that would be interesting to study is academic achievement during the period in which students were taught in the “nearby temporary facilities” mentioned in the article. What if it turns out that the particulars of the building have no effect at all on academics?

Related:

• Touring the Mediocrity Factory (meeting with principal of rich suburban public school)

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I asked a divorce litigator what she thought of “The Marriages of Power Couples Reinforce Income Inequality” (a economics professor’s Christmas Eve New York Times article on Americans’ mating decisions):

As it becomes harder for many people to “marry up” as a path for income mobility for themselves or their children, families that are not well connected may feel disengaged, and the significant, family-based advantages for some children may discourage others from even trying.

A study of Denmark by Gustaf Bruze, a researcher at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, showed that about half of the expected financial gain of attending college derived not from better job prospects but from the chance to meet and marry a higher-earning spouse.

The response from the world where street smarts are more important than degrees?

“If you can’t get into a college that graduates investment bankers, you can make just as good money by banging an investment banker, preferably one who is already married.”

(See “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage” for some of the practicalities.)

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A friend is an investment banker helping restructure the ownership and financing of a group of nightclubs. She said that nightclubs own or rent valuable real estate that may be used as few as three nights per week. There is a certain amount of revenue from rental for private events, but that is also mostly in the evenings.

Some of the highest profit margins in the real estate world are at co-working spaces, which may also be characterized as “startup company incubators.” Given the tendency of people to work during the daytime and party at night, why not use the otherwise vacant nightclub real estate during the daytime as a co-working space? Put in some crazy fast WiFi, have a side room where the Aeron chairs can be stashed, and then offer people co-work space at a discount if they’ll agree to vacate by 7 pm.

Where’s the flaw in this idea?

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A friend of a friend is an immigration official in the Netherlands. As measured by departures and re-entries at Schiphol, where do successful asylum-seekers go on vacation? The answer turns out to be that they go, with spouse and children, back to the country in which they were supposedly at risk of violence, imprisonment, and harassment from the government.

[Note that this is not very different from what happened with the Tsarnaev family. They received asylum in the U.S. based on their fear of “deadly persecution” in Russia. But then both parents voluntarily returned to their original home in the Russian province of Dagestan (CNN), leaving four children to be supported by U.S. taxpayers.]

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“Missing U.S. Missile Shows Up in Cuba” is a WSJ article about how the U.S. government mistakenly shipped a Lockheed Martin Hellfire missile to Cuba. What if the shipment wasn’t a mistake? What better way to bankrupt and disable a military opponent than getting them signed up as a customer for Lockheed Martin?

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