Month: June 2016

I’ve been listening to Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany as an audiobook. The Germans held more than 30,000 American airmen prisoner by the end of World War II, i.e., more men than were enrolled in the U.S. Army Air Forces prior to the war.

According to the author, Donald Miller, just as depicted in Hogan’s Heroes, the Luftwaffe supposedly let the prisoners more or less run everything within the camp except for security. The inmates ran theater, taught each other classes, and manufactured stuff, including escape tools (though towards the end of the water the Germans began killing escapees rather than punishing them for 10 days with solitary confinement). Except for the food and health care, life as a Luftwaffe prisoner was probably better than the life of a U.S. prison industry customer today.

The Geneva Convention was observed to a large extent by the Germans, who hoped to ensure reasonable treatment for their own prisoners by the Allies and also, once they realized that the war was lost, to avoid post-war retribution. The main area where the Germans violated the Geneva Convention, according to the author, was in supplying nutrition. Inmates were supplied with only about 1800 calories per day of rancid vermin-infested food. Had it not been for packages sent from the U.S., delivered through the Red Cross, many prisoners would have gradually starved. Mail was also delivered, though this was not always a blessing. A man wrote to thank a Stateside woman for knitting a sweater that he received. She responded with “I didn’t realize that they would give it to a prisoner. I knitted it for a fighting man.” A man received a letter from his wife: “Dear Harry, I hope you are broad-minded. I just had a baby. He is such a jolly fellow. He is sending you some cigarettes.” There were so many similar letters that each bunkhouse had a wall of photos of former wives and girlfriends who had decided to discard their imprisoned mates via a “Dear John” letter. (Today there is a significant opportunity for financial profit in breaking up with a serving member of the military, but back in the 1940s there were no child support guidelines to determine the profitability of out-of-wedlock children and alimony was generally short-term as the woman who discarded one husband was expected to remarry quickly.)

Bailing out over France or Belgium resulted in a pretty good chance of being returned to England via Spain, with the assistance of a network of friendly civilians known as “the Comet line”. Bailing out over neutral Sweden was also a good option. Though the Swedes theoretically interred the combatants in reality they looked the other way as escapes were made. One real question is why aircrew who had jumped out of a flaming bomber would try to escape a comfortable life in Sweden to return to get back into a B-17. That is true heroism in my book. Bailing out or landing a disabled plane in Switzerland was problematic. The Swiss were theoretically neutral but at least the German-speaking portions were sympathetic to Germany. Luftwaffe planes came and went, but Allied planes were often fired upon, even when plainly disabled, e.g., with flaming engines. Imprisonment in Switzerland, especially following any escape attempt, could be shockingly harsh and filthy.

When bailing out over Germany it turned out that the luckiest break an airman could hope for was to be found by German soldiers. Oftentimes the soldiers would have to threaten civilians with their rifles to prevent Americans from being lynched or stoned to death on the spot. Absent serious wounds, once an airman was in the custody of the German military his troubles were mostly over.

[German civilians had not endured a single battle on German soil during World War I and were genuinely stunned when their cities began to be destroyed. According to the author, Germans regarded British and American bomber crews as “child murderers” who were not entitled to the protections of prisoners of war. This was not a universal sentiment, however, and Allied bombing of German cities was not a misfortune from the perspective of all city-dwellers. The remaining Jewish residents of Dresden, for example, were scheduled to be deported to a concentration camp just a few days after the firestorm that destroyed the city. Many were able to escape due to the chaos that ensued. (Most of the roughly 215,000 pre-War German Jews had already been killed by their Lutheran and Catholic neighbors by 1945, of course, but a handful were still living in various places due to being married to non-Jewish spouses.]

Aside from being shocked at the accuracy of a 1960s TV show, the most shocking part of this portion of the book is the split-personality of both Germans and Americans during World War II. On the one hand it was Total War with no qualms about civilians being targeted. On the other hand, both sides were consulting the Geneva Convention and various other rule books before acting.

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Angelika Graswald (previous posting) is on trial for murdering her fiance in order to pocket the life insurance proceeds. The main evidence against her is stuff that she supposedly said to a police investigator (nytimes; ABC News). Does this make sense? Here’s a woman from Latvia who figured out how to work the U.S. immigration system, marry and divorce twice at a profit, and arrange for life insurance on her fiance. Then, two weeks after the drowning, she calmly gives it all up with a justification of incipient domestic violence? This recent New Yorker story describes the criminal justice system in New York as somewhat less than straightforward (consistent with the lectures on Forensic history that I wrote about in March). On the other hand, the police have at least some of it on video.

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Backroads is a typical company that offers organized bike tours. They charge about $700 per night for their tours and a typical day might have 15-mile, 25-mile, and 40-mile options. There is a van (“sag wagon”) to follow the tourists, fix flats, etc.

I’m wondering if it wouldn’t be cheaper and better to use electric bicycles for these trips. The strongest tourists can bring their own road bikes, suit up in Lycra, and pound out the full 40 miles including any intervening mountains. The rest of the group can enjoy the full ride but at whatever level of electric assist is desired/required. The tour company has to provide more expensive bikes, but at $700 per night that should not be significant and the cost would be offset by running a sag wagon along only one route rather than three. These tours usually include a lunch stop where batteries can be recharged. If there are epic hills to conquer the sag wagon can have extra batteries for hot-swapping.

biketours.com claims that there are e-bike tours out there, but they are listed as “self-guided” (i.e., you can rent an electric bike and do whatever you want). Red E Bike will take you around for three hours.

Thoughts on whether this is the right idea for a multi-day van-supported trip?

Related:

• Why are electric bicycles still so expensive?
• Trek T80+ Electric Bike Review

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The 40th Air Race Classic begins today and should conclude on the 24th. It is limited to basic airplanes, visual flying (VFR), daylight flying, and a prescribed route. Planes are handicapped (sorry, “differently-abled”) based on speed. Teams must be all-female and include at least two pilots. The site, airraceclassic.org, has a “follow the race” link with a live map.

[I’m not sure how a “women’s air race” makes sense in our transgender age. I asked a pilot who has been involved with the race for a few years if I could participate if I identified as a woman. She said that I would be excluded. I asked “You want to promote women in aviation but you’re hostile to the transgendered?”]

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What can a young person planning a career expect to earn as a pilot? Professional Pilot answers this question, at least retrospectively, every year. The 2016 survey is out.

Involvement with turboprops is bad. The manager of a corporate aviation department, responsible for the hiring of pilots, supervising $400,000 engine overhauls, etc., earns on average about $70,000 per year, as does the chief pilot. A captain responsible for the lives of up to 10 passengers clocks in at about $60,000 per year. Being a unionized regional airline turboprop captain can boost this up to $85,000 to $100,000 per year.

Jets in the corporate world result in higher pay. The flight department manager involved with midsize jets will earn about $120,000 per year, supervising a chief pilot at $105,000 per year, captains at $95,000 per year, and first officers at $55,000 per year.

Midsize jet charter pilots earn about 25 percent less and are presumably away from home more than a corporate jet pilot with a home base and executives who want to return to it.

Flying an epic-size corporate jet internationally for a huge company can pay as much as $150,000 per year, but there are a lot of Cessna Citations for every Gulfstream G650.

Regional jet captains harvest union wages of about $90,000 per year, with the right-seat pilot earning $45,000 per year. The real money is in major airlines. A 10th year captain on the smallest aircraft in the fleet ears a base annual salary of $205,000 at Delta, $225,000 at Fedex, and $190,000 at JetBlue. They can work their way up to $281,000 at American and $275,000 at Fedex on the largest jets. These numbers don’t include flying hours beyond 960 per year, per diem rates, and other bonuses that would typically add at least $25,000 per year.

Remember that the airline salaries are tainted by sample bias. Pilots who end up at airlines that don’t grow can upgrade to captain only very slowly. By union rules, pilots who end up at airlines that go bust have to start over as the lowest-seniority first officer at a new airline.

The helicopter world is arguably more fun and typically involves fewer hours in the seat (if only because the helicopter runs out of gas after 2-3 hours!). The corporate flight department managers earn $80-125,000 per year depending on helicopter size while the chief pilots and captains are at $80,000 to $120,000 per year. Cut those numbers by 30 percent in the charter world. Sikorsky (S-76 or S-92) is what you want to fly for maximum earnings, but most of those jobs may be snapped up by military veterans.] Police helicopter pilots can earn over $100,000 per year and they don’t even need an FAA pilot certificate, but typically those jobs are restricted to people who are already police officers. Offshore (oil rig transport) Sikorsky captains can earn just over $100,000 per year. News helicopter flying pays less than corporate: $70,000 per year on average. Medevac helicopter pilots don’t fly much so the per-hour rate is high but the annual salary averages only about $80,000 per year, which is not a great return on the training investment (but perhaps there is a lot of satisfaction from helping people?). The hardest helicopter jobs, in logging and construction, pay less than the easiest (flying executives around in Sikorsky S-76s), about $80,000 per year.

[From this chapter on Massachusetts family law:

“There are a lot of women collecting child support from more than one man,” Nissenbaum noted. “I remember one enterprising young lady who worked as a waitress at Boston’s Logan airport. She targeted three airline pilots, had a child by each of them, and back then was collecting $25,000 in tax-free child support from each pilot. …”

How would the numbers work out today? Assuming that the woman studied airline uniforms and limited her partners to men wearing four stripes, she would be collecting child support from defendants with an earning potential of at least $250,000 per year (attorneys we interviewed said that airline pilots, like deployed members of the U.S. military, are nearly 100-percent guaranteed to lose any custody lawsuit, even if they switch to a 9-5 job, due to the fact that they cannot win under a “historical primary caregiver” standard). Under the Massachusetts child support guidelines she therefore collects $40,000 per year from each pilot and has a tax-free spending power of $120,000 per year for 23 years. It would be typical to obtain court orders for the pilots to pay additional child-related costs such as day care, after-school activities, health insurance, unreimbursed medical expenses, private school tuition, college tuition, etc. Thus she might actually be able to spend $150,000 to $200,000 per year on a household basis. Had she invested $150,000 and four years in college, $100,000 in flight training, spent 25 years living out of a suitcase, and been fortunate enough to work for a successful airline, she would have earned $250,000 pre-tax and been able to spend $160,000 per year after taxes. An important difference is that the waitress/child-support plaintiff could start her earnings at age 18, or younger, while the woman who chooses the pilot career won’t enjoy a comparable spending power until she is 40 or 50 years old. The pilot will also likely be burdened by student loan debt through age 35.]

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I was at Harvard Bookstore the other day and happened upon A is for Activist, a board book for toddlers (video of the author reading). This is a second edition from 2013 and the author seems to have been ahead of his (“her” by now? T is for “trans” according to the book) time. F is for Feminist, but oddly C is not therefore for Child Support nor is L for Litigation. C is in fact for “Co-op” (also “Cats”) and L is for “LGBTQ”.

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When you combine the treacly sentimentality of Facebook with a Hallmark Holiday such as Father’s Day one’s literary expectations must be set low. Nonetheless, I found something interesting in an MIT friend’s feed:

When I was born, sophisticated families fed their babies with formula, instead of nursing. And my father, who was not a control freak by any means, somehow made it his job to prepare my formula each and every day because he trusted no one else to do it, including my mother or our housekeeper. Now I realize that lack of trust might sound a bit mean, but you must understand that my mother never cooked a meal in her life, and was quite willfully perplexed in the kitchen. When my father died, she lost nearly 40 lbs in the following months, because she had no idea how to prepare food. My dad had cooked for her the prior quarter century and was such a good cook, she had no reason to learn.

Anyway, back to when I was an infant, my father insisted on preparing my formula daily, despite his busy schedule. He worked for General Electric at the time, and occasionally would have to fly from Detroit to Schenectady for a multi-day trip. And when he did, he had GE fly him back home every night and out every morning, just so he could prepare my formula. This went on for well over a year. Fortunately, my father was well-liked and highly valued, so he got away with costing his company extra money (sorry shareholders!)–just so he could be a good dad.

[What period of American life are we talking about? She was born in 1961.]

Readers: What’s the best thing that you saw yesterday on Facebook related to Father’s Day? Please cut and paste into the comments!

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“Where More Women Are on Boards, Executive Pay Is Higher” (nytimes) says that public company CEOs can boost their pay (i.e., their stealing from shareholders) by putting women on their boards.

Certainly it seems likely that through a combination of pressure and demographic shifts there will be an increasing percentage of public company board members who identify as women. Should we expect this pay boost for in-house looters to be persistent?

[Separately, like other reports that count up men versus women, I’m not sure how this article makes sense in an age where cisgender-normative prejudice is frowned upon. How can anyone know what the gender composition of a corporate board is given that people might change their gender ID tomorrow morning and/or might have changed it some months ago but without changing names?]

Related:

• Economic Recovery Plan for the U.S. (November 2008 document suggesting shareholder-driven corporate governance)

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“Afghan Lovers Begin an Asylum Odyssey in New York” is about two would-be legal immigrants who are currently in New York City: “Even if they win asylum in the United States, both are illiterate, with little experience living or working beyond the potato fields of their home in Bamian Province.”

The same newspaper runs stories just about every week about excessive income inequality in New York City, i.e., expressing shock that a Goldman Sachs partner earns more than someone who is illiterate.

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Stormy Peters, with whom I have indirectly worked by (slightly) helping KidsOnComputers.org, what may have seemed like an anodyne article on how a woman might be able to attend a tech-related conference without “feeling harassed”. She titled this “Events are not cesspools of harassment.” Publication led to… well, a cesspool of harassment being dumped on Peters’s head by commenters on the article’s page and on Twitter. (I would hesitate to say “female commenters” in our transgender age, but most had names such as Holly, Renee, Sarah and other traditionally female monikers.)

Instead of a craven apology for her ThoughtCrime, Peters followed this up with an ironic summary and analysis of the criticism. Commenters were predictably even more enraged by this one, e.g., Holly Wood’s “I see you’re in a fairly lofty position at your company. Are you a supervisor of some kind? While I know I’m wildly outside your area of expertise, I would not ever consider working for you.”

Peters finally throws up her hands and tells the commenters to, if they have such great ideas, write them up in long form.

[It is curious to me that there are women who like to go to conferences but don’t like working in tech because of harassment and don’t like tech conferences. Why wouldn’t they quit to work in some other field? Or if they are drawn to conferences per se why wouldn’t they go to a dermatology or radiology conference in Boston, have sex with a drunk physician, and then harvest $100,000 per year tax-free for 23 years under the Massachusetts child support guidelines or, if not interested in children, sell the abortion? The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that the median web developer, a typical “tech” job, pays a pre-tax $65,000 per year (occupational outlook handbook). Is that a high enough rate of pay to compensate for all the pain and suffering these commenters say that they are enduring?]

I asked a software engineer who currently identifies as a woman what would happen if a man had written an article with the same text as Stormy Peters’s original. “He would have been fired immediately,” she responded.

[Not very related: I asked a federal government worker what would have happened to him if he had set up a personal email server to use for official business, Hillary Clinton-style. “I would have been fired immediately,” he responded.]

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