Author: philg

When Harvard graduates try to use numbers (Dan Koh, Massachusetts candidate for Congress)

by philg

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:

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.

In case the above tweet is memory-holed:

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Rename Caribbean “The Sea of Obesification”?

by philg

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:

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New favorite Caribbean island: St. Kitts

by philg

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.

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Celebrity Starlink Wi-Fi Internet (3 Mbps at $1,000 per month)

by philg

Ten years ago, I reported on receiving 3 Mbps Internet service while eating six meals per day: Royal Caribbean Voom Internet service review: now you can live and work on a cruise ship.

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).

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Should today’s 18-year-olds avoid liberal arts colleges because such schools are likely to disappear during their careers?

by philg

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.

“What’s Lost When Liberal Arts Schools Close” (New York Times, October 2025):

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 Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia put out a moderately gloomy analysis:

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Are used car prices falling now that immigrants are leaving the U.S.?

by philg

Used car prices went up to insane levels during the Biden-Harris open borders period. The Washington Post reports Brookings calculations that immigrants are now departing:

Are used car prices coming down? “Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index: December 2025 Trends”:

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.

Rents are falling, according to this industry source that takes the landlords’ perspective of higher rents = “improvement”…. “US apartment rents drop in steepest November decline in more than 15 years”:

Related:

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Our neighbor prepares for the college football championship game

by philg

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.

Meanwhile, our county is the world’s largest buyer of Israel’s debt:

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)

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Does the Greenland controversy prove that Donald Trump is a genius?

by philg

Here’s the front page of the Guardian:

All of the folks previously focused on helping Hamas and harming Israel (“Queers for Palestine”) have now turned their attention to an issue that hardly anyone prior to 2017 had ever considered, i.e., whether Denmark should continue to rule Greenland, whether Greenland should be independent, or whether Greenland should become a U.S. territory.

Could it be that Donald Trump is actually a genius?

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MIT IAP courses for 2026

by philg

I wondered if it was continued fallout from coronapanic, but the course offerings for MIT’s January 2026 term (“IAP” for Independent Activities Period, in which both for-credit and more casual courses are traditionally offered) seemed rather thin when I first looked. The deadline for submitting an event was December 1, 2025 and I checked the schedule on November 29. There were still some awesome classes, e.g.,

Here was another one that seemed likely fun/challenging/technical:

Keep an eye on the neighbors?

Want to learn what’s new and interesting in physics? A search on November 29 revealed zero events (see below for how the site populated later):

There were two pages of results for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion:

Let’s look at the first class on Informed Philanthropy: “Students analyze the work of non-profits to address the challenges and opportunities facing MIT’s neighboring communities, with particular focus on community representation, equity, and social justice”. Imagine raising one’s hand towards the end of the class and saying, “Cambridge is critically short of affordable housing and health care. Therefore, in order to advance social justice for those whose ancestors were slaves in the U.S., we should give the $7,000 to ICE so that they can deport all of the undocumented migrants who are living in Cambridge public housing, contributing to long waiting lists to see doctors, and driving up food prices with their SNAP/EBT cards.”

It you were concerned that the recent jihad waged by Rahmanullah Lakanwal might exacerbate the crisis of Islamophobia in the U.S.:

When I searched again on January 14, about 10 physical science events had been added for the month of January. More importantly, since LLMs will soon do all of the physical science research that anyone might want, I found a class on AI!

As in previous IAPs, this conflicts with what will probably be an awesome talk on mechanical watches:

(The same folks are going to run 32 students through a 4-hour session (8 at a time) where they’ll actually take apart and put a watch back together.)

Here’s another AI course that you could do after our FAA Ground School class!

It seems that the MIT IAP tradition has survived, but curiously the more technical or scientific the class the later the date at which it would appear in the online guide. Also, it seems that some classes aren’t listed at all in the IAP guide, e.g., our own class is on a Course 16 web page but not in the larger guide.

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One can mock the righteous, but Google won’t index it

by philg

One of my favorite posts from 11 years ago, Guy with a “Whites Only” sign in his conference room tells others not to discriminate, poked fun at Tim Cook for complaining that people he’d never met in Indiana and Arkansas were racist and might put up a “whites only” sign while simultaneously going to work every day in a white-only environment:

I was trying to find this to add to White people who live in all-white neighborhoods say that Scott Adams was racist and it turned out that Google had elected not to index this page:

(It’s in the Bing index, however, so the problem isn’t a technical one.)

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