Author: philg

New York City: new land acknowledgments and reminders that white women behave poorly in public

by philg

A report on an August trip to New York City. My favorite sign was one in the subway, officially reminding customers that it is white women who are typically the most poorly behaved group of humans. Why won’t these Speakerphone Americans use headphones?

Also new, I think, are the land acknowledgements near Central Park regarding Seneca Village, a settlement of “approximately 225 people” who were Black. Examples from the Public Theater and from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

This is kind of confusing. We must acknowledge Native Americans, who were dispossessed usually without any compensation, and condemn the dispossessors (white people). In the case of some of the land that is now Central Park, apparently there were dispossessors who happened to be Black. Unlike white dispossessors, the Black dispossessors are virtuous and must be acknowledged. (According to Wikipedia, the Black property owners of Seneca Village were paid market value for their land because it was acquired by eminent domain.)

Who else must be acknowledged? Those behind the “Latinx Freedom Movement” in the 1960s (they were Latinx ahead of their time and the term “Latinx”?). The billionaires who created today’s Hudson Yards remind us that capitalism is the root cause of inequality (humans were equal prior to the advent of this evil system, which, unfortunately is still practiced in Palm Beach County where one of the above-mentioned billionaires fled).

More of the exhibit, which reminds us that the reason we have immigrants is not due to an open border+cradle-to-grave welfare state, but rather because of U.S. military intervention in Guatemala, Cuba, an dthe Dominican Republic. (Our military interventions in India also explain the large number of Indians now living in the U.S.?)

Speaking of Hudson Yards, “The Vessel in NYC’s Hudson Yards reopens with safety netting 3 years after spate of suicides.” (CNN, 2024; the Chinese can build thousands of miles of high-speed rail or several new NYC-sized cities in 3 years, but Americans need 3 years to install some ugly nets?)

Don’t forget to mask when outdoors on the adjacent High Line:

It is safe to unmask when inhaling healing marijuana, however, which is available on nearly every block. LA Olympics ambassador Snoop Dogg has his own brand of weed, apparently, and smoking cannabis all day is “safe and legal”:

I’m too stoned now (just from looking at the above images) to continue writing, so I’ll post a follow-up with the rest of the photos…

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New York Times tells employers how to boost profits (hire only women)

by philg

“Gloria Steinem, Personification of the Women’s Movement, Dies at 92” (New York Times, today):

Here’s the part of the news story, professionally edited and fact-checked, that interested me:

Women still earn less than men for the same work (81 cents for every dollar made by a man, according to the 2024 census).

Much of the NYT is devoted to decrying corporate greed, workers who are “underpaid”, and capitalism’s tendency to exploit workers. In this article, however, we are told about corporate altruism and a class of workers who are overpaid by about 25 percent (every man who has a job is paid, on average, 25 percent more than a woman who would do “the same work”).

It’s also a little interesting that someone who died childless is the “personification” of a movement for a class of people (“women”) previously associated with having children (“becoming pregnant people” in modern parlance).

Some other media coverage… AP uses the term “potent” to describe someone who died childless:

Nancy Pelosi talks about a “trailblazer” (followed by no children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren of her own) and future generations in the context of someone who had no genetic role in any future generation:

If white feminists had limited or no fertility we can ask the question of who are the future generations to whom white feminists passed down their intellectual legacy? Observant Muslims in hijabs (Rahmanullah Lakanwal‘s wife and five children, for example)? Latinx who follow Catholicism? Will these future generations want to continue down the “trail” purportedly “blazed” by Gloria Steinem and fellow white gals?

  • “White feminism is a term which is used to describe expressions of feminism which are perceived as focusing on white women while failing to address the existence of distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking other privileges.” (Wikipedia)
  • “Feminists and the Clinton Question” (Gloria Steinem in the NYT, 1998), pointing out that a woman might have accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment in order to make money: “If any of the other women had tried to sell their stories to a celebrity tell-all book publisher, as Ms. Willey did, you might be even more skeptical about their motives. But with her, you think, ”Well, she needs the money.””
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Whitney Biennial 2026

by philg

The Whitney Museum’s Biennial is still on display, sort of. It “offers a space for contemplating the shifting currents of art in the United States, asking not only what is being made but also what it means to name something “American” at all.”

The approach to the museum exhorts us to “Free Palestine” while eating Halal food:

Once inside, there is some awesome non-political art:

Sign for the above:

New Yorkers who don’t get enough of the “river to the sea liberation” message from their mayor and the assorted public gatherings can sit for 32 minutes and contemplate the displacement of Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian” (I didn’t stay for the whole 32 minutes, but I have a feeling that the Arab rejection of the United Nations partition of the British territory and subsequent Arab declaration of war on the Jews wasn’t mentioned as a possible explanation for displacement; we are reminded that the Arabs who invaded the Levant during the Muslim Conquests are “indigenous”):

I’m not sure that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) would approve of the restroom signage:

If the restroom sign is haram, the mask compliance of visitors was halal:

The staff also wore masks:

Returning to the question of signage, what if an Ivy League graduate artist went around NYC removing (“stealing”, haters might say) signs that had been fabricated and mounted, at tremendous union labor expense, by office building owners? (Could the Whitney be prosecuted for receiving stolen property?) David L. Johnson says that the signs are overly restrictive, e.g., “no defecating”, but what if someone tried to do that in his living room or studio?

The smartest artist was able to get into the exhibition by applying a square of black tape to the wall:

Another way to get into the exhibit was to put a bunny suit on a doll:

If you had always been curious about “parallels between the discrimination of Okinawans and Black Americans”…

Who can infer the gas price? Is it less than $1 per gallon in this 1986 photo?

Speaking of combusting gasoline into CO2, the exhibit allows us to learn about “environmental collapse”:

(If the artist doesn’t want to be in a filthy degraded environment why does she choose to live in Philadelphia?)

If you’re behind on your rereading of Malcolm X:

And then it was time for coffee… 2SLGBTQQIA+ welcome, but no Canine-Americans:

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Recognition of Art by Women (Norton Museum in West Palm Beach)

by philg

The Recognition of Art by Women: In Retrospect show at the Norton Museum in West Palm Beach closes on September 27 so there is still time to plan a somewhat unfashionably-early-in-the-season trip to Palm Beach County (via DJT!).

Official description:

Recognition of Art by Women series began at the Norton in 2011 in an effort to recognize and promote living women artists through solo exhibitions, addressing the persistent inequity in exhibiting and acquiring art by women.

I can’t figure out how this is legal under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which purportedly guarantees “equal protection” to women vs. artists of other gender IDs. The Norton Museum is heavily funded by taxpayers, sometimes directly from local, state, and federal government and sometimes indirectly via tax deductions taken by donors (such as Ken Griffin, a refugee from the collapse of public order in Chicago/Illinois). Given that about half of the money is coming from taxpayers, could they host an art show limited to white male cisgender heterosexual artists, for example? If not, how are they allowed to host a show in which art can be selected only from artists identifying as “women”?

How bad has the historical discrimination been against women that the museum needs to redress the imbalance with this limited-to-one-gender-ID program? “Of the Norton’s 10 directors, nearly half have been women.” The first director was named “Mary”. The “women-only” series was initiated, 15 years ago, by a director named “Hope”.

The most recently featured artist, Danielle McKinney, paints pictures of Black women not working, which the curators say is “radical”.

(There is some support for this in BLS data; Black women are more likely to work than white women, while the reverse is true for Black men. Non-Black men are more likely to work than any of the foregoing.)

One of the radical acts:

A previously featured artist, María Berrío, does some interesting work:

The sculpture garden features a work by Louise Nevelson, who objected to being pigeonholed (“I’m not a feminist. I’m an artist who happens to be a woman”).

Also an interior Nevelson (I love her work so much! Maybe this one would be easier to steal):

How about some kid art? Here’s a painting by a local public school kid:

And one from the private school for nerds started by Jeff Greene, a billionaire refugee from NYC:

Here are some folks who probably should have used Kodachrome. Check out the color fading on these Polaroids:

(Imagine a camera technology so that even Walker Evans seems incompetent.)

Exit through the gift shop… (these photos were taken in June, admittedly)

Stop at Costco on the way home for some low-priced steak:

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Is the economic/stock market boom from Artificial General Intelligence already behind us because the advent of AGI is already behind us?

by philg

A PhD physicist friend on Facebook:

The reason I’m all-in on AI investment, and there may not be a top to this “bubble”: Unlike tulips, railroads, or internet connectivity, there is no upper bound on the value of intelligence.

Me:

30-year TIPS yield is 3% real currently. So your perspective isn’t shared by the market. Investors wouldn’t lend money to the federal government at 3% (after inflation) if they thought there was no limit to NVIDIA’s value. If investors overall thought that there was a low-risk way of making super high real returns over the next 30 years they the government would have to pay 8% real, for example, if buying an AI index was expected to yield 12% real for the next 30 years.

I think AGI is already here from the perspective of most users of ChatGPT and similar. A generally intelligent human isn’t great at everything and makes mistakes… just like ChatGPT! People ask ChatGPT all kinds of questions and give the answers at least the same weight that they would give to an answer from a typical human. In that sense, ChatGPT has passed a Turing Test for general intelligence. Maybe Advanced Superintelligence is already here. The typical human is not good at mathematics. A math professor could have been described as “super intelligent” before WWII. LLMs are supposedly doing all kinds of advanced work in mathematics right now, even if they might fail at a plumbing task. The math professor in 1935 who was a failure at plumbing would still have been considered superintelligent, right?

In other words, we can’t expect hockey stick growth for the economy due to AGI/ASI arriving because the current growth is already an example of what an economy does with the gift of AGI and ASI (but maybe not robotics!).

Will the $40 trillion in federal debt be a drag on economic growth? Scott Bessent says “no”:

Let’s use a 20-year time horizon for the U.S. to potentially get out of Argentina territory (150% debt-to-GDP max; we’re at over 125% right now). For US debt to GDP to fall to the level of a high IQ society (e.g., Taiwan, which has lower-than-US tax rates and debt of about 20% of GDP), GDP growth would need to be 10%/year real for 20 years with Congress not borrowing any more money (the latter condition seems unlikely to be met, since Congress now borrows even in the most robust economies, contrary to Keynes). Investors plaintly don’t believe that this will happen because they’re willing to lend to the Feds at 2.75% real (20-year TIPS current price) and they wouldn’t do that if investing money in domestic stocks would generate a roughly 12% real annual return (real GDP growth plus 2% as a return on investment from corporate earnings).

Does this mean that we’re in an AI bubble? Not necessarily. Only that AI by itself apparently doesn’t hugely lift the overall U.S. economy (a huge part of which is government spending/welfare state!). We’ve got about 1.5% per capita real GDP growth right now. Maybe that includes the AI lift? This NBER paper by a Nobelist (sort of) predicts minimal per capita growth, but cites estimates as high as 3.4 percent per year as the boost (nowhere close to the 10% we’d need to get out debt down to Taiwan’s relative level):

(He cites McKinsey, the giant brains behind Enron!)

The only way to make $40 trillion in debt insignificant, therefore, would be to grow the U.S. population to about 1 billion humans at roughly the same level of skill/income as the current U.S. population. Until Donald Trump showed up (again!), our wise politicians were working on this, but they forgot to apply and skills test for immigrants.

(In case this blog post is going to be a source for an NPR or PBS story (example), let’s not forget that both Turing and Bessent were/are members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community.)

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What does Syracuse University teach for $100,000 per year?

by philg

“Why Syracuse Can’t Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills” (WSJ) covers the financial slide at this Rust Belt school pretty well, but doesn’t dig into the product. Let’s pick a few professors at Syracuse and see what a $100,000/year customer might learn from they/them.

Scholar-activist, Professor Kishi Animashaun Ducre:

“The Black feminist spatial imagination and an intersectional environmental justice”, “Katrina as Postscript to Racialized Spaces in Louisiana.”, and “Addressing Environmental and Food Justice toward Dismantling the School-to-Prison Pipeline: Poisoning and Imprisoning Youth”

Professor PJ DiPietro (she/they, her/them, hers/their):

engages decolonial thinking, hemispheric Latinx studies, and critical theories of race, gender, transgender, and sexuality

“The Coloniality of Gender”; “Trans of Color is an Oxymoron. Humans, nonHuman Animals, and the Bodies Beneath Animals”; “Co-Creating Transdisciplinary Decolonial Curricula”; “Hallucinating Knowing: (Extra)Ordinary Consciousness, more-than-human Perception, and other Decolonizing Remedios within Latina and Xicana Feminist and Queer Theories”

Here’s a department that acknowledges that the university is on stolen land, which it refuses to give back and won’t pay rent on:

What they promise students will be able to do after forking over $400,0000 and four years away from the AI Klondike:

Integrate feminist and queer theory and practice to challenge social relations, representations, knowledges, institutions, and policies.
Model feminist and queer competencies of collaborative learning that embrace cooperation and mutual aid.

From Professor Eunjung Kim, a member of this department:

Kim, E. (2010). How Much Sex Is Healthy? The Pleasures of Asexuality.

Kim, E. (2024). Asexual Kinship: Capitalism, Reproduction, and an Imperiality of Asexuality.

(At least 14 years of studying people not having sex.)

Update: I posted this on X and so far (a day later) it is up to 434,000+ views. One X comment, “This is scary! If true.”, inspired me to visit the Syracuse.edu web site again. This time, I picked the Syracuse School of Education and then picked the first faculty member from an alphabetical list: Professor Barbara Applebaum. She has a “research focus” of “critical whiteness studies; epistemic injustice; feminist philosophy” (Wikipedia: “Epistemic injustice occurs when an individual or group is wronged in their “capacity as a knower”, meaning that their ability to produce knowledge is called into question.”) Prof. Applebaum teaches a full semester course on “Critical Whiteness”:

Her book Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy promises to “help white students understand and acknowledge their white complicity”. Some Amazon reader review excerpts:

Included are Applebaum’s ideas on how to indoctrinate others to accept this insane ideology that seeks to, at its core, tear down society and “liberate the oppressed” into the Communist utopia that awaits if they could only be “woke” enough to see it! Utter garbage. Stay away.

I am using this work as a foundation of my dissertation. I really don’t know where I would be without this important piece of work.

Whatever ones personal views may be it is a disgrace that Syracuse University would employ this author as a academic professor. This book deposits ideas that are simple anecdotal opinions based of off no scientific data and tries through the use of word salad to push them off as facts deliberately attempting to manipulate data to deceive its intended audience knowing full well that the audience it is targeting does not have a sophisticated understanding of statistical analysis or historical awareness. … [the book] no business in a place of higher education and the author should seek psychological intervention for her racist presuppositions and destructive methods of solutions to her paranoid delusions.

This book helped me understand that most white people aren’t ignorant, but just have a different kind of knowledge that’s based on ignoring racism. And that this is a very active thing that they do (even if it’s unconscious).

It might be a challenge figuring out how to adapt this work to improve the pedagogy in an aeronautical engineering class…

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AI hotel room rates ($4,312 per night plus tax)

by philg

I’m headed out to the San Francisco area. Who wants to meet up? Maybe Labor Day morning in Menlo Park or Palo Alto?

In looking for a hotel, Google Maps included this place in Menlo Park, California, rated 4.7 stars:

What if we add taxes?

It’s $14,970 for three nights in the cheapest available room at the Rosewood Sand Hill, which might sound expensive until you consider that it includes “Complimentary wireless internet access”.

(I rented someone’s guest house in Woodside, just a few minutes north of this hotel, in 1982 after graduating from MIT and starting work at Hewlett-Packard Research Labs. If memory serves, I was paying less than $300/month ($10 per night rather than $5,000).)

What if you bring two kids and want each to have his/her/zir/their own bedroom? That will be $54,410 including tax:

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Avoiding the Mamdani Caliphate’s pied-à-terre tax with a child in college

by philg

A friend in Wall Street, but not quite on Wall Street told me about a potential way around Ayatollah Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax. The typical rich douche who is rich enough to have a NYC place as his or her 3rd home is also rich enough to have reproduced successfully (unlike the American working class; see below for how they’re being bred out of existence). If the douche owner has a child in college or grad/professional school, the child can declare the fancy apartment as his/her/zir/their primary residence so long as he/she/ze/they comes “home” during breaks. At that point, no tax is owed because an immediate family member is living in the place. The law says “For purposes of this article, the phrase “immediate family member” means a spouse, child, sibling, parent, grandparent, or grandchild.”

Separately, a recent photo from Manhattan that includes a mixture of haram and halal outfits for females:

(ChatGPT says that American Muslims wouldn’t vote to outlaw these shameless un-Islamic displays of female flesh because “The evidence from actual Muslim political organizations in the U.S. points much more toward protecting Muslims’ own religious practices than toward imposing Islamic dress rules on everyone else” and then admits “What American Muslim organizations advocate while Muslims are a small minority tells us something about their current priorities, but it does not reliably tell us what the same constituency would advocate if it controlled legislatures. … I would expect some political pressure around the margins. It might take forms such as stricter school dress codes, sex-segregated recreation, modest uniforms, objections to sexually explicit advertising, accommodation of gender segregation, or pressure on municipal facilities.” ChatGPT cited a Pew survey in which a majority of Muslim women said that they themselves wear hijab in public.)

Incidentally, the sourdough bagels (Apollo Bagels) for which people were waiting in line (30+ minutes) didn’t seem as good as what we get in the local strip mall from Bagel Boyz. I’m sure that they were made perfectly, but not sure that sourdough is the answer for bagels. Measured by traditional criteria, a Dunkin bagel might actually be better than the best sourdough bagel! (Did I wait in line behind the haram blonde? No! This was place was right next to my hotel so I popped in at 2 pm when there was no line.)

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Minivan news for the 2027 model year (TL;DR: time to buy a Tesla Y L)

by philg

There were no improvements in minivans from Honda, Toyota, Chrysler, or Kia for 2026 (see Minivan news for the 2026 model year). What did the legacy automakers do with the additional year of engineering time? There are no improvements in minivans for the 2027 model year either! Honda’s driver assistance tech on the Odyssey, for example, is the same as it was in 2017 (for the 2018 model year). The only change for Honda is a $400 price increase. Car and Driver says that “the [Toyota] Sienna carries over into 2027 unchanged” (this is the only manufacturer from whom we might have to wait until October to get official news; maybe there will be some tech improvement over what was introduced in 2020).

Chrysler killed the plug-in hybrid version of the Pacific and tweaked the styling (for people like us who buy minivans for maximum style/prestige!).

So… it is time to buy the Tesla Y L. Car and Driver:

A dynamic difference we can comment on is the Y L’s new suspension. The Y L uses the Y Premium’s single-valve adaptive damping with a specific tune for the L’s larger chassis that prioritizes comfort without permitting unnecessary body roll in corners. There’s even a passenger-comfort setting that attempts to absorb more impacts for those in the rear seats. Anyone who has ever bounced around in the back of a Tesla Uber will appreciate the idea of a softer rear-seat ride. The Model Y’s excessively firm ride has long been a sticking point at C/D, and the Y L addresses it in a way that doesn’t compromise the car’s handling strengths.

I guess we won’t be able to get one until March? It would be absurd to have an AWD version in Florida (the last snowstorm in Palm Beach County was on January 19, 1977 and deposited 1/4 inch). Dragging around a second motor that compromises the range makes no sense. (The extra acceleration from from the dual motor version isn’t interesting either given that the RWD Model Y can do 0-60 in roughly the same amount of time as our Odyssey, which is overpowered for America’s traffic-choked roads.) A friend in Maskachusetts ordered the Launch edition as a replacement for his Lucid Air due to that machine’s lack of FSD and, of course, he will be able to take advantage of AWD if Climate Change doesn’t progress faster than expected by the expert consensus. When he ordered the machine, a couple of weeks after the launch of the Launch, he was told that it would be delivered in September or October. This was later updated to perhaps as late as December.

I don’t think the Y L will win any beauty contests, but maybe it isn’t dramatically uglier than the Y? It’s 7-9 inches shorter than today’s minivans.

(source)

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Fact-checking at the New England Journal of Medicine

by philg

From “Jason Arday and the Perils of Being Black in Academia” (New England Journal of Medicine, August 20, 2026):

Jason Arday had the distinction of being the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. … Black academics know that we will always be held to a different standard … Prof. Claudine Gay was hounded by accusations of plagiarism and ousted by Harvard, who bent to those who simply could not stomach a world where a Black woman was president of such a storied institution.

As pointed out in Plagiarist Claudine Gay getting paid $3.1 million/year after “resigning” from Harvard, anyone with access to ChatGPT and/or Google could determine within less than one minute that Claudine Gay was still on the Harvard payroll (not “ousted”) and with a little more diligence, determine that she was being paid a higher-than-average wage.

If the NEJM didn’t fact-check this article what else aren’t they fact-checking?

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