Mamdani also wants Albany lawmakers to increase the amount of state funding the city receives. Hochul has boosted state funding to the city since she took office, according to a spokeswoman for the governor.
The governor and the mayor said earlier this month the state would fund a rollout of free child care for 2-year-olds in the city—another major policy proposal of Mamdani’s campaign.
New York City is wealthier than the rest of New York State. Why would people who say that they’re against inequality want to see money funneled from the Rust Belt cities of Upstate to Manhattan? As a parent myself, I’m a huge supporter of any government program that forces the childless to work extra hours and gives the resulting money earned to Americans who are blessed with and can enjoy children. However, how is it fair for a parent of a 2-year-old in NYC to get free child care while the parent of a 2-year-old in Syracuse or Buffalo gets nothing?
If NYC wants to add services for its residents why wouldn’t NYC fund that with city taxes, e.g., on the Wall Street heroes, owners of skyscrapers, etc.?
(The median income in NYC, of course, isn’t high, but rich people in NYC are stratospherically rich.)
Back in September, I showed a $7 million house in Cambridge, Maskachusetts owned by two guys that was festooned in “Gaza Genocide” messaging. See Harvard Square: Queer Stoners for Palestine.
How did it look more recently, three months after the latest round of fighting between the Gazans and Israelis was settled, signed by the elected representatives of the Gazans (the Islamic Resistance Movement, or “Hamas”) and of the Israelis? Might the owners have, for example, moved on to the battles between progressives and ICE in Minneapolis or to the outrage of Donald Trump taking over Greenland? Apparently not:
How could they ignore the killing of Renée Good? Is it because at the current level of immigration an American who gets killed is replaced within 30 seconds by a legal immigrant? (Renée Good would have been replaced within 10 seconds by a migrant during the Biden-Harris administration.)
Finally, why does their sign read “Israel Kills in Palestina”? I don’t think that’s how the river-to-the-sea nation that some Arabs hope to establish is pronounced in Arabic. The owners are “SEIDMAN, JEROME & STEVEN B. BLOOMFIELD” according to the city property database. These don’t sound like native Spanish speakers who might say “Palestina”.
Verse 1 He walks through Minneapolis before dawn’s release, Breath calm as a prayer in the half-frozen streets. Boots trace a path through the filthy snow, Where the city feels tired but still tries to grow.
Pre-Chorus They sell fear loud on every screen, But he’s learned what quiet courage means.
Chorus He carries 9mm of peace, Sig Sauer held low, Not for the fire, just the things he can’t know. No thirst for the fight, no hunger for war, Just 52 rounds of love, nothing more. Yeah, 9mm of peace, let the sharp edges cease, And 52 rounds of love for a fragile release.
Verse 2 He passes the empty day cares, paint fresh on the wall, Rooms built for laughter that never came at all. No scuffed little sneakers, no drawings in crayon, Just silence that hums where the funding was drawn.
Pre-Chorus Paperwork perfect, the numbers all square, But nobody ever was really there.
Chorus He carries 9mm of peace, steady and sure, Sig steel on his side, but his intent stays pure. No anthem of violence, no glory to chase, Just 52 rounds of love in a hard time and place. Yeah, 9mm of peace, hope under his sleeve, And 52 rounds of love he prays he won’t need.
Bridge He’s seen the signs and the shouting at ICE, He’s heard every argument, wrong and right. Knows anger’s easy, knows blame is cheap, But peace costs more than promises we keep.
Final Chorus Yeah, 9mm of peace, through the cold and the grief, Sig Sauer stays silent while fear finds relief. From the filthy snow to accounts that decease, From the empty day cares built on taxpayer peace. Yeah, 9mm of peace, let the long night decrease, May we all carry forward 9mm of peace.
(Credit to my co-lyricist N. Vidia.)
Loosely related, an audio-video work that could be in an art museum but probably won’t be selected by a curator:
A tale of a political fight in a place without any viewpoint diversity…
While visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts I spent a bit of time with my Harvard Square condo neighbor. In five minutes I learned more about the crimes of Donald Trump than I had in five years talking to Floridians, both Democrat and Republican. More interestingly, she told me about a rift that had opened between her and some like-minded progressive Democrats across the street. They’d all been on the street for over 30 years and now the friendship among these righteous white senior citizens was over.
It seems that two gentlemen would park alongside a fire hydrant across the street from our small condo building and spend a couple of hours smoking “essential” marijuana. They’d laugh and my neighbor would chat with them from time to time. This went on nearly every day for a few weeks. In discussing these happy cannabis consumers, my neighbor referred to them as “Black”, not out of animosity toward noble Black Americans, but simply to provide a description. The progressives across the street called her a “racist” and an argument over virtue scraps ensued from which the 30-year friendship hasn’t recovered.
Here’s what it looks like when you walk out the door of a $1,000/sf apartment… 34 degrees, gray skies (all day), light snow, filthy worn signs, overhead power lines (considered a hideous blight in Florida and unsuitable for a neighborhood occupied by people of means):
“there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.” (page 286)
I thought of this on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2026 in Cambridge, Maskachusetts. My goal was to get photos of elite whites enjoying their fully paid day off from government, university, nonprofit, and Big Tech jobs and juxtapose those with Blacks forced to work. (See Juneteenth: a day off for white members of the laptop class and government workers)
It turned out to be almost impossible to find Black people at work on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day or on any other day in Cambridge. In any business that was independently owned or a franchise, all of the workers were either native-born American whites or migrants from Latin American and Islamic countries. All of my Uber drivers were immigrants. As far as I could tell from a full week of wandering around, the only enterprises that hired Black Americans in customer-facing roles were the largest companies, e.g., Whole Foods and Target. This was in stark contrast to my experience in the same as an MIT undergraduate (Class of 1982). The only immigrants I can remember meeting then were part of a Greek family that ran a restaurant in Central Square, Zorba’s, and returned to Greece on retirement. Native-born Black people often held service jobs of various types, e.g., cashiers in stores.
Here are a few Black workers that I encountered in Central Square:
My Uber drivers were Mohammad, Ayoub, Furkan, Rohit, etc.; never a native-born person of any race. The Silicon Valley righteous behind Uber have decided that “Mohammad” is a nonbinary name (pronoun “they”):
All of this is consistent with “Effects of Immigration on African-American Employment and Incarceration” (2007 paper by some Harvard economists), but I hadn’t fully absorbed the transformative impact of the post-1965 immigration boom on Black Americans prior to last week. The Central Square McDonald’s still had quite a few Black customers, but everyone employed there was Latinx. Most of the Dunkin’ Donuts seemed to have all-Latinx employees. The exception was one with all-Islamic staff:
I’m not sure how to square the above anecdotes and photos with nationwide statistics. The labor force participation rate for Black Americans has fallen since 2000, but not any faster than for whites:
I guess we could infer that Black Americans in Cambridge are working in high-paid office jobs that aren’t customer-facing. But the customer-facing jobs in Harvard Square paid enough to attract reasonably well-educated whites. Maybe Black Americans moved out of Cambridge as they have have moved out of New York City? NYT:
Citywide, white residents now make up about 31 percent of the population, according to census data, Hispanic residents 28 percent and Asian residents nearly 16 percent. While the white population has stayed about the same, the Asian population grew by 34 percent and Hispanic population grew by 7 percent, according to the data.
Chris Olah, one of the programmers at Anthropic behind Claude, expresses surprise that Alex Pretti was shot and killed “for seemingly no reason and with no provocation” in Minneapolis:
I try to not talk about politics. I generally believe the best way I can serve the world is as a non-partisan expert, and my genuine beliefs are quite moderate. So the bar is very high for me to comment.
But recent events – a federal agent killing an ICU nurse for seemingly no…
If a man with a pistol and 52 rounds of ammunition gets into a heated confrontation with five men who are also armed with pistols, is there a significant chance that someone gets shot and killed?
Response:
Yes, there’s a very significant chance someone would be shot and killed in this scenario. When six armed individuals are in a heated confrontation, the risk factors are extremely high: High probability of gunfire: In a tense confrontation with multiple armed people, the likelihood that at least one person fires their weapon is substantial. Fear, adrenaline, perceived threats, and escalating tensions all increase this probability.
Anything different from ChatGPT?
Yes — the chance that someone gets shot (and potentially killed) in that scenario is meaningfully high, even if nobody intends to kill anyone.
Here’s why, in plain terms:
Five armed people vs. one armed person is an unstable situation. More guns usually means more fear, more split-second decisions, more chances for someone to misread a movement and fire.
Heated confrontation + pistols is exactly the recipe for an impulsive escalation: shouting → someone reaches/steps forward → someone draws → others react → shots. …
I remember one of my own close encounters with armed government agents. I landed a small airplane at a hotel in Baja California, Mexico with its own dirt/sand runway (background). Three teenagers holding military rifles came over as I was parking the plane. They spoke no English and I no Spanish. I recognized the potential for a misunderstanding and was glad that I didn’t have a gun of my own. I certainly was careful not to do anything that I thought would have made them nervous. Fortunately, we were able to communicate with smiles. This particular runway had no control tower or any other civilian infrastructure, which meant that a gringo pilot who made the soldiers suspicious, e.g., of drug-related activity, wouldn’t have a bilingual local available to mediate and explain.
Friends have been asking me about the tragic Challenger N10KJ crash in Bangor, Maine on January 25 at 7:44 pm (NBC). I’m not type-rated for the Challenger 650, but I was trained on the Canadair Regional Jet, which is essentially a stretched version of the business jet.
The closest weather that I could find to the accident is the following:
This is at 00:53Z on January 26th, but we subtract five hours for Eastern time so that puts us at 7:53 pm in Bangor.
The weather wasn’t terrible. Wind was from 040 true at 9 knots, which is roughly 56 degrees magnetic. Runway 33 has a magnetic heading of exactly 330 (airnav). So it was almost a perfect crosswind, which is unfavorable, but only 9 knots, which is easily handled even by a general aviation pilot in a slow piston airplane (where 9 knots is a larger fraction of the airspeed).
There was 3/4 miles of visibility or more than a mile down the runway (6000′). It was cold (minus 17C or 1F), which typically means that any snow will be dry and there wasn’t a lot of snow (“-SN” means “light snow”). There was roughly 1100′ of ceiling above the runway. To come back and land on the same runway 33 would require only 200′ of ceiling and 2400′ of visibility (the opposite direction runway required only 1800′; presumably due to superior lighting). (As a general rule, you don’t want to take off unless conditions will permit a return to the airport in the event of a problem, e.g., warning light (jet), or door pops open (old Cirrus). One can still do it with a “takeoff alternate”, i.e., a different reasonably nearby airport with either better weather or a better approach procedure, but that’s perhaps best left to the airlines.)
Part of the ILS 33 approach plate:
Decision altitude is at 363′ and the runway touchdown zone elevation is 163′ above sea level (that’s on a difference part of the chart; the “#363/24” at the bottom is what’s relevant (the # means “only when the lighting system is functional”)).
Jets work only if the aircraft is clean. The Challenger 650 is supposed to rotate at about 140 knots in icing conditions, but this plane was still on the ground at 152 knots:
At a distance of 1760 m past the threshold of runway 33, the aircraft veered right at a ground speed of 152 knots. The airplane flipped over and was partially consumed by a post crash fire.
What could have kept it from flying? Ice or snow on the wings that disrupts the smooth airflow necessary for generating design lift. How can one prevent the accumulation of dry snow? If starting from a cold hangar, the easiest way to be a hero is to do nothing. Dry snow won’t stick to a below-freezing surface so you taxi to the runway threshold, have your terrified junior co-pilot look out the side window to verify that the snow is blowing off during the takeoff roll, and abort the takeoff if the chicken in the right seat says “we don’t have a clean wing!” I actually did this once in a Piper Malibu out of KBED in Maskachusetts with my favorite gynecologist at the controls. We climbed through 20,000′ of clouds and dry snow and broke out on top of the clouds without ever having accumulated a speck of ice on the plane, just as my gynecologist had said we would. We landed about five hours later in Florida. A friend with a lot of round-the-world experience says that this is the preferred technique in Russia. ChatGPT says that you’d be an idiot to attempt it, but Grok says it is okay:
In extremely cold, dry snow conditions like those in the METAR (-17°C with light snow), the snow is typically non-adhering and powdery, meaning it won’t stick to a clean, cold-soaked aircraft surface. Many operators and pilots (including some Part 121 carriers) rely on this property, determining that light dry snow will blow off during the takeoff roll without needing de/anti-icing fluids. This is permissible under the clean aircraft concept (e.g., 14 CFR § 91.527, § 121.629, § 135.227), which prohibits takeoff only if frost, ice, or snow is adhering to critical surfaces—loose, blowing snow that doesn’t adhere does not violate it.
What if the snow isn’t dry, the airplane wing is warm from being in a heated hangar, the airplane wing is warm from above-freezing fuel being pumped in (truck recently filled from underground tanks), or the airplane wing has picked up ice in a descent from a previous leg? (the last two conditions might have applied to this plane because it had just come in from Houston and was making a refueling stop) In that case, the standard approach is to use Type I de-icing fluid to melt/wash the snow and ice off the plane and, if the snow is still falling, apply Type IV de-icing fluid to protect against any additional accumulation of precipitation. (What about Types II and III you may ask? The first rule of De-ice Club is not to ask about Types II and III.)
As the plane rolls down the runway, Type IV fluid magically shears off and leaves behind a perfect wing. This may happen at roughly 120-130 knots so it won’t work for a crummy piston airplane, but the airlines rely on it.
In order to facilitate fluid recycling, de-icing typically happens on a pad that isn’t right at the runway hold short line. How do the pilots know if the plane is still safe to use if they’ve spent some time taxiing from the de-icing location to the runway or, even worse, waiting for other aircraft to depart and land? They’ll have a holdover time table in the cockpit. Here’s an FAA example:
Notice that the holdover time for light snow is as little as 9 minutes in -17C temperatures and only 2 minutes if the snow is “moderate” rather than “light” (who can distinguish between these?). ChatGPT, no matter how hard it is pressed, always says “Type IV still makes sense despite its limitations [and] … is still immeasurably safer than guessing what will or won’t blow off”, but is able to explain how Type IV fluid can kill everyone:
The conclusion from our strict AI overlord:
But the problem with “Type IV within HOT” being “acceptable” is that the holdover time ranges are large and the pilots might get inaccurate information about whether there is “light” vs. “moderate” precipitation (or just guess wrong). Not only that, but the pilots sitting inside the plane can’t know, especially at night, how thorough the de-ice personnel are being with the Type I and Type IV fluids.
How many minutes elapsed between the Type IV fluid application and the takeoff?
The crew communicated with ground ops by radio requesting Type 1 & Type 4 de-ice & anti-ice fluid application. At 19:13 the aircraft taxied to the de-icing pad, where it remained from 19:17 to 19:36. It taxied to runway 33 and commenced the takeoff at 19:44.
The deicing seems to have taken about 20 minutes so we can perhaps guess that Type IV application was begun at 19:26 or 18 minutes prior to takeoff. That’s within the holdover time range from the above chart, 9-30 minutes, but longer than the “you might be in trouble shortest number” of 9 minutes. Bangor has an epic runway (11,440′) so things might have gone better during daylight hours. The pilot monitoring would have had a chance to see that the wing wasn’t clean at 130 knots, for example, and told the pilot flying to abort. They would have had plenty of runway available within which to stop. Perhaps the VIP passengers/owners, headed for France, insisted on lingering in Houston rather than getting out ahead of the storm. If they’d left Houston three hours earlier it wouldn’t have been snowing at all in Bangor:
I like to tell my advanced students “If you’re rich enough to own a jet then you’re rich enough to set your own schedule so that you’re never flying in airline-style weather.” (That said, one great way to become “unrich” is to own a jet…)
It’s too early to say whether icing/de-icing was the cause of the accident, of course. But as of right now it is tough to think of another way that a competent two-pilot crew could have wrecked the airplane. One sad thought is that the plane might have been flyable if the crew had rotated at a higher speed. If the investigation shows that the pilots rotated (pulled the jet off the runway) at the book speed and then, once out of ground effect, the plane wouldn’t fly, it will be sobering to reflect that the plane might have flown just fine if they’d waited for another 15 knots (the most critical surfaces on the plane, such as the leading edges of the wing, are de-iced with hot “bleed air” pulled from the engines’ compressors). With sufficient airspeed, even an inefficient wing will generate quite a bit of lift, which varies as a function of the airspeed squared.
From a friend who operates quite a few jets:
Everything I know about Challengers is that they are terrible in ice. It’s a supercritical wing and any trace contamination will be a huge problem. Unfortunately not all aircraft designs deal well with icing. Some aircraft are better than others and the Challenger 600 is probably the worst I can think of.
Unrelated to the physics and aerodynamics, but there seems to be a sad irony that the plane involved in this spectacular accident was owned by a personal injury law firm, i.e., folks who make their money from spectacular accidents. Arnold & Itkin:
Finally, the crash does show the merits of using big airports. The fire and rescue team reportedly reached the crash site within a minute or so. If you experience an in-flight issue and think that there is any chance of having an accident on landing, therefore, divert to the biggest air carrier airport that you can find and certainly reject any unattended nontowered airport.
Update: audio from various frequencies collected and subtitled. N10KJ crew didn’t hear the conversation between the two airline crews regarding the failure of the Type IV fluid and Allegiant’s decision to return to try de-icing again (about 10 minutes in). ATC moved their conversation to Tower and 10KJ was likely still on Ground. Get-there-itis is powerful, but perhaps hearing that Allegiant’s Type IV fluid had been overwhelmed by blowing snow would have resulted in a decision to abort or at least scrutinize the wings very carefully on the takeoff roll.
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.”)
