Author: philg

Is the smartest response to the Jason Arday tragedy to eliminate academic research departments of sociology and education?

by philg

Prof. Dr. Jason Atta Kwei Arday, Ph.D. was a “sociology of education” scholar. His work, despite generating awe at Cambridge University, failed to impress ChatGPT. What would happen if both sociology and education were eliminated as academic research departments and, instead, the questions being asked were bounced into economics (and maybe a few to anthropology)? Would the world then suffer for lack of interesting or useful research results? ChatGPT estimated that Professor Arday was certainly a better researcher than at least 30% of the people in education/sociology and possibly better than 50% (i.e., as many as half of the people getting paid to do research in this area are even less competent).

Can anyone think of a PhD thesis or journal paper from sociology or education that has had significant impact and that wouldn’t have fit reasonably well within economics or, perhaps, anthropology?

(This is not to suggest that the “Doctor of Education” professional education programs, such as what Prof. Dr. Jill Biden, EdD went through, should be eliminated. I don’t know enough to say whether these EdD programs make better school principals and other education bureaucrats.)

How much less would future generations earn if degrees in education were no longer offered because the faculty had all been cut loose? The chart below says that young people earn $18,000 less over a 10-year horizon if they get a degree in education vs. simply do the work that a median high-school graduate would do:

(“Social Sciences” that aren’t economics get a boost in earnings, so perhaps a sociology degree actually does have cash value? Wikipedia lists a huge number of majors that could fall under this umbrella, including degrees that prepare young people for lucrative DEI management jobs. This 2015 study found that sociology graduates had among the lowest earnings of any social science majors. We also have to consider the selection bias of those who choose to attend college and those who have the stick-to-itiveness to finish a degree. That population would probably do quite well economically if they never attended college, but simply started working at 18. That same issue cuts through all of the studies, I think. An 18-year-old who had what it takes to get into college and complete a CS degree could probably also do great via self-study and practical experience as a programmer.)

Let’s check in with the world’s leading sociologists and see if we’d be sorry if they were cut loose. Here’s Joya Misra, professor at University of Maskachusetts and head of the prestigious American Sociological Association, which publishes the leading journal in the field (ASR), giving a presidential address:

She emphasizes how feminist and decolonial methods that bring sociological researchers into collaborative and participatory partnerships with broader communities can develop transformative solutions, building communities of hope, justice, and joy.

She appears to cite Hater-in-Chief Ron DeSantis!

at this time of rising authoritarianism, attacks on academic freedom, and loss of trust in science, sociology must recenter itself … DeSantis 2024

The implication that sociology is a form of “science” is interesting, but even more interesting is that the cited article is about Ron DeSantis, but isn’t by Ron DeSantis. It’s by Gary DeSantis, adjunct teacher at State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota in the tennis training capital of Bradenton, Florida. Here’s the abstract of “‘We believe in education, not indoctrination’: Governor Ron DeSantis, critical race theory, and anti-intellectualism in Florida” by the other Mr. DeSantis:

This article examines how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ remarks contribute to anti-intellectualism and fuel the pushback against critical race theory (CRT) championed by like-minded conservative Republicans who view its instruction as an affront to society and authentic historical narratives. Dismissing educators and scholars who uphold the teaching of CRT as unpatriotic and denigrating to American society, DeSantis, who has presidential aspirations, has effectively used the issue (along with a number of other matters) to solidify his conservative base fearful of social and hegemonic change. Although CRT is not taught in Florida public schools, similar to other conservative-dominated states which have seized on the teaching of CRT as anathema to their civic principles, DeSantis’ thinly veiled attempt to appease right-wing voters is yet another example of Republicans stoking cultural wars designed to energize conservative constituents against what many of them perceive as liberal attacks on their beliefs and values.

Circling back to Joya Misra, in her address she mentions the problem of “overinclusion”, which does not mean hiring the incompetent/below-average because of personal characteristics:

In one article, we focus on the experiences of faculty of color, considering how faculty in the twenty-first century, in an era of DEI, still experience substantial exclusion and exploitation in their jobs (Misra, Kane-Lee, et al. 2024). We theorized three different processes. First, we conceptualized overinclusion: how faculty of color are asked to do more work, and work that is devalued in promotions, such as mentoring and service—leaving them less time for more valued activities, such as research, as well as less choice about what they would like to do

The second process we identified is active exclusion. Research on faculty of color has identified this issue for decades … Active exclusion explains why highly qualified people are not offered jobs, not offered good jobs, receive fewer resources for their work, or face greater challenges being promoted.

Prof. Misra’s personal work:

We have to do the work to identify inequalities before we can identify more equitable approaches. But I worry that we too often stop at identifying the disjunctures, the inequalities, and the brokenness of our world

The world is “broken” when someone like her can get a lifetime taxpayer-funded job?

As a feminist and as a methodologist, I suggest we build on participatory action and community-engaged methods to envision a different, more community-focused discipline … As such, I adopt an epistemological approach to knowledge production that builds on feminist and decolonial methodologies, even as it is at odds with some traditional approaches to empirical research. Feminists have long called for epistemological approaches that undo the divide between expert and participant

Building on this work allows us to link U.S. sociology to sociological traditions from other parts of the world, where the relationship between academia and activism looks different.

There’s a bit of hope in western Maskachusetts:

In the town of Amherst, where I live, we are working on a plan for reparations (Lord et al. 2023). How can we possibly make reparations for the centuries of enslavement, displacement, discrimination, death, and the constant grind of anti-Black racism? … So far, the town has pledged only two million dollars to the reparations fund and has yet to fully fund that two million … I am endlessly infuriated with the town for not doing more. And yet, what is the alternative? Not to work toward reparations?

Maybe there’s some social media output for Prof. Dr. Joya Misra, Ph.D.? A quick search revealed that she was far too virtuous to have an account on X. She posted on Facebook in support of what the Supreme Court found to be racism that violated the 14th amendment:

She was proud to have been injected with the Sacrament of Fauci:

What about on Blue Sky, the natural home for conventional-minded progressives? Joya Misra does have an account!

(When the candidate for whom the majority of people vote is elected, that’s the end of democracy.)

She re-skies (?) a blue (?) exhorting the righteous to #resist:

Considering all of the above, and remembering that this is perhaps the best sociologist in the United States (elected by peers to head their organization), would it be a net loss to the average citizen if all departments of sociology were shut down and the taxpayer funds redirected to economics, literature, engineering, and actual science?

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Bad news for the Florida Beach Season: there is no beach (NYT)

by philg

Americans in the Northeast are making plans to come down to Florida this winter, either 183 days (the “skip on state taxes” plan) or just a shorter break from misery. They might want to consider this New York Times article from 31 years ago, “Scientists Say Earth’s Warming Could Set Off Wide Disruptions” (September 18, 1995):

A continuing rise in average global sea level, which is likely to amount to more than a foot and a half by the year 2100. This, say the scientists, would inundate parts of many heavily populated river deltas and the cities on them, making them uninhabitable, and would destroy many beaches around the world. At the most likely rate of rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years. They are already disappearing at an average of 2 to 3 feet a year.

The NYT’s “experts” were sort of right. It did become impossible to go to a lot of East Coast beaches in 2020, but that was because Science made it illegal (#StayHomeSaveLives), not because the beach had physically disappeared.

Maskachusetts COVID-19 Order No. 22, issued 25 years after the NYT article predicted beach closure:

How has Florida’s shoreline changed over time? Here’s Catesby’s map from circa 1729:

Compare to today (Google Earth):

Loosely related, but I had to mention this in case it jinxes us with a repeat of Hurricane Andrew (1992; Category 5 landfall, 25-mile-wide swath of destruction south of Miami), “The Atlantic Just Broke a 60-Year Record” (ScienceAlert):

September 12th became the furthest into the year we have ever gone without a hurricane in the Atlantic basin since the advent of modern satellite tracking in 1966 – by a day.

“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” explains António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

“The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up.”

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25th anniversary of “Islam is Peace” (and photos from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum)

by philg

Twenty-five years ago, a fatwa from the great scholar of Islam, Ayatollah George W. Bush:

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace.

A video version:

There is no evidence of W. ever having read the Koran in Arabic nor having studied the Hadiths, but he is standing by his fatwa 25 years later (Fox).

Some photos from an August 2025 visit to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum…

The footprints of the destroyed buildings are preserved as memorials, surrounded by the names of those killed, starting with the 1993 parking garage jihad.

The museum is nearly all underground:

The museum has a lot of touch screens:

A cornerstone plaque was preserved, dedicated to the thousands of legacy Americans who constructed the World Trade Center:

Generally speaking, the destruction and deaths that occurred at the site are attributed to motive-free “terrorists” with no relationship to any religion. Example:

A drawing from Alexandra, age 3, whose father was killed in the not-related-to-Islam attacks:

The remains of Ladder Company 3’s truck were preserved:

All 11 members of Ladder Company 3 were in the North Tower when it collapsed and all were killed.

One fight that New Yorkers will apparently never give up on is the struggle against SARS-CoV-2. More than five years after coronapanic began, the “one person per bench” rule still applies:

The gift shop reminds us that most of the heroes of 9/11 were female:

Some were Canine-Americans:

We are reminded that “Love is Stronger than Hate”:

A last look at a tower foundation:

A few steps away, it’s back to the average New York City streetscape:

Related:

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Why not fight inequality in corporate profitability?

by philg

I hope that everyone is getting ready for International Equal Pay Day, coming up on the 18th. Americans fight (thank God!) inequality in individual earnings with the world’s most progressive tax system. Why not also fight inequality at the corporate level?

Nvidia’s recent quarterly report:

(The company is so forward-thinking that they’re already in 2027 while us peasants are stuck in 2026.)

Net income was almost $60 billion and an even-more-eye-popping 62% of revenue. For every dollar in sales, the company enjoys 62 cents in profit. The typical S&P 500 company earns about 15% in what the NYT tells us is an economy that has been destroyed by Donald Trump (the 10-year average is 11%).

(I want to pause here and take credit for my investment acumen. My standard line was that Nvidia’s profit margin couldn’t stay at 30%, despite the goodness of CUDA, because people who were big users of GPU would find better price/performance chips and recompile their software to run on those competitor GPUs. These latest quarterly results certainly prove my prediction correct because the profit margin did not stay at 30% (it moved to 62%). “Follow me for more investment advice.”)

Federal corporate income tax isn’t based on profitability, but is a flat 21% (Nvidia actually pays closer to 16.5% due to some money being earned in countries with lower tax rates, credits for research, etc.).

Bernie Sanders informs us that nobody needs to own more than 3 houses. The analogy for a corporation would be that no company needs to earn more than a 25% profit margin and, therefore, the corporate income tax rate should go up closer to 100% on the chunk of a company’s earnings that are more than 25%.

Speaking of Bernie and Nvidia, TIME’s 100 AI “innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence” does not include any current or former employees of Nvidia (sorry, Jensen Huang, Bill Dally, and the rest of the merry band identified in Even companies worth $1 trillion don’t want to pay Nvidia’s prices). Bernie Sanders, however, is featured as one of the top 100:

Perhaps this is because Senator Sanders was the first author of the 2017 paper that kicked off the modern LLM:

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AI in Africa fueled by what would have been tax dollars (Bill Gates as Upgraded-with-LLM White Savior)

by philg

Let’s check in on what would have been our tax dollars (capital gains tax on appreciated Microsoft stock) if not for our wise policy of allowing rich douches to deduct unlimited amounts for “charity” (not to be confused with “vanity”!)… “Gates Foundation Pledges $1 Billion to Combat A.I. Inequality” (New York Times, today):

The foundation’s annual Goalkeepers report, released on Monday, advocated an urgent effort to ensure that A.I. “helps narrow gaps between the richest and poorest rather than widening them.”

The foundation said that it would divide the new funding among external groups working on its priorities, spanning work like encouraging A.I. use among doctors, farmers and teachers, or developing data sets in more languages.

Last month, Mr. Gates warned that A.I. would spread across the economy, possibly causing job losses across the economy and leaving little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. The biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft, are racing to help corporate customers adopt A.I., and have said it could replace many workers.

The visionary was telling Americans to bulk up on low-skill immigrants just a year before Google kicked off the LLM revolution by publishing its transformer architecture (BBC 2016):

The billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has told the BBC that the United States “should set a better example” by taking in more refugees.

Mr Gates said his home country “had the capacity” to follow the examples of Germany and Sweden, who were “to be congratulated” for welcoming migrants.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Gates added that governments were dealing with “tight budgets”. However, he emphasised that the issue was largely a political one, and that “the total number of refugees is not a world record”.

The statement about “tight budgets” is confusing. We’re informed that low-skill migrants make a society richer. If true, why is a government budget a limiting factor? Separately, how has Germany done economically and culturally since 2016 thanks to its virtuous refugee policy? The refugees of 2016 are now fully established in the German labor market. With unprecedented levels of low-skill immigrant residents, Germany should thus be experiencing an unprecedented economic boom. The Wikipedia page titled “German economic crisis (2022–present)” says “[Germany] became the worst-performing major economy globally in 2023” (attributed to “slowing immigration to Germany” because, of course, the fix when open borders doesn’t work is more-open borders).

How about Sweden? With government at 50% of GDP, the country was roughly evenly balanced between those who benefit from a larger government and those who are harmed by an expansion of government, welfare, etc. (The U.S. percentage of GDP devoted to government is similar if we include nominally “private” (but heavily regulated) health care.) In a recent narrowly-decided election, the balance was tipped to the “expand the government and keep the borders open” party by immigrant voters (about 13% of those eligible; source; see also this X post).

Was Gates’s 2016 statement due to the crisp mountain air at Davos? No.

the U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I’d say treatment of immigrants is one of the greatest injustices done in our government’s name. (Bill Gates, quoted in Rolling Stone 2014)

Why do Africans need a snow white savior and 7 dwarf NGOs to tell them how to use ChatGPT? Is this new Gates Foundation program an example of epistemic injustice? (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.”) Here’s a still frame from Bill Gates’s video:

ChatGPT says that it is in the Wolof language, spoken in “Senegal and also in The Gambia and Mauritania”. ChatGPT adds “I can usually read, translate, summarize, and explain Wolof documents, especially standard written Wolof.” So the video example of how AI doesn’t work for African languages is provided in a language that the most familiar AI understands well enough to translate.

(ChatGPT identifies the photo as likely from Saloum, Senegal and can give some history: “religiously motivated Muslim violence and coercive Islamization occurred in Saloum, especially during Maba Diakhou Bâ’s jihad of the 1860s”; it was a peaceful jihad according to George W. Bush that resulted in Muslims becoming 97 percent of the population in Senegal (state.gov))

Readers: since you’ll have to pick up the slack and pay the taxes that Bill Gates skipped on via his foundation, what do you think of this program? If Gates Foundation employees aren’t going to work at a company training and/or running an LLM how are they going to have a significant effect on what AI can do for the Africans that the Gates Foundation purports to understand? Unless they think that Africans are stupid, wouldn’t it make more sense just to give $1 billion to Africans and let them spend it on whatever they believe that they need? Even if having trained do-gooders spend money rather than letting the purported beneficiaries choose, is the local language idea a good one? A lot of people get motivated to learn widely-spoken languages because proficiency will enable them to play a desired videogame or watch and understand a movie (estimate of at least 200 million English learners for video gaming in 2020). Imagine the motivation for someone in Senegal to learn French or English if that were the only way to take advantage of AI (which, of course, it currently isn’t since ChatGPT actually does understand Wolof and 80 percent of Senegal’s adults already have smartphones).

Finally, if AI is unsafe, which Bill Gates says it is, why would working to make an unsafe technology more widespread in Africa, or anywhere else, be a noble endeavor?

A related classic from the pre-AI era… “For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!” (Der Spiegel):

The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor. Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program.

… believe me, Africa existed before you Europeans came along. And we didn’t do all that poorly either.

Loosely related, my latest way of responding to anyone in academia who expresses an interest in AI safety, AI regulation (now that Trump is anti-regulation, all of my academic friends are very keen on government-imposed restrictions), etc.:

I do feel unsafe. Current models are close to PhD-level intelligence. At some point in 2027, they’re expected to achieve the intelligence of a human who decided not to enter a PhD program.

Not very related, my X response to a New York Times article about the horror of Sydney Sweeney being shown to the general public:

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Trying to make sense of 9/11, a few days later

by philg

The front page of the New York Times, exactly 25 years ago:

Some excerpts, not in quote style for readability (modern correction: the Langley-based F-16s arrived in D.C. closer to 22 minutes after the Pentagon impact):

The forces or ideas that transformed Mr. Atta are not clear. What is clear, however, is that two years ago his habits began to change. He requested a prayer room at the university for himself and 20 other Arab students. He grew a beard. He listed himself at the university under a different family name, el-Amirals.

Mr. Atta, who was registered in Germany as a native of the United Arab Emirates but appears on other documents as an Egyptian, was for most of his years in Germany an apparently secular man. Then ”something changed in him,” said one of his teachers, Alptekin Ozdemir, a Turk who has lectured at the university for 15 years and helps advise the foreign students there. Perhaps 40 to 50 of them are Arabs, out of a student body of 3,600.

Rescue workers in lower Manhattan carried body bags from piles of wreckage to refrigerated trucks. One worker said he had found the remains of people strapped into what seemed to be airplane seats. Another reported finding the body of a flight attendant, her hands bound.

But despite elaborate plans that link civilian and military efforts to control the nation’s airspace in defense of the country, and despite two other jetliners’ having already hit the World Trade Center in New York, the fighter planes that scrambled into protective orbits around Washington did not arrive until 15 minutes after Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.

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Migrants whose TPS status has expired can stay and work for 10+ years via the asylum process

by philg

The New York Times today says that Key West wouldn’t have any tourists if not for Haitian migrants. Somalis built Boston and Minneapolis and Haitians created Florida tourism. “Haitian Workers Keep Key West Tourism Afloat. Now They’re Disappearing.”:

The Haitian hotel housekeepers, restaurant cooks and Uber drivers who quietly help power Key West’s tourism economy are disappearing.

Some have been detained by Border Patrol agents since late July, when the Trump administration ended a legal protection that had allowed 330,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States.

There is “violence and instability” in Haiti, but we can import 100% of Haitians and the same people won’t create any violence or instability here:

It’s a situation familiar to communities across Florida; the state has the nation’s largest Haitian population, including tens of thousands who have lost the legal safeguard known as Temporary Protected Status, which the United States had granted them because of the violence and instability in their home country.

(the violence and instability are features of the terrain, not something in any way related to the people who inhabit the terrain)

The New York Times constantly reminds us that workers should be paid more (they’re “underpaid”). But in the context of making sure that we max out on immigrants, it is also bad if workers in the U.S. get paid more:

When Mayor Sam Kaufman visited Hispanic-owned restaurants last month, owners shared stories of line cooks, busboys and delivery drivers, some with valid work permits, getting detained and deported. Those who remained were being crushed with extra work, with some owners delivering food themselves.

Mr. Kaufman noted that Key West was too far from the mainland to bus in workers.

“The price of labor is going to shoot up,” he said. “There is going to be real competition to retain the work force.”

Or will the supply of workers be reduced? Here’s the most interesting part of the article:

One such person, a 41-year-old father of two, said he had fled gang violence in Haiti for Brazil, before joining relatives in Key West in 2022. The man, who did not want his name used for fear of attracting immigration authorities, works at a supermarket deli, earning $19 an hour.

He lost T.P.S. in July. He is still able to work because of a pending asylum claim, but that offers little guarantee against immigration detention. Inside their tiny trailer home, he and his wife anxiously monitor WhatsApp for immigration enforcement updates last month as they care for their young children.

Asylum is a 10-year bureaucratic process, at least (see Will any Salvadorans in the U.S. go home to El Salvador today?). So by saying “I request asylum” this guy should be able to get W-2 work until his anchor babies (multiple “young children”) are old enough to sponsor him for a green card under family unification (a U.S. citizen adult has the automatic right to bring parents here).

At what rate are migrants being detained by ICE? The NYT article says that 5,000 Haitians live in Key West and that 30 were detained in August. (I don’t think this 5,000 number counts children since they’re “American”, not “Haitian”, via the magic of birthright citizenship.)

Related, a web page regarding the La Concha, built by Haitians in 1925-6 as the first luxury hotel in Key West.

See also the Overseas Railroad Wikipedia page, regarding the railroad that prominent Haitian Henry Flagler opened in 1912 and that opened Key West to mass tourism.

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Getting rich off the Tesla Cybercab with disclaimer magnets/clings

by philg

Menlo Park, California, Labor Day Weekend:

Suppose that a Democrat wants to take a ride in a new Tesla Cybercab, coming soon to a city near you? He/she/ze/they wouldn’t want to be seen in the vehicle without a disclaimer on the back. How about selling temporary magnets and vinyl cling signs? Here are some ideas for the wording, but maybe readers will have better ones…

  • Democrat on board
  • I support autonomous driving, not autonomous trillionaires
  • I hate Elon Musk
  • I needed a ride. I didn’t join a cult.
  • Robotaxi passenger — not a Tesla customer
  • I did not choose the CEO
  • Vehicle’s politics do not reflect those of its passenger
  • (for the older rider) I booked this before I remembered who owns Tesla
  • Temporarily occupied by a registered Democrat
  • I am using this vehicle under protest
  • I have serious concerns about the owner of this company
  • This is transportation, not complicity (#FreePalestine)
  • I am participating in this ride ironically
  • NPR tote bag in the trunk

Figure $15 per magnet/sticker. A majority of Americans are Democrats. Tesla hopes to address the entire market. Each Democrat might need three stickers/magnets per year (some will fall off; the messages will lose their novelty). We can’t get money from babies, but the U.S. population is at least 343 million (nobody knows the true number because nobody knows how many migrants live among us). The total addressable market, therefore, should be approximately 150 million times $45 per year = $6.75 billion per year for Signs of Righteousness LLC. Does anyone see a flaw in this business plan?

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Preparing for the Age of AI with Prof. Uju Anya at Carnegie-Mellon at $93,614 per year

by philg

Large Language Models (“AI”) are transforming our world. How is Carnegie-Mellon’s linguistics department preparing students to contribute to the Age of AI? Professor Uju Anya has been in the news lately. Example:

On Sept. 8, [2022, as Queen Elizabeth II was on her deathbed] Anya tweeted from her personal account, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving and raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”

(Note that use of the phrase “chief monarch” shows an inability to use the English language. There are no non-chief monarchs. Wokipedia: “The word monarch comes from the ancient Greek words monos (meaning “alone”) and arkhein (meaning “to rule”).” Also, is it fair to characterize the UK in 2022 as an “empire”? “Small Islamic island nation,” perhaps? If we are looking back to the 19th century and want to paint the former empire in a better light we could say “Ender of the Arab and African slave trades that began circa 700 AD (Arab) and BCE (African).”)

As with What does Syracuse University teach for $100,000 per year?, nobody asks what students at CMU, each of whom theoretically pays $93,614 per year for the privilege, are learning from Prof. Uju Anya. (Let’s also not forget the taxpayers, who contribute in the form of subsidized student loans (sometimes entirely forgiven!), tuition grants, research grants, tax exemptions for the university’s endowment, and tax deductions given to donors (that increase the burden on other taxpayers).) She’s the author of Racialized Identities in Second Language Learning: Speaking Blackness in Brazil.

What if Anthropic isn’t hiring anyone for their Speaking Blackness in Brazil group? Prof. Anya teaches “Hip Hop and Funk Discourses of Black Womanhood in Brazil and the U.S.” (all course materials hidden behind a paywall to exclude those who don’t pay $93,614 per year to CMU). That would prepare a CMU graduate to work in the Black Womanhood in Brazil department at OpenAI.

More work by this professor whom the CMU administrators were wise enough to hire in 2021 (four years after Google’s “Attention is All You Need” transformer paper kicked off the machine learning/ChatGPT revolution) and subsequently wise enough to agree to pay every week until she dies (“tenure”; the lifetime paycheck drawn from the students paying $93,614 per year and from the taxpayers (“the chumps”)):

Her Instagram seems to have been locked down recently:

(Note that the “lesbian” is given priority over the “mom” role. Would that work for a cisgender heterosexual man? List sex habits before “father”?)

Google indexed her tenure announcement from two years ago, but it can no longer be viewed:

Finally, ChatGPT found that if you’re a federal taxpayer (“a chump”) you kicked in $180,000 via the U.S. Department of Education for “An HSI-HBCU collaboration to create open access Spanish language curricula celebrating Blackness in Latin America (P017A230050)”, from which Uju Anya was paid.

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Tesla Y Avis rental experience

by philg

Here’s a report on driving a 2022 Tesla Y around Northern California. The car, built in Dec 2022, was delivered to me at SFO by Avis with over 71,000 miles on the odometer. My range anxiety began at the airport. The fully charged machine was predicted to go only 186 miles before bricking itself. No problem, I thought. My friends in Napa are Righteous and will have a charger for anything that can reverse Climate Change (TM). The car sported error messages regarding climate control (because of #ClimateChange since 2022?) and rear tire wear:

The rear tires had at least some tread left and I wasn’t planning to use Dog Mode so these messages didn’t worry me too much. The car was pre-tuned to the Bollywood FM radio station. Just remember that it’s not a “replacement”:

I made it to Piedmont, California without incident:

A house next door to my cousin’s reminds Native Americans that America was “Built by Immigrants.” (Or maybe not, actually, since it is extremely rare to see anyone non-white in Piedmont.)

One great thing about the Tesla software/camera systems is that the machine is smart about when to cancel a turn signal, e.g., after a lane-change is complete. Sadly, though, the vehicle still lacks CarPlay and its Google Maps-based navigation display is nowhere near as driver-friendly as Google Maps. It doesn’t show stop signs or traffic lights along one’s route, for example, and, therefore, it is impossible to see that one should turn right at the second light. All navigation cues are essentially distance-based, despite the fact that “second light” is a lot easier for a human to gauge than “0.2 miles”.

Maybe it was the glass roof or maybe it was the climate system fault that I had been warned about, but the climate control system in the 2022 Tesla Y was dramatically inferior to what we’re accustomed to in our luxurious Honda Odyssey, a 2017 design. Even when the outside temp is in the 70s, the interior surfaces, such as the seats, will be broiling hot. The AC takes around 20 minutes to cool it down and the climate system seems to lack an awareness of whether it is sunny or dark outside. If sunny, a temp setting of 65-67 degrees is necessary for comfort. At night, though, the same setting will result in the interior becoming too cold. (By contrast, our Odyssey cools down from a 90-degree Florida parking experience in about 5 minutes and we just leave it on “72 Auto” independent of the insolation. ChatGPT says that the latest Teslas have improved rejection of solar heat through the glass and also “15 percent” better cooling.)

On arrival in Napa at a worrisome 25% charge level, I discovered that Avis had either not provided me with the J1772 adapter to a “standard” charger or it was in the glove box, out of which I was locked without a required PIN code. It’s apparently too complex to have rental customers be authorized in the Tesla app and, therefore, everyone who rents from Avis is a valet and uses the valet key (which, at least in the plastic case supplied by Avis, scratches up the side of the driver’s door pillar). Did my friends in Napa have the correct hardware for charging an Elon Musk-designed Tesla? Here’s their entryway and living room:

(Yes they are white Boomers and no they aren’t paying any property tax (owned the same place for about 45 years so they pay tax on the 1980 value).)

They had an electric car charger, of course, but only for their Nazi-free Chevrolet Bolt, which uses the J1772 “national standard” that, in fact, is no longer a standard because everyone is adopting Tesla’s connector. I hit a Supercharger on the way out of Napa, though, and it worked seamlessly (just plug it in and they bill Avis and, presumably, Avis will eventually hit me with 55 cents/kWh plus an absurd markup). That said, how much time do you want to spend at a Circle K?

My second Supercharging was at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. Tesla tells you how to get there, but not that the Supercharger is on the second floor of the parking structure. There’s a slow “destination charger” bank on the ground floor. Once upstairs, I discovered that a white Model Y is the new black Model T:

Locking and unlocking was always a painful process, especially if one needed more than the driver-side door open. This wouldn’t have been as serious an issue, I’m sure, if Tesla were to engineer a Honda-style key fob intended for renters who are fully, but temporarily, authorized to use the car.

Despite the epic hassles of charging, I’m not sure that a gas-powered car would have been dramatically less expensive for fuel. Unleaded regular was over $6 per gallon ($3.90 in Florida during the same week, says AAA):

Would I want to own this vehicle for manual driving? No. Our Honda Odyssey is two years older and has almost as many miles on it and is a superior machine overall. Were the deficits relative to the Honda tolerable if the Tesla would drive itself competently? Yes.

Wishlist (of stuff that hasn’t already been fixed in 2025 update of the Y):

  • real switches for basic adjustments, such as mirrors
  • gauges behind the steering wheel, as seen in every other modern car
  • adopt CarPlay or at least show traffic lights and stop signs on the navigation map
  • make the glass roof optional; I never got any value out of it while sitting in the driver’s seat and it is an absurdly bad idea for the Sun Belt
  • a new name for the car with the next rev of the design (it’s confusing if an obsolete jalopy can be rented out by Avis and called by the same name as a nice new redesigned car); how about “Tesla Le Tigre”? (optional Derek Zoolander decals and/or tiger stripes)

An engineer friend with a 2003(!) BMW M5 as his daily driver sat in the Tesla and played with the switches on the steering wheel and pronounced them to be “garbage”. It makes sense that Tesla would cheap out on everything for its current models/pricing, but why not have a “super premium” version where they put in BMW-/Mercedes-grade switches, a screen behind the steering wheel, etc.?

Separately, shout-out to California for allowing people to set up Short-Term License Plate Accounts when driving rental cars through various toll gates. Toll-by-plate charges then go, for a specified time period, directly to one’s credit card rather than taking months to get through Hertz or Avis with various markups applied.

(Traffic was mostly terrible, incidentally, though not if one stayed within Menlo Park/Palo Alto and avoided commuting hours (8-10 am and 4-7 pm on weekdays?).)

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