Author: philg

How was the immigration of José Antonio Ibarra supposed to make the average American better off?

by philg

Let’s take a moment to remember Laken Riley. In a closed-border world she would in all likelihood be getting ready to enter the nursing profession, ideally here in Florida where population growth means that we’re always short of healthcare providers. Instead, she is gone, her murderer welcomed into the U.S. by the Biden-Harris administration in 2022.

Suppose that José Antonio Ibarra hadn’t killed Laken Riley or committed any other violent crimes. What was there in his educational or employment background that the U.S. needed? We are informed that diversity is our strength and that every immigrant enriches us culturally and economically. What was there about José Antonio Ibarra that made us want to welcome him to the U.S., pay for his housing and airfare from NYC to Georgia, etc.? What is the rationale for our open borders policy, in other words? Why wouldn’t it have made sense to screen out Mr. Ibarra even if we didn’t expect him to kill anyone?

Laken Riley was killed back in February, so I hope that it isn’t too soon to look at the economics of what happened. José Antonio Ibarra killed a universally liked young soul who would have earned about $86,000 per year (BLS) in 2024 dollars. If we assume a 40-year working career and don’t do a net-present value adjustment, that’s $3.44 million in GDP that will be lost (perhaps $1 million was invested in Laken Riley’s upbringing and education, so that investment was destroyed via opening our border to Mr. Ibarra).

What will it cost to imprison this 26-year-old migrant for the rest of his life? USA Facts says that there is a big variation from state to state, with Maskachusetts being the leader:

It’s tough to believe that Georgia is able to imprison the convicted at $30,000 per year when Massachusetts is spending over $307,000/year, but maybe this is correct. If Mr. Ibarra can live to 82, the life expectancy for Hispanics nationwide (due to systemic racism, apparently, more than 3 years longer than white Americans can expect to live), this will cost approximately $1.7 million in 2024 dollars (probably not accurate because prison costs should rise faster than inflation).

On the third hand, if imprisonment means that Mr. Ibarra is prevented from reproducing, the U.S. taxpayer may actually spend far less on him than we spend on the typical low-skill migrant because the typical low-skill migrant and his/her/zir/their descendants require multiple generations of public housing, free or subsidized health insurance (Medicaid), SNAP/EBT, and Obamaphone.

Related:

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Book selection at the San Francisco fine arts museum gift shop

by philg

What do the folks who run the de Young Museum gift shop think that their California customer base wants to read?

Here’s one categorized as “Art Theory & Criticism”:

(Just now, I reviewed the photos that I took inside the museum. No Black women appear in any of the galleries.)

A few more about the victimhood category of “women” more broadly (so to speak):

The author who is an expert on mansplaining (Rebecca Solnit) also happens to be an expert on planetary physics:

What about people with more advanced gender IDs than simply “woman”?

The museum offers a Land Acknowledgment. What about the Indigenous?

How about all-purpose #Resistance?

Related:

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A true artist can sell his crack for $1 million

by philg

I hadn’t ever noticed this before, but on a recent visit to the de Young Museum in San Francisco, I noticed that they’d purchased Andy Goldsworthy’s crack for what was, no doubt, a significant sum:

Speaking of the museum, they acknowledge that they’re on someone else’s land:

Native Americans are welcome to return to their land for $20 per person, $30 for parking, and $35 for the special exhibit of 100-year-old work that “challenged gender norms”:

It was great to see the Pavia tapestries again (see Could robots weave better tapestries than humans ever have?), especially with the added bonus of Californians wearing their 3-cent surgical masks against an aerosol virus (one of them with the mask over a beard):

The museum reminds us that it is critical to consider the victimhood category of an artist (“women”, “of color”, and “LGBTQ+” are the choices):

Then they organize an activity centered around a sculpture by Louise Nevelson, who rejected and resisted being categorized as a “woman artist” (“I’m not a feminist. I’m an artist who happens to be a woman.”).

Here’s a work that Stéphane Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus might have been able to steal and that would look great in any house:

I’ll cover the gift shop book selection in another post….

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Grafitti Drone countermeasures?

by philg

On a recent trip to San Francisco, a local friend took us to Andy Goldsworthy’s Spire in the Presidio:

We had just come from a parking lot where quite a few cars were virtuously marked:

Our friend said “What we need is a drone to paint the Spire sculpture in the Palestinian flag colors.”

Let’s suppose that residents of the U.S. with a lot of community spirit did build some drones that could paint the sides of building with huge messages such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”, “#Resist”, and “Trump is a Nazi.” It is much easier to build a spray-painting drone than a scrubbing drone, I think. How could cities and building owners defend against virtuous painting drone owners/operators?

(Though moderately rich by average American standards and blessed with a garage at home, our friend who lives in SF drives a 22-year-old car for fear that anything nicer will attract thieves.)

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Goodbye to San Francisco

by philg

Today was my last morning in San Francisco.

Unhoused folks, whom the rich locals say they want to help, in front of the Rolex store and the safe deposit vaults for said Rolexes:

Outdoor maskers were everywhere, but the iPhone 16 Pro Max hasn’t proven to be a nimble tool for street photography so I managed to photograph only a few of the roughly 15 whom I saw on a morning stroll:

This picture below has the following conventional elements for San Francisco: an outdoor masker (cheap surgical mask rather than an N95); a vacant storefront; some unhoused people; a Trader Joe’s.

The rivers of cash flowing into AI seem to be helping the city’s luxury retailers. Example:

Our hotel was right next to a BART station and BART goes all the way to SFO. What did The Google say about driving vs. BART?

Matt Gaetz is in the news, condemned by Democrats for purportedly having had some sort of sexual encounter with a 17-year-old female when he was in his 30s. What if Gaetz had sex with a 16-year-old male? San Francisco might consider naming one of the SFO terminals after him. I flew out of the Harvey Milk Terminal 1 (previously covered here):

(Above, note that we won World War II due to “womanpower”. Also note the N95 mask over a beard (Californian in a green jacket; a bit tough to see due to the fact that the photo is so heavily cropped).)

CNN:

According to the late San Francisco journalist Randy Shilts’ biography of Milk, “The Mayor of Castro Street,” Milk began a relationship with Jack McKinley, a 16-year-old runaway, while living in Greenwich Village. Milk was 34. Their relationship has long been a source of controversy. The age of consent in New York was raised from 14 to 18 in 2017. McKinley died by suicide in 1980.

Finally, although I hate to brag (in fact, nobody hates to brag more than I do), here’s something that I did while on JetBlue:

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Cure worse than the disease: locked-down Americans became alcoholics

by philg

From the Official Newspaper of Lockdown, “Excessive drinking persisted in the years after Covid arrived, according to new data.” (NYT, Nov 11, 2024):

Americans started drinking more as the Covid-19 pandemic got underway. They were stressed, isolated, uncertain — the world as they had known it had changed overnight.

Two years into the disaster, the trend had not abated, researchers reported on Monday.

The percentage of Americans who consumed alcohol, which had already risen from 2018 to 2020, inched up further in 2021 and 2022. And more people reported heavy or binge drinking,

“Early on in the pandemic, we were seeing an enormous surge of people coming in to the clinic and the hospital with alcohol-related problems,” said Dr. Brian P. Lee, a hepatologist at the University of Southern California and the principal investigator of the study, published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

This adds some weight to my oft-expressed theory, starting in March 2020, that American lockdowns and other coronapanic measures would, in the long run, kill far more people than they saved. A person who goes to work in an office is well-separated from the obesity-exacerbating fridge and a stockpile of wine and beer. Co-workers who smell alcohol are likely to inquire. The office environment is thus protective and that protection was lost when the typical state governor made it illegal for Americans to go to work.

Who else noticed this? Donald Trump. From the October 2020 debate with soon-to-be-Genocide-Joe:

I want to open the schools. The transmittal rate to the teachers is very small, but I want to open the schools. We have to open our country. We’re not going to have a country. You can’t do this, we can’t keep this country closed. It is a massive country with a massive economy. People are losing their jobs, they’re committing suicide. There’s depression, alcohol, drugs at a level that nobody’s ever seen before. There’s abuse, tremendous abuse. We have to open our country.

Related:

From Teddy Wong’s (excellent) restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas (maybe don’t try this lettering/language if you’re not Chinese…):

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The High IQ Party (TM) processes their loss (conclusion: Americans are even dumber than Democrats imagined)

by philg

In recent conversations with Democrats in California, New York, D.C., and Maskachusetts they’ve volunteered their feelings regarding the High IQ Party’s recent loss of power. I’ve also checked out their Facebook and X feeds.

Typical and eloquent: “What’s WRONG with Americans?” The poster owns a $2.1 million home in Berkeley, California, holds a taxpayer-funded job that requires a master’s degree, has a husband who earns money at a technical job, has a nonbinary child (1 out of 2, I think, so only a 50 percent rate of identification with the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community), and is passionate about cats and foster kittens. She will never compete with a low-skill migrant for a job nor an apartment for rent. I responded by pointing out that low-skill immigration is economically harmful to the working class, citing a Harvard study that is consistent with Econ 101 (albeit inconsistent with the Democrat Religion in which Our Lady of Open Borders performs miracles of raising wages and lowering rent every time a migrant walks across), and therefore another explanation was that some American voters are differently situated than she is. She and her friends doubled down on how the only reasonable explanation for a Republican vote was stupidity and/or immorality. I cited the example of my mother’s Haitian aide who voted for Trump. Did the white Berkeley Righteous want to say that there was something wrong with this Black immigrant? Answer: defriending. (Just like when my friend’s daughter asked the “male feminist” (button) social studies teacher in Lincoln, Maskachusetts why companies didn’t hire only women in order to earn higher profits after the teacher asserted that women do the same jobs as men for 80 percent of the salary. Answer: Detention!)

Part of a subsequent text-message exchange with a friend who was part of the Facebook conversation:

I think this is an example of how Democrats failed to understand that peasant Americans might be turning against them. Democrats live in bubbles where they almost never interact with anyone who disagrees with them or where disagreeing with the Democrat dogma is punished so severely that dissenters stay quiet. 

If California ever finishes counting its ballots (slower pace than Ron DeSantis restoring power after Hurricane Milton!) we will likely find that there are some Trump voters even in Berkeley. But they are never going to put out a lawn sign or mention their Love that Dare Not Speak its Name in casual conversation.

The result is an asymmetry. The working class understands [let’s call her Nina] and her point of view as a homeowner and holder of a job that requires an advanced degree that undocumented migrants and their descendants are unlikely to ever earn. But Nina will never understand the working class.

(This reminds me of what a wise gringa in Corcovado, Costa Rica said about parrots: “They understand our language, but we don’t understand theirs.”)

Here’s a typical Democrat on X highlighting “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” (Democrat-run The New Republic), which points out that a majority of Americans were apparently fooled by lies in “right-wing media”. As Democrats were not fooled, that makes non-Democrats… stupid.

My mom recently had lunch with a Radcliffe ’55 classmate. The 90-year-olds, both in poor health, talked about their fears of an impending Trump dictatorship. My mom’s friend heaped derision on the Americans who had voted “against their interests” for Trump. She expressed sorrow that would-be-Assassin #1 hadn’t killed Trump. I successfully refrained from pointing out that a change of government in D.C. isn’t the biggest risk faced by a typical 90-year-old.

It’s interesting that that Democrats claim to be the Party of Empathy, a quality in which all Republicans are sorely lacking, and can’t put themselves in the shoes of a working class American for even a few seconds. On a recent Uber ride from Stuart, Florida back home the driver was an immigrant from Colombia who had voted for Trump in hopes that further low-skill immigration would be curtailed. Having never tried to make a living as an Uber driver, I don’t think any of my friends could fathom the man’s desire to not see the labor market flooded with new arrivals. Nor would they understand why he doesn’t want to pay higher taxes and/or receive fewer government services so that college graduates can fly to Europe instead of paying back their student loans.

Here’s a beautiful one. An election prophet says that his/her/zir/their prophecy of a Kamala-Tampon Tim victory did not come true because the electorate was irrational (i.e., stupid) and misled by misinformation/disinformation spread by Elon Musk.

Surveying X, we find the old reliable explanation for why not everyone supports Democrats:

(If a Trump dictatorship is all about misogyny that raises the question of why there wasn’t/isn’t more solidarity among the sisterhood. As in 2016, the Trump 2024 campaign manager identified as a woman (she’ll now be his Chief of Staff). A Representative who identifies as a woman just agreed to be Trump’s UN Ambassador. Why are people who identify as “women” helping Donald Trump against the interests of those who share their gender ID?)

Readers: What are you hearing from your Democrat friends? As noted above, mine are saying that they knew tens of millions Americans were stupid and easily fooled by Fox News and similar, but they made a mistake in underestimating the number of stupid Americans.

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The dual fantasy worlds of Republicans and Democrats

by philg

As we celebrate National Pickle Day, let’s look at a 63-year-old Democrat who expects, absent dramatic birth control measures, to become pregnant and crave pickles and ice cream. In the video below, she discusses a first person possibility of being a customer for IVF and abortion care as well:

Julia Louis-Dreyfus has reached the age of a great-grandmother in most human societies, but imagines that she could get pregnant and give birth (the Guinness Book of World Records age for this feat is 59) and also that someone other than a gerontologist is interested in her reproductive system. (The post and video above originally a tweet on JL-D’s official X account, but apparently it was deleted or restricted so that only non-Deplorables/non-Garbage can see it.)

What’s the corresponding fantasy world for Republicans? Deporting undocumented criminals:

“There’s about 4.5 million who would be the first priority for that, people who’ve already committed crimes,” Johnson (R-La.) said Thursday. “They’re in the system now [for] shoplifting, or whatever it is … or [having] done things that are untoward or unlawful.”

This politician imagines that there is a country (or countries) out there, other than the U.S., that is dumb enough to take in 4.5 million folks who’ve been adjudicated criminals. Note that criminality is heritable, so if a country takes in a criminal it will be on track to have additional criminals in the future. (Also remember that nobody can agree on how many of the undocumented are currently enriching us with their presence: “Yale Study Finds Twice as Many Undocumented Immigrants as Previous Estimates” (2018); the estimate of 11 million seems to have been in use by mainstream media for 20+ years, even as the same publications report on floods of new arrivals.)

I think the 63-year-old’s fear of getting pregnant and not being able to secure abortion care might be more reasonable than the Republican expectation of being able to dump migrant criminals on some other nation!

So the good news is that the two parties will be back to governing soon, now that the election drama is mostly over. The bad news is that both parties seem to be living in fantasy worlds of their own creation!

In case the above Instagram post is memory-holed…

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Parachute and rocket replacement option for Cirrus owners who love Disney and Harry Potter

by philg

It’s the 13th of the month so let’s talk about some equipment that you’d have to be unlikely to need…

Cirrus airplanes need new rockets and parachutes every 10 years whether they’ve been living on the ramp in Texas or coddled in a climate-controlled hangar. The typical service center can’t do this work. In the southeast, the conventional choice has been to take the airplane to Atlanta where a couple of highly regarded shops have extensive experience with CAPS replacement (see DLK/Avias and Romanair, for example). This post is about a potentially more convenient/fun option: the Cirrus-owned factory service center in Orlando, Florida (Kissimmee, actually; KISM).

Our SR20-G2 is coming up on its 20th anniversary and, thus, without a new parachute/rocket it would have become illegal to fly starting in January 2025 (maybe all private planes will become illegal to fly in Jan 2025 if my Democrat friends were correct in predicting a dictatorship if Donald Trump were elected; a dictator wouldn’t want people flying around VFR, certainly, with no government tracking).

One advantage for the factory shop is that they may have the inside track on getting the rockets and ‘chutes. Others have reported planes being grounded for 6 months as these parts failed to arrive sooner than 9 months after being ordered. Assuming that Cirrus does eventually sort out its supply chain, a persistent advantage for the Orlando shop is that it is in Orlando. A Cirrus owner can load up his/her/zir/their family and arrive in Kissimmee on Monday, visit Disney, Universal, the cathedral, etc., and fly away on Friday (I arrived on Monday at noon and the plane was completed on Thursday).

Note that Cirrus offers a ferry pilot service if you want the plane picked up or dropped off, but they have very few pilots who are qualified to fly the old Avidyne planes.

The factory service center is mostly there for Vision Jet owners, I think, and it is tough to get an estimate and make a reservation (there is a “concierge” who never seems to be available), but once organized and confirmed everything is jet-smooth. Enterprise rental car is there on the field at Signature so it is easy to do a one-way car rental if you’re based elsewhere within Florida and don’t need a week of Orlando.

What about the price? It seems to be roughly the same as having the work done at an independent service center with CAPS authorization, i.e., about $20,000 (it was $12,000 ten years ago). Speaking of our inflation-free economy, when the Cirrus maintenance manager mentioned proudly that the company was spending $15 million on an under-construction facility at the airport, I responded “That sounds great, but $15 million might soon be the price of a Diet Coke.”

I enjoyed spending Christmas (on November 9, 2024) at Disney Springs as part of my Cirrus retrieval experience:

Kissimmee itself is famous for understatement and elegance:

(See also Kissimmee’s Monument of States)

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Why isn’t the Ring camera smart enough to notice that a garage door has been left open?

by philg

We live in the glorious age of AI. Here in our concrete block hurricane-resistant fortress we have a Ring camera in the back of the garage pointed at the door. It’s called “Garage” in the Ring app. Why isn’t it smart enough to wake up once every 30 minutes and, if appropriate, notify us that the garage door has been left open for half an hour? That doesn’t seem like a huge ask of our future robot overlords.

There’s an “AI” company here in Palm Beach County called Levatas that claims to be able to do stuff like this. Amazon/Ring presumably also has plenty of smart programmers. They claim to have delivered AI recently. Why haven’t they done the basics?

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