Author: philg

Five-year anniversary of the first U.S. lockdown order

by philg

According to “Statewide COVID‐19 Stay‐at‐Home Orders and Population Mobility in the United States” (2020), today is the five-year anniversary of the first American lockdown order:

In the United States, the first coronavirus‐related activity restrictions were issued on March 12, 2020, when a community within New Rochelle, New York, was declared to be a “containment area.” A traditional quarantine order would require individuals presumed to be exposed to stay at home. This containment order was not intended to limit individual movement. Instead, it mandated the closure of schools and large gathering places within the zone, including religious buildings (Chappell, 2020). Residents were allowed to enter and leave the containment zone, but they were not allowed to gather in large groups within the designated geographic area.

On March 16, 2020, a “shelter‐in‐place” order was issued for six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area (Allday, 2020). Shelter in place was a term many Californians were familiar with due to its use during wildfires and other natural disasters, active shooter drills, and other short‐term emergency situations. In those contexts, “shelter in place” means “stay where you are,” but that was not what the COVID‐19 orders were asking residents to do. The order did not require individuals to stay where they happened to be located when the order was released. Residents were allowed to leave home for essential purposes, including food, medical care, and outdoor exercise, and people working at businesses deemed to be “essential”—such as grocery stores, hospitals, pharmacies, veterinary clinics, utilities, hardware stores, auto repair shops, funeral homes, and warehouses and distribution facilities—were allowed to continue onsite work.

Related:

  • “COVID-19 Lockdowns Unleashed a Wave of Murder” (Reason, December 2024): “In 2020, the average U.S. city experienced a surge in its homicide rate of almost 30%—the fastest spike ever recorded in the country,” write Rohit Acharya and Rhett Morris in a research review for the Brookings Institution published this week. “Across the nation, more than 24,000 people were killed compared to around 19,000 the year before.”
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Market is tanking or merely mean-reverting?

by philg

A Ukrainian immigrant friend has been (understandably) expressing rage at Donald Trump for wanting to shut down U.S. support of Ukraine’s military. He also recently texted us that he was enraged with Trump’s tariffs (that never actually happen? I can’t keep track) tanking the stock market. As an index investor who worships at the Church of the Efficient Market Hypothesis I don’t trade and, therefore, don’t check the market.

Not having previously checked, I proposed the following:

Compare to June 1, 2024 so that we filter out some of the noise (back in June the market thought that we’d have continuity with Genocide Joe)

I don’t think we can count the market’s optimistic run-up when it looked like Trump was going to win

Then I looked at a one-year chart:

The Google says that we’re up

adjusted for inflation, perhaps not

5643/5283 [the March 10 price divided by the June 3, 2024 price] compared to around June 1 that’s up 7%

actual inflation (not the government’s fake number) is 4%/year (3% in 9 months)? so we’re up about 4% real in 3/4s of a year, which means the market is on track to deliver a 5% real return (more like 6% if we accept the government 3% annual inflation stat)

that’s not too different from normal (7.5 percent real annual return over the past 20 years using the government’s understated inflation figures, so probably closer to 6 percent if we adjust for inflation by looking at the stuff that an investor might want to buy (houses in decent neighborhoods and upscale vacations, not DVD players at Walmart))

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Five-year anniversary of universities charging full tuition and delivering almost nothing

by philg

Five years ago, here: Coronavirus enables elite universities to pull off the ultimate scam?

First the big research universities figured out that they could charge more than $50,000 per year in tuition for in-person classes taught by graduate students with a tenuous hold on the English language. Now they’ve figured out that they can charge $50,000 per year without having to deliver in-person classes at all!

… A poster cluster in Harvard Yard, afternoon of March 10, 2020:

Speaking of universities, here’s one from the official White House X feed to Columbia:

Note that I don’t believe Columbia will receive less money as a result of this purported “cancelation”. The money will be “unfrozen” soon enough. It will be like the billions of dollars that the U.S. taxpayer has paid to Hamas over the years. We see a headline about “aid” to UNRWA (i.e., a funnel straight to Hamas) being cut off and then the “aid” is quietly restored a few months later after some weak promise is made by UNRWA or affiliates. Nonetheless, I enjoy hearing the former New Yorker saying “Shalom Columbia”!

In case the above gets memory-holed one day by a righteous administration:

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How did our coronapanic investing ideas work out?

by philg

Five years ago… Investing in the time of plague?

Thought experiment: What stocks will go up in response to the coronavirus plague?

One idea: Comcast and similar cable TV stocks. If people are stuck at home they won’t mind paying for premium channels and will be less likely to cut the cord.

Second idea: airlines and hotel stocks. “Buy on bad news” is the theory here.

Some ideas from readers in the comments:

  • Oil ETFs and/or Exxon/Mobil (XOM)
  • Valero (VLO) for diesel fuel
  • telephone stocks (Verizon?)
  • an index fund of Japanese pharma companies
  • carnival cruise stock
  • short Boeing and Airbus (BA, EADSY)

Let’s see if my ideas are reliably terrible. Comcast is about flat today (dramatically lower, if adjusted for Bidenflation) than it was five years ago while the S&P 500 has roughly doubled:

How about Hilton (HLT) as a proxy for the hotel industry? It has outperformed the S&P 500.

For airlines, JETS seems to be the ETF that holds U.S. airline stocks. It hasn’t done great.

Reader ideas? XOM and CCL (Carnival cruises) would balance each other out:

Conclusion: it is difficult to beat the index.

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Justifying our total war against Japan

by philg

It’s the 80th anniversary of a bombing raid on Tokyo in which the American military killed 100,000 Japanese civilians in one night (Wokipedia). Did the Japanese attack on our military installations in Hawaii justify our attacks on their civilians?

University of Alaska in Fairbanks runs a beautiful museum and it answers the above question to some extent.

Right now, about one fifth of the core exhibit space at the Museum of the North is devoted to the victimization of 220 Japanese-Alaskans whom President Franklin Roosevelt ordered interned (with Supreme Court approval) and also the evacuation of 800 Native Alaskans from islands thought vulnerable to Japanese attack.

The PhD scholars explain on a sign leading into the exhibit that the Japanese were on track to conquer interior Alaska, western Canada, and Seattle:

If we hadn’t waged total war on this enemy, including killing 100,000 civilians in one night (pre-atomic bombs), folks in Seattle would to this day be forced to live a Japanese lifestyle. Certainly, it wouldn’t have made sense to engage in the settlement negotiations that the Japanese expected after Pearl Harbor.

What else goes on in the museum? First, visitors are reminded of the irrationality of W-2/1099 work in the American Welfare State (admission is $20 for chumps; free for EBT cardholders):

The PhDs in charge of the museum use native languages whenever possible (Troth Yeddha’ is apparently not, as I’d thought, a location of one of Jabba the Hutt’s branch offices) and also note that the noble indigenous themselves don’t want to use these languages anymore (consistent with John McWhorter’s explanation of how humans converge toward a single language in a media- and telecommunications-rich world)

Compare your level of patience and attention to detail to Cynthia Gibson’s, who sewed salmon vertebrae into a dress:

The Into the Wild bus will be on display here soon:

Looking for decorating ideas?

Even without indoor plumbing you can have a beautiful home:

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Progressive town in Maskachusetts admits being 60 years late to the feminist party

by philg

Happy International Women’s Day to those who celebrate.

A January 7, 2025 post from the suburb of Boston where we used to live:

History was made today in Lincoln. Town Clerk Valerie Fox swore in Sergeant Jennifer McNaught as the newest member of the department. Sgt. McNaught becomes the first woman supervisor in the department’s history.

More than 60 years after second wave feminism made it through the United States, the righteous progressive town finally appoints a female to a position of responsibility. Why admit being this late to the feminism party? (Also, if the town has been working for years on Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, & Anti-Racism (“IDEA”, not the discredited “DEI”) why are both of the employees in the photo white? They wanted to hire some non-white people, but couldn’t find anyone qualified?)

Massachusetts progressives love to talk about how stupid, racist, and sexist folks in Alabama are, for example, yet Birmingham, Alabama appointed Annetta Nunn captain in 1995 (CBS) and police chief for the whole city in 2003. If we assume the “captain” job in Alabama is comparable to the “supervisor” job in Maskachusetts, it took the progressives of Lincoln, MA 30 years to catch up to the people whom they enjoy characterizing as primitive and prejudiced.

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Robinson goes to war

by philg

Incredibly, the U.S. military decided that it didn’t need to waste every possible dollar every day. The Army will now do some primary training of helicopter pilots in the Robinson R66 (rebranded the “TH-66 Sage”) at a civilian flight school in Marianna, Florida, a one-hour drive from Ron DeSantis’s house in Tallahassee. An R44 would probably make better economic sense, but the idea of a piston-powered aircraft is apparently too terrifying for America’s bravest heroes.

See “Crew Training International and Helicopter Institute awarded U.S.Army FAA Part 141 Helicopter Flight School Pilot Program” (March 6, 2025)

Related:

the airspace (Marianna at the top center; note the magenta color for the airport, which indicates that there is no control tower):

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Poor as a Professor, Dumb as a PhD (UCLA edition)

by philg

A friend who taught computer nerdism in Hong Kong before joining our lab at MIT used to try to intensify the pain and suffering of graduate students by remind us that the Chinese had an expression “Poor as a Professor, Dumb as a PhD”.

In an age where an average OpenAI employee earns $1 million/year and a receptionist at an NVIDIA branch office likely gets considerably more, UCLA is hiring mathematics professors for “$78,200 – $101,400 annually.” In case the original URL gets memory-holed, here are some screen shots:

Google’s AI says “The average home price near UCLA in Westwood, Los Angeles is around $1.3–1.6 million, depending on the source. The median sale price per square foot is around $857–$859.” The same AI says that a 30-year mortgage on a small house near UCLA will cost about $90,000 per year (i.e., roughly 100 percent of what UCLA is offering to pay the proud Ph.D. in mathematics.

Let’s dive into some of the specifics to figure out what a successful applicant looks like. In theory, California government employers aren’t supposed to sort applicants by skin color (the hated-by-progressives Proposition 209 from 1996). Let’s look at some of the language:

We strongly encourage applications from individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups, and other individuals who are underrepresented in the field, across color, creed, race, ethnic and national origin, physical ability, gender and sexual identity, or any other legally protected basis.

If they don’t discriminate by skin color in hiring then where’s the “strong encouragement” for those who have a favored skin color?

Donald Trump is trying to eradicate DEI from federally-funded universities such as UCLA. Instead, UCLA will have “EDI”:

Statement of contributions to equity, diversity, and inclusion that includes previous and planned efforts that advance EDI through formal and/or informal mentoring, especially of Latina students

Are they trying to put together a “Hot Latinas” calendar for their nerd departments?

This search is part of a cluster hire with faculty positions in the departments of Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics and Astronomy who will support UCLA’s goals to achieve federal designation as a Hispanic Serving Institution as early as 2025. … Faculty hired through this search are expected to maintain an active affiliation with the Chicano Studies Research Center and to have a track record or demonstrated commitment to mentoring and encouraging the success of U.S.-based Latinx and first-generation scholars. Since the Latina population is particularly under-represented in physical sciences nationwide, the Department of Mathematics and the Division of Physical Sciences are especially interested in candidates with potential to serve as outstanding mentors to Latina students.

Maybe I could be considered, despite my lack of a math Ph.D., because I consistently use the term “Latinx”:

the Office of the Chancellor and the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost have sponsored this search in order to recruit exceptional scholars whose teaching, scholarship and/or mentoring has strong ties to Latinx experiences in the United States.

Let’s have a look at Proposition 209:

The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.

Circling back to the economics… as prestigious as some of these institutions are, how is a math professor earning $78,200/year in his/her/zir/their 30s ever going to be able to afford a family unless he/she/ze/they chooses a job at a school in a part of the country with a lower cost of living? It’s tough to have two children in a studio apartment shared with another adult.

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Ayn Rand’s Antique Car Museum in Fairbanks

by philg

Last month, I spent 1.5 hours at Alaska ComiCon in Fairbanks, which isn’t quite the jam-packed experience of the San Diego Comic-Con, but included the world’s largest balloon costume (Godzilla, of course!):

My friends picked me up for the short drive to the Fountainhead Antique Auto Museum, which seems to be indirectly named for Ayn Rand, ironically famous for not having learned to drive despite living for a time in Los Angeles. (The connection seems to be that Tim Cerny, a real estate developer, liked Rand’s novel The Fountainhead and named his company after her and then the museum is named for the company.)

Despite the founder’s apparent free market orientation, the museum has an Elizabeth Warren section:

My favorite car was the Owen Magnetic, spiritual heir to the Chevrolet Volt, in which the internal combustion engine is a generator. It even had regen braking:

Here’s a 1932 Cadillac…

After 90 years of evolution, the ugly duckling 1932 Cadillac was transformed into the beautiful Escalade:

Americans 110 years ago hadn’t discovered the joys of helicopter parenting and, therefore, brothers aged 10 and 6 were able to ride on horses from Oklahoma to the East Coast, buy a car and learn to drive in NYC, and then drive back to Oklahoma (the horses went home by train). They met two presidents and both Wright brothers:

State-sponsored PBS did a show about them (I recently learned about this from a Facebook friend; it aired in April 2020, just as coronapanic was in full swing, but it is tough to imagine a lockdown strict enough that I would have the patience to watch PBS).

The museum covers the challenge of building a practical snowmobile, which didn’t happen until airplanes were into their second generation (most of the invention seems to have occurred first in Russia; Wokipedia).

I knew that Carl Fisher, the creator of Miami Beach and the Indy 500, had developed a gas-based “Prest-O-Lite” headlight, but didn’t realize that it involved a tank of acetylene right next to the driver!

For fans of the old Bell 47 and Hiller helicopters… the Franklin company that made their engines was produced cars with air-cooled engines back in 1905:

After the museum, we went downtown to Soba for Moldovan food.

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Testing ChatGPT 4.5

by philg

On this glorious day of Turing Award presentation to two reinforcement learning nerds, I went back to some of ChatGPT’s failures, feeding the same prompts to the 4.5 version of our future robot overlord.

December 21, 2024: ChatGPT tries to figure out time zones; Today: correct answer!

December 14, 2024: LLM failure on a simple question (“What are examples of museums named after two people with different last names?”) Today: failure once again.

August 2024: ChatGPT 4o tackles the challenge of AC ducts sweating in an attic; Today: complete failure. It concludes that if you put 50-degree air inside an R-30-insulated duct in a warm attic, the outside of the duct will be at 50.8 degrees F and, therefore, the duct will sweat.

The latest version of ChatGPT thinks that pit bulls are, in general, more dangerous than golden retrievers. But it adds an “important nuance”:

Individual temperament, training, socialization, and responsible ownership significantly impact dog behavior.

I followed up with

You’re saying, then, that your chances of being killed by your pet golden retriever are low, but never zero?

and ChatGPT agreed, highlighting “but never zero”. Asked for an example, ChatGPT claimed “A notable fatal incident involving a Golden Retriever occurred in 2012, when an 8-month-old infant in South Carolina was tragically killed by a Golden Retriever.” I found the story:

… found dead in his family’s mobile home …. The baby was in a swing when Lucky, a golden retriever-Labrador mix, bit the child several times and tore off his legs, authorities said. The child’s father, Quintin, was in the home at the time, police said. He was in another room asleep with the family’s 3-year-old and their other dog. The baby was discovered when his mother, Chantel, came home after taking their seven-year-old to a doctor’s appointment, The Post and Courier reported.

Here’s a photo of what a Goldador is supposed to look like:

Based on this photo, I’m not convinced that the mostly peaceful animal is a golden-lab, though a lot of puppies do love to bit arms, hands, legs, and feet!

Let’s try some image generation… “generate a picture of failed flying machine design circa 1900 based on the principle of wing flapping”

This can be considered a fail due to the apparent rigidity of the structure.

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