Author: philg

Uber stands with the Black community

by philg

Judging by the contents of my inbox, America is truly the land of goodwill and brotherhood. A typical recent example has a subject line of “Uber stands with the Black community”:

I wish that the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others weren’t so violently cut short. I wish that institutional racism, and the police violence it gives rise to, didn’t cause their deaths. I wish that all members of our Black community felt safe enough to move around their cities without fear. I wish that I didn’t have to try to find the words to explain all of this to my two young sons.

But I’ve been given hope this week by hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors demanding change. I am committed to being part of that change.

We know this isn’t enough. It won’t be enough until we see true racial justice. But we plan to work day in and day out to improve, learn, and grow as a company.

Dara Khosrowshahi
CEO

(From the fact that riots and looting give him hope, I think it is safe to infer that he’s explaining everything to his two young sons while safely enroute in the family Gulfstream from fenced airport to fenced airport.)

The Uber Diversity and Inclusion Report for 2019 shows that standing with the Black community can be done by “tech leaders” who are 51 percent white and 47.5 percent Asian (“Black of African American” people hold 0.8 percent of these jobs; “Hispanic or Latinx” are also at 0.8 percent).

Readers: What would Travis Kalanick have written about recent events?

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Why haven’t all of the Minneapolis police officers and local politicians been fired?

by philg

By touching off riots throughout the U.S., the incompetence of the Minneapolis city government has cost Americans who live elsewhere at least billions of dollars (insurance industry estimate; some color from the Daily Mail) in the short run. Owners of property in other cities may be out tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in the long run, as people decide that they’d rather live and work in suburbs and/or small towns, thus escaping both Covid-19 and civil unrest.

Imagine if the Minneapolis police department had been a Roman legion. After the killing of Justine Diamond (“Noor had been lauded in the past by Minneapolis mayor Betsy Hodges and the local Somali community as one of the first Somali-American police officers in the area”), it would have been time for decimation (every tenth officer killed by others in the legion). After the murder of George Floyd, surely it would have been time to kill the entire legion due to the disgrace and costs imposed on the Republic/Empire.

Of course, justice isn’t as harsh today as it was in Ancient Rome. However, given the above-market wages, health care, and pension benefits paid, the entire Minneapolis Police Department could be easily replaced at a substantial savings to taxpayers. Why not fire the entire force immediately as a modern-day substitute for how these people would have been punished in the time of Trajan? State police and National Guard units can fill in until the city has had a chance to hire the next class. Also fire anyone in city politics with any supervisory responsibility for the police, right up to and including the mayor. Maybe it would take a replacement police force a few years to become fully effective, but the example would be helpful to other cities and maybe people around the U.S. wouldn’t be angry enough to keep rioting if they saw that the people responsible for the Minneapolis murder had faced some actual consequences.

(As it happens, I was in Minneapolis this week! Glorious plans to hang out downtown were revised in favor of holing up in the Hampton Inn, Eden Prairie. After two nights locked into my room (one of 6 occupied out of 105), with only occasional escapes to nearby strip malls, I had little trouble understanding why those who’ve been locked down in small apartments are rioting. Except for the nice Beaver below (Flying Cloud Airport), the scenery was bleak (leavened slightly by the fact that restaurants are now open for outdoor dining). There was a nightly curfew even in suburban Eden Prairie.)

Readers: What do you think? Should the Minneapolis Police Department be warmly told “Thanks for your service” and sent home with two weeks of severance pay? Also, should Minneapolis be cut off from Federal funds for the next 5-10 years? U.S. taxpayers will have to pay $billions to rebuild the cities trashed as a consequence of what happened in Minneapolis. Why can’t the folks there (“some very fine people”) pay for their own services with local and state $$ for the next 5-10 years?

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Post-coronaplague world of employment will be even less friendly to older workers?

by philg

All of my friends in the new work-from-home economy say that coworkers with newly unskooled children to manage are “useless”. Employers who fire their least productive employees, therefore, in an age-neutral manner, may actually be firing an older-than-average population (and, coincidentally, saving a ton of money on employer-provided health care for both these older adults and their children!).

I’m wondering if the new “wear a mask 8 hours/day” policies will also winnow the older workers out of the U.S. labor force. Older people have reduced lung capacity and muscular strength compared to the young, so they are going to be more impaired by the masks. Already in retail stores I have noticed some older workers struggling and, in some cases, wearing the mask around their necks, even when interacting fairly closely with customers.

Finally, you have the actual risk of coronaplague. As workers get closer to the average age of a Covid-19-tagged death (82 in Massachusetts), they might not want to take the risk of coming into contact with a lot of co-workers, customers, etc.

Related:

  • The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (EEOC): “The ADEA prohibits employment discrimination against persons 40 years of age or older.” (i.e., employers wouldn’t hire people over 40 without the threat of lawsuits and coercion by the government)
  • “Lung Capacity and Aging” (American Lung Association): “Your lungs mature by the time you are about 20-25 years old. After about the age of 35, it is normal for your lung function to decline gradually as you age. This can make breathing slightly more difficult as you get older.”
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Helicopter pilot and cosmetics entrepreneur

by philg

Nicole Vandelaar Battjes is the founder, CEO, and Chief Pilot of Novictor Helicopters, a Robinson R44 tour operator in Hawaii. Now she has launched a cosmetics company too! Nicol Cosmetics (pilot/founder is in the middle):

It is rare for me to get excited about cosmetics, but I am hoping this company is a big success.

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Urban riots predictable after lockdown?

by philg

Loyal readers of this blog (i.e., both of you!) will recall that I have regularly asked whether the lockdown cure is worse than the coronavirus disease. I anticipated deaths in the U.S. due to the shutdown of health care for non-Covid issues, due to poverty and unemployment, due to the shutdown of clinical trials for new/improved medicines, and due to the shutdown of clinical training for medical doctors (post). I anticipated a vast number of deaths in poor countries that were our trading partners.

I did not anticipate civil unrest and the destruction of American cities, but of course in hindsight it seems obvious that locking the poorest Americans into their crummy tiny urban apartments for months, while taking away jobs from most of those who formerly worked, would lead to them eventually emerging and entertaining themselves in ways that wouldn’t be entertaining for the mansion-dwelling governors who ordered the lockdowns. (see “Your lockdown may vary”)

Police departments in the U.S. murder citizens on a regular basis (and why not, since they are generally immune from being fired). The typical police murder does not bother too many Americans or even make the news. This one was unusually disturbing and unusually thoroughly documented on video, of course, but I still don’t think it would have been enough to trigger nationwide riots back in, say, 2019.

In addition to the lockdown itself having put non-mansion-dwelling Americans into a bad mood, I wonder if the lockdown created a general environment of lawlessness. Unlike in Sweden, for example, Americans were told that everything had changed due to the killer virus and therefore their Constitutional rights were inoperative. Since the old laws didn’t apply to the government, maybe the old laws against looting didn’t apply to the subjects?

Is it fair to say that a lot of Americans actually did anticipate this kind of breakdown of society? There was a huge run on guns and ammo back in March, right? I discovered that several of my friends had become new gun owners. These included female physicians in their 40s, for example, living alone in cities. I scoffed at them, saying that the militarized U.S. police state would keep the ghetto-dwellers quietly imprisoned, watching TV while consuming alcohol and opioids purchased via Medicaid.

Readers: Were these riots easy to foresee?

Bonus: Some pictures from a recent helicopter trip over Dover, Massachusetts. #WeAreAllinThisTogether #StayHomeSaveLives

(The house is at 36 Farm Street. Trulia says that the annual property tax is $141,000 per year, i.e., not enough to pay the pension for one retired senior police officer or school administrator. It may belong to Kevin Rollins, former CEO of Dell.)

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How is Russia doing with coronaplague?

by philg

A couple of previous posts about coronaplague and Russia:

How is Russia doing according to the official WHO reports? Do we think that they will end up doing better than the U.S. when the first full year of the plague is over?

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Jet pilot hero considers returning to the Air Force Reserve

by philg

A friend used to be a military hero flying an exotic airplane for the U.S. Air Force. Due to the airline industry boom, a lot of pilots retired during the past few years, but now the Air Force hopes to get some back, at least part time, for the Reserve. A recruiter called. Here were the first three questions:

  1. What was your sex at birth?
  2. What pronouns do you use now?
  3. Have you tested positive for Covid-19?
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iCloud for Windows creates a single folder with 44,000 items

by philg

Trigger Warning: A First World problem.

A recent example of software engineering from the best and brightest of Silicon Valley is iCloud for Windows version 11. Want to see the picture that you just took on your phone? It will be zapped automatically to \Pictures\iCloud Photos\Photos … where it is mixed in with 44,000+ additional photos and videos that you’ve taken since 2014 (thumbnails only, which load slowly even with a 1 Gbit fiber connection).

Yes, a single flat directory of however many thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of photos and videos that you’ve ever taken. Even worse, the software no longer converts from Apple’s unconventional choice of HEIC to JPEG. Except that if you edit the photo on the device, e.g., because the orientation sensor got it wrong, the corrected version comes through as a JPEG. So now you’ve got a directory with a mixture of HEIC and JPEG files.

Is there any way to change this behavior? The 10.x version of iCloud would take the HEIC files captured by the phone, convert them to JPEG, and actually download them into a \Pictures\iCloud Photos\Downloads

Stylish Macintosh users: does it work the same way on the Mac? One enormous flat folder with every photo that you’ve ever taken?

(Maybe Apple is just leading the way into a HEIC future? Apparently not. The Apple-brand silicone case for the iPhone 11 Pro Max failed and I tried to send them a picture of the failure so they’d send me a replacement. Apple support has a web-based system for uploading “files”. If you try to upload a photo that you took with Apple’s own device, from Apple’s own browser (Safari), into Apple’s own server, it fails with no further explanation. If you try to do it from Windows, you get the same unexplained failure. If you convert the HEIC to JPEG on Windows and then upload… it works.)

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Making $200/hour on the coronapanic front line

by philg

Text from a pilot:

A good friend’s daughter works at a local restaurant in summer breaks from college. They called her up and offered her $40 an hour to come and hand out the take out orders because they could not get anyone employed full time before to show up until unemployment runs out. She ended up making $800 for one shift because the guilty-conscience of the Wellesley Elite was tipping her $20 for each bag of food she brought to their Mercedes while saying “Thank you for your front line service”.

Now that the summer heat is upon us and wearing a mask will become more uncomfortable, what will be the additional wage that employers will have to pay to entice workers into these jobs where hours of mask use is required?

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