Category: American Life

Happy New Year and Last Day of Kwanzaa

by philg

Happy New Year to all readers and I hope that 2024 is when all of your dreams will come true. Stolen from Facebook:

Separately, today we say goodbye to Kwanzaa, a holiday invented by a guy who was convicted of imprisoning women. The women said that they were hit on the head with toasters. Let’s see if ChatGPT can illustrate an authentic Kwanzaa celebration:

Unless you don’t see color, notice the skin tone change once the holiday is introduced. Also look the defective kinara and the ignoring of the request for just 5 candles:

An attempt to correct the number of candle slots wasn’t successful:

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Rest in Peace, Alex Kowalski

by philg

As we say goodbye to 2023, let’s also say goodbye to a loyal reader of and commenter on this blog: Alex Kowalski (July 15, 1970-July 6, 2023).

If you think of yourself as just one in seven billion It can make you want to die

But if you think of yourself as an irreplaceable one of one

Doesn’t it stir just a little bit of courage?

— Tetsuya Miyamoto, creator of KenKen, quoted in The Puzzler

From my point of view, Alex was, indeed, an irreplaceable one of one. He read every chapter of Medical School 2020, starting long before, I think, that he had an inkling that he would become enmeshed in the health care system.

Some basics: Alex is survived by his parents, Dave and Karen of Holland, Massachusetts and younger brother Stephen. Alex and Stephen both worked with their father in a computer-organized printing and mailing business. If you would like to send a condolence card, their address is 122 Mashapaug Rd, Holland, MA 01521. (If you want to contribute to a memorial for Alex at the National Corvette Museum, email me (philg@mit.edu). A few readers have already committed $250 each.)

A tribute from someone in Union Township, New Jersey (source):

Alex is in the front row, second from left, in the blue jacket:

Alex was an outstanding student. He learned to program a computer at age 12 and achieved National Merit Scholar status in 1988. He attended the New Jersey Institute of Technology for two years, then transferred to Johns Hopkins, where his father had studied operations research and industrial engineering. (The first photo, above, is of Alex in 1993 at Hopkins.)

Evsey Domar, an MIT economics professor, cautioned undergraduates against falling in love, not because of the potential disaster that could befall a defendant in the U.S. family court system, but simply because the lover was giving far too much power to the loved and risked despair at the whim of the loved. Alex’s young adult life was, unfortunately, an example of Prof. Domar’s wisdom. Alex fell in love with a woman at Hopkins and followed her to Chicago where she would study for her Ph.D. in clinical psychology. She depended on Alex for financial and intellectual support until she had her degree in hand (7 years after they met), then discarded him when she realized that she was on track to earn more money than he was. Alex had a job assisting the dean of DePaul Law School where his voracious appetite for reading made him a valuable asset, but unfortunately his employer died and Alex decided to move to central Massachusetts to work with his father and brother.

Some of Alex’s last thoughts, expressed on Facebook:

I shall be meeting him soon I think. Sooner than I wanted. If I do, my close friends will know and we’ll know what to do I love you all. (July 2)

God what a horrible day. Inexpressible. Nothing but pain eveverywhere and pain killers are killing me. No more. Oxycodone, methadone, MORPHINE. Must STOP. (June 30)

come what may, I feel liberated to be done with the hospital care. I have been riding this hospital horse over increasingly rough ground as many as four times per week through rain, snow, summer heat, terrible traffic, at almost random hours, and as much as 200 miles round trip for a loooooong time now. I get up as early as 4:30 a.m and don’t get home until 2:00 a.m. some nights. I just can’t sustain that. … I am out of the hospital and in fact I am 100% done with my hospital care. Everyone agrees that there is nothing else they can do for me. … (June 23)

(I missed most of these as they were happening because we were on a whirlwind tour of the national parks and I wasn’t checking into social media (I had blog posts pre-scheduled).)

Based on Alex’s comments here, he was knowledgeable in at least the following domains:

  • automobile racing (a fan of Ayrton Senna)
  • automobile technology and repair, including mechanical and electrical, especially of the 2010 Ford Escape Hybrid and of a 1968 red Corvette, whose engine he rebuilt (this was the Corvette generation enjoyed by Apollo astronauts)
  • motorcycles (he had three dirt bikes)
  • watches (he became a passionate amateur watchmaker during his cancer struggles)
  • baseball (“Japanese pro baseball is the only form of the game I can watch anymore. … American baseball – despite the fans roundly hating it – is being transformed … They want hitters who can smash the ball so hard the particles emit radiation…”)
  • economics
  • Arduino programing
  • graphic arts and printing
  • philosophy (quoting Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”)
  • guns, especially rifles and the local rod and gun club
  • laser printer cartridge reconditioning (“When I lived in Baltimore a long, long time ago, for about a year I ran a pretty good side-hustle business recharging HP toner cartridges for old LaserJets. Those cartridges were comparatively easy to disassemble, clean, and recharge with a new main “pull” seal and new toner. I used to wear an N95 mask and did the “blow out” and cleaning outside!”)
  • music
  • shaving history (“Barbasol was first formulated by a former MIT professor, Frank Shields”, on one of my Gillette v. Dorco shave-off posts)

Where did he stand on COVID-19 and coronapanic? He did not discount the possibility that the disease would be as bad as the Covidcrats said, but starting on March 15, 2020, he predicted that the purported cure (lockdowns and other coercing government measures) would be worse than the disease.

The elephants in the room are the number of people who are going to die because they run out of money, and the social unrest that is going to materialize within about a month of lockdowns and closures. … What are people going to do in the July heat when they have no money, no jobs to go to, and their kids to feed? I’ll tell you what they’re going to do: they’re going to go crazy.

It looks as though he predicted both the failure of Faucism and the mostly peaceful BLM protests. Also from March 15, 2020:

All the “blunt the peak” and social distancing theory is nice, but what it really means is that the epidemic is going to last months longer. Anyone who has ever run a business knows that you can’t just shut down for two months and then pop back into action. And in large cities and small, we’re going to have real public order and crime problems.

From April 21, 2020:

everyone under 30 is going to wish they were dead when they have to dig themselves out of the $20 trillion dollar hole this is going to blow in their future.

Reading between the lines, it looks as though Alex’s cancer detection was delayed by the shutdown of health care services in Massachusetts. In April 2020, he talked about “a family member” who needed a cancer screening test due to some concerning symptoms, but the test was pushed out until the summer of 2020. His parents confirmed that Alex was diagnosed before the governor-ordered shutdown of non-emergency medical care in Massachusetts and, therefore, his cancer treatment was delayed. Metastatic prostate cancer ultimately killed our loyal friend and reader.

I will miss Alex, the knowledge that he generously shared, and his thought-provoking perspective on many topics.

Readers: I hope that you’ll raise a glass to Alex’s memory tonight. I will.

If you want to make a donation in Alex’s name, here were some of his favorite charities:

The National Corvette Museum has bricks starting at $125 for members, $175 for non-members. Alex’s parents didn’t mention this museum as one of Alex’s favorite charities, but perhaps it would make sense to memorialize him at the home of one of America’s greatest engineering achievements. Alex was a huge patriot. (I’m in the middle of an email conversation with them and waiting for their engraver to return from vacation to find out what is doable; there is a 15-character limit per line that can occasionally be stretched to 16.)

Alex’s parents, sadly, were not serious family documentarians. They were able to share a few photos, however. Alex was an accomplished rollerblader and here he is in Cancún, Mexico with, I think, the girl who ultimately broke his heart:

Alex was blessed with a golden retriever named Einstein (after Doc’s dog in Back to the Future), adopted in 1985:

Karen: “Einstein was the love of all our lives. When Alex talked to him he shivered with excitement. Alex would give him commands do this or get that and Einstein would hang on every word it was so much fun to watch.”

Here’s Alex on vacation (Savannah, Georgia?) in 2003:

In the early 1980s, Alex went to Disney World with his family. Here he is playing “Chip Cruiser”, which Google says was an EPCOT game in which you’d shoot at “contaminants” in a communications network (i.e., computer viruses!).

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Californians: assorted humans with nothing in common

by philg

Readers will be familiar with repeated questions of how our asylum-based immigration system is supposed to work. People are invited to become U.S. residents and then citizens based on a fear of violence in their country of birth. Thus, immigrants to the U.S. may have no affinity for the U.S. and nothing in common with other immigrants or natives other than a desire to avoid being killed.

Let’s see how this is playing out in California, the U.S. leader in diversity via immigration (stats below). A native-born Jew disagreed with a Muslim immigrant and the Jew ended up dead (Wikipedia).

Paul Kessler was an instrument-rated Private pilot. I couldn’t find much else that was authoritative about him.

Loay Alnaji (from a memory-holed web page at Ventura County Community College; pulled from the Google cache):

Note that “surahmeaning.com”, listed as part of his personal contact info, may relate to chapters in the Koran (“Surah“).

Are these the only two Californians who’ve been fighting recently? Let’s check this ironic headline from ABC:

Some detail on the event from the Paper of the Deplorables… “Gal Gadot’s screening [in Los Angeles] of Hamas terror attack film ends in mass brawls between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters” (New York Post, November 9, 2023):

Police officers were already out in force around the ironically named Museum of Tolerance for the “Wonder Woman” actress’s screening of “Bearing Witness to the October 7th Massacre,” which uses Israel Defense Forces footage.

Even so, wild videos posted online showed people waving Israeli flags and brawling in the streets with pro-Palestinian protesters — kicking and punching one another.

Police formed a skirmish line in an effort to control the unruly crowd — and ultimately used pepper spray, according to ABC 7.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass decried the violence in the aftermath.

“We’re not antisemitic, we’re anti-Zionist,” the unidentified protester told Rolling Stone.

UCLA:

At a decolonization rally in Los Angeles: the crowd chants “we are all Palestinians” and promises to “globalize the intifada”. Nobody wants to go to Gaza (via Egypt/tunnels) or the West Bank (easy) and fight on the side of virtue (see Why won’t the people who say that Israel is committing genocide go to Gaza and fight?). So “globalize the intifada” has to mean something that can be done in the U.S. and, likely, in California. Is it fighting with Jews in the streets? Fighting against Jewish-owned businesses? Fighting against fellow residents of California who support continued ties with Israel? Preventing fellow Californians from using the Bay Bridge (cost $6.5 billion in pre-Biden money to repair earthquake damage, up from an original budget of $250 million)?

A well-coordinated group of hundreds of Pro-Palestine protesters shut down the Bay Bridge on Thursday morning, tying up traffic during rush hour and calling out to world leaders to end the war in Gaza during the APEC summit.

The four-hour chaotic event, which started around 7:45 a.m., ended with at least 70 arrests and 29 towed cars. All lanes finally reopened just before noon, but not after at least 200 protesters had chained themselves together and purposefully tossed their car keys into the bay, stalling efforts to reopen the span to frustrated drivers.

Is it fair to say that the conflict in and around Gaza has exposed the fact that Californias have little or nothing in common?

And on the other coast… “Two women arrested in NYC attack on Jewish victim who confronted them for tearing down hostage posters: cops” (New York Post):

Mehwish Omer, 26, surrendered to police Monday morning and was charged with assault and criminal mischief — both as hate crimes — in connection to the attack on the 41-year-old woman at the corner of Riverside Drive and West 82nd Street just before 10 p.m. Nov. 9, authorities said.

Her alleged accomplice, Stephanie Gonzalez, 25, was cuffed a week earlier and also faces a hate crime assault rap, as well as an attempted robbery charge, cops said.

The duo allegedly assaulted the victim — ripping off her Star of David necklace and knocking a cellphone out of her hand — after she challenged them for ripping the “Missing Persons” posters from a light pole at the intersection, according to police.

“Mehwish” is an Islamic first name, according to The Google. “Gonzalez” suggests a Latinx individual. The victim was, presumably, Jewish. Diversity was supposed to be New York’s strength, but these three did not have enough shared values to avoid a physical fight.

What about the next stop south on I-95? “Philadelphia Jewish Restaurant Targeted With ‘Genocide’ Chants” (Newsweek):

Philadelphia lawmakers and Jewish commentators have hit out at demonstrators who targeted a falafel restaurant in Philadelphia owned by an Israeli Jewish chef, chanting slogans accusing it of “genocide.”

On Sunday, footage emerged of a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathering outside Goldie on midtown Sansom Street who were chanting “Goldie, Goldie you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, the march was organized by the Philly Palestine Coalition, which in October called for a boycott of “Zionist”-owned businesses in the city, including Goldie outlets and others owned by Michael Solomonov.

At the same time, other video footage of a demonstration near the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia showed protestors chanting “intifada revolution” and “long live the intifada,” though it is unclear if it is the same group that congregated outside Goldie.

Same question: How is diversity Philadelphia’s strength if the motley assemblage has nothing in common other than mutual animosity?

Circling back to California, it is the state with the highest percentage of immigrants, around 27 percent of the total population. How does that compare to the nation as a whole? “In October 2023, the Foreign-Born Share Was the Highest in History” (from the haters):

The Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey (CPS) shows that the total foreign-born or immigrant population (legal and illegal) was 49.5 million in October 2023 — a 4.5 million increase since President Biden took office and a new record high. At 15 percent, the foreign-born share of the U.S. population is also the highest ever recorded in American history. … The scale of immigration is so high that it appears to have made the new Census Bureau population projections, published on November 9 of this year, obsolete. The bureau projected that the foreign-born share was not supposed to hit 15 percent until 2033. … While a large share of the recent foreign-born growth is due to illegal immigration, legal immigrants still account for three-fourths of the total foreign-born population.

So… California shows us what the U.S. will be like if present trends continue. It wasn’t a great place for either Paul Kessler (now dead) or Loay Alnaji (the immigrant now embroiled in the criminal justice system; he couldn’t have killed a Jew if he’d hadn’t emigrated because Islamic countries have been almost entirely free of Jews since the late 1940s (900,000 Jews were forced out by Muslim neighbors or emigrated to Israel voluntarily)).

Previous posts regarding immigrants who did not enjoy diversity in the U.S.:

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Thanksgiving

by philg

This year, I’m especially grateful that there is no war on U.S. soil. Regardless of which side in the Hamas-Israel fight one supports, nearly everyone will agree that war is hell and those who are insulated from war are fortunate. Since 1865, Americans have enjoyed better insulation than almost any other group of people, though, of course, quite a few Americans who identified as men have been sent off to fight.

Zooming all the way to the other end of the spectrum… I’m grateful that we can eat outdoors in nice weather in Florida without being besieged by yellowjackets, the wasps that ruin what would otherwise be great experiences in the Northeast U.S. I’ve enjoyed outdoor meals on both coasts and in Orlando and never been bothered. Florida is supposedly part of this insect’s range, so I have no explanation for why yellowjackets don’t swarm around restaurants and backyard barbecues.

For something in the middle… ChatGPT, which will be one year old on November 30, especially its ability to liberate programmers from the tedium of having to search for libraries and API calls (admittedly a tedium created by other programmers, drunk on the near-infinite memory capacity of modern computer systems). ChatGPT and similar have the potential to make programming an interesting job once again (see Is “data scientist” the new “programmer”?).

Readers: What are you grateful for this year?

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Elon Musk’s biggest failure to date: the solar roof

by philg

Since the mid-1960s, the U.S. has been embarked on a program of rapid population expansion via low-skill immigration (Pew):

We bring in low-skill migrants who are destined to become lower-than-median earners (if they work at all) and insist that they be provided with at least reasonably high quality housing. This makes sense only if the cost of building housing, and delivering the required energy to that housing, can be reduced via innovation.

What about America’s most successful innovator? His contribution to this challenge has been the solar roof. From Elon Musk:

Musk had helped his cousins, Peter and Lyndon Rive, launch SolarCity in 2006, and he bailed it out ten years later by having Tesla purchase it for $2.6 billion.

As always, he invoked to [Brian Dow] the steps of the algorithm and proceeded to show how they should be applied to the solar roofs. “Question every requirement.” Specifically, they should question the requirement that the installers must work around every vent and chimney pipe sticking up from a house. The pipes for dryers and ventilator fans should simply be sheared off and the solar roof tiles placed on top of them, he suggested. The air would still be able to vent under the tiles. “Delete.” The roof system had 240 different parts, from screws to clamps to rails. More than half should be deleted. “Simplify.” The website should offer just three types of roofs: small, medium, and large. After that, the goal was to “accelerate.” Install as many roofs as possible each week.

[during a sample installation in 2021] Musk clambered up a ladder to the peak of the roof, where he stood precariously. He was not happy. There were too many fasteners, he said. Each had to be nailed down, adding time to the installation process. Half should be deleted, he insisted. “Instead of two nails for each foot, try it with only one,” he ordered. “If the house has a hurricane, the whole neighborhood is fucked up, so who cares? One nail is going to be fine.” Someone protested that could lead to leaks. “Don’t worry about making it as waterproof as a submarine,” he said. “My house in California used to leak. Somewhere between sieve and submarine should be okay.” For a moment he laughed before returning to his dark intensity. No detail was too small. The tiles and railings were shipped to the sites packed in cardboard. That was wasteful. It took time to pack things and then unpack them. Get rid of the cardboard, he said, even at the warehouses. They should send him pictures from the factories, warehouses, and sites each week showing that they were no longer using cardboard.

“We need to get the engineers who designed this system to come out here and see how hard it is to install,” he said angrily. Then he erupted. “I want to see the engineers out here installing it themselves. Not just doing it for five minutes. Up on roofs for days, for fucking days!” He ordered that, in the future, everyone on an installation team, even the engineers and managers, had to spend time drilling and hammering and sweating with the other workers. When we finally climbed back down to the ground, Brian Dow and his deputy Marcus Mueller gathered the dozen engineers and installers in the side yard to hear Musk’s thoughts. They weren’t pleasant. Why, he asked, did it take eight times longer to install a roof of solar tiles than one with regular tiles? One of the engineers, named Tony, began showing him all the wires and electronic parts. Musk already knew the workings of each component, and Tony made the mistake of sounding both assured and condescending. “How many roofs have you done?” Musk asked him. “I’ve got twenty years of experience in the roof business,” Tony answered. “But how many solar roofs have you installed?” Tony explained he was an engineer and had not actually been on a roof doing the installation. “Then you don’t fucking know what you’re fucking talking about,” Musk responded. “This is why your roofs are shit and take so long to install.”

The one-nail idea proved to be unworkable, failing during installation rather than requiring a hurricane. Musk’s intervention did result in reduced installation time, but he never got anywhere near the goal of 1,000 roofs per week. A year after the above events, and following the firing and replacing of quite a few top managers, the company was at 30 roofs per week.

(We tried and failed to get a Tesla solar roof for our house in Maskachusetts. See Tesla Solar Roof (the price is not the price). Here in Florida, we are theoretically using all solar power via paying a little extra every month. That extra money is funding a utility-scale solar array owned and operating by Florida Power & Light.)

In the rush to expand the U.S. population, nobody seems to have noticed that attempts to reduce construction costs have failed. The single-family home is still stick-built by developers in more or less the same way as 100 years ago. The dream of lower cost via prefab did not pan out. Apartment buildings aren’t getting cheaper to construct, in constant dollars, I don’t think, but inflation has been reduced by lowering quality. Developers use flammable wood and sprinklers instead of concrete. “Why America’s New Apartment Buildings All Look the Same” (Bloomberg 2019)

Los Angeles architect Tim Smith was sitting on a Hawaiian beach, reading through the latest building code, as one does, when he noticed that it classified wood treated with fire retardant as noncombustible. That made wood eligible, he realized, for a building category—originally known as “ordinary masonry construction” but long since amended to require only that outer walls be made entirely of noncombustible material—that allowed for five stories with sprinklers.

By putting five wood stories over a one-story concrete podium and covering more of the one-acre lot than a high-rise could fill, Smith figured out how to get the 100 apartments at 60 percent to 70 percent of the cost.

the buildings have proved highly flammable before the sprinklers and walls go in. Dozens of major fires have broken out at mid-rise construction sites over the past five years. Of the 13 U.S. blazes that resulted in damages of $20 million or more in 2017, according to the National Fire Protection Association, six were at wood-frame apartment buildings under construction.

Maybe these buildings won’t burn, but I expect them to degrade and sag more than a concrete apartment building would and be more resistant to rehab.

So… even our most successful innovator, backed up by $billions in capital, hasn’t been able to scratch, much less dent, the problem of housing costs being far higher than what immigrants can afford. And yet we continue to keep our border open.

Health care, obviously, is not affordable for today’s typical migrant, though the true cost is often disguised either by an employer or the government (Medicaid). Let’s also look at car prices. A car is the typical family’s third largest expense after housing and health care. It seems unfair to compare today’s pavement-melting SUVs to the cars of 1965. Maybe we could look at the bottom end of today’s car market as a comparable. CNBC says that this is 30,000 Bidies. That translates to about $5,500 in 1965 dollars (BLS). How much did a car cost in 1965? Hemmings says that a Corvette cost $4,223 in 1965 while a Mustang with a V-8 was $2,734. A basic Dodge Dart was $1,959 and a full-sized Chevy Impala was $2,295 (I think both would seat 6 humans, so they actually had more utility than today’s cheap cars!), according to this source.

So… the costs of producing all of the basics of American life have gone up, in real terms, since the modern immigration wave began, we do not seek to preferentially admit those who are likely to earn higher incomes, and even heroes such as Elon Musk can’t get the construction industry out of its productivity stagnation.

As there is no Spanish tile option for the Tesla solar roof, I don’t think that we would be able to get one. I typed in some data on our house, including that we pay $600/month for electric (the average number might be closer to $500) and got a quote from their web site:

If we assume a zero interest rate environment, the purchase price works out to 606 months of electric bills. The roof then pays for itself in 50 years. Perhaps it would be fairer to subtract the likely cost of a new tile roof since we will need one of those eventually. Let’s call that $80,000. Now we’re down to a 39-year payback period. This is before considering the subsidies from working class renters that our rulers have generously decreed.

Related:

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The father of 96

by philg

A rich current American Zeitgeist mine… “A Sperm Donor Chases a Role in the Lives of the 96 Children He Fathered” (WSJ):

Dylan Stone-Miller took a 9,000-mile road trip this summer to see some of his 96 children.

Months after Stone-Miller and his wife split up in 2020, a stranger messaged him.

Stone-Miller has twice visited Harper and her sister Harlow—also one of his biological children. In July, he stayed nine days at an Airbnb near their house in Edmonton, Canada, the longest visit of his road trip. The girls’ mothers acknowledged the complexities of the relationship, from his role in their lives to what to call him.

“I don’t want Harper to feel like she can call him anything,” Bowes said. “He is not her dad. Period. If she were to say that in front of us, we would straight up say, ‘Dylan is not your dad. He will never be your dad. You don’t have a dad. You have a donor.’ ”

Before leaving on his trip, Stone-Miller went to see Cal, his 6-year-old biological child who lives in a suburb of Atlanta. He had visited the boy several times in the past two years, and Cal told his two mothers that he wanted to spend time alone with Stone-Miller. The moms agreed to let Stone-Miller drive Cal to a Target store to buy toys. … After Target, they went to the park to spend the afternoon with Cal’s moms and his 3-year-old brother, another of Stone-Miller’s biological children.

Stone-Miller’s parents divorced when he was 14.

Stone-Miller, who was studying psychology at Georgia State University, was arrested for underage drinking.

Fans of The Son Also Rises will not be surprised that the child of divorce is himself divorced. Let’s hope that the tendency to be arrested isn’t heritable with these 96 kids as it has been for most humans (see, for example, “A Swedish national twin study of criminal behavior and its violent, white-collar and property subtypes”).

The WSJ includes a photo of what the ideal modern American family looks like:

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Big Sky v. Jackson v. Park City as a summer destination

by philg

Interested in escaping to the mountains for all or part of the summer? Here’s a report, based on 2023 visits, regarding three possibilities.

Park City, Utah (elevation 7,000′) is the best choice if you’re passionate about Pride and 2SLGBTQQIA+. The city purchased at least 100 trans-enhanced rainbow flags and has hung them from every lamppost in the small downtown area. You can pay obeisance to Rainbow Flagism before you think about entering a business establishment, which might in turn have its own 2SLGBTQQIA+ talismans on the windows or door. If you’re not a follower of the state religion, however, you might be annoyed by Park City’s tilted situation. There are no level streets downtown. Park City is great if you’re planning to break a bone doing an adventure sport or if you’re planning on suffering a total body meltdown due to old age. A friend went from ski accident in Park City to world-class University of Utah hospital in 25 minutes via ambulance. The surrounding area is certainly more scenic than most of Florida, but it is far from any National Park.

Big Sky, Montana exemplifies everything that is bad about American sprawl. There are three main developments spread out along a highway, none of which has sufficient critical mass to constitute a city or even a “town”. Let’s call them three strip malls, one of which includes ski lifts. Everything is part of a single “resort”, which is able to impose a 4% sales tax on everything sold by the stores within Big Sky (Montana itself has no sales tax, so stock up in Bozeman or West Yellowstone!). But the resort corporation ignored all of the principles of New Urbanism and the sprawl does not feel planned. You can be crammed into a townhouse or condo development or you can be isolated and car-dependent far out from one of the three strip malls.

For peasants, Big Sky is tough to access. It is a 1.5-hour drive from the regional airport in Bozeman. The elite will sometimes do this or Gulfstream it to KWYS, a 35-minute drive away and blessed with an 8400′ runway and approaches down to 200′ AGL.

The exception to the above might be for the rich folks who hang out together in the Yellowstone Club (two shared and one private helipad inside so that the above drives are rendered unnecessary). Otherwise, Big Sky shows the genius of the New Urbanism folks who created our community. The shared gym, pool, lawn, playground, etc. for every 150-200 households and the compact layout (but still mostly single-family homes) facilitate social connections.

If you’re going to check out Big Sky and coming from sea level, I recommend the Marriott “Wilson”, which is in the middle strip mall that is 1,000′ lower than the base of the ski hill. This hotel was built in 2019 and folks say that the base lodges are getting worn and tired. There is a good walk down to an impressive waterfall. Bidenflation is a Republican lie: my haircut (without shampoo) at the local barber shop was only $55 plus tip. Here are the prices at the local Mexican food truck where local laborers get lunch (13 Bidies for a sandwich):

Jackson, Wyoming (elevation 6,237′) shows the importance of flatness. Hills are great if it is winter and you want to ski, but they’re annoying if you’re going to the supermarket. Jackson has a huge amount of more-or-less flat valley area that enables the development of a functional city, an extensive bike path network that you don’t need to be a hero to enjoy, etc. The wildlife art museum is a great place to hang out, especially because the members’ room is open to all and there is a good restaurant on site. You could spend 4-5 hours here with a meal and then doing some reading while looking out over the elk refuge. Jackson has its own regional airport (kind of a short runway and the approaches aren’t great, but airlines serve it). It also has an in-town low-elevation ski hill that looks good for beginners (the eponymous ski resort for Jackson is huge and terrifying).

Jackson offers quick access to Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park. Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that it will take nearly 5 hours to drive to the nearest real city: Salt Lake. I’m sure that the local hospital is great for orthopedics, but if you need any other high-end specialist it will be quite a project to see a doctor in Salt Lake City. The lack of inflation meant that it was only $30 plus tip for Pad Thai in Jackson:

Residential construction was proceeding at a feverish place in all of the places that we visited (on our way to a Chinese level of population density!), but even where it seemed that a lot of land was available the prices were stratospheric. Park City was perhaps the most affordable. In Big Sky and Jackson, the townhouse lifestyle is $1-2 million and the single-family houses with a big of land and a gorgeous view were mostly $4-10 million. Here’s the downtown Jackson view on Zillow. Note that many of these multi-$million properties are either apartments or vacant land.

Tax implications: Wyoming has no personal income tax. If you end up getting stuck there for more than 6 months or fall in love with Jackson and decide to make it your primary home, you won’t pay income tax. Utah and Montana both have income taxes. None of the three states have estate or inheritance taxes. The family law systems and associated profits for alimony and child support plaintiffs are quite different among these three states as well. See Real World Divorce.

Conclusion: I think that Jackson is the nicest place among the above three. Unfortunately, it is also everyone else’s favorite so it is super expensive. The long distance from a major city is concerning as well. Due to the urban layout, it should be easier to build a social life in Jackson than in Big Sky or Park City. That said, it probably still wouldn’t be that easy due to the large percentage of transients.

On the third hand: If you stay in Florida for the summer, you are unlikely to suffer from forest fire smoke, a problem that has been common for thousands of years in the mountain states, especially up north. Here’s the sky in the Titusville/Cape Canaveral area on July 1, 2023, when folks in the Midwest and Northeast were putting their N95s back on:

(we were up there watching SpaceX push the European Euclid telescope toward the L2 Lagrange Point; even the Florida-hating NYT was forced to admit that “The weather was almost perfect for the flight”)

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Djibouti and Puerto Rico

by philg

Happy Industrial Workers of the World Day.

From the World Bank, here’s a chart of labor force participation in Puerto Rico:

41 percent of the folks who are 15+ work. Compare to 70 percent in Singapore, New Zealand, Jamaica, and Ghana. Where can we go to find places where people are less likely to work? Djibouti!

Related:

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Abortion care as a wedding gift?

by philg

I just RSVP’d for a family wedding. Here’s what I found in the wedding registry:

In other words, to mark an event traditionally associated with reproduction guests can give the gift of abortion care (for pregnant people).

Since I absolutely have to be there and might have to zip to Los Angeles the day after (helicopter ferry trip), it was time to give some money to our commercial airline oligopoly. United tried to sell me trip cancellation insurance, noting explicitly that COVID-19 is “foreseen”:

Readers: If you are are giving abortion care as a wedding gift, what is the correct amount to give?

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Book review: the American love affair with opioids, accelerated by McKinsey

by philg

Loyal readers may remember a review here of a book by a Los Angeles Times reporter on America’s taxpayer-fueled heroin habit (see Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.). Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty covers the same story from the angle of the family behind OxyContin. The Sacklers, whose names adorn university and art museum buildings throughout the U.S. and Europe, have been convenient scapegoats, but it turns out that they didn’t do it alone. Some things that I learned from the book…

Arthur M. Sackler, the patriarch, died before OxyContin was invented (the slow-release coating was actually the invention of a British company that had been acquired by the Sacklers’ sleepy Purdue Pharma and was used originally for morphine pills called “MS Contin”). He was the significant art collector and benefactor of AOC’s party venue at the Metropolitan Museum (how did it cost $587 for a car ride from the Bronx to the Upper East Side?). With the help of some friendly bureaucrats at the FDA, who would go on to be of much greater assistance to his brothers’ company Purdue, he pushed the limits of what was legal/ethical in medical advertising, especially for Valium and Librium, but museums are still happy to display the name of Hoffmann-La Roche, which actually made the drugs.

The book describes McKinsey, “The firm that built the house of Enron”, working to help Purdue Pharma increase sales of OxyContin even after the company and three executives had pleaded guilty to federal crimes regarding claims made regarding the drug. McKinsey’s biggest idea, according to the author, was that Purdue Pharma’s salespeople should make more frequent calls on the doctors who were the biggest prescribers, i.e., the “pill mills” such as Eleanor Santiago‘s (1 million pills, which resulted in a 20-month prison sentence for the physician). McKinsey also consulted for Johnson & Johnson, the author says, to help them push more opioids out to consumers. (See “Behind the Scenes, McKinsey Guided Companies at the Center of the Opioid Crisis” (NYT 2022))

Speaking of Johnson & Johnson, they owned a division in Tasmania where all of the poppies were grown to enable the production of OxyContin and competitive opioid pills from Janssen (J&J’s pharma subsidiary, now famous for its never-FDA-approved one-shot COVID vaccine) and other companies (in-depth background). The Federal DEA was also complicit in allowing a massive increase in the import quota for this critical raw material.

The author describes Mary Jo White, later appointed by Barack Obama to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission, as instrumental in weakening the government’s efforts to punish Purdue, which was owned entirely by the Sacklers (not, however, by any of Arthur M’s descendants or cash-hungry former wives, “the Valium Sacklers” as opposed to the “OxyContin Sacklers”).

Consistent with Dreamland, the book previously reviewed here, Empire of Pain says that it was common for people to transition from Oxy to heroin sold by migrants from Nayarit, Mexico and that, in fact, 80 percent of heroin overdoses were among people who’d previously been prescribed OxyContin. (See also “From Nayarit to Your Neighborhood: Heroin’s Path to a Ready Local Market”.)

The book supports the heritability of success theory advanced in The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications. Even after a couple of generations that could have succumbed to idleness, the Sackler descendants are reasonably hard-working and successful. Madeleine Sackler, for example, has been successful as a filmmaker (ironically, a couple of them are about life in prison, which is not unrelated to the drug that has funded her lifestyle).

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty is timely given that a lot of our American brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters were just paid $600/week to stay home for two years and consume drugs and alcohol (this Senate document says there was a 30 percent increase in overdose deaths, but blames the “pandemic” rather than the “lockdown”). The antiracism experts at Mass General say that heavy drinking increased by 21 percent during lockdown.

If nothing else, reading the book will make you cautious about taking that first bottle of painkillers that a doctor prescribes!

The author is a New Yorker writer and he asserts as fact that HIV/AIDS would have been a solved problem if Republicans had not blocked federal funding for research into a cure for this disease (yet SARS-CoV-2 continues to kill steadily despite literally $trillions in tax money that has been thrown at it; see Did vaccines or any other intervention slow down COVID?). He also asserts as fact that if Purdue Pharma was liable for opioid-related deaths then gun manufacturers are obviously liable for shooting deaths (never mentioning that the gun manufacturers have always been quite candid about the lethality of guns/bullets and that the theory of liability for the opioid industry is that the companies lied to Americans about heroin-style drugs not being addictive/harmful).

Loosely related… the Temple of Dendur at the Met, in what used to be called “The Sackler Wing” (funded by Arthur M, blameless in the OxyContin debacle), “temporarily closed” in June 2021 for coronapanic:

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