Category: Government

How did the legacy admissions scheme last this long?

by philg

Nominally “private” colleges and universities get so much money from taxpayers that they are essentially part of the government. Taxpayers fund tuition grants that go straight into the colleges’ pockets. Taxpayers subsidize student loans that boost revenue by letting students pay more. Taxpayers fund research grants from which universities extract “overhead”.

The Equal Protection Clause:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

College admission isn’t exactly a “law”, but various cases have been decided in which this clause was applied to government programs generally, e.g., forcing states to allow same-sex marriage (and, eventually, throuples?). It wouldn’t be okay for the FAA to say “Your mom held a pilot certificate so therefore we’re going to let you have a pilot certificate at 35 hours instead of the usual minimum of 40.” Nor could the FAA say “We’re cutting you slack on the practical test because you paid $1 million in federal income tax last year.” Why is it okay for government-funded schools, such as Yale and Stanford, to say “We’re going to lower the bar for you because your parents attended and/or donated”?

Is the answer simply that no high-scoring-but-rejected-by-Yale applicant ever sued and obtained discovery showing that (1) second-rate legacy kids got admitted instead, and (2) Yale is firmly entrenched underneath a shower of government money?

Related:

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What if our National Parks charged Navajo prices?

by philg

Our National Parks get less than 10 percent of their budget from entrance fees. In other words, people who don’t go to the parks are subsidizing people who do go to the parks. A 2015 report found that visitors paid $186 million in fees directly and $85 million via concessions (food and hotels) while the Park Service spent $3.1 billion.

Part of the reason for this is that prices are low. Not quite as low as in 1938, when the parks were free:

But an annual pass that enables 8 people in a minivan to spend 3-4 weeks in the parks is $80. I had already purchased a pass for the Vegas/Pahrump trip (Death Valley, Sheri’s Ranch to try to meet up with Hunter Biden, Corvette School, etc.) so it cost us $0 in fees to spend 3 weeks in the National Parks in June. Even if we had paid $80 that would have been less than the cost of housekeeping tips ($5 is the new $3).

Let’s assume a family of 4. What do the Navajo charge for them to look at something interesting? We took a one-hour tour of Antelope Canyon and it worked out to $100 per person. Here’s a photo from that excursion:

Let’s assume that a typical family won’t be able to pay $400 per hour every hour, but $100 per person per day is the “Navajo rate” for what could reasonably be charged. The National Park Service budget is up to $3.6 billion in Bidies. For the agency to be fully funded by visitors, therefore, they’d have to host 36 million person-days. Is that practical? State-sponsored NPR says that 312 million people visited in 2022. It is unclear if they’re counting how many days each person spent in the park and, of course, visitation would fall if Navajo pricing were established rather than give-away pricing, but it seems clear that the Park Service could easily fund itself from entrance fees.

For reference, the Chileans charge foreigners $35 per adult to visit their signature national park for one day. Even at Chilean prices it would seem that the NPS could easily be self-funded.

What about families where nobody has worked for 4 generations? How are they going to enjoy the Grand Canyon? As with museums, anyone with a SNAP/EBT card could be admitted for free.

What’s wrong with the current system? Nothing, if you’re a member of the elite! Since the NPS isn’t charging anything for park entry, the people who own hotels and restaurants in the parks (i.e., the cronies) can charge higher prices. It ends up costing about $1000/day to visit the parks in any degree of comfort, so the visitors themselves tend to be elite.

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National Parkflation

by philg

Gift shops at National Parks sell books, stickers, posters, and quilts featuring all of the parks for those who wish to try to hit them all (my favorite is a scratch-off). If you’re old and remember when the “National Park” designation was reserved for truly spectacular places you will greatly underestimate the challenge. There are now 63 National Parks. How is that possible? 63 places in the U.S. that deserve to be mentioned as peers to Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon?!?

It turns out that there has been a substantial amount of Parkflation.

Eero Saarinen’s 1965 Gateway Arch in St. Louis was redesignated from Jefferson National Expansion Memorial to Gateway Arch National Park in 2018 (Wikipedia).

Black Canyon of the Gunnison was a National Monument starting in 1933. Without any upgrades to the sights, which Coloradans say are worth a half-day visit, it became a National Park in 1999.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park is a set of hills cut through with highways just south of Cleveland. Half of Connecticut and all of New Hampshire qualifies as a National Park if this place does. From Wikipedia:

Cuyahoga Valley was originally designated as a National Recreation Area in 1974, then redesignated as a national park 26 years later in 2000, and remains the only national park that originated as a national recreation area.

We checked off the park on the way to Oshkosh 2021. It’s a pleasant place for an afternoon walk if you don’t mind being able to hear road noise.

The UNESCO World Heritage folks are more discriminating. Only 12 natural sites, all National Parks, make the cut:

  1. Carlsbad Caverns National Park (1995)
  2. Everglades National Park (1979)
  3. Grand Canyon National Park (1979)
  4. Great Smoky Mountains National Park (1983)
  5. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (1987)
  6. Kluane / Wrangell-St. Elias / Glacier Bay / Tatshenshini-Alsek (1979, 1992, 1994)
  7. Mammoth Cave National Park (1981)
  8. Olympic National Park (1981)
  9. Redwood National and State Parks (1980)
  10. Waterton Glacier International Peace Park (1995)
  11. Yellowstone National Park (1978)
  12. Yosemite National Park (1984)

(One’s in Florida!)

Readers: What are your predictions for the next few U.S. National Parks? Here are mine:

The southern edge of Vermilion Cliffs, as viewed when driving from Grand Canyon North Rim to Page, Arizona:

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Branch Covidians in the National Park Service

by philg

3.5 years after coronapanic began, the National Park Service web site:

Tours of Glen Canyon Dam
Following guidance from the White House, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and state and local public health authorities, the dam is closed to the public.

In case the above is memory-holed:

At Yellowstone, the National Park Service encourages visitors to wear a mask and social distance when outside in a 20-knot breeze:

What are other Americans up to? Just 10 minutes from the National Park Service HQ in Washington, D.C., there is a 24/7 bathhouse:

(The 2SLGBTQQIA+ club reopened in the summer of 2021. A 12-year-old needed to show his/her/zir/their vaccine papers to go to a public place in D.C., such as a restaurant, but the Covidcrats didn’t see any infectious disease potential in a venue where a customer might have sex with 25 different partners in one night.)

Perhaps we’re just looking at #AbundanceOfCaution and slavish devotion to CDC guidance? Here’s the CDC’s main page for COVID-19 prevention (the filename is actually “prevention”):

Handwashing is featured above even the sacred Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The National Parks have become mass gatherings and are more crowded, certainly, than our day-to-day lifestyle in the city of Jupiter, Florida (see this post, and the photos link, regarding Zion). Florida city, county, and state governments are all about building and maintaining clean public restrooms, despite being notorious for rejecting CDC guidance on lockdowns, school closures, mask orders, and forced COVID-19 vaccination. We might expect the Branch Covidians at the National Park Service to have overtaken Florida government officials in providing handwashing facilities to the general public. Yet, in fact, I found the opposite was true during a summer 2023 visit to various parks. Restrooms with running water inside the parks were closed and/or being shut down (sometimes primitive outhouses with no sinks were substituted), thus making it impossible for the humans gathering in these parks to wash their hands per CDC guidance. Said humans are encouraged and/or forced (depending on the park) to ride packed buses, so the “they’re gathering only outdoors” response does not apply.

Here’s an example closed restroom in Yellowstone:

Near the popular Steamboat Geyser:

How about in Canyonlands National Park? Maybe it is unreasonable to ask the Feds to give customers a potentially life-saving running-water bathroom on a plateau that is so high above the water? (Some of the guys running cattle on the adjacent federal land seem to be pumping water, though.) The Feds are charging only $30 per vehicle, after all, so maybe outhouses are all that we can expect. On the same plateau, the Utah state government folks who run Dead Horse Point State Park charge a $20 fee and truck water up so that visitors can enjoy civilized bathroom experiences:

Only very loosely related… the federal government imposes just one rule for what it calls the “Fishing Bridge”: no fishing. Yellowstone National Park:

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Diversity is our strength, NASA edition

by philg

Many moons ago, so to speak, I was a Fortran programmer on the Pioneer Venus project. Here’s a recent tweet from my former employer:

There’s “space for everyone” and “different perspectives” are valuable. But on the other hand, there is no space for perspectives from taxpayers who fund the agency.

Also, why is it just “LGBTQI+”? Why not 2SLGBTQQIA+?

Finally, if the future of the galaxy is female, according to Science and the baseball cap below, why does NASA hire anyone who identifies as of the 73 other genders recognized by Science? Why is “diversity” better than betting on the winning gender?

Related:

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Where can state government workers relax at Black taxpayers’ expense?

by philg

Today is Juneteenth, when the Black working class can work and pay taxes so that the white laptop class (e.g., federal government workers) can enjoy a day off. But where does the Black working class have the opportunity to pay taxes to fund leisure for white laptop class members who are state government workers? Pew offers a map:

It isn’t surprising that Deplorable Florida fails to give state workers an extra paid holiday (the same article, however, shows that Florida was the very first state (1991) to recognize Juneteenth as “an observance”). Shockingly, however, Juneteenth is merely a “personal holiday” in California that workers can choose to take on June 19 (in which case a worker would lose the opportunity to take a holiday on Eid al-Fitr or Eid al-Adha, for example).

Separately, I hope that your Juneteenth celebration is at least “mostly peaceful” (see “1 dead, at least 22 hurt in a shooting at a Juneteenth celebration in Willowbrook, Illinois, police say” (CNN): “At least 22 people were injured and one person was killed by gunfire overnight in Illinois, in a peaceful Juneteenth celebration… The incident is now one of 310 mass shootings in the US this year…”).

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San Francisco Fed sends a thank-you note to the FDIC

by philg

In light of this weekend’s failure and seizure of First Republic Bank, I thought it might be nice if the FDIC employees who are working over the weekend, at modest rates of pay, got a thank-you note from the regulators and supervisors at the San Francisco Fed who enabled the Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic failures. (The regional Feds are not technically part of the government and they pay employees vastly more than actual federal government agencies, such as the FDIC, do.)

My prompt to ChatGPT:

My name is Mary C. Daly and I earn over $400,000 per year working at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. I’ve been busy tackling the diversity crisis at the Federal Reserve and also in the wider economics profession. Consequently, Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank both failed on my watch. Please draft a thank-you note from me to the hard-working employees at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for all the clean-up work that they do after banks that I supervise fail. Work in that I hope they enjoy that GS-based salaries and ask if they want me to buy them a Starbucks gift card with my higher-than-Joe-Biden’s salary paycheck.

The response, not in quote style:

Subject: Gratitude and Appreciation from Mary C. Daly

Dear FDIC Team,

I hope this message finds you well. My name is Mary C. Daly, and I am currently working at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank. I wanted to take a moment to express my sincere gratitude and appreciation for the outstanding work that each and every one of you does at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

I understand that, in recent times, both Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank experienced difficulties that ultimately led to their failure. As the events unfolded, it became apparent just how crucial the FDIC’s role is in providing stability and confidence in the financial system. I am truly grateful for the diligence, professionalism, and expertise you demonstrated during the clean-up process, and I acknowledge that your hard work has been indispensable in mitigating the impact of these unfortunate events.

As someone who has been focusing on addressing the diversity crisis within the Federal Reserve and the wider economics profession, I am keenly aware of the challenges and demands associated with our roles. I hope you find satisfaction and pride in the vital work you carry out, as well as in the GS-based salaries you earn, which are well-deserved.

I would also like to extend a lighthearted offer: if you ever find yourselves in need of a little pick-me-up, please let me know, and I would be more than happy to send a Starbucks gift card your way. It would be a small token of appreciation for your continued efforts in ensuring the stability of our financial system.

Once again, thank you for the important work that you do. Your dedication and commitment to upholding the integrity of our financial institutions do not go unnoticed. Wishing you all continued success in your endeavors.

Warm regards,

Mary C. Daly

How about a thank-you for the folks who will pay for all of this? The prompt:

Please write an additional thank-you note that will go out to all Americans who are customers at banks outside of California, thanking them for accepting low interest rates and poor customer service on their deposits so that their boring banks could pay big fees into the FDIC fund that will bail out the banks that I was supervising.

The output:

Subject: A Heartfelt Thank You to Bank Customers Nationwide

Dear Fellow Americans,

As a representative of the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to all of you who bank with institutions outside of California. Your continued support and patronage of these banks have contributed greatly to the stability and resilience of our financial system.

I understand that many of you have been accepting lower interest rates and, at times, less-than-ideal customer service in order to support your local banks. Your willingness to make these sacrifices has enabled these institutions to contribute to the FDIC fund, which in turn has played a critical role in safeguarding our financial system during times of crisis.

The recent challenges faced by Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank have highlighted the importance of the FDIC fund in maintaining confidence and stability within our banking sector. Your ongoing support has been instrumental in ensuring that the necessary resources are available to assist banks in need, thereby minimizing the impact on both the industry and the wider economy.

I want to thank each and every one of you for your understanding and commitment to the greater good. It is through your collective efforts that we can continue to build a stronger, more resilient financial system that benefits all Americans.

In recognition of your contributions, I encourage you to voice your expectations and demand better service and competitive rates from your financial institutions. Your feedback and active engagement will drive improvement within the industry, ultimately leading to a more prosperous and stable financial future for us all.

Once again, thank you for your unwavering support and dedication to the financial wellbeing of our nation.

With warm regards,

Mary C. Daly
San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank

Meanwhile, a tweet from a San Francisco resident:

(I admonished her that the CDC-preferred term is not “crackheads” but rather “Persons who use crack”)

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Quantifying our incompetence at government-run health care

by philg

Almost everything having to do with health care in the U.S. is controlled by our government. A doctor cannot practice unless approved by a state government (can take 6-12 months here in Florida, so the supply of doctors always lags the demand from patients who have moved). Once he/she/ze/they is approved, half of his/her/zir/their salary will be paid for directly by government (Medicare/Medicaid) while the other half comes from government-regulated and government-subsidized “private” health insurance. Bureaucrats often talk about their heroic efforts in controlling costs. Without them in our corner, we would pay 40 percent of GDP for health care instead of 20 percent.

Every now and then we get a window into our own incompetence via an international comparison either for price or quality. “Have Eggs, Will Travel. To Freeze Them.” (New York Times, April 8):

Milvia found that in the United States, the entire process — including the medications, the doctor visits and the average number of years of egg storage — costs about $18,000, and most women can’t count on health insurance to cover it. As of 2020, less than 20 percent of U.S. companies with more than 20,000 employees had health insurance plans to cover the procedure, according to Mercer Health News, though that figure rose from 2015 to 2020.

(Why does the NYT speak of “women”? Men may also want to freeze their eggs!)

Hotels, restaurants, and other labor-intensive services aren’t cheaper in Europe than they are here in the U.S. what about egg-freezing?

Many countries have clinics that are much cheaper. In the Czech Republic and Spain, for example, you can get one round of egg-freezing done for under $5,400, according to the website of Freeze Health, which provides information on egg freezing around the world.

Milvia is taking its first women to Britain, where prices hover in the $7,000 range, because “we wanted to start in a place where there is no language or cultural barrier,” Mr. Ghavalkar said. “We also want to make sure we’re in a place where all clinics operate at very high standards.”

So it is 14X the cost of a decent hotel in London to freeze an egg in London. If we assume that a decent hotel room in a typical U.S. city is now $250 per night, egg-freezing is 72X the cost of a hotel here in the U.S.

How about running a refrigerator? Where electricity is more expensive, cold storage for eggs is about 1/4 the price:

Women who freeze their eggs abroad can choose to keep their eggs in that country where storage costs are usually cheaper. In Canada, for example, it can cost under $200 a year to store your eggs. In Spain you can do it for a little over $200. In Los Angeles, by contrast, a year of storage costs about $750. In New York City, it’s more than $1,000, according to Freeze Health.

(Again, note the hateful anti-2SLGBTQQIA+ assumption that it is “women” who freeze eggs.)

Vaguely along the same lines, the NYT also recently published “In Search of Romance? Try Moving Abroad.”:

For some American women, relocating outside of the United States has improved their dating lives. But some warn that finding love involves more than a change of address.

Now, Ms. Margo is living a dream [having sex with a wide variety of French guys] of many American women who are seeking relationships abroad, some of whom cite the toxic dating scene in the United States.

If you thought that Americans were insufficiently passionate about geriatric parenthood and/or a lifetime of Tinderhood…

Cepee Tabibian, who moved to Madrid at 35 from Austin, Texas, felt similarly. She was excited to meet people in Spain, where she noticed a culture of getting married or having children later in life than in the United States, or not getting married at all. “When I walked into the room, I wasn’t the oldest person,” Ms. Tabibian said. “I wasn’t the only single person.”

Is there a market for successful American divorce plaintiffs?

For Cindy Sheahan, meeting people outside of her circles in Denver was momentous. She started traveling solo shortly after ending her 30-year marriage in 2016.

She found the men she dated in Denver after her divorce to be unadventurous. She said she went on 60 dates in 2017.

“It was like a comedy show,” she said.

At the end of 2017, she quit her job and traveled throughout Southeast Asia for leisure, and she started using Tinder.

“Because they were out there living their life, there was a lot more energy to the dates,” Ms. Sheahan, 61, said about the people she met while traveling. “It wasn’t just somebody meeting after their work at the bank, on their way home to let out the dog in Denver.”

In 2018, she met her partner of five years, Jean-Marie Mas, a 61-year-old professional tandem paraglider from Dordogne, France, in Nepal.

Apparently the divorce lawsuit freed her from ever having to work!

Related:

  • Time is ripe for Cubans to become Medicare vendors (2014)
  • A modest proposal for the Carnival Triumph (2013): The Triumph would leave every morning at around 8:00 am. Medicare clients would enjoy a Cracker Barrel breakfast on board the ship. The ship would arrive in Cuba at 12 noon. Those who were well enough to walk could enjoy a stroll around Havana. The Triumph would pick up patients returning from hospital care in Cuba and anyone who’d been enjoying the sights, then depart around 2:30 pm. An early bird special dinner would be served on board starting at 5 pm, with an arrival back in Key West at 6:30 pm.
  • Carnival Sunrise (instead of doing something innovative with international healthcare, the cruise line simply renamed the fire-and-sewage-plagued vessel)
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Remembering when Vladimir Putin tried to help us

by philg

Today is the 10th anniversary of the jihad waged by successful asylum-seekers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev at the Boston Marathon. They lived at taxpayer expense in Cambridge, Maskachusetts after being granted permanent welfare entitlement in the U.S. on the grounds that Russia would not let them wage jihad in Russia. Dzhokhar studied diversity and tolerance at the Cambridge Public High School.

Tamerlan celebrated the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by killing two Jews and a roommate in Waltham, Maskachusetts.

Aside from eliminating access to the U.S. for asylum-seekers, what could have been done to prevent the Waltham murders and the Boston Marathon jihad? We could have heeded the warning of Vladimir Putin’s government. From “Russia Told America To Detain Tamerlan Tsarnaev Years Ago” (Insider, March 2014):

NBC News said the Russian intelligence agency FSB cabled the FBI about its concerns in March 2011, warning that Tsarnaev was known to have associated with militant Islamists.

The network said the FBI opened an investigation of Tsarnaev that month conducted by a joint task force of federal, state and local authorities. Tsarnaev was interviewed in person, and a memo was sent to the Customs and Border Protection database called TECS that would trigger an alert whenever he left or re-entered the United States.

But the investigation was closed in June 2011 after finding Tsarnaev had no links to terrorism, NBC quoted the report as saying.

In September 2011, the FSB sent a cable to the CIA, restating the warnings of the first memo. NBC News quoted sources close to the congressional investigation as saying a second note about Tsarnaev was entered into the TECS system the next month, but spelled his name “Tsarnayev.”

So we can perhaps reflect today on a time when we had a better relationship with Russia.

Related:

IMG0045.PCD
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Is the government lying to us about gas stoves?

by philg

From the Environmental Protection Agency:

We have an Italian natural gas range of doubtful quality. It is 15 years old. I am willing to bet that it has not been adjusted at any time in the past 5 years and, very likely, not at any time since its 2008 installation. I spent $200 on a low-level CO meter with 0.1 ppm resolution (not for this project, but to verify proper sealing of the piston-powered airplane’s heater). The meter arrives pre-calibrated at least at the 5 ppm level, which is supposedly the minimum we can expect near our health-destroying kitchen appliance, and says it has a range of 0-100 ppm.

What did it read parked right next to the range with two burners going? 0.0 ppm. Maybe it was broken. I walked around to various other parts of the house and got readings between 0.1 and 0.3 ppm. I went to the garage and started a car without opening the door. Within about 10 seconds the meter began to register 5 ppm then the alarm went off at 10 ppm (a home CO detector will trigger quickly at 400 ppm; see below from Kidde).

The garage air hit about 50 ppm in less than 60 seconds of running the car without the door open and the meter then showed a gradual downward trend after the was shut off and the door opened.

The EPA says that we should have expected a best case of 5-15 ppm in our kitchen, where two burners of the stove had been in use for an hour or so. We were reading 0.

Readers with CO meters: can you please test your house? How can we account for the discrepancy between what Science (the EPA) says and what a humble engineer measures?

Note: I would support a tax on non-induction ranges, both electric and gas, to fund hospital burn units and if I were building a house I would choose induction rather than a showy faux-commercial gas range. [Update: After the reader comment below regarding pacemakers and insulin pumps, I might have to reconsider my love for induction (or wear foil-lined garments once I reach pacemaker age?). It would be a horrible shame to have to convert from induction back to an old-school electric cooktop. On the the third hand, https://acadiacenter.org/hot-topic-dispelling-the-myths-about-induction-stoves/ says “There has never been a recorded instance of pacemaker interference with induction cooktops.” Maybe this is superstition like booster seats for 5-year-olds!]

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