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Two of the most popular political ideas in the U.S. right now are expanded immigration and socialism. While on the ground in Havana it struck me that maybe Cuba provides a good laboratory example. The native population, e.g., the Taíno, contributed the city’s name and then were promptly disposessed of their land and wiped out by waves of immigrants. The current government doesn’t seem to think that this was a positive example of the benefits of immigration and therefore citizenship is apparently generally unavailable except via birth to existing Cuban citizens (source).

How about socialism? On the positive side of the ledger, the crime rate in Cuba is low. Havana is considered safe and walkable at all hours. Other than mojitos, drugs are illegal and do not seem to be prevalent either for consumption or buying/selling. Our guide told us that there was essenetially no drug crime. There are plenty of neighborhoods in San Francisco that are far scarier.

As with most U.S. cities, the road and highway infrastructure dates primarily from 1900-1960. Unlike most U.S. cities, however, the infrastructure is adequate to meet current demand (background). I visited on a typical working Monday and traffic flowed smoothly on all major arteries. If you have enough money to afford a car or taxi ride, you can realize the freedom of movement that car proponents envisioned circa 1900. (If you don’t have the funds for a private car, bus rides are available for roughly 2 cents each and, in a formerly classless society, there are first classes buses with guaranteed seats and A/C available at a premium price.)

Guides we listened to expressed a belief that the expropriation of foreign-owned assets had been a mistake and that the consequent trade rift with the U.S. was unfortunate. However, they pointed out that every country has its problems and that Cubans are happy (outranking Americans in some ways; see Cato for an analysis/complaint). Our main Havana guide expressed satisfaction with the free health care system, which had also provided her with braces at no cost (the CIA says that life expectancy at birth in Cuba is about the same as in the U.S., despite our spending far more on health care than the Cubans spend on their entire lives). She expressed admiration for entreneurs who had set up restaurants and encouraged us to patronize these private establishments, but did not seem to question the overall idea of socialism and central planning. She wanted a richer welfare state (Sweden circa 1975?), not a Hong Kong-style free market state. (Government services continue even after death in Cuba; our guide to the cemetery explained that transportation to the cemetery is free, as is the coffin and burial. “The family pays only for flowers.”)

[How do some people in a society that rejects capitalism amass sufficient capital to open a restaurant? Our guide said that she suspected most of the cash was coming from US- and EU-based relatives of Cuban residents. “A lot is happening under the table.”]

The transition to a partially private economy does not seem to be going smoothly. A fellow passenger who was in Cuba two years ago on a land-based (Afro-themed) tour with Dr. Runoko Rashidi said that she had noticed an increase in litter, prices, and older Cubans expressing fears about being targeted for street crime if they were seen to receive convertible cash (“CUC”) from a tourist. She thought that the country was going downhill.

Kids, at least, seem to enjoy themselves despite the lack of Xbox and iPad. We saw 10-year-olds thoroughly entertained with only a large log to roll around on. Teenagers were seen talking to each other rather than absorbed in devices (since they don’t have devices!). Helicopter parenting is unpopular, which led to some disturbing scenes of children running into traffic and drivers swerving to avoid them.

All of our guides used the opportunity of having an audience of American voters to plead for a normalization of relations with the U.S. Obama visited in 2016 and Coolidge in 1928 (Guardian), but Cubans feel ignored by their powerful neighbor to the north. They would rather be connected to the U.S. Internet than have to go via Venezuela for their video chats with relatives and friends living abroad. The U.S. is inscrutable from a Cuban point of view. Fidel is dead. Raúl Castro is retired to the south (but Wikipedia shows him as still in power?). Why can’t the U.S. forgive Cubans for events that happened before most of today’s Cubans were even born? (And, indeed, the worst problems can perhaps be attributed to American military incompetence, e.g., the Bay of Pigs invasion plans being redrawn by President Kennedy and his advisors.) Cubans suspect lobbying by Cuban-Americans who harbor continuing resentment from the confiscation of their property so many decades ago. (One guide threw in that he couldn’t understand the lobbying power of the NRA. Maybe an American gun nut will one day take him to the range to show him just how much love there is for firearms!)

It does seem tough to explain the continued trade embargo. As the guides note, Cuba is not perfect. However, they’re not threatening neighbors with nuclear weapons, they’re not allied with a major U.S. enemy, they don’t oppress citizens on the basis of race, religion (except for Jehovah’s Witnesses), gender ID, or sexual preferences (the country is on track to provide same-sex marriage; compare to 72 countries in which homosexual acts are illegal (Guardian)). Given our current standards of virtue, what makes Cuba obviously right near the top of the list of the world’s worst nations?

Facebook post from Havana: “Friends asked me to take some photos of the cars here, so I did.”

Summary: “Immigration in Cuba killed all of the natives. Socialism killed all of the buildings.”

Related:

• https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/07/03/can-puerto-rico-be-a-laboratory-for-the-future-of-the-rest-of-the-u-s/

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One thing that I’ve learned from going to public lectures on astrophysics or planetary exploratoration is that people with no sci/tech education love science and hate engineering. The more irrelevant the topic to everyday life, the more fascinating. At a (fascinating) lecture by Brian Keating, author of Losing the Nobel Prize, I remarked to a friend “Look how excited people are to hear about stuff that they can’t do anything about, that happened billions of years ago, and that won’t have any effect within their lifetimes. Even if you offered to pay, however, I bet that none of these people would be willing to sit through a lecture on how their televisions or personal computers or smartphones work.”

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, by Simon Winchester (author of the truly awesome Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883) fights against humanity’s indifference to engineering and engineers. I would love to hear from non-engineer readers who’ve read this book.

The ancients were not always successful:

Modern investigators have concluded that the device was very well made, “with some parts constructed to accuracies of a few tenths of a millimeter.” By that measure alone, it would seem that the Antikythera mechanism can lay claim to being a most precise instrument—and, crucially for this introduction to the story, maybe the first precision instrument ever made. Except that there is an inherent flaw in this claim. The device, as model-tested by the legions of fascinated modern analysts, turns out to be woefully, shamefully, uselessly inaccurate. One of the pointers, which supposedly indicates the position of Mars, is on many occasions thirty-eight degrees out of true.

The early steam engine guys were partying like Kavanaughs:

What is especially and additionally noteworthy, though, is that a historic convergence [with James Watt] was in the making. For, living and working nearby in the Midlands, and soon to produce a patent himself (the already noted Number 1063 of January 1774, an exact one hundred fifty patents and exactly five years later than James Watt’s), was no less an inventor than John Wilkinson, ironmaster. By then, Wilkinson’s amiable madness was making itself felt throughout the ferrous community: all came to learn that he had made an iron pulpit from which he lectured, an iron boat he floated on various rivers, an iron desk, and an iron coffin in which he would occasionally lie and make his frightening mischief. (Women were in plentiful attendance, despite his being a somewhat unattractive man with a massively pockmarked face. He had a vigorous sex drive, fathering a child at seventy-eight by way of a maidservant, a calling of which he was inordinately fond. He kept a seraglio of three such women at one time, each one unaware of the others.)

Before working hard was outlawed, the French were the pioneers in automobiles and also in precision gun-making:

IT WAS IN the French capital in 1785 that the idea of producing interchangeable parts for guns was first properly realized, and the precision manufacturing processes that allowed for it were ordered to be first put into operation.

Henry Ford and Henry Royce, the engineer behind Rolls-Royce (Rolls was a sales guy), were both born in 1863. Royce’s aunt paid for the boy to serve as an apprentice for three years in a railroad workshop. Royce started with cranes and began making cars in 1903, partnering with Rolls in 1904. The authors shows how Henry Ford’s basic cars were equally dependent on high precision:

The Model T had fewer than one hundred different parts (a modern car has more than thirty thousand).

Within Rolls-Royce, it may seem as though the worship of the precise was entirely central to the making of these enormously comfortable, stylish, swift, and comprehensively memorable cars. In fact, it was far more crucial to the making of the less costly, less complex, less remembered machines that poured from the Ford plants around the world. And for a simple reason: the production lines required a limitless supply of parts that were exactly interchangeable.

There is a chapter on the modern jet engine. As with many other innovations in aviation, Americans were late to realize the value.

It was Frank Whittle, the first son of a Lancashire cotton factory worker turned tinkerer, who invented the jet engine.

Also, it is worth noting that American laboratories were curiously blind and deaf to the idea of a turbine-powered engine as having any utility for the aircraft industry, and the United States pursued almost no research until the 1940s. It was left to the diminutive Frank Whittle, therefore, to pursue the dream, fired by his famous criticism of the outmoded nature of propeller-driving piston engines, a condemnation that resonates today. “Reciprocating engines are exhausted,” he declared. “They have hundreds of parts jerking to and fro and they cannot be made more powerful without becoming too complicated.* The engine of the future must produce two thousand horsepower with one moving part: a spinning turbine and compressor.”

Jet engines are beasts of extreme complexity bound up within a design of extraordinary simplicity. All that ensures they work as well as they do are the rare and costly materials from which they are made, the protection of the integrity of the pieces machined from these materials, and the superfine tolerances of the manufacture of every part of which they are composed. Frank Whittle had to deal with these harsh realities for ten testing years, from the moment he had his grand idea in the summer of 1928. Every imaginable obstacle was put in his way during that decade. Nevertheless, he persisted.

(Based on that last sentence, is it same to assume that Frank Whittle identified as a woman?)

It is impressive how far into the future Whittle was able to see:

.. first planted the seed at the end of his stint as a flight cadet at Cranwell, the Royal Air Force academy in the English Midlands. Cadets at the time were each obliged to write a short scientific thesis on a topic that interested them, and Whittle’s paper has since become a part of aeronautical legend: with all the hubris of a young man on the make, he titled it “Future Developments in Aircraft Design.” At the time of his graduation from Cranwell, powered flight was only a quarter of a century old. The aircraft in which cadets such as Whittle trained were mostly biplanes—they had wooden frames, were in no sense streamlined, had no enhancements such as retractable undercarriages or pressurized cabins, flew at low altitudes, and trundled through the skies at speeds seldom exceeding 200 miles an hour. RAF fighters, in many ways more advanced than most, averaged a puny 150 miles per hour, and operated at only a few thousand feet above sea level.

It was fifteen months later, in October 1929, that the penny finally dropped. Whittle was by now a fully qualified general duties pilot, stationed in Cambridgeshire, and while training and teaching others to fly, he obsessively ruminated and calculated and imagined the kind of engine that could possibly make aircraft go lightning fast. All his designs involved some kind of supercharged piston engine. At the same time, he could see that even a modest increase in engine power, and thus aircraft speed, would require a very much larger and heavier engine—an engine probably much too big and heavy for any aircraft to carry. He was about to abandon the quest when, suddenly, one day that October, he had his brain wave: why not, he thought, employ a gas turbine as an engine, a gas turbine that, instead of driving a propeller at the engine’s front, would thrust out a powerful jet of air from the engine’s rear? An idea that would change the world in unimaginable ways had come to Frank Whittle when he was just twenty-two years old.

Moreover, a gas turbine could also, in theory, be vastly more powerful than a piston engine, and for a very simple reason. A crucial element in any combustion engine is air—air is drawn into the engine, mixed with fuel, and then burns or explodes. The thermal energy from that event is turned into kinetic energy, and the engine’s moving parts are thereby powered. But the amount of air sucked into a piston engine is limited by, among other factors, the size of the cylinders. In a gas turbine, there is almost no limit: a gigantic fan at the opening of such an engine can swallow vastly more air than can be taken into a piston engine—as a rule of thumb, seventy times as much, in the early, Whittle-era jets.

The guy who engineered our modern world of travel was not celebrated like a scientist with a Nobel Prize. You’re only as good/valued as your most recent project:

Frank Whittle, initially honored—King George VI conferred a knighthood—and somewhat revered, did not have as happy a time in postwar England as one might think he deserved. Power Jets was nationalized, and its chief engineer sidelined, put out to pasture. He traveled, he lectured, he wrote, and he particularly savored his election to a fellowship of the Royal Society. He won prizes, the most valuable of which, at around half a million dollars, he decided generously to split with Hans von Ohain, the German inventor whose Heinkel-powered plane had been the true first to fly with a turbojet engine. Whittle argued often for the good sense of building a supersonic passenger plane, and badgered officials long before Concorde was a drawing board dream. But no one listened, and by 1976, with his marriage failed, he decided to light out for America, and spent his final years in a suburb of Washington, DC.

The chapter includes a fascinating desciption of issues with cooling power turbine blades and how a small manufacturing error led to a dramatic uncontained engine failure for Qantas 32, an Airbus A380 that barely made it back to Singapore.

The book is a personal selection of topics, not a survey of the most important engineering developments or contributions. Each chapter stands on its own, so if you don’t want to relive the Hubble Space Telescope fiasco you can just skip that chapter. Some of the later chapters on newer technology were less interesting, perhaps because they lack the illustrations that would serve to explain how systems work.

The 74-year-old author is somewhat out of step with the times. Except by using pronouns, the book does not mention the gender IDs of any of the engineers featured. Nor is their skin color described. This book cannot be proudly displayed alongside Rosie Revere, Engineer or Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World.

More: Read The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

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… but they apparently hate the Trump Winery. A promotional email from info@trumpwinery.com was flagged by the Gmail system as spam.

(If you want to start a conversation at a New Year’s party in Massachusetts, bring sparkling wine from this vendor!)

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“Women May Earn Just 49 Cents on the Dollar: A new study suggests that the gender wage gap is much wider than previously thought” (Atlantic) is kind of interesting.

Note that it is a “gender wage gap” when someone who identifies as Gender A chooses not to go to work at all and then earns less than a person who identifies as Gender B who does go to work.

The article betrays cisgender-normative prejudice:

According to Rose, these facts suggest that the most accurate way to compare women’s and men’s earnings is to take the career-long view. “When you look at all women versus all men over time, the gap is 51 cents,” he said, referring to the 15-year figure.

If gender is normally fluid, why is it reasonable to assume that a typical person identifies with the same gender for 15 years?

As I noted in “Gender equity should be measured by consumption, not income?” it seems a little odd to say that someone who can get a satisfactory spending power without working is disadvantaged compared to someone who needs to work 80 hours per week in order to obtain sufficient spending power. By this standard, some of the most disadvantaged people on Planet Earth are in royal families, are the children of billionaires, etc.

Related:

• “Feminist focus on W-2 wages instead of spending power”

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One thing that I’ve learned from trying to keep in touch with my parents via Skype and FaceTime is that multi-purpose devices, such as smartphones and computers, don’t work well for octogenarians.

I’m intrigued by the Facebook Portal+ and Amazon’s echo show.

Readers: Have you tried these? Can they legitimately serve to as a convenient portal between non-tech grandparents and grandchildren? Which device is better?

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It is time for the family winter trip to Florida. Due to the fact that it is too cold to swim in the ocean even in Miami, we’re going to Jacksonville Beach and St. Augustine (kids can enjoy playgrounds, at least, without a down jacket). We should be there from Christmas through January 5. The plan is to ferry the Cirrus SR20 down from Hanscom Field to KCRG so that we can use it for day trips around northern Florida, e.g., to Crystal River to see the manatees.

Email philg@mit.edu if you’d like to get together in northern Florida at some point between Dec 25 and Jan 5.

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One thing that I have learned from being an expert witness in the U.S. court system is that there are seldom any surprises at trial. Everyone who will testify has already been deposed for 7 hours (Federal rules).

I have recently done some work on a U.S. case in which a bunch of folks in Brazil were involved. I asked the lawyers “Are you going down to Brazil to take depositions?” They responded with “We would be arrested. It is illegal to take a deposition in Brazil.” The legal system down there runs on documents, apparently. If human witnesses are going to add anything, they testify at trial and lawyers have to think on their feet for cross-examination.

It turns out that Germany is organized along similar lines (1985 article that explains the system there), though I don’t think they go so far as to imprison folks who agree to hang out and depose one another, e.g., for a U.S. case.

If we want to see Perry Mason-style drama, maybe we need to visit a courtroom in Brazil!

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One interaction from Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland (fortunately my mom has escaped):

Brenda the nurse: “I’m from Kenya.”

Mom: “I was there in 1988.”

Brenda: “It was a lot nicer then.”

Me: “How come?”

Brenda: “Because of population growth.”

Separately, my mother went through a period of delirium and the nurses would go through their standard list of questions: What’s your name? When were you born? What year is it? Who is the President?

Having lived through the golden years of U.S. economic expansion, my mom can’t see any limits to tax revenue or government capability and thus is a 100 percent loyal Democrat. Even when only 2 percent of her brain was functioning and got her birthyear wrong, for example, she would answer that last question with “Donald Trump and I don’t like him.”

(Except at FBOs (fueling points for small planes), the trips to D.C. were mostly about encounters with immigrants. The Burger King/Mobil that is walking distance from Business Aircraft Center at Danbury (KDXR) was 100-percent staffed with Spanish speakers. Every Uber driver in the Maryland/DC area was an immigrant. The physicians who cared for my mother were immigrants, one from India and one from Colombia (second residency in the U.S., though). Roughly 85 percent of the nurses and techs were immigrants. The only health care job that seems to be dominated by native-born Americans is social worker.)

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“Mom Dresses Six-Year-Old Son As Girl, Threatens Dad With Losing His Son For Disagreeing: A Texas custody case splits a 6-year-old child’s gender identity in two.” (Federalist):

In their divorce proceedings, the mother has charged the father with child abuse for not affirming James as transgender, has sought restraining orders against him, and is seeking to terminate his parental rights. She is also seeking to require him to pay for the child’s visits to a transgender-affirming therapist and transgender medical alterations, which may include hormonal sterilization starting at age eight.

(Sidenote: In a jurisdiction that offers no-fault or “unilateral” divorce (see this chapter on Texas family law), there is nothing mutual about a divorce lawsuit. One parent sues the other. So “their divorce proceedings” is misleading.)

In addition to the lawyers, the psychology industry is getting revenue:

When his mother, a pediatrician, took James for counseling, she chose a gender transition therapist who diagnosed him with gender dysphoria, a mental conflict between physical sex and perceived gender. James’ precious young life hinges purely on the diagnosis of gender dysphoria by a therapist who wraps herself in rainbow colors,

In the world’s most litigious and expensive venue for custody litigation (compare to Germany, for example), transgenderism adds a new twist. In addition to arguing over where children spend their time and how much cash children will yield for a plaintiff parent, now everyone in the industry can get paid to argue about whether an 8-year-old gets gender reassignment hormones and surgery.

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“My 15-Year-Old Daughter Told Me She’s Pansexual and Dating a Transgender Boy. I’m Struggling.” (nytimes):

She came out to us as pansexual when she was 11. I was concerned about her labeling herself at such a young age and being bullied. She met a transgender child in summer camp, then a few others, and helped them through some tough times. I was proud of her for her compassion and did not restrict her friendships, though she wasn’t allowed to sleep over at anyone’s house.

This reminds me of The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook:

Today I made a Black Forest cake out of five pounds of cherries and a live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word “cake.” I was very pleased. Malraux said he admired it greatly, but could not stay for dessert.

The virtuous Steve Almond, a name that seems to be associated with images of a white-appearing cisgender male, and whom Wikipedia says “lives in Arlington, Massachusetts with his wife and three children”:

it sounds like your underlying anxiety is that your daughter has a sexual identity and desires that aren’t heteronormative. It’s hard enough to move through a world fraught with bigotry as a young Latino woman. It becomes that much harder when you identify as pansexual and have a transgender partner.

Unless he himself is bigoted, how does the white cisgender man know what is difficult or easy for a “young Latino woman”?

Mr. Almond says the important questions to ask are not about sexuality, but rather “Is she happy? Is she doing well in school? Is she kind to those around her?” But why is doing well in school plainly more important than what kind of sex the daughter is having and with whom? Suppose that a high school Student A gets 1600 on the SATs and straight As and has (safe) sex with a different partner every night, in a full assortment of genders and sexual preferences. Student B gets 1000 on the SATs and has a B average and has no sex partners. The parents of Student B should be envious that the parents of Student A have a superior offspring?

The other writer responding to the mom is Cheryl Strayed, who is a “feminist” and has been married to two different men (“Brian” and “Marco”). Ms. Strayed does not seem to have any experience changing her gender, having sex with other women, etc., yet speak confidently about transgender and pansexual issues:

I encourage you to examine the ways that negative assumptions you’ve made about L.G.B.T.Q. people have needlessly stoked your fears. … Why do you put her current romantic interest in a special category because he’s trans? Because our transphobic society has told most of us that trans people are in a special category, that’s why. But they aren’t. They’re just people.

If trans people are “just people”, why hasn’t Ms. Strayed even once chosen one as a partner for long enough to write about?

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