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Who has tried out the new Herman Miller Aeron Chair?

by philg

Folks:

Herman Miller says that they’ve improved the design of their Aeron chair so that it now looks exactly the same but works better (presumably there is at least a higher price that works better for Herman Miller shareholders?).

Has anyone tried the “Aeron Remastered” for an extended period of time? (e.g., a whole day of typing)

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

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What did the people in the book Hidden Figures do?

by philg

The movie Hidden Figures is out in theaters. We’re planning on going to the theater as soon as our presence is not required in the house every single evening, i.e., in 2033. I looked at the book on which the movie is based last night. This title is Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. I.e., it contains the word “mathematicians.”

I majored in math in college due to a mistaken belief that I was intelligent. So I was eager to see some equations. Yet the book is solid prose. The only numbers are page numbers, basically. Certainly there are no equations. Instead of the festival of LaTeX that I expected, the book could have been authored via text message.

So… what did the NASA employees chronicled in this book actually do?

[Note that I was myself a NASA employee in 1978(!), developing a database management system for Pioneer Venus Orbiter data to support physicists writing analysis code. The PDP-11/70 that I used has disappeared because hardware engineers have made so many advances since the mid-1970s. The computer language that we used, however, which was developed by John Backus in 1957, is alive and well today. What does the survival of Fortran tell us about progress in computer software and computer science?]

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Tail of procedures, litigation, and reportage following encounter between two Stanford students

by philg

This New York Times article covers what happened after

The case involved a woman, a sophomore, who had met a player on Stanford’s powerhouse football team at a fraternity party one Saturday night. They went back to her room where, she said, he raped her. He said they had consensual sex.

There was a hearing in front of the university’s kangaroo court in 2015. Then there was some litigation in a government-run courthouse: “After the case ended, she sought a temporary restraining order in state court against the man.” Now there is this epic-length New York Times story with more than 1400 comments (here’s mine:

This is a good argument for colleges to stop running sports teams, dormitories, etc. If they were to focus on teaching they could probably do a better job at it. With all students living in private housing, an alleged rape (unless it occurred in a lecture hall during a lecture) would be purely a matter for government law enforcement personnel.

Even before we add rape adjudication into the mix, how can managers who are trying to run a Four Seasons-grade hotel and restaurant complex and also NFL/NBA/MLB-grade sports teams also have attention left over to try to improve the way that education is delivered?

).

[I wonder if my comment is correct, though. The Obama Administration in 2011 ordered colleges standing under the shower of federal cash (e.g., loan subsidies) to set up kangaroo courts. Might that order apply even to a college with no dorms or sports? So the college with no way to monitor what students are doing after class has to set up a court to hear about stuff that happened off campus?]

How much administrative and legal process and media attention can a society afford to invest in after late-night private encounters between 20-year-olds before it becomes a serious drag on GDP growth?

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How can investors make money on higher minimum wage laws?

by philg

Massachusetts has raised its minimum wage for 2017 to $11/hour, up from $8/hour. This won’t have much effect in the Boston area but it should cut down on employment in the already-blighted central and western portions of the state. With benefits and taxes a full-time minimum wage worker will cost $30,000/year or more, right? Plainly there are plenty of American workers who don’t generate an extra $30,000 per year in additional revenue for a business and there are plenty of businesses for which it would be tough to find any workers that can generate $30,000 per year in additional revenue.

We can cry about America’s declining labor force participation rate or we can optimize our portfolio to adjust to reality.

With more people excluded by law from the labor force there will be more entitlement to public housing, so cities and states will have to build more. Is there a public company that builds free houses for lower-income Americans? How about buying stock in cable TV companies? Fewer people in the workforce means more are watching TV, right? People who don’t have jobs can drink more beer, right? What are the publicly traded companies that sell the most beer to low-income or no-income Americans?

Fast food chains and big retailers have lower labor costs, as a percentage of sales, than quaint local businesses (one source). If we assume that two local coffee shops die and are replaced by one Dunkin Donuts, that should be good for Dunkin’s, right? The company will have lower real estate costs due to less competition from independent shops and higher sales. Local retail is already under pressure and higher minimum wage laws should further tip the scales in favor of Walmart, Costco, and Amazon. Buy these stocks?

What about betting against commercial real estate? If businesses that can’t afford higher labor costs shut down there will be less demand for space and rents won’t grow as rapidly as previously planned. This seems risky due to immigration-driven population growth. With a forecast population of 441 million in 2065 and the same amount of land it is tough to see how owners of land zoned for retail are going to suffer.

Readers: any better ideas for investors in this new labor market landscape?

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New Jet Ranger certified

by philg

A couple of weeks ago, Bell got its new 5-seat Jet Ranger 505 certified (press release; product page). The machine will be built in Quebec, rather than the originally planned factory in Louisiana. Otherwise the development seems to have gone as scheduled, a remarkable achievement.

With air conditioning and other non-optional options, the out-the-door price seems to be roughly $1.3 million. Presumably due to the collapse of the worldwide helicopter market, occasioned by the stagnation in oil prices that limits offshore production, Bell has not raised the price from what it was offering back in 2014 at Heli-Expo. That means a used steam-gauge Bell 407, which can seat 7, is now available for less than the cost of a new Jet Ranger.

Aviation-oriented readers: What do you think? When a used old-style Jet Ranger can be had for $400,000 (example), is there going to be a strong market for this new design? The new design has many improvements, but are they sufficient to justify the extra cost? (the old Jet Ranger will need more maintenance, of course, but perhaps the extra cost will be roughly the same as the difference in cost of capital and insurance)

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How did we behave in our Occupied Territories?

by philg

Israel’s behavior is an evergreen source of interest to the United Nations and lately the two organizations have been in the news. My Hillary-supporting Facebook friends have been out in front of this, praising Obama and criticizing Israel for building houses on land won during the 68-year war that has followed the Arab rejection of the UN’s proposed 1947 borders. I respond with “Let me know to which Indian tribe you’re going to be giving your house, and please do send me your new address in Manhattan, which I understand was legally purchased.”

How did we actually behave in our own Occupied Territories when the occupation was fresh? The Pulitzer Prize-winning Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People answers this question to some extent:

Ancestral Mandans appeared in what is now South Dakota around 1000 C.E.17 Their arrival in the Missouri River valley coincided with a major climatic shift: a trend toward warmer, wetter conditions in the years from 900 to 1250. The trend extended far beyond the grasslands of North America. In Europe, these centuries coincide with the Medieval Warm Period, an era in which painters depicted bountiful harvest feasts, Norse settlers built colonies in Greenland and America, and peasants expanded their fields onto lands formerly too cold, high, or dry to plant crops.

CROW CREEK VILLAGE, SOUTH DAKOTA, MID-1400s The site of this ancient village overlooks the Missouri River in south-central South Dakota, eleven miles north of the modern town of Chamberlain. The land today belongs to the Crow Creek Sioux, but during much of the 1300s and 1400s its occupants were Caddoan-speaking newcomers—refugees or descendants of refugees from the drought on the central plains. And at some point in the mid-fifteenth century, something terrible happened here.* The community was fortified by location and design. Naturally protected by the river and two smaller waterways, the town also had defenses constructed by its residents. Keen eyes still can discern the low-lying trace of two dry moats the townspeople dug for protection. The inner moat was bastioned and backed up with a palisade. The outer moat may not have had a palisade, but its ten bastions are still visible if you follow its course across the ground. At one time, this trench was six feet deep and twelve or more feet wide.27 These concentric fortifications indicate that the community went through a period of growth. Archaeologists think the settlers created the inner ditch and its palisade first. But twelve house sites in the gap between the two trenches suggest that the population eventually became too big to fit inside the first ditch. When this happened, residents dug the second one beyond it, enlarging the fortified area of their village. One calculation puts the town’s population at 831. The defense system clearly indicates that Crow Creek’s residents felt threatened from outside. And indeed they must have been, because at some point their town came under attack. The identity of the assailants is not known, but their actions were ferocious. In 1978, archaeologists unearthed at least 486 jumbled sets of human remains from the northwest end of the outer fortification ditch. If the ancient town’s population was 831, those bones represented the remains of nearly 60 percent of its residents. The end has to have been gruesome. Mutilated craniums indicate that the attackers scalped 90 percent of their victims and dealt skull-fracturing blows to 40 percent. They decapitated nearly one-quarter. A number of townspeople had limbs hacked off. Cut marks on jawbones indicate that some had their tongues cut from their mouths.

… warfare and hunting took a toll on Mandan men. When the anthropologist Alfred Bowers polled the Mandans in 1870–72, he found that women outnumbered men nearly two to one. The painter-ethnographer George Catlin estimated “two and sometimes three women to a man” when he visited the upper Missouri in 1832.

Life was kind of tough before the White Man showed up, but we brought rats to eat their corn supplies and smallpox:

The rats multiplied at a rate hard for human beings to comprehend. Some wild rats live as long as three years, but one year is average. Brief though it may be, that twelve-month life span is sufficient for a female brown rat to accomplish impressive reproductive feats. She reaches sexual maturity at three to four months and then is virtually sure to conceive each time she is fertile, for during a single six-hour fertile period she might mate as many as five hundred times. After she has mated successfully, pregnancy lasts about twenty-three days, and she can breed again less than twenty-four hours after delivering. A normal litter yields six to eight pups, and a typical female has seven litters a year, or roughly fifty offspring.

For the Mandans, the proportion of losses [from smallpox] was highest of all. Chardon estimated seven-eighths of them were dead. Joshua Pilcher reported that just 31 of 1,600 survived. The Jesuit father Pierre-Jean de Smet, who traveled to Council Bluffs in 1838 and then to the Rockies in 1840, heard that the scourge had reduced the Mandans “to thirty-two, others say to nineteen only!”

Lack of recent exposure [to smallpox] was not the only reason that Mandans were so vulnerable. When Catlin had taken the Yellow Stone upriver to the Mandans five years earlier, two physicians—participants in a new federal effort to vaccinate Native Americans against smallpox—had joined the passengers at Fort Leavenworth. With the help of military personnel, they immunized many of the nations below the Arikaras. Some individuals chose not to submit to the strange procedure, developed in England by Edward Jenner in 1796. But those who were vaccinated included 2,081 Omahas, Otoes, Sioux, and Pawnees. By February 1833, more than seventeen thousand had been vaccinated nationwide. The Mandans and Hidatsas were not among them, nor were the Crows, Blackfeet, Crees, or Assiniboines. Why? The immunization effort had gotten off to a late start in 1832, with winter closing in while the vaccinators were still in South Dakota. “Many individuals were not vaccinated owing to lack of time,” writes the historian Michael Trimble. The physicians asked to continue their work among the more northerly nations the next year, but the commissioner of Indian affairs turned them down. In fact, federal authorities intentionally excluded the northern tribes from the vaccination campaign. They deemed the villagers peripheral, and expendable as well. “Under any circumstances, no effort will be made to send a Surgeon higher up the Missouri than the Mandans, and I think not higher than the Arikaras,” wrote Secretary of War Lewis Cass to the Indian agent John Dougherty on May 9, 1832. The Mandans had lost their economic clout. The fur trade was fading, and their association with the Arikaras had tainted the Mandans as hostile. In an observation shaped by these changes in circumstance and perception, Cass proclaimed that the Indians of the upper Missouri were now “far beyond the operation of any causes, primary or secondary, which can be traced to civilised man.”

The Mandans do survive today (Wikipedia), with roughly 365 “full-blood” members.

More: read Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People.

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Dog with a strong fashion sense

by philg

Here’s why I still need to check Facebook… “Dog attacks family trying to dress it in sweater, 3 hurt” (Miami Herald):

Police in Florida say an angry dog sent three people to the hospital after one tried to put a sweater on it.

Tampa police say the pit bull mix named Scarface bit a 52-year-old woman who was trying to dress him on Friday and her husband was attacked while trying to pull the dog off of her. Police say the couple’s 22-year-old son was attacked while trying to stop the dog by stabbing it in the neck and head.

(Thanks, Tara!)

Let’s hope that Mindy the Cripper forgets this tale prior to Halloween 2017…

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