A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Merry Christmas!
Helicopter nerds may appreciate this video of Mrs. Claus flying an AStar.
[Scrooge might note that the helicopter is registered in Argentina (“R-“), closer to the South Pole than to the North. A Trump-inspired sexist would also note that the purported female pilot was sitting right seat in an aircraft typically flown from the left seat (unlike most U.S.-designed helicopters, which are flown from the right seat).]
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Full post, including commentsMindy the Crippler wishes you a Happy Hanukkah:
(but I still like Christmas better:
)
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Full post, including commentsThe world of plastic airplanes will need to study Mandarin. A Chinese company has purchased most of Diamond Canada, makers of spectacular-handling light airplanes such as the Diamond Star DA40. In other news, Chinese money has finally pushed the Cirrus Jet out the door (first delivery), five years after Cirrus was purchased by China Aviation Industry General Aircraft.
Full post, including commentsI love my Trek electric bike, but it has one seat too few to be considered a tandem. In August 2015, in Electric bicycle questions, I asked “shouldn’t tandem bikes all have electric boost? Tandems are already crazy heavy and expensive.” Except for a lame Pedego cruiser there were no electric tandems then. Now there is one from France: Moustache Samedi. It is kind of a mountain bike but can be fitted with hybrid-style tires for road use.
Full post, including commentsFor me one of the sadder parts of Dreamland was an example of an immigrant family that thought they’d be better off in the U.S.:
In 1906, a delirious Christian revival roared out of Los Angeles. … The Azusa Street Revival marked the first explosion of the Pentecostal faith. … Among those who embraced it there were numerous Russian immigrant workers. They returned to Russia to preach their new gospel as communist revolutionaries were toppling the czarist government. These Pentecostal pioneers converted thousands in Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus.
By the time the Soviet experiment ended, seven hundred thousand people, most of them in the Ukraine and Belarus, were fervent Pentecostals. … Tens of thousands emigrated, settling mostly in Sacramento, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. Among them was a young couple, Anatoly and Nina Sinyayev, from the city of Baksan. Anatoly was a welder. Nina’s father was an evangelist, touring Germany and Israel to preach the gospel. When the Soviet walls tumbled, the Sinyayevs took their two toddler daughters and fled to Portland. Nina’s first baby in America was also their first son, Toviy. From then on, she was always pregnant. The couple had ten more children. Anatoly was always working. … They attended a conservative Russian Pentecostal church, and raised their children in their faith.
But their American dreamland contained hazards they hadn’t imagined. Remaining Christian in America, where everything was permitted, was harder than maintaining the faith in the Soviet Union where nothing was allowed. Churches were everywhere. But so were distractions and sin: television, sexualized and permissive pop culture, and wealth. Leaders turned to the prohibitions that had sustained the faith during the dark decades back home. Girls couldn’t dye their hair, pierce their ears, or wear makeup. Young men and women could not talk, or date. If a man wanted to marry, he went to his pastor, who asked the young woman if the suitor interested her. Russian Pentecostals didn’t associate much with American society, which they viewed as a threat. … The Sinyayevs’ daughters were not allowed to wear nail polish or mingle with Americans. … The Sinyayevs’ second child, Elina, was their most stubborn. A pretty girl with an aquiline nose, Elina raised her siblings while her mother was pregnant and railed at the church teachings that ruled her home. “All they preached was that women should wear long skirts, head coverings, no makeup,” she said. “They never teach you about love. They didn’t want us to know God forgives.” As they moved into adolescence, the Sinyayevs’ oldest children hid their lives from their parents. Elina applied makeup on the school bus each morning, and exchanged her long skirts for pants.
Mostly, though, opiates consumed young people in Portland who had never used them, virtually all of them white. As a group, it appears none fell to it harder than the children of Russian Pentecostals who came fleeing persecution and found U.S. pop culture a greater challenge than anything a Soviet apparatchik could invent. Among them was Vitaliy Mulyar. Born in the Ukraine, Vitaliy grew up in the cocoon of the Russian Pentecostal church in America—first in Sacramento, then Portland. Like his peers, he spoke fluent Russian, and his English carried the hint of an accent from the country he had left when he was two. He, like his peers, found church desiccated and boring. Vitaliy and his Pentecostal friends grew up in their own world. He found work as a mechanic. Cars became his passion, especially his prized sequoia-green 1999 VW Jetta. Then a friend at work offered him a Vicodin. Doctors prescribed them, so how bad could they be? With that, he found a new passion. Soon he migrated to OxyContin and his habit rose to four Oxys a day.
Elina Sinyayev tried heroin the first time with a friend from work, who told her it would relax her. Her sister started with OxyContin. So did Toviy, her brother. Elina lost her job and, desperate for her dope, began dating a Russian Pentecostal heroin dealer, who also got his tar from the Mexicans delivering it like pizza. Elina believed she was the only one in her family using heroin. But one night at home she looked at her sister and brother and watched them nod off and knew the truth. Two decades after Anatoly and Nina left the Soviet Union for the freedoms of America, each of their three oldest children was quietly addicted to black tar heroin from Xalisco, Nayarit.
One afternoon in March 2011, Toviy told his mother he had the flu. He went out with Elina and they returned hours later. He seemed different but Nina had too many kids to pay close attention. The next morning, she found her eldest boy in bed, unconscious and gasping for breath. Paramedics couldn’t revive him. He lasted for three days on life support.
More: read Dreamland.
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Margaret Thatcher is famously quoted for saying “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” (Snopes) Cambridge, Massachusetts, however, has proved her wrong. The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s houses. The Cambridge Housing Authority provides free apartments with market rents of over $60,000 per year to some families. Others are on a waiting list and receive nothing (rather stark inequality!). Since January 1, 2015, however, even the waitlist is closed.
Where is the Christmas spirit for families who want and/or need an apartment?
[Related: I can’t figure out what the rationale is for free houses plus long waiting list. If a free house is a human right, how can there be a waiting list? There is no waiting list for free food (food stamps). Everyone who is entitled gets food stamps more or less immediately. How can a comfortable taxpayer-funded house be simultaneously a human right and require crashing on a relative’s sofa for 10 years? But if a free house is not a human right, why do taxpaying Americans have to work extra hours every week to fund the millions of existing free houses?]
Also see
“Flight controller accidentally sends jet on course toward Mt. Wilson after LAX takeoff” (LA Times), especially coupled with this LiveATC recording, might make a good case study for a human-/user-interface class. The controller is trying to steer a Boeing 777 using her voice and two human actuators (the pilots).
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Full post, including commentsIn interviewing attorneys and consumers for Real World Divorce, we heard a lot of tragic personal stories of children who’d lost a parent (almost always the father) and parents (almost always the father) who’d lost children in the family courts of America’s winner-take-all states. Dreamland describes parents losing children even when neither parent sued the other:
When it was her turn, Roberts told the gathering that her daughter was a pill addict who had stolen from her blind. Lisa had forced her daughter out of the house. “My daughter,” her colleague said, “is in jail accused of executing three people for their pills.” Half of their coworkers’ kids were addicted. They followed with a description of the pill mills, of the OxyContin barter economy, of the constant overdose deaths. The room was silent. “I remember coming home and being real mad,” Roberts said. “It’s not right that our kids are having their futures and freedom taken from them because they’ve fallen prey to this horrible chemical that steals their soul. Our kids shouldn’t be going to the grave. We sent our kids into the military. After she got clean, my daughter had a better chance of surviving a war than she did of surviving the pill epidemic.”
As the opiate epidemic mangled the middle class, these kids doped up and dropped out. Earlier generations of opiate addicts became self-employed construction workers or painters, because that was all they could manage with heroin, and often jail, in their lives. With the new generation, time would tell how they would do, but it wasn’t looking good. A large subset of these new young addicts had criminal records now. Many were on probation; a good number went to prison. Either way, their parents were realizing that life with a record was as stunted as life with an opiate addiction. Any dreams these kids’ parents once had for them were now improbable. Even qualifying to rent an apartment was hard. With a criminal record, finding a job in the teeth of the great recession was almost impossible.
“For 6 long years I’ve begged, pleaded, screamed, yelled, cried, grounded, took things away, called the police, kicked him out & not to mention the countless hrs feeling guilty & terrified for him,” one woman wrote about her heroin-addicted son who’d just been thrown out of rehab again for a dirty drug test. “And the thousands of dollars spent on rehab, hospital bills & therapist as well as bailing him out of jail. I have prayed prayed prayed & prayed . . . ”
The above-referenced children are the comparatively lucky ones. The unlucky children died from overdoses, sometimes shortly after being declared cured by a rehab clinic. One thing that I learned from the book is that there is no reliable way to cure a person from opiate addiction.
That raises the question of what should parents do upon discovering that a child is addicted to opiates? There does not seem to be any realistic hope that heroin supply will be restricted in the U.S.:
As happened after Operation Tar Pit, the Sánchez heroin cells quickly reconstituted. His networks, and those of his family, are believed to encompass most of the state of South Carolina, including Myrtle Beach, where police have six times dismantled the Sánchez heroin cell, only to see it return each time.
I asked if [an Anglo who collaborated with the Xalisco boys] ever wondered what became of the boss called Enrique and the drivers who gave him all his dope. Not really, he said. It seemed so long ago. But he felt no rancor. They were nice guys, clean-cut, not killers, just working-class boys trying to get ahead and were probably living back in Mexico somewhere. He marveled that they were the only dealers he’d encountered in forty years doing heroin who didn’t use their product. He was still startled at how organized they were. After Tar Pit, he remembered, there was no dope on Santa Fe streets for exactly one day. That’s how organized they were.
The Scioto County [Ohio] pill mills illustrated how generalized opiate prescribing had become in America. In their last year of operation, 9.7 million pills were legally prescribed in the county of eighty thousand. But even two years after the pill mills were done, 7 million pills were still prescribed there.
What about simply moving the family or at least the child to a place where opiates are not available? Other than a research station in Antarctica, does that exist? If so, where? (Of course I am hoping that none of us reading or writing on this blog will ever need this answer.)
More: read Dreamland.
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Full post, including commentsI just recently stumbled on “New U.S. overtime rules will bump up postdoc pay, but could hurt research budgets” (Science Magazine):
Shock waves are rippling through the U.S. research community in reaction to a new labor law that will require that postdoctoral researchers be paid at least $47,476—thousands of dollars more than many earn now.
Apparently 10+ years of STEM education does not lead to a big Christmas shopping budget….
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Full post, including commentsThis December 21, 2016 New York Times article is interesting for featuring the statement “Women have, historically, been short-changed in divorces.” The law professor who makes this assertion doesn’t make any attempt to explain why most divorce lawsuits are filed by women (see the classic Brinig and Allen paper referenced in “Causes of Divorce” as well as this statistical study of a Massachusetts courthouse where 72 percent of the cases were filed by women).
[Separately, I think the University of San Diego law professor is wrong about a prenup barring a woman, at least one whose fertility has not been exhausted, from recovering some of the value that a man realizes from a successful startup. Let’s stick with her home state of California. As explained in California Prenuptial Agreements, for example, a prenup cannot limit an adult’s right to profit from child support. Census 2014 data show that 94 of Californians collecting child support are women. If the female victim posited by the NYT author can have one or more children during the marriage she is on track to collect between 30 and 50 percent of her former husband’s future income (for 18 years) from all sources, regardless of the contents of a prenuptial agreement. (If she can find a man with a lot of intellectual property who won’t agree to marry her, there remains a profit opportunity via selling an abortion or out-of-wedlock child-bearing.)]
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