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While out at the Reno Air Races a pilot friend and I saw the movie Sully.

Spoiler alert: there is a plane crash in the film.

While watching the movie there were some things that made me curious…

Did they really land off-airport with only partial flaps extended? That would result in a higher impact ground speed and, given that energy goes up as the square of speed, much more impact energy for the airframe to absorb. The full transcript from the cockpit voice recorder indicates that Flaps 2 was indeed used. The NTSB report confirms this and has a section (page 90) titled “Decision to Use Flaps 2 for Ditching.” It was in fact probably a bad idea, especially given the tailwind that further increased ground speed, but the NTSB points out that nobody has done much experimentation landing Airbuses on the water.

I knew that sim pilots had been able to land the plane back at LaGuardia but had they really been able also to make it to Teterboro? And did ATC suggest 1 at KTEB rather than 19 or 24? I.e., suggest that pilots without engine power fly a leisurely downwind leg before turning around to head north on Runway 01 (runway numbers are shorthand for magnetic heading so 19 is approximately a 190 magnetic heading and 01 is approximately a 010 (north) heading)? The transcript confirms this seemingly bad suggestion. The NTSB report, page 50, says that Airbus simulated attempts to land on Runway 19 at KTEB and that it was successful only once out of two tries given an immediate reaction to the engine failure.

The movie shows New York City’s finest not hanging out in a donut shop discussing what to do after a retirement with full pension at age 40. Instead, the police are hanging out in a building right next to a continuously spinning Huey helicopter. Thus they are able to make it to the accident site and a rescue swimmer jumps into the frigid Hudson to heroically save a female passenger who had become separated from the herd. This heroic validation of the rescue helicopter and NYPD is absent from the NTSB report, which instead credits the New Jersey ferry boat sailors. (See Government versus private industry helicopter operating costs for what happens with your tax dollars and helicopters in the NYC area.)

The jet type rating training that I’ve had stresses using the autopilot’s Indicated Airspeed mode following a dual engine failure. This way the plane is guaranteed to be at the best glide speed (also close to the minimum sink airspeed; planes need more power to overcome drag when flying close to the stall and therefore if there is no engine power a slowly-flown airplane will sink like a rock) even if the pilots are distracted by running checklists. The movie shows Captain Sully heroically taking the controls and hand-flying the airplane. This seems to be historically accurate but the airspeeds chosen by Sully were slower than optimum and ultimately slower than safe (see below). His co-pilot was head-down in the checklists trying to get an engine restarted so couldn’t be expected to monitor carefully. Fortunately the Airbus software wouldn’t let the plane stall.

My big take-away from the movie is the lack of credit given to the engineers of that Airbus A320. The plane was presumably designed to withstand being ditched (a) into the wind, (b) with full flaps, and (c) at a minimum sink rate airspeed. Instead it was slammed down with a high vertical speed and roughly twice as much forward energy. Yet the plane did not break up and sink. Also the engineers protected the pilots from stalling. Like a panicked student pilot, Sully had the yoke way too far back fro the last 150′ of the flight, but the Airbus envelope protection software kept the plane from stalling (page 97-98). Of course it might be that Sully knew that the Airbus programmers wouldn’t let the plane stall and therefore this was a feature rather than a bug. On the third hand, Sully said that he was trying to maintain the Airbus-recommended “green dot” Vls speed from the airspeed tape (page 56), not hover right above a stall. See page 120: “The captain’s difficulty maintaining his intended airspeed during the final approach resulted in high angles-of-attack, which contributed to the difficulties in flaring the airplane, the high descent rate at touchdown, and the fuselage damage.”

What about the idea that it is reasonable for pilots to ponder the checklists for 35 seconds before taking action? That is definitely consistent with the airline culture (see below for a link to an accident in which 35 seconds stretched to an hour and the airplane ran out of gas). On the other hand, Julia Link was flying a recently overhauled Robinson R-22 helicopter when the engine quit. If she hadn’t reacted within about 1.5 seconds she and her passenger would have been dead. Instead she lowered the collective, entered an autorotation, and landed on a Honolulu street (NTSB report; TV news). Her photographer passenger got away with a scratch.

The movie features Captain Sully as a psychologically tortured man, kind of like Owen Wilson’s pitch to female guests in The Wedding Crashers. Yet one of our local instructors experienced an engine failure in a Cirrus SR-22 (I prefer the SR-20 partly for this reason; the lower the power of a piston engine the less likely it is to fail), deployed the parachute, and walked away (WCVB news). I saw her the next day going out with a student in a Cirrus SR-22 (not the same one!). She never complained to any of us about psychological torment. (On the fourth hand, she has five kids so presumably she had to get out of the habit of complaining about anything…)

[I wasn’t curious about the fact that the NTSB investigators were hostile and that everyone on the FAA payroll turned out in some big public hearing because I already knew that the NTSB stuff in the movie was fiction.]

Readers: What did you think of the movie?

Related:

• United Airlines 173, in which a three-person flight crew (two pilots plus a flight engineer to handle the cerebral tasks) runs a functional DC-8 out of gas due to the lack of a gear-down confirmation light.
• My visual approach, and Asiana’s (newbie airline pilot flies LGA to Charlotte)
• Review of Highest Duty, Captain Sully’s book, in which I write “Sully matter-of-factly notes that he immediately switched on the auxiliary power unit (APU), but does not take enough credit for this singularly inspired act, for which he would have received no simulator training (the true airline pilot doesn’t touch any switch until after finding and reading the appropriate emergency checklist). With the engines spinning down, the Airbus was a few seconds away from losing sufficient electric power to run the hydraulic pumps. Without hydraulics there would be no flight controls. There is an emergency backup ram air turbine (RAT; a window fan basically), but it doesn’t run the whole airplane and is not something you’d want to rely on.”

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Peter the Great: His Life and World explains life in the Ottoman capital:

But in the seventeenth century, Constantinople was the capital of the Moslem world, the military, administrative, commercial and cultural hub of the mighty Ottoman Empire. With a population of 700,000, larger than any city in Europe, blending many races and religions, it was studded with great mosques, colleges, libraries, hospitals and public baths. Its bazaars and wharves were piled with merchandise from every corner of the world.

Inside this city 5,000 servants fulfilled the sultan’s needs. The sultan’s table was presided over by the Chief Attendant of the Napkin, assisted by the Senior of the Tray Servers, the Fruit Server, the Pickle Server and the Sherbet Maker, the Chief of the Coffee Makers and the Water Server (as Moslems, the sultans were teetotalers). There were also the Chief Turban Folder and the Assistants to the Chief Turban Folder, the Keeper of the Sultan’s Robes, the Chiefs of the Laundrymen and Bathmen. The Chief of the Barbers had on his staff a Manicurist who pared the sultan’s nails every Thursday. Besides these, there were pipe lighters, door openers, musicians, gardeners, grooms and even a collection of dwarfs and mutes whom the sultan used as messengers, the latter being especially useful for attending the sultan during confidential moments.

In rooms where the sultan might wish to speak confidentially to an advisor, there were fountains so that the sound of running water would keep the wrong ears from hearing what was said. The harem was a closed world of veils, gossip, intrigue and—at any moment of the sultan’s choosing—sex. But it was also a world rigidly ruled by protocol and rank. Until the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, sultans had married; the Moslem religion permitted them four wives. But Suleiman’s wife, a red-haired Russian woman named Roxelana, had interfered so much in matters of state that thereafter Ottoman sultans did not marry. The sultan’s mother, therefore, became the ruler of the harem. The Turks believed that “heaven lay under the feet of the mother,” that no matter how many wives or concubines a man might take, he had only one mother, who held a unique place in his life. Sometimes, when the sultan was young or weak, his mother issued orders in his name directly to the grand vizier. Beneath the sultan’s mother ranked the mother of the heir apparent if there was one, and then the other women who had borne the sultan’s male children. Finally, there came the odalisques, or concubines. All of these women, technically at least, were slaves, and, as Moslem women could not be enslaved, it followed that all the harem women were foreigners: Russians, Circassians, Venetians, Greeks. From the end of the sixteenth century, most came from the Caucasus, because the blue-eyed women of that region were renowned for beauty. Once she passed through the harem doors, a woman remained for life. There were no exceptions.

More: Read Peter the Great: His Life and World

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Over the years I have written a few posts with the assumption that Americans whom the government pays to not work would be avid videogamers. “The Free-Time Paradox in America” (Atlantic, September 13, 2016) confirms this casual assumption:

Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago, was delivering a speech at the Booth School of Business this June about the rise in leisure among young men who didn’t go to college. He told students that one “staggering” statistic stood above the rest. “In 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men [those without a college degree] aged 21 to 30 had not worked at all during the prior twelve months,” he said.

“Think about that for a second,” he went on. Twentysomething male high-school grads used to be the most dependable working cohort in America. Today one in five are now essentially idle. The employment rate of this group has fallen 10 percentage points just this century, and it has triggered a cultural, economic, and social decline. “These younger, lower-skilled men are now less likely to work, less likely to marry, and more likely to live with parents or close relatives,” he said.

So, what are are these young, non-working men doing with their time? Three quarters of their additional leisure time is spent with video games, Hurst’s research has shown. And these young men are happy—or, at least, they self-report higher satisfaction than this age group used to, even when its employment rate was 10 percentage points higher.

[Note that the decision of a young man to refrain from marriage, at least in Professor Hurst’s hometown of Chicago, could be a rational one given the winner-take-all character of Illinois divorce law (Census 2014 data show that 94 percent of the Illinois winners (obtaining custody and collecting child support) happen to be female).]

And what about those of us who aren’t living with relatives and/or in government-provided housing?

Elite men in the U.S. are the world’s chief workaholics. They work longer hours than poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in other advanced countries. In the last generation, they have reduced their leisure time by more than any other demographic. As the economist Robert Frank wrote, “building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”

[Elite women don’t work as hard? Is that because they get paid 23 percent less? (See “Should the SEC make it illegal for public companies to employ men?“) Or do they get paid less because they work less? (see this article on Claudia Goldin’s work about how companies pay more per hour to employees who work more hours)]

Here’s the most depressing part of the article:

Rich, ambitious Americans are already spending more time on what makes them fulfilled, but that thing turned out to be work. Work, in this construction, is a compound noun, composed of the job itself, the psychic benefits of accumulating money, the pursuit of status, and the ability to afford the many expensive enrichments of an upper-class lifestyle.

Credit: Mark Hurst (no relation to the economist cited above) of Creative Good told me about the Atlantic piece.

Related:

• Rethinking 99 weeks of unemployment (2011)
• Formal analysis of effects of government-funded 99 weeks of Xbox (2013)
• Academic Eggheads: Unemployment benefits encourage unemployment (2013)
• Book Review: The Redistribution Recession (2015)

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Peter the Great: His Life and World:

Essentially, Peter’s attitude toward morality in relations between men and women was based on a utilitarian social ethic. He was indulgent toward behavior and indiscretions which did no harm to society. Prostitutes enjoyed “perfect liberty in Russia,” reported Weber, except in the case of one who had “peppered some hundreds of the Preobrazhensky Guards who, being unable to march on their duty with the rest, were obliged to remain behind at Petersburg in order to be cured”; this woman was knouted [whipped] for having harmed state interests.

Unmarried women, when pregnant, were encouraged to bear their infants. Once, when Peter found a pretty girl barred from the company of other maidens because she had an illegitimate son, he said, “I forbid her to be excluded from the company of other women and girls.” The girl’s son was placed under the Tsar’s protection.

But if Peter was tolerant of indiscretion, he was implacable in criminal matters. Prenatal abortion or the murder of an unwanted infant after birth was punishable by death.

Related:

• Where New York Times readers don’t want to follow Europe: Legalized prostitution
• Book Notes: The Origins of Sex

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The Reno Air Races attracts a political demographic more or less 180-degrees opposite of what prevails in the Boston area. The national anthem was played every morning around 10:30 pm as a military parachute team carried the flag down from the sky. As shown in the photo below, it was hands-on-hearts (easy to find your heart when you’ve been breakfasting on deep-friend Twinkies and Snickers, both readily available at the races) and hats-off time. I didn’t see anyone protesting!

I shared a table in the VIP tent (highly recommended for food, drinks, and shade!) with a local divorce litigator: “I’ve been in Nevada nearly all of my life because I like my guns, my space, and low taxes.”

The other locals at the table agreed that they did not want to hand over their wages to the government so that it could be redistributed to the non-working. (Fact check: Nevada taxes are low, at 8.1 percent of income and $3,349 per resident (Tax Foundation); compare to New York at 12.7 percent and $6,993 per resident. On the other hand, the state has a full range of welfare programs and for many citizens it will be better to collect welfare than to work.)

[The divorce litigator would be a lot better off in Massachusetts. She is able to charge only a flat $3500 per divorce, plus $6000 additional for the 5 percent of cases that go to trial. Compare to $100,000 to $300,000 (or more!) in the Boston area. Her female customers would also be a lot better off financially if they’d chosen a different state. “We got a new law in October 2015 that slipped by the lawyers and judges,” said the litigator. “Judges are interpreting 125c.0035 to require joint custody [a 50/50 schedule] in almost all cases.” What about the domestic violence escape clause that works for plaintiffs in Alaska? “It works only if she can get an actual conviction for domestic violence,” said the litigator. “Most moms are going into court saying ‘I want primary custody because I’m the mom’ and judges aren’t persuaded.” The law also applies to children that result from one-night encounters. Let’s compare outcomes for a woman earning $125,000 and suing a father earning the same.

Massachusetts

Nevada

Mom wins “primary parent” status with greater than 90 percent probability. Free babysitting from the defendant every other weekend. Along with primary parent status comes $20,000 per year until child reaches 23 years of age (up to $460,000 total, tax-free). Given approximately equal costs of having a child around 1/3 time versus 2/3 time, assuming continuing equality of income at $125,000/year, winner parent will be nearly $900,000 richer than loser parent after 23 years.

Child receives week-on/week-off access to both parents. (better expected well-being for the child) No winner/loser parent division. Mom receives no cash due to equal incomes and equal schedule (her revenue would have been limited to $13,000 per year per child regardless). Potential for litigation and child support profit ends when child turns 18. Minimal opportunity to become wealthier than defendant; parents who start with equal incomes will have approximately the same level of wealth after 18 years.

]

Affection for Donald Trump was in short supply but resistance to Hillary, the Democrats, and the idea of a bigger government was strong.

Of course this is a selected group due to the passion for aviation and the tendency of pilots to valorize personal responsibility. On the third hand, the folks with whom I had lunch were not pilots, just airport neighbors.

Related:

• Life Lessons from Successful Pilots
• Blue Angels at the Reno Air Races 2016

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Peter the Great: His Life and World has an idea that we might be able to use, given the number of wars in which we are involved:

Before leaving Moscow for St. Petersburg in early March 1723, Peter invited his friends to another astonishing spectacle: the burning of the wooden house at Preobrazhenskoe in which he had first secretly planned the war against Sweden. With his own hand, the Emperor filled shelves and closets with inflammable colored chemicals and fireworks and then he put the house to the torch. Many small explosions and brilliantly colored flames erupted from the burning structure, and for some time before it collapsed, the heavy log frame of the house stood silhouetted against an incandescent rainbow. Later, when only the blackened, smoking rubble was left, Peter turned to the Duke of Holstein, nephew of Charles XII, and said, “This is the image of war: brilliant victories followed by destruction. But with this house in which my first plans against Sweden were worked out, may every thought disappear which can arm my hand against that kingdom, and may it always be the most faithful ally of my empire.”

[The war with Sweden above was the Great Northern War, which had lasted for 21 years.]

More: Read Peter the Great: His Life and World

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Due to the fact that the latest laptop computers don’t offer all that much more than the 17″ HP that I bought in 2012 (e.g., see “Why do laptops STILL have so little RAM?“), I decided to see if I could figure out why the old machine was unable to boot. At first I blamed Microsoft for its Windows 10 updates because the machine had died right in the middle of one. But then we discovered that the computer couldn’t boot properly even from a USB drive if the hard drive were simply plugged in. The machine would die with “page fault in nonpaged area.” I remembered that I had paid $50 or $100 extra for a 32 GB SSD cache. Hunting this animal down required a nearly complete disassembly of the machine, including removing the keyboard and top cover, a bunch of zero-insertion force connectors, about 25 screws, etc. When we were done, however, and the little Samsung board was removed from its mSATA home, the machine was considerably healthier.

I guess it makes sense that you wouldn’t want to add an extra level of complexity to every hard drive access. Certainly the purported acceleration never materialized. The machine was slow to boot and subject to the same “I’m thinking for a while” pauses that plague any other computer with a mechanical hard drive and bloated software. I wonder if this mSSD cache ever did anything for consumers other than break computers.

I’m putting this here in my weblog for antique laptop fans who are Googling for why their computer either can’t find an operating system on the hard drive and/or dies with “page fault in nonpaged area” when trying to boot from a USB drive.

It does seem to be time to retire this beast. I had ordered a Lenovo X1 Yoga but the delivery date slipped quite a bit and I canceled it. What else is happening in the laptop world? Dell seems to be stuck at 256 GB SSDs, even for $2000+ XPS laptops. 256 GB sounds great until you realize that this the same storage capacity as an iPhone 7.

Intel has a 7th generation processor line but the devices aren’t available yet? Should one wait for the next generation MacBook Pro? Go to Costco and buy a $400 laptop then stuff in a $235 1 TB SSD?

Related:

• Microsoft Surface Book review
• Good 15-inch laptop with a great keyboard?

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Some photos from the Blue Angels show at the Reno Air Races: with Google (until they decide to kill Photos the way that they killed Picasa?)

[Tech details: the now-discredited Canon 5D Mark III (we all need a Mark IV!) and the 200-400/4 zoom lens with built-in teleconverter. Incompetence papered over with motor drive and cropping in Picasa. It was a real pleasure to return to the Canon user interface after a multi-year sojourn in the Sony wilderness. On the other hand when it was time to capture a little video I said to myself “How come I can’t see the video in the viewfinder (optical) or on the rear screen (washed out by the sun)?”]

Separately, for those who wanted to see where tax dollars go to die, the Air Force brought a couple of F-35 fighter jets there.

Watching the Blue Angels it occurred to me that few people would say “Wow, we need to spend $400 billion on some new fighter jets because these F-18s aren’t very maneuverable.”

I had an off-the-record talk with a couple of Air Force guys. They couldn’t come up with a scenario in which any fighter is useful other than a hot war with China or Russia: “We’re dropping bombs from F-15s just because we needed to give them something to do.” But we need the F-35 for dogfights? “No. The F-35 is the everyday fighter. You send out 30 and hope that 20 come back. The F-22 goes out, kills 30 bad guys, and comes back before the enemy knows it was there.” Why don’t we just have F-22s and the older fighters then? “They shut down production of the F-22 because the F-35 was just around the corner and was going to be a lot cheaper. Now the F-35 is the same price and it would be too expensive to restart the production line for the F-22.”

Complicating matters is the fact that the old planes have a limited airframe life, e.g., 6000 hours for an F-18. So we can’t just run the old ones forever like we do with transports and bombers, at least not without a lot of inspections and perhaps strengthening.

The Air Force guys described new software (Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System) added to the F-16 fighter jet that will save the airplane from pilot error or incapacitation (article/video). If we assume that human-piloted fighter planes do have a future (i.e., that the aerial battlefield will not belong to a swarm of inexpensive drones), I’m wondering if it wouldn’t have been smarter to spend $400 billion on software to assist human pilots in the existing airframes.

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Peter the Great: His Life and World describes a world that is in some ways very familiar…

The Tsar’s demands for money were insatiable. In one attempt to uncover new sources of income, Peter in 1708 created a service of revenue officers, men whose duty it was to devise new means of taxing the people. Called by the foreign name “fiscals,” they were commanded “to sit and make income for the Sovereign Lord.” The leader and most successful was Alexis Kurbatov, a former serf of Boris Sheremetev who had already attracted Peter’s attention with his proposal for requiring that government-stamped paper be used for all legal documents. Under Kurbatov and his ingenious, fervently hated colleagues, new taxes were levied on a wide range of human activities. There was a tax on births, on marriages, on funerals and on the registration of wills. There was a tax on wheat and tallow. Horses were taxed, and horse hides and horse collars. There was a hat tax and a tax on the wearing of leather boots. The beard tax was systematized and enforced, and a tax on mustaches was added. Ten percent was collected from all cab fares. Houses in Moscow were taxed, and beehives throughout Russia. There was a bed tax, a bath tax, an inn tax, a tax on kitchen chimneys and on the firewood that burned in them. Nuts, melons, cucumbers, were taxed. There was even a tax on drinking water. Money also came from an increasing number of state monopolies. This arrangement, whereby the state took total control of the production and sale of a commodity, setting any price it wished, was applied to alcohol, resin, tar, fish oil, chalk, potash, rhubarb, dice, chessmen, playing cards, and the skins of Siberian foxes, ermines and sables. The flax monopoly granted to English merchants was taken back by the Russian government. The tobacco monopoly given by Peter to Lord Carmarthen in England in 1698 was abolished. The solid-oak coffins in which wealthy Muscovites elegantly spent eternity were taken over by the state and then sold at four times the original price.

The governors commanded, the fiscals schemed, the tax collectors strained and the people labored, but only so much money could be squeezed from the Russian land. More could come only from the development of commerce and industry.

No matter how much the people struggled, Peter’s taxes and monopolies still did not bring in enough. The first Treasury balance sheet, published in 1710, showed a revenue of 3,026,128 roubles and expenses of 3,834,418 roubles, leaving a deficit of over 808,000 roubles. This money went overwhelmingly for war. The army took 2,161,176 roubles; the fleet, 444,288 roubles; artillery and ammunition, 221,799 roubles; recruits, 30,000 roubles; armament, 84,104 roubles; embassies, 148,031 roubles; and the court, medical department, support of prisoners and miscellaneous, 745,020 roubles.

For some, the burden was too heavy and the only solution to the demands of the tax collector and the work gang was escape. Perhaps hundreds of thousands of peasants simply ran away. Some faded into the forests or traveled to the north, where prosperous settlements of Old Believers already existed. Most went south to the Ukrainian and Volga steppes, the land of the Cossacks, the traditional refuge for Russian runaways. Behind, they left deserted villages and nervous governors and landlords anxiously trying to explain why they could not fulfill the Tsar’s demands for manpower. When, to check this dangerous outflow, the Tsar ordered that the runaways be returned, the response of the Cossacks was hesitation, evasion and, ultimately, defiance.

After Poltava, the emphasis changed. As the demands of war diminished, Peter became more interested in other kinds of manufacturing, those designed to raise Russian life to the level of the West and at the same time to make Russia less dependent on imports from abroad. Aware that large sums were being drained out of the country to pay for imports of silk, velvet, ribbon, china, and crystal, he established factories to make these products in Russia. To protect the fledgling industries, he placed high import duties on foreign silk and cloth which doubled their price for Russian buyers. Basically, his policy was similar to that of other European states at the time, which can generally be described as mercantilism: to increase exports in order to earn foreign currency, and decrease imports in order to stem the flow of Russian wealth abroad. Peter’s industrialization policy had a second purpose, equally important. His tax collectors were already wringing the Russian people lifeless to finance the war. The only long-term way to extract more revenue from his people, Peter realized, was to increase the production of national wealth, thus increasing the tax base.

Commerce is a delicate mechanism, and state decrees are not usually the best way to make it work.

Although Peter repeatedly emphasized to his officials that taxes should be levied “without unduly burdening the people,” his own constant demand for funds overruled this sentiment. Taxes crushed every article and activity of daily life, yet the state never collected enough money to pay its mounting expenses. In 1701, the army and navy swallowed up three quarters of the revenues; in 1710, four fifths; and in 1724, even though the war was over, two thirds. When money was short, Peter slashed the salaries of all officials, temporal and spiritual, excepting only those most necessary to the realm: “foreign artisans, soldiers and sailors.” In 1723, there was so little cash that some government officials were paid in furs. The only solution, until growing commercial and industrial activity could expand the tax base, was to lay still heavier taxes on the burdened nation. Hitherto, the basic tax had been the old household tax, determined by a census taken in 1678 during the reign of Tsar Fedor. This tax was laid on every village and landowner according to the number of houses and farms possessed (and made for crowded living because, to avoid taxation, as many families and people as possible crowded under one roof). In 1710, believing that the population must have increased, Peter ordered a new census. To his astonishment, the new census showed that in thirty years the number of households had decreased by from one fifth to one quarter. There was some real justification for this: Peter had drained off hundreds of thousands of men into the army, the shipyards at Voronezh, the work on the canals and the building of St. Petersburg, while thousands more had fled into the forest or to the frontier. But the new low figures also represented the helplessness of the government to overcome the stratagems of both nobility and peasants who were determined to evade taxes. Bribing the commissioners who counted the houses was a preliminary gambit. If this failed, the peasants simply removed their houses from the commissioners’ sight. Russian peasant houses were largely made of logs or timbers notched at four corners. Thus, they could be un-notched in a few hours and either removed to the forest or scattered about. The census takers and tax collectors knew the trick, but there was little they could do about it.

[Contradicting some of the above…] When the Emperor died, the state did not owe a kopek. Peter had fought twenty-one years of war, constructed a fleet, a new capital, new harbors and canals without the aid of a single foreign loan or subsidy (indeed, it was he who paid subsidies to his allies, especially Augustus of Poland). Every kopek was raised by the toil and sacrifice of the Russian people within a single generation. He did not float internal loans so that future generations could help to pay for his projects, nor did he devalue the currency by issuing paper money as Goertz had done on behalf of Charles XII of Sweden. Instead, he laid the entire burden on his contemporary Russians. They strained, they struggled, they opposed, they cursed. But they obeyed.

More: Read Peter the Great: His Life and World

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I just updated the passwords on my seldom-used Yahoo! account and also on some other accounts where I used the same password (quelle horreur!). I have enabled two-step authentication everywhere that it was disabled. I’m wondering if this proves the point made in Swiss pour cold water on our Internet dreams (cost of securing the Internet will exceed the benefits of connectivity by 2019). How much of my life will I spend waiting for text messages to arrive as part of the two-step authentication process? Re-typing fresh passwords into mobile devices?

Separately, given the cost of securing an employee’s electronic devices is more or less fixed (same cost to secure devices for someone who works 1 hour per week as for someone who works 80 hours per week), I wonder if the fact that Russians turned out to be so much smarter than Americans also contributes to the gender pay gap (see “Reassessing the Gender Wage Gap” regarding research by Claudia Goldin of the Harvard econ department; she says that companies pay more per hour to employees who work more hours per week; see also Goldin’s study on parental altruism in the Rationale chapter of Real World Divorce (punchline: at least some parents are happy to make their kids worse off if they can get more cash for themselves)).

Related:

• What will Verizon do with Yahoo?
• Programming considered harmful? (Yahoo)
• Did ad blockers and Facebook kill Yahoo?

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