Category: Uncategorized

Department of French products that may be tough to export to the U.S.:

Around the same time that I encountered this fine product, in a grocery store on the Rue Cler, I shared dinner with a schoolteacher from Kansas. He said “the weirder the name the more difficult the kid. When a child comes in named Diamond or Precious I know that it isn’t going to work out well.”

[Separately, the Kansas schoolteacher (art) and his wife, a former schoolteacher of French, mentioned their passionate hatred of all things Republican, especially Kansas’s Republican governor, who has tried to cut the growth in the state’s spending on education. (I wrote “cut the growth” rather than “cut spending” because it seems unlikely that spending could actually go down; BallotPedia says that state spending increased by nearly 5 percent, or $686 million, between 2014 and 2015, but the schoolteachers perceived this as a cut.) Kansas is a fairly conservative state (though not so traditional that working pays better than out-of-wedlock sex; see this chapter for Kansas’s offer of unlimited tax-free child support revenue to those residents or visitors who have sex with a high-income partner). If people in Kansas who get a government paycheck are this passionate about the Democrats it will be tough sledding for Donald Trump in November. The percentage of Americans who work for or depend on the government goes up all the time.]

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A friend has applied her substantial literary talents to an area that did not seem amenable: the hair dryer review. Check out “Say Hello to the Dyson Supersonic Hairdryer.”

Separately, will significant numbers of people actually pay $400 for a hair dryer? If so, what does that say about the economy?

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“Obama’s Historic Day of Clemency” (Atlantic) was a topic of discussion on our cruise ship. President Obama cut short the sentences of 214 out of 200,000 federal prisoners.

I found the discussion interesting because people who didn’t know any of the facts around these 214 cases assumed that the original sentences were “just.” I probed a little to figure out why and it was as simple as faith in the American justice system. There was a law. There was a judge. The two intersected in a sentence of X years and therefore the sentence of X years was by definition “justice.”

Yet the cruise itself showed that “justice” can be a relative term. The Soviets who deported wealthier and/or more troublesome Estonians to Siberia were criminals from the Estonians point of view, but not from the Russian point of view. The rolling text at the end of the BBC/HBO dramatization of the Wannsee Conference, in which the murder of millions was planned, shows that a lot of the participants were sentenced to just a few years in prison. By contrast, our guide in Latvia told us that, after World War II, the KGB had investigated the murder of Jews in Riga, tracked down Latvian collaborators, and sentenced them to 25 years of hard labor in Siberia. One of the passengers at our table had a friend who was in his 16th year of an 80-year sentence imposed by a Texas court. The friend was in his 40s when he had consensual sex with a 16-year-old girl. He will be eligible for parole after 18 years. Our tablemate, a retired Texas schoolteacher, expressed the opinion that the 80-year sentence was unjust, but was quick to add “I’m not saying that what he did was right.” It was pointed out that what his friend did would have been legal in a lot of states. (Wikipedia confirms this; regarding European countries, Wikipedia says “15 is the most common age of consent in the European Union” and in fact his friend could not have been prosecuted in any of the countries that we visited (Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Denmark).)

Americans don’t seem to have a lot of faith in the executive or legislative branches of government so I was kind of surprised at the extent to which people assumed that the judicial branch was faultless and its decisions shouldn’t be meddled with.

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Here’s a good case study for a business school rebranding class…. driving around northern Israel recently we passed a big warehouse prominently marked “ZIKA”. This turned out to be part of a company founded in 1950: ZIKA Industrials. Fortunately the products are for welding and are not targeted at consumers.

[http://www.zikavirusnet.com/history-of-zika.html says that the origin of the name for the virus comes from the “Zika Forest” in Uganda.]

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“World’s largest Viking ship, headed to Duluth, needs to pay $400K or turn around” has some good career tips for young Americans:

Red tape, bureaucracy and an unexpected $400,000 bill threaten to doom the Draken Harald Hårfagre’s visit to America.

It wasn’t the reception that the world’s largest Viking ship was expecting after leaving Norway in April to cross the Atlantic and head as far west as Duluth, just in time for Tall Ships Duluth 2016, where it’s one of the event’s marquee attractions.

Without $400,000 to pay for a pilot to guide it through the Great Lakes, the Draken will head home to Norway and miss a series of cities eagerly awaiting its visit through the Great Lakes.

The Draken set sail in April and was under the impression that it would not need a pilot to sail the Great Lakes because it was less than 35 meters long. The Draken is 34.5 meters (115 feet). However, that ruling applied only to its passage through Canadian waters. Once the ship left Snell Lock west of Montreal, it entered international waters, which are under jurisdiction of the U.S. Coast Guard, which requires pilots. That is when the Draken was informed it had to have a pilot, which can cost up to $400 per hour.

The pilot guild explains how it works:

The Office of Great Lakes Pilotage, U.S.C.G., determines the number of pilots required for each U.S. Great Lakes district. … Permanent positions become available as pilots retire and when the Office of Great Lakes Pilotage determines an increase in the number of pilots is required.

I.e., the government decides how many Americans will be allowed to work at this job. federalregister.gov has a guide to the U.S. Coast Guard’s 2016 process:

Step 4 sets each pilot’s target compensation at $326,114, with a total target compensation of $12,066,225 for the 37 pilots. We set these targets after identifying 2013 Canadian Great Lakes Pilotage Authority (GLPA) compensation, with adjustments for currency exchange and inflation, as the best benchmark for our 2016 rates.

Plainly not every young American can expect to earn $400/hour or $326,114 per year, but to me this is a good example of the superiority of government or government-regulated careers compared to careers in private enterprise.

Related:

• Life Lessons from Successful Pilots (airplane pilots, but the most financially successful and free were working in areas created by government regulation)

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Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker is worthwhile for anyone who wants to know what it is like to be an airline pilot. The author is a first officer for British Airways who has type ratings for the Airbus A320 and the Boeing 747. The descriptions of systems seem to be technically accurate and the writing is graceful. Here’s takeoff:

But with speed comes the transition, the gathering sense that the wheels matter less, and the mechanisms that work on the air—the control surfaces on the wings and the tail—more. We feel the airplane’s dawning life in the air clearly through the controls, and with each passing second the jet’s presence on the ground becomes more incidental to how we direct its motion.

Rated pilots will find some stuff here to enjoy, e,.g.,

On sky maps of the Tasman Sea, the triangles that denote the waypoints hanging like notes on a musical staff arcing toward New Zealand are marked WALTZ, INGMA, and TILDA—a reference to Australia’s unofficial anthem, “Waltzing Matilda”—while many thousands of miles west, running north to south over hundreds of miles of Indian Ocean off Western Australia, is a lyrical sequence that begins WONSA, JOLLY, SWAGY, CAMBS, BUIYA, BYLLA, and BONGS—“Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong…”

SNUPY. Near Kansas City are the culinary waypoints BARBQ, SPICY, SMOKE, RIBBS, and BRSKT. Near Detroit is PISTN, surely for the basketball team whose name reflects the city’s heritage of industry; the skies around Detroit also feature MOTWN and WONDR (Stevie, Michigan-born) and EMINN, perhaps for the rap star.

Boston has etched a particularly intricate constellation of itself onto the ether above New England. There is PLGRM, for the region’s history; CHWDH, LBSTA, and CLAWW for its food; GLOWB and HRALD cover the city’s newspapers; while SSOXS, FENWY, BAWLL, STRKK, and OUTTT chronicle the anguishes of the city’s baseball team across the heavens. Even the region’s speech—WIKID, followed by PAHTI—seems to be mapped.

The book describes why modern aircraft are such complex and overweight messes:

Most airliners now make use of GPS. Often, it’s been added onto an airliner that was not originally designed for it. There are many such technologies—related in particular to communications, and to the avoidance of other aircraft, wind shear, and mountains—that accrete in aircraft systems as layers of progressively higher neurological functions evolve in living organisms, while older systems still twinkle in the lower-down layers.

Highly recommended, though keep in mind that I’m biased!

Related:

• Professional Pilot Salary Survey 2016

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One family in our merry band of tourists in Israel last month has a child who is devoted to Ethiopian food. The mom found a restaurant with great reviews in Google. We thus hailed a taxi and gave the driver the address in central Tel Aviv. “Are you sure that you want to go there?” he asked. Why not? Google says it is 15 minutes away. “Well, that’s near the old bus station. Quite a few of Israel’s 160,000 illegal immigrants live in that neighborhood. There are also a lot of prostitutes, which doesn’t bother me because they’re doing honest work. But there are also a lot of drug dealers and that does bother me.”

The neighborhood was almost completely dark, except for some brightly lit street-level apartments containing barely dressed women. The restaurant, at Ha-Negev St 10, featured warm friendly service and food that the New Yorkers said was better than their neighborhood Ethiopian place. It was also kosher! (On the other hand, if the boy’s father hadn’t had the GetTaxi app on his phone we might never have gotten out of there.)

I asked around and learned that there are indeed a substantial number of asylum-seekers/illegal immigrants in Israel. “They’re mostly from Sudan and South Sudan. They just walk across the border from Egypt,” said one Israeli, “It is a real problem because it is illegal for them to work here. But of course they do get jobs and are paid in cash. Then when there is a problem with their employer they sue under all of the Israeli laws protecting workers.”

One of our hotel maids was Agok, who said that she was South Sudan. She was very pleasant but it was unclear if she wanted to learn Hebrew or become somehow “Israeli.”

Related: A friend here in the U.S. hired an undocumented immigrant to work as a nanny and receive roughly $900 per week in cash compensation. After about four years the child outgrew the need for a nanny. The nanny then found an attorney to sue the employer on a contingent fee basis. The facts alleged were that the agreement was for $1300 per week in cash and that, every week for four years, the nanny had been shorted $400. The nanny was thus owed about $83,000 in unpaid back wages. That it was illegal for the nanny to be working at all apparently did not impair her claim under state law.

[Note: I mentioned the taxi ride and restaurant experience to one of the front desk clerks at our hotel. She said “I lived in that neighborhood for three years. It is kind of dark at night but it isn’t really unsafe and I enjoy being in a multicultural environment.”]

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While in Warnemünde, I talked to a few Germans as well as a software engineer from Canada who had emigrated to Germany for a job. They either volunteered their opinion regarding immigrants or I asked for it. Here were some responses:

• We aren’t doing a good enough job at integrating them.
• I don’t see how integration is possible; they don’t want to be like us and we don’t want to be like them.
• It is ridiculous to take in people who aren’t allowed to work. Why do we take in refugees and then not give them work permits within two weeks? Of course we have to pay to house and feed them regardless of whether they work.
• Not too many of them settle here in North Germany. This is just a transit point to Denmark and Sweden where the welfare benefits are more generous.
• It is too many immigrants too fast. 2 million immigrants in a short time cannot be absorbed.
• Germans don’t like to admit that they made a mistake. They make a decision and just stick with it, regardless of evidence that it was the wrong decision. That’s what is happening with the decision to admit so many Syrians, most of whom are not actually Syrian despite what their papers may say.

The Germans with whom I spoke thought that their welfare state would have to be torn down if they were to continue accepting refugees. This would make Germany more like the U.S. back in the 19th century. Anyone could move to the U.S., but they wouldn’t get free housing, food, and health care. They also thought that German women would likely have to return to 19th century clothing to avoid coming into conflict with the imported traditional Arab and Islamic culture.

Regarding the EU, our guide told us that the governments of southern Europe were moving to the left while the governments of the north were becoming more conservative. This dovetailed with the German who said “A Spaniard, an Italian, and a Greek walk into a restaurant. Who pays the bill? German taxpayers.”

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I attended graduation ceremonies at Oberlin College this year, explaining to friends that I wanted to “see if they were going to restore Bill Cosby’s honorary doctorate (awarded 2010; rescinded 2015).”

The president of the graduating class had minored in “gender, sexuality, and feminist studies” (see this video at about 41:00). I congratulated a college official nearby on getting a 20-year-old to pay $300,000 to learn about sexuality.

The main speaker was the great soprano Jessye Norman (at about 1:13:30 in the video). The transcript of Norman’s speech includes a quote from Albert Einstein: “when I examine myself and my method of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing knowledge.” (i.e., J.K. Rowling is in line to become the 21st century’s greatest physicist; I noted to my friend that the people most likely to quote physicists on subjects other than physics are those who haven’t met many physicists…) Norman did not have any kind of personal tale of social injustice, having come from a two-parent household and having obtained scholarships and jobs commensurate with her hard work and natural talent. Nonetheless, her talk touched on social justice. Examples:

You will not be daunted by the terrible amounts of despair and struggle in our world.

Someone said that public service … this offering of our ‘better selves’… is the dues we pay for the privilege of life.

Allow me to ask … as you do … should homelessness even exist in the richest nation on this earth? Should anyone be hungry in this world of plenty?

The Metropolitan Opera House would need still more time for its wisdom of inclusion to make an appearance. It was not until 1955 that an African American appeared on that stage in a leading role.

With that short history lesson for some of you, events of the past which show us how far we have come, I trust you are inspired to set about making your own history, your own special mark in this world … a world that is just waiting for and needing your passion and your humanity, as we have yet so much further to go.

At lunch with three young future professional musicians who had heard the address I asked them “Given that Norman is not an economist, would you have rather heard her talk about her rarefied world of music and what she had learned, rather than wondering how economic growth could be consistent with hunger?” [Sidenote: Malthus may have a better explanation for this than Einstein.]

It turned out that Norman had struck all of the right notes (so to speak) with her speech. The young folks loved it, loved hearing that social justice was the most important issue, and loved hearing that they had an important role to play in achieving social justice.

What about Norman’s description of the world as a place that needs urgent fixing? Given that she was born in 1945, right at the end of World War II, did it make sense for her to quote “On the surface of the world right now there is war and violence and things seem dark.” Weren’t things a lot darker in 1945, with tens of millions of people recently killed? The young folks around the lunch table said that the world was in far worse shape than in 1945. “The problems back then were obvious,” one said, “whereas now they are hidden.”

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A Hollywood screenwriter cranked out Before the Fall, a novel concerning some rich people who crash in a chartered 9-seat jet out of Martha’s Vineyard. As befits a Hollywood-derived work, the characters are generally either rich or recovering alcoholics:

Studying Doug’s back, Scott wonders how much money the boy stands to inherit from his parents. Five million? Fifty? His father ran a TV empire and flew in private planes. There will be riches, real estate. Sniffling, Doug hikes up his pants with both hands. He pulls a small toy car from his pocket. It still has the price tag on it. “Here you go, slugger,” he says. “Got this for you.” There are a lot of sharks in the sea, thinks Scott, watching the boy take the car.

The things money can’t buy, goes the famous quote, you don’t want anyway. Which is bullshit, because in truth there is nothing money can’t buy. Not really. Love, happiness, peace of mind. It’s all available for a price. The fact is, there’s enough money on earth to make everyone whole, if we could just learn to do what any toddler knows—share. But money, like gravity, is a force that clumps, drawing in more and more of itself, eventually creating the black hole that we know as wealth. This is not simply the fault of humans. Ask any dollar bill and it will tell you it prefers the company of hundreds to the company of ones. Better to be a sawbuck in a billionaire’s account than a dirty single in the torn pocket

At twenty-nine, Leslie Mueller is the sole heir to a technology empire. The daughter of a billionaire (male) and a runway model (female), she is a member of an ever-growing genetically engineered master race. They are everywhere these days, it seems, the moneyed children of brilliant capitalists, using a fraction of their inheritances to launch companies and fund the arts. At eighteen, nineteen, twenty, they buy impossible real estate in New York, Hollywood, London. They set themselves up as a new Medici class, drawn to the urgent throb of the future. They are something beyond hip, collectors of genius, winging from Davos to Coachella to Sundance, taking meetings, offering today’s artists, musicians, and filmmakers the seductive ego stroke of cash and the prestige of their company. Beautiful and rich, they don’t take no for an answer.

The woman in back, on the other hand, who told him to keep the change from a twenty, lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, and owned nineteen televisions she didn’t watch. Once upon a time she was a doctor’s daughter in Brookline, Massachusetts, a girl who grew up riding horses and got a nose job for her sixteenth birthday.

The book goes off the rails when it comes to aviation:

They started him as a copilot. This was September 2013. He loved the luxury jets, loved the clients he served—billionaires and heads of state. It made him feel important. But what he really loved was the grade-A, top-shelf pussy working the main cabin. Goddamn, he thought the first time he saw the flight crew he’d be working with.

Under normal conditions it is a twenty-nine-minute flight. Less than a short hop. There will be a six-minute lull before they are in range of Teterboro ATC

He stepped out of the cockpit. The crew bathroom was right next to the cockpit.

He had a few hours to kill before his next flight, a quick jog over to Martha’s Vineyard to pick up a payload of six. For this flight he’d pilot an OSPRY 700SL. He hadn’t flown the particular model before, but he wasn’t worried. OSPRY made a very capable airplane. Still, as he sat in the crew lounge waiting, he read up on the specs.

It’d do Mach .083, though he’d never push it that hard with paying passengers aboard. It’d fly coast-to-coast on a full tank at a top speed of 554 mph. The specs said it topped out at forty-five thousand feet, but he knew from experience that that was a cautious number. He could take it up to fifty thousand feet without incident, though he couldn’t imagine needing to on this flight.

On Friday, August 21, she flew from Frankfurt to London on a Learjet 60XR. It was her and Chelsea Norquist, a gap-toothed blonde from Finland, in the main cabin. [Note that a stripped Lear 60 has a full-fuel payload of 1068 lbs, so two flight attendants and their bags would consume about 30 percent of the payload.]

The plot critically depends on a 9-seat business jet having an armored flight deck door and a flight attendant. Planes that are used for short regional flights are also used to go on intercontinental trips. Small business jets have multiple flight attendants (the second flight attendant is required by the FAA when there are more than 50 passenger seats), dedicated crew bathrooms (like a 747?), and a “main cabin”. Pilots fly new-to-them turbojets without getting a type rating (training specific to that model of jet). Teterboro Tower controls airspace halfway to Martha’s Vineyard.

I can’t figure out why publishers and/or authors wouldn’t get one of America’s 500,000+ pilots to review and correct a manuscript like this. Perhaps nobody cares (i.e., the books still sell) and if you just assume that really the plane they were flying was a Boeing Business Jet then potentially it could make some sense.

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