Category: Uncategorized

The Tax Foundation publishes data on state taxes as a percentage of personal income (example: Texas). WalletHub has released an alternative ranking that is mostly consistent but potentially interesting. One huge discrepancy in the two data sources is New Jersey, which Tax Foundation says is one of the least efficient states, consuming 12.3 percent of residents’ income, while WalletHub says that only 10.4 percent is siphoned off. It may be that different years are used in the calculations, but the discrepancy seems too large to be explained by that.

WalletHub shows the Vermont/New Hampshire border to be perhaps the most dramatic, with Vermont taking 11.13 percent and New Hampshire down at 6.88 percent.

I wonder if these data are accurate. New Hampshire is shown as collecting 1.41 percent of residents’ income via a “sales and gross receipts tax” yet the state doesn’t have a sales tax. Could this be fees?

It would also be worth adding in something about state services. Florida, for example, has low taxes but also low college tuition (collegeboard.org) and excellent public schools when adjusted for student demographics (nytimes). (Also, Florida is a wonderful place to be an alimony plaintiff, assuming that the governor vetoes a recently passed law.) Texas is not quite as great as it looks to start with if you’re going to send a bunch of kids to a four-year state college, though the same nytimes story indicates that the public schools are great (don’t move and subject yourself to Texas family law if you want to make money from child support (capped) or alimony (the polar opposite of Florida’s “permanent alimony” system)). New Hampshire has comparably low taxes to Florida but in-state tuition at a four-year state university is more than 2X what Florida charges. Vermont is off-the-charts bad if you consider the high taxes and also the crazy high college tuition (they are too busy admiring Bernie Sanders to watch how their own tax dollars are being spent?).

Full post, including comments

I’ve been so busy displaying my virtue on Facebook by denouncing people who live in North Carolina and celebrating PayPal as an example of diversity (nothing says “diverse” like an all-white Board of Directors! (type their names into Google Image search)) that I haven’t had time to ponder the practical questions of gender and lock rooms.

Suppose that Person A walks through a door labeled “Women’s locker room”. Someone complains that Person A doesn’t fit a cisgender-normative concept of “woman.” The police are called? And then what? If there is a law saying that Person A has to use a locker room labeled consistent with Person A’s birth certificate gender, how can that be applied in practice? Person A is not required to carry a birth certificate, right? Some Americans don’t even have birth certificates and/or the authenticity of their birth certificates is questioned. Is Person A hauled off to jail until a birth certificate can be located? A medical examination conducted? A chromosome test run by Theranos?

What if we consider the situation without North Carolina’s hateful laws. Let’s say the above facts occurred in a progressive state such as California. Person A showers with a bunch of women who become upset that Person A lacks a body that meets cisgender-normative assumptions of “female.” Can Person A be arrested for having shown up in clothing from a store’s “men’s department”, using a name traditionally associated with so-called “men”, failing to wear a sign that says ‘I identify as a woman”? If Person A is arrested, what is the legal standard applied to determine whether or not Person A’s gender identification as a woman was legitimate on that particular day?

Full post, including comments

“The good lawyer knows the law while the great lawyer knows the judge,” is an old adage. This was on display in the Lizzie Borden case, according to a fascinating lecture on the subject within Forensic History: Crimes, Frauds, and Scandals, by Elizabeth Murray.

There was a lot of evidence against Lizzie, including that she was seen burning a dress a few days after the murders of her father and stepmother. Lizzie had a motive to murder her cheapskate father because, following his death she would be able to move to a fancy house and enjoy a lavish lifestyle.

How did Lizzie get off? Professor Murray attributes her acquittal primarily to the fact that she was able to use what had been her father’s money to hire a lawyer who had been governor of Massachusetts and who, while governor, had appointed the judge who ultimately heard the case. The judge excluded a lot of evidence that would have been unfavorable for the defense.

Full post, including comments

We received a resume from an applicant for our flight school’s open helicopter instructor position. As is typical for today’s young pilots, this applicant has a military background (see this posting for why). His role in the military was “Human Resources Supervisor” at a U.S. Army fort. What were his main responsibilities? Here’s how the block on his resume begins: “Led a comprehensive Drug and Alcohol training for 300+ staff members. Led comprehensive safety training for 300+ staff members.”

Full post, including comments

Should we be sorry that spam is filtered out so assiduously by Gmail, et al? Here are some recent items…

Rita from Jiangxi Pingxiang Xingda Aquarium Filter factory gives me these prices:

• ceramic ring: Fob guangzhou $694.5/ton
• bacterial house:Fob guangzhou $1782.4/ton

You can buy the rings from Eheim for $43 per kilo (Amazon). That’s a 62:1 ratio of retail:factory.

Grace Morgan, an Online Marketing Executive, asks

Are you interested in acquiring a contact database of Ophthalmologists and Optometrists along with their Emails for your marketing projects?

Some of the Physicians specialties available in our database: Anesthesiologists, Cardiologist, Chiropractors, Dentist, Dermatologist, Emergency Medicine physicians, Family Practice physicians, Gastroenterologist, Hematologists, Internal Medicine physicians, Neurologist, Obstetrics/Gynecologists, Oncologist, Ophthalmologist, Optometrist, Orthopedists, Psychiatrist, Psychologist, Radiologist, etc.

Combined with the information in “Child Support Litigation without a Marriage” and residency in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, or a similarly-oriented state, this could prove lucrative indeed…

Bad news for traditional media: Offers-to-subscribe emails from both New Yorker and the Boston Globe were marked by Google as “spam”.

“Obama” is tacked on to various proposals under which the recipient can get cash without working, e.g., “President Obama’s Student Forgiveness Program” in which “Students and (Former Students) are being forgiven on balances owed”.

 

Readers: What are the best spam emails that you have received lately?

Full post, including comments

I was pretty enthusiastic about the Samsung Galaxy S7 (review based on early experience). And it is a lot of fun to awe retail clerks with the Samsung Pay magic: “Sir, I’m telling you that we don’t have the Apple Pay hardware and it is not going to work” while looking at me instead of at the POS terminal screen, which would have shown them that the transaction had already been completed. However, battery life seemed almost unusable. I removed Facebook and Facebook Messenger and that helped a bit.

Today I did a formal test. The phone came off its wireless charging station around 7:30 am. I managed the following:

• 10 phone calls totaling approximately 1.5 hours
• a 24-minute Skype session
• taking 48 still photos
• capturing 4 videos in 1080p with a total duration of about 4 minutes
• running background tasks such as Gmail, Dropbox (uploading photos and videos), Google Photos (also uploading photos, albeit low-res)

The phone died completely at 7:30 pm. The screen had been on for a total of about 1 hour and 40 minutes so it wasn’t the screen that had drained the battery. GSM Arena rates the phone at 22 hours of talk time. Android Authority got the phone to last for 400 minutes of Web browsing or at least 700 minutes of video playback. They also noted that they could run the phone for a whole day with 4-6 hours of “screen on” time. That’s what I remember getting out of my iPhone 6 Plus, which virtually never ran out before bedtime even if it had not been topped up.

Readers: Any thoughts on why the battery life is so short? What’s the debugging procedure for Samsung/Android? I would like to keep the phone because the camera is so much better than on the iPhone and some of the other features are cool. But a battery-powered device needs to have good power management to be useful.

 

Update: I discovered that Uber’s software doesn’t think that the Galaxy S7 is a legitimate device (we ended up having to use a friend’s iPhone)

Full post, including comments

The Wall Street Journal ran an unintentionally funny story about the “sharp fall” in CEO pay at American public companies. Here’s the front-page graphic:

The journalist doesn’t suggest that an investor might look at the above graph and consider that the “sharp fall” was in shareholder return rather than CEO pay.

Full post, including comments

A pilot friend was displaying his virtue on Facebook by denouncing Donald Trump with a reference to a BBC article saying that “Trump presidency rated among 10 global risks.” I responded with

Given your passion for private aviation, I am surprised that you aren’t looking forward to King Donald I. He won’t be shutting down New England by vacationing on Martha’s Vineyard. He himself has been a user of small airports and FBOs. He ran an airline so he knows what it is like to deal with the FAA.

Pilot Readers: What do you think? Will it be good for us aviation nerds to have a user of the U.S. aviation system as president?

[Separately, my friend won’t have to worry too much about economic risk from whoever occupies the White House. He took the advice from the Introduction to Real World Divorce:

“When young people ask me about the law as a career,” said one litigator, “I tell them that in this country whom they choose to have sex with and where they have sex will have a bigger effect on their income than whether they attend college and what they choose as a career.”

(i.e., he married the daughter of a guy who got rich decades ago; he lives as “the dependent spouse” in no-fault Massachusetts so he can also count on lucrative property division and alimony in the event of a divorce occasioned, e.g., by his having an affair with a younger woman).]

Full post, including comments

In ancient times Linux was free and other Unix implementations were fast. With all of the effort that has gone into Linux over the decades, I’m wondering where the chips finally fell. Has the practical performance of Linux surpassed that of full-fledged commercial operating systems? As of 2008, IBM’s AIX was supposedly 5-10 percent faster (IBM Systems Magazine). Windows has near-infinite financial resources behind it but may be slower than Linux (source). Solaris circa 2013 was supposedly faster than Linux (throughput charts that are virtually impossible to read).

Maybe it doesn’t matter because development costs, available libraries and security patches, etc. are vastly more important. But it came up over dinner (time to find more interesting companions!) and now I am curious…

Related:

• Java is the SUV of programming tools (149 impassioned comments!)
• Fallout from the Java = SUV posting
• Java is fading as a Web development tool… along with the SUV?

Full post, including comments

In the department of “Why you don’t want to invest in a U.S. aviation company,” back in 2010 I wrote up a review of the Icon A5 amphibious seaplane that the company promised to ship in 2011. They made a lot of noise in July 2015 about delivering the first production unit, but have been quiet since then. This AOPA article indicates that real production won’t begin until some time later in 2016.

Back in 2010 I wrote

It is not hard to see who would want to buy a fun toy like the ICON A5, but one has to wonder who funds a company like this. Suppose that ICON sells al 500 airplanes and collects $200,000 in revenue from each customer. That’s $100 million. Suppose that two percent of those 500 aircraft are involved in fatal crashes in which a jury finds ICON liable, either for telling unlicensed pilots that they could learn how to fly an amphib in 20+ hours or for not including a gear-down-in-water warning system. That’s 10 crashes. Suppose that each crash costs $10 million. One hundred percent of the company’s revenue has thus been paid out in legal awards.

It appears that the company has been thinking along similar lines. The AOPA article describes extraordinary efforts by the company to limit its liability through 41 pages of legalese that have been sprung on formerly unaware customers. The company imposes a transfer fee on anyone who tries to sell an airplane, restricts training and maintenance options (the owner of an FAA-certified aircraft actually would end up with far more flexibility), and gives itself the right to repurchase aircraft in case an owner has the opportunity to sell one at a profit. The company has imposed a 6000-hour, 30-year airframe life, which is kind of odd considering that composite aircraft aren’t subject to metal fatigue and this plane is not pressurized, which is the typical reason for having an airframe life (e.g., the TBM has a 12,000-cycle or 16,200-hour life limit).

Here’s one comment:

I just refused the proposed contract. Asked for a refund of my deposit. I have signed nothing with Icon; yet they first refused to return all of my deposit, then agreed to refund the whole deposit in about 6 weeks IF I agreed to another lengthy document regarding my rights. I have refused to sign anything this company conjures up. We will see how long it takes them to return my money. I am extremely disappointed.

Related:

• Now that Icon has cranked up its prices, what you can buy for about the same money: Grumman G-44 Widgeon (Alaska-ready five-seat twin-engine IFR-certified amphib), available on Controller right now for $200,000 to $325,000

Full post, including comments