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I was with friends who have a Tibetan Mastiff who is the size of a small pony. I’ve known this animal since he was a puppy and he has always been a (big black fluffy) marshmallow with me, but they mentioned that he truly hates a mutual acquaintance and has nipped this guy. I said “Maybe we should get a custom chew-toy with [Donald’s*] likeness for him.”

What about this idea for a business in our Etsy/3D Printing/computer-controlled embroidery age? Chew toys for dogs in the shape of or with the likeness of someone the dog hates?

* Name changed to protect the guilty.

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Some of my Yale-graduate friends, most of whom are now college professors, were discussing the twisted panties at Yale regarding Halloween costume etiquette (see “The New Intolerance of Student Activism” for some background).

What is known is that a person currently named “Erika Christakis” wrote an email that some students didn’t like. The only other item regarding the email author that seems to be authoritative is that this person is married to “Nicholas Christakis.”

One of the Yale graduates in the exchange wrote the following:

On a campus where students of color regularly experience racism, a request goes out to refrain from costumes that mock and demean people of color. A request, not an edict, to refrain from hurting and dehumanizing others.

A straight white woman with no experience of being afraid on campus poo-poos the request, equating black-face with harmless child’s play. Her email completely ignores the issues which led to the request, as well as the tremendous imbalances of power that exist on a majority-white, majority-straight campus, where there’s no such thing as peer pressure curbing the impulses of frat boys to mock, demean, and threaten marginalized students.

[emphasis added]

Suppose that we accept the idea that the ideas expressed in what literature scholars call a “text” should be judged according to the sexual preferences and gender identity of the author. If we also accept the idea that biology is not destiny, is it reasonable to make heteronormative and cisgender-normative assumptions about an author? And who among us is qualified to look at a photograph of an email author and say “this person identifies as white”? Finally how does anyone know if another person has “experience of being afraid on campus”?

I prodded the author of the passage quoted above and asked how it was possible for us to know definitively that “Erika” identified as a woman and also to know what kinds of sexual desires were present in Erika’s brain. The Yale graduate responded with “It’s relevant that the author of the email comes from a position of privilege … It’s not a question of her ‘sexual practices,’ but of how she experiences the world as she walks through it – differently than the students who had a problem with her email.”

Christakis’s web page notes that her highest level degree is a master’s and that she specializes in early childhood education. In any other context she would be described as an underpaid victim of a society that doesn’t value K-12 teachers (they are so undervalued, of course, that hundreds apply for an open public school position!). Or she would be the subject of sympathy as an underpaid adjunct teacher and/or an exploited master’s degree holder at an institution where the people making real $$ ($820/hour at Yale!) are PhDs. But for this purpose she needs to occupy a “position of privilege.” A Yale graduate responded to this by citing a cartoon on everydayfeminism.com explaining white privilege. Yet the rest of the content on that site explains that women of all races in the U.S. are oppressed victims. Can Erika Christakis, if indeed she identifies as a white woman, simultaneously be privileged because of her race and an oppressed victim because of her gender identification?

Gary Shteyngart writes about being at a liberal arts college in the 1990s (previous posting):

I master an Oberlin technique called “As a.” “As a woman, I think …” “As a woman of color, I would speculate …” “As a woman of no color, I would conjecture …” “As a hermaphrodite.” “As a bee liberator.” “As a beagle in a former life.”

These self-identification prefaces still make logical sense in our gender-is-a-state-of-mind world. But how does it make sense to make an assumption about an author’s gender or sexual preferences unless one has intimate knowledge of that author? And if it is not reasonable, does that mean that entire careers of literature scholars are in jeopardy?

[Separately, if you’re an employer watching this unfold, do you want to pay a premium for a Yale graduate? What’s the value of an employee who will devote a lot of time and energy thinking about what people should wear to the company Halloween party?]

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I’m polishing my sequins and heading out to Las Vegas this week to interview with Cirque de Soleil. In hopes of seeing Al Gore at the Gulfstream booth, I thought that I would also check out NBAA. Please email me (philg@mit.edu) if you’d like to get together. I can meet at 7:30 am for breakfast at the MGM Grand on Thursday 11/19. I may also be able to meet Thursday for afternoon coffee or dinner.

And, of course, if you happen to be attending NBAA as well, let’s meet at Al Gore’s ceremonial lighting up of 50 barrels of Jet-A.

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Friends have been asking me about “The Disturbing Truth About How Airplanes Are Maintained Today,” a December 2015 article in Vanity Fair. Here are some excerpts:

In the last decade, most of the big U.S. airlines have shifted major maintenance work to places like El Salvador, Mexico, and China, where few mechanics are F.A.A. certified and inspections have no teeth.

Over the past decade, nearly all large U.S. airlines have shifted heavy maintenance work on their airplanes to repair shops thousands of miles away, in developing countries, where the mechanics who take the planes apart (completely) and put them back together (or almost) may not even be able to read or speak English. US Airways and Southwest fly planes to a maintenance facility in El Salvador. Delta sends planes to Mexico. United uses a shop in China.

The airlines are shipping this maintenance work offshore for the reason you’d expect: to cut labor costs. Mechanics in El Salvador, Mexico, China, and elsewhere earn a fraction of what mechanics in the U.S. do. In part because of this offshoring, the number of maintenance jobs at U.S. carriers has plummeted, from 72,000 in the year 2000 to fewer than 50,000 today.

The work is labor-intensive and complicated, and the technical manuals are written in English, the language of international aviation. According to regulations, in order to receive F.A.A. certification as a mechanic, a worker needs to be able to “read, speak, write, and comprehend spoken English.” Most of the mechanics in El Salvador and some other developing countries who take apart the big jets and then put them back together are unable to meet this standard. At Aeroman’s El Salvador facility, only one mechanic out of eight is F.A.A.-certified. At a major overhaul base used by United Airlines in China, the ratio is one F.A.A.-certified mechanic for every 31 non-certified mechanics. In contrast, back when U.S. airlines performed heavy maintenance at their own, domestic facilities, F.A.A.-certified mechanics far outnumbered everyone else. At American Airlines’ mammoth heavy-maintenance facility in Tulsa, certified mechanics outnumber the uncertified four to one.

A little background… If you hire a mechanic under a shade tree, he or she must be an FAA-certificated A&P. If the goal is to get a signed-off annual inspection, that person must have an FAA IA certificate. If, on the other hand, you hire an FAA-certificated Repair Station to do the work, at least some of the work can be done under the supervision of FAA-certificated employees. The shop’s overall practices have to be approved but individual employees need not be.

Labor is not the only cost when aircraft maintenance is performed. Parts have to be purchased. Components are typically sent out for overhaul to subcontractors, e.g., when an overhauled engine is installed it is not the mechanics at the maintenance shop who did the overhaul, and those subcontractors may get the lion’s share of the total fee. FAA bureaucracy has to be complied with. The aircraft has to be ferried to the shop and the crew somehow shipped back.

Having done some flying in Latin America I don’t think that saving on hourly wages is the main motivation here. There are a lot of things that are easier and more obviously cost-effective to offshore. Being a good aircraft mechanic requires a high IQ, attention to detail, and a fondness for paperwork. The Mexicans, Panamanians, and Argentines that I’ve met who worked at the airport took a tremendous amount of pride in their jobs and were conscientious about their work (e.g., maintaining Robinson helicopters in Panama City for Helipan).

A guy who teaches mechanics for a large U.S. aircraft manufacturer told me that every year the quality of the Americans who come to the class is lower. Thus it may simply be the case that there are no longer 72,000 Americans who want to do this kind of work and can do it well, at least at the middle-class wage that the airlines offer (about $30/hour before overtime, benefits, etc.; see the American Airlines contract).

If the foreign maintenance shops were doing a bad job the result would be a lot of squawks and grounded aircraft (a typical maintenance error would not result in a crash but rather the pilots rejecting the aircraft based on a warning light or a failed test). Thus I think it is safe to infer from the continued use of foreign shops that they are doing pretty good work.

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As noted in “Minority group members in positions of power increase prejudice?”, people express sometimes unhappiness with an entire group when an individual in power does something that they don’t like. I’m wondering if Bernie Sanders being elected to the Presidency would result in a huge increase in hatred directed toward American Jews. Nobody likes paying the current 40-50% tax rates (federal plus state). Imagine how outraged they will be when a Jew president cranks up the rates to 90%.

There is already a fair amount of acceptance for any statement blaming Jews for whatever is upsetting a non-Jew. Here’s an example from Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace laureate writing in the NYT about “A Five Nation Plan to End the Syrian Crisis”:

Before the revolution began in March 2011… Because of many complex reasons, he was supported by his military forces, most Christians, Jews, Shiite Muslims, Alawites and others who feared a takeover by radical Sunni Muslims.

Wikipedia says that the “Jews” Former President Carter was talking about numbered 50 in 2011 and 22 in May 2012 (the last significant group having departed in 1992). What have those 22 Jews done for Assad that merits a mention in the New York Times? This article says that “all are elderly without family abroad and living in a building adjoining the (only work) synagogue in Damascus.” Apparently no editor at the New York Times was willing to ask Mr. Carter “Is an old Jew using a walker a substantial threat to ISIS?”

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I’ve decided to defrost my brain, which was last used at some point in the 1990s. One of the tasks that I am setting for this previously idle organ is learning the Russian language. I would appreciate tips from readers on the best materials. Textbooks? Rosetta Stone? Apps? For correcting pronunciation and conversational practice, I have more or less full-time access to native speakers. I don’t need to be able to read, though perhaps that is helpful for learning to speak and listen?

(Note that I don’t want to go to a face-to-face class due to the travel time and scheduling that would be involved, though I guess it would be worth hearing from readers who’ve tried self-study and also a traditional class.)

Thanks in advance for any advice!

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Deepest sympathies, of course, to anyone living in Paris or otherwise directly affected by the recent attacks. Not much more can be productively said, I don’t think, from 5,500 kilometers away.

This posting is really a question for European readers. Please comment on how you understand these events. Are they part of a trend or grand plan? If so, how does life in France or Europe change?

Americans: How does the Web format of today’s newspapers strike you when an event like this occurs? In the old print world, coverage of a tragedy like this would occupy the entire front page and the reader wouldn’t be asked to contemplate the diurnal or trivial as well as the tragic. The nytimes.com site, however, has the news from Paris sharing with summaries of and links to articles such as “In Ireland, Milk Chocolate Reigns,” “Build Your Thanksgiving Feast,” a piece on fantasy sports, “Meet the Instamom, a Social Media Stage Mom,” etc.

Related:

• some photos that I took in Paris in happier times
• A drawing by one of our resident young artists, starting from the preceding photos:

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The debate this evening among Democrats could, if translated into Spanish, easily be mistaken for one occurring in Latin America. One candidate is the spouse of a former president. All candidates promise an expansion of government and an increase in handouts to the popular masses (to be paid for by taxes on those who have unjustly become rich).

“America’s Fragile Constitution” is an enlightening Atlantic magazine article on the parallel political systems operating in the Americas. While the rest of the world mostly operates with a parliamentary system, in which one party takes responsibility for running the government, the U.S. has a presidential system that closely resembles a monarchy. Who else has done this?

Since the american Revolution, many new democracies have taken inspiration from the U.S. Constitution. Around much of the world, parliamentary systems became prevalent, but some countries, particularly in Latin America, adopted the presidential model, splitting power between an executive and a legislative branch.

When, in 1985, a Yale political scientist named Juan Linz compared the records of presidential and parliamentary democracies, the results were decisive. Not every parliamentary system endured, but hardly any presidential ones proved stable. “The only presidential democracy with a long history of constitutional continuity is the United States,” Linz wrote in 1990. This is quite an uncomfortable form of American exceptionalism.

So lay out the pupusas, humita, and empanadas for your guests tonight…

[Separately, when listening to Bernie Sanders, these words may be helpful:

“Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.” — Theodore Roosevelt, 1902.

“I cried because I had no Gulfstream G650 until I met a man who had to fly a turboprop” — attributed to Al Gore, boarding one of his chartered Gulfstream G550s.

]

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On the same day, one friend posted video captured by his personal drone over downtown Boston, 3.2 statute miles from the center of Logan Airport, while another posted a video captured by his personal drone (from Costco!) over his backyard, about 2 miles from the center of Hanscom Field. The downtown Boston pilot said that he relied on his DJI software to warn him about restricted airspace. The DJI map shows that the protected zones around KBOS and KBED are essentially the airport perimeter fence. I.e., they don’t incorporate any knowledge about charted FAA airspace (see skyvector.com for a full selection of VFR charts). A towered (Class D) airport typically owns a ring of about 5 statute miles around the airport, from the surface up to 2500′ above the ground. A Class B airport such as Boston Logan owns a ring of about 9 miles down to the surface.

[One area that DJI does seem to have blocked out very conservatively is the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, essentially all of which is now a no-fly zone.]

Plainly one can toss a soccer ball up into the air from one’s backyard, even if it falls within the surface area of a Class D or Class B airport. And perhaps one could fly a radio-controlled toy helicopter 20′ above the ground? When is approval from an FAA control tower required? My efforts to figure this out were unsuccessful. My contacts at our local FAA FSDO weren’t immediately sure of the answer. A friend who is a NASA expert on UAVs in controlled airspace gave an answer that was so long-winded and complex as to be unactionable. The clearest FAA web site on the subject seems to be http://www.faa.gov/uas/model_aircraft/ and it says “strongly encouraged.”

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The New Yorker has a good story about the emergency response system in Iceland: “Life is Rescues.” Highly recommend for fans of things Polar.

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