A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
President Obama was on TV here in Las Vegas scolding some less evolved Americans regarding their lack of enthusiasm for new neighbors fresh from the battlefields of Syria. A guy wearing an NBAA badge said “It takes a lot of personal courage to dismiss the security concerns of others when you have Secret Service protection for life and will never board another commercial flight.”
Full post, including commentsThe Wall Street Journal ran an article, “Behind Rising Inequality: More Unequal Companies”. with some interesting charts.
Since 1990 the return on capital of a 90th percentile U.S. company has spiked from its historical average in the 20-30% range up to about 100%. Within-firm employee pay distribution hasn’t changed that much but if you work for a winner (market-leading or monopoly) company you probably get paid very handsomely compared to people who work for a loser (exposed to competition) company.
Some excerpts:
Full post, including commentseveryone at the top companies, from the lowest to highest paid, pulled away from the pack, and everyone at the bottom companies languished.
The economists did find that the top 0.2% of earners in firms with more than 10,000 employees did significantly better than their fellow workers. But for the other 99.8%, the expanding pay gap can be explained by where they work.
Some companies may so dominate their market that they can extract profits over and above what a purely competitive landscape would allow; economists call these excess profits “rents.” Employees at those companies then share in those rents.
Airbus Helicopters, formerly Eurocopter, is famous for kicking in the teeth of America’s jet-powered helicopter manufacturers. In fact, so great was the disparity in technical performance that even the U.S. military had to cave in and buy machines from the absurdly named “American Eurocopter.” Now it seems that Airbus is gunning for our piston-powered market as well. From “New High Compression Engine”:
Airbus Helicopters has successfully completed the first flight test of the high-compression engine demonstrator aircraft at around 3pm on Friday, November 6th, at Marignane Airport.
“The first result of the 30 minutes flight confirms the advantages of new-technology high-compression piston engines for rotorcraft in offering reduced emissions; up to 50% lower fuel consumption depending on duty cycle, nearly doubled range and enhanced operations in hot and high conditions”, said Tomasz Krysinski, Head of Research and Innovation at Airbus Helicopters.
Integrated into an H120, the 4.6-liter high-compression piston engine incorporates numerous technologies already applied on advanced self-ignition engines, and runs on the widely-available kerosene fuel used in aviation engines. Its V8 design has the two sets of cylinders oriented at a 90 deg. angle to each other, with a high-pressure (1800 bar) common-rail direct injection and one turbocharger per cylinder bank.
Other features include fully-machined aluminum blocks and titanium connecting rods, pistons and liners made of steel, liquid-cooling and a dry sump management method for the lubricating motor oil as used on aerobatic aircraft and race cars.
English-language translation: We stuffed a diesel engine into a standard jet-powered helicopter and now it can fly twice as far on one tank.
Note that the five-seat H120 (formerly EC120) is roughly comparable in size and capability to the Bell JetRanger.
Separately, what does it say about a U.S. industry when a company using French labor can take over the market?
Full post, including commentsPeople are arguing about whether or not ISIS members can “slip through” the EU’s refugee processing system and/or whether at least one of the Paris attackers came to Europe as a migrant/refugee. In poking around international law, e.g., this article on asylum and Wikipedia, I’m wondering whether an admitted ISIS member wouldn’t qualify. The refugee/asylum standard seems to start with
A person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.
Thus if there is an armed conflict between two sides, a person from either side should be able to asylum on the ground that he or she might be killed by a person on the other side. There is nothing in this standard that says the “political opinion” of ISIS leads to a stronger or weaker claim than the “political opinion” of someone who supports the Syrian president.
What would stop a person from showing up in England, France, or Germany and saying “I am a member of ISIS and I have a well-founded fear that I will be killed by opponents of ISIS, including military forces from your own country” and getting asylum on the basis of that statement?
Related:
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.
Full post, including commentsSome 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?]
Full post, including commentsI’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.
Full post, including commentsFriends 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.
Full post, including commentsAs 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?”
Full post, including comments