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Folks:

I’ll be in Denver (Golden, actually) from Monday morning through Thursday morning. Would anyone like to meet for breakfast at the Table Mountain Inn on Tuesday morning (August 21)? 0800? Alternatively…

• the Wings over the Rockies Museum on Monday morning
• the Morrison Natural History Museum on Tuesday or dinner before Rodrigo y Gabriela
• Boulder on Wednesday
• Thursday morning breakfast at the Table Mountain Inn
• Beaver Creek on Saturday or Sunday

Let me know! Email philg@mit.edu or text me at 617-864-6832.

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I’m hoping that readers can help me out here…

The trial of Paul Manafort is basically over. When it started there were headlines saying that he had evaded taxes on $60 million of income by keeping the money in offshore accounts.

Yet the government itself presented evidence at the trial that Manafort was broke. See “Bookkeeper says Manafort was broke in 2016 and lied to banks” (CNN).

If he’d ever had $60 million in taxable income (i.e., actual profit from running his lobbying business), how could he be broke? Did he spend $60 million on personal non-deductible consumption?

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“What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?” (nytimes) concerns a woman who is a college professor and therefore holds her job based on being smarter than everyone else (at least smarter than the tuition-paying students!). What happens when the super genius gets into bed?

Mr. Reitman, who is now 34 and is a visiting fellow at Harvard, says that Professor Ronell kissed and touched him repeatedly, slept in his bed with him, required him to lie in her bed, held his hand, texted, emailed and called him constantly, and refused to work with him if he did not reciprocate. Mr. Reitman is gay and is now married to a man; Professor Ronell is a lesbian.

In a metro area with a population of more than 20 million, the professor couldn’t find anyone to sleep with other than a student. Okay. She allegedly used her status as a professor to coerce a male student into bed. Unfortunate if true. But given that the professor identifies as female, how challenging would it have been for her to find a heterosexual male student?

Most Americans who lack a college degree, much less a Ph.D., are nonetheless able to find someone in roughly the correct category for sharing a bed (I share with Mindy the Crippler and we’re both happy!).

Will this cause readers to lose respect for Academia? NYU tuition is over $50,000 per year. Is it worth paying $50,000 per year to learn from someone who can’t figure out that a gay man+woman is not a great bed combination?

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“Trump poses with supporter with sexist patch at motorcyclist event” (Washington Post) leaves out some classics, e.g.,

• “Honk if you’ve never seen a gun fired from a motorcycle”
• “Better your sister in a whorehouse than your brother on a Honda”

but it is still kind of fun to see the Uber-riding media elite pondering the deep meaning embedded in every biker’s jacket.

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“Monsanto Has to Pay $289 Million in Damages in First Roundup Cancer Trial” (Fortune) sounds like mostly a bad day for Bayer AG shareholders (the German company acquired Monsanto just a couple of months ago and now they have their first gift from the U.S. legal system!).

But, assuming that Roundup does cause cancer, maybe this is actually a bad day for people with cancer?

Bayer is worth only about $86 billion. At $289 million per cancer-stricken person, fewer than 300 people can be compensated before all of the value in Bayer is consumed. But Roundup is one of the most widely used products in the world. So if it does cause cancer then tens or hundreds of thousands of people should be affected (anyone who hates poison ivy, for example!).

Readers: Why are folks on Facebook celebrating this? Don’t they see that at $289 million per victim the funds run out pretty quickly? The same folks are concerned about inequality and yet they don’t seemed tuned into a situation where the later litigants are on track to get nothing. If someone who has cancer today gets $289 million and someone who is not diagnosed with cancer until 2020 gets $0, how is that fair?

Related:

• “The Cost of a Human Life, Statistically Speaking” (Globalist), which notes that “As of 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency set the value of a human life at $9.1 million. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration put it at $7.9 million — and the Department of Transportation figure was around $6 million.”

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Mike Busch of Savvy Aviation was at Oshkosh talking about his new 500-page book. He described replacing a functional engine at TBO (usually around 2,000 hours of flight time) as “euthanizing an engine.” He points out that old age problems are less sudden and severe than new-engine problems.

For an IO-360-powered Cirrus SR20 is there a reasonable alternative to a new-in-the-box engine from Continental? Busch said good things about John Jewell in Memphis, TN and Zephyr Aircraft Engines in Florida.

What does he think about the Cirrus? He was skeptical at first about the parachute, but now “unlike the second engine that’s out there trying to kill you all the time, the CAPS system sits there quietly until you need it.”

Busch supervises maintenance for a lot of aircraft, including my dream family airplane, the original Piper Malibu with the four-blade MT Prop STC (reduces interior noise dramatically to the point that it measures as quiet inside as a Pilatus PC-12)? Based on his experience, Busch says that it is not crazy to own one and he likes the original TSIO-520 engine better than the -550 conversion that a lot of owners have done. Busch says that Continental has fixed all of the issues with this engine (maybe I’m just not following the news carefully, but I don’t hear about Malibus suffering engine failures anymore) and a Malibu operated primarily in the mid-teens should be a reliable mule. (Operating this plane right up to its 25,000′ service ceiling deprives the engine of cooling due to the prevailing thin air.)

Can it be that Busch is right and the engine manufacturers and the FAA are wrong? I know of at least one R22 that came out of the sky and into the water with a supposedly bulletproof Lycoming four-cylinder engine that was operated a few hundred hours past TBO. A friend limped to a runway on one cylinder with a 20-year-old low-powered engine that was still within the TBO hours but beyond the 12-year recommendation. Our new-in-the-box Continental engine has run more or less perfectly for 13 years and about 1950 flight hours. Why not another new-in-the-box Continental? (only $47,000 plus removal/reinstall)

Related:

• Mike Busch on Engines (EAA sold out of hardcopies at Oshkosh)

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Quite a few friends have been asking me about the Horizon Air Q400 that was appropriated by a suicidal ground crew member. Here are some things that I’ve told them…

Piston-powered airplanes have engines that would be familiar to the mechanic of a Model A Ford and, not coincidentally, an ignition key that would be familiar to the owner of said 1927 automobile. The key for the Cessna, Cirrus, or Piper can ground magnetos or activate the starter. Turbine-powered aircraft… have no key. If you can get in and press the start button you’re good to spin. In theory the door can be locked, but it is usually not practical in charter or airline operations to keep track of a door key. So the door is unlocked and the start button is there and the security is all about keeping the unauthorized out of the airport.

The big challenge in flying turbine-powered aircraft is starting. The Q400, however, is equipped with a FADEC. Starts should therefore be computer-controlled and as simple as starting up a Toyota Camry.

What about the aerobatics? Airliners are certified for only 2.5Gs, but if you aren’t worried about some cracks in various spars the airplane won’t come apart until considerably more force is applied. Can a Q400 match the capabilites of a GB1 GameBird? No, but remember that an empty airliner has a tremendous amount of extra power. It needs to be able to climb on one engine when fully loaded. If two engines are spinning and nobody is in the back it will deliver an exciting ride.

What about an aerodynamic stall in the event of a botched maneuver? The Q400 is equipped with a stick pusher that should make it very tough to stall, especially with a lot of power in. (Unfortunately, the captain of Colgan 3407 overpowered the pusher and did manage to stall a Q400; see Public TV figures out how to fly regional airliners and Time for a robot assistant up in the dome light of the cockpit?)

What about the transfer of skills from Windows-based simulators to a real airplane? Instructors at our flight school have commented on the superior stick-and-rudder skills of sim addicts that come in to fly real aircraft.

Not a great weekend for aviation, but I thought that readers might be interested in the above.

[Very sad about the loss of life, of course, but I don’t have a more informed perspective on that than anyone else might.]

Related:

• some photos from The Sun (UK)

 

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Boston Magazine has a sidebar on page 61 of its August 2018 issue.

A nurse in metro Boston earned $11,596 in 1975, about $54,500 in today’s dollars, adjusted via the official CPI. Today the nurse’s median earnings will be $97,136. So the nurse is way better off, right? That’s $42,635 extra.

Median annual rent in boston has supposedly gone from $675 ($3,173 in 2018 money) to $36,012. The 1975 number sounds too low, but there were a lot of slum areas of Boston back then. If we do believe the numbers, nearly all of the nurse’s advance in pay has been captured by a landlord. Professional sports can perhaps capture the rest? A grandstand seat at Fenway Park has gone from $3.75 ($17.63) to $83.

Perhaps explaining why our highways are so jammed, tolls on an example section of the Mass Pike have gone from 70 cents in 1972 ($4.53 today) to $1.20. The cost of a subway ride has gone up only slightly faster than official inflation, from 50 cents in 1975 ($2.35 today) to $2.75.

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A friend’s Facebook post:

We passed by Womrath, Bronxville’s bookshop, which still manages to stay in business despite Amazon. … I said to [the owners] that I appreciated that their window display featured mostly female authors. I had decided not to say anything, but then I figured that window dressing also deserved reinforcement. “That wasn’t intentional,” the woman proprietor responded. “We had no idea,” the man proprietor echoed.

Some things are getting better.

Is it obvious that things today are better? (Let’s assume that “more female” = “better”) I pointed out Hawthorne’s 1855 complaint:

America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash-and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the ‘Lamplighter,’ and other books neither better nor worse?-worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the 100,000.

If female authors were not featured by booksellers in 1855, why would Hawthorne have complained? And if bookstores are featuring certain authors, shouldn’t we assume that they are motivated by profits to feature books most likely to sell? Therefore it is really the customers who shape what goes into the window. Who are the customers? “The Most Likely Person to Read a Book? A College-Educated Black Woman” (Atlantic) says “Women read more books than men.” I said

This reminds me of a guy who complained to my friend about the gay-themed ads that he was seeing on Web pages. My friend had to gently inform him that ads were based on his browsing history…

Should we be patting ourselves on the back for being more enlightened than Americans of the dusty past? The Wikipedia page regarding The House of Mirth (1905):

Charles Scribner wrote [Edith] Wharton in November 1905 that the novel was showing “the most rapid sale of any book ever published by Scribner.”

A 1936 nytimes review of Gone with the Wind did not think the female gender ID of the author was worth highlighting. The book sold 30 million copies and won the Pulitzer Prize.

All of the Facebook authors’ commenting friends, most of whom are American humanities professors, agreed with the proposition that the featuring by a book merchant of female authors was an exciting new development. None expressed skepticism or asked for data.

Readers: What’s your theory about why these folks would be so interested in (a) devaluing the commercial achievements of female authors in the old days, (b) believing that commercial interest in the works of female authors is currently on the increase?

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“New York City Caps Uber and Lyft Vehicles in a Crackdown” (nytimes):

New York became the first major American city on Wednesday to halt new vehicle licenses for ride-hail services, dealing a significant setback to Uber in its largest market in the United States.

The legislation passed overwhelmingly by the City Council will cap the number of for-hire vehicles for a year while the city studies the booming industry. The bills also allow New York to set a minimum pay rate for drivers.

This is being sold as a way to reduce inequality:

“More than 100,000 workers and their families will see an immediate benefit from this legislation,” Mr. de Blasio said, referring to the city’s army of for-hire drivers.

I wonder if the effect will actually be to increase inequality. There might be a small increase in income for Uber drivers. Presumably Uber itself will capture most of any increase, in the same way that taxi medallion owners capture all of the value of any taxi fare increase, with the drivers continuing to earn a (low) market-clearing wage. But if prices to consumers go up, the result will be kicking middle-class New Yorkers back to walking, waiting for the bus, being jammed into subway cars.

If, as promised, street congestion is reduced that will increase the mobility of a New Yorker wealthy enough to purchase a Bentley and hire a chauffeur. But the mobility of the non-rich, especially those who aren’t physically fit enough to walk long distances, stand for hours each day waiting for public transit, etc. will be reduced by higher prices:

Ride-hail apps have become a crucial backup option for New Yorkers swept up in the constant delays on the city’s sputtering subway, as happened on Wednesday when signal problems again snarled train lines across a large swath of the city. Ride-hail services have also grown in neighborhoods outside Manhattan where the subway does not reach.

Readers: What do you think? Is this “help the struggling Uber driver” regulation mostly going to help Uber shareholders and help the rich in New York distinguish themselves from the proletariat?

[An interesting data point from the article:

The taxi industry has also been decimated by Uber’s rise. The price of a taxi medallion, which is required to operate a taxi in New York, has plunged from more than $1 million to less than $200,000.

]

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