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In “Economics lesson from McKinsey regarding the homeless in Seattle” I wondered the following:

The McKinsey geniuses don’t answer the question that always strikes me when I’m in Seattle and I see homeless folks camping in the cold rain: Since these unfortunate souls don’t have a job or a house, why don’t most of them move to Santa Monica and camp in a warm dry climate?

It seems that quite a few have done this! From a recent NYT, “In Los Angeles, Where the Rich and the Destitute Cross Paths”:

In recent years, homelessness has leapt beyond its old boundaries, with more than 53,000 people living without homes this year. This means that Angelenos are encountering homeless people in places they never did before.

For many in Los Angeles, the spread of homelessness is a challenge to their identities as political progressives. Some are angered by the presence of the homeless and some communities have mobilized to keep shelters out of their neighborhoods.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has called homelessness the “moral crisis of our time,” and voters have approved millions of dollars to tackle the issue.

Across Los Angeles communities oppose new housing for the homeless. “It’s fear of the other,” [John Maceri, executive director of The People Concern, a social services agency] said. “It’s ‘those people.’ It’s ‘them.’”

“Millions of dollars”? Enough to buy one third of a house in Santa Monica, in other words? (well, not one third of a nice 15,000 square foot house, nor anything in the Bel Air neighborhood) And this will substantially assist 53,000 homeless people?

How is it that in a place where nearly everyone votes for Democrats and professes a desire to help the “vulnerable,” the only person that the reporter could find with a kind word for the local homeless is Mr. Maceri, a guy whose paycheck depends on the continued supply of local homeless?

The reader comments are kind of interesting:

cbarber from San Pedro: If i was homeless(i’m one paycheck from the street) LA is where I’d want to live. The weather is great and you wouldn’t have to worry about freezing to death at night.

Reader In Wash, DC: Another reason to crack down on illegal aliens. According to Pew Research there are 500,000 illegal aliens in NY metro area. If they double and triple up and they do to save cost even at 10 people per unit that is 50,000 housing units off the market. Why bleeding heart liberals want to turn the US into a 3rd world slum is a mystery.

Papaya in Belmont, CA: Same with us “empathetic” Bay Area residents. We support the disadvantaged and poor in theory but NIMBY. We consistently reject most ballot measures that may even allow our teachers, police and fire departments to actually live in the cities they serve. If those with middle class salaries won’t be helped, how do homeless people have a chance?

Aaron (A-aron?) in Orange County: Why can’t we send these people to Detroit? Detroit has thousands of empty tract homes and open land.. We just need a few billion dollars to re-build the place. In addition, if European nations decided to contribute they can send their immigrants to us. Detroit can be a worldwide refuge for homeless and immigrant populations. A convergence of diversity and creativity.

GeorgePTyrebyter, Flyover, USA: There is a simple reason that LA has this crisis: the tidal wave of illegals. Illegals drive up the cost of rental housing, by increasing demand. They take the low-end jobs. That 18YO-19YO couple would in years past been able to get jobs dishwashing or other low end jobs, but these are taken by illegals. Schools in CA are being destroyed by the cost of ESL and the needs to take care of far more kids than planned for. Illegals need to be booted, to allow US citizens to live in the US.

DickeyFuller, DC: But I am not for giving them housing in the expensive cities of Washington, NY, Boston, SF, LA and Seattle. If middle class folks cannot afford to live there then there is reason for them to expect we will house them there. No. You don’t get to pick your free housing. We’ll build homeless housing in states where the cost of living is dirt cheap — Oklahoma, for example. Way upstate New York. The rural South.

sob, Boston: Thanks to the NYT to bring this issue to light. Seems to me that the liberal California politicians, who have had complete control of both houses and the governorship have shown the country their true contempt for the poor. The more they talk the worse the poverty gets, and yet the mostly liberal media can’t bring themselves to tell the truth.

Scott, Los Angeles: Homeless is the new scam industry to keep city employees/agencies busy and justify the jobs of the people that work there. … Santa Monica is paying their Homeless Director $150K+yr. Her only credential – a self chosen degree from a for profit diploma mill AND she got canned by the city of LA prior!

William Case: The U.S. Census Bureau now publishes an annual poverty report titled the Supplemental Poverty Measure that takes regional cost of living into account. The report is changing perceptions regarding which states are rich and which are poor. The most recent report shows that California is by far the poorest state, with 20.4 percent of its residents below poverty level. The poverty rate in often maligned Mississippi is 16.9. The national average is 14.7

Jack Wagner, Los Angeles: Homelessness is a symptom of overpopulation. The US population has increased by 36% since we passed the Immigration Reform Act of 1986 which was supposed to end illegal immigration.

SC, Venice: The Palisades raised $750k to send all their homeless to Venice. The Palisades are the ultimate NIMBY’s: no facilities in their community to help the homeless, just raise loads of cash to ship them next door.

Back when U.S. population was around 200 million it was fashionable to at least feign sympathy for the homeless. Now these virtuous California-dwelling, Hillary-voting, NYT-subscribing folks aren’t even bothering to make that effort.

Readers: Do you agree that NYT subscribers are going to be the most sympathetic large audience that could be found for any proposal to help the homeless? If so, why is there now so little sympathy?

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“Mothers in Denmark Are Less Productive at Work, Study Finds, Partially Explaining Gender-Wage Gap” (WSJ) looks at an analysis of a comprehensive data set on Danish workers:

Young mothers are less productive at work than their male counterparts and women without children, according to a new study of Danish workers, a finding with important implications for gender-pay gaps.

Productivity is measured as output per hours worked, using Danish government records that tie workers’ demographics to output data from individual firms.

For example, mothers between 30 and 32 years old were about 87% as productive as similar childless men … Women without children between 30 and 32 years old were 101% as productive as similar men

An interesting article and study (“Motherhood and the Gender Productivity Gap”) for those passionate about big data sets and those passionate about gender issues (which I hope all of us are!).

[Related analysis made possible by the Danish passion for data… See the discussion of “Parental Responses to Child Support Obligations: Causal Evidence from Administrative Data” (Rossin-Slater and Wust 2014) within “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy”.

Using a comprehensive data set for all Danish adults, the authors found that for every 1,000DKK ($141 at 2017 exchange rates) additional that a father is supposed to pay under the Danish [child support] formula, the following behavioral changes are observed:

• a 2.1 percent reduction in the likelihood that the father and child will ever live together
• a 3.2 percent increase in the likelihood that the mother will have an additional child with a different man, either while married or not
• a 3.7 percent increase in the likelihood that the father will have a subsequent child with a different woman (“higher obligations may lead to less time spent with existing children, freeing up time available to invest in future children”)
• a reduction in his labor force participation rate by 0.2 percent (with larger effects for higher earners)
• only about $70 additional actually paid, as fathers reduced their voluntary contributions]

On a casual reading, it sounds as though markets are rational. Women with children are 87 percent as productive as men without children and earn 85 percent as much. But then it seems that markets are not rational. Women without children were actually more productive than men (101 percent) and yet earned only 89 percent as much. On the third hand, perhaps this is an example of Gresham’s Law: “bad money drives out good”. It may not be possible for an employer to determine if a woman has children or is going to have children and therefore the economically sensible course of action is to pay her as though she does have children.

Readers: What do you think? In an age of fluid gender identity, can this kind of data set be of any value? If so, what can we learn from the data-driven Danes?

 

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Car and Driver magazine offers a story about a world globalized enough that people in China want the same cars that are offered in the U.S., but not globalized enough that the price is the same in China and the U.S.: “How I Bought Millions of Dollars’ Worth of Luxury Cars and Got Blacklisted by Jaguar Land Rover, Mercedes, and Porsche”

the current base price of a new Range Rover is $88,345 here, but it starts at 1,518,000 yuan in China, which is about $240,000.

an enterprising individual can make $10,000 this month buying luxury cars. You need a heartbeat, a driver’s license, and that’s about it.

See also “How Michelin Is Trying to Reinvent the Wheel: Michelin’s flexible wheel protects a car’s footwear from crumbling roads.” in which we learn that Americans insist on buying tires and wheels that would make sense on smooth European roads (see “U.S. versus German infrastructure spending and results“) and the inevitable current result is purchasing a lot of replacement wheels and tires (but we’re still saving the planet if these are mounted on a Tesla?).

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From a recent trip to Provincetown, Massachusetts… The Womencrafts store (established 1976) says “Welcome: all genders” and simultaneously features T-shirts that read “The Future is Female”:

(Also “Families Belong Together” in a state where women are more than 3X more likely than men to go down to the local Family Court and ask the judge to break up a child’s family.)

Separately, the sign says that they welcome “all beliefs”. I wonder how they would react to someone in a MAGA hat who said “I believe that Donald Trump is doing a fine job as president. I believe that homosexuality should be discouraged. I believe that government-funded welfare programs should be eliminated.” I will gladly pay any brave reader willing to make a video of going into that shop wearing a T-shirt with the above slogans! Or even just a “The Future is Male” T-shirt in the same font!

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The U.S. is a great place to live if you’re rich. There is no wealth tax and income tax rates, though much higher than in the most efficient countries (e.g., Singapore, Estonia), are still lower than in many European nations. Prices are low and there is no VAT so you can consume like crazy.

The U.S. is also a great place to live if you’re poor. You’re entitled to a lifetime of free housing, free health care, free food, and free smartphone. If you start at age 18 and navigate the policies and waiting lists you might find yourself in an apartment with a market rate of $60,000 to $100,000 per year in the heart of one of America’s most desirable cities, e.g., San Francisco, New York City, or Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What if you’re on welfare and want to give up some of your 168 hours per week of leisure time to work? According to a post by Greg Mankiw, an economics professor at Harvard, you’ll face a 76 percent marginal income tax rate unless you can vault beyond the middle quintile of income. You will have a slightly higher spending power as a middle-earner compared to if you were a bottom-quintile earner, but for most people it wouldn’t be worth the loss of freedom and aggravation that are entailed in having a full-time W-2 job.

Related:

• Book Review: The Redistribution Recession (it turns out that Americans who are eligibile for welfare do figure out all of the above and generally refrain from work at high marginal tax rates)

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The Thai cave rescue operation is one of the more complicated three-dimensional events that has dominated the world news. I’m wondering if readers have found interesting graphics that explain to laypeople the stratigraphy, the techniques being used to extract the boys, etc.

Here’s what I’ve found…

• “An illustrated look at the Thai cave rescue” (USA Today)
• “Why Hydrogeology Plays Such An Important Role In The Thailand Cave Rescue Operations” (Forbes)
• a Daily Mail piece with a bunch of photos and a graphic

Readers: What have you found that is better/interesting?

Separately, when this is over will we Americans tighten up our (currently rather generous) standards for “hero”, “courage”, and “brave”? The rescuers are volunteering for a dive that requires multiple tanks of oxygen and swimming for miles underground. They’re doing this knowing that one expert diver, a former Thai Navy SEAL, has already died.

[Example of how Americans use “courage”? See “West Hollywood to Honor Stormy Daniels as ‘Profile in Courage’”:

Adult-film actress Stormy Daniels, who has earned international headlines for her legal battle with President Donald Trump over an alleged affair she claims the pair had a decade ago, will receive a key to the city Wednesday in West Hollywood. … “In these politically tumultuous times, Daniels has proven herself to be a profile in courage by speaking truth to power even under threats to her safety and extreme intimidation,” according to a statement from the city.

see also Salon, “Stormy Daniels is a feminist hero“, and “Cassandra Smolcic, a graphic designer who worked at Pixar Animation Studios for five years, has become the first woman to go on the record about disgraced former chief creative officer John Lasseter, with her full name attached. In a brave 12,500-word essay…” (in other words, the author bravely denounced a man who had already been “disgraced” and fired; see “Pixar and being lectured by our Bay Area superiors“).]

Related:

• “Book review for Bostonians: Trapped Under the Sea” (a project at the end of a 10-mile long tunnel that ended in tragedy)

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The media claims that Amy Coney Barrett, an appeals court judge, is being considered by Donald Trump for the Supreme Court. Most people would agree that being an appeals court judge or a Supreme Court Justice is a demanding job. Americans generally say that it is impossible for them to rear one or two kids and work without a shower of financial and other assistance from childless workers and taxpayers (see “When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children?” for example). Yet Judge Barrett has 7 children, according to Wikipedia, two of whom are adopted. Is the answer a stay-at-home spouse who is responsible for all child-related tasks? Wikipedia says that her husband has his own demanding full-time job (Assistant U.S. Attorney).

In addition to driving our social, ethical, intellectual, and financial superiors in Silicon Valley nuts (what could be worse for these advocates of everything female than to see a woman nominated to serve on the Supreme Court?), would the nomination of Judge Barrett finally stop Americans with kids from demanding that the childless pitch in via higher taxes and longer workers hours?

Related:

• Bill Burr on whether it is reasonable to characterize Motherhood as The Most Difficult Job on the Planet

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In case this is helpful to other flight instructors, my email to a renter at our flight school. He has thousands of hours of flight experience, mostly in light aircraft, but some that are quite a bit more complex than the (mercifully and wonderfully air-conditioned) Cirrus SR22 that we flew.

Thanks for inviting me up into the sky today. Here’s a debrief…

Consider flying with the FPL [flight plan] block on the PFD [primary flight display; shows if airplane is upside down or not] up all the time as a reminder of which flight plan leg is active. This is especially important on approaches.

Remember to use the PFD soft key at the bottom of the PFD and then the BRG1 key to give yourself a GPS pointer to the FAF [final approach fix; a point in space] whenever you’re on vectors to final (LOC or GPS).

Consider whether you want to start flying the SR22 just like a jet. Given the capable autopilot, I think it is possible to fly single-pilot in the SR22 the way a two-pilot crew would have in an old King Air or early jet.

What would that mean?

1) have the flight director up all the time, at a minimum. So you’re flying the flight director or, if you can’t program it to give you helpful guidance, clear it with the red A/P disconnect button on the yoke (this also makes engaging the autopilot less risky because you always know what the A/P would be doing)

2) pay careful attention to the autopilot mode displays at the top of the PFD so you know what the autopilot thinks it is trying to do, e.g., HDG, and what it is planning to do next, e.g., LOC [localizer, a ground-based radio navigation signal] or GPS.

3) run all of the checklists on every flight. So if you’re going to the Midwest with a non-rated passenger, have the passenger run the checklists. Maybe there is a way to make peace with that horrific G1000 checklist system on the MFD (experiment on next enroute leg). Otherwise, paper! (remember that an airline crew will run every checklist even on a single trip around the pattern) Being disciplined about running a go-around checklist or a climb checklist means you’ll never forget to retract flaps or turn off fuel pump or whatever.

4) brief every instrument approach, even if just to yourself

This is how the airlines keep everything safe even when both pilots are exhausted toward the end of a 5-day trip so why not adapt it for GA? I’m not going to be at my best on Sunday evening returning from the beach in the SR20 so I will use the climb, cruise, and descent checklists to correct any mistakes (fortunately I will be using the Avidyne MFD so I won’t have to stretch my brain out to full power just to bring up said checklists!).

A few more small points…

a) consider not touching anything after landing until across the hold short line. Wait for 50 knots, then start applying the Cirrus’s feeble brakes, then wait until stopped to touch the flaps, lean the mixture, turn off fuel pump, switch to Ground, etc.

b) Cirruses up until -G5 (?) have pathetically wimpy brakes that are prone to overheating. You can taxi all the way from the Old-Ts to Rwy 29 runup area with maybe two touches of the brakes (once turning out of Old Ts and once turning Sierra to Echo). It may require full rudder deflection but the plane will respond any time power is above 1000 RPM

c) move heels back a touch for landing and takeoff so that you can’t hit the brakes accidentally. This is a bitter lesson learned by PC-12 owners (flat-spotted tire is $2,500; brakes on the PC-12 are not anti-lock, unlike any other airplane in the price category).

Something else I learned, from the Department of Complete User Interface Failure: this guy has about 75 hours of SR22/G1000 time, a Ph.D. in engineering, and thousands of hours of flying experience yet is not proficient with the G1000. If he cannot reasonably maintain G1000 proficiency should we ask “For whom was this G1000 designed then?” (I myself have a type rating in a twin-engine business jet that relies on the G1000 and fly the G1000 with customers periodically. I never feel truly at home with the system. I wonder if the latest G1000 NXi version is better.) See “Avidyne versus Garmin G1000 glass cockpits” for more on this issue. As I have gotten more experience with both systems I have come to appreciate the Avidyne more and the G1000 less. The Avidyne PFD has not failed in any way for years (since a software upgrade). The G1000 still has more redundancy but it is clumsy for a mostly-VFR airplane.

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“8 Soccer Players At The World Cup Who Have Been Caught Up In Tax Scandals” (Forbes) is World Cup news that Americans can understand.

One interesting angle is that value-added tax can be collected on a human:

In 2014, Spanish tax authorities set their sites on another soccer transaction: Luis’ move from Deportivo La Coruña to Atletico. The transaction was subject to value-added tax (VAT)

Buried at the very end is an explanation for why the litigation is so often with the Spanish government:

Years ago, the so-called “Beckham Rule” was made law in Spain to allegedly benefit England’s David Beckham, who moved to Spain to play for Real Madrid. Under prior Spanish law, you could elect to be taxed as a nonresident if you lived and worked in Spain, if you met certain criteria. The law was short-lived and wrapped in 2010 (perhaps, not coincidentally, after Beckham left Spain). Most of the recent allegations aimed at soccer players have their beginnings in 2011 and after.

I wonder if any of this is reasonable. Consider the Brazilian who plays soccer in London on behalf of a team in Spain… why does he or she pay income tax only to Spain? In the U.S., for example, professional sports team players have their income apportioned to the states where games were actually paid (See Why isn’t the Super Bowl always in a tax-free state?). Maybe they also do that in Europe, but these licensing deals and then taxed only in the country of official residence? But the licensing deals wouldn’t exist without the games being played.

European readers: Can you try to explain to us Americans why the World Cup is worth watching?

Related:

• “Taxation and International Mobility of Superstars: Evidence from the European Football Market” (December 2009 draft from London School of Economics and UC Berkeley, Klevin, Landais, and Saez): “the level of top earnings tax rates has a large and significant impact on the migration decisions of football players. … The large tax induced migration effects we uncover translate into significant effects in the performance of football clubs across countries.” (i.e., when you watch the World Cup you are actually seeing competition among tax codes)

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A neighbor recently asked for a camera recommendation for a 12-year-old and also a way to organize and share photos.

A few years ago I would have recommended Google Picasa, which was a great mixture of the best of desktop (responsive and powerful) and the Web (good for sharing). Google decided to throw away everyone’s years of work, though, by de-supporting the application, then causing uploads to fail as of March 26, 2018 (so if you spent years with Picasa adding to a collection (“Album”) that was synced to the web you can’t add a recently-taken photo to the collection). They didn’t release the software as open-source. As far as I know they didn’t make a real migration tool that preserves all of the database information on the high-res photos that remain on one’s desktop, e.g., that Photo X belongs to Album Y. (It looks as though there is an independent project called P2Lr that will migrate Picasa to Adobe Lightroom.) I think that they also managed to break a lot of old links from web content into Picasa uploads. Maybe in software the flip side of “woken” is “broken”? (See USA Today for what folks at Google are doing instead of taking care of loyal Picasa customers. WIRED shows that the male/female ratio at Google has remained constant for at least four years, so Picasa customers can virtuously blame white males for their suffering.)

Adobe Lightroom is sort of an obvious choice in the sense that Adobe has paying customers and presumably cares enough about them to preserve their work. However, it is $120/month including 1 TB of cloud storage. That seems like a fair price, but a 12-year-old might need/want something free?

What do readers think?

[Separately, the family of the 12-year-old is considering “Nikon D3400 dSLR (18-55mm)” for the kid. I’m not sure what she wants to take pictures of so maybe the kit zoom actually is a good starter lens? Certainly they are a lot better quality than kit zooms from 20 years ago.]

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