A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Here’s one of the delights of Facebook membership:
Happy Cinco de Mayo to all of my readers!
(I refrained from responding “If a very pale-skinned person gets hungry for Taco Bell on May 5, would it be less (micro-)aggressive to put on brown face makeup prior to departing for the drive-through?”)
Full post, including commentsFrom a friend…
(I love this girl. When she was younger and in a stroller she pointed back to her mother and said “My GPS.”)
Full post, including commentsI noticed a Mitsubishi MU-2 on the ramp at our local airport the other day. The twin turboprop airplane is famous for having unforgiving stall characteristics. The designers put in a stick shaker, as on many jets of the day, but not the stick pusher that is now common. Considering their near-jet level of performance, these airplanes have been considerably devalued by the accident history and perceived lack of safety (see Controller for what is currently available on the market; it looks as though a decent Solitaire can be purchased for $500,000. That’s for an airplane that can cruise at 310 knots, handle some ice (legally anyway; the practical ice capability is an open question), take 6 people more than 1000 nautical miles in pressurized comfort, fly over most weather at 33,500′, etc.).
More than 700 of these airplanes were built and a lot of them are still flying.
What if the latest retrofit autopilots could make the MU-2 a lot safer? Consider the Garmin GFC 600 and similar. These retrofit autopilots, even when not engaged, can provide “envelope protection” and nudge the flight controls in a safe direction if they sense that the plane is approaching a stall. It isn’t quite the level of idiot-proofing of an Airbus A320, but maybe if set to “max” could turn what has been “kind of unsafe” into “reasonably safe”?
Pilot readers: What do you think?
[More radical idea, but perhaps not for an airframe worth as little as $200,000 in airworthy condition: retrofit fly-by-wire controls. Put a big “don’t touch this” sign on the yoke of a legacy jet or turbopop and install a sidestick that, as in an Airbus or F-22, gives suggestions to the computer. Through extra-beefy servo motors, the computer becomes the sole manipulator of the flight controls. If the computer fails, the pilot can grab the yoke and look for a runway at least 10,000′ long (let’s presume he or she will be rusty!).]
Related:
An Excess Male is an interesting novel by Maggie Shen King. She posits a Chinese society in which “plural marriage” is the adaptation to the fact that there are more men than women. Except this is not plural marriage quite as Brigham Young might have envisioned.
The book opens with a meeting arranged by a matchmaker. At the table are a 22-year-old woman’s two current husbands, the candidate third husband, and the candidate’s two fathers:
I suddenly understand what it’s like to be Dad, my mother’s second husband and my biological father. But then, he has only one husband who outranks him, while I will have two to mind if I marry into this Advanced family. Dad bestows a fatherly smile upon May-ling. “Our Wei-guo has impeccable health habits. He weight trains three times a week and swims and runs as well. He can bench a hundred kilos. You should see his biceps.”
Our matchmaker is trying to help, but mention of The Worldly Bachelor only serves to remind May-ling and company that there are forty million more single men like me out there to choose from, that it has taken me until my forties to save up enough to enter matchmaking talks at this lowest rung.
After my family saved the requisite two million yuan needed for me to enter matchmaking talks as a third husband, it has taken another eight months to get this nibble of interest,
“They don’t assign nights. May-ling decides who gets bedroom time.” A smile takes over my face. I can already see her choosing me over the two grandpas. “That’s outrageous,” Big Dad says. MaMa kept a strict bedroom schedule, as do most Advanced families. She used to spend every other week with each of my dads, but they eventually talked her into alternating nights. My dads argued that too much closeness was lost over seven days.
What about guys who don’t have enough cash to get married, even as a second or third husband?
I do not say that I’ve grown weary of my weekly ten-minute hygiene session with my State-assigned “Helpmate,” but…
Helpmates receive their pension after fifteen years of service.
“Does he tip you?” “Sometimes.” “How much?” “Twenty-five, usually.” Helpmates receive a salary and are only required to provide missionary or doggy-style sex and lower-body nudity during weekly appointments. Services outside of that are extra, and their fees, payable to the State. Most men are saving toward a dowry, and only the most generous tip.
Parents who are steeped in tradition want to have at least one son. Parents who are hungry for cash want to have daughters:
Hann ignores the dig and asks if Hero has dug up Hann’s marital contract. “May-ling’s parents are entitled to twenty-five percent of the third-round dowry.” Hann curses. When he married, two spouses had been the max, the standard for two decades. The government allowing a third spouse did not seem like a remote possibility, let alone May-ling agreeing to it. “I can try to negotiate for you.” Hann sneers at the absurdity of that. May-ling’s parents are gambling addicts who lived off the fruits of their loins and their mahjongg winnings. While everyone was obsessed with producing a male heir to pass on the family name, they placed their bet on girls. Her parents must have paid staggering fines for defying their one-child limit. May-ling avoids the subject, but no one could have had six daughters in eight years without abortions, illegal sex selection drugs, or semen spinning. Rumor had it that the engagement of the four eldest (all by the age of three) helped finance their household. They had no need of a second husband and his income. The last two girls were allowed to come of age and auctioned off. A double contract to brothers, May-ling’s engagement set records. Hann and Xiong-xin supported the household after that, the parents’ life savings all but depleted.
Divorce discouraged by the government. When one character is considering a divorce, his boss calls him in for a chat:
And listen to this: ‘Divorce leads to the disintegration of society, to the depreciation of Confucian values, to lawlessness and violence. Divorce is an antecedent to crime, and all measures must be employed toward its prevention.’ It says here that I am required by law to refer you to marriage counseling.”
Not everyone is part of this Brave New World…
Like most of the superwealthy, Chu lives an hour outside town with a wife he does not share and more children than he’s allowed to have.
As with a lot of books that imagine an alternative reality, the beginning of the book is stronger than the ending, but I enjoyed An Excess Male.
Related:
“Women Said to Accuse Times Editor Who Resigned of Inappropriate Behavior” (NYT):
Wendell Jamieson, the metro editor whose resignation was announced by The New York Times on Monday after an internal investigation, was accused of inappropriate behavior by at least three female employees, according to two people familiar with the investigation.
The people said at least two women at The Times had alleged that Mr. Jamieson engaged in inappropriate communication.
After stepping down from his post, which he had held since 2013, he was replaced in an interim capacity by Susan Chira, a senior correspondent and an editor covering gender issues.
Mr. Jamieson, 51, joined The Times in 2000 after working for Newsday, The Daily News and The New York Post.
The short story is that this 51-year-old guy probably won’t be working in an office again. Could he be trained to do a job where nobody will care about his personal characteristics? Why not HVAC technician? After about a year of inexpensive training he can be earning $50,000+ per year. At least in Boston, HVAC technicians are in high demand and nobody who is without heat or A/C is going to ask too many questions about the “wokeness” of the tech who shows up to get things working again. Also, HVAC technicians, like our local cable installers, seem to be all-male so there wouldn’t be a lot of temptation back at the shop.
For the “prime age” males who are being discarded from the cushy office jobs after accusations, what other jobs could they take that would provide a decent income?
Related:
A private message that I received:
I just ordered a WiFi Sous Vide cooker. I will be the first person to use one and not post about it on Facebook.
My friend then proceeded to message me and the rest of his friends with tales and photos of sous-vide heroics. (At what point have you private-messaged enough people that it is the moral equivalent of bragging on Facebook?)
Let’s consider the home range. It costs a lot of money. It takes up a lot of space. It is difficult and time-consuming to clean. It requires periodic service (if Viking, more or less continuous repairs!). Sometimes it will burn a resident of the home or set the house on fire.
Why take these risks when Amazon’s favorite sous-vide cooker costs $125? The water is heated to 135 or 140 degrees, right? Nobody will get burned and no fire can be started. The food is in a plastic bag that will be disposed of humanely and therefore there is never a need to clean the pot or the cooker?
Maybe you would also want a Breville countertop oven (for toast!) or GE Advantium microwave (can toast with a crazy bright light), but if sous-vide is as great as Facebookers says and if Ziploc are available in huge quantities at Costco, why have a range at all?
[Separately, is it true that the literal translation of “sous-vide” is “Facebook douche”?]
Full post, including commentsWikipedia says that the Robert Mueller investigation of Donald Trump has now reached its one-year anniversary. There are close to 20 lawyers on the team so that means at least 50 government workers are involved (FBI agents, paralegals, assistants, etc.)?
After a year, most of what is in the media concerns two young women who supposedly got paid to have sex with an old guy 12 years ago and keep quiet about the encounter.
Is it thus fair to say that taxpayers paid for 50 person-years of work (about $25 million, including pension, benefits, office space, and other overhead?) to learn that old people have to pay in order to have sex with young people?
[I have seen arguments (from Hillary supporters) that the investigation needs to be thorough because Trump is involved with a “hostile foreign leader” (e.g., Putin was in a hotel room with Trump and Stormy Daniels back in 2006). But, if true, why would you want an investigation to consume a healthy fraction of a presidential term? It is okay for a hostile foreign leader to exercise control, via puppetry, of the U.S. government for several years while a thorough investigation and then equally sluggish prosecution proceed?]
Full post, including comments“Starbucks drops Jewish group from anti-bias training session” (The Hill):
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) will no longer work on Starbucks’s anti-bias training sessions next month after the company faced backlash from activists, the company told Politico on Monday.
Activists criticized Starbucks for involving the ADL, citing the organization’s support for Israel and failure to endorse the Black Lives Matter movement. The group announced in 2016 that it would not fully endorse the movement over some leaders’ “anti-Israel — and at times anti-Semitic — positions.”
Tamika Mallory, an organizer of the Women’s March, posted on Twitter that the ADL is “constantly attacking black and brown people,” and criticized Starbucks as “tone deaf” for involving the group.Mallory came under fire earlier this year for attending an event where Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan made anti-Semitic remarks. Those remarks drew widespread criticism, including from the ADL.
It seems that not every group within the U.S. claiming victim status can be accommodated in any particular training event. Does Starbucks need to develop an official hierarchy of victimhood for the May 29 training and going forward? If so, what would it look like? And would it change with the year or the season?
(Is this a more general illustration of the problem that arises when there are many groups, some as large as 51 percent of the population, claiming victim status? If people have a limited sympathy budget, devoting sympathy to Group A will necessarily reduce sympathy for the victimization of Group B?)
Readers: Have you been going to Starbucks more or less since hearing the news of their passion for racism?
Related:
Hangar space at busier airports in the U.S. is scarce. Hiring people who are competent to move aircraft without smacking them into each other (creating “hangar rash,” potentially a multi-million dollar issue on a jet) is getting tougher every year (the American workforce skews to either white collar desk jobs or SSDI/Xbox, leaving a big shortage of competent blue collar workers). There are some innovative tug technologies that can substantially increase the density of packing (see mototok.com, for example).
How about this for an AI master’s thesis: put a few cameras in the ceiling of a big hangar and then provide assistance to humans driving the Mototok? Back in 2011 there was a company with a laser-based “warning system” for wall contact (article). But airplanes should not be hard to see in a well-lit hangar, especially from a ceiling-mounted vantage point. Why not a system that can run on a mobile phone and be suitable for use in a small hangar with, e.g., just two or three aircraft?
[Why is hangar space scarce? There are the usual permitting costs plus high construction costs that make it tough for the U.S. to build infrastructure quickly or cheaply. But mostly the scarcity is unique to airports. The public pays aviation fuel taxes that the FAA uses to build runways and taxiways, but the land around those federally-funded resources is controlled, usually, by a municipality. The municipality will restrict construction of FBOs and hangars to one or two chosen cronies, thus creating artificial scarcity for fuel and hangar space. Fuel prices may be boosted by 1.5-2X and hangar prices by 3X compared to nearby less busy airports. If a new FBO tries to get in, the incumbent(s) will lobby politicians (usually successfully) to prevent vacant land at the airport from being used for an aviation purpose.]
Full post, including comments“The Colorado Wedding Cake Case: A Gay Couple Versus A Principled Baker” (WGBH), by Harvey Silverglate:
The Supreme Court soon will issue its opinion in one of the most contentious, but least understood cases on that court’s docket, the clash between gay rights advocates on the one hand, and a merchant’s claim that his religious conscience forbids him from selling to a gay couple the same services and product (a custom-made wedding cake) that he readily provides to straight couples.
The legal analysis is sort of interesting. In a country that is ever more packed with people, do we want to allow someone to get off and stay off the reservation when the standards for correct thought change?
What continues to baffle me about this case and similar is why there are people who consider civil marriage to be a sacred institution from which same-sex couples, threesomes, or person-cat unions should be excluded. “America, Home of the Transactional Marriage” (Atlantic) says that Americans marry based on cash incentives. Colorado family law, which covers the baker’s region, provides for on-demand unilateral (“no-fault”) divorce. Maybe it would be logically reasonable (albeit morally deplorable) for the baker to object to a same-sex religious marriage in his church. But if a civil marriage is primarily about giving one partner the right to sue the other, possibly as soon as the day after the wedding, why did the baker get his panties in a twist? (and keep them twisted all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court!)
From one of my smart friends (who happens to be gay):
First, an observation: whatever legal and ethical principle applies to gay weddings also applies to, say, interracial or Jewish weddings, if particular vendors have religious or philosophical objections to those.
I strongly support free speech even for views I consider despicable. And free speech has to include not only being able to express one’s views, but also not being forced to express view one disagrees with.
However, merely having to provide services to someone (when those services are offered to the public) does not reasonably constitute having to express any particular view, whether the services are in the form of a cake, or other food, or renting out a hall or chairs, or whatever. If it did, why draw the line at the wedding itself? Why not permit refusing certain couples when they try to rent apartments or hotel rooms, or be served dinner together at a restaurant, etc.?
If the baker had been asked to create artwork on the cake that explicitly championed a form of marriage he disapproved of, there would at least start to be a legitimate competing interest (though the artistic contribution would be so minimal that I’m still skeptical that consideration should prevail, particularly since the baker’s own views would not plausibly be inferred by anyone from his providing that service, at least no more than if he had merely provided bagels for the wedding).
And in the case at hand, my understanding is that the baker turned the customers away before even discussing what the cake would look like. If it was just to be a generic wedding cake, then denying it to a gay (or interracial or Jewish) couple would be no different than refusing to sell them beer or napkins for the wedding, no different from refusing to rent them an apartment or serve them together at a restaurant.
I followed up with him by asking
So let’s say that A goes into a cake shop and asks B to make a cake and B says “I won’t do it.” If there is a law against B refusing to bake cakes for certain reasons then the court system is trying to sort out what B’s internal feelings are. Why did B refuse to do this? Too busy at the time? Did not think the project was interesting? Disliked A because A belonged to some protected class?
His response:
There’s a curious, selectively-invoked conservative myth that taking account of the intent behind an action is somehow establishing a novel kind of thought-crime.
In fact, at least as far back as the Hammurabi Code, it has been recognized that ascertaining an act’s intent is a crucial aspect of justice. Common sense concurs. If I sell someone a product I’ve misrepresented, whether there’s criminal fraud depends on whether I knowingly and intentionally deceived them. Possession of lock-picks may be legal or not depending on intent to use them for a burglary. If I knock someone over and they fall off a ledge, the extent of my culpability depends on whether I meant to collide with them at all, and if so whether I intended to shove them off the ledge (or even knew it was there). Etc.
Determining intent is also, of course, a key element of antidiscrimination law. It’s one of many practical problems that must be solved in enforcing most laws. Like all the other elements of establishing guilt (was the defendant even present at the scene?; did the victim shoot first?; etc.), the task can be difficult but is not necessarily insurmountable. The practical difficulty of proving intent certainly does not warrant a 4,000-year rollback in civilization’s understanding of justice.
In the case before the Supreme Court, intent is easy to establish because it’s openly acknowledged. In other cases–for example, landlords refusing to rent to blacks or Jews, but hiding behind a pretext–it’s sometimes necessary to show a pattern by comparing a sufficiently large sample of otherwise-similar applicants who are systematically approved or rejected consistently with a proscribed criterion.
He cited a New York Times article that says that this particular case is not about free expression:
Although Phillips’s cakes are undeniably quite artistic, he did not reject a particular design option, such as a topper with two grooms — in which case, his First Amendment argument would be more compelling. Instead, he flatly told Craig and Mullins that he would not sell them a wedding cake.
Readers: Who wants to bet on how the Supreme Court rules?
[My bet is that they rule in favor of the baker. My first reason is that the justices are super old. They grew up in a country of 150 million with plenty of elbow room and haven’t thought about how when the U.S. hits 400 million in population there is a high cost to having an outlier/throwback/Neanderthal such as the baker running around loose. Second, they will be concerned about a slippery slope. If this baker can be fined or imprisoned due to his irrational (see above) thoughtcrime, how far does the government have to go to stamp out non-violent dissent from the latest and greatest official thinking on social issues? Finally, the justices know that about half of Americans are at least sort of religious (Pew). They won’t want these 165 million people to see the Supreme Court as illegitimate so it would make sense to throw religious Americans a bone of some sort. (Based on their selection of people for stories on furniture-, house-, or car-shopping, our media suggests that at least 30 percent of married couples are same-sex, so the typical business owner will not want to alienate this group of consumers.)]
There is a separate economics angle to this. Back in December 2017, I wrote to my friend as part of the above exchange
Full post, including commentsThe U.S. spends about $300 billion per year on lawyers and for every $1 spent on a lawyer there are probably $2 spent on non-lawyer time and money worrying about litigation, being deposed, trying to avoid litigation, trying to comply with various regulations, etc. (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/InOurEconomy for the source of the numbers on the total legal spend).
The NYT piece you referenced sounds reasonable, but it is not cost-free to have a legal system figure out what happened. Figure a minimum of $500,000 in legal fees, depositions, etc. to figure out whether a dispute was about the message on the cake or the customer. And you won’t know the “truth” after this. You will just maybe have a better idea of what most likely happened. Just having Americans print and then read that article shrinks the GDP. Americans could have been learning a skill instead with that time.
Same deal with all of the arguments about who had sex with whom and in exchange for how much cash or career advancement 20 years ago. The GDP shrinks every time people are contemplating Kevin Spacey or Harvey Weinstein and their various sex partners.