Category: Uncategorized

Would gentiles like Jews better if we complained more?

by philg

A virtuous Facebook friend highlighted “Anti-Semitism Is Rising. Why Aren’t American Jews Speaking Up?” (nytimes) He suggested “Rock the boat and fight back.” (where “fight back” in the article is “complain verbally,” not “pop a cap in the Jew-haters ass”)

A year ago we had a big Jew-hatred scare from the NYT and similar media. Donald Trump had caused dozens of Jew-haters to call in bomb threats to dozens of Jewish schools. It turned out to be an American Jew in Israel with an auto-dialer and an angry Hillary supporter in the U.S. (see Donald Trump is threatening Jews?).

Here’s the war-winning advice from the best minds at the New York Times:

If the vinyl banners proclaiming “Remember Darfur” that once graced the front of many American synagogues could give way in a wave to “We Stand With Israel,” why can’t they now give way en masse to “We Stand Against Hate”?

Suppose that there is someone in the U.S. who currently hates Jews (maybe Iron John, who commented on my Black Panther posting). Will this person hate Jews less because there is a “We Stand Against Hate” banner on the nearby synagogue? Because American Jews fill their Facebook feeds with posts about how they don’t like Jew-haters? Because they see a group of Jews marching in the streets waving signs reading “We are super-likable people”?

[Separately, why don’t they have “Remember Darfur” banners up anymore? They don’t want to remember Darfur? They don’t care anymore? Wikipedia says that the war continues.]

Full post, including comments

Can a border wall pay for itself?

by philg

My Facebook friends heaped derision on the calculations in “Cutting welfare to illegal aliens would pay for Trump’s wall” (New York Post):

If a wall stopped just 200,000 of those future crossings, Camarota says, it would pay for itself in fiscal savings from welfare, public education, refundable tax credits and other benefits currently given to low-income, illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America.

Camarota explains that illegal border-crossers from Mexico and Central America — who account for more than 75 percent of the illegal immigrant population in the US — are overwhelmingly poor, uneducated and lack English language and other skills. In fact, the average Latino illegal immigrant has less than a 10th-grade education. That means if they work, they tend to make low wages; and as a result pay relatively little in taxes while using public services. And if they have children while in the US, they more often than not receive welfare benefits on behalf of those US-born children, who have the same welfare eligibility as any other citizen.

“A large share of the welfare used by immigrant households is received on behalf of their US-born children,” Camarota said. “This is especially true of households headed by illegal immigrants.”

Therefore, illegal border-crossers create an average fiscal burden of more than $72,000 during their lifetimes, Camarota says. Including costs for their US-born children, the fiscal drain jumps to more than $94,000.

I can’t see how these calculations can be right. There seems to be no allowance for the cost of building infrastructure to accommodate the new Americans that result from immigration. (See “How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure?“)

Let’s just look at the school construction cost. Mexican immigrants to the U.S. have an average of 3.5 children per woman (source). So let’s assume that each adult immigrant therefore adds 1.75 children to the U.S. school population. Our town is about to spend $166,667 per student on a new K-8 school (previous posting). Let’s assume that these kids also need a place in high school at $166,667. That’s a maximum of $583,335 in construction costs for every person added to the U.S. school population (this is a maximum figure because the marginal cost of building extra classrooms, per square foot, is presumably lower than the average cost; it doesn’t cost quite 2X to build a school that is 2X larger).

Readers: What do you think? Is there any way that the $94,000 number can be correct for a low-skill immigrant coming across the border with Mexico? That’s about what the City of Cambridge spends, including capital costs, to educate a child for three years in the K-12 schools.

[Of course, one could argue that we will be better off in non-financial ways as a consequence of expanded undocumented overland immigration. Money isn’t everything. This post is really about whether my Facebook friends are right in that the border wall is a stupid idea purely on fiscal grounds.]

Full post, including comments

Tesla 3 interior noise

by philg

Car and Driver has posted “The perils of outsize expectations,” a review of the Tesla 3:

Although the Model 3 is a bit less involving than the best sports sedans on these roads, it lacks the refined isolation of its similarly priced rivals. The stout structure stifles harsh impacts, but you do hear what’s going on below as the tires persistently thwack and thrum over pavement imperfections. Our sound meter measured 69 decibels at 70 mph, louder than an A4. There were also some subtle yet annoying rattles and creaks in our test car, which had less than 2500 miles on the odometer.

This is a louder number than what I and Car and Driver measured in a 2018 Honda Odyssey.

The knob- and button-free dashboard sounds like a user interface disaster:

This aggressively minimalistic approach results in some strange and unsuccessful attempts to reinvent the automotive interior. The process required to move the mirrors and to manipulate the power-adjustable tilting and telescoping steering wheel incorporates both a menu within the touchscreen and the finicky steering-wheel scroll buttons. Changing the direction of airflow from the HVAC vent that stretches across the full width of the dash is, similarly, a multistep affair in which you must pinch and swipe a display within the climate-control menu that resembles a not very addictive smartphone game.

My old dream was adding navigation information to the speedometer right in front of the driver, instead of having it off to the side. Tesla has done the opposite. The nav information stays in the middle of the car and the speedometer and other critical data have been moved to join the navi screen. (See also Honda Clarity versus Accord test drive for how annoying it was to lose a volume control knob.)

Car and Driver didn’t like the seats, especially in the back, or the exterior build quality:

Inconsistent panel gaps around the doors and myriad ill-fitting trim pieces were among the worst we’ve seen in recent memory.

They got 200 miles of range (against a spec of 310 for the $56,000 car) in weather just below freezing.

Will Tesla 3 passengers who aren’t starstruck by Elon Musk say “I feel like I’m riding in a tin can mounted on top of a marine battery”?

Related:

Full post, including comments

New York Times celebrates indentured servitude

by philg

“Where Companies Welcome Refugees, the More, the Better” (NYT):

Haimonet Demcasso, the recruiter, explained, in two languages, the broad outlines of the jobs. The poultry-plant work pays roughly $11 to $13 an hour in small towns in Virginia and West Virginia. Labor Solutions would transport the recruits, find apartments for them to share, help fill out paperwork, and advance them the money to cover their travel, the first month’s rent, the security deposit, heavy work boots and home essentials. They could pay it back out of their paychecks with no interest at a rate of $60 a week.

They are paid the same as other plant workers, but they are employees of Labor Solutions for up to a year, until they’ve repaid their loans.

The tone of the article is a little closer to neutral than the typical NYT piece celebrating immigration, but basically it seems positive. Would it then be fair to say that the NYT is celebrating indentured servitude?

Related:

Full post, including comments

Americans versus Germans and Brazilians

by philg

A friend works as a helicopter tour pilot. The operator has a fleet of beautiful EC130s. One day a colleague was flying the usual route when the Turbomecca engine remembered that it had been built by the French. There was an instant loss of power and it was time to enter an autorotation. Unlike in training, the engine failure did not come with quotation marks (a throttle rolled to idle) and did not occur conveniently over a smooth clear surface. The pilot did the best he could and the helicopter landed hard enough on some uneven terrain that the gear was bent. Two groups of tourists were on board. The Germans booked a replacement flight for the next day. The Americans went to the hospital “to be checked out.”

Separately, as part of our ground school class at MIT, we scheduled a Brazilian Air Force officer (and current MIT PhD student) to talk about flying the F-16 and working as a test pilot. Here’s some email correspondence:

the American (me): MIT is doing an article on the class and the journalist, cc’d, would like to talk to you about your role. I explained that you’re going to give a talk on the last day of the class (Thursday, Jan 18, around 12) on the differences between Brazil and the U.S. and also, of course, about your heroic adventures in the Air Force!

the Brazilian: “Keep in mind that there is nothing ‘heroic’ in defending my country during peaceful times. We all prefer this way, right?”

I explained to him that, with this kind of attitude, he would never make it in the U.S. military….

Related:

Full post, including comments

Tesla is the Lisp Machine of cars?

by philg

Here’s a meme that programmers between age 60 and dead will like: Tesla is the Lisp Machine of cars.

A recent message exchange:

  • friend1: Prediction: Tesla is done. They already closed the Hingham [Massachusetts] store.
  • friend2: Everybody who wanted one bought one

This reminds me of the MIT Lisp Machine, a $100,000 personal computer to which only a handful of programmers could gain access in the 1970s. The computer itself was the size of a refrigerator and lived in a machine room. The programmer worked on a big-by-1970s-standards bitmap display in his or her office, with the display connected via a coax cable (a Tom Knight design). The keyboard was vastly better than today’s pathetic $29.95 examples, though it was rumored to cost $1,000 per sample. The mechanical mouse wasn’t so great, but Knight eventually designed an optical mouse along the lines of today’s devices.

Symbolics commercialized the machine and it sold rapidly for a few years as “Everybody who wanted one bought one”. The company went public. Confident predictions were made. Then sales fell off a cliff after the market of people who had already wanted a Lisp Machine was saturated. Computer buyers who hadn’t been desperate for Lisp Machine would, if reached by Symbolics marketing materials, decide that cheaper personal computers, e.g., “Unix workstations,” from larger and/or more established companies could serve the same function.

Readers: If you’re over 60 and passionate about writing software, what do you think of the meme “Tesla is the Lisp Machine of cars”? There were tens of thousands of (rich, smug) people who wanted a fancy electric car, but couldn’t buy one. They rushed to buy Teslas, which made it seem that Tesla was awesome at selling and taking customers away from legacy car-makers, but actually Tesla was just fulfilling orders from people who had already wanted a fancy electric car. Now they will face the challenge of actually selling and it is unclear if they will be good at it.

[Not related, but from the same friends:

[son] wanted school off tomorrow for Good Friday. I said only if you accept the Lord Jesus as your savior and no longer eat meat on Friday.

]

Related:

 

Full post, including comments

Airline web systems should let you go somewhere else after a major weather event

by philg

During the first March nor’easter storm I had a ticket from Dallas to Boston, nonstop on Americn Airlines. About 12 hours before the flight, American emailed to say that the flight had been canceled. Shortly after that, American emailed to say that I had automatically been rebooked for the Dallas to Boston trip via a 9-hour ordeal with a long stop in LaGuardia. Although there were American planes leaving DFW every minute for various destinations, many of which were also served by nonstop flights to Boston, there was no way for me to say “I acknowledge that I’m not getting back to Boston for two days, but I would like to sit this one out in Florida rather than Dallas”. Why not? Wouldn’t that be a common customer desire?

I figured I would try to arrange this over the phone. I spent one hour and 9 minutes on hold and then gave up. I did manage to execute on my plan, though. I purchased a ticket on Southwest to DCA and spent two days with family before purchasing a DCA-BOS leg (arriving at roughly the same time as American’s automated reroute).

To American’s credit, when I called them about 30 hours later they did answer the phone after a 5-minute hold and they refunded my fare for DFW-BOS. But due to the lack of a Web interface for my “take me somewhere else” request, they gave up the revenue for the Dallas-DC leg. I actually would have been willing to kick in an extra $500 to wait in the city of my choice. And American refunded me about $500. So they gave up $1,000 in revenue because they couldn’t answer the phone and couldn’t handle the request via their web site.

Full post, including comments

Painting and sealing a garage floor that was previously covered with sand and paint?

by philg

Suburban heroes needed…

We rent a small hangar with an underlying asphalt floor. Perhaps 30 years ago a previous tenant painted this floor with what seems to have been a lot of sand mixed in (for anti-slip?). Now this coating is disintegrating and every time we go into the hangar there is a seemingly huge amount of sand to be pushed out with a broom and/or vacuumed.

Sand plus airplane is a bad combination because people walk up on the wing to get in.

Keeping in mind that we are renters and don’t want to invest a huge amount of $$, what can we do to seal this floor? We don’t care about aesthetics. It would be okay, for example, if the floor were to show tire tracks. Note that the airplane parked inside is somewhat lighter than a typical car, roughly 2,500 lbs. when fully fueled, but there are only three tires and they are not as wide as car tires.

Home Depot sells epoxy floor paint. If we were to clean up and dry the existing floor, would that likely work to seal in the remaining sand? Customer reviews are not promising, with dire tales of peeling and flaking.

If we want to “seal” asphalt, why not “asphalt sealer”? Example 1 and Example 2. Is this stuff too goopy? It will stick to everyone’s shoes and then end up on the wing and the carpet of the plane?

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Full post, including comments

Shopping and banking on a computer network in the 1980s (Minitel)

by philg

Minitel: Welcome to the Internet (Mailland and Driscoll; MIT Press) says that the French were banking online starting in late 1983:

The first service, Vidéocompte (video account), was launched on December 20, 1983, by CCF Bank (now part of HSBC). But far from being what the Financial Times called an “electronic gadget,” within a year the service attracted 65 percent of CCF clients who owned a Minitel. Other banks were a bit less successful, for unlike the CCF, they actually charged a monthly fee for the service. A 1991 France Telecom survey estimated that “the penetration ratio (total subscribers/total bank customers) average[d] 8% for nationwide banks and 19% for local banks.” Nonetheless, that was enough for banking services to repeatedly be ranked in the top of all services by France Telecom. Services ranged from checking balances and making appointments with bank personnel, to ordering checkbooks and transferring money. Using Minitel as a modem, the home or office accountant could download banking data to further manipulate it using a personal computer. The contrast between the successful Minitel model for online banking and US videotex failures in this realm highlight the power of Minitel as a neutral, open platform on which private actors could layer their services. In contrast, the fragmentation of US systems made it impossible for banking services to succeed. Different banking applications required separate subscriptions to distinct gated communities and sometimes dedicated hardware. The United States would have to wait for the privatization of the open Internet as a neutral, open platform to see the successful emergence of online banking in the retail sector.

They had Amazon Fresh:

Tele-Market promised to deliver food to the Paris area and offered same-day delivery. It competed with several other companies; a 1987 guide lists four different services focused on delivering to the Paris area, and twenty-three total in France, enabling one to order from large stores, specialized wine retailers, or straight from local farms.

[under a 1985 photo of a Tele-Market van]

They had Google:

The France Telecom telephone directory, known as Le 11, featured a natural language interface. Name searches could be successfully completed even when the name or address was spelled wrong, and the yellow pages sections of the State-run directory as well as the Minitel online directory MGS offered powerful natural-language search capabilities. For example, one could search for “reservation of theater tickets in Paris” or “residential real estate rentals in Lyon.” By May 1991, France Telecom would boast a 98 percent rate of accuracy in the search results.

They had Siri:

In addition to natural-language interfaces, the private sector also experimented with on-demand personal assistants and semantic search. Before Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana, Minitel users could chat with Claire or Sophie. Claire provided administrative information, while Sophie answered questions on Parisian cultural activities. But Claire and Sophie were not powered by artificial intelligence software; there were real, live people on the other end of the connection, referred to as “Minitel girls.” That was 1984. Truly automated personal assistant services with natural-language interfaces began to appear around 1987, such as 3615 AK, a public-facing database of health information similar to WebMD.

The Minitel nerds also envisioned (and built) the Internet of Things (IoT), but without TCP/IP or the Silicon Valley Insufferables:

The Minitel terminal—and specifically, its serial port—played a central role in coordinating the domotique network. First, it provided communication to and from the outside world by supplying an interface between the various “smart” devices in the home to the telephone system. This enabled cybernetic devices to communicate with the outside world. For example, a domotique fire alarm could ring the firehouse. Similarly, the Minitel could receive orders sent remotely and communicate them to the control unit.

Domotique devices from the 1980s included thermostats, VCRs, security systems, lights, yard irrigation, and even kitchen appliances—although it remains unclear why anyone would want to remotely control a stove, fridge, or supply of laundry detergent or trash bags.

[Sadly these folks couldn’t get $3 billion after doing a little 8051 coding.]

More: read Minitel: Welcome to the Internet

Full post, including comments