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Today is the official Martin Luther King, Jr. birthday. Domestic Senior Management is slaving away in the pharma mines (their tax home and corporate heart are now in Ireland so they no longer celebrate American heroes, apparently). My Facebook feed is full people discussing the Hollywood Cleansing and other stuff that adult men and women purportedly did behind closed doors. I’m working where we would be now if MLK, Jr. were alive in this Age of Harvey. There were plenty of stories about MLK, Jr. and various women (example: FBI file). How would the opposing Vectors of Sanctimony sum out?

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Two years ago I wrote “Equal Rights Amendment, Bristol Palin, and Aziz Ansari” and now Mr. Ansari is back in the news.

This Independent article opens with

Aziz Ansari, comedian, creator of one of the most socially progressive shows of our time and an ardent feminist campaigner has been accused of taking sexual advantage of a woman.

What makes this guy’s show “progressive”? And, if he is espousing the discredited “equality feminism” of the 1960s, how is he “an ardent feminist campaigner” by the standards of 2018?

[Separately, will the older thought criminals who wondered why fit young women couldn’t outrun the morbidly obese 65-year-old Harvey Weinstein now ask why a 23-year-old couldn’t get away from a slightly built attacker 5’6″ in height?]

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“Instead of Work Requirements, Why Not a Jobs Guarantee?” (Atlantic) is kind of fun. The author recognizes that the centrally planned Medicaid system now consumes more money than Americans want to spend (though many are unaware of it!). The proposed solution is a fully planned economy for a subset of Americans in which the government provides a job for anyone whom private industry doesn’t want to hire (e.g., at the new $15/hour minimum wage?).

[Separately, the January 19, 2018 issue of The Week carries an article about the UK’s National Health Service running out of cash, space, etc. It quotes some Brits saying that the NHS was designed for a country of hard-working laborers who died young and now is dealing with “sedentary workers who eat too much and exercise too little” and then keep living more or less indefinitely.]

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The New York Times publishes an annual “52 Places to Go” list (for 2018).

Here’s an idea for a high school student project: calculate the carbon footprint of a person who does travel to these 52 places (starting from New York City and returning there at least once per month) and compare that to the carbon footprint of a person who lives in a median-income country. It looks as though Costa Rica, Mexico, and Malaysia are close to the median (source).

[Don’t forget that the calculation should include the carbon footprint of living in hotels in these various destinations; assume four days per destination, some travel time (what’s the carbon footprint of being in an airport terminal changing planes?), and some time back in Manhattan taking Uber everywhere (because the subway system has collapsed).]

Readers: Who has a high school-age kid that could get credit for this somehow? I would love to know the answer!

Related:

• the NYT, in between publishing articles about the planet’s imminent destruction due to climate change, is sending one person on this climate-changing journey

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Our two-year-old was happily snacking on a cheese stick in the minivan and Domestic Senior Management said “Whoever invented cheese sticks was a genius.” Google and Atlantic magazine to the rescue with “The Secret Life of String Cheese” (2014):

For these early pizza joints, [in the 1950s] Baker Cheese would make six-pound loaves or 20-pound blocks of cheese that restaurants would then cut and slice for their pizzas. But then Baker Cheese started getting requests for consumers who were addicted to the hot white melted mass of cheese on their pizzas. They wanted smaller units that they could eat as a snack.

“My grandfather was an innovator by nature,” Brian said. “He wanted to see if he could seek to do something with the product and packaging for these one-pound packages of mozzarella. Mozzarella was already shredded and cubed, but we didn’t want to compete and invest in that market.”

So Frank started experimenting in the factory with these one pound packages. Normally, mozzarella is molded into a shape from a continuous flow of cheese that is then shaped into a block or square. Frank wondered what would happen if he took this continuous flow of mozzarella and simply chopped them into strips?

“He would cut off strips and hand stretch them and roll them up and cut them into ropes, into little three, four, five inch pieces,” Brian said. “He’d soak them in the salt brine—this highly concentrated salt water—and he realized by doing it this way, cheese would have ‘stringing’ characteristics.”

That was in 1976. But it wasn’t until the a few years later, when string cheese had become cylindrified from its original twisted rope state and retail opportunities abounded, that string cheese catapulted from a local oddity to a national craze that caught on with the younger set. A key part of that was packaging, Brian said. Rather than stuffing 15-16 sticks into a one pound bag, they started making the individually wrapped mozzarella tubes we know today.

“With the one pound bags, parents would get [the entire bag] but have to throw them out because it would start to spoil,” Brian told me. “But we invested in vacuum packing to extend shelf life. Pretty quickly, kids thought it was cool and the adults liked it, too.”

A success for both Internet and traditional media!

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We saw the remake of Jumanji last night and enjoyed it . With the Rock, Jack Black (with a female gender ID, but not for car insurance purposes), and Kevin Hart as leads, what’s not to like?

There is a UH-1 Huey for the heroes and an in-flight repair is required to the flight controls up at the lower swash plate (a “mesh plate” in the movie for some reason).

Accuracy: The three tubes connecting the cyclic and the collective to the swash plate are not actually independent functions. In other words, if one becomes disconnected it will not result in a loss of, say, collective control while cyclic control is maintained.

Readers: Who has seen the original? How does it compare to this one?

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Expert readers: What’s the best screen recording software for Windows? I want to make some YouTube voice-over lectures for folks who can’t make it physically to http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/ground-school/ (or who have to miss a section). Almost everything is in PowerPoint, but I don’t think I can use PowerPoint “narration” because some content is hyperlinked out to a Web browser or YouTube. So I think I need something that just records what is on my screen. I have a 4K desktop and a near-4K laptop so maybe output in 4k is ideal?

I don’t need anything fancy. Just turn on and record whatever is on the screen plus whatever comes in from a USB microphone. Maybe trim the front and back (but I have Adobe Premiere also).

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In most states car insurance companies are free to discriminate on the basis of age and gender (dmv.org). If “Starting from the time they begin driving, women generally pay less than men do for car insurance,” and gender ID is not necessarily a function of biology, wouldn’t it make sense to check the “female” box and obtain lower rates?

Why, in a transgender age, is anyone checking the “please charge me more due to an arbitrary and temporary distinction” box?

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I have forgotten the state capitals, but one intact memory of elementary school in Bethesda, Maryland is lining up to get shots (vaccines?) from some sort of “gun”. These were administered roughly every 15 seconds either by the school nurse or a county health worker. It went so fast that I wonder if we were all effectively sharing one needle (HIV and hepatitis were not concerns for schoolchildren circa 1970).

The other day I was waiting for a friend at CVS so decided to use the time to get my “free” (i.e., included in my $10,000/year Obamacare policy) flu shot. Ten minutes later my friend showed up. It took roughly another ten minutes before the shot was “ready.” It turned out that three health care professionals had to process various forms on a computer screen, get a one-page questionnaire from me, and finally deliver the shot with a simple needle (less than one minute). A licensed pharmacist was required as part of the paperwork pipeline.

Here’s what I got in hardcopy:

1. Two-page document regarding the vaccine (Flucelvax Quad). It says “This is an OFF-WHITE SYRINGE.”
2. CVS Health Notice of Privacy Practices, a two-page document in 6 pt type. It is a paper copy that, among other things, says “You have the right to obtain a paper copy of our current Notice at any time.” It also says what will happen if I am or become “an inmate of a correctional institution.”
3. A five-page “Vaccine Information Statement” that discusses the side effects (overlaps to some extent with Document #1)
4. A Vaccine Consent and Administration Record
5. A three-foot-long receipt for $0.00 (coupons following)
6. A $5 off any $25 purchase special coupon specific to having gotten a “free” flu shot (i.e., for giving CVS the opportunity to bill the health insurer)

Is there now this much paperwork and process attached to what was, in my youth, a 15-second paperwork-free experience?

[I posted a shorter version of the above on Facebook and it generated the predictable encomiums about the wisdom of Obamacare requiring insurance companies to pay for flu shots:

I think the insurance companies cover shots as a preventative measure, hoping we won’t incur more healthcare expenses related to the flu we’d contract if we didn’t take the shot.

It should be free and universal. That will save the most money, and the evidence for that is stone-cold solid.

In other words, the central planners working for the government are smarter than the actuaries who work at insurers, which didn’t previously pay for flu shots. I decided to poke at this assumption a bit with “If it made actuarial sense to do this, why wouldn’t the UK bureaucrats be smart enough to figure it out? They don’t offer free flu shots to everyone. (source) Are the U.S. central planners smarter than the UK ones who’ve been doing it for decades?” That proved to be an impossible conundrum!]

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My Facebook friends have their panties in a twist because President Trump purportedly referred to some countries where people want to emigrate to the U.S. as “shitholes.” (e.g., see “Trump Alarms Lawmakers With Disparaging Words for Haiti and Africa” from the nytimes) The only righteous attitude toward these countries is that they are wonderful places full of culture, orderly Swiss-style cities and villages, and economic opportunity. It is just that the people who live there would rather be in Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, or Buffalo.

Their horror reminded me of the experience of a CBS News crew in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. A former instructor at our flight school was flying a Pilatus PC-12 for a rich guy and the owner said “go down to Haiti and fly supplies around.” He was indifferent to whether the plane was flying out of Teterboro or Port-au-Prince so he packed his bag, stopped for fuel in Fort Pierce, Florida, and kept going to Hispaniola. After a week or so, Dan Rather hopped on the plane so as to be on the ground when the food and water were delivered to grateful quake victims. The crew decided to gather some B-roll from the pilot, assuming that he was there in Haiti because of his profound commitment to humanitarianism. Here’s how the conversation went…

• CBS: What do you think the effect of your work here will be?
• Pilot: Well, Haiti was a shithole before this earthquake and I’m sure that it will be a shithole after all of these relief workers have packed up and gone home.

Somehow I don’t think that this heartwarming footage was ever aired…

[Separately, when are the folks who criticize Trump for saying that Norway is nicer than Haiti going to spend their vacation time and money in Haiti? Or, better yet, become rich by setting up a vacation resort in Haiti?]

Related:

• 2010 Haiti cholera outbreak (caused by the do-gooders), which killed nearly 10,000 people

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