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“Apple, Capitalizing on New Tax Law, Plans to Bring Billions in Cash Back to U.S.” (nytimes) says that Apple is going to pay $38 billion in tax to the U.S. Treasury on money that it has been stuffing overseas. Here’s the confusing part to me:

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said in a statement, “We have a deep sense of responsibility to give back to our country and the people who help make our success possible.”

It makes sense that Apple is bringing the money in before the next Congress comes up with a new tax scheme that is less favorable. But why brag about the company’s “deep sense of responsibility”? It wasn’t quite deep enough to pay taxes at the old rates? But it is deep enough to pay some U.S. taxes at the new lower rates? Apple assumes that nobody will ask these (to me) obvious questions?

Maybe they can use some of the repatriated money to sit down with Honda and create a working version of Apple CarPlay?

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Today in our aviation class at MIT we are going to have a special talk by an expert from Avidyne about quality assurance and certification of software for avionics. To introduce the speaker I needed to create a sentence of the following form: “Look at this incredibly broken and failure-prone piece of software and contrast that with the near-bulletproof software behind your certified avionics.”

The best example turned out to be the Apple CarPlay system in our 2018 Honda Odyssey. It exhibits the following behavior:

• plug in phone: crash about 10 percent of the time
• arrive at the destination after navigating with Apple Maps: crash about 30 percent of the time
• phone calls: about 1 call out of 10, play sound through car speakers, but continue to rely on the microphone on the iPhone 7 Plus (result: person on other side cannot hear)

There are lots more quirks. Also plenty of design flaws, e.g., if you click on “phone” from the steering wheel controls it will say “no phone connected”. You can see that your iPhone is actually plugged into USB! What does this mean? That the iPhone is not connected to the legacy Bluetooth system, but only to the fancy new CarPlay system. If you want to make calls you need to use the center touch screen.

I’m not quite able to abandon CarPlay because (a) I like to listen to Audible books and there are strange skips in Bluetooth audio (worked nicely in the 2014 Odyssey), and (b) the car does not have its own navi system so I want to use Apple Maps (one sure way to develop greater appreciation for Google!).

I’m wondering if this works for readers. Who else has CarPlay? In a Honda? Does it work reliably?

The car can accept over-WiFi updates, but none have been made available in the past 6 weeks.

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I’ve been observing Americans fight in the media and on Facebook regarding immigration policy. A lot of people exhibit what seems at first like a logical inconsistency. They want laws to keep the majority of would-be immigrants out of the U.S. But they object to deporting people who are here in violation of immigration laws (cue “No Human Being is Illegal” T-shirt).

Deporting a person is certainly a dramatic step, but on the other hand immigration determines (1) the size of our population [and therefore how crowded our country will be, what kinds of traffic jam our grandchildren will experience, our impact on the planet, the intensity of competition for space to rent, etc.], and (2) the kind of society we will have (since the culture and values of the people are what make up “society”).

Why does it matter how long someone has been in the U.S. if he or she is in violation of the law? Is it that there comes a point where it is simply rude to kick someone out of the country?

I’m wondering if the legal concept of adverse possession can be applied here. Taking over someone else’s house is illegal. But if you do it for long enough (about 15 years in most states; Wikipedia has a map) then it becomes legal.

Most undocumented immigrants haven’t made any serious attempt to hide from the various police forces and government agencies that the U.S. operates. Thus this corresponds to the “open and notorious use” element of adverse possession.

Note that if we accept extending the idea of adverse possession to citizenship this restores logical consistency to a huge block of Americans.

Readers: What do you think? If we’re going to do absurd stuff such as claim that El Salvador is in some kind of temporary emergency for 16 years (it is slightly more dangerous than Detroit and significantly less dangerous than New Orleans) should we then lose the right to kick people out?

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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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