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Back in 2003 I asked why Iraqis wouldn’t logically split up into three countries: Breaking Up Countries Where Citizens Hate Each Other. Yesterday the New York Times had a headline of “At Last, Iraq Regains Mosul. But Can Iraq Itself Survive?” on the front page, linked to an article that says “tensions between the Sunni minority and the majority Shiites still undermine efforts to reunite the country” and “The Kurds, who have operated an autonomous enclave in the north since the 1990s, are moving quickly to hold a referendum on independence in September, despite pleas from American diplomats to hold off.”

My California-based Facebook friends want to secede to escape the dictatorship of Donald Trump (one posted the other day decrying deportations of undocumented immigrants, concluding that Trump “is ruining this country. … We are doomed.” (deportations are actually down compared to the numbers under Obama, but that fact doesn’t change her feelings on the subject)). The divisions in Iraq seem to be at least as large as the divisions between Bay Area Hillary-supporters and the Trumpenfuhrer.

Obviously it was a huge mistake to invade in the first place, but, taking the long view, was our biggest post-invasion mistake not immediately trying to get everyone to agree to split up?

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Boston-area traffic now includes regular mid-day traffic jams, not a huge surprise considering that the road network has more or less the same capacity as in 1990 when the population was 3.78 million (in 2015 it was 4.35 million and growing rapidly; see Boston Foundation report).

The other day I was stuck in Cambridge near Alewife. The car in front of me was a Subaru with bumper stickers celebrating Elizabeth Warren (a Native American) and unlimited immigration (“No Human Being is Illegal”).

I was wondering “Given that U.S. population growth is almost entirely driven by immigration and children of recent immigrants, and that traffic jams are driven by population growth (combined with our inability to build infrastructure), if we interviewed that Subaru driver right now, would she support immigration enthusiastically?”

So here’s an idea for a Sociology Masters project: Interview people at highway rest stops and ask

• Should the U.S. have a larger or smaller population?
• Do you support expanding immigration to the U.S.?
• Should the government have policies to subsidize and encourage Americans to have children?

Compare the answers from times when the highway is clogged with traffic and when the highway is flowing freely.

Readers: What do you think? Would this be an interesting data set to gather?

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Apropos of the discussion in the comments on my July 4 Harrison Ford on flying and freedom, a two-pilot airline crew nearly landed on a taxiway at SFO (Mercury News; contains audio clip from LiveATC) on Friday night. Unlike with Harrison Ford, the taxiway was not clear at the time, but contained four heavy airliners. And unlike with Ford, it was night, which arguably makes it easier to distinguish a taxiway from a runway (the runway has different colored lights (“different lights of color” in California?), more lights, and brighter lights). Of course, Harrison Ford was by himself whereas the Airbus A320 has two qualified pilots on board (not like the Miracle on the Hudson where Captain Sully was heroically single-piloting the machine!).

The recording suggests that it was another pilot who first figured out the situation, leading the Tower controller to issue a go-around instruction to Air Canada. Note that pilots are always free to go around themselves if they don’t like what they see on the runway (or taxiway!) or if they can’t get the aircraft stabilized (see the end of Asiana 214: Training with passengers in the back? for a discussion of stable approach criteria). This can be done even after the wheels touch the runway in a light airplane. With a heavy jet, absent an emergency, it should be started when the plane is still roughly 50′ above the ground and the engines are reasonably “spooled up.”

Related:

• King Donald’s Privatized Air Traffic Control System

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Facebook, Apple News, New York Times, and Google News are filled 24×7 with reports of the evildoings of the Trumpenfuhrer. Can I infer from this that Donald Trump, or maybe someone else, has cured humanity of Zika virus infection? I can’t remember that last time that I saw a news article on the subject.

I did a Google News search and came up with examples such as “Pregnant or trying? Don’t let Zika guard down” (AP/Salt Lake Tribune). But if the headline says “you should pay attention to this,” doesn’t that suggest that people have, in fact, let their guard down?

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“Prostitutes speak out against Senate health bill” (CNN) is interesting for some insight into the economics of sex work in the one U.S. state where it is legal. The article explains that women who work in brothels are independent contractors, not employees:

At the helm is Alice Little, 27, who works near Carson City at Dennis Hof’s Sagebrush Ranch brothel. … “I have been fortunate to amass a strong clientele and establish myself as a financially successful businesswoman within Nevada’s legal brothel industry, but that can take time,” Little said in the release. In fact, she’s so successful Hof says she made about $500,000 last year.

Separately, the article is interesting for what it reveals about Americans’ understanding of their own government.

“Under Trumpcare insurers will be able to charge older consumers five times more than young consumers,” [Alice Little] said. “People over the age of 65 make up a very large percentage of Nevada brothel clients. If these clients are forced to pay unfairly augmented health care costs, they will not have money on hand to spend on the things that make life worth living in the first place — like sex.”

So here’s someone who is capable enough to earn $500,000 per year, pays a significant amount of her income in taxes to support Medicare, and yet is apparently unfamiliar with the details of Medicare, one of the largest U.S. government programs. As far as I know, the Obamacare versus Republicare debate doesn’t involve Medicare and therefore it wouldn’t affect the senior citizens that Ms. Little is concerned about. (If anything, Ms. Little should support a straight repeal of Obamacare due to that bill’s cuts to Medicare.) Have we built a government that is beyond the understanding of even our most capable citizens?

In fact, [the brother owner] says half of them have college educations, 20% have master’s degrees, a few have doctorate degrees and one, an Ivy League educated professor, picks up hours to help pay off her huge student loans.

I’m going to guess that this is not one of the alumni success stories featured by Princeton or Yale or wherever it was that she got her Ph.D.!

Related:

• Nevada family law (child support revenue capped at $234,000 tax-free per child over 18 years, so it isn’t practical to live off the profits from one night of sex with a high-income partner)
• Where New York Times readers don’t want to follow Europe: Legalized prostitution
• The strip club owner’s opinion of the $15/hour minimum wage (strippers are also independent contractors)
• Canvassing for Elizabeth Warren (the passionate Democrat who was unaware of the existence of Medicaid)

 

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From Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets:

I was eager to hear her recollections of that terrifying day, February 6, 2004, when there was a terrorist attack on the Zamoskvoretskaya line of the Moscow Metro, between the Avtozavodskaya and Paveletskaya stops. Thirty-nine people were killed and 122 hospitalized.

[from the mother of a victim] I was always scoping out suspicious passengers on the Metro. At work, it was the only thing we talked about. What’s happening to us, dear Lord? One day, I was standing on the platform, and there was this young woman near me with a baby stroller. She had black hair, black eyes, I could tell that she wasn’t Russian. I don’t know what her ethnicity was—Chechen, Ossetian? Who was she? I couldn’t help myself and peeked into the stroller: Was there a child in there? Or was it something else? Thinking about riding in the same car as her ruined my mood. “No,” I thought. “She can go ahead, I’ll wait for the next train.” A man came up to me, “Why did you look into her stroller?” I told him the truth. “So you too, then.” …I see an unhappy girl curled up in a ball. It’s my Ksyusha. Why is she all alone? Without us? No, it’s impossible, it can’t be true. Blood on the pillow… I cry, “Ksyusha! Ksyushenka!” But she can’t hear me. She pulled a hat over her face so that I wouldn’t see her, so that I wouldn’t get scared. My little girl! She’d dreamed of being a pediatrician, but now, she’s lost her hearing. She was the most beautiful girl in her class… and now her face… For what? I’m drowning in a viscous fluid, my consciousness is splintering into shards. My legs don’t work, they feel like they’re made of cotton, and I have to be led out of the ward. The doctor screams at me. “Get ahold of yourself, or else we won’t let you see her again!” I get ahold of myself… and go back into the room… She didn’t look at me, she looked past me, off somewhere, as though she didn’t recognize me. The look in her eyes was like a suffering animal’s, it was unbearable. It was barely possible to go on living after seeing it. Now she’s hidden that look away somewhere, she’s put on an armored shell, but she’s holding all that inside of her. It’s all been imprinted on her. She’s always in that place where none of us were with her… There was an entire hospital ward full of girls like her… They’d all ridden in the same Metro car, and there they all lay… lots of students, school kids.

One operation… another… Three total! Ksyusha regained her hearing in one ear… then her fingers started working again… We lived on the border between life and death; between faith in miracles and utter injustice. It made me realize that even though I am a nurse, I know next to nothing about death. I’ve seen it many times, but only in passing. You put an IV in, listen for a pulse… Everyone thinks that medics know more about death than other people, but no.

…Everything is scarier underground. Now, I always carry a flashlight with me in my purse… …I couldn’t hear any screaming or wailing. It was completely silent. Everyone was lying in a big pile… It wasn’t scary, no… Then, slowly, people started moving. At a certain point, it dawned on me that I had to get out of there, everything was covered in chemicals, and it was all on fire. I was looking around for my backpack, it had my papers in it for school, my wallet… Shock… I was in shock… I didn’t feel any pain…

…At the top of the escalators, two women ran up to me and plastered some rag to my forehead. For some reason, I was freezing cold. They got me a chair, I sat down. I saw them asking other passengers for their belts and neckties and using them to tie off people’s wounds.

Everyone is used to it now. They turn on the TV, hear a little bit about it, then go drink their coffee…

[from the daughter, who had been attacked in the Metro] …The dead lay on the ground with their cellphones endlessly ringing… No one would brave going over and answering them.

…Why am I silent? I had been seeing this guy, we were even… he’d given me a ring… but after I told him about what happened to me… maybe it’s completely unrelated, but we ended up breaking up. I learned my lesson, it made me realize that you shouldn’t confess things to people. You get blown up, you survive, and you end up even more vulnerable and fragile than you were before. You’re branded a victim—I didn’t want people to see that brand on me…

I once had this conversation with a Chechen at the market… The war had been going on for fifteen years already, they’d come to escape it here. They’re fanning out through all of Russia… getting into every corner… even while we’re supposedly at war with them… Russia is fighting the Chechens… that so-called “special operation.” What kind of war is this? The Chechen I talked to was young: “I’m not out there fighting, lady. My wife is Russian.” I heard this story once—I’ll tell it to you, too… A Chechen girl fell in love with a Russian pilot. This handsome guy. By mutual agreement, they decided he should take her away from her parents. He brought her to Russia. They got married. Everything was by the book. Their son was born. But she kept crying and crying, she felt so bad for her parents. Finally, they wrote them a letter: “Please forgive us, we love each other…” And they sent them greetings from her Russian mother. But all those years, her brothers had been looking for her, they wanted to kill her for bringing shame on their family—she’d not only married a Russian, but a Russian who’d bombed them. Killed their people. The return address led them directly to her… One of her brothers murdered her, then another one showed up to take her body home.

More: read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

 

 

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“How Silicon Valley Pushed Coding Into American Classrooms” (New York Times) is worth a look mostly for the disconnect between reader comments and the enthusiastic journalist.

How do humanities majors see computing?

Computer science is also essential to American tech companies, which have become heavily reliant on foreign engineers. Mr. Trump’s efforts to limit immigration make Code.org’s teach-Americans-to-code agenda even more attractive to the industry.

i.e., a person who can write a basic program in an imperative language (BASIC?) is learning “computer science.”

Which of these does Rachel Dolezal join?

Along with groups like Black Girls Code, Girls Who Code and Latina Girls Code, Code.org has worked to make the subject accessible to a diverse group of students.

Does a student with fluid gender have to bounce between the Girls Who Code classroom and the Code.org classroom?

Mr. Partovi noted that Code.org had opposed a “more extreme” coding bill in Florida that would have required students to obtain industry certification.

Nothing’s scarier to educators than a test that students might actually fail!

As with most NYT articles, the comments are the most interesting part, offering us a window into what Americans (or at least Americans who voted for Hillary) think.

As an ex-college professor I would like to point out that many students do not know when the first and second world wars occurred. That about four-fifths of Americans cannot find Iraq on the map (despite the fact that it has been in continuously in the news for over a decade). That about half of Americans believe evolution is not true. That about 40% of college undergrads need remedial classes in math and English coming into college. That a large number cannot even write a coherent essay.

Perhaps these can be solved first. They are of greater much importance than providing a specific industry with workers it “needs” (ironic considering that high tech industry throws out employees over the age of 40 [or less], when they become obsolete).

This professor does raise a good point. If programmers are in such short supply, why can’t old programmers get jobs?

To all this talk of teaching computer programming in schools to fill tech jobs, why won’t the tech companies create their own apprentice programs? Why won’t tech companies use some of their millions/billions and open up learning centers in communities where they don’t have business centers if they are truly altruistic, and not self-serving? Logical thinking can be developed through any scholarly pursuit.

Maybe the Trumpenfuhrer should call the bluffs of the Silicon Valley Hillary-supporters! He can offer to let them bring back, tax-free, some of the overseas $billions (that they were sheltering from Obama’s tax rates) as long as they spend it to train Americans for the jobs currently done by H-1B visa holders. It would be awesome to see the reaction!

[Todd Goglia] Most jobs are for “mediocre coders”. Only a tiny percentage of programming jobs entail a real understanding of advanced computer science concepts such as machine learning. Most jobs consist of getting data from a database and outputting it to a web page or getting user input from a webpage and saving it to a database.

Maybe he read Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing (or its predecessor, Database backed Web Sites) back in the 1990s!

Readers: What do you think? People have been trying since the 1970s to make programming part of K-12. Is this code.org thing going to be the initiative that succeeds?

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From Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets:

Love? That’s not even an option… I’m not against all that happy shiny stuff, but you’re probably the first person to say that word to me in ten years. It’s the twenty-first century: It’s all about money, sex, and two smoking barrels, and here you are talking about feelings… Everyone finally got their hands on some dough, for the first time ever… I was in no hurry to get married, have kids, I’ve always put my career first. I value myself, my time, and my life. And where did you ever get the idea that men are looking for love? Ooh, love… Men consider women game, war trophies, prey, and themselves hunters. Those are the rules that have been developed over the course of centuries. And women aren’t looking for their knight in shining armor to come galloping in on a white horse—they want him on a sack of gold. A knight of indeterminate age… even a “daddy” will do… So what? Money rules the world! But I’m no prey, I’m a huntress myself… I came to Moscow ten years ago. I was wild, fired up, I told myself that I was born to be happy, that only the weak suffer, and modesty is nothing but adornment for the weak. I’m from Rostov… My parents work at a school, my father’s a chemist, and my mother’s a Russian language and literature teacher. They got married when they were in college, my father only owned one decent suit but had more than his share of ideas. Back then, that was enough to make a young girl swoon. They still love to remember how, for ages, they got by with one set of linens, one pillow, and one pair of slippers. They’d spend their nights reciting Pasternak—they knew it all by heart! “Anywhere is heaven with the one you love!” “Until the first frosts,” I’d laugh. “You have no imagination,” my mother would reply, hurt. We were your typical Soviet family: For breakfast, it was always buckwheat or noodles with butter; we only had oranges once a year, on New Year’s Eve.

It took a long time for people like my parents to realize that capitalism had already begun in earnest. Russian capitalism, young and thick-skinned, the same beast that had been put down in 1917…[ She falls into thought.] Do they understand it today? It’s hard to say… There’s one thing I know for sure: Capitalism was not what my parents ordered. No two ways about it. It’s what I ordered, it’s made for people like me, who didn’t want to stay in the cage. The young and the strong.

I was looking up… to the top of the tall ladder of life… I never dreamed of being fucked in stairwells or saunas in exchange for expensive dinners. I had a lot of admirers… I didn’t pay any attention to my peers—we could be friends, go to the library together. It was unserious and safe. I preferred older, more successful men who had already made it. They were interesting, fun, and useful.

And that’s when I met him… You could say that I loved him. This sounds like a confession, doesn’t it? [She laughs.] He was twenty years older than me, married with two sons. A jealous wife. He lived under a microscope… Now I see that love is also a kind of business, everyone is taking their own measure of risk. You have to be ready for new configurations—always! These days, few people go weak in the knees for love. Everyone saves their strength for the leap forward! For their career! In our smoking room, the girls gossip about their love lives, and if any of them has real feelings, everyone feels sorry for her—like, what an idiot, she’s head over heels.

Loneliness is freedom… Now, every day, I’m happy I’m free: Will he call or won’t he, will he come over or not? Is he going to dump me? Spare me! Those aren’t my problems anymore! So no, I’m not afraid of loneliness… What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of the dentist! [She suddenly loses control.] People always lie when they talk about love… and money… They’re always lying in so many different ways. I don’t want to lie… I just don’t!

The plot? A tale as old as time… I wanted to have his baby, I got pregnant… Maybe it scared him? Men are such cowards! Whether they’re bums or oligarchs—makes no difference. They’ll go to war, start a revolution, but when it comes to love, they’re traitors.

I am filled with horror when I consider how hard you have to work to keep someone in your life. It’s like breaking rocks at a quarry! You have to forget about yourself, reject yourself, liberate yourself from yourself. There is no freedom in love. Even if you find your ideal partner, he’ll wear the wrong cologne, he’ll like fried meat and mock you for your little salads, leave his socks and pants all over the place. And you always have to suffer. Suffer?! For love… for that harmony… I don’t want to do that work anymore, it’s easier for me to rely on myself.

I’ll never be able to fall in love with a man from a dormitory town who doesn’t have any money. From a prefab ghetto, from Harlem. I hate people who grew up in poverty, their pauper’s mentality; money means so much to them, you can’t trust them. I don’t like the poor, the insulted and the humiliated.

The whole ride home, he lectured me on common sense: “It’s all bullshit! Nothing but idiocy! In 1991, I was a student in Moscow, I also ran around to demonstrations. There were more of us than there are of you. And we won. We dreamed that every one of us would start a business and get rich. And what do you think happened? When the Communists were in power, I was an engineer—now I’m a cabbie. We chased out one group of bastards, and another group of bastards took their place. Black, gray, or orange, they’re all the same. In our country, power will corrupt anyone. I’m a realist. The only things I believe in are myself and my family. While the newest round of idiots tries to usher in the latest revolution, I just keep my nose to the grindstone. This month, I need to make enough money to buy my daughters new coats, and next month, my wife needs boots. You’re a pretty girl. You’d be better off finding yourself a good man and getting married.”

More: read Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

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At least 10 of my Facebook friends posted their outrage that Ivanka Trump moved up to the main table at a G20 meeting (see “Ivanka Trump briefly sits in for her father at G20 session” (CNN)). These folks describe themselves as “feminist” and “pro Affirmative Action”. However pointless the G20 meetings might be, why wouldn’t they be happy that a woman got to sit in a position of apparent power? (If the answer is “there were more qualified people available,” how can that be squared with their support for affirmative action (Wikipedia says this is called “positive discrimination in the UK”)?)

Readers: What do we think about Ivanka now that she’s had nearly six months of White House experience? Has she done anything notable other than advocate for childless taxpayers to subsidize parents via paid leave? (See Paid Maternity Leave: Employers or Taxpayers should Pay? and When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children?)

The self-described feminists today on Ivanka:

• Handbag designer represents US at G20 meeting. Christ, this is embarassing.
• Yes, In America, Anyone Really Can Be President.
• I didn’t realize today was bring your daughter to work day!

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Back in April I wrote “FAA punches a hole in the U.S. economy today” about how the FAA was forcing American helicopter charter operators to spend money on radar altimeters, which actually reduce safety in a helicopter intended for visual flying (as opposed to instrument flying). The regulation was drafted with an exception for light helicopters, such as the Robinson R44, but the FAA decided that they wouldn’t give an exception unless “will not fit on the instrument panel without removing equipment required by regulation” (FAA Notice 8900.405).

A lot of R44 operators should still have been entitled to an exception because the panel of an R44 is small and typically full of required stuff. The FAA began interpreting the above guidance, however, to demand that R44 operators add an extra hump on top of the existing instrument panel (essentially taping it to the top of the dashboard, like you might do with a radar detector in a 1970s Camaro).

Here’s Maria Langer, a pilot and charter operator, on the subject of the Robinson R44 and radar altimeters: “The FAA’s Irrational Application of a Rule”

Obviously this is going to seem pretty obscure to most people who aren’t pilots or aren’t charter operators, but I think it is illustrative of what happens as an economy winds down and ever more resources are devoted to regulations and regulatory compliance.

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