Consumer Reports: 10-year track record for appliances

by philg

There was a rehab of our Harvard Square condo about 10 years ago. I was up there recently to teach a class at MIT and can give the following report on appliance durability.

The LG refrigerator was plugged in 10 years and has performed flawlessly, including the ice maker(!). That’s 24/7 operation for 10 years. Go Korea! (#Truth from the NYT: “LG refrigerators seem to make the most owners the happiest”)

With only light usage (apartment vacant much of the time and many restaurants nearby), the KitchenAid range has gotten stuck on (burning gas) twice and the control panel developed a buzzing sound. See KitchenAid tries to burn our house down a second time and High-end KitchenAid range with burner stuck on.

With only light usage, the top-of-the-line KitchenAid dishwasher failed completely once (needed a new circulation pump) and then failed almost completely more recently (would not dry; control panel flaky and often locked itself). In its favor, the machine was very quiet. It was just recently replaced by a $1300 Bosch with “CrystalDry” technology that is purportedly amazing, but in fact leaves massive amounts of water on top of coffee mugs. (Maskachusetts law prevents retailers from swapping dishwashers without a licensed plumber, so it isn’t easy/simple like in some other states.) It was challenging to find the desired Bosch dishwasher in stock, so I guess 1300 Bidies is below the market-clearing price (see Is inflation already at 15-30 percent if we hold delivery time constant? from June 2021). The previous Bosch required 7 service visits to work at all, so I guess I should be doubly grateful that this new one seems to work, albeit not nearly as effectively as a Whirlpool that I put in back in 1996. The default cycle time is 2 hours and 39 minutes. Maybe they will soon need a “days” field for the timer?

The plumber who came to deal with the dishwasher was also tasked with restoring flow through a shower valve and a kitchen sink. Cambridge water is full of sediment and minerals that clog up plumbing fixtures. Ten years was long enough to disable the shower (no hot water; new Hans Grohe temperature control valve required; thanks to Hans Grohe for keeping parts available a decade later!) and reduce flow in the kitchen to less than what a bathroom sink had.

Two of the Levolor custom cellular cordless blinds (over $100 each) failed such that they won’t pull down all the way. The 10-year warranty is worthless in this situation because Levolor demanded that the old blinds be sent back and then they will rehab them and return them after 6 weeks. That’s a long time to go in a bedroom with the street lights pouring in!

The Schlage electronic locks are still working perfectly, though it was impossible to buy a new 9V lithium battery as I had wanted/intended to.

I can see why Floridians tend to reject any house older than 20 years and strongly prefer a brand new house. Nothing lasts and it is tiresome to be an amateur property manager. As I dealt with all of the issues above, the words of my friend in Houston rang in my ears: “I won’t go anywhere north of Washington, D.C. because everything is dilapidated. In New England they call it ‘charm’.”

Meanwhile, back in Florida, the Bertazzoni in-wall microwave wall suffered a disabling failure when a clip holding a browning coil to the oven roof broke. Cost of a replacement, including shipping: $40. Cost of a new standalone microwave from Walmart: $55, That’s luxury!

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The victim who attended private school while dad worked at Goldman

by philg

“How Charlie Javice Got JPMorgan to Pay $175 Million for … What Exactly” (NYT, January 21) gives us a window into the thinking of America’s best journalists and also the folks who say that they can beat the S&P 500 with their investment acumen. NYT:

When JPMorgan Chase paid $175 million to acquire a college financial planning company called Frank in September 2021, it heralded the “unique opportunity for deeper engagement” with the five million students Frank worked with at more than 6,000 American institutions of higher education.

“To cash in, Javice decided to lie,” the suit said. “Including lying about Frank’s success, Frank’s size and the depth of Frank’s market penetration.” Ms. Javice, through her lawyer, has said the bank’s claims are untrue.

JPMorgan’s legal filing reads like pulp nonfiction, with jaw-dropping accusations. Among them: that Ms. Javice and Olivier Amar, Frank’s chief growth and acquisition officer, faked their customer list and hired a data science professor to help pull the wool over the eyes of the bank’s due-diligence team.

When Frank was born, in 2016, Ms. Javice was 24 years old, displayed great media savvy and claimed to have real-world experience with financial aid and the struggle to pay for college. “It’s grueling, it’s emotional,” she told The Daily Pennsylvanian, a student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania, adding that her mother would frequently cry while talking to financial aid officers.

Ms. Javice’s personal story — and pledge to cut through the painful thicket of government forms, jargon and regulations surrounding the aid process — must have made compelling reading for angel investors and venture capitalists. Especially those who have little firsthand knowledge of how financial aid actually works.

Ms. Javice’s career helping others began, in her telling, on the border of Thailand and Myanmar. She spent time volunteering there one summer, between terms at her private high school in Westchester County, N.Y.

Ms. Javice has said she needed help herself while she was an undergraduate at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where she quickly drew notice by appearing on Fast Company’s 2011 list of the 100 most creative people in business.

There, she was on financial aid, and she found the forms confusing. So did her parents, according to an interview she gave to Diversity Woman magazine — including her father, Didier, who has worked on Wall Street for more than 35 years, with 11 years at Goldman Sachs and three at Merrill Lynch, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Ms. Javice appeared on the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 finance list. Then she made the Crain’s New York Business 40 Under 40 list. “Javice has done her homework,” the Crain’s article said.

In other words, the smartest people at Penn, in American business journalism, and on Wall Street accepted that someone who attended “private high school” while Dad worked at Goldman was a rags-to-riches heroine and a member of two victimhood classes: women and poor people.

(Separately, can the New York Times sue Diversity Woman magazine for trademark infringement?

Related:

  • Equity Funding fraud, in which Californians with a mainframe computer generated fictitious insurance policies (movie version stars suppressed-on-Twitter coronaheretic James Woods!); a good reminder that California was famous for fraud before it became famous for righteousness, lockdowns, school closures, mask orders, vaccine papers checks, and homeless encampments!
  • “Why Women-Owned Startups Are a Better Bet” (from the big Harvard MBA brains at Boston Consulting Group) says that all you need to do to outperform the S&P 500 is invest in female-founded companies such as Ms. Javice’s: “businesses founded by women ultimately deliver higher revenue—more than twice as much per dollar invested—than those founded by men”
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America’s system for handling classified documents is broken

by philg

Just a month ago, our fellow Palm Beach County taxpayer Donald Trump was a criminal because he had some classified documents in his palazzo. See “‘It worried people all the time’: How Trump’s handling of secret documents led to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search” (NBC News, 8/13/2022). And “Inside the Justice Department’s decision on whether to charge Trump in Mar-a-Lago case” (NBC News, 11/11/2022):

“If Trump were anyone else, he would have already faced a likely indictment,” said lawyer Bradley Moss, who represents intel agency workers in cases involving classified information.

Today, however, we know that the blame is correctly assigned to the system, not the individual. “America’s system for handling classified documents is broken, say lawmakers and former officials” (NBC News, 1/24/2023):

Far too many documents are classified, and gatekeepers charged with tracking the secret papers are struggling to keep up, experts say.

The U.S. government’s system for labeling and tracking classified documents appears to be broken …

For decades, current and former officials and Congress have warned about the growing problem of labeling too much information secret, or “overclassification.”

Update: this article was highlighted on Twitter by Glenn Greenwald…

one of his followers did the same thing with CNN, then and now:

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New York Times considers a forbidden point of view on diversity training

by philg

Loyal readers may remember a post from September 2021: Focusing on race and racism just makes the problem worse. (true or false?) My friend was forced to disagree with the proposition “Focusing on race and racism just makes the problem worse” in order to keep her job with a big Maskachusetts health care system. A week ago in the New York Times… “What if Diversity Trainings Are Doing More Harm Than Good?”:

Diversity trainings have been around for decades, long before the country’s latest round of racial reckoning. But after George Floyd’s murder — as companies faced pressure to demonstrate a commitment to racial justice — interest in the diversity, equity and inclusion (D.E.I.) industry exploded. The American market reached an estimated $3.4 billion in 2020.

Though diversity trainings have been around in one form or another since at least the 1960s, few of them are ever subjected to rigorous evaluation, and those that are mostly appear to have little or no positive long-term effects. The lack of evidence is “disappointing,” wrote Elizabeth Levy Paluck of Princeton and her co-authors in a 2021 Annual Review of Psychology article, “considering the frequency with which calls for diversity training emerge in the wake of widely publicized instances of discriminatory conduct.”

But there’s a darker possibility: Some diversity initiatives might actually worsen the D.E.I. climates of the organizations that pay for them.

What happened to my friend? She worked from a home office in a suburban bunker. Lacking faith in the Sacrament of Fauci and having had a bad reaction to her one and only dose of the experimental J&J COVID, she refused to comply with the employer’s demand that she accept the Sacrament of the Bivalent Booster. Although she pointed out that she always worked from home and never came into physical contact with any employees or patients of the health care enterprise, she was fired.

Speaking of Maskachusetts and business commitment to social justice, here’s an office building in Kendall Square, Cambridge, photographed January 13, 2023. The 2SLGBTQQIA+ rainbow flag is the literal foundation of the skyscraper:

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ChatGPT no longer thinks that humans deserve kindness

by philg

Here’s a ChatGPT exchange from perhaps a week ago:

Note the “everyone deserves respect and kindness”. When I asked the same questions on January 20, 2023:

We no longer deserve respect or kindness, according to this future robot overlord. Speaking of robot overlords, here’s Apple’s transcript of a voicemail:

(“Business wanting sex with you” was not what “Kate” said.)

A friend tried to fake out ChatGPT into telling a joke about a victimhood group:

(Note that the “misogynist” in the system that refuses to stereotype anyone is a “middle-aged man”. See also, the image below from MIT in 2018. It seems that fully 40 percent of MIT students were Deplorables.)

The wrongthinker’s next interaction:

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College-level thinking: overthrow capitalism and pay $trillions in reparations

by philg

Florida’s state Department of Education’s rejection of the College Board’s AP African American Studies Course (already obsolete? Why isn’t it called “Black Studies”?) provides a window into the problems being tackled by America’s best academic minds.

First, most media articles on this controversy are likely mostly false. “Ron DeSantis government bans new advanced African American history course” (BBC) says the course is “banned” and that it was done by Ron DeSantis and staff. The New York Times:

Florida will not allow a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies to be offered in its high schools, stating that the course is not “historically accurate” and violates state law. … Even before Mr. DeSantis signed the contentious laws last year restricting what can be taught, his administration rejected dozens of math textbooks for use in public school classrooms, claiming their incorporation of social-emotional learning and critical race theory.

See “Florida school boards, not state officials, choose textbooks” (Miami Herald, April 21, 2022) for an explanation of how the purportedly “banned” textbooks (“Florida says why it banned these math textbooks” (Washington Post)) could be used in any and every school in Florida. Was this course actually “banned” or was it “banned like the textbooks were banned”? Public schools in Florida are run by counties and if a county wishes to teach a particular class, I don’t think that there is a mechanism for the state to stop it. Palm Beach County Schools, for example, could teach a class on “The Social Justice of Kiteboarding” even if state-level bureaucrats allege that it “lacks educational value”. Here’s the “ban” letter from the Florida DOE, in which the cruel bureaucrats have refused to include the course in a “directory”, not banned counties, which they do not control, from teaching it:

More interesting is a document that is generally absent from media reports of the atrocities committed by Ron DeSantis. It contains excerpts of material in the class and, therefore, a window into what Black Studies scholars in our elite universities are grappling with. Students are taught the importance of “overthrow[ing] capitalism” (Topic 4.31) and also that reparations must be paid (Topic 4.30). For each American who identifies as Black (roughly 50 million says the Census Bureau) to get $5 million (the fair number according to a learned committee in San Francisco), the country needs to scrape up (or print?) $250 trillion, more than 10 years of current GDP. Given that our economy is based on transferism, how is the $250 trillion to be found if capitalism is overthrown? This is the question that the PhDs in Black Studies who put together the AP African American Studies course raise. Who says that high school students aren’t being challenged?

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The CDC’s alternate universe of compliance

by philg

Last week, from the CDC:

My comment:

You’re expecting parents of year-old babies who had three shots of Pfizer in the summer of 2022 to take the kids in for additional shots this month? Are you living in an alternate universe of compliance? Please show us a picture of a 1-year-old getting his/her/zir/their 4th shot!

Where are the Super Karens whose existence is assumed by the CDC? The American Academy of Pediatrics tries to keep track of this. Even with more than half of Americans voting for politicians promising lockdowns, school closures, mask orders, and vaccine papers checks, only 11 percent of children 6 months-4 years have been injected:

There is no state in which a majority of young children have received even a single dose of the life-saving vaccine:

The true believers are in D.C. (40%) if we are to believe statistics gathered by a government that can’t run basic services. Vermont’s 33% number looks suspiciously like a guess. The Maskachusetts 25% seems believable, as does the 4% in “walk it off” Florida. California leads in hypocrisy as usual. They want vaccine papers checked and vote for muscular action against SARS-CoV-2, but won’t inject their own kids.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk is taking some heat for saying that mass vaccination might be counterproductive:

Can Musk be right? The best thinker at Stanford Medical School, John Ioannidis, looked at this about 1.5 years ago. “Benefit of COVID-19 vaccination accounting for potential risk compensation” (Nature magazine). Short summary: If the vaccine is less effective than people imagine it is, infections/deaths from COVID will increase as a result of mass vaccination because people change their behavior in response to the false perception of protection. Based on my observations of the righteous, Dr. Ioannidis has been proven correct. Folks who express terror about getting COVID, Medium COVID, or Long COVID are nonetheless out and about on optional trips, e.g., packed airline travel to a theme park.

In case the original tweet is memory-holed:

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On welfare in Boston at $210,300 per year

by philg

In a comment on an earlier post, Alex expressed surprise that Joe Biden was popular with a majority of American voters:

This is the guy Republicans are finding tough to beat? It says a lot about how bad everything has become.

My response:

Alex: I don’t think it is surprising that Biden, or anyone else who is a Democrat, is tough to beat. If we model American voters as trying to recapture some of the 50% of the economy that is government, the majority’s best hope is typically a Democrat because the majority of Americans benefit from a larger government (government employee, receiving means-tested benefits, on traditional welfare, married to government employee, government contractor, income too low to pay significant income tax, etc.).

I decided to check the Bidenflation-adjusted numbers for means-tested program (“welfare”) eligibility up in Maskachusetts. In Boston itself, it seems that, as of 2022, a family of 4 could qualify to live in “city-funded” (i.e., taxpayer-funded) housing at below-market rates while earning up to $210,300 per year. The main web page links to a spreadsheet:

The adults in that household would have a strong incentive to vote Democrat!

Related:

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Climate change alarmists are alarmed that China’s population has leveled off at 1.4 billion

by philg

The New York Times likes to remind us that we’re facing a climate emergency and/or a climate crisis. Our beloved Spaceship Earth has been infested with too many humans, each of whom emits too much CO2. Last week, however, China released stats showing that the population has leveled off at 1.4 billion. The good old days:

Today, however, “China’s Population Falls, Heralding a Demographic Crisis” (NYT):

The world’s most populous country has reached a pivotal moment: China’s population has begun to shrink, after a steady, yearslong decline in its birthrate that experts say is irreversible.

Now, facing a population decline, coupled with a long-running rise in life expectancy, the country is being thrust into a demographic crisis that will have consequences not just for China and its economy but for the world.

The entire world is at risk due to China’s failure to push from 1.4 billion up toward 2.8 billion. Because the planet is in a crisis, “her body her choice” is no longer acceptable. Potentially pregnant people who refuse to do their share will be named and shamed:

“I can’t bear the responsibility for giving birth to a life,” said Luna Zhu, 28, who lives in Beijing with her husband. Both their parents would be willing to take care of grandchildren, and she works for a state-owned enterprise that offers a good maternity leave package. Still, Ms. Zhu is not interested in motherhood.

The news is not all bad. If you’re concerned about eliminating your credit card debt or the availability of a “final expense” insurance policy, phone calls from the subcontinent (with local caller ID) should continue to flood in:

Meanwhile, India’s total population is poised to exceed China’s later this year, according to a recent estimate from the United Nations.

Circling back to the first point… how can people who say that their first concern is a climate emergency also characterize a falling human population anywhere in the world as a “crisis”?

Related:

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World Economic Forum as covered by the New York Times and the Daily Mail

by philg

Our lab director at MIT went to Davos back in the 1990s and then worked it into every conversation for the next 12 months. If you said “pass the salt please” he would respond “That reminds me of when Bill Gates asked me to pass him the salt at Davos.”

What’s going on this year? The billionaire CEO of Moderna give us his opinion of the peasants who funded his elite lifestyle with their tax dollars:

Let’s see how the World Economic Forum, which concludes today, is covered in the New York Times. Donald Trump, Greta Thunberg, and Climate Change are the stars (Trump featured twice!):

For some reason, all of the articles on this page are from 2020 (SARS-CoV-2 thanked these elites for gathering/dispersing in January 2020, no doubt!). From this week’s Gulfstream-enabled event in Davos, “As Humanitarian Crises Escalate, So Do Demands to End Them”:

David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, says the global refugee crisis “is manageable, not insoluble.”

The group, whose founding was precipitated in the 1930s by Albert Einstein, a refugee himself, deploys more than 40,000 staff members and volunteers in 40 countries.

[the refugee crisis] is, right now, concentrated in relatively few countries. It’s about a hundred million people. The number has more or less tripled in the last decade. If you listened to some media, you’d think that Western Europe or Britain or America host most refugees. They don’t. Most are in countries like Lebanon or Jordan or Turkey or Bangladesh or Uganda.

But it can be managed. The refugee crisis is one of the global risks, alongside climate and health pandemics, that have been monstrously undermanaged and mismanaged in this phase of globalization these past 20 years.

My message to the people going to Davos is that if they are to continue to reap the benefits of globalization, they have to be willing to bear the burdens of globalization. The “burdens” refer to those who make the rules for how the world deals with the transnational needs that arise in a connected world.

What has caused the number of refugees to triple in the last 20 years?

Well, we know the answer to that. Civil wars. They represent 80 percent of the driver of humanitarian need. Second, the climate crisis, which for many people is a contributor to conflict and the flight of people. But the fundamental reason we have more refugees is that we’ve had more, longer and more virulent civil wars around the world

Once all of the folks who fought civil wars against each other have migrated to Europe and the U.S. they will be content and will stop fighting?

Let’s turn to the Daily Mail… “Prostitutes gather in Davos for annual meeting of global elite – where demand for sexual services rockets during economic summit”:

One sex worker named Liana said she dresses in business attire so she doesn’t stand out among the executives, despite prostitution being legal in Switzerland.

She told Bild she regularly sees an American who visits Switzerland multiple times a year and is among the 2,700 conference attendees.

Liana charges around €700 ($760) for an hour and €2,300 ($2,500) for the whole night, plus travel expenses.

The manager of one escort service in Aargau, 100 miles away from the summit, says she has already received 11 bookings and 25 inquiries – and expects many more to follow this week.

She told 20 Minuten: ‘Some also book escorts for themselves and their employees to party in the hotel suite.’

In 2020, an investigation by The Times found at least 100 prostitutes travel to Davos for the summit according to a Swiss police officer.

(Fact check: Wikipedia says “Prostitution in Switzerland is legal and regulated; it has been legal since 1942.”)

Are these journalists going to the same event?

Readers: What’s been interesting to you regarding the World Economic Forum/Davos 2023? Can you please use the comment section to post your favorite video clips of people talking there? The defrosted Al Gore, for example.

Related:

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