I’m tired of people who complain about the price of everything….
$15.00 for parking. $5.00 for coat check. $34.95 for a basic pasta and chicken entrée. $3.95 for coffee.
I’m just going to stop inviting them to our house.
Separately, today’s the day for the December 2022 inflation report from the BLS (actually deflation compared to November! Down at a 1.2% rate, but up 6.5% compared to a year earlier). We can see whether Kwanzaa shopping and travel overpowered the deflationary effect of weather that kept people as locked in as a K-12 student in a Democrat-governed city during 18 months of coronascience. What’s the correct level of panic regarding inflation and the recent escalation in deficit spending by Congress?
Anecdotes: the local Abacoa (Jupiter, Florida) barber shop is charging $30 to cut the hair of anyone identifying as a “man”, up from $20 in 2019. I paid $30 each for pizzas to feed some MIT students. At most, each was sufficient for 4 students.
One thing that is going up by 5 percent in 10 days… a USPS stamp. They didn’t get the memo that inflation had been whipped by muscular action in Washington, D.C.? Certainly it will be worth paying 63 cents to mail a letter and celebrate the Year of the Rabbit (starts on the same day as the price increase) simultaneously:
On the last day of Kwanzaa, I decided to pay homage to Tom Brady by seeing him play live. This was only the third time at an NFL game in my life. Once was the New England Patriots at Gillette Stadium, a horrible experience due to cold weather and multi-hour traffic jams. The second game was a recent Miami Dolphins game (previous post). Tampa is far and away the easiest from a logistics point of view. You fly, or get a friend to fly, a small plane to Sheltair TPA. No need to pay ramp or parking fees if you buy at least 16 gallons of fuel (enough for about 270 miles of travel in a Cirrus SR20!). The Sheltair folks will then zip you via minivan through closed-to-the-public airport roads (6 minutes) almost to the stadium front entrance. On the way back you can wait for the minivan or simply walk 30 minutes back to Sheltair.
In order to avoid get-there-itis, I waited until I was on the ground and on Sheltair’s WiFi network before purchasing any tickets (from the Ticketmaster verified resale market). Here are some photos…
(Note some of the Floridians above wearing long pants as protection against the frigid 75-degree temperature.)
Getting food or drink inside the stadium was a nightmare. If you don’t want to miss the game, put some snacks in your pockets before going in. Here are the lines outside the vendors 30 minutes prior to the game:
You’ll want to be on the west side of the field (the Bucs side) most of the season because then you’ll have the sun at your back.
Our hero of the gridiron and an inspiration to all men who are interested in marrying a woman (“All that you need to do to keep a wife happy is be in better physical shape, have a better personality, and be more successful than Tom Brady”) led the team to victory over the Carolina Panthers, 30-24.
It’s a different and more confusing experience than watching a game on TV. They do show closed captions from the TV broadcast on a screen within the stadium so it is easier to understand what the referees are saying. Or you can bother the expert fan sitting next to you, as I did every 5 minutes: “What just happened?” It’s also loud, so bring earplugs if you don’t want to be exposed to fatiguing levels of noise for 3+ hours (but Miami is much louder due to sound pumped into the stadium electronically; in Tampa the loudness is mostly from the fans).
Head over to the commercial airline terminal to see the giant flamingo sculpture. You can also eat authentic Lu Cai (Shandong) food at an authentic restaurant within this pre-security part of the terminal: P.F. Chang’s.
I was delighted to see that the airport terminal management takes Kwanzaa seriously:
Loosely related: I rode the FBO minivan with a Bonanza pilot who runs a logistics business. “All the people who were charging huge premiums a year ago are now calling me begging for business,” he said. “Trucking companies call me every day offering capacity at a discount.” From his point of view, the boom economy was over.
Summary: I’m still not a huge live football fan, but a late season game in Tampa is probably as good as it gets. The weather is likely to be dry and 70s. Every time the Bucs score, cannon shots are fired from a pirate ship at one end of the stadium. The fans are loyal and enthusiastic (in Miami, by contrast, it seemed as though at least half of the audience was rooting for the other team).
I hope and trust that everyone has cleaned up from their Kwanzaa celebrations and recovered from any toaster-induced head injuries. Now that you all have some free time, I’d like to ask that you paint and mail a portrait of me so that I can cover all of the walls in our house with portraits of its most distinguished resident.
Inspiration for this project comes from America’s top doctor via the New York Times:
The walls in Dr. Anthony S. Fauci’s home office are adorned with portraits of him, drawn and painted by some of his many fans. The most striking one is by the singer Joan Baez. The two of them, he said, “have become pretty good friends over the years.”
Dr. Fauci seemed a little uncomfortable with people knowing about the pictures. He said that previously, when they were captured on camera, the “far right” attacked him as an “egomaniac.” If someone goes to the trouble of sending him a portrait of himself, he said, he would “feel like I’m disrespecting them” if he discarded it.
I know that none of you are sufficiently poisoned by far-right ideology and QAnon (whatever that is) to call me an egomaniac as a result of this decoration plan. I would also appreciate it if you would name your next dog after me, as this Maskachusetts resident has named his/her/zir/their Goldendoodle “Fauci”. A friend uses a Fi collar and sent me this screen shot related to another user’s dog from his app:
(At 20 lbs., this animal is not at high risk from COVID! Mindy the Crippler is a little heavier, but Science says that there is no point in trying to slim down to avoid a virus that targets the obese. If we take her to a lockdown state we can start calling her “Faucina”.)
I would like at least some of the portraits to reflect my commitment to #StoppingTheSpread. So the scene could include me getting a 7th booster shot at the local CVS, me swabbing my nose for a rapid Covid test before entering a crowded theme park, me putting an N95 mask and face shield on our golden retriever (Mindy the Crippler).
In a study of NIH funding published in The BMJ, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I found that in the first year of the pandemic, it took the NIH an average of five months to give money to researchers after they were awarded a COVID grant. This should be unacceptable during a health emergency.
Consider the question of how COVID spread—was it airborne or spread on surfaces? (Remember all those people wiping down their groceries?) It lingered as an open question without good research for months, as Fauci spent hundreds of hours on television opining on the matter. Finally, on August 17, 2021—a year and a half after COVID lockdowns began—Dr. Fauci’s agency released results of a study showing the disease was airborne. Thanks for that. The announcement on the NIAID website, titled “NIH Hamster Study Evaluates Airborne and Fomite Transmission of SARS-CoV-2” came 18 months too late.
Imagine if, in February 2020, Dr. Fauci had marshaled his $6 billion budget, vast laboratory facilities, and teams of experts to conduct a definitive lab experiment to establish that COVID was airborne. On this question and many others throughout the pandemic, our problem was not that the science changed—it’s that it wasn’t done.
What science was done by Science?
the NIH spent more than twice as much on aging research as it did on COVID research in the first year of the pandemic, according to my team’s analysis. I’m all for aging research, but not when a novel virus is killing thousands of Americans per day.
the NIH spent more than twice as much on aging research as it did on COVID research in the first year of the pandemic, according to my team’s analysis. I’m all for aging research, but not when a novel virus is killing thousands of Americans per day.
Because the NIH moved at glacial speed, most of our COVID knowledge came from overseas. The critical discovery that steroids reduce COVID mortality by one-third came only after European researchers did a randomized trial that Fauci’s agency should have commissioned quickly. Similarly, a conclusive study showing that Vitamin D reduces COVID mortality, published last month, arrived two years too late.
Time to hit Costco for the Vitamin D!
The official government job description for Dr. Fauci’s role states that the director must “respond rapidly to emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases.” Dr. Fauci didn’t do that during the coronavirus pandemic. In order for the U.S. to respond better to the next pandemic, we will need our nation’s infectious diseases research agency, and its top doctor, to act with a sense of urgency.
The NIH’s disheveled COVID response is a window into a bureaucracy that has underperformed for decades. With obvious biases and blind spots, our nation’s top research institution has long hindered research progress in important topics, from food as medicine to the role of general body inflammation in disease. The “H” in “NIH” stands for health, and health means much more than laboratory medicine. That means it should fund proper studies on environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just chemotherapies to treat it. The NIH’s legacy system of having the oldest scientists in the room determine what research is worthy of investigation crowds out the study of fresh new ideas.
The last point is one made by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Evolution did not supplant preceding dogma because Darwin was persuasive to established scientists. Evolution prevailed as the dominant paradigm after the established scientists retired and/or died.
I’m back up in Cambridge to teach. I thought it might be worth checking out one of the places that made Cambridge pleasant (Darwin’s sandwiches/coffee is closed): the Regattabar live jazz venue. Here’s the web site, captured on 12/30/2022:
It’s been a three-year temporary closure (Yale graduates: note the failure to use the word “temporarily” by folks who sit three blocks from Harvard Yard).
What about Harvard’s American Repertory Theater? Before they began excluding audience members based on skin color (see this November 2021 post) I was a regular there. Their “plan your visit” page:
Followers of Fauci will be cheered to see that cloth masks meet the mask requirement (though N95 is recommended):
Here’s their “Blacks-only” policy from 2021:
What do people who refuse to sell tickets to white people call themselves? “Anti-racists”:
(They “pay respect” to the rightful owners of the land they occupy, but do not pay rent.)
If you’re freezing cold in a northern lockdown state today, here’s an image (source) that will give you a warm glow: University of California graduate student slaves and other campus peasants picketing for a living wage (from the faculty that claims to be expert at determining how much for-profit corporations should pay their workers out of fairness and decency):
We can see the full range of Faucism here. The bandana against an aerosol virus. The simple surgical mask. Some cloth masks. A double mask (cloth over surgical?). No 3M N95 respirators that might conceivably block some virions.
Keep in mind that these are America’s smartest young people.
Related, a star University of California faculty member cheers on the workers but doesn’t explain why his own peasants had to strike:
Good morning!
There were more than 374 worker strikes started in 2022 — a 39% increase over 2021.
The Silicon Valley religion is that robot software can figure out what you want based on what you’ve done in the past. The result is that Twitter shows you tweets that are a lot like tweets with which you’ve previously interacted. But what if you’re in the mood for something different? Suppose that you’ve spent a lot of time on Twitter condemning hate, ridiculing Deplorables for their refusal to wear masks and accept experimental vaccines, exhorting young people to get out and vote for Democrats, and demanding additional investigations of the January 6 insurrection. If you open up the Twitter app as you’re settling down for the night, the application will show you political tweets. But what if you don’t want to see the same stuff at 9 pm that got you riled up at 9 am?
Suppose that Twitter had a “laugh” emoji option for a reaction to a tweet. Then it would be possible for a user to click “entertain me” and see the recent tweets that other users thought were funny. Based on text analysis, the system could respond to a “teach me” click with tweets that were educational in nature and/or linked to thoughtful tutorials. With a bit of merging of ChatGPT into Twitter search, perhaps this could be done as freeform text rather than a set of predefined moods, but I think the moods/interests button would be better (less effort) for most users.
Note that this could be done without cooperation from Elon Musk & Co. as a skin on top of Twitter by a search engine that had ingested at least a significant subset of tweets.
How does it work now? Spectacularly badly. If I type “funny” into the search box, the results are mostly people fighting. “funny tweets twitter.com” works on Google to find Twitter accounts that offer hand-picked items.
Here’s a site that tries to do the third-party skin… funnytweeter.com. Some of the tweets were a lot funnier than people hitting each other, but they can’t take advantage of anything known about an individual user, e.g., that he/she/ze/they likes knitting or aviation or whatever. Examples:
Readers: What do you think about this idea? Twitter should track your moods and figure out your mood by asking you… What are you in the mood to see?
To commemorate the heroic efforts of our government’s millions of armed police and soldiers in putting down the very-nearly-successful January 6, 2021 insurrection, let me relate my own recent trip to Washington, D.C.
Our journey began at the Robinson factory in Torrance, California (KTOA). Here are some photos that I took there in 2013 (they don’t allow pictures anymore).
This is a wiring harness that will connect up all of the electrical items in a helicopter.Machining some parts from a block of aluminumtail cones
Getting out of Los Angeles we studied the FAA helicopter chart… (note that the official routes require some understanding of local highways)
And the Robinson-specified route:
One thing that Robinson does not give to pilots fleeing the City of Lockdown is a list of frequencies and elevations for all of the airport traversed, so I prepped a couple of days before by writing all of these down on a pad (we were a bit too low to get advisories from SoCal Approach and therefore went from tower to tower). I handled the radio while my co-pilot (a former student at MIT 15 years ago and, having started a successful business, now proud owner of a $700,000 new helicopter) flew the machine. We made it out of LA without losing our certificates.
We passed the Morongo Casino and the Banning Pass into Palm Springs and a stop at KUDD:
After a stop at the Phoenix-Goodyear Airport, we made it to Tucson, Arizona just after dark:
My co-pilot was skeptical as I waxed expansively regarding the marvels of the Sonoran hot dog at El Guero Canelo (James Beard award winner and also a song from Calexico). If you’re looking for shelter from Bidenflation, the $3.99 dish is ideal:
(Note that each hot dog costs taxpayers closer to $10,000 when military pilots stop in. Tucson/El Guero Canelo is, according to the FBO, a popular stopover on training excursions.)
The War on Christmas cannot touch the fortified positions of El Guero Canelo:
We cranked before sunrise at KTUS and headed into the mountains of New Mexico:
In El Paso we saw the cruel conditions suffered by asylum-seekers and reflected on Governor Abbott’s noble provision of bus transportation for those migrants who want to escape to sanctuary cities where progressives will cater to all of their needs.
A 17-knot headwind, which was to be our near-constant companion, plagued us as we departed El Paso. In Pecos, Texas, we found the best dim sum west of the Pecos:
The help wanted sign was typical. Seemingly every retailer and restaurant was hiring in every town that we visited. A Texas FBO manager who had paid $13/hour in 2019 for entry-level jobs now has to pay $20/hour. “I still can’t find anyone who wants to work,” he said. (We also learned that the wholesale price for 100LL at the time was about $4.70/gallon.)
We continued to follow Interstate 20 over Midland, Texas and into Sweetwater.
It was freezing overnight and we hadn’t been able to find a heated hangar so we visited the National WASP WWII Museum to give the engine a chance to warm up before starting. We stopped for an awesome dim sum lunch at Bushi Bushi in Addison, Texas, also home to the most luxurious FBO that we visited during the trip: Galaxy.
We flew in the dark to Atlantic in Jackson, Mississippi and shut down for the night. We shared a heated hangar with an Ercoupe. Corporate says it is all about diversity and inclusion, but the employees had selected Fox News and were enforcing gender binarism:
Speaking of Fox, here’s a throwback to November 20 from the trip. Twitter was “in chaos” and presumably the site was at risk of shutting down due to all of the valuable employees departing:
The most emotional moment of trip for me was circling the Talladega Superspeedway, which happens to be right next to the airport. Ricky Bobby‘s NetJets was waiting:
All over the Southeast, the landscape was scarred by the Federal Reserve Bank’s 0% interest rates. I wonder how many of these developments won’t be finished any time soon. (A few weeks later, I was in Death Valley, California and talked to a Mountain States builder. He’d stopped doing any projects at all. “It costs $400 to $500 per square foot to build and I’m not sure that people will pay enough for me to recoup my costs.”)
Best airport restaurant of the trip (Elevation at KRYY near Atlanta):
A fly-by of Dulles Airport on the way to landing at KGAI.
There was minimal traffic in Montgomery County, Maryland as I traveled to my mom’s retirement complex on the Beltway. “The economy hasn’t come back,” said the Uber driver. “People in D.C. are still working from home or not working.” Did that mean his income had fallen? “No. There are fewer customers, but nobody wants to work either so the balance isn’t that different. Also, a lot of my customers are guys who lost jobs in 2020 and can’t afford child support payments that were ordered when they were working. They can’t renew their driver’s licenses because they’re behind on child support, so they take Uber to get to work.” (see this article on the scale of child support profits obtainable in Maryland)
The labor shortage made it tough to get a post-trip haircut. The barber shops were jammed with people who’d made appointments in advance. On the other hand, maybe Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is working. One-way tickets from DCA to PBI were less than $200 just two days before Thanksgiving.
We were lucky with the weather, except for the headwinds most of the way and then some moderate turbulence from 30-knot winds around the Appalachian mountains toward the end of the trip that required us to slow down to 80 knots (best cruise in the R44 II is about 110 knots). Even though some of the infrastructure is frayed because so many Americans have withdrawn from the labor force, the U.S. private aviation infrastructure remains a marvel to behold. The bigger airports usually have FBOs that are staffed 24/7. There is usually a crew car when you need it. Air Traffic Control is always relaxed and helpful. Most of the fees to keep this going are rolled into the price of fuel (or, even better, paid for by the Gulfstream crowd) so you’re not hit with annoying small bites constantly as in Canada and Europe.
A friend is planning a trip to the Bahamas in his new Cirrus SR22 (more than 1 million Bidies for a piston-powered airplane!). When out of gliding distance from land, it is prudent to carry both life jackets and a life raft in an aircraft. Pre-coronapanic, rafts of all kinds were in stock at retailers and would ship within a day or two of being ordered. What does it look like after Americans took months or years off work? “I can’t find any of the brands that people like without a multi-month wait,” he said. “Winslow dealers are telling me 8 months to 2 years.”
It is unclear to me why Winslow is so backlogged given that the company is located in Florida and they were never ordered by a governor to shut down. But perhaps they are having trouble getting the components and/or being part of Collins Aerospace (a big bureaucratic presumably corona-averse company) has contributed to the shortage.
What do these look like? Here’s one from Switlik, which I like because it can go 5 years between recertifications (cumbersome and expensive):
Also, Switlik is a supplier to the U.S. Coast Guard, which presumably knows water at least as well as Dr. Fauci knows SARS-CoV-2. When is the Switlik available? They can’t even say on their web site! “Due to demand and limited inventory, this product is experiencing longer than normal lead times. Please call for quote – 609-587-3300.”
A raft isn’t required for a private single-engine airplane headed over water so it is quite possible that the disruption in the economy caused by COVID lockdowns will lead to additional risks being taken. And for every aviator who is at risk there are presumably 100 boaters who are having trouble getting the life rafts that they want. This is a consequence that I don’t think the technocrats recommending lockdowns in the spring of 2020 would have factored into their decision.
The media is full of reports about House Republicans being unable to agree on a Speaker. New Yorkers say that they are smarter and more sophisticated than everyone else in the U.S. Thus, the obvious choice is the Representative whom these hyperintelligent voters selected: George Santos. Would Mr. Santos be the first immigrant to serve as Speaker? That would be very exciting indeed!
Separately, I am also waiting for Sam Bankman-Fried to be nominated by Joe Biden as U.S. Treasury Secretary and confirmed by Senate Democrats.
Related:
New Yorkers say that voters in Arkansas are stupid. Tom Cotton is their choice (two Harvard degrees and a former U.S. Army Ranger)
New Yorkers say that voters in Florida are stupid. Ron DeSantis is their choice (Yale and Harvard degrees; former U.S. Navy officer)
a tweet from the Democrats’ thought leader:
If only! If Dems took a shot every time McCarthy lost a Republican, we’d all be unconscious by now🍹 https://t.co/Vb1i29o4rv
As part of my expert witness slavery to the world of patent litigation, I recently reviewed the transcript from a five-day trial.
Part of the first day’s transcript covers jurors attempting to be excused from what was promised to be a single week of jury duty.
Teacher saying that she wanted to present for the first day of school. Success!
Medical office manager who is responsible for transporting children to school. Failure.
Woman with “extreme anxiety”. Success! Not only that, but her plea to be excuse was expedited above most of the others. The judge’s only question for her: “you are in a lot of discomfort about being here?”
Bartender who needs to work and get tips to survive financially. Failure.
Person who lives one hour away and will have to stay in a hotel to make serving on the jury practical. Failure. (Some of your tax dollars will be used to pay for that hotel, however.)
Mom who says that she has to drop off and pick up an 8-year-old at school while the father works from home in an inflexible call center environment. Success!
Person who had planned a vacation and had already bought a plane ticket for the trip. Success! (offer to show the judge an email proving the plane ticket purchase was refused)
The surviving jurors received an explanation of what the case was about and, before the attorneys on both sides could give opening arguments, watched the following video:
The action had started at 9 am and the above items filled the time until the lunch break just after noon.
It feels as though some of this stuff could have been done via Zoom or email on the preceding business day. Jurors who were destined to be excused could have avoided coming in, spreading COVID-19, etc. On the other hand, how would you be sure that jurors were paying attention to a YouTube video if they weren’t in the courtroom?
