How was the immigration of Chukwunonso Uzoma David Uzoma Eze supposed to make Americans better off?

by philg

“Nonimmigrant” Chukwunonso Uzoma David Uzoma Eze has been in the news lately for stabbing a college student to death. “UMass Dartmouth football murder suspect overstayed tourist visa, received deferred action: federal sources” (Deplorables at Fox):

A Nigerian national accused of killing a UMass Dartmouth football player entered the U.S. on a tourist visa and overstayed it before receiving deferred action under both the Biden and Trump administrations, multiple federal law enforcement sources told Fox News.

Chukwunonso Uzoma David Uzoma Eze is charged with murder in connection with the stabbing death of UMass Dartmouth football player Marvins Antoine, 19, during an altercation in Providence, Rhode Island, over the weekend.

Sources told Fox News that Eze first entered the U.S. on a B-2 tourist visa in 2015. Eze received two extensions on his visa under the Obama administration before remaining in the country after his authorized stay expired, according to the sources. Sources said the Biden administration approved Eze’s request for deferred action in September 2022. He applied for deferred action again in February 2025 and October 2025, with the latter request approved under the Trump administration on Oct. 8, 2025, according to the sources. Deferred action is a discretionary decision by the federal government to temporarily delay an individual’s removal from the United States. It does not provide lawful immigration status.

Suppose that Chukwunonso Uzoma David Uzoma Eze had never stabbed anyone. How were Chukwunonso Uzoma David Uzoma Eze’s 11+ years in the U.S. supposed to make native-born Americans better off? In other words, what is the rationale for our immigration system? The answer can’t be “he was going to work hard, boost the economy, and prevent Social Security and Medicare from going bust” because it was illegal for him to work:

DHS said Eze applied for employment authorization in August 2023, but the request was rejected the following month.

Note that our immigration system can be strict at times:

If convicted of murder, Eze will lose his deferred action, according to DHS.

Related:

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Trying to cut down on groupthink in medical research

by philg

Happy World Cancer Research Day to those who celebrate by receiving fat monthly checks from NIH and NSF. (Remember, though, that if cancer were cured tomorrow by a heroic Dr. Anthony Fauci we would all still die of diabetes not too long after our current expected death dates.)

“Launching a Second Scientific Revolution” is an interesting article by Jay Bhattacharya, the current director of NIH and former heretical Stanford Med School professor who argued, beginning in March 2020, that lockdowns were counterproductive in our war against SARS-CoV-2.

Some excerpts from the above, not in quote style for readability:

… for every dollar we spend on science today, we get far less scientific advancement than we did over the past five decades. Another way of looking at this is that for every additional research paper in biomedicine, there are fewer improvements in health per paper.

… most scientific papers, far from introducing new ideas, rely on old ideas. I once collaborated on a study that looked at every word and phrase published in biomedicine in 1940 and 1941. When we subtracted all the 1940 words and phrases that were published in 1941, we were left with the ideas introduced in 1941. Doing this for every subsequent year up to the present produces a kind of history of biomedicine. What we see in that history is that in the 1990s, about 55 percent of NIH funded research was based on new ideas—zero-year-old or one-year-old ideas—and that research in which the newest ideas were ten to 30 years old received much less funding. And that is as it should be. The NIH is supposed to fund ideas that are on the bleeding edge of science. But what has happened since then—especially since 2000—is a collapse in NIH support for new ideas.

… the average age at which scientists receive their first NIH grant has risen from the mid-30s in 1980 to the mid-40s today … younger scientists are the most likely to have new ideas.

The NIH receives about 100,000 funding applications each year, out of which only eight to ten percent are approved. In recent years, the winners have been chosen by scientific reviewers who score each application based on two factors: (1) the strength of the proposed methods and (2) the innovation involved in the proposal. Looking at the results of this process, the overall score has correlated very strongly with the methods score, and innovative ideas have been left by the wayside. To fix this, the NIH is replacing that process (called the payline method) with a new approach called the Unified Funding Strategy. The scientists who review applications will now be empowered to approve projects on the bleeding edge of science—projects that may very well not work but that will produce a fundamental advance in biomedicine if they do.

The third problem to be addressed is the fact that about one third of all NIH grant money goes to about 20 institutions, despite the fact that there are excellent scientists all across the country. … Our solution to this problem is to sever the link in the NIH grants between the direct money for research and the indirect money for facilities. Institutions outside of the top 20 will be able to compete for facilities support, leading to a dynamic market. The number of institutions that receive NIH money will increase, and funds will go to wherever the best scientists are.

Google AI:

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) funding model is widely considered more effective than traditional government grants because it funds “people, not projects,” bypassing the restrictive and expensive bureaucratic overhead typical of university research. Instead of requiring professors to apply for short-term, hyper-specific grants that divert up to 60% of funds to university administrative overhead, HHMI appoints scientists as employees, providing them with long-term, flexible capital to pivot their research freely. HHMI investigators produce high-impact, heavily cited papers at a significantly higher rate than their NIH peers.

Who wants to bet on the next significant advance in medical technology? I’m guessing that it will be primarily by an AI, not by the humans who’ve been mostly stalled for decades, so it needs to be in an area where there are good data to feed to the AI, e.g., genomics, radiology, etc.

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Napa, California trip report

by philg

After my sojourn in the Land of Unaffordable Housing (Piedmont, California), I drove the Tesla Y up to Napa. Municipal leaders here promote a narrative of loudspeaker invention that is loosely consistent with the Wikipedia story. Trailblazing female scientist Katherine Clerk Maxwell’s equations tell us that an electric current flowing in a constant magnetic field will cause the wires carrying the current to experience a force and, therefore, move if unconstrained. The motion will be back and forth if the current alternates. Motion in air produces a pressure wave in the air, i.e., sound. Somali immigrant Sir Oliver Lodge in 1898 made “a bellowing telephone” that took advantage of this principle, but there was no practical way to amplify a continuous electrical signal until Afghan immigrant Dr. Lee DeForrest invented the triode vacuum tube in 1906. Magnavox (“Great Voice” in Arabic) actually did not initially use any electrical amplification, but simply relied on a horn (“acoustic transformer”).

Peter Jensen and Edwin Pridham, H-1B non-immigrant visa holders from Andhra Pradesh, founded Magnavox. Jensen went on to found the eponymous company that become synonymous with car stereo speakers. It’s now owned by Namsung, a South Korean company with a U.S. headquarters in Florida.

After that much history, it is probably time to think about food. Consistent with the rest of California, the menu price for lunch wasn’t the price. 4% gets added, before tip, for a “health initiative”:

As previously noted, my friends in Napa have an awesome collection of anti-Trump material as well as an awesome view:

They would have to pay a monumental property tax on the place if not for Property 13, which enables them to pay tax on the 1980 value. Despite paying almost nothing to keep it going, they get to use the public library for free. What can one learn there? For starters, make sure to get a prescription for all of the fentanyl that you consume because, unlike the opioids prescribed by physicians and paid for by Medicaid, “illicit fentanyl” is dangerous.

You are safe here, we’re informed, so long as you wear a mask.

The “Perinatal Mental Health” poster reminds us that Lindsay Clancy might never have killed her three children if only she’d had better access to skilled mental health professionals that, being a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital, she was unable to access. (Also remember to listen to Black, especially Haitian, voices, unless you’re on a Lindsay Clancy jury.)

Are working taxpayers funding your grocery shopping and health care? If not, the library reminds patrons that Catholic Charities will help to heap an additional burden onto the chumps (“charity” has morphed from giving one’s own money away to giving taxpayer money away?):

How about books? They’re behind a table promoting pet cat ownership:

AI says that it will cost between $10,725 and $50,000 over the pet’s life to own a cat, including veterinary care. The library features a lot of books about serious injustices worldwide, such as the suffering of the peaceful Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian”. Is it reasonable to spend up to $50,000 on a cat when one could instead give the money to a worthy cause, such as humanitarian aid that Florence Nightingale predicted would encourage people to go to war and stay at war? A sample of Gaza Good/Israel Bad works:

The library reminds us that there’s a “genocide” going on in “occupied palestine” and also that one should spend tens of thousands of dollars on a cat.

If Palestinians are good, is there anyone who is great? Yes. Angela Merkel, who transformed Germany into a model society by “Leading as a Scientist” (don’t just Follow the Science, but Lead via Science):

If If Palestinians are good and Angela Merkel is great, is there anyone who is bad? Sadly, yes. We have to ignore any orders from the “lawless” Supreme Court. Trump is a “fascist”, but unlike with any other fascist government in world history, there is still plenty of “democracy” that we can use to vote Trump supporters out of office:

Contrary to what the notorious-yet-weak-enough-to-be-voted-out Trump might tell you, U.S. citizenship is merely a “myth”:

Unfortunately, racism isn’t a myth and daily antiracism is required.

Planning a trip south? Brown and Gay in LA may be helpful:

Need to learn more about pronouns? You came to the right place:

The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers is one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020. Oddly, however, there is no chapter on the thriving 2SLGBTQQIA+ community within Gaza.

What if you can’t learn enough about queerness at the library? Stop in the core of downtown where Rainbow-first Retail is practiced:

Copperfield’s Books can fill in the gaps of your LGBTQIA+ Literature collection:

Don’t forget to #MaskUpSaveLives:

I hadn’t heard of Coming Up Short, by an author famous for standing 4’11” tall and for simultaneously advocating for affordable housing while fighting development in his own Berkeley neighborhood. Whoever came up with the title isn’t going to be replaced by AI.

Here’s Robert Reich’s letter to Berkeley officials arguing against development near his own mansion:

Here’s another great title: The Nerd Reich.

(According to the author, Elon Musk is the #1 fascist and has waged war on democracy by allowing people to express their views on X, previously censored when it was still Twitter. Even worse, Elon Musk allowed Donald Trump to return to the platform. The author of the book actually was banned after hurling the “fascism” insult at Alex Karp of Palantir.)

Our democracy is pretty much toast, which is why it is important to #resist and buy these books before #resistance is outlawed.

Queer resistance is even more effective than non-queer resistance:

One radical step that an American who identifies as a “woman” can take is walking in a national park:

I’m not quite that radical, so the next stop was a humanoid robot company in Silicon Valley and then a hotel in Menlo Park.

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iPhone 18 Pro Max first impressions

by philg

Was it worth sticking to a one-year upgrade cycle on the iPhone Pro Max? (see the comments in Are iPhone 18 sales off to a weak start? for the costs: “$414/year for annual, $345/yr for every 2 years, $281/yr for every 3 years.”)

So far, I think so! The provisioning process wasn’t too bad, maybe because I had the new phone copy everything directly from the old phone rather than going through the cloud. It seemed that a lot more apps were already signed-in and ready to use. Battery life is vastly superior to the year-old iPhone 17 Pro Max. Is the camera way better? Tough to say. Here are some samples.

Predator emerges from the sea in Jupiter, Florida:

(This isn’t Mindy the Crippler, in case you were wondering. She actually doesn’t like the water!)

A high-contrast scene due to shadows from the mangroves:

Let’s check text sharpness:

This high-contrast scene of a father and son strolling by the Juno Beach Pier doesn’t seem to have been handled well… (the humans are too dark):

Here’s one that worked out, though:

A local restaurant (Double Roads in Jupiter, Florida) held a small car show. Click to read some of the text and, also, think back with nostalgia to a simpler time when Americans could buy cars that weren’t tainted by any Nazi associations (1966 Volkswagen Beetle). In my opinion, it is impressive how well the camera handled the engine, which has a lot of Black parts (that matter) and is shaded by an overhanging lid.

(Maybe the Tesla Y, currently at 4 million, will surpass the Beetle’s production record of about 23 million? Elon doesn’t seem to be in any mood to update the name or the body shape.)

This 1960 Corvette was handled well:

I bought the wrist strap and the Apple silicone case. My idea was that the strap would be useful when using the device primarily for photography. Unfortunately, it gets in the way when using the smartphone as a smartphone, e.g., putting it into and pulling it out of one’s pocket. It would be great if there were a way to store the strap somehow inside the case or up against the case, but there isn’t.

Loyal readers know me as a historical hater and mocker of Apple (part of my successful record as a stock picker!) so it pains me to admit that Apple has done a nice job with the iPhone 18 Pro Max!

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Oakland, California trip report

by philg

Yesterday on this blog we highlighted Piedmont, California, which is 0.8% Black and 3.8% Latinx. Today we look at diversity-is-our-strength Oakland.

Folks in Oakland seem to have a lot more sex. “Cheated On? freeSTDcheck.org”:

Oakland is a center for Rainbow-first retail. Before one can spend $6 on a coffee, for example, one must walk underneath the sacred flag:

Who are the customers for $6 coffees? Quite a few undocumented immigrants, it seems, because the coffee shop is officially a place where migrant customers are safe from ICE thugs. (I didn’t see a bathroom for customers, so I’m not sure just how long a noble undocumented migrant could stay, as a purely practical matter.)

What passion goes hand-in-glove with Rainbow Flag worship? Pro-Hamas advocacy. The windows next to the door of Walden Pond Books.

What’s in the bookstore? Books celebrating a Hamas-/Palestinian Islamic Jihad-ruled “Free Palestine” with a Rainbow Flag in the background:

Detail:

Who among us is obstructing the glorious day when Free Palestine arrives? If we could only “catch a fascist” we, and our Palestinian brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters, might yet be okay.

What language would people speak in Free Palestine? “Queer Arabic”:

Were there any tutorials available on how to be queer? So glad that you asked! You can learn how to cook “Queer Food” from Queers at the Table and put it on a table that is an example of Queer X Design.

How different are readers’ tastes in California vs. the national average? Prominently featured Queers at the Table has just two Amazon reviews and is “#753,447 in Books”. Queer X Design is significantly more popular: “#343,353 in Books”.

What about some after-dinner reading? Hijab Butch Blues:

A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran … Through personal experiences, Lamya H navigates the complexities of gender, sexuality and faith as a queer, nonbinary Muslim.

What kind of people want to pay full price for books in the English language? Undocumented migrants who will presumably be shielded from ICE by the merchant:

What if you’re planning to head up the hill to Piedmont and need to agitate against the construction of affordable housing? You can prep by reading Golden Gates, regarding the “housing crisis” that in no conceivable way could have been caused by importing at least 70 million humans (more than the current population of France), mostly low-skill, over the past 50 years.

Criminals don’t tend to be either Black or Latinx, but the bookstore says that you should buy “Books on Black, Latinx … history and culture” for people who are currently incarcerated.

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How would the AI slowdown for safety actually work?

by philg

Wall Street Journal:

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has called on the world’s leading artificial-intelligence labs to slow down development and asked Washington to grant an antitrust exemption so they can coordinate on safety without being treated as a cartel. OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceXAI’s Elon Musk and Google’s Demis Hassabis were quick to support the slower pacing. But why do AI labs need an antitrust exemption?

When competitors agree on standards the rest of the industry is expected to meet, the law becomes suspicious.

In short, coordination is lawful when it creates value rather than excludes rivals or exploits consumers. If AI labs’ coordination is needed to create value and isn’t exclusionary or exploitative, they need not worry about antitrust liability.

So why demand an exemption? The labs appear to have in mind an agreement among competitors to restrict output and set a safety standard collectively rather than compete to produce the safest product. That is classic cartel conduct.

The labs’ apparent belief that competition will inevitably produce a race to the bottom is an awkward admission by OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which were founded to serve the public interest and premised on the idea that AI could be developed safely. Anthropic in particular espoused that safety would be its competitive advantage against rivals. If these companies genuinely believe slower development serves the public interest, nothing prevents them from slowing down unilaterally.

The strongest counterargument asserts that a coordinated slowdown solves a collective-action problem: A lab that slows down alone risks losing market share to rivals willing to cut corners. But this is precisely the problem OpenAI’s capped-profit structure and Anthropic’s public-benefit charter were supposed to solve by insulating their public-interest missions from competitive pressure.

The American frontier labs are purportedly concerned that Chinese models will close the performance gap and cut into what would be profits if they were profitable? Note that Anthropic says it is profitable, but Morningstar says that this is a scam:

The report, from the Financial Times citing multiple people with knowledge of the matter, said Anthropic told investors that it will profit on a measure called adjusted operating income.

According to the report, adjusted operating income excludes stock-based compensation, which is not unusual for technology companies. However, the report also quotes its gross margins – above 80% – exclude revenue shared with distribution partners, as well as the cost of training its models.

(Like saying “Our family is doing great financially so long as we exclude the burdens of mortgage, college tuition, taxes that we have to pay to support families that don’t work, and payments on our two pavement-melting SUVs.”)

Let’s suppose that the AI companies get their antitrust exemption and they cut way back on the training costs that would keep them from being profitable if such costs were included in their new improved accounting scam. How would Americans then be prevented from downloading and running models from Chinese companies that aren’t part of the cartel? Anyone who tries to do this and offer a chatbot or API on the public Internet will be shut down by the FBI? Peasants with Mac Minis and AMD AI Halo-based machines will be hunted down somehow?

FDR made it illegal for Americans to own gold (Executive Order 6102), but the government didn’t do house-to-house searches. If typical desktop PCs adopt an architecture powerful enough to run AI models from countries where “AI slowdown collusion” isn’t happening, how will the government’s AI Safety Regulation Team (controlled by Effective Altruists who are friends with Sam Altman and Dario Amodei?) shut down home-based unsafe AI?

Circa 1980, I remember Ed Fredkin, one of the only professors at MIT who was smart enough to have skipped a PhD program (“poor as a professor, dumb as a Ph.D.” as the Chinese say), saying that he thought that AI could be achieved with VAX 11/780 computing power. Due to Moore’s Law, this would soon be available to everyone on the planet. “What if a teenager in Brazil figures out how to do AI? He can then have his AI trade stocks and become the richest person in the world and control entire nations,” Fredkin pointed out. He wanted computers to be licensed and controlled. Nvidia’s Rubin GPU is between 200 million and 500 million times faster than a VAX for “normal high-precision calculations”, according to ChatGPT, but closer to 200 billion times faster for “highly specialized low-precision matrix operations that dominate modern AI”. ChatGPT says that if we apply Moore’s Law to the Ryzen AI Halo product, it doesn’t reach Nvidia Rubin level until 2040ish (memory bandwidth, AI TOPS).

So… maybe a partnership between government and the current market leaders could suppress competition within the U.S. for the next 15 years or so, even if our brothers and sisters in China continue to deliver awesome free open-source models. Ownership of server-grade GPUs would have to be regulated, of course, but if the government could close schools and order peasants to stay home for Covid safety why not outlaw high-performance GPU ownership, except by responsible companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, to keep all of society safe?

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Piedmont, California trip report

by philg

First in a series of posts about a trip to Northern California over Labor Day weekend. The trip began at FLL, a center of poetry (“Pack the Fun, No Carry-On Gun!”).

One is greeted by signage celebrating Harvey Milk (Florida Sen. Ashley Moody, by contrast, points out that Harvey Milk’s sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy should disqualify him from being painted as a hero by first-grade teachers):

And, of course, one sees the Followers of Science (this one relying on a non-N95 mask):

After picking up the 2022 Tesla Y from Avis, I fought my way through heavy traffic (at 1 am on the Bay Bridge!) to Piedmont, California where open-borders candidate Kamala Harris recently won 85 percent of the vote. Where do the residents of Piedmont want the New Americans to live? Not in Piedmont, California. They’ve spent a couple of decades fighting the development of affordable housing, higher-density lower-cost market-rate housing, etc. More than 10 percent of the town, for example, signed an anti-development petition in 2022. This eventually reached the national news, e.g., “Civil war breaks out in rich, white California town as activists from crime-plagued neighboring city demand it’s ‘canceled’” (New York Post, August 2026):

Oakland resident Jesse Rosemoore is behind the provocative “Cancel Piedmont” campaign targeting the 1.7-square-mile city of roughly 11,000 people that is surrounded by Oakland but maintains its own schools, police, parks and tax base, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The median price of homes in Piedmont is almost $2.6 million, which is more than three-and-a-half times that of Oakland’s.

Census data cited by the outlet shows Piedmont is roughly 70% white and around 1% black, while about one in five Oakland residents is black.

What does the front yard of someone who was willing to pay 3.5X for a house so that his/her/zir/their children wouldn’t encounter Black kids in their school look like? In case someone from the 1% minority of Black residents happens to walk by, this house (right next to a school) is equipped with a full-size “Black Lives Matter” sign.

Here’s another example in which the BLM sign has been augmented by pro-Hamas and pro-Iran signage.

(We later walked by the high school. Students were visible on an outdoor patio and through a classroom window. All of them appeared white.)

Based on homeowner signage, quite a few Piedmont residents want to see a “Free Palestine”. What if, unlike in any other Arab or Muslim country, there were a significant number of remnant Jews in the resultant Hamas-ruled nation? (Remember that it wasn’t “ethnic cleansing” when Arab and Muslim nations got rid of their Jews after 1948.) The remnant Jews could have a temple devoted to advocating that the Gazans who perpetrated the October 7, 2023 attacks not suffer from any counterattack and, also, that Black Lives Matter (even more so when Arabs who call themselves “Palestinian” refer to Black people as abeed):

Kehilla Community Synagogue’s website says that they admit they are parked on land stolen from the indigenous and, also, that they want to fight ICE so as to increase the number of additional humans who will park themselves on land stolen from the indigenous people of North America:

Speaking of Native Americans, we’re informed by the Piedmont Righteous that they played no role in building any part of “America”. (Perhaps, like Boston, America was primarily built by immigrants from Somalia?)

Returning to the subject of schools, the elementary school recommends that everyone be masked. #SafetyFirst and, when masking the kindergartener, don’t forget the daily temperature check:

Everyone in Piedmont can agree that they don’t want a king in Washington, D.C. telling them they must allow the construction of affordable housing:

Would you be “OK” if you owned a $2.7 million house for which you paid $135,000 (in 1977 dollars; $750,000 in post-Biden dollars) and on which you paid almost nothing in property tax thanks to California’s Proposition 13? No, you would not be okay! And you’d have to remind everyone “No Trespassing on Democracy”:

What about as an investor? Would you be okay investing $135,000 and getting out $2.7 million minus realtor commission, 50 years of maintenance expenses, etc.? ChatGPT says that you would not be okay! Had the $135,000 gone into the S&P 500 in 1977, with dividends reinvested, it would today be worth $36 million. (This might not account properly for federal and California state income tax on the dividends. One could also point out that the buyers likely used leverage (mortgage) to buy the house, but they could similarly have used leverage to buy the S&P 500.)

Here’s another way to be a rich douche and not be okay…. buy a Range Rover instead of a Honda or Toyota:

Let’s close by pointing out that the residents of Piedmont love Martin Luther King, Jr. so much that they leave the posters up eight months after the event:

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Tesla Y L showroom experience

by philg

A week ago, we visited the Tesla showroom in West Palm Beach (not in the part of town that is being gold-plated by Stephen Ross, but in a shabby “functional” area that includes Ferrari and Mercedes dealers as well as endless strip malls) to look at the Tesla Y L. Our 11-year-old was immediately sold on both the front and rear screens. He particularly enjoyed being able to adjust the front right seat while sitting in the 2nd row. The power folding 2nd- and 3rd-row seats are kind of cool.

For transporting four people, the luggage capacity is nowhere near what a minivan offers, but is still substantial. With four people plus a dog, though, the 2nd row becomes tight. A 50 lb. Canine-American could perhaps sit between the two 2nd-row seats, but it is nothing like the comfort of being up on the minivan’s 2nd-row bench (ChatGPT says that the Odyssey is about 14″ wider on the 2nd-row bench, at hip level, vs. the Tesla Y (non-L) 2nd-row bench). I’ve always disliked the Tesla interiors, including the seats and especially the “vegan leather”, but the grandma that we brought along pronounced that the 2nd-row Tesla seat was more comfortable than her perch in the Honda Odyssey.

The car is substantially back-ordered. The folks who work in the West Palm Beach showroom, plainly not on commission since they weren’t interested in talking to us, said that they already had 700 customers who had ordered and were waiting. Delivery is now promised (sort of) for January. The Launch edition remains a bad choice for Floridians due to the 10% range penalty from dragging around a useless second motor. Our last snow was in 1977 so the AWD isn’t needed. Acceleration any faster than a 1981 Corvette (0-60 in 9.2 seconds) isn’t required when the roads are jammed (pretty much always, as soon as one gets south of the DJT airport). The staff at the showroom said that the Launch edition was “almost sold out” so perhaps there is hope for a “premium RWD Y L” (there already is a “premium RWD Y” at $4,000 less than the AWD Y and with 357 miles of range vs. 327; the Launch Y L AWD is at 332 miles so a Y L RWD with the same battery should perhaps hit 360 miles of range when brand new?).

We’re in a strange situation, I think, with the self-driving hardware. Tesla says that AI5 won’t be in cars for a while because they need the chips, which Samsung says they’re already fabbing, for “Optimus and our supercomputer clusters.” AI5 seems to have disappeared from the news even faster than Graham Platner, but I am pretty sure that if I (a) wait for the Y L RWD to become available, and (b) order a Y L RWD on the first day of availability that it will be delivered with HW4 exactly one day before Tesla switches all of the cars over to AI5.

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Is the smartest response to the Jason Arday tragedy to eliminate academic research departments of sociology and education?

by philg

Prof. Dr. Jason Atta Kwei Arday, Ph.D. was a “sociology of education” scholar. His work, despite generating awe at Cambridge University, failed to impress ChatGPT. What would happen if both sociology and education were eliminated as academic research departments and, instead, the questions being asked were bounced into economics (and maybe a few to anthropology)? Would the world then suffer for lack of interesting or useful research results? ChatGPT estimated that Professor Arday was certainly a better researcher than at least 30% of the people in education/sociology and possibly better than 50% (i.e., as many as half of the people getting paid to do research in this area are even less competent).

Can anyone think of a PhD thesis or journal paper from sociology or education that has had significant impact and that wouldn’t have fit reasonably well within economics or, perhaps, anthropology?

(This is not to suggest that the “Doctor of Education” professional education programs, such as what Prof. Dr. Jill Biden, EdD went through, should be eliminated. I don’t know enough to say whether these EdD programs make better school principals and other education bureaucrats.)

How much less would future generations earn if degrees in education were no longer offered because the faculty had all been cut loose? The chart below says that young people earn $18,000 less over a 10-year horizon if they get a degree in education vs. simply do the work that a median high-school graduate would do:

(“Social Sciences” that aren’t economics get a boost in earnings, so perhaps a sociology degree actually does have cash value? Wikipedia lists a huge number of majors that could fall under this umbrella, including degrees that prepare young people for lucrative DEI management jobs. This 2015 study found that sociology graduates had among the lowest earnings of any social science majors. We also have to consider the selection bias of those who choose to attend college and those who have the stick-to-itiveness to finish a degree. That population would probably do quite well economically if they never attended college, but simply started working at 18. That same issue cuts through all of the studies, I think. An 18-year-old who had what it takes to get into college and complete a CS degree could probably also do great via self-study and practical experience as a programmer.)

Let’s check in with the world’s leading sociologists and see if we’d be sorry if they were cut loose. Here’s Joya Misra, professor at University of Maskachusetts and head of the prestigious American Sociological Association, which publishes the leading journal in the field (ASR), giving a presidential address:

She emphasizes how feminist and decolonial methods that bring sociological researchers into collaborative and participatory partnerships with broader communities can develop transformative solutions, building communities of hope, justice, and joy.

She appears to cite Hater-in-Chief Ron DeSantis!

at this time of rising authoritarianism, attacks on academic freedom, and loss of trust in science, sociology must recenter itself … DeSantis 2024

The implication that sociology is a form of “science” is interesting, but even more interesting is that the cited article is about Ron DeSantis, but isn’t by Ron DeSantis. It’s by Gary DeSantis, adjunct teacher at State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota in the tennis training capital of Bradenton, Florida. Here’s the abstract of “‘We believe in education, not indoctrination’: Governor Ron DeSantis, critical race theory, and anti-intellectualism in Florida” by the other Mr. DeSantis:

This article examines how Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ remarks contribute to anti-intellectualism and fuel the pushback against critical race theory (CRT) championed by like-minded conservative Republicans who view its instruction as an affront to society and authentic historical narratives. Dismissing educators and scholars who uphold the teaching of CRT as unpatriotic and denigrating to American society, DeSantis, who has presidential aspirations, has effectively used the issue (along with a number of other matters) to solidify his conservative base fearful of social and hegemonic change. Although CRT is not taught in Florida public schools, similar to other conservative-dominated states which have seized on the teaching of CRT as anathema to their civic principles, DeSantis’ thinly veiled attempt to appease right-wing voters is yet another example of Republicans stoking cultural wars designed to energize conservative constituents against what many of them perceive as liberal attacks on their beliefs and values.

Circling back to Joya Misra, in her address she mentions the problem of “overinclusion”, which does not mean hiring the incompetent/below-average because of personal characteristics:

In one article, we focus on the experiences of faculty of color, considering how faculty in the twenty-first century, in an era of DEI, still experience substantial exclusion and exploitation in their jobs (Misra, Kane-Lee, et al. 2024). We theorized three different processes. First, we conceptualized overinclusion: how faculty of color are asked to do more work, and work that is devalued in promotions, such as mentoring and service—leaving them less time for more valued activities, such as research, as well as less choice about what they would like to do

The second process we identified is active exclusion. Research on faculty of color has identified this issue for decades … Active exclusion explains why highly qualified people are not offered jobs, not offered good jobs, receive fewer resources for their work, or face greater challenges being promoted.

Prof. Misra’s personal work:

We have to do the work to identify inequalities before we can identify more equitable approaches. But I worry that we too often stop at identifying the disjunctures, the inequalities, and the brokenness of our world

The world is “broken” when someone like her can get a lifetime taxpayer-funded job?

As a feminist and as a methodologist, I suggest we build on participatory action and community-engaged methods to envision a different, more community-focused discipline … As such, I adopt an epistemological approach to knowledge production that builds on feminist and decolonial methodologies, even as it is at odds with some traditional approaches to empirical research. Feminists have long called for epistemological approaches that undo the divide between expert and participant

Building on this work allows us to link U.S. sociology to sociological traditions from other parts of the world, where the relationship between academia and activism looks different.

There’s a bit of hope in western Maskachusetts:

In the town of Amherst, where I live, we are working on a plan for reparations (Lord et al. 2023). How can we possibly make reparations for the centuries of enslavement, displacement, discrimination, death, and the constant grind of anti-Black racism? … So far, the town has pledged only two million dollars to the reparations fund and has yet to fully fund that two million … I am endlessly infuriated with the town for not doing more. And yet, what is the alternative? Not to work toward reparations?

Maybe there’s some social media output for Prof. Dr. Joya Misra, Ph.D.? A quick search revealed that she was far too virtuous to have an account on X. She posted on Facebook in support of what the Supreme Court found to be racism that violated the 14th amendment:

She was proud to have been injected with the Sacrament of Fauci:

What about on Blue Sky, the natural home for conventional-minded progressives? Joya Misra does have an account!

(When the candidate for whom the majority of people vote is elected, that’s the end of democracy.)

She re-skies (?) a blue (?) exhorting the righteous to #resist:

Considering all of the above, and remembering that this is perhaps the best sociologist in the United States (elected by peers to head their organization), would it be a net loss to the average citizen if all departments of sociology were shut down and the taxpayer funds redirected to economics, literature, engineering, and actual science?

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Bad news for the Florida Beach Season: there is no beach (NYT)

by philg

Americans in the Northeast are making plans to come down to Florida this winter, either 183 days (the “skip on state taxes” plan) or just a shorter break from misery. They might want to consider this New York Times article from 31 years ago, “Scientists Say Earth’s Warming Could Set Off Wide Disruptions” (September 18, 1995):

A continuing rise in average global sea level, which is likely to amount to more than a foot and a half by the year 2100. This, say the scientists, would inundate parts of many heavily populated river deltas and the cities on them, making them uninhabitable, and would destroy many beaches around the world. At the most likely rate of rise, some experts say, most of the beaches on the East Coast of the United States would be gone in 25 years. They are already disappearing at an average of 2 to 3 feet a year.

The NYT’s “experts” were sort of right. It did become impossible to go to a lot of East Coast beaches in 2020, but that was because Science made it illegal (#StayHomeSaveLives), not because the beach had physically disappeared.

Maskachusetts COVID-19 Order No. 22, issued 25 years after the NYT article predicted beach closure:

How has Florida’s shoreline changed over time? Here’s Catesby’s map from circa 1729:

Compare to today (Google Earth):

Loosely related, but I had to mention this in case it jinxes us with a repeat of Hurricane Andrew (1992; Category 5 landfall, 25-mile-wide swath of destruction south of Miami), “The Atlantic Just Broke a 60-Year Record” (ScienceAlert):

September 12th became the furthest into the year we have ever gone without a hurricane in the Atlantic basin since the advent of modern satellite tracking in 1966 – by a day.

“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” explains António Guterres, the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

“The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up.”

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