Does the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill give us some insight into the cost of immigration?

by philg

With the U.S. already having spent more, as a percentage of GDP, on infrastructure than Germany (previous post), how did we get to the point that we needed to spend another $1.2 trillion? (sounds like a lot, but maybe $1.2 trillion will be the price of a Diet Coke by the time some of these projects are completed)

In How much would an immigrant have to earn to defray the cost of added infrastructure? I did a rough calculation that every new migrant would cost the U.S. $250,000 in infrastructure expense. At that rate, the $1.2 trillion will build (or repair) enough infrastructure for 4.8 million migrants (as many people as live in Los Angeles+San Jose (the cities themselves) or about four years of legal immigration under the pre-2021 rules).

So, maybe we could look at this as catching up to the costs of the immigrants who arrived since 2017. On the other hand, is the money going to be spent in states where immigrants have settled and/or where population is growing? And on the third hand, why is infrastructure spending federalized? Don’t individual states have a better idea of what infrastructure is required? Wouldn’t it make more sense for states to tax, borrow, and spend on infrastructure as necessary than to send money up to central planners and have them, sitting in Washington, D.C., try to figure out whether a bridge that is 2,500 miles away should be rebuilt?

Here in Florida, infrastructure spending includes some awesome signage:

Related:

  • “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (Politico, by a Harvard professor): if we ignore costs such as traffic and school congestion, there are some financial benefits to natives from low-skill immigration, but they all go to the rich at the expense of the poor and working class (i.e., low-skill immigration transfers wealth from American workers to American landlords and corporation owners)
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Harvard Art Museums shows us the alternate universe of non-profits

by philg

Here’s a request for money from the Harvard Art Museums, recently received in the mail:

They lead with the fact that they were closed for 1.5 years. Surrounded by fully open (“essential” according to the governor) marijuana and liquor stores, adults meeting in restaurant-bars after Tinder matches, etc., the Harvard Art Museums decided that they would all sit at home and they want potential donors to know that. If we assume that the primary mission of an art museum is to have people come in and look at art, the non-profit did nothing to further their primary mission during this 1.5-year period, despite the fact that they were ordered closed by the governor for only about 3 months of the 18-month closure that they proudly highlight.

(Even now, they won’t be executing all that aggressively on their primary mission; visitors have to make online reservations before showing up, a significant discouragement to those strolling around (fully masked, of course!) Harvard Square.)

Readers: Does this seem like a good illustration of the alternate universe inhabited by non-profit organizations? A for-profit enterprise wouldn’t expect to win points with customers by highlighting more than a year of voluntary closure, would it?

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Wisdom from Greta Thunberg at COP26

by philg

The wisest comment regarding the most recent mass in-person gathering by the elite? “Greta Thunberg tells protest that COP26 has been a ‘failure'” (BBC):

Ms Thunberg said: “It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve a crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place.”

She described the UN climate change summit as a “two-week long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah” to “maintain business as usual” and “create loopholes to benefit themselves”.

The logical inconsistency of the gathering was impressive, even by coronapolicy standards. We’re in a climate crisis, so we’ll agree to stop cutting down forests nine years from now (in 2030; BBC: “Experts welcomed the move, but warned a previous deal in 2014 had ‘failed to slow deforestation at all’ and commitments needed to be delivered on.”).

[As with Ayn Rand, I can agree with Greta Thunberg on the description but not the prescription.

She said: “We need immediate drastic annual emission cuts unlike anything the world has ever seen.

“The people in power can continue to live in their bubble filled with their fantasies, like eternal growth on a finite planet and technological solutions that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere and will erase all of these crises just like that.

If this is a 100-year problem, as we’ve been previously told that it is by the climate modelers, why does it make sense to try to deal with it via 2021 technology? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_in_aviation was not very impressive compared to what is doable today. If we need to cool off the planet in 2081, won’t we be able to ask a Chinese space company (“Red Origin”?) to pull down the shades for a few days? Greta T. says this is a “technological solution that will suddenly appear seemingly out of nowhere”, but even a 60-year horizon is nearly impossible to predict. The integrated circuit (“chips”) revolution was transforming lives in the 1980s (PCs and dial-up networks). The first inkling of the modern semiconductor transistor was in 1925 (Julius Edgar Lilienfeld), but it wasn’t until after William Shockley and colleagues at Bell Labs made a prototype in late 1947 that anyone could reasonably have begun to foresee the 1980s tech landscape. (so maybe 30 years is about the limit for the smartest person with the best crystal ball?) From the point of view of someone in 1947, the world of 2007 was, in fact, packed with technological solutions that had suddenly appeared seemingly out of nowhere and the world of 2047 will be yet more advanced (maybe you’ll be able to find an Xbox Series X in stock at Walmart by then!). Furthermore, we don’t have to go it alone. If we go back 60 years from today, China was suffering from famine and poverty in the Great Leap Forward. India was deeply impoverished. Taiwan was not a place to get advanced electronic components. Korea was recovering from a war, not making OLED panels, etc.]

No really related… carbon sequestration Palm Beach style:

Related:

  • How’s the Climate Change summit in Glasgow going? (“For nearly two years, the global elite have been telling the peasantry not to gather across households for fear of spreading deadly SARS-CoV-2. The global elite have closed borders as well (except for the U.S. southern border, which must remain open), because one certainly wouldn’t want to give a variant virus a chance to infect a new area. It is doubly bad when people from different countries mix. Since at least 2015, when elites gathered in Paris via Gulfstream, elites have been telling the peasants not to emit CO2.”)
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What is the practical highway speed limit in Florida? (and in other states)

by philg

I caught an Uber from Jupiter to PBI the other morning. My Colombiana driver (I did not actually ask for this driver’s gender ID; should it be Colombianx?) blasted down the left lane of I-95 at 90 mph.

(Was this unsafe in a subcompact Honda C-HR? Certainly not! We were both wearing masks.)

I assume that an Uber driver knows the real-world speed limit and therefore that 90 mph is slower than speeding ticket territory. That raises the question: how fast would one have to drive on the straight perfectly smooth highways of Florida to be pulled over?

Based on what I have seen, traveling at 80-85 is a 75th percentile speed on I-95 in South Florida or on Florida’s Turnpike towards Orlando. Back in Massachusetts, I would say that the real-world limit is 80 mph (i.e., that one is likely to get a ticket driving above 80; note that Maskachusetts highway standards are lower than in Florida, where everything is newer and can be done to the latest highway engineering textbook standards).

Readers; What’s the real speed limit in your state?

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Locked-down, pregnant, and stoned is actually a great way to go through life…

by philg

…. in the opinion of American pregnant people.

“Rates of Prenatal Cannabis Use Among Pregnant [People] Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (JAMA):

Considered an essential business in California, cannabis retailers remained open during the pandemic with record sales in 2020. We used data from Kaiser Permanente Northern California (KPNC), a large integrated health care delivery system with universal screening for prenatal cannabis use to test the hypothesis that rates of prenatal cannabis use increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Of 100 005 pregnancies (95 412 [people]), 26% were Asian or Pacific Islander; 7%, Black; 28%, Hispanic; 34%, non-Hispanic White; and 5%, other, unknown, or multiracial. The patients were a mean age of 31 years (median, 31 years).

… In the ITS analysis, we found that prenatal cannabis use increased by 25% (95% CI, 12%-40%; Table) during the pandemic over prenatal cannabis use during the 15 months before the pandemic.

Note that I have edited the title and a portion of the text to remove offensive language that is inconsistent with #Science and CDC Guidelines.

Related:

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Single image that best summarizes the American spirit?

by philg

Here’s an image that, I think, best summarizes the current American spirit. It is from September 7, 2021 at 5 pm and was taken on the Jupiter campus of Florida Atlantic University. The apparently healthy and reasonably slender student is swaddled like a baby, wearing a hoodie for protection against becoming dangerously chilled in the 90-degree, 90-percent humidity weather. He’s roughly 75′ from any other human and wearing a mask to protect against becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2, a notorious killer of 82-year-olds. He’s using a piece of recreation gear (swing set) typically associated with 4-year-olds.

Anyone else have a better candidate single photo for summarizing the spirit of the typical American in 2020/2021?

Camera: iPhone 12 Pro Max on “telephoto” setting.

From 7:17 pm on the same day, Juno Beach Pier, someone who is seriously out of step with our times (though not out of step with the prevailing spirit among young people in Florida!):

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Google Pixel 6 Pro versus iPhone 13 Pro Max camera quality

by philg

Google spec’d a bigger sensor than what Apple uses in the latest iPhones and, therefore, should have been able to crush Apple in image quality. DxOMark says otherwise. In lab conditions, the Pixel 6 Pro scores 143 from the main camera:

The iPhone 13 Pro Max scores 144:

In real-world conditions, I would expect that the Apple camera software yields substantial practical advantages. The autofocus scores, above, already show that the iPhone is likely to be better at capturing kids running around.

As impartially measured by Google DEI employees, the Pixel 6 Pro scores higher in equity. “Image equity: Making image tools more fair for everyone” (blog.google):

As part of Google’s Product Inclusion efforts, our teams are building more equitable camera and imaging products for people of color.

Building better tools for a community works best when they’re built with the community. For the new Pixel 6 Camera, we partnered with a diverse range of renowned image makers who are celebrated for their beautiful and accurate depictions of communities of color—including Kira Kelly, Deun Ivory, Adrienne Raquel, Kristian Mercado, Zuly Garcia, Shayan Asgharnia, Natacha Ikoli and more—to help our teams understand where we needed to do better. With their help, we’ve significantly increased the number of portraits of people of color in the image datasets that train our camera models.

(the bad old days: “Google Photos Tags Two African-Americans As Gorillas Through Facial Recognition Software” (Forbes))

If having accessible “communities of color” is helpful in building a more equitable camera, shouldn’t Samsung have the most equitable camera of all? Nearly all South Koreans are “of color” by our current definition. (See “Michelle Wu is Boston’s first woman and first person of color elected mayor” from state-sponsored NPR, regarding a Chinese-American (apparently this person’s most important characteristics relative to the mayor job are current gender ID and skin color)).

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Stoking coronapanic is a good way to destroy traditional religion?

by philg

The centuries-old struggle of humanism versus traditional religion hasn’t resulted in total victory for humanism, even in thoroughly debauched Western societies. Until March 2020, for example, a lot of Americans would shut down their casual sex apps and drive past the billboards for recreational marijuana on Sunday mornings to attend church.

What if humanists could make traditional religious believers afraid of going to church? Or make churches uncomfortable to attend? Enter the public health battalion in the Army of Humanism!

A friend in Newton, Maskachusetts attends an orthodox synagogue. Attendance In October 2021 was about half what it was pre-coronapanic. “The biggest drop off is among the women,” he said, “for whom going to shul is optional.” Christian churches nationwide seem to have experienced a similar drop in attendance.

Now that most of the COVID-vulnerable are either dead or vaccinated (Maskachusetts would be on page 1 of countries ranked by COVID-19 death rate if it were its own country), why wouldn’t the synagogue be full? Mask-wearing is required by the righteous secular #science-following bureaucrats and politicians who run the City of Newton. This makes sitting together for hours unpleasant for no obvious personal health benefit. If the masks do work their 11 percent magic (closer to 0 percent for cloth masks), all of us remain doomed to eventual infection.

The slave states have managed to shut down churches and other houses of worship entirely and/or make attending uncomfortable via mask orders. What about in the free states, such as Florida and South Dakota? In those places, the national and local media, generally run by non-believers, can work to instill fear of COVID-19 that will keep people away from church.

Regardless of whether the fight is happening in a slave state or a free state, is it fair to say that SARS-CoV-2 is the best thing that ever happened to humanism? Religion relies heavily on in-person gathering, which people will refrain from doing, either voluntarily or involuntarily, once convinced that avoiding COVID-19 should be their primary life goal.

Separately, as long as we’re talking about religion, here’s the curve of deaths, including the summer Delta variant surge, for the infidels following the Church of Sweden:

(Cumulatively, Sweden has suffered about half the COVID-19 death rate compared to Maskachusetts. On the COVID-19 death rate leaderboard, the give-the-finger-to-the-virus country sits right next to Greece, celebrated by technocrats for its victory over the virus: “Greece has responded swiftly and effectively to the Covid-19 pandemic and has so far managed to contain the spread of infections, but the economy has been hit hard, adding to long-standing challenges, according to a new OECD report.” (oecd.org); “The key to Greece’s success, analysts say, was the government’s early steps to contain the virus ahead of most of Europe.” (TIME); “How Greece is beating coronavirus despite a decade of debt” (Guardian))

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A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system

by philg

I had thought that SABRE, a joint development of IBM and American Airlines, was the first computerized airline reservation system, going live in 1960. However, “The Univac Air Lines Reservations System: a special-purpose application of a general-purpose computer” was published in 1958 and talks about the system being up and running already.

Have a look at the authors’ affiliations at the bottom right. A cautionary tale that success in the computer industry can be fleeting! How powerful was the mainframe?

Transaction processing time wasn’t that different than today’s bloated servers, with their infinite layers of Java, can manage:

The system was up 99.7 percent of the time for its first six weeks and the authors envisioned a future system serving 1,200 travel agents simultaneously.

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How did Zillow become the world’s dumbest buyer of real estate?

by philg

I used to pride myself on being the world’s dumbest buyer of real estate. I like to overpay for a house, overpay for renovations, contract at fictitious prices for non-existent products, fail to account for the risk that a state could revoke residents’ freedoms and necessitate a move, etc. It seems, however, that I’ve been unseated. “Zillow Quits Home-Flipping Business, Cites Inability to Forecast Prices” (WSJ, November 2):

Real-estate firm Zillow Group Inc. is exiting from the home-flipping business, saying Tuesday that its algorithmic+ model to buy and sell homes rapidly doesn’t work as planned.

In a statement Tuesday, Chief Executive Rich Barton said Zillow had failed to predict the pace of home-price appreciation accurately, marking an end to a venture the company once said could generate $20 billion a year. Instead, the company said it now plans to cut 25% of its workforce.

The move represents a big hit to Zillow’s top line. Home-flipping was the company’s largest source of revenue, but it has never turned a profit.

Zillow, which released earnings Tuesday, said its home-flipping business, Zillow Offers, lost $381 million last quarter, as measured by adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. That resulted in a combined adjusted Ebitda loss of $169 million across all of Zillow.

They were using the fraudulent EBITDA measure, which excludes the interest they had to pay to hold onto these houses. So $381 million/quarter would have been the minimum loss.

How is it possible for people who do nothing but real estate all day every day to lose their own money in this spectacular fashion? It isn’t surprising when some big developers go bust. They are in an arrangement where they keep the upside if a high-risk project goes well and stick a bank with the downside if the economy tanks (1990 calling!). But Zillow didn’t have this incentive to take crazy risks. And the real estate market did not tank. To the contrary, we’re in a period of inflation not seen since around 1980. A monkey should have been able to make money buying houses in this market since the cost of borrowing is lower than the rate of inflation in house prices.

Related:

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