20-hour Bonanza flight over the North Pole

by philg

I got a call today from my sea turtle connection (see Merry Christmas (again) to the Sea Turtles). He needed help getting some turtles from the Boston area to Beaufort, North Carolina. I said that it was a 4-hour trip in the Cirrus SR20 and that was too long to sit in those seats. Therefore we would have to take a stretch-bathroom-coffee-fuel stop after 2 hours. (this doesn’t bother the turtles)

Compare to this AOPA story on a May 11, 2021 trip from Reykjavik, Iceland to the North Pole to Fairbanks, Alaska: 20 hours nonstop in a Beechcraft Bonanza.

Perhaps it is time to stop complaining!

(Also, I’m not sure what is more impressive… that he flew 3,200+ nm in a single-engine piston aircraft or that he surmounted the bureaucratic COVID-19 requirements to get into Iceland and back to the U.S.)

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Non-profit logic: higher prices make the museum more accessible

by philg

From the Boston Museum of Fine Arts:

(“We’re raising our membership prices on July 1 so we can continue to make art accessible for all.”)

So a middle-class family that wants to visit the museum regularly and not pay $50 per visit (two adults) will find art more accessible when annual membership is more expensive!

Separately, if you ever need someone to run an Ebola clinic, the MFA should be the first recruiting stop. We visited on February 19, 2021 and they’d set up a quarantine tent outside the front door. About six people were employed to check the handful of visitors to make sure that they had reservations, that they answered a bunch of COVID-19 symptom questions, that their temperature was checked, and that they donned orange wristbands to show that the screening process had been accomplished and they couldn’t somehow slip into the building without first going through the quarantine tent.

Once inside, the vast spaces had a post-apocalyptic empty feeling.

The white say-gooders who run the museum delegated curatorial responsibility to high school students (of color?):

An allegory of #Science crushing coronavirus via masks and shutdown:

And let’s not forget that closing the drinking fountains will keep us all safe:

If you’re not too dehydrated from the closed drinking fountains to need to use the restroom, the good news is that the Women’s room is for those who “self-identify” as “Women”:

A thoughtful technocrat determined a COVID-safe capacity for each gallery in which masked (a bandana was fine as PPE) visitors might congregate:

Directional stickers on the floor would, if followed, prevent people from passing each other while moving from room to room.

During a post-museum lunch stop, we were reminded that the same government that uses #Science to protect us all from COVID-19 will also buy us an unlimited supply of opioids as a means of treating our opioid addiction:

Although we’re members and returning to the museum would be free, we haven’t gone back. The constant COVID-19 messaging, the emptiness, and the screening procedures more elaborate than what local hospitals use for visitors made it an overly clinical experience.

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Government cheese is better than European PDO cheese

by philg

From the Wine and Cheese Cask of Somerville, Massachusetts, purveyors since 1970 of imported Protected Geographical Status cheeses:

After 51 years of continuous operation, the cheese counter is closed about half the time that the store is open (they also sell alcohol, which doesn’t need to be cut to size). In other words, for the first time in 51 years, government cheese has become irresistible to the shop mice.

(The shop did not have to close during Peak Coronapanic here in Maskachusetts because alcohol, like marijuana, is “essential” under our governor’s 68 orders so far.)

Note that it is possible to get cheese here even when the counter is closed. A selection of the full inventory is available as pre-packaged grab and go items.

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Public school priorities

by philg

From our local education officials, who previously decided to build the most expensive (per student) school ever constructed in the United States ($250,000 per town-resident student, about $110 million for 440 K-8 students).

The May 20 Lincoln (PreK-8) School Committee meeting will focus on strategic priorities for the present school year. The highest priority for the District, aside from keeping our schools open during the pandemic, was professional learning on anti-racism across the district. At next Thursday evening’s School Committee meeting, members of the Lincoln Public Schools Anti-racism, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Advisory Group (LAAG) will present their findings from surveys, focus groups, and an “equity audit.” LAAG includes 22 students, faculty, administrators, community representatives, and School Committee members. Their report outlines recommendations to be included in a multi-year District action plan. Please save the date.

(If anti-racism is priority #2, how far down the list is quality of education? We may never know! One thing that we do know is that quality of education for gifted students was not even on the list in Maskachusetts, going back to before coronaplague. See “Is Massachusetts failing its brightest kids?” (January 2020): Nearly every other state has a definition of giftedness, and 32 states require districts to identify and/or serve gifted students, according to the state report. In contrast, Massachusetts eliminated its specialized licensing of teachers for advanced learners because of the lack of instructors seeking the certification. Just 69 of the state’s 1,872 schools reported having a talented and gifted program in a 2015-16 survey conducted by the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. In the most recent survey of state policies and practices for gifted students, conducted in 2014-15 by two national organizations focused on gifted education, Massachusetts was one of nine states that didn’t even respond to the survey.)

The school’s email system adds the following signature, in red font, to every email from a 6th grade teacher:

Lincoln Public Schools are united in standing with those who are calling out ingrained racism and violence toward people of color in our country and calling for acknowledgement of humanity in one another. This is not just an issue for black and brown people, but an issue that impacts all of our futures. We must:

  • Listen to each other, showing compassion and empathy
  • Never turn our backs on senseless brutality
  • Continue to denounce injustices
  • Unify our voices to create systemic change

During this painful time, let us work together to be a light to break the darkness that silence can bring. Let us facilitate education, healing, connection, and let us support each other and our communities. Every one of us needs to be part of the solution and we must work together to ensure that there is justice for all.

My favorite part of the above is that the school stands with “those who are calling out ingrained racism”. They’re not standing with those who are doing something about ingrained racism. So they stand with a white person who puts a Black Lives Matter sign on his/her/zir/their lawn in an all-white 2-acre-minimum-zoned suburb. They don’t stand with a white person who moves to a town with Black and Brown neighbors (anyone in our town who wanted to do this would pocket $1 million, the difference in value between a house here and a house in a diverse community).

What are the priorities for schools in the town (Jupiter, Florida) where we’re moving in August? The school system is run by Palm Beach County:

The Gifted Education Program provides appropriate instruction for eligible students by delivering effective and innovative strategies beyond the basic curriculum. The program is designed to challenge and empower students to produce quality work and to become productive citizens while protecting and nurturing their unique characteristics.

The State of Florida defines a gifted student as “one who has superior intellectual development and is capable of high performance.” Schools have an obligation to identify and provide services for gifted students.

Palm Beach County School District currently universally screens second-grade students for gifted with the CogAT in 33 schools. … Students identified as being eligible to receive gifted services each have an Educational Plan (EP) that is developed to foster both their strengths and areas of need.

Should we abandon all hope that Floridians, despite the influx of the righteous from New York and Maskachusetts, will see the anti-racism light? No! “Palm Beach County school board’s new core principles call for equity, ‘dismantling racism’” (May 4, 2021):

Palm Beach County public schools are poised to adopt a new set of core principles this week declaring a heightened commitment to combating racism and ensuring equity for all students.

School board members have drafted new mission and vision statements and, for the first time, an “equity statement” underscoring the school district’s dedication to “dismantling racism and other systems of oppression and inequity.”

The move reflects the district’s effort to join the growing number of companies and government agencies publicly signaling their support for racial justice in the wake of the protests last year over the police killing of George Floyd.

Children of color make up the vast majority of students in the county’s public and charter schools. Of the 189,000 students, 36% are Hispanic, 29% are white, 28% are Black and 3% are Asian.

The centrality of George Floyd is interesting. He was killed by one government agency (the Minneapolis Police Department) and the solution is not for government agencies to have less power, smaller budgets, and a more focused mission, but rather for government agencies to have more power, bigger budgets, and a more complex and varied mission.

George Floyd is also central here. An email to the town mailing list from yesterday:

I’m a 5th grader at the Lincoln Public School.

I’d like to invite everyone to please join me in commemorating the death
of George Floyd one year after his death. *I’m coordinating students,
families and the community to come to Pierce Park and form a big heart
holding cards that we will be disseminating. The formation will be captured
via aerial photo, with the help of our Fire and Police Departments.

We will have a brief vigil with speakers – especially from the children of
Lincoln, and 9:30min of silence to reflect.

The event details are:
Layers of Love
Tuesday, May 25th
*Pierce Park *
4:30 – 5:30pm

Who will be brave enough to show up and read from “Sex Money & Drugs” off the Blockbleeders album by the rap group of which George Floyd was briefly a member?

Related:

  • “Surprise: Florida and Texas Excel in Math and Reading Scores” (New York Times, October 2015): Florida and Texas look worse than they deserve to because they’re educating a more disadvantaged group of students than most states are. … With the [demographic] adjustments, Texas jumps all the way to third in the 2013 state ranking, and Florida to fourth.
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Analysis of Sweden versus UK COVID-19 outcomes

by philg

“Sweden, Covid and lockdown – a look at the data” (The Spectator (UK), May 17, 2021) should be interesting for Church of Sweden adherents.

Sweden currently has Europe’s highest COVID-19 “case” rate, but a fairly low COVID-19 death rate compared to other European nations.

One of the interesting charts is “population-weighted density” (i.e., how dense is the average person’s neighborhood in Sweden compared to other countries):

Swedes are actually packed together more tightly than Germans, despite Swedish ownership of a big area of uninhabited land up north.

What about Stayin’ Alive, the thing that most of us insist on doing even when the other 8 billion folks on the planet say that we wouldn’t be missed?

Even in 2020, the Swedes had a low rate of excess deaths compared to other European nations of similar density (see above). The Swedes should also have a lower rate going forward because they didn’t have a 15 months of lockdowns in which people were unable to exercise and maintain mental health. And they didn’t lose as much economically, which means they’ll have better public health going forward (since they won’t have impoverished themselves the way that other European nations did):

None of this will convince Church of Shutdown members, of course, but I thought readers might be interested to see these data from a 200-year-old current affairs magazine. And maybe it is time to buy Swedish stocks! Unless Nature runs out of coronavirus variants, it seems safe to assume that this coming fall will feature soul- and economy-destroying lockdowns in many countries while Sweden remains open.

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The tenets of reform Judaism: Black Lives Matter, guns are only for the government, #FollowFauci

by philg

The street-facing wall of a Reform (Jewish) Temple in Washington, D.C.:

If “Black Lives Matter” and “We Support Gun Sense Reforms” are the two commandments worth posting on the wall most visible to the public, is it fair to say that these are the most important elements of American Reform Judaism?

The front door has some good news for anyone who wants to come in and carry out a repeat of the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting (a white male who accurately perceived low-skill-immigration-supporting Jews as his enemies came into the temple rather than traveling to one of the organizations that is actually part of the immigration-industrial complex). Nobody inside is going to be armed.

While we can sometimes trust in Yahweh (but why did He allow the U.S. to have a Second Amendment?), right now it is more important to worship St. Fauci:

The building could have comfortably accommodated more than 500 people, but only about 15, including the rabbi, cantor, et al., had been allowed in for Saturday morning services. The main sanctuary:

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Irrational for Americans to work unless above-median income can be earned

by philg

As we celebrate Tax Day (updated date for coronapanic) and you add up what you’re paying to the Feds and states, it might cheer you up to look back to this 2019 article from a former Senator and a former top executive at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a Wall Street Journal article on income inequality:

Official measures of income inequality, the numbers being debated, are profoundly distorted by what the Census Bureau chooses to count as household income.

The published census data for 2017 portray the top quintile of households as having almost 17 times as much income as the bottom quintile. But this picture is false. The measure fails to account for the one-third of all household income paid in federal, state and local taxes. Since households in the top income quintile pay almost two-thirds of all taxes, ignoring the earned income lost to taxes substantially overstates inequality.

The Census Bureau also fails to count $1.9 trillion in annual public transfer payments to American households. The bureau ignores transfer payments from some 95 federal programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps, which make up more than 40% of federal spending, along with dozens of state and local programs. Government transfers provide 89% of all resources available to the bottom income quintile of households and more than half of the total resources available to the second quintile.

Today government redistributes sufficient resources to elevate the average household in the bottom quintile to a net income, after transfers and taxes, of $50,901—well within the range of American middle-class earnings. The average household in the second quintile is only slightly better off than the average bottom-quintile household. The average second-quintile household receives only 9.4% more, even though it earns more than six times as much income, it has more than twice the proportion of its prime working-age individuals employed, and they work twice as many hours a week on average. The average middle-income household is only 32% better off than the average bottom-quintile households despite earning more than 13 times as much, having 2.5 times as many of prime working-age individuals employed and working more than twice as many hours a week.

Condensed version of the above: Your spending power will be roughly the same if you don’t work at all (and therefore don’t have to file tax returns, extensions, estimated tax, etc.) than if you work full time, unless you are a high-skill worker who can command a wage that is well above the median. The article includes a chart from 2017, before all of the Coronawelfare was ladled on top:

Note the flat shape of the “Net income” (i.e., spending power) curve until one is in the top 20 percent. The old sourpusses who wrote the article conclude with a scolding tone:

America already redistributes enough income to compress the income difference between the top and bottom quintiles from 60 to 1 in earned income down to 3.8 to 1 in income received. If 3.8 to 1 is too large an income differential, those who favor more redistribution need to explain to the bottom 60% of income-earning households why they should keep working when they could get almost as much from riding in the wagon as they get now from pulling it.

But, as Cicero noted more than 2000 years ago, “The cash that comes from selling your labour is vulgar and unacceptable for a gentleman … for wages are effectively the bonds of slavery.” Maybe the fact that we’ve created the world’s largest group of humans who don’t work is a feature, not a bug?

(Separately, I don’t see how the above calculation can be done accurately. Many of our brothers, sisters, and binary resisters who receive free housing and/or reduced rent are in private-sector apartment buildings that have been ordered by local governments to provide free or reduced rent. The rent subsidy is reflected in higher rents paid by market-rate tenants, not in a local government’s budget.)

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Keeping the faith, coronapanic edition

by philg

“They’re Vaccinated and Keeping Their Masks On, Maybe Forever” (NYT):

Whenever Joe Glickman heads out for groceries, he places an N95 mask over his face and tugs a cloth mask on top of it. He then pulls on a pair of goggles.

He has used this safety protocol for the past 14 months. It did not change after he contracted the coronavirus last November. It didn’t budge when, earlier this month, he became fully vaccinated. And even though President Biden said on Thursday that fully vaccinated people do not have to wear a mask, Mr. Glickman said he planned to stay the course.

In fact, he said, he plans to do his grocery run double-masked and goggled for at least the next five years.

He has direct personal evidence that his “safety protocol” does not deliver “safety” (since he actually got COVID-19 while wearing two masks and goggles).

The article reminds us that if you’re seeking financial safety, get a state or local government job:

Leni Cohen, 51, a retired kindergarten teacher from New York City who has a compromised immune system, said she planned to continue wearing a mask when she helped out as a substitute teacher. But what she would like more is for her students to stay masked.

“Kindergartners, while adorable, are quick to share their secretions,” Ms. Cohen wrote in an email listing the illnesses, including colds, strep throat, pneumonia, influenza and parvovirus, that she has caught from her students over the years.

“This year is so different!” she continued. “The kids are not sucking on their hair or putting classroom objects or thumbs in their mouths. Their mouths and noses are covered, so I’m (mostly) protected from their sneezes and coughs. I can see keeping up with masks. It is the safest I’ve ever felt in a classroom full of 5- and 6-year-olds.”

51 years old and retired; she was born after 1960 so if she’d chosen to work in the private sector she would reach standard Social Security retirement age at 67, or 16 years from now.

Is this more evidence that reactions to coronavirus are essentially religious in nature?

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Is cryptocurrency the ultimate estate tax avoidance tool?

by philg

President Biden has promised to raise estate taxes (but wouldn’t it make more sense to get money from Melinda Gates, MacKenzie Bezos, et al.? See Would limiting charitable deductions raise more than a wealth tax?).

Crytocurrency has become more mainstream.

Could these two be put together?

Let’s go back to the family in Can billionaires marry their children to avoid Joe Biden’s new estate taxes? Jack and Jill have a lot of money that they want to transfer to children. Why can’t they buy cryptocurrency and give their children, Morgan and Parker, the relevant passphrases? After Jack and Jill die, if the IRS asks what happened to a big chunk of money that was wired to a crypto exchange overseas some years earlier, the survivors can say “Jack and Jill must have bought some crypto and lost the password” or “The password died with them.”

Morgan and Parker can quietly spend cryptocurrency for the rest of their lives, so long as they don’t lose the passphrase or spend so much in a short amount of time that they draw IRS attention.

Readers who are experts on crypto: What am I missing?

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Smoke alarm with wireless access point for hotels?

by philg

Our April trip to Florida and back entailed a bunch of stays at Hilton-family hotels with crummy Internet. The WiFi networks at Embassy Suites and DoubleTrees seem to be throttled to about 5 Mbps when they work, but coverage was spotty. Working remotely would have been impossible in most of our Embassy Suites room in Atlanta (at right), for example.

When we looked up to pray to the WiFi gods, however, we inevitably saw smoke alarms in the room. These were hard-wired back to a central station. If each device needs to be connected to power and signal, then mounted to the ceiling, why not have that device also provide WiFi service? It couldn’t add more than $20 to the cost of a smoke alarm to have it serve as a wireless access point, right? Maybe the wires back to the central station would need to be beefed up.

Something vaguely along these lines exists for the home: “First Alert Has Its Own Wi-Fi Mesh Router That Hijacks Every Connected Device With Smoke Alarm Warnings” (Gizmodo, January 2018).

Every new hotel by law must have a smoke alarm in each room, right? And every new hotel for commercial reasons must have WiFi coverage. Why isn’t there an off-the-shelf solution combining these two requirements?

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