Passengers love airplanes because they’re fast. Piston-powered aviation is, of course, almost always slower than driving, but time spent at the airport is seldom wasted. I went up to Stuart, Florida the other day to fly the Cirrus and have dinner with the Quiet Birdmen. Here were a few of the sights:
(Icon A5 and a Kaman helicopter as well as the usual Florida sunset.)
Flying turns out to be the slowest part of my life and the part where I’m most likely to engage strangers in casual conversations. Nobody is rushing to answer an email or text.
My mom was Class of 1955 at Radcliffe, the women’s college that was part of Harvard University in parallel with the men’s college (“Harvard College”). Here’s part of a recent email from Radcliffe:
Women’s history is deeply entwined with the history of resistance. In this issue of our Women, Gender, and Society newsletter, we feature stories of women who challenged the status quo, from the German resistance to sex-positive feminism. Learn more about women who inspired change—and don’t miss the latest Schlesinger Library exhibition, which highlights the many facets of women’s movements working toward liberation in the United States, starting at midcentury.
By inference, I think it is also fair to say that people who identify as “women” are allied with Hamas (the “Islamic Resistance Movement”). If my mom’s class is representative, the typical Radcliffe graduate seems to have enjoyed tremendous success in resisting working for wages. Either during or just after college, these women got married to men and then lived off the wages earned by those men, whether they stayed married or availed themselves of the no-fault divorce laws that became available circa 1970 collected alimony.
Speaking of Hamas, once Harvard comes under Hamas’s direct management I wonder what they will think of the following:
Katherine Maher, the former head of Wikipedia and recently hired CEO of state-sponsored NPR, has been in the news lately. Christopher Rufo has been highlighting her years of progressive-themed tweets. This one is my favorite:
(It’s actually a prompt of exclusion since the password does not include “Ze”)
What I can’t figure out is why NPR hired this white native-born 40-year-old. Here’s the NPR diversity policy:
If diversity is their core value, as they say, why couldn’t they find a CEO who fits into more corners of the “big tent” that they’ve identified? A Black gay transgender poor religious old disabled conservative undocumented immigrant, for example. And why did she take the job? She says that she wants to help sex workers, Black and brown people, Muslims, “LGBTQ+ folks”, et al. Shouldn’t she have rejected the offer and told NPR to hire someone who fit into one of those categories?
Lawmakers must consider the intersectional consequence that this will have on activists, sex workers, Black and brown communities, Muslim communities, LGBTQ+ folks, disabled people and other marginalized communities before they make a change. https://t.co/ibpXOyYGSt
(It’s a “man’s world”, but someone with only a bachelor’s degree was able to get the top jobs at Wikipedia and NPR without identifying as a “man”?)
My brothers and I had some deep talks about this recently. We're each over thirty with real jobs, and deep discomfort about what it would mean to bring a child into a warming world. https://t.co/qFW31DUrPO
Don’t have kids, but invite 100 million migrants and their kids into a high-carbon society from their low-carbon societies? Hearing about the possibility that immigrants destroyed the natives (Anglo-Saxons moving into present-day Britain) makes her more confident that open borders are the correct choice for current Americans:
Yeah the Wikipedia article is fascinating! There’s this hideous thing happening in the US right. Ow where the white nationalists are claiming to caucus around Anglo-Saxon identity as part of their anti-immigration, racist platform. It’s a case of, “have you read history?”
Here’s a prizewinner from the AP Art class at the Lincoln-Sudbury (Maskachusetts) public high school:
(I blacked out the student-artist’s name in case she one day becomes a Deplorable.)
I’m not sure if “penis made from birth control pills” is the title of the work or if it has a title at all.
Science shut down the high school in question completely or partially for 1.5 years. Part of this period was “hybrid” in which students gathered two mornings per week and then retreated to their suburban bunkers. Presumably SARS-CoV-2 was told not to spread during these handful of hours, but the virus would have rejected a demand to refrain from spreading during a full school week.
Thanks to the hard-working folks in China and at Walmart, stuff has gotten cheaper. The result is that we live in large environments crammed with stuff. This makes it tough to find one’s keys, the cup of coffee that one recently set down, etc.
Instead of AI taking over the creative jobs of writing poetry and making art, why not have AI watch everything that happens in the apartment or house (video and inferences from the video stored locally for privacy) and then we can say “Yo, ChatGPT, where did I leave my keys?” If we get in the habit of showing documents that arrive in the mail to a camera we can also ask the AI to remind us when it is time to pay a property tax bill or ask where we left an important document.
This could be rolled into some of the boxes that Unifi makes. They already make sensors for the house:
They claim to have “AI” in their $2500 “DSLR” PoE camera (only 18 watts):
Their basic cameras are $120 each. If the basic cameras are good enough, this should be doable on top of the Unifi infrastructure for perhaps $300 per room plus whatever the central AI brain costs.
Speaking of Unifi, I’m wondering why they don’t sell a combined access point/camera. If the customer has just a single CAT 5/6 wire to the back yard, wouldn’t it make sense to have the same PoE-powered device handle both security and WiFi? As far as I know, there isn’t any combined camera/AP.
(I’m still using the TP-Link Omada system that I bought because Unifi’s products were all out of stock. See TP-Link Omada: like a mesh network, except that it works (alternative to UniFi). Everything works, but they don’t seem to be trying to expand beyond networking as Unifi has. Maybe when WiFi 8 comes out it will be time to trash all of the working WiFi 6 Omada gear and get with the Unifi/Ubiquiti program.)
Speaking of houses, here’s a recent New York Times article informing us regarding what a typical American “couple” looks like (the word is used 11 times in the article)…
Happy Tax Day for those in the U.S. and also U.S. citizens who live abroad and get no services from the U.S. but still must pay taxes (consider the U.S. citizens held hostage by Gazans, for example).
How about a new 3 percent tax from a restaurant on the restaurant and kept by the restaurant, couched as an “Admin Fee” on the receipt?
One of my companions asked what it was for. The waiter responded, “It’s a fee that we incur to keep our prices competitive.”
Houlton, Maine has at least two downtown tattoo shops. While passing the one below I shouted out to my companions, “Brainwave: We get a tattoo with the city name and date every time we watch an eclipse.” This idea was topped with “It has to be a face tattoo.”
United Way, the nonprofit that operates about half of the country’s 200-plus 211 centers, and other poverty researchers blame that disconnect partly on the federal poverty line, which they say hasn’t kept up with the real cost of living.
The share of households below the census-designated federal poverty line has barely budged since 2010. Meanwhile, poverty researchers say a large and fast-growing group of people are earning too much to qualify for social services and not enough to afford the basics where they live.
The trend, which was hugely accelerated starting in 2021, probably isn’t going to be reversed. The question then becomes how should a person of modest means, yet not entitled to “not-welfare”, adapt to a society that has been degraded for the working class?
Humans are social animals and a lot of the misery inflicted on the working class has to do with their standard of living being lower than that of nearby non-working people on what used to be called “welfare” and is now “means-tested”. The working class person will experience pain at the grocery store when seeing a relaxed-from-not-working customer pay for a huge cart of groceries via EBT card, for example.
How about a move to a state where people who work have a higher spending power than people who don’t work? “The Work versus Welfare Trade‐Off: 2013” (CATO) is filled with pre-Biden dollar figures that are absurdly out of date, but the percentages and rankings are still relevant. Here are the states where a working class American is going to feel the dumbest for not having gone on the welfare career track starting at age 16:
Here are the states where a median worker might enjoy twice the spending power of someone who chooses the relaxed non-working lifestyle:
We then probably want to look at these states to figure out which ones have the best opportunities for free recreation, the best schools for kids so that they can move up, and the best weather. In the report covered by “Surprise: Florida and Texas Excel in Math and Reading Scores” (NYT 2015), Texas, Florida, and Colorado had the best schools among the above states. Florida and Colorado have great weather and free recreation. Florida is ranked #8 for happiness by WalletHub and Colorado is down at #31. So maybe the answer for a working class person feeling like a chump is to move to Florida! (Maybe not to Palm Beach County, though, if envy is an issue!)
The same advice applies to people who are rich, incidentally, if the rich person wants to be in an environment where anyone with a job can thrive and not suffer despair. Inequality isn’t a terrible thing, from a rich person’s point of view, but for those who adhere to the now-obsolete Protestant work ethic, there is value to being in a place where the working people one interacts with are cheerful.
An Arizona lawyer had an entrepreneurial idea: advertise his services over the Internet, the global web of computer networks.
Advertisements are beginning to appear all around the network, usually followed swiftly by messages of outrage and dismay from longtime denizens of cyberspace. However, no one can recall so relentless and pervasive an advertisement as the one sent last Tuesday by Mr. Canter’s law firm, Canter & Siegel.
Paying nothing beyond his $30 monthly connection fee, and with little more than the press of a button, Mr. Canter advertised his firm’s bid to provide legal services for people wanting to participate in the planned “green card” immigration lottery, in which the Federal Government intends to allow foreign applicants to vie for a United States work permit. Mr. Canter’s missive went to nearly every nook and cranny of the Internet, which has an estimated population of 20 million users.
The mailing list that Mr. Canter employed was the addresses of more than 9,000 Internet Usenet news groups. The Usenet is a particularly anarchic and popular segment of the Internet composed of discussion groups, typically in the form of electronic bulletin boards.
“The Internet is changing,” Mr. Canter said. “People don’t like the invasion of what has been their private world. But as long as it’s set up the way it is, where anyone has access to it, it’s a public forum, and they have to accept anything that comes into it.
“In fact,” Mr. Canter added, “I’ve received a lot of calls from people who want to know how to do it.”
So pleased is he with the the response, in fact, that he said he planned to write a book on how to advertise on the Internet.
in the early 1990s, Congress devised the Green Card Lottery program to encourage diversity in immigration. Unfortunately, it also provided an opportunity for charlatans to charge exorbitant fees to file lottery entries for hopeful immigrants.
In truth, all it took to enter the drawing was a postcard with your name and address mailed to the designated location.
Canter and Siegel, a husband-and-wife law firm, decided to join the lottery frenzy by pitching their own overpriced services to immigrant communities.
The spam is still available from Google Groups, which establishes the date as April 12, 1994:
Related:
Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel (Wikipedia): Canter and Siegel were not the first Usenet spammers. The “Green Card” spam, however, was the first commercial Usenet spam
As noted in How’s your eclipse viewing?, I wussed out on the Fredericksburg, Texas eclipse plan in favor of hitting the shorter-totality Northeast where the forecast was for clear skies. As with nearly all of my decisions, this one turned out to be bad because the friend I had planned to visit/join in Austin ended up having a perfect view of totality (the clouds disappeared due to the cooling effect of the eclipse somehow).
The day started with pocketing snacks at Jet Aviation in Bedford, Maskachusetts (Hanscom Field):
We loaded up the plane with three generations of my friend’s family and had an uneventful VFR flight at 17,500′ to KHUL (Houlton, Maine). The FAA had issued a cautionary NOTAM:
To assist FBOs with staging aircraft and to ease ramp congestion, aircraft departing airports along the eclipse path are strongly encouraged to coordinate their departure times as early as possible. There may be a higher traffic volume than normal anticipated at airports along the path of the eclipse. Traffic should anticipate delays during peak traffic periods. Aircraft parking may be limited, particularly at the smaller, uncontrolled airports.
And, indeed, many airports in Vermont had instituted a prior permission required (PPR) policy. Watching the eclipse while celebrating social justice and Bernie Sanders in Burlington, VT, for example, wasn’t possible last-minute. Despite this somewhat dire forecast from the FAA, we had no trouble getting VFR advisories from Air Traffic Control all the way into KHUL and there was no shortage of parking.
The town-run airport had plowed out its crosswind runway and had that available for parking, but used it for only about four larger planes.
2700′ of parking is a lot of parking!
They were short on fuel, but we managed to 50 gallons of Jet A in order to keep Greta Thunberg happy. Speaking of Greta T, here’s a Citation Sovereign that came in from Minneapolis. The forecast for much of the Midwest was clear, but apparently not clear enough for these (12?) Heroes of Climate Change (1,700 gallons and over 30,000 lbs. max takeoff weight!):
Some images need to be repeated from the earlier post. A partial eclipse of the sun by the moon(-ey):
The town set up a “star park” adjacent to the airport and organized a two-schoolbus shuttle between downtown and the airport:
As noted previously, downtown was hosting a lively party with music and dressed-up characters and a commitment to social justice (“All Labs Matter”):
The George Washington statue was augmented, Elizabeth Warren’s cousins danced, and costumes were worn:
All of the parks in the downtown area were filled with viewers, but never unpleasantly crowded. Note the logging truck crossing the Meduxnekeag River:
Quite a few NASA and NOAA employees seemed to be enjoying a taxpayer-funded vacation trip to see the eclipse and some of them gave talks or organized events:
I thought that these folks with a Pennsylvania plate won the award for longest drive to Houlton, but apparently someone drove more than 1,400 miles to Houlton from north of Chicago.
There were lines for most of the restaurants in town, but food trucks had come in both on Main St. and at the airport. More important, the local Amish were selling donuts for $2 each:
The Amish grow potatoes, of course, but also have quite a few greenhouses. Speaking of religion, the official established U.S. religion is observed in Houlton:
At 1:45 pm we caught the shuttle back to the airport in prep for totality at 3:32 pm.
The ramp was lively, but nowhere near as crammed as a typical South Florida airport in the winter:
Edward Tufte tells speakers to arrive early because people wander in gradually and then leave suddenly. Thus, it is better to be available for questions before a talk! It wasn’t a mad rush for the exit, but the airport and airspace was at least 5X busier for departure compared to arrival. It didn’t seem practical to get advisories from Boston Center until we were well southwest of Bangor and on a different frequency from the airspace over Houlton. The NetJets crew couldn’t depart for quite some time because they had trouble getting ATC’s attention for an IFR clearance and their ops specs prevent them from doing the obvious and departing VFR.
The Science education didn’t stop in Houlton. When returning to the Land of Science-denial via Logan Airport, I learned that an N95 mask works great when loosely arranged over a full beard. Also that healthy young females face maximum risk from SARS-CoV-2:
Some nice views of the city courtesy of Delta Airlines:
Conclusion: We should pray to the omnipotent God of the Sacred Trans-Enhanced Rainbow Flag to arrange all future eclipses so that they pass over Houlton.
Let’s close this out with some porn for aircraft owners:
(Big city airports are now at $1,000/month for a long-term lease on a hangar for a little Cessna or Cirrus. In post-Cuomo South Florida, now home to half of what used to be New York’s planes, you might pay $1,200-1,500/month to store a plane that, pre-Biden, was worth $80,000.)
Related:
“Massachusetts family among Tesla owners who waited hours to charge car after total solar eclipse” (WCVB): When the Livesey family found a charging station in St. Johnsbury, there were lines of electric vehicles dozens deep. “I got there with one mile only to find out there were about 60 cars waiting to be charged,” Livesey said. … The Livesey family waited more than four hours to charge their Tesla and the last ticket they handed out before leaving was No. 189, and they saw more vehicles pulling up to the stations. [A friend missed totality due to EV charging delays. He tried to get his kids up to northern Vermont from Boston and a combination of traffic and the time required for a mid-trip charge of his electric Ford pickup meant that they couldn’t get far enough north in time.]
