A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
January 28, 2024, front page of the New York Times:
And the link to the full story if you feel that you need to know more.
An window into what’s on the minds of progressives! (But how is it consistent with their love for the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad? Neither of those groups is renowned for celebrating the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle.)
Full post, including commentsAn Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford covers a few mostly forgotten foreign policy challenges that Gerald Ford faced.
The Fall of Saigon in April 1975 was depressing, but people didn’t blame Ford for it.
One that lifted his reputation was a debacle by body count standard: the Mayaguez incident (May 1975). The Khmer Rouge seized a merchant vessel and its crew. The U.S. military rescue operation resulted in as many deaths among our soldiers as the number of crew members rescued. The American public was nonetheless happy to accept this as a victory and it boosted Ford’s approval rating substantially.
The U.S. gave the green light to Indonesian President Suharto to invade East Timor in December 1975, a former Portuguese colony, so long as the Muslim takeover of the Christian territory was done quickly. At least 100,000 Christians were killed, mostly via starvation, out of a total population of about 600,000. After decades of occupation and war, East Timor became a country in 2002. It’s fair to say, therefore, that Gerald Ford had a far larger impact on the Catholics of East Timor than he did on Americans.
Palestinians killed our ambassador to Lebanon, Francis E. Meloy Jr., in June 1976, and left his bullet-riddled body at a garbage dump. Having gone nuts with aggression in response to the kidnapping of the Mayaguez crew, none of whom were harmed, we didn’t retaliate.
The Mayaguez response included “Ford ordered the Air Force to sink any Cambodian boats moving between Koh Tang and the mainland” (Wikipedia). It’s unclear why we aren’t doing that with the Houthis. They’ve attacked U.S. warships as well as merchant ships. Why do we allow them any use of the ocean? We recently lost two Navy SEALs who were trying to board a ship:
This wouldn’t have happened under Ford’s orders because the ship would have been sunk by a plane or shell without being boarded.
Ford put a lot of effort into negotiating with the Soviet Union, but ended up with nothing to show for it. Ford and Henry Kissinger (later a Theranos board member… for three years!) spent a lot of time trying to take away from Israel territory won in the Yom Kippur War (a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria that, like October 7 for the Gazans, began well). Ultimately, Jimmy Carter could take credit for the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt (1979) and the SALT II agreement with the Soviets (1979; repudiated by the U.S. Senate after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan).
The book is a good reminder that we’re not the boss of the rest of the world and nobody listens to us unless we present a credible threat of carpet bombing with B-52s.
Full post, including commentsWe have two Bertazzoni-brand wall ovens. One is a microwave that purportedly also works as a thermal oven, but is wildly inaccurate for temperature. The other is a big convection oven that is even worse for temperature control (if you set 350 you might get 310 or 400).
I’m trying to figure out if I can live my domestic dream of a GE Advantium microwave that can also broil via a halogen light and a wall oven that can inject steam into the cavity for roasting turkey without drying it out, a feature that we had on a KitchenAid range back in Maskachusetts. GE and its brother/sister/binary-resister brands Cafe and Monogram don’t make any full-height ovens with a steam feature. LG and Samsung are the reasonably-priced brands that do make full-size ovens with a steam kicker and they don’t offer Advantium. So I am trying to do a photo montage of the disparate brands to see which ones clash the least.
The LG oven photo comes with a huge red badge on it. I asked ChatGPT 4 to remove it:
I’d like you to edit this photo to remove the red badge at lower right and fill in the pixels to be symmetric:
Maybe readers will want to weigh in on this important decoration issue! Here are Monogram, Cafe (no logo!), and GE versions of the same 240V 30″ Advantium wall oven:
Here is the Samsung steam-capable oven:
(The LG is above.) Here’s another version of the LG:
The “Signature Kitchen Suite” product appears to be exactly the same oven internally, but costs about $2,000 more, maybe due to heavier and fancier faceplate and door, a three-year warranty, a dedicated service organization for the elite/stupid. etc.
I’m thinking that the Monogram+Samsung and Monogram+Signature are least likely to cause a visitor to the house to ask “What happened?” or “Who hurt your kitchen?”
Full post, including commentsAn Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford reminds us of the 1976 panic regarding a respiratory virus: a strain of influenza called “swine flu”. This was the genesis of the modern muscular CDC. Congress appropriated $500 million in pre-Carter/pre-Biden dollars. The CDC said that every American should get vaccinated (Republican Ford publicly accepted the sacrament; Democrat Jimmy Carter refused it). The vaccine was rushed to the market, greatly enriching four pharma companies who also were indemnified from any liability. This indemnification turned out to be useful. The vaccine was at least 10X more likely to cause Guillain-Barré Syndrome (paralysis) than it was to protect the injected person from death due to influenza (contemporary CDC page on the subject).
Abram Saperstein, who changed his name to Albert Sabin, was recruited to sell the idea of universal vaccination. Sabin was famous at the time for having created the oral polio vaccine. After a few months, however, Sabin concluded that the rushed-to-market swine flu vaccine was more likely to harm than help and that a 1918-style epidemic was unlikely.
Speaking of Jimmy Carter, the book notes that his campaign promises were similar to Javier “Chainsaw” Milei’s in Argentina. Candidate Carter promised to reduce the number of federal agencies from 1,900 to 200, for example. What did President Carter deliver? A brand new Cabinet-level Department of Education that kicked off decades of tuition inflation at American colleges and universities via subsidized student loans and grants.
Personal health anecdote: Following the example of Jimmy Carter, the greatest president in our nation’s history, I ignored CVS’s constant reminders of flu vaccine availability. In early January, embedded in Boston with the nation’s smartest and most assiduous mask and vaccine Karens, I got a truly horrible cough/flu. I cursed myself for ignoring CDC advice. After limping home on JetBlue (I actually wore a mask in hopes of protecting fellow passengers!) I went to a German-trained physician here in Palm Beach County and tested negative for both COVID and influenza.
Related:
Today is the day, supposedly, for Apple to begin delivering its $3500-4150 version of the $500 Meta Quest 3. Have any of you ordered one? Tried one? Figured out what could be done with a device that becomes a 1 lb. stone around your head after two hours of battery are exhausted?
As with everything else from Silicon Valley, it is important to be young and Black to be an effective user:
But what if you’re not young and Black? What would you say that you do here?
Based on a quick search, it doesn’t seem as though the obvious “take a walk through every famous art museum” app is available, either for Meta’s or Apple’s headset. On the more mature Meta product, it seems as though shooter games are popular. But who is going to invest in developing great games when there are only 20 million Quest headsets out there and many have been collecting dust on shelves? A non-VR game can be sold to almost anyone on the planet (Xbox, PlayStation, PC). The problem is yet worse for the Apple VR world. Apple is planning/hoping to sell just 400,000 headsets in the first year. A $20 game that gets 10 percent market share will yield just $800,000 in revenue for a developer.
I was wrong about Tesla’s prospects for success and wrong about Bitcoin, so I’m probably wrong about the Vision Pro. But what will it actually be used for?
Full post, including commentsHere’s an idea to bridge the divide on abortion: codify sexual responsibility for men into the law. If a woman carries a child to term, she can automatically make the man fully $$ responsible both for herself and for the child, if confirmed by paternity test. Should be an idea that both parties can agree on.
Elon Musk responded with “Yes”. You’d think that he would already be aware of the U.S. system; see “Elon Musk Battles To Keep Custody Case In Texas Where Child Support Is Capped At $2,760 Per Month For 3 Kids, Despite Being The Richest Man In The World”:
Elon Musk is in the midst of a custody battle with Grimes, and things are getting as complicated as a SpaceX mission.
According to reports from Business Insider, Musk initially filed in Texas, accusing Grimes of moving to California to avoid the Lone Star State’s child support cap of $2,760 per month for three kids.
Grimes fired back with a countersuit in California, seeking physical custody. Musk reportedly had custody of their 3-year-old son X Æ A-Xii against Grimes’ wishes. The different child support limits in California, where there’s no cap, could mean a hefty sum for Musk, currently the richest person in the world.
Given that family court profits are a huge sector of the U.S. economy and Vivek was claiming to be qualified to run the whole thing, I find it fascinating that Vivek is unfamiliar with the current system in which having sex with an already-married specialist physician can yield a spending power equivalent to what an American who goes through medical school and residency to work as a primary care doc can enjoy (profitability depends heavily on the state in which the plaintiff resides/sues). Some lawyers who specialize in this area refer to child support as “woman support” since the typical plaintiff identifies as female, the money is paid to the adult plaintiff, and there is no requirement that a successful plaintiff spend any of the family court profits on the child.
Hunter Biden was reported to be paying $20,000 per month to Lunden Roberts (Daily Mail), thus giving her an after-tax spending power in excess of a primary care doc’s (the $240,000 per year was tax-free). Why wouldn’t someone in politics such as Vivek have followed the Biden family and thus learned that sex in the U.S. can pay better than most jobs?
Of course, it isn’t just Vivek. Twitter shows over 5,000 replies to the post. Most of them seem to be from people unaware that it is already possible to get a court-ordered paternity test and then 18-23 years of cashflow (depending on the state).
How can this blind spot be explained?
Related:
A tweet from Barbara Lee, California Democrat who is running for U.S. Senate:
52 years ago, Shirley Chisholm announced her campaign for president—becoming the first person of color & Democratic woman to run for the office.
At the time, as a Black single mom on welfare, I didn’t believe in America’s political & governmental systems.
Then I met Shirley…
She was able to marry the taxpayer and have all of her needs met (housing, health care, food; maybe not Smartphone and home broadband like today). Why wouldn’t she “believe in” a system that transferred all of that money from working Americans into her pocket?
Full post, including commentsBack in October 2022, we ordered a $13,249 Sub-Zero refrigerator to replace a 42-inch-wide KitchenAid from 2003. The KitchenAid was a $500 landlord special wrapped in $3,000 (pre-Biden dollars) of cabinetry. It looked beautiful with panels that match our cabinets. Unfortunately, the fridge was set up with a single compressor and single evaporator. Cold air to the fridge was supplied via a duct/door from the freezer compartment to the fridge compartment. Failed insulation after 20 years between the two compartments resulted in frost building up every 3-4 weeks and causing the freezer to go down to -20F while the fridge went up to +50F or higher. The automatic defrost mechanism wasn’t hitting the location where this frost was building. KitchenAid’s latest and greatest fridges weren’t exactly compatible with our panels and, in any case, were out of stock. Everyone seems to like the local Sub-Zero service organization and friends with Sub-Zs were happy with the product, so decided to go “Full Douche”.
The new fridge showed up in mid-January 2024, 15 months after our order. Partly this was due to underpricing in a world of raging inflation (corrected to some extent; the current price is $14,250, a 7.5 percent increase that in no way suggests that the U.S. is plagued by inflation). Partly this was due to Sub-Zero having introduced a new product line that relies on R600a refrigerant, which is more energy efficient and also enables a more compact cooling system, thus resulting in 0.5 cu. ft. more freezer space.
The aesthetics, such as they are, take some getting used to. It’s a huge wall of stainless steel in what is otherwise a somewhat traditional kitchen. The cream-colored cabinet panels that we had before looked a lot better in my opinion. If you’re starting from scratch and have the option to do matching cabinet panels, I recommend that. Actually, if you’re starting from scratch and have the option to use a non-built-in fridge that can be purchased at any time at Home Depot for $1,000 to $2,500 (a dual evaporator model at the higher end), I recommend that! Despite its hulking size, this 42-inch-wide fridge holds only 24 cu. ft. in the two compartments combined. You can make a freestanding fridge look like a built-in simply by digging out a one-foot space behind the fridge. A 36-inch-wide LG freestanding fridge has 30 cu. ft. of space. It’s 36 inches deep without handles (compare to 26″ for the Sub-Z). It has dual evaporators, all kinds of fancy features including a clear door, and costs $3,200. If it were to die, Home Depot has a whole page of 36-inch wide freestanding fridges, including single-evaporator models (like our old KitchenAid!) starting at just over $1,000.
The first thing that we noticed is the noise. This fridge has, I think, two compressors. Each one is definitely louder than on a standard LG or Whirlpool fridge and the two together make a continuous rumbling that is audible from 15′ away. Everyone who comes to your house will be constantly reminded of what a rich douche you are!
The second thing is that the ice/water dispenser is a design failure compared to what KitchenAid, LG, or anyone else provides. A glass must go twice as deep into the fridge as on the old KitchenAid. If you’re trying to make a powdered drink, for example, it is impossible to stir and fill at the same time (was easy to do with the KitchenAid). More problematic, the water continues to flow for a split second after you take the cup away, thus resulting in a significant spray into the drip tray.
[Update April 10, 2024: After three months of use, we tried for the first time to remove the ice bin to dump ice into a cooler. The bin couldn’t be removed because there was ice stuck in a drop-down door that is part of the ice-making mechanism and maybe a sensor for when the bin is too full. Service was called!]
We haven’t had time to experience whether Sub-Zero’s ethylene gas filter (replace once/year for $65) and other preservation tricks will, in fact, keep produce in good shape for longer. A retailer in Maskachusetts did a test back in 2020 and concluded that “Sub-Zero was the overall winner. It did an excellent job on the grapes and lemon. The cucumber could have been fresher.” The Sub-Zero does have three completely separate sealed drawers in the freezer and four in the fridge, so maybe that helps reduce cross-contamination.
The fridge has built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It was easy to set up the app and the fridge on Wi-Fi. However, the app doesn’t seem to do what you’d want it to do, i.e., warn you that the actual fridge temp is nowhere near the set fridge temp. In fact, the app can’t show the current refrigerator temperatures (displayed on a panel inside the fridge), but only what it is set to do. This was obvious during the startup phase when the fridge was set to 37 and actually at 70.
[Update March 2024: The app alerted us to phantom temperature settings changes, usually by just a degree, even though nobody was in the fridge touching the controls. This resulted in a service visit and then a return service visit with a new control panel.]
The interior lighting is awesome. If you hire a decorator to come in once a week and arrange everything that you bought at Publix, the result will be a tasteful beautifully lit display. (Or cram in 35 cu. ft. of food, half of it expired, and it will look like our fridge.)
Owners seem to like Sub-Zero. Here’s the satisfaction ranking from Consumer Reports:
Maybe the old refrigerant was associated with a quieter compressor because Consumer Reports reviewed an older model and said that it was 5/5 on quietness. On the third hand, our house came with a ghetto $700 Frigidaire R600a-based 11 cu. ft. fridge built in 2018. It is completely silent (lives in a pantry closet, but we’ve never heard it, even when going into the closet to get items). So the latest and greatest Thunberg-approved Earth-saving refrigerant does not necessarily result in noise.
Three guys from the appliance store (Jetson in Stuart, Florida) came to deliver and install the new fridge ($275, including hauling away the aesthetically beloved KitchenAid). Although I usually don’t see color, I noticed that all three were Black. Skilled labor like this in Boston, by contrast, almost always involves a team of white people coming to the house; Blacks in Maskachusetts occupy a parallel society to which whites seldom gain access. It’s about a two-hour process for removal, delivery, and careful installation.
The KitchenAid lasted for 20 years so the good news is that we have to live with the wall-of-stainless look and the noise for only 20-25 years (median age for replacement of a Sub-Zero is about 22 years, supposedly). I’m still trying to figure out who thought stainless was such a great idea! It won’t accept fridge magnets, which is tragic. It isn’t easy to clean. If stainless steel is so beautiful, why not cover a bedroom or living room wall in stainless? (Elon Musk might be on board with this! He is a huge proponent of stainless steel in rockets and in the Cybertruck.) I guess that circles us back to building a nook for a 36-inch-wide fridge. The visual impact of one of those is much smaller both due to the reduced width and the lack of a compressor tower on top.
[Update: After three months, the fridge has required three service visits (see above). It may be that the mass-market companies have better engineering resources for controls and ice makers!]
Related:
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu responded to Gov. Maura Healey’s potential plan to use the Melnea A. Cass Recreational Complex in Roxbury as an overflow shelter site for migrants. Wu said she is working closely with the state to find solutions amid the ongoing migrant crisis, but expressed some frustration around the idea of using the Cass complex.
“For the first community where this is being proposed to be Roxbury, a community that over so many decades has faced disinvestment, redlining, disproportionate outcomes, it’s very painful,” Wu said during an appearance on WBUR’s “Radio Boston” Monday morning.
Amid historic levels of migrations, the emergency shelter system in Massachusetts has been under stress for months. Healey declared a state of emergency last year, and instituted a 7,500-family cap on the system. For months she has been pressuring federal officials and lawmakers to give Massachusetts more funding to deal with the crisis and make it easier for migrants to obtain work permits.
But the flow of migrants into the state shows no signs of slowing. More than 600 families were on a waitlist for emergency shelter as of Friday, and dozens of families have been forced to sleep at Logan Airport.
When I arrived at MIT in 1979, Roxbury was a Black neighborhood. This history describes what a hater might call a population replacement:
By the early 1970s, a combination of declining property values in Roxbury and rising values in the South End and discriminatory home lending practices had conspired to push Boston’s black community into Roxbury. As Latinos moved into Boston in greater numbers in the 1970s and ’80s, Roxbury became more heterogeneous. In 1990, the neighborhood was 79 percent African American, 14 percent Latino and 3 percent white.
[in 2019], Roxbury is 53 percent black, 28 percent Latino and 12 percent white.
It seems that there is no room for migrants in Weston, Wellesley, Dover, Concord (a sanctuary city), Lincoln, Newton (a sanctuary city), or other nearly-all-white towns with 1-2-acre zoning minimums. Maybe Newton doesn’t make sense because the teachers are on strike and migrants are entitled to a U.S. taxpayer-funded education (teacher strikes are illegal in Massachusetts, but 98 percent of the Newton teachers voted to break the law; apparently, they can’t be fired from their union job even when they violate the law).
Related:
An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford describes a vigorous debate about whether approximately 50,000 Vietnamese refugees should be admitted to the U.S. This was a non-representative group containing the professional and managerial elite of South Vietnam. Nonetheless, opposition was intense, including among liberal Democrats who today would be demanding more immigration. George McGovern, for example, and California governor Jerry Brown (he sought to make it illegal for private groups with California to help Vietnamese immigrants settle).
Other countries, such as the Philippines, were even more hostile to taking in these educated migrants.
Ultimately, closer to 125,000 refugees arrived in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War. That’s comparable to the number who walk across the southern border and introduce themselves to our border patrol agents every 12 days (300,000+ per month).
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