Text message exchange with a couple of 24-year-olds:
Me: We can come over now.
Them: We are at the gym!
Me: You’re always there. I am amazed you haven’t gotten coronaplague yet!
Them: Hahaha I know! The gym we go to is super clean.
Surface contamination has been ruled out as a significant source of coronavirus infection, right? (see below, however, for how cleaning can cut flu risk by 2 percent) Everyone agrees that it is now mostly about aerosols and therefore a gym is a perfect environment for spreading, yes? (People breathing hard and relying on non-N95 masks and/or bandanas as PPE.)
Masks make people complacent and prone to ignoring instructions to keep a 6′ distance. I wonder if the sight of workers with spray bottles and paper towels has the same effect. These 24-year-olds feel that they are significantly less likely to get infected because they’ve seen every surface being wiped, despite the fact that wiped surfaces are irrelevant when faced with an aerosol enemy.
“I didn’t have time to do anything,” said Kevin Escoffier. I just had time to send a message to my team. I’m sinking, I’m not joking. MAYDAY.”
Escoffier, 40, the French sailor who was lying in third place in the Vendée Globe solo round-the-world race, was talking after his dramatic rescue. On Monday afternoon, 840 miles south west of Cape Town, in strong winds and heavy seas, his 60ft carbon fibre boat PRB slammed into a wave at 27 knots and broke in half. PRB is one of the latest generation Imoca 60s with foils to lift it up so that it is practically flying. Escoffier abandoned ship and took to his life raft.
Escoffier was at 40°55′ S, 9°18′ E (source), confirming the old saying:
Below 40 degrees south there is no law; below 50 degrees south there is no God.
The local 9th graders were sentenced to watch Hidden Figures by their English teacher. Immigrant Dad’s running text message commentary:
Watching the movie “Hidden Figures” about Black women at NASA. About how they created the space program for us.
I stopped the movie to say that the real hidden figures were 1600 Nazi scientists, led by Werner von Braun, the SS Sturmbannführer [major] who basically did everything.
All white males.
Aryans.
In this movie, von Braun is nowhere to be seen despite scenes with Alan Shepard and NASA top brass
Can’t afford to have an SS guy in this poetic script.
Black women all coding now. And teaching white men how to do it.
This whole film was a giant waste of time.
I need to help my kid write a paper referencing this work of woke art. I am teaching them how to feed idiots what they want to hear. Useful in life.
Another friend chimed in:
The scene where Harrison smashes the Colored Ladies Room sign never happened, as in real life Katherine refused to walk the extra distance to use the colored bathroom and, in her words, “just went to the White one”
A Silicon Valley coder in the chat group:
These ladies make money in a more civilized manner: https://youtu.be/hsm4poTWjMs (featuring Joe Biden’s friend Cardi B). Those fingernails are like Chinese foot binding, they say, “I am too important to do a ghetto job like programming.” Remember that the black struggle was all about getting off the plantation; why go back to it with all the Indians and people on the autism spectrum? [black power fist emoji]
I’m not sure that the youngsters learned what the teacher was hoping they would…
They are watching and making fun of it. Especially black women programmers. In [one kid’s] view Blacks are as rare in computer science as whites in basketball.
How does Immigrant Dad’s history lesson hold up? Wikipedia:
Operation Paperclip was a secret program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency (JIOA) largely carried out by special agents of Army CIC, in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians, such as Wernher von Braun and his V-2 rocket team, were taken from Germany to the United States, for U.S. government employment, primarily between 1945 and 1959. Many were former members, and some were former leaders, of the Nazi Party.
Some January photos from the Kennedy Space Center. Note that programmer Margaret Hamilton is depicted larger than life size, while Werner von Braun is at 1/10th the scale. (The photo on the bottom is captioned “The Original Mercury Seven Astronauts with a USAF F-106.” Alan Shepard is among them. They are but midgets next to Margaret Hamilton.)
And this is a good time to reprise my heroic Cirrus SR20 landing on a 15,000′ runway (same trip):
Also a good time to remember our hosts down there, Al Worden, who sadly died just 6 weeks later despite seeming to be in perfect health, and Bruce Melnick, helicopter pilot-turned-astronaut.
Just hours after Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl voted to ban outdoor dining at L.A. County’s 31,000 restaurants over COVID-19 safety concerns, she visited a restaurant in Santa Monica, where she dined outdoors, FOX 11 has learned on Monday.
During Tuesday’s L.A. County Board of Supervisors meeting, Kuehl referred to outside dining as “a most dangerous situation” over what she described as a risk of tables of unmasked patrons potentially exposing their servers to the coronavirus.
“This is a serious health emergency and we must take it seriously,” Kuehl said.
“The servers are not protected from us, and they’re not protected from their other tables that they’re serving at that particular time, plus all the hours in which they’re working.”
Kuehl went on to vote in support of restricting outdoor dining in Los Angeles County, which passed by a 3-2 margin of the Board of Supervisors.
In other words, reasonable minds can differ on whether or not restaurant dining is permissible. Everyone can agree that public schools for children of the non-elite, closed since March, should remain closed. From the LAUSD site (retrieved 12/1):
As the level of the virus in the Los Angeles area remains widespread, state guidelines say schools cannot reopen at this time, and we will not reopen schools until it’s safe and appropriate to do so. We are preparing to serve students at schools as soon as it’s possible, in the safest way possible. Our plans include the highest standards for health, education and employee practices at schools.
“I think it is good that they don’t wear face masks,” one mother tells FRANCE 24, as she leaves her children at school. “I think it is very important that they go to school, otherwise it would be very difficult for me to work.”
The teachers also believe it is very important to stay open, particularly for struggling students.
“They need a teacher in the same room as them to cheer them on and clarify things,” says Charlotte Hammarback, a teacher at the NYA Elementary School in Stockholm. “Most of the time these students will not ask for help, they will just sit and wait until someone comes up to them.”
A friend wanted to be dropped off in Bend, Oregon and not witness the inevitable mask disputes of commercial airline travel. We loaded up the extra seats with family members for the following route:
KBED (Boston area)
KGYY (Chicago)
KRAP (Mt. Rushmore)
KBDN (Bend, Oregon)
KHWD (San Francisco area)
KBVU (Las Vegas)
KBWG (Bowling Green, Kentucky)
KGAI (Washington, D.C.)
KBED
It was an 11-day trip total and my main take-away is that this is too short if the goal is to show children the United States. Even with a reasonably fast airplane, three weeks would make more sense and be a better use of dinosaur blood and CO2 footprint.
Late fall weather in the U.S. is pretty ugly. On a lot of days roughly half the country was covered with airmets for turbulence and icing and the occasional sigmet for severe turbulence or thunderstorms. Morning of our departure from Boston (ignore the route):
We spent three days getting out to Oregon in order to avoid surface winds gusting up to 48 knots in South Dakota. We left Bend a day earlier than planned in order to avoid strong winds and severe turbulence. We stayed an extra day in San Francisco for the same reason. We departed Las Vegas a day earlier than planned in order to avoid forecast thunderstorms and snow over the Rockies. The Pilatus PC-12 is a good airplane, but we would have needed a plane capable of cruising at FL430 or FL450 (e.g., Phenom 300) to avoid the turbulence and travel in guaranteed comfort on a fixed schedule.
The boys are 5 and almost 7. Their firsts in Chicago:
International Style (we did a walking architecture tour)
A Picasso sculpture used for skateboarding (why hasn’t Picasso been canceled and the sculptures/paintings sold to the Chinese and Russians?)
A massive Chagall mosaic
The Art Institute, especially the miniature rooms and arms/armor
gauntlet of hundreds of homeless lining both sides of the street as in a Zombie movie (near the Bay Bridge ramps)
SFO and San Mateo (visit to 6-month old cousin)
Nob Hill (Mark Hopkins hotel)
Union Square (crazy guy screaming continuously)
Ferry Building
Transamerica Pyramid
the highest peaks in the Lower 48 (e.g., Mt. Whitney)
Firsts in Las Vegas:
Hoover Dam
Bellagio Fountains
Bellagio Conservatory
High Roller Ferris wheel (world’s tallest!)
Red Rock Canyon
dinner at Andy and Tina’s (playing the Otamatone, making cotton candy from Jolly Rancher)
Animatronic Ratatouille scene at the ARIA pastry shop. Also a house built entirely of sugar and a Henry Moore sculpture (of brief interest by comparison!)
The Halo water vortex sculpture at the Crystals mall
800-pound chocolate Statue of Liberty at New York, New York
Venetian canals (“What news on the Rialto?”) and St. Mark’s Square (improved with handrails!)
the best of Paris
ancient Rome (Caesar’s Palace)
Statue/memorial to Siegfried and Roy (who survived Montecore’s teeth, but died at age 75 from Covid-19)
We had planned to stop at the Grand Canyon, which is blessed with a beautiful airport. However, the shuttle and taxi services are both run by government contractors and they’ve elected to shut down #UntilTheresACure. No rental cars are available. No crew cars are available. We did fly over the Zuni Corridor at 11,500′, though:
In Bowling Green:
National Corvette Museum (the sinkhole collapse simulator was a huge hit!)
White Castle
Mammoth Cave National Park
Stalagmites and Stalactites in (Diamond Caverns)
“truck on truck” (5-year-old’s coinage)
When they grow up they’ll be asking “What voltage came out of those pumps?”
On a three-week trip we could have relaxed a bit more in Vegas, driven to/from the Grand Canyon and Death Valley, stopped in Colorado, stopped in St. Louis and/or Kansas City, stopped in New York City.
The stock market has been up lately, perhaps in response to the Biden-Harris electoral victory. I wonder if this makes sense. Democrats promise a bigger government. The companies that are well situated to harvest contracts, bailouts, etc. are the biggest American companies. Investors could expect a disaster for small business owners and the working class (i.e., the folks who voted for Trump), but that shouldn’t discourage them from buying stock in publicly traded companies (i.e., the biggest U.S. companies).
It may turn out that Donald Trump was the one force keeping the Democratic Party together.
Trump didn’t sell out his supporters. In fact, his presidency saw something extraordinary, even if it was all but invisible from the country’s globalized cities: the first egalitarian boom since well back into the twentieth century. In 2019, the last non-Covid year, he presided over an average 3.7 percent unemployment rate and 4.7 percent wage growth among the lowest quartile of earners. All income brackets increased their take. That had happened in the last three Obama years, too. The difference is that in the Obama part of the boom, the income of the top decile rose by 20 percent, with tiny gains for other groups. In the Trump economy, the distribution was different. Net worth of the top 10 percent rose only marginally, while that of all other groups vaulted ahead. In 2019, the share of overall earnings going to the bottom 90 percent of earners rose for the first time in a decade.
The reasons for Trump’s success are not yet clear. They may well have involved his unorthodox policy choices: above all, limiting immigration.
So the good times for the elites might be even better soon! That’s a great reason to purchase stock in America’s largest companies owned by elites, managed by elites, and mostly employing the reasonably elite).
“Classrooms Without Walls, and Hopefully Covid” (NYT) says that it is vaguely alive, but the examples are mostly in the frozen north. The efforts at physical infrastructure have been feeble. And, instead of simply teaching the regular curriculum, the schools are trying to reinvent teaching at the same time as reinventing the teaching environment.
Heirs whose wealth has come from a specific source sometimes use that history to guide their giving. Pierce Delahunt, a 32-year-old “socialist, anarchist, Marxist, communist or all of the above,” has a trust fund that was financed by their former stepfather’s outlet mall empire. (Mx. Delahunt takes nongendered pronouns.)
“When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression,” Mx. Delahunt said. There’s the originally Indigenous land each mall was built on, plus the low wages paid to retail and food service workers, who are disproportionately people of color, and the carbon emissions of manufacturing and transporting the goods. With that on their mind, Mx. Delahunt gives away $10,000 a month, divided between 50 small organizations, most of which have an anticapitalist mission and in some way tackle the externalities of discount shopping.
A friend who was a reporter for this paper in the 1980s told me that they wouldn’t write “Dr. Jones” for a mere Ph.D. Jones had to be an actual medical doctor. I think the paper has been doing “Mx.” for a while, but I didn’t notice until recently.
The article is also interesting for the unchallenged idea that immigrants from India are victims:
“The narrative of giving away everything feels like it’s being framed by white inheritors,” said Elizabeth Baldwin, a 34-year-old democratic socialist in Cambridge, Mass., who was adopted from India by a white family when she was a baby. Heirs in her position, she said, must decide whether to redistribute to their own communities or others’, and what it means to give up economic privilege when they don’t have the kind of safety net that comes with being white. She plans to keep enough of her inheritance to buy an apartment and raise a family, enjoying the sort of pleasant middle-class existence denied to many people of color in the United States.
Because her adoptive family’s wealth originated in land ownership and slavery, she donates to anti-racist groups and will soon begin making low-interest loans to Black-owned businesses. “The money I’m living on was made from exploiting people that look like me, so I see my giving as reparations,” she said.
Black Americans look like Indian-Americans? Is it time for an update of alllooksame.com? People of color from India can’t lead a middle-class existence in the U.S.? Is that because they earn 2X the median and therefore have to live an upper-middle-class existence? From Wikipedia:
Indian Americans have risen to become the richest ethnicity in America, with an average household income of $126,891 (compared to the US average of $65,316).
The rich and righteous don’t like stocks for the long run:
“My money is mostly stocks, which means it comes from underpaying and undervaluing working-class people, and that’s impossible to disconnect from the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery,” Ms. Gelman said.
Maybe it would be possible to get hold of some of Ms. Gelman’s cash by creating a mutual fund of stocks in companies that don’t have a significant number of employees and/or that pay high wages to employees because all of the crummy jobs have been outsourced to contractors?
