For the first time in 14 years, as of today it is possible to buy a new version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. How’s that for bad timing? If this thing had been released in mid-March, after 13.5 years instead of 14, when governors had locked Americans down into their electronic home bubbles, how much more money would it have made?
The Icon A5 is included! Also the Airbus A320. You need to spring for the Premium edition to get the Cirrus SR22.
The label of “homeless” has derogatory connotations. It implies that one is “less than”, and it undermines self-esteem and progressive change.
The use of the term “Unhoused”, instead, has a profound personal impact upon those in insecure housing situations. It implies that there is a moral and social assumption that everyone should be housed in the first place.
Who can disagree with this?)
From the NYT piece:
When New York City moved shelter residents into tourist hotels on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the neighborhood’s values were tested.
The guests arrived at the Lucerne Hotel, two blocks from Central Park, carrying their belongings, stepping off buses and filling the hotel’s empty rooms, which typically cost more than $200 a night.
They were not tourists nor business travelers but residents of homeless shelters whom the city sent to the Lucerne to contain the spread of the coronavirus in the crowded shelter system. Over three days, 283 men moved into the hotel.
Their arrival has become a flash point and a test of values for the Upper West Side — a neighborhood with a reputation as one of the most liberal enclaves in New York and in the entire country.
One day after the men began moving into the Lucerne, on West 79th Street, a private Facebook group — Upper West Siders for Safer Streets — was created by residents who were up in arms. The group has more than 8,700 members.
Many commenters said the men menaced pedestrians, urinated and defecated on the street and used and sold drugs in the open.
In interviews, some longtime residents said the hotel’s conversion into a shelter had dimmed the quality of life and evoked memories of an era when the neighborhood was filled with single room occupancy hotels that helped fuel crime.
“People are generally concerned to go outside now,’’ he added. “The fear is palpable.’’
If only there could be an article like this every day in the NYT!
Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, predicted that human adults, freed from the obligations of rearing children and caring for aging parents, would have sex with new friends at least once a week.
In the years since the novel’s publication, at least in the West, we’ve had progressively less social pressure to get married, stay married, and have children. Free of these pressures, what did humans in fact do? “The average number of sexual partners for each generation… from baby boomers to millennials” (The Sun) says that each generation in Europe (where Brave New World is primarily set) had sex with more partners than did the previous generation. So Huxley was right!
Would it be practical for Americans to adopt Brave New World sexuality? Behaving like a character in the novel, the typical student would have sex with at least 200 different partners during four college years. In light of the recent conviction of Harvey Weinstein for acts that occurred years prior and that weren’t reported to the police at the time, a winning financial strategy would be to save physical evidence from each of these 200 encounters and then wait to see which of the 200 partners become financially successfully (it would be terrible luck if none ended up as a “one percenter,” right?). Then launch a criminal and/or civil rape case and demand compensation. The statute of limitations for a rape prosecution is now 20 years in New York, for example (CNN). By the time all of the litigation ended, there should be a substantial reduction in inequality (though maybe the litigators would pocket most of it and become the oligarchs).
Huxley imagined some tremendous advancements in technology. The book was written ten years before the first production line for helicopters was set up, yet every Alpha male seems to own an aircraft kind of like a Lockheed Cheyenne, one of the most advanced vehicles of the 1960s. But he couldn’t envision a simple system of contraception. Fertile women (there are only two genders in the book and the LGBTQIA+ rainbow was not contemplated) wear “Malthusian Belts” and undertake a complex bathroom-based process with the items carried in these belts to avoid pregnancy. When that doesn’t work, there is a high-rise abortion center large enough to warm the heart of any modern Democrat running for President.
(Speaking of aircraft, as noted in the previous posting on this book, Huxley doesn’t envision any form of radio navigation. The pilot-citizens of Brave New World follow a ground-based system of “lighthouses”. This is despite the successful use of radio navigation in in 1928 and 1929 (source) and a pioneering effort in 1920.)
Related:
“Sexual Hookup Culture: A Review” (Rev Gen Psychol. 2012 Jun 1; 16(2): 161–176): “Several scholars have suggested that shifting life-history patterns may be influential in shaping hookup patterns. In the United States, age at first marriage and first reproduction has been pushed back dramatically, while at the same time age at puberty has dropped dramatically, resulting in a historically unprecedented time gap where young adults are physiologically able to reproduce but not psychologically or socially ready to “settle down” and begin a family and child rearing”
Published in 1932, Brave New World is worth re-reading in every election year when politicians promise us salvation through technocracy. Today is the first day of the Democratic National Convention and presumably we’ll hear a lot about how the government can take care of all of our wants and needs (but without significantly higher taxes, except on “billionaires” and “the rich who are not paying their fair share” and maybe “corporations that aren’t paying their fair share”). Let’s see how many of Brave New World’s promises will be repeated this week.
Huxley was all in on what was then the infant technology of helicopters. The term “main rotor system” had not been coined and therefore the book describes “helicopter screws” on a vehicle that sounds like a Lockheed Cheyenne (pusher prop in the back and stub wings). Then stub wings and a tractor propeller it seems. Perhaps the author, writing in 1931, was aware of work by Étienne Oehmichen (1922-24) and Corradino D’Ascanio (1930). All of the pilots are Alpha males, though already in 1930 Amy Johnson had flown solo from London to Australia. (Hannah Reitsch would fly a practical helicopter for a German audience in 1938.)
Huxley had no vision of progress in information technology, despite the fact that there were some extremely capable punched card machines prior to 1931. Hence the need for Epsilons to serve as elevator operators and for all of the helicopter-airplane hybrids to be continuously hand-flown. Televisions, in their infancy in 1931 (history), were cheap enough to place at the foot of every bed in a hospital for the dying, but the only phones were landlines. Presumably the signals for the televisions were being transmitted via radio waves,
It seems as though there is an equal distribution of sexes within each caste, but Huxley couldn’t find any jobs for the female Alphas. He completely missed the trend toward women in management and high-level technical jobs. (He also completely missed the Rainbow Flag religion. Everyone is either male or female, though some females are sterile “freemartins”. Nobody has sex with a person adhering to the same gender ID. Nobody changes gender after being decanted.)
Humans don’t age in Brave New World. Technology is used to maintain health and vitality at roughly a 30-year-old’s level. This wears out the body so that people end up dropping dead at 60, but without a period of decline first. If we’re going to spend 20 percent of GDP on health care, maybe we should ask for this (though with a later drop-dead date please!) instead of what we are getting, which is to keep the ancients (like me!) hanging on despite total decrepitude.
The optimized Brave New World includes an ample helping of racism. Low caste members are described as being “part Negro” or “Octoroon”. But this doesn’t make any sense given the goal of complete harmony among men and women, which drove the technocrats to seek to generate humans in batches of 100+ with identical genetics. Why have more than one race? Maybe the “one race” would contain some genetics from multiple pre-Ford existing races, but everyone should have the same skin color. It can’t be because Huxley thought that only certain races had the necessary genes for low IQ. The low-intelligence babies are produced by putting alcohol into their gestation bottles.
Huxley’s character, Mustapha Mond, seems to predict that Americans who want to feel heroic will refuse to be happy about a buoyant economy and stock market under Donald Trump:
The Savage shook his head. “It all seems to me quite horrible.”
Mustapha Mond: “Of course it does. Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”
One thing that Huxley gets absolutely right about the modern-day U.S.: opioid addiction. It isn’t exactly clear what soma is, but it seems to be an opiate. People feel great after taking it and also sleepy. There is no alcohol-style hangover after moderate indulgence. People who take too much will die.
Readers: Please let me know what the Democrats promise this week at the convention and whether any of it aligns with Brave New World!
Shocking incompetence has unnecessarily wiped billions of pounds from the UK economy
So now we know: Sweden got it largely right, and the British establishment catastrophically wrong. Anders Tegnell, Stockholm’s epidemiologist-king, has pulled off a remarkable triple whammy: far fewer deaths per capita than Britain, a maintenance of basic freedoms and opportunities, including schooling, and, most strikingly, a recession less than half as severe as our own.
Our arrogant quangocrats and state “experts” should hang their heads in shame: their reaction to coronavirus was one of the greatest public policy blunders in modern history, more severe even than Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis, Suez or the ERM fiasco. Millions will lose their jobs when furlough ends; tens of thousands of small businesses are failing; schooling is in chaos, with A-level grades all over the place; vast numbers are likely to die from untreated or undetected illnesses; and we have seen the first exodus of foreigners in years, with the labour market survey suggesting a decline in non-UK born adults.
Tegnell is one of the few genuine heroes of this crisis: he identified the correct trade-offs.
Good news: Britain has no “systemic racism”; bad news: it does have “systemic incompetence”.
This is a catastrophically high price tag for the British state’s systemic incompetence, the uselessness of Public Health England, the deep, structural failings of the NHS, the influence of modelers rather than proper scientists, the complacency, the delusion, the refusal to acknowledge that the quality of the British state and bureaucracy are abysmally poor.
The author notes that “panic and hysteria were the only possible outcome.”
(Coronavirus hasn’t been a problem for people who live on alimony and/or child support, but the article describes “cancelled weddings” and therefore a delay in being able to file a divorce lawsuit in one of the world’s most lucrative jurisdictions. (see “International Divorce, Custody, and Child Support Systems” for how profitable a short-term marriage in the U.K. can be).)
Tough to imagine an editorial this harsh in a major U.S. paper! The NYT might publish something that attacks Donald Trump, but not an attack like this on the competence of the federal and state governments!
The article is paywalled, but I uploaded a PDF that a reader graciously created.
What are the numbers? The U.K. has a higher death rate than Sweden or the U.S., but it would appear that the U.K. and the U.S. will converge. In other words, both panic-stricken and shut-down-for-months countries will end up with more deaths per capita than never-shut Sweden. The U.K. line is the top of the chart below.
I haven’t been getting a good supply of climate change alarmism and panic due to coronapanic dominating the media. Here’s an item that I missed: the next big solar project in Abu Dhabi will deliver power for 1.35 cents/kWH (cleantechnica).
One of the things that I have learned in meetings with a big health insurance company whose claims data we use in the classroom: emergency room (“ED”) visits are expensive. A long wait followed by a temperature and pulse ox test then advice to take two Tylenols will cost the employer who sponsors a health plan at least $1,000.
One idea that I came up with around a conference table with the insurance folks was to put a doctor and nurse in a motorhome crammed with all of the stuff that one would typically find in a primary care clinic. Tell folks enrolled in the plan “You can go to the hospital and wait two hours to be seen and pay a $125 co-pay. Or you can stay comfortably at home and the doctor will be there in four hours.”
This is plainly a bad idea because it is obvious and yet no insurance company is doing it. Maybe it is bad because the U.S. is so short of physicians that it is intolerably inefficient to have the physician idle when driving from one house to another. France has a lot of doctors per capita and they do still make house calls (see this 2009 article).
Perhaps the idea is a little less bad in the Covid-19 age. Do we want people congregating in hospital waiting areas now that we can be pretty sure that at least one of the waiting patients is plagued? If the patients are seen at home, at least there is no patient-to-patient contact/transmission.
We already have the technology and skills to build the motorhome-based clinics. Matthews Specialty Vehicles seems to have built a bunch, for example. Odulair in Wyoming has everything up to mobile CT and mobile MRI (these are perhaps overengineered for checking on a person who has flu-like symptoms). Laboit says that they can fit a primary care clinic with a single exam room into a 28 ft. Class C RV:
Massachusetts’ education department is reportedly issuing guidance on the amount of remote learning schools should use based on the coronavirus risk level in their communities.
As school districts scramble to submit reopening plans to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education by Friday, superintendents received a memo from Commissioner Jeffrey Riley Tuesday night that would limit the use of online learning, according to The Boston Globe.
Here’s the map….
From a linked page:
Chelsea, Everett, Lynn and Revere are included in the high risk category, meaning they have over eight cases per 100,000 residents. Twenty-nine other communities, including Auburn, Belchertown, Boston, Brockton, Charlton, Chicopee, Fall River, Framingham, Georgetown, Granby, Holyoke, Hull, Lawrence, Longmeadow, Malden, Marlborough, Maynard, Middleton, Northampton, Peabody, Salem, Saugus, Springfield, Quincy, Randolph, Taunton, Winthrop Worcester, Wrentham, are in the moderate risk category, meaning they have between four and eight cases per 100,000.
In other words, if your town is packed with welfare-dependent People of Color and migrants… no school (“remote learning” in your crowded public housing apartment). The rich white kids in Wellesley and Dover can go back to school, though!
I spent some time recently with two Harvard undergraduates who are camped out in a Cambridge apartment. I’m the oldest person that they’ll have any contact with for the foreseeable future, yet these 20-year-olds behave as though they either worked or lived in a nursing home for 90-year-olds. Asked why they put so much effort into mask-wearing and deny themselves so many social opportunities that they would previous have jumped at, they say that they are personally afraid of getting coronavirus. They’re not obese or chronically ill, so their statistical risk of being felled by Covid-19 is low (see
from mass.gov, statistics that have now been removed), but they seem to perceive Covid-19 as the main risk to their lives and health. They won’t take off their masks, for example, even when outside in mostly-deserted Cambridge. After talking to and observing them, I concluded that, at least for young Americans, Covid-19 is now primarily a disease of the mind. Support for my theory: “We’ve Hit a Pandemic Wall” (NYT, August 5)?
New data show that Americans are suffering from record levels of mental distress.
Let’s start with the numbers. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, roughly one in 12 American adults reported symptoms of an anxiety disorder at this time last year; now it’s more than one in three. Last week, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a tracking poll showing that for the first time, a majority of American adults — 53 percent — believes that the pandemic is taking a toll on their mental health.
This number climbs to 68 percent if you look solely at African-Americans. The disproportionate toll the pandemic has taken on Black lives and livelihoods — made possible by centuries of structural disparities, compounded by the corrosive psychological effect of everyday racism — is appearing, starkly, in our mental health data.
Turns out the extra ten extra pounds around my middle have moved in and unpacked, though I’d initially hoped they were on a month-to-month lease.
The newspaper that has been cheerleading for Shutdown now is surprised that there are some negative consequences? How did the coastal elites not figure out that not everyone’s shutdown experience would be positive? A friend in the Boston suburbs, who was a work-from-home consultant long before the Age of Shutdown, was telling me that his 8th grader hadn’t minded being at home for three months with minimal instruction being provided by the lavishly funded public school. Therefore, he concluded, shutdown was not a big deal, and if the school shutdown lasted another year that was okay too. His son would do fine practicing on the grand piano, learning from Ph.D. Dad and super smart stay-at-home Mom, etc.
I pointed out that not every American child lived in a 6,000 square foot $2 million house with two biological parents who get along at least reasonably well. Would he acknowledge that an inner-city child crammed into a two-bedroom public housing unit with mom, a step-sibling, and mom’s latest boyfriend might have a less favorable view of school shutdown? (he did!)
This is like the Twin Towers imploding all over again – except this time, one story collapses each day, and there is no ground floor.
The pandemic in and of itself is stressful but then add the stress of Trump’s daily tweets. The thought that he might get re-elected makes the stress almost unbearable.
What I think has caused the national stress-out, Ms. Senior, is that America now knows that it’s on its own. We don’t have a president who actually understands and cares about us.
I stress over the corrupt Republican leadership, so unconcerned for 99.9% of Americans that they let a a spoiled child throw our health, education, and welfare out the window, …
A coworker yesterday confided that about 15 of her relatives are COVID positive after a big family graduation party 10 days ago. I couldn’t hide my disgust. She is a very highly paid executive. We work for a research university health system!!! My neighbors just had a 40-person party for their 9-year-old. And seemed miffed and befuddled that many of us on the block declined to attend. They were all crammed under a tent shoulder to shoulder. Nary a mask in sight.
Maria from Maryland: The thing is, a lot of us are coming to the conclusion that all our problems are the same problem. Botched coronavirus response? Republicans. Insisting on doing things that spread the disease? Same. Economic deprivation? Republicans again. Two generations of failing to address racial issues? Again. Two generations of banging our heads against the same gender barriers? You guessed it. Failure to deal with climate change? Do you need to ask? Guns? Infrastructure? Science? Arts? They’ve been at it my whole adults life, ruining everything. And at their apex, they produced the very worst man in the world. There will be a vaccine for the virus, but what about the humans who are ruining our lives?
Coronaplague wouldn’t bother them at all, apparently, if Joe Biden were the Great Father in Washington right now!
Coronaplague obviously is a real problem for the elderly/vulnerable. And in societies where it is allowed to run wild, e.g., Sweden, it will kill approximately 0.05 percent of the population within a few painful months. But will readers agree with me that if young people are afraid of getting the disease personally, despite having no actual or planned contact with the old/vulnerable, then coronavirus has mutated into something whose main effect is mental illness?
Facebook remains a safe space for Shutdown Karens to pour out their fear regarding school reopening. Children will die. Maybe the death rate among children could become 100X what it had been? Certainly it could! The Tuesday, August 11, 2020 dashboard:
Out of 8,529 deaths so far, exactly 0 have been among those under 20. A naive person might look at these data and say “since I’m not 82 years old, I won’t worry too much and I certainly won’t worry about children, none of whom have ever died here in Massachusetts.”
[How is Maskachusetts doing as Month 6 of Shutdown begins? The never-masked, never-shut Swedes have lost 5,770 residents so far (WHO). In other words, righteous Massachusetts, carefully following Church of Shutdown dogma, has had twice the cumulative death rate of the wicked Swedes, sending their children into the killing zones (schools) daily.]
The August 12, 2020 dashboard has a new format. This one is much scarier to middle-aged parents. 8,547 of us have perished. There is no breakdown by age nor average age reported. 18 people were reported dead yesterday (compare to 4 in Sweden, suggesting that Massachusetts has 6X the daily death rate compared to Sweden).
