Turboprop coast to coast to coast with youngsters

by philg

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
  • A protest (“Trump/Pence Out Now!”)

(Central Camera, boarded up after losing $1 million in inventory during the BLM protests:

)

Firsts in Rapid City, South Dakota:

  • seeing Mt. Rushmore
  • meeting some Native Americans (other than Elizabeth Warren)
  • seeing the statues of U.S. presidents all around downtown (Gerald Ford was a big favorite because his statute includes a dog)
  • staying at the historic Alex Johnson hotel
  • breakfast at Black Hills Bagels

Speaking of President Ford, the hotel puts him right next to Gene Simmons of Kiss on the wall of famous guests:

In Bend, Oregon:

  • seeing snow-covered Rocky Mountains (from the plane)
  • Walking up Pilot Butte and along the Deschutes River
  • Mercedes crew car
  • Mount Shasta (way out)

We coincidentally parked said crew car right in front of a candy store!

In San Francisco:

  • Bay Bridge and Golden Gate Bridge crossings
  • Urban sea lions (Pier 39)
  • Redwood trees (Muir Woods)
  • Pacific Ocean (Cliff House)
  • Bison herd (Golden Gate Park)
  • Conservatory (Golden Gate Park)
  • Science Museum
  • 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
  • ancient hieroglyphics at Luxor
  • a Komodo dragon at Shark Reef
  • pizza restaurant dedicated to Evel Knievel
  • the Fremont Street Experience
  • In n Out Burger
  • Trump International Hotel
  • Wynn garden
  • 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.

Full post, including comments

The stock market is up because Bigger Government is great for Big Business?

by philg

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).

From “The Biden Popular Front Is Doomed to Unravel” (New Republic):

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).

Full post, including comments

Implementations of outdoor school for plague prevention

by philg

What about my May 2020 dream Plague-proof Florida and Texas with shaded outdoor classrooms?

“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.

Full post, including comments

New York Times style: Mx. Jones

by philg

“The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism” (NYT):

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?

Full post, including comments

Even a dead president needs prohibited airspace

by philg

President George H.W. Bush died two years. He left office more than 27 years ago. As far as pilots in New England are concerned, his most important legacy is Prohibited Area P-67, centered on the former/late president’s house in Kennebunkport, Maine:

It is thus illegal to zip up the coast at a low altitude, but why? To protect Barbara Bush, the former First Lady? She died in 2018 as well. Because George W. Bush occasionally goes up there? (But then why would it be necessary to “check NOTAMs daily for expansion”? Does a big TFR follow an ex-President?) Because the U.S. government is good at prohibiting things, but has no mechanism for de-prohibiting?

Full post, including comments

High hopes for Kamala Harris

by philg

Our hotel in Bowling Green, Kentucky had a stack of the WKU student newspapers. From “A ‘monumental moment’: What a Kamala Harris vice presidency means for young POC”:

Americans have been governed by a white executive since 1789 when George Washington and John Adams assumed the presidency and vice presidency. It wasn’t until Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 that representation truly began to change.

“Kamala Harris being the first African-American Asian woman vice president is life-changing for so many girls including myself,” freshman journalism and broadcasting major Brianna Cooks said. “Growing up as a girl and in the minority race I never saw someone on TV or in a position of authority that I could look up to. Kamala Harris gives me encouragement and hopefully other young girls of color and other races.”

Harris is next in line for the presidency, and that is a symbol of hope for many women of color. “Now we have someone to look up to and we know that if she did it we can too,” Cooks said.

All of our problems are solved? Maybe not. From Chicago (stopped for fuel and shut down to let the 48-knot surface winds move off the Great Plains):

And from Bethesda, Maryland on the way back:

“BLM is the minimum,” which means that our neighbors are actually weak. “Black Lives are Needed,” which means that the Chinese are finished. Should we short the SSE Composite? (Sad: flight instructors are classified as “essential” yet we are not thanked.)

Related:

  • Election 2008 Prediction: Obama wins by 5 percent; we will all be depressed (from December 2007: “People assume that all of their problems can be blamed on George W. Bush personally. When the hated King Bush II has been back to Texas for a year and the beloved Obama has been in office for a year, people will look around for a quick status check. They will still be stuck in horrific traffic. They will still be paying insane prices for crummy housing in bleak, lonely communities. Their children will be getting a terrible education at the local public school, perhaps developing to about 15 percent of their potential. If in a hip urban area, criminals will still be smashing their car windows and taking their GPS. They will realize that virtually none of the things that are unpleasant about their life have anything to do with the federal government, except for the war in Iraq, which a quick check of the headlines will reveal that we are still losing.”)
Full post, including comments

Will almost everyone have had COVID-19 by the time the vaccines are available?

by philg

“Government Model Suggests U.S. COVID-19 Cases Could Be Approaching 100 Million” (NPR):

The actual number of coronavirus infections in the U.S. reached nearly 53 million at the end of September and could be approaching 100 million now, according to a model developed by government researchers.

Since [September], the CDC’s tally of confirmed infections has increased to 12.5 million. So if the model’s ratio still holds, the estimated total would now be greater than 95 million, leaving about 71% of the population uninfected.

The model, created by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, calculated that the true number of infections is about eight times the reported number, which includes only the cases confirmed by a laboratory test. … Some of these antibody studies have suggested that only about one in 10 coronavirus infections is reported.

Cases are currently “spiking” all over the U.S.:

We yearned for ventilators and, by the time they were available, realized that we didn’t need or want them (since they actually harm the typical COVID-19 patient). Currently we yearn for vaccines, but perhaps we won’t need or want them by the time they’re available in significant quantity. (Though perhaps a vaccine could be useful to boost the immunity of someone who’d had COVID-19 the natural way a year earlier.)

Full post, including comments

Trump International Hotel Las Vegas review

by philg

One of our young customers got it into his head that we should stay in Bellagio. We indulged him for two nights and enjoyed some of the architecture, e.g., the Conservatory, but the hotel felt crowded despite a 50 percent occupancy limit imposed by the state’s COVID-19 mandarins (subsequently reduced to 25 percent). Lines developed at the breakfast restaurant, for example, and it wasn’t practical to keep a 6′ distance from others when navigating from the parking lot to the room. (Partly this was due to the Swedish MD/PhD prediction that humans wearing masks feel invulnerable to coronaplague.) The air was always a bit stale/smoky. The kids were exposed to scenes of gambling every time we wanted to go out and do anything.

The Trump hotel, by contrast, is all non-smoking and there is no casino. It is conveniently located about one block off the Strip abeam the Wynn. There is a good restaurant in the lobby (“DJT”) with reasonable prices and also a shopping mall across the street with a bunch of additional dining options. We got a corner suite on the 53rd floor. Senior Management: “The bathroom here is as big as our entire room at the Bellagio.” (It was finished with enough marble to entomb a communist leader.)

Our suite had a full kitchen (Wolf, Bosch, Sub-Zero appliances; they must have gotten a screaming deal when buying hundreds of these!), but the plates, silverware, and pots had been removed due to local COVID-19 restrictions.

Valet parking is included.

If you’re a light sleeper, be aware that the hotel is close to some train tracks and heavy/noisy freight trains roll by periodically. (But they’re mostly carrying coal, so President Harris and AOC will put a stop to these soon?) On the plus side, the bed and linens are both top-of-the-line. The photo below shows the train, a sex shop, and a marijuana dispensary (though, as with San Francisco, the sidewalks are now so empty that you might need to buy your own marijuana if you want to get high).

As at other Trump hotels, the staff is superb. We had a great breakfast at lower-than-Bellagio prices and, unlike at Bellagio, the servers got our order precisely correct.

The pool is huge, open longer hours than the casino pools (7a-6p in mid-November during our visit), heated to 80-85, and blessed with open southern exposure for nearly the entire day. It is a perfect late fall/early spring pool. The gym was large, well-equipped, and empty.

Depending on your politics/religion, the strongest or weakest spot might be the lobby’s “Trump Store” with Trump logo items (suitable for wearing in most of America’s counties, if not in the big cities where bigger government tends to spend taxpayer funds). For the Age of Coronapanic, the WiFi is also a weak spot. It seems to be provisioned at 70 Mbps download, but only 3 Mbps upload, a marginal speed at best for video conferencing.

Summary: An almost-perfect hotel in Las Vegas. It would be nicer with outdoor balconies for each room (only a handful of Vegas hotels have these, which is a shame considering the wonderful shoulder season climate) and with a higher WiFi upload speed for Zoom/FaceTime/etc.

Full post, including comments

What case for the iPhone 12 Pro Max and what is MagSafe useful for?

by philg

After an agonizing two-day post-order wait, an iPhone 12 Pro Max has arrived from Verizon. My main interest in this new phone is the purportedly improved camera (the super wide “0.5x” camera on the iPhone 11 Pro Max was especially bad, with terrible corner and edge sharpness).

Do any of the early adopters have a case recommendation? I’m interested in (a) protecting the camera lenses from being scratched while in my pocket, and (b) making it more secure to grip the camera (a slightly soft silicone case would therefore be good).

Finally, what is MagSafe useful for? It is supposedly a “wireless charging” system that requires connecting the phone to a wire? This could be considered an innovation in the English language, but how is it a useful innovation technologically? If I have to attach a wire with a magnetic connector to the back of the phone, can’t I just as easily attach a Lightning cable to what we would have called the “female” connector in the phone back in the pre-LGBTQIA+ days?

(I don’t have Apple DouchePods nor an Apple Watch, which I understand both interact somehow with MagSafe.)

From Union Square, last week, a toilet for the homeless with a billboard for the new $1,000+ phones in the background. Social Justice, California-style:

Full post, including comments

Should we follow the Pope’s advice and make it illegal to drive to church?

by philg

“Pope Francis: A Crisis Reveals What Is in Our Hearts” (NYT):

With some exceptions [here’s looking at you, Sweden!], governments have made great efforts to put the well-being of their people first, acting decisively to protect health and to save lives. The exceptions have been some governments that shrugged off the painful evidence of mounting deaths, with inevitable, grievous consequences. But most governments acted responsibly, imposing strict measures to contain the outbreak.

Yet some groups protested, refusing to keep their distance, marching against travel restrictions — as if measures that governments must impose for the good of their people constitute some kind of political assault on autonomy or personal freedom!

(Imagine a healthy 21-year-old believing that being locked into his/her/zir/their apartment is a reduction in his/her/zir/their personal freedom! He/she/ze/they is free to sit in any room in the apartment, watch any TV show, and eat anything/everything from the fridge.)

If we take the Pope at his/her/zir/their word, after coronaplague is a distant memory shouldn’t it be illegal for people to drive to a Catholic church? When it is quite easy for people to participate via Zoom, if “protecting health and saving lives” is the #1 goal, why let anyone subject themselves and others to the risk of an accident on the roads? A person killed from a car accident is just as dead as a person killed by COVID-19 (and, in fact, the loss of life-years is likely to be much higher due to the much younger age and better health of the average car accident victim).

God is everywhere, according to the Catholic religion. If we #FollowThePope, why shouldn’t the government protect health and save lives by forbidding anyone from driving to church in order to find God?

Related:

Full post, including comments