The Greeks dump gold into the sea

by philg

Our politicians inform us that low-skill migrants will make any country richer and the existing residents of any country better off. Apparently, not everyone got this memo. “Taking Hard Line, Greece Turns Back Migrants by Abandoning Them at Sea” (NYT, August 14):

The Greek government has secretly expelled more than 1,000 refugees from Europe’s borders in recent months, sailing many of them to the edge of Greek territorial waters and then abandoning them in inflatable and sometimes overburdened life rafts.

Since 2015, European countries like Greece and Italy have mainly relied on proxies, like the Turkish and Libyan governments, to head off maritime migration. What is different now is that the Greek government is increasingly taking matters into its own hands, watchdog groups and researchers say.

​For example, migrants have been forced onto sometimes leaky life rafts and left to drift at the border between Turkish and Greek waters, while others have been left to drift in their own boats after Greek officials disabled their engines.

The most confusing part of this: Since migrants make a country rich, why aren’t other countries rushing in with surplus cruise ships to pick up these valuable migrants and invite them to settle permanently? There is no country on Earth that wants to be richer?

Some 2004 images from Santorini, the all-American Greek island:

Separately, does the NYT running stories about the travails of migrants mean that we’re nearing the end of coronapanic? Will it soon be time to return to climate panic, for example?

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Trump has dismantled the Post Office; let’s have the government run all health care

by philg

My Facebook feed has been alive lately with Post Office Panic supplementing the usual Coronapanic:

Trump acknowledged he is starving the USPS because he thinks it will hurt the Dems. His selfish nature in full display. He doesn’t care how many businesses and seniors of his own base he will hurt by doing this. His lunatic rationale will backfire. It will reduce his own voter base and motivate the Dem voters to go vote even in the rain and with long lines just like it did in Michigan for their Supreme court position.

Trump is refusing to sign any bill that provides additional financial support to the USPS, where new cost-cutting policies are leading to delays in the delivery of every kind of mail, including checks, bills, and medications.

Maybe if people aren’t alarmed by the USPS being dismantled before the election, what about a month and a half later when it’s time to send Xmas presents?

If you’re concerned about the United States Postal Service, you might want to file a complaint with the Inspector General for the Post Office.

Shared from Hillary Clinton (she is still alive?): Call your Republican senators and let them know: We won’t let them dismantle the USPS–and disenfranchise millions of Americans—without a fight.

I am alarmed by recent actions by the Trump administration to sabotage the 2020 election. It is very clear that their strategy is to suppress voting by slowing down the post office, telling lies about so-called danger of mail-in voting and endorsing voter-ID. All this during a pandemic when many of us are worried about the safety of grocery stores or banks, let alone polling places.

In response to one of these, I wrote

People who think the post office has collapsed and can’t deliver a few ballots also want a similar agency to take over their health care.

This was labeled “trolling” of course! But it is still interesting that people simultaneously believe that any government function can be destroyed by a wrongly-selected Great Father in Washington AND if that it would be smart to give the Great Father/Mother/Other control over health care. I asked

If the Post Office can be destroyed by Donald Trump acting alone, what stops whoever takes over from President Kamala Harris in 2028 from acting alone to destroy whatever government-run health system that President Harris and a Democrat-controlled Congress set up in 2021?

One response to this is that Medicare and Medicaid have been running for decades, much to the satisfaction of providers (who are pocketing 18 percent of GDP now, up from 5 percent prior to Medicare/Medicaid being introduced in 1966). But maybe they are running only because Trump, for whatever idiosyncratic reason known only to him, did not decide to terminate these programs as well. If he can kill off the postal service, running in various forms for at least 2000 years, why couldn’t Trump kill Medicare as well?

From the Azores, 2017… what a Post Office truck should look like (Portugal’s postal service was fully privatized by 2014):

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Vote for Ed Markey (AOC’s favorite) or Joe Kennedy?

by philg

The 74-year-old Ed Markey is running for reelection to the Senate here in Maskachusetts, The 39-year-old Joe Kennedy III, whose primary qualification is being a Kennedy, is running against him. Whom to vote for?

Ed Markey advertises on Facebook that he is not old. In fact, he is so young that AOC likes him:

Text: “Progressive leadership isn’t about your age. It’s about the age of your ideas and your commitment to fighting for what’s right, even when it isn’t easy. That’s what my partnership with @AOC is all about.”

If we average Markey’s age and AOC’s age (30), we would get the age of a person whom an American business might trust to serve as a manager?

No Republican can win in November, so the real contest is the September 1 primary among Democrats. (Though, in fact, all of the other candidates on my primary ballot are running unopposed. So there will be two successive ballots in which nearly every candidate is unopposed!)

Why doesn’t AOC like Joe Kennedy III? Wikipedia says that he supported the Green New Deal (we can prevent climate change from killing anyone who somehow escapes coronadeath). Kennedy has an elite educational background: BB&N (where students actually got taught this year, unlike in the Massachusetts public schools), Stanford, Harvard Law School. Maybe AOC is worried that Kennedy will follow the old rule: “If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.” As Kennedy gets older he will begin to listen to his buddies from Stanford and Harvard Law School about how taxes are too high?

Readers: How should I vote in the primary? (Wisdom of crowds: Markey leads Kennedy)

(Among registered Republicans, those who #BelieveScience and #RespectScience have the option to vote for a real scientist (PhD in systems biology), Shiva Ayyadurai (also the inventor of email). A sign among the righteous suburbanites, many of whom have “We Believe… Science is Real” signs in their yards:

Next best thing to voting for Dr. Fauci! The inventor of email’s opponent in the tilting-at-the-windmills exercise in futility (a Republican primary in MA) is a law firm partner, Kevin O’Connor.)

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Department of Bad Business Timing: Microsoft Flight Simulator released today

by philg

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.

Who has tried out this new game? How great is it?

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When the unhoused move into a neighborhood full of people who say that they want to help the unhoused

by philg

Today is the day that I get full value out of my New York Times subscription: “What Happened When Homeless Men Moved Into a Liberal Neighborhood”.

(Note the use of “homeless” rather than “unhoused”:

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!

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Sexuality in Brave New World

by philg

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.

This was written in 1931, 40 years before the no-fault divorce revolution, 80 years before Tinder.

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”
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Revisiting Brave New World

by philg

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!

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Church of Sweden versus Church of England branch of the Church of Shutdown

by philg

“Sweden’s success shows the true cost of our arrogant, failed establishment” (Telegraph, August 12, sadly paywalled, by Allister Heath, the editor of the sister Sunday Telegraph):

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.

The Friday W.H.O. report shows Sweden with 2 deaths from/with Covid-19. Here in Maskachusetts, with a smaller population, there were 14. With a fully-masked population that is 4X Sweden’s, California is suffering 150-200 Covid-19-tagged deaths per day.

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Solar electricity at 1.35 cents/kWh in Abu Dhabi

by philg

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).

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Cut down on ED visits with doctor and nurse in motorhome for house calls?

by philg

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:

Readers: A year ago we would have said it was stupid to pay Americans more in unemployment than they had been getting paid to work. Has my stupid idea also flipped to brilliant?

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