A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
This is the month when non-Asians find out if they got into Harvard College. What happens when the world’s smartest mostly-white people pour themselves some water by opening a tap and letting gravity fill up a cup? Apparently, the result has been dramatic enough to generate some sales for Brother label maker tape:
(From Smith Campus Center, formerly “Holyoke Center”.)
Full post, including comments
Happy South Carolina Primary Day!
Who wants to predict the outcome?
(Separately, how is it that these folks vote on a Saturday? If that makes sense, why don’t all of the states do it? If it doesn’t make sense, why does South Carolina do it?)
Full post, including comments… before the first concrete has been poured.
Yeoman suburbanites west of Boston voted overwhelming to build themselves the most expensive, on a per-student basis, school ever constructed in the United States (see betterlincolnschools.wordpress.com ). It will be 2.5X the cost, per town-resident student, of Newton North, a nearby high school that was formerly the high-water mark for lavish government spending.
At $600/square foot for a combination of renovation and new construction, I figured that it was set up so that there was no possibility of a cost-overrun. Here’s an email from the school superintendent:
Last night, the Lincoln School Building Committee met to review the outcomes of going out to bid for the construction portion of the Lincoln School project that is slated to begin in June. As construction bids have come in for the school building project, the total bid value has exceeded our budget for the project by 3.5 million dollars. This is forcing us to make some significant cuts from the 100% design to remove elements from the project. These cuts are going to be hard and feel frustrating, and perhaps dispiriting, at this juncture in the project. However, this is the process working – we are confronting the real costs of the project now, before work has begun, so we are sure we are building within the budget the community has provided. This is not unlike what would happen if a homeowner was planning a big kitchen remodeling project, and when they received quotes from contractors, the quotes were all higher than what the homeowner had budgeted. Tough choices to cut some aspects of the project would need to be made. Maybe the counters will be Corian instead of quartz, the island will be 10 sq./ft. smaller, and the old refrigerator will be kept until it needs to be replaced. While it is disappointing to have to make these decisions, the homeowner will still be getting a wonderful new kitchen.
They already took $15-20 million out of the construction budget via an Enron-style accounting maneuver (letting a third party company buy the solar panels in exchange for an agreement to purchase power at above-market prices for 30 years). This was necessary because state law limits the amount that a town can borrow as a percentage of property value and Lincoln was trying to go over the limit. Somehow this off-books borrowing from the solar panel vendor doesn’t count and the town therefore managed to move forward as the most indebted town in the state, but not over the limit.
The town committee volunteers/experts predicted that property prices would rise once people heard about the fancy new school building and they’d be able to borrow more. Instead, however, property prices have fallen since the vote to approve the school (i.e., the market may value the new school building at $0). So the town can’t borrow more for what the school superintendent compares to a Whole Foods heater-uppers new kitchen.
I think this is of more than local interest because of the human psychology involved. First, there is the faith that an upgraded building housing the same teachers and students using the same curriculum will yield superior academic outcomes. Then, there was the in-person town meeting Vote of the Righteous in which retirees who had no chance of ever sending a child to the Palazzo of Education enthusiastically voiced their support for saving Planet Earth by bulldozing the existing school (sections that were 25-year-olds and sections that had been renovated 25 years earlier) and creating a Net Zero structure in its place.
What is most interesting for explaining decisions in the rest of the country was that people were able to come together to agree to spend the money, but later fought amongst themselves regarding how to pay for the spending. Massachusetts enables towns to use a progressive property tax structure such that owners of lower-value property pay a lower rate. Would a town of self-described “progressives” vote for progressive property tax? It turned out to be a tougher question than Hillary v. Trump and depended quite a bit on whether one occupied a higher-than-median-value home!
Another passionate discussion ensued regarding approving the construction of more housing and commercial structures in the town. This was now vital to increase the property tax base since (a) the density of the town wasn’t sufficient to support a $110 million (with solar panels) school building, and (b) the property values of the existing houses had fallen (“Lincoln home values have declined -0.1% over the past year and Zillow predicts they will fall -0.7% within the next year.”; compare to nearby “Cambridge home values have gone up 1.7% over the past year and Zillow predicts they will rise 1.2% within the next year.”).
What happens when people who enthusiastically support U.S. population increase via migration ponder the prospect of population growth within their own town? At a minimum, any project needs to be built far away from their own homes. And, they wonder, without quoting any numbers, if the per-pupil spending at the school is $25,000/year plus capital costs of $250,000 per student, how can they make sure that the occupants of the new housing don’t breed additional children that might further drive up school spending? As the average property tax per household will settle in at about $20,000 per year, if there is even one school-age child in a household, the result is a net drain on the town treasury.
A great example of the fiscal outcomes of democracy in action!
Full post, including commentsWhen at Universal Orlando… see a movie! My Irish friend and I saw Knives Out, in which Daniel Craig speaks in a Southern accent that no Southerner since the 19th century (or ever?) has used.
Despite the anachronistic accent, this is perhaps the most modern Hollywood film. It concerns an extended multi-generational family of native-born Americans. They are mendacious and lazy. One even might be a Trump supporter and Wall advocate! All seek to live off the money earned by the patriarch. Their fertility is low, with a one-child maximum.
On the other side of the scale is a hard-working migrant from Latin America. Her mother is undocumented, but somehow she and a sister are citizens. So that the mom can be a completely heroic “single mom,” no father is mentioned nor appears.
It’s a mystery so I don’t want to spoil the rest!
It is worth seeing just to see how thick Hollywood is willing to lay on the “immigrants are better than natives and the U.S. will be better off once the natives have been replaced” message.
[There is a technical inaccuracy. The citizen migrant is supposedly concerned that her undocumented mother will be deported. But the citizen is over age 18 and therefore has an automatic right to bring in her parents (including a father, if one can be identified) via chain migration.]
Full post, including commentsWhile flying between the Bahamas and Florida at 8,000′, we were mostly outside of gliding range from land. However, we were often within gliding range of a ship (but we wouldn’t have known this if we’d been flying in or over clouds). Since 2002, ships have been broadcasting their location via the Automatic identification system (AIS). Aviation caught up in 2020 with the similar ADS-B system. For safer overwater flights in light aircraft, why not combine these two? Given the AIS information, onboard avionics could plot a path that keeps the aircraft within gliding range of at least one ship whenever possible. Given the ADS-B information, augmented with a distress button (not built into the current system, sadly), a ship’s crew would know when to start a rescue effort.
What’s the best case for modern electronics and communications currently? The people in an aircraft would to make it out of the aircraft, get their hands on an EPIRB, activate the EPIRB. The centralized group of people looking at the EPIRB signal would have to find the closest ship via AIS, then succeed in contacting the ship, etc.
Would integrating AIS and ADS-B be a good idea? I can’t find anything on the Web to suggest that it has been done or contemplated.
Full post, including comments“Local emergency declared in San Francisco amid coronavirus concerns”: It is just another day in utopia when driving one’s new Tesla past poor people living in tents on the sidewalk. It is an emergency when rich people sneeze.
Full post, including commentsI recently listened to “Story of Human Language”, a 36-lecture course by John McWhorter, a professor at Columbia.
Of the world’s 6,000 extant languages, roughly 20 have a significant number of speakers (Vietnamese is on the list, for example).
19th century attempts to make a universal language failed with “volapuke” and Esperanto (some history). In the 20th century, however, English accomplished what Esperanto could not.
The world’s disparate languages developed due to isolation. Now that the world has been saturated with communication, the academic linguist does not expect substantial changes going forward. People tend to first learn a more popular language as a second language because it is useful for commerce. But eventually the unpopular language withers and their grandchildren end up being native speakers of what had been the useful second language. Native Americans had at least 300 languages when the European invasion began. Today, however, a Native American such as Elizabeth Warren will grow up speaking English. The same process has occurred in China, where linguistic diversity has shrunk and the comparatively simple second language of Mandarin is now the first language for children. That means that eventually English might eventually be every human’s native language.
Separately, the teacher is a bit of a heretic according to Wikipedia: “McWhorter considers that anti-racism has become as harmful a force in the United States as racism itself. According to him, what is holding blacks back is ‘black attitudes’ rather than white racism. … McWhorter has criticized microaggression and white supremacy theories, and has argued that technology cannot be racist”. Let’s try to imagine how long a white employee of Columbia would last if he/she/ze/they made these kinds of statements!
Full post, including commentsLanding page for a recent Facebook alert:
Assuming that I am not special, why does Facebook the Company care whether or not we all vote? (as it happens, the ballot in our suburb is mostly taken up with candidates running unopposed; in the general election, it is nearly all unopposed Democrats)
If this is about general virtue, why not encourage Americans to quit smoking, eat less, study and work harder? Those are much more important and useful messages in all but a handful of swing states.
Full post, including commentsI saw from the headlines that the Harvey Weinstein trial in New York is over (but he still has one or more to go in California?). I hadn’t followed the case because the judge said prior to the trial that Harvey was going to spend the rest of his life in prison (Vice); it was only a question of whether it would be for using his phone in the courtroom or something related to the transactional sex that we read about (and would a jury who got even a quick look at the obese elderly Harvey need convincing that sex in which he was participating was transactional?).
Given that the outcome was predetermined, was there anything new that came out?
Separately, back in 2017 I asked “Where can Harvey Weinstein go for a peaceful retirement?”. It turns out that Harvey might have accidentally escaped prosecution if he’d followed his political heart. From a September 2016 article:
Talk turned from Oscar voters to American voters as fervent democrat Weinstein, appearing in Switzerland for the European premiere of the Garth Davis directed drama, was asked if he’d move to Canada if Donald Trump were elected US president.
“I’ve known Hillary Clinton 20 years. The allegations about her being untrustworthy are not true,” he said.
“I don’t think anything she did [with email servers] was intentional. The Clinton Global Initiative has the highest rating of any charity in America, and probably as good as any charity in the world, and I’m proud I’m part of that too.
“It’s insane that she doesn’t have the trustworthiness and it’s the only thing keeping her from winning. I don’t want to move to Canada, but I certainly don’t want to see Donald Trump [win] with bigotry and racism.”
Weinstein, who has hosted Clinton fundraisers this year, continued: “This is the worst I’ve ever seen it. This is not Mitt Romney or Robert Dole, or anybody you could afford to have as president.”
The Oscar season veteran didn’t mince his words when it came to Clinton’s opponent.
“Ronald Reagan ran the country and it survived. This is not George W. Bush. This is really serious. It’s somebody appealing to the worst in us.”
Mr. Weinstein, at least, seems to be living proof of the wisdom of fleeing the Trump Presidency (though perhaps it would be better to choose a country other than Canada, e.g., one without an extradition treaty with the U.S.).
Full post, including comments“Friends are like seashells.” Because they look good at first but start to smell a few days after you get them home?
Conch salad at the Fish Fry:
Also some drink options and some popular after-drinking options…
Waving goodbye from the Cirrus SR20:
