During a recent visit to Orlando, except for one former Moroccan, all of our Uber drivers were former Venezuelans aged 50+. Via communication in a pidgin of English and Spanish, I learned that all of the former Venezuelans were chain migrants. Each had 4-5 children, at least one of whom lived in the U.S. and was therefore entitled to bring in both mom and dad. The guy who spoke the best English was a retired military officer. His pension was $2 per month.
It does not seem as though these folks are going to be net taxpayers, since all whom I met had earnings that would entitle them to subsidies for housing, health care, food, etc. American taxpayers will fund all of their medical expenses (about $11,000 per Medicare beneficiary per year plus these folks should be on Medicaid or subsidized Obamacare prior to age 65, so figure $500,000 total for health care?).
Over the last 35 years, chain migration has greatly exceeded new immigration. Out of 33 million immigrants admitted to the United States from 1981 to 2016, about 20 million were chain migration immigrants (61 percent).
According to the most complete contemporary academic studies on chain migration, in recent years each new immigrant sponsored an average of 3.45 additional immigrants. In the early 1980s, the chain migration multiplier was 2.59, or more than 30 percent lower.
I wonder if U.S. chain migration policy means that we can estimate the cost to U.S. taxpayers of a country experiencing an economic downturn. Let’s suppose that the meltdown in Venezuela has added 2 million chain migrant parents to the U.S. welfare state at roughly $1 million each (housing subsidies plus the $500,000 in medical expenses described above). Thus, it would be fair to say that Venezuela’s ongoing woes (can’t say “crisis” if it lasts for years, right?) will cost Americans at least $2 trillion?
(This does not account for the costs of congestion due to the fact that U.S. infrastructure is more or less fixed while the population grows. We experienced a traffic jam on a Saturday in Orlando and our driver said that was typical.)
Could we go around the world, figure out how many migrants from each country are already U.S. citizens, figure out how many parents, spouses, children, cousins, etc. have been left behind in the old country, and then estimate the cost to Americans if the economy in that country fails? We could then use these data to inform our foreign policy (usually starts from an isolationist premise, but due to our chain migration policy, it seems that our welfare is intimately intertwined with the welfare of any country that has previously sent us immigrants).
KMCO (thanks, Signature!), SeaWorld and Magic Kingdom from 2,000′ (thanks, Orlando Approach, for the 270 heading):
I hate day trading but can’t help but feel like I missed out on Tesla stock. Some people say it is going up another 20x, which would make them worth many trillions of dollars.
How can the big automakers continue to ignore Tesla, which is now a Colossus astride the stock market at least?
What if they’re managing the real world of car sales? Roughly 80 million cars are sold each year annually (CNBC). Tesla accounted for 367,500 of those (source). That’s 0.4 percent market share.
So perhaps there is no point in worrying about a 0.4 percent loss of sales unless Tesla can convert its stratospheric market cap into R&D money that will enable the company to pull ahead of Toyota, Honda, Audi, and BMW in overall engineering.
Tesla S for the security guards at Pad 39a, an Apollo launch pad now leased to SpaceX
Separately, my Irish friend, a huge car enthusiast (owns an Aston Martin, a Land Rover, a vintage Mercedes, etc.), got his first ride in a Tesla S down in Charleston, South Carolina. “That was rubbish,” he said, after we got out of the 20-minute Uber trip from Signature to downtown. Interior noise, ride smoothness, seat comfort, and upholstery (“was that cheap vinyl?”) were not up to his standards for a luxury vehicle.
(By contrast, he loved an Uber ride in the front seat of a new Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, back from the USS Yorktown (CV-10; below), admittedly fairly noisy with the soft top.)
Finally, my friend with the Tesla X recently traded it in on a Tesla S. The “autopilot” software is getting worse, not better, in his opinion. The system gets confused about oncoming traffic on two-lane roads, freaks out, and hits the brakes unnecessarily. (Our 2018 Honda Odyssey, roughly once per month, similarly warns spuriously about an oncoming car, but the system does not apply brakes by itself.) He says that the car won’t use regenerative braking when the battery is cold (i.e., most of the time here in Massachusetts). Tesla has concluded that the batteries don’t like the sudden injection of power unless they’ve previously been warmed up, as they are during the first couple of minutes of being connected to a Supercharger.
Readers: What accounts for Tesla’s huge market cap? Is it achievement in the domain of self-driving technology, potentially revolutionary for sales? This market research firm does not put Tesla even in the top 10.
Bonus: demonstrating my own commitment to the battery-electric vehicle revolution by sitting in a 2005 Cirrus SR20 while wearing a Nissan LEAF cap:
THE PROSECUTION OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: How the House Democrats, in the face of certain defeat, presented the case for impeachment.
The magazine hasn’t been that interesting since 2016 when it switched to an all-Trump-hatred-all-the-time format, but this article is. Prosecutors who knew that they had no chance of convicting someone nonetheless pressed on!
This feeling of inevitability was shared among those who were most intimately involved with the House’s impeachment efforts. As recently as July … Adam Schiff, the ex-prosecutor who became the de-facto leader of the House’s impeachment inquiry last fall, said that he would “be delighted” if there was a real prospect of removing the President through impeachment. Unfortunately, he said at the time, “the only way he’s leaving office, at least at this point, is by being voted out.”
Ordinarily, we don’t celebrate prosecutors who go after people whom they know they can’t convict, but when Trump is involved, apparently the standards are different!
Mr. Wiener’s measure, Senate Bill 50, would have overridden local zoning rules to allow high-density housing near transit lines, high-performing school districts and other amenity-laden areas. Supporters portrayed it as a big but necessary step toward reducing the state’s housing deficit — and helping to curb carbon emissions from long-distance driving — by fostering development in dense urban corridors.
Well, you can guess what happened next!
Separately, how do America’s vulnerable fare when parked amidst millions of rich people who say that their #1 priority is helping the vulnerable?
Housing costs are the primary reason that California’s poverty rate, 18.2 percent, is the highest of any state when adjusted for its cost of living, despite a thriving economy that has led to strong income growth and record-low unemployment.
With no new infrastructure and not too much new housing, what will American cities look like in 30 years?
The Tesla II post started looking at the material in Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, by Bernard Carlson. Summary: Tesla made bank with his AC motor and then Tesla got famous as a showman in the pre-TV age.
The book goes on to explain that Tesla was never successful after that. He never understood Katherine Clerk Maxwell’s equations and therefore kept trying to run everything through the Earth (which turns out to be quite effective at grounding out signals!):
Of course, in many modern applications of radio—such as FM or communicating with aircraft—the transmitter and receiver circuits do not need to be grounded. In insisting on a complete circuit through the Earth and returning through the atmosphere, Tesla reveals here that his thinking was based more on nineteenth-century practices in power and telegraphic engineering (which emphasized complete circuits) and not on the electromagnetic theory then being developed by the Maxwellians (see Chapter 6) that is widely accepted today. Thinking like a maverick has advantages and disadvantages.
Tesla believed that he would not need to pump huge amounts of electrical energy into the earth; only a small amount was needed, at the right frequency, to serve as the trigger, and resonance would do the rest. With the whole Earth pulsing like his metaphorical football, Tesla was confident that he could annihilate distance and send power and messages around the world.
He not only believed this, he acted on his belief:
Leaving Chicago by train, Tesla arrived in Colorado Springs on 18 May 1899. At his hotel, the Alta Vista, he was immediately accosted by a reporter who asked him about his plans. “I propose to send a message from Pike’s Peak to Paris,” Tesla boldly replied.
… he devised a telescoping mast that could hoist a thirty-inch copper-covered ball to a height of 142 feet. To stabilize the mast, Tesla added a twenty-five-foot tower to the roof of the station.
Under Tesla’s direction, Lowenstein and Gregg built an enormous magnifying transmitter. In the station’s main room, they constructed a circular wooden wall about six feet high and 49.25 feet in diameter. Around the top of this wall they wound two turns of thick cable in order to create the primary winding of the transmitter. In the center of the room they built the secondary coil using a hundred turns of finer wire. One end of this secondary coil could be connected to either a spherical terminal inside the laboratory or the copper ball atop the mast while the other end was grounded. To provide AC to the transmitter, Tesla tapped into the streetcar line that stopped just at the edge of the Knob Hill prairie. He stepped up this 500-volt current by employing a 50-kilowatt Westinghouse transformer that he rewound so that it converted the incoming current to 20,000 or 40,000 volts. The transformer was connected to a large bank of capacitors that were automatically interrupted (and hence discharged) by a motorized breakwheel. Rounding out the equipment were several large coils that could be moved around the space between the secondary and the primary.
Tesla was able to detect signals from his high-voltage high-power apparatus from a short distance away. He did not bother to check whether the signal would be attenuated with distance.
Over the next few months, Tesla conducted additional tests to verify that his magnifying transmitter was sending currents into the ground and that they could be detected. In August he tried “arrangements for telegraphy,” finding that “[t]he apparatus responded freely to [a] small pocket coil at a distance of several feet with no capacity attached and no adjusted circuit. Consequently will go at great distance.” A few weeks later, he took a receiver outside and connected it to an underground water pipe; at 250 feet from the station, he drew one-inch sparks, and at 400 feet he got half-inch sparks. On 11 September 1900, Tesla carried a receiver a mile away from the station, to nearby Prospect Lake, where he was able to measure that the magnifying transmitter was operating with a wavelength of about 4,000 feet.
This lack of witnessed distance tests can be explained on two levels: the theoretical and the personal. From a theoretical standpoint, Tesla did not believe that such tests were necessary. Tesla had decided that stationary waves in the earth, unlike ordinary Hertzian or light waves, did not lose energy as they propagated; consequently, if they could be detected a short distance from the transmitter, these waves could be detected at any distance. Likewise, Tesla also thought that in the return circuit through the atmosphere the process of conduction was extremely efficient and that there would be minimal losses. If there were no losses as the waves traveled from the transmitter to the receiver and back again, then any test detecting the waves—no matter how short the distance—was sufficient for Tesla. Hence he concluded that “communication without wires to any point of the globe is practicable … [and] would need no demonstration.”
Tesla conceived impractical ideas for radio-controlled military attack boats that earned scorn.
Tesla might have done well in San Francisco: “Though we may never know exactly why Tesla never married, the existing sources suggest several possible explanations. The first is, quite simply, that Tesla was more attracted to men than women.”
Why didn’t he invent the rainbow flag, then? “… since sexual degeneracy, like poverty, was viewed as proof that the poor were inferior, middle-class individuals were careful not to reveal anything that could be construed as unusual about their sexual conduct.”
How about mental health?
Tesla’s way through the mountain was electrotherapy. During his earliest work with high-frequency AC, Tesla had noted how such currents affected the body, and during his spectacular demonstrations, he may have observed how shocks altered his mood. Moreover, there was a tradition in popular medicine in mid-nineteenth-century America of using electric shocks from Ruhmkorff coils to treat a variety of ailments; Elihu Thomson’s father, for instance, took shocks in the 1860s as a medical treatment. Over the next few months Tesla gave himself regular shocks, probably using one of his oscillating coils, in order to keep “from sinking into a state of melancholia.” “I was so blue and discouraged in those days,” he later told a reporter, “that I don’t believe I could have borne up but for the regular electric treatment which I administered to myself. You see, electricity puts into the tired body just what it most needs—life force, nerve force. It’s a great doctor, I can tell you, perhaps the greatest of all doctors.”
In other health news, Tesla experimented with X-rays and exposed himself to what would be criminal levels of radiation: “both he and his assistants soon experienced eyestrain, headaches, and burns on the skin of their hands.” Yet he lived to 86!
Donald Trump has demonstrated his criminal mastermind capabilities by beating the impeachment rap. In the entirely non-partisan process, out of 535 members of Congress there were 4 people whose vote could not have been predicted by party affiliation?
The failure to remove Trump has occasioned despair among my Facebook friends:
The Day Democracy Died
Tombstone: American Democracy 1776-2020, killed by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans who refused to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of a criminal president
An American flag morphing into a Nazi flag
Today the US Senate has validated the most dangerous precedent in its history. … This principle could be used to literally make a US president a dictator. Republicans will come to deeply regret this sad day. [more dangerous a precedent than court-approved Japanese-American internment?]
We now have a Russian-style government [if true, where is the U.S. metro system that runs a train on every line every 60 seconds?]
[From January 28] People who aren’t following the impeachment story are missing one as fascinating as any cliffhanger Game of Thrones story. It looks like the senators might not want to be caught letting Trump murder the Constitution. Surprise.
Today is going to be one of the darkest days in the history of the United States. Maybe, just maybe we did not deserve Democracy and all the efforts of the Framers who dedicate their energy, time and vision to set up the architecture of the Constitution… [In the good old days we had the Framers holding slaves, stealing land from the Native Americans, and speculating in real estate west of the Proclamation Line]
My fear grows that Donald Trump will win in 2020. … Badly constructed polls, and definitely national polls should be denounced. Anybody who cites a national poll should be criticized as distracting from the actual task at hand. Anybody who funds one should be questioned as being under the spell of Putin, because they can only mislead from the real answer. … Yes, under the spell of Putin. We are highly confident he is trying to manipulate the left in this election, to make them self-destruct. The question is not whether he is doing this, but to what extent he is succeeding. Any time you see the Democrats doing self-destructive things, you should be suspicious.
[me, responding to the rich Bay Area dweller above] How will you survive if the next five years are anything like the last three?
[him] it will be a challenge. More down the road, as Trump hastens the decline of not just the USA but the West, in the world.
For the above-quoted folks, impeachment of Trump is serious and/or entertaining. Why let it end with acquittal? Removing a Hitler-style dictator would be worth more than one try, right? Maybe in the second try more than one Republican will see that Trump actually is the new Hitler.
Most of us do stuff every day, right? From the point of view of politicians in the party to which he no longer belongs, isn’t almost anything that Donald Trump does conceivably impeachable? If so, why not start a new impeachment process next week? (or tomorrow!) Surely it can’t be too early to begin an investigation at least?
Who watched the State of the Union? What were the highlights?
From one of the private jet terminals (FBO) at our local airport… $80,000 Audi A7 with a “Dump Trump” bumper sticker. How will the owner survive four more years of economic crisis?
A bill arrived for a (routine and negative) medical test today. Due to the artificially restricted supply, the provider attempted to fix the price at $150 (ask a physician who #resists Trump and welcomes migrants if European doctors should be able to come to the U.S. and start offering medical services!). Via the miracle of monopsony, however, Blue Cross dictated to them a price of $47.08 (why the .08?) and thus a paper-in-the-mail process was initiated to collect the cost of a local restaurant meal (annual deductible not yet met so this $47.08 has to be paid on top of the $10,000-ish cost of the policy).
My favorite thing about Bernie Sanders is that he is the only politician with the courage to say “this is dumb; we should try something else.”
Sanders seems to have done well in Iowa (though not as well as the politician that I thought, six months ago, should be #1 among the Democrats). Maybe the enthusiasm for Sanders is partly driven by consumer rage on receiving explicit disclosures like this of how the U.S. health care system is not representative of an ordinary market (you can’t buy food insurance and get 2/3rds off your next McDonald’s bill; McDonald’s doesn’t make that much profit at its headline prices).
I wonder if Sanders’s opponents from all parties (Socialist, Green, Libertarian, Democrat, and Republican) would be wise to start their fight against Sanders by proposing a law that forbids providers to charge a higher price to individuals than to insurers.
A smartphone app tasked with reporting the results of the Iowa caucus has crashed, delaying the result of the first major count in nominating a Democratic candidate to run for the U.S. presidency.
Previously, I wrote about how a handful of lines of code could have prevented the Boeing 737 MAX’s software from trimming the airliner into a dive-bomber-at-Midway nose-down attitude (see “Boeing 737 MAX crash and the rejection of ridiculous data”, for example).
I recently visited the Kennedy Space Center visitor center. In the building housing one of the leftover Saturn V rockets there is a compelling “Lunar Theater” presentation explaining that software overloaded the computer system in the Lunar Module during Apollo 11, the first landing on the moon. According to the dramatic retelling, the mission was saved only because the crew hand-flew the spaceship to a successful landing. In other words, all of the civil, mechanical, electrical, and aeronautical engineering challenges were met, but the software failed.
[Update: See comments below for how the the software in this case may have been blameless!]
The books for sale at the KSC do not encourage young visitors to become computer programmers…
Also, what if the Iowa debacle had happened in some other country? Would U.S. media report it as resulting from a fundamental problem with that country’s culture and educational system? Whereas if it happens here in the U.S. it is just an unfortunate freak event?
Related:
Apollo 11: Mission Out of Control (WIRED): “The inside story of how Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin struggled to touch down on the moon, while their guidance computer kept crashing. Again and again.”
So many questions after watching part of the Super Bowl with an Irish friend.
“Are any of the Kansas City Chiefs from the same tribe as Elizabeth Warren?” Turns out that this was already answered by the New York Times:
On Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs will play the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl. Chiefs fans will don headdresses and mark themselves with red paint to perform the “tomahawk chop,” a wordless chant complete with a swinging motion of the forearm, caricaturing what they believe is Native American culture.
A 2005 resolution by the American Psychological Association recognized research that found that Native American team mascots and symbols harm our children’s self-esteem. Racial stereotypes are harmful, no matter the intent.
How do multiple “chiefs” play together as a team? (No answer so far.)
Inevitably from a person accustomed to soccer: “Why is this game so f*cking slow?” (I timed the last 2.5 minutes of the game… more than 20 minutes.)
A minor question: Why couldn’t the 49ers concede with a few seconds left in the game? Why were the players collectively forced to run out the clock?
My own question: Fox and Fox News are owned by the same parent company. Watching the Super Bowl thus puts cash into the pockets of the Official Channel of the Deplorables. Why would people who proudly #resist and who claim that Fox News is responsible for the parlous state of our nation watch regular Fox at any time for any reason?
Readers: How can anyone who purports to be resisting Donald Trump tune into a Fox station?
