Ireland and immigration

by philg

The same question of “How do you run a welfare state with open borders?” that Milton Friedman answered with “You can’t” remains a live one in Ireland: “The Irish are losing control of Ireland once again?” is a video that an Irish friend sent me. Gemma O’Doherty, towards the end, asks what the point was of fighting the British colonizers if Ireland ultimately will be primarily occupied by non-Irish. She also points out that one third of “social housing” in Ireland is currently occupied by non-Irish. (Not sure how this can be true since, as in America, there is a long waiting list for a free house (yet folks say that free housing is a basic human right! But if it is actually a right, why is there a waiting list? If it is not a right, why do some people get a free house?)).

Ireland is far more hostile to immigrants and asylum-seekers than the U.S. Voters eliminated birthright citizenship in 2004 with a constitutional amendment. Asylum-seekers are dumped into cramped apartments, forbidden to work, and forgotten about (except by Amnesty International, which criticizes Ireland for this). The Irish with whom I spoke thought this was brutal, but effective. “Nobody is coming here to claim asylum anymore.”

During a May/June trip to Ireland, employers and developers of rental property were the most positive regarding the merits of immigration, praising the work ethic of Eastern Europeans, for example, and noting which neighborhoods in Dublin were now primarily occupied by (rent-paying) Pakistanis.

Folks who were not able to make money as a result of immigration and population growth were less sanguine. They missed the cohesion of a society in which they could find common ground for a conversation with anyone anywhere in the country. A retired police officer sounded unhappy that pedestrian streets now had to be protected from vehicular mass murder, a requirement that he attributed to the decision to allow Muslims to emigrate to Ireland.

The places in Ireland where an immigrant might settle, i.e., the cities with jobs, are jam-packed already. Traffic in Dublin and on the surrounding highways slows to a crawl in mid-afternoon. Commuter trains are standing-room-only during weekday morning and evenings. There is no realistic Chinese-style plan to add a subway system. Here’s the situation close to 9:00 am on a weekday, when people should already be at work:

Housing is not affordable for median-income earners (see “Dublin’s Housing Crisis Reaches a Boiling Point”: “The city’s average rent as of March was up to €1,875 ($2,176) a month. This is a large amount for anyone on the Irish average monthly wage of €3,181 ($3,692) and completely impossible for anyone paid anything close to the minimum hourly wage of €9.25 ($10.74).”) As in the U.S., the government engages in every possible scheme to fight the result of Econ 101 supply and demand curves. Developers of new buildings have to give apartments to central planners for them to allocate. Housing bureaucrats conceive grand plans for “social housing,” never imagining that demand for guaranteed free housing could outstrip supply (as in the U.S., the best way to get hold of a “social housing” unit is to have a child and refrain from working).

It is unclear what it would mean to apply a fashionable American politician’s open borders policy to Ireland. The country is home to roughly 5 million people. If 1 out of every 1,000 people currently living somewhere else decided that it would be nice to move to Ireland, that would be 7.6 million immigrants (from a baseline of 7.6 billion) and the country would no longer be “Irish”.

The debate is pretty much the same as in the U.S., but with all of the numbers scaled down. People who want to exclude 98 percent of would-be migrants claim the moral high ground by contrast with those who want to exclude 99 percent. Nobody who expresses love and concern for migrants actually wants to allow everyone in, much less shelter any of them in his or her own home. The country’s welfare state offers citizens the ability to refrain from work for an entire lifetime and, indeed, for multiple generations. People don’t want immigrants to come in and use the system as designed, but they have signed high-toned international agreements promising not to discriminate when ladling out the welfare.

Related:

  • “Migration in Ireland a huge issue but what we need’s a solution” (IrishCentral), concluding with “As the taoiseach said, the ultimate answer lies in improving the countries migrants are coming from, whether that’s in Africa or South America.” (i.e., Ireland now has to figure out how to make Africa and South America prosperous on a per-capita basis!)
  • “Huge scale of immigration is making our housing crisis worse” (Irish Independent)
  • “In Ireland, Bid to Restore Birthright Citizenship Gains Ground” (nytimes): “The government’s opposition is based on the special relationship between Ireland and Northern Ireland, said a spokesman for the Department of Justice and Equality, which has responsibility for immigration matters. Although Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, its people are legally entitled to both British and Irish citizenship. The Irish government fears that people living illegally in Britain could move to Northern Ireland, give birth to a child there and obtain Irish citizenship for their child after living there for three years. The parents could then use the child’s citizenship to obtain residency anywhere in Ireland or the United Kingdom which, though separate countries, confer extensive mutual residency and travel rights on each other’s citizens.”
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Paternal leave increases income inequality?

by philg

Back in June, the NYT suggested that moms will be better off if taxpayers and childless workers suck it up to give more paid time off for “fathers”: “Sweden Finds a Simple Way to Improve New Mothers’ Health. It Involves Fathers.”

(Why the headline cisgender-normative assumption (during Pride Month!) that if the first parent of a child is a “mother” then the second parent will be a “father”?)

But which moms?

The study was done in Sweden (by the same author who found that court-ordered child support payments for the mother reduced fathers’ voluntary contributions to the child (monetary and time-invested) in roughly equal measures, thus leaving children no better off financially (and worse off from a personal contact point of view); the NYT did not consider this previous study to be newsworthy). Compared to any other country, the U.S. has a much higher percentage of children who grow up without a father, so maybe it is worth asking “For those children who actually do have a father, what is our best guess regarding the family income level?”

Asians have a low divorce rate and a higher-than-average income, so “Asian and high income household” would be one guess for characteristics of “kid with father”. On the other hand, Asians are not yet a large percentage of the U.S. population. So “White and higher-than-average income” is an even better guess.

Thus, the NYT proposed extra benefit targeted at women who happen to live with the father of their children turns out to be a benefit primarily for richer whiter women. Thus the newspaper that regularly decries income inequality ends up promoting a policy to increase inequality!

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New York helicopter crash: why not robot intelligence?

by philg

Last month, New Yorkers were stunned when a helicopter crashed into a building on a miserable cloudy day. The NTSB report describes the machine as an Agusta A109E, the “Power” edition of the twin-engine helicopter that came standard with an autopilot.

Thus we have a machine with autopilot servos that can manipulate cyclic and collective. The machine came with a glass cockpit so it also should have at least two digital attitude sources (whether the helicopter is pitched up, banked left, etc.). Finally, it almost surely had a GPS receiver and a digital terrain database, which would have included the obstacles of Manhattan.

Media coverage centered on the pilot’s lack of an instrument rating (example: CNN). (In fact, being capable of instrument flight does not help that much unless one is actually planning an IFR flight from airport to airport with established procedures for departure and approach/landing.)

Nobody seems to have asked “If it had autopilot servos, attitude sources, and a GPS, why couldn’t a $10 million helicopter fly itself through the low clouds, away from the buildings, and to the destination? A DJI drone would have been able to do that.”

We expect so much of our phones and so little from our aircraft!

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Cougar 91 lesson: on-board computers should run the checklist flowchart

by philg

I recently had occasion to go through materials regarding the crash of Cougar flight 91, a nearly new $20 million Sikorsky S-92 that went into the water off the coast of Newfoundland.

The helicopter featured five big bitmap displays, all driven by on-board computers. From the (Canadian) TSB report:

Following the sudden loss of oil in the main gearbox (takes power from the two engines and sends it up to the main rotor and back to the tail rotor), the screens were displaying a MGB Oil Pressure red warning message and a main gearbox oil pressure of 0 psi. The pilots were supposed to get out the paper checklists, see that MGB red light plus < 5 psi implies “land immediately” (i.e., ditch in the sea), and then act on the result of this IF statement. It turned out not to be easy to find the correct checklist (2.5 minutes) and it was ultimately 6.5 minutes after the catastrophic oil loss that the pilots realized that Sikorsky’s recommendation was to “land immediately” (i.e., ditch in the sea despite the risk of rolling over and potentially drowning).

There were a bunch of changes recommended after the accident, but nobody seems to have questions that it was the task-saturated pilots’ job to get out paper checklists and run flowcharts.

It was a computer that was displaying the red message and a computer that was displaying the oil pressure number.

Shouldn’t the computer have an additional two lines of code to run the algorithm itself and display a “MGB FAILING: LAND IMMEDIATELY” message?

[Why wasn’t it obvious to ditch rather than try to make it back to land? In aviation it is more common to have an indication problem than a real problem. If a gauge is showing “unhealthy” but there aren’t unusual sounds or other secondary indications, it usually does not make sense to take immediate drastic action. Putting a helicopter down in the open ocean, even a helicopter with pop-out floats, entails the risk of a rollover and then occupants having trouble escaping.]

Intro to the emergency checklist section of the S-92A RFM:

After a bunch of distracting preliminary pages, the RFM does say that the reading of oil pressure below 5 psi is a secondary indication to the red warning:

Keep in mind that it is one thing to find this page in a massive book and then follow its logic while sitting at a desk drinking a latte and quite another to do it in a stricken helicopter with 16 passengers in the back and an 8-foot swell in the cold Atlantic Ocean below.

Related:

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Why don’t our cars text the police when we’re breaking the law?

by philg

Volodymyr Zhukovskyy killed seven motorcyclists in New Hampshire recently. He had a long history of driving erratically, presumably at least partly due to his passion for consuming alcohol, cocaine, and heroin (see USA Today and WCVB).

Driving is something that happens in public. We don’t expect or receive privacy when we’re on a public road in a vehicle that is 15′ long. Why wouldn’t the vehicle, now packed with electronics, simply text the police when the vehicle was speeding or weaving? This guy might have been off the road a few years earlier, thus sparing 7 lives, if the cars and trucks he’d been driving had ratted him out.

The police aren’t allowed to run video continuously everywhere and then arrest all of the criminals thus discovered, but at least in a lot of European countries they seem to do this in public (signs indicate that video recording is in use).

What’s more public than driving on a public road? Why do we have an expectation that our vehicle’s track over the road is private? Why do we spend a huge amount of tax dollars on traffic law enforcement when electronics in cars could do this for us at zero cost?

[The situation is different when people are indoors. For example, “‘Bungled from the beginning’: How Robert Kraft’s sex sting was marred by cops’ missteps” (South Florida Sun Sentinel, May 18, 2019):

In all previous prostitution stings at South Florida massage parlors — including a few with similar sneak-and-peek warrants for secret cameras — the cases resolved quietly and mostly out of the spotlight. Few if any people charged ever challenged the prosecutions. They paid fines and performed community service hours, to avoid embarrassment. … But Aronberg’s office walked back the claims, telling Kraft’s judge that there was no evidence of human trafficking. It was just misdemeanor solicitation of prostitution charges for the men, and felony charges of making money from prostitution for the women. … After judges approved the sneak-and-peek warrants, police used “tactical ruses” to clear out the businesses so they could install the cameras in the massage rooms and the lobby. The cops said they needed to investigate a suspicious package, creating a bomb scare. … But Hanser concluded the warrant still broke federal law, because police didn’t do enough to focus only on crimes and to minimize the cameras’ intrusiveness. At all of the spas with the secret cameras, police wound up recording people receiving lawful services, even though the focus was supposed to be only on men paying for sex acts. … All massage-parlor customers have a reasonable expectation of privacy under the U.S. Constitution, regardless of whether or not they went there for a lawful massage, the judge found.

(One never-answered question raised by the Robert Kraft case is why it was legal for him to pay a 40-year-younger woman in Los Angeles by the month (PEOPLE magazine on the “girlfriend” who lives in a house Kraft owns) but it was illegal for him to pay a woman in Florida by the hour.)]

Related:

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Meet in Washington, D.C.?

by philg

Dear Readers:

Because I like to do everything in the dumbest way imaginable, I will be visiting Washington, D.C. in July.

If you’d like to get together for coffee, perhaps Sunday afternoon, July 14, or Monday early(ish) morning, July 15, please email me (philg@mit.edu).

Venue will be the Conrad hotel near Chinatown.

(I would have preferred to meet at the Capital One café for Pride Month, but I fear that they may have removed their Pride decor (the issue is important enough to be focused on during June, but not for the rest of the year?):

)

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Where does all of the soccer money go if not to the teams?

by philg

“Revenue Disparity Explains Pay Disparity Between Soccer World Cup’s Men And Women” (Forbes):

The men still pull the World Cup money wagon. The men’s World Cup in Russia generated over $6 billion in revenue, with the participating teams sharing $400 million, less than 7% of revenue. Meanwhile, the Women’s World Cup is expected to earn $131 million for the full four-year cycle 2019-22 and dole out $30 million to the participating teams.

The male/female/Iranian pay disparity isn’t as interesting to me as what happened to $5.6 billion ($6 billion minus the $400 million paid out to men’s teams). Someone other than the teams (management, owners, and players?) ended up with more than 93 percent of the revenue? Can this be true? Why wouldn’t the teams start their own league and bypass the folks who are skimming off 93%?

Maybe Forbes is being sloppy? And it is players who are getting 6.7 percent of the money while team owners and managers get most of the remainder?

Related:

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Don’t talk to the police without a lawyer

by philg

The Last Stone, by Mark Bowden (author of Black Hawk Down), shows the terrible consequences for one criminal of not availing himself of his right to have a lawyer present (who presumably would have told him to take the Fifth Amendment, since he was, in fact, guilty).

After decades of smaller convictions, Lloyd Welch was in prison in Delaware for molesting a 10-year-old girl. The Montgomery County, Maryland police detectives came to talk to him in 2013 regarding the disappearance of two girls in 1975. If he had refused to talk to them, he would have been released from prison a few years later, signed up for public housing, Medicaid, food stamps, Obamaphone, etc., and enjoyed the last third of his life:

Prior to this collision with the Lyon squad, the path had seemed clear. His prison mental-health report had all but pronounced him rehabilitated. “Mr. Welch took advantage of the treatment opportunities available within the prison to come to an understanding of the problems that led to [his] offense,” it read, its author either asleep or completely taken in. “Mr. Welch seems to have developed deep insight, empathy, and remorse for his victim’s pain and suffering.”

Over about 70 hours of interviews, though, the police gradually got him to admit his involvement in the kidnapping, rape, and murder of the girls (sisters, aged 10 and 12). The critical tools were flattering, lying (pretending that they knew more than they did), and patience. Multiple interrogators collaborated on this project and they had different personalities, which lent itself naturally to the good-cop, bad-cop ploy.

Mark, in particular, seemed to get this. He showed no sympathy for Lloyd whatsoever. He badgered him with the falsehoods and inconsistencies in his stories. He also liberally exaggerated the evidence against him. “We found a lot of cases that are all across Maryland, South Carolina, Florida. All these cases around Wheaton, Takoma Park, that look like they’ve got your name on them. Rapes. Girls have disappeared. Girls that have been found murdered.” “Hold. Hold. Hold,” Lloyd protested, raising his hand. “No, this is the truth, Lloyd. We have all the old evidence. All the old fingerprints, DNA samples, stuff that was never analyzed. Because back in the seventies they didn’t have DNA analysis. But we kept all that evidence. Now it is all getting compared. And it’s not just going to be us saying that you did it. That’s evidence, Lloyd.” Mark was bluffing. None of this was true.

Electronic surveillance suggests that the family is guilty (see previous post), but does not yield enough information for a conviction:

The squad had anticipated monitoring calls for a month, but they ended up listening for three months. It was costly. Supervised by veteran Montgomery County detective Rich Armagost, the bugs had to be monitored twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, occupying four or five officers at a time. Many of the things overheard were redolent of deeper knowledge. For instance, after seeing news reports about the digging on Taylor’s Mountain, Pat Welch told one caller, knowingly, “They are going to find something on that mountain.” When told where the police were digging, she remarked, categorically, “Those aren’t their graves” and “They are on the wrong side of the mountain,” even though she had insisted to the squad that she knew nothing whatsoever about the Lyon girls.

The police can’t get any good physical evidence, even after they are pretty sure that they know what happened to the two girls’ bodies:

The location of the bonfire had been fixed, and the dirt there scooped out and sifted through screens. A fragment of charred human bone was found, along with scraps of singed fabric that might have been worn by the girls or come from the bags described by Connie and Henry. Melted fragments of beads were found that might have matched a necklace Kate had worn, and a piece of wire recovered might have matched the frame of Sheila’s glasses. None of these items tested out convincingly. No DNA could be recovered from the bone.

So it comes down to getting Lloyd to keep telling his story and lying about the physical evidence is not off limits:

Virginia’s prosecutors weren’t buying it, Dave explained, because they were more intent on nailing him than on learning the truth. In short, Lloyd was about to be charged with murder. “Does the DNA from the bones show that it was the girls?” Lloyd asked. “Got one fragment that shows,” said Dave, falsely.

The most effective tactic is wearing down the suspect.

After four hours, Dave left and Katie stepped in. She buttered Lloyd up at length, going on about how much better a person he was than the rest of his family, how much more cooperative he was. Then she pleaded with him to help himself by helping them. They were on his side!

Katie sometimes tried to simply overwhelm Lloyd. She would start talking, throwing out ideas, her words flowing in great improvisational gusts, easing from one concept to the next, alternately flattering, reasoning, bargaining, confronting, empathizing. Mark called it her superpower; he joked that sometimes suspects would confess just to shut her up. Katie turned it on full bore now. She invoked Lloyd’s children, who, she said, wanted this all to be over. She talked about mistakes she had made in her own life. She was somebody who knew mistakes. Life, she said, was about learning and moving on … She was still at it when the session passed the six-hour mark. It was a magnificent torrent of cajolery, all of it delivered earnestly and with a straight face.

Jesus forgives even if the Montgomery County police do not:

The Virginia detectives came back in before the session ended to reassure him that he had a few more days. Lloyd told them how bad he felt for having done nothing to help the girls back in 1975, about how his life had changed. He’d become a Christian; he was determined to turn things around. “I’m not a bad person,” he said.

But the Montgomery County police pretend to forgive. They often tell Lloyd that his interest in young girls and drugs was perfectly normal back in 1975:

There were totally different things goin’ on back then.” Katie was smoothing the path for Lloyd. She was allowing, for purposes of easing Lloyd’s concerns, that having sex with prepubescent girls was somehow a normal thing, especially in the anything-goes 1970s.

Lloyd said he thought his story would be interesting. He had never touched the girls, he said, but he’d led an interesting life. “I had a lot of ass when I was growing up,” he said. “I didn’t have to force myself or anything like that. I mean, when I lived in Washington, DC, in that runaway house, I had different girls every night, because we just partied together. Nothing forceful or anything like that. We’d all just get together—” “It was the seventies.” “—and it was free love. Sex, rock ’n’ roll.” “Exactly.”

Separately, the author tries to explain why a person would kidnap two girls from a shopping mall, 10 and 12, and participate in their rape and murder. The answer comes from Bernie Sanders and Thomas Piketty:

In a twisted way, it made sense for Lloyd to prey on children at the mall, for several reasons. … Malls were suburbia’s gleaming showcases, lined with high-end stores stocked with goods Lloyd could not afford, displaying colorful, oversize ads for a lifestyle beyond his reach. They drew clean and prosperous families with credit cards and shopping lists. Living in the woods with his girlfriend, Lloyd would not have known how to take the first step into that world. And while he was not the sort to reflect on such things, much less articulate them, he must have resented the plenitude, all the comforts of money, family, and community that he lacked. As Lloyd himself had put it, “I was an angry person when I was young.”

If only we can eliminate inequality, we may also be able to eliminate this kind of crime. #VoteWarren

What do evil people look like? Would we know them if we saw them? The author goes to visit Lloyd Welch in prison and finds “an unimpressive, scheming man.” The guy does seem to lack self-awareness: “He complained about being treated in the prison as a rapist and murderer of children.”

The guy certainly deserves to be in prison, it seems. But he put himself there by not asking for a taxpayer-funded attorney. That is one of the strangest aspects of the story.

More: Read The Last Stone.

Related:

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Getting together at AirVenture (Oshkosh)

by philg

Here are some places I hope to be at AirVenture. I would be happy to get together with any readers. Maybe the best way to reach me is via text: 617-864-6832. The guaranteed meeting would be on Wednesday morning, since I’m the speaker!

Tentative schedule… (I usually execute on about one third of these plans!)

Monday, 2:30 pm: USAF pilot training, Forum Stage 4 (conflicts, unfortunately, with David Martin in the Beech Baron in the airshow)

Monday afternoon: Aeromart (swap meet and the good stuff is picked over quickly).

Monday evening, July 22: Cirrus pilot dinner at the Hilton Garden Inn, 5:30 onward. Non-COPA owners may register.

Tuesday, 8:30 am: PT6A operations for PC-12, Workshop Classroom C.

Tuesday, 10 am: Over Both Poles in a Homebuilt by Bill Harrelson, Homebuilders Hangar. Tough competition from Back-Country Flying with SkyChick (Ramona Cox) on Forum Stage 11.

Tuesday, 10 am: Designing the Perfect Paint Scheme, Forum Stage 10. I did this last year (report) so I won’t go again, but highly recommended.

Tuesday 11 am or noon: Try to catch a Vintage Aircraft Tram Tour from the Vintage Red barn (every hour from 9-1).

Tuesday 11:30: Mad MAX-style kit helicopter and gyrocopter demonstrations at the Ultralight runway.

Tuesday, 1 pm, Theater in the Woods: Southwest 1380 talk by both pilots (imagine that, Captain “single pilot” Sully! Tammie Jo Shults brought her first officer Darren Ellisor into the spotlight!)

Tuesday, 2:30: Aerovie App, which looks like it has some interesting features, including an 8-day weather profile view (original idea is from WeatherSpork, I think), Forum Stage 9. (But it isn’t free, so how can it compete with modestly-priced market leader ForeFlight, now owned by Boeing? The plan is that Boeing will move some of its 737 MAX programmers onto the ForeFlight team and thereby destroy the product?)

Tuesday, 3 pm: Learn to use your weather radar, Part II, BendixKing Pavilion

Tuesday, 4 pm: Boring but important… Suzanne Meiners-Levy talks about business use of aircraft under the latest tax law. Forum Stage 10.

Tuesday, 5:30: EAA Press HQ social media meetup.

Wednesday morning, 0830: a talk on helicopter aerodynamics, Forum Stage 6. I should be finished talking (God willing!) by 9:00 am. Add another 15 minutes for questions from anyone crazy enough to have gotten up for 0830 and we can have a reader get-together at 9:15. We can walk over to the WomenVenture Group Photo at 11:00 am and see if we can get a T-shirt and be accepted in to the photo by saying “I woke up this morning identifying as a woman.” (I was previously rejected from the Air Race Classic despite offering to identify as a woman; apparently aviation is not transgender-friendly.)

Wednesday, 11:00 am: Learn to use WX Radar, Part I, Bendix/King Pavilion

Wednesday, 11:30 am: ForeFlight for experienced users, Forum Stage 8.

Wednesday, 1 pm: Flying to Mexico and Central America. Forum Stage 1. (Nobody told the pilots, mechanics, air traffic controllers, airport administrators, et al. down there that it is unsafe and they all must flee to the U.S. in a caravan (Cessna Caravan?).)

Wednesday afternoon: evening air show from Aviator’s Club: don’t want to miss Patty Wagstaff and Mike Goulian in their Extras or Jim Peitz in his inspiring Beech Bonanza (we can all do this in our family four-seaters!). The other theme will be The Death of a Tax Dollar, with the F-22 being demonstrated.

Wednesday, 6 pm: EAA WomenVenture – Celebrating Powerful Pilots, Theater in the Woods.

Wednesday evening: night air show from the Aviator’s Club. If sufficient energy, follow this up with the short aviation films at the Airbus fly-in theater

Thursday, 8:30: NASA Langley talk about pimping out a Cessna with the Mother of All Autopilots, Forum Stage 1. (it is unfortunate that most of NASA’s budget is wasted on pointless manned space missions; when these folks turn their attention to aviation the results are usually fantastic). During the same time slot, some folks are talking in the EAA Museum about creating a 270′-high “triumph of flight” monument. I.e., to celebrate aviation they are creating a dangerous obstacle!

Thursday, 8:30: Helicopter Safety Team, Forum Stage 3.

Thursday, 10:00 am: Innovation Showcase (“aviation innovation” is typically an oxymoron if we’re talking about certified!) in Aviation Gateway Park

Thursday, 11:30: Meet the FAA Administrator, Theater in the Woods

Thursday, 11:30: Flying the Concorde, Forum Stage 8 (i.e., EAA thinks 30X more people will be interested in hearing from about bureaucracy compared to hearing about supersonic flight)

Thursday, 1 pm: Burt Rutan talks in Theater in the Woods. Our age’s greatest airplane designer and also a climate change heretic (good thing he isn’t trying to get a job at Google!).

Thursday, 2:30 pm: ForeFlight for experienced users, Forum Stage 8 (if missed the above)

Thursday afternoon airshow: Jim Peitz at the beginning in the Beech Bonanza and David Martin near the end in the Beech Baron. I love these demonstrations of what ordinary aircraft can do when flown by someone skilled.

Thursday, 8 pm: Double Rutan action in the Theater in the Woods: Starship to Spaceships.

Thursday, 9:30 pm: U.S. premiere of a film about the Lafayette Escadrille in the Airbus theater.

Friday morning: Seaplane base! (maybe stay for the 1:30 “Floats Up” talk by Mary Build, a seaplane CFI from Maine) The want-to-go items below probably will have to be skipped.

Friday, 10:00 am: The Women of NASA, Theater in the Woods: “The speakers will encourage women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.” (i.e., the speakers will encourage women to choose a career that times out at age 50 and pays 1/10th to 1/3rd of what a physician earns!)

Friday, 10:00 am: Solar System Science with the James Webb Space Telescope, Forum Stage 6. The interesting part of NASA gets a small stage at the same time.

Friday, 11:30 am: Designing the Perfect Paint Scheme. Forum Stage 6. I did this last report (report) so I won’t go again, but highly recommended.

Friday, noon: Vintage Aircraft Tram Tour if did not already get it in.

Friday, 1 pm: Gyroplane 101, Ultralight Forums Tent. If these folks want to fly for about 200 hours low and slow in a two-seater, why don’t they simply buy a nearly timed-out Robinson R22?

Friday 1 pm: Hot Topics in Aviation Law, Forum Stage 9.

Friday, 2:30 pm: Airline Pilot Job Market, Forum Stage 8

Friday, 4 pm: Airport Secrets by a consultant to airports. FAA Aviation Safety Center.

Saturday, 0600: mass balloon launch (probably will sleep through!)

Saturday, 0630: 12 Step Recovery Meeting, Nature Center – Tent 3. Anyone crazy enough to get up for 0600 on a Saturday is probably suffering from a disease worse than alcoholism.

Saturday 0700: Ford Tri-Motor Flights (something to do before the show really starts).

Saturday 0730: Warbird Tram Tour

Saturday, 0900: Combating the Startle Effect, International Federal Pavilion.

Saturday, 10:00 am: Registering to fly in the D.C. FRZ. Recover the use of three airports buried in red tape after 9/11. Register ahead of time.

Saturday, 11:30 am: New in Foreflight, Forum Stage 8.

Saturday, 1 pm, EAA Museum, Wrights v. Curtiss patent wars. Americans have been leaders in aviation and nobody touches us when it comes to litigation. Let’s see what happens when these themes are combined!

Saturday afternoon: wander around EAA Museum (air-conditioned!) and the rest of the stuff in that area. Museum closes at 6 pm.

Saturday, 3 pm. Drone Obstacle Course in the Drone Cage. (if done early at museum).

Saturday, 6 pm: Homebuilt Aircraft Awards, Homebuilders Hangar.

Saturday evening, starting 8 pm: night air show from the Aviator’s Club.

Saturday, 9:30 pm: short aviation films, Airbus theater (if missed)

Sunday, 9:00 am: DJI Drone demo. Drone Cage.

Sunday, 9:00 am-4:00 pm: The exhibitors will be burned out, but there aren’t a lot of talks, etc. scheduled for today.

Sunday, 12:30 pm: DJI Inspire 2 demo. Drone Cage. This is the big one!

Sunday afternoon, 1 pm: Airshow? Don’t want to miss David Martin in his Beechcraft Baron(!). More tax dollars will be destroyed by an F-22. Also potentially interesting is Kyle Fowler in a Rutan Long-EZ. The F-35 and A-10 will also be demonstrated. (Wouldn’t it be nice if they could bring an enemy to do the announcing during these displays of military might? The North Korean guy could say “Whoa! Now I am truly frightened and will do whatever Donald Trump tells me.” An Iranian could say “Now that I’ve experienced the power of the F-22, there is no way I am going to keep building nukes.”)

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Increase Federal border staff in the south by moving some from the north?

by philg

The situation on the U.S. southern border is now considered by our media to be a “crisis.” The crisis is not so severe, of course, that Congress has been motivated to change any of the laws that encourage people to migrate here (birthright citizenship, lifetime taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone, etc.) [Just as the treatment of migrants who say that they’re under 18 is horrific, but not so bad that anyone complaining about it offers to open his or her own home to a migrant!]

Since we don’t have substantially more money or new laws to deal with the situation on the southern border, would it make sense to move resources that we’re already paying for?

When you fly a private airplane into Canada, for example, you let the Canadians know who is on the plane and where you expect to land. On landing, if you don’t see any officials (the usual case) you call up the authorities and they give you a “report number” to write down (unclear what this could ever be used for!), thus freeing the Canadian government to deal with more pressing issues.

When you fly a private airplane into the U.S., on the other hand, you have to provide complete information on all occupants of the aircraft via a web site (eAPIS) and also make a phone call as you would with Canada. The Feds will send out an armed agent ($1000 per working hour if we factor in pension, overtime for evenings/weekends, periodic weapons training, government SUV, and other benefits?) to do a cursory inspection of the plane and the people.

If the U.S. went to the “random sampling” approach that the Canadians use, there would be a lot of resources freed up to deal with the tide of migrants washing over the southern border. Aircraft operators are fairly diligent about customs and immigration. None of them want the government to take away their airplanes if an unauthorized person is found on board.

The same approach could be used for commercial airline flights. Why have 100 people at Logan Airport to deal with flights coming from London? The government already was advised via eAPIS of the passenger manifest. The passports were already checked in London by the airline. Why not move 90 of the 100 people to where they are most needed and have the remaining 10 randomly sample passengers from London?

If we had a country in which 100 percent of the residents were documented, maybe it would make sense to screen 100 percent of inbound travelers. But if we already have between 10 million and 22 million undocumented people living in the U.S., why does it make sense to screen the inbound family Cessna, the inbound Fortune 500 company’s Gulfstream, or the inbound British Airways flight whose passengers were carefully sifted through by the carrier?

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