Vendor of Chinese-made items congratulates Team America

by philg

From Apple.com just now, a graphic to celebrate the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team:

The products are made in China. The taxes are paid (sort of) in Ireland. But the soul of the enterprise is red, white, and blue?

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Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. (review)

by philg

To see how many folks would defriend me on Facebook, I decided to stay at the Trump Hotel (#1 ranked on TripAdvisor) during a recent business trip to D.C.

The hotel is located in one of the most impressive buildings in Washington, D.C., the 1899 Old Post Office. This became derelict by the 1970s and a 1983 revival attempt failed to turn it into a viable shopping mall. Trump leased it in 2013, fixed it up, and opened it as a hotel just in time for the 2016 coup d’etat (in which the rightful heiress to the U.S. throne failed to obtain it).

The ornate Trump style for which even he has mocked himself (see this 2004 episode of Saturday Night Live: “This place looks like the Liberace Museum”; “Who did your decorating? Saddam Hussein?”) works pretty well in an ornate Victorian-era building. Bring on the gold leaf!

Basic rooms are about $400/night (roughly 20 percent cheaper than comparably luxurious hotels). A pet is $50 extra. The bathroom featured enough marble to entomb a Communist leader (Bernie Sanders will eventually have his mausoleum here?).

A shaving kit was provided quickly and graciously by the front desk. The included razor was a three-blade Gillette, thus linking the Trump brand to a fight against toxic masculinity and to a celebration of transgenderism. Performance was truly terrible compared to anything made by Dorco.

The gym was huge (by hotel standards), with a full selection of weights, cardio, and other equipment. It was usually empty. Sadly, the gym restroom was not marked “all gender”:

Food in the hotel is served in the main glassed-over courtyard room. Breakfast is great, at typically high luxury hotel prices. The evening steakhouse is superb, with waitstaff who are obviously quite serious about cuisine. The Trump Organization does seem to have a knack for hiring great people. Everyone in the hotel is welcoming.

One nit: The courtyard, and therefore restaurants, is suffused with a soft techno-style thumping music. This might make sense at a W Hotel (which I can’t stand!) or in Miami, but Mozart string quartets would make a lot more sense given the decor.

My Facebook friends were outraged as predicted. A national bank “community relations” executive told me that the Trump hotels were her favorite and she would always try to get a room in a Trump property for any business trip to a city where the empires. She is even more passionate about her love for Obama and Hillary, however, and stopped patronizing Trump hotels in 2016.

A DC-based lawyer with whom I work said that he was a regular drinks/dining customer at the Trump D.C. hotel, but has shied away since Trump won the election.

Given that the intensity of Trump hatred among Democrats is much stronger than the intensity of Trump love among Republicans, I wonder if the narrative that Trump hotels are getting a boost in business from his presidency is false. Maybe there are some folks who think it is fun to be a Trump customer and perhaps there are some foreigners who think that Trump will do their bidding if they are regular guests. But these have to be outweighed by those who want to demonstrate their virtue by never setting foot in a Trump-named enterprise again.

(A friend at a local Harvard Club event was listening to a talk about negotiating difficult deals. The speaker said that one had to find something to “appreciate” about the person on the other side. Once that bond had been made it might be possible to make progress. As an example, then, he asked a woman in the audience “What can you appreciate about Donald Trump?” She answered immediately, and in a huff: “Nothing.” It doesn’t seem as though she will be a customer of Trump D.C. any time soon!)

Democrats have not explained how the influence would work. I would have loved it if the room had included a doorknob hang tag with the guest’s desired change to federal regulations (my pick: FAR 135.160!).

Some more views….

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Why is the U.S. doing well in women’s soccer?

by philg

Some American women’s soccer players are in the news lately. They hate Donald Trump and are winning matches against Europeans.

The U.S. has never won a men’s World Cup (our dismal record).

Why is the women’s team able to prevail over other countries?

[Also, if the teams are drawn from citizens of the respective countries, shouldn’t the populous countries such as China, India, and the U.S. have a huge advantage? Why would the Netherlands or Sweden have a chance?]

Finally, what stops a country from sending in what had been their “men’s team” and saying “all of these players now identify as ‘women'”? How competitive would the 20th place men’s team be against the top women’s team? Has there ever been a soccer equivalent to the various tennis battles of the sexes? (a Chinese female star prevailed over Novak Djokovic in one of the last three matches)

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  • a post quotingThe Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq: “He was starting to get pissed off about the world’s stupid obsession with Brazil. What was so great about Brazil? As far as he knew, Brazil was a shithole full of morons obsessed with soccer and Formula One.”
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LGBTQ+ as a hierarchy

by philg

Pride Month is over, but I am not quite ready to return my attention to Black Lives Matter and other social justice causes.

From a deeply closeted New York Deplorable (she runs a small business and therefore is unable to cheer for bigger government and higher taxes with appropriate enthusiasm):

I couldn’t help noticing that the purportedly Native American Two Spirit is at the bottom and therefore implicitly inferior to all of the white European ways of being LGBTQIA+ that are above. Also, Intersex is two notches better than Nonbinary. Who made that decision?

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Why do Americans care if migrant children are housed in a poor environment?

by philg

“Government Watchdog Finds Squalid Conditions in Border Centers” (nytimes) and similar are upsetting to quite a few Americans (at least my friends on Facebook are constantly expressing their anguish on this subject).

It might seem obvious why they’re upset. Nobody wants to see children living in a bad environment.

But is it obvious?

Federal and state governments provide housing for millions of children who are not migrants. Some of this is directly operated public housing. Some is the Feds giving Section 8 vouchers so that people who don’t work can live in what might turn out to be some crummy neighborhoods.

The result is American-born children living in, for example, the “Top 25 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods in America”. See also this article on crime in New York City’s public housing.

The terrible environment for American-born children housed by the Federal government has persisted for decades without any serious objections from voters (who keep returning the same politicians to office to continue the same policies!). Now the Feds are providing a terrible environment for non-American children and it is a crisis that people say they’re motivated to address (as long as they don’t have to house any migrants in their own homes!).

One could argue that the children in dangerous crumbling taxpayer-funded (and sometimes government-run) housing are free to walk out at any time, unlike at the migrant concentration camps. A child who lives in a gang-plagued project is as free as Bill Gates to check into a 5-star hotel on the other side of town. Yet the practical value of that freedom seems to be limited, as evidenced by the fact that many families have stayed in these projects for multiple generations.

Why the interest in migrant children and the lack of interest in American children for whom the government provides housing?

Separately, have we reached a high water mark for the discrepancy between expressed concern and practical action? There are only about 10 million people in Honduras. If they could deposit the expressed goodwill of Americans who say that they want to help migrants, every Honduran could live in luxury and ease. Imagine if everyone who posted on Facebook against the Trumpenfuhrer’s concentration camps sent a check to a Honduran. Why, at that point, would any Honduran be motivated to make the trek to the U.S. border?

I poked around a bit among the Facebook virtuous say-gooders.

  • Say-gooder 1: The conditions are horrible there … Policy is political- but the treatment of these humans by US is disgusting. We are not that. Dignity is precious.
  • Me: “Revealed preference” as the economists say. Dignity for Hondurans is not, in fact, as precious to the average American as a new car for him/herself. That’s why the money is spent on a new car instead of being sent to help the Honduran enjoy a comfortable life south of the border.
  • Me: If you would like to spend your own money to rent an apartment in Mexico for migrants so that they don’t have to risk the border crossing and internment in a concentration camp, I will be happy to match your spending dollar for dollar.
  • Say-gooder 1: You have to be that pedantic? How horrible these conditions are to humans, people are being treated -families separated, conditions undignified. I pay taxes, btw. Treat other people, even refugees, with dignity. Why not? The political allocation of funds (or profiteering) is different than the basic humanitarian treatment of other humans. Call your congressperson or run for Congress.

  • Me: [people in Santa Monica who say that they want to help migrants and also make housing more affordable should turn their soon-to-be-vacant 227-acre airport into 40,000 units of housing instead of a park for existing wealthy/housed residents. This to chip away at the 568,000-unit shortfall of affordable homes in Los Angeles]
  • LA-based say-gooder: … I don’t think 40,000 is a correct number in any scenario, because that’s a hugely disproportionate ask of Santa Monica vs. the homeless population in the entire region as a whole. If you want to make such demands, at least demand it of everyone (including L.A. which by territory is the largest city and also has land available), not just Santa Monica.
  • Me: Why is it an ASK for Santa Monica? If immigration into the U.S. makes our country better, why wouldn’t immigration into Santa Monica make Santa Monica better?
  • LA-based say-gooder: Is there a reason you singling out Santa Monica specifically?
  • Me: Of all of the cities in the U.S., Santa Monica is the only one that I know of that is planning to shut down its city-owned airport. So it is the only city that is about to free up a huge vacant lot. AND it happens to be in Greater LA, where there is a shortfall of affordable housing. AND folks there say that they are passionate about helping those with low incomes. So it their words are sincere, it is odd that they are passing up what seems like an obvious opportunity to align their deeds with their words.
  • LA-based say-gooder: [Santa Monica shouldn’t have to do this. It is burdensome. Immigration, even from other parts of LA or the U.S., will make Santa Monica worse off.]
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Another reason to abandon the suburbs in favor of the city?

by philg

If you’ve been on the fence regarding whether to give up the car-dependent lifestyle and move back to the city… “Lyme Disease Cases Are Exploding. And It’s Only Going to Get Worse.”:

Since 1992, the Cary Institute [Millbrook, NY] has been compiling a record of tick ecology that they believe to be the longest continuous study of this kind in the U.S. and possibly the world. … The process for counting ticks not affixed to hosts is called a drag — the researchers pull a one-square-meter sheet of fabric along the ground for 30 meters then tally the number of ticks affixed to it. Oggenfuss holds the Cary Institute record for ticks collected in a single drag: 1,700. As horrifying as that haul was — and it would, by extrapolation, put the tick population on the Cary Institute’s 2,000-acre campus at 2 billion — Oggenfuss is quick to note it was exceptional, and tick density is irregular. Her more conservative calculations of average tick populations, based on drags done during the same time of year (August, the larval peak), are only reassuring by comparison: upward of 20,000 ticks per acre, more than 100,000 on the Henry Control grid, and more than 40 million on the Cary Institute grounds.

Here’s the bottom line for American humans: “It’s estimated that 300,000 people contract Lyme every year in the U.S., with victims found not just in traditionally tick-heavy areas like upstate New York and Maine, but also in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.”

We dug our own Lyme-infested graves by burning fossil fuels:

Human-driven climate change is making tick season longer and tick country larger. As winters get warmer and shorter, ticks become dormant later in the year (if at all should it fail to fall below freezing) and active earlier.

But the disease started in Connecticut, which is much cooler than the southern U.S. Climate change is so powerful that it is spreading ticks and Lyme disease both north and south:

When Aucott joined Johns Hopkins in 1996, Lyme disease had been a mounting concern for a number of years, but conventional wisdom held that the illness would not spread south of the Potomac River. However, he soon began seeing case referrals from first northern then southern Virginia. Lyme is now endemic in North Carolina and has moved westward to Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio.

How about escaping both state income tax and Lyme disease by moving to Las Vegas (check Nevada family law first; the state takes a completely different approach to custody and child support compared to the typical winner-take-all U.S. state)?

That very scenario is playing out on the U.S.-Mexico border in Mexicali, where a particular clade of brown dog tick has caused a massive outbreak of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which can be fatal in up to 30% of cases and causes more deaths than any other tick-borne disease in North America. … While ticks need moisture to survive, the common brown dog tick requires far less than most. This particular clade takes that to the extreme, suggesting its spread could be hastened by climate change. “This tick needs it hot and it needs it dry. This tick is rooting for global warming and drought,” Foley says. As places like California and Arizona become hotter and drier, the tick’s reach will expand, she says. To compound matters, research has shown that the hotter the temperature, the more aggressive this tick becomes. “You can actually do experiments and bring the temperature up and increase the bite rate of that tick,” Foley says.

How about simply live in the city? It would be tough to get bitten by a tick in Midtown Manhattan.

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A tale of two tanks…

by philg

… as told by the New York Times and the Boston Herald.Pictures of the physical papers, courtesy of an FBO:

One difference is that the Trump-obsessed NYT put this story at the top left of the front page while the Herald buried it within the interior of the paper, saving the front page for local stories.

For folks who experienced this in person or on TV, how was the show in D.C. that got American newspapers so excited?

(Also, I think this is a perfect example of why living in the Washington, D.C. is great. Americans in Hawaii, Alaska, Kansas, etc., get taxed to pay for a free air/tank-show that can be consumed only by those who are physically in D.C.)

Separately, why do we have human-occupied tanks as part of our military? Wouldn’t it make more sense to have robotic/remote-controlled vehicles? Also, what chance do tanks stand against far more nimble anti-tank helicopters and airplanes (e.g., the Mi-24 or the A-10 Warthog)? Is the idea that we use tanks against lightly armed opponents, such as ISIS?

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What’s great about the United States?

by philg

Happy July 4th!

To have complete sovereignty over our own country, we killed a lot of people, enslaved millions more for an extra generation (the British freed most slaves in their empire in 1833), and stole a ton of additional land from the Native Americans (west of the Proclamation Line, which the British had honored).

Let’s talk about the dividends from this sacrifice (mostly paid for by others!).

Readers: What do you think is great about the U.S. compared to other countries, especially the UK?

My personal vote is our aviation infrastructure. On a recent trip to Canada, we landed at CYHM (Hamilton, Ontario), which has a 10,000′ runway, no 100LL fuel, and, despite imposing a CAN$50 ramp fee, no chocks sized for a Cirrus. We then repositioned to CYSN (near Niagara Falls), where the FBO has only one person on staff to pump fuel and run credit cards. The woman who was working on the Friday when we arrived said that she had never added oil to an aircraft.

Compare to the U.S., where the 100LL truck may pull up to the airplane before you’ve gotten out and where the line personnel push to learn and do everything that they can. No plane? We have a higher density of flight schools and rental clubs than anywhere else in the world.

How about innovation? At a small airport here in Massachusetts, I stumbled on a hydrogen-powered hexcopter that seats five and is close to ready for tethered flight. The energy density of hydrogen is much higher than today’s best batteries (Toyota has placed huge contrarian bets on hydrogen fuel cells for cars, where weight is much less of an issue), so this aircraft can have vastly superior range and payload to a battery-powered plane or multicopter. Flight control is accomplished by varying the speeds of the six motors (not blade pitch, as in a conventional helicopter). If things go truly south, there is an airframe parachute, as with the Cirrus. The full-scale carbon fiber test vehicle is impressive and the company, Alaka’i Technologies, seems to have ample funding (big boost received in 2018) and a full slate of industry veterans.

Readers: What do you love about the U.S., especially things that are different from the U.K. or a result of our being an independent sovereign nation?

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Boeing hires software engineers for $9/hour

by philg

“Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers” (Bloomberg) seems to be getting folks’ attention regarding the aviation safety angle. I think the career planning angle is much more interesting. The other day, I met a bright young high school student who said that he was considering a career in software engineering. He used the term “STEM” about 15 times. Presumably he is being pushed in this direction by well-meaning adults, including our politicians (nothing helps turn a person into a cheerleader for STEM more than a complete absence of any engineering background and a college transcript that is devoid of a single science class).

Programming/software development/software engineering tends to be a brief career, almost certain to end when the former coder is in his or her 50s (usually much quicker because people don’t love this job).

Now we learn that one of America’s most demanding employers is able to find programmers to work for $9/hour. Why would a young American want to slug it out against that kind of competition?

Coders can make decent money, but they often need to be in high-cost cities to get the bigger paychecks. Earning an above-median $125,000/year does not secure a good lifestyle in New York, D.C., Boston, or anywhere in California. The dental hygienist (BLS median $75,000/year) has much more flexibility regarding where to live and work and can probably enjoy a higher standard of living. (Tax Foundation’s real value of $100 map.)

This is not to say that nobody should be a programmer. If you love to code, don’t feel the need to interact meaningfully with humans during the day, don’t mind having less personal space than a McDonald’s cashier, think that you can manage the health risks of a sit-all-day job, and have the discipline to save for a forced retirement at 52, go for it!

But I am confused as to how non-programmers can read a story like this Bloomberg one and then tell a young person “You should go try to grab that $9/hour job!”

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If black Americans get reparations for their stolen land…

by philg

… do they have to then turn the money over to Native Americans? (perhaps allocated by Sachem Elizabeth Warren?)

“Black People’s Land Was Stolen” (NYT):

in addition to invoking the 40 acres black people never got, the reparations movement today should be talking about the approximately 11 million acres black people had but lost, in many cases through fraud, deception and outright theft, much of it taken in the past 50 years.

These property holdings could have provided a foundation for black wealth-building in post-Jim Crow America. Instead, they became a source of riches for others. Rather than helping to close the racial wealth gap, blacks’ landholdings became a key force in widening it.

By 1910, black people claimed ownership of nearly 16 million acres in America.

As often, though, whites undermined black property ownership by more subtle means. White tax assessors routinely overvalued black-owned land, forcing black property owners to bear a heavier tax burden than whites (to pay for services they didn’t receive) and slowly draining families of earnings. If black-owned property became valuable or a black property owner challenged white supremacy, local officials could simply declare the property tax-delinquent and sell it at a tax sale.

These continuing practices, more than the government’s broken promise of 40 acres and a mule 150 years ago, explain why black families today have 10 cents to every dollar held by white households and why that gap continues to widen.

Suppose all of the above is true. Wouldn’t it make more sense to restore land ownership to the Native Americans?

[Separately, the idea that multi-generational wealth can be assured with a one-time injection of land has been tested in the U.S. and is chronicled in the book The Son Also Rises. From a chapter of Real World Divorce:

Is the focus on cash transfers for the benefit of children supported by research? “What Happens When We Randomly Assign Children to Families?” (Sacerdote 2004; National Bureau of Economic Research), a study of Korean children adopted by American parents, suggests not. It turns out that there was a low correlation between the ultimate income of a child and the income of the parents. Adoptees brought into homes with $25,000 per year in income had the same family income, as adults, as adoptees who had grown up in homes with $200,000 per year in income. There is a stronger correlation between the income of biological children and their parents, suggesting that genetics is more important than environment when it comes to career attainment.

The Son also Rises (Clark 2014; Princeton University Press) contains a survey of the academic literature regarding the effect of family wealth and unearned cash transfers on children. In 1832 there was a land lottery in Georgia where winners received a parcel of land roughly equal in value to the median family wealth at the time (i.e., the typical winners ended up with twice as much wealth, about $150,000 extra in today’s money). How did the children of the winners do?

They were no more literate than the children of losers. Their occupational status was no higher. Their own children in 1880 (the grandchildren of the 1832 winners) were again no more literate. Worse, they were significantly less likely to be enrolled in school than the grandchildren of the losers. … Wealth is not statistically higher for lottery winners’ children…

Clark also reviews a study of Cherokee Indians who, starting in 1998, received substantial boosts to their income from casino profits. For children who had not been living in poverty, “there was no measurable change in any educational outcomes, including high school graduation rates…” This was despite the fact that a child who graduated high school would immediately become eligible for his or her own $4,000-per-year payment.

The professor writing for the NYT, Andrew Kahrl, states confidently that black Americans today would be way richer if ancestors had obtained all of the land that they were promised 150 years ago, but he cites no research to bolster his opinion.]

Finally, I think it is interesting that the New York Times publishes a piece in which annual property tax is characterized as a slow draining away of rightfully obtained wealth!

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