Demanding more refugee migrants in Arlington, Virginia

by philg

The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (founded with private money to help Jews settle in the U.S.; currently running with tax dollars to bring in non-Jews) helped set up a protest at National Airport in Arlington, Virginia: “Waiting for Refugees Who Are Not Coming”. They demand at least 95,000 migrants right now.

What if the refugee-migrants did show up? Can they sign up for a taxpayer-subsidized house? From the Arlington ministry of housing:

No. The Housing Choice Voucher Program wait list is closed and we are not accepting new applications. We do not anticipate that the waitlist will be opened for several years. …. The average wait for a voucher is approximately 5 years. There are many families and individuals who have applied for housing assistance and are on the waiting list for the Housing Choice Voucher Tenant-Based program.

Maybe things are better in the semi-private sector? “Arlington’s Affordable Housing Crisis” (Arlington Magazine, February 19, 2019):

Arlington’s affordable housing shortage has grown increasingly dire in recent years. And that’s before Amazon announced plans to bring 25,000 new jobs—and more people needing places to live—to the area.

A county report issued in 2017 surmised that only about 8.2 percent of Arlington’s housing stock—9,369 units—was affordable for households earning less than 60 percent of [area median income].

What about a little farther away? Somewhere else in the Greater D.C. area? “Northern Virginia’s growing crisis in affordable housing” (The Arlington Catholic Herald, August 30, 2019):

Years ago, people with low incomes could easily find a market-rate affordable apartment, that is, a dwelling place in a privately owned complex that had relatively low monthly rent because of the age of the building, lack of amenities or a less desirable location. An apartment is considered affordable if people making 60 percent of the area median income spend 30 percent or less of their income on rent.

Now, those market-rate affordable apartments, also known as MARKs, are nearly gone. Officials in Arlington and Alexandria say they have lost approximately 29,000 MARKs in the past 19 years mostly due to rent increases.

Maybe it was better back in 2013 before Donald Trump ruined everything? “3,600 apply for 122 new Arlington apartments” (Washington Post, 2013).

So… the HIAS folks are standing in a town where, due to population growth and consequent market demand, Americans can no longer afford to live. After commuting in through a multi-hour traffic jam, they’re holding signs demanding the importation of migrants who will need to compete for the same housing supply and highway capacity.

Related:

  • What were garages for people born in the mid-20th century will be homes for their children and grandchildren (NYT on California)
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Pilatus cuts down on cabin noise in the PC-12

by philg

NBAA officially starts tomorrow, but most of the important announcements are today.

“Pilatus Unveils NGX, Its Third-Generation PC-12” is interesting:

In what Pilatus is calling a first for turboprops, the new engine will be able to operate in a low-prop-speed mode, reducing the prop speed from 1,700 rpm to 1,550 rpm and lowering cabin noise.

This is potentially an enormous improvement for the PC-12. For passengers in the cabin it is about as quiet as a turboprop can get, but a similar-size true turbojet is as much as 10 dBA quieter. As noted in my Pilatus PC-12 review, the faster PC-12 NG is actually a little bit noisier than the original comparatively sluggish PC-12/45.

What else is new and exciting?

Additionally, the new engine will have a 5,000 hour time-between-overhaul period with hot section inspections only required on-condition and be able to transmit data on more than 100 engine parameters that are continuously monitored, adjusted, and recorded. “Building on the legacy of the PT6 family, the new engine is a leap forward in engine control and data management systems,” said P&WC president Maria Della Posta.

The old engine was 3,500 hours TBO and, unlike in a piston, that was a requirement for Part 91 operators. Fleet operators often got extensions to 4,500 or 5,000 hours, but this new engine will do it without the paperwork hassles and maybe without as many borescope inspections.

Too busy punching autopilot buttons to adjust the power lever? The new PC-12 will do it for you:

An option in the NGX cockpit is a fully integrated digital autothrottle.

The 15-year-old Honeywell avionics that everyone agreed were powerful, but that nobody loved, get a user interface update with a touch screen.

Related:

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California blackouts part of a Jewish holiday?

by philg

The Jewish holiday of Sukkot ended yesterday. If the California power blackouts also end, that will add evidence to my theory that someone at PG&E wanted to help Californians celebrate Sukkot, a big part of which involves eating outdoors by candlelight. Without a power cut, how many Californians would be motivated to evacuate their comfortable air-conditioned conveniently lighted homes?

From My Jewish Learning:

Another reason may be, that it should remind us of the long wanderings of our forefathers in the depths of the desert, when at every halting-place they spent many a year in tents. And indeed it is well in wealth to remember your poverty, in distinction your insignificance, in high offices your position as a commoner, in peace your dangers in war, on land the storms on sea, in cities the life of loneliness. For there is no pleasure greater than in high prosperity to call to mind old misfortunes.

Remembering the Less Fortunate
The last reason for sitting in the sukkah is my own, although I’m sure someone has said it before. By sitting in a flimsy sukkah, exposed to sun and wind (and in some places, rain and snow!), we are reminded of those less fortunate than ourselves. Precisely at harvest time when we thank God for the bounty he has given us, we must remember to share it with the poor and the hungry.

The world is more interesting when correlation does imply causation!

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Loving the iPhone 11 Pro Max camera; struggling with the case

by philg

I finally managed to carve out 20 minutes to go over to the Verizon store and swap my iPhone X for an iPhone 11 Pro Max (20 minutes turned into more than one hour thanks to Verizon’s 9 Mbit in-store WiFi).

I’m in love with the camera so far. Here are a couple of challenging scenes with the standard camera…

(mostly backlit; note the bearded hipster behind the 3-month-old Corgi)
(tough job watching Head of the Charles)

Verizon sold me a Gear4 Battersea case. It might be tough, but it makes the already huge phone a little too big for a blue jeans pocket. The case buttons are super stiff and make it tough to turn the phone off from the top side button. An Amazon reader says “after using it for a week I noticed that it has extremely scratched up all four sides of my iPhone”. It is so rigid that I am skeptical that it would protect the screen from shock in the event of a drop. The soft silicone cases seem much more likely to be helpful for a drop on concrete. One good feature: The case is thick enough to keep the lenses of the cameras off whatever surface the phone is resting on.

Readers: Do you carry an iPhone 11 Pro Max in a front pocket? If so, what case works well? What about the Apple silicone case? The Verizon sales guy scared me off by saying that it lacked a bezel to protect the screen from a face-down drop.

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Esther Duflo: Nobel-grade evolution in thinking about women as victims

by philg

An MIT economist, Esther Duflo, was a co-winner of this year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. How has her scientific thinking evolved?

From a 2016 New York Times article:

“Women aren’t particularly nice to women,” notes Esther Duflo, an economist at M.I.T. who has studied gender issues. She observes that in Spain, researchers found that having more women randomly assigned to a committee evaluating judiciary candidates actually hurts the prospects of female candidates. A similar study found that on Italian academic evaluation committees, women evaluate female candidates more harshly than men do.

From a 2019 CNN article:

She also said that she hoped the award would inspire other female economists to continue working, “and men to give them the respect they deserve, like every single human being.”

After three years, white women with PhDs in North America continue to be victims, but the gender identities of the victimizers have evolved!

[Duflo is also an expert on taxation. From “Should We Soak the Rich? You Bet!” (NYT, October 12, 2019):

Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, demolish the traditional arguments against higher taxes on the wealthy in an incisive book coming out next month, “Good Economics for Hard Times.” While major league sports teams have salary caps that limit athletes’ pay, Banerjee and Duflo note that no one argues “that players would play harder if only they were paid a little (or a lot) more. Everybody agrees that the drive to be best is sufficient.”

“High marginal income tax rates, applied only to very high incomes, are a perfectly sensible way to limit the explosion of top wealth inequality,” Banerjee and Duflo write.

Does the example of sports stars make sense when considering, e.g., a 95 percent tax rate on the highest incomes? The Nobel winner fails to consider the possibility that the average American desk job is less fun than playing sports. People, including kids, will play sports for fun; very few people will do a desk job without the expectation of a paycheck.

In addition to the fun of the game, sports stars receive some non-monetary compensation. “The Drugs, Sex, and Swagger of the 1980s Lakers” (GQ):

In his autobiography, A View From Above, Wilt Chamberlain said he slept with 20,000 women. From the sounds of it in your book Showtime, it appears the 1980’s Lakers weren’t far off from that tally.

The Lakers were superstars in a hot city at a time when HIV awareness wasn’t there yet, and groupies were at their peak of popularity. There were women in hotel lobbies, women outside the arena, women in the arena. Everywhere. And they wanted to have sex. So Lakers players did—often. But. . . it wasn’t all that unusual in the world of pro sports. The Knicks, I’m guessing, had lots of sex. And the Cavs. And even the Clippers—well, maybe not the Clippers. But most teams.

What about generic business executives and Wall Street fund managers? If their spending power, after tax, isn’t very different from what a Medicaid dentist earns in Massachusetts, why would women want to party with them? Maybe Wilt Chamberlain would have continued playing basketball, winning games while the crowd cheers and then meeting the female groupies in the hotel. But why would a mutual or hedge fund manager want to keep sitting at a desk and staring at a Bloomberg terminal to take home 5 percent of his or her pre-tax pay? Why not quit and move to a beach resort to live off the savings?]

Related:

  • https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/01/12/gender-equity-should-be-measured-by-consumption-not-income/
  • from a recent PR pitch: “Gender disparity in tech is a noted issue within the industry, and while the cannabis industry promised women an equal playing field, female leadership percentages have gone down in the past year. Would you be interested in speaking to a female coder and engineer who helped lead the development of a newly patented cannabis soil-to-shelf technology? Trace, a soil-to-shelf company utilizing block-chain technology have created a system tailor-made for the cannabis industry by experts in cannabis crop optimization and the cannabis supply chain. Current systems leave much to be desired.” (the company’s web site opens with “Speak Truth to Flower”)
  • CNN: “[Duflo] also said that she hoped the award would inspire other female economists to continue working”; yet Econ 101 says that a woman with a Ph.D. should continue working unless she can find some way of getting cash that does not require work
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We are in a climate emergency, but Californians can wait 3-4 years

by philg

Nobody can accuse Californians of being slackers when it comes to tackling the climate change emergency: “California bans hotels from using tiny plastic bottles” (USA Today).

When does the planet-saving ban take effect?

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday he had signed a law banning hotels from giving guests plastic bottles filled with shampoo, conditioner or soap. It takes effect in 2023 for hotels with more than 50 rooms and 2024 for hotels with less than 50 rooms.

Violators could be fined $500 for a first offense and $2,000 for subsequent violations.

So it will be 3-4 years before (a) hotels have to go to CVS and buy some Softsoap and shampoo with a pump, and (b) people can apply for government jobs (with health care and pension!) inspecting and fining hotels that are filled with hate for Planet Earth.

If we’re in an emergency situation and hotels don’t typically stock more than a few months of supplies, why wouldn’t the ban take effect sooner than 2023-2024?

Related:

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Harvard freshman experience

by philg

A friend’s daughter recently started her non-Asian odyssey through Harvard College ($70,000/year).

While identifying as a cisgender heterosexual female, she elected “gender-inclusive” housing and was matched up with a roommate. She’ll undress and go to bed every night right next to a person who identifies as a heterosexual cisgender male.

What’s she studying that wouldn’t be much the same at State U? “HIST-LIT 90DW: Queering the South: Race, Gender, & Sexuality in the American South”. From the class site:

The course examines the intertwined histories of race, gender, and sexuality in the American South from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 through the present. We will consider how struggles for gender and sexual freedom are linked to race in the modern South. The course proceeds along two tracks: first, we gain knowledge about the lives of women, trans people, and gay people in the South. Second, we consider how African Americans, women, and LGBTQ individuals struggled for freedom and how these efforts changed over time in response to opposition, developments elsewhere in the world, and victories. We will explore the circumstances under which people from different backgrounds come together in pursuit of a common goal and the times when conflicts arise. We will read poetry and novels, manifestos and diaries, and secondary literature written by historians. In addition, we’ll watch videos and listen to music to understand the different ways people queered the South during the last century. The course recognizes that Southerners do not fit neatly into racial, gender, or sexual boxes and so investigates the intersections of identities to lend complexity and verve to the histories of people often forgotten.

Who’s the expert on intersectionality of black, gay, and southern? Andrew Pope, whose biography says that he studied at University of Rochester (NY) and Harvard.

I tried to show off my mastery of English v5.0 by asking the freshman’s younger brother, “How’s zir candy bar?” She admonished, “You aren’t using pronouns correctly. ‘Your’ isn’t gendered.”

[Old Version = v1.0; Middle English = v2.0; Early Modern English = v3.0; English with two gender IDs = v4.0]

Related:

  • Interview with Andrew Pope that talks about the class and that he “read, and excitedly re-read, Jennifer Nash’s Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality.”
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Hybrid cruise ship: not as dumb as it sounds

by philg

We recently made it through the Northwest Passage on the MS Roald Amundsen, a diesel-hybrid cruise ship.

What could be dumber than putting a huge bank of batteries into a machine that needs to be generating power constantly, e.g., to run lights, water desalination, air conditioning, sewage treatment, etc.?

At a talk by the ship’s chief engineer, Jonny Johnsen, we learned that this may make good engineering sense. The key insight is that it is most efficient to run any of the four diesel engines at 80 percent power. Although the ship can sail for 30 minutes at 14 knots on the battery alone, that’s not the point of the batteries. The idea is to have a power reserve that does not require keeping an extra engine at idle. If the ship needs a sudden burst of power for maneuvering, the power comes from the battery while perhaps just a single engine is running. After the demand is gone, the engine keeps running at 80 percent to recharge the batteries.

The batteries enable the crew to run just one engine without fearing a blackout (though maybe California-based passengers would feel right at home in such an event?).

The engines are reasonably efficient to begin with, over 50 percent before heat recovery, which is used to heat water, heat the cabins, heat the pool/hot tubs, and help with desalinization. But having a big bank of batteries makes the overall trip more efficient. The engineer said that he expected we would use 300,000 liters of diesel for the trip from Greenland to Nome, Alaska. Divided by the 472 passengers who were on board, that’s only 169 gallons in a three-week period. An SUV-owning American who liked to drive a lot might consume more!

More engineering facts:

  • the ship produces 156 cubic meters/day of fresh water via two RO systems (force seawater through a membrane and dump the brine overboard); 300,000 liters per day
  • the ship does not anchor; computers, GPS, swiveling propellers (2) and bow thrusters (2) maintain station (as in https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/08/21/movie-the-last-breath/ )
  • for NOx emissions control, the engines use the same “add blue” urea as European diesel cars
  • the ship has a conventional anti-roll stabilizer system
  • the ship is rated Polar Class 6, which means we could go through 70 cm of level ice
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U.S. southern border versus Syrian northern border

by philg

Facebook is alive with outrage regarding Donald Trump’s scaling back of our military involvement what will soon be the 9th year of the Syrian Civil War.

The same people who demanded the abolition of ICE and the pulling back of armed U.S. forces patrolling the U.S. southern border are demanding that armed U.S. forces patrol the Syrian northern border. The people who advocate for a wave of migration from Central America into the U.S. are opposed to a wave of re-migration of Syrians currently in Turkey back across the northern border into their original home (map from the BBC, which says “Turkey launched the offensive in northern Syria a week ago to push back from its border members of a Syrian Kurdish militia called the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and create a ‘safe zone’ along the Syrian side of the border, where up to two million Syrian refugees can be resettled.”

Readers: Is Trump wrong? Should we spend the next 10-20 years patrolling the Syrian border and trying to keep our NATO ally Turkey (population 80 million) from doing what it deems prudent in its immediate neighborhood?

[If Elizabeth Warren prevails in 2020, will she solve both of these problems by relocating U.S. Border Patrol forces over to northern Syria?]

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