Campaign workers for Bernie Sanders have taken aim at one of the senator’s key policies in his 2020 presidential run — raising the federal minimum wage. According to The Washington Post, some members of Sanders’ campaign team have been lobbying to raise their wages so that they make the $15 hourly rate that the Vermont senator has frequently called for both on the campaign trail and in Washington D.C.
That unlikely phrase is used in some lakefront communities in sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the world where men catch the fish and women sell the catch to local customers.
Or if the supply of fish is low because of overfishing, several women may vie for a fisherman’s catch — and transactional sex may be used as a bargaining point.
The writer does not seem to have researched the question of whether commercial sex is more common around this lake compared to other parts of the same countries.
Related:
“America, Home of the Transactional Marriage” (Atlantic); the NPR article implies that Africans are backward compared to Americans, but is it obviously worse to have sex for cash than to get married for the cash?
National Flight Centre in Dublin has an interesting functional decor item next to the front desk: two big flat-screen televisions showing the location of the flight school’s fleet (why two? a view of the traffic pattern and then a view of the region). ADS-B is not mandated in Ireland currently so they are doing this with portable GPS trackers that are in a key/notebook bag that students take out to the plane when renting. For a U.S. school in a transponder-required area, however, I think the same thing could be done with software pulling ADS-B data from public sources.
When customers and potential customers come in they can see all of the fun that is happening. For our school it would be planes out on Cape Cod, up in Maine, etc. (Would need to program the software to show the last received position so that the plane does not disappear from the Martha’s Vineyard airport once shut down.)
Readers: What’s the easiest way to build this using ADS-B data? What source?
I learned recently that transitioning from Green Card to U.S. citizenship requires paying a $725 fee. However, the fee can be waived if the new American can prove that this would be a hardship to pay, e.g., because the Green Card holder is receiving taxpayer-funded benefits, such as public housing, food stamps, etc. In other words, our government has an official policy of granting citizenship to working-age people who prove that they (a) receive means-tested benefits (“are on welfare”), and (b) can’t scratch up $725.
How does it work in practice? The case I learned about involves a family that won a Green Card via lottery five years ago. After arriving in the U.S., they were entitled to means-tested prices for essentials, i.e., taxpayer-funded housing, taxpayer-funded health care, taxpayer-funded food (SNAP or “food stamps”), etc. On realizing that there was no social stigma to being a divorced woman in the U.S., the wife divorced the husband, explaining that she had never wanted to be married, but had only done it because it was expected in her birth culture. Neither of the parents earned much money so there wasn’t significant divorce litigation. As children don’t yield significant cash compared to public assistance, she and the father were able to agree to a 50/50 schedule. The result for U.S. taxpayers was there were now two households eligible for government-provided housing, health insurance, food stamps, and smartphones. And soon those will be two citizen-led households…
[Note: the typical American newspaper would not describe someone living in a taxpayer funded house, receiving taxpayer-funded health insurance, eating taxpayer-funded food, and calling friends on a taxpayer-funded smartphone to be “on welfare” because the foregoing are all non-cash benefits.]
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!)
“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.”
(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”?)
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!
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!
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.
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?
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:
U.S. taxpayers will also eventually pay for an elaborate procedure-rich deportation process for this guy, assuming that Massachusetts does not provide him sanctuary; Masslive says “ICE has failed a detainer against Zhukovskyy”
