Traffic in the U.S. is going to get slower every year as the population continues to expand via immigration and children of immigrants (Pew, 2015). Self-driving systems are going to get better every year, but perhaps not good enough that they can be completely unsupervised. What are people going to do on multi-hour car trips where they still have to sit in the driver’s seat and look at the road? How about exercise? With more time lost to traffic jams Americans will have less time to hit the gym or walk in the neighborhood so we’ll get yet fatter and weaker unless the car itself becomes a gym.
Suppose that resistance bands were built into the dashboard, floor, doors, and ceiling of the car. I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of this, but the request fried our future overlord’s brain.
It could look something like this image from Amazon, but with the band attached to the door or the dash instead of to the wall:
Harvard University is in the news right now for its showdown with the Trump Administration. Remember that inequality is bad and also that the federal government should spend taxpayer dollars at the nation’s richest institutions in the richest states rather than at, for example, University of Mississippi, Ohio University, or University of Michigan (the 13th poorest state).
My question for today is how did Harvard keep the river of taxpayer cash going for so long given its explicit race discrimination polices, most famously in admissions and hiring, but also in selling theater tickets. From a 2021 post:
We have designated this performance to be an exclusive space for Black-identifying audience members. For our non-Black allies, we appreciate your support in making this a completely Black-identifying evening. We invite you to join us at another performance during the run.
Proof of vaccination or negative test results required to attend.
Maybe a privately-financed and privately-run theater could refuse to sell tickets to those with the wrong skin color (though it would seem to be contrary to the Maskachusetts state law), but how can a federally-funded enterprise do it?
Here’s Harvard, the operator of a one-race-only theater, claiming the moral high ground as a recipient of federal dollars:
“No government—regardless of which party is in power—should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” – President Alan Garber https://t.co/6cQQpcJVTd
There have been plenty of racists in the history of the United States, but right now I can’t think of any recent racists held up as morally superior to the average person, business, or institution.
Related:
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, in which Harvard was found to be violating the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment requiring equal protection (but the Feds said “Hey, let’s just keep sending them money because they surely wouldn’t violate the Constitution ever again”?)
Happy Tax Day for those who celebrate (i.e., Americans who aren’t smart enough to have joined Mitt Romney’s Club 47).
David Brennan and Jackie Mustian, attorneys at Moffa, Sutton, & Donnini, gave a talk at Sun ‘n Fun about how people avoid owing a 6 percent sales tax when buying an aircraft that will ultimately be based in Florida. (Imagine the potential liability for an elite buying a $100 million Gulfstream!)
First, it seems unlikely that Florida is getting any real benefit from imposing this tax. The true beneficiaries are attorneys and accountants who set up schemes to avoid it. Perhaps because of that, there is no urgency among legislators to eliminate the tax, as Maskachusetts did back in 2001. Under the assumption that the tax, and the army of professionals whose job it is to avoid it, are with us forever, here’s what we learned…
A nonresident who owns a new-to-him/her/zir/them aircraft has to be careful about visiting Florida for reasons other than maintenance or flight training. If the aircraft is here for 21 days within the first six months of ownership, Florida sales tax is owed. A flight that lands at 11:55 pm and departs 10 minutes later at 12:05 am is considered to have spent two days in Florida out of the allowable 20.
A Florida resident cannot take advantage of the above exemption. If the Florida resident is the sole owner of a Maskachusetts, Delaware, or Montana LLC that owns the aircraft, the 20-day exemption might apply, but an auditor might also try to look through the LLC shell to the real owner. The Floridian ideally would keep the aircraft out of state entirely for six months and also not display an obvious intent to bring it into the state on Day 183 (maybe the Floridian is a super douche and also is looking at buying a house in Nantucket and has written to the airport there about getting on the hangar waitlist).
Where the tax advisors seem to make money is in setting up an LLC that is in the business of owning an aircraft and reselling it or its use to others. Prior to the aircraft purchase, the LLC is registered with the State of Florida to collect sales and use tax. The “real owner” then dry leases time with the aircraft from the LLC and the LLC collects and remits sales tax on the dry lease payments, e.g., $75/hour, but only for those hours flown within the State of Florida. In the speakers’ opinion, the State of Florida doesn’t have a legal basis for challenging the reasonableness of the lease rate. The state is entitled to collect tax only on the money that is actually changing hands. That said, a $10/hour dry lease rate for a $1 million aircraft could seem ridiculous. (Other states where this kind of scheme is employed have some rules about the minimum cost for the dry lease based on prevailing interest rates.)
It’s too bad that DeSantis and the Legislature haven’t cleaned this up. In my opinion, the efficient way to tax aviation is a fuel tax and if the state wants more money from aircraft owners it should simply raise the existing aviation fuel tax (FL 206.9825):
Books on the Holocaust, histories of feminism, civil rights and racism, and Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” were among the nearly 400 volumes removed from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library this week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office ordered the school to get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. … In addition to Angelou’s award-winning tome, the list includes “Memorializing the Holocaust,” which deals with Holocaust memorials..
Some Jewish Democrats in the group agreed with him that these book removals were an outrage on a similar scale to what happened in China during the Cultural Revolution.
Let’s have a look at the very first book of the headline, Memorializing the Holocaust. According to Amazon, the full title includes the word “Gender“, a word that appears 15 times on the selling page, and the book is properly categorized in “General Gender Studies”. The author is “Professor of Sociology and Women and Gender Studies”. Here’s the Amazon description:
How do collective memories of histories of violence and trauma in war and genocide come to be created? Janet Jacobs offers new understandings of this crucial issue in her examination of the representation of gender in the memorial culture of Holocaust monuments and museums, from synagogue memorials and other historical places of Jewish life, to the geographies of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Ravensbruck. Jacobs travelled to Holocaust sites across Europe to explore representations of women. She reveals how these memorial cultures construct masculinity and femininity, as well as the Holocaust’s effect on stereotyping on grounds of race or gender. She also uncovers the wider ways in which images of violence against women have become universal symbols of mass trauma and genocide. This feminist analysis of Holocaust memorialization brings together gender and collective memory with the geographies of genocide to fill a significant gap in our understanding of genocide and national remembrance.
The book is so important to our wider culture and has touched its readers so deeply that, after 15 years on Amazon, it has garnered exactly zero reviews. (Maybe it is required reading in some college-level gender studies courses? The book is “57,829 in Books” for sales, much higher than Queer Black Dance, featured in an independent bookstore.)
I find the CBS article and the reaction to it interesting because they show how easily discontent can be manufactured by our media. Nobody in the group, other than me, bothered to find out whether the “Holocaust book” was about the Holocaust. All of the Democrats accepted CBS’s headline characterization of the book and reflexively condemned Trump and Hegseth.
Most of the lectures at Sun ‘n Fun happen in a modern air-conditioned building that belongs to Central Florida Aerospace Academy, a public high school. Fittingly for today’s topic, one enters the building via a door that features a coronapanic sign:
The presenter was Dr. Daniel Monlux, the kind of physician that noble aid recipients in the Middle East, accustomed to free food, education, health care, etc., probably wouldn’t ask to see twice (he was in the F/A-18 in the U.S. Navy). Dr. Monlux is a founder of Wingman Med, a consulting firm that helps pilots maintain their medicals.
The most important take-away from the talk is that every pilot should get certified under BasicMed even if he/she/ze/they also holds a conventional medical certificate. That way, if there is a hiccup in the medical renewal process, the pilot can still fly his/her/zir/their family around in a Cessna or Cirrus. There is no obstacle to dual medical certification.
What can go wrong in the medical renewal process? If the pilot discloses a new condition of some sort (the FAA doesn’t normally have access to a pilot’s medical records other than self-disclosure, according to Dr. Monlux) and that new condition isn’t on the “CACI list” or the pilot doesn’t have the right documentation for the AME (Aviation Medical Examiner) to issue a medical under CACI then there will be a deferral.
First, how can the pilot avoid a deferral? One way is to look at the CACI list web pages and figure out what the AME will need to see. Typically it is a report from a physician (not a nurse-practitioner or PA) within 90 days of the aviation medical exam.
Suppose that there is a deferral? Then the pilot is plunged into a hellish holding pattern. Mostly this is not due to the low-paid doctors employed by the FAA in Oklahoma City wanting to torture pilots, but rather because the FAA is required by regulation to use only USPS and hardcopy letters for communicating with pilots. It takes 2-3 months for a hardcopy mail exchange to occur. If the pilot hasn’t given the FAA exactly the information requested in the format that is requested, there will be at least another 2-3 months of delay. (no need for a DOGE reengineering here!)
Pilots often make things worse during this process. They will submit more information that the FAA requests, e.g., a full medical record from a provider that happens to have a medication list and a condition list. Invariably, these lists at medical institutions are out of date and contain conditions and medications that are no longer relevant, but once the FAA sees any of them they will need an explanation (from a physician within the past 90 days) about why the condition no longer exists and the medication is no longer being taken.
These processes can drag on for years and there is a plan for the FAA to start denying medical applications, rather than simply continuing the deferral farce, if the pilot can’t get organized to supply everything that the FAA needs (could be challenging in a country where it can take 3-4 months to get an appointment with a specialist). If the FAA actually denies a medical certificate then the pilot can’t continue to fly under BasicMed.
As noted above, most problems in this domain are self-inflicted. However, in the event of a complaint by a copilot, for example, the FAA does have access to prescription drug databases and might be able to see, for example, that a pilot was prescribed opioids (America’s favorite pastime) or anti-psychotic drugs.
Let me close with a trendy new topic: What if you’re a massive beefcake and decide to slim down via Ozempic or similar? Make sure that it is prescribed for weight loss, not diabetes! Diabetes is a matter of serious concern to the FAA because, among other things, it can affect vision.
Readers: Who has been on Ozempic or a competitive GLP-1 inhibitor? I have a few friends on them and everyone seems happy in their new thin guise. Is Elon Musk right that everyone should be on them? I would have to lose 20 lbs. to get into what the government says is an ideal weight range. As long as our house is within 15 minutes of Costco, I don’t see that happening absent Ozempic and, at the same time, I hate the idea of giving myself injections almost as much as I hate the idea of grueling exercise.
I’ll write up a couple of in-depth items separately, but here’s an overview of my day at Sun ‘n Fun (Lakeland, Florida).
Previous visits to Sun ‘n Fun have been via (1) commercial flight from Boston and rental car from Tampa (advantage: Bern’s Steakhouse, back when you didn’t need to reserve months in advance), (2) Cirrus landing in the morning (complicated NOTAM, but not as busy as Oshkosh) and then potentially long-ish wait to depart between end of air show and 7 pm curfew, (3) minivan from our home in Jupiter, with stop at nearby Legoland. This year, I decided on a night-before flight to Bartow, Florida, a former P-51 training base (KBOW) that is 30 minutes from Lakeland, rent a car from Avis, and stay in a hotel (Florida has so much hotel capacity that prices don’t get to the insane levels that they do in Oshkosh). The mechanics of this worked out pretty well, but it is a mistake to try to leave Sun ‘n Fun by car within the first hour after the end of the air show.
For those who want to build their own planes, Sun ‘n Fun has a full slate of skills-building classes. Not sure that I would want to fly in a plane that contained my very first welds:
The airshow was loud, louder, and loudest with, admittedly, some finesse from superstar Mike Goulian. There were demonstrations of the F-35 (A and C models), the E/A-18G Growler, the F-16, and the Blue Angels (back to an all-male pilot team now that the Amazon Prime movie cameras aren’t rolling). With a smartphone, I think that the breakups are the best pictures that one can take of the Blue Angels, e.g.,
If you want to be a hero among progressives, you can volunteer with this Illinois-based organization (the representative was wearing an N95 mask, of course!) to exfiltrate a 15-year-old from benighted Florida to a state where his/her/zir/their genitals can be safely removed as part of gender-affirming care (abortion care is also part of the mission and the org says “hosted our very first drag show” in the 2024 annual report):
I’m not sure that the message of Elevated Access resonated with everyone at Sun ‘n Fun. There were some downright Deplorable people and planes (a couple of veterans, below):
As bad as it is to be a teenager in need of gender-affirming care stuck in Florida, the status of certified avionics is even worse. Situation summary: grim and expensive. Systems are old and clunky, e.g., the 2009 Garmin package touted in the latest -G7 Cirruses, and super expensive. There is still no reasonable upgrade path for the 4000 Avidyne-equipped -G2 Cirruses. A broker estimated that about 5 percent of these have been converted to the latest Garmin gear ($150,000 in an airframe that, pre-Biden, was only worth about $150,000) and that nobody should invest this kind of money. Considering that brokers make a commission on the total price of the plane, the advice not to do the Garmin upgrade means that it must be a stunningly terrible value. (Contrast to realtors, who always advise homeowners to do a huge amount of work prior to selling!) The Avidyne Vantage system is not certified yet. Dynon has nothing for the -G2 Cirrus.
Cirrus runs a great operation for owners at Sun ‘n Fun, including a perfect viewing location as well as air conditioning and cold drinks/snacks. I had my checkbook out to purchase a -G7, but the company refused my demand to add Blue Steel and Magnum to the color chart:
The latest and greatest Cirruses typically come with built-in oxygen for maintaining mental sharpness at high altitude. I’m wondering if this is being done all wrong. There’s a bottle built into the plane that is expensive to service and recertify. FBOs are getting into the habit of charging a fortune to top up these bottles with oxygen because their costs of labor and insurance are so high (the typical oxygen customer is a jet owner). There are some portable systems (example) that supposedly can concentrate enough oxygen up to 18,000′ to keep one pilot mentally sharp. It is rare to have more than two people on an oxygen-required flight and also fairly rare to go above 18,000′ (the limit for nasal cannulas). Maybe it would make more sense to put two of these these concentrators into the typical unpressurized airplane than a bottle-based system. I guess have a bottle supplement for those rare super high altitude flights.
V1 Hats is working on the problem of baseball cap-headset interference by thinning out the material near the ear:
I wish that it were possible to get custom designs and logos! Godzilla, at a minimum.
Here are some imports from China that made it in just under the tariff wire:
Towards the campground:
Flying out of Bartow, some ideas for decorating one’s living room ceiling and a nice museum devoted to the military’s time here:
Flash back to 2024 when the Western Washington University Jewish Voice for Peace (unclear if there are any actual Jews involved in JVP; major funding is from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Lannan Foundation, neither of which seem to have any Jewish heritage) invited everyone who hates Israel and loves wearing masks (“required”) to a Seder starting at 5:30 pm (Jewish law says to start at 8:13 pm, sunset in Bellingham, Washington).
Readers: What are you doing for Passover this year? I’m going to join a medical school professor and his kids. Maybe masks will be required since, as an MD and PhD, he personifies The Science.
Friends have been asking for an explanation of the horrific recent NYC tour helicopter crash, in which the machine was seen falling without its empennage (i.e., the tail had been chopped off by the main rotor system). Here are the passengers just before departure:
The weather seems to have been pretty good. The crash was at 3:15 pm, 15:15 Eastern or 19:15Z. Here’s the nearby (LaGuardia and Newark) weather at 1851Z:
LGA had winds gusting 22 knots, which can generate some turbulence near buildings. Newark had steady winds of 11 knots with light rain and a low ceiling of 1000′ (not a problem for a helicopter that will operate at 500′). If turbulence leads to a low-G condition and the pilot doesn’t react properly, the result can be mast bumping (inner portion of the blades hit the shaft holding up the rotor system), but that common initial speculation seems unlikely in this particular case because the winds weren’t that heavy and a tourist flight isn’t usually the time for intentional rollercoaster-style maneuvers.
“The pilot of the doomed aircraft reportedly radioed about needing to refuel minutes before the helicopter crashed into the chilly waters, according to New York Helicopter Tour CEO Michael Roth, whose company operated the helicopter.”
This points to a more likely scenario (albeit still complete speculation until further data are available): engine stoppage due to running out of fuel followed by a failure to initiate an autorotation. The Robinson R44 has a similar two-blade rotor system to the Bell 206L4 (N216MH) that crashed. Here are some excerpts from the pilot’s operating handbook for the R44 that lay out the accident sequence:
fuel exhaustion causes the engine to quit
the engine quitting causes the rotor system to slow down
the pilot, startled by the engine quitting, does not immediately (within 2-4 seconds) enter an autorotation, a lowering of the collective pitch control that flattens the blades and allows them to maintain speed while windmilling
the retreating blade stalls, partly due to the high angle of attack caused by the relative wind beginning to come from below the helicopter as the helicopter falls, and the rotor system “blows back” due to the lost of lift (explaining this in full requires some understanding of the physics of gyroscopic precession)
the severely tilted rotor contacts and chops off the tailboom
If this is indeed what happened, what can we learn? First, it is a lot easier to do the right thing in a training environment when simulated emergencies (e.g., an instructor rolling the throttle to idle) are expected. Second, being 100 percent vigilant 100 percent of the time is a perfect job for a computer whose job can be to shove the collective down and enter the autorotation even if the human pilot is still startled and frozen. A system like this has been designed, but is not widely available. See “HeliTrak launches R22/R44 Collective Pull Down” (2018), for example.
You might ask how it is possible for an experienced pilot to run an aircraft out of fuel. I was providing some recurrent training to two Brazilian helicopter pilots. Brazil is a huge market for helicopter taxi service due to horrific traffic and high levels of crime (they could use an El Salvador-style clean-up!). We were in the R44 at a quiet uncontrolled airport (6B6) in Maskachusetts doing some pattern work (take off, fly around in a circle, land). I stressed the importance of checking fuel levels and temperatures/pressures on downwind (flying at 500′ above the ground parallel to the runway) and before lifting up or taking off. I did the standard Robinson flight instructor trick of pulling the “gages” circuit breaker (aeronautical engineers can’t spell?). This causes the analog gauges to show 0 fuel, 0 oil pressure, and 0 oil temperature. The pilot flew 3 or 4 patterns without noticing anything amiss (i.e., missed at least checks of the gauges). His pilot friend in the back seat also didn’t notice anything. I asked them what they thought the most common cause of aircraft engine stoppage was. “Cylinder heat temperature too high?” was the answer (supposedly it is fuel exhaustion). I reminded them to make sure to do the pre-take-off and downwind checks. We fly at least 4 additional patterns without anyone noticing a problem. I asked the flying pilot to set the helicopter down on the runway and explicitly asked “How do the gauges look?” He responded, “fine”. His friend in the back seat agreed that nothing was amiss. Nervous myself about the fuel situation, I pushed the breaker back in, but not before noting that 0 fuel wasn’t a great way to fly. (In retrospect, I didn’t have to be nervous because Robinson’s orthographically-challenged engineers wisely put the low fuel light (10 minutes) on a separate circuit.)
Update: I’ve now seen some video, thanks to reader comments, in which the rotor system, still attached to part of the transmission, is also separated from both the tail and the fuselage. That casts some doubt on the above theory, but I will leave it in place as a reminder of how wrong I usually am.
The phone system has become useless, with seemingly 90 percent of calls and texts being from scammers (SMS: “Hi”). The USPS is losing money and trying to justify its existence as a sink for taxpayer dollars. What if the USPS launched a competing voice/text/email service in which every participant was authenticated? People could sign up by going to a Post Office and showing an ID or by receiving a PIN code at their regular physical mailing address. Instead of giving your phone number to a bank or doctor’s office, you’d give your USPS “RealNumber” and then the institution could contact you without getting lost in the tide of spam. Because the security would be guaranteed to be as good as physical letters carried by USPS, medical records could be exchanged via this service instead of by FAX(!). This would be a good way to receive bills because they wouldn’t get buried in the daily tide of spam.
Inevitably, of course, someone would start spamming within this system, but USPS could kick spammers out much more easily and durably than other services (the spammer couldn’t sign up again without getting an ID in a different name and getting a new residential or business address where mail was being received in that name). On the third hand, the USPS makes nearly all of its current revenue by delivering spam (unsolicited mail) so maybe they wouldn’t be able to resist selling the right to spam everyone in the system.
As others have noted, USPS could also start a bank as post offices in many other countries have done (taking advantage of their many physical locations). Then the authenticated bills received via the RealNumber could be paid directly.
Readers: Does this idea make sense?
A recent Facebook post of mine:
Why can’t pig butchers be more specific? Text today: “Hi, Monica. This is Linda. Do you have time to take care of my pet? I need to go on a business trip for a few days and I hope you can help me. I will treat you to a seafood dinner when I come back”. Who says “pet” in this context? And “seafood”? That’s a supermarket section, not a colloquial dinner plan. Is there some language in which the above umbrella terms would make sense in a text message or conversation? If so, which one?
The United States managed to destroy the utility of Antonio Meucci‘s invention, the electromagnetic telephone. We did this via a combination of (1) free calling, and (2) failure to authenticate callers. This has enabled half of India and their robots to work as phone scammers.
Why not simply turn off conventional phone calls completely? Health care, banking, and some other essential-for-most-people services still rely on this now-useless technology.
But why can’t the phone itself screen all calls and make phone scamming unprofitable? An AI resident on the phone could put through calls from recognized numbers and silently answer the rest of the calls to see if a legitimate human is on the other end. It should be able to quickly learn to recognize folks offering home renovation, solar panels, final expense insurance, Medicare benefits, etc., from some combination of long wait before caller speaks, Indian accent, saying “the reason of my call” instead of “the reason for my call”, and the use of previous scripted phrases. The AI could be programmed to lead on scambots and the human scammers behind them (“transfer to my senior supervisor”) so that 5-10 minutes of their time is wasted without any personal information being divulged. Answer
It seems as though there are some third party apps vaguely trying to do this, but since answering a phone call is a core function of an iPhone or Android phone, shouldn’t the capability be built directly into the operating system?
I flew to India at the end of 2019 hoping to visit some of the call centers that L. had identified as homes for scams. Although he had detected many tech-support scams originating from Delhi, Hyderabad and other Indian cities, L. was convinced that Kolkata — based on the volume of activity he was noticing there — had emerged as a capital of such frauds.
Late in the afternoon the day after I met with Nath, I drove to Garden Reach, a predominantly Muslim and largely poor section in southwest Kolkata on the banks of the Hooghly River. Home to a 137-year-old shipyard, the area includes some of the city’s noted crime hot spots and has a reputation for crime and violence. Based on my experience reporting from Garden Reach in the 1990s, I thought it was probably not wise to venture there alone late at night, even though that was most likely the best time to find scammers at work. I was looking for Shahbaz.
