Our town’s Memorial Day ceremony is about to begin (live stream):
The speaker is Brian Mast, a veteran who represents us in Congress and who has been at odds with the Biden administration regarding U.S. support for continued Hamas rule in Gaza.
I arranged a brick for my father, who was drafted and served as a corporal in the NYC area (my dad was born in 1930, so he was 23 years old when he went into the Army, a late start due to a college deferment).
My dad was not killed while serving in the military (unclear how that could have happened other than via a car/bus accident or if a filing cabinet had fallen on him) so, fortunately, he is not one of those for whom the day was established.
Readers: What are you doing to observe Memorial Day?
Memorial Day thought: Will coronaplague bring us years of peace? (a 2020 prediction that has been proven wrong; “Do countries that have shut down their societies, schools, and economies have the will or the wealth to go to war? What would they fight for? To conquer a territory that is also shut down and packed with inhabitants who are entirely dependent on government welfare?”)
I was delighted that the brief trip from the hotel to the airport included a view of the following car:
Not sure if I love the reference to Talladega Nights or “I Identify as a Problem” more.
A powerful politician directed a river of federal tax dollars into the KSME airport back in 2006 to build a world-class commercial airline terminal:
It has never been used.
We fired up and vaguely followed the Ohio River to Parkersburg, West Virginia (KPKB). We enjoyed tailwinds of up to 30 knots, but combined with the terrain that also made for bumps so we once again climbed as high as 7,500′. Note the Tesla charging station, below.
Parkersburg features a sometimes-used commercial terminal, thanks to continuing applications of your tax dollars into the Essential Air Service program. We enjoyed some breakfast there and got a lesson in philately as well as in how wrong people are in their perceptions of inflation. A luxurious four-seat piston-powered aircraft, the Beech Staggerwing, cost $9,250 and first class postage was 32 cents in 1997 (the stamp is now worth about 1.75 Bidies).
A photo of the Ashokan Reservoir in the Catskill Mountains about 20 minutes before descending into KGBR:
Here’s Torrance’s finest product with 30.7 hours on the collective meter:
The happy owner supplied us with an Enterprise rental car, pre-tuned to NPR, for the trip to Boston/Cambridge.
As previously noted here, we were offered free samples of healing marijuana within 30 minutes of our arrival in Maskachusetts:
Every crosswalk in Great Barrington is painted in the sacred colors:
Retailers post signs for the world’s smartest humans:
They also worship the Sacred Rainbow in Stockbridge:
The world’s smartest humans are provided with instructions for how to use the devices depicted above:
Except for the final trip down the Mass Pike, including an inflation-free $15/person meal at McDonald’s, that was it!
George Floyd should be alive. He deserved so much more.
Today, I join all those who loved him and all those touched by the civil rights movement he inspired in remembering the tragedy and injustice of his death.
George Floyd changed the world and we should “act in his memory”.
Readers: what have you done today (or recently) to act in George Floyd’s memory? What did this American hero do that we should also do so that our children can see an ideal way for an adult to act?
Some other things that happened on May 25 that Joe Biden isn’t talking about (source):
1241 1st attack on Jewish community of Frankfurt am Main, Germany
1784 Jews are expelled from Warsaw by Marshall Mniszek
1787 Constitutional convention opens at Philadelphia, George Washington presiding
1927 Henry Ford announces that he is ending production of the Model T Ford
1942 First commercial fluid catalytic cracking facility begins production at Exxon – now produces half the world’s gasoline, developed by the “Four Horsemen” research team at Exxon
1961 JFK announces US goal of putting a man on the Moon before the end of decade
1961 NASA civilian pilot Joseph A. Walker takes X-15 to 32,770 m
1968 Gateway Arch in St Louis dedicated
1973 US launches 1st Skylab crew Kerwin, Conrad, Weitz
1977 Original “Star Wars” movie (Episode IV – A New Hope), directed by George Lucas and starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford, premieres
1979 Israel begins to return Sinai to Egypt
1986 Hands Across America – 6.5 million people hold hands from California to NY 1991 Israel evacuates 14,000 Ethiopian Jews
2017 Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg receives an honorary degree from Harvard University, after dropping out in 2004 (a Harvard commencement without a pro-Hamas component!)
2018 Harvey Weinstein turns himself in to New York police to face charges of rape, a criminal sex act, sex abuse and sexual misconduct (conviction overturned in 2024)
We didn’t start quite as early as planned in Abilene, but we managed to crank shortly after 8:00 am:
We flew over the Promised Land of free wind energy and then straight over the top of DFW:
You might think that it is rude to fly directly over one of the world’s busiest airports. However, that’s often exactly what the best controllers want you to do because airplanes don’t take off or land vertically and, therefore, a helicopter direct overhead doesn’t present a separation challenge.
We stopped at Galaxy FBO at KADS, one of the busiest general aviation airports serving Dallas. There, I received the happy news that inflation has been conquered by our wise leaders and their appointed technocrats in Washington, D.C. It is just that our used minivan keeps going up in price because it is so rare and desirable.
If you don’t like California’s lockdowns and 13.3% state income tax, it seems that they aren’t going to run out of houses in the Dallas suburbs any time soon:
From there, it was on into Arkansas and over the mountains to Mena (KMEZ) for lunch at Cruizzers Drive-In (better for sculpture than food):
Our next leg took us to Jonesboro, Arkansas (KJBR) for fuel and then across the Mississippi river to KCKV (“Outlaw Field” in Clarksville, Tennessee):
Our final leg was to KSME, Somerset, Kentucky, a truly magnificent facility:
At the Marriott, I wondered if they wouldn’t get more people to cooperate with their environmental goals with a sign reading, “Like Jeffrey Epstein, these towels aren’t going to hang themselves.”
Discouraged by reports of low clouds at various points along Interstate 10 and Interstate 20, but encouraged by forecasts of improving conditions, we launched from El Paso (KELP) to Van Horn, Texas (KVHN). The airport was deserted, but we managed to get the FBO guy on his cell phone and he popped right over to help us fuel the R44 from the pumps. The big users of this airport have been the U.S. Army with some drones and Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos with Gulfstreams and helicopters coming to see rocket launches (not stopping to chat with anyone at the airport).
We departed after refueling and, sure enough, the forecast great weather hadn’t materialized. As the highway climbed, the cloud deck didn’t move, which meant that the ceiling kept getting lower and lower. We hadn’t gone more than 10 minutes from KVHN before making the decision to do a 180-degree turn. We then called our FBO guy back to get the keys to the crew car and went into town for a truly great early dinner in a classic hotel:
After dinner… the same damn clouds. But they certainly didn’t look very high. Maybe we could go over them at 7,500′ and… we did! It’s unusual to fly over a cloud deck in a helicopter and if we’d had to do an autorotation to the highway it could have been challenging, but I have done autos on instruments in training. Anyway, the faithful Robinson never hiccupped so we made it over the last of the mountains and the broken cloud layer without incident and landed at Abilene just as it was getting dark. Abilene Aero lent us their crew car for the overnight hotel stay.
Downtown El Paso seems to have been set up to serve Mexicans who came over for a day of shopping and then returned over the bridge. Here’s what it would look like to arrive from Ciudad Juárez:
After our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters from south of the border get through the 1950s-style shopping district, they arrive at the Square of the Sacred Rainbow Flag:
On the way they might pass this multi-story mountain lion (64 feet high!), fashioned from recycled trash by Bordalo Segundo of Portugal:
Inspired by the street art, it was time to duck into the (free) art museum. Meanwhile, I checked the radar to see whether we’d made a good decision (“sunk cost fallacy”?). From 2:30 pm:
Here’s another temporary installation, a sculpture by Vanessa German:
Black Girl on Skateboard Going Where She’s Got to Go to Do What She’s Got to Do and It Might Not Have Anything to Do With You, Ever, 2022. Lemony things: vintage French beaded flowers, a yellow skateboard like I never had when i was a fat little Black girl in Los Angeles when riding a skateboard meant that you could fly, Capidomonte Ceramic Lemon Center piece, a dance in my thighs, high yellow so-flat paint, porcelain bird figurines, decorative resin lemons, papery yellow flowers, meanness transmuted, love, oil paint stick, rage, self-loathing transmuted, a joy-bitch, masturbation, plaster, wood glue, black pigment, giddiness, freedom in the body, freedom in the Soul, wood, tar, wire, a distinct and purposeful healing, hope, yellow flood light, heart, yellow decorative ceramic magnolia figurine, acceptance, abandon, not being afraid to be full of your own self in your own divine body, divinity, fear transmuted, plaster gauze, magic, silicone, tears, epoxy, water, tomorrow, now, yes.
Wandering around after the art museum, we happened on the Paso Del Norte, a hotel that put our Marriott to shame:
Some images of downtown, including the very first Kress store (part of the fortune built turned into the art museum and its collection). See if you can spot the Science-following photographer:
We enjoyed dinner at Tex-Mex institution L&J Cafe (1927), preceded by a walk in the grass-free graveyard:
Then it was time to enjoy El Paso by night, including a minor league baseball game (packed with enthusiastic spectators) and fireworks from our hotel’s pool deck:
The next morning I did my annual visit to the gym and also looked out from the pool deck:
Speaking of the gym, they still had their coronapanic signs up. Is there any kind of procedure for taking these safety notices down?
To undo any negative effects from the gym, we hit the Glazy Donut on the way out of town. Note how easily Internet content can be corrupted:
Then it was back to the airport where the skies were clear at least to the next stop (Van Horn, Texas) and forecast to improve beyond Van Horn:
The Consumer Price Index climbed 3.4 percent in April from a year earlier, down from 3.5 percent in March, the Labor Department said on Wednesday. The “core” index — which strips out volatile food and fuel prices in order to give a sense of the underlying trend — rose 3.6 percent last month, down from 3.8 percent a month earlier. It was the lowest annual increase in core inflation since early 2021.
The report followed three straight months of uncomfortably rapid price increases that rattled investors and worried policymakers at the Federal Reserve. Economists cautioned that one month of encouraging data was far from enough to put those worries to rest. But they said that the data should ease concerns, at least for now, that inflation is re-accelerating.
If you couldn’t afford stuff previously, therefore, you’ll be “relieved” to learn that prices are yet higher.
Even more confidence-inspiring… an 81-year-old who never took an economics class is tackling what non-NYT readers might perceive as a problem:
“I know many families are struggling, and that even though we’ve made progress we have a lot more to do,” Mr. Biden said in a statement released by the White House. He called bringing down inflation his “top economic priority.”
If you don’t like higher prices, it’s “progress” when prices are higher every month. Maybe it doesn’t matter that the president hasn’t taken economics because he/she/ze/they is advised by expert economists? Let’s look at the chair of Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors:
Bernstein stated he grew up in a “musical family” and aspired to be a professional musician as a young person. Bernstein graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music from the Manhattan School of Music where he studied double bass with Orin O’Brien. Throughout the ’80s, Bernstein was a mainstay on the jazz scene in NYC.
He also earned a Master of Social Work from Hunter College as well as a DSW in social welfare from Columbia University’s school of social work
(He’s so old that he could get to class at Columbia without pushing through a thicket of tents and Palestinian flags!)
The NYT deceptively charts CPI since 1965 without noting that the definition has changed dramatically over this period. The reader is left with the impression that things were far worse during the Jimmy Carter “malaise years”:
Larry Summers and friends, though, show us what the chart would look if you simply undid the big change from 1983 to use a fictitious rent measure rather than actual housing costs. In fact, Bidenflation is roughly comparable in intensity to the inflation that Americans suffered as a consequence of the Kennedy/Johnson expansions of the welfare state and the Kennedy/Johnson decisions to enter the Vietnam War (Carter gets blamed for this, but the seeds were sown in the 1960s).
Mostly I find the above fascinating as an example of journalism that purports to be neutral and skeptical yet in fact is primarily propaganda about the great job that our rulers are doing.
Loyal readers know that I’m a huge fan of the human ability to hold beliefs that are apparent logical contradictions. Here’s an interesting collection from one Tweet exploring the interior of Joe Biden’s mind:
The basic mental disease present in all Biden foreign policy is the bizarre need to take both sides in every conflict. Condolences for the mass-murdering head of a terror regime. Humanitarian aid for Hamas, which Biden also says Israel should defeat. Weapons for Israel but also constant condemnation and criticism. Arms for Ukraine that they’re not allowed to use against targets in Russia. Taking the Houthis off the sanctions list but also bombing them.
Full tweet:
The basic mental disease present in all Biden foreign policy is the bizarre need to take both sides in every conflict. Condolences for the mass-murdering head of a terror regime. Humanitarian aid for Hamas, which Biden also says Israel should defeat. Weapons for Israel but also… https://t.co/3txqCgaImh
A reminder of my personal favorite collection of logical contradictions, from 2020:
And let’s not forget the mental gymnastics around immigration. The border is not “open”, but Joe Biden is considering “closing” it (and would “close” the non-open border if Republicans in Congress would cooperate). Native-born Black Americans are not being “replaced” by immigrants; it is just that their former houses and jobs are now occupied by the Latinx (Politico and NBER).
I’m a huge fan of Alexander Payne (not just because my cousin produced About Schmidt). If you’re not familiar with his work, try Election, Sideways, and The Descendants.
The Holdovers (streaming on Amazon Prime) is Payne’s latest and features a teacher who loves giving bad grades so I can’t relate to that part (I don’t think that teachers should be allowed to grade their own students!). A Bell 206 Jet Ranger helicopter makes an appearance so I will try to confine my review to what I know. First, the Bell holds a maximum of five people, including the pilot, and the movie suggests that at least six people go on a flight in the machine. The helicopter comes in because one prep school kid’s dad is supposedly the president of Pratt & Whitney and the machine is his corporate perk. But why would a Pratt executive travel around in a machine powered by an Allison (now Rolls-Royce) engine?
The arrival of the helicopter is handled accurately, with the pilot apparently doing a high recon before the off-airport landing. (Assess the following from 500′ above the ground: Wind, Wires, Way In, and Way Out; Shape, Size, Slope, and Surface)
A few points beyond the helicopter-only comments…
The movie, set in 1970, makes only a few concessions to 21st century social justice. No character is a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. All of the Black characters are noble and exemplars of stable married life. Most of the white characters are deeply flawed and are either unmarried or divorced and remarried. The richer the white person, the worse he or she behaves (“he or she” because there were only two genders in the movie’s 1970). In fact, Paul Giamatti’s crusty teacher is too crusty for credibility. If he regularly gave a lot of mediocre students failing grades, the school would have axed him (or simply adjusted the grades he handed out). A private school teacher doesn’t have the union protection to do whatever he/she/ze/they wants as a public school teacher would. But it is still fun to watch him!
Readers: Who else saw this movie? What did you think? I wouldn’t say it is one of Payne’s best, but it is still better than 98 percent of what’s streaming today!
(We likely lost at least one great movie to California family law offering plaintiffs the chance to win a lifetime of ease following a brief sexual encounter. After three years of marriage, 34-year-old Sandra Oh sued Alexander Payne for divorce (Fox) and alimony (“spousal support”). The litigation to determine the profitability of her three-year marriage lasted for two-thirds the length of the marriage. The result was a gap in Payne’s filmography between 2004 and 2011. What did Sandra Oh do with the cash? Today she expresses her hopes for continued Hamas rule in Gaza (Variety), but it is unclear whether she’s donating funds to help the Palestinians liberate Al-Quds.)
If you’re interested in a possible route out of “more migrants; no more land” reducing living standards, check out Downsizing.
All previous tools that were hyped as making programmers more productive had no effect or a positive effect on the demand for computer programmers. I would have thought that we would be in a golden age for young computer nerds as every company on the planet seeks to “add AI”, e.g., “Joe’s Drywall and Paint, now with AI”.l
Note the hateful depiction of a non-Black non-female not-obviously-2SLGBTQQIA+ computer wizard (NYT would never make this mistake). Also note “Those from top schools can still get job”. In other words, it is the mediocre computer nerds who can’t get hired. Either there has been a huge boom in the number of people who are passionate about computer nerdism or a lot of kids have gone into CS, despite a lack of interest in staring at a screen, because someone told them that it was a sure path to a solid career (this was my experience teaching Information Technology; 90 percent of the students were not even vaguely curious about the subject, e.g., curious enough to search outside of the materials assigned):
My guess is that, due to lack of interest/passion, 70 percent of CS majors shouldn’t have majored in CS and won’t have lasting careers in CS. They are at best mediocre now and will just get worse as they forget what they were supposed to have learned.
Almost all of the news in the article is bad:
To be sure, comp-sci majors from top-tier schools can still get jobs. Pay, projected to be at about $75,000, is at the high end of majors reviewed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, or NACE. They are just not all going to Facebook or Google.
“Job seekers need to reset their expectations,” said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, a trade group that follows the tech sector. “New grads may need to adjust where they’re willing to work, in some cases what salary, perks or signing bonus they’ll receive, and the type of firm they’ll work for.”
And while big tech companies are hiring for AI-related jobs, Herbert said, many of those positions require more experience than a new grad would have.
Salaries for this year’s graduates in computer science are expected to be 2.7% higher than last year’s, the smallest increase of eight fields reviewed by NACE.
In the past 18 months, job growth has remained flat for software publishers, a group of employers that includes software developers, according to the Labor Department. On the student jobs platform Handshake, the number of full-time jobs recently posted for tech companies is down 30% from the year-ago period.
$75,000/year?!?! That’s $55,000 per year after Joe Biden’s and Gavin Newsom’s shares (online calculator). About $12,000 of that after-tax $55,000 will be consumed paying for the car that is required to get to the job (AAA and CNBC). Salaries are 2.7 percent higher than a year ago? That’s a pay cut if you adjust for the inflation rate in any part of the country where (a) people want to live, and (b) there are jobs.
I’m wondering if the big problem is in bold. Four years of paying tuition should prepare a smart young person for almost any job, including “AI-related” (if not at OpenAI then at some company that is planning to use an LLM via an API to OpenAI or similar). In the late 1990s, colleges weren’t teaching “How to build an Amazon or eBay” (so we developed a class that did and a textbook) even though it was obvious that employers wanted graduates who could built database-backed web sites. Could it be that the CS curriculum is totally stale once again? Very few of the professors have what it would take to get hired at OpenAI and, therefore, they can’t teach the students what it would take to get hired at OpenAI.
I think this confirms my 2018 theory that data science is what young people should study and that data science restores the fun of computer programming that we enjoyed in the pre-bloat days.
