Folks who vote for a larger Welfare State should also discourage the teaching of evolution?

by philg

I’ve been enjoying The Great Trials of World History and the Lessons They Teach Us, by Douglas Linder, a professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law.

One of the trials covered is the familiar Scopes Trial, in which ignorance is pitted against Science.

Professor Linder highlights that one of the reasons William Jennings Bryan was against the teaching of evolution in schools, however, is that he was an advocate for equality and was fighting against attempts to discourage unsuccessful Americans from breeding, e.g., in the Eugenics movement.

I wonder if Jennings Bryan would be perplexed by the situation today in which advocates for a larger Welfare State, which encourages maximum reproduction by the least successful Americans (by providing free housing, health care, food, and smartphones on condition that they have children), are simultaneously loud advocates in favor of teaching evolution in schools.

Readers: Why do people who advocate for maximizing the percentage of Americans who are descended from those who never worked also enjoy rooting out the handful of American Creationists and calling them stupid? Shouldn’t folks who advocate maximum fertility among those on Welfare want to downplay a biological theory that says children will closely resemble their parents?

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Mid90s Movie

by philg

The life of a software expert witness involves quite a bit of “hurry up and wait.” Thus did I recently find myself in Easton, Pennsylvania waiting for things to move in the Federal Courthouse. After roaming the strip mall to find treasures for the kids, I spent an evening watching Mid90s.

Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t rate movies for wokeness, so maybe I can add that this movie should get a 40/100 on the wokeness scale. Positive: the only intelligent, wise, and ambitious youth in the movie happens to be African American. Negative: A 13-year-old enagages in sex acts with a woman of 17 or 18. The older sex partner is the initiator and therefore it is unclear if the encounter can truly be described as “consensual.” Certainly the 13-year-old does not explicitly say “yes.” Unlike the kids who’ve had sex with teachers recently, he is not damaged to the tune of $millions by this experience and, in fact, seems proud of it and happy to have had it. Definitely not in sync with our modern (enlightened/woke) thinking about youth sex.

The movie is primarily about this 13-year-old who is curiously undamaged by his sexual encounter. He is not loving life at home. The 36-year-old Mom started having sex with a long list of random guys beginning in the mid-70s. Two of the sexual encounters resulted in pregnancy and childbirth so the 13-year-old has a violent 18-year-old half brother. The mom’s sexual encounters with strangers have been reduced in frequency recently, but the 18-year-old reports that noise from these events would often disturb his sleep when he was young.

(Mom has enough money to sustain a middle-class LA lifestyle, but it is unclear if this is due to wages from work or child support from the biological fathers of the two boys. Her boys were born prior to the formulaic child support guideline system (history) so it may be the case that she didn’t get a lot of money out of them and/or that she didn’t have sex with men with sufficiently high income (California provides for unlimited child support revenue for single mothers who select high-income defendants; see this calculation of what Ellen Pao could have made by having sex with her boss).)

The 13-year-old escapes the half-brother and the mom by hanging out with older skateboarders, all of whom are burnouts except for the African American (see above). The stunts are pretty awesome and, I think, done by the actors themselves (but maybe Hollywood magic is hard to detect?). The movie is strong on teenage life before the helicopter parenting age. Adults don’t interfere too much with tribal activities and are seldom even seen.

There is a dramatic car crash in the movie, which makes me like it less. It is a cheap way to generate drama. One thing that I love about Sideways, for example, is that nothing unusual occurs. The filmmakers have to work harder to make the audience care. At the opposite end of the spectrum are movies where a main character becomes paralyzed or is diagnosed with a terminal illness. Mid90s is closer to Sideways, but not as pure in its rejection of the easy way to audience hearts.

Recommended.

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Immigrant Nobel laureates

by philg

A Facebook friend with a Ph.D. in Physics posted the following as her status:

All six US science Nobel prize winners this year are immigrants.

Last year, all six US noble [sic] prize winners were also immigrants.

I’m sharing this in case you still think “immigrants are ruining America.”

As part of my campaign to be defriended by everyone, I responded with

Did they all arrive in the same caravan from Honduras or was it six separate caravans?

I then pointed out that nobelprize.org shows 2018 U.S. winners having been born in exotic locales such as Pittsburgh, Norwalk, and New York City. But I helpfully supplied a video from an immigrant Nobel laureate in Physics (he won in the 1970s). Her response:

You can’t possibly feel threatened by 5K women and youth.

Me:

let’s maybe not encourage the caravan women to apply for the Nobel in Literature (see “The ugly scandal that cancelled the Nobel prize”)

One find: Wikipedia says that George Pearson Smith (immigrated to the U.S. from Norwalk, Connecticut) is a “a strong supporter of the Boycott [Israel], Divestment and Sanctions movement”. Now that he is stuffed with Nobel cash, let’s see if he will give up his house to the Native American tribe from which the land was stolen!

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Boeing 737 MAX 8 crash, clear tech details

by philg

“What the Lion Air Pilots May Have Needed to Do to Avoid a Crash” (nytimes) contains a lot of good cockpit photos and illustrations explaining the combination of manual and automatic flight controls that likely played a role in the recent Boeing 787 MAX 8 crash (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/11/11/boeing-737-crash-is-first-mass-killing-by-software/ ).

If it sensed a stall, the system would have automatically pushed up the forward edge of the stabilizers, the larger of the horizontal surfaces on the plane’s tail section, in order to put downward pressure on the nose.

To counter the nose-down movement, the pilot’s natural reaction would probably have been to use his yoke, which moves the other, smaller surfaces on the plane’s tail, the elevators. But trying that maneuver might well have wasted precious time without solving the problem because the downward force on the nose exerted by the stabilizer is greater than the opposite force the pilot would be trying to exert through the elevator, said Pat Anderson, a professor of aerospace engineering at Embry Riddle.

“After a period of time, the elevator is going to lose, and the stabilizer is going to win,” he said.

(The same guy gave an interesting lecture this summer; see “Transitioning to electric flight (lectures at Oshkosh)”.)

The pictures show a mix of 1950s (the big trim wheel), 1980s (the switch-controlled trim and trim interrupt), and 1990s (the MCAS layered on top that puts in heavy trim silently).

My comment on the NYT piece:

I sometimes fly the Pilatus PC-12, a simple 11-seat turboprop. Its stall-protection system was designed in the early 1990s. There are two angle-of-attack (AOA) sensors, one on each wing. There are two computers, each one of which is connected to a single AOA sensor. Only if both AOA sensors show a stalling angle of attack (“nose too high”) AND both computers agree THEN there will be a “stick push”. Thus there could never be a nose-down push due to a single bad AOA sensor. In the unlikely event that both sensors and/or computers went haywire at the same time, there is a “pusher interrupt” switch right on the yoke (“stick”). So the pilot need not hunt for an out-of-sight and never-previously-used switch.

It sounds as though Boeing engineered something that relies on just one sensor.

Plainly the Pilatus-style system would not have interfered with these 189 souls making their way safely to the destination. I wonder if a simple voice annunicator on top of the Boeing system would have also saved the passengers and crew. If it had said “trimming down, trimming down” into the headsets, the pilots would have known to direct their attention to the trim and trim interrupt switches.

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“Marriage and alimony are acceptable, but being single and letting a guy give you things is not”

by philg

“How to Date a Lot of Billionaires” (nytimes, 11/10/2018):

The Matharoo sisters never intended to become a cautionary tale about the perils of social media influence. They were born and raised in Toronto, by middle-class parents who had immigrated from India. The sisters’ lives changed abruptly 10 years ago, when Jyoti, fresh out of college, met a Nigerian petroleum magnate.

“He’s not a rapper with expensive watches,” said Jyoti. “It’s generations and generations of money.”

He flew both sisters on private jets to France and Greece and eventually to Nigeria, a destination they did not disclose to their strict parents. Upon landing, a convoy of Mercedes-Benz G-Class S.U.V.s drove them to his home, a heavily marbled mansion with a pool and a litany of servants. Kiran lazed away poolside while Jyoti accompanied her lover to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to play polo with a prince.

“It all happened so fast,” Jyoti said. “There wasn’t even a moment for us to be like, ‘Is this really happening?’”

Within a few months, she said, he bought her a condominium in Toronto and began giving her a monthly $10,000 stipend so she would not have to work.

This affair was not to be a forever love, though. Over the years, the sisters globe-trotted with a succession of paramours. In particular, both sisters traveled frequently to Nigeria and said that dating wealthy men there was easy. “Once they find out you have a sister, it’s over,” Kiran said. “We don’t find them. They find us.”

Neither would say exactly how many billionaires they had dated. “If you say more than one, you’re automatically considered a gold digger,” said Jyoti, though she admitted that the number is higher than one. “I’m attracted by the power of who they are, what they do and what position they are on the Forbes billionaire list.”

In the explicitly amoral societies of the U.S. and Canada, others would like to adopt this lifestyle:

The Matharoos also said they have been inundated with messages from women asking for guidance on finding a billionaire sugar daddy. “Surely you can shed some tips on how to become a kept woman who is still doing her thing,” read a typical message sent to Kiran’s Snapcha[t].

(The Times journalist and editors helpfully include some of the sisters’ best tips in the article.)

Yet a U.S. government agent suggests disapproval:

Recently Jyoti arrived at the Toronto airport with a plane ticket to Houston, only to find herself interrogated by United States customs officials.

“They were grilling me, like, ‘So, are you a prostitute? When was the last time you had a boyfriend,’” she said. “I said, ‘I didn’t know being single was a crime.’ I was so mad. Then I started crying.”

One sister correctly points out that a quickie marriage to a high-income target, followed by a family court-ordered cash stream, and/or getting pregnant and harvesting profitable child support (or selling the abortion; Canada offers unlimited child support and legal abortion, therefore lending itself nicely to this means of earning a living), wouldn’t lead to any uncomfortable questions at the border:

“Marriage and alimony are acceptable, but being single and letting a guy give you things is not,” Jyoti said. “You have to own it. I don’t feel like I’m a piece of property.”

Related:

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Women suing Dartmouth demanding damages sufficient to send every Dartmouth student to University of New Hampshire

by philg

“7 Women Accuse Dartmouth Professors of Sexual Abuse in Lawsuit” (nytimes):

Seven women are suing Dartmouth College for sexual assault, harassment and discrimination they say they experienced from three prominent professors who, according to the suit, turned a human behavior research department “into a 21st-century Animal House.”

For over a decade, the professors — Todd Heatherton, William Kelley and Paul Whalen — “leered at, groped, sexted, intoxicated and even raped female students,” according to the court papers, which were filed Thursday in federal court in New Hampshire.

The lawsuit, which seeks $70 million in damages…

There are approximately 4,300 undergraduates at Dartmouth. In-state tuition at University of New Hampshire is $18,500 per year (source). At rack rates, therefore, 4,300 students would pay $79.5 million at UNH. Assuming only a modest amount of financial aid, then, it would cost less to send all 4,300 of these undergrads to UNH than the amount of damages that was inflicted on these seven women.

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H-1B program means that MIT graduates aren’t special anymore?

by philg

I got the cold shoulder from a couple of aviation companies when I invited them to come speak and demo in our three-day FAA Ground School class at M.I.T. Maybe it is Boston’s typically miserable January weather that is putting them off, but I wonder if the main reason for the lack of interest is the ease of recruiting skilled foreigners via the H-1B visa program (created in 1990).

In the 1980s, companies that needed nerds would flock in-person to MIT, a rich source of a scarce resource. Companies would organize presentations about what they did and why it was interesting and then invite audience members to apply for jobs. Certainly it was unusual for a company to turn down an invite to show up and get in front of 70 young folks studying Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Aeronautical Engineering.

Readers: What do you think? Is on-campus recruiting suffering in the H-1B age?

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The Amazon HQ2 deals show how to implement a planned economy?

by philg

I’m wondering if the Amazon HQ2 deals show how to implement a planned economy without having to acknowledge that one’s country has transitioned away from the market.

Planned Economy v1.0: It is illegal for anyone to operate a business without approval from a government ministry. Government experts decide which companies can operate, from which locations, and engaging in which businesses.

Planned Economy v2.0: Set up tax rates that are, by global standards, punishingly high. It is therefore impractical to do business if a company must pay the headline rates. Government experts decide that certain companies, in certain locations, and engaging in certain activities, can operate with tax rates that are closer to global norms.

We’re not quite to this point, but with a few upward tweaks of the tax rates I think that we could be.

Related:

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Surveillance Nation

by philg

“The Subway Bomber’s Journey to 42nd Street, Captured on Camera” (nytimes, November 5, 2018) is a little shocking for showing just how many security cameras are running in our cities these days.

There is a lot of speculation on why crime is less prevalent today compared to 30 or 50 years ago. I wonder how much of the credit for this reduction can be claimed by the developers of the integrated circuit. Now that cameras and memory are almost free, maybe criminals know that it is tough to get away with crime (though plainly Akayed Ullah did not expect to get away with his actions and did not regard what he was doing as a “crime”).

Related:

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Amazon settles into low-tax New York City

by philg

“Amazon Announces New York and Virginia as HQ2 Picks” (nytimes):

Amazon could receive more than $2 billion in tax incentives across the two top locations, the company said in its announcement. Up to $1.2 billion of that will come from New York state’s Excelsior program, a discretionary tax credit. In Virginia, the company could receive up to $550 million in cash incentives from the state.

Plainly both New York and Virginia will be low-tax environments for Amazon (not for small competitors, though! The Tax Foundation ranks New York almost dead last in business tax climate; only California and New Jersey are more punishing places to have a company), but how exactly are the “tax incentives” ladled out?

Amazon will pay less in state income tax? In payroll taxes? In property taxes? A combination of these taxes? 

“The mystery tax breaks bringing Amazon to LIC; New York has an incentives package for Amazon, but taxpayers may never know what’s in it” talks about “tax credits,” but doesn’t say if these are credits against state income tax or local property tax or what.

[Separately, anyone planning to sue an Amazon employee for child support or alimony should probably wait for the lawsuit target to be transferred from Washington (capped child support and limited alimony) to New York ($100,000 per year in tax-free child support readily obtainable and far longer taxable alimony duration). New York enables child support profits to be collected through age 21, while Washington cuts them off at age 18. New York is also more favorable for plaintiffs seeking to obtain sole custody of a child (see TMZ for why it was smart for Katie Holmes to sue Tom Cruise in New York rather than in California). For plaintiffs suing the very highest Amazon earners, the Virginia location offers unlimited child support by formula, but a child stops yielding cash at age 18.]

I wonder if the Amazon New York location will end up presenting the nation’s largest contrast in leisure time. “Amazon’s New Neighbor: The Nation’s Largest Housing Project” (nytimes) says that 6,000 people who have no financial incentive to work (they may actually suffer reduced spending power by working due to the welfare system structure) will live right next to people that the same newspaper says are essentially slaves (see “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace; The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.”: “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.)

Readers: What do you think of New York residents paying the nation’s highest tax rates (tied with California?) so that Amazon can be in NYC but be taxed more like a business in Florida or Nevada?

Also, does this mean that the New York transportation system will melt down? How can it handle 25,000 more commutes per day via subway, Uber, private car, train, etc.? Every mode of transit in NYC (even walking in Midtown!) seems to be gridlocked and/or overburdened currently.

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