Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

One of my Facebook friends linked to this editorial from the Weather Channel about a proposed 17 percent budget cut to NOAA. Americans will die, said these Hillary supporters, if the Trumpenfuhrer’s cruel axe falls on NOAA.

One question is why would a federal agency’s work suffer from a budget cut? If NOAA is like the USDA, they could fire half of their workers without any effect on productivity. Given that Federal workers are paid roughly 2X the private sector average (higher salary plus more valuable benefits, especially pension), there could simply be a 17-percent pay cut and almost nobody would quit (since their compensation would still be higher than what is obtainable elsewhere).

Let’s assume, however, that NOAA would have to shut down the hurricane forecasts that are cited by the Weather Channel. I linked to “Are Europeans Better Than Americans at Forecasting Storms?” (Scientific American 2015), which says that the European weather nerds continuously forecast the same hurricanes and do a better job.

• me: How would you be affected if the U.S. government stopped forecasting hurricanes? What is wrong with the European forecasts that are available at no cost to U.S. taxpayers?
• Passionate Democrat 1: “National security vulnerability”
• Passionate Democrat 2: “The 2016 and 2017 budgets addressed the computing gap” (i.e., if we only had a fancier computer we would kick those European asses; it is not that they might be smarter than us regarding physics)
• me: “Why not cut NOAA back to gathering data to give to the Europeans? Where’s the national security risk?  We don’t trust our allies in Europe to give us weather forecasts when we ask?”
• Passionate Democrat 1: “It’s not just trusting them to give us weather forecasts, it’s trusting their integrity protections. An attack on the US could be enabled by perhaps a one hour blackout of weather forecasts if well timed. So $ENEMY gets into their system. Ok, they could get into our system. But we could respond to that, or ensure redundancy etc, directly. Fast warfare happens in the air, so does weather.” (i.e., now that Marissa Mayer and her team at Yahoo have freed up they can show the Europeans how computer security is done)
• me: “What if we could form a military alliance with some of these efficient and capable Europeans? Maybe get something formal together with the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and other advanced economies in Europe? Do you think that it would be possible to have some kind of organization where we didn’t have to be solely responsible for everything military?” [this was apparently too oblique; nobody read this as a reference to the already-existing NATO]
• Passionate Democrat 1: “Not for something as fundamental as weather is to military operations. We might as well have them running the simulations for response deployments in the event of an attack.”
• me: “It looks like there is already a parallel military weather forecasting operation.  Why would the feared cuts to NOAA prevent these military forecasters from continuing to do what you say is critical national security work?”
• Passionate Democrat 2: “It’s not just blackout, etc. It’s getting the specific information you want for your operations. We might be able to pay for that — but a major reason our forecast quality declined after 2013 is we didn’t budget money for commercial data like Tamdar. Is it really more efficient to pay someone else to do something? Doubtful — they’d have to ramp up their capabilities to provide the results we need, including buying the commercial data. … it’s not just military that has specific needs. FEMA, for example.”
• me: “How do the European countries survive then? Does each country say ‘we can’t take the security risk of relying on European weather forecasting so we’ll build our own domestic operation’? Why doesn’t a 10-year-old with a rifle take over France if France doesn’t have its own NOAA-style agency?”
• Passionate Democrat 1: ” Imagine $ENEMY changing hurricane tracking just slightly, enough that we mistakenly conclude there’s no need to secure NYC.”
• me: “Your point about NYC being unprepared is a good one, but doesn’t that suggest that we shouldn’t rely on the low reliability U.S. forecasts and should instead rely on the high reliability European ones?”

This is a selection from roughly 100 responses involving a bunch more Americans. All of them were terrified about losing something for which a free and arguably superior alternative exists on the Web.

Obviously the NOAA budget is small change and, as a pilot, certainly I would be the last person to suggest cutting it even if we do have trouble figuring out how to borrow the next $20 trillion. What I find interesting about the above is the reaction to any reduction in the Great Father in Washington’s responsibilities for us.

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Tyler Cowen says that Americans are increasingly immobile and unwilling to get off the sofa to do anything more challenging than hold up their phones to watch a movie. The FAA seems to agree. The bureaucracy’s forecast for individual flying is that it will die off at roughly the same rate as the population of currently certificated pilots: 0.8 percent annually. There will be some growth in business jet travel to compensate for this, but it might take until 2037 to exceed the number of “general aviation” (everything but airlines) hours flown in 2007. This against a backdrop of population growth from about 300 million Americans in 2007 to roughly 380 million in 2037 (Census projections).

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My standard line in response to neighbors fearful of King Donald I starting a war was “Why would a guy who owns $4 billion in real estate want to start a war?” It looks as though I was wrong. The leftovers from the inauguration festivities are still in the fridge and we lobbed $93 million of missiles into Syria.

Readers: Can you explain the point of this attack? How does it serve American interests? How does it help the average person in Syria if the effect is to weaken the government and thus prolong the civil war that they’re having? Do we now have to let in the entire population of Syria (23 million people) as refugees because they can credibly claim to be at risk from being hit by our $1.6 million missiles?

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If you were wondering what would happen after customers with 20 hours of training got in their Icon A5 amphibious seaplanes, here’s a story about a factory instructor wrecking one. The word on the ramp (at Sun n Fun) was that the hull split open after a hard landing. What hope is there for the rest of us?

Note that I’ve got a single-engine seaplane rating and about 10 hours of seaplane time. That, plus my CFI certificate, means that I’m legal to teach people how to fly seaplanes! Who wants to be my first student? Separately, a friend told me that he fell into the water while trying to dock a seaplane at the end of his checkride. The examiner said “oh, that happens all the time” and proceeded to issue him the modified certificate with new rating.

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I’m kind of awed by the young genius described in “Student gets into Stanford after writing #BlackLivesMatter on application 100 times” (CNN). Can we think of a better example of someone able to get into the mind of a modern day university bureaucrat?

I wonder if genius will inspire imitators. What better way to assure a college that you’re not going to rock the groupthink boat than to clutter one’s application with references to “progressive activist” events? As there is no way to verify attendance, an applicant could play Xbox all through high school and fabricate an impressive resume of activism. Can the Stanford admissions officer question the statement “I went to the Boston Women’s March”? Impossible! Even if the officer happened to be in Boston and happened to attend the march, he or she could not know about everyone who attended. Telling details can be cribbed from media or Facebook reports. Why didn’t you get an A in Calculus? “I was too busy protesting Trump.” Why weren’t you elected president of any groups in your high school? “I was too busy knitting a pussy hat.”

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“Going From Marginalized to Welcomed in the Workplace” (nytimes):

… TransCanWork, a nonprofit that has teamed up with the California Restaurant Association, among other groups. The program trains employers to become transgender-friendly in their hiring practices and their overall operations. It also connects transgender people with employers; a state grant pays for the first 60 hours of each new employee’s wages.

If you’re an employer, why not ask every new-hire to identify as “transgender” (Wikipedia says that this is “an umbrella term” that covers potentially almost anyone)? At that point state taxpayers are funding most of your costs of bringing a new person on board.

What’s the flaw in this strategy for cutting costs and increasing profit?

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Folks:

A market research firm wants to understand the light helicopter (R22 and R44, for example) market, as well as why people drop out of private helicopter training (folks whose objective was to be a Private-rated hobbyist, not flying to the oil rigs). They want to pay you about $300 for your time. Interviews would be in early May.

Please email me (philg@mit.edu) if interested.

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I like to be the last person on the planet to read any given bestseller. I finally got around to reading Unbroken, about Louis Zamperini, a U.S. Olympic athlete-turned-World War II bombardier. He survives 47 days in an inflatable raft and then just barely survives being a prisoner of war in Japanese custody.

Japan had signed the Geneva Convention regarding treatment of prisoners, but hadn’t ratified it. Thus prisoners were beaten and starved and scheduled to be killed as whatever island they were held on was overrun by American forces. According to Unbroken, there were in fact mass executions of prisoners held on islands beyond the Japanese core islands.

What could have saved prisoners? A quick and Big Bang-ish end to the war. Something that wouldn’t give the Japanese sufficient time to carry out their execution plans.

The modern fashion among historians, including in the biography of Eisenhower that I finished recently, is to treat the atomic bombing of Japan as an unnecessary act shading into war crime territory. At best it is something to be regretted. Invading Japan wouldn’t have been that costly or have taken that long.

Unbroken is a good reminder that not everyone would regret the A-bombs dropped on August 6 and 9, 1945. Zamperini was within weeks of dying from malnutrition, dysentery, and beatings even if the Japanese had not planned an August 15, 1945 execution date. He ultimately lived through 2014 (aged 97).

The book is also a good reminder of how much more dangerous accidents were than combat during World War II. Zamperini’s plane went down due to the crew feathering a good engine after one quit (so they could have had three out of four running engines and a dead one with a feathered prop; instead they ended up with two running engines, both on the same wing, and a dead engine with a stopped prop generating a huge amount of drag; this is a classic problem when learning to fly multi-engine piston aircraft and has been mostly addressed by auto-feather props and/or turbojets that don’t need to be feathered after quitting (and they hardly ever quit). Despite auto-feather, TransAsia 235 came to grief in a similar fashion in 2015. A crew of five USAF pilots wrecked a C-5 cargo plane in Dover, Delaware via a similar mistake in 2006. Machines get better, but apparently humans do not.

Lauren Hillenbrand does a better job than 99 percent of America’s journalists and authors in explaining aviation concepts. She thanks her brother, a Private certificate holder, in the acknowledgments.

Some statistics:

Pilot and navigator error, mechanical failure, and bad luck were killing trainees at a stunning rate. In the Army Air Forces, or AAF,* there were 52,651 stateside aircraft accidents over the course of the war, killing 14,903 personnel. Though some of these personnel were probably on coastal patrol and other duties, it can be presumed that the vast majority were trainees, killed without ever seeing a combat theater. In the three months in which Phil’s men trained as a crew, 3,041 AAF planes—more than 33 per day—met with accidents stateside, killing 9 men per day. In subsequent months, death tallies exceeding 500 were common. In August 1943, 590 airmen would die stateside, 19 per day.

These losses, only one due to enemy action, were hardly anomalous. In World War II, 35,933 AAF planes were lost in combat and accidents. The surprise of the attrition rate is that only a fraction of the ill-fated planes were lost in combat. In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas theater in which Phil’s crew served, for every plane lost in combat, some six planes were lost in accidents. Over time, combat took a greater toll, but combat losses never overtook noncombat losses.

As planes went, so went men. In the air corps, 35,946 personnel died in nonbattle situations, the vast majority of them in accidental crashes.*1 Even in combat, airmen appear to have been more likely to die from accidents than combat itself. A report issued by the AAF surgeon general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.

The book is also a good reminder of how enthusiastic the U.S. has become regarding imprisoning people. Although some Japanese war criminals were executed, hardly any were imprisoned longer than the Green Card holding woman who tried to vote in Texas. The worst criminal described in the book escapes punishment altogether. He went into hiding after the war and came out after an amnesty was declared.

Then, one day in March 1952, as he read a newspaper, his eyes had paused over a story. The arrest order for suspected war criminals had been lifted. There on the page was his name. The lifting of the apprehension order was the result of an unlikely turn in history. Immediately after the war, there was a worldwide outcry for punishment of the Japanese who had abused POWs, and the war-crimes trials began. But new political realities soon emerged. As American occupiers worked to help Japan transition to democracy and independence, the Cold War was beginning. With communism wicking across the Far East, America’s leaders began to see a future alliance with Japan as critical to national security. The sticking point was the war-crimes issue; the trials were intensely unpopular in Japan, spurring a movement seeking the release of all convicted war criminals. With the pursuit of justice for POWs suddenly in conflict with America’s security goals, something had to give. On December 24, 1948, as the occupation began to wind down, General MacArthur declared a “Christmas amnesty” for the last seventeen men awaiting trial for Class A war crimes, the designation for those who had guided the war. The defendants were released, and some would go on to great success; onetime defendant Nobusuke Kishi, said to be responsible for forcibly conscribing hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans as laborers, would become prime minister in 1957.

Mutsuhiro Watanabe’s flight was over. In his absence, many of his fellow camp guards and officials had been convicted of war crimes. Some had been executed. The others wouldn’t be in prison for long. In keeping with the American effort to reconcile with Japan, all of them, including those serving life sentences, would soon be paroled. It appears that even Sueharu Kitamura, “the Quack,” was set free, in spite of his death sentence. By 1958, every war criminal who had not been executed would be free, and on December 30 of that year, all would be granted amnesty. Sugamo would be torn down, and the epic ordeals of POWs in Japan would fade from the world’s memory. Watanabe would later admit that in the beginning of his life in exile, he had pondered the question of whether or not he had committed any crime. In the end, he laid the blame not on himself but on “sinful, absurd, insane war.” He saw himself as a victim.

Watanabe married and had two children. He opened an insurance agency in Tokyo, and it reportedly became highly profitable. He lived in a luxury apartment worth a reported $1.5 million and kept a vacation home on Australia’s Gold Coast. Almost everyone who knew of his crimes believed he was dead.

Watanabe died in April 2003.

More: read Unbroken.

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Facebook and media hysteria regarding the repeal of Obamacare suggests that it will be patients who will be harmed (with death, for example). Medicine will continue to advance and physicians will continue to get paid well.

Facebook and media hysteria regarding the Trump Administration’s proposed funding cuts to various federal agencies suggests that science and scientists will be harmed.

Does this show what a crummy career science is compared to medicine? (see “Women in Science” for a comparison) Nobody says that doctors will be harmed if the federal cash river is interrupted or redirected. But if scientists can’t get their tax dollars they are apparently headed for the unemployment line. According to the hysterical, science is incredibly valuable yet there is apparently no foreign government or corporation that would want to hire a typical U.S. scientist.

Why should young people be encouraged to enter a field that is this vulnerable to the U.S. government not being able to find another $20 trillion to borrow?

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