Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Short version of the below: If Democrats pack themselves into states that are already majority Democrat, are they helping Republicans to win the Presidency?

Today the Electoral College votes (timeline). Democrats are upset about the system and arguing in favor of a decision based on popular votes instead. I’m wondering if they have a good point. Based on my Facebook research, it seems that committed Democrats can’t tolerate political dissent. They don’t want anyone with doubts about Hillary as a Facebook friend and certainly wouldn’t want to share a street with a deplorable neighbor afflicted with racism, sexism, and sufficient stupidity to be swayed by a demagogue. Certainly they don’t want to share a dormitory with anyone who supports Trump. Hillary-loving academic friends approvingly posted this nytimes story, by an 18-year-old NYU student who doesn’t say why her roommate voted for Trump but that the roommate’s vote means they can’t live together. When I suggested that schools segregate out deplorables into special dorms, push them off campus, and/or expel any student who admits to having voted for Trump, the response was “Because this is my space and you are a guest here, I will exercise my prerogative by asking you to stop posting–not because we disagree, but because you are not capable of respecting others or showing empathy to people who are afraid or in pain.” (All of the Hillary supporters on the thread started from the assumption that anyone who voted for Trump is a racist, sexist, and anti-Muslim.)

The Russians whom I know in the Boston area say that there is narrower range of political expression tolerated in Massachusetts than there was in the former Soviet Union (you could disagree with the party line at social gatherings or at work, whereas if you did the same thing in Massachusetts you’d be an unemployed social outcast). Typical recent expression: “For a lot of Hillary supporters it’s not that we lost. Human decency lost. He’s a dangerous racist and wanna be demagogue.”

A cluster of my rich Google executive friends on Facebook talked about re-sorting American voters:

If 2% of California Hillary voters had been in OH/PA/WI (remained in/moved to/moved back), she would still have won CA by a landslide, and would be president-elect now.

Long term strategy for those with large funds: Establish a Stanford-like research university in Florida, along with a bunch of tech companies. Google, Facebook etc could open offices. Basically create a new tech center.

Strategy 2: Allow the Blue areas to build more housing, so that the population can go up, and in the long term get more electoral votes. Texas has gained more population than California in the last 15 years.

Idea: the tech industry decides to spread itself out. It builds offices in Red states and encourages employees to work from those locations. This decreases pressure on Bay Area Housing and has a ripple effect on national politics.

P, maybe you’re on to something. Why not organize this as a program for ‘unattached’ Californians to get airbnb places in swing states for a few months.

It is pretty interesting. Not sure about every state, but it seems like 30 days residency is the norm before you can register. And the deadline to register is different in different states, but yes, if you;re willing to move for 1 to 2 months, you could register and vote in another state. Not sure if that is the fairest approach, I was thinking more of people permanently moving.

Gives new meaning to the concept of buying an election. Let’s see, $500/month to rent a place and eat while living there (I assume they’ll mostly be renting in rural areas)*say 1M people means you could swing the election for about the current cost of campaigning….

Assuming that these folks don’t use their cash to send loyal Democrats out from San Francisco to the benighted Midwest, it seems that Democrats are increasingly sorting themselves into states with fewer electoral college votes per popular vote. Thus they are fighting against what would otherwise be a tide of sentiment in favor of a Democrat president (next time maybe don’t run a public “servant” who made $2+ billion via public “service”!).

What do readers think? Does the inability of Democrats to talk to, share a Facebook presence with, or live alongside Republicans combined with the Electoral College work against their chances to elect a president?

Full post, including comments

Can one be great on the four-hour workweek? Sadly, no, according to Catherine the Great (Massie):

She rose every morning at five or six and worked fifteen hours a day. This left perhaps a single hour between the time her official duties ended—usually late in the evening—and the time she fell asleep, exhausted.

Travel did not alter Catherine’s daily schedule. She rose at six as she did in St. Petersburg, drank coffee, and then worked alone or with her secretary or ministers for two hours. At eight, she summoned her close friends to breakfast, and at nine, she entered her carriage to resume the journey. At two, she halted for midday dinner, then resumed an hour later. At seven, long after the fall of darkness, she stopped for the night. Usually, Catherine was not tired and would go back to work or join her companions for conversation, cards, or games until ten.

Before this assembly gathered, however, Catherine decided that she must provide its members with a set of guiding principles upon which she wished the new laws to be founded. The result was her Nakaz, published under the full title Instruction of Her Imperial Majesty Catherine the Second for the Commission Charged with Preparing a Project of a New Code of Laws. It was the work that Catherine considered the most significant intellectual achievement of her life and her greatest contribution to Russia. She began working on the Nakaz in January 1765 and devoted two to three hours a day to it for two years. The document was published on July 30, 1767, and is, in the view of Isabel de Madariaga, the preeminent historian of Catherine’s Russia, “one of the most remarkable political treatises ever compiled and published by a reigning sovereign.”

IN 1796, CATHERINE, in her thirty-fifth year on the Russian throne, was the preeminent royal personage in the world. Age had affected her appearance, but not her devotion to work or her positive attitude toward life. She was heavier, and her gray hair had turned to white, but her blue eyes were youthful, bright, and clear. Even at sixty-seven, her complexion was fresh, and dentures preserved the illusion that her teeth were intact. Dignity and grace were embodied in her bearing, particularly in the way she held her head high and nodded graciously in public. From friends, officials, courtiers, and servants, she drew deep affection as well as respect. She rose at six and wrapped herself in a silk dressing gown. Her movements awakened the family of small English greyhounds sleeping on a pink satin couch next to her bed. The oldest of them, whom she had named Sir Tom Anderson, and his spouse, Duchess Anderson, were gifts from Dr. Dimsdale, who had inoculated her and her son, Paul, against smallpox. They, with the help of Sir Tom’s second wife, Mademoiselle Mimi, had produced numerous litters. Catherine attended them; when the dogs wanted to go out, Catherine herself opened the door into the garden. This done, she drank four or five cups of black coffee and settled down to work on the mass of official and personal correspondence awaiting her. Her sight had weakened, and she read with spectacles and sometimes used a magnifying glass. Once when her secretary saw her reading this way, she smiled and said, “You probably don’t need this contrivance yet. How old are you?” He said that he was twenty-eight. Catherine nodded and said, “Our sight has been blunted by long service to the State and now we have to use spectacles.” Promptly at nine, she put down her pen and rang a little bell, which told the servant outside her door that she was ready for her daily visitors. This meant a long morning of receiving ministers, generals, and other government officials; of reading or listening to their reports; and of signing the papers they had prepared for her. These were working sessions; visitors were expected to object to her ideas and offer their own when they thought she was wrong. Her attitude almost always remained attentive, pleasant, and imperturbable.

Related:

• Sex Education for Catherine the Great
• Serfs in the Age of Catherine the Great and Minimum Wage Today
• Sexual Mores in the time of Catherine the Great

Full post, including comments

Here’s some of the stuff that I inflict on Facebook friends. The latter two were posted with a caption of “This is why dogs do not like days when it is too cold for children to run around outside. (Was 2 degrees F this morning.)”

Photos were taken with an iPhone 7 Plus. I hate to say this, but although I love normal lenses on DSLRs I am falling out of love with the normal (“telephoto” in Applespeak) lens on the iPhone 7 Plus. It lacks image stabilization and the sensor behind the normal lens seems to have much worse low-light performance than the already-pretty-bad regular camera. In many indoor situations you could get a better 56mm-equivalent image by using the 28mm lens/camera and cropping. I am hoping to get a posting together about this. For now I think there is a moderately high risk that the Plus-sized Emperor Has No Clothes.

Readers: What do you think? Should I keep these conventional family pictures out of this weblog, reserving the space for discussion of issues and ideas? Or do you want to post your own family pictures in the comments?

For comparison, the same scene with a Sony A6300 camera on more-or-less-complete-idiot mode:

Full post, including comments

The sexual revolution happened in the 1960s, right? Catherine the Great (Massie) suggests that things weren’t so simple 200 years earlier:

Zorich was replaced by a twenty-four-year-old Guards officer, Ivan Rimsky-Korsakov, whose term [as Catherine’s lover or “favorite”] lasted two years. … Despite Catherine’s praise, most in the Russian court expected Rimsky-Korsakov to last only briefly, because everyone except the empress saw that his heart was not in his work. He was expected to be in constant attendance, was forbidden to leave the palace, and became bored and restless. He escaped into the arms of Countess Bruce, Catherine’s principal lady-in-waiting and for years one of her closest friends. Foolishly, the couple believed that they could carry on their affair inside the palace. They managed for almost a year, but it ended abruptly one day when the empress opened a door and discovered them making love. Catherine sent a message to Rimsky-Korsakov informing him that she would be generous provided he left St. Petersburg immediately. Countess Bruce was commanded to return to her husband. … There was more to this tangled plot. Catherine, the court, and Countess Bruce soon learned that Rimsky-Korsakov had been using Bruce as a decoy with whom to pass the time and alleviate his boredom. His real object was a beautiful young countess, Catherine Stroganova, married to one of the wealthiest men in Russia. The Stroganovs had just returned from six years of living in Paris, and, on first seeing the handsome “king of Epirus,” the young countess fell in love. Only when the disgraced Rimsky-Korsakov left for Moscow and Countess Stroganova immediately followed him, was the extent of this operatic, labyrinthine double betrayal fully revealed. Count Stroganov behaved with patrician dignity. Worried that his young son would be affected by public scandal, he installed his wife in a Moscow palace, where she and her lover lived happily for thirty years. There, they brought up the three children they had together.

[The Empress Catherine] summoned [her apparently unfaithful young lover] Mamonov and Scherbatova and saw immediately that the young woman was pregnant. She pardoned Mamonov and granted the couple permission to marry, even insisting that the ceremony be performed in the palace chapel. She did not attend, but gave them a hundred thousand rubles and a country estate. “God grant them happiness,” she said, stipulating only that they leave St. Petersburg.

At four on Sunday morning, April 10, [eldest son and heir to the throne] Paul awakened his mother [Catherine] to tell her that his wife had been in labor since midnight. … Toward six in the evening on Friday, April 15, after five days of agony, Natalia died. … Beyond Natalia’s death and Paul’s uncontrolled grief, Catherine now faced the fact that three years of marriage and a pregnancy had produced no heir. To subdue this emotional storm, Catherine chose a cruel remedy. She broke into Natalia’s desk. There, as she expected, she found the love letters exchanged by the dead woman and Andrei Razumovsky. Furious at seeing her son weep over a wife who had betrayed him with his best friend, Catherine decided to use the letters to wrench him back to reality. She thrust the pages under Paul’s eyes. He read the proof that the two people he had loved most had deceived him; he did not even know whether the dead child had been his.

More: read Catherine the Great.

Related:

• Sex Education for Catherine the Great
• Russian Empress Stories to Comfort Hillary Supporters

Full post, including comments

Today is the 113th anniversary of the first successful flight by the Wright Brothers (Wikipedia).

Where should this be celebrated? The North Carolina beaches are not at their best this time of year and they haven’t been profoundly changed by the flourishing of aviation.

Readers: What part of the world has benefited the most from aviation? My personal nomination is Las Vegas (also not a bad place to be in December!). During a trip earlier this year I learned that 80-90 percent of customers for helicopter tours are foreign visitors (and indeed the folks with whom I shared a tour were from China and the UK; the pilot was a former student of mine, a Swiss citizen who became an instructor at our flight school). If there were no commercial airline service to Vegas, it would be a tiny satellite of Los Angeles, right?

Related:

• Paul Cornu’s 1907 helicopter flight

Full post, including comments

Facebook Friend 1’s Post:

Dear Electors:
We have literally never, in 224 years, needed you before.
We need you now.
For the first time in American history, our national election was hacked by a foreign power.
Worse, a foreign power that the presumptive-president-elect has openly courted and engaged.
It is astonishing to me that this is even a question but: WE MUST DEFEND OUR DEMOCRACY FROM FOREIGN POWERS.
In the age of the Internet, it will become increasingly easy for China or Russia or Brazil to hack our systems, and tilt our elections one way or another.
The only way we can protect ourselves against this risk is to deny the beneficiary any benefit.
We must have ZERO TOLERANCE for attacks on our democracy.
And at a very minimum, I urge you to withhold your vote until you are convinced that the CIA is mistaken.
Lessig

His friend’s comment:

Thousands of vulnerable civilians in Aleppo and other cities, face an almost genocidal campaign waged against them by Assad’s forces, backed by Russia. Given President elect Trump’s policy’s aligning so much with those of President Putin, will the slaughter of innocent people be curtailed or escalate should he be inaugurated? And knowing that could even POSSIBLY happen, how could the electoral college not exercise humanity, caution and prudence by denying Trump the Presidency? Notwithstanding the dozens of other reasons why he is unfit for the office.

My comment:

Agreed, T. Imagine if the U.S. were run by a President who had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Then none of this suffering in Aleppo would have occurred.

Full post, including comments

The world of government regulation may be getting a little less painful for folks trying to certify airplanes (but not helicopters) with 19 or fewer seats: “FAA Issues Final Rule on Small Airplane Safety Certification Standards”.

It will likely still be true that the paperwork for certification weighs more than the aircraft, but maybe we will get a few finished designs out of this?

If you’re curious, the old rules are here: 14 CFR Part 23

Members of the public still can’t seem to fathom how far behind the world of aviation lags in many ways. A reporter the other day asked me various questions about Malaysia Airlines 370, the B777 that disappeared. I had to remind him that “all of the electronics in that plane taken together are less powerful than the phone in your pocket.”

Related:

• Flight deck integration + regulation = reduced innovation
• FAA committees meet for 17 years…
• Cirrus (and the Chinese) push the world’s first personal jet out the door
• Tecnam P2012, an Italian 11-seater that might benefit from this change, thus allowing Cape Air to replace some of their Cessna 402s (introduced 1967); supposedly the Technam is going to cost more than $2 million, against closer to $200,000 for an old Twin Cessna

 

 

Full post, including comments

From Catherine the Great:

The empress then wrote to Voltaire attributing “this freakish event” to the fact that the [rebellious] Orenburg region “is inhabited by all the good-for-nothings of whom Russia has thought fit to rid herself over the past forty years, rather in the same spirit that the American colonies have been populated.”

We might still be British citizens, but for a decision by Catherine:

There was one foreign policy decision Catherine made at this time in which Potemkin played no part. In the summer of 1775, King George III of England requested the loan—the rental, actually—of Russian troops to fight in America against his rebellious colonial subjects. London’s first instruction on this matter came on June 30, 1775, from the Earl of Suffolk at the Foreign Office to Sir Robert Gunning, the British ambassador: The rebellion in a great part of his Majesty’s American colonies is of such a nature as to make it prudent to look forward to every possible exertion. You will endeavor to learn whether, in case it should hereafter be found expedient to make use of foreign troops in North America, His Majesty might rely on the Empress of Russia to furnish him with a considerable corps of her infantry for that purpose. I need not observe to you that this commission is of the most delicate nature. In whatever method you introduce the conversation, whether with Mr. Panin or the empress, you will be very careful to do it unaffectedly, so as to give it quite the air of an idle speculation of your own and by no means that of a proposition. Soon, the British government was more specific. What was wanted was a Russian force of twenty thousand infantry and one thousand Cossack cavalry, for which Britain was prepared to meet all expenses—transport to America, maintenance, and pay. Catherine considered the request. She was indebted to the king and England for the assistance rendered five years before when the Russian fleet made its passage from the Baltic to the Mediterranean—the voyage that had led to Russia’s naval victory over the Turks at Chesme. She was flattered that her soldiers were respected by England. And she was strongly sympathetic to George III’s difficulties—she herself had just dealt with a massive rebellion in Pugachev’s uprising. She nevertheless refused the king’s request. When she did so, Gunning appealed to Panin and then tried the new man, Potemkin, but Catherine was adamant. Even a personal letter from King George could not persuade her. She wrote back a friendly letter, wishing the king success, but still saying no. An important but unexpressed reason was that she considered that Russia’s future lay in the south, along the Black Sea. Despite the peace treaty with Turkey, she sensed that the settlement would not be permanent and that another war would be coming. When this war began, Catherine knew that she would need the twenty thousand soldiers herself.

Full post, including comments

Folks who live in public housing here in Boston can start growing marijuana legally today. What else can they do with their taxpayer-funded electricity? Enjoy Verizon FiOS 150 mbps Internet:

The service can be installed now in Dorchester, Roslindale, and West Roxbury, … Boston has issued a cable TV license to Verizon covering just those neighborhoods … The company’s license with the city says Verizon may avoid installations in Boston when it is “commercially impracticable,” though this exception does not apply to public housing for low-income residents.

What if you don’t live in one of these low-income neighborhoods and/or a housing project?

Verizon told Ars today that it “plans to offer FiOS across the city over the next 6 years.”

How about if you hang out in government-owned real estate in the suburbs? The managers of our airport (dual civilian/military use) sent this email:

For those of you that are authorized to access Hanscom AFB as part of your normal operations at Hanscom Field, please make note of the following article related to upcoming legislative changes in the Commonwealth starting December 15th.

Excerpts from the article:

“Even though Massachusetts has passed legislation that decriminalizes marijuana possession, military installations are considered federal property, so nothing changes as it relates to bringing and or having drugs on base, even for civilians” said Maj. Joseph Bincarousky, Sr., 66th Security Forces Squadron commander. “If anyone is found on Hanscom Air Force Base in possession of or using marijuana, that person will be subject to the federal laws related to marijuana, not to the Commonwealth’s law.”

Capt. Christopher McNamee, 66 SFS operations officer, highlighted that base employees and residents will need prudence when sponsoring base visitors.

“When base residents and employees consider sponsoring visitors on base, they may want to tell their visitors that marijuana, and other illegal drugs, are not permitted on the installation,” McNamee said. “Sponsors are ultimately responsible for their visitors, and if they knowingly allow visitors to bring illegal substances, they will be held accountable.”

Full post, including comments

What was sex education like before the Age of Internet? Catherine the Great (Massie):

Catherine’s premarital nervousness did not come from fear of the nocturnal intimacies that marriage would demand. She knew nothing about these things. Indeed, on the eve of her marriage, she was so innocent that she did not know how the two sexes physically differed. Nor had she any idea what mysterious acts were performed when a woman lay down with a man. Who did what? How? She questioned her young ladies, but they were as innocent as she. One June night, she staged an impromptu slumber party in her bedroom, covering the floor with mattresses, including her own. Before going to sleep, the eight flustered and excited young women discussed what men were like and how their bodies were formed. No one had any specific information; indeed, their talk was so ill-informed, incoherent, and unhelpful that Catherine said that in the morning she would ask her mother. She did so, but Johanna—herself married at fifteen—refused to answer. Instead, she “severely scolded” her daughter for indecent curiosity.

How did the arranged marriage work out?

The next day, Madame Krause questioned Catherine about her wedding night. Catherine did not answer. She knew that something was wrong, but she did not know what. In the nights that followed, she continued to lie untouched at the side of her sleeping husband, and Madame Krause’s morning questions continued to go unanswered. “And,” she writes in her Memoirs, “matters remained in this state without the slightest change during the following nine years.”

two weeks after their wedding, Peter finally had something to say to Catherine: with a broad smile, he announced that he had fallen in love with Catherine Karr, one of the empress’s ladies-in-waiting.

The woman carefully selected by Bestuzhev to oversee and administer these tasks was twenty-four-year-old Maria Semenovna Choglokova, Elizabeth’s first cousin on her mother’s side. Madame Choglokova had a remarkable reputation for virtue and fertility. She idolized her husband and produced a child with almost annual regularity, a domestic accomplishment meant to set an example for Catherine.

According to the author, Catherine never did have a baby with her husband. Her first-born son Paul was the child of a lover, Sergei Saltykov and the subsequent children were fathered by different lovers.

Catherine the Great valued sexual variety and youth. Regardless of her own age, her boyfriends were generally in their 20s and the sexual relationship lasted for about two years:

WHEN CATHERINE, then Sophia, arrived in Russia at the age of fourteen, she learned that “favorite” was the term used to describe an established and formally recognized lover of the woman on the throne, Empress Elizabeth.

Most of Catherine’s favorites were young officers originally selected for their handsome faces …

When Catherine dismissed lovers, it was not because they lacked virility but because they bored her. One need not be an empress to find it impossible to talk in the morning to a person with whom one has spent the night.

Catherine had twelve lovers. What shocked her contemporaries was not this number, but the age difference between Catherine and her later favorites. She crafted an explanation: she categorized these young men as students whom she hoped to develop into intellectual companions. If they did not completely measure up—and she did not pretend that one would become another Voltaire or Diderot, or even another Potemkin—then she could at least say that she was helping to train them for future roles in administering the empire.

Most of the favorites were young men whose youth and social inexperience offered a striking contrast to the dignified demeanor of their imperial patroness. The differences in age and station confused the court and created a whirlwind of gossip in Europe. But the specific manner and intimate practices by which these favorites pleased Catherine are unknown. Only in the cases of Potemkin and Zavadovsky is private correspondence available, and, in this regard, it is unspecific. Those seeking physical details of Catherine’s romantic liaisons will learn nothing; neither in her own words nor in the words of others are there any references to sexual preferences and behavior. Her bedroom door remains closed.

[Note that Catherine’s 18th-century behavior is similar to what lawyers interviewed for Real World Divorce told us about choices made by their female clients. Catherine got her position and wealth from a husband and then discarded him (not through divorce court, but by having him murdered). As there was no marital partner who could add substantially to her wealth going forward, she settled into a long cougarhood where she used the cash she’d gotten from her marriage to fund a series of sexual relationships with attractive young men.

The husband’s death occasioned little more interest than a present-day divorce lawsuit:

At Catherine’s request, [French Ambassador] Pictet sent a long account to Voltaire, explaining the intolerable situation in which she had found herself after her coup, and her innocence in the murder itself. Voltaire accepted this account, and brushed it aside by saying, “I know that … [Catherine] is reproached with some bagatelle about her husband, but these are family matters in which I do not mix.”

]

More: Read Catherine the Great.

Full post, including comments