United Way, the nonprofit that operates about half of the country’s 200-plus 211 centers, and other poverty researchers blame that disconnect partly on the federal poverty line, which they say hasn’t kept up with the real cost of living.
The share of households below the census-designated federal poverty line has barely budged since 2010. Meanwhile, poverty researchers say a large and fast-growing group of people are earning too much to qualify for social services and not enough to afford the basics where they live.
The trend, which was hugely accelerated starting in 2021, probably isn’t going to be reversed. The question then becomes how should a person of modest means, yet not entitled to “not-welfare”, adapt to a society that has been degraded for the working class?
Humans are social animals and a lot of the misery inflicted on the working class has to do with their standard of living being lower than that of nearby non-working people on what used to be called “welfare” and is now “means-tested”. The working class person will experience pain at the grocery store when seeing a relaxed-from-not-working customer pay for a huge cart of groceries via EBT card, for example.
How about a move to a state where people who work have a higher spending power than people who don’t work? “The Work versus Welfare Trade‐Off: 2013” (CATO) is filled with pre-Biden dollar figures that are absurdly out of date, but the percentages and rankings are still relevant. Here are the states where a working class American is going to feel the dumbest for not having gone on the welfare career track starting at age 16:
Here are the states where a median worker might enjoy twice the spending power of someone who chooses the relaxed non-working lifestyle:
We then probably want to look at these states to figure out which ones have the best opportunities for free recreation, the best schools for kids so that they can move up, and the best weather. In the report covered by “Surprise: Florida and Texas Excel in Math and Reading Scores” (NYT 2015), Texas, Florida, and Colorado had the best schools among the above states. Florida and Colorado have great weather and free recreation. Florida is ranked #8 for happiness by WalletHub and Colorado is down at #31. So maybe the answer for a working class person feeling like a chump is to move to Florida! (Maybe not to Palm Beach County, though, if envy is an issue!)
The same advice applies to people who are rich, incidentally, if the rich person wants to be in an environment where anyone with a job can thrive and not suffer despair. Inequality isn’t a terrible thing, from a rich person’s point of view, but for those who adhere to the now-obsolete Protestant work ethic, there is value to being in a place where the working people one interacts with are cheerful.
An Arizona lawyer had an entrepreneurial idea: advertise his services over the Internet, the global web of computer networks.
Advertisements are beginning to appear all around the network, usually followed swiftly by messages of outrage and dismay from longtime denizens of cyberspace. However, no one can recall so relentless and pervasive an advertisement as the one sent last Tuesday by Mr. Canter’s law firm, Canter & Siegel.
Paying nothing beyond his $30 monthly connection fee, and with little more than the press of a button, Mr. Canter advertised his firm’s bid to provide legal services for people wanting to participate in the planned “green card” immigration lottery, in which the Federal Government intends to allow foreign applicants to vie for a United States work permit. Mr. Canter’s missive went to nearly every nook and cranny of the Internet, which has an estimated population of 20 million users.
The mailing list that Mr. Canter employed was the addresses of more than 9,000 Internet Usenet news groups. The Usenet is a particularly anarchic and popular segment of the Internet composed of discussion groups, typically in the form of electronic bulletin boards.
“The Internet is changing,” Mr. Canter said. “People don’t like the invasion of what has been their private world. But as long as it’s set up the way it is, where anyone has access to it, it’s a public forum, and they have to accept anything that comes into it.
“In fact,” Mr. Canter added, “I’ve received a lot of calls from people who want to know how to do it.”
So pleased is he with the the response, in fact, that he said he planned to write a book on how to advertise on the Internet.
in the early 1990s, Congress devised the Green Card Lottery program to encourage diversity in immigration. Unfortunately, it also provided an opportunity for charlatans to charge exorbitant fees to file lottery entries for hopeful immigrants.
In truth, all it took to enter the drawing was a postcard with your name and address mailed to the designated location.
Canter and Siegel, a husband-and-wife law firm, decided to join the lottery frenzy by pitching their own overpriced services to immigrant communities.
The spam is still available from Google Groups, which establishes the date as April 12, 1994:
Related:
Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel (Wikipedia): Canter and Siegel were not the first Usenet spammers. The “Green Card” spam, however, was the first commercial Usenet spam
As noted in How’s your eclipse viewing?, I wussed out on the Fredericksburg, Texas eclipse plan in favor of hitting the shorter-totality Northeast where the forecast was for clear skies. As with nearly all of my decisions, this one turned out to be bad because the friend I had planned to visit/join in Austin ended up having a perfect view of totality (the clouds disappeared due to the cooling effect of the eclipse somehow).
The day started with pocketing snacks at Jet Aviation in Bedford, Maskachusetts (Hanscom Field):
We loaded up the plane with three generations of my friend’s family and had an uneventful VFR flight at 17,500′ to KHUL (Houlton, Maine). The FAA had issued a cautionary NOTAM:
To assist FBOs with staging aircraft and to ease ramp congestion, aircraft departing airports along the eclipse path are strongly encouraged to coordinate their departure times as early as possible. There may be a higher traffic volume than normal anticipated at airports along the path of the eclipse. Traffic should anticipate delays during peak traffic periods. Aircraft parking may be limited, particularly at the smaller, uncontrolled airports.
And, indeed, many airports in Vermont had instituted a prior permission required (PPR) policy. Watching the eclipse while celebrating social justice and Bernie Sanders in Burlington, VT, for example, wasn’t possible last-minute. Despite this somewhat dire forecast from the FAA, we had no trouble getting VFR advisories from Air Traffic Control all the way into KHUL and there was no shortage of parking.
The town-run airport had plowed out its crosswind runway and had that available for parking, but used it for only about four larger planes.
2700′ of parking is a lot of parking!
They were short on fuel, but we managed to 50 gallons of Jet A in order to keep Greta Thunberg happy. Speaking of Greta T, here’s a Citation Sovereign that came in from Minneapolis. The forecast for much of the Midwest was clear, but apparently not clear enough for these (12?) Heroes of Climate Change (1,700 gallons and over 30,000 lbs. max takeoff weight!):
Some images need to be repeated from the earlier post. A partial eclipse of the sun by the moon(-ey):
The town set up a “star park” adjacent to the airport and organized a two-schoolbus shuttle between downtown and the airport:
As noted previously, downtown was hosting a lively party with music and dressed-up characters and a commitment to social justice (“All Labs Matter”):
The George Washington statue was augmented, Elizabeth Warren’s cousins danced, and costumes were worn:
All of the parks in the downtown area were filled with viewers, but never unpleasantly crowded. Note the logging truck crossing the Meduxnekeag River:
Quite a few NASA and NOAA employees seemed to be enjoying a taxpayer-funded vacation trip to see the eclipse and some of them gave talks or organized events:
I thought that these folks with a Pennsylvania plate won the award for longest drive to Houlton, but apparently someone drove more than 1,400 miles to Houlton from north of Chicago.
There were lines for most of the restaurants in town, but food trucks had come in both on Main St. and at the airport. More important, the local Amish were selling donuts for $2 each:
The Amish grow potatoes, of course, but also have quite a few greenhouses. Speaking of religion, the official established U.S. religion is observed in Houlton:
At 1:45 pm we caught the shuttle back to the airport in prep for totality at 3:32 pm.
The ramp was lively, but nowhere near as crammed as a typical South Florida airport in the winter:
Edward Tufte tells speakers to arrive early because people wander in gradually and then leave suddenly. Thus, it is better to be available for questions before a talk! It wasn’t a mad rush for the exit, but the airport and airspace was at least 5X busier for departure compared to arrival. It didn’t seem practical to get advisories from Boston Center until we were well southwest of Bangor and on a different frequency from the airspace over Houlton. The NetJets crew couldn’t depart for quite some time because they had trouble getting ATC’s attention for an IFR clearance and their ops specs prevent them from doing the obvious and departing VFR.
The Science education didn’t stop in Houlton. When returning to the Land of Science-denial via Logan Airport, I learned that an N95 mask works great when loosely arranged over a full beard. Also that healthy young females face maximum risk from SARS-CoV-2:
Some nice views of the city courtesy of Delta Airlines:
Conclusion: We should pray to the omnipotent God of the Sacred Trans-Enhanced Rainbow Flag to arrange all future eclipses so that they pass over Houlton.
Let’s close this out with some porn for aircraft owners:
(Big city airports are now at $1,000/month for a long-term lease on a hangar for a little Cessna or Cirrus. In post-Cuomo South Florida, now home to half of what used to be New York’s planes, you might pay $1,200-1,500/month to store a plane that, pre-Biden, was worth $80,000.)
Related:
“Massachusetts family among Tesla owners who waited hours to charge car after total solar eclipse” (WCVB): When the Livesey family found a charging station in St. Johnsbury, there were lines of electric vehicles dozens deep. “I got there with one mile only to find out there were about 60 cars waiting to be charged,” Livesey said. … The Livesey family waited more than four hours to charge their Tesla and the last ticket they handed out before leaving was No. 189, and they saw more vehicles pulling up to the stations. [A friend missed totality due to EV charging delays. He tried to get his kids up to northern Vermont from Boston and a combination of traffic and the time required for a mid-trip charge of his electric Ford pickup meant that they couldn’t get far enough north in time.]
The Canon mirrorless 800/11 lens is light enough to pack for Eclipse 2026 in Spain (or Iceland if you feel extremely lucky with the weather).
How well does it work for photographing totality? The magnification seems about right for photographing the full corona. Here is the entire JPEG out of the camera at 1/250th of a second and ISO 400 (no need to spec the aperture because it is always f/11):
With an exposure of 1/13 of a second, the corona gets quite a bit larger:
The camera was set to autofocus and fixed at ISO 400. It was mounted on a cheap light Slik ballhead tripod that I happened to have available in Boston (we flew from KBED to KHUL (Houlton, Maine, the last stop in the U.S. for Eclipse 2024) and these pictures were taken from the ramp at KHUL).
It’s tough enough to aim at 800mm and I certainly wouldn’t want any higher magnification without a star-tracker camera mount.
I’m generally negative on trying to photograph the eclipse. The great images are nearly all stitched together laboriously in Photoshop based on multiple exposures, e.g., one long enough to capture some details in the moon itself and the farthest reaches of the corona and some short enough to show detail in the corona right near the surface of the sun. It’s better to leave the documenting to the nerds with infinite Photoshop patience and bulky equipment and park yourself with a great pair of binoculars to simply enjoy the show.
Here’s a Photoshop special from NASA in 2017 that looks great but bears almost no resemblance to what you can see with your eyes or with a camera in a single image:
Here’s the ultimate example of the “f/8 and be there” principle of photography (an experienced photographer’s technical-sounding advice to a beginner):
Kendall Rust (Facebook post) says she took it in Jonesboro, Arkansas and that this is straight out of the Canon camera, though it looks like a Photoshop wizard created it! CNN shows a remarkably similar image and credits it to Bobby Goddin:
Here’s yet another:
Unless you’re Kendall Rust, Jack Emshwiller, or Bobby Goddin, though, I’m going to stick with the “just enjoy totality” advice and take some images of things that happen around you just before and after totality. (What if you are Kendall Rust, Jack Emshwiller, or Bobby Goddin? My advice is that you abandon your hatred of government-created inequality and load up on Powerball tickets the next time the jackpot reaches $1 billion!) Here’s a quick iPhone picture of the pseudo sunset:
But if you’re going to ignore my advice, the Canon 800/11 seems like a great choice! It’s cheap, light, and does the job pretty well.
Some years ago people envisioned a refrigerator that would track contents via RFID and alert a consumer to being low on milk or whatever. Making this a reality would have required cooperation among all of the companies that make packaged food (to add the RFID tags) so of course it never happened.
A human can inventory a fridge. Anything a human can do ChatGPT can do better, or so we’re told. If a fridge costs $15,000 (see Sub-Zero refrigerator with R600a owner’s review) why can’t it use a handful of inexpensive video cameras to look at everything going in and out in detail? It can make some good guesses about quantities, e.g., every time the eggs are removed there will be three fewer eggs remaining in the carton (refine this guess after some experience in a household as to when the carton stops being returned to the fridge (assume this means the egg count is zero)). The in-the-fridge AI could email with a list of expired stuff to throw out and a list of stuff to buy. It could email at 3 pm every day with a suggestion for what to cook for dinner given the ingredients present in the fridge, adding critical items via an Instacart order if approved.
The fridge’s technology also reportedly enables users to add expiration dates for items purchased, and the refrigerator will alert them once that expiration date is near.
Why is it the human’s job to read expiration dates off the packages? Why can’t the brilliant AI do that? Let’s give some credit to Samsung, though, for including an epic 32-inch TV on the $4500 fridge:
So the Samsung fridge is missing the Instacart ordering support, I think, as well as the automation of ferreting out expired food.
I had some worked planned in Austin, Texas over the weekend, which dovetailed nicely with the predicted eclipse and the generally clear skies in this dry part of the country.
Inmates at a New York prison who sued the state corrections department over a planned lockdown during the Monday total solar eclipse will be able to see the celestial event after all.
The lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in upstate New York claimed that the lockdown, which would have prevented many statewide inmates from witnessing Monday’s solar eclipse, constituted a violation of religious rights.
“For many, this eclipse is a moment of monumental religious significance that cannot be overlooked or dismissed out of hand,” according to the lawsuit, which listed six plaintiffs of various religious faiths.
Corrections officials agreed Thursday to permit the plaintiffs – a Baptist, a Muslim, a Seventh-Day Adventist, two practitioners of Santeria and an atheist – to view the eclipse in exchange for the lawsuit’s dismissal, department spokesman Thomas Mailey told USA TODAY.
Practitioners of Santeria also trace historical ties to chanting rituals performed during a solar eclipse. For atheists, an eclipse may not be a time for worship, but it’s still a time to marvel about the natural wonders of the universe, the lawsuit contended.
)
Nervous nail-biting began on Wednesday, April 3 based on the cloud forecast at https://eclipseweather.info/eclipse/. It appears that God loves Bernie Sanders and fellow progressives in and around Burlington, Vermont. God also loves folks in Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. Why does God hate Texans?
I’m testifying as a software expert witness in Federal District Court in Newark, New Jersey on Wednesday. Getting to EWR from Austin on Tuesday was $2,000 in economy. Flights to JFK were about $1200, with no difference in cost between economy and first class. But it would have been well worth it (to the client!) if the weather had been clear.
https://www.pivotalweather.com/eclipse2024/ is also an interesting site. The “NWS Blend” cloud cover forecast as of the evening of April 4 wasn’t promising for just west of Austin:
Pivotal displayed a tempting map of Vermont and Maine:
Based on these forecasts, I canceled the Austin flights and booked a trip into Boston. From there we departed to Houlton, Maine on the Canadian border (passport and blackface kit packed just in case). The terminal forecast from 8 pm Sunday:
The relevant part is that from 15Z (GMT; subtract 4 hours to get 11:00 am EDT) on the 8th the wind would be from magnetic 300 (NW) at 7 knots, better than 6 statute miles of visibility, and a few clouds at 25,000′ above the airport.
Who has plans for North Dakota or Greenland in 2044? Don’t want to wait that long? Looks like Spain is the smartest place to be (the weather in western Iceland is not reliable!) on August 12, 2026. Has inflation gotten so severe that hotels won’t let people book more than a few months in advance?
Readers: let’s hear your heroic eclipse-viewing tales!
Post-trip update: The weather was just as forecast. We had severe clear weather and a great view of totality as well as all phases of partial. The town organized a warm welcome for thousands of visitors.
On recent trips to the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston, friends who are Democrats spoke gleefully about the prospect of Donald Trump being reduced to poverty via lawsuits. While this might be straightforward in California or Maskachusetts, stripping a Floridian of all of his/her/zir/their wealth is more challenging.
Florida law shields insurance policies and annuity contracts from creditors. Statute 222.13, for example:
Whenever any person residing in the state shall die leaving insurance on his or her life, the said insurance shall inure exclusively to the benefit of the person for whose use and benefit such insurance is designated in the policy, and the proceeds thereof shall be exempt from the claims of creditors of the insured unless the insurance policy or a valid assignment thereof provides otherwise. Notwithstanding the foregoing, whenever the insurance, by designation or otherwise, is payable to the insured or to the insured’s estate or to his or her executors, administrators, or assigns, the insurance proceeds shall become a part of the insured’s estate for all purposes and shall be administered by the personal representative of the estate of the insured in accordance with the probate laws of the state in like manner as other assets of the insured’s estate.
That would seem to protect only the family of an insured after his/her/zir/their death. But then there is 222.14:
Exemption of cash surrender value of life insurance policies and annuity contracts from legal process.—The cash surrender values of life insurance policies issued upon the lives of citizens or residents of the state and the proceeds of annuity contracts issued to citizens or residents of the state, upon whatever form, shall not in any case be liable to attachment, garnishment or legal process in favor of any creditor of the person whose life is so insured or of any creditor of the person who is the beneficiary of such annuity contract, unless the insurance policy or annuity contract was effected for the benefit of such creditor.
Donald Trump could take an unlimited percentage of his wealth and stuff it into a whole life policy and then Florida state law might protect him from, for example, Democrats in New York.
How about 20-acre Mar-a-Lago, worth either $18 million or “hundreds of millions” depending on when you tuned into CNN. It looks like the house and central 1/2 acre of land (maybe this isn’t even the entire house?) can be protected from creditors as long as it it Donald Trump’s primary residence. This is based on the Florida Constitution:
It looks as though they’ve captured the godlike powers that Democrats ascribe to Mr. Trump, e.g., immortality. Age might tarnish this medal, but never the Donald himself!
How do Americans go bankrupt after seeking health care?
A friend’s child had some back pain after a fall. A hospital billed $27,321.50 for an MRI (it says “4 services” below, but it was really just one encounter with the MRI machine; some different body parts and contrast). That’s what an uninsured person (“a mark”) would have been chased for, eventually into bankruptcy if necessary. What’s the real price of this service? I.e., what does the hospital actually expect to get paid from a typical patient (insured either privately, via Medicaid, or via Medicare)? About $1,287:
(And, of course, the results were inconclusive, so the value of the $27,321 MRI was $0.)
Europeans, especially Germans, are famous for their Jew-hatred in the 1930s and early 1940s, culminating in the death camp system run by the Nazis and their collaborators. (Remember that the original German goal was a Jew-free Europe to be achieved via expulsion and expropriation, similar to what the Muslim/Arab nations achieved after 1948, and the death camp idea was conceived after expulsion proved impractical due to other countries’ refusal to accept Jews (to keep the Arabs happy, the British wouldn’t allow Jews expelled by the Germans to move to Mandatory Palestine, for example).)
Could it be that today’s progressives in the U.S. and Europe have outdone the 1930s/40s Europeans in Jew-hatred?
Let’s consider a German circa 1933 who was among the 44 percent who voted for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and its 25-point program (not too different from what today’s politicians promise). Getting 500,000 Jews out of Germany, whose population was 65 million at the time, would deliver a potential personal benefit to the non-Jewish German. The German who supported the Nazi plan to expel Jews might have felt that social cohesion in German society would be improved without a group whose value system was different or at least perceived as different. Such a German would not need to feel any personal animosity towards Jews in order to prefer having Christian Germans as neighbors rather than Jewish Germans. (Similar to today’s Americans who are opposed to low-skill immigration, especially from non-European nations; they might not hate Somalis or wish them any harm, but they don’t want to live in a neighborhood whose culture is imported from Somalia.)
Although only some of the progressives marching in London, New York, San Francisco, etc. will openly say that they want to “end Israel” or that they support the general Palestinian goal of destroying Israel (2021 poll, for example), support for the “Palestinian cause” inevitably is helpful to the majority of Palestinians who have a long-term goal of destroying the Zionist entity and establishing a river-to-the-sea Palestinian nation. In theory, some of the Jews in Israel could return to places where their ancestors lived, e.g., Russia, Poland, etc. But the largest group of Jews in Israel are from Arab/Muslim countries and there is no evidence that the ancestors of their former neighbors in Iran, Iraq, etc. want them back. So the progressives are where the Nazis were in the 1930s. They want to rid the former Ottoman-then-British-ruled areas of the Levant (present-day Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt) of Jews, but aren’t particular about how the ridding is accomplished.
Pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted the City Council in Berkeley, California, on Tuesday, shouting “Zionist pigs!” and “End Israel!” during a meeting that included a vote on marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, video of the event shared by the Jewish Community Relations Council showed.
A sticker that a group was handing out on the Berkeley campus, March 14, 2024:
If progressives have the same goal as the Nazis how can they hate Jews more than the Nazis did? The progressives demonstrating in Washington, D.C. and Toronto don’t live in or near Israel and they have no plans to visit the new Palestinian state whose establishment they support (the new Hamas-ruled nation might not be as friendly to the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community as the Queers for Palestine might want for a vacation destination). In other words, the progressive works for the destruction of Israel but would receive no personal benefit via the destruction of Israel. It’s an entirely unselfish Jew-hatred, unlike the Europeans of 90 years ago who had selfish reasons for wanting to live in a less diverse society. One could argue that this selfish desire was irrational (diversity is our strength, after all), but that isn’t relevant to the question of whether the Europeans were doing something that would have an effect on their own lives.
In order to protect 8-year-olds from a virus that was killing Americans at a median age of 82, Science said that it made sense to close public schools for between 3 and 18 months, depending on the degree to which Democrats controlled a city/state. (Adults continued to mix freely at alcohol and marijuana stores, on Tinder, in quickly-reopened restaurants, etc.) This was almost certain to result in premature deaths many decades from now due to the correlation between years of education and life expectancy. However, it looks like the loss of years of education has continued beyond the 18 months that schools were closed in the Cities of the Righteous. From the New York Times, March 29, 2024:
Lengthy school closures were primarily perpetrated by politicians and bureaucrats who claim that racial equity is their first priority, but it turns out that the school systems that suffered the worst long-term consequences were “majority nonwhite”:
Florida isn’t mentioned in the article, but if we dig into the underlying PDF report, it turns out that Governor DeSantis forcing teachers to return to work in the fall of 2020 was minimally helpful. Chronic absenteeism went from about 20 percent to about 31 percent in Deplorably Open Florida, very similar to Virtuously Closed New York’s numbers.
Maybe the answer is that even a few months of school closure communicates to about 10 percent of American families that school isn’t important?
Could we use Science to solve this created-by-Science problem? If half a year off school (Florida) was just as pernicious for attitudes toward attendance as 1.5 years off school (New York) maybe we should eliminate the summer break from school for at least two years to re-instill the habit of going to school every day. If unionized teachers refuse to work more than 185 days per year, we could either hire some summer-only teachers or distribute the summer days off more evenly around the calendar so that teachers worked the same number of days. We could have multiple three-week breaks during the year, for example.
Who else doesn’t bother showing up to school since coronapanic introduced them to the joys of being home M-F with the Xbox? Teachers! NYT:
Teachers typically receive paid sick days and a small number of personal days. Over the 2022-23 school year in New York City, nearly one in five public schoolteachers was absent 11 days or more, an increase from the previous year and from before the pandemic. In Michigan, roughly 15 percent of teachers were absent in any given week last school year, compared with about 10 percent in 2019, researchers found.
Related… from Science itself (the CDC), which said “yes” to booze and “no” to schools (and maybe the CDC itself was imbibing when it told everyone to wear cloth masks as PPE against an aerosol virus):
A sobering reality: 📈 A new CDC report reveals a spike in alcohol-related deaths—up by 40,000 annually.
