Department of Old Guys can Fly: nonstop cross-country at 1,100 lbs gross weight

by philg

Hiding from the heat at the EAA Aviation Museum this week, we noticed an exhibit about a guy who designed and built a small plane then flew it nonstop across the U.S. at a takeoff weight of less than 500 kg. The punchline? Arnold Egneter was 82 years old on the day of the flight.

A Smithsonian article about the achievement says that the airplane had “a crude autopilot”.

EAA keeps saying that their mission is to inspire young people, but if you look at the ages of the airshow performers, the round-the-world and over-the-poles pilots, and achievers such as Ebneter, maybe what EAA is actually doing is inspiring the elderly!

(Separately, if Joe Biden fails to win reelection (the horror!), perhaps he will design, build, and fly his own airplane across the U.S. at age 82!)

Speaking of old age and Oshkosh… here’s the jam that we found in the fridge in the $4400/week $420,000 (Zestimate) house that friends rented:

It’s free of toxic added sugar and expired less than 10 years ago (September 2014). Can “EAA week” pay for the homeowner’s expenses? Zillow shows that property taxes were $6,000/year in pre-Biden money (latest data available are from 2019).

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DeSantis kills permanent alimony

by philg

Although the profit opportunity from child support, e.g., from a one-night unmarried encounter, was limited in Florida, the state was a paradise for alimony plaintiffs, especially those married or 7 years or more who could seek “permanent alimony”. The successful plaintiff could use what had been the defendant’s money to throw a massive divorce party, as recently described in the Wall Street Journal. Due to the cruel tyranny of Ron DeSantis, however, the party may be over a little earlier than planned…

“Governor DeSantis Signs Landmark Alimony Reform Bill Eliminating Permanent Alimony” (Lowndes). As in some other states, the alimony revenue opportunity is now a formula based on time served:

The length of durational alimony is not to exceed 50% of short-term marriages (<10 years); 60% of moderate-term marriages (10-20 years); and 75% of long-term marriages (20+ years);

Plaintiffs still have an incentive to quit jobs and spend like crazy in the months or years leading up to their lawsuits:

The amount of durational alimony is to be determined by reasonable needs not to exceed 35% of the difference between the net incomes of the parties, whichever is less.

“reasonable needs” = whatever a plaintiff was spending during the marriage, so a plaintiff who takes five trips to Europe before suing can say that regular trips to Europe were part of the marital lifestyle. Also note that alimony is now tax-free (as child support previously was), so 35% of the defendant’s income is roughly 50% of the defendant’s spending power (and could become more if Joe Biden delivers on his promise to make successful Americans pay their fair share). Alimony revenue entitlement is subject to modification if incomes change, so a plaintiff who wins 15 years of alimony will have a financial incentive to refrain from work for 15 years.

Embedded in an amoral society, moralism:

Courts can consider the impact of adultery in determining the amount of alimony whether or not it has a financial impact.

(In the true no-fault states, a plaintiff who says “I want a divorce because the defendant objects to all of the Tinder dates I have brought home to the master bedroom” is entitled to the same profits as one who has been faithful.)

It will be tougher to profit after a defendant’s death:

Requires the showing of a special circumstance to secure alimony with life insurance.

Let’s check the reactions…

A “gender bias expert” (PhD!) implies that it is “women” who are alimony profiteers, despite the fact that the Florida alimony law was and is gender-neutral:

Here’s one from a “fascism fighting scribe” (who complains of living in “DeSantistan” (why not move away from fascism?)) in which the reduction in profitability of divorce lawsuits is characterized as “erosion of the institution of marriage in Florida”:

Note that this person also suggests that, out of 74 gender IDs recognized by Science, it is “women” who are passionate seekers of permanent alimony.

Regardless of the gender IDs of those involved, the new law is interesting from a cultural perspective. Americans apparently can agree that decades of cash payments are the natural outcome of a marriage in which one participant decided that he/she/ze/they would be better off partnering with someone else (or flying solo/Tinder). The British have a different point of view. A married defendant will see his/her/zir/their plaintiff in court over a period of months and, in an ideal world, one former sex partner will pay the other a lump sum as part of a “clean break”. And then in Germany, assuming the couple being divorced checked a “separate property” box on the marriage license application, neither former sex partner will pay the other (someone who didn’t work during the marriage is expected to work once divorced).

Related:

  • Real World Divorce Florida chapter (will now require revision!)
  • a look at how family law financial incentives shrink the U.S. economy by discouraging plaintiffs from working
  • below is an ideal Presidential-style tweet from Joe Biden’s handlers that, in my opinion, DeSantis needs to copy if he’s going to win. Biden’s script line, “There is nothing beyond our capacity if we work together” is completely false, but it sounds great. (Why false? Building and operating a Chinese-style high-speed rail system is way beyond our capacity. Creating a health care system that an increasingly low-skill population can afford has been beyond our capacity for decades (so 18% of GDP is spent on health care compared to less than 5% in high-skill Singapore).) DeSantis would have to modify the below. Say that he’s optimistic if we change a few things, e.g., stop offering to change the depicted child’s gender with drugs and surgery, try to cut the number of Americans on means-tested welfare down from 100 million, etc. But DeSantis needs to start with a message that even the lowest-skill most welfare-dependent richest-in-criminal-background Americans are going to contribute to a bright future.
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Oshflation v. Official CPI

by philg

Climate change has had a dramatic effect on EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”). High temperature today was 90 degrees, 12.5% higher (using God’s preferred temperature units) than last year’s 80 degrees.

How about prices? We parked a car at the seaplane base this morning. It’s $25 to park for the day, 67% more than the $15 charged a year ago (the Biden administration says that inflation is 3%).

Speaking of the seaplane base, here’s a Cessna that was previously parked in a tow-away zone:

…and some general photos…

Finally, three cheers for AirCam. With two people on board, the twin came off the water after about 100′ with no apparent transition from plowing to step!

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Wall Street Journal on the economic value of low-skill migrants

by philg

Like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal has worked tirelessly to spread the Good News about the Miracle of Low-Skill Migration. An example from 2015… “Migrants Offer Hope for Aging German Workforce”:

By some estimates, Britain is on course to eclipse Germany as Europe’s biggest economy by 2030, thanks in part to its large numbers of young, energetic immigrants.

Germany “is going to be severely challenged” by demographics, said Peter Sutherland, the United Nations special representative for international migration. Managing the trends “requires a great deal of proactive thinking” and openness to immigration, he said.

About 20% of asylum seekers were from war-torn Syria—more than from any other country—and four out of five arriving Syrians are believed to be from “average or even well-off economic circumstances and have a good education,” the agency said.

In the 1950s, Italians and other Southern Europeans flooded in to help rebuild the country, contributing significantly to its fast postwar economic recovery. In the following decades, millions of Turks arrived and many ended up working in German industrial companies, helping its economy more.

This summer, however, the same newspaper informs us that the countries that have been getting rich via low-skill immigration every year since 1950 are now, in fact, poor. “Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off.’”:

Europe’s current predicament has been long in the making. An aging population with a preference for free time and job security over earnings ushered in years of lackluster economic and productivity growth.

Adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, wages have declined by about 3% since 2019 in Germany, by 3.5% in Italy and Spain and by 6% in Greece.

Karim Bouazza, a 33-year-old nurse [in Brussels] who was stocking up on half-price meat and fish for his wife and two children, complained that inflation means “you almost need to work a second job to pay for everything.”

The eurozone economy grew about 6% over the past 15 years, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the U.S., according to International Monetary Fund data. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every U.S. state except Idaho and Mississippi, according to a report this month by the European Centre for International Political Economy, a Brussels-based independent think tank. If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the U.S. and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today, the report said.

Apparently, expert consensus is that there is no longer a connection between low-skill migration and economic vibrancy. The 2023 WSJ article does not contain any of the following words or phrases: “migrant”; “immigrant”; “refugee”; “asylum-seeker”.

Separately, here’s a luxury car in one of Europe’s richest countries, the Netherlands (photographed in Delft, July 6, 2023):

The Netherlands now contains 27 percent migrants and children of migrants and thus should be insanely rich if we believe the Wall Street Journal’s 2015 Science.

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Dream address for white Democrats

by philg

Here’s an intersection where a real estate developer could make enormous profits if white Democrats were sincere. Imagine the prestige of being able to tell people “I live at the corner of President Barack Obama Highway and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.”

(Note that President Barack Obama Highway was formerly known as “Old Dixie Highway”; see this NYT story from 2020 and this ABC story about a renaming of the road farther south to “Harriet Tubman Highway”.)

This ideal location is in Riviera Beach, Florida, just a few steps from the water, and it is not currently overdeveloped:

The righteous occupants of the MLK&Obama Building will not be troubled by any neighbors who’ve voted for insurrection/treason. Biden won 96:3 in this neighborhood (source: nytimes 2020 election map):

Zillow says that a house near this corner is currently worth only about $200,000, so an enterprising developer could buy up quite a few lots and create a condo or apartment complex (“Progressive Gardens at MLK&Obama”? “Tower of Justice”?).

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Oshkosh to San Francisco Tent Truck

by philg

Loyal readers may remember the Bloomberg Abortion Care Bus. This post explores the question of whether it would make sense to transport almost-new tents from EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) to San Francisco.

When perhaps 50,000 overnight visitors converge on a town with a population of 66,000 and just a handful of hotels, many tents are pitched. The return journey is usually via light airplane or commercial airline and, therefore, tents are often discarded after a week of use. What about delivering these tents to the vulnerable sidewalk-dwellers of San Francisco and surrounding communities? A truck that gets loaded up starting on Thursday morning and that departs AirVenture on Sunday night.

Here’s a typical “let’s take a vacation in my private Boeing” situation:

Here’s a pilot who won’t have any space for souvenirs in the 1940 Funk unless he loses the tent:

The weather was forecast mostly peaceful and thunderstorm-free for the entire week. What was the actual weather above our Walmart tent this morning?

If the tent truck is a good idea, which California billionaire who expresses passion for housing the unhoused should it be named after? My vote: the Benioff Tent Truck (see, for example, https://cvp.ucsf.edu/programs/benioff-homelessness-and-housing-initiative ).

Labor Day stop for the truck: Burning Man! Speaking of that, Tumbleweed gave a great talk at OSH about her experience running the temporary airport at Burning Man. The airport now has a contract tower staffed by Oshkosh veterans.

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American Eagle eschews Rainbow-first retail in Rotterdam

by philg

May 2023, Manhattan, American Eagle shop windows:

July 2023, Rotterdam (different city), American Eagle (same retailer):

Despite the fact that rainbow flags are almost non-existent in this region, and therefore are sorely needed, American Eagle doesn’t roll out its 2SLGBTQQIA+ message in Rotterdam. If the company is committed to this cause (which they should be), why don’t they promote it in Rotterdam? If the company is not committed to this cause, why do they promote it in New York City?

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New York Times on the fascist “paradise”

by philg

The New York Times regularly runs stories about Floridians suffering from “fascism”, “tyranny”, and “authoritarianism”, the most accurate descriptions of being governed by Ron DeSantis. What else is true about Florida, according to the newspaper of record? “36 hours: Florida Panhandle” (NYT, July 6, 2023):

The word “paradise” appears twice in the article as the most succinct characterization of the destination covered.

So… Florida is “fascist”, but also “paradise” for a tourist. Does this make sense? Did the NYT recommend attending the 1938 rally in Nuremberg, Germany (after Anschluss) because the city was a “paradise” of historical buildings, culture, and parks?

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Remembering Ed Fredkin

by philg

The New York Times published a thoughtful obituary for Ed Fredkin, an early MIT computer scientist.

I met Ed when I was an undergraduate at MIT (during the last Ice Age). He is quoted in the NYT as optimistic about artificial intelligence:

“It requires a combination of engineering and science, and we already have the engineering,” he Fredkin said in a 1977 interview with The New York Times. “In order to produce a machine that thinks better than man, we don’t have to understand everything about man. We still don’t understand feathers, but we can fly.”

When I talked to him, circa 1980, the VAX 11/780 with 8 MB of RAM was the realistic dream computer (about $500,000). I took the position that AI research was pointless because computers would need to be 1,000 times more powerful before they could do anything resembling human intelligence. Ed thought that a VAX might have sufficient power to serve as a full-blown AI if someone discovered the secret to AI. “Computers and AI research should be licensed,” he said, “because a kid in Brazil might discover a way to build an artificial intelligence and would be able to predict the stock market and quickly become the richest and most powerful person on the planet.”

[The VAX could process approximately 1 million instructions per second and, as noted above, held 8 MB of RAM. I asked ChatGPT to compare a modern NVIDIA GPU:

For example, a GPU from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series, like the RTX 3080 released in 2020, is capable of up to 30 teraflops of computing power in single-precision operations. That is 30 trillion floating-point operations per second.

So if you were to compare a VAX 11/780’s 1 MIPS (million instructions per second) to an RTX 3080’s 30 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second), the modern GPU is many orders of magnitude more powerful. It’s important to remember that the types of operations and workloads are quite different, and it’s not quite as simple as comparing these numbers directly. But it gives you an idea of the vast increase in computational power over the past few decades.

Also note that GPUs and CPUs have very different architectures and are optimized for different types of tasks. A GPU is designed for high-throughput parallel processing, which is used heavily in graphics rendering and scientific computing, among other things. A CPU (like the VAX 11/780) is optimized for a wide range of tasks and typically excels in tasks requiring complex logic and low latency.

Those final qualifiers remind me a little bit of ChatGPT’s efforts to avoid direct comparisons between soccer players identifying as “men” and soccer players identifying as “women”. If we accept that an NVIDIA card is the minimum for intelligence, it looks as though Fredkin and I were both wrong. The NVIDIA card has roughly 1000X the RAM, but perhaps 1 million times the computing performance. What about NVIDIA’s DGX H100, a purpose-built AI machine selling for about the same nominal price today as the VAX 11/780? That is spec’d at 32 petaFLOPs or about 32 billion times as many operations as the old VAX.]

I had dropped out of high school and he out of college, so Ed used to remind me that he was one degree ahead.

“White heterosexual man flying airplane” is apparently a dog-bites-man story, so the NYT fails to mention Fredkin’s aviation activities after the Air Force. He was a champion glider pilot and, at various times, he owned at least the following aircraft: Beechcraft Baron (twin piston), Piper Malibu, Cessna Citation Jet. “The faster the plane that you own, the more hours you’ll fly every year,” he pointed out. Readers may recall that the single-engine pressurized-to-FL250 Malibu plus a letter from God promising engine reliability is my dream family airplane. Fredkin purchased one of the first Lycoming-powered Malibus, a purported solution to the engine problems experienced by owners of the earlier Continental-powered models. Fredkin’s airplane caught fire on the ferry trip from the Piper factory to Boston.

One of the things that Ed did with his planes was fly back and forth to Pittsburgh where he was an executive at a company making an early personal computer, the Three Rivers PERQ (1979).

The obit fails to mention one of Fredkin’s greatest business coups: acquiring a $100 million (in pre-pre-Biden 1982 money) TV station in Boston for less than $10 million. The FCC was stripping RKO of some licenses because it failed “to disclose that its parent, the General Tire and Rubber Company, was under investigation for foreign bribery and for illegal domestic political contributions.” (NYT 1982) Via some deft maneuvering, including bringing in a Black partner who persuaded the FCC officials appointed by Jimmy Carter that the new station would offer specialized programming for inner-city Black viewers, Fredkin managed to get the license for Channel 7. RKO demanded a substantial payment for its physical infrastructure, however, including studios and transmitters. Ed cut a deal with WGBH, the local public TV station, in which WNEV-TV, a CBS affiliate, would share facilities in exchange for a fat annual rent. Ed used this deal as leverage to negotiate a ridiculously low price with RKO. To avoid embarrassment, however, RKO asked if they could leave about $15 million in the station’s checking account and then have the purchase price be announced as $22 million (71 million Bidies adjusted via CPI) for the physical assets. The deal went through and Channel 7 never had to crowd in with WGBH.

[The Carter-appointed FCC bureaucrats felt so good about the Black-oriented programming that they’d discussed with the WNEV-TV partner that they neglected to secure any contractual commitments for this programming to be developed. Channel 7 ended up delivering conventional CBS content.]

A 1970s portrait:

A 1981 report from Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli:

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Meeting at Oshkosh

by philg

Who’s going to Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture) and would like to meet up? Email philg@mit.edu if you want to get together. Perhaps Tuesday at Chick-fil-A around 11 am? Or we can pick a talk that we all want to attend. I haven’t researched the presentations yet. Folks who have suggestions for important presentations can post them here.

Bad news for those who’ve chosen to leave the safety of Florida’s smoke-free air, ubiquitous A/C, and almost-invulnerable power grid in order to attend this one-week outdoor event: the New York Times says that it is typically unsafe to go outside. See “Is It Safe to Go Outside? How to Navigate This Cruel Summer.” Climate change has come for EAA. Just a few days ago, the hottest day was forecast to inflict a high temp of 94 degrees on aviation enthusiasts. Currently, however, the forecast is for 97 degrees on Thursday:

Maybe we will have to escape to The Sweet Lair in Menasha for air conditioning, board games, and food.

We’re going to be reading the VFR arrival procedures carefully…

… while driving our rental car up from Chicago/Milwaukee (I need to be in Los Angeles for business immediately after). We’re staying at the Sleepy Hollow campground across from the Deplorable SOS Brothers with their beer and bikini-clad bartenders. I’ve packed a full library of works by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, and Catharine A. MacKinnon to present to the Brothers in hopes that they will change their ways.

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