Federal taxpayers provide massive subsidies to all universities via the guaranteed student loan scam. In addition to this river of cash, state taxpayers have traditionally paid to subsidize state-r… | Continue reading
Oshkosh is winding up today and that means a bunch of young people have been inspired to pursue aviation careers, which generally means airline flying. Americans generally assume that anyone who wa… | Continue reading
AirVenture is almost over and one thing that I haven’t seen is one of my old wishlist items; integrated cameras in new aircraft, e.g., built-in mounts for GoPro cameras (a long-lived mechanic… | Continue reading
… and that was just a test flight for a trip over both the South and North Poles in a four-seat piston-engine airplane. One of the most interesting talks at Oshkosh this year was by Bill Harr… | Continue reading
Since there has been so little progress in piston and turboprop engines, the latest aircraft off the assembly lines are often not very different from those of 15 or 30 years ago. However, the manuf… | Continue reading
If you’re here in Oshkosh, a press release from June, “Theater in the Woods to Celebrate Female Pilots”: Notable women in aviation will be featured in a special program at Theater… | Continue reading
Stopped by the Airbus booth at EAA AirVenture and they were giving out hats… | Continue reading
Slides for my talk on helicopters tomorrow at Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture, officially): If you want to come, set your alarm! The talk is at 0830 in Forum Stage 6. Given that the venue seats hundreds, i… | Continue reading
Day 2 of EAA AirVenture and the air is filled with fast jets. Martin-Baker, the family-run English company that makes ejection seats, won the Aero Club of New England’s Cabot Award this year.… | Continue reading
Opening day for EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”). I hope to see readers during and/or after my Wednesday talk on helicopter aerodynamics (0830 on Forum Stage 6). One big theme at Oshkosh is t… | Continue reading
The decision to fly in via United Airlines and stay in the dorms is looking good. The “set up weekend” preceding EAA AirVenture was plagued with nearly 5 inches of rain an 70 mph wind g… | Continue reading
As part of a recent trip to D.C., I enjoyed seeing a projection of a Saturn V rocket on the Washington Monument: What if we tried to do this again? Would it be easier or harder to accomplish? As pa… | Continue reading
Every now and then someone is impressed that I graduated college on the younger side. I would respond by pointing out that Sho Yano got his Ph.D. at age 18 and an M.D. at 21. Cal State Los Angeles,… | Continue reading
Americans are at the large and heavy end of the spectrum of humanity. Car and Driver says “The 2020 Corvette Is at the Large and Heavy End of the Mid-Engined Crowd”. Coincidence? Large … | Continue reading
At a late June birthday party for one of my best 4-year-old friends, a fifth grader mentioned that she had just returned from a Carnival cruise from New York to Bermuda and back. How was it? “… | Continue reading
“Apple Suddenly Abandons Massive New iPhone Camera Upgrade” (Forbes): Major UK newspaper The Telegraph has revealed that Apple has pulled cutting edge camera technology from its upcomin… | Continue reading
“World’s Largest Solar Power Plant Switched On” (Forbes): The $870 million project was the result of a competitive tender process that will see electricity from the site sold to t… | Continue reading
My Facebook feed is lit up with posts regarding Jeffrey Epstein. Example: My current guess: Trump’s tweet was his standard distraction from something awful by starting something even more awf… | Continue reading
Article from Newsweek: Campaign workers for Bernie Sanders have taken aim at one of the senator’s key policies in his 2020 presidential run — raising the federal minimum wage. According to Th… | Continue reading
… like to hire a lot of white and Asian males, apparently. The “Best CEOs for Diversity 2019” has a bunch of Silicon Valley titans right at the top. Sundar Pichai of Google is the… | Continue reading
National Flight Centre in Dublin has an interesting functional decor item next to the front desk: two big flat-screen televisions showing the location of the flight school’s fleet (why two? a… | Continue reading
I learned recently that transitioning from Green Card to U.S. citizenship requires paying a $725 fee. However, the fee can be waived if the new American can prove that this would be a hardship to p… | Continue reading
The same question of “How do you run a welfare state with open borders?” that Milton Friedman answered with “You can’t” remains a live one in Ireland: “The Irish… | Continue reading
Back in June, the NYT suggested that moms will be better off if taxpayers and childless workers suck it up to give more paid time off for “fathers”: “Sweden Finds a Simple Way to … | Continue reading
Last month, New Yorkers were stunned when a helicopter crashed into a building on a miserable cloudy day. The NTSB report describes the machine as an Agusta A109E, the “Power” edition o… | Continue reading
I recently had occasion to go through materials regarding the crash of Cougar flight 91, a nearly new $20 million Sikorsky S-92 that went into the water off the coast of Newfoundland. The helicopte… | Continue reading
Volodymyr Zhukovskyy killed seven motorcyclists in New Hampshire recently. He had a long history of driving erratically, presumably at least partly due to his passion for consuming alcohol, cocaine… | Continue reading
Dear Readers: Because I like to do everything in the dumbest way imaginable, I will be visiting Washington, D.C. in July. If you’d like to get together for coffee, perhaps Sunday afternoon, J… | Continue reading
“Revenue Disparity Explains Pay Disparity Between Soccer World Cup’s Men And Women” (Forbes): The men still pull the World Cup money wagon. The men’s World Cup in Russia gen… | Continue reading
The Last Stone, by Mark Bowden (author of Black Hawk Down), shows the terrible consequences for one criminal of not availing himself of his right to have a lawyer present (who presumably would have… | Continue reading
Here are some places I hope to be at AirVenture. I would be happy to get together with any readers. Maybe the best way to reach me is via text: 617-864-6832. The guaranteed meeting would be on Wedn… | Continue reading
The situation on the U.S. southern border is now considered by our media to be a “crisis.” The crisis is not so severe, of course, that Congress has been motivated to change any of the … | Continue reading
From Apple.com just now, a graphic to celebrate the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team: The products are made in China. The taxes are paid (sort of) in Ireland. But the soul of the enterprise is red, w… | Continue reading
To see how many folks would defriend me on Facebook, I decided to stay at the Trump Hotel (#1 ranked on TripAdvisor) during a recent business trip to D.C. The hotel is located in one of the most im… | Continue reading
Some American women’s soccer players are in the news lately. They hate Donald Trump and are winning matches against Europeans. The U.S. has never won a men’s World Cup (our dismal recor… | Continue reading
Pride Month is over, but I am not quite ready to return my attention to Black Lives Matter and other social justice causes. From a deeply closeted New York Deplorable (she runs a small business and… | Continue reading
“Government Watchdog Finds Squalid Conditions in Border Centers” (nytimes) and similar are upsetting to quite a few Americans (at least my friends on Facebook are constantly expressing … | Continue reading
If you’ve been on the fence regarding whether to give up the car-dependent lifestyle and move back to the city… “Lyme Disease Cases Are Exploding. And It’s Only Going to Get Worse… | Continue reading
… as told by the New York Times and the Boston Herald.Pictures of the physical papers, courtesy of an FBO: One difference is that the Trump-obsessed NYT put this story at the top left of the … | Continue reading
Happy July 4th! To have complete sovereignty over our own country, we killed a lot of people, enslaved millions more for an extra generation (the British freed most slaves in their empire in 1833),… | Continue reading
“Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers” (Bloomberg) seems to be getting folks’ attention regarding the aviation safety angle. I think the career planning an… | Continue reading
… do they have to then turn the money over to Native Americans? (perhaps allocated by Sachem Elizabeth Warren?) “Black People’s Land Was Stolen” (NYT): in addition to invoking the… | Continue reading
Magnetic disk drives were supposed to get more capacious, on a per-platter basis, at a steady “Kryder rate” (40 percent per year). Now that it is time to get a monster hard disk drive t… | Continue reading
Readers: Please take a look at this video of Pete Buttigieg speaking in April 2017 and tell me why this guy isn’t the front runner among Democrats. Like Barack Obama (whose victory I predicte… | Continue reading
Here’s a scooter permanently parked on a public sidewalk in Washington, D.C. catty corner from the Trump Hotel (#1 ranked in Trip Advisor!): Aside from the female sex symbol with a fist in th… | Continue reading
AirVenture 2020 (“Oshkosh”) is July 20-26, 2020. The reservation form for the dormitories at University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh went live today. The A/C rooms sleep two for $125/night. The… | Continue reading
A Facebook friend linked to “Evangelicals Are Supporting Trump Out of Fear, Not Faith” (TIME) and the Hillarist faithful responded lovingly. The idea that Republicans are quivering fear… | Continue reading
June is nearly over and, with it, Pride Month. On June 1, a church in nearby Concord, Massachusetts added a Pride flag of equal size to their permanent Black Lives Matter flag (parishioners are so … | Continue reading