From a European friend… Dan had worked 80 hours per week in the family business since finishing high school. Due to the long hours, at age 45 he was still single and still living at home with… | Continue reading
Our flight school here in the Boston area is looking for a full-time Robinson R44 helicopter instructor: full ad. This is an opportunity to fly 500-600 hours per year in a helicopter that is much s… | Continue reading
One surprise from The Last Stone, by Mark Bowden, is how successful low-income criminals are at meeting women and passing on their genetic personality characteristics: At that point all they knew a… | Continue reading
A Facebook friend shared the following post from a Conservative Rabbi: (i.e., a prime spot for a Black Lives Matter sign (in a nearly-all-white town, of course, with restrictive zoning to keep it t… | Continue reading
From MIT President Rafael Reif, “Letter to the MIT community: Immigration is a kind of oxygen”: For those of us who know firsthand the immense value of MIT’s global community and of the… | Continue reading
I’m reading The Last Stone, by the journalist behind Blackhawk Down. The book concerns an extended family of degenerates and criminals and their involvement in the kidnapping and murder of Ka… | Continue reading
A tale of an encounter in a department store dressing room with a rich famous guy in which both man and woman had to keep silent for fear that the dozens of nearby department store workers, includi… | Continue reading
My Facebook feed is alive with the righteous condemning the U.S. government’s parking migrant “children” (some could be 25-30 years old as long as they say that they are under 18?… | Continue reading
A friend’s 7th grader wished a Happy Birthday to Donald Trump on Instagram. This prompted some private messages with her classmates at our mostly-righteous-thinking public school. Exchange 1 … | Continue reading
Just a few days left to register for EAA GirlVenture camp. This three-day event includes two meals per day and access to AirVenture, all for $100. Limited to “Girls in grades 9-12” (unc… | Continue reading
… because it doesn’t go far enough! Economists have found that most of the benefits of subsidized federal student loans went to colleges, which used the money to overpay administrators … | Continue reading
“How Trump’s Tariff Threat Could Outsource the Asylum Crisis to Mexico” (New Yorker) is kind of interesting. During Donald Trump’s election campaign and for the first year or two … | Continue reading
Donald Trump today supposedly prevented our military from launching an attack on Iran. How was this covered in the New York Times? The only thing more “dangerous” than war is a Trump-re… | Continue reading
A recent email from Zillow: We’re marching at Pride 2019 to show our support for the LGBTQ+ community. Because home is more than just an address — it’s the place you belong. Live where … | Continue reading
Based on GDP per capita, Ireland is substantially better off than the U.S. It is ahead of Switzerland and Norway, though not within sight of Singapore or Qatar. Yet the observed lifestyle in Irelan… | Continue reading
At a recent barbecue I talked to a couple of Europeans, one from France and one from Romania. They’re living in Massachusetts now. Would they want to return to live in Europe? “No,̶… | Continue reading
From the Los Angeles Times, “Councilmen weigh legal action, saying other cities are pushing homeless into L.A.”: Councilmen Mike Bonin and Joe Buscaino called Wednesday for City Atty. M… | Continue reading
Happy Father’s Day! This seems like a good time to wrap up the razor blade test inspired by Gillette’s Toxic Masculinity ad. Side-by-side testing with multiple subjects and some female … | Continue reading
Why let the amateurs at the power company generate and deliver power in exchange for a monthly subscription fee when you can go into the power generation business yourself? A local friend (and MIT … | Continue reading
From “Should You Get Certified As A Woman-Owned Small Business?”: Generally-speaking, if you’re thinking about working with the government in any way, then getting it’s worth at least l… | Continue reading
From CNN: “Employees turn their back on Agriculture secretary over being relocated to Kansas City” Apparently one thing that they learned at the USDA is that one should try to avoid liv… | Continue reading
… which is why 20 times as many people now live there compared to 1900 when the Earth hadn’t been trashed (estimated 17.5 million today versus 885,000 before CO2 poisoned everything). A… | Continue reading
New England’s latest museum to open is the American Heritage Museum in Hudson/Stow, Massachusetts. It is run by the long-established Collings Foundation, which owns priceless warbirds and cla… | Continue reading
One of the topics that we cover in the Aerodynamics lecture within our MIT Private Pilot Ground School (link to all of the slides and videos) is the industry inertia that results in all airliners l… | Continue reading
While doing a bit of research for an upcoming trip to Washington, D.C., I found the following in TripAdvisor: Bad (but fake?) news for folks, such as the attorney general of Maryland, who are suing… | Continue reading
One thing that isn’t unionized in the European Union is regulation of aviation. All of the member nations belong to the ICAO and there is an EU agency (EASA) that does most of the same stuff … | Continue reading
My Irish host’s son is just finishing what we would call high school. At great cost to the Irish taxpayer and himself he is now fluent in Irish. I asked whether this had any practical value. … | Continue reading
On a recent trip to Ireland I visited National Flight Centre, one of the country’s two full-scale flight schools. Lufthansa decided to abandon cloud-plagued Germany and train all of its ab in… | Continue reading
“Mexican armed forces meets migrants at southern border” (NBC) is subtitled “The tougher response follows the Trump administration’s threats to impose stiff tariffs if Mexic… | Continue reading
My hosts in Ireland have four children, the youngest of whom is just graduating from high school. He is studying like a demon for a high-stakes “Leaving Certificate” exam. All of the re… | Continue reading
Some miscellaneous items learned from reading On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle by Hampton Sides. Impressed by hysterical headlines regarding… | Continue reading
“Dismissed by Degrees; How degree inflation is undermining U.S. competitiveness and hurting America’s middle class” (Harvard Business School) is a 2017 report recently brought to my att… | Continue reading
One of my virtuous neighbors was talking about evil corporations that prioritize profit over human life, not making products as safe as possible. Of course I had to agree that this was, shall we sa… | Continue reading
Alimony is now tax-free to the recipient (Forbes). (See “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” for a reference to a U.S. Treasury analysis regarding the roughly 50… | Continue reading
Virtuous American corporations are boycotting Georgia due to some more restrictive abortion laws (list from The Wrap; article on an Amazon Studios production being pulled). Yet the same companies t… | Continue reading
She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer: In 1996, Lee Nelson proposed that microchimerism might make some mothers sick. With half their g… | Continue reading
“Boeing drops Embraer name from Brazil commercial jet division” (Reuters): Boeing Co on Thursday said that after taking over Brazilian planemaker Embraer SA’s passenger jet unit, it wil… | Continue reading
Some more interesting stuff from She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer… It turns out that Biology 101 contains a lot of simplific… | Continue reading
One of the joys of traveling in Europe is being forced to watch what they call “football” (i.e., soccer). Tonight is the UEFA Champions League final. From a high level, it looks to me l… | Continue reading
June is apparently both Immigrant Heritage and LGBTQIA Pride Month. From the Lexington, Massachusetts public library last year: Happy June to all of my readers, but especially those who identify as… | Continue reading
“‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects” (nyt): The strange objects, one of them like a spinning top moving against the wind, appeared almost daily from the … | Continue reading
She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer: Tough as they might be, though, Tasmanian devils were in trouble. A singular epidemic was sweepi… | Continue reading
An Irish friend who is unaccountably fond of English music and English cars (haven’t the English in Ireland mostly been unwanted immigrants and/or oppressors/exploiters?) took me to see Rocke… | Continue reading
A recent Sunday afternoon trip to Boston’s Logan Airport: There was plenty of time to chat with the Uber driver: He was a 24-year-old U Mass Lowell graduate with a business degree and he̵… | Continue reading
Posted on Facebook under “Heard it might be a Boeing 737 MAX on way back from Ireland so decided to take a ship for safety.”: Could this be the world’s most lavish museum devoted … | Continue reading
I was down in Washington, D.C. recently to catch the 88th Joseph Henry lecture run by the Philosophical Society of Washington. There was a dinner beforehand to honor Brian Keating, the speaker, and… | Continue reading
There have been a bunch of articles about purported Trump Administration plans to release migrants into sanctuary cities. Here’s a dumb question: Where are they released currently? From a rec… | Continue reading
On Desperate Ground: The Marines at The Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle by Hampton Sides is a sobering Memorial Day read. The book tells the story, from the American point of view… | Continue reading