Tesla is offering leases for the Model 3. The stripper version (“Standard Range Plus”) is supposedly $39,500 to buy. It can be leased for $2,000 “down payment” plus $545 per… | Continue reading
“Religious Minorities Across Asia Suffer Amid Surge in Sectarian Politics” (nytimes), first three paragraphs: The deadly attacks in Sri Lanka on Sunday highlighted how easily religious … | Continue reading
One of our local supermarkets is now crippled: “New England Stop & Shop strike enters ninth day, as stores sit empty and unstocked; With support from Warren, Biden and Buttigieg, 31,000 s… | Continue reading
In another triumph for American engineering, it seems that the Cirrus Jet’s stick pusher activates if a single AOA sensor fails mechanically (FAA Emergency Airworthiness Directive 2019-08-51)… | Continue reading
According to the New York Times, the crisis that began when Hillary Clinton failed to defeat Donald Trump on November 8, 2016 only intensified with the release of the Mueller report. Some recent it… | Continue reading
A friend’s daughter is finishing up law school. Due to my not-so-secret double life as an expert witness working with big law firms, she asked me for advice as to whether to join one of three… | Continue reading
“Microsoft staff are openly questioning the value of diversity” (Quartz) quotes from an internal Microsoft discussion forum: “Because women used to be actively prohibited from full-time… | Continue reading
A two-seat light sport plane crashes near the runway while a 13-knot wind is blowing. The 90-year-old pilot is killed. Who is to blame? Jasmine, the right-seat Labradoodle, according to the NTSB re… | Continue reading
From lectures that I’ve heard by scholars of Ancient Egypt, U.S.-style plantation slavery was not common in that society. A person referred to as a “slave” in Ancient Egypt may si… | Continue reading
The only thing that our neighbors love more than spending $250,000/resident-learner on a new school building is expressing contempt for stupid Republicans and their “anti-Science” attit… | Continue reading
“‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’; Women at the Salk Institute say they faced a culture of marginalization and hostility. The numbers from other e… | Continue reading
Having determined that Dorco razors are superior to Gillette, the question of “which Dorco” remains live. Dorco makes life difficult by ignoring every principle of modern marketing. Ins… | Continue reading
Today was the big exciting day for the Mueller Report. I don’t have the patience to read 400 pages. The nytimes coverage of the report fails to distinguish between stuff that was previously k… | Continue reading
A core feature of the tales told by many asylum-seekers is that criminal gangs tried to force them to join. The sought-after gang member thus fled from Honduras, for example, and couldn’t fin… | Continue reading
“About 1 in 4 Japanese adults in their 20s and 30s are virgins, says study” (CNN) started a bit of discussion among some of my (married high-income guy) friends. They highlighted ‘… | Continue reading
I was asked to fill out a form showing the aircraft that I have flown and it turned out to be a longer list than expected… 8KAB (Decathlon)AA5 (Grumman Tiger)AC95 (Twin Commander 1000 turbopr… | Continue reading
David Marchant, still a geologist, but no longer a Boston University employee, has learned what my friend who teaches at University of California explained: “I can be fired for any reasonR… | Continue reading
In we looked at data from cities around the world. “Housing’s hidden crisis: Rural Americans struggle to pay rent” (CBS) says that a lot of Americans can’t afford housing ev… | Continue reading
In 2016, I wrote “Earn $400 per hour in a government-regulated job” about today’s harbor pilots, whose jobs are protected by the U.S. Coast Guard. That’s about 20X the U.S. … | Continue reading
Here are some photos from a 2016 visit to the Notre-Dame de Paris, a time when it seemed like the worst threat to the cathedral was a plague of tourists. Sad, obviously, but Moscow rebuilt a huge c… | Continue reading
As we send in your checks today to keep the wise planners in D.C. funded, let’s consider why D.C. is where it is. In our government-funded K-12 system, I learned that the location between Mar… | Continue reading
I think that 2018 will be remembered as the breaking point in which the federal tax code become too complex for anyone other than a full-time accountant to understand. One of the brand new areas is… | Continue reading
“Trump claimed Oakland’s mayor doesn’t want released immigrants. Her response: We welcome all.” (Washington Post): President Trump threw more fuel on the flames of the immigration debat… | Continue reading
A friend is an MIT graduate. His son scored 750 math/730 verbal on the SATs, has a perfect high school record, and is a super-nice kid who is passionate about building software. When filling out th… | Continue reading
Back in 2014, I wrote about Oberlin College setting up special dorms for students with darker skin and/or less family money. Much funnier is this recent video (not de-platformed by YouTube/Google y… | Continue reading
“Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax.” (ProPublica) is about a bipartisan effort to prevent the IRS from making it easy to file … | Continue reading
From one of our most intelligent citizens, a salute to the scientific genius working alone: Brian Keating’s Losing the Nobel Prize, published just last year, said that the age of a Katherine … | Continue reading
I’ve been listening to America’s Founding Fathers, a lecture series by Allen Guelzo, a professor at Gettysburg College. It turns out that all of the things that Americans fight and fret… | Continue reading
“Surprise: Most NYers did well by Trump’s tax cuts but very rich at risk” (NY Post) says that, despite New York having the nation’s highest state and local tax burden and the limi… | Continue reading
“China Bans All Types of Fentanyl, Cutting Supply of Deadly Drug to U.S. and Fulfilling Pledge to Trump” (nytimes): China announced on Monday that it would ban all variants of the power… | Continue reading
“Brunei’s Royal Barbarity and Hypocrisy” is from the New York Times Editorial Board: The oil-rich sultanate imposes harsh Shariah law on its subjects, while members of the royal family … | Continue reading
The UK is not so busy with its non-Brexit Brexit that it couldn’t arrest and plan to extradite Julian Assange to the U.S. Back in 2017, Newsweek ran an article explaining why the First Amendm… | Continue reading
“Uber Is Said to Aim for I.P.O. Valuation of Up to $100 Billion” (nytimes) says that the company wants to raise $10 billion via an IPO. Crunchbase says that the company has already rais… | Continue reading
If you’re trying to save a few dollars, maybe a head-mounted display is a good idea. What if you don’t care about capital cost? Disney World has a lot of immersive simulators that don&#… | Continue reading
Supposedly, the cost of a Disney World ticket has gone up roughly 3.5X, adjusted for inflation, since 1971 (chart). During a March 30-31, 2019 visit, however, the parks were so jammed that waiting … | Continue reading
“Piper’s financial ties to anti-gay Brunei stir up controversy, with Harris caught in crossfire” (Florida Today): Vero Beach-based Piper Aircraft Inc. has become embroiled in an i… | Continue reading
Stop the Presses! My opinion has been asked for by another household member! It is time for a new laptop for Senior Management. She is accustomed to Microsoft Windows and a 15″ screen. She do… | Continue reading
“Boeing 737 Max: What went wrong?” (BBC) contains a plot showing the angle of attack data being fed to Boeing’s MCAS software. Less than one minute into the flight, the left senso… | Continue reading
Some folks who get salaries from taxpayers have announced plans to spend the next 1.5-2 years running for President. Examples: “Pete Buttigieg (It’s ‘Boot-Edge-Edge’) Is Making Waves in the 2… | Continue reading
… we can all die from diabetes. Learned during a Harvard Medical School class: “Over time with aging everyone gets closer to diabetes.” If President Nixon’s War on Cancer (s… | Continue reading
Thirty years ago, 85 percent of students and instructors could conduct training in a two-seat airplane. Today, 85 percent of students and instructors need to use a four-seat airframe. It would be i… | Continue reading
One of the cases in which I am a software expert witness was recently dismissed with prejudice (it would be nice to say that this was due to my brilliant analysis of the technology, but it was actu… | Continue reading
Had MacKenzie Bezos married and divorced Jeff Bezos in Germany, checking the “separate property” box on the marriage application, she would be getting no asset transfer, only child supp… | Continue reading
Some numbers that I heard at Harvard Medical School: About 1500 compounds that are currently approved as patented or generic drugs.About 500 in clinical trials. About 10 approved every year and dec… | Continue reading
“Dismay after Trump moves to cut aid to Central America” (BBC): Mr Trump ordered the suspension of aid payments to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to push their governments to stop … | Continue reading
Playing around with R (bleah) and NHANES data (a comprehensive survey of American health and socioeconomic situation; see also this exploration tool at Harvard Medical School), I got a few surprise… | Continue reading
From my 2008 post about A Farewell to Alms: [economics professor Gregory] Clark starts with a defense of Malthus. In most societies at most times in human history, Malthus was right. The population… | Continue reading