Posts

Trump and the aircraft carrier aesthetic

When my dad was a Naval officer in the 1950s, he was part of the team that designed the USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier. I remember him explaining to me in excited detail about the arresting gear, the device that stopped a landing jet. He spent most of his career as a chemical engineer, so this was a bit of an excursion. Regardless, I’m confident that he possessed more engineering expertise about aircraft carrier design than failed real estate businessman Donald Trump. “ President Trump has decided that he prefers the look of the World War II era battleships where the tower is in the middle of the ship. And he is pushing the Navy (and considering ordering the Navy) to move the tower forward on the Ford class ships. This comes after Trump just a few days ago ordered the Navy to go back to steam-powered catapults (the thing that hurls the planes forward off the ship for takeoff) from the new electromagnetic catapults. He apparently wants to do this because he once talked to a catapult ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Quote of the day

If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but that no one believes anything at all anymore—and rightly so, because lies, by their very nature, nave to be changed, to be “re-lied,” so to speak. So a lying government which pursues different goals at different times has constantly to rewrite its own history. That means that the people are deprived not only of their capacity to act, but also of their capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. ~Hannah Arendt  
Post a Comment
Read more

Quote of the day

When a columnist writes that Trump has reached a new low, the columnist is doing something that looks like moral reporting and is not. The columnist is administering the fiction that the object has an interior. The fiction says: somewhere, in there, is a person who could have chosen otherwise, and today he did not, and we register the failure. The sentence keeps the person alive on the page after nine years of evidence that there is no person on the page. The sentence has an author, and the author does not know how to describe a machine, so the author keeps writing about a man. ~Mike Brock
Post a Comment
Read more

Will AI be too big to fail?

Businesses fail all the time in America. The owners and investors pay the price (yes, the employees too). But if the businesses are large banks that gamble with other peoples’ money, they become too big to fail and instead are bailed out by the government, a form of financial socialized medicine.   “. . .  the 2008 bailout   was a political albatross   around the establishment’s neck, seen as a rescue of the very rich and connected people who caused mass unemployment and foreclosures. Whoever was in power as this anger built would get singed by it.   “More recently,   a loud chorus   of venture capitalists and tech magnates   pressured the Biden administration   into bailing out depositors at Silicon Valley Bank. This crash, much like 2008, stemmed largely from inane financial practices, with fintech and crypto firms keeping massive amounts of cash in regular bank accounts at SVB instead of using   basic risk management practices . ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Quote of the day

The Citizenship Clause was indeed written to repudiate  Dred Scott , the 1857 Supreme Court decision holding that Black people could never be citizens. But the Reconstruction Congress did not swap one caste rule for a narrower one; it  extended the promise  to “every free-born person in this land.” The idea wasn’t just to retroactively protect “the babies of slaves”; it was to prospectively forestall  all  future efforts to deny citizenship based on whatever other non-sovereignty-based criteria might be politically popular in any given moment.  ~Steve Vladeck
Post a Comment
Read more

Medicare for all

Sound economic projections are critical in assessing investment and public policy. I try not to let the fact that I’m philosophically valanced towards Medicare for all blind me to the need for rigorous study of its likely economic impact. “ Previous research has   shown   that shifting the   United States   to a   Medicare for All   system could   save   roughly 68,000 lives and $650 billion per year, but a new   study   by experts at Yale University suggests the savings would likely be even greater on both fronts.” *snip* “We estimate that such a system would reduce national health expenditure by $1,041 billion annually,” they explained. “Sources of savings include reductions in administrative overhead, pharmaceutical prices, fraudulent billing, and avoidable emergency care. Combined with the reversal of recent retractions, universal coverage would save over 114,000 lives annually.”   “Specifically, as Sanders’ office detailed in a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Book review: Little Blue Dot

The first time I recall using a map was in boy scouts. Travel in unfamiliar places on foot, bike or car required maps for me for decades. The first time I saw GPS in action was when my brother and I were on Ride the Rockies. We were invited to dinner by a friend in Aspen. After being dropped off in town by a bus, he navigated to our host’s condo with his GPS. A couple years later, I borrowed an old car of his to drive across Colorado for a meeting. The speedometer on the car was broken, so he clamped a GPS receiver to the dashboard that gave a read-out of the speed. Now, any trip I take out of town requires Siri. It has become essential for us as newcomers in New England. I barely recall what it was like before GPS. Little Blue Dot, by Katherine Dunn, is a history of GPS. It begins in England during the Blitz, when the Royal Air Force figured out how German bombers were using ratio signals to guide Luftwaffe aircraft for nighttime bombing raids. This led to efforts to jam or spoof thos...
Post a Comment
Read more