American Hegemony

A few weeks ago, I discovered that CBS Sports Network (a cab/sat-only feed) carries CFL games, two or three a weekend. Which led me to the wiki. I'm old enough to sorta, kinda remember Doug Flutie went to the UFL (playing for wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^©'s New Jersey Generals!) before getting a gig in the NFL. Then he went to the CFL and great fame in The Great White North, and thence back to the NFL. The odd differences between CFL and NFL are easily seen on the field. What I was curious about was where do the players (have to) come from?

The wiki, and other sources, describe a variable rule-set for rosters. Near as I can tell, the current rule is that a CFL team has to have 7 more-or-less Canadian players on the 24 man playing field; it's 12 a side up there. That's not a whole lot of Canadians playing CFL football. I had suspected that the rule, for competition reasons, would allow some number of non-Canadians on the roster, but not require a minimum number of Canadians on the field at all times. Turns out, they do. Good on them.

Which brings us to today's NYT (again), and the saga of Mexican baseball. Here the difference has gone for more imports.

[T]he floodgates opened this year, when the league office increased the number of foreign players allowed on each team's 30-player roster from seven to 20.

And foreign players, and not just Americans, flooded in.

Whenever the subject of immigration from the shithole countries to the South rears its head, I usually send readers off to the wiki to review how Operation Wetback actually came about. And it was the Mexican side that initiated the program; their government felt that losing workers, even the barely skilled, to El Norte was a bad thing.

[I]t originated from a request by the Mexican government to stop the illegal entry of Mexican laborers into the United States.

But now, let's get us some good ballplayers!! My, how times have changed! Although the report does note that some in Mexico find the loss of roster spots for natives is not a Good Thing.

"It has taken away from what I call the traditional Mexican League," said Diablos manager Bundy, who grew up in Virginia and first experienced the league as a player in the 1980s. "Obviously, it has definitely taken opportunities away from the younger Mexican players."

It's a small world, after all. Classical econ says that labor will always get its fair share of revenue. Were that such were ever true.

Deep State - part the first

Now we know more about The Real Deep State^©, thanks to the NYT, of course.

DoL reporting is supposed to have hard-and-fast embargoes. But, it turns out, not always. And more than a one-off in this last year of Sleepy Joe's administration. Could it be that there's a MAGA/Big Bidnezz/billionaire Boys Club deep inside such a Blue Gummint? Fool me once, your fault. Fool me some more, my fault. So, yeah, there has to be.

To be clear: much of the data that comes out of DoL is actually gathered by Commerce's survey staff. Gives them something to do when they ain't no census.

And in May, the agency inadvertently posted data on the Consumer Price Index 30 minutes before the scheduled release time. The report is closely watched and heavily traded, and some Wall Street firms and data platforms monitor the part of the bureau's website — internally called "flat files" — where the data was accidentally published. Less sophisticated users do not.

Yeah, and they not be using RDBMS. COBOL uber alles!!

Lost in Translation

Way back when, high school, I read Russian for a year. It was intended to be at least a two year stint, but The Powers That Be in the school system decided that our teacher was a latent Communist, and rather than fire the guy, pushed him into administration. And didn't get them a new teacher. Of course. It was the Cold War. Thus avoiding public scrutiny. Oddly, he was just a standard short Jewish American, who had been studying the language with a Russian native speaker, an older woman whose name I've long since forgot. This was Classical High School (no, I'm not making that up), designated as the city's college prep school, meant to rival the tony private schools that proliferated in my corner of New England. The number of languages on offer included Hebrew, of course.

All that by way of introduction to a long-ish piece in today's NYT on a husband and wife team of Russian literature translators. They've been at it for a while, and their output is considerable.

Both the NYT piece and the wiki page discuss their supporters and critics. The NYT piece points out that at least two of their critics don't read or speak Russian. I can't claim to have a perfect memory of the language from all those decades ago, but among other things, the structure is more Latin-esque than Latin itself. As in Latin, nouns have declension, while verbs have conjugation.

Here's the wiki for Latin declension: 6 cases
And for Russian: they go on and on

Yes, it was a bitch to keep it all straight. And, of course, the weird alphabet and script. CCCP isn't see-see-see-pee, y'all know, right?

I imagine that Russian is the toughest sorta, kinda Western language to render into idiomatic English. One point made in the NYT piece is that other translations leave some names merely transliterated into English alphabet; thus Foolsburg here is what the Russian word means in English. Previous translations just left the Russian/English spelling word. Unless you are somewhat fluent in Russian (I'll imagine the Russian word is a borderline swear word), you don't get the joke.

It's likely too extreme to say that translation of fiction is harder than writing fiction in one's own language. But it ain't like falling off a log.

I Told You So - 26 August 2024

So, it was last night that I elevated Dr. McElhone to the long-term (if not permanent) spot at the top of the page. And, boy howdy!! What should I find today? Derek Lowe (you really ought to read him) just posted an essay on the low-level chemistry of cells. Since my biology was one year in high school and chemistry two years in college, I can't claim to be an adept in the field. But I've long wondered how it is that we (well, the actual scientists) can know how these molecules behave? Can we only know now what we know due to electron microscopy and such? Until the Bohr model, how did we know what water looked like? And so on. A fun read.

The authors of the new paper linked above find that the ppGpp system is a very good mimic of "sliding mode control", a control method for nonlinear systems that one might have thought was rather advanced for a bacterium to implement. But they're not working it out mathematically - instead, as usual, there have been two or three billion years of do-or-die optimization that arrived at it.

Turns out, Dr. McElhone is right again. Not to mention Darwin, of course. Oh, and Mother Earth is really 6,000 years old.

By The Numbers - part the sixty eighth

So, you think your life is complicated? I'm not a Starbucks sorta guy; they ain't be one near my neighborhood (shithole that it is). So, it was with some amusement that I encountered this report on their travails

Starbucks says there are more than 170,000 possible drink combinations available, but outside estimates have put the number at more than 300 billion. And the person in front of you always seems to be ordering 100 million of them.

And, of course, the company ethos (like Friendly's in my hometown, and elsewhere since) decrees that staffing always be less than sufficient. The Large Minds that run such retails remain convinced that keeping labour cost under some Magic Number is the key to profit.

Pity that there's no accounting entry for lost revenues from customers who walked away.

And, of course, for those who surmise that "the easy 80%" is a figment of my warped mind

In many businesses, including food and grocery, the 80/20 rule applied. You'd get 80 percent of your business from 20 percent of the product line.

That's not exactly the easy 80%, but in the same family.

So, is there any data which proves that the BoM of retail is dominated by labour? Let's see what our fingers walking through the Yellow Googles can find. Boy Howdy! there is some data.

For fashion retailers, labor costs typically ranged from 10% to 20% of sales
...
Grocery stores, on the other hand, had lower labor costs, as many positions require less specialized skills.

I'll guess that Starbucks falls toward the grocery store end of things: customers know what they want (the more convoluted the better), the baristas aren't helping them get the right look, and so forth.

So, what's the deal? At the store level, managers have no other say in cost control and little to no say in stimulating demand. Knowing a few managers in such retail, about all they do is fill out paperwork, and try to keep a handle on "shrinkage". And, increasingly, as the report shows, Corporate controls staffing pretty tightly. The C-suite denizens feel powerless (and may be right) to control any other costs or increase demand. As a result, profit, such as it is, has to come out of the hides of the worker bees. Ain't capitalism grand?

Simpletons

In the days when I got paid to do econ for a living, the issue of home buying came up, generally during times of shifting interest rates. There were/are some in the field who still insist that mortgage rate and house price are not correlated. Such morons do piss me off. One buys a house on the basis of the monthly nut: the maximum nut varies from time to time and lender to lender, but hovers aroung 30% of gross income.

Luckily, today brings a report on the issue. Thankfully, it makes the case.

If you're old enough, you might remember the 70s with double digit mortgage rates. House prices crashed as a result, but the boomers who bought their Cape Cods found the prices adjusted nicely over the next decade or two. Windfall capital gains with no effort. The American way.

By The Numbers - part the sixty seventh

Killing them softly with his song? What with Baffert still in deep shit, is there much future for killing horseys with races as a side-effect? It appears dicey.

In 1990, for example, more than 40,000 foals were born in the United States
...
Last year, the number of would-be thoroughbred racehorses born was 17,200

Horse racing needs its own JD Vance. Let's make more babies!!! Well, so long as we keep those rich Mid-East Oil State dictators from providing younguns. OH, wait... they buy up most of the good foals.

"Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Bahrain are areas that have an increased interest in dirt racing; and the one thing that is clear, is the best dirt racehorses in the world are coming from the United States," he said. "It is a natural progression that paid dividends today."

W. Edwards Deming is said to have said: "In God we trust, all others bring data." In the racing bidnezz it appears to be, "In money we trust, who cares about deprivation?"

Thought For The Day - 23 August 2024

Well, what to say about RFK Jr.? Just that the nutballs who would vote for him would vote for wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© were he not around. Which he isn't now. Will he slough off the disaffected Progressives from Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^©? Hardly.

Sense of Humor - part the second

Yet another series, based on a previous essay: the NYT sometimes displays a cruel sense of humor in printing contradictory reports on topics of national interest.

Today's duet: does the Deep State really impeded progress or stifle it? Two reports, one about ketamine and the other about sweatheart regulation. It's hard to take the NYT seriously, at times.

The first deals with Matthew Perry's OD death by ketamine, and puts the spotlight on what FDA approval really means.

Because the Food and Drug Administration approved ketamine for one purpose — sedating patients during surgery — more than 50 years ago, doctors can prescribe it for other uses.

So, it was perfectly legal to give Perry ketamine in any amount they wanted. The fact that he died as a result may be criminal, but charging them for over-prescribing is iffy. IOW, FDA isn't really some Deep State actor putting handcuffs on drug companies. As the report implies, may haps it's not such a good thing to have off-label prescribing? But, of course, that would entail forcing drug companies and FDA to fully test (at least one PIII trial) some drug for each indication. There are drugs that already go through that regimen, but not for clinical reasons. It's all about the money. Insurers generally don't cover off-label use, so getting FDA's OK for a large use population can be worth the grief.

That brings us to clearly corrupt conflict of interest by a C-suite FDA critter. It's a very long report, and smells to high heaven. He is head of device approval at FDA, and she (Wifey) is a lawyer working for companies seeking approval of devices. While the Perry story is about one sad fuck up, this one is about myriad corrupt events.

Their job is to protect the public health. They're doing the opposite. Anybody who doesn't see that is not looking.
-- Paula Cofer

Among other things, it reports that FDA, much after the fact, admits that the two engaged in conflict of interest activities. She actually backed Theranos, of all things.

Her partner at the helm of the firm's life sciences team began representing Theranos, the discredited blood testing company, in 2015, demanding that the F.D.A. halt an inspection at its sites in California.

Up to 1962, before the Kefauver-Harris Amendment, FDA's remit was safety. Yet, under his involvement

Reports of device-related injuries soared to 900,000 in 2023, up from about 190,000 in 2012, according to Device Events, a company that makes F.D.A. data user-friendly for subscribers.

Now, that's doin the job Sparky.

So, yeah, FDA is all about persecuting drug companies in a Socialist frenzy. Sure.

By The Numbers - part the sixty sixth

With the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts revving up their Founding Fathers engine, let's have a look at one of the bigger lies they rely on: socialized medicine for geezers is a cost we can't and shouldn't afford because Americans are living so much longer than they used to. Keeping geezers alive is an unjust burden on the Young (tee hee).

Well, as mentioned before in these essays, it depends on how you measure. Here's one report (from the esteemed school that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024^© claims to have "gone to") that provides some data.

In 1900, one in 40 Americans died annually. By 2013, that rate was roughly one in 140, a cumulative improvement of more than two thirds. As shown in Figure 1, life expectancy at birth rose by more than 30 years over this period, from 47 to 79.

All well and good. And true. But not relevant to the question of the burden of keeping geezers alive now versus 1900. To be blunt: 65 year old geezers will not now, or likely ever, live to 95 as a matter of course. The 30 years is almost wholly due to the Younger Generations not dying like flies. If you made it to adulthood in 1900 or 2024, your cohort of geezers will be about the same.

So, what?

[T]he average life expectancy at age 65 (i.e., the number of years a person could be expected to receive unreduced Social Security retirement benefits) has increased a modest 5 years (on average) since 1940.

And, one might expect, not much different if using 1900 as base: almost all the interventions keeping geezers alive longer have happened post WWII.

So, you guys, shut the fuck up. It bears repeating - since SS is a current account system (NOT an individual retirement account), getting babies to live to adulthood (and contributing) is a Good Thing. It's why the parents of Baby Boomers got fat and happy on SS - more workers. Just Dumb Vance^© is a dumb motherfucker, fur shur, but if Mother Earth weren't overstocked as it is, then rebalancing the age distribution with scads of sub-GED fishbelly white babies would also be something of a Good Thing (if it weren't powered by eugenics, of course). But Mother Earth is overstocked, and the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts and fellow travelers deny that Mother Earth is hot under the collar. And ready to burn the whole thing down. Mother Earth got along just fine without humans for Billions of years. She will again. She's nostalgic.

Brainiac

One has to wonder whether Bone Spur Samurai has even an ounce of grey matter left? So, once again, he's insulting real heroes and praising a couple of rich Jewish donor-class geezers (one dead and gone). And, of course, he lies

[I]t's the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but civilian version. It's actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor — that's soldiers. They're either in very bad shape because they've been hit so many times by bullets, or they're dead.

There's so much wrong with that, and the whole remark is worser. The main point being that the Presidential Medal of Freedom is a perk controlled by the President's discretion. He gives it away to those he favors; if that's his ploy.

any person recommended to the President for award of the Medal or any person selected by the President upon their own initiative.
-- the wiki

It is NOT, as Bone Spur Samurai asserts, the equivalent to the (Congressional) Medal of Honor. You know, for those shot up or dead soldiers. Award of the Medal of Honor is NOT a door prize for shipping lots o Bongo Bucks to a broken down politician. It's equivalent is the Congresional Gold Medal, the other Branch's highest medal. Bone Spur Samurai really needs to use what's left of his Alzheimer's addled brain and consider: if he keeps at this, somenoe who knows how to shoot a M16 is going to put him in her sights. Bank on it.

They's Gold in Them Thar Shills

We've already seen Just Dumb Vance^©. So, why not Just Dump Vance^©?

I should sell rights to both: the DNC and the RNC, who're widely reported to be sick of The Guy already. Who would blame them? With all those ads and prints and such on both sides, I'd have enough to get a boat next to the Busted Flush. Ah, Florida Man.

But, thoughts of vast wealth streaming through my artificial brain made me reconsider why it is that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 would hang such a pair of concrete overshoes off his bone spurred patent leathers? And, as a bolt out of the Blue, it was clear. If, by some subterfuge, he did get back in the White House, impeachment will be just a wink and a nod away. How to build a moat? And, of course, the answer is simple: a Veep that is so far more unhinged, that not even AOC would go the distance. The Devil you know is better than the Devil You Don't. Impeachment insurance.

By The Numbers - part the sixty fifth

Someone needs to clue Just Dumb Vance^© into some history and demographics. "Me, teacher! Me, teacher!!".

Humbly, I leap into the breach. Just Dumb Vance keeps prattlingly on about the glory of breeding. More people, preferably fishbelly White, not cows and pigs. As most of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts, he is either blythely ignorant or just dumb. Mother Earth is in no need of more humans. Mother Earth has a finite caring capacity, full stop. We're perilously close to that carrying capacity today; his kids will live in a world beyond that. Their kids will live in poverty hell. Hot and burning kind, not the ice at the bottom of hell as Dante wrote. The 1% will only notice that something has gone wrong when all their amassed wealth can't buy them clean water, air, survivable temperature, and abundant energy stocks. Way past too late, buddy.

So, where does mass breeding myth come from? Well the Judeo-Christian Bible, of course. Specifically, Genesis and the tale of Onan. And it ain't what the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts want you to think.

This act is detailed as retribution for being "displeasing in the sight of Lord". Onan's crime is often misinterpreted to be masturbation but it is universally agreed among biblical scholars that Onan's death is attributed to his refusal to fulfill his obligation of levirate marriage with Tamar by committing coitus interruptus.

Of course, levirate marriage no longer exists (the wiki), outside of Shithole Countries. Or, may be in Appalachia it still happens. Just Dumb Vance could tell us. The point being that this "spilling seed" prohibition is written in Genesis, about 400s BC. And, if you read, it really says nothing about demanding mass breeding, at all. But the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts try to enforce it that way.

So, how low was the people meter back then?
-- 100 to 162 millions
So, how high is the people meter these days?
-- 8,162 millions

And, of course that mantra of the social Darwinist cabal remains true: "the rich get richer and the poor have kids". There's even a long essay in today's (dead trees version) NYT about how crypto has been taken into oligopoly land; no central control? Not hardly. Didn't take long, now did it?

It doesn't pay to contradict the ultimate truth:
The world is not linear.
-- Donald Hughes McElhone, Ph.D. [math stats, Iowa State]/1980

Ingrates - part the second

Yet again, we find some on the Mealy Mouthed Left trying to suck the dicks of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts. This time it was cancelling "Morning Joe", on the putative reason that MSNBC would have first-chairs wall-to-wall coverage of the failed wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 kill shot.

Didn't happen, and once again The Brass at NBC News look like ineffectual MAGA dick suckers.

Not to mention yet more reporting on the ingrates in the MAGA Red States taking credit for the IRA support these shitkicker counties are getting. It's just stupid to be nice to folks who've been ingrates since FDR. They're not going to change, or vote Blue. When the USofA goes to hell in a handbasket, some charismatic Darkie Democrat will be dragged into cleaning up the shitstorm just like always?

"Since House Republicans have no record of accomplishments, they are trying to falsely take credit for ones that aren't theirs," said Viet Shelton, a spokesperson for House Democrats' campaign arm. "This is exactly the sort of hypocritical behavior that the public hates, and the DCCC will be sure to remind voters of Republicans' do-nothing agenda between now and November."

And, by the bye, it was 104 in DC a couple of days later. As Billy Joe Bob, a close buddy of mine says, "dey ain't no such a ting as climate change! God said he won't flood the earth again, and I guess dat means he won't fry us like a Tanksgibbin turkey, either!" Gotta love Billy Joe Bob. The wonders of Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts education.

Billy Joe Bob doesn't read or see much news that isn't Fox or Newsmax, so I guess he's not heard about Houston.

"Areas that fail to protect local quality of life in the face of extreme events will suffer a 'brain drain' as people and jobs will migrate to relatively safer areas," one of the authors of the study, Matthew Kahn, an economics professor at the University of Southern California, said in an email.

Well, no shit Sherlock. Yes, it does cost more to have competent governance. And yes, that governance is almost always funded on a progressive structure because just soaking the poor isn't fruitful enough. Did you know that the first federal income tax was on only the top 10%?

In 1894, Democrats in Congress passed the Wilson-Gorman tariff, which imposed the first peacetime income tax. The rate was 2% on income over $4,000, which meant fewer than 10% of households would pay any.

With the 16th amendment, the result was about the same. The Red State ingrates!

Damn Lazy Bureaucrats!

It likely comes as no surprise that I live in the True Blue Northeast. On the other hand, the Shithole County that I actually live in is dripping blood Red. It's tons of fun. It happens that Wifey has a nearly lifelong friend who is a whisky heir in Canada. There are lots of them, going back to at least Prohibition. Had it not been for that rank stupidity, Canada might still be a frozen shithole country.

We've been granted adoption should wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 succeed. Well, I dug out my passport, and Yikes!! Expired Aug. 2019!! Well, that gives five years to renew, which is nearly gone. So I trundled off to the Post Office, expired passport, picture, paper, and check in hand the end of July. The clerk asked if I was traveling soon, and I said no. Couldn't risk saying the real reason, of course. I asked how long it takes, and he said four to six weeks for the new one, and the old one returned a week or two after. I said, fine. As long as it's before November. Which it would be. Off it all went.

Well, boy howdy! New passport the beginning of the week and old one yesterday!! How could that be? It appears that State does triage, on renewals at least. While I got the application in some weeks from the deadline, the new passport has an issue date the beginning of August. I surmise that the new issue date has to align with expiration date + 5 years, not that the date of application has to align and the issue date is whatever the processing makes it to be. So, rather than send the pile back and forcing me to get a brand spanking new passport, they did the smart thing and process renewals (at least) in time to fit the date window.

These damn bureaucrats are such lazy idiots!! Right?

Water Madness

It was just over 3 years ago that water diversion became a topic in these here parts. Well, so it is again.

This go-round seeks to divert Great Lakes water, rather than Mississippi river, to water the Central Valley of California. Which valley is said to produce 25% of USofA's agriculture. I suspect the midwest cereal farmers might dispute that, but that's another episode. The Central Valley is mostly truck farms. Some big, but not staple foods.

The author points to, among other crops, almonds. It turns out that almonds (mentioned before in these essays) require a prodigious amount of water. Hard to see where it goes, given that almonds are more like rocks than tomatoes. So, an alternative to shipping Great Lakes water to CA, is to cut down all those fucking almond trees. It isn't as if almonds are a staple food, now are they? They are, by and large, an upper-class candy. We need a one-day dictator to raze those almond farms! You can have more people or more almond trees; ya caint have both. In due time, neither more.

If you look closely, the author is in one of those Desert States that covet thy neighbors' water. I guess all that sun, and no shade, turns people Red. These thoroughly Red States are always taking from the Blue States, since they are 'growing' and deserve others' resources. Not that it ever made sense to populate deserts and haul water in from great distances in the first place. I saw "Chinatown". Did you? FDR might have done the country a better long-term solid by killing Hoover Dam and the stupidity of building cities and farms in goddamn Deserts. It gets tiring after a while.

For comparison, the Colonial Pipeline runs from Houston, TX to Linden, NJ. I can't find the end-to-end distance, only system pipe total length of 5,500 miles. But map programs show that to be ~1,600 miles. So, that's the current state of the art.

So, let's spitball the problem. The easiest way to move the Great Lakes to the Central Valley is to backfill the Colorado; just use the river's right-of-way. The straightline distance from Chicago (not that we'd start the pipeline along Lake Shore Dr., of course) to the headwater is 989 miles in Rocky Mountain National Park. Not that we could go like a flying bird. The current driving distance (which is a decent surrogate, since the highway folks had to work around messy spots, first) is ~1,000 miles. Since, I'll guess, the map programs use Interstates as much as feasible, we might speculate that this pipeline could be built, largely, in the median of said Interstates on stanchions just like oil pipelines.

Mother Nature does offer up a problem: hydrocarbons don't freeze at 32^°, but water does. The oil pipes are heated and massively insulted, since crude does slow down a bit if it cools. So, we'll need the engineers to optimize speed (moving water doesn't freeze at 32^°, but somewhat lower depending on thermodynamics) versus heating the water. This assumes, of course, that the pipeline is above ground. Burying such a large pipe below the frost line the whole way is another option; cost and time difference are likely to the moon. And, of course, the engineers will take into account the properies of water vs. oil.

Now for something completely different. Who pays? The pipeline itself will be Socialist just as Hoover Dam (and most, if not all, of the many other dams on the Colorado) was. But how much should the Blue states soak the Red state fools to water their lawns and golf courses and swimming pools? Lots o Bongo Bucks is my suggestion. Enough to force them to choose among golf courses and almond trees and more houses for more rednecks.

The author belies an ignorance: all surface water is groundwater. Those rivers and lakes and streams and ponds are fed by groundwater. It's called a "headwater" for a reason. Yes, intelligent states (mostly Blue) have reservoirs supported by watersheds, which do what the word implies: send rain into the reservoir. But that's just a faster way to claim the water. Absent the watershed structure, rain percolates down to the watertable and, voila, groundwater.

There's one final issue. Not all underground water is equal. Some (many? most?) aquifers store what's called paleo-water. The most well known is the Ogallala. Such water sources aren't easily, or at all, replenished in real time, due to the geologic cap on the aquifer.

The aquifer is composed of unconsolidated alluvial deposits. Groundwater in this aquifer has been dated to have been deposited in the humid time following the last glacial maximum. In much of the aquifer's area, an impermeable layer of calcrete prevents precipitation from infiltrating. In other regions of the aquifer, some relatively small rates of recharge have been measured.

You don't miss your water until the well's run dry.

Some Assembly Required

Henry Ford didn't invent the assembly line method of manufacture, that was about 1853, but Henry is the avatar for its use. The Boeing door plug saga is a lesson in doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Or, may haps, doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason.

Years ago, Volvo among a few others, tried building cars in situ with a dedicated cadre of workers who did most of the assembly tasks as a unit. The effort was abandoned rather quickly.

If all goes as planned, the plant will be organized into work teams - each of which will ultimately assemble a complete car by itself.

Now, it can be argued that the assembly line method is the most efficient way to build widgets.

Ford was inspired by the meat-packing houses of Chicago and a grain mill conveyor belt he had seen. If he brought the work to the workers, they spent less time moving about. Then he divided the labor by breaking the assembly of the Model T into 84 distinct steps. Each worker was trained to do just one of these steps. Ford called in Frederick Taylor, the creator of "scientific management," to do time and motion studies to determine the exact speed at which the work should proceed and the exact motions workers should use to accomplish their tasks.
[my emphasis]

For what it's worth, Taylor is infamous for the art of de-humanizing labor.

It can be argued that assembly line manufacture really only works when the widget is actually made in an in situ linear process, the widget moved step by step to the next task. Today's autos are built with an even more capitalized assembly line. The key to success is that each task point is limited and specific. The 737 has an estimated 500,000 individual parts. A car about 30,000. And, of course, a car can be assembled in a traveling assembly line.

One might wonder whether aircraft assembly is amenable to the method. Based on today's reporting (and earlier similar), Boeing's method rely heavily, if not exclusively, on ad hoc manual reporting, "paperwork", to keep track of the status of a plane. That's not really assembly line method.

As it happens, I am addicted to a Canadian series, "Air Disasters", which tells the stories of airplane crashes (you thought it was about mahjong games?). More than a few incidents are driven by maintenance work which didn't keep proper paperwork and let the aircraft crash. Maintenance isn't done in an assembly line fashion, and when the work exceeds a shift and/or team, paperwork must follow the plane. No paperwork, no task completed, no part installed. It appears that aircraft manufacture has the same issue.

What happened with this 737 is that, according to the existing record, the removal and replacement of the plug door was done by multiple groups doing a single task; single from the outsider's point of view. In particular, hard to believe, is that the group which put the plug door back in the fuselage, wasn't tasked to bolt it in. Now, the assembly line method is based on reducing the work done in each task to the minimum possible. But here we find a case, if true, that the following group(s) can only know to replace the bolts if there's paperwork in the flow to tell them to. It's not clear from my reading of the record whether the replaced door plug was such that the missing bolts were not viewable; that is, was the interior panel set in place at the time the door plug was re-fitted?

Deming said that the best policy is to do it right the first time. From the report, we get this

To avoid the problem in the future, Boeing is considering adding a warning light in the cockpit that would alert pilots if the door plug moves even a little bit — well before it could blow out in the kind of accident that occurred on the Alaska Air flight. Since it is a known phenomenon that aircraft fuselages flex during pressurization cycles, won't such an alarm fire every flight?

Given how the door plug eventually failed, after ~150 flights, one might wonder whether such a warning light would do any good? If the plane is at 35,000 feet, and the warning light flashes, how much time would the pilot have to get the plane back on the ground before the door plug flew away? A second? A millisecond? Stupid.

It would appear that calling aircraft manufacture an "assembly line" process has led the industry to complacency. Since it's an assembly line, then we must know that a plane can't get from Step X to Step X+1 without Step X being completed, by definition. Guess not.

Tennis

Most folks follow tennis, at least at the Majors (and possibly, the Olympics), and are aware of the, now past, kerfuffle when computerized, e.g. Hawkeye, line judging put all those folks out of a job. Now, it seems, something similar is happening in medchem. It's a fascinating read, even if you don't get all the jargon.

As mentioned more than once, I started undergraduate as a chem major, but that didn't last long thanks to a 1940's vintage PChem lab. But since then, I've always wondered about the process of determining the structure of molecules. Clearly, it was possible decades ago before X-ray methods were available, since we still know what water looks like at the atomic level.

At one point in time I happened on a piece written, I assume, by a coding guru which boiled down to: 'software has eaten the world'. Which asserted that writing code was the key to Tomorrow. Well, not so much. Even in its current lame version, AI is possible not because of new Nobel level software algorithms, but because the EE folks have managed to generate logic and memory at densities never contemplated. So, sorry coders, but your lame century and a half old correlation programs now can converge on something resembling "truth" thanks to prodigious amounts of CPU, GPU, and memory. Now, if only AI could just intuit like Einstein.....

Stupid Is As Stupid Does - part the fourth

Today's dead trees NYT has an "interview" betwixt David French and Neil Gorsuch. More like a softball game, thus more fun to make fun of.

Whether either knows it, all that's accomplished is making certain that Gorsuch is just an Evangelical Radical Right Wingnut hack. But enquiring minds already know that. But the "interview" does contain some stunning words of idiocy.

What do we lose in that process? We lose juries. Juries are wise, right?

Well... not necessarily. And, as anyone who's watched even a little bit of L&O knows, there is a very positive side of a plea bargain: the perp's allocution. A jury verdict of guilty does not carry an admition of guilt. A plea does. That's why there are plea bargains. And that's why prosectutors go to Hell and back to make the plea penalty so much less than the verdict exposure: they, and the victim (most always) want the admission.

You're absolutely right that in an increasingly complex world, we need experts. There's no question about that. At the same time, our system of government is premised on the idea that we the people — those are the first three words of our Constitution — are sovereign, and we are entitled to govern ourselves.

And here is the crux of the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts vast stupidity: the sub-GED majority in the shithole states get to govern, comfortable in the beliefs like bleach, hydroxychloroquine, and such snake oil are the God Given Cures for Covid, and, further, that any future disease cure is their remit.

And, herein, he reveals the depths of his stupidity:

And I think if you go back and you look at what Madison and others had in mind, it could be summarized by the wisdom of the masses, that concept. You know, Francis Galton, who's a cousin of Darwin, went to a county fair in England, and there was a "guess the weight of the ox" contest. And he observed all the experts and their guesses on the weight of the ox. But then he also summed up all the guesses of ordinary people. And he found that the average of the ordinary people's guesses was more accurate than any of the experts.

It gets better. If you read the wiki on this "experiment", it is not the case that the Masses were more accurate than the experts, only that they agreed to a minuscule difference. IOW, ole Neil lies, if only by saying that the median/mean of the crowd is "more accurate than any of the experts". Well, yeah, that's the nature of stats.

Only the truly innumerate would buy such a pile of shit. It's called The Small N Problem, and figures quite prominently in drug clinical trials. In a nutshell (repeated in various ways over the course of these missives), if you have an estimate of a parameter twice, once with a small sample size and once with a large sample size, the large sample size will almost always be closer to the true value. Always. The Phase II trial will have up to a few hundred (cherry picked) patients, will often show that Drug X is a miracle. Then, on to the Phase III trial which will have much more, as much as 10 times the number of patients. The efficacy measure plummets, sometimes so much that Drug X is abandoned There is no wisdom of the crowds, only stupid rubes being conned by conmen.

So, based on a bit of stupidity from a 19th century conman, we should embrace the Governance of the sub-GED cabal?

Toward the end, French tries, not very forcefully, to pin Gorsuch down to what "text, history and tradition" really means. He won't admit that the Evangelical Radical Right Wingnuts are using that non-Constitutional code for extreme reactionary justice driven by their simple greed for reactionary power. "Party like it's 1829!" Just what the sub-GED cabal wants.

Finally, near as I can read, French does not tell Gorsuch that there's not really "too much law" compared to 1800 just because the USofA is much larger, land and population and complexity. 99.44% of what the Law has to deal with didn't exist in 1800. So, yeah, there's more Law on the books now.

USofA, 1800 -   5,308,483 
USofA, 2020 - 392,500,000  

Grow the fuck up, Neil.

By The Numbers - part the sixty fourth

Here's a factoid question: don't look yet. Since the inception of the Summer Olympics, how many sports have been contested in all games? I bet you don't know. I sure didn't. ...
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Only five sports — aquatics, athletics, cycling, fencing and gymnastics — have appeared in each of the 30 iterations of the Olympic Games. Others, such as croquet and karate, have had much shorter Olympic runs and were discontinued immediately after debut.

As some sports pundit (no link, alas) bemoaned, 'how did 3x3 basketball get added? more important, why did 3x3 basketball get added?'. And, BMX bicycle racing, boys and girls?

By The Numbers - part the sixty third

Here's a factoid question: don't look yet. Since the inception of the Summer Olympics, how many sports have been contested in all games? I bet you don't know. I sure didn't. ...
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Only five sports — aquatics, athletics, cycling, fencing and gymnastics — have appeared in each of the 30 iterations of the Olympic Games. Others, such as croquet and karate, have had much shorter Olympic runs and were discontinued immediately after debut.

As some sports pundit (no link, alas) bemoaned, 'how did 3x3 basketball get added? more important, why did 3x3 basketball get added?'). And, BMX bicycle racing, boys and girls?

By The Numbers - part the sixty second

Well, as the saying always seems to go: that didn't take long. Now, as gentle reader does know, I take my NYT in dead trees form, so while these missives have links to the cybertext version, I first see them on paper and generally a day later, or so. So it is with some high-lair-ity that I can report that what was mentioned in the last episode of this series

the sector is teetering on the edge overall

gets another example.

In 2006, the hulking office building at 135 West 50th Street in Midtown Manhattan sold for $332 million. Tenants occupied nearly every floor; offices were in demand; real estate was booming.

On Wednesday, it changed hands again, in an unusual online auction — for $8.5 million.

You can bet your bippy that Letitia will add that factoid as the case furls out. He He He.

It would be useful to know how many actual buildings wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 still owns (mostly mortgaged to the hilt, one suspects), not just NIL rights. We know that some of those have gone the way of all flesh. Here is what TRO admits (exaggerates) to. An independent report has a much shorter list. It's real fun to read. Reminds one of the curtain scene in "The Wizard of Oz".

Musk Ox - part the fourth

By now you've read about the plunge in Tesla's sales/profit and subsequent Musk backlash (for an increasing host of reasons). What seems to always take something of a backseat is the physics of EVs. All chemical batteries are temperature sensitive. Here's a graph EVs by state. You'll see that with only a couple of Blue State exceptions, EVs are in southern/warm states. You'll not get very far in Minnesota in January, what with having to use the battery to keep your fingers and toes warm, and run headlights (one supposes that all EVs do sport LED lights) a lot. It's also funny that warm, but Red, states like Mississippi don't do EVs. Of course, Mississippi and other warm Red states have piss poor incomes. A 20 year old F-150 is likely the preferred vehicle; Cybertruck, anyone?

Here's a breakdown of battery capacity by ambient temperature.

And, it turns out, above about 85°, EV batteries don't fair well. There's not only the chemistry, but also that most folk run the airconn max, and that does a number on the battery.

So, it seems that the Goldilocks area would be that swath from the mid-Atlantic to Commie California; not too cold and not too warm. IOW, the TAM for EVs is limited by physics. Damn physics.

By The Numbers - part the sixty first

This is high-lair-eeee-ous. There've been a couple of reports on wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's travails as a bidnezzman in the wake of Sleepy Joe's constipated debate performance and Kammi's picking up the baton. You can read about the latter in the "Kabuki" essay.

Now we find out how bad it is: wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 has lost $900 million in net worth just from the losses on Truth Social.

Jet Blue market cap: 2.2 billion Bongo Bucks
wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024: 5.1 billion Donnie Dollars

Jet Blue revenue: 9.43 billion Bongo Bucks
wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 revenue: 4.1 million Donnie Dollars

Them thar MAGAmorons sure couldn't find their bums with both hands.

Of course, we only know this because the root of 'Truth Social' is a reporting company. How much of a hit has his commercial real estate taken in the wake of Covid (the sector is teetering on the edge overall), and his golf courses? The latter are not, on the whole, money spinners.