Give me a shiny plane and I’ll let you build a base in Idaho.
The request for a training facility was made in 2017, shortly after the Obama administration approved selling current versions of the F-15 Strike Eagle to Qatar. Like most military base construction, there's a ton of hoops to jump through. Not long ago the final environmental impact statement was finished, so they announced the training facility. Badly. Horribly. Using terms that don't describe things accurately.
Singapore already has a training facility at the same air base for their F-15 pilots and mechanics. And a facility at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona for their F-16 pilots and mechanics. Both planes are supersonic; neither Singapore nor Qatar are big enough (in square miles) to support a supersonic practice range. Mountain Home is close to the Utah Test and Training Range, and Luke to the Nevada Test Site, where low-level supersonic flights are allowed. And it's easier to house a few of the exact planes you're buying in the US than try to ferry some in over great distances.
Every other President in my lifetime has represented himself as serving in the interests of all Americans: this one is for his people only.
He's not even doing that, at least if equate "his people" with people who voted for him. His tariff war is seriously damaging for a variety of farmers. Cutting the ACA market subsidies will do particular damage in red states that haven't expanded Medicaid. The Medicaid cuts are going to exacerbate the financial problems facing rural hospitals.
When I was on the budget staff for my state's legislature, from time to time I heard members from rural areas say, "The Front Range urban corridor has declared war on rural Colorado." My job was understanding the state's cash flows. I was always tempted to say, "No, they haven't. You'll know they've declared war when the subsidies for your schools, roads, health care, electricity, and phone service stop."
@GftNC, your long comment went into the spam folder. I'll leave it up to the real editors to fish it out.
The initial "awaiting approval" is because there are more than two links. Why WordPress classifies something as spam is a mystery, they don't reveal how it works.
The Nobel committee is generally swayed by the peaceful delivery of increased individual rights. In addition to his personal antipathy to that idea, Trump is laboring under the handicap of a Supreme Court that is determined to reduce individual rights, not expand them.
@nous, it would be interesting to see the conductor during the actual performance. My impression of the rehearsal is that he's focusing more on individual bits, sort of "remember what I want here" to a particular section of the orchestra. During an actual concert, the conductor is performing for the audience more than directing the musicians.
@wonkie, I forget who said it but, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." :^)
"Ride of the Valkyries" is excellent for the soundtrack of certain sorts of movie scenes, and has been used often for that purpose, probably most famously for the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now. (Or perhaps for the Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?", often referred to as "Kill the Wabbit".) But it's only five minutes out of a five-hour opera. And even in five minutes it suffers from repeated cases of "Oh, yes, there's supposed to be a melody here someplace, isn't there?"
Personally, I think Wagner could have been brilliant writing movie scores where the running time constraint was imposed on him. Think John Williams' score for the original Star Wars, very much in the Wagner mold, and often cited as the best movie score ever written.
As an observation, for 80 years the pattern has been that from time to time Israel expands its borders somewhat, and from time to time it expels some of the non-Jewish population (for various values of expel). It seems to me unlikely that this is going to suddenly change.
Less power if you've got an OLED (or other emissive) display. If you've got older/cheaper tech, black pixels and white pixels all consume the same amount of power.
Before that, it has been Italians, and before that the Irish. At our nation’s founding the boogie man was the Germans.... I won’t be astounded if, down the road, South Asians replace Hispanics as the outsiders of choice.
I went to high school just west of South Omaha. The sequence of ethnic groups there that became, or are becoming "white" was Irish, Italian, Central/Eastern European, and now Hispanic. Blacks overlapped those at first, but were basically pushed out to the north side of Omaha proper.
My guess is that South Asians don't become outsiders because there are a lot of them already here in high-skill positions -- engineering, medicine, etc. Maybe if there's a "flood" of poor climate refugees. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are 1.9B people in an area that will experience* early climate disasters.
* Arguably, Pakistan already is experiencing them, in the form of now-regular catastrophic monsoon flooding.
I suppose because of the Japanese cars that hit the US market at about the time I reached the car buying stage.
My first car was a used 1969 Toyota Corolla. My second car was a 1979 Datsun 300ZX (pre corporate name change to Nissan). The improvement in build quality over that ten years should have absolutely terrified Detroit.
I was in college in the early 1970s when Japanese brands became serious contenders in high-end audio equipment.
Consumer video recording put an end to the belief that while Japanese companies could copy American and European engineering, they couldn't innovate.
I am not an economist (although I've taken a few graduate classes) so take the following with a grain of salt...
1) It strikes me that if Japan is selling large amounts of debt, and it's almost all being bought domestically, they have a problem with their tax structure. Selling interest-bearing bonds seems like a very inefficient way to do income redistribution.
2) As I recall the basic welfare theorems that justify the use of prices to match supply and demand, they say "There exists some initial distribution of wealth and set of prices that maximizes utility." Soon after, the initial distribution of wealth assumption disappeared from the discussion. This seemed a shame, since to paraphrase someone, the US government is primarily an income/wealth redistribution system with a very large military tacked on.
3) The answer to all of the problems the experts claim shrinking populations or shrinking worker-to-retiree ratios will cause is productivity: getting more out of the available resources (labor, electricity, land, water, etc).
4) Can't speak to Japan, but one of my long-standing complaints about the US is that forcing the elderly back into employment doesn't work if "employment" means eight hours plus commuting time five days a week, 50 weeks per year.
5) With respect to #3 and #4, I have been known to complain bitterly that US business management has gotten incredibly lazy and cheap, unwilling to be flexible or invest in education and productivity tools.
USA Fencing (the national governing body for sport fencing in the US) starts Veteran categories at age 40. They keep adding higher age categories, recognizing that 60-year-olds can't generally keep up with 40-year-olds. At this year's national tournament, there was a Vet-80 category. There are online videos of the finals bouts in Vet-80. Some of the age-related health problems -- eg, many forms of cancer -- just come with the territory as things wear out at the cell level. More of the elderly health care problems are related to people just going sedentary at some point.
I recall visiting a club where one of the members was an 84-year-old who won a silver in epee at the Olympics in the 1950s. All of the local members seemed to be ignoring him despite his being dressed out, so I made a point of asking him to fence. He couldn't move and fence both, so he stayed in one place. But his eye was sharp, his wrist was quick and strong, and if you left any sort of opening on your weapon arm, he hit it. The club owner thanked me later for taking the time. I never did find out how an 84-year-old Eastern European fencer ended up living in Lincoln, NE.
For some reason, there are no fencing clubs within a reasonable driving distance of Fort Collins. This strikes me as particularly odd since it's a university town. I miss it.
On a more serious note, I know some WP, but mostly things related to attaching odd bits of PHP to the standard hooks in various ways. For pulling stuff out of the database -- eg, some subset of comments -- I only know things that have PHP shorthand calls, not SQL. I know about get_comments(), but nothing about the underlying database calls.
I'm a long-timer Perl programmer, so I just think of PHP as Perl with a lot of the useful stuff stripped out.
Throughout my tech career, I always said that I was glad there were people who seemed to be interested in database design, because it meant I didn't have to worry about it.
...could anyone, even Ezra Klein, assert that Charlie Kirk was “doing Christianity the right way”?
Tony, I believe there are tens of millions of people in the United States who believe in straight white male nationalism with a side of selective interpretation of biblical texts and assert that Charlie Kirk was doing Christianity the right way.
Ah, topology. When I was in graduate school I took a topology class where the professor used the Moore Method. No textbook. For each unit there was a handout with a bunch of definitions and a few examples. Then a list of theorems. Prove the true ones, find counterexamples (or proofs of falseness) for the false ones. Class time was students at the board going through their results. If no one had a result, a random student was put at the board while everyone gave suggestions.
I was amazed that there were smart people who had that many years of school behind them and didn't understand the basic management skill for that sort of class. If I had a proof for #3, and nothing for #4 or #5, I was already on the way to the board before the professor could finish asking, "Does anyone want to take a crack at #3?"
I'm glad Disqus isn't being considered. The Lawyers, Guns & Money blog switched to Disqus because handling their large comment volume was beyond the capability of the WordPress built-in system or available plug-ins. A very regular comment is someone asking, "Is it just me, or is Disqus more screwed up than normal today?" From time to time I add a comment there to the effect of, "If I weren't so lazy, I'd round up some of the commenters who are also retired geeks and we'd write a system to be what Disqus wanted."
I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland.
This is in the same category as "who are your people?" questions.
At a party once, standing on the outskirts of a conversation and not really paying attention, someone asked, "And what about you, Mike? Who are your people?" I think the answer was supposed to be something like the English, or the Baptists, but what popped out of my mouth before I had even thought about it was, "The applied mathematicians."
At some point, with any luck at all, an administration which actually believes in the law may try to arrest and try those responsible.
In my honest but non-lawyer opinion, not a chance. US Navy action in international waters: the legal questions that may reach civilian courts will be about authorization to use force; those under the UCMJ will be about rules of engagement. Obama and Biden weren't as bad as Bush and Trump, but all four stretched the hell out of Congress's AUMFs on terrorism including rules of engagement. To be blunt about it, from 2001 the US military has been in the assassination business. My prediction is the best we might expect is that suspected drug smugglers outside of US waters will be made non-targets going forward*.
Part of me says that this is an inevitable outgrowth of drone technology. The idea has been kicking around for many years. In Real Genius (1985) the purpose of the 5 MW one-shot laser is assassination from a bomber flying tens/hundreds of miles away. The main piece of military porn in Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon (2000) is smart bombs that can be dumped from high altitude, then autonomously identify targets and strike straight down, wiping out whole divisions' worth of armor while the top brass watch from the other side of the world via a drone called Marilyn Monroe.
* I have an occasional nightmare that my kids probably and my granddaughters certainly will live to see the day when the 20 km on the Mexican side of the border will be labeled a no-go zone. Spotter drones and artillery will enforce it against climate refugees. And yes, in the nightmare Tijuana and Juárez and all the smaller cities have been reduced to rubble.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Let’s start calling a thug a thug”
Give me a shiny plane and I’ll let you build a base in Idaho.
The request for a training facility was made in 2017, shortly after the Obama administration approved selling current versions of the F-15 Strike Eagle to Qatar. Like most military base construction, there's a ton of hoops to jump through. Not long ago the final environmental impact statement was finished, so they announced the training facility. Badly. Horribly. Using terms that don't describe things accurately.
Singapore already has a training facility at the same air base for their F-15 pilots and mechanics. And a facility at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona for their F-16 pilots and mechanics. Both planes are supersonic; neither Singapore nor Qatar are big enough (in square miles) to support a supersonic practice range. Mountain Home is close to the Utah Test and Training Range, and Luke to the Nevada Test Site, where low-level supersonic flights are allowed. And it's easier to house a few of the exact planes you're buying in the US than try to ferry some in over great distances.
"
Every other President in my lifetime has represented himself as serving in the interests of all Americans: this one is for his people only.
He's not even doing that, at least if equate "his people" with people who voted for him. His tariff war is seriously damaging for a variety of farmers. Cutting the ACA market subsidies will do particular damage in red states that haven't expanded Medicaid. The Medicaid cuts are going to exacerbate the financial problems facing rural hospitals.
When I was on the budget staff for my state's legislature, from time to time I heard members from rural areas say, "The Front Range urban corridor has declared war on rural Colorado." My job was understanding the state's cash flows. I was always tempted to say, "No, they haven't. You'll know they've declared war when the subsidies for your schools, roads, health care, electricity, and phone service stop."
"
@GftNC, your long comment went into the spam folder. I'll leave it up to the real editors to fish it out.
The initial "awaiting approval" is because there are more than two links. Why WordPress classifies something as spam is a mystery, they don't reveal how it works.
On “…..”
The Nobel committee is generally swayed by the peaceful delivery of increased individual rights. In addition to his personal antipathy to that idea, Trump is laboring under the handicap of a Supreme Court that is determined to reduce individual rights, not expand them.
On “Weekend music thread #1”
@nous, it would be interesting to see the conductor during the actual performance. My impression of the rehearsal is that he's focusing more on individual bits, sort of "remember what I want here" to a particular section of the orchestra. During an actual concert, the conductor is performing for the audience more than directing the musicians.
"
@wonkie, I forget who said it but, "Wagner's music is better than it sounds." :^)
"Ride of the Valkyries" is excellent for the soundtrack of certain sorts of movie scenes, and has been used often for that purpose, probably most famously for the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now. (Or perhaps for the Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?", often referred to as "Kill the Wabbit".) But it's only five minutes out of a five-hour opera. And even in five minutes it suffers from repeated cases of "Oh, yes, there's supposed to be a melody here someplace, isn't there?"
Personally, I think Wagner could have been brilliant writing movie scores where the running time constraint was imposed on him. Think John Williams' score for the original Star Wars, very much in the Wagner mold, and often cited as the best movie score ever written.
"
Wagner: orchestration without melodies.
On “…..”
As an observation, for 80 years the pattern has been that from time to time Israel expands its borders somewhat, and from time to time it expels some of the non-Jewish population (for various values of expel). It seems to me unlikely that this is going to suddenly change.
On “Excelsior 2.1”
Less power if you've got an OLED (or other emissive) display. If you've got older/cheaper tech, black pixels and white pixels all consume the same amount of power.
"
We've done dark writing on light media since at least the ancient Egyptians. For a variety of reasons, including how the human vision system works.
"
<em>Alternate test of various ways</em> to do <strong>emphasis.</strong>
"
You have to use the tools along the bottom edge of the comment edit
window."
Darker type in these comments, please. Middlin' gray doesn't cut it for these old eyes.
"
Just an observation that you have to have JavaScript enabled in order to leave comments now.
Testing the attach-an-image comment feature:
On “The DIY party”
Before that, it has been Italians, and before that the Irish. At our nation’s founding the boogie man was the Germans.... I won’t be astounded if, down the road, South Asians replace Hispanics as the outsiders of choice.
I went to high school just west of South Omaha. The sequence of ethnic groups there that became, or are becoming "white" was Irish, Italian, Central/Eastern European, and now Hispanic. Blacks overlapped those at first, but were basically pushed out to the north side of Omaha proper.
My guess is that South Asians don't become outsiders because there are a lot of them already here in high-skill positions -- engineering, medicine, etc. Maybe if there's a "flood" of poor climate refugees. India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are 1.9B people in an area that will experience* early climate disasters.
* Arguably, Pakistan already is experiencing them, in the form of now-regular catastrophic monsoon flooding.
On “Japan unleashed”
I suppose because of the Japanese cars that hit the US market at about the time I reached the car buying stage.
My first car was a used 1969 Toyota Corolla. My second car was a 1979 Datsun 300ZX (pre corporate name change to Nissan). The improvement in build quality over that ten years should have absolutely terrified Detroit.
I was in college in the early 1970s when Japanese brands became serious contenders in high-end audio equipment.
Consumer video recording put an end to the belief that while Japanese companies could copy American and European engineering, they couldn't innovate.
"
I am not an economist (although I've taken a few graduate classes) so take the following with a grain of salt...
1) It strikes me that if Japan is selling large amounts of debt, and it's almost all being bought domestically, they have a problem with their tax structure. Selling interest-bearing bonds seems like a very inefficient way to do income redistribution.
2) As I recall the basic welfare theorems that justify the use of prices to match supply and demand, they say "There exists some initial distribution of wealth and set of prices that maximizes utility." Soon after, the initial distribution of wealth assumption disappeared from the discussion. This seemed a shame, since to paraphrase someone, the US government is primarily an income/wealth redistribution system with a very large military tacked on.
3) The answer to all of the problems the experts claim shrinking populations or shrinking worker-to-retiree ratios will cause is productivity: getting more out of the available resources (labor, electricity, land, water, etc).
4) Can't speak to Japan, but one of my long-standing complaints about the US is that forcing the elderly back into employment doesn't work if "employment" means eight hours plus commuting time five days a week, 50 weeks per year.
5) With respect to #3 and #4, I have been known to complain bitterly that US business management has gotten incredibly lazy and cheap, unwilling to be flexible or invest in education and productivity tools.
"
USA Fencing (the national governing body for sport fencing in the US) starts Veteran categories at age 40. They keep adding higher age categories, recognizing that 60-year-olds can't generally keep up with 40-year-olds. At this year's national tournament, there was a Vet-80 category. There are online videos of the finals bouts in Vet-80. Some of the age-related health problems -- eg, many forms of cancer -- just come with the territory as things wear out at the cell level. More of the elderly health care problems are related to people just going sedentary at some point.
I recall visiting a club where one of the members was an 84-year-old who won a silver in epee at the Olympics in the 1950s. All of the local members seemed to be ignoring him despite his being dressed out, so I made a point of asking him to fence. He couldn't move and fence both, so he stayed in one place. But his eye was sharp, his wrist was quick and strong, and if you left any sort of opening on your weapon arm, he hit it. The club owner thanked me later for taking the time. I never did find out how an 84-year-old Eastern European fencer ended up living in Lincoln, NE.
For some reason, there are no fencing clubs within a reasonable driving distance of Fort Collins. This strikes me as particularly odd since it's a university town. I miss it.
On “Ad futurum”
On a more serious note, I know some WP, but mostly things related to attaching odd bits of PHP to the standard hooks in various ways. For pulling stuff out of the database -- eg, some subset of comments -- I only know things that have PHP shorthand calls, not SQL. I know about get_comments(), but nothing about the underlying database calls.
I'm a long-timer Perl programmer, so I just think of PHP as Perl with a lot of the useful stuff stripped out.
"
...or some knowledge of mySQL?
Throughout my tech career, I always said that I was glad there were people who seemed to be interested in database design, because it meant I didn't have to worry about it.
On “Ezra Coates DESTROYS Ta-Nehisi Klein!!!”
...could anyone, even Ezra Klein, assert that Charlie Kirk was “doing Christianity the right way”?
Tony, I believe there are tens of millions of people in the United States who believe in straight white male nationalism with a side of selective interpretation of biblical texts and assert that Charlie Kirk was doing Christianity the right way.
On “Gnarly knot, dude!”
Ah, topology. When I was in graduate school I took a topology class where the professor used the Moore Method. No textbook. For each unit there was a handout with a bunch of definitions and a few examples. Then a list of theorems. Prove the true ones, find counterexamples (or proofs of falseness) for the false ones. Class time was students at the board going through their results. If no one had a result, a random student was put at the board while everyone gave suggestions.
I was amazed that there were smart people who had that many years of school behind them and didn't understand the basic management skill for that sort of class. If I had a proof for #3, and nothing for #4 or #5, I was already on the way to the board before the professor could finish asking, "Does anyone want to take a crack at #3?"
On “Precursors continued”
I'm glad Disqus isn't being considered. The Lawyers, Guns & Money blog switched to Disqus because handling their large comment volume was beyond the capability of the WordPress built-in system or available plug-ins. A very regular comment is someone asking, "Is it just me, or is Disqus more screwed up than normal today?" From time to time I add a comment there to the effect of, "If I weren't so lazy, I'd round up some of the commenters who are also retired geeks and we'd write a system to be what Disqus wanted."
On “Rule Six, there is NO … Rule Six!…”
I kind of feel the same way about that yearning for an ancestral homeland.
This is in the same category as "who are your people?" questions.
At a party once, standing on the outskirts of a conversation and not really paying attention, someone asked, "And what about you, Mike? Who are your people?" I think the answer was supposed to be something like the English, or the Baptists, but what popped out of my mouth before I had even thought about it was, "The applied mathematicians."
On “IANAL, but…”
At some point, with any luck at all, an administration which actually believes in the law may try to arrest and try those responsible.
In my honest but non-lawyer opinion, not a chance. US Navy action in international waters: the legal questions that may reach civilian courts will be about authorization to use force; those under the UCMJ will be about rules of engagement. Obama and Biden weren't as bad as Bush and Trump, but all four stretched the hell out of Congress's AUMFs on terrorism including rules of engagement. To be blunt about it, from 2001 the US military has been in the assassination business. My prediction is the best we might expect is that suspected drug smugglers outside of US waters will be made non-targets going forward*.
Part of me says that this is an inevitable outgrowth of drone technology. The idea has been kicking around for many years. In Real Genius (1985) the purpose of the 5 MW one-shot laser is assassination from a bomber flying tens/hundreds of miles away. The main piece of military porn in Tom Clancy's The Bear and the Dragon (2000) is smart bombs that can be dumped from high altitude, then autonomously identify targets and strike straight down, wiping out whole divisions' worth of armor while the top brass watch from the other side of the world via a drone called Marilyn Monroe.
* I have an occasional nightmare that my kids probably and my granddaughters certainly will live to see the day when the 20 km on the Mexican side of the border will be labeled a no-go zone. Spotter drones and artillery will enforce it against climate refugees. And yes, in the nightmare Tijuana and Juárez and all the smaller cities have been reduced to rubble.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.