Why are there foreign do-gooders working in Gaza?

by philg

We regularly read about foreigners doing heroic deeds on behalf of Palestinians seeking to liberate Al-Quds, destroy the Zionist entity, and establish a river-to-the-sea nation. Most dramatically, we have learned about the deaths of six foreigners working for World Central Kitchen (Wikipedia):

The IDF claimed that before the incident, the WCK cars had escorted an aid truck that had a gunman on its roof that fired a gun … A second gunman was spotted at the warehouse joining the first gunman, leading to the drone operators assuming that they were of Hamas, claimed the IDF. As a result, according to the IDF, the IDF drone operators believed that the WCK cars were being used by Hamas militants, and further suspected that they saw a person entering a WCK car with “a rifle but at the end of the day it was a bag”, in a “misclassification”. The IDF claimed that the drone operators believed that the WCK aid workers had remained at the warehouse with the aid truck, instead of leaving in the cars.

It doesn’t surprise me that people get killed by mistake in a war zone (especially if they share a warehouse with armed men who look just like one side’s fighters). If the risk weren’t there one couldn’t claim credit for heroism by volunteering to work in a war zone. What does surprise me is that WCK employs non-Palestinians to work in Gaza. Even before the October 7, 2023 resistance action, only a minority of adult Palestinians worked (one of the lowest rates of labor force participation of any society ever to exist, presumably at least partly due to the fact that EU and US taxpayers provide food, health care, education, etc. via UNRWA). If the majority of adult Palestinians don’t work, why can’t an aid organization do whatever it wants to do with an all-Palestinian workforce? Gaza has an enormous surplus of potential labor, in other words, so it shouldn’t make any sense to send workers rather than cash and material goods.

Here’s UNICEF, for example, sending a blond do-gooder to delivery food and water:

Instead of paying her salary, why not hire 10 locals with the same money?

There are plenty of Palestinians who can drive trucks, stock shelves with food and water, and cook. Why do UNICEF and WCK bring in foreigners to do these jobs?

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Meet at the Miami Grand Prix (F1 race)?

by philg

Who wants to meet at the Miami F1 race, sort of, on Saturday, May 5? This is one day before the “big race” that rich people are desperate to see. There are a lot of events throughout the day, including a spring race, the F1 Academy (from which 73 genders recognized by Science are excluded and this exclusion is the epitome of social justice), and some Porsche racing.

The official F1 site sells only 3-day tickets. A lot of buyers, however, don’t want to show up on Friday and Saturday. Individual days thus show up as verified resale on Ticketmaster. A “campus pass” that lets you walk around is about $120 and a ticket in a grandstand is $200-300 (this also includes the right to wander).

Given the often-brutal Miami heat and sun, I picked tickets in the Turn 18 grandstand. This has its back to the sun and rows beyond about N are shaded (our tickets are in Q). It has views of cars braking out of the longest/fastest straight and then navigating a couple of turns. The one knock against this grandstand is that it might be a long walk to the Fountains and Promenade areas. The Marina grandstands might be better for taking that one perfect photo of a race car in front of boats, but I don’t think the cars are moving as fast in this area.

It looks as though parking passes are sold on SeatGeek and VividSeats. I’m thinking that traffic won’t be terrible on Saturday because people will arrive gradually and also leave gradually depending on which of the events they’re interested in. On Sunday, by contrast, there is literally nothing on the schedule after the 6 pm finish of the Grand Prix per se (which I’d rather see on television so that I would have a chance of understanding it) and, therefore, there will be a mad rush for the exits.

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Monogram 36-inch gas range (versus Wolf)

by philg

Our house came with a 36-inch gas range made by Bertazzoni that sat flush to the counter/cabinets, which looked clean, but an inflexible and inappropriate-for-us set of burner sizes. The cooktop was also a little tight on space and it was sometimes tough to use more than two pans on the six burners. The most serious problem, however, was that the oven wouldn’t light reliably or stay lit. A Florida house is almost indestructible, but a range that fills it up with natural gas is risking an explosion test.

We couldn’t get the “leaks gas into kitchen” issue fixed, so we decided to replace the range. Without sacrificing a wall oven we didn’t have enough electric power to install an induction range and, in fact, didn’t really have enough electric power for the typical “dual fuel” range (a single 20-amp 240V circuit behind the range). Retrofitting wiring in a concrete Florida house with no basement or attic is not a simple proposition. Thus, the only reasonable choice was another all-gas range.

The choices quickly came down to Wolf and Monogram. The Wolf sits flush to the counter/cabinets, as the Bertazzoni had, but that means a little less space in the oven and on the cooktop. The Wolf GR366 also has wimpy burners compared to the Monogram: five at 15,000 BTU and one at 9,200 (compare to two 23,000 BTU burners, two 18,000, and two 15,000 for the Monogram).

Consumer Reports found that the 30-inch Wolf oven was dramatically inferior to the Monogram’s gas oven:

The 30-inch Monogram’s ratings:

The Monogram also has LED rings behind the burner controls to show at a glance whether a burner has been left on. (For even more peace of mind, the range talks to an app that can show whether any burners are on and that allows direct control of the oven.)

The Monogram was about $700 cheaper and came with a $1,500 discount on a GE Monogram Advantium wall oven that we wanted to buy. We got it at Best Buy and signed up for their credit card, which took another 10 percent off in the form of credits to spend at Best Buy. So it works out to nearly $3000 cheaper than the Wolf for a more capable machine. Here’s what the $7,100 ZGP366NTSS looks like sticking out beyond the cabinets:

The controls could be improved. The legends for which burner a knob corresponds to are unreadable when looking down at the knob from in front of the range. They should be above and to the right of each knob, not below. The screen is tiny. The massive rotary knob for controlling the oven is impressive, but it would have been much better if the range had a tilted-up touch screen for controlling the oven, timer, and other functions (and the confusing buttons underneath the screen would be gone). As the range is laid out, the numbers for the displayed time are half the height of what you’d find on a $99 microwave from Walmart. The best way to describe the design aesthetic is Derek Zoolander’s display meets Godzilla’s range.

We’re very happy with the range so far. We probably use 10 pans on the rangetop on an average day, though we seldom use the oven (the Breville super toaster oven is the go-to). An induction cooktop that could be wiped completely clean in 45 seconds would probably be better, but this range is more fun. The monster 23,000 BTU burners work great on the low setting, which lights up only an inner ring. Visitors to the house have remarked favorably on the appearance of the range and nobody has asked, “Why does it stick out?” Apparently, when the “pro-style range” craze began in the 1990s it was conventional for the ranges to be deeper than the counter. Sticking out, therefore, is an indicator that the kitchen owner is a rich douche (or at least a douche).

Another possibility if you want a range that sits flush is Bluestar. Their “culinary series” open burner range is about $5,000 and comes in huge range of colors. The burners are only 15,000 BTUs but supposedly act like hotter burners due to being open (I’m not sure that I believe this!).

Related:

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A pleasant afternoon and evening at the airport

by philg

Passengers love airplanes because they’re fast. Piston-powered aviation is, of course, almost always slower than driving, but time spent at the airport is seldom wasted. I went up to Stuart, Florida the other day to fly the Cirrus and have dinner with the Quiet Birdmen. Here were a few of the sights:

(Icon A5 and a Kaman helicopter as well as the usual Florida sunset.)

Flying turns out to be the slowest part of my life and the part where I’m most likely to engage strangers in casual conversations. Nobody is rushing to answer an email or text.

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Radcliffe: It was women who defeated Hitler

by philg

My mom was Class of 1955 at Radcliffe, the women’s college that was part of Harvard University in parallel with the men’s college (“Harvard College”). Here’s part of a recent email from Radcliffe:

Women’s history is deeply entwined with the history of resistance. In this issue of our Women, Gender, and Society newsletter, we feature stories of women who challenged the status quo, from the German resistance to sex-positive feminism. Learn more about women who inspired change—and don’t miss the latest Schlesinger Library exhibition, which highlights the many facets of women’s movements working toward liberation in the United States, starting at midcentury.

By inference, I think it is also fair to say that people who identify as “women” are allied with Hamas (the “Islamic Resistance Movement”). If my mom’s class is representative, the typical Radcliffe graduate seems to have enjoyed tremendous success in resisting working for wages. Either during or just after college, these women got married to men and then lived off the wages earned by those men, whether they stayed married or availed themselves of the no-fault divorce laws that became available circa 1970 collected alimony.

Speaking of Hamas, once Harvard comes under Hamas’s direct management I wonder what they will think of the following:

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Why did NPR hire a white person as its new CEO?

by philg

Katherine Maher, the former head of Wikipedia and recently hired CEO of state-sponsored NPR, has been in the news lately. Christopher Rufo has been highlighting her years of progressive-themed tweets. This one is my favorite:

(It’s actually a prompt of exclusion since the password does not include “Ze”)

What I can’t figure out is why NPR hired this white native-born 40-year-old. Here’s the NPR diversity policy:

If diversity is their core value, as they say, why couldn’t they find a CEO who fits into more corners of the “big tent” that they’ve identified? A Black gay transgender poor religious old disabled conservative undocumented immigrant, for example. And why did she take the job? She says that she wants to help sex workers, Black and brown people, Muslims, “LGBTQ+ folks”, et al. Shouldn’t she have rejected the offer and told NPR to hire someone who fit into one of those categories?

Some more tweets from the head of the taxpayer-funded radio network:

(It’s a “man’s world”, but someone with only a bachelor’s degree was able to get the top jobs at Wikipedia and NPR without identifying as a “man”?)

Don’t have kids, but invite 100 million migrants and their kids into a high-carbon society from their low-carbon societies? Hearing about the possibility that immigrants destroyed the natives (Anglo-Saxons moving into present-day Britain) makes her more confident that open borders are the correct choice for current Americans:

In case the original of my favorite tweet goes into a memory hole:

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Birth control pill sculpture wins a prize at a suburban Boston public high school

by philg

Here’s a prizewinner from the AP Art class at the Lincoln-Sudbury (Maskachusetts) public high school:

(I blacked out the student-artist’s name in case she one day becomes a Deplorable.)

I’m not sure if “penis made from birth control pills” is the title of the work or if it has a title at all.

Science shut down the high school in question completely or partially for 1.5 years. Part of this period was “hybrid” in which students gathered two mornings per week and then retreated to their suburban bunkers. Presumably SARS-CoV-2 was told not to spread during these handful of hours, but the virus would have rejected a demand to refrain from spreading during a full school week.

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Why doesn’t ChatGPT tell us where to find items in our houses?

by philg

American houses have gotten larger:

Thanks to the hard-working folks in China and at Walmart, stuff has gotten cheaper. The result is that we live in large environments crammed with stuff. This makes it tough to find one’s keys, the cup of coffee that one recently set down, etc.

Instead of AI taking over the creative jobs of writing poetry and making art, why not have AI watch everything that happens in the apartment or house (video and inferences from the video stored locally for privacy) and then we can say “Yo, ChatGPT, where did I leave my keys?” If we get in the habit of showing documents that arrive in the mail to a camera we can also ask the AI to remind us when it is time to pay a property tax bill or ask where we left an important document.

This could be rolled into some of the boxes that Unifi makes. They already make sensors for the house:

They claim to have “AI” in their $2500 “DSLR” PoE camera (only 18 watts):

Their basic cameras are $120 each. If the basic cameras are good enough, this should be doable on top of the Unifi infrastructure for perhaps $300 per room plus whatever the central AI brain costs.

Speaking of Unifi, I’m wondering why they don’t sell a combined access point/camera. If the customer has just a single CAT 5/6 wire to the back yard, wouldn’t it make sense to have the same PoE-powered device handle both security and WiFi? As far as I know, there isn’t any combined camera/AP.

(I’m still using the TP-Link Omada system that I bought because Unifi’s products were all out of stock. See TP-Link Omada: like a mesh network, except that it works (alternative to UniFi). Everything works, but they don’t seem to be trying to expand beyond networking as Unifi has. Maybe when WiFi 8 comes out it will be time to trash all of the working WiFi 6 Omada gear and get with the Unifi/Ubiquiti program.)

Speaking of houses, here’s a recent New York Times article informing us regarding what a typical American “couple” looks like (the word is used 11 times in the article)…

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The Admin Fee at a restaurant

by philg

Happy Tax Day for those in the U.S. and also U.S. citizens who live abroad and get no services from the U.S. but still must pay taxes (consider the U.S. citizens held hostage by Gazans, for example).

How about a new 3 percent tax from a restaurant on the restaurant and kept by the restaurant, couched as an “Admin Fee” on the receipt?

One of my companions asked what it was for. The waiter responded, “It’s a fee that we incur to keep our prices competitive.”

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