Predicting the effects of AI on labor markets by looking at container shipping (a book about the Box called The Box)

by philg

I hope that everyone who celebrates is having a meaningful National Supply Chain Integrity Month.

I recently listened to The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson, against whom I was somewhat prejudiced because he has worked as an editor for The Economist, a magazine written and edited by experts who never met a human.

It’s a suprisingly interesting book on an uninteresting subject. The author is an economist so he is expecially weak on the engineering challenges of building ever-larger container ships and cranes. Nonetheless, we do learn about some of the engineering that went into designing the containers themselves, e.g., the corner connectors and figuring out how to support the weight of additional containers piled on top.

Like AI today, container shipping was perceived in its early days (1960s) as potentially saving a huge amount of human labor, especially dockside. Breakbulk shipping required large crews of longshoremen working for days to pack items into cargo holds, thus giving the mariners a relaxed week in port. Because longshoremen were usually unionized and had the power to shut down ports completely, they were able to negotiate the transfer of a massive share of the expected profits from container shipping to their members, either for not working at all or for working part-time. Non-unionized workers in the breakbulk shipping industry were completely out of luck. Future workers were also out of luck. As members of longshoremen unions died, the benefits of the union contract flowed only to those who were still alive and/or working. Crane operators in Los Angeles can make over $300,000 per year, but there aren’t many of them.

Practical advice for young people: Get a union job now and in a union that can shut down something important to the rest of the economy and/or the public. If containerization is any guide, unionized schoolteachers will be able to keep their wages even if Optimus can teach better. It would be ideal if one could think of a union that can shut down all AI data centers, but I am not sure there is one. Maybe the people who handle cooling? Even then, however, the data centers theoretically have the right to hire replacement workers during a strike. (School districts have this right too and it would be trivial to hire some adults to take over teaching/daycare responsibilities, but they don’t do it because, I guess, the union and the people who run the city are part of the same political party.)

Container shipping caused a massive shift in employment. Docks and their associated jobs in Manhattan and Brooklyn disappeared. So did factories that had been close to the docks in order to faciliate shipping to Europe. The replacement was Port Elizabeth in New Jersey, set up in 1963 to handle containers for Malcom McLean‘s Sea-Land. The factories moved to Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut because with container shipping they just needed to be able to put a box on a railroad car headed for Port Elizabeth.

The advent of container shipping did not highlight the merits of technocratic government or credentialed experts. Governments, armed with expert advice and forecasts, were investing huge quantities of tax dollars in wharves for breakbulk ships just as the container boom was becoming established. Experts predicted minimal savings and disruption from containerization, perhaps partly due to government regulations that stifled the growth of the industry. Until President Gerald Ford kicked off the deregulation trend in the U.S., rates for shipping via rail and truck were set by a central planning agency (the ICC). International shipping rates over water were similarly regulated by a combination of bilateral agreements, cartels among shipping lines, etc. The rate to ship a load of refrigerators, for example, might not be different whether they were in a container or not. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the full benefits of containerization began to be experienced by shippers and consumers. In other words, government intervention in the market delayed the benefits of the technology by 15-20 years.

As with AI, which has made receptionists at NVIDIA richer than 99% of the people who live in Michigan (Detroit was once the richest city in the US and maybe the world!), the benefits of container shipping haven’t been equally distributed. A privately-owned non-union (at the time) port in Felixstowe took away thousands of jobs from unionized government-owned ports in other parts of the UK. Intelligent and efficient countries got dramatically richer, e.g., Singapore and the Netherlands, while countries that couldn’t get organized were left much farther behind than in the breakbulk days, where everyone was inefficient. It’s almost free to ship cargo among the world’s leading container ports and expensive/slow to ship cargo to places that aren’t regularly visited by big ships. The cycle tends to be a virtuous one. Because Panama has a busy container port that’s also the logical place to put factories that divide up and repackage pharmaceuticals for re-export to other Latin American countries. Being a landlocked country was already bad, but the penalty increased with containerization. (Our family experienced this with roofing tile. We got $30,000 of clay tiles from Spain, including container shipping and a truck ride up from Miami. It was going to cost $16,000 for tiles from Ohio…. just for the shipping.)

Consider Haiti, one of the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies (which is why the U.S. is eager to import as many people from this society as possible?). It also has a violent and dysfunctional container port. UNICEF:

Armed groups breached the city’s main port a week ago, severing one of the capital’s last remaining lifelines for food and supplies as the country edges closer to collapse. Currently, over 260 humanitarian-owned containers are controlled by armed groups at the port.

Even if the rest of Haiti weren’t violent and dysfunctional, no factory could be set up profitably given the violent and dysfunctional nature of the port.

Moving over to the most functional country in Sub-Saharan Africa… “South African ports still rank among worst in the world” (BusinessTech 2025):

State-owned Transnet Port Terminals is pouring investment into cranes and new equipment after years of corruption and mismanagement that eroded the quality of its operations. The Container Port Performance Index from 2020 to 2024 took note of the upgrades and measures, including better weather forecasting at two local facilities. … Still, Cape Town was 400th in the survey, with Coega and Durban the penultimate and last of the 403 ports ranked.

The countries with high-ranked container ports are likely to be more advantageous spots for factories, at least the parts of those countries connected by good rail links to the efficient ports. Note that even today it can cost more to ship a container a few hundred miles by rail than thousands of miles by ship.

Also interesting from the above-cited report, what happens when you compare the best that Americans can do, considering all union and cultural factors, to our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Asia?

(Note that some of this inferior performance might be robot vs. human. American unions have had a lot of success in obstructing the installation of automation at our ports.)

So… if the AI revolution turns out to have dramatic economic effects, as predicted, the benefits will be radically unequal. Maybe Californians won’t complain so much about inequality if it turns out that nearly all of the wealth of the U.S. ends up in California as a result of the AI economy? Will they be eager for federal tax policy that plucks wealth from California AI Achievers and pays it out to Left-Behind Mainers and Michiganders?

Can we predict the people and places that the AI boom will enrich the most? I hope that SE Florida will be fine, even if money is earned elsewhere in the U.S., thanks to the spectacular mismanagement and consequent high taxes of a lot of other parts of the U.S. (Maybe Jensen Huang will eventually retire and bring his personal $trillions to tax-free Florida?) California is an obvious candidate for a place where a lot of individuals will keep getting richer, but mostly the rich AI nerds will leave the other 40 million Californians in the dust.

Maybe the answer is that AI is most useful to the smartest humans and, therefore, the big winners from AI will be the smartest humans and places where smart humans cluster. This was the core point of the book The Bell Curve, improperly characterized as a book about IQ as a function of race. In fact, the main point is that, unlike in medieval times, the modern industrial economy delivers enormous rewards to the smartest people. A potato-picking peasant in 1500 who happened to have an IQ of 130 wasn’t going to earn a lot more than his counterpart with an IQ of 100. If AI accelerates the trend identified by The Bell Curve then maybe Korea, China, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan will be the ultimate winners. (Average IQ in the U.S. started to fall shortly after our post-1965 opening of our borders to immigrants from countries with lower-than-100 IQs.)

Containerization was invented by an American. The first purpose-built container ships were built in U.S. shipyards. All of the early leaders in container shipping were American companies. One of the biggest early adopters of container shipping was the U.S. military (to support our ultimately futile efforts in South Vietnam). Today, however, the U.S. is insignificant in building and operating container ships. Merely because the world’s current AI leaders are in the U.S. we shouldn’t be complacent!

Readers: Who wants to make some predictions?

Fresh on X today, from the Financial Times, about how AI makes the cognitive elite more elite (i.e., another reason why the majority of Americans will eventually vote for everything that Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and AOC propose):

(Photos from Panama, 2023)

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Instead of free public transit, how about congestion rebate public transit?

by philg

Happy Earth Day to those who used to celebrate before they moved on to Queers for Palestine, etc.! And what better way to celebrate Earth Day than to get on a clean soot-spewing diesel-powered bus? “It’s where America’s poor and very poor can meet,” a friend pointed out.

Ayatollah Mamdani wants to bring free bus service to the Manhattan Caliphate, though it seems as if the dream is deferred (“Zohran Mamdani backs down on cornerstone campaign promise of free NYC buses” (NY Post)). A Republican in the NYC woodpile objects because “free busses will inevitably turn into rolling homeless shelters and drug dens, and become miserable and dangerous for the people who actually need to utilize them”:

(Wokipedia on the horrors of this Deplorable harpy: “Paladino has openly expressed Islamophobic and homophobic views. She has also opposed pro-Palestinian protests during the Gaza War, squatter houses, Drag Queen Story Hour, congestion pricing, and COVID-19 vaccine mandates.”)

As someone who loves Zohran and hates sitting in traffic jams, I’m a believer that public transit should be free and, actually, negatively priced during peak traffic congestion. On the other hand, maybe Vickie Paladino is right that “free” in a filthy city such as New York doesn’t attract the best people.

How about if people pay the usual fare when boarding, but via a smartphone app become eligible for a monthly rebate that is paid via Zelle. The unhoused New Yorkers and drug-dealing New Yorkers whom Paladino doesn’t want to encounter aren’t likely to have bank accounts and, therefore, aren’t likely to be able to get rebates via Zelle.

The rebate would vary by the ride and time of day and be linked to congestion on the roads. Someone who rode the bus during rush hour (that’s 8 am to 8 pm in NYC?) would get a rebate larger than whatever the fare is cranked up to. Someone who rode the bus at midnight wouldn’t get a rebate, which aligns pretty well with transit system costs because it is expensive per rider to maintain a schedule at night when ridership is low.

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Barrett-Jackson Palm Beach car auction

by philg

2026 was my first time at a fun Palm Beach County event: the Barrett-Jackson car auction. It’s a three-day event and I attended on Day 2. The crummiest cars are auctioned on Day 1. By Day 2 there are still a lot of nice cars in tents on the South Florida Fairgrounds (just west of PBI/DJT airport) and some reasonably interesting cars are being auctioned. Day 3 is a Saturday and presumably jammed because the local authorities had everything in place for dealing with a massive traffic snarl.

Prep: You won’t need sunscreen because almost everything is under either a tent or inside a building. There were no biting insects, despite recent wet weather, so you don’t need insect repellant either. General admission tickets were readily available at the gate, with no waiting mid-morning, for about $50. Consistent with Florida norms, children 12 and younger are free (1 kid per adult admission; both parents need to show up if it’s a welfare-or-super-rich-sized family). there is supposedly a “clear bag policy”, though women were carrying sizable conventional (non-clear) purses. Expect to spend about four hours if you’re not a professional/bidder.

Gemini says that Scottsdale is the biggest auction, with the most people and the most cars. Palm Beach has about 1/3rd as many cars and is second for “high-profile, high-dollar sales”. Las Vegas is similar in size to Palm Beach and the Columbus event is “focusing on custom cars and hot rods”.

Here’s what the main auction looks like:

The seats in the center seem to be reserved for those who’ve registered as bidders.

Here’s what it sounds like:

I would love to interface recordings of this guy to Indians who call us up trying to sell us insurance, home improvement, etc. How about an app that would instantly connect a call to auction audio?

You walk into the event through a vendor area. Chevrolet and Dodge have big areas, but a company that makes 80 cars per year, Orlando-based Revology, also shows up:

A German company was pitching $500+ heavy foam blocks on which to park one’s car, claiming that the softer-than-concrete material extends tire life:

ChatGPT begs to differ:

Tire pressure (e.g., 32–40 psi) dominates the contact behavior

The deformation happens inside the tire, not at the surface interface

If your goal is tire longevity, these are far more impactful: (1) Keep tires properly inflated (or even +3–5 psi for storage), (2) Move the car occasionally, (3) Avoid long-term parking in heat + sun, (4) Use jack stands for very long storage.

For long-term storage (months): some benefit, but minor compared to inflation and movement

ChatGPT says “curved tire cradles are actually better than flat foam” for avoiding flat spots during long-term storage. For most of us, any flat spots will be temporary and the permanent damage is being done by aging. For collector cars that are driven only a few thousand miles per year, ChatGPT says that rubber gets harder as it ages, thus reducing performance noticeably after five years and that manufacturers say to replace tires 6-8 years after manufacturing date (sooner if not garaged). The last four digits of the DOT code might be 1022, which means the 10th week of 2022.

(Claude generally concurs.)

A complete range of home decor was available for the motorhead Deplorable. Imagine being rich enough to permanently park a Carroll Shelby engine in one’s living room as part of a table:

The building behind the main auction building is home to the local model railroad club, which graciously showed up to run their layout.

That same building is home to a lot of high-end cars and trucks that get auctioned on the last day:

Here’s an exotic Pagani with a twin-turbocharged V-12 that produces 730 hp, just slightly more than the Corvette C8 Z06s that one sees every day in Publix parking lots around here and the Corvette does it with a normally aspirated V-8. (Of course, 730 hp is almost nothing compared to what’s in the ZR1X Corvette, above.) Despite the lack of sliding doors and seats for 8 (Honda Odyssey always wins!), the Pagani sold for $3.2 million, including buyer’s premium.

Cars that cost less than $200,000-ish are underneath tents, which was fortunate considering that there was moderate rain for a couple of hours. Occasionally one would hear cars being started. This is part of the caveat emptor inspection done by bidders. It wasn’t hot enough, however, to truly verify A/C capacity.

If you’re in the free parking areas it could be 10,000 steps to go into the event, wander through all of the tents and return to your own car through the main auction building. The pro move:

I’m still high on the idea that we need the Chevy El Camino and Ford Ranchero brought back for people who want to carry bicycles conveniently in low-crime areas such as our part of Florida and without guzzling gas like a standard pickup. Hard pass on this one, though, due to lack of factory A/C or Vintage Air.

ChatGPT says that it would be $1,500-$3,500 for labor to install a $2,330+ A/C kit, plus additional money for refrigerant. (If Greta Thunberg and Ayatollah Mamdani become co-presidents, the Vintage Air system could be rendered useless due to its reliance on R-134a refrigerant, banned for new cars starting in 2021).

If carrying the latest generation of e-bikes, maybe what is needed is an extra axle on a full-size pickup:

The rap sheet for this 6×6 says that it suffered “severe structural damage/structural alteration”. I hope that was the conversion and not an accident!

A 1963 Chevrolet Corvair, from the pre-1965 suspension redesign, for Ralph Nader fans. The engine is truly tiny 80 hp affair, mated to a two-speed(!) automatic transmission.

If one registers at the Barrett-Jackson web site, it is possible to learn that this Lot 604 sold on Day 3 for $30,000.

For older Maskachusetts residents who can’t abandon their loyalty to Volvo, a 1972 1800ES that sold for $22,000 (it actually cost the buyer an additional 10% in “buyer’s premium” to Barrett-Jackson; bidders literally give 110%). Less than half the horsepower of our Honda Odyssey and more than half the weight for Volvo’s version of a “sports car” (admittedly, other “sports cars” of the era were also absurdly feeble by today’s standards). The result was a 0-60 time of 11.3 seconds vs. 6.4 seconds for the latest-generation Odyssey (2018-; Car and Driver).

Here’s an $11,000 1950 Oldsmobile that runs at least well enough to make it from tent to auction venue and back. Ideal for shipping up to its likely birth home in the Islamic Republic of Michigan where the black paint and lack of A/C won’t be a serious liability:

For about the same price, one can bask in the glory of British engineering and craftsmanship in this 1983 Rolls-Royce (original cost over $110,000, equivalent to $365,000 in today’s mini-dollars), with brand-new A/C compressor:

(British cars seem to be the depreciation champs. A Jaguar XJ Portfolio from 2012 that likely cost $90,000 with tax sold for $10,000. In 2026 dollars, that car could have cost the buyer $130,000 new.)

In other British items, a 1964 Lotus Seven that has been upgraded with disc brakes and an engine that was made by diligent precise Japanese people (Toyota), in place of the original British drum brakes and English Ford engine:

The car was painted to reference this TV show:

Imagine a reboot of The Prisoner today. Half of the pedestrians in London would be wearing burqas. The iconoclast’s car would be a Tesla Cybertruck?

The Chick-fil-A is next to where they’re prepping cars for entry to the auction:

On the way out, one couldn’t spit in the inner parking lots without hitting a Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, or G-Wagen:

Everyone there was super friendly and answered my questions, no matter how dumb. I would definitely go again.

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Sixth anniversary of the best COVID-19 video

by philg

Today is the sixth anniversary of the best video to come out of coronapanic. By Adley Kinsman:

What was on this blog on April 20, 2020?

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Marijuana and book stores in Harvard Square

by philg

Happy 4/20 Day to those who celebrate. Photos from a January trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts…

The marijuana store for the 2SLGBTQQIA+ that opened in 2022 seems to have closed.

Leah also has a specific audience in mind: “Those of us who are often left out of things.” By that, within the cannabis industry, she means consumers who are older, or identify as LGBTQ, or women of any age. “That’s who I want to educate. That’s who I want to learn to believe and know that they can be a part of the cannabis community and culture too.” The programs she has in mind for the second floor at Yamba Boutique reflect that, including demonstrations and lectures that integrate cannabis with healthy lifestyles, from yoga to cooking and sex-positive practices.

For someone who has spent a lifetime trying to remove stigmas and upend stereotypes for herself and others, Yamba Boutique is a logical step. Leah began her career as a social worker, counseling teenage mothers like she and her mother before her, having gotten pregnant at 16 and 14, respectively. “I wanted to try to remove the stigma that we have as teen moms, that we are nothing and that our lives are gonna be ruined.”

Last week:

The “Marijuana for LGBTQ” store is being replaced by “Marijuana for Everyone” (don’t forget that marijuana is “essential”, which is why adults in Maskachusetts were able to go into a weed store and mingle while it was illegal for children to attend school).

For anyone who isn’t too stoned to read, there seems to be a new bookstore in the Square (note the two Rainbow Flags in the windows, a Biden-style trans-enhanced Flag and one with an innovative diagonal stripe pattern):

“No Kings; No ICE; No Fear; Immigrants are welcome here”. Looking through the window I observed at least five people in the store wearing masks. The person in the photo was my favorite. He/she/ze/they would remove the mask, sip his/her/zir/their coffee, and then put it back on repeatedly.

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Who will rescue the rescuer? (Hampshire College)

by philg

From January: Should today’s 18-year-olds avoid liberal arts colleges because such schools are likely to disappear during their careers?

From 2023, a liberal arts college offers to rescue Floridians whose lives were ruined by Ron DeSantis:

Hampshire College announced today its commitment to offer admission to all New College of Florida students in good standing and to match their current cost of tuition. This opportunity is in response to the continuing attacks on New College of Florida intended to limit intellectual exploration, turn back progress toward inclusion, and curtail open discussion of race, injustice, and histories of oppression. By committing to impose a narrowly politicized curriculum on New College, the newly appointed trustees broke promises made to its current students to support a self-directed, rigorous education grounded in a commitment to free inquiry.

Last week:

How much was the college extracting from each customer? About $80,000 per year:

Maybe they got into financial stress because they gave their land back to the Native Americans, who they say are the rightful owners, and then had to pay rent?

The original peoples of this land have had connections with these lands for millennia and maintain and reclaim relationships to this day. They are part of a vast expanse of Algonquian relations. Over 400 years of colonization, Nipmuc, Nonotuck, and Pocumtuc Peoples were forcibly displaced. In the 17th century, the Nonotuck peoples responded to ongoing settler colonial violence by seeking safety with their kinship connections in surrounding areas. … we are on stolen land built up by the stolen labor of enslaved African peoples. Let us be mindful of the ongoing colonial violence that continues to rage across the globe in places like Sudan, Congo, and Palestine, and our complicity in that violence.

Who are the evil people perpetrating “colonial violence” in “Palestine”? Maybe we could have learned at Hampshire’s 25th Annual Eqbal Ahmad Symposium, “The boomerang Comes Back: How the U.S.-Backed War on Palestine is Expanding Authoritarianism at Home”:

Noura Erakat, human rights attorney and associate professor in the department of Africana Studies and the Program in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, as well as the cofounder of the online journal Jadaliyya, presented an analysis for our times. Amherst College Writer-in-Residence George Abraham moderated.

Here’s the professor at the UN (2025):

Today is day 585 of genocide. Every day is a day of unprecedented atrocity.

She agrees with Gavin Newsom (see “Newsom Compares Israel to ‘Apartheid State,’ Questions Military Support” (NYT)):

Since 2020, an emerging consensus among legacy human rights organizations as well as the world court, have defined Israel as an apartheid regime. Rather than boycott, divest from, and sanction apartheid Israel, the global community has attempted to normalize it.

What else can one learn at Hampshire? That our society rests on “fundamental contributions” from Africans:

That the university is a place for “theorizing queer horizons”:

That being trans is not a modern fad of some sort:

That anyone who says liberal arts kids study basketweaving is an ignorant hater. It’s actually how to make brooms:

Students can study Donald Trump, a man who likely be long-dead by the time they’re mid-career (separately, a group of people who can’t figure out whether they’re male or female throws rocks at Donald Trump’s understanding of science):

What’s the value of having “Trump vs. Science” on one’s resume? It gets a graduate into the lucrative world of taxpayer-funded nonprofits?

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Lionel Shriver on elite college admissions

by philg

You might remember Deplorable Lionel Shriver from these pages, e.g.,

She has a new book: A Better Life. It’s about a NYC progressive who lives her principles by taking in a migrant (with a $3,300/month rent from taxpayers under the “Big Apple, Big Heart” program) and the effect that this has on her adult children, one of whom is a failure-to-launch-after-coronapanic boy.

“I don’t know how long the program is budgeted for. Who knows, our first experiment could be short-lived. Most migrants are anxious to find work and establish their own home.” “In the most expensive city in the country.” “Yes, even here. As a rule, migrants are resourceful. Resilient. They’re natural problem solvers. Our creaming off the most aspirational people in other countries is a kind of stealing. A porous border would be a policy of fiendish demographic genius, if only it were intentional.”

(the mom’s principles were somewhat flexible: “She got alimony, which before the divorce she’d claimed she didn’t believe in,”)

The relevant section for today’s post is on the near-impossibility of getting into elite colleges when applying from the Northeast:

Furthermore, confirming he was way dumber than his parents and teachers had alleged, he’d bought wholesale into his country’s glib formula for winning the college admissions game: earnest study + fanatical test prep + an overkill of extracurriculars both broad and a little quirky + savvy reading up on tips for making your essay stand out from the pack (when the rest of that pack was acting on the same tips). But imagining that anyone named Nico Bonaventura had a crack at the Ivies in the 2010s was hilariously naive.

He wasn’t a legacy candidate; his father went to Bennington, his mother to Smith. Whatever its in-august status in 1992, Ditmas Park no longer qualified as deprived. All the top schools had an excess of applications from New York. His parents were too wealthy for him to qualify for scholarships but not wealthy enough to seem like potential big donors down the line. He didn’t have a sob story (truly determined to gain admission to the rarefied ranks of higher education, he’d have run out in front of a bus). His test scores were near the top, but not, like those of his high school’s Asian math whizzes, perfect. The coup de grâce: he was white.

His parents might have spared him that blizzard of form-filling: “Honey? You haven’t a prayer. You fit the profile of exactly the candidates every selective admissions office in this country is bending over backwards to reject. Remember that Borough of Manhattan Community College accepts anybody.” Because not only were all his first choices nonstarters, but so were the second-tier “safety schools”—Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt, Rensselaer. He was left with third-tier, or no-tier. Meanwhile, word spread at his high school that certain students, who everyone knew full well were academic mediocrities at best but who also displayed the, ah, qualities that these fastidious admissions officers were looking for, got into Brown (irony alert), to Yale, and to Cornell. The whole college scramble was a con, and having jumped all those hoops like a performing seal—joining the chess club, studying the oboe, taking that AP course in International Relations—left him feeling humiliated.

Anecdotes from friends’ white male kids this year:

  • applied from New Jersey with 1590 on the SATs (test taken in 10th grade for the first and only time) and perfect grades at a public high school in a rich town: rejected at every Ivy League; waitlisted at a “near-Ivy”; accepted at Rutgers.
  • self-starter with a passion for engineering who applied from an expensive formerly-mostly-Jewish suburb of Boston with 1540 on the SATs and $240,000 of elite private high school tuition expended: rejected at every Ivy League and quasi-Ivy science/engineering schools (MIT and CalTech)

Let’s assume that Ivy League colleges still hate accepting Jews and Asians as much as they did before Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (in which the Supreme Court officially found that the colleges that claimed to be anti-racism experts were racist to an extent that violated the U.S. Constitution). Because of the Supreme Court they can’t simply hang out a “no Jews/Asians wanted” sign anymore. What if they simply cut way back on accepting applicants from the Northeast? That gets rid of half the Jews/Asians who apply in a manner that can’t be attacked in court.

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Statistics on taxes paid by the undocumented

by philg

Happy Tax Week for those dumb enough to work and pay federal personal income tax (about half of us, as Mitt Romney famously noted)…

I hope that all of you put extra postage on your tax payments this year since the money needs to go all the way to Somalia and Diego Garcia. Maybe with enough undocumented low-skill migrants our economy will be so rich that none of the native-born will have to pay taxes? There are some statistics hidden in “To File or Not to File: Undocumented Immigrants Face a Tax Return Dilemma” (New York Times):

The federal treasury could take a hit. Many undocumented immigrants have taxes withheld in every paycheck, but experts worry some could shift into under-the-table jobs. Others with less formal earnings may now skip filing a tax return — and therefore not pay federal taxes at all. The Yale Budget Lab, a nonpartisan research center, projected lost tax revenue of about $300 billion over a decade.

Yale estimated that we were being enriched by 22 million undocumented migrants in 2016, which would mean a population of approximately 30 million enrichers today without legal immigration status. If we divide $300 billion by 30 million and then by 10 years we get $1,000/year paid by each enricher into a welfare state where each dependent family costs nearly $100,000 per year (some data in pre-Biden dollars). A different study in the same article works out to about $2,000/year paid per undocumented migrant:

Before the agreement between the I.R.S. and ICE, unauthorized immigrants paid roughly $60 billion annually in federal taxes, according to an estimate by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a progressive think tank. Much of it went to Social Security and Medicare, which are programs that undocumented immigrants cannot benefit from.

(I think the last sentence is factually incorrect, despite the NYT’s claims of checking facts. As soon as an undocumented immigrant’s anchor baby turns 21, the undocumented migrant is immediately eligible for a green card and, thus, immediately eligible to receive Social Security and Medicare.)

The New York Times repeats the absurd statistic that the number of undocumented migrants in the U.S. has barely grown over the past 30 years, even during the Biden-Harris administration’s open border period (see the Yale study: “There’s a number that everybody quotes”):

About 14 million undocumented immigrants lived in the United States in 2023, the latest available estimate, and about 70 percent of them were in the labor force, according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

Department of Undocumented Migrants Aren’t Getting Welfare:

But last year’s Republican tax law cut off the child tax credit, which had been available to families if a child was a U.S. citizen.

(A cash handout from federal taxpayers (“the chumps”) isn’t “welfare”, apparently.)

The child tax credit by itself is $2,200, $1,700 of which is “refundable” (i.e., if you don’t owe any tax because you don’t work or have a low income then you get $1,700 anyway). So the child tax credit alone is larger than even the largest estimate of taxes paid per undocumented migrant.

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Hop a flight to Orlando or Tampa for Sun ‘n Fun this weekend!

by philg

If you don’t live in/near Florida, I recommend that you get a last-minute flight to Orlando or Tampa and then drive about one hour to Sun ‘n Fun in Lakeland.

I went on Tuesday, the first day. Here are a few photos.

P-51 Mustang and NASA’s Super Guppy:

Feel better about flying… the flight controls get disconnected and reconnected every time the plane is loaded or unloaded.

Placid Lassie is looking great despite her many trips to Europe for D-Day commemorations:

Today, it’s tough to imagine the sacrifices that Americans were willing to make to defeat Germany, which never had the same “Death to America” passion that Iran has maintained for 47 years. 2,501 U.S. soldiers died on D-Day and more than 3,000 French civilians were killed plus as many as 19,000 civilians killed in pre-invasion bombing.

Speaking of the Islamic Republic of Iran, here’s an unwelcome A-10 Warthog:

A lot of the most interesting planes are in the parking and camping areas. Here’s a 1947 Antonov biplane, for example:

And who doesn’t love a Grumman boat-hull seaplane?

Cirrus puts on a good display and has a couple of lounges and viewing areas for owners:

How they get people to move from the 200/210-hp SR20 to the 310-hp SR22:

I enjoyed talking to Dave Pascoe, the founder and operator of LiveATC.net. I learned that the service has a $5 app that makes using it much more convenient on mobile devices. Dave generously volunteers at Sun ‘n Fun Radio:

(Why doesn’t the FCC require that mobile phones have built-in FM radio reception at least, to keep communities together? Streaming radio over mobile data isn’t reliable. AM would be tough due to the antenna requirements, but maybe some RF genius could find a way?)

The secret Quiet Birdmen have a not-to-secret secret private club next to the radio station:

The high school at the airport still has a Coronapanic sign on a side door (see When will we feel safe enough to remove our coronapanic signs? (2024; the answer is “not before 2027”?)):

What if you’re irrational and choose to fly in? The NOTAM explains what to do. All of the waypoints seem to be in the Garmin 430 database (or maybe I entered them in during a previous trip?). I arrived mid-morning on the first day (Tuesday) and, therefore, the ATIS said to start at Fantasy of Flight rather than at Lake Parker. It’s somewhat unnerving to be 1 mile behind the plane in front and 1 mile in front of the plane in back, but it sort of works if everyone is precise about 100 knots and 1200′. It might have been smarter to file IFR and land on the big runway.

Not the best plane for flying the above procedure, but the under-wing graffiti is interesting. “N1972” makes sense for registration of this G650ER because that’s the year that Nike-brand shoes were introduced. I will give Nike credit for registering this to their own corporation instead of trying to hide it in a trust or LLC. In Stuart, Florida as I was preflighting the venerable Cirrus SR20-G2.

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Art Palm Beach

by philg

Happy World Art Day to those who celebrate…

Newer and less famous than its Miami Beach cousin, Art Basel, Art Palm Beach 2026 happened at the end of January and your fearless host braved Climate Change and fallen iguanas (down to freezing overnight!) to bring you the story. It’s the same concept at Art Basel and Art Miami: art galleries from around the world set up booths within a big open space and those interest in art roam the aisles, with a ratio of 1000 ticket-buyers to every collector.

First, hats off to the HVAC engineers who set up the Palm Beach County Convention Center back in 2004. Except for the bathrooms at the edges, the cavernous structure was warm and comfortable despite what was likely a temperature seen only about once in every 5,000 days.

I valet-parked the Honda Odyssey because it was too much trouble to park in the adjacent $2/hour structure and walk for 5 minutes:

(Grok: That’s a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud III convertible (also known as a Drophead Coupé), likely from the 1963–1966 production run. The model was the last iteration of the Silver Cloud series, featuring a 6.2L V8 engine, updated quad headlights, and bodywork often customized by coachbuilders like H.J. Mulliner or Mulliner Park Ward.)

Tickets were $40/person and easy to buy at the door. Kids are welcome, but each must have a full-price ticket (unusual for Florida, where kids are typically free or heavily discounted).

If you show up without a service dog, you’re doing it wrong.

Unlike Art Basel Miami Beach, this show seemed to be geared to active shoppers. Gallerists sought to engage and were approachable. Nearly every work was labeled with a price as well as a description. Prices were often reasonable, e.g., $3,500 for a small Hockney print, $15,000-30,000 for an original work by a not-so-famous artist, and hundreds of thousands of dollars at the top of the labeled range.

Adam Greener’s $14,500 works to inspire young scholars:

Perfect for the kitchen if you’re fully stocked with Ozempic (Rogerio Piexoto, “Be Butterfly” 2024, $188,000):

I can’t figure out who would pay $17,000 for this 48×60″ David Drebin C print (standard photo paper for printing from a color negative or digital file). Would a woman want a photo of naked women being showered with $100 bills? If not, how would a man get approval from Senior Management to bring this work into this house? Maybe a man who was single and wanted to remain single would be the customer? Someone who appears in the Justice Department’s 3.5 million pages of Emmanuel Goldsteinism and who tells visitors “I took this photo at Jeffrey Epstein’s place in Manhattan”?

Doug Powell made this 54×54″ Monopoly mosaic from “upcycled” keys:

A couple of New York gallerists wearing masks to protect themselves from the Science-deniers of South Florida (I hardly ever meet anyone here who is sick; by contrast, a tremendous number of friends in Cambridge reported recent or current respiratory illnesses when I was there in January):

An $85,000 Warhol Mao for your elite progressive friend:

A $10,000 3′-square Sarah Fishbein glass mosaic that would be perfect for our righteous brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Minneapolis if the characters were redesigned to make it clear that it was a native-born Kamala voter promising “I’d set the world on fire for you” to an undocumented migrant:

Here’s an entire wall of Obama-era Hope from Robert Indiana at $50,000 in today’s fascist dollars (edition of 125 since the rest of us 350 million must live without hope?):

The cafe in the middle is remarkably good and not insanely priced considering the captive audience. Here’s a $26 poke bowl with which I fortified myself before a Swiss friend’s Raclette dinner (complete with the special ovens):

A 6.5′-square $27,000 reminder to limit the population to 1 inch of fish per gallon of water, from Eric Alfaro:

Here’s an $18,500 Porsche 911 painting by Conrad Leach. How tough would it be for an AI+Optimus robot to design and paint this?

(The gallerist noted my interest and said, helpfully, that they had a wide range of car models on canvas from the same artist. I replied, “We have a Honda Odyssey.”)

Here’s a clever $12,000 work by Caroline Dechamby (Dutch-born; now in Switzerland?) highlighting the ease with which Optimus might recreate a Mondrian:

A medium-sized Calder that I would love to own ($165,000):

If you want a gift for an older person, here’s a $14,000 mid-sized painting by Scottish-Italian Leon Morocco in his 83rd year. (“Marocco” was the original family name, but it got corrupted to “Morocco”.)

Any friend who is a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community might enjoy this $125,000 30×36″ John Whorf painting of Provincetown, Massachusetts:

Compare to present-day (Cape Cod Times 2022):

If you need a gift for Zohran Mamdani, a couple of paintings of IDF soldiers by Natan Elkanovich (#FreePalestine #FromTheRiverToTheSea):

Speaking of Israel, Tali Almog’s encaustic-on-cork works seemed like great choices for public spaces:

If the public space is a Rolls-Royce dealer, maybe this 6′-square $362,000 print of Ormond Gigli’s Girls in the Windows (1960) photo? Wouldn’t this be easy to update with Photoshop or ChatGPT? My version would have a Honda Odyssey on the sidewalk. All of the humans would be nonbinary. There would be a range of golden retrievers, Samoyeds, and Sheep-a-doodles sticking their paws and heads out the windows underneath the humans. It would be called “Hes/shes/zes/theys in the Windows”.

A photo of the valet area on my way out. Check the range of vehicle size between the Bronco in front and the Ferrari 296 GTS Spider ($400,000) in the background. An alien might conclude that these vehicles were built for different-sized species. (If the Bronco back up and rolled over the Ferrari, would the driver even notice?)

Summary: It’s a great event that is less snooty and more kid-friendly than Art Basel Miami Beach. It’s a better place to learn about art and artists because the gallerists are more open to conversation and the artists themselves are more likely to be there in the booths.

Separately, it’s Tax Day. If you’re mailing in a hardcopy return and check make sure that you put some extra stamps on the envelope. Your money needs to go all the way to Somalia by way of Minnesota.

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