The Insightful Troll

Rants and ruminations.

Airlines Are Asking for $50 Billion

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The Airlines for America on Monday claimed that all seven major U.S. passenger carriers would run out of money between July and December. Therefore they are asking $50 billion in assistance from the federal government. And the way they are asking for it is to divide it evenly between grants and low-interest loans.

But why do they even need this money? Airlines are coming off a historic 10 year boom. And the mergers have given Delta, United, American, and Southwest about 80 percent of the U.S. market. Delta’s profits for each of the past five years, back from 2019 to 2015, were $4.8 billion, $3.9 billion, $3.2 billion, $4.2 billion, and $4.5 billion. Thats $21.6 billion. And this when the oil prices are low with the economy was booming.

So where did all that money go? They spent all of that profit on themselves and their executives. According to Bloomberg the airlines spent 96 percent on cash buybacks and executive compensation.

Sure the Covid-19 threw everyone into a downward spiral. But it wasn’t as if this was not completely out of the blue. American Airlines actually reported in their December 31, 2018 Annual Report Form 10-K the following:

In particular, an outbreak of a contagious disease such as the Ebola virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, H1N1 influenza virus, avian flu, Zika virus or any other similar illness, if it were to become associated with air travel or persist for an extended period, could materially affect the airline industry and us by reducing revenues and adversely impacting our operations and passengers' travel behavior.

So instead of saving their pennies for such an event, the airline companies spent all of that cash to enrich themselves.

If any American family operated like that, we would say its financial mismanagement. When the American people ask for government assistance - we get told that we should have managed our money better.

But yea we get it. We need robust air infrastructure to grow and support our economy. But you have some gaul asking for free money (also known as grants) and a low interest loans. Needless to say, the airlines should not get to dictate terms.

This is how this bailout should be structured:

  • There will be no grant given. You and your executives do not get to take the gains and we, the taxpayers, take the loss for your lack of financial mismanagement.
  • You will be given a credit line to borrow against while you figure out how to stay afloat.
  • You will continue to pay your taxes.
  • You will have to pay back the taxpayers first over any other loans you have.
  • In return for this emergency credit line, you will accept oversight from the government for the next 10 years.
  • You will have to demonstrate that you have put forth sufficient safeguards so as not to repeat these events.

And the government should seriously consider breaking up the big four - but that is a post for another time.

Why Is Soap the Best Against Coronavirus (COVID-19)?

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While there has been a mad rush by people all over the country to buy hand sanitizers of all types, good old hand soap is known to work best against viruses such as the Coronavirus (COVID-19).

Here is an excellent thread on why:

Coronavirus (COVID-19) - Facts Not Fiction

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Before the media sensationalizes this and the politicians amp this up even higher, lets stop for a minute and look at the facts so far. I am not saying we do not take immediate action to prevent further spread, but folks, its not the end of the wold.

On Tyranny

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In his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder looks at lessons from the collapse of various democracies across Europe over the course of the 20th century. A short read on the lessons to be learned and the what we can to protect our democracy.

The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex. Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or Communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.

Bernie Sanders Takes Double Digit Lead

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New poll has Sanders support at 31% nationally, up 9 points since December, the last time the poll asked about Democratic voters' preferences. Next closest contender has 19%.

The Rule of Law Failing Under Trump

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Rachel Maddow on the resignation of the four prosecutors in the Roger Stone sentencing case.

There's no line that this President will not cross. Tell me if you can imagine one. Tell me the thing that would be bad for America but good for him - he wouldn't do it because it'd be bad for the country. What's beyond the pale for him?

Time Is Now!

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Michael Render (aka Killer Mike) gave a rousing speech in support of Senator Bernie Sanders. This is the most powerful ad I have seen this election season. The Sanders champaign should blanket the airwaves with this.


Look to your neighbor and say:
Neighbor, the time is now.
There are more of us.
We're stronger.
We will wait no longer.
The time is now.
When you go to the that booth next year,
I need you to carry in that booth the memory of this room
Black.
White.
Straight.
Gay.
Men.
Female.
We are together.
We are united.
Our time is right now.
We will not wait four more years.
We will not wait 20 more years.
We will not wait two more Presidents.
We will not wait three more Presidents.
The time is now.
The time is not in the future.
The time is not some abstract time.
The time is not something that might be.
The time ain't something that could be.
The time ain't nothing that should be.
That would be.
It ain't tomorrow.
It ain't the day after.
It ain't coming next week.
The time is
Now!
The time is
Now!
The time is
Now!
The time is
Now!

Revolution indeed. The time is now!

NASA Moonshot 2024

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No one has been to the moon since 1972, even though, back in 2004, then-President George W. Bush laid out several goals for NASA, including a "return to the moon by 2020 as the launching point for missions beyond."

Moonshot in 2024? Thas 4 years from now! No chance.

This isn’t the 1950s. We don’t just throw people atop rockets anymore. These are vehicles, aircraft. There is absolutely no way any of the current crop of space vehicles could be made ready for a trip to the moon anytime before 2024.

Going beyond low orbit, away from the sub-45min return time, is something we haven’t done in generations. The craft need to be tested, repeatedly. Each test flight then has to be analyzed before the next test flight. The turnaround for a single test will be many months, even a year. Getting all the bits and pieces together would then take many more years of integration work.

Look at the F-35. Look at the 737-max. These are complicated systems with layers of dependencies. Our society today simply does not accept the cowboy approach to safety that was the original moon race. The next moon landing will only happen after a decade-long deliberative, iterative, campaign requiring the support of many subsequent governments.

It is good to have a goal. But lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Anders Hejlsberg on Compiler Construction

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Anders Hejlsberg gives a talk on compiler construction. For those who don’t know, Hejlsberg is the one who gave us Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and most recently TypeScript. An excellent intro to modern compiler construction by one of the true masters of the field.

Logitech G Pro Keyboard Review

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A mechanical keyboard is a keyboard built with high quality, typically spring activated, key switches. These key switches vary based on the keyboard’s application or user preference.

While some of the first widely sold keyboards such as IBM’s Model M in the 1980’s utilized mechanical switches, the 1990’s brought on a wave of inexpensive rubber dome keyboards that flooded the keyboard market. Rubber dome keyboards represent over 90% of keyboards in use today and provide an inexpensive but dissatisfying feel and typing experience.

Mechanical keyboards raise the bar in every way. A mechanical keyboard’s switches, framing, functionality, type print methods, key construction, PCB board, LED lighting (sharpness, brightness, adjustability), and a slew of other features are far superior compared to traditional rubber dome keyboards. Most of these improvements boil down to one thing - feel. Mechanical keyboards simply feel better than rubber dome keyboards.

Over the last few years, mechanical keyboards have become extremely popular. And as a developer I prefer the force feed back and the reassuring click and tactile feed back that they provide. However there is a huge variety of keyboards available with different layouts, key types and price points. How do you pick one that is right for you?

After trying many of mechanical keyboards, I can honestly recommend the Logitech G Pro Gaming keyboard. Don’t let the gaming part fool you. This is a serious keyboard that gives one of the best performances at a very reasonable price.

What is in the box

The Logitech G Pro Gaming keyboard comes with a just the essentials - the keyboard itself, a braided micro-USB cable and a small leaflet that tells you how to plug in the keyboard. Thats about it. You’ll either want to hold on to the box or invest in a separate case as one is not included.

The G Pro’s braided micro-USB cable deserves mention. With hooks on either side, it provides for a secure fit. This is good for securing the cable so you don’t accidentally remove it while in use. And the braided cable looks to be strong - no fraying or cutting problems here.

Design

The G Pro looks like what would happen if we were to take a standard full mechanical keyboard and simply chop off the numpad with some kind of high-tech paper cutter. It has a full selection of keys (minus the numpad), in addition to a key that controls the lighting and one that activates a Game Mode. The Game Mode is useless for programmers. It prevents you from clicking keys such as Alt-Tab or the Windows button, so that you won’t accidentally shut down your game midway. I wish this key was programmable to something else - but alas, you can’t.

That’s most of what there is to say about the keyboard’s looks. It’s small (14.2 x 6.0 x 1.4 inches), attractive and streamlined. Instead of employing discrete media controls, you can use the Fn key and the top row of Function buttons. Discrete controls would have been nice, but the advantage here is that they don’t clutter the keyboard.

Keys

The keyboard makes use of the company’s ubiquitous Romer-G mechanical switches. If you’ve never tried them before, they feel like Cherry MX Browns: tactile and fairly quiet. While Cherries are the standard to beat, Romer-Gs are supposed to be a hair faster, more responsive and more durable, so you could do much worse. Taken on their own merits, they’re pretty comfortable.

The Romer-G switches are great for typing. With the G Pro, I typed 115 words per minute with nine errors. Thats pretty good - at least for me.

Features

The Logitech G Pro runs on the Logitech Gaming Software, which is excellent. You can program the F1 through F12 keys, as well as adjust the backlighting and keep track of your stats (where your fingers spend the most time, how often you press buttons, and so forth).



There’s one onboard profile for the G Pro keyboard. This profile stores one lighting profile, which means that you can hook up the keyboard to any computer and have it retain any key colors that you care to program.

I’m not sure if this constitutes a bona fide “Big Deal,” but it’s a helpful feature, particularly because the keyboard’s default color wave can be somewhat distracting, and turning off lighting entirely makes the peripheral feel a little plain. My only complaint is that it took me a little while to figure out how to save the onboard profile. Hardly a deal breaker.

Performance

I put the G Pro through its paces, with both e-sports and narrative-driven titles, and it worked well in both cases. I had no trouble gliding around the battlefield as Mercy in Overwatch or commanding Jaina Proudmoore to encase enemies in ice in Heroes of the Storm. Likewise, the keyboard was competent and responsive when I was adventuring through the realm of Eorzea in Final Fantasy XIV or taking down bandit camps in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The keyboard’s compact size is a boon. It was easy to play Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm with the keyboard straight in front of me, or off to the side at an angle; such maneuverability is sometimes necessary, depending on how much space you have at a tournament. Otherwise, it’s just as responsive as Logitech Orion keyboards, which have already proved their worth as e-sports peripherals.

Conclusion

The Logitech G Pro is a great keyboard. If you want a small mechanical keyboard that’s suitable for long stints of daily typing or coding and you don’t want to sacrifice comfort or performance, the Logitech G Pro is the one you should get. Just ignore the gaming keyboard part. And at $79 dollars - you aren’t going to get a better deal. The only downsides - and I am nitpicking here - is the lack of a case and being able to program the gaming button. Get yours here.

If Right Doesn't Matter, We're Lost. If the Truth Doesn't Matter, We're Lost.

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Adam Schiff’s summary argument in the Senate trial of Donald Trump’s impeachment. It sums up the state of the world today.

March Release of iPhone 9 Imminent

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Looks like we have the successor to the iPhone SE - which in my opinion, was the greatest iPhone form factor ever made - scheduled for release in March. With the price expected to be at $399 - Apple is going to sell a ton of these. I just might be on the buy list for one of these.

The spec run-down form phoneArena.com:

If you’ve somehow missed the constant bombardment of iPhone 9 leaks, here’s a quick rundown of what we’re expecting right now.

Design-wise, the phone should look almost identical to the iPhone 8, with a 4.7-inch IPS LCD display and a home button with Touch ID. Unlike the iPhone 8, however, inside there will be Apple’s latest A13 system chip with all of its benchmark-topping power.

On the back, a single wide-angle camera will have to fill all the photography needs, just like in the good old days. If the iPhone 9 gets the lens from the iPhone 11 series alongside Night Mode, we doubt there will be anyone complaining.

Kenobi Fan Film

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That moment when a fan film feels more like star wars than the huge Disney productions. You don’t need 1000s of starships or hundreds of Jedi. You just need big stories – saving a little boy can have more then enough drama for a movie.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Real Time With Bill Maher

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Nancy Pelosi made an appearance on Bill Maher’s season opening episode - needling President Trump:

If I knew that the president is listening, I would want him to know that he is impeached forever, and he is impeached forever because he used the office of the president to try to influence a foreign country for his personal and political benefit. In doing so, he undermined our national security, he was disloyal to his oath of office to protect the Constitution and he placed in jeopardy the integrity of our election. He gave us no choice.

Nothing would please me more then if this women would run against President Trump. When asked about how Democrats often fall victim through their own purity tests - Speaker Pelosi:

I don’t worry about that … And in the recent elections we won. And we showed in the house we know how to win. Disciplined, focused, cold-blooded in terms of just winning.

I agree with Bill Maher - Speaker Pelosi is our Iron Lady.

Tesla Worth More Than GM and Ford - Combined

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Tesla is now by far the most valuable car company in America. Tesla’s market capitalization is $93 billion, compared to $50 billion for General Motors and $37 billion for Ford. Remarkable considering GM sold around 20 times as many cars as Tesla in 2019, while Ford sold more than six times as many.

Tesla is the Apple of the automobile industry. If I were a car manufacturer right now, I would be loosing a lot of sleep.

Timoth B. Lee in Wired sums it up the best:

I’m not the first person to compare Tesla to Apple, but I think the comparison makes sense. Apple has only 15 to 20 percent of the global smartphone market, well below Google’s Android. But the distinctiveness of the iPhone platform, combined with the loyalty of the Apple customer base, means that Apple can charge a premium for the iPhone. As a result, Apple’s share of smartphone industry profits is much larger than its share of unit shipments or revenue.

We don’t know what the electric car marketplace will look like a decade from now. But it’s not hard to imagine it evolving in a similar direction, with Tesla becoming the Apple of transportation. People will be willing to pay a few thousand dollars extra for the prestige and unique features of a Tesla—just as they’re willing to pay a few hundred extra dollars for an iPhone. And in the ruthlessly competitive car industry, even a small difference in price can translate into a big difference in profits.

Wall Street Bonus Culture Is Ending

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Yet another industry is being eaten by software- looks like Wall Street is the latest casualty.

Roosevelt Bowman, who traded bonds at Lehman Brothers back in 2008, learned to code as the firm collapsed. More than a decade later and now senior investment strategist at AllianceBernstein Holdings LP’s private wealth-management division, he uses programming languages such as R and Python regularly in his job in New York.

At UBS, Purves is spearheading an effort to digitize the investment bank’s trading of fixed income and equities and as part of that he went on a course with Silicon Valley’s Singularity University to learn how experienced bankers can evolve and stay relevant. When it comes to new hires, Purves says, the best candidates are those that have the least to “unlearn.” They are team players with computer science skills who are often new to banking, he said.

Jack Miller, head of trading for Robert W. Baird & Co. in Milwaukee, agrees. For the first time last year, he included proficiency in coding as a requirement for a junior trader job, but hasn’t found anyone yet with the right mix of technical and people skills.

No, AOC Should Not Leave

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Froma Harrop argues that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) should leave the Democratic Party because she is not playing nice and stepping in line.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not entirely wrong when she said, "In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party," in an interview with New York magazine.
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Ocasio-Cortez most likely doesn't have the guts to leave the Democratic Party probably for the same reason that Bernie Sanders ensures he has the "D" after his name whenever he runs for office. In the 2006 and 2012 Senate races, Sanders ran as a Democrat in the primary, then refused the nomination when he won so he could run as in Independent without facing a Democratic challenger.

AOC might also want to also have it both ways, using the Democratic designation to get elected in her liberal district while bashing the party that gave her power.

If AOC identified as a Democratic Socialist in 2020, she could conceivably win reelection to Congress, given her celebrity and her genius on social media. And she wouldn't have to be in the same party as Joe Biden. Why doesn't she try it?

To answer her question, that’s what a political party is for. It’s not a hobby; it’s not an association for making friends or hosting stimulating conversations and seminars; it’s not “a 30-year project”. Its purpose is to win and exercise power in the here and now. If AOC can use the Democratic party and mold the party for a new electorate - in my opinion that’s a good thing.

Winners Take All

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Winners Take All is Anand Giridharadas’ 2018 book about how “the global elite’s efforts to ‘change the world’ preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve”.

Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? His groundbreaking investigation has already forced a great, sorely needed reckoning among the world’s wealthiest and those they hover above, and it points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world — a call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.

The RSA made an animated video of a talk by Giridharadas that provides a graet summary of the central theme in five minutes — it’s a good watch/listen. Full talk is available here.