Author Archives: eehines

Complexifying Problems

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Kyle Smith opened his piece in The Wall Street Journal‘s Free Expression with a summary of a survey on non-pilots landing a passenger airplane in an emergency. Included in that was this bit about women’s assessment of men’s ability to do so:

To the average woman, the idea that the average man could land a complicated passenger aircraft on his own is ridiculous.

Not only for women, though, the problem with working seemingly complex problems is the mindset that blindly goes along with over-complexifying the challenge.

As an F-106 driver I once worked with said about flying his jet, “Pull the stick back to go up, push forward to go down, left-right just like driving a car.”

The airliner is just the same, for all the dials and gauges and switches and levers in the cockpit. Not easy-peasy, but not that difficult, either.

That’s the Point

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Recall that one of New York City’s Progressive-Democrat Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s goal was a plethora of city government-run grocery stores to sell groceries at “affordable prices”—which, for Mamdani, meant “cheaper than what existing grocery stores were selling.” He could mean only that, else he’d be conceding that those prices already were affordable.

The outcome of such a move is laid out in the subheadline:

His socialist supermarkets could put New York’s little grocers out of business.

That’s the point.

Like any good socialist, Mamdani wants government to control the producers. Especially if it’s the particular socialist’s government. Getting rid of the little businesses demonstrates to the larger stores and the chains—whose individual stores generally are franchises run by moms and pops or collections of them run by small- or mid-sized businesses—that they’d better kowtow to the socialist government or leave. In either case, that would increase government’s control over the remains.

Contradiction in Terms

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The lede lays it out.

State financial aid continues to expand within higher education, allowing money to go to eligible illegal immigrant students.

That’s an obvious oxymoron, or it should be. Leave aside the plain fact that folks in the US illegally are not “migrants”—those are folks who entered (and remain) our nation legally. These folks are illegal aliens.

The contradiction is magnified by this bit:

Currently, around 21 states and the District of Columbia offer in-state tuition eligibility to certain illegal immigrant students, and 18 states and DC provide access to state financial aid programs, according to Higher Ed immigration.
For example, at a University of California school, the base in-state tuition is roughly $15,000 annually. For nonresidents, the base tuition is over $31,000, which means eligible illegal immigrants are essentially receiving $16,000 a year in aid.

That understates the case: these illegal aliens (not migrants or immigrants) are receiving $31,000 per year in aid, since they are, or should be, by dint of their illegal status not at all eligible for any of this taxpayer largesse.

Illegal aliens should be eligible for none of our welfare or other financial assistance beyond the payments they’re offered for leaving voluntarily, payments consisting both of a lump sum cash payment and he preservation of a one-time ability to come back, this time doing so legally and above board.

An Upstart Election Win

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Andy Burnham, a deep back bencher in the UK’s Labour Party, won the special district election held in the dinky little district in northern England, defeating his closest competitor, a Reform candidate, by 55%-34%. This puts him in line to overtly push his challenge to the UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and at least get Starmer tossed as PM. Starmer has been insisting all along, in the face of his collapsing support and popularity, that he won’t go quietly.

Labour has long been the strongly dominant party in Makerfield, so the Reform candidate had no real chance. The Conservative candidate, who would have been the traditional strongest challenger, might as well have not bothered: he got all of 2% of the vote.

This raises a question in my pea brain. Is Nigel Farage, Reform’s leader, Machiavellian enough to get the Makerfield Reform candidate to tank the election in order to bump up Burnham’s numbers in order strengthen Burnham’s effort to get Starmer tossed in order to longer-term benefit Reform in the ensuing national election?

Inquiring minds are curious.

Driverless Trucks and Good Paying Union Jobs

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Keith Hernandez, of Teamsters Local 727, doesn’t like driverless trucks.

Driverless trucks endanger good-paying jobs and the communities that rely on them… he says. And

Automation would remove the real-world, first-hand experience and knowledge drivers gain on the road.

No, they wouldn’t and don’t. All that “real-world, first-hand experience and knowledge” is contained in the computers that operate the autonomous vehicles. Delivery drivers are my friends and sales people, as Hernandez also claims? They may well be friendly, even friends, but that’s wholly outside of and separate from their role as drivers. And, no, neither the UPS driver, nor the FedEx, nor Amazon—nor even the Door Dash driver nor the pizza delivery guy are salesmen and women. They don’t pitch me, and I wouldn’t be interested if they did.

Driverless trucks, though, to the extent they succeed in safe, efficient, speedy delivery actually will reduce costs to consumers by taking the labor cost out of the picture. And if they don’t succeed, the truck drivers will continue to thrive in their own right.

No, leave it to a union man to take this tack. Your money belongs to the union. If it can’t get your money by forcing dues payments, it’ll try to get it by featherbedding into unneeded jobs, driving up your costs.