SAT Success; Saving Time At The Gate May 10, 2017May 10, 2017 Guess what? One of New York’s Success Academy public schools now has an 11th grade whose students have just taken their SATs. These are kids from tough New York City neighborhoods, chosen by lottery. Their mean SAT score was 1230! None scored below 1000; one hit 1440. That put the class in the 84th percentile nationally and in the 94th for students of color. They’ve won more than $100,000 in scholarship money for summer programs at places that include MIT, Cornell, and USC. Statewide in 2016, these 41 charters — up from one in 2006 when I first started writing about them, now serving 14,000 kids! — scored in the top 1% in math, 2% in English, and 5% in science. All five of the top five schools in math (out of thousands) were Success Academy schools. Two of the top five in English. Their ELA students (English as a second language) and their students with disabilities outperformed native English speakers and students without disabilities. Success Academy — an entirely nonprofit operation which costs New York City not a dime more than any of its other public schools — would like nothing better than to be replicated. They welcome other schools and school systems around the country to steal their methods. Let’s make every kid a success. Think how this would impact the cycle of poverty and the nation’s long-term well-being. (And yes: some teachers do burn out and move on to easier assignments. So what? We should honor them for their service and they should be hugely proud of the impact they had. What matters more than the teachers are the kids — if only because there are so many more students than teachers — a dozen or more to one — because and the leverage is so much greater when you’re six than when you’re 26.) WheelTug / Borealis enthusiasts: Did you happen to catch “The correlation between airline ground time and profits“? It appears that for every minute an airline saves; operating margins increase 0.43% in Europe. If that’s true, once WheelTug is cutting gate time by 20 minutes a flight (by not having to wait for a tug to back out; by not having to pad the schedule with extra time in case the tug is late; by being able to board and deplane from both front AND rear doors), an airline currently operating at a 5% margin (say) might one day operate at a 13.6% margin — nearly triple the profit. Except that WheelTug’s letters of intent with 20+ airlines call for annual lease payments of half the savings. And, of course, it will never be as simple as — bang, you have WheelTug and then, bang, all the savings fall into place the next day. Still miles and miles to go before we reap. If ever. But five years from now? Let alone 10? Why should we passengers have to waste 20 minutes a flight? Especially those awful minutes once we’ve landed but are stuck in 28E and have to wait — and wait — instead of just walking out the rear door. The FAA pre-certification agreement has been signed; the work toward full approval continues; IATA’s second E-Taxi Conference convenes in Singapore this month; WheelTug parent Borealis remains (in my view) a terrific lottery ticket, to be purchased only with money you can truly afford to lose (and only with “limit” orders, lest your 500-share buy order double the price of the stock).
Our 2020 Bench May 9, 2017 A long way off, to be sure — and who knows? But add Connecticut’s junior senator, Chris Murphy, to your list. I had been a supporter even before reading this — Chris Murphy Looks — and Tweets — Like a Man Running For President — but have now begun retweeting him.
Mother’s Day Is Sunday May 8, 2017May 5, 2017 So how about giving her the gift of mental acuity? Help take 10 years off her mental age and avoid dementia? If you give your mom a year of BrainHQ you’ll get — as a bonus — a free year yourself! (Sure, you’re just 39 — but so is Tom Brady, and he swears by it.) “And wait — there’s more!” Take advantage of this special Mother’s Day offer and get, also, a free download of Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life by much-awarded BrainHQ inventor Michael Merzenich. (“What if you had the power to change your brain for the better? In Soft-Wired, Dr. Michael Merzenich–a world authority on brain plasticity–explains how the brain rewires itself across the lifespan, and how you can take control of that process to improve your life. In addition to fascinating descriptions of how your brain has produced your unique memories, skills, quirks, and emotions, Soft-Wired offers sound advice for evaluating your brain and gives clear, specific, scientifically proven guidance for how to rejuvenate, remodel, and reshape your brain to improve it at any age.”) You can send Mom the gift electronically or print out a certificate to deliver in person. If she does the BrainHQ exercises an hour a week for ten weeks this year — and four more hours four years from now — a 10-year study of 2,800 subjects suggests she’ll have a 48% lower likelihood of developing dementia than if she just did crossword puzzles. And (as I’ve written before, being an enthusiastic shareholder in this enterprise): imagine how low that risk would fall if she did, say, 10 hours a year of these exercises every year. By 90%? Not a bad gift for a holiday whose commercialization its founder found appalling. Or you could just give her chocolates.
Why Is This Complicated? May 5, 2017May 5, 2017 Obamacare takes billions from the wealthy to subsidize health care for the rest of us. The just-passed Republican bill takes those billions away from health care and gives it back to the wealthy. It’s that simple. If wealth for the wealthy trumps health care for the rest of us, yesterday’s vote was, as the Republicans argue, a great achievement. Here are 10 ways it breaks their promises and could affect you personally. Trump got elected saying he would give “everybody” “great health care” at “a tiny fraction of the cost.” But how will he do it? By increasing the number of doctors and nurses but paying them just a “tiny fraction” of what we do now? By switching to a single-payer system modeled after those in the rest of the civilized world? That would actually be a great step forward, but it’s clearly not what he has in mind. He has nothing in mind except to make wild promises that play on people’s frustrations and naivete. In Rare Unity, Hospitals, Doctors and Insurers Criticize Health Bill. Have a great weekend.
Billy Kimmel May 4, 2017May 3, 2017 Did you see where Jimmy Kimmel spoke movingly about his newborn son? And how health care for children should transcend partisan politics? Whether or not you take 13 minutes to watch on YouTube, as more than 7 million others have . . . . . . take one minute to click “Jimmy Kimmel Really Changed A Lot Of Minds In The Fox Audience (No, He Didn’t)” and read the comments. E.g.: Nobody wants to hear about your kid. Millions are going through the same thing stuck with the Obamacrap that you support. Cry them a river. David Zippel: “Even though I am a realist, it shocked me. But then I remembered the gay veteran who asked a question about health insurance at a Republican Presidential primary Q&A and some in the crowd shouting ‘Let him die.'” Wanted: a kinder, gentler nation. Less, “Let him die!” or “Lock her up!” More, “Blessed are the meek.”
Musk See TV May 2, 2017 His interview was called “The Future We’re Building — And Boring.” I referred to a lot of it yesterday, but now here it is. So exciting! (Separately, I ran into a friend last night who knows Elon’s mother. She kept not accepting a free Tesla — she didn’t want to waste his money — until finally, apparently, after years driving around in some ratty old Chevy or something, he said, “Mom, you’re embarrassing me. You have to drive one of my cars.” So she relented.) Oh! And did you watch Al Gore’s trailer? When I put something in bold print, that means you have to do it. It’s a law. And have you shared the Ted Halstead’s idea for unlocking the climate puzzle — the carbon dividend we should all be getting? C’mon, people — we have a planet to save!
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power Unlocking The Climate Puzzle April 30, 2017May 3, 2017 Al Gore was at TED. We’re making progress. Solar’s now cheaper than coal in some places — and continuing to fall. It’s too late to avoid disaster: everything from more powerful storms to longer Zika transmission windows. Kiss low-lying areas good-bye. But even Republican senators have told Al privately they’re on the verge of publicly acknowledging the crisis and joining efforts to confront it. Imagine that! Pre-order An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power — here. Watch the trailer here. Seriously: watch the trailer here. Within a few decades, why would anyone build a house without a solar roof? Or replace an old one with one that fails to generate electricity? (Another advantage: solar roofs won’t leak or need replacing.) Calculate your current solar economics here. Fueling cars from the sun — via your roof — is around the corner. Gas stations are the Blockbuster Videos of the future. Today’s five-year-olds may never need one — or a driver’s license. If they grow up owning cars at all, those cars will be (a) self-driving; (b) electric; (c) able to generate revenue from those who won’t bother owning one. In a few years, you’ll have your car drive you to work and then — if you choose — send it off to make money driving others. The choice will be yours: share it with no one; with friends and family; with anyone willing to pay when you don’t need it. Self-driving technology will put millions out of work — truck drivers, cab drivers, Uber and Lyft drivers, parking lot attendants, DMV clerks . . . . . . and it will avoid millions of accidents, saving tens of thousands of lives each year in the U.S. alone — and putting yet more people out of work: insurance agents, claims adjusters, emergency room attendants. Climate change could increase cloud cover, but that (we learned from the cloudologist who immediately followed the glaciologist) works both ways. Increased low-altitude clouds would cool us by their shade, but increased high-altitude clouds could warm the planet even more. Spewing chalk dust into the upper atmosphere could deflect enough sunlight to cool Earth back to pre-industrial levels — a single fire hose spewing nonstop would provide sufficient volume, this inventor told us, and chalk dust is so safe we put it in baby food — but hang on, we were assured by everyone else: this is a terrible idea. It would be used to treat the symptoms of our problem, not the problem itself; would do nothing about the acidification of our oceans; could affect things that rely on traditional levels of sunlight — like plants. No, Greenland and pretty much everything else is melting; the 16 hottest years on record have occurred in the last 17 years; we need to stop spewing billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. Enter Ted Halstead, who unlocked the climate puzzle — a plan fore a gradually rising carbon tax, every penny of which would be remitted in dividends each year to every adult American, 70% of whom (especially the least affluent) would come out ahead and should thus want to vote for politicians who favor it. (Bonus: we save our planet for future generations, but that’s a harder sell.) . . . The carbon tax would be collected at the refinery or at the first point that fossil fuels enter the economy—typically the mine, well or port—and then passed on to consumers in the form of, for instance, higher gasoline prices, airfare, and electricity bills (depending on your source of power). If your carbon footprint were precisely at the nation’s median, you would get back in dividends essentially the same amount as your costs increase. But since the wealthy have larger carbon footprints on account of their more lavish lifestyles, the majority would come out ahead, even before they start altering their behavior. [But] . . . wouldn’t such a system encourage manufacturing companies and the jobs they provide to move to another jurisdiction? The answer . . . is border adjustments, levied on the carbon content of imports from countries with no or lesser carbon pricing. . . . . . . Suppose the United States puts such a system in place: any products it imports from Europe or China would be subject to border adjustment taxes, in turn distributed to all Americans via dividends. The European and Chinese publics would soon realize that they are being disadvantaged by such a system, as the dividends that should be going to them are in fact going to Americans. The obvious cure is to push for similar legislation in their own lands. Prominent Republicans back this plan — he flashed several faces up on the screen — George Schultz! James Baker! — and this is absolutely something the world should do — should have begun 30 years ago. Start pushing it. Pre-order Al’s book. And seriously: watch the trailer here. This is all so important, I may take the rest of the week off.
Saving The Trumps Billions April 27, 2017 By eliminating the alternative minimum tax, Trump’s tax plan would have saved him 85% of the federal income tax he paid in 2005. By eliminating the estate tax (if his estate is truly worth $10 billion), it will save his heirs $4.5 billion. There are probably other ways Trump would benefit from his plan, but we can’t know because — remarkably — his 2015 tax returns were selected for audit within seconds of filing. All his tax returns are under audit, always. No audit has ever been completed on any year of his taxes, ever. And that — along with the unprecedented crowds at his inauguration and the fact that, frankly, we’ve been winning so much we’re actually tired of winning — is why his tax plan makes so much sense. If rich people and corporations pay less tax, we’ll have the money to rebuild our military, renew our infrastructure, and assure everyone gets better health care at lower cost. Herewith, Nick Kristof’s less sarcastic analysis. TED is inspiring. It confirms (for me, at least) that these next few decades will be either the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning for our species. Do we hurtle off the rails? Or do we successfully harness the technological explosion that will make virtually anything possible? We have a president excited by the future of coal.
I’m At TED April 26, 2017April 26, 2017 So I’m bursting with things to share. (We had the Pope yesterday!* I rode a lithium-battery-powered bike!) Mainly, from yesterday: the future of robots and artificial intelligence — and the need for an incentives-enhanced universal guaranteed income. But let’s start with Dollar Street: a website that sent photographers to 240 homes in 46 countries to document 135 different items — their beds, their toys, their toilets — that shows how similarly people at similar income levels live all over the globe. I.e., yes, you live in Ohio or Zimbabwe, but you also live at a particular income level. Take the tour. Everyone needs to eat, sleep and pee. We all have the same needs, but we can afford different solutions. Select from 100 topics. The everyday life looks surprisingly similar for people on the same income level across cultures and continents. More tomorrow — or soon. TED talks are free. Ideas worth spreading. *Via Satellite, but still.