Pharaonic Megastructures

For the last week or two, I have been somewhat obsessed with the idea of pharaonic megastructures—those monster construction projects that are usually proposed by demented leaders, using public money to compensate for what is probably a personal physical inadequacy.  (A shortcoming, so to speak.)

These useless structures form some kind of contest among the various builders:  each successive pharaoh wanted the biggest pyramid, cities want the tallest building, communist dictators strive for the largest soccer stadium, simple-minded university presidents suffering from an Edifice Complex strive to build ever larger football stadiums.

It used to be a running joke that if you visited a communist country, as part of the government’s mandatory arranged tour, you would be steered to admire the new soccer stadium.  Just pick a dictator and google the name followed by the words ‘soccer stadium’.  Fidel Castro, Juan Peron, Daniel Ortega, Mao, and Hugo Chavez all have their stadiums.  Actually, at the time of his death, Hugo was building two soccer stadiums, both to be located next to his copy of Disneyland, in the appropriately named “Hugo Chavez Park”.  They might have moved the zoo there, too, if the starving people in Venezuela hadn’t been so desperately hungry that they killed and ate the animals.

As fascinating as I find every mega-rich oil country’s competing to build the world’s tallest building—a building so tall that more than half of the bottom floors are taken up by the elevators necessary to reach the top floors—what I find really interesting are the incredible mega-monster architectural boondoggles that were seriously proposed but were never actually built.

Let’s start with The Illinois.  By 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright was pushing 90, and there was growing criticism that some of the 500-odd homes he had designed were nothing more than a collection of unlivable, high-priced boxes.  Perhaps to prove his continued relevance, Wright announced plans to build the tallest building ever (even though there was no oil in Illinois).  While Chicago is the birthplace of skyscrapers, The Illinois was going to really push the envelope by rising a full mile above the city—a full 528 floors that would mean the building would have been roughly four times the height of the Empire State Building, which was at that time the tallest building in the world.

Wright wanted to build the building out of steel, meaning it might have been possible to actually construct the monster, but steel buildings sway in the wind.  At a mile above the ground, those top floors would have been tolerable only for bronc riders, circus acrobats, and astronauts.  And then, there was the problem of the elevators.  As buildings get taller, there is an increasing need for additional elevators, so that you eventually get to the point where the entire middle of the structure is full of the shafts necessary to reach the upper floors.  Today, innovative engineers are experimenting with elevator cars that move sideways into a different shaft to pass those cars that have stopped to let passengers on and off.  Back in 1956, Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a unique solution for this problem.

Wright wanted to use atomic-powered elevators that could reach 60 miles per hour.  And now you know one of the reasons The Illinois was never constructed.

Then there is the Volkshalle, the People’s Hall, designed by Adolf Hitler.  This is not exactly an obscure architectural work, but it is the one that most people have actually heard of.  In 1925, Hitler sketched out a rough drawing of a monster version of a huge hall, loosely based on Rome’s Pantheon.  After rising to power, Hitler turned the plans for the “Great Hall” over to his architect, Albert Speer.  Under Speer’s plan, the hall was to be the center point of Germania, the new, improved capitol complex of the country.

The dimensions of this proposed monster are staggering.  Over a thousand feet tall with an interior capacity so large that St. Peter’s Basilica could fit through the oculus…. Actually, the dimensions don’t really matter.  Hitler lost, the hall was never built, and as it turned out, it never could have been built.  Albert Speer was many despicable things, but he was also a good architect, and as such, he realized there was a problem:  Berlin is built on loose sand that is on top of a subterranean swamp, and it was not at all certain that a foundation could be constructed capable of supporting such a structure.

On the outskirts of Berlin, Speer conducted a test, building an ugly concrete mushroom called the Schwerbelastungskörper, that weighed over 12,600 tons and sat on a hundred square meter base.  Don’t let the name throw you—it just means “Heavy Load-Bearing Body”.  Within this ugly stump was situated a surveyor’s level aimed out a tiny window at a distant marker.  In a relatively short time, as measured by the surveyor’s level, the concrete mushroom sank five inches.  There was no way that Hitler’s much more massive Volkshalle could ever be constructed.  It is more than ironic that the only part of Hitler’s Germania that was ever constructed and is still standing is an ugly, overlooked concrete mushroom.

I’ve read all the books Albert Speer ever wrote.  He’s a great writer and his books are very good…so good that you can almost forget that he was a self-serving Nazi who used slave labor for his projects.  Nowhere in any of his books did Speer even mention this test.  Do you think Speer ever told Hitler his dream could never be built?  

The last weird megastructure that was proposed but never constructed would have been a monster statue that started out as a monument to the descamisados of Buenos Aires, the shirtless workers.  Juan Peron used the term as his own, but it originally came from Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo.  Later, Peron’s wife, Evita, became the champion for the underclass, speaking passionately for the poor, working tirelessly to be heard over the rattling of her diamond jewelry.

Evita wanted a massive statue of one of those workers, to be displayed on top of a huge plinth, the two of which together would have risen to more than 460 feet—more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.  Underneath the statue was to be the tomb of a shirtless worker.  It was never actually explained why the figure on the top of the monument was to be wearing a shirt.  Supposedly, Evita had been inspired during a visit to Paris, when she visited the tomb of Napoleon at Les Invalides.

However, the statue, El Monumento al Descamisado, underwent a sudden design change.  On July 26, 1952, Eva Peron died from uterine cancer, a diagnosis that her husband had ordered her doctors to keep from her.  On the day of her death, the Argentine Chamber of Deputies enacted a law changing the figure on top of the plinth to be that of Evita, with her coffin to be entombed in the base and the inscription on the plinth to be, “Monument to Eva Peron”.

Work had barely begun on the foundation when Juan Peron was driven from office, and he took refuge in Spain.  Evita’s coffin had been stored in a government office and the new government was scared to death that the coffin might be a rallying point for those same descamisados.  The body was quietly shipped to Milan and buried in a cemetery under the name of Maria Maggi.  

Two decades later, Peron came back into power and Evita’s coffin was disinterred and shipped to Buenos Aires.  For a while, it was kept in Peron’s living room as sort of a creepy coffee table and Juan encouraged his new wife to lie on top of the coffin to “soak up some of Evita’s energy.”  After Juan died, his newly energized wife was briefly the President of Argentina and she suggested that instead of a statue, the prior site be used for a massive mausoleum for both Perons.

Instead, the military stepped in and put the former president under house arrest. Since the military junta was still worried about the potential for Evita’s coffin being used as a rallying symbol for Peron’s supporters, it had Evita buried in a nearby cemetery, supposedly under sufficient concrete that the body might survive a direct hit from a nuclear warhead.  

So maybe, that last megastructure actually was built and Evita finally did get her massive monument.  It’s just upside down and underground.

Dining at Enema U

Let me start by giving you the best advice about eating at Enema U:  Don’t. 

If you live on campus (which is a requirement for new students), there is one large cafeteria where students are treated like cattle at feed lot shortly before the slaughter.  I can state this with some authority because Enema U is the state agricultural college and I’m an alumnus.  I am absolutely positive that the college feeds its livestock better than its students.

This is where a few of my readers will start writing me hate mail.  “When I was at college they only fed us K-Rations left over from the war with Japan….”

Whenever campus food or campus parking are mentioned, some senior faculty member immediately responds with a story about how much worse it was when he attended the University of Bedrock.  I’m sure that what the faculty member is stating is probably factually correct.  I’m also sure that such comparisons are asinine.  In a day of shrinking enrollments and rising costs, Enema U is competing for students, and any businessman will tell you that if your customer believes there is a problem, then there is a problem.

There are many universities—even state universities—that have decided that one way to attract more students is to cater to their needs and wants, and good food is definitely among the things that students desire.  A few campuses even brag about the chefs supervising their dining rooms.  I found a university that even encourages the parents of students to suggest recipes to the cafeteria staff.  

Perhaps the best review of the cafeteria is that you will almost never find anyone from the administration eating there.  I walked through the cafeteria three times this week and only once observed two faculty members sitting with some students.  

A few years ago, Enema U sent me to BYU for a week to study the language lab there—a computerized set of classrooms that aided the instruction of foreign languages.  While I slept at a nearby hotel, I soon learned to take my meals on campus.  The cafeteria was large and featured a wide variety of food from around the world, and everything I sampled was excellent, particularly the fresh sushi.  

To be fair, it is easier to get a good cup of coffee at Enema U than at BYU, where the longest cafeteria line was for the “Water Station”, located in the middle of the cafeteria.  Contrast this with Enema U, where the administration recently removed all the drinking fountains in or near the cafeteria to force students to purchase drinks.  How much additional income could the university possibly hope to make from this?  

The problem is that the university believes that students are an endless source of income, a resource that can be strip mined without consequences.  In economics, they call this static scoring, where you pretend that raising prices will have no effect on customer behavior.  Actually, raising prices and generally mistreating the consumer will make them more likely to go to a competitor that will offer them a better deal.  In the case of Enema U, there are already universities across the border in Texas offering in-state tuition to New Mexico students.

So, who is responsible for the bad dining on campus?  The university has leased our bookstore to a company that doesn’t seem to want to sell books and has leased out the cafeterias to a company that only barely knows how to produce an edible meal.  In the case of the cafeterias, they have a contract with Sodexo, a company that focuses on the business of providing food for prisons, airports, and universities.  I have no direct evidence, but I suspect the food at prisons is better than at the universities for the simple reason that students are less likely to shank you.

According to a Niche Magazine survey of university food across the United States, Sodexo ran some of the worst university cafeterias in the nation—a distinction in itself that should have been sufficient for the administration to never consider turning over cafeteria services to such a company.  Sodexo, by the way, is a French company, so the profits from selling swill to students goes back to its home office in Paris.  Somebody, get a rope!

At Enema U, if you choose to dine in the student cafeteria, the first thing you will notice is that they no longer provide trays so as to limit the amount of food you can select from the self-service buffets.  There is not a lot of variety to choose from and the limited menu repeats every three days.  The condiments are also very limited, being served out of those big pumps that always remind me of the grease gun I used to lube my pickup.  On weekends, the cafeterias open late and close early.  And since university that frequently talks about sustainability and being environmentally conscious, why are most of the meals seemed to be served on Styrofoam?  

Try to imagine you are an incoming freshman going to that cafeteria for the first time.  As you stand in the middle of the noisy cafeteria, you imagine eating the same meals every third day for the next four years.   Then try to imagine you still want to be a student at Enema U.  Yeah, sure!

Let’s Grab the Third Rail

If, like me, you are tired of both parasites, I mean parties, using Social Security as a means of scaring voters, then you probably found all the nonsense following this week’s State of the Union speech a little tiresome. 

It would probably surprise most Americans to learn that there is no legal requirement for the president to give such a speech, and from the presidency of Thomas Jefferson through that of William Howard Taft, presidents had the good sense to skip the personal address and just send Congress a letter.  The letter at right is Lincoln’s second annual message to Congress.  If letters were good enough for Lincoln, I think we might manage to survive without the annual dog and pony show of heavily scripted speeches where the spectators take alternate turns booing and cheering.

Social Security has frequently been called the “third rail of politics” because to even touch the subject invites political suicide.  This means that, instead of anyone sharing facts, you just hear sound bites, accusations, and empty politics.  I’m tired of it, so I will ignore the warnings and say the things that politicians are too afraid to explain.  

First, the information is out there for everyone to see for themselves.  Social Security has trustees, and they make an annual report that almost no one reads and even fewer politicians ever reference, mainly because the news contained in it is bad.  Really bad.  To give you an idea how bad:  some of the trustees are non-political appointees and no one has volunteered to serve lately so there are empty slots on the commission.  Evidently, everyone is afraid of the messenger being shot.  (The phrase ‘killing the messenger dates back some 2400 years to Sophocles.  The verb was changed to shooting during the days of the Wild West…If I were smart, I’d write about that instead of Social Security.)

During his address, President Biden mentioned that ‘some Republicans’ wanted Social Security to “sunset”.  To be more precise, one prominent Republican, Senator Scott of Florida, several years ago suggested that all federal legislation sunset every five years.  The word, “sunset”, in this connotation means to come up for periodic review, to possibly be revised, and to be evaluated for reauthorization.  Many federal laws are already subject to such reauthorization, including the entire Defense Department, which has to be reauthorized every two years.  Periodic review is a good idea, so…is this, perhaps, why then Senator Biden, himself, proposed in 1995 that Social Security should periodically sunset?

There are currently no serious attempts by any politician in either party to change, alter, or end Social Security.  Should such an attempt be made, any law that would harm Social Security could not possibly make it through both houses of Congress, and no president in the last half century would have signed it.

Social Security is deeply, deeply in debt.  For the last five years, it has paid out more than it took in—a condition that is likely to continue for many decades to come.  And what of the Social Security trust fund, that ‘lock box’ that Vice President Al Gore promised us would protect future recipients?  It does exist, but all it has ever held are promissory notes against a future government.  Since the very beginning, all of the incoming receipts from Social Security have been added to the regular Treasury receipts and spent the calendar year they are received.  Nothing whatsoever has been saved or invested against future needs.

You might remember that there have been three different times in the last seventy years that Presidents boasted of a budget surplus.  Well, not really.  If you earned $100,000 and only spent $90,000, you might say that you had ‘saved’ $10,000.  But, if you claimed a surplus while charging an additional $25,000 on a credit card, you would be misrepresenting your actual indebtedness.  This is similar to the so-called budget surpluses.  The United States has been steadily creating unfunded costly promises to future retirees and those unfunded obligations were not listed as part of the deficit.  

Currently, the United States has a $32 trillion deficit, but that does not include the current $68 trillion in unfunded obligations promised to future and current retirees.  (And that latter number is a conservative best case lowest possible amount: it might be as much as 50% higher).

Under current conditions and existing law, if nothing is done to provide additional funding, in the year 2034, Social Security Old Age and Survivor’s Insurance benefits will—by statute—decrease automatically by 23%.  And every year that we wait to correct this imbalance, the amount of mandatory decrease will likely grow larger.  

We have already waited far too long to correct this without feeling some real pain.  If you think that the United States could just suddenly decide to save more money up for the looming financial crises….Well, No!  To fix the problem now, it would take the equivalent of two years entire Gross Domestic Product to correct the problem.  (And remember, that just fixes Social Security—it does not pay off the national debt).

At this point, there are only a few possible solutions left to us.  Here are our remaining options:

1. Dramatically raise payroll taxes.  Currently, Social Security taxes are shared equally by both the employee and the employer.  Both pay 6.2% of wages for a total of 12.4% of wages up to $160,200.  Both the percentage and the wage limit could be raised but this would be unlikely to raise sufficient sums as employers and employees would be likely to find alternative means of compensation to avoid what they see as excessive taxation.

2. Lower the amount paid out by means testing recipients.  Those with adequate retirement income from other sources would find their Social Security benefits lowered or eliminated.  While this might provide significant savings, such a move would be the equivalent of political suicide for the party that supports it.

3. Reduce the number of recipients by raising the minimum retirement age.  This has already been done to a small extent.  People wishing to retire this year with full Social Security retirement benefits must be at least 67 years old.  This number could be raised again, and by a significant amount, but that is likely to be politically unpopular and every politician is very aware that the elderly show up at the ballot box more frequently than their grandchildren do.

4. Congress could eliminate the annual cost of living adjustment to recipients and allow inflation to slowly erode the real cost of future payments.  While this option would avoid any significant reaction from recipients in any given year, it would require Congress to actually pass legislation since the annual COLA adjustments are currently automatic.  This is unlikely since, if Congress could pass bipartisan legislation on Social Security, we wouldn’t be in this predicament to start with.  We might get a committee or another scoring by the Congressional Budget Office, but there is little chance of passing meaningful legislation since all it would take to derail the bill is for one attention-seeking Congressman (redundant) to start yelling, “They are killing senior citizens!”

5. Raise money by selling off national assets.  The federal government could have a garage sale and sell off property to raise funds.  More than half of New Mexico is owned by the government with similar amounts in Nevada and Alaska.  I suppose that it is possible, but it is unlikely that the government would raise funds this way.

That’s it.  I can’t come up with other ways to finance Social Security.  Taxing the rich wouldn’t make a dent in the debt nor would forcing employers to pay some mythical “fair share” in taxes.  What will probably happen is some combination of all five of the above.  Such measures will hurt the economy, and that hurt will be borne by everyone.  It’s a mathematical certainty.

It would be nice to end this on a high note, but that’s not going to happen.  All of the above are only about Social Security.  The future funding problems for Medicare are much, much worse.  

Causation and Correlation

There is wonderful data that definitively show that as the number of pirates decreased worldwide, global warming increased.  Obviously, the only hope for the planet is the immediate rebirth of the Pirates of the Caribbean.  Where is Johnny Depp when you need him?

Before I jump back into some of the more ludicrous examples of correlation being misinterpreted as causation, let me make an impassioned plea for at least one more pirate.  If Greenpeace were to purchase just one measly little attack submarine from the former Soviet Union and to use that sub to attack Japanese whaling vessels—while displaying a green Jolly Roger flag—I would happily send them a large donation.  

If we compare two dissimilar variables and find certain similarities, it is simply human nature to conclude that the events are linked.  This sounds preposterous, but luckily there are statistics and graphs enabling everyone to prove that anything is possible….As long as you don’t do the math (and you abandon common sense).

Humans are hard-wired to find patterns in unrelated data.  This is why we see shapes in clouds, we hear the phone ringing while we are in the shower, and we find a face on the surface of the moon.  Couple that with our tendency to only observe data that correspond to our prevailing beliefs and we are ready to jump to the wildest conclusions, all supported with “facts”.

Watch any Sunday morning news program and you’re likely to hear someone proclaim, “Correlation is not causation” in a futile attempt to win an argument.  Even though we know that simple coincidence doesn’t explain causation, this doesn’t prevent people’s continuing to make this common mistake.   Almost daily, the news is full of stories about public policy being based on the shakiest of mere coincidences.  

Take, for example, the Ivy League university professor who advised parents not to send their children to ACT and SAT prep courses because his extensive review of the data showed that the students who went through those courses averaged the lowest scores.  This noted scholar believed that these students would have scored better without the prep courses, ignoring the fact that the students who chose to take those courses were usually those who most needed them to make acceptable test scores.

If you were to graph the sale of ice cream by month and overlay the number of shark attacks per month, you will find that, in most years, there is a direct correlation.  Obviously, sharks are attacking people who taste like ice cream.  Either that or, as the temperature rises in the summer, more people eat ice cream and more people go to the beach.  Take your pick, but I prefer to believe that people who gorge on ice cream taste better.

Every year for the last century, the number of master’s degrees awarded by four-year universities is proportionate to the box office revenue of the motion picture industry.  This close relationship leads to the inevitable conclusion that the more the population is educated, the more it wants to see Rocky XI or Dumber and Dumberest.  An alternative (and ultimately, more boring) explanation is that both variables increase as the population of the country grows.  This would also explain why the annual production of nuclear power correlates closely to the number of pool drownings.

Recently, someone programmed a computer to shift through news reports to find correlated data.  Within minutes, the computer had found scores of examples and after running for several months, it had found more than 30,000 sets of correlated data, including the following:

The increase in imported lemons from Mexico inversely correlates with the drop in highway deaths.  As Facebook attracted new users, there was a matching correlation in the amount of national debt accrued by Greece.  The rise in cheese consumption exactly parallels the rise in the number of deaths caused by people getting choked in their sleep by their bedsheets.  The divorce rate in Maine mirrors the use of margarine. 

Naturally, my favorite example of correlation being mistaken for causation comes from history.  In 1830, as a cholera epidemic swept across Russia, the Tsar took extreme efforts to limit the spread of the disease.  Quarantines were imposed and the military was dispatched to the most stricken areas to impose order.  The Tsar even sent doctors to the worst afflicted areas to help the people in their suffering.

Unfortunately, the people noticed that wherever the soldiers and doctors went, the cholera epidemic was much worse.  Obviously, the soldiers and doctors were deliberately poisoning the peasants.  Desperate for the epidemic to be over—a feeling totally understandable to us now after the pandemic of 2020—the peasants launched a wave of violence that came to be called the Cholera Riots.  Mobs attacked public buildings, ransacked the state hospitals, and finally, in desperation, attacked and killed the doctors.

If this reminds you of anything recent, it is just correlation.