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Rick Kinnaird

Archives for October 2021

Day 276 – Pruitt-Igoe, The 719, The Mann Gulch Fire

October 21, 2021 by Rick Kinnaird 3 Comments

The House in Maine

Thursday October 21, 2021

It popped into my head – Pruitt-Igoe. It’s been fifty years since I thought about it.

I was reading Fiona Hill’s book. I’m getting near the end of her book. It’s not a book I can read quickly. I need to think about the facts and the ideas she presents. Last night I read that the wealth of the richest Americans increased during the pandemic by fifty percent to a little over 4.5 trillion dollars. This group is made up of 719 people. That’s and average of about Seven billion per person.

I also read that something like 87% of the stocks are owned by a tiny sliver of people.

Also in the news was the redistricting in Texas that allows 40% of their population to have influence over 60% of the government seats. I don’t think I have to tell you who that group is. Asians, who make up 5% of Texas’ population will have no representation. The list goes on.

Several states have now passed laws that say the legislatures can select the electors to go to the counting of votes of the Electoral College – regardless of how the people of the state voted. In other words, they can overturn the will of the people in the legislature.

Then I thought of Norman Maclean’s book about the Mann Gulch Fire. It was a grass fire. Smoke jumpers had parachuted into the Mann Gulch to set up a line to stop the fire’s advance. They saw it burning below them. They began their work. The fire advanced. 

Grass fires are different than forest fires. They are swift. They are hot. They are gone. 

I knew how you defend against being consumed by such a fire. You start another fire and as it begins to spread you step into the charred remains. Then when the larger fire comes it will move around you because there is no fuel for it to burn where you are. 

Apparently, most of the smoke jumpers did not know this technique. They tried to out run the fire. One or two made it to the rocky draw. Most did not. Only the supervisor survived by lighting a second fire. He tried to get his men to listen, but it was too late. The fire was so close they couldn’t hear him. Fear had overwhelmed them. The fire was roaring and the noise of it and their own fear made it impossible to listen. They ran. They died. He lit a secondary fire and got inside the circle just in time. He laid on the ground face down as the fire’s rushing wind picked his body up and slammed it to the gourd three times. Then it was over. All that was left were charred remains.

Fiona Hill talks about how in Britain they are separated subtlety by class. How the wealthy shipbuilders of a previous century had whipped up racial fears and had workers set upon each other. They were told and believed that immigrants were taking their jobs. Hill points out that in the U.S. the divides are more obvious and stricter. In both the U.S. and Britain the idea of White Supremacy becomes popular in desperate times. Somehow people are told they are being cheeated, not given their due, and it’s another group’s fault. Hill points out that if you are working class your problems are the same. It’s not race; it’s class.

That’s when Pruitt-Igoe popped into my head. 

Pruitt-Igoe was a high-rise housing development in St Louis. Built in 1954 to house low income (ie black) people, it was touted as – all, all kinds of things. By the 1970s it was crime ridden, vandalized and dangerous. It was blown up in 1972. The area was fenced off and it sits now as a forest inside of St. Louis.

At the time of its implosion I was studying race relations. Pruitt -Igoe came up, as did the Moynihan Report, as did mention of a study whose name I wish I could remember. That study outlined the signs of a neighborhood in decline. There were seven or ten steps to the decline and they weren’t necessarily obvious – at first. 

What were the causes of racial problems? What were the solutions?

First and foremost – it was not really a problem of race. Race was a mask, class was the problem. 

What defines a class of people? Commonly held values. 

In the case of the working class, if they can be divided against themselves then they will oppress each other and the wealthier class can exploit them. Ta-dah! 

In psychology terms, as Eric Berne, Author of “Games People Play” put it “Let’s you and him fight.” 

Hill points out how the working class in Britain were set upon each other dividing by immigrant versus more established. In America, it was easier to do it by race.

In America, I learned that back in the 1970s most black people were lower class and therefore if you saw a black person you could assume they were lower class and you did this unconsciously.

That’s not to say you couldn’t make exceptions. That’s the nature of prejudice. “Oh, he’s  different than them.” This was applied to prominent black actors and singers like: Sidney Poitier, Samy Davis Jr, and Harry Belafonte.  

What was the solution to racial discrimination? The only thing that had been shown to work was putting people on different sides in the same job working shoulder to shoulder. I have never been in combat, but when my son was a young teen he got into paintball, We went to weekend war-games. I gotta tell you, when the stuff is flying you don’t really care what color the person next to you is as long as they have your back.

The other thing that helps, that elevates the situation is education. Education is the ticket out of poverty. Hill points out that if one is desperately poor they need a lot of help. She didn’t go to one school because her parents could not afford the school uniform.

During the pandemic many childcare and after school programs shut down. What’s a working parent to do? The burden falls mainly to women and they were forced to leave the work force in droves. So it’s not a matter of “they don’t want to work anymore,” but rather how can they? “Who’s going to take care of my kids?” Certainly not the Reagan Thatcher Republicans.

I see a fire on the horizon. It used to be a small orange line. It was far away. “It will burn itself out,” I told myself. “It will go away.” 

It hasn’t, and, I fear, it won’t.

We don’t have much time. It may be too late. Can we take away the fuel that feeds this fire? Can we stop it? Can it be contained or is it too late?

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Day 275 – Poverty

October 20, 2021 by Rick Kinnaird 2 Comments

Say No to Pot

Wednesday October 20, 2021

I am reading Fiona Hill’s book “There Is Nothing For You Here.”

The title of which comes from her father’s plea for her about living in coal country in northern England.

He wanted her to get out if she could. However, you have to understand the extreme poverty there. She was so poor that when she got a full scholarship to a school she couldn’t go because her parents could not afford to buy her a school uniform. That’s poor. 

What Hill points out is that where she came from is similar to the Rust Belt in the U.S. and rural Russia. When you are that poor there is no “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” because there are no bootstraps. What Thatcher and Reagan and Yeltsin in Russia did not understand was this basic fact. FDR did. That’s why rural electrification of the U.S. had to be done by the government. Actually, one could make the case that Roosevelt didn’t get it so much as his Secretary of Labor Perkins did, and his wife Eleanor who went out and visited those poor places.

We now face a similar problem to what FDR faced – infrastructure. Not roads and bridges as much as cell phone service and wi-fi. If you don’t have those services in you area you are in a communication desert. Who is going to provide those services to rural America? The only real solution is for the government to step in and do it. You can jump up and down and yell “Socialism” if you like but I’ve noticed those who are doing the yelling are also well off and usually from the help of their government.

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Day 269 – Moderna’s Blip and Grinding Poverty

October 14, 2021 by Rick Kinnaird Leave a Comment

Thursday October 14, 2021

I haven’t been writing much in the screeds because it’s more of the same and I’ve been trying to do some other things. However, the recent behavior of Moderna’s stock price has been intriguing to me. This is an instance where a stock took a huge plunge and I could see a reason for it, albeit not related to the company at all.

Hello

The day after Merck announced they had a pill for people who got Covid and it would lessen the symptoms Moderna went down. It had been in the mid 400s, now it was in the low 330s. I bought some more. Then it went lower still the next day. I bought some more. Now it is turning around. It is in the low teens of 300. 

What caused this? As far as I can tell people dumped because of Merck’s announcement. It’s not often that I have seen a direct cause and effect on a stock price.

Now, Moderna had said they may have a vaccine for HIV. The stock hasn’t moved on that announcement.

There is also talk that you may not need a booster if you got Moderna’s double shot. As far as I can tell the FDA is still considering. They have said if you are in certain risk groups get the booster. 

When I went to Moderna’s website they said they are setting up facilities in Africa to be able to produce five hundred million shots a year ( I think that was the number ). 

From what I have gleaned, everything about Moderna is positive. An outside influence caused people to dump, and this has created a huge opportunity. 

The brings me to one of my tenets of investing, which I’ll call “accepting reality.”

Yes, you’d like the stock at 165 when I first suggested it. (Or later at 110 and then 93) Or wouldn’t we all have liked it at 20? Sure. But that’s not reality. The reality is it was 450 and now it’s 312, do you want it?

No one can tell you what it will do.

Most systems for buying stocks are based on history, not current events. The ones that look to the future have to guess.

What’s your guess? Will the overwhelming positive evidence cause the stock to go back up?

What?

In two weeks Moderna will announce its earnings for the quarter. This is always an interesting exercise for any company. Financial people who follow a company make estimates. Before the actual earnings meeting there may be another meeting where they “ask for guidance.” Interestingly, if a company has boffo numbers but they don’t meet the estimates of the experts the stock can go down. This to me makes no sense, but then again much of what happens in the stock market doesn’t make sense.

Moving on to Southwest Airlines. Did I say I was going to write about this? No? Huh. Okay, I saw an explanation that made sense to me as to what happened. This goes back to my time at Cray in the 1980s. We were trying to sell a computer to American Airlines. It cost $35 million. That’s before peripherals.  Airlines have two big computational bottlenecks. One is figuring out where you want your planes and when you want them there. The other is making sure you have crews that know the plane at that location and that they have enough hours left in their monthly allotment and enough rest in between their last flight. That crew stuff is strictly controlled by the FAA. Apparently, the government doesn’t want an overworked exhausted pilot flying a plane. (Why aren’t there any cries about “Freedom!” Around this issue? All I can say is, “Thank god there aren’t.”)

Because the scheduling was so intensive computationally American only ran the scheduling program once a month. If we could show them that a Cray could run the program more often and in so doing reap even a small benefit on fuel savings (I think the number was .2% of fuel costs) American could pay for the computer in one year. 

It turns out that Southwest run a direct route system. That means they fly from point A to B and don’t go through a hub. Many airlines use a hub and spoke system. Think Delta in Atlanta or United in Dallas and Chicago. Southwest has a lot of flights to Florida. Florida got hit with a series of thunderstorms that knocked out their airports for several hours. This caused Southwest to delay flights. Those planes were scheduled to make other flights. Those other flights had to be cancelled and the result was a rolling set of delays. A hub and spoke system would have helped them recover because all the flights would have come into a central area where crews and planes could have been shuffled around.

I know what you are asking, Did we sell American that Cray? No. We had optimized their program. It was flying. Then one of their people said all our answers were wrong. I kiddingly asked if they wanted speed or accuracy. They decided they didn’t want to spend the money at that time. Bummer.

Oh Grinding Poverty. That was it. I’m reading Fiona Hill’s book “There’s Nothing For You Here.” Her dad’s comment about living in coal country in northern England is the title of the book. He wanted his daughter to get out if she could. Her parents had to tell her at one point that they couldn’t afford to send her to a school where all the tuition and books were paid for because they couldn’t afford to buy the school uniform. 

It’s hard to imagine but Hill makes the point over and over again in different ways that when you are that poor even the smallest obstacle is insurmountable. Reagan and Thatcher advocated that if you worked hard you could make it out. Hill points out in example after example that is not the case. When major industries in a one company town shut down the people can’t just move on. They are stuck. 

Without help, from someone, anyone, or anything (the government? Socialism!) conditions will not get better for those folks. Period.

PS Neighborhood Halloween Preparations

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Rick Kinnaird
I’m Rick Kinnaird, a writer of fictional adventure and travel. That means I write stories about things that never happened in places I’ve never been. This way facts don’t get in the way.

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