A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
A friend’s Facebook status, accompanied by the below picture: “Good. More people SHOULD speak out about shark attack. It’s NEVER OK.”
Comments included the following:
A couple of stupid questions about this latest “bailout” of Greece…
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In September 2014 I wrote a post asking what the 2015 Apple Watch would do better than the Samsung Galaxy Gear watch from 2013.
The Apple Watch has been out for a while now. Sales are slowing down. What do readers who own the device find most useful about it?
I have an iPhone 6 Plus, which I love for the camera (see below), but I don’t feel any motivation to acquire a watch that requires its own custom charger.
“Meet the women shaping the future of the drone business” (Fortune) turns out to be the American economy in microcosm. Person 1 designs widgets. Person 2 operates them. Person 3 uses connections from former government job to lobby regarding the legality and regulation of what Persons 1 and 2 are doing. Person 4 scolds Persons 1-3 for thoughtcrime (sexism in this case).
Full post, including commentsThe U.S. has a glut of lawyers (Forbes; Boston Globe). At the same time, a group of lawyers are expanding the definition of “rape” to include, potentially, simply holding hands (nytimes).
This might not have a huge effect on the number of lawyers employed in criminal rape prosecution and defense, but should open up a lot of opportunity for civil litigation (see my review of the book Missoula for the interaction between the civil and criminal systems in this area of the law).
Can there ever be a long-term glut of lawyers if lawyers are the ones who get to decide which human activities might draw citizens into court?
Full post, including commentsYet another cherished belief under assault: Flat v. Clipless Pedals.
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Ellen Pao has been axed from her job at Reddit (timeline). She failed to collect on the $176 million that she was seeking from Kleiner Perkins. Her husband seems to be underwater financially due to legal fees associated with defending against various fraud lawsuits. Pao apparently still gets checks from Kleiner, payouts from deals made during her time as a junior partner, but presumably at age 45 she eventually needs to find a new way to make money.
If Ellen Pao actually had the superior ability as a venture capitalist that Kleiner was allegedly unable to discover, she could become the richest person in the U.S. in fairly short order, simply by backing the right startups and taking the standard 2 and 20 percent fee (presumably investors in VC funds would forgive her history of litigation if she could earn consistently high returns for them). That Pao went to work as a salaried manager of an existing company (Reddit), however, suggests that she doesn’t know how to outperform the S&P 500 (like most VCs, according to this analysis!).
As noted in this April 2015 posting, Ellen Pao could have been paid $238 million tax-free for having sex with her old boss at Kleiner. From a legal point of view, the fact that Pao is now married does not impair her ability to earn money from bearing out-of-wedlock children with (or selling abortions to) any of the high-income men that she might meet in Silicon Valley. However, at age 45 it might be tough for her to establish a profitable pregnancy (see OvaScience.com, however, for how the career opportunity of child support profiteer might be extended).
Could Pao just get another W2 job? Having embroiled Kleiner Perkins in years of litigation, being married to a man who embroiled his previous employer in race discrimination litigation, and having failed to meet expectations at Reddit, she doesn’t seem like a new employer’s likely first pick. (except maybe the New York Times? all through her Kleiner lawsuit they kept writing about how wonderfully qualified Pao was; the Times has a digital division and now they can use their editorial insights about how exceptional Pao’s performance was at Kleiner to earn some superior profits by hiring Pao for themselves)
One idea would be for Pao to write a book. It seems that at least a large fraction of the New York Times readership would want to read it. “It’s Silicon Valley 2, Ellen Pao 0: Fighter of Sexism Is Out at Reddit” is a July 10, 2015 NYT story that describes Pao as “a hero to many.” Note how the Times editors were confident that a jury in the nation’s most liberal plaintiff-friendly jurisdiction got it wrong. After hearing weeks of evidence, the jury decided that sexism was not the reason that the partners (both male and female) of Kleiner decided not to promote Pao. But, according to the plain words of the headline, there must have been sexism blocking Pao’s career there because that’s what she was fighting against (not “Phantom Sexism” or “Alleged but Disproven Sexism”).
The market for books by female managers at Silicon Valley companies has been proven out by Sheryl Sandberg (see my review of Lean In). By using a ghostwriter, Sandberg demonstrated that Pao wouldn’t even have to do the wordsmithing in order to enjoy an income as an author. That does leave an open question… what should Ellen Pao’s book be called? And what would be a good outline of content?
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“I’m a female Silicon Valley executive who worked with Ellen at Microsoft. Ellen should look for a job in academics because that is her core competency. Working in the business world, not so much. Her story is illustrative of a commonly-held misconception among some that great academic success always translates into great success in other areas. Both Ellen and her employers have bought into this fallacy with disastrous results: employers have continued to hire her for jobs with increasing responsibility, wrongly hoping that she will one day live up to the promise shown at Princeton and Harvard, only to be disappointed; and, Ellen still can’t accept that she can’t repeat her academic success in the business world, which has caused her to believe that her failure is the result of discrimination.”
Full post, including comments“Ellen Pao encapsulates the myth of elites in America. Silicon Valley and Wall Street both suffer from tautological thinking where the best are the best. However again and again we see the mediocrity of our “elite” schools. (See: Bush, G.W.; also Summers, Larry)
Ellen Pao represents entitlement of the elites personified, a sort of Peter Principle for the well heeled: they keep getting promoted, regardless of their incompetence, because of old school ties. And yet America was and is built by the Scrappy Classes, not the country club set looking to get their kids into the Ivies, Stanford, or Duke.”
Back in February 2013, following an engine fire aboard the ship, I proposed that the Carnival Triumph be turned into a Cuban medical shuttle. I wrote a follow-up in December 2014. Now it seems that my wildest dreams are coming true. Carnival will be sailing to Cuba starting in May 2016 (USA Today), but with a do-gooder rather than a medical theme. The WSJ says that “Carnival’s cruisers will need to spend eight hours a day on the ground in Cuba, per U.S. regulations…”
Have any readers actually been to Cuba on one of these approved cultural exchange tours? What was it like? How were the accommodations? Would you rather have been on a Carnival ship for sleeping and meals?
Full post, including commentsFor about 15 years I have been arguing that professors shouldn’t grade their own students (see “Simple Change 1” in “Universities and Economic Growth” from 2009, for example). The original idea was to fight against the natural corruption of professors overestimating their own efficacy as teachers.
Now that the U.S. has entered the universal Age of Victimhood, at least on campus, this article from The Nation gives some more weight to my idea:
Last fall, David Samuel Levinson, the author, most recently, of the literary thriller Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence, taught a course called “Introduction to Fiction” at Emory University, part of a two-year fellowship he’d been awarded there. Blunt and scabrous, he prides himself on being frank with his students. “My class is like a truth-telling, soothsaying class, and I tell them no one is going to talk to you like this, you will never have another class like this,” he says.
One student, he says, a freshman woman, sat besides him throughout the course, actively participating. At the end of the semester, he gave her a B+, because, although she worked hard, her writing wasn’t great. “They don’t really understand that they can do all of the work, and turn in perfectly typed up, typo-free papers and stories, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to get an A, because quality matters, talent matters,” he says.
While he was on vacation over winter break, he got a Facebook message from her. He ignored it, figuring it was a complaint about her grade. She started sending him imploring e-mails asking him to reconsider her B+. Finally, he says, he got an e-mail from the director of his program saying, “You need to take care of this. You don’t want this to escalate.”
The student, he learned, was threatening to bring him up on sexual harassment charges. …
If any two people who interact face-to-face on a university campus can bring career-ending charges, it doesn’t seem as though there is any way for traditional (in the U.S.; many other countries use impartially administered exams) grading to work.
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Full post, including comments“The Struggle for Fairness for Transgender Workers” is an article by the New York Times editorial board, which has chosen not to hire any transgender workers, about how other employers should be forced to hire such workers. It is unclear why the business folks at the Times haven’t been attracted by the opportunity to profit by hiring workers that no other employers (because of their deep-seated prejudices that the non-transgendered staff at the NYT has ferreted out) are willing to hire. If the Times is correct one would think that a business with a 100% transgender workforce would have remarkably low labor costs.
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