Month: October 2015

“The Anti-Redskin” is an interesting Atlantic Magazine article on Ray Halbritter, the self-described “Indian the white man doesn’t want to see.” For students of American cronyism there are some interesting elements:

Halbritter was the sort of adversary the Redskins had never seen before: a leader of an American Indian tribe, with media chops, A-list political ties (he sat beside Obama at a White House event in 2013 and hosted a golf fund-raiser for John Boehner this August), and a bankroll big enough to keep the NFL’s third-most-valuable franchise under a blistering spotlight.

The Turning Stone Resort Casino, a ribbon of white stone and dark glass located half an hour east of Syracuse, is one of the top-grossing American Indian casinos, raking in well over $200 million a year in revenue from its slot machines, golf courses, and hotel rooms.

… The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, in turn, revoked his status as the tribe’s federally recognized representative. Halbritter drew on his ties with New York politicians; the bureau reversed its decision within 24 hours.

Six months before the showdown, Halbritter had inked a sweetheart deal with then–Governor Mario Cuomo to open Turning Stone. It was the first legal casino in New York State, and it didn’t have to share a cent of gaming revenue with any government. The deal’s generous terms, along with the tribe’s lawsuits—which sought to reclaim land from 20,000 property owners, many of them local homeowners—poisoned relations between the cash-swamped casino and the struggling rural communities around it.

What puzzles me about the article is how Dan Snyder and the Redskins are managing to resist the trend toward comparative victimhood that has swept America. Are people so busy worrying about gender discrimination and Ellen Pao that they don’t have time anymore to care about the hurt feelings of Indians?

Readers: What’s your best guess as to whether and/or for how long the football team in D.C. can continue to be “the Redskins”?

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I was enthusiastic about buying a Microsoft Surface Pro 4. My 1993 prediction of the death of Microsoft Office, in favor of collaborative browser-based apps, has stubbornly failed to come true. The Surface seems like a good travel companion. I can look at documents that are stored in DropBox and edit them with Office and then email them off to patent litigators (where my carefully crafted prose will ultimately be shredded 🙁 ). My DropBox plan is 1 TB. This seems to hold my current expert witness work plus a year of photos and videos (the rest to be archived on a 6 TB mechanical hard drive on my desktop computer, then backed up via CrashPlan).

One would think that the 1 TB of SSD is the most expensive requirement, with a Crucial driveretailing for $315 (though perhaps Microsoft pays less as a wholesale customer?). How much does the $315 of SSD pump up the price of a $900 Surface Pro 4? It is available only with a Core i7 CPU, which I don’t need, and 16 GB of RAM ($80 at retail?), which I do need, for a total of… $2,700 (to add insult to injury, it is not even available for pre-order in this configuration). This is more than I paid for my monster desktop computer, which includes a 1 TB SDD, a 6 TB mechanical hard drive, and 32 GB of RAM.

Who loves the Surface and wants to tell me that it is worth $2,700? And how is that keyboard? Could one type out the Great American Novel on it?

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The best answer for “how risky is that?” is generally “how much would it cost to insure against that?” Now Zurich, the Swiss insurance company founded in 1872, is saying that the cost of securing the Internet will exceed the benefits of connectivity by 2019: report.

Related:

• unemployed = 21st century draft horse?

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TIME magazine recently ran “Polygamy Is Natural For Some People,” an essay advocating that polygamous marriages be recognized in the U.S.:

As far as my second wife and I are concerned, we’re married. But changing the law would afford her legal recognition and protection.

Legalizing polygamy actually empowers women. … If such relationships were legally binding, all spouses would be protected and have an equitable stake in the common property.

… Currently, some polygamists abuse the system by putting their additional wives on welfare. States only recognize one spouse in marriage, therefore making “single mothers” out of subsequent wives. Legalizing polygamy would also help neutralize some of the social stigma. People tend to confuse legality with morality. Same-sex marriage was illegal in many states until this summer. Interracial marriage used to be illegal. The laws only changed because people stepped forward.

Monogamy is natural to many. Polygamy is just more natural to us, and I’m fighting for our rights as a family.

Readers: Have you seen other examples of mainstream publications running advocacy pieces for polygamy?

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I strolled down to the MIT Sailing Pavilion to get a few late afternoon photos and discovered that MIT now requires students to wear helmets:

 

(wind at nearby Logan airport was reported at 6 knots)

Separately, what about the Hovding airbag helmet for bicycling? Annoying to have to charge it every 10 hours but it seems like a better idea than conventional bike helmets.

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Some of my women friends on Facebook have been promoting “Michelle Obama Dropped Some Wisdom Every Young Girl Should Hear,” a story in which America’s First Lady gives the following advice:

If I had worried about who liked me and who thought I was cute when I was your age, I wouldn’t be married to the president of the United States today.

Is there a way to read this other than “Getting an education was primarily important because it enabled me to marry a richer and more powerful husband”? And, if not, why are women who style themselves as feminists (a version of feminism that is rather evolved from the 1970s “equality feminism” because many of those who liked this on Facebook have themselves chosen to marry high-income men and withdraw from the workforce) enthusiastic about this statement?

Related:

• section on modern ways to interpret “feminism” in our Rationale chapter

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Here’s an obituary from my suburb’s local newspaper: Peggy Schmertzler. I think that, in one life, it shows the fragmentation of family that has occurred in the U.S. due to a variety of technical and social forces.

The subject was born in 1931 and grew up in Baltimore. She moved to Boston to attend college and settled in a suburb with her lawyer-husband, thus severing her daily ties with her parents and any extended family in Baltimore.

Following a divorce lawsuit (the obit doesn’t say who sued whom, but statistically it is generally the woman who decides to sue (some Massachusetts data)), she moved to Cambridge, thus severing her daily ties with her husband and, presumably, former neighbors.

Her children then scattered to New Zealand, California, and a Boston suburb, thus severing their daily ties to each other and, for the non-Boston-area kids, eliminating the possibility of grandchildren having daily ties with this grandmother.

I’ve written before about how I think one reason that Mexicans might be happier than Americans, adjusted for income, is the central nature of Mexico. People either stay in their hometowns or move to Mexico City, but they don’t generally keep moving after that.

[Separately, the obituary shows how well-educated Americans are pulled into low-productivity-growth non-profit activities. Ms. Schmertzler “worked for the next 15 years in the nonprofit sector” and put 26 years of effort and time into “the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard.” (The GDP per capita of China grew from less than $2,000 per person to more than $8,000 per person during the same time period.)]

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“More grads choose industry over PhDs: Survey data reveal decade-long trend away from graduate school” is a story from MIT’s student newspaper.

I ran into a faculty member who is doing research for the federal government on where to fund PhDs. “We didn’t used to have postdocs in engineering,” he said. “But now MIT has more than one postdoc per faculty member. There are nowhere near enough assistant professorships for all of the PhDs that we are generating. So we’re exploiting them by paying them $50,000 per year.” (Paying a market-clearing wage is apparently now generally accepted as “exploitation.”)

Related:

• Women in science

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“U.S. Will Accept More Refugees as Crisis Grows” (nytimes) says ” The Obama administration will increase the number of worldwide refugees the United States accepts each year to 100,000 by 2017.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows a decline in the labor force participation rate from 66 percent in 2009 to 62.5 percent today (chart). In other words, every year a smaller percentage of adult Americans are working.

Minimum wages are rising all over the country.

There are a variety of legal attacks on hiring people as contractors (potentially working out to below minimum wage) rather than as W-2 employees.

What will immigrants who are not selected for English fluency, education, job skills, or youth do once they arrive? If they are legal immigrants, especially if they have children, they will presumably eventually be eligible for the full range of welfare benefits, e.g., a taxpayer-funded house, taxpayer-funded health care, taxpayer-funded food, etc. According to this page, immigrants both legal and illegal collected welfare at a 57-percent rate back in 2009 (compared to 39 percent for native-born households with children; soon the majority of us will be dependents of the Great Father in Washington!). The same page, however, says that 95 percent of immigrant households in 2009 had at least one worker.

The U.S. has been successful at absorbing immigrants, but our largest waves of immigration (as a percentage of the population) were before the 1938 introduction of a minimum wage and many decades before we built a comprehensive welfare state (e.g., Medicaid was created in 1965).

What do readers think? Where will these new Americans fit into the labor force? Who will want to pay them $15/hour plus benefits?

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Atlantic magazine’s October 2015 issue carries “Are Bosses Necessary?” One of America’s more useful business school professors is quoted:

What’s enabling this shift [to Zappos-style holacracy], argues Thomas Malone, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, is simple: falling information costs. In his 2004 book, The Future of Work, Malone broke the history of organizations into three stages. In stage one, information is expensive to convey, so most decisions are made face-to-face in necessarily small firms. As communication costs begin to fall, Malone explained to me, we reach stage two, in which “it becomes economically feasible to send information to a single, central place for decisions to be made.” That is, the large, centralized hierarchy becomes possible. Then comes stage three: “As communication costs continue to fall, there comes a time when it’s economically feasible to bring information to all points, so in some sense, everyone can know everything.” In this third stage, the benefits of bigness can persist, but its traditional handmaiden, hierarchy, doesn’t have to. (Indeed, when the volume of information grows large enough, trying to direct its flow upward for evaluation can slow everything down.)

[See Malone’s “Semi-Structured Messages” paper from 1986.]

I want to push one of my old ideas… combine Edward Tufte’s sparklines (see explanation in this 2006 posting) with a 1200 dpi 11×17 color laserprinter. Take every number that matters to an organization and print it out every day on an 11×17 sheet of paper that is given to every employee. For a web site it might be “new registrations yesterday” printed in green if it went up from the moving average of the previous week, printed in red if it went down. Next to the number would be a Tufte sparkline to put the number into context. The next line down could be “500 Server Errors,” followed by “Average pages per session,” etc.

What do readers who work in companies with at least 50 employees think? Would it be helpful to arrive at work and find an 11×17 sheet of paper across your keyboard with perhaps 150 metrics of the company’s performance?

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