Month: May 2016

My work as an expert witness (mostly in software patent cases) occasionally takes me to absurdly lavish offices of the world’s largest law firms. Perhaps partly due to the rent that they pay, the fees are breathtaking even when the stakes are pretty small, e.g., because the accused product does not generate much revenue. A partner at a small firm, which, at least in his opinion, can do work of comparable quality, explained that companies, especially public ones, aren’t very price-sensitive because the decision regarding which law firm to hire is made by Board members rather than the shareholder-owners who will have to pay said breathtaking fees. “If the firm loses the case the Board members are completely protected if they can say that they hired the biggest and best firm. There is no potential for liability if they spend 2-4X more than they needed to. But they can be sued and/or suffer a loss of personal reputation if it becomes known that they approved the hiring of a no-name firm.”

Related:

• Will the New York Times like their own plaintiff as much as they liked Ellen Pao?

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A friend who is a passionate supporter of Bernie Sanders recently got into an email discussion with some other MIT alums regarding whether it was racist to seek treatment from a black dentist rather than a dentist with some other skin color. He thought that choosing a dentist by (black) race was a sign of virtue while others felt that a dentist should be chosen based on other factors.

Why was it okay to search for a black dentist? “The point is that because of white privilege your dentist is so likely to be white anyway that explicitly searching for a white one is a joke, like ‘searching for a gasoline powered car’ or something like that.” The author also uses the phrase “male privilege” in most arguments.

I pointed out that, according to this statistical study, “white males decided to use their privilege to cut themselves back to about 25% of dental school enrollees in 2012.” and asked “Is a white female dentist privileged because she is a dentist and white or a victim because she is female?”

The Sanders supporter responded with “individual results may vary” and “Is the sun hot, or bright? White privilege and male privilege are not the same thing, though they obviously overlap in some cases.”

I then raised the question “What is the practical value of white privilege and male privilege if people who have both of these privileges had to watch non-white, non-males snatch up 75% of coveted spots in dental schools? What can they do with these privileges if not prevent others from gathering up valuable credentials and cash?” He responded with “Well, privilege is a diagnosis, not a cure. Individual results may vary…”

I pointed out “But those weren’t individual results, Q. That was an aggregation of thousands of dental school applicants and enrollees. If white/male privilege is powerful/valuable, how can you explain the apparent lack of value in this situation? If I enjoy the privilege of being a country club member, I can keep the rabble from using the tennis courts and golf course when I want to use them, right?”

His response was “As usual you fail to understand that just because something exists does not make it universally applicable. To find out how this works, try asserting male privilege with your wife.”

me: “So white/male privilege can’t be used to assure career success, e.g., via preferential entry into dental school. And it can’t be used in the domestic (non-career) realm. But you’re saying that it is somehow powerful in another area?”

him: “It’s a statistical effect, not a secret weapon you can reliably use to slay your opponents. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t. … Since we cannot examine every human interaction including the mental states of the participants we cannot individually diagnose every instance of X privilege. Only a general pattern if it appears in the data.”

I think the exchange is interesting because the believer in white/male privilege thinks that it is something that can be confirmed by “data” but his faith in white/male privilege was not shaken by data apparently showing the ineffectiveness of white/male privilege in dentistry. (The apparently contradiction could be resolved if white males were especially unsuited to being dentists and/or underperformed dramatically on the things that dental schools look for among applicants.)

Readers: Does this mean that Americans will be explaining events with statements about “white/male privilege” pretty much indefinitely? If any factual or statistical situation can be shaped to conform to the white/male privilege idea then how could the disappearance of such privilege ever be confirmed?

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Cirrus has flown its first production jet (Avweb). Certification and customer delivers “by the end of June” (notice that they don’t say June of which year!).

This is kind of exciting, though folks might point out similarities to the 1954 Paris Jet, which typically sells for around $200,000 (one for sale right now). Sourpusses might also point out that a used very light twin-engine jet can be purchased for around the same $2 million price.

Kudos to the Chinese owners of Cirrus for pushing this out the door. I do think that it will be sufficiently simpler to fly than a twin-engine jet (which consumes $30,000 of sim training every year per pilot, for example, plus $40,000 per year of hangar at the higher-end airports) that it will shake up the market. There presumably won’t be a revolution in the single-engine market until someone figures out how to make a much cheaper turbine engine, ideally with lower horsepower and better fuel economy. A $2 million Cirrus is not a replacement for Caitlyn Jenner’s 1978 Bonanza.

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I wonder what the naming consultants were paid for this end-result:

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“Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares” was presumably written in the same do-gooder spirit that permeates most of the New York Times. But consider the practical take-away of information such as the following:

We’ve long known of the persistent and troublesome academic gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers in public schools.

Children in the school districts with the highest concentrations of poverty score an average of more than four grade levels below children in the richest districts.

Even more sobering, the analysis shows that the largest gaps between white children and their minority classmates emerge in some of the wealthiest communities, such as Berkeley, Calif.; Chapel Hill, N.C.; and Evanston, Ill.

In some communities where both blacks and whites or Hispanics and whites came from similar socioeconomic backgrounds, academic gaps persisted. Mr. Reardon said that educators in these schools may subliminally – or consciously in some cases – track white students into gifted courses while assigning black and Hispanic students to less rigorous courses.

Consider an employer with a stack of 1000 resumes of applicants for a job. Given the above tips from the New York Times, she can cut her workload considerably without a significant risk of overlooking a great candidate. She tells her assistant “Take the resumes from people who went to school in poorer-than-average neighborhoods and toss them into recycling.” If the stack is still daunting, she adds “The Times says that blacks and Hispanics don’t do well academically so toss any resume that you think is from a black or Hispanic person.”

Given the resistance of America’s public school systems (see “Smartest Kids in the World Review”) to any kind of change, what could the Times editors have been thinking the positive effects of running this article were going to be? What if Donald Trump came out with a long statement about the academic performance of Americans sorted by skin color? Would the Times celebrate Trump as making a thoughtful helpful contribution?

Related:

• The Son Also Rises: Racism may not be relevant to inequality
• The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications
• The Son Also Rises: Tips for Optimizing Your Life
• The Son Also Rises: Policy Implications

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“Child porn suspect jailed indefinitely for refusing to decrypt hard drives” says “A Philadelphia man suspected of possessing child pornography has been in jail for seven months and counting after being found in contempt of a court order demanding that he decrypt two password-protected hard drives.”

Suppose that he tells the judge “I forgot the password” and the judge replies “That’s a little too convenient in your situation. I don’t believe you. You can stay at Club Fed until you develop a better memory.”

Let’s also suppose that he actually has forgotten the password. Now what? How can this situation ever be resolved?

Related:

• “The Domestic Violence Parallel Track”: One tactic that can backfire is the use of child pornography. According to the Indiana (PA) Gazette, “Woman guilty of downloading child porn,” August 20, 2014, Meri Jane Woods of Clymer, Pennsylvania was successful in obtaining a Protection from Abuse order that ended her husband’s access to the family home. To cement her victory she placed child pornography onto a personal computer and, without bothering to update the timestamps on the files, turned it over to the state police, alleging that her husband had performed the illegal downloads. In investigating the crime, however, the police “almost immediately ruled out Matthew Woods’ involvement by finding the images date-stamped between Aug. 11 and 14, 2013. Matthew Woods had been forced from the home before that time by a protection-from-abuse order, prosecutors told the jury.” As downloading child pornography for any reason is illegal, Ms. Woods was convicted of a felony that carried a possible sentence of seven years in prison (she was apparently not charged with the federal offense of receiving child pornography, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years). What finally happened? A December 16, 2014 Associated Press article, “Wife who used child porn to frame husband gets jail time,” notes that she “must spend six months to two years in county jail” and that “Woods continues to deny wrongdoing saying, ‘I only wanted to protect my children.'”

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“Clinton Son-in-Law’s Firm Is Said to Close Greece Hedge Fund” says

It was a hedge fund portfolio pitched by Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, as an opportunity to bet on a Greek economic revival.

Now, two years later, the Greece-focused fund is shutting down, after losing nearly 90 percent of its value,

Where is the dead cat bounce for Greece at least? And why have they faded from the media? Has Facebook sent them into a memory hole? It used to be an urgent question as to whether this country (population a little smaller than Illinois, which is probably just as insolvent on an actuarial basis) would stay in or leave the EU. Why is it no longer urgent? They have been successfully bailed out?

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Thanks to Jonathan Graehl, this summary of a 900-page book on the Colonial lifestyle. Albion’s Seed is not new but much of the information was new to me.

Do you love the city of Newark as much as Silicon Valley billionaires do? You’ll be pleased to know that the name comes from “New Ark Of The Covenant”

“The Puritans tried to import African slaves, but they all died of the cold.” (And we are still a lot whiter than other states.)

Massachusetts today may be the most lucrative jurisdiction in the world in which to get pregnant during a vacation, have an out-of-wedlock child, or to sell an abortion (see this chapter on Massachusetts family law and this chapter on out-of-wedlock child support; note that for plaintiffs suing defendants with income over $2 million, California and Wisconsin may be superior jurisdictions). Puritans, on the other hand, explicitly forbade the single parent lifestyle, whether done on a for-profit or not-for-profit basis: “Everyone was compelled by law to live in families. Town officials would search the town for single people and, if found, order them to join a family; if they refused, they were sent to jail.” and “98% of adult Puritan men were married, compared to only 73% of adult Englishmen in general.” Families were sizable: “The average family size in Waltham, Massachusetts in the 1730s was 9.7 children.” Results achieved included “Teenage pregnancy rates were the lowest in the Western world and in some areas literally zero.”

Massachusetts was unfriendly to startups: “In 1639, Massachusetts declared a ‘Day Of Humiliation’ to condemn ‘novelties, oppression, atheism, excesse, superfluity, idleness, contempt of authority, and trouble in other parts to be remembered'”

We were not the anti-gun bastion that we are today: “Everyone would stand there [in church] with their guns (they were legally required to bring guns, in case Indians attacked during the sermon) and hear about how they were going to Hell, all while the giant staring eye looked at them.”

Despite our lack of racial diversity, today we are one of the most financially unequal states (“Why Have Democrats Failed in the State Where They’re Most Likely to Succeed? Massachusetts should be a model state for liberal public policy, but instead it is one of the country’s most unequal.”). In Puritan times, by contrast, “the top 10% of wealthholders [in Massachusetts] held only 20%-30% of taxable property.”

Don’t like our culinary contributions to the world, such as Dunkin’ Donuts? In Puritan times food was “meat and vegetables submerged in plain water and boiled relentlessly without seasonings of any kind.”

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Our local NBC affiliate station runs a turbine-powered helicopter that captured some video of the end of a State Police chase (see the raw footage on youtube and also ABC News with some wider angles). It seems that beating up an unarmed on-the-ground suspect is not a good idea when you’re being filmed in HD. A couple of state troopers are now suspended. What might that cost them? This database (type in “Department of Police” and then click twice on “2015 Earnings” to show the highest earners on top) shows that the top-paid employees with a title of “Trooper, 1st Class” earned between $239,000 and $288,567 per year.

Massachusetts State Troopers can start work at age 21 and are eligible to retire after 20 years. The guy who tried unsuccessfully to escape them was 50 years old. Thus very likely what we’re looking at is about 8 guys with guns (and a dog) beating up a guy old enough to be their father.

I wonder if this is going to become more common. Here the public servants were apparently unaware of a 5000 lb. jet-powered Airbus Helicopter (formerly “Eurocopter”) hovering overhead. The drones that are proliferating don’t announce themselves with the sound of a Turbomeca Arriel. It would be unfortunate to lose a $288,567/year job because of the neighborhood drone nerd and his or her $499 DJI Phantom 3.

Related:

• “Walter Scott: at odds with the law prior to being murdered by the police”
• first follow-up on Walter Scott
• 2nd follow-up on Walter Scott

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There is an interesting article in the Boston Globe by Hiawatha Bray about the difference between Facebook featuring all-transgender-all-the-time and the New York Times doing the same thing:

Pot, meet kettle. Traditional media have always been edited by humans. Pick up the Globe, and you’re getting a view of the world that is, inevitably, colored by our personal tastes, interests, and biases.

But traditional media companies have checks and balances to keep us reasonably honest. Some have full-time ombudsmen to call out bias. Nearly all welcome letters to the editor. The names, e-mails, and phone numbers of staff members are easy to find. Most effective is the reporter’s byline. My name is attached to everything I write, so there’s a price to pay when I blunder.

But Facebook’s curators have no bylines. The software engineers who created the algorithms are equally anonymous. The entire system is relentlessly opaque, and likely to remain so.

As Facebook grinds down every other Web publisher, except perhaps for Google, this is plainly the future so we might as well get used to it. If we don’t all think like 25-year-old hipsters in Menlo Park we soon will! (Remember that folks in Silicon Valley expect to earn most of their money via capital gains so, like Eisenhower circa 1948, they aren’t too worried about headline tax rates!)

(A former Soviet comrade told me that the U.S. has a more effective system of thought and opinion control than the Soviet Union ever did: “Nobody took the regime seriously so you could laugh about everything the Party said when you were home with friends. In the U.S., though, if you don’t accept the official dogma you won’t have a job and you’ll be ostracized socially.” Maybe Facebook is just part of this. You have to agree that Donald Trump is the new Hitler (and North Carolina would be Bavaria?) or you’ll be unfriended.)

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