Month: June 2016

A reader sent an AP story in the Miami Herald: “Websites connect college students with ‘sugar daddies’ willing to pay the bill”. What I found most interesting is that a woman was willing to go on record with a name (changed here to “Joyce Carefree” in case she someday changes her mind) that potential employers might be Googling:

[Joyce Carefree] graduated from law school debt-free this spring, thanks to a modern twist on an age-old arrangement.

During her first year, she faced tuition and expenses that ran nearly $50,000, even after a scholarship. So she decided to check out a dating website that connected women looking for financial help with men willing to provide it, in exchange for companionship and sex — a “sugar daddy” relationship as they are known.

Now, almost three years and several sugar daddies later, [Carefree] is set to graduate from Villanova University free and clear, while some of her peers are burdened with six-digit debts.

The domestic violence angle is also interesting:

Kristen Houser of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center says that violence is common any time money is exchanged for sex. “You need to pay attention that there is a power imbalance,” she said.

The same organization says in a factsheet that “one in five women … will be raped” and “46.4% lesbians, 74.9% bisexual women and 43.3% heterosexual women reported sexual violence other than rape during their lifetimes.” Unless the organization also thinks that a substantial percentage of women are sex workers, it would seem that sexual violence is also “common” for women who engage in unpaid interactions with men. So the choice for a woman is really between paid versus unpaid rape and “sexual violence other than rape”?

Readers: Does the fact that [Joyce Carefree] is willing to go public with this at the beginning of her career as an attorney indicate that there has been a significant shift in mores?

Related:

• Where New York Times readers don’t want to follow Europe: Legalized prostitution

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People who can get cash without working usually work less. The Redistribution Recession looks at the aggregate effect on the U.S. economy when the government offers people taxpayer-funded benefits on condition that they not work. Real World Divorce looks at how aggressively Americans will pursue alimony and child support, both of which can be more lucrative when a plaintiff refrains from working. What about PhD academics who have chosen a life in the Ivory Tower because of a deep passion for knowledge? It turns out that if they can get cash without working hard they respond in the same way as a public housing occupant or child support profiteer: “Why Do We Tenure? Analysis of a Long Standing Risk-Based Explanation” (Brogaard, et al). See the Abstract:

Using a sample of all academics that pass through top 50 economics and finance departments between 1996 and 2014, we study whether the granting of tenure leads faculty to pursue riskier ideas. We use the extreme tails of ex-post citations as our measure of risk and find that both the number of publications and the portion that are “home runs” peak at tenure and fall steadily for a decade thereafter. Similar patterns holds for elite (top 10) institutions, for faculty with longer tenure cycles, and for promotion to Full Professorship. We find the opposite pattern among poorly-cited publications: their numbers steadily rise after tenure. The decline in both the quantity and quality of publications points to tenure incentivizing less effort in publishing rather than more risk-taking.

From within the paper:

it appears that academics can exert effort toward both quantity and quality, and reduce both post-tenure.

We attribute the decline in the quantity and quality of research output post-tenure to a reduction in effort incentives, but the threat of termination is by no means the only incentive that academics face. To find support for our explanation, we consider another publicly observable event around which there is likely to be a significant change in incentives: the promotion to Full Professor. Full Professorship is often associated with a substantial increase in pay, as well as rights to contribute to university decision-making. We therefore expect a similar effect of promotion to Full Professor on the number and quality of publications. We find that the number of publications per year rises until two years prior to a professor attaining the rank of Full Professor, and falls steadily over the next 12 years. The same pattern is apparent for the number of home runs per year. The percentage decrease in each variable is nearly identical to the post-tenure period, and doubly significant.

Related:

• The public schoolteacher on incentives to work hard

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Six different readers emailed with news of Ellen Pao’s book project. This answers to some extent the question that I asked in “Ellen Pao’s new job?” (but it does cast some doubt on the merits of her lawsuit against Kleiner Perkins; if she were in fact a competent venture capitalist and therefore had sufficient skills to beat the S&P 500 by investing in young companies, why wouldn’t she have been snapped up by some greedy investors looking for yield?) It comes close to answering What should Ellen Pao’s forthcoming book be titled? (July 2015)

What I found most interesting in this Jezebel piece on Pao’s new book is the statement from the publisher: “one of the few visible, prominent women of color who have reached the C-suite in corporate America.”

The “corporate America” phrase is interesting because Reddit had roughly $8 million per year in revenue while Ms. Pao was CEO. By that revenue standard, the manager of three McDonald’s franchises would also qualify (Forbes) as a member of the corporate America C-suite. (Compare to Rosalind Brewer, responsible for $57 billion in sales at Sam’s Club.)

An Asian-American qualifying for the “women of color” category is yet more interesting because it shows the evolution of victimhood in our society. About 20 years ago a Korean-American friend was denied membership in a Harvard Law School Women of Color group. Today she would be able to join?

Title ideas from the July 2015 reader comments:

• From VCs to Reddit: How I exposed Silicon Valley sexism
• Pao! Right in the Kisser!
  The Sayings of Chairman Pao
  How to Get Ahead in Business without Really Trying
  How to Marry a Millionaire
  Mean In
  Rean In
• Pu$$y Warrior, Fighting White Male Patriarchy: the Ellen Pao Story

Related:

• Global douchebag circuit: Aspen Institute, Ellen Pao, and Buddy Fletcher
• Litigious Minds Think Alike: Divorce litigators react to the Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins lawsuit
• Ellen Pao v. Kleiner Perkins wrap-up

 

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Folks:

I love my Trek electric bicycle and now a friend wants to get one. It seems that she must pay a minimum of about $2,800 if she wants to get a name-brand such as Trek or Specialized. The question for today is why. Back in 2009 Costco was selling electric bikes for $899. You can find Chinese-made electric bicycles retailing on Alibaba for $500-1000.

If we can go into a neighborhood bike store and buy a mainstream Trek for $440, why is the first rung of the electric bike ladder at $2000+? What is stopping Trek, Specialized, and Giant from throwing the electric components of a $500 Chinese electric bike onto one of their $440 bikes and selling the combination for under $1000?

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It seems that Hillary Clinton has been nominated by the Democrats (I predicted this result in April 2015). My friends on Facebook are going nuts about how this is somehow historic and will inspire American women and girls.

Can this be true? Isn’t part of Hillary’s message that you can’t get ahead in American society or in the American economy unless you are born to rich parents, are white, etc. If people believe that message, why would they be inspired by a woman who succeeded financially and politically by being married to the President? There are more than 150 million American women and girls yet only a handful of living past, current, and future Presidents of the U.S.

Readers: Do any of you who are parents of K-12 girls think that Hillary being President for 8 years will significantly affect the practical opportunities that are available to your daughters?

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I finally couldn’t live with my Samsung Galaxy S7 due to the limited battery life, though I think that was mostly due to a combination of (a) apps I had loaded, and (b) Android’s willingness to let any app do whatever it wants, including run the battery down. Among other things I wanted a bigger battery and inherent toddler-proofing.

Samsung has released the S7 Active, which has… 33 percent more battery capacity and a toddler-proof package: dpreview. Only on the AT&T network, unfortunately.

[Separately, given the mindset of many app programmers (“My App is the Most Important”), I don’t see how Android can ever compete against iPhone without somehow putting every app on a power budget. It seems to be the case that iOS will protect the owner against an app that wants to run every 15 seconds in the background but Android will not. Apple at least bothered to ask the question “How should a battery-powered device’s operating system be different from that on a device that plugs into the wall?” Here’s some email from a friend who loves his Samsung S7 and is willing to put some effort into it:

Regarding your S7 battery-drain post from last month: I just discovered that the mediocre battery life on my Note 5 was because the phone wasn’t going into deep sleep mode when idle. Using the CPU Spy app, I discovered that the phone wouldn’t sleep with Bluetooth enabled, and tracked the problem down to my Pebble or Health apps (or some interaction between them).

After reinstalling everything, I have deep sleep working properly and it makes a huge difference–essentially zero battery drain when the phone is idle (despite having WiFi, BT, GPS, etc turned on, my Pebble watch connected, and various social-media apps standing by for messages).

… [one day later]

Speaking of debugging effort, it turns out I’d mis-identified the source of the BT wakelock. It wasn’t the Pebble or fitness apps; after some web-searching, I found out it’s the CVS app.

CVS recently installed BT beacons in their stores to bombard your phone with ads about products you’re standing near. Apparently they decided it’s a good idea to keep your phone from ever sleeping, lest you miss a nearby ad. No matter if you’re not even in CVS, or not even using the app–it autostarts, and runs all the time.

It turns out you can solve the problem by disabling in-store notifications in the app’s settings–provided you can figure out to do so. Almost everyone, of course, will have no clue it’s CVS that’s cutting their battery life in half. They’ll just think their phone sucks.

How many consumers will have the computer knowledge and diligence that this guy had? And why should a phone owner have to do the kind of performance engineering formerly the exclusive domain of Unix server sysadmins?

Here was my advice to a non-tech friend who couldn’t resist getting an S7: “I would install just one application at a time. Maybe one every 3 days. If the battery life falls apart, throw that app out or configure it so that it can’t run in the background.”]

Readers: What do we think? Can Tim Cook take a sufficiently long break from his Social Justice War to supervise the development of an iPhone 7 that is a better practical photography tool than this new indestructible Samsung?

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When the first Microsoft stores came along I asked myself “What could be more useless?” Consumers know what Windows is like. Microsoft doesn’t sell a lot of hardware and most of it is stuff such as keyboards that you would throw out in the event of a failure.

Yet the Microsoft store in the Burlington Mall here in the Boston area proved to be useful for trying out a lot of different laptop keyboards. They have a range of laptops from ASUS, Acer, Dell, HP, et al. It turned out that there are some subtle differences among them. For my hands the worst machine by far was the HP Spectre x360. The trackpad is super wide and thus every time I tried to type my palms would brush the track pad and cause mayhem. Spacing was remarkably consistent across laptops though I had imagined the Dell XPS 13 to have a cramped keyboard. I ended up liking the Dell XPS 15 and the Surface Book the best. I opted for the Surface Book due to (1) a pimped out XPS 15 configuration (e.g., with 1 TB SSD) was over $2,500, (2) I want to experiment with traveling using the Surface Book as both tablet and laptop (i.e., leave the iPad at home), (3) the Surface Book is somewhat lighter and more compact. I will miss the Dell’s 4K-resolution big screen.

I wasn’t sure how much I would love the Surface Book so I opted for the lower-end 8 GB RAM/256 GB SSD version. I will have to be judicious about which Dropbox folders to sync. It is possible add a monster SD card for additional storage at a reasonable price, though of course then it has to be removed when it is time to plug in a camera SD card.

Full report on the Surface Book to follow.

Separately, it is always interesting when the Obamacorps (American workers who came of age during the past eight years) try to deal with something technological. One of the senior saleswomen there assured me that adding a GPU to the inside of a Surface Book would “make the colors more vibrant.” (The online tech specs suggest that it is the same physical screen on all models.)

Overall I would say that the atmosphere in the Microsoft store is a lot better than in the Apple store, where it looks like an African rift lake ferry full of restive passengers with cracked screens has just unloaded.

Related:

• Good 15-inch laptop with a great keyboard?

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At a recent social gathering an attorney told me about her job at a company run by an immigrant from China. She said that due to his immigrant status the firm goes to the head of the line (along with women-owned and minority-owned companies) whenever there is a government contract. She seemed like a reliable source but at least with a Google search I can’t find the regulation or law that would give an immigrant priority over a native-born American in soaking up the tax dollars (e.g., $182 million to build and run a campground reservation site).

Readers: Is anyone familiar with these rules?

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Here’s another one for the “Why doesn’t the U.S. economy just collapse under the weight of its health care system?” file: John Oliver buys $15 million distressed medical debt for $60,000.

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The First Amendment doesn’t apply to anyone who needs to hold onto or get a W-2 job. Expressing a politically unpopular or unacceptable idea puts an employee on a greased slide to the front door.

Here’s a recent Facebook posting from a friend who runs his own business:

Sent my 6-year-old daughter to buy something Target so that she could learn to be independent. I waited about 30 feet away as she checked out some Pokemon cards on her own using my credit card.

From this ensued a discussion among his friends regarding the pros and cons of free range children. Example:

Given that folks have been charged for letting their 9 year olds play in the street with out the parents being there, I would be cautious. Also, use cash. You are technically the only one that can use that card.

The self-employed original poster then noted

I am 100% sure my kids would not run into a wild animal exhibit and jump down a 15 foot concrete wall to enter a moat.

(Reference to an incident that led to the shooting death of Harambe, an endangered gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo.)

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