Month: September 2016

How much would you pay me to take you on a tour of most of the countries hit hardest by the Zika virus? Unless your job is public health or biomedical research, I’m guessing the answer is “not much.” Yet isn’t this precisely the offer made by Caribbean cruise lines? The cruises are planned out a couple of years in advance so at this point I guess they are locked into the route. But wouldn’t it make sense for everyone who is currently going to the Caribbean to instead cruise around the Indian Ocean or South Pacific?

Related:

• “Baltic Sea on Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas”

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Aside from the fact that my vote doesn’t count, I refuse to get excited about the Hillary v. Trump contest because it seems to me that the laws with the biggest effect on Americans’ lives are local and/or state. I’m wondering if the Internet, the Death of Print, and the Death of Local is responsible for Americans over-focusing on national elections. My friends on Facebook treat the Hillary v. Trump choice as a life-or-death decision. Yet if asked “What bad thing might happen to you if Trump were elected?” the best that they can come up with is that Trump would start a nuclear war (why would someone with extensive real estate interests in the U.S. want a nuclear war?).

Absent that forecast nuclear war, I cling to my belief that local/state laws are more relevant to citizens. Let’s work through a few Massachusetts examples.

State legislative level: our Legislature recently considered a bill to suggest (but not require) that family court judges assign children to shared parenting in the event that biological parents are divorced and/or were never married. I wrote about this in “Men in Massachusetts should simply not show up to defend restraining orders, divorces, and other family law matters?” Note that “shared parenting” might be simply every-other-weekend plus a few extra days here and there as opposed to every-other-weekend. State Senator Will Brownsberger, however, managed to kill the bill in committee (story) by expressing concerns about what happens when there is “high conflict” between the parties. As explained in our Massachusetts chapter, this means that any plaintiff wishing to win sole custody of a child can simply manufacture conflict by starting fights with the defendant (women have a 97-percent statistical chance of winning custody in Massachusetts, according to Census data from 2014; one lawyer noted that “This is a good state in which to work your mind and education, but it is a great state in which to work your body and child.”).

What were the stakes? Suppose that judges interpreted the new law to encourage actual 50/50 shared parenting like they have in some other states (e.g., Arizona). Assume two parents who each earn $125,000 per year and have a single joint child. Neither has been previously sued for alimony or child support. Assume that the mother sues the father (a 75-percent probability, according to our statistical study of a Massachusetts courthouse) and wins the current standard 70/30 schedule with the child. Under the Massachusetts guidelines, as the winner parent she gets $20,072/year tax-free plus perhaps the child’s actual expenses paid by the loser parent. Had the new law passed and had a judge been influenced by the new statute’s language, she would take care of the child 50 percent of the time and get… nothing. Over 23 years, she is approximately $461,656 poorer in after-tax dollars (her real estate costs will be the same whether the child lives with her 70 percent or 50 percent of the time; any reduction in food expenses will be minimal). All of this plays out regardless of who is in the White House. [Imagine the dislocation if Massachusetts adopted a German-style system! A plaintiff could have sex with the richest person in the state and collect only $6,000 per year in child support. There would be no alimony for the able-bodied. Legal fees would be a percentage of the amount in dispute. This would shut down one of the state’s largest industries and it wouldn’t matter what anyone in Washington, D.C. said.]

Thus, from a successful plaintiff’s point of view, the reelection of Will Brownsberger to the state legislature is much more important than who wins the White House.

Local laws and decisions in Massachusetts can also be more significant than the typical federal law. Do you care about your child’s education? The quality of that education is mostly determined at the town level here. Want your child to go to a charter school? There is apparently a state law that caps the number of charter schools and a current ballot question that seeks to work around the cap (the union for public school teachers opposes the ballot initiative). This fight goes on independent of who is giving speeches from the White House.

Would you prefer to go through life being totally stoned 24/7? Question 4 on our ballot will make that legal (Barney Frank supports this). Stoned versus straight makes a bigger difference to most people than most Supreme Court decisions, as does “imprisoned for smoking weed” versus “not being arrested in the first place.” (Note: If you are passionate about marijuana, vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson. New Yorker says that he was formerly CEO of ” Cannabis Sativa, Inc., a marijuana-branding company that hopes to benefit as legalization spreads.”)

Consider simpler pleasures. What if an American city were to build Copenhagen-style bicycle infrastructure? That would change the day-to-day experience for hundreds of thousands of people, possibly have a huge impact on public health, improve the environment, etc., and it could be done regardless of whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump was President.

There are, of course, federal programs that matter even if federal individuals may not. If you’re one of the 10+ million Americans collecting SSDI, for example, you would care about what happens in D.C. But the program dates back to 1956 (history) and it doesn’t seem likely that a new President will persuade Congress to drop it.

Readers: What do you think? Are your friends overinvolved with national elections that have little relevance to their personal situations?

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From Peter the Great: His Life and World, about which I will write more later, …

Since the earliest times, Russians had calculated the year not from the birth of Christ but from the moment when they believed the world had been created. Accordingly, by their reckoning, Peter returned from the West not in the year 1698 but in the year 7206. Similarly, Russians began the New Year not on January 1, but on September 1. This stemmed from their belief that the world was created in autumn when the grain and other fruits of the earth had ripened to perfection and were ready to pluck, rather than in the middle of winter when the earth was covered with snow. Traditionally, New Year’s Day, September 1, was celebrated with great ceremony, with the tsar and the patriarch seated on two thrones in a courtyard of the Kremlin surrounded by crowds of boyars and people. Peter had suspended these rites as obsolete, but September 1 still remained the beginning of the New Year.

But to blunt the argument of those who said that God could not have made the earth in the depth of winter, Peter invited them “to view the map of the globe, and, in a pleasant temper, gave them to understand that Russia was not all the world and that what was winter with them was, at the same time, always summer in those places beyond the equator.” To celebrate the change and impress the new day on the Muscovites, Peter ordered special New Year’s services held in all the churches on January 1. Further, he instructed that festive evergreen branches be used to decorate the doorposts in interiors of houses, and he commanded that all citizens of Moscow should “display their happiness by loudly congratulating” one another on the New Year. All houses were to be illuminated and open for feasting for seven days.

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I applied for Global Entry in the spring of 2016 and, absent a willingness to travel hundreds of miles from home, the first interview that I was able to get was in August. At that point no interviews were available at Logan Airport until April 2017.

I arrived at Logan Airport and found a Customs agent behind an inch-thick bulletproof glass screen. She directed me to a different office within Terminal E, next to the Dunkin’ Donuts. There is no reception area for this office, just a door with a lot of signs saying not to knock but instead to wait in the hallway until one’s time is called. My appointment was for 10:45 and at about 11:15 our group was called in. After looking at my passport and driver’s license, the agent looked at some records on a computer, offered the names of some countries that I had visited, and then asked if I had visited Canada or Mexico within the past five years. I told her that I had just recently returned from Canada (pilot convention in Quebec City!) and dredged up a distant memory of a Mexico trip. She also asked if I’d ever been arrested (no). Then she took my fingerprints, which is about the 10th time the government has done this (the previous 9 were associated with applications for various airport security badges; see USA Today for some information on this program, which is per-airport).

At all times the agent talking to me wore a thick bulletproof vest. Added to the bulletproof glass at the beginning of the process, I began to wonder if there had ever been attack on a Customs or Immigration agent at a U.S. airport. If they don’t have any cash, why would someone bother to go this deep into the airport? If the answer is the all-purpose “because, terrorism” then why would a terrorist want to go to an office containing just one person instead of the check-in area where hundreds of people congregate?

A few minutes after walking out the door I received an email notification from DHS (“via usdhs.onmicrosoft.com” indicating that these folks are proud customers of the Microsoft cloud?) saying that my application had been approved.

Given that what they need to do is mostly the same as what they do when people enter the U.S. (aren’t foreigners fingerprinted?), i.e., ask some questions and verify documents, I wonder if the backlog couldn’t be cleared by having Global Entry “interviews” done on-the-spot when Americans return to the U.S. and there isn’t a huge line. There is already a DHS agent talking to the American. There is already a fingerprint machine. The traveler already has his or her driver’s license and passport in nearly all cases.

Related:

• Clearing immigration and customs at Logan Airport

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